Katrina vanden Heuvel, publisher and editorial director of The Nation, served as moderator of a conversation between Jamelle Bouie, columnist for The New York Times Opinion section, and Corey Robin, Political Science professor at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. In a tour de force, vanden Heuvel’s questions guided the conversation from “how did we get here?” to “will our institutions hold?”
Of course, the Trump Presidency and the general rise of authoritarianism were a big topic, but the conversation was much larger and Bouie and Robin offered deep and nuanced insights, building on each others points, framing and contextualizing US democratic institutions and issues across centuries. The speakers agreed on the baseline that American democracy is not the perfect system that would just translate popular will into politics and policy. Instead, Bouie and Robin elaborated on how constitutional design curtails electoral institutions and political will and expression, and at which points there are other factors at work.
As an example, one part of the conversation focused on the changing role of the Supreme Court, lately known for providing restrictions on bodily autonomy and freedom, without democratic recourse. In broad strokes Bouie and Robin established its trajectory from an arbiter of larger questions of the political system (with its important constitutional amendments) to sole, detached interpreter of a set of rules established at founding. They successfully show that the Court, like other branches of government, has its own trajectory and the potential of change over time, and how that may be dependent on larger, ideological and cultural factors, such as the Cold War.
Did they answer the question of the panel, Can Democracy Survive in the US? Our assessment: both panelists are optimistic about the survival of US democracy (to the extent that the US ever was democratic). Bouie for his deep belief in the power of the Constitution, and Robin for his refusal to get hysterical over a momentarily dislodged systems of checks and balances, within an infrastructure that best serves the powerful conservative right. But then, he argues, the branches of government are not necessarily were democratic power is located in the first place.
See for yourself: