Show 320 - Steering Into the Iceberg

Speaker 1 He's Dan Carlin, and this is common sense.

Speaker 1 The question that I get asked most often these days, and there's no good way for me to answer questions other than this, isn't that what's locked me into doing a show

Speaker 1 at this point when my natural inclination is to not do one?

Speaker 1 And the number one question we get is, why aren't you doing one? So maybe explaining why my natural inclination is as it is

Speaker 1 would preclude me getting a bunch of emails, maybe.

Speaker 1 I get it, though. I mean, I see what people are wondering about.
I mean, the times are absolutely, wickedly fraught with menace at the moment. And so why aren't we speaking out about it?

Speaker 1 So I think that leads us into

Speaker 1 questions of,

Speaker 1 call them of a personal nature, maybe.

Speaker 1 Things I'm going through that I hope is, you know, the way I frame it when I'm in a good mood is that I've always tried to say that wisdom requires a flexible mind, right?

Speaker 1 You know, we have this little slogan, we put it on t-shirts, but sometimes you find yourself trying to avoid the label of hypocrite and trying to live up to your own hype. And so I'm trying to

Speaker 1 be flexible on what the data seems to be showing me, living through the current events we're living through right now.

Speaker 1 But it's tough to be flexible when it's not so bad if you have to tweak something in your mental paradigm or your worldview, for example.

Speaker 1 You can tweak, you could say, hey, according to the data,

Speaker 1 this is reality. So I'm going to alter my viewpoints 8% to 8 degrees to starboard right or whatever as a way to match reality and the way I see the world internally.

Speaker 1 But when the adjustment required in your internal paradigm is large,

Speaker 1 I worry about my flexibility level. I'm a little worried everything might just break, foundationally speaking, if I have to try to incorporate the logical,

Speaker 1 and they may not be logical, they just might be the ones that occur to me first, which is why doing a show like this is difficult, because I don't feel like I'm far enough down in the logical argument chain

Speaker 1 to be at a helpful point yet. I mean, I feel like I'm still trying to figure out

Speaker 1 what to do with what I think the data tells me. I mean, how do you explain this?

Speaker 1 Well, if you know me, you know that there's certain things that I think about myself. And we all do this.

Speaker 1 I think, you know, I only took like the most basic psychology in college, but I remember that they were teaching us about things like totems, which if I understood it correctly, but I was not an A student in psychology,

Speaker 1 it has to do with one's self-image and how one sees oneself.

Speaker 1 And I think we we all have this. And I think as we get older, that self-image maybe becomes even more, it becomes more like cement that's drying, right?

Speaker 1 At my age, now this is hard cement the way I think I see myself, which is not always the way others see us, right? As we all understand that that's a

Speaker 1 long time discussed,

Speaker 1 you know, dichotomy in life, right? The way we see ourselves versus how others see us. But I've always been a weigh-the-people kind of guy.
I always describe it in the traditional American lines of

Speaker 1 thought: that I'm a Jefferson man.

Speaker 1 I always say that I want an America that matches the marketing material.

Speaker 1 And when one looks at the history of the marketing material and the slogans used and the people that did all that most of the time, I think you'd be pretty safe saying that Thomas Jefferson's probably the guy that deserves the most credit for the way it sounds, the language, right?

Speaker 1 And Jefferson, like almost every other hero or great person from the past that you can think of is a flawed character, right?

Speaker 1 I mean, nobody lives up to the current standards, just like we're not going to live up to future standards.

Speaker 1 And so I always try to transpose people, though, through, you know, history needs to be graded on a curve over the different eras might be a way to... to think about it.

Speaker 1 I always think about Jefferson in the time machine.

Speaker 1 And then while you're in the time machine, coming from the late 18th century to now, you go through the historical curve and you say, okay, Jefferson's views in relation to, let's call them, the center of the political spectrum during his own time period, transpose to now, and Jefferson's a righteous dude.

Speaker 1 I mean, listen, go read the marketing material that's mostly his fault. And I don't care if you're a Black Lives Matter protester or a hardcore President Trump supporter.
It sounds good, doesn't it?

Speaker 1 Especially if you apply it in the way that we would apply it now, right? So it's not just for white males who own property, you know, in Virginia.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's something that encompasses, I mean, and that's how Jefferson would be today. If he went through the grading you want to curve synthesizer on the way to now,

Speaker 1 Jefferson would be

Speaker 1 when compared to the Senate, I mean,

Speaker 1 he might be at some of these Black Lives Matter protests.

Speaker 1 But my problem with this, and because, you know, when I look in the mirror, I see a guy who sees himself as a Jeffersonian, right? I'm not one of those Andrew Jackson guys.

Speaker 1 I'm not one of those, God God forbid, John Adams guys.

Speaker 1 I'm a Jefferson guy, we the people guy. I have to tell you something, though.

Speaker 1 John Adams is all of a sudden much more understandable to me than he's ever been, which is scaring me because I'm not a John Adams guy, but I'm reading him going, yes, that John Adams.

Speaker 1 I finally get what he meant when he said this or that.

Speaker 1 Now let's understand something. John Adams is kind of a jerk

Speaker 1 as a guy, as a president of the whole thing. He just doesn't come off as one of these people you want.
First of all, he doesn't look like any hero you ever saw, right?

Speaker 1 But you read what he says now, and you go back, I was reading a recent book on Adams.

Speaker 1 And when you read, and the wonderful thing about all these guys, by the way, that makes them so fun is that the letters exist.

Speaker 1 And that's something that's sad that we don't do letter writing anymore because you're going to miss that.

Speaker 1 But there are letters from Adams to his son, Adams to his wife, and Adams to other famous people that they have. And you can read them.
And just like any other kind of writing,

Speaker 1 you get a little a little glimpse into the personality and the brain of the person who who who wrote the piece and for as a younger man adams just looked like a kind of a i mean just a

Speaker 1 i couldn't relate to him

Speaker 1 because i was this we the people kind of guy and and adams always had a healthy suspicion of the people, right? Didn't totally trust them.

Speaker 1 And I was always the kind of guy who knew that I could always pull out, if you'll pardon the pun, my Trump card in any argument with anybody about anything, especially if I knew that

Speaker 1 I had the vote on my side. I could always pull out the Trump card that, hey,

Speaker 1 yes, you make a lot of good points about your argument. Why don't we let the people vote on it? How do you think they'd vote then? I used to pull this one out in the argument over U.S.

Speaker 1 foreign policy all the time, whether or not we should have a military in 1807 countries and all these kinds of things, the money we spend on it.

Speaker 1 And somebody would always have a thousand different wonderful points from the national security establishment point of view. And And I'd finally, you know,

Speaker 1 if you couldn't argue your way out of that, I'd always pull out the, well, you know, hey, pal, why don't we let the American people vote on this and see how they feel?

Speaker 1 And they'd know that you had them. Because it's like the nuclear card in the U.S.

Speaker 1 In the U.S.

Speaker 1 I grew up in, in the argument days when there was things like, we used to pretend anyway, there were things like evidence and sources one could trust and agreed upon truths and a zeitgeist that most of us saw similarly.

Speaker 1 I was telling Ben the other day, I used the term mutual zeitgeists, and then I said, that's not a term that's supposed to be plural, is it? But it applies to now, which should tell you something.

Speaker 1 But once upon a time, we sort of pretended, 95% of the people out there sort of pretended that we had a similar reality that we lived in. You could have an argument from there.

Speaker 1 And if the argument went against me long enough on a subject like the one I just mentioned, I'd just simply say, hey, pal, what if we voted on it? And if that guy said, well,

Speaker 1 there'll be none of that. We can't have the American people voting on something that is so important, you know, because they might vote wrong.

Speaker 1 There is no argument when I was younger that went that way. That's a checkmate move there to say, hey, let's the people vote on it.

Speaker 1 Now, somebody might say, well, let's let the people vote on it, see how it goes.

Speaker 1 But on some of these issues, the governmental policy was so out of whack with popular sentiment that the people who were supporting that policy knew. I mean, if you vote on it, we're going to lose.

Speaker 1 So I guess what I'm saying is there were three words that just moved me my whole life.

Speaker 1 Three really powerful words. They were sort of the opposite of the Mao statement.

Speaker 1 You know, Mao, the communist Chinese leader, supposed to have said power emanates from the barrel of a gun or something like that.

Speaker 1 But in the country that I grew up in, the one whose marketing materials I definitely believed as a child, I was raised with all that. I like that stuff for the most part.
I want to be that country.

Speaker 1 The three most powerful words when you strung them together, the fountainhead of all power in our system and maybe all power everywhere was we the people.

Speaker 1 We the people. Hey, pal, you like your foreign policy idea? How about we put that to a vote? And if you don't want to put it to a vote, what does that mean?

Speaker 1 You try being an American politician, no matter how you really feel about that subject, and going up in front of the electorate saying, oh, listen, that's a subject that the American people should not weigh in on.

Speaker 1 That's a nuclear boomerang right there for your career, because it was a position that is not really, it's a not allowable position, I guess you could say, right? It's a not allowable.

Speaker 1 You're not allowed to be.

Speaker 1 You're not allowed to have a sentiment in this country that I grew up in that said that the people should not be the ones deciding that. You might live that.

Speaker 1 That might be the way you really do things. You might find 900 ways to avoid having that subject ever come up.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of ways to play three-card Monty in our system so that the electorate never has that choice.

Speaker 1 But you can't say openly, oh no, no, if the American people overwhelmingly didn't want to do that, I don't care. Not gonna work.

Speaker 1 So that's the guy I am, or was

Speaker 1 or always saw reflected back at me when I looked at a mirror, right? The totem of my self-image. But I'm scared, all of a sudden, of we the people.

Speaker 1 I'm scared.

Speaker 1 First of all, I don't like mobs. As an individualist, mobs have never been my thing, mob thinking.

Speaker 1 And we have more mob thinking because of the social media and the ability to have created a giant virtual mob. Everybody, all of us collectively broken down into our various sub-mobs.

Speaker 1 It's funny how, I mean, there's going to be studies done someday, and I'm sure there already are some preliminary ones, where they're going to look at how tendencies human beings have always had,

Speaker 1 but that used to have to be analog, right? You have to get a crowd together in the public square once upon a time to do what you could do now virtually with a giant group message or a tweet.

Speaker 1 I keep trying to tell my oldest kid,

Speaker 1 you don't understand that you are a guinea pig generation.

Speaker 1 And one can say that we've had guinea pig generations now for several generations because when the pace of change started speeding up mid-19th century and I don't know when you want to label it but but when that started to happen

Speaker 1 human beings who were growing up in a world that was changed because of those changes were the first generations that had ever had to deal with things so I mean let's just say the growth of modern media radio television I mean that stuff is wildly destabilizing right that's a guinea pig generation who grows up with that but it's almost like we keep trying to see if we can top ourselves with the

Speaker 1 the wild uniqueness of each experiment because we've never lived with anything like what we're experimenting with now.

Speaker 1 We have, and let's remember this when we talk about what we're going to talk about today, folks, we live in a world that when we're talking about political institutions,

Speaker 1 things like countries and international organizations and even things like corporations, these are legacy structures.

Speaker 1 These are things developed in an analog world that we are trying to make fit into whatever the hell world we're on our way to now.

Speaker 1 The likelihood that it's going to be flexible enough to do that is nil. Now, some areas are going to be flexible enough to do that.
That's without question. Some areas will be.

Speaker 1 And the fact that some areas won't be is built into the pie, right? That's the creative destruction. You hear it all the time.

Speaker 1 Yes, well, that kind of industry has to die out now just because, you know, the new jobs will be created at 10 times the rate in these new industries that are making them go out of business.

Speaker 1 I mean, you hear that all the time, too. So, the idea that everything's going to survive, what we're going through now,

Speaker 1 nobody believes that, not even the optimists.

Speaker 1 But which legacy systems are going to go down versus which ones are going to survive versus which ones we never needed anyway. And we're creating, I mean, if one of the legacy systems that goes down,

Speaker 1 just throwing it out there for argument's sake, Is the United States of America, you know, a country, an analog-founded country with a contract clearly from an analog era, an Enlightenment era inspired contract?

Speaker 1 I mean, what happens when something like that goes down? That's a legacy system. Can that sort of legacy system survive

Speaker 1 what we have now, what this modern world has

Speaker 1 wrought. I don't know what the right word, I don't want to put a spin on it, negative or positive.
But at the moment, when you look at the effect it's having on the current climate,

Speaker 1 you know, it's a wonderful thing, this giant species communication.

Speaker 1 If you think that the giant hive mind of human beings out there is recommending, first of all, in good faith, that they're not all trolling everybody else for the fun of it, for the laughs.

Speaker 1 But I mean, it's one thing if you believe that the giant hive mob

Speaker 1 is right about anything, and you say, well, listen, this is just we the people in digital form, right?

Speaker 1 Instead of just having the people that could show up at the public square for the vote and to weigh in on the matter, the entire world can just tweet in their opinions.

Speaker 1 This is the public feedback, right?

Speaker 1 I've heard people argue that the president's style

Speaker 1 that seems so breaking with protocol with earlier presidents, it's because he's the first TikTok era president, Twitter president.

Speaker 1 This is what it's like in the short attention span era where, you know,

Speaker 1 a reality TV pro-wrestling sort of an approach is a way to reach more people. It's a communication style that this generation understands, right?

Speaker 1 Much more applicable to them than that old-fashioned sort of,

Speaker 1 I mean, the way presidents talked from Obama before that, that's like hearing Shakespeare now. This, thou, that.

Speaker 1 So much easier to say something like, you know, they're crooked. They're a loser.

Speaker 1 And we throw in a few expletives now, and, you know,

Speaker 1 that's the new protocol.

Speaker 1 And we get so used to it that it becomes difficult maybe to make distinctions between a president who everybody thought was kind of funny when he's calling his opponents in primary debates short, crooked, ugly,

Speaker 1 fourth-grade playground schoolyard taunts. But, you know, basically harmless.
It's a style question, Dan. You don't like his style.

Speaker 1 to a guy who can utter

Speaker 1 lines like this and have people basically brush it off because they're so used to brushing off the stuff that maybe is harmless, schoolyard taunting. We've somehow conflated that with this.

Speaker 1 I actually wrote this down from the video of the speech. This wasn't filtered through any news outlet.
And I watched him do it more than once. So it's written in the speech.
It's a talking point.

Speaker 1 It's not an off-the-cuff remark. The president said: the only way we're going to lose this election is if this election is rigged.
Remember that. It's the only way we're going to lose this election.

Speaker 1 That is not calling an opponent that you're running against a derogatory name. That's not making fun of someone.

Speaker 1 That's not little pro-wrestling, little reality TV schmaltziness thrown in for communicative purposes, right? Relatability.

Speaker 1 That is scary, scary, laying the foundation for Civil War stuff.

Speaker 1 Folks, there's only two ways you can interpret that. They're both negative for the president.

Speaker 1 The lesser of two negatives is that this is somebody who believes he might very well lose this election. I'm not sure at all, but

Speaker 1 if he does, he's laying the groundwork for a Mike Tyson bites the ear

Speaker 1 and never has to say Holyfield beat him moment in the ring.

Speaker 1 Although Donald Trump would say he got his ear bitten and he was disqualified, but a chance to run off, start the Trump network on a cable station and continue to play this same role he plays from outside the hard work of the White House and never have to admit he lost.

Speaker 1 And you could even play the statesman, you know, walk away and say, I won, but for the good of the country, I'm leaving. And Trump.com will begin airing my podcast next week.

Speaker 1 But that's the charitable interpretation.

Speaker 1 The other thing that you would have to insist if it's not that is that the guy is essentially saying that anything other than my victory at the polls is ipso facto evidence that this election was stolen, that the rightful winner that you voted for did not get the office, and your adversaries, your opponents, your enemies stole this election from you, and they're going to destroy the country, that this is a ipso facto evidence of sedition, traitorous act.

Speaker 1 And what does it imply?

Speaker 1 It implies that, well, you know, now's the time for all good people to rise up and defend the Republic and blah, blah, blah. I mean, I've never seen a president do this in my life.

Speaker 1 I've never seen a president come close to doing this.

Speaker 1 This is the sort of stuff that most presidents do everything in their power to diffuse.

Speaker 1 Because when you have a triage list of national problems, there's one thing that jumps right to the top of the list if it's even a question that's in play, a civil war.

Speaker 1 So, and anybody who justifies flirting with this line as sort of a, well, this is the art of the deal, Dan.

Speaker 1 This is Trump, you know, and he's going to pull back from this negotiating position, but he was scared everybody into concessions.

Speaker 1 I mean, folks, flirting with a civil war is like flirting with a bullet to the heart, right? And you can argue all day long about, hey, Trump's fixing this patient's long-neglected broken leg.

Speaker 1 And look at that wonderful job. Nobody could have done it better.
But if... If Bullet to the Heart is on the triage list, it doesn't matter what other things you accomplish.

Speaker 1 You negate every good thing you want to claim the president's done if the guy gets us into a civil war. And he's the only guy I've ever seen running this country, steering into it.

Speaker 1 We've always used

Speaker 1 a sort of a mental image to describe the country and its problems, the Titanic and the iceberg. I like the Titanic idea because it's like a vehicle, and we're all on it together.

Speaker 1 And it has a potential negative thing in our future. And somebody's driving this thing.

Speaker 1 And as we always said, you know, if you're far away from the iceberg, whatever the iceberg may be, and we usually said that the iceberg is the partisan divisions that are pulling us apart.

Speaker 1 Well, holy cow, we steered right into that, right? But we got a guy who steers right into that for his own gain anyway.

Speaker 1 What did General Mattis say?

Speaker 1 And I told you, I met Mattis once, and he's a very impressive figure, a deep, wise, heavy-duty reader, philosophical kind of guy, fascinating guy, by the way, very deep.

Speaker 1 And he's the one that said Trump's the only president he's ever seen that doesn't try to unite the American people. He deliberately does the opposite.

Speaker 1 So he's doing it either, the only argument you can make, and he's doing it for the country, because the things that I need to do for you are so important that it's worth tearing the country apart a little to make, you know, these sorts of gains.

Speaker 1 You've got to burn down the village maybe in order to save it at least a little bit.

Speaker 1 Or he's doing it for his own purposes.

Speaker 1 I can't stand the dynamic that we've created that is right out of the Roman Republic.

Speaker 1 I mean, if anybody, if you want to talk about what we lost not studying more, this in school, that more people don't see that we've done the whole Julius Caesar

Speaker 1 deal here on Trump, where if I think is it New York State, Ben? New York State's the one that's got some legal things hanging over his head.

Speaker 1 But the argument is, and he's probably right, you can't prosecute the sitting president. I mean, something like that can't, has to wait until I'm out of office.

Speaker 1 Well, like the Mongol commanders who always want to leave a nice path out of any group that they surround, I want to leave the president a nice, easy path out of office should things go that route.

Speaker 1 I don't want to, like the Mongols always worried about, if you surround an enemy, they fight to the death, right? Then, then all bets are off. Anything is legal, right? Leave them a nice way out.

Speaker 1 I don't want to create the conditions like these Roman consuls had, where they were, you know, going to be legally eviscerated by their opponents, but they couldn't be touched while they were consul.

Speaker 1 But the minute the consulship's over, they're vulnerable. So you had guys like Caesar going, listen, maybe I would have left, but my enemies will get me if I leave.
So what the hell?

Speaker 1 I'll cross the Rubicon, roll the dice, and see how it goes.

Speaker 1 I'd prefer the president have a nice, easy way out of office. I don't want him thinking, well, shoot, if I leave, if I concede this election, New York's going to prosecute me.

Speaker 1 Maybe that's just me, but I don't think that's so smart right now.

Speaker 1 This is the most scary election, folks,

Speaker 1 that I've ever lived through. And there's nothing close.

Speaker 1 The people that are out there on message boards right now and commenting after news stories, and as I've always said, we have no way of knowing how representative they are.

Speaker 1 If this is a trolling expedition, either something organized by another country's government and secret services, or a bunch of teenagers in a whole bunch of countries looking for laughs, destabilizing the USA, it is having a wild effect on our country.

Speaker 1 Wild.

Speaker 1 And to hear Trump administration officials, by the way, talking about buying ammunition, all these little, I mean, what what was it Roger Stone said the other day on, was it Alex Jones' show, that the president, if he loses the election, should declare a martial law, should

Speaker 1 arrest Zuckerberg and Tim Cook from Apple, should prosecute Mattis for sedition. And you may say, oh, that's just Roger Stone being Roger Stone.
It's all these things added up together, folks.

Speaker 1 This is not the equivalent of calling Marco Rubio Little Marco.

Speaker 1 But it's provided a weird cover where people are laughing off comments that if President Obama had said any of these things, do you know how many of the Second Amendment types would be out in the streets?

Speaker 1 And let me ask that for a minute, because as a guy who did radio here in the Pacific Northwest all through the 1990s, I had a lot of people call in, a lot of listeners, a lot of people that I would converse with regularly, try to understand, find meeting in their minds with people that fall into that camp.

Speaker 1 And when you're a constitutionalist like I am, right, when you're a liberty-oriented person like I am, there's places where you can have a meeting of the minds.

Speaker 1 These were always the people that saw themselves as the,

Speaker 1 you know, modern-day descendants of groups like the Sons of Liberty, all these

Speaker 1 organizations that cropped up as part of the revolutionary times, you know, very anti-king, anti-dictator, you know, sort of a we the people kind of group.

Speaker 1 So you always feel like, well, listen, worst comes to worst, Dan, they'd tell me you don't have to worry.

Speaker 1 That's why the Second Amendment's out there to protect us from anyone who might seize control, disregard the Constitution, set themselves up in an authoritarian kind of position.

Speaker 1 Folks, I got to tell you something. If you're looking at this election coming up now, who's the more authoritarian threat?

Speaker 1 You can talk about cabals

Speaker 1 and stuff. Oh, Joy,

Speaker 1 oh, Biden has dementia. It's just going to be a cabal of Democrats.
It's going to be anti-fo-leftists.

Speaker 1 I mean, you can make all those little conspiracy things you want, but you've got to invent that kind of. Trump's open about this.

Speaker 1 I said way back two months after his inauguration, I called him an authoritarian.

Speaker 1 It was Dave Rubin show. I said, he's an authoritarian.
And I didn't mean he was like a Hitler.

Speaker 1 I meant he wants to run the country like he's the CEO of the country, disregarding the fact that that's not the job. And that we have this constitution.
The other thing the guy is, is

Speaker 1 he treats the American people like a marketer. He sells sizzle, not steak.

Speaker 1 I had a marketer tell me that once, that you sell the sizzle of the steak, the sound and the smell, as opposed to the meat of the matter. And I was always a meat guy.

Speaker 1 I was a steak guy, not a sizzle guy. The president sells sizzle.
And by that, I mean he makes a lot of hay with the patriots in our country, hugging flags in photographs.

Speaker 1 Right? He hugs flags, but this is not a guy who's a constitutionalist at all. You ever hear him talk about the limitations on his power?

Speaker 1 You ever hear him say, yeah, well, you can't do that because of our wonderful constitution. Ever hear him extol the other branches? Ever hear anything where he sounds like he's read it?

Speaker 1 So he hugs the flags for the photo ops. Same thing he did with the Bible, right? You hold the Bible for the photo op.
That's the sizzle, right? It's a message to the audience, you know.

Speaker 1 But never mind that, you know, you have to walk that walk a little bit, maybe. Have to maybe go to church sort of regularly to hold that up and really claim that, no, no, no, this is the steak.

Speaker 1 This is me. No, it's the sizzle, right? You're selling the advertising side, the photo op side, but that's not who you are.
But why are my Second Amendment friends out there buying

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 sales pitch when it is so clearly a sales pitch to most of us? I mean, folks,

Speaker 1 can you not see, I guess, what I'm saying is how unnerving it is for the rest of us to have to have our countrymen so besotted with a figure out of politics that they support him no matter what he says and does.

Speaker 1 I mean, if he talks about something that would sound scary out of anybody else's mouth, his supporters just write it off one way or the other.

Speaker 1 That's, folks, that's dangerous, right? The Constitution is a document that creates a country that is a country that is ruled by laws, not men.

Speaker 1 And if we get into a cult of personality thing here,

Speaker 1 well, here's what I always say. Go look at the countries where cults of personality have been in vogue at one time or another.

Speaker 1 And go read about life under those time periods and ask yourself if that's what sounds good to you.

Speaker 1 And if all this power that you're happy with the president talking about using, if you think Roger Stone's right and the president should go out there and declare martial law and do all these kind of things, folks, you better hope.

Speaker 1 You better hope that there's never, ever another election and that there's never, ever another president from the other party because what the heck will this president have legitimized and normalized?

Speaker 1 That is Marius and Sulla from the Roman Republic. That's exactly Marius and Sulla from the Roman Republic.

Speaker 1 Are the people who are who pride themselves on playing a role in this system that if it worked the way they've always advertised it to me, would be the people defending us from Donald Trump right now.

Speaker 1 And in front of them, by the way, it should never have gotten to this point. I mean, is there any better example of what we talked about for years?

Speaker 1 This is another one of those icebergs we always had in the distance of our metaphorical Titanic.

Speaker 1 But the idea of the warping of the powers of our government and the way that the three supposedly co-equal branches of government have gotten like a spinning top that begins to lose its whole sense of rhythm.

Speaker 1 They've gotten out of whack over time and the deformations have led to greater deformations.

Speaker 1 Is there any greater example of that than the fact that Congress has done nothing of any sort of usefulness in preventing us from getting to this point?

Speaker 1 I mean, this is supposed to be a co-equal branch of government. This is a firewall for us so that it never gets to the point where we're talking about civil war, right? Where the heck is that?

Speaker 1 What Robin Williams had said about the UN once, but I think it works for the American Congress just perfectly right now. He said that the UN was like a traffic cop on volume.

Speaker 1 And that's how the Congress feels. This here is the perfect symbolic view of what the end result of all of these kinds of problems that for years we discussed is.

Speaker 1 How often did we say you have to imagine these powers, you know, fill in the blank what powers we were talking about that day, in the hands of someone you hate?

Speaker 1 But both Democrats and Republicans happily agreed to them, as long as it was their side doing it at the time and causes that they favored, right?

Speaker 1 And then because we couldn't hold, we were political hypocrites, we couldn't hold both sides to the same standard, slowly but surely, things got passed, things became laws, all kinds of things you've never even heard of, folks, insurrection acts, emergency powers, stuff that we were always assured would never be anything we needed to worry about because they would always be in the hands of

Speaker 1 people who, first of all, the system had highly vetted, right? These are people that, I mean, listen, by the time someone becomes president of the United States, they're a completely known quantity.

Speaker 1 These are people who are responsible people. They feel the gravity and weight of the office.
They adhere to protocol.

Speaker 1 You can trust them with these extraordinary powers that you will wish that they did have if something terrible happens.

Speaker 1 If there's a nuclear war, you're going to say, why didn't the president have the power to do A, B, and C in an emergency or insurrection, right?

Speaker 1 But what happens when you inevitably get the person in there who doesn't adhere to protocol?

Speaker 1 who doesn't feel the gravity of the office or who doesn't feel like it should inhibit him the way it inhibited all his predecessors, right?

Speaker 1 Now all of a sudden, these powers begin to look a lot more ominous, don't they?

Speaker 1 And again, if you're a Trump supporter and they look good to you,

Speaker 1 you better hope, like I said, that this is the last president we ever have.

Speaker 1 And if you do hope it's the last president we ever have, how much of a patriotic, constitutional, liberty-loving American can you be?

Speaker 1 I mean, let me just say, it is a little bit weird and historically ironic that, you know, the Second Amendment anti-authoritarian firewall protecting this country from any would-be dictators are,

Speaker 1 well, in many respects, supporting passionately the guy who has friends talking about martial law and hanging corporate figures and sedition trials for generals. I mean, doesn't seem very

Speaker 1 respectful of the system he inherited right there. Is that going back to America?

Speaker 1 Is that going to be the kind of thing that, you know, you're going to be okay okay with when the other side's starting to do that stuff too?

Speaker 1 I mean, if this is how we renew the country, you don't think it's always going to be in the hands of your side, do you?

Speaker 1 And what's good for the goose is good for the gander, as has been proven with our political hypocrisy stuff now for a long time. So you okay with this?

Speaker 1 One way or another, it doesn't make you look like a great American to either support a guy who's going to do away with elections or support the lowering of our standards to the point where the next time you get a candidate you hate, they're doing this kind of stuff too.

Speaker 1 There's a lot you could say about Joe Biden that's not wonderful, but he's not this.

Speaker 1 If authoritarianism is something as a Second Amendment rights-holding American that you're worried about, clearly we have one candidate that leans more in that direction than the other.

Speaker 1 And in Biden's case, let's be real. Let's throw away the conspiracies for a moment.
Let's talk about what you're really getting with this guy, because it's not all wonderful. Let's not sugarcoat it.

Speaker 1 This is a return to the way things were. This is going to be the Obama administration part two.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Now, if you're one of these people that thinks he was the worst president who ever existed, ever, ever, ever, well, then yes, your nightmare scenario will come true with Joseph Biden.

Speaker 1 But there's nothing radical about this guy. Just ask the Democrats who wish he was more radical.
Ask Elizabeth Warren supporters. Ask Bernie Sanders supporters.

Speaker 1 This is a traditional, you know, over the last 30 years, traditional anyway, corporate new way Democrat.

Speaker 1 And,

Speaker 1 you know, in that sense, he may be exactly what you don't want, but let's not pretend he's something he's not. He's no fire-breathing, revolutionary,

Speaker 1 you know, antifa-type stooge, as many of these conspiracy websites would have you believe.

Speaker 1 Listen, it's bad enough that he's a return to the swamp because the swamp is what got us to here in a sort of a roundabout way.

Speaker 1 But there are times, as I said, where, you know, I've never been a person who believed in positional voting, you know, voting for this person who I don't like to stop this other person I dislike more.

Speaker 1 But I'm making an exception to the rule this year because I think the stakes are that high.

Speaker 1 I do think this is an election between an authoritarian candidate and a return to the pre-authoritarian candidate status quo, which I consider to be the lesser of two evils.

Speaker 1 As many of you know, I've not voted for a Democrat or Republican for president since 1992. I've voted for Libertarian candidates for president.
I've voted for Green Party candidates for president.

Speaker 1 I've voted for Independent candidates for president. I believe I've written in somebody's name once.

Speaker 1 But I'm voting for Joseph Biden this year because

Speaker 1 he will not

Speaker 1 steer deliberately into the iceberg, which to me seems like a pretty big deal right there. That's almost a deal breaker right there.

Speaker 1 If you're going to steer into the iceberg, I don't vote for you for president.

Speaker 1 He's also the guy I would rather have in charge of the other thing that should be at the top of any of our triage lists, but is not. I trust him more with nuclear weapons.

Speaker 1 Then, if you say, Joseph Biden has dementia, Dan, you can't trust a guy with dementia with nuclear weapons, then I trust the National Security Establishment and the Vice President and the system more run by that group of people than I would in the hands of Donald Trump.

Speaker 1 I think there's a lot of qualities you want in the hands of somebody who's going to have their finger on the nuclear button. I think if we put this into real terms, it's important to understand.

Speaker 1 The American President of the United States is the most powerful person that has ever existed in world history. Let's phrase it another way that means the same thing, though, in this case.

Speaker 1 He is the most dangerous person that has ever lived. More dangerous than Hitler, more dangerous than Genghis Khan, more dangerous, the most dangerous person who's ever lived theoretically.
Okay?

Speaker 1 Is Donald Trump the right person to have in the position of most dangerous human being who's ever lived?

Speaker 1 I'm going to suggest that the level of introspection that I want in a person like that, I think you're going to need some empathy to be the sort of person that can weigh whether we'll look weak in this sort of negotiation if we're afraid to use nukes versus let's not use nukes under any circumstance.

Speaker 1 It's the wrong thing to do. I mean, I want a lot more.

Speaker 1 I guess what I'm saying is, is a man who is, and I don't, this is not fake news, who is clearly narcissistic and narcissistic above and beyond what you can normally expect in a U.S. president.

Speaker 1 After all, a lot of those people get a little full of themselves when they get that high up. But this guy's on a different level entirely.
I don't think a

Speaker 1 really

Speaker 1 powerfully strong narcissistic personality should have their finger on the button. I'd rather have either Joseph Biden or the Democratic cabal with their finger on the button.
I'll feel safer.

Speaker 1 And if you're one of those people, because I hear this all the time from people who say things like,

Speaker 1 you exaggerate the danger of nuclear weapons, Dan. There's a whole intricate series of controls that make sure that these are actually the safest weapons on the planet.

Speaker 1 And I'll get a lot of those speeches. Let's remember something.
And there's lots of books written on this. There's lots of history on this, but go get Barbara Tuchman's book.

Speaker 1 The Guns of August. It's one of the best examples of this dynamic.
And her whole book is built around the dynamic.

Speaker 1 And the dynamic is how you can think you're pushing events for a while, current events that will later become history.

Speaker 1 You can think you're in charge of them, that you're dictating them, that your decisions are equaling outcomes.

Speaker 1 But history has this wonderful little trick it plays on all of us, us, where just when you think you're in control and you're pushing events, like an ocean riptide, it can grab hold of the momentum and start pulling and take you in directions that the people who set the dynamic in motion never intended or wanted to go.

Speaker 1 Happens over and over and over again. And John F.

Speaker 1 Kennedy, as a matter of fact, gave the book to his staff people because he wanted them to apply this lesson about this tendency of history to start pulling when you thought you were pushing into a nuclear context so that they would think about this possibility.

Speaker 1 When you think about that possibility, the person in charge of nuclear weapons and who that individual turns out to be is, in my opinion, and I would think the opinions of many, many important people out there, you know, not just an unimportant person like myself, the most important consideration we can have.

Speaker 1 And I don't know how you look at President Trump and think, you know, that's the guy with the stable genius. qualities I want with his hands on the nuclear button.

Speaker 1 I want Donald Trump to be in the position of most dangerous man in the world because I trust him, his decision-making power, and his ability to properly weigh the facts and come up to the right conclusion and then take the right action.

Speaker 1 Really? Really?

Speaker 1 So I'll vote for the guy that will steer away from the Civil War iceberg rather than towards it, and who I feel would be a safer person to have his hands on the most dangerous weapons arsenal that's ever been, and that is actually in control of a single individual's,

Speaker 1 you know, I mean, the president may not have 100% total control, but let's just say he has 95% control, and that's enough to make that decision, as I said, what should be the ultimate consideration on all our part in a voting triage of important issues, right?

Speaker 1 And listen, there's another reason. I don't want a president who makes things worse in terms of our willingness as a society to buy into harmful conspiracies.

Speaker 1 And so far, the president has shown a willingness to steer into that iceberg as well.

Speaker 1 We should talk about conspiracies for a minute, actually, since we're on that subject. I mean, this is where the we the people thing takes a hit right on the chin.

Speaker 1 If you believe too many conspiracy theories, I've come to the conclusion that you shouldn't vote. That's not a very we the people-like statement to make, is it?

Speaker 1 And it's funny because if you think about conspiracy theories, I had somebody explain it to me once, and I'm going to go from memory here, but they were explaining how implausible it gets if you believe too many conspiracies.

Speaker 1 So they said, okay, in any choice that you have, you're going to have an Occam's razor choice, right?

Speaker 1 What's the obvious thing that everybody sounds like they believe?

Speaker 1 And then you're going to have what we'll call the conspiracy choice, but that's probably not the right name for it, but just the alternative unlikely option, right? That's a little bit more sinister.

Speaker 1 But sometimes those things are true. So maybe you go with the conspiracy option with this first way of viewing the world, right? I don't think that's what we're really seeing, Dan.

Speaker 1 That's the Childs and the Illuminati controlling that. Okay.
Hey, you could be right. Every now and then you are.

Speaker 1 Okay, so the next worldview decision, current events sort of analysis question comes into your mental paradigm and you weigh it again.

Speaker 1 Okay, do I believe the Occam's razor on this one or do I believe the conspiracy side? I believe the conspiracy again.

Speaker 1 Okay, so now you're on your second analysis of reality and you've once again chosen the more unlikely of the two options. Okay, still could be true.
You never know.

Speaker 1 Every now and then, you rarities pop up twice.

Speaker 1 But as you continue to go down the analysis, if you're always or most of the time choosing the much more unlikely option, eventually you're living in a fantasy world.

Speaker 1 And you see it on whole programs devoted to nothing but confusing or antagonizing or arousing the American people with some conspiracy theory. I mean, the whole QAnon

Speaker 1 phenomenon is something that is absolutely symbolic of this era that we live in and the times that are so challenging now that we're all guinea pigs as a society.

Speaker 1 I mean, I'm trying to think of how the revolutions of 1848 would have gone if they'd had Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and QAnon. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 That's a variable that's like throwing a weapon of mass destruction into some, you know, era of the past that's really not ready for it. Here, ancient Egypt, have a nuclear weapon.

Speaker 1 And this, by the way, is not to excuse, you know, the other side of the political ledger in this, also, because so much of what I'm decrying here as

Speaker 1 an extremist threat, if you will, a constitutional danger.

Speaker 1 This is stuff that was fed and fueled and amplified by the conduct on the other side that became, if we want to use the sporting term for it, bulletin board material.

Speaker 1 I mean, when you have people,

Speaker 1 I mean, looting, that's an easy one, but burning of buildings and stuff, all that stuff becomes fodder for the other side to use against you. I mean, Gandhi knew this, Martin Luther King knew this.

Speaker 1 These are people who understood that, listen, there's multiple ways you can do this. Don't do it in any way that undercuts your cause.
And remember what you're doing all this for.

Speaker 1 You're trying to convince the great mass of Americans of the righteousness of your cause.

Speaker 1 And believe me, for five minutes, everybody, virtually everybody of goodwill was sitting there open to the conversation.

Speaker 1 And the burning and the looting and the, and the

Speaker 1 bulletin board material. And it's everywhere.
And you just look and you just shake your head. I wrote on a piece of paper, we can't help ourselves.
We just can't help ourselves.

Speaker 1 People have to show up at

Speaker 1 protests with a mock guillotine. Really? And people, the protests think that's okay? You don't think that undercuts your cause? Remember what you're trying to do here?

Speaker 1 You're not forcing anybody into anything. It's a hearts and minds war.
Is that helping or is that hurting? Or how about the

Speaker 1 ready-made campaign ad that was, and you saw it shared on all these right-wing websites forever. It was a kid at one of these looters

Speaker 1 get-togethers,

Speaker 1 and he ran in front of the camera and said something like, I'm paraphrasing here, but we're coming for the suburbs next.

Speaker 1 Folks, there is no better example of political slash current events slash historical bulletin board material than that.

Speaker 1 You don't even have to edit that for the campaign ad to come from that. Just put some words up on the screen afterwards, right? Vote Donald Trump.

Speaker 1 And listen, the truth be told, there might be a logical reason why we're seeing this so often, and it might be the lack of centralized control or leadership this um

Speaker 1 in this affair.

Speaker 1 I mean, there is no uh central authority calling the shots and determining how these protests are going to go and what the rules are going to be and what the standards of behavior are and all these kinds of things.

Speaker 1 You know, what to do if you see somebody in the crowd breaking windows or what have you.

Speaker 1 So without that, we're left towards human beings behaving as human beings, in which case it's going to be quite variable, isn't it?

Speaker 1 You're going to have your people on good behavior, those who understand the ramifications of their actions, that everything's being filmed, that all this can be bulletin board material, and you're going to have everyone else.

Speaker 1 Here

Speaker 1 in the protest we had here in my little hometown where I live now,

Speaker 1 we had a whole giant group of people, which included a bunch of young people who happened to be homeless living in the park nearby, for whom this was the most exciting thing that had happened in quite a while.

Speaker 1 And when windows started to get broken, they were at the forefront of that because that was much more interesting to them in this particular case, most of them anyway, than this movement which had dragged out a ton of principled people who had their eyes on the prize.

Speaker 1 But no one remembered that they came out here and protested nice and peacefully because, you know, the old line about if it bleeds, it leads applies to protests too.

Speaker 1 So not having anybody in control, and even when you have someone in control, it's difficult to make everybody behave.

Speaker 1 But I'll give you an example of the counterproductive tactics, and you can see them all online. I mean, they happen quite a bit.
There was a woman, this was in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 1 There was a Black Lives Matter protest that passed by where where she was sitting outside at an outdoor table at a restaurant.

Speaker 1 And a crowd of people swarmed by her table, get up in her personal space in a menacing sort of way. I looked at the crowd.
It looked to me to be overwhelmingly young and overwhelmingly white.

Speaker 1 And the menace was connected to the idea that in order for this woman to get the crowd to stop doing this to her, the story said, and I read it on a mainstream news site, said that she had to raise her fist in a black lives salute in solidarity with the crowd.

Speaker 1 If this was the only time we'd seen this, I wouldn't have brought brought it up. But you see it over and over again.

Speaker 1 It's a natural extension of this idea that we talked about in an earlier Common Sense show about the validity or righteousness of the idea of punching Nazis, which was the statement that was in vogue for about five minutes earlier

Speaker 1 in the last several years general news cycle.

Speaker 1 And my argument was punching Nazis just ends up creating more of an animosity toward the people who punched them and creates a climate where eventually people who don't know better might sit there and just go, you know, both both sides are bad.

Speaker 1 Right? You create a dynamic where they write both sides off. In other words, don't give bulletin board material to the other side because the other side will use it to equate your actions with theirs.

Speaker 1 Again, counterproductive. But there's this little strain of this intimidation or intolerance side on

Speaker 1 both of these extremes, where they do not leave space for people to think radically different than they do.

Speaker 1 And there's a righteousness about them that precludes legitimate disagreement in their eyes, right? This is good and evil, and shades of gray have nothing to do with it.

Speaker 1 Or discussion, we're past discussion here, or if you don't think like we do, you are ipso facto bad and deserving of whatever happens afterwards.

Speaker 1 I'll give you an idea of how far this can go and how destructive it is to the idea of,

Speaker 1 you know, I mean, when you see, and I think I said this before, I mean, when you see the, when George Floyd died, you had another one of those moments in American history where lots of people who don't think about this issue very often, people of goodwill, were ready to have a conversation about this stuff.

Speaker 1 The way the conversation is handled, though, determines how receptive they are to it.

Speaker 1 And all this sort of stuff muddies the waters.

Speaker 1 There was an incident in Compton the other day in Los Angeles where somebody, a gunman walked up to a police vehicle with two police officers in it, opened fire and sent both of them to the hospital with critical injuries.

Speaker 1 Okay, well, this stuff happens, right? But outside the hospital, as reported by mainstream news media, some of the people were chanting, let them die.

Speaker 1 And of course, the way the story is picked up, these might as well be the Black Lives Matter organizers, according to the right-wing media, right? Here's your talking points.

Speaker 1 Everybody screams, let them die, which of course couldn't be further from the truth, right?

Speaker 1 There are a small number of individuals who showed up here and because that's what they wanted to say, you know, not commanded from anybody at a higher authority nor controlled nor monitored nor um

Speaker 1 you know downplayed i mean maybe you get your own people going hey man be cool you know this is going to look terrible on television if you're screaming there's nobody there to do that and so the entire movement and everyone who's associated with it gets tarred by the behavior of a small number of people which if we think about it logically folks especially without any centralized control over these things is inevitable

Speaker 1 you know i'm a kurt vonnegat fan i know many of you are too. And one of my favorite authors, Kurt Vonnegut, of course, lived through famously the bombing of Dresden.

Speaker 1 He was a POW in Germany when the bombing happened. And he, like many of the other POWs, had to get out and clean up the mess afterwards.

Speaker 1 And if that doesn't make you a little cynical or misanthropic, I don't know what will.

Speaker 1 But over his lifetime, and I didn't know the man, I didn't know his family.

Speaker 1 I just read a lot about him, read his works, and then read a lot of interviews as he got older, and a lot of comments by people who either knew him or talked to him. And the man, as he got older,

Speaker 1 seemed to just become disappointed disappointed with humanity.

Speaker 1 Not angry. See, anger is what I had at 26 when they used to call me the angry young wolf on the radio.
And I was angry because I thought we could do better.

Speaker 1 And you get angry that we're not or that we're not trying harder or that nobody's leading the cause to make things better. You get angry at humanity.

Speaker 1 When you get older and you've seen this movie a few times, the emotion changes a little bit. And the emotion shifts to disappointment, I think, like Vonnegut had.

Speaker 1 Because disappointment sort of acknowledges that you're not sure we could have done better, right? You don't get angry at what was unavoidable.

Speaker 1 I think the extremes of these human beings showing up, whether it's at a right-wing rally and they want to dress in swastikas and carry torches and say things like, Jews will not replace us, or people that show up at a hospital where two police officers have been critically wounded and say, let them die.

Speaker 1 I don't know how you control the edges of the human species. I just know that rather than get angry at them, I'm just disappointed because it's predictable.

Speaker 1 And I don't know how you control it. Under the best, I mean, I have a book by Mark Kurlansky called Nonviolence.

Speaker 1 And one of the things I like about it is it's a good book to dispel this idea that somehow nonviolence is wimpy, when in fact, nonviolence is the most dangerous form of protest to most governments, unless they're toppled by violence, right?

Speaker 1 So anything, any violent response to a government that doesn't topple the government is actually easier for most governments,

Speaker 1 especially governments in a free society, to deal with than having Gandhi show up and decide that they're not going to lift a finger against the government.

Speaker 1 And anything you do to us, you're going to do to us. And there's not going to be a single piece of bulletin board material to muddy the waters on who's righteous here and who's not.

Speaker 1 The good guys and the bad guys will be clear because only one side will be striking and only one side will be sucking up the pain and the wounds and the damage.

Speaker 1 Kurlansky points out in his book, though, and he interviews a lot of people who know this subject very well, nonviolence is extremely hard to do because how do you account for all those idiots out there who will do something that will end up on the YouTube video that will then be circulated as not a single individual's out-of-control statements, but the views of the movement's central core leadership, right?

Speaker 1 This, we're coming for the suburbs, Dan. That's not a single looter's comment.
That's what they really are thinking. He just voiced it, right?

Speaker 1 Once you get there, it becomes very hard to avoid a situation where you're ready to come to blows because look at where you're at. You think the other side's ready to come to blows with you.

Speaker 1 You have this whole thing now equated as self-defense, right? Dan, we don't want a revolution. We don't want a civil war.
They want the civil war. We're just defending ourselves.

Speaker 1 That's how you get here, folks. You talk yourselves into it and you have nobody from the leadership side giving you any sort of counter-narrative to diffuse that.

Speaker 1 And I think as we said earlier, Congress is

Speaker 1 gone, asleep at the wheel, non-existent. And then when you bring this up to them, they just blame the other party.
Well, we'd get tons of things done, but you got the party of intraction and duty.

Speaker 1 I'm sorry, people have been dealing with that since the Republic began. That's no excuse.
It's like when presidents say, well, I didn't have a Congress to work with me.

Speaker 1 Well, okay, we don't give you too much slack for that. Presidents have been dealing with that forever.

Speaker 1 I'll tell you what, though, the only positive benefit for me as a history nerd is that I get a chance to feel maybe what other times in history where the zeitgeist was the way it is now, and it's never the same.

Speaker 1 It's just a little, smells a little like it did in earlier times. And, you know, you can read about that smell your whole life.

Speaker 1 Until you catch a whiff of it personally, you don't know exactly what they were talking about. And I feel like, hmm, I get a little whiff of Weimar right now.

Speaker 1 A little chance to just sense what,

Speaker 1 you know, watching the dynamic begin to pull us like the riptide.

Speaker 1 So while I'm sad that we have to have the inevitable and predictable reaction, then counter-reaction, then counter-counter-reaction that human beings, when we get into large herds, predictably do.

Speaker 1 I mean, for every reformation, there's a counter-reformation. For every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction.

Speaker 1 And the first time you see it as a young person watching current events, you're going, oh, look at this. I've seen this whole thing so many times.
Now you kind of go, we just can't help ourselves.

Speaker 1 Makes me wonder if that means we're not capable of really governing ourselves. I don't know.
I don't know what the line is, and I don't know if the line's moved over time.

Speaker 1 I don't know if once upon a time life was simpler. You know, the 19th century, life is simpler.
Maybe the question of what it took to run one's life was...

Speaker 1 you know, at a lower level of need, right? It's not too hard to figure out this, that, and the other thing in the 1850s, maybe.

Speaker 1 Maybe you can argue that in this world we live in now with the complexity level and the pace of change, what it is, that a person can't play their role as informed citizenry anymore with that level of either

Speaker 1 understanding or involvement, right?

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 paying attention to the news, if you want to call it, well, I don't even know if that would help you even now. I don't know how you become an informed person in a completely Orwellian news situation,

Speaker 1 which is what we have now.

Speaker 1 There's so much, so many lies in the air, the truth can't even breathe, right? A needle in a haystack trying to find the truth. And I used to be a professional news person, right?

Speaker 1 So you would think I could cut through the BS, but I find it very difficult.

Speaker 1 And so wondering how my fellow man, who maybe is trained in a completely different field, how they're managing it, I don't even know.

Speaker 1 But reading what people are writing online leads me to believe that the amount of understanding and what's going on now is so so small that nobody seems qualified.

Speaker 1 I mean, the number of people that have, if I had the Dan Carlin test for whether or not you should vote, the number of you who are going to pass it is going to be small.

Speaker 1 What kind of a we the people

Speaker 1 kind of government is that, Dan?

Speaker 1 Don't recognize the guy staring back in the mirror at me these days when it comes to my political points of view, but

Speaker 1 my countrymen are starting to scare me.

Speaker 1 And I don't know if it's their fault or the times we live in or, you know, there were theories going way back to the ancient world that democracies maybe had lifespans or that all systems, governments had lifespans, that eventually, you know, they got the equivalent.

Speaker 1 You know, if they didn't die from the

Speaker 1 historical version of a heart attack or have a historical version of a stroke, I can think of several countries that had the historical version of a stroke.

Speaker 1 If they live to a ripe old age, eventually there's just a hardening of the arteries, as they used to call it, a deterioration, you know, a mounting number of nagging little things that just drags it down.

Speaker 1 Some of the greatest empires in history were too strong to fall, folks. What happened is they just sort of deteriorated.

Speaker 1 Like really old people on the world stage.

Speaker 1 I keep trying to come up with mental images of wild things that would reinvigorate that side of us that if this is true, if all this stuff I just said has any validity at all, you know, what do you do to fix that?

Speaker 1 And it's funny contrasting the fact that I have nothing now with what I used to think might do that shows you the optimism of an earlier era where we used to talk about, you know, wouldn't it be interesting to be able to harness all this high-tech stuff we have now to

Speaker 1 to more adequately involve people in the process. In other words, to involve the citizenry more in the running of affairs and decision making and the guiding of where things went.

Speaker 1 I mean, think about that.

Speaker 1 So maybe if you want to be one of those cynical people from the ancient world writing or sneering about the downsides of a representative system, maybe you just need to wait long enough for those downsides to become self-evident.

Speaker 1 But I don't know how I'm supposed to incorporate that sort of information coming into my sensors, given my self-image of the we the people Jeffersonian, right? Like I said, I can,

Speaker 1 this is more John Adams and the mob.

Speaker 1 When I think of the mob, too, I think of like the old Frankenstein movie, and they've got the torch and the pitchforks, and they're just this crazy group heading towards the castle to kill the monster.

Speaker 1 I just feel like there's about 500 of those groups now, and every single one of them has a different monster they're after.

Speaker 1 Hopefully, none of them are podcasters.

Speaker 1 And we had said in an earlier show, by the way, that one of the things you should keep your eyes on, a milepost, if you will, on this darker road to where we might be heading, was when you would have protesters and counter-protesters show up at the same place and at the same time and leave people dead in their wake.

Speaker 1 And when I said that before, somebody wrote me an email and said, Dan, you know, there have already been people who died. Charlottesville, this, that, or the other thing.
And I...

Speaker 1 I said, no, that's think about like a Bic lighter that takes a few tries, a few sparks in the first couple of attempts before the flame actually takes off. To me, those were like the sparks.

Speaker 1 But once you get the tit-for-tat retribution cycle primed, you know, they did it. We're going to come in and pay them back.

Speaker 1 And once you get that going, which I think it is now because we've had people now dead on both sides,

Speaker 1 that milepost is now past the car and in the rear view mirror.

Speaker 1 It's like the giant mob showing up to the castle to get the monster shows up into a counter-mob there to defend the monster. And everybody's got their pitchforks and their shotguns and their torches.

Speaker 1 And,

Speaker 1 well, here we are. Normally, you would have a leadership do everything they could to defuse this crisis because this isn't going to be good if these two mobs go at it, right?

Speaker 1 And instead, we're steering into the iceberg.

Speaker 1 And listen, the people that designed our country, the framework, the structures, the laws, the setup, They understood, as we said earlier, that this is a contract between a bunch of different territories with different people and different histories and different backgrounds and different ideas.

Speaker 1 And there were always a lot of what I always thought were elegant and clever little safety valve ideas built into our system that the founders had looked at other systems.

Speaker 1 I mean, they studied Greece, they studied Rome,

Speaker 1 the Venice democracy. I mean, they looked at all these things to try to figure out: okay, what was the sticking point for them? What did they have to do? And they tried to foresee some of this stuff.

Speaker 1 One of the things that was clearly understood is that it is tough to get a whole bunch of different people with so many differences over such a wide area.

Speaker 1 And remember, it was a much smaller area back then than it is now, to live together in harmony unless you provide space for them to live the way that they want to live.

Speaker 1 And this was basically sort of the practical value of this idea of federalism in the United States.

Speaker 1 For those of you outside the U.S., a lot of you have federalized systems too, where the idea was that there was going to be a lot of local autonomy amongst the states.

Speaker 1 Now, the one place you couldn't have local autonomy is in places where the federal constitution superseded the state ones, and it wasn't supposed to come into play too often.

Speaker 1 That's the argument, though, over things like slavery or later on things like the Jim Crow separate, but equal stuff, right?

Speaker 1 The states could go very far towards determining their own destiny, you know, at one time.

Speaker 1 But when you cross the line to, yes, but now the majority in that state is violating the constitutional rights of a minority in the state, right? The tyranny of the majority, that's called.

Speaker 1 So you're in violation of the federal constitution, so you have to stop. If that happens every now and then on the most extreme issues on the edges of our discussion, that's one thing.

Speaker 1 As a matter of fact, that's the sort of protection you want in a federal system, right? You don't want it to be able to go too far.

Speaker 1 But if you take away too much of the ability for the different people in the different parts of the country to live the lives that they want to live, then you turn every battle we have in the country into into a life or death one.

Speaker 1 Because in the old days, where maybe you could say, listen, Alabama is going to have one sort of way of looking at the world and California is going to have another.

Speaker 1 As long as the people in Alabama can live the way they want to live for the most part, and the Californians can do the same thing, they're much more inclined to be tolerant of the way the other people want to live.

Speaker 1 I mean, you could say, I'd never want to live in Alabama. California is the place for me, but hey, that's the way they want to live down there.

Speaker 1 If that comports with the way that they do things, that's fine. As long as I don't have to live under it.
And the people in Alabama are usually a little bit disposed to the same thing, right?

Speaker 1 Those Californians are wacky and crazy and immoral and godless and the whole thing.

Speaker 1 The whole thing may just drop off and go to hell. But you know what? That's how they want to live.
They can live there. I'm not moving there.

Speaker 1 But when it's a winner-take-all thing, if some senator from Alabama decides to push forward some law that gains traction in D.C.

Speaker 1 and somehow gets steamrolled and then the people in California have to live under some thing that people in Alabama love and people in California can't stand,

Speaker 1 then it becomes a time when, well, what do you do when that happens, right? That's when it becomes the kind of politics we've had in this country now for several generations.

Speaker 1 Life or death, winner-take-all,

Speaker 1 the Supreme Court becomes the most important thing in the entire world because how we interpret these laws is going to determine who has to live under the, you know, does California have to live under Alabama's laws or vice versa?

Speaker 1 In the original design, somebody would say, well, listen, that's why we created enough flexibility at the state level so that you hopefully could alleviate most of these sorts of disagreements.

Speaker 1 But there's been a lot happening in this country over the course of the country, and most of it is positive. I mean, we've expanded who votes to many more people.

Speaker 1 We've taken a system that was a very pretty strict republic when it started, and we've democratized a lot of it, right? People forget, once upon a time, senators were appointed.

Speaker 1 When you decide to let the voters elect senators, that's one step away from a pure strict republic in the old Roman sense of the word and one step closer to more of a democratic system, which is why a lot of people call us a democratic republic now.

Speaker 1 We're hybrid.

Speaker 1 But if some of the things you lose in the hybrid are some of the very things that allowed you to coexist anyway, the safety valves, right?

Speaker 1 The things that in your system allowed the release of steam and pressure. Well, then maybe it's no surprise that we've seen a steady growth in those things over my lifetime to the point now

Speaker 1 where there aren't just people

Speaker 1 who are talking about civil war. We've got a decent amount of people who are looking forward to it,

Speaker 1 licking their chops for it.

Speaker 1 And if you're someone who's doing that, if a civil war sounds like a good thing to you, then you're another one of those people

Speaker 1 that I don't think should be voting.

Speaker 1 I don't think you have the foreknowledge of consequences versus actions and all that sort of stuff to be the kind of person that should be.

Speaker 1 I mean, I use the Titanic as a mental image, but a better one in a voting society rather than a Titanic that we're all on that's that's steered by a captain or a helmsman, and we hope they steer correctly to avoid the iceberg in a system where we the people are the fountainhead of authority.

Speaker 1 It's much more like the nightmare version of the driver's education car many of us had when we were learning how to drive.

Speaker 1 When I was a kid, the driver's education teacher had a special car that had a wheel for them and a steering wheel for the student. And the steering wheel for the driver overruled the student.

Speaker 1 So if the student did something stupid or crazy or panicky or whatever, the teacher could use their wheel to correct the course of the student driver.

Speaker 1 We're all, instead of on our Titanic here, we're on a bus, city bus, school bus.

Speaker 1 And instead of one driver like on the Titanic at the helm, we all have the steering wheel on this bus, like the like the car that we learned to drive with the

Speaker 1 student driver steering wheel setup, right? 60 people on this bus, 60 steering wheels.

Speaker 1 And maybe,

Speaker 1 maybe we could suggest that if 31 of us steer to the left and 29 of us steer to the right, we go to the left.

Speaker 1 Although I'm inclined these days to think maybe as few as 20 of those drivers could make a wrong turn at Albuquerque and we'd be screwed somehow.

Speaker 1 I keep trying to think maybe how we could create better drivers if we're going to keep using that analogy. At the same time, as I get older,

Speaker 1 you know, I think I went through the resentment stage when I'm younger. Now I'm just getting disappointed.
I'm disappointed that,

Speaker 1 you know, we are, we just have so many crazy drivers.

Speaker 1 So many people who don't know where they're going. So many people who don't know how to steer, so many people who don't, I mean, I don't know how you fix that either.

Speaker 1 Especially since I'm one of many people that played with the idea of greater democratic input over my career and discussions of political events, right? Let's have more people involved.

Speaker 1 Let's have more direct democracy. You know, what did I say? Let's have the people vote on that foreign policy view of yours, pal, and see how they go.

Speaker 1 We, the people, may have more of a hive-mind level of wisdom than

Speaker 1 you people in Washington, D.C., as corrupt and insular, inside the Beltway bubble, you all are. Well, now I'm not sure I trust them or us.

Speaker 1 And it's really hard, as you might imagine, for a person like yours truly to be trying to do a show when my whole stock in trade is in seeing the shades of gray out there, the nuances, the things that

Speaker 1 allow us to walk. What I always say in my grandfather's line that he liked, it wasn't his line,

Speaker 1 it was a famous line, walk a mile in the other guy's moccasins. That's how I behave in life.

Speaker 1 I always try to see, you know, okay, so how does this look from the other side, right?

Speaker 1 From my fellow man, my fellow American's viewpoint, you know, could I try to see how maybe they're seeing this as a way to better understand how there could be a meeting of the minds?

Speaker 1 But there's got to be a desire to have a meeting of the minds. And both extremes today seem to eschew the entire idea, right?

Speaker 1 And, you know, again, I went after the protesters a little while ago, but this is human. I mean, do you know how one of the people got shot at one of these protests?

Speaker 1 The Patriot side, the Donald Trump supporting side, showed up at the protest with paint guns and ran right into the protest and shot paint guns from the back of truck.

Speaker 1 What do you think is going to happen?

Speaker 1 Right? That's Americans steering into the iceberg. And at 26, I would just think, you know, I'd be angry.
Now I'm disappointed because I see it as almost something that's predictable and inevitable.

Speaker 1 And of course, we're going to have that happen with some of our people.

Speaker 1 If we could just say it's some of our people and allow that to allow us to then take the views of the rest of the good people involved in any of these movements and talk about them seriously, that'd be one thing.

Speaker 1 But you get one kid who says, we're coming for the suburbs next, and that's the face of the movement on one side.

Speaker 1 And you get some of these other people on the pro-Trump side licking their chops for civil war, and that starts to look like what the other side wants, right?

Speaker 1 They may not be representative of the great mass of people in this country, but they're sucking up all of the

Speaker 1 poster child time.

Speaker 1 Mobs are dangerous. The country's full of them now.

Speaker 1 I keep hoping that there really is a silent majority out there. And Trump likes to call people who are supposedly going to re-elect him a silent majority.

Speaker 1 Nixon used the term to mean people that would vote for stability and the conservatism of staying with the guy in the White House.

Speaker 1 But I'm hoping that the silent majority out there is just living up to the name and not commenting on message boards and after news stories because they're being silent and that this time

Speaker 1 the right move for a silent majority seeking to avoid something as dastardly and as crazy that we're talking about it as civil war.

Speaker 1 I hope that those are people who would vote against the candidate that would steer into the sorts of ideas, policies, pronouncements,

Speaker 1 conspiracy theories and speeches that would make a civil war more rather than less likely.

Speaker 1 And once again, I mean, how patriotic can it be

Speaker 1 to

Speaker 1 support the idea of somebody deliberately calling into question votes, the election system. I mean, these are the very foundations by which we trust each other

Speaker 1 that keep us from going at each other's throats. And he's destabilizing all of them.

Speaker 1 And as I said, there's only two reasons for that.

Speaker 1 Either he's doing it because he thinks building a wall and all these other things that are so important to him, saving Western civilization, as somebody said at the GOP

Speaker 1 convention, that it's so important that it's worth flirting with Civil War for, or he's doing it for his own gain, which is,

Speaker 1 well,

Speaker 1 again, I'm not sure how you can be patriotic and support someone who's willing to treat the Republic with such carelessness and risk.

Speaker 1 You know, there's a famous line.

Speaker 1 supposed to have been uttered by Benjamin Franklin right after the U.S. Constitution was decided upon, because the people who decided upon it,

Speaker 1 the public didn't know what the decision was and what was being made. And so the story is that someone came up to him right outside where it had happened and said, Dr.

Speaker 1 Franklin, what kind of government do we have? And I'm going from memory here, but it sounds much more ominous now than it used to. He's supposed to have replied, A republic,

Speaker 1 if you can keep it.