Global Affairs Expert Webinar: The American Experiment
Jeremi Suri, the Mack Brown distinguished chair for leadership in global affairs and professor of public affairs and history at the University of Texas at Austin, leads the conversation on the evolution of American political and institutional norms.
These webinars provide an opportunity for college and university educators and students to discuss global issues with CFR fellows, Foreign Affairs authors, and other leading experts. To register for future invitations, please complete this form or email [email protected] with your name, title, and academic affiliation.
Speaker
Jeremi Suri
Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs
University of Texas at Austin
Presider
Irina A. Faskianos
Vice President, National Program and Outreach
Council on Foreign Relations
Transcript
FASKIANOS: Welcome to today’s session of the Fall 2025 Global Affairs Expert Webinar series. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. Thank you for joining us.
Today’s discussion is on the record, and the video and transcript will be available on education.CFR.org. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.
We are delighted to have Jeremi Suri with us today to talk about the American experiment. Dr. Suri is the Mack Brown distinguished chair for leadership in global affairs and professor of public affairs and history at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author and editor of eleven books on contemporary politics and foreign policy, most recently Civil War By Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy. He has earned numerous accolades, including being named one of America’s top young innovators in the arts and sciences by Smithsonian Magazine, and receiving the Pro Bene Meritis Award for contributions to the liberal arts and President’s Associates Teaching Excellence Award from the University of Texas at Austin. And he is a CFR member as well as the author of Democracy of Hope Substack.
So, Jeremi, thank you very much for being with us today to talk about this—the American experiment. I thought we could begin with you giving us your thoughts on the defining principles of the American experiment and how the country’s political and institutional foundations have evolved in response to major historical and contemporary challenges. So with that, over to you.
SURI: Thank you, Irina. I’m so delighted to be here. Thank you for all of the participants for taking time. I know how busy everyone’s schedule is, particularly this time in the semester. And I also know how difficult this is a topic to talk about. I’ve been telling people, and this is, I think, something we’re all experiencing, that the pressures on free speech are pretty serious today. We’re living in a kind of McCarthyite moment, particularly on many of our campuses, because there are very powerful people, particularly in Republican states like my own, who don’t want us to talk about certain things, or want us to talk about certain things in a certain way.
And one of the most important things we can do as scholars, as teachers, as members of organizations—teaching organizations, policy organizations, like the Council on Foreign Relations, which is one of my favorite organizations—one of the things we can do is speak clearly and accurately about what we know. It’s probably not our role to call people names, at least not in our public positions, but it is our role to build on our research and our knowledge, and to stand up for research and knowledge and be willing to defend that. What I have seen are a lot of people becoming diffident about even speaking out about what they know. And we can’t let that happen. We have to speak clearly and forthrightly about what we know, what we study, because that’s who we are. That is our professional responsibility.
And so with that I want to talk a little bit for about ten minutes, that’s all, about how I approach and think about this topic. Obviously, as always, the question Irina asked is, you know, for weeks and weeks, it’s for a whole class or a whole set of books. (Laughs.) And many of us have written and taught whole classes about this. But I’m going to try for a few minutes just to give an overview to get us started about how I think about this, and how I think we can talk about this question of American democracy and the challenges to American democracy in a way that’s forthright and open and builds on our research, and hopefully is also a safe way, though still critical way, to talk about—to talk about this. So I’m going to share my screen, if I can do this without messing things up. Let’s see. There we go. And let me get into slideshow mode. There you go. After four years since COVID, I’m finally, finally learning how to do this.
So we’re going to talk about the American experiment. I want to start with a text I’m sure almost everyone knows, and I hope we all continue to teach this. I think this is another golden moment to teach Alexis de Tocqueville. It’s one of those texts that’s evergreen. De Tocqueville, as I’m sure most of you know, came to the United States in 1831. He came with his partner, Mr. Beaumont, to study prisons. And instead, became enthralled with trying to understand exactly what we’re talking about today, what are the sources—what’s the secret sauce of democracy? And also, what are the threats to it? Those who have read the book carefully know that he sees particularly the threat that race and slavery posed to American democracy.
The most important point for us today, and the point I think we all need to emphasize, is that de Tocqueville saw that one of the biggest contrasts between the United States and Catholic France was that in the United States you had a pluralistic society. And I think we need to bring that word back, more pluralism. Pluralism, for de Tocqueville, were the range of religious experiences. You know, he was taken, as a Catholic, going to all of these town churches in the places he met, and the Locofocos, and the Shakers, and all of these different groups. And what astounded him were the very different backgrounds, faiths, perspectives Americans had, and yet they found a way to work amidst their difference. This is a really important point to make.
There was no moment when all Americans thought, looked, sounded, and acted the same. There is no homogeneity in our history, unless you go back before European settlement. (Laughs.) And even then, there’s no homogeneity. My friend Ned Blackhawk and others who write about Native American history tell us that there’s also incredible pluralism within that environment as well. We are, by definition, a pluralist society. And what de Tocqueville reminds us, that we need to be reminded today, is that we thrive not when we deny our pluralism or pretend that it’s not there. We thrive when we find ways to work with our pluralism. We can have many differences over what that means. That is not an argument for or against affirmative action. That’s not an argument for or against DEI.
But it is certainly an argument against the pretending of homogeneity in such a heterogeneous space, and also the denial of the strength that comes in pluralism, the strength that comes in—our democracy is built around pluralism as much as it’s built around anything else. And I have to say this, as the child of immigrants, my mother’s the child of—my mother’s the child of immigrants who left Russia fleeing antisemitism, and my father came as an immigrant from India in 1965 right after Lyndon Johnson signed the 1965 Immigration Act. So I’m a Hinjew. I grew up in New York as a Hinjew. What could be more American than that? And, by the way, even in Texas that’s common now, right? So in fact, there are lots of Hinjews in Texas now, believe it or not. This pluralism is what makes American democracy. And if you go to a place like Japan you see the contrast immediately.
The book I published most recently, that Irina was kind enough to mention, really builds off the end of the Civil War, to make a larger point about how there were competing ways of thinking about pluralism in American democracy. Pluralism creates a problem, as de Tocqueville pointed out, as well as a strength, because the problem is who in this pluralistic environment gets to decide? Our founders never believed that everyone should vote. This is important, right? Built into American democracy, unfortunately, is not just the sin of slavery, it’s the sin of an absence of a right to vote. We have a right to speak, First Amendment. We have various other rights, perhaps even a right to bear arms, that are written into our Constitution. But the right to vote isn’t, for obvious reasons. We all understand historically why that’s the case.
Over time we have continually debated who gets to count and who doesn’t, who gets to vote and who doesn’t. And what my book argues is that, coming out of the Civil War, although the battles of the Civil War and in many ways the economic decisions are decided, right? This is the victory for northern Republican capitalism, as Charles Beard wrote decades and decades ago. But nonetheless, what’s not resolved is this question of whether we’re going to have a bounded democracy, a democracy that protects the power of white planters, in particular in the South—welcome to the Democratic Party for the next hundred years—or a more expansive democracy, though not fully expansive, but an expansive democracy that builds, in particular, upon immigrant voting that was so important for the Republican Party in places like Chicago, Detroit, and elsewhere, right? What kind of party are we going to have? What kind of democracy?
And my point in this book is that it’s unresolved. It’s a debate that goes back and forth between bounding American democracy and expanding agency in American democracy. And it’s an unresolved debate. It’s an unresolved debate. One of the reasons we want to teach this history is for students to understand that and understand why we’re debating these issues today. The question is not so much whether people vote; it’s who votes. Not whether people count, but who counts—who counts in democracy? And that’s how we can be in a moment now where both sides claim that they stand for democracy, right? Both sides do claim that, right? But the question is, whose democracy? And debates about voting fraud are debates exactly about that. As I try to show in this book, they go back in our history. They’re not new. And we have to be prepared for them. And they’re not going to go away, even if things turn in one direction or another.
And that’s what gerrymandering really is. It’s strangely the most American of things. We’ve been gerrymandering since before we even had a constitution. And the British were doing this with rotten boroughs, and things like that. But because voting has been tied to land since our start, the founders believed you had to be a landowner to vote. You could only be independent if you were a landowner, because it’s tied to land. Now it’s tied to where you live. How we organize the lines has always mattered. And we’ve only reached a point now where computer technology allows us to do this with such infinite fine-grained analysis that we can actually put one house in one district and one in another.
This is the Second Congressional District of Houston. This is Dan Crenshaw’s district. It’s slightly changed now because of the most recent gerrymandering. I can’t keep up. Every time I put up a map, it’s inaccurate; they’ve changed it again. But you can see how ridiculous this is, right? How Houston—which actually is the most diverse city in the U.S. now, more diverse than my hometown of New York City—how Houston actually can have one African American representative, and, I think, five or six white representatives. You can see now how this works, even though whites are a distinct minority in Houston now? Democrats do a version of this too, right? The New York City I grew up in did this. And there were recent court cases about this in New York. I’m not saying who’s better, who’s worse.
I’m pointing out that this is built into the problematic that de Tocqueville goes back to of a pluralist society. Because we’re a pluralist society there’s a competition as to which groups get to count, how they count, and how we organize ourselves. We have not resolved that. And in fact, we are no better now than we were in the past. I’m not sure if we’re worse. We might be worse because the technology allows us to use this for even more predictable means. But this is an old problem. This is an old one, and we haven’t gotten better on this. We haven’t gotten better. There are potential fixes. We could talk about that. But we’ve been unable and unwilling to move forward on them.
At the center of this debate is also a debate between two documents. I don’t, for such a learned group as this, have to say too much about the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, but I do want to make the point that there’s a fundamental difference in these two documents that we often elide, right? The Constitution provides a certain restriction on how one should think about freedom in our society. It’s a governmental state limit upon the ways in which freedom is exercised, creating institutions. It’s a brilliant document. This is not to criticize the document. But it becomes a—for originalists, it becomes a touchstone for saying things you can’t do, right? It becomes a limiting factor. Sometimes that’s good. Sometimes that’s bad. The Declaration of Independence is a much more open, principled statement.
And that is why—going back to my book, that’s why Abraham Lincoln relies on the Declaration of Independence so much more than the Constitution. The Constitution made it illegal for him to end slavery. The Declaration of Independence was where he turned to principle to justify emancipation, to justify what would later become constitutional changes. And throughout our history, because of the difficulty of amending the Constitution—our Constitution has been hard to amend. We have had moments when we’ve had clusters of amendments. I’m going to talk about that in a second. But oftentimes we have had to turn to the Declaration of Independence because of the difficulties of getting through the Constitution.
And one of the challenges today is that originalism seems to focus on certain elements of the Constitution. I’d like us to think about the originalism of the Declaration also, and what our country is about, right? For Lincoln and for others, right, the Declaration is actually the ur-source, the Ten Commandments source, as much as the Constitution is. And there’s a debate about that. It would be wonderful—we won’t—but it would be wonderful if at the 250th anniversary of the Declaration we actually had that debate. I’m not sure we will. But it would be wonderful if we did, one way or another, because we’ve stuck with more of the constitutional structure, because the Constitution structures our government more than the declaration, we have some real institutional legacy problems.
And that’s really where I think we are today. We can say a lot about Trump. We can say a lot about social media. We can say a lot about violence in our society. I’ve written about that recently. But I think one of our big problems is that our institutions over time have decayed. They were great institutions. They still are good institutions. But they’ve decayed because the problems of an old time have gotten worse because of the historical evolution of our society. One of the first things I try to teach students in a history course is that institutions have a history, just like people do. And the institutions—just like we were all born in a time, institutions were born in a certain moment. And they get stuck in those moments, even as the world moves on.
So just as my musical taste does not match up anymore with my students’—(laughs)—institutions don’t often match up with our society. That I think, more than ideology, is really at the core of our problems. Here’s the U.S. Senate for you. Now, the Senate was always malapportioned because it’s designed to give territory rather than people representation. But this malapportionment was actually something the founders could never have dreamed of, something Abraham Lincoln could never have dreamed of, something that even mid-century was hard to dream of. The range—look at the difference between Wyoming and California and Texas here. Look at this, right? Less than 40 percent of the population, somewhere around 37-38 percent of the population, through its representation in the Senate, can stop anything from happening in our country through the filibuster.
That is not democracy, ladies and gentlemen. That doesn’t exist because someone tried to break democracy. It’s because an institution, the Senate, and then a practice, the filibuster—which goes back to Aaron Burr in the early nineteenth century, it’s because those practices and institutions, that already pushed against democracy a little bit, over time have become much more egregious. Much more egregious in the way they affect our democracy. It’s sort of like that leak in your roof that was OK when you didn’t get much rain, but then as climate changes and now it’s a bigger, bigger problem, right? The climate has changed as the demographics of our society have radically changed, even in the last forty years.
Texas was the heart of the white Confederacy. Now it is a white-minority state, ladies and gentlemen. (Laughs.) It’s actually a state that is less white than most other states in the country. New Jersey is whiter than Texas is, right? I mean, it’s extraordinary if you think about it, right? But nonetheless, our institutions have not kept pace. Our institutions have not kept pace. And this is what makes governance so hard. This is what makes governance so hard. It’s why presidents—it was a prior book I wrote—our presidents have trouble succeeding, and then why some look to just blow up the system or break the law as the only way to get things done. That’s their argument, right? And that empowers the worst of behaviors, right? The blow up the system argument was not simply because people didn’t like the system, but because they didn’t think it worked.
The Electoral College is this too. I mean, the Electoral College is one of the most—one of the greatest historical curiosities. We are this great democracy that has the most undemocratic presidential elections. Almost every other democracy chooses their executive, if they have an executive election outside of the parliament, in a way that’s more democratic. India, France, Germany all do a better job than we do, because of the Electoral College. Here’s the other thing, the Electoral College is not even a college. People don’t even know what it is, right? And no one likes it. No one likes it. But we’ve not changed it because no one can agree on what to do. And in recent years, it’s become evident the Electoral College now has created an opportunity for people to try to steal elections, right?
This is an example of institutional decay. Just for those who don’t know, I’m sure most of you do, the Electoral College was created as a created as a last-minute compromise by the founders at the Constitutional Convention. They didn’t think it would last. They didn’t think it would work, themselves. They believed most presidents would be chosen by Congress because they believed that there would always be three or four candidates. See how wrong they were? And that Congress would have to choose, as what happened with Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams in 1824. It’s not worked out that way. And we’ve been stuck. We’ve been stuck with this.
So, what is my assessment of the state of the American experiment? I think the experiment is still a great experiment and there’s a lot to it. And Americans still, I think, cling to it. Our democracy will survive, because we’ve been doing it for more than 200 years and it is sort of built into us, in the way de Tocqueville talked about. But we’re in serious trouble because our institutions and our practices are not keeping up with who we are as a people. We are far better than our leadership—far, far better. But our institutions are creating, selecting, and empowering people who really don’t represent who we are. And I mean that really on both sides of the aisle. And what we need to do is have a discussion about understanding this history and how we can make the institutions reform to address who we are, right?
And there’s some obvious things—dealing with limits on gerrymandering, getting rid of the Electoral College. There are a whole number of things. And our great presidents were institutional reformers. That’s really the last point I want to make. They obviously didn’t fix all the problems. The reason the two Roosevelts turn up always among twentieth-century presidents in the top four or five—one’s a Republican, one’s a Democrat. I made sure of that in putting up this slide, right? The reason they show up that way is because they were institutional reformers.
Teddy Roosevelt created the primary and created the civil service exams. He did civil service exam work before he was president. Primaries were—he was crucial in creating primaries for the selection of candidates, right? Franklin Roosevelt, through the New Deal, transformed the federal government and, most important for all of us, right, created more mechanisms for political participation for groups, right? He had a much more expansive view of participation. Theodore Roosevelt had a less expansive view. But they operated through institutional reform. That’s why they were great presidents. It’s not just their words, it’s how they made our institutions adjust to match what we need in our democracy. That’s what we need today. It’s less about Republicans and Democrats. It’s more about adapting institutions for a vibrant democracy that we want to be.
A couple of quick advertisements. My podcast that I do every other week with my son—with my son who’s now a junior at Yale, we started this when he was actually in high school—is an effort to talk about these issues in ways that young people can understand. We bring experts, activists, and others on. And a lot of schools actually use the podcast now, and I’m really proud of that—it’s one of the things I’m most proud about—to try to show young people that this is a discussion. This is not just a textbook that we’re talking about here. And then I have a daily Substack newsletter where I try every day, or four or five times a week at least, to comment on how history can better inform our understanding what’s in the news. Not to take a side, but to understand how history can help us—help us better understand where we are today, and how we can think about fixing democracy by using history around problems that we have every day.
I wrote a piece, for instance, on Monday on why protests are good and how protests can actually—peaceful protests can move democracy in the right direction. You can subscribe to the Substack for free. You can also pay $5 a month. As I was telling Irina before, I have students who lost their funding, graduate students. I’m sure many of you do as well. And so I’m trying to use the Substack to also get them some more funding, one way or another. I will stop there. I will turn off the share, if I can. And we can go into discussion. Thank you for listening, everyone. I’m trying to turn off the share. There it is, stop.
FASKIANOS: Jeremi, that was fantastic. I would love to be a student in your classroom. Thank you for this analysis. And the slides really brought it to life. So we’re going to go to all of you now for questions.
(Gives queuing instructions.)
And let me see. And don’t be shy. I’m looking now. All right, we first question from Frederic Pearson. You can unmute yourself. I hear you, yes. Oh, wait. There you go.
Q: Wayne State University, Detroit. That was very enlightening.
As you showed the map, I wondered, are we basically in the problem because we have states—(laughter)—sovereign states, as they were initially conceived? And sometimes argued today, one side or the other, wanting reversion to states’ rights for various reasons. And the compromise on the Senate was sort of a, you know, way of dealing with that question. Are we doomed by statehood?
SURI: Great question, Frederic. And thank you, because I didn’t talk about federalism, lowercase F, and I should have. So, the first thing that needs to be said is the states’ rights argument, or the local control argument, I think the historian has to say that has really not been a serious argument in American history for the last 150 years. I’ll give you—I’ll tell you why I say that. Because most of the figures who make a states’ rights argument, and make it vociferously, will then often when they’re on the other side make the opposite argument.
And I have witnessed this in Texas, because the very people who were elected ten, fifteen years ago, who are still in office now, who were elected—like our governor—on states’ rights and local control, now are so centralizing power and using it. (Laughs.) My wife used to be on the city council in Austin. And to tell—to call the governor intrusive is under-using the term intrusive, right? But the argument had been for local control. So a lot of these states’ rights arguments become arguments to justify limiting the federal government when you don’t like what the federal government is doing, or vice versa.
What has worked—where I think federalism is a strength of our society, Frederic, is it does allow the states to be laboratories, to experiment with things where they have jurisdiction, and the federal government doesn’t. Education being one of these examples, healthcare, to some extent, being one of these examples. And so insofar as states, in a decentralized system, are experimenting and sending ideas up to the top, that’s a positive element. Insofar as states are used as points of friction to justify a position on power that you’re not really serious about states’ rights on, then they’re a restriction. So it’s how we think about federalism.
And honestly, I think that’s where the Supreme Court should be more involved than it is today in protecting the ability of states to pursue diverse experiments, but not allowing the state argument to be used to justify prohibiting necessary national reforms.
FASKIANOS: Great.
I’m going to take the next question from Edward Alden, who’s a professor at Western Washington University and also a CFR fellow: My Republican grandfather thought that Franklin Roosevelt was something of a tyrant because of his then-extreme assertions of presidential power, but you call him an institutional reformer. How should we then assess Donald Trump?
SURI: Right. So we have had presidents that push the boundaries more than others. And certainly Franklin Roosevelt did. Two examples of those, of him pushing the boundaries of things that, at the time, he was accused by Republicans, but also by his own party, of pushing too far. Some—one good, one bad, right? A negative one was Japanese internment. That’s by executive order. There was not an act of Congress. And FDR was actually told that he was imprisoning people who were not criminal without due process, but he went ahead. That’s clearly a step too far, for which he was criticized. Positive side, FDR did a lot through lend-lease and various other measures to get around congressional law and provide aid to Britain and Russia despite neutrality legislation. He actually broke the law in neutrality legislation. Many of us look back on that and say he was preparing for the war. This was a good thing. So it’s a fair argument to say that FDR crossed the line. You can make this argument about Lincoln.
But what I’ve come back to was that fundamentally, even though he did this at times, FDR believed his presidency was legally bound. And he believed that the institutions of government outside of the executive had to be consulted and involved in general. That was his general principle. And almost all of the major acts of the New Deal, that you can support or oppose—and there are reasons to be against the AAA and things like that—they all went through Congress. They all went through Congress. And when the Supreme Court got in the way, he did try to influence the Supreme Court, but never tried to go around the Supreme Court. So he believed in the rule of law. He pushed the boundaries. And it’s fair to criticize him on that. And maybe that’s not acceptable. But he didn’t try to act by going beyond the rule of law.
Donald Trump has clearly done that. He has clearly done that. The examples I point to, one is trivial but we’re looking at it right now, the White House. I’m sorry to say, is a public building. It’s the people’s house. When Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman conduct major renovations of the White House, they go through Congress. It’s not a castle. It’s not a castle. If you treat it like a castle, you’re showing you don’t believe in the basic structure. FDR never would have done that. More egregious version of this, I have to say, is—and maybe relevant to a lot of our CFR members—the attacks on alleged drug dealers in the Caribbean, who we are not at war with, for whom there is no congressional authorization.
The president is going around killing people, ordering the killing of people, some of whom apparently are Colombian, not Venezuelan. Ordering the killing of them without consulting Congress and without an operative AUMF (Authorization for Use of Military Force), what we were using for our drone strikes in Afghanistan and elsewhere. And he’s made no effort—I’ve actually talked to my Republican senior senator, John Cornyn, about this. He has not been even briefed. They’re not even giving them information in the Senate about who they’re killing and why they killed them. That’s unthinkable, I think, by almost any other president. So it’s not that other presidents didn’t push the line, but they still operated within the rule of law. I think Trump has gone well beyond that.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
I’ll take the next question from Robert Orr. I think Bob put his hand down. All right. Oh, wait, Bob, if you can accept the unmute.
SURI: Hi, Bob.
Q: Thank you.
FASKIANOS: There we go.
Q: Jeremi, that was fantastic. Thank you.
I loved where you started with—starting with Tocqueville and his analysis of the U.S. In many ways, someone from the outside can see us better than we can see ourselves. Do you have any go-to sources, nationals of other countries that have done more current analyses of what they see in American democracy? And if so, I’d love to hear who you’re reading in that regard.
SURI: That’s great. I’m trying as much as possible to, as you say, Bob, read others outside the U.S. and how they see us. And my natural go-to place is actually Germany, because I spent a lot of time studying Germany. I was just there for a week a few weeks ago. I would say the German coverage in newspapers like Die Zeit has been really interesting, particularly how they see the changes in U.S. commitment, or not commitment, to Ukraine, to international trade. I also find the Financial Times really interesting on this. I don’t think of a historian right now, but I think of—and I should. I should promote other historians. But I think of good journalism, right, that’s done—and many of these societies do somewhat better journalism than we do—but journalism that’s commenting on us and seeing these changes, particularly in the trade space and in the defense of NATO, free world space. So that’s where I look on a daily basis.
FASKIANOS: Great. And that was—Bob is the dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. All right. I’m going to take the next question from Justin Delacour, who’s an associate professor of political science at Lewis University. I think this is from his class.
A lot of the readings warn that populist movements like Trump’s can threaten democracy by undermining institutions. But isn’t it also possible that these same institutions have already lost public trust through bias or overreach? How can we tell the difference between an actual slide toward authoritarianism and a democratic backlash against control?
SURI: It’s a terrific question from Justin and his class. I think that’s right. I think the literature is pretty clear that populism emerges from people losing trust in institutions. They turn to populist instead of institutions because they don’t believe the institutions are serving them well. They look for someone to offer a difference from what the traditional procedures, the traditional rules, are. They see it as a moment of exception. And we’ve had populists of all kinds in our history, right? William Jennings Bryan from the left, for example, right? Huey Long from, I guess, the left. It’s hard to characterize a lot of these. So it is the—it is the failure of institutions, or the underperformance of institutions, that enables populism. I think how we could judge populists is, are they trying to build new democratic institutions to replace the ones or reform the ones that are not functioning? Or are they trying to go extra-institutionalist, right? I think that’s the question.
So Theodore Roosevelt was a populist. Was criticized, I think legitimately, for misusing the bully pulpit. You know, we always say that as a positive term. It was not always a positive term for people. Before Theodore Roosevelt, you really weren’t supposed to campaign as someone running for office. Can you imagine that? I mean, people forget that through most of the nineteenth century, people did not campaign. They had surrogates campaigning for them. Theodore Roosevelt was—saw himself as a bit of a populist, as a charismatic figure. But everything he did was to try to make democratic institutions stronger, to benefit himself and to make those institutions stronger. For example, building a more vibrant civil service. For example, trying to make parties more responsive to those in their communities. So he was building institutions that would be more democratic.
Populists like a Donald Trump, or like a Huey Long, or perhaps like a George Wallace, they’re actually trying to destroy institutions and just have an individual there, right? It’s more of a Fuhrer principle, if I could say that, put it that way. And that’s undemocratic. So it’s really, what are the populists using the energy and support they have for? Are they using it to build new democratic institutions? Or are they using it to create a cult of personality and just empower themselves?
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
I’m going to go next to raised hand from Hillary Knepper.
Q: Got it. Thanks, Irina.
So I appreciate this very, very much. And I attended today from a slightly different perspective. I’m a professor at Pace University in New York. And I am in a graduate program of public administration. So the vast majority of my students, both here and across the globe because I have an international student body, are in this program because of a deep passion for public service. Which, ironically, alongside the challenge of the declining public trust in our government services, these are folks who are really committed, deeply passionate about this. So I guess I signed on today hoping for some motivation, some ideas for trying to translate what’s happening into a lesson from the past. Which is, obviously, our resilience and our ability to learn, to grow, to reform our public service, to sort of fight off our institutional decay, as you were talking about. But I guess I’m looking to you in what should I be doing to try to retain hope for our students? I guess what’s—I’m definitely going to check out your podcast, I promise.
SURI: It’s a great question, Hillary. I struggle with it every day, because in addition to teaching the history department, I teach at the LBJ School. And we have many students that fit the profile you described. And it’s hard right now. It’s hard to really figure out—and you can’t be Pollyannish, because that’s the least persuasive thing, right?
Q: (Laughs.) Yes.
SURI: So I could tell them, you know, just wait. Wait three years, you know? But, you know, they’re in a master’s program now. (Laughter.) So what I try to talk about on the podcast and in my Substack, are these three things. These are three themes I come back to. It’s why the Substack also is Democracy of Hope. One—and I think these are hopeful things. One, what we’re seeing at the national level does have its echoes at local levels, but local government is often very different. And I saw that with my—with my wife, actually, who was basically running the city of Austin for eight years, in a very red state. There were a lot of good things she could do, and a lot of good people she could help. And in our history, change often starts at the bottom. You know, it becomes glamorous when it’s at the top, but there’s so much public service to do in local government, in New York City government.
I’m not an expert on the mayoral election there, but, I mean, that just shows there’s an—there’s an opening, there’s some kind of space there. And so I think one thing is to get people to think locally, where I think there’s more space, there’s more hope. Because local governments now have to pick up the slack. And if you are running—if you’re like my wife and running a city council, you got to get stuff done. You got to have—you got to feed the kids, right? You’ve got to get internet to people during COVID, right? You’ve got to do these creatively. So that’s one thing. So locally, I think there’s a lot of energy there.
Second, I think that it is really imperative now for people who care about public service to think about the places they can do public service that are nontraditional. There’s all kinds of public service that’s done by other kinds of institutions, not even traditional nonprofits. All kinds of institutions, often for-profit institutions that want to make a difference. We need to persuade them that what we do is important for who they are, and then we need to get involved. And I’ve been trying with my students, you’re probably doing more of this, Hillary, to connect them to people in the tech community and elsewhere, because there are lots of people who care about education, for example, in the tech community, about health care, and things of that sort. So really thinking broadly about other spaces for public service.
And then the last thing, and the thing I come back to the most in terms of hope, is we need to build the next—the next generation. And they’re not in our programs for the job tomorrow. They’re in for the long term. And the fact that we have these problems, and that people recognize these issues, says there is a role for them in the future. We can’t promise them that when they graduate they’re going to have exactly the job they want, but in the long term there’s no shortage of demand for what they want to do. So those are the—those are the messages I try to send. But I would love to hear yours. Maybe offline we can talk, because I need your advice as well.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
I’m going to take the next question from Carl Gilmour, who wrote his question but also raised his hand. So, Carl, if you can tell us who you are. You have to accept the unmute or unmute yourself. OK, we’re still working on that. One more minute. OK, I’m going to—well, we’ll come back to you. Hopefully you can unmute yourself.
So then we’ll take the next question from Ellen Gorsevski, who’s at the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University in Ohio: What are your thoughts on any parallels between now and McCarthy era and early twentieth-century red scares in terms of federal government meddling in academia?
SURI: Thank you for that question, Ellen. I think, of all the many parallels people are drawing to different periods, that’s the parallel that works best, to the red scare of the early twentieth century and McCarthyism of the 1950s. I think we are in that kind of mode. There are differences, of course, but let me point to some of the similarities and why the historical comparison is effective. We have an obsession with something that could be threatening, could be misused, but has been so redefined as everything and nothing that it’s impossible to really talk about it in any serious way. It just becomes a boogeyman, and that was Bolshevism in the 1920s, communism in the 1950s. Both were real threats, in some ways, but they became defined so broadly that everything and nothing were part of them, and therefore it was hard to defend anything when it was accused that way.
And that’s where we are with the sort of diversity and gender stuff. My position is that we went too far with DEI and other things. But now this is an overreaction in the other direction, far over. And things are being called out that are not—I mean, the notion that, you know, trying to have a program that would help first-generation students from minority backgrounds, that that’s somehow an attack upon fairness, is astounding that anyone would make that. So there’s this creation of an amorphous threat, which is the hardest threat to respond to. That’s similar to those moments.
Second, there is the use of fear, right? It’s not the number of people you prosecute or fire. It’s the prospect of that, and that no one is safe. I have tenured colleagues who don’t feel safe now, right, even though they’re tenured, right? And it’s the removal of not just due process, but the removal of any basic safety that leads people to say, OK, I’m just going to become fully risk-averse. And that chilling effect. And I am feeling that now more than I ever have in my career. I’ve been a scholar, a professor for twenty years. And the only analogies I see are to what I read and studied about universities in the McCarthy period. Ellen Schrecker’s work is very good on this. I’m sure you know it. And the work on the 1920s, on that red scare. And so that chilling effect. And it shows up everywhere. People afraid to use the word “diversity.” People afraid—I had a colleague of mine yesterday I had lunch with who said she took the word “gender” out of her syllabus. She’s not even a—she’s a statistician. You know, that kind of fear, that chilling effect, I think we’re experiencing.
And then the third thing I think that’s like McCarthyism and like the red scare and the Mitchell Palmer raids, is that we have not just state governments, local governments—there are always they’re always elements of intolerance there—but we have a federal government that’s putting its weight behind this, and trying to incentivize, through compacts and crazy things like that, but also making direct threats to institutions, right? And university presidents and administrators who have not shown themselves well in recent years are running scared. They want to protect funding for their university so they feel they have to not allow gender studies or whatever else it is. These parallels are very, very strong.
The hope in this is that these periods end when people get fed up, including those who initially supported this, right? It’s the Army and McCarthy hearings, when they go after the Army, where people finally say, this is enough. We need alumni of universities and others, especially Republicans, who can say, you know, this is—this is detracting from the environment that made that university a place I loved when I was there. They don’t have to agree with what people are saying. They have to recognize that they want a vibrant space where people are not afraid to speak. So I’ve been writing about and talking about free speech in this context, right? That’s what free speech is. Free speech is an environment where one hears in civil terms various different points of view. We need to do a better job of exposing students to pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian points of view, not shutting both off. That’s what’s going to get us out of this moment.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
I’m going to take the next question from Inken von Borzyskowski, who’s at the University of Oxford. There seems to be a lag in unmuting, so I’m just going to give it—take a pause. Oh, there we go. Great.
Q: Hello. My name is Imran. I’m one of Inken’s students.
And my question is that one of the institutions that’s most problematic in the American government is political parties. Like, for example, parties control who gets into government and, to an extent, the limited engagement in the primary system seems to encourage more polarized candidates. So my question is how polarized parties reformed in the past, and what does this tell us about their capacity to reform today?
SURI: Great, great question, Imran. Thank you for being with us.
It’s true. Part of our problem today is a problem with party institutions, right? Primaries in particular. You referred to this already, I’ll just underline the point. Primaries, which were created—going back to the early twentieth century, but really in the 1970s—created to open up the parties to give people more say, so you didn’t have a smoke filled room with a few fat cats deciding who the nominee is. Those have actually now made parties more extreme and less representative because only a very small proportion of people in the party come out to vote in the primary.
Texas is Exhibit A of this, basically because the Republican Party dominates the state. And in the primaries, you get less than 10 percent of Republicans who show up. In essence, you have something like 7 or 8 percent of Texans choosing the governor, because they’re the ones who vote for the governor in the primary, in the Republican primary. And then it’s not really much of an election after that, right? And that happens with senators, members of Congress. So there’s an institution that was created to open up the party that’s actually made it more narrow. This is your point.
What’s the capacity for reform in parties? The capacity for reform is quite great, actually. What parties need to do to reform is they need to move away from thinking about one candidate and thinking more about how they can be representative of more people. What will incentivize them to do that? When more people show up. When more people show up. And so the most important thing we can tell people is that they actually need to go out and vote in primaries. They need to make their voices heard and make it clear that the standard-bearer in the party is not the person they want. As that happens, the party will then shift to choosing different people.
The whole Trump phenomenon is actually that, because he criticized the Republican Party for choosing people in this narrow way that were not representative of their base. He brought their base into primaries. The Trump voters were not the voters for Bush in the primaries. They were new voters, Republicans who normally didn’t vote in primaries who now came and voted in primaries, right? And so the way beyond this is to create a system where there are more candidates who are doing that, more people coming into the primary system. And I don’t believe you have to be on the extreme right or extreme left for that. I think you could bring a lot of people out to a primary today on the Democratic or Republican side by making a strong argument for healthcare, for example, especially as people are losing their healthcare.
So the parties will reform when the people who are part of the party push the party in that direction. And that’s what we need to see more of, and what I hope we’ll see more of. And I have to say, I’m not necessarily a Mamdani fan, but what Zohran Mamdani has done in New York is showing that, right? He’s showing—that is the Democratic Party being pushed in a new direction not by him capturing a minority, but by him bringing in a large number of people into the primary who are then enthusiastic and changing how the Democratic Party functions in New York. We need to see more of that.
FASKIANOS: Great.
I’m going to go next to Roy Pettis, raised hand, also written question. So, Roy, if you could share with us that would be great.
Q: Sure. Roy Pettis at George Washington University.
I actually have a—mainly to ask about a rhetorical comment I regularly get in classes. Like, one of the students will say, well, but we’re not a democracy. We’re a republic. And my usual response to that is to say, well, what do you think is the impact, the importance of that point? But I’m curious as to whether you think there’s a more important response, historically informed response for that? Also, if I can throw in a second sub-question, I’m always interested in the idea of increasing the size of the House of Representatives, which we haven’t done since the 1930s. Do you think that would have much structural impact?
SURI: Thank you, Roy. Let me start with the latter question because I didn’t have time to get to that, but you’ve enabled me to talk about that. Absolutely. Most people don’t realize this, right? Every decade or so, we increased the size of the House and we added new states, until the early twentieth century. And by the way, when we added new states we generally try to add one for one side, one for the other. That’s why we have North and South Dakota. That’s why they’re not one state. Where there was always a kind of trade off was being done. And increasing the size of the House helped with representation. Now, most House districts have 800,000 or more people in them. And so most people don’t know their House member. And House members spend most of their time raising money, not representing their people.
We should definitely increase the size of the House. We stopped doing it in 1920 or so because we believed then that this was a stable position. And, again, this is institutional decay. Over time, it has made the House less representative because our population has more than doubled, in fact, I think it’s tripled since then. And yet, the House remains the same size. People will say, OK, well, you can’t have more than 435. It’s just too many. I was just in Germany, again, a few weeks ago. The Bundestag, for a country one-third the size of ours, or 40 percent the size of ours, has more than 500 members. And it seems to work much better than ours. So we should definitely increase the size of the House. I just—I don’t see an argument against that except fear of change. I think it would change the structure. You’d have more representation. And you would have cities that are better represented, right? It would make it harder to gerrymander. The fewer districts you have, the easier it is to gerrymander in a state. If you create more districts, it’s harder to gerrymander people out of representation.
To your question about republic or democracy, we are both. We have always been both. This is a silly argument that I hear people like Senator Mike Lee make quite often. Yes, the founders believed in a republic. But they believed a republic was also a democracy. That’s why the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution matter. The Declaration of Independence says very clearly, right, “all men are created equal and endowed by their creator.” The government is to represent them. And the argument for consent of the governed in the Declaration of Independence is a democratic, not a republican, argument. It’s an argument about representation, taxation, and individuals. So we have always been a hybrid of democracy and republic. To say we are one or the other is, you know, like asking are we a country or an empire, right? Or, is New York City a city, town, village? It’s all those things, right? And so it doesn’t make sense to try to do anything other than that, unless you want to get rid of the Declaration of Independence.
FASKIANOS: I’m going to go next to Mia Bloom at Georgia State University.
Q: Thank you so much. It was fantastic.
So, just really quickly, when you talked about the lack in—like, when people no longer have confidence in the institutions and you see populism, I was curious. One of the things that I had found, and what I put in my 2021 book, was that when people lost faith in institutions they gravitated towards conspiracy theories. Could you maybe discuss if there, in your opinion, is a link between what we’ve seen with conspiracy theories and populism? And sort of what is the best way to get us back on track to have people start to have faith in institutions again? Thank you.
SURI: Great. And I think you’ve written about this, Mia, right? I mean, the existence of distrust in institutions leads to distrust in the knowledge that institutions have created, distrust in conventional wisdom. That’s what we’re hearing in the attacks on our universities, right? It’s so ironic, right? I mean, our applications at major universities are through the roof. We’re going to have more than 100,000 people apply to the University of Texas this year, right? More people want to come here than ever, in a Republican state. But yet, they’re attacking us as professors because they’re saying, just at the core of your question, well, we don’t believe—we don’t trust the institutions.
And so what you tell us, if we don’t like it, it’s probably not true, rather than some deference and trust to the fact that, what is the truth, that most PhDs teaching in the classroom are trying every day to just get butts in seats and do the best they can to make sense of the world, based on their research, and share that with their students. So, conspiracy theories become—they multiply when people lose trust in the institutions and the knowledge those institutions create. They look, therefore, to nontraditional institutions to get nontraditional knowledge. And often those nontraditional institutions today are institutions that have no qualification for saying what they’re saying and have a direct economic interest in making a different argument. And that’s where we get these conspiracy theories from.
What’s the best antidote to that? I don’t think it’s trying to hit people over the head and show them more statistics, bring them more archival evidence. I think it’s getting them to rebuild trust in institutions. I want people to see, Mia, how we really operate as scholars, and how all of us in the classroom—I don’t know a professor who’s trying to indoctrinate. I know professors who are trying to get students to see and understand evidence and understand research in a way they wouldn’t before. We need to show our work, right? Kind of the way the New York Times is trying to do this, with maybe mixed success. Telling us now, especially on Sundays, how they cover a story, why they cover it. But show our work. Get people to rebuild trust in our institutions. Then they will liberate themselves from these conspiracy theories.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
I’m going to take the next question from Colin, who is in the library so he cannot unmute. Sorry, Carl Gilmour. He’s at San Antonio College: Can you give us any update on the modern FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) courts and their positions during times of pendulum shifts between far-left and far-right administrations changing hands in the strata? An example of recent actions taken in relation to those archived from Obama and Biden for some perspective as to how this instrument is used by both sides of our government.
SURI: Yeah. Great question, Carl. The FISA courts, which are relatively recent creations, right? These are the kind of secret courts that will approve surveillance and other use of, often, cyber technology to acquire information about people. My colleague, Adam Klein knows much more about this than I do. So we don’t have too much of a historical record with them. But what we generally know is that they’re generally deferential to the White House. And so, in their deference to the White House, I do think they swing very much toward the pressure from presidents and others. But they are supposed to be a backstop. You do have to provide evidence for why you want surveillance or access to someone’s data. And so they are supposed to provide some accountability for that. I don’t think they work very well, though, when they face enormous pressure from the Justice Department, because they just don’t have much to stand up on. I think other district courts, other federal courts have much more staying power than the FISA courts, in my experience.
FASKIANOS: And I’m going to end with one final question from, again, the class at Lewis University: Steve Levitsky and [Lucan] Way explain how fear leads citizens to retreat from opposition. What practical steps can ordinary citizens or local governments take to avoid that self-sidelining behavior and defend democratic standards?
SURI: Excellent question. And I think there are two things we must do in order to keep opposition vibrant, right? And you cannot have democracy without opposition. You know, I don’t think you can have actually an interesting life. I have to confess, right, maybe it’s one of the reasons I love being a scholar, I inevitably—if I see a majority opinion, I want to be against it. I’m skeptical that when people all agree that they’re ever going in the right direction—I’m a natural critic, in that sense. But I think that’s how democracy works, right? It’s how—we test. We’re always testing knowledge.
So the two suggestions—the two very practical suggestions that I think have worked historically. First, focus on the issues. It’s much harder to take someone on personally, even though you might want to. And we—in social media we get angry. But, you know what, you can justify what you’re saying much more by the issue than by the individual. What do I mean by this? Well, maybe you have people who accuse you of being a communist because you like—you’re criticizing an individual. But you say, no, I’m not just really criticizing this politician. I’m arguing for health care for people. Or, I’m arguing for good jobs. The issue—focus on the issue in your opposition, not as much the individual. And that makes it easier to get people to see the issue, rather than see you as some heretic, to the individual.
And then the second thing I think that’s really important is you need to build—you need to build a team, right? Politics is a team sport. Politics is a team sport. What makes protests work? I just wrote this piece for my Substack on Monday. What makes protests work historically—they do, by the way. Protests work because people feel part of a team. They feel bolstered. If you were at the No Kings Protest you probably came away feeling a little more confident, a little more like you weren’t alone, right? We need to build teams. We need to build coalitions. Not conspiracies, but we need to be talking with our friends. We need to explain why something’s important. And we need them to be there with us, coming to the school board meeting with us, showing up if we’re campaigning for local office.
It meant an enormous amount for my wife when not just us as her family members, myself and our children, when we came to her events—we didn’t have a choice. She made us come. But when other people came, when neighbors came, when friends came, right? Especially as a woman, when you have—let’s be honest, right, you have men yelling at you in a room, right? To have friends there, to have people there—they don’t always have to speak—but to build your team. Politics is a team sport, like anything else. And opposition can work when it’s not just one—you know, one person against the tank, but a large number of people out there.
FASKIANOS: Well, we are at the end of our time. And I’m sorry that we did not get all the questions. But, Jeremi Suri, thank you so much for being with us for this hour. Again, I commend Dr. Suri’s books, Civil War by Other Means and to sign up for Democracy of Hope Substack, and This is Democracy podcast. Since we can’t be in the classroom with you, at least we can follow you on those platforms, and get your insight and analysis there. So, again, thank you very much.
SURI: Thank you.
FASKIANOS: And to all of you, for your great questions and comments. Our next Global Affairs Expert Webinar will be on Wednesday, November 12, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time (EST). Dara Massicot, who’s at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, will talk about Ukraine, Russia, and the future of European security.
And I, as always, I encourage you to learn more about CFR paid internships for students and fellowships for professors at CFR.org/careers. And, of course, visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues, and education.CFR.org for free, expert-informed teaching and learning resources. So, again, thank you to Dr. Suri and all of you. And we look forward to convening again on November 12.
SURI: Thank you.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
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