democratic norms

In this episode of The PDB Afternoon Bulletin:     European leaders managed to bypass Hungary and voted to open membership talks with Ukraine to join the European Union, despite failing to reach an agreement on additional financial and military aid. Amid the ongoing territorial dispute in South America, the leaders of Venezuela and Guyana met at a neutral site on Thursday, signaling their intention to keep the tense situation peaceful. Please remember to subscribe if you enjoyed this episode of The PDB Afternoon Bulletin.     Email: PDB@TheFirstTV.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sam Harris discusses two dangerous misconceptions about the siege of the Capitol.

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Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan sing the praises of President Trump.

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I have grown obsessed with a seemingly simple question: Does the American political system have a remedy if we elect the wrong person to be president? There are clear answers if we elect a criminal or if the president falls into a coma. But what if we just make a hiring mistake, as companies do all the time? What if we elect someone who proves himself or herself unfit for office — impulsive, conspiratorial, undisciplined, destructive, cruel? I’ve spent the past few months reporting out a story on that question — a story that is about Donald Trump, sure, but also about the American political system more broadly — and so today, on the podcast, the tables are turned: Sean Rameswaram, the host of Vox's new, soon-to-be daily explainer podcast, interviewed me about “The case for normalizing impeachment.” The big question here is one that I've been weighing on the podcast in recent months (listen to my second episode with Chris Hayes and you'll hear an early version of it): Are the civic and political consequences of impeachment worse than the consequences of leaving a dangerously unfit president in office? I think I've come to an answer — but it's not the answer I started with. Enjoy! Suggested books on impeachment: Impeachment: A Handbook by Charles Black Jr. Impeachment: A Citizen's Guide by Cass Sunstein Young Radicals: In the War for American Ideals by Jeremy McCarter Constitutional Law Stories edited by Michael C. Dorf Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yascha Mounk is a Lecturer on Government at Harvard University, a Fellow in the Political Reform Program at New America, and host of the podcast, The Good Fight. He’s also the author of some of the scariest political science research I’ve seen in a long time.What Mounk found is that the consensus we thought existed on behalf of democracy and democratic norms is weakening. The percentage of Americans who think it’s important to live in a democracy has been plummeting in recent decades. The percentage of Americans who say they would support a military coup is worrying high. This is the context in which Donald Trump — a politician with clearly illiberal instincts — won the presidency. And this may help explain why he won the presidency: the political consensus elites thought he violated may not actually be a consensus anymore. The good news, which Mounk and I talk about in this podcast, is that Trump may have authoritarian instincts, but he doesn’t appear to have plans, and he definitely doesn’t appear to have the discipline to stick to his plans. We also discuss Trump’s bizarre first few months in office, as well as the challenges democracies face across the western world, and whether diverse societies make pluralist liberal democracies harder to sustain. Mounk is scary smart, he’s got an international perspective most commentators on American politics lack, and his story about becoming an American citizen after growing up Jewish in Germany is worth the price of admission on its own (that would be true even if this podcast wasn’t free). Enjoy!Books:“The Subjection of Women," by John Stuart Mill"A House for Mr. Biswas," by V. S. Naipaul“The Leopard," by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices