Jon Allen, Stacy Schiff & Barbara F. Walter

sees as our democracy hangs by a thread. But first we have NBC News is national political reporter Jonathan Allen. Welcome to Fast Politics, John Allen, Molly John Fast, friend, countryman. You've been in Congress for two days now. How many times have you seen Kevin McCarthy lose the speakership. I think we're in eight now as we speak. I feel like it's an advertisement for what Nancy Pelosi did. I mean, I remember reading some reporting that said, you know, she

would handle people for their votes. She would call them and email them, and she had someone that the grandmother called them. You know, she was very like on it. I think this is a case for that kind of whipping. On the one hand, it does show how effective and efficient Nancy Pelosi was. On the other hand, it shows that Kevin McCarthy is the first person in a hundred years to have to go to a second ballot, much less than eighth ballot or ninth ballot, or however many

we might get to it. So, on the one hand, Nancy Pelosi effective and efficient. On the other hand, Kevin McCarthy not just ineffective and inefficient in the moment, but at a historic level of the last century. Yeah, when he said on Monday, he said, you know, he explained to us in the viewing public his plan, which was just to make everyone vote until they voted for him,

not an effective plan. Huh. Well, I mean it's possible that we could see some retraction, we could see some you know, we could see some erosion in the group

of people who are opposed to him. But the problem with that is the people who are opposed to him are the more fanatical, the more extreme, so they are much more likely to take things to extremes, and the people who are behind Kevin McCarthy are much more likely to look around and say, like, maybe Kevin, if you can't do it, maybe we should look at somebody else and see if there's someone who can do it. I mean,

what is it like on the floor. I mean, this is like, in my mind the dream of all backbench congressmen. I mean, you see congress people you haven't ever seen on television on television and they get their moment of fame where they get to stand up and talk about really quickly for the good of the republic, or you know, they shout out in Leroy Jenkins fashion a vote for speaker and then they go back away and you've never seen them until the next volte. But yeah, I mean

it's true, and um, what's fascinating also right now? You know, I was in the House gallery on Tuesday when the voting started and for the first couple of votes, and you know, so when you're in the House gallery you can see what's going on the floor, but for the first time, viewers at home are really getting a feel of what's going on behind the scenes because there are no rules governing what c span and the cameras in the chamber can show. Will you explain that a little bit,

because that's really interesting Right now? The House doesn't really exist. That is to say, because members are sworn in after a speaker has chosen, there are no members of Congress. There are no rules for this Congress. They are operating on sort of the history and precedent of how you have speaker votes, and really the only thing that they can do is either vote or adjourn until a certain time where they come back and vote, and until that happens,

they won't have rules. And because they don't have rules governing what can happen in the chamber, cameras that are in the chamber, controlled by c SPAN, can basically zoom in on whatever they want. Usually when there are rules in the House, they are limited in what they can do. They're limited in what angles they can show and who they can show on the floor. So viewers at home we're getting a much more intimate story about what's actually going on in the house floor when you see Matt

Gates and Alexandre Acasio Cortes conferring with each other. I asked her about that the other day, I said, what does she say? She said, I was fact checking Kevin McCarthy. So McCarthy will tell Republicans, hey, if you don't do X then the Democrats are going to vote for me or whatever. And then you know, so Gates is checking with Casio Cortez to find out what it is the Democrats are really going to do or not do, and she's, you know, apparently according to her, giving him some information

about that. Today you could see Kevin McCarthy, you know, sitting down with Andy Clyde, one of the Calcitran Republicans, for a very long period of time, you know, just chatting him up, looking like he was trying to win over a vote. You don't get to I mean, you get to see that if you are a reporter who sits in the gallery above the House Chamber in you know, important vote situations. Sometimes you see stuff like that. Viewers at home very seldom good to see it. So that's

so fascinating about what's been going on this week. So it is this situation was c SPAN where c SPAN is not being ruled right now by the speaker, correct, Whereas it is typically limited by the rules of the House, which you know, the speaker puts forward a package of rules once there's a speaker, and then the and then the House votes on it, and you know, typically the majority party supports the rules and the minority party votes against them because the rules are designed to help the

majority party and harm the minority party for the most party, and one of the rules that's you know you see every two years limits what media can be in the galleries and what those media can do. So let's talk for a minute about where this goes. Now we have this incredible fracas going was that the last vote where mad Gates nominated Donald Trump, that kids did vote for Donald Trump after saying yesterday that it was Gates's word, not mine. Sad that Donald Trump had come out so

hard in favor of Kevin McCarthy. So, I mean, they're they're not dominating a lot of different people. They don't expect to win. What Lauren Bobert said she wanted was that she wanted a one person mandate for this rule to vacate the chair, so that would make it completely impossible to be speaker. I thought that McCarthy actually acquiesced to that though. Yeah, that that offers on the table now to go from five votes to one vote to

make a motion to vacate the chair. The House would still have to have a full vote to the House, but you can imagine that if Lauren Bobert wanted to vacate the chair, wanted to get rid of the speaker, and brought that motion to the floor and there was a vote on it, that all of the Democrats would support her in that right, right, and then Kevin McCarthy would be just a couple of votes away from getting

thrown over the side, right. And you know, if you have to continue to have those votes over and over again, even if you're winning them, it's deeply embarrassing and it you know, it's a tactic that could be very obstructionist in terms of trying to get legislation passed. If it had a sort of a privilege, meaning that I had to be brought to the floor within a certain time period.

You could see that being used to prevent the House from acting on things like ending bills or raising the death ceiling to you know, retain the full faith in credit with the United States. So we have these twenty and one has now started to it was nineteen and then you had one who was this abstaining who's now and these are sort of the crazies, And then you have Keem Jeffries who keeps winning, I mean not winning enough to win, but he does get Democrats continually vote

for him. There's no world in which Republicans could like accidentally make Keem Jeffreys a speaker. It could conceivably happen, but they would immediately undo it. Okay, but it is like amazing, right, I mean, he does keep winning even though he's losing. It will not happen. Republicans would have to vote for Jeffreys for that to happen. That's not

gonna happen. So I think one of the things that's really important to remember about the speaker vote, unlike a lot of elections, is it's not that you need a plurality of votes. If that was case, like Kim Jeffreys would already be the speaker. Only need the most votes out of the You need a majority of those who are present and voting to eight unless you lose some people, and then it goes down right right, meaning if there are people who vote for someone or something that is

not an actual living human, those votes don't count. So if someone votes for Mickey Mouse or for Dwight Eisenhower, their vote doesn't count. Or if people vote present, those votes come out of the denominator or if people are

simply absent, those votes come out of the dominator. So it would be possible if trying to do the math here, if you know, if roughly a dozen or so Republicans didn't come to the floor, it would be possible for Keevan Jeffries to when I think of his thirteen or fourteen Republicans you know basically didn't vote, it would be possible for Jefferies to win a majority of those voting. But it's inconceivable to me that that would actually happen,

and if it did, it would be immediately corrected. I mean, the body is designed for the majority party to run it. We think that this is Steve Scolease's moment, and he, as he once referred to himself forever to live in infamy, David Duke without the baggage, so hardly a unity candidate. But do you think this is the moment in which

this is his moment? Look, I mean, if you're Scholz, you're in a box, which is that if you were to go out there and start whipping against Kevin McCarthy and stand for nomination against Kevin McCarthy, like McCarthy will get more votes than you wrote, So if you're Scalize, you have the same deathlock that they're in. Right, Well, you have to wait until people get desperate for another candidate.

You have to wait until McCarthy, you know, basically withdraws, at which point then you see if Steve Scalise has two both which he may or may not, but he has to be very careful because as long as he's not campaigning for this job, and he has seen to be loyal to McCarthy, then there's a possibility that McCarthy

withdraws and McCarthy's people go to Schleize. If Scleaze is seen its screwing with McCarthy, then there may be some McCarthy people that decided to screw back with them, right, and that could end up in a hundred and fifty four votes. Probably not, though, I mean eventually people are going to be like this is because right now it showed endures Congress. Right, it neither exists exists nor or

doesn't exist, right, I mean, that's right there. It exists in the sense that there is certainly there's a Senate,

although they're not meeting either right now. And then there's a house with a bunch of Congress people elect like they are not members of the Congress yet, and they don't have the rights of members of the Congress yet, And so you know, it is a body that is operating without really without any structural rules and sort of depending on everyone's civility to observe the sort of two basic rules that they've had, which is that you keep voting until you have a speaker, or you adjourned for

a specific amount of fun. And even those votes are getting hard for McCarthy to win, to be able to adjourn for some hours, right, right, I saw that they were having some trouble getting the numbers last night, and now they're going to have to adjourn again today, right, At some point, you would expect that to happen. Although in theory they could just keep the House floor open in perpetuity and keep voting. Wouldn't that be just a

nightmare for all parties involved. Well, it will exhaust people, which would mean that one level House Republicans who support McCarthy may get cranky with him earlier. On the other hand, and maybe that there are some Democrats at three o'clock in the morning that decide they don't really want to show up you know, McCarthy can't count on that, so it has to be sensitive to the needs and desires of the people who support him, and some of them will want to go home at night. How do you

see this going predict for may? I wish that I could. You know, it's one of the rare times where you're watching a vote in Congress and it's unpredictable what will happen. And this, by the way, this is the one I was talking to somebody used to work from Nancy Pelosi today and they said, you know, she would never bring to you know, something like this the floor without having the votes already. And I was like, but this is the one vote where the leader doesn't have any control

over when it up. I meaning the Constitution provides for the you know, for the House to meet at noon on January three, and the first thing that's for them to vote for speaker. So you know, if you're the leader, if you're the speaker of the House, most legislative issues you can choose, you know, when to bring it to the floor. You don't bring it to the four vote.

In this case, McCarthy had really no choice, right He's been running for speakers since two I mean at least so he's had plenty of time, but just to that small point of like in this particular case, like there was a fixed it's very unusual fixed date and time for a vote, he was not ready by that deadline. Even as he tries to make up for having missed

that deadline, he's not getting it. It's like it's like a student who misses a test, right or like you know, and then shows up they're like, all right, well I got all this extra homework. Teachers like yeah, that's not gonna do it, and come back with another set of homework. What about this Now that's not going to do it? Just keep coming back. I mean, where do you see

this going? If you have to predict it? And by the way, I will make fun of you for this if it's not right, So go, yeah, that's why I'm not predicted. Well, I don't want to be the scorn and derision. Doesn't it seem that every passing day, Steve Scalise looks a little more likely or now, yes, it is more likely with each passing day that the people who support Kevin McCarthy work in another direction and Scalize makes the most sense because he's the person who's won

the most votes in a leadership lestion before. Right, he's number two, correct, so he's the he's the most obvious choice. But if there was a very obvious choice, that person want to come forward already. If that happens, do you think that Kevin McCarthy will stay in Congress, you know, just to fill out his term and then leave. I mean that will be so traumatic for him. Yeah. I think nobody will think about Kevin McCarthy. Ever, again, doesn't when the speakership, and I think he knows that, which

is why he's continuing to have this fight. I mean, like like outside make money, you know, as an advisor to somebody or you know, like a pseudo lobbyist. You know, they will be hired as you know, somebody to give advice and counsel to some lobby infirm and so you won't actually have to register, but will make his zillions of dollars trying to influence his former colleagues. Right, makes sense, well, very moral and ethical. One last question here for you,

my friend John Allen. These nineteen or twenty holdouts, a lot of them are Trump supporters. Lauren boeberd Andy Biggs, Matt Gates. Trump did make a full throttle and toursement of Kevin McCarthy. What happened? So this is amazing mine. So Trump has been working these guys for quite a while behind the scenes. He's that conference calls, that one on one and he's been trying to get them to

vote from McCarthy. My colleague Garrett Hate from NBC called him on Tuesday and said, you know what's gonna have. McCarthy's gonna and Trump said, We'll see what happens, which was very very quickly got out of People are like, wait what, and McCarthy were like, wait what. And McCarthy had gone to Trump like a month after Trump had done the insurrection, you'll remember, Yeah, he had pretty much given up everything for Trump. He bent all the knees.

And so there's this reaction to Trump's sort of weak sauce like we'll see what happens with McCarthy kind of response, and then Trump comes out Wednesday morning, He's like, full throated endorsement of Kevin McCarthy. Then all the people that were voting against McCarthy, as you point out, like all friends of Trump, all big allies of Trump, stayed against

Kevin McCarthy. They were unmoved completely, like Donald Trump had no ability to influence them on the next vote or any of the subsequent ones that we've seen so far. I talked to Ralph Norman, a congressman from South Carolina about it yesterday. He said he was on a conference call a couple of weeks ago with Trump and like just doesn't see I I with him, and he said, basically, this isn't Trump's fight. I respect the guy, but like this is an internal house matter and I'm not listening

to a lot it. You saw Lauren Bobert go esterday on the House floor and kind of shame Trump and say, look, look, we're your friends, You're my favorite president. We should be calling telling us to sit down and shut up, or to knock it off. You should be calling Kevin McCarthy and telling him to withdraw. So all these people. And the thing is Trump has to kind of walk this careful line because he needs this set of people in the House. He needs these allies to be out there

for him as he seeks the presidency again. He can't afford to alienate the House. Freedom carcass Well, and I think he also sees that he's diminished. I mean it's obviously frustrating, con deeply he's had. You know, he's been out campaigning for president now, and I say campaigning for president. By that, I mean he's been in more alago campaigning for president for about six weeks now. You couldn't tell

that he's campaigning for president. The most newsworthy thing he's done since the election was to have a meal with Kanye West and the white supremacist Nick Flente, which did him. I mean, everything has been going poorly for Donald Trump, you know, arguably since the election, but certainly over the last course of the last six weeks. And then you know, he goes to show how cluentially can be on behalf of McCarthy, just the opposite. So interesting, John Allen, thank you.

Will you please come back? I will come back any time you wrest every time you w Yeah for New Year's Best. Stacy Schiff is the author of the Revolutionary Sam Adams Welcome Too Fast Politics. Stacy Chiff, thanks so much, mallam, delighted to join you. Well, I'm so happy to have you. And you know we don't have that many Pulitzer winners. You have a lot of people with some pretty lens or insights. However, right, but I wanted to talk to you about your new book, which is called The Revolutionary

sam Adams. How did you get here and why did you write this? And tell us how you got involved with this. A couple of things came together. It was if any explanation is required, I would start searching for some kind of solid ground. I think, like many of us, I was thinking a lot about what democracy was and

how we had got where we were. And in the course of that I had realized that Samuel Adams made a cameo in my Ben Franklin book, and I had never really given him much thought, and went back to read about him and was struck by how much his contemporaries call him out as the man of the hour, to a man may write him down as the most active, the earliest, the most persevering man of the revolution, the father of the revolution, and yet he has largely been

lost to us. So it was a large part that sense of you know, how did we end up where we are? How instrumental with this man? And then topping that off was my was my sudden sort of realization of my own ignorance in that we all know that Paul Revere jumps on a horse in April of seventeen seventy five, but I anyway had never really thought about where he was going. And where he was going was to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock they were about that they were about to be arrested or assess snated

by British forces. And so it was sort of an attempt to bail myself out of my own lack of understanding that I finally fell down the Samuel Adams rabbit hole, which is not an unhappy place to be during these years, right, I mean, what did you learn? Well, you know, what you learn very quickly is that he essentially writes what you could today call the Bible of civil resistance theory.

I mean, this is ten years before the real shots are fired, the ten years that precede seventeen seventy six, or the twelve years, depending on how you count what John Adams would refer to as the revolution in hearts and minds. It's the revolution in thinking that precedes the revolution in fighting. And what's surprising is, first of all, the entire sea change that is affected in those years. How messy and nonlinear. Those years are it really is

a protest movement. It precedes by fits and starts. And how essential one person, and in fact, one fairly flawed person can be in affecting that change of that's really interesting. Why was he flawed? Well? I think that you could say that the attributes that served him so well for those dozen years basically to some degree turn against him. He's undeviating, he's unwavering, his remarkably resolute, and proceeds with a kind of sort of serene confidence in the essential

righteousness of his convictions. And that's all very true, and that serves him beautifully and serves country beautifully. But after the Revolution, when the country is being put back together, those same attributes I think fail him. I think that there is a rigidity, in a funny way in the thinking that came in very handy when it was time to upset the apple cart, and come in less handy when it's time to establish a government. I mean, why

was he lost to history? He somewhat erases himself from the record, and part of that is simply protection of himself and his colleagues, given their seditious activities. John Adams leaves us this sort of horrible account of Samuel Adams sitting in Philadelphia in front of his fire, feeding his papers to the fire and Huntedham says to his cousin Samuel, you know, don't you think you're maybe overreacting a little bit? And Samuel Adams response that he doesn't want any of

their friends to suffer for his negligence. So there's really enough tempt to make this, you know, the no fingerprints school this, you know, this is treason at this at this juncture, no name should be mentioned. It's very important that that everyone that does be a collective responsibility, and that and that no one particularly be able to be

singled out. So some extent he erases the record. He's an extraordinarily modest man, and there is a sense that he prefers to be in the wings Throughout much of this history. He very much likes to promote people like John Hancock who prefer the spotlight. And in the end, as I said, he his popularity wanes, and he is somewhat tired by criticism of his former colleagues after the Revolution, and for those reasons as well as the fact that

he stood for a somewhat set of antiquated principles. I mean, he really stands for a kind of purity and simplicity as opposed to the more commercial, more opulent nation that is kind of racing ahead of his somewhat antiquated ideals. He's also not a federalist, so he really falls out with um with much of the popular with much of the popular feeling post revolution. But he is related to

two of the presidents, correct. He is actually the person who will recruit John Adams, who's a little over a decade younger than he, and in fact, John Adams is first accounts of him. John Adams really leaves us some of the best descriptions of Samuel Adams, and John is

utterly starstruck by his cousin. He goes on about his and in a way that defies I think our standard sense and so far as we have one of Samuel Adams as this kind of hot headed, rabble rouser, John is very clear about the fact that he's a man of great affability, very decorous, very charming, much air udition, as he puts it, exquisite humanity. He's a very prudent thinker and a very calculated, shrewd tactician, but he's also just an immensely sort of sweet and charming man. Like

are the people remembered by history the blowhards. I think there's no question that history belongs not so much to the blowhards as to the eloquent. Certainly, John Adams survives as well as he does. I mean, obviously he's a bit of immense accomplishment, right, but he's not a blowhard. A lot a blowhard, right, but wrote the best letters. And I think those of us who worked a lot in the eighteenth century possibly overstate John Adams is roles

and things, rolling things because he's so eloquent. But yes, I mean a really great way to go down in history would be to grab the microphone. That won't surprise any of us, right, yeah, I mean it's just interesting because you think of the Adams is their their own sort of weird self loathing. I always think of that family. You know, there's that real sort of purit and modesty, which doesn't come in handy when you want to be

remembered by history. I mean I should add also that much of Adams's work is work that he publishes under pseudonyms, and you know he's a master of propaganda in the press, and he's writing under at least thirty, if not more, pseudonyms, So that too, I think, contributes to it's difficult to connect him sometimes to his work because pseudonymous writing was the nature of editorial writing or political writing in the day. It's very hard, therefore, to credit him with all of

his accomplishments. Interesting, so you think that there are things we don't know. If you add up the pseudonyms that other people have identified and ones that I've newly brought to the table, you come to about thirty or thirty one. I'm sure that we're missing quite a few means. It's difficult because he's often credited with pieces other people wrote, incorrectly credited, and then other pieces are credited to to

other writers which may well have been his. You know, I suspect if you really wanted to, you could feed all of the Boston gazettes of those years through some sort of a I and you could figure out where we've we've lost him. But you know, you can see points where he cribs from his own letters in pieces. We know those articles are his. We know from other people's notations in their in their copies of newspapers that those articles are his, but I'm sure that there are

pieces that have alluded us. Still very interesting, what are the lessons that we can learn from this? I think the greatest run is how essential communication is. This is someone who was able to really just clarify these very large principles and somehow funnel them into this very convincing editorial writing that he does. So there really is just the sense of being able to sort of pull an ambient concept out of the air and articulated in a

way that makes it that makes it almost irresistible. He's able to do something which has a lot of residence today, which is that he unites the elite, unites the well educated. He holds two degrees from Harvard, but is as comfortable in the streets with a bricklayer or or someone who works on the wharves to unite the top and the bottom.

And that sense that the government was unresponsive, that government was in the hands of a very tight oligarchy, is something that he peddles and gets an enormous amount of mileage on and uses as a demonstration close at hand of the tyranny abroad. I guess what I'm saying here is that that sense of inequality and explosive inequality can be is something that obviously we should be paying attention.

It's dangerous when inequality doesn't have its limits. He's really reacting against a sort of feeling of disenfranchisement, a feeling that government is unresponsive because it is in the hand of these political dynasties. And I think that feels very relevant today. It does. How should we sort of think

of him in this pantheon. I suppose that he's the master communicator in the sense that he translates these concepts more ably to the page and to a wider readership than anyone else had done in years where questions of independence were really nowhere on the radar, and is able

to capture the sense of resentment that people had. John Adams tells us that when he and Samuel Adams meet for the first time, which would have been in the early seventeen sixties before the Stamp act Um, they're both agreed that Thomas Hutchinson, then the Lieutenant Governor, poses a greater threat to American liberties than any other man in existence.

So that sense that there is this elite who have too much power in their hands, and that the government has to be redistributed in some way is something with which Adams is deeply dedicated. That's quite interesting. What are you working out next? I have been unable to separate myself from Samuel Adams, so I'm working another up ed about him, and another aspect of the book that I feel like I'd either like to go back and rewrite

or I'd like to expand upon. And since it's easier to expand upon it than it is to go back and rewrite it, That's what I'm working on for now. How fantastic? Can I add one more answer to your question? Please? Please please, when you ask about a modern parallel, Yeah, I think the other piece to which we not paid enough attention is that what there is this explosion of media at the time, and Adams. Adams capitalizes on that in a really almost unfathomably brilliant way. Suddenly there's this

explosion of newspapers. It will leave the crown officers in Boston writhing. You know, how can you govern a town with five newspapers, one of them says, And the fact that you suddenly have papers which are being passed hand to hand read by often nine tenths of the town is which you can write in Boston and publish in Boston, in New York and Philadelphia. A connection among the colonies

on which Adams is very intent from the beginning. You suddenly have this ability to communicate from town to town and from colony to colony. And it's really that effort in which Adams is is hugely instrumental that makes the revolution take off with the speed that it that it finally takes off after the Boston tea party. That's really interesting. You've written so many important biographies. I'm curious if you look back, who are the characters that sort of stick

with you the most. I mean, which one is my favorite child? Wow? Yeah, I wasn't gonna ask that, but you know, the ones they'd come back to you, or like pieces of their lives come back to you. I think that Ben Franklin gets the award for the subject with which you cannot finish because he's so protean and so much a modern man. And even even in writing this book, I always sort of had Franklin at the back of my mind because in many ways he's the

counter example to Samuel Adams. He's abroad for all of these years, and in fact, in Samuel Adams's mind, Ben Franklin is insufficient revolutionary during these years, because Franklin is still intent on holding together with the British Empire. But

I think the answer would probably be Franklin. Technologically speaking, he's so much a man of the future, and he anticipates so much of the modern world and is a master psychologist in much the way that Adams is, but in a way that in the back of your mind, you're watching something happen at the dinner table and you're thinking, oh my god, Franklin, you know, had had an epigraph about this, you know, years ago. So I think it's

Franklin probably carry around with me more tightly than anyone else. Oh, that's really interesting. This was really interesting. Thank you so much for joining us. It was a great delight. Thanks so much. I know you, our dear listeners are very busy and you don't have time to sort through the hundreds of pieces of punitentry tweak, And this is why every week I put together a newsletter of my five favorite articles on politics. If you enjoy the podcast, you

will love having this in your inbox every Friday. So sign up at Fast Politics pod dot com and cut the tab to join our mailing list. That's Fast Politics pod dot com. Barbara F. Walter is the author of How Civil Wars Start and How To Stop Them. Welcome too, Fast Politics, Barbara F. Walter. Thank you very much. It's great to be here. We're so thrilled to have you. I want to talk to you about the book How Civil Wars Start, and I think a very important little

ending on this and how to Stop them. So how do civil wars start? They generally actually start quite slowly. Um usually it's started by a handful of people. They're they're almost always extremists. They're operating on the fringe of society. It takes some years to get off the ground. And while they're doing this, the rest of the country is going about their business. They're not thinking about it, they're not concentrating on it. And then it's usually a series

of events that allows these tiny movements to grow. One of them can be if it's in a in a democracy or kind of a partial democracy, it could be the loss of a series of elections. So you start to get people who had been sort of more moderate becoming more dissatisfied, and then these radicals start to they start to listen to these radicals. Another way these movements tend to grow is if there's some events. It's usually a protest, and the police or the government goes in

and overreacts and reacts to the protesters really harshly. This could have happened on January six. You know, people talk about the Capitol police and how they didn't do anything on January six, and they and they talk about this as a criticism. But for somebody who studies how these movements grow, I actually think that was a gift to the American people because had they responded, and especially if they had responded harshly, all of those insurrectionists with their

camera would have caught this on tape. They would have crafted a narrative around how the federal government is overreaching, how they're how they they hate patriots, and and it's those situations that also allow these movements to grow. That's a pretty interesting idea, right there. I want to talk to you about that. So you think it's sort of like the Archduke fer Nan, right, is that the kind of way that happens. Well, that was the trigger for

World War one. Nobody's ever asked me that quick. Sorry, does it like the archduke Curtain? And that's a little bit of a stretch, But you know, the idea that there's violence that then creates a kind of it's interesting, So is that sort of the is that really you feel like largely the catalyst for civil wars. Here's the challenge that these extremists, these radicals on the fringe have in the early parts of a movement. They are more radical than most people in a country. In fact, they're

more radical even amongst their own population. Every country has people who are, you know, more passionate about an issue or they're willing to fight for something, and people kind of look at them and nod their heads and they say, you know, yeah, they're kind of crazy. We're going to ignore them. But these extremists are constantly talking to the moderates, telling the moderates listen, the government's really bad. You need to pay attention, we need to do something about this.

The country is going in the wrong direction. And again, moderates tend to ignore them. So extremists, if they're going to grow the movement, and that's really hard if they want to, if they want to become something more than just a handful of these guys. They have to somehow convince the moderates that what they're saying is true. And and one of the things that they do is they try to provoke a really strong government reaction to something.

And if the government comes into their neighborhoods or the government starts bashing heads, then this, in some respects provides this evidence to moderate it's that what the extremists have been saying is true. Now, let me give you an example. The Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland had been unhappy with being under British rule forever, since the nineteen twenties. They peacefully protested in the twenties, the peacefully in the thirties, forties,

the fifties, the sixties. They weren't getting anywhere, and yet they continued to sort of try to work within the existing regime. The IRA had been around for most of that time, and they kept telling Irish Catholics peaceful protests is going to get you nowhere. We need to shift to a violent strategy. And Irish Catholics just wouldn't do it. You know. The IRA was saying, the British government really

was never gonna let them be treated well. They were always going to allow Protestants in Northern Ireland to run the show um and and that's just the way it was going to be, and the Irish Catholics didn't believe it. So when Protestants started to get more aggressive about protesters, wh they started going into their neighborhoods and started hitting innocent civilians with their batons, the British government did send British soldiers to Northern Ireland, and the Irish Catholics were thrilled.

They're like, finally, finally the government's paying attention. They can see how undemocratic this is, they can see how poorly treated we are. They're coming here to help us. And there was this enormous hope that things were going to change and that they were going to be proven right

and the IRA was going to be proven wrong. And instead, the British soldiers came in and they started to use um counterinsurgency tactics against the Irish Catholics, going door to door, house to house, dragging men out of their homes and throwing them into prison without trial. And suddenly this radicalized the population. Suddenly they saw that in fact, what the more radical elements of their of their population were staying was true. The IRA now suddenly had the evidence that

the IRA was was saying was true. And you saw a certain portion of just average Irish Catholics support the IRA and and that's when you started to see violence expand. Oh, that's really really interesting. So tell us a little bit about how one stops a civil war, because that, I think is an anxiety that many of us have. Though I think some of us feel a little better after these mid terms, and by some of us, I mean me.

So we actually know the two conditions that really are are very predictive of a country experiencing a civil war. The first is whether it's an innocracy, and that's just a fancy term for a partial democracy. It turns out that full, healthy democracies, places like Denmark and Switzerland and Canada almost never experienced civil wars. It also turns out that full autie prossees the North Korea's, the Saudi Arabia's, the bar Rains of the world, um, they also rarely

experienced civil war. The violence tends to happen in this middle zone, where democratic institutions are weak. They're often in transition, you have lots of instability. These are the times when individuals and groups who want to try to grab power, they take advantage of those times, and you know, oftentimes they'll they'll use violence to try to gain control. Where we are as a country as the most dangerous. Where we were in December of right, Yeah, when Trump was leader.

It since improved, and there are lots of people who had a big sigh of relief when when Trump left office. There were lots of us who were really happy with the mid terms and we kind of feel like, Okay, we're on more stable ground and in some respects we are. Yes, Trump left office, that's a really good thing. January six failed, that's a really good thing. Lots mores, especially young voters, went out to vote and and and all of these election deniers who tried to gain office, many of them

were unsuccessful. But the reality is that our institutions are democratic institutions that have been weakening since nothing has changed there. The Democrats have been trying to initiate certain reforms, but they don't have the votes for it, and Republicans have no interest in reform because as long as they continue to play to a predominantly aging white evangelical Christian base, which is a demographic that's declining faster than any other

demographic here in the United States. As long as they continue to play to that base, they can't win elections. If we are truly a full and equal democracy, that's really quite interesting. So anyway, so go back to what

we can do to get out of it. If an ocracy partial democracy and oh and I didn't I didn't talk about the secon In fact, for the second factor that is a big risk factor for civil war is whether a country is a partial democracy and its political parties are based on identity, if it's political parties are predominantly based on race, religion, or ethnicity as opposed to

political ideology. So if you think about Yugoslavia after the fall of the Soviet Union, when Yugoslavia attempted to democratize rapidly, um, one of the things that that these ethnic entrepreneurs within the Serb and the crow Up community did is they quickly started to build political parties, not over any issue like are you a conservative or a liberal, or communist or a capitalist, but whether you were ethnically Serb or

ethnically crow Up. When you have countries that start to do this, those are also the countries that that tend to have a much higher risk of civil war. So if these are the two conditions inn ocracy and and these ethnically based parties, then you know that gives us two things that we can do. If we strengthen America's democracy.

If we get rid of these undemocratic features like the filibuster and jerrymandering, if we reform perhaps the Senate, if we create an independent election commission to run our elections instead of putting it in the hands of party leaders. All of these things would make our democracy stronger. And again,

stronger democracies don't experience civil war. And if we if our political parties, both of them, both Republicans and the Democrats, were willing to reach across racial, ethnic and religious lines, that would go a long way. The problem is is that we're not seeing really either of those patterns happening. And so you know, usually people ask me, Okay, if those are hard to do, if those solutions are not likely to be implemented in the near term, what can

we do now? And and my answer is is actually that the simplest thing that we can do now the biggest bang for our buck will come from a regulating

social media. The five biggest tech companies in the world are all US companies, and one of the things that we're beginning to find out is that the algorithms that they've developed to keep people engaged with content are disproportionately pushing out the most incendiary material, information that tends to make people feel threatened and scared and insecure and angry. They're selecting out the more extreme material and they're pushing

it out there. One of the effects that's having is not only to increasingly polarize the population, but to increasingly fomen ethnic nationalism, ethnic hatred. And again, if here we have an industry and a media outlet, the only media outlets that are not regulated, we are increasingly seeing that they have all sorts of negative societal effects, and to

date we've done nothing about it. I want to talk for a minute about Elon Musk, because right now as we tape this, we have Richard Spencer, the Nazis whole is hosting a space on Twitter. What do you think the consequences of this kind of free speech absolutism. This is the most generous way to describe what he's doing probably too generous. Explain to us what you think the

problem here is. I'm going to say something provocative, which is I'm less concerned about a neo Nazi going on Twitter and writing things are being interviewed, then I am about the algorithms that are going to take those interviews or take those tweets and push it out to tens of millions of Twitter followers. And I think this is

something that most people don't understand. The tech companies that run these social media platforms, their business model is to maximize profits, and they maximize profits by keeping people engaged on their platforms as long as possible. And they've brought in all sorts of social psychologists, They've run all sorts of experiments on groups of people to try to figure

out what keeps people on their devices the longest. And and they have discovered that we human beings, because we have these sort of you know, old limb big brains that have allowed us to survive this long. Those limbig brains are very very attuned to anything that could possibly be a threat to us. And so when we're in you know, a sea of information, our brains will select out the more negative material, the material that that makes us feel like we we might have to trigger our

fight or flight response. And it's not the rainbows and butterflies. It's not the positive messages, it's not the calming messages. And so if if you're Elon Musk or if you're Mark Zuckerberg and you basically want people on their phones or on their laptops as long as possible, you're going to design your algorithms to pick out this type of material, whether it's true or not, and in fact, whether it has really bad implications for anxiety and depression and teenage

girls or political violence. And that's exactly what's happening now, and it's allowed to happen because there's absolutely no regulation. So you know, have this guy Spencer on Twitter, I don't care. If algorithms didn't exist, you would actually have

to search to find him. It would be work to find him, right, all right, that's a good point instead of just going to your Twitter feed and boom, seeing it right there on top and then scrolling down and if it's a really popular interview, then seeing it again and again and again. Right, that's a good point. And you're doing absolutely nothing to find that it's being pushed to you. You know, it's the same thing. You know, Amazon,

you know they've been tweaking this. But but the bible of the far right is this book called the Turner Diaries. It's a fictitious account of a civil war in the United States, essentially a race based war by white supremacists to take over the federal government. But it's really a primer on and how you would launch a war against a powerful government like the United States. Tynothy McVeigh at pages of the Turner Diaries in in his pickup truck

when he bombed the Federal Building Oklahoma City. And if you look at videos of January six, one of the Proud Boys was was holding up the book when he was being interviewed by a journalist and saying, you need to read this book. The book talks about how you would attack FBI headquarters. It talks about how you would

attack the US capital. It talks about how you would put up a gallows outside the capital so that when you arrest quote unquote arrest traitorous government officials, you could put them on trial for treason and then hang them up on a gallows. It's all there. So in December. I went to Amazon to to purchase The Turner Diaries, and when I purchased it, it'll you know how Amazon recommends, if you like this book, you'll like all these other books. Well,

it was. It was a who's who of white supremacy mysterial. You could buy mind comp by Hitler. You could buy deeply anti semitic books. You could buy I mean, the whole cornucopia of awful material. Now, Amazon, to its credit, right after January six, took The Turner Diaries off its website. You want to purchase it there. I wasn't looking for ten additional books to tell me how how to wage, you know, white supremacy here in the United States. It

was pushed into my feed and that's the danger of algorithm. Jesus, Barbara, thank you so much. I hope he'll come back. I would love to Molly and thank you for being interested, and thank you for everything you're doing. That that's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to your the best minds in politics

makes sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going, and again thanks for listening.