On November 5, Americans went to the polls and once again elected Donald Trump president of the United States. By this point, you probably know the broad strokes of his victory: He won every swing state and, unlike in 2016, the popular vote as well. 

It also seems clear that a key part of the Democratic Party’s message — that another Trump term would threaten democracy and push the nation toward authoritarianism — didn’t resonate with voters like they hoped it would. 

However, as Financial Times U.S. National Editor and Watson Institute Senior Fellow Edward Luce explains on this episode of “Trending Globally,” that doesn’t mean it’s not true. 

“There's this sort of surpassing irony of what happened last Tuesday is that it was a free and fair election. Democracy worked to elect a person who rejects the democratic system unless he wins,” Luce told host Dan Richards.

Luce is the author of several books, including “The Retreat of Western Liberalism,” which was published in 2017. He is an indispensable voice when it comes to understanding Trump and the MAGA movement as a phenomenon that is both uniquely American and part of decades-long trend in global politics. 

This is something Luce also explores with Watson Institute students in his study group, “The Revenge of Geopolitics.” On this episode, Luce spoke with Richards about what another Trump term could mean for American democracy, geopolitical stability, and the future of liberal democratic values around the world.

Learn more about and purchase “The Retreat of Western Liberalism” by Ed Luce

Learn more about the Watson Institute’s other podcasts

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DAN RICHARDS: From the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, this is Trending Globally. I'm Dan Richards. On November 5, Americans went to the polls and once again elected Donald Trump President of the United States.

By this point, you probably know the broad strokes of his victory. He won every single swing state. And unlike in Twenty Sixteen, he also won the popular vote. His defeat over the Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris, was decisive.

It also seems clear that a key part of the Democratic party's message that another Trump term would threaten democracy and push the nation towards authoritarianism didn't resonate like they hoped it would. However, as our guest on this episode explains, that doesn't mean it's not true.

ED LUCE: It's this sort of surpassing irony of what happened last Tuesday. It was a free and fair election. Democracy worked. To elect a person who rejects the democratic system unless he wins.

DAN RICHARDS: That's Ed Luce. Loose is the Financial Times national US Editor, a senior fellow at the Watson Institute, and author of among many other books, The Retreat of Western Liberalism, which was published in Twenty Seventeen.

He is an indispensable voice when it comes to understanding Trump and the MAGA movement. Understanding it as both a uniquely American phenomenon and as part of a decades long trend in global politics.

The global context for the rise of Donald Trump is also something Luce explores with students at the Watson Institute in his study group called the Revenge of Geopolitics. On this episode, I spoke with Ed on what another Trump term would mean for American democracy, geopolitical stability, and the future of liberal democratic values around the world.

We also talked about what exactly we mean when we use phrases like liberal democratic values. We started, though, with Trump's surprising electoral victory, and why it's important to understand Trumpism as both a cause and a symptom of a rapidly shifting global order. Here is our conversation.

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Ed Luce, thank you so much for coming on to Trending Globally.

ED LUCE: It's a pleasure to be with you.

DAN RICHARDS: So there's a lot I want to discuss with you about what the last week has meant for the country and the world, but I wonder if we could just start back with election night or maybe it was early the next morning. But what went through your head when you realized that Trump was going to win this election or that he had won this election? Were you surprised?

ED LUCE: I was surprised by the scale of it and the fact that he ended up winning the popular vote and quite possibly half of the vote. I wasn't expecting that. I had always thought that the floor and the ceiling for Trump were pretty much the same thing, which is roughly sort of 46.5, 47%.

And that he could sort of leap an extra, very significant in this context. Extra three percentage points was quite a surprise. But him winning the electoral college wasn't a surprise. But I confess it was a shock, but not a surprise.

DAN RICHARDS: And as far as those elements that were maybe a little surprising, the breadth of his winning, what do you think about this broad shift in favor of Donald Trump? Like how much was it an election about voting for him versus perhaps voting against the state of the country in the last few years under President Biden?

ED LUCE: It has to be both. There was one article that went viral, in fact, but just before the election in the Financial Times by my colleague John Burns Murdaugh, pointing out that every single election this year has been anti-incumbent across the democratic world.

The one place where it didn't happen was India, but it was a sort of loss making victory for Narendra Modi's BJP in India. That being the one exception. But everywhere else, people have been swept out left or right. No ideological pattern. The commonalities there is incumbent.

And so that clearly, I mean the sort of distemper amongst people at the lingering aftershocks of the pandemic and the fact that they haven't really acclimatized to the higher prices caused by the earlier surge of inflation. That's got to be some of it.

But Trump is special. And I think there was an expectation that the fact that at least half of America hates him would be enough to get Kamala Harris over the finishing line and it wasn't. And therefore, the question has inevitably descended into this circular firing squad amongst Democrats and liberals and never Trumpers as to, what we did wrong?

We, being the Harris-Walz campaign, and whether Joe Biden bears a lingering and sort of grandeur, perhaps responsibility for the outcome. And that the post-mortem without end, this is going to be quite subjective and it's going to be quite heated and it's going to be an absolute gift whilst it goes on for Donald Trump.

DAN RICHARDS: What are the ways that you-- and as you said, it's a little subjective right now. But what stands out to you in this aside from the anti-incumbency when you try to think about this broad shift? Are there major forces beyond anti-incumbency and inflation, things perhaps more particular to the US?

ED LUCE: I think the fact that Trump had tried to overturn the last election and had been prosecuted for it gave both sides a zeal that in a two-party system, most of the other democracies we're talking about are multi-party systems. But this is a two-party system, gave both sides a zeal that gave everybody, regardless of their point of view, a sense of stakes involved that were existential.

From the Trumpian point of view, this was his famous phrase, I will be your retribution. He personified the idea that there was lawfare, that there was judicial revenge being practiced on him as being representative of all those people out there who feel that they're mistreated or overlooked or persecuted in some way in their lives, maybe only in their own minds. But politics is about perception.

And he managed to make it in his own way a referendum on Twenty Twenty. It's like, well, I don't believe that I was defeated. I believe Biden was an illegitimate president, and therefore this is the referendum on that election.

And so in his own mind, this vindicates his view. And he have no doubt will release the January 6 martyrs or whatever he calls them, hostages, patriots, probably in the first few days of being sworn in. And of course, from the democratic side, here was somebody who tried to overturn a free and fair election, had been very belatedly and somewhat incompetently prosecuted by the Department of Justice under Merrick Garland.

I mean, on quite a lackadaisical timetable, it has to be said, had managed to not only postpone this reckoning on most of those trials. Now, of course, he's scot free. And now they're over, Jack Smith's resigning.

But that this was nevertheless from a democratic point of view, an extraordinary-- democratic with a small D and a big D, an extraordinary test of whether America's alleged democratic backsliding is now going to accelerate. And I'm going to have to say, after Tuesday night, it's pretty hard to see it slowing. I mean this is a vindication of somebody who tried to overturn a free and fair election.

But trying to put it neutrally, that gave it an extra flavor that, say, the British general election or the French parliamentary elections or the imminent now German ones and Ireland's about to have one. I mean, this gave an extra set of stakes and of visceral concern and xanax taking build up to the election that puts it in its own category.

DAN RICHARDS: Do you think it was a mistake in the end to prosecute so many cases against Trump over the last four years? It seems to have played into his narrative so effectively.

ED LUCE: It does. I mean, I think two of those cases were absolutely essential. A system with the rule of law must defend itself. And if you try to overturn an election, it cannot happen without consequences.

DAN RICHARDS: So those being the January 6 case and the Georgia?

ED LUCE: And the Georgia case. And in the first case, as you know, the Supreme Court managed to really slow pedal this one. And they played for time. And that worked. And then in the process, gave him an extraordinary blank check on immunity or theoretically gave the president. But I think we all know who's going to use that immunity.

And then with the Fani Willis case in Fulton County, Georgia, well, I'm afraid that there was some serious negligence, professional negligence there in her relationship with a senior member of the prosecuting staff.

So Trump lucked out. He lucked out also, as I mentioned earlier, with having Merrick Garland as the attorney general who's idea, I think from the beginning, as many people had, was Trump's just going to go away.

Now, I know there were people who on day 1 of Biden's presidency said, look, appoint special counsels now. Appoint three. Appoint four. There are separate lines of investigation. And it took him, I don't know, almost two years to do that. If he had done it on day 1, well, history might be very different.

DAN RICHARDS: When speaking of the substance of these cases, throughout this election, we heard so much about Trump as a threat to our democracy, especially from the Harris-Walz campaign, and about the risk of there also being even a constitutional crisis if he had lost.

Instead, however, of course, we got a free and fair election that he won handily. And so I guess I just wonder, how are you thinking about all these questions around American democracy and holding all these facts together at the same time a week out from this election? How do you see the next Trump administration affecting our democratic institutions?

ED LUCE: So there's this sort of surpassing irony of what happened last Tuesday is that it was a free and fair election. Democracy worked to elect a person who rejects the democratic system unless he wins. And that's, I mean, you could see that as a silver lining or as something with a sting in the tail.

You can look at it with jaundiced or rose tinted spectacles. But the constitutional crisis now, I think that Trump has won, is going to be slow burning, and it's going to be about the abuse of power, the fact that he will ask for forgiveness, not permission, before doing things. He might not even ask for forgiveness. He will just do things.

And that we're very likely to see this Supreme Court become essentially opinion giver, not a laying down of the law court, but an opinion giver. It's like, well, two or three years from now, it'll be an advisory body.

Because I think he's going to do what he wants to do and he's going to dare them-- like President Jackson did almost centuries ago, dare them to oppose him. And in many cases, they will agree with him, six out of nine of those justices, possibly seven out of nine within a year or two, if Sonia Sotomayor's parlous health is accurate.

And that is a constitutional crisis because this was framed in order to have checks on each branch of government checking the other. And I just don't think we have any of those checks in place anymore. We've got people who are working in the bureaucracy or certain judges, civil society, certain media organizations, but they are in his sights.

The Federal Communications Commission is one. I mean, most people talk about the FBI or the DOJ or the IRS, but actually there are so many agencies that have power that, with Trumpian loyalists, they're willing to do his bidding, can take or remove the licenses of television stations.

So if you're Comcast or Time Warner or whoever it might be, your fear of having criminal tax investigations weighed against the upside of owning what is a declining legacy media. Well, I can see quite a few of them folding pretty quickly.

And therefore, you don't need to have people being hustled out of their homes in the middle of the night and dropped in Rikers Island. You just need the financial fear of investigations, audits, and the kind of hell that, that puts people's lives through, both individuals and corporations.

I don't envisage it will be that much trouble for Trump to do what Viktor Orban has done in Hungary and Narendra Modi has done in India, and many other examples of taming the media and pushing the sort of dissenting media right out onto the fringes.

DAN RICHARDS: Well, and that brings me to something else I want to talk with you about, return to is looking at Trump in the context of the rest of the world. To start, though, I wonder if we could just go back a little bit.

In Twenty Seventeen, you wrote a book titled The Retreat of Western Liberalism, which, among many other things, it offered in some ways a powerful explanation of a lot of the forces that either gave rise to Trump or that he kind of illustrated. But first, for listeners, could you just define Western liberalism?

ED LUCE: Well, I mean, this is a term that's morphed. And of course, it has different meanings, which is why I put the word Western. Different meanings on each side of the Atlantic. By liberalism, I don't mean what a liberal necessarily in America believes.

It is the tradition of having a machinery of justice and equality before the law, and of independence of the judiciary, of freedom of expression. I suppose another term for it is liberal democracy. It's the liberal bit that is separate from the democratic bit. And it's better to illustrate through an example.

On Tuesday, democracy won. Trump got a majority of the vote and he won fair and square. And liberalism, though, the liberal bit is now in danger. So the liberalism bit is the independence of the courts, is people's due process before the law of equality before the law, and all the other things that freedoms that we take for granted as part of this system.

De Tocqueville, I think, summarized it well, the French thinker, when writing about America, young America, and about what the founding framers wanted, which was to prevent a tyranny of the majority. The majority can't just come in and say all those rights you have, they're down the drain. Those rights are built into far tougher protective codes.

And so when I wrote about the retreat of Western liberalism, I guess liberalism was a shorthand for liberal democracy, but with the particular accent on the liberal bit of it, because a lot of this is populist majoritarianism, and therefore it is democratic.

And therefore, we get into then the term illiberal democracy, which is coined by Viktor Orban-- Hungary's Viktor Orban, but is pretty much the blueprint for what Project Twenty Twenty-Five is all about. And I have read all 920 something pages of Project Twenty Twenty-Five, and this is a really state of the art example of what the right wing populists want, and that is illiberal democracy. And it's a roadmap of how to get there.

DAN RICHARDS: And our leaders like potentially Trump and, as you mentioned, Viktor Orban, do you see them-- how much are they propelling this retreat of liberalism, of Western liberalism? And how much are they more a symptom of a retreat that has already been taking place?

ED LUCE: Yeah, it's a really good question. And that does key in to the five or six days-- or no, week since the US presidential election about where we went wrong. We, meaning I'm characterizing Democrats. Is it because we weren't strong enough on the economy?

Is it because we underestimated the cultural nativism of large sections of the electorate? Or is it just more tactical stuff about how we campaigned and where we put our advertising dollars, whatever? Or was the candidate herself just not very good?

I mean, all of these are relevant questions to us, but the deeper ones about, well, what is it that is causing the working class to migrate from the party of the working class, the Democratic Party, to the right? Then I think you cannot ignore the economic conversation, and the fact that the broader context we're discussing within, is a country of very high inequality and it's been worsening.

It's a country where the sense of the meritocratic escalator having broken down is pretty widespread, that it is just far harder to get ahead and to get your kids into the IV League, et cetera. It tends to be more out of reach, at least in most people's minds than it used to be.

And I think the fact that Trump would make all this worse occludes people's ability to see that it is still a reason, irrational or otherwise, why people, they have lost faith in the system. And I think I've used this analogy before. But when you lose faith in a religion-- this isn't a religion. But when you lose faith in a religion, you tend to either drift into agnostic apathy. You just sort walk away from it, or you turn to militant anti-religion.

And we're seeing both really. There are a lot of people who just switched off from politics completely. There's a lot more low information voters than there used to be. There is a lot more apathy. It's a lot harder to reach people. It's really, really difficult.

The media environment is so fragmented and attention spans are so much shorter. So there is that apathy, agnosticism part of this. And then there's the anger part, the militancy part. And that's the MAGA base.

And I don't think the MAGA base are primarily motivated by economics, and I don't think necessarily the apathetics are motivated primarily by economics. But I do think that the broader context of a breakdown, of a sense of fairness, that sense of equality, of opportunity, of the American creed, the cynicism about it is what gives rise to people like Trump.

It's a market opportunity for pretty unscrupulous characters to come in and try and whip up and harvest that resentment and turn it into votes. And then over time, that turns into its own thing. And in Trump's case, that is an entire party that is a personality cult.

So I would put an accent on that broader political economy framing, but that by no means says that racism and xenophobia and misogyny and homophobia isn't relevant too. So there is a either or either this is economics or this is culture. Well, it's clearly a chemical reaction between the two and with this uniqueness of Trump framing it.

And that that's a complex explanation. I wish I had a simpler one, but it has the advantage of being fairly similar to the trends that we're seeing in other democracies, is why are we all experiencing something like this at the same time?

Well, maybe we've got similar structural changes that have been challenging us and challenging the glue that holds society together. And that I think is the hardest thing to-- America is so exceptional and it's so big. It doesn't do comparative very well. And that's if I bring anything to the table, I can point out, well, look, there are similar maladies and distempers elsewhere. Let's see what these have in common.

DAN RICHARDS: I want to turn and hopefully bring some of these ideas we've been discussing as well into what you've been working on a little bit at the Watson Institute with your study group called the Revenge of Geopolitics. First off, what is the central message of that class? And why did you want to teach it right now?

ED LUCE: A couple of reasons. One is it really struck me. I was thinking, well, how old are these young students? They're very smart group who are electing to do this. This isn't a credit course. Very smart group of 19, 20, 21-year-olds.

And I was thinking back to when I was their age and what world I was going into. And this is a different world. There was a greater serenity, maybe complacency, we can call it in retrospect. In Nineteen Ninety, '91 when I was graduating into the world, then I think you could possibly make a case for in today's world.

And a lot of the bigger assumptions about the end of history, about the victory of a certain political model, and about the rightness, economically speaking, of globalization. A lot of those assumptions are just completely in tatters now.

And America has lost confidence in its own post-world war role as the architect of the world we're living. It is now the architect is now leaving the building, and it's criticizing the building. And that creates not just a return of history, but when I say revenge of geopolitics, we're back into great power competition.

And that is an inherently unpredictable and unfortunately unstable situation to be in compared to the Nineteen Nineties, the unipolar moment we saw after the Cold War under Clinton and right up to 9/11, I think. And the world since 9/11 has been getting steadily more and more geopolitical. And it's really after last Tuesday we're beginning to chart new territory now.

So I felt this would be a relevant framing. And you do need to understand the present. You do need some context that stretches back into the past. So I'm not delving into the Cold War too much. There are some references. And there are some analogies, by the way, that are useful to today in terms of looking at US-China competition from the Cold War decades.

But generally, I wanted to give a sort of pretty broad tour d'horizon, as the French call it, of the world we were in and the world we're moving into, and then break that down into various consequences. And the economic piece of that is important, although this isn't an economics class.

And then just the other thing is it happens to dovetail with a project I've been working on, which is a biography, full life biography I've been working on for four or five years, and I've just finished it of Zbigniew Brzezinski. And he was the great rival of Henry Kissinger. They were the two really great geopolitical strategists and sparring partners, frenemies during the Cold War.

And the Brzezinski-Kissinger mindset is very geopolitical. And I believe that their skills, namely, both being really from interwar bloodlands of Europe, that flinty realism, maybe sense of the tragic was very useful and timely for an America seeking to win a Cold War.

And I believe that we need more and more of those skills in today's Washington and more perspectives of, well, let's put ourselves in China's shoes. What are they thinking? And what does that mean they're going to do next? We need more of that.

DAN RICHARDS: I'm curious, just as an example, when you say putting ourselves in the shoes of thinking about what China's goals are and our relationship in these more geopolitical ways, what was the alternative to that during this more end of history era? Was it just an idea that ca capitalism was going to organize these countries for us, and we just didn't need to think that strategically about national goals of other countries? What was there in that period?

ED LUCE: That's a really good question. I mean, we really-- I guess, we're talking about a 10-year period because it does end on 9/11. And that changes everything. And so it's really the Clinton-- the two terms of Clinton that we're talking about here.

And the idea that we would have global rules of the game and differences would be contained and resolved through diplomacy and either bilaterally or through the United Nations, was at least the theory of the case.

Of course, in practice, stuff kept happening, and there were crises in Bosnia and Somalia and Kosovo and places like that. But broadly speaking, these were considered to be aftershocks of deeply ideologically split world and that they would just be manageable.

Not that we would be heading into utopia, but the age of really serious questioning or threat to the liberal democratic model led by America, but embodied by the West, that, that was really over and that people were going to become more like us and wanted to become more like us.

And so it was, in retrospect, pretty delusional. And also the actual frozen conflicts were not trivial. I mean, the China border, India border dispute. These have been two largest countries in the world. That is not trivial.

The antagonism between Japan and China, historic but also current, is not trivial. And Russia seeking to regain a lost empire, which looks less like a Marxist monolith in retrospect and more like a Russian empire.

Well, all of these messy realities of how humans and cultures and political units operate make the Nineteen Nineties look pretty naive, I have to say. But I mean, the idea, I think, was that we will resolve all these and people basically want to be like us.

DAN RICHARDS: And now I can't help think, especially over the last week, as you talk about this shift away from a traditional Western liberalism, the US isn't maybe just watching this retreat, but is participating in it and may help accelerate it in some ways.

I wonder, as we start to wrap up, what do you see arising in its wake? I mean, I know we can't predict all of world politics, but what are some major themes or trends? Or how are you thinking about that?

ED LUCE: I tried to think about it a lot. I never get very far because if you think of earlier periods of vacuum of power, and the most famous is the interwar period. What is it that fills that vacuum? When America refused to join the League of Nations that it had created. Largely it was Wilson's plan, but he couldn't get it ratified by the Senate.

And so from day 1, the League of Nations, which was designed to prevent a return of the war, to end all wars, the First World War. And Britain too weak, really, to resume the hegemonic role it had, had up until the First World War, which bankrupted it. Well, you had a vacuum, and that vacuum was filled by the nastiest regimes we've seen in history.

But there have been other periods of geopolitical jostling where there's been no one hegemon, no one leader that can impose order or legitimacy on the order. What's different about today is that we can kill each other 50 times over.

We cannot afford to blunder in the way they did in the '30 or in the 19th century or in every other century before then. We just can't do that anymore without potential extinction, species extinction risks. And we know that. It's not like we're dumb.

I mean, I don't think the Chinese want nuclear war, and I don't think the Americans do. But I don't know how we're going to get to a situation where we minimize the chance of great power conflict, let alone through government action, at any rate.

I mean, the private sector and scientists and what they do is quite different. But let alone get to serious global compact on climate change, which is the ultimate, ultimate threat to all of us. Maybe that threat, will at some point, through some mind concentrating natural disasters that are clearly attributable to carbon emissions, maybe our minds will be concentrated and we will be forced through shock and through teachable moments to cooperate.

But it seems really odd-- the week after Trump has been reelected and America is going to walk away from any intergovernmental discussions on that, it seems really odd to be speculating about that at this point. That's not foreseeable at the moment.

DAN RICHARDS: Nuclear war and climate catastrophe, I mean, these are some of the scariest things imaginable for the future of the planet. And I think as you're saying, to look for silver linings right now, I think you're offering an incredibly clear view that is intimidating and scary, which is fair.

But I guess I wonder maybe to close out, as you mentioned, teaching this class to young students at the Watson Institute, is there anything about the way they seem to be, thinking about the world that has, if not given you hope, even just surprised you? These are people who are in a very different world than the one that you grew up in and the one that I grew up in.

ED LUCE: They're clearly smart, very curious, and very diligent. So I'm kind of intimidated by just how young and how muscular their resumes sound. So I'm generally impressed by their sort of purposefulness and their level of commitment and seriousness.

We started off-- we meaning my cohort, with false hope. And they're not. I mean, one thing that I've told my daughter who's not that much younger, she's 17, is like she said it's game over. I said, the game is never over.

The game is never over. It's not like Trump's going to-- there will be plenty of resistance. So there will be plenty of opportunities to block him. And you can always rely on his incompetence to block him if we don't. And he's getting older and all kinds of things happen. Shit happens. But sometimes positive thing, whatever the opposite of shit is, happens too.

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You can get shocked on the upside. So I think psychologically, this is a good, gritty, realistic place to start where you will be expecting the worst but hoping for the best. And that's not a bad posture to be in at that age, going into the world.

DAN RICHARDS: Yeah, I think it could be a good posture for many of us to take right now.

ED LUCE: I agree.

DAN RICHARDS: Ed Luce, thank you so much for coming and talking with us on Trending Globally.

ED LUCE: A real pleasure. Thank you. I enjoyed that a lot, Daniel. Thank you.

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DAN RICHARDS: This episode was produced by me, Dan Richards and Zach Hirsch. Our theme music is by Henry Bloomfield. Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions. If you liked the show, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps others to find us.

And while you're there, make sure to hit the like or subscribe button too. You can find Ed Luce's reporting and weekly column at the Financial Times website. We'll also put a link to his book, The Retreat of Western Liberalism in the show notes.

If you have any ideas for our show, for guests or topics, or if you have questions or comments, send us an email at trendingglobally@brown.edu. Again, that's all one word, trendingglobally@brown.edu. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode of Trending Globally. Thanks.

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