Transcript: "Bruce Cain - Back to Compromise"

Bill Lane Center Director Bruce Cain joins Michael Krasny on his "Grey Matter" podcast for an episode called, "Back to Compromise." 

Transcript:

Welcome to this episode of Grey Matter with Michael Krasny. We're joined this episode by Stanford Political Science Professor Bruce Cain, who is also Director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West. The author of several books, including The Personal Vote, Governing California, Democracy More or Less, and most recently Under Fire and Under Water.

Bruce Cain, in my judgment, is one of the nation's premier political analysts, a Rhodes Scholar and a Harvard PhD. He served for years before joining the Stanford professoriate as Professor of Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley, where he was also Director of the University's Washington Center. This podcast will be live and interactive, so if you have questions or comments for Bruce Cain, please feel free to send them in and be part of the podcast.

And if you haven't yet done so, become a member of Grey Matter with Michael Krasny. I urge you to do that simply by going to greymatter.show. That's Grey with an E, and welcome Bruce Cain.

Good to be back with you.

Good to be with you, Michael.

Well, we've, this week, witnessed something really unprecedented and unimagined in American history. The third indictment of a former president and fourth probably on the way in Georgia. I'm just wondering how you assess all this.

I had this strange image this morning of Trump in prison, with secret service guards in prison with him. I mean, they would have to be in a detail with them, I guess. This isn't necessarily trying to be funny about it or anything, but the reality is you could have a former president, like say, Olmert in Israel, going to jail.

Yeah, no, it is truly extraordinary. I agree with you 100%. And we've lived through a lot of extraordinary events in the last 30 or 40 years in politics, things that none of us would have imagined back in the 50s and 60s.

But there was a ramp up to this kind of activity. We've known about Trump for quite a while now and talked about it. And things seem to be catching up with him in a way that I'm sure he didn't think that would happen.

But it's not something that the world hasn't seen, all right? If you think of Italy and Berlusconi, there are people we've seen in advanced democracies that have to run for office to stay out of jail, okay?

It's happening in Israel with Netanyahu.

Exactly, exactly. And so that, I think, adds a level of importance, at least from the point of view of a political scientist, like myself, to the case that's being presented, particularly in this third indictment, because it really is sent not just about Mr. Trump himself, but it's about a signal to people who think that office, public office is a place to exercise your grifting talents or your ability to stay out of trouble or that you are above the law. And I just think that's very, very dangerous to a democracy, and it only adds to the cynicism, which I think makes possible this kind of behavior.

So it's kind of like a terrible feedback cycle where as you become more cynical, then you get people that are more cynical in office. And so I think there's, it not only is extraordinary, but it's incredibly important that signals be sent that this is not the way a democracy should be run.

What about the Trumpists though, and the president, former president himself, who say that this is really a politicization, that the FBI and the Department of Justice are trying to keep him from running the way they did with when he was supposed to be running against Hillary Clinton and did run against her, that it's all about using institutions as weapons.

It's what you would expect him to say. And no doubt there are people, consultants, and politicos on the democratic side who are thinking of whether this is advantageous or not in terms of the politics. It's not obvious that it is because it certainly is rallying the base of the Republican Party.”

So it's not obvious that this is even in the advantage of the Democrats. But no, that's not what this is about. This is about a person who has over and over again decided that he doesn't have to obey the laws that the rest of people have to.

You mean it's not a witch hunt, Bruce?

No, it's not a witch hunt. Nobody except Trump was responsible for what he did leading up to the documents case and keeping those documents knowing it was illegal. Nobody except Trump was in his ear when he decided to encourage people into an insurrection.

Nobody was in his ear when he went around and tried to reverse the result of an election in which he lost both the popular vote and the electoral college. Nobody was in his ear when he kept on lying when he lost 32 to zero with all these different judicial cases. The courts have spoken over and over again that there is no validity to this.

So, he's responsible for his own troubles. And the idea that he's doing this for his base is ridiculous because none of them were ever in a position to do some things like this. And if they even did one of these things, like the Hush case, you know, or any of the average citizens did anything in terms of their tax forms, they would be treated very differently than the way Trump has been treated to date.

So no, that's just stuff you say to rally the base. He's in trouble right now. He needs to raise a lot of money to pay for all these different cases.

And his only hope of staying out of jail is to win elections. So he knows that he's in trouble. So he has to just keep pumping out as much of this inflammatory rhetoric as he can to keep people supporting him.

Because if they abandon him at any point, and this could happen because we know from our own corruption cases in California, that at some point, it becomes real to people or tiresome to people, and they will abandon him. And it's getting close to that point right now. If you look at what his former attorney general is saying, and if you look at what his vice president is saying, there are a lot of people that are coming awfully close to saying we need to cut our ties or out.

They're saying it, but it may become more prevalent that the Republican Party is saying we have no chance if we keep doing this.

According to a recent article in Politico, the money is ebbing from indictment to indictment. But this last indictment is, by many people's lights, the most serious of all, because it involves four counts and six co-conspirators and trying to take over an election and actually turn the country in a different way. But let me get us back to what the argument is from the right or from the Trumpists, because I'm interested to see how you analyze this.

They're talking about Biden and the Biden crime family. They're talking about Hunter Biden particularly, and there's a kind of what about Hunter Biden that keeps coming up, especially in Fox News and Breitbart, and some of this is troubling. It's troubling, frankly, that 50 intelligence officers said that this was Russian trolling, that I'm talking about, of course, Hunter Biden's laptop, that what apparently had been indicated on there as the big guy or something along those lines, money going to Biden was a part of Russian trolling.

In other words, they're presenting a case that seems somehow to the American people the way they want to present it as equivalent.

Well, they are certainly trying to do that, and I agree with it. And I will also agree with what I think I heard in your comment, which is that this kind of behavior, which has been going on pretty much the whole time I've been watching politics over the last half century, which is the relatives of presidents trying to milk whatever relationship they have with their dad. Or their brothers.

Or their uncle or their brothers. And it's been going on, went on with Jimmy Carter, went on with Bill Clinton. It's a Democratic and Republican, and it's distasteful and it needs to end.

So insofar as the Bidens were part of that, they should be criticized and Hunter Biden should be punished. Okay, that's fine. But that's not, that's just a minor piece of the Trump, you know, Trump, should we say errors or flaws or law breaking activities.

I mean, that has nothing to do with why he held on to those documents. It has nothing to do with why he encouraged the insurrection on January 6th. You know, it's one aspect of the case because his kids were definitely grifting on him, but that's not going to work.

And when it was brought up, I noticed on a, I watched a CNN clip, and I think it was Adam Kissinger, one of the former representatives was asked about, and he said, that's laughable. And indeed, that's exactly what Barr and other people are saying. So if prominent Republicans are saying that's laughable, I think it undercuts.

It means really, this is intended, this language that Trump is using is intended for that 37% of the Republican Party that's the base, that's the immovable base that allows him to do whatever he wants. But this election is going to be determined by the rest of the electorate, who according to the polls are open, at least to the idea that this man has made some serious, you know, mistakes and is criminally liable. So it's way too early to see whether this strategy will work for very long, but it does in the short run help him raise money.

But the right reality is he's burning through the money almost as fast as he's getting money from people. And in politics, money, as much as anything, is a signal of whether you're getting support from your key groups. And we've seen with DeSantis that DeSantis has trouble because he's not doing very well.

He's burning through his money and the big donors are abandoning him. And with Trump, it's not going to be the big donors because I don't think they've jumped on board. They went with DeSantis and some of the others.

It's really the small donors. And he needs to keep the flame underneath them. He needs to keep them passionately believing that this is a conspiracy just like, you know, and it's going to eventually reach them.

And it's like all the other conspiracies against them in order to keep them, you know, giving small amounts of dollars so that he can continue to pay for these legal expenses. And I don't know whether that game will work over the long run. I don't know how much the capacity of those donors is or their patience with it.

So we'll see.

Yeah, I was struck by what you said before about the idea that Trump somehow puts forward that if they can do this to me, they can do this to you. And that creation of an identity with him and, you know, his crucible is their crucible somehow. I don't know how that really works with working people and people who are mega people, but somehow it seems to translate somehow.

I'm also interested, though, since you mentioned DeSantis, at one point, he was really the only likely contender other than Trump, but his fortunes have gone another way. He's revamped his whole campaign. Do you think it's because he was trying to sort of outright flank Trump and say even, you gotta be tougher on abortion and things like that?

That may prove to be a mistake. I do think it resonates with some voters in the Republican Party. So initially, it looked like it was a good move, but some of the issues that were the issues that he was promoting, like on schools or recreating the history of race relations and other aspects of wokeness haven't really held up as issues, I mean, you know, the COVID successes are sort of in the past, and it's a mixed record in terms of what happened in terms of the number of deaths in Florida.

So it just seems to me that the strategy was gonna be problematic whether he went to the left or the right of Trump, because Trump has this big core inside the Republican Party. Probably it's estimated to be at least 37%. I'm gonna guess it's probably a little bit more when you take some of the people that the pollsters put into kind of leaning towards Trump category.

And that's hard to overcome, since I don't think Trump's main appeal is really intellectual and the least, or pro-chromatic and the least. His appeal is, I'm angry and I am your voice of anger, and you've been downtrodden by the elites on both coasts, and I am your spokesperson. And that's what it is.

It's sort of giving the middle finger to the elites in the United States, and that's his appeal.

And he's a showman.

Yeah, and he's a showman, exactly.

DeSantis is, in fact, seems to have some personality deficiencies where a lot of people are deficient.

To say the least. Yeah, no, I mean, that's the other thing. And Michael, you remember that Pete Wilson and various other people who were pretty good candidates in California didn't have the retail politics touch, you know?

You have to like to kiss those babies and be friendly all the time. And DeSantis is just one of these people that doesn't have that touch. And so that's hurting him somewhat from what we can tell.

What about the other GOP candidates or would be candidates? I mean, you've got a number who were in the running and who have declared, Nikki Haley, for example, who at other time might have gained a lot of traction, one would assume, Jim Scott.

Yeah, it's hard to tell whether they're campaigning to be vice president or campaigning for the next election cycle after 2024. But one person that I thought would do better and hasn't yet caught on is Christie, because he at least embodies the sort of anger sometimes that channels the Republicans' mood at the moment. And he, you know, there's his ability to debate and to be, you know, tough on Biden, you know.

I think it would be a tough matchup for Biden. So it's hard to say whether it'll ever catch on with Christie because he's perceived as too far to the left, I think, by many of the people in the base. The others just, to me, I don't see them having a lane yet, okay?

Haley, maybe if Trump really does get into serious trouble and the party completely abandons him and he runs out of money and he cuts a deal, which I doubt he do, but if under those scenarios, then maybe people will take a look at Haley or Scott a little more closely. But at the moment, it just doesn't seem to me that they have a lane to run. And so I think if you had to bet right now, it's Trump's coronation because of the way the party dynamics are.

I'm struck by Governor Sununu, though, of New Hampshire. The first primaries are going to be in Iowa and New Hampshire, saying, I don't think that we'll see a rerun between Biden and Trump. I think you're going to see other people running for the offices, both Democrat and Republican.

I know where it comes up with that, Chris Sununu.

“Yeah, I don't either, because a lot of Republicans keep saying that. I run into this, I have friends that are Republicans and they keep telling me that, you know, RFK's son is going to overtake Biden. And I say, you got to stop smoking whatever you're smoking, because that's not going to happen.

The Democratic Party already proved in the last election cycle that, you know, whatever serious issues people have with Biden, and there are many, when it comes to it, Democratic voters will rally simply because Trump is so odious, and the Republican Party has gone so far to the right, they're going to rally. And so the question is, the election always comes down to the independent voters in a small handful of states. And that's, you know, this is the big change, Michael, in our lifetime, we used to be able to look at national polls and be able to predict the election.

And that's not the way we should be doing it anymore. It should be, okay, the parties are too closely competitive. There are way too many independent voters to pay attention to these polls.

The independent voters don't tune in until the fall. Okay, the fall of the election. So everything before that is just kind of noise, unless there's a crash of the economy.

And so bottom line is, what are the declined state voters thinking? And at the time, a couple of years ago, Biden was really in serious trouble largely because it looked like there was a series of mishaps. The economy wasn't doing very well.

The Afghanistan decision wasn't doing very well. There were still resentments about the restrictions from COVID. It just looked like it was anybody, but Biden would win.

But a lot of that now has changed. The economy's improved. And the other sorts, the BIF, which is Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill spending, is actually helping the economic recovery and is bringing projects into many different states.

So that sort of anybody but the Democrats and Biden, I think, is waning unless we suddenly go back into a serious economic crisis. So then it comes down to, well, how much will all these trials and their memory of January 6th, which Trump is definitely trying to keep at the forefront, how much is that is really going to appeal to decline to state voters? And to me, as a political scientist, this is trying to take the temperature of how serious a problem do we have in terms of democracy in this country, because it seems to me that what happened in January 6th should preclude anybody ever thinking of voting for Trump again.

You think it's likely that the Republicans in September will hold things up in terms of financing? That's the talk now already from the right.

You mean another budget crisis?

Yeah.

Well, I don't see how that helps them, because if they're instigating it, they have to have a good cause, and I don't know what that good cause will be. They've backed away from that hasn't worked in the past, and it didn't work most recently, so I'm not sure why they would think that that was a winning strategy, particularly if they're the ones initiating it and the economy is doing better. So, yes, will they probably think about it, but I don't see a lot of enthusiasm from the Republicans in the Senate.

McConnell really wasn't interested in playing that game again. And at this point, a lot of people, Republican members of Congress are thinking, what's this election mean for me? If I have to support some of the wacko things that are being proposed in the House, and I have to support a person who, Trump, who at best has got chalk on his toes from going very close to breaking the law, but more often has broken the law.

I mean, what does that mean for me? And at some point, they're going to prioritize their own caucuses and controlling power over what's going to happen if they believe that Trump is going down or the Republicans are not doing well. So I don't imagine that a crisis that they initiate is a good way to help their own campaigns.

Talking with Bruce Cain, and as I said, questions and comments are welcome. First question comes from Reid, who wants to know, well, actually this ties in with your book to some degree, which we'll talk about later in this podcast. But he says, environmental costs of the Ukraine War and other conflicts are great.

Do you hold hope that the human species will truly be able to confront climate change and save ourselves?

Yes, I do in the long run. And the reason is that my office these days is located in the sciences. Not the social sciences.

And I can see that given enough time, we're going to be able to make some amazing technological innovations that will help us decarbonize the economy. The problem is the timing one, that I think the transition from where we are right now in terms of the amount of global emissions of carbon and where we have to get to and what we have to do in terms of changing every aspect, every aspect of our economy is so vast that as a political scientist, when I go and I listen to the modeling that the scientists do and when they sort of take it as a given that people are going to adopt the things that they want people to adopt, like electric cars, et cetera, I see lots of political and institutional hurdles. I think we can jump over those hurdles.

But what's scary is that the scientists believe that there are these tripping points of irreversibility. They're not yet able to really put dates on them or to understand all of them. But there is this sense of urgency in the scientific community, which causes them to obviously be concerned that we're not moving fast enough, even in a state like California, in terms of our ability to build out green energy or to start to get rid of our gas lines or transform or change our transportation sector over and electrify it.

All these things, we're not going fast enough even in California, let alone the rest of the world. So in the short run, yes, I do despair that there's just so much hard work that has to be done. And I can't guarantee that we're going to do it in any kind of, or no one can guarantee, let alone me, of course, can guarantee that we're going to do it as quickly as we need to.

And I think we're going to blow through the 1.5 degree increase pretty soon. And I doubt that we're going to, I mean, I think it's just going to be very hard to hit the goals that the international community has set. But in the long run, I really do believe, because I see the things that are going on, the possibilities of green hydrogen, the possibilities of maybe small scale nuclear, there are things that are being discovered and thought about.

And I think in the long run, we will probably find a way to decarbonize. But whether we do it in time or not is really the big question.

Well, as you point out in your most recent book, the pace is too sluggish. And there's a lot of political fractionalism that makes that pace even worse. I mean, it slows it down even more.

Yeah, exactly, Michael. If you thought of the coincidence of the political climate and institutional situation we have and the need to do the most difficult challenge, which is to reverse some of the pillars of the Industrial Revolution to them at the same time, could we have picked the worst time in American history to do this? No.

And of course, the two feed back on one another that the pressure to do this is going to make the political tensions worse and the political tensions make it very hard. And of course, one of the things that I point out in my book is that even if we get beyond the partisanship, it's not obvious to me that people, even in the Democratic circles, really understand what's being asked of them and will have the resources and will to do it. Whether it's getting rid of the trivial stuff like gas stoves, whether it's willingness to do the adaptation like the vegetation management that's necessary to keep houses from burning in the woo-wee areas, whether it's getting the charging stations in neighborhoods where people really don't want to see big, massive charging stations, level 3 charging stations, whether it's sighting wind and energy sites anywhere near Marin or Sonoma or any of the wealthy counties, these are all the problems that we haven't even gotten to because we're so busy with the partisanship problems, but all of that in the short run is problematic.

But you point out in your book that the West, you talk about beyond the 110th meridian here, that the West has more alternative sources of energy possibilities than any region in this country.

Yeah, and again, that's why, you know, if you ask me at certain times of day whether I'm optimistic or pessimistic, it depends upon what aspect I'm thinking about. And I think that the fact that we have excellent solar in the Southwest and that the Midwest has excellent wind and that, you know, there are resources, you know, hydro resources that we can use. When you put all these things together, there is reason to think that if we get our act together, we can do this.

And particularly in the Southwest, we have real advantages in terms of the renewable resources that should make it easier for us to do that than some other areas of the country which really don't have the solar or wind that they can rely on.

Well, you do point out that acid rain, for example, and the ozone layer and the closing, not the ozone layer, the ozone hole, closing that out do give hope, and those stories are instructive in positive ways.

Yeah, they are. And I think one of the lessons of this, I think, is that the impact of extreme weather is going to have, I believe, an effect on people who are doubters. It's going to take a while, but you can already see it happening.

“And in some of the work that we've done here at Stanford, you see that people that have had to move and evacuate because of a fire, Republicans that had to actually evacuate or they got burned out, you can bet that that makes a difference in how they think about climate change. And what we're seeing are remarkable events across the country in terms of the record heat, in terms of the strength of the storms, of the hurricanes, in terms of the wildfire, and actually they create storms too, smoke and embers and winds. So all this is, I think you can see in the polling, more and more Republicans saying, yes, there's climate change, but we're not so sure that it's mainly the effect of human activity.

And that's still not where they have to be, but that's at least a movement from the past, which was, no, there is none. And the number of people, even in states like Texas and Arizona, we were looking at, we did some polling comparing California and Texas to Arizona. It's single-digit number of people who think that, Republicans that think that this is, you know, that there's no problem here.

They recognize the problem. They're trying to come to grips with what the cause of the problem is, but they recognize it. So I think that the extreme weather, while it is unfortunate and it's sad and it's tragic and people die and people lose their homes and they're not properly insured and they can't get back into their homes, all that's very sad, but it does have the effect, I think, of making people realize that there's a serious problem that we have to solve in a bipartisan way, that we have to get on the same page.

When they're baking, it sort of puts a light bulb above their head, perhaps. I'll go to some more questions, but before I do, you put a good deal of stock still in polling and yet polling has come under attack, especially the idea that we can be looking at polls as so invincible, especially when, for the most part, a lot of polls have to do with phones as opposed to cell phones, which mostly young people have when they don't have the kind of phones that you can call. Can I get you on record here about polling and how you see it?

I don't disagree with you. Polling is a very imperfect and increasingly imperfect tool. We've gotten more clever in adjusting for sample biases that occur when you do these opt-in samples, and so far some of them have held up even in the presidential elections.

“But I think there's a deeper point here, which is we would be foolish to simply let public opinion by polls be the guide on everything we do. I think because not everybody is informed about everything, and so if you ask people that haven't had an experience or are not directly involved, they tend to have ill-formed ideas. So yes, you have to take polling with a grain of salt.

We often do in our projects actually focus groups so that we actually talk to voters and hear what they say. But mainly we also rely on a lot of other data. What are the hard data?

What's going on out there? If you take a problem like the electrification of transportation, what's actually going on in terms of charging stations? Where do we see the pattern of where these charging stations are and where they aren't?

And you can make inferences about that in terms of the opposition and the attitudes of the neighborhoods to what you see. So I would say it would be a mistake to wholly rely on polling, but I think it would also be a mistake in a democracy not to pay attention to what the people are thinking.

And here's Chris, and thank you for the question, Chris, who says, do you see the Democratic strategists and pundits acting within a rationalist framework while the Republicans think and act within a faith, loyalty, celebrity and resentment-based framework?

Not all Republicans. I have spent the last, I don't know, five or six years trying to work with many smart, sensible Republicans. I disagree on things with them, but they are rational and they are thoughtful, but they've been drowned out.

“They've been drowned out by this MAGA movement and by the people that Trump took off of the sidelines, and to be fair, it was probably good for us to realize that there is such a level of alienation and we should be spending some time thinking about what was happening in terms of depletion of jobs and blue collar jobs in the United States. So I think there was a real problem there that we needed to address, and I do think the Biden administration has taken that seriously. If you look at the IRA, there's a lot of effort to try to restore manufacturing, to French shore, to get away from what was, I think, a model of trade where we were pushing things over to China or Mexico or other places and not paying attention to what the implications of that were in terms of security of supply and also in terms of employment.

So I believe there are rational people. I know it. I have friends and you probably do too who are Republicans who are rational.

They are kind of trapped right now because they don't really like Democratic policies, but they recognize that their party is in a dangerous situation. And so I've tried to work with them and to think about what are the kind... How do we start to restore common ground?

I've got a project with Ben Ginsberg, who was the attorney that dropped out of the Trump campaign when he got wind of what was going on. And Ben and I have been working on thinking about, well, how do we deal with these election issues to restore the legitimacy that people have and need to have in the election system? And so we've been working to try to think about, okay, so where do you start?

What are the things that are no brainers that you start? And one area is the threat to, physical threat to poll workers that has increased. There was this remarkable study, Michael, that the Brennan Center did on the number of poll workers who felt they were physically harassed.

And many of these people were Republicans. The Republican voter registrar in Maricopa County, which was the very controversial county in Arizona, he came to a conference in March at UCLA, and he played the tapes that he received, the phone calls he received, threatening him and his wife, and they were chilling. Chilling.

This guy is a Republican. He was planning to run for higher office in Arizona. This was a stepping stone.

And he was being threatened with death threats from MAGA people. That has to stop. And it turns out only eight states have the statutes to go after this kind of harassment explicitly.

Fortunately, this guy was smart enough to have taped what these people said. But bottom line is that we need to strengthen our laws just on very simple things that we all took for granted, which is you shouldn't be threatening anybody, voters or election officials, or harassing them. And so I think there are places where there can be common ground.

That means maybe sometimes we have to agree to disagree about how much we put into election security through voter ID versus a mailing out absentee ballots to everybody. Maybe we have to accept that some states are going to do that differently. But there are some common things, like not allowing people to be threatened when they either are trying to vote or facilitating the voting process, that I think we have to get.

We didn't think that we had to articulate. We thought that was culturally understood, but the reality is that it isn't, and we need to put it into writing and put it into statute.

Well, it's become commonplace with poll workers, also with prosecutors, and with people who serve the public, especially health officers. I mean, the kind of threats that people are under are just commonplace now. They're ubiquitous, and something really needs to be done about that because it undermines democracy, and it's really at the heart of what we associate with anti-democratic governments, isn't it?

Yes, I agree with every word you said. And obviously, an element of this, it's always been there. It's not like bigotry and violent behavior is anything new in human behavior.

But social media has given it a megaphone, and one that really transmits these threats quickly and widely. Much more quickly and widely than in the past. And there are some projects at Stanford and pretty much all the universities looking at this.

But that's another vexing problem, because we believe in freedom of speech. And it's very hard to think of who could regulate such things. To me, it's not obvious to me that Facebook or any of these places are either going to do a good job or should even try to do that.

So it's a vexing issue, but clearly social media at all levels is problematic. It's problematic for the kids that get threatened. It's problematic for the political system getting threatened.

It's problematic for journalists who get threatened, and ultimately some of them, more of them are dying than ever. So this whole business, I guess at some time, we had this rosy view that if the world can communicate with one another, we'd get better. But it doesn't seem to work that way, because the loudest voices are often some of the most disturbing ones.

And here's another listener joining us with a question, wanting to know, do you think that the persistent political resistance to acknowledge what is clearly happening empirically, is that the result of disinformation getting pumped into our media from external sources such as the Russian Internet Research Agency?

To some extent. I mean, so I have a colleague in France who is one of the leading people in France and in the world in looking at what's going on in the sort of cyberspace. And they're able to track these websites.

And it's pretty clear that there are people way to the left, way to the right, but then there's this incredible third category of kind of hard to categorize paranoia, extremism that's out there as well. Some of it is generated by bots, some of it is generated by foreign intelligence. And again, this was, it's not like any of this is new, this stuff was going on, but it now has a bigger megaphone in the way social media works.

And so the problem is, what do you do about it in a society where you believe in free speech? Where do you draw the line? I mean, traditionally, we draw the line when the speech either provokes violence or hatred to some point, but that's not easy when you get into court.

And there's lots of spaces like the dark web where it's very hard to monitor what's being said. And, you know, Facebook hired thousands of people to try to mediate conversation, and that doesn't seem to have made a difference. So it's a real problem for us.

It is a real problem for us, and I think artificial intelligence is just going to exacerbate those problems probably, because you have those bad actors.

We're doing all the nightmares here.

Yeah, I'm sorry. I always feel badly when that's the case because I like to hope that feathered thing, as Emily Dickinson said, you wanted to take flight. But the reality is, you're writing about the climate crisis makes us acutely aware just of how serious that problem is and what we face.

Yeah, no, I mean, look, I'm with you that I think all of us have to struggle to keep in mind the balance between the positive things and the negative things that are going on. And as I said, with the climate change, there are positive things. And I do think with social media, I see with the students, Michael, much more sophistication about what they see online than earlier generations.

I think they know there's a lot of nonsense. And so I think part of the answer is getting back down into the school systems to try to get some sort of sophistication so that people can understand what social and political messages could be from outside sources or from provocateurs or from bots, et cetera. And maybe there's software that can help us in that.

So I think software itself and AI by itself can be used as an instrument for good and for bad. And so we just have to be much more conscious of how we can use it for good. We're not going to stop the development of these things, nor should we.

I mean, I think technology has made life better on an average, but we do have to self-consciously realize that these tools can be used against you. And so we have to really be careful about how we introduce them and how we counter things that are bad that come from them.

I've been struck recently by a number of people who have said that we're talking about Russians with bots and all the like. The biggest enemy we face is the enemy within. It's the old Pogo-Walt Kelly line.

We've seen the enemy, and it is us.

Yeah, and part of it is that it turns out that my TAs tell me that they can always tell when chat cheap tea is being used to write an essay. So it turns out that just as a sophisticated wine drinker can distinguish between good and cheap wine, it turns out that sophisticated young people that actually know quite a bit about the Internet can spot people that are cheating with chat cheap tea. And I do think that part of it is that people do adjust to the way they operate and to the conditions of the world.

And so some of us that are older aren't as capable of doing that. And we know that the Internet tends to exploit older people. So I do take some hope that people do seem to pick up a sophistication, but I think the schools could be more helpful in fixing that.

Yeah, great. And another question apropos what we're talking about with hope. You think that our climate deteriorating too far will ultimately cause people to get over their partisan differences.

What do you see in human and political nature that gives us hope or despair?

Yeah, I don't think it'll help them get over their partisan differences generally, because the reality is that while we can be on the same page with respect to facts, we're not always going to be on the same page with respect to values or goals, etc. And we have to accept, and that's a premise of American democracy, we have to accept that there are going to be differences, and we have to find institutional incentives to get people to compromise those differences. Now, we happen to live in an era, and there have been other eras like this, where compromise and conciliation and deliberation leading to consensus is regarded as kind of a wimpy, boring activity.

But I think we're going to rediscover 18th century truths and get over our 19th century impulses. And I think we will swing back towards, I hope, that's my hope, that we swing back to understanding that a lot of this stridentcy just is not going to work in a democracy where you have a lot of diverse voices and a lot of diverse needs. And the climate issue is, I mean, there are serious trade-offs that we have to think about.

How quickly do we decarbonize if it means that countries like India and China and Africa need to industrialize? They haven't finished industrializing. It's all well and good for us to industrialize, deindustrialize and decarbonize.

But what do we say to the countries that aren't right now enjoying the luxuries of industrialization? And I think that means that some of our... I see a rigidity out there about possible intermediate solutions.

I see a rigidity in the government. I see rigidity in some of the liberal groups about this. So we did, for example, change our mind on nuclear.

We were going to close Diablo Canyon, which was 9% of our energy for the state. And to the credit of many liberal groups, they accepted the fact that we can't do that, okay? And we need to go back to carbon capture.

We have to understand that there are probably, in the transition period, countries that need to continue to use coal. It can't be a religious tenet that nobody can use coal. What we need to do is look at carbon capture techniques that take the CO2 and turn it into some harder product that could be buried somewhere.

Again, we have to find intermediate solutions. We can't just sort of bury our head in the sand and say... And it creates problems in the last COP, okay?

The last meeting, international meeting on this, basically stalled out because a lot of the developing countries were saying, well, wait a minute, you guys have contributed to all of this over many, many years. And so if you look at the cumulative amount of greenhouse gas, the United States and Europe are far more responsible for the problem that we have than China and India, even though China and India right now are emitting more than the United States. And so these are difficult issues, but we have to realize that there are some trade-offs and we have to accept some intermediate solutions.

Maybe in 2035, despite what the California government is saying, we're not going to get to all of the vehicles being ZEVs, the new vehicles being ZEVs. Maybe we have to look at plug-in hybrids for a little while. Okay, maybe, but that has to be the solution.

So we can't treat this as like it's some moral imperative and there's only one way and there's no trade-offs and everybody just got to become virtuous like Greta Thunberg. Okay, it's got to be... No, no, we got to be realistic about this and we got to keep moving forward and we got to realize that we can't leave people behind in modern lifestyle for 30 or 40 years while we work on the solutions.

We got to figure out ways that we can both reduce emissions and let them continue to industrialize.

Well, you're bringing me back to my first civics class with Ernie Roach who said politics is about compromise and getting things done is about compromise. It has to be.

Yeah, and believe me, this has been a problem on the campuses. The willingness to listen to the other side, especially when they're being provoked and treating it in a civil way and trying to figure out solutions rather than retreating into your bubble and retreating into your own self-righteousness. Even though there are many times in life when you just have to say, okay, well, we got to settle for second best and keep on pushing, keep on pushing.

But if everybody just retreats to the extremes, the whole society stalls out. The institutional design of American politics is that if we can't come to a sufficient level of agreement, nothing happens. The Congress gets divided.

We see the situation that we're seeing right now in Washington where nothing really gets done unless you have single party control, and that only happens for a short period of time. So we were able to get a whole bunch of legislation when Biden had control of the Congress, but now we're in a situation back to divided government where nothing will get done. And that will continue to be the pattern until we reestablish norms about trying to compromise across party lines.

Well, I think you hit on something particularly important when you were talking about the fact that social media contributes to... I was just reading, for example, Marjorie Taylor Greene making some statement. I mean, that's an extreme example, perhaps in many people's minds, but making a statement that Jack Smith was only going after Republicans.

And the fact of the matter is that Jack Smith, even though he was a Democrat, went after Robert Menendez, as I'm sure you're aware, went after also a couple of other major Democrats. And he wasn't successful in prosecuting Edwards, for example, but nevertheless, went after him as well. So there's Sheldon Silver in New York.

I mean, there's that record. But the facts don't seem to matter. In fact, this goes to another question from Jeff in Miami who says, how do we get back to the mindset of compromise when the reality of social media and 24-hour news cycles is that conflict and outrage is good for candidate fundraising and voter turnout?

Yeah, no. I mean, look, it's a real challenge, and far be it from me to say that I've got the solution to everything, but I do think that one aspect of that is rethinking civics education at K-12 level. Right now, civics education, insofar as it exists, and it doesn't really exist, but insofar as it does, it's a lot of memorizing of dates and of history, and that's important.

But what we really need to do is work on civics as the practice of democracy. And so what we should be doing is having an imaginative curriculum with 3D virtual reality and gaming where you win points by trying to find a solution to a problem, and you lose the game when you don't. And you could get a lot of kids to do that, and they would get in the practice of doing, and it might not even help.

It might not only help with democracy, it might help with marriages and various friendships, etc. Learning the skill of trying to figure out compromise. But I think you have to start with the education system and the habits that people develop very early on.

Now, that's not an immediate solution. The immediate solution, alas, is just lots of little things that we try to do. You know, Fishkin has been working, and Jim Fishkin at our campus has worked on these deliberative polls, and there's some evidence that that can work in certain situations.

You know, and certainly there are states where the governors are more pragmatic, and so it looks like the habits of compromise and pragmatism are a little stronger at the state and local level than they are at the federal level, so maybe it's not a bad idea to let more of these decisions be worked out at the state level. I don't know. It's going to be a bunch of little things in the long run.

It's going to be education in the long run that gets to the K-12. That's what I think it's going to take to get some of these habits re-instilled.

Well, here's Reid from Santa Rosa who wants to know, has Professor Cain found any inspiration and hope from current literature? Current literature?

Well, if he means fiction, then Professor Cain has to admit that he doesn't read much fiction these days. He reads a lot of nonfiction. So I would have to say, I don't know whether there is a literature out there that's helping people think about that.

But that could be helpful, certainly. But my sense is that's not what's going on in terms of the trends in fiction. But you, Michael, would be a better person to answer that question than me.

Current fiction does not necessarily offer us beacons of hope, although Barbara Kingsolver has made her almost personal commitment to not only support those kind of writers who offer at least political solutions or political consciousness raising, but puts it in her own work. So there's a writer certainly to reckon with right there. Let me get back to politics, though, and what's presently going on.

Do you think Garland waited too long? That's been the criticism.

I'm talking about Merrick Garland, of course. Yeah, no, I understand the question. I think that both Biden, the Biden administration, Garland, I think they're really trying to keep the appearance of hands off as much as possible.

Now, that will never convince the Republican hardcore, remember the election isn't going to be determined by them. It's going to be determined in about eight states by decline to state voters. So I think you don't want to feed the ad machine with statements that make it appear, that fit the image that this is all part of the conspiracy against middle America.

And so I think waiting, allowing this process to sort of unfold the way it has, I think it was the best that the Democrats could do. It's still going to be in the minds of many people that this is somehow all a Democratic conspiracy. But you certainly don't want to say something that's going to appear in 30-second ads throughout the whole country that really sort of caricatures the whole process that way.

So, no, I think the slowness of it. The only reason you might regret that is if, in fact, none of these things gets to trial before the election, and then Trump gets elected, and he basically pardons himself and every other rogue that was involved in all these conspiracies. And then, of course, you can second-guess the timing of all this.

But I think it's a hard call, and I think that the Democratic Party probably did the right thing with the timing that it had pursued.

You were talking before about the undermining of belief and confidence in the election process, and that certainly has happened and happened in ways that are very disturbing. But there's sort of a new kind of interpretation of what happened. You don't hear that as much now as you hear, well, it wasn't maybe a conspiracy because all those judicial things failed in terms of showing that the election was somehow stolen.

But it was stolen nonetheless. It was stolen by those on the side of the Democrats, meaning those in social media, Zuckerberg and company, or Democrats. It was stolen because they were on the side.

It wasn't like Richard Daly in Chicago, you know, turning votes his way or anything, but it was done in a concerted and again suggesting conspiratorial way. And what also has been undermined, I think, and I'd like your thoughts on this, has been the kind of confidence in the grand jury system. I mean, there's talk now about you can't have a fair grand jury if it's in Washington.

It has to be in West Virginia, or you can't have a fair grand jury if it's in Detroit or, you know, cities that are heavily Democratic. Grand juries were also, I mean, traditionally, you believed in grand juries, and now, you know, you've got grand juries indicting Trump, and there's a sense of the confidence in grand juries being challenged.

Yeah, I mean, obviously, the politicization of the judicial process is another major change and challenge that has really escalated over the last several decades, and it's very worrisome. On the other hand, you know, I think they're going to find enough independents and republicans in DC. I lived in DC when I ran UC DC up there for seven years, and even though it's a 75% democratic place, you only need a handful of jurors to balance it off.

So I hear that. Again, I think for some people, that will be a strong argument, but the judicial system is operating every day, and for the most part, the strength of these cases is going to, I think, impress some people. We can only speculate on this latest case, whether Mr. Smith put all of the things that he really knows.

A lot of people believe that there probably is a lot of testimony that hasn't been brought forward yet. I think the documents case, that one definitely, a lot of people see the evidence on that as very damning, and the fact that he said some of the things that he said.

Also, they tried to get rid of the surveillance pretty much, too.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yes, you're absolutely right that the politicization in the judiciary is a real problem. It could affect the way judges deal with the procedure of these cases.

Lord, help us if it actually affects judgments of the jurors. But that's just something we'll have to see. But there are four trials of all the different branches, the three branches of government.

The judiciary, even though it's more politicized, is at least more rational than the Congress. So maybe there's hope there anyway.

I also wonder what kind of toll this is all taking on Trump. There was an article in The Guardian, someone who observed him in the court and said, although publicly he always tries to appear strong and confident and everything, he looked very meek. He looked certainly piqued and disturbed when the judge referred to him as Mr. Trump and not Mr. President.

Let me get a couple more quick questions in here. One from Mexico City says, how can we improve civic education when the educational institutions are being hijacked? I'm not sure what one means by that hijacking, but there's concern there.

Well, I mean, look, educational institutions are not perfect, okay? And we have our own struggles with keeping balance and civility in place. And when you get down into schools, teachers have their own views, etc.

So some of the polarization in society infects, obviously, the polarization of teachers as well. So the enterprise of trying to get us back into a more rational discourse where people are being civic, it's a tough challenge, but I think it can be done. And I think there's a way to set up a curriculum.

I think the emphasis has to be on getting the sensible people on the left and the right together and standing up and making a statement for creating such a curriculum and really working on establishing common ground. And I think there's enough people in both the parties that can do that. So that's where you start.

And yes, it is problematic that in elite schools, many of the faculty are highly liberal, but the reality is that if you get into the engineering and sciences faculty, you find that there are many that aren't. And if you get down from the most elite schools, you find much more balance. And so I do think the universities will also be able to make some changes to try to be at the forefront of trying to have rational conversation about public affairs.

There's a big question from Colin who says, if you could be king for a day, what other changes to our system would you make to address the difficulties you've mentioned?

Well, first of all, we got to get rid of the electoral college. Like a lot of people in my generation, I didn't see this as being problematic throughout most of the 20th century. Basically, every election now is completely driven by the dynamics of the electoral college, and that's got to go, okay?

There are a lot of things that you could do that haven't yet permeated the public consciousness, but rank choice voting is a favorite at Stanford. Not so much because it's going to change the outcome of the elections, but it A, gives people more choices, and B, incentivizes people not to insult each other. Okay, so if I want to get, if rank choice voting works, everybody ranks their votes.

And if I want to get your vote and you support a different candidate, I'm going to be nicer to your candidate because if your candidate drops out, I get that vote. And so rank choice vote actually does incentivize consultants and candidates to be nicer to one another. I think we could use that.

So there are little things that you can do, but ultimately, this is a cultural thing that we have to attack very deeply. And that's why I say education, there's a role for religion here, there's a role for people in the journalism world. All of us have to get on the same page to think of the values that essentially were created for American democracy, which is the Madisonian premise that yes, factionalism can be a real problem, and we have to work very hard to create a situation where there aren't permanent winners and losers, and where we actually do try to compromise and make progress.

Always welcome, and I'm grateful for your sense and sensibility. In fact, here's Chris from Tempe, Arizona, good way to conclude, who says, Bruce is a brilliant, humble and even-handed explainer of why the monkey wrench in our system makes us feel as it does. A diagnostician, not a hasty surgeon, thank you.

And let me thank you, Bruce. Always great to talk to you. And thanks to all of you who heard this episode of Grey Matter with Michael Krasny live, or will be hearing it recorded on Apple or or Spotify or at greymatter.show.

And please, if you haven't already done so, feel free to join our growing community and become a member of Grey Matter with Michael Krasny by going to greymatter.show. That's Grey with an E. My thanks and appreciation to our Grey Matter with Michael Krasny team, Alex, Shannon, Colin, Chad and Jeff.

And to this episode's special guests, Bruce Cain. I'm Michael Krasny.

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From Grey Matter with Michael Krasny: Bruce Cain - Back to Compromise, Aug 7, 2023

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