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- [00:00]
Sarah
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- [01:56]
Charlie Sykes
Welcome back to another week and another week of to the Contrary podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. Once again, where do we start? We are joined by our good friend Ed Luce, who is the U.S. national Editor for the Financial Times and a columnist and one of the prescient theorists of Western liberalism. How about that for an introduction?
- [02:16]
Ed Luce
Ed, that's a wonderful introduction, which I couldn't possibly justify, but it's nevertheless always wonderful to be with you, Charlie.
- [02:24]
Charlie Sykes
Okay, so I think that there's so much. There's so much horrible stuff happening right now and we could talk about the invasion of Portland, we could talk about the invasion of Illinois, the escalation of that. We're gonna get to all of that stuff. But I wanna talk about my favorite story of the weekend that I know you're familiar with. And I have to confess, my wife came into me the other day, came into the room and said, hey, did you see this interview with Jane Goodall where she's talking about launching Elon Musk and Donald Trump into space in a rocket? And she read it to me, and I said, you know, that just doesn't sound like Jane Goodall. But you know what, Ed? See, this is my naivete again. It was real. So she's actually asked. She knew that, you know, the days were growing darker. And the producer of this show asks her, do you have people that you don't like because you're like the best person in the world, known for your love and your hope and all this? And she says, absolutely. There are people I don't like, and I would like to put them on one of Elon Musk's spaceships and send them all off to a planet that he's sure that he's going to discover. And then she's asked, who would be on the spaceship? Well, would Musk be on the spaceship? Absolutely. He'd be the host. Doug Goodall quips. And you can imagine. And you can imagine who I'd put. I'm sorry. And you can imagine who I'd put on that spaceship along with Musk would be Trump and some of Trump's real supporters. And then I would put Putin in there, and I would put President Xi in. And then she would definitely also put Benjamin Netanyahu. So, okay, so this is. This is real. You know, even the nicest person in the world looks at this and goes, God, we'd be so much better off if these people were on a rocket ship headed to a different planet. Now, I am not as good as Jane Goodall. I would like the rocket ship headed toward the sun. But your thoughts, Ed?
- [04:18]
Ed Luce
I am fully behind. I'm happy to subscribe to USS Posthumous Goodall and its journey to some burning planet or another. The fact that she was speaking to us really from the dead, as it were, I mean, although it was obviously recorded a few months before she died, but in that sort of very gentleman, 91 year old, almost sort of twee way, made it even more effective. I had the fortune to meet her a couple of times and get her to sign books for my daughter, who, you know, was a great fan, and she's amongst the gentlest and yet most inspiring of figures you could imagine. Somebody posted the other day that they would rather live in a nation that lowered the flag for Jaden Goodall. And I fully agree with that.
- [05:18]
Charlie Sykes
Oh, my. Gosh imagine living in a country where they would lower the flag to have to have for Jane Goodall instead of, I am not going there. So, as I was thinking about talking with you today, I was looking through my bookshelf, and of course, I came across this, the 19. I'm sorry, the Before Times, the 2017 book, the Retreat of Western Liberalism, 2017, which now feels like a kinder, gentler era, a more naive era, a more hopeful era. So when you wrote this, when you talk about, and you know, it's described by Lawrence Summers as a terrifying view of the challenges facing the West Coast. So looking back on this from 2025, how surprised are you that the west, the Western liberalism, retreated so far and so fast in such a short period of time?
- [06:14]
Ed Luce
Well, that's a really good question, Charlie. I mean, at the time, some people accused me of being alarmist, although I think we forget how alarmed we all were by Trump's first. So we shouldn't sort of downplay how we felt then. And, you know, Trump then was the same Trump as he is now. It's just that his first administration, he really had no idea how Washington worked. And he appointed all kinds of, perhaps without knowing it, all kinds of people who restrained him. They are completely absent now in his second administration. And I guess, you know what we also thought, and we forget maybe the intensity with which we did feel it was that when Biden was elected in 2024, that that showed the truth of Biden's words, that Trump was an aberration. And that it's particularly painful now, looking back on this last eight, nine years, to realize that Biden was probably the aberration and that the retreat of Western liberalism has become a siege. And every day, I mean, you and I, Charlie, were just talking about it, every day we get further evidence of the complete supporting of America's sort of federal, awesome federal powers to Trump's personal and often vindictive, but also sort of wag the dog sort of war creating instincts. It's worse than I imagined in 2017 when I wrote that book.
- [07:59]
Charlie Sykes
Well, I think it's worse than most of us imagine. But what your book reminds me, though, is that there was a time when we thought that we had seen the triumph of Western liberal democracy, that we were in this new era. And yet, as you point out, and this was really before Trump comes into his own, that there were signs that Western liberalism was in decline, that it was much more fragile than we thought. And I think the real shock of Trump 2.0 is not just that he actually meant everything he was going to say, you know, that he was going to do all that stuff. I'm not shocked by that. What has been shocking is the weakness of the institutions that we thought supported the pillars of Western Democratic liberalism, and that those were much, much weaker than we thought. But you had written a book again, almost a decade ago saying, you know, by the way, you know, many of these guardrails are much more fragile than you imagine, and they were. I'm sorry, I don't want you to, like, read through the whole book. But, but, but what happened? What did we miss? How. How was liberalism so vulnerable, not just in the United States, but. But throughout the world, including Western Europe, including Great Britain, I think.
- [09:16]
Ed Luce
I mean, at the time when I was writing that book, I looked quite a lot at the history of Watergate. And what really shone through about Watergate was not institutions holding up. It was people holding up. It was individuals holding up. So it's the IRS commissioner who refused to use Nixon's enemies list in the way Nixon wanted. So it's attorneys general who resign and solicitors general who resign rather than carry out illegal orders. It's the U.S. treasury Secretary who balks at what Nixon's asking him to do, and many other examples of that. And then, of course, Howard Baker, a really, really important Republican figure, he indicates that Nixon deserves to be impeached. And, well, that then signals to other Republicans they can take on a Republican president. And even in 2017, it was pretty apparent that this was not the same Republican Party as it was in the 1970s, and that Trump was also a much more potent and unhinged figure than Nixon, for whatever Nixon's sort of dark, Saturn alien impulses. He'd been in US Politics so long, he'd been vice president for eight years. And although he sponsored illegal outfits and stuff, he did his best to prevent anybody from finding out about it. Whereas, of course, Trump boasts of it and was boasting of it in 2016, 2017, that the law would be him.
- [11:07]
Charlie Sykes
You can go back to everything that's happening right now and see that Donald Trump was saying this explicitly over and over and over again for many, many years. But this point you're making, I think is absolutely crucial, is that, is that we talk a lot about institutions, but institutions are people. And it is these individual choices, these individual people who stand athwart history or stand athwart authoritarianism and say no, whether it's not. And again, perhaps not popular for some of you out there. But, you know, Mike Pence standing there on January 6th and saying, no, I'm not gonna overturn the election. The members of the military that told Donald Trump, no, you're not gonna put troops on the street. You're not gonna be shooting protests, those people. It is so absolutely crucial. So when you're describing what's going on right now, it's not just the failure of institutions, it really is the failure of people because the Constitutions are not. The Constitution is not self, you know, you know, self enforcing laws are not self enforcing. You need judges, you need people in these positions. And that's been the failure again and again and again, hasn't it?
- [12:09]
Ed Luce
Constitutions do not uphold themselves.
- [12:13]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, they do not.
- [12:14]
Ed Luce
People uphold constitutions. And you are right, entirely right, Charlie, that in the first term there were individuals who did that. And when you think of what Mark Esper did at a key point, refusing to put troops on the street, now we have Pete Hexseth. If you think of the attorney generals that Trump had, they were loyalists for sure, but they had limits. Even Bill Barr, even more, Pam Bondi does not have limits. He had a professional, you know, FBI Director in Chris Wray. Cash Patel is basically his opposite. There were, there were all kinds of people who would put brakes on Trump. Counsel against him feel Jim Mattis, another, of course, Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chief. People who felt able to stand up to him and sometimes succeeded in dissuading him, often succeeded because they had others they could call on in support of their arguments. The Trump administration 2.0 is not an administration. It's a collection of loyalists, each competing to be more Trumpian than the next. There's no interagency process. There's no policy discussion. There is simply guessing what Trump wants. And if you know, it works to the extent they know what Trump wants. But if they don't know what Trump wants, well, they can sometimes get it wrong. Hegseth prematurely, for example, said he was going to stop all the remaining US Military shipments to Ukraine. And apparently that was too early. So Trump then sort of humiliates Hegseth by announcing a reversal. So what's Hegseth been doing? He's been stretching every possible law and I think arguably breaking them to bend over backwards to please Trump. These televised strikes on Venezuelan. Unidentified Venezuelan boats. Trump clearly likes that there's any authorization for this or any legal basis for what is war. No evidence provided that these boats were. That these boats are actually sort of narcotics boats, let alone one sponsored by Venezuela. I mean, it's. There is no sort of legal inconceivable under Mattis or Mark Esper that this would be happening.
- [14:54]
Charlie Sykes
You know, I'm glad you mentioned, and I want to get to Hegseth and what happened in Quantico last, last week. But, you know, we were seeing the videos that they, they show of the boats speeding along and then being blown up and everybody killed with these guys. The video is often the point, isn't it? Did you happen to capture, catch the, the video that they made about the invasion of Chicago when they had the Blackhawk helicopters and then rappel down onto a five story apartment building on the South Shore of Chicago? They, there's a lot of angles to that. But the fact they made a video, a sort of a sizzle reel of all of the, you know, guys going in there with the flashbangs, knocking down the doors, you know, the guns aimed at people, zip tying people, throwing them in vans. You know, these people with the Michael Bay like music behind it. It's so performative. It's like they are living in this movie in their heads. But you can tell they are, they, they get off on this. They are excited by it. They are excited by the violence. They are excited by the drama that they are creating. And if Donald Trump is the executive producer of Our times, he's creating a, you know, this is the movies that he wants to create. He wants Americans to open up their tablets and watch people being blown up in speedboats. He wants them to, you know, seeing these doors and these windows blown open. And so sometimes the video seems to be the point in the mentality of these folks.
- [16:25]
Ed Luce
Yeah. So you can imagine a situation where there's going to be a raid, say on an apartment block, a Trenda or agua, alleged apartment block in Chicago or whatever they're planning in Portland, where they say, we're going to do this right now. Let's maximize the TV optics and the, this is the other way around. This is what is the best for TV optics. And Kirsten Noem has made it very clear that this is the point. And let's find an example that will best serve the image. We want that Trump will see that Trump will then pat me on the head for Kirsty Noem or Pete Hegseth or Kash Patel. And that is the way this is being done. And so I'm resistant to normally resistant to somewhat overblown 1930s analogies between, you know, Hitlerism and Trumpism. I do think they're very different. But I think Goebbels explains what's happening. Goebbels was all about it's, it's creating the drama, staging, present it. Exactly. Lenny Riefenstahl. It's the visuals, the optics, it's the impact on the, the mass psychology of these optics that we want and on the leader who is very, very keen, the Fuhrer is very, very keen on that, on that method of propaganda. And so in that instance, I think the 30s analogy is utterly appropriate for what we're seeing, which is wage war. I mean, one other, though it's a bit more hackneyed, but I think it's no less true, is Wag the Dog is a fake war with a foreign country to distract from a president's domestic problems. Trump's twist on that plot is that the fake war is at home, it's on America's streets, it's in America's cities. And this fake televised optical war with Venezuela auditioning to play a co starring role, it's been lined up and antifa. Yeah, it's been exactly.
- [18:38]
Charlie Sykes
No, and it's, you know, it is, it is interesting just watching these guys go about doing all of this. Also, it's the totalization of this state power. And again, as somebody that's watched American conservatism over the years when they gave lip service perhaps to limited government, you know, and the real difference between, you know, government power and the private sector, for these guys, there is no line whatsoever. So you have, you have Donald Trump exercising his power over private companies and corporations and the speech of private actors. I mean, I just think it's interesting with everything that's going on, I mean, with wars and rumors and wars and mass deportations, that last week we had this big MAGA freakout, Department of Homeland Security freak out about the NFL's decision to have Bad Bunny perform at the Super Bowl. Halftime. Now, on a different earth, Ed, the President of the United States, the federal government would go, yeah, whatever, we have more important things to do about. But you saw that their reaction to this, the Puerto Rican superstar, you had ICE issuing these statements like, we will hunt you down. And if you show up at this concert, it's like there's no part of society that Donald Trump and his minions don't want to have some sort of control or influence over. And that is extraordinary, especially coming from the leader of a party that used to claim that they were all about small government.
- [20:06]
Ed Luce
Yeah, I mean, I find myself in an unusual position because I'm not a libertarian of reading consistent ones. And there are fewer than we might have imagined. But reading Somebody like George Will and finding. I pretty much agree with every column he writes nowadays.
- [20:25]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, do too.
- [20:26]
Ed Luce
Rule of law, limited government, constitutional norms, modesty in, in, in your aims, in, in government. All of these things I'm, I, I find myself nodding my head to. We're not witnessing anything resembling a conservative administration. It's, it's a complete perversion of the word conservative to think this is in any sense conservative. This is an administration that is creating, at every possible opportunistic moment it's presented with. And Pad Bunny is, you know, one of the more sort of darkly comical ones. I mean, the idea that this is a threat to national security and into our way of life and to our Americanness. To have a Puerto Rican, very, very popular pop star on. In the. SINGS in SPANISH SINGS IN SPANISH My goodness, how unamerican. I mean, it's, it's as American as you get to have, you know, a pop star, you know, from Puerto Rico who's really popular all over the world.
- [21:37]
Charlie Sykes
Who'S a US Citizen. Who is a US Citizen, by the way.
- [21:41]
Ed Luce
Who is a us.
- [21:43]
Charlie Sykes
I think part of the shock. Yeah, I'm sorry, go ahead.
- [21:45]
Ed Luce
No, no, I wasn't going to, you know, I don't, don't claim to be a bad bunny expert. It would not be my special subject.
- [21:54]
Charlie Sykes
Well, you know, one of the, I think the shocks and the complication of dealing with all this is that we're almost on a daily basis presented with scenarios or events that are, and I'm sorry to use this word, unprecedented, that we, we haven't had a chance to think through it. So right now we, we have the President, United States, putting federalized National Guard troops into American cities, the invasion of Chicago, what's going on in Portland, which again, if you and I would have predicted this a year ago, I think we would have been accused of Trump derangement syndrome. But now we're getting these interesting twists on all of this, that he's doing this over the objections of the state governor, and he's sending troops from Texas to Illinois, sending troops from Texas to Portland, Oregon. Now, I was reading, you know, somebody on substat who was saying, you know, look, I'm, I'm, I'm not, I don't want, you know, I'm not predicting Civil war type stuff, but suddenly you're having troops from one state going into another state. You know, out outside in the, in the last century, we don't have any, any roadmap here. We don't know how this works. We don't. Know how this plays out, but it has got a very, very weird vibe. In Portland, you had a federal judge, a Trump appointed federal judge who decisively rejected his, his rationale for sending troops into Portland. Stephen Miller rages about it. And then they tried this cute workaround where they decide, well, we'll send troops from California into Oregon. I mean, we are facing almost daily constitutional crises for which there's no roadmap, no precedent for any of this stuff. It doesn't feel like it.
- [23:43]
Ed Luce
There isn't. I mean, I've been very pleasantly not surprised, but I very pleasantly observed how many of the lower courts, really most lower court rulings have attempted to keep in the law. And that includes from several Trump appointed judges, including the Oregon one, as you pointed out. But the intimidation against judges, you know, this pizza doxing, this finding, their addresses, the death threats against judges. We just saw the arson, by the way, of the burning down of the home, the private home of a judge in South Carolina, a circuit judge, Diane Goodstein, which is being investigated for arson. And she'd issued a stay on Trump's DOJ asking for all the voter rolls from South Carolina in a quest to find illegal immigrants who are on the voter rolls and became instantly a figure of hate, had multiple death threats. And this is being investigated for us. And it's not theoretical, the climate we're living in, the warnings are out there. I mean, it's a very, you know, and the ruling, the injunction that she issued is part of this issue. It's part of the idea, and I think the wag the dog idea, that illegal immigrants, that undocumented migrants are changing elections, that this is the Democratic Party's plan, is to flood the polling booths with illegal immigrants and take over, that they're the enemy within and indeed that they are the beneficiaries of the Democrats closing the government down in order to preserve health care. Allegedly, again, for illegal immigrants. I mean, this is mostly complete nonsense. There is no evidence of that happening in terms of changing elections, there's barely any voter fraud of any significant scale anywhere in America. And in terms of medical spending, in terms of Medicaid spending, and in terms of the Obama insurance subsidies, ACA subsidies, well, the latter. There are no illegal immigrants. But in terms of emergency services in hospitals, sure, there are some who are undocumented, that's true. But it's a fraction, tiny fraction of Medicaid spending, hospital spending. So we've got this complete bogey issue. We have this wag the dog war going on and in which anybody who Gets in the way. Including judges are seen as legal insurrectionists. They are depicted as the enemy of democracy and the will of the people. By Stephen Miller, by students of the kind of propaganda we were talking about, and forgive my French, but, you know, shit is getting real. Judges are.
- [26:47]
Charlie Sykes
It is very getting real. No, the shit is getting very, very real. And one of the things that makes my head hurt a little bit is that this has been going on for a long time. It is escalating. It is an assault on the judiciary. It is assault not just on the rule of law, but now on the judiciary, on individual judges who are sounding the alarm with increasing urgency. And the contempt for the judicial process and the independence of the judiciary is so overt that at some point, I keep waiting for is the reaction from the Supreme Court to understand what they have unleashed here. I understand you have a 6, 3 conservative majority. You would hope they would be watching this. And so the big question, I think the big question right now in America is, is this intimidation of the judiciary, will it backfire by, you know, making the Supreme Court eventually wake up and recognize that they need to rein this in, or is this campaign of intimidation going to intimidate the court so that they become fearful of defying the administration? Because I think the thoughts in the back of the brainworm in John Roberts mind is, what if I issue an order and Donald Trump says, no, you're a bunch of, you know, radical, radical judicial leftists who are engaging in insurrection, and I don't have to follow you, and MAGA goes along with it, that he basically exposes the Supreme Court as a nullity. And I think that John Roberts fears that, fears to exercise the power knowing that he might be ignored. Your thoughts?
- [28:27]
Ed Luce
Yes. That we could get a President Andrew Jackson situation.
- [28:30]
Charlie Sykes
Yes. Yeah.
- [28:32]
Ed Luce
Where he says, force me, and they couldn't. So he called their bluff. I mean, I think it's entirely conceivable. I mean, this Supreme Court has already shown, you know, at least six of the nine have already shown their true colors in terms of taking Trump on. I mean, they preemptively offered him immunity in mid 2024, and since then have been essentially overriding all these lower court and appeal court stays that we've very impressively seen from the rest of the judicial system, or much of the rest of it. In the last eight, nine months, the Supreme Court has basically been waving Trump through and overriding those injunctions. I hear a lot of people, I think, in this sort of spirit of hope over experience, saying they think the Supreme Court is going to block Trump's tariff emergency tariff measures. I mean, if you judge by the rulings the Supreme Court has issued that have been critical of Trump or that have slowed him down, which are very, very few, you can count them on the fingers of one hand. They only do so partially and almost apologetically. And so I think what you'd get with, say, the tariff war and on things like the 14th amendment is the Supreme Court saying, well, we don't think in this instance it's particularly good, but here are some other options. That's been their sort of way of doing it. Which implies that. Your question is quite correct, Charlie, that fear, fear and instinct of self preservation is dominant amongst Roberts and his five fellow conservative justices.
- [30:18]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, you know, I should never raise a question I don't know the answer to, but one of the questions that hit me in the middle of the night the other night on this question of the court and the president and immunity, you know, given what's happening right now, is what is the status of the question about can The President order SEAL Team 6 to murder a political opponent and be immune from criminal prosecution? Remember when that came up during the appellate court argument and it seemed to me to be the decisive question and answer? Of course, the President of the United states cannot order Seal Team 6. And then you have the US Supreme Court ruling that says that, you know, in the exercise of his official duties, he is absolutely immune. So I don't know, I would kind of like a clarification of that, you know, of exactly what can the president get away with? Because right now, Stephen, he's sitting in the office with Stephen Miller and Pete Hegseth, and they're telling him, you can get away with anything. And if you can't get away with it, you can get away with anything. And anyone you order to do it can get away with anything because you can pardon them, which would. If that is the case, then we're not in a boiling frog, boiling lobster scenario. The frog is freaking dead. The lobster is cooked. We are literally in a post rule of law era. If the president is above the law and can put any of his henchmen above the law.
- [31:43]
Ed Luce
So Pete Hegseth has reportedly. I haven't myself verified this, but I seem well reportedly to have been to have lined up a plan to send the 82nd Airborne.
- [32:00]
Charlie Sykes
Yes, I saw that.
- [32:01]
Ed Luce
Into Portland. Now, this is something. This is active, active military, active duty military, and a different, whole different level from having the National Guard. Trump hasn't yet said yes to this, but they're lining this up because they know it's the kind of thing he'd like to do. So we might be getting that test soon. The one silver lining I get to sort of Trump's recent attempts to skirt court orders is that when the Oregon judge said, you cannot deploy the Oregon National Guard, then he went to California and said, okay, we'll send the California National Guard. Now that same judge has put a stay on that and on a National Guard from any other state. So the ball is back in Trump's court. Will he blatantly ignore that? I don't know. Or will he send the 82nd Airborne in? Because the ruling's only about National Guard? I mean, we don't know. But to date, one sort of ghost of a sort of shred of reassurance in this situation is that Trump wants to be seen to conform with the law, even whilst all the people around him and the whole sort of MAGA media machine are saying they are traitors and they are siding with the enemies of the people. So we need to do that test.
- [33:34]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, I think he's softening his base, his supporters up for defying the courts. So, I mean, that's the thing, is he hasn't yet done it, but he is softening up. Okay, so let's talk shutdown for a moment. You had a very provocative column in the Financial Times, why the Democrats cannot win the shutdown fight. Ed Loose. Why not?
- [33:54]
Ed Luce
So I think they are very, very principled and correct to fight on the basis of healthcare provision to Americans, even though any deal that they negotiate with Trump, and I doubt Trump is gonna negotiate a deal. He sees this as a really. He and Russ Vogt, his budget director, who, of course is the sort of chief author of Project 2025, see this as a great opportunity to implement DOGE 2.0, to do what Elon Musk didn't do very well, which is to fire people in what they call Democrat agencies like the EPA and the IRS and so on, whilst ring fencing and protecting his Praetorian Guard at ICE and trade negotiators, et cetera. So I don't think Trump's word would really count if there were some kind of a deal that ended this shutdown, which would carry far less weight than Trump's actions of disobeying laws that Congress has already passed through his impounding of funds, his pocket rescissions. So you can't really rely on his word. So you've got to really own and mean this shutdown. And it's. It's health care is very important and I strongly support fighting to retain that. But we have a federal government that is now breaking, as we have just been discussing, Charlie, I mean, we, we that is using its funds to break the law and vandalize the Constitution and essentially declare war on American cities in, in Democratic control. That, I believe should be the much larger sort of goal of a shutdown. And the fact that it isn't suggests to me that Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries and others who are sort of conventional legislators operating in a different era are looking for a conventional off ramp. So I don't think they can win this. It's slightly misleading. I guess my headline said they can't win it. Well, they could if they were pursuing a different strategy. There's going to be, I think, another no Kings Day demonstration later this month. If I believe very strongly, if I'm right in believing that there are millions, possibly tens of millions of Americans who would come out on the streets if there were a national campaign, national leadership, national emergency here with the Democratic Party and Republicans who agree with them joining in, saying this is a DEFCON situation, we must get on the streets and we must oppose this administration, then I believe you would get serious traction. It might be dangerous, it would be escalatory, but we are in an extremely dangerous situation. And I just don't see Schumer and Jeffries basing their tactics on that premise. I might be wrong. I really hope.
- [37:06]
Charlie Sykes
No, no, no, you're not wrong. You know, these leaders are not the ones who will meet the moment here. And this has always been the internal contradiction that if in fact, Donald Trump poses an existential threat to the, you know, constitutional democracy, how do you make a compromise with them? What if he turned around and gave you what you wanted on healthcare? Does that make everything okay? And I think you're at the key here is that you have conventional politicians who are playing by conventional rules in very unconventional times. And this was really the fundamental, maybe the original sin of the Biden administration that they thought that we could go back to normal times, that, you know, somehow that had passed. And the fact that as you point out, no, that was not an aberration and they did not meet. They did not meet the moment. Okay, you've read Kamala Harris's book. And I guess the larger question and this sort of dovetails into this is do Democrats understand the moment? Do they understand what went wrong? Give me your sense of what you took away from Kamala Harris, explanation or rationalization of her defeat last year.
- [38:24]
Ed Luce
So this is, you know, quite a readable book because she settles some scores and there's quite a bit of gossip.
- [38:32]
Charlie Sykes
In there and it's entertaining.
- [38:33]
Ed Luce
I'm not surprised that it's, it's reportedly sold something like 350,000 copies, which is big numbers. But as the title suggests, she has one explanation chiefly for why she lost the election, and that was she didn't have enough time.
- [38:51]
Charlie Sykes
Time.
- [38:52]
Ed Luce
Now I'm, I'm persuaded having, you know, observed like you and, and, you know, every second of this, of this campaign and been there at sort of certain moments there in Chicago for the DNC in August 2024 and watched her, you know, what was probably her peak moment. I am persuaded that although she, she was definitely a sigh of relief, there was a lot of sort of outpouring of relief in Chicago that essentially Biden wasn't the one on the podium, that it was Trump, somebody else, and that she also did well in her sole debate with Trump. I am nevertheless persuaded that actually if she'd had more time, her defeat could have been worse. She simply had no theory of the case there. She did not have a positive agenda to sell to America. She didn't speak economics in a way that anybody found memorable. I mean, even the sort of biggest election geeks, if you ask them now, what were her policies again, there'll be something about price gouging in supermarkets and something about subsidizing first time home buyers and a bit of this, a bit of that. Nobody really remembers the message because she didn't have one. Now Biden didn't either. Or if he did, he wasn't really able to articulate it.
- [40:17]
Charlie Sykes
Classic Democrat whiteboard, right? That they honestly believe that if they just have this program, this program, this program that will be rewarded for it. And as you point out, at the end of the day, nobody even actually remembers what was on that whiteboard. And yet they're totally invested in it.
- [40:32]
Ed Luce
Yeah, it's, it's, it's hard to recollect. I mean, I do remember, you know, I mentioned my daughter, maybe too much, but she's a teenager and she was kind of coconut pilled. There was a lot of excitement and as I say, I think relief around Kamala Harris's campaign. And so a lot of people sort of got seduced into thinking it was kind of 08 Obama light or some version of. And it was utterly deluded. And if a campaign can lose against Trump, you know, when the economy is growing, knowing what we know about Trump as a nation, Then this, this calls for not sort of usual postmortems into election defeats. This cause calls for revisiting first, first principles, checking every assumption, questioning every approach you take as a party. Because this is not, you know, this isn't a dress rehearsal. This, this is a, this is defcon. Defcon won. So I didn't find her book measured up to that. And, you know, I give her credit for what she did in those 107 days, but I don't think her book measured up to the top, and I.
- [41:53]
Charlie Sykes
Don'T think the Democratic base has measured up to it. And going back to our discussion, whether Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries measured up, Look, I mean, part of me, I understand the mentality that says that, you know, all we need to do is oppose Trump, just keep, you know, pointing out who and what Donald Trump is. And that's persuasive to me. It's apparently not persuasive to the rest of the country. And you have to go back to that point you just made. This is a political party that has lost to Donald Trump now two of the last three times, one of the least qualified, least fit men ever to run for president. And so the failure of the Democratic Party, you know, is truly alarming. And so there ought to be that introspection. But what I see, particularly among the kind of the roiling base, yes, there are some of the think pieces about it and some of the excellent articles that you'll read in the Atlantic. But you go on social media and there's this sense, don't criticize Democrats, don't say anything bad about Joe Biden, don't raise any of these issues because we can't take our focus off Donald Trump. And the whole point is, wait, we need to do a little bit of game playing. We need to go back a little game analysis on how we fumbled that football. How you fumbled that football two out of the last three elections, because that is an American crisis. Now, part of the rationalization is, oh, it's not our fault. If we had just messaged better. No. Or it's not our fault. The voters are just too stupid, they are too dumb, they're too evil. Well, that basically gives up the game. That basically says you've given up on American democracy, you've given up on America. And there's an entire school of thought, including, among some never Trumpers, who've decided they're going to go that way. But that is never going to win you the next election. That is never going to come up with having that compelling alternative. So do you see any, who are the leaders that you see that are potentially rising in the moment? Because the ones that are in power right now not meeting the moment. I mean, I'm looking at and I'm skeptical about these guys. Just so you know, JB Pritzker seems to be up there. I am really a Gavin Newsom skeptic, but he seems to be rising. Are there any others that you see understanding this moment?
- [44:10]
Ed Luce
So let me pick up on what you, I think very rightly just said before then, Charlie, which is that you go on social media and there's this protectiveness, this is circling the wagons. Don't criticize Biden. Don't criticize, criticize Harris. Do not look at politics as an additive game. You know, you're, you're not seeking to, you're not wanting to reach out with people, to people who disagree with you. You're not for, for example, people who are anti abortion or, you know, would be depicted as transphobes maybe whatever. You're not seeking to add and to say, well, we might agree viscerally on some issues, but we can agree on something larger, which is that there is this existential threat. Trump politics should be an additive game where you build coalitions and swallow your pride and bite your tongue on some issues, but because you've got a larger, more important thing in common. For the Democratic Party, it is still a subtractive game. It is a movement that is in which significant portions of it are still looking for heretics rather than seeking converts. And until the party has a really sort of strong inward looking, sort of searching for within itself, for where it's gone wrong and why Trump could have won twice, I think it will remain, I mean, at worst a subtractive party, but, but at best, what we're seeing now, which is a defensive party and a reactive party, which makes it oddly because it's react because Trump sets the agenda, it simply reacts to everything he does. It's the conservative party. It is the conservative. It's the one that's sort of defending the status quo, which is clearly, it's clearly very, it's diabolically clever of Trump to have them in that position, but.
- [46:17]
Charlie Sykes
They played into it. You know what, this is so frustrating because it's 2016. The mood of the electorate was as clear as possible, but it wanted change. It was tired. And so what does the Democrats do? They nominate the symbol of the status quo, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, very much a keeper preserver, curator of the status quo. And they have to break that, you know, break through. I do think that there are some voices out there. It'll be interesting if Abigail Spanberger wins, is expected as the governor of Virginia, Andy Bershear, who is the Democratic governor of a deeply red state in Kentucky. But I think you need some of these to stand up. And Frank, I can't believe I'm saying this. Do the kinds of things that Bill Clinton did back in the 1990s where he called out his party for the way that they talked to other Americans, the way they didn't talk to other Americans, the way they were in denial about what other Americans saw. You're going to need somebody who has just won an election in an area that will determine who the majorities are. And I think that the focus needs to be lasered in on who are the majority makers, not who is going to scratch your id, not who is the most fashionable or the most showy. Who can win. And if you can get Democrats, who can win in places like Kentucky and in Virginia and in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and Michigan, you know, attention must be paid to these folks. But I agree with you very much. Ed Luce, thank you so much for joining me on the beginning of another God knows what kind of a week it's going to be. Do you know what I mean? Do you know what I mean?
- [47:59]
Ed Luce
Such a pleasure, Charlie. Thank you.
- [48:02]
Charlie Sykes
And thank you all for tuning into this episode of to the Contrary podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We do this and we will continue to do this because now more than ever we have to continually remind ourselves we are not crazy.
- [48:28]
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