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Aaron Ross Powell: Welcome to this special live (of sorts) joint episode of the liberalism.org show and Zooming In at The UnPopulist. I am Aaron Ross Powell, senior director of liberal projects at the Institute for Humane Studies, and I’m joined today by this esteemed panel. We have two of the most thoughtful columnists at The New York Times, Jamelle Bouie and David French. And we have Harvard University’s Danielle Allen.
We are talking tonight about institutions. We’re in a fraught political moment, one that we will be through at some point, and there will come a time after when rebuilding is needed. It’s the theme of LibCon2026. But there are also institutions that have persisted, regained strength now, ones that we probably don’t want to see persist after this moment, that we want to dismantle, tear down, reform.
If you look out at the state of American politics and culture, and this administration, and what’s being inflicted on the country, one of the things that really stands out is this return of not just institutions, but values and belief systems that a lot of us at least thought were decades into retreat—not defeated, but on their back foot—shrinking, disappearing to some degree: institutions of bigotry, of racism, of misogyny, of social control, domination, exclusion. But they’ve come back. And they’ve come back from the top. We have what is arguably an openly white nationalist regime ruling the country right now.
So my first question is: What did we think was gone or was in retreat that’s come back? And why? Or maybe: How did we convince ourselves that this stuff had disappeared more than it has?
Jamelle Bouie: Thank you all for being here for this conversation. It’s a pleasure to be here. I’m of two minds of this. It’s not that I ever thought, for example, that open racism in politics had gone the way of the dodo. Jim Crow and that era of American history is just too recent to be able to say this stuff was gone. I would say that one of the most openly racist political ads of the 20th century was made in the [1990] North Carolina Senate election. So, relatively recent stuff. It’s the “Hands” ad. It’s genuinely crazy—you should watch it … or you shouldn’t, I don’t know your tolerance for that stuff. But I did think that, not that there was any sort of post-racial utopia, but that there was a clear electoral penalty for open racism and open bigotry that political parties and candidates respected. They understood that this was the case and so would avoid that kind of thing in making public arguments.
What I’m surprised by is the extent to which, if there is a penalty, it’s not so much a penalty that will cost you an election. And I’m also surprised by how—and this is what I actually find kind of interesting about the use of racism and such by Trump—this interacts with a notion of outsider-ness. So, the anti-establishment politics, the notion that you want political outsiders, [on top of Trump’s] willingness to be openly and publicly racist, seems to signal to at least some voters, “Oh, that this guy is serious about being an outsider.” Far from being a penalty, it validates the claim he’s making about his own political identity. That’s very disturbing to me. I don’t particularly like it. And I don’t think that’s a thing that’s going to go back into the box.
In point of fact there was a story just today that in Georgia in the Senate race there, the Republican candidate, Mike Collins, his son-in-law is just a neo-Nazi. It’s not even a, “has been accused of gesturing” … he’s just straightforwardly a neo-Nazi. And will that matter? [Shrugs]
David French: Yeah. Boy, on that note … first, I want to thank you all for being here, and congratulate you for choosing the superior of the podcast options. Yeah, I did not know it was a competition, but as soon as I saw that it was, I decided we need to win, okay?
All right, on the question … I think we need to embed this in our brains: evolution is a fact when it comes to biology; it is not when it comes to morality. So we are the same human clay that existed in 1860 or 1660 or 1460 or whatever. We are just as susceptible to hatred, to evil, to bigotry, to ignorance, as any generation of human beings who’s come before us. And I think that we began to take for granted the moral superstructure that was created around this American experiment, especially in the post-Civil Rights era. I’m very guilty of this. I will just tell you, I am guilty of this: that when I was a younger person—and by younger person, I mean like 10 years ago, so, fully grown …
Danielle Allen: You’re still young, David.
French: I don’t feel as young as I did. When I was a younger person, I think even though if you had asked me, “Do you think people evolve morally?” I would have said that’s absurd. But if you had said to me, “Would America lapse? Is America vulnerable to the kind of overt, open, outright, grotesque racism and illiberalism that we see today?” I would have said no. I would have said we’re past that. And that’s the fundamental mistake to make.
I’m a long time conservative, former Republican, came up in the Reagan era, would have always described myself as a Reagan Republican. But there was one thing I disagreed with Ronald Reagan about—there are a few things, but here’s one that I was wrong about—he said, “Freedom is only one generation away from extinction.” And I thought, that’s excessively pessimistic. But it was, I think, exactly correct.
One of the things that we are doing right now, in the United States and the world—I wrote a column about this—it’s like we’re walking through the Museum of Wretched Ideas and then picking them all out and saying, “let’s do this again! So how about a little fascism? How about big buckets of antisemitism? Let’s throw in dashes of tariffs and a land war in Europe! How will this work out?” It’s like we are pulling items off the shelf from the Museum of Wretched Ideas. And one of our challenges is, we know where this will end up. And so the question is: Can we create enough public concern, enough public awareness, enough public alarm about the direction that we’re heading that we don’t actually go into the iceberg? But if we don’t, we will. And we will experience all of the consequences that history teaches this will accomplish.
And so one of the fundamental challenges of our time is: How can people who support liberalism, who support liberal democracy, who understand its value and also understand how it is often counter to human nature, can teach the next generation of people to avoid the mistakes of the past without reliving the mistakes of the past?
Allen: Well, thank you, again, for the invitation to do this, to have this conversation and the great adventure of a live podcast—who knows what will happen up here? I have a different way of approaching this question, I think, than everybody else so far. I don’t tend to think of this question in terms of the aggregate, as in, “this is where the American people are,” or “this is what’s happening to us.” I think so much of this is driven from the top that it actually is important to remember that, and it’s important to get really careful about where it’s going, how far it goes. That is, I’m not sure I would say about the American people what I would say about the Trump administration. So I want to just be very direct about that.
“Puncturing the kind of hyperreality the administration is trying to create … they want everyone to live in this hyperreality where Trump is popular, where he is dominating everyone, where the troops on the street are storm troopers patrolling. I just walked past, earlier today, a bunch of National Guards people. They’re like 22-year-old kids who are bored as hell, right? In reality this is all kind of shoddy, and not particularly impressive. That doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous, but it does mean that I think it’s really important not to buy the image that they’re trying to project to the country.” — Jamelle Bouie
What have I learned or reflected on watching what the Trump administration is doing? You know, I always go back to 2016 and the fact—some of you may know this little factoid and I think I still have it right, it could be slightly off, but I believe it’s the case—that 96% of Black women voted against Trump in 2016. It was the only demographic group of which that was true. We knew. We absolutely knew. And we were the only group that did. Okay, now, what did that mean exactly? Was it that everybody else was actually oblivious to what we were seeing? Did everybody else embrace the racism and misogyny? Not exactly.
I think for me, the takeaway in that was: it was really easy for people to say, “it’s not going to touch me.” That’s a little different than racism. I think that’s what our problem is. It’s not actually feeling common cause across lines of difference. So that’s very subtle, right? And it’s a problem. It’s a problem for our social fabric. It’s a problem for our sense of community. But I just want to say it is a different kind of thing than actual racism.
The other thing I would say is: I think this is an important moment for us to compare this to Woodrow Wilson’s presidency. Wilson resegregated, and that was his blatant intention. We are watching that, in the federal government, in the bureaucracy, in the Pentagon. And what I don’t understand is why there are not more lawsuits. This is a true mystery to me. That’s a thing I hope that we could talk about here. There should be class action suits happening and I don’t understand why they’re not.
French: I can answer.
On the military front it is virtually impossible to contest a promotion or demotion, it’s virtually impossible given the autonomy the courts give over national security decisions to the military. It’s one of the things that, if you’re going to take a public institution in the United States that’s the hardest to sue on virtually any ground, it would be the United States military.
We are seeing some suits in the civil service, and I think they’re going to work their way through the system. And I’m very concerned about what the Supreme Court will ultimately decide about civil service protections. Those lawsuits are underway. One of the things that is very dangerous about this moment is that 200-plus years of history and legal development have put the president in such a power of absolute primacy over the military, and his appointees of such primacy over the military, that the courts … it’s one of the areas where a federal court is the least likely to intervene, in the military, than any other federal agency by miles.
Bouie: Yeah, I think as far as the effort to resegregate the military, the solution there is going to be political. It’s going to be congressional investigations, it’s going to be a serious congressional inquiry into what—I agree—is very apparently like an effort to …
Allen: Why don’t we have that, then? Where’s our congressional inquiry on this subject? So, people, we need you to rise up!
French: Mike Johnson ain’t conducting that inquiry.
Allen: But there are some great procedural maneuvers where you could do things like—I don’t know what the equivalent is in Congress, but in New York state you can have a forum instead of a hearing. It’s exactly the same thing, but you don’t actually have to have majority support to do it. I’m sure there’s some maneuvers like that in our federal Congress, too.
Bouie: You can do that. You can do that as the minority party in Congress. I wanted to say, just building up something … Danielle, you said: one of the dynamics happening in our moment now is that people don’t experience … how do I put this? What happened in Minnesota was so impactful because it was one of the first times in this go-around that I think for a lot of Americans, people are like, “Oh, this is real. Those people look like me. I know people like that. This is real to me.”
The extent to which the bigotry and the illiberalism is refracted through entertainment, and through screens, it’s consumed as media and not necessarily as an experience that a person might have. And that distancing, I think, plays a really important part in just leading at least a critical part of the public not to take it that seriously. This has been one of Trump’s political advantages. When he’s not in office, he gets reverted in the public mind to being just a guy on TV, and it’s only when he’s back in office that—almost immediately—people are like, “oh yeah, this sucks.”
French: And the other thing is that experience is more impactful than education—in the sense that if you go through something, or somebody you know goes through something, that is always more impactful than reading about something. And so I think in particular, as we’ve watched absolute collapse of Hispanic support for Donald Trump, what you’re seeing is the radiating effects of experience. So all across America there are people who don’t have the right ethnic profile, who are entirely legally here, who are going through hell in various encounters on the streets, in their cars. And those stories, I think, are radiating out across the country.
So, “if Donald Trump wins, then you might experience…” is now replaced by “Donald Trump won and my uncle in Minnesota had this happen,” or “my cousin in San Antonio, or my son or my daughter…” And so the sheer breadth and extent of the—especially in the immigration context—of the crackdown, you’re already seeing it in this utter collapse of Hispanic support for Donald Trump. And I think that is due to experience. People are hearing stories; people are living through things that are fundamentally changing their mindset. And this vibe shift that was so hyped by the Republicans after the 2024 election is the shortest vibe shift I’ve ever seen in my entire life. They squandered it, all of it. And the only real question is: Can the 62 to 63% of Americans who actually oppose everything that’s happening get our freaking act together?
Allen: Exactly, rise up.
Powell: I want to see if I can tie some of these threads together into what I hope is a coherent question. I take the point about “this isn’t all of America backtracking on values and beliefs,” that we’re moving in the right direction, if in fits and spurts. And that it’s elite-driven in a lot of ways, but it’s also certain pockets-of-the-internet-driven, certain influencer-types-driven. And I think that ties into the point about the experience, because one thing that stands out is: so much of the really awful bigotry that we’re seeing from this administration is almost rhetorical or performative, not in the sense that it’s not actually doing genuine harm to people, but that it’s like they’re doing racism, they’re doing violence, for the content. They want to post it on social media. Trump wants the traffic stops by ICE, mostly because the footage is exciting for him.
What I’m wondering is: to what extent is this shift back—this community’s performing for each other? And if it is, then it feels like the way out is the rest of us seeing how horrific that is. And so, do we get a turn back? Does Minnesota represent “it doesn’t matter what the memes look like, this stuff is awful”? But they keep doubling down on the memes, which then, they set themselves up for a cycle that reverses this pretty quickly, is the question.
Bouie: Yeah, I think you’re right … I came here via train, then I biked from Union Station over to here, and you pass the big banners of Trump on federal buildings. And in real life those banners are large, but they’re not imposing. But the photos they take of them—this is me being a bit of a photography nerd—they always use telephoto lenses. And what a telephoto lens does is it compresses the image. It makes something far away seem much closer than it is. So they’ll put these photos of the buildings taken with like 200-millimeter lenses, which makes the banner look enormous, like something out of North Korea or whatnot. And it creates the impression of this overwhelming dominance. So much of what they’re doing … to the extent that there’s a theory of the case here that they’re working from, it’s that if you create the image of dominance, then people will feel dominated. And then you’ve won. You’ve succeeded in whatever you’re trying to do.
“What have I learned or reflected on watching what the Trump administration is doing? You know, I always go back to 2016 and the fact that 96% of Black women voted against Trump in 2016. It was the only demographic group of which that was true. We knew. We absolutely knew. And we were the only group that did. Okay, now, what did that mean exactly? Was it that everybody else was actually oblivious to what we were seeing? Did everybody else embrace the racism and misogyny? Not exactly. I think, for me the takeaway in that was: it was really easy for people to say, ‘it’s not going to touch me.’ That’s a little different than racism.” — Danielle Allen
I do think that part of the response is both puncturing the image. So you can take a picture of one of these buildings with a 24-millimeter lens, which makes it look quite small. And you can also remind people that there is real life. I recently said this to my seven-year-old, we were driving somewhere and he was looking at the map and he’s like, “it doesn’t look like the map.” And I was like, “Carter, listen to me, listen to me very closely. Remember this, the map is not the territory, buddy.” The map is a representation of what you have to actually observe with your own eyes. And I think getting people to observe with their own eyes, both to see that, no, they’re not actually dominating us—they’re doing lots of horrible stuff, but they have not fully dominated us—and that also, this is the point that I’ve been making quite a bit, kind of similar to one Danielle has made this evening, that the American public doesn’t like this stuff.
If you just look around, you can see all the many ways in which they do not like this stuff. So I do think that puncturing the kind of hyperreality the administration is trying to create … they want everyone to live in this hyperreality where Trump is popular, where he is dominating everyone, where the troops on the street are storm troopers patrolling. I just walked past, earlier today, a bunch of National Guardspeople. They’re like 22-year-old kids who are bored as hell, right? In reality this is all kind of shoddy, and not particularly impressive. That doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous, but it does mean that I think it’s really important not to buy the image that they’re trying to project to the country.
Allen: So I’m going to jump in for a second and just try to name the different drivers that are giving us a very different kind of racial politics, and politics around gender, now than, say, 10 years ago. Because partly Trump is a big part of it and we focus on that, and we’ve named the internet, but we have to actually be more precise about the different streams there.
There is the sort of neo-reactionary right, Curtis Yarvin type, Peter Thiel universe, and the ways in which a whole lot of conceptions that are familiar from South Africa are reemerging there and are, regrettably, attached to significant capital and political power. So that is new—not anything that we could have predicted 30 years ago, and I think we have to take that extremely seriously. Then there is more of your on-the-ground, the son-in-law who’s the actual neo-Nazi—the fact that that sort of far-right organization has grown to a point that, again, we wouldn’t have predicted 30 years ago. And then lastly, [we also have] the other important point of external international interference and efforts to foster that. That sort of grassroots far-right organizing is a global phenomenon, as everybody knows. So all of that does mean that our racial politics have gone backwards.
But again, the picture I just painted is not a picture of the American public broadly. It’s in some sense marginal communities that are, however, figuring out how to consolidate meaningful power. And I guess the reason I want to anatomize it that way is because I think it gets to be clearer how to fight it. I mean, it is a political fight across the board. And what one does need is a really massive multiracial cross-ideological coalition that is strong enough to make the rest of those units small. We are unlikely to get rid of them completely, and we never did. There always has been a durable stream to tap into in that regard in the country, but it can be made small again. But that does take coalition-building. I know that’s why we’re all here, and so that for me is where the real question is. I mean that sort of supermajority coalition for democracy that’s actually going to put at its core those values of universal inclusion, full participation, all people are created equal. At its core, building that seems to me the critical work.
French: There’s another piece here as well. If you’re going to talk about the pillars of Donald Trump’s strength, you obviously would talk about some of the billionaires and centimillionaires who are part of MAGA who are now propping it up, including the world’s richest person, who’s the world’s richest person by miles. So they’re a lot of the financial backing.
If you’re going to talk about some of the intellectual backing—Donald Trump doesn’t give a rip about intellectual backing, but if you’re going to talk about the people who are trying to put an intellectual frame around Trumpism that will cause it to exist and live past him, well then that’s a very small slice of Catholic integralists, a Curtis Yarvin neo-reaction … again a very small slice.
But if you’re talking about raw numbers—the people, the foot soldiers—then you’re talking about millions upon millions of fundamentalist Christians. Now this is the foundation of Donald Trump’s electoral [strength]—his capacity to win an election is the white evangelical church. The center of his power within the white evangelical church is in the fundamentalist wing. And if you doubt me on this, Trump won white evangelicals 82-17% in 2024. He lost everyone else 58 to 40%. Think about that. When you think about who, more than anyone else electorally, is responsible for Donald Trump, it is the evangelical church.
And I’m from that church. I’m from that tradition. At first, it seems extremely counterintuitive to think a man as libertine, as immoral as Donald Trump, that the more fundamentalist you are, the more likely you are to wrap both arms around him. Until you realize that fundamentalism isn’t much—this is borrowing from Richard Land, who’s the former head of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission at the Southern Baptist Convention—he said, “Fundamentalism is more of a psychology than it is a theology.” And what is it a psychology of? It’s a psychology of incredible certainty and unbelievable ferocity. And so when you see Donald Trump, and when—I’ll never forget, on the run up to Super Tuesday in 2016, and I began to see him, this New York billionaire in his tailored suit with his model daughter …
Bouie: It’s not that tailored, I just want to put that out there.
French: Yeah, yeah. Not super great, but whatever. It’s expensive, right? But I saw the bond form with the most strident and fundamentalist people in real time, and I remember thinking very distinctly, “Uh-oh, we are screwed.” Because who was the foundation of Huey Long? Same population. Who was the foundation of George Wallace? Same group of people. It just goes back and back and back and back to Confederacy and before.
One of the issues that we have is we do have a tremendous … I’m not going to say that we can sit here and pry Trump away from fundamentalists. I think that that is the last group of people who will leave him. It has been prophesied; they’re operating under prophecy right now, not under, like, “oh, I’ve studied the issues and…” No, we’re talking prophecy, all of that stuff. But there’s an awful lot of really well-meaning, good folks in the evangelical church who are not fundamentalists but are unbelievably intimidated by fundamentalists. They have a problem pulling away from them; they have a problem resisting them. What ends up happening is millions of good people are being swept down this stream, in large part because they’re essentially being told in no uncertain terms that “you will lose your community, you are a traitor, you are godless, you are demonic, you are a heretic if you back away from Donald Trump.” And who among us wants to be known as a demon? Having been called one many times, I can tell you it is not fun!
This is one of the real issues and problems that we have—how do we pull apart away from that very strident fundamentalist core? The millions of people who don’t like it, they’re not comfortable with it, but they also know that if they defy it, if they fight it, they lose everything.
Powell: Most of the forces that we’ve talked about that have reemerged in this moment are things that have been with us for quite some time. We’ve had fundamentalism in this country for a long time. We’ve had racism in this country for a long time. We’ve had misogyny. We’ve had performative violence. We’ve had all of this stuff. If the American electorate hasn’t overwhelmingly just shifted backwards but it’s these pockets, what enabled this emergence right now?
Jamelle, you mentioned Trump has two superpowers of sorts. One is that the penalty that most politicians would pay for being openly bigoted in the way that he is, and the way that a lot of other people in his administration are, doesn’t seem to attach to him. He just gets away with it. It falls to the side. And the other one is the point about, when he’s out of power people kind of forget who he was; “he was just the guy who was in charge when I was getting COVID checks,” say.
Does that mean that this is just a Trump phenomenon? Is a path out of this that he won’t be around forever? That there’s something special about him that gives people—he gives people—permission to express these views or behave in these ways; but others, like a JD Vance, perhaps don’t have these features, or when he’s not in power, people aren’t going to necessarily forget what he’s about? Is this a Trump phenomenon? Does that mean that both in terms of “he won’t be around,” and in terms of the building backlash to him, that these behaviors and beliefs are invested now with that experience of, “boy, this sucks” in practice? Does that lead to a reverse, or can someone else come along and this just persists?
Bouie: I think that if Trump had not won in 2024 you could say that “this is it.” They got lucky in 2016, and then they couldn’t reproduce this. I don’t think you could attach Stephen Miller’s politics to a generic Republican and that person would win a national election. I do think that that is a function of Trump, the Trump celebrity, the fact that he still retains his powerful pre-political persona as a reality TV star, as a celebrity, as someone who is synonymous with wealth. I was at the gym today listening to a bunch of early ’90s hip-hop and Trump shows up all the time as a reference, a reference to how much wealth you have. That’s still quite powerful. And I think you don’t get the political victories necessarily without that.
“People are hearing stories; people are living through things that are fundamentally changing their mindset. And this vibe shift that was so hyped by the Republicans after the 2024 election is the shortest vibe shift I’ve ever seen in my entire life. They squandered it, all of it. And the only real question is: Can the 62 to 63% of Americans who actually oppose everything that’s happening get our freaking act together?” — David French
But the thing about electoral politics, and the thing about administrations, is that you win and it’s stacked full of people. You now have basically, between the two administrations, eight years of Republican officials, Republican lawyers, budding Republican politicians, who have all been acculturated in the Trump way of doing things. After all of this, unless my deepest fantasies come into being, Bill Pulte is going to be out there living his life after all of this. These guys are going to be out there living their lives and trying to kind of recreate the particular constellation of political forces and so on and so forth to get themselves back in power.
His wins in 2016 and 2024 are, I think, very tied to him specifically. But now there’s sort of a whole ecosystem around him that is quite opportunistic, and so I do think that going forward for at least the next 20 years, any Republican politician who wins high office is going to be plugged into this one way or another. And it’s not going to go away.
It may not be as electorally competitive as its own thing. And I think what we’re likely to see in 2028 is Vance attempt to kind of play—triangulate, basically—Trumpism into office. And I don’t think the guy is talented enough to do it; we’ll see. I mean, I’ve been wrong about these things before, but he just doesn’t seem like he has the juice. But the more important point is that … I’ll put it this way: a classmate of mine from college has a political consulting firm—she’s a lobbyist or something related—and I, out of curiosity, was just like, “What’s she been up to for 10 years?” And it’s like, “oh, she worked in the Trump administration for four years, and now she’s a lobbyist and the next Republican administration, she’ll probably work in it, right?” Her government experience will be the Trump administration. That is a generation of Republican operatives, a generation of Republican lawyers, and so on and so forth.
And then you have to think about the voters, who … this is what Republican politics is. They have no memory of the pre-Trump era. They have no memory of George W. Bush or the ‘90s or the ‘80s. For them, Trumpism is just being a Republican. And so that’s the other aspect of this. That will be around for the next generation.
French: I really enjoy teaching at my alma mater, a small Christian college in Nashville called Lipscomb University. It’s a great thing. It’s a great way for me to really sort of take the pulse of where specifically evangelical young people are and all this—and I taught a class in the fall of 2024 called “Why American Politics Has Gone Insane.” And 80% of the class was history and sociology. Only about 20% was actually politics. But the reason why I taught this class is I just had the sudden realization—to Jamelle’s point—that every one of my students knew no politics other than this moment. If they were a senior that was 22 years old, at that point, they were 12 when Obama and Romney were fighting it out. And unless they were the biggest nerd in the world—me, at 12—they were not paying close attention.
So one of my assignments that I gave them was to watch any one of the three debates between Romney and Obama and just share with me their thoughts. And I remember, I’ll never forget this, the first hand that went up after they watched—and I don’t even know which one she watched—she said, “I had no idea that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney were such good friends.” And I almost fell over. Like, I was a Mitt guy in 2012. I was a—this was before I was in journalism—Mitt delegate to the Republican National Convention in 2012. And this idea that Mitt Romney and Barack Obama were friends was hilarious to me. But then I thought about it for five seconds and I thought, they have not encountered decency and civility in politics. And so, when somebody’s like “my friend the governor,” or “there’s a lot that the president said that I agree with, however …” that, to them, coded like friendship. Isn’t that amazing?
Bouie: Whereas I hear that and I’m like, yeah, those motherfuckers hate each other!
French: Exactly. Exactly. But civility, decency, decorum … and it was really interesting, they loved it. They loved those debates. What that told me is there is—I mean, look, you don’t want to over-extrapolate from these kinds of individual encounters and things like that—but I do think that there is a reservoir, even amongst young people, of longing and yearning for something that could be better and different. To your question about is this Trump or not? Yes, it’s Trump and it’s not.
Trump drew on strains and strands and coalitions that have existed in American politics for a long time. My friend Yuval Levin said he basically took the entire George Wallace constituency—which used to sometimes be split to some degree in the white working class between Republicans and Democrats, depending on where you were—and he put it in the GOP. And he took another entire constituency of X or Y and Z, that had sort of been on the fringes of American life—conspiratorial people in public health or whatever—and he’d yank them all into one tent. So on the one hand, these people exist. It is a group of people who exist in America and have existed in America for a long time. On the other hand, can only Donald Trump bring them all together? And that’s the question.
I draw some encouragement from the 2022 midterm elections. Because in 2022, this was maybe when Trump was at one of his lowest ebbs, but inflation was at its peak, the recovery from COVID was very slow. Remember all the supply chain problems? You could not buy something. Like, Americans are not used to going to a car dealer and not being able to buy a car because it’s not there. That’s not something we’re used to. But the performance for Republicans was deeply disappointing. And I would put it to two reasons: Dobbs and doofuses. So Dobbs was of course the abortion decision—which as a pro-life person I was deeply saddened that America reacted the way that it reacted to Dobbs—but the doofuses was a whole bunch of Trump Mini-Mes that were put forward into swing states by the Republican Party. Trump Mini-Me after Trump Mini-Me after Trump Mini-Me, and every one of them lost in a statewide swing state election—every last one of them. And so that tells me that in the absence of Trump, the Mini-Mes really do struggle. So that gives me some degree of hope, but that is tempered by the fact that Trump did tap into actual, real, live American constituencies that do exist and will exist after he’s gone.
Allen: I want to build on that a little bit, especially your story with the students about what’s changed in American culture; and what’s changed, if it’s durable, it’s a dangerous change, right? And that is that, you talk about the generation of operatives have been trained one way—we also have generations of young people who have never seen anything but toxic engagements in politics, and that has authorized toxicity from them as well.
And what do I mean by that exactly? I definitely have heard people—like I was on an airplane—and heard two people who were behind me having a plain old, old-fashioned, totally wholehearted, antisemitic conversation. Like I’ve never in my life heard such a thing like that before. And that is the kind of thing that I do think Trump’s behavior is authorizing, but not just that. Here, we have to have Elon Musk in the picture too. We have to have what he is doing with his platform, where he is absolutely driving a racial politics whose purpose is to reinstall racial hierarchy. That, from my point of view, is actually far more dangerous even than what Trump has done.
But between the two of them, yes, they have authorized performative racism as something that gets you ahead in the world. I said, to start, I wanted to keep the American people out of this, to some extent. [Because this] is sort of coming from the top. It really is, in its most powerful ways, coming from the top. The American people are not wholly corrupted by what has occurred. Nonetheless, we can see corruption occurring. Young people who don’t know it can be any different, the way they talk to each other on social media. At any rate, the kind of information control, norms control that is being driven by Musk in particular seems to me our single greatest problem for any projects [aiming at] reversing the dynamics that we’re seeing.
Powell: We’ve been talking a lot about Trump and about his political party, but I want to pull it back to ideas because, yes, there’s this kind of conflict of this particular personality versus most of the rest of, and this constellation of elites that are propping them up. But this is also a conflict—and this is the theme of LibCon2026—between liberalism and illiberalism. And what occurred to me in this conversation … David, when you were talking about your students seeing this kind of, even if it’s a feigned civility because they actually hate each other, it feels …
French: And they loved the feigned civility, by the way.
Powell: Yeah, but it feels good to them. And so, we have people who are being raised, don’t know anything outside of this world, but we also are seeing—people are seeing—what this world looks like. I’ve had the privilege, several times over the last few years, of talking to student groups both in the U.S. and in Europe, and particularly in Eastern Europe. And one of the things that stands out to me is that young people in the U.S. were more willing to think Trump was cool or edgy, or maybe buy into it a little bit, versus very similar sorts of kids over in Europe were just like, “We’ve seen this stuff. We’ve seen these guys. We got out of it. We know what the experience of it was like. We know what it’s like to get out of it. There’s no value in this.”
I guess the question is, to what extent does the suffering that people are facing right now from—whether that’s like the messaging that’s being inflicted on them or the policies that are hurting them or the friends that they’re seeing targeted and so on—affix to the illiberal ideas and preferences and policies that the Trump administration and the various people in his orbit represent, [where] those students [might have reactions] like, “actually, it turns out not just that illiberalism doesn’t work in terms of supply chains and quality of life, but also the alternative of a liberal sensibility seems really appealing, feels really good. I want that. I don’t want the Nick Fuentes. I want the positive vision.”
Bouie: I myself am very skeptical that, in the absence of actual political work, that it attaches. I don’t think you can count on people simply making the connection themselves. I think you actually have to show them the connection, sell the connection, say that this connects to this. You don’t want to elect these people because you get these outcomes. This constellation of ideas and ideologies produces exactly the things you don’t like. I think you really do have to say that and sell that. I think part of winning people back over to any kind of liberal sensibility is liberals themselves understanding that they have to get in the fight.
And the fight isn’t … we can get to a point maybe in the future where we can have our feigned civility again. But in the meantime, you have to actually stand up for these values and be quite assertive and aggressive about that. I was just watching today confirmation hearings for the new intelligence chief, and Jon Ossoff from Georgia was doing the questioning. I found his approach so interesting; it’s something I hadn’t quite seen any Democrats do before. And that is not simply to be like, “look at the crazy thing this guy is saying, he’s asking who won the 2022 election.” But he had this look of almost like, “don’t you respect yourself? Don’t you have self-respect that would lead you to just say the true answer?” That sort of attaching is an example of what I mean.
“Democracy is not utopian. Liberal democracy is not utopian. It accommodates the messiness of human nature. It realizes we’re always going to be messy. We’re never going to be all together on this. We’re never going to have that total unity. And what the illiberal alternatives do is, they put together this shining vision of total unity, of unified effort, of solving the problems that democracy cannot solve. And because so many people have zero experience with the alternatives, I’m not at all surprised that very old ideas are beginning to have new resonance.” — David French
He was presenting liberal values as, in part, a matter of self-respect. The kind of society we want to have where we respect each other, and we have respect for ourselves, does not permit us to just embrace lies for the sake of lies, for the sake of some guy. I think that that kind of rhetorical approach is part of what this looks like, it’s not actually saying “my friend,” but is saying “this person lacks dignity. And you don’t want to be like that.” And that embracing this makes you a person who lacks dignity. And if so much of our politics are being shaped by battles and anxieties over status, then connecting illiberalism with a fundamental lack of dignity and self-respect, I think could be a very effective approach.
And I’ll also say, just watching it, it’s also very funny to watch Jon Ossoff be like, “you’re a sack of shit.” And this guy’s like, “I can’t say otherwise.”
French: That was a phenomenal exchange. It really was well done. Ossoff has been pretty impressive lately in a lot of ways. And I think he’s going to win going away in his Senate election, which should raise eyebrows, because he’s going to win going away in Georgia, in all likelihood. So that’s very instructive. A couple of things. I’m reminded of, again, we have to meet people within their frame of reference. There’s just no way around that. And so, one of the things that we’re seeing is a lot of younger Americans are being more attracted to political violence. A lot of younger Americans are being attracted more to extremist movements. Why? Well, I’m reminded of Winston Churchill’s famous statement that democracy is the worst system in the world except for every other one. And there’s so much truth in that.
But think about this: if you’re a person born, let’s say you’re born in 1980, so you’re 46 years old now, and you do not have really a memory of Soviet communism. You just don’t. You definitely don’t have a memory of German fascism. You have zero experience with Imperial Japan. None of that, right? What you do have a lot of experience with is a pretty messy American democracy that is going through a period where quite frankly—as messy as democracy inherently is—it’s been extra messy. We’ve not been good. And we have not solved, we have been incapable through our current electoral process, of solving some really besetting problems.
So on the one hand, you have all of the reasons why democracy is the worst system in the world that they see, and they have no experience with the other systems. And the other systems happen to have a utopian vision that they cast. Democracy is not utopian. Liberal democracy is not utopian. It accommodates the messiness of human nature. It realizes we’re always going to be messy. We’re never going to be all together on this. We’re never going to have that total unity. And what the illiberal alternatives do is, they put together this shining vision of total unity, of unified effort, of solving the problems that democracy cannot solve. And because so many people have zero experience with the alternatives, I’m not at all surprised that very old ideas are beginning to have new resonance.
It’s very interesting, sometimes you’ll even see in the postliberal right people longing for the Sun King, Louis XIV; or they’ll talk about we need a Protestant Franco; or we need a Protestant Pinochet; because they just do not have the knowledge or experience of these alternatives. Now it’s interesting they do not say that we need a Protestant Petain from Vichy France—which by the way, if you read Vichy rhetoric, it tracks American Christian nationalist rhetoric just shockingly. I could put up different quotes and you would not know the difference. But this is what we’re dealing with.
It’s the responsibility of people of my generation, it’s responsibility of American political leaders right now, to make democracy better, to fix what is broken as best as we can in this messy system that will never be utopian. But we also have to raise the alarm about the alternatives that many of us know lead to ruin and death. We know it; but they don’t, because they have not seen it, experienced it, know about it. And that’s when the siren song of that utopianism that illiberalism often offers is the most compelling. And we need to really think about that hard, because when they’re hearing that illiberal siren song, they’re hearing it from the standpoint of idealism, perfection, order, beauty, all of these things. But those of us who know better know where this all leads.
Allen: I think one of the hardest things about this conversation is, if you sort of think back through history, how did liberal peoples emerge? They didn’t emerge through public philosophical argumentation. They didn’t emerge through people saying, “there’s this thing called liberalism, and here are its core ideals, and here’s why it’s important to embrace them,” which we’re all kind of … I talk that way all the time, right? So this is directed as much at myself as anything. I think, from my point of view, Lincoln gives us the best lesson in what it takes to help foster the emergence of liberal people. Very, very simple formula: the goal is government for the people, you only have that when you have government by the people.
So is government for the people? Eh. Prices are horrible, housing is a disaster. It takes me four years to get an appointment for my colonoscopy because of how insurance works and all the complications; I can’t take time off work to make an appointment so I can’t make a doctor’s appointment. Healthcare is not working. My kid’s not going to get a job when they come out of high school, come out of college. There’s a whole lot of reasons we can point to to say, “look, no, all over the country, across the political spectrum, voices are calling out that right now government’s not for the people.” Then you have to ask, if it’s not for the people, is it failing to be by the people? And you ask that consistently over and over: oh yeah, corruption; this is government by a small group of people who are just taking for themselves and therefore not actually governing for the people. So what are we going to do about that problem of corruption?
“I think it’s been taken for granted in the conversation that, yeah, liberalism is not an ideology with a particular comprehensive conception of the good. But, you know, I think about Frederick Douglass’s speech, the ‘Composite Nation’ from 1868, where he—in part in that speech he’s arguing against Chinese exclusion, but kind of the thrust of that speech is that, no, the good we are creating here is a nation for all peoples. Everyone welcome, everyone who wants to be an American can be one here. This is the composite nation. And to me, that is a good. That is, you know, liberal pluralism, some measure of egalitarianism … these things are good to pursue for their own sake. And I do think even if liberalism isn’t a utopian ideology, a measure of utopianism in our rhetoric I think is an important thing to have.” — Jamelle Bouie
Oh, well, what about the fact that 60 million Americans no longer have a meaningful vote in federal elections because of the combination of gerrymandering and closed primaries? That is not government by the people. Oh, are these the reasons we don’t have government for the people? And that gives us a thing to do; it gives us a very concrete thing to work on. And that’s what people actually really, I think, respond to: a concrete thing to work on where they can see from A to B, that will—instead of lining their pockets—that’s going to actually make the change that I need with regard to a government that’s going to be responsive, address that housing problem, address that affordability problem and so forth.
The point of saying this is that you have to actually give people, and invite people to work on, something concrete that will change their lives. And the shape of the thing that you want to ask them to work on has to be a liberal shape. That’s, I think, how a liberal people emerges. So that’s where I would say we need to ask our politicians to focus. So I would say it’s less about rhetoric and more about how we evaluate whether our institutions are securing our safety and happiness.
Powell: Danielle, David, Jamelle, thank you so much. Thank you to all of you. We have a few minutes for questions now.
Audience Question: So maybe I’m naïve, but what concerns me is the people in the current administration. I don’t believe they’re going to pay any price, on any level, for their conduct, whether criminal, civil, social, financial, in any way. I think they end up on corporate boards and Hollywood producers, and will there be a price paid? What does the law—you’re the attorney—how does the law end?
French: So the question was, are the people in the Trump administration going to pay a price for their conduct? Oh boy. So, a couple of things on this. Number One: what we are going to see by 2028 is one of the worst fears of the anti-Federalists vindicated. If you go back to the argument over the Constitution, one of the biggest concerns they had was over the pardon power. Because what they properly saw was that pardon power, which is the last vestige of pure monarchical power that’s in the Constitution, could be used to totally wreck the rule of law in this country.
What we’re going to see, I think, is a mass pardoning, where people have enriched themselves at a level that makes the Gilded Age guys think that they were born in the wrong century because they could have made real money now. We’re going to see large-scale pardons. We saw that from Corey Lewandowski—it was reported that he said, “Well, it doesn’t matter what I do because I’m going to get my pardon.” Now, what do we do about that? Well, we can’t reverse the pardon. We can’t. But we need to be very serious about thinking that every single person who received a preemptive pardon from Donald Trump, or received a pardon from Donald Trump, here’s what we could do: impeach and convict them so they can never hold public office, as in federal office, in the United States for the rest of their lives. And I don’t know if we’d have the will to do that.
If we actually have at least a decent-sized electoral majority that expels Donald Trump, I would urge that, as a mass impeachment of everyone who accepted a preemptive pardon with conviction. That’s one way to cleanse out the worst of the worst from future eligibility. And it’s completely constitutional and it’s exactly what the founders would want us to do. Now, I’m also saying that cognizant of the fact that impeachment is fundamentally broken right now, and we’re not able to do this.
However, I will say this. We cannot plan for the continued 50/50 polarization to continue forever. We have been through this before. We have been through close polarization. We’ve been through hyperpolarization, and the dam breaks eventually. And I think we have to do two things at once. On the one hand we have to be hanging on by our fingernails through the moment to try to survive as best as we can, and number two we need a coherent program for how we try to make sure this doesn’t happen again. We won the Civil War, but we had to have the Civil War amendments. You had Watergate and got rid of Nixon, but we had to have Watergate era reforms. Well, if Donald Trump is defeated and MAGA is defeated, what are the reforms that follow? And that’s what I think we have to be thinking very intentionally about, not to hype the panel tomorrow that I’m going to be on about executive power, but I’ve got thoughts on that. Okay, but I really do think you raise a great question. How can we hold pardoned rich people accountable, and if we cannot figure that question out, we’re going to be in real trouble
Bouie: I just have two quick thoughts. One, people can still be civilly liable, even if they’re not criminally liable, even after a pardon. So there’ve been proposals, for example with ICE, for Congress to essentially create civil liability for agents and officers. So that, maybe you couldn’t hold Steven Miller criminally accountable, but you can make him poor. And that’s what they care about.
“If you sort of think back through history, how did liberal peoples emerge? They didn’t emerge through public philosophical argumentation. They didn’t emerge through people saying, ‘there’s this thing called liberalism, and here are its core ideals, and here’s why it’s important to embrace them,’ which we’re all kind of … I talk that way all the time, right? So this is directed as much at myself as anything. I think, from my point of view, Lincoln gives us the best lesson in what it takes to help foster the emergence of liberal people. Very, very simple formula: the goal is government for the people, you only have that when you have government by the people.” — Danielle Allen
But I will suggest that if the pardons are so blatantly corrupt, I myself am not entirely certain that a legislature has to respect their validity. I think this gets into the question of constitutional interpretation, and who can say what the Constitution means. But I would argue that there is like an implicit “these are good faith pardons” written into the pardon clause. And if they aren’t good faith pardons, if they’re pardons explicitly meant to preclude any kind of meaningful accountability for bad behavior, do they have to be honored in the first place?
Audience Question: So, apologies in advance because I’m an anti-trust lawyer, so I think of everything through the lens of competition. And I think of liberalism through that same lens. Liberalism is competition for ideas. Illiberalism is a monopoly over ideas: “this is the only way that we’re going to do this.” And so my question is, if we think about this, the reason people are comfortable with illiberalism is because you don’t feel concerned: “this is one thing, we just have to believe it, we don’t have to worry about it anymore.” And liberalism, it is a mess. There are competing ideas, everybody’s telling you something else, something different. I’m just wondering, if you reframe it that way, how can we make people comfortable with the fact that there is always going to be a debate. That illiberalism is an illusion: you don’t have a debate anymore, but you also don’t have freedom.
Allen: I mean, that’s the whole story there, right? I mean, it’s everything. It’s institutional incentives that actually make competition productive. So a whole lot of changes to our election system that would do that: getting rid of traditional party primaries, having all-party primaries, ranked choice voting, all that gives incentives for a very different kind of public discourse.
There’s the culture side of the question: civic education, infrastructure, retracted for decades. It’s being rebuilt now, thank heavens, but that’s one of its critical jobs, is to make sure that people can be comfortable with debate, they can understand what they care about, what matters to them and why, but also listen to, understand, for others and be able to speak from that listening position, not just straight to an argumentative position. On both sides, there’s just huge amounts of reform work to do to achieve that. So, I mean, yes, that is part of what we need. And I would say, you know, for me, it’s not a question of reform after the Trump era. It is how we will get out of the Trump era, is actually by undertaking these projects of reform, from today.
French: Let’s be super blunt and honest here. If it weren’t for the American evangelical community, right now we would be talking about, “remember that Donald Trump guy who ran briefly in 2015 and he went back to reality TV? That was weird.”
We have to be very blunt: the people we need to persuade on this, to really get through this moment, are devout evangelical Christians. And one thing that we need to educate devout evangelical Christians about is that liberalism, American liberalism, is a product of Christian people making a Christian argument for tolerance of people from all backgrounds and all faiths. James Madison in 1785—and look, I’m quoting Founders who we all know had problems, okay, so James Madison had problems—but James Madison said this in 1785. He said, when the state of Virginia tried to impose a religious assessment to try to pay the salaries of pastors, he said, “This proposed establishment will do damage to this idea of America that says we are home for the oppressed of all nations and all religions.” So here’s James Madison entering our current debate to say to all of these people who claim to be revering the Founders, “you’re really wrong here.”
Okay, but you have to keep reading. Why was it so bad, to James Madison, to have this establishment of religion? About two or three or four paragraphs later, he says, “because it will diffuse the light of Christ.” We liberals have to be comfortable making religious arguments for liberalism. Now, I’m not asking secular folks to do that, but those people of faith who are liberals: make a religious argument. Because what James Madison said is that when Jesus Christ came, he did not establish an earthly government. He didn’t do that. Instead, he established a regime that said, “love God and love your neighbor.” And we want to love your neighbor.
Now, of course I’m fully cognizant that James Madison was not loving his Black neighbor, okay? I’m fully cognizant of that. But he articulated a principle that is a religious argument for liberalism. We have to make this. We cannot shy away from it. Because I guarantee you the other side is making religious arguments for their point of view, for totalitarianism, for authoritarianism. We just had Al Mohler, the head of the most powerful seminary in the Southern Baptist world, which is then therefore the most powerful seminary in America, saying the Constitution is flawed because it doesn’t make us a Christian nation. And so what you have to answer to him is: you’re contradicting the Christian vision of the Founders. When George Washington wrote to the Hebrew congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, what did he do? He quoted scripture to support his acceptance of Jewish Americans in this new republic.
So this is one of the things that I feel very strongly about, is that we have to go … because we have to be super honest, it is the religious community in this country that has given Trump power. You have to meet them where they are with a religious argument, and by golly we got the better religious argument. And it’s based on two fundamental truths about humanity. One, we are all flawed. “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God,” says Scripture. So therefore, if we’re all sinners and flawed—this is Federalist 51: men aren’t angels—we have to have checks. We cannot have one big ruler.
Here’s another one. We’re all flawed, but we’re also all created in the image of God. So, what does that mean? Every single one of us—Christian, Jew, Hindu, atheist—needs to be treated with the same level of dignity and respect.
What is the system of government that accommodates these two great truths about humanity? Liberalism. Liberalism.
Now, I’m not going to say that, I’m not this person who’s going to say, “Well, this is the system of government that God ordained.” That’s a very dangerous argument, but the argument I think that is very fair is that this system of government embodies particular principles about humanity that are taught in the Christian faith, that should resonate with Christians and did resonate with the Christians of the Founding. And it’s one of the weird ironies of our time—and this is something that neither side, neither extreme likes, but it’s true—it was a lot of Christian argumentation that created a secular country. And we have to understand that that is a fact, and why that is a fact. Because they had lived through Christian authoritarianism. They were as far removed from the wars of religion as we are from World War I, so they knew what could happen. So, I just feel like we have to fill that void, because the other side is filling it. They’re pouring in gallons of garbage into the religious sensibility, and we have to counter that with gallons of truth.
Bouie: The only thing I’ll add to that, it’s sort of a similar line as David. I’ve just been thinking about this for 10 minutes, which is, I think it’s been taken for granted in the conversation that, yeah, liberalism is not an ideology with a particular comprehensive conception of the good. But, you know, I think about Frederick Douglass’s speech, the “Composite Nation” from 1868, where he—in part in that speech he’s arguing against Chinese exclusion, but kind of the thrust of that speech is that, no, the good we are creating here is a nation for all peoples. Everyone welcome, everyone who wants to be an American can be one here. This is the composite nation. And to me, that is a good.
That is, you know, liberal pluralism, some measure of egalitarianism—and yeah, mixed company, some measure of egalitarianism—these things are good to pursue for their own sake. And I do think even if liberalism isn’t a utopian ideology, a measure of utopianism in our rhetoric, I think is an important thing to have. To say that, no, we are not just fighting for a country where we can all disagree, we’re fighting for a country where you’re going to be a pluralist and you’re going to like it, goddammit. And that’s sort of where I fall on these things. It’s related to what David’s saying, but I think you can have a harder edge with this. And I do think that’s appropriate.
Powell: Thank you all again for the conversation.
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