PERRY BACON: This is Right Now, the The New Republic show on politics and policy. I’m the host, Perry Bacon. I’m joined today by Ryan Enos. He’s a professor of Government at Harvard University, and he’s been doing a lot of writing and thinking about the democracy crisis we’re in. So I want to talk to him about that today. So, Ryan, welcome.
BACON: I want to start with something that I assume you’ve not done a lot of research and study about, but the East Wing being demolished in the last few days. This is one of those things that—it’s easy. It’s an easy story to remember. It’s very visual, obviously. When we think about these democracy stories, where we’re going, how radical Trump is, is the East Wing something that we should think about or something that’s sort of a frivolous thing? Or where do you—talk about the East Wing story in comparison to—talk about the East Wing thing a little bit.
But it’s not unrelated because what he’s doing—and I think this is the most important part of it, of course, is that he is bypassing the law. He’s bypassing independent commissions that have been set up to regulate this sort of thing. He’s doing what I think is more concerning, which is he is using private money to reshape a public building. And if you think about that, if you think of the limits of that, like, could the president spend money to build his own casino in Yellowstone National Park?
And I think the other thing, which is a little more—a little less directly illegal, I mean, it isn’t directly illegal. But it’s something that I think is worth thinking about; it’s also just indicative of Trump’s vision of America, which is, he wants to build this gaudy 90,000—is that how big it is?—square-foot ballroom on the White House. And it’s something that is—it’s out of character. And I think this is important for the White House.
BACON: Let me probe both those comments you mentioned. So the first one is more, this is an example of him going around laws, regulations. Like, in theory, there’s a bunch of people who should have approved this before the East Wing was—so that’s the core. That’s part of it. And part of it you’re saying is, the second thing you said is more symbolic in a certain way. Like, that is more like the—he’s treating the White House in a way other presidents have not treated the White House.
It’s, he was spending money and taxing money without the approval of the legislature, in some cases, without the approval of the British Parliament. And so they said, if you want to have a government that is responsive to the people, you must have the legislature, the ones that can appropriate and tax money. And parenthetically, Donald Trump is going around both those things, because he’s imposing taxes on the American people through tariffs in a way that would shock the designers of our Constitution.
And in a democracy, you don’t do things like have an unelected king who can build a palace to make himself feel grand. And that’s what Donald Trump is doing. He looks at that little White House, and he says, it’s not grand enough for him, right? It’s not something—he wants to be a—you know, he wants to be some sort of Middle Eastern oil baron, where he can build himself a palace and impress other rulers and things like that.
BACON: Speaking of that, that’s what I was going to ask next about; there have been political scientists like you have talked about the idea that we’re maybe moving toward competitive authoritarianism or we’re already there. I think it’s generally agreed. I know Brendan Nyhan has this group of scholars who he solicits. It’s called the Bright Line Watch, and they’re political scholars who say democracy is in some decline in America.
ENOS: Yeah it’s interesting that you ask because I taught about this in my undergraduate class last week. This is a class on political psychology, and we were talking about the psychology of authoritarianism. But in order to frame that, we have to think about why are we talking about this. What is this moment we’re in? And I think it’s important, of course, as a scholar, not to be alarmist about these things. So I try to be very careful about this. And I thought really hard about how to describe this to my students.
But if I had to put a label on it—and some people would disagree because there’s no bright line—but I think we are no longer in a full democracy, and we’re living in a system of competitive authoritarianism. And it’s understand—it’s important to understand what that means, and I’ll say two things about this. So one is: Often the reason we don’t recognize this is because when we think of authoritarianism, we think of something that’s fully nondemocratic, where all of the Democratic—all of the things that make something a democracy, in terms of elections, civil rights, in terms of things like that, have gone out the window.
And when that happens, the incumbent ruling party, in this case, Donald Trump, is no longer responsive to the voters in a way that makes things a true democracy. So he can violate their civil rights. He can abuse the power. He can abuse the Constitution, all these things we’re seeing Donald Trump do. And one indication that we are no longer living in a full democracy is, Donald Trump seems perfectly at ease doing these things that normally he would worry about either landing in prison, or he would worry at least ending his political future and the political future of his party.
I mean, we’ve seen—and this happened very early in the Trump administration— we saw students getting picked up off the street for things that they wrote in newspapers. We worry now it’s gone much further than that. We see people—
ENOS: Yeah, exactly. We see Trump’s political opponents being prosecuted. And that is very clearly a sign that you’re no longer living in a full democracy. Now, we’re holding on. Right? There are a lot of ways to go before we lose our democracy entirely. And if I had to bet, I’d bet that Comey and James will be found—the courts will side with them, ultimately. But that also doesn’t mean that, because we still have some trappings of an independent judiciary, but that doesn’t mean that the damage isn’t being done.
BACON: Talk about—what’s the problem that I’m trying to get at here? But I mean, we had massive protests, so that’s one thing to think about over the weekend. People are mobilized. The Democrats in Congress are opposing a lot of these things, I would say. Is the problem the Republican Party in Congress and in the courts is not reinforcing these traditional barriers?
One is the—I’ll get to the Republicans in a minute, so I’m not trying to give them a pass—but one is that Democrats have been somewhat feckless in their opposition to these things. And by this I mean our most senior Democrats in Congress and in other places—not all of them, but a lot of them—they haven’t treated themselves as an opposition party.
So I think Democrats have failed to meet the moment. More importantly, as you mentioned, there, of course, the Republican Party—and there’s lots of reasons for this that we could talk about, but the Republican Party has abdicated any role they have in defending democracy, as well, and essentially become subservient to Donald Trump. So if you look at the Republican Party now, even compared to 2012, which wasn’t that long ago, and even the beginning of the first Trump term, they’re an entirely different party ideologically.
Now, as I said, there could be deeper reasons for this that we could discuss, for example, the fact that we have a system set up where primary elections are dominated by a small group of people, and that means that when you have somebody that dominates the party like Donald Trump, ultimately, the future of those politicians is beholden to that one leader that dominates those things. Now, in a perfect world, what I’d like to see them do is choose honor over their electoral future; choose their democracy and their fellow citizens, and say, It’s more important for me to stand up for democracy than to spend another two years in the House of Representatives.
And the third thing I would mention is [that] the courts really put us in a tough spot. Who knows what the reasons for this is? We’re in a sad position because we’re always trying to psychoanalyze our politicians. And that’s one way you know your democracy has gone wrong, is when you’re spending your time psychoanalyzing your leaders.
But they’ve also now essentially rubber-stamped everything that has come through the Trump administration in a way that would have been really hard to believe. I think it’s really hard to convince anybody, and we have pretty direct evidence for this, that they wouldn’t have done the same thing with a Democratic administration, or even with previous Republicans. Yet here we are.
BACON: So my guess is [Senate Majority Leader Chuck] Schumer and [House Minority Leader Hakeem] Jeffries with truth serum would say their view is, the best way to stop authoritarianism is to win the midterms. So everything they’ve done has been around trying to say “health care” as much as possible, talk about poll—you look at polls, be very careful, be very cautious. Democracy didn’t help Kamala Harris win. So I think part of what we’re getting at here is the incentives for a political party in a midterm versus the opposition party defending against an authoritarian are probably different.
ENOS: Yeah, that’s right. And look. I don’t envy those guys because there’s a tension here. Don’t get me wrong. And they’re right that we should be looking to the midterms. And they at least think they have a formula for how to win those midterms. Now, that’s not obvious. You know, it’s not obvious. I think this is a standard trope. We go back to the American people; they care about these bread and butter issues, and they want—it’s going to be about health care and things like that.
But there’s—we can see. I can cite lots of pieces of evidence for this. You know, one is that Donald Trump is just wildly unpopular. And we have to remember that. And part of that is because of the damage he’s done to American democracy. And people respond to that. The colloquial example I give is just even how popular Harvard has become recently, right? And Harvard is a place that nobody likes for a lot of different reasons, right? I mean, who wants to get behind Harvard?
So politicians and institutions can be rewarded for that. There’s no doubt about that. And so the question of what Democrats should be doing—and this was your question of looking forward to 2026 or fighting now—in some ways, first of all, I think that those are compatible, if we think that politicians and institutions are rewarded for democracy. But it’s also the case that we need to be looking forward to make sure we have free and fair elections in 2026, right?
I mean, we started off by talking about these, but they’re some of the grossest violations of civil liberties any of us have seen in our lifetime, sending people overseas without trial; occupying American cities. These are all things that would have been unimaginable in previous decades in American history. And so would he disrupt elections? I mean, I don’t have anything to believe is stopping him now, other than pushback.
And eventually, that may get to these elections that we’re putting our hope for democracy on.
ENOS: Well, that’s a good question. I mean, constitutionally, unfortunately, yes, because this is a flaw in our system. States have the ability to draw these lines. And going back to the Supreme Court, recently, within the last decade, they decided that political gerrymandering was something that the court had no role in policing. And so now courts can—or the legislatures can—gerrymander as much as they want.
And so the deeper question, what you’re asking, is that a free or fair election, a constitutional election? But the United States operated under that same Constitution, not as a full democracy, for a long time. We know that, right? We had elections where for a long time, half the population couldn’t vote because of gender, even more than half the population, sorry. And another large portion of the population couldn’t vote because of race.
And it’s hard to fight all these fronts at once, all these battles at once. And one thing I’d say is, unfortunately, one way to think about this is that these are two things that may be at cross-purposes. Because I understand, and I think ultimately I’m in favor of Democrats that want to start gerrymandering too, to make up for the Republican gerrymandering. Like, this is what’s going on. California is going to start redrawing its lines, probably.
BACON: Let me finish on another topic, which is related to all this, which is higher education. You’ve been very eloquent in calling for Harvard to not comply, and to not fold, and to not do whatever Trump asks. And I appreciate that work. So I guess a couple things in the news this week—I want to start there. One is that you’ve had eight or nine colleges, maybe a bunch of colleges, that have rejected this sort of quote-unquote compact with Trump, where basically, you’d jump the line for federal funding if you agreed to all their policies. So that was good.
ENOS: Well, I’m of many different minds on this, so I’ll try to give you a somewhat coherent answer. So the UVA thing is very disheartening, right? And some people have pointed to this, and this is new news. I don’t know how many people have actually looked at this thing. I always put “agreement” in quotation marks because what it is is an extortionary demand and an extortionary payment because this is essentially what Trump is doing to these universities.
And in a democracy, you do not negotiate over your rights. You don’t negotiate the authoritarian away. That’s not a democracy when we’re doing that. And they did that on the heels of having their president run out by the Trump administration. So they’ve already given up their independence. And now they’re doing that. So that’s a very bad thing.
But it’s a clear target of authoritarians. And there’s one piece of evidence that we know Donald Trump is operating as authoritarian is he’s trying to shut down higher education. This is what happened in Hungary. It’s what happened in Turkey. It’s what happened in Nazi Germany, is people have gone after universities. Yet universities in the United States, especially, because we have such a vibrant field of higher education, have a true identity that allows for collective action potential.
And there’s a lot of things that make me worried about that because they haven’t done that super effectively at all times. But one thing we’ve seen, at places like Harvard, for example, is that the scholars in higher education who, normally, we want to spend our time in our books and our computers, are really finding their voice about these things. And it took us a little while to find our feet. But they’ve been really successful, and they’ve really pushed back in a way that is making our leaders accountable.
BACON: Oh interesting, OK.
And so I think if we can continue our voice, that that’s going to be a powerful pushback in a way that, frankly, things like corporate America are not really capable of.
So talk about that idea. I guess I’m uncomfortable with the idea that we’re hinting universities should kind of ask people what their politics are, and then hire them accordingly, and at 50-50. On the other hand, I used to complain when universities or other institutions had 2 percent Black people. So I think there is something. There’s a tricky thing here. It’s like, diversity is good; viewpoint diversity is probably good.
ENOS: OK, so Perry, I could talk about this at length. You’ll have to cut me off if I get going, because this is something I’ve thought a lot about. Let me say the first, most important thing, which is that the federal government has zero business in trying to regulate the ideology of university faculty. That is full stop.
ENOS: Yeah, sure. But what that is is the government using coercion to put an ideological test on a private entity, or even a public entity. And both of those things have been—a plain reading of the Constitution tells you that’s against the Constitution. But the courts have ruled on this very clearly. And it’s an affront to democracy to say that we’re going to go in and measure the ideology of the people that work somewhere, and then control how much money they have.
And nobody’s doing an ideological test in Boeing. Right? You know, if you went and looked at the corporate board of Boeing, what do you think their voting patterns are? And so this is targeted at a certain group. And that’s an affront to democracy. We just can’t do that. That’s full stop. Now, there’s another question, which is a separate question that I think is a very good one, which is, how should universities be if we want to operate to be the best that we can be; if we want to fulfill our mission to educate and to research.
And so I really think that’s important. Now, there’s a question of how do we get there. And that’s more complicated because—
ENOS: Yeah, exactly. This is the problem, right? It becomes self-reinforcing. So let’s say you’re a smart young person and you’re interested in some kind of pursuit in the sciences, or the social sciences, or even humanities. And you look around, and you say, well, but I’m a conservative. Do I want to go into that? And you can understand why they wouldn’t, right? And so I wouldn’t, if I was going to be an extreme minority and even potentially have my ideas looked down on and mocked.
But universities need to take a serious look at this. There’s a really bad taste in our mouth right now to talk about—people throw around this phrase “affirmative action for conservatives.” And at the same time, we’re stripping away race-based affirmative action. That just sounds absurd. And I can understand why people don’t want to go down that path because the idea that those are two things we’d be doing at the same time sound almost like an affront to both ideas, in many ways.
And ultimately, we might say that we want to do things where we can think about creating ways to get more conservatives on faculty, to have more conservative voices among our students, and all those things. That would make us stronger in the end. But it’s not an easy problem to solve in the same way that—I don’t like this parallel, but it’s one that people have talked about, and you mentioned it when you first started—about how things like bringing in racial and gender equality at universities.
BACON: But I guess JD Vance would say, We’ve given you time to solve this problem. You’re not solving it, so now we’re going to solve it for you by … This is not a new issue, that academia is considered too left. I guess it wasn’t a new problem in 1960 that academia was very white.
And so we have to be very clear that Donald Trump and JD Vance, and people in that circle, they don’t care about free speech, actually, and they don’t care about ideological diversity either. What they want is [for] universities to be more in their image. And we can see this in the way that faculty have been pressured to be punished, have lost their jobs because of things they say. We’ve seen this in a lot of red states now.
BACON: Let me ask, because we use the term “lasting ideological diversity” and conservatives. We’ve sort of conflated these things. But I went to a Black church when I was a kid. It was working class. People were not super politically engaged. We all probably voted for—most people voted for the Democratic candidate, but [there] was actually a fair amount of disagreement about how should schools work, the police, et cetera.
They might just not have a party—. When we say, I hope we mean, actually, a mix of socialists, libertarians, not just R and D, which I think is very … we have two parties. We shouldn’t reduce everyone’s thinking to that, in my view at least. I just want to talk about that a little bit.
And when we respond to that, rather than thinking about it from the perspective of what are we trying to accomplish and what are our goals, then we end up reducing it to these sort of reductionist paradigms like, oh, we just need to balance conservatives, Republicans and Democrats. And if you think about institutions in America, institutions aren’t set up that way. Right? You know, the NRA doesn’t have Democrats running around as board.
Now, one important thing to mention is that universities actually—and this is part of the problem because this has become politicized; there’s this caricature of universities, where we’re all somewhere in between socialist and Marxist or something like that. And that’s our ideological—of course, that’s not true. You’re meeting faculty members—
ENOS: Your median faculty member is kind of a center-left person. And a lot of those, 20 years ago, probably would have been Republicans. Because a lot of them are rich folks that have a lot invested in the system. And it’s just the Republican Party has moved away from them. So now they find themselves as Democrats. And that’s true. There’s some radicals running around here, but that’s diversity, right? Radicals are part of the diversity too.
BACON: Binary, right.
But to me, in many ways, that was the success of diversity in universities. Look what happened. I mean, we had people wildly—yeah, it was a very touchy subject. And we have people—and many institutions aren’t like this, and this is why they didn’t experience this—we had people with wildly different worldviews. We had people from different parts of the world. We have Jewish Israelis. We have Arab Palestinians. We have people from other parts of those countries. We have people from different religious backgrounds.
Sometimes they’re coming in the classroom and having respectful debates about these things, and that’s actually happening almost nowhere else in America. And that’s actually a really amazing thing. And you can choose, you can point to all kinds of other issues that people come here and have diverse viewpoints on and argue about, and that’s actually an amazing success.
ENOS: Yeah, and so one way to frame this whole conversation we’re having—and this is often lost, so I’m glad you’ve given me an opportunity to talk about it—is we talk about these universities being these very single-minded and closed-minded places. And that’s a complete mischaracterization. I would argue that we are some of the most open-minded, wildly diverse-thinking places in the entire country, if not the world.
BACON: Because I guess if you have five parties, like other countries—I guess on the Harvard campus, the most right-wing candidate would probably not get many votes on the Harvard campus. That is a problem [for] that person, but the other four parties might get some.
And we teach things like that at Harvard; our professors understand that and things like that. And as the Republican Party has moved away from that, especially in the last year, and completely abandoned that, then you can understand why people aren’t willing to put their name behind that. But it doesn’t mean there’s not conservatives on campus. It doesn’t mean there’s not people that, given another situation, would vote for conservative policies, and that’s OK.
BACON: Brian, this was a great conversation. I really enjoyed it. I feel like I’ve learned a lot. Hopefully, the audience has too. Thank you for joining me. I appreciate it.
BACON: Good to see you.
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