Brad begin with an analytical discussion of political nihilism in order to provide a window into the chaos in congress created by the ouster of Speaker Kevin McCarthy. They then provide a historical timeline of government shutdowns and congressional chaos going back to the Tea Party. For Dan, this is a long time coming - a populist revolt with no goal except for destruction. For Brad, it is a matter of political fantasy and the refusal to live in a world of political complexity, negotiation, and disagreement.
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My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
I also have a two-week-old, so my brain is kind of working, kind of not.
So, Dan, good to see you.
It's nice to see you, Brad.
So much happened this week.
Brad's like, I must talk, I must climb on soapboxes.
No, so I am Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark.
College, glad to have you.
I'm mostly over my anger about the new Onishi not being named Daniel Miller Onishi, but there may be some residual feelings that come through.
We looked in so many baby books and there's just so many Dan Millers already, just people wanting to, you know, It's also not quite like Joe Smith, but Dan Miller is one of those names.
Like, you go somewhere and you're like, last name?
You're like, Miller.
And they just kind of look at you like, are you kidding?
You're like, no, not really.
And then like, there's, yeah.
So, I don't know.
A few more months, I'll be fine.
I am a mixed race person, as you know, and for most of my life.
People have read me as white.
I walk in their door and people just assume I'm just a white guy, and that's kind of changed as I've gotten older.
But oftentimes when I would go, I would hang out a lot in like Asian American spaces.
Like, and this includes like sushi restaurants.
And I would go and be like, hi, reservation for Onishi.
And they would look at me like, okay, yeah, white guy.
You don't have to say like your Japanese last name.
We serve everyone here.
We'll let you get a table.
Yeah.
Did you hear somebody else put in a reservation?
Are you trying to cut the line?
What are you doing?
So, and I'd like bring my dad up.
They're like, that's not your dad.
Anyway, all right.
So, big week, Dan.
Just for all of you who are wondering, we're doing good.
My newborn daughter is doing great.
We have tons of help.
Both my wife and I are not working.
She's not working.
I'm working just a little bit here and there.
We have grandparents, so we're really doing okay.
We have people helping us, and we feel really lucky.
So thanks for all your support and for the well wishes.
This week a lot happened, Dan, and I think the biggest thing that has happened that everyone is familiar with by now is the ouster of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House.
This also coincided with new developments in Trump's trials.
He appeared in court in New York looking very glum and very sad.
He also had some incredibly disturbing remarks to make before and after his appearances in court.
We'll get to some of that.
But, you know, you and I were talking and I think we decided we wanted to organize today's kind of analysis around these events under the auspices of political nihilism.
And some of you are like fans of the show and you like what we do here, but you just sort of said to yourself, do I really want to listen to the rest of this?
Some of you are very excited.
So let's talk about political nihilism, Dan, and why political nihilism is a kind of a way to understand the events of this week.
Leo Strauss, professor, theorist, kind of famous social theorist of the 20th century, defines nihilism this way.
The desire to destroy the present world and its potentialities, a desire not accompanied by any clear conception of what one wants to put in its place.
I think the easiest way to think about this, Dan, is the Joker when, you know, in the Batman movie, he's described as some men just want to see the world burned.
They want to see the world burn.
They don't have anything to offer in its place.
They're not trying to build something else.
They just want to watch what's there burn for It's just destruction sake.
So, Dan, you're a social theorist.
You're somebody who's probably more well-versed in this stuff than me.
Off to you.
Help us understand political nihilism and then we'll link it to Matt Gaetz and Kevin McCarthy and Donald Trump and the big mess that Republican politics and American politics is today.
Yeah, so we didn't plan it, but it's funny that you highlight that clip.
I taught a class for a long time, and nihilism was one of the things we were supposed to talk about in there.
And we would watch The Dark Knight Rises, that's the Batman movie with the Joker character, and looking at whether or not he's a nihilist because of that.
If you want to see people who aren't nihilists that are called nihilists, and it's just funny, just go with the Big Lebowski, but that's just a side thing.
Yeah, so I think, not surprisingly, I'm like, oh, Leo Strauss had a good definition.
It is.
And I think that's the key, is all of these debates people have, if we're going to bring it down to earth and be like, why are we talking about politics?
We're talking about the contemporary GOP.
That's what we're talking about.
I think that'd be the first point, is that's like the sort of terrifying thing.
When people think of something like political nihilism, it's supposed to be theoretical or it's supposed to be, I don't know, some sort of indicative, you know, accompaniment of fascism or something.
It's not supposed to be something of like mainstream political thought in a well-established democratic system like the U.S.
or modern Europe or something like that.
And that's what we're looking at.
And for me, when we look at the GOP, that's what we see.
This is why people have heard me rail about it for years.
I think I'm gonna be railing about it for years more.
When people talk about the GOP and they still use the term like conservatives or conservatism to apply to it, it's not.
I disagree with political conservatism of pretty much every stripe or classical liberalism or whatever title you want to give it.
Fine.
But it's a political philosophy.
It has principles.
It has reasons why policy decisions are made and so forth.
The contemporary GOP doesn't, right?
And that notion of sort of destroying the present world and its potentialities or To use the method, it was Alfred who said it, describing the Joker in The Dark Knight Rises, who says, some people just want to watch the world burn.
That's what we see.
We see a politics of retribution.
We see a politics of payback.
And that's what this McCarthy thing really was.
We see a politics of targeting people.
So just to give some examples, like a laundry list of things we've already talked about lots of times, but just to kind of lead up, because this is just more of the same, when you have the Republican Party targeting queer kids or targeting people of color, and that's what the book bans are about.
They're not about protecting people.
They are about removing voices of color, removing queer voices, removing certain experiences from sort of the public realm, targeting women through abortion criminalization.
And again, for people who say, well, it's about protecting, it's not, it's criminalized.
All these things about making it a felony for a doctor to like even advise a woman about like, that's vindictive.
We talked earlier about how the Military Academy is now under suit, right, for affirmative action.
This week, the Naval Academy is named in a suit.
The same thing, like, targeting every time.
Anti-vaccine on the offense.
Not just, don't force me to get a vaccine, but we have attorneys general, you know, urging people not to get the vaccine and the active promulgation of disinformation.
Trump playing kingmaker in the House this week, right, of toying with the idea of being named Speaker of the House and throwing his support behind Jordan.
We can talk about that.
The point is, that's what this politics is.
None of these are about principles.
None of these are about, oh, here's a good stalwart principle set a number of weeks ago that you can tell that there's no principle there because a Republican now, a mainstream Republican, wouldn't be able to tell you what they advance until you can tell them what position you hold, and then they'll tell you what position they have because it's the opposite.
I did see, I'll sort of throw this out and then close off, I think it was maybe a TikTok video or somewhere else on social media.
This guy had this hilarious thing, and he was right, where he's like, you know what the Democrats should do right now is like put every bit of gun control they want and call it the like Stop Hunter Biden Act.
Because then the Republicans will suddenly vote for all of the gun control measures that they don't want because Hunter Biden is up on gun charges.
That's what we mean sort of practically when we talk about political nihilism, is a system that doesn't have political principle.
And just to head it off, are there still conservatives?
Yes.
Are there still principled?
Yes, there are.
I'd love to hear from people.
You want to keep them coming, keep them coming.
But the emails that are like, this is still the heart of the... It's not the heart of the Republican Party.
It's like a remainder.
It's like a math remainder that you cut off the end when you're rounding up.
That's what conservatism is in the GOP now.
So in concrete terms, political nihilism is what you and I, Brad, have been talking about for years now, what other people are seeing.
And I think it's slowly dawning on broader segments of people that there really is a As they might say behind the GOP, there's no there there.
There's nothing below this.
There's nothing behind it.
This is just what it what it is in the effort to create a kind of Christian American whatever it is that they think they want.
So I want to just add something to this, and I'm happy for you to fill out what I'm going to say here or disagree, but I think when you take an approach of nihilism, as you said, nihilism being, I don't have principles.
I'm not fighting for ideals.
I'm not trying to create a better world.
I'm just trying to destroy what exists because I'm angry or because I don't Just because I feel like it, and that's what I want to do today.
Or because I want retribution on people of color, or independent women, or non-Christians, or whatever may be.
Okay.
I think you're prone to follow strongmen leaders, and here's why.
It's not because you think that they are God or the Messiah.
Now, there are people who think that about Trump, OK?
So, you know, we'll put them in another bucket for now.
But I think someone like Matt Gaetz, for example, is going to follow Trump because Trump is the guy that seems like he can do the most destruction.
He's the guy that can do the most damage.
So if you're a political nihilist, you're probably drawn to the biggest bully or the biggest strongman or wannabe authoritarian because you think they can do the most damage in the world.
Okay.
Now, this brings me to a point, Dan, just talking about political nihilism that I think will help us sort of make a comparison.
There are a lot of Americans on strike right now.
Okay, so we can talk about the automaker industry.
And basically the line coming from the unions there is, look, some of our CEOs make $29 million a year.
my $29 million a year.
They could make $18 million a year, send that money down the chain and the price of a car wouldn't change.
So why are we on strike, Dan?
We're on strike for fairness.
We're on strike for equality.
We're on strike for getting a fair deal.
It's an idea.
It's a set of principles.
It's a set of values.
We are not getting a fair share.
So we want to build a world That is more fair for us, the workers.
Okay, so that is not nihilism.
That's actually like, hey, I think if we're the ones doing the work making the cars, we should get a fair kind of shake out of all this.
All right, that's fine.
Okay, good.
Kaiser is a huge healthcare provider and 75,000 Kaiser Permanente workers just walked off the job this week.
Now, they did so out of, yes, they would like higher pay, but they're also concerned, Dan, about conditions in the medical industry, safety concerns.
People are being really violent in hospitals these days because of conspiracy theories and anti-vaxxers and all kinds of stuff.
People are being overworked.
There's a high suicide rate, unfortunately, among certain health care providers in certain positions.
So they're fighting for a world where they have better working conditions, safer working conditions, higher pay.
So you're like, OK, I understand why they walked off the job.
OK, that makes sense to me.
Great.
I could talk about other people are on strike.
There are teacher unions.
There are other folks who are walking out the job.
Here's the difference between them.
And the Matt Gaetz and his cronies and cohorts, who almost like shut the government down, were like within an inch of shutting the government down, and then eventually just got rid of Kevin McCarthy, Speaker of the House.
They wanted to walk off the job, in essence, or they wanted to put McCarthy out of a job because of retribution, because of revenge, because of power.
And they can say, well, it was because of spending or it was because of the border or something.
You know, if you read all the statements, if you read all the, and we'll get to this in a minute, it comes down to this was revenge against McCarthy.
Dan, when the government has been shut down over the last 15 years, it has really done, if you look at the statistics, it's really led to nothing.
It has not helped the Republican Party.
It's not helped pass things.
And it's really just been about, well, if you don't give us what we, what it is that, you know, we asked for, we'll just shut it down.
Okay.
And you start to ask them what they want, and it becomes harder and harder, as you just said, to figure out what they actually want.
And so it's just we just want retribution.
So I'll give you one more thing and throw it back to you on this political nihilism.
David from at The Atlantic.
I don't always appreciate what he writes, but he wrote this this week.
He said that basically the GOP, and he's talking about Matt Gaetz and the folks who were in that wing of the party that wanted to get rid of McCarthy, could not accept reality.
They could not accept that the Republicans had, Dan, in the House, a slim five-seat majority.
Like, not enough to just do whatever they wanted.
They could not accept that they could just bulldoze the Democrats in Congress.
They could not accept that this was a complicated Uh, world of politics where they were gonna have to negotiate and compromise and all.
So when someone did that, McCarthy, when he negotiated the debt ceiling in May, when he negotiated the debt ceiling a couple days ago, okay?
When he did work with Democrats across the aisle, something that we hear about all the time, work across the aisle, why won't Joe Biden work across the aisle?
Why won't AOC?
When McCarthy did that in the most low bar, minimalist way, They said McCarthy's the problem.
The rules of contemporary Republican politics from rights make it hard to accept reality.
Reality is just too awkward.
In reality, Trump has been a big vote loser for Republicans.
He fluked into the presidency and then he lost Congress and I could go on down the line.
Here's what I'm getting at, Dan.
If political nihilism makes you prone to following a strongman, it also makes you prone to fantasy and fantasy revenge actions.
Revenge fantasies is what I should say.
Because you don't want to live in the reality where you don't have all the power.
You don't want to live in the reality where you have to negotiate and compromise and work with others and not get everything you want.
So when someone in your group like McCarthy does that, you're like, get rid of him because he's just one of the bad guys.
Instead of facing the reality that, yeah, we're going to have to like work across the aisle, you know, figure out our differences in order for this government to work at the very minimum, raise the debt ceiling, not shut it down, whatever.
To recap, I think political nihilism makes you prone to strongmen.
I think it means that these guys walked off the job for no reason except for retribution.
And I think it also makes you prone to fantasy and specifically revenge fantasy.
All right, off to you before we jump into the specifics of what happened.
Yeah.
So I guess all this puts me in a theory mood or something, but a couple of other things.
So in my book, Queer Democracy, I draw on some of the people like this notion of fantasy There's a theorist named Slavoj Žižek.
He sent me all the emails about Žižek past, like, 1990.
I don't really have anything to do with him, but he does have... People who know Žižek know why Brad's laughing.
Hold on.
So I just want to note, we're like 15 minutes into the show, and you've not only mentioned Žižek, but you also said you watched a TikTok.
Since when do you watch TikToks?
Like, that's a whole, what happened?
Like, we got Zizek, we got TikTok, this is a crazy Friday.
I mean, I take one week off, Dan, and you're out here watching TikTok, and now we're doing Zizek.
And I'm not even wearing cargo pants today, so it's like, yeah.
I hope you're wearing pants.
The world is upside down.
Yeah, you'll never know.
But he has this notion where he talks about fantasy, but he's got this idea and he says what fantasy does is it directs desire.
It tells us what to desire.
So when you have these kind of fantasies of a state that doesn't exist, a nation that has never been what it is that you think it is, and whatever, all you can fantasize about, all you can desire is destruction of the existing world.
And it leads me into another more concrete thing because I can hear somebody saying now, I get everything you're saying, Dan and Brad, but isn't this kind of a utopian vision?
You talk about Christian nationalism all the time.
They want a Christian America.
Is that really nihilist or is it a utopian vision?
And for me, it's this kind of weird negative utopianism because it brings me back to that point that they can't tell you what that would actually look like.
It's a state where we're safe.
It's a state where we're free.
You're like, well, cool.
What does that look like?
Whatever the Democrats are doing is not it.
It just turns into that negativity.
For me, that's the telling point.
It just launches back into that all the time.
And then the last point, I think, to support what you're saying that'll bring us into that discussion of, you know, what happened in the House this week, and you can walk us through that, is the proximate cause for McCarthy being booted?
Like, what was it?
Was it an ethics scandal?
Was it, you know, hiding money?
Was it any of that stuff?
Nope!
It was not shutting down the government.
It was not doing something negative and destructive.
That Was the proximate sort of, you know, straw that breaks the camel's back, so to speak, with the GOP and boots him out.
So even all the language of a Christian nation, which we'll come back to, even that is sort of negatively characterized.
It's just these kind of empty terms that we use that can be filled in with all kinds of things.
They have no meaning.
It's completely vacuous in the Republicans' appeal to them.
So I just want to pick up on this idea of desire What I hear you saying, Dan, is if you fantasize about something, that conditions you to want certain things.
Like, if I fantasize about this reality, then I desire that reality.
I want that.
Even though it may not be possible, even though it may not be actually something that can be achieved.
I want to read some remarks that were made by Greg Gutfield at Fox.
And I'm going to actually talk about this next week, I think, because it's so incendiary.
But he went on this incredible rant, Dan, but he says this.
What about us?
And the us is very directed.
And if you watch the clip, and I'll probably talk about this Monday, the us is like, Very clear, the who the us mean.
And it means conservative white Americans who are Christian and blah, blah.
We have to change our lives to accommodate risk wherever we go.
We have to move out of cities for the sake of safety of our families and our own.
That's what's happening.
We're being driven out of cities by the oppressed.
So I return to my imperfect analogy.
And he starts, he goes in on slavery.
And he basically says that we need to have a new civil war.
Why?
Because our schools are, I mean, this is what he says.
Our schools are a mess.
We have no border.
And the entire economy is wrecked.
And the world is on fire.
The cities are so dangerous, you can't even walk in them.
And what he's painting there, Dan, is a fantastical vision of the United States.
There are problems in cities.
There are problems with all kinds of things, including the president of the United States, Joe Biden, deciding he's going to start deporting people to Venezuela again and building the border wall, which I Yeah.
Could go on for about an hour about how I'm not...
Not great, Joe Biden, OK?
There are problems.
But Dan, he just laid out your negative utopia.
He just laid out your dystopia.
So a nihilist, right?
They don't want anything.
They're working from the fantasy that the world is so dystopic that they just have to destroy it because anything else would be better.
And I think that's what's happening here.
I also just want to say, and then we'll go to break, that none other than Kevin McCarthy agreed with you about Gates and all these other Republicans not being conservative.
Here's what Kevin McCarthy said this week.
They don't get to say they're conservative because they're angry and they're chaotic.
That's not the party I belong to.
They're not conservatives and they do not have the right to that title.
Now, we could talk all about Kevin McCarthy and his chops.
I'm not, yeah, I mean, yeah.
If I, if I really liked pain, Dan, I would do a whole 10 part series on Kevin McCarthy.
I'm not going to do it.
But he says exactly what you just said.
They don't get to say they're conservative just because they're angry and chaotic.
That's not conservatism.
That's nihilism, as we've been saying.
You want to close up any theoretical loopholes because we're going to get more concrete as we go ahead, Dan.
So your social theorist hat, your philosopher hat.
If you want to take it off, go ahead, but any final comments before you take it off?
Just the last point about that directing desire thing.
We talk about this all the time.
It's one of the reasons why facts don't fix things, because it's not about information.
It's about desire.
And if you want a bad America, you want the America that exists to be bad so that you can be able to blow it up.
You can do that.
The language about, you know, we're being pushed out of cities by the oppressed.
Yeah, the majority of poor Americans live in rural areas, not urban.
They throw out all the stats about poor whites.
It's not all minorities.
It's like just all of it.
All of it's factually flawed.
But the reason why that doesn't impact people the way that we intellectual types want it to, is that it's about desire.
And I'll just leave it at that.
I think that that's the key.
That's the really hard thing to change for people.
You have to change what they want.
And that's hard to do.
But it's also a matter of, right, Fantasy is fantasy.
You also have to admit to yourself that this is not real and it's not something that I could actually attain.
So I need to admit that.
Anyway, that's a whole other dimension to it.
All right.
Let's take a break.
We'll come back and we'll talk about some of the events here, go through some of the details, and I think get a little more historical rather than theoretical.
Be right back.
All right, y'all.
So there's a bunch of folks out there, Dan, and I know this because I get their emails.
There's a bunch of y'all out there that watch news and consume news nonstop.
And when you come to us, you're like, do the theory, do the analysis.
There's a whole nother set of you who cannot physically watch the news because it makes you angry or hurt or sad.
So you're like, I'll just listen to those two nerds.
They'll be my news for the week.
And that way I don't have to turn on MSNBC or read the paper or whatever.
So I know that there's kind of two types of y'all out there.
So some of you know these details already.
Some of you are just going to get caught up.
So basically this week, Matt Gaetz of Florida and several others, half dozen to a dozen Republicans, led a rebellion against Kevin McCarthy.
Kevin McCarthy was ousted as Speaker of the House the first time that the speakership has been made vacant in the United States.
So we are now without a Speaker of the House.
It's not because a new party has the majority, right?
It's not like the Democrats just got the majority of their – it's not like they have to elect a Speaker because the majority changed hands.
They got rid of their own Speaker.
And you're saying, well, why did they do that, Rad?
I mean, I didn't watch the news this week.
Help me understand.
Here's the Wall Street Journal.
Matt Gaetz, who led the rebellion against McCarthy, said that those deals, the deals of working with Democrats to raise the debt ceiling, continued an unprincipled tradition of forcing lawmakers to vote on funding for many federal departments at once, depriving them of the ability to consider the merits of individual programs.
McCarthy, he said, would make budget votes just a sideshow, just a puppet show, just something to keep the hamsters on the hamster wheel, okay?
So he's basically saying, I'm doing this because of funding, budgeting.
It's all about money.
Now, what this recalls for us, Dan, us old people who are really into history and theory, is a lot of other folks over the last 15 years in the Republican Party who have also claimed, I'm angry and I'm shutting down the government because of spending.
I don't like spending.
That's the problem for me.
I just can't believe we're doing all this spending.
Dan, there's been a bunch of Republican speakers of the House who have basically got up and left because the radical wing of their party has threatened to shut down the government, shut them down over, quote unquote, spending.
We could talk about John Boehner.
We could talk about Paul Ryan.
We could talk about the last 15 years of congressional Republican politics.
So I'm going to ask you.
To take us through a history, a recent history of Republicans claiming that they need to shut down the government or get rid of Kevin McCarthy or whatever because of spending.
And I'm going to also ask you, is that true?
Is that why they're really doing this?
Yeah, so what I want to start with, a long, long time ago, one of our first episodes, we talked about sort of situating Trump, and is Trump something new?
Is Trump something different?
Is this sort of MAGA nation thing something new?
And we said then, and I think we still firmly believe it, that Trump was like a kind of culminated, not even a culmination because it's still going on, but Trump was the effect of longstanding patterns in the GOP.
So where I want to take us is to the formation of the Tea Party.
Let's go back about 15 years, a little bit less than that, and you get the Tea Party that takes shape.
And everybody can remember that the Tea Party took shape around the Obama presidency.
And there were those of us, both of us, and a hell of a lot of other people that said, this has a lot to do with having a black president.
This has a lot to do with all those Americans and Republicans and whatever else who said, I just don't know if I'm comfortable with Barack Obama yet.
That was the coded language.
That was the difference between then and now, is everybody was still talking in those kinds of codes, right?
Media would still say things like, so-and-so said something that some consider to be racially insensitive, instead of just saying it was racist.
The racists would say that they were uncomfortable with somebody instead of saying, let's quit talking about diversity and equity and so on.
But that was there.
And what was their logic?
Nope, it was all about spending.
It was about fiscal conservatism.
It was about rationing things back.
And who was one of the big figures in this?
Oh, one of the big names is a guy named McCarthy, you know, and Paul Ryan, whom you named, two now former speakers of the House.
Who said this, that it was all about, it had nothing to do with religion, it had nothing to do with race, it had to do with good conservative fiscal principles and so forth.
As you say, what we find is anytime that they would start working with somebody else, and we could add John Boehner, and John Boehner was, you know, sort of butted heads with the Tea Party and so forth, but he was another speaker who committed the cardinal sin of working across the aisle.
There was also Eric Cantor.
Eric Cantor was part of the McCarthy Paul Ryan, and they were called the Young Guns, Dan.
The Young Guns.
They were on the cover photo of a 2000 book called The Young Guns, all about the future of this kind of youth movement in the GOP.
They were painted up as the intellectuals of the movement, especially Ryan was supposed to be some sort of intellectual giant because he, I don't know, read John Locke or something.
I don't know what it was.
What?
Why if a white guy is wearing glasses?
And it doesn't matter.
I'm not.
No, go ahead, Dan.
I'm not going to interrupt you.
Go ahead.
I just.
All right.
It's really hard to imagine a world where Kevin McCarthy was in the like intellectual way.
Anyway, it's just really hard to imagine that right now.
But I'm going to stop.
I apologize.
I interrupted you.
Go ahead.
Yeah, I actually don't need glasses.
I just wear them so I can be, you know, taken seriously as an intellectual.
No, but the point is, so, and then you say, well, okay, so maybe they were about that.
But what you find in the record, and we've talked about this with Trump, right, is that Republicans are fiscal conservatives when they're not in power.
When it's the other side spending money, they talk about tax cuts and so forth and rolling things back.
But when they're in power, They run up deficits.
You emphasize this all the time.
This is not about small government.
It's about big government, but it's about putting it where you want it.
So it's not about the fiscal conservatism, and it never has been.
So what is it about?
This is where the research into the Tea Party and other things since then has gone and said, oh, well, guess what?
It turns out that this populist wave that I think for so many people became real with Trump.
And I think there were lots of people who, before they saw what unfolded in Trump, really didn't see it.
They didn't know it.
They've got other things to do.
They're living their lives.
They're not, like, delving into the nuances of politics and government and so forth.
There's a great article this week in Politico, quoting the political science data, Scope Paul, and I apologize if I've got her name wrong, but this is what she said.
This was a quote that I think was worth having.
She said, The Tea Party had taken the shape of a just-say-no, blow-it-all-up, don't-cooperate, do-politics-on-Twitter faction.
And it was a precursor to Trump.
What those young guns did is they figured out that they could talk a lot about things that sounded good, like fiscal conservatism, but they could tap into a deep-seated populist anger at the quote-unquote direction of the country, being what, most approximately, the election of a black president, And they could tap into that, and they could win votes, and they could gain power in the House.
And what happened was, I think, they unleashed forces that they couldn't reel back in, which is why now people look at the Tea Party, they go, yeah, there was a lot of racist stuff there.
There was a lot of Christian nationalist stuff there.
We can come back to that.
The point is that it bit McCarthy this week.
It bit Paul Ryan before.
We've talked about this before.
All those Republicans who were willing to hitch on to Trump because they thought he was just bluster, he would just say things, and all those white, working-class, disaffected Americans would vote for him and propel them to power, and they could somehow put the genie back in the bottle.
It's been about this populist move for a long time.
And so in the last Obviously, we could do a longer history of American populism and the GOP and conservatism and all of that.
But just in the last decade and a half, you've gotten this move and the Tea Party was a key part of it.
We could talk about other things.
We talked a long time ago about John McCain tapping Sarah Palin as his VP candidate in a blatant, obvious move to tap into this kind of populist nationalist sentiment.
It tapped into something real that was propelling Republicans, has been for a long time, and it is now the dominance of the GOP.
And it's this nihilism.
So that, for me, is where the connection is.
And every time you've had a speaker, a Republican speaker, who tries to temper that, Who probably thought that they had control of this movement, that it was just something to help them get votes?
What's it done?
It's eaten them alive.
And the last point I'll make about this is that's also typical, we've talked about this, of authoritarian movements, of fundamentalisms, of movements that are locked into doctrinal purity.
They always start cannibalizing themselves because you can never be pure enough.
You can never have it right enough.
It doesn't matter who eventually becomes Speaker of the House for the Republicans if they so much as talk.
To Democrats, they're going to be out.
So it's a longstanding pattern, often painted over with this language of fiscal conservatism, but that's not the driving force and hasn't been for a long time.
When did John Boehner give up the speakership?
He wasn't ousted like McCarthy, but he did famously sort of say, I'm done.
And then he left Congress.
He's now like a lobbyist.
When?
When he helped engineer a deal with the Obama administration to raise the nation's borrowing limit and pass a federal budget.
So it's like history repeating itself here, Dan.
Here's some quotes about Gates and the engineering of everything.
Here's Jill Filipovich at CNN.
Gates, on the other hand, seems interested in a toxic combination of attention and destruction.
That so many in his party are following him in his annihilation mission is yet another confirmation that this is not a party focused on getting things done for the American people.
It's a party focused on emulating and grabbing the attention of the reality TV star former president who may have permanently broken this country.
Republican Rep.
John Rutherford, who tore into Gaetz earlier this week, said he said this, Gaetz is driving our nation toward the brink of another government shutdown, all for clicks and cash and a boost in his national profile.
So here's what I'll add to this, Dan, is if 15 years ago you start electing people because they're really good at temper tantrums, you said you can't temper it, and with that Lit up in my brain is you can't compromise.
You can't rationalize.
You can't work with people whose only mode of engagement is temper tantrum.
I have a two-year-old.
I know about this really well, Dan.
This is kind of what I do every morning, every night.
My wife and I have these talks of like rationalizing with her does not work.
She's two.
You can try to be somebody who's compromising and she will just look at you, throw everything on the floor, cry because she's two.
All right.
You cannot work with people whose only mode of engagement is temper tantrums.
Well, guess what's happened, though, Dan, in the 15 years since the creation of the Tea Party is who are the people who have become not only elected to Congress, but have gained prominent positions in the Republican House.
People who throw temper tantrums, people who will not work with others, people who will not compromise, people whose goals are attention, clicks, and raising their profile.
We have talked way too much on this show about the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert.
Those are two great examples.
Jim Jordan is another example, and Jim Jordan may be the next Speaker of the House.
Matt Gaetz is a perfect example.
The quote that it's not about governance, it's about attention, it's about clicks.
Well, why?
Because this is what they learned from their predecessors before them, that being a politician is about throwing temper tantrums.
It's not about reality.
It's not about... And this is something we say in the show all the time, Dan.
For them, governance is not about making people's lives better.
It is not a matter of human flourishing.
It is not a matter of human needs.
It is not a matter of communal survival.
It is not a matter of global community.
It is about my way.
And if it's not my way, guess what I'll do?
I'll be a nihilist and I'll destroy everything.
And by the way, I don't even know what my way is.
I want to reference my two-year-old once again, Dan.
There are times she's having a hard time.
She's overwhelmed.
Her system is all lit up.
She's crying.
She's upset.
And I asked her, like, OK, what do you want?
Like, do you want more cheese?
Do you want that toy?
Do you want that scooter?
Do you want to listen to Cocomelon again?
Because that's really what I love.
I mean, a million, two million hours of Cocomelon is really what I ordered.
I mean, I'm hoping for that answer.
And you know what?
Oftentimes, Dan, she's two.
She doesn't know what she wants.
All she knows is she's throwing a temper tantrum because she doesn't have an answer to what would help.
She's just throwing a temper tantrum.
That's where we are here.
That's why we're calling this political nihilism.
It's not about building.
It's not about governance.
It's about I just want to tear down because that's what I want.
I like attention.
I like the rush.
I like the national profile.
I like it when people put cameras on me.
And if you don't know about Matt Gaetz, I'll just say one more thing I'll throw back to you.
Matt Gaetz is a rich kid.
He's a rich kid, spoiled dude.
And if you read some of the things that have come out this week from his fellow Republicans, some of them are not happy with him and they're leaking things about how he shows up on the House floor and he's showing them pictures of very young women and saying, you know, all the things that he's done and he's making these bragging, disgusting comments about sexual conquest and blah, blah, blah.
This is Jonah from Veep, okay?
Y'all watch Jonah Veep?
Y'all watch that show?
This is Jonah from Veep.
He's not a serious person, and yet he's brought our government to a basic standstill.
All right, what else you got, Dan, on this in terms of history or current events with the House and all that before we turn our attention to some other things?
So, I mean, the last point I'll make about that, so you quoted McCarthy earlier with, this is not the party I belong to.
No, it's the party you created, right?
Like, this is the other thing I am so tired of.
Now we get the Republican denunciations of Gates.
Not 15 years ago of the Gateses of the world, Not 10 years ago or last election cycle if it would have cost them the House.
No, then we principled conservatives, we're going to keep our mouths shut and we're going to let everybody come flowing in.
We're going to let the crazies in.
We're going to let them represent the worst of what America can be.
We're going to let it get to the point where nobody can win a primary in lots of GOP controlled states unless they are kind of the worst of the worst when it comes to this.
And then very conveniently, once it blows up in their face, they're going to say, geez, shucks, I don't know what happened.
I mean, Gates is a really bad guy.
And, you know, like I say, McCarthy, not the party I belong to.
No, they built this and they rode this populist wave for decades.
And I don't know, I won't give them a pass now when they do this.
And we see this all the time, every time, especially a Republican announces that they're going to retire instead of running for office.
And then all of a sudden their principals come rushing back in.
It's like it creates this vacuum and they start saying all these good things and you're like, That would have been pretty cool if you had actually said that on the floor of the chamber, or if you had said that in a campaign.
Even if it cost somebody a seat, that would be principle, and it's completely lacking in the GOP.
So let's just debate something that's been a big question this week.
And you and I may have different views on it, and that's OK.
The question that's been all over cable news and Twitter and everywhere else has been, should the Democrats have saved McCarthy as speaker?
Because the Democrats could have voted in a way, whether present or or against, in order to meet McCarthy would have stayed speaker.
That was on the table.
So there are people, there was an article that received some attention at the Daily Beast about how the Democrats could have been the grown-ups.
They could have saved McCarthy from this Matt Gaetz temper tantrum and all the extremists in his party, and they could have shown the American people they're about being above the fray, okay?
So should the Democrats have helped McCarthy?
Now, if you listen to AOC, if you listen to other Democrats talk about this, here's what they're going to tell you.
They're going to tell you that Kevin McCarthy did these things.
At the last minute, he did avoid a government shutdown by working with Democrats.
He then got on TV the next day and said, I wasn't sure this was going to pass because of the Democrats, even though it was clearly their extremist wing of his own party, the Matt Gaetz's and others, who were the ones that were going to shut down the government, not the Democrats.
He was willing to open an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden for basically what?
Fantasy reasons.
Remember how we just talked about fantasy y'all like half an hour ago?
What's the impeachment inquiry into Biden?
It's fantasy and he was willing to go along with it.
What happened, Dan, after January 6th?
McCarthy was really hard on Trump.
And then what?
He went down to Mar-a-Lago.
He kissed the ring of the mob boss and he came back.
And all of a sudden Donald Trump can do no wrong.
He would make fun of behind the scenes Biden and Biden's excuse me.
He would make fun of Biden in public about Biden being old and he can't think and put a sentence together.
And then behind the scenes, he would sort of admit Biden's actually a pretty good negotiator.
And I have to kind of come with my A game to talk to him about what I want.
So the Democrats are like, look, we are not here to save you.
You're supposed to be adults.
Why do we have to be responsible for you?
So, Dan, I would just say, like.
One, I agree that it is not their responsibility.
This is one of those situations where have you all ever been around somebody who is so out of line and so just like.
Uh, socially uncouth and transgressive, disruptive, that when they actually do the minimum, somebody's like, hey, we should at least give John credit, because he, like, he really came through.
And you're like, what do you mean he came through?
He just did what we all do every day.
As adults.
He didn't come through.
He did what other people just do because they're adults and they're responsible.
That's how I feel here about like, Kevin McCarthy didn't shut down the government.
Yeah.
Great.
What am I supposed?
Is this guy supposed to be like, you know, in the pantheon of American like political heroes because of that?
No.
The second thing I'll say is there's voices out there that be like, well, you know, you might as well have a moderate like McCarthy rather than some extremists.
Are you what?
Really?
In what world is Kevin McCarthy a moderate?
He only looks moderate next to, like, yelling and screaming Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Matt Gaetz.
He is not a moderate.
And I'll let you take this, Dan, because I can tell you're about to lose your mind.
Kevin McCarthy's not a moderate, am I correct?
I mean, what do you want to say about that?
No, you're exactly right.
And that's where I'd pick up is the fact that he was ousted by the MAGA wing doesn't make him, yeah, as you say, a moderate or somebody who is going to advance any progressive policies or anything.
It's all the stuff we just said about the Tea Party.
Like, that's him.
That's always been him.
I agree with you.
If somebody was serious about that and they wanted the Democrats to save the Speaker, it would be possible, conceivable in a world, to find some candidate for the Speakership who would be a true moderate, who could get enough votes From the moderate Republicans who are so... They tell us all the time how fed up they are with the MAGA wing, but they don't ever kind of do anything.
And all those, you know, Democrats who'd be willing to... It would be possible.
It would be possible.
It'd be essentially in other places, they'd call it a coalition government.
That's what it would kind of be.
It would have to be a speaker with that.
McCarthy had that option when he was trying to be speaker in the first place.
He could have cut deals with Democrats.
He was willing to cut deals with everybody, right?
The whole rule that made it so that one member could call for the vote to oust, he agreed to that as a condition of being named speaker.
He signed his own death warrant, politically speaking, when he came in.
So yeah, that notion that, oh, they need to be the grownups in the room.
They could be.
It'd be fine if anybody was serious about having a conversation about having a speaker that you could actually get a majority of the House to support, not on strict sort of ideological lines or whatever.
That's not going to happen.
And I think the other piece, aside from just McCarthy as not being a moderate, you kind of touched on this, he was a double dealer on everything.
He would tell everybody what they wanted to hear.
He would agree to everything.
And one of the unfortunate realities of leadership is, if you agree with everybody, you don't agree with anybody.
Being a leader, I've never run Congress, but I've been a department chair.
I've had to lead committees.
Lots of people have that experience, and you know that you can't make everybody happy all the time.
You have to be able to do that.
He would tell one group one thing, and another group another thing.
As you say, the White House has talked about how tired they would be of him coming in and being very reasonable and straightforward or whatever.
And then he would go and say different things to the cameras or when he was talking to the MAGA camp or pull the rug out or whatever.
So, no, I think it's scary.
I think...
I think some of that the Democrats should have helped him comes from fear.
And I think I'll end with this.
And I think there are those who are worried about like, you know, like, so who are they going to get now?
Like McCarthy was like, what's?
Yeah, maybe it may be even worse.
We don't know.
But that's not the fault of the Democrats, right?
It's just not.
Sorry, folks.
We just talked about the last 15 years.
This has been a long time coming in the GOP.
And here it is.
What I would say to the GOP, And to anybody else who wants to tell us that the real GOP are still the principal conservatives, whatever, here's your chance to show us.
Let's see where this goes.
Or is it just jump behind, you know, somebody like Jordan because Donald Trump endorsed him today or yesterday or whenever it was.
Yeah, show us what you've got if this is really who you are.
So just to close this out and we'll take a break is we talked about nihilism.
And one of the things I talked about nihilism is fantasy.
And if you have a fantasy about a world that cannot exist, but you're like, I have a fantasy, I have a political porn addiction to a certain thing.
And you know what?
Uh, I'm not going to stop until I get that, even though you will never and can never get that.
When you are Kevin McCarthy and you engage in that fantasy, you kiss the ring of Donald Trump, you play ball with the extremists, you are, in essence, one of the MAGA extremists in your party.
And then you become leader and you have to sit down behind the desk stand and look at the budgets and look at the papers and look at the committees and be like, oh no.
What have I done?
I actually have to live in the real world if I want to stay in this position.
I actually have to like compromise, negotiate, work with others.
This is going to be hard.
I don't get to just have my political porn addiction anymore.
You know what happens?
You're out.
And that's the obituary of him as speaker.
Let's take a break.
We'll be right back.
All right, Dan, a lot of this goes back to the fact, and we talked about it, I talked about this Monday, we've talked about it on the show, we are now eight years into Donald Trump having a stranglehold on the Republican Party.
And this all comes down to Donald Trump was rooting on Matt Gaetz and others, right, to do this, and they were more than happy to submit infealty to the strongman.
One of the things I don't want to miss this week is that Trump was in court, And one of the things I really appreciated was actually seeing Trump in court, seeing the man sit there sad and angry and, you know, irritated and throwing a temper tantrum.
But I want to focus and I don't want to make today about Trump.
I feel like we can make every week about Trump and I don't want to do that.
And we're going to have to talk about Trump more and more as the next year goes on because of the election.
But I want to talk about one thing that should not go overlooked.
After he left court the other day, he gets out and he starts lambasting Attorney General Letitia James of New York.
And he's mad because he has been found guilty, his organization has been found guilty of fraud.
They have overvalued his properties.
It's like if I have a house that's worth $300,000 and I show up and I'm like, hey Dan, guess what?
I have a house that's worth $30 million.
And Dan's like, I've been to your house.
Not so sure, buddy.
Lawn looks pretty good, I'll admit, but it's not a $30 million lawn, okay?
That's what he did for decades.
His attorney didn't file the paperwork correctly so he doesn't get a jury trial because they didn't Click the box.
So now he's left with this judge and he's already been found guilty of fraud.
And we just need to figure out what that means.
He comes out of the courtroom and he says a lot of things, but one of the things he talks about is how this is an illegitimate attorney general who happens to be a black woman.
And he says, and I'm quoting, you should go after this attorney general.
You should go after this attorney general.
Dan, that is fascist dictatorial language.
He is encouraging people to hurt this woman.
And you're like, that could mean anything, right?
That could what?
That's no big deal.
I want to quote you Ellie Mistel, then I'll throw it to you as we close today.
Trump's rhetoric is designed to get someone killed.
It's happened before and not just on January 6th.
I do not believe the 2019 mass shooting at the Walmart in El Paso would have happened in a world without Trump.
J6 and El Paso were mass violence events but just last week a guy in MAGA Excuse me, a guy in a MAGA hat shot an indigenous protester in New Mexico.
White domestic terrorism is part of the MAGA brand.
We all remember Charlottesville, Dan.
And that comes from the top.
People are obsessed with whether Trump is, quote, ordering the violence.
But that slightly misses the point by focusing on the legal definition of incitement.
The larger problem is that the person at the head of a giant political operation tries to get his people to hurt others, and his constant threats have become so normalized that people just shrug it off.
I don't want to normalize this, and I don't want to shrug it off.
It is not OK to live in a society where the head of one of our two parties comes out of court and says, you should go after this attorney general.
Dan, That is right out of a dictator playbook.
It's right out of fascist politics.
Go hurt them.
And again, I can hear the detractors.
Well, he didn't say that.
He didn't mean that.
But Dan, as Mistel says, he knows what he's doing.
Rhetoric matters.
Discourse matters.
And when a leader like him, with so many people that just are obsessed with him, says things like that, folks are gonna use their imagination and they're gonna, quote, go after this attorney general.
This is not okay, so I just wanted to pay attention to it at the end here so we don't shrug it off.
Any thoughts on this?
So when you say, you're right, people will be like, that could mean anything.
Yep, that's the problem.
If that's not what he meant, he could say people should get her removed from office, there should be a recall election, people should sue, like whatever, all kinds of ways that you could quote-unquote go after somebody legally.
Politically, whatever, and not threaten their life or be taken to be threatening their livelihood.
And Trump's stock in trade for a long time has been this kind of language.
We've used the analogy before, right?
It's like the person who says something as a joke, and when you call them out, like, what?
That was a joke.
You have a sense of humor.
You can try to play it off.
I didn't say that.
I didn't say to do this.
But you didn't say not to.
Right?
You're one of the most influential people on the planet, right?
Everybody knows this.
It's documented by now, in my view, what the language that quote-unquote could mean anything means, how it's interpreted and picked up by your followers.
So if anybody wants to convince me, Uncle Ron, you know, I guess we're coming up on Thanksgiving next month, right?
You want to sit around and have the chat about whether or not Trump meant it?
Trump could have said, she needs to face a recall vote.
People need to get the petitions going now, you know, or whatever.
He didn't.
So, yeah, I'm with you.
It was chilling language.
I was delighted to see the judge not playing along and, you know, putting the gag order on criticizing.
It's kind of unclear to me exactly who's covered with, like, court staff.
It's, you know, what exactly that means.
But beginning to do that, it's worth watching as well in his federal trial because they've asked for a gag order against him for things like Witness tampering, witness intimidation, these kinds of statements where he explicitly calls on his followers to, quote, go after those whose job is to try to bring these things to trial and so forth.
In a more kind of analytic sense, it's interesting to see how that'll play out and if he'll actually be reined in from saying these kinds of things because they are incendiary and because they incite people to violence.
All right.
We haven't even mentioned the fact that there's credible reporting that he leaked secrets about nuclear submarines to people at Mar-a-Lago just to show off.
And anyway.
All right, reasons for hope.
My reason for hope comes in an article that was just published, and it was one that I learned about through Sam Perry, but it's by Pat Sharkey and Megan Kang, and it's all about gun mortality and what happens when you regulate guns.
Dan, I don't know.
What happens when you put gun regulations in?
You know what happens?
This paper demonstrates.
I'm gonna read it.
Here we go.
State regulations passed from 1991 to 2016 were associated with substantial reductions in gun mortality.
I'll just read that again.
Regulations passed from 1991 to 2016 were associated with substantial reductions in gun mortality.
Dan, this is a paper that shows persuasively that if you restrict guns, if you put in place laws that make it so that people, I don't know, Have to go through certain checks and certain, you know, administrative steps to get a gun, to own a gun, etc.
Guess what happens?
Gun deaths go down.
Just at the DMV and my my wife, you know, we're there with our newborn or trying to take care of something.
We really don't want to be there.
My wife was like, we have to do all of this at the DMV and you don't have to do anything to own a gun.
So I think this is good news because this is I hope that this gets more attention.
I hope that more people are talking about it and I hope that people use it in Congress and other places.
When they're asked why we should reduce, or I'm sorry, why we should restrict gun ownership and so on, and they can say, because it leads to less death.
Here is a great... Mine is a very wonky one, but I was glad about it.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, people might remember this is the organization that was started after the 2008 economic meltdown to try to do things like reining in predatory lenders and things like this.
You talk about government trying to help people, this was something of government trying to help people.
The Republicans have always hated it, businesses have hated it, and so forth.
They've been trying to defund it.
They argued before SCOTUS this week, opening arguments in a case where basically, the nuance, it's super, super murky, but the basic argument is that it's funded in an unconstitutional way, and therefore, it shouldn't be allowed to do what it does.
My reason for hope, because I was really nervous about this, and I believe we need more of these kinds of protections, Was that all the reporting says that a majority of Supreme Court justices seemed really skeptical about this.
It did not appear like they were very convinced to do away with this.
So we've seen lots of things that have developed to help people that have been weakened, you know, whether it's student debt forgiveness, whether it's Obamacare, whether it's the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
I was hopeful about that because I feel like we need more of these things to help real people.
We could have pointed to, for a reason for hope, the 10 drugs that have been negotiated as being part of Medicare and having price reductions.
They account for something like $50 billion in gross costs in the country.
So that's a reason for hope and something I think is positive.
Just have to say it, I think it is negative that Joe Biden's decided he needs to be Building Trump's wall and continuing that whole policy, but that's for another day.
Something like 26 federal laws to do it or whatever it is.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
Different day.
You're right.
This is a show that lasts an hour.
And we're very focused.
But there are other shows out there, Dan, where people go for like four hours and they like drink beers and they talk and they're like hanging out.
They're at a barbershop.
They're in a living room and everyone's like, hey, I'm going to listen to the show.
And it's like hanging out with these, you know, if we had one of those shows, I feel like you could have some beers.
I would have some boba and we would really let loose on Joe Biden about that.
But anyway, I think we need to make it a live event and we can just like, you know, yeah, we'll let that we'll let that we'll let the people speak and sell us on it.
I did listen to your show last week when I was gone and you did first just an amazing job and the whole time I was listening I was like we need to get Dan a call-in show because you would just be great you know on the mic talking Making your case and then people call in and they agree or disagree and you, you know, so friends, if you want that, you know, hit hit us up on Instagram or Twitter or email and say, yeah, get Dan a call in show, because I think you're like very equipped for that kind of situation.
I don't know.
We need to figure that out.
All right.
Dan's nodding like, Brad, I have too much to do.
I can't do it.
But what I'm really thinking is I just want Aaron Rodgers to call in and, you know, try to convince me that he's secretly not an anti-vaxxer.
That was a whole other thing.
Well, he could call in and show you the bleach he's using on his ankle to make it better if he wants.
All right.
There's a snarky comment.
Aaron Rodgers, come get me.
As always, friends, find us at StraightWhiteJC.
We are launching, have launched, Axis Moody Media.
The last episode of American Idols is on Monday, and that's Andrew Whitehead, a world-renowned sociologist, talking about how he stayed Christian by leaving Christian nationalism behind.
This episode is all about what we can do in the face of Christian nationalism, so if you want To hear from organizers, from academics, from pastors about that, tune in Monday.
And October 17th, we have the first episode of On God's Campus Dropping.
And you can learn more about all this at accessmoondi.us.
So check that out.
We can always use your help on PayPal, Patreon, Venmo.
We are an indie show.
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We do all this our own.
We don't have big grants.
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So a bunch of new patrons.
So thankful for you.
If you can think about helping us out, that'd be amazing.
Other than that, we'll be back next week.
It's good to be back with you, Dan.
I gotta go sign off, change some diapers, relieve my wife from baby duty, and get ready to sleep another three hours tonight, because that's about what I'm doing.
