Welcome to Beg to

beg to differ the Bulwerks weekly roundtable discussion featuring civil conversation

across the political spectrum. We range from center left to center right. I'm

Mona Charon, indicated columnist and policy editor at the Bullwork and I'm joined by our regulars

Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution in the Wall Street Journal and Damon

Linger of the week. Sitting in for Linda Chavez this week is the Bulwarks publisher Sarah Longwell and our special guest is Tom Nichols,

professor at the US Naval War College and author most recently of Our Own Worst Enemy.

Okay, ladies a gentleman, I don't know how to describe this, but it has the feel,

doesn't it, of those crisis moments when we used to have divided

government and it was a question whether we would default on our national debt,

whether we would get a budget through,

whether there would be a fiscal cliff, etc.

We've got that feeling right now with a lot of plates spinning in the air and yet the

Democrats are in control of everything. So, so Tom Nichols, I'm going to go to you first. You know, when you, when you read people on the left, they're saying, how is it possible that those centrist

those selfish awful centrist could be willing to blow up Joe Biden's agenda

for their own selfish purposes.

And when you read the Centress, they say,

how could these progressives be willing to take us to the brink

and have Joe Biden be unsuccessful

for the sake of their pie in the sky, $40 trillion, I exaggerate slightly, a bill.

Well, I think the problem between the Centrists and the Progressive Wing is that they don't agree on the one thing that all of us should be agreeing on, and which is why I think all of us here are part of the same coalition these days, which is that we are in an

existential crisis of democracy. And instead, they're acting like its business as usual, and

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