Amen. First Corinthians chapter 5. So there's probably 20 different sermons in First Corinthians chapter 5, but we're talking about church culture, so it's a good chapter for us in general. We've been talking about church culture for the last couple of weeks. We'll talk about it again this morning, how we want to be a, you know, function as a church together. This is going to be a very practical sermon, as it was last week, with some very practical, specific examples of the type of culture that we want to have in this church. So in the end, the middle to end part of this chapter, we're talking about how the brethren should function together. Look down at verse number 22, which will be the focus of the sermon this morning, where the Bible says abstain, or look at your bulletin, abstain from all appearance of evil. That's the verse of the week. So that's what we're going to talk about this morning, is First Thessalonians 5.22.  I am sure that there is going to be people here this morning that hear this sermon and say, wow, that's extreme.  But here's the thing, I don't really care what you think. I care what the Bible says, and that's the way the church will function.  But hopefully, I can convince you to think about a few things this morning in that area as well. So First Thessalonians 5 in verse number 22, it doesn't say abstain from evil. It says abstain from the appearance of evil. Now today, you will have people that it almost seems like they are, look, the world doesn't agree with this verse today. The world says, oh, you know, I'm not doing anything wrong. If you think that I could possibly be doing something wrong, that's your problem. But that's not what the Bible says. The Bible says abstain from even the appearance of something that's wrong or something that's evil in this case. So we're talking about church culture this morning. Let me just start off by saying this. Not much, or maybe even nothing about our culture today is appropriate. Okay, so we're going to talk about the relationships between men and women in the church, and appropriate relationships between men and women in the church. Nothing about our culture today is appropriate. Please keep that in the back of your mind when you think, wow, that doesn't seem like that's something wrong. I'm going to say something this morning. Just remember, everything that you've been taught from the world is wrong, or backwards. Okay, look, people don't even know, and I'll prove this to you today, people don't even know what is appropriate anymore in this country, in this world that we live in. Look, if you would mention these things, because I've done this, I've done this just recently, I've mentioned some of these things to people that I work with, and people look at you like you're crazy if you mention some of these things. I'll give some more examples about that later, but let's talk about appropriate relationships between men and women in the church. So, you know, we want a biblically appropriate culture here. We don't really care about the world, I'll show you what the world thinks and how fast the world is changing in some of these areas. But first, to understand what I'm going to teach on this subject, we need to do a short Bible study. Okay, turn to Exodus chapter 34. And the first thing that I need to do is I need to show you the difference in the Bible between jealousy and envy in the Bible. So, let's do a short Bible study, and then we'll get back to and apply the sermon to appropriate relationships between men and women in the church. Look at Exodus chapter 34. First, I want to show you and I want to talk to you about jealousy. What I'm going to tell you this morning is that the world's definition of jealousy is wrong. Even the dictionary definition of jealousy is wrong according to the Bible. And I will show you the definition of jealousy from the Bible now. Look at Exodus chapter 34 and verse number 12. The Bible says, and look, I can't get to all the verses on jealousy in the Bible. I just want to prove my point and then we'll move on to envy. Look at Exodus 34 and verse 12. The Bible says, take heed to thyself, lest thou make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land with a thou goest. lest it be for a snare in the midst of thee, but ye shall destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves.  And look at verse 14. For thou shalt worship no other god. This is God giving command, by the way. This is God speaking, God giving command. For you shall worship no other god. Smaller case, lower case G. Smaller case, lower case G. For the Lord, whose name is jealous, is a jealous God. So look, it doesn't just say God is jealous here. That's one of his names. It's one of his names. Turn to 2 Corinthians chapter 11. So first of all, we see that God is jealous. He's jealous over his people in this case. Look at 2 Corinthians chapter 11 and look at verse number two. 2 Corinthians chapter 11 and verse number two. The Bible says, look, there's a lot of different places in the Bible about this. I want to show you some New Testament and Old Testament examples. In 2 Corinthians 11, too, the Bible says, for I am jealous over you with godly jealousy. For I have espoused you to one husband that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ. So here we see that you can have a godly jealousy. God is jealous. Obviously, you can have a godly jealousy. And he's jealous over us. So what does that mean? Because it certainly isn't portrayed as a good thing in the culture that we live in today. If you say somebody is jealous or you have a jealous husband or somebody is jealous over somebody else, it's generally looked at as a bad thing. It's used as a bad thing. And herein lies the problem. Our modern definition of things many times is not correct according to the Bible. Let me read for you the definition from dictionary.com about the word jealous. And I'll prove it to you. An adjective. So there's three different definitions of jealous in dictionary.com. The first one is this. Feeling or showing envy of someone or their achievements and advantages. In example sentence, he grew jealous of her success. The second one. Feeling or showing suspicion of someone's unfaithfulness in a relationship. A jealous boyfriend. This is the dictionary terms, not mine. And then the third one is this. Fiercely protective or vigilant of one's rights or possessions. Now, here you have a dictionary.com definition. There's three definitions. Two of them are wrong. They're literally incorrect. I mean the dictionary definition of this word in our modern language is incorrect. The first one is feeling or showing envy. That's wrong because envy and jealousy are not the same thing. And I'm going to show you that. Showing envy of someone or their achievement and advantages. So being envious, it's saying being envious and jealous are basically the same thing. Which is not true. And the second one is feeling or showing suspicion of someone's unfaithfulness in a relationship. And then that I could almost agree with that one. Except then it gives an example of a jealous boyfriend. Which, you know, I'll explain that one to you in a few minutes. But two of these three definitions are wrong, folks. We'll talk about that later. But first of all, let's talk about the correct definition of jealousy. Well, first of all, turn to Ezekiel chapter 16. Can God sin? Can God do anything bad? He cannot. God is perfect. God cannot sin. It even says in Titus that God is unable to lie.  Look at Ezekiel 16.8. The Bible says, Now when I pass by thee and looked upon thee, behold, thy time was the time of love, and I spread my skirt over thee, and covered thy nakedness, yea, I swear unto thee, and entered into a covenant with thee, saith the Lord God, and thou becameest mine. Turn to Ruth chapter 3 in verse number 9. Let me explain this phrase, spread my skirt. In this case, the Bible is saying, spread my skirt over thee, and covered thy nakedness. But look, what it means is this. In Ruth chapter 3 in verse number 9, Ruth is asking Boaz to marry her, and he says in verse number 9, he said, Who art thou? And she answered, I am Ruth thy handmaid. Therefore, spread thy skirt over thy handmaid for thou art a near kinsman. Look, it means marry me. That's what that means. It's a phrase that means, let's be married. So God is saying he's married to us in Ezekiel 16, and in Ruth it's talking about the same thing. Look, God considers us the saved his spouse. Is what I'm trying to get at. Turn to Leviticus chapter 20. Leviticus chapter 20. So God considers us his spouse, what does that mean? This is a theme that is all over the Bible, that we belong to the Lord. Look at Leviticus chapter 20 in verse number 26. Leviticus chapter 20 in verse number 26. The Bible says, And ye shall be holy unto me, for I the Lord am holy, and have severed you from other people, that ye should be mine. Sounds like we belong to him. Turn to 1 Corinthians chapter 6. You say, that's the Old Testament. I mean, I don't even know what that means when people say that. But whatever. Go to the New Testament, 1 Corinthians chapter 6, and look at verse number 20. 1 Corinthians chapter 6 and verse number 20. 1 Corinthians chapter 6 and verse number 20. The Bible says, For ye are bought with a price. Therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are gods. Look, we belong to the Lord, and he is jealous over us. Look, God is jealous. God considers us his spouse, and he's jealous over that. Now, turn to 1 chapter over to 1 Corinthians chapter 7. We belong to him. 1 Corinthians chapter 7. And look at verse number 2. Now, this also can be applied to a husband and wife in the church everywhere. In 1 Corinthians chapter 7, we see this. Look at 1 Corinthians chapter 7 and verse number 2. So, God is jealous over his spouse, which is us, because we belong to him. So, jealousy we can look at as something that belongs to you, that you are protective over because it's yours, is what the Bible teaches. 1 Corinthians 7, look at verse 2. Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife. Sounds like she belongs to him. And let every woman have her own husband. Sounds like he belongs to her. Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence, and likewise also, the wife unto the husband. The wife hath not power over her own body, but the husband. And likewise, also the husband hath not power over his own body, but the wife. Verse number 5. Defraud ye not one another, except it be consent for a time that ye may give yourselves to fasting and prayer and come together again that Satan tempts you not for your incontinence. See, this is talking about the physical relationship between a man and a woman. But the overall theme here is that you belong to your wife, men.  You belong to each other. Kind of sounds like two became one flesh. Genesis 2. Turn to Proverbs chapter 14. I mean, Genesis 2.24 says, therefore shall a man leave his father and mother and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall become one flesh. So God is jealous over us. And the Bible also teaches that God is, you know, we are God's spouse. And thus, a husband and wife, you know, belong to each other. So it is okay to have godly jealousy towards your spouse or for your spouse because she is yours. He is yours. So jealousy is not a bad thing. There's a godly jealousy in the Bible. Now on the flip side of that, the dictionary told us that jealousy and envy are the same thing. Look what the Bible says about envy. Look at Proverbs chapter 14. A sound heart is the life of the flesh. But envy, the rottenness of the bones. That doesn't sound good. Envy is bad, folks. Turn to James chapter 4. So why is it bad? What is the difference? The dictionary tells me that it's the same. What does the Bible say? Turn to James chapter 4. Another reason you need to have a King James Bible, by the way, because the new Bible versions, they just flip this word around. They just use these words flippantly like it doesn't matter what these words say or what these words mean. James 4, look at verse number 5. Talking about envy. Do you think that the Scripture sayeth in vain the Spirit that dwelleth in us lusteth to envy? So here we see envy tied to lust. Here we see envy tied to lust. Look at Proverbs 27 verse 4. Proverbs 27 in verse number 4. The Bible says, Wrath is cruel and anger is outrageous, but who is able to stand before envy? Look, envy is not the same as jealousy, folks. Envy is lusting or coveting over something that is not yours. Jealousy is being protective over something that is yours. Completely different things. One is good, one is bad. So look, this is another reason you need a King James Bible. You need a King James Bible because the modern Bible versions and even the dictionary itself have blended these two words together. First of all, it dumps down the English language. You're going to get a lot of rounding errors. Remember we talked about rounding errors? Out of the King James sermon last Sunday night. Look, jealous is something that belongs to you. Envy is covetousness over something that belongs to someone else. Covetousness and envy go hand in hand. So how do we apply this to the church? Now that we know these two differences, how do we apply this to the church? How do we apply this to appropriate relationships between men and women in the church? That's where we're going to go now. Now look, I'm going to get very specific. I'm going to talk to the married people and then I want to talk to the single people about what's appropriate and what's not. So first let's start with the married people. Married people. You need to understand, and everybody actually needs to understand this, we'll get to the single people in a minute, that somebody's spouse belongs to their spouse. You should respect that fact in the church, in general in your life, but in the church we will respect that fact. Men and women not married should not be in conversations together. What does that mean? Does that mean that I can't say hi to somebody? No, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about being friendly, I'm not talking about saying hi to somebody, good morning to somebody. I'm talking about being in separated conversations with someone who is not your wife or not your husband. It's not appropriate. It's not appropriate. Because look, here's why. Let me just give you the two scenarios, married men talking to other married women. That's scenario number one. Or married men talking to single women. Either of those two are not appropriate situations. And look, I've seen some of this here and it should not happen. And vice versa with women. People today will say this is crazy. People today will say this is paranoid. People today will say this is sexist. But look, I don't even know what that means. Because here in this church, we acknowledge the difference between men and women, first of all. We acknowledge their roles in life and in the marriage. We acknowledge these differences and the Bible acknowledges these differences. We're not going to play this game where just nothing's wrong and nothing is appropriate. Everyone else in this world, folks, has blinders on when it comes to these things. I actually have a recent story from a work situation I was in. And I mean, I don't go to work and say, I am not allowed to be in a room.  But look, I just keep myself appropriate in work situations. I don't have to, I just make sure. There's a lot of planning that goes in up here to make sure I'm not in an appropriate situation. There's women in the workplace today. It's not my wheelhouse if another man sends his wife to work. My wife's not there, but some other men's wives are. So I must respect that fact, the Bible says. But look, I was in a situation where I had a person that works at a different company and I would get together and we would drive around job sites every week, every two weeks. And it was just this guy and I in a truck every single week, one-on-one just checking some things out. Well, it turns out that the person that was replacing me was a woman. And this woman was to now go and do this, this drive. And I just mentioned to one of the bosses that, hey, you might want to make sure that it is okay with this man to drive around with, you know, a woman, you know, one-on-one. Just to make sure you don't offend him or put him in an awkward position. Everyone's like that. I just said it to one person. He's like, that could be considered sexist today. I'm like, consider it whatever you want. But you might want to just be polite and just... There's nothing against the woman. It was about putting this married man in a situation that he might not want to be in. That's all. The woman and men go to lunch together, carpool together. I've been watching this for 10, 15, 20 years. It's not appropriate. And many times, it's not just the appearance of evil. Let me tell you. But look, we must avoid these appearances of evil. We will not do this type of thing in the church. I don't care what the world thinks at all. I mean, if you think that this is weird and you're going to go and put the world on this, two things. Two things that I'll just remind you of. First of all, 50% of marriages in this country right now end in divorce. That's half. And that depends on who you ask. That's a conservative number. I've heard up to 75% talking to certain, you know, different polls. And the second thing is, you know, you'll not do it here. Whatever you want to do in your life, you know, the church is different. It's not appropriate to do this here. So we'll have an appropriate biblical culture here. Men and women should not be having conversations with the opposite sex other than their spouse when they're married. It's not appropriate because why? Because it could provoke the other spouse to jealousy. That's the first reason. Why is that guy always talking to my wife all the time? She doesn't ever even want to talk to me. And it will give that spirit. Turn to Deuteronomy chapter 5. I don't have this in my notes, but Deuteronomy chapter 5, it will provoke that spirit of jealousy. You say, but that's bad. That's spirit of jealousy. Somebody shouldn't be jealous over somebody else talking to his wife. That's an insecure person. No, there's a spirit of jealousy there. Look at the Bible. It talks about this. In Deuteronomy, I'm sorry, I think it's Numbers 5. Numbers 5 28. 29. Sorry. Numbers 5, 29. So this is talking about a woman who's been caught or been accused of adultery here in Numbers chapter 5. And in this case, she was brought and she was either guilty or not. And look, if she was not guilty of adultery, then there was just nothing that happened. And she had children, you know, and everything's good. But look, in verse 29 of Numbers chapter 5, this is the law of jealousies. When a wife goeth aside to another instead of her husband and is defiled, or when the spirit of jealousy, sorry, number 30, and he be jealous over his wife and shall set the woman before the Lord, it doesn't say, then they shall tell the husband, quit being jealous. Moron. You know, it says, no, they shall set the woman before the Lord and the priest shall execute his law. Look, they take her to a judge. If there's a spirit of jealousy, they're like, okay, they investigate why that happened. They investigate, and look, and if there was no cause for it, then nothing happens. But look, we don't want to provoke a spirit of jealousy in anybody. All right, and look, it could appear evil. That's the second thing. It could appear evil. And don't tell me that it won't. Because it will. Because whenever you have a, whenever I see a married man and a married woman going out to lunch together in one of their, I mean, everybody is saying what's going on there. Even if they won't say it out loud. That's what they're thinking. And we won't have that type of thing here. They're like, why are those two friends? Here's another statement. As a married man, you should never have a friend who is a female. Ever. You're like, what? That's extreme. No, that's the truth. Why would you want that anyway? You ever met a guy who just never wants to talk to the other guys? It's weird. Something's wrong there. I noticed that. That's like a red flag for me. Whenever you see like a teenage young man that never wants to talk to the other man or whatever, I mean, it's weird. You know, and I get it, teenage young men are going to want to talk to teenage young women and we'll get to that in a minute. A man who just never wants to talk to the other men? Red flag. Something's wrong. You should never, married men should never have a friend who is female. Ever. Blanket statement. I don't like blanket statements, but that's a good one. Alright, look. We don't want the appearance of evil. We don't want the spirit of jealousy provoked between a spouse. A wife can have a spirit of jealousy over her husband. Why is my husband constantly talking? I mean, he never talks to me. It doesn't mean that something's happening, but it appears evil to other people and it provokes the spirit of jealousy in his spouse. It's no good. Don't do it. So those are the rules for the marites. Single people. What are the rules here? So first of all, let me define single. Turn to Luke chapter 16. Turn to Luke chapter 16. The definition of single as far as this church goes is this. Eligible to be married. That's what the definition of single is in this church. You're like, what? Yeah, it's going to be different out there. It means eligible to be married. Meaning if you're divorced, you're not single. According to the definition of eligible to be married. Look at Luke chapter 16. You say, why is that? Here's why. Verse 16 and verse number 18. The Bible says, whosoever puteth away his wife. These are red words in your Bible, by the way. Meaning these are Jesus's words. Whosoever puteth away his wife, that means divorces his wife and marries with another, commiteth adultery. That covers the guy who he's married and he finds somebody better and then he's like, I'm going to divorce this one and get married to that one. That's adultery. What that man did. And what about the woman that's divorced? Well, keep reading. Whosoever marries her, that is put away from her husband, commiteth adultery. Translation, if you're divorced, the Bible teaches you should stay unmarried. That's what the Bible teaches. The definition of single people that are talking to other single people in the church in an appropriate situation should be two people that are eligible to be married. When I say single people, that's what I mean. Okay? If you're divorced, I'm not trying to be mean. I'm just explaining what the Bible says. People have gotten divorced, people get divorced. I understand that, but you just need to do the right thing going forward is what the key is. We're talking about the culture of the church. Let's talk about the single people, most of which are going to be younger people. Here's rule number one. Single people should only be in conversations with other eligible single people. What does that mean? That means that they should not be in conversations with married people of the opposite sex or conversations with divorced people of the opposite sex because they're not eligible to be married. And when these conversations happen, they should be in an appropriate environment, an appropriate setting, not in a private room somewhere. They should be open of the church. The church is in an appropriate setting. Turn to 1 Corinthians 6. You say, why? This is extreme. I'm not even getting started on this one. You say, this is extreme. It's like, you're crazy. No, I'll tell you what crazy is.  Okay, turn to 1 Corinthians 6. Single people should only be in conversations with other eligible married single people in the church in an appropriate open setting. Not back in the corner in the kitchen somewhere out of the open where people can see and that's what is appropriate here. Okay, look at 1 Corinthians 6. You say, why? You're crazy. No, you're crazy. The Bible says flea fornication. Every sin that a man doeth is without the body. Sineth committed fornication. Sineth against his own body. Fornication, what's the definition of fornication? It is a physical relationship between a man and a woman that is outside of marriage. Everybody thinks this is crazy now. The Bible says that the physical relationship between a man and a woman is to be exclusively inside the marriage, period. The Bible says flea fornication. It doesn't say don't fornicate. It doesn't even get close to it. It is a serious temptation for young people especially today. Look, here's the world's way. You say how big of a temptation is it? How big of a temptation is it? Look, here's the thing. One in four people, one in four people as of two years ago believe that fornication is wrong. Only one in four. 75% of the people in this country think that physical relationships between a man and a woman is okay, is moral outside of marriage. That's insane. It's one thing to be just in sin but at least knowing what's right. But you know what the next stage after that is?  That's what happened with the baby boomers. All their kids turned out to be fornicating, wicked people. They just changed their morals. How many older people over the age of 60 do know that they started out conservative and now they're liberal? It's huge. I see it all the time. This figure was almost 50% in 2001. 50% in 2001 was wrong to fornicate outside of marriage and now it's 25%. That's how fast things are going down this slope. 20 years ago the CDC's National Survey of Family Growth for 2015 through 2017 found that 90% of young men 15 to 49 have fornicated before marriage. Pretty much everybody's doing it. So it's kind of a problem. If you're reading the Bible anyway. Or you can just change your morality and then I guess it's not a problem. But here's the thing. According to statistics by WebMD 75% of marriages with infidelity eventually end up in divorce. And about 40% of divorces in general are because of infidelity. So when I'm trying to get you to understand and you'll never see this connection in a study but this attitude this culture of fornication is following itself into marriage. That's what's happening. This culture of fornication kids they grow up fornications fine their parents are like fornications fine the kids all how's your kids? Oh they're living with so and so and we wish they would get married and pretty soon it's just they're living with another person and another person and another person normal. That's where it's at today. And then they get actually married to somebody and they're like well what's the difference? They've been living with people their whole life and then they get married to somebody and then now it's adultery and they end up getting divorced because of it. It's the same culture that just follows them right into marriage. That's where you get your 50% your 75% divorce rate right there. But wait there's more. Let me give you some more worldly wisdom. 20% of the US population that's everybody that's 1 in 5 has an STD. You're like I can't believe you're talking about this in church. Look somebody's got to talk about this. 20% 1 in 5 people has a sexually transmitted disease. Half of these are youth 15 to 24 year olds meaning 1 in 4 or 1 in 3 of these teenagers not these teenagers but fornicating teenagers has a disease from fornication. Turn to Ephesians chapter 5 that should make you like go ugh. Turn to Ephesians chapter 5.  That's the world. That's what the world's producing. That's what the world's beliefs. The world's moral slide. That's what it's producing. This generation, what do we want for our kids? You're like this is old fashioned. Yes it is. This is a fundamental Baptist church. We're not going to change the fundamentals for anybody. I don't care how bad it gets. I don't care if 99.99 every single kid except for the kids in this church are fornicating. I don't care. We're not changing. The Bible is the Bible. I am the Lord. I change not. Ephesians chapter 5. Look at verse number 3. But fornication and all uncleanness verse number 4 neither filthiness. Look there's a reason that fornication is called unclean and filthy. It's because it is. It leads to disease. Many of these diseases can't be cured. Many of these diseases will cause cancer. They will cause women to not be able to have children. It's worse on the women all the time. Protect your daughters. It's worse on the women all the time. That's the world's wisdom and that's where it will lead you into filthiness and uncleanness. Fornication, filthiness and marriages ending in divorce. This culture that you can't kick off one thing that being in the ministry and I kind of knew this a little bit but being in the ministry will show you that it's really hard for people to get out of their back. Especially somebody that's a little older maybe past the age of 30 they say that once you're 30 you're set in your ways. That's why your music is set in your mind many times your political opinions are set in your mind at that point. We have to be different. That's why we're having sermons on church culture because it shouldn't matter what the culture you came from or what you were taught you have to understand there's a very, very good chance that it's all wrong. The Bible will lead you to appropriate relationships from the start and they will end in lifelong marriages that can be the best gift you could ever have in your life on this earth. You say salvation is pretty good. I'm not talking about spiritual gifts. A great marriage is something that can be I think probably up there with kids and a good marriage should be one of the best blessings that you could have on this earth. And look if you follow what the Bible teaches you say my marriage isn't good right now. Look you can change that too. You can change your culture and you can fix your marriage and you just have to listen to what the Bible says and forget what everybody else is telling you. It's the opposite of the truth. So let's go back to church culture. Single people talking to eligible single people of the opposite sex not married people, not divorced people and in an appropriate atmosphere. And look outside the church and this isn't my wheelhouse look you're like can't I go on a date as a single person? Yes you can go on a date as a single person but someone should go with you. You should have an appropriate you know you should not be riding a drone in a car together a single man and a single woman should not happen you're like wow that's old fashioned you bet it is. Flea fornication don't even get close to it don't even put that opportunity in front of you. This is how you do it preferably your parents would be you know the chaperones in that type of situation. So let's just recap to avoid the appearance of evil and to respect the jealousy a spouse has over their husband or wife we need an appropriate culture but look I'm being specific because I've seen some of this stuff here okay I've seen some of this stuff here and I'm not saying that there was evil intent or anything like that but we don't want to see this type of thing. So in the church we need to avoid the appearance of evil we shouldn't see married men talking to married or single women. Married men you cannot have a friend who is female sorry it's not appropriate. Single men or single women talking to ineligible people of the opposite sex married divorced etc but look please don't misunderstand me this does not mean you cannot be friendly this does not mean that you know when my wife walks in the door that every man is like that's not what I'm talking about let's be reasonable here or even ladies specifically ladies that you can't have access to your pastor. You're saying well can I not be in a church and have access to my pastor if I need advice or something like that let me explain to you how that works okay first of all you can ask my wife because you know what my wife ladies you know what my wife does with many things as the Bible said that she should she will ask me so you could ask my wife could you ask your husband's opinion on this and my wife will ask me and I can talk to you through my wife that's one way I can talk to you you know in person no problem but there's never going to be a time when I'm you know talking with a woman in a counseling type situation and my wife is not there so my wife is just going to be there that's just the way and preferably your husband would be there too but that's there's never going to be a situation like that with me and somebody else's wife or a single person or whatever in a counseling it's not appropriate it's not even close to appropriate you say but you know you're going to be the pastor of this church god willing they don't mess it up but you know but you're a pastor you're the spiritual leader look do you know how many pastors have done wicked things look I mean everyone thinks that everyone thinks that oh this is church nothing bad could ever happen here I mean there's a reason that there's cameras everywhere in the church because look I mean we're not paranoid but yeah we kind of are when it comes to protecting people okay look you can't just be like oh these people are from church they can just watch my kids or these people are from church these two are always hanging out together this married man and married woman look I've seen affairs happen in church it's ridiculous my wife and I were just talking about it yesterday and you kind of we all knew something was going on because you're like that's weird that she's always out talking to all these different people and he's always out talking to other people besides his wife it's strange everybody knew it was strange nobody wanted to say anything but look it appeared evil so we're going to avoid that appearance here you know I mean so don't forget that I mean especially when it comes to people like watching your kids too be careful I mean be careful this isn't the scope of the sermon but I mean oh they're church people look we're family integrated we're family integrated let me tell you another story and I might have mentioned this to a couple of you but I actually got insurance for the new church and this is super interesting but I actually got insurance for the new church last week and the guy who's going over the insurance policy with me he asked this question like over what kind of coverages we need what kind of coverages and things like that if somebody would get hurt in the church he's like how many people go to the church and then he said okay what kind of things do you have and he asked me there's a weird question he's like well what kind of breakout groups do you have at the church he's like small groups like youth groups like Sunday schools and all this and it's like we don't have any groups like that we're never going to have any groups like that I'm not saying we're not going to have youth activities someday and there's never going to be all these breakout groups these small little bible studies of young marriage and all this stuff at people's houses without the pastor there and all this kind of stuff he's like what kind of breakout groups do you have especially for the kids and I was like none we're family integrated the kids are in the church there's no Sunday school there's no breakout groups like that and he's like okay you won't need let me just say the appropriate the same type of church the same kind of policy the Catholic church probably needs or the Boy Scouts need we don't need that because look insurance companies they know where these things happen they know the risk they're experts at doing risk analysis on things because they're a for profit company but I thought it was super interesting so look we're talking about being appropriate in the church that's just a side note but here's another thing let me just end with this be appropriate in your life you know this is the church you know I mean it's this is my scope here right and we will have things be a certain appropriate way here but look you would be wise to apply these things to your life you would be wise it will help your marriage young people it will help you avoid fornication you know as the bible says that you should apply these things to your life it will lead to long healthy relationships both married and unmarried a lot of these things these things seem weird especially maybe to you young people today but it's the culture here and you'd be wise to forget as much as you possibly can of what the world has taught you it's gone bad it's gone bad and it's getting worse I mean one in four I was look I know how bad the world is I preach on it like every single Sunday and one in four only 25% of people think look I could agree I've been surprised if the number would have been like people that are just allowing it people that are allowing their children to be in fornication people that are looking the other way that their children are in fornication or that people are in fornication but I never would have thought that it was only 25% that actually thought it was wrong to be in fornication I mean you have got to be kidding me as something as basic as that the relationship between I mean just think of the question is the physical relationship between a man and a woman only for marriage or does it not matter if it's outside of marriage and 75% of people say it doesn't matter that's where it's at I mean you should all be thanking God that you have the Bible in front of you I mean we have become a society without morals and we have been to just destruction and disease of just generation after generation and after generation and we can avoid it all here we can avoid it all here and you can avoid it all in your families you can have healthy happy marriages you can raise godly children that grow up and you know what they want to get married pure and they want to stay married the whole life and they want to have a great marriage I mean look it's possible it's possible but you just got to forget everything else and that's why we're talking about these things apply it to your life not just the church the entire Bible apply it to your life and see how things go for you let's borrow our heads and have a word of prayer


Good afternoon, you're very welcome to this latest IIEA webinar on the upcoming U.S. presidential election and all things American. I'm delighted to welcome Ed Luce, who is U.S. National Editor of the Financial Times and a weekly columnist with that newspaper. And as many of you will know, his columns in recent times have not made one more cheerful about the country in which he resides. Ed is no stranger to us at the IIEA and we are yet again grateful to him for taking the time to join us virtually. By way of bio, Ed has previously served as the FT's Washington Bureau Chief, South Asia Bureau Chief and Capital Markets Editor, among other roles. Outside journalism, he worked as a speechwriter for Larry Summers during his time as U.S. Treasury Secretary. He's also written a number of books, his most recent one, The Retreat of Western Liberalism was published in 2017. And it was his first book on that most fascinating of country's India that I spotted on my bookshelf a while back, which prompted me to ask Ed to join us again. There really is a lot to discuss this lunchtime and the stakes could hardly be higher as we head towards perhaps the most crucial presidential election in modern U.S. history. In terms of format, we're going to do it slightly differently this lunchtime with a more in conversation style discussion, which is entirely on the record. We will, of course, engage with the audience, so please submit questions and comments at any time via Zoom's Q&A function at the bottom of your screen. You can also join the conversation on Twitter using the handle at IIEA. So, Ed, perhaps we'll start at what's going on more widely in American society and what sort of changes you observe and you see. Parallels are often drawn between the 1960s, the late 1960s and the current period in the U.S. How similar, how different, how is American society evolving? Well, I should sort of first of all give the health warning that I was born in the late 1960s, so I had no direct observation to make that comparison. But clearly, the extent to which we are in a culture war rather than a sort of more business as usual political debate about tax rates and spending, there is a strong 1960s parallel and this is partly generational as well, which of course has a very strong 1960s echo and there is a lot of street action to put it mildly. That said, there's nothing like the street action today, even if you include cities like Portland and Louisville, Kentucky and Chicago and elsewhere. There's nothing like the action today that we saw in terms of America's burning cities in the late 60s, early 70s. The source of a lot of the concern about domestic stability today comes from more from the right than it does from the left. White supremacist groups, QAnon affiliated groups, groups with names, you know, like the Oath Keepers and the Minutemen and the Patriot, this, the Patriot, that. There is a second amendment visibility to these paramilitary groups that you saw on the left with the Black Panthers and other groups in the late 60s. It's now a lot more on the right, but in terms of the sort of broad echoes of a country that is breaking down over non-divisible cultural differences, there is a striking parallel there and that makes it a pretty unstable environment for an election to be held. And on the issue of culture war, there's also a question about, you know, what is driving change? Some people argue that it's the populism has been driven by economic factors, greater insecurity, people are feeling greater insecurity and this is helping populists. Others, and maybe they're not, you know, mutually exclusive. Others mentioned culture wars and this sense of that things are more important than that, that your cultural perspective is more important than your position on taxes, et cetera. Where do you see the economic insecurity part feeding into it, if at all? Oh, I think it's a very strong part of it. And I think there's been a kind of false distinction made between either this is about culture or this is about economics. It's they're not mutually exclusive. I think what happens when you see the hollowing out of the middle class, some going down, some going up, but the middle, that sort of great stabilizing middle being depleted over a generation or more, is an analog polarization in politics because the economy has been polarizing. There's been a lot more going to the winners and a lot less going to the losers. So it's it's got a parallel in what happens to the middle of politics. Men have been particularly in their own eyes victims of this hollowing out the traditional blue collar job, the kind of job where in the 1970s, you could have your wife stay at home and still afford to fund your kids college. That kind of job is for somebody without a postgraduate degree, extremely rare nowadays. So that sort of post war bargain is pretty much dead, but the aftershocks of its death go on. And I think what it does is it makes people insecure. It makes people ready to scapegoat and it makes the material of American society more susceptible to cultural appeals by unscrupulous characters. And so we have got this sort of seeming paradox that the breakdown of the economic social contract is leading to racial identity politics. I don't see that as an actual contradiction. I think that's pretty much in a very simple form. What we've been seeing over the last over the last few years, just to put it in sort of context for us in Europe. It was always striking to me that when the French economist Thomas Piketty published his book in France, nobody didn't get any traction. When it was published in the US, it became a huge phenomenon and it only got picked up in Europe once the Americans started talking about it. I just wonder in my own senses that inequality issues are much less important in European politics than they are in US politics. Do you think that's do you think that there is a different dynamic around the extremes of inequality in the US versus Europe? That's a good question because normally you'd have the opposite that any focus on inequality is immediately shut down as class warfare in the American idiom. But I think it's become acceptable because it is so visibly extreme. The American creed is essentially meritocracy. It's essentially that if you're talented and you wipe the sweat from your brow that you put the effort in, that this system allows you to get ahead and create similar opportunities for your children. And it's just not a reflection of the reality that most Americans face. They see that the vast majority of students who make it to Ivy League are in the top two, three percentage points of income brackets. They see that roughly a quarter of Ivy League students are legacy students, meaning one parent went to the same institution. And they see the prohibitive cost of health care and education inflation over the last 30, 40 years. The inflation measure doesn't really capture that. It captures more ordinary day-to-day goods where inflation has been quiescent for a generation. If you had inflation measured by health care and education, we would have had hyperinflation in the last generation. So those basic sort of means of mobility have been put more and more out of reach of most Americans. And I don't think the elites of left or right really get that or feel it or sympathize with it. And that in turn aggravates this sense of resentment against elites that you're seeing displayed in different ways. You know, in some corners it's support for Bernie Sanders. In others it's falling prey to Trumpianism. But you're seeing people lose any tolerance for normal politics. And I think there's a reason for it. It's not just because they're deplorable people who, you know, have deep prejudices. I think they are very strained people who are finding it extremely hard to make ends meet and don't really see an end in sight to this. So you do feel the social escalator has at least slowed and not broken down entirely. The elites don't perceive that, but you think more and more people do. Like that is something you feel people really do feel. Yes, and if you look at the numbers, you know, I think the latest from Gallup was 37% of Americans believe that children will be better off than they are. That's a pretty extraordinary number. 60, almost two-thirds of Americans think essentially we're going down. So I think that is a pretty widely held view. Look, the elites, you know, I shouldn't generalize too much about the elites because there are clearly two different elites. There is a conservative elite and there is a liberal elite. But the liberal elite do seem to be much more concerned with racial justice than they do with broad-based economic upliftment. And they do seem to be happy on very good grounds to talk about historic victimhood for non-white working-class people, but to talk in much more sort of thatcherite Reaganite terms about white blue-collar people as if they are to blame for their own plight. So I think tactically speaking, as well as substantively speaking, the Democratic elites have misplayed the blue-collar white vote, which after all still remains the largest single category of voters in the United States. So I just think it's negligent politics on a tactical level. I also think it's just substantively wrong to imply they're to blame for their own plight because it takes a lot of resources to educate your children to the degree that the elites are. It's just not realistic to think people can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps with the cost of education and the extreme competitiveness of education being what it is nowadays. So I think that the healthcare and education thing is very different from Europe. And those, as you say, the inflation, the rising cost of healthcare and inflation, really there's no country in Europe that remotely resembles the U.S. in those terms. An issue that there may be a difference as well either side of the Atlantic is immigration. You know, the U.S. is a nation of immigrants. How do you see immigration as an issue? Is it becoming a more important issue? Will it be an issue for the election? It's not as big an issue in this election as it was in 2016. I think to some degree it's been supplanted by the whole George Floyd situation and Black Lives Matter situation and Trump's response that I am the candidate of law and order and that a Biden presidency would unleash anarchy in our cities, in our democratic run cities, it is meant that that's taken more of the heat as an issue, as an identity issue. Trump remains very strongly anti-immigration and I'm including legal immigration. He's making legal immigration more difficult as well as illegal immigration. But if you remember in 2016 he did promise to build a wall with Mexico and get Mexico to pay for it and of course neither of those things have happened. So he's not exactly in a position to run on that accomplishment and maybe to some degree he's focusing on this because this is a better way of, how do I put it politely, increasing the enthusiasm of his base? Our former finance minister, Alan Jukes, asks how important to US voters are environmental issues, rejoining the Paris Accord, repairing the damage that Trump has done to environmental protection agencies and policies would throw that one at you? I think that's a very good question. I was doing a panel last week with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and they do some very good surveys of American public opinion and they listed the top five issues for Democrats and the top five issues for Republicans and what was really striking was that there was not one overlap between these issues. It was like two different universes, two different sets of issues. Climate change, the threat of climate change was second on the Democratic list. First was the pandemic but climate change was second. Now I think partly that's because you've seen the fires, the pool of smoke from the West Coast fires in the last few weeks spread across the country here in Washington DC was remarkable. There was a day or two last week where it was sunny but it didn't feel sunny because there was this deep haze preventing the sun from breaking through from 3,000 miles away. So I think events like that really underline. They bring home to people the reality of global warming. I suspect the pandemic in a funny way has two because it is a Deus Ex machina. It's something that's come from outside our normal business in a way that climate change does too. But that wasn't anywhere on the Republican list and if you look at polls of Republican voters Donald Trump's decision to withdraw from the Paris Accords remains very popular and the idea that global warming is essentially a Chinese plot to make America less competitive is a widely held view amongst conservatives in the United States. So I think I would sort of almost broaden your question to say what is the view on science amongst the US electorate? And it's striking that those groups that are saying that global warming is either not man-made or exaggerated or is susceptible to an easy technological solution are the same groups that are questioning the science of wearing a mask or having lockdowns or social distancing regulations. There is a broader skepticism there to authority, to expertise, to public pronouncements and to science in general I think on America's conservative right and really the opposite of that on the left perhaps a sort of almost willfully overtrusting sort of approach to public announcements. Could I in terms of how that's communicated, could it maybe bring in an issue issues around the media and the role of the media in the US? How do you feel the media has changed? Has it become more polarized to reflect society? Is there a dynamic where the media society becomes more polarized, media becomes more polarized, people enter into echo chambers, they don't hear other sides? Is that a very real phenomenon there and has it affected the quality of journalism in the United States? It's a very real phenomenon. I think the horse is bolted on that one. I think the answer I would give you now is very little different to the answer I would have given you in 2016. It's the same but only more so that people, the idea and the Jefferson and others so sort of poetically sketched over a public being a place where there is a public square and you may disagree in that public square but you're all in the public square. That's been put to rest for a long time now. There is no public square. There are lots of different public squares and they don't seem to have adjoining passages between them. The role of what is still called the mainstream media or maybe the traditional media, the network, TV stations, the big broadsheet print, the role of those in 2016 was to see Trump as an extraordinary business opportunity. He got eyeballs onto the website. He got viewers onto the TV. He was good for business. Hillary Clinton was perceived to be going to win anyway. This excessive coverage of her emails, which looks so quaint nowadays. What was the problem? I'm not really sure. Still sure what the problem was. This lavish attention on her emails and the idea that Trump was just good for business meant that essentially people were given permission, people who consumed the mainstream media were given permission to vote for a third party, to vote or not vote at all. About a fifth of Bernie Sanders voters either didn't vote in 2016 or voted for Trump or possibly for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, all of which helped Trump win. The media narrative today of the mainstream media is that this is a really close election and it's having the opposite impact on voters. It's not giving them permission to vote for Trump or not to vote or to vote for a Green Party. It's panicking people into saying, well, we're going to vote. We're going to vote. We have to get this man out. Now, I don't think it's any more accurate than the 2016 meta narrative amongst the mainstream media. I don't think it is that close. I think Biden's got double the lead that Hillary had and that's been a consistent lead all year. Well, since the spring at any rate. I don't think it's any more accurate. I do think, though, it's having the opposite effect on potential Democratic voters and people in the middle to galvanize the turnout for Biden. Now, we've got a lot of really floods of questions coming in. Let me just reassure viewers that we'll come to sort of international relations in the second half. We'll deal with sort of US domestic politics in the first half of this. So I'll put those questions later before going to some of the questions that are coming in the domestic politics. Could I also ask you how business is reacting to this polarization? In a democracy, companies generally don't want to be associated with one political party for fear of alienating those who support another. With polarization, is this proving to be a difficulty for businesses in terms of just doing business and human resources, etc. Is that something you picked up on? Business tends to be, most forms of business tend to be pro-Republican in traditional times, but it's much closer than you would expect and there's been some industries you'd attribute to the right and some you'd attribute to the left. So, for example, the defense industrial complex would be seen as pro-Republican and Silicon Valley would be seen as pro-liberal and Wall Street's the swing vote. You know, some elections that go with the Republican and others like with Obama in 2008, Wall Street pretty decisively came in behind Obama. All that's really changed. Trump's such a different kind of president that the normal laws of the normal patterns of money and politics in America have changed. It's not at all clear to me that Silicon Valley is pro-democrat anymore, for example. Trump's robust stance against China and the idea of a bifurcated global internet is actually something that the Mark Zuckerbergs of this world have been playing at quite aggressively. They like low taxes. They don't like what Elizabeth Warren's talking about in terms of regulation and potentially anti-trust action. Wall Street, I think is pretty much split. I don't think it's strongly pro-Trump. I think it's been enjoying the party in the stock market. But there are also serious questions about whether Trump would break the goose that lays the golden eggs, which is globalization. And Biden's seen as a more normal candidate. Defense too. Well, there's been a lot of cozy relationships between the Pentagon under Trump and the defense industrial complex. But he's not a conventional Republican in foreign policy and defense either. And Biden is seen as a more business as usual person in terms of American alliances, America's presence globally. So I think there's more ambivalence there. Generally speaking, though, for business across the board, this is not a time they feel involved in to put their head above the parapet. This is an era of ultra-caution. Politics is more unpredictable. It's more dangerous. You can get decapitated. So keeping Sturm seems to be the council that most CEOs have been receiving. Okay. Okay. We've got one here. Americans were long noted and admired for their civility. Yet sadly, that appears to have changed. An English academic friend of mine was back in the U.S. about a year ago, after an absence of 20 years. She told me on her return visit that she could not wait to leave as people were so angry everywhere. What accounts for this apparent change in Americans' demeanor? That's from Louise Brennan. Could I ask speaker questioners just to write in their affiliation? Because I can see your name, but I can't see your affiliation. So it's always good to know that. So you could just add that in. I think Louise Brennan is from Trinity, but yeah. Do you sense, is there anger? Is this and what accounts for it if people are so much more angry these days? It's really funny. Louise's question is a very good one. My wife, Neve, who's Irish, and I always find everybody very polite in Ireland. And I was talking about this because she has just been in Ireland because of relative and Galway's dying. And she came back with exactly the same observations, which is how strikingly sort of polite people were. And therefore, how techy and irritable and stressed Americans, by contrast, appear to be. Now, I've lived here for 15 years.  People are sort of quicker to anger and little public disputes are just more commonly visible. And so I would agree with the premise of the question. The question is why, I guess, America has become a less polite place, a less civil place. And I think it sort of, I think it keys into what we were discussing at the beginning with the culture wars. You know, one measure of how American society has changed. I think politics is too small a word. It's society that has changed. Is this really sharply declining trust in everything, whether it be science, whether it be politics, whether it be media, whether it be academic institutions, public institutions in general, even less trusted than they were five years ago. And the sort of curve has been going downwards. I've been saying this for years, but you know, the glue of autocracies is fear. For democracy, the glue is trust. Democracy presupposes some goodwill on the part of people who disagree with each other. But at least you all have a similar understanding of the rules of the game. And okay, you won this election, but you know, I disagree with you, but I trust you're not going to change the rules so that I'm not going to have an equal shot at winning the next election. That's gone. We are now in six weeks away from the first presidential election in modern, there's been a taking place in the era of polling, in which most people, most Democrats and most Republicans think that if the other side wins, it will be because of fraud. And the reason why they are saying this is because they think that, for example, if you're a Democrat and Trump wins, there will not be a free and fair election in 2024. That he will so have changed the rules of the game or just abandoned the rules of the game, that the whole idea of there being a playing field will have changed. If there is one, it'll be tilting, it'll be, it'll be sloping heavily away from Democrats. And Republicans have the same fear. In my view, Republicans have much less grounds to fear Joe Biden than Democrats do to fear Donald Trump. But the fact is, the plain fact is, the perception is that the people on the other side are your enemy. They're not your opponent. They're not your adversary in politics. They are your enemy in society. And that's, you mentioned that I've had some not very cheerful columns recently. I would love to be writing more conventional stuff about the election. This is their tax proposal. That's their regulatory proposal. That's what elections, for the most part, been about. This isn't that kind of election. It's a long way from what Louise asked about civility. But I think it's all to do with that. Let's get into the nuts and bolts of the politics now. Peter McClune, who is a board member of the Institute, asks about your views on Joe Biden's running mate. Will she make a difference? And a related question, again, the appointment of the Supreme Court vacancy that has just become apparent with the death of one of the justices. Will that be an election issue? And many, many people have put that question. Actually, that's kind of quite a bit in the question. So I'll group all those questions around the Supreme Court and that issue together. Well, in terms of Kamala Harris, I think she was a fairly smart choice on the part of Biden. You know, she's tough. She doesn't need training wheels. She's been in the Senate. She's been Attorney General of California. She knows how to stand her corner. And she'll probably be a pretty formidable debating opponent for Mike Pence when the vice presidential debate occurs. The bigger question, I think, is the replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Now, I was thinking the other day about what the October surprise would be for this election, whether it's some vaccine that Trump rolls out or a clash with the Chinese Navy in the South China Sea. And as I was thinking of what it might be, Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. And I realized this is the October surprise. This, perhaps more than anything, her passing is a lightning rod for the culture wars. It forces the idea that this is a visceral culture war election. I think that in the next few days, President Trump will nominate possibly as early as today, nominate a replacement. My guess is it will be either Amy Coney Barrett or Barbara Nagoa, both of whom are very conservative justices on the federal appeals courts, both of whom would make it very clear that they are in support of overturning Roe v. Wade. So, we would be getting down to the most motivating issue there for conservative evangelical and Catholic right, which is ending a federal abortion right. And we would be breaking all precedent by having this pushed through in the six weeks before the election. If Mitch McConnell, Senate Republican leader, wanted to confirm a Trump nominee to the Supreme Court, but before the election, he could, assuming he had his party with him. So, it might well boil down to, you know, can you peel away for, well, it would boil down to, can you peel away for Republican senators to uphold the rules of the game and say, look, you know, this isn't fair. We should wait until the American people have spoken and decided who their new president is. If it is Trump, then we can confirm her most likely after polling day in the lame duck session. If it isn't Trump, then we should wait until January the 20th. That is something I expect Mitt Romney will say. And I think Susan Collins of Maine has said that. Lisa Mikowski, you need one more. And we don't know whether that will happen. The pressure on Republicans to vote for the nominee is going to be acute. The liberal backlash, should it happen, will, I think, be equally acute. There will then be, it will then be extremely hard for Biden to resist the factions that are arguing. In that case, the moment we get in power, we should expand the size of the Supreme Court from nine to 13. And we will just nominate and confirm four liberal justices within the first week. And I think it would be, it would be, I hate to use a cliche, but it would be a Rubicon. America would be crossing at that point. There's nothing in the Constitution that says how large the Supreme Court should be. It doesn't have to be nine. It's been as small as five over American history. It's been as large as 10. The only time that the president tried to change this was Franklin Roosevelt in 1937, known notoriously as the court packing incident, where he tried to pack the court because the court kept striking down aspects of the new deal. And he tried to pack the court and it blew up in his face. I think in these circumstances, if Trump and McConnell managed to confirm somebody like Amy Coney Barrett, it would be pretty hard for Biden to resist those forces saying we've just got to expand the size of the court. It's in our power. This is about power. We are students at the feet of Republicans. They know how power works. We need to learn from them. Bill Emmett, amongst other things, former editor of The Economist and now a resident in Ireland, asks, how weak a candidate do you think Joe Biden is? This looks like his election to lose. How might he lose it? Hi, Bill. Nice to hear from you. I think this is Biden's election to lose. The difference between 2020 and 2016 is not just that Biden has a higher poll lead. His average is about a percentage point lead over Trump. Hillary's was, I think, 4.6 percent average over the previous six months. So it's a much larger poll lead, but also that pollsters are wiser to swing state polling, where we got let down in 2016 was not the national poll. Hillary did win by a couple of percentage points, the popular vote in 2016, which was within the margin of error. Where the polls got it wrong was in the Midwest and swing states that Trump won, where she was shown to be ahead, namely, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. And I think that those, the polling groups have made big adjustments to how they measure those votes and those minute sort of shifts that they missed in 2016. Second, there isn't a Jill Stein to split the vote on the left. There's been some moves to get Kanye West on the ballot, but it's been too haphazard and too late.  So he's not the sort of stalking horse type that Republicans might have hoped. And third, Trump's been in office for four years. This is no longer a gamble. This is no longer, well, look, everybody else is corrupt and we know them and we, the familiarity of contempt that people felt for Hillary Clinton, you know, and that Trump was new and could therefore try and change the system and you could justify a gamble on them, a flatter on them. That's no longer the case because he's been in office for four years and we're going to, by polling day, be up to about a quarter of a million dead in the coronavirus pandemic, many of whom need not have died if proper federal guidelines and social distancing policies have been pursued. So that's the fourth and final difference with 2016. People over 65 are now supporting Biden. He's got a lead amongst voters over 65. I wouldn't have expected that and that you can put down pretty much entirely to Trump's handling of the pandemic. So I do think that Biden, the odds are Biden will win. My concern is about the free-ness and fairness around voting and particularly around men in balancing and how easy that's going to be and whether you're going to have enough volunteers to count them and how long it takes to count them. People, you know, are used to thinking of polling day, but this is going to be polling week. It might even be polling month. It takes a long time to count ballots and if you've got a lot of lawyers, county by county, disputing signatures, 2000 Florida style, this could turn into a very prolonged multiple legal drama. That would be my concern and just as an addendum to that, most of the people who are planning to vote by mail are Democrats. Most of the people who are planning to vote in person are Republicans for predictable reasons and they take the coronavirus less seriously and Democrats take it extremely seriously, maybe too seriously and therefore you're going to have the in-person polling numbers coming out instantly on polling day in the evening, showing Trump ahead. And this is what sephologists call a red mirage, showing that Trump is winning. And Trump and Bill Barr, the Attorney General, saying, this is the election, stop the count. We've won. Mail-in ballots are fraudulent. I've been telling you all year they're fraudulent. And in those circumstances, you're going to have to pray that there are more cool heads across the spectrum than hot heads because it could get very hairy. Ethan McDermott is following up on that. She compliments you in your talk so far and asks, are the political institutions and constitution likely to be sufficiently robust to ensure that the incumbent leaves office if he's defeated? It's a very good question. I mean, Joe Biden, perhaps ill-advisedly in an interview or two a few weeks ago, was asked what he would do if Trump refused to leave office having lost the election. And Biden said that he had no doubt the military would escort him out. That was ill-advised because the military are not supposed to get involved in politics, and that's been upheld for 230 years or so. In practice, it would be somebody like the US Marshals or the Capitol Hill Police. I guess, though, the norms are as good as the people upholding them. And we're not in normal times, and norms don't seem to matter so much anymore. If you think of the 2000 election, Al Gore could have disputed the Supreme Court ruling, which halted the recount in Florida. Most of the projections showed him winning the recount, but the Supreme Court voted five to four to halt it. Al Gore could have disputed that, but he didn't. He said, fair enough, these are the rules in the game. I wish George W. Bush all the best as president. That wouldn't be possible today. In the event that we have a Florida-style situation, and you have, let's say, a Supreme Court with Amy Coney Barrett just confirmed, there is no way the left would permit Biden to say, I'm going to just abandon your express wishes of the majority because he will win the popular vote and just let Trump carry on. Because that trust that the other guy will keep the rules of the game fair for you for the next bite at the apple of the next election, totally gone. And I would argue justifiably gone. I wouldn't trust Trump further than I could throw him. Economist, former trade unionist Paul Sweeney talks or asks about the possibility of major civil unrest. How likely do you see that breakdown of trust that you mentioned over the next few years, whether it's to do with the election or not? Do you see civil unrest becoming a more common thing in the United States? I think more specifically around the election, yes. So I've been involved in a group, a bipartisan group that called the Transition Integrity Project, which has been doing war games, essentially, around different election scenarios. And one of the ones I did was where Biden wins 52 to 47, gets six, seven million more votes in a low turnout election in which Trump somehow manages to win the electoral college. And the pressure on Biden to concede is resisted. He's just not allowed to concede, basically, because of what's at stake. And there are massive demonstrations. And Trump uses this in this scenario to send in the various parliamentary groups from the Department of Homeland Security that you saw cropping up in Portland and elsewhere over the summer, to then create the sense that Trump is the candidate of stability and continuity against these anarchic forces on the ground. We've seen in the last few months a lot more liberals buying guns. There are Second Amendment liberals too nowadays. And it wouldn't take more than a couple of incidents for Trump to justify federalizing the National Guard, having the insurrection act invoked, in which case you could be getting into very dangerous, very, very dangerous territory. I'm not predicting this is going to happen. And scenarios like this, which had pretty impressive players in it, not me, but people from senior echelons of the law and American politics, scenarios like this are about seeing what's plausible. And I don't find that one particularly implausible, precisely because of what we've been talking about in the last 45 minutes, the breakdown of civility, of trust, the assumption of the worst about your opponents. It's feeling more toxic than I've ever felt it. And that, of course, bespeaks of great risks in the years ahead in terms of maintaining civil order. You mentioned earlier that one of the differences between now and the 60s was that the extremism was on the left in the 1960s. There are clearly some extremist groups on the left this time and Tief, et cetera. How big, how powerful, how well armed, how widely supported are those extreme left groups? So the Department of Homeland Security has been doing studies on this, and I don't know if you might have seen that the White House got them to change the conclusions of their study and dilute some of the main findings. But it's very clear that the groups, if you look at groups that are armed, massively stronger on the right than the left. But on the left, you're getting a growth of really hardline groups as well. From a much lower base, it is growing. And you have loosely affiliated organizations like Antifa. They don't have the same hierarchy and structure and membership. You can't really identify them in the state. They're much more amorphous. There are militant wings to Black Lives Matter that are perhaps easier to identify. But there's no doubt they're growing. There is a mini arms race going on amongst paramilitaries in America, which a normal administration and state governments could completely contain. This doesn't have to be a threat to the Republic. But if you're looking at a breakdown of norms in a post-election scenario, then things could get pretty combustible because you've got, I think we estimate that the CSIS had was that there were 30,000 armed militia on the right. They didn't have a number for the left, but I imagine it's thousands. That's enough people with guns to cause a lot of problems. Okay. I'd love to. Apologies to Peter Gunning, who asked a great question about the prospects of American public education and whether there's a connection to that and anti-science, anti-facts. I'm not going to ask you that, Ed, because we really need to move to the international relations dimension to this, given how little time we have left. Packhawk's a former president of the European Parliament. Post-war multilateralism has been laboring under increasing strain. What future for multilateralism after the US elections? I guess that depends. There are two answers to that, a Biden administration, a Trump administration. Well, great question. Look, I think if Trump is re-elected, I think that the US will pull out of the WTO. I think NATO will be very questionable. I think you'll see a continuation of what you've seen in the last four years, which is America walking away from international institutions and China filling the vacuum to some degree by either taking over existing ones or creating ones of its own. I don't think the Trump scenario would be that surprising. It would be more of the same, but probably accelerated. Biden is still, at heart, a status quo anti-person. He shifted a bit beyond his initial contention that Trump is an aberration. I think he now sees Trump as a symptom of a more deep-seated problems, but by and large, on the foreign policy side, I think he sees Trump as an aberration who can be corrected. It's pretty clear from what Biden has said that America would rejoin almost everything that Trump has pulled America out of, barring the TPP. Of course, the TPP was America's creation, but politics forbids Biden from even mentioning the TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, in a favorable light. The people around Biden are experienced, winnowed public servants for the most part. People like Nick Burns, Bill Burns, Tom Donilon, Kurt Campbell, Susan Rice having been pipped to the post as vice presidential candidate would probably be Secretary of State, in my view. Michelle Flournoy, probably Pentagon, Tony Blinken, probably National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, probably Deputy National Security Advisor, possibly Deputy of State, Secretary of State, Tom Donilon. I mean, there are a lot of familiar, fairly trustworthy names who aren't going to reinvent the rulebook here, but they are going to be very competent in how they administer the rulebook. I don't think Biden in the early months, if he wins, of his administration would need to do very much to reanimate America's partners across the Atlantic, and indeed in Asia. He would just need to swear his oath of office and he'd get a standing ovation. I think there would be a great deal of relief amongst America's allies, probably not so true in Hungary or Poland or some of the allies that have tilted more towards Trump. And you might have some ambivalence in China, which has an ongoing debate about whether Trump is good for them or not. It's actually quite unclear who China wants to win this election. Definitely it would be a bad day for Putin if Biden becomes president, but I think that he will inherit a world that's different to the one he left off. And so simply resuming business as normal isn't enough. You have to imagine and reimagine some of these institutions and America's place in the world. And so that debate is happening in democratic foreign policy circles, and there are different generations. A lot of the people I've mentioned are older generation, but there are younger ones, led perhaps by Jake Sullivan, who are a little bit more prepared to push the envelope on what America should be and how it should reimagine its foreign policy. And I suspect that would be a very important cleavage in a Biden administration. I do get to ask a Peter Gunning question. He wonders if there are fundamental aspects of the Europe-U.S. relationship that have changed. Now, I think you partially answered that question already, but on issues and on moving towards the trade thing as we move towards the conclusion of particular concern, the United States is on its biggest trading partner. I know many people think it's Britain or some of the continental countries, but it's actually the United States. So are there fundamental things that have changed? As you say, Biden would inherit something that is different. What are those fundamental changes? And particularly on trade policy under a Biden administration, do you think America will become much more protectionist, a little more protectionist? Any thoughts on those issues? The direction is on trade. It's sort of Trumpianism with a human face, and a more predictable sort of signaling system. So I don't think America is going to go back to saying, okay, let's resume T-Tip discussions. Just find that hard to believe. I think there will be a lot of focus on getting a common Western position on the Internet in the context of how much further along China is than it was in 2016. So I think there will be that. I think there will be very little chance of a U.K.-U.S. trade deal, even if the U.K. starts behaving well again on the Northern Ireland protocol. I just don't think it's going to be high up on a Biden administration's list. And I think we've spoken about this before, but the key players there are Nancy Pelosi and Richie Neal, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. They're not in favor of rewarding Brexit Britain with a trade deal. So Biden is more protectionist, not maybe at heart, but he's a poll's poll. He knows which way the winds are blowing. And he's not going to be pushing for big deals unless he can show massive reshoring potential from those deals of American manufacturing. Personally, I think none of this makes much sense. You don't reshor jobs in manufacturing. You just reshor production. And America has more manufacturing than it's ever had. It's just it doesn't create jobs. And the problem is the lack of jobs, not the lack of manufacturing. So until America understands that basic distinction and allows its politics to think more rationally about these things, you know, that unfortunately is going to continue to distort the whole debate about trade. I don't think Biden's going to be moving in a direction that Europe particularly wants America to move, but it's not going to be in a dramatic way. And it's going to be far more predictable and far more easy to be an interlocutor with a President Biden than with a President Trump. Just a follow up. Do you think Trump would pull out of the WTO? Is that a he mentioned that even in the last election campaign, obviously, there's been the US position on the dispute arbitration system with the WTO has effectively stopped it. But do you think the US could pull out of the WTO all together under a second Trump administration? I think it would do so within the first year. I mean, there's been a couple of points where Trump had wanted to pull out of the WTO and light highs, though his trade rep sensitive is in favor of that. You know, not to mention people like Robert Navarro, his trade advisor in the National Security Council. And what would Biden do on WTO? I think Biden would have to talk about reforming it. He's been very light on trade policy in his campaign. He's been very light on trade policy and he's been very light on China policy and the two are sort of hard to separate nowadays. So if you would privately ask all of these people, I just mentioned, I know all these people, you know, I've been in 15 years, they've been around, I've been around. All of them would be totally on board with America rejoining the TPP as the best way to handle China as it originally was. But they understand that the politics of this is very difficult. So you'd have to do to the TPP what Trump did with NAFTA.  And, you know, then the WTO, you know, maybe it wouldn't really matter at that point, you could just sort of revive it and fulfill its quota on its appeals body, on its appellate body, and that wouldn't matter so much. But you're going to have to, if you want to get back to the status quo, Auntie, you're going to have to make a great show about pretending not to. Two questions from two comments. Sonya Highland asks, could Trump pull out of NATO? And Connor Fagan asks, what are the prospects of Biden rejoining the Iran nuclear deal? On the latter, the Iran nuclear deal, I think Biden wants to rejoin it. As you know, all the other original signatories, China, Russia, Germany, UK, France, have stayed in it. But Iran, because of America's withdrawal, has breached some of the limits on the Iranian enrichment, etc., that it agreed to in the 2015 deal. So Biden's simply coming in and saying, now that it's breached these limits, we should rejoin. Again, he's going to have to, he's going to have to somehow renegotiate this and get Iran to agree to new restrictions. So it's not simply saying, well, we left the club, now we're rejoining it. The politics won't permit that. Yes, Trump wants to leave NATO. He's been cancelled against it. He's had that instinct all along. I think a Trump who twice wins against conventional wisdom, when people expected him to lose, it's very hard to overestimate what that would do to his psychology, that he can do anything he wants. To do this twice, I've long seen this election as a Trump election as three times as consequential as him getting elected in the first place. Getting elected in the first place, you can see as an aberration, an accident, a quirk, a freak of electoral nature. Twice would mean America really wants him, that America is really serious about this new phase. But in terms of the psychology of Trump, there would be nobody who could dissuade him from doing what he wants instinctively. He would be the genius. I think that is a good note to end it on, Ed. We're just coming to the end of our time. I apologize to people, the questions that I couldn't get in the hour is over. So thanks for everyone for tuning in. We've covered an awful lot of ground. Thanks so much, Ed, for joining us again. It's been a real pleasure and a real tour de force, so we greatly appreciate it. Thank you so much, Dan. A real delight, anytime.