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- [00:00]
A
Hey guys, it's jvl. I sat down to talk to a guy I've been reading for like 20 years but had never met before. His name is Brian Beutler. He is an old hand from journalism. I knew him in his salon days and his New Republic days. And now he's on Substack and we had a long talk about just sort of how this all gets better, how do we fix things, where do we go from here? And I gotta tell you, especially by my standards, it's pretty optimistic. I think you're going to like it. Especially you're going to like Brian's optimism on how, how we get out of this and how Democrats can do better. Here's the show.
- [00:35]
B
Hey everyone, it's Brian Beutler. I'm editor and publisher of Off Message. I'm here with Jonathan V. Last, or jvl as I think friends know him of the bull work. And I wanted to connect with JVL for a few reasons, I guess. One, because as I was telling him in the green room a minute ago, just a couple times a week, basically every week, I'll be listening to him make some like, unner about the death of American democracy or whatever on one of his bulwark podcasts. And I'll be saying to myself like, I agree, but. Or I agree and. And. But then I remember that I'm just like, I'm only listening and he can't hear me talking to myself while, while.
- [01:13]
A
He'S on his podcast yet.
- [01:15]
B
Not yet.
- [01:15]
A
I can't. Once, once I get the Elon Musk chip, then I'll be able to tell.
- [01:21]
B
And then so I like fished around for a pretext for us to do one of these. And then he, he wrote a piece of last week. You know, I want to like, keep the floor open in case you want to veer off in another direction, but wanted to talk to you about a piece you wrote this last week about rebuilding liberal democracy after inheriting whatever it is we stand to inherit from the people who are currently wrecking it. And maybe it just makes sense for, for you to like, give people coming from my corner of Substack a summary of, of what inspired you to write your piece and the sort of model you described. You worry the system can't be recovered because as I read it, I found myself simultaneously, like, more pessimistic than you, but also less so. And I wanted to tease out, well.
- [02:11]
A
I, I'm going to need a little more from you because I feel like I've written that piece 10 times in the last two weeks. Because the last two weeks have been really bad.
- [02:18]
B
It was simple systems, complex systems.
- [02:20]
A
Oh, simple, simple, complex systems.
- [02:22]
B
Yeah. And, and it's possible that this has just been ripped asunder so badly that putting something coherent back together might not actually work.
- [02:31]
A
So are you, are you a sci fi nerd?
- [02:34]
B
Not really. No.
- [02:35]
A
No, no.
- [02:35]
B
So I try to keep up with like high brow sci fi illusions so I can sound smart to people who are sci fi nerds.
- [02:42]
A
So it's fantastic book series called the Expanse that got turned into an Amazon series. I did not watch it. I, I, I'm more of a super hard, like I like hard science fiction. Science fiction where they devote like three or four pages to math problems. That's gets me going. Oh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I would.
- [03:01]
B
Like that because I, I come from a hard science background and like when science fiction actually has verisimilitude, I kind of like it more than when it's just laser beams out of eyes or whatever.
- [03:10]
A
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Anyway, in the Expanse there's a subplot talking about how simple complex systems are prone to failure. Right? And so the, I mean there are essentially three types of systems. There are simple systems, complicated systems, complex systems. But then within the world of complex systems, there's simple, complex and like complex, complex. And nature is complex, complex. I mean nature just has pathways everywhere. And systems tend to be incredibly robust because nature is full of catastrophic events. Man made complex systems are less robust because you can only make so many pathways. Right. Man made systems can only have so many adaptive pathways. And that's really what democracy and liberalism is. And I sort of use democracy and liberalism interchangeably even though I understand that they are different things. And when I say liberalism, I mean like the small L liberalism of like minority rights and rule of law stuff. Like, you know, real basic. I don't mean like progressivism or, or like the American political context. I mean the societal complex context. Anyway, and what I was saying is I wonder if right now what you have is you have Trump stressing liberalism and democracy and you have a bunch of these compensatory pathways which are trying to, trying to manage those stresses and they keep failing. Like Congress has failed, the legislature, which was there, has failed. The business community has basically failed. The legal world has partially failed, but partially held. Right? So some of the courts have held, but not all of them. They've held in some places, not in others. You've seen like officers of the court doing dereliction of duty. Anyway, it just it strikes me that we may not be at the tipping point where the whole system goes into terminal failure yet, but there probably is one. And once you hit that, like, I just don't know what goes next, you know, like, you know, how do you dig out from this? Do you dig out from this? What, what would you even, what would. If we just fast forwarded four years and, you know, assume a ladder, right? Is the, the old economist joke, right? You're in a hole. First thing you do, well, you assume a ladder. So we'll just assume we have a ladder to get us out of this hole. Okay, well then what, like, what is it just like? Well, every four years you have to cross your fingers and hope that the authoritarian party doesn't come in and try to wreck democracy and move to competitive authoritarianism again. Or do you have to do a bunch of stuff which is going to look super radical and this, like, gets back. I'll stop talking in a minute, I promise.
- [06:05]
B
No, it's fine. It's fine.
- [06:07]
A
This gets back to the, the heart of a debate that my, my partner, Sarah Longwell and I had a lot in the early Biden years. So, like, the first six months of Biden, which was there, there, there were two pathways in front of him, and one was, we're going to do a whole bunch of really radical shit to try to trump proof the system, and it's all going to be unpopular and we're gonna get yelled at for it, and a bunch of it will fail, but some of it will get through and we'll try to protect America that way. Or, hey, we're just gonna try to take down the temperature and fake it till we make it, you know, like, this is a, There is nothing, there is no way to trump proof a system against authoritarianism. If the people want authoritarianism badly enough, eventually they will get it. So what we're gonna try to do is lower the temperature and try to, like, let the poison leech itself out.
- [07:06]
B
Of the body politic.
- [07:07]
A
And I think that was a very close call, a judgment call. I mean, I, I can make arguments for both, for both pathways. Biden clearly chose the second and he clearly failed. But that doesn't, you know, again, I, I don't think that was fordained necessarily. And if you run it 10 times, maybe it fails every time, maybe it doesn't. I, I don't know. So, anyway, I'll stop. You go.
- [07:30]
B
No, yeah, so I, I, I agree that the, the time to really address this in a way where it did not seem like such a heavy lift was 4 and a half years ago and choices were made that precluded that. I'm not sure I see it as quite, like a, quite as much as a fork in the road as, as, as you see it where he could have picked doing the, like we're going to build a bunch of bridges in Michigan and then that's going to convert people back to the Democratic cause and we're not gonna foreground accountability. Like I think you could have done both and in actually that if, if you'd had a Biden administration like charging hard at accountability, that would have freed Democrats in Congress to like hide a little bit while they took the votes on all the stuff having to do with taxes and money. And maybe, maybe then you can get the best of both worlds, like a Trump proofed system and like a liberal democracy that is delivered for people and then you can present that to the voters anyway, none of that happened or the bridges were enacted and then half built and then Trump took back over. And I think I basically agree insofar as, you know, you're talking about things like Congress, the courts, the legal system. And to the extent that the question is can we just go back to where those things work as well or poorly as they did before in 2029. Like, I think that that ship has sailed. Where I think I'm maybe more optimistic than you about it all is that if you, like, if you imagine three and a half years ahead and how much worse things then than they are now. So basically almost like rebuilding a liberal democracy from scratch. Like I, I think if you break that challenge down into its component parts, like none of them is unheard of. Like it's, it's, it's a lot of stuff and it's, it's hard. And as, as you suggest, I think a lot of it would be politically unpopular and things have to go right more often than not.
- [09:32]
A
Right.
- [09:32]
B
Like things can't keep failing as you're propping new things up. But it's not like reinventing the wheel. And for me, the main source of despair or just like the thing that makes it hard for me to remain engaged in kind of pro democracy fighting is that I see very few signs that the people who are most likely to inherit whatever, whatever it is, you know, is going to be left to them. Like they are not taking the initial steps towards saying and doing the things that you would want them to be doing. Where you're like, okay, those guys realize that there's a big task ahead and they're they're preparing to execute on, on what needs to be done. Like, so, like if I was going to put meat on the bones, you know, one component, and I know this is Sarah's thing, and she's totally right about it, is that Trump has to be more unpopular than he is, like, significant. And that might happen to some extent on its own, but it's such an essential component that ideally I think you'd like to be seeing Democrats doing more affirmative things to try to drag him down rather than just kind of stand back and hope he self immolates like they've been hoping for the last 10 years. But then if you manage to make Trump unpopular, you need like, was it a physicist or an economist will assume a unified government in 2029. Right, whatever. They said that.
- [10:59]
A
Right.
- [10:59]
B
But then from there you can, you can start building things. And, and here's where like it would differ in either in statutory terms or in constitutional terms or just even just in like norms bound terms from the government that Biden handed off to Trump. But like a purge of Trump loyalists and, and like, no apologies for purging Trump loyalists, right? Like staffing up so like bringing in new bureaucrats, giving them raises, like finding some people who have important knowledge that were pushed out of government, retain them, give them consulting money to help rebuild quickly. Right. And then you need, like, procedurally you need, you need something to give all the stakeholders reason to trust that this will be more durable. Right. And so that's like accountability for like people who weren't pardoned. Like, if they broke the law, they'd need to be pursued. If they committed, you know, professional violations that should challenge their ability to practice law or whatever. Like those need to be pursued. And then you need like something like a reckoning, like a, you know, like a January 6th committee on steroids. It's like truth and reconciliation where you just kind of air out what happened. Right. Like, and, and like, just like a total rejection of the idea that Republicans get to break things unconstrained, but the Democrats can only rebuild by, by playing by the old rules. And so it's like, you know, it's like a, it's like the post Watergate settlement times 100. But we've seen societies do each of these things before. Like, we have done each of these things. We've seen societies backslide, democracies backslide and then like reassert themselves. We've seen democracies arise from nothing. And so I don't feel like this is a hopeless situation if you can make it so that less than 44% or whatever it is of the, of the public is on board with keeping this authoritarian, like cell administration that we have. If you can get that below 40% or 35 and have the people in place with the right mindset and just willing to press ahead, I think that like, you can get there. And it's not the people who, who, who are like poised to do that work are capable enough to do it. I just don't think that they're. I think they're too scared.
- [13:35]
A
Well, I mean, I don't want to be a smart ass, but are there a lot of examples of democracies which backslid and then reasserted themselves?
- [13:43]
B
Not a lot, no. I mean, I think Poland is kind of in the process. Right. In the pro.
- [13:48]
A
Yeah, right.
- [13:49]
B
It's like, it's like in the limbo. I mean, I like, you know, the reading that I've done on this. Like, it feels like a dimmer switch.
- [13:57]
A
Sort of where.
- [14:00]
B
Things get darker, but then they can get lighter. And what has happened now is that things have gotten darker faster than I thought they would, but the light hasn't gone out. And where we are is very dark, but there's a needle point of light at the end where if these steps are taken in a concerted way by people with the courage of their conviction to follow through, then it's like, it's something that, like, it would also, obviously I would feel better about waking up every day participating in that than I do watching the response to this from people who have power.
- [14:34]
A
Now, let me ask you two questions that are connected. The first is what percentage of the country do you think wants what we have now? Not like, well, they don't really like it, but, you know, inflation or blah, blah, blah. But what percentage of the country do you think looks around? Not that they're not poorly informed, but like, it's like, yes, this, this is what I want.
- [14:57]
B
Um, I would guess it's north of 30, but not much, which I think puts it higher than is ideal. Like, like I, I was listening to. I, I forget which one. Whether it was Ziblad or, or his co author, whose name is escaping me at the moment on how democracies die. And I think he was basically like 20 to 25% of every democracy is basically fascists. But depending on how the system is set up and contingent on it being at that kind of level, they will typically lose. They can charge and they can do frighteningly well in elections, but they have a hard time taking Power. And here they've taken power because our system didn't have certain fail safes. And I think that's right. I think that if George Bush could leave office at 28% having crashed the economy and gotten us into a, a quagmire of a war, then Trump could leave office maybe a little less unpopular than that because he's got a more dedicated cult around him. But I think that he, I think that, like, I, I don't, I forget what number Sarah likes to put it at.32. 35.
- [16:10]
A
32 is what Sarah likes.
- [16:12]
B
Yeah.
- [16:12]
A
So let me ask my follow up question then. What, at what percentage of the population that wants this, does it stop mattering, like, how smart or how convicted or how, like how well the good guys conduct themselves? Because, I mean, I, I do, you know, like how many Bolsheviks were needed to overthrow the czars? Like, not, not that many. It's like 20,000 Bolsheviks. Right. You don't, you don't need 50% of the country to wreck liberalism. You can do you. Liberalism is only sustainable with like a really, really overwhelming consensus.
- [16:50]
B
So. Big question. I mean, I'm, I'm not. Sometimes I think about the 2008 election and like, you know, if we could, if we could have an election of that magnitude or similar, like, I think a lot of progress could be made towards creating a more robust version of the liberal democracy that is currently collapsing. But that's because you could design it better, because you could entice people out of the sort of Trumpish world to like, you know, in the same way that people testified at the January 6 committee hearings against Trump from his own administration, he could leave behind a mess big enough that people are going to be like, look, this is what I saw. This is what needs to happen to prevent it from happening again. And so you can broaden the coalition and fine tune the rebuilding. Even if the Democrat who takes office in 2029 or whenever only wins 54% of the vote or 53% of the vote. Right. Like, just like Barack Obama was running against old John McCain who liked war. The, the country was weary of war, the economy was in collapse, George W. Bush was at 28%. And you know, he, McCain still walked away with like, what, 45% of the vote.
- [18:04]
A
Mm.
- [18:05]
B
Which is, you can look at that as bearish and in, in a way it is, I think, like a bearish historical fact. But I think you can also look at it as like, well, like, couldn't we make a lot of progress if Democrats had their 2009 majorities. Again, McCain was.
- [18:23]
A
No, I don't think you could. I mean, McCain was not running on totalitarianism though. Like that's, that's like the difference is that the parties have sorted out so that, you know, when you said like 25% of every population probably has a bunch of is fascist inclined, something like that is broadly true. But I want to say is Eric McMillan, it's the name of the social scientist just wrote a book about this or not didn't just. But wrote a book about this about four years ago. And the point he made was that what had happened, has happened in America post Trump is that those people with fascist inclinations were broadly distributed across the political spectrum in the same way that like anti vanc, anti vax sentiment and conspiracy theory adherence was basically sprinkled across the political spectrum. And that stuff has all been polarized now. And once we'll just pretend it's 25% once that 25% is all together in a single home. That's unbelievably powerful.
- [19:28]
B
It is. I mean, you see, I mean you, you can see that, that like despite being smaller than the anti Trump opposition, the, the pro Trump movement is the strongest force in the US And I think, I think, but I think part of that has to do with how the pro Trump movement or the pro democracy movement assembles itself and conducts itself because the, like, the MAGA movement conducts itself with total confidence at all times. Right. Like they project forward momentum and intimidation and it gives them a sense of inevitability. And the, the pro democracy movement is fractured and unsure of itself. And it, I think this is like an unattractive quality of it that, that prevents it from like reaching maximum power, which at that, you know, I think they're just, it's, it's larger and might be able to just like tackle MAGA head on in, in ways where like you wouldn't see businesses like bending the knee because they'd be worried about what the pro democracy contingent was going to do right on the other side of the next election. And so I like, I take the point that if it's 30% of the country you have, you're in this permanent pickle kind of. Right. Because you can't illegalize fascist coups. Right. You could pass a law, but if they decide, if they decide we're just going to hold on to the next election and break the law all over again to break down the new thing that you built, you can't, there's very little you can do about that. But I do think that like, you can create a quasi stable system that out, you know, that isn't just a four, eight year sting. And then, you know, if it gets ripped down, if it never gets built up again, or gets built up and then ripped down very quickly, I, that's probably just game over. Like, nobody's ever going to believe that the United States of America can be a stable democracy if we go through this and don't come out of it with something that has decades of life ahead of it. But like, I do think that if you have, like Trump instituting this project, it fails in part on its own weight and in part because Democratic leaders in Congress and the next Democratic presidential nominee and people in the streets, you know, expose all the contradictions within it and make its failures manifest so that he has 30% popularity when he leaves or whatever it happens to be the next Democratic president will probably only win 50 plus percent of the vote.
- [22:04]
A
Right?
- [22:05]
B
Like, but there will be a weariness of, of what we've been through that if there's a, like a real concerted effort to rebuild, doing the sort of, you know, the all components. I, I mentioned five minutes ago that something like that could hold for the rest of our lives. I don't know. Beyond that.
- [22:26]
A
Maybe, I mean, I, maybe we're, we're making all sorts of rosy assumptions, right? Yeah, he didn't.
- [22:34]
B
I know. I mean, but this is the thing is that like, like, I think that, I think that it would feel less rosy. I'm sorry, the assumptions would feel more realistic, less rosy than they do if, like, the basics were there. If like the people who need to be acting like this is possible, were acting like it. Right? And, and the, the, the place where I'm more pessimistic than you, I think is, or maybe we're just equally pessimistic is that that's not happening. Like, I, I've written about this a few times, starting like January or February, about how like the fights between abundance and post neoliberals and social Democrats are all whistling past the graveyard, right? Like, if there's going to be a Democratic governing party in 2029, like, they're going to have to focus on rudiments, right? Building some, some foundation on which like you can later on figure out what kind of economic system you want to, you know, build or whatever, and they're going to have to figure out like, how to hire people, how to retain people, how to make them stick around because, like, give them confidence that it's not just all going to disappear in four or eight years. You got to do the accountability piece. And, like, if that were where we were headed, I think we would feel it now and then. Sam Bagenstas, who was like, a lawyer in the Obama administration and in the Biden administration at the sort of, like, here's a bureaucracy lawyer, basically, right? So he knows what it would take to create a system like that, and he also knows the players who are contemplating what comes next. And he's like, there is not nearly enough talk about how this, this is like a root and branch situation we have. And, like, he gets the sense that they're all making plans to just do the best with whatever they inherit from Trump. And, like, I, I find that, I don't find it shocking, but I find it, like, a very depressing thing. And I'm glad he wrote the piece in the hope that, like, we can take the conversation down from the, like, abstractions and the luxuries of, of abundance versus post neoliberalism and bring them back into, like, what, like, how do we want to organize ourselves toward the end of, of saying, hey, you don't get to pulverize the government illegitimately and get away with it. So we're going to rebuild just on, on principle two. We're going to do it because we have, we have, like, we have a vision for what, like, America can and should be, and we need a foundation on which to build it. When I start feeling like that is, if I ever start feeling like that is settling in among the, like, the Democratic elite class, I will feel like, okay, like, we are moving in the direction of something that might actually stick. Like, I, like, I don't want to leave anyone watching with the impression that I think, oh, Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Simple, right? Rebuild a whole bureaucracy. Simple. Like, that's not what I'm saying, but I am saying that if everyone was rowing in that direction, these are super bowl challenges. And, you know, like, in a way, the things that would, it would take to get there. Like, you, you need to unshackle yourself from the filibuster. You need to unshackle yourself from a partisan Supreme Court if you're going to make any of this stuff work. And having decided we're gonna unshackle ourselves, you could have a much more dynamic, like, leading party, doing the rebuilding in a way that, you know, who knows? It could, like, like, you don't have to abandon all hope at this juncture, even though it seems bleak. And anyway, that, as I was, like, reading the piece that you wrote and Then listening to you talk about it, that's just like the, the thing I want to get out there for you guys, for everyone, because it's like, it's like, you know, I get yelled at for criticizing Democrats more than Republicans, but it's like in this, like, go in this direction. Like, like we, we will feel like we're all working toward the same goal if you, you know, fight a little harder and, and show a little more awareness of like the reality you're. You're set to inherit. Does that make sense?
- [27:07]
A
Yeah, no, it makes sense. I think it's more optimistic than I'm, I'm at. I mean, for instance, you know, like you're talking about, you're talking about like doing better policies and stuff. And I think, like, I don't know, like, does that matter if you don't reform the Supreme Court? Does it matter if you don't like, add a couple Senate seats and start like you have to make fundamental systemic changes.
- [27:31]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [27:32]
A
That I think are really hard to make. I think I have very, very hard to do.
- [27:37]
B
Okay, so, so I think this has almost nothing to do with policy. Like policy the way, you know, I think that the abundance people have policy ideas and the, and the anti monopoly post neoliberal, they have policy ideas and they're really fixated on them without realizing that there's not, there's can be no basis for implementing. Okay, what I'm, what I'm like, I mean, will to do things like add states, but also an affect. Right. Like, okay, here's something that I think is very possible, if not likely to happen, is that over the course of the next two or three years, like a bunch of the things that Trump has done, like the Supreme Court will find them to have been illegal. Right. And so they'll say, you know, hollowing out the Department of Education, that was, that was not cool. And then so the New York Times and the Washington Post, they'll all like talk about our institutions are holding. Oh, they held, Brian.
- [28:33]
A
Everything's cool, bro.
- [28:35]
B
But the practical effect, right, Practically speaking, there will be, there will be like no remedy for the people who are fired. Right. The practical effect will be a precedent saying that presidents can't actually hire and fire with abandon starting now. Right, right, right.
- [28:48]
A
That's how it works.
- [28:49]
B
And, and the, the effect, if not the intent, will be to force the next Democratic president to just make do with this government suffused with Trump cronies. Right. And what I'm talking about is not necessarily Democrats going out on the hustings and saying we're going to pack the Supreme Court irrespective of whether that's like a winning political argument, but saying we're not going to tolerate that, like, there's going to be a reckoning for the theft of the court, there's going to be a reckoning for the things the court let Trump get away with and then try to Calvin ball us. Right. Like we have Democratic Party is filled with really distinguished lawyers and we can read your briefs and we can see where they conflict and we can see when you move with dispatch and we can see when you drag your heels for convenient ends. And we are like, we are simply not going to abide by a different set of rules. Like we insist on it. And then maybe they do a switch in time, that saves nine or maybe you just pass a bill packing the court. But you, but you, if Democrats were going to be like, understand that they needed to do something like that, I think we already see them test driving different ways to get that across to the justices and to, and to honestly, to the law firms, to the businesses that are caving to Trump. It's like we are watching, we are taking names, there's going to be a new sheriff in town at some point. And you know, you see Elizabeth Warren wrote a good letter to Sherry Redstone about bribing Trump and you saw a handful.
- [30:17]
A
That was good. I like that.
- [30:18]
B
Yeah, but, but, but it could have been 46, seven Senate Democrats instead of three. Right?
- [30:24]
A
Right.
- [30:24]
B
When, when Tom Cotton wanted to subvert the Iran nuclear deal, he got all 47 Republican senators to write a letter to the, to the Ayatollah, I guess, saying, hey, there's going to be a, a Republican president at some point. We're just going to rip up the agreement. You should know that going into your negotiations with the Obama administration. And like Obama pulled off the jcpoa. Turns out Tom Cotton wasn't, it wasn't an idle threat. Trump did rip it up. And, but like, it, it caught people's attention. It let you know that they were serious because he got everyone in the party to sign on. And when there are like, it's like a quarter or less of the House Democratic Caucus and the Senate Democratic Caucus that see things the way you and I do. And they're the ones who sign their names to these letters that don't have any intimidating effect because they're like, well, on the one hand it's Donald Trump and the whole Republican Party threatening us. And on the other hand, it's Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden, like, who are we actually, you know, who are we going to bend? And, and so, you know, like my whole project at this point, I feel like, is trying to get Democrats stacked more like Tom Cotton did when he wanted to get something, when he wanted to have an impact. And like, if we can get that done, then I feel like we'll at least start to feel like a little less pessimistic about everything all the time because, like, there will be capable, energetic people with power at our back and like, kind of like doing what seems to make sense given how big of the emergency is. I, like, it's this, like, I, I just see like, you know, like a pinpoint of light at the end of the tunnel. And, and I feel like if you could just get, get a little bit more of what I'm talking about, it would widen a little bit. Right. And then we could keep moving forward and it might widen a little more. And anyway, that's like, I, I don't think that like the, the, that like we'd be incapable in theory of rebuilding a like, viable liberal Democratic state. But I, I, the, my pessimism stems from basically from personnel, I guess.
- [32:41]
A
Yeah. And mine stems from people and human nature. I, I, I'm, again, the base assumption in this is that you get like an overwhelming rejection of the, the world we live in. And I think that a reasonably large percentage of people like this, they voted for it, they want this. And it's not a majority, it's not a plurality, but it's enough, it's enough to make liberalism untenable.
- [33:08]
B
Do you think that that, is that so if you think, let's just put a number on it, 35% maybe. You quibble, sure. But like as Trump tests hotter and hotter, right? He, he, he takes an inch, takes a mile. Now he's murdering people in the Caribbean. Do you think that that group of people grows or shrinks or just intensifies at that level as they see that when you really go down this road, it's not just owning a lips, it is wars, it is murder. Because I, I do think that there are sadists, you know, tens of millions of sadists in the United States who you'll never get to admit that this is like there's anything wrong with what's happening. But do you think that the 35 who, you know, you like, like, I know one thing from your newsletters is like, you, you like to signed the Republicans who voted for Trump, but now he's not, you know, funding their emergency.
- [34:20]
A
Right.
- [34:21]
B
And, and, and instead of being like, we got it wrong, they're like, but we voted for you. Right. Do you think that those people are permanently in the 35% or that as. As the atrocities pile up, they'll be like, oh, okay, maybe this is more than we bargained for?
- [34:38]
A
So this is a. I mean, this is the $40,000 question. And, and I don't know the answer to it. And human. This is another human nature question. Right. And you see this in like every, every time authoritarianism blossoms, different societies react differently to it. Right. And a lot of times it picks up steam because it's, it's like the Osama bin Laden, the weak horse and the strong horse. Right. I mean, people who were indifferent to it, once they see the way that it's ascendant, some, some people are going to be repelled by it, but some people are going to be like, I don't know. It's like it's the only game in town. Got to get on. And so I don't know what the net effect is. I have no. Do you have thoughts on that? How do you think that plays out?
- [35:20]
B
So I think it goes down, but I don't think it goes down well, No, I think it could go down to more or less where things were when George W. Bush left office. Because a. I remember the hot house environment post 9 11. And George Bush wasn't trying to turn America fascist, but there was a lot of bloodlust in the country and he did channel it and to great effect for years. And then things started dragging him down. Right. And this reminds me of a, like a very famous blog post from the Netroots era. The early Netroots era. I will have to find this and I can send it to you, but it was like a colloquy between two progressives. And one asks the other, like, what do you think is the floor of. On George W. Bush's approval rating? And the guy said 28%. And it was like, that's a very specific number. How did you, how did you arrive at that? And he said there was just a Senate election in Illinois. And at the time Illinois was like Peoria was like the, the median state. Right, Right. It looked a lot like America. And it was between Barack Obama and Alan Keys. Both.
- [36:30]
A
Alan Keys got 28.
- [36:32]
B
And he was like, look, the. The race factor is neutralized because both candidates are black. Barack Obama is about as polished and capable as you could ask a senator to be. Keys is about as kooky and unfit for office, as you can imagine a candidate to be. And keys still got 28%. Yeah, fast forward like two and a half years. That's exactly where George W. Bush leaves office at. And, like, maybe that number has floated up a little bit in the, whatever, almost 20 years since then, but I think it's lower than 44 or whatever Trump's approval rating is now. And, like, and like, you know, I think that there's a zone below 40 where you, you know, you'll get some, like, vestigial people who are like, well, I don't like, you know, I think Trump has taken some wrong terms, but I'm still a Republican. Like, they'll probably vote Republican, but they probably, like, would prefer it if Republicans, like, move back towards, you know, people who had any interest in public service. And, I mean, I, I, I want to, I have to be honest with myself every time I write and when I, like, do podcasts and talk like this, like, a fair number of the ideas that we're talking about, like, from my perspective, they're at least partially rooted in, like, imagining what would make me feel more galvanized, right? Like, more confident that there's, like, future Democratic life in the country. And then, like, maybe constructing ways for Democrats to talk about things and whatever that are, that are cognizant of their political calculuses. And so I realized that, like, that approach is sort of rooted in projection or, like, gut instinct as much as, like, empiricism. But I feel like at the same time, there's, there's value if, if only in, like, allowing for more variance, like, try more things. Maybe some things will work better than the approach we've tried for the last decade. But the other part is that, like, I don't think that, like, what's the best way to prevent fascism from taking root permanently is, like, fundamentally an empirical one. Like, like, it isn't really a thing for quants to, to answer for us. Like, how do you get Donald Trump's approval rating down? Well, we're going to focus group this.
- [38:45]
A
And we're going to do that.
- [38:46]
B
And this is the message that does best in the lab. It's like throwing haymakers a lot. And, you know, like, it could be the, the murder of 11 boat people in the Caribbean. It could be Epstein. It could be a combination of a bunch of things. It could be a, you know, one of these city invasions turns into a, like, you know, Tiananmen type thing. Who knows? Like, it is a infinitely complicated, complex world. Like, that is much more like nature Complex. Complex. Right. And. And I, I think it's a little bit too pat to say Trump's been stable at 40 to 45% for forever, and so that's the permanent condition. I, I don't think that. And I also think trying as, like, almost like as a team to yank him down is something that just gets more people invested in, in, like, rowing forward.
- [39:50]
A
Yeah. And.
- [39:51]
B
And then it feels, maybe it feels like better, and then we're all, like, a little more confident that we can get there.
- [39:55]
A
Well, and let me. I mean, I'll. I'll give you my optimistic take.
- [39:59]
B
Yeah.
- [39:59]
A
If you want it.
- [40:00]
B
Yeah.
- [40:01]
A
Because we've been here for a while.
- [40:02]
B
Look, like your colleagues are going to, you're going to say, Brian managed to get the optimistic side.
- [40:06]
A
The other, the other possibility is that this all just goes away on its own. So there's a good book, the Age of Acrimony, about the period. I think it's like 1890 to 1910, 1915, like, American politics was incredibly ugly. And then it just stopped. People moved on. There were other things. And when you look through American history, there's a lot of this tensions that don't get resolved, they just get buried. And I don't know, I think back to the 70s, right. 70s are a really bad time in American life. Economic shocks, social problems, rampant crime, still dealing with legacy of Jim Crow. I mean, all, all these things. You have Vietnam, incredibly unpopular war, and then like, by 1990, that's all just kind of gone. And it's, you know, it's not really gone because it's all underneath the surface. But, you know, like, sometimes things, not always, but sometimes they just get plowed under. And maybe that could happen here.
- [41:16]
B
Right.
- [41:16]
A
Why not? Especially since this whole thing that has happened in America, there isn't a reason for it. There is no, there is no reason that America decided to turn fascist. Right. It isn't like, well, we had just undergone the First World War and an entire generation of young men was dead, or we'd undergone insane inflation. And, like, you know, we've been living through insane levels of peace and prosperity. This is just, it's. I mean, it's basically out of nowhere. There is no causal effect. We could say, oh, yes, the American people, I can understand why they all of a sudden wanted totalitarianism, like, and so if there's no real cause for it to happen, maybe there won't be really a cause for it going away.
- [42:06]
B
Can I suggest a mechanism by which that might happen that I think is. It's it, it like, ratchets down the optimism of the scenario a bit, is that, well, so, so first, like, we. The country wasn't as polarized in the 70s as it is now. And so for people to just, for people just be like, like, pause, restart, like, they, they didn't have to go sort themselves in any kind of way. They were just, they could stay where they were. The. I think we came out of it in the 90s, just kind of like, oh, like we've turned the page from that because Republicans won three consecutive elections and Bill Clinton came in and was like, we're just gonna make do with what we got, right? What, what we inherit from Reagan and Bush is what we'll work with, and he governed it in that way. And, you know, there are a lot of people who have like, Rooseveltian ambition for the country who think that was a lost opportunity to try to rebuild and that if we get to. Whether it's 2029 or 2033 or whatever, and everyone's just exhausted by this and they're like, let's just move on from it. I agree. It could happen. But that means that the losses that we're talking about are just. We just kind of accept them. And then. So the liberal state is Social Security, Medicare, whatever's left of Medicaid. You don't have the best scientific research in the world. And, and there's no basis to rebuild it on. You know what I mean? And we just kind of decide we'll be a democracy. We're just going to be a small mediocre one. And like, I'll take it. I would take.
- [43:39]
A
Where do I sign up? That sounds great, Brian.
- [43:45]
B
You know, like, if I wake up and I'm 50, 55, and that's, that's like the country I have to spend up the last 20, 30 years of my life in. You're right. I'll take that over, you know, the, the worst case scenarios. But like, I think that as an immediate ask to try to avoid that scenario. Like, you, you wrote something recently where I was like, yes, right on. It was about. It was after the Minnesota mass shooting. And you were like, why aren't Democrats, like, saying, okay, if this is a, if Cash Patel is calling this a.
- [44:15]
A
Terrorist attack, that tweet of his doing pull ups, like, and shouldn't every Democrat have just, like, been running with that only. Oh, you're doing pull ups four days before a mass shooting when this guy left a trailer. Yeah, sorry. This is, I was.
- [44:29]
B
Republicans can't do pull ups. None of Them. But yes, it was like, you know, but, you know, you're like, why aren't all Democrats saying, yeah, you took your eye off the ball to, to focus on political vendettas and pull ups and you let a terrorist attack happen. You need to be fired. Right. And I totally agree. That would have been a great thing for Democrats to latch onto. And it's like, what I really want is less Democrats to take every piece of advice I offer them, or you might offer them or whatever and run with it. But just for me to have some faith that they're thinking along those lines and that they will choose some battles. Right. Like just being willing to say, like, we're taking names, we are not gonna accept this lying down. And you know, the, you know, Pritzker comes close. Pritzker says things along these lines. But you need a, you need, I think, to get people believing that, that like, we will come out of this okay. And not just like, we'll, we'll accept 12 years of eating shit and then make do with what we have. Like, you need more than that. And it's just like, like the, the one thing that I feel like I can do with my efforts is try to get it from like three senators signing onto the letter to 10 to 20, and maybe eventually, before it's too late, you have a whole party being like, okay, we're ready to rumble. Not there yet, though.
- [45:49]
A
Yeah. And part of that is, I mean, there, there is a fairly significant, I don't know how big it is, but a fairly significant contingent of Dems who really don't think that Trump is different, who just think like, nah, this is the same. This is, you know, this was George W. Bush, this was H.W. bush, this was Nixon, this was Reagan. And I sort of, I basically reject that while accepting that the forces propelling Trump have been there for a very long time.
- [46:29]
B
Yes. Oh, okay.
- [46:31]
A
We could do five hours on this. But. Right. The forces which propelled Trump, I think go back to like the founding.
- [46:40]
B
Oh, yeah.
- [46:41]
A
But, but he, I just really reject the idea that he is a straight line fulfillment of everything from like 1946 Republicanism. And I say he's not as a fan of the Republican Party. Now, remember, it's like, I have no defensiveness about this, but he seemed, it seems highly contingent. Like what, what has happened to the Republican Party under Trump. And Trump himself seems to be a category difference in terms of his hostility to liberalism. Again, small L liberalism, which has just never existed in America, didn't even exist under Nixon.
- [47:22]
B
Yeah, I Think, yeah, we, we like, I, I, we've in like the liberal half of letters or whatever. We like this, like, is, is he the natural endpoint or is he a break? Right. Like, and it's kind of both. I, I think it's obviously kind of both. I do think that the, the breathtaking abuse of power in term two is disabusing people, particularly on the left left of the idea that this is just the same as Bushism or Reaganism. And then there are Democrats like Jared Goldin who are, who know that Trump is different but feel scared to say so because their districts are pro Trump. I don't think he believes it when he says I'm not. I don't think, you know, Trump is a threat to democracy. So I think that the, the percentage of people who are part of the Democratic coalition who realize this is a different beast is growing. It's large enough now that the party can just ride a consensus that this is different.
- [48:21]
A
I would hope so, man. I mean, I remember Freddy DeBoer who I, I always find Freddie to be an interesting guy.
- [48:27]
B
Let's see if he's a good critic.
- [48:30]
A
Sometime between the election and the inauguration he did a sort of everybody calm down post about Trump and he's like, you know, it's not going to be terrible. Like they'll do some bad things about unions, you know. And I just remember thinking, what is, what fucking planet are you living on, dude? And again, I, I don't know Freddie at all. This is, I, I'm talking, it's like, it's a conversation. It's not, I don't know, freedom and, but that was like, to me, that was the perfect distillation of like the progressive blindness to how Trump is different.
- [49:03]
B
Yeah.
- [49:04]
A
You know, he's like, he might wind up appointing some FTC chairs that we are going to have to unwind. Hey, dude, we should be so lucky. Yeah. We're gonna have troops in the streets. And he was just incapable of seeing it anything other than like, this is big business. This isn't like, that's not it is that, but it's that with a category difference on top of it.
- [49:25]
B
You know, I wonder how he, if he'd reassess now. I know, I know like people invested in the is he fascist debate are kind of slinking away from, from their like long held view that he's basically no different than any other conservative. Going back to, I don't know, I don't know Oakshot Michael. But you know, I remember just covering the news in the, in the 2010s and watching the way Republicans operated on Capitol Hill and in elections versus Democrats. And like, I, like, I remember when, you know, Democrats spent the 2012 primary talking about the math of Mitt Romney's tax plan. And then Barack Obama and Mitt Romney get to the debate stage and Obama's got his math based attacks ready to go. And they're like solid, they are based on solid analysis from nonpartisan actors. And Mitt Romney's like, that's not my tax plan. And Obama would, had nothing to worry. He lost that debate. He obviously did fine in the election. But it's like if you can just do that, if you can just say, nope, not true. And like at some point I began disabusing myself of the notion that they're in an information bubble, they really believe in trickle down economics, that when they say tax cuts raise revenue, that that's just, they're making an analytical error and not saying something they know to be false. I was like, no, they get it. They know it's not true and they're saying it anyway. And this is like an alarming basis for Democratic small D politics. No, and like, like I, I did not predict based on that that they would then like nominate and elect Trump. But I did know that Trump was going to win the nomination in September of 2015. Like, it was clear to me then. I remember having like an exchange with. It was Brendan Buck, who was then working in John Boehner's office about like, you guys are about this. Like, you guys are like making any kind of good faith legislating impossible with like the people you're allowing power in the party and so on. And I pointed to this guy, Chris McDaniel, who was running in Mississippi as a, as like a far right person. And he didn't win the nomination in the end. But Brennan's response was basically like, so one guy in Mississippi who can't win. Like, no, we got this. We are in control of the party and we're not going to let that contingent take over. And I'm like, I think you are going to.
- [51:57]
A
Yeah.
- [51:57]
B
And I'm the main voice.
- [51:59]
A
Do you feel in control?
- [52:03]
B
And I, and I like. And so like when Trump, you know, took over the GOP and it gave rise to these questions, is he sui generis or is he a logical endpoint of conservatism? I was like, it's, it's both things. If the past 30 years hadn't happened, there wouldn't be Trump. But maybe Trump was the Only kind of figure who could do it in one fell swoop, like, take the Chris McDaniels who couldn't win the primaries and make them the center of power in Republican politics. And I think that's kind of what happened.
- [52:36]
A
So I'm gonna have to jump in a couple, but I would say I'll just sort of leave this as a thing for people to think through. Obviously, I've written about this specific question a lot over the last decade, and I had a reader reach out to me with sort of a synthesis theory on this, which is that Trump is not the natural extension of the last 40 years of American conservatism, but the last 40 years of American conservatism were a striking deviation from the norm. And Trump is a regression to that norm, which is like the pre Jim Crow, which, and this becomes difficult because you have to disentangle Republican from conservatism. Right? You have to, because these things have all moved around and changed. And, you know, you go back to the 60s, and the Republicans are a much more liberal party. The people who are segregationists tend to be Democrats. Right. Like, it's, so you have to, you have to take the partisan stuff off of it and think much more in the theological but sense. But when you start going back, like, conservatism in America looks a lot more like Charles Lindbergh traditionally than Ronald Reagan, you know, and, and, and Trump represents a return to that from basically the holiday of conservatism that existed from, like, Bill Buckley when he starts banishing the Birchers through George W. Bush. Anyway, I don't know this is. Right. But I found it to be a fascinating frame for thinking about this question, and so I wanted to give it to you guys.
- [54:25]
B
Yeah, it's a good one. If, if you, if you have one minute for me to.
- [54:27]
A
Yeah, please, I'd love to hear yours.
- [54:30]
B
Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I think that that's like a really good synthesis. It's, you know, I, I, I, I think that given that, like, it confines itself to American history, then you, if you, if you really just winding the clock back, you say that Trump is sort of the re. Emergence of the antebellum south, but with Republican in front of its name instead of Democrat. And I think that there's more like Lindberghian fascism or whatever you want to call it mixed in to what we're living through now than what existed in the south then, which was from that, you know, slavery in that historical period. But that, that there is a sense in which he's running the. That Lee Atwater timeline in reverse, where Atwater gave this interview where he's like, you know, you start out by saying N word, N word, N word. And then that becomes unpopular. And so you start talking about busing, and then, you know, that becomes, you know, not great ground. So you start talking about taxes and all these things. But the key is that they hurt black people more than they hurt white people. And this is like the Rosetta Stone for a lot of people like me who were trying to figure out what the Republican Party is over the last decade or two. And, you know, we're not all the way back to N word, N word, N word. But he, Trump, is successfully pulling the conservative movement toward where they're more comfortable saying the things that they've wanted to say for 40 or 50 years that have been continually suppressed by liberal cultural dominance. And I think that there is a huge wellspring of gratitude for him among movement conservatives for making them free to act like assholes, basically. And the question for me is, like, just how far back can he roll the. The wheel of time and how many people decide, yep, this is things getting better as he does it. And I still feel like moving the direction that he's moving. Like, you're going to have a lot of bad people who have a lot of guns who are. Who are, like, really militantly pro Trump, but it's going to be a shrinking.
- [56:36]
A
Pool of people for your lips to God's ears.
- [56:41]
B
This is fun.
- [56:43]
A
Man.
- [56:44]
B
Very, very.
- [56:44]
A
It's nice to meet you.
- [56:46]
B
Yeah, you too.