Gary Gerstle, historian and Paul Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus, Director of Research in American History and Emeritus Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, UK, considers American history since the fall of communism through the prism of the Civil War in conversation with IWM Rector, Misha Glenny.
Misha Glenny: Thank you all very much for coming to this session with Gary Gestle. In the next hour he is going to trace some of the historical roots which have nurtured the extraordinary and sometimes frightening twists and turns that we’ve seen in American politics over the past 30 years or so. But first, let me ask what you’re working on at the moment.
Gary Gerstle: I’m writing a sequel to my book The Rise of Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era. It’s tentatively titled Politics in our Time: Authoritarian peril and democratic hope in the twenty-first century. The authoritarian peril part of that is pretty clear to me. I don’t know whether the democratic hope will be a very small or very large part of the book. That will be what I write last. I’m hoping for good developments in the next year and a half.
Misha Glenny: We’ll keep our fingers crossed on that. You argue that throughout American history there has been a struggle – one might even describe it as a dialectic – between two competing nationalisms: racial nationalism and civic nationalism. How do you define those two nationalisms? Can you describe when they’ve waxed and waned periodically, and indeed clashed? And where are we with that clash at the moment?
Gary Gerstle: Civic nationalism is the belief that America is open to anyone in the world, of any ethnicity, race, creed, sexuality, as long as the person in question is willing to obey the law, revere the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, and become American. Its principles are encoded in two very important documents. One is the Declaration of Independence, which declared that ‘all men are created equal’ – the US is coming up to its 250th anniversary of that world historical document. The other – an even more profound statement – came out of the American Civil War in the 1860s. Most people don’t recognize its profound nature, because of the anodyne way in which the words of the 14th Amendment (1868) to the Constitution were written. That amendment simply says that every person born on the soil of the US is a citizen of the US. That is probably the most profound democratic statement ever written into law in the United States. It means, it doesn’t matter if you’re old or young, if you’re Asian, Black, Latino, Irish or Jewish, or homosexual, gay or trans, conservative or radical. If you’re born on the soil of the United States, you’re a citizen of the United States. No questions asked. It’s a profoundly egalitarian sentiment – not just aspirational but encoded into law. The phrase commonly used to describe this sort of belonging is ‘birthright citizenship’—you are a citizen of a country by virtue of your birth in that country.
The Trump administration is trying to get rid of birthright citizenship. Many of the people in his movement are supporters of racial nationalism, which is the opposite of civic nationalism. It declares that citizenship and belonging in America ought to be restricted to people of European descent, for such peoples are thought to be ‘racially’ or ‘civilizationally’ superior. At times, as in the 1920s, the circle of racial belonging has been drawn even tighter, allowing the ‘races’ of only five nations to enter the US as immigrants: Britain, Ireland, Norway, Sweden and Germany. At the time, Eastern and Southern Europeans – Poles, Russians, Eastern European Jews, Poles, Slavs, etc. – were excluded from coming to America because they were thought to belong to inferior races.
Now, for these traditions to survive as long as they have means they have to be protean. They can’t be just etched in stone. They have to be able to respond and be flexible without losing their core meanings. And so, to study the ebb and flow of these two sentiments across American history is to be aware that what is ‘racial nationalist’ in one moment may not be ‘racial nationalist’ in another. Also, civic nationalism has had to evolve and periodically ask what it means to be a citizen. Is it enough to have free speech? Is it enough to have rights if you’re accused of a crime? Well, for the twentieth century, the answer to these questions was no. You needed employment security. You needed welfare assistance if you fell on hard times. The meaning of civic nationalism, the rights which it entails, can expand in other words or contracts. Across American history both these traditions have changed their character without changing their essence.
The American Revolution, beginning in 1776 and ending in 1792, was a moment of civic nationalist triumph: the early aftermath of the Civil War when the 14th Amendment was passed was another moment of civic nationalist triumph. The half century following the Civil War (1870s-1920s), by contrast, saw a resurgence in racial nationalism, marked by the restoration of white supremacy in the South. Another instance was the closing in 1924 of America’s immigrant gates to ‘racially inferior’ peoples. Not only did the 1924 law reduce the total number of immigrants allowed to enter the US per year to 150,000 – an 85% decrease – but it also reserved 120,000 of those 150,000 slots for the people of those five countries I mentioned earlier. If you were from Eastern Europe, if you were from Africa, if you were from East or South Asia, you basically had no chance of getting in. The only exception to that was Latin America, because there was a need for Latin American labour in US agriculture. Cutting off America from so much of the world had huge implications not just for the United States, of course, but for the victims of Nazism seeking refuge. Those fleeing Nazism from Eastern and Southern Europe were not welcome in the United States. Poland was given a quota of about 2,000 people a year. Italians about 2,000 a year. Greeks about 2,000 a year. Really, the gates were closed.
Misha Glenny: How long did that that quota system last?
Gary Gerstle: From 1924 to 1965. It was modified a little bit in the 1950s. But it was only in 1965 that this racial nationalist tradition was renounced clearly in law.
Misha Glenny: I wanted to come back with a follow up about civic nationalism. One of the striking things is that the civil rights movement of the 1960s was 100 years after the Civil War – a hundred years after a war that was supposed to establish the equality of American citizens. Was the Civil War a failure from that perspective?
Gary Gerstle: Yes. The American Civil War was the bloodiest war in the nation’s history: 700,000 Americans died. In comparison, the US lost 300,000 soldiers altogether from a much bigger population in the Second World War. So, the impact of that earlier event is enormous and continues to cascade through American history. The Civil War achieved one very important outcome: it abolished slavery, which had been in existence at that time for 240 years. But it did not eliminate racial bigotry or white supremacy. It is useful to keep in mind that America has been without slavery for ‘only’ 160 years, still far short of the 240 years when it enshrined slavery in law. Think of a country living one way for 250 years before it found the will to live in a radically different way. The Civil War, then, was a revolutionary moment. But every revolution generates a counter-revolution. And a counter-revolution came out of the South. The victorious North faced a dilemma. It said, ‘We’ve got to give African Americans not just freedom but equal rights. But we also have to put the country back together again, uniting South and North. It became impossible to do the two things together. The South was under occupation by northern forces for nearly 15 years, those forces attempting to enforce racial equality on southern society. Then the North throws up its hands and said, ‘We’ve got to have the nation put together again. We’re in a scramble for world supremacy. We need the power of the white South with us, not against us.’
Unidentified African American soldier in Union uniform with wife and two daughters, Library of Congress, USA. Cropped image via Wikimedia Commons
When I teach this subject to my Cambridge students, I ask, ‘How long would you have put northern troops in the South in order to eradicate white supremacy?’ It’s interesting to discuss this with them. My own estimate is that troops would have had to be there for 30 to 50 years. Is a nation capable of doing that? Can it find the will to do that? Can it put part of its country under occupation for half a century? The answer given in America was ‘no’. Privileging reunification before racial equality had been achieved allowed racial nationalism, white supremacy, to resurge. It would take another hundred years to gather the will to finish what the Civil War had started – putting African Americans on the same plane of equality as white Americans. That will expressed itself in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. And even that effort came up short, making it clear to all how difficult a project of racial egalitarianism has been in America. And, of course, racial nationalism has thrived yet again under Trump.
But it would be a mistake to think that civic nationalism is dead under Trump. Remember Obama? Seems like a hundred years ago, but it was just 20 years ago. Remember the two million people who turned out for his inauguration? That moment embodied a moment of high hopes for civic nationalism. Civic nationalism will resurge again. What I can’t foresee is a future in which one of these traditions decisively triumphs over the other to a degree that the other one is crushed out of existence. America is destined to struggle perpetually with this conflict.
Misha Glenny: I was really struck by what you said about how long you would keep northern troops in the South. In 1999 I made a programme for the BBC for which I went to Charleston and interviewed a variety of people. We were talking about the first shots in the Revolutionary War. I was with two Democrats from Charleston, who were liberal in all of their attitudes. And then at some point I mentioned the American Civil War and the youngest, the son – they were father and son – came back to me and said, ‘You mean the war of northern aggression?’ And I thought, ‘Wait a minute. This is 1999. These are liberals in Charleston. And they still refuse to accept it as anything other than an invasion.’ It was extraordinary.
Gary Gerstle: It was William Faulkner, the great southern writer in America, who wrote ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ On this matter, the past is always present.
Misha Glenny: So, we have these two competing nationalisms. I wonder what you think about the strategy developed primarily, not exclusively, yet primarily by the Koch brothers in the late-1980s, who ceased supporting individual Republicans at various elections and instead tried to build out institutions in order to change the political narrative in the United States, whether it’s the Heritage Foundation, or the George Mason University and so on and so forth. And it struck me, as you were talking, that this was an attempt to sustain what is ultimately the unsustainable: the rule of white males primarily from those countries that you talked about. That they understood there was going to be a demographic shift. That white males would be increasingly in a minority – the people who’ve exercised power for centuries – and that they would have to come up with a way of preserving it. Would you agree that Trump’s approach is a culmination of these strategies?
Gary Gerstle: In part, yes. And, in part no. I have to unpack that scenario a little bit. I wouldn’t say that the Koch brothers were and still are – some are still living – first and foremost racial nationalists. They really believe in freeing capitalism from its fetters. And they’re willing to welcome people of all races into that endeavour, as long as the regulatory state that has tried to impose some discipline on capital and spread its rewards is completely abolished. I write about this in my book on neoliberalism.
This is a way of thinking that began with Friedrich Hayek, continuing with Milton Friedman and others. They saw not just Soviet tyranny but also Social Democracy in Europe and the New Deal in the United States as all leading to collectivist tyranny. And so, it became their project to dismantle the regulatory state, to dismantle Social Democracy, to free capitalism from its chains. This ideology, which I call neoliberalism, began in the 1930s and 1940s. For 30 or 40 years, it was irrelevant to politics in Europe and America. The big opportunity for its advocates came as a result of the great recession of the 1970s and the period of economic crisis – recession, unemployment, inflation – that ensued.
Misha Glenny: Which, of course, started here in Vienna.
Gary Gerstle: Absolutely.
Misha Glenny: Up until the great recession of the 1970s – post-New Deal and particularly post-1945 – America seemed to have hit a golden mean of how you regulate capitalism successfully. More or less all sectors – with the exception of some racial minorities – were integrated and bought into it. What was the secret of that period, the ‘late New Deal’?
Gary Gerstle: Capitalism was in crisis throughout the world in the 1930s. The crisis began in the United States in 1929 and lasted until 1941. The Great Depression remains the worst economic crisis in American history. Capitalism in the US was simply not functioning. This situation opened up opportunities for public regulation of private capital that otherwise would not have been there. Policies were put in place to regulate finance, empower labour viz a viz employers, establish a social welfare state, reduce inequality between the rich and poor, and so on. This was not the first instance of reformers trying to impose regulation on the powerful engine of American capitalism. But this time it lasted, in part because of the Second World War, when heavy direction of private industry by the government finally brought the economy back to full health. And in part because of the Cold War, which intervened in a very important and powerful way. Absent the Cold War and the most important regulatory achievements of the Roosevelt administration would have been rolled back.
Misha Glenny: Really?
Gary Gerstle: Yep. Suddenly you have a superpower rival that not only has a nuclear bomb but is also committed to world revolution and the abolition of capitalism. Meanwhile, scores of nations in what was then called the Third World were emerging from European colonialism. Both American capitalism and Soviet communism understood that the battle for the Third World was going to determine who was going to be dominant in the globe for the next 30 years. The Cold War erupted at a time when it was not yet clear whether the recovery that American capitalism had demonstrated in the Second World War World years would persist.
Meanwhile, the Soviet economy was performing reasonably well and could legitimately make the claim that if you were a worker, you might be better off under a communist regime than under a capitalist regime. The possibility that communism was a better system than American capitalism for the average working man scared capitalists in America, prompting them to do something they had never really done before and have not done since the end of the Cold War: arrange a compromise with the American working class. They essentially said to workers, ‘we will share more of our wealth with you, because we understand that in order for us to beat the Soviet Union, we need a working class that is reasonably happy, reasonably secure’.
Thus it’s a threat of communism that puts a kind of discipline on American capitalism that had not been there before – with the exception of the Great Depression – that leads to what some economists call the ‘great compression’ –the narrowing of income and wealth inequality between the rich and poor. The only period of the last 150 years in which economic inequality decreased in America was precisely the era of the Cold War. In 2000, after the Cold War had ended, an average CEO in America made about 300 times what the average assembly line worker made. What’s the ratio in 1960? You want to take a guess?
Misha Glenny: It’s about seven, isn’t it?
Gary Gerstle: It’s a little greater than that but not by much. An executive in 1960 made 16 times more than an average worker. In 2000 it became 300 times more than what an average worker made. So, the Cold War inaugurates a period of impressive economic equality in American society. It is also a time when the American welfare state was at its most generous. In my book on neoliberalism, I argue that this economic egalitarianism occurred because American capital was profoundly threatened by a radically different social and economic system. In these Cold War circumstances, American capitalists were inclined to compromise with their workers in ways they had not been willing to compromise before and have not been willing to compromise since.
Misha Glenny: And if we think of the 1950s and 1960s, and the sort of emerging middle class out of the working class and blue-collar workers, they would have had pensions that would enable them to lead a pretty reasonable life after their working time was over. This starts to change. The pension issue is really interesting, that switch from defined benefits to defined contributions.
Gary Gerstle: I lived through that change – and not well.
Misha Glenny: Was it with Nixon or was it later on during Carter and Reagan that we really start to see the ideas of Hayek and others push through into the political classes in America?
Gary Gerstle: It began to happen a little bit under Nixon, but I see Nixon as the last president operating under what I call the New Deal order, under the New Deal regime. Carter is a transitional figure. He knows the world is changing. He can’t get on top of it. Which is why I tend to regard him as a failed president. When I was teaching in the United States, I’d always have a few students from Georgia and they’d get really upset by my calling him a failed president.
The real architect of the neoliberal regime was Ronald Reagan. And I, like many people of my political coloration in the 1980s, thought he was a fool, not a serious thinker, made stuff up, the originator of fake news, lived by fables. But I’ve had to reappraise the man. He was a very serious person, who fought communism for 40 years. If you want to take a measure of his seriousness, listen to the address he gave to Westminster, to Great Britain’s Parliament in 1982. This is a man who is engaged in a historic fight to defeat communism, free capitalism from its fetters, and tell the American people that freeing capitalism from its fetters was their godly mission, originating with the American Revolution in 1776. He wrapped neoliberalism in nationalist jargon. He took the first steps toward turning his political movement into a political order.
The next steps involved convincing the opposition that the only way for them to get elected was for them to subscribe to your – in this case Reagan’s – core beliefs. Reagan may have been the architect of the neoliberal order, but Democrat Bill Clinton was the one who sealed the deal on the neoliberal order in the 1990s, persuading Democrats that the only path toward political power lay in becoming neoliberals themselves. There are close parallels between Britain and he United States at the time: Thatcher was an American Reagan; Blair an American Clinton.
Margaret Thatcher was asked at one point – this is second-hand reporting – ‘What do you consider to be your greatest achievement?’ And she is reported to have declared: ‘Tony Blair’. We don’t know whether she actually said that. This comes from a journalist who posed the question and then heard and later reported it. The exchange is not recorded anywhere. But like a lot of apocryphal stories, they are too good not to be true.
Misha Glenny: And also pretty accurate in their logic. So, how do you account for the fact that the 1990s – in Britain and America, perhaps to some extent in Europe but less so elsewhere in the world, where all sorts of unpleasant thing were going on – is a) seen as some sort of mini golden period and b) that it was under social democrat / progressives that neoliberalism, as you said, sealed the deal with neoliberalism. Why was it Social Democrats that saw this through?
Gary Gerstle: The death of communism happened much more quickly and decisively than anyone at the time could have imagined. If you run into anyone my age who tells you they knew in the 1970s that the death of communism in the Soviet Union was coming …
Misha Glenny: It’s bullshit.
Gary Gerstle: You know it’s bullshit. Across the last 2000 years, I don’t know if there’s another example of an empire dissolving itself so quickly and completely. The suddenness and completeness of communism’s dissolution caused a crisis for the whole Left. Not just the communist Left, which of course was devastated. I think it caused a crisis for the non-communist Left, because the communist experiment was the most spectacular effort at social engineering, transformation, creating a new man, new woman, of the twentieth century. And the extraordinary nature of that failure, I think, damaged the entire Left, disoriented them, made them more vulnerable. It made them think, ‘Maybe markets are the way, maybe capitalism is the way’. That’s one element of it.
The other element is that the 1990s was the dawn of the IT revolution. Arguments were made that ‘well, you needed regulation by states in the past because markets were imperfect’ and ‘you needed a state to iron out the imperfections of the market’. But suddenly you have this computer revolution – this sounds like ancient times relative to AI, but if you lived through the 1990s, you know what I’m talking about – and the sense that a new age was dawning and suddenly you had information available to you instantaneously from every single part of the world. And you could persuade yourself – as many did – that if there had been market imperfections in the past, there was no longer a need for them because market knowledge was now perfect. If you have perfect market knowledge, markets would work perfectly. You don’t need government to regulate markets, you don’t need a state – or so the reasoning went. Everybody bought into this. Even Joe Stiglitz, who served on Clinton’s council of economic advisers, admitted in his book The Roaring 90s, that he got caught up on this. And his credentials as a Social Democrat or Democratic Socialist are unchallengeable, right? Paraphrazing Kennedy’s famous line ‘we are all Berliners now’ from the early 1960s, Stiglitz wrote how he and others, in the 1990s, allowed themselves to think that ‘we are all deregulators now’.
A kind of hegemony was forming. These sentiments are so powerful. And they seemed to be backed by such powerful technologies. They acquired the aura of truth. And once they acquired the aura of truth, they became difficult to challenge.
Misha Glenny: I want to go back to the working class and the middle class of the 1960s, because it is to that sort of America that Trump seeks to appeal. Am I right? It’s that memory of America – ironically, a sort of Democratic Party America…
Gary Gerstle: 1950s America. He doesn’t like the civil rights movement.
Misha Glenny: That’s right. Civil rights got in the way. 1950s America is something, of course, that he can’t possibly reproduce. But that’s what he’s promising. Is that right?
Gary Gerstle: There are two elements to what he’s promising. One is a pre-civil rights moment and pre-liberation movement moment. The 1960s were convulsive in the US as they were in Europe, China, other parts of the world – an extraordinary period of tumult. And the world changed as a result of the 1960s. Trump wants to re-establish a kind of white supremacy, which was not being challenged very seriously in the 1950s. Secondly, he has an acute sense of what was happening to the white working class during the neoliberal era, from the 1990s forward. White workers weren’t just losing their racial supremacy; they were losing jobs. Trump understands that working-class prosperity in the 1950s and 1960s was built on manufacturing and the kind of incomes that came from manufacturing. What he leaves out of his historical account, of course, is that organized labour had a very big role in ensuring good wages. Nevertheless, he became one of the first politicians in America to challenge the gospel that free trade and globalization were good for the working man. The advocates of neoliberalism admitted that globalization was going to introduce greater inequalities into the world. But they insisted that growing inequality would not matter because ‘all boats would rise’: if the rich were getting richer, the poor too would see their incomes rise, it wouldn’t matter if inequality was widening. Everyone was becoming better off.
This is not what happened. The haemorrhaging of manufacturing jobs in the US in the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century after China was admitted to the World Trade Organization was catastrophic. From the 1940s and the 1950s through to the 1980s, if you were part of the white working class in America, as a young person you could look forward to doing better than your parents. All the indices of social mobility and social advancement reversed in the 1990s. Most mainstream politicians in both parties were not willing to acknowledge the hurt and the pain of a certain portion of working-class America. Trump picks up on this. If we want to understand his power and his appeal, we have to recognize that he is appealing to an enormous number of people whom the economy has left behind, and that the American dream, once promised to them, is no longer within their grasp. The people themselves understood this reversal, for the pain was woven into their lives on a daily basis.
To take one example, in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, young and middle-aged white men in America suffered a demographic reversal that had happened nowhere else up until that point in the North Atlantic World, except in times of war: their mortality rates shot up. The demographic story of the second half of the twentieth century in the US (and western Europe) is that life expectancy rose dramatically. But for white men in America between 20 and 55, life begins to shorten between 2005 and 2015. Why? Alcoholism, drugs, suicide. What some economists have called ‘deaths of despair’. The families and friends of these men who died became among the most ardent of Trump’s supporters.
A significant figure in the 2016 election was not only Donald Trump but also Bernie Sanders, who suddenly rockets from political irrelevance to political stardom. In my book I reproduce a speech that Trump gives to steel workers in western Pennsylvania in 2016. If you don’t know who’s giving the speech, you wouldn’t know whether it’s Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders. Trump and Sanders were nearly identical in this respect: they were giving voice to a part of America that had lost its opportunity and that was aware that it had lost its opportunity. Many of Trump’s supporters also felt that their opportunity had been poisoned by the campaigns for racial uplift, putting Obama in the White House. This is all happening at the same time. And this is what makes Trump’s campaign – which, in my mind, has elements on its economic programme that are justifiable – poisonous and so harmful. The sense that white people are losing out because people of colour are gaining. And that’s not acceptable because ‘if you’re going to take our jobs, if you’re going to destroy our communities, god damn it, you cannot take our white privilege’.
Misha Glenny: We’ve looked at some of the social issues, some of the economic issues. I want to take a look at the Constitution. Benjamin Franklin famously responded to a question about whether the new country was a monarchy or a republic, saying it’s ‘a republic if you can keep it’. This partly reflected the fact that a lot of the founding fathers didn’t think it was going to last for very long. But in the intervening period, the Constitution has, as you said, become revered, it has taken on a sort of quai-religious position in American political consciousness. Is the Constitution now beginning to show its age and beginning to buckle and show signs of wear and tear, that it’s not capable of managing conflict in the United States?
Gary Gerstle: Well, let me say something positive about the Constitution and then something negative. The positive element of the Constitution is that America has had this Constitution governing its republic for more than 230 years. It has never been suspended, except for elements of it in times of civil war and world war, and now the twenty-first century. But bracket the twenty-first century for a moment. That’s the good news, because it imparts powerful continuity to a society.
The bad news is it’s not good to have an eighteenth century constitution that, for all intents and purposes, can’t be changed. America’s archaic Constitution is no longer sufficiently fit for purpose. If the high constitutional requirements that govern the process of amending the Constitution in America had been in place for Brexit, Brexit never would have happened. To get an amendment passed in the US, you need two-thirds of both houses of Congress and three-quarters of the state legislatures to approve. That’s what you call a super, super majority. For all intents and purposes, the Constitution can’t be changed. But the Constitution needs to be changed. When he was alive, I disagreed with Anthony Scalia, a prominent conservative Supreme Court justice, on everything but one thing. When once asked, ‘What would you change in the Constitution?’, this profoundly conservative jurist said, ‘I would make it easier to amend.’
What is very troubling to me now is not just that the Constitution is aging poorly, but that many, many Americans don’t think it’s working anymore. As confidence in the Constitution declines, confidence in American democracy slides as well. If we’re to understand Trump’s success, especially being elected to a second term in 2024, we have to recognize that many Americans were drawn to his strongman persona, thinking that perhaps he, somehow, would cut through all of America’s democratic failings and weaknesses, and deliver solutions, strength, and maybe even hope. The loss of confidence in democracy has been particularly pronounced among the young and they have a good case. If you’re 20 or 25 years old and you ask, ‘How well has America been governed as a democracy in my lifetime?’ Well, you got the 2003 Iraq war, which I consider to be the worst foreign policy mistake in American history – a 50-year mistake, in the sense that the repercussions are going to last 50 years. The 2008-2009 financial crisis, which cost tens of millions of Americans their jobs and homes, and for which the government embraced a recovery policy that privileged the welfare of the banks over the welfare of the people. And then there’s the stark inability of Congress across decades to address such pressing issues as immigration and global warming.
I was at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute last year with a lot of young fellows, some of whom wanted to interview me. I often used those occasions to turn the tables and interview them. I asked them, ‘What do you think about American democracy?’ And they said, ‘Not much.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Well,’ they said, ‘if anyone’s going to solve the climate crisis, it’s not going to be the US, it’s going to be China.’ Are they wrong to believe that the health of the planet will depend more on a country ruled in an authoritarian, Leninist way than by one of the world’s proudest democracies? Or, they would say, in response to my query about democracy: ‘Let’s talk about Citizens United’, this horrible Supreme Court decision from 2010, which opened the floodgates for money, dramatically increasing the influence of elites on the democratic process and deepening problems of corruption.
It has been remarkable to witness Congress, one of the world’s most distinguished legislative bodies, just lying down before Trump, submitting to his every whim. Recently, I asked a conservative podcaster who once worked in the George W. Bush administration, ‘Galen, why has the Senate become so submissive, so unable to protect its legislative prerogative and to discharge its duty to represent the American people? Tell me why. You’re a Republican.’ He said, ‘No, by this time, I’m to the left of you, Gary.’ But I said, ‘No, you’re a Republican. Why is this going on?’ He said, ‘The senators don’t care about the Constitution anymore.’ The erosion of the confidence in democracy in America has been profound. It’s deep. This is not just an American issue. If you look at polling from different countries in the world, there’s decreasing confidence in democracy in multiple nations, and an increased willingness to have a strongman come in and set things right. We’re in the grip of international forces.
The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is coming up 10 months from now, on 4 July 2026.
Misha Glenny: Yes. You’ve got some interesting observations about that. I remember the 200th anniversary. I was in the United Kingdom, but we were flooded with stuff about it. It must have been extraordinary in the US.
Gary Gerstle: It was extraordinary in the US. And those of us who were not happy with America at the time, what did we do? We organized the people’s bicentennial separate from the official bicentennial. As far as I can tell, except for Trump’s garden of great patriotic heroes, there’s no thrill in the government about celebrating this event. And I can’t find anyone outside the government thinking much about it. The difference between 1976 and 2026 is very profound and very troubling. Trump has been pushing on an open door.
Before Trump got elected, he spoke at a town hall where he said, ‘Well, I may be a dictator, but it will only be for a day.’ And then a Time magazine correspondent got him for an interview and said, ‘You realize Americans are quite upset about your desire to be a dictator for a day and perhaps longer.’ At first Trump tried to brush off the question, but the correspondent didn’t give up. He stayed with the question. And then Trump said, ‘Well, actually, I think Americans quite like the idea of my being a dictator for a day or more.’ Trump may be right in sensing that there is this groundswell of interest and support from very different quarters of American society to say ‘democracy is not working, let’s try a strongman’.
This is happening just at the moment when the last witnesses of dictatorship in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s are passing from the scene. I mean, how many witnesses to the Hitler era are left? So, what does it mean for young people to have no direct personal or family connection to that era, or no contact with those who witnessed those times? They’re not thinking Trump is going to be Hitler. They’re thinking, ‘OK, we’re going to try a strongman and if it doesn’t work out in four and eight years, we’ll go back to democracy.’ That’s not, of course, how dictatorship works.
Misha Glenny: At this point, let me synthesize the discussion we’ve been having about the nature of nationalism in the US, about the economy, about the Constitution and about Trump. By the time people wake up to the fact that his solutions are snake oil solutions – given the inappropriateness of the Constitution and the enormous centralization of power that he is presiding over – will there be the mechanisms there to prevent a dictatorship and the prolongation of a dictatorship? Does American democracy have sufficient strength to counter that? You mentioned Citizens United. That seems to me to be a really calculated strategy of preventing democratic solutions to social and political conflict.
Gary Gerstle: Well, the United States is not Weimar. What I mean by that is it’s not a democracy that is only 14 years old before it’s very existence is being challenged. It’s hundreds of years old. And that history matters. It still matters to a lot of Americans, even if they don’t really understand it. And in that context, the 2026 election, which is coming up in a little bit more than a year from now, is critical – mid-term elections, not a presidential election. And I’m pretty confident that if it’s a fair and free election – mark my words – that the Republicans will lose in at least one or perhaps both houses of Congress. And that would be an enormous accomplishment. It would put constraints on Trump, and then Congress could begin reclaiming its constitutional role.
But I’m very worried about the fairness and freeness of that election. You may have been reading about the militarization of American society and the calling out of the troops, not just police but active military, first to arrest immigrants, then to arrest ‘criminals’ in Washington DC, and now in Memphis, and now Portland – it’s spreading. I see this as a rehearsal. Hegseth, the Defense Secretary, has just recalled all the generals.
Misha Glenny: Yeah. What is all that about?
Gary Gerstle: I think it’s a loyalty test. I think he wanted to put the generals on notice so that they would better obey Trump if he wants to continue with the militarization of the domestic front. My great worry is that what is going on now is a rehearsal for sending in troops to northern, blue cities for the elections of 2026, to intimidate voters, to keep the ‘wrong kind’ of voters from getting to the polls. An awareness of this threat is spreading, and attempts are being made to counter this threat. But plans for intimidating voters in the 2026, I fear, are more advanced than resistance to such intimidation. The situation frightens me.
Although I shouldn’t end on an entirely pessimistic note, I think there’s a good chance America is losing its democracy. I think that’s probably clear to you. I am now spending my time reading about societies that lost their democracies and then had a struggle to regain them. And there are quite a number of good examples of democratic recovery: Spain, Greece, Portugal, Brazil, Chile, Argentina. We can find other societies. That the struggle to regain democracy manifests in so many places says to me, first, that the aspiration to be governed democratically is irrepressible. And, second, the very need to engage in such struggles underscores democracy’s fragility.
That’s what Ben Franklin meant when he said it’s a republic if you can keep it. He and the other ‘Founding Fathers’ were schooled in classics. They knew that the republics of Greece and Rome, which they admired so much, had never lasted very long. And they would probably be amazed to learn that the American republic they founded in 1789 lasted more than 230 years. But their acute sense of democracy’s frailty co-existed with a great hope that a democracy lost could be regained. That was the hope that animated the American Revolution in 1776 and the writing of the Constitution in 1789. Should America lose its democracy in 2026, there will be a struggle to re-establish it.
This interview took place on Sunday 28 September during the Vienna Humanities Festival 2025, which was organized by the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) and Time To Talk (TTT) in cooperation with ERSTE Foundation, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, the City of Vienna, Open Society Foundations, Ö1 Intro, Volkstheater, and Wien Museum.
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