Although it is on the edge of Nanjing, the backstage area of the Poly Grand Theatre has more than a touch of New England about it. In one dressing room, prison clothes and a faintly familiar flat cap hang from the wall. They will be worn by Mark Rowswell, a 59-year-old Canadian who, until he starts speaking Mandarin, looks as though he would only ever be reading from an English script.

Over four decades, Rowswell has carved out a career in the Chinese language. Breaking through on state-backed television in the late 1980s and 1990s, he was the first foreigner to be initiated into “crosstalk”, a specialised form of stand-up comedy. This year, after a three-year hiatus, he is touring the country in a Chinese-language production of The Shawshank Redemption. Every part is played by a foreigner.

Trying to learn Chinese is a bit like trying to learn tennis in a world with a billion Roger Federers. But Rowswell, even if he didn’t pick up a racket until he was 19, has the aura of a Wimbledon contender. Among the Chinese population, where he is known as Dashan, he easily ranks among the most famous living foreigners. If you impress a taxi driver, you might be flattered with a comparison. “The funny thing is, people actually do say that to me,” he tells me, a few hours before the play begins. “You speak good Chinese, but not as good as Dashan.”

His almost mythological status, like many myths, is tied up in the soul of a nation. As China reopened from Communist closure in the 1980s (“The next century belongs to China,” he recalls in the headlines of the time), few outsiders had learnt the basics of the language. Rowswell, who arrived in 1988 to study, was soon swept up in an often joyful process of rediscovering the wider world.

Today, the mood has shifted. During the Covid-19 pandemic, when Rowswell remained in Canada, China was once again cut off. Its relationship with the world’s superpower deteriorated sharply. North Americans are again few and far between: there are now fewer than 1,000 US university students in China, compared with more than 10,000 pre-pandemic. In this environment, the prospect of greater integration, linguistically or culturally, suddenly seems distant.

Meanwhile, political controls have tightened. The Shawshank Redemption, the 1994 prison drama based on a Stephen King novella that became one of the most celebrated American films, is a bold performance to stage. For some, it might be seen to embody a competing worldview. But Rowswell, despite finding himself in a different era, still believes in the pursuit of “commonality”.

“In English, we would say this is a story about freedom. In China, we would see it more as a story about hope,” he says. “But what is it that we hope for? Freedom.”

It was in 1988, shortly after graduating in Chinese from the University of Toronto, that Rowswell first played the part of Dashan. The name, which literally means “Big Mountain”, was given to him for a skit on state-run China Central Television in which two foreigners were speaking “vernacular street Chinese”.

He had a foreign accent, he says, but after another year of study he appeared with Chinese comedians. “Everyone remembered that image [from a year earlier],” he says. “That’s when I started to get the reputation for someone who speaks Chinese better than Chinese people.”

It is hard to imagine anyone elsewhere attaining such a reputation so quickly, or at all. But modern Mandarin Chinese, like the railways, the mass media, the schools and the newly reopened stock market, was part of a 20th-century nation-building exercise: an updated lingua franca. Many people in China were, and still are, native speakers of dialects that remain distinct from it.

I think there’s a very, very deep sense in China that they are misunderstood at a very fundamental level, and they never will be understood

The spectacle of a Canadian conveying the country’s officially defined sounds struck a chord. “This whole idea [of speaking] Chinese better than the Chinese was culturally reassuring,” says Rowswell. “I think there was a real angst about losing Chinese culture and language.”

He recalls the routine for crosstalk: “I would be the foreign pupil and I would be working with my Chinese teacher, but I would always be getting the better of my teacher . . . and that became kind of a comedic schtick.” 

This public image soon became “oppressive”. People were eager to test him. “It had become this sort of perfect, ‘Dashan opens his mouth and poetry comes out’ kind of thing, and I can’t do that in real life,” he says. “I can’t live up to the standard of a polished television show 24/7.”

The most striking thing about Rowswell is his voice, an instrument that remains finely tuned no matter how long he plays it. So, while out of China for three years during the pandemic, he set up a voice recording studio in Canada. 

His first project was a Chinese translation of the memoir of a Canadian doctor in Henan province in the 1930s (the Brits and Americans would be in Beijing or Shanghai, but “smaller countries like Canada” would be in the hinterlands). It was a “salute” to his own grandparents, Canadians who lived in China in the 1920s as Anglican missionaries. There was widespread tuberculosis at the time. “They came with three children and left with one,” he says.

After that, he soon moved on to classical Chinese poetry, which he recites to music. It might have been expected that he had already studied it, before or during his rise, as many western university students of Chinese do. “It’s too complicated, it’s too advanced,” he says. He has a database of several hundred poems by now.

His recitations, which he memorises (he struggles to read from a script, and suspects he has a “little bit of dyslexia”), have tens of millions of views on social media platforms. Many of the comments remark that he is now “old”, which, not wanting to be “frozen in time”, he doesn’t mind. Others remark, as they did decades ago, on the quality of his Chinese. He says the poems are recognised as being performed to a “professional level”, rather than being a “novelty”.

“As a performer, in a piece that I’ve worked on, I can achieve native-level fluency,” he says. “But not in regular life.”

What does he lack? He often makes “a mental note of an interesting expression” when listening to others speak, “because I would think, I could express that idea, but I wouldn’t express it the same way, and that’s a much [more] elegant way.

“I’ll search for words, and maybe I’ll use repetitive patterns of expression that are more limited than a native speaker.”

Speaking is one challenge, but understanding is another matter. In a culture that venerates age, people try to test him less often now. But he has also embraced imperfection. “I try in my work now to be sincere,” he says, “and when I don’t understand something, just to tell people I don’t understand.”

“Don’t you think too,” he adds, “part of the thing about having an international experience is you learn how to operate in an environment where you don’t necessarily understand everything?”

For Rowswell, the experience has been international by design. In the mid-1990s, he moved back to Canada with his Chinese wife and two children. Even during the golden era of integration, he travelled to the mainland for around half the year, rather than living there.

Is China more closed now? “Certainly.” But he “never expected China was going to become a western democracy or anything”. As with his own career, he sees the internet as the driver of change. “It seems to have made it more important for us to find an identity, because it’s kind of scary [for] the world to be so open.”

In contrast to Canada, he says, China has “such a strong sense of self-identity” and emphasises difference when comparing cultures. “I think there’s a very, very deep sense in China that they are misunderstood at a very fundamental level, and they never will be understood,” he adds. But sometimes, he is told that “foreigners just don’t get it, except for Dashan”.

His own internationalism, meanwhile, seems embedded in his upbringing in postwar Canada. He says he “totally failed” with compulsory French at school, though an hour earlier, when describing his grandfather’s service in the first world war, he pronounced Ypres with a certain aplomb. Canada was, in his childhood, an “immigrant society”, one where you’re exposed to “all different kinds of cultures”.

“I had friends who were from India, or Hungary, or Lithuania, and they spoke their native language at home with their parents and then they came to school and they spoke English,” he says. “So that’s why I started studying Chinese in the beginning . . . I started to just really think, man, I should learn a different language too.”

A few hours later, at least among the audience in the Nanjing Poly Grand Theatre, the sense of New England is less palpable. The foreign actors deliver their lines in impressively standard Mandarin, and the story, complete with Bible references, remains intact.

Zhang Guoli, the director and only Chinese person to speak, is introduced on to the stage by Rowswell. He thanks the cast, in a Mandarin that is somehow the same, and somehow different. “They love China,” he says. One young actor spontaneously raises his hands in acknowledgment.

Is this, I wonder, a glimpse of China dressed up in a foreign costume? For Rowswell, who is not well known outside the country, it was another performance among many: part of a long, unusual career, with which almost everyone in the theatre would have been so familiar that it does not, really, seem unusual at all.

“That’s one of the problems I have with doing foreign media interviews,” he says. “The readers at least, or the audience, don’t have that background, so it’s always a new story, it’s always a novelty story.”

Dashan, Rowswell reflects, has always been a “specific entity” — a character who exists within a Chinese universe.

“It only exists within that universe,” he adds. “Even this article, this is sort of outside of the universe.”

Thomas Hale is the FT’s Shanghai correspondent.

Additional reporting by Wang Xueqiao

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The main character in Coriolanus, which is on at the National Theatre in London, is what we would nowadays call a fascist. He respects very little in the field of human endeavour outside of military service. He begrudges the plebeians their grain.

At the end of the evening, though, it isn’t clear that Shakespeare disowns him. Never the most loved or the most lyrical of his plays, what Coriolanus does is bring out the dramatist’s talent for evasion: what John Keats called, in a nice way, his “negative capability”. To write 38 plays without revealing a worldview or even a consistent set of biases would rate as a feat of artistic detachment in any age. In 2024, when a museum exhibition can feel like a sermon, and zeitgeist fiction of the Sally Rooney type bends your ear about capitalism, it seems godlike. 

Why is art, in the main, so bad at politics? At best, what it has to say is commonplace, as when Martin Amis discovered in the 1980s that nuclear weapons exist and have some unlovely properties. At worst, it is so strident as to have an undergraduate activist quality. Either way, banal or bonkers, there is an itch to venture an opinion but no corresponding gift for insight: a sort of positive incapability. 

Each world, art and politics, is almost set up to be unintelligible to the other

My guess is this. The creative act requires prolonged solitude, whereas politics begins when two people encounter each other and find their preferences conflicting. It is inescapably social. First principles have some purchase inside the study or the atelier, but less in the public square, where all is fudge and half-loaves. (And, above all, practical detail, with which no artist can have much patience, at least without turning their work into journalism.)   

Each world, art and politics, is therefore almost set up to be unintelligible to the other. Rather than the political naïveté of artists, we might just as well note that electoral geniuses, from FDR to Tony Blair, tend not to have the richest aesthetic lives. And that under-achievers in politics, such as Anthony Eden, often do. It is a question of whether you are ultimately interior or exterior. 

The one “political” painting I have seen up close that fathoms something of the messiness of politics is Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat. It is a picture by a French revolutionary of a French revolutionary who has been killed by a French revolutionary for being the wrong sort of French revolutionary. Besides its visual effect — all that bare space, suggestive of republican austerity — what comes across is the self-consuming nature of high ideals, the uselessness of good versus evil as a frame for understanding public life. More argumentative paintings, by Goya, by Picasso, by David himself in his earlier phase, seem one-eyed and didactic next to it. And what was David? A political practitioner, a social being. 

It isn’t always necessary to reach back centuries to find an undogmatic mind at work. There is a deflating moment early in the new Alan Hollinghurst novel when you think he is going to yak on about the folly of Brexit. (He’d be right to.) What follows are hundreds of pages of supreme and only tangentially newsy writing, for which it was worth breaking my rule of letting a decade of historical winnowing go by before trying a novel.  

Still, overall, the past is the best escape from the browbeating tone of so much culture now. Next month is the 100th anniversary of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. The book boils down to a recurring squabble between a creature of the Enlightenment and a mystical reactionary. Moby-Dick aside, it is the hardest slog I have ever waded through, but I return to it most winters, in part because of the enigma of where the author stands. Mann’s achievement is Shakespearean, in that he illuminates the process of politics — the trade-offs, the complex motivations, the double-edged nature of individual charisma — while recusing himself from ultimate judgment.  

If he had a clear view, would his work still beguile us? I doubt it. Whether art lasts or not rests to some extent on its ambiguity. This is the selfish case for making non-argumentative art, and it is odd, if also flattering, that so many artists prefer the columnist’s role.

Email Janan at janan.ganesh@ft.com

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Reuters

‘Its appeal might also be its weakness’

‘They controlled my computer’

Last week, a Nasa spacecraft set off for Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, in search of signs of life beneath the moon’s icy crust. The previous day, SpaceX engineers caught a booster rocket with mechanical arms on its return from a test flight, potentially making interplanetary travel easier than ever. Space exploration has been much in the news this month — but, as two new books remind us, it also gripped the public’s imagination at the height of the cold war.

In 1962 Venus became the first planet in our solar system to receive a radio message from Earth. Transmitted from a Soviet radar complex, it consisted of three words in Russian: “Peace, Lenin, USSR.”

Well might we wonder what the little green inhabitants of Venus, had there been any, would have made of this. But the message was not really aimed at extraterrestrials. Rather, as a triumphant article in the Soviet armed forces newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda made clear, it was intended to demonstrate to people on Earth “a new victory for Soviet science and technology”.

In Mixed Signals, Rebecca Charbonneau tells this story as a way of illustrating that, during the cold war, US and Soviet efforts to communicate with aliens in space were as much about superpower competition on Earth as about locating those elusive beings. A historian at the American Institute of Physics, Charbonneau has written a well-researched and splendidly entertaining account of humanity’s search for alien life in the era of the US-Soviet “space race”.

The other book under review, Ines Geipel’s Beautiful New Sky, draws attention to the darker side of science in the cold war. She exposes the highly secretive programmes in communist East Germany in which researchers conducted risky, even cruel experiments on humans and animals to find ways of enabling cosmonauts to endure long-distance space travel.

At one level, Charbonneau’s book is a heartening tale. Despite their ideological and geopolitical rivalry, the US and the Soviet Union often co-operated from the 1960s to the cold war’s end in the late 1980s in an effort to discover and communicate with extraterrestrial life. Scientists such as Carl Sagan, the American astronomer and author, and Iosif Shklovsky, his Soviet Ukrainian friend and opposite number, thought they were engaged in a common quest that transcended national identity.

As Charbonneau explains, there were good practical reasons for such collaboration. Earth’s rotation meant that continuous observation of an extraterrestrial source with ground-based telescopes was impossible from one country alone.

However, the space race and the search for aliens always had a military dimension. The powerful signals detection and analysis capabilities of the equipment used in this search made them ideal for military surveillance in deep space, Charbonneau says.

Sometimes the search had embarrassing consequences. In 1965 Tass, the official Soviet news agency, reported the potential discovery of an alien supercivilisation on the radio star CTA-102. This inspired the Byrds, one of the era’s biggest rock groups, to write a song about it. But there were no aliens — CTA-102 is just one of more than 1mn quasars (highly luminous galactic cores) so far discovered in the universe.

Charbonneau trawls thoroughly through the available records to tell her story, but acknowledges future historians will probably find out more. When she visited Russia in 2019, she says, she “was unable to access a single scientific archive”. Under President Vladimir Putin, Soviet-style secretiveness and suspicion of foreigners are back with a vengeance.

Geipel, a former sprinter and long jumper who was one of thousands of victims of East Germany’s covert doping of athletes, has produced a powerful, at times deeply moving book about that now defunct state’s sinister involvement in space research. She provides an important corrective to recent revisionist accounts of East Germany as a place where life wasn’t so bad after all, even though the regime was a communist dictatorship marked by the omnipresence of the Stasi secret police and slavish loyalty to the Soviet Union.

As Geipel writes, the great myth was that everything East Germany did was for the cause of progress and peace. “Even after 1989, this myth was able to survive, remain intact and even regenerate itself in the face of all sources that indicated a different story,” she says.

East Germany’s research on human endurance was a militarised effort, with the Stasi’s keen involvement, from start to finish. The goal was to forge “a clear path towards a New Man created through complex chemical substances”, Geipel writes. Researchers realised that anabolic steroids — also used to dope athletes — could combat muscular atrophy in space.

Experiments with neuropeptides — tiny chemical messengers — were designed to remap the limits of human existence, improving the body’s ability to withstand extreme heat, cold, exhaustion, loneliness and mental disorientation. Speech analysis devices intended to analyse cosmonauts’ psychological state were of especial interest to the Stasi, as they could also be used to monitor critics of communism.

In all this, western countries were not entirely blameless. After Germany’s reunification in 1990, investigators discovered that almost half of 35 doping substances used in the east’s sports laboratories had originated in the west. Moreover, as Charbonneau reminds us, the CIA conducted experiments on humans with mind-bending drugs such as LSD.

Both books make clear that science can be turned to terrible as well as noble purposes. If there are indeed aliens somewhere in the universe, perhaps they too know that.

Mixed Signals: Alien Communication Across the Iron Curtain by Rebecca Charbonneau Polity £25, 256 pages

Beautiful New Sky: Fabricating Bodies for Outer Space in East Germany’s Military Laboratories by Ines Geipel Polity £20, 178 pages

Tony Barber is the FT’s European comment editor

Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen

This is an audio transcript of the FT News Briefing podcast episode: ‘Election denialism is still in style’

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Sonja Hutson
The January 6th attack on the US capitol was unprecedented. It was also the culmination of Donald Trump’s months-long refusal to accept the 2020 election results. And with just a few weeks until voting day this year, Trump and his allies are using the same playbook to cast doubts on the election. This is Swamp Notes, the weekly podcast from the FT News Briefing, where we talk about all of the things happening in the 2024 US presidential election. I’m Sonja Hutson. And this week we’re asking: is the US ready for another contested election? Here with me to discuss is Eva Xiao. She is a data journalist at the FT. Hi, Eva.

Eva Xiao
Hey. Glad to be here.

Sonja Hutson
Glad to have you. We’ve also got Joe Miller. He is the FT’s US legal correspondent. Hi, Joe.

Joe Miller
Hi. Good to be with you.

Sonja Hutson
OK. So before we look ahead to next month’s election, I want to take a look back really quickly first. You know, we all know how Donald Trump’s refusal to accept the 2020 election ended. But Joe, how did it start? What sort of legal challenges did Trump and his team bring forward in the weeks after the election?

Joe Miller
Well, it started in many ways before the 2020 election, when the Trump administration started to sow doubts about the integrity of the process. And soon after the result, Trump and his acolytes filed a flurry of lawsuits across the US and various states over 60 lawsuits alleging a broad sort of smorgasbord of fraud from, you know, disqualified voters being on voter rolls to counting fraud. And we should say that the vast majority of these were ultimately unsuccessful, but they did cause a lot of chaos in those weeks and months after the election. And at the same time, the Trump administration and its co-writers were pressuring election officials around the country to find extra votes. So there was a sort of concerted effort at every layer of federal and state government.

Sonja Hutson
Now, I want to come back to the present to 2024. Eva, you recently wrote in FT Big Read called ‘How Trump Allies are Sowing Election Doubts.’ so what’s the answer? How are they sowing doubts this time around? And how does it compare to what happened in 2020?

Eva Xiao
I think what’s really interesting is that if you just look at lawsuits and legal activity from rightwing organisations, but also, you know, the Republican National Committee, they’ve been a lot more proactive this election cycle. So traditionally, actually, pro-voting groups are the most proactive in filing lawsuits. But in the last two years, rightwing organisations have really caught up. And the concern there is that, you know, a lot of these lawsuits did not pass, a lot of them are dismissed. But the concern is that just filing them, creating conversation around these voter fraud allegations can kind of raise the spectre of this extremely unlikely risk.

Sonja Hutson
Yeah. And I just want to make clear, when we say that, you know, these lawsuits don’t go anywhere or they’re, you know, batted down, that means that the court didn’t actually find any evidence of the fraud that the lawsuit is alleging. Right?

Eva Xiao
Exactly.

Sonja Hutson
Joe, I want to ask you, what do you think it is about the American electoral system that makes it possible for these, you know, oftentimes baseless claims of fraud to spread so far?

Joe Miller
I think at the heart of it, it’s that most Americans, even very well-informed Americans and even people who pay more attention to elections than the average person have very little idea of how the system really works. And that is almost by design. It changes not just state by state, but sometimes county by county. And there are so many layers to this. And the power is devolved all the way down to the local level that it’s very easy for groups with various agendas to cry foul and say, you know, could you believe that, you know, this box landed up over here or that these people involved in counting the votes are, you know, registered Democrats or whatever it is. And, you know, even for someone like myself, or even those trying to look into this for the last few weeks. You can spend weeks and weeks and weeks trying to understand the system and you still feel like you’re learning something new every day. And, you know, I think that in a country that is so divided and where there are lots of, you know, sort of bad faith actors trying to sow doubt and to soak it.

Eva Xiao
Something that was striking in reporting the stories. I think the decentralised aspect of the US election system can also kind of be exploited by, let’s say, you know, media personalities or influencers or what have you, who are kind of spreading voter fraud conspiracies because, you know, there’s thousands of local election officials who actually run the elections. And a typo somewhere. It could just get blown into something really big.

Sonja Hutson
Yeah, that’s something that really strikes me about a lot of these stories where, like you read the initial claim and you’re like, that does seem super fishy. But then if you dig even just a little bit deeper into what’s actually going on, there is a reasonable explanation for these claims.

Eva Xiao
Yeah. Like one of the challenges that we got from like a public records request was, you know, pointing out over 100 people who are registered to a church address, right? And then when you call the church, they say, yeah, you know, we let people mail their stuff or list us as a, you know, physical address to receive things because, you know, some people experiencing homelessness, they need a physical address. Society is complex. And maybe on the surface it looks very suspicious. But when you dig down deeper, it actually just kind of reflects those complexities.

Sonja Hutson
Joe, you recently interviewed Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger. People may know his name when he became a major player in the 2020 election controversy after Trump told him to, quote, find the 11,780 votes that he needed to win the state. Is Raffensperger worried about what might happen in Georgia this time around?

Joe Miller
Well to hear him say it. He claims he’s not worried at all. I suppose that’s his job as secretary of state. He’s in charge of Georgia’s elections. He’s the highest official in charge of Georgia’s elections. And what he’s been doing pretty much for the last four years, he’s been reelected in the interim, I should say, is to go around and to tell Georgians that their elections are safe. Early voting began this week in Georgia, and on this first day on Tuesday, it’s smashed any previous record. I think over 310,000 Georgia voters cast their ballots, which is more than double the 2020 election.

Sonja Hutson
OK. So Raffensperger says that he’s not concerned about the election this year, but I guess, does he have reason to be, I mean, has anything changed in Georgia since 2020 that might make his job more difficult?

Joe Miller
Well, what has changed is that the state election board, which is this kind of strange body which sort of runs the elections, it doesn’t have full authority over it. The authority is split between the secretary of state, between Brad Raffensperger and this election board. And this election board is made up of five members, four of whom are Republicans and three of whom are election deniers. And they have sought to essentially throw as much sand in the engine of the Georgia election process ever since they got their seats on this board. And, you know, they’re so closely co-ordinated with the Trump campaign that Trump has named these three people in his rally in Georgia and praised them as standing up for democracy, et cetera. In many ways, you know, two bodies here with different messages. You have Brad Raffensperger saying, you know, I’m in charge of these elections and I can tell you they’re safe. And you have the state election board out there trying to pass last minute measures and more or less signalling that without those measures, Georgia’s election integrity is imperilled.

Sonja Hutson
I’m also curious, what have election administrators at the state and local level across the country done to prevent a rerun of what we saw happen in 2020?

Eva Xiao
Basically, you know, the last election, there was no one thought that there would be any kind of threat of violence where there would be an attempt to overturn election results. And this time, it’s kind of all anyone can think about. There’s been a lot of work on the security aspect. You know, there are places that put up bulletproof glass.

Sonja Hutson
Wow. That’s really telling about the state of this issue in the country.

Eva Xiao
Yeah. And there’s you know, there’s there have been incidents. I think there’s one in September, actually, where, you know, unknown powdered substances were mailed to election officials. So all of that has driven like this huge effort to beef up security protocols. I think another aspect is just even increasing transparency with voters. So obviously, a lot of these local election officials are getting a ton of questions about various voter fraud conspiracies or, you know, misinformation that they read or hear about online. And so a lot of election officials there kind of tactic. They’ve really tried to kind of open their doors. They’ll do more town halls. There’s kind of been a lot of efforts just around the country.

Sonja Hutson
What about on the federal level? I mean, the catalyst for January 6th was this, you know, counting of the electoral college votes. Can you talk a little bit about what’s been done on the federal level to prevent something like that?

Eva Xiao
There’s something called the Electoral Count Act, which is kind of this old piece of legislation. And it had a lot of loopholes and ambiguities in it. And so in 2022, Congress passed the Electoral Count Reform Act. And the goal was to really clarify a lot of those ambiguities. So, for example, it makes it absolutely clear that the vice-president’s role in the electoral vote counting process is like ministerial. You know, they don’t have authority to disrupt that process.

Sonja Hutson
Which is what then president Donald Trump wanted, then vice-president Mike Pence, to do.

Eva Xiao
Exactly. So a lot of it was just kind of tightening up different gaps that were revealed in 2020.

Sonja Hutson
All right. We’re going to take a quick break, but we’ll be right back.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[ELON’S SPIES PODCAST TRAILER PLAYING]

Sonja Hutson
So given all that we’ve talked about today, what do you two think is the likelihood that there is a significant issue after this election? I mean, I guess the question that, you know, I think we’ve all been asking since 2020 is will the system hold? What do you think?

Joe Miller
I’m not an election law expert, but the election law experts I have spoken to all seem very confident that ultimately any challenges will fail and that the election will be correctly certified. And that tends to undermine that will all, you know, ultimately meet a bitter end. The question is whether that is significant enough because, you know, just the attempts to sow doubt have been successful enough that, you know, a large proportion of the country still believes that the 2020 election was stolen. And, you know, as Eve has been laying out this time, it’s an even more concerted effort across the country and at local levels to start to inject out into the system. So, you know, will anyone care that the challenges to the election results are thrown out a few months later or a few weeks later or by then, will those people be convinced that it was stolen and we’re sort of back to square one? You know, I think that is the bigger concern than whether these legal challenges themselves will be successful. I think the consensus is that they ultimately will not.

Sonja Hutson
So I guess lastly, I’m just curious if you’re a voter going in to cast your ballot this fall, how should you be thinking about your vote and what happens to it?

Joe Miller
Well, you may be able to tell from my accent that I did not get a vote in this country.

Sonja Hutson
Hypothetical (laughter).

Joe Miller
(Laughter) Yeah, hypothetically. I mean, I think that in some ways I would feel more confident this time around just because of the amount of sunlight that’s been shone on the process. I feel like there are an awful lot more people out there who are cognisant of the risks. So I would feel marginally more confident. I know that would be a spare comfort to people who are queueing up outside polling stations and facing intimidation or things like that. But generally speaking, it seems to me that the amount of activism around this is just supercharged compared to four years ago.

Eva Xiao
You know, I think in our conversation we haven’t really talked about Covid, and that was a big part of the 2020 elections, too, right? Like kind of running elections through the pandemic. And a lot of actually, I would say, good benefits of pandemic era policies. You know, there’s been a huge expansion of mail-in ballots. There’s also been, you know, states that have expanded voting rights or have made it easier to do things like early voting, which is really popular. Right. So you don’t just have to queue up on the day. We spent most of this episode talking kind of about things that are concerning. But I would also just like to point out that there have been changes that will also make this upcoming election hopefully more convenient and safer for people.

Sonja Hutson
All right. Well, I think we have done the impossible, which is to end an episode about election denialism on in a relatively optimistic note. So I want to thank our guests. Eva Xiao. She’s a data journalist at the FT. Thanks, Eva.

Eva Xiao
No worries. Any time.

Sonja Hutson
And Joe Miller, he’s our US legal correspondent. Thanks, Joe.

Joe Miller
Thank you.

Sonja Hutson
This was Swamp Notes, the US politics show from the FT News Briefing. If you want to sign up for the Swamp Notes newsletter, we’ve got a link to that in the show notes. Our show is mixed and produced by Ethan Plotkin. It’s also produced by Lauren Fedor and Marc Filippino. Special thanks, as always to Pierre Nicholson. I’m your host, Sonja Hutson. Our executive producer is Topher Forhecz, and Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. Original music by Hannis Brown. Check back next week for more US political analysis from the Financial Times.