learn about politics and make decisions about what they think about politics. And I'm going to start by positing kind of a profound question. Will President Biden be successful? This is about domestic policy and if you care anything about American politics, and if you're on this call, I assume you do, this has to be something that's on your mind. Will President Biden succeed in his agenda? And if you support him or not, this is important. If you support the president, you generally believe his policies are good for America and maybe the world and you want to see him succeed. If you oppose him, you want to see him fail because you think that's better. So how if he's going to be successful? Generally in politics, we assume that political capital is what's important to presidential success, that popular presidents are able to get their agenda accomplished and they do this because they're influential. So if a president is considered to be popular, usually we talk about this, that a majority of the population approves of their job in office, that president can then go to members of Congress, typically in their party but sometimes others, and convince them to support their legislative agenda. And they do this by saying, if you support me, I will support you for reelection. And this tends to be influential. So presidential approval is critically important for policy development. So how well is Biden doing? If you're a political junkie like I am, you're probably familiar with figures like this, which is President Biden's approval ratings over time. When he came into office, he was doing pretty well. A 55% approval rating is rather typical for a president coming into office, but it's not fantastic. President Biden was able to maintain this for about six months until he recently started losing his popularity and this suggests that he's losing his sway with legislators and it might be harder to get his agenda moving. So does this mean his presidency's over? Well, not necessarily. It is still possible for the president to accomplish things without going through Congress, but we can turn to the prior president to see how successful that can be. These are President Trump's approval ratings and he had a very different experience in presidency. When he came into the office, President Trump was below 50%. Within weeks of being president, he fell what we call underwater. More people disapproved of President Trump than approved of him. And if you look at President Trump's ability to succeed in implementing his agenda during his presidency, it was not very good. Whether you're a supporter or an opponent of President Trump, his major accomplishments that will last the test of time are rather limited. The one legislative success he really had was the 2017 tax cut. And other than that, not much legislation got through. And this was because the president didn't have the cachet, both with his party and with the opposing party, to persuade people to work with. And I think this is not just something that's localized to President Trump or President Biden. This is a new phenomenon in American politics. And there are a lot of contemporary factors that work against presidents in developing their domestic agenda, the first of which is the nationalization of politics. If you go back 30 years ago, your average American citizen got a local newspaper, they had regional television channels they paid attention to, and they also maybe got a national level newspaper or watched national media. But their daily diet of information had a range of different focuses. So people were well informed about what happened in their town, in their state, and at the national level. Well, that's all gone now. Local level media in the United States has been dying out for 30 years, really with the advent of the internet. And right now, most media in the United States focuses on national issues. So people don't hear about how their local town's economy is doing. They only hear about the national economy now. They only hear about national level issues. And there's a lot of pressure on the president. Presidents can't just kind of skate by without people paying attention to it. Every day, people in America hear about these national level issues, and they believe the president is intimately involved in resolving them. And while this is happening, the party that's not in power just criticizes. They constantly point to what is wrong with the president's policies, which is a new factor in American politics. We have not seen this homogenous diet of national level information before, and it's changed things. And one of the things we've noticed over the last 30 years is that people are suddenly developing a stronger political identity. So an identity is simply an understanding of who you are and what you think is important, what you care about. And politically, identity used to be rather weak in the United States. And this is because it was localized around elections. People largely ignored politics when an election wasn't happening. And as an election got closer, people would focus on candidates and learn more about politics and they'd care more. Well, those days are gone.  There's this phenomenon that we call the centralization of political identity, that people across the United States are intensely focused on politics. And because of the nationalization, it's national level politics that people are focusing. And we know there are some reasons behind this. For 50 years now, there has been a very stable ideological sorting of the electorate where people have learned which party they belong in. If you go back to the 1960s, you had conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans, and there was a lot of diversity within the parties, which meant that two Democrats could sit down and have an ideological argument and learn from each other because they respected each other. They were from the same party. So they could have these diverse discussions about policy development and what would be good for the country. Well, that's gone.  If you're a conservative, you're in the Republican Party.  You have to choose a camp because there's no home for moderation. On top of this, the media has changed. In the last 30 years, the media has become partisan. 1996, Fox News channel opened its doors and immediately said we are the source for conservative information in America. And if you're listening to anybody else, they're liberal.  They've been very successful at this. All conservatives in America practically turned to Fox News as a key source of information. And this means that every day, when they tune in, they hear the message of the day from their party. And that message is never going to be supportive of a Democratic president. Similarly, the mainstream media has gone in the other way. Since they've lost the conservative audience, they've started catering to a more liberal audience. And liberals know the sources they should turn to. So every day, Americans now consume a daily diet of largely hearing why their party is good and the other party is bad. And on top of that, we now have social media. And this is very recent. It's only in about the last 10 to 15 years that we have seen people turning to social media, not for information, not for facts that support their beliefs, but to find out who believes what they believe. And this is an environment that can be largely fact free, but it reinforces that whatever you want to believe is supported by others, which creates a very intense sense of identity. People are starting to only hang out and talk to people who already agree with their political perspectives. So what does this mean for policy development? Well, so this is a complicated figure, but I share it to you because it explains a lot about the changes in American politics and policy over the last 30 to 40 years. And I'll explain this. This top line is a line that shows how Democrats over the years have felt about their party. And the takeaway is for 30 or 40 years, Democrats have always liked their party about the same degree. It doesn't matter who the presidential candidate is. It doesn't matter what the platform is. Democrats like their party. And for Republicans, it's largely the same. For Republicans, it's a little bit below Democrats. It has tailed off over time, but this figure ends at 2016. With the Trump presidency, there has been a rebound is how much Republicans take pride in their own party. And they're now on par with Democrats. So the takeaway here is in 30 or 40 years, both parties pretty much like themselves about as much as they always have. The interesting thing is down here. This line is actually two lines. And these are measuring how Democrats feel about Republicans and how Republicans feel about Democrats. So how you feel about people from the other party. And there is a large change here. Over the past 30 years, we have measured this steady erosion of liking of the other party. And it's gotten to the point where it's not just that Democrats don't like Republicans and Republicans don't like Democrats. It's that they hold contempt for each other. That Democrats look down on Republicans as inferior people and Republicans look down at Democrats as unredeemable. And this is what we call the rise of affective polarization. Now, again, this chart ends in 2016 by 2020. These lines were pretty much together. Partisans don't like each other anymore in America. And that has consequences. So with this blended universe, we've entered into what I call the impossible presidency. Public opinion scholars are really interested in what room presidents have to act now.  We know that partisans are always going to remain partisan. Since we've been studying partisanship, we know that Republicans are always likely to vote for Republicans. Democrats are likely to vote for Democrats. There used to be this space during an election cycle where campaigns could change people's minds. Well, that space seems to be ending because now people don't wait till a campaign to filter out information. They're learning about it every day from partisan sources that just reinforces their existing beliefs. So even if President Biden is able to push through major legislation, he's got two major bills that have passed so far. There's one that may pass today, at least through the House. Is it likely to have an effect? Well, not likely. Because Fox News is never going to say that this bill looks good for America. So Republicans are unlikely to ever get information that would change their mind. We also know that negative information, saying something is bad, is much more powerful than positive information. And this is evolutionary psychology.  Negative things are always more impactful on our minds. And the world is full of negative information. People are constantly aware of the negative information about what the president is doing and what's happening in the world because of the president. So one of the things we're seeing is that nonpartisans, people who don't have strong party preferences, are tending to turn away from the president during their time in office. We've seen this with President Bush, President Obama, President Trump, and President Biden. It's just a matter of how quickly it tends to happen. And as people turn away, they tend to turn towards the other party who presents an alternative. And the sum here is that a lot of this is due to the modern information environment, that we're still living in a world where people are trying to learn about politics, but it's no longer just an occasional act. It's something that's happening on a daily basis. And because of the sources of information we have access to today, we tend to make the same decisions over and over and over again. And the only way out of this is typically a crisis that is of extreme scope, that forces us to focus not on the news information we're seeing online and on TV, but in our daily lives. And if you think about the timeline here, we've gone through the 2008 financial collapse. We've gone through recently the COVID pandemic, and these have not been large enough. So it's very doubtful that another crisis is going to come that could shake this. So that sum is the policy future in America is a little bleak, because it's unlikely that a large majority will emerge that allows the president to act and really fully implement their agenda. All right, that is all I have for today. Thank you for listening. And I will turn it over to Laura. Thank you so much for that fascinating and insightful presentation. Professor Anderson, we really appreciate it. Just a reminder to our audience, any questions you may have, we've got a Q&A function, which is fantastic. Please put them in whenever they occur to you, really look forward to hearing all of your questions and taking as many as possible. So with that, I hand over to our other expert, Marish's fellow Lady Margaret Hall University of Oxford, Gillian Peele. Sorry, Gillian, I think you're muted. Okay, right. Can you hear me now? Perfect. Okay. Well, I want to pick up on David's excellent introduction. He was focusing, I think, very much on the impossible presidency and on the strengthening of political identity and some of the implications for American politics. And I want very briefly, in the time available, to say that I think the situation is much more serious than that. It's not just that presidential government has become very difficult, but I think the United States has entered a period where its constitutional arrangements, its civic culture, indeed the very viability of governance are under threat. And I think this is a very frightening situation in many respects. I want to go back, of course, to what we will all remember very vividly, the January the 6th invasion of the Capitol. And I suppose that the events surrounding that were as close perhaps as the United States has in recent times come to a coup. And I think the United States has in a very peculiar way still not reconciled itself and really got to grips with what was going on there. I think what we did see in that episode were a number of developments, which by and large reflect changes on the American right. And I think David's focus was very much on where we are with both parties. I want to talk a little bit about what's been happening on the American right, painting in very broad brush for the moment, because we can take up some of the issues at question time. And I think the point I want to make is that there has been a massive transformation of the American right in the period since I dated back to probably 2008 to the beginning of the Obama presidency. But many of the developments probably have a longer origin than that. But we've seen, I think, changes that make the Republican party as part of that broader right wing coalition, a very difficult party to negotiate with. I think it's moved the Republican party into a position where any kind of consensus or bipartisan negotiation is going to be difficult. And I think it raises a lot of questions about the extent to which the American two party system is really viable because clearly both parties are still there. But what the impact is on the ability of American governmental institutions to work. So let me just say a couple of words about what I see as having happened on the American right and why it's so important. Obviously, the advent of Trump to the presidency in 2016 was a major change because here we had someone who was, we should never forget this, regarded with disdain by many members of the Republican party. He was an outsider. He was somebody who had no governmental experience. He was someone who had a very limited relationship with the truth. He was totally cynical, I think, in many respects about policy making. He was not interested in the nuts and bolts of governance. And yet he had this very, very, very dramatic ability to connect with a certain section of the American electorate. And once the Republican party had decided that he was a winner to effectively capture and transform the Republican party. There were certain other, of course, obvious features of Trump's presidency, which I'm sure we want to discuss in more detail. But the most corrosive, I think, of those features was his determination to emphasize, and this goes back, of course, to something that thrust of David's talk, to emphasize divisions in the American political system and to emphasize identities which he thought would play into the Republican base. So, of course, the racial issues were highlighted, his support for a certain vision of the American founding of American history, a kind of cultural Christian nationalism. All of these factors made, I think, at the end of his presidency, the United States at an even more divided place than it had been in 2016. Now, if we actually think about brought not the Republican party as such, which I'll come back to in a minute, but the broader coalition or conservative coalition, which has become a fairly significant feature of American politics, certainly since the Reagan era, since the advent of Reagan, I think what we can see, we can see certain things changing in that coalition. I think the first thing is that there's very little emphasis on ideology, as such, or at least on ideas. All the think tanks that were part of the conservative revival in the 1970s and 80s, they're still operative, but I think the dynamic of Republican politics has shifted to a much more visceral kind of politics. It's not about debating ideas, it's about debating emotions. There was a parent, obviously in the January 6 coup, but it had been apparent long before then, a strengthening of extremist militant elements on the right, which Trump of course gave some legitimacy to, Proud Boys being just one example of that, but many parts of the United States, I think, experienced visible demonstrations by armed militia groups, which is, I think, a totally new development, but I think they all regarded themselves as strengthened by the Trump presidency, and of course social media gave them a dark space or a dark place to make contact with each other. The religious right, which backed Trump, rather bizarrely given his own lack of religious belief, and his very interesting lifestyle, the religious right has, I think, become much more, much closer to a kind of Christian nationalist movement, seen in the growth, it's quite small at the moment, of so-called Patriot churches. And I think that what we can see happening on the right is a very strong religious right, a strong assertion of Christian cultural values, a lack of interest or support for ecumenism, a more extreme approach to issues like abortion. And I think, to the extent that the religious right is, in many respects, slightly declining in numbers, a much greater feeling of being embattled. I think if we look at the Republican Party itself, which has obviously been captured by Trumpism, to an extent that I think many would not have predicted in 2016, we can see that there are some very extreme elements in the Republican Party in Congress, which only this week we've seen a sort of censure of one of them for showing fairly violent videos. We've seen people, like Montreux, Taylor Green, people who are, I think, would not have been tolerated in the Republican Party 15 years ago. And these people are there, and I think they are, in a sense, not going to disappear. They see themselves as a very legitimate part of the Republican Party. I think the other point that I would make, which I mean, David sort of hinted at, is that underlying this, there is a retreat from what I would call reason or rational debate. One of the features, which again, was very evident in the January the 6th invasion of the Capitol, was the presence of supporters of QAnon of conspiracy theory. But a tendency to see that as a kind of an eccentric fringe is misguided, that actually a very large number, I think, of American voters now believe in various forms of conspiracy theory, and many more are rejecting, or perhaps because of religious belief, perhaps because of lack of education, I don't know. But rejecting what I would call scientific-based explanations of the universe, that they are looking for some kind of conspiracy to explain the dynamics and the process of politics. So I think we've got different mindsets in the United States. We've got a new extremism, which obviously can result in violence. We've got cultural divisions of a very extreme sort, and we've got a party in Congress. I'm not saying that it's only the Republican Party that has extreme elements, but I think the Republican Party is having trouble handling, managing some of its more extreme elements. So what are the consequences of this? We can pick up on many of these points. I think a capture of the Republican Party by Trump, or Trumpism, because it may be that Trump himself will decide not to run, but then there'll surely be a Trump lookalike who will try and combine some of the features of Trump with perhaps a slightly different kind of set of ideas. I think that sets a new style in American politics, a very personal, much more demagogic style. I mean, America is not unfamiliar with demagogues, but this I think is a new development partly because of the points that David has raised, and that certainly Phil has written about in the past, the new media environment. So I think it's going to be very difficult for anyone who wants to step outside that kind of style to be successful in getting the Republican nomination in 2024. I think we've seen, and this was of course the whole thrust of the rejection of the electoral results, the notion that it was a steal, a rejection and an alienation to an extent I've never seen before of the United States institutional arrangements, not of course for the whole country, but a substantial minority feeling that somehow the democracy isn't working. When you add to that, the fact that governance has long been identified as a problem in a deadlocked and polarised political system, the fact that it looks as though it's going to be difficult for any president perhaps to develop a policy agenda, I think it won't, it's hardly going to be surprising that you're going to get an alienated, if you get an alienated electorate. And I think finally I don't see how, given the incentive for the parties to develop and capitalise on the social divisions, which clearly there are in the United States, identity politics, how you get back from that to a different, much more consensual style of political engagement and encounter. So I suppose my message is really rather gloomy, that I think that this movement that probably the right from the late 1970s onwards was the key factor in driving some of these developments, but I think it's going to be very difficult indeed to stop them having very serious consequences for the stability of American democratic life. Okay, I'll stop there and people, can I, I'm sure, pick up on a lot of those points, which I hope have been relatively controversial. Oh, and there's a lot for us to dig into, maybe even we can find some optimism somewhere in the questions. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to start with, we've received a couple of questions in the chat. If people could put them in the Q&A, that would be really helpful. We've got a couple coming in there as well. So that's fantastic. So I'm just going to start with the ones in the chat and then I'm going to flip over to the Q&A function. So to start with Elizabeth Grant, I don't know whether your microphone is working if you would like to verbalise your question. You could tell me, oh yeah, there you are, I can see you. Please go ahead and ask her a question. So do you want to just go ahead and have a No, I'm just saying if we can, if Elizabeth can, if we can hear her. Okay, I'm going to read out a question and Elizabeth could scream if we're able to hear her. She writes, this is a question from Professor Anderson, following his very interesting presentation. The issue of a crisis being the only way out. Does he think that the undeniable physical impact of climate change can make some headway in assessing which president offers the best path forward? Also passing the infrastructure bill will certainly address experience on the ground. And she thanks you both very much. So yes, I, I intentionally try not to be so down on American politics, but the reality is bleak. Exactly as Jillian was saying, America is at a crossroads on whether it continued to function as a democratic society. And I would agree that it is largely in the hands of the Republican Party to change this. I do believe that throughout American history, it's been crisis that brings the country together. And crisis usually forces reality to take hold. And usually polarization doesn't go away, but one side assumes superiority, numeric superiority over the other. And I think that that is inevitably what the country needs right now, which is a horrible thing to hope for. In the last 20 years, the United States has faced major terrorist attacks that has refocused the country's attention to defending its borders. It faced a financial collapse in 2008. It faced the pandemic. And none of these were capable of overcoming partisan politics in the United States. So if those aren't sufficient, what will be climate change is a good candidate that if climate change ramps up as we expect it will, the big worry for the United States is that when rainfall patterns shift and farmland in the Midwest is no longer viable, there's nowhere to move that food production. And this could quite honestly lead to starvation in the United States and around the world because the United States produces so much food. That might do it, except the Republican Party has taken a hard stance that climate change is not happening.  And if it is the fault of human beings, there's nothing we can do about it. And if there is something we can do about it, it would destroy the economy so we can't even talk about it. So something apocalyptic in nature would be necessary, I think, to shake them out of this. And thinking about this, just brainstorming it, I think is a pathway to a horror show. The size of the cataclysm that would need to shake Republican Party politics to accept, as Jillian said, basic science about what to do about the problems of America. Thank you for that. I think apocalyptic message. But your honesty and your insight is really fascinating. And I think we could debate for a long time. This question came up. One of the A-level students actually was really an insightful question about this idea of bipartisanship or crisis that you're talking about. And I tried to put a positive spin saying that, well, you must remember that, for example, the Great Depression didn't bring people together. There was always that contention over the New Deal and things like that. I think we could debate for a long time about how long 9-11 brought people together before it all sort of disintegrated into different partisan groups. But that's not for me to say. I'm going to pass over to Richard Johnson. Richard, it's great to see you again virtually. I don't know whether you're able to ask your question if your microphone is working. I know you've got another question for David. Okay. I'm going to read it out. Mia Costa's recent article, Ideology Not Affect, AJPS, found that voters were actually less favorable toward candidates who made negative partisan appeals, i.e. the other parties corrupt, immoral, evil, and more favorable to those who used positive partisan messaging, i.e. our party is great. So wouldn't it seem that while negative partisan appeals are probably more powerful than they once were, it's still the case that there's a lot of room for positive partisan messaging? In other words, fine could still go high even if the other side goes low. I like that shout out. Well, unfortunately, not familiar with the article. So it's hard for me to address it in specific. But in general, I would say there may be room for positive appeal. And there is a lot of information. There's a lot of research on the campaigning side that says you can't just attack your opponent. You have to offer something in return. But attacking your opponent is a really good strategy. Almost every campaign in America right now is intensely negative because we know that particularly for people with weak partisan predispositions, that negative information matters more than the positive information. Positive information gives people a reason to come out and vote for you. And you need to do that to win an election. But the negative information gives them a reason to listen to. Usually when people hear negative information, it makes them think more. All of us get anxious when we hear scary negative things. And our reaction to anxiety is to try to learn more. We try to learn more about what's happening in the world. And that's where a positive message works. So I don't know the specific article, but I would say both are important. I do think the negative information still remains dominant in its impact on political beliefs. Can I just have one thing, though? It seems to me that once a negative message has got across, it's very hard to overcome that. So therefore, if you've got somebody's stereotype and the example that's springing to mind now is, of course, the Vice President, that once you've got an image that and a vulnerability that you can attack, you go on attacking, it's then very hard for to insert some positive messaging into that. So I think, of course, there's both positive and negative messaging. And I think Biden's positives will go up. But I think the negative tendency in campaigns is dominant one. And if I can, I would just add to that because I think that's a great observation. And I think one of the big problems in American politics today is that it is very professional. And campaigns are not just run by amateurs anymore. It's a professional operation. And people know the science of decision making now. And one of the things the Republican party learned first in the early 2000s is the most effective negative information does not need to be true. It needs to address the strengths of your opponent. So immediately hit back with Biden's infrastructure plan and say it's ineffective, it's wasteful, these roads fall apart. And that way, when positive information comes out, people are confused. They've heard both sides. So the positive kind of gets discarded. And you say, well, there's still doubt. And it's not a fair fight, unfortunately. All right, we have another question for Elizabeth this time. It's for Jillian. So I'm hoping we might be able to hear her. And if not, I can absolutely be able to read out her question for her. Let's give it another go. I can see you're unmuted. Liz, we can't hear you for some reason. Not quite sure why that is. Technology is great when it works. Okay, I'm going to read out your question for Professor Peel. She says, I personally have ceased calling the Republican party that name. I refer to it as the new Republican fascist party in response to the extremism of media, beliefs and paramilitary elements. Do you think that without passing federal laws that supplement the new quote, Jim Crow style, state laws is America lost? Well, that's a very interesting question. I mean, the two parts really one is about whether it's moved to be a fascist party, the Republican Party. And I think, of course, there are elements, but I'd be a little bit careful about using that word. Although there are similarities, particularly the emphasis on the leader and the popular and Democrat democratic style. I think the Jim Crow issue, I mean, we know that Republicans see a threat in voting laws, which maximize the electorate and therefore want to restrict it. And that there is a kind of place strategy playbook that they're all going to follow to try to limit the franchise and roll back access to the ballot. Whether or not federal laws could actually work to prevent that. Yes, they're going to try, but I don't think they're going to get through. And I think they would be challenged in the Supreme Court. I mean, part of the problem that we have at the moment is the rolling back of sections of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court. And I don't think there's a majority in Congress to even try and overturn that. So I don't know when we will get a majority in the court that would itself overturn it. So I think I think that actually getting any serious law that would remove the state's powers to control of their own voting laws, getting getting any kind of legislation through Congress on that is going to be remarkably different, difficult, particularly if we get a Republican Congress next time, next time around. So ultimately, that's the answer, of course. But getting from A to B is going to be very difficult. Thank you so much for that. So we have two questions from Peter. One of them has already been sort of discussed about this idea of crisis. So Peter Gordon, if I could invite you, if you would hopefully like to verbalize your question about Trump and the question of charisma, that would be fantastic. Can you hear me? Yes. Oh, that's good. Yes. I wonder how much of the success of Trump is due to his charisma. I think back to Ronald Reagan. Obviously, Ronald Reagan was the nearest device of Trump, but he was seen as the great communicator, and people obviously were affected by his charisma. Do you think that is the case? And if so, is there any obvious person to follow? If it's Mike Pence, well, first grace, is Mike Pence is obvious to follow on? Maybe he's maybe isn't. Do you think Mike Pence will be able to get the same sort of following? So I'll take this. Number one, I don't think Mike Pence is at all going to follow in the footsteps of Donald Trump. Trump's appeal, at least in part, was due to his charisma and his ability to speak to a class of American voters who felt like nobody was talking to them. And I think we hear about this a lot when there are big political shifts that a candidate came out and he talked to some group that had not been spoken to in a while. And I think what happened with Donald Trump is he forgot all about policy. He had no interest in policy. He did not care about sounding intelligent or like he had a plan. He spoke to a segment of America who wanted simple solutions and were really angry about their lot in life. And he blamed everybody else and said, give me power. I'm brilliant. I'm amazing. Don't worry about what I'm going to do. I'm just going to do it because I'm great. And people did not expect this to be successful. And I still believe that if you go back to 2016, there is a series of unfortunate events that led to Trump winning the Republican nomination that are just unlikely to ever repeat in history. And then another series of unfortunate events that led to his eventual winning of the presidency. I think his charisma is a major factor there. I don't think many people could pick it up because it was just too wrapped up in who he was. It was very authentic. Donald Trump is who he is. But he's also a self-funding billionaire who, by most accounts, never expected to win the nomination and never expected to win the presidency. And very early in the campaign, turns it into a PR push that would help his business and that he could hopefully make some money off of. And it happened to work. But I don't think it's a model for success for many other candidates. Can I just go in? I think that there is a, I mean, the problem is the term charisma. I mean, I think Reagan had real charisma in the sense that he could communicate. People liked him. He left office with a great deal of popularity. He was seen as sunny. I think Trump was seen as a bastard. But he was our bastard to those groups who actually felt threatened by all sorts of cultural and social and economic development. So your point about the groups that he appealed to absolutely right. What they thought, I think, when they saw Trump was that he wasn't like other politicians and indeed he wasn't. He would get things done. He would actually deliver on draining the swamp of clearing up the mess and repudiating some of the ideas which have become dominant in American politics. So I think the notion of charisma, I mean, we might need a sort of some kind of different term. But I think, you know, it seems to me that there is a marked difference between Reagan and his appeal and that of Trump's. It's a much blacker, much darker kind of appeal that Trump had. It's a fascinating discussion, especially considering all the comparisons that Trump tried to make between himself and Reagan. That's not something that he would keep trying on. So it's absolutely fascinating. Thank you so much for that. While we're waiting for some more questions to come into the QA, I'd just like to take the opportunity as chair and incredibly excited opportunity to ask you both as experts. We've talked a lot about sort of the pessimism of bipartisanship, how we feel things are going in the sort of year lead up to the midterms. And we've talked a lot about, well, maybe we touched a little bit about cancel culture as well. And I know David in his presentation, for example, mentioned about almost this self segregation, people putting themselves into echo chambers, people living in residential areas where they only communicate either with people who go to Crackabourg, people who go to Whole Foods. And so people are sort of self-segregating. And I think that I still have some Republican friends, one of them even evangelical, you mentioned Jillian about the evangelicals who vote for Trump. And she was, she will vote Republican whoever's on the second yet, because she wants conservative judges. And so one of the things that I've reminded her is that cancel culture, unlike the conservative narrative, is not just one sided. It's not just liberals saying we don't want to hear somebody who could be offensive or politically correct. So I just wonder what you both saw as experts in terms of how America moves forward in the age of social media to be more inclusive and going beyond any sort of sense of cancel culture. So funny, funny noises off there. Can you, can you hear me? We could hear you, Jillian. I think Laura has frozen. Take that into your own. Are you frozen? No, okay, fine. You've gone mute. I think many of these issues are being picked up. There is obviously, I think the whole debate about cancel cultures is perhaps, I mean, if you say it can affect left and right. I think what I see as a rather frightening development is the kind of effort to exploit and develop arguments about critical race theory in the schools, even though it probably isn't taught in the schools, and to take out of schools, certain kind of books sort of. So these sort of, there's a sort of list of books that people want to see out of out of school libraries, which include sort of, you know, Mayor Anjulu, and they include sort of Toni Morrison, and they are about a whole range of things that haven't really got much to do with critical race theory, or even about giving a more balanced view of history. So there's a kind of, I mean, it reinforces the idea both, I think, frighteningly of there being two different kind of mindsets to different kind of visions of America, but also that there are groups out there, as they have been for a long time, who are interested in textbook censorship, who are interested in finding out what's in the school library, finding out what children are being given to read. And I think that's incredibly dangerous. Now, there are some pretty odd and extreme things happening on campus around issues, both in the United States and here about, for example, debating the rights of transgender people. But that's, I think, a slightly different kind of issue to a much more widespread movement that could really take off, particularly given, and I go back to the point about voting laws and the relationship between states that if something seems to be working in one state or somebody gets a good idea for a campaign in one state, it gets picked up and funded perhaps by groups who want to see it spread across other states. So in a sense, it's very rare that you get a local campaign remaining local for very long. Yeah, I think those are great observations. And the thing I'd pick up on is the rise of the issue of cancel culture and then the issue of critical race theory being taught in schools. These are not real crises in America. They're manufactured. And I think it goes back to something Jillian had mentioned earlier, how the think tanks on the conservative side in America have stopped functioning like they used to. If you go back to the 70s and 80s, these think tanks had positioned themselves as counterweights to liberal minded think tanks. We have all this research saying government programs work. So we should do them and conservatives formed their own think tanks to say they don't work. Well, in the 90s and early 2000s, those think tanks changed and said, forget about the research, let's just figure out how to win. And instead of trying to win on the issues, which in the United States, every time there's surveys put out asking people what you politically believe, the issues the Democratic Party supports are more popular than the issues the Republican Party supports. And I think the Republican Party learned you can't win on the issues. So what they decided to do instead is create non issues to talk about and put the Democrats on defense. You don't want the Democratic Party talking about social welfare because people like that. You don't want the Democratic Party talking about healthcare because people like that. You want the Democratic Party to have to explain why critical race theory is being taught to 13 year olds in America. But it isn't. But now every Democratic candidate on the campaign channel is trying to explain to people this isn't happening. Oh, but do you support it? I don't have an opinion on it because it's not happening. And suddenly they're playing defense. And we see this every year in American politics that this issue emerges out of nowhere on Fox News that galvanizes the right and puts the left on defense. That's a really fascinating perspective for you both. Thank you so much for that. I'd like to give the audience an opportunity to ask the last question. So if you have something niggling and a burning question, please do put it into the Q&A right now. In the meantime, I'll take the luxury of just asking one. Jillian, you mentioned how you are anticipating and perhaps as you mentioned your pessimistic outlook, you are anticipating that the next Republican is even after Trump is going to embrace Trumpism is going to be in his sort of mannerism and how it will last beyond him. And as we saw in 2016, when he faced a huge Republican field, we've seen some like Marco Rubio try and recreate him and it didn't go well. We saw continuing Ted Cruz trying to sort of recreate elements of Trump. And that doesn't seem to be appealing in the same way. And I just wondered if you could explain a bit more how you see Trumpism moving forward without Trump. Well, of course, the first the big question is really whether or not Trump is going to run. And I think if he does, there's nobody's going to beat beat him assuming he doesn't run on that assumption. Then I think you're going to have somebody who can play who can adopt a fairly popular style. Someone who will be very good at getting the message across somebody who was certainly not going to play up what I think any kind of detail on policy and will appeal to, I think, the instincts of what they see as the base. I mean, DeSantis seems to me to be the person who is likely to preferably with I mean, this person will want Trump's blessing. But I think he seems the person who will possibly could possibly carry carry that legacy forward. But I can't see I mean, given that all the things we've talked about have put Republicans in a fairly successful position. I can't see them changing their style of moving back towards a more moderate style of Republicanism, which aims to overcome divisions. I think they're going to go on playing the same the same messages, at least while the numbers look look right. I mean, obviously, there will be an attempt to try and bring in more Latino voters, possibly an attempt to broaden the appeal to to women and education women. But that's not really good. That's not really what it's about. It's going to be about getting out your base. And I think that's going to be done by hard hitting negative campaigns on cultural and social values, as well as issues, as well as, of course, on the economy. It's going to keep us employed as academics for a long time. The positive note. Gary Coyle gets the luxury of the last final question. I don't know where the Gary can vocalize it. I'll give just a second. Here's Gary. Hi, Gary. Can you unmute, maybe? Mark is working. I'm going to go ahead, Gary, with your question. Has the insurrection on the 6th of January been the nail in the coffin of American exceptionalism? Final question. I guess that depends on what your definition of American exceptionalism is because Americans have very varied opinions on what it is that makes America exceptional. Some people point to the deep religious roots of the nation. Some people look at the innovation and the economic success of the nation. And a lot of people for a long time have really looked at the United States as the crown jewel of democracy in world history. And of course, there's a lot there to unpack. But I think for a lot of non-Republicans, January 6th was really damaging to this image of America as this exceptional democratic society. When you see people storm Congress like that, just full of anger and rage, and pushed on by a president who's clearly just lost an election and refuses to accept it, that was hurtful. A lot of people felt the strings of democracy being cut that day. But Republicans didn't see it that way. Republicans voters largely today still believe that it was a justified action. It was not done by Republicans, it was actually imposters from Antifa, and they've excused it. And that's difficult to reconcile. It's difficult to say what it means for the whole country when on yet another issue, there's no consensus even on what happened. I think for the world, January 6th changed the perception of America. For America, I think they're turning a big blind eye to it right now. Yeah, I mean, I think I would certainly agree with that. I think the reputational damage to American democracy on January 6th was huge. But I think the interesting question is why is it that American political processes, including members of Congress, cannot agree on a process for working out exactly what did happen? And that I think is the big question. It's not, I mean, obviously there is a lot of double think going on. And many Democrats and many Republicans obviously felt sympathy, if not more, for those people. These are our people. This is our movement. And on that fascinating note, I'd like to thank both of our expert panelists for a wonderful session. And I'm going to pass it back to Kara. Thank you so much, Laura. Thank you very much to Gillian and David for a wonderful session, because it's Friday afternoon. And I think we all know that the Zoom fatigue is real. I'm going to encourage everyone to have a quick five minute break, stretch our legs, get a glass of water, whatever everyone needs. So we will be back at 3.05. So don't go too far away. But we will see you soon. Thank you, everyone. Okay, I have to go. So thank you. Thank you, Gillian. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. See you in option. Thank you, everyone. So I should meet you soon. Hello, everybody. And welcome back. It is five past three. We are now into our second session. So I'm going to hand over to Andrew Moran, who is going to chair this session, which I'm very much looking forward to as I'm sure everyone is. But take it away, Andrew. Thank you. Thank you, Kara. Good afternoon. My name is Andrew Moran. I'm the head of Crominology, Sociology, Politics and International Relations at London Metropolitan University. It's an absolute pleasure to be chairing this panel. We've got two expert panelists, and they are Dr. Ashley Godwin, who's a senior specialist in national security and international policy at the House of Commons, and was recently seconded to work as a policy advisor to the prime minister. And then we have Dr. Jonathan Montell, who is an associate professor in political science and the director of the International Public Policy Program at University College London. Welcome to you both. The format will be exactly as the format that we just had with the domestic policy sessions. So both Ashley and Jonathan are going to say a few things about foreign policy. And then the floor is open for questions, either if you're able to get your microphone working or in the chat box on the side. So thank you very much. I don't know if you've decided who's going to go first. I'm happy to, if that helps. That would be fabulous. Thank you. No worries. Thank you very much. And thank you very much to the Eccles Centre for inviting me to speak today. It's always a pleasure to be part of the APT conversation. And I really do hope that we'll be able to meet in person in the not too distant future. So I wanted to use my initial remarks to look at the bigger picture of foreign policy under Biden, and especially the strands of debate about the clarity of an emerging Biden doctrine and the drivers of the current administration's foreign policy, the potential continuity and changes from the Trump administration and some of the more notable events of the past year. So I should say to start with that this isn't an area of detailed study of mine currently, but it is a subject I've engaged with fairly extensively throughout the past few years through both my work for select committees in Parliament, but also while working for number 10 on the UK's integrated review of security, defence, development and foreign policy, which was published earlier this year, as many of you know, just a couple of months after President Biden's inauguration. So take us back to the start. I think it's fair to say that much of the Western world breathed a huge plight of relief upon hearing the words America is back during Biden's first foreign policy speech just a few weeks into his administration. I think this only served to reinforce all the positive signals of an administration that brought in an experienced group of mainstream figures that are for disciplined, predictable and sophisticated foreign policy. However, was America back in the way that the West expected? I would argue that this speech and that phrase in particular in the way it was quoted around the world set false expectations and that it did so for a couple of reasons. In part, this I think was the result of a misreading of Biden as an individual. There was a really interesting article in Foreign Affairs in September that described Biden as a pragmatic realist who prioritises the needs of US national security and its national strategic interests over all foreign policy orthodoxy and actually that he expects other countries to do the same in relation to their own interests as well. So the authors of this article track Biden's long history of engagement in US foreign policy from his vote against the first Gulf War by his support for intervention in the Balkans and for NATO enlargement in the 1990s, his support for intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s albeit with reservations on the latter through to his skepticism about nation building that became ultimately downright opposition to the Iraq surge of 2009 to 11 as well as opposition to a Libya campaign that he described as being only in the US peripheral strategic interests. So obviously this notion of realism is just one lens on events but the article does paint a quite compelling picture of a man who long has long recognised the limits of what some have called muscular internationalism and certainly attempts to use American political and military power to shape the world in its own image and the article also paints a picture of a man whose foreign policy views have consequently changed quite considerably depending on the prevailing circumstances. So for me the emphasis on pragmatic realism does explain many of the administration's actions you know whether taken by Biden personally or by his administration in general and that would include actually his summits with Putin and Xi even though obviously he's been criticised in some quarters for those. So perhaps the most telling quote of all in relation to Biden's approach came after the Putin summit when he said that diplomacy is not about trust it's straight up about doing business identifying interests on where they align. So that's one thing a misunderstanding of Biden the man but I would also suggest that that phrase America is back spawned other false expectations due to a wider misreading of trends in US foreign policy especially in the past decade. I personally don't see Trump as the complete aberration from all that went before and in some ways on the substance of his policy on issues such as US involvement in the Middle East and the need for European allies to step up for example I would suggest that Trump's extreme personality and style distracted from the realities of continuity in intent if not in practice. So where does this leave us now? We've set off with the world expecting something perhaps different from from what we've ended up with and Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote a very prescient article in October last year in the UK's Financial Times in which she suggested that Biden's foreign policy would be about three D's domestic deterrence and democracy and having been closely involved in the creation of the UK's integrated review I would say this is not probably not too dissimilar from the UK's approach certainly when we compared the draft integrated review with the Biden administration's interim national security strategy guidance in the week before the aisle was published we we thought the number of similarities between the two was striking and so given that defense sorry deterrence and domestic deterrence and democracy are generally self-explanatory albeit with a 21st century twist that speaks of today's global and globalized landscape I'd like to focus briefly on the domestic element that Anne-Marie Slaughter identified. So former Trump foreign policy advisor Carafino is not alone in criticising Biden for seemingly putting major foreign policy issues on the back burner during the early months of his administration in favour of seizing a window of opportunity presented by the COVID-19 pandemic transform America. However I do think that's at least a somewhat inaccurate interpretation of the Biden administration's intent. You need only read the September 2020 Carnegie Adowment paper by the now national security advisor Jake Sullivan among others to understand that this administration directly ties domestic strength politically economically and socially with the United States ability to compete directly with authoritarian states such as China as well as indirectly through shaping the international environment in its favour and in the favour of democracy in general. It really wouldn't surprise me if that paper which was called US foreign policy for the middle classes I'm sure many of you are familiar with it became a seminal paper in understanding this administration's approach. In short it makes clear that foreign policy shouldn't be allowed to become untethered from domestic needs in pursuit of unthinking internationalism while also explaining clearly that democracies must deliver for their own citizens first in order to be both competitive in the international environment and attractive to others in the international environment. So for me this closer linkage of domestic and international needs and outcomes may possibly explain some of the continuities of specific elements of Trump's policy such as the trade or irritaris. But it doesn't explain other elements of the Biden administration's handling foreign policy issues such as the withdrawal from Afghanistan and also the announcement of AUKUS the security deal with the US between the US UK and Australia. It's probably not a surprise that the French Foreign Minister made a direct comparison between Biden and Trump in the wake of the AUKUS announcement nor that some allies NATO allies complained that Biden either hadn't consulted them on his decision for the timeline of withdrawing from Afghanistan or that the council had been ignored where he had consulted them. So if nothing else I think these two events should really serve as a sharp reminder to the Biden team that they may want to put the Trump here at a bed by announcing that America is back but the world has moved on since 2016 but it can't simply erase the past four years. However I am inclined on this one to agree with Stephen Walt who saw these two incidents as really being extremely poor mishandling of the situations at hand rather than as something out of the Trumpian American first playbook and to quote as Walt put it it does seem that these were sensible policies being pursued carelessly by a team that was supposed to be a lot better at managing relations with friends and friends alike. So in Afghanistan in particular there are questions to be answered about whether the intelligence just wasn't there or wasn't right whether that information didn't make it to senior officials and principals or whether those principals had the right information that made the wrong calls. Taking a step back I think it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the failure to nominate and appoint key ambassadors and so many layers of political appointees within departments is having a really detrimental effect on the ability of the Biden administration to gather the information it needs to take the appropriate decisions and to engage with and represent its own interests and positions with allies overseas. I think it is quite a shocking state of affairs but after nine months only one ambassador had been appointed the ambassador to Mexico. This leaves pretty much all other ambassadors to key allies and organisations unfilled and this really matters the Biden agenda shape in the world so that it continues to favour democracies. Just to take one example we are now in a situation where Poland, Lithuania and Latvia are talking about convening NATO for Article 4 discussions but there's no US ambassador to NATO in place with the full authority of the president. I think it's also worth pausing momentary on the fact that one of the few areas of foreign policy that's so far provided has been climate change where instead of sort of being done as something that's done through the system you have instead a roving but respected and experienced envoy in the form of John Kerry who's supported by the State Department but not constrained by its encumbrances. So to bring my opening remarks to a close all this has implications for what the Biden administration can achieve in what is a really complex world it's multipolar, globalised and in being globalised there's a need to compete economically and in some ways ideologically while also cooperating on major global issues such as climate change, global health and obviously the recovery from COVID-19 in particular but in this world the helpful binaries of the Cold War just don't apply anymore and in trying to navigate such complexity with a more realist pragmatic approach there is a real danger that the Biden administration's foreign policy will look undisciplined and incoherent and indeed it will likely be really contradictory from up to the time as the goals themselves, the administration's goals pull in different directions. So this may be one reason to limit the administration's ambitions to a set of issues that are that bit more manageable it's certainly true while the government lacks the essential layers of political civil servant interface without which the administration is liable to score many more own goals at the time we've seen this summer. However I would also argue that it's all the more essential to limit its ambitions if it wants to rebuild trust with allies and partners alike and to put down the roots of sustainable policy in key areas and for me this is really important because not only is the administration seeking to turn around the tanker in the wake of the last Trump administration but it's also having to shake off the shadow of president's future with a potential return of a Trump or a Trump-like successor in just three years time. Thank you. Thank you very much for a very thought-provoking introduction. Jonathan. Thank you. Thank you very much and yeah I wanted to thank the organizers for inviting me to the workshop and like Ashley I study or think about foreign policy issues although I guess with compared to Ashley with less real-world consequence but I wanted to discuss a topic that I've looked at that I think might be of interest to an American Politics Research Group and that is the topic of US public opinion towards foreign policy issues maybe this relates to the third D that Ashley mentioned on the domestic side and I wanted to specifically discuss the narrative or idea or conventional wisdom over the last several years preceding Trump but I think that sort of rose during Trump that there is a growing divide between the US public on the one hand and the US foreign policy elites or experts the foreign policy community what has been derisively called the blob the foreign policy blob by a former Obama administration official on foreign affairs in which elites are American elites are committed to continuing an expansive international role for the United States while the US public is increasingly turning inward and I think a part of that narrative is also that that growing disconnect is generating a kind of populist backlash that Trump and others have exploited and as an example of this view I chose a quote also like Ashley from Steven Walt who is a prominent international relations scholar and he's written that US foreign policy has been hijacked by quote an out-of-touch community of foreign policy VIPs so I just wanted to discuss some some work some survey work that I've done that tries to assess whether this claim is actually true whether this is actually the case that there is a large and growing divide between US foreign policy elites and the public on foreign policy issues what that might mean for US foreign policy going forward and this draws on survey work that I've done with some academic colleagues as well as in partnership with the Chicago council on global affairs over the past few years we fielded biannual surveys both of the US public and also of US foreign policy elites and these include individuals who are currently who were serving in government foreign policy or national security positions in government at the time of the survey as well as the wider community of academics think tank media advocacy group experts who are in the foreign policy business essentially and that survey format allows us to compare both what experts think and what the public thinks on foreign policy issues but also how experts perceive what the public thinks and based on that work I wanted to make two arguments to the group to motivate some discussion on this on this question first argument is that we actually find little evidence for the claim that there is a large or growing gap in the views of US foreign policy elites and the public on foreign policy questions in the most recent survey that we did in the summer of 2020 so so preceding the election we found that large majorities of both foreign policy elites and the public support pro-internationalist positions on a range of issues including trade immigration the importance of maintaining global alliances although elites tend to be as you might expect more supportive so for example on a kind of benchmark question that the Chicago council has asked over about 40 years on the question of quote should the US playing an active part in world affairs 97 percent the foreign policy experts agree unsurprisingly compared to 68 percent of the public on the question of whether international trade is good for the US economy for example 99 percent of our foreign policy elite sample agreed with that statement compared to 74 percent of the public on the question of whether the US should reduce its commitments in NATO or withdraw from NATO again not surprisingly only three percent of our elites elites in the sample agreed compared to 27 percent of the public and another interesting finding from these surveys is that during the Trump administration comparing surveys from 2016 prior to the election to 2020 the public actually moved closer to the elite view on trade immigration and alliance issues that is Trump failed to carry the public debate towards his view on those questions and in fact a small but sizable percentage of the public moved away from Trump on those questions second argument that I wanted to make was that US foreign policy elites consistently underestimate public support for pro-internationalist positions so in our survey we added a little bit of a twist where we ask experts to estimate what they think the average public response will be on various questions related to you have various farm policy issues and in the 2020 survey for example we found that elites underestimated public support for decreasing legal immigration for example by about 20 percentage points similarly elites underestimated the public support for continuing an active role in NATO by about 22 percentage points and that pattern continues across a range of topics that elites typically predict that a minority or at least a sort of plurality of the public supports these pro-internationalist positions when in fact there are large majorities of public support for them interestingly we also found that the elites elites degree of inaccuracy how inaccurate they were in estimating what the public would think didn't really vary by dimensions you might think such as partisanship both democratic leaders and republican leaders consistently underestimated or mis underestimated if I may say public support for international positions it didn't really vary by professional group whether you had served in government or not whether you were in a think tank role or media role or interest group role fairly consistently across these professional categories foreign policy experts underestimated how much public support there was for pro-internationalist positions probably the group that was the least accurate was academics so make of that what you will although not always to a statistically significant degree so make of that what you will in short I think the sort of bottom line that we have found for running these surveys over a number of years is that elites are out of touch with what the public thinks but their views are not actually out of step there is more consensus between what the blob what US the US foreign policy establishment community thinks the US should do on foreign affairs compared to the compared to the public and so that's sort of our major conclusion that's sort of the major conclusion that I wanted to put to the group for discussion but I think it also raises a couple of interesting questions one is I think it raises the question of what is driving this elite misperception of the public these survey results that I've discussed are from the last few years from the Trump Biden from the Trump administration and prior but looking at these surveys over a number of years the past 10 years or 20 years you see a consistent and durable pattern of elites misperceiving the degree overestimating the degree to which the public takes isolationist positions on issues like trade immigration alliances use of force questions as well as general questions of whether the US should play an active global role or not so one question is what what is driving this durable misperception it's not a it may have accelerated during the Trump era hopefully the first Trump era I don't mean Trump era but it preceded Trump that that that misperception we find evidence of that misperception preceded Trump I think it also raises the question of whether correcting this misperception in the minds of foreign policy experts would have any tangible benefits it may be the case that political leaders party leaders might be more willing to embrace costly or difficult policy decisions on issues like climate change for example if they were made aware of the depths of public support but yeah I think that's a as well as whether it would just in general improve democratic accountability for political leaders to be more to be able to more accurately assess or be more accurately aware of what the public thinks on on key foreign policy questions so I will leave it there thank you very much thank you very much Jonathan so the so two two excellent papers and I'm hoping that we will get some excellent questions as a result so the floor the floor is now open I can see one straight away from long-term support of the APG Elizabeth Grant which says absolutely fascinating excellent introduction just a thought could President Biden task VP Kamala Harris with getting ambassadors and senior representatives to organizations in play she seems to have been kept quite really quiet this needs to change surely I think that's probably direct to you Ashley yeah no I was I was just thinking that thank you so much for the question I have to say my knowledge of the sort of internal workings of us is sort of the intricacies of the US government system is fairly basic so I won't pretend to answer that question in full what I will say sort of what I observe is that actually what the the government does seem to the Biden administration does seem to have made a choice to prioritize that the big bills you've just seen in past in the last couple of months but now is you know in favor of sort of waiting and holding off for getting its Senate votes through but it's probably now in danger of running into the next slew of big legislation such as the Spends Authorization Act and in some respects it feels as though it's allowed itself to become hostage to the drumbeat of legislation going through Congress I won't answer there as I'm sure there'll be many more people on this call who you are in a better position to answer that question than me so I won't pretend to to get towards the detail of that one okay and shall I ask so Peter Peter Gordon you've asked the question here I wondered if your microphone works or you'd like me to read the question out oh I can see you can we can hear you yes that's great yes so of course it's based about US isolationism much of its history of course the US has been very isolationist but we've seen times when that's changed really because it receives a threat from abroad the obvious example there was the was the USSR how do you how isolationists do you see the US at the moment and it's slightly changed I mean the obvious example is China and if China adopts a more expansionary economic foreign policy which it may do under she what effect will that have for instance the USA might need to might wish to adopt a wider alliance against China I don't know what your thoughts on that shall I shall I take the first shout out that yeah excellent question thank you um yeah my sense is that over the past um at least for the survey data um that we have over the past few decades that yeah there there is a a fairly durable but small minority of the public that at least in on these surveys takes the position a sort of true isolationist position you know that that the US should withdraw from global affairs should withdraw from military alliances around the world should not intervene in various scenarios and it tends to be I think surprising I think that runs against the conventional a wisdom of it you know on the question should the US play an active role in world affairs which is a question that as I mentioned the Chicago council has been asking since I think 1974 in some form even even before that the percentage of the public that basically agrees with that sort of basic question of international orientation has been pretty steadily between 60 to 70 percent over four or five decades you know and how much weight you want to put on that data that that kind of evidence I think that could be it could be up for debate how much importance or salience the public attaches to those kinds of pro-international positions maybe that varies as well but I think the the fundamental orientation of the US public in the post-war era from what this these a wide range of sort of survey type projects have indicated is that there is a that that isolationist view has never really broken through um beyond a small but but dedicated minority thank you Ashley and did you want to comment yeah can I just say I thought the survey data that Jonathan was talking about in in his presentation was absolutely fascinating like we don't wish that we in the UK had a sort of back catalog of these surveys tracking these sorts of issues I think there's one group now the British Foreign Policy Group that's just started to undertake these types of surveys and and we we did we definitely took a lot of put a lot of store in that during the integrated view trying to understand public opinion but to have that history is is fascinating um I think for me I quite like Walter Russell Mead's work on this sort of issue about sort of the Jacksonian the Wilsonian the Hamiltonian and the one that I always forget and I can't remember but he um he basically takes sort of different elements of American history and and practice those trends that those approaches towards foreign policy through right through to the modern day so that if you're interested in that sort of thing I think it's worth reading but what I would say uh Jeffersonian is the last one what I would say is that um I'm not sure being isolationist anymore is is some is a label that can realistically and accurately be applied because in a globalized world um where your your trade is so very interlinked as uh unlike um Cold War with some uh power that is becoming ever more sort of certainly a rival certainly more competitive probably an adversary as well potentially a threat in the long term um I don't think the terms and labels such as isolationism really apply anymore it's probably not possible when those sort of threats and vulnerabilities cross your borders so easily thank you I've got I've got two questions now um I'll go quickly to Richard Johnson who has uh typed question in because his bike's not working unfortunately he says how much blame should the Biden and this is erected at Ashley um Jonathan feel free to comment as well um how much blame should the Biden administration receive for the lack of US ambassadors my understanding is the main blockage has been the blanket hole placed by the Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee with Ted Cruz as main ringleader and given Democrats is something similar to Trump nominees four years ago do uh does the new reality oh sorry do use the new realities is the new reality that every president sorry will now struggle to fill ambassadorial nominations in the first year I sincerely hope not um but I suspect that may be the way it's going um it does mean that you can't really get your foreign policy going and active for for your first year and then obviously you're in the year towards your midterms um um I think to be honest it's a mixture of both as I understand it is the Biden administration was actually particularly slow in nominating um individuals in the first place um I certainly have read a few different things that blame the focus on sort of diversity and inclusion I don't know how true that is but my understanding is it's basically it's both it's slow nomination in the first place and then real reluctance slash political ground standing in the Senate in terms of refusing to um approve or at least to hear those approvals in the Senate as well um as I understand it's it was Ted Cruz alone for a while primarily but also now Josh Hawley also holding up the process in response to Afghanistan and certainly demanding the I think it's the he wants the um national security advisor the secretary of state to step down in the wake of the Afghanistan crisis in the summer in return for approving nomination so I think it's a bit of both in this instance thank you Jonathan did you would you like to add or should we move on to the next one uh let's move on yeah move on okay so the next one thank you Ashley the next one is from from Andy Andy Rowe uh Andy I'm hoping your mic will work so you can ask and it's about public opinion yeah um thanks Andrew which is yes specifically to Jonathan um yeah I think it's really fascinating data there Jonathan um but of course public opinion is not just about distribution it's also about intensity and you know the data that you um describe suggested there's not much of a constituency for for Trump's sort of public opinion positions but you know maybe he's got intensity on his side you know so I think an immigration it's the anti-immigration is so more intense on on globalization it's the anti-globalized globalization it's the anti-free traders so Trump yeah he might not have he might not stand with the majority of the american people stand there he might not stand near the median voter but he's on the side of those people who feel really really strongly about these issues so on the one hand your opinion your data sort of doesn't match with you know Trump the success of the Trump presidency on the success of electoral success of the Trump presidency but on the other hand there's a bit missing and that that bit that's missing is about the worthy intensity of opinion lies I agree it's an excellent point um we've we've thought a lot about that question of how to capture the intensity of um or or weight that the public places voters place on foreign policy issues you know relative to other kinds of issues domestic issues and what just to what extent do those preferences actually translate into you know voting or or real political action and it is very difficult uh to get at and I look forward to hearing comments from American you you all are the experts so maybe you have some suggestions about how to actually get at that question I think the question of whether or not there is this sort of vocal minority of Trump supporters where yes they they may not have the median voter on their side but they have intensity on their side I think there are two versions of that argument one version is you know that just might explain this degree of misperception that this sort of media narrative or general narrative that there is this growing constituency for those um anti-trade or anti-immigration views is being distorted by the fact that that minority is becoming more vocal but they don't actually represent where the true center of gravity of public opinion is so it could be that it's that's what's driving this misperception but not actually changing anything I mean the other version of that argument is yeah those are more they care more there's more intensity around those issues so they are they are voting and organizing and acting on those issues in a way that say a pro trade voter may not be so which of those two is actually the case I uh I don't know okay um whilst we're waiting for another question can I and I'm hoping that you you still have 15 minutes to ask questions so please do if I can have the chair's privilege and ask a quick question as well but based on anecdotal evidence from students I just wonder whether you feel that it's too late for Biden in terms of America being back the listening to students I have from Africa from Latin America from the Asian subcontinent the point they often make is that China Russia India have filled the vacuum that the the end of the Obama years if you think about the lack of action in Syria and then the actions of the Trump administration were drawing from globalization with drawing from climate change regulations and so on that this provided an opportunity for other countries to take advantage of that and Biden's going to find it very hard to recover that and and touching on what I'm being an academic asking a long question I'm sorry touching on that with a point that you were making Ashley which is about whether the public or states trust America in the future because will we see Trump again I mean if we think of Macron and Merkel talking about Europe creating its own army you know has America's moment gone is it too late for Biden that's a very big question a long answer I'm so question I'm sorry about that I'm assuming that's good for me at least for both of you much for both of you it's a big question as well as a long question so that's really good and to be honest I it's going to be really difficult for all of the reasons you've said I mean I think some things may or may not come to pass I I'm still skeptical of a European army in in the form that is politically decisive if not militarily but yeah I think anecdotal evidence is really important and there has been a vacuum it has been um it has been filled in some respects and actually um it requires the Biden administration to be even more focused on the things where it can actually make an immediate difference and a substantive difference and also to to avoid the sorts of own goals we've seen in the summer where you can just annoying allies for no reason um really completely unnecessary for me it's sort of it may well be too late but I think it's by degree not by sort of totality I'll just add again that's also a it's a big and challenging question and I think yeah to me the answer is I I hope not I hope that's not the case uh time will time will tell um I guess from my point of view a lot of the benefits that a Biden administration can deliver are there just just by virtue of winning the election and being in power and maybe they are just purely defensive but to just minimize the change and the changes that Trump could have brought the damage that he could have brought had he come back for a second term we can all speculate about what those might be or would have been or what they might be two years three years from now but I just think the very fact of being elected the very fact of blocking further damage on a host of foreign policy interests to me is a victory in itself so so whether or not they can get a lot of their agenda through or across um you know yeah well we'll see um and to the extent they're getting in their own way about that um as Ashley's arguing I guess we'll see too but to me that's that's benefit enough thank you um thank you very much I wonder if there are any more questions from the audience we've we've got a few minutes left I think it's a Friday afternoon's Jonathan I don't I have a question for Ashley if I might um I'm kind of curious I mean from your your vantage point um what within government um you know you you see issues like ambassadorial appointments um or these very kind of um sort of um civil service issues um very sort of um detailed operational governmental things um how much of an impact do you think that those ultimately have on on policy decisions and policy outcomes because the you know the basic conflicts of interest the basic you know calculus that sort of high level government leaders are making around issues like climate change or um the australia treaty or taiwan or whatever the issue on the front burner is um those those that that sort of basic interests exist you know whether or not there's an ambassador or a play in place or an acting ambassador or whoever it may be so I see why from your vantage point that those things are those are in your vision your field of vision but how much do you think they actually make a difference in terms of real tangible policy outcomes that's a really fair question um it's something I've thought a lot about actually since leaving government there wasn't much time to think about it while I was in government but it's something I've really sort of started really sort of started to think about a lot more in the last few months um I think you told you right there are obviously some some structural um premises if you like of all foreign policy for countries you know most national interests are enduring um you know things don't change that quickly it's unlikely that um a piece of information from an afghan an ambassador in afghanistan for example would have changed a lot of what happened certainly that wasn't the case in the uk that that is how it appears from the media reporting at least and I think also it depends a bit where you sit within that government system as well if you sit at the centre um I think the forces that come into play and in terms of decision making are very different to if you're sitting out at a post somewhere around the other side of the world but one thing I would say I did observe in my time something again I'm still thinking through is just how much sort of if you're trying in a strategy making process which was the process we just went through in the uk government um really yes you have that sort of structured ends ways means way of thinking about things but there's a reality to strategy making and all decision making at least at the centre of government where you get what I would call the four p's coming in play so that is politics personality politics small p big p power the realities of power and how it flows across government and then finally the processes you put in place to manage those things towards your end goal um so I to bring it back to your question I think I think it's both and I think it depends where you sit in government and and understanding the complexity of the government machine is just I mean it's mind boggling and um I think for me you know we talk quite a lot about you know the fog of war you know it's very ingrained in our sort of our communities conversations and understanding that there's external uncertainty that affects our decision making I'd quite like to start talking about the fog of governance where we talk about the internal uncertainty of the inner workings of government and governance as well in the way that that shapes decision making too I think I think there's a question come into the chat based on that from Elizabeth I think which coming out of it which is do you think there's a tendency for elites to stay in their own circles rather than risk face to face opportunities with people who might disagree with them that's an yeah that's that's an excellent question and I think um yeah from my perspective um the question of whether or not there is this gap in farm halls this elite public gap in farm policy their farm policy views I think is tied to a a larger narrative of there being a kind of um polarization a vertical polarization whatever you might call it between elites and increasingly disconnected and globalized and um urban elite um professional elite in the united states and the the rest of the country um and to what extent that that social and economic um and educational um party-based polarization um translates into these kinds of views and if you are yeah if you are an academic um I'll use myself as an example um I live in London I go back to visit my parents in New York City I travel back and forth it's very rare you know that I had you know that that's a very unique experience you know that there is a there is a kind of bubble um around that kind of experience although I did teach for a few years at the University of Oklahoma so I'll take that as as credit on my side um but um yeah I mean to what extent that actually explains this gap um the inability of um elites and experts to accurately or within some degree some bound bounds of accuracy understand what the public thinks yeah I don't know um how much of it is actually explained by that I mean one curious finding um that that we've been thinking a lot about is the fact that those those groups of elites who you who might have an incentive to really understand what the public thinks that is foreign policy specialists working in congress you know members of congress um people who are tied to elections are no better at guessing what the public thinks than think tank experts um or media experts um or people in interest groups or advocacy groups that deal with foreign affairs um so it seems to be the case that even when you have an incentive to really understand what your own district thinks on this issue people often underestimate it and we're all other other groups of academics are finding that that's similarly true on domestic policy issues um that congressional people tied to elections and parties um tend to think the public is more conservative um than it is and now there's a little bit of a literature around that question um as in terms of what's driving that um so I think that that point is is yeah that to me that is definitely on the table as a possible explanation for what's what's fueling this misperception not the divide itself with the misperception of it I think um that's the point where we can uh take a break for a few minutes they were great as as uh thank you very much for your answers I think Kara is hoping to get the congressman online in about 10 minutes so it's a good it's a good time for us to to have a break can I thank you both for some excellent presentations I'm I'm looking in if I think I'll meet both of you this evening and get the chance to droop to drill you with some questions a little bit more I'll grill you with questions a bit more so thank you ever so much that was fabulous thank you well thank you thanks a lot to Jonathan and Ashley um and to Andrew for chairing so um as Andrew mentioned our third and final session coming up after the break is our uh congress session where we have our two former members of congress uh who will be sharing their insights with us and having been lucky enough to be with um senator Tim Hutchinson and congressman Larry LaRocco uh for most of this week um I have uh I've thoroughly enjoyed um hearing their insights and I'm eager to do so again so the fact that after five days I still want to hear them talk I hope uh gives you all a sense of how of how good they've been so um I'm going to encourage everyone to to uh to take a break step away from their computer and come back at four o'clock so thank you so much everyone see you are you attending an event and is it the break time your powers of deduction are are improving yes they are what do you think the echolus center in cooperation with the american politics of the british association of i don't know i don't know whatever i just did i don't know how is that that's over now um um that's terrible think that's terribly right you know hey i have a little bar these days yeah we've got terribly so i'm very far excellent excellent we're enthusiastic yeah yeah good good they've got some uh senator who's about to come on oh right and then we're gonna have dinner longer than dinner not on zoom i don't know you're gonna meet in person which senator the uh conference is on zoom dinner is in person what are these jokers they think you are tim hutchinson oh i'm not on mute welcome back everybody it's now uh four o'clock and so we're going to get started with our final session i'm going to invite um larry and tim and potentially my colleague philip who is with them to um to turn on their camera uh there we go and also we should have i hope professor philip davis he's going to to chair the session um so take it away phil thank you very much thanks thanks very much kara and thanks for everything you've done today including sorting out these technical issues so we can have our congressional team with us larry and tim good to see you again ladies and gentlemen larry and tim have been here in the uk all week and have done a series of events uh for which we're very grateful um to university students and school students and and public events uh as well um uh this is great generosity on their part we sadly for them we don't pay any fees uh we we we just ask ask people nicely to volunteer and volunteering a week of your life uh to do a program that starts uh early in the morning and goes to late at night uh is um it is quite a lot to ask so we're very very grateful uh for their involvement um i'm going to ask them briefly to introduce themselves um larry just to set it off larry is uh from Idaho um and uh was a member of the house of representatives the term from arkansas uh was a member of us senate uh gentlemen if you could take just a couple of minutes to uh introduce yourselves say how you've got how and why you've got into politics where you want to begin uh first of all phil it's been such a great week and i want to thank uh all the sponsors of this trip uh in coordination with the u.s association of former members of congress this is sort of our last official gig here uh before we all meet casually for dinner but it's been a great week we've reached many students and um your hospitality has been superb so thank you so much uh i'm larry larraco um i served in the first district of Idaho from 1991 to 1995 um i started in politics um as a staffer for former senator frank church i was his field representative in an area that was half a congressional district and after church lost in 1980 i don't know if it was out of anger or you know or a realization that i represented him in half a congressional district i i ran for congress in 1982 i had a very innovative campaign i took jobs in every one of the counties for a week at a time and called it my working for congress campaign and i ran against an incumbent unfortunately i only got 46 and a half percent of the vote not bad for a first time out candidate against an incumbent but no cigar and so i ran for the state senate unsuccessfully uh in 86 got 47 percent of the swore off incumbents but uh in 1990 the seat opened up i ran again and and uh like many members of the house uh who uh were successful they were unsuccessful maybe in a try or two before i i prevailed against a entrenched republican and uh became the first democrat in a quarter of a century to win the seat in the first district of Idaho i served on the banking and interior committees uh Idaho is a public land state 62 percent of the state is owned by the federal government so that was pretty important for my constituents and i lost in the big sweep of 94 and uh uh became one of 11 000 americans to serve in the congress i ran for lieutenant governor uh and the u.s senate uh in 2006 and 2008 unsuccessfully and uh now i just try and mentor uh young people and uh if i ran again for office i'd be divorced i've been married 54 years and i think i'll just stay on the sidelines but i do programs like this and uh i'm grateful to be here larry um let me just say how much i have enjoyed working with you this week it's been a real a real pleasure getting to know you uh phil thank you for the hospitality and and the whole team uh we have been made to feel so welcome and it's been a just a glorious week and a great time so uh i'll give a thumbnail of my history i'm from the state of arkansas for those of you've not traveled through the middle part of the united states we're in the middle of the country near the mississippi river border in the mississippi river and in the southern part of the country so um uh i'm from the northwest part of that state which is the hill country which at one time was the only republican part of arkansas was up in the hills we were we were pro-north and so we were very much in the minority i grew up on a farm there always had an interest in politics though i never thought i'd run for office uh i i uh after graduating from college try to abbreviate this after graduating from college i have my master's degree in political science eventually running for the arkansas state legislature uh in a overwhelmingly democratic state at the time uh we had out of 100 members of the arkansas house there were nine republicans that's how democratic it was then it's just absolutely the opposite now after serving eight years in the arkansas legislature we had an open seat uh that was created uh in the in my congressional district and there was a fierce battle because it had first time it had opened up in 26 years uh i won a three-man republican primary then defeated the democrat in a difficult republican year bill clinton was at the head of the ticket that year from arkansas um after serving two terms in the us house i was persuaded to run for the united states senate in 1996 and i was the notable uh distinction of being the first republican elected to the united states senate from arkansas since it's inception in 1836 so it had been 160 years without a republican since that time i served one term in the senate uh the state of arkansas politically has turned a very dark red and they have elected uh the whole congressional delegation and both senators are all now republicans so dramatic change i like to say well i created all of that but i didn't but it was a lot of factors um since uh leaving the us senate i've my wife and i stayed in the dc area uh alexandria virginia and i stay on the hill quite regularly and stay in touch with a lot of my colleagues and new senators who have been elected since i left um and so that's uh that's kind of my political background we can't hear you phil yes oh dear no i was trying to stay out of your way um uh thanks very much both uh now ladies and gentlemen out there who are watching of course we we'd like to be driven by your questions uh uh none of arrived at the moment but please feel free to throw questions into qna or chat i'll look them up um uh if if you don't i'm perfectly capable of keeping this going for an hour uh so but we much prefer to hear from you um tim and and larry in the absence of immediate thoughts from our colleagues out there during this week um what questions have come up now you've met hundreds hundreds of uh members of audiences what questions have come up that you have been surprised by or felt you know particularly notable among the things that have been been thrown at you in this week we had a lot of curveballs uh they're very bright very bright students who had done their homework they had done a lot of research on our past our voting records so a lot of questions i think comparative comparing the uh parliamentary system in in the uk to the presidential system in the united states there were a lot of questions that we expected but right off the bat we got we got hit with a question from a afghan refugee student a very moving moment when he put us on the spot about the messy withdrawal from afghanistan i thought that was a surprise i was taken aback by um a question about votes that i cast 20 years ago wanting me to justify that vote so i had to do a little backtracking and apologizing for some of my votes so they were very very sharp students larry yeah um when i've been abroad um i generally get questions on the electoral college guns and healthcare uh because that's what people don't understand about our culture and so forth so we got a few of those but um i was sort of amazed felt at the questions that we got on the supreme court and uh and and the question of abortion and the detailed knowledge of what's going on in texas for example and uh so that led to a pretty good discussion on judges and and trump's success and uh uh nominating and confirming uh you know the court and and the role of the court um that that surprised me that the granular knowledge about the texas case uh came up during our discussions um of course it on any kind of the physics of this kind uh questions are going to look uh backwards as well as forwards um uh so it seems to me like not that i was at every event but quite a few uh in looking backwards people were very interested in uh what your response was to uh the trump presidency uh and looking forwards uh what your feeling was uh about the midterms uh another thing that came up kind of if you like more granular was the effect of social media um and uh i've just literally in the in the break that we had i've just uh received an email pointing out that in the last month advertising on social media in the uh uh in the states um amongst the top 10 advertisers most of them are republican advertisers they have spent about one and a half million dollars in the last month whereas the couple of democratic participants have spent only about three hundred thousand dollars is this an area where uh the republicans appear to have established uh an uh an advantage and where the democrats are just failing to catch up um i'll go ahead yeah um first of all we did get that question and it came in the form of uh so what's the difference between when you were in office and now and the answer immediately is social media and the communications and the flow of misinformation disinformation and so forth so so uh we had a uh you know a robust discussion about that um i think that the democrats i mean the republicans as i viewed things and based on the statistics that you just gave fill on the expenditure are into branding mode and i think they're they're being very aggressive about uh branding democrats before the midterm elections not waiting for the primaries to sort things out i think they're they're going to start now and it's it's going to be relentless uh in terms of branding the democrats as being uh away left socialists i mean there'll be lots of trigger words that will be used um and they'll try and take uh the steam out of the passage of the infrastructure bill and build back better by uh defining it before the democrats have a chance to define it and i i think that's a very concerted effort on the republicans not a bad strategy by the way and i think the democrats have to uh uh get going and and you know you have to brand your opponent you have to brand yourself um and uh and uh there's a saying of course that i'm sure all the political scientists are aware of and that is if you're explaining you're losing so you've got to be out there and be aggressive and um i'll just conclude this answer by saying uh the one question we got during the week was what would you do if you were to whisper and jump eyes here and my answer was uh get out of dc and go sell uh your accomplishments because this infrastructure bill has got something for everybody so specifically on the on the issue of social media i think donald trump proved the power of social media he he uh especially well throughout his campaign and throughout his presence they used social media to can to go over the heads of both the media and uh politicians to get his message out and it was incredibly effective uh as far as advertising you know i think republicans may be ahead um on the value of and the use of uh social media advertising we just came through in the state of virginia the gubernatorial election and i i stay on facebook more than i'm an older generation so i'm looking at facebook more than i am um some on twitter but not so much instagram and some of the others but on facebook in particular i never saw a terry mccullough the democratic candidate for god never saw one of his ads on facebook it was a non-stop barrage of ads on the on the part of uh the republican yonkin who ended up winning uh so i take from that well maybe republicans are ahead on that i'm told that it's more it's pretty cost efficient compared to television advertising there was a barrage of advertising on both sides on on the on the networks on cable news but on the use of uh facebook i saw a real advantage for the republicans if i may i have a quick comment on that uh not on that specifically but uh everything tim said brought back that democrats are spending a lot of money on field organizations right now and they believe in quote field and um i know they tried it in and uh virginia but um obviously it didn't work but that's where there's a lot of emphasis right now rather than on other forms of voter contact um we got a question from uh julie colla cotzer um can i bring her up oops well i certainly can't if i press that button um uh julie colla cotzer um uh if you if you'd like to um unmute and ask your question um julie is a former staffer for barbra cannelly who had done congress campus uk previously um uh but does not seem to be responding to uh that request um anyway if i can get julie's question up how do you feel about the state of bipartisanship in washington these days are folks speaking with colleagues on the other side of the aisle anymore um and i guess she's uh bringing to his her experience on uh on barbara cannelly's staff well uh i'll start on this one uh bipartisanship is almost non-existent and the level of vituperation and um extreme partisan hyper partisanship is at a new level i think we saw that uh the last 24 hours when kevin mccarthy stood on the floor of the house representatives as the republican majority leader or minority leader and railed against the bill back better legislation for seven to eight hours uh all-time record and during his speech he was being roundly ridiculed and mocked by democrats uh tweeting real time and um and mccarthy was was equally vicious in his attacks i thought you know in the last 24 hours that really validates everything that larry and i've been saying all week that we're at a new low in um civility uh collegiality bipartisanship now i think part of the question was great question by the way but i think part of it was well is there any of it going on yes there's some and there's some people of goodwill on both sides who would like to see uh civility return and by partisanship return uh it i i'm as much as i want to see it happen and i know that there are people that want it to happen i think donald trump is so poisoned uh that that if you if you're viewed as talking to the other side your view is compromising with the other side if you're if you're viewed with as co cosponsoring legislation then you must be a traitor to the cause and uh even republicans who would like to and have a history of working in a bipartisan manner are afraid to do so uh in the current political environment yeah i think james right i mean it's at an all-time low and i i think during the earlier discussion on uh domestic issues uh dr anderson i think framed it pretty well and and uh it's just at a dismal level um now the the infrastructure bill is uh was bipartisan 19 senators voted for and 13 house members um it seems like the anger from the far right and maybe the trump camp is being directed at the house members uh but uh uh mints mcconnell who also freed up his caucus to vote as they wanted on that thing as being a target as well so um bipartisanship is in uh uh really tough shape um i think as we all know there's nothing wrong with partisanship i think we should all i'm a partisan i've been and tim's a bit of a partisan we've been discussing that but doing it civilly all week now it's beginning to be um uh dehumanizing and in terms of the the way that the sides look at each other and uh they're using dangerous language and um as i sort of looked at the history of what's going on in politics is that it the the negative ads at the end of the campaign used to use really bad language and uh very tough stuff and the way they described uh the opponent now it's being sort of part of the vernacular by other by members against members so it the tone has really gotten bad and um um you had a good discussion about exceptionalism and and what that means but anyway um at this point in time things are pretty tough another um colleague uh peter finn can we get peter finn up um who's asked the question which kind of throws this uh into the future uh peter would you like to unmute and ask your question hi yeah so can you hear me yes hi thanks Phil um so i just wondered and it's in a similar vein really to the previous question um but kind of projecting forward into the future can you imagine kind of the people who are working in who are elected in the house and the senate now in 15 20 years time working together in a similar way obviously with different views but working together in some sense or is the animosity so huge um that it's just it's just not going to be possible thanks well i have an opinion on that you want to go first uh i'll jump in and try to be short so you could uh carry on um the geographical shift in politics uh tim made a really good point in talking about the shift in arkansas for example from blue to red i mean we've seen that shift all over the country and and uh when i was in the house from idaho um there were two democratic members of the house and uh we filled both seats and uh now all seats are so anyway we've had this dramatic shift and it's come up that it's just closely divided in the united states and um it's the way it is now it's in the senate so it's and we've hollowed out the middle uh so that moderates like myself uh can't you know that there's no lubrication uh in the uh system for people to talk across the aisle anymore so um uh i don't know where it's going but we are where we are at the moment in this hyper anti-establishment uh period when donald trump came along and uh nobody expected them to win even including himself and uh he's in and we're left with this and uh hopefully we can survive i i'm worried by the way by democracy so as you look ahead as i as i understand the question looking over the next 20 to 30 years can we anticipate can we look forward to a return to civility and collegiality and bipartisanship and first of all 20 30 years is a long time if you look back the last 20 years we almost have a whole new conference used we used to talk a lot about in the united states about having term limits uh we don't need term limits i don't think we we have seen a big turnover both in the house and senate so i would expect in the next 20 to 30 years you're gonna have a whole new group of people uh and and that might maybe that's maybe that's what we need but let's assume that these these people that we have now can they could they return to bipartisanship there's a lot of them that they would like to uh i've talked to them and many of them and and they will say i'm that they are responding to what their constituents want which is on the republican side anger meanness uh i had a senator won't mention what state he's from or what his name is but he said i i go back i want a reason i want to logically talk with constituents about issues that we're facing and they say you're not tough enough you're not mean enough you're not angry enough that that's what they're wanting so the return to what i would like to see in the congress it will require a change among the attitudes the american people i think that the the the ugly meanness that we see in washington is a reflection of the anger that exists right now uh amongst the american people so that's what i think would have to happen and maybe at some point there will be a a backlash a repudiation of the kind of anger that's fueling our politics to a great extent on both sides but particularly the republican side um i this question clearly um is one uh close to the hearts of our audience since we've had two or three more questions basically reflecting the same kinds of comments but uh um along who tells me her mic isn't working um has asked a very similar question in in terms of you know are there ways of returning to a more bipartisan uh approach uh with away from the strong uh partisanship strong and perhaps rather brutal partisanship that's developed um uh you may feel you've covered all the comments but uh given that it really does seem you know exercise our audience a few years ago i remember uh senator lamar alexander from the great state of tennessee lamar was probably the most overqualified member of the united states senate he'd been the president of the university he'd been secretary of education he was a brilliant guy but i remember him talking to the republican senators well it wasn't just republicans to both sides and he said you know we come up here and on tuesdays the democrats go over and have their luncheon and the republicans go over and have their luncheon and they talk among themselves and on wednesdays the democrats go over and have their lunch and the republicans go over and have their lunch and we'd both get in our huddles and we decide how we can beat up on the other side and he went on he said maybe we ought to get together and have lunch together and figure out how we can work together so he started a bipartisan uh luncheon breakfast i think it actually was he had about a dozen people coming you know what happened it faded away till nobody was coming and then lamar decided i've had enough i'm gonna retire uh there are efforts like that that happened there's a group in the house um called problem solvers caucus bipartisan trying to come to the middle um i go to the senate prayer breakfast where there are about 20 senators and i know that they are goodwill both good hearts on both sides who would like to work together and that's an effort and maybe that's going to be the one area in which we actually do find some some common ground uh but it's very tough and it seems like most members on both sides would rather fight as talk yeah i have i have a thought there too and it was discussed earlier in this forum about uh the role of a crisis for example and i would think that that would be the reason for people to come together but it could bond people um that would be a shame if that were the case um and tim is suggesting things that have happened in the past like gangs like sometimes you if you follow american politics there's a lot of people doing this call or everybody you know you have the gang of six the gang of 12 the gang of 14 and it's generally made up of equal number of democrats republicans who are sort of going against leadership that are trying to uh you know promote and and continue this um polarization and they're trying to break through and tim just mentioned some efforts to break through and and it could be that there could be a breakthrough where people are just tired of it and maybe it'll just have to be the right mix i'd like to uh enter into the discussion the role of consultants and some of this it's sometimes you know you go to congress you want to do the right thing uh it's your background it's your religious upbringing whatever it is you you want to reach across the island people will say no you can't do that you won't get elected re-elected you can't be too nice you can't uh a reason um uh it was mentioned earlier the retreat from reason well the Lamar Alexander is a perfect example of that but where does all of this come from sometimes the consultants are there in the pollsters and so forth instead of people just plain old working get out um the last thing i'll say on this point is that there was a really good example of this tim you i think you must have been part of this when uh during the clinton impeachment i think you were there and everybody retreated to the old chamber right yes i was there and and help me out if i'm going to describe it and then you okay but everybody wanted to go in there because you had to figure out some rules and what was going to go on but you wanted to do it without press without staff and you wanted to talk to each other you were in the room and right it was uh it was pretty amazing meeting because uh there had not been an impeachment trial on the u.s senate for i think over a hundred years at that point and no one knew exactly how to proceed with a trial except everybody felt we didn't want to what we thought was dragged uh the senate to the mud like what had happened in the house with the sexual allegations and all of the tawdry details so they're trying to figure out how to move forward so they called a meeting in the old senate chamber which goes back pre civil war um and there they allowed no press and no staff just senators and i'll always remember it because uh ted kennedy liberal senator from massachusetts stood up and made a suggestion on how we proceed uh essentially there to be a truncated trial and there'd be no only a very limited number of live witnesses on the floor of the senate and monica lawinsky would not be called to the floor of the senate and so forth phil graham who at that time was probably the most conservative u.s senator from the state of texas he stood up and he said i think senator kennedy is on to a good idea and from there of course we joked about it later and said this was the spirit of the senate that had come in and taken over and taken control but there was a bipartisan agreement that came out of that meeting uh that that led to you know a civil way of proceeding that's pretty rare but we need more of it well maybe it's a spirit that needs to be captured or or it was doing it together now exactly as human beings and senators and devoted public service um yes and continuing slightly in a different way but still in this area uh liz grant can we get liz grant back um has a suggestion of a potential long she says long shot way forward liz do you want to say it uh liz was still not getting your sound okay uh um sorry sorry about that uh but basically liz has asked now is there any possibility of in this uh in this confrontational political world that has developed uh that a third party candidate um might mobilize cooperation we may ask that a few times this week too it's a very good question um i'll just say this i hear more about um leaving the people leaving the republican party and becoming independent and talking about the need for a third party than i have in many years that said uh it is very very difficult to create a third party and make it viable in the united states it the two-party system is so ingrained into our tradition and we've had periodic efforts starting a third party um uh Ross Perot being one of the ones back in the 90s who did better he ended up getting in the for a while he was running second then he dropped the third and ended up not being a a huge contender it is um but then his party faded away and i can think of uh what is this name anderson who had uh john anderson a serious third party effort as a moderate in the in the middle but the normally in the united states when a third party emerges whatever it is that is strong enough to attract significant attention ends up being absorbed by one of the two major parties and the third party melts away and and uh so while we've never had an environment quite like this and maybe it will take this for uh i i'm pretty skeptical that a third party could develop uh that would that would seriously challenge either of the two major parties i agree with that i don't see it coming um but i find it interesting that more people are talking about it and the reason that more people are talking about is because they want to see some way out of this and uh that that's uh you know a suggestion and some people say well let's let's break the logjam in congress we need term limits they come up with solutions that it may not get uh be be placed into effect but but they're looking for some way out of it they're hungry for it um i you know i don't know if we're gonna have defections from republicans to democrats republicans to independence somebody we've got two independents in the senate now um but i don't see a viable third party coming together one of the reasons on the democratic side is because uh ralph nader uh you know messed up the election for the democrats in 2000 for goodness sakes and and so if you lose uh a part of a possible coalition if you will within the party uh you could end up losing the whole uh the the whole power in the government like we did in 2000 and uh i'm sure the republicans are afraid of that they even brings quite a few people at uh uh the third largest county in my state a few weeks ago endorsed the republican central committee endorsed the john birch society for goodness sakes john birch society they used to be so fringy and hit under rocks now they've been embraced by the republican you're gone mainstream they're gone they're gone i had a couple of colleagues that very dear friends one of them was the chief of staff for a prominent democratic senator and he's frustrated with the democratic party because he thinks they are uh viscally irresponsible and that we'd better get serious about our deficit spending and the growth of our national debt if we're going to save our country well i feel the same way and he and i will talk and he'll say maybe we need a third party you and me third party will there people feel just like us let's build a third party around this idea of fiscal sanity and then we keep talking and he's a democrat and i'm a republican and we differ on so many issues you could you could never find enough consensus and i think that's that's the problem in forming a third party in the united states is that americans tend to gravitate to the to the to their corners on the two major parties of course we seen things like the lincoln project which is not a third party uh phenomenon it was just created by a lot of republicans who wanted to defeat um uh trump and they said uh in this case we should vote democratic but uh they if if trump disappeared from the scene they may be back and try to rebuild rebuild the republican party list chainie says she's a republican she's not bolting but uh she's got an uphill battle to to defeat uh uh uh trump um she's just been kicked out of the republican party in wyoming for goodness sake so um of course one of this one of the problems for third parties minor parties whatever you like in in the states is that the two major parties have in the past anyway been varied enough and extensive enough that they have if a third party has shown any uh likelihood of success they've extended the tent if you like uh over those and brought them in or at least brought enough of them in to to to take away uh the third party's dynamic um and maybe that's still happening but what you've got now is within the major parties uh whereas previously my feeling is that on the whole those who were brought in then uh kind of centralized their opinions and they moved towards the party uh now you've got a situation where um the parties have still got these people who might otherwise be in third parties but they are remaining strong in their opinion they're not coming towards the party center if anything they're dragging it away so uh whether it's um bobert or green or core thorn or somewhere like somebody like that or whether it's uh aoc or or bernie or whatever on the other side um that they are these groups within the party seem possibly to be more problematic now than they were or am i just misunderstanding no i think you're you're totally right but you know we've got like on the arkansas ballot for president we'll have the green party we'll have the libertarian party we've got a number of parties that are actually on the ballot where people have options but in the end voters tend to say i don't want to throw my vote away i know that person's not going to win they'll end up voting for one of the two major candidates the other problem that a third party has is is getting ballot access while because the republicans and democrats so control the election process that they can oftentimes squeeze out it's tough to get even a line on the ballot am i right yeah yeah you know i mean uh there have been uh ideas proposed like rank choice voting um which uh if you had a very safe seat say a republican seat and then you had a third party who got uh the second highest uh you know amount of votes it might give that person that candidate a launching pad for something and and then maybe the uh the other candidate could you know step on his or her toe and falter and have some scandal come up at the last minute or something and then you you might get somebody in there but uh rank choice or or these guerrilla primaries that they have in some states are jungle jungle thank you thank you for that my zoo uh which was a very good jungle project yeah um um that's something that could happen well uh surprisingly to me anyway we've got this far without talking about trump in this hour peter gordon is peter gordon still around he uh he put in a question a while ago um that involved yeah there's some unmute myself um yes the question really is you've got um the two parties if you look at the g.o.p that's very much dominated by the trump faction if you want to um stand in the prime you've really got to be a trump supporter if you look at the democrats that's interesting because you've got the different wings you've got the sanders and the warren wing and you've got the if you like um the more the more centrist people how the two of you see the two parties um uh going is it likely that there might be some change of control some other parts some other facts becoming um uh dominant in the parties in the in in short term was that some way off you want to yeah i mean i'll take a shot at it i um um and all this week uh i've been trying to make the point that uh uh the democratic caucus is pretty broad i mean it's much broader than aoc and uh uh the squad and so forth there in uh in 2018 there are a lot of moderate candidates that were successful and people with extraordinary backgrounds and public service and national defense and and intelligence and um and and uh a history of serving and uh other bodies and so forth so so what's in today's world is that uh uh if you're on you know the cable network you get a lot of attention and then you sort of define the party um i think Pelosi's done a good job of trying to work with everybody and and say compromise is not a dirty word let's get the job done and get this over the goal line for the president otherwise uh their goal of maintaining the majority is really going to be out the window so that's one thing i i think that um if you look at the age of the leadership of the house for example uh i think everybody's uh either close to 80 or over 80 certainly stenny and and nancy are are over nancy Pelosi steady order over 80 so there's going to be a change in leadership in the house and there's going to be probably a knockdown dragout fight on that um jeffreese from i guess new york has got uh you know a coveted position in leadership right now but i think pay paul and uh from the state of washington who's leading the the progressive caucus is is actually running for for speaker now so um you see that leadership in the house um schumer can even get a challenge in his primary and um i i i look to leaders like dick durbin for example from illinois i think he's a fantastic leader that and schumer will get credit for a lot of things he's done but we'll have to see if there's this turnover there's people are going to be frustrated i mean especially when when if the democrats lose their majorities