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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman answer excellent questions posed by the Patreon community about the state of our politics heading into a Trump presidency.
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I'm looking forward to, you know, existing with you for a little while pre-Thanksgiving.
I am thankful for existing with you.
That is a lovely way to put it.
Thank you so much.
Everybody, we have a big, giant, double-stuffed, triple-stuffed mailbag of listener questions that we're going to get into today.
And I'm very, very much looking forward to this.
There are so many questions on so many different topics and things that we don't always get to touch on.
I'm very, very pumped.
For those who are listening to the free preview, a reminder, go to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
Get the whole episode, access to The Weekender, the Discord, all that good stuff.
I want to say in the week of Thanksgiving, Nick, I am very, very thankful that people have been coming to listen to this show, supporting this show, particularly as...
I don't know if you've seen the numbers about what's happening at, like, CNN and MSNBC. Like, there are shows that are getting, like...
Tens of thousands of viewers at this point.
People are obviously coming to independent media because they want to hear what's going on.
I am very, very grateful for that, and thank you for everybody who's supporting the show.
And then also, just a little Blue Sky shout-out.
I'm getting much more engagement all of a sudden there, and people are responding and just saying how much they enjoy the show, which...
On the other site, no one responded to me on their site, so I feel really grateful.
It feels like this is something happening.
We're getting away from that area, and we're going to forge ahead, which could be part of what we're looking for right now.
Yeah, and, you know, in the interest of being earnest and honest and open, you know, I think one of the things that's happened after the election is, one, I think a lot of people are getting serious about what's going on, and number two, I think they're grateful for people who are having actual conversations about what's going on as opposed to continuing to peddle, like, unearned hope towards them that basically bottles them away from being able to change anything.
So I am very, very grateful that people have given us their trust.
You know what's interesting about the unearned hope you mentioned is it's a little bit of a parallel to what Trump does in this sort of bullshit reality he tries to create that's like sort of the power of positive thinking, what he'll practice.
So it's weird.
It's sort of a flip of the other side of the coin, but in the same method.
Yeah, I wrote an article about that for Mediasan Zetao.
And, you know, it more or less without like sort of the child grooming abuse elements, it immediately parallels QAnon thinking, right?
Which instead of like, there are white hats that are fighting this battle, it's the institutions are going to do it.
And of course...
You know, we told people left and right, like, do not expect these institutions to hold Trump accountable to keep him from power.
And meanwhile, other people wanted to believe it.
And I understand why they wanted to believe it.
Yeah, I mean, it's going to be a rude awakening, I think.
It is going to be an extremely rude awakening.
All right, everybody, we have just tons of questions on a variety of topics.
These first couple of ones, I'll go ahead and start with one and then move to the other.
Concern the Democratic Party moving forward.
Nick, Steven wrote in and asked, do you think there's any chance that Democrats like AOC and Jasmine Crockett can rise to leadership roles in the party next year?
They are the only ones I've heard that seem to have any backbone and real fight in them, plus determination to figure this mess out.
If we're ever going to return to power, we need to exercise all Obama and Clinton Democrats in the old guard in general from party leadership.
And this is coming from a 68 year old lifelong Democrat who's tired of the centrist neoliberal attitudes that got us here.
You guys are the best.
Thank you, Steven, for that.
Nick, what are your thoughts?
Do you think people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jasmine Crockett, do you think they'll rise to a leadership position in the new Democratic Party?
I mean, absolutely.
Eventually.
I just hope they're not the same age as the people in charge now by the time they're ready to do that.
Or not ready, but able.
We just saw Crockett lost her bid to Debbie Dingell in Michigan to win the leadership role of the Dems.
And it is frustrating because I would like to see them.
At some point, you can't keep saying, oh, don't worry, you're young, you know.
At some point, it's time.
And I would love to see that happen.
I think it will happen sooner or later, but it's still just depressing to see people who are in their 70s controlling this party.
Yeah, I mean, the old generation of Democrats have most certainly held on to power way past the point that they should have.
And, you know, neoliberalism was sort of the framework that they all worked within, whether it's Biden, Pelosi, Schumer, you name it.
That is the crux of it, whether or not that will turn into an actual discussion.
And I've been thinking about it, and we're going to be asked a question in a second about the future of the party.
So I'll sort of like bifurcate what I'm answering here to these two questions.
I will say for someone like an AOC, I think what we're going to see over the next couple of years is we are going to see more center left and leftist Democrats.
And Chris Murphy is now making a bid for this.
And Andy Beshear is making a bid for this.
I think we're going to see an inter-party war.
And I want people to understand that the resources and the apparatchik of the Democratic Party, we already see what they're doing.
They're already saying we need to become more like the Republicans.
We need to stop worrying about trans and gay people.
We need to, you know, get tougher on the border, those types of things.
I think we're going to see a lot of points, much like what we saw with Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020. We're going to see a core group of Democrats that are going to at least provide an alternative to that.
I would not be shocked if AOC ends up running for the Democratic nomination in 2028.
I wouldn't be shocked about that.
I'm not saying that she's going to win it.
We already see what the Democrats do to leftists when they run for things.
But I do think that watching that conversation happen is going to give people choices.
And the Democratic Party at some point through those members and also through the organizing that people like us are going to have to do is going to be pressured to at least consider those things.
So I don't think that they're going to rise to leadership positions necessarily within the body.
I think that they are going to basically provide leadership for the base who feels abandoned and feels like they've been disregarded.
I think that's probably what we're going to see.
And I would like to see them...
You know, we talk about how Gates and Marjorie Taylor Greene, and every couple of weeks when they fall out of the news, they insinuate themselves back into it with some random, ridiculous thing.
I would probably like to see the younger class...
Not in a crazy way, but continue to get more of that spotlight nationally.
I think that would help to keep them in that spotlight with these issues.
I think they would be able to gain a lot of traction that way.
I also think the problem is that the old heads need to realize that they're old and need to step down.
Do you remember when it was when I had said that Schumer needs to go?
We had said that.
It was years, right?
It's been years since we've been saying that Schumer needs to move away and Pelosi needs to move away, yes.
Yeah, and so it's frightening that we're still in this point where it's clinging at this point.
They're clinging in their cold hands this power that at some point you need to have some wisdom here and be like, we need to then find someone who we can take over.
And, you know, Pelosi did that to some degree with her hand firmly on the wheel still, but that was something versus what Schumer did that has not done.
That's crazy.
I mean, listen, we had Feinstein.
They wheeled her around in the last year of her life versus just stepping down to enjoy...
Repulsive.
She had laughs.
I mean, that tells you something.
It absolutely does.
Nick, do you want to read the next one?
Sure.
Let me get to that question.
So Todd asks, all this talk of soul searching after a humiliating but inevitable loss to the worst person on the planet is infuriating.
We know full well that the Dems won't ever actually look at themselves deeply enough to make any of the wholesale changes that might help them be a real force in American politics.
They will remain the same cowardly conservative party that lets the right dictate all the terms and continues to follow them to the right all while being branded, quote, radical leftists, laugh out loud.
So my question is, realistically, what will happen with the Dems?
Will they fade away?
Is there anyone among them with the charisma and courage to take them in a new and invigorating direction that isn't just some warmed-over right-light BS they've been giving us since at least Clinton?
And as someone who is a full-blown pessimist about how bad American fascism is actually going to get, I have to ask, since the Dems probably can't stop the worst of this, do we have any actual guardrails whatsoever to prevent a full-scale collapse of our democratic institutions, as well as the economy, which always suffers under sustained abuse by Republicans?
Thanks for all you do.
Well, thanks for writing in.
I'll go ahead and start with the second question first.
The guardrails aren't there.
They were never actually there.
They relied on people playing based on norms.
That's what it was.
And, you know, Nick, one of the most prescient things that you said years ago was it was the loss of shame.
It was when suddenly people didn't have to worry about shame anymore, that suddenly they realized all these things never existed in the first place.
And they were just playing within it basically by gentleman or gentlewoman rules.
Right.
So, no, there are no guardrails right now.
We have to create them.
When it comes to the party, Nick, and going back to the intraparty war that we're about to see happen, I think it's important to point out that one of the things that has not been discussed in basically any post 2024 sort of autopsy whatsoever is that more and more people are dropping out of I think it's important to point out that one of the They don't think they know the Democratic Party won't fight for them.
They know that they're not being represented.
They see it as a rigged duopoly and there's nothing for them to do.
Much like we've discussed with the Republican Party meeting a small-D Democratic brick wall and then reacting to it by embracing authoritarianism, the Democrats are going to continue to move towards the right.
The question at this point is whether or not anybody within the party will recognize that the majority of voters in the United States of America do not agree with them on politics, the economy, you name it, that those people are ready to be activated and to be brought into the fold, right, to suddenly believe something could happen. that those people are ready to be activated and to
And by the way, the party apparatchik that continues to push the Democratic Party to the right, their existence and their jobs and their power, they rely on them never talking about that, right?
Because if they at any point whatsoever talk about the majority of the people don't agree with them, they're not going to be in charge of the party anymore.
So the question here and historically what we see is as this happens, one of a couple of things will occur.
One, either the pool of actual voters will continue to shrink and the Democrats and Republicans will continue this dance going forward.
That is a real possibility, particularly as things get worse.
The next possibility is that the Democratic Party will have to face some sort of a major, major cataclysm between the apparatchik and the base.
And eventually they will say, you know what, we have to go along with this and we have to change, you know, see Barack Obama 2008, right?
And that's a different conversation for a different day.
And of course, it turned into sort of a faux populist movement.
The other question is, and I've continually referred to the Whigs.
The Whigs were part of the duopolistic environment leading up to the Civil War, and eventually the people said, we recognize you're not going to fight for us.
We have to create something else, and then ended up creating the modern Republican Party.
So, in terms of what we have to build and in terms of the work that we have to do, we have to put pressure on the Democratic Party to either accept the terms and change, a la what happened with the Tea Party after Obama's election, or we have to create something that is different and that is an alternative to the Democratic Party.
And then they go bye-bye.
You know, they become relegated to history much like the Whigs did.
Those are the major outcomes that are possible here, and it's too early to tell which one of those is going to win it.
Wow, my head is swimming with all sorts of ideas from that awesome answer.
What did I just write down?
So I think what can feel futile to the Democratic Party is when you realize that a lot of the electorate that agrees with your platform will vote against you.
And that's sort of a fact of the situation right now, where it's like, how many polls are we going to continue to see where, oh, when they strip off who was behind the platform or the ideas, they will invariably vote in large numbers for whatever the Democrats' platform is, and then they end up voting Republicans.
So that's tough.
It's like, what are we supposed to do?
Especially with a misinformed electorate that is driven by I mean, again, not the blue sky thing, but it's like, let's create something again that we could actually feel good about that will have momentum and energy.
I have to imagine the Republican Party, and I feel really icky when you say it's the modern Republican Party.
Yeah.
Right?
Because it has turned into the, you know...
It has turned into what it has turned into.
Yeah.
And so anyway, but, you know, I have to imagine, if you confirm with me, when the Republicans started back in 18, whatever that was, there was probably a huge amount of populist energy behind it, right?
Right.
Oh, absolutely.
It basically was to the point where northern states or anti-slavery states, and, you know, I always want to be careful with this because we have to give context.
We don't want to give in to conventional narratives.
This was the point where northern industrial states were like, you know what, somebody needs to stand up to these southern states.
And a reminder, Nick, the entire reason that the Constitution was able to be ratified was because the founders made a deal with the southern states that they would basically control the federal government.
That they would have power over all this stuff.
That's why all the presidents had been Southern or at least somehow or another slavery adjacent or curious.
Eventually that needed to change and the Industrial Revolution needed to take over.
It was an economic thing but also had ideological purposes.
So eventually people stood up and said, we need a political party that is actually going to represent our interests and is also going to stand up to Southern slave owners.
And that is of course how the modern Republican Party came into being.
We'd really appreciate it if you could give it a try.
