#206 — A Conversation with David Frum
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Summary
David Frum joins me to talk about his new book, Trumpocalypse, a book that focuses on the Trump presidency and what it means for the future of the country. He also talks about why he thinks people should vote against Donald Trump and why they should vote for a different candidate. And he explains why he doesn t think that s a good idea. Sam Harris is a writer, essayist, and podcast producer. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, and The New Republic. He is the author of several books, including Trumpocracy, which focuses on Trump s rise to power and what comes after. He is also a regular contributor to CNN and the Wall Street Journal, and is a frequent contributor to conservative publications such as The Weekly Standard and National Post. He has been a member of the Conservative Party and served in the Reagan administration, the George W. Bush administration, and the House of Representatives, and to the Canadian government, including stints in both the cabinets of both houses of Congress and the vice president s office in the George H.J. H.W. Carter administration. He s been a frequent guest on conservative media outlets such as Fox News and NPR, and on the radio show Morning Joe, and he is a regular guest on the conservative radio host on conservative talk shows such as Morning Joe and conservative talk radio. The View From the Ground Ground Zero and the Morning Joe. His latest book, Trumpocalypse is out now, which is available for purchase on Amazon Prime and elsewhere, and will be available for pre-order starting on October 31st, 2019. to be available on October 19th, 2020, and available on Audible, October 20th, 2019, and October 27, 2020 and October 28, 2020 on Amazon, October 29th, and November 28, 2019 on the 27th, 2019 on Prime Video on the 28th and September 2019, and so on October 30th, 2018 on the 29th and October, 2019 on the 31st and September, 2019 at 7/day, 2019 and so far in the 30th and the day after July 5th, all day on the 26th and so much more! Thanks for listening to this episode of Making Sense? to make sense of it? and to share it with the world? Thank you so much, Sam Harris and I really appreciate it, and as always, thank you for listening?
Transcript
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You have been hammering Trump hard, and it is necessary work.
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I've written quite a few books, but I wrote a book that came out 2018 called Trumpocracy,
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And this book is called Trumpocalypse, and it's a study of the Trump finale and what comes
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Well, it's great to have you on to talk about this, because as you know, and everyone will
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know, we are under the shadow of a presidential election that seems especially consequential.
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I guess whatever your view of reality here, you must think this election will matter unless
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you're a nihilist, or maybe especially if you're a nihilist.
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If you want to tear everything down, there is a good way to do it by voting wrongly here.
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The problem I keep failing to adequately confront every time I talk about Trump, and I think
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you know I do that vehemently, although now sparingly, is that it does seem somewhat hopeless
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I'm painfully aware of how boring it is to simply sing to the choir.
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And I want to do some good in the world here with conversations of this kind.
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I want to convince people to see Trump as we do, because I think we have an accurate
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view of him, and it matters to understand what has happened here and what it would mean
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What can we say at the beginning here to try to inoculate our listeners against some ways
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There will be an assumption on the part of many that this is a partisan bias where we
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Well, let me say, I have spent my life, and it's now a lengthening life, in the conservative
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As a teenager, I was supported Ford over Carter in 1976.
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I, the first time I was ever involved in an American election, I'm originally from Canada,
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was in 1980 when I knocked on doors for Ronald Reagan in the town, my college town.
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I've been involved with conservative parties in Canada and Great Britain.
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For me, the theme of the Trump years has been the discovery.
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And I think this is so true for everyone who thinks about politics.
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And they're often potentially in conflict, but we don't, we're not forced to confront
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And then comes a moment where we say, well, I believe this, and I believe that, and I
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So maybe the way to start talking about this in a way that's useful, as you recommend,
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is not to talk about what we don't like, but to talk about what we do.
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And I hope that that will resonate with some of the people who are on the fence that you
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I grew up, as I mentioned, in Canada, under the shield of that mighty American system of
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On my father's side, particularly, we lost the vast majority of our family to the Nazi
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We understand intimately what a world that is not, where justice isn't safeguarded by
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power, how justice in a world not safeguarded by power, justice becomes a victim.
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I was formed by the extraordinary explosion of global prosperity in the 1970s and 1980s through
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The happiest moment of my political life was that moment in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came
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down and went from South Korea and Chile and South Africa and Eastern and Central Europe,
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it seemed like we were moving the whole planet to a world, a place of greater security and
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And I think that altogether adds up to the most stupendous human political achievement of
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Things got, it didn't serve everyone equally well.
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And as that development advanced, it got bumpy and we went through the 9-11 crisis and the
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war in Iraq, which I was a supporter of and that alienated so many people, and then the
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global financial crisis, and then the strains and stresses of mass migration and unequal
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And so it's not crazy that there was a reaction to that.
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Donald Trump positioned himself at the head of that parade.
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I spent a lot of time in the 2000s warning Republicans that their message was not responsive to where
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But Trump now is putting at jeopardy everything I cherish, down to such basics as the integrity
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Yeah, you know, an analogy comes to mind which would characterize my view of that jeopardy
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and also how a criticism of Trump need not entail any partisanship.
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Just to cut through the partisanship algebra pretty quickly, as you did, you are a Republican
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or have been a Republican, so, you know, obviously your partisanship, if anything, runs the other
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I have never voted Republican, but there's absolutely nothing I have said or will say about Trump
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that would apply to someone like Mitt Romney or John McCain or any other normal Republican.
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So, again, it's just, it's not coming from a partisan place in me at all.
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And an analogy occurs to me that captures this and some of the risk you just cited.
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I mean, just imagine you're on an airplane cruising at 30,000 feet and at some point near the end of the
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flight, you see the pilot come stumbling out of the cockpit and he appears just visibly drunk or insane.
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You know, let's say he gropes one of the flight attendants.
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He gets on the PA system and he begins bragging about how rich he is and maybe he starts castigating
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You know, he might say, if you want me to land this plane, you have to be nicer to me.
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I mean, something completely out of keeping with the role and responsibility he has to
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Then he'll, you know, just to continue this analogy, he could launch into a conspiracy theory
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about how the airline is really run by a shadow group of maintenance workers who have been
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And he thinks they've been monkeying with the instruments in the cockpit.
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He could send him to the back of the plane and tell him not to move, right?
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And he could do a dozen other things like that in the span of an hour that prove beyond
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any possibility of doubt that this isn't a normal situation, right?
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And now when it comes time to land this plane, the danger of something going wrong has been
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And you are worried about this, quite reasonably so.
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And you're appalled to find that control over so many lives, yours among them, has been given
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to somebody who is quite obviously unfit for the job, monstrously unfit for the job.
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And now you find yourself worrying about this out loud.
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And notice that there are people on the plane who are inspired by this pilot's antics and
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You know, he's now threatening to punch some old woman in the face and people are, you know,
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And then people are turning to you as you begin to worry about this out loud.
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And they're claiming that you have pilot derangement syndrome and they should just stop whining
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and enjoy the flight and that Captain Trump is making flying great again, right?
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You're worried about obvious incompetence and distraction from the task at hand and coming
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at a moment where everyone can least afford it, right?
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I mean, just we're in the middle of a global pandemic and a global economic emergency, right?
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Now, the question is, and I'm posing this to our listeners, how much of your concern about
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not dying in a plane crash is due to political partisanship?
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Just, it is obvious that that's not even a variable, right?
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And that, you know, you may disagree with me and David here, right, in our view of Trump
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and the situation and the importance of institutions and political norms.
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And I mean, we'll get into that, but the conversation we're about to have is coming from a place of
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concern about our society being able to respond intelligently to real risks.
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And again, it is our view that we're being led by somebody who is obviously a fraud and
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a con man and an incompetent and a morbidly self-interested person.
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And that has been obvious from day one, but it's becoming completely untenable to deny that
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So with that, you know, long preamble, David, you've described, you describe in your book,
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Trumpism, you know, i.e. support for the president and the kind of social movement that has kept
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him rather impervious to the kinds of criticisms we will launch here.
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You've described it as an affinity fraud, but what do you mean by that?
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I mean that people who study organized crime or white collar crime will note that fraudsters
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often take advantage of people who are in some way similar to them and sympathetic to them.
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So Bernie Madoff, the great, you know, Ponzi scheme on Wall Street, he stole from people
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like Elie Wiesel, people who are involved in fellow Jews, people involved in collective
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Jewish life, and Madoff, with his stealing, would often be very generous to Jewish institutions.
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And when you look at victims, overwhelmingly, unfortunately, Jewish, and what you will find
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often with other kinds of schemes like that, that people prey on their own.
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They create an affinity and they take advantage of that.
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And that is something that Donald Trump has done with many conservative-minded Americans
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who would normally, you know, when you think about the Republican Party, I mean, historically,
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the Republican Party famously, you know, what's the joke?
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Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line.
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It chooses people with long histories in the party.
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They are always choosing outsiders, you know, governors of Arkansas in their 40s, a guy who
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makes it from the Illinois State Senate to the U.S. Senate and has been there for a couple
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The Republicans pick, well, let's take the guy who was vice president last time and make
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And all of that orderliness, that quest for predictability.
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I mean, Donald Trump is none of those things, but he benefits.
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I want to say something about the title of this book, and it's relevant to what you just
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So, most of us use the word apocalypse to mean, you know, locusts and famine and hornets and
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And we are certainly suffering through those, this global pandemic and this terrible economic
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But literally, an apocalypse means an unveiling, a revelation.
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It comes from Greek words that mean to take the cloth off of something.
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And when Jewish and early Christian writers began to use the idea of the apocalypse in their
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Now, the future they chose to reveal was a pretty horrifying one, but it was horror that
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And so, the Trumpocalypse that I want to write about is one that shows us something about who
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As you say, I mean, there is a substantial minority in this country, maybe a little less
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than it was three months ago, that sticks with Trump, that sees something in him that
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And I think that loyalty is a danger, not just immediately, but in the long term, to
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a lot of institutions that we should all cherish.
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And what I wanted to write about was the nature of that danger.
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And then, how do we prevent that kind of disaffection from being a threat to the country in the future?
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Not how do we brainwash people or convert them, but how do we make the disappointments that
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are maybe inevitable in modern life less dangerous to the political system that upholds modern
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There seems to be a core that now has outside political influence because they seem to be
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so unpersuadable, which is to say unmovable based on the 10,000 pieces of information that
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should have pried them loose from their affinity to Trump.
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What do you think the organizing principles are there?
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I mean, it's clearly not racism as often alleged by the far left.
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I mean, I'm not suggesting that there aren't racists who support Trump.
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In fact, I would imagine almost every racist does, but I find it very hard to believe that's
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One thing that is clearly happening, and it's even creating a larger footprint in our society
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than support for Trump, is a distrust for institutions.
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By institutions, we're talking about the press.
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We're talking about normal arms of government that heretofore seemed important, like the
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We're talking about science and scientists attempting to communicate it.
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How do you view the relationship between institutions and the rest of society right now?
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This is a problem that I described in a book I wrote a long time ago as the man in the white lab coat issue.
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If you watch an American movie made between the end of World War II and the end of the 1970s,
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whenever there's a man in a white lab coat, he's there to explain how the plot is going to set in motion.
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He's going to explain how you can shrink a submarine so it's small enough to go inside the bloodstream.
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He's going to give you the device that'll save James Bond's life in the last act.
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Sometime around 1978-79, whenever you see a man in a white lab coat, he's got some moronic idea
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And the last time we see him, he's disappearing down the throat of the dinosaur.
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Although in his defense, I'm in support of cloning some dinosaurs just for the fun of it.
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And I wrote about this in my first book about the Trump presidency.
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I'm trying to think, starting in about 1998, whenever people we socialized with, the people
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we went to school with, our type of people, whenever they had a brainwave, let's sell stock
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in a pet food company that moves pet food by air.
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Every one of those brainwaves turned out to be an absolute calamity for most of the people
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So a lot of the trust that we would like to see in our institutions was squandered by
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But he had a shrewd eye for people's vulnerabilities.
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So one of the things that I am in this new book talking about is how do we regain that trust?
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And how do we make practical changes in a way that stabilize democratic society?
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And not just the states, because we need to see Trump in a more global context.
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But, and a little, a lot of the way forward, you know, human life is tragically short.
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But the fact is people have been living longer and longer.
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And as they live longer, they are carrying forward quarrels from half a century ago into
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I mean, Newt Gingrich is still talking about Woodstock.
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He looks like the one guy who didn't get invited and held it against them.
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All, you know, this half century, now more than half century later.
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And Donald Trump uses all of these cues from like the Nixon campaign of 1968.
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And we need to build a politics for tomorrow's world.
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And that means sometimes that some of the things that you talk about on the, that seem
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to be so-called left-wing issues, like making healthcare more universal, can only be effectively
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executed in conjunction with things that would be considered right-wing issues, which is having
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That a lot of our, the rights, a lot of the solutions to problems like climate change are
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going to involve ideas that actually look right-wing, like pricing and like more use of nuclear
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And we are going to need a new generation of political leadership that is not stuck in categories
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left over from when there were three channels on TV.
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And we've been noticing this in many ways, that the old way of talking about left and
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right politically and the boxes that one needs to check to be a member in good standing as
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you move left or right of center, that seems to have been getting scrambled in a variety of
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And it just makes it difficult to talk about what's happening and predict how people will
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I mean, Trump himself is an existence proof that politics as we knew it prior to 2016
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I mean, the idea that the Christian right is behind this guy as though he were some apotheosis
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of their values, it's a reductio ad absurdum of everything they pretend is their values, and
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So it's a very strange time to even categorize political thought.
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One of the things that defined politics when a generation ago, in the 1990s, was the United
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States was an exception to the rule, that as societies became technologically developed,
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And so when you looked at social science from 1995, the United States looked like a real,
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I mean, it's completely different from Britain or Germany or the Netherlands or Australia
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or even Canada, all of which were rapidly secularizing, and the United States just wasn't.
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And then beginning of 2002, the United States suddenly, bang, caught up.
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And the United States has been, and I talk a lot about this in Trump Hock Lopes, about the
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loss of religious affinity that has happened in the past decade and a half.
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And how much of this is about people under 30 simply not identifying with parental religion.
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And this may be a reaction, I mean, it raises the question, how religious was America ever,
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Because there's always a big, if you asked questions in polls like, do you believe in
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God, do you believe in an afterlife, you used to get 70, 80, 90 percent.
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But if you actually counted the number of people sitting in a church on a Sunday morning,
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Even if you asked, were you in church on Sunday morning, and then counted the people
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in church on Sunday morning, those two numbers didn't add up.
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But there were a lot of people who were Christian-identified, religiously identified, but it may not have
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And then the assertiveness of political religion since in the 21st century, we talked before
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A lot of people are like, yeah, I'm a Methodist.
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I don't go that often, but I think they're doing good work.
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Then they suddenly confront, wait, wait a minute, I see Derry Falwell Jr. on TV.
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And so you are seeing the secularizing society.
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I think one of the reasons that the so-called Christian right has been so committed to Trump
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is because they are reckoning with this de-Christianizing among their own followers.
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And in fact, they are moving from something that was a religious movement in a way to something
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that is now purely a cultural movement, where you no longer can tell the difference in what
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is Christian here and what is Southern, or what is rural.
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Or what is Christian and what is an animus against so-called elitism, right?
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Or against the coasts or, you know, against the libtards in their big cities who are too
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woke and too, in the context of the current pandemic, you know, terrified to get out there
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So how does a mask become a symbol of cultural war?
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There have been some very startling images broadcast to us, at least on social media, of,
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again, it's just amazing that the perception of this global health crisis and economic crisis
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But two images have jumped out to me in recent weeks.
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One is just the confrontation between pandemic protesters, that is people protesting against
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So they're literally shrieking epithets at frontline healthcare workers who are in their
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And then there was another video that went pretty viral.
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You might have seen this of a local news reporter covering a protest.
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I think it was in New York, New Jersey or New York.
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And just the level of hatred being expressed by otherwise normal people toward a random
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Again, you know, it could be something manipulative about how this was set up, but it seemed to
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be a member of a local news affiliate walking the sidewalk among...
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I mean, this was just, you know, ordinary people protesting the lockdown.
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But when they saw that a member of the press was among them, it was just awful the degree
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to which they were visibly living in an information space where, you know, the pandemic was essentially
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It was an attempt to kind of engineer an informational coup against the president, right?
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This is why people are pretending this is something other than the flu.
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We have to talk about Trump and the election and the reasons for our concerns, but it's
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very hard to talk about anything if we can't find a shared space of facts and, you know,
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vetting of information whereby we can talk about what has happened on a Thursday on Earth.
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What do we do with respect to the degree to which the press is now reviled, you know, especially
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And how does the press even cover Trump critically, obviously, without discrediting itself?
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You know, every moment, it attempts to shine a light on each one of the president's innumerable
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Well, this is one of the ways, and I talk about this in Trumpocalypse, but how we have to bring
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When people of a certain age, certainly my contemporaries, when we talk about the press,
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we mean the New York Times, we mean the CBS Evening News, we mean CNN, we mean institutions
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like that, that are self-consciously press organizations, that are funded by advertising and reader
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pay, and that have a legacy that stretches back in time.
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So how do most information Americans get their information?
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You know, the New York Times is maybe in the top five list because it is a provider, as a
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secondhand provider of content to those streams, Reddit.
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And the Americans who are most likely to say, I don't trust the media, in fact, are the people
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They're not, you know, they're not interviewing scientists.
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Even though Facebook is not creating the content, it is certainly making decisions, maybe robotically,
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but it's making decisions about the content you get.
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So we need to have, we need to bring our concepts of the world into alignment with the world we
00:25:42.780
And we live in a world in which the media are very trusted, dangerously so, and in which
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they are losing their own ability to assess the quality of what they are providing, where
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they truly are acting like mediums, like connectors between one thing and another.
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So that, I think one of, the problem here is not a loss of trust of media.
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The problem is that we have media that no longer have a, see it as their job to evaluate the
00:26:08.780
So that is an internal problem in the, but whenever, so I always say, whenever you talk about the
00:26:13.800
media, don't use general, say, do you mean the New York Times?
00:26:24.380
And if you have a concept of media that excludes the most important media companies in the
00:26:31.180
Yeah, they are clearly distinct categories because you take Facebook and Twitter and the rest of
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social media, these are platforms which are trying to disavow any responsibility as publishers.
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And it's understandable because I don't know how you, even with some real breakthroughs in
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AI, I don't know how you perfectly vet or really take full editorial responsibility for
00:27:05.280
Supposing an entrepreneur invents a company called McDonald's and he says, you know what?
00:27:10.500
Look, when you used to get your hamburgers from a local store, obviously it was very important
00:27:15.240
that there be some government regulation of whether the meat in those burgers was rancid or not.
00:27:19.900
But we're going to serve a billion burgers a day or a billion a year.
00:27:24.280
We are operating on such a scale that it's just impossible for us to verify that the meat in our
00:27:32.780
Our business model makes it impossible for us to vouch for the fact that our meat isn't
00:27:36.460
I think a lot of us would say, well, I'm not here for your business.
00:27:44.520
If your business model is you can't vouch for the fact that the meat won't make me sick,
00:27:50.040
Yeah, it's interesting that there's been kind of a land grab for informational norms which
00:27:57.740
just happened and now we're anchored to a status quo that is very difficult to rethink.
00:28:05.720
So on some level, you're calling into question whether something like Facebook should even
00:28:12.500
You can link up half the world on a platform and allow people to talk to one another and
00:28:17.980
to talk to everyone all at once if things go viral.
00:28:20.560
Well, and Facebook has obviously found a way to monetize that, Twitter less so, but we're
00:28:27.620
asking whether that sort of thing should be allowable on some level.
00:28:33.000
Is this a public square that you'd be, to take the U.S. constitution as a norm here, you'd
00:28:40.620
be violating free speech if you tried to tamp that down?
00:28:44.780
And it's like a room in the mansion of human experience that's just opened up based on a
00:28:51.740
certain technological innovation, you know, in this case, the internet.
00:28:55.620
Or you take another example, which is different but strikes me as relevantly similar.
00:29:01.540
Like all of this anguish people feel over privacy concerns around the iPhone.
00:29:07.640
You know, should Apple be forced to build an iPhone in a way that it can be unlocked ultimately
00:29:14.380
with a, you know, an FBI warrant because, you know, we know a murder has been recorded
00:29:21.500
Well, there are many privacy purists now who think, no, this is, you've got strong encryption
00:29:27.160
and this is just math and technology dictating that we should have now a zone of privacy
00:29:34.280
that, you know, even if we acknowledge that we ourselves are murderers, you know, no one
00:29:42.460
They can demand our DNA, but they can't demand access to our FaceTime interactions or our WhatsApp
00:29:50.000
You know, on one level, that's just totally bizarre that we think that these are, are in
00:29:58.520
But, again, I'm sympathetic to a default to free speech and I'm just impressed by how
00:30:06.480
intractable it seems to monitor in real time everything that is hitting Facebook's servers
00:30:13.380
because any lunatic can post a video right now communicating anything he wants and that
00:30:21.300
will be one of, I don't know, someone has the numbers here, but let's say one of a billion
00:30:29.840
It's a needle in a haystack until it isn't, but I guess a different set of expectations
00:30:35.080
could be invoked once it becomes obvious that this thing is there and causing a problem.
00:30:42.520
But the idea that Facebook can't be in business unless they figure out a way to never produce
00:30:49.960
a poison hamburger with all the hamburgers they're making, it does seem like a deal breaker
00:30:54.820
unless barring some perfect algorithm coming online.
00:30:58.280
Well, let me give you another example of one of these questionable business models.
00:31:01.720
The way politics worked in the United States from the civil rights era till the end of
00:31:07.180
the 20th century was you had these two vast political parties.
00:31:10.380
They're pretty messy assemblages of lots of different kinds of people in lots of different
00:31:15.980
And for that reason, they were not super ideological.
00:31:19.560
And for that reason, they tended to coalesce around, with bare exceptions like a Ronald Reagan
00:31:24.440
figure, pretty moderate people, when they became non-moderate like Barry Goldwater or George
00:31:30.820
And even a non-moderate like Ronald Reagan learned he had to be a really beguiling, winning,
00:31:36.160
sunny, reassuring person if he was not to frighten people with his ideology that was
00:31:43.640
The parties became much more ideological for reasons that had to do with American life.
00:31:47.960
As they became more ideological, they accelerated with reasons that didn't have a lot to do
00:31:52.180
with American life, but became part of gaming of the system.
00:31:55.220
And that on the Republican side in particular, the Republicans realized they had an ideology
00:32:02.160
In 1985, if you were in that predicament, you'd say, well, I guess we're going to have to
00:32:05.280
change our ideology if we want to enjoy the spoils of office.
00:32:09.340
But by 2015, the attitude was different, which is we don't want the conventional spoils of office
00:32:15.440
like post-masterships and ambassadorships and those things.
00:32:18.780
We actually have a program here that we are determined to cram through.
00:32:22.180
And we are self-becoming aware we actually can't win in an open competition.
00:32:28.420
So we're going to have to make the competition more closed.
00:32:30.900
And one of the big themes of the book is how the Republican Party, forced to choose between
00:32:35.140
its ideological commitments and a competitive democracy, has been gaming the system more
00:32:41.560
And it's helped to do that by the movement of Americans from the interior of the country
00:32:47.140
to the coasts in a system that makes these ancient boundaries so important.
00:32:54.160
So you can have people, you can have all of California with no more, I mean, if people
00:32:57.840
in Wyoming ever retreated on an equal footing with people in California, they would feel
00:33:04.200
And then you have the system where the money flows from the coast to the interior, but the
00:33:12.200
You may remember Senator Mitch McConnell talking about driving states into bankruptcy.
00:33:17.040
What that's about is bankruptcy is a federal responsibility.
00:33:22.260
When state defaults on its debt, states have been doing that since the 1830s.
00:33:25.840
But if a state were ever to go bankrupt, which they can't now do, that would mean the state
00:33:29.600
would submit itself to the oversight of a federal judge, i.e. somebody picked by Mitch
00:33:35.140
It is an attempt for the parts of the country that are receiving money to leverage their
00:33:41.640
excessive power because of constitutional compromises and the way the system has grown up over time
00:33:46.700
to take other people's economic power and use it to their own hands.
00:33:50.400
So I have a series of suggestions in the book about how without radical political reform or
00:33:55.160
fantasies like abolishing the electoral college, you could bring the American federal system
00:33:59.900
more into line with how wealth is produced in the American nation.
00:34:05.820
My last thought on this is, you know, 2008 at the Republican convention, Sarah Palin gave
00:34:11.980
And one of the lines, written by a friend of mine, you did a great job.
00:34:15.180
And one of the lines she used was, she quoted a piece of writing, and I tell the story of
00:34:19.480
that writing, in which she said, we raise good people in our small towns.
00:34:23.780
And in the book, I said, just imagine how all hell would break loose if a candidate at a
00:34:30.040
Democratic convention would say, we raise good people in the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
00:34:37.220
Perhaps not quite as bad as the Upper East Side, but close.
00:34:42.700
Yeah, I mean, the degree to which the cities and coasts subsidize the heartland is an interesting
00:34:53.840
And as you say, the political leverage based on representation, at least in the Senate,
00:35:02.240
Why do you say abolishing the electoral college is just a pipe dream?
00:35:08.740
You need to do a constitutional amendment to do away with it.
00:35:11.520
So I'm focused very much in Trumpocalypse on things that you could do with ordinary votes
00:35:18.460
Not with an idea of making the system perfectly representative, but avoiding its most terrible
00:35:23.820
Many of which are at the state level, where in states, and not just southern states, but
00:35:28.020
in Wisconsin, that the party that holds the majority, nearly a two-thirds majority in
00:35:35.320
the Wisconsin state legislature, Assembly and Senate, actually won.
00:35:39.400
The Republicans now have about 64 of 99 seats in the Wisconsin legislature, which they won
00:35:45.440
with fewer votes than the Democrats won in 2018.
00:35:49.380
And that is happening because the federal courts, which used to, from the civil rights era
00:35:54.100
until the 2000s, police, the wilder actions at the state level, have withdrawn from that
00:36:01.440
And so I talk in the book about how do you restore some of the concepts of the civil rights
00:36:06.200
era in ways that are feasible, not too radical, that don't require huge change, but how do
00:36:11.820
you get a new Voting Rights Act that would make sense in the post-civil rights era?
00:36:17.600
When the Supreme Court struck down the key sections of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, they made a
00:36:22.920
good point, which is the Voting Rights Act held a state or a town in suspicion according
00:36:30.620
So Hawaii got special scrutiny under the Voting Rights Act, as it then was, and Wisconsin did
00:36:36.600
By the year 2013, Hawaii was a very good actor for voting rights, and Wisconsin is the worst
00:36:43.560
And it's just weird that you would say, okay, Wisconsin gets an easy ride because of what
00:36:52.280
But then having struck down the key sections, nothing happened.
00:36:54.980
And so states are now free to do whatever they want.
00:36:57.820
And because of the Republican success in the elections of 2010, which were immediately followed
00:37:04.880
by the census of 2010 and the redistricting of 2011 in the throes of the terrible aftermath
00:37:11.420
of the Great Recession, they built an especially reactionary set of state and federal maps that
00:37:17.860
disempowered everywhere in America where new products are invented, where songs are written,
00:37:24.440
So I talk about this with how all the productive parts of the country are systematically disenfranchised.
00:37:30.560
And that's, you know, from a Republican point, if you want the Republican Party ever again
00:37:35.420
to be the party of enterprise, it has to get out of the business of being the party of the
00:37:41.420
de-industrializing and places where coal used to be mined and reconnect with where the future
00:37:51.160
Trumpocalypse is full of ideas for making the political system more responsive to the country.
00:37:57.240
That's one of the ways that you protect the country against the future of Donald Trump's.
00:38:02.680
I mean, let's remember, he got 46% of the vote.
00:38:05.700
He got barely more of the vote than Michael Dukakis, 1988, and a lot less of the vote than
00:38:15.200
And if you bring the political system into harmony with the country, the biggest beneficiary of that
00:38:21.440
will be the Republican Party itself because you will take away from the party the option
00:38:25.780
of defending enterprise by appealing to the most disaffected parts of the country.
00:38:31.800
So how sinister do you think this actually is behind closed doors?
00:38:36.840
I mean, when you talk about, you know, a reactionary attempt to gerrymander and suppress voting rights,
00:38:45.640
you know, like you take an article that would be written in a place like The Nation,
00:38:50.060
you know, or, you know, Rachel Maddow's take on just how dark this gets behind closed doors.
00:39:01.100
I mean, when Mitch McConnell is talking to whoever, I don't know, back in the day, Paul Ryan,
00:39:07.320
about just how to win, stay on this point of suppressing votes or managing to shore up
00:39:17.080
support for Republican candidates in ways that anywhere left of center just seems illegitimate.
00:39:28.000
The right to vote has always been bitterly contested in the United States.
00:39:32.100
At a certain period in history, we learned a happy story of the ever-spreading progress
00:39:37.000
toward the vote, toward ever greater democracy.
00:39:40.120
And it's inscribed in the Great Amendments, the Constitution, the 13th Amendment ending slavery,
00:39:45.840
the 14th Amendment extending civil rights without regard to race,
00:39:50.340
the 15th Amendment extending the right to vote without regard to race,
00:39:53.240
and through votes for women, and through the extension of the vote to the District of Columbia
00:40:01.820
It was always going forward and going backward.
00:40:05.000
It has always been, through American history, a familiar tool of politics
00:40:10.260
to try to prevent your opponents from having the right to vote.
00:40:12.820
And to this day, the United States has the weakest constitutional protections of voting rights
00:40:18.860
of any of the democratic countries, partly because the Constitution is so old
00:40:23.160
and so much of it was written before Americans agreed that everybody should vote.
00:40:27.820
And so one of the things I think we need to make, and this may be the service Donald Trump has done us,
00:40:33.960
I think it is not impossible that we will look back and say,
00:40:37.320
hey, that was a very upsetting experience, but it actually put us back on the right footing
00:40:42.660
because Donald Trump made explicit and made kind of cheaply corrupt a lot of things
00:40:47.460
that were going wrong in the country without him.
00:40:50.280
And so we need to commit ourselves to say, you know what, we're a democracy.
00:40:54.260
I mean, sometimes you'll hear Republicans say, it's not a democracy, it's a republic.
00:40:58.640
I think a lot of people reacted to that was, I always thought it was a democracy.
00:41:02.740
And if it's not a democracy, shouldn't it be a democracy?
00:41:08.260
And let's say, you know, you can compete in all kinds of ways.
00:41:12.380
You can find, you know, more appealing candidates with better resumes.
00:41:16.420
I mean, you can dig up dirt your opponent did when she was a college student.
00:41:21.840
But what you can't do is compete by preventing people from voting.
00:41:25.520
And what you certainly can't do is write voting systems,
00:41:29.040
where if you get 45% of the vote, you get 60% of the seats.
00:41:35.340
And if Donald Trump helps us to do that, and other things too.
00:41:38.460
You know, Donald Trump has taught us how the United States has,
00:41:41.000
compared to any other democracy, a super politicized system of law enforcement.
00:41:45.780
There is no other democracy on earth where decisions about who to prosecute
00:41:49.120
and who not to prosecute are made by such political people as in the United States.
00:41:56.820
I think we basically live through a big tidying up of the American political system
00:42:01.680
after Watergate and the related scandals in the 70s.
00:42:04.540
And then those reforms have just been losing their impetus, losing their effectiveness
00:42:10.820
I think we are going to need post-Trump kind of moment of reform like that,
00:42:15.700
which we had just before the First World War, just after Watergate,
00:42:19.600
really renew institutions, and not just voting institutions, but those that enforce law,
00:42:26.460
those that make our social welfare systems work, and those that preserve the climate
00:42:33.900
Trump has definitely pressure tested our political system and the rule of law to a degree
00:42:44.060
I think one surprising discovery is how much the sane functioning of government relies not
00:42:56.840
Just, you know, you don't do that sort of thing, right?
00:42:59.440
So it takes someone who has absolutely no political scruples to do that sort of thing for us to realize,
00:43:09.700
There's nothing keeping us from the howling abyss if we move further in that direction,
00:43:15.860
and Trump has exposed so much of that landscape.
00:43:19.460
I want to get into some of these up-to-the-minute controversies around Barr and the so-called Flynn controversy,
00:43:27.340
but before we jump into those details, you, if I'm not mistaken, at least in the book,
00:43:32.720
I don't know if anything's changed, you seem very confident that Trump will lose in November.
00:43:37.980
I really would like to share that confidence because, you know, if for no other reason,
00:43:48.880
Well, I thought he was probably going to lose even before the pandemic struck.
00:43:52.740
And I think now, in the face of just the terror of the commandment of this crisis,
00:43:58.460
it's one person who wants to be able to lose even before the pandemic.
00:44:01.640
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