Now Claude Lorraine, who you see over here on the left, is often just called Claude. Lorraine refers to the place in France that he called home, or that weds his home before he went to Italy. Now he was a contemporary of Nicolas Poussin, who we studied in the previous subunit, and you might remember that Poussin was also a Frenchman who spent most of his life in Italy. So important to keep that in mind, there's sort of a trend here with some of these French artists we're looking at. Now, like Poussin, he spent a great deal of time in Italy, and he was very influenced by the work of Italian artists that he saw in Italy. But he was also very influenced by the Italian countryside, the countryside around Rome. And he used what he saw as inspiration in his landscapes, and you see two of his landscapes on the right side of the screen here. And he's known for these really lush, sumptuous, beautiful landscapes with this soft light and almost an impossible perfection. So, and just to introduce you to what these are, we're going to look at them a little bit later. But this image here is landscape with the flight into Egypt, and it dates to 1663. And over here on the right is an image known simply as pastoral landscape, and it dates to 1648. And I think you can see just right off the bat, they are these really idealized, beautiful landscapes. And there are certainly details within them of people and buildings, but mainly they are landscapes. Now, before we take a close look at these paintings, I want to take a look at some of the other artists of the time to provide some context and understand what Claude's unique role was in the Baroque. So, here on the left we have landscape with the flight into Egypt, which we just looked at above. So it's landscape and scape with the flight into Egypt. And it dates to 1663. And on the right is an image we've already looked at in this course, and hopefully this is familiar to you. This is Jacob van Roistal's view of Harlem, which dates to around 1670. Now, hopefully you remember that Roistal was a very successful landscape artist, and he was working in the Dutch Republic in a Protestant culture. And he was a really important figure in advancing landscape painting, but it's important to remember that he was working in a very different cultural context. You should hopefully remember that in Protestant countries, genre paintings were more popular, more common, more accepted. And remember that the Dutch Republic was Protestant. So this is Protestant culture, whereas Claude was working in a Catholic context. And in Catholic cultures, paintings were still expected to have a little bit more grandeur in them. And what I mean by that is you often see noble paintings depicting historical events, usually from the classical world or from the Bible. And of course there are a lot of religious paintings commissioned in Catholic cultures. So the fact that Claude was able to paint a lot of landscape paintings and to make them very successful and popular in this context is important, because he was working against a little bit more of a hurdle there than Roistal was in this Protestant context. Interestingly, he does kind of insert little stories, and that is Claude I'm talking about, into his landscapes, almost as a way of justifying the rest of the landscape. So this is landscape with the flight into Egypt, and that's exactly what we see within this circled area here. And the flight into Egypt was a biblical story, a story of the Holy Family fleeing King Herod, who had ordered all babies to be murdered because he had heard a young king was born. So this is the Holy Family fleeing into Egypt, but essentially this is just a landscape painting. You can't really see this little detail in here. You might not notice it right away. So that's a major difference between these two paintings. In Jacob van Roistal's painting on the right, we have an image of a place. This is clearly identifiable as Harlem. Sorry, that's Harlem. If you were from this place in the 17th century, you would see this and know what you were seeing. Whereas with Claude, it's a little unclear. This seems more like a fantasy world, not necessarily an immediately recognizable place. And landscapes really can do and say a lot of different things. And I just kind of want to show you a few images to hit that point home. So like Jacob van Roistal's painting, and again this is view of Harlem over here, which we already looked at, images can tell you about place. They can say, I am a photo, I am a picture of an identifiable place that is real and you know about. Much like this photograph here on the right, if you're familiar with the geography of the United States, you might immediately say, oh that looks like the American Southwest, or if you're even local to the area, you might know this is Utah. Landscapes can also be something of a background. And on the left here we have Nicholas Poussin's Et in Arcadia Ego, which again we looked at Poussin already. And that's much like this image on the right, which is a photograph of the Vietnam War, and it's a violent image. Now both of these have a story going on, and the landscape kind of serves as the background. It certainly helps add to the story. We know where the story is taking place, but really the main point of these images is what's going on, right? We have violence and war in this image on the right. And in Nicholas Poussin's painting, a story of these shepherds encountering a sarcophagus in this beautiful place in Arcadia. So that's another way landscapes can work. Now with Poussin's Et in Arcadia Ego in mind, and that's again what we see here on the left, Et in Arcadia Ego versus Claude's Pastoral Landscape. Now I mentioned already that these two artists are contemporaries. They're both French, they're both working in Italy, and they both do pay a lot of attention to landscape in their paintings. But I think you would agree if you just take a moment and look at these two that there's some very different things going on in these paintings. For one thing, there's figures front and center in Poussin's painting. And as I mentioned when we just looked at the example above, this is really a story here. We have shepherds who've come across this sarcophagus with the inscription Et in Arcadia Ego, which means I too am in Arcadia, and this is often viewed as a meditation on death, right? Even this image of death, this sarcophagus intrudes into the peaceful and idealized world of Arcadia. So this is kind of a meditation on a very specific idea. Whereas in Claude's painting, there are figures over here, probably shepherds, right? We have some animals, but there isn't necessarily a clear story or narrative to focus on. And really this is pure landscape. Our attention is drawn into the details of nature, right? And our eye is drawn kind of back into this deep landscape. And indeed, Poussin is often called an intellectual painter, or you hear scholars call him stoic, whereas there seems to be a greater level of emotion in Claude's painting. Both artists are clearly influenced by classicism. But again, there's more emotion and a meditative quality in Claude's painting here on the right. And indeed, the style is different too. Notice the softness of the light in Claude's painting. You can really see the way it illuminates the landscape. And really the landscape is front and center here. There's more attention to color in Claude's, whereas it's more about line in Poussin's. And really I think this boils down to an interest in mood in Claude, versus narrative and ideals in Poussin. And to me, Claude's painting evokes a timelessness, a sort of perfection. And indeed, there is sort of a perfection of already beautiful nature in Claude's painting. And really it's a meditation on beauty and this golden age of classicism and a desire to return to that kind of perfection.  Well, I think in this seemingly straightforward landscape, there is really a wealth of very deep and lofty ideas that you can meditate on. And yeah, maybe beauty is sort of the point too.


It's quite spectacular, the fact that the Prime Minister actually understands our business when he was contextually giving us suggestions, asking us questions. Quite mind-blowing that he has such granular information about our industry and business. It's very clearly evident that he is focusing on entrepreneurs and how to grow the entrepreneurship in the country.


Thank you. It's my pleasure to introduce Professor Daniel Ziblatt today. I'm going to read a little from his bio because there are a lot of accomplishments that I don't want to miss. Daniel Ziblatt is the Eden Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard University, where he's also a resident faculty at the Mindegansberg Center for European Studies, and Harvard's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. His research focuses on democratization, democratic breakdown, political parties, state building, and historical political economy with an emphasis on Europe from the 19th century to the present. His first book was Structuring the State, the Formation of Italy and Germany in the Puzzle of Federalism. He's also the author of Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, which won the American Political Science Association's 2018 Woodrow Wilson Prize for the best book in government and international relations. It's also won three other prizes, including the American Sociological Association's 2018 award, the Barrington Moor Book Prize. Professor Ziblatt co-chairs with Steve Levitsky, a new challenges to democracy research cluster at Harvard's Weatherhead Center. Today he's here to talk to us about his most recent work, How Democracies Died, also co-authored with Steve Levitsky. The book is a New York Times bestseller that's currently being translated into 15 different languages. In it they draw on decades of research and a wide range of historical and global examples from the 1930s in Europe to contemporary Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela to the American South during Jim Crow. They show us that democracy no longer ends with the Bank, but can die quietly, subverted by the very same leaders who were elected to sustain it. With the wealth of insight into how democracies die and what we can do to prevent such a fate in ours, we are fortunate to have Professor Ziblatt here to conclude this day-long symposium. Please help me welcome him to the stage. It's really wonderful to be here. Thank you for the invitation. I'm actually just very grateful to be part of this public forum, which I wasn't able to attend all of it today, but it's a fascinating and important set of events that have happened today. So I'm talking at the end of the day, so I appreciate you all being here. I'm going to be talking about the health of our democracy and the role of polarization in that. And so in thinking about the health of our democracy, American democracy, I'm going to be trying to answer a question that actually really motivated the book that I wrote with Steve Levitsky and that question is a question I will admit that I never thought I would ask. The question is, could American democracy generally be in danger? Could American democracy generally be in danger? So I approached this question, though, from kind of a distinctive angle along with my co-author, and I will do so also tonight, because I have spent most of my career studying democracies in other parts of the world and in other times. And so from that global angle and with a kind of broader historical view in mind, the first observation that I just want to begin with is that democracies don't die like they used to. So democracies used to die at the hands of men with guns. During the Cold War, three out of every four democratic breakdowns happened in the form of military coup. Contemporary democracies die in much more subtle ways. They died at the hands of generals, but of politicians, prime ministers, and presidents. Leaders used the various institutions of democracy to subvert it. So democracies today often die constitutionally through parliamentary legislation, through corporate rulings. As a result of this, many citizens often aren't even fully aware that it's happening until it's too late. So in 2011, 12 years into Hugo Chavez's presidency, a majority of Venezuelans according to surveys thought they still lived in a democracy. It was clearly no longer dead. Similar dynamics are visible today in Turkey, a decade after the AKP is sent to power in Hungary and Poland as well. So if democracy now happens at the ballot box instead of in the military barracks, one of the keys to protecting democracy is preventing these democratic figures from getting elected in the first place. And it's here actually where political parties play a really critical role. Political parties are democracies' gatekeepers. They often don't think of them this way, but because they select the candidates, they have incredible power to keep extremists and demagogues out of office. It's when parties fail to play the gatekeeping role that democracies get into trouble. It's really important, as one thinks about polarization and democracy and threats to democracy, to recognize that electoral authoritarians rarely come to power on their own. They almost always come to power with the assist or with an aid from mainstream political parties. Mainstream parties and politicians are often tempted to form fallacy and bargains in the sense with demagoguers outsiders. They often hope they can align with them to tap into some of their popularity and their popular support. And also often with the mistaken belief that they can control the outsider. This is a bargain that almost always backfires. So in the book we recount in Italy in the 1920s, when Mussolini was on the rise in the early 1920s, a local statesman Giovanni Gelletti formed an alliance with Mussolini, concluded him on his party list at election time with the hope that he could tap into some of Mussolini's appeal. In the 1930s in Germany, the German conservative party formed alliances, loose alliances, as she joined proclamations and programs with Hitler's party, which was a marginal party in the late 1920s. This only paved the way for Hitler's assent to power. In early 1933, when Franz von Poppen, the German conservative statesman, elevated Hitler to chancellor, he assured his conservative friends, don't worry, and the quote from von Poppen is, don't worry, within two months will have pushed Hitler so far into a cornmeal squeal. So both Italy and Germany, in many cases, driven by kind of short-term political motivations, politicians abandoned their gatekeeping role. And this often turns out to be a tragic miscalculation. Now in the United States, political parties have actually done a pretty good job of gatekeeping. This is important because in the United States, there's actually been no shortage of extremist demigods. You know, we don't have to look at, just in the 20th century alone, you could think of Father Kaufland in the 1930s, the right-wing radio personality, you have tens of millions of listeners, Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Company, Robert Anti-Semite, Huey Long in the 1930s, Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, George Rawls, the segregationist governor in the 1960s. It's important to kind of list this cast of characters, because Gallipoli data exists going back to 1930s, showing that each of these figures garnered around 35% approval ratings. So there's really nearly a continuous strand in American history, along a very robust liberal tradition, not the illiberal tradition. You know, I don't think there's some kind of dramatic transformation that's taking place in the preferences of American voters. There's been a kind of nearly continuous strand. So the real question is how are these types of figures kept up, despite the fact that they were very popular. And the argument we make in the book is that they were kept up mostly through the presidential selection process. So prior to 1972, the way that we selected our presidents was in what was often described at the time as a system of smoke-filled back rooms. I mean, this was not a very transparent system, not an inclusive system, but this was a system that worked quite effectively at keeping demagogues out. Party leaders worked as gatekeepers. What this meant was that party leaders who worked up close with politicians knew how they dealt with stress and adversity and knew who might be potential demagogues. These politicians at convention time got together and kept out these sorts of figures. So despite all of the shortcomings of this old system, and I wouldn't ever advocate going back to the old system, we have to recognize that this system had a pretty good record of keeping demagogues out. And so what happened in 2016? Well, first of all, Americans, of course, adopted a system of binding primaries in 1972. So this is far more transparent, far more open, but it also weakened party leaders' role as a gatekeeper. And so now it was much easier for a demagogue to make it through the kind of obstacle course to a nomination. So that's the first point. But even more critically in a lot of ways, even after candidate Trump won the nomination, Republican party leaders failed a second time, gatekeepers failed a second time, when they clearly, all Republican leaders publicly and privately expressed the view that Donald Trump might be a not-fit-for-office or they thought he might be a demagogue. Yet nonetheless, they didn't do the one thing that the great Spanish political scientist Juan Lenz recommends that politicians do in facing somebody who clearly is a threat to the established order, democratic order, which is to endorse somebody from the other side. It's of course always difficult to run against, to go against one's own side. It means that a party might face defeat. It's handing power over to the other side of the tension. But this is really a critical thing that might have made a difference. So this is all sort of background to say that in 2016, the United States, we argued for the first time in two centuries, elected somebody to office, presidential office to the presidency was a clearly explicit, visible threat to democratic politics. But this of course does not mean our democracy is doomed. This is in a way where political institution and polarization enters the story. Because it turns out Americans, of course, place a lot of faith in our constitution. We have the oldest and most successful written constitution in the world. And our system of checks and balances has constrained many ambitious politicians. But constitutions are not self-enacting. They don't just enforce themselves. They don't work out of that. Just to give you an example, Argentina, a country that my co-author has spent a lot of time studying, is a country that has a constitution that's nearly identical to the American constitution beginning in the 19th century. And yet Argentina experienced six military coups over the course of the 20th century. So the point is constitutions, it's not just the words on the page that matter. And we make the case that constitutions work best when they are reinforced by robust democratic norms or unwritten rules. So in our book we focus on two norms in particular. One, we call mutual toleration. And essentially it's accepting the legitimacy of your rivals, so of our partisan opponents. So this means no matter how much we disagree or even dislike our partisan rivals, that we recognize they have the right to compete for office and if they beat us together. And so in other words, we don't treat our rivals as enemies. The second key norm is a little less familiar perhaps, which is the norm that we call institutional forbearance. Forbearance means essentially acting with restraint in exercising one's legal right, one's legal power. So it serves as an underutilization of power. And we don't often think about forbearance in politics, but if you're just thinking in American political setting, what does the President can actually do according to the written word on the page, according to the written law? The President can pardon whoever he or she wants at any point for any reason. The President with a congressional majority can change the size of the Supreme Court. You don't like how the Supreme Court is ruling, you can increase the Supreme Court's size to 11, 13, whatever, perfectly legal. The President's agenda is stalled in Congress. The President can circumvent the process and rule by executive order. The Constitution, of course, doesn't prohibit such action. Think about what Congress can do. Congress, the Senate can use its right of advising, can set to block every single cabinet appointee, to block all judicial appointments. The Congress can impeach a President on any grounds it wants. So the point is that politicians can exploit the letter of the law in ways that eviscerate the spirit of the law. This tendency to exploit the letter of the law to eviscerate the spirit of the law is what we call constitutional article drawn on our legal scholar Mark Tushin. So if you look at any failing or failed democracy in the world, today or in the past, you'll find an abundance of constitutional hardball. So Argentina under Barone, Spain and Germany in the 1930s, Venezuela under Chávez, contemporary Hungary, Poland and Turkey. Constitutional hardball is how even a brilliantly designed constitution gets subverted and the system of checks and balances gets subverted. It's how judicial and legislative institutions get transformed from watchdogs into lapdogs. It's how checks and balances degenerate into gridlock. What prevents the system of checks and balances from descending into constitutional hardball that can wreck democracies is this notion of forbearance. It's a shared commitment to exercising restraint and deploying one's institutional broadness. It's rooted in a commitment to the sphere of the law. So think just about presidential term limits. So prior to 1951, of course, the United States placed no legal limits on the president's ability to seek reelection. So legally, if re-elected, presidents could be presidents for life. Yet George Washington, of course, famously didn't seek a third term, stepped down after two terms, and for nearly 150 years, no president ever even sought a third term. So even incredibly ambitious and popular presidents, Jefferson, Jackson, and U.S.S. Graham, was an unwritten removal of self-frustration. Take the filibuster. It's another example of forbearance. Technically, a Senate minority can use the filibuster to block every piece of legislation. But historically, the filibuster was used really as a weapon of last resort. Between 1917 and 1960, there were only 30 filibusters, so fewer than one a year. So these two norms, these unwritten rules of mutual toleration on one hand, forbearance on the other hand, are what my co-author and I think of as the soft guard rails of our democracy. These unwritten rules prevent normal political competition from descending into partisan fights to the death that have killed democracies in Latin America in the 60s and 70s and Europe in the 1930s. America has not always had these soft guard rails. It wasn't born with them. Our founding fathers really actually never got the idea of really a mutual toleration. And that's because this idea of legitimate opposition, the idea that the opposing party has a right to compete for office, was really just a notion that was developing in the late 18th century. So as brilliant as the founding fathers may have been, they couldn't quite wrap their heads around this idea. So under President Washington and President Adams, the governing federalist party regarded the emerging Jeffersonian opposition as seditious as working for revolutionary France. Of course, the Jeffersonians thought the federalists were monarchists and wanted to bring back British rule. This is a pretty intense polarization. Both sides view the other side as agents of foreign powers. And both sides engage the egregious harbour, corpac, and other forms of harbour. The passage of the Aliens' Edition Act. This is an intense harbour. And it's really not until a post-revolutionary generation that this norm of mutual toleration or accepting again your rivals as legitimate emerge. But it didn't last long. In the 1850s, Southern Democrats regarded the new Republican Party as an existential threat because Republicans were anti-slavery. And as slavery emerged on the agenda, both sides regarded the other side as traitors to the Republic. As norms eroded, these newly emergent guardrails began to break down. The politics took on a kind of anything-goes character. So one historian accounts 125 different acts of violence on the floor of the Congress and the lead-up to the Civil War, so fistfights, canyons, stabbings on the floor of the Congress. Mutual toleration obviously collapsed during the Civil War and it remained low for a generation after the Civil War. So during reconstruction, both sides regarded each other as existential threats. This resulted in the 1860s and 70s of an abundance of hardball politics, corpaking. Supreme Court nominees were blocked. Supreme Court size was expanded, fraudulent election in 1876. But for very tragic reasons, and this comes again back to the theme of polarization that we discuss in our book, beginning in the late 19th century, Democrats and Republicans began to accept one another as legitimate and began to avoid destabilizing acts of hardball. And in particular, what prompted us was that Republicans gave up on the agenda of racial equality. They gave up on the agenda of reconstruction. Republicans allowed Democrats to disenfranchise blacks in the South. So Southern Democrats no longer view Republicans as an existential threat. The kind of tragic truce was achieved. Mutual toleration was restored. Forbearance re-emerged. But this great tragic irony that we still live with today is that our norms of mutual toleration and forbearance preconditions for democracy were achieved at the price of racial exclusion. And so our democracy was fundamentally incomplete and flawed. But this ultimate, at the beginning of the 20th century, constitutional hardball began to diminish. There was no impeachments, no successful corp acting. Senators were judicious in the use of the filibuster and the right to advise a consenting. And outside of wartime, presidents were framed from acting unilaterally, circumventing Congress in the courts. So for more than a century, our system of checks and balances worked in the 20th century. But again, they worked because they were reinforced by these norms. In some sense, we could think of ambiguous norms of toleration forbearance. Now as we show in our book, these norms have been unraveling in the United States of the last quarter century. We see this dramatically accelerated over the last several years. But again, it began long before the current political moment and really began, we argue, in the 1990s. Newt Gingrich, who became Speaker of the House in 1995, began in the early 1990s to speak. He told his Republican allies in Congress to use terms like trade, anti-flag, anti-family trade, when describing demographics. Gingrich was also a master of constitutional hardball. He engineered the first modern government shutdown in 1985. The Republican House carried out a partisan impeachment. It was the partisan impeachment of Bill Clinton. It was the first presidential impeachment in 130 years. So the process of normal erosion really accelerated in the 2000s. During the Obama year, the Tea Party movement radicalized the Republicans, encouraging them to abandon mutual tolerations. Republican leaders like Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Runi Giuliani, Mike Huckabee told their followers that President Obama did not love America, that Obama and the Democrats weren't real Americans. The further movement, of course, went a step further questioning whether President Obama was even really born in the United States. Fundamentally questioning his right to be president. So I'll just give you one example of one Colorado congressman, Mike Hoffman, declared at one point, I do not know if President Obama was born in the United States. But I do know that in his heart he's not an American. He's just not an American. Hillary Clinton, of course, received similar treatment. A Republican presidential candidate on live national television at the Republican convention led the Republican chant to block her up. Now, America has always obviously had an extremist fringe. That was going to my earlier point here, but this was no longer French politics. These were national Republican leaders. This was the vice presidential candidate in 2012. This was the presidential candidate in 2016. This was live on national television at the Republican convention. So leading Republicans were now questioning the basic legitimacy of their rivals for office. So this worries me. This worries shouldn't worry us all because what we've learned from studying democracies in other parts of the world is that in the absence of mutual toleration, if you regard your political rivals as enemies, they were attempted to abandon forbearance and engage in an escalating spiral of heart-ball in order to defeat them. We view our partisan rivals as a threat, as existential threats. We've grown tempted to use any means necessary to stop them. And that's exactly what has begun to happen. Politicians have begun to throw forbearance to the wind. So when Republicans won control of Congress in 2010, they adopted a strategy about right obstructionism. Filibuster use, which had already been increasing under Democrats and Republicans reaching all-time high, it was actually more filibusters during President Obama's second term than all of the years between World War I and the end of the raving presidency combined. President Obama responded with constitutional heart-ball with his own. When the Congress refused to pass immigration reform or climate change legislation, he circumvented Congress and made policy of the executive orders. The action was technically legal, but again violated the spirit of the Constitution. So by the end of the Obama presidency, Republicans, in our view, seemed willing to adopt any means necessary to stop Democrats and prevent people from winning. So 15 states, all of them Republican-led, adopted strict voter-ranking laws, between 2000 and 2016. And most study of all, in my mind at least, was the U.S. Senate's 2016 decision not to allow President Obama to even hold hearings on Merrick Barlow to fill the Supreme Court vacancy created by Justice Scalia's death. This was the first time this had happened since 1866. All of this was before Donald Trump had elected. So the problem is not just that Americans elected a demagogue in 2016. It's that Americans elected a demagogue at a point which our soft bar rails have been corroborated. Okay, so why is all of this happening? We argue what's shredding our norms is polarization. Republicans and Democrats have come, according to surveys, and I think generally there's lots of evidence of this, have come, Democrats and Republicans have come to fear and loathe each other. In 1960, 5% of Republicans said they would be displeased with their trial in their area of Democrat. Today, that number is 50%. According to a recent Pew survey, 45% of Republicans and 41% of Democrats said the other party's policies threaten the nation's well-being. 49% of Republicans and 55% of Democrats say the other party makes them a threat. We have not seen this kind of partisan hatred since the 19th century. This isn't just traditional liberal conservative polarization. People don't fear and loathe each other over taxes and healthcare. Today's partisan differences run much deeper. They're about race, religion, and way of life. Our parties have changed dramatically over the last 50 years. So in the 60s and 70s, Republicans and Democrats are culturally actually quite similar. There are huge policy differences, of course. But demographically, the party's leadership were overwhelmingly white and Christian. Three big changes have taken place. First, the Civil Rights Movement and the achievement of full civil rights and voting rights for all Americans in the 1960s led to a massive and gradual migration of Southern whites from the Democratic Party for the Republican Party, while African Americans became predominantly Democratic. Second, the U.S. experienced a massive wave of migration in the wake of immigration reform in the mid-60s, and most of these immigrants ended up in the Democratic Party. And third, by the time of the Reagan era, evangelical Christians who had been evenly split between the Democrats and Republicans flocked to the Republican Party. So what does all of this mean? Well, today the Democratic and Republican parties are culturally and racially quite distinct. The Democrats are mostly a rainbow coalition of urban and educating secular whites in a range of ethnic minorities. The Republicans, by contrast, remain overwhelmingly white and Christian. This is important because white Christians aren't just a group. They were once the majority, and they once used to sit unchallenged atop this country's social, economic, cultural, and political hierarchies. They filled the presidency, the Congress, the Supreme Court, and governor's managers. They were the pillars of local communities. They were the CEOs, the newscasters, the movie stars, and college professors. And they were critically the faces of both the Democratic and Republican Party. Those days, of course, are long gone, but losing a majority and losing one's dominant social status can be deeply threatened. Many Republican voters, of course not all, but many feel that the country they grew up in is being taken away from them. And that ultimately is what we are driving in polarization. The problem is that extreme polarization can kill democracies. This is a major lesson of the failure of democracies in Latin America in the 60s and 70s and Europe in the 1930s. When politics is so deeply polarized that each side views a victory by the other side as intolerable beyond the pale, the democracy is in trouble. When an opposition victory becomes intolerable, you, of course, begin to justify using extraordinary means to stop this. Things like violence, elections brought, military kids. Of course, Americans haven't reached that point, but we have reached a point where according to exit polls in 2016, one in four Trump voters, one in four people who voted for Trump believed he was unfit for office. The important exit polls, they still preferred him with a Democratic candidate. We've reached a point where, according to Gallup, polls over the last couple of years, Republicans have a more favorable view of a lot of your food than the new ability content. These are dangerous levels of polarization. Donald Trump, of course, is a part of the symptom of that polarization. He's not just a positive. And so his departure won't put an end to it. So what has happened in the last 18 months since we wrote our book? Let's say there's good news and bad news. Good news and not-so-good news. The good news is that America's Democratic antibodies, I think, remain strong. Trump administration, of course, has confronted lots of pushback on multiple fronts from media, from civil society, from the courts, from law enforcement agencies. It also faces a robust political opposition. The last year's midterm elections were really critical. It shows that the United States is not like Russia, Hungary, Turkey, or Venezuela, where authoritarian governments esteem ruled the opposition. The U.S. has a strong opposition, and a strong opposition has ushered in the era of divided government. We're going to train President Trump and make it less likely that he can be a concentrated power for a used government. But the not-so-good news is that the underlying problems of polarization and normal erosion haven't gone away. Our system of checks and balances only works when there's a minimum of mutual toleration of forbearance. Remember, without forbearance, politicians play any means necessary to win, and so they turn to constitutional hardcore. When that happens, divided government can very quickly descend into gridlock, an institutional warfare. This is a world of stolen Supreme Court seats, court packing, partisan impeachment, government shutdowns, declarations of national emergency. That's the danger I think we face today is dysfunctional government. So a few months ago, Steve and I met with a group of U.S. senators, and one of them told us that he expected that we'll never again see a successful Supreme Court nomination when the president's party doesn't also control the Senate. So in other words, Merrick Arland is about to become the rule, not the exception. So our democracy, I think, is becoming increasingly dysfunctional. And seeing the government shutdown, the longest government shutdown in history, followed by threats to declare national emergency, these are symptoms of this basic dysfunction. So in the face of polarization, I think it's really important to think about, can our government actually respond to the genuine crises that we face, climate change, stagnant wages, and so on. So what can be done, and I'll kind of conclude with these some reflections on this. Well, for one, I think it's clear that the Republican Party has to change. It has to become a more diverse party. As long as the Republican Party remains an overwhelmingly white Christian party in the society as diverse as ours, they'll be prone to extremism and desperate acts of constitutional hard work. So I'd just like to kind of develop this point, because I think it's actually really great. Democracy requires that parties learn to lose gracefully. This means that when we lose, we accept defeat, we go home, we regroup, and we get ready for another political battle the next day. We don't cheat when we're about to lose. That's what Democrats do. But for parties to lose gracefully, two conditions really have to hold. First of all, parties have to believe that they stand a chance of winning in the future, and they also have to believe that losing will not bring ruinous consequences. When these two conditions don't hold, losing gracefully tends to go out the window. When politicians fear that they can't win the next election, and in context of extremely high polarization, politicians' time horizons short. They say the future shouldn't be damned, and we'll use any means necessary to all want to power that. In other words, polarization and desperation need politicians to play dirty. This is what happened to German conservatives in the early 20th century. Conservatives were terrified by the prospect of giving the working class the right to vote. They viewed full suffrage not just as an attack on their right to government, but as an attack on the entire social order that they dominated. So they clayed dirty in terms of election fraud and repression of the whole lot of power. Or think about southern Democrats after the Civil War. Reconstruction of the 15th Amendment, brought widespread black enfranchisement across the South, because African Americans represent a majority or a near majority in most southern states there, and enfranchisement represented a threat to southern Democrats. So it challenged not only electoral dominance, but again, it threatened to overturn the dominant social order. So Democrats played dirty. 11 post-Confederate states class laws, poll taxes, literacy tests, property and residence requirements to effectively eliminate African Americans from the right to vote. So black turnout in the South fell from 61% in 1880 to 2% in 1912. Contemporary Republicans, I fear, something similar is happening today.  Not only that, the percentage of the electorate, younger voters are now increasingly overwhelmingly Democrat. So like the old southern Democrats, Republicans have to play dirty, attacking norms, changing the rules that violate basic Democratic rules. We could talk about lots of instances of them. The only way for all of this to change is if the Republican Party itself diversifies. If and when that transformation happens, and I think it will, I hope it will, our politics can be polarized. What about Democrats? There's been a lot of talk of Democrats learning to fight like Republicans. It's time to fight dirty is the name of Greece's book. Democrats are going to break the rules, Republicans are going to break the rules than Democrats should policy. So I really disagree with this. I think in a context of polarization Democrats must avoid the temptation to fight like Republicans. They can, of course, push aggressive policy agenda. They can push for democratizing reforms of our political systems, automatic voter registration, independent commissions to do redistricting, but they must continue to abide by the norms of our political system. So, in other words, don't push for impeachment unless the Mueller report warns it. As long as institutional and electoral channels exist, Democrats must avoid the temptation to respond in time. If not, it's another term in the spiral. In our experience, studying other democracies, other parts of the world, this spiral doesn't end well. I think Democrats, in fact, have good medium-term prospects, unlike Republicans. And so putting our institutions at risk is actually not in Democrats in the light of self-interest. And so more broadly, and I'll end it on this note, when we talk about the crisis of democracy and think about that moment that we're in, there's often a sense that we're kind of in a moment that's in our politics, it's very similar to global work. It's kind of an analogy to people implicitly having to learn. The world is moving in one direction. There's rising tides of disaffection, dissatisfaction, dysfunction, and things are only getting worse. History is only moving in one direction. Now, if this assessment were correct about our politics, desperate measures would be needed. And perhaps forbearance should be available. But I'd like to suggest a different metaphor drawn from the natural world. The metaphor not of global warming, but of earthquakes. The crisis of democracy while severe may be like an earthquake. Like with earthquakes never to be deep in real fault lines of polarization that are driving it. And the crisis can itself do dramatic damage. But democratic crises, perhaps like democracy like earthquakes, tend to come and go. The biggest challenge is to get through the crisis with the institutions intact. We have to make sure that our institutions are built strong enough both to get through the earthquake and for life after the earthquake. And to do this, we can't take it. We cannot attack our institutions by playing hardball and simply too much at stake.


I get asked a lot about student samples. Can you show me a student sample? Can you show me an amazing one? And while I can, a lot of times students are kind of seeing the back end of a ton of work, right? It's like an iceberg. They're only seeing the kind of top half that you see or top kind of little nugget that you see above the water and you don't see all the work that came below it. So I'm weary of showing or sharing personal statement on samples without context without the work. So stick around and we're going to kind of talk through some context while I share some samples. Thank you for joining me on my channel for the best personal statement coaching. Definitely subscribe and hit the bell. My name is Dr. Josie with Write Your Acceptance. After teaching at the university level, college writing, political science, writing, technical writing in the writing centers and working with so many students on personal statements, it is my privilege to share this information until with you. So definitely stick around and let's get to it. Honestly, I'm lucky to work with so many students every cycle. And so at this point I've seen a few kind of types of samples, especially at the kind of rough cut beginning version of the personal statement. And so it is something that I tell my students all the time. Definitely you want to come back to this and come back to this. This is not something you want to just kind of like, you know, hammer out at the end and think that the first version is going to be that final version. I hope it's not. So definitely give yourself time. But I've seen these kind of different types that I want to go through because I want to share the evolution of some of these so that then you can start thinking about how to adequately adapt it to your personal statement. So type one is answering why I want to go into medicine. And I know this makes no sense. That is the actual prompt. But students actually answer the question in a very intellectual kind of telling way. I want to become a physician because I am good with people because I care about my community because since all of these telling phrases, I am this, I kind of, you know, value that. But it doesn't show me that it doesn't show me moments where you kind of show yourself in action showing the values and traits that you kind of prioritize and hold so dear that you think have been central to your journey to medicine. And so a lot of students kind of start writing the essay as if they're just kind of talking about telling me about why they want to be a doctor and I want them to show me in key moments and then reflect on the images and analyze so that we can kind of share with the reader how that experience or experiences have been kind of formative in their journey. So here's an example. For me, medicine is the only path I have wanted to become a doctor since I can remember and focus my undergraduate career on excelling in my courses, assuming leadership roles with numerous student organizations and volunteering in my community. My experiences shadowing a primary physician and a dermatologist have taught me the importance of individualized patient care since every patient's needs are different. However, volunteering at a mobile medical clinic after the hurricane helped me realize how truly committed I am to the field. So basically the student shared everything they wanted to share in this one short paragraph and it's because they only kind of focused on telling me what they kind of, you know, it's like this speed, speed round tour of a house or a campus, right? So it's like, and then this was, and this, and this, and this, but they don't really kind of pause there and let us sit with the moment and the experience and why it was so formative in their journey to medicine. So this type is the kind of rush telling version, right? And so you want to kind of slow it down. And in this, basically, I, when I started working with this student, I was like, okay, so you know what your entire essay is going to be on basically because you have all of the content that you can possibly and maybe even more in this one paragraph. And then we went from there. So how do you start fleshing this out developing these kind of pointers? You want to have these kind of storytelling moments. This is in creative writing piece, but you want to have creative elements. So you want to have a camera over your shoulder moments and it's just a few sentences just enough to get us into the moment so that we can have some sensorial description, right? See, hear, touch, taste, whenever appropriate moments. That's that raw data, the raw information that puts us in the scene in action with you or watching you in action. And then we can reflect on why this mobile health clinic after the hurricane was such a kind of foundational moment in your journey. So what was it about talking to 54 year old Sylvia? Or what was it about 72 year old Frank who really kind of helped clarify your position in medicine, your place aspirationally in medicine? So how do you doctor this essay? First, we're finding redundancies and potential for stories. And so I will show this with you. The blue is redundant, but would be better told with a quick anecdote, right? Of their first memory of wanting to become a doctor or scrapped this altogether. The green that is highlighted is also a throwaway sentence in that you do not want to narrate your resume or transcript. That's another, I think, maybe a whole other video we'll talk about. But yeah, you want to capture moments in your personal statement that aren't in other aspects of your candidacy, right? So if I can see it in your transcript, I don't need it in your personal statement. If I can kind of, you know, see it rough cut in your resume, I don't really need this here. I need the more kind of personal moments in your journey captured here. And so the green is a throwaway sentence, right? This definitely has potential because the purple I would say is interesting, but I would love to see it as an example, right? And so the next step right now, I would say stop writing and start brainstorming examples and stories and anecdotes that you can kind of fill in so that I can start seeing you in action. And the gray again has great potential, but I want to see it. Show me a moment where you are in action, right? Running triage, taking vitals, hide and wait, where you are connecting with a patient. So kind of that has a ton of potential. And it could be a paragraph long, but I need the content of kind of an example story.  Ideally, each kind of story is a different notch in your journey to medicine, right? And so then they all have a slightly different lesson that complements or builds your kind of persona within your journey, right? That that is kind of teaching you different dimensions of the field and different dimensions of who you are and how you see yourself within medicine. So you want to kind of not only have stories and very, very short and brief, just enough, right? But then you also want to reflect on, give your insight into your journey to medicine. So give your perspective and that's going to be most kind of compelling. So now number two is really thinking about the type of structure that a body paragraph should have. So great. Now you know what stories you want to tell. Now you know the difference between showing and telling. And so how do I structure those body paragraphs where I'm kind of dedicating a story? So let's look at a kind of rough cut and well, I would do what the student did basically. Okay. So here we go. I decided to pursue a career in medicine when I walked into the OR at Northwestern Memorial. Approaching the 76-year-old patient, I held her hand as the anesthesiologist prepped her for surgery. Before she succumbed to the mask, the woman gripped me closer. Estaré contigo. I assured her I would be by her side the entire procedure. So the gray is the kind of an okay topic sentence I would try and not all of them, but I would try and kind of gesture to the lesson that you are going to then kind of wrap up or talk about, reflect upon toward the end of the paragraph. So that may be something that can kind of really ground the purpose of this paragraph. So something like walking into the OR at Northwestern Memorial, I never expected to sidestep the scalpel for an emotional exchange with the patient. Right away, I took off kind of, for me, unnecessary words. I decided to pursue a career medicine when I walked into, right? I decided to pursue a career medicine, a ton of words. And you're going to say that in different places at different times, right? So maybe not the necessary moment here in a body paragraph. So I go straight into the action, walking into the OR Northwestern Memorial, right? And so then the second half, it doesn't say I learned the lesson up, it could, but I wouldn't do that for everybody paragraph. So I wanted to show you kind of what I would say is a creatively harder or more challenging topic sentence, just because it give it gestures to a lesson that then you can talk about later, but through images, right? I never expected to sidestep the scalpel for an emotional exchange. So like this person is going to be completely in awe at the fact that they're in the OR, but they were more in tune with the patient's kind of emotional weight and toll than the kind of mesmerizing newness of the experience, right? That is kind of strategically why I think maybe adding a little bit more would be interesting. So the green is your story, right? And look how brief it is. I don't think it really needs a lot more. I like that the student brought in kind of a snippet of Spanish. If you do speak multiple languages, whatever that is, this is a nice way of kind of saying I am diverse without saying I'm diverse, right? Or if you have taken a couple of professionals of Spanish, right? Kind of within the medical context, even if your Spanish is rough, even, you know, if your French is rough, whatever other language, if you've been able to kind of use that tool to connect with a patient to put someone at ease, it's a very interesting way of showing kind of your comprehension of your competency, not just say that, right? And what I would do, what I would consider is not directly translating it right after, but just contextually translating it. So the next line really says what the Spanish phrases say. So in case the, you know, AdCom reader does not speak that language, they won't miss a beat, right? So that's something of interest. And so then ultimately, I think that what's missing in this paragraph is that reflection. So why was this moment so interesting, so valuable? What did you learn about yourself? What insight did you gain into the field of medicine? So give me that kind of reflection toward the end that really kind of tells me why this is such an important foundational moment in your experience, in your journey. So this is from a previous student and so to give you kind of some context, what they did, when they start with the reflection, they talk about how their connection actually forged not in the OR, but before when she was taking, when the student was starting to help take their intake, intake information. So they go into how they really made a point to, to help the mother and daughter, the mom is the one that is the patient feel at ease with kind of their overwhelming situation. And so they connected from where they like the respective home countries. And then they had this kind of wonderful connection that then allowed her to be by her side and offer some comfort just moments before the operation. And yeah, and ultimately what that taught you. So I would end with a line or two about why this has been valuable to you. If it's something that is, you know, part of your journey. Thank you so much for watching. I have a free 15 minute strategy call. If you are writing your personal statement or starting to write your personal statement and want to chat with me and chat details on how I work with students, how I can help you strategize your essay, all that good stuff. So it is in the description below, but it's also on my channel banner if you want to grab it there. If you found this helpful, give us a like and share with your pre-med friends. Thanks so much for watching. Come back. Thanks. Bye.


Hey guys, my name is Mui My brand is called Mui Style Baseball. I'm a hitting and fielding instructor Baseball instructor, so I'm here in Oklahoma based out of Oklahoma, and I started this back in 2018 and honestly back then I Had no clue how to run a business I Was to the point where I was just doing I got to a point where I was doing like 60 lessons a week 60 individual lessons a week, so it was pretty exhausting and So I did this for a while and I started watching some of Ben's videos on on YouTube Last year and the more I started watching I just couldn't believe that you could actually have a plan You can follow in this business, so I Got in contact with him. I text him and he takes me back right away, and then we got on a call and it was it was awesome from there because I Actually didn't think you could actually have a plan that you can follow his program literally Breaks it down step by step what you have to do what you have to do if you want to do group sessions If you want to charge more for individual lessons If you want to you know grow your your camps, so He literally breaks it down step by step, and I just couldn't believe somebody out there kid You know had an idea how to even run this the right way, so Back then 2018 I just couldn't believe I was charging ten bucks a kid, and so I remember It would take me about two days worth the work to make what I make now in one hour Which is kind of crazy to even think so Last year when I got when I met with him, it's actually been a year now is I met with him So he's put me on a plan where you know he in We're literally have to follow the step by step, and it's it's it's a little bit of work But I guarantee if you stick with it, it's gonna work. I'm telling you because last year. I thought it was my best year Before I actually Met him I got to 40 45. No, I'm sorry 45,000 to 50,000 last year now this year I won't try to hit anywhere from 90,000 to 95,000. I'm hoping to get to 95,000 But for sure I'll hit 90,000 so next year my goal is to double my my my income.  So I Know at first I was a little skeptical. I was like, there's no way this this actually works And then after I started doing I was like, well, I wish I would have done this sooner You know, I would have been a lot better off But now our next plan now that I've been working with Ben Now to to take my camps nationwide, so that's one of what's been one of my my goals You know for the longest time, so he's helped me out To get there obviously it takes time, but hopefully this next year will will do will do Quite a few lessons. I'm sorry.  It's gonna be worth it And then you gotta look back and man You gotta be just like me and thinking why the heck did I not do this before so again? My name is boy and with more style baseball and Ben appreciate you for all you do and keep up the good work guys