Political Analysts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman dive into the Trump Administration's burying of the IG Report on the Russian Collusion investigation, Bill Barr's willful disrespect for the law, and the history of the war on education and experts that conditioned the Republican base to become a cult in the thrall of Donald Trump. Then, Jared interviews journalist Ross Barkan to discuss his article "The Fascism to Come" and how the Republican Party might actually grow more extreme in a post-Trump America.
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And now, after years of investigation, the Inspector General said there was nothing wrong with the origin of this investigation.
So this conspiracy theory that the President of the United States has been pushing for years was a total lie.
And I was just briefed on it and it's a disgrace what's happened with respect to the things that were done to our country.
It should never again happen to another president.
It is incredible.
Far worse than I would have ever thought possible.
If what we're talking about is not impeachable, then nothing is impeachable.
Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast, the political podcast that promises to dig deeper.
I am Jared Yates Sexton.
I am joined, as always, with my co-host Nick Haussleman.
Later on, we'll be talking to writer and journalist Ross Barkin about his article about growing fascism in the Republican Party.
Not that that is a timely subject at all, but here we are on the day that The impeachment inquiry keeps going forward.
The IG report just dropped that said that the investigation into Russian collusion in the 2016 election was done properly, which completely gets rid of all, well, it doesn't get rid of, it begins to poke holes in every conspiracy theory and eradicates them that Trump and his cronies have hidden behind.
So here we are, Nick, how are you?
Jared, I am doing great, and in light of Trump's response to this IG report, my question to you is, as a writing professor, how often do you grade papers that you don't actually read?
Nick, can we just be very clear that Donald Trump has not read a single word of a report that has been written in the past three years about his crimes, impeachment, the Mueller report, the IG report.
He sat in front of a camera.
And said it said the exact opposite of what it said and showed absolutely no ability to recall anything about the report because he had never read it.
And I would actually turn that classroom around and say that this is a student who obviously didn't do the assigned radio.
Yeah.
And, you know, it does remind me of when I listen to like NBA radio and you know that one of the commentators is trying to talk about a team that he clearly hasn't really watched.
And he's quickly like maybe even while he's talking calling up a box score and he's going to try and spit out something that's so not nonsensical.
That's what we got from Trump today and I love it because he says well I'm gonna get briefed again even more now it'll be really double extra bad or whatever he said.
And it really is frightening because we're now getting the true Trump.
It's now more and more apparent the cognitive decline that he is under.
And again, here's my only fear is I don't want to end up having a thing where we just kind of shit on the guy 100% of the time and that's all we're doing, kind of whining.
So how do we mitigate that?
Well, we have to talk about what this is.
I mean, the weird thing about Trump, obviously, is you can sit around all day and you can talk about, oh, Trump did this, Trump said that, and at the end of the day, what we're actually saying when we're saying that is, This is beyond the pale.
This is ridiculous.
This is dangerous.
And focusing on Donald Trump in a lot of ways is like focusing on a black hole out in the universe and wagging your finger at it because it's a black hole, right?
It's doing what a black hole does.
Donald Trump is incompetent.
He's uncurious.
He is in some sort of decline, however you want to call that.
And he is a force for greed and corruption and grift.
And at the end of the day, it doesn't matter, right?
That that's who he is, like that's who he is, and no amount of talking about it is going to change it.
The only thing that we can do, and I like to think that's what we're trying to do, Nick, is talking about the things It means giving it some historical context, talking around it, giving a little bit of an idea of why we're here and how we can get away from it.
And talking about Donald Trump not reading a report is pretty much a nonstarter.
But I'll tell you what we can talk about, which is his attorney general, Bill Barr, Who is a disgraced human being at this point.
I don't know how you can be an attorney general and be so lawless and so cravenly against the law and the Constitution you've been sworn to protect.
Bill Barr, like he did with the Robert Mueller report, came out and mischaracterized the findings of the IG report, said that it proved everything that he has been saying, which have been lies, and did it bold-faced and in front of the world.
So we can talk about people like Bill Barr who know better.
You know, the historical context with Bill Barr goes all the way back to the Iran-Contra, because he did something very similar to what he did with the Mueller report, with the report that he wouldn't have released back then as well, and they buried that whole thing.
There was an excellent article just over the weekend I read about the historical context of the Iran-Contra and how they were able to get away with that.
In fact, you can argue that they're getting away with it now.
Because they got away with it in Iran-Contra.
Almost to the point where they're willing to sort of dismiss these things.
Let me ask you this, Jerry, real quickly.
Do you think it would make a difference if the Republicans, and even just regular Republican people who are clearly not going to change their vote, would it make a difference if they just admitted out loud that they just don't care about bribing another country or extorting them for a political gain?
That's a great question.
I mean, at this point, that's pretty much what's happened.
I mean, I mean, what you brought up with that Ron Contra, it's one of those things where when you really like dive underneath the surface, you find a despicable crime and you find a betrayal of American principles.
And you find and if when you look at that time period, you see an administration that is helping one dangerous, murderous, genocidal group of people everywhere around the world.
Right.
They're totally going against American principles, but they're doing it because they think that they are right and they think that it helps them politically and geopolitically.
Now, when we start taking the idea of politics and mixing it with law, which law is supposed to be the antidote to politics, right?
It's supposed to be the base level of what we agree on.
We can argue about this over here, we can argue about what politics are supposed to be, what bill to pass, all that.
The law is supposed to be, no, at this point you're not Democrat, you're not Republican, you're not left, you're not right.
You are a citizen of the United States and here are laws.
But what you're talking about is an evolution of thought, right?
So we have a party that has decided that the law doesn't matter because you can manipulate the law and use it for political power, enrichment, all these types of things.
And at the end of the day, if they said something like, oh, it's OK to bribe countries in order to help ourselves.
Unfortunately, we have an electorate and a base on the Republican side now that would see that and they'd say, that's good strategy, right?
That's a pragmatic decision.
That is the way that we need to go.
And so I think at the essence of this thing, we have that difference of philosophy of what law is.
The idea that some people should be above the law and use it as a weapon.
Other people are at the mercy of it.
And just to explain a little bit around Contra in 10 seconds, you know, the Democratic Congress recognized that the administration, the Reagan administration, wanted to help the Contras.
And they also recognized that this would have been terrible because the Contras really were, you know, human rights violators and it was really not a good look.
They didn't want to be involved with that.
So they passed a law that says you cannot help and give money to them.
So, they were already ahead of the game here.
They knew what was going to happen, they knew what was going on, that's why they passed a law, and then Reagan decided to just completely flaunt that and lie about it later.
It almost to the equivalent of, had Obama tried to pass a law really quickly or some sort of executive order, it says you cannot solicit help.
I mean, we already know it's a law, it's the whole problem here.
The law is already there, you cannot solicit help for a campaign from foreign nationals or a foreign government.
And here we are, anyway, And again, what you described is this notion that it doesn't seem like they want to state it out loud because it still doesn't sound quite right when you say, oh, I'm OK with shaking down another country.
It's totally fine.
We do it all the time.
But it does plug into this other thing that gives them a rationalization for a lot of this bad behavior, which is that, well, all politicians lie.
They're all like this.
You're so naive, Nick, that you just now notice that this is what's going on.
But my response has been, in the past, when you did get caught lying and doing something, you had severe consequences.
You lose your seat.
You lose the election.
A lot of bad things.
You can go to jail.
And we've somehow gotten to the point now where that doesn't happen anymore.
Well, so what we're talking about, you're exactly right.
The past is Riddled with America behaving in really, really terrible ways and American politicians behaving in borderline illegal ways, right?
And that's part of the problem is a lot of people like to look at this and just to promote real fast the conversation with Ross Barkin that is going to follow our discussion.
You know, this idea that the Republican Party and Trump That what we have right now is just something a blip on a radar that just came completely out of nowhere is completely false.
The American history is all about shaking down countries but without being overt about it.
That's the line we're talking about here, right?
It's the ability to get away with things and to still maintain a relationship with the line of the law.
That's what we're dealing with and that's why this thing is so dangerous is because in the past we've had all these problems that we need to take a look at and we need to investigate and we need to start De-threading the difference between American myth, what we think about America, and the truth of it.
We don't get to this point unless you have people like Reagan and Reagan's cronies breaking laws.
We don't get to this point if you don't have George W. Bush breaking laws and having an unjust war.
You don't get to this point without one step after another that keeps troubling the line of the law.
And right now, with the Attorney General, who, and this shouldn't need reminding, the Attorney General, it's not the President, Attorney he is not supposed to work for the president in his interest This is a person who's supposed to and that's one of the reasons why because we have the law which is supposed to be non-political, right?
He's supposed to be the guardian of the law and instead he's acting as a de facto press secretary for Trump So what we're watching is we've moved closer and closer to the line and it becomes seductive, right?
Whenever you start moving closer and closer to the line and you don't suffer consequences from it politically and economically and all these ways, you start troubling it a little bit more.
So now we have a point where we have just total open corruption and we have groups of people that don't even respect the line that used to be there.
So it didn't start here.
It didn't come completely from here.
American history has been moving towards this direction.
And unfortunately, we find ourselves at a point of crisis.
You know, another article that came out this weekend that was also terrific begs the question, if we were in 1979,
Having gone through withdrawal of Vietnam, losing that war, gone through Watergate, all these different things, the malaise of the country, don't you think if you were to ask anyone in 1979 who was somewhat politically aware, if you asked them, do you think that America would ever get into another war where the politicians could systematically lie about the progress year over year over year of the American public, do you think that they would actually say, yeah, that would happen?
considering what happened in Vietnam and how we discovered how horrible it was.
Well, we just found out that that's exactly what they were doing, the war in Afghanistan.
They were completely lying about just about every facet of it.
By the way, they lied to get us into it, so I guess we shouldn't be surprised.
But here we are again, you know, now in the midst of the longest war we've ever been involved with, and it's the same stuff, and you know, not to crap on the Republican Party, but guess what?
It is the same party that's doing this, that isn't transparent, and they're the ones who seem to be more willing to lie than anyone else.
That Washington Post article about the Afghanistan war is really tremendous, actually.
I recommend anyone who hasn't looked at that yet to take a look at it.
What you're talking about is a big chunk of what's happening here.
There's a weird thing that's happening with history and reality, particularly with Trump.
This is a person who, and I mean, Make America Great Again and all the things that he says, it's all about sort of not moving forward, but sort of pushing society backward to sort of pave over American mistakes.
And what you're talking about is a result of that.
So like the malaise, so to speak, of Jimmy Carter, Jimmy Carter's presidency.
So those who weren't alive or those who haven't looked through this stuff, This is a president who would get on TV and be like, there's something wrong with America and we really need to reckon with it and it's existential and it's personal and we need to reckon with what America is in a post-Woltergate era.
Well, guess what?
That doesn't make you very popular, right?
Like getting in front of a camera and saying the answer is self inflection.
There's a reason why Ronald Reagan followed him.
There's a reason why Reagan prospered.
There's a reason that That this ends up moving in this direction is because people don't like to look backward for too long and they don't like to consider the privilege that they're coming from and where their power comes from.
Trump tells them that they don't have to write that that's a big chunk of that.
And you have things like the Afghanistan war and the Iraq war.
Those are all these things that are manufactured.
And if anyone wants to spend some time on this, neoconservativism, if they want to look at it, look up a guy named Leo Strauss.
And basically, this is a group of people that have a philosophy that you don't have to tell the truth as long as you tell a good lie.
And when you tell a good lie, and it's based on a mythology of something like Americanism or something about America being the chosen country of God, you can do whatever you want.
And then at the end of the day, it's good for the world, right?
And so that's sort of where Trumpism comes from.
You can lie about the past, you can lie about what you're doing, but as long as you maintain that myth, you're still going to succeed.
But it creates a three-dimensional problem.
And part of what We got on here to talk about today is what they've done to not just reality and the law, but our understanding of the world, right?
Like what has happened and how the Republican Party has gotten to this point.
I don't know if everyone has seen this, but so last week we had a panel of scholars at the impeachment inquiry, legal professors.
Who came out and said without hesitation that Trump had committed impeachable offenses.
And by the way, these are not like, you know, rabid partisans.
These are law professors.
These are people who care about like the minutia of what we're talking about.
They were followed by a letter signed by more than 500 law professors from around the country.
And I'm talking everywhere in the country.
We're not just talking like New York City, D.C.
people, coastal elites.
We're talking about people around the country.
That didn't matter.
It didn't move the needle even for a moment.
We have this report that just came out from the IG that says, no, Trump has been lying, Barr has been lying.
It doesn't matter, Nick.
It doesn't matter at all.
And we really need to talk about not just the effect of that, but how we got here.
I have a rant about this, if I may, for a minute.
I was on a plane and I just started typing away on my phone because I had these ideas I wanted to get out and I couldn't wait to get here because, you know, I'm a grandchild of immigrants, right?
I am this story that we kind of think about as America and, you know, coming to this country for a better life.
And my grandparents sacrificed their lives so my parents could have a better life.
And education was the chief motivation.
It was a chief thing that they made sure their kids did.
You're going to go to college, you're going to become a lawyer or a doctor and improve the world and all these different things.
Well, I'm starting to think that based on the reaction to these professors of law from last week, the Republicans were so, tried to sneer at them to such a degree where Gohmert was saying, the Republican Congressman Gohmert was saying, you know, I hope the Republican Congressman Gohmert was saying, you know, I hope none of your mothers out there would ever send your kids to Harvard or Stanford Law School.
And it was so striking to me because these are the schools that we should be aspiring to get into, knowing that that's the result of incredibly hard work and intelligence.
And that's what we used to, I always thought we stood for.
But here's the thing.
Look at the last two presidents we've had.
They both, I mean, sorry, the last two Republican presidents, they both went to Ivy League schools.
They're both on the idiot level, right?
They both, without question, did not deserve to go to Ivy League schools.
The only reason why W gets into Yale is because his father did.
And now the only reason why Trump got in, you know, he had a transfer from, um, where did he transfer from again?
Um, upstate New York.
Anyway, I'll come up with that country.
And by the way, it's galling that he claims he went to Wharton School of Business because that's always been interpreted as the graduate school of business, and he did not do that.
Now, but what does it tell the people who are maybe not educated, not college-educated white people in America who are the firm base?
Well, it kind of tells you it doesn't even matter whether they go to those colleges or not because they can get to the highest office in the land anyway.
And that is where we, I think, are living and it's spawning more and more of this kind of ideology where we don't want to aspire to an Ivy League education anymore.
In fact, the irony there is that most of the liberal, elite, you know, snobby people that they would accuse of, who are those really smart people, I would think more than anybody are the most dedicated to fairness and helping people and being the kind of people that, you know, uneducated college or, you know, college educated people would actually respond to.
So I don't know what to say about that.
It's a lot of words I just said out there to Jared, but I don't know.
Help me.
Help me come to grips with this.
I am A liberal arts professor.
I'm an academic.
That's who I am.
That's how I make my living.
That's what I do.
I make a decent middle class living.
I'm not living large.
I still have my own student debt.
I'm not living in a house or an office filled with mahogany.
That's not what this thing is.
Your tweed jackets are being eaten in the closet right now.
Right.
I like to go to class in t-shirts and jeans.
That's how I like to do it.
But the narrative of what college is has been a narrative that has been completely crafted by conservatives.
They have vilified academics.
They have vilified intellectuals.
And a large part of the reason that they've been able to do that is because it's been a sour grapes operation, just to lay it on the line.
Again, I'm a person who has my own student debt.
The idea of college has become so expensive, so ridiculously expensive, that by the time you get out, even if you get a good paying job, you are going to be shackled to this thing for maybe the rest of your life, right?
Like, they've made it nearly impossible to get away from it.
Well, guess what?
That means that college is a very, very easy target.
Well, okay, so why would Republicans want to do that?
Well, let's go through history.
Academia hasn't always been the way that it is now.
In fact, in the 1940s and 1950s, they were really conservative establishments.
Colleges around the country were dedicated to right-wing ideas and practices.
The academies were places that worked hand in hand with the military and the CIA.
They designed weapons.
The social sciences in part were created to game theory, the Cold War and military exercises and ideas of how to control people.
If you really want to get deep into it, I mean, there were experiments done on people via the CIA that like are really problematic.
And the universities were used for that purpose.
Well, then in the 1960s and 1970s, we start to see the beginning of a counterculture, right?
We start seeing the beginning of a group of liberal students who start striking out against a technocracy, the idea of a military society, right?
And in Vietnam and the civil rights movement are big reasons that this happens.
Well, so what happens on the right is they start to realize that the Academy and a learned populace is one of the biggest threats to Republican rule that there is in conservative rule, right?
This is where the ideas get made.
So there's this war that starts being waged and it begins.
Richard Nixon had a treasury secretary named William Simon who played a big role in this whole thing.
He wrote this big book called A Time for Truth and he basically said that Republicans were losing, right?
That they were losing the information war and that they were losing the idea of how society should work, particularly where more and more people are going to college.
This is where we get the idea of indoctrination, right?
The liberal professors are indoctrinating their students into little safe spaces.
Right, right.
Man, so ridiculous.
Anyway, so William Simon says, what we desperately need in America is a powerful counterintelligentsia.
So basically, they start saying that they need their own alternate reality.
If that sounds familiar, stop me now.
So they start saying that we basically need our own experts, we need our own literature, we need our own media that will fight against what the college is doing.
Well, that's what they did.
They followed that prescription to the letter, and at the same time, what they end up doing to colleges, and this goes back to the professors and the reason why they're not taken seriously, they start They're playing class games with professors, right?
And teachers.
And they start saying, oh, they think they're better than you because they could afford an education.
Or they think they're better than you and they live better than you.
Don't listen to them.
They're out to get your kids.
And so then they start vilifying academia.
And anybody who's in academia now can tell you, basically, there's been a flip in how colleges have been run.
It's a top-down model now.
There's austerity that's taking place.
and professors live in constant fear.
And on top of that, society doesn't really listen to what they say.
You eventually hear a report every now and then.
And all of this information that is necessary to understand how we got here and what's going on, it sort of gets scattered to the wind, and academics get siloed, and basically, it doesn't matter what the experts say anymore.
And so then you have a panel and then you have 500 professors who say, no, this is unequivocally impeachable and wrong and against the law.
It doesn't matter.
Then you have reports that come out from experts who look into things and they, you know, everything from Mueller to this IG report that say, this is what's going on.
Here are the problems.
Here's a solution forward.
But guess what?
It doesn't matter because of that counter intelligentsia.
Because an entire group of people, an entire base of people, have been insulated from the information that would explain to them what's going on and how to move forward.
And so we end up in a really, really terrible situation.
And that's, in a nutshell, why it doesn't matter that a panel of experts would say it's impeachable.
Because nobody trusts them.
Right, and let me explain how that works today, because after the Inspector General report came out that explained that the investigation of Trump in the beginning was completely above board and was not influenced by any political bias, Bill Barr, our Attorney General, comes out and says the Inspector General's report now makes clear
that the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken.
And he says later on, later on, he says, it is also clear that from its inception, the evidence produced by the investigation was consistently exculpatory.
This is what you're talking about.
This is the upside down.
It's exactly the opposite.
How many sentences is that?
How many sentences is that?
How many sentences?
That's, well, it's two.
Two long sentences.
Two sentences versus an extensive government report.
And there's no relationship between the two at all.
But guess what?
Those two sentences, they fit into a tweet or a Facebook post really easily.
So all they have to do is say the thing that people believe already.
It doesn't have to have any relationship with the truth.
They say it and a group of people who should know better and could know better, they automatically go ahead and they go with what has been told to them by the people that they trust versus the people they don't trust.
And there you go.
That's how this thing keeps going.
Jared, I'm old enough to remember when Bob Mueller had to write two letters to the AG, to Bill Barr, saying that what you are describing of my report is so wrong that you have to actually go back and tell them that it's wrong.
Basically is what he was saying.
Now I'm going to get accused of lying because I so completely mischaracterized what that letter said.
Hey Nick, real fast on Bob Mueller.
What political party was Bob Mueller?
You know, he was a Republican.
He was a Republican?
Oh yeah.
How long did he serve in government?
A while, right?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, you can almost argue that his entire career was dedicated to having such high standards that he was unimpunable.
Is that the right word?
Something along those lines.
And also, if I'm remembering right, wasn't he in the military for a while?
I believe decorated?
Yeah, yeah.
He might have even fought in that war we were just talking about.
Okay, so he was a decorated veteran, a lifelong Republican, a serious man, and At the end of the day, they turned him into a pawn of the quote-unquote deep state, a secret Democrat, who apparently spent decades as a loyal Republican to hide himself as a secret Democrat, you know, who's eventually going to take down Donald Trump, because we all saw that coming, right?
Oh.
I have a secret, I do take a secret satisfaction when we hear Trump accuse Democrats of being so dirty.
and like ruthless.
It does make me feel like, oh, that would be that would be so awesome if we really were that way, if that was really the case.
But I do get a little visceral like, oh, yeah, that's great.
I wish we could be that way.
But I think that's part of the Republicans mindset is because they're so willing to break the law, they can't even fathom anybody else not doing that for their cause.
The Democrats couldn't conspire to carry out a picnic.
I mean, it doesn't it doesn't work that way.
I'm sorry, but the Democratic Party every four years falls into an ideological civil war that's split among like five or six different groups.
To carry out a conspiracy in the Democratic Party would be akin to a miracle.
Oh, I hear you.
And that's the thing.
We're not in lockstep.
We just had Trump railing last week about how lockstep they are and they're all together.
He's always projecting.
He's just describing the Republican Party.
And it's frightening how that continues to hold in the face of what is going to be an election that in theory will finally, once and for all, help us decide where we stand.
I have to admit, I'm very curious about conspiracy theory culture and where it comes from and how it bubbles up.
Behold the Pale Horse is a book by William Cooper, who is sort of the grandfather of American conspiracy theories.
I listen to this audiobook, which is, by the way, really, really poorly written, but it's kind of fascinating.
He's one of those people who's like, You know, we've been working with aliens for years and years and years and the New World Order is an alien conspiracy, reptilian stuff, whatever.
But William Cooper starts out his book on a really, really fascinating note that I think about all the time now.
And I think it's really prescient and kind of amazing.
And he starts out before he lays out his conspiracy theory, he says, "I know that there are conspiracies working in the world because if I could be involved in a conspiracy, I would.
If I could work with other people to reach my chosen, desired moment, that's what I would do.
And I think it's like one of the most all encompassing explanations of why this stuff happens.
The Republican Party literally does believe that there's all these conspiracy theories happening out there because they themselves are more than ready to engage in them, right?
They're more than ready to trouble that line of the law.
I mean, what I was just talking about with the subjugation of American higher education, That's a really well carried out conspiracy and it's not false I mean like they'll tell you if you ask them like this has been carried out intentionally and and here's the thing it's not just a It's not just efficient in sort of hiding their crimes and hiding their lies.
It's also done other things.
It's hurt American innovation.
It's hurt American understanding and creativity.
It's sort of hindered the ability of us, our ability to sort of handle the problems of our moment.
And they just keep piling on trash on top of it, and they keep hiding the fact that, you know, this game doesn't end well.
It's always trying to stay one step ahead of the disaster that they've already put into motion.
And the hindering of education and the vilification of educators, and now the vilification of experts.
I'm sorry, you need experts!
You know, when you look at, like, a gas or an oil company that pays experts to come out and say that global climate change isn't real, well, guess what?
Maybe that helps your bottom line for a while, but that doesn't make the disaster go away, right?
We're still dealing with it, even as people are out there being paid to say it's not real.
It's real, and when you don't deal with the reality of the situation, it has really terrible consequences, and the check is going to come due.
That's the bottom line and that's on global climate change and it's on the destruction of the law and knowledge.
The checks coming due.
It's just, and this is a very Trumpian idea, how much money can I make before the check comes due?
And that's the whole ballgame right there.
Now, I was saying this this weekend, you know, if aliens did tap into, you know, the Cooper conspiracies, if aliens came down and observed our nation or our world for a couple weeks, they would probably come to us and say, OK, so this whole the whole purpose of this is to have a huge swath of your country just be poor.
Right?
This is why you're doing this.
Your school system is set up to create poor people that can do these menial tasks for all these very few rich people.
Right?
That's what it would appear to them to be on purpose.
And I think that's where we're at.
And by the way, that ideology plugs into What the Republicans want to do with, they constantly give tax breaks to the rich, there's a deficit in revenue because of that, and then they have to cut entitlement spending.
And it's always because they say they don't have any more money, but they're doing it on purpose so they don't have any more money and then they can finally cut those programs they wanted to, as if the people who use those, like food stamps, which was just cut or made a lot harder to get, are frivolous.
and are just freeloading people who, you know, clearly if they just would tighten up their shoes a little bit harder, they'd be able to make more money and live a life of fulfillment.
So let's change the perspective on that.
And look, because if you look at it from like a removed thing, I love the alien perspective.
I think that's always a good way to do it.
Just look at it on the face of what's happening and not necessarily even understanding the why, just recognizing what's happening, I think is really important.
And I actually think more people should do it.
I think that it really helps to sort of digest this stuff and understand it.
If you were to talk to a Republican who has been engaged in both vilifying higher education and also sort of rigging the economy for the wealthy and the powerful, They would tell you that they're doing it because wealth and power denotes competence and talent.
They believe in things like Adam Smith's idea of the invisible hand in the economy, which means that people who are successful are successful because they're talented.
And that basically there is an arbiter, which is the economy that tells you who is important and who is talented.
Well, that doesn't work.
Just to go ahead and throw that out.
The meritocracy is a complete and utter fraud, and it's based on past privilege and past power continually perpetuating itself.
I think Donald Trump has done an amazing job of showing America that you do not have to be talented in order to be rich and powerful, right?
This is a person who is really, really untalented and has just continued to fail up.
They don't want to make people stupid or they don't want to make people poor, but it is the necessary side effect of it, right?
Because when all of the capital or all of the money is on one side and the other side doesn't know what's going on and they can be paid less, that enables the people who have the money and the power to do the things that are right.
Right, they are the people who know the will of God, they know the will of the market better than anybody else.
So these people over here, if you keep them from power, you keep them from knowledge, you keep them from wealth, Because if they get those things, right, if there's a redistribution of wealth, if socialism gives them a fair chance, then what's actually happening is they're gunking up the gears of what the market should be doing.
It's a bizarre mindset.
And when you look at it from outside of it, it's a barbaric concept.
I mean, like I come from a poor family.
I have watched my family suffer my entire life.
I've watched their lives.
Shortened.
I've seen them hurt.
I've seen them languish in conditions that I can't even get into without getting upset about it.
But that's over here, right?
The people over here are like, well, obviously, they've done something wrong.
Obviously, they're not as competent as the people over here.
And it's a completely bizarre mindset, a really brutal mindset.
But the people who are in it, they think that they're helping Right.
progress of the world.
They really do.
They really believe that this is the right way to tell the difference between the worthy and the unworthy.
And it's really hard to get them out of that mindset.
Right.
And it's precisely what allows them to even maybe deep down inside acknowledge that they're breaking the laws because they have been brainwashed or convinced that their version of how life needs to be is justified no matter what they need to do to get there.
And everyone was going to see you'll see one day this will really be amazing for everybody.
And yet whenever they've had a chance to do this, it It's completely failed every single time and made things worse and you know here we are now where we got to talk a little bit more about the impeachment exactly what's been happening on that front I think because it's sort of another another outcropping of this because it's that same mindset of I can do whatever I want You know, because eventually what's going to happen is, you know, it'll be OK for everybody.
So that's where we are now with Trump.
Right.
I think we're going to we're slowly moving into the defense of what's what he did by basically shaking down another country is to get to the point where, like, yes, I did it all.
And you shouldn't care that I did.
Maybe that would make it easier.
Maybe maybe I wouldn't get so angry if they would just acknowledge that.
Wow.
The idea of having to just accept that.
I've been thinking a lot about the possibility of the impeachment being thrown out of the Senate, him getting away with this, and then getting reelected.
And again, we're going to have Ross Barkin on in a few minutes to talk about the long game of what the Republican Party would look like in a post-Trump era.
I've been thinking a lot about the possibility of all those things.
And the idea of looking into the future and thinking about myself walking around the United States of America.
While people are blatantly doing this, like not even attempting to hide it, like even right now, they're doing a really piss poor job of hiding it.
I mean, the Republicans are mounting an insane defense that doesn't make any sense whatsoever if you pay attention to it for even more than a second.
Donald Trump has no idea what's going on in his own impeachment.
I mean, he's so out of it and so intellectually unable to grasp what's happening to him that it's almost sad.
And, you know, there's all these things are very, very transparent and open, but at least they're, I guess, pretending.
The idea of living in a country that just thinks it's OK to shake down other countries and break the law constantly without any fear of repercussions.
That's a really – man, I really struggle trying to wrap my head around that concept.
Man, I really struggled trying to wrap my head around that concept, but I guess we probably should.
But I guess we probably should.
Well, I think also what that means is that so many other countries in the entire world have lived this way for so long.
Well, I think also what that means is that so many other countries in the entire world have lived this way for so long.
I almost feel like they're saying, welcome to the club.
I almost feel like they're saying, welcome to the club.
Now you finally know what we've been living with all these years and all this whole time.
When you have that kind of attitude, which I'm sure that's the attitude they have now, almost like a mocking tone, we have now lost any of that soft power that we used to have where we would represent a country that did have ethics.
Like I mentioned before, I know that politicians lie and they cheat and they do all these terrible things.
But when they get caught, there used to be huge repercussions for them, and now there isn't.
And that's where we've now gotten.
So there's no more American exceptionalism that exists in the world.
And that just becomes a real problem because, you know, one of the best ways to keep America safe is to have as many people as possible that do not live in this country look up to us and not want to kill Americans.
and the other means.
And the less ability you have to do that, the less safe it becomes.
So, what you're saying is 100% right, because one of the reasons we're living in the era that we are is because the veil of American exceptionalism has started to shred.
And it used to be based on, you know, whether or not it was real or not, at least it was there.
It was what Reagan would talk about, the Shining City, which is a complete farce, but it's neither here nor there.
There's this idea that keeps coming back around.
In my research, and it goes back to one of the awakenings in America, and it's this concept of benevolent empire.
It's the idea that America should behave in a way that inspires the rest of the world how to behave.
Well, that's gone.
You know, like, we're taping this after Donald Trump went to a NATO meeting, and the leaders of the industrialized world are standing around.
And by the way, it is not A coincidence that they were filmed doing this, making fun of him and laughing at him.
These are careful politicians with the exception of Boris Johnson.
These are people who are serious people.
They know that they probably shouldn't be making fun of a president when somebody could whip out a camera and catch them doing it.
They didn't care because he's lost all ability and faith and any sort of belief in him whatsoever.
So that decline is something.
I will say, and I always try and Divide these things up.
I think American exceptionalism, as we understand it, or as we have understand it, is a myth.
I think it's a cultivated, manufactured thing, right?
I think watching what America has said it's about and how it actually behaves, the difference between those two things is damning.
But that doesn't mean that you can't be exceptional.
Right?
Like if you want to talk about the idea of American exceptionalism and you want to talk about how America is supposed to be a leader in the world, well, guess what?
Now's the time to step up to the bar and behave in an exceptional way.
It's when you start living the principles versus when you just put them out as Some sort of advertisement or branding, which is what has happened time and again in this country.
Now's the moment where you can say, OK, that is fake and this is real.
And we have to start siding on the on the side of the real.
We have to start believing people who understand things.
We have to start believing people who are experts.
And we have to start investigating the difference between propaganda and reality.
And if we don't, the ballgame's over.
That's it.
We have to start moving towards some sort of understanding and some sort of reality or else it's all done.
You know, that's exactly like what we're seeing in today's testimony.
They asked Castor, the lawyer for the Republicans, they said, would you agree that Joe Biden was a leading contender to face President Trump in 2020?
And Castor shook his head and says, I wouldn't agree with that.
Now, obviously, what they're trying to do is make it seem like, well, he wasn't out to get Biden because Biden isn't even a political rival of his that's going to run against him, right?
This is all about 2016, whatever.
Now, and I made this point before.
Obviously, they had control of both houses and the White House for two years.
They easily could have been investigating whatever kind of corruption they wanted to in Ukraine when they could have done that.
And they just only decided to do it now as we lead into the election.
So this is another one of those goalposts that they're moving as far as we're going to see how they're going to defend this.
And it kind of does feel like it's a dance with no clothes on because it doesn't – again, it doesn't necessarily matter anymore.
All of the things they've built up since Lee Atwater and Ronald Reagan in 1980 have now – are in full effect, right?
Everyone is now firmly entranced in this in this cult or whatever you want to call it.
And again, I know people who are reasonable Republicans are listen to this and think that we're the ones who are crazy, I guess, or we would feel insulted.
But I don't know if you're still, you know, believing what like what Castro just said, then there's some cloud hanging over your head.
It's making your brain very But it's not about evidence.
It's about faith.
And you're absolutely right.
It's a cult.
Yeah, it's about how you feel about it and how that reflects in reality.
I mean, that is the difference.
we know that he's going to run against him and probably get the nomination.
I hope not, but that's what's going to happen.
But it's not about evidence.
It's about faith.
And you're absolutely right.
It's a cult.
Yeah, it's about how you feel about it and how that reflects in reality.
I mean, that is the difference.
And if we want to get, and we're late in the podcast, but like just real fast, what we're talking about are enlightenment principles.
The enlightenment, which is supposedly where we're living in still, or you can argue about that all day, but what birthed America is.
The idea of the enlightenment where you start questioning articles of faith and you start looking for evidence.
I mean, there's a reason why and Let me see.
On Saturday, I'll be going to commencement ceremony.
There's a reason why, as the graduates are walking out, there's a mace and there's a torch, right?
It's the light of knowledge.
It's the light of fact-based living and being delivered into a world and knowing the difference between things that you just assume are real and things that you find evidence for.
For these people, and unfortunately they're in a cult, there's no other way to put it, and I know that people want to dance around that thing, but they are.
They are in a place where Donald Trump and what he says are articles of faith.
We've talked about this.
The wall is not going to be built.
The wall is in the supporters.
It's a metaphor for them.
It's a religious symbol for them.
The things that he says, they don't have to look for evidence because he is the arbiter.
He's the person who carries the evidence.
He's the person with the mace and the torch and the flame, right?
When you start going that route, when you turn your back, on not just experts but you turn your back on evidence in in in on behalf of faith that it's not just faith by the way and and people can have faith I'm talking about bad faith.
I'm talking about people, uh, charlatans, right?
That's what we're talking about.
We're talking about charlatans who are using people's faith against them.
And it is a cult that has been cultivated and created and insulated.
They are using this for their own benefit and enrichment and empowerment.
And until we start moving towards evidence versus that bad faith, there's really nothing else to do.
And I don't want to poo-poo this and make it seem like, oh, only the dumb people are entranced by their Pied Piper style.
Not at all.
No.
And because the next progression of what you described would be like really, you know, maybe wealthy people who are intelligent, they simply want no taxes.
Right?
They want to maintain their status in society and for their kids and their grandkids and have this sort of, you know, kleptocracy.
So that's what their motivation is.
It's money.
And we talked about this before anyway.
So I'd almost want to say, because they would take umbrage of this notion that they're like, they're just, you know, sheep jumping off a cliff.
No, but they are simply in it for the money.
And they don't really care about a place like Ukraine.
So they don't care if Russia takes over Ukraine, or Russia takes over Poland next, or wherever they might want to go to continue their, you know, and recreate the Soviet Union.
Like, I don't think that they care about any of that until it's like, um, in the hunt for Red October, when they're getting chased by the Russian sub, I don't know, whatever.
The best part of the thing is, is that the hubris of the Russian sub commander ends up getting them killed, and right before they do die, the guy right below him goes, you idiot, you got us killed!
And this is sort of what, that's the moment we're going to get to when all the other people who could have stepped in and done something, who were smart, could have said that before we got in a situation where the torpedo was about to explode in the nose of our submarine.
I have to say, I love A Hunt for Red October.
That is a great movie.
I'm so glad you brought that up.
Yeah.
No, you're right about the electorate.
I mean, in some cases it's about taxes, it's about money.
In a larger sense, it's also about identity and history, wanting to believe what you've believed and believing that you've been living on solid ground for forever, which is what Trump gives permission to these people to believe, is that they don't live in a racist country that has racist origins and has these starts and stops and the exceptionalism isn't all there.
But they get caught up with the people who are full-blown believers in this article of faith and in this article of bad faith.
So I actually think this is a good place to segue into talking with Ross Barkin about the future of the Republican Party, what happens as Trump's influence really goes through, and even a discussion about what happens after Trump.
So here you go.
Here's Ross Barkin.
Here on the Muckrake Podcast, we're going to introduce our first guest, Ross Barkin.
Thanks for being here.
Thank you for having me.
So, to get people up to date, Ross Barkin is an author and journalist from New York City, a columnist for The Guardian, and contributor to The Nation and Gothamist.
He's been a columnist for The Village Voice, and his journalism and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and the Columbia Journalism Review.
He's also an author with the new book called demolition night and a former candidate for office and as a fellow member of the Academy I just like to always give a hat tip to fellow academics and adjunct professor of journalism at NYU All those things are fantastic.
The reason why we have Ross on the podcast today is Ross recently wrote an essay that I thought was pretty extraordinary and I wanted to talk to him about it's called the fascism to come and it was published on medium and And the idea in the thesis behind the essay that Ross wrote is basically the idea that this problem with Donald Trump isn't just a problem for right now, but it's a problem that's going to continue even after he's in office.
And it's going to continue to germinate in the Republican Party that is obviously shown itself to be really receptive to fascist ideology and the idea that after Trump there might be somebody Who could be more dangerous or could actually follow Trump's lead and sort of do some really, really troubling things.
I'm just going to open this with a quote and then I'm going to ask a question of Ross and then we're going to talk about this thing because I feel like this is a conversation that has needed to happen for a while and most people are actually kind of afraid to have it or maybe they don't think it's important.
I'm not really sure what's happening there, but we'll talk about that.
The quote from the article that really got me was this.
There could come a day when the left looks back on Trump, the man they compared to the most vile human in history, as the less terrifying version of what's come before them.
A Republican party marrying the most reactionary elements of today's GOP, the hatred of immigrants, the tolerance of white supremacists, the ending of female autonomy, the cult of the semi-automatic weapon, with the discredited, destructive interventionism propagated by George W. Bush and his democratic enablers.
A party, in other words, purified of Trump's domestic incompetence and unreliable instincts abroad.
So I think Ross, your article lays out the worst case scenario that I've been worrying about too.
But a lot of people have treated this iteration of the Republican Party like it's a brief aberration or, I don't know, a fever that might break.
I mean, we've heard this from people like Vice President Joe Biden and others in the media who don't, I don't think they quite understand what we're looking at here and that it's a real and existential threat.
I guess to open the conversation, what about this do you think that people don't get?
Or why do you think that this is something that more people aren't looking at?
It's an excellent question.
I do believe it's much easier to think about Donald Trump as this aberration who can be one day driven out of office and then We can all go back to normal.
It's a very comforting idea.
If you watch any movie or read any book, unless they have really dark endings, typically the narrative arc is something like that, right?
The moral arc.
Yes, you have your conflict, good defeats evil, and by the end of the arc, you are returned to where you began.
So this idea that, well, Trump won, But then come January 2021, the clouds will part, the sun will shine, a righteous Democrat will be here, and we can all forget about this.
And it's much harder to think about Donald Trump as a symptom and not a cause, that, you know, he's not the boss at the end of the video game.
And I think Democrats get caught in that trap and the resistance, which I have much admiration for, That if you simply defeat him in an election, or if you remove him from office through impeachment, you will have your Republic back.
And the Republican Party, as I write in my essay, is a very radical organization.
If you look at it and compare it to political parties around the world, and if you just look at where it is today, versus where it was 30 years ago, for example.
And these very conservative forces really on both social and fiscal policy are very much there.
And the next incarnation or the next candidate that we'll see in a post-Trump world will really carry forth these forces.
And Donald Trump himself has been something of an unreliable I mean, in some ways he's been very reliable for the conservative movement, certainly on the appointment of judges.
But on other facets, which we can talk about more, he's pivoted in different directions.
And my argument in the essay is that the next post-Donald Trump Republican candidate for president, whoever it is, and I posit Mike Pence, I look at Tom Cotton, Senator from Arkansas, whoever it is, I do fear That they will bring the worst of Trumpism, the nativism, the enabling of white supremacists, with really the worst of what we've seen in the domestic policy agenda of the Republican Party.
And I really think about the Koch brothers, the Mitch McConnell wing, for lack of a better word, those who really want to dismantle Federal government as we know it this has been a long brewing project and my fear is if these people are allowed to really seize power With someone other than Trump in office and they get the majorities in Congress They can do far more serious damage than we're seeing right now Well, I think what you bring up is a really interesting part because there's been this
Weird reimagination of what has happened over the past few decades.
I I really appreciated in your essay that you brought up the George W. Bush administration, which, you know, created a criminal unjust war and and gallivanted around the world, interfering in dozens of countries.
Affairs and and just did this blatantly as the country just sort of waved flags and pretended like everything was fine And I think the idea that Trump is somehow or another this phenomenon that came completely out of nowhere is just laughable I I don't think there's any truth to that whatsoever but I also tell people that it doesn't matter if Trump is necessarily defeated or even removed from office.
I think if he's removed from office it sends a A message that these sort of things can't be tolerated, but at the same time everything that he's done.
I look at Trump and I see a person who is basically without any talent or ideology and by just savage flailing has exposed all these weaknesses in our democracy and has really exploited a lot of the things
That we I think American myth tells us are strong and our safeguards tour, you know to keep us away from this sort of fascism But I think there are serious people and I this is what I read in your essay and I'd love to hear your talk on this I feel like there are serious people who have their own ideology who are not as transparently incompetent or corrupt as Who have been able to look at Trump and sort of study what he's done and are going to be able to reverse engineer it.
I mean, I think what we're seeing in the impeachment inquiry is really troubling because Republicans have obviously realized that the Trump playbook works in a mass media age and the idea that somebody like a Pence or a Cotton who have institutional connections and also an ideology.
I think that's a really frightening thing.
Yeah, Sid, I'm glad you used the term reverse engineer.
I didn't write that in my piece, but it's definitely a way I was conceiving of it.
And it is really the reality that a lot of Democrats and liberals and progressives don't want to acknowledge that Trump is Merely this, as you said, this incompetent, savage flailing around, right?
What does he really believe?
He was a Democrat.
He was a Republican.
He was pro-choice.
Now he's the most anti-choice president we've ever seen.
He supported gay marriage.
Now he doesn't.
He's a showman.
He's senile.
Whatever it is.
But what Trump did show, either through bald instinct or some level Of cunning, and we could debate that to death, is that there is absolutely a winning playbook for the Republican Party in presidential primaries, and the winning playbook is nativism.
It's cultural conservatism.
You cannot win a Republican primary in this day and age without being a cultural conservative in the most ruthless way and being a nativist.
At the end of the day, Trump On foreign policy and even on some fiscal policy deviated from the norms quite dramatically.
I go back to when he attacked Jeb Bush over supporting the Iraq war and many pundits said, well, how Trump is attacking Jeb Bush and Republicans support the Iraq war and he can't win doing that.
And then he took every delegate in South Carolina and I was in South Carolina when that happened.
So we know that There is this path to victory for Republicans, and it's through this really aggressive, savage nativism and cultural conservatism.
And for the future, if you think about the Republicans who want to be president, and Mike Pence is at the top of that list, and we've talked about Tom Cotton, you can talk about Nikki Haley, you can talk about Josh Hawley, the new senator.
From Missouri, whoever you name, and my argument is that in a way it may not even matter who this person is, they are going to see I can only become president and seize power by being a nativist who either winks and nods to white supremacy or embraces it more aggressively, and I can only be president if I
Crack down as severely as I can on a woman's right to choose.
And you're seeing now in the Republican Party where Roe v. Wade getting demolished is very much the mainstream.
And there was probably, you know, a time where it seemed like Republicans could evolve on this.
You know, gay marriage, they maybe were going to.
But Trump has shown that really the path to victory is with this cultural conservatism.
So you take those elements, which obviously are very troubling, and you marry it with the disastrous foreign policy.
And that's why I'm glad you brought, you mentioned George W. Bush.
I wrote this in my essay.
George W. Bush was the most destructive president in modern history.
George W. Bush inflicted more damage and killed more people than Donald Trump could ever dream of.
And that's also a statement that a lot of people on the left don't seem to want to make or don't seem to want to consider that we did have a president for eight years who really ran amok and did severe lasting damage to world affairs.
And so my fear is that this discredited neoconservatism, this lust for war, for interventions abroad, for bolstering the military-industrial complex, That this will reemerge in the post-Trump Republican Party and will be fused with the social conservatism and the reactionary elements that I mentioned before.
And Donald Trump on foreign policy has not really dramatically changed things a whole lot.
There's certainly on the surface rejecting NATO.
Pissing off foreign leaders.
But the military-industrial complex churns on.
You've got troops in 100 countries, whatever it is.
Real institutional change has not happened.
But for whatever reason, Donald Trump's instincts have actually been not quite as warmongering as we would see from other Republicans.
That's the best way I can put it, where he seems to have some interest in diplomacy.
My fear is the next Republican, if it's a Tom Cotton, if it's a Pence, if Ted Cruz comes back, that they will want this more traditional neoconservative approach and fuse it with the domestic radicalism and we will have a really Destructive combination.
Well, I think you're bringing up a really interesting thing about the Republican Party, which is there's this weird thing that I think we see in history where Republicans find a rhetoric or a metaphor and then they use it with policy, right?
So like you brought up Ronald Reagan and the research that I found on Reagan is that Reagan was basically an empty vessel who didn't have a whole lot of political opinions of his own.
But he was more than happy to let the Heritage Foundation and sort of the hardliners of the Republican Party sort of imbue it with what they thought.
And funny enough, George W. Bush was the exact same way.
I was reading a book the other day that in 97 he was telling people that he had no idea what he thought about foreign policy.
And so then you have the Project for the New American Century that comes in and they're like, hey, we got some ideas.
And so you find a lot of these people who are sort of the leaders of the Republican Party that stand up on a stage at a pulpit and they talk about like the myth of America and the righteousness of America.
And then you have these other people who have more ideology and more direct goals behind it that are willing to take that figure and sort of use it however they want.
And I think when you look at Trump, because you're exactly right, Trump's ideology has been completely flexible, and there's no ability to really put down a pin in anything besides a base cruelty and sort of a cravenness to appeal to evangelicals and certain groups that make up his base.
That is, I think you said he's going to loom large over the Republican Party like Reagan.
And I think that makes a lot of Republicans skin crawl.
But they're also in love with an idea of Reagan that never actually existed.
And that has become sort of a metaphor and a symbol that they've used to sort of push in any direction that they want.
And I personally, so I think the two that we've talked about so far, Mike Pence and Tom Cotton.
I think these are two interesting candidates for what we're talking about because Mike Pence, so I'm originally from Indiana, and Mike Pence, you know, yeah, so actually, Mike Pence is a pretty untalented politician.
He's not exactly good at coming up with ideas of policies, not exactly good at doing anything besides sort of playing the right role that is expected out of them and appealing to evangelicals.
Tom Cotton is kind of the same thing.
He's sort of this character who basically has built up his own power base again on nativism and warmongering.
And I think you're exactly right that you have someone like Trump who is a ready-made symbol or metaphor that can be grafted onto whoever else and be turned into a weird engine of destruction.
I think that's a really apt thing you've noticed there.
It definitely makes a lot of people skin crawl.
I'm sure both establishment type Republicans who in their own way wish Donald Trump gone because he is embarrassing, right?
And the many Democrats who despise him.
This idea of him looming large over the party in America after he's gone is horrifying to people because we go back to the idea we discussed before.
This hope and belief that merely defeating him or removing him from office will be like excising a growth on the body or something, and it'll be gone and that's it.
You look at the popularity of Trump in the Republican Party, it's remarkable.
He is very popular with the base of the party, like Ronald Reagan sort of evolved into this mythic figure.
As long as he's alive, he's going to exert a lot of influence over the party.
And that's something I don't think a lot of people have thought about yet.
Because it's very hard in this era of Trump, in this era of emergency, of constant interruption, to think ahead.
We all struggle with it.
It's hard to think two months ahead or two minutes ahead, let alone years into the future.
To imagine a future first without Donald Trump is difficult and then to imagine a future without Donald Trump as president but one where Donald Trump is still influential is also very difficult to conceive.
But I do believe it will come and what it'll look like is Donald Trump in retirement calling all the shots.
Every Republican running for president in the future will have to kiss the ring of Donald Trump.
They will have to come to Mar-a-Lago and sit before him, tell him what a great man he is.
And he'll have to go on TV, on Fox News, and spread the Trump agenda.
And if they deviate from the Trump agenda, and this is key, Donald Trump will not hesitate to call them out.
And by calling them out, get them canceled in the Republican Party.
I use that term very explicitly because this is the cancel culture.
You will see in the Republican Party, Donald Trump can single-handedly cancel any Republican he wants.
He did it to Jeff Sessions.
I knew people who liked Jeff Sessions more than Donald Trump.
Republicans who viewed Jeff Sessions as the ideal nativist, conservative, paleo-conservative warrior, whatever word you want to use, and Donald Trump, because he didn't Because Jeff Sessions does not recuse himself from the Rush inquiry, Donald Trump got mad at him.
And now you see Jeff Sessions struggling to win his old Senate seat in Alabama, which would have been unthinkable just a couple of years ago.
So you'll have a future where Donald Trump can cancel Republicans.
What happens then?
The primary will be competition for Donald Trump's ideas, for his agenda, for the nativist agenda, for the cultural conservative agenda.
There will be no such thing as an anti-Trump Republican lane in the Republican primary.
I don't see how one can exist.
You see now it's they've been driven out of the party altogether or they've been converted.
I think most anti-Trump Republicans have realized the future and kind of bowed to the to the king, so to speak.
So I do believe because of all of these factors that Donald Trump until he dies, who knows when that will be, will be extraordinarily influential in Republican Party politics in a way we haven't seen.
Certainly in a way Barack Obama can never be over the Democratic Party, and that's a point I make as well, that Obama is relatively powerless to determine the future of the Democratic Party, whereas Donald Trump can absolutely shape the future of his party?
Well, first of all, I just want to say I appreciate this thought experiment that we're doing here.
I think this is actually something that people kind of miss out on a lot of the time, because I think everybody gets very focused on what's going on today that they don't necessarily think about the consequences of stuff like this.
And I would even say, when I look at somebody like Trump, and you're talking about like his ability to sort of hold sway over the Republican Party while he's alive, if Ronald Reagan has taught us anything, it's that Even like in depth, in depth, yeah, the mythology of it will grow.
I mean, I think with Donald Trump, you look at this person, he actually does himself more damage every day than he would if he was away.
Right.
And I think one thing that we could see with the Republican Party, if it continues in this iteration, is a group of people that will look at a failed presidency that was absolutely rife with corruption and will mythologize what he wasn't able to get done as a way to sort of propel themselves to trying to fulfill a legacy that he actually sort of ruined himself, which in a lot of ways is what's happened with Reagan and George W. Bush to a lesser extent.
And I would even argue that one thing that I don't think a lot of people have thought about since, you know, 2016, because I think everybody looked at Obama as the idea of like a transformational president.
We actually see the Democratic Party moving farther away from Obama because they sort of see him more as an agent of status quo now, particularly, you know, in the wake of Trump's.
So I think there's a weird balance of legacies that's going to play out there.
And I guess my question to you is, so you sort of end this up, and correct me if I'm wrong, I was sort of reading the beginning of your essay, it starts out with you saying that you had a lot of people around you who were instantaneously sort of, you know, looking at Trump and sort of calling him the next Hitler, and you felt like you were a little distanced from that, and you still do, correct?
I do.
compare him to Hitler I believe that Hitler was dramatically a singular Many ways and and the project he undertook was a different project.
So yes, that's a comparison I still don't like to me right Right, so I guess the interesting thing that I took from your essay was this.
So you start out talking about how you were a little hesitant to talk about that, but by the end of the essay it feels like something had sort of changed in your philosophy and you start talking about the idea of That if Democrats are going to try and undermine this by sort of going more toward the center or finding a more status quo sort of a presidential candidate like a Joe Biden, that you see that as the wrong sort of, not just necessarily strategy, but sort of trajectory.
And you said something that I thought was really prescient, and I've been reading a lot of stuff lately about how Democracy's fall apart and how authoritarians come into power You said that the Democrats don't understand that politics is about survival and one of the things that I keep finding in democracies that are Subverted is you have a group of people who they get caught up in playing a game, right?
I'll do this in order to get this and you know, I'll take this versus this and as a result, it's sort of the artificial Playing of a game and so you don't really take politics at its face value that it is about survival.
And I feel like a lot of people, you know, when we start talking about even the word fascism, I think probably raises the hair on the back of necks of a lot of people.
And the fact that you said the fascism to come, I think is, I think it's apt, but it's also a controversial move.
And the fact that we're even having this conversation as part of like independent journalism and sort of a thought experiment that is sort of outside of a status quo, you start talking about what Democrats can do and what maybe might counteract this because the Republican Party, I personally believe at this point, you start talking about what Democrats can do and what maybe might counteract this because the Republican Party, I personally believe at this point, and I don't even consider myself a I,
I think you talk a little bit about the antidote toward that, and I was hoping that you could elaborate on it now.
For sure.
So I argue at the end of the essay that all hope is not lost.
And I wanted to make that clear because one of the frustrating things I find in journalism and essay writing is there will be simply expounding upon the problems, but there will be no true attempt to even reckon with the solution.
And I do believe that you can't make the Republican Party Less conservative, you can't bring back the Rockefeller Republican, but you can defeat the Republican Party and ensure it does not come to power.
Or you can ensure that your policy gains are so dramatic that no future Republican can destroy them.
And that was really very important for me to articulate.
Because now you see this debate in the Democratic Party that's gone on for a long time.
It can get very tiring.
And you hear it from Joe Biden every day that we have to compromise.
We can't go too far this way.
We have to find that center again.
And there is no political center as politics are currently constructed in the United States of America.
There is a far right party.
And there is a left party that is composed of those who want to negotiate with a non-existent center and those who recognize that there is nothing left to negotiate.
And as you said, politics is survival.
And as someone who has written a lot about politics, who's participated in politics, who's also been a media critic, it gets very frustrating to me when there are those Really particularly journalists who write about politics in a way that's like a sport or a game.
It's like a sports center, yeah.
Exactly.
And those who don't understand, and I'm a huge sports fan, who don't understand it's not like whether your team wins the AFC East or wins the World Series.
It's literally a life and death proposition.
Do you get a Medicaid expansion?
Do you not get a Medicaid expansion?
Funding for public schools.
Does the funding get cut?
Does the Planned Parenthood clinic stay open?
Does it close?
Those are the things that actually matter.
So I truly believe it's important for Democrats to understand that you are fighting against a party that wants to negate everything you do.
And I think Mitch McConnell is one of the worst people In perhaps in modern political history, but he's also brilliant at getting what he wants.
And it's Mitch McConnell and it's the Republicans that do understand politics is a game of survival.
And I should say a battle for survival.
I don't even want to use the term game.
And it's always striking how differently Republicans and Democrats will see politics because Republicans for a long time have understood this is what it is.
Mitch McConnell in 2016 being told he's got to confirm Merrick Garland and going, wait a second, I have the votes in the Senate.
You don't have the votes in the Senate.
You're not getting a judge.
And the pundits and the people will cry out, how could you, Mitch?
You can't do this.
It goes against the norms of democracy.
And Mitch McConnell will say, what norms?
And Democrats need to understand that is what you're dealing with.
You're dealing with a party that wants to reshape dramatically the democracy we've built and the social safety net we've built.
And that goes back to the last part of my essay where I talk about the difference between a Biden presidency, for example, And a Sanders or a Warren presidency.
And I do believe Biden has a very good chance of winning.
I don't like Joe Biden's politics, but I recognize he has real strength in the party thanks to Barack Obama.
So if you get a presidency that's a center-left presidency that really tinkers around the edges of what's possible and doesn't really implement any dramatic domestic or foreign policy changes, The next Republican president can easily wipe away the legacy.
And while I do believe Barack Obama did some very good things as president and does have a legacy, you're seeing how even with Donald Trump, someone as remarkably incompetent and unfocused, he has still been able to, I'd say, quasi-effectively negate the Obama legacy.
He failed on the Affordable Care Act.
But if you're looking at environmental regulations, you're looking at the various executive orders Obama signed, Trump has very rapidly undone them.
He got out of the Paris Climate Agreement.
So you see what like an incompetent Republican could do.
Now imagine a competent one in office.
So my argument really is for progressive, aggressive Progressive policy because, and this is the bright side of my essay, the best and most ambitious changes made domestically are still with us today and have not been destroyed by the Republican project.
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.
It's important to understand all these programs were once viewed as fringe Socialist giveaways.
In the early 20th century, it was the Socialist Party of America that was pushing a lot of these to the forefront.
And it really took, you know, FDR and then Lyndon Johnson to get these done.
And the Republicans have spent decades dreaming of the day they could privatize Social Security.
Some Democrats too, I say centrist Democrats, revoke Medicaid.
We're even revoke Medicare, though, of course, seniors vote, repeal the civil rights legislation that was put into place in the 1960s.
But they have stood just as in Britain.
The National Health Service has withstood attacks from the Conservative Party because they're popular.
They're broad based.
They help a lot of people.
They uplift a lot of people out of poverty.
And the Republican Party, for all of its Ability to do damage for the savageness of its conservatism.
It has not been able to destroy the social safety net, the New Deal consensus, I call it, in the United States of America, though it dreams of doing it.
And I do believe if we can get the right kind of Democrat in office, if we can push it further, if we can really get big, bold programs starting with universal health care,
That can stand up to attacks and stand up to the ultimate test of time, that if this fascist or quasi-fascist Republican Party arrives back in power, if it's Mike Pence, if it's Cotton, if it's Nikki Haley, if it's Josh Hawley, if it's whoever it is, they will be impotent in the face of a very robust
Social safety net that is incredibly popular and the Republicans who are smart they understand that these programs are Popular and they're afraid of that and they resent that and they know it's very hard to take away something Once you've given it to a person, especially if it's very affordable.
Well, what you just said, I think I just want to put this on there because I actually, you know, you brought up the idea of fascism versus quasi-fascism.
Not too long ago, I was sitting around reading Benito Mussolini's definition of fascism, the book that introduced the concept of fascism.
And he pushed the idea in defining what it was that liberals and progressives And actually, the people who engage in all of politics like to believe that history is going in one direction, which is progress, right?
Which is people should be offered better things and they should live better lives.
And he posited that fascism is the realization that that isn't necessarily the truth and that you can pause history, which is the essence of conservativism, right?
It's the idea that that flow of history can be stopped or, you know, stand us.
Right and and I think part of it what you're talking about why Republicans do this and why they grasp it differently than Democrats I think that Democrats look at the progression of history as a given that they're going to win over time and in the meantime It's about this.
It's about that.
It's about making steps and Republicans I and and this is one of the reasons why I think they disenfranchise people why they gerrymander why they Bring people like Trump in is because they recognize that the demographics are not on their side and the only way that they can continue power and to actually survive, to bring it back around, is to actually stand atop history and yell, stop, and by any means possible.
And so I think that's probably the difference that you're talking about.
And one of the reasons why I think fascism is a really apt word in this case.
Yes.
And you brought the demographics and it's interesting because that's one of my hopeful pivots Or points I make in the essay that ultimately this current approach, for lack of a better word for the Republican Party, this evolution, this itineration, it is not one that leads to growth in party enrollment.
It is not one that builds the broad-based coalitions that it takes to succeed.
The Democratic Party is a diverse party.
of many different coalitions, and that is a strength in the long term.
In the short term, one could say it's a weakness in that the different coalitions are not always on the same page, whereas the Republican Party coalitions are always on the same page.
There are no factions of the Republican Party, and this is really a big difference between the Republicans and the Democrats.
But yes, there are Republicans who recognize that they are in a demographic death spiral, for lack of a better word.
The bad news for Democrats is even though Republicans have less people, as you've said, through gerrymandering, through control of the courts, there are other ways they can find to win.
And if turnout spikes, they tend to lose.
They don't win popular votes in national elections.
Only once in the 21st century, they won the 2004 popular vote.
That's not an accident.
That is just how people vote.
But in the meantime, they can find and devise other ways to attain power.
And so this can be comforting for Democrats and comforting for the left.
But I think it also can breed complacency because it's like, as you said, there is this hopefulness that simply time will pass.
And naturally there will be progress.
The grass will grow.
The sun will come out.
There will be a garden here where there is currently merely soil.
And the Republicans say, well, sure, perhaps in the long term you'll get your garden, but we're going to pour a lot of salt into the earth into the meantime.
You are not going to be able to stop us, because we are better at politics than you are.
And that is really where we are.
You have a Republican Party that really recognizes this fully, and you have a Democratic Party that wholesale does not, more so party elites.
Party elites in the Democratic Party are not particularly prescient or forward thinking or understanding of how politics operates.
I think Republican elites are better at it and get get the stat the status quo of the nation and where they have to go to ensure history is stopped.
Well, again, I can't recommend your article enough.
It's called The Fascism to Come by Ross Barkin on Medium.
I think it is one of the most clear-eyed diagnoses of what we're facing right now, and I thought it was a really incredibly well-written and important article, so people can check that out.
For people listening at home, where can they find your work, Ross?
They can find me, I write a column in The Guardian, so you can find me every so often in The Guardian.
I contribute to Gothamist and The Nation, so you can also find me there.
I have a newsletter, which you can join, where I send out my work periodically.
I have a book out, a novel, Demolition Knight, definitely check that out.
You can see that on my website, rossbarkin.com.
And always where all journalists are, which is on Twitter.
And I'm there, and I'm available, and I'm opinionated.
So you can find me in all of those places.
Awesome.
Thank you so much for coming on The Mug Wrap, Ross.
