Chauncey DeVega On Why Democracy Might Not Survive
Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman welcome politics writer for Salon Chauncey DeVega on the show to discuss a wide range of topics including the media's coverage of Biden, the Democrats' poor messaging, and what is happening to our democracy.
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I'm Jared Yates-Saxton, here as always with Nick Halsman.
We have a real, real special treat today.
Before we get to that, a little bit of housecleaning.
An announcement On December 16th, that is a Thursday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, we're going to have the Muckrake Community Holiday Show, a live taping of the Weekender Edition.
You are invited.
Go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
I've heard a rumor that I myself started that I'm going to make Nick eat a milkshake with french fries, which anybody who listens to this show knows that this is a big deal.
I'm going to make peer pressure work.
But before we get to that, one of our most requested returning guests is here.
That is right.
That is Chauncey DeVega of Salon Politics, as well as the Chauncey DeVega Show, one of the best podcasts out there.
Chauncey, thanks so much for coming over.
Thank you for having me.
All right, Chauncey.
So let's go ahead and get this thing started and see where it goes.
First things first, I gotta say, man, we've been talking now for a couple of years.
One of the things that we talk about a lot is that regardless of how much the writing is on the wall and how obvious the threat within this country is of rising authoritarianism and fascism among the right, people have continued to stick their heads in the sand.
They've ignored all the warnings, lived in pleasurable delusion because a lot of these people are going to make out just fine if this comes to pass.
I have noticed In the past few months, I assume you have as well, that all of a sudden some of the people in some of the larger publications, media places, have started to talk about this a little bit, but they're still hedging their bets.
It's disturbing, frustrating, infuriating.
How does it look from your corner of the woods?
It's funny you say that.
I was reading an essay at a very prominent place that's being circulated today where everyone is falling all over themselves about this person's vision.
And they're not saying anything that you and I and other folk have not said four years ago, three years ago, a year ago.
So of course there's the frustration.
It's not about ego or narcissism, although a thanks, we heard it from you first, would be nice.
That having been said, it just signals to the American corporate news media, notice news media business, and how they are so fundamentally late in terms of telling the truth, Their own self-interest in terms of a money-making model, they maintain the approved boundaries of public discourse, and even when they tell the truth, they tell it too damn late.
Never mind, as Eric Boller and others have been documenting, the clear bias against President Biden in terms of the both-sides-ism, the inside-the-beltway, this fear, this obligation to elevate Joe Biden and somehow make him equivalent to a human monster, Donald Trump.
It's sickening.
It's frustrating, and it's disgusting.
And you know I stay up late at night.
I'm a night owl.
I'll go to bed about 4 or 5 in the morning.
That's when I do my best writing.
Because that's when the spirits are out.
That's when the ancestors are talking.
Because when we go to the dark place we gotta do to write about these issues of fascism, you gotta be up at night.
You gotta be.
That twilight hour.
And late last night I noticed this.
Guess what they had on a certain cable network?
They played all three in a row.
Uh, what?
The Rocky 1, 2, and 3.
So they got me with Rocky 1, so I had to stay all the way to Rocky 3 until 6 in the morning.
The other night, they had on Red Dawn!
And I'm sitting there watching these movies saying, what fantasies of America!
And this reality with the rising fascist tide should disabuse the American people of their fantasies about themselves.
But they're stuck in a surreality, a dream world.
I was watching Rocky saying, people actually believe this stuff.
Watching Red Dawn, I was like, wow, our democracy's falling.
Nobody's yelling wolverines.
They're sitting at home watching TV.
The conspiracy, then, is that they didn't show Rocky IV, which, with the death of Apollo Creed, clearly is the metaphor that I think we're facing right now.
Rocky IV hits different now.
They just brought out the new cut of Rocky IV, and I watched it, I want to say last week, and I got to tell you, watching that unfold again, like, that hits very, very different.
The Cold War, of course, was such a farce.
The United States of America lost any soul that it ever possessed within the Cold War.
And to watch it now, it's incredible propaganda.
It's really a glimpse into an alternate reality that I think a lot of people still want to live within.
Well, there's a great book thinking about Christine Dumez's book about John Wayne.
And white right-wing Christians.
I think it's called John Wayne and Jesus.
I spoke to her a few weeks ago.
Just thinking again about these fantasies on the white Christian right about patriotism and John Wayne and Ronald Reagan.
And that's why at present, again going back to fascism, what is fascism?
A masculine ideology.
A hyper-masculine nationalist ideology.
So when you have right-wing neo-fascists talking about men and masturbation and porn and their obsessions with their bodily fluids and taking away women's reproductive rights, we can go down the list.
Making monstrous mothers, whose job is to breed new Republican fascists, ban him!
Going back to the Great Replacement Theory.
Literally, I think it was last night or today on his podcast, he was talking about, pardon me, he was talking about the need for basically white Christian women to have more white babies again.
So we're watching this country's textbook dissent into fascism and the folks who are supposed to help the public understand what they're supposed to see, what they're supposed to understand.
What is that old phrase?
The news media is supposed to help the public to tell them what to think about and how to think about it?
They've utterly failed in their responsibility.
So on one hand, I'm remarkably upset at the American people.
Not having their Wolverines stand up and fight for their own country moment.
But you gotta blame the leaders.
You gotta blame Biden.
You gotta blame the agenda setters.
You gotta blame a complicit news media as well.
You know what's frustrating that Jared and I deal with all the time is that we are having Wolverine moments, but it's the people on the right who are having these moments, who are welcoming the fascism, and to make it worse, like you mentioned, they're turning it on to the Democrats and claiming that they're the fascists.
There's these polls that say that the Democrats are more evil or more untrustworthy with their elections than the Republicans are.
That is what is hard to rectify, wouldn't you say?
Well, it's not hard to rectify or resolve at all.
Again, one of the things to understand with fascism is that you're dealing with liars.
These folks actually believe it's a cult.
And this is a problem that Democrats, liberal progressives have.
They are incapable, because of personality, temperament, perhaps even brain structure, to realize that there are people who live in their own world, who don't care about facts.
I love it when I read these op-eds and essays that use the word should or would.
Every so often I'll slip into that, but I qualify it.
Or here's the other one I love.
Hypocrisy.
These people aren't hypocrites because they have no moral standards.
Yeah, they don't.
All they care about is winning and power.
And one of the things I actually do respect about them, I know Jared and I have talked about this previously on my podcast, they tell you what they're going to do and they do it.
There's nothing revelatory about this.
So Democrats, liberals, progressives talk about norms and institutions and they try to shame them.
Do they have any shame?
These people don't have any shame, which is again, why we're losing.
Yeah, Chauncey, I kind of had a thing this morning where I was sitting there with my coffee and in the article that you're talking about, I'm almost hesitant to even really bring this thing up.
It's by Barton Gellman, of course.
Trump's next coup has already begun in the Atlantic.
And there's this moment in it that I read it and it felt like a moment of deja vu.
I almost felt like I had not woken up.
You know what I mean?
And I was reading about this and at some point Gelman apparently talked to this guy named Richard Patterson who's a retired firefighter who is a Trump person and believes in the big lie of the election.
And he talks to this Patterson guy, and Patterson has obviously been completely radicalized by right-wing media.
And Gelman is completely shocked that even though he gives him statistics and he gives him an alternative in which the election wasn't stolen and speaks facts to him, He's absolutely shocked by the fact that this Trump supporter won't go along with actual reality.
And I just want to go ahead and check my calendar real fast.
It's December of 2021!
That's the year, and these people are still surprised that this entire subdivision of the American culture lives in its own reality.
Meanwhile, this has been obvious for years for anyone who pays attention, and suddenly they're discovering, oh my god, I think some of these people are immune to facts.
It boggles the imagination to think that some people in this country have had their heads so far in the sand that they're just coming around to this.
Well, I think it's even deeper than that.
Just thinking about, again, news media.
Because they're part of the elite, right?
They go to the same clubs.
Their kids all hang out.
They have the same interests.
They went to the same schools, for the most part.
They're all into Tucker Carlson.
Yeah, they're all friends.
So when I read, and I wasn't even thinking about the Atlantic piece, which I think is very valuable in terms of taking the data, Robert Pape's great research, other folk, and then actually going out and talking to these people.
So the alarm has been sounded late, and his great writing as well.
And I love the part there where he actually talks about the two scenarios for a democracy collapse.
And I'm with him where the American people aren't going to do a damn thing.
And it's just gonna be like Putin's Russia.
He's spot-on because, again, the Wolverine moment ain't there.
Nobody gonna stand up and fight except they're willing to fight because they understand the power of violence and they're attracted to it.
They don't care about normal politics.
I think for a lot of the folk in the mainstream corporate news media, it's a narcissistic injury.
Because if they admit that there are tens of millions of Americans who are wholly immune from the fact, because imagine and think about who these folk ...depict themselves as truth-tellers, the voice from on high.
They have special gifted insight.
They're talking to the plebes.
They're gonna tell the people on low, the troglodytes in the cave, what to think and how to behave.
But then you've got a whole alternate reality where they say, we don't care.
So for these professional smart people, the fact that you have all these Trumpists, Trump cultists, and others who are in that sphere, who are utterly immune to anything they say, they don't care about the Times, they don't care about the Washington Post, they don't care about CNN, MSNBC, hell, they probably don't even care about the Sacramento Bee.
That hurts them.
They can't acknowledge it, that they're utterly impotent in the face of that delusion.
It would hurt them, it hurts them psychologically, they can't admit it.
Yeah, and I want something you just touched on that I wanted to get into a little bit.
I was talking about this last night on my live stream, the bourbon talk thing, where somebody asked, like, what I thought would happen if Roe v. Wade is taken down and what it would lead to.
And I wanted to go ahead and get you on the record for this, because this is something I think that people need to go ahead and get prepared for.
If it does happen, yes, of course there are going to be protests.
Yes, there are going to be clashes.
The concern, and I think this is the calculation that the Republican Party has made up to this point, and these ideologues have made up to this point, and I think correctly, is that people will go out, they'll protest, particularly in so-called blue states, but then they'll go home.
And that will be it.
They'll say, oh, my God, can you believe what's happening in the red states?
And then they'll sort of abandon the red states and some of these purple states that, of course, are going to be stolen through elections being overturned and all this apparatus that's being set up.
But I think if people want to understand where this thing is going, they need to steel themselves to the possibility that we are reaching a real moment, an epoch of conflict.
Did people have to be prepared for sustained action?
And I don't think Americans are prepared for that right now, unfortunately.
Of course they aren't.
You're spot on.
They're going to go out and walk in the street and go home.
There's not going to be a national strike.
They're not going to boycott these corporations en masse.
They're not going to punish these folk at the voting block.
And again, going back to the long-term plan, you had a lot of folk, mainstream corporate media, Democrat corporate types, folks who are beholden to normal politics, the everyday Americans who still believe that voting matters.
These folks have been Working on this, Nancy McLean documents it.
To overthrow American democracy for decades.
This is an old plan.
So think about it this way.
Democracy, representative democracy, is prefaced on the idea that you can punish your elected officials.
Right?
You vote them out of office.
What have the Republican fascists done?
They don't care about public opinion, marches, and protests.
They rigged the damn system!
And the other thing that good liberal Democrat, small L, D, liberal Democrat types need to understand is that your pain is someone else's pleasure.
For all the people crying and boo-hooing about Roe vs. Wade, which is just part of a plan to overthrow basic civil rights and human rights for gays and lesbians, black and brown folk, disabled people, we can go down the list.
Laborers.
Labor, union.
Fascism is hungry.
It's got to eat.
It's coming for you next.
But they sit up there, they'll march and boo-hoo and protest, but guess what?
The other side is happy.
This is jubilance.
And again, the Democrats and the other folk who vote for them don't seem to understand your pain is their pleasure.
They do a remarkably horrible job of studying the enemy.
That's why they're surprised by these fascists marching in D.C., New York.
They're surprised by the coup.
They're surprised by every antisocial act by the Republican fascists.
Every day they're shocked and surprised.
Why?
Because they refuse to admit they're in a struggle with evil and in a struggle with a movement that wants to destroy them.
They can't admit it.
It's too scary.
Well, you know, for a long time there, I felt a little bit shaky thinking in the, you know, we used to say all the time, if everyone could vote, who could vote, the Democrats would win in the landslide every time they had an election.
I kind of regained my faith in that statement after 2020, because clearly what we ended up seeing when we made it as easy as we could, For the first time, probably ever, you know, they broke the record for a number of votes for Biden, right?
Of course, Trump broke the record as well, but I think that says something.
So I feel like if we're looking at, you know, what's going to happen with these midterms, because everyone can pretty much guarantee that the Republicans will take over again, this sounds like, and what you're saying too, it's more rooted in some sort of weird apathy by the left.
As long as they have an iPhone that they can order on Amazon from, I think, and Chauncey, I'll let you get to it here in a second, I think part of it also is that Americans have been convinced that democracy is about going and voting.
a deficit of votes here.
We're simply talking about not being able to get enough of the people out for this incredibly important election. - I think, and Chauncey, I'll let you get to it here in a second, I think part of it also is that Americans have been convinced that democracy is about going and voting, which is part of it, but that's not all of it.
I think part of the problem with America being turned into a consumerist society, Nick, as you just pointed out, we have so much to do.
We have fantasy worlds to escape to.
We've got things to consume.
And I think if you're not willing to go out there and have some sort of a strike, you're not willing to go out there and have a sustained protest, if you're not willing To kind of lay some skin on the ground, democracy gets reduced to every two years, every four years, and basically, you're not even voting for people who even really have your back.
I don't know, Chauncey, are you in on that?
Yeah, I mean, it's not a novel idea.
You know, Sheldon Wolin, so many other folks have written about this, that in this type of late capitalism, that the American people, and in Europe and elsewhere, but just on America, Given our political culture and history, and I'm not gonna say America, I'm gonna say white America, capital W-A America, although it manifests with black and brown folk in a different way too, is that they have confused consumerism and consumer citizenship as democratic citizenship.
We're free because we can buy crap we don't need on Amazon.
That ain't freedom.
And getting to the point about democracy is something not guaranteed, notice again, going to history, America had its own native form of fascism.
It's called Jim and Jane Crow.
Black folks have only been on paper equal citizens for a little over 50 years.
So this is very contingent.
But if you're a white American, in particular white and upper class, you have convinced yourself that this is a permanent state of being.
So no, no skin in the game, no blood, sweat and tears.
Going back to Rocky, no sense that I may have to die.
I may have to fight and bleed, and guess what?
The Republican fascists, they're telling you they're willing to kill.
They have killed.
They're willing to fight, they're willing to bleed, because they have a vision.
They are wholly committed in an existential struggle to defend white civilization.
And you've got the other side worrying about voting and worrying about video games and shopping and consumerism and citizenship.
I wonder, does that mean you're arguing in favor of returning to the draft and having people have to serve this country and fight for this country in the military?
I mean, that's sort of tangential, but no.
But I do think there's a conversation to be had for national service, and that's a whole other conversation.
What I'm saying is folk have to understand the stakes.
And I literally had a series of conversations with a few folk, both in person and online, white brothers, middle class, upper class, and they were shocked when I said, they're coming for you next.
Your skin color and your gender ain't gonna save you.
Fascism is a death cult.
It always eats its own.
And I think you got a lot of folk because of money and skin color and the parts between their legs that have convinced themselves that they're safe.
And I think a lot of people, and you know, as I'm doing the research on the new book, what I keep finding is when fascism comes, when authoritarianism comes, I think we have this idea in our heads, and this has to do with the way that we've told the story of fascism, that, you know, people are going to stand up and they'll say, no, this isn't enough.
But what you actually find is that most people sort of shrug their shoulders and they just keep doing their jobs and living the lives that they have while people are being rounded up, obviously, and being roughed up.
And in this case, in America, I don't think they understand something that you just brought up, which is really, really important, which is That consumerism and sort of the decline of democracy was by design.
If anybody is interested in this, go look up the idea of consumer sovereignty.
Neoliberalism created a situation where they didn't want people really voting to upturn the apple cart.
Because if you have, like, big political societal changes, that really messes with your bottom line.
That messes with your profit.
That messes with your quarter earnings.
So instead, you vote with your pocketbook.
What brands that you buy.
How you dress yourself.
The type of car that you drive.
Meanwhile, the meaning of politics gets drained out.
All of a sudden, people look around and they're like, I don't have anything to believe in.
I don't have anything to, like, rally around.
But they have found something.
And that's what fascism is about.
It's about sanctifying the process, which means I will give my body over to the factory.
I will give my body.
I will go out and I will kill.
I will bleed myself for the state or I'll bleed myself for capitalism.
Whatever it is, it injects meaning into a meaningless situation.
And you're right.
People have not been able to wrap their heads around the fact that they have created a movement that has some sort of meaning to them.
And it's a hell of a time right now for the left to try and figure out what their meaning is.
The underlying meaning, of course, I think, is solidarity and faith in one another and something higher than ourselves and buying things.
But the right has created meaning even if it doesn't, even if it's incoherent, even if it doesn't make sense, they don't give a shit because fascism is incoherent.
It simply answers a question that other people aren't answering.
And on that point, I mean the crisis of meaning, I love that part, one of the most important movies in recent years, and I wouldn't say just because I love George Miller, The Last Mad Max, Thunder, oh my god, when you had the war boys scream and witness me.
That's a cousin to people saying I'm a brand on social media.
You have a whole society with existential crisis, a whole generation, at least one, probably two or three, that has no sense of great meaning in their lives.
And again, going back to what liberals and progressives are afraid to acknowledge, what do they believe?
What is their great struggle?
You can watch Tucker Carlson and see what their great struggle is.
You can go to neo-Nazi white supremacist websites.
They'll tell you about a great struggle.
You can look at January 6th.
You can look at these fascists marching in DC, New York, all across the country.
Mass shootings and the like.
They know what they stand for, and it's attracting a whole generation of young white men and women who want meaning in their lives.
And you found folks to give them meaning.
That gets to the martyrdom operation, right?
Look at Rittenhouse.
Look at January 6th with that woman whose name I won't use.
Look at all these folks willing to die.
Why?
They want to mean something.
They want to be heroes.
And you see that, of course, with Islamic terrorists as well.
They want meaning.
They want to be knights in an Islamic struggle.
Yeah, I want to say real fast, I watched this video before we got on here, which has just been sort of rattling around in my head like a, like a ball bearing.
And it's this, it's obviously out in the mountains somewhere.
And it's this woman who, outside of her house on the porch, there's like a mountain lion, a giant mountain lion.
And her little dog is sitting there looking at this mountain lion.
And the mountain lion is trying to get into her house.
And instead of like getting her dog and getting away from the mountain lion, she's taking a video of it.
Because that video is going to go viral, right?
You're going to get attention for it.
And all of a sudden, what actually happens is your own self-preservation, your own sort of panic and fear mechanism gets overrun by the idea that there might be profit or opportunity, which obviously is what the internet gives us, what social media gives us.
I might be one of the elect.
I might be chosen to be moved forward.
Meanwhile, literal death is staring at you through the window, but you're not able to see it, which it feels like right now is like, unfortunately, a really dim metaphor for what's going on.
I mean, that's a powerful example.
Literally look at death in the face, but you want some hits on the internet Because you'll get a dopamine hit in your brain, and maybe you'll make a hundredth of a cent if it's monetized.
But it's that desperate cry for attention, for meaning.
And was it Brother Malcolm or Martin?
Maybe it was Du Bois or Frederick Douglass.
I'm sure this wisdom is across cultures.
I think it was Brother Malcolm who said, or Muhammad Ali repeated what Malcolm said.
He said something akin to, you don't know who you are unless you have figured out what you're willing to die for.
You ain't got no meaning unless you have something you would be willing to sacrifice your life for.
Think about that.
And you have a society where there is no meaning.
There was some research that came out, digital studies folk did some surveys about young men in particular college age who are obsessed with video games.
And one of the things they found, I read this some years ago and it just hit me, it hit home because it's so real.
They said a lot of these young white men in particular who are obsessed with, I mean literally living online, is that that's a world that gives them affirmation, there are rules, and they can get attention.
They'd rather live in the video game, thinking about that as a symptom of neoliberalism, and what it has spawned, than interact in the quote-unquote real world.
Because the real world is hard.
They can play by the rules and still lose.
But that digital online space, Facebook and meta, whatever this monstrosity they're creating, it's another world where they feel validation.
So who cares about the polity?
Who cares about the public sphere?
Who cares about fascism?
I can jack in like a bad sci-fi movie and live in another world, because it gives me affirmation and meaning.
And community.
I just don't understand why the left doesn't have that same sense of meaning or needing that meaning that will resonate enough to either a get them out to the polls so that we can put down this ridiculous Republican Party.
That's what's so strange to me because in some respects if we want to have to come together how Biden likes to talk about it.
It really would have to be the left going all the way toward the right to reach out to them and move toward them.
But what that means is that, yes, you have to embrace fascism, right, to come to some sort of, you know, connection between the left and the right the way it is now.
And that, you know, obviously can't happen either.
I'm just sort of fascinated by this.
There isn't a way to galvanize that meaning of life that the left needs to have that would have the same kind of fervency that we would get, you know, out in the public.
I mean, the Soviet Union failed.
I mean, you know, it's like one of those things where, like, there's nothing for the left to aspire to.
The lack of imagination that's there anymore is, like, incredible.
I don't know.
It feels... There's a really good book about that.
I want to call... I want to say it's like Leftist Melancholy or something along those lines that really documents this.
Like, I think that the left has been so crushed It's almost like there's no ability to even imagine an alternative anymore and everyone's just sort of waiting around for someone else to find it.
Well, you got folks who gotta be careful with our language, right?
Democratic corporate party is not the left, right?
And a lot of times, folks conflate it.
And there's some good folks, real liberals, real progressives, real leftists, who are doing great work locally, who understand how to speak to the people.
Be it stopping evictions, be it standing up against these out-of-control thuggish robocops on these streets.
But on a national level, I always come back to the messaging, right?
I can go up to a Republican, and I can ask them, a Tea Partyist, a Trumpist, what do you stand for?
What do they stand for?
They'll tell me.
Do the Democrats have any policy proposal?
Screw policy, because that's the problem.
Can the Democrats, in simple emotional terms, one word, tell me what they stand for?
No, they can give me a thesis and talk about public policy and material realities.
Liberals leftists love talking about material realities.
Going back to The Rock, take your material realities, turn them sideways, and stick them up your butt.
Because they ain't gonna rally nobody the way you're packaging it.
It's a messaging.
Tell me a story.
Give me heroes and villains.
I got one.
I'll give this one to the Democrats for free.
I won't even charge a consulting fee.
They should have done ads that said Donald Trump's trying to kill you.
Easy.
People understand that.
Donald Trump, the Republican fascists, they want to put babies in you.
It's true.
Go down the list.
Burn in the earth.
They want grandma to be blind, no teeth, and can't hear.
Et cetera, et cetera.
But the Democrats want to talk about policy.
And that makes it very easy for the right to just say, like, socialism.
That's all.
What do they want?
They want you to wear a mask so you can be protected from other people.
They want you to get a vaccine so you don't get infected.
They want to have universal health care for everybody.
I mean, these are the things that would probably resonate, but with one word, you can brand that all as socialism and tap right into the 80s welfare queen imagination of the right.
And it just crumbles and then they're left standing there on the corner with their pants down.
And they don't give a shit about any of that.
I mean, one of the hottest rhetorical tricks that the Republicans have right now are calling corporations corporate Marxist and corporate communist, which is a complete oxymoron.
The problem is that the Democratic Party is so reliant at this point On analysts, they're so reliant on pollsters, these technocratic people that they, I mean, my God, try explaining means testing to the electorate because they don't care.
There's no news story that the Democratic Party is willing, well, not all of them.
There are certainly people within the party who try, but the Democratic Party doesn't really want to come out and criticize the system that has been built.
It's been the exact same thing since the late 1980s, early 1990s.
Once all the neoliberals took over the party and said, the reality is we simply can't compete with the Republicans and Reaganism.
And as a result, they just keep chasing.
And we were talking about this a little bit before we were recorded.
They keep chasing this mythical median voter.
And for anybody keeping track, that is a white person.
It is an imaginary white person.
It's always been an imaginary white person.
I believe they always said it.
This white person lived in Dayton, Ohio.
This person was uncomfortable with civil liberties, right?
But didn't consider themselves a racist.
Read between the lines all you want.
But it has been the problem for the Democratic Party.
They jettisoned labor unions.
They jettisoned people of color, they jettisoned their traditional working class sort of base, completely went away with it and now they've moved to the professional managerial class, people who went to college, people who more or less are managers at this point and they are part of the system, who don't want the system to change, And as a result, there is this vacuum that the Republican Party has just managed to just fill.
It makes no sense, the positions that they hold, but it doesn't have to make any sense whatsoever because they fill the vacuum that the Democratic Party has left behind.
Well, and on the point about socialism and how the Republicans would respond, the Democrats, strategically, need to stop playing defense.
Go on offense.
Relentless attacks.
So many Democrats are like, oh, they'll say this about us.
Oh, they'll do that about us.
Well, using the socialism example, yeah, you let the Republicans brand you for 30 years, using Newt Gingrich's talking points, but guess what?
Quote-unquote, socialism is remarkably popular among young people.
And others when you actually talk about the details.
So using critical race theory as an example.
They let him box them in.
They let him come up with some boogeyman lie about this monster called critical race theory that's coming to hurt white people.
Never mind, specifically take away your white kids and indoctrinate them into communism and have black folks and Jewish people tell them what to think.
What the Democrats should have done is not even engage nonsense.
You don't even use their language.
You should have pivoted and said, they want your kids to be sick in school.
They want your kids to be stupid.
Don't you what?
We know your kids are smart, etc, etc, but the Democrats are always on the defense.
Attack, attack, attack.
Don't seem like these Democrats know how to do that.
They're waiting for the Republicans to create the story about them.
Here's another example.
Think about Roe v. Wade.
It sickens me, and I know I've said that several times, you got me in a mood today, when I hear Democrats, liberals, progressives talk about pro-life.
Why the hell are you using their words?
You should say anti-women's freedom.
You should look to the Republicans every time you talk about these issues and say, force pregnancy, force birth, protecting rapists, as we see in Texas, taking away human rights.
Why would you ever use any of their words?
When they say pro-life, say no, pro-death.
You oppose human life.
You want to burn the earth.
You want guns everywhere.
You don't support the social safety net.
All your policies, and this is an empirical fact, have actually shortened people's lives.
But I know the Democrats and the commentariat use their words.
Now, you might not remember, but Al Gore, when he debated Dan Quayle, forced Dan Quayle to do that.
He goes, Dan, I want you to repeat after me.
I support a woman's right to choose over what happens to her body.
And he would not do it.
And I would argue that that was one of the seminal moments that actually helped Clinton come out of nowhere and win that 92 election.
But the thing about the abortions is a problem, too, because I suspect that a lot of intelligent people on the left would say, well, you know, it goes to the states.
So we're going to have half the states in the Union allow abortions.
And so maybe it doesn't have that same effect as you'd hope it would have.
But here's the rub.
Don't you think that once they take control of Congress and they have control of the Senate, that they're going to try and enact a federal ban on abortions once they get control of the White House again?
Oh, I wouldn't be surprised, because again, They're going to win the midterms, they're going to win the Senate, next thing is they impeach Biden.
Or they're certainly going to try.
And they're going to, again, long-term thinking.
Nancy McLean, Sarah Chase, some of the other folks have documented this.
They're going to go Heritage Foundation, these Koch think tanks, the Claremont Institute.
They got it all laid out.
The America Democracy RIP.
If they lose the midterm, show's over.
I think in terms of that, I think that it is more than likely that they will probably win in the midterms.
After that, the hope that I have is that that might end up being some sort of a wake-up call.
And I'm glad that you brought up Claremont.
I'm glad you brought up Heritage.
Because I don't think enough people understand that these people, these think tanks, these organizations, And they operate, for anyone who isn't aware, they operate, they are just fat on the money that comes in from the Kochs, that comes in from all of these right-wing billionaires who are obsessed, and this is what they're being paid to do.
They're being paid to destroy democracy.
They're being paid to roll back every single possible piece of regulation.
I was saying this last night.
It doesn't end with Roe v. Wade.
It ends with those children being born and forced to work in factories 12 to 15 hours.
And if you think that isn't something that these people want, they designed the first, second, and third world system so that corporations could go around the world in order to do this.
Unfortunately, capitalism doesn't rest.
You have to increase your profits, and eventually the way that you treat the so-called third world, it has to come back to the first world with those people.
That is what they're being paid to do.
And I have to tell you, when you listen to them, they will tell you straight out that this is what they are doing.
They talk about dictatorships.
They talk about legal ramifications of these things.
They are completely focused on this.
And so this isn't a false alarm.
This isn't hysterical, you know, walking around worrying about something that isn't coming into fruition.
These are serious people.
Donald Trump is not the person who's sitting around thinking of this stuff.
He's a buffoon who is out front of it.
The people behind the scenes who are actually laying the tracks on this stuff, they are serious, serious people and they mean what they say and they mean what they do.
Well, look at Florida.
DeSantis wanting his own private state militia.
And he's also talked about having election police.
The new Jim Crow in Texas.
I think it was Claremont where they basically had a paper where they laid out the claim for more of these state governor-controlled militias.
Also at Claremont, I believe, or someone adjacent to it, I'm sure you tracked this, all they're writing about the need for an American Caesar.
Yep.
That's the main thrust now.
And also, here's one your listeners may have encountered online.
This is how powerful and how vast their tentacles are.
When you have these right-wing bloviator fake-smart people on these internet forums, even if they ain't in Russia, talking about, oh, America is a republic, is not a democracy.
That's straight right-wing Claremont Heritage, et cetera, Heritage Foundation, rather.
Um, Talking Point 101 right there.
This all comes from somewhere, and they're excellent at disseminating their talking points.
So when you hear the foot soldiers repeating these things, they didn't come up with these ideas.
It was put out in the ecosystem, and it's internalized.
Well, it's not even that they can create that whole line of reasoning.
They also will take the argument that the left has legitimately against the right and simply just change the words.
Like, they're going after NBA players who won't criticize China, for instance, because, oh, they're too beholden to China and their money.
And it's disgusting to hear those people go after somebody else because of money and because they're greedy about something.
And yet it resonates not only does it resonate and you watch these the people and their reaction It is like you said it's the Wolverine moment any chance to get a chance to dunk on the left It is it's it kind of is it's in so I don't even know what the word is It's uh, it's just hard to rectify and deal with it kind of shuts you down.
It's intimidating to see that kind of vitriol and that kind of energy poured into this.
And the wake-up call I don't think happens.
Jared, you were talking about some sort of wake-up call.
There was a wake-up call in Germany in the 30s, and nobody even decided to listen to that for those years until Hitler took over.
I'll say this, because here is the thing.
There was a robust opposition to the Nazis.
There was a robust opposition to all these authoritarians.
The question is whether or not it's going to be the left that does it alone.
And most of the time, unfortunately, the bourgeoisie, what we would call sort of, you know, dyed in the wool liberals, some of these professional managerial class people, they look around and they see which way the wind is blowing.
And they're like, you know what, I would rather go with these guys than with the left.
Right.
Because taking a chance on the left, taking a chance on societal change means that you risk some of your money.
You risk your house, you risk your car, you risk your career.
A thing that I just found the other day which was chilling to me.
Was there was this moment as the Nazis are taking over and as Hitler is becoming a full-blown dictator, this Nazi official goes into a university.
He sits down with all the professors and he's like, listen, I got news for you.
You either teach what we want you to teach or you're going to a concentration camp.
Not a single person walked out.
Not a single person said anything except for one guy that was like, are we going to get more money for our research now?
That was the question because the system goes ahead and corrupts you.
The question for me is whether things will change.
Because history is not static.
History is not necessarily a slippery slope.
There are moments in which there's a give and a take and things can change.
Can there be a civic revolution in this country?
Can there be a reformist revolution in this country?
I think there's a possibility.
The question is how fast it happens, when it happens, and if it will be enough.
And as of right now, I find it lacking.
But I do maintain a hope that maybe one day people will wake up in a white hot terror the way that they do as they're driving for hours and they suddenly realize they're at the wheel of, you know, an automobile that can kill people and kill themselves.
Well, I tell folk as, you know, Brother Cornel West told me, and I've been going back to it repeatedly, get your casket ready because a casket or a coffin can also make a good lifeboat.
But you've got to be ready to get in the casket.
And you've got to be ready to accept the fascist tide is here.
Get your casket ready, get your cemetery suit ready, get in the casket.
Make your own, because there's only so much room in mine, and maybe you can float out of this thing.
But a lot of folk are going to stand there, wait to the last minute, and the water's already at their nose, and then the water's going to be over their head.
And there's some folk, these Republican fascists and their followers, I wrote this a few weeks ago at Salon, I said, you know what, they think they can surf on the fascists, like it's an amusement park, a water park, they're going to have fun, like Action Park back in Jersey.
Uh-uh, they're gonna drown too.
Maybe they just drown a little later, but they're gonna be drowned too.
Well, and they are.
And by the way, I just want to point out, fascism is a suicidal movement.
If they aren't being killed in purges, if they're not being oppressed, eventually what happens with these groups, they have to expand.
They have to create this movement outside of themselves.
Usually it's war.
And do you know who goes into war smiling and thinking that they're serving a higher cause?
The people who, as you said, Chauncey, think that they're going to ride the thing out or they're going to gain power.
It is Always an empirical death drive.
It is the idea that by creating this new suicidal religious nationalist cult, that somehow or another it's going to turn into a rejuvenation, but it eats you up.
It eats everybody up, everybody it touches.
That's my cue to ask Jared why he hates America, which we have to ask every episode.
And I start to think about what, like, you're describing some sort of movement that could finally, you know, come in, cue the music and the lights and the camera, you know, the crane on the camera.
And I wonder if it's like, you know, the counterculture in the 60s was sort of like that and came out of a similar circumstance.
But the problem with that is that they had a war that you were bound to join the army to have to go fight, at least the men were.
And that would certainly be the thing that would fight against, like, what we don't have now because there isn't any sense of sacrifice for this coming, you know, movement that you would need.
I don't know what else would spark that.
Well, and I'll just say very, very quickly that that movement of the counterculture is aggrandized as it's been in conventional history.
You're right.
It was because they were going to get drafted into a war.
And then, once the draft went away, a large part of that counterculture went away, and they got bought off.
Instead of going out in the streets and protesting and being against the machine that they needed to throw their body on the gears, they bought blue jeans, they bought hippie clothes, they bought rock and roll, and all of a sudden that comfortable lifestyle sounded a whole lot better than getting gunned down at Kent State.
And then the question becomes, how are your blue jeans?
How are your hippie clothes?
How is your rock and roll?
I enjoy all three!
They're totally fine.
But you have to find something larger because that cycle has gotten us to this point.
I mean, just an interesting historical note and, you know, more than interesting, instructive.
So you're looking at, you know, the black freedom struggle, looking at all the former black radicals, Panthers and others in the 60s, early 70s.
Guess what happened to them?
The Ford Foundation and others bought him off, gave him university positions.
So it's real easy to be a hippie, counterculture, right?
Especially, you know, thinking about the white brothers and sisters who were part of that movement.
Yeah, there was some revolutionary action involved, but where did that come from?
They were the children of the rich who could afford to do that stuff.
And as Jared pointed out, guess what?
You cooptate them too, they get jobs, they get a mortgage, they got 2.2 kids and a car.
So yeah, we learn from history.
And in terms of that learning from history, there's a very, very powerful book.
It's called The Germans.
They thought they were free.
I think it was Martin Meyer's book, M-A-Y-E-R, and he documents, I quoted it recently in a piece, literally what it was like for Germans watching the rise of Hitlerism.
How they negotiated made sense.
They knew something was wrong.
Some were terrified.
Some thought if they just keep their nose down, it'll be okay.
And you got a lot of Americans right now, and this is where I'm hard on the news media, they keep talking about the future.
And I'm very curious, Jared, as to your reaction when you see these pieces.
The Republicans are succumbing to violence.
The violence is coming.
I love the ones about the reasonable Republicans will save us.
The fascist coup is ongoing and it's here.
The violence is here.
But they keep talking about some ill-defined future.
And the one I love, this one.
Civil war in the Republican Party.
Where are they fighting?
It's a purge.
No civil war within the Republican Party.
But again, that gives them comfort.
It's Christmas.
Santa Claus ain't real, friends.
Yeah, that future.
And this is the problem, not just with the American media and political prognosticators in general.
They always believe that the future is stagnant.
They really can't imagine interruptions and changes, and that's one of the reasons why I think January 6th was so instructive.
Look at what they did.
Literally, we had an attempted coup that was one of the most broadcasted events in American history.
We all watched it.
We all saw what happened.
Every single nay now, we find out more and more that it was an actual coup, that there were right-wing extremists and terrorists there who were trying to overthrow the government.
But in order to go ahead and keep that idea of the relentless future and a static future, which is what neoliberalism needs, It needs to go ahead and get rid of all political tumultuousness and any sort of human will in order to say, you know what, you're going to keep buying products until you die and maybe you won't even die.
We'll figure out death.
We'll get you to Mars.
We'll, you know, we'll figure out whatever's next.
And you just keep marching.
They cannot imagine possibly that things could change.
So a potential attempted coup gets turned into, ah, it was a riot.
Let's just call it a riot!
People got really amped up.
But you know what?
Things are totally fine now.
Everything's fine.
The Republican Party is going to figure it out.
And you know, we'll all meet for Christmas next year and everything will be totally fine.
Well, what I've been telling folk, think about September 11th.
On September 10th, if somebody told you September 11th would be this horrific day, you wouldn't have believed them.
Most people wouldn't have.
And I keep trying to prepare, folk.
And I'm going to say it to you.
I say it to everybody.
There's no guarantee you and I will be having this conversation or one like it in a few months from now.
There's certainly no guarantee in a year or two from now.
And that's how folks have to start living.
There is no guarantee of tomorrow and what's going to happen with our civil liberties and what we've already seen.
There is no guarantee that you and I will be having these conversations again.
And I keep telling folk again, September 10, 9, 10, 9, 11.
Before and after.
And what's going to happen, and is happening in this country, I'll predict it.
I predicted Trump would win.
I will predict this too, because I'm a rocket scientist.
I'm just looking at the facts.
One day, very soon, the American people are going to have another one of the moments where they wake up, and that Monday was totally different from the Tuesday that comes.
And I think it's going to be massive, right-wing, white supremacist terrorism.
I really, I've talked to enough people.
I'm very curious, Jared, of the stuff you've been learning and studying.
That insurgency is real.
And there's going to be a wave, a series of days and weeks where so many things happen that the American people at large will be shocked.
Totally shocked and dismayed when it was advertised the whole damn time.
Yeah, and the thing that really bothers me, and I think most people really don't want to understand this, which is when you live in a society, you live with a lot of people who are capable of really horrendous things, a lot of violence, a lot of anti-democratic actions.
The question is whether or not there is an energy and a momentum to give them the choice to carry it out.
And again, I think January 6th is instructive.
There are different groups there, right?
Of course, you have right-wing extremists and terrorists who are more than willing to go in and gas every Democrat inside and hang the Vice President of the United States of America and overthrow the election.
Then you have QAnon people who have been waiting for this.
And then you have what they, you know, so derisively refer to as normies who have kind of a decision to make, right?
They've been following Donald Trump.
They've been talking about how they want to defend the country and take it back.
If there was blood spilled, a lot of those people who were there have to make a decision in the moment.
Do I engage in this or do I reject it and walk away?
There are a lot of Americans who have to make that choice, and many of them have been prepared.
They've been radicalized.
They've had their own problems and their own illnesses exacerbated by this whole thing.
They're going to go along with it because it's part of human nature.
Fascism was not just a 20th century Western European phenomenon.
It is a human condition that people have to make choices about in the moment, and there are a lot of people in this country who are going to make the wrong choice.
Well riddle you this, so when these right-wing street fascists, these paramilitaries show up in the street, as they have been doing increasingly, I've asked this in print and elsewhere, how come everyone else, because we outnumber them, They show up with 500, we show up with 5,000.
They show up at a school board with 10, we show up with 100.
I just don't understand the calculus being made.
You outnumber them, but if you allow them to dominate the political battle, well in this case a real battle space very soon, a few number of people can change the world.
I think it's the Green Berets who have a motto, informally I believe, is that 12 men can change history.
I don't understand why we don't show up 10 to 1.
Every time they show up, every time they're anywhere, you counter them.
But no, I don't see it.
Chauncey, there's a story from pre-World War II Britain where Oswald Mosley, who is a pretty acceptable fascist in Britain, him and all of his fascists, they were marching around London and there was just a neighborhood that said, fuck this, we're not going to deal with it.
And they beat the living shit out of them and made them run tail-scared.
And that was the end.
And eventually, and there are all these accounts, and I'll go ahead and wrap this up with this, There are all these accounts of the people who were engaged in that resistance.
They said, I've never felt more alive.
Suddenly, I realized that I have purpose.
There's something that I can do.
Having to face this thing down reinvigorated their thirst for life and their own personal meaning, because much like staring at death in the face, it suddenly reminded them there's something that I can do.
I am not powerless.
There is an ability here to reject this.
And learned helplessness is how fascism wins.
Absolutely.
Chauncey, as always, it's not a pleasurable topic to talk about, but you are a pleasurable guest.
Always, always, always.
Tell the good people where they can find you.
Yeah, two podcasts, Chauncey DeVegas Show and The Truth Report.
Find those at all the usual places.
Follow me on Twitter.
Follow me on Facebook.
Read my essays over at Salon.
All right, thank you so much.
We will be back with our Weekender Edition on Friday.
A reminder, all you have to do to get access to that is go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
Thank you so much for being here.
If you needed this before then, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me SMH.
