The Hidden Crisis Threatening American Democracy

Lindsay S: In his second term, President Trump and Defense Secretary Hegseth have purged senior officers and lawyers from the military and encouraged personal loyalty to the president among military personnel in moves that are drawing comparisons to countries around the world where militaries are being pulled into undemocratic politics.

Here to discuss whether we are in a crisis of civil-military relations in the United States are Rebecca Best, a political scientist at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, who is the editor of a new special issue of Current History, a magazine of global affairs managed by IGCC, on the military and society in democracies. Rebecca, thanks for joining us.

Rebecca: Thanks for having me, Lindsay.

Lindsay S: We’re also joined by Lindsay Cohn, an adjunct professor at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, who’s currently writing a book on the history of the domestic use of federal forces in U.S. policing. Lindsay, thanks for being with us.

Lindsay C: Thank you for having me, Lindsay, with an “A”—the right kind.

Lindsay S: That’s right. That’s right. Nothing worse than when people sneak an “E” in there. It just gets me…

Okay, so Rebecca, in your introductory essay, you describe a hidden crisis threatening American democracy. So what’s the crisis, and why is it largely invisible to the general public?

Rebecca: I think you could identify, and our authors in the issue do identify several different crises, but what I think is perhaps at the root of this is that the American public has largely forgotten the norms of democratic-civil military relations. The military, for the most part, remember these norms, and that’s why they’re sort of holding on in spite of a public that seems less concerned with having a non-partisan military and more concerned with whether the military weighs in on their side or not, on their party’s side.

And because on the civilian side, we’ve somewhat accepted the idea of a partisan military, I think there’s less outrage than there might be at the politicization and even the personalization of the military by the administration. So civilians, I think, we’ve largely forgotten or neglected our own role in protecting the military from becoming a partisan or political football.

Lindsay S: Lindsay, how about you? You want to weigh in on that question?

Lindsay C: Sure, and you know, of course, I agree with what Rebecca just said. I think she’s pointing out some really important things. The angle that I sort of took in my piece, and what I think is maybe getting a little bit less discussion, is that when we civil-military relations observers classically talk about a civil military crisis, we’re usually talking about a crisis of the military interfering in politics in some way, or the military exerting inappropriate influence in some way.

What we don’t frequently talk about is a crisis coming from the other direction, from the civilian authority direction, which is what we have in a situation of democratic backsliding or democratic erosion. One of the reasons that many of us think the American public is not really quite aware of the extent of what’s going on, as Rebecca said, is because the public knows how to recognize a coup, right? But the public doesn’t know how to recognize when civilian authority is using a military in ways that are inappropriate for a democracy. Or I shouldn’t say the public can’t recognize that, but the public is not used to that kind of thing. They don’t have experience recognizing that kind of thing.

And they look at these and they think, “Is that right? That doesn’t seem right.” But they don’t have necessarily concepts and vocabulary to talk about it, because these are the kinds of things that we might think of as happening, quote, “somewhere else”.

Lindsay S: So tell me about, for both of you, your backgrounds. How did you get interested in this particular area of scholarship? Bec, why don’t you go first?

Rebecca: So I grew up in rural eastern North Carolina, not too far from Camp Lejeune and from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, and I remember as a teenager, I was really intrigued by the different stereotypes of Marines and of airmen and how they could be both omnipresent in a place and sort of characterize that place, but also be outsiders to that place and to its people, and also how perceptions of service members did and didn’t shift after September 11th.

After I finished my PhD in political science at the University of North Carolina, as an assistant professor… [laughs] Lindsay Cohn is doing some hand motions as an alum of Duke.

It was as an assistant professor here at the University of Missouri-Kansas City that I started to occasionally be invited out to the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth to talk to those classes that I really kind of returned to that interest.

Lindsay S: I did not know that about your background. That is so interesting. Neither did I know that you were both North Carolina PhDs, and so there’s an intense rivalry happening right here. I can see it in their faces.

Lindsay, tell us a little bit about your background. What’s your story?

Lindsay C: Well, I actually grew up in a Marine Corps family. I lived near Camp Lejeune when I was very small. My father was a career Marine. My brother spent a career in the Marine Corps. So I grew up around Marines, sometimes living on bases.

And I had in some ways a very similar experience to Rebecca mostly in the contrast between the Marines that I lived around and knew as, you know, wonderful, funny, generous, great people, and where I frequently went to school, you know, we did move around a lot, so I went to a lot of different schools. But one thing that kept on happening was I would hear these stereotypes of people in the military, and I would hear stereotypes from military people about civilians as well. And it was weird for me to be listening to these two sets of stereotypes and going, “I know these people, and they’re not like that,” right?

You know, the civilians are not the way that the Marines talk about them. The Marines are not the way the civilians talk about them. And so I became really interested in this whole concept of like, why do these people think these things about each other? Why do they have these ideas? And I’ve always been sort of interested in the concept of how a society and a state sort of organizes and legitimizes the use of force or violence. That’s always been of interest to me, which is where my interest in policing also comes from.

One project that I was pulled into very early on when I was a young graduate student was a project done for the European Union. This was, you know, in 2000, 2001 when the EU was really interested in how to improve and deepen harmonization among the various EU member states, and they were trying to identify various areas of friction. And one of those areas of friction was the constitutional position of the military, because the various European countries treated that very, very differently. Some of them said, “Sure, you can use militaries as domestic police, no problem.” Others were like, “Absolutely not, that’s something we do not do.” Others had, you know, somewhere in between. And so I was pulled into this project to do a lot of work on the various European entries.

But because I was American, all of the contributors were constantly asking me, “Well, what is it like in the United States?” And so I sort of became this sort of mini expert, and I laugh now to think that I thought of myself as an expert then. I’ve learned so much since then, but it’s been a particular interest of mine for a very long time at this point.

Lindsay S: Deep and wide expertise for both of you, and interesting personal connections, also.

Let’s back up for a minute. Before we delve into the problems of the present, let’s get oriented on the fundamentals. Rebecca, what’s the purpose of a military? What’s the bargain that we as a society make with the military, besides the kind of obvious one?

Rebecca: I think that’s a great question. So the military’s job is to defend the country, its system of government, and its population. The U.S. Army Oath of Enlistment, for example, includes the words, “I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” But it also says, “I will obey the orders of the President of the United States.”

And so the military carries out the policies of the civilian elected government, and provides advice to that government based on its military expertise as it’s appropriate to do so. And in return for that service, in return for troops who are willing to put their lives and their safety on the line for their country to spend months or years apart from their families, and to carry out even the orders with which they disagree, even orders that they might find morally reprehensible, the civilian public has a responsibility to protect those troops from undue harm, which could be the water at Camp Lejeune, the burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the harm of military operations that do not serve the country’s interests, but put troops at risk. And it also has a responsibility, of course, to see that those troops are adequately provisioned to protect them from unlawful orders and to protect them from partisan co-optation.

The point is that the civilian public is responsible then for putting people in charge who can be trusted to use the military responsibly so that service members, for example, don’t have to try to figure out if an order is legal before they carry it out, when time may be of the essence, right?

Saira Mohamed argues in her essay in this issue that the government also has legal obligations under international law and under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which is U.S. law that applies to service members particularly, to protect troops. And the troops themselves are in, as she argues, a really poor position to insist that they receive the protections that are guaranteed to them. The Congress and the public therefore have to do this for them, and Mohamed argues that the real crisis right now in her view is that the public refuses to see soldiers as people rather than as mere tools. And she clearly means as tools to solve security problems, but we can also see today the president and other political leaders using the military and veterans as partisan props or tools to gain public support.

Lindsay S: Yeah, it’s interesting. I grew up in San Diego around a large military presence too, and just remember, before they shut down the big base in Point Loma, that there would on Sundays be lots of military guys out walking around and getting their burritos or whatever. And when you see that, you’re not thinking about all of the promises that we make to each other about what that is all about. So it’s interesting to hear you spell it out.

Lindsay, in your essay in Current History, you write that while the civilian control that Bec talks about is necessary to maintain democracy, it isn’t sufficient by itself—that if we want to preserve a robust military, a lethal military, and be a democracy, something else is required. What is it?

Lindsay C: So the way that we frequently think about civil military relations is as this idea of a principal/agent relationship. And in most scholarship on civil military relations, we think of the government, particularly the executive, although the legislature does come in, as the principal, the one issuing orders, and the one doing the controlling, and the military as the agent, the one whose job is obedience, the one whose job is duty, right?

But in a democracy, this is supposed to be a nested principal/agent relationship where the public is the principal, right? The public is the one who are governing themselves, in theory. They’re just doing it via the agency of a government of elected representative officials.

And so what I meant by the sort of statement that you referred to, is that it is dangerous and inappropriate in a democracy for the military to be making its own policy choices, right? They are an agent, which means that they are not supposed to be making the decisions about their use and application, et cetera.

But that relationship of duty and obedience in a democracy is meaningful and appropriate only if the government is in fact working as an agent of the public. When the government stops working as an agent of the public, when the government is violating that relationship, when the government is not fulfilling its obligations, then you have a serious problem that is not solved by military duty and obedience. In fact, it can be exacerbated by military duty and obedience, right?

If you think of this as a triangular relationship, right, with the government and the public and the military as the points of a triangle, when the relationship between the government and the public is not balanced and healthy, when that relationship is off from the perspective of democratic expectations, then the military is left in a position where it has to choose either to align with the government against the public or with the public against the government. It can also choose to just kind of go off on its own and follow its own organizational interests against both.

But the problem here is that in that situation, when the relationship between the government and the public becomes problematic, the military—and again, we’re talking about human beings here—the military is put in an extremely difficult position where it has no real ethical guidance on what it’s supposed to do. It knows that it owes duty and obedience to the government, but it also knows that it owes duty and obedience to the Constitution, and those two things can sometimes appear to be at odds.

Lindsay S: So Rebecca, in your essay, which introduces this wonderful collection, you say right at the end that we are in a crisis in the U.S., a civil military crisis.

Can you kind of walk us through what are some of the dimensions? What is the nature of what’s going on?

Rebecca: So, President Trump’s interventions in military justice in particular really began in his first term. That’s when we see then-Fox News correspondent and pundit Pete Hegseth lobbying for pardons for service members who had been accused or convicted of war crimes. And ultimately, the president is influenced by this and weighs in on these cases, not just by issuing pardons, which he issues several of those in 2019, but also by making public statements.

So he tweets in 2019, for example, “We train our boys to be killing machines and then prosecute them when they kill.” And then he also publicly admonishes the JAG officers who prosecuted Eddie Gallagher for posing with the corpse of a murdered Iraqi boy. So he publicly admonishes those JAG officers for doing their job in prosecuting Eddie Gallagher, and also I think strips some medals from them.

So that really, of course, sends a signal about his tolerance as a president for war crimes. And my own new research that I hope will be out soon with my colleague Ben Woodson looks at how those interferences from the first administration, the pardons in particular, impact the public’s confidence in the military justice system, and also how serious Americans consider war crimes committed by service members to be.

But in this term, the gloves were really off from the start of the administration. The president removed the commandant of the Coast Guard the day after his inauguration, right? He wastes no time. A week after his inauguration, he fires the inspector general of the Department of Defense. This is the office that’s responsible for auditing, evaluating, and investigating the DoD. And so this prompts immediate concern about loss of accountability and the potential even to use the office of the inspector general to conduct politically motivated investigations, and we pretty quickly see that with investigation into retired General Mark Milley, who had previously served in the first Trump administration and fell out of favor.

And then about a month after his inauguration, the president fires the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which is the nation’s top military officer. He fires the chief of naval operations, Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the Air Force vice chief, and significantly, the JAGs of the Army, Navy, and Air Force. These are the military branches’ top lawyers. And the top JAG officers for each branch are responsible for ensuring that the Uniform Code of Military Justice and laws around use of force are followed by commanders. In other words, they’re the ones who are responsible for making sure that our troops aren’t being ordered to commit crimes.

And so that move, too, set off alarm bells about the independence of military oversight and about just what it was that the administration planned to use the military for that they felt they needed to first get the JAGs out of the way, and also they’re not just getting the JAGs out of the way, they’re also sending a signal to people in lower ranks that if you are not sort of immediately jumping to do what the administration has ordered, whether it’s legal or not, that you could be ending your own career, you could be subjecting yourself to some type of legal inquiry.

These concerns are not soothed by Secretary of Defense Hegseth’s explanation that he didn’t want any, quote, “roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander-in-chief.” And again, we pretty quickly see reasons why they might have felt that the removal of the JAGs was necessary. So it’s in September of 2025 that we see the first lethal strike on a suspected drug trafficking boat., and through the fall we see an escalation in these lethal strikes on suspected drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean and in the Pacific. Those continue into this year. And I think it’s important to note, this is very much a choice. This is not a military necessity. The Coast Guard had been successfully engaging with suspected drug boats headed for the United States for decades, mostly without fatalities, and it continues to engage with interdictions of drug boats

Lindsay S: Let’s talk about another indicator of the decline of Democratic control of the military in the U.S.: the increased domestic deployment of troops, which we’ve seen in LA, and in D.C., and other cities. Lindsay, this is the subject of your essay in the Current History collection, and you argue that these deployments have been unprecedented.

Can you remind us about these deployments, and explain to us what makes them different than what has come before?

Lindsay C: So last summer, in a number of cities, the president ramped up his policy of immigration enforcement, right? And he was sending ICE and Customs and Border Protection, CBP, and Border Patrol, into various places to do lots more arrests. And the first one of these interventions that really turned into a military intervention was in Los Angeles, right? ICE and CBP stepped up their activity. People in the city protested. These protests were largely peaceful. There was some property damage. There were a few people arrested. But in general, these weren’t riots or anything like that. But President Trump decided that this was reason enough for him to deploy the military to the city to make sure that ICE and CBP could do their jobs.

The president deployed 700 Marines, so those are clearly federal troops, and then he federalized several thousand California National Guard. And when, when I say federalized, National Guard troops can operate in three distinct statuses.

One is what’s called state active duty, and that’s when the governor calls up the National Guard to respond to some state problem, usually a natural disaster, sometimes a civil disturbance. But generally, it’s when something happens in the state, the local civil authorities are not able to deal with it, the governor calls up the National Guard, the National Guard mobilizes and goes and takes care of the problem. They are under the governor’s authority, and they are paid and treated as state employees.

At the other end of the spectrum, the Guard can be federalized, that is put under Title 10 orders. And that is when the federal government says, “You, my National Guard, are a reserve component of my federal forces, and I need you for a federal mission. So I’m activating you and turning you into my federal active duty forces.” At that point, they become indistinguishable from regular federal forces like the Marines or the Army, et cetera.

What the president did in California is federalize, that is put under Title 10 orders, the California National Guard. And this is why Governor Newsom was upset about it, because basically the president said, “I’m taking your National Guard troops out from under your control, and I’m telling them to do my mission now, and you have no say in this.”

So I go through that because this is what happened in several other places. So there was Los Angeles, there was Washington, D.C. There was Portland, Oregon. There was Chicago, Illinois. In every single one of these cases, the governors objected to this. They objected both to the federalization of their National Guard because, in some cases, they needed them for other things, like in California, that was wildfire season. They also objected to the federal intervention in their cities, right? They said, “Look, we did not ask for this, and we don’t need it.”

Now, one of the reasons that I claim that these interventions are unprecedented is because there have been times in U.S. history when a president has federalized National Guard members out from under the control of the governor. The most famous cases are the desegregation cases, right? President Eisenhower in Little Rock federalized the Arkansas National Guard because Governor Faubus was using the Arkansas National Guard to violate a federal court order. So the president said, “No, you can’t do that. I’m taking those away from you and turning them around and making them do my mission.” That also happened in 1962, in Mississippi. That also happened in 1965 in Selma, Alabama. So this has happened before.

What is unprecedented is that in all of the cases in 2025, those governors sued the federal government. They went to court to say, “This is illegal. This is inappropriate. This is not something that should be allowed.” And they did that on the basis of some statutes, but they also claimed that the federal government was violating the Tenth Amendment, right?

So this has never happened before. In the past, when governors objected to these federalizations, they simply said, “I really don’t like that you’re doing this.” And the president said, you know, “It’s tough to be you.” And the governor basically said, “Okay, fine.” In some cases, the governors were actually sort of privately happy that the president was doing this because it took the political pressure off of them. They could just say, “I had no choice. The president took my National Guard away.” In this case, the governors are fighting back through the court system, and in many cases, winning. So we are in entirely uncharted legal territory for some of these things.

And then the last way that these are all kind of unusual is that in all of the past cases, there has at least been some arguable case that the president was right that there needed to be some kind of intervention, right? Now, not everyone agreed with that, but there was at least something big happening that could be considered a rebellion or could be considered really significant civil unrest. You think of the protests, the riots in 1992 in Los Angeles, right? The Rodney King riots.

In all of these cases, the courts have been finding this over and over again, the facts on the ground just do not rise to any sort of colorable claim that there is a rebellion against the authority of the United States or that local authorities are unable to enforce the law, and this is just very, very unusual.

Lindsay S: One of the things that’s interesting about these deployments, relative to all of the things that, Bec, you described, is how visible they are to sort of ordinary people and what a spectacle they are.

Have either of you seen these deployments with your own eyes? Have you found yourself in any of the places, or do you know people that have? Just curious what it has felt like for people on the ground. Have either of you seen this?

Lindsay C: The only one that I’ve actually experienced was Washington, D.C., and of course that deployment is still ongoing, and the president has announced that it will continue until the end of his current term.

That one was very interesting just because most of the National Guard members in D.C. that I saw were just sort of standing around for one thing, right? Which is fine, that’s not a criticism. But when I actually asked them, of course I did, right? I was like, “So what do you guys think of the mission?” You could tell that they wanted to believe that they were doing the right thing, right? Which is completely understandable. But you could also tell that they were kind of frustrated. And I don’t know whether that frustration was with the mission or whether that frustration was with the fact that a lot of people in D.C. didn’t want them there. I don’t know what the source of that frustration was, but you could tell that it was kind of wearing on them. I think that many of the National Guard members that did these deployments probably felt the same way.

Lindsay S: In the broader context of this discussion, what do you think the real purpose of this is? Why do this?

Rebecca: I think there are probably a couple of things going on here. I think one of them is that this is part of the Trump administration’s effort to sort of co-opt the military, and so I think some of these National Guard troops, probably part of that frustration is the fact that they’re very aware that a lot of the people living in D.C. don’t want them there, and I think that’s part of the point, right? So part of the point is sort of punishing the publics in these cities, but also trying to set the Guard against the publics, in those cities, and to then make it the liberal population in these cities is against the Guard, and the administration is for the Guard, and by extension, for the military.

Lindsay C: Yeah. I mean, I don’t know what the administration believes it’s doing with this. I do think that to a certain extent, it probably started out as a way to assert control and sort of dominance in a sense over both the military and these quote unquote “blue cities, blue states”.

I do think that the president has been sort of surprised by how much resistance there has been, and I think we see the result of that in his sort of pulling back, letting some of these court cases go, not doing some of the deployments. And so I think what we see there is he tested out whether the military would sort of unquestioningly do these things, and whether he could assert that kind of authority over the states and the cities. And he found some resistance from that, and he probably saw that it was not popular even with some Republican voters to do this. And so I think what he’s doing now is pulling back on using the military for these things, and choosing rather to use agencies where there is no question that he has this authority.

Lindsay S: So given all of this crisis, what needs to happen next?

Several of the essays in this issue call on the public to play a stronger role, to kind of hold their elected leaders accountable for supporting the military, for holding the executive accountable for when they misuse the military. I can think of a lot of obstacles to relying on the public as the source of accountability. Lindsay, what is your view on this?

Lindsay C: Well, of course you want an engaged public that holds its representatives accountable. That sort of goes without saying. It’s the how do you get that that’s the big problem, right?

One of the things we sort of started out with was that many of the public don’t know how to think about these issues. These are not issues that they’ve really been confronted with in their living memory. I think it’s a little unfair of people like us to be like, “Well, if only the public would engage, then everything would be fine.” It’s our job to help them understand this. It’s our job to think about these particular things that most people do not spend their lives thinking about, and it’s our job to articulate that to people and try to help them understand what’s going on.

So I definitely think that one of the things that needs to happen is those of us who care about these issues, those of us who focus on these issues need to be talking to people, whether that’s our own families and communities or whether that’s on social media platforms or whether it’s engaging with journalists to help them understand how to frame certain stories. Not just to talk about how there is in fact a crisis, but to talk about what is going wrong and what needs to be fixed. Because I don’t think we can just expect the public to sort of know that instinctively..

Lindsay S: One of the essays in the collection by Admiral Robert Thomas talks about what a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of Americans serve in the military, so how little exposure people have.

And so one of the things he talked about is some kind of public service that would be mandatory, if not a required military service, but something that would engage Americans in our civic life and that would impose some kind of a responsibility that might wake some of us up to our responsibility for our civic life, which we do have.

Do you wanna say more about Admiral Thomas’s essay? And also I’m interested in your thoughts more broadly, of course.

Rebecca: So first, I just want to say I think Lindsay is absolutely spot on. If we want the public to be engaged and to hold the government accountable for how it uses and treats service members, we have to educate them.

But yeah, so Admiral Thomas in his essay, he talks about having skin in the game, right? And so he talks about how military service has become something that so few Americans have direct experience with.

But it’s not just that fewer Americans have served in the military, it’s also that military service gets concentrated into military families, right? And so you’re more likely to serve if you have a parent or an aunt or an uncle who served. And so what that means is fewer Americans not only have served, but fewer Americans have a close relationship with somebody who has served.

And that service is not just getting concentrated in families, it’s also getting concentrated in geographic regions of the country. So he proposes in his article something that’s kind of been bouncing around for a few years now, which is the idea of a sort of a return to a draft of sorts, which would be mandatory service either in the military or in some other sort of public service, whether that’s education or whether it’s working at the DMV, but a period of mandatory service to make sure that everyone kind of feels that they have a bit of skin in the game.

Logistically and politically, I think there are a lot of barriers to implementing that, but I think it’s an interesting thought experiment to think about how that could change how connected Americans feel to the service.

Lindsay S: Okay, last question. Everyone has their eyes on the midterm elections, and one of the interpretations of what we have seen unfolding in terms of the sort of damage to military justice is that there is a preparation going on for activities that may or may not happen using the U.S. military. Are you concerned that this crisis will escalate if the elections are contested? And maybe you’re not, but what are you gonna be watching over the next three months, over the next couple of years?

Rebecca: So I think one concern is that if we have contested elections, that the president may attempt to use the military as he has increasingly sort of tried to personalize his control over the military, that he may attempt to use the military to hang on to power. I think that’s sort of the big autogolpe, or self-coup, concern.

But I think there are other concerns that we should be worried about as well. So one, I think, is that we might see opponents of the administration, for example, if the president loses the election but contests it, we could see opponents calling on the military to forcibly remove the president.

And that is also concerning, right? Any time that we have the military sort of weighing in to determine who is going to be in the White House and who is not, I think that’s a concern. And any time we have the public calling on the military to do that is a concern. So as civilians, we should all be trying to avoid a situation where that happens.

Lindsay S: Lindsay, how about you?

Lindsay C: I mean, yes, I am concerned that political violence could escalate if there is a contested election. I am also fairly confident that there will be at least some irregularities and contestations around this election. I think we will not avoid that. The side that makes me a little bit hopeful is, as I mentioned before, the fact that it seems like the president has come to a conclusion that maybe using the military for these things is not worth it, that maybe there’s too much trouble around it.

Now, that’s not a guarantee. He does have what we call first mover advantage, which means that he can create fait accompli, and then be like, “Yeah, you can challenge me in court. Go ahead, the election’s already done.” So it’s not a guarantee that he won’t try to use the military in these ways, but I do think if you’d asked me this a year and a half ago, I would’ve been very worried about that. Now I’m a little bit less worried about that. But I do agree with Rebecca that it’s also a concern if the public thinks the military ought to do something around these elections.

The other issue that I am concerned about is, of course, elections are supposed to be run by the states, right? The Constitution is very clear that the federal government has no role in running elections in any way, shape, or form. However, the National Guard under state control has traditionally and frequently had a role in election security, both physical security and cybersecurity.

The U.S. public doesn’t necessarily understand the distinction between the National Guard and federal forces. And now that the National Guard has been used by the federal government in clearly politicized ways, there is some concern that if people see the National Guard doing normal National Guard state things, they might think that there is some interference going on.

And so I think there are a number of very delicate situations that could get out of hand, and I am worried about these things. I hesitate to make specific predictions about what is or is not going to happen but, as a scholar of political violence, I would definitely be keeping a very close eye on this particular set of elections.

Lindsay S: Rebecca Best, Lindsay Cohn, such a pleasure to have you on Talking Policy. Thank you for, Lindsay, being part of this collection. Rebecca, thank you for putting this together. It’s really important, so thanks to you both for being with us.

Lindsay C: Thank you.

Rebecca: Great to talk with you both.