We’re back with a new season and our 200th episode! Penn State’s Jim Piazza returns to the show this week to discuss a new study on why the loser’s consent is a critical part of a healthy democracy — and what happens when politicians and other elites fail to abide by it.
Piazza found that countries where one of the main political parties lost the election but refused to accept the results experienced five domestic terrorist attacks per year, compared to one attack every two years in countries where political parties accepted election results. The “sore loser” effect also makes terrorism more acceptable, with one-third of people in countries that reject election results saying terrorism is justified, compared to 9% of people in countries where election results are accepted.
At a time when many experts are sounding the alarm that “it can’t happen here” might not hold, Piazza’s work and the principles behind it are critically important to consider.
Additional Information
Article in Political Research Quarterly
Related Episodes
Understanding domestic terrorism – Piazza’s first appearance on the show
Episode Transcript
Michael Berkman
From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University, I’m Michael Berkman.
Candis Watts Smith
I’m Candis Watts Smith.
Jenna Spinelle
I’m Jenna Spinelle, and welcome to Democracy Works. Happy New Year, everybody. Welcome back to our spring 2022 season. We have with us today for our first episode of the season. Jim Piazza Liberal Arts professor of political science here at Penn State’s author of a new paper in Political Research Quarterly called sore losers does terrorism and approval of terrorism increase in democracy when election losers refuse to accept election results. Jim’s name might sound familiar to some of you, he was on the show less than a year ago talking with us about domestic terrorism and the paper that he recently published. There’s also a companion article in the conversation that will link to in the show notes also. But I think it’s important to talk about this idea of sore losers and the transition of power as we both reflect on the one year anniversary of the insurrection at the Capitol and also looking ahead to the midterms this year and the next presidential election in 2024.
Michael Berkman
Jim’s argument, which draws heavily on democratic theory, and I know you’re gonna draw this out in the interview, is essentially that the peaceful transition of power, which requires the loser of an election to concede is absolutely critical to a democracy, and for a democracy to be able to avoid domestic violence of different types. This is sort of the point where Jim begins his argument, you know, some people may think back to Al Gore, conceding his election after the Supreme Court made its decision in 2004, you know, was very clear and say, I disagree with the Supreme Court here, I still think I won, essentially. But he can see it, because he recognized the importance of conceding to a healthy democracy. And so one reason I think Jim’s work is so helpful, is that it takes us away from just focusing too much on January six, actually, I’ve put it in larger context of something which began before the election. And that is a systematic effort to undermine public confidence in the result of the election. And the role that political elites are playing in doing this, because of political elites weren’t doing it, it wouldn’t be able to have the power and effectiveness that it does. And of course, this is, you know, Jim’s point in his research is, when you see this in democracies, it can easily lead to violence.
Candis Watts Smith
And so what Jim talks about the losers consent, also speaks to just kind of the informal norms of making a democracy work that is just as important as what is written on the Constitution on state constitutions. Legally, Trump didn’t have to concede we didn’t need him to do that legally, to move to the next step. But the norm of a concession is so important to ensure that the winners and the losers are on the same page, about the integrity of the election and the state of democracy. So I do think that he is in full recognition of the significance of the concession. And by not doing so, where he is able to keep alive the idea that we have a problem that the way that our elections are run are unfair. And if the outcomes of the election are illegitimate,
Michael Berkman
I think that’s really well put about the importance of the losers consent and that norm. And we’ve talked a lot ever since the book, how democracies die came out about sort of this issue of norms and guardrails and their importance that, you know, I think we’re seeing clearly here what happens when norms are just violated in the way that Trump is. Because how do you get them back? One way norms can sometimes be restored, is by codifying them, in other words, putting them into law. But that’s going to be a really difficult thing to do here. And Trump and others around him have made it clear that there are absolutely no institutional mechanisms that that run our elections or rule in our elections that they will accept. So how do you restore this norm? I don’t think you can, and what Jim’s work as you get into, and what will demonstrate is that this is really important that this sets a democracy on a very dangerous path. And of course, we already saw it. January 6, was violence related to the refusal to accept the result of an election.
Candis Watts Smith
And, you know, I think that there are folks, journalists, colonists, who are just like, You guys are being dramatic, but it really doesn’t take that big Have a proportion of citizens or elites to really get things off the rail. And how much being on the rails is around norms, is just doing what we kind of implicitly agree to do to keep things going.
Michael Berkman
Yeah, especially among elites, candidates. I mean, I think this is something that we’re seeing in our present moment that’s really important in that this is not simply something that’s being promoted by people or by groups. This is being promoted by elected political leaders. And when you see that, that’s highly problematic, you know, and in countries that that could potentially have really seen significant violence, where political leaders are willing to kind of try to avoid it and restore norms and work in a democratic fashion, you can avoid that.
Jenna Spinelle
Well, I think that does a good job of laying out some of the the case that Jim is making here, and why it’s important to talk about right now. So let’s go now to the interview with Jim Piazza.
Jenna Spinelle
Jim Piazza, welcome back to democracy work. Thanks for joining us.
Jim Piazza
Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
Jenna Spinelle
You have long studied terrorism and political violence. We had you on the show last year to talk about some of those things and domestic terrorism in particular. But you are joining us today to talk about a new article that you just published in Political Research Quarterly that overlays some of these themes in terrorism and political violence with the concept of the peaceful transition of power and and what you describe as sore losers and some of those themes. So before we get to some of the specifics of your piece, can you just talk a little bit about where this this idea came from? How you sort of came up with the notion of overlaying domestic terrorism or terrorism more broadly, with this idea of the losers, consent and democracy?
Jim Piazza
Sure, happy to. Yeah. So among people who study terrorism, a big topic is whether or not democracies experience more terrorism? Is there something about democracy that pacifies political extremism that could turn to violence, or on the other hand, are autocratic regimes better equipped to deal with violent extremism because they can just crush dissent? So there’s actually a pretty big literature about that there’s a lot of people that have written a lot about that, use a lot of case studies, used a lot of data and that kind of stuff. That’s, that’s a pretty well developed literature. No one has really written anything about what happens when you have an election. And things don’t go as they’re intended to go in terms of how democracy works, no one’s kind of looked at that. And I actually, I guess, I kind of think of that in the context of a much wider observation that I’ve had in the past five years. And that is, how much like norms of behavior really matter, for the functioning of political systems. And if you think about the United States, the Constitution lays out and our laws and legal structure lay out the basics of how democracy works, and how democracy sustains itself and lends stability to the system. But not everything, norms of behavior, ways of behaving resemble the norm, that a political party, if it runs an election, and it loses, it agrees to lose, right, something that we take for granted so much. That’s critical for the security and the stability of the system. And when it’s gone, we have these pretty bad effects. Well, political scientists will even say that either at least in my neck of the woods. And so I wanted to look at what happens when political parties, I generally want to know what happens when political parties kind of don’t agree to abide by the not only the formal, but the informal rules of democracy.
Jenna Spinelle
We are recording this on January 7, 2022. So one day after that January 6, one year anniversary, and I think that that is certainly for a lot of people, one maybe brought this idea of what happens when people don’t accept a loss that sort of brought that right to the fore.
Jenna Spinelle
But there’s another example perhaps related that you talk about people who had planned to bomb, the California Democratic Party headquarters. I don’t remember this in the news and things passed by so quickly in our new cycle these days. Can you talk about that and how it might fit into this larger argument that you’re making here?
Jim Piazza
Right. So if for people that don’t know, after the 2020 election in November, and after President Trump refused to concede and said that the election was fraudulent and that he had really won and, and after that became sort of like a big talking point in right wing circles. That kind of percolated out and they’re these two men that were in California MYRIN county of all places in California that were very ratifies and angered by their perception of that there was fraud in the 2020 election and that Joe Biden really had won the election, Trump won the election. But Trump has been unfairly denied this. And so they concocted the plot, they talk with each other it was it was truly a homegrown terrorism plot. They had not, to my knowledge, at least not been involved in violent extremism in the past, they talked to each other. They did connect through social media with another like militia group. But to my knowledge, that’s the only extent they had connections with any other potentially destabilizing actors. And they concocted this plan and they started to put into motion this plan to bomb the Democratic Party’s headquarters in California. And thankfully, the reason this has not been a widespread story is that they were foiled, they were actually caught by federal officials and the Justice Department’s prosecuting them now. And so I use that as sort of just a story to talk about what can happen when political parties refuse to accept an election loss.
Jenna Spinelle
And bringing back this idea of norms, this is this story in California was an example of what you refer to as the losers consent or lack thereof, perhaps in this case, but can you just kind of lay out for us what you mean by that losers consent where that norm kind of originates in democracy?
Jim Piazza
Yeah. And it’s absolutely critical to democracy. And so the concept of losers consent, it’s actually pretty well known, it’s been talked about quite a bit among scholars who study most, you know, functioning democracies, right, and want to understand what a functioning democracy requires. And it kind of gets to the heart of what you’re talking about in terms of like a normal behavior. And so what losers consent means is that one of the things that a democracy needs in order to thrive, is it when it holds elections, elections are inherently unpredictable things right and a real democracy. You don’t know who the winner is going to be either side plausibly could win and non democracy, you know, what the outcome is going to be before the election? It’s a sham, right? But in a democracy, and this is true in 2020, it was equally plausible that Trump or Biden could win, right? What communicates to partisan supporters of a candidate. And what is necessary to communicate to the wider society after election is held, is that it was a fair and free and clean election. And one of the strongest ways that that is communicated is when the loser of the election concedes, and says, we fought the good fight. It wasn’t enough. I’m proud of what we did. See you next time, I want to congratulate my opponent, even though what they’re saying there is I don’t agree with my opponent, I have oftentimes have a diametrically opposed policy idea about how the country should be run. But it was a free and fair fights. I think about this with the 2016 election, right. As bitter and nasty and contested that election was Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee conceded and what she was telling Democrats who voted for her Republicans who didn’t vote for her and the wider society is that democracy prevailed, right. That’s something called loser consent. The idea that democracy is a system in which parties agree to lose elections, I think Adams DeVore SKUs, a pretty famous political scientist, who studies comparative politics, famously said in his book democracy in the market, you need to have parties agree to lose elections, if they won’t agree to lose elections, free and fair elections, then you are destroying the norms that govern democracy. And you’re really also sending a message to your supporters in the wider society, that election results can’t be trusted, that the system can’t be trusted, that they should be aggrieved. It polarizes a divided society in important ways. I think that we’re seeing all of that I think that’s pretty kind of obvious.
Jenna Spinelle
People say a lot of things people think a lot of things people like to grouse and all of that. How do you get from a That to political violence or terrorism.
Jim Piazza
So the research that I’ve done hasn’t zeroed in on that actual mechanism. And that’s crucial to do. It’s crucial to do it just this is a preliminary cut. I kind of have some ideas from what the literature says about that. And I kind of sort of say, I mean, number one, how do you get from a politician, refusing to concede refusing the legitimacy of an election refusing to accept that a loss to political violence, and I sort of conjecture that there are sort of three things that are happening when that happens. And they could be happening in tandem, or they could be happening separately. Number one is, of course, you have supporters in the wider public that grow very distrustful of political institutions and political rules and that kind of stuff. And so you have a scenario, you have a situation under which people they don’t trust any official information, they don’t trust, any official count of votes, you know, they just believe that the the system is compromised that way, the system is very, very corrupt. And once that happens, we do know that in societies where rule of law is weak, or where there’s like, not trust in political institutions, those are societies in which you’re going to have a lot more terrorism. There’s quite a bit of literature showing that, for example, newly transitioned democracies, that don’t have very tested political institutions, and people know that they experience more terrorism than any other type of system. Established, democracies typically experienced lower levels of terrorism. Established autocracies do as well, it’s the newer or the weaker democracies that are the ones that are kind of the most prone to terrorism that would be consistent with that. The second sort of component is just grievance. And we know that’s a pretty vague term. But when people are just really fed up, two things happen. Number one is someone who engages in terrorism is less likely to be met with pushback materials, music is a pretty controversial thing. It’s a it’s a type of behavior that typically people condemn. But if you put a big thick layer of grievance over society, kind of anything goes, you can imagine an actor out there saying, given the environment and the mood, I can commit a terrorist attack, and I won’t have the same level of backlash or sanction that I normally would have. Also, it becomes a little bit easier for people to become more marginally supportive or endorse terrorist activity, right? And terrorist activity is a pretty marginal thing. You don’t need a lot of people to be radicalized to sustain a terrorist movement, certainly not the majority of people. I mean, it’s just it could be a fringe thing and still be a problem. And the third thing is polarization. The third thing is that it does create this Us and Them situation, you know, when you have losers, consent is essential to bringing together the partisan supporters of the losing side back with the part of the sport is the winning side. And that doesn’t happen when you have an election loser that rejects it. And I’ve done some research showing that politically polarized societies are much more likely to experience terrorist activity.
Jenna Spinelle
So you set out in this paper to take a deeper look at this and actually try to quantify it. So you walk us through kind of how you did it, what the hypotheses were that you were looking to prove, or to disprove?
Jim Piazza
Sure. So because my focus is really not necessarily an only American politics, it’s politics in other countries or global politics, I wanted to sort of see if this was a general cross national phenomena, I wanted to look at it two ways. I wanted to look at it in terms of attitudes and outcomes. And so I looked at some survey data from what’s called the World Values Survey, the World Value Survey WBS. It’s a really great resource. Academics use it quite a bit. You know, political commentators sometimes use it as well, meetings as well. It’s a free open access, anyone can use it. It is a series of surveys in multiple countries. And I looked at the ones in the democracies for the more recent years, and asked people all types of questions about themselves and about what they think about politics. And one of the questions they asked in the most recent wave seven of the World Values Survey is attitudes about terrorism, how justifiable how acceptable it is. So I use that data to sort of see is it the case in countries and democracies, where there was a free and fair election, and most importantly, where external experts have judged the election to be free and fair to be properly I didn’t obviously didn’t want to have situations in which there really kind of was fraud. In the sample. I only look to countries democracies, were experts to judge that the election was clean. And were the one or more of the political parties that were contesting election rejected the results that were not going to buy by the results, and want to see what that did to political attitudes. And as you can see, in the paper, it increases the public tolerance of terrorism, people in democracies where there’s a free and fair election without fraud. Nonetheless, political parties with contested election claim that it was unfair, all of a sudden tolerance goes up for terrorist activity, right? Nowhere because a majority opinion, but it’s worrisome how much increases. And then also I looked at a wide range of countries over 100 democracies from the years 1970 to 2016, or 2017, or something like that. And I looked at does more domestic terrorist activity actually occur subsequently in countries in democracies, where there’s a free and fair election, Judge be free and fair by outside experts, but where major political parties would not accept the results, and lo and behold, there is an increase in terrorist activity. And this is holding constant. I mean, the already existing level of terrorist activity within the country, economic factors, demographic factors and everything else.
Jenna Spinelle
And so what did you find?
Jim Piazza
I found that, in democracies, where all of the losing parties accepted the election results of a free and fair election, about 9.2% of people said that terrorism is acceptable or justifiable on some level, right? That’s kind of you know, that that’s not great here, but it’s less than 10% of the population still a marginal belief, that level of except the percentage of people that say terrorism is acceptable as the behavior rises to 27%, if the main opposition parties say they reject the results, and if all the losing parties reject the results, it’s a third of the population of the country that then says, terrorism is a more acceptable behavior. And that’s mirrored in actual terrorist activity in democracies, where all of the losing parties after the election accepted the results. And, you know, extended losers consent to the system publicly, those kinds of countries expense a domestic terrorist attack about once every two years, right, that’s a relatively low rate, that number jumps to five terrorist attacks per year, if the main opposition parties rejected the results, and if all of them reject the results, it goes to 10.6 terrorist attacks per year. So it’s a pretty dramatic increase.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, and you were talking earlier about this behavior of these patterns tending to occur more frequently in newer democracies versus more established ones. But thinking about established democracies, are there any examples from elsewhere in the world that you can point to that might help us understand some of what we’re seeing now in the US, or, you know, might just just be helpful as we’re trying to understand this current moment?
Jim Piazza
Yeah. So it is true. One of the things I kind of worried about when I did the analysis is well, and I just kind of picking up this new democracy, untested democracy effect. So I did try to like, include things in my analysis that would like look at like the age of the democracy and that kind of stuff to make sure that that wasn’t the case, right. And so what I actually do find is that this increase in activity, you do see across different types of ages of demand. It’s not just the new democracies that are sort of experiencing this. So where do you see more of that when you have sort of like an uncontested election, right. One of the things I saw was that in Spain in the 1980s, I believe this pretty bitter election between the Spanish socialists and the conservatives, and one of the parties refused to concede that there was more terrorist activity afterwards. And, and there was sort of an increase in that right. Now, that said, I think more investigation needs to be done. I think the public next step in this research would be just to isolate countries that are just the established democracies are just countries that most closely approximate what you’re seeing in the United States, I think the next step would be to look at either historical examples in the United States that look like what we’re in right now. Or examples in other countries, like in Western European countries, for example, like the United States, where you would sort of see more of you wouldn’t be able to do a more closer approximation.
Jenna Spinelle
I know, Jim, that you have also done or are currently working on research that drills a little bit more specifically into supporters of former President Trump based on some public opinion work that you did that I think gets at some of these same themes. Can Can you tell us a little bit about that project and what you found so far,
Jim Piazza
There’s been a lot of research that has come out a lot of polling data that shows in addition to the fact that a startlingly large number of Americans believe or say that they think that the 2020 election was fraudulent, and, and Joe Biden was not the winner of that election, a relatively startling number of Americans also say that they think political violence is acceptable. Right. Now, this number really varies depending on the survey. And that’s because it depends on what you’re asking people, right. And there’s a whole dispute about when you ask people, do they support political violence, oftentimes, they’re not hearing the same thing that you’re asking them, right. Sometimes they might mean things like, well, destruction of property or disorderly behavior, versus like murdering somebody. Right. But most of the polling seems to suggests between let’s say, like, 20 to like 30% of Americans, depending on how you ask them tolerate at some level political violence, they’ll say that political violence is acceptable under certain certain circumstances, just send the government a message to fight for American values, whatever the justification is, right? And in some of those more recent polls, people who approve of Donald Trump or support Donald Trump are more likely to say that are more likely to support political bonds. So we didn’t understand necessarily why that was the case. And so we wanted to look more into that. And so we did an analysis, we did the survey, we launched the survey thing. And we looked at over 2000 respondents, the United States all over 18 years old, from all parts of the country, Democrats and Republicans. And what we’re finding is this, that Trump supporters are statistically more likely to events support for political violence, that is not true of ordinary Republicans. So if you if you separate Republicans versus people who support Trump, who include Republicans, and some people who are also independents, it really is the Trump supporters, irrespective of party sounds kind of strangers at a party that are more likely to say that they support violence, then we want to know why this is the case. So we asked a lot of other questions about what their attitudes were, and we tested a couple of these. One was this idea of maybe they’re politically aggrieved, maybe they just think, well, it’s tied back to this idea that they don’t trust the political system. They don’t trust political institutions, we also had economic grievances. So there’s been a big sort of discussion about whether or not what kind of drives some of this more extreme political behavior than it is in attitudes is that these people are economically hurting. We looked at extreme partisanship or polarization, there’s a really interesting literature. Sometimes it’s called political polarization. And it’s called effective polarization, social polarization, political sectarianism, political tribalism. It’s just this idea that politics is a team sport, you’re on this one team, or tribe. And what’s most important, what’s most salient to your identity is your hatred for the other tribe. Right. So your feelings of dislike people outside your tribe are greater than your feelings of love for your tribe and your or your belief in their policies. And then finally, we wanted to also look at racism and xenophobia, and the one that comes out the strongest as a thread that links Trump approval to tolerance and political violence is raised xenophobia and racism. And it’s quite clear that that’s sort of the case. The other ones just didn’t come in as well. I mean, actually, none of them did. But it was wasn’t necessarily the case that Trump supporters are necessarily more economically grief. And that’s why they support more violence, politically aggrieved, to our supply, we also looked at distrust of public institutions like government and media, I would have thought that would have made a difference. We were not seeing that yet, as important thing, it really is a fear of demographic change in the United States, are growing diverse, the United States of his racial diversity or greater immigration, and so on. And this is something that in some ways, I find very interesting, right? It’s something that is consistent with other things that have been found in the literature.
Jenna Spinelle
We will, I’m sure pick up this thread or, you know, maybe have you back on again, whenever that paper is, is ready to come out. I know it’s still in process. So we don’t want to say too, too much about it at this point, but going back to this the sore losers, was there anything else that you wanted to add about that, or anything that you think is important for listeners to take away from that work?
Jim Piazza
I really have come around to believing that reinforcement of norms of trust in our democratic system, reinforcing norms of responsible, trustworthy behavior of politicians, and trusting each other is just absolutely critical to the survival of our democracy. We this we have to have it, you know, I mean, the truth of the matter is, you look at look forward in the future, Democrats are going to win elections in the future, and Republicans are gonna win elections in the future. We’re looking at 2020 22 Anyone can win control the House of the Senate, you know, the Democrats could retain control of the House and the Senate, Republicans could lose it right. In 2024. I don’t know that I can prognosticate who was going to win. That’s what democracy is all about is inherently uncertain. I think torski says, that election process is an institutionalization of his political uncertainty. Right. And that is the best chance we have at trying to have orderly politics in the United States. Right. And I think there’s real consequences to destroying the trust associated with that. I was surprised at how clear the results came out with this, but I mean, I’m not surprised. I guess that that’s a reality.
Jenna Spinelle
Well, Jim, we will link to both your article in Political Research Quarterly and to your companion piece in the conversation so folks can learn more and and digest some of this on their own. But thank you so much for joining us today to talk about it.
Jenna Spinelle
Thank you so much. I appreciate being on.
Candis Watts Smith
Thank you, Jenna for that excellent interview with Jim. I want maybe to pull maybe a millennial move and just Two things that were quite triggering for me in this interview, one of the things that stood out to me about how do you move from the lack of losers consent to political violence, and Jim kind of points out three things. He says, you know, if supporters are distrustful of political institutions or political rules, political violence can arise in societies where the rule of law is weak, or where there’s not trust in political institutions, and then polarization. And these I think are three things that are, if not already true, in the United States, are becoming more and more true as we move along. And so, again, to our point about whether people are just kind of being dramatic, folks who study, democratic backsliding, terrorism, Civil War, democratic erosion, they find that when we see these patterns, we see the loss of democracy, and we see the increase for political violence. So I think it’s really important for us to kind of be who’ve these warnings. And given that we have the elements, we have the components that can produce a particular recipe for political violence.
Michael Berkman
And actually, authoritarian regimes are quite effective at restricting political protests that restrain political violence, that restraint, terrorism, and democracies, strong democracies, because they allow so much pluralist inclusion and participation in the political system are also able to withstand and rarely be subjected to excessive political violence. But the ones that are most at risk are the ones that are slipping, or moving one way from the other, moving from more democratic to less or less democratic, to more. And the thing about the American system right now is by almost every measure, I’ll say, By every measure I’ve seen from people that do this kind of work, we are slipping. And we have, you know, whether you’re looking at politics, or V dem, or something else, we have moved, you know, some number of points from a strong democracy to something else. And I think Jim’s work and others is a this is a very dangerous sort of sweet spot, when you’re seeing that.
Candis Watts Smith
Studies do show that the US has historically, you know, on a scale of one to 10, or 10 is awesome sauce on the democracy front, the United States has been attend, and in the past five years, it’s slipped to a five, six is the lower boundary for democracy. So it has been said that the United States has been downgraded to an accuracy rate. So you’re in the middle, right, some souter’s kind of illiberal democracy, the fact of the matter is, is that we are seeing more political violence, it seems that we are already seeing the kind of outcomes that a slip from a 10 to a five would tend to go with, we correlated with, we’ve seen the storming of the Capitol. But we’ve also learned about Florida attempts of political violence. And we’ve seen like an increasing number of people who are like building militias. But I think that when we look at people who are doing the work, are finding that there are not only people who are willing to do violence, but a significant number of people who would be willing to suggest that that violence is legitimate. And it’s that number and that proportion of people who are really important here, that if they think that it’s okay, to do terrorist acts, taking over of capitals, or, you know, kidnapping governors, we have a real problem.
Michael Berkman
You know, I think January six has to be seen in the context of Charlottesville, and in the context of what happened in Michigan, and a variety of other events around the country. Now, you know, since January six, I guess we could say things have been pretty peaceful. But I don’t think that tells us very much about what we’re going to see as we get closer to these elections. And, you know, there’s no doubt that the President is going to double down on getting his people to believe that this election was stolen.
Candis Watts Smith
So there’s physical violence, there’s also threats of violence. Yeah, very good. And I’m thinking about school. What what’s going on in the school boards? Yeah. Not only kind of the behavior at school board meetings, but also threats to people on school boards, yes. And threats to people on city councils and threats to people who do work around, you know, yeah. Many of those people are choosing not to run again, because they don’t want themselves or their families to be at risk of political violence. So what that means is that there are people who are the kinds of folks that someone like Trump would want in those positions. And so we don’t necessarily need actual violence, to get the kind of outcomes that some, you know, if you’re looking for a one party state, you know, you don’t have to actually do violence to get the kinds of outcomes you’re looking for.
Michael Berkman
There’s a new book coming out that I hope will be able to talk about on the podcast about the harassment of the election officials that occurred in 2020. and is continuing to occur. And and I appreciate your pointing out my lack of imagination, because I think I’d have been flicked so many of us, right, we don’t really think that the US is liable to civil war, because our concept of civil war sort of stuck in the 1850s and 60s, right, with two huge opposing armies going at it in a muddy field. And you know, Civil War scholars will tell you, that’s not what Civil War looks like, in the 21st century, you need to have more imagination to understand. And you know, I’m looking at January 6, or something like that, well, we haven’t seen that again. So there’s no violence and forgetting about or failing to see or recognize the importance of these other sorts of events that have been been going on the school board meetings, in particular, I thought were really disturbing, because you just never really saw it even with hot conflictual issues. I mean, I studied for many years, the creationism, evolution, debates in schools never saw this kind of thing, even though these were, you know, really value laden, very emotional kinds of kinds of issues.
Candis Watts Smith
Civil war could also be just lots of violence, it could be bombs, it could be domestic terrorism, it could be not these kind of depictions that we tend to cling on to, and again, by isolating the US case, from everyone else we miss out on when we’re actually seeing the democratic backsliding, if we actually come to see what a civil war looks like, when we actually come to see that we’re in an autocracy and not a democracy, it’s hard to know, because not enough, I think of us have really a good grasp on the many permutations that these outcomes may look like, because we’re so focused on the way that we do things and that we couldn’t ever be characterized similarly to another country or their political challenges.
Michael Berkman
Yeah, that’s why I really appreciate it work likeJim’s because I think it helps us to really put what’s going on here in a more appropriate context. And it’s hard not to look January six, from a racial angle, I think a couple of ways. I mean, one was just all of the purely racist symbolism. That was there, maybe not symbolism, but symbols, right, a noose was erected in front of the Capitol, there were Confederate flags. You could go on and on about that. But also, I am still struck. When I think back to that day, that nobody was arrested, when it was happening, that I just remember watching this all these people leaving, and there wasn’t a single arrest made. And you just could not help the think. Would that have been the case? If this were a black crowd? They could do this and then walk away and though, and the FBI will call you later?
Candis Watts Smith
Yeah. So my family was driving from somewhere on January 6th. And so we’re listening to all of this on the radio, and I tend to write as I go, Hey, babe. Let’s go to Washington, DC, with weapons and show up at the US Capitol and expect to walk away alive.
Michael Berkman
Yeah. Did you think that was a good idea?
Candis Watts Smith
No, I mean, I just like it wouldn’t have even occurred to me that you could do that as a black person. And I think
Michael Berkman
It was so built into what went on.
Candis Watts Smith
And, yes, that but also specifically, and just going back to something that Jim said about the rule of law, there are some people right, like, essentially, we had a president who said that he was above the law. I could go on Fifth Avenue and shoot a person and my supporters would still support me. We didn’t see him impeached the first time. He doesn’t get impeached. The second time, there’s no kind of legal ramification for what this person is doing. And so like the message essentially, is that you all people like you are above the law, and that anything that you do, you can get away with because it’s for our version of the way this country should be run. And so I think it’s really also important just to note again, the kind of messages that are Are telegraphed to white Americans about the extent to which they will be held accountable for that kind of behavior. So I guess one last question, perhaps is whether we can pull back from the abyss Trump’s Republicans have led us to,
Michael Berkman
I think we both know that political elites have got to step in here and help to lead the way. And you just don’t see it. I mean, they they’re like, Yeah, Biden’s the president, but they, they never talk about why this is so dangerous. They just flirt with it. And that would have to change. I would think,
Michael Berkman
So anyway, this has been an interesting discussion, as I suspected it would be off of Jim’s very powerful new work from the report needs to do. From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy, I’m Michael Berkman.
Candis Watts Smith
I’m Candis Watts Smith. Thanks for listening.
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