Transcript: Trump Spirals Into Fury After Harvard Humiliates Him Badly

Enos: Well, I think part of it is the collective action problem that we’ve noted, where everybody thinks maybe it’s somebody else’s job to push back and things will go back to normal. And of course, when that happens, eventually we all lose, right? We all put our head in the sand, and [when] we put them back up, our democracy is gone.

But I think it’s the easy human ability to push things off, or to rationalize things away—to say, “Maybe this isn’t so bad.” But I also think—and I think this is a problem that the American public is just waking up to, no matter Harvard professors and everybody else—in many ways, it doesn’t matter how educated you are. It’s hard for us to see the threats that we’re facing because we always assumed that these were things that happened in other countries. You know, America was “the democracy”; we’re the oldest democracy in the world.

And in many ways, those of us that are alive now lived through the most fully democratic period of our democracy. And so it’s hard for us to imagine a situation where, when somebody like me says, “No, our democracy is coming apart,” [or] in many ways, it’s already come apart, and it’s a matter of whether we can take it back to its full state or not—they think that’s hyperbole because they’re basing this, somewhat rationally, on the whole history they’ve seen. And what they need to do is think about it more holistically and realize that, yeah, we are now in a system of “competitive authoritarianism.” And it’s just about whether we manage to take our democracy back from that.