Unbiased

Arjun: Traditionally foreign policy has not been of great interest to the majority of the American public, but with the war in Ukraine, this has really changed. And now foreign policy is not just some elitist pursuit, but something that very much affects all of us in this interconnected world that we live in.

One of the best people who can decipher American foreign policy, and really American politics in general, is our guest today, Tom Nichols. Tom is a recently retired professor at the U.S. Naval war college, where he specialized in issues concerning Russia, nuclear weapons, and national security affairs. He's also prolific writer most recently writing for The Atlantic and with op-eds in dozens of publications from the Washington post to the Federalist.

He's written multiple books, including The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge, as well as Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault From Within on Modern Democracy, both of which will delve into today. He tweets at @RadioFreeTom, and I must say his tweets are outstanding. They're witty, insightful, sarcastic, and just playing fun.

Incidentally, if you were a jeopardy fan back in the nineties, you might remember Tom. He was a five time champion in 1994 and for a while, the games all time, top player. So Dan and I are excited and tad intimidated to have Tom on the show today, we've been preparing with several games of trivial pursuit just in case.

So welcome, Tom.

Tom: Thank you. I have to correct you though. I was not the games all time. I was just one of the top 100. when we went into the big tournament of the top 100 champions, I got dusted immediately. So I'm guessing my rank was probably 100.

Arjun: Still very Impressive.

Dan: Yeah, you've competed against more top 100 champions than Arjun or I have. So that puts you at the of the And Arjun gave me the honor of asking the first question. I'm gonna ask two questions. The first question is how did it feel to start your retirement as an expert in Russia, and then have a war breakout in Ukraine almost immediately after?

Tom: Actually I'm gonna say this it was liberating because,look, I did 25 years of teaching, I was working at the defense department and this way I felt completely comfortable being able to talk about the things I wanted to talk about, without being constrained by, what am I gonna have to say in the classroom, with my officers, who have to deal with this problem?

I think, in some ways I feel bad that I'm not in the classroom with American officers talking about this. But on the other hand, I felt like, this is something that's very personal to me after a lifetime studying Russia. I taught at the Naval war college, but it's not like I was getting super cool, CIA briefings or anything like that.

So in a way, it just allowed me to go focus on this war rather than have to teach the whole curriculum of. the kind of government mandated curriculum while I would rather have been glued to the set watching what's going on in.

Dan: Yeah. And do you think the war could have been avoided?

Tom: I don't know. I think if this war could have been avoided, it had to have been averted 10 or 15 years ago.

I think, a series of fumbles, bipartisan fumbles, I will say. even though I think, there was no better time for Vladimir Putin than the four years under Donald Trump. But I think the response to the Georgia war, the response to the Crimean war, the pullout from the middle east, the pullout from Afghanistan. I think a lot of things together, convinced at least Putin and some Russians that he could probably get away with this.

Tom: But there was one contingent event, that no American administration, no European government or NATO could have stalled or foreseen. And that's COVID. And my colleague at the Atlantic, Anne Applebaum has suggested that, this could ha and, just a speculation that the war in Ukraine could have been one of the weirdest outcomes of COVID because Putin was in such isolation. He's such a germophobe. He was so worried about this, that, left alone for a year and a half kind of in his dungeon with his own thoughts.

And with a very small group of people around him, he really got this into his head that he could finally pull this off. he's been thinking this way for at least a decade. And if not more, I'm told George Bush back in oh seven,

he was also giving speeches and interview saying, but you can't just invade other people and impose your system of government. Those days are over. Nobody's gonna try and recreate the Soviet union. So something changed over the past, seven or eight years. And I think it was a combination of, inattentive American foreign policy, but also there are things we don't know. It's possible that Putin is old. he is old, but he's getting sick. He may have thought this is his hail Mary pass for greatness. He was too long in his cups down in his bunker, whatever it was. So could this particular event have been avoided? Probably not.

And I think, I give a lot of credit to the Biden administration for doing things, that I think were remarkably daring in a way with intelligence. Constantly trying to head him off by letting out what we knew, which the intelligence community really doesn't like to do. We think he's gonna go in the next two days and that kind of rattled the Russians, but could it have been stopped?

Ultimately, I just don't know. I don't think so. Unless you started a decade ago.

Arjun: So Tom, that's a very interesting, response and nowhere in that was anything about, what Putin said was one of the instigators, which is NATO's eastward expansion. And so I'm curious what you think about that. Is that just a red herring that he's using to justify it, or if you flip the tables and you thought about some military Alliance with, let's say China, and they were consistently adding members all around the United States on some side, wouldn't the US be equally rattled and, irritated?

Tom: No. I'll take that second part first and say that, that is, utter moral relativism about international relations. And I'll come back to that. as for Putin's argument about NATO expansion, that is what we, political scientists call a, gigantic boatload of crap.
The technical term, he, if he were that concerned about NATO expansion, then he should have gone to war over Finland and Sweden joining. Instead they shrugged and said, yeah, we figured that would happen. he knows it wasn't about NATO. And he's actually given up on that. His last argument about this was I am Peter the great, and I am recovering traditional Russian lands. He has just completely abandoned all that realist who ha cuz he got a lot of mileage out of it. because there were Americans who were incredulously repeating it. People like John Meer Shimer and others. but he's making no bones about it.

This territory used to be ours. It was ours back then. It's ours now. It should be ours again. that's really what was always motivating this, he has in his mind this idea that he's gonna create a Christian slavic post Soviet yet kind of Soviet empire. because I think, the guy's deranged part of the problem with realist political analysis is that it takes human beings with all of their fallible, thoughts. And it tries to jam them into a highly rational framework so that it can make sense and that we can play with it like a rubiks cube. he keeps telling us why he's doing it. These are traditionally Russian lands. They belong to us. Peter, the great owned them. The Soviet union collapse was a tragedy. I'm getting them back.

Tom: Arjun, your point about. what if China did that to us? Yes. I suppose if China created an Alliance with Canada and Mexico after we had spent 70 years occupying and brutalizing, all of Canada and Mexico, and they hated us, after, destroying them and forcibly incorporating them into us as the Soviets did. Yeah. We'd probably feel a little insecure, but we didn't do that.

People forget the United States now has 32 NATO allies because they petitioned us for entry. We didn't go and capture them like pieces on a chess board, the way the Russians.

I always tell my students,you have to do Dr. Evil air quotes. The Russians had an Alliance system, which meant that it was basically as, Bigney of Bransky once called it the Stalinist interstate system. and the minute that those people had a chance to make a choice about whether or not to be in the Warsaw pact, they said we're out. Thank you. so I think it is just utterly, false equivalence to talk about authoritarian states creating, phony Alliance structures around the United States and the United States accept along with its democratic partners, accepting the petition of other countries to join us and be part of that Alliance because they're so afraid of being brutalized again by the same country.

Dan: I may ask you to repeat that answer over again, cuz one question I have for you as a follow up is there no internal political logic to Putin's invasion other than imperialist ambitions?

Tom: Only in the sense that if you think he did it, because he's worried about shoring up his situation at home and that a nationalist war is always a good way to glue a country together. But there is no, I feel like, Lawrence Friedman and I, and a few other folks out there are among the lonely voices saying Putin is not a good strategist. like it's like when people talk about Trump and his 36 dimensional chess. what is what's Putin's real game? Putin screwed up. It's that simple. He made a bad decision in a very tight circle of decision makers and the way, this is that he's looking for scapegoats.

he's throwing intelligence guys in jail. he's got a two star general sitting in the Ford of a prison,or no, actually he's a sailor's rep. they threw him into the equivalent of the Florence supermax. at some point I think we do ourselves a disservice by searching for the realist pigeonhole that will make this all make sense.

Tom: He screwed up. He genuinely believed that Ukraine was low hanging fruit, one quick, kick to the crotch and Kiev would fall. And,that Zelensky the, apparently the Nazi Jew,would flee the country and the whole thing would come apart now. With that said, by the way, I, because my understanding of the Ukrainian military was clearly outta date.

I thought that the Ukrainian military would collapse and that Zelensky would have to leave Kiev for his own safety. I was wrong. I think almost none of us who study Russian military matters were really ready for the incredible staggering incompetence of the Russian military.

We have not really seen the Russian military against anything like a near peer in a long time. And I think none of us were just ready for just how bad they are at this. But with all that said, Putin really thought he could pull this off and be over in a week, it would be a fait accompli. So when we're constantly trying to say, but what was the real motivation?

The real motivation is he wanted to put together the Slavi core of the old Soviet union and the old Russian empire. He already had Belarus. He would've gotten, Ukraine. Moldova was probably next. It's you know, sometimes, cigars, just a cigar. Imperial conquest is exactly what it looks like.

Imperial conquest and the constant hand wave of if only NATO hadn't, this is especially painful to me. this is one of those things where in my expert mode, I have to start confessing my sins. I was a go slow on NATO, guy in 97, 98. I was like, bring in Poland, bringing the Czech Republic, bring in Hungary. And then go very slowly, very carefully step at a time. We're extending a nuclear guaranteed at other countries. We need to have a bigger debate about that.

of course that was in Yeltsin's Russia where I said him we'll work it out. we'll do this carefully so that we're not destabilizing forces that are friendly to us and so on. but I think without NATO expansion, I think some of those other countries already be on the hook.

so you know as I often say, the person who really talked me out of my views on NATO was Vladimir Putin.

Tom: They had to put a portrait of Putin in the hallway in Brussels as like the greatest single, builder of NATO, put it right next to the 1949 signing ceremony and say, this is the guy who rescued NATO 75 years.

Dan: Top 100.

so Tom, you brought up a good point and it, ties in with your book, The Death of Expertise. So you said essentially something like the war surprised a lot of experts. I might be paraphrasing that might not be fair, but, even as troops were being amassed on the border days before the actual invasion, a lot of people are like, nah, it's sabre rattling.

Arjun: It's not really going to happen. He'd be crazy to do it. And like you said, maybe a lot of people didn't even know the Russian military's capabilities and then assume that if it were to happen, Ukraine would collapse really quickly. And we got a lot of these things wrong. So I'm curious, death of expertise talks about the public's lack of trust in experts.

What do you think about that statement?

Tom: Expertise does not mean that you have a crystal ball and that you are infallible. And the most important thing is to not only know why you were wrong, but to be able to draw policy implications out of being both wrong and right. as I tried to say in the book, the public likes to play a prediction game. will Syria use chemical weapons this year? that's a coin toss. That's a 50, 50 coin flip. because if you go on a betting market, the answer is either yes or no. that's not how policy makers work, the problem, how likely is it that Syria will use chemical weapons? What can we do to reduce the likelihood?

How do we affect this calculation? What do we do if for some unforeseen reason or if we're wrong that they use chemical weapons and on and on. one mistake, I think that the experts make is they give into this and I've done it.

I've been on TV and I've done the punditry thing, Where, okay, fine. Here's my prediction. But the other problem is that the public kind of then plays gotcha. The same way they do with weatherman. You said it wasn't gonna rain. No. I said it was highly unlikely that it would rain. I always feel bad for Nate silver, right?

Donald Trump has a one in three chance of winning, but how did Donald Trump win? Because every third time he wins. That's the way this model works. it doesn't mean he can't win. It means that two out of three times under these conditions, he will lose, but one out of three. and I think the other problem too, is the problem of contingent.

that experts cannot explain everything at each moment. could it have been at the last minute that especially where in a system where power is so personalized, like in Russia, could it have been at the last minute that Putin said, oh, maybe I won't go. Maybe I will go. Maybe I won't.

I always tell my students when we study the Gulf war, the second Gulf war, we have all these really complicated models of decision making. And yet there's a really telling moment where George Bush walks by Conde Rice's office and he pokes his head in their door and they've been, debating this and what do we do and WMD and so on.

Tom: And he pokes his head and he says, fuck Sadam. We're taking him out. if you're a foreign policy expert in another country there's only so much inside baseball you're gonna get to know whether the president of the United States is just gonna get up out of his chair one day, lean into, the national security advisor's office and say, fuck that guy. We're taking him out.

so I think the experts oversell what they can do in part, because they're afraid of admitting that the limitations of, what we're capable of, but the public wants extraordinary levels of certainty, with no qualifications and no nuance. And I think we used to be better at this.

Tom: And I'll, I know I'm on a rant here, but I'll add a story that I always throw out at moments like this,back when Apollo 13 was crippled, that was a time when American said. Hey space travel is really dangerous. This is like an amazing miracle that we can pull this off at all.

Something went wrong and we're gonna get those guys home. And we're all rooting for NASA and failure is not an option and God willing, our boys are gonna get off that spaceship and in the ocean. I think today, if Apollo 13 happened, it would be like, what, who screwed this up?

How, what is it? It's just a trip to the moon. How hard could this be? who's responsible here. and I think,we just have a different attitude about things that are highly complicated, highly risky, have a lot of moving parts to them. because we've gotten used to things being so successful.

look at COVID. We came up with a vaccine in a year. I almost think it's like a movie script. We came up on a 96% effective vaccine in 12 months and people are already like,it made me sick for a day or two. oh wow. What a failure of science.

Arjun: Oh, I love

Tom: It's incredible. It is incredible. The expectations that we have come to have about expertise. but again, experts don't help their cause by saying, yes, we, we are the Jedi masters. it's not a healthy dialogue in an either direction at this point. do you think part of the issue is there's an inability to distinguish expertise from policy because

Oh, absolutely.

Dan: the Iraq war and that's one of the two big events that I think really undermined Americans' faith and experts in the first part of the century, there was the Iraq war and then of course there was a financial crisis. Both of which were overseen by people who were supposed to know better. So do you feel like there's,

do you get what I'm saying?

Tom: oh, you are pushing my buttons man

Dan: All right.

Tom: man.first on the Gulf war, people forget how popular that war was and that there was something like a national consensus that killing Saddam Hussain was just a good thing to do. now it was a total mistake for the policy makers to sell this as just about WMD.

I actually argued for taking out Saddam in the nineties on humanitarian grounds that he had engaged in genocide. he was trying to wipe out the Kurds and the marsh Arabs. there were, perfectly good reasons to depose Saddam Hussain, in the nineties based on the humanitarian grounds. but in the end, the policy makers are the ones responsible. And, just because George tenant walks in and says slam dunk, that doesn't get you off the hook, I was a foreign policy advisor to a Senator. And in the end, as he often reminded me, he was the one that had to cast the vote.

Tom: I could say anything I wanted, he's the guy that has to answer the American people. And I think too much too often, the experts are asked to justify things, which they are more than willing to do the politicization of intelligence but also that the advice we give gets turned into something that even we don't recognize

Paul Bremer, I don't know who told Paul Bremer to disband the Iraqi army, that I think was him saying, I've read history. I'm not sure there would've been a whole lot of people would've told him to do that, but again, it becomes this, what do you think about disbanding, the Iraqi army and, experts are trained to say, here's the pros and the cons, And the policymaker say good. Then I'm gonna do it and say,whoa. I didn't say that. that makes, by the way, that makes experts infuriating to deal with sometimes because you ask us what we should do. And we say, here's the pros, here's the cons. This is something I got into a lot of trouble with a lot of Atlantic readers.

should we, go back to mask mandates? Probably not mandates. If you wanna wear a mask where a mask. Mandates to me wear down people's faith in experts, they're not properly carried out. Everybody gets pissed at them. They're wearing cloth mask that don't really meant and so on. but that's a policy maker decision based on values that the community elects the policy maker to express.

Tom: Like the idea that a policy maker could stand up and say, we are going to set the national speed limit at X miles an hour. Even though we know that means X number of deaths every year. That's a normal policy making thing. and that, risk and trade offs are part of that. I think we have become a society that says, we must be safe at all costs. it's safety. now that with the first Gulf war, I think the most cynical part wants to say for people inside the Bush administration to say, we will never have a better chance to knock off Saddam Hussain than in this year after nine 11. So let's just do it. again, I thought it was a good idea to take out Saddam Husain on principle. I didn't think it was a good idea to do it and then screw everything up for the next 10 years. I think it was ambassador Barbara Bodine, who said in an interview, something like there were four or five ways to do it, right. There were 500 ways to do it wrong. And I didn't count on us trying all 500 ways first. again experts and policy makers sharing the blame, but they're not the same,people.

The housing thing. On this, I am Dan. I have been, I wrote about it in death of expertise. I wrote about it in our own worst enemy. I'm sorry, but the idea that people should have been supervised by people who know better. Americans are the kind of people who say, be the daddy who tells me I can't buy the house. And also don't, you dare interfere with my freedoms and my choices. I have had many people, particularly on the left tell me, it's the bank's job to tell you you can't afford that house. To which my answer is no, it isn't. No, it is not the bank's job to tell you that. The bank's job is to say, if you live responsibly and don't blow your money, can you actually meet this house payment with the money you make?

Then, that's on them to determine whether they're gonna lend you that. but we, when it came to the housing crash, we started to engage in this childlike demand for paternalism that I still don't understand. That's like walking to a Lexus dealership and saying now, I'm not the most responsible person in the world, so I don't know if you oughta sell me this car and the Lexus dealer saying, you really ought to go down to the Dodge dealership and just get yourself a, something for the family.

don't come here. I can't sell you this Lexus. That would be wrong. that's ridiculous. and I think, now with all that said, there were people who engaged in wrongdoing. People, saying that properties were worth more than they were worth. But in the end, having bought a house and refinanced and, done all that stuff in the end, they hand you a pen and they point you at the line that is dotted and says, this is the number you have to meet. Can you do that? And that to me is a matter of individual responsibility.

Tom: So I really push back hard on the housing crisis, being the housing market failure, being an expert failure. Bankers are not experts. Bankers are selling things. and the policy failure was a bipartisan decision to say, everyone should own a home regardless of their credit worthiness. that is where all this started. and it was easier to just talk about wall street and the bank.

And by the way, I have no connection to wall street or bankers. I'm not, I hate that. I'm defending guys that were doing credit default swaps, in the giant casino. But in the end,the original sin here was to say, everybody should be able to buy a house when everybody can't buy a house, that's just the way that is. Some people are less creditworthy than others.

I have one more story to tell about the housing collapses, and then I will get off this. So I was shopping for a house around 1999, 2000. I'm living here in Rhode Island. We're still not in a housing boom here, but houses are a little expensive. we're near water. And we're driving past all these McMansions that have just been put up 20, 25 years ago. And it's all four by fours and kid toys. And I'm like, are these young families with $40,000 trucks and, new construction McMansions?

I said, I'm 40, I'm almost 40 years old. And they make a six figure salary. I can't do that. And she said, they cash out the equity in their parents' homes. Oh yeah. And put down big down payments. I said, that is a house of cards because when they can't make it, the parents are gonna go down. And this real estate agent, we were driving through this development and there was this long silence and she said, she nodded, and finally, she said, you understand, it's not my job to tell people not to buy houses.

And I said, I understand. And that was eight years before the housing collapsed. And I remember going home and saying to my wife, I don't know if we can find it. No, we have, we turned out, we bought the house, we were renting and then we worked on it and painted it and remodeled it and did all the stuff we were doing.

but I said, those nice houses. I said, those are all gonna be up for sale pretty soon, like in five or 10 years. And of course when the housing market collapsed, it took everybody down with it. But, that was how it was done. And I said, okay, when the housing market melted down, I think I was one of the few people sitting around going, it amazed that it took this long.

Arjun: Yeah. by the way, having just finished your book, our own worst enemy, the phrase moral hectoring appears a few times and you are certainly living up.

Tom: That's what

Arjun: Exactly. You were living up to that billing very well, Tom. I feel like my uncle is, but rightly Hey, don't hold back. It's what you believe. I love it.

cause I, when I first, pitched the book, one of the outside reviewers, cuz it is a peer reviewed book and I love working with Oxford. but one of the outside reviewers said, Tom's, the right guy for this to write this. but I hope it's not just moral hectoring. And I was like I said to my editor, but that's my core skillset

Arjun: That's me in

Tom: That's like the only thing I know.

Arjun: Only because you brought it up, Tom, I want to go a little bit of a tangent, what do you think of overall us foreign policy in the 20th century as we have meddled in affairs of many countries to depose all kinds of dictators or people that are unsavory and likes. And of course, you know them a million times better than me, but just throwing out Chile, Nicaragua, any of these places, what's our record on this?

Actually Iran is a, another great one. If you think back into 53, I think what's our record. Is it at the net? Is it net a good thing that the United States has been doing overall at meddling? Or should we have said actually, maybe we should have just stayed out of all these things.

Tom: That's a great question that aligns carefully the difference between the cold war and the post cold war environment. There are a lot of really bad things that we did that, I think you could argue were part of the necessity of fighting the cold war. We deposed some regimes and we got into bed with some really awful regimes in the global struggle with the Soviet union. I, being the kind of, what did they call us enlightened Willians Reaganites I always believed winning the cold war without completely losing our souls was the most important task of American foreign policy.

That didn't mean that we weren't going to have blood on our hands. And we did, some of that blood was avoidable. Some of it was the result of paranoia and overreaction, but some of it was just the brutal reality of fighting a brutal enemy. I think after the cold war, we had a positive responsibility to engage in meaningful and humanitarian interventions for the sake of doing good things. I'm a R two P guy. I think there is a responsibility to protect.I think that we should have in adopted the Spider-Man policy of with great power comes great responsibility.

I think we should not have averted our eyes from Rwanda and let a million people die in 90 days. we intervened in a lot of places for the sake of our own power and our interests during the cold war. And some of those I disagree with and some of those I think were necessary and we can have long arguments about which interventions during the cold war we should or shouldn't have done.

Tom: But after the cold war, I think it was incumbent on us and the other developed democratic nations of the world to use that same power for good. Now, I guess that makes me in the old verbiage of NeoCon, Using American power for good. I don't, I hate that term because I think it just means it has come to me in anybody who, of anybody who's foreign policy I don't like. but I would've been happy with a foreign policy in the early 20th century after the cold war that said two firm rules of American foreign policy. no new nuclear powers, no genocides. And the rest we can work out. I don't believe we should have been democracy crusaders and going around and picking at will saying you are not democratic enough.

We will, therefore, that's different. I think that's where you use diplomacy and economic aid and cultural, power and all those other things. But I think it would've been a simple enough matter to say here's a good, solid bipartisan foreign policy: no new nuclear weapons, because that is the ultimate threat to humanity. Reduce the ones we have. And no more genocides. That doesn't mean no more wars. That doesn't mean no more violence doesn't mean no more bad stuff, but ethnic cleansing and genocide, we didn't survive world war II and the cold war to make the world safe for genocidal lunatic. And I think we could have done that.

And instead I think nine 11 in that sense,bin Laden's last laugh was to distract us to the point where we went off on a lot of these, goose chases around the world. And we elevated counter-terrorism to a religion, in our foreign policy.

Dan: Now after four years of bashing international institutions and bashing our own allies during the Trump years do you think that now with the war in Ukraine and a lot of the coalition building that's gone on, is this a chance to reset that mission? Biden's doing that. And again, I think our greatest ally in resetting that has been Vladimir Putin. I think that when Trump left office, the Europeans, the damage that can't be undone that Trump did is that the Europeans and others around the world now have concrete evidence that the Americans are actually capable of losing their minds.

we had always been able to say, look, responsible adults are in charge of our foreign policy. We understand, we get a little crazy Americans, have some nutty things going on at home. sometimes we're not the most serious people in the world, but serious adults are in charge of our foreign policy.

Tom: I think this was the first time where the Europeans could say, yeah, no, no,Mike Pompeo was in charge of your foreign policy. You've got a bunch of weirdos loose in your white house. Mike Flynn is sitting in the oval office with your president. But I think what Putin proved in one fell swoop,the pandemic and Putin together, the pandemic proved that globalization was not a problem, but a solution, there were a lot of hot takes right at the beginning of COVID about, oh, this is the end of globalization national borders.

And, protecting your own. When in fact the globalized system is what enabled us to avoid a financial meltdown. Keep international trade moving, exchange the kinds of information we needed to create vaccines and move them, around, we weathered this storm because of globalization.

And I think it's just funny how, I was collecting those articles in the first six months of the pandemic about this is the end of globalization and all it's all gotten very, quiet and crickets on that end of the political spectrum now. But then Putin on top of that proved that international institutions really matter.

And that alliances really matter. And that, what happens in one part of the world is important to people in other parts it's so strange, the argument that,as Trump came into office, that this is the end of alliances and international institutions and, the globalized elites and all of that stuff.

if you'd have said that five or six years later, NATO would be 32 countries, including Finland and Sweden, that the European union would actually be acting like a transnational organization capable of, at least trying to do stuff, that,the Brits would've booted out Boris Johnson.

Tom: And that there's clearly, even though they can't say it too loudly, that there's a whole lot of buyer's remorse about Brexit loose in Britain, as some of us experts might have predicted. I think, I think really that. that there were people who didn't, who wouldn't have foresee that in 2017. But these institutions, by the nature of an institution, they are durable. and it takes more than just, one, weirdo, crack pot president to undo it. But he made a good run at it. Now, if things go south in the 20 22 and 2024 elections, we may be revisiting this because then I think democracy in America is on the way out. And when we fall, a lot of dominoes will come with us.

Arjun: let's go to that. That's effectively the subject of your book, our own worst enemy. And I just finished reading. it's a very interesting read. I have dozens and dozens of highlights on my Kindle. let's talk about, one of the early passages, around comparing democracy and authoritarian systems and effectively, there's this quote, that you have.

It says "authoritarian systems are the authors of their own trouble and deserve every molecule of opposition they face from within. But why are people who are already free, as in democracy, and who are by any relative measure materially and politically better off than those in more repressive states attacking their own systems of governments.

The answers are as disturbing as they are counterintuitive. We are losing because we won. We are suffering because we are successful. We are unhappy because we have what we want."

That is a pretty brutal passage and very thought provoking one. what's your take is democracy inherently unstable in the long run, especially as wealth in inequality rises?

Tom: Oh, you snuck that right in at the end about wealth inequality, which again, you know, as I point out in the book Arjun, inequality is not a good predictor of democratic stability. the former, president of Estonia likes to point out that Hungary, which has one of the, healthiest Gini coefficients in Europe is the leading, edge of authoritarian, pushback, and democratic decline.

And I would argue that's actually more revealing that affluence is the thing that enables democratic backsliding because people don't think there's any cost to it. It becomes the law, nothing matters. Approach to politics,sure. I'll elect Donald Trump because I'm pissed about something my life what's the worse it can happen. Everything's gonna keep working. The lights are gonna stay on. Country's gonna stay safe. The, gasoline's gonna get bumped. And I think, that kind of,affluence frees people up to think about to engage in the narcissism of small differences. Like now that I'm not worried about building highways or protecting the country, or, finding food and shelter.

Now I have plenty of time to think about how much I hate the guy next door, because he has granite countertops or how much I hate people who are different color from me or how much I hate the fact that my kid lives in the basement and won't move out. And I'm gonna blame somebody because I was told that my life was gonna be really good by now. And there's a thing I talk about in the book that social scientists call hedonic adaptation, which is that you just get used to the high standard of living you're at. And you think that anything below that is really, a burden and an egregious kind of offense, and you really see it in every corner of American life.

oh, we can't afford houses anymore. No, you can't afford American houses in the 21st century anymore. Your parents lived in a three bedroom, one bath, which you would not even look at on the market. and your parents lived like my, I lived in a three bedroom, one bath, a hundred year old dump, that my father bought for a song because it was basically a junkyard.

and. and in a town, 90 miles out near the Connecticut river, away from Boston. Now, when people say I can't afford a house, they mean I can't afford the kind of house I want in the kind of place I want to live. and why is that? Because somebody's screwing me over and the government is supposed to enable me not being screwed over and to have what I want, therefore democracy sucks. And I think we have just made that series of intuitive leaps to why democracy always sucks. look, I'm not being Pollyannaish here.

Tom: I mean, there are plenty of problems about inequality is a real thing, and it's a real problem, in that it, it depresses economic activity. It sucks a lot of capital out of markets where it should be. And so on the average person, however, could not begin to tell you how income inequality really matters to them. Other than that, it knowing about it, just pisses them off. And interestingly enough, as I point out in the book, people direct their anger about inequality to the people who are closest to them in income, not to the people who are fantastically wealthy.

the whole problem with the economically motivated theory of democratic decline. It's a great theory, except none of the data supports any of it. Which one might say makes it a win. Scary. think about it though. why is it that the most dedicated anti-democratic activity in the United States in great Britain and Italy and Poland, Turkey is from the middle class? by that economic reasoning, the most dedicated enemy of democracy, should be, poor black and brown people rioting in the streets and burning the capital.

Tom: When in fact they are not that the people who attack the capital are, real estate agents and orthodontists and chiropractors and accountants.

And until somebody can come up, I think I've come up with a pretty good theory about why that happens. And it's not necessarily that original a theory either.

it's drawn from Eric Kaufman. it's From,Hoffsteader and others. I just, until somebody comes up with a theory better than that, I think that the data takes a lot more explanation than well, it's just, it's because of climate change and equality and, racial injustice and social problems and so on. it's boredom and affluence literally poisoning us to the point where we will do anything rather than live the ordinary lives that human beings live every

Dan: Mm, do you know? I was thinking,

Tom: How.

How.

I love, I. I, I was thinking about this ahead of our conversation too, because in a lot of ways, even if you look at Trump's campaign in 2016, it really harken back to this, leave it to beaver era in the 1950s, which was a time when in, in my estimation, America won the lottery.

we had a long, a young population. We had a thriving economy, we owned two thirds of the world's gold. the industrial capacity of the rest of the world was rubble. We had nothing but tailwinds. And it almost seems as if like lottery winners we're now 70 years later bought a bunch of expensive stuff and wondering where our money went and we've just expected this certain lifestyle that was really more of an anomaly than it was reflective of like baseline reality.

what are your thoughts on that?

Tom: It's funny that you bring up lottery winners. Because one thing we know about people who win big in lotteries is that it almost invariably ruins their lives. this is like a, ongoing, it's, it used to being just a meme or a kind of a lifestyle piece in the newspaper. But we now know when enough years of lotteries that winning big in a lottery literally does wreck your life. and, and I think, in, in a passage, I quoted in my book, Andy Bacevich with whom I disagree about everything. nonetheless got off a great line where he said the end of the cold war was the in effect, winning the lottery.

And suddenly we said, where's my car, where's my condo, where's my vacation. Part of the reason I'm such a grouchy old man about this is that I lived through the seventies. and recently I just did a piece in the Atlantic a few weeks ago where I said, I know you think it's 1979, right?

The Russians are on the March and there's high inflation and the president's unpopular. But if you didn't live through the seventies, it's hard to explain how different it was. Where the Soviet union was literally putting out, articles that people around the world agreed with. That said America's on the way out. And we're on the way out. And people went like you had the prime minister of great Britain before Thatcher basically saying my job is to help manage the decline of NATO and Britain's decline in Europe. we just took it as at, for granted that factories were closed and not coming back, inflation by 1979 had already been around for seven years.

We've had one year of it finally hitting 9% in the last few months and people are like freaked when that was just the normal inflationary problem that began under Nixon. for older folks that are listening to this, I will remind them that, I'm old enough to remember whip inflation now buttons like the Ford administration put out wind buttons, whip inflation.

Now as if somehow I, as a citizen by wearing a button, I could do anything about inflation. so I think, this is, there is part of this problem of the hedonic adaptation a about this,that we just don't understand. How bad things were and how bad they can get.

I know that all seems like grumpy, old man stuff. You kids don't understand that in the seventies, we had to, listen to a track tapes and blah, blah, blah. but there is a problem here that I think we have had such a long unbroken streak of prosperity, that we don't really know what to do with where we are right now. especially after two years of a pandemic.

sorry, Dan, I feel like that kind of dodged your

Dan: No, it was actually,it helps a lot because I think, if you look at, again, going back to the beginning of the cold war, there were almost two, maybe tracks America was on. And one was this sort of being the democratic stalwart against the Soviet union. But a lot of that was represented in terms of consumerism in a way, look at these nice stoves.

We have these nice televisions, these nice cars. And it almost seems like when the iron curtain fell, that we forgot about the democracy, it had kept on the consumer track. And that's where

of

Tom: arewe made a choice. I really hammer this and some folks out there who've read the book have gotten it that underlying both the death of expertise and our own worst enemy. There is a critique of capitalism here, which is that when you, marketize everything, you start losing the ability to determine what's important.

and particularly marketizing a youth culture, which we have. but you're right, that post world war II America, it was a lottery hit. but you also had a generation of people who had been through a war and understood. This is where I was going with the seventies, who said, wow, I can afford a tiny house on a little patch of ground in Levittown.

Tom: I am the richest guy in the world, because up until then the norm was you lived in apartments. people thought I was a well off kid because I had a house. Like that today is just like in inconceivable. Like of course you had a house, every kid has a house.

but most of the people, even in my neighborhood lived in apartments and three Deckers and, multi-family, dwellings. And, I think you're right that after the end of the cold war, we said, okay, now what do we stand for in the world? And what we stood for was 9,000 different flavors of Doritos.

Tom: And I think we lost that's even though the world was still a dangerous place that needed in America with a sense of mission, we just of gave up on that and said, we kicked George H w Bush out of office because of people like pat Buchanan and Ross perot and we elected the guy who said, it's the economy, stupid enough, feel your pain. And I think that was, and Clinton, wasn't the worst president in terms of economics or foreign policy. But I think that was part of a beginning of a slide where we just said, just as long as everything's okay and there's enough TV and beer and popcorn, then we're good. to me, Clinton, was a very adolescent kind of personality. And I think it was perfect for our times in the nineties, just like Trump being the kind of angry old white guy, narcissist was just the perfect avatar for a Republican party that had turned into that. Said the angry white guy yelling into a microphone,

Arjun: Nice. nice Clinton impression there, by the way the, the voice was clutch. okay. on a, maybe slightly more positive note, I don't know, in your most recent newsletter in the Atlantic, you had.

Tom: Oh,

Arjun: Yeah, I know. It's you read the book, it's quite, doom and gloom and I like, at the end, you try to save it.

You're like, I suppose I should give you some like recipes for solutions. I don't have a lot. but in your newsletter, you said this, you said "American democracies on the ropes and the destruction of our constitutional system is still possible if enough of the unhinged minority votes, and enough of their rational majority does not vote."

So my question is this: in there, you're basically saying that look, the majority is still rational. there's still, possibility this works out. If they show the polls, I'm curious. Why do you think the rational majority is not more visible in everything policy day to day stuff? Why.

Tom: Because their lives are good and they just are comfortable with it. And this frustrates the hell outta me, because I've been, I've talked with people that I care about a lot, but who say, all right, so January 6th was bad at me. What were they gonna do? Overthrow the government.

And I'm like, yes, that's exactly what would've happened. And there would've been bloodshed. And then there would've been fighting in state capitals and people shooting at each other. and then they, you get this kind of a, all the biggest danger is this complacency that I think a lot of people, who are not Republicans at this point, but I think the rest of us, the kind of broad majority that we have, this complacency that, what things just work out.

It'll be okay. It's not going to be okay. This is now a time in history. when I joined you guys, I was working on a piece that I'm gonna do this week for the same newsletter where I said, look, I threw hard partisan elbows. When I was a younger guy, I was a young Reaganite, I grew up in very liberal, Massachusetts in the seventies.

And so it was really fun to be, part of this kind of morning in America, young Reaganism when I was in my twenties. And I felt like it was okay to throw hard elbows because it'll be okay. yeah. Some of my opponents are practically, I went to BU and the president of BU called them short pants, communists, which I thought was hilarious.

I told a story in another newsletter about a very left wing colleague I had where we used to argue and we would burst out laughing because it usually end with me yelling bolshevik, and he would yell hun. And, and then we would say, but it's gonna be okay.

we would co-host we would co-host election coverage for the Dartmouth radio network and do stuff like that. so if, sometimes I threw harder punches than I might have even believed in this kind of partisan sandbox, because I too thought, it'll just be okay and, yeah.

Tom: They think I'm a commi. I think there are commis and they think I'm a, hun, but we don't really think that. And at the end of the, at the end of all, this, the end of the day, as the old saying goes, we're going to join arms and respect the borders of the constitution. Constitutions are the toddler bumpers on all the sharp furniture that prevents us from hurting ourselves or hurting each other.

I don't think those are there anymore. And I think it is now incumbent on us to be a lot more responsible about what we say,and what we do. But that also means putting aside all of the bitching and whining about I didn't get my student loans forgiven, and gasoline is too expensive. And salary is, went up a buck and just say, look, there's only one thing to vote on. And that is the survival of the constitution. If we do that, everything else works out. And I think we haven't gotten there yet. I think the broad mass of very reasonable people are saying,Biden's old and he doesn't inspire me and Trump's a weirdo and I'm just, it'll work out.

It'll be fine. it's see Trump was present for four years. We didn't die. and I think. It's one reason I'm really glad that the January 6th committee is doing what it's doing, because anyone who's, anyone who's watching those hearings should know we've we had a near death experience on January 6th.

if Mike Pence had gotten in that car, if those rioters had gotten inside the building or gotten in the chamber, and I think people need to understand that for that not to happen again, this is a country where we congratulate ourself for the youth vote, getting to about 50% in 20 20 that's an excusable. we think it's a big deal that we got to 65% turnout in a fight against an authoritarian sociopath. So I think we can survive this. I think we can build a better country, but people have to get off their asses and they have to just show up and stop complaining about well, but my it's gerrymandered or I'm, it's, doesn't matter.

Tom: And I live in a blue or a red district just vote on everything. The part of the reason that we're having this problem with things like gerrymandering, and I say this as a guy who worked in state politics, when people don't show for local and state elections, you are setting yourself up to lose congressional elections because of who gets to draw the maps on who's in charge of the rules.

And who's running the state legislature, abortion, abortion rights, activists who thought as long as we keep electing presidents who appoint Supreme court justices will be okay. that shift, that fight has shifted to state legislatures. that was clear for years should have said fine. If Roe V. Wade has ever overturned, which I never thought it would be, but it has been,then to say, we have a durable majority in these state legislatures that are gonna protect abortion rights, but they didn't. because we elected Obama. We had two terms that we elected bill Clinton. It'll be okay, we'll it'll work.

no, this time things will not work out this time. You have to show up and not show up with signs and coast playing and funky chance and megaphones. Show up and with voter registration forms and get people to the polls.

Dan: Hallelujah, Tom Nichols. I think tapping into our collective conservatism here. I think one of the things the right has done much better than the left is the right just has a way better local game, just a way better local game.

Tom: Oh yeah.

Dan: I think especially with the left, not to bash my friends on the left, but it's always about the midterms. It's always about the presidential election. It is never about the most local elections where to your point, you can have the greatest impact. And I do think, especially with some of these Supreme court decisions, hopefully there are some people at the state level who are willing to do that work. because I do think ultimately, that could potentially reverse the tide and to your point, and everybody listening show up at the state level and the federal kind of takes care of itself.

and also the, primaries. I'm sorry, but if you really believe that we are in a fight for democracy, and you're still in a place like Seattle or New York, city where primary turnout is 12, 13, 15% shame on you. Primaries are where you can help. your friends, for example, learn how to vote. primaries are a good dry run for general elections.

Tom: Even if you think the primary doesn't matter that much, you can, that's where you learn where you're polling place is. You get used to the idea you vote in every damn thing you can vote in because the other thing that happens in primary elections, there are ballot questions. There are other things, or, draft, ballot initiatives, and people just don't do it because they don't, they have a million excuses.
I, I was a college professor teaching undergraduates for many years and, I still do, part-time and there's a lot of passion. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. Just show up. And the other thing I think, Dan, Republicans are really good at putting aside their differences and saying that person has an R next to their name. Lauren Boebert's a maniac, but I want the Republicans to hold the chamber and she's a vote for holding the chamber. So I'm just gonna bite the bullet and do it. Or conversely for people on the far right to say, oh, I can't stand Mitt Romney. he's a squish and a liberal Republican, but he will vote to make sure that Mitch McConnell runs the Senate.
Think about how often Democrats have said we need to primary Joe mansion.
I am not gonna defend Joe Manchin. I think he's awful. But what do you get if you, primary Joe Manchin? You get a Republican Senator is what you get. Is that what you want? Okay. but sorry, you can have a bad Democrat who keeps control of the chamber for the Democrats, or you can get rid of that bad Democrat and put Mitch McConnell back in charge. You don't have a third alternative here. There is no third choice. Life is imperfect. What's that line from the breakfast club, it's an imperfect world, sir, screws, fall out doors, get loose.
You just, sometimes you just have to say it's an imperfect world and this is the best you're gonna do. And Democrats are very bad at that. They're very bad at saying, I just have to eat this half a loaf rather than get everything I want

Arjun: By the way, your book has so many references to movies at some that I hadn't seen as well. So funnily enough, I made a list of movies to watch as I was reading this. There are good recommendations in here.
Really tested. I tested the patience of my editor with that one. I know cuz somebody, we weren't having a talk one time at Oxford and someone said, oh, that's a great reference too. You should put that in. And that's a great pop culture reference and my poor very definition of long suffering editor, cuz it's a second book we worked on together. He was like, no, I think he's got enough of those in there now. You, you even had the prime directive from star Trek in there? I was like, wow. no, that was fabulous. I think, maybe people don't wanna get moral hectoring, but, I think it's worth it. It's important. and actually very good to hear from you, Tom. it's a good call to arms. Don't take what we have for granted. so many of our guests on the show have said the same thing.
Don't take it for granted. We have something great and it's on us. Every one of us has gotta do our part. I think that's a very fair call to arms and it's not a partisan one. It's not a unrealistic one. It's a civic expectation that we should all have. So I think it's very fair. Thank you for that, Tom.
No, this has been great. I do, but. Not gonna be Tom Mrs. Airport run. So I'll shut my mouth.
I appreciate it guys.

Tom: It was fun. Thank

Arjun: Thank you so much.