Alex:

I think, especially historically, when you study empires, it's very easy to only look for the area that's colored, if you studied British Empire, colored red on the map of the world and not think about the rest of the world that's part of an informal empire.

Dorothy:

Perhaps some policymakers in Washington operate under the illusion that US imperialism in the Americas ended, with a few exceptions, with the shift from kind of territorial expansion in the 19th century, to other types of expansion and influence. But that illusion, I think, will be held again by maybe very few people in the United States. And if you ask policymakers, regular citizens, public opinion, academics in Latin America, I think most people you would talk to would include these other types of influence in that broader definition of imperialism as well.

Alex:

You can't separate anything that's going on now in parts of the former imperial world from developments that the British are, in large part, responsible for. And, as Dorothy's saying, that's true of the Americans too, in a whole lot of ways.

Dorothy:

One thing that's really striking is that some of the most aggressive and perhaps infamous examples of US intervention in Latin America in the 20th century, for example, our involvement with the Contras in Nicaragua, the Iran Contra scandal, some of these incidents were very unpopular.

Brandon:

Imperialism. In today's world it's not the easiest term to define. It's often less characterized by mass that would once be coded with territorial gains. It is now more commonly discussed through the lens of influence. In recent years, so-called American imperialism has been prominently criticized in the case of American involvement in Venezuela, where in January 2019, the United States sided with opposition leader, Juan Guaido, and against President Nicholas Maduro, whose 2018 election is disputed. Venezuela has, in this time, been overwhelmed by an enormous refugee crisis. But a major overarching question here is, what role should the US play at all? And what does imperialism actually look like in the 21st century?

Brandon:

Today, we attempt to tease out and understand what imperialism is, the impact of imperialism in Latin America, and what lessons might be learned from the history of the most notorious former imperial state of them all, the British Empire.

Brandon:

Joining for this discussion is Dorothy Cronin, assistant professor of political science in the School of Arts and Sciences and assistant professor of history, Alex Jace Levinson.

Brandon:

How are we all doing?

Alex:

Hanging in there. How are you?

Brandon:

Wonderful. As good as can be. How about you, Dorothy?

Dorothy:

Very well, Brandon. Thanks for having me.

Brandon:

Great. So I guess we can start by doing some introductions. How about you first, Dorothy? Could you tell me, and our viewers and listeners a little bit about your background, and how you came to Penn and what you study?

Dorothy:

Yeah, so I'm an assistant professor in the political science department here at Penn, and I primarily study Venezuelan politics, Venezuelan history, the economy, et cetera. I also teach an undergraduate lecture on US intervention, and US influence in Latin America, which I think is very relevant to our discussion today, so looking forward to it.

Brandon:

All right. How about you, Jace?

Alex:

Alex. [crosstalk 00:03:24].

Brandon:

Or, excuse me.

Alex:

Sorry. I have a lot of names. So, natural.

Brandon:

That's true. You've got that little triple decker there.

Alex:

Yeah. I'm an assistant professor in the history department and my area of research is 19th century British history. So seemingly a little far from our discussion today, but I research and think about an empire at its heyday and I certainly teach up to the period of British supposed decline. So, a lot of the themes that come up in my work and in my teaching, I think, will be relevant to what we're talking about.

Alex:

Specifically, my main area of research has been quarantine and epidemic disease in the Mediterranean and the way the British Empire has interacted with other European states against the fear of the plague. But I'm moving on from that project now and thinking more about borders and imagined frontiers in the 19th century. So, again, some stuff that might come up in our discussion today.

Brandon:

What a breath of relief to be able to move on at least a little bit from that subject.

Alex:

In one part of my life, I'm moving on from quarantine. Yes.

Brandon:

So we are talking about imperialism today, that does seem to be our broad unifying theme for this episode, and I think a good place to start is always to look at how it's been defined in the past, and sort of contrasting that with how we might define it today.

Brandon:

I know in our prior conversations, we've talked about the idea of informal imperialism versus the colonial imperialism that we tend to think about. So I'd like to open up the discussion. How do we define imperialism today?

Dorothy:

Yeah, I think you kind of previewed two good ways of thinking about it. So we can think of on the one hand a formal empire as a kind of a polity in which people or citizens in the center formally have different rights from people in colonies or territories. And I think by that definition, thinking about the US today, at least in Latin America, empire is very limited, right?

Dorothy:

Puerto Rico is a territory, but we don't have a lot of formal territories in that sense in which citizens have different rights than people in the United States. But then there's this broader idea we were talking about of an informal empire, or empire in the kind of sense of the word imperial, or imperious, or domineering, or having a domineering character.

Dorothy:

And in that sense, thinking about the US and Latin America, we might include everything from sponsorship of coups and regime change, of which there are many examples. Meddling in elections, even conditionality in aid, saying, "If you want this foreign aid, you have to implement X, Y, and Z policies, economic sanctions that might seek to change the behavior of government officials in other countries, all of that falls under the scope of what I think people would commonly talk about as US imperialism in Latin America, in an informal sense.

Alex:

Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. You know, something interesting to think about is the way in which empires have historically been a kind of dominant way that most people have experienced political existence over human history. Or at least in the past couple millennia, the nation state as a kind of basic form of organizing the world, that's only come about as a dominant form into the 20th century.

Alex:

So, formal empire is certainly one way to think about it absolutely, and I think the way Dorothy put that was great, as a kind of succinct way of thinking about it, as a polity that has people with different rights.

Alex:

But we can have some polities, like the Hapsburg empire, or the Russian empire, that simply by virtue of having an emperor, and crucially a poly-ethnic populace, that's another way to think about empires, as opposed to ethnic based nation states. Which is kind of after World War One, a dominant way people have thought about nation states.

Alex:

And certainly, a lot of these concerns about cultural homogeneity, ethnic homogeneity, racial homogeneity, clearly play into fears and anxiety certain groups of people in the US are going through now. So, inextricable from questions about empire, are questions of what a nation meant to people, and what are the different ways in which one can think about experiencing political existence in a world that's clearly undergoing a lot of change right now.

Brandon:

We maybe have been too strict in defining what imperialism is, to the point where maybe we don't recognize when it's happening?

Alex:

I think so. I think, especially historically, when you study empires, it's very easy to only look for the area that's colored, if you study the British Empire, colored red on the map of the world, and not think about the rest of the world as part of an informal empire. And it takes a lot of thinking, and I think historians have stressed the importance of the informal empire in British history. How much investment, how much trade is happening outside the formal parts of the empire. But imperialism means different things to different people.

Alex:

And absolutely, again, as Dorothy was saying about the way in which you could think of that is just behaving in an imperious way, there's ways in which kind of different perspectives from so-called imperial centers and from parts of the world experiencing what they perceive as imperialism are totally different.

Alex:

So, what is or what is not, imperialism differs in the eye of the beholder.

Dorothy:

Yeah. I think, it's funny, in the Latin American context, my instinct is that we've almost perhaps defined imperialism too broadly, as opposed to too narrowly. So perhaps some policymakers in Washington operate under the illusion that US imperialism in the Americas ended with a few exceptions, with the shift from the kind of territorial expansion in the 19th century, to other types of expansion and influence.

Dorothy:

But that illusion, I think, would be held again by maybe very few people in the United States, and if you ask policymakers, regular citizens, public opinion, academics in Latin America, I think most people you would talk to would include these other types of influence in that broader definition of imperialism as well.

Brandon:

What's known as economic imperialism, in the case of Latin America?

Dorothy:

Yeah. I mean, there are certainly a lot of types of policies that would fall under that rubric, or that many people would classify under that rubric. I think in the 1980s and 1990s conditionality in aid, and so international financial organizations, institutions like the IMF, or the World Bank providing big loans and saying, "Well, if you want this money, you have to implement X, Y, and Z policies." Some of which were necessary and others of which turned out to be rather ill conceived. I think that's something that many people would call imperialist in some way, that it was implementing what was called the Washington consensus, right? Or more recently certainly imposing crippling economic sanctions, not only on-

PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:11:04]

Dorothy:

... economic sanctions, not only on targeted sanctions on individual politicians and supporters of various regimes that aren't friendly to the United States, but also economic sanctions that affect how a country can trade and how a country accesses financial markets, things that have major implications for everyone living in the country. I think that also falls under what a lot of people would term imperialism.

Interviewer:

Can you unpack why that is, especially in a case of something like Venezuela?

Dorothy:

Sure. In the Venezuelan case, Venezuela was actually a close ally of the United States throughout much of the 20th century, and then in 1999, Hugo Chavez came to power. He was elected in 1998 and very quickly distanced Venezuela from the United States, made clear that... Infamously called George Bush the Devil, and had a lot of hostile rhetoric toward the US. And then when he died, his successor, Nicolás Maduro, has been a really brutal dictator moving the country very far away from democracy, transitioning from democracy or competitive authoritarianism to dictatorship, which has been primarily terrible for the Venezuelan people, also bad for US business interests at the same time.

Dorothy:

And so the United States, especially under Trump, was trying to pursue a policy of regime change and trying to say, "Let's get Maduro out, and let's restore democracy." At least that was the rhetoric. And part of that policy has been economic sanctions, which have made it hard for the Venezuelan government to access financial markets, which have made it hard for the Venezuelan government to sell oil, which was 90% of Venezuela's export revenue. And the idea of those policies I think was, at least nominally, the idea was this is going to put pressure on the regime, it's going to make it hard for this evil dictator to hold onto power, and a regime change will be good for the United States and will be good for the Venezuelan people.

Dorothy:

And a few years in, it hasn't worked out that way. There's a lot of evidence that these sanctions have exacerbated a really horrific humanitarian crisis, one of the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, without doing much to loosen this Dictator Maduro's grip on power. And so I think people might call that imperial in that broader definition we were talking about, of exerting undue influence in some way. People might think about that normative implication of the word when thinking about that set of policies.

Interviewer:

Is there a desirable alternative that has been proposed?

Dorothy:

Well, I think things are changing already. The Biden administration has already made a few changes. So first granting temporary protective status to Venezuelan immigrants in the United States. The presence of immigrants from Latin America of course, is intimately related to everything Alex was talking about ethnicity and culture being part of how we think about empire. And there has been some discussion certainly of changing our approach to sanctions, of thinking about keeping regime change and the restoration of Venezuelan democracy as a long-term goal. But in the short term, kind of prioritizing the humanitarian situation and making sure that Venezuela is able to have some income from the sale of oil and certainly to get food and medicine into the country.

Dorothy:

So I think all of that is very much part of the discussion now with this new administration. I also think in a broader sense, going back four years, if the Trump administration had taken a different approach, certainly Venezuela would likely be in a better place today. US Venezuelan relations would be in a better place today. And so I think there are a lot of more appealing counterfactuals, certainly.

Interviewer:

Alex, whenever the UK sort of lost some of its sphere of influence and decolonized, did it take on a procurable position as the United States has from exerting influence in this way with things like economic imperialism and sanctions against countries, etc.?

Alex:

Well, I think one of the tricky things in drawing a direct parallel from the British experience to what America might experience in the decades going forward is that Britain was never precisely the same kind of superpower. And of course, every historical moment is different, but the British empire in the 19th century was a superpower in a very different way. It was kind of a comparative superpower, but not in absolute terms. There was no sense that the British would beat necessarily the Russians or the Germans after Germany unified in a major land war. It was something that the British devoted some anxiety to and fear about. Britain had a kind of set of advantages that coincided with this historical moment where it was not entangled in European wars that worked out very well in conjunction with the industrial revolution and the kind of presence of coal in the British Isles. It meant Britain was a superpower in a certain period of time, and that those circumstances kind of changed in the early 20th century and the situation changed.

Alex:

So, the US kind of advantage as a global hegemon is a different situation, but the military advantage the United States has, the kind of specific policy of our military being larger than or more powerful than any other country. That's not the same as we see in British history. You do see with the British, interestingly, because we have a kind of longer swath of history in which to investigate a post-imperial moment. You do see a move over the course of the 1950s and sixties and seventies of the British to kind of reposition themselves as a good actor on the international stage, no longer explicitly devoted to the growth of the empire in the same way, and then often stepping in to try to mediate informally a former imperial colony.

Alex:

So for example, in the early 1960s in Kashmir, the British were trying to be the ones to mediate both by themselves and at the UN to try to kind of say, "Well, look, we have experience here, and we can try to mediate between the Indians and Pakistanis." Of course, trying to gloss over the fact that the British essentially created that problem and to a botched and very rushed partition of India. So there are threats. You could see some of this is trying to undo damage that the British themselves created.

Alex:

You can also see in a situation like Zimbabwe, where the British first are sponsoring a white minority regime, then sort of come over in the course of the 1950s to the principle of majority rule and in colonies, as they moved towards independence and distanced themselves from the white minority regime, which then unilaterally declared independence and then embroil themselves for that entire period in the seventies in a war against Mugabe led party Zimbabwean patriots, but pushing yet to take this government out. You got the infamous regime.

Alex:

So the British do position themselves there as mediators and kind of come to a settlement in 1980 and bring all parties to the table. But again, this is sort of cleaning up a mess that has been created by policies that British in a previous era had sponsored. So there some ways in which the US is in a similar situation, and in some ways the British experience is different.

Interviewer:

Would you describe the support for materialistic measures in the UK versus in the United States? Is there, or at least historically, has there been support for having colonies and expanding the empire? And I suppose just how does that compare to the United States? Because here, it seems to be quite a mix. There are people who are very pro intervention for the sake of spreading democracy. We've had whole wars based on that premise. And then there's certainly a large swath of folks who are very either apathetic or they are very vehement about not wanting any involvement at all.

Alex:

That's a really interesting question, I think, and it's something historians debate about. How implicated was the general public in the history of empire. And of course, in many ways implicitly they are absolutely implicated in empire. They're consumers of imperial product. They're benefiting from imperial investments. They kind of like to see a map of the world that looks awfully red. In another way of thinking, of course, the average British member of the public is not thinking about the empire in the same ways that an imperial subject has to contend with the British as part of a daily existence. So, I mean you can argue about just how absent-minded the British were, not really in their interest obviously impelled them towards their empire. They can't really disclaim responsibility, but in terms of just thinking about it and then filling in through politics, I think you can make a pretty good case that until the later 19th century, the British public was sort of apathetic about empire, even though when it came to it, they certainly, weren't wanting to pay more for their sugar or tea, and they benefited from empire in those ways.

Alex:

And then later in the 19th century in this kind of much more nationalistic, jingoistic, xenophobic overtly racialized era, I think support for the empire overtly [inaudible 00:21:18] went up and it was very prominent in political campaigns. And similarly, I think while it's not been overtly discussed so much with the end of empire, I do think you see a sort of casting around sentiment driftness in the British public. Voting public, it does have to do in some way with the retreat of Britain as a world power, primarily because of de-colonization. So I think it does matter. It's not something that's been irrelevant, but at different historical times, it's been kind of more or less at the top of mind of members of the public.

Dorothy:

I think you see that kind of variation and even oscillation in the US case as well. I mean, one thing that's really striking is that some of the most aggressive and perhaps infamous examples of US-

PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:22:04]

Dorothy:

... aggressive and perhaps infamous example of US intervention in Latin America in the 20th century. For example, our involvement with the contras in Nicaragua, the Iran Contra scandal. Some of these incidents were very unpopular. And it is really striking and kind of an interesting historical puzzle to think about what were we doing violating US law? We being the US government at that time, violating US laws, going against Congress, and going against public opinion to get involved in some of these conflicts in the way that we did during the Cold War. So I think that's an example of where, as Alex is saying, there's moments when the public is not on the side of this type of intervention. At the same time, I think certainly in the Cold War context, there are also moments when the US government said, "You know what? We're going to try to pull back and maybe have a little bit less intervention and be less aggressive and let domestic forces, events run their course." And there were moments when that ended up being very unpopular as well.

Dorothy:

Jimmy Carter, for example, tried in some ways to take a less active role in supporting certain dictatorships, certain anti-communist regimes in Latin America. And then for example, when the Sandinistas came to power, that was extremely bad for him and arguably a big determinant of the results of the 1980 election here in the United States. So I think here, you also see a kind of ... I don't want to call it public opinion. I don't want to say it's [inaudible 00:23:46], but there are certainly examples of the public saying, "This is wrong. This is not in the interest of the United States," but there are also moments when the public, and especially exiled communities, may be very powerfully in favor of certain types of intervention. I mean, thinking about politics today, and over the last 20 years, the Cuban community in Florida, now the influent community in Florida, obviously has had outside influence over US foreign policy. And that's an example of a public that is certainly not apathetic and has very strong preferences about what the United States does in Latin America.

Interviewer:

Well they're also sort of a product of American imperialism, right? Because they got involved for resources in the first place in the Caribbean.

Dorothy:

Sure. You're saying that the rise of Castro and the Cuban diaspora here is also the results of past US-

Interviewer:

Well that's literal [inaudible 00:24:56] I guess is what I'm saying, but that plays-

Dorothy:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the long history of US imperialism or intervention broadly defined in Latin America, absolutely cannot be separated from the rise of various governments that we oppose today. Alex mentioned that in the UK case, part of the kind of post-colonial role has been sometimes cleaning up messes created during the colonial period. And to some extent you see there are examples of that with the US in Latin America as well. I mean, in Chile we infamously embraced, if not didn't plan to perhaps embrace and sought, a coup against Salvador Allende in 1973, bringing to power General Augusto Pinochet who massacred 1500 people in his first couple of months in office and went on to kill over a thousand more, and tortured people, and was a very destructive dictator. And that situation was partly of the US's making. And then in 1988 and '89, the US did have a role in supporting a kind of nascent, pro-democracy, anti-Pinochet movement and vote. And so I think that fits into to Alex's framework of cleaning up the mess created by past Imperial actions.

Alex:

Yeah, and the thing about those kinds of messages is they don't really end. I mentioned earlier the case with Zimbabwe, what the British called Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, of course that Lancaster House agreement in 1980 led to the rise of Robert Mugabe, who the British initially supported as this bonafide anti-imperial fighter, but became a brutal dictator himself. And then the British tried to lamely protest the degradations of the Mugabe regime now. But again, all of this part of the long-term knock on effect of empire, and you can't separate anything that's going now in parts of the former imperial world from developments that the British are in large in large part responsible for. And as Dorothy is saying, that's true of the Americans too in a whole lot of ways.

Brandon:

Greg Grandin is a professor of history at Yale University who last year received a Pulitzer prize for general nonfiction for The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, a reflection on the United States sense of itself and relationship to its search for frontiers. In it he writes: "The overseas frontier, wars in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, the Philippines, Nicaragua, and Haiti, acted as a prism refracting the color line abroad back home. In each military occupation and prolonged counterinsurgency, they fought. Southerners could replay the dissonance of the Confederacy again and again. They could fight in the name of the loftiest ideals, liberty, valor, self-sacrifice, comradery, while putting down people of color.

Interviewer:

And thinking about Venezuela, Dorothy, are you more optimistic about the leadership of President Biden?

Dorothy:

Certainly. I mean, yeah, that's a low bar, but-

Interviewer:

[inaudible 00:28:25] [crosstalk 00:28:25].

Dorothy:

Yeah, I mean, I think that's a low bar, but I certainly am more optimistic than under the previous administration. I think there's a close tie here to what Alex just mentioned. I mean, it's different, but as I mentioned, Biden has already done something that the Trump administration didn't quite do, which is grant temporary protective status to Venezuelans living in the United States, which is protection from deportation among other benefits. And so, I think I've used that as something very positive. Thinking more generally beyond Venezuela, I think many are optimistic that Biden will restore some of our asylum policies, giving migrants and people who arrive at the US border the right that had already been established to claim asylum and to have a hearing, and a lot of those rights were of course, violated or eliminating and under the Trump administration.

Dorothy:

And here again, we have a case of this sense of, what is the role of an informally or formally Imperial power in cleaning up former messes? So when you think of these waves of migration that we've seen from Central America, and when we think about unaccompanied minors in particular arriving from Central America, a lot of that, the causes are very complex, and a lot of them have to do with climate change, and that's a whole other issue of the US's culpability enrolling climate change and drought. But a lot of it does have to do with seeing violence, gang violence and drug violence in central America. And I think there's a strong argument to be made that the US role in central America during the Cold War period was pretty important, or pretty influential I guess, in getting us to where we are today in terms of drug trafficking and gang violence and the endemic violence that is driving this migration.

Dorothy:

So I think that's another example along the lines of what Alex is saying of something that Washington can do that is in some way helpful, that may in some way address problems that the US has partly created or participated in creating in the past, in a way that may not have some of those risks and dangers of other types of intervention we've been talking about, or other types of policies we've been talking about.

Interviewer:

We see the climate crisis influencing modern Imperialism, especially as energy needs change.

Alex:

That's a difficult question and it's very hard to predict, but I think one of the more depressing things about the climate crisis is how disproportionately the parts of the world that are going to be the most effected by it are in many cases parts of the former Imperial world. And the ways in which that further raises obligations of the West to not shy away from internationally aid of various kinds and from really taking a lead and not just kind of, okay, we'll rejoin the Paris Climate Accord, but really thinking more deeply about the kind of moral obligation of Western countries to mitigate the climate crisis and not try to say all the onus is on parts of the developing world where the emissions are bad too. And obviously, to think about those unequal impacts of it as part of a much longer trajectory of inequality in a huge number of ways in world history.

Dorothy:

Absolutely. And I think a balance that's hard to predict, but I do think what seems very, very clear is that because of the climate crisis, climate change, we will see over the next decade, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of refugees, of climate refugees, and migration and [inaudible 00:32:41] more, or a rival of these immigrants, is going to be a huge issue, I think, for every former Imperial power, all of Western Europe and US as well. And so that gets back to what I was just saying about the importance of really thinking through what-

PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [00:33:04]

Dorothy:

... the importance of really thinking through what our immigration policies are, what our asylum policies are, what our policies are for, whether climate refugees have a particular status. And I'm not an expert on these issues, but it seems safe to say that that will be a primary focus of certainly an immigration policy and perhaps of just the way that the United States interacts with the world more generally over the next decade.

Interviewer:

And generally imperial powers are always looking toward the next frontier. Interpret this how you will, but what would you consider the next frontier for the world powers and trying to exert influence? Is that digital spaces? Is that the Space Force? Any guesses?

Dorothy:

One thing that comes to mind in thinking about that question is the rise of China, right? The one parallel that we might draw between, you tell me, Alex, but between the decline of the UK as an imperial power over the last century and a half or whatever, and the role of the United States in the world today, is a shrinking of national GDP as a share of world GDP, right? There was a time when the UK was, as Alex said, not militarily dominant in the same way that the US was during part of the 20th century, but economically dominant.

Dorothy:

And there was a long time when the US was, I don't know, a third of the world GDP. I'm not sure, but it's a huge fraction. And now we're seeing that change. And so I think for China, we certainly see a rapidly expanding role in all sorts of what you might broadly call economic imperialism, right? In providing aid in return for specific policies, helping build infrastructure in return for various forms of control and influence across Latin America and Africa, as well. When I think frontier, I think China extending into Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa in ways that we hadn't seen certainly prior to 1990. Even prior to 2000, really.

Interviewer:

Which is already underway, correct?

Dorothy:

Oh, yeah. That's been going on now for a while. So, in that sense, I guess it's not a totally new frontier, but it brings to mind the kind of expansion that maybe the US was involved in at some period [inaudible 00:35:44] the UK was involved in some period. Different kind of expansion, but similar expansion of influence and growth as a certain type of frontier.

Alex:

Yeah, and another thing to think about is the more precarious stature of democracy in the world over the last decade, and certainly over the years of Trump and the rise of populists around the world and the particular brand of authoritarianism by [Xi Jinping 00:36:14] and Putin and all these other kind of figures. So one must wonder, as British or the Americans, in what way is it possible to evangelize democracy in the world going forward? And it's a much more contested situation where you even have members of the EU, like Poland and Hungary kind of backsliding in democratic terms. So clearly, I think that's a question that venerable democracies, like the US and Britain, have to think about in terms of the years going forward and in a world that is much more multipolar and where there's less of a sense of narrative destiny, as you had, perhaps, in the 1990s with the fall of the Soviet Union. And that the United States need to reign supreme.

Dorothy:

Yeah, and I don't think you have to go as far as the EU to find backsliding, right? I think we've had a lot of that here in the United States, as well. Right. And so I think from a Latin American's perspective, it's long been the case that people would say, "Rightfully, who is the US to try to promote democracy?" And as Alex said, that's probably more true today than for a long time at least.

Interviewer:

So examining the world as it is today, I just want to throw it out there, what gives you hope? What is keeping you hopeful about the state of the world and where we're going?

Alex:

Well, I'm generally an optimistic person and I'm always looking for stories where it looks like you can find some kind of hope. And I do think this pandemic, the end of it seems potentially easier to fathom these days of increasing vaccinations, and hopefully the spread of vaccines around the world will start to equalize. And in general, in the next couple of years, that can be behind us. And the extra charge of stress and bitterness over the last year, I think it's pretty hard to separate from coronavirus. The kind of broadness and violence of our politics. I have a lot of other explanations, but I think that's one of them. It's a win of the pandemic [inaudible 00:38:38] for everyone.

Alex:

And the number of things Biden has managed to reverse that were awful and anger inducing and horrifying in the last 4 years, I think has been substantial. And I think the stimulus bill has been even better than expected. So domestically, it seems like there are some things to feel good about. If we're looking at ways in which what goes on inside the United States matters for the rest of the world in all kinds of ways, maybe democracy might start looking good again if the Democrats are able to stop the tide of voting restrictions that we're seeing rising here. And depending on how things go in the next few years.

Alex:

I think one way of being hopeful is to simply say, "The story is not yet baked and we are not clearly doomed." And maybe we can find some hope from that summation at the moment.

Dorothy:

Yeah, I think we share that optimism. One specific thing I would point to is appointments. So Biden, I guess Alex and I share the view that he's been a better President for the United States and for the world than his predecessor. But ultimately, his leadership is obviously very important, but a big part of his role is assembling a good team. And when I look at the people that he is putting in charge in the area of foreign policy and thinking about the Americas, and thinking about [inaudible 00:40:09], in particular, I feel very optimistic. I think he fields things to the right people. And when I just casually talk to colleagues who are in other areas who are focused on climate change or environment, or even health policy, we see a lot of really good appointments. And that really makes me feel optimistic that some of these challenges can be, if not overcome or surpassed, that we've met with competence and intelligence and our best shot.

Interviewer:

Thank you both for joining today.

Dorothy:

Thank you so much for having me.

Brandon:

Thanks for listening to Understand This, a production of the Office of University Communications at The University of Pennsylvania. We hope you'll join us again for more interdisciplinary conversations about today's world. To keep up with Understand This and news at The University of Pennsylvania, follow @Penn on Twitter, or sign up for the Penn Today Newsletter.