Podcast: Tom Nichols on Biden’s “boring” presidency and a narcissistic nation

TRANSCRIPT: Tom Nichols on Biden’s “boring” presidency and a narcissistic nation

Tom Nichols:

Politics, in my view, ought to be boring. It shouldn't be something you have to pay attention to every minute of every day, and I think that's how Biden has approached the job.

Ian Bremmer:

Hello and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. Here you'll find extended versions of the interviews from my show on public television. I'm Ian Bremmer, and today we are talking about President Biden's first 100 days and all the challenges the next months will bring. Joe Biden began with a flurry of activity on day one and has kept up the pace. More executive orders than any president since FDR, 200 million COVID shots in arms and a nearly $2 trillion stimulus plan. But as the pandemic recedes from the American headlines and Americans turn their attention to immigration, the federal budget, gun control, and other much more polarizing issues, can Biden effectively bring a deeply divided Congress and nation together? My guest today is the Atlantic's Tom Nichols, author of the upcoming book, "Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy." Sounds cheery. Let's get right to it.

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The GZERO World Podcast is also brought to you by Walmart. Since 2013, Walmart has been committed to supporting jobs in the communities we serve. That's why we're investing $350 billion in products made, grown or assembled in the United States, supporting 750,000 new jobs. Learn more at walmart.com/america.

Ian Bremmer:

Tom Nichols, he's professor at the US Naval War College. He's contributing editor at the Atlantic and his new book, "Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy." Tom, good to be with you.

Tom Nichols:

Good to see you, Ian.

Ian Bremmer:

A hundred days of Biden. How's he doing?

Tom Nichols:

I think he's doing well by any standard, but I think he's doing remarkably well considering the bucket of problems that he had to pull into office with him. It's an A or A- for those first a hundred days, and I think especially noteworthy is that he seems to have not made a big deal out of being a new president in the first hundred days. He just kind of walked in and started to get to work, which I think is a refreshing change.

Ian Bremmer:

The country, as you know, as you write about, as you talk about, is incredibly divided. He became president at a particularly fraught and fractured time in the country broadly as well as given the events that led up to his inauguration. Are there any indications in your mind that a Biden administration can actually, in any meaningful way, start to bridge that divide?

Tom Nichols:

I don't think Biden administration can bridge that divide consciously. I think that the president has done exactly the thing that bridges that divide by default, which is just going to work and doing things rather than making big declarations, putting forward big splashy pronouncements because those are the raw meat for political division. I guess that's another way of saying that the best way that we could have a non-divisive presidency is to have one that's kind of boring.

Politics in my view, ought to be boring. It shouldn't be something you have to pay attention to every minute of every day, and I think that's how Biden has approached the job. So, I think insofar as he has approached the presidency as a job and as work to be done, I think that's really helped. But I don't think there's any way that the president can just step forward and say, "Now I'm going to enact something that creates national unity." I just don't think that's possible right now.

Ian Bremmer:

There are some splashy headlines around this administration. I mean, a $1.9 trillion relief package is unprecedented in recent times, the United States leading the world right now in rollout of vaccinations among major countries. I understand that Biden personally is not necessarily a massive headline generator, but do you think his administration has been uninteresting in that regard?

Tom Nichols:

Well, what I mean by uninteresting is doing workman-like things. I mean, we're not divided as a country over things like economic packages or how many vaccines are being rolled out. So, when I say an uninteresting administration, I mean in the sense that it's workman-like, that it's just putting forward and executing policies. We're divided over kind of big splashy cultural war stuff and Biden just hasn't been a very good source of that for his opponents. We're not going to have big fights over whether the bailout is going to be $1.9 trillion or $1.4 trillion. That's not what people are arguing about in modern America. We're arguing about big cultural issues, and Biden just hasn't been a good source of raw material for that. So, I think in that sense, uninteresting is good. But these are big achievements. I mean, there's no doubt that the Biden administration has a lot to show for a hundred days, particularly in a country that's been hammered and locked down by a pandemic.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, we are arguing about vaccines. I'd argue we shouldn't be, but certainly there is a large amount of vaccine skepticism, vaccine hesitancy in the country. It is principally politicized. How worried are you that the politics continue to affect even this most basic blocking and tackling and getting out of the coronavirus?

Tom Nichols:

Unfortunately, I think we are at the end of any meaningful discussion about vaccines, and maybe I'm being overly pessimistic here. I agree with you. Masking and reopening, we can have legitimate debates about that. But the vaccine question, I personally think we need to be past that. There are people who want more information, they need to feel a little more secure. I'm all for talking people through that process, but the people who have politicized this, the people who say things like, "I'm not getting the vaccine, and if there are passports, I'll get a fake one." That's performative and attention seeking, and it's time to be done talking to those people and it's time to begin stigmatizing them in the same way that we would've stigmatized people who didn't want to get a polio vaccine or a smallpox vaccine in an earlier time.

And when I was a boy, there was nobody in my neighborhood who said, "Well, I'm not getting the polio vaccine." You did it because it was a good thing to do and because you were protecting your community. I just think that now on the vaccine issue, the arguments for hesitancy are mostly bad faith, and I don't think we get very far by indulging bad faith arguments.

Ian Bremmer:

Getting a polio vaccine wasn't even patriotic. It was just kind of common sense.

Tom Nichols:

Right. And the idea that somehow you would show your individualism or make it a political declaration to say, "Well, my son's not getting the polio vaccine," would've been ludicrous. And I think that's where we are with this. I think we've proven these vaccines are safe, they're highly effective. They're going to give us our lives back. We turn the country and the world to normal, and now you have people simply saying, "Well, I'm not going to do it because I am narcissistic and attention seeking." And I just think it's time to be done with that.

Ian Bremmer:

Would you favor making vaccines mandatory for those that do not have a medical or legitimate religious reason to not take one?

Tom Nichols:

No, but I also wouldn't stop public organizations, businesses, schools from saying, "You don't have to get the vaccine, but you can't come in here. If you want to go to the movies, you get a vaccine. You want to watch Netflix and stay home, you're free to do that as an American." What I object to are the people who say, "I want to be the free rider. I want everybody else to get vaccinated. I want the economy to open up and I still want to thump my chest and say I didn't have to do it." Well, life doesn't work that way. That's not how adults live in a community.

Ian Bremmer:

So, meaningful consequences for people that refuse to vaccinate in this environment?

Tom Nichols:

Absolutely. I mean, actions have consequences.

Ian Bremmer:

What about vaccine passports? President Biden has said that he does not want that to occur. We've seen big fights happening in various states and municipalities, a lot of corporations of course, saying that they are going to move forward with their own sorts of passports for employees.

Tom Nichols:

I think it's sad to think that in a 240-year-old democracy like the United States, that we even have to think about vaccine passports instead of being able to trust our fellow citizens. I'm kind of agnostic on them because again, there are people who have already vowed to get fakes and counterfeits if vaccine passports are implemented. I will say that I had one as a child because I couldn't travel overseas to see my relatives without an international smallpox vaccination form. And it shows you how irrational we've become about this because when I mentioned this once some years ago to a younger student, he said to me, "Smallpox? Why did they vaccinate you for that? Nobody gets that." And of course you wait a moment and let the penny drop and, "Oh, right. That's why nobody gets it." The real pandemic that we've been dealing with, not just in the past year, but for the past several decades, it's been narcissism.

And I think the pandemic really brought that out because when people would ask me, "How will we overcome this distrust? How will we think about pulling together and trusting science?" I said, "Well, a war, a depression, or a pandemic will probably shake us out of it." And I was wrong. A pandemic deepened it. It encouraged people to say, "Well, I'm going to do my own research." And after five minutes of Googling, I know all about vaccinations, and RNA, and epidemiology, and it brought out the very worst traits of an already deeply narcissistic culture. There is a real selfishness and self-absorption and narcissism that has come with living in a country that is peaceful, prosperous, affluent, super high standards of living, technological innovations that we now just take for granted and things just work. Cars, I mean, when I was a kid, car trouble was a really common excuse.

"I had car trouble." And people say, "Oh, I know what you mean." Cars just work today. They just do. We are used to those kinds of things. We are used to having even air conditioning, which was an unthinkable luxury for kids in my generation. Because of all that, we've become very self-absorbed and our world has kind of collapsed down to this kind of villager mentality. What's good for me and what's good for my family is good, and I don't really have to care about anybody else. I think that's poisonous, not just for international cooperation, but I think it's poisonous for democracy.

Ian Bremmer:

What are the things that you would like to see happen in the United States that you think would start to move the needle back towards less mutual hostility and more ability to discuss issues reflecting what the population actually thinks?

Tom Nichols:

More turnout and more attention among American citizens to state and local elections. Radicalism begins at home. When people are concerned about things like gerrymandering, voter suppression. In part, this happens because one of the big divisions in American politics is that the right shows up for every election down to dogcatcher and the American left has become obsessed with the White House, and the assumption that if you can just win the presidency, you solve all the problems in a top-down way. So, the very first thing, I think we need to have a serious discussion and a serious voter turnout effort about turning out in state and local elections. To me, that would obviate many of the problems that we face in America. We would get a more representative government, we would get a less partisan government, and one that I think reflects more of the average American's wants and needs.

The second thing I think we need to do is that we have to somehow disconnect. And again, I don't think we can do this through policy. I don't think we can mandate it. We have to convince people to somehow disconnect from the constant censoring stream of political messages that are pumped through their televisions and through their computers. And that sounds hypocritical from me. I mean, I'm on morning television or an evening news show, but I think that we have to return to some sense of a balanced diet where we are not constantly having 220 volts of pure political energy coursing through our body 24 hours a day, and that has to start with people just disconnecting.

Ian Bremmer:

We've talked a lot about the US and a lot about identity and a lot about how people act, but you are of course, first and foremost an international affairs scholar. And so, in that regard, I mean, Biden has not yet had major foreign policy crises on his watch. What's the single thing that you think that the average American doesn't understand about America's role in the world today that they really should?

Tom Nichols:

I think the most important thing is to understand that America has a role in the world. As much as I would like to blame all this on Donald Trump, that's an idea that's been eroding ever since the end of the Cold War. When my fellow citizens say things to me like, "Why are we in NATO? Why should we be the policeman of the Pacific?" And so on. I always answer and say, "You live in a world that is organized around delivering things to you that you want while you live in peace. If you want someone else to make the rules of that system, if you would prefer the Beijing rules to the Washington consensus, then just say so and accept the consequences of living under someone else's rules." But I think Americans have become so spoiled and so inured to the idea that the world is a dangerous place, that they just don't understand that.

They don't understand that the seas are navigable because someone makes them that way. They don't understand that peace between the great powers is not simply like the weather and it just happens. Someone actually, there is an agent and group of agents called diplomats and foreign policy experts actually make it happen that way. And so, I think what I'm really hoping for is that Americans say, "Right, we have to be in the world. There are costs associated with that. There are risks associated with that, and the debate should be over the costs, risks and benefits, not whether we should be doing it at all." And I think that became very toxic during the Trump administration, that this was, it's sort of like the conservatives who went from debating the size of government to debating whether there ought to be government.

Ian Bremmer:

'America First' is the obvious slogan to use against the reasoning that you just offered. And yet, in the Trump administration, he said he was going to get rid of NAFTA. Actually, he strengthened it. US trade relations got a little more difficult with the Chinese, got a little bit better with the South Koreans, stayed more or less the same with the Europeans. I mean, there's a lot of sloganeering, and that sloganeering makes a lot of Americans a little crazy, but is the United States really shifting that much in terms of what it actually does?

Tom Nichols:

No, but you asked about the public. And I would push back a little bit here, Ian, and say, I don't think things are just where they were with the Europeans. I don't think that we've basically had a kind of status quo for four years. I think things are measurably worse in the world. And I would argue that in part what you're talking about with the outcome of the Trump administration is the inadvertent blessing that Donald Trump and the people around him just didn't know very much and weren't good at policy. If your argument is that they did a lot of sloganeering but didn't mean it, I would disagree. I think they meant it, but they were just too incompetent to actually make it happen, which is... we should all be thankful for. But that does have an effect on the public.

The public believes things that are not real. The public believes that we have to go around shaking down our allies to make them throw into the collection plate for NATO as though that's how NATO is funded. That administration created its own reality. And I think when Biden, again, wisely, Biden has not come out and said, "Hey, that didn't happen and that didn't happen, and that's not true." Instead, he's simply saying, "I'm just going to keep going, keep doing the things we need to do and to press on." But I think that in terms of the attitudes toward foreign policy among the public, Trump really was deeply destructive, not just because he undermined the notion among average citizens that if you really believe in 'America First,' then America engaged in the world is how you keep America first. But he also convinced people that it's easy, "Well, foreign policy is easy, trade wars are easy, economics is easy." It's not easy. It's complicated, and we don't have any tolerance for that.

Ian Bremmer:

I mean, there are obviously very sharp and very toxic fights on all of these issues in Congress, on cable news, in social media, and yet when you look at the Pew research polling of Americans, number one, on big issues, there's a lot more overlap than you might have expected. Number two, generally much more supportive of things like looser immigration, of focusing more on climate change. So, you can drive a small number of Americans really crazy by delivering this message to a fringe, but is that really affecting the population as a whole?

Tom Nichols:

I think it is, and I think the word we're leaving out here is salience. You know, one of the good things that came out of the Trump administration is that when push came to shove, a lot of Americans had to decide, do you really want to be in NATO? There were a number of people who got off the dime and went, "Yeah. Okay, NATO's a good thing." Because they hadn't really thought about that. But the people who really object to it are now objecting even more strongly. And this comes back, moving off of foreign policy here for a second. This issue of salience comes back when you look at things like gun control, right? 95% of Americans think background checks and enhanced security about gun control-

Ian Bremmer:

Are good things.

Tom Nichols:

They all think they're all good things. The problem is that the 5% who don't really don't, and they are much more mobilized to stop it.

In a way, I almost miss the bipartisan era of there were some people who were very much in favor of American engagement, some people who were skeptical about it and kind of a broad middle who said, "I don't think I have to think about this a lot." I would almost rather that than this kind of trench warfare every year of, "Thank God, 60% of us want to stay in NATO." We shouldn't even have to have that argument every year.

And I think that this environment that was created over the past four or five years really made that into a constant open wound about foreign policy that we just don't need to have. And I think the people who object to these things on irrational or partisan grounds, and I say irrational in the sense of factually not understanding the matter, have gotten stronger about it, and it has more salience for them, and we are more in danger of them getting their way because of the way the Senate is structured in particular. So it does reverberate into our politics.

Ian Bremmer:

Tom Nichols, the book is "Our Own Worst Enemy." Thanks for joining the show, man.

Tom Nichols:

Thanks for having me, Ian.

Ian Bremmer:

That's it for today's edition of the GZERO World Podcast. Like what you've heard? Come check us out at gzeromedia.com and sign up for our newsletter, Signal.

Speaker 3:

The GZERO World Podcast is brought to you by our founding sponsor, First Republic. First Republic, a private bank and wealth management company, understands the value of service, safety, and stability in today's uncertain world. Visit firstrepublic.com to learn more. The GZERO World Podcast is also brought to you by Walmart. Since 2013, Walmart has been committed to supporting jobs in the communities we serve. That's why we're investing $350 billion in products made, grown, or assembled in the United States, supporting 750,000 new jobs. Learn more at walmart.com/america.

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