The Inflection Election: Democracy or Fascism in 2024 - w/ Mark Green
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Brad discusses with author Mark Green about his new book, 'The Inflection Election: Democracy or Fascism in 2024'. They explore the critical choice facing the U.S. in the upcoming election, with paths leading either towards continued democratic freedom or increased authoritarianism under Donald Trump's influence. The conversation highlights Representative Jamie Raskin's forward in Green's book, emphasizing the stark differences between defending democratic principles and the potential rise of a fascist regime. They also touch on issues of violence and corruption within the political landscape, the role of Trump’s rhetoric, and the impact of fascist ideologies in certain American communities.
Buy the Inflection Election: https://www.powells.com/book/the-inflection-election-9781510780835
00:00 Introduction: The Crossroads of Democracy
00:58 Guest Introduction: Mark Green
03:24 Historical Context: Inflection Elections
04:09 Trump's Authoritarian Threat
06:53 Hypothetical Future Under Trump
16:56 Violence and Corruption in Politics
30:41 Hope and Action: The Path Forward
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AXIS MUNDY On one path, we can choose to continue our national experiment in democratic freedom with all the necessary complications of democracy and freedom.
We can stay true to the rule of law under the Constitution.
We can defend the rights and liberties of the people.
We can hold fast to the principle that the government, as an entity, must be an instrument to advance the well-being and common good of the whole society.
On the other path, even after everything we know about Donald Trump, his dangerous movement, and his sordidly corrupt business model, we can choose to carry the country back into more of his trademark chaos, dysfunction, and authoritarianism.
We could restore to office Trump's one sincere conviction that the government is nothing but an instrument of personal self-enrichment, self-aggrandizement, and wealth maximization for the guy who lies, cheats, and steals his way into executive power and office.
That's Representative Jamie Raskin, writing in the foreword to The Inflection Election by Mark Green.
Green is my guest today, and he's going to talk about his book, The Inflection Election, Democracy or Fascism in 2024.
He pulls no punches.
He says it as plainly as Representative Raskin.
We have a choice to make in this election, and it will shape our country for years to come.
Mark Green is the author or editor of 26 books, including the number one New York Times bestselling book, Who Runs Congress?
He worked with Ralph Nader and founded the Democracy Project and served as the twice-elected public advocate for New York City.
He was the Democratic nominee for mayor in 2001, losing the general election to Michael Bloomberg by two points.
For subscribers, I have something from the archives that I think is of great interest today and goes really well with what I talked about with Mark Green.
It's an episode with Dr. Sarah Riccardi-Schwartz, who is a professor at Northeastern University And Professor Swartz studies a group of conservative Christians in Appalachia, many of whom proclaim openly that they are fascists and that their devotion is more to Putin and Russia than it is to the United States.
It's a case study into some of the most extreme Christian communities in the country and a window in the mechanics of how some of these faith communities end up Devoting themselves to fascist leaders and authoritarian rule in the name of God.
If you're not a subscriber, now is the time to take the plunge.
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It is totally worth it.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is Straight White American Jesus.
Mark, thanks for joining me here.
Appreciate it.
I'm delighted.
Thank you.
Your book is The Inflection Election, Democracy or Fascism in 2024.
So what does that mean?
What is an inflection election and why are we in store for one in this year?
Well, we know them in the past.
1860, a liberal called a Republican named Lincoln wins.
The South says, oh, we don't trust him a bit.
He didn't get one electoral vote from the South.
And so they succeed.
A pivotal moment in American history, obviously.
1932, Roosevelt starts ahead, ends ahead because of the Depression.
Free market Hoover or a progressive FDR.
Well, here we are.
This is not Jimmy Carter versus Gerald Ford.
To this day, it's hard to distinguish between the two of them ideologically.
And the losing side didn't feel like the country was at risk.
This is different.
We have never in our history—never in our history—had such a ruthless, corrupt, lying, bad-faith president.
And that's not my opinion.
Look at what he said.
He denounces immigrants as people who are not human.
He violates the law like when his aide said a law that disallows the federal government from using federal money to promote themselves.
Kellyanne Conway, she said, arrest me.
Here he is, of course, no president's ever been indicted or convicted.
And here he is in four, probably more, cases.
So we're dealing with someone who has told us, forget the both sides.
Major media, like the New York Times.
Trump has told us he wants to deport 11 million likely Latino.
He's told us he wants to arrest and indict Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, even after he complains about Biden's DOJ weaponizing the law.
So he's told us that this is do or die.
And I'm more optimistic than pessimistic, but that's just me.
My goal in the election was to tell people, hey, if I was a weather station and I didn't tell you that there's a Category 5 hurricane about to level your town, I'd be negligent.
This is an alarm bell to people who are comfortably saying, yeah, one is not much different than the other.
And we're not going to believe him when he says, He's a chesty Caesar.
He wants to be, and he is.
He's talked about being a dictator on day one.
He's talked about using— Let me interrupt.
Dictator on day one.
That's sort of funny.
As if he's going to stop being a dictator on day two.
Excuse me?
And so, let's take him at his word.
Enough already of, oh, he was just joking.
He didn't mean it.
He didn't say it.
You got to take him at his word.
We've seen potential tyrants in the past.
Tell us what they were going to do, and then they did it.
Let's learn.
You're a student of history.
Can you recall a dictator who said, all right, I'm good now.
I think I'm done being a dictator.
Let's go back to democracy and sharing power.
I don't think there's one.
And they tell us, Mussolini said, I don't debate my opponents.
I destroy them.
Now, if I hadn't told you that was Mussolini, Can you see Donald Trump saying that to one of his crowds?
You give us a preview here.
In the opening of the book, you have a vignette titled April 19, 2025.
I'm not going to read the whole thing, but I just think it really sets the tone for the entire book.
At the direction of Donald Trump, the 47th president of the United States, Attorney General Ken Paxson yesterday sent teams of FBI agents to the residences of Rachel Maddow, General Mark Milley, and Hillary Clinton.
The vignette continues.
There are camps being set up in the desert by Stephen Miller.
There is a defiant Trump saying, what are you going to do about it?
identically telling their targets, "We've come to confiscate your electronic devices pursuant to a lawful warrant.
You are not now under arrest." The vignette continues.
There are camps being set up in the desert by Stephen Miller.
There is a defiant Trump saying, "What are you going to do about it?" And it really gives us an image of what could be in store this time next year if he's elected.
If someone reads that, they could say, "What?" This can't happen, because it's never happened in this country.
And so it's hard to persuade people that something very bad is coming down the road, unless you listen to Trump.
And see who he surrounds himself with.
He says, I admire Putin, Bolsonaro, Orban, Xi.
Stephen Miller, he says that dictators are his favorite people.
I asked listeners, has he ever said of a Western leader, historically Churchill, or recently, oh I admire that, but he hasn't.
And so if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, you know the end of it.
And so while it's astonishing that he would go against everything he's now saying, In terms of, oh, Biden is, as I said, weaponizing the Justice Department.
That he, in fact, with power, with his staff saying previously, oh, this violates the law, quote Dan Scavino, we don't care.
Would he order his Attorney General to do this?
Sure.
He thought out Mark Milley.
He cooperated with the Chinese to tell them that America was stable.
He should be executed.
I'm not saying he'll execute General Milley.
But you know what?
He said it.
He says it.
Everybody who opposes him.
And so the opening vignette, which of course is fanciful, but it's rooted in reality.
That is, he wants to deport 11 million people?
Well, he's going to start relocation deportation centers to house 100,000 people at a time before they're shipped out, including him.
Anybody who doesn't believe that Trump would do Is being just a Pollyanna and naive.
Now some of the smartest people I know discount this vignette like the New York Times because they have a template and it's worked to make them the greatest paper of the last century, which is treat both sides equally.
And so we have Ballard.
But what happens if one side is not equal to the other?
Then you're treating dissimilar people, a radical, violent, illegal, unlawful party, versus Democracy Joe, versus King Don.
And so unless they and other mass media Understand that this vision of Trump's is possible, and the inflectional election tries to advance that concept.
It makes it more likely, because should he be in office?
Help me, where are the guardrails?
Where's the checks and balances?
I mean, the Supreme Court is in the tank.
It's hysterical.
I'm a lawyer.
I review the Supreme Court.
But they decide on the result they want, then they hunt for cases or common law.
Or clergy in the 12th century.
They did that in the abortion case.
To justify themselves, if both houses go republic, and if he controls the law enforcement, federally, who's to stop him?
The answer is, ultimately, we the people.
That's how the Constitution starts.
And it will come down to, unless there's a In the one case that's been allowed to go forward, the Hashemite obstruction of justice case, then he's home free.
But I believe the American public, by the time of the fall when attention is being paid, Biden outspends Trump two to one.
I want to stay on this vignette for just one more second, and that's this.
Everybody hears Trump say these things.
on abortion, that ultimately the better argument for undeciders in the Senate swing state is on the Democrat.
But right now, it's a competitive election, of course.
I want to stay in this vignette for just one more second, and that's this.
Everybody hears Trump say these things.
I've heard him say these things.
I've covered it I've told my audience.
Here's what he said.
Stephen Miller says it.
Roger Stone says it.
Whoever it is.
And then when you write a vignette like this, because I've interviewed a few others who've offered hypothetical situations like this one as what it looks like in 2025, the pushback I get is, well, this is fear-mongering.
Why would you entertain these kinds of scenarios?
I mean, you're just going to scare people.
And I'm thinking, What's the dissonance between what he told us he's going to do and us sketching out into the future what that looks like if he does do what he's going to do?
Why is there a dissonance there in terms of what?
People believe what they hear.
think is possible.
And that's what I always come back to when I see a vignette like yours, because for me, it's frightening and it's realistic.
But as you're saying, whether it's the New York Times or anyone else, there's those out there that would say, well, we certainly can't do this kind of prognostication.
It's just unwarranted or something like that.
And I just don't understand that.
I'm wondering if you have any insight into that.
People believe what they hear.
Like, forgive me.
I don't lie.
Maybe I exaggerate my virtues and the love for my family.
I would But I hated one to even think of lying.
So basically when you hear someone tell you something, imagine if we would live in a world where we doubted everything that we heard.
How could we live?
There'd be no assumption that we could bank our health and our wealth and our family on.
And so this is mocked brilliantly in Adam McKay's movie Don't Look Up.
Where, of course, the comet, it was coming, and all the science said it was going to.
But still, there were vested interests who didn't want to believe it because it would jeopardize what they are.
Second, a third of the country, at least, are Make America Great people who, you know, I might as well try to persuade an eagle's thing to buy giant season tickets.
It would violate everything they believe, not that they know who's better, the Giants or the Eagles in any given year, but they so believe that they can't let go.
The Clifton analogy I can come to, there are people who are numb and gone.
So many crimes have been committed that unlike A sitting president who does one spectacular thing that they get caught at.
Nix.
I mean, everyone now would agree, although there wasn't a fox there to justify it.
Oh, Nixon, Watergate, I get it.
He lied, he obstructed justice.
There are hundreds of scandals of Trump.
And so his audience, think of the movie Idiocracy.
It's not a well done, but it's a cult movie because of the idea it's a reverse Darwinism.
That the country goes backward.
And so the jury, in a particular case, are screaming people who don't care about the law and just want, you know, hang.
Well, a chunk of voters are like that, and you can't talk to them.
Because it's like talking to a Catholic or a Jew to switch religion.
You can't rationally argue with that.
That's based on faith.
And so the only second.
Well, our system may be the best democracy, the oldest democracy.
The founders were brilliant, but flawed.
In that they had an electoral college, which gave way to white owners in rural states because they didn't trust people would know what was going on hundreds of miles away.
Now Republicans can stop increased voting by local laws that discriminate against areas and around cities and minority areas to lower that vote, gerrymandering where Republicans can That's it, so that when you win a majority of the state in the House in terms of numbers of votes, the other party, the Republican Party, win a majority of the seats for the House.
You add all this up together and there is an irony and a potential tragedy that if opinion leaders don't recognize it, we'll get there.
The irony of a allegedly tiny democracy.
Defeating, in 1781, the world's greatest monarchy.
That we're going to elect a monarch nearly 250 years later?
One of the things that I think, two of the chapters that really just have stuck with me are on violence and corruption.
So I want to talk about violence and corruption because a minute ago you asked, well, who's to stop Trump in a second term?
And there's a couple things.
Pages 74 and 75 just have some really fantastic examples and verbiage.
Page 74.
Today, by their own admission, Trump and MAGAs will threaten, trigger, condone, or engage in violence when it's to their advantage.
So they favor elections and laws so long as elections and laws favor them, but will ignore both if necessary to maintain power or fortune.
One of the aspects about people not believing Trump when he says what he's going to do is they don't believe the kinds of violence he's willing to go to to get power, to stay in power, despite the fact of what we saw January 6th a couple of years ago.
What do you see, Weatherman, when it comes to what he's talking about and his his acolytes and his proxies are talking about with the types of violence they're willing to use if they don't get their way?
Well, not people like you, me, but your audience.
There are laws that say don't kill, don't pickpocket, don't drive 100 miles an hour into a crowded intersection.
Follow the law.
Trump's superpower, and that of Ted Cruz and other, his magamobocracy, a word that Lincoln made popular in the 1850s, They, uh... They're not ever shamed.
That is, if you catch them, Trump just lies again, encourages more violence.
He's not, forgive me, there's something wrong with him based on normal social standards.
And he's not the first, but he may not be the last demagogue to understand.
Now, this is Joseph Goebbels.
Hitler spoke Brit communications propaganda saying, what matters is not whether you say something that's true, but that you repeat it.
And a big lie, like he's going to overthrow democracy, the name of democracy.
Like he won the 2020 election and got lost by 7 million votes.
It's so big that normal people won't believe it.
They may believe, you know, the margin.
We wouldn't be the first country in the world where a kind of mass psychosis It takes hold, but we are rightly proud of America.
We're a democracy, majority rule.
We don't have majority rule now.
If Trump should win, he'd be the third Republican presidential nominee out of seven elections to win the White House with a minority of the vote.
So there's something broken in our system, and along comes a corrupt, cunning, Demagogue, who's bullied his way in business successfully, bullied his way on TV with The Apprentice successfully, and now it'll be actually... And again, the book ends optimistically, if you want to get to it.
Should he win, which is possible, but I think unlikely, it'd be the greatest propaganda coup and trick ever.
I'm going to put in a good word for Germany in the 30s, but Germany was deeply wounded psychologically and industrially by its loss in World War I. And so they react.
Lenin takes over with a hundred people.
He knocks off the Tsar because the Tsar Brutal, impoverished, 95% of the people.
In America, we have not suffered any eruptive, disastrous calamity recently.
The last one was the Civil War when the team that wanted markets and slavery lost to the team that wanted the human rights and the rule of law.
Yet, implicably, Enough Americans go with him, and there's enough flaws in our constitutional democracy, like I mentioned, like a very malapportioned Senate and gerrymandering and money and voter suppression laws, that it could be, you know, an incredible upset.
And then, because of the Supreme Court and his followers, it's going to be, you know, the democracy is in peril.
Then you're locked into this journalistic both sides where the New York Times says this.
They're brilliant at exposing individual scandals.
They refuse to connect the dots and take Trump at his word because they're habituating to a Carter for even Obama-Romney type.
Well, each of those four nominees were grown-up senators, governors, but this is different.
And if you treat Different people, different parties, the same.
It's going to be an unjust result.
You asked about violence?
You know, a Democrat or a Republican, including violence, obviously.
But only the Republican led by Trump, are saying that immigrants are vermin, they're invading our borders, we have to deport them.
When Trump was asked about the violence on January 6th, he said, "Well, and hang my fence." He said, "Well, they were angry." He's just fine.
Yeah.
There's a piece here that I think people should hear, and that is listeners, maybe a lot of listeners out there are the types that are going to read books.
They're going to listen to to a bunch of politics podcasts.
They're gonna keep up on the news.
But there's a bit here on page 75 that I circled as soon as I read it.
You talk about Mitt Romney disclosing in his biography that some Republicans won't vote to convict Trump of articles of impeachment because they personally feared violent retaliation against them and their families from the MAGA mob.
Romney talked about having so many death threats that he paid five grand a day for extra security for himself and his family.
You then go on to talk about Brendan Buck, who had been a top aide to Representative Paul Ryan, Romney's VP pick, admitted that, quote, the fear is real and pervasive.
Members fear for their lives and their safety.
When you change your vote on impeachment, you might as well leave.
Andrew Hitt, the Wisconsin GOP chairman, who told 60 Minutes he signed fake elector's slate because he was afraid of being killed otherwise.
I just want to make clear to people that when you think about the fear of crossing Trump, The fear of retribution.
It's not future, it's present.
And as you say, the Supreme Court is already locked in.
Congress, however, seemingly operates, at least in the Republican side, in a fear of Donald Trump and his retribution against them.
It will only be Exponentially worse if he is actually the president again, claiming absolute immunity, claiming he cannot be, you know, tried for crimes and claiming that there's no one to stop him from doing whatever he wants.
How can you have a legislative branch that will operate in any sort of independence if they are afraid of actual violence against them or their families?
Uh, in terms of how they vote, in terms of the policy positions they take, and so on.
Again, I've said these things on this show, and I get the emails that say, of course that's not real, of course that wouldn't be true, of course people wouldn't just fall in line because they'd fear the president would show up and take their kid away, or somehow their loved one would disappear.
And I'm thinking, It's already happening.
I just read about it in your book and I've heard all the comments from Romney myself.
This is not a future thing.
It's a present thing.
And it'd only be worse if he's actually elected.
Almost the worst lies are the lies we tell ourselves.
We want to believe.
We want to have hope.
But Donald Trump said, I'm going to run a campaign of retribution and revenge.
That's him.
That's him talking.
Mitt Romney is a moderate Republican, whatever that means.
And so you have to take him at his word.
And if you're a MAGA listener, I doubt it.
But if you're a MAGA listener, he reports that fellow senators told him, and 57 voted to convict Trump.
For his second impeachment.
And they fell nine, ten votes short because they were afraid for their lives.
Now, what does this remind you of?
It's hard to imagine.
It's that 1850s America, with a passion about slavery or free market, so great that the law couldn't settle it.
Dred Scott said, oh, slavery is fine because black people are property.
That couldn't be sustained.
The only answer, because the law was failing.
Courts were failing.
Was violence.
It is a way to break a tie, by the way.
You know, if it's nine all in the ninth inning, one team could, you know, try to kill the other team and claim to win by forfeit.
And that's not the way we operate.
That happened in the 1850s, 1860s, obviously.
And people, some people just cannot believe Their own eyes.
Allow me one historic example, not to say that anybody's a Nazi or, and this is a Holocaust.
It's reported that when Jews were being on trains going to concentration camps, they would see wheelbarrows full and carts full of dead bodies that had been danced to death going in the opposite direction.
So they would see this.
But still, because they only know to hope to live, they blacked it out of their heads, you know, extreme form of denial.
We now know, I mean, there were Germans who might still be alive who didn't believe that Nazis would ever do that, but they did.
So here we are.
And what's essential is that we understand the violent words and actions.
We see what Trump is saying.
We see how his words have led to a person going to the church in Charlottesville and, you know, just killing nine parishioners in their pew.
But then he just says, oh, how dare you associate me with that?
Well, they're listening to you, and if you're not going to take accountability, then we have to reward Democracy Joe.
Decent Joe.
Whatever you think of Biden's talents or ideology, nobody thinks that he's rational, could think that he's out to destroy democracy.
Yet, several millions of people are still undecided in this contest because they'll say, oh, I don't like a particular policy of Biden's.
Like, he's in a tough place on Gaza-Israel war, tough place on campus protests that, you know, the hard decisions rise up to the presidential level.
And he's run a very successful presidency, but people driven by emotion rather than empiricism.
Oh, won't accept it.
The violence is one-sided, and we've seen it before.
The black shirts under Mussolini, the brown shirts under Hitler were private militias that each of those two tyrants controlled.
They were off the books.
They didn't follow a law.
They would harass, injure, and kill people.
You know, worst being Kristallnacht in 1938.
And we have a nominee, an ex-president, who won't criticize these loner or individual militias who do this.
So they regard that as a permission slip, because their leader is looking the other way.
The only alternative, then, Is to win in the Electoral College by enough, as Biden did in 2020 against the same opponent, obviously.
And JFK in 1960, and Trump in 2016, and Biden in 2020, all got 306 electoral votes.
All won by narrow or substantial voting margins, which is magnifying the electoral college.
Well, we're down to seven states.
You've said several times you're optimistic, and I think if we close here, I'm reminded so often on this show to hope, because I think that people see us as really good at explaining the dire situation we're in, but we all do need a sense of how we might avoid the fate you've been discussing here today and that you discuss at length in the book.
What are some of the things that have given you hope over the last recent years, and what are some of the things you see in the election components that give you hope that this is not where we're headed?
Well, good to be hopeful, but not naive.
And Biden did win in a similar race a cycle ago.
And in the off-year elections, which are based not on polls, but actual votes.
So put aside the polls now, which will be the polar coaster, to quote one podcaster, they can go up and down, but when people actually vote, In 2021 in off-year elections, 2022 in the by-elections that year, and 2023 in off-year elections, when they actually voted, should abortion be constitutional and legal or not, 60% of the states, many red,
Voted pro-abortion, including Kansas and Ohio.
And Democrats won disproportionately based on history.
In all those elections, 2016 was a freak because of James Comey, Electoral College, etc.
And now the trend line, not in polling, but in voting, is pro-Democrat.
And it's unhopeful that American democracy, which has bent
1860s, but never broken, notwithstanding McCarthy, Nixon, you name it, that it will bend but not break this time because of, forgive me, the way you began this interview, thank you, the way I began the election, was by envisioning what would happen if Trump won unchecked by checks and balances with people around him
Going along with whatever predatory beliefs he has, and if he won, we'd have not a rule of law, but a law of rule.
That's right.
But I think enough good faith people, plus Biden having more money and a better argument, and we'll see what happens in trials, whether he's a convicted felon when he runs.
We'll pull it out for Democrats and the country.
We will see.
And as you say, the polar coaster continues.
I do feel like every week it's, oh, Biden's doing better than we thought.
And then today I see, oh, Trump's leading in these key states.
And it can be unhelpful, I think, as people think about the next few months.
Let me conclude.
Someone in the 1950s wrote Norman Coase, no one is smart enough to be a pessimist.
Now, you can think things may not be going well, but you can't say this Can't happen.
Well, that takes a level of omniscience none of us have.
We can make our destiny by talking to neighbors, talking to family, donating, volunteering, pulling out the vote.
Because ultimately, it's up to us.
I think that part is so key, and that's the part that I always want folks to hear.
There are things you can do, and you know what feels bad?
Sitting at home in despair.
What feels good is organizing, is activating, and getting together with others to make it happen.
Mark Green, thank you for your time.
The book is The Inflection Election, Democracy or Fascism in 2024.
The foreword, as you said, by Representative Jamie Raskin, and just very plain language and very brutal, brutally honest approach to where we are as a country.
