First as Farce, Then as Tragedy

Hey everyone, this is Leon from Prologue Projects.

On this episode of 5-4, Peter, Rhiannon, and Michael are joined by their friends Jay Willis from Balls and Strikes and journalist Josie Duffy Rice to discuss what happened last week.

And we do have some breaking news from the decision desk.

NBC News can now project that Donald Trump has won the state of Wisconsin, which means he is the winner of this race and will return to the White House as this country's 47th president.

And for so many of you watching right now, that news is,

to say the least, a lot to digest.

The group talks about what went wrong, where the Democrats go from here, and how the second coming of Trump, combined with Republican dominance in Congress, will play out in the courts.

This is 5-4, a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks.

Welcome to 5 to 4, where we dissect and analyze the Supreme Court cases that have left us abandoned, like Hispanic men abandoning the Democratic Party.

No, God.

Like, basically, the only freaking, like, a person who's not here on this recording.

Hey, I am Latino.

Okay.

My mom is Cuban.

Look, I'm just, I'm a data guy.

I'm Peter.

I'm here with Michael.

Hey, everybody.

And Rhiannon.

Hey.

And our friends, Jay Willis and Josie Duffy Rice.

I want to be in whatever political party Peter is not in.

Yes.

Yes.

Same.

I guess this is a run-through of the ethnicities we're going to blame for this moment.

We're just going to keep you doing that on this episode.

I don't see how it's a blaming situation.

I am a man of political science.

Great news is white guys cannot be blamed for anything here.

That's right.

Our beautiful angels, the white men of America, who did nothing wrong.

Now,

we wanted to get the whole gang together because we're all in a group chat.

Yeah, don't be jealous.

No, seriously, don't be jealous.

It's awful.

A lot of the group chat is Josie sharing her opinions, and then

you have to sort of just put it.

out of your mind.

You know what I mean?

You have to ignore it if you want to continue the friendship.

But was I right?

No.

Yeah, I was.

Well, she was right about the election.

If you're talking about the election, yes.

If you're talking about the million dollar thing, no.

And I'm not explaining this for the listeners.

No, but which one of those mattered?

Out of curiosity.

The million dollar thing matters because it speaks to what's going on inside your brain.

I'm not going to talk about this.

We're supposed to start off this podcast sad and angry.

Yeah.

Well, that's the way to do it.

Yeah.

Before we start, also, we should mention my audio probably doesn't sound good.

I don't have power and I'm doing this like a call-and-radio show on my phone.

So, apologies about that.

Michael lives in a failed state.

I live.

That's right.

That's what happens when you have a Democratic governor.

Now, Michael, of course, experiencing a early snowstorm in New Mexico in the desert.

Meanwhile, I'm in New Jersey, and it's 75 degrees in mid-November.

Yeah.

What could be wrong?

Things are going great.

That doesn't portend anything.

Now,

we are recording this a couple days after Donald Trump's victory over Kamala Harris in the election, and we wanted to do just a reaction.

So maybe we go around the room first.

How are you feeling?

And

what are you thinking?

We can start with Ree.

All right.

If this is just like a go around the room, kind of quick temperature check, you know, I wouldn't say that I am well.

I wouldn't say that I'm happy, you know, but I also wouldn't say that I am surprised or shocked.

I think some details that I think we're going to get into are certainly like noteworthy, interesting, worth like introspection, reflection, assessment, and worth thinking about like what the path forward is for like this fucking country.

But yeah, not shocked.

The U.S.

is a shithole.

So it's a shithole.

Okay, Jay.

Rehan speaks for me as usual.

Also, I mean, yeah, I agree.

Like after 2016, this isn't going to shock you, right?

Like the concept of Trump winning.

It literally happened once already.

Yeah.

I got to say, I thought...

Harris would win in the days before the election.

I was coming around on the idea that she would win pretty handily.

And so that's on me.

You can come and get a full refund for this to the socialist country to which I am moving with no extradition treaty.

Going to stand out like a store fum.

Yeah, really, though.

I feel grief that so many people went through four years of Trump, the cruelty he inflicted on so many people, who then saw January 6th, who then saw him, you know, deteriorate in the four years since and signed up for another four years.

And I feel kind of resigned.

I remember, you know, I was just getting started in journalism in 2016 when he won.

And there was a real energy at the time to, you know, hold his feet to the fire and hold this Trump administration accountable.

It sounds corny now, but like it felt like an exciting thing to do.

It felt like a responsibility.

Yeah.

And I also think that like.

Every outlet was suddenly doing politics coverage because everyone was reading politics coverage.

There was such an appetite for it.

I got started at GQ magazine, you know, like we went from here are the best suspenders you can buy for under $300

to like real politics coverage because our audience wanted it.

Yeah.

And now like, you know, maybe I'm just older.

Maybe this energy will come later.

I don't know, but like.

I don't want to do this again, man.

Yeah.

It was fucking exhausting.

Like, I don't want to learn who the new like Rex Tillerson and Seb Gorka are.

I don't want to know who these these people are.

I don't want to care about them, but that is what the next four years is going to look like.

And I'm not thrilled about it.

Yeah.

That's part of what I'm excited for.

Who are the new guys going to be?

There's a counterpoint.

Yeah.

Who's the news?

Every week in the Trump administration, you learn about a new guy.

And it's like, yeah, they found him kicking puppies on the street.

And now he is the deputy secretary of the interior.

And then a week later, he's gone.

There is a magic to it.

And I, I'm sorry, Jay, that you don't seem to get it.

All right.

Josie.

I am laughing because I had totally forgotten about Rex Tillerson.

Of course.

Just remembering those names.

Yeah.

It's so funny.

I,

as this chat knows,

was absolutely sure that this was going to happen and it was going to be a blowout.

So I do not feel surprised.

And it makes me remember that like, so much of the pain of 2016 was the surprise.

So like knowing the bad thing is going to happen is a shitty feeling, but it's a very different feeling than being surprised by it.

I

think that this is an astronomical failure on basically both parties' parts in such a major way that like it feels like a fundamental restructuring of how we think about politics is necessary.

Yeah.

And I think that like objectively, what's going to happen over the next four years is going to be worse than what happened in 2016 and 2020.

Just objectively, he has a court.

He has like at least for the next two years, like probably both houses of Congress, like it's going to be a disaster.

And

also, I don't feel that kind of like, will we get through it feeling that I had in 2016 in part because I'm not sure we'd get through it on either party.

Like things are so broken and the parties have failed us so badly that I'm not, I don't think I'd feel much more sure of what's next either way.

Michael?

I would say I have two big emotions right now.

My biggest emotion right now, my biggest feeling is anger.

I am very,

very angry.

Like Jay, I had come around on the idea that Harris might win and might win handily, but I wasn't surprised.

You know, this was definitely a known risk, which is kind of why I'm angry.

This risk has been present and obvious for years,

and I don't think enough was done to mitigate it or prevent it altogether.

And I'll talk about this more later, but you know, I really feel like

between 2017, really, and 2022, the American people really did their part.

And the institutions

that they looked to to oppose this failed them, you know, didn't hold up there into the bargain.

And so, I'm angry.

I'm angry at a lot of people and a lot of institutions.

I'm also very sad, and I'm sad because I think a lot of bad things are going to happen, and there's going to be a lot of suffering.

And it's not going to be suffering that will be easily mitigated, or alleviated, or prevented.

The cake is already baked on some of this stuff, and there's not much we can do now.

And that is

really

disheartening.

And I know one of the big things is to not let that disheartening feeling paralyze you, which is why I'm trying to lean into the anger instead.

Yeah, you still have to be clear-eyed about like what the reality is, though.

Like, yeah, if things are bad, you have to be real that things are bad.

Right.

Because that actually gives you the path forward in a much more like clear way and responsible way than sort of like, you know, rose-colored glasses or whatever.

Right.

Right.

I also think like it's really tempting to become callous.

No, it's cool.

It's not my turn to talk or anything.

I'm not feeling that.

Shut up, Peter.

What happened to my feelings?

Peter, as another man, talk on this, on this on this podcast.

We don't need to, no, I'm just kidding.

I was just going to say that to your point, Michael, like, I feel like one of the key things here is that it's easy to try to not get angry or sad because it's self-protection, but that is the mandate is to like stay.

both of those things because otherwise right what do we have because otherwise what we're accepting this as normal no yeah right like that can't be the thing.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Peter, how are you feeling?

Thank you for asking.

I am tired.

And

it's a combination of my mind always racing.

And my neighbors' lawn people have started a little earlier than they usually do this week.

And I get woken up by leaf blowing.

So earlier.

than I'd ever want, I am awoken by the sound of a leaf blower and then I am immediately thinking about Donald Trump.

That's sort of the situation I'm in.

I feel like this overall feeling I have reminds me of how I used to feel when I was younger.

Like when I was a teenager,

9-11 happened

and everyone

was bloodthirsty, right?

Politicians were.

Yeah.

Celebrities were.

The broader culture was racism and imperialism were being like embraced by everyone.

And I was just starting to sort of come into my own politically.

And I was like researching what the CIA did across the globe in the prior century.

And it was all of these horrible crimes that no one ever paid for.

And the people who committed them were often still in power in the Bush administration.

And

I just got overwhelmed with the feeling that the world is unjust and cruel, and no one around me seems to notice or care.

And I mention it because it sincerely feels like the same thing to me.

It reminds me of that feeling, but also it like stems from the same place.

This is a nation born in blood and we're still rolling around in it.

And like the Obama era didn't change that.

We haven't exited that phase of our country's history and we probably never will.

And I think on the left, that's something that we all know intellectually,

but occasionally you get this visceral reminder and it's very grounding.

All right.

Let's put on our pundit hats here and speculate wildly about what went wrong.

Big picture.

You know, obviously we don't know too much.

We don't have all the data here.

But who, who wants to take the lead here?

I can start.

I think what went wrong is that Kamala Harris and the Democrats had a bad campaign.

They ran a bad campaign given the moment, given what is like very clear about what voters were saying they wanted, about what voters were expressing in terms of disapproval of Joe Biden and the opportunity that was there for the Kamala Harris campaign to do something to signal that her presidency and her administration would be different from what had turned into a deeply unpopular administration in Joe Biden's presidency.

And I think there was a lot of like understandable positive energy when Joe Biden finally fucking said that he wasn't going to seek reelection and then that it was going to be Kamala.

And there was so much.

positive energy and I think a few good steps taken by the party in terms of like, yes, it's a break from this unpopular old ghoul.

But then like pretty quickly, immediately, the campaign was just like, we're going to be Joe Biden again.

We're going to do exactly the same things.

The DNC was fucking crazy to be like, let's make sure the cops talk.

Let's make sure we're talking about courting Republican voters.

Let's make sure we're talking about having the most lethal military in the world.

And let's make sure in interviews that when Kamala is asked about what she would do differently from a Biden administration, that she says absolutely nothing.

For me, like that's really squarely where things went wrong.

And then I think what it comes down to in the ballot box for voters, there's so much screaming in these couple of days since the election.

There's so much screaming online about like who is to blame, whether it's Hispanic men or black men or Arabs, the situation in Gaza and what voters did in reaction to that.

I think like what it came down to is

the economy.

And like, that's always what it comes down to, like.

people's material conditions and who they believed was going to do something different for them in that regard.

I mean, like Joe Biden barely beat Donald Trump, barely beat him four years ago.

And

groceries were cheaper.

And there was not a war in Gaza or like an active war like there is today.

Yeah.

And

I don't think that the primary blame here goes to like sexism and racism, but as always, they play a role in it.

So like Joe Biden being a white guy, like helps.

And

so to me, I was always like, how could she win this?

Like the economy is worse.

People are more pissed off.

And nobody picked her, which was not her fault per se, but it's just a reality.

And now you're saying you're going to do the same thing.

Like, what, like,

the numbers never made sense to me because Joe Biden barely beat him the first time.

And everything this time was worse.

We've said several times that.

the up or down result isn't shocking.

It's the magnitude of the victory that is sort of something to you know sit and ponder a little bit you know we're still counting votes Peter as you mentioned but like

as of now it looks like Harris will have received you know 13 14 million fewer votes than Joe Biden did in 2020.

That is just an astonishing drop off.

And the other one I saw is that so far,

only two states shifted more in the Democratic direction.

My home state of Washington and Utah.

So shout out to my friends in Utah.

It was the Romney family.

All nine million of them.

There's a group text titled Sweater Best Bros.

Yeah, I texted them and they came through for me.

Every other state moved to the right.

Jay and the Romneys.

That's right.

That's right.

One syllable name.

Jay and Mitt.

And tag.

And

you want to keep going?

You got any other?

The only one I could remember.

Doesn't have a ten name tag.

Yeah.

I really thought, and you know, this is me being both optimistic and stupid coming into play.

I really thought that for a small but significant chunk of the electorate, that January 6th would make a difference.

That there would be people who looked at the last election, who looked at the candidates before them and thought, I don't know if like Kamala Harris is my candidate, but the last time I saw that guy, he was like urging his followers to go to the Capitol and kill people.

And that's a deal breaker for me, I imagined voters saying.

And

I was wrong about that.

There wasn't a peaceful transfer of power last time, and voters still chose to reward him for it.

And it just makes me wish, like.

If only there were law enforcement officials who had the power to hold Trump accountable in the weeks after January 6th.

It's a shame.

Yeah, Jay, I do think there were some voters who said that.

I think that probably

January 6th concerns are reflected in the increasing education polarization.

And my guess would be that it's Democrats getting support with a lot of college-educated people who had previously, you know, been conservative or, you know, moderate, probably is in part because of January 6th, and probably in part because of Dobbs.

You know, I think that makes sense.

I think that fueled that a lot.

I think it didn't sink through to the rest of the electorate because I don't know that the Democratic Party leadership really believed it was a big deal.

They didn't behave like it was a big deal.

They didn't.

And since they didn't behave like it was a big deal, media took their cues from them and started welcoming.

people who were involved in the you know plotting and execution of a fucking coup back into you know polite circles onto the debate stage, essentially.

And corporations started giving money to them.

And

the time to act on that was in, you know, fucking day one, but at least in the first month of your presidency.

And they didn't want to.

They didn't want to do that.

There are articles.

You can go back and see them in November 2020 after Biden was like, you know, the president-elect saying that he didn't want his administration bogged down in Trump investigations.

This was before he'd even selected an attorney general.

And then he selected Merrick Garland.

And so

it would be naive not to think that the choice of Merrick Garland did not have anything to do with his desire to not have his

administration bogged down in Trump investigations.

And we can look at what happened and say that January 6th didn't change that.

Like quite obviously, January 6th didn't change that.

Merrick Garland's priorities didn't change after January 6th.

And there was not a fucking peep out of the administration about them being upset about that, about his very slow pace, until after the January 6th committee hearings, 18 months later.

They fucked up.

They did.

They fucked it up.

They missed the moment.

And now it's normalized.

I mean, probably the strongest thing that Biden has said about January 6th came after the Trump the United States decision this year.

That's three and a half years.

That's too late.

Yeah.

Well, it's also too late because now he's immune.

Right, exactly.

Right.

Peter, what do you think went wrong?

Yeah, I mean, I think all we can do at this point is make educated guesses.

Big picture, like Jay said.

Turnout for Trump did not increase overall.

Democrats' turnout decreased substantially.

Right.

And you can slice it all sorts of ways if you look at exit polls.

Hispanics, especially Hispanic men, moved toward Trump.

Younger people moved toward Trump.

White women didn't move toward Harris as much as Democrats had hoped.

I think if you look at the problems that incumbents have had around the globe, the simplest explanation here is what you said, Rhea.

We are exiting a very rough and weird economic period, and we're doing it in an awful media environment.

And maybe there was nothing that could be done.

Maybe there was no realistic campaign with this Democratic Party that could have won this election.

I think that's fairly realistic.

I think that's a reasonable thing to think.

But I think we also have enough information to know that there is a problem for Democrats here.

And I think the problem is probably that the tent is too big and the philosophy for how Democrats build a coalition

is not sustainable.

I've been researching this for, if books could kill, for an episode that is now much more depressing than I wanted it to be.

But in 2002, there was this book called The Emerging Democratic Majority published by a couple of political science guys.

They basically argued that due to demographic change, Democrats were going to be the dominant political party in the country in the near future.

And that was in 2002 when Republicans took control of all three branches, right?

So this felt like this very

interesting,

counterintuitive position to take.

And it was very invigorating to the party because they were so completely out of power at the time.

And the thesis seemed to be correct.

And in fact, it was half correct.

The voting population was getting more diverse, and that helped Democrats win.

But at the same time, the white working class voters, whites without degrees, were leaving the party.

And there's research that indicates that the reason for this was ideological.

So

Republicans are building an ideological base of primarily white people, primarily white men.

And Democrats are building a demographic coalition that consists of all these different disparate groups.

So that's much more fragile because you have to hold together all of these different people with different interests and values.

They're not necessarily going to be motivated by the same things.

But that has been the democratic theory of politics for the last 20 years.

And it's cracking, and it's cracking in ways that some people predicted.

A lot of people looked at this 20 years ago and said, like,

okay, but a lot of Hispanic immigrants are Catholics, right?

They sort of align with Republican values in a lot of ways.

So maybe they move right over time.

And I think Democrats.

They assimilate, they start thinking of themselves as white.

Right.

So what has happened is that the Democrats have had to sort of abandon their values in an effort not to alienate any given demographic.

That means a political party that is often without a clear message.

And that means a lot of things.

It means it doesn't inspire an ideological base.

It doesn't motivate an ideological base.

And it also doesn't have a message that can cut through a disinformation-laden media environment.

And I think that's why, part of of why at least they can't generate enthusiasm for their vision, because people don't really know what their vision is and their vision gets watered down at every step.

So, okay, now you have Hispanics leaving the coalition, for example.

How do the Democrats remedy that?

The premise of the coalition is that these groups will default to the Democratic Party.

But if they're not doing that,

what's your message?

What's your message that's going to resonate in these communities?

If you believe that, well, Arabs have have always voted for Democrats and the alternative

is nominally more racist.

So they're going to keep voting for us.

What do you do when that thesis falls apart?

Yep.

Even as you're blowing them off the map.

Right.

I mean, and you know, Gaza didn't cost Kamala the election.

It might have cost her Michigan.

Maybe it didn't.

Maybe the Democrats were right and they would have alienated the rich white ladies that they needed to vote for them in this election if they had taken a different position.

I don't know.

But I can tell you that the

position that the Democratic Party has taken on Gaza is emblematic of what I think maybe didn't cost her the election, but at least cost her votes and is costing the Democratic Party votes, the substantive vacuousness of the party.

We have to say it in a way that is not a surprise.

No.

People said it, have been saying it for a year and have said, we've been taught our whole fucking lives, your vote is your voice.

Your vote is your voice.

use your voice and so this community every single person that i have talked to in the arab community in the muslim community that withheld their vote for kamala harris has no shame about it whatsoever because they have said we have said it for a year they have told us to use our voice with our vote i have said how i would use my voice with my vote on this issue if the democratic party didn't change on it they didn't and so i did that that's what i'm supposed to do as an american yeah Yeah.

Right.

What does a vote matter if you vote for someone who's bombing your people?

Like literally, what's the point of voting if that's what you have to vote for?

We talked about this a couple of episodes ago, but many Democrats seem to believe that you can sort of demand rationality

from your voters, right?

Oh, it would be irrational for Arabs and Muslims to vote for Trump because he is in fact more pro-Israel than the Biden administration.

Not how politics works.

And I think everyone would understand this if like Kamala had come out and said, hey, I'm actually pro-life.

I agree with all of the Republican platform on abortion.

And then Democrats could make the same pitch.

Well, there's still climate change.

She's still better in all of these other different ways.

But does anyone who's not a fucking dipshit think that that wouldn't cost her votes?

No, because you're signaling to a group of people that they're not part of your coalition.

Exactly.

That will alienate them.

It

leaves them looking for someone else.

And someone else, in this case, is the person running against you.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Or fucking Jill Stein or whatever.

Right, exactly.

And they said we can do it without the Arab vote.

And so the Arab vote said, okay, then, do it without us.

It was a conscious choice.

It was a conscious choice.

Very clearly communicated from both sides.

Right.

Right.

We don't need to harp on it because I think you're right, Peter.

I mean, it is objectively true.

It's not the lack of the Arab vote that cost Kamala the election.

So I don't think Gaza was like the dispositive factor or input thing that like gave the output of a Trump win.

It's just something to like be thinking about.

That would have been a moral, again, I think I said this in view guys.

That would have been a moral clarity.

Right.

You know, a sort of a manifestation of moral purpose that is way too

interesting and beautiful for the American public.

Right.

Right.

Right.

Right.

This was about eggs being expensive.

Yeah.

You know, at the end of the day, because that's more American.

Continuing with like with the big tent leads to small ideas, leads to like electoral weakness, a theme.

The Democratic Party's apex in this century was

after a campaign whose motto was change you can believe in.

That was change you can believe in.

And immediately, the party apparatus around that candidate defaulted to actually almost nothing will change.

And since then, in the intervening 15 years, the party has become the party of the status quo, has been the party of America's already great, and all we need to do is tinker at the edges.

This was like within three months of Barack Obama being inaugurated, it was, well, we can't pass his agenda because of the filibuster.

The American people spoke in unequivocal voice that that they wanted something new out of politics.

And the Democratic Party, writ large, said, well, I kind of think the Senate parliamentarian is more important than that.

I kind of think this, the filibuster is more important than that.

And never really let go of that mindset.

Like they still have that mindset of like, we can just tinker at the edges and we don't have to be ambitious and bold and we don't have to worry about reform.

Oh, you want to change the Supreme Court?

That's crazy.

Oh, you want to do single-payer?

That's crazy.

Oh, you want like, it's a campaign.

It's a party built around small ideas.

Yeah.

And it's like their ethos.

And it doesn't work.

It doesn't work.

And I said this like a couple of weeks ago, and I think in our labor episode, I thought that the expiration date for this approach would be.

after this election.

Unfortunately, it turns out it was before this election.

But it doesn't work anymore.

Like the party needs to be started over from scratch.

But you you know, I think, Michael, there is something that you're pointing out that I think Donald Trump has a lot of really big ideas that aren't good for anybody.

And yet the fact that they're big and they're bold and they're different is attractive.

There's something very attractive about someone who's willing to say, like, I think we should do things differently, even if the way he wants to do things differently are bad shit insane.

And I feel like that's something that we have, like, this party has just failed.

to internalize over and over.

It's like, I mean, it's everything that you guys are talking about today from the filibuster to the post-January 6th reaction is like, there is no ability to like separate yourself from the institutions that put you there.

And like, Kamala Harris could have had 10 really bad ideas or like ideas that a lot of people didn't agree with, but that felt bold and exciting.

And I think she would have gotten more votes, truly.

Like, I think there is something about the feeling of feeling like someone's working hard for you.

I mean, I think I completely agree.

I will sort of throw a little bit of cold water on this discussion in the sense that if Republicans were in power, Democrats would have won.

You can feel it.

Yes.

Yes.

With the same like economic circumstances, war circumstances.

Yes.

With all the same messaging on either side.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

And I know that Josie has a meeting she has to run too.

I do.

So do you have any final thoughts, anything about what this moment calls for that you want to squeeze in here?

I'll say the only thing that, and it sounds corny, but I very much feel this need for real community structure and this idea that like the more you know your neighbors and the more you know your community and the more you do things locally, like you are building something that's kind of impenetrable.

I feel like in these moments, it feels so lonely, except for like the people that I'm on Zoom with or whatever.

You know, I keep thinking about whoever tweeted like people call themselves organizers, but they're always in fights with their roommates.

Like so much of this work has to be done person to person,

seeing people in real life and engaging with them and meeting people, new people, and trying to build really in like the old kind of construction of build, not the skip steps kind of construction of build.

And I'm trying to get back to that feeling.

So that's all I have to say.

That and

Peter is the problem.

Yeah.

Oh, we can agree on that.

I am the solution.

I'm getting off scotch free here.

This is great.

It's only because I talked to you separately.

It's interesting that how many people at this time will blame a Middle Middle Easterner.

Look, I'm a black woman.

I'm getting blamed left and right.

Okay.

I guess, Josie, that that's where you are.

So you believe that you have a right to blame Middle Easterners for this law.

Goodbye.

All right.

Well, that's Josie Duffy Rice, folks.

She's signing off.

Bye, Josie.

Thank you.

Bye, Josie.

Bye.

Love you guys.

One other thing, maybe the last thing we can talk about in terms of what went wrong, a huge thing in my mind that is so, so obvious, like set aside the messaging, is how people are getting delivered the messaging from either side.

The right wing in this country has a media machine that reaches every single possible demographic in every possible medium.

A podcast, a YouTube stream, a Twitch, cable news.

You are reaching teenagers to senior citizens, and you can get that messaging constantly and easily and super accessibly.

And that is simply not replicated on any comparable scale on the left.

I mean, I think the solution has to be like vigorous antitrust.

Like as a policy matter, it has to be you got to break up Facebook and Google and Sinclair Media and MSNBC and Fox and all of them.

You can't just let the entire delivery of information be controlled by literally a handful of people who can make decisions that affect how the entire country sees the world.

Like that's not enough.

Yeah.

That's a good example of how empty the Democratic Party can be, because when Lena Khan was putting in a

more aggressive antitrust regime than we've seen in several decades, big Democratic donors were trying to step in and put a stop to it.

That's right.

And people within the party were abiding.

And

that is short-sighted, to say the least.

You will not win by

abiding the wishes of oligarchs who nominally support the Democratic Party.

You will win by disrupting the power centers on the right.

All right.

We should talk about what they're going to do with the courts.

We should talk about what they're going to do with the administrative state.

Like, I mean, we should talk about it.

Yeah.

You know, two, four years from now,

it might not matter what the fundamentals say for Democrats' electoral chances.

It literally might not.

So we should talk about that.

Yeah, let's swerve back into our own lane.

I think at the simplest level, looking at the Supreme Court, it feels very obvious what the next couple of years look like.

Blarence Thomas and Sam Alito will retire.

Yeah.

Yep.

My guess is that they will retire in 2026 because who can resist hanging out an extra year?

Two more years, yeah.

Right.

They're going to wield power and then they're going to step down and they will be replaced by people who are

ideologically

relatively similar to them, at least functionally, in terms of where they exist as a vote, but are

a little dumber, a little hackier.

Someone like Clarence Thomas is an ideological fascist and someone who has a vision of government that exists outside of Donald Trump.

Someone like James Ho or Eileen Cannon, who I think are very likely candidates to replace him, are hacks.

They are MAGA chuds fundamentally, a little more like Alito, though I think they sort of post-date him in terms of their ideology.

These are people who don't really, at this point in time, have a vision of politics outside of Donald Trump or no Donald Trump.

And I don't know that that sort of changes things in the short term.

I don't know that that changes things vote to vote, but it certainly makes the court dumber.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think that's basically a guarantee.

The only thing that I don't know, and I think is a genuinely interesting question, is does John Roberts retire under Trump?

And I really don't know the answer to that.

One thing that I think the election kind of brought into focus is the subject of a lot of speculation over the last two years, which is the political impact of Dobbs.

And

in the two years since Dobbs, when voters had the opportunity to protect abortion rights when it was on the ballot, reproductive rights had been batting a thousand.

Everywhere they were on the ballot, reproductive rights won.

In purple states like Michigan, purple reddish like Ohio, but also even in red states like Kansas and Kentucky over the last two years.

Voters have voted to protect reproductive autonomy from their Republican lawmakers.

And I kind of thought this energy would carry over into 2024, that the ongoing backlash to anti-choice politics would push Harris over the top.

As a white man, it pains me to say this, and I so rarely have to, but again, I was wrong.

There were 10 states in this election with abortion on the ballot seven of them once again voted to protect it and that doesn't include florida which only missed because under florida law you need 60 of the vote and only 57 percent of floridians voted to protect abortion rights yeah great system we have here but obviously harris lost florida abortion was on the ballot in arizona and nevada They voted to protect access.

It looks like she could lose both.

Montana and Missouri voted to protect abortion rights, went to Trump by almost 60%.

There was no specific ballot initiative here, but the numbers on this are so wild to me that I think it's worth mentioning.

Texas has an abortion ban, with no exceptions for rape or incest.

That polls among Texans at about 15%.

It is wildly unpopular.

And, you know, Democrats are always thinking, you know, will this be the year that Texas goes blue?

Of course, like not even close.

I don't really know why that is.

You know, this was the first presidential election since Dobbs.

I think it's at least possible, armchair psychology here, that having the option to vote to protect abortion rights makes you maybe feel a little bit less bad about voting for Trump if you might be inclined to support him.

But I don't know.

And the political backlash to Dobbs, I think, has been...

one of the more inspiring and powerful political movements to watch.

It's probably the biggest reason that Democrats overperformed expectations in the 2022 midterms.

And it's pretty grim to look at that and think, well, that was it.

That was the price Republicans paid is a midterm election in which they did a little worse.

And now they have the presidency and the Senate and very may well have a unified Republican government all over again.

That was it.

Yeah.

I think that the fact that abortion rights referenda won in Missouri and Montana is a pretty good indication

that Democrats have fucked up in some way that I don't entirely know that I understand.

That's bad.

But the disconnect between those votes is significant.

And maybe it's just that abortion is

preferred,

but not as salient as other things.

But that, again, is a problem with Democratic messaging.

And that, I think, is one of the more interesting things, you know, interesting, quote unquote, not to sort of dehumanize it, that has happened here.

Noteworthy, whatever.

Yeah.

And I think we should, you know, note

that it's very clear that the abstraction

of federal courts from the political process has left people

who are less engaged with politics unable

to grasp exactly how it works and the difference between the parties.

And this has operated to the benefit of Republicans in a very significant way.

Jay, you wrote in Balls and Strikes that by the end of his term, it's likely that Trump will have appointed half the federal judiciary.

That's so many.

That is an insane, massive transformation of the judicial branch by one president.

That is wild.

At minimum, a majority of the Supreme Court, bare majority of the Supreme Court.

It is

hard to comprehend, I think, even for us,

how transformative that will be to American politics.

And I think that the average person

has no real sense of how this shit works, what the connection between Donald Trump and the administrative state is, for example.

And

I think think that what you're going to see is that, for example, in a decade, the sky will be a little darker with pollution.

And your average person will look up

and they will understand that something has changed, but they won't understand exactly what happened.

That abstraction benefits Republicans in an enormous way.

And it speaks to a failure of Democrats themselves to grasp the challenge of the courts.

And to not name that.

Yeah.

I think the only way this could have worked was that the day Dobbs came down formally was for Joe Biden to come out like breathing fire, yelling about abortion rights in like a very angry speech in which he backed court reform and connecting in all of political coverage and therefore in the public's mind, the Supreme Court to the loss of abortion rights.

You needed to do that.

He needed to make that connection with his messaging and his policy saying, we are going after the Supreme Court because they're stripping us of abortion rights so that every fucking article that talked about abortion rights would mention that Joe Biden wants to change the Supreme Court in order to protect abortion rights.

They didn't do that.

They said people who wanted to change the court were out of the mainstream and not their base.

And something like 15, 20% of voters think Joe Biden is responsible for the end of abortion rights.

Yeah, as bad as the Supreme Court has been for the past,

I mean, several decades, right?

But in particular the past five, six years, I think it's important to remember that the conservative supermajority that Trump created was not really in power while Trump was president.

That's right.

And to date, this six justice conservative supermajority, for as bad as they've been, their role has been to, you know, overturn precedent, but also to check the Biden administration while Democrats have held the White House.

And I think the landscape looks very different when the role of this Sixth Justice conservative supermajority is blessing the things that the Trump White House is doing and that Republicans in Congress are doing.

I mean, the best case scenario here for the Trump presidency is incompetence, that Trump and his people are not skilled or motivated enough to do the things that they've been promising on the campaign trail.

And Trump has never really been interested in doing the work of governing.

And the task of rounding up and deporting tens of millions of people, that's a lot of work.

And

again, the best case scenario is that he just does not have the capacity to get it done.

At the same time, I think there is a significant risk that the people who are going to work for him this time, the people who are going to surround him, are much more malevolent and much more motivated than at least some of the more establishment Republicans who were involved in his first administration.

And so, yeah, I think the future is the same thing that happened last time, which is people are going to suffer.

Things like family separation are at minimum back on the table.

And in all likelihood, it is going to be much much worse versions of barbaric policies like that.

For people who are vulnerable under Trump, who frankly remain vulnerable under Biden, things are going to be worse by just about every metric.

And on the left side of things,

you know, I talked about this a little bit earlier in the context of media, but I fear people checking out.

I'm speaking a little tongue-in-cheek here, but part of Trump's defeat in 2020 was the redemption of the hashtag resistance.

People said, you know, he won by an impossibly narrow margin in 2016 with a sort of constellation of serendipitous events in the political landscape that propelled him to victory.

You can sell yourself a narrative where people said, you know, no, not this asshole, not again, we won't do it again.

They fought and they won.

And to go four years later and to lose, to have the same guy back, like, I think it is perfectly understandable for people to feel deflated, for people to feel cheated.

Like, what was the point?

What was the point of all that hashtag resisting that we did?

And I think it is understandable to tune out, but I also think that that is bad because when people start tuning out, that's when the bad shit starts to happen.

Between 2017 and 2022, the American people like subscribed to newspapers and got in the streets and protested and voted and donated and volunteered at insane numbers, like record numbers for like all of that shit

and propped up a bunch of institutions

to act as a bulwark against emergent fascism.

Newspapers, political parties, political organizations, etc.

And

what did those organizations do?

What did they do with that they failed down the line yeah every single one the democratic party said thanks we're going to pass a highway bill we're going to pass a bipartisan infrastructure bill that's what they did you know the newspapers capitulated to trump did his dirty work writing basically press releases for him quote-unquote sainwashing him taking his insane incoherent babblings and turning them into coherent policy messages the american people did their part The institutions failed them.

And so I think resistance right now starts by understanding how you support or build new institutions.

It can't be the Washington Post and the New York Times.

It's got to be ProPublica.

It's got to be alternate media.

And

I'm right here, dude.

I can also hear this.

Bossum strikes them 5-4.

That's right.

And that goes for politics too, right?

It's got to be like the Democratic Party also has to be rebuilt.

Like it can't just be, you know, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer are not going to be leading us out of this wilderness.

They're just, they're not like any more than Joe Biden was.

We see this in their...

the way they don't take issues we talk about on this podcast a lot very seriously like the courts we see this in the way they like fetishize and prioritize proceduralism like the senate parliamentarian and the filibuster over real policy And you see it in shit like the appointment of Merrick Garland.

This was the most important

appointment.

And he had the most important job in the administration.

And it was a fucking disaster.

Yeah.

Rampant corruption for years.

You had prosecutions for Trump teed up to start on day one.

uh you had the coup and he was just like nah let's not do that

it is just the most obvious symptom of the underlying disease.

But it's, I mean, Garland is a real fucking villain.

He's a villain in this.

Like, yeah, he's, you know, I think when people talk about like what the Democratic Party did wrong, too often they're talking about like

the attempts of the party to frame their messaging and appeal to people.

But like, what about what you actually do with power?

Because

you had this motherfucker in your hands.

Like you let him slip through your fingers.

You can't just go, well, the country's reactionary and inflation.

It's like

you had him in your fucking sights and you choked, you choked, you appointed this moron, this like basically what, a fucking Republican due to some what, like residual obligation because of the Obama debacle, it makes no fucking sense.

It is symptomatic of a party that

is just thinking about this shit too much, has its allegiance to all of the wrong principles.

It's fucking embarrassing.

I mean,

all you had to do was prosecute this guy.

And

everyone in the country was okay with it for a brief period there.

For a couple weeks after January 6th,

Republicans were like, well, yeah, obviously he is a criminal and he's a traitor and something needs to be done about him.

That was like, you had like Brett Stevens writing that in the New York Times and you let that get away from you.

It's, it's fucking humiliating.

Dude, people in his own administration, when they're, you know, in their testimony to the January 6th committee, were saying like, yeah, I was telling the people involved in the plotting of the coup, like, you better have good lawyers or whatever, because the assumption was you do this, you're going to jail.

And the Democratic Party was like,

well, I don't know.

Do you really?

Is that really it?

Dude, his lawyer, Trump's lawyer, Michael Cohen, went to jail on campaign finance charges in which Donald Trump was an unindicted co-conspirator.

They could have just taken that indictment on January 21st and fucking arrested him and said, we'll we'll sort out the coup stuff, but in the meantime, we're putting him in fucking handcuffs and we're bringing these charges.

If they wanted to, if they wanted it, they didn't want to.

And that is a problem.

That is a core issue.

Nobody in leadership wanted this guy in prison.

And

now here we are.

Yeah.

I think this point about the rebuilding of institutions is incredibly important.

We've been talking the whole episode about like the failure of the Democratic Party.

It is a failure.

These are massive failures because what we're talking about is this institution failing the people that it should be accountable to.

This institution ushering in even more suffering, even more of a political crisis now looming ahead, to say nothing of the suffering that this institution has already caused.

So it is a failure.

There is another way to look at it, which is that like this is the logical result of an unfair and captured by corporate interests and wealthy interests.

This is the logical result of like how that system, it's not failing.

It's doing what it's been built up to do since it has been captured by these interests that certainly like don't care about the people.

I think in the wake of the election, you know, we're recording this on Thursday, two days after election day.

I think there is a feeling among progressives and liberals and Democratic Party voters who are understandably incredibly sad, incredibly angry, incredibly disappointed.

I think that there's a bit of a miscalculation or maybe a misidentification of what the political crisis is right now.

People are defining right now, the main political crisis of our time as being Trump and not a system that produces Trump, including the Democratic Party.

That is the political crisis that we live in.

Genocide is the defining political crisis of our time.

The fact that American workers today, their weekly wages adjusted for inflation are less than 50 years ago, that's a political crisis.

And so it's how you think about what politics is and what the crisis is.

Is it a party?

Is it elections and who gets elected and who's the figurehead of this sick and poisoned system?

Or is it the actual politics, people's material conditions?

And so, yes, we do have a massive political crisis.

We live in it currently.

Fascism is already here.

Trump is going to bring hell.

Trump is going to be super bad.

Trump is going to be so, so bad.

But when I have watched people burning alive live streamed for a year, we already live in hell.

It is fascist already.

And so let's not misidentify what the crisis is right now.

And I think, Michael, like you're saying it exactly.

The crisis is the failure or the way, depending on how you're looking at it, maybe not the failure, the success of the political institutions that we have right now.

They must, must, must be held to account by the people.

That takes organizing.

That takes community building in exactly the way Josie was talking about it, literal relationship building.

And that is very, very different.

People's minds have to shift in the next

soon.

People's minds have to shift about what it means to do social justice and to enact social justice and to organize and build their communities.

The only thing that we haven't touched touched on that I think our listeners are going to want to hear about is:

will there be,

for example,

the overturning of Obergefell in the next four years?

Will we see a

right to life, quote unquote, enshrined in the Constitution in the next few years?

I think the surface level analysis is

the composition of the Supreme Court is not likely to change that much.

You get Alito and Thomas being replaced by nutjobs, but they're already nut jobs, so maybe

no real change.

Another way to look at it, though, is that people like Roberts and Kavanaugh

have been hedging their bets because

they want to maintain the legitimacy of the institution.

But what does that look like when Donald Trump walks into office with a mandate, with something that looks like electoral legitimacy?

Does the calculus change?

Are they emboldened?

All of a sudden, I think the chance that Roberts or Kavanaugh says, okay,

I'll vote against gay marriage, I think that goes up.

I don't know what happens.

You know, Gorsuch is a wild card in this scenario, for example, which usually spells some amount of doom for the conservative position.

But I would say that there is a precariousness to that case that didn't exist before.

And when you look at, for example, the prospect of a constitutional right to life,

I would say that's unlikely, but not off the table, at least in the medium term.

What I would be concerned about is whether this court says, hey, Comstock Act, yeah, you can enforce that as much as you want.

I think we will sort of see

new dynamics emerge because we haven't seen a Republican Supreme Court and a Republican government working together in this modern era.

I think it's hard to predict, but I would expect a sort of shift in the dynamics.

I guess one way to end this, and I told you guys I wanted to talk about this, what are you most looking forward to in a Trump administration?

I can tell you guys personally what I am.

If RFK is in charge of the FDA for more than a few months,

obviously it's going to be a disaster in many regards.

There will be human suffering in many regards.

But it will also, in very small instances, be funny.

I posted about this online, but we are going to be entering a new age of diarrhea if RFK is at the helm of of the FDA for a while.

Baby Formula is just going to be raw beef within six months.

You're going to see shit you never even heard of.

And

he said he wanted to ban Mountain Dew.

And

I haven't heard a policy position that I've thought was funnier.

than banning Mountain Dew in years.

This is my come and take it moment.

God, let him ban Mountain Dew.

Just the

sweaty little nerds freaking out about it would be, be,

oh, God, it would be good.

Anyway, yeah, you know, I'm trying to embrace the positive here.

For me, the positive is the potential that the freak son of the Kennedys bans Mountain Dew in America.

We touched on this a little bit earlier, but I have reluctantly been thinking about some of the guys from the first Trump administration.

And I am excited to see what role the Krassensteins play in the Trump White House.

I think it'll be a real full circle moment for them.

It's a deep cut, yeah.

This is just like sort of a sequence of words that I was shocked I said once and hoped I would never have to say again.

But do you guys remember the Big Dick Toilet Attorney General?

Oh my God.

The interim attorney general, acting attorney general, who

at one point had been involved in a business venture marketing a toilet for well-endowed men.

I don't know what role he's going to play in the new administration, but again, I am excited to find out.

And I also want to float one other sort of downstream impact of a Trump presidency.

Wondering how Peter feels about the Chiefs losing the Super Bowl because

they lose their kicker in the last week when Harrison Butker is appointed Secretary of Education.

I think that will be a real story for you football fans to follow.

Yeah, but it'll be worth it to get Butker in there.

Doing what he does best, you know, opining on the rights of others.

I think the guys of the Trump administration are, it's going to be fascinating.

And in big picture for me, are we going to see the freakish J.D.

Vance wasps take the reins or

the Italians who love Donald Trump, right?

Which I think are fundamentally his base, wasps or Italians.

That is, I think, in my mind, up in the air, but I think it'll be definitive.

You're going to sort of understand what this administration is going to be about based on whether they put in

the

insane wasps or the insane Italians.

Those are different types of Republican insanity, and I think it's important to understand the difference.

Yeah.

So I'd say, you know, Brump has said that he thinks criticizing the Supreme Court should get you thrown in jail, which obviously could have serious implications for our podcast.

That does stress me out.

But I am looking forward to, in the worst case scenario, I'm not saying that this is likely.

or even plausible, but in that tail risk scenario where Peter, Rhiannon, and I become enemies of the state.

I am looking forward to seeing the world going on the run, you know, doing some backpacking and going to countries I've never, never thought I would visit.

And yeah, that'll be exciting.

It'll be really

just a new experience.

I'm looking forward to that.

I'm thinking about what my price would be to dime you guys out.

It's like 5K, probably.

I'll go 4,900.

You guys have very funny answers.

I can't think of anything in the quippy what I'm looking forward to.

I'm looking forward to.

Say Merrick Garland's execution.

It's right there for me.

That was Peters.

That was Peters.

That's true.

I've said that before.

That, yeah, if

please, please put Merrick Garland in prison.

Like, just do me a solid, bro.

Just do me a solid.

You want to reach out across the aisle, Donald?

Merrick Garland in prison.

It works for everybody.

It works for everybody.

It's really funny.

No, what I was going to say, like, I'm looking forward to confronting fascism.

Let's go.

All right.

All right.

Estodo.

All right.

Well, this was

a lot of thoughts that we've put onto the podcast.

Yeah, I think at the end of the day, it's bad and it's going to get worse.

And I think that there will be moments of complete despair and

defeat and exhaustion.

And I would say it is going to be important for everyone, including us,

to learn how to

pick ourselves up and like not just

do politics again, but also find happiness in little ways that you might not have done before, like find joy in your personal life.

And that's not to say to disengage, but to sort of like engage with the world around you in a positive way.

And that might sound like it's completely disconnected from politics, but it's not.

No, it's not at all.

It's not at all.

Yeah.

It can be community building, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, on the point of despair, I've been thinking about a couple of things.

One is, you know, I think Jack Merkinson over at Discourse Blog kind of mentioned this recently.

And it's been on my mind, you know, over the past year as I've organized with not liberal and not necessarily quote unquote just progressive, but left organizations and community groups on Palestine.

You know, we celebrate sort of social justice, civil rights, liberatory victories in history.

And in our country, think of the civil rights movement.

We rightfully celebrate those things as incredible achievements that they are.

And we often forget that, like,

how long the struggle was to get to those victories.

And that a lot of history is about taking up a struggle for humanity and pushing towards that, not knowing when that victory is going to come.

And so I take a lot of hope from that, that my role actually

isn't to win tomorrow, but to take up the struggle in an earnest and genuine and sort of full way and to think very seriously about what my role is in picking up the struggle.

I derive a lot of meaning and a lot of hope day to day from that.

Again, recognizing, just like I said, we're already in hell.

It is already fascist.

So there's that.

And then I also think, you know, me, certainly, certainly as a Palestinian, but I hope that other people can draw sort of hope from this as well, and strength and motivation.

That my people right now, standing on the rubble of their homes, will say, I am not leaving.

This is my homeland.

I will be free here or nothing else.

And so if my people right now, in Geze right now, aren't giving up hope, don't sort of sway from that line.

Despair is not the option for me right now then either.

All right, folks, next week, we're going to take the week off.

I think we need the rest and so do you.

But we are going to do a Zoom event for subscribers sometime this week.

So stay tuned if you are a subscriber.

Follow us on social media at 54pod.

Subscribe to our Patreon, patreon.com/slash 54pod, all spelled out for access to premium episodes, special events,

our Slack, all sorts of shit.

We'll see you in a couple weeks.

Bye.

Bye, everybody.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Brett Favre.

Just workshopping some things here.

That's good.

That's good.

5-4 is presented by Prologue Projects.

This episode was produced by Dustin DeSoto.

Leon Nafok and Andrew Parsons provide editorial support.

Our website was designed by Peter Murphy.

Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at ChipsNY, and our theme song is by Spatial Relations.

If you're not a Patreon member, you're not hearing every episode.

To get exclusive Patreon-only episodes, discounts on merch, access to our Slack community, and more, join at patreon.com/slash five four-pod.