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Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics and life.

My name is Freddie Gray. I'm the deputy editor of The Spectator.

I am delighted to be joined here at the Spectator's offices by Yoramazzoni, who we recently

had on the podcast. He is the author of Conservatism, A Rediscovery, among other books.

And we are meeting the morning after the midterms, and I think we have to talk about that.

Must we?

I'm afraid we must.

Because again, American democracy seems to have thrown up an imponderable.

The House, it looks as though there isn't a great red wave in favour of the Republicans,

but they are going to win it.

And the Senate is very,

very close. And it looks as so it's going to be decided at this moment. It could be wrong by the time

this broadcast. But it looks at this moment so it will be decided by Georgia, probably in four

weeks' time. What's going on in American democracy? Let's start with that very large question.

American democracy is not in good shape. In fact, I don't think we've seen anything remotely like this

during our lifetimes. The basic story is that the last two presidential elections have been

suspect in the eyes of very, very large numbers of Americans.

You know, I don't know what the numbers are, but there's 20 or 30 or 40 percent of the population

that thought that the 2016 election of Donald Trump was in some way foul play was rigged.

...