interviews
The Uniqueness of Electrification in The United States
by Gretchen Bakke
September 10, 2021
This interview with Gretchen Bakke, author of The Grid, and visiting professor of anthropology at the Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems at Humboldt University in Berlin. , Humboldt University, Berlin Germany, was conducted and condensed by franknews. This interview was originally published in February 2019.
frank: I have your book here, it's such a great framing piece that simplifies something so complicated.
GB: Incredibly complicated.
I would love to talk about energy democracy. How people want to move forward, and what sort of policy needs to be in place.
I think when you talk about energy democracy, it's not quite the same thing as equity.
I've spoken to some people who incorporate equity into their definition of energy democracy. They say, in trying to fix certain systems, we need to also engage people who have been marginalized from energy systems in the past. But it is also definitely its own issue.
One thing that's remarkable about systems everywhere, is that there's some sort of universal electrification. Just the idea. That idea seems to be an early 20th-century idea. Places that didn't get a grid in the early 20th century have a very partial and elite system. If you look for example, at Lagos in Nigeria, what you have is rich people on the grid, and poor people on a generator system. Even poor people means middle-class people, right? There's still a grid there, but it's like two or three generators, a bunch of cables, and it runs for one building or maybe two buildings. It uses heavy fuel oil, usually diesel, so it's a much more polluting thing.
The fact that there already is universal electrification, even though it's not profitable for companies is something that in my experience, everybody wants to preserve.
I never talked to anybody, the entire time I was doing research, that thought some people should have electricity and other people shouldn't.
I did talk to people who thought it might be wise, as the system is redeveloped, overhauled, or given a new shape at the lowest levels, to think more about the quality of electricity as being matched more closely to the needs of the user. This is maybe true, but it's also a sneaky way of saying Facebook should have more reliable, more stable voltage, with no interruption whatsoever, and the home user should not.
The question is, once you open that door, how far can you go with it before you start to actually develop two parallel systems? It might be true – it might be that I personally don't need to have the same quality of electricity as the US military. But give an inch and they take a mile. You don't want that to happen. I think that's one question. I think the other thing, and this is what I would guess you're interested in talking about democracy, is thinking about the way in which the electricity systems are becoming more individualized, especially with rooftop solar, and how that sense of ownership, or control, over the electrons that you make can be produced, while maintaining this universal system.
Absolutely.
The dream version of it is that everybody has solar, everybody has some kind of small wind, everybody is connected to a big grid, and everybody has some kind of storage, and thus has the capacity to run off their own electricity when they want, when it's cheaper, or when the big system is down. But also has the capacity to feed into a public electricity system. This is perfect. It's hard to manage, and it's hard to figure out how to pay for the grid if you do that, because you still have exactly the same giant infrastructure, but the way you make money off of it is removed.
In this ideal, is it a combination of public and private sectors maintaining the larger infrastructure, and the individual running their personal solar on the home?
If it was really ideal, the individual could choose to run it or not. The only way that that kind of system can actually work is with some pretty serious AI. When I was finishing the book, people were always talking about an orchestrator. What we need is an orchestrator to make all of this complexity work together. It was still this idea that it would be a person. What I’ve found in the three years since, is now there’s an assumption that computers can do this. Computers can make it so that whatever is happening on the level of the individual, the small scale producer doesn't actually take down the larger grid. You could just have a button that said, “I'm available to go off the grid if needed”, on your phone, I guess. I always imagine a real button on the wall, but this will be on your phone.
Then if there is too much demand, the orchestrator can just flip you off, and you can run on your own system, because it's two o'clock in the afternoon and you live in Phoenix, you need air conditioning. You have your air conditioning, but you also have your solar. Solar and air conditioning are so nicely married to each other. That's the ideal, but then the question is, where are all the ways that it can go wrong? Where we lose democracy, actually, and we lose equity. Even though there's some sort of dead reckoning sense of where we want to get to.
We tend to think of renewable energy as good, but eventually those companies will accumulate the same amount of wealth and power as coal or oil. The question becomes, like you said, what are the challenges and how do you move forward?
And how does democracy need to be reformed? Because if you think of it as kind of old school democratic, then a house can be an entity that can vote somehow forward into a management structure, which then represents it up. Along the way, you can do that with little company forms. Like I have my own little electricity company, and this is how much I make. My block is represented by this other kind of electricity company, and that goes up. It's not rocket science, we know how to do democracy in that way.
The question is, does democracy in that way work? Does it only produce a trickle up of funds and a trickle down of responsibility and risk?
As we move forward do you think we continue to use the grid as our primary infrastructure? Or do we move away from it?
The premise is, and the fact of the matter is, it's not replaceable at this point. It's simply not. We are replacing little tiny bits of it all the time, but the bigger system, you can't just build a parallel system next to it. It's too expensive to do that.
The thing that I really understood about the grid when I was writing the book is that nobody understands it.
There isn't any one person who understands how it all fits together. People understand their tiny little piece of it, and they understand the thing on either side of that tiny piece, and that's it. The expertise and the technology has the same structure. If we have 80% solar feeding into this grid, here's what happens when a cloud goes over at the level of five seconds. Now, this is a giant problem, and there's electrical engineers working on figuring out how to make the grid function in this case. There's a push behind the expert. At the expertise level, people are interested actually, in the larger infrastructure. And nobody else knows enough to get around it. It might just be like inertia when you sit there. One thing that I really have seen is that the way in which reforms are happening in the western part of the US, and the way that they're happening in the northeast are quite different. There are different logics at work that might actually, in 100 years, if we're still here, and not completely roasted to death, produce two systems with fairly different underlying structures.
What is the difference?
The west is inter-regional cooperation. The west is really like, how do you deal with the fact that you have hydro in the Pacific Northwest, and you have wind in the Dakotas, and you have all this solar on the south. It turns into this regional balancing of renewables that then depends a lot on people being able to take themselves off the grid in order to manage that in a reasonable way, but it's huge. That's why you have all these fights in California saying, we don't want to import any coal power from Idaho, and Idaho is saying, "We don't want to be part of this thing. You're going to force all of your renewables on us." The reason those fights are happening is because what's developing is, in fact, a very large regional balanced, renewable system.
What's happening in the northeast, because it's so much denser is, micro grids that can island themselves, but for the most part are interoperable. It's a very different shape. It's like a foam in the northeast, all these little bubbles that are stuck together. If this will happen, we'll see, but that seems to be the direction it's going. Whereas there's very few little bubbles developing in the west. What happens in the south is up for grabs.
Is one better than the other?
The grid is always about geography. It's always a local system. What you have available to you geographically determines what you're capable of doing. You can have pumped air storage in Alabama or Mississippi. The way in which the weather affects the grid is interesting. During Hurricane Harvey, one of the things they learned was that the solar panels stay on the house if the roof stays on the house. Really the weaker link is not how a solar panel connects, it's how the roof is connected to the building. These are things that in the West Coast, with the possible exception of the Pacific Northwest, are just not problems. The storms aren't that ferocious, but on the East Coast they are. There needs to be a reaction to that, that provides the resilience they all like to talk about. What they also found after Sandy, is that communities that had one house on a block that had electricity came back much more quickly. They had a sense of cohesion, of social cohesion, of neighborliness, and there was less sense of trauma, things will rebuild quickly, and everything worked better. In that in that case, you want to be able to have a micro-grid even if it's at the level of the home.
The idea of being islandable seems like a very good thing. People like to point to Wall Street during Sandy, which seemed islanded off.
They actually had generators in the basement, so everything was out except this one building, and people were really mad because they saw the lights on, and they're like, "Why do those guys have it?", assuming that they were prioritized to get electricity, but they actually had a generator system in their skyscraper, and on the ground floor in that skyscraper were all kinds of shops and restaurants that then served everybody. Everybody talks about this like, "We could go there, we could have kebabs."
At least we have kebabs!
They weren't islanded properly speaking, it's just that they had giant diesel generators in their basement.
They weren’t on their own grid.
Problem with that is, of course, you run out of gas.
Now, there's a race in the technology sector to figure out how to store renewable energy. I mean, we have batteries –
People love batteries. There's a lot of ways to store electricity that are less detrimental to the environment, but people do love batteries.
What was your initial motivation in writing The Grid?
The original motivation is kind of twofold, but they go together. One is that I felt like I saw a lot of people trying to intervene in the system who didn't understand what that meant, didn't understand what it was as a system. Those interventions were people putting solar on the roof, and then they're super mad that when their house blacked out. I know a lot of people who have bought diesel generators instead because during a blackout you get to have power.
It was also just this idea that you could make electricity into a commodity and make money off of it like anything else that has been so damaging to the system. There were a lot of interventions happening in the grid, and I just thought well, we need a primer. That's a super practical side of it.
The other side was this desire to try to tell the history of America in a different way. I was surprised how much the book ended up being a business history. I did not intend it to be that way, I was really like, "I'll have a technology history chapter, a business history chapter, legislative history chapter, and then we'll just sort of go forward.”
But the uniqueness of electrification in the US is that it's always been for profit.
There are pockets that are not that way for historical reasons, and ideological reasons. The fact that the business community has been so interested in the book, I think it's been really good, I hope. I hope it's really good. Those were the two pieces. It really is this American story of a battle between freedom, independence, self-reliance, big money, and big government.
How do we determine what energy is worth? As you wrote, it's not tangible. It's not a banana.
One of the problems I have with the way these arguments are happening in the US is that what is it worth always, somehow only has one metric, and that metric is money.
But what is it worth to you that you have energy security? If there's a way you can have solar and not lose your power, which is not that complicated, what is that worth to you? A lot. What is it worth to stop carbon emissions? If you just get a lot of solar up, all you've got are the emissions that go into making those panels, and getting them on your roof, from China or wherever they come from. The singular metric is a part of capitalism – that we're not allowed to measure anything any other way. That's not true everywhere.
Not to glorify China because it does not need to be glorified at this moment, but I did see one talk by a Chinese electrical engineer, whose job was to make a new green city from scratch. Everything he presented had two metrics, how much it costs, and what the carbon emissions were. I was just like, "Okay, great, I don't care what the metrics are, but I'm so happy you have two of them so that then there's this possibility of saying, "Okay, how do I, in fact measure worth?"
Right. It's actually a much deeper conversation than just what technology is available, how much does it cost, and how much money can you make?
I think you really see that with the fires in California. How can you maintain a system that doesn't spark? What is the cost of that? It's not about just money.
I was thinking about how relevant The Grid is in relation to these California fires.
I think the thing to look at is the difference between the way in which Southern California Edison has been upgrading their system, and the way in which PG&E was not upgrading their system. At this very basic level of how a wire connects to a pole, how a wire connects to a transformer, if you're in a situation where any spark creates a fire, what's the necessary technology to not have any sparks at all, ever?
PG&E was just neglecting that sort of upgrade?
I don't know if they were neglecting it, but they weren't prioritizing it to the same degree that Southern California Edison has, and I would say at this point, it might be interesting to talk to Southern California Edison. Because there should be fires in Southern California too. It's not just bad luck that they're all happening in PG&E territory. There are sometimes fires in Southern California, but it's not the same. With the same frequency.
This is where energy democracy becomes a question. This is a public thing, this grid. I embrace this, the infrastructure, but also what it gives us, what it affords us, and if I'm the master of my house and I have my solar panels, and I live in Southern California or Northern California, I do not want to be the one responsible for hooking that system up, because I'm going to burn down everybody.
It's not like this Occupy Wall Street movement of electricity independence, we'll just destroy the entire country. One spark at a time. Even the companies do it wrong, and they're well trained people. I think there's a place for expertise in the future. If you want universal electrification, there's a place for expertise in there.
In terms of policy in the U.S., what do you think we need in order to move towards a more ideal scenario?
We need to stop using fossil fuels. I think what Governor Brown did wasn't little. It will be interesting to see if it sticks, but it was an interesting first trial, which is just, here's the date we'll be done. We're not going to put it in our cars, we're not going to put it in our electricity system, we're not going to extract it, we're not going to burn it, we won't import it. The fossil fuel businesses will be gone.
I recognize the current government does not want to do this, but the reason I say it has to happen at the level of policy, is that as soon as that kind of thing gets said seriously, there's a lot of innovation that starts to be funded. Things begin to change. I don't know if you've seen this yet, but you should, you will – you stop seeing a house with like two solar panels on the roof. Every single rooftop should have solar. Where you're moving away from private decisions about household electricity use being mimicked in the infrastructure into a larger, statewide decision. For example, if the car becomes electric, how do you deal with that? You need some people who conceptualize it, but you also need a lot of tiny little machines that are going to make these things interoperable with each other. This is a wonderful thing, you have the car, it can store electricity, and then it can charge at work, and then you drive it home, blah, blah. But it turns out that the cars are using their own electricity at precisely the same moment the sun goes down. Actually they are not a storage resource to a solar power grid, not at dusk at least. These little things, where you're like, "Oh, weird, that's not going to work." It was a great idea, it won't work. But those kinds of studies, and the kind of investment, if we're keeping capitalism for right now, that's necessary to make major change happen, will only happen when there's laws in place.
Right. And laws that say no fossil fuels?
I think law saying no to fossil fuels. That's what I think. The issue is, does it need to be across the board, like what California did? I find that interesting, in a good way. Does it need to be sector by sector? If there was no global warming, I think by 2100, we'd have renewable electricity anyway because once you build it, it's free. This is something that has been a shock to everybody that I've talked to. That the price per kilowatt hour is coming down to about zero. You still have to build the thing and there is some maintenance, but essentially, what you're paying for is the labor power to make it, and continue to make it work. I think that transition would happen, we'd figure out how to do it, we'd be at 100% renewables, people would start having electric cars because it's cheaper to use free electricity than it is to pay for gas. The shift would happen slowly.
Without global warming, we will be doing this anyway. The question is if we need legislation to make it happen, because we need it to happen faster.
That's a really interesting way of framing it because that doesn't seem to be the debate. The debate seems to be why should we do these things? Is global warming real? Who cares? This is how things function, any alternative seems impossible, new policy that’s ambitious is wild idealism, etc. etc. But framing this as what is already happening, climate change or not, is really interesting.
I guess the problem is just like when we lose coal – we should all be super attached to coal. But industries change.
Everything is an issue of perception. I like your idea of working backwards.
I think we'll move that way with capitalism completely intact. There's a lot of reasons to challenge the current world order, but we don't even have to challenge it.
It's like getting ready to go to the airport. Your flight is at 10, you need to be there at 8, so you leave your house at 7. If we're going to move to renewables by 2050, what are the steps that need to take place right now?
Exactly. But something needs to happen, and that's the thing, any kind of law is going to make a giant difference, but it seems to be very difficult to make a law.
Do you find one argument most compelling after all this research?
Of why we should have a law?
Of why laws should change? Of why our energy systems are important to focus on period.
No. I feel like I don't talk about things in terms of climate very much. Sometimes because I've been explicitly told not to, but sometimes because everybody gets really anxious. When you're talking about transforming the electricity system, people are like, "That's a funny problem". Engineers are all super excited, because they have a good job again, and they used to have a boring job, and the utility people are kind of scared, but they're also excited, because maybe they can change the way the company works.
The transformation of the electricity system is producing all of these very exciting problems for people who are in the industry. I think it's producing a lot of exciting opportunities for people outside the industry. There's a kind of hopefulness.
It hits the desire to tinker, that a lot of people have. There's not an ideological argument in it.
Part of that is, we need to retire all of our coal fired power plants for 2050 anyway. They've been retiring for a while, we've been replacing them with natural gas for a while, natural gas works differently than coal fire plants. We've already had to adapt the system to that, now we're not building as many, and we're building more renewables. But it's all outside of a conversation about good and bad people.
I feel like 2018 has made climate change a much more mainstream conversation than it was before. The weird weather piece of it, like, "Okay, we don't know about climate, but weather", we can tell you that it's weird. That might be just the beginning of a way in, where it stops being about having this abstract conversation about what lefty people believe rigthy people should do.
I feel like there is a holier than thou attitude that gets rolled in. People have a lot of other problems and desires, so for now, how can an energy transition not be about climate change? That's the slow path. But if we want to speed it up, then it has to be about climate change, and after that, it just turns to politics, and that's hard. I don't have a solution for that one.
We'll talk in five years.
Who knows what anything will look like in five years! The slow way is avoiding climate change in conversation, and the fast way is folding it into the conversation, and risking politicizing everything.
Really. I think what you said about the airport is really nice because there is the sense that the airplane will leave if you're not on it. That's essentially what the IPCC's latest report was – we have 12 years to do this. What do we do?
Do you feel optimistic?
I have decided that being optimistic is a more interesting story. I think it's really easy to talk about how you would fold up your life and future generations of your family and call it the death of humanity and all that. That may be where it all ends up, but at least for now it's not the more interesting story to tell or to investigate. Until it's hopeless, I would say I'm kind of in the, what are we doing? What is working? What is stopping us? How can we get around that? I feel like there are people who have believed that climate change is happening for a while, and now what they really want is action, and that group is growing every single day. People are just like, "Could somebody do something, please? Someone."
Anything.
Anything. Anything will be fine. I believe that each of those anythings, if they can be done, then opens up a whole new world of possibility. I can say, "Yes, we just need to get rid of fossil fuels, no extraction, no sale, no trade, no use." You can say that. I would be fine with just, we're going to stop having cars with engines in them.
Yeah.
I mean France said that. France is all nuclear, so they can. I guess it's still kind of how do we knock down a giant fireball, and while, by the way, we're doing that, try to make the world a little more equitable. The number one thing I would say needs to happen at the small level is that people with rooftop solar or small wind, need to be able to keep their lights on. That just has to happen.
How does that happen?
Essentially the problem is that if there's any electricity feeding into the system, when the men working on the system try to bring it back up, they get electrocuted. There just needs to be a switch, essentially, that automatically takes anything generating electricity off the system. There are places where this is being discussed more seriously, but if you have a diesel generator that already happens. You can do it with solar.
You can do it...
Yeah. To run a microgrid with solar power is more complicated technologically than with a diesel generator. With diesel, you actually have to go turn it on, and in that act of turning it on, you make a signal that says this house is an island. But with solar, it just stays on, there isn't any break. There would have to be some sort of artificial break put in, like maybe your power goes out for 45 seconds and then comes back on again. I don't know how it would work, but I could tell you that it's not so complicated.
It's a legislative problem, and it's a systems engineering problem, but it's not a technological problem.
I think the argument that everybody starts with is the good one, which is that electricity is everything – it's money, it's information, it's family, and some ways it's communication. It's the sense of how you're connected to the world. Just the idea of a blackout is a ridiculous misnomer, because the lights are not what matters anymore. If the electricity goes out you don't have running water anymore in your house. It's become this completely essential substructure of everything that we are and do.
Of course we should be interested in it.
We can't remove it anymore.
interviews
The Question of Extremism in American Politics
by Matthew Dallek
March 12, 2020
Hello! First, will you introduce yourself?
I'm a political historian and have written a couple of books. The first, The Right Movement, was on Ronald Reagan's first campaign for Governor of California. In the book, in terms of what is relevant to this discussion, I explored how Reagan and the conservative movement were able to inoculate themselves from the charge that they were extremists or even pseudo-fascists who opposed Democracy. Of course, that charge had dogged the conservative movement for years before Reagan won office in 1966, and it continues to dog the Republicans through today. It has been a constant theme or tension, even though it's evolved for decades in American politics.
Right now, I'm writing a book about the history of the John Birch Society, as a political movement.
I can't wait for that.
All right, great! Well, I have only started to write it. The Birchers are interesting because they really personified extremism in the 1960s. They were extremism made flesh for a lot of people. I think it's fair to say they were the most controversial grassroots political movement on the right in the '60s. Robert Welch, the founder of the Society, had famously charged Dwight Eisenhower as a dedicated agent of the Communist conspiracy. They tried to impeach Earl Warren, the Supreme Court Chief Justice. You get a sense, of course, of the ways in which they were seen as extreme. Yet they were also a quite successful grassroots movement with between 60,000 and 100,000 members nationwide. These are a couple of ways I have written about the question of extremism in American politics since 1945.
Between the John Birch Society, and whoever occupies the right wing extreme posts now, has the message changed? Has the true conservative component of the party shifted what it wants? Isolationism during World War II and President Trump’s rhetoric now feels like some sort of return.
Yes. Well, it certainly is not static. The first thing I will say is that there was an alternative tradition in the conservative movement that we see echoes of today. This alternative tradition was established by some of these more radical constituents like the John Birch Society, those who saw Communist conspiracies within the United States, the people who made the argument that Jews were controlling the international system, or those who argued that international institutions were dictating America's foreign policy. They tended to be isolationists in some ways, although there were certainly divisions, even on that count. But of course, America First going back to World War II, was deeply isolationist. There were also elements in it that were anti-semitic.
What I would say is that after the 1960's, Trump’s predecessors kept this tradition alive. It was not necessarily the mainstream in the conservative movement, but it was a part of the coalition. It was a part of the coalition that some conservative leaders, some Republican elders, and some at the grassroots level, tried to wall off, tried to kick out of the party of the mainstream, but not very often, and I would say not very effectively.
The extremists were people like Phyllis Schlafly who led, among other things, the Stop the ERA movements. Pat Robertson, who described in his book a one world conspiracy among international institutions and elites to control all elements of American life, and literally to destroy American freedom.
The idea that there are elites in Washington and on Wall street, who are conspiring to fundamentally change the character of the country, to basically put big government in control of all their lives and destroy their freedom.
There are racist elements in right-wing extremism – we saw these when Trump rose to political fame during Obama’s presidency as a leader of the “Birther” movement. That remains such a critical moment of the past decade because it brought together these extreme ideas that there was a grand conspiracy, potentially, at the heart of government, that the country had been duped and that the nation's first African American president was actually “foreign born,” that he was “a left wing radical.” He wasn't “a true American.”
When John McCain was running for president in 2008 and the woman at his rally said, "Barack Obama is a Muslim" and was spouting some of these baseless theories, McCain stood up to her. The reason that got a lot of play is that that was a pretty unusual thing for a conservative leader to do.
I do think that the issues have evolved, and what is at the forefront of the debate has shifted, but some of the rhetoric, the anti-establishment rhetoric, the use of race and religion and gender, this idea that leftists are fundamentally un-American, and that the left is conspiring to destroy family values and freedom, that represents an alternative tradition that is traceable roughly from the 1960's through today.
I’ve been reading Myron Magnet, all the ideas you outlined above, the appeal to culture being bigger than policy, to elites conspiring against family values, had a big influence on Karl Rove and the Bush campaign. Their conclusion became “compassionate conservatism”, which on its face is different from what we see in the GOP now.
That's an interesting example.
He was pro immigration reform.
Right.
He did quite well among Latino voters in Texas and nationally, which was really important to his coalition and all of his political victories. He appointed the nation's first African American woman as Secretary of State, and before Condi Rice, Colin Powell, of course.
When Trent Lott was caught saying he wished Strom Thurmond basically had won the presidency when he ran on the segregationist platform in 1948, Bush and his team moved to oust Lott as Senate leader, which is hard to imagine happening in today’s White House. At the same time, Bush attended an event in South Carolina at Bob Jones University. He then ran his 2004 reelection campaign in part by supporting referendums in key swing states to ban gay marriage. We see a tension within the movement, even within George W. Bush's campaign. McCain, of course – look who he picked for Vice President, Sarah Palin.
Conservatives had to put together the coalition, but the coalition has included extremist elements, in terms of both the ideas and the individuals that are embraced. Romney even. He took the endorsement from Trump. Why did that matter in 2012? It wasn’t because Trump was a real estate mogul, or even a Reality TV star. It was entirely, I think, because of the Birther smear against Obama.
There was a large portion of Republicans during the 2016 election who were vocally opposed to Trump.
Yeah.
Can the party return to a version of moderate after President Trump?
It's an interesting question. When Trump goes away, is no longer President, no longer the leader of the party, it's almost inconceivable that aspects of not just his personality – but his ideas on trade, immigration, his incendiary rhetoric around race, won’t be part of any Republican campaign.
There is a reason why Trump won the nomination, and why he won the presidency, and why he is still at 43%. There is a real market, a real constituency, for a lot of his ideas.
There's a reason there's a conservative infrastructure to support Trump. You've got Fox News. There's Breitbart. You now have the Daily Caller, people like Kellyanne Conway and Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh. These people have been around for a long time, and they have been very influential in the conservative movement.
Even those like Bob Dole, who are really the embodiment of what people would call the establishment, have courted this faction of the party. When he was running for president, he had to go to Pat Robertson's Christian coalition and appear at the conference and declare, in essence, "I have a 100% rating from you. I'm with you. I'm with you, Robertson, every step of the way."
Did Bob Dole subscribe to Pat Robertson's conspiracy theory about this global world order that was destroying American freedom? No, I don't think he did. At the same time, he recognized what Robertson and Robertson's supporters had tapped was an essential part of the conservative coalition, and that Dole was going to have to prove his loyalty to that if he was going to win the nomination.
The infrastructure and the ideas that the radical half of the party has built will still be very much a part of the conservative appeal and, in some ways, will be fundamental to the coalition that they're going to build. That's not to say it's going to remain static. Of course, nothing ever does in politics.
Both left and right are leaning into “extremes,” in direct opposition with each other. What does that mean for democracy?
One of the things that has enabled the country to survive so long, more or less intact, is that there has been an important element of pragmatism within the political parties and also within the constitutional structure. It's very hard to get things done. Radical change is very hard to enact. We have peaceful transitions of power. There has also been, in the modern era, respect or regard for democratic norms and democratic institutions.
With Trump on the right, first and foremost, and Sanders on the left to a lesser extent, though he’s certainly playing a part in this, we get a steady drumbeat of attacks against the system, against the idea that our institutions can function in any sort of effective way. What does Sanders say? The system is rigged. There is a corporate establishment. There is a political establishment and they are conspiratorial.
Sanders and Trump, even though there are major differences between them on policies and important stylistic differences, there's also a shared sensibility. This idea that the establishment has completely screwed people over, that while the rich have gotten richer, everyone else has been left behind, and that this is part of an orchestrated campaign or plot to elevate this top one percent. The idea that there is a military industrial complex that is taking people into wars and that politicians are beholden to it.
Look at their positions on trade. They both argue that globalization has done more in the way of harm to people than it has in achieving the goals of opening up borders and promoting tolerance and economic dynamism.
In terms of what does that rhetoric do to democracy? It continues to erode people's faith in democratic institutions. There is a trampling on democratic norms that we have seen, obviously, with Trump.
Part of the problem is that there has been a legitimate failure on the part of American government and American politics. You can take the example of growing income and economic inequality over the past five decades. Trump and Sanders are tapping into something clearly real, something that is deeply felt. At the same time, I think these are worrying trends for democracy and that we have seen some of the fruits of that rhetoric in the Trump administration with the attacks on the judiciary, and Congress, and calling the media the enemy of the people, or in Sanders' case, the corporate media.
Right. Not me, I’m the independent media.
I don't know who owns you guys...
Myself.
Oh, really? Okay, good. That's cool.
I think the appetite for this sort of leadership [on both sides] shows an anger within the electorate, rage even – which drives a base and certainly calls for participation. But voter turnout is still abysmal. Does that apathy symbolize distrust in the system to such an extreme people don’t want to participate? Is it just too hard to vote?
Trump and Sanders have spoken, and I think you're right, they have spoken to people who have felt left out of the system and they probably have brought some people to the polling booth who might otherwise not go because they just don't think that there is a candidate for them.
Sanders has brought people into the process, especially young people, and given them a stake, and he has spoken to their legitimate anxieties in a way that other candidates, like Joe Biden, have not done and are not able to do.
In terms of why overall participation rates are so low, it’s a complicated question. As seen with these most recent primaries, the youth vote did not really grow. If anything, in 2016, we saw increased turnout for Trump, but that was not the case among African American voters for Hillary Clinton. It didn't seem to be true for Latino voters, either. Where was the big turnout on Super Tuesday for the Democrats? African-American voters; and in the suburbs among white, educated, upper income women – the same voters who turned out to give the Democrats the House in 2018.
Two, I think you're right, voting has become very hard to do in this country. Seven-hour waits in Texas. Hours-long waits in California. These are obviously disgraceful things that shouldn't happen, but they do continue to happen. Look at the Iowa caucus; think about how hard it is to actually go out and vote or caucus. The barriers to entry are really high.
On top of that people are cynical. They don't think, with whoever they vote for, anything is going to change. The things that people do in Washington, those things don't matter. I don't think that's accurate, but certainly that feeling is understandable.
Where was the big turnout on Super Tuesday for the Democrats? In the suburbs. White, educated, upper income, women – the same voters who turned out to give the Democrats the House in 2018.
But, another word about the question of extremism: I would say that all extremism is not necessarily a bad thing.
Sometimes what seems to be extreme or impossible at one time, does become possible, right? Public sentiment changes, and part of the reason it changes is because there are mass movements and they have a cause and political leaders. The mass movements are not necessarily always taking extreme positions, although sometimes they do take positions that seem impossible to achieve in a given moment in time. Then, over time, they become achievable. They become reality.
I think the way it has manifested itself in contemporary politics, in the past 50 or 60 years, has represented this very anti-establishment anger and hostility towards people in power, a sense that the system is broken and at the heart of it, there is something or someone keeping us down. There is something or someone who is getting rich while all the rest of the people are left to suffer and struggle.
Again, there are elements of that that are true. There is real corruption. There is real corporate greed. There are a lot that do manipulate the system, but that argument really does make people more cynical, who already feel cynical.
But, of course,with extremism, comes intolerance. On the left, but mostly on the right, what we see, especially in times of economic anxiety, but also fundamentally as a part of American political life, is that extremism oftentimes presents itself in terms of intolerance. Intolerance toward religious minorities or racial and ethnic minorities or immigrants. The anti-black racism, nativism, anti-semitism. These things are alive as well in American life.
Often they are given oxygen and energy by these extremist groups and extremist ideas. That, of course, is a worry trending in American politics and one of the things that political leaders and the political system should tamp down as much as possible, as opposed to breathing life into it.
Is it even...
Achievable or fixable?
Yeah. Where do you go? How do you go?
One way to address these extremist challenges is when the policies of the country become more responsible for the vast majority of the country. When we are reducing inequality, when people feel more empowered at work, when people in the service economy are not so worried that they don't have to live paycheck to paycheck, when there is good access to good education, higher education, whether it's community college or four-year public universities in a way that students don't have to come out with tons of debt, the stakes feel a little less existential.
It's not just the failures of our political system and American government; there are a lot of other structural factors like industrialization and globalization, the rise of social media, the focus on politician's personal lives, aggressiveness to root out scandals, to report on mini-scandals. That has all contributed to this age of polarization, but at some point when the country and the government is able to again address issues like climate change, which is increasingly central and existential for a lot of people understandably, then the extremists have less oxygen and there are people who don't feel as livid at the system.
The argument that the system is rigged, that the establishment is corrupt. I think those arguments have less weight for people if the county and the government can eventually get to address some of these big systemic problems in American society.
The last thing I'll say is we're still struggling with the country's original sin, which of course was racism and slavery. We're still living in the shadow of the civil rights revolution of the 1960's, which was just a partial revolution. It became extremely important, but it obviously did not go far enough, and I think a lot of people continue to feel like they don't have a real stake in our society. That it is not necessarily democratic for them.
So the elusive quest to achieve racial equality and racial justice is another massive challenge that has got to be confronted.