Hanna Switlekowski:
I'm Hannah Switlekowski, a proud member of the Class of 2013, a politics major alum and co-president of the Alumni Club of Greater Boston. It's my pleasure today to welcome you to Alumni College Session with Professor Julian Zelizer, Class of 1991, and professor Dan Kryder, who will discuss "In the Balance: the 2020 Elections in the Historical Context." We're delighted to have the opportunity to share this event with you, our alumni, parents, Brandeis National Committee members, and friends around the world. Thank you so much for joining us. And now, to introduce our speakers.
Hanna Switlekowski:
Dan Kryder is the Louis Stulberg Chair in Law and Politics and Associate Professor of Politics at Brandeis. He earned his PhD in political science, from the New School for Social Research in New York City, and joined the faculty of Brandeis in 2005. Professor Kryder teaches American Political Institutions, the Presidency and Social Movements. His research concerns the American President during war time. The subject of his book, Divided Arsenal on police and protestors in American history, which is the subject of his new book. Professor Kryder has taught or held fellowships at MIT, Princeton, Harvard, Al-Quds University in the Palestinian Territories, and the British Library in London, where he was a Fulbright Scholar.
Hanna Switlekowski:
Julian Zelizer, Class of 1991, is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University, and a CNN Political Analyst. Professor Zelizer has been one of the pioneers in the revival of American political history. He's the author and editor of 20 books on American political history. His latest book, "Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party," will be available this July. Professor Zelizer is a frequent commentator in the media. He's published over 1,000 op-eds, including his weekly column on CNN.com. He's received prestigious fellowships from the Brookings Institute, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, New America, and the New York Historical Society.
Hanna Switlekowski:
Thank you so much to both of you. Welcome.
Julian Zelizer:
Thank you.
Dan Kryder:
Thanks, Julian, would you like to start?
Julian Zelizer:
Sure, it's great to be here. It's great. I wish I was in a room with everyone. I just had a reunion with some of my Brandeis friends on Zoom and had great memories about being there. So, thank you. Thank you for having me. And these are difficult times, but what I'm learning is our educational institutions, even when virtual, really provide an incredible connective thread and intellectual engagement that is more necessary than ever before. So thanks for having me here.
Julian Zelizer:
I could throw out a few thoughts to begin with. The first, let me just say, I value Brandeis very much, and we can talk about that later. It really was a foundation for my intellectual development and I keep coming back to a lot of the ideas that I learned in the classroom and in my conversations in the dining room, dining room hall.
Julian Zelizer:
And I do feel... I graduated in 1991. I was thinking then, or paying attention to the '92 election, which was obviously historic, like any other election is, and where there were big issues at stake, but nothing like what we are going into today. I'm a historian. I'm often asked, "How does this compare to something else?" People look to me for precedent to figure out comforting comparisons, like Professor Kryder, I'm sure often gets. And this one feels pretty distinct. And it's a weird combination of an election taking place in the middle of a major pandemic that has closed down, not simply the economy, but civil society at some level, or a lot of our civic institutions, and caused enormous casualties, like human loss of life, and public health problems, and all sorts of fallout.
Julian Zelizer:
And it's also a historic election when we planned this event a long time ago, because it's about the reelection of President Trump, and where do we stay on, on this kind of presidency? And is there political support? Is there a foundation for this kind of a presidency to have two terms? And, that raises all sorts of questions about the Republican Party, where we are as a nation, how our media works, our civic culture. And so, now these two things combine. And it's pretty phenomenal, I was telling a historian friend of mine, it's easier actually to study these periods than to live through them, I was noting.
Julian Zelizer:
But we really are in an exceptional moment, and we'll talk now about different elements of the election, but I'll start by saying I don't know the answers, and I feel more that way than in most elections. Not, who's going to win or who will lose, but how will this even work? What does the election look like? What does it mean for the opposition candidate to be in his basement in his home campaigning? Will there be voter turnout? These are questions that are on the table, which I genuinely feel are unanswerable. So, I'm looking forward to talking, and let's start.
Dan Kryder:
Well one question I have maybe to start pealing this, whether you could help us just understand where we are in the trajectory development of the Republican Party in the last 30 years or so, given that your next book is coming out very shortly. Can you give us a sense of where, where you feel the Republican Party stands, given this unorthodox leader in Donald Trump?
Julian Zelizer:
Look, I think there's two ways people think about that question. One is, Donald Trump is either an outlier or maverick, and then he's remaking the Party now. What you're seeing is the Republicans are becoming the Party of Trump, and he's introducing a new rhetoric, new styles of politics, new ideas in terms of policy that weren't there, but the Republicans are rallying around it. And this is one way to look at it, for convenience, for political interest, or because they agree with it.
Julian Zelizer:
I tend to be in the other school that this is really an endpoint. That we are looking at the culmination of several decades, where the Republican Party has been remade in many different ways since the Reagan era. And he comes, President Trump comes out of that era. So the book on Newt Gingrich is about how Gingrich in the 1980s, before becoming Speaker, introduces a new style of smash-mouth partisan politics, where institutions can be torn down where civic norms that people care about in Washington really are not relevant he thought, as much as partisan power was relevant. And where he unleashed a new kind of a pretty ferocious rhetoric about the opposition, that was normalized by the Party before he became Speaker.
Julian Zelizer:
And there's other people who study within the Republican Party, traditions of nativism, of playing on racial issues, racial backlash issues, all the way back to Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon. And, I kind of see the moment we are in that light. This is a... The Party has been remade gradually, but dramatically. And that's why Donald Trump was even elected to begin with, and it's also why his base of support in the Republican Party has held remarkably firm, regardless of what he did.
Dan Kryder:
There's a political scientist named Stephen Skowronek, who is a part-time historian, I guess you would say. He's written a book called The Politics Presidents Make., And he's recently published a new essay, in which he discusses this possibility that Trump is in fact, the last carrier, if we could use that word, of the Republican Party, as modeled by Ronald Reagan and the Reagan regime is at its end. And that we may be looking at a fairly significant reestablishment of Democratic Party control. Although we have to say that Biden is not exactly a reconstructive leader. He's fully an orthodox leader. Do you think there are parallels with the early '30s and sort of the fact that an unexpected, in that case, economic crisis revealed the incapacity of the ruling regime. It's an inability to have any kind of reasonable ideas to deal with the catastrophic crisis. Are there parallels between this moment in that moment?
Julian Zelizer:
Well, there's certainly parallels. And, Skowronek, everyone out there, you should take a look at his work. He's a great political scientist, and he had this book on the presidency, which is that. You have certain Presidents who start a new regime, essentially, start a new era, a set of policies and ideas. Then you have Presidents in the middle, who refine them and who solidify them. And then you have Presidents who come at the end of this period, like Jimmy Carter, at the end of the FDR era, who are just holding things together by a thread, but really they're the end of an era. And, people make the comparison to Trump to Hoover, Herbert Hoover, the end of a Republican era of politics, where all the failures and manifest weaknesses of this era that we've been living in, become front and center.
Julian Zelizer:
And that is true. I think there are a lot of parallels. And the pandemic is our Great Depression. Literally in terms of the economics, we might be seeing that, but figuratively too, in terms of the damage it's done. But there is a question, and I don't know how Skowronek would answer this. But, there are certain institutional pillars that the Republican Party is still counting on. Even if they're shown to be politically weaker than ever before. Even if there's problems, a lot of the electorate doesn't like. The Electoral College might very much still favor them. Gerrymandering might still protect their House representatives.
Julian Zelizer:
And we can go on in some of these elements of politics. The conservative media, which Herbert Hoover didn't have in 1932 is going to be a powerful force in this election. And even intense partisanship in the electorate, which is so strong today might be unshakable. Might mean that you can't have a landslide election anymore, because some people, regardless of what the leader is doing, will vote for the leader, if it's a leader of their Party. So, I think it's true and not true. And I don't know which of those two will win out, ultimately, in, in November.
Dan Kryder:
Do you think that this pandemic will come to entirely dominate the campaign season? Is there any room for the Parties to talk about kitchen table concerns, and other kinds of social and political and economic concerns? Is this... Are we looking at a fully recast campaign season, do you think?
Julian Zelizer:
Well, it is recast. And there's no way not to make the pandemic the number one issue for both Parties. I don't know where we'll be in September and October, but we'll still be living in the shadow, literally dealing with this, our institutions will be adjusted as a result of this. That's the best case scenario, meaning we won't be in this situation in particular. But, then there's room for candidates to talk about how do those other issues relate to this? So obviously, if you take an issue like healthcare, whether it's what kind of funding do we need to give to public healthcare, public health institutions like the CDC, or do Americans have enough insurance protection, so that as the health problems emerge, they can be treated and cured. So that in the future, we know that's a kind of a foundation and everyone has. Those are vital issues.
Julian Zelizer:
We know that this is affecting lower-income Americans, concentrated in areas of poverty in worse ways than much of the rest of the country. And so that's an issue, inequality, that has been part of the campaigns for a while and can [inaudible 00:13:15]. So, I think you can go through almost all the issues we were talking about, even climate change, obviously. The other crisis that's going to come, that people weren't paying attention to, which I think none of those are disconnected from the pandemic.
Julian Zelizer:
So, I don't know, for example, if Democrats are able to achieve it, but there's many ways to make the argument, the issues that they were fighting for and Republicans will try to do the same, are in fact the way to not only get out of this, but to prevent it from happening again.
Dan Kryder:
Yeah, it was striking, in the first few weeks of the crisis, as I was talking to my students in my Presidency class, it seemed to me that the peculiar quality of the crisis very much favored Democrats, for many of the reasons you've described. That it calls for really heightened and robust response by the central states, by the administrative state, in terms of healthcare provision, in terms of income support, in terms of public education, even in terms of issues like gender-based violence that are now growing more systemically difficult and entrenched.
Dan Kryder:
And it's been striking to me how the Republican Party, it took them a little bit of time, but they've certainly absorbed this crisis I think reasonably effectively, for precisely the same reasons. That these are de-constructors, that these are people who believe in a reduced footprint for the administrative state. And in some ways I feel like these events in the Capital of Michigan, for example, are early shots in the campaign season, that the Republican party has somehow absorbed this crisis quite effectively, and turned it towards one of the rights of individuals and the reestablishment of liberties, as opposed to the expansion of the federal administrative state.
Julian Zelizer:
Well, I think there's, I mean, there's two ways in which you can see how they're going to try to use this to their advantage, which is hard. When you're the Party in power and you have a shutdown of the country and massive economic pain, it's not obvious, how do you turn that to an advantage? But you can actually see it. One way is exactly what you're saying. I think that the threads of the argument that are front and center in places like Michigan, and I'm not talking about the armed protesters. But, just the general rhetoric that this is a fight about how much government there should be, and how much authority the government should have. That's a classic Republican theme, and they will capitalize it. This is going too far. That the rights of individuals are being taken away.
Julian Zelizer:
But the second, is to turn the economic kind of question around. And rather than Trump being Hoover, he'll argue Biden is essentially Herbert Hoover. I think that's what you're going to see, that he wants to start jobs again. And he wants to quickly make sure people are earning a living. And that's a powerful argument. I think it's a mistake to underestimate that. Democrats are not in fact against that. Democrats are arguing, how do you do that safely? But I think you're going to see that argument a lot in the next few months. And I think that can resonate, even with people in blue states, there is a thirst, obviously, to get back again. And so I think those are the two ways in which the Republicans are going to try to capitalize. And, it's possible that diminishes some of the potential fallout that you talked about a few minutes ago.
Dan Kryder:
One of the curious things about this crisis, as it relates to voting and civic participation, political participation, we're up to about 90,000 deaths, as an estimation. Something like that. It's about twice as many as the combat casualties in the Vietnam War. One of the patterns we seem to see in American history is that in major wartime crises, democratic rights tend to expand. And so African Americans, I think, were particularly attuned to the role that the Civil War played in the expansion of democratic rights for African Americans. The role that World War I and World War II played in extending new opportunities of all kinds to out-groups in cities and in communities that had been excluded from participation. Even the Vietnam War was associated with the expansion of the electorate, with the 18-year-old vote.
Dan Kryder:
But this one is to be different in that regard, isn't it? That in fact, as you mentioned, you highlighted in your introductory remarks, we're looking at a crisis that at least promises by its very nature, to actually suppress participation. Not through some evil scheme, although those are still possible, by people who are trying to restrict voting rights, but actually the difficulties that individuals, particularly in underserved communities, the difficulties that they will face in actually going to polls and registering their vote in the fall. And this strikes me as something that's really distinctive about this crisis.
Dan Kryder:
Do you see a way that we can somehow revitalize our democracy in the midst of a crisis that's forcing us to distance ourselves from each other and from the political process?
Julian Zelizer:
There it is. I'm back. I heard your question. I can get right into it.
Dan Kryder:
Okay.
Julian Zelizer:
And you can see me and everything.
Dan Kryder:
Well done.
Julian Zelizer:
I think the vote is really important. And, I remember one of my first thoughts when this started to really close down was how's this election going to work? How are people going to vote? For a while, the issue of enfranchisement and voting restrictions have been something a lot of people have been working on. There has been an effort through the Republican Party to impose voter restrictions in certain states. And that's all going to be at play in November still. But much more important is, can voting even... Are people going to go out to vote? Will this automatically depressed turnout, unlike all these other moments in American history that you're talking about? And I suspect they will.
Julian Zelizer:
I mean, in a best case scenario, a lot of people won't want to go out and vote. They will be nervous about standing in line. They will be nervous about touching the same screen or touching the writing utensil that you need. It depends on where you are in the country. And in a worst case scenario, we might be in some kind of shutdown in parts of the country. And so that's why there's a push now for mail-in voting, to provide federal support for all states to have this, like California and New Jersey have done and I'm sure some other states are working on it.
Julian Zelizer:
But the odds are you're going to have, unless you have mail-in really up and running, it will be depressed voting. And that gets back to where we were 10 minutes ago. What's another structural advantage that President Trump can rely on and count on, that might overcome some of the weaknesses of where the GOP is? And this is it. Low voter turnout traditionally helps Republicans, and that might very well be the case again. And you might see really depressed turnout with the constituencies hardest hit by this pandemic, who are likely to be Democratic constituencies.
Dan Kryder:
One of the things that fascinates me about our political discourse these days as it relates to Trump, is how his administration began with so many warnings about the death of democracy and the rise of authoritarianism in this country. And there's been a huge increase in the attention that political scientists have paid to the United States, in a comparative perspective and looking at it as yet another case of the rise of authoritarianism. And what's a little bit puzzling to me and I think some other political scientists is that Trump is not, it seems, inclined to be an authoritarian in many ways. He's not one who is using this crisis as one might imagine to extend his central control over the economy or over society, quite the opposite. Could you say a few words about this sort of paradox, which is that this presidency began with a fear of authoritarianism, and now we're experiencing something of the opposite, which is a fear of indifference.
Julian Zelizer:
Yeah, I think it's important, and it's not even at the beginning of the presidency. Just rewind to January and February when we were still talking about impeachment, and the central issue was the President of the United States using presidential power so extensively that he was willing to basically manipulate foreign policy to get dirt on a candidate. That was at the heart of the impeachment, and we've seen other instances of what people fear, such as the kind of effort to build a wall through national emergency powers or the way in which he's willing to invoke pretty dangerous rhetoric at times because he can do that. And yet here we are where the country needs presidential power more than ever before on certain issues. But it's really a problem of either indifference, incompetence, or whatever people want to call it, but it's certainly not authoritarianism. And this isn't what we're seeing in authoritarian countries where the reaction was much more fierce.
Julian Zelizer:
I don't know kind of what explains the paradox, whether it is the case that those claims were exaggerated, meaning it was still limited how much he was ever going to really get into using executive power, whether there are interests in terms of why he doesn't want to use it in this case that he understands a lot of the business community wants him to lay off or not to go too far in imposing regulations and restrictions on what they can do, even the medical community. I don't know if that's that's the issue. Or in some ways the ultimately kind of ultimate chaotic idea about this is there's a political logic to how he's handling it. That what we said earlier about how he's going to turn this and present himself as the hero, not through authoritarianism, but by being a champion of opening things up again, it all works in his favor, it's probably a mix of the three.
Julian Zelizer:
I would add one more though. Ultimately, it's not just about strong state power when you're in a pandemic, it's really about a kind of love, passion, and skill at governance. And many people do credit President Obama during his pandemic crises for managing it very well, for moving people around, for listening and bringing in the best experts. This is not something that President Trump enjoys.
Dan Kryder:
Seems that we have another slight breakup. And we'll see if Professor Zelizer will dial back in. Daniel, I wonder if we might turn to a question from our viewing audience.
Daniel Larson:
Absolutely. So we have a question here about the value and importance of predictive modeling in this day and age for elections, and how does that relate to what Professor Skowronek says about upcoming elections?
Dan Kryder:
Predictive modeling could take a couple of different meanings, predictive modeling of vote, of vote shares, for example, is one way to read this question. And I think what's Skowronek would say is that this next election will be a referendum on the durability of the Reagan regime and that we-
Julian Zelizer:
I'm back.
Dan Kryder:
Hi, Julian. Welcome back. We just had a question about the value of predictive modeling in considering our place in political time and sort of the durability of the Reagan regime. And believe me, we're just starting the campaign season, and we're starting to see more polling being executed across all the states and across the vital five or six swing states. And so the political science profession, the polling profession is gearing up with great gusto to try to anticipate vote shares across these different states, and senate contests in particular. It remains to be seen whether this particular kind of crisis will affect the quality of the modeling, the quality of the data that people can work with. So far, it seems that the polling agencies are going forward with their normal practices.
Daniel Larson:
While we're waiting for the professor to be able to get back in, I have a question here. We're talking about the presidential election and the metamorphosis of the GOP pillars of democracy that have been 40 years, the process of what this questionnaire it says is undermining, but the way the GOP gets a continued manipulation is by efforts that undertake at a state level. So they're looking at how does the GOP advance things at the state level versus the federal level, they're remarking that just an hour ago, Georgia Republicans canceled the election for the state Supreme Court, meaning that a governor can appoint a Republican.
Dan Kryder:
It's a very complicated republic we live in, this is something the framers very much had in mind. They wanted to fragment power across the states, and they also wanted to fragment power from the federal level down to the state and down to the local level. So we're really talking not about a democracy, but about literally thousands of democracies across this country. And each of them are struggling with these issues within a local context and with local citizens and local constituents. And no, you're quite right. This is also something I think that Karl Rove and kind of the early brain trust of the Reagan Republican regime was very keen on addressing, which was a more comprehensive attempt by the party to seize power and hold power in localities and states. And that conflict is going to continue. It's something that Democrats, at least in the last 20 years, paid less attention to. And certainly it's something that they're organizationally more capable of doing now. We've got Professor Zelizer back, and, Daniel, maybe you could pose another question for him.
Daniel Larson:
Sure. We have a question here that is, do you see a dynamic other than the establishment of partisan media that undergirds the kind of tribal support Trump seems to enjoy, or is it just bubbling up and reinforcing the influence of Fox News in such institutions?
Julian Zelizer:
It's more than Fox News. I mean, the conservative media is certainly important, and it is something that is now distinct from what we've had certainly in the 1950s or 1960s. Part of this though, is there is an alignment between a lot of what President Trump supports and where a lot of the Republican party is, including many voters. And it's the myth of the Never Trumpers, is that they're a majority of the Republican party, they're not. And I think they have to get their heads around that in some ways. And many are, that's what a lot of these books coming out are about, like, "I didn't understand where a lot of my party was on immigration, on economic policy, on deregulation, climate change." Trump isn't an outlier, Trump's more an outlier stylistically. And even there, there's a lot of Republican precedent for what he does from the tea party back to Newt Gingrich.
Julian Zelizer:
So I think the pillars of support in the party are strong. And then the structural elements that the GOP relies on to be a minority party, essentially, that keeps winning, such as the electoral college, are all in place and explain why some of this is going on. So it's not kind of blind tribalism. I think that doesn't really capture where the party is.
Daniel Larson:
We have another question here for both of you, if you could comment on your thoughts on the recent special election that was held in California.
Julian Zelizer:
Dan, you want to start?
Dan Kryder:
I honestly don't know what that refers to. I'll pass on that one.
Julian Zelizer:
Yeah, I don't. I mean, I read about it in a newspaper article, and I must admit I don't have anything particularly new to add to that, so we can move on on that one.
Daniel Larson:
We have a question here. What does the nomination of Joe Biden tell us about the status of the democratic party within the crumbling Reagan regime? Is Joe Biden situated to be a reconstructionist President?
Julian Zelizer:
Yeah. It's hard to imagine that term being used for him. He's so much a product of the previous year of democratic politics, and not simply his age, but even a lot of his ideas and outlook. He's changing a little bit now, but he doesn't really kind of seem to reflect the next generation or the next regime, but it might, Skowronek, who's a great political scientist, one of my biggest influences, actually, I don't know, maybe he doesn't have it totally right in that you can have someone from an old regime, someone who really is holding on by the threads of a previous era actually be the start of something new.
Julian Zelizer:
Once I was having a debate with someone about, when the primaries were starting, and the debate was about how do you move beyond the era of Trump? And some of the people in this debate said you need someone who represents the next era. You need someone who doesn't accept the status quo and all of the things that Trump comes out of as acceptable. You can't just say, "We'll go back to normal." But then someone else said, "Well, electing him is the first step," meaning getting Trump out of office is the first step to ending Trumpism. And so I think that might be true. And so I think he can actually be both people. He can be a representative of the Clintonian era of politics, but in the end, because of our circumstances, open the doors for a lot of these new voices who we're hearing.
Dan Kryder:
In political science, there was a great wailing of disbelief with the Republican selection of Trump the last time around because it violated the expectations that the profession had regarding how the party, the political party, and by that scholars meant the elites and traditional orthodox leadership within a party, through a complex process actually selects the best candidate to run in the general election because presumably they have better information about which candidates can best appeal to the largest number of separate constituencies and so on. There's a great famous book called The Party Decides, which now has been called into question because Trump was certainly not the choice of the orthodox Republican party establishment leadership. He ran very purposefully against it. And I think Biden represents a kind of reversion to the traditional expectation that candidates should be chosen by elites and by this kind of complex process of vetting, in large part because of the broadest appeal that that candidate can bring forward to the largest number of states.
Dan Kryder:
And so to me, it's a relatively safe choice. It's an establishment choice. I tend to think there's too much emphasis on personalities in politics. He is simply the face of the Democratic party. And of course he's personally connected to Obama and to the last sort of eight years that so many Democrats miss so deeply. So he does have, I think, a certain number of advantages in terms of reliability, his access to the network of establishment politicians, and also policy advocates and policy entrepreneurs. He's calling on a very deep bench of establishment Democrats. And I think the party is choosing someone they feel is the safest choice.
Julian Zelizer:
I agree. I think those are all very, very important points and equally relevant. He did draw a lot of support in the primaries from the electorate. I mean, he wasn't a traditional pre-1970s choice that the party said, "This is the best person, and he should run." He actually won in the South Carolina kind of primaries and was able to draw the enthusiasm of African American voters, and even traditional democratic voters on economic issues. So I think all around that's correct. Will that work? I don't know, sometimes predictions of the most electable turn out to be wrong. And we will learn in November whether that's the case.
Dan Kryder:
I've been reading a fair amount, I always read when I have free time, books about Abraham Lincoln, who is a source of sort of solace for me as a political scientist, someone who thought very carefully about our constitution and about a destructive crisis that he saw coming. I wonder, Julian, how serious do you think the crisis is in our country in some broad sense, the increasing polarization, the increasing sorting of American citizens into camps that sort of reject the basic principles and legitimacy of the opposition? Seeing armed protestors in State Capitols, something we last saw I think in the 1960s, are these mirror side shows and symbolic demonstrations, or given your sense of the broader sweep of American history in politics, how concerned should we be about the gravity of the crisis surrounding the compatibility of the two parties and their inability to recognize the Americanness of each other?
Julian Zelizer:
I think it is a problem. I don't think division is always a bad thing. I think often we benefit from having two parties that have different points of view and put them forward. And in most of American history, that is the case. So the anomalies are periods where things work against that essentially. And we don't really have much of that. And I also think, and I'm a proponent that it's, the Democrats tend to still have more of that element in the party. It's a much more divided party than the Republicans who have moved in more lockstep fashion to the right. So putting that aside though, it's not good to have a situation where, A, the members of both parties can't reach solutions on major issues that we face over time or in moments of crisis. This ultimately is so powerful, it can gridlock us. That's just not useful. And it's certainly dangerous for the country.
Julian Zelizer:
And then it's dangerous to have such a discrepancy in how people view what's going on. We don't have a common set of facts anymore upon which to have the debate. So that's a whole other level of discord. It's one thing to say, "Well, this happened, what do you think? And what do you think?" And we have different views. Whereas now we're in a period where we don't even know what happened anymore. And there's many accounts that are all considered acceptable. And finally there is a different part of it, which is what you're referring to also, when you see people with weapons in the State Capitol, or obviously go back to Charlottesville, that's dangerous. And I don't think we should ignore it. It's a very real phenomenon that we've seen. It grows out of all sorts of extremist groups out there. But I think it matters, when people see this on TV, even if they don't have guns, it kind of creates a mentality about what the issues are.
Julian Zelizer:
Somehow this is storming the gates and threatening legislators rather than a public policy problem we as a nation need to solve. And if we can't see it that way, and we see that we have to take up arms symbolically, literally, you're never going to have a kind of functional solution to a crisis. So it's a big problem. And I think we need to take this all very seriously, just how divisive we have become. And just as important that there's nothing working against that anymore.
Dan Kryder:
By extension, I'm wondering how you are sort of interpreting Trump's presidency for your own students. These are always questions that imply partisan orientations, but again, given the longer sweep of the modern presidency, how did you explain to your students how we can understand or keep in perspective Trump's, to use the mildest term, unorthodox behavior, his insistence on loyalty within the administrative state and within the bureaucracy, within the White House, within federal agencies, his own sort of playing loose with norms that govern the apolitical pursuit of national interests. How do you explain to students how to keep a perspective on how to evaluate Trump's behavior over the last three or four years?
Julian Zelizer:
Well, the best comment I ever got, I teach a class at Princeton, The U.S. Since 1974, I've been teaching it for many years. I used to teach it with a guy named Kevin Kruse. We wrote a book that came out of this, Fault Lines, and we've been teaching this since like 2011 or something, and I still teach it. And when Trump was elected in 2016, one of our former students wrote and said, "This kind of makes sense. I'm glad I took your course. It's not so much of a surprise given the stuff you were talking about and the way American politics had developed."
Julian Zelizer:
And that's exactly how I treat it. I mean, I try to get out. I only teach Trump at the very end of my class, and I do, when I speak about him, try to get out of the particulars, try to get out of some tweet that he said, or just one moment, and try to root him in these bigger developments in American politics, whether that development is where did this conservative media come from and how did it evolve or how political polarization has unfolded since the 1970s and the asymmetric ways we've seen both parties develop. Or the social tensions over gender and race and immigration that have all been front and center in American politics. I try to give all of that to my students so that by the last few classes, when we reach President Trump, they can make some sense of him.
Julian Zelizer:
And I was just thinking the question of the California election. I don't kind of go into a, special elections and why did the Democrats lose, and what does that say? I'm just using that kind of as an example, but rather I think of structures, I think of big developments, and then you have a different understanding of Trump. He is less surprising. I don't discount how unconventional he is, and I don't discount how he takes things to extremes that no one else would do, but there is a logic to his presidency. I often say, the last thing on this, is that, in the end, in 2016, one of the key factors that he depended on for his victory wasn't simply the voters in Wisconsin or Michigan, a small group of voters. It was the fact that in most red areas, Republicans came home. They voted for him. It wasn't 1964, because the party ultimately could live with him. And so that's how I try to teach it. It's hard though. We live in heated times. It was hard with Obama. Everyone has a point of view. Because we are in a polarized moment, everyone sees everything you're saying through a lens. You're trying to support this side or the other. And so you have to kind of work through that, but it's more urgent than ever that you give that contextual element to students. So they understand what's going on and what are they seeing in front of them these days.
Dan Kryder:
I agree with that. I wonder if you would also, we promised this at the beginning, I wonder if you might say a few words, Julian, about your years at Brandeis and how you felt that it set you up for your career as a historian of American politics and society.
Julian Zelizer:
It was a hugely important to me. I tell people this in private and in public, I really feel so loyal to Brandeis. Obviously there was just the great network of people who were not only good friends and remain friends, maybe some of them are out there listening right now, but what was remarkable back then was we still had conversations. We did all the things college students do, but we also had real debates about politics all the time. It was kind of part of the culture still in the '80s and '90s. I remember so clearly my junior year sitting with two of my friends, Adam Decter and Robert Finkel, and we were watching on TV as the Berlin wall fell in '89. And I remember our discussions, like, "What does this mean? Good, is it bad? What's it going to do for world affairs?"
Julian Zelizer:
And I had a lot of those discussions, another friend of mine, Amy Rutkin, who's currently Chief of Staff for Congressman Nadler. I remember talking with her about the Women's March in D.C. when we were undergraduates. And I just learned a lot from that campus culture that I believe made someone who is interested in politics kind of triply interested in a totally different way where it became all consuming. And then second, I just had really, really amazing professors there, each of whom had a profound influence on me. My advisor who's no longer at Brandeis, Jim Kloppenberg, really guided me. I wrote a thesis on Massachusetts liberalism in the 20th century, it really helped me understand how do you study history and how do you study politics in context, and how do you see big ideas and big developments, so you get out of the game change moments, the every day turns of American politics.
Julian Zelizer:
Morton Keller taught me about how the kind of structures of politics that political scientists study apply to the day to day minutia that historians love to uncover. Gordie Fellman, who I saw when I was in Brandeis a few months ago, boy, he had some amazing classes that for a college student in your 18th, 19th year, he just opened your eyes to different ways to think about issues you heard about a million times, like the Israeli Palestinian conflict. And not everyone agreed and not everyone was on the same page, but boy, in the classroom, he pushed you to say, "I need to see these very fresh ways to think about these problems." All of that is an essential part of who I became. So it wasn't surprising that's where I started, and the culture was very distinct. I loved it. Those were really the two things I think about when I think about Brandeis.
Dan Kryder:
One of the things I'm kind of struggling with is how to, none of us have very much extra time or free time, but as an historian, what do you recommend we do as individuals, students, parents, grandparents, faculty to somehow record or make sense of the enormity of the crisis we're living through? This is a period that is of the scale that we study in the history books. It seems more consequential than anything we've seen in our lifetimes. What do you recommend we do or think about, given your training as a historian and given your position as a professor of history, given that we are living through this extraordinary period of history?
Julian Zelizer:
I'm going to take a pause before I answer, I want to add one other person who I, David Hackett Fischer was also a professor of mine who, what he did as an under, he would bring in his book to class, like the manuscript. It wasn't published yet. He put it on his lectern, and he'd give his lectures from this on the Civil War in Colonial America. He, in terms of the influence, brought to life that research universities are amazing teaching universities, which for me, I always remember those lectures when I'm giving mine. And it was really eye opening to see someone do that. In terms of your second question, I think for historians and scholars in the academy, I think our best bet now are, A, to help people make sense of this as it unfolds, whether we're on Zoom or whether, hopefully we're in classrooms come spring.
Julian Zelizer:
I don't think the public needs more of the day to day stuff you get on the news. I think what they really are thirsty for is giving the young people who are living through this, and it's an amazing thing for them to live through, I truly admire the way young people just, they figure it out. They say, "Okay, this is the normal," and they move forward. But what we can give is perspective, whatever, whether it's a scientific perspective on what is a pandemic and how it works, to a statistical perspective on how do you calculate how this stuff is transmitted. Political sciences, historians, we have to help make sense for young people of what they're going to have to live through and figure out, but you make them stronger that way.
Julian Zelizer:
And the second thing we have to do is we do have to keep our educational institutions working well. I was very committed personally this semester, even though we went virtual, to figure out how to make this exciting for students and make it interesting and do things I couldn't do in public. Because I do believe we focus on the economy, we focus on public health, but our civic health is really important and it is struggling because we are not together. And as educators, whatever format we're talking about, I think that's part of what we're doing. This conversation itself, I can't see all the people who are watching us, but they're here and we're here and we're having these kinds of conversations. And I think that's incumbent on us. Outside of academics, people should kind of mark what's happening, take photos on your phone of interesting signs you see about the shutdown, talk to elderly people in your family about what this is like, or how does it compare to being in World War II or the Great Depression? There's people alive who were in the influenza of 1918, ask those questions and record them. I think that's really important.
Julian Zelizer:
I have an article coming out of anyone's interested on Thursday in tablet, and this is my effort to do this. I have, my grandfather was a conservative rabbi who served in World War II in the Pacific. He was a rabbi in Columbus, Ohio, and he had a small little Torah that he got when he went overseas to use for services. And that Torah is now in our synagogue, and I saw it being used the other day on Zoom on the virtual services. It was striking, there's this Torah from World War II in this crisis. I have an article, more personal than most of my stuff, about what that means and what religion can do in the right ways. I think all of us should record this and think about that. Ultimately, what we're all going to need to do from the professors to the students to everyone else, in addition to now getting us healthy and safe, is figure out how to rebuild all these institutions that we desperately will need to move to a new normal.
Dan Kryder:
Thank you. Daniel, would you like to lob us a few more questions?
Daniel Larson:
Sure. So we have one here, it says, "I'm a former politics major and also Canadian. I'm struck by how throughout my lifetime Americans of all political stripes have always spoken of American democracy as the model for democracies. When, as of this moment, it seems to me that American democracy actually is broken. It looks to me that many norms that have been shattered and lines crossed causing damage that can't be easily repaired. Do you agree? Are Americans still so united in the belief that their institutions are better than those in the other Western democracies?"
Julian Zelizer:
There are many people who think that, I don't think it's true anymore. I think this lays bare, the crisis like this, so many of the flaws and not just dysfunction, but brokenness of a lot of our politics. We talked earlier about lack of a public commons of information, and the way in which it's not simply silos of different political positions, but no common information at all anymore. And you see that in the pandemic when there's disputes over how do we read the numbers of people deceased, or what does it mean to recover in terms of our public health? That's a brokenness of a democracy. It can't function if we continue that way. I don't know exactly how that compares to other countries.
Julian Zelizer:
Second issue I would say is problem of voting. We're moving in the wrong direction. We were moving toward more voting, toward greater enfranchisement of people until 1965, and even a little after, but now we're moving toward restricting. We're dealing with a major problem in November, and it's not front and center right now. People talk about it, but the states aren't all making sure everyone can vote, and that fits a bigger story. So I don't think we are a kind of shining city on the hill right now, and I think we need to acknowledge and deal with that before it gets worse.
Daniel Larson:
We have a question here. Oh, sorry. Dan, you want to go-
Dan Kryder:
No, no. Well put.
Daniel Larson:
We have a question here about the Federal Reserve. "The Fed has emerged as a very important source of economic stability, for now at least. What do political scientists have to say about the Fed's role and relevance in American politics? Is that changing over time?"
Dan Kryder:
I mean like so much of our governing institutions, the Fed has grown more politicized. And so what used to be seen as a relatively independent and insulated institution, they kind of gain that insulation from a set of assumptions and norms that were shared across the two parties, the crucial role that relatively disinterested expertise would play in moderating economic dislocation and stabilizing economic transactions and financial transactions. Those are the kinds of norms and shared expectations that are beginning to be called into question by this kind of increasing politicization and increasing polarization. Trump has targeted the Fed quite explicitly, as he has with many other of these traditionally insulated, depoliticized institutions. It's a kind of common theme in the last five to 10 years as the American electorate has grown more sorted and more politicized and more polarized. Julian, maybe you have-
Julian Zelizer:
No, I think that's all very good. That combined, ironically, with its expanding role and impact on the economy are the two key storylines. I had a graduate student, Peter Conti-Brown, who wrote a very good book on the Fed, if anyone's interested. And it's a history of accountability and independence of Fed leaders and the different ways that works.
Daniel Larson:
We have a question here, "Professor Zelizer, you spoke about how President Trump is not the authoritarian that people were concerned that he might be. How does this square with the idea of the unitary executive theory that is commonly espoused by his supporters?"
Julian Zelizer:
The unitary executive theory is this idea that the president is in command of the executive branch. Everyone is beholden to him, essentially, no one can hold him accountable within the executive branch. And it's a centralization of power model that several presidents have, the Bush presidency, George W. Bush, this is where it became popular during the post 9/11 period as a way to justify the president being able to do almost whatever he wanted in the name of national security. Justice couldn't check him because he ran Justice. That's the essence of the theory. Ronald Reagan during his presidency in the '80s, this is when the idea actually takes hold among legal thinkers.
Julian Zelizer:
I do think there's a difference between that and authoritarian government. I think that's a story of an Imperial Presidency, of a vision of executive power that's certainly dangerous and certainly expansive in terms of not only what the president can do, but are there any measures to really stop them short of Congress taking action, versus an authoritarian, which we should be clear, this is State controlled society, where there aren't any freedoms. There aren't any kind of real avenues toward pushing back if a president wants to do something. I don't think we have that. And I don't think if the president wants to achieve that, he's done that. You even see it in the chaos of the States right now. This is certainly not an authoritarian system. This is federalism and decentralization trying to handle an international pandemic, and that's part of the problem we face.
Dan Kryder:
I was sort of struck by the reference to the Imperial Presidency. I think even Arthur Schlesinger Jr. would say that sometimes, and I think Lincoln would say this, "Sometimes we need an emperor." And if there was ever a time that called for better federal coordination of the delivery of social services and public health services, this would be it, but we're not seeing it.
Julian Zelizer:
Right. Again, we don't need an authoritarian to do that, but you certainly need... This is one of the moments that requires a strong presidency. Schlesinger wrote this book on the Imperial Presidency, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is a historian. He wrote it in the heat of the Nixon presidency, and he starts his book with an apology. And he writes that he was one of the people who was enamored with the presidency. And he came of age with FDR and saw that at certain moments, you need a president to have that authority, to be able to make decisions, to be able to speak with clarity and move with clarity. And basically that book is saying, I didn't get it right, and now I see the dangers of where this can go with Richard Nixon. This is before Watergate even unfolded, which is an interesting part of the story. And I think we're in a moment like the '30s where we certainly need a president who is not only strong, but willing to use that strength in wise ways. And right now, at least, we're not seeing that.
Daniel Larson:
We have a question here about political demographics. "Has the number of people who identify as Republican decreased? In other words, is it possible to say that even though the president's approval in the party is rising, that it's actually because there are fewer Republicans?"
Julian Zelizer:
For a while, that was what I had read from political scientists. One of my colleagues, Nolan McCarty, I saw speak about this. So yes, he's held his support among Republicans, but the number of Republicans has shrunk since he became president. I think that's still true. It doesn't answer if they're going to come back, to me at least, in November. So even if they're not identifying any more as a Republican, maybe push comes to shove in November, they're right back where they were. But I think that is one of the Trump effects since 2016, unless political scientists have challenged those numbers.
Dan Kryder:
I don't have those numbers at hand. I think those numbers are relatively stable. You look at aggregators of public opinion polls like FiveThirtyEight and you'll see that those are questions posed to the American public as a whole, and his public approval rating is really quite astonishing. It's been very, very stable. It's relatively low, but it's been very, very stable throughout his presidency. There's been some small ticks upward and downward over the last three months, but nothing really consequential. The striking thing about public opinion in the Trump years is how stable those indicators have been.
Daniel Larson:
We have a question here, actually has several questions have come in about whether the president and the Republican Party will use the pandemic as a reason to postpone the election. That's certainly something that's got a lot of coverage in the media. Could both of you speak to that point?
Julian Zelizer:
I mean, theoretically, they can't. The president will lose power come January. And so it's not as if that is an authority that the president has, even under the unitary presidential theory, that's not something that would fly. It wouldn't have constitutional muster. Is he going to try to declare a national emergency somehow? I don't put anything off the table. He will try a lot of things people like myself or Professor Kryder say can't be done. It doesn't mean it will play out. What I imagine much more clearly is another close election, maybe made closer because of the particularities of how voting will work, where he contests the results and ties this up in court like in 2000, and uses that as a way to, hopefully from his perspective, to win reelection. But he doesn't have the authority to cancel this election. That's been out there. It's not his to cancel. That's the entire point of our democratic system. You're out of office. And if you don't win, you're out. You can't just stop that decision making.
Dan Kryder:
I agree. I think that's a very good survey of the possibilities. He said himself that the election, I think not in so many words, that the election will take place as planned. I think attempting to abolish that date is much too radical an idea, even for the vast majority of Republican elites and Republican voters. I think he also sees a pathway to reelection, which is an important incentive to observe the formalities. And I think professors Zelizer's right that what's probably more likely is for him to begin to frame the election as rigged in some fashion and then perhaps pursue a court challenge after the results are in. Right now... Pardon?
Julian Zelizer:
No, I would just... I mean, I would add to that. I think people focus on that question, but for me, the more pertinent question is this mail-in voting and absentee voting. And I think that's where he is actually, right now, making sure nothing happens on that. Not supporting this, standing firm with his Republican colleagues, even threatening the budget for the postal systems.
Dan Kryder:
That's right.
Julian Zelizer:
That's the threat. Because that's what he... That all adds up to victory in the election. He'd much rather have that than the chaos of not having an election. He wants to win. He thinks he can win, as you said. And I think that's really where the erosion's happening, right now, in front of our eyes with the absence of a plan of how voting is going to work.
Daniel Larson:
I have a question here about checks and balances. American system, obviously, is built upon the notion of checks and balances. And the question here: as to what does that look like in the current political climate? And do you see that changing anytime soon?
Julian Zelizer:
Checks and balances have been out of whack since the early 20th century. That's the imperial presidency argument. Congress has certainly seated power in many areas. National security is the most glaring example. We don't declare war since World War II. Presidents can send troops.
Julian Zelizer:
In terms of oversight, in many areas it's gotten a lot weaker. Congress has just not been as forceful. And so the trends that we're seeing today are not an invention of the Trump presidency. It's a gradual erosion. But on the other hand, Congress still has immense power. It's more about when they want to use it and what their calculations are.
Julian Zelizer:
So Senator Mitch McConnell is phenomenally powerful. If he wants to stop the president doing a lot of stuff, he actually can. He can do it pretty quickly. He just doesn't want to. I think what you're seeing is Congress is actually using its power to support the president. Certainly, the GOP. That's how the Senate majority works. And there's a convergence of presidential interest and partisan interest on Capitol Hill. And I think that's often a story we miss when we talk about the balance of power.
Julian Zelizer:
I've written about Vietnam and one of the phenomenal parts of it is, early in the Johnson presidency, the Democrats in Congress... They gave him the power to expand the war because they thought, ultimately, it would be politically beneficial. It was better for the party. They had no interest in stopping him until it was too late.
Julian Zelizer:
So I think both part... A historian can always say both things are true. That's the beauty of the discipline. But I think in this case, both things are true. Congress still has a lot of power in terms of the budget. You're seeing with the stimulus, right now. The president... His hands are tied too, and he's waiting. So we shouldn't miss the many ways in which Congress, if it wants, can still be very assertive and is in many issue areas.
Daniel Larson:
A question. What is your assessment of the ability of the Democratic Party to pull together when it is now, at best, a coalition of different political ideologies, rather than reflecting a consensus of policies?
Julian Zelizer:
It can... You could... Coalitions... Most of the time until recent decades, we've had coalitional parties. So, Dan's done a lot of work on the New Deal period and that FDR coalition is... It's a coalition of people who often were very much at odds with each other Southern Democrats who wanted nothing to do with civil rights and Northern liberals who thought this should be a top priority. And yet they were held together in a coalition.
Julian Zelizer:
Ronald Reagan brought together a Republican Party, which in the eighties was still a very fragmented with evangelical conservatives who had nothing in common with Wall Street Republicans who were really focused on deregulation and economic issues and yet the coalition was very, very powerful.
Julian Zelizer:
And I think while the Republicans have united and coalesced, the Democrats have had moments of success as a fragmented party. I mean, Obama didn't bring everyone together, in fact, you can argue the party got more divisive under him. That progressive wing got stronger when he was president and, yet, he had a two-term presidency that was pretty impactful.
Julian Zelizer:
So, I don't think the fact that Biden and AOC are in the same party means that that party can't win and that it can't be quite formidable in years to come.
Dan Kryder:
I agree with that and I... The only thing I would add is remember, too, that the American Republic and the Republic as it was designed by the framers is multilayered and that there are opportunities to pursue different brands of Democratic Party politics at the federal state and local levels.
Dan Kryder:
And I think that, going forward, the Democratic Party would benefit from a kind of ideology that allowed people to express different kinds of political instincts at different levels with different degrees of radicalness or progressive-ism.
Dan Kryder:
We don't have to have a single brand for either party. There are so many different contexts and so many different democracies, so many different platforms for political activism that it allows for people to express different versions of Democratic Party politics, all across the nation in very, very different contexts.
Dan Kryder:
And I think Professor Zelizer's right, the Democratic Party has always been a motley crew of out-groups in addition to some more well-to-do and well-educated Americans. And one of the real geniuses of FDR was his ability to hold together that coalition in the 1930s that had really bipolar aspects: radical, egalitarian, race reformers, and also extreme segregationists, white supremacists. And that's a very difficult trick, but it's something that I think is... One enduring aspect of Democratic Party leadership is the ability to manage those different kinds of coalitional partners.
Daniel Larson:
I know we're at 1:10 now here, but would you be all right with a couple more questions to put us to 1:15?
Dan Kryder:
Sure.
Daniel Larson:
Great. We've got lots of questions coming in and I'm sorry that we're not going to be able to get to everyone. A question here. If Trump loses the election, what changes do you foresee for the Republican Party without Trump?
Julian Zelizer:
I mean, for me, it depends on how bad it is. The only way I see the party really rethinking itself... This is a landslide that we haven't seen since 1984, where it's an election that doesn't occur because of how polarized the electorate is. Meaning parties don't shift from red to blue or vice versa. You just have swing states.
Julian Zelizer:
The only thing that would cause Republicans to really rethink everything is if somehow this election, most States go to Joe Biden, Republicans really lose the Senate... Don't just lose it, but really lose it. Same... The house is retained with even greater margins by the Democrats. That's the only thing that I could imagine leading to a rethinking because the party is what you see. We keep coming back to that. It's not as if all of a sudden, after this election, most voters or even most of the politicians are going to easily let go of everything.
Julian Zelizer:
They've gradually built a case around certain issues, like limiting immigration and cutting taxes and deregulation, and they have gradually embraced the style of politics... This Smash Mouth-style of partisanship... And they're not going to let go of that unless they have to.
Julian Zelizer:
And earlier people talked... Someone asked demographics. And the demographics don't necessarily lend themselves to the Republican Party. Their support is actually shrinking and their numbers are shrinking, but this style of politics works in the electoral college configuration we have spoken about and in the tightly gerrymandered districts. And so, even at a very strategic level, it's not obvious you just abandon everything because President Trump loses re-election.
Julian Zelizer:
So it would have to be devastating to make them rethink where they are. That's my opinion. I just don't think things are going to change very dramatically.
Dan Kryder:
I think that's right. There are some indications that we're finally in the period of something like a re-alignment in which demographic change systematically favors the Democratic Party. We're starting to see some early polling from the swing states and it looks like Arizona is moving considerably more blue. Florida seems to be moving in that direction although it will be very closely contested. North Carolina is moving blue. Virginia moving blue. Georgia, not yet, but it's trending blue.
Dan Kryder:
And these are systematic, structural changes at the demographic level that are the foundation for, I think, what Professor Zelizer is talking about, which is a defeat that may be so humiliating and so thorough that it begins to look a little bit like the election of 1932 in discrediting the Republican Party and these standard rules of governing that they promote in a way that will call for a real reassessment of the Republican Party's ideology and platform.
Daniel Larson:
So we have time for one more question here and I think... Oh, Julian's back. Great. Worried we lost him. What do you think... Why do you... Sorry. Why do you think that some of the younger Democratic Party candidates couldn't succeed? In so far as, at the beginning of the primary race, there were as a wide, diverse slate of candidates. Ultimately, it ended up with Joe Biden.
Julian Zelizer:
I mean, I think that, before the pandemic, the anger and sense of desolation among many Democrats about two Trump terms was so great that nothing is more important than who can win. And that generates a certain amount of conservatism in the electorate.
Julian Zelizer:
Conservatism, not in terms of issues, but who can win. Not taking risks. And I think there were a lot of exciting voices for Democrats. They are now on the national stage. I think in the end, a lot of voters in those early primaries made a decision that they just want a safe bet. That it's better not to have Trump than to have a candidate they love. And I think he really solidified his support as this was all unfolding in that final week. I mean, the potential threats of the pandemic. And I think that added a little bit of a yearning for governance and experience in governance. So that's one part.
Julian Zelizer:
I think the younger people also we're competing with Obama. I mean, I think when Biden announced... And I was in this camp, I thought of Senator Biden. But I think a lot of the public thought of Obama Biden. And that was a powerful thing because he is still very much a loved president and he's not seen as the old guard. And so I think that helped Biden over some of the younger people.
Julian Zelizer:
And finally, look, give Biden his due, or his campaign, his due. Whatever it was, he out-foxed them. He figured out a way to beat them, especially when he got a coalition of the people who had lost to support him and so, those are some campaign skills. Old age and treachery always beats youth and skill. That's a song by Willie Nelson. And I think there's an element... And Waylon Jennings... And I thought of that in terms of what he did.
Julian Zelizer:
I think those are the three reasons, but I think those young voices aren't going away. You're going to hear a lot of them, either as vice president or just in the realm of politics for a while to come. They are the next generation.
Dan Kryder:
If I could ask with, maybe, the last question, given the timeframe, Julian, Brandeis is associated with learning in the service of social justice and we, on campus, still love that legacy and struggle with that legacy all the time. And I just wonder if you would talk for a moment about how Brandeisians, current and past, those of us who care about the institution should be thinking about this moment as an opportunity to reclaim a social justice framework. Invent one, reclaim one. How can we help to fashion a social justice agenda given the severe crisis that the United States is struggling with right now?
Julian Zelizer:
Well, look, the pandemic is a policy problem. How do you end it and get out of it? But it has also just put before us all these problems that certain parts of the political world we're talking about but now we see as really they are the problems way down our democracy. The fact that we live with this kind of economic inequality or the fact that we haven't solved our healthcare insurance problems or climate change is this big issue. Everyone's saying, "We need to deal with it."
Julian Zelizer:
Various ways to think of social justice are now front and center. And we need institutions that help teach people and inspire people, like Brandeis, not to take one position or another toward how to solve social justice but to agree that that has to be front and center. It can't wait any longer.
Julian Zelizer:
I mean, that is the lesson of 2/20. It can't wait because when we wait, we end up like this. And we need to understand that the social justice issues in front of us are just as urgent. Many people lived locked-down on a daily basis. It doesn't matter if there's a pandemic happening. And I think Brandeis is certainly... It is ingrained in its tradition from its founding that this is part of what education aims to do.
Julian Zelizer:
It aims to move young people in the direction that this is the kind of problem they're thinking about. They might end up writing about it or they might end up as activists or politicians, or financiers, who devote their time to it. But this is the direction they consider essential. And we've lived through an era where markets were the goal. Being part of the market, enjoying the market, fostering the market.
Julian Zelizer:
But I think we're in an era now, and I think this will define everyone. Not the alumni who are watching as much as the young people who are living through this and realize these are the problems we have now accepted as normal. I think institutions like Brandeis have a responsibility to giving all of them, and us, the tools that we need and the vision we need to direct our energy in the direction of solving this. It's not really an option. You think it's an option then you're not paying attention to what's going on right now.
Dan Kryder:
Thank you.
Hanna Switlekowski:
Thank you so much, professors. We really appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedules and just... Really fascinating conversation and discussion. Very timely. As someone who lives and works in politics, it really just brought to light a lot of the issues that we're thinking about. So, a special thank you to everyone who joined us today. It was great to see so many people participating in these conversations and discussions. We invite you to our next event, which is going to be Tuesday, May 26th at 12:00 PM Eastern standard time. And the next faculty event is going to be titled US-Russian Relations in 2020 and Beyond with Professors Gary Samore and Carol Saivetz, class of 1969. So thank you again and stay safe and healthy.