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 the naacpieces. Florida's openly hostile and travel advisory is slamming Desantas. Yale professor Jason Stanley, author of How Propaganda Work, stops by to talk about.
Where he sees our politics heading.
Then we'll talk to the New Yorkers Adam Gopnik about his latest book, The Real Work on the Mystery of Mastery. But first we have legendary campaign manager the Lincoln Project, Stuart Stevens. Welcome back to Fast Politics. Stuart Stevens his for asking the party. Why great to be you know, I continue to be a fan and friend. I w want to talk to you about at the Republican primary contest.
It's heating up.
Yeah. I've done five of those. One was on the winning side four times, lost one.
What was the winning one, Bob Dole?
Okay, that's right against our truly triumphant victory against Pat Buchanan.
Yeah, that was a good one.
After losing New Hampshire to Pat Buchanan, we finally began to beat him when he started holding large caliber weapons over his head at photo lot in Arizona and wearing a cowboy hat. If you can imagine any guy lived his entire life in DC, you know, a classic Catholic family, wearing cowboy hat and holding like a Winchester over his head.
It was sort of absurd. Then I worked for George Bush.
I moved down to Austin in ninety nine, where we brilliantly managed to take a sixty five point lead into New Hampshire and lose by nineteen Don McCain out spending in three to one.
I have to say, you really have to get up very early morning and work at that. It does not happened by chance.
I went wrong.
McCain made the decision to only focus on New Hampshire and basically run for governor of New Hampshire and the way that all life imitates high school, when people like you, you liked them, and he completely ignored Iowa. I predicted at the time that by winning Iowa, whoever went Iowa, you would get a bump, and that would compensate for any sort of slingshot you above what was happening already in New Hampshire.
That theory proved.
To be sort of like gravity is a regional phenomenon. Bush won New Hampshire and went Iowa not very prettily nightmare.
We did the whole Iowa.
Caucusstant but we did the Iowa straw Pole thing the year before, which is one of the great scams. And then we went to New Hampshire and McCain this was at its peak when he was doing the Straight Talk Express. We would go, we would sneak away, like me and mart McKinnon and our crowd, you know, we'd sneak away and go to McCain rallies and then we go to our Bush rallies and we're like, oh, they're having so much more fun.
Actually, it's an interesting little moment there. You know.
For reasons that are complicated, we stopped polling at the very end, in part.
Because we didn't know what we were going to do.
Differently, I got a call from the other side, as you know, I have a lot of friends over there working for McCain on the day of the election from their poster good friends saying look, I'm you know, I'm sorry about this. This is you know, I'm not going to be easy. I said, well, I said, yeah, we're going to lose, and then those kinds of a policy goes, Oh you don't understand, do you? I said, what you're going to get crushed? I said, well, like more than five,
there's another loan, polsy go is. The question is will it be twenty?
Yeah? I was like, oh, okay, great.
So you know I went and told the governor and our little crowd and Bush actually did it. You know, I was going around Saint Ronald Reagan won New Hampshire and fired everybody.
We're sucked.
And Busch got a little group together of us that afternoon, and by then exupposed were coming in to confirm it, and he said, look, and I screwed this up.
You guys screwed this up. It's gonna be a really bad night.
But the only thing that's gonna pissed me off if I hear anybody else in this room bad mouth to anybody else in this room, it's just my fault. We're gonna lose. We're gonna go down to South Carolina, we're gonna win. And a year from today, all you guys are gonna come to the White House and we're gonna laugh about this, and you're gonna get drunk I don't get drunk anymore. But we're gonna put this behind us,
so forget it. It's over. And it was, you know, one of those moments when the campaign could have fallen apart. You know, you walk out of that room just for morning to like kill for the guy.
He was right.
We went down the South Caroline one and then I did Bush when he ran it wasn't really much of a race. Where running a race for re election in the primary. And then I worked for Romney in two thousand and eight. I got involved late in the campaign.
That was after Mark left because Mark had a deal. Was meant he wasn't going to help him run against Obama.
That was only for McCain.
Oh, that was only for McCain.
He was learning for McCain.
And then we lost, and then to my surprise, Romney decided to run again.
Romney was not planning to run.
People think, oh, you know, Mitt Ronney must have immediately started planning to run. It's really not the case. You know, the guy ran, he lost, he dealt with it. He decided he wanted to write a book. And they've bought this place out in California, sold a house where they brought up the kids like a typical thing, you know, the five kids.
That all graduate, all left the house. They're empty nesters. And he was happy as a clam sitting there.
I used to go down and visit him there down in La Jolla, and then his kitchen by the beach, right in this book, and I never thought he'd run again.
He only ran again, really because the economy was so bad.
We're in this different time right now in American history that seems very dark in a lot of ways.
Oh that is like saying in eighteen sixty, I don't know, maybe bad things will happen.
Let's dig into that a little bit.
I mean, it seems so crazy that we were going through normal political machinations when one side really doesn't believe in democracy anymore.
I've been working on a new book. I've been thinking about this a lot and reading a lot about this a lot. And one of the keys when democracy slide into autocracy is the ability for autocracy to use the freedoms of a democracy to kill that democracy. And a case in point would be the Trump town hall. They want disappearance of normality. And to me, this is a great challenge for journalists in the twenty and twenty four race. It has the patina of being a normal political race.
You have both parties, yet they still call themselves the same thing, whereas one has become an autocratic movement and one has no basis in truth our system. And you know this better that I of journalism always the greatest good with objectivity, and it is not equipped to handle this. All my journalist's friends and you have more and closer than I are struggling with this. It's not a normal race. And one of the challenges is how to talk about
it without sounding alarmist. And you know I always say it's like a pandemic. Whatever you say at the beginning of sound alarmist and in the end of be inadequate.
Yeah, that's a good point.
It is the greatest danger we faced since eighteen sixty. It's not a Trump phenomenon because the party has now become trumpest. If this played out according to sort of classic form, Trump wouldn't be the nominee and they would probably going to DeSantis because it's typical autocratic movements to sort.
Of in their next stage, move to a more cleaned up version.
Right exactly this week, I did a bulwark event with those guys, and I am constantly having this same fight with Sarah Longwell again and again, which is she says that DeSantis is less dangerous than Trump, and my argument is, actually he's ten times more dangerous because if you see what he's done in Florida, Trump could never have done that, could never have figured out how to do that kind of stuff.
Yeah.
I had a back and forth with David from about this, because David wrote a piece basically saying the same thing for The Atlantic. The plus side that I hear and you talked to Sarah, you can tell what she said is he's not crazy and he will function like a normal politician.
I don't think not being crazy is really the standard.
But also the fascistic attitudes are still there.
Now I'm going to pull back and ask you a question because you know, yesterday had red fleece fested. Glenn Youngkin burst onto the scene not having announced, but having a video that certainly looks like he's about to announce.
Yeah.
I mean, Glenn Younkin is a parable of what happened to the Republican Party. He's the kind of guy at the time in my life I would have loved to have as a client. Seems like a normal human being, had a lot of money, nice to film. But look, so what happens. What happens to Glenn Younkin. So here's
the guy you know, comes out of corporate world. Carl ol come saying, guy, but to advance in this party ends up in Arizona standing next to a total fucking lunatic, Carrie Lake, knowing that Carry Lake is a lunatic, and you have to do that. It's not that Youngkin changed Terry Lake. Terry Lake changed Younkin. And this is what the party demands. You cannot advance in this party. You get a debate up there. First question I would ask is is Joe Biden. Was he elected an a legal,
unfair election? And that will be interesting. Asa Hutchinson, another former client of mine, will say yes. I think that Trump will say no. And what will Youngkin say? Maybe he never would have gotten too a competitive primary in Virginia. He was able to get the nomination by this convention system that they have, so he never had to go in front of the general Republican electorate. He ran a racist campaign while he was out there attacking Margaret Walker.
He's sending his son to Georgetown Prep, which has seminars to Margaret Walker.
Right, he knew what he was doing. So you can't do this halfway.
You can't be sort of for democracy while you're trying to rise in an anti democratic party.
You have to just confront it.
The only person really who's there's really no one doing that, and you know, they very cleverly have said that you can't get in a debate unless you'll endorge the nominee.
And this is where the whole language of.
This Molly is is very same because saying I will support the nominee of a party, it's like saying nice to meet you when you're meeting someone you're really not glad to meet. It's just it's just a social convention almost, I'll support the nominee of the party, but now harmless whatever. But it's not when that person wants you to story a democracy.
How do you deal with this?
So Asa Hutchinson, who I think has run in Canadas, he's run the most honest campaign. I don't know if you've been following, but he's the one when Trump was indicted in New York he said we have to respect the jury system. He's a former US attorney. But I heard an interview with him and he was saying that he wants to be in the debate, and yes, he will say that he will support the nominee of the party, because you have to say that to be in the debates.
So what is Chris Christy going to do?
Another former client of mine, is he going to say he'll support the nominee. The irony of this is the party is being destroyed by abandoning the vagus that it claimed to say that it was for. You know, this will the party that was the Character Counts party. Peggy Newman wrote a book when character was king, and had it believed in that and stuck by it, it would never have accept the Trump.
But once you go down that road, you can't go back, you yeah know.
And that's why you know what I thought when I was working in the party were values turned out to be marketing slogans?
Right? You know?
I was the idiot that like when you know Chevrolet runs and ed saying that they're the heartbeat of America. I was taking my Chevy to like a cardiologist.
So let me ask you. In Florida, you have DeSantis fighting with Disney. We're finding ourselves in this you know, Republican v capitalism versus capitalism kind of debacle.
What do you think about that?
Well, it's insane.
You know.
I heard an interview with Larry Hogan, another client of my former client. You know, I was just a little lavy about it, like is there a governor of America that doesn't want Disney? It is the most anti conservative imaginable. And Desantas is a quintessentially sort of small damaged person. Trump is sort of a quint essentially big damage person. You're both damaged to go out and attack the Happiness company.
Right.
It's almost like we were setting up a Saturday a joke, like what if the governor Florida attacked Disney? You know, you've got in a fight with Mickey Mouse and he's losing. I mean it used to be so we go from mister Gorbatrov, tear down this wall to I'm going to fight with Mickey Mouse. It is the smallness of it. It is the bathroom and bedrooms party.
Right.
Ron Desanta spends more time talking about the bathrooms and the genitalia of underaged girls and boys to anyone who is not on a watch list or not a convicted pedophile.
It is just weird. Normal people don't do this.
But they think it's a winner for them.
I mean that they're responding to the someone has told them this idea is a winner for them, right, I mean they're not just coming up with this out of nowhere.
Well, someone has said it's a winner in a Republican primary.
I think they're wrong.
Is that Bannon?
You know, I'm not in that room.
I wouldn't be surprised if it is de Santus and his wife. You know, the whole idea that ron to Santas won Florida by nineteen points, so therefore he has great skill as a national politician.
Okay.
I worked for Bill Well, Massachusetts Republican governor. He won reelection by thirty three points in a blue state in Massachusetts. That didn't mean that the Republican Party had changed and he could take over the Republican Party. Rick Perry won reelection by double digits in Texas.
And how did he do.
When he ran for president in two thousand and twelve and he's running again.
Yeah, mcbromney took him apart in one debate.
DeSantis ran against Charlie crist Charlie crist was a client of mine. I did all of Charlie's races when he was a publican, and he won everyone. But in the history of modern politics in America, no Switcher has won a race for his former job, so Charlie law. So they take that there is just a need to invent DeSantis by the National Review crowd. He knows switch fork to pick up. He is well educated. You know, he won't embarrass you. He won't talk about having sex with
his daughter in public. But that's where the threshold sort of is. But here's a guy talks about physically assaulting Falci. I want to throw this little elf across the Potomac. I mean, there was a time just saying that in himself would be disqualifying. A governor talking about taking a doctor who's saving millions of lives, who has saved millions of lives and assaulting them, and he would say that space.
The essence of this whole trans thing is a way to refight same sex marriage, and it never was accepted by a lot of Republicans. They just got quiet about it, and they're trying to relitigate that. It's very much a party about going back to the past, afraid.
Of the future.
Iowa was a We're gonna have a whole conversation. I've done all these Iowa primaries. It's like thirty three thousand votes to win Iowa, right, It's like a little more in the student body of the University of Texas. Jeff row is running that campaign. He ran Ted Kruse's campaign. He has a list of the people who voted for Ted Cruz and nobody moves in Iowa. So and Mitt Romney had run in two thousand and eight and coming
second in Iowa caucus in twenty twelve. Our plan initially was to skip to Iowa caucus and used to call it to Lebrea tar Pits of politics, it's.
So easy to go in, hard to get out.
But we had this list of everyone who voted for Mitt, and we kept going back to this list, thinking that they would drop off if Mid wasn't out there campaigning, And by kind of the end of November, they were still fer Mit.
So it was like, Okay, we'll do it.
So Mitt Romney campaign eight days in Iowa and want it more or less, that's a path to victory potentially for Trump. For the chances to take the cruise list and run a very nuts and bolts campaign.
He could win Iowa.
Stuart Stevens, thank you so much.
Great to smalk.
Jason Stanley is a Yale professor and author of How Fascism Works.
Welcome to Fast Politics. Jason Stanley, Thank you so much.
It's really great to be in conversation with you.
Well, very excited and you have two books.
But you know you're a brilliant academic.
But how fascism works and how propaganda works?
Why are you the person of the hour?
Was my first piece for The New York Times in twenty eleven, I think, was on birtherism, Trump's conspiracy theory about Obama. So I've been tracking this kind of rise and disturbing propaganda means like conspiracy theories that unify figures against the enemies and are sort of problematic in liberal politics and liberal democratic politics. And I had always been
studying fascist propaganda. That sort of my interests have been in My training is in philosophy, language and linguistics, and I really got interested in the structure of propaganda, how lots of different versions of propaganda work, and fascism was of course part of that background. And it's something familiar both from being a US citizen and.
Parents' background.
Yeah, talk to me a little bit about your parents' background, because I mean, I certainly, as a Nepo baby, have found myself very affected by my parents' stories.
But your story is pretty interesting, Litosa.
That I'll begin with my mother. My mother was through both my parents survived arts of the Holocaust. My mother was in the Gulag in Siberia from nineteen nineteen forty five and then, which she always talked.
Up as well she should, I mean, yeah, go ahead.
So because she wasn't being murdered along with her cousins and aunts and uncles in.
Poland, how did she end up in the Gulag and.
Not shot over ditches? After the Multi Ribbon Trope packed, they split Poland and the Nazis took half, Salin took the other half.
And Stalin took one hundred.
And thirty thousand Polish Jews into the Gulag in Siberia and eighty thousand survived. And it is the largest group of Polish survivors of the Holocaust once who survived in Siberia. So they were repatriated back to Poland in nineteen forty five where they encountered a tremendous amount of anti Semitism, hatred, beatings, and killings. And then nineteen forty eight many of them left.
My mother left it eight years old to New York City, and my father is German Jewish from Berlin, and he was seven when he left Berlin in July nineteen thirty nine and arrived in New York City August third, nineteen thirty nine, so just in the nick of time. But he experienced castalinofft Both of them experienced very difficult childhoods, which is always bad when you're complaining to your parents about violence, that's right.
But it did, but it obviously made an impression on you. Yes, I think.
I think a key moment, a key sort of lynchpin, is that my mother worked for forty four years in Manhattan criminal court. She was a Red Center Street during the Central Park five case, and so through her I learned about racial fascism in the United States. I think that was one of my key I learned. She would always talk about the parallels she saw with how the criminal justice system treated Black Americans and her own experience
as a child. So that was something you know she was the first to tell me the Central Mark five were completely innocent. For instance.
Oh interesting, even during that time when people thought they weren't right.
Like as you and I know, at the time, very few people thought they were innocent, but everyone one hundred center Street knew they were innocent.
Oh, so interesting. How you know.
My mom was disgusted with me when I didn't realize that. She's like, it was a horrible crime, and their sentences were so low. How could you not figure out that we all knew they were innocent?
Oh?
Interesting?
Because there was no physical evidence, right, no evidence at all.
We had one of the exonerated five on this podcast because he's running for office in.
The district I'm sitting here right now.
Yeah.
Yeah, And he's incredible, and it has so much forgiveness in his heart.
I don't know how you have that kind of forgiveness in your heart.
After Yeah, but that speaks to this idea that you write about, this way in which Trump was able to capture a hard mentality the same way.
So talk us through sort of how that happened.
First of all, we have this history of racial fascism here. Yeah, we sort of got rid of it in our national politics in the nineteen sixties around the civil rights movement, and Trump has always been leaning into this past and the vilification of supposed black crime and black corruption Frump CNN town Hall, he again reiterated the lies that in black in cities with large black populations, there was massive corrupt voter fraud, so, which is just straightforward racist trope
dating back to Reconstruction when they said black politicians were too corrupt right democracy. Now we're getting a much more sort of explicitly fascist structure. The highlighting of Ashley Babbitt's killing January sixth, he's representing her as the Nazis represented a forced vessel. Yes, the stormtrooper who was valorized as a martyr, and the person he shot, Ashley Babbitt, was block so if you noticed, Trump called him a thug,
of course, the accepted code word for black people. So Trump has continuously leaned into this kind of familiar white supremacy that is part of American history, but also combines it with a kind of patriarchal machismo that is going to bring in a multi racial coalition as we're seeing behind the kind of macho sprouting authoritarian and now we have this kind of valorization of January sixth, Instead of being a coup against democracy, it's being presented as a
great patriotic moment in American history. All that is credibly dangerous.
Yeah, I would think, explain to me how multi racial fascism works, because it runs so counterintuitive, but it's clearly something you talk about.
Go on.
First of all, patriarchy, right, lots of groups have macho men threatened by feminism, LGBT, et cetera. Patriarchy has always been central to fascism. It's it's you know, Ruth ben Guillot's book Strong Men isn't about fast, but she emphasizes the sort of macho, strutting male figure that's so appealing for authoritarian minded voters. Secondly, when you think about American fascism, you have to think about what is the underlying group ideology,
social identity. That is, as it's basist in Germany and Nazi Germany, it was at the Aryan rings here it's Christian nationalism. So the way white Christian nationalism works is, you know, you're told about the great achievements of the founders, and you're told the founders were white Christian men, and then you're given a list of white Christian men and great achievements. Then you think, oh wow, it's the white Christian men who made this country what it is, and
that's the structure of what we see. But white Christian nationalism is also going to be Christian nationalism, and so Christianity is going to draw a lot of people in. Certain fascist movements succeed when they can gather different groups together in an electoral coalition. The different groups often of conflicting agendas. Group of white supremacists, another group anti semites, another group billionaires who want to use all that stuff
to get their taxes cut. So fascism succeeds at the ballot box when a fascist leader can convince multiple groups that authoritarianism is preferable to democracy.
Say you're black, I mean you just identify with the misogyny more than the racism.
Yeah, you identify more of the misogyny than the race. And it's not just patriarchy, it's also anti socialism. It's sort of libertarian capitalism. We're going to protect private property. The Nazis were obviously anti capitalists because capitalism was a global system, but they were very strongly protective of private property.
They didn't believe Jews deserve private property. They constantly attacked institutions as Marxists and represented the Weimar Republic and government institutions as threats to private the private property of Arians. And so we find that dynamic here where it's also anti socialism. That's part of it, and that's going to attract libertarians. It's going to attract libertarian minded people of all races.
If you were to.
Game this out in your head and you were to think, like, what would in your mind the smartest thing for Biden to be doing right now? Because remember it's like he's running against Trump. This Republican Party has embraced all of these tenants now, so this is no longer right, Like, is Trump more fascist than DeSantis?
I mean, they seem the same to me.
Correct. What we have is a fascist social and political movement. In the literature, you divide the social and political movement phase from the regime phase. We don't have a fascist regime. However, we've allowed many of the states in this country to become little hungaries.
Right, Florida is the best example, but Texas too.
Florida, Texas, North Carolina. What you know, the Florida voters voted to give former felons back their rights voting rights, which would have enfranchised over a million Floridians. Desantas simply overruled that. All the voter suppression. You have super legislators of Republicans in fifty to fifty Republican Democrat states like North Carolina, so you have authoritarianism. None of that is democrodict.
I had allowed that to happen. So then the question is why is Republicans are quite frankly reasonably saying why can't we do that at the national level. So that's what's going on, So what can be done against it? So a lot of us, in communication with the various people in the Biden administration, I think there was a strong urge to sort of go new dealersh in response, what when's the last time the United States faced a
sort of concerned explicit fascist movement? I mean, I think Jim Crow is a fascist regime if that lasted very long, to some extent still lasts. But in the thirties we faced explicit fascism and we beat it because of the supposedly that's the sort of commonly held belief. We beat it because of the New Deal, which was oune of money going to the white working class, the poor white said du Boyce's sense. And so I think they administration has taken that tactic as the Inflation Reduction Act wards
and all is an enormous expenditure on green jobs. It spent a ton of money to working class Americans. That's been the tactic of the Biden administration. Unfortunately, we're in what I've called fascism's legal phase, where they've taken over courts, they've taken their changing the laws to make minority rule a permanent thing.
Yeah, I mean, I'm watching it happen in real time.
How do we stop this?
Welly, Unfortunately, I'm not an expert on how do we stop it? Really good at describing what's happening, what will happen if we don't. If you look at the literature and look at you know, fighting racial fascism in the United States, fighting fascism abroad in Europe, Latin America, labor unions turned out to be key. It's something that sort of I spent a lot of years grappling with in the literature. But then you see it in real time right now, you see the labor unions fighting the attack,
the teachers' union fighting the attack on education. You see labor movements across the country gaining more popularity for labor, and fascism is always intensely anti labor union. So we see that in the South. We see in the South all these states are anti harshly anti labor. It goes with the racism. So the labor movement has to be central in the response here.
So interesting, So talk to me about propaganda, how propaganda works, and a little bit about how you got there and how we're seeing propaganda right now.
So earlier I talked about how my mother, who's a Holocaust survivor, recognized parallels between the criminal justice system and what was happening to Black Americans the criminal justice system and what she experienced as a child. James Baldwin says this at one point in his essay, Negroes are anti Semitic because they're anti white. But brilliant where he says he's talking about Jewish people, He's like, we know you're
glad not to be us. So I grew up and in like twenty ten, once I started to realize the scope of my mass incarceration and that many of us white Americans had lived through the nineties thinking it was a great decade, when when it goes, it was like a horrific decade for our fellow black citizens. And you know, nineteen ninety one, the crime rate starts dropping precipitously. And
then we had super predator theory. We had the Clintons leaning into qulification black Americans to win votes at the ballots. And I realized I had been subject to propaganda, like I had completely missed a human rights disaster.
It was happening in front of you.
Happening in front of me. Tim Snyder and I teach a course mass incarceration in the United States and the Soviet Union.
Oh wow, I wanted to take that class. That sounds amazing.
It is, it is great. So trying to figure out how my country, my home country, the United States, became the world's largest incarcerator, how the formerly in twenty fourteen, the formerly enslaved population of the United States was ten percent of the world's prison population. And wondering how you could sort of wander around to the streets of America thinking this is a free country when it's a giant
prison state. Was what got me into the topic of propaganda, and it led me to think about the nineteen thirties in Germany, which was a happy time for many Germans who saw on out of the corner of their eye what was happening to my family and others, But you know, it was a great time for most Germans. I started to think about how propaganda can mask for us what's
going on right before our eyes. A lot of people when Trump happened, they were surprised, but I wasn't surprised because I was working on this history of the United States. And when you're kind of brutalizing one portion of the population with militarized police and prison, massive prison, why wouldn't you that move to sort of general authoritarianism. You already
kind of lawlessness for part of the population. And Trump is leaning into the American tradition that justify that sort of raises hysteria about you know, cities engulfed in crime, which Trump, of course has been doing his whole life, supposed black crime, and raises the ancient fears that white people need to protect themselves.
So where does this go? We're out of time, but just give me a quick where this goes?
Well, one thing that's optimistic is these are old forces. We shouldn't think that we're facing something new, because when aism comes, it repeats the practices of the past. So we see ron dessentism, foringly, going back to sort of scrubbed up versions of Jim pro tactics, voter suppression, massive policing of the schools, so you have a white education that places white Christian nationalism center stage. So we face this before, so we have historical.
Understanding of what to do.
We will need.
Mass protests, possibly at a certain point, and you'll need to raise alarms something like the Civil Rights movement, where you raise alarms about the loss of democracy, where ultimately I think we have to make sure that all the states in the United States are actual democracies. We've let the authoritarianism go too far.
Those mass protests actually work, I mean they've worked in Israel. But we're at a time. Please, Jason, I hope you will come back.
Oh yeah, I'd love to anytime.
Hi.
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Adam Gopnik is a writer at The New Yorker and author of the Real Work on the Mystery of Mastery. Welcome to Fast Politics, Adam Gottnik.
It's wonderful to be with you, Molly. It's been a joy, you know, having known you so long, to have watched your evolution and to be listening to you all the time doing this and now to be a discipline is a special pleasure.
Well, I am very excited to have you here, and I feel like you have also had many iterations. You have been doing this a long time, and you have an incredible breath of knowledge, and you have also more importantly a new book out. But first let us talk about what the hell happened last night?
Would that see in town Hall?
You know, I was out actually seeing this new production of Oliver with Rola Sparza, and I was on a real high because it's wonderful, and then came back and idly did what none of us should ever do, which is see but how did that go? And then became aware of it. A million people can itemize all of
the vile absurdities of the thing. What I will say is, and I say this not in self congratulation, but in perpetual warning that back in twenty sixteen, when people were so Trump, I was writing urgently, desperately in the New Yorker where I work, in a note of political excitation, that it was not typical for me about how dangerous this guy was, how uniquely dangerous he was. Now I sound like Trump. I may have been the first person to say I actually think I was that he was
a fascist. Now we can argue forth Molly about you know how what we want to call fascists and whatnot. Key point about making that point is not that Trump is on an absolute moral plane with Hitler or a Mussolini. It's exactly when you know, you go see the dermatologists to show him a mold, to ask if it's a melanoma or just a pimple. Not because it's already stage four cancer, because you want to know what the pathology
is and what the outcome is likely to be. When you recognize that Trump is essentially part of an ongoing authoritarian, right wing nationalist movement that we should call for short, fascist,
you recognize how dangerous he is. And back in twenty sixteen, when I was saying that, saying that he represented that he was an absolutely hostile figure against anything one could recognize as the liberal democratic order, I was perpetually as I'm sure you were too, and as other Pressian people were mocked and derided and alarmist by the full range of New York Times conservatives, and I was right.
We all were writing, Yeah, I want to read a line you have here, So you have this paragraph. The Murdoch media congomerate has been ordered to acquiesce. It's no surprise that it has. But Trump's other fellow travelers, including Roger Stone, the Republican Political Operative, and Dirty Trickster. And then and you mentioned Alex Jones, a ranting conspiracy theorist who believes in a global plot where in an alien
force out of this world is attacking humanity. Not to mention Jones marketing of the theory that Michelle Obama is a transvestatee who murdered Joan Rivers. But I think this is the line. These are not harmless oddballs Trump is flirting with. This is not the lunatic fringe. These are the lunatics.
Thank you, Molly. I like that line, and I wrote it a long time ago, seven years ago, and it was ever more true last night. This is not the lunatic fringe. Every political party has got a center and a left wing and a right wing, and it's got nuts around the edges, and we can recognize it, whether it's the Labor Party in Britain or the Democratic Party in the United States, take your pick. This is not
the lunatic fringe that Trump is flirting with. These are the lunatics whom he speaks for it, you know, and we I'm so acclimatized to it. And to use a word that I know is overused but is essential here. It is still so much in the process of being normalized.
You know.
Of all the things I read this morning about it, I thought that what Michael fanone is that how you pronounce his name?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The police officer.
The police officer was the shrewdest and the most acute. He said, what happened last night is that you're setting up the idea that accepting or not accepting the results of an election is a choice. Politicians choose to accept the results of election or not. You can say, oh, it's you're wrong, But then he answers, I'm right, and therefore you have set up right away a kind of ping and pong. Well, maybe he's a little bit right.
And so we've never before had in American history, at least since the Civil War, a figure who was aggressively
and unmistakably an enemy of the democratic constitutional order. And to continually treat this guy as a political phenomenon, as CNN did last night, as The New York Times, since this I'm doing day after day as simply one more figures on this spectrum as well, maybe flirting with the lunatic fringe but not actually embedded with the lunatics, I think is just an historic mistake of such enormous proportions that I fear the consequences, and I fear them particularly Molly,
because I wrote a piece early on in the Biden administration called Biden's Invisible Ideology, and what I was trying to. It was meant to be a kind of sympathetic account because what I sensed, with no inside knowledge, was that Biden and the people around him, who deliberately did not take on all of Trump's Michigoths about the election and
the rest of it, had a smart, intuitive sense. There's a great old boxing coach named Charlie Goldman who once said, never play a guy in a game he invented, because he didn't invent it to lose at it. And that's very wise, right. And if you played Trump's game, you lose, because that's Trump's game. I understand the logic of that. And they decided to invest in restoring and renewing institutions, which I profoundly believe in, and in lowering the price
of insulin. When Trump was screaming about his wall and the rigged election, I recognized the decency of that, and I recognize a certain kind of logic in it too. But in every historical struggle between institutionalists and fascists, the fascist win because they do not respect the institutions, and these sists are left looking around at the end saying, hey,
what happened here? We did everything right? We did everything correct, and they're shocked that they have lost and that the institutions they were trying to defend and protect have been destroyed. And I am terribly frightened that we are seeing this year and what happened last night was one more episode in the destruction of liberal institutions.
Yeah, Jesus, all right to talk to me about the book.
Well, the book is actually my new book. The real work on the mystery of mastery is actually in an odd way that I've been trying to articulate out on the road, and I am the Willy Lowman of American literature.
Molly the Mystery of mastering exactly.
I go from town to town with my satulate books, trying to be well liked, like welly and selling them. One of the things I've learned on the road is people ask me often because my last book, A Thousand Small Sanities was explicitly a defense of liberalism, by which I mean not just the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, but the much broader moral adventure of trying to have democratic procedures and egalitarian institutions in the world. That that
was what that last book was about. And people say, this new book, where are the politics in this new book, because it's all about my own exotic adventures in learning to do new things in middle age. I learned to drive, I learned to draw, I learned to box with my daughter Olivia, who you know well, to dance, which is the climax of the book, is Olivia and I dancing out in the esplanade, real dancing foxtrot and waltz with the teacher to Sinatra records out in the Esplanade in
Central Park at the height of the pandemic. That's the image of the book ends on Oh wow. So the question people have asked is, well, is this sort of a diversion from that, you know, kind of saying whoo, we got through that by the skin of our teeth, perps, we did. So now we can go out and elves and improve ourselves. And that's not really my intention at all.
On the contrary, and forgive me if I sound a little pretentious about it, what I was trying to do was talk about pluralism because the key I think, the key idea, the key concept for liberal democracy, is the idea of pluralism. It's as important, if not more important, than the idea of democracy. Or the idea of equality, or it's about the idea that we accept the known that many, many different kinds and classes and creeds can coexist without killing each other, which is a very new
idea in the history of humanity. The preceding idea was always that, well, all of those creeds and classes and kinds will war with each other and mascuer each other until somebody dominates. That's the core ideology, by the way of Trumpism, as it is of all fascism, that all of life is simply a contest for domination, and somebody will win, and someone will lose, and the winner will
destroy the loser will exterminate the loser. And the core idea of liberalism as it's grown up since the Enlightenment is exactly the idea that you can coexist, that you can not only accept but embrace a pluralism of different kinds.
You know. The image I used in the book is when I like you know, you go out on a Friday night into Williamsburg in Brooklyn, and the sat Mars are celebrating in their way, and the Labovators in their way, and the hipsters in another way, and sometimes can't tell the hipsters from the Hastam right, because they dress a like. That's the glory of a liberal city like New York is we coexist. We sometimes, we have difficulties, often we do,
but basically we accept that principle of pluralism. The point I'm trying to make in this book is that principle of political pluralism rests on a principle of a pluralism of pleasures. That we only can get to a pluralism of opinions if we're rooted in things we genuinely like doing, if we're rooted in all the little activities that bring us together as people across classes and kinds, that show
us in advance that it is possible to coexist. You know, my hero in this regard, and it's funny, you know I mentioned that the book ends with Olivia and I dancing together in Central Park is Frederick Law Olmsted. And it was the great designers appoint of at Homestead that he was oho a journalist, a writer for he was a park designer, and he went south to the Slave States and he said, not only is this and obviously brutal, cruel, oppressive culture, but it oppresses the masters in its own ways,
not to mention, obviously the slaves. And one of the ways it does is that it eliminates the possibility of what he called beautifully commonplace civilization, that is, all the small ways in which people interact with each other on a daily basis, because if you live in a society of fear and terror, you can't have those kinds of interactions.
And he wanted Central Park to be a place for commonplace civilization, a place where people, a park for people of very different backgrounds, very different kinds, very different pleasures could all coexist in a pluralistic way. And this book by talking about my own pluralism of pleasures. Learning to drive from an Ecuadorian immigrant, learning to draw from an inspired but kind of crazy old style reactionary not crazy but determinedly backward looking, learning to do or at least
observing magic with a brilliant, irascible Brooklynite. It's all about how every time that in every everything we do, we are necessarily everything we are. You know, when you learn to do something like driving, you are forced into the
broader society of drivers. You're forced to confront the way that cities are self organizing, that we amazingly if you, like Molly, we sort of obey traffic laws even when nobody is enforcing them, because we recognize that it's the only way all of us can coexist in traffic is through those things. So that in that own steady and sense, a pluralism of pleasures always has to be the foundation for pluralistic politics, and that's very much what this book is about.
Yeah, so interesting. What was the thing that you learned where you were like, I'm not going to.
Be able to learn this well, drawing, you know, classical drawing. I'd say at some point in the book that what we basically do in life, we like to tell ourselves, oh, I'm just concentrating on the things I'm good at. Basically what we do is we banish the things we're bad at so we don't have to think about them. And you know, we spend our time elementary school just being you know, shamed and humiliated and pained every day by
everything we can't do. We can't do algebra, we can't do trigonometry, we can't do drawing, And then we find a niche in life where nobody asks us to do those things, and then we think we've actually gotten good at something. We haven't. We've just banished the bad. And drawing is one of those things for me. You know, you put me in front of a sheet of paper and I stab away as though like Lady Macbeth with
a dagger. And I had a wonderful teacher, Jacob Collins, and he got me to loosen my wrist and to draw underhand instead of overhand, and step by step he got me relaxed enough so that I could begin the business of drawing nude bodies in half light. That was the most resistant thing, because when I first tried it, I just had tears in my eyes. I thought, I will never be able to do this, and I never can claim to be good at it. But I'm certainly better at it than I was when I started. And
that was the single most sharing thing. Driving is well, you know, I didn't learn to drive until I was in my fifties. And Luke and I got our licenses literally not just on the same day, but within the same hour from the same driving judge, from the same driving inspector. And I think that may be the only time in New York City history where a fifty five year old father and a twenty year.
Old life I'm sure it's not.
No, probably not.
Yeah, because it is New York.
This is everything has happened at least once. There's nothing so peculiar that it has happened many times.
That's part of the joy.
Of living in New York. Actually, nothing singular can happen exactly. I want to.
Ask you because I have relatives, close relatives suffering from dementia. There's some evidence that learning new things can actually grow these pathways in your brain and can make you less likely to become demented.
I too have a close relative struggling with dementia. And yes, that is one of the things that comes up again and again in the literature. I don't want to hold it out as some kind of pantacea, because it isn't.
It doesn't have that form. But what is certainly and arguably true is that the lives of the aging are immeasurably enriched by pursuing new activities, even if they're they're at war with their own brains as tragically so many I did a piece Molly about the science of aging and the tragedy of it is that medicine has given us twenty years of extra life gross on motive, but
has nothing to do yet for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. But what's certainly true is that our access to happiness through our absorption in a new activity is just as profound, if not more profound, at sixty five or seventy or eighty, as it is when we're kids. You know the basic rhythm of accomplishment, which is the thing I'm writing about.
Whether you're learning, you know, beatle guitar chords when you're twelve years old, or you're learning, as I did, to box when you're in your sixties, the basic rhythm is always the same. You break it down into its smallest parts. You know, boxing, you don't unleash your beligion insurance. My boxing teacher is an incredibly sweet, cool guy named Joey Contrada, and he once said, very un self consciously, oh, it's terrible.
The other day in the boxing gym, a fight broke out. Instead, you've learned this very tight choreography of jabs and crosses and slips and undercuts, and that's what boxing is about. And it's very exhausting at first, because none of that sequence will make sense to you. You know, you're thinking about it all the time, but with passion and perseverance, it turns into overtime, a somewhat seamless sequence, and where you're not any longer thinking about throwing the right punches in
the right order. They're just coming, They're happening, and the high we get, you know, psychologists sometimes call that the flow, that we enter into the flow, but I just think of it as happiness, because what's happiness, after all, except absorption in some activity, meaningful activity outside ourselves. That's when we all feel happiest, including sex, one might add, but and taking in everything else's well, and that's always available
to us. And if there's a kind of message for those of us who are who are entering middle age, to put it politely, that the book wants to send, is that pursuing a passion a new accomplishment imperfectly provides you with every bit as much of that flow, every bit as much of that cognitive opiate of absorption as anything we did when we were twelve years old.
So interesting, Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Adam Gopnik, tell us what the book is called again, I will do it in the intro too.
It's called The Real Work on the Mystery of mastery by me, and as I say, it's an account of my adventures in learning and struggling. It's in the mystery of mastery. I don't claim mastery, but I claim some insight into the mysteries of mastery. And as your listeners now know and no one else does, it's undergirding is to be about how pluralism of pleasures underlies pluralistic politics. So saying thank you, Adam as you're talking to Molly always.
A moment, Jesse Cannon, Molly John Fast what do you see that this death ceiling thing? I think people are starting to get a little nervous.
It's a completely fake thing that Republicans have decided they can do to make life hard for Democrats. It started in twenty eleven. When there's a Republican president, Republicans pass the dead ceiling. When there's a Democratic president, Republicans don't pass this dead ceiling. And so we know it's bullshit. And for that, as Republicans to keep the entire federal government hostage, they are our moment of fuckery. 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 common conversation going. And again, thanks for listening.