>> Who will lead the Republican Party into the future?

This week, on "Firing Line."

[ Crowd shouting, explosions ] With the Biden administration now in office... >> Democracy is fragile.

At this hour, my friends, democracy has prevailed.

>> ...And Democrats controlling Congress by the slimmest of margins.

>> Being equally divided, the Vice President votes in the affirmative.

>> With differing views about how we vote and how to get things done... >> I believe we need to get rid of the filibuster now.

>> They would guarantee themselves immediate chaos.

>> ...where does the Republican Party go next?

And what's the roadmap for a stronger Democracy?

What do Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Anne Applebaum and former White House speech writer David Frum say now?

>> "Firing Line with Margaret Hoover" is made possible in part by... And by... Corporate funding is provided by... >> Anne Applebaum, welcome to "Firing Line."

David Frum, welcome back to "Firing Line."

>> It's been a while.

>> Yeah.

[ Laughs ] Look, the two of you are long-time friends and fellow travelers, public intellectuals identified with America's political center-right.

David, you were a White House speech writer, and author of the recent book Trumpocalypse, Restoring American Democracy.

Anne, you are the winner of a Pulitzer Prize, and your most recent book, Twilight of Democracy, chronicles the rise of authoritarianism in the west.

First, for the sake of our audience, how do each of you characterize your political views in this moment?

Anne, you first.

>> So, that's a difficult question to answer.

You know, you just described me as being center-right.

I'm not sure I would call myself that anymore.

I might have done so 20 years ago or even 10 years ago.

I think I would now have to call myself a center of the center.

I don't identify at all with the modern Republican Party, I've voted Democrat for the last several elections.

Historically, I was an anti-communist -- I was in Eastern Europe in the 1980s and 1990s, and, you know, believed very much in the overthrow of communism, and that put me on the right.

But in the modern world, we no longer have a right and left that are arguing over, you know, the size of the state or arguing even much over economics anymore.

They're arguing over cultural issues, and I find that I don't really agree with the extremes on either side.

>> David, do you still consider yourself to be a conservative or a Republican?

>> I am a registered Republican, and I think that the survival of a healthy, flourishing Republican Party committed to democratic values is very, very important.

And, certainly, if I were living in one of the -- I live in the District of Columbia, but if I were living in California or New York, I would be, I think, pretty active in state Republican politics, to make politics in those places competitive.

>> Look, both of you, in your recent books, use "democracy" in the title.

Tell me, right now, is democracy in peril, Anne?

>> Yes, I do think it's in peril.

It's in peril not just in the United States but around the world.

In the United States, what we're watching is not just polarization -- so, not just deep divisions between Republicans and Democrats, but we've also seen a part of the public, mostly inside the Republican Party, turning against the institutions of American democracy themselves, and questioning their value and reliability.

So, I mean, if you look at the attack on the Capitol on January 6th, that wasn't Republican fighting Democrats, that was a group of people who were fighting the system, and they were there to block the process of American democracy.

But you can see an echo of similar disappointment and similar distress in quite a lot of democracies, including big developing country democracies as well as European democracies.

So, yes, I do believe it's a threat.

It's not just in the U.S., but it's around the world.

>> And I want to ask you, David and Anne both, about your solutions for strengthening democracy here at home.

But first, let's agree on what is, in your estimation, broken.

What elements, David, of our democracy here at home are most urgently in need of reform?

>> Well, America has always been very conditionally committed to democracy.

That, before 1965, that there was racial supremacy across most of the country.

But I think things have been going especially in reverse since 2010, and the very radical gerrymander that happened after the election in 2011, which is institutionalized minority rule at many state levels.

Why is that so important?

Because what happened in 2010 was the Republicans got a danger and an opportunity.

They discovered that their ideology was increasingly out of sync with where the country was.

The country did not want what Republicans were offering.

But the political system offered new opportunities to use minority power to foist an unwelcome ideology.

So, one of the reasons I have been so on this soapbox is because one of my concerns is to bring the Republican Party into the 21st century and to say, you know what?

This narcotic of rigging elections, it's not good for you either.

The right thing to do is to compete to offer useful policies for the country, not to try to rig elections so that even though your policies are massively rejected, you can eke out power anyway.

>> You write "visibly preventing minorities from voting was the strategy that Trump's reelection depended upon."

>> Mm-hmm.

And you later said... >> Yeah.

>> How so?

>> Well, I think American conservatives had to be very pessimistic about their chances in open competition, and I always find that kind of incredible.

The most successful political organization in the democratic world is the conservative party of Great Britain.

They've dominated the politics of Britain for the past century.

The message of a flourishing business environment with people keeping most of their money for themselves, beyond what's necessary to sustain a moderate social insurance network -- those are powerful messages that can work in democratic competition.

But in the United States, conservatives have been much more doubtful, and so they have focused, in the pre-Civil Rights era, on a racial basis.

In the post-Civil Rights era, on a nominally non-racial basis -- on shaping the electorate, not shaping their policies.

>> To add a historical note to this, if you look back in history at the numbers of democracies that have gone wrong, very often they have gone wrong because the center-right has gone wrong.

In other words, center-right parties are very often the anchor of electoral systems, because they're homes for voters who dislike rapid change, who are willing to accept some alterations in their lives but they would like some feeling of continuity and stability.

And it's when center-right parties become more extreme or when they split up or divide that you very often have challenges to democracy, and you have real democratic declines.

It's another historical reason why maintaining a Republican Party that seeks to be a center party -- in other words, it seeks to win the votes of a wide variety of people, not just people defined narrowly, geographically, or culturally, but people from all different kinds of communities.

This is very important for the maintenance of democracy in the United States.

>> Take this question of gerrymandering, David, because Republicans, of course, will tell you, is that both sides do it, and perhaps the Republican Party has just been more successful at it.

>> Well, both sides have done it, but something changed in 2010 -- it really is different now.

And here are the things that have changed.

First, beginning in the early 60s, the Civil Rights era, the courts began policing gerrymandering.

After 2010, courts exited supervising gerrymandering, and in two Supreme Court cases at the end of the 2010s, the Supreme Court said, "That's it.

Unless there is an actual record of an explicit intent to disenfranchise a racial minority group, do what you want."

And finally, you never had the kind of control that the Republicans got because of the accident -- that the big sweep election of 2010 occurred in a year ending with a 0.

The United States conducts a census every 10 years, in a year ending with a 0, and then the redistricting happens in the following year, at the year ending in a 1.

But in 2010, there was a more extreme gerrymander than ever before.

At a time when the courts were out of the business -- at a time when Americans are spatially segregating anyway.

So the map favors the Republicans in these projects.

The law favors the Republicans in the project.

The timeline favored the Republicans in the project, and deterrents in 2010 vanished.

So they went for the gusto, and the result is, I'll say, like Wisconsin, Republicans get 45% of the vote and take 65% of the seats in the state legislature.

>> Another reform you've both written about is the filibuster.

Anne, you've called it "a relic of the past."

Because of the Senate filibuster, of course, most legislation requires 60 votes to move forward.

How would ridding ourselves of the filibuster strengthen democracy?

>> One of the oddities about the filibuster is if you try to explain it to someone who lives in a different democracy, they look at you like you're crazy.

"What?

That can't possibly be the rule.

Why does that work?"

The filibuster is not a constitutional rule -- it's not connected to the Founders or to anything essential about the constitution.

It's also a reflection of something bigger, which is, more generally speaking, the decline of Congress -- Congress as an institution that can pass laws and get things done.

And so, the filibuster now operates as a tool that just makes it much harder to get things done.

The filibuster is also a particular problem because of the nature of the Senate.

David has just spoken very eloquently about gerrymandering and how that affects state legislatures and, of course, it effects the House of Representatives as well.

But, in a way, the bigger problem is the structure of the Senate.

And again, the structure of the Senate -- which is in the constitution -- means that rural America now out-votes urban America, and a number of states where very few people live can out-vote states where a lot of people live.

And this has created another democrative imbalance -- large numbers of the population who want things like gun control, which is a very popular idea, are now out-voted in the Senate by a small number of people in less-populated states, because they have two senators for Wyoming, which has a few hundred thousand people, and two senators for California, which has many millions of people.

And the filibuster, in a way, adds to that.

So, in other words, you already have this kind of grotesquely imbalanced Senate.

On top of that, you have this arcane procedural rule, which means that it's even easier for that smaller population to out-vote the rest of the country.

And I think for the sake of democracy, it should be removed at least in certain cases or in certain circumstances.

>> I think people don't understand how new the filibuster is.

The filibuster, in its present form, dates back to the 1970s, and the filibuster in its real active form dates back only about 15 years.

So the filibuster is new.

It is not some hallowed tool of antiquity.

The filibuster also -- and this is, I think, one of the things that Anne really drives home here.

The filibuster encourages political irresponsibility.

Here's how it's harmful to democracy.

Republicans have been campaigning since 2010 to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Although the Republicans fulminate against the law, defund the law, try to sabotage the law, they've never accepted the responsibility of power -- to create an alternative that people can see, that accomplishes the ends the Republicans say they want, because they say, "Well, why bother?

We don't have 60 votes."

>> You two also both have something in common with many Democrats, and that is that D.C. should become a state.

Of course, that would give D.C. two senators -- presumably, they would be Democrats.

Anne, why are you in favor of D.C. statehood?

>> First of all, I'm in favor of D.C. statehood because it's a matter of justice for the District of Columbia.

I am actually a native Washingtonian -- I was born in D.C., I was brought up there.

But it would also very quickly solve one of the problems that I've pointed out, which is the imbalance of the Senate between rural and urban America.

Because D.C. is, obviously, an urban area.

And so, it's not a perfect solution, but it's a constitutional one -- it doesn't require constitutional reform or change -- it's not complicated.

If we simply admit D.C. as a state, then we have a little bit of the problem solved.

>> Look, let me add something to that.

When people say, "Well, it's obvious the Democrats are talking about D.C. and Puerto Rico as states, with a view to gain the Senate.

That's sort of true, yes -- that's what they want to do.

But the reason they are gaining the Senate is there is a party whose power in the House depends on making it difficult for Americans to vote.

So it's crude justice.

The better answer would be, make sure that Americans have a legal right to vote.

But the right to vote itself doesn't exist, only how that right may be regulated.

So if the art of American politics has been finding ways to take away people's right to vote, in ways that don't trigger a judicial reaction.

But that's wrong.

We've got to stop doing that.

>> I'm going to take the conversation to how to move beyond the moment of Donald Trump for the Republican Party and the country.

David, seven Senate Republicans voted to impeach Donald Trump for his role of inciting the insurrection, and you called that a good day.

>> Yes.

>> Because it was more than expected.

>> Yes.

>> But the fact is that the GOP still largely -- particularly the base -- believes in Donald Trump, supports Donald Trump.

Do you suspect that his influence will wane?

Or continue?

>> I think we can see his influence waning, and waning fast.

He has become a kind of cultural totem -- like refusing to wear a mask, like carrying a gun everywhere -- it's a way -- saying you're for Donald Trump is sort of a way of offending people you regard -- the people do it to offend people who seem too pious or too bossy.

But you can see that Donald Trump's problems -- his lack of attention, his laziness, his corruption -- those have become real obstacles to his power outside of politics, and he's going to have tremendous legal problems.

So I do think it's waning.

He also insists that everything be about himself.

2022 should be a pretty good Republican year -- the Democrats have the presidency, that usually generates a reaction, the map is favorable, and they've got all of these gerrymandering opportunities.

But Donald Trump insists the election must be a referendum on him -- on how great he was.

And he's going to drive -- he's going to create primary challenges, or try to, all in order to assert, "Let's keep talking about me forever."

And if the Republicans keep talking about him forever, they will continue to do as badly as they did in the elections of 2018 and 2020.

>> Anne, you wrote a very important column after the insurrection on January 6th, in The Atlantic, where you used the word "seditionist" to describe not just the people who took part in the riot, but the far larger number of Americans who were united in their belief that Donald Trump won the election.

Now, the title of that column was, Coexistence Is the Only Option.

Explain how a party goes forward coexisting with seditionists.

>> That column was an attempt to address a kind of misapprehension in the majority of the country, actually, but certainly on the left and certainly among people who vote Democrat, that this group of -- very large group who believes that Donald Trump won the election, and the smaller but still significant group who backed the Capitol insurrection, who believe that that group can somehow be ignored or pushed aside or we can just forget about them because they don't count.

I mean, much as some would like that to be true, that's not going to happen.

And so, therefore, we need a modus operandi -- we need a way forward, we need a way to think about politics and think about political conversation that will allow us to avoid violence and allow us to make some progress.

And when I was thinking about this, I tried to think of precedents for this situation.

The closest I could come to was Northern Ireland, and the way in which the situation there finally moved forward and towards peace was through people agreeing to talk about other things.

In other words, we're not going to talk about the thing that we really -- that we'll never agree about, which is are we British or Irish.

But instead, we'll talk about the local community center, or how to fix the roads.

We'll focus on economic issues.

We'll focus on other things that we all have in common, and we'll leave the elephant in the room outside.

And I was arguing that some way of conversation between the left and the right or Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. will also have to move forward on that basis.

You know, can we at least try to have national debates that are about economics, or about infrastructure, in which we can put aside the fact that we disagree about who won the election or we disagree about guns or we disagree about some of these other big cultural issues, and focus on that.

>> David, in Trumpocalypse, you did warn that there was a real possibility that the GOP could degenerate into a, quote... >> Yes.

I don't think this is something, by the way, that is exclusive to right-of-center people.

I think there are a lot of left-of-center people -- it's a personality type.

There are people who are easy-going and there are people who are not easy-going.

There are people who are prone to compromise, and there are people who reject compromise.

And they're distributed across the political spectrum.

I think the answer to this is that Republicans and conservatives are going to have to learn this through negative experience -- they're going to have to try and fail and try and fail.

And it's been going on for a while, and they're going to have to keep trying and failing until they understand, maybe it's time to try something else.

Maybe we should try actually having a healthcare law that's acceptable to us.

Maybe we should try to meet some of the problems.

If people could understand, we are going to have to answer the question.

Okay, we promised not to have Obamacare, but to protect pre-existing conditions -- how do you do that?

Write the bill.

The resources are there to do that -- do that work.

>> I agree that the impulse towards authoritarianism can be left-wing or right-wing.

You know, I spent much of my career writing books about the Soviet Union, so I'm under no illusion that there could be a form of left-wing authoritarianism, because there has been historically.

But what all of the best science and what all of the best analysts have concluded is that the impulse towards -- the impulse against democracy increases in times of stress, and in times of rapid change, whether it's rapid demographic change, whether it's rapid sociological change, rapid economic change.

And we are, right now, living in one of those periods of very, very rapid change, and one of the things I think that this has created in a lot of places -- and this is true in Europe and it's true in the U.S. and it's true in other countries too -- is a reaction against change itself, and also a reaction against the noise of change and the clamor of public debate.

You know, there's simply a strain of people who would like things to remain silent, and they would like everyone to be quiet, and they would like to have a sense of solidity and stability and security delivered to them by their ruling figures, whoever they are.

And all of these impulses can be -- and, you know, unless used in the right way, can be anti-democratic impulses, and we see them.

I just think it's not a coincidence that we see them right now, all over the world, including the United States.

And so, I do think that the American Republican Party has sought to find those people, identify with them, and make them more frightened and more anxious about the times that we live in, and they're not alone in doing that.

>> Anne, you wrote a recent piece, How Put Out Democracy's Dumpster Fire.

And you wrote, quote, "The civic habits necessary for a functioning republic..." How did the Internet contribute to the current state of polarization?

>> So, in addition to some of the other things that we've discussed -- the imbalances in politics, the Senate, the House.

One of the other sources of democratic decline in the United States, and along with other democracies, is the state of the modern Internet -- which I don't just mean social media, I mean the Internet more broadly.

The best way to think about it is to think about what the Internet looks like in an authoritarian country.

You know, in China, the Internet is controlled by the state and it reflects the values of Chinese authoritarianism.

It's surveillance, censorship, control.

But in the western world, the Internet does not reflect the values of democracy.

It doesn't -- you know, there are no human rights built into the Internet, there's no openness, there's no transparency.

Instead, our Internet is controlled by very few companies, who operate it according to various -- to secretive algorithms that we don't have any control over or have any defense over, or have any insight into.

You know, the companies are, you know, are tracking what you see and read.

They're collecting data about you, and they're using that data to feed back to you information that they think you will want to see.

And the reason why they're doing that is not to promote democracy or to promote better civic conversation or polite discourse, they're doing so in order to keep you online and to get you to buy things.

So, they're motivated by advertising.

They're not motivated by the need to promote better discourse or better conversation.

But one of the pieces of the solution could be thinking much more creatively about how to have online debates in spaces that aren't regulated by Facebook or by Twitter, but are regulated according to rules designed to increase civic conversation.

>> We'd always run a clip from the original "Firing Line" on the program, and David, by my count, you were a guest on "Firing Line" four times.

In 1974, days before Nixon's impeachment hearings, William F. Buckley Jr. pressed then-Republican Party chairman George H.W.

Bush about the GOP in a post-Nixon era.

Take a listen to this, both of you.

>> The Republican officials are divided on whether association with Mr. Nixon helps or hurts.

As head of the Republican Party, is it uncomfortable for you to cooperate with people running for Congress on a "I have nothing to do with Nixon" ticket?

>> Well, I -- it's not -- I think we've got room in our party for diversity, and my advice to them -- and very few people seek it, these days, but if they do, I'll say, "Look, emphasize the good things that the administration has done, and jump up and down and say you don't like Watergate.

Be against the bad thing, be for the good thing.

>> Reflect on how different the party is now than it was in that moment.

>> The difference is, the way to get ahead in the Republican Party in the post-Trump era is to be for the bad things, and to be against the good things.

So, simply stated -- I mean, you think, "What a breath of fresh air, to acknowledge that the president did do bad things and that you might oppose them."

Those Republicans who have opposed the very worst thing that Donald Trump ever did, which is incite this attack on Congress -- they find themselves in terrible trouble.

And yeah, we could use George H.W.

Bush back again, that's for sure.

>> Anne?

>> I think it's interesting that George H.W.

Bush emphasized the point that Republican Party is a coalition, as is the Democrat Party, as are -- have to be -- parties in our two-party system.

And, I think the fact that it has to be a coalition is maybe the one thing that can save us, and pushing them to recognize that they need this broader coalition in order to win national office.

That's the hope we have -- that the party will begin to think about broadening its views and its attitudes in the future.

>> David Frum, Anne Applebaum, thank you very much for your time and for joining me here on "Firing Line."

>> Thank you.

>> Goodbye.

>> "Firing Line with Margaret Hoover" is made possible in part by... And by... Corporate funding is provided by... ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> You're watching PBS.