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Hello and welcome to the Bullwark podcast.

I'm your host Tim Miller.

It is Monday. So I've got editor at large Bill Crystal back from a very non-vacation vacation, you know, people do vacations differently in the summer.

Myself, JVL, others decided to check out from the news altogether. Bill Crystal was texting me more than ever last week, well, he is with his grandchildren. So maybe that's a comment on the grandchildren? Maybe not? I don't know. No comment on the grandchildren. I have to have to explicitly and emphatically. And truthfully, we're about that. We did have the hurricane, which was out in the Atlantic, obviously had spillover effects at Bethany Beach. So there were two days of basically, you know, pouring rain and stuff.

So a little more time in the house and therefore text prone, I suppose.

And also the news, maybe you didn't notice this since you were working so hard all last week,

but the news was not all great in terms of the health of a liberal democracy in America.

On that point, you returned with the newsletter this morning saying it's not democratic backsliding. It's a march towards dictatorship, despotism, one or the other, both. Talk about the biggest picture there. And then you kind of list a couple of the things that happen that we'll get through. I mean, this term democratic backsliding has become pretty common in the last 10 years, I guess, in the U.S., but it really was invented, I think invented, or certainly you popularized, to describe the troubles in Central and Eastern Europe, and actually Russia, the former Soviet Union itself, after 1989, the tendency, the difficulty of getting rid of the old authoritarian habits, the old

authoritarian people of getting democratic institutions solidly embedded quickly enough

and democratic habits. And it's a very reasonable political science concept and there are

different countries that backslid more quickly than others and some haven't. So that's,

that's, it's not an inevitable thing.

But the impression it gives, and I think it's especially true when it's, well, and why I think it's misleading now to apply it to the U.S. is there's just this pull away from democracy in countries that haven't had it for a long time. It's kind of an old habit to die hard type. yeah yeah which is perfectly reasonable and then you'd be an idiot to go to you know

Poland or Bulgaria or something and time. It's kind of an old habit to die hard type. Yeah, yeah, which is perfectly reasonable.

And then you'd be an idiot to go to Poland or Bulgaria or something and not spend a lot of time thinking about. How do we get rid of those old habits? How do we change them? How do we embed new ones? But that's not the case in the U.S. It's a complicated way you can say it's sort of the case in the U.S. we have some old habits that have died hard and that are authoritarian and that didn't go away and now we're backsliding

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