[EAI Online Seminar] COVID-19 and the New World Order Series 1.

YouTube 링크 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2v6W-uVEMg

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The East Asia Institute (EAI) hosted an online seminar on “2020 U.S. Presidential Election Prospects” as the first online event of the COVID-19 and the New World Order series. The session hosted University of California at Berkeley’s Professor Paul Pierson, the John Gross Endowed Chair and Professor of Political Science, and Professor Taeku Lee, the George Johnson Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science, as speakers, and was moderated by Professor Yul Sohn, President of EAI and Professor at Yonsei University. The participants discussed a range of topics including the trend of democratic backsliding in the United States, COVID-19’s prospective impacts on election outcomes, and the structural elements pertaining to the presidential election.

Date & Time: May 15, 2020 (Friday), 10:00 - 11:30 KST

Speakers:     Paul Pierson (John Gross Endowed Chair and Professor of Political Science, University of California at Berkeley)

                     Taeku Lee (George Johnson Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science, University of California at Berkeley)

Moderator:    Yul Sohn (President, EAI; Professor, Yonsei University)

Discussants:   Chaesung Chun (Chair, National Security Research Center, EAI; Professor, Seoul National University)

                    Byoung Kwon Sohn (Professor, Chung-Ang University)

※ A brief analysis of the virtual seminar is provided below. For the full transcript, please download the PDF file at the bottom of this page.

I. Executive Summary

Challenges Outweighing Trump’s Structural Advantages?

• The political dysfunction that has been on display in the United States is unfortunately not just a one-off experience. It is reflective of deep challenges and problems facing American society and the American political system in particular that really hang over this presidential election. Political scientists have to be humble about predicting presidential elections because the United States never experienced an election against backdrop this time of economic and social crisis ranging from unemployment rate to public health crisis.
• There is an enormous uncertainty in this upcoming election because President Trump has both advantages and disadvantages. The important structural advantages in the upcoming elections might include his ability to control and direct the conversation and attention of media, and electoral college, whereas his disadvantages lie in his low approval rating. On balance, Paul Pierson considers President Trump to be an underdog attributing to the idea that those challenges at least somewhat outweigh the structural advantages Trump has.
• Both Professor Lee and Professor Pierson do not think that neither will Trump cast China as his enemy nor will there be a big rise in anti-Chinese sentiment in the U.S. in the coming years as there is not incentive strong enough for Trump to do that. This can be illustrated by a polling that only a small percentage of Americans have picked up this language calling “COVID-19” the China virus or the Wuhan virus.

How Far Has Democratic Backsliding Gone?

• The 2020 election is unlikely to be a typical election in which we can rely on the political science forecasting models or polling aggregator predictions for two essential reasons which is (1) the forecasting models will not be useful given that Trump is an uncommonly effective disruptor of political norms and institutions and (2) the U.S. is increasingly vulnerable to “October Surprises”.
• The United States is polarized in a way that two political parties that are organized on a national level are coherent national political entities, where the same kind of cleavages work all the way from the top to all the way down to the locations all around the United Sates. Rhetoric and behaviors suggest that people see the other side as not just their opponents but their threat, which is especially true on the political right, where Republican political elites and the interest within the party have resorted to increasingly intense, extreme appeals, and particularly white working class voters.
• Concerning the influence of American white working class nationalism in the upcoming election, Professor Pierson sees the Republican party shift in the direction of bolstering its appeals to economically downscale voters, pulling back from trying to expand the racial diversity of the party coalitions and Professor Lee adds to the point that President Trump moved himself from white, working class nationalism “as a strategy” to “as an identity”.

What if Democracy is Not the Only Game in Town?

• The upcoming election should be understood by how the fundamental elements of American politics, its institutions, identities and information are currently operating and evolving. In terms of institutions, the U.S. is currently undergoing major changes in that the Republican Party moves from being the Grand Old Party to so-called Party of Trump and that the Democratic Party is on the threshold of a deep divide between a Clinton-Obama-Biden Old Guard and Sanders-Warren-Ocasio-Cortez. In terms of identities and ideologies, the cleavage lines in American politics are becoming redrawn along Pro-Trump or Anti-Trump axis. Lastly, in terms of information, mediating institutions that inform the public and adjudicate facticity have been under assault.
• Professor Lee suggests four possible scenario that might happen in the 2020 election and points out that there is a possibility in which the Biden win and Trump refuses to accept that outcome or the vice versa. Given the scenarios, he argues that it can happen where the U.S. constitutional electoral democracy becomes under threat and where there will be a strong impetus to return to pre-Trump normalcy.

Implications to South Korea

• As Biden thinks of himself as relatively advantageous in foreign policy and if he is elected, the U.S foreign policy is likely to be rearranged in a way that is similar to that of Obama and Clinton.
• If going back to pre-Trump normalcy scenario is the case, especially for countries like South Korea, the U.S. will be a reliable ally, a regular trade partner, and a global leader. Additionally, there is expectation that new American administration will put more emphasis on the importance of alliance and revitalizing the importance of multilateralism. ■

■ Paul Pierson is the John Gross Professor of Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Yale University. He is an active commentator on public affairs, whose writings have appeared in such outlets as The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, and The New Republic. He has served on the editorial boards of The American Political Science Review, Perspectives on Politics, and The Annual Review of Political Science. He has also served as Chair of the Berkeley political science department. His research focuses on the fields of American politics and public policy, comparative political economy, and social theory. He is the co-author (with Jacob S. Hacker) of the forthcoming Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality. Earlier books include Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Abandoned the Middle Class (2010), co-authored by Jacob Hacker, and Politics in Time: History, Institutions and Social Analysis (2004). He also authored Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Retrenchment (1994), which won the American Political Science Association's 1995 prize for the best book on American national politics, and “Path Dependence, Increasing Returns and the Study of Politics,” which won the APSA’s prize for the best article in the American Political Science Review in 2000, as well as the Aaron Wildavsky Prize in 2011.

■ Taeku Lee is George Johnson Professor of Law and Professor Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago. He is co-Principal Investigator of the National Asian American Survey, co-Principal Investigator of the Bay Area Poverty Tracker, and Managing Director of Asian American Decisions. He also serves on the National Advisory Committee for the U.S. Census Bureau and has previously served as member of the Board of Overseers of the American National Election Studies, member of the Board of Overseers of the General Social Survey, Treasurer and the Executive Council member for the American Political Science Association, Department Chair at Berkeley, and Associate Director of the Haas Institute at Berkeley. His research focuses on racial and ethnic politics, public opinion and survey research, identity and inequality, and deliberative and participatory democracy. His recent publications include the Oxford Handbook of Racial and Ethnic Politics in the United States (2015) and Asian American Political Participation (2011).

■ Yul Sohn is the president of EAI and a professor at Yonsei University’s Graduate School of International Studies. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago. He previously served as the dean of Yonsei University GSIS, president of the Korean Association of International Studies, and president of the Korean Studies of Contemporary Japan. His research focuses on the Japanese and international political economy, East Asian regionalism, and public diplomacy. His recent publications include Japan and Asia's Contested Order (2018, with T.J. Pempel), and Understanding Public Diplomacy in East Asia (2016, with Jan Melissen).

■ Byoung Kwon Sohn is a professor at the Department of Politics and International Relations, Chung-Ang University in Seoul, Korea. He teaches American Politics, American Foreign Policy, and Party and Legislative Politics as a subdivision of Comparative Politics. He got both BA and MA degrees from the Department of International Relations, Seoul National University, and Ph.D. from Department of Political Science, the University of Michigan, majoring in American Politics. He published several books and articles, including Climate Change and the Dilemma for the U.S. Hegemony (2012, written in Korean), Is U.S. Congressional Politics Still a Model to Follow? The U.S. Congress Captured by Partisan Politics (2018, written in Korean), “The Superdelegate Reform in 2018 in the Context of Democratic Party's Delegate Reform History” (2019, written in Korean).

■ Chaesung Chun is the chair of the National Security Research Center at the East Asia Institute, and a professor of the department of political science and International relations at Seoul National University. He received his Ph.D. in international relations from Northwestern University. He serves on the policy advisory committee to the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Unification. His main research interests include international political theory, the ROK-U.S. alliance, and Korean Peninsular affairs. He is the co-author of The Korean War: Threat and Peace, and the author of a number of publications including Are Politics Moral and International Politics in East Asia: History and Theory.

■ For inquiries: Sea Young Kim, Research Associate/Project Manager

02 2277 1683 (ext. 208) I sykim@eai.or.kr

The East Asia Institute takes no institutional position on policy issues and has no affiliation with the Korean government. All statements of fact and expressions of opinion contained in its publications are the sole responsibility of the author or authors.

영상 스크립트

hi welcome to East Asia Institute I'm your host your son and I'm currently president of East Asia Institute and Yonsei University professor I'd like to thank everyone for joining us today this event is the first of the eai virtual seminar series titled the New World Order after coffee 19 today's topic is the u.s. presidential election which is arguably the most consequential election of the world in the years to come it is tremendously difficult to predict the upcoming election not just because it's

already a close race but also because of the extraordinary circumstances United States currently faces the crises of both health and economics will discuss election outcomes for selection domestic politics and foreign policy implications we have two speakers to present today followed by two designated discussion of customs and a Q&A session at the end which is open to all of you we encourage you to participate by asking questions you you type of question either English or Korean at any time during the talk

using the Q&A function at the bottom of the room seminar will keep track all the questions please remember also to include your name and affiliation when giving a question with that I'm pleased to introduce our two distinguished guests for pearson is john gross endowment chair and professor of political science at university of california berkeley paul authored many books including off-center politics in time the transformation of American politics and dismantling the welfare state question mark which is the winner of the

APSA best book on American politics Paul is also an active commentator for New Times and Washington Post our second speaker is Keiko Lee who is also UC Berkeley professor he is a George Johnson professor of law and political science Kaku is the author of mobilizing public opinion transforming politics transformed transforming America why Americans don't join the party question mark asian-american political participation among many others tegu also serves on the National Advisory Committee for the

US Census Bureau now Paul we are delighted to get your first guy you can speak about 12 to 15 minutes okay great thank you very much a professor son it's a pleasure to be with you I'm just going to start my stopwatch here so I can make sure I don't go on too long and it's a pleasure to have a chance even from this distance to speak with a South Korean audience I think Americans who are aware of the broader global picture are very conscious of the striking contrasts between the way that the South Korean

government society have dealt with this crisis and the way that the United States has dealt with this crisis or rather failed I think failed to deal with the crisis and I start by saying this not just to congratulate you and your countrymen but but also because I think the kind of dysfunction the political dysfunction that has been on display in the United States is unfortunately not just a one-off experience I think it's it's reflective some deep deep challenges and problems facing American society and the American

political system in particular that really hang over this presidential election and I think we need to understand that broader political context to to say anything helpful about about the election so a few quick remarks before I turn to talking specifically about about what's going on in the in the election this year and the first is just a caveat that we should be very humble I think after 2016 political scientists in the United States learned to be humble about predicting presidential elections and they should probably be

even more humble this time around because we've never experienced certainly in the modern era of polling and focus groups and electoral forecasting we've never experienced an election against a backdrop of this kind of economic and social crisis the US will almost certainly be facing 15 or 20 percent unemployment through through this year Congress is I think as it isn't on so many issues gridlocked and it's going to find it very challenging to respond forcefully to the economic crisis that we're facing and of course

at the same time there's a public health crisis which is also likely to continue to be severe even though the exact course of that is unpredictable so I any of the standard things that people who study presidential elections might say about predicting what's going to happen this fall I think need we need to approach that with enormous caution under the under these kinds of circumstances and the second thing I want to say is a little bit about the nature of the deeper political turmoil facing the United States the country is

extraordinarily polarized polarized in a way I would say it has not been since since the period leading up to the Civil War I know some political scientists argue that our the polarization is not that unusual in American politics but but I think the kind of polarization that we see now in which two political parties that are organized on a national level are coherent national political entities where the same kind of cleavages work all the way from the top all the way down to locations around the United

States and you see the same kinds that divides the same kinds of folks falling on opposite sides of those divides all across the country and you see a lot of rhetoric and a lot of behavior that suggests that people see the other side is not just their opponents but they're a threat a potentially existential threat to things that they value and I want to emphasize that I think that that is especially true on the political right in the United States I don't think that it's equally balanced in the same

way that I don't think that the Joe Biden represents a radical figure in American political life in the way that Donald Trump represents a radical figure in American life and you see that reflected in the coalition's and over the past generation what has happened in the United States is that Republican political elites and powerful interests within that party have increasingly found that they have to resort to sort it to increasingly intense extreme Appeals and particularly at white working-class voters who see themselves

as losing ground in America losing ground economically losing ground in terms of cultural status who cede the United States slow but steady shift towards being a multiracial democracy as something that is threatening to that and and powerful groups within the conservative coalition you can think about groups like the National Rifle Association right-wing media especially Fox News and talk radio evangelical Christians or as as an organized political movement I have really amplified this sense of threat

and and that development generated the the extraordinary presidency of President Trump and that's the other factor that I want to just talk about briefly before it turning to the election this is a new a very new kind of a presidency in the United States and it's one that I think should be seen as part of the the national trend that you sorry international trend I would say towards kind of soft versions of authoritarianism or what what Daniels applied and Steve Levitsky in their book how democracies die are described as as

democratic backsliding where you can have you can continue to have elections but they're increasingly unbalanced as unfair as a country slides towards something that looks more authoritarian and while some American political scientists would be resistant would say that me raising this is alarmist I think there's actually enormous evidence to suggest that the considerable Democratic backsliding has already taken place in the United States that since Donald Trump became president he has engaged in increasingly aggressive

attacks on any independent source of political mobilization in the United States or political organization in the United States whether it's the judiciary or the civil service right where he is systematically along with this allies and systematically tried to replace anyone who shows any kind of real independence with somebody who is going to be loyal to him the same thing is happening with the media the same thing is happening with the political opposition so just in the last 24 hours the president has indicated that he

thinks of both his immediate predecessor President Obama and his current opponent Joe Biden should be in prison which is something that he already of course has said repeatedly about his upon in the last election Hillary Clinton so even though they're people who wanted to dismiss this as this being loose talk if we look at other countries you know I think if Americans were to look at Hungary or Turkey or Brazil they would recognize this kind of behavior and the way in which president Trump's party has

embraced that behavior as something that we would call democratic backsliding and something that represents a real threat to the democratic practices that had been such a core part of American political history so I see 2020 as an absolute watershed election that it is going to be I think a moment where where the United States is going to decide what path it is going to be on whether it is going to continue on the path that has been on for the last few years of moving slipping towards a less free less

open society one that is not governed by the rule of law but is governed by whether or not one is in political favor or not or whether we will steer away from that from that direction towards the path that I think the United States was was broadly on before 2016 which was a gradual very difficult turbulent but gradual evolution towards a multiracial democracy that's what's on the ballot on in 2020 now I've already said there's enormous uncertainty about how this is going to how the election itself is

going to play out obviously a lot of things going to happen between now and November we've never had circumstances like this before president Trump has a couple of important structural advantages that I just want to mention quickly one is his unbelievable ability to control the conversation to direct the conversation and direct the attention of the media doesn't always do that to its benefit um but he is very good at attracting attention and getting people to focus on things that he wants people

to focus on and I think that that that is an advantage more fundamentally he has an advantage in the electoral college which decides who wins the presidency and the advantage that exists there is because the Republican base is more rural the Democratic base is more urban in the as when you have a winner-take-all system for each individual state that provides an advantage for the more widely dispersed party as you probably know a president Trump actually lost a popular vote by almost three million votes in 2016 but

won the electoral college the projections are that this time around because a lot of the that rural urban split is only intensified that it's possible that he could lose the popular vote by four or five percent and still win the electoral college by winning the more rural states and by winning some hotly contested states that that lean slightly Republican and that could carry him over over the top in the electoral college so he has those advantages against that he has the disadvantages that he's not popular by historic

standards his approval rating has always been pretty low it's it's definitely in the danger zone for a president running running for re-election and there there are lots of people who don't just disapprove of the president but who strongly disapprove of him so there is he's gonna have a hard time winning them over so he can't afford to lose much more support before his prospects for reelection election become really critical and and he now has to do that not with a decent economy at its back but with an economy that is going to be

probably with depression level unemployment in the fall and probably you know very significant continuing difficulties the pandemic very hard to know how this would play well play out on balance I think I would consider President Trump to be an underdog I think that those challenges at least somewhat outweighed the structural advantages that he has if we have open free fair elections where people feel like they can safely go to the polls in November I would say that he is likely to be a slight underdog but

I don't take it for granted that we will have those kind of electoral circumstances in November I feel like things have gotten to a point in the American polity where the level of conflict and now the level of social crisis is so high that we cannot be fully confident that that we will have a free open easily contested election in November I'll stop there thank you Paul excellent presentation you know before moving on to a tegu I just a quick question I'm I'm just curious I mean you said there's an uncertainty

about the free and open elections in America what what do you mean I mean it's not like you know you know but reading kind of thing whoa can you elaborate more on that last point well so so here I think I would I would point to the kind of argument that levissi and zeb lat make in their book which is that we need to recognize that democracies in the real world are not they're not all pure they're there they often have impurities in them and that often Democratic backsliding is about just increasing the amount of impurities so

like if you can make it more difficult for your opponents to vote then that gives you a big advantage and one of the things that's interesting in the United States now is that because the coal it the electoral coalition's are so predictable of the two parties there are all sorts of interventions that you can make and and conservatives have already been doing this and been in many ways to try to raise the thresholds make it more difficult for for voting to be carried out for further opposition's voters to

get to the polls and of course one thing that's very unusual about the United States is that local and state elections are often generally they are run by political officials not by neutral independent officials but by political officials who may be associated with with one party or another and there there are many decisions that they can make in Wisconsin there was a an election a few weeks ago in which in the middle of the pandemic Democrats were arguing that it was important that people have a chance to vote by mail to

but to vote remotely so that they wouldn't put their lives in danger by going to the polls well Republicans in Wisconsin thought that and the Republican a Republican dominated court prevented Democrats from from pursuing that that vote-by-mail strategy because they thought it was going to be their political advantage that the turnout among Democrats would be harmed more than the turnout among Republicans actually Democrats ended up winning that election voters weren't happy I think with with that but it

gives you an illustration of the kinds of things that potentially could be done okay thank you let's turn to pick ooh and those hoping to touch on as well in my remarks I'm for me in order to be able to keep to my time I have to read some prepared remarks but I wanted to first just sincerely thank presidents on for the opportunity and the honor to deliver some thoughts on the 2020 presidential elections in the United States the United States and South Korea are special allies with a linked history at

least throughout my lifetime and I very much look forward to sharing my house with you this morning I want to begin the same place that that all began in most of the u.s. presidential elections in my career as a political scientist there's a familiar cadence and rhythm between the moment that candidates declare their interest in running for president and the evening when results are counted and a winner is declared somewhere along that road political scientists like Paul and I might wager our forecasts as to who will win and all

the way along that road pollsters will gauge the sentiments of American voters with horse race polls that give us a further fine-grained sense of who is likely to win and why political science forecasting models using variations on a theme of indicators such as economic well-being and presidential approval can often predict who will win the labor day before the year of an election and even this year the first of the most commonly recognized half dozen or so forecasting models which is Helmut North's primary

model is already out with a prediction in case you missed it in January of this year nor quaff declared that donald trump had a 91 to 95 percent certainty of being reelected at the same time there are also poll aggregators like 538 the Princeton election consortium of automatic that are also remarkably good at not only predicting who will win but also estimating the margin of victory in a given election and here aggregators like five thirty eight.com currently predict the exact opposite outcome at

the present moment if you look at all the a grade polls reported by 538 they all show Biden ahead of Trump by about a seven to ten percent margin and that leads to my first key point which and this really not only should surprise nobody in this learned of audience but you've already heard this from Paul the 2020 election is unlikely to be a typical election in which we can rely on these political science forecasting models or polling aggregator predictions the first reason for this is that we only need to remember to 2016 election

when all the major political science forecasting models confidently predicted a win for Hillary Clinton and then Clinton lost the 2016 election gives us at least two reasons to be skeptical that forecasting models will be useful in 2020 one is the lesson that we continue to learn often in shocking and even lethal ways which is that Donald Trump is an uncommonly effective disrupter of political norms and institutions the other reason is that the United States for a whole host of reasons from foreign

intervention to domestic polarization is increasingly vulnerable to October surprises that could completely upend our expectations about who will win and who will lose and 2020 is shaping up to be an election in which there could be an unusually high number of potential October surprises from legal challenges to release Trump's tax returns which we're currently seeing constitutional challenges in terms of the emoluments clause tell-tale books that are currently being written and ready to be published by Trump's former confidants

and appointees not to mention the possibility of Russian interference again or the fallout from a another wave of COBIT 19 in the fall of course one major surprise is already upon us in the social economic and political and public health earthquake which is the corona virus pandemic and there's no understanding the extent to which covet 19 is a once-in-a century crisis with really unpredictable consequences on American politics so much so that even helmet nor paw the person who had the 91 to 95 percent prediction of a Trump win

has updated his website to say the massive disruptions caused by the corona virus outbreak may prompt me to revise my forecasts so how should we think about what is likely to happen in an upcoming election if existing models are unlikely to be useful and if we continue to face this unprecedented once in an epic crisis so here's my second point I think we should think about the coming election by identifying and understanding what has changed and what continues to change in the United States in terms of the basic

building blocks of border preferences and I'm going to refer to these alliterative ly as stories about institutions identities and ideologies and then information and a lot of my thoughts here a common thread with comments that Paul has already shared so I'll try to be a brief here each of these things could be an entire treatise by themselves so in terms of institutions political parties in the United States are really a a living organizational form that is currently undergoing major changes on

the right the Republican Party continues a metaphor Phasis that we started to see in 2016 if not before with the Tea Party movement from being the Grand Old Party that most of us grew up with - what could now be called the party of Trump one consequence of that is that we cannot continue to expect things like party leadership and party discipline independent of what Trump wants and where Trump is taking the party on the Left the Democratic Party is as much as it has been for a couple of generations

on the threshold of a deep divide between a Clinton obama-biden old guard and an angry insurgent mobilized Sanders Warren becauseö core-tex Cortes leftist wing one immediate consequence is that it is yet unclear whether Biden will or should try to win back independence and moderate Republicans by moving to the center during the election and maybe naming somebody like Amy Klobuchar as his running mate or whether he will or should tap the enormous potential of a reenergized left by naming somebody like

Warren Kamala Harris or Stacy aprons as his running mate and in this backdrop of parties reorganizing at the same time we also see norms of bipartisanship continue to erode polarization continue to grow and the proportion of Americans who I don't who don't identify with either party continue to grow my own personal view here is that Biden would do better to move to the left but I can save that for further in labor so that's institutions in terms of identities and ideologies American politics more and more is defined by

cleavage lines but the cleavage lines that have traditionally divided the country by party by ideology by identities are increasingly become becoming redrawn along a pro-trump or anti-trump axis one important trend here in American politics is that power struggles are increasingly moving from what political scientists would call the first face of power who wins or loses on for example a policy issue - struggles in the second face of power without getting too into the weeds of how political scientists think about

power in the United States the upshot here is very similar to president song's question to Paul about how this might not be a free and fair election which is the second face of power is all about battles over the rules of the game itself such as battles over checks and balances whether we will be governed by the rule of law or the constitutionality of certain exercises of executive power and conflicts over who gets to vote and how we get to vote and these all come down to likely battles we will see in

the future over the exercise of democracy itself so this matters because we need to expect in 2020 that who wins and how they win may very well be in a story about who wins the battle over the rules of the game and not so much what we're used to which is an election which is characterized by which party was better organized which candidates had the better ideas or more money and whether voters fundamentally wanted to change or more of the same then third the pro-trump anti-trump axis is also increasingly redefining and re sorting

Americans by social cleavages around race religion gender class citizenship and critically redefining and re sorting America around relatively new ideological beliefs such as the belief and fake news the prevalence of conspiracy theories and a renewed distrust of science and evidence this is the third key to understanding what may happen in 2020 and this is a story of information in terms of information the ability of Democratic voters to voice their opinions against elite level tactics and strategies over institutions and

ideologies depends crucially on the health and functioning of mediating institutions that inform the public and adjudicate facticity those institutions most prominently the mainstream media but I would also add universities and the scientific community have been under assault we are witnessing the lethal consequences of it this very moment in terms of kovat 19 and we will witness unfortunately I think much much more of this between now and November so so far I've stressed two key points about the

2020 election first that we should not look to traditional forecasting models for our expectations about what will happen this November and seconds that we instead need to understand how some of the fundamental elements of American politics its institutions identities ideologies and information channels are currently operating and evolving I want to make one last third key point about 2020 which is that we need to also keep in mind that for 2020 there are more than two possible outcomes to the presidential election in stable

consolidated democracies there are two outcomes to accompany two major party candidates either candidate a wins or candidate B wins and the litmus test for democracy stability as Adam svorski once famously put it is when democracy quote is the only game in town when no one can imagine acting outside democratic institutions when all the losers want to do is try again within the same institutions under which they have just lost to me it is unclear that in 2020 that all the losers on either side will

want to do is just try again within the same institutions under which they have just lost specifically I think we need to keep in mind that in 2020 there are probably four possible scenarios for what may happen the first two are familiar one Trump might win and the Democrats would accept that outcome to Biden could win and Trump might accept that outcome but they're also two other scenarios one where Biden wins and Trump refuses to accept that outcome throwing the country into disorder and political violence and fourth Trump

could win and the Democrats could also refuse to accept that outcome throwing the country into disorder and political violence this third and fourth scenario of the loser not conceding I think is more plausible than most of us would like to imagine possible as noted before Trump is a preternatural disrupter of political norms and institutions and for Trump the threat to delegitimize democratically held elections is already rehearsed in the 2016 election when he repeatedly voiced his worries publicly about the

legitimacy of the election anticipating that he would lose and he has been waving the flag of electoral fraud throughout his presidency as well for Biden if the Democrats lose because of things like foreign interference voter suppression or other kinds of corruptions or shenanigans it is entirely plausible to me that Biden and the Democrats also will not go as quietly into the night in defeat as Al Gore did in 2000 so the third key point is that we need to expect political potential scenarios in 2020 where our

constitutional electoral democracy itself is under threat in addition and I think this is a really important point in only one of those four scenarios will there be a strong impetus to return to some sort of pre Trump normalcy that is in particular for countries like South Korea a return to normalcy in which the United States can be a reliable ally a regular trade partner and a global leader only one of those four scenarios and even if Biden wins and Trump peacefully concedes the election this will only happen if Biden wins by moving

more to the center rather than fight and winning by moving to the Sanders Warren Aleksandra mikaze of Cortes wing of the Democratic Party in which we might return to something other than the Biden of the obama-biden years so this is a lot of doom and gloom but I think a realistic assessment at least on my part about the upcoming election for both personal and institutional reasons I am personally very invested in the scenario in which Biden might win and Trump might concede the legitimacy of that election

but I am also far from optimistic that that will actually be the outcome we are all faced with come Wednesday November 4th 2020 and I'll just stop there thank you thank you Teague for your excellent but gloomy presentation what would your poor trading what your trading America is not the country that we know so yeah with that let's turn to our designated discussants the first is I like to invite professor Sunbeam one of China University who is a leading spirit in American politics here in Korea mo please no to progresses thanks

for your presentation and it helped me a lot to have her understanding of the workings of American democracy and you were concerned about the prospect of future American democracy and I do not have much time so I recalled directory to the questions I have in mind the the first question I'd like to ask that of ask the first question to Professor Pierson and the second question to Professor Li okay and the first question is is about the you know the repetition of the 2016 white working-class nationalism and my question is is this

what would be the influence of the American white working-class nationalism and the anti-american sentiment in 2020 presidential election cycle compared with the 2016 presidential election would they be weakened or strengthened or late remain dust made above the same level and related to this you know rampant convey the nineteen chaos how would they convey the 19 effect the influence of the white working-class nationalism in this 2012 2020 presidential election that's my first question and the second question to this

time professor Lee is list about the satisfaction and you know in the team of the sender's faction within the Democratic Party and their relationship with are the old guard you know are by defection so my question is this what would be the prospect that the Sanders supporters and satisfaction in the Democratic Party also supports Joe Biden with the vase of pop Joe Biden and if they would why would they vote Joe Biden instead of being stuck at home on the election day and what kind of counteroffer

should the Joe Biden prepare for gaining their support center section and if Joe Biden embraces the left-wing agenda can there be risk of losing middle ground voters in the 2020 pressures Election Day that would be the my second question to Professor link and this is very trivial question the last one I hope professor terribly answered this question you you know dividing the old guard Democratic fraction and you know insurgent you know very very angry fraction let my cut okay so caucus and you know send us and

you you know categorized former President Obama as the old guard you know Democratic leader can you say that you know he's in between you know Joe Biden and Sanders so uh if you add more more you know explanation on that it would be fine for me that's my questions thank thank you pin one yeah I think you know each of you have questions and then the last question I think it goes to the polls so Paul who you want to start first sure thank you very much for that great questions and I'll just say a little bit

about Trump and the white working-class and you know it's part of a longer evolution right where this is the direction the Republican Party has been moving for some time is shifting in the direction of really bolstering its appeals to more down second ah mcclee downscale voters with less education pulling back from trying to expand the the racial diversity of the Republican coalition around you know becoming hard more hardline on immigration and so on and Trump just accelerated that process and what's interesting is that since the

2016 election he has just intensified that movement in the party you might have thought that he would actually maybe at that point sort of moderate a little bit and find ways to expand his electoral coalition and reach out to voters who traditionally had vote in Republican I'm thinking especially of white suburban college-educated people many of whom did vote Republican because they liked low taxes and so on and Trump has made no effort to expand his coalition in that direction quite the opposite and in fact there's been

movement away from him among those among those suburban voters which is partly why Republicans lost the House of Representatives in 2018 so during the current campaign I think we can see he only really knows how to play it this way which is to do the kind of red meat appeals populist kinds of kinds of rhetoric where it's all about who you who you should hate and and who you should be angry at and so trying to continue to mobilize and just increase and increase the intensity with which you try to mobilize these white

working-class voters now that's going to be more challenging now because the economy is performing so much worse right and many of those voters are going to be badly damaged by this change in the economy but but it's clear already I think that this is the direction that he's going to go in trying to generate hostility to China um you can see already that he's tried various rhetorical moves hostility to China being a prominent one that he's going to try to use to mobilize that that kind of sentiment

so he made continuing games after 2016 with these groups that were sort of offset by his loss of white suburban votes so the question is what will now happen over the next six months and I think one aspect of this that is really interesting to watch is that it appears like he's losing ground among white Americans who are over the age of 65 which had become a very strong voting bloc for him and that's a very important voting bloc because these are people who actually turn out as an issue in American

elections we don't typically have very high turnout in our elections but older people though so that's been a very reliable constituency for Trump among white White's over 65 and 65 year olds in the US or you know there's much higher proportion of people in that age group that are white in the US but that that support seems to be really softening and in part because in part I think because of the virus because his his his eagerness to essentially say let's not worry too much about Grandma you know let's get the economy going

going again that doesn't sound as good to some voters who who are grandmas and grandpas right so so I think that's going to be an interesting thing to watch and then and then the other aspect of it is that those voters mostly don't find Biden very threatening right Biden actually appeals he's well known by older voters so he he has more appeal to them than then Hillary Clinton did now now whether Biden can buy was gonna lose votes among younger voters it looks like he's not he's not as popular as either

Obama or Hillary Clinton was at this point among younger voters so that but that feeds into the question you ask takes you so I'll leave I'll leave that for him great I can't resist the opportunity to say I think Paul just predicted that Biden would win Florida well if I if I were them I'd be worried about if I were the Republicans I'd be worried about Florida for these reasons yeah I think I think I think those are great comments to think about the one edition I would say even though I know the question was mainly directed at

Paulus I think one thing that's happened during the Trump presidency is that he he's moved himself from white working-class nationalism as a strategy to win the election to white working-class national as an identity and I think in the process of that move I think the potential electoral base around white working-class nationalism has shrunk a little bit and in a close election that might that might matter you know in terms of the Sanders faction I you know I think the two important parts of that

question are you know will will they move over to Biden and will they actually turn out to vote so will they move over with enthusiasm I think the easy answer is to say you know it depends in large part on who he picks as his vice presidential candidate but that is also probably putting far greater weight on vice presidential candidates than that it deserves and I think on Biden's part if he picks a vice presidential candidate that really ought shines him as a presidential candidate that too can be a liability and if you

know about Joe Biden's performance as a political candidate it's probably not too hard for a vice presidential candidate to outshine him so I think he has to be very careful about weighing too heavily on that decision of a vice presidential candidate to do the work for him of bringing the Sanders voters over to his side I think potentially much more promising is the consequences of kovat 19 which I think it has been such a crisis in the United States that it really reveals a lot of structural problems in the United States both in

terms of its economy and the way in which politics works in the United States and if the core of the Sanders war on Alexandria or Kasich Cortez Wing is a structural critique of business power and American political economy I think voters are much more open to hearing that argument now even voters in the center arguments such as the need to universalize our healthcare system to something closer than what they have in the United Kingdom than what we've traditionally had the United States I think it's

inconceivable that we would have been at this particular place but for the fact of this crisis so I think to the extent that Biden uses that opportunity to move towards a to move the Democratic Party towards more of a structural critique of the American economy and a business power then I think that could do more work to bring Sanders voters over to to his side than picking the right vice-presidential candidate in terms of Obama you know I think I described Obama as part of the old guard in part because of my own personal views

of Obama where I thought he was a transformational candidate and a very old guard president so I think he was there was much more continuity in terms of how he governed with Democrats of the past such as the clinton-gore administration then there was anything that was distinctly different about it so I think he was very transformative in the way he thought about mobilizing voters to win elections in ways that I think we continued to see in the 2018 midterm elections when there was large-scale repudiation of Trump in

elections that usually see very low voter turnout and I think we'll you know remain to be seen whether Biden is able to tap into some of that as well so I think you know Obama as a candidate is quite different from who Obama was as a president and I would read Obama as President as part of the old Democratic Guard okay thank you now let's turn to check on Qian yeah please please go about it thank you I'm Jin Seong Chun thank you for your great insightful presentation I have two questions related to the u.s. foreign

policy it's not directly related to your presentation but there are many audiences in South Korea who are interested in you know u.s. point policy first question will be about the bilateral relations between ices in China the second one will be about the expecting foreign policy of the new administration from next year so what will be the top priorities of the foreign policy for the next administration whether you will be Biden or Trump administration both two professors if possible the first one is

well we expected that the coronavirus situation will be a silly teacher of the bilateral cooperation between us in China because that's the common threat to the public health in teacher terms but it turns out that for the virus is not bad enough or fatally enough to facilitate the bilateral cooperation so there are many discourses and never it is about blaming game who will be more responsible for this aggravation of the situation so do you expect this type of the escalation of confrontation starting

from both countries will define the short term bilateral relations until the election times will it be the short term president Trump's election strategy to blame China probably to aggravate that the trade tension in the coming month promised by starting the second phase of the trade deal or is it the result of the long term aggravation of American public's perception of China saying that China is the disseminator of the International global collective bats such as virus by mishandling a divided

situation the initial face so will it be the result coming from this generally aggravating American public's perception of China so what will be the long-term prospect of this Alero confrontation how will that define the American foreign policy becoming a month in years so that's the first one the second one when we go back to the 21st century in general under the US unipolarity many American s administration started with crisis we should measure with the terrorist attack an Obama administration

with the 2008 it can make it a concise recession and now the next administration will be confronted with a serious challenge coming from the Corbett situation and public health so we expect that top priorities of the next American administrations will be very much different from the past ones or exceptional so we can easily expect that the top priority is how to deal with this healthy situation the second one will be to revitalize American economy the question will be what will be the third well if there is a trump

administration of the second term will he be different in dealing with the foreign policy situations thinking probably the legacy in his mind is to change his courses to foreign policies there are a possibility of that the more interesting question will be what would be the foreign policy of the candidate Biden if he becomes the president so we expect that there might be turned to the pre trumpian normalcy by you know reassuming American global leadership and providing international collective goods to other countries but still there

is a concerns that in this very different situation even though he will pursue different foreign policy but there will be a continuing somehow trumpian american first type of foreign policy even under the Biden administration because there are a lot of lack of American capability to deal with the situations but in South Korea there is expectation that new American administration will put more emphasis on the importance of alliance and revitalizing the importance of multilateralism and what will be the

public support in those states about reassuming the American leadership generally for the next administration thank you very much thank you thank you for for those questions at this time why don't we start with Teague and then oh sure so I mean those are great questions I think in terms of bilateral relations between the US and China I'm thinking a bit about presentation I gave that a KAS conference in the fall where I thought out loud about this theory and international relations about domestic audience costs and why it is

that you would expect the idea behind a theory is that when leader makes a lot of threats empty threats and engages in a lot of cheap talk that's hostile towards another party oftentimes that leader has to bear domestic audience costs audience costs for having done so in Trump's case especially with respect to China there seems to be close to zero domestic audience costs for the kind of vituperative rhetoric he is engaged in with respect to China and there's a lot of reasons why that might be the case

but I think the upshot of if that's a fair characterization of the absence of domestic audience costs in Trump's case is that he is freer to basically move around as as he chooses to in terms of how he thinks about and uses us-china relations for his own personal political purposes and I think anything that concerns predictions about a second Trump administration I think has to start from observations about his record in his first administration which is in my reading not a administration that has

some grand design either with respect to domestic politics or foreign relations but really emanates from a the the personality himself of Trump and so from that perspective I think if Trump sees it necessary or expedient to try to cast China as an enemy for the purposes of political gain he's certainly going to do that between now and and November it's important to keep in mind though that to the extent that he has already done that in the last three years of his presidency for the most part it hasn't

had that much traction with American voters so in the polls that I've looked at for the most part Americans still value the idea of globalized economy they still like the idea of America being engaged in multilateral relations with other countries they certainly think of that as being the way forward in terms of how we move on from the current colvett crisis in terms of you know having coordination with the w-h-o for example and so there there's some slight uptick specifically in terms of how the US thinks about China in

slightly more negative terms but I don't think we are in a situation so far from based on the first three years of the trump presidency of Trump really being able to rail against China and against eugen thing and create this mass upsurge of angry Americans and angry sentiments towards China so for example if you try to project far far ahead to a worst-case scenario about whether or not US and China might be engaged in you know military conflict as a result of this kind of incendiary rhetoric I don't see

any appetite on the behalf of American voters for anything like that so even though I think Trump likes to opportunistically choose enemies for personal political gain and China certainly is low-hanging fruit from that perspective I don't really see him as being able to gain that much from from doing that you know I think that the and for the most part I've already touched on some parts of an answer towards your second question about top priorities the one other thing that I would add is you know I think Biden really sees foreign

policy as his strong suit that's really been one of his top priorities and one of his areas of you know unique policy expertise from his years as a senator and I think based on his record from those years unless there's a really strong pole towards the left from the Sanders wing of the party in a way that really compels Biden I think Biden's first goal if he were to win the presidency would be try to try to return the United States to some semblance of a pre Trump normalcy in terms of foreign relations thank you all

so it would be more interesting probably if I disagree with my colleague but I don't about about anything that he said there but those are both great questions let's it very quickly on the first one I agree I don't think president Trump would hesitate for a moment to turn China into a demon if he thought that it would help him electorally but I agree with Daegu I actually don't think the evidence so far suggests that that's likely to work all that well just as not seen polling for example on you know

what percentage of Americans have actually picked up this language of calling it the the China virus or the Wuhan virus and it's it's vanishingly small like you know it just and I think that in all their additional obstacles but like the fact that Trump is on video you know saying you know many of the things that he wants to accuse other people about with respect to being duped by China so I I just I he he wouldn't hesitate to play play that card and I'm sure that they will try it they'll try anything they can they wouldn't hesitate

but I I'm I'm doubtful that it will end up that there will be a big rise in anti-chinese sentiment in the US and in the in the coming year you know looking ahead to future administration's so just I think the the thing that I would say about a Biden administration is that I I'm sure that Biden would want broadly to recreate the kind of foreign policy that you might associate with Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama and you know that he that he would aspire to do that the challenge is going to be that it

that it's a lot easier to break things the way that the Trump administration has than to re-establish relationships that are based on a trust and credibility and reliability and I think I I would expect other countries to be much more careful in their dealings with the United States and in the future and and much more skeptical the idea that they can expect a reliable negotiating partner and so that's going to be in addition to all the other crises and by an administration would face I I think that's just a it it is going to be very

very hard to put back together the pieces that have been broken over the last four years now a second Trump term I would just so again I'm I will be blunt like I I do not think that his foreign policy is America first I think it is Donald Trump first and and but you know pulling out of the constraints that are created by international agreements agreements and alliances is a way for him to put himself first and I think one of the many things that are that are I think are genuinely alarming about the

situation the u.s. finds itself in now is that I think a second Trump term and I think we're already seeing this in the last year of the first Trump term he is unshackled now he is Unchained he is quite confident that the checks and balances that are built into the American political system do not constrain him he does not have to worry about Republican senators removing him from office increasingly he does not have to worry about the courts checking him and if he has another four years in office my guess is he won't be as

worried about the media he'll feel like he'll have more leverage over the media as well and one of the nice things about Trump first or America first foreign policy is that when he's negotiating with foreign countries he can accept a massive side payments to his personal economic financial interest right um that you know that will not be visible especially won't be visible if all the checks have been removed and you know that's there are lots of countries that would love to negotiate with a broken

superpower that is willing to make concessions in return for private benefits so so I agree that his foreign policy in many ways is incoherent but I think that kind of coherence is what we might expect out of a second Trump term okay thank you yeah we have featured two discussions and replies from on the presenters now let's turn to the audience we have already have lots of questions from from the audience the first question I mean this is really the first question that we got is I guess yes as a question from from an American

working in in Korea is it projected that the Tony Tony R presidential election will be held by absentee ballots only across the 50 states question mark kind of you know technical question and second question also it's about I mean we have three questions you know asking same thing how many independent candidates will be and how important will independence be in the election who do you want to I mean I think on the first question I think everything should be preparing for the possibility absentee mail and balance only but I

think that circumstance would only arise if there were a second wave of this outbreak that spread across all 50 states and there will be a lot of states as Paul pointed out that will play out the dynamic that we witnessed in Wisconsin where if Republicans are in power in a given state and they see value and holding elections at actual voting booths because they think it will have the effect of suppressing voter turnout and depressing the turnout and ways that will benefit Republican candidates and Donald Trump then we will

probably see even if there is a massive second wave of that spreads across the country we'll probably see a lot of states that will insist on having real elections as well on the second and the second question I think there's typically a libertarian candidate and I think this year Justin Amash is running as a candidate for that party's ticket but there's nothing else that I've heard of and I think so far the positive the biggest threat would have been if somebody like Michael Bloomberg chose to run as a third party

candidate and for a range of reasons so far does not seem that even though there you could argue that he was treated poorly as a candidate but maybe only as poorly as he actually performed as a candidate for the Democratic nomination doesn't seem like he's motivated to to for any personal reasons to run as a third party candidate he seems more motivated to actually defeat Donald Trump thank you here's here's a question from Maria hiko from Salaam University this question goes to Teague you you said

that the the scenario Biden wins and Trump refused to accept what do you think are the direct actions trunk would take you know I think this these are the kinds of scenarios that I really think especially political scientists in advanced industrialized democracies like the US are really not trained to think about you know I think part of an answer is the way in which Trump regularly especially at his rallies talks about how he has the military on his side and how he has the police on his side I I

think I wouldn't put it past our president to play out scenarios in which he would not peacefully leave from his political office and that involves a lot of ugliness domestically in the United States and most of those scenarios are not ones that that I'm trained as a political scientist to really carefully think about and a lot of it also will depend on what role you know the Congress is willing to play in that situation and what role the courts are willing to play in that situation yeah I mean I want to say first and I

know I have some of the same discomfort that I think take you you know with this it's quite extraordinary i yes i i i was trained to teach about and do research about a very peaceful and highly stabilized at least in terms of its formal institutions democracy and it feels very peculiar to have to wrestle with these kinds of questions but i don't think that we can i I don't think we can hide from them I think that the realities are apparent that which is not to say that we're necessarily going to

slide in this direction but there is enough going on that it's just to me it is not intellectually honest to not to attempt to wrestle with it and so and just as an illustration of that so today the state legislature in the state of Michigan announced that they were going to go into they were they were going to go out of session of the legislature because they were fearful about the armed groups that had been protesting including inside the Capitol building the building where the legislature meets

people carrying automatic weapons and and protesting against the fact that that there were stay-at-home orders in place in in Michigan and the situation there serious enough that the state legislature actually Republican majority in the state legislature decided that they had to go into hiding they could not need in public session and so now imagine what happens if a president who has been saying for years that the other side is cheating and stealing elections and is backed by powerful media that is taken

as gospel by tens of millions of Americans imagine that on election night he declares that the election has been stolen from them what would happen then I don't know but it's a it is not an implausible scenario at all if the election is closed and of course one thing that's also going to be the case in the US and will be probably even more the case because of the virus is that the the absentee vote the mail-in vote comes in slowly you know the vote in California comes in slowly I live in California you know

most people in California now vote by mail it takes it takes can take ten days to count all the ballots in the various districts so it's you know it's quite possible that you know that a president could declare fraud at that point thank you here's here's a question on identified question in in in I mean the recent Korean election I mean generally election we see the rising generation gap amount of voters for the United States for example like you know millennial voters the youngsters is there any political characteristics you

know from those voters and particularly today support America's global leadership I can start wheat you know one thought I had and listening to that question is if America's young voters were like South Korea's young voters Trump would not have won in 2016 and the question over who's likely to win would be much less of a debate so that even in the there was an election this week in California in Southern California to finish the term until November of currently of a elected member of Congress in 2018 who

had to resign because of an affair that they had with one of their staffers and but that was a democratic member of Congress and they lost their seat to the Republican candidate running to fill that seat until November and that surprised a lot of people but part of the story of that election especially during the Komen crisis was that older Americans turned out to vote and younger voters in that district did not turn out to vote that's a very very old story in the United States the 2018 midterm congressional elections were really an

exception to that and I you know I would be very pleasantly surprised if young voters continued to turnout and mobilize in the way that they did in the 2018 midterm elections I worry that they might not in particular given that Donald Trump is at the head of the ticket for the Democratic Party Biden you mean what could I say I said from oh sorry Joe Biden yeah that's right yeah I mean I I do think that's one of the the biggest to the extent that there's a campaign here to follow I do agree with daegu that this is one of

the biggest questions is what is going to happen with young voters and they're not going to vote for Donald Trump you know there's a there is a big gap young voters have been tilting you know strong strongly Democratic in recent years and trumpets just accelerated that trend the question is more how many of them will potentially could be for a third party but it doesn't really look like that's gonna be that's gonna be a big issue it's more whether they will turn out to vote and I have to say I I remain inclined to think at the end of

the day that youth turnout is likely to be pretty high that it is actually likely to look like 2018 and if that's just because and I think it actually probably depends a lot less on what Joe Biden does than just the fact that that Donald Trump is going to be on the ballot and the election is going to be a referendum on his presidency and which is what I mean that is a traditional thing in American politics is that when a president runs for the second term the election is you know mostly about how

people feel about the president's first term or at least the end of the president's first term and you know I think there's a lot of reason to think that that's a big problem for for Donald Trump thank you here's a question both of you mentioned democratic backsliding which is which you know occurs across the world particularly you know advanced industrial countries do you see any particular American element in in comparative perspective yeah that's a that's a great question and I mean I think they're I think the American

system is peculiar in in certain respects having to do with the nature of our institutions and traditionally our institutions I think did provide a pretty strong check against that that kind of dynamic because the political system was so fragmented that the idea that you would really get a national coalition around a figure like say Donald Trump where and who would not be effectively checked by other parts of the political system that had their own power that just seemed like a really hard thing to pull off and so one of the

things that I think has been really stunning and it has to be explained if I got a book coming out with Jacob hacker that tries to explain some of this it that that the Republican Party really has rolled over and or you know I I watch Game of Thrones and the famous the line over and over and Game of Thrones was will you bend the knee you know will you bend the knee to the person who is asking for your loyalty and basically Republicans have at the end of the day they have bent their knee and and that

wasn't supposed to happen in a in a Madisonian you know separation of powers political system so it's interesting to understand why that that might take place and then the other thing I think that's interesting about the American case for this is that you do have this kind of unusual possibility in the American system which is that you can get what Jacob hacker nark are calling a minority Rhian government right that you can have a unified minority of the country because of the way that they're located geographically that is actually

able to govern over a majority so the Senate in the u.s. you know is bears no resemblance to the population of the United States and so if you're a strong party in rural areas of the country you're gonna have a real advantage in in getting a Senate majority and that so Republicans have lost the overall national vote in the Senate in in most recent elections but they have a majority of the Senators because of this rural advantage and the same advantaged help present Trump to win even when he lost the popular vote in the presidency

and then I don't want to get into all the complications of it but it even helps Republicans in the House of Representatives because demo wastes so many of their votes in urban districts so you potentially have a system especially if you can then stack the Supreme Court with your supporters you have a system where you you don't actually command the support of a majority of the country but you you can run the country and so that's a little different than the kind of democratic backsliding that levissi and zib lat

talk about but it's part of the part of what's going on in the US yeah I would just add to that I think anytime you ask a question about whether the United States something that's happening in the United States is exceptional compared to what happens in other countries in the world I think you have to think about the role that race plays as an organizing principle in American politics in a way that it rarely does in a lot of other countries and so part of what's happening today I think is one party's reaction to what seemed to be

almost inevitable demographic change which was likely to secure the long term dominance of the Democratic Party at the national level electoral II in the United States and the way the Republican Party already even before Trump had begun to prepare for that inevitability was to change the contest from a contest over who wins and who loses to a contest over what are the rules of the game whose votes get to be disqualified whose votes get to be suppressed and so on and now with Trump it further becomes I mean

Trump almost doesn't exist without Obama as a president that preceded him and so it's hard not to at least entertain the argument that the trigger for Democratic backsliding in the United States was the Obama presidency it's not clear that the Trump the Tea Party movement on its own had enough momentum to really fundamentally a brute American social political economic institutions in the way that three years of the Trump presidency has done and I don't think the trump presidency would have happened

without the Obama presidency okay it's almost time the final question to you I mean each of you if Biden wins would that be a in terms of foreign policy would that be a true rigorous course you know really going back to pre Trump normalcy or I mean he tries but basically it'll be the continuation of the current leadership which is in decline who do you want now so I'm not an expert on foreign policy at all so this is it is highly highly speculative but maybe I can answer in one way they kind of ties it back to

some things that I do know more about I thought I've thought more more deeply about you know I did that the the challenge' Biden administration would face in foreign policy is you know you how do you glue all this back together particularly in a context where American power is seen as an as in relative decline and I do think that is a I think that is a huge challenge it would it's a very very heavy lift on even under favorable circumstances for an American president the one thing that I think might if one hope for that kind of

outcome the one thing that I think might generate some optimism would be the following and it really follows from what take who was saying a minute ago which is that the Republican Party in some ways has been engaged in a race against time right they're pursuing a political strategy that that makes no long-term Democratic sense in in the context of an American democracy right and they're alienating minority populations that are growing they're alienating anybody under 45 so you know as Lindsey Graham senator

Lindsay Graham described we're not producing enough angry white guys anymore enough or they're not making enough old white angry guys to maintain this strategy all right so so if you accept that it suggests that there is the hope has to be that the Republican Party at some point is going to have to change course right if American democracy can hold itself together and get through this dark tunnel then the Republican Party in order to be competitive is going to have to change course away from the very narrow targeted narrowly

targeted constituency that it's been Android and and so if you and of course American foreign policy traditionally depended upon that kind of bipartisanship and that kind of consensus so that's my general take about American politics more generally we need a healthier Republican Party if the American polity is going to is going to thrive you can't you know in our political system you you can't have one of the two major parties not be a healthy political party and have the system hold up in an enduring way so if

I were going to try to paint an optimistic picture of the future of a bright Abidin foreign policy it would be that me and I'm sure they are thinking in these terms that they do want to try to engineer a shift towards a different kind of future for the Republican Party that is less based on a you know a strategy of burning everything down I think Paul is absolutely right that it's much easier to break things than to build them back up and I also agree that a key part of building it back up is building rebuilding a lot of trust that

has been frayed and so here I think there's sign of signs of potential optimism and signs of potential pessimism I think you know one of Biden's strong suits is not only the fact that he sees foreign policy as his area of expertise but over the many years that he was a senator on the Foreign Relations Committee and over eight years of being vice president he just literally knows a lot of people on the global political stage and has personal relations with them and that's a good foundation to start rebuilding a

lot of the trust that is necessary for the u.s. to return to the position that it has been in the past as an ally and as a global leader I think reasons for pessimism are the United States is not the only country that has changed over the last few years you know I think NATO is not the NATO that it was before Trump stepped into the presidency the UK is not the UK it was a number of years ago it is very difficult to think about how you could resuscitate the Paris Accord given koban 19 it's very difficult to see how you

might resuscitate the TPP given a lot of what's happened a lot of Asian economies in the last few years so it's not just that the United States has changed quite dramatically over the last years but a lot of the world has changed quite dramatically over the last years and that also will be a constraint in terms of the likely success of Biden bringing us back to some pre Trump state of the world thank you we are slightly over time so it's time to close it's been a truly intriguing and an enlightening

discussion today and thank you Paul and tegu for sharing your insight with us great to be with you and also thank someone and Chesham for and and also the audience for you know excellent questions I apologize those of your questions didn't really get to answer but we have another time I mean another opportunity coming soon and last but not least eai is is grateful to Ministry of Foreign Affairs or Korean government I mean are okay for sponsoring this event before you leave I would like to kindly ask if

you fill out a brief survey about the webinar you know your feedback is absolutely indispensable for us to improve and the survey could be found in the public opinion polls somewhere below once again thank you all for joining us today and I'll see you next time with our second webinar posting very soon goodbye from Seoul thank you you

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