Hello, and welcome to DEEPER LOOK coming to you from Stanford University here in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I'm Del Irani, it's great to have your company.

We're traveling across the country to speak to some of the top experts,

as it's a pivotal election year here in the US,

and the fragile state of American democracy will take center stage.

There's a good chance that the 2024 presidential election will once again

be a rematch between current President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.

As the eyes of the world are on the US, what is the current state of American democracy?

And just how dramatically will the upcoming presidential election impact its future?

Well, these are just some of the questions I'm going to put to democracy expert, Larry Diamond,

who's a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, here at Stanford University.

Larry Diamond, welcome to the program.

Thank you very much. It's nice to be with you.

Larry, how concerned are you about the current state of democracy in the US?

I'm very concerned.

I think we had a near death experience with democracy in the United States on January 6th of 2021.

We had President Donald Trump who had been engaging in increasingly, I think, unconstitutional and undemocratic behavior.

And then he tried and many of his supporters to overturn the results of a legitimate and verified election,

certified by the courts, with all of his legal appeals rejected.

- And, you know, by some accounts, he came close to doing so.
- Right.

I think we need to acknowledge that the threat to American democracy did not end on January 6th of 2021.

- First of all, the man is running for election to the presidency again,
- That's right.

with a much more overt, you know, elaborated, well prepared, well-staffed authoritarian project than he had last time.

What makes the decline of American democracy so unique?

What makes it unique is that of the advanced industrial democracies,

who, which are part of the OECD or part of the European Union, the US, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

None of them to my knowledge compares to the United States in the extent and depth of anti-democratic sentiment

among a significant slice of both the public and in particular, organized political life.

None of it compares in terms of the willingness of some actors,

not only to heat vitriol and disinformation on their opponents but to threaten violence against their opponents.

And we do not have a case in history yet, fortunately, of a very rich, very mature,

presumably we thought consolidated liberal democracy that has failed.

I mean, I guess how much of that has got to do with a few polls and you know,

data that's out there that suggests that roughly a third of the American public

still believe that the 2020 election was rigged.

How do you explain this phenomenon persisting in a country like the United States?

Like what you say where we've had free and fair elections and a really thriving democracy for so long

that so many Americans think the 2020 election was wrong.

Well, the inclination of human beings in societies where they're gathered together,

to believe in conspiracy theories, is hardly new. Right?

It has very ancient roots.

And it has to do with groupness and identity, fear, anxiety, resentment, distrust.

We could go into deep sociological and psychological explanations.

Social media, has accelerated it to a frightening degree.

And a good portion of that 1/3 of the American public who believed that the election was fraudulent, that Trump really won;

they're living in social media bubbles, where they're cut off from objective information.

They're living in echo chambers.

They're blinded by their passionate loyalty to a single charismatic, and I think authoritarian figure.

And they are not open to the evidence.

So how can democratic citizens come to conclusions about what's the right evidence?

What's the... is there an objective answer?

And fortunately, liberal democracy has an answer to that.

And it's the adjudication of that evidence by neutral and independent judges through due process and a rule of law.

And in the case of the United States, more than 80 courts of law at the federal and state level

have looked at the evidence and found the charges of election tampering and fraud,

to be lacking in credibility and substance and have endorsed the outcome as the legitimate outcome.

That's when it becomes so much more disturbing that people persist in this denial.

So, given that context, I mean, with the upcoming US election,

how concerned are you about the election and the impact it's going to have on democracy?

Well, I want to put this in perspective, because I think it's important for friends of the United States

and also adversaries of the United States and viewers of your show,

not to misunderstand or exaggerate the situation in the United States.

I think there are a lot of elements of resilience in American democracy.

I think the courts acquitted themselves extremely well,

in the 2020 election controversy, and I think they're poised to do so again.

I think that... two things that I think that we should be concerned about in the United States,

are one, that the supporters may mount if Donald Trump loses,

are likely to mount because Trump is likely to mount or organize the same election denial scenario,

using the same and now more super empowered means of digital disinformation,

because we're now living in an era of fake videos, and AI generated false content on media.

And the second possibility, which is related to the era of fake news, and super empowered disinformation through generative AI.

Is that assisted with these false narratives and these stimuli of fear and disinformation

in some cases coming from our authoritarian adversaries,

it is certainly quite imaginable that Donald Trump could actually win.

When we talk about misinformation and the undermining of democratic norms,

why is American democracy so vulnerable to that?

And I mean, are all democracies like this? Or is it just unique to America?

"What's different about the United States?"

First of all, we have, you know, history of violent conflict from the Civil War.

How we never fully resolved those crises, those existential divisions in the United States - number one.

We have a history of fierce libertarian independence, the American frontier, the West - number two.

Number three - we have a second amendment, which I think has been overly broadly interpreted by the courts

to allow a very wide berth of weapons to be in people's hands.

And then the fourth thing, I think, actually may right now be the most important.

And that is, we have a very antiquated electoral system in the United States,

which most democracies in the world have abandoned.

And which most countries in the world that have changed their electoral systems have moved away from.

And that is the system of first-pass-the-post, a plurality winner and single member districts.

And when you can narrow cast your political appeal, and you know,

you don't need to win a majority, you don't need to broadly appeal to the electorate.

And then, this is very important to understand, the way we nominate candidates is in very low turnout party primaries,

where in most states, only people who are registered for that party can vote.

So, you've got a narrow minority nominating a candidate,

and who's likely to be more extreme than the rest of the party, not to mention the electorate,

who knows that if they vote for compromise, and they denounced Donald Trump,

that will end their political career, because they'll lose the net low turnout party primary

dominated by the most extreme voters in the party.

Then you have this electoral system, that doesn't induce a breadth of appeal and moderation.

It's a very bad combination.

What strategies would you recommend for an inclusive and more constructive political dialogue without having to,

you know, rewrite the whole US electoral system, for example?

We've got to go to work on social media, and the social media companies,

they have utterly abandoned responsibility in this regard.

Their behavior, vis-a-vis, the elections, and the open sewer of disinformation

is far more irresponsible in this electoral cycle than it's been previously.

This is now an existential cause for many people who want to save democracy and not just in the United States.

We demand and we will work to legislate,

a requirement that social media companies offer transparency into the algorithms

that are driving what information gets elevated, and what they are doing, deliberately, consciously,

with a profit motive in mind, to accelerate disinformation and division.

My last question to you is what ramifications will unfold globally

for democracy based on the outcomes of the upcoming US elections?

Well, if Biden wins, it will be a reaffirmation, I think,

of the fact that democracy is still a consummate value in the United States,

and we're still there in partnership with our democratic allies in the world.

If Trump wins, the world will probably see it as a disconfirmation of what I just said.

And partially misinterpret his victory, because a lot of people may vote for Donald Trump simply because

they want more robust enforcement on the border in terms of immigration,

or because they think that Trump will produce a better economy for them.

But the ramification will obviously be that he's more isolationist,

and it was, at a minimum strain, our partnerships.

And if you want a third ramification,

I think it will be something that may surprise a lot of people to hear more and more,

you know, we've had this, I think, very complacent and even slightly arrogant attitude in the United States.

Vis-a-vis a lot of countries where democracy has been for decades, or even from the beginning more in question.

As it is recently in India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Mexico, South Africa, I could go on and on.

And I think that a third ramification is, if we have to switch to a mode of democratic defense,

democratic resilience, democratic struggle, as civil society, media, universities and so on,

we will find ourselves in and welcome the partnership of civil society and other democratic countries.

- Larry Diamond, thank you so much for your time and insights.
- Thank you.

America is clearly at a turning point.

As anticipation builds for the 2024 presidential election,

the intensifying dynamics of the political landscape will undoubtedly shape the trajectory of American democracy,

and democracy around the globe.

Join us next time as we continue our conversation with Larry Diamond and delve deeper into global democracy.

I'm Del Irani, thanks for your company.

I'll see you next time on DEEPER LOOK.