GFR: Your firm, the Eurasia Group, is a political risk analysis firm. What is political risk analysis?
Ian Bremmer: It just basically means we want to understand how politics and the markets come together and provide that information to our clients. They come in all different shapes and sizes, but they’re all interested in how politics create outcomes that you otherwise wouldn’t expect.
There’s no lobbying, there’s really no partisanship. You get found out very quickly if your analysis is politicized because you’ll be wrong. As a political scientist, who deeply cares about what’s happening in the world, but kind of doesn’t like partisanship and politics — I’ve never been a part of a political party — this is a fascinating time to be in this field. The world order is in such flux. Our own country and our own institutions are in such flux.
Certainly, it’s a fascinating time in political journalism as well.
I’m going to ask you one question: What’s driving you nuttiest right now, Garance?
Oh, my goodness. That’s a good question. I did a bit of a deep dive into some MAGA Twitter today and people were very convinced the election was stolen. It just makes me sad that we’re in this environment, where there’s so little consensus about what is reality and this broad assault on the idea of a shared reality.
Yeah, it is painful. And it is part of the reality that our media institutions and social media have become so delegitimized in the eyes of so many people over the course of the past decade.
Let’s look at the country right now from your risk-analysis framework. It feels like a very risky period. We’re more than a week into this post-election period. We have what looks like the most decisive margin of victory over an incumbent president since FDR. We have the incumbent resisting the transfer of power, whether sincerely or in a bid to raise funds for retiring campaign debt or funding GOP challengers in Senate contests, or possibly even just setting up whatever his next move is.
There was one day after the election was called for Biden when people who supported him felt very relieved. But now, just a couple of days later, we feel like we’re plunged back into this unstable, uncertain, high-anxiety America that we’ve become used to living in under Donald Trump. What would you tell your clients about the risk picture for America right now?
I’m glad you put it that way, Garance, because this is a very emotional time for a lot of Americans. Some people feel vindicated, some people feel victorious, some people feel incredibly nervous, some people feel ashamed, and it’s all at the surface, it’s bubbling out. And a lot of the takes that are driven by emotions — that doesn’t make them less real, but it does make them less likely to reflect reality.
First of all, American institutions today are not what they were 30 years ago. And it’s painful to say that. But if you think about all of the world’s countries on a spectrum, from most open and representative and legitimate of the people that live in that country, to least, and least would be, say, North Korea, but also China, Russia, of the large economies. Most would be Germany and Japan and Canada and the Nordics, and in-between would be hybrid systems like Hungary and Turkey. 30 years ago, the United States reasonably could be placed alongside Canada and Germany in the Nordics. You can’t today.
Our institutions in many ways have eroded. Some of that is the capture of the political process by special interests and big money. Some of that is the effort to disenfranchise and suppress voters with the election process. Some of that is the incredible polarization of our legislature, and as a consequence, the inability to effectively do things like pass basic policies that address the common good of the country, or even get a budget done. Some of that is the ability to contain and constrain the actions of the executive in the United States, and the failed impeachment process that was itself so politicized and clearly did not reflect the rule of law in a country, in a great democracy, that we like to believe ours is.
So I think one of the reasons why people are so upset today is because they understand that the institutions feel more rigged against them. This is one of the reasons why, for example, polling error in the United States is so much higher than it is in other developed countries that have the same companies doing the polls. There are more Americans who refuse to respond to someone calling from a polling organization because they say those people will do nothing for me, they’re illegitimate. And so you can have a good poll, but if it doesn’t reach 10%, 15%, 20% of the population who has self-selected out, who are those people? We just don’t know, we don’t connect with them. So I think that’s a big piece of why people are so angry, and that anger is certainly not on only one side of the political spectrum.
The other part of the question you asked me is: What’s happening right now in the United States, where are we going? And here, I want to say that even though the United States has slipped significantly from Canada and Germany, it ain’t China. It’s not even Hungary or Turkey. It’s a democratic system that’s damaged, but our election worked. I mean, 67% of the population voted during a pandemic, and there’s virtually no fraud.
The highest turnout since 1900.
That’s right. There have been a number of cases that the Trump campaign has brought, and so far they’ve mostly been thrown out. I mean, Trump is not about to concede. Trump has publicly said that he won the election and it was stolen, but that is not what the GOP leadership is saying.
That’s another of the norms of American life that Donald Trump has now blasted away.
Yes, that’s right. But once he has exhausted all of his legal means, the likelihood that Biden does not become president on January 20th is zero. He’s going to be inaugurated.
But I think that a large number of Americans may well continue to believe that the election has been stolen, that the election is illegitimate, and that may well even be a majority of Trump voters. And I think the damage that does to us institutions is lasting. I think it will go well into the Biden administration.
Biden would have an extremely short honeymoon with the American public and certainly with the GOP.
He’s going to have no honeymoon. I mean, literally zero. If I were a Republican, I’d be pretty happy with this outcome, because as you know, Trump’s been problematic and a two-edged sword for Republicans on many issues, right? But they’re kind of captured by him because the voters have become Trump voters.
So I think that the fact that he’s not going to be president is of mixed import to them. They’ve got a 6–3 judiciary in the Supreme Court. They’ve managed to appoint an enormous number of judges through the system, they will likely hold the Senate. They’ve picked up seats in the House, they’ve won state legislatures and they’ve kept all the major ones. I mean, in the middle of a pandemic, a massive crisis with an economic downturn and almost 250,000 dead, this is a pretty fantastic outcome for the GOP. And the fact that you have President Trump saying it was rigged is only because he only cares about himself.
What does this mean for Biden? Well, it means on the domestic front, Biden gets to do a lot of executive orders. That’s the way Obama governed. And in some ways, I think Biden’s going to be a more effective leader domestically than Obama because Obama lectured a lot. Obama told the Republicans, “Look, I’m doing this for you in the stimulus, taxes are going down, so you’re supposed to support it.”
But he never really enjoyed the bipartisanship, he thought that he had all the right answers. Biden is much more the kumbaya type. His speeches have really reflected that. Now, the country’s much more divided. It’s much harder for Biden to do that. But I do think that with the executive orders, you can get a lot done as we saw both under Trump and under Obama.
Getting rid of the Muslim ban — that’s a useful thing for Biden to do fairly early on. Rejoining the Paris climate accord, the immediate nuclear forces agreement, the World Health Organization. And governing in a crisis and having a task force together that actually is led with expertise, that’s important. But at the same time, we’re not going to get $3 trillion of stimulus, and there are a lot of people in the United States that are in danger of being evicted from their homes and defaulting on their debt.
But then, even if we can’t get $3 trillion, if we have a Pfizer vaccine that rolls out at the beginning of the Biden administration, and it’s 90% effective, the economists tell me that’s two points of GDP in the U.S. That’s a lot of money; that will increase wages. That might make Biden look like a hero, even if he can’t do very much.
And in the global picture, do you think Trump’s defeat is going to impact how other people look at their populist and or authoritarian leaders?
That’s a big question. I mean, so in Brazil where Bolsonaro has not yet recognized the Biden win, there are some in Brazil who say this is the end of Bolsonaro. Bullshit. Bolsonaro is relatively popular right now, and he’s been able to write some economic reforms to get checks for most of the Brazilians that need it. The fact that Biden will be president will have virtually zero impact on whether Bolsonaro is able to carry that out or not.
We Americans have this habit of viewing the rest of the world as a blank slate that the Americans kind of insert ourselves in, so how will the rest of the world react to our new president? And that was always an over assessment. I mean, you look at Assad in Syria, Americans are functionally irrelevant. You look at what’s happened between Armenia and Azerbaijan or even the Eastern Mediterranean, the U.S. is not there. And I’m not sure under Biden, the U.S. is going to be all that much more there. I mean, we’ve got to rejoin all the [alliances], but that doesn’t mean that the U.S. wants to be the world sheriff anymore.
For example, you’ve got Germany and Japan — economically, the two largest democracies in the world after the United States — both going through very smooth transitions with reduced populism for reasons having literally nothing to do with the United States. If you listen to the foreign policy establishment and just read the American news, you might think the world really did start here and it just ain’t the case.
It’s been fascinating to me to watch who’s been quick to reach out to Biden and who hasn’t. It’s no surprise that Putin has not reached out with congratulations. But it is a bit of a surprise that Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has not reached out as quickly.
Not to me, because even though the Mexican president is completely opposed to Trump, he is also the single leader whose country is most impacted by Trump doing anything against him. Remember, when Trump called him up and said to tighten the Southern border, López Obrador moved mountains to get that done; within three months, those numbers were down 50%.
That’s not because he likes him. When Trump comes out after a meeting and says, “Oh, these presidents, they love me. They say such great things to me.” I don’t know López Obrador, but I know Abe in Japan very well. And you would hear from Abe after these great meetings with Trump: “Oh, my God, I’m walking on eggshells the entire time. I had no idea what he was talking about, he threw out numbers that made no sense.” So I’m not surprised at all if López Obrador takes another three, four weeks to make a call to Biden.
Doesn’t make any difference to Biden.
I talked to Biden’s advisors. These are smart people that have been around the block, they get it. I have seen on social media people criticizing some of these leaders that aren’t immediately coming out and supporting Biden, and it’s because we refuse to put ourselves in their position.
These countries are not the United States. We may have lost some of our credibility morally, but we haven’t lost any of our power. And Trump uses that power in a way that Obama was frequently reluctant to do.
That’s such an important point because people sometimes wonder if the United States has lost its power globally as its reputation has declined under Trump.
But think about coronavirus: The tech companies have become so much more important, and we dominate that space aside from China. But you’re not exactly going to invest in China, there’s no rule of law there. So who do you come to? You come here, right?
The U.S., from a hard power perspective, is actually in an incredibly strong position.
Do you have any cabinet speculations?
I think Biden is appreciative that the Senate probably being held by Republicans is a deep problem for him in terms of legislating, but it’s a great excuse for him to hold off progressives he’d rather not have to appoint in the cabinet. I mean, Elizabeth Warren has no shot. I mean, Biden’s 77, he’s an establishment moderate, and he’s much more comfortable with people like Lael Brainard and Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken and Larry Summers and Larry Fink.
And it’s going to be a very diverse cabinet, but there will not be a lot of serious progressives.
Are there any areas where you think he’ll lean more progressive?
On climate, I really do believe that Biden represents a sea change well beyond what Obama-Biden were doing four years ago. That is one area that Biden will be able to provide some leadership on the global stage that could start to look multilateral.
Earlier this week, you were talking on Twitter about the importance of people reaching out to Trump supporters, and you got some pushback around that. If you were advising Democrats who actually did want to reach out to the Trump supporters, what would you tell them to try and say? I know people who’ve been hosting dinners for this whole period, trying to bring together Trump supporters and Democrats to try and talk across the political divides. Everything we’ve seen is that these one-on-one direct conversations are the most persuasive kind of thing you can have for changing people’s opinions; shouting at people on Twitter doesn’t actually have an effect except making people more dug in to their positions.
Yeah, because you need to be in connection. One of the worst things about coronavirus is that people aren’t actually engaging personally with other people. We’re only letting people into our bubble that we already trust, who probably share most of our political views. What a horrible thing to increasingly polarize society. So we have to find ways to engage one-on-one, we have to do long-form. It’s why I like Medium.
I mean, I like social media because I find that you engage directly with influencers. You mentioned that I put this post out that said, “Hey, this is a good time to reach out.” And it was very controversial. And so, literally 15 minutes after I posted it, when I saw that the mood was so polarized, I then wrote, “If you’d prefer to tell me to fuck off and that’s more cathartic go for it.”
And 40,000 people immediately told me to fuck off. I thought that was pretty cool. I’m like, “Well, at least if we can all get together around telling Ian to fuck off.”
Your message was not that different from President-elect Biden’s message.
That’s right. It was exactly his message, but the country’s not ready for it. But my point is that Twitter’s a bad place for this because Twitter is hyper-politicized. Twitter is where people that are already really dug in live. And so I wasn’t talking about the 5%, the 10% of Americans that are hyper-politicized, I was actually talking about the average American who most of the time doesn’t think about this stuff, but happened to vote for Trump or happened to vote for Biden. And otherwise, they want to go out to drink and they want to have their friends for a cookout, they want to take their kids to soccer. A lot of them have had a hard time in the past years. Most do not have the same opportunity economically that they would have had 40 years ago. And that includes a lot of Blacks, a lot of Hispanics, a lot of Whites, almost everyone that doesn’t have a college education, but a lot of people that even have college educations. And I do think that Biden is the right person for that time. It’s the thing that I liked about him.
I voted for Biden. I almost never talk about who I vote for. But I didn’t just vote for Biden because I think that Trump is unfit for office and I do. I proactively voted for Biden because I actually believe that he’s someone that wants to govern for the whole country. I’ve seen historically where there are people that are razzing him and he goes over and spends time and talks to them to try to understand what they’re all about and then he finds a way to connect with them. And more often than not, they end up hating him less.
When Obama needed something done on the Hill, he sent Joe Biden because he’s such an old Senate hand. There’s the possibility that he might be able to be a bit more of a dealmaker than people expect.
I’m skeptical.
He unified the Democratic Party around him and his candidacy, which nobody really expected.
But that was in part because Trump was so hated. I don’t believe that Elizabeth Warren is suddenly going to become aligned with Biden, once she doesn’t get what she wants. And I certainly don’t think that the Republicans under McConnell are going to be any easier to deal with than they were under Obama, when McConnell said, “My goal is to ensure that Obama gets nothing done, absolutely nothing.” Which is such an anti-American thing to say, but nonetheless has been very effective for the Republicans.
So I’m skeptical, but I agree with you completely, Garance, that I think that’s who Joe is, and I think that is what he will want to do. Even if it doesn’t work, it is important to have someone who is seen as reflecting that, as representing that, because there are a lot of Americans that are swayable.