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, and Donald Trump says on stage again that he wants to be a dictator. Take him seriously and literally. We have such an interesting show for you today. The Intercepts Ryan Grimm stops by to tell us about his new book, The Squad, AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution. Then we'll talk to Professor Steven Levitski about why Republicans have turned against democracy.
But first we have.
The host of the Enemy's List, the one, the only, the Lincoln Project's own, Rick Wilson.
Welcome back to Fast Politics.
Rick Wilson, Mollie Jong Fast, How are you this fine day?
Just keeping it going? Unlike the United States Congress, you.
Know, well, unlike the United States Congress, and unlike so many arms of our government these days, you are the hardest working woman in show business.
Well, the bar is very fucking low if we're going to come the Congress.
I've started listening to a lot of podcasts, and I.
Was listening to a podcast that specializes in Congress and is not very liberal. It's very striking them at all if even maybe a little conservative, and they were talking about how this Congress is the do nothing Congress.
Do nothing.
There is a meaningful number of actions Congress could be taking right now that would improve the lives of Americans. But why would they do that?
I mean, come on, crazy talk.
I heard this morning that they're trying to prepare hearings on the Taylor swift syop because you know, if you're the Republican Party and you want to cause yourself enormous agony, you could do one of three things. You could put your dick in a meat grinder, or you could attack this week.
You get I love Rick.
You cannot have Rick on the podcast without the superfluois dick meat grounder joke.
I don't know. It wasn't superfluous though.
I mean, right, just moving us right along.
The attacking tailors is like you're shoving a live wolverine in your pants. It's going to be loud and messy, but it's also got to eventually into nothing but pain and suffering.
So let's just talk about this for a minute. The Republicans in the House, you know, I think they have like a few days left and do nothing Congress before they go out for Christmas, because God forbid anyone should work during any holiday ever. But one of the things they're really working on is they want to open this impeachment inquoy. One of my favorite things is I don't know if you heard, because I have no life, and I listened to c SPAN.
I heard what speaker Mike Johnson was trying.
To get people to vote, and he said, don't vote for this because you believe in impeachment. Vote for this because you believe in the United States Constitution.
So what I have questions? Yes, one of which is what the fuck? I was like, huh wait what.
He's almost slick, that guy, but not quite.
He imagines that he's slick. He imagines that he's some sort of like crafty rhetorical player. But let's be real, other than being inspired by God himself and being told that he's the Moses of our generation.
Yes, I think God actually spoke to him.
I think at least they were having a signal chat with God.
Right exactly.
When you look at Johnson's hubris and that kind of thing, it doesn't match up with his ability to move the ball at all. So far. He is a guy who's walking around with a target on his back. He knows it. He knows that the gates is and all the weirdos are ready to just leap on him and destroy him at the slightest provocation.
But does anyone think that he would be good at this?
I mean, I don't think he got the job because anyone thought he'd be good at it.
Moly. I think that's a really good observation, is that in some ways he wasn't a compromise candidate. He was exactly who they wanted, was somebody who would not resist the train wreck, because remember, what they want is the spectacle. They want the collapse, the chaos, the ugliness, the train wreck, the bullshit. They want all those broken toy moments that you know, if you have a party that has been replaced by a cult run by mad men, right.
And I think that's a really good point. And that's where we're looking down the barrel of So I don't know where this goes next.
I mean, I don't know, what do you think.
Look, they have to do a few housekeeping matters before the end of the year.
The enormous supplemental that would save U. Krayon just a few housekeeping matters.
Whilst I am not a Jim Langford fanboy, he's actually dealing with the White House to work out a deal. The White House wants a deal too, and I think it's important that they try to land something. And believe me, Langford's not doing this without Mitch mca donald's blessing. They're teeing up something that will put Johnson in a very bad spot. But real talk, he has no choice. He have to swallow hard and vote for this because if he doesn't, the rest of the fund stops for the
Republicans in the House. Because even those guys need the supplemental stuff. Even they need it, you know, it's just you don't just as like a like blow it off.
At this point, there are three things in the supplemental that Ukraine funding, Taiwan funding, and Israel funding. So these are the three places where the world is on fire, except Taiwan is to stop the world from going on fire.
If you're a Republican, do you want your Democratic opponent to say my opponent, Republican John Smith is soft on Jina. Yes, he voted also Chinese Communist Party in Jina, right, But.
I also think an important data point here is that this is money that ultimately, right it goes to making more weapons in the United States because we're sending Ukraine our old stockpile, So it's actually money that's going into the American economy.
So there's any number of reasons to do this.
Two thirds of the spend on Ukraine aid so far has been to American defense contractors and American workers who are replacing the old crap we're sending over there. By old crap, I don't mean it's crappy. I think it's just it's stuff that you know. Look, the Abrams tanks were sending over there are things that were around during the First Golf War and they're perfectly good combat operations things.
But now we're building new things to replace them. This is not a bad outcome for this economy, which, by the way, once again, the unemployment rate is now down to three point seven percent as of this Friday, and two hundred thousand jobs were created. Once again, the Biden economy is a healthscape for what's the living in the dead.
Thoughts and prayers to Maria Bartaromo and all the people at Fox and Fox News are going to have to pretend that the economy is bad for another cycle.
By the way, Mawi not to change the subject, but I don't know if you caught the Peter Deucy clip on Friday morning, where he on the White House lawn admitted to a shocked audience back on the Curvy Couch that they'd been seeking to try to impeach Biden for years and could never find any evidence. How did the deep state get to Peter Deucy? My god, does there reach no no limit?
What I love about Peter Doocy is that he's just a fucking moron.
There I said it.
I don't know if you could even call him a moron. It's like an insult to morons to call him a moron.
Yeah, that's a good point. That's a very very good point.
That's a kind of hot take that we at fast politics here we really appreciate. So there's this like last dash to try to save Ukraine. And by the way, the stakes in Ukraine, I mean could not be higher, because I mean, this is what's keeping Russia from just taking over, right.
The idea that we would abandon Ukraine at this point and hand Vladimir Putin to win in a moment that would destroy NATO, and look if you're a Trumper, maybe you want to do that. That would shatter America's reputation as an ally in the European battle against authoritarianism, that would reward Vladimir Putin's war crimes because jd Vance and Donald Trump and Steve Bannon want a side with Putin. If you're willing to do that, you're a loss. You're
a lost cause, you're a lost soul. And the fact of the matter is the same people right now who don't want Ukraine aid. The minute the ukraineate stops and the tanks rolling the Kiev will be screaming Joe Biden so weak you couldn't stop Putin from advanting to you, this is a very dark group of people who who are completely in an alliance with Putin, whether they want
to say it or not. And frankly, some of them were in a more there's a whole like weirdo Republican alliance with Alexander due getting all these strange Russian nationalist types.
Even inadvertently or Edvertony, that crew probably would like to see Vladimir Putin win. But it's a lot cheaper for all parties involved for that not to happen. So the hope, I think is that that doesn't happen.
From what I'm hearing around the feed store, we're getting a lot closer than people want to admit. Which is fine. You know, it's fine. It's Washington doing what actually is supposed to happen in Washington, which is people are negotiating compromises. I know this is sort of an astoundingly dangerous concept for most people, but yeah, here we are.
Yeah, so we have that, and then we have the incredible stuff happening with Hunter Biden.
Hunter Biden.
No one has ever been charged with more things for less stuff than Hunter Biden.
I'm just really terri that this is going to cost Hunter Biden in the electoral swing states this year. Because Hunter's presidential campaign is just getting off the ground, and now that he's going to have these things hanging over him, I just don't know he's going to perform in Arizona, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. It's just a right.
But we'll talk. Let's just talk about this. Does this hurt Biden?
No, let me tell you it's already baked in the cake. The only people that are that would make a decision to vote against Joe Biden because of Hunter. Biden are Trumpers. They were never going to vote for Joe Biden in the first place. But of course I guarantee you we will see a New York Times story the next like seven days. These Democrats were considering Joe Biden, but now because of Hunter, they've dogged the red hat of Maga.
We sat down, We sat down with four in cells, kind a Dungeon and Dragons party.
Those dungeons and Dragons people are liberals. But I mean, I do think it is really interesting. I mean, like, you know, I saw polls this morning on how seventy percent of Americans want action on climate seventy percent, fifty percent of all Republicans. Okay, we're never going to see that, Poul, Right, We're only going to see the poll that says.
Americans think Biden is too old. Right. That's the only pole you ever get to say.
Mm hmm. It's funny you mentioned that because I talked to a friend of mine who a very well meaning activist and a smart person the other day. We're talking about Trump and you know, Trump winning a second term, and she said, you know, my biggest worry is you know at that point, we'll we'll never get a climate bill. I'm like, let me tell you, I love you and everything, but uh, you see, the biggest problem of Trump's second term is not getting a climate bill.
I have some news for you.
You won't even know about it because you'll be in the camp.
I mean really like, that's the biggest.
That's your biggest source of worry about the second Trump term.
Yeah, so I mean that, I think is a really good point. And do you think people wake up on January first? And I are like, oh fuck, because a lot of people don't think Trump's going to be the nominee. I mean, I was talking to someone who's a very fancy media insider who was saying, fifty to fifty, Nicki Haley is the nomination for focks.
And I thought, what.
Happen if the Republican Party were so normal that they would nominate someone like Nikki Haley despite the fact that she you know, her policies.
Saw the chance of that are zero, Like, there.
Is no universe. Let me just let me just go back to this again. There is not a universe in which Nicky Haley, even if she won. Don't like either Iowa or New Hampshire wins the Republican primary. She is behind Trump in the Super Tuesday states, which comprise over twenty five percent of the total on average, by fifty two points. Donald Trump could be caught in public fucking a live goat, and there is no scenario where Nicki Haley suddenly becomes like the anti live goat fucking candidate
and Donald Trump loses. It's not going to happen. People, when somebody who is had by fifty points sixty days out from an election, it's not going to change. This is not how anything works. Nothing happens this way in politics.
So you're saying she has a chance.
Jesus Christ, So oh no, let's be this way, okay, Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina. She's at a distant third in Iowa right now, her numbers are improving, the Santa's are slightly declining. She's still going to place second, only thirty five points behind Donald Trump. She's doing okay. In New Hampshire, she might play second, only twenty five points behind Donald Trump. She's thirty points behind Donald Trump. And her home state. She's at eight percent in Florida, which is a very
big prize on March twelfth. She's sixty points behind Trump in Texas and California on Super Tuesday. Okay, sixty points behind Trump are in Texas and California, and all the Super Tuesday states except for like one or two, are winter take all and the big states are all winner take all. So if you have Trump winning Texas, California, and Florida in March, and if he wins nothing else right there, he's got thirty percent of the vote, this
isn't gonna go like she thinks it's gonna go. You can put all the money into Nikky Hilly in the world you want right now, and I'm sorry, you have basically put your cash on a bonfire. Does it fuck with Trump? Great? Does it make Trump look a little weaker?
Sure?
Okay, none of it, at the end of the day is going to make this outcome any different.
Right.
Sorry. I'm passionate about the subject because I believe you have to hit the monster that's actually out there, and that's Donald Trump.
Yeah. No, I feel like that's a good point.
I also feel like the thing I'm I see so much is that there's so much like media on media violence, and so many of these news cycles are driven by like fantasy, wish cast god yes, holes that were direct by Republican pollsters. You know, I don't think much of the organic stuff, but I don't think much of the news cycle is organic right now.
Oh No, As you pointed out in your article about pulling, I guess a week ago. Now, these are not real events. These are not real things driving the polls. And because reporters look at all the polling aggregation sides five point thirty eight real clear, all those places, Republicans learn you can dump a lot of junk polls into the system to get a media narrative running that every young motor is a band of Joe Biden over Hamas. No, not true.
Every Hispanic voter, no, not true. Black men are all that. No, not true. All those things are happening in small numbers, and they should be concerning. But there's a lot of fundamentals out there right now that put Biden in a very strong position that is being underestimated and simultaneously underreported. But look, Biden is in the middle of a massive economic good news story. It's taking long time to trickle into the minds and hearts and brains of people. But
it's happening. None of these things are easy. The facts on the ground are starting to make it harder and harder for Fox to portray the country as you know, an economic healthcape. It's harder and harder for them to deny that gas prices are down, interest rates are down, the labor market is booming, the retirements are booming, the stock market is booming.
And now we are booming on too far. So Rick Wilson, thank you for joining us. You are the best.
I do my very best each and every day to serve and protect this a great democracy of ours.
Ryan Grim is the Washington Bureau chief of the Intercept and author of the Squad AOC and the hope of a political revolution.
Welcome to Fast Politics.
Ryan, thank you for having me here.
Molly, talk to me about this book.
I want first explained to me why you decided to write this book. I'm not surprised about the topic and why you decided to write it, but I want you to sort of talk us through it.
It's like a sequel kind of to my last book, which was called We've Got People, which ran from basically the nineteen eighties up until twenty eighteen, tracing the kind
of arc of the progressive movement. They like little underdog story, you know, originating with Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition fighting an outmatched battle against the kind of center left wing of the Democratic Party, and then running through Howard Dean really giving birth to the kind of online interaction and the ability to raise you know, small donors to counteract big money in politics, which then really gets turned into perfection by Barack Obama in two thousand and eight.
But then Bernie Sanders in twenty fifteen twenty sixteen exclusively runs basically on the famous twenty seven dollars from his individual supporters, and the book finishes with the squad getting elected to Congress and AOC occupying Nancy Pelosi's office to call for a Green New Deal and strong action on climate change. So the book had a nice satisfying arc
to it. The sequel, I think is much less satisfying, but I think even much more interesting, you know, in some ways, it goes back through the twenty fifteen twenty sixteen campaign to kind of find the origins of many of the debates that we seem to be stuck in a loop on now, and then ends with kind of the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in the mid terms of twenty twenty two, and traces the way that the progressive wing of the party evolved and transformed over
a very short amount of time. Like if you think about what things were like and who Bernie was in twenty fifteen and compare that to kind of where the squad is today, a lot has happened.
So one of the things that I think a lot about is how progressives have actually infiltrated the Republican the Democratic Party oops the Democratic Party in lots of really important ways. And one of them was that Bernie Sanders had real par in the Biden administration when it came to budget.
Will you talk a little bit about that.
It was a surreal moment, I think for Bernie Sanders, somebody who had spent thirty years kind of shouting from the outside and ran a quixotic message campaign in twenty sixteen, Like eventually it caught fire and he started to believe that maybe he could actually win the nomination, And certainly in twenty twenty he was running to win. But he started out just as somebody needs to be out there, you know, making these points so that there's a national
conversation about them. His idea was never that he was actually going to be in power, but to be the kind of chair of the Budget Committee while someone that he likes, John Joe Biden was ushering through one of the biggest transformative agendas at least since the nineteen sixties, perhaps since the New Deal was just a capstone moment for Sanders. For sure, he had never had the ear
of a president before effort, and now he did. And at the same time, Yeah, the kind of rise in kind of celebrity of the squad at AOC in particular, gave progressives a purchase on kind of cultural power that they hadn't really had before either, and that translated into ron Klaan in particular. You know, the chief of staff for first two years really paying more attention to the left of the Democratic Party than basically any chief of staff ever probably.
Yeah, So I want to ask you about that, because it does seem like there were a lot of progressive piece of legislation. Progressors were able to influence the Biden administration in a lot of really cool ways.
I don't feel like we talk about that that much, and I'm.
Always kind of disappointed that progressives don't get more credit for, like we are reopening factors in the United States, right, Like, I mean, one of the things people don't talk about because they think it's boring, so it's not a pole, so you're not allowed to talk about it on television is the Chips Act, right, which is like they go around the goal is you know, if something happens, you won't be getting all of your technological your chips, the
stuff that runs your cell phone and your watch and your.
Car from China. You'll be getting it from Ohio.
And this is like really a kind of tenant of sanders'ism, right, is this fiscal populism where you say, you know, we're going to bring jobs back, but.
Then you actually just bring jobs back. R Trump who says, you know, we're going to put everyone from Mexico in jail.
Is this not talked about because it's boring or is it not talked about because I always feel like democrats are a little scared to say, like we did this, and progressives wanted us to like that, they're worried that something's going to happen to them.
There is still a kind of scared of the progressive shadow element to it.
I think that is real. At the same time, cutting against it was you.
Know, Ron Klayan and the Biden administration's real belief, particularly in twenty twenty one, that the youth vote was very progressive and that the key to unlocking the youth vote was both the Squad and organizations like Justice Democrats, and particularly Sunrise Movement, which I write about in the book. Sunrise Movement had a shocking amount of access to the White House.
Tell us what Sunrise Movement is.
This was a group of kind of left wing activists who came together in twenty sixteen twenty seventeen around the issue of climate, but with a lens toward you know, economic and racial and social justice, believing that all of the kind of big green climate groups that had come before them weren't being confrontational enough, weren't aggressive enough, weren't taking it seriously enough, weren't taking seriously the deep anxieties young people around the world, and that somebody needed to
channel that and their first cycle in business. You know, they endorsed all of the members of the Squad, and they were willing to take a very confrontational attitude toward the Democratic Party whereas the kind of big green groups, you know, the Serah Club and those in that ecosystem you have generally become kind of allies of the democratic establishment.
And so when they decided to occupy Pelosi's office and AOC joined them in that protest, it was a global media sensation because you had the hallways just filled with these sixteen, seventeen, eighteen year olds, maybe some in their twenties, but it really symbolized the kind of rise of this of this climate generation and put the Green New Deal on a map in a way that we may not even fully understand, like Spain implemented a Green New Deal, like they took the name, Germany took it and called
it a New Green Deal lost in translation and sheared of its connection to FDR. But there was a real excitement and energy around this idea that we're going to kind of transform our economy and get away from fossil fuels, and while we do that, we're going to bring jobs back on shore, and we're going to make sure that we created a more just society.
In the process.
And so you would not have expected when this small organization launched that just a couple of years later, they would constantly have the ear of the Biden White House in helping to shape what then becomes later the Inflation Reduction Act.
But progressives have also been very patient with the Biden administration. Like one of the success stories, were not allowed to talk about success stories ever in the mainstream media.
But I won't tell anybody, it'll be our secret.
But one of the success stories about the Biden administration has been that the Biden administration has not been out there fighting with Bernie Sanders or fighting with AARC. And in fact, I mean there have been moments certainly in this administration where Progressives have not been happy, but they've been able to sort of work with the administration as
opposed to you know, on the Republican side. And again I don't want to compare Republicans to Democrats because they've become authoritarian, many of them, so it's not the same. But you definitely see, you know, the Republicans recently got rid of their speaker, right, there hasn't been Dems in Disarrye.
I tell an interesting story that wasn't reported at the time, of a rare way that the kind of you know, super angry the online left the squad and Bernie Sanders, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and the party leadership kind of all worked in unison to make the American Rescue Plan as good as it was and beat back objections from
Joe Mansion. Basically what happened was, if you remember, there was this ridiculous, outrageous thing where the parliamentarian comes in and says, ah, you can't do a minimum fifteen dollars minimum wage through reconciliation. Bernie holds a vote, you need sixty. At that point he doesn't get He only f forty eight, and so there's no fifteen dollars minimum wage.
People are livid.
Meanwhile, you've got Joe Manchin coming in saying these unemployment benefits are too generous, These these checks are going to too many people. You know, we need to trim this back heavily or I'm out of here. Primila Jayapaul, who had developed a relationship with Chuck Schumer over the years, was able to go to Schumer and say, if you cave to Mansion on these demands, the squad is going to walk. They're out of here. And you see the
pressure that they're under like they will walk. And it was the first time in decades that the left, the Progressive Caucus could deliver a credible threat from the left, because usually in the end, the left says, you know, if I don't have X y Z in this bill, I'm against it. But you don't get X y Z and it's still decent bill. So you're like, okay, find them voting for it. And so the left then has no leverage in any of these negotiations. Finally they had leverage.
So Schumer went back to Mansion. He's like, Joe, I can't do this, Like this is what you have to take when it comes to unemployment, when it comes to these other things, or you have to take the whole bill down because we don't have the votes in the House if you get your way, and Manchin thought about it, any caved. And so there is a world in which all of these kind of forces within the Democratic coalition can work together against the kind of center right pro
corporate wing of it. But it's very hard to keep that coalition together because there's so much suspicion. And I hope one thing that this book does is help readers across the kind of democratic spectrum get a better understanding of the kind of AOC wing of the party.
Yeah, that is I think really such an important point. It's certainly what I think about when I think about all the stuff that's going on under the surface, like the docks paddling.
So I wondered.
Also, it does seem like this squad started as a group four had expanded in twenty twenty, added.
Corey Bush and Jamal Bowman in twenty twenty.
Talk me through where they are now.
In twenty twenty two, Summer Lee, who was elected in twenty eighteen to the Pennsylvania State Legislature the same year the squad was elected nationally and she was a Pennsylvania wide story like, wow, look at Summerlee. And also she was elected with Sarah Enamorado, who is now the Allegheny
County executive, so that they've both risen up together. And so summer Lee won despite getting hit with like three million dollars in APAC and DMFI Democratic Majority for Israel money telling voters that she wasn't a good enough Democrat. What I love about that criticism from APAK is not only that they supported one hundred plus Republicans you know, who were insurrectionists. And then after she wins the primary, apag turned around and spent money on behalf of the
Republican so not just Republicans around the country. They even try to get a Republican to beat her in that very district where they were saying she wasn't a good enough Democrat. So none of this is on the level, but not that anybody thought it was to begin with.
As a Jew myself, the whole idea that somehow Republicans are against anti Semitism while supporting a guy who told me I was a bad Jew for voting Democrat because he's an anti semi And that is one of the best anti Semitic tropes you know, is that you know, if you don't vote for Israel, you're not a good Jew.
I mean, it's just sort of mind blowing.
But anyway, the level of anti Semitism that comes out of Trump's mouth is just startling. And when we almost like don't even hear it anymore, it's just so blatant to see them pretending out they're somehow concerned about that. But what Trump says is fine is yeah, it's a
little bit too much to handle. Then you also had in twenty twenty two, Greg Kassar winning an Austin seat, and you know a lot of people consider him kind of squad adjacent or kind of a squad member, and maybe and maybe Becka Ballot, who would be I guess the first white member of the squad if you considered her and so. But now the question is do they shrink radically in size or do they expand in the
face of this. So you've got APEX threatening to spend one hundred million dollars in the twenty twenty four race to knock out as many of these squad and squad adjacent members as they possibly can. That would be the by far, the biggest super Pac spend in congressional history. Though they did come in. You know, they and DMFI and another alley groups came over with forty plus million last time, so jumping to one hundred wouldn't be that out of it.
There's a lot of wanting to primary some of these Democrats because they did not vote.
I mean, I thought it was interesting. I want to talk to you about this.
So there was a vote against anti semitism in the House last week and that vote there some people voted present, a lot of people voted yes. There were some I don't know exactly who voted what, but mostly people voted against anti semitism as well they should of course Thomas Massey voted now. But then there was another vote there Republicans brought up that said anti Zionism is anti Semitism.
Just straight upset it, Yeah, because.
The goal here is not about protecting Jews, right, The goal here is to get to try to make it look like some of these Democrats are anti Semitic.
That's the goal, right, This is bullshit, And so in that vote, this was set.
Up to make people who are progressives on the left look bad. And I just want to sort of speak to that for a minute, because you know these people, I mean, it's a very tough situation there in but this is just yet another target.
Right, right, And you had people like Jerry Nadler coming out and helpfully explaining to the uninitiated it is just I think, as he put it, it's either it's either factually wrong or it's intellectually disingenuous to make this claim, and for some of them it might be both, Like you can't underestimate the amount of ignorance that there might
be over on the other side of the Aisle. But for many of them, it's just completely disingenuous, and like you said, it's not about doing anything about anti Semitism.
In fact, it probably.
Trump voices.
My word to the Proud Boys is stand back and stand by.
Those are not ourn't people the Proud Boys. When you're telling the browd boys to stand.
Books, yeah, you've kind of lost your privilege to say. I think at that point, right, those.
Guys are not friends to the Jews.
I mean, it's funny because it's like my grandfather, Howard Fast Jewish Communist House on American Activities, sent to jail fighting with the certain conservative Jew over like whether we get to be called Jews or not, because you know, we are not Zions. I mean, I believe in the State of Israel one hundred percent and I'm a Jew, but I.
Do not believe that.
Zionism should be connected to Judaism. It's not the same thing, you know, it's conflating two totally different things. And so I just think that, you know, if I have to fucking fight with that same family for three generations, we're.
Fighting with each other by dianu, as we say.
Right, And so going back through the brief history.
When I was read reporting this book, it was interesting to see, you know, how quickly and how dominant this issue became. In January twenty nineteen, that's when Mark Mehlman stood up Democratic Majority for Israel. And Mark Melmon's a
long time kind of APAC advisor. He's also a consultant for the Yaye Lapede, prominent Israeli politician, and he told me that his work against the progressive left in the US was aimed at I'm curious for your take on his rationale was aimed at defeating that Yahoo and his argument was Netanyahu holds up the squad and people like them in America and says, you know, this is why we can't elect somebody like yere Lapede, and you have to stick with me and the far right over in Israel.
This kind of interesting bank shot, which also is kind of an admission that the work he's doing in the US is on behalf of a foreign agent, which is
completely another question. It's like, okay, well, that's interesting. They launched DMFI in twenty nineteen in direct response to Ylan Omar and Rashida Talib being sworn into Congress and josh Gottenheimer, who was kind of connected with no labels and founds the problem Solverri's caucus in the US House makes it his mission to kind of marginalize as much as possible to leave in omar, and so you saw that developing very early and really never taking a break from then up until now.
This was so interesting. I really appreciate you, Ryan. I hope you'll come back.
I would love to.
Steven Lebitski is a professor of government at Harvard University an author of Tyranny of the Minority, How to Reverse an Authoritarian Turn and Forge Democracy for All.
Welcome Too Fast Politics.
Steve, Thanks for having me.
I want to talk to you about what it means to have a political party that no longer believes in the tenants of democracy, because this is something I've observed casually and then I heard you talking about it on c SPAN because I'm very exciting, and it was like, Oh, that's exactly what I have been casually observing in a more intellectual framing. So explain to me a little bit about what that looks like and what these tenants are.
Sure. Well, first of all, I'm so excited that you heard about Sea spit At didn't begin any bit.
It's me. It's just me.
Secondly, this is a really big deal. Democracies cannot survive if one of two parties in a two parties system is not committed to democracy. This is a big problem that I think as a society we have not come to grips with because it's more than just Donald Trump.
In our book Tyranny of the Minority, we argue, drawing on the Great twentieth century put beside this que lens that for a party to be committed to democracy, For us to be able to say that a party is committed to democracy, it needs to do three really basic things. First of all, the party needs to accept the results of elections, win to lose. Needs to unambiguous publicly accept
the results of elections, win to lose. Secondly, party needs to unambiguously renounce and denounce the use of political violence. And third party needs to break completely and unambiguously with anti democratic extremist forces. So parties need to accept elections, they need to reject violence, and they need to break with anti democratic extremists. When Danie and I wrote How
Democracies Died, I was public just twenty eighteen. We wrote it in twenty seventeen, we believed that the Republican Party was still committed to democracy. We thought it'd made a huge mistake in allowing Donald Trump to be their nominee, but that the party was committed to democracy. But since twenty twenty, it's become clear that that is no longer the case. The bulk of the Republican Party no longer checks off any of those three boxes.
So interesting.
One of the things that I think enables people not to see this slide into autocracy that the entire party has engaged in or been victim to, however you want to give them credit, which I do not, is that I don't think and again this is like my own subpositions, but I don't think they got here because they were malevolent. I actually think they got here because they were cowardly. Not that that matters, but I mean, do you think
that's true? And it's like, there's been an important slide since Trump was president, but then it's been worse since Trump has not been president.
On Yeah, it has radicalized, it has gotten worse. I think a lot of us assumed that after the election, especially after January sixteentynty one, that the Republicans would sort of deradicalize or come back down to earth, and that has not happened. I think your basic pre subposition is correct, Molly. It's not malevolence on the part of most Republicans. I think Trump is a is an openly authoritarian figure. But most Republican leaders even today, don't want to kill democracy there.
That's not what they're setting out to do. What they want to do is keep their careers golled. They want to get ahead in Republican politics. That's their job. They have calculated and this is a serious problem, but they've calculated that in order to get ahead, in order to keep their job, in order to aspire to a higher office, in order to maybe keep from getting shouted down by the base or Fox News, that they need to enable Donald Trump. They need to be complicit in this authoritarian urn.
So in the book, in Tyranny of the Minority, we have a chapter on what is called semi loyal Democrats, and this is small D democrats.
Can you explain the difference between small D Democrats?
Just for my dad, A large D Democrat is a member of the Democratic Party. I'm not talking about the Democratic Party. I'm talking about democrats in the sense of are you committed to democracy or not? And a semi loyal democrat is someone who meets all three criteria that I just talked about. Always accept someone, always rejects violence,
always rejects anti democratic extremists. Van Lenz, the Spanish political scientist, use the term semi loyal democrat to describe someone who's a regular politician, not someone storming the capital on January sixth, but rather one of the folks in a suit inside the capital on January sixth, looks, dresses, talks like a regular politician, but is willing to cooperate with condone enable authoritarians. Authoritarians like Trump cannot kill democracy by themselves. They require
accomplices among mainstream politicians. And that is what the vast bulk of Republican leaders, from Mitch McConnell to Lindsey Graham to Kevin McCarthy to Alice stephonic and you can go down and down and down the line. That's what they've done. They have quietly enabled Trump in different ways. They have condoned his behavior, they have protected him. The Senate vote to acquit him after the second impeachment was crucial because he would not be a candidate today had they vote
simply voted to convict him. It's that enabling behavior which
is done. You could say it's political cowardice. There's also an increasing amount of information coming out, and we see this in both Admit Romney's biography that came out several months ago, and also in Chinese book is about to come out that many Republican leaders not only that they fear a primary, or that they fear you know that somebody on Fox News is going to criticize that they actually fear physical retribution if they they take god Trump,
if they voted to convict Trump, for example, or voted to impeach him in the House, they feed, or that something would happen to them or their families, their kids. There is a level of violence percolating the Republican base that is affecting the behavior of Republican leaders. It's fear in a very real sense.
So the original sin here is that quote from the Republican in the New York Times, the unnamed Republican who said in twenty twenty, he's just playing golf. Let's just humor him.
It's not the original sin, but it's one of the later original sense.
They've been committed a sin since he came down the Golden Escape. Yeah right, Oh, you know, take him seriously, don't take them literally. He'll grow in the office. It's not that ads doing this from the very beginning.
Can you talk a little bit about sort of how you got into studying democracy, because it's really interesting.
I'm a political scientist. At my day job is to study Latin American politics. I've been a student of Latin American politics since the nineteen eighties. And I got into this game as it literally as a teenager in college at a time when Central America was in civil war and when South America was just coming out from under the most brutal period of military deputation in that region's history.
And so my introduction to democracy was studying the absence of democracy and the achievement of democracy at great cost in Latin America in the nineteen eighties.
And I learned my.
Teachers, my professors, and their colleagues were people who had directly suffered at friends and cousins and brothers and sisters, who had been exiled and jailed and tortured, in some cases disappeared in life in America and I learned from them directly what it was like to lose a democracy, and that those lessons, for whatever reason, stuck with me my whole career, and I've been a student of democracy and committed to learning how to preserve a democracy, how
to not lose a democracy again my whole career. What I did not expect was that I would be studying this in the United States and I would be talking about this in the United States. It's only in twenty fifteen,
twenty sixteen, maybe a little early. I think we saw glimpses of this with the Tea Party, but really with the rise of Trump, I started to see my co author, who studies the breakdown of democracy in Europe in the twenties and thirties, we started to see and hear language and behavior in the United States in twenty fifteen and sixteen that we'd seen in our own regions, that I'd seen in Latin America. And I started to feel like I'd seen this movie before and that it doesn't end well.
And so it was that that's what got me early on in twenty sixteen thinking about the coming crisis of democracy in the United States. We started to see the warning signs, And I never ever imagined that I would think about applying lessons that I learned in Latin America to the United States. But here we are.
Yeah, do you see similarities there?
Sure, there are a bunch of similarities. First and foremost, I mean, Donald Trump would be a great tinpot dictator. We have in the United States, very many figures like Trump. Trump is a is an authoritarian through and through. He's someone who thinks that who thought when he came to the presidency that all of the machinery of government and the agencies of the state ought to be deployable for
his own personal and political use. That's not not even addicted tinpot dictators like Somosa or Tohieu in mid twentieth century Latin America, they were able to use the entire state apparatus, the entire machine government for their own personal and political ends. And that's what Trump's instincts are. It took us a while to come to grips with that here, because most of our politicians, even our nastiest politicians, sort of respect that they can't do whatever the hell they
want with the state. But that's not Trump. Another thing about Latin America is if you go back to the nineteen seventies, we see what happens when politics becomes extremely polarized, when parties begin to see one another not as rivals, not as people they disagree with and don't like or don't like their policies, but when they see their rivals as an existential threat, as enemies, as forces that are so noxious that we need to use any means necessary
to prevent them. American politics has been there before. We were there in the eighteen fifties. We were there in the seventeen nineties, but nobody alive in the United States remembers our parties being so polarized that they can no longer accept the other side winning that the nineteen sixties seventies he didn't and well, and in many cases in military dictatorship and heavy repression. And that's where we've gotten in the second decade of the twenty first century in
the United States. I'm not predicting civil war or military too, but we are a polarization.
One of the problems I've had throughout this period is that there has been on the left and the right, there has been a sort of hope wish casting, which hasn't worked of this fantasy that eventually things.
Will go back to normal.
Right, Maybe then there's a conversation about how normal was never good, but that eventually, you know, the norms will the guardrails. I mean that's my favorite. You know, the guard rails will hold. The guardrails have held. But we're looking down the barrel of a Trump nomination, right, I mean bearing some kind of media or Trump is going to be nominated, So we're going to have another year of real anti democratic speech and ideas. And so even if he doesn't win, and if he does win, I
think we're all just completely fucked. But if he doesn't win, we still will be one step closer to autocracy, right, I mean.
There's a slow process. So we do have a very strong constitutional order, a very stable democracy, strong institutions, and a strong opposition, all of which serves us well. So we're not immediately going to slide into Russia or Venezuela or even hungry. We do have a lot of guard but guardrails eventually wear down if you assault them over and over again. And we have both informal and formal guardrails.
Informal guard rails are the norms of mutual toleration, and forbearans that we write about how democracies die, those have been pretty much beaten to smithereeds. We also have important formal guardrails the Constitution, a very strong independent judiciary, federalism, Bill of Rights. Those things, for the most part, have help, but we have tested them in ways that we never ever imagine. I'm considered a pessimist. Some people consider me
an alarmist about the state of US democracy. I never expected that there would be a serious effort by an incumbent president that would almost succeed to overturn the results of an election. And yet there we were. We had in the summer of twenty twenty political deaths. People kill each other on the streets for political reasons. So the guardrails held at some level, but they clearly have been weakening,
and they're continued to weaken. And another Trump presidency, it's impossible to predict exactly what would happen, but there's no question that Trump learned a bunch of lessons from his first presidency. He learned that he really needs to go out and purge and pack the administration in order to wield state institutions the way that he wants to, He will try to do that.
He will throw.
Many, many more punches at our democratic system than he did the first time around. The Republican Party, we know, very very clearly will back him with much greater loyalty than in the past, because all of the dissidents in
the party have essentially left. There are very few remaining, and so you know how much damage will do, how many of those punches will land, how much damage will be done when he lands these blows very hard to predict, but I think the second presidency will be much much worse, much more dangerous than the first one.
I think another year of Trump campaigning will further radicalize the Republican Party and make them more anti democratic.
Think about what we're getting used to, right, it's now become socialized in the Republican subculture. Among two thirds of Republicans that the twenty twenty election was still and that it's okay to reject the results of elections again the cardinal rule of democracy. Only way democracy works is if all the major political parties accept the results of elections,
whether they win or lose. And what Trump twenty twenty and subsequent has done is socialized within the Republican Party is break that norm right, is say that not only was the election stolen, but it's okay to reject the results of elections. And now the Republican Party is rallying
behind his I agree with you. He is almost certain to nominate a president who tried to overturn the results in the election, who tried to effectively lead a whop, who says openly that he will use the Justice Department to go after his rivals. Let me smike a point here. I can't think of any candidate in any competitive political system since World War Two that is as openly nakedly authoritarian promising to engage in authoritary behavior as openly as
Donald Trump. Not Victor Orban, not Air Towan, not open when he was first elected, not Ulu Chavez. None of these guys were as openly telling voters as openly as Donald Trump how authoritarian they're going to be. Most of them hight it. Trump doesn't even hide it. So Republicans are getting used not only to not accepting results, not only to not believing electual results, but they're getting used
to backing a candidate who's openly authoritarian. You got to go back to the nineteen thirties to find this kind of behavior in Western democracies.
And it's not good. I did not end well for my people. No, Steven, thank you so much for joining us.
Thanks for having me pleasure.
No moment, Wick Wilson, our special guest for fuckery.
Do you want to know what my moment of fuckery is?
I do, go ahead.
Mine is the Great State of Texas. I mean that ironically, Ken Maxton, he is suing a pregnant woman to make sure she doesn't have an abortion, despite the fact that her baby's going to die if he is about to die.
Or maybe dead.
Forcing a woman to carry a dead or dying baby because of life. Again, I could read this, but it's just Ken Paxton shoots back with more.
You're not allowed to have control of your own body.
And for that, Ken Paxton and his band of Republicans in the gynecological chair, they are my moment of fuckery.
And rightly so. My moment of fuckery are the college presidents of Harvard, MIT and Penn. Now, look, I am not an e least stophonic fanboy by any stretch of the imagination. She's the Gretchen Wieners pick me girl, of Republican politics. But when she asked them this week, individually and collectively if calling for the genocide of the Jewish people violated their speech codes and their harassment codes on their universities, every single one of those people hemmed and
hawed and smirked and gave smug, discursive, evasive answers. It weirdly united America in a weird moment, left right and center of absolute loathing of how these university presidents who if someone said I want genocide for all trans Americans, or genocide for all African Americans, or genocide for indigenous people or anything close to that, they would be expelled
and thrown off campus in a hot second. But somehow it requires these elaborate, jesuitical answers so baroque and complex and evasive when it comes to saying it's not cool for anyone on our campuses to call for the genocide of the Jewish people. That's how you get the genocide of the Jewish people, you Fox, that's my moment of fuckery.
Thank you, Rick Wilson.
A lot of fucks in the show today. Sorry about that, folks.
People love it.
I think, all right, guys.
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to hear 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.