Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds.
We're on vacation, but that doesn't mean we don't have a great show for you Today. Director Matt Tiradaur examines how we see Gourvidal through today's political lens. But first we'll talk to author Broadclass about how we fortify ourselves for Trump two point zero.
Welcome to Fast Politics.
Brian, Yeah, thanks for having me back.
I feel like it's one of those moments that you have written about so much.
Explain to us.
There's so many headwinds and tailwinds and so many unknowns.
Explain to us where we are.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's sort of a couple parallel stories happening, and the ones that I'm paying the most attention to first is the sort of absolute meltdown of norms and guardrails where stories that used to be five alarm fires in twenty sixteen are now just simply shrugged off before the day is even halfway done, right, I mean, there's so many crazy appointees who would have instantly been done out of arrival in early twenty seventeen
that now are likely to be confirmed. And I think that, along with the politicization of rule of law, is what people like me had been warning about would happen if Trump returned to the White House, and I think we're
on the sort of precipice of that happening. The second story that I'm looking at is how the Democrats are responding to their loss and the sort of ways in which the party is trying to think about not just how to reposition itself, but how to end up being an effective tool at blocking the worst machinations of the Trump machine. And I think that's the sort of calm before the storm as we all get ready for January twentieth.
You know, it's interesting because last time there was a feeling in the mainstream media that Trump was a sort of five al on fire. But in the end Democrats were able to block a lot of Trump's more heinous instincts, so you know, he didn't end up deporting as many people as Obama did. I mean, certainly there was a terrible payandemic and a million people died, and they did, in fact have refrigerated trucks in front of hospitals, but some of his worst instincts, he was not able to
engage in. It feels like that's not going to happen this time.
Yeah.
So I think there's two ways that responded that. The first is that I separate out of my mind the worst of Trump's behavior and the threat he poses to the country into two camps. One of them is policy that's reversible. Right, So, this is the kind of stuff where you pass legislation and then if the Democrats win in a couple of years, they could undo it. Right now, that stuff is very bad, potentially, like a lot of the policies he's proposing are awful, but it is reversible.
The stuff that's not reversible is the destruction of democracy and the erosion of democratic institutions and norms, which can take literally generations.
To rebuild, if at all.
And so I think the thing that the mainstream media's characterization, as you put it before, of the sort of first Trump presidency as not as bad is that, yes, some of the policy stuff was blocked, but the erosion of americans civic life, the erosion of democratic norms, it's so clear that that has happened for precisely the reasons I'm talking about where we're now thinking about putting, you know, a person in charge of health who's an anti vaccine,
person who beheaded a whale. I mean, you have aspects where you have sexual offenders up and down the list of nominees, and that's viewed as something that's not just acceptable but actually being cheerleaded by a lot of the Republicans in power. And the sort of just normalization of attacks on the press and talking about shutting down news organizations, the politicization of rule of law, etc. So what I worry about is that the second term is going to
have both of those things. It's going to have a lot more terrible policy and a lot worse violations of democratic norms and attacks on institutions. So you know, I think that there is a way in which Democrats can try to block some of this stuff because of the really narrow majority the Republicans have in the House, for example,
But you know, they're prepared this time. The agenda is much more set, and I think I think that Trump also is not going to be as hesitant with his instincts in power, because I think he thinks that his first term was was sort of hampered by the fact that he didn't go far enough.
So what do you say to people who say, and I am one of these people, and I think I'm probably wrong because I've decided that optimism has been my achilles heel when it comes to political prognosticating. I mean, not prognosticating, but because we don't want to prognosticate here. But what do you think about the idea that somehow public markets will provide some kind of check on Trump?
Well, I think that the problem with that is that there's a lot of authoritarian regimes that make a lot of money. What we're talking about, and this is where I think it's important to sort of highlight what people like me are talking about when they say that a country is going to become, you know, semi authoritarian or
lose its democratic institutions. I'm not envisioning, you know, a situation like a lot of people picture where you have, you know, martial law and tanks rumbling through the streets and all this type of stuff. When I went to when I've gone to authoritarian regimes and lived in regimes to study them, what you realize that life sort of goes on. It's just that people don't have a meaningful say,
in politics anymore. Right, So what's the big difference is the reversibility and markets are able to adapt to this as long as they have some level of predictability, so you have you know, obviously it's terrible, right, I'm not trying to sugarcuat authoritarians. It's a terrible, terrible system that stifle's freedom of expression, crushes rights, is really bad for the economy over the long term, is terrible for innovation,
and is awful for freedom. But at the same time, like, there are a lot of companies that I think would adapt to a semi authoritarian regime in which you know, you can't criticize the presidents as openly, or judges are simply overtly partisan and going after political enemies. I think there's a lot of companies that would still make money
in that situation. And so while I think that your rights in terms of things like there might be pushback on you know, millions of people getting deported if it was going to hurt GDP and hurt the labor force and so on, that's slightly different from you know, how much is Wall Street going to react if you have judges and henchman from the FBI who are going after Liz Cheney, and I suspect the answer is probably not that much, which is the sort of dark side of
how capitalism and authoritarianism can sometimes work together.
I'm more thinking about, Like, again, the Liz Cheney stuff is for sure coming down the pike.
That seems inevitable. The thing that gives me pause.
Here is the idea that actually America has done this. I mean, you know, I am a person whose grandfather was jailed by a Republican president for his political beliefs, so you know, I wasn't born yet because I'm only thirty six. But the idea that America is a benevolent force. First of all, if you live in the Middle East, that's never been true. But even like, the idea that America's a benevolent force to Americans is a pretty new ideology, you know.
I think it's a very worrying development.
It also strikes me that, I mean, you even see in this admin, in this coming admen, that they are going to go for laws that are still in the books, right like Jim Crow era laws, Victorian era laws. This is the America we know. Not to be too Synegalue.
I think there is a truth to that, which is that there's a way in which the past is romanticized. Right, So like when we talk about like the sort of America of the past, we tend to think about many of the good bits. We talk about d Day, but we don't talk about Jim Crow, or we talk about you know, Abraham Lincoln. But you know, there's a lot of stuff in the aftermath of the Civil War that was disastrously terrible for a significant part of the country,
particularly minorities. And so I think this is the kind of stuff where, yes, there is a romanticization of the past. What I will say though, is that much of American institutions in the modern era have been broadly speaking democratic, And what we talk about when we study, you know, the breakdown of democracy and so on, is really about institutions which base means are you able to have fair rules in politics such that if a different party comes to power, can they undo what has been done before?
And I think that's the stuff that's really scary. That's the stuff that you see in Hungary and Poland and the Philippines and Russia over time and so on, where it's like, at some point it becomes what is deemed as you know, competitive authoritarianism, where there's sort of an aspect of competition where parties do compete, but basically the field is not level.
In other words, it's a rigged game.
Which is what's happening right now in North Carolina. Right North Carolina, the governor is about to take over. It's another democratic governor. The state House is freaking out, and so they're trying to pass non democratic norms. I just wonder how much this was cooking under the scenes before Trump. Isn't this in some ways like the work of John Roberts as much as anyone.
Yeah, I mean, so you have to have a certain level of permissive factors before.
He gets destroyed.
Right, So in other words, you know, Trump didn't create the situation where US democracy was vulnerable, but he is the person who's likely to burn.
It down exploit it. Yeah.
Yeah, There's so many things that American democracy has obvious need of reform. I mean, jerrymandering is a classic one.
You have an.
Aspect with the electoral college, which is unique in modern democracies, where you have a person who gets fewer votes wins the presidency. You have the Supreme Court justices in a political appointment for life that doesn't exist in most other democracies. You have the role of money in politics, right, which is again the US is a major outlier. So all of these things are areas where the US is like
completely different from most quote unquote normal, advanced democracies. And what Trump is doing is he's exploiting this such that you could have potentially minority rule for the foreseeable future, where even if Republicans lose future elections, their policies might continue because, for example, the Supreme Court knocks them down.
Or you could have Trump overtly committing crime and not be held accountable because his Supreme Court, which he largely appointed, is saying he's immune as law as an official conduct.
Right.
This is the kind of stuff where the danger zones are created by the sort of breakdown of norms and these sort of steady slow shifts, and then Trump is the person who takes advantage of it and knocks democracy down in a much bigger way in a shorter period of time. So I agree with your characterization, like there's a huge number of vulnerabilities, but I still think that like if Hillary Clinton had won, or if Kamala Harris had won, that those vulnerabilities would sort of stumble on
weak but not destroyed. And now there's I think there's a risk of some of.
The institutions getting destroyed.
If you are a Democrat in the Senate right now, what would you say they should be doing? Because I'm seeing Klobashar do a fucking bill about the ball devil.
Yeah, yeah, I think you know, this is the kind of stuff where you need to have both moral clarity that you don't get how because you lost an election
and you need to pick your battles. And I think this is the kind of stuff where despite the fact that I, like you, have been at times overly optimistic, I still believe that there's a significant majority of Americans who look at someone, you know, if they knew about Pete Hegseth's police report or his past misconduct, that they would care about that, right, And like, this is the kind of stuff where you have to you have to draw lines in the sand and say these people are
not fit for for office. It's not a question of, you know, whether we agree with their policies or not. It's that how can we not agree that this person is not qualified? To lead the most advanced, you know,
fighting force the world has ever seen. And it's the kind of thing where I think the Senate Democrats really need to get together with one voice and not engage in sort of overtures of fake by partisanship like the Bald Eagle Bill, but really really be a clear and sort of selective fighting force that actually goes against the worst of the Trump machinations. But this does require and this is something that I think needs to be different
from the first term. It's something I've learned personally. You don't need to chase every single you know, shiny object, and you know, I simultaneously think that it's important to highlight a lot of the crazy behavior that Trump does that's disqualifying. I also think that you have a case where you can only get so much of your message through and so the Senate Democrats really need to focus on a couple things that are really really important and that they're going to win on politically.
Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. That is the flooding the zone, right, They've fled the zone.
They make so much outrage that you can't keep the outrages straight. And the reality is right now, it's his inauguration, then it will be these cabinet hearings. Then it will be something else, right, I mean, so here's another question, and again remembering our optimism problem, you and I, there is a CR, a continuing resolution. It is sitting on the desk of Mike Johnson to pork Laiden bill. It is also the only chance to keep the government funded. It expires in March. Elon is mad about it. The
Vague is furious. Neither of those guys work in the federal government in any capacity. But it does show that Donald Trump has many, many, many people who put him in office, all of whom are going to want their goodies.
Yeah, you know, I think this is an issue though where what's going to happen is what happens to most populist parties who are actually given the chance to govern. Is that what you say in a tweet, as Elon Musk, he knows very little about how the government actually operates or what you promise on a campaign is very different from what actually happens when you govern. And you know, I think at some point reality is going to bite here when these people talk about two trillion dollars of cuts.
I mean, the delusional. Right, It's like simple basic math that if you were going to do this, it would require you to do some of the most politically unpopular things in a century. And so maybe they do it and it blows up in their face, or maybe it just becomes another one of those empty promises. But I think this is the kind of stuff where at some point, you know, I am of two minds on this, because
the Democrats can only block so much. And I think that if you end up having a situation where the Republicans try to govern and catastrophically fail at doing so, that over the long term, that might actually be beneficial for American democracy to show people this truly does not work.
And that's a ten million dollar question.
Yeah, And the question is how much harm is going to have to happen in the meantime. Right, That's the debate I think Democrats are having is that if you block everything, you might muddle through and you might still get blamed for everything.
You can't block everything. The good news is that's a false choice.
Right.
They don't control the House, they don't control the Senate. There is no blocking, right. I mean, that's the other thing is like there, it's sort of just a triage situation.
What I'm wondering when we talk about.
Like, you know, the thing that I'm so struck by is they want to cut the federal government but don't exist right because Republicans want to keep these tax cuts for billionaires.
I mean, you know, they could just let the tax cuts expire. I mean nobody is talking about that. Why is nobody talking about that?
Well, this is the kind of stuff where like the Democrats have a really easy and actually like good form of populism that they can run on, right, that they can actually highlight what exists in this moment for most Americans is anger at elites and also grotesque inequality that people are really fed up about, right, And so I think it's kind of one of these things where you have this bizarre situation where a series of ultra rich
people are sort of self dealing, right, whether it's through corruption, funneling stuff to the Trump organization and trying to make money off government, or Elon Musk trying to get you know, much better advantages and also doubling his wealth after the election.
Apparently all this type of stuff at the same time that, as you say, they're trying to cut taxes for rich people, and you know, the Democrats have to focus on the sort of core aspects of this that this is something where you know, the idea that the Republicans are seeing to be the ones burning down the system, when in fact they're basically entrenching this system of inequality that's gotten steadily worse since the nineteen eighties is a failure of
political messaging. And so, you know, I think that's the issue where Democrats really need to dig their heels on what is truly important and pick three or four messages and just have the discipline to hammer them over and over and over. And Trump, for all of his failings, the one thing he's very good at is getting through to people what he stands for. And he's always been the immigration guy, and like Democrats or Republicans know that about him, no matter all the crazy things he says.
And I think there's a lot of voters who don't know what the Democratic Party at its core stands for right now. And that's the problem.
Well, and Democrats did a very stupid thing by not elevating AOC who is their best messenger. But instead of putting Jerry Connolly in the leadership seventy six year old through cancer patient Jerry Connolly, which as much as we look, I mean, my husband had cancer. This is you know, a real thing that people can get through. But it's still like here we are in a desperate moment in American life where Democrats have told us that we are on the precipice and they're just elevating their fracts.
You can't really get away with as a party arguing that this is an existential threat to democracy, which I think it is, and then focus your time on like bald eagle bills and having old guard figures that don't fire anybody up run these committees. I mean, you have to fight. You have to if you say that this is an existential threat to democracy and then you sort
of don't fight. It's like, well, hold on, there's one of these two things is wrong, and either your behavior is wrong or your diagnosis of the problem is wrong. And I the other false choice that I think is being put before the discourse as it were around the Democrats' response to the election is like was this bad or was this not so bad?
Right?
Well, okay, it was a narrow loss in the in the sort of popular vote that doesn't mean you shouldn't be smart about politics right like it means it doesn't. It doesn't mean change nothing. And I think what's clear about the Democrats is there, Chris, I think rightly as a party that mostly is governed by older people and you know, doesn't have a lot of really sharp talent that is, you know, super super visible on a daily basis, I.
Think that's wrong. I would say they have a lot of talent. They're just I mean, even Hakem.
I said I think perceived. Though I said perceived. I think there's tons of talents in the Democratic bench.
I'm thinking that.
I'm not sure that's right though, because I think I mean, I think that, look, there's a there's a gerontocracy that is desperately trying to grasp on and keep those young people down. But fundamentally the leadership is still significantly younger. I mean, Mike Johnson is young, but Mike Johnson is It may not even be able to pass this CR but I do agree that there is for sure. I mean, whatever they're doing, this is not the way to do it.
I really appreciate you coming on. I hope you will come back and we can talk about this more.
Yeah, sounds great.
Hours the director of Carvil Witting is Everything and Where's by Roy Cohne.
Welcome back to Fast Politics, Matt.
Thank you great to be here.
Thank you so much for coming on.
I really wanted to have you on because besides your incredible Carvel doc which everyone should watch it is really fun, is just awesome, you have done a bunch of other movies and also including a really brilliant Roy Cohen movie.
But I was hoping you would talk for twenty minutes or two. But who's scanting about a person that I knew? But you really knew Gorby.
Daal Loadly, you know, it's funny. Your mam, I know, was friends of Gorbie Dolls and they were literary stars at the same time, and growing up, I thought he was just extraordinary and I started reading his books when I was very young, and he was the type of public intellectual who was always on The Big Cavage Show and the Johnny Carson Show. And this was an era
that I really miss in American cult. Sure me too. Yeah, And I encourage listeners to google Habits shows with the Doll and Mailer and even Capodi and Buckley and all these guys. Were always beating publicly, but the conversation compared to today, was so high blinded, and I think the doll was the highest minded of them all. I would have been jealous of someone like you who was born into having a Gorvi doll in your living room at
a cocktail party when you were six years old. Always thought, Oh, if only my parents would get Gorvy doll over here. That's how strange a child I was.
Tell me how you met Gorbidal, Well.
That's what I'm getting at it, because it eventually what I realized is that medium on my own power was better than you know. Not to take anything away from your pixy.
Dutch sprinkle childhood, please do.
The medium on my own power was even more thrilling. I had been a writer for Vidanity Fair. Graydon Carter tapped me at a thirdly too young an age to write features for the magazine, and it was the ultimate candy store of journalism at that time. And Vidal being one of my cultural and literary heroes, he wasn't writing
for Vanity Sayer. He was writing all these for the Nation and the New York Review of Books, and I thought he should be in Vanity Sayre and I'd ask grading part of if I could approach him, and I did. He had a piece that he wanted to get published, and it was on It seems prescient now, and many of the teachers that he did with me, editing them in vanity fairs, seemed really prescient. Now we fall on
the destruction of the Bill of Rights. He was really on to this moment we're having in this country, a generation or more ahead of when it came to pass, which was that the Bill of Rights was being trashed and that there was going to be an uprising of populism in the country because it was becoming an oligarchy and a kleptocracy. And I well, that piece was in
the mid nineties. But if you go back and look at the collective essays of gord Udal, which there are many volumes, there's one called United States, which is the big kahuna that I recommend that highly. You'll see essays from the seventies and eighties called the Day America ran out of Gas, and even an entire volume of essays called the Second American Revolution, which was mostly about or predicting a moment like this, And he frequently called for
and I think tried to create a constitutional convention. I think he was part of an organization with doctor Spock, the pediatrician, not the fictional character of Star Trek, and some other lefty activists to do a new constitutional convention, which this is now being talked about from the populace right mostly I'm hearing about it now, But Vidal was
onto that. But basically he was kind of holding his deathoscope up to the nation, the body politic, and he was hearing bad things and he was warning about them constantly, and that was I think one of the great contributions that he made. He was a very strange blend of and ROOSEVELTI in upper class liberalism with some strange of conservatism and populism as well. He kind of made his own brew that way. But boy did he have traction. I mean, he was on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carrson.
He sold millions of copies of books, both historical fiction and kind of experimental nonfiction. He was a household name. He was incredibly glamorous. And then the last thing I'll say before about it back to you is that he was gay. And he was very ahead of his time in being a voice for what then would have been called,
I think kind of creepily gay lib. It got shortened to gaylib at the time, but it actually termed that he didn't like gay liberation, but it was about It was about human rights and equal rights, and not so much gay marriage, which I don't think he would have been in favor of, which is why I think he's very out of fashion today, which is something I will want to talk about with you because I think that's really important. I think my diagnosis as to why is
that he was the ultimate unidentitarian. He did not really think identity politics, which didn't have a name when he was in his prime, was a good thing, and that included being tagged as a gay writer or a gay thinker just didn't appeal to him. He thought that homosexuality was just a normal fact of human nature and didn't need to be called out or demagogue as an identity, that it was just a fact of life. He was very ahead of his time with that, but he's also very out of that right now.
Yeah, it's interesting.
I actually wanted to talk to you about how out of fashion he is because almost all of those public intellectual of that time are out of fashion Mailer.
I'm trying to remember who else we were just talking about.
Well, you know, Capodi wasn't really so much a public intellectual, but they were all grouped together that they were literary superstars. And the more public intellectual ones that got on TV were Janet Lanner, who was of corresponding for The New Yorker. Sometimes journalists, new journalists such as gay to Lead, Tomwold were all on TV blogging their book, but they were talking about ideas and talking about politics.
Yeah, for sure.
But Mailer and those guys, those public intellectuals are sort of lost to history. And if you think about I was actually watching the Best of Enemies, there really is a sense in which those kind of people, they're just no longer read the same way, right.
Correct, It was a species. It was perfect for the mid century muscular network universe that twentieth century, the late twentieth century people were raised in That's the way it was. That's why publishing and network television were so strong and wildly profitable because the way they were organized at that time, it wasn't atomized. They were programmed basically by gatekeepers and editors, and their books were acquired by these publishing houses, and
there was then the greed upon agenda. And you can argue with whether the greed upon agenda mid century United States was exactly perfect, but I would argue that the people that took their role seriously in that, at least from my perspective, as I'm on the left side of the spectrum, and there were figures on the right as well who were gave up. And plenty of oxygen blamed by Buckley Junior, et cetera. Not on They're Barring, which took place in the pages and on the airwaves of
the legacy media, was just epic. It was really like now it seems like Jurassic Park, but it was really like the Land of the Giants. And you know the last one, by the way, I want to call out the title of the movie that you referenced, and the Best of Enemies, which is a movie by Morgan Neville, a friend of mine, which is very good and I'm a talking head in it, kind of standing up for Vidal and Vidalism, and I'm proud to be in that film. Worth watching, and you'll see that era depicted in it.
But I think the last person who was of that ill is Christopher Hitchin, who died more than ten years ago now I think just ten years ago, and he was very related to Vidal. In fact, it was Hitchin who formally introduced me to Gore because Christopher and I were colleague. Then he's there and Vidal had This is actually a fun literary fact about a feud. Vidal had kind of annoyed Hitchins, his successor, and made a big
deal about it, and people did things. Then he called him the Dafahn and said that he would take the doll's place when he passed from the stage. That was Vidal talking about him. Well, that was not going to work because some of them. An ego as big as Gore had immortality, I think as part of his plan and the idea that Christopher was out there getting more attention at times than he was, and also he was, you know, at least twenty years older than Christopher wasn't
going to sit well. Ultimately. I think those of us who knew them both saw this at the slow motion car accident that was unfolding our eyes. Then they they had an epic falling out that took place in the pages of Vanity Fair, where Hitchens wrote a takedown piece of his former idol call in the headline was vidal Loco, which was the play on the Vita Loca song of
the moment. Sort of embarrassing it now to talk about that got a lot of attentions for the last gas of the time when these two people would spar But another point I want to raise that's absolutely baffling to me. And I love Christopher, and I think Christopher the treasure,
but Christopher Hitchens is not out for some reason. The message of Hitchens and the persona of Hitchens really clipped with millennial and gen On Neilson's gen Z. And I think the thing that would hurt orvide all the most if you were around today is to know that someone in their twenties actually knew who Christopher Hitchims was and said the name Lord. He is trying to summon a lightning bolt from above or below to send it back to the living world, to show us how leasy is about that.
Yes, and I have to say, as someone who knew Gore not nearly as well as you, that sounds one hundred percent right.
But it's also that was how my grandfather was, That was my mother was.
That you know that that kind of literary shot was such a typical outgrowth of those people's egos.
Yeah, and you know, I'm having a thought based on your thought right now. I think in a pre social media age, it was the precursor. It was sort of like the err version of picking fights on Twitter. Yeah, and they just had to do it on a much bigger stage because that was the stage that they had. And someone's doing a PhD thesis on all of this right now.
Oh good, excellent, It'll be eager to read it.
One of the things I'm struck by with Gore was that he was both very, very very left wing, probably as left wing as say come, but also very much a product of the Washington d C.
He grew up in. Will you talk about that?
This is a deep thing here, PM Black, and has to do with the entire scope of twentieth century politics. Really. He was the grandson of a populist senator who was one of the first senators of Oklahoma, Tomad Pryor Gore, and he was very proud of this fact, and he used it to launch his pedigree in that period. He was the Gorvidal you have to realize, was byronic, almost like a modern Lord Byron. He was very handsome and so brilliantly spoken, made for television and radio, a literary master.
And it came from a grand upbringing.
Too grand, but relatively impoverished, which is even better, right he marketed all of this. He was step in to Jacqueline Kennedy o'nassis because they shared the same stepfather, who was a very wealthy.
Man, jack Black Bouvier.
Right, well, no, that was Jackie's father, but the mutual stepfather was you B alcin Claus, who was compared to a standard oil fortune. And Jackie's mother married Aufkins laws and with Janet alkin class. But the previous Missus Alcinclaus was Nina or Vidal, who was Gorvidal's very beautiful mother who was a DC socialite in a flapper in mid century.
And out of this background comes this matinee idol looking World War two veteran who surprised the world with a galar first novel called Willa Waugh in forty eight, I believe when he's eighteen or nineteen years old, well, one of the first war novels. And that's where Mailer made his name. He had a war novel The Naked and the Dead I believe was that one. But then something very significant occurred, and this was his genius. And this is why I think that's unfair that he is out
of fashion right now. In nineteen forty eight, I think was the third book. The first one was earlier forty six, and that was called The City and the Pillar. I highly recommend it. It was, believe it or not, that late in the game, the first novel in English to have an openly gay storyline to it. So the protagonist of the book is homosexual, so they would have said then. And it was a bit of a romong the Clay. It was sort of a bit of a biographical novel,
and it shocked the world. I mean, it was planted like a bombshell, and Vidal became infamous as this kind of out a pretty boy in nineteen forty eight and was on all the bestseller lists. But it was sort
of prescribed as a dirty book. This is where I think he and Erica Jong your mother might have had some ominality in their literary relationship, because no one quite knew what to do with her with fear of flying, If I'm correct, it was sort of like it's bestseller, done with dueled by its naughtiness, it's dirty bookness, but it was also intrinsic to it, and it was also regarded as a really good book too, So we'all had had that happen to him some twenty five years before
twenty years maybe, And he becomes infamous, and this is the best kind of thing if you can manage it. It's very Lord Byron. Really Byron was infamous in his own day. And then right at the you know, on cute TV happened and he becomes a TV writer and a TV personality on the talk shows of the era, and he become this kind of eybrid hop literary hero TV star, but also really respected intellectual who was also
an essayist and then later a playwright. He did it all, and he was a self made person who made all his fortune on his own, even though he had the pedigree. He was a political candidate. He ran for Conference and Senate, both unsuccessfully, with very close friends with Jfpa and part of the early days of what was called Pamelot the Kennedy port all seems so ridiculous now.
And.
Another feud with Bobby Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy took Bobby's side, and he had a big falling out with that part of his family, and he never let anything go to waste. He publicized that and wrote about it, and then turned on them violently and wrote this hilariously evil, cruel essays, all the while making good points about the dynasty of the Kennedys. And these things were on the cover of Escor magazine at the time, and then they were all
repurposed in these best selling essay collections. But why this guy's out of fashion? I think it really has to do with the vogue for identity politics. I think if you look at the positions he took about the what it meant to be an American, which was an obsession of his, it was really not about identity politics. And it, oftentimes the discussion of same sexuality, as he would have put it, led because he was one of the few people's willing to talk about it publicly, and he was
saying that homosexuality was negligible as a trait. It was the difference he said the son. In fact, the CBS special about homosexuality that was hosted by Mike Wallace and aired, I believe it was called the homosexuals. I encouraged people to watch it on YouTube. It's kind of creepy with Mike Wallace.
I bet that's insane.
Grilling Goorvidal on beIN full lifestyle, and he does famously to all that his sexuality or anyone's sexuality, and the devian from the norm, which he called the heterosexual dictatorship, with only the difference between blue eyes and brown eyes. People didn't want to hear that.
It's such an interesting and important story of Gorvidal.
Hopefully he will come back into fashion at some point.
Thank you so much, Matt.
Thank you.
That's it for.
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