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"Conclave," Ralph Fiennes' new movie about a papal election, offers valuable insight into our own election.
Focus Features
Certainty is the enemy of unity and tolerance
Nov 01, 2024
Schmidt is a columnist and editorial board member with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Certitude in viewing the other side as malevolent might just break the country apart, but putting faith in one another and our institutions might be the glue that can keep us together.
Just days before Election Day, I chose to go see a movie in a theater as a way to break away from the horse race politics and hyperpolarized rhetoric. Little did I know the movie would provide me with valuable insight into the very thing I was trying to escape.
“Conclave,” directed by Edward Berger and based on a novel by Robert Harris, is the fictional story of Roman Catholic cardinals gathering in Rome to elect a new pope.
In the movie, cardinals from all over the world descend on the Eternal City and begin the process of choosing a successor to the recently deceased Holy Father, who died of a suspected heart attack.
The dean of the College of Cardinals, Cardinal Lawrence (played by Ralph Fiennes) leads his colleagues as they sequester themselves in the Sistine Chapel and begin the process of choosing a new papal leader.
Just as in our own political reality, there were conservative, liberal and even moderate factions of cardinals in the movie. The cardinals debated deeply held views and discussed issues that were tearing apart fragile coalitions. Each caucus believed its ideology would best serve the millions of Roman Catholics around the world.
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The movie delved deep into the quest for power, why individuals want it and the depths some might take to achieve it. And like our current political situation, corruption, ambition and selfishness emerged as important factors.
Prior to being locked into the chapel for deliberations, the cardinals celebrated Mass. It is here Lawrence delivers a homily “from the heart,” saying: “There is one sin which I have come to fear above all else … certainty.” He goes on to describe how “certainty is the great enemy of unity … the deadly enemy of tolerance.”
Lawrence provides further wisdom to his fellow clerics: “Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery and therefore no need for faith.”
This idea of certainty being the great enemy of unity and tolerance can apply to our domestic political circumstance as much as it can mean to a person of faith or to a fictional group of cardinals debating about the future of the papacy.
Our current toxic hyperpartisanship creates the illusion that the “other side” is absolutely evil or that the country as we know it will end if candidate X is elected. How many times in the last few months have you heard something like,“Donald Trump is a fascist and if he is reelected, our democracy will end”? Or, “If Vice President Kamala Harris wins, we will be living in a socialist, communist hellscape”?
Negative partisanship extends beyond the candidates themselves and onto their voters as well, allowing Americans to paint with a broad brush of certitude that the other sides’ voters are also nefarious; and therein lies the danger.
In the coming weeks, the losing side must try to understand why the winning side won and not blame their fellow citizens who voted for the other candidate.
Yuval Levin, author of “A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream,” defines an institution as “The durable forms of our social life, the shapes, the structures of what we do together, the ways in which we act in the world, not just as isolated individuals and not just as clumps of people, but as organizations, as structures of people working together toward a common end.”
No spoilers here, but ultimately the cardinals elect a new pope, because despite the flaws of humanity, the institution produced a worthy candidate. The cardinals in the conclave placed their trust in, and believed in, the institution itself and allowed it to do its work. While fictional, the make-believe conclave acted in the exact way Levin lays out.
It is incumbent on the electorate to reject the inevitability narratives and embrace open-mindedness if we are going to remain united states. We also must have faith in one another as Americans and work towards rebuilding and strengthening our republic’s institutions. We should also reject the absolutism and certainty of impending doom.
Let us hope that real life follows fiction and there is more joy and unity than pain and anger when the white smoke of our general election bellows out of its chimney.
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John M Lund Photography Inc/Getty Images
Whatever happens Nov. 5, democracy will remain in deep trouble
Oct 31, 2024
Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College.
Sunday brought more bad news for and about American democracy. In the latest New York Times/Siena College poll, only 49 percent of respondents said American democracy does a good job representing ordinary people. Hardly a ringing endorsement of our form of government.
In that same poll, “three quarters of voters in the United States say democracy is under threat.”
And it is no wonder that confidence in democracy is down and concern is up.This is because, in the run-up to the Nov. 5 presidential election, partisans on both parties are doubling down on accusations that the result will seal the fate of American democracy.
Throughout his campaign, former President Donald Trump has regularly called his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, a fascist. And when he is not calling her that, he accuses her of being a Marxist or a communist. He has little evidence to back up his claims. But that has not stopped him from making them.
On the other side, following an interview last week in which John Kelly, Trump’s White House chief of staff, labeled his former boss a fascist, Harris agreed. When asked by CNN’s Anderson Cooper "Do you think Donald Trump is a fascist?" she replied, "Yes, I do. Yes, I do. And I also believe that the people who know him best on this subject should be trusted.”
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Fascism, as The Associated Press notes, is “An authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement. It is often associated with the far right and characterized by a dictatorial leader who uses military forces to help suppress political and civil opposition. History’s two most famous fascists were Nazi chief Adolf Hitler in Germany and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.”
Forty-nine percent of the American people now think Trump is a fascist. That includes 90 percent of Democrats. On the other hand, 22 percent of the public say that Harris is a fascist, including 40 percent of self-identified Republicans.
That members of both political parties now use that label to describe their opponents is unprecedented in this country’s history. It signals that both sides see the other as posing an existential threat to democracy and the American way of life.
That will not end when all the ballots are in and all the votes are counted. Democracy has sustained considerable damage in the 2024 campaign. When it is over, the election will have left this country more divided than ever, and our democracy severely weakened.
The hard work of repairing democracy will have to be done no matter who wins. That work will need to be done by organizations and civic groups across the nation and by members of both parties. They will need to invest time and resources on the same scale that was required to put a man on the moon.
Only then will we have a chance to address growing public dissatisfaction with democracy and its root causes.
Signs of that dissatisfaction are everywhere and have been registered in a number of public opinion surveys over several years. For example, surveys taken last year showed that three-fourths of Americans already believed that “the future of American democracy is at risk in the 2024 presidential election.” Things have only gotten worse since then.
A YouGov poll released just last week registers Americans’ deep pessimism about the future of our democracy, with 75 percent of respondents saying they are “scared about the way things are going in the world today.” That fear was reflected in what they said about democracy’s future.
Forty-four percent of respondents “thought that it was likely that America wouldn’t be a democracy in 10 years’ time.” Twenty-two percent predicted this country would become a communist dictatorship; around the same number see fascism in our future.
And, if that was not bad enough, 35 percent think we are on the way toward a “civil war between Democrats and Republicans.”
Young people are particularly worried. A national survey of 18-29 year olds taken in 2023 found that two-thirds of them “have more fear than hope about the future of democracy in America.” Another survey, taken last month, suggests that figure is now 83 percent.
Not surprisingly, young Democrats and young Republicans identify different causes for democracy’s problems. Democrats tend to blame Trump or point to factors like structural racism as endangering our form of government. Republicans point to the media and political correctness as the cause of that danger.
Even more worrisome, as the Times/Siena College poll found, is the fact that substantial numbers of Americans are deeply dissatisfied with the way democracy is now functioning in this country. That dissatisfaction seems to be growing year by year.
Forty years ago, 60 percent of Americans were satisfied with our democracy. Now that number is just 28 percent.
A decade ago, Americans were “disillusioned with the way democracy was working, perhaps due to continued gridlock in Washington amid growing budget deficits, ongoing gun violence, racial tensions and illegal immigration.” Today the causes of dissatisfaction have proliferated.
They include “economic unease amid higher prices, disapproval of the jobs President, Congress and the Supreme Court are doing, increasing hostility between the political parties, former President Donald Trump’s persistent political strength, and concerns about election security, voting rights and the independence of the courts and the justice system.”
Seventy-two percent of Americans now think that “democracy in the U.S. used to be a good example” of what a democracy should be, but “has not been in recent years.”
Political scientists Christopher Claassen and Pedro Magalhães offer a more troubling analysis.
“The commitment of the people of the United States to a democratic system, long taken for granted, is now in doubt. A growing body of research,” they say, “has demonstrated their shaky support for democracy.”
They claim that “Americans’ commitment to democracy even in the abstract is … in decline” and “alternatives have become more acceptable.’”
Another study found a dramatic decline in the percentage of people who say it is “essential” to live in a democracy. This is especially apparent among younger people.
As I observed in 2017, 72 percent of Americans born before World War II say democracy is essential. About 30 percent of people before in the 1980s and after hold a similar view.
That disaffection and the public’s broader dissatisfaction with democracy will not be easily resolved. Whatever happens next month, we will need a massive investment in rebuilding our democratic infrastructure.
Schools, civic groups and the media will need to do the work of explaining what democracy entails and why it is desirable. But more than public education will be needed. We will also need to address the massive inequities that now characterize life in this country.
If we do not, democracy’s future will indeed be bleak.
Voters who care about that future need to consider the stances the presidential candidates have taken on defending and protecting our democracy when they cast their ballots.
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Election highlights need for — and warnings about — civic education
Oct 31, 2024
Bobb is president and CEO of the Bill of Rights Institute, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that advances civic and history education.
Remember when election season just meant getting bombarded with television advertisements and direct mail?
Now, we are in the age of polarizing, hyperbolic headlines and strangers launching withering personal attacks against each other on social media.
Americans are so exhausted with our nation’s political tone that most now limit how much information they consume about politics and government, according to the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Election Day will come and go soon enough. But we need to reflect on what happens afterward, and how we can create a healthier discourse moving forward.
This will require a revitalization of civic education in America. And it is clear this process cannot and should not be led by our federal government.
At the Bill of Rights Institute, we work with more than 76,000 civics and history teachers who reach more than 7.6 million students per year.
Civics helps young people learn about founding principles that connect us as Americans, regardless of our differences, such as liberty, equality and freedom. Students also learn to think critically and engage civilly, even with people they disagree with.
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These skills are lacking among too many Americans today — perhaps an inevitable byproduct of decades of deprioritizing civics in schools. This has led to calls for extensive federal investment and involvement in civic education.
Not so fast.
The notion that greater federal investment will improve student achievement should induce skepticism. For example, we have had a Cabinet-level Department of Education since 1980, andthere has been no sustained progress on fourth or eighth grade reading scores during that time.
Our federal government, regardless of who is in power, is ineffective at allocating resources to improve student learning. The data has long made this apparent.
Perhaps more concerning, we need to decide whether a hyper-polarized Congress should determine allocations and conditions for civic education in America.
Inviting politicians still arguing about who won the last election to chart the future of civics is a grave mistake. It is a recipe for whiplash-inducing changes that could sow chaos in schools as political winds shift.
There is no need to speculate about this — it already happened.
In January 2021, during its waning days, the Trump administration released a history framework called the1776 Report. It was derided by some historians as far-right propaganda, and Donald Trump has since promised toreinstate the commission that produced it.
In April that same year, the Biden administration’s Department of Educationreleased a grant program extolling the virtues of The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which faced withering attacks from the right and calls for corrections.
Wherever your sympathies lie, these diametrically opposed texts were both endorsed by the federal government within 90 days of each other. If the federal government assumes a larger role in civic education, expect much more of this chaos.
The notion that we cannot improve civic knowledge without massive federal involvement is a red herring. We should be wary of a “No Child Left Behind” for civics and the baggage that will accompany it.
Instead, the movement to improve civics must happen locally, where most funding and curricular decisions are made. This movement is already happening in places like Johnstown, Pa., wherethe University of Pittsburgh-Johnstown and local schools partnered to increase civic education throughout K-12 classes.
These community approaches can yield more rapid, effective and locally tailored solutions than anything coming out of Washington.
To improve civic education and our national discourse, we need more local initiatives and we need more local citizens speaking up. But if we reach for Uncle Sam’s purse strings, expect our schools, teachers and students to become tangled in them.
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It's possible Donald Trump and Kamala Harris could each get 269 electoral votes this year.
Electoral College rules are a problem. A worst-case tie may be ahead.
Oct 31, 2024
Johnson is the executive director of the Election Reformers Network, a national nonpartisan organization advancing common-sense reforms to protect elections from polarization. Keyssar is a Matthew W. Stirling Jr. professor of history and social policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. His work focuses on voting rights, electoral and political institutions, and the evolution of democracies.
It’s the worst-case presidential election scenario — a 269–269 tie in the Electoral College. In our hyper-competitive political era, such a scenario, though still unlikely, is becoming increasingly plausible, and we need to grapple with its implications.
Recent swing-state polling suggests a slight advantage for Kamala Harris in the Rust Belt, while Donald Trump leads in the Sun Belt. If the final results mirror these trends, Harris wins with 270 electoral votes. But should Trump take the single elector from Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district — won by Joe Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2016 — then both candidates would be deadlocked at 269.
In case of a tie — or any scenario with no candidate winning a majority of electoral votes — the House of Representatives picks the president and the Senate chooses the vice president, and, yes, they could come from different parties. The House’s contingency election gives each state one vote, meaning Wyoming and Vermont have the same impact as California and Texas.
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This year, a contingency election would almost certainly result in a victory for Trump — Republicans have held a majority of congressional delegations for many years, including when Democrats won more seats in the House. This unrepresentative tiebreaker would probably occur after a Harris popular vote victory, further underscoring the deep flaws of this system.
Of course, the chances are low the election gets “thrown to the House” — it has occurred only twice,the last time exactly 200 years ago. But even if rare, the presidential contingency mechanism impacts our politics on a regular basis.
In a democracy it should be possible — and desirable — for new parties to emerge and to challenge the status quo with policy alternatives and new leadership. But in the United States a new party faces the near certainty that its presidential candidate would throw the election to an undemocratic vote in the House or “spoil” the election by “stealing” votes from a politically similar candidate. Facing such prospects, alternative political groups often stay on the sidelines, as No Labels decided to do this year. And if parties aren’t competing for national leadership, they’ll lack the stature to compete for other major offices as well.
There are many other significant hurdles to creating strong third parties in the U.S. such as first-past-the-post elections for most public offices,anti-fusion laws and stringent ballot access requirements. Together these forces have made the United States a rarity in the democratic world. We are the only country where no new party came to power in the 20th century. Even countries like England, France and Canada that — like us — use single-member districts for the legislature have more than two parties seriously contending for power.
Our completely binary politics starves voters of a range of choices — for president, and on down the ballot. Perhaps more dangerously, binary politics fuels the vilification of opponents and the competing versions of truth that increasingly dominate our national narrative.
Removing disincentives to new party formation is a critically important goal requiring a range of reforms. This presidential season it is worth focusing on the part that the presidential tiebreaker plays. The vast majority of countries with directly elected presidents have a two-round runoff system, providing citizens the opportunity to consider new parties and enabling greater innovation and dynamism in the party system.
France is a case in point. Amid widespread political dissatisfaction, almost a dozen candidates contested the first round of the 2017 French presidential election. The surge of support for Emannuel Macron’s new Renaissance party carried him to the presidency and catalyzed a paradigm shift in French politics. The runoff rule was critical in allowing this to happen.Studies in Latin America likewise find that presidential countries using a runoff election score higher on formation of new parties and on overall democracy — as runoffs encourage moderation and give victors the “legitimacy of majoritarianism.”
We too can do this. Proposalsto amend or abolish the Electoral College have circulated for two centuries, and an amendment calling for a direct popular election with runoff nearly passed in 1970. A current modification that would not require an amendment is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which would ensure a majority of electoral votes for the popular-vote winner, ending the risk of an election thrown to the House. Ranked choice voting (which is often called “instant runoff voting”) is another path to reducing the risks of the Electoral College contingency mechanism.
In 1992, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) proposed an amendment maintaining the Electoral College but establishing a second round if no candidate reached an electoral vote majority. Arguably, we could fix many of the system’s flaws by taking McConnell’s amendment and adding to it a requirement that states allocate electors proportionally rather than by winner-take-all, which would greatly expand the number of competitive states. That approach would keep the Electoral College, which many conservatives will fight hard to protect — not a perfect solution but perhaps a feasible one.
When McConnell introduced his amendment, it was Republicans who’d likely lose a thrown-to-the-House election since they controlled fewer state delegations. That’s a valuable reminder that both parties can be threatened by undemocratic Electoral College rules. Similarly, in 2004 George W. Bush came close to being a popular vote winner and Electoral College loser, and it’s certainly possible that a Republican could suffer that fate in a future election.
The challenges are huge and the record of failed attempts daunting. But we can find new ideas, alliances and motivation from understanding how the Electoral College hurts our politics on a regular basis. Addressing once and for all the archaic Electoral College is a critical step in building a robust and innovative democracy for the 21st century.
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