WHAT CONDITION WILL AMERICA'S SOUL BE IN AT THE MIDTERMS?
A Conversation with Professor Brian Klaas
A year from now the US will be consumed with election tension. It is already building:
Will there even be midterm elections? Will they be free and fair? Will the MAGA Republicans accept the results?
We need to think about these questions now because, let’s face it, anti-MAGA folks are relying on the midterm elections to put a stop to the radical right-wing changes being imposed every day on American society.
In this special edition of of FRDH, First Rough Draft of History, Brian Klaas, Professor of Global Politics at University College London, joins me to talk through the situation. Klaas is always worth listening to. He has studied the 21st century variants of authoritarianism and written three books on the Trump era. He has just returned from a month in the US and this conversation is animated by the impressions he brought back with him.
Listen now to this rough draft of our historical moment, and then listen a year from now to see how close we were to anticipating events. Then listen a decade from now to see if this conversation is a historical artifact of a moment when people worried US democracy was finished, or if it anticipated a darker turn in the American story.