While co-host Jared Yates Sexton was unavailable for today's episode, Nick Hauselman welcomes on the show Jason Niedelman, who teaches Political Theory at the University of LaVerne, to talk about the surprisingly large turnout by Republican voters despite underperforming in so many races. This leads to discussing Kristen Sinema's move toward Independent status, and what this means for the political landscape going forward.
To support the show and access bonus episodes each week become a patron at http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Today, Jared Yates Sexton is out and not available to record with me, your other co-host, Nick Hauselman.
So, as a result, I'm bringing in friend of the pod, Jason Needleman, who teaches political theory at the University of Luverne in Southern California, and a guy that you, I'm sure, will recognize his voice because he's been on the show several times.
And, Jason, I can't wait to break some stuff down with you.
Great to be here.
Thanks for having me.
Awesome.
Well, you know, I think we should start with talking about the midterm elections a little bit because there's an interesting article in the New York Times that discussed the Republican, let's see, interest or how much they turned out in these elections.
And when you're watching places like Fox News and they're tearing their hair out because, oh, my God, they're realizing that they have a turnout problem.
It looks like when you look at the numbers, it wasn't that issue.
Yeah, I mean, it's actually kind of shocking.
I didn't expect that more Republicans would vote in the midterm election than Democrats, because we really thought that that wouldn't happen for the foreseeable future.
Our complaint was always, you know, we can turn out millions more voters and because of gerrymandering, the Republicans will still hold the House.
So we on the left would kind of hammer away at the voter turnout question and, you know, lament gerrymandering and single member districts.
And we would say, oh, 6 million more people voted Democrat, and yet the Republicans held the House.
Well, shockingly, actually, from the data that's in so far, it looks like more Republicans voted than Democrats.
And you kind of see this in some of these states where Democrats eked out, these swing states where Democrats eked out narrow victories, like Raphael Warnock most recently.
Because if you look at the other statewide elections, Republicans did really well.
Yeah, that's what's fascinating to me.
And we knew that was going to happen.
Like with split tickets, someone would vote for a Republican governor and maybe the Democratic senator, which I think in the historical perspective, that is like unheard of.
Isn't that safe to say?
Well, I wouldn't say unheard of, but you know, so you ask yourself, so what could explain it?
Well, All of the political scientists call the fundamentals cut in the direction of Republicans having a really big night or big election season.
Pretty much everything.
The fact that the in party always gets beat, almost always gets beat, in the first midterm election.
Inflation, all of the voter suppression gerrymandering that they've been able to do.
You just thought, The combination of those factors is going to produce a big night for Republicans.
And it doesn't happen.
So then you start looking, well, what's the variable that could explain that it didn't?
And yeah, it's probably candidate quality.
You know, you look at where you had a generic Republican, they did pretty well on the whole.
And then you look at elections where they had what we might call like a MAGA Republican, and that's where they did poorly.
And so, like you said, it's only ever happened a couple times that the in-party gained seats in the first midterm.
That didn't quite happen here, but the Democrats definitely overperformed.
They lost fewer seats than we thought they would.
So that tells me that Mehmet Oz, Blake Masters, Hershel Walker, people like that, are just slightly better Then 9-11 and the Great Depression, because those are the only two times that the in party gained seats in the last 80 whatever years.
During the Great Depression, FDR gained seats, and right after 9-11, Bush Jr.
gained seats.
So those candidates are just slightly better than the Depression and 9-11, but not by much.
And meanwhile, let's not forget there are plenty of candidates that are, would he be even considered even worse than them that did win and did hold their, you know, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, I guess the congressional people, because of the gerrymandering are safer than maybe senators and governors in theory.
What was interesting about Nevada was that here was a guy who had already won a race in Nevada for Attorney General, so he had a base of popularity, was expected to win, was backed by Trump, and Masto ends up beating him anyway, and I think it's a bit of a surprise, even though they saw a significant amount, a higher percentage of Republicans voting than the Democrats of their percentage voting.
Uh, that, that seems to be, you know, I get Georgia to some degree, but I don't know if I understand how Nevada happened that way.
Right.
And, and, and, and I don't either.
Um, but again, you know, we're hyper polarized, partisanship is at an all time high, and yet you have this in a few select elections.
It didn't happen right with, um, Brian Kemp in Georgia.
It just happened with Herschel Walker.
So I think, you know, The inevitable conclusion has to be that it has something to do with candidate quality, that these candidates were too closely tied to Trump or Trumpism or the MAGA agenda, or really probably more specifically, election denialism.
You know, the ones that steered really heavily into election denialism did worse.
And people like Brian Kemp, who, you know, for all practical purposes, Brian Kemp's politics are no better than that.
Hershel Walker's politics.
It's just on that one issue of, you know, respecting the integrity of the election, he differentiated himself.
And it looks like there's enough Republican-identifying voters for whom that's a kind of make-or-break issue.
And they're willing to say, you know, we're loyal Republicans, but we don't want to go down that path, the destruction of democracy path.
Yeah, that all makes a lot of sense.
And thank God that there's enough people who feel that way.
You know, I was thinking about Georgia and how razor thin some of these margins are.
How viable is it as we're getting more and more polarized to like, why don't the progressives organize some version of a thing where you're going to go move To Georgia, we're going to get like 15 or 20,000 people just to move for six months.
You know, you could probably work remotely because of how we've learned how well that could work in some, you know, jobs.
Should we start organizing to do that?
It's happening.
I mean, it's happening because of the housing crisis.
You know, it's happening because of COVID, but not always to the advantage of You know, the Democrats.
Right.
But I mean, that is happening.
You're seeing places turn blue because housing prices are so high in some of these coastal cities.
I mean, they haven't turned blue yet, but that probably partially explains what's happened in Arizona.
How it went from being pretty reliably red to now purple, maybe even slightly leaning leaning blue.
I wonder if that might've been the difference in Nevada.
Angelino's fleeing to Vegas for cost of living and Texas people leaving for Texas.
I think it cut the other way in, in, in New York though, you know, a lot of liberals fled to Florida.
Yeah.
And, but either, yeah, that's probably part of it.
And then, cause again, there's no income tax in Florida and the weather is better.
But I think that this, they just dropped the ball.
They didn't, they didn't get enough people to turn out.
It feels like, which, Speaking, which is funny because when you're watching the right, like the Hannity's, they're wringing their hands because they don't understand what happened and why or their solution now is maybe we should get some of these of our the people watching the show to like to vote by mail more.
Like that has to be the answer.
And the funny thing is, is that up until a few years ago, it was the Republicans who voted by mail much more than that.
And maybe it's not strange.
I think you're going to tell me exactly why that's changed.
Well, yeah, you know why that's changed, but a fella called Donald Trump demonized early voting.
But Hannity is the classic, you know, conservatism can't fail, it can only be failed.
So that's why they're like rummaging around for an explanation for why they lost, because they don't want to think about the possibility that it may be that they have an unattractive ideology or set of political commitments.
But, yeah, it's actually kind of hilarious to me that you watch them and they think that the reason they lost is because Ronna Romney McDaniels, that her name?
Yeah, they have the wrong head of the of the RNC and that they need to get.
What's her name?
In charge of the the RNC.
I mean, please, that's why he lost because, you know, or Mitch McConnell didn't give enough money to certain candidates.
Or he said, you know, poor candidate that we have poor candidates.
They're villains if you look at like Hannity and Fox or Ronna, Romney McDaniel, they wanna get their favorite, Harmeet Dillon, they wanna get Harmeet Dillon, that's gonna fix it, election denier.
Harmeet Dillon is gonna fix the party.
And then the other villain is McConnell, because I guess he pointed out that they had poor candidates and something, something funding.
All of that is just grasping, it seems to me, to avoid confronting the real issue, which is that they've created a kind of incipient, fascist, anti-democracy, election-denying movement, and they just want to double down on it instead of thinking about how that's costing them elections.
I heard someone say, someone said, oh, Trump promised that there'd be a lot of winning.
I just didn't think it would be the Democrats winning.
Well, here's here's my take on that, because obviously it's Trump who had poisoned the well for early voting.
And by the way, I'm still not sure that if like, like, because the alternative to the Republicans that they're talking to, you know, not voting early would be, I think the point is, is they voted.
Not necessarily didn't vote early.
They went to the polls and they voted.
Right.
So it has nothing to do with they would have voted from their homes a week before the election.
Right.
The numbers are not there.
And so as we've been talking about the slow and like to reject Trump is not anything that's going to happen overnight.
This has to be a tedious and very slow process because, you know, eventually they don't want to piss off the crazies that are that make up enough of that to swing these elections.
I think this is also indicative.
So instead of saying Trump is an idiot and he destroyed our party by poisoning us well, I think they're going to start, you know, they're going to first say, well, maybe we should try and vote more by mail and like start to erode some of these ridiculous things that he did.
Maybe, I mean, the next thing would have to be like, well, maybe we should get that vaccine and we'll stop dying so much.
I mean, that might be the next one they start doing.
All in the service of finally, by before 2024, getting rid of Trump from the party.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, that's interesting.
I mean, I think that does tend to be how we revise our worldview.
It's not like a light bulb goes off and we abandon everything we've always believed.
It's that we... I heard Will Wilkinson talking about his libertarianism, which he's abandoned, and how he ended up doing it.
And what he said was, well, I was, you know, like an orthodox libertarian.
And then people would come with an example that I couldn't quite account for.
And so I would carve out an exception for that.
And then Eventually someone will come with another example, and I'd carve out an exception for that, and eventually I just had to accept that this ideology as a whole is not sustainable, and at that point I discarded it.
But I think that's a great theory.
It seems like they want to get rid of all the election denialism stuff, except for Terry Lake.
But they want to retain the rest of Trumpism.
All the kind of immigrant bashing, the anti-woke-ism, all the culture war stuff.
But like you're saying, yeah, the anti-vax stuff, maybe the next step is they accept the vaccine and then slowly sort of the pieces fall away and you get something that is maybe closer to a more traditional, coherent, conservative ideology, which, you know, any healthy political system is going to need.
It's not my politics.
But you're going to need someone who voices a kind of coherent, consistent conservatism, and we just don't have that now.
That's why I worry so much about the risks of what I would call fascism, because we don't we don't have a intellectually honest, coherent conservative party right now.
Right.
By the way, what frightens me about a move away from Trump would be that if they could get to closer to what you described as a conservative movement, then they could dominate elections in theory.
Right.
Because, you know, I think part of the reason why Herschel Walker runs in Georgia is because they can't get anybody who's better than that to run.
Aside from the cynical notion of they needed a black man to run against another black man, I really feel like that was what it was, right?
Find anybody who's willing to be part of our party who looks like him and will run.
That'd be great.
But other than that, I think that that's the other issue, right?
Like, you're not going to find a lot of these stalwart, you know, reliable, upstanding members of society.
Well, and we could maybe talk about the Herschel Walker candidacy because that was an exercise in cynicism so many different ways and really insulting and embarrassing.
For the country and a lot of black people have written essays about just what an insult it was and how that probably spurred black people to come vote for Warnock because they sense themselves being attacked and insulted.
But I don't think you're right about the kind of recovery of a traditional conservatism because one thing Trump proved is there really isn't much of a market for that and that the energy on the right.
Really is more for this kind of divisive culture war politics and melting the snowflakes and attacking the libs.
I mean, people say the reason Trump was important, what was successful was because he had the right enemies.
So I understand why they're reluctant to discard, if we want to call it Trumpism, that kind of MAGA ideology, because they think they can't win elections without it.
But here's the dilemma.
And a lot of people have put it this way.
You probably can't win a Republican primary without the Trumpists, but it's looking more and more like you can't win a general election with them.
So the kind of stuff that you have to do to kind of activate that base and win the nomination, I mean, look at Blake Masters.
I mean, look at this guy.
With that and Peter Thiel's money, he manages, okay, so he's the favorite son of the MAGA, right?
And then just runs one of the most embarrassing, incompetent general election campaigns.
that you'll ever see this side of Herschel Walker and Mehmet Oz maybe.
And I mean, they're in a competition for who can run the worst campaign, right?
But it's not an accident.
It's because the only kind of candidate that can get out of the primary is precisely the kind that's going to go down in flames in the general.
I wish J.D. Vance could be on that list because he should have been.
And yet he was able to pull it out.
That's a little frustrating.
I guess there's some remnants, right?
Some particles still floating in the air they can grasp onto a little bit as the thing goes.
Which, by the way, brings us to another part of the discussion, which is that Chris and Cinema decided because She isn't going to be able to win a primary in the Democratic Party in Arizona.
She decides that she's going to go be independent.
Or she just needs more.
She hadn't been in the news recently, right?
And she wanted to get some more, you know.
Some of these guys, that's what they do, right?
I talk about this with Matt Gaetz all the time.
Matt Gaetz can't go more than about two or three weeks in a row without being in the news somehow.
And he'll say, like Marjorie Chandler Greene, same thing.
It's part of their strategy, right?
And by the way, I haven't heard from Matt Gaetz in a while.
So be prepared.
He's going to say something crazy.
So here's the thing.
So Sinema, is it clear?
Did she even come out yet publicly and say she'd caucus with the Democrats?
She is going to caucus with the Democrats.
OK, but she's not in the party.
Now, we know how well that works when you do national races, when you look at someone like Bernie, right, who was not in the Democratic Party and was really upset that they wouldn't help him and support him like they would the candidate who was actually in their party.
And I didn't know how to break it to him.
And I wonder, obviously, if Sinema is going to feel the same way.
It's gonna hurt her if she tries to run for president, but I don't think she's thinking about that.
I think she's thinking about how to survive in Arizona.
If you look at her approval ratings, especially among Democrats, terrible.
I mean, really bad.
And so she probably understands she has no chance in a Democratic primary.
So the move to becoming an independent is just a way to avoid having to run in the primary.
And it's actually pretty clever in a sinister way.
So what you have with the other two independents that caucus with the Democrats, with Sanders and Angus King, is that they have the cooperation of the Democratic Party in that the Democratic Party pledges to support them in the general election.
And not to run a primary where they would oppose them.
And Cyn was looking for the same deal from the Democratic Party, from the DNC.
And I don't think they should give it to her.
I think they should.
I would run Ruben Gallego in a Democratic primary.
Um, but that's what she wants, and it's a threat.
It's a pretty serious threat, because if she runs as an independent, and let's say it's Gallego, let's say he gets the Democratic nomination, now you've got a three-way race, that could be interesting.
Like, would she be the kind of independent who would only get, you know, 5-10% of the vote, or could she get like, 1520 and then, you know, if you run some kind of a reasonable Republican, if you can find one, that's the thing.
Can you get a reasonable Republican through a Republican primary in Arizona?
But let's say you can.
They got, you know, really good chance of winning under those circumstances.
So it's clever from that kind of cynical political perspective for her to do that.
But I would call her bluff and just Just put in tons of resources and just crush her.
Just crush her.
Because you're right, like if she were to run as an independent, they'd be giving the seat to the Republicans.
A Democrat would not want to run against her because they couldn't afford the risk of getting into that general and splitting that vote and then the Republican wins.
You know what I mean?
So that's her calculus, right?
But yeah, I guess that would be the thing is obviously they could afford They could afford to do the, well, they can't because they're not running against her in a primary.
Because almost like you can see, well, how well does Gallego do in the primary to find that you get a good sense of that?
And then if you really felt good, great.
I'd call her on it.
I just say, you know, because, you know, there was a libertarian who ran in Georgia, he got 2% or whatever.
I'd call her out and try to drive her down into like the two or one percent, which she's horribly unpopular, especially among Democrats.
So where she has a little popularity is among Republicans.
So that could be interesting in the generalist republicans.
Did you see her lambasting Senator Lieberman?
For now, he'll be referred to as Senator Palpatine.
But he did the same thing.
He switched parties after destroying what we could have had in Obamacare.
You saw that.
You know what?
People change their minds.
It's not like she's hypocritical, per se, that she thought it was really bad for him, for Lieberman, to switch, to become an independent.
And now she's doing the same thing.
I think maybe she's grown up a little bit, right?
She sees what the big world, the adult world, is like.
I'm sure that's how she would say it.
It's just, it's like, you know, when people tell the story of how, you know, they've grown wiser with age, why does it always correspond to, like, huge donations from, like, the largest industries in the country?
Oh, now I've seen that I was wrong in my idealistic youth.
It's a little bit like the guys who are always screaming about how you have to be a free thinker and think for yourself.
Always end up at, like, the same kind of anti-vaxxing, proto-fascist, Well, that reminds me of some of that ideology, because let me ask you this.
You're old enough to remember 2016, right?
Yes, I am.
So do you remember how Republicans felt, let's just call it like 10 days before the election, how they felt about the FBI?
Yeah.
They didn't have a problem with the FBI then, did they?
They wore pins, and if you didn't wear the pin, you weren't sufficiently patriotic.
Right.
But, you know, like, you know, Comey comes out, has this ridiculous, you know, press conference.
And they're right.
You know, they had no they had no reason to doubt what Comey was saying.
Right.
They didn't think he was lying or making up or forgering any kind of evidence against against Hillary Clinton.
Is that safe to say?
So we cut to now.
Right.
And I found it funny because we were talking earlier about how Republicans were the ones who did all the early voting.
They were always mail-in voting.
They were organized.
They were ahead of the game, whatever.
Well, now the idea that they'd be against the FBI and CIA as well seems to be a complete and utter reversal.
What do we make of that, just really quickly?
Is this only because of what happened at Mar-a-Lago and the raid that has now made the FBI and CIA these deep state covert fascists against democracy?
This was the this was this goes back to, you know, quote unquote Russiagate.
I mean, Trump did this.
This is a way that Trump successfully transformed the party.
And I don't know if you saw the Dave Chappelle monologue on Saturday Night Live, but I thought that was one thing that Chappelle really got right, which is that Trump, he called him like an honest liar.
And what he meant by that was He told the truth about, you know, the system, let's say, including the deep state, and basically said to people, you know, what you think about there being a kind of elite or a cabal that works for their own interest and against yours is true.
And I know it's true because I've benefited from it and I've used it.
But elect me and I promise you I will start using it for your benefit.
I will turn it to your benefit.
So he Ran in as part of his campaign that there was something like a deep state that he could master because, you know, he had climbed to the top of the system and done it in a selfish way for himself.
But now he would be selfish for the country.
He would be selfish on behalf of the people.
So I think that narrative probably goes back to 2016.
And then it plugged like really well into all of his complaining about, you know, the Russia investigation.
And so.
The base was primed to be suspicious of the FBI when, you know, they executed a proper legal search of Mar-a-Lago, not a raid, a proper legal search.
They were primed to be suspicious of the FBI.
But you're right, it's so completely inconsistent with kind of the jingoism and the rallying behind the flag and the support for law enforcement that preceded.
Proceeded 2016.
And, you know, you mentioned Sean Hannity.
Whenever he talks about this, he understands he's on shaky ground because he always says, I'm just talking about the 1%.
99% of them are great.
I'm just talking about the 1%.
But meanwhile, you know, every issue that comes up, it's like that damn FBI again, but just the 1%.
Oh, yeah.
And by the way, that also then brings us to, you know, so it seems to me that the Republicans It's so cynical at this point that they simply latch on to an issue that they think is going to help them win the election.
Let's say we'll call the presidential election.
So they knew way ahead of time that dragging Hillary Clinton in front of the Benghazi hearings was going to be fodder for something they're going to grab on to ultimately was the emails.
And they really felt like the Hunter Biden story was that same thing.
In their adult brains, it would have been, if they had better people around the campaign, they would have realized, right, this isn't the same as Hillary's emails, which is also the reason why the Hunter laptop stuff was kind of, it was buried, right?
We seem to be getting more and more evidence, and you can now see the right wringing their hands even harder on this, where because Twitter decided to, you know, and they now have the receipts in the Twitter files, they decided to Be a little bit cautious with these reporting.
I think everybody was because they realized what a ridiculousness the Hillary emails were.
And in their minds, I think it destroyed the entire election for them, right?
This was the issue that's going to win it for them.
These guys took it away.
And have you seen all the takes now about how Twitter supposedly runs elections now?
That's how they're describing it.
They de-platformed a guy and now they're controlling our elections and controlling the ballots through Twitter and I just find it fascinating that we're watching that unravel in real time.
Oh, and every element of that story is just fake and a lie and it's almost like impossible to follow all the lies going back and forth.
Even this thing of, you know, shadow banning and So, so, you know, this person was shadowban, you know, and without defining what shadowbanning is, and, you know, they use this to refer to, you know, hate speech, conspiracy theories, misinformation, fascist, agit, props, hacked material that Twitter just, as you see from the Twitter files, Twitter just has actually pretty, like, impressive conversations about how to handle.
I mean, if I were to ask you this, would you even know, like, do you know how long Twitter, and this is, Twitter's, you know, what is it, like a few million people on Twitter?
It's not like one of the bigger social media platforms.
But anyway, like you said, we're just talking about one.
One of the many social media platforms.
By the way, there's a whole bunch that cater to the most far-right extremist views.
But do you know how long Twitter held the New York Post Hunter Biden laptop story?
Was it 10 hours?
Yeah, it was like a day.
Yeah.
All of this is because they held it for a day.
And they didn't want to print the stolen, pornographic, you know, Hunter Biden on a bender stuff.
That's what all this is about!
And it's lies in every which direction, because it has nothing to do with government suppression of speech.
It's a private entity.
All these social media platforms are getting flagged and reported.
I mean, you've probably reported stuff.
I've flagged and reported stuff for social media companies.
It has nothing to do with violating anyone's First Amendment rights or the breakdown of democratic discourse.
It's just lying every which way.
But at the core of it is exactly what you said.
It's that they thought they had their butthurt emails, and they're so mad that they didn't.
You know, that the media isn't giving it to them.
Oh, yeah, I agree.
And so it's an interesting insight.
And we've seen this before.
So I'm not like inventing this idea out of whole cloth or from the Twitter files.
But like what they're going to do is they're cherry picking, you know.
But by the way, it's a very reasonable conversation between heads of Twitter.
Right.
I feel terrible for the old Roth right now because he's he's going to be he'll need security without question with him, I imagine.
You know, here, because here's the thing.
It's like, we like to think about AI and automation and all these different things.
But, you know, you can't moderate Twitter with a robot.
You got to have people.
And YouTube is the same way, Facebook.
And it's like, when you realize just how much literal brainpower is being used on like individual tweets throughout this, it's kind of like, I respect that.
That's, I would hope that that's how they do it.
But then you realize how many of the People in that group have now been fired, you know, almost the entire you know section, in a way that there's no way they're ever going to be able to moderate that again unless they, let's say double the amount of hires they had fired.
And so, This is what makes it so interesting to me is that criticism to them or being pragmatic is a violation of the First Amendment.
Now, I think we don't need to go into the law, but I think everyone who's listening understands that it's not a First Amendment violation when a private company decides to not amplify a tweet.
I think we all understand that, right?
Yeah.
Okay, so I guess what they would say if I want to try to get in their headspace.
It's that the FBI, you know, an agent of the government, flagged certain information and that that could be seen as government suppression of speech.
Of course, it's not.
It was up to Twitter to decide what they wanted to do with that information.
I'm sure the FBI is flagging all kinds of misinformation all the time, just like private citizens are.
Government and non-government entities are probably doing it all the time, but that's probably what they're, you know, what they're thinking.
Like with the Hillary Clinton emails and like with Hunter Biden and Burisma and like with this, there's like a kernel of truth.
And you know, they try to spin that kernel of truth into a larger scandal.
But the kernel of truth is something that I think is worth thinking about and actually worth legislating on.
And it is like to ask yourself, what role do these social media platforms play in democratic discourse and deliberation in the country?
And how can we make sure that they serve Free speech and freedom of expression, as opposed to undermining it.
And I know a lot of Democratic representatives and senators, Congress people, would like to actually get around a table and talk about how we might regulate social media platforms in ways that would serve free speech interests.
Some of them, maybe some of these MAGA chuds will like, and some maybe they won't like.
But I actually do think it's worth looking at social media platforms as a kind of public square and thinking about what the implications of that would be.
But yes, of course, you're right.
There are no free speech or I should say no First Amendment concerns implicated in any of these Twitter file revelations.
That's one of the many ways it's like a kind of like tsunami of of lies.
But the other thing is like the whole scandal is also built on lies about what Joe Biden supposedly did in Ukraine, which is You know, the truth is the opposite of what they're saying.
And then it's also like there's a certain mindset that, you know, you have to sort of live in to be on the right when you're like Jim Jordans and those kind of people where, like, they're going to pour through the January 6th raw intelligence, raw data collection that they had.
And what they're going to do is find out that somebody said that such and such a thing happened on a Saturday.
That's what they said under oath.
And they're going to look into it and realize it was on a Sunday.
And then they're going to say, see, he lied there.
And that means everything else that they said for the entire two hour deposition is lies.
And you know what?
What percentage of the people that are on that side are going to laugh that up and believe it?
Probably a great percentage.
Right?
That's what's going to happen.
That's what's so frustrating about it is that, you know, that's what they're able to do.
So it's the tiny kernel of truth that they expand into a mountain of bullshit.
But then it's also the slightest slip up of a misspeak of something on a detail that's inconsequential becomes the whole thing is just a lie and you can't trust anybody for saying anything.
Right.
And that's, you know, as I was saying to my wife yesterday, I haven't learned much in 30 years of studying political theory.
But one thing I'm pretty sure I've learned is that there are no laws, no institutions that can solve the problem of bad faith actors.
You could design, you know, we could start from scratch, fix all the problems in the Constitution.
You know, let's imagine that we got the perfect one.
You could imagine Perfect legislation and lawmakers.
If you have bad faith actors, they'll do something like what you just said, take something out of context.
And so that gets into a really big discussion about the book project I'm working on now.
But there's no way of escaping the problem of what political theorists call civic virtue.
People have to have certain virtues if democracy is going to succeed.
You can minimize it.
You know, the American founders set out to minimize the extent to which the system would depend on the virtue of citizens, but there's no escaping it.
You can't do without it.
And you just gave a perfect example of why.
Especially in the current media climate, there's just so many ways you can selectively edit And, you know, and target audiences that you know are ripe for this.
I mean, these scandals, the MAGA base is just voracious for these.
I mean, you see how desperately they want it, right?
They're just kind of doing anything to cling on to the Hunter Biden drug binge, laptop, China-Ukraine conspiracy.
I agree, and it's extremely frustrating to be on this side of it and look at the world the way I do.
And this is sort of the bridge we can't, you know, connect is because, you know, there's personality, there's definitely personality traits or personality, you know, demarcations that people have, right?
And you have all different kinds of different definitions of who people are and how they think and all these different things.
And to me, it's like, You know, we're getting herded into these, you know, these sort of like-minded ways of processing.
The problem is, is that, like, the founders, I mean, isn't the reason why we have a public school system?
It's because they wanted to have educated people who could then participate in democracy properly.
And the irony here is that, like, I'll scream, we need more civics classes.
We need more history.
We need better English.
And in fact, the right is arguing almost the parallel argument, right, because they don't like the schools either.
But they're like, we have to get rid of wokeness.
We have to get rid of learning about how we are.
Another perfect example of how you can have these pristine principles like universal public education, and they can be corrupted in the hands of a bad faith actor.
Because what they're saying when they do the anti-woke legislation, they're portraying themselves as the defenders of an education.
And we're the ones that are trying to corrupt the kind of true history of the country.
Yeah, I mean, there's a big debate over why we have universal public.
It wasn't the founders.
We didn't have universal public education until like the mid 19th century.
But yeah, and I think you're right that definitely like Horace Mann has kind of seen as the father of the American commitment to public education.
He definitely saw it as important for educating citizens as much so that they would be kind of docile laborers as patriotic democratic participants.
But now we tend to think of public education, it seems to me, more in the terms of competition in the global marketplace to outdo China and that kind of thing, which is a little bit less education to democratic citizenship.
But that also is another podcast, but we need like a double down on investment in shocking that a professor political theory would say this, but we need to double down on investment in the humanities because those are what sustain democratic citizenship. - Oh, you know, Absolutely.
And you just now proved my point I made was that by me saying the founding fathers and not Horace Mann, you know, 70, 80 years later, everything I said in this whole podcast is a lie.
You made one mistake.
You can't trust anything else.
There you go.
Yeah, exactly.
And by the way, I figured I'd just throw it out there because in the Twitter files version 3, I suppose, 3.0, whatever you call it, from Michael Schellenberger, a stalwart of journalistic integrity, he has an interesting quote.
You know, they're getting all these ridiculous Yule Roth tweets that he sent out that were kind of, you know, kitschy and fun.
But he wrote, I thought you'd appreciate this.
He goes, yeah, academia is by far the most abusive working environment I've ever been in.
The entire system is exploitative in a way, in a ton of ways, and also not necessarily productive if your goal is to drive change in the world, which is the reason why I left.
I thought you'd appreciate that because especially in the sense that the right keeps trying to portray these campuses as radicalized left-wing bastions of communism when I think it's safe to say that that is not the case.
It's certainly in your experience.
Yeah, there's a line I like in Two Cheers for Anarchism, which is a James Scott book where, I won't get it exactly right, but he imagines, I think, a world in which, I want to say it's Condoleezza Rice becomes Secretary of Education, something like that.
Anyway, what she says is, in surveying the landscape of higher education in this imaginary story, he has her say, yes, yes, I very much admire The capitalism that you practice in external affairs and the feudalism you practice in governing the institution.
And it feels a little bit like that when you're at a university that we're driven by capitalism externally.
How do we bring in dollars?
And then we're governed internally by feudalism.
But it is true though that, again, to somewhat sympathize with them, it is true that universities lean left politically.
You know, pretty hard, actually.
You feel that way?
I mean, in terms of the faculty, in terms of the politics of the faculty.
If you did a survey of the politics of the faculty at your average university, you're going to find that it leans left.
I actually heard a really good talk by a conservative political theorist, and he said, look, that's not surprising.
He's conservative himself, but he said, you know, for our political agenda, like, Scrutiny is not ideal, you know.
He said, what do we believe in?
He says, we believe in like broad values, and the more you tend to scrutinize an issue, the more you're going to sort of start to kind of lean left on it, because you're going to sort of explain the circumstances for why things occur the way they do, and the more kind of nuances that you introduce.
This was Jeremy Rabkin was his name.
He says, look, it's going to push people to tend to be on the left.
And on the right, we need, he says, more of a doctrine than we need academic inquiry.
So, for example, he says, you know, we believe in things like, you know, proportionate punishment for criminal activity.
But the more you kind of do classes in this study of criminology, you start to learn, well, wait a minute, people aren't even necessarily responsible for their own actions.
So should we sent them?
It's about, you know, socialization and upbringing and so forth.
And so broader cultural forces.
So should we sentence someone to these long prison sentences?
And he said, this is like for us on the, on the right.
Maybe that's not like our best path to cultural power.
So, you know, I think it's, it's, it's not wrong to say that the more you study something, the more likely you are to become To have a progressive or liberal view of that thing.
Okay.
Yeah, I mean, it kind of just reminds me of being laughed at in my face when I said I read the Mueller report.
As if you would, you know, you, I would stoop to scrutinizing something in a, you know, in a, in an intelligent way, like in an academic way to really understand what the truth is.
No, you can't even begin to do that because you might start to realize, and it's also the reason why you, I don't know if other people have this issue, but when you talk to people on the right, as I have, sometimes they get agitated.
You know, and I try and get less and less agitated the more we speak, and I have to believe that one of the reasons is as you have them speak out loud some of these ideas, they hear how ridiculous it sounds as well, and that's very agitating to someone who cannot afford to allow themselves to have that level of scrutiny about anything in their lives, certainly their political beliefs.
So I think that is, in a nutshell, where we're at.
You mentioned that you're working on a book.
Do you want to tease that for us real quick?
Oh my God.
Well, I mean, I'm just thinking about something that I'm calling Rousseau's cultural politics.
I work on Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
That's what I do.
But, so yeah, it's going to be all of the things.
So there's, we could call it like the constitution or fundamental law that structures any political system.
And then there's the culture that sustains those institutions.
And when it comes to Rousseau, who I work on, I would say there's a lot more emphasis on the formal institutions that structure political life, a little bit less on the importance of the culture that sustains those institutions.
And I think it probably will have implications.
For the kind of culture more broadly that you need to sustain a democratic society, like I was referencing earlier.
That actually sounds fascinating, and I look forward to seeing that in print.
And I want to thank you for coming down out of your ivory tower as the bastion of liberal, you know, thought, groupthink on your campus and selling it with, you know, getting down on the dirty.
Always good to get a little dirty with you guys.
Awesome.
Well, we'll talk to you soon and we'll thank you for coming on.
