this is "gps," the global public scare. welcome to all of you in the united states and around the world. i'm fareed zakaria live from new york with a special edition of "gps." the presidential season began almost 600 days ago. >> i'm announcing that i'm running for president of the united states. >> it has been a long and brutal slog. >> boy, oh, boy. what a mess. >> but on tuesday, america will finally have, one hopes, a president elect. and we will begin with the huge

challenges the victor will face in the foreign policy realm in particular after he or she takes the oath of office. former national security adviser zbigniew brzezinski joins me to break down those challenges. then the up-ending of american politics. conservatives against trump, liberals against clinton. just what happened during this election campaign and will it go back to normal afterwards? bret stephens, j.d. vance, stephen moore, and katrina vanden heuvel will join me. also, polls. who's up, who's down? more importantly, what should we pay attention to on tuesday. after polls failed to predict brexit, can these models truly be trusted? we will talk to the experts from fivethirty-eight and upshot. >> and i could stand in the middle of fifth avenue and shoot somebody and i wouldn't lose any voters. >> the 2016 campaign will be

fodder for historians for decades to come. >> america is once again at a moment of reckoning. >> but what can they tell us about now? i have a great panel of smart historians to discuss. jon meacham, danielle allen, conrad black, and tim nephtally. but first, here's my take. over the course of this campaign, i have heard from many people who have cheered my opposition to donald trump. but there are others who have objected, arguing i was being biased, that hillary clinton had many flaws as well. so let me try to explain one last time why donald trump is worth special attention. i'm not a highly partisan person. i have views that are left of center, but others that are conservative. i came to this country when ronald reagan was president, and i admired him. i think well of many republican politicians, including the last two gop presidential nominees, john mccain and mitt romney. both of whom are honorable men and would have been good

presidents. donald trump is different. not just because he is obnoxious, tacky, and vulgar or that his business dealings show him to be a scam artist. he's different because of what he believes. the simplest way to understand trump's core beliefs is to look at his words and actions not just today but well before. politicians pander to voters and trump's views on, say, social security and medicare which he promises not to touch or taxes which he promises to cut, seem pretty insincere. they're reflections of what he thinks his supporters want to hear, but he does have deeper beliefs, values and instincts. the first one that stands out is race. donald trump has consistently expressed himself in word and deed in ways that can only be described as racist. in his earliest years as a developer, he was sued by the justice department for allegedly denying housing to qualified black people.

in the case of the central park five, trump jumped into the public arena, taking out full-page ads assailing the accused black teenagers and demanding the return of the death penalty. most strikingly, he refused to back down when dna evidence had clearly exonerated the five men and new york city was forced to pay $41 million for wrongfully imprisoning them for up to 13 years. trump seems to believe deeply in ethnic stereotypes. he boasts of his own blood line. in a 1991 book, one of his associated described him as horrified to see african-americans in his accounting department at two of his hotels, saying, quote, black guys counting my money, i hate it. the only kinds of people i want counting my money are short guys that wear yom caws every day. trump acknowledged the veracity of these comment in a later playboy interview by walking it back in a 1999 nbc interview

calling it all nonsense. trump has also always been a protectest. in the 1980s, he was sure that the japanese were about to take over the world and the only solution was tariffs and trade wars. he doesn't seem to have noticed that the future he predicted never happened. undeterred, he's now focused his wrath on china as that economy has begun to slow down, and on mexico, it's income so small. the common thread is trump is quick to face americans facing real economic hardship that they should blame their problems on foreigners. if there's one view trump has expressed consistently, openly, and with relish, it is that women exist fundamentally as objects for men's pleasure. he has said and done dozens of things over 30 years that confirm this demeaning view of women. in interviews with howard stern, during his ownership of the miss universe pageant when describing

working women, and when debating female candidates like carly fiorina and hillary clinton. women, he once said to new york magazine, you have to treat them like shit. finally, donald trump has expressed impatience and contempt for many of the foundations of liberal democracy. he has repeatedly promised to change laws to make it easier to punish journalists who offend him. he has threatened people who contributed to his republican primary opponents. implying that he would have the government look into their business affairs. he has proposed a number of policies that are illiberal, unconstitutional, or even war crimes such as banning all muslims from entering america, waterboarding suspected terrorists and killing their families. he has compared his ideas to the internment of japanese americans during world war ii implying he approved of that measure. and he has threatened to jail his opponent if elected. >> it's just awfully good that

someone with the temperament of donald trump is not in charge of the law in our country. >> because you would be in jail. >> these then are the core views of donald trump. expressed over decades and confirmed by many of his actions. racism, sexism, protectionism, xenophobia, and authoritarianism. his views on taxes and regulations are irrelevant. your view of hillary clinton is irrelevant. donald trump is not a normal candidate. he is a cancer of american democracy. and that is why i will vote against him next tuesday. for more, go to cnn.com/fareed, and read my "washington post" column this week. and let us get started. >> all right, you heard my take. let's get a few others.

joining in me new york, bret stephens is a foreign affairs columnist for the "wall street journal." katrina vanden heuvel is the editor and publisher of the nation, j.d. vance has the best seller hillbilly elegy, a book that many believe explains the world of the trump voter. trump economic adviser stephen moore is supposed to be joining us from chicago. we're hoping he joins us. we'll have him jump in. what is going to happen, bret? describe for me the scenarios after tuesday. >> well, if i make a prediction now, it will be, and it's mistaken, it will be replayed endlessly against me, but what i'm hoping will happen is mrs. clinton will win the electoral college and popular vote decisively. the reason i hope that and i say this as someone who has voted republican all my life, is because i think the wing of the party that donald trump represents needs to be rebuked. people have to understand in the

words, it's worse than a crime. it's a mistake. this is not the way the republican party ought to go. i think if it's a very close vote, the view will be that trump was in fact stabbed in the back by people like me, people republicans who simply could not bring themselves in any way to embrace his brand of politics. what i would also like to see is republicans hold the house and senate, so i'm going to vote republican down ballot and have a divided and hopefully constructive government. >> how do you think trump voters would react? let's stay for a moment with the prospect of a trump defeat. what would be the lesson, i think? >> i think it dependsen in large part of how trump himself reacts to the defeat. if he acts to the loss graciously like we all expect him to, just kidding, he may actually do a good service to the country and allow some healing to take place and hopefully some constructive government down the road. if trump decides to go to war

against the bret stephens of the republican party, those who have fought him, folks like me who fought him pretty robustly, there's a chance we'll have a long-term civil war in the republican party where we have to figure out what we really believe, and my view is folks like me would be smart to repudiate the intellectual leaders of trump and know that the voters of trump have a lot to be concerned about and that's why he's our candidate. >> the scenario bret outlines sounds plausible. hillary wins. the senate seems very close, but let's say a republican senate, republican house. the house has already made clear they're going to have inquiries, to go to war effectively, perhaps even impeachment if the senate is also republican. on the next two-year cycle, as you know, it favors republicans. so this sounds like a pretty miserable prospect for hillary clinton. >> this has been a surreal, bizarre election, fareed, but i'm going to try to be optimistic at this moment.

i believe hillary clinton will win. i don't think it will be by a large margin, but she will win. i believe the senate can go democratic, and if it does, you have a very interesting dynamic in the senate. you have a progressive caucus for the first time. senator warren, senator sanders, senator sherrod brown, jeff m k merkl merkley. i think you also have the ability to hold hearings on things that matter to the american people. bernie sanders asked the department of justice to hold hearings on drug companies collusion. i think you have interesting new progressives in the house who will lead initiatives and in washington state, jamie rasken in maryland, and i think the court becomes vital. i know there's now obstructionism and the republicans vowing they will not permit a vote on a supreme court nominee. i think it's un-american, unconstitutional. trumpism isn't going away. the fact this election is so close forced us to do some soul

searching, and i think that the fact that -- i think hillary clinton and the democrats need to speak to the white working class in this country. they need to put forward proposals, debt-free higher education, new noncorporate trade policy. all kinds of things that would pull together the obama coalition, which i think will be a defining one, especially hispanics in this election cycle, and a white working class, and by the way, latino and black working class. i think there are real possibilities that are not just doom and gloom. >> you know, i think the thing i hear, i think all of us hear the most is i can't believe these are our choices. how did we get to this? how is it that our politics is where you want both sides to lose? it's almost like the opsult of the world series where you couldn't describe, indians and cubs, both very deserving teams. what inreal yearning in this country is for is centrist government, for constructive, productive government. i think the best thing mrs.

clinton could do as president is work across the aisle with paul ryan, say let's figure out what we can do. let's try to marginalize the extreme factions in our party, whether it's the freedom caucus on one side or elizabeth warren on another. >> the problem is, you know, people say they want centrism, but somehow, it's the extremes that get elected. the extremes that make the noise and send the thousands of e-mails. >> if hillary clinton is elected, she will be a great president. if she can break with this polarization in american politics and try to govern as her husband did with all of the prompts, that was, we remember that as a housian period in american history of 3%, 4% growth, very low unemployment, a technological revolution, america at the top of the world. that was a period when america was unmistakably, undeniably great. >> also the period where the republican party tried to impeach a sitting president. >> i would disagree. >> incredibly trivial next to

how good the '90s were for the united states. for all of the political -- >> but to bret's point, the '90s were very good on the surface, but there were already serious planted seeds that caused a lot of problems over the next couple decades. i think what either for hillary clinton to govern effectively or for trump to win to govern effectively, they need to start with a massive dose of humility. the recognition if they won, they won because the other pa party's candidate was so bad, and with that humility, hopefully will come some measure of constructive government. without it, i agree with bret that we're not going to have a very effective policy or politics in the next few years. >> this election largely was about a revolt against a discredited failed sdb r establishment. brought us a financial crisis, the iraq war. i think we need to think hard about that because we can go different ways in this country, go toward a trump kind of authoritarianism or what bernie sanders showed speaking to the

kind of voters j.d. has written about. precariousness is the new normal in this country. people are anxious. the economy on the surface is doing well, but you know, the democrats and republicans have failed the working class, the base in this country. let me just switch for a moment because this is about the world as well. >> stick with that working class. we'll get back. i want to ask, and i'll ask you, bret, all the data increasingly shows all of you have these economic solutions to assuage the white working class. but increasingly, it is aparpt it's culture at the heart of it and immigration. if you look at the journal and times reporting on same data showed it is the bases, the counties with the greatest cultural change, really meaning immigration, the largest number of immigrants coming in that are most strangly for trump. what do you do about that? the truth is, these people, j.d., they're right. their world is being transformed by lots of people who come in and they don't look like them,

don't sound like them, they don't wurshm like them. what do you say to those people? >> what else is new? mer america is always being transformed by new waves of immigration. we used to have a mentality in this country that immigrants were assets to this country. indeed, they are assets and continue to be. i think what's really changed is the demagogy about immigrants and the suggestion that latin americans or asians who over is coming to this country is an economic threat, a cultural threat, a security threat, when it's the opposite. the fact that america is a magnet and remains a magnet to people all over the world is a great sign of continuing american greatness. marriage imagine if we were exporting human capital instead of importing. that requires people in positions of intellectual and political leadership in the party to say to their base, immigrants ought to be on our side, and by the way, that's how you win the voters four or eight years down the road. >> it also requires a media. there has been media malpractice

in this election in ways we have not seen in a long time. the stunning absence of any policy discussions, maybe on immigration and trade a little, the trivialization, the obliteration of the line between news and entertainment, the abetting of donald trump. now there has been fine reporting, but until we have a media which illuminates and it's not left/right. it's about public interest and what is in people's communities, what's on people's minds. we're destined to have a kind of demagogry which afflicts our political system. >> j.d., i'm going to give you the last word because it does seem to me this cultural issue, we don't know how to talk about it. every solution we come up with tends to be, let's do a credit for this, rework our retraining. maybe these trade deals need to be renegotiated. it's harder to deal with these cultural issues. >> it diefinitely is harder to deal with these cultural issues. you look at these issues from the opioid epidemic to family breakdown.

they're moving in the wrong direction. there needs to be a recognition in our culture, in our policy. what's important about this is politics can be upstream from culture. the discourse we have as a political group definitely affects the way that our culture changes and the way that our culture, my white working class culture responds to some of these changes, so to b reret's point, we have to reject the rhetoric of trump, but recognize there are complex factors that have to be dealt with and wisely. >> thank you all. fascinating conversation. we'll of course be watching on tuesday. trump economic adviser stephen moore was supposed to join us from chicago. we're sorry he was unable to make it. next on "gps," zbigniew brzezinski, the former national security adviser will weigh in on what surprises are in store for the next president.

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ii could stand in the middle of a5th avenue and shoot somebody and i wouldn't lose any voters, okay? and you can tell them to go f**á themselves. you know you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever. you gotta see this, i don't know, i don't remember. he's going like 'i don't remember.'

for the last several months, americans have been obsessed with this presidential campaign, but you might not have noticed but the world has kept turning and a number of major international problems require urgent attention. the president elect will have to start dealing with them on day one. i want to bring in zbigniew brzezinski to talk about what the president can expect in his or her inbox. he was, of course, president jimmy carter's national security adviser. zbig, what do you think is most urgent the president will have to deal with on day one or the first 100 days? >> maybe even the first week. i think we have to make a serious effort to do some national healing regarding major issues in particular foreign policy. we can't afford the kind of implicit divisions that have developed or the rather sordid

language that sometimes accompanied them. america has to have a vision for the world. it has to be a vision deeply steeped in the principles to which we are committed. but it has to be promoted by whoever is the next president. and i hope that the next president will be open-minded and connected with the world rather than disconnected. but it will take a major effort to again create a sense of shared direction if not necessarily specific shared policies. >> and probably it's fair to say that one of the things that pretty early on will have to be dealt with is this issue of russia. how should the next president, i mean, you know, obviously, this is going to be very different if it's hillary clinton or donald trump, but do you face this extraordinary situation where every intelligence agency believes that the russian government has been trying to

influence the american election. >> well, that's probably the case. i would guess that if they felt that they could get away with it, they should try. and if we can make sure that they don't get away with it, that it is exposed, that will be all to the good. but i think we have to go further than that. it's not just russia. at the very least, it's russia and also china. because if we manage to have a stable and intelligent relationship with the chinese, we increase the probability that the russians will have to go along and play with us and particularly so with the chinese. but if we allow the situation to develop in such a fashion that china becomes increasingly hostile, then some sort of informal chinese/russian alliance against us becomes very likely. and that would be a very, very negative strategic development for us. >> what about syria, zbig?

obama has tried to handle syria, i would say, in a way where he's responsive to the problem. he's trying to do something but appears very reluctant to send any kind of major american effort or intervention that could mean that america ends up owning the problem. is it going to be possible to continue to have that kind of reasonably active but ultimately hands-off approach to syria? >> well, you said we have been responsive. i sort of started smiling at that stage because i can see myself on the screen. what does responsive mean? responsive for major power means serious commitment, clarity of one's posture, very direct explanation to the parties concerns of the benefits and costs of the defining of

american power and then proceeding accordingly. we had all of that in small bits, but none of them very consistent. and i think the result has been that we have engaged but ineffective, committed but not able to deliver. and it's not a very good prospect. i think we'll have a lot of recovering to do, but here, i bring to a point which i have been thinking about lately, namely i think it would be very good if the president elect, whoever it is, but preferably one that endorses an open, long-range, coherent and intelligent foreign policy, made every effort to engage in a bipartisan discussion at the highest level. not necessarily involving all of the candidates, but people who are responsible on both sides of the political fence, for our future, and to engage in a dialogue so we can establish at least some parameters for a

minimal consensus regarding how we conduct ourselves in regards to the problems among others you have just mentioned, but there are others. i think there has been too much talk and gestures but very little consistent action, resulting in a situation in which our global standing today is in some doubt in terms of its ability to influence others. i think some countries are very tempted nowadays to take advantage of the fact that we are really not very decisive. >> zbigniew brzezinski, thank you very much. wise words. now, what we really want to know is who is going to be the next president. so traditionally, we have tended to look to polls to be our crystal ball. but in the wake of big misses by pollsters on events like brexit, people have grown even more weary of polling than they were before. let's take a look at where things stand right now. cnn's poll of national polls has

clinton leading 45% to trump's 42%. let's go beyond that to the so-call ed prediction models which take state and national polls and take it through thousands, in fact millions and millions of simulations. when the "new york times" does this, it finds mrs. clinton's chances of winner are 84% versus trump's 16%. it's competitor, fivethirtyeight.com, has clinton at 64% and trump at 36%. we'll try to make sense of this with harry enten, and nate cohn. nate, you wrote an article, i think it was two days ago saying clinton has a lead but it is narrow and within the margin of error. that was a three-point lead. today, you have two new polls out, good, solid polls. abc and nbc, which say that the lead is now 4%. can they breathe easy that you have now gotten just out of the margin of error? >> you know, not really. a couple of polls is not enough

to firmly conclude that the race has shifted from a three-point lead to a four-point lead. i dathink that when the clinton campaign looks at the electoral map and the national polls, they see a fairly clear path to victory. i think they lead in states worth more than 270 electeral votes. the states carried by john carey, plus colorado, virginia, new mexico, and probably nevada, and maybe not new hampshire. so long as she holds those states, she'll win the presidency. if those fall short, she has the potential to make up for that by carrying a state like florida or north carolina. >> so you guys have consistently had a prediction model that has been lower than every other prediction model. try to explain as simply as you can why. >> well, it's simply that we look back at more data over time, right? we look back to say the 1972 election and polls in the past before say 2000 where a lot less

accurate. that's one of the things going on. the other thing that's going on is our model is much quicker to adjust to new polls. we don't take that long of a span. and the newer polls, despite the two you mentioned, if you look at the states as well, those have tended to show a tighter race in the past few weeks than say two weeks before that after the first debate when hillary clinton jumped out to a huge lead. but what i should point out is whether you look at the upshot model or our model, all of the models have hillary clinton ahead. it's just by varying degrees. >> right, but the probabilities matter. when you say that essentially hillary has a 2 in 3 chance of winning, it means if you flip the coin, you know, two of them will come heads, one could come tails. it's not unlikely. there are many sports teams, for example, where you say they have a 1 in 3 chance of winning and they do win. >> sure, but i should also point out, you know, if you look at, say, the upshot model, 86% of the time isn't 100% of the time either. what i will say is if you go back to the 2000 campaign, right, look at the final national polls between george w.

bush and al gore, bush held a three-point lead. very similar to the lead that hillary clinton holds right now, and it actually ended up that al gore was the one who won the popular vote. this race is not over, but it is one in which hillary clinton has an edge. >> if i could add a sports analogy. i think that's a really good way to think about it in a way. not in so far as elections are comparable to sports, but they're things people have seen before. our model says hillary clinton's chance of winning the presidency is roughly the chance an nfl kicker hits a 38-yard field goal. clinton in our view would probably hit that field goal, but any person who watches the nfl knows that kickers miss 38-yard field goals. it happens. we have all seen it. there was a game on sunday night involving my seattle seahawks two weeks ago in which there were two kicks missed from even closer in overtime. you know, i don't want to bring up a hard moment for a bills fan, but the bills lost the super bowl in a game winning

kick. >> but the kickererize more accurate. >> let me ask you what very respected polling expert at princeton university says. he says you guys on 538 are overcounting polls. "huffington post" says you are actually deliberately unskewing data in a way that, again, pl e places your thumb on the finger for trump. not doing it for trump, but the effect is to overrepresent trump's advantages. sam says that most important thing you should look at, first of all, he thinks this model makes no sense. the polls should reflect all the fundamentals. however people are feeling about the economy, however they feel about a second, a third term for a party, all that is reflected in who they say they want to vote. if you do a polls only model, which he argues is the most accurate, and he does 76

quadrillion models. he does 76 quadrillion mutations. the median you get is clinton at 312 electoral votes, which he says, and he says a clinton win comes out 99% of the time. why is he wrong? >> well, i would just tell you, everyone can have their own model and everyone seems to have their own model, but if you go back to 2010 and look at sam's house predictions, he had a small margin of error and said republicans were going to pick up something like 53 seats plus or minus two. they picked up 63 seats. so it was well outside of his margin of error. the fact is we work very hard on these models. we look historically how off the polls have been, and we feel fairly confident in the result we're putting out in terms of uncertainty. i'll tell you this much. if you go back to early in 2015 and told me donald trump would be the republican nominee for president. i would laugh at you.

>> you did laugh. >> i did laugh. >> 538 thought he had a zero r percent chance. >> uncertainty is smart. i have no problem with being less incertain and most people should be humble and recognize polls aren't perfect. we have a polls plus and a polls only model and they're showing the xablth same thing. >> i think that people have often focused on the differences between the polls. those differences are fairly modest compared to indifferences between either of our models and what sam shows. you know, the notion that a three or four-point lead in key states and in the national popular vote gives you a 99-1 chance of winning, that's ahistorical. there's no empirical basis to believe that. i think that harry is right that historically, there's a tendency for that model to be overconfident, including in the 2014 midterm elections when i believe mr. wang gave the democrats a 95% chance of holding the senate in september. and you know, i would think of

it, if you want to see how different the models are, don't think of it in terms of percent. think of it in terms of trump's odds of winning. 99 to 1 versus 6 to 1. that's a much bigger gap than the difference between our models. >> everybody says that the senate is literally too close to call. you have seven seats, and so what's your best, again, what does your model say about this? >> exactly the same thing. if you look at the upshot model and our model, it's basically 50/50. maybe the slightest of edges to the democrats. we had more polls this afternoon, it might change a little bit. in my opinion, maybe six or seven seats are going to determine this. what's so interesting is you have seen the polls in the different state move in different directions. if you look at a state like pennsylvania, katie mcginty, the democratic candidate, moved up. if you look at missouri, you saw jason candor, who had a lot of moment momentum, has slowed down. it's difficult to understand exactly what's going to happen.

at this point, the most likely outcome is probably a 50/50 senate with whomever the vice president is breaking the tie. >> we keep talking about tuesday as though it's election day. but in fact, 40 million people roughly have already voted. what do we know from the early voting? what conclusions can you draw? >> i think that we know this is a presidentialelectorate. this will not be a low-turnout election. many parts of the country, the turnout will surpass that of 2012. a presidential electorate will draw millions of young and non-white voters. it may not be the same as the electorate that voted for the president in 2012. hispanic voters could tick up perhaps significantly, but the electorate we're seeing is largely the electorate assumed by the polls. >> we see a real surge in hispanic voting, right? >> that wasn't inevitable, and there are parts of the country right now where the early vote has already exceeded the total

2012 vote, in hidalgo county, texas, a heavily hispanic county, the total vote already there has exceeded the final vote from 2012. in south florida and miami-dade county, they already have 600,000 plus votes already, and hispanic voter whose are turning out are not people who voted in past elections. that's a new vote that has changed the electorate. >> the silent vote people have been talking about has turned out not to be the silent trump voter who has, you know, didn't vote in the past and is coming out, but is the silent hispanic voter. >> they may well come out still, but so far, the clearest and easiest to identify change in the electorate is the influx of hispanic voters. >> what about african-american voting? >> numbers have fallen, but perhaps it's coming up a little bit. the real question is, though, is what percentage of these hispanics are going to vote for hillary clinton. remember, african-americans have voted traditionally niept%, 95%

for the democratic candidate. even if hispanics are coming out, that's not a seal for hillary. a vote cast on election day is worth the same as an early vote. with some of the cutbacks in the alrea early vote hours, say in north carolina, we can't exactly know how the electorate is going to change too much with african-americans. it wouldn't be surprised if turnout was down given of course that barack obama was the first major party nominee who was black. >> will both of you agree this will get resolves earlier rather than later on tuesday, because some of the crucial states are in the eastern time zone. if she wins north carolina, it's over. if she wins florida, it's over, right? i'm going to ask you now, i am going to go with sam wang, 312. you must have an electoral vote count that you have figured out. >> i'll go with 318. >> okay. >> 322. >> higher. all right.

so you think that despite the fact that your models are less confident of a hillary victo victory -- >> i don't think the main difference between the models is how far clinton is ahead. the difference is how far the results could differ from our current estimate of the race. >> you still think, in other words, on the coin toss, trump might win. >> it could happen. >> really. >> guys, thank you. real pleasure. >> thank you. next on "gps," america has never seen an election like it, but surely, there are some precedents for some aspects of it. i have four very smart historians to discuss it all when we come back. what powers the digital world? communication. like centurylink's broadband network that gives 35,000 fans a cutting edge game experience. or the network that keeps a leading hotel chain's guests connected at work, and at play.

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how will history judge the

2016 campaign? has there ever been a more divisive election? have there ever been two candidates as unpopular as today, and what about the explosion of populism, has the united states seen anything like it before. we'll talk about all this and more with a great panel of historians. jon meacham is the author of destiny and power, a biography of bush 41. danielle allen is a government professor at harvard university and a columnist for the "washington post." conrad black is a former media tycoon and the author of several presidential biographies. and tillathy enounephtally is a presidential historian who teaches history at nyu. the most obvious analogy that people bring up is barry goldwater running an outsider campaign and in a sense the campaign that rejected much of the republican party. is that what the great historical analogy is?

>> we had a number of instances in american history where one would describe as a protest candidacy or an insurgency has taken over a political party. 1896, william jennings bryan. 1964, barry goldwater. 1972, george mcgovern. and 1980, ronald reagan. in all of those cases, the leader of the insurgentacy has some washington experience or some governmental experience. ronald reagan hadn't been to washington, but he had run the biggest state in the country. this is thefirst time you have a protest movement whose beneficiary is a man without any governing or public administration experience at all. 1964 is interesting in another way. barry goldwater never led that contest. he was never close to winning. this was clearly a protest movement that was not going to take over the levers of government in washington. the other thing that's important to keep in mind is that anger

motivated '64 just as anger motivates a lot of the support for donald trump. in 1964, it was two things, people forget this, john f. kennedy started a limited day taunt with the soviet union. there were a lot of hard right anti-communists who thought it was a mistake, and number two, the civil rights administration. the fact that the kennedy administration had introduced the most wide-ranging civil rights legislation ever and it was carried forward by lyndon johnson. that anger propelled the barry goldwater movement. >> conrad, let me ask you about the goldwater analogy. the other thing that is striking about goldwater is he was, as tim said, part of the system, a parliame parliamentarian. he was not promising to blow it up, and trump really is. if you listened to his speech on saturday, there's a kind of almost apocalyptic nature to what he says. we're going to destroy everything. we're going to tear down, you know, these decades-long

establishment. the anti-elitism seems much more strident. first, would you agree? and i know you have signed a petition supporting him. do you approve of that kind of rhetoric? >> i don't interpret it quite as you do, fareed. i would differ quite sharply from the screed with which you opened the program. i recognize donald trump's shortcomings, but i think he's as a person in the 25 years i have known him, evolved to be a responsible comparative centrist. one aspect of this campaign is very underrecognized is that mrs. clinton and ms. trump both did manage to win the nomination against people well outside to use a football expression, which has been popular in this program, outside the 30 yard lines. the alternative to donald trump was ted cruz, who is well to the right. and the alternative to mrs. clinton is senator sanders, who is well to the left. at least they have kept their

parties more or less towards the center. i do think that there's a great deal of anger in this campaign, much more than there was in '64. i think the reason is that the preceding 15 years have been years of misgovernment. i put it to my fellow panelists, it has been the poorest period of presidential government in history. more so than the ten years preceding the civil war and more so than the three republicans between president wilson and president roosevelt. and the country is angry at that, and there have been references to that earlier in the program. but i think it's not the sort of extremely dangerous anger that has been portrayed. i don't think that -- i don't think there is anything like as much violence in the politics of the country as there were in the '60s, especially when you had both the racial disturbances and the anti-vietnam disturbances going on. i do agree this is the first time that anyone has taken over

a major party who has never held an elected office or a political office, like taft or hoover or an elected office or a high military command with the one exception of wendell wilke, but he had -- he took four ballots to win. they didn't have many primaries then, and he had, as we now know, practically no chance of defeating president roosevelt. this is a phenomenon and a phenomenon of people angry at misgovernment, and they have some reason to consider it to be so. both parties. the bushes and the clintons. >> jon meacham, when you look at this anger, put it in some historical context for us. >> you know, the word i would use more than anger is paranoia. and obviously, we owe that construct to richard hofstetter, who delivers a lecture in 1963, it became a cover story in harper's. this month in 1964, and ultimately a book, in which he

talked about a recurrence policy in politics for a significant minority of the country to believe there are forces arrayed against them in a conspiratorial way from the bavarian illuminati of the 1970s to the early 1960s. and so, anger is also a perpetual force in american life. anger is supposed to be part of democracy because anger is a subset of disagreement. but i think this paranoia, i think the sense that the world is fundamentally and organizationally arrayed against large numbers of people, is the more corrosive issue that whoever wins on tuesday is going to have to deal with. the other analogy that comes to my mind which is more than goldwater in 1964 is the way the country felt in 1932. franklin roosevelt said in 1932

said that the summer that the two most dangerous men in america were douglass mcarthur and huey long. because mcarthur could lead a revolt from the right and long from the left. one of the ways we came out of that was a kind of, if i may, centrist, center left leadership, which is what i suspect we're going to be in the next chapter of the country now. >> the other element of it that i am struck by, and i have talked about this, danielle allen, is the criminalization of politics. the degree to which everybody is now accusing the other side of in some way or the other breaking the law, needing to be investigated, you know, the most recent one is that melania trump may have broken the law in the way she worked. but it also has taken on a very charged feeling. does that -- i mean, there are some precedents back to the founding, but it feels very intense, and it feels very

destructive to me because it's very difficult to compromise when you think your opponent belongs in jail. >> it is destructive, it is intense. there are pres dnlts, and they were also dangerous. i think we should go back to 1800 and look at the politics that led up to that election, the contest between adams and jefferson. adams had passed acts in 1878. it turned to great violence in france and a growing paranoia, to quote jon meacham, about french refugees. there was a concern to keep french refugees out. there was a concern to crack down on the government's approach to that, and adams using those laws threw journalists into jail, a congressman was arrested and indictmented and jailed under the sedition laws and jefferson aggressively resisted those. the 1800 election was bitterly contested. there was lots that could be said about the characters of the variest parties at the time, but at the end of the day, hamilton

threw the election to jefferson. it was sort of in the electoral college context, and that produced the bitter enmity between bur and hamilton that led to hamilton's death. we have seen similar politics. it was a paralist state of affairs. the country was in a dangerous state and required aggressive work to rectify. adams at the last minute tried to reduce the number of supreme court justices on the court so jefferson couldn't make appointments there. there are a lot of close parallels. it took hard work on the part of jefferson to right the balance, to restore impartiality, to pull the politicalization out of the justice system, to work on decriminalizing politics. >> tim, you were director of the nixon library. you were the founder director when it became a national archive rather than an outgrowth of president nixon's apparatus. in some ways, the modern version

of this all begins with watergate, right? >> yes, it does. and my sense in this campaign is we had a choice between the 1980s, the glorious '80s or the 1990s. that seemed to be our choice between trump and clinton. what we saw was that the levers of government, the machiachiner government for the first time in 100 years faced the prospect of removing a president from office. it wasn't easy. >> in the '70s? >> in the 1970s. democrats don't talk about impeachment. we're hearing about impeachment already for a hillary clinton presidency should it happen. democrats didn't start talking about impeachment until 1973. the watergate break-in was 1972. it's because it had been 100 years since andrew johnson. so the machinery wasn't well oiled. but after richard nixon is removed for good reason, because of his many abuses of government, the machinery is there, it doesn't go away.

so when there's anger about the clintons. about bill clinton, it comes back and people talk about impeachment as if it's nothing. when in fact the founders had expected it only to be used for the undefined high crimes and misdemeanors. what's really troubling is that that machinery never went away. and that people have forgotten that it's only in unusual circumstances that the founders wanted us to remove the chief executive. so in a sense, the clintons got the backlash after watergate. and right now, we're seeing the fact that people who don't have a historical memory are talking about impeachment as if it's something the founders expected to be part of good government. you know, somebody doesn't do the right thing as president, you don't like this person, him or her, just use impeachment to get rid of them. that was not the intent. >> conrad, when you look at this issue, you have written about the american justice system. surely, this must trouble you. the way in which we now are sort of sick prosecutors and special investigators on people, and

effectively say troll through everything they have done, thousands of e-mails. whether it's the trump university, whatever, you know, warren buffett has this line of a cop tails you for 500 miles, you're going to get a speeding ticket. >> yeah, i find it terribly upsetting. and i'm venerable enough, fareed, to have said the watergate affair was in progress that it was going to be a terribly dangerous precedent. i wrote at the time in my opinion completely spurious attempt to impeach and then remove president clinton, that the result of it should have been not only the acquittal of president clinton, which did occur, but also some kind of warning that this reflex to criminalize policy differences should be resisted. and an ideal world, there would have been a sort of historic aspect to say neither the attempted impeachment of johnson or the run-up to the impeachment

of nixon were justified. i agree there was a criminal conspiracy in '72 to-74 in parts of the committee and the staff, but i have yet to see conclusive evidence that nixon broke the laws. there's room for controversy about that, but i agree entirely. i think it is in general the prosecutors in the country are out of control. when 99.5% of the cases, 97% without a trial, and if the political leaders are going to bandy this around as loosely as seems to be happening, it's extremely dangerous. >> danielle allen, i give you the last word. how do you think historians will record this campaign? what is the bottom line? >> i think you called it earlier. we are undergoing an incredible transformation in this country that is simply a fact. we're headed to being a country

where no ethnic group is in the majority, and that is different from the history of the country for 200 years. we're wrestling with how to manage that, how to do it fairly, justly, make sure that everybody has opportunity and fair and equal place in the country. i think where that's the seismic change that we're fighting over right now. that's what historians will name about this moment when they're writing 50 years hence. >> danielle allen and all of you, thank you all. really fascinating conversation. thank you all. >> a final thought if you would indulge me. i'm an immigrant and one of the greatest privileges of being a naturalized american is to part in the country's democracy. i know many of you are sick of it all, the nastiness, the intensity, the sheer length, but i still look at america's presidential election as an extraordinary act of civic education. after all, every four years, this process becomes the center of the country's life. for more than a year. but being a student of

international affairs, i'm also aware of how fragile democracy is. look at poland. the poster child for democracy in europe over the last 25 years, where a new party in power has subordinated the judiciary courts and media to its authority. look at russia, where the democratic tradition so promising in the 1990s has almost vanished. look at turkey, where a once reformist leader has decided to accumulate power and erode traditions of freedom and democracy that were rare in the middle east. it doesn't feel like it could happen in america, the oldest constitutional democracy in the world, with many checks and balances. but in fact, it takes one man, one party, one vote to break long-standing traditions of constitutionalism, and the system can morph. we now face the prospect of a candidate refusing to accept the outcome of the election. of mobs protesting and perhaps hoping to change that outcome because they have been fed lies about voter fraud, of congress

refusing to legitmo mimize the election by threatening investigations, inquiries, impeachment. these poisonous altitudes have also infected law and justice, such as the fbi. these might seem like small erosions, but each one takes a hammer to the foundations of democracy. until the cracks become too deep and the entire edifice begins to cr crumble. the founding fathers of this consistentry, choof among them, alexander hamilton, worried that it was week. after the constitution, a woman in philadelphia asked benjamin franklin, well, doctor, what have we got? a republic or a monarchy? franklin responded, a republic if you can keep it. that's what we have in america. the world's greatest republic, if we can keep it. so vote on tuesday with that sense of history in mind.

and don't forget to watch cnn on election day. in fact, stay with us until the very last vote is cast and the final results is in. thank you all for being part of the special program. i will see you next week. hey, i'm brian stelter. it's time for a special edition of "reliable sources." this is our weekly look at the story behind the story, of how the media really works, how the news gets made. a special welcome now to our viewers here in the united states and around the world on cnn international. we're live from our nation's capital where we're about to find out if hillary clinton or donald trump will be moving into their house right behind me, 1600 pennsylvania avenue. there are fewer than, get this, 60 hours until the first polls close. we're counting down by hours now. and then the healing begins, right? hopefully. so will the news media help or will it hinder that?