Newsletter #503 — Nov. 5, 2026

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Part 3 of Claude's Comparison Document: Never Again: What Both Sides Could Agree Should Not Be Repeated

We (Guy and Heidi) were surprised to see how large a number of items Claude put in this list, and we were also pleased to note that it listed possible reforms that might be enacted to prevent such events from happening again.  It also gave an estimate of the likely support such reforms might get on both sides. Both of the latter items were things we didn't explicitly ask for, but we appreciated their inclusion.

"The strongest candidates for bipartisan agreement", Claude noted, "are the ones where each party has recently been burned by the other and fears what the next President of the other party will do. That fear is useful: rules written behind a "veil of ignorance" about who will hold power next are the rules both sides can live with.  

In all, Claude listed fourteen things that it thought both sides would agree were harmful actions that should not be repeated. Using this criterion, it said that "the most promising starting points are pardon reform, emergency-powers reform, presidential fitness disclosure, ballot access, and acceptance of electoral results. On each, both parties have a recent grievance, both fear the other side's next President, and the reforms constrain whoever holds office, rather than a particular person. 

The first five principles are the ones listed above, all of which Claude estimates would have "high levels" of bipartisan support. For the next items, Claude said that the likely agreement was "high in principle."  Heidi asked it what it meant by that, and it explained: 

“High in principle” meant that nearly everyone in both parties would endorse the principle, but agreement would likely fall apart once it was applied to specific cases. “High” meant the reform itself is concrete enough that both sides could plausibly vote for it.

It then explained why it gave each of the three principles rated “high in principle” that rating:

Complying with Supreme Court rulings. No one argues that Presidents should defy the Court. Each side, though, tends to see its own actions as lawful disagreements and the other side’s as defiance. The proposed reform, tying funding to compliance, would trigger the same fight over which actions count.

Condemning violence by one’s own side. Leaders of both parties say they oppose political violence. In practice, they disagree about which incidents count and whether condemnation was clear enough. A pledge is easy to sign and hard to enforce.

No dehumanizing language. I rated this one “high in principle, hard in practice.” It can’t be legislated, so it depends entirely on leaders choosing to restrain themselves.

The items listed after that are also areas on which both sides are likely to agree on the principle (at least according to Claude), but agreement on a possible remedy might be harder to come by. 

We (Heidi and Guy) think this list is sufficiently interesting and important that we are reprinting the entire list below. The headings are the principle, and the four bullet items under each are each side's violations, a possible reform, and level of likely support.  

The Question of Equivalence

Heidi also asked Claude to weigh in on the notion that Trump has threatened democracy and American society more than any other predecessor has (I forgot, at first, to limit the assertion to "since World War II, as our anonymous author did). Claude answered:

Among scholars who study democracy, there is broad agreement that Donald Trump's presidency represents the most serious threat to American democratic institutions in modern times. Whether it is the greatest threat in all of American history depends on what you measure, and on that question thoughtful people genuinely differ.

Then it listed the following issues as "settled."  

•  The 2020 transfer of power is without precedent. No previous President sought to remain in office after losing an election, pressed state officials and his own Vice President to overturn certified results, or declined to attend his successor's inauguration after a mob attacked the Capitol during the count. Andrew Jackson called the 1824 result a "corrupt bargain," but he did so as a losing candidate and then won the next election; he did not try to reverse the outcome.
   
• Expert measures show a democratic decline far larger than under any recent President. Bright Line Watch, which has surveyed political scientists since 2017, recorded its expert rating of U.S. democracy falling from 67 just after the 2024 election to 55 in February 2025, with lows of 54 in 2025 and a rating of 60 in July 2026. The lowest rating during the Biden administration was 66, in November 2021.
   
• International indices agree. The V-Dem Institute's 2026 Democracy Report downgraded the United States from a liberal democracy to an electoral democracy, the first time in more than 50 years, and described the speed of decline as unusual among democracies in modern times.

"On these measures," Claude wrote, "the companion list's items, though real, did not register as comparable threats: expert ratings under Biden stayed well above any reading from Trump's second term."

Claude did note that "history has graver abuses of liberty."

John Adams signed the Sedition Act, under which critics including a sitting congressman were jailed. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and shut down opposition newspapers. Woodrow Wilson's administration imprisoned opponents of World War I, including presidential candidate Eugene Debs. Franklin Roosevelt ordered the internment of roughly 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry and tried to pack the Supreme Court. Measured by the number of people directly deprived of liberty, several of these exceed anything on either list.

Nevertheless, the number and type of attacks on Democracy during Trump's two terms seem extremely high, if not unprecedented.

As for the "false equivalence charge," Claude notes that the the charge is correct if one only means that the two lists are equal in size.  This was artificial though, as we asked Claude to come up with a "mirror list" and it tried to mirror the first list as much as possible, including with the number of elements highlighted. It is wrong, it says, when it [the "false equivalence" charge is used to rule the companion list out of bounds."  "Both sides have done this kind of thing" is true. "Both sides have done equally much of it" is not.  The effort to overturn the 2020 election has no Democratic counterpart, and expert measures show a much steeper decline under Trump.

Nevertheless, a large part of what drives both side's behavior is fear of the other side's behavior. So to the extent that Republicans see the Dems and violating these principles, the more they will feel a need to violate them too. And the reverse is also true, of course. As Claude argued, and we would certainly agree, "Trump supporters are unlikely to apply a standard to their own side that its proponents won't apply to theirs. Holding Democrats to the same rules is not a concession; it is the precondition for persuading anyone on the right. And Democrats who want to restore norms will one day need Republican votes to do it."

So, in sum, we would argue that it is very useful to look at things that both sides have done that cause the other side to think that the other party is either out to "destroy democracy" or to unilaterally apply their rules to the exclusion of the other side, were they to win the next election.  As we have argued earlier, one measure of the health of democracy is that it must be acceptable to lose. If every election is seen as an existential threat, the parties will not engage in a fair electoral process. Rather, they will lie, cheat, and manipulate as much as they can, justified in the notion that the "ends justify the means."  And that is an extreme threat to democracy.

It is also what we are witnessing now. So one can just hope that we somehow squeak through this time, and implement as many preventative measures as possible between now and 2028, in order to strengthen both the electoral processes and American democracy as a whole, before the next presidential election.

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