In the last two presidential elections in the United States, one issue has entered our political debates in a way we haven’t seen in recent history: the health and future of American democracy itself. And as Rob Blair, a political scientist at the Watson Institute and co-founder of the Democratic Erosion Consortium, explains, this isn’t without reason. 

“I am not especially bullish on the future of American democracy. I think it has deteriorated quite a bit in recent years, and I suspect we will see continued deterioration in the years to come,” Blair explained to Dan Richards on this episode of Trending Globally. 

However, while this erosion is concerning, it might not mean exactly what you think it does. 

“If what we're expecting is tanks rolling down the streets at least anytime in the immediate future, I think that's very unlikely...the end can just be a worse democracy,” said Blair.

On this episode, Blair talks with Dan about the  nuanced, complex reality of democratic erosion in the U.S. and around the world: what causes it, how to measure it, what it looks like in our politics, and how we might stop it. 

Learn more about the Democratic Erosion Consortium

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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. In the last two presidential elections in the United States, one issue has entered our politics in a way we haven't seen in recent history. That issue, the health and the future of American democracy itself.

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- But as I stand here tonight, equality and democracy are under assault.

- If this election isn't won, I'm not sure that you'll ever have another election in this country.

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This isn't just coming from politicians running for office, and this isn't just happening in the United States.

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- India has fallen short of its Democratic ideals before Modi, but rarely has it fallen so far, so fast.

- The quality of democracy in South Africa, the quality of democracy in the Philippines all worse than 10 years ago.

- In September Twenty Twenty-Two, EU parliament declared that Hungary is no longer a functional democracy because the government and the prime--

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So are we, in fact, experiencing a moment of global Democratic erosion? And how big a threat does our democracy face in the United States? Well, according to our guest today, to even begin to answer those questions, we first need to understand what exactly Democratic erosion means and what it doesn't.

ROB BLAIR: I'm not especially bullish on the future of American democracy. I think it has deteriorated quite a bit in recent years, and I suspect we will see continued deterioration in the years to come. But if what we're worried about is a collapse into autocracy, tanks rolling down the streets, I think that's very unlikely, at least anytime in the immediate future.

DAN RICHARDS: Rob Blair is a political scientist at the Watson Institute and co-founder of the Democratic Erosion Consortium. On this episode, I talked with him about what democratic erosion actually looks like in the US and around the world. How concerned we should be about the future of democracy. And what, if anything, can be done to push back against democratic erosion even in our own communities.

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We started, though, with the reaction to this November's election in the United States. Some observers have called the election of Donald Trump a grave threat to American democracy. Others have pointed to his election as proof that American democracy is working just fine.

Trump won the electoral college, and unlike in Twenty Sixteen, he also won the popular vote. But as Rob explains, the truth about the state of American democracy right now is much more complicated than either of these stories. Here's Robb.

ROB BLAIR: So when I think about, what's the greatest threats to democracy in recent years have been, certainly, the wake of the Twenty Twenty election, Trump's attempt to overturn that result. Obviously, January 6, those of course, loom very large in my mind, but so do politicized prosecutions of Donald Trump, especially, I think in the hush money case.

DAN RICHARDS: This was the federal case brought against Donald Trump by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who charged Trump with falsifying campaign documents in an effort to conceal payments he had made to a woman Trump had allegedly had an affair with.

ROB BLAIR: So Bragg, this is an openly partisan Democrat who ran at least partly on a platform of prosecuting Donald Trump. He prosecuted for a crime that would normally be considered a misdemeanor, but that was shoehorned into a felony by tying it to other crimes.

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- These are felony crimes in New York State, no matter who you are. We cannot and will not normalize serious criminal conduct.

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- That might all be well and good in the context of a New York criminal trial. I'm not sure that, that should have been the first criminal conviction of a former president of the United States. I just don't think it rises to the level of seriousness to merit that distinction.

And I wish there had been a little bit more prudence and a little bit less gusto for going after him for anything that he could be convicted of. I wish the attempt to prosecute Trump had been much more limited to his actions after the Twenty Twenty election, up to including and after January 6.

So Yes, I would characterize the hush money case as partisan. And I think many Americans would characterize it that way as well. Not just Republicans, but Democrats as well. Now, I don't want to draw a false equivalence. I think it's important to recognize that there are real differences in degree and in kind in the types of threats posed by Trump and the Republican Party and on the other side by the Democratic party.

But I think it's very important that we look at the health of American democracy as a whole and not simply turn a blind eye to threats that are coming from one party or the other simply because they're less severe or even worse, simply because we happen to identify with one party or the other.

I think looking at this as an empirical question rather than a partisan one, I think it's really important that we do that so that we avoid these blind spots where we allow our own side to commit pretty serious transgressions of the democratic process. And we allow that simply because they happen to be on our side.

DAN RICHARDS: As Rob sees it, the escalating rhetoric around the threat the, quote, "other side" poses to democracy, no matter where that rhetoric is coming from, it in itself can also contribute to democratic erosion. It degrades trust, and it heightens animosity on all sides of the political spectrum.

ROB BLAIR: And I think that is a lot of the alarmism that you hear, especially in the media. When people talk about the crisis of democracy, they're talking about concerns that this will be the last free and fair election we ever have.

And I think that sort of overheated rhetoric, I think it distracts us from the more subtle but still very important ways that democracy can deteriorate over time, ways that don't result in something like a coup. It can convince us that any action, no matter how extreme, is justified to try to repel the threats to democracy that we perceive to be existential.

And that, I think, is what makes a moment like this, particularly dangerous, where it is this sense that whoever is on the other side of the political spectrum is an existential threat to the survival of our democratic norms and institutions. If that's the way we perceive politics, well then I think anything goes attitude sort of naturally follows from that.

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DAN RICHARDS: So there's so much in what you said that I want to talk about and get back to. And before we get into other examples around the world and a little bit more into American politics, can we just start with, how do you define democratic erosion?

ROB BLAIR: Yeah. So I would define Democratic erosion as a slow, subtle deterioration in the machinery of democracy. Elections are held and they are probably largely free and fair, but maybe they become a little less free and a little less fair over time.

Elected officials are held accountable to some extent, but the degree to which they're held accountable deteriorates over time. It's also a discontinuous process. So you could have democratic erosion that occurs for a while and then seems to stop and then starts again.

And I think most importantly, it's indeterminate. So the end of democratic erosion is not autocracy. It can be. It can be certainly. I think that's what happened in a country like Venezuela, for example. The end can just be a worse democracy. And that's, I think, the thing we should be worried about.

DAN RICHARDS: How do you, as a political scientist, actually try and measure and understand if a democracy is eroding and how much and what's to blame for that?

ROB BLAIR: Yeah. I mean, so typically, political scientists would use one of a number of pretty high profile democracy indices. So the varieties of Democracy Project has one of these, the Polity Project has one of these, Freedom House produces one of these. And typically, we'd just be looking for year over year changes in aggregate democracy scores.

And so if you plot the index over time, the overall story is of a democracy that has improved dramatically across American history. And you do see some of those moments of backsliding that then reverse. So a dip after 9/11, for example, a pretty significant dip that then reversed over the course of the early Two Thousands.

DAN RICHARDS: And how are these indices getting their numbers? Is it just as simple as how many people are voting in an election? Or are there other factors?

ROB BLAIR: Yeah. So typically, they would incorporate a whole bunch of different indicators. A lot of it is expert assessments of what's going on in a given country. They'll aggregate over a bunch of different experts and a bunch of different indicators.

So one could be they have an electoral democracy index that's really focused on what we think of as the machinery of democracy. Are elections happening? Are they free and fair? Are incumbents leaving when they lose? Et cetera. And then they have indices that incorporate a bunch of things like civil liberties, rights to speech, assembly, that sort of thing.

DAN RICHARDS: We had Ed Luce on the podcast recently, a columnist and editor with The Financial Times. And he was talking about the liberal side of a liberal democracy. Values like equality before the law, independence of the judiciary, freedom of expression, traditional liberal values beyond simply voting.

And he was saying that even when the machinery of voting works, liberal values can still degrade and be under assault. They don't have to go together. And so I guess just to make that distinction, it sounds like these indices you're describing focus on liberal democracies. Is that right?

ROB BLAIR: Exactly right. And there is a pretty heated debate among academics right now about the extent to which democratic erosion is actually happening on a global scale. So there are some who argue, well, if you strip the definition down to its bare bones, democracy is about elections, it's about turnover.

If those are the core components of your definition of democracy, then actually, global democracy doesn't look that bad in recent years. It's only when you start incorporating some of these elements of liberal democracy where you start to see more erosion.

DAN RICHARDS: So what are the things you see, either in the data or just as an observer of US politics, that makes you feel like we are experiencing democratic erosion at this moment?

ROB BLAIR: I think it's a whole bunch of factors. And they differ somewhat, I think, on the political left and the political right. So on the political right, I would say certainly, unwillingness to accept election results, unless they are favorable.

I think certainly, if Trump had lost this year, there's no question in my mind that he would have contested the loss and that a lot of both elected Republicans and also Republican voters would have happily gone along with his lie. I think also on the political right, the declining trust in the media. It's not that the media has been completely faultless, but the sort of precipitous decline in trust, I think is really problematic.

More on the political left, I would say I do think some of the prosecutions of Trump, I think, were quite problematic, especially the hush money case, but to a lesser extent, some of the others as well. I think the attempts to remove a presidential candidate from the ballot via this previously obscure provision in the 14th Amendment.

DAN RICHARDS: A quick refresher. If you forgot about this episode over the course of what was a rather eventful election. In Twenty Twenty-Three, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Donald Trump would be removed from the state's ballot in Twenty Twenty-Four, citing a section of the 14th Amendment that bars officials who have been engaged in insurrection from running for office.

In Maine, the Secretary of State disqualified Trump on those same grounds. Though the Supreme Court eventually ruled against these decisions, they marked the first time that the 14th Amendment was used to disqualify a presidential candidate.

ROB BLAIR: I viewed that as a very problematic attack on the machinery of democracy.

DAN RICHARDS: So according to Rob, figures on both the left and the right have contributed to democratic erosion in the United States in their own unique ways. And again, Trump's efforts to overturn the Twenty Twenty election stand alone.

ROB BLAIR: Trump poses a greater danger than I think, anything currently coming from the left. My point is simply that I think we should be concerned about the quality of democracy overall. And if we are only concerned about threats to democracy coming from one party, then we're going to have some significant blind spots.

DAN RICHARDS: There are also bipartisan long running forces that Rob sees as contributing to democratic erosion in the United States.

ROB BLAIR: These background conditions, expanding executive power, certainly, I think that's been a trend that's been going on really since 9/11. But it has continued apace. And a concurrently a reliance on the executive rather than on the normal legislative process to get big, important things done.

The example that comes most immediately to my mind is Obama's immigration rules, where he was pressuring Congress to act. Congress didn't act. And so he acted through executive orders. And I think increasingly, as Congress has become quite dysfunctional, there is a reliance on the executive to do more than the executive really ought to be doing.

And then, of course, background conditions of extreme income inequality, which I think is typically pretty problematic for democracy, extreme partisan polarization. There's a debate, again, among academics about the extent to which people who hate the other side of the political spectrum are more likely to use violence or otherwise undermine democracy because of that hate. But it certainly can't be a good thing.

DAN RICHARDS: I want to get into political polarization later. But first, I had a question about the Supreme Court. When we think about the escalating rhetoric around some of the threats to democracy and maybe some of that rhetoric that's coming from the left, a lot of it in the last few years has had to do with the Supreme Court and a view that the Supreme Court has become a truly, partisan body in some ways really serving President Trump.

And I wonder, how do you think about those criticisms? Are they merited or should they be described in a different way? If the left really thinks the courts are this big of a problem to democracy, shouldn't they say it? How do you think about that tension?

ROB BLAIR: So I think if the accusation is, well, the Supreme Court or the judiciary more generally is just an agent of the Trump administration, I have a hard time taking that terribly seriously because of how frequently Trump lost.

And it's not to say that he never won. He certainly won on some big cases, but he lost repeatedly, most conspicuously in the wake of the Twenty Twenty election. I mean, he lost over and over and over again, including in front of judges that he himself saw appointed.

So I think some of the ethical concerns that folks have raised about the Supreme Court, I think they are quite serious. And I think there are some actions that should probably be taken to try to rein in those ethical violations. But I think it's hard to claim that the judiciary has just become an arm of the Trump administration.

At the same time, I think also some of the outrage has been pretty selective. So outrage over recusals, for example. I think back to when Ruth Bader Ginsburg called Trump a faker and criticized him very openly for not releasing his tax returns.

But then she refused to recuse herself when a case on precisely that issue came before her. And I don't recall the same intensity of criticism that we are now hearing from the left directed at a justice like Ginsburg. So to me, that selective outrage suggests that well, maybe the outrage we're seeing now is it may be sincere, but maybe not entirely warranted.

DAN RICHARDS: Let's turn for a little bit to the rest of the world. I want to ask you about the global nature of this phenomenon. And like you said, there's debate in the scholarly community about the extent to which democratic erosion is happening around the world right now.

But I think a lot of people see it as a global phenomenon, that a lot of democracies around the world have experienced some sort of backsliding. I guess A, do you agree with that? And B, if so, why is this happening right now in so many different places around the world?

ROB BLAIR: I think it's indisputable that democracy has eroded in some important and high profile cases, places like Poland, places like Hungary, places like India, arguably. So I think rather than focus on democracy just as a global phenomenon, we can focus on those cases.

And democratization came in waves and democratic erosion seems to be coming in waves as well. And it's hard to pin down explanations that account for simultaneous erosion in a bunch of different contexts.

But I think some of the factors you could point to certainly, it seems like the global financial crisis, also simultaneous refugee crises, and an influx of immigration that clearly has contributed to the rise of especially far right populist parties in a number of countries. I think you could point to globalization itself.

I think, for a lot of voters, democracy is a luxury good. It's something that you will prioritize and really care about when other needs are taken care of. And if you feel like inflation is so high that you can't afford groceries anymore or crime is so severe that you can't send your kids to school without worrying that they're going to be a victim, I think it's hard to put democracy at the top of the list of priorities when those things are so top of mind.

DAN RICHARDS: That sounds like something I think a lot of people have said, too, in analyzing the results of this most recent election in the US. Do you see that as what happened a little bit in the Democrats failure to galvanize people around this issue of Trump's threat to democracy?

ROB BLAIR: Yeah. I mean, I think several things happened. I do think, one, that people just-- people had a hard time prioritizing democracy over these other kitchen table concerns. And that, I think, is very understandable.

I don't think the Democrats necessarily helped their case when Joe Biden dropped out and Kamala Harris was anointed as his successor on the ticket. And there's nothing illegal or inherently undemocratic about that. But it's not a great look for a party that's billing itself as the great defenders of democracy to have a candidate elevated to that position who didn't receive any votes in a primary process.

I also think-- maybe I'll just speak from a personal perspective because I don't know how voters in general reacted to this. But I think those claims that folks like Harris were making about Trump, they hit a little bit less hard in the wake of things like the Bragg prosecution of Trump, for example.

If both parties are-- and again, I don't want to engage in false equivalence here. But if both parties are in some respects threatening democracy, then it's not going to be quite as compelling when one points to the other and says the crux of the threat is right there.

DAN RICHARDS: Absolutely no. And I think many Republican strategists saw that, that would potentially help them in the election, that appearance of a politicized trial.

ROB BLAIR: Yeah. So when you look at surveys of Americans, they're not terribly optimistic about democracy. But when you ask them, which party or which politician poses the greater threat? There's quite a bit of disagreement.

And some of the surveys that I saw, they were more likely to say Democrats, more likely to say, Biden and Harris. And there are different ways to interpret that. One is that it's just a function of polarization. That, well, the parties are so polarized that Democrats think Republicans are the threat and Republicans think Democrats are the threat. And that's just it.

But I think it's worth, for just a minute taking these numbers at face value. And I think for Democrats who truly do believe that the Democratic Party is the defender of democracy against a Trumpian threat, take those numbers seriously and consider like maybe voters are on to something. Maybe they are seeing threats to democracy coming from the Democratic Party that Democrats themselves are blind to.

DAN RICHARDS: Are there any examples that come to mind of things the Democrats have done that are not so directed at President Trump that are also contributors to democratic erosion? Because I think I totally understand your point about they're attacking of this former president. But are there other ways they've been challenging democracy or at least been credibly appearing to?

ROB BLAIR: I don't know if these are the things that voters had top of mind when they were answering these surveys or when they were going to the ballot box. But when I think of other examples, so you certainly saw under the Biden administration a variety of different administrative agencies repeatedly overstepping their authority and getting beaten back by the courts.

I mean, it's kind of hard to think of a three-letter agency that didn't at some point get beaten back. So the SEC, the FEC, perhaps most obviously, the Department of Education with Biden's attempted student loan forgiveness.

That was something where I think a lot of people saw Biden recognizing that he didn't have the authority to do this. And then doing it anyway. And then when he got beaten back, finding other ways to circumvent the court's rulings.

And now, look, that's not anywhere near the same caliber of a threat as something like January 6. Student loan forgiveness is just simply not in the same category. But it does strike me as an example of a president who seemed to have, at the very least ambivalent relationship with constitutional and judicial constraints on his power.

DAN RICHARDS: Back to the politicization maybe of some of those cases that were brought against Trump, you mentioned earlier that you wish prosecutions around Trump had been limited to those having to do with his election interference as opposed to say, the hush money case.

So I take that to mean that you think it was a good decision to charge Trump on the federal insurrection case, for example, and the Georgia case, or do you think they all were too politicized and contributed harmfully to democratic erosion?

ROB BLAIR: No, I absolutely think there should have been an effort to prosecute Trump for not just January 6, the day, but for the entire effort to overturn the results of the Twenty Twenty election. I wish the cases against Trump had been limited to just that. Likewise, I think the impeachment after January 6 was justified.

So it's not that I think there should be no attempt to hold Trump accountable. In fact, just the opposite. But I think once it balloons into four different prosecutions and on a number of different issues, some of which are related to January 6 and some of which are not at all, like the hush money case, I think it just dilutes the power of all of the cases.

And it becomes very easy to dismiss this as one large partisan witch hunt because at least one part of it has a clear partisan angle. And I think we just-- it's really hard to calibrate this. So looking outside the US for a moment, Brazil, I think, is both an instructive case and something of a cautionary tale.

In Brazil, Bolsonaro oversaw his own January 6 moment when he contested the results of an election and his supporters invaded government buildings, destroyed property, et cetera. So a lot of echoes of January 6 there.

And the Supreme Court barred Bolsonaro for running for office again until Twenty Thirty. He has now been arrested for plotting a coup. So even a separate incident. Those seem to me like justified prosecutions of an elected official for very serious wrongdoing related to the quality of democracy in Brazil.

But the Brazilian Supreme Court has also taken it upon itself to engage in a variety of lower level prosecutions that I think Brazil experts now worry might be indicative of a real judicial overreach. So, for example, there was a group of businessmen who had a WhatsApp group chat. And on that chat, one of them made a comment that he'd like to see a coup over another leftist government in Brazil.

And you know that comment. That's certainly not great. But, these are private citizens in a WhatsApp group chat. And in response, the Supreme Court, one judge in particular, ordered raids on the homes of several of these businessmen, froze their bank accounts, subpoenaed a bunch of their records.

And in this case, the Brazilian Supreme Court seems to have arrogated to itself a vast array of powers to pursue cases that it perceives to be relevant to the quality of Brazilian democracy. And it's very easy to see how this goes too far. How in the name of protecting democracy, an institution like the Brazilian Supreme Court, ends up doing quite a bit more damage.

DAN RICHARDS: And if I'm understanding correctly, that damage could be their own overstep in this moment. But it could also be simply escalating and providing more ammunition for another Supreme Court down the road to act more harshly towards a different group?

ROB BLAIR: Precisely. Yeah. This is exactly what I mean when I talk about these sort of escalatory dynamics where it's very easy to see how overreaction can be a threat in and of itself and can also provoke further counter reaction from whoever's being prosecuted. And I believe this is a tenuous moment because I do think the risk not just of threats to democracy, but also of overreaction to those threats is very high.

DAN RICHARDS: Well, in the spirit of observing, but not overreacting to the risks, I want to ask you about what we've seen so far from President Trump about his plans for his next term in office. Obviously, he's not yet President, but we're getting more details about his cabinet picks and his administration's plans.

And obviously, we'll have to see what actually happens. But as you are watching this right now, what are you looking for to give you a sense of how this next Trump term will affect American democracy?

ROB BLAIR: Like you said, I think it's too soon to tell on a lot of these things. I would be watching in particular. So we know he is going to try to deport some number of immigrants. He puts the number very high. That probably is not feasible, but he's certainly going to try to deport some large number.

And I think things that I would be watching for, does he get the military involved? He's threatened to do that. If you start to see, the military going through the streets of cities, rounding up purported illegal immigrants. I mean, that, to me, would be a real red flag moment.

Certainly his threats to prosecute his political opponents, I will certainly be watching those. That to me would be very damaging. And I think that as we're watching the Trump administration, it's important to separate concerns we might have for policy outcomes we don't like or for just sort of rank incompetence from concerns that we have about the quality of democracy.

DAN RICHARDS: Are there any lessons either from our own history or from other countries around the world for how a country can come back from a period of this type of democratic erosion that maybe we've seen and that you expect we might continue to see for a little while?

ROB BLAIR: An example I think of a lot is Poland, where you saw very significant erosion of Polish democracy under the Law and Justice Party over a number of years. And then just quite recently, the Law and Justice Party suffering a very serious electoral setback.

And I think a lot of experts perceive this to be a real moment where maybe Polish democracy is making a real comeback. And I think there are a couple of interesting dynamics that are relevant for the US. So one is voters did ultimately mobilize around the issue of democracy, but only sort of obliquely.

So one of the biggest catalysts to voter outrage, mass public outrage against the Law and Justice Party was a decision by the Polish constitutional tribunal that would have significantly restricted access to abortion.

And this came on the heels of continued attacks on the independence of the judiciary by the Law and Justice Party, including a very contentious decision to force the early retirement of Supreme Court judges.

And voters really did not like that. The public really did not like that. And I think what ended up happening is questions about the quality of democracy and the independence of the judiciary became intertwined with another policy issue that voters were really up in arms about. So the issue of access to abortion.

And I think earlier when I was talking about democracy being a luxury good in the minds of many voters, I think when you can tie it to one of these other policy issues that people really care about, that makes it feel like there are real stakes involved.

Because I think the phrase preserving democratic norms and institutions that doesn't have much of a ring to it, probably for most voters. What you also saw in Poland was the rise of this sort of pro-democratic coalition of centrist and left wing parties willing to collectively beat back the threat posed by the Law and Justice Party.

And that sort of coalition building, that's easier, I think, in a political system like Poland's I think it's harder in a two-party system here like in the US. But you could similarly imagine, and you've even seen some of that already, but pro-democracy forces uniting in a coalition that might otherwise include some strange bedfellows.

I think of that as a very promising model as well. And again, you've seen some of that when folks like Adam Kinzinger, he is clearly a very conservative man, but aligning himself with the Democrats precisely because he perceived Trump as a threat to democracy. That's the sort of coalition building that I have in mind.

DAN RICHARDS: It's interesting, I think, both of those aspects of politics and polling that you've pulled out, I feel like it's a little bit like you can see echoes of them in the United States, like you said, with former representatives Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney.

With Democrats in the US, do you think hoping that actually reproductive rights would play a similar role in this election in somehow connecting this very powerful issue to a broader issue about democracy?

ROB BLAIR: I don't think the Democratic Party successfully connected reproductive rights, abortion access to the question of democracy in voters' mind, or at I don't get the sense that it did that terribly successfully.

And I think maybe that effort was complicated by the fact, whatever you make of the fall of Roe, it did result in a series of referenda at the state level, either for or against abortion access. I think if you're a voter, it probably looks like, well, if anything, there's a lot of voting going on around the issue of abortion. So to try to connect abortion access to threats to democracy, the connection maybe feels a little bit more tenuous.

DAN RICHARDS: For every day Americans who are concerned about democracy, the ones who maybe have the luxury to really be fretting at night over the future of our Democratic institutions, are there things you think citizens can do to help strengthen a democracy or prevent this type of erosion? Or is it sort of only in the hands of more elite actors and institutions?

ROB BLAIR: I mean, I have to confess, I am somewhat skeptical of the role that rank and file voters and citizens can play in beating back threats to democracy. But I do think, and I've written about this as well that when very serious threats emerge, massive protests can be an effective way, at the very least, to signal mass public discontent with the direction an administration is taking.

Unfortunately, I think a lot of the responsibility for trying to beat back these threats is ultimately going to lie in the hands of elected officials and the courts as well. And there, the voter's role is to vote for the right elected officials. But otherwise, there's maybe not a whole lot we can do.

DAN RICHARDS: What about the escalation you've described of animosity that many Americans seem to have towards people on the other side of the partisan divide? What can be done to help push against democratic erosion on that more, maybe cultural angle as opposed to legal angle?

ROB BLAIR: So if I were advising my students on what they should do in the coming years to try to marginally improve the quality of democracy in the US, I think I would tell them, one, really work on seeking out opportunities to empathize with folks on the other side of the political divide and to view them as less of an existential threat because the vast majority of Republicans and the vast majority of Democrats, they're just normal folks going about their lives.

And I think building that sort of cross-partisan empathy can be a really useful exercise. Prioritizing democracy in your voting decisions, it may be something that voters struggle to do, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't do it.

I think really seeking out and voting for candidates who prioritize preservation of Democratic norms and institutions, that is really important. Sending a signal to elected officials that we value these things.

And I think it's especially powerful, again, when Democratic voters push back on Democratic elected officials for doing something that's perceived to be problematic for Democratic norms and institutions, I think that is especially powerful. And likewise, when Republican voters push back against Republican elected officials. I think when the pressure is coming from your own side, it tends to be more powerful.

DAN RICHARDS: Rob Blair, Thank you so much for coming on to Trending Globally.

ROB BLAIR: My pleasure.

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

And while you're there, make sure to subscribe to the show, too. We're going to take a short break for the next few weeks, but we will be back soon with all new episodes of Trending Globally. Thanks for listening and have a great new year.

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