Does America Exist Without Democracy and Rule of Law? (with Barton Gellman) 37:58

Hey everyone, it's Reed. Before we get started, I just want to reiterate something I said on a recent episode. This is a campaign about values. This is a fight about values. Who are we as a people? Who are we as a nation? Who are we as individuals? I know that if you're listening to my voice, you're on the right side of history and you're on the side of good.

Please go to LincolnProject.us and sign up to join us today. Be part of the fight. Get in the arena with us, gang. The work that we will do in the next seven plus months will change the future of America and the future of the world, and we'll make sure that our kids and grandkids have a country they can be proud of, not one they're afraid of. And now, on with the show.

Welcome back to The Lincoln Project. I'm your host, Reed Galen. Today, I'm joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author, and democracy defender, Barton Gelman. Bart is a senior advisor at the Brennan Center for Justice, where he works to promote democracy and the rule of law. He is also a visiting lecturer at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.

Prior to joining the Brennan Center, he was a staff writer for The Atlantic. And before that, he spent 21 years at The Washington Post, where he served tours as legal, diplomatic, military, and Middle East correspondent. Today, he's coming to us from New York City. Bart, welcome back. Thank you for having me.

It's been a while since we had you on. The last time we talked, I think, was right after your what I'm going to call seminal article on January 6th, I think was a year later, called This Was All a Drill or This Was Preparing for a Coup. It was a cover story on The Atlantic. And so let me ask you this. I want to get a sense of why you left journalism for advocacy. But before I do that, since you wrote that article about January 6th was just the beginning, how do you see things?

I see things as risky. There's one really good development. At the time I wrote that story, which was called January 6th was Practice, I wrote that democracy defenders were sleeping.

that they were not alive to the scale of the risk that Trump and his allies would try to steal the next election. They were not working as hard as they could against subversion. And at the time, Joe Biden was not making it a priority. He was not using the power of presidency to protect election integrity and to call attention to the threat to democracy. And that's changed.

Biden has made it a principal theme of his reelection campaign. The Justice Department has intervened against some election suppression laws around the country and against efforts to take political control over counting and certification of the vote.

And the world that I'm in now, the world of nonprofit democracy defenders and organizations, is much more alive to the problem and has magnified its efforts considerably. Yeah, so let's talk about that. So you spent your first career, I'm going to call it, your first career as a journalist with much success, much incredible work, several books, Pulitzer Prizes. What...

convinced you that now was the time to leave journalism for something like the Brennan Center, which I've known of for years and have done some work alongside of from time to time. They do incredible work. What made you decide that now was this time?

I drank my own Kool-Aid. I'd been writing for four years that democracy was genuinely at risk, that this country risked losing its constitutional form of government, that the rule of law was under assault, and that there was an actual possibility that we could move toward an autocracy or move toward an authoritarian form of government and we could lose democracy.

what we had built for more than 200 years. And you have to ask yourself, once you're convinced of that, that there's a real and present danger, you know, what are you doing about it? And I don't discount the power and importance of journalism to call attention to problems, but it increasingly started to feel like I was just, you know, pointing a finger and saying, well, that looks really bad over there and not stepping in to do anything about it.

And I don't think one person can solve the problem, but I do think everybody can shoulder their share of the burden. And I wanted to get off the sidelines and onto the field and do whatever I could to protect the system that I grew up with.

Well, and certainly, you know, welcome to the arena. We couldn't be happier that you're here. So I think a lot of American voters, and I want to get your opinion on this, still see this fight. And it is a fight in the context of Republicans versus Democrats, not democracy versus authoritarianism. And, you know, democracy is easy to say. Sometimes it's hard to describe. Authoritarianism doesn't really roll off the tongue. You have to explain it.

We've seen this kind of thing happen in other countries. It's not an unusual event, despite the fact that it's unusual for us. But let me ask you this, between your reporting and now the new work you're doing, I mean, Donald Trump has not been better since he came down the escalator. It's hard to believe, Bart, almost nine years ago. He hasn't been better since he was in office, certainly since he refused to leave office, since he's been out of office, and he's not going to be better in the next decade.

seven and a half or so months. So how do we need to communicate to individual Americans, right? I mean, look, we do it all day, every day.

But the truth is, is that we as a super PAC have a very narrow remit, right, is electorally, which is we have a universe of voters in certain places that we are trying to convince to either stay off of Trump and if we can get them there to come across the line for Biden. But how do we make this a broader national discussion in which we could say, hey, everybody, like this is really what the stakes are.

Well, I think you have to talk about particular examples that speak to the life concerns of individual citizens. Now, at the Brennan Center, we're an IRS charity, 501c3. We don't get directly involved in electoral matters, so we're not advocating for Biden or Trump or against either of them personally. We're not telling people how to vote.

But we are very open and clear about the threat of authoritarianism. And what you said earlier, that people can mistake this as a simple question of Republicans against Democrats, that's just not what it is anymore. I mean, it's not a traditional political contest. It is a contest of people who believe in our fundamental system that you win if you get the most votes. And if you don't get the most votes, you leave.

And people who don't believe that. And we have a candidate and a party that stands for lying about the election results to try to overturn the will of the people. And it's been very successful in that regard, at least as far as many Republicans are concerned.

Well, right. So there's about, you would know better than I do, but something on the order of about one third of the country that believes that Donald Trump actually won the last election. That's a- That's a hundred million people. It's an astonishing victory for propaganda and lies.

And it's the kind of thing that seeds the possibility of political violence in this country. Because if you really believe that Joe Biden is an imposter, is a guy who rigged his way to the presidency, is an illegitimate holder of that power.

then honestly, violence seems like a viable option. It seems like one of the few things you could do if you have what they believe is an illegitimate dictator. Right. We live in an occupied country. Right. I mean, and some people just say that kind of thing and they're content to just say it, but there's good research done out of the University of Chicago, a guy named Robert Pape. Oh, sure. We've referenced him many times. Sure. As you have in your work. As I have. And-

He has found that something on the order of 15 million Americans believe both of two propositions. One is that Joe Biden is an illegitimate president. And two is that the use of violence would be justified to remove him from office and install Donald Trump. That's 15 million Americans, many of whom are armed.

And they are primed for violence. They're ready for it. They're dry tinder. And the question is, what's going to be the spark? And Donald Trump is very good at manipulating people right to the edge of that. And he tries not to take responsibility for violence, but he brings people right to the doorstep. And the next time he makes a less ambiguous call for people to rise up and fight, physically fight, violently fight, they might be there to listen.

And so I'm curious, you know, both in your reporting, your experience and now in your new role, it appears that, you know, we don't hear as much, at least if we do, I'm not paying attention to it, as much of the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters, you know, the militia groups. We hear more about Christian nationalists and, you know, their predilection to discuss, you know, violence in a biblical sense.

So I guess my question is, do you think they are those that would do violence on a candidate's behalf? Do you think they're more or less organized than they were, say, on January 6th, 2021?

Well, they weren't very well organized at all on January 6th. It was a largely disorganized crowd that got sort of lashed up to the point of violence by Trump and the other MAGA speakers on that day. There were organized efforts by relatively small numbers of determined people, proud boys and oath keepers who, at pivotal moments,

opened the breach and started the most violent actions. And they've been held accountable. I mean, there are over a thousand people now who have been charged, most of them convicted, and some of the cases ongoing. There have been virtually no acquittals.

And the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers have had their leadership decimated by lengthy prison terms. But the organized part of it was never the largest threat. You have a lot of anger and disaffection and a propensity for violence now among millions of Americans who only need the triggering event.

And January 6th was it last time. And if Donald Trump loses the next election and claims he's won and rallies people and tells them to gather and fight back, they will. Support for the Lincoln Project podcast comes from Odoo. If you feel like you're wasting time and money with your current business software or just want to know what you could be missing, then you need to join the millions of other users who've switched to Odoo.

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Let me ask a question, and I come up with all sorts of different answers, but I'd love your perspective. And you reference Bob Pape out at the University of Chicago. What, in your mind, is the reason for such disaffection? And I ask this question, let me preface it by saying, because

While we are helping our friends like Ukraine in their fight against Russia, and we do always have troops and sailors and Marines and airmen deployed around the world, we are largely out of Iraq. I think we're completely out of Afghanistan. If you want a job now, Bart, you can have one. Inflation is there, yes.

But, you know, wage growth seems to be helping a little bit on that front. Every time I go to an airport, I can't speak for you, Bart, but every time I go to an airport, the place is jammed to the gills, right? Like it's not like people aren't out and about. So if everybody has what they need, theoretically, not everybody, but most people have what they need from a material perspective, then what is the cause of the great unrest? What is the cause of the anger and the revanchism and the resentment?

Well, there's a lot of debate about that and there are a lot of causes, but one of them, clearly not the only one, is changing demographics and race. The studies that went alongside the ones I already referenced, Pape's group at Chicago

looked very carefully at the zip codes of the homes of each of the insurgents on January 6th who's been charged. So a thousand people, where did they come from? And

What they did by comparing census data to those zip codes was they found that you were more than twice as likely to send an insurgent to the riots on January 6th if in your zip code the percentage of white people in the past 10 years had gone down and the percentage of black and brown people had gone up where you live.

So where white people were fearing loss of status and loss of their majority, that's where it was happening. They weren't coming primarily from red and certainly not primarily from blue districts. They were coming from purple districts where the balance of power was at issue and where whites were on the decline.

There could be several different definitions of that, which is on the decline demographically, which is there are now just less white people. Right. But let me ask you this. And this is where maybe we should get a psychologist involved here. Right. But the propaganda works because those people, even if there are less white citizens, white voters in that given district, probably live in the same house. Right. Go to the same job, drive the same, if not a better car. Kids go to the same schools.

So there's something other than the economic and material. It's the demographic. But this is where I think you start to bring in the propaganda and, you know, the the white nationalism, the race piece of this, which is.

The world is changing around them, but their world individually necessarily hasn't changed, but they're being made to feel as if it is, if that makes sense. It does make sense. I mean, it is not, generally speaking, a change for the worst in material circumstances. It is a change of status, maybe. It's a change of hierarchy. It's a sense that they no longer count for as much. It's why so many people are open to

to the absurd charge that what Democrats are trying to do is to bring in as many brown immigrants as possible to replace white voters. The great replacement theory, which began as a Hitlerian propaganda. So Tucker Carlson popularized it. Trump has used its themes and means from time to time. It is not all Trump supporters.

but it's a reasonably influential fraction of them. And there is an issue in social psychology. In every large group of people,

There is a minority, but a significant minority, that is hankering for an authoritarian personality. They want the great man to lead them. They want someone who has power and doesn't tolerate dissent and doesn't tolerate obstacles and just blasts through all that. And they think it should be illegal to criticize or try to stop him from doing what he wants to do.

They want that great figure, that Putin, that Orban, that Trump to come and dominate them. And they're not a majority of the population. They're an important minority. And the only thing you could do with those people is defeat them at the polls.

But this is what confuses me. Even after all the years I've spent doing this work, Bart, and you've spent reporting on it and now you're doing it is in many cases. And I have some friends that are like this. They're the same people who say, you can't tell me what to do. I'm a rugged individualist, right? Like, and so this is where like the cognitive dissonance, whatever you want to call it, is like, you know, I call them the F you white guys.

You can't tell me what to do, but Donald Trump can tell me what to do or an authoritarian can tell. It just to me, that's where like, how do those synapses fire together that don't result in a brain just melting inside your skull?

Yeah. I guess we've all got our blind spots, and cognitive dissonance is something that we all experience in some way or another, but it's a particularly acute case, I think you're right, when it comes to someone who says, don't tread on me and also be a dictator. Right. To me, that's one of the most confusing things, is...

I've told this story not for a while, but in Southern California, where I have family once, Bart, I saw this blacked out Range Rover, totally black, black wheels, blacked out windows, black license plate, which is very hip in California now. And it had a don't tread on me sticker on the bumper. And I was like, this is someone who's never been tread on in their life. Right. But he drives around in his hundred and fifty thousand dollar car believing he's under siege.

It's crazy. It's related, I think, to the phenomenon of people who think they're against the government. But the data are clear that, for example, in red states, they get a lot more money from Washington than they send to Washington. And you have the same person who's collecting disability benefits, driving on public roads and sending their kid to public schools. Keep your government hands off my Medicare. Right. Like that.

Let's talk about what we're seeing, you know, not in the context of a political campaign, but in the context of policy that is being put forth by politicians.

groups like the Heritage Foundation, America First Action. I'm going to do a whole series on Project 2025 here, probably coming up in April. But I want to do just a sort of a curtain raiser here with you, which is talk to us about how you and Brennan see the kinds of policy suggestions that are being put forth in

in what would be another Trump term. And I put it in the context, not of politics, but in the context of policy and how the executive branch of a government would operate should a Donald Trump type be elected in November and then take over next January. Right. So that is exactly what I'm focused on now. I'm focused on what policies or actions might Trump take

If he returns to the White House in 2025, that would threaten the rule of law, that would threaten democracy, that would threaten their constitutional boundaries. I'm not talking about areas of simple policy disagreements.

I'm not talking, for example, about climate change, which is a huge issue, really big deal, something that I care about as a private citizen. But if he's going to push fossil fuels and drill, baby, drill, that's not a threat to democracy. That's just, you know, in my personal point of view, a bad idea. But if what you want to do is crush the independence of courts,

or retaliate against news media that investigate you or criticize you, or try to prosecute your political opponents, or try to politicize the career civil servants who are doing essential work for Americans, then you're changing institutions. Then you're threatening the legitimacy of institutions that we rely on to protect us.

I mean, there was a reason why we have the modern civil service. There was a spoils system in the early years of the American Republic and government- Wasn't that Marbury versus Madison? Well, the reforms came a good bit later than that. But basically, president would come in and would fire everybody and appoint his friends and family and accolades to all the jobs. And it was deeply corrupt.

And it led to corrupt behavior. I mean, I was part of what the residual part of that, right? I was a what was called a Schedule C appointee, right? I was a political appointee in several different executive departments, you know, 20 years ago during the first term of George W. Bush. And, you know, we had...

they tended to be roles related specifically to the politics, you know, related to the secretary, the executive office of a department, but surrounding that relatively small number were the people to your point that went out. And, you know, if there was a,

legislatively mandated program in HHS, right? There were people who came to work every day and it was their job to administer that program. Now, maybe there was a political appointee somewhere along the way, but there was probably a senior executive service career civil servant

making sure that stuff happened on a daily basis. What we're talking about now is getting rid of all of that, all of those people who do that work so that only ideology or a particular narrow band political goal is being pushed forward. Yeah. I mean, we grew a civil service that was based on merit

and was independent of politics, on top of which you had a political layer, which there needs to be. And every president, there's a literal book called The Plum Book that has, I think last I checked, I think it was 6,000 jobs. It was like 5,400, but yes, we definitely were like, oh, this would be great. This job would be amazing, which of course, you weren't going to get that job probably. But those are the ones that the president and his people can just appoint politically.

politically. Some of them need Senate confirmation, most of them don't. And you want the president to be able to have his policy leaders be the ones that he chooses. But when it comes to, is this medicine safe? You want public health and medical people and scientists to be in charge of that in an independent commission. I mean, there are so many things that the federal government does, setting standards and

enforcing basic consumer protections and so on, that you want to be done on merit based on institutional knowledge and based on the best expert advice.

And Trump wants to politicize all those departments, and many of them are independent or quasi-independent of the president, and he wants to exert political presidential control over all of those. Right. I mean, there's the – well, I think I did an event for Bush, you know, for the – it was at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, right? I think it's maybe out of the Commerce Department, Bart.

But again, that kind of thing, that's I don't want to call it mundane because I think it has an important function. But most Americans on a daily basis are beneficiaries of its work, but have no idea what it does on a daily basis. Right. But that can go all the way to the CIA. Right. Like or the Justice Department. And to me, that's the concern. I'd love your thought is that when you look at this stuff like Project 2025 and these ideas.

It appears to me, and I'm going to oversimplify it here, Bart, because I'm not a policy guy, is that it denudes the parts of the federal government that are designed to help people and bolsters and grows the kinds of parts of government that control people or determine the way they live their lives. That's interesting. I haven't thought about it that way. I'd have to give it a little more thought, but there's definitely something in that. But look, I mean, the CIA has a huge analysis division.

And it's filled with people who've spent their lives studying Ukraine or studying Russia or studying China. They speak the language. They've spent time there. They know all the institutions. They might have assets in those places. Right. They're relying on secret information that comes from surveillance by the NSA, that comes from human spies. And

They put all that together and they figure out what's going on. They should not be replaced by people who will tell the president what the president tells them to say because it's politically convenient to him. I mean, we should count on their expertise. When we go to the supermarket, we don't have to think twice about whether something weighs a pound if it says 16 ounces on the package because we have government agencies that enforce that. And that's done by career civil servants.

Any proximity to power, right? Steve Jobs used to have, you know, they called Steve Jobs, he had his reality distortion field. And I feel like any proximity to power, certainly the presidency, right? I used to say this, there's like nine people in the world who can walk into the Oval Office without permission, right? And just walk in.

Those people typically want to hold on to those jobs. One of them is probably the first lady. Right. So she's going to hold on to her job. But most people want to keep being able to do that part. Right. And you only go into the Oval Office so many times to tell the president he's got no clothes on before you don't get to come back, regardless of who the president is. Right. There are different ways to communicate that. But for someone with authoritarian tendencies, you say the wrong thing one time, you never get to come back. And God knows what else happens to you. But think about this two plus years ago.

Let's take it overseas. Let's take it to Vladimir Putin, right? He's sitting in the Kremlin. He wants to invade Ukraine. No one's telling him.

that, oh, you know, the Ukrainians are going to put up a fight. Either they didn't know and they told him this will be three days or they did know and they didn't want to tell him. And you know what? We're two years in, right? And Ukraine is fighting for its life. But Russia has suffered grievous losses because Putin had a vision. He wanted that vision and nobody was going to tell him any different. Yeah, dictators get bad information. People are afraid to tell them. I mean, here's an example from when I was a reporter for The Washington Post.

We went to war in Iraq because we thought or said we thought that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. And part of it was that Saddam was refusing to let people inspect the places where he used to make WMD because he really did have those programs once upon a time.

And part of it is that we were intercepting with the NSA, we were intercepting communications in which people were reporting to Saddam Hussein that they were working on these weapons. They were lying to him because he wanted to hear it. They didn't actually have those programs, but they were lying to him because they were afraid to tell him that it wasn't happening. And that's just another example of how dictators get told what they want to hear and they get bad information. Well, I,

I did not know that. I worked at the Department of Homeland Security when we invaded Iraq. In fact, I went to Northern Ireland on a quote-unquote secret mission, Bart, to Belfast for the last summit between Bush and Blair right before the invasion, and I had no idea about any of that. I'm sure you reported on it, and I'm sure that most of our listeners had no idea that that was part of it. But to your point, think about all of the things that happened because some guy in a bunker outside of Ramadi

was afraid to tell his boss the truth. Yeah, it's a startling phenomenon. All right, so tell us a little bit more about the Brennan Center and what you guys are working on this year.

On the democracy and voting issues, my colleagues here at the Brennan Center are doing a remarkably broad range of important things. I've admired the Brennan Center for years and feel very lucky that they found a place for me to work here. But they have fantastic programs on protecting the integrity of elections. We are a research institution, for one thing. So, for example, they have just come out with a big report.

that has gone through every kind of rigorous academic scrutiny and has found that when the Voting Rights Act was gutted by the Supreme Court, when the Supreme Court said you no longer have to get prior permission from the federal government to change your voting laws, preclearance, in states that had a long history of

of racist voter suppression. When the Supreme Court ended the need to get that preclearance, the rate of voter participation by Black and Brown people diminished considerably in the years after that. So the participation gap, as this report put it, widened every year and they used all kinds of regression analysis and showed that it was because of the Supreme Court ruling and the state laws that followed. So we do research.

We lobby for legislative change. We do litigation. So there's a lot of programs to protect the vote. There's programs to educate election officials on what they can do about disinformation and what the threat is. They have programs where they brief law enforcement officials in big metropolitan areas about what is and isn't legal. Can somebody in that jurisdiction go to a polling place

carrying a gun. Where can they stand? Where can they not stand? They're trying to make sure that people know the rules and are ready to enforce them on election day and to protect against subversion of the election. We are also, and this is my part of it, beginning to plan for 2025 in case we get an authoritarian sworn in on inauguration day.

And we are looking at the gravest threats to democratic self-government that might come out of a Trump presidency and what can be done to slow them down, to restrain them, and to mitigate the worst damage of policies like that. I don't delude myself that there's an answer to everything, that the guardrails really will keep Donald Trump on the straight and narrow.

I think that he can test the system and break it in some places. But we are looking to set an agenda for actions that can be taken to prevent him, even if he takes office, from turning us into an authoritarian state. I sort of reverse engineer it too. Maybe that's the wrong expression, Bart, which is Trump is an empty vessel in many ways. But there are many people around him who have very strong

beliefs, as you were talking about, in the idea that an authoritarian version of government is the right thing, right? That a democracy is broken, it's messy, it's inefficient, right? You know, I mean, it's always interesting to me, you read a lot of this stuff, right? These people also, considering how much of their base, you know, the quote-unquote masses make up, have complete disdain for the people that they claim to represent, right? And that

take that representation to heart is like, you know, Donald Trump speaks for me. Stephen Miller speaks for me. Steve Bannon, like these people are all elites, right? They're not regular people. In some cases, they never have been. So I think that there's also that, okay, so Trump is willing to, you know, lead the torchlight parade, right? But there's people around him who are like, you know, go that way, go that way. And if it's in his interests or if he doesn't care, he'll go along with it. Right. He has a

A small number of genuine policy instincts or beliefs. I mean, he's for, you know, tax cuts for rich people. He's for cutting off regulations that get in his way as a developer. He doesn't like immigrants. He admires strongmen overseas.

All the rest is fill in the blank from the conservatives around him who have their own agenda. But the underlying instinct is do not tolerate resistance. Do not tolerate any institution that wants to slow you down or tell you that that's illegal or tell you you can't do that. And that's why Trump consistently delegitimates courts.

attacks the Justice Department, attacks regulatory bodies. He is bashing away against the legitimacy of these institutions that we rely on to set the rules of the game. Right. Because for him, going back to his childhood, if you read Mary Trump's first book, there was never a rule he wasn't willing to break. There was never something he wasn't willing to do. And what he found, and he's been right up to now for the most part, is that

When they see something so crazy, egregious, outlandish, a lot of people just stand their mouths agape, not knowing what to do, not sure where to go next. And it's a very powerful thing. But I'm so glad that you are now, as I said, in the fight with us. Before I let you go, where can we find you? If you dare to tread online, where can we find you and where can we find more about the Brennan Center? I am at bartengelman.com. The Brennan Center is brennancenter.org, named after the great Supreme Court Justice Brennan.

And I am still on Twitter at Barton Gelman. Right. As always, gang, you can find me on Twitter and TikTok, as long as that thing lasts, at Reed Galen on Instagram and threads at Reed underscore Galen underscore LP and over at Substack at the home front. Barton Gelman, thanks for joining me. I hope you'll come back before Election Day. Thank you. Everybody else, we'll see you next time. Take care.

Thanks again to everyone for listening. Be sure to follow and subscribe to The Lincoln Project on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, or however you listen. Don't forget to leave a five-star review. To connect with us, follow us on Twitter, at Project Lincoln. And for more information on our movement, to join our mailing list, subscribe to our newsletter, or make a contribution to our efforts, visit lincolnproject.us.

If you want to message the podcast directly, please send an email to podcast at LincolnProject.us. And if you want to personally join the fight to save our nation's democracy, visit JoinTheUnion.us. For The Lincoln Project, I'm Reid Galen. I'll see you on the next episode.

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