Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the torque that exists in many of the Republicans' positions that tend to act in opposition to each other. Plus, they break down how Republicans vote as acts of faith, preferring candidates who believe in their policies without them actually doing anything to achieve them.
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There will be justices who would prefer to stay out of this, who would prefer to protect their own credibility, essentially to protect their backsides.
I think that's the wrong thing to do here.
It's an outrage.
Well, what's wrong with the Republican Party?
Where is the outrage?
Tens of millions... Tens of millions of ballots... What the hell are the Republicans?
No signature checks.
What the hell are the Republicans?
You're right.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the Munkerick Podcast.
I'm J.O.D.
Saxton here with my co-host Nick Hausselman.
Before we get going today, I just want to remind everyone that we do have bonus content for our Patreon subscribers.
This week, we're going to be jumping with both feet into the holiday season and watching the classic, It's a Wonderful Life.
Talking about not just the history of it, but the political and philosophical implications of it, its effects on culture and all that good stuff.
We will be releasing that on Thursday of this week, so if you haven't already, make yourself some hot chocolate or poured bourbon, whatever it is people are doing nowadays.
Watch It's a Wonderful Life and then, you know, become a patron and see what we have to say about it.
In the meantime, though, we We broadcasted on the last episode talking about how tiring and exhausting this moment is and surprise, it's still exhausting and frustrating.
But now we're looking at a situation where we have a looming special election.
By the way, I'm recording this from the blue state of Georgia.
Isn't that something we started out as a red and blue state podcast, and right now, I mean, just a liberal utopia we're living in.
Am I right, Nick?
Oh, just look right outside your door, Jared.
Just see that liberal haven of the state of Georgia.
We have a special election here, and the President of the United States stopped by the other night and said some really helpful, constructive things.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party has just fallen into it left and right, might very well lose the special election because of their special brand of idiot bullshit.
On top of that, they have a couple of just really special candidates.
Just we had our final debate.
Loeffler showed up, probably shouldn't have.
And David Perdue just decided not to show up in general.
So it is it's pretty indicative of what this party is, the place where we are in our political moment and just, again, aggravating on every single possible level.
You know what's interesting is, and this is a continuation of a theme that we've seen for decades with the Republican Party, is just the torque required to maintain their ideological positions and how much diametrically opposed they tend to be.
And I think what was exposed with Trump's visit is that it's hard to argue vehemently that this was a rigged election that couldn't possibly have gone off properly But, by the way, you better go vote for Leffler and for Perdue because that probably will be okay, that election, as long as you guys get out and vote.
They'll do that one fine now that we're watching them.
But it also then still doesn't really jibe with what Trump wants, which is to overturn that election.
So I feel like it's just kind of, it's mind-blowing brain bending here to figure out how you're supposed to exist in this space.
And I hopefully it indicates that they simply won't go out to vote as much as the Democrats will.
I have to tell you, I have spent the past four years talking to people, trying to explain the mindset of the right, the weird, psycho, sexual, dysfunctional, psycho, sexual, dysfunctional, abnormal thoughts that take place that have led them into the fascistic, anti-democratic abyss.
I'm I've been trying to do it simply because I know these people.
I've studied these people.
I've done the research.
I've thought about it.
I've thought about the stuff that most people don't want to do.
Where we are right now is such a twisted space Of so much garbage.
And it's so fetid and disgusting and putrid.
So what you just said is exactly right.
So you have a guy who lost a presidential election, who doesn't really want to be president anymore, who continues to try and pull off a coup in order to keep a job that he really doesn't want.
In order to make sure that he has the financial windfall that he needs after the presidency, but if it happens to destroy our democratic system, he's fine with that too.
He's also held this special election hostage, trying to make a governor overturn the, and by the way, that's something that happened, is that he called Brian Kemp and asked Brian Kemp to basically invalidate the election, give him electoral votes and get rid of the special election.
So he's held this whole thing.
Otherwise known as another day at the office.
Yeah.
You know, it's just the way things work.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party, and I have to tell you, it almost gives me a migraine trying to, you know, that gif where it's like the algorithms and like playing around with numbers or Nash and a beautiful mind drawing on like windows.
The Republican Party knows that Trump lost the election.
They're trying to keep the millions of Trumpists happy and on their side, while also saying that the election was rigged, while trying to get people to come out for the next election.
It is just a bubbling cesspool of bullshit.
And if you think about it too hard and for too long, which unfortunately I do, it's almost impossible to pull yourself out of the muck at this point.
And it has manifested in a party that is not a political party whatsoever, but is basically a festering wound at this point.
Right.
And by the way, you pointed out that everyone seems to know that he lost the election.
But man, to get anybody on the record to say that is like pulling teeth on the Republican side.
And the danger, obviously, is we could say whatever we want about the people who are elected in Congress and how smart, how savvy they are politically.
But the trickle-down effect of this is that you're seeing just massive amounts of the country now forever convinced that this election was rigged.
Now, I keep trying to go back to 2016 because we all felt robbed, we all felt slighted, we all felt like a slap in the face and it was shocking and all these things, but I don't know if I completely lost faith in the actual election itself, right?
Listen, you know, this is the thing here is we have to call him like we see him.
We have to talk about the truth where we're trying to be, you know, we have our biases, but we're trying to be an unbiased podcast where, you know, we try not to bullshit you.
There are reasons to question our electoral system.
You know, like there is widespread disenfranchisement.
Gerrymandering is a massive problem.
There's a little problem with our voting systems that have apparently been susceptible to hacking or, you know, the possible malicious actors finding their way in.
These are things that we've tried to talk about.
This thing that has occurred over the past few weeks, I don't know if you've been keeping track of the witnesses.
That have been showing up at these hearings and moments with Rudy Giuliani.
Oh, by the way, Godspeed, Rudy.
Couldn't have any nicer guy.
Godspeed in recovering from the coronavirus, which, by the way, he will because he's rich.
And what we have seen in this country is the grave injustice that people who were poor and vulnerable are the people who are dying of this thing.
Meanwhile, the assholes of the earth Continue to get state-of-the-art medical care and that's what I want to point out is you have Trump and Giuliani and all of these assholes who are using an army of people who are Maybe they don't know better.
Maybe they're trying to make money.
Maybe they're angry.
I don't know.
They've got people coming in who... There was the woman who was about three sheets to the wind who came in and basically said that she saw all kinds of things happening.
One guy was a ghost hunter, Nick.
I don't know if you know that.
They had a ghost hunter come in and do this thing.
And you keep having these people who are just angry and trying to prove things and do all this stuff.
And what happens is, not only are people losing faith in the electoral system, people are being radicalized.
But we're still dealing with a bunch of privileged, stupid people who are not talented or capable, who aren't even actually interested in politics besides trying to gum up the system and the works.
It's a really bad situation all the way top to bottom.
And I think that the difference now is that those kind of people didn't have a platform before.
So it was in the shadows to some degree.
You kind of knew that that existed to some degree.
I mean, heck, we even had a woman who was essentially originally from India completely go racist batshit against Chinese people.
In this crazy way.
And, you know, I always feel like we need, I just wanted to address at least what's going on in Georgia with what Trump is obsessed about right now.
Because it's these signatures that he wants them to be matched and make sure they match.
When in reality, it's impossible now, because once they're matched and they're opened, the envelope goes away and is thrown away, and then the ballot is so it's secret, it's somewhere else.
So, it would be impossible to do what they're asking them to do anyway, and yet people can't seem to wrap their heads around that.
And even if you did, I'm still curious to understand what this plot is.
Because remember, You apply for the mail-in ballot and you sign, that's the signature, and then you get it and you send it back in, that's the signature they're going to match.
So, somehow they think that all these Democrats must have preemptively sent in these fraudulent ballots and that they were able to, you know, not be detected, and then hope that the original person didn't send in their actual ballot, because then they'd have duplicates and then they'd have a whole mess in their hands to try and figure that out, which didn't happen.
On a scale, we're talking about tens of thousands of these, which is just impossible to do the way it is.
In fact, the setup is so convoluted to some degree across the whole United States that it's a really good argument to say you wouldn't really be able to affect a national election because every precinct is different the way they do it, and you couldn't coordinate it at all.
I love you to death, Nick, but you are losing seconds and minutes of your life trying to understand things that they don't even want you to understand.
None of these things have anything to do with facts or reality.
I keep trying to tell people this is a matter of faith.
Yeah.
Right.
So the problem here and again, I live in Georgia.
I live in the blue state of Georgia that gave or that will give its electoral college votes to Joe Biden.
There are people that that idea does not compute with the reality that they think that they live in.
There's no way that Georgia could have gone for Donald Trump.
There's no way that Donald Trump could have lost the 2020 election.
They've been told for years that they are the majority and that they have control of everything and that they should win these things and there's no way that they're going.
Right now they have talked themselves into believing that Donald Trump won 400 plus electoral college votes.
That has nothing to do with facts or reality.
It's about a faith.
It's a religious faith, right?
It's, it's, you know, we were talking earlier, uh, before we even started recording.
It's like, you know, we play these games with reality and stuff.
And like, if someone like, you know, if something tragedy takes place, you can say it's for the best or, you know, it's part of a plan.
And, and we do that in order to sort of like curve off the sharp edges of life.
Right?
This is what these people are doing is they are suddenly realizing that they are part of a really, really small minority of the country and that the world is changing them, which, by the way, is why they're conservatives.
They're reactionary.
They don't want the world to change.
They want to stand atop history and say, stop.
Well, this whole thing is such madness with no basis in reality.
That it is what leads to radicalization.
It is what leads to violence.
It's going to be a bloody shirt that's going to be waved for decades.
I mean, this is part of their reality now.
It's part of the existence that they live.
And that's not going to change one way or another.
I hate to say that.
There's not a magic word or magic bullet or something that is going to make people stop believing in that.
And that's one of the things is we have to stop engaging With the bullshit.
Because there's nothing to do.
You know what I mean?
There's not a headline to send them.
There's not a publication that exists anymore that will win them over.
We've seen.
Fox News told them Biden won.
So what'd they do?
They turned the channel, Nick.
They turned the channel.
I gotta find a different channel.
Yeah, and then all of a sudden the OANN and Newsmax, they're exploding with their ratings and that means they're going to get more advertising, they're going to get more money and more legitimacy.
It is very frightening.
I'm sure we all could, you know, what you're describing is a situation where maybe we shouldn't engage the other side.
There's no hope.
They'll never be convinced.
We'll never be convinced.
And that's probably true.
And I'm sure everyone can relate to having one of these discussions.
I know on my end when I've had that with people and they start to, you know, give up all these feelings.
This is what it feels like is happening, which then means it has to be happening.
They get so upset in the midst of this.
And I don't feel like I get upset, you know, outwardly at least.
I'm listening to what he's saying.
But I almost feel like the agita that comes out of that is when they hear this stuff out loud and they're realizing how hard they're clinging to these things that don't make sense and are diametrically opposed to each other.
And that's why it's like, well, that's why you're wrong.
And that's why that side needs to wake up and figure something out.
And what really makes me fucking pissed off is when you read these articles about how we're going to come together.
And one of those things is going to be, well, we're not going to have that.
We can't prosecute Trump after he leaves office.
because that'll just, you know, make it even worse.
And we've been talking about this for months and months and months.
And as far as I'm concerned, the only way to avoid this ever happening again in the future, and by the way, it's already happened.
Reagan has already done this.
Reagan was Trump 1.0, and now Trump is Trump 2.0.
So it'll happen again anyway.
But the whole point is we need to have some sort of way to dissuade this kind of behavior a little bit harder and by prosecuting the criminalization of this thing.
Well, I would say, yeah, but I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna hold my breath on it.
That's the problem.
And again, this loses me followers, this doesn't make people happy.
I wish I could tell you that it's going to happen and everything will be great and, you know, goodbye Donald, enjoy your stay.
Unless the SDNY does something, the government won't.
And by the way, like one of the things that we're talking about today is white, wealthy people.
They avoid problems and they always land on their feet and they always gain advantage.
I mean, I do not think that Donald Trump, I mean, when has he ever suffered consequences for his actions?
Ever.
You know, I mean, he's in his 70s now.
He became president of the United States despite numerous crimes, a complete capability, a total obvious gross incompetence, a cruelty that is unmatched, and basically is the embodiment of all the worst parts of humanity.
And yet he became president and, you know, avoided anything.
Well, now we also have a situation, and going back to the special election, we have two candidates, Loeffler and Perdue.
They're terrible.
They are just terrible candidates.
And I'm not just talking about their political positions.
They don't really have political positions.
What we have with them, Woffler, by the way, got up in front of Warnock, who is, by the way, the pastor of like, you know, one of the most important churches in the country.
And I'm sorry, but Warnock is a center candidate.
No, he's not centered left even.
He's not.
And meanwhile, the only thing she could do was just a repeated role of he's a radical socialist.
He's a radical.
He's not a radical socialist.
Right.
Then Purdue couldn't even be bothered to show up.
The only thing that they offer.
And by the way, both of them have abused their offices.
Both of them have profited off of people dying in chaos.
And they're just disgusting humans.
The only thing they offer, Loeffler can shoot off a gun in a campaign video, and Perdue can throw on a denim jacket and pretend that he's one of the people.
They don't offer anything.
They're not actually talented.
They actually are really terrible politicians, but they're wealthy, white, and so they got where they're at.
This is where we're at.
We're held hostage by a broken meritocracy, and I'm glad you brought up Reagan, because that's the guy who made sure that it stayed broken and skewed it.
I mean, I was a person who didn't know what he was doing as president, but man, did he look good on camera.
And he played all these symbolic games that people wanted.
That's the only thing that mattered.
Yeah, are you aware of the sheer volume of trading that Purdue was involved in while he was Senator?
I mean, it's like four times the amount of anybody else.
He couldn't even do that well.
He sucked at insider trading.
He sucked at using his office.
It was all obvious.
Right.
So it's so obvious when you watch what's going on.
And Leffler is the same way.
So it's like, what's frightening to me is that they'll still get almost the majority of the votes.
They both might win.
They both might win.
Listen, you gotta be a terrible candidate when Donald Trump thinks you're a terrible candidate and that's what he thinks about Loeffler.
By the way, have you watched when he was on stage when Trump introduced them and they came up for a second?
So just in case you're thinking that Loeffler's affectation was only reserved for the debate where she didn't she looked like a robot.
No, no, no.
She was the same way on stage, talking in front of all these people.
It was scary.
But when she walks by and you can see Trump going, thank you, and he smiles to her, and as soon as she gets beyond his, she can't see his face anymore, he gives her this look, like, disgusted, a disgusted look, like, God, you're terrible.
So think how bad you need to be if you're on the same side as Trump and he doesn't even want to, you know, stump for you and help you win this thing, which he clearly doesn't.
He doesn't, he didn't even speak about Perdue and Loeffler this whole time, almost the whole time while he was on stage.
And again, it goes back to what we said earlier, where it's like, here's the thing.
How is he going to be able to handle if they win?
How are they going to be able to win this election and he loses?
How does that make sense in his mind?
How is he going to be able to house these, those facts in his mind?
I don't, I think he'll completely go batshit crazy at that point.
Oh, he'll figure, he'll figure out a way.
I mean, that's the thing is like, he, he is just an incredible, machine in this regard.
Trump's ability to take literally everything through a lens that eventually, like, converts it to something that's positive for him, he'll simply say that they won because he went to Georgia.
There it is.
That's the quickest route.
There we go.
There we're in.
And you're exactly right.
Like, he introduced them.
He basically went out and, you know, he sprinkled a little bit of Trump dust, which most of us call coronavirus particles.
Uh, you know, on them and said this, you know, go out and vote for them or whatever, which is, I think he, there's a part of him who truly believes that they'll take the Senate.
And by the way, his own press secretary, I don't know if you saw this, she went on Fox and said, you know, we have to cancel these elections to make sure that we hold on to power.
Well, I have a question for you.
This is important and this is something that we're circling around.
I think it's, uh, it's, it's essential here.
What is the main principle of the Republican Party now, Nick?
What's their main project?
Greed?
That's it.
That's literally it.
There's nothing else.
Like there's nothing.
And again, this is like Loeffler and Perdue.
There's nothing that they do.
They simply say that the people they're facing are dangerous radicals.
That's it.
They propose nothing in the future.
We go back to Donald Trump.
He never intended to build a wall.
The wall was never real.
It was something he said that could happen.
It was an article of faith.
It was something that the people who trusted in him believed maybe he would do, but they never really expected it, right?
They wanted to vote for someone who believed in a wall.
I mean, I was working this out the other day.
The Republican Party has gotten to the point where the Republican Party has no principles anymore.
They don't have anything that they actually stand for besides the pursuit of power and wealth.
That's it.
I actually think that they've broken the brains of the people who follow them to the point where the people who follow them don't actually expect anything anymore.
They just want somebody to go up and say the thing that they like.
And they're like, yeah, fine.
Politics doesn't work.
There's nothing you can do.
There's nothing that anybody can do.
And by the way, the pandemic has made that obvious.
Our government does not work for us.
It doesn't actually try to make anything better.
It doesn't try and construct anything or push us forward.
There's nothing that the government can do for these people.
So the least you can do is vote for the person who either makes you happy or makes the other people unhappy.
And so that's the entire dog and pony show of this whole thing right now.
Right.
But you've got to be careful about that only because, and you said this a lot in the last year, is at a certain point, if not enough people believe in laws, let's just say, then the laws kind of cease to exist.
And we've seen a lot of the radicalized people kind of say, I'm not going to listen to your laws.
I'm not going to wear a mask.
And then that's not even a law, but it's a recommendation or whatever to save lives.
Like, you know, you're not helping me.
The system's broken, all this stuff.
So I'm not going to listen to you.
Can I say something real fast?
Yeah.
This is important.
What you're just saying about not wearing a mask, not sheltering in place, all that stuff.
I think it's really important because we are an unbiased podcast and we call it like it is.
The Democratic governor of California, Gavin Newsom.
Yeah.
Got caught not listening to the commands and the advice that he gave everybody else.
There's a reason why they don't trust that shit.
That's the problem.
If there is a reason why they don't trust government, the problem is the message that they take from that.
Right?
Which is there's a democratic conspiracy.
Which, by the way, I'm glad that the Democrats are on the same page to carry on a conspiracy, by the way.
There's a democratic conspiracy, and they're working with the Jews, and they're working with people of color, and that's why government doesn't work.
Instead of, we have a bunch of rich and wealthy white people who are running the government for their own benefit.
Like, there's the disconnect there.
That's the problem.
Yeah, but you sound like you've never been to the French Laundry.
You've never eaten there?
Because, you know, if you had, you'd realize why it would be worth it.
You know what I'm saying?
Oh, so you take your bully pulpit and your entire reputation and it's worth it.
Yeah, for a great meal.
No, actually, can I be honest with you?
I have eaten there and it wasn't that great.
Wow!
There you go.
Suck on that, French Laundry.
You made your governor go against everything that he said.
Meanwhile, the Buck Creek Podcast won't even endorse it.
Good work, Nick.
We had a mayor in Texas who was in Cabo who had flown on his own private jet, which again, if that's something he can afford on his own dime, I'm not going to say you shouldn't get on a private jet and fly whatever.
I will say that he shouldn't have gotten on a private jet and flown to Mexico as he's telling everyone to be safe and shelter in space.
I'll go ahead.
I'll let you own that one.
Okay, fair enough.
So, um, yeah, I mean, it's, um, that's the danger is that at some point this whole thing kind of crumbles if enough people really, because we could be just as angry about it too and be like, well, fuck it.
I'm not gonna, uh, you know, listen to these laws I don't like.
And I used to be the guy who was like, yeah, you can't just pick and choose which laws you want to enforce because that used to be the cynical response from Republicans about, well, that law hasn't been enforced for years and years and whatever.
And I'm like, yeah, but why are you getting to pick which ones that get to be enforced?
They should all be treated like laws.
And you know what?
Very soon we can get to a point where a lot more people are feeling that way.
And then the laws start to get a little bit fuzzy and shaky.
You know, it's funny.
There was an awesome article in The Atlantic talking about a guy who grew up in Turkey and how about how often they have coups.
OK.
And it's like, you know, the lady at the airport was freaking out about what was happening.
She goes, oh, don't worry, this must be your first coup.
You know, when you get to your third or fourth one, you're not going to be, you know, won't be a big deal anymore.
And that actually is another fear here, because what they're doing here is normalizing this notion of a coup.
And it will, it could ultimately be successful.
Turkey had a lot of terrible ones apparently in the 60s that didn't go anywhere, but they got better at them and the people got more cynical and less interested in fighting back and keeping their politicians accountable.
So... I'm really glad that you brought that up.
Because here is... Here are the stakes, man.
Like, this is really what we're looking on.
I've said this a lot, like, in different forums.
Like, we're on the precipice of a change.
The question is what that change will be.
Right.
So, like, I think one of the reasons why, and I've been doing all this research on history, both for American Rule and this new project.
And what I keep finding is that there are these moments of crisis, right, where the system as it worked reaches sort of a terminal point where it doesn't work anymore.
Right.
It's sort of like flickers and all of a sudden something has to change one way or another.
Right.
Some sort of major societal change.
We were born in an America, and by the way, we were watching the Reagan documentary, which is excellent.
I really think everybody should.
I was so glad that it was like a mature, thoughtful documentary about Ronald Reagan.
You know, we were born at a time where Reagan was proselytizing American greatness and American exceptionalism.
We won the Cold War.
We watched the, you know, the so-called apex of the American experiment, all that stuff.
It very well might be that we will also be the generation that sees it collapse.
Like, we could very well see America turn into exactly what you said, a Turkish-like situation where, yeah, this is what happens.
People don't accept that they lose an election.
This could be the type of country where laws are just sort of laughed at.
I mean, there are countries around the world where it's like, You know, if you get arrested, you have a choice.
You either go to jail or you pay a bribe.
You know, and so the wealthy always get what they need.
It doesn't have to be that way.
One of the things that we have to do is we have to reject the symbolic stuff.
It's not enough to simply just have these victories where it's like, our guy won.
Suck on it.
You know what I mean?
Like, that doesn't do anything.
And it doesn't build towards anything and it doesn't create any sort of an environment that doesn't lead to those constant coups.
You know, do you think that this is simply a overall government thing?
Or is it really just like singularly because we have someone at the head of the Senate in Mitch McConnell who is uniquely qualified to create the situation?
And I wonder if that really how that happens because he becomes such a focal point here of what's been happening.
They can't even get a bill passed to help people give them some money, which would benefit everybody politically.
I'm not even talking about the $1,200 that maybe or maybe didn't help anybody back in the spring.
But just politically, it would actually help everybody to be able to pass something and give them some money.
Which, by the way, I saw a great tweet where they extrapolated out the $1,200 that they paid the hundred and some million people represented like less than 7% of the total money they spent for the bailout.
And it blows your mind because when you start thinking about what that represents and think about what they could have done with that.
And the biggest thing, it's almost like a moment of clarity that people have, which we have been arguing for when it started, was just be able to pay people to stay at home and pay the businesses, the small businesses, to be closed for two months straight while we get rid of COVID.
It would have been a real easy thing to be able to do that.
We have plenty of money and we don't have to be worried about debt anymore, right?
Because we just simply keep adding debt.
We keep printing money.
There doesn't seem to be anything, any problem with, oh my goodness, there's no problem with money being worth less because it's called inflation.
Thank you.
And it's just fascinating to me how we got to the point there where it's really one guy can end up fucking it up for everybody else and it's a guy who's like probably on death's door as it is anyway.
These guys are simply aren't going to go away.
They never die.
Well, I think the American experiment, particularly where it's at right now, I think we were always going to get to a point like this.
It always ends up in, like, a bubble bursting, you know?
That's inevitable.
That's just the way it works.
I feel like you gave me the stink eye when I had proposed this idea, like, months ago in a pod, when I was like, this is the inevitable, you know, cross-section of capitalism and democracy.
But now you're on board.
No, I'm good on that.
I never would have put the stink on that.
No, let's do that.
Five hours.
Talk about it.
I actually think, you know, and again, so much of this always goes back to Reagan, because that's sort of the start of the modern era, right?
The modern project.
And, you know, it's actually this crazy thing that happened with the Cold War, which was we didn't really get taught what capitalism actually was.
We got taught, again, the fate of capitalism.
It's perfect and good, you know, because it's the contrast to the USSR and communism, right?
So obviously capitalism is good and we have to just throw gas on the fire, right?
And see what happens.
Well, it always burns itself out and it always reaches a point where It always has to grow.
Well, eventually, it grows until it can't grow anymore.
So what do you do?
Something has to give.
You either pay people less, work them harder, or you do all of that, plus you also take over the government and eliminate taxes and eliminate competition, and it just always has to go and go and go.
The problem in America is that the Republican Party, because they're so devoted to that idea, they've always been willing to innovate.
In a way that the Democratic Party has not.
The Democratic Party is always following the Republican Party, like, into the darkness, right?
So, like, Reagan comes along and decides this is all about symbolism.
It's all about, you know, projecting something while you're doing something else, right?
Like, you know, I am the embodiment of America.
America is good, cheerful, old grandpa.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party later on is like, well, we gotta do this Reaganism thing.
What are we going to do?
And then, of course, you have Newt Gingrich.
And Newt Gingrich comes out and says, well, we could have a discussion of shared ideals, or we could just call them disgusting socialists who are working for the new world order.
And the Republican Party is like, yeah, absolutely, go to town with that.
Well, Mitch McConnell is part of that whole project.
And you're exactly right, because he has shut down public good completely.
The government does not do any.
We were talking before we started recording.
The last piece of legislation besides the poultry stimulus package, which I never got my check, by the way, besides that, the last thing that really helped anybody was the Affordable Care Act.
And before that, there was a drought.
Our government does not exist to actually help us anymore.
It provides the illusion of public good.
Like, you're always one more election away from changing things, Nick.
If you just get the right people in, if you just get the Senate, like, everything's gonna be fine.
And it doesn't work that way.
It's like a complete illusion that really has been completely dismantled based upon The corporate acceleration towards greed and growth.
And so we live in a situation now where if this continues, by the way, it'll just burn itself out because it'll collapse.
We're nearing an economic collapse as is.
But we also have to bring back some kind of concreteness to politics and we have to do it ourselves.
It's not going to be about electing one person or voting for one person.
We have to do it ourselves.
I think it's interesting you say it starts with Reagan and primarily because I think Carter right before him was probably the last president who actually cared about the people in the country and in earnest who really wanted to do good and did his best and as a result got destroyed in his reelection bid for that and manipulated for that.
So I find that really interesting.
How why that becomes the beginning.
It's almost like we finally have enough of this.
And it comes out of the 60s and out of the radical, you know, 60s of like, you know, we could we could actually affect change, which might have been the last time that the Democrats did have, you know, innovative ideas and did try and change things like that.
So it used to be for the Democrats.
It used to be it used to be class and race based consciousness.
Right?
It was about, we need to build a coalition of the people who have been oppressed and mistreated, and we'll figure out politics then.
We have to make this fairer.
And in recent years, it's become, I'm sorry, but the Democratic Party has not built much in the way of winning.
Do you know what I mean?
They haven't built the infrastructure for it.
Most of it is about symbolic victories.
It's about being on the right side of arguments versus actually changing things.
Well, let's not ignore TARP, which is another thing that they ended up, I guess, passing out of the 2008 collapse.
And by the way, the only way we got Affordable Care Act is because Obama ended up having 67 senators, whatever he had, 66 plus one.
That was the last time we'd ever seen a Senate that so skewed for one party.
And I don't know if we're ever going to get that back.
And that was because of the Affordable Care Act, right?
Because people were willing to try and help people in earnest like they tried to do.
It costs a lot of senators their seats.
And I think they knew that was going to happen.
It ended up having to be this terrible confluence of like that in 2012, that election after, you know, Obamacare passed with so many vulnerable seats.
And then the next two years later was a lot more vulnerable seats.
They just, you know, it was like one of those rare things.
So at any rate, that's the result, you know, when you really try and help people.
Well, and I want to put this out there.
Like one of the lessons we can draw from that.
And we're having a real conversation about real things and we're treating them with the weight and gravity that they deserve.
Like that's how bleak things are.
And everything that we're talking about in terms of like how log jammed public government is, how, you know, these people have dismantled government as a public good, dismantled.
These things seem very large and immovable.
You know what I mean?
Like they're just nothing could ever happen.
And by the way, it's like on Twitter, the favorite reply that people have is.
And now what?
And it's like, well, you can you can fight back against this.
Like the amazing thing about politics is it goes through these waxes and wanings where it feels like you have no power.
And then suddenly you're like, oh, yeah, that's right.
I have power.
Right.
All of a sudden it's like, oh, that's right.
When I actually talk to people and get to know people and form alliances and coalitions and, you know, engage in solidarity, you can change things.
We're at a moment where we feel completely powerless, but that's also faith too, right?
That goes back to how it feels versus what it actually is.
Because right now it just so happens that our political system is such that the actors can act with impunity.
Like, you know, if If every Democratic person in the Democratic Party is not worried about losing their seats, well, then they're not going to take any chances.
You know, they're not going to, like, work and try and invigorate things and try and plan for the future because, as we've learned with the pandemic, no one wants to take responsibility for trying something.
If you try something and fail, you suffer consequences.
So we have to make it to where there are other consequences that will actually lead to innovation.
Yes, it reminds me of when I was coaching at high school, my old high school freshman team in 1995.
Somebody was able to articulate on that team, one of the freshmen was like, you know, if I don't try as hard, then I don't feel as bad if we don't actually win or if I fail.
And I had never even conceived of that as a notion, but it turns out a lot of people from then on have kind of adopted that notion.
So this reminds me also of the fact that Trump is going to get to run for president for four years from the rallies.
But do you know why Donald Trump lost the election?
Why?
Because he was president for four years.
That is why he lost.
And you know what?
He now gets to run and campaign without being president, without any accountability.
And that's what is really frightening because he might be able to rebuild his coalition and make it even stronger and bigger because there's no accountability.
He can say whatever he wants.
He can do whatever he wants without being in a government position where there is any accountability that would hurt him negatively, like, you know, COVID or the COVID response, which is primarily probably why he ended up losing this election.
So that's what's really, really interesting about this whole thing is that generally when, you know, they lose, they go away, they disappear, they're not relevant anymore.
And this guy has a platform now and it's a different world where he'll be able to have this like, you know, Christlike resurrection out of all of this and, and make himself appear to be the most pristine, caring, competent person of all time because there's no decisions he needs to make. - So here's the amazing thing about being a pundit.
You don't suffer any consequences for being wrong.
And by the way, we've seen this over and over again.
And our memory of it is so short and ridiculous.
It's like the people who got us into the Iraq War, nobody remembers who they are anymore.
Like, I keep telling people, I think it would be, like, if we have to counteract cable news as, like, a sports center, let's go all the way.
When one of your pundits gets on Anderson Cooper, there should be a sidebar that not only talks about their record, like they would, you know, the head coach, I'll go bears.
But it's like, this guy was for the Iraq War.
This guy was against stimulus payments.
And by the way, on top of it, you know, it'd be great if there was like a running tab that said, here are his donors.
Here's who donates to his campaigns.
Here are the people who keep him awash.
And here are the PACs.
And here are the people who do this.
And that, I think, actually would make a difference.
But nobody would want to do that because they're all so chummy and it's all, you know, garden party stuff.
But Trump doesn't want to be president.
Trump wants to talk about politics without any consequences.
And that's how he governed.
The whole point of this was he went in there and it goes back to exactly what you were talking about in terms of like the feeling of it.
Trump wants to say what he feels about things.
He doesn't want there to be consequences to the things that he feels.
But he does want the world to just magically Do whatever he wants it to do.
He doesn't want to put in the hard work.
He doesn't want to build coalitions.
He doesn't want to listen to experts.
He doesn't want to go to the office.
The post-presidential Trump is going to be the anti-president, as I've taken a call.
It's exactly what he wants.
He's going to be treated with all the pomp and circumstance of being president of the United States.
All of his opinions are going to be treated by gospel, by his cultists.
And he's going to build a coalition of people who are going to believe that he is right about everything because there are no consequences.
Time and time again, we see that's the whole point.
He's not a serious person.
It's more about the emotion of it and how he makes people feel.
Yeah, and again, if it was even intentional or not, he just hit it at the right time and was able to convince these people that that's what he was.
And as a result, what you're saying is nothing gets done.
I think this is the coalesce everything we've been saying is when you're built on something like that, but nothing will get done You're gonna have enough people who are gonna be like that's not the reality you've got people saying what's how I feel and this is what feels of the reality and Though when you're when you have opposite sides like that I don't see a path to like trying to get anything done on a consensus unless you Somehow were able to convert a few people over and that's what the wealthy and powerful want They want government to be dismantled as a public good.
They want to allow the illusion of it because, like a Twitter, where you get to post things and say how angry you are about something or take a stand or whatever, they want government to be the illusion of representation.
They want government to be there to make people believe that they're free, while meanwhile they're being controlled and they're being, you know, more or less betrayed by the people that they put into office.
They want people to cheer when David Perdue puts on a jean jacket or Kelly Loeffler grabs a semi-automatic and is just like, nobody's gonna take my gun.
It's like, no one wants to take your damn gun.
No one's going to take your damn gun.
And it's all this passion play that has nothing to do with it.
But I will say, it's important, while we're talking about it, to say it can be different.
It can be different.
And it should be different.
And it is a Damn shame that it's not different.
And we deserve better than this.
We deserve a government that actually represents us and actually tries to make a better future.
This one is not interested.
It's interested in pausing and not really helping in anything that's going on.
All right, everybody.
So that's going to do it for this episode.
A reminder, we are going to do a special holiday episode watching It's a Wonderful Life That will come out on Thursday.
That will be for patrons, so go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast where we will be talking about that this week.
We'll be back with another episode.
Hopefully, knock on wood, no emergency podcast.
They've settled into a holding pattern of dumbassery.
Is what's happened.
It doesn't make it less dangerous.
It's just a dangerous idling, so let's hope that that continues.
A reminder, if you're enjoying the show, if you appreciate what we do, like, share, subscribe, tell people about this, because there aren't enough of these conversations happening.
They need to be spread far and wide, because that's actually what's going on.
In the meantime, you can find Nick over at Can You Hear Me?
