The Worst People Are Happy (With Tim Miller)

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Speaker 1 Hello and welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.

Speaker 1 Am I delighted? Well, I'm just happy, I guess. I'm satisfied.

Speaker 1 I'm something to be here with John Lovett, co-founder of Crooked Media, and a podcast host, including the great podcast, Love It or Leave It, where this show will be cross-posted later today.

Speaker 1 So if you want to hear it twice with his audio team,

Speaker 1 you can go listen to it over there. How are you doing, John?

Speaker 2 I'm doing okay, Tim. Yeah,

Speaker 2 normally on Tuesdays, we record a monologue, a kind of comedic look at the previous few days' news. And I thought maybe this

Speaker 2 would be a better, a conversation about how we're feeling would be maybe more fruitful right now.

Speaker 1 All right. Well, I'm not sure how comedic it's going to be, but I'm sure we'll find a laugh somewhere.

Speaker 1 As you alluded to, because

Speaker 1 we are gay, white men, and podcast hosts, this will mostly be a self-indulgent therapy session about how we feel. But before we go fully solipsist there, I want to think a little bit about others.

Speaker 1 Can we start by thinking a little bit about others? Is that okay?

Speaker 2 Sure. Let's do that.

Speaker 1 I guess just open-ended, we've had a week now to marinate on this. And, you know, there are fears, you have fears and worries about what might come.

Speaker 1 And there's a lot of unknowns still, a lot of known unknowns, if you will. And so I just wonder, like, what feels the most acute to you as far as actual threats versus hypothetical threats?

Speaker 2 I was thinking about this question, and it's very hard to answer. And I was thinking back to how this period felt the last time

Speaker 2 Trump became president. And this was a very dark time.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it continued to be one through the first couple of weeks of the administration when he went for the Muslim ban.

Speaker 2 And there was a lot of protest, and we just didn't know what the bottom would be.

Speaker 2 And then Obamacare repeal failed, and Trump was in a lot of ways overtaken by his own lack of discipline and chaos and kind of quotidian politics.

Speaker 2 And so I'm trying to like

Speaker 2 keep in mind that this is a very hard time because it's all perspective,

Speaker 2 and we don't know what the future holds. What struck me yesterday when we were recording Pod Save America is this was a record on Monday

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 John's very reasonable question was: NBC is reporting on Trump's enemies, being unsure if it's safe to remain in the country, some being advised by lawyers to leave the country.

Speaker 2 Who are Trump's enemies? What happens if Trump targets his enemies? What are the politics of Trump targeting his enemies?

Speaker 2 A week earlier, we were sitting in the same studio saying to ourselves, well, we'd rather be Kamala than Trump right now.

Speaker 2 Hopeful for tomorrow.

Speaker 1 Barely, you'd rather be Kamala for Trump. So I guess actually what's relevant here is which of Trump's enemies would you rather be? Sure.

Speaker 1 The other one should probably be the one that's more worried.

Speaker 2 And what I felt about it was

Speaker 2 how do we deal with the bloodless kind of ticky-tack politics of Trump's aberrations

Speaker 2 without forgetting that they're aberrations? And obviously, we don't want to have a whole conversation about normalizing Trump again. Trump is obviously quite normal.

Speaker 1 Here he is.

Speaker 2 But my main fear right now is

Speaker 2 that in facing a million different versions, a million different threats from a million different directions, we will win some battles, lose some battles.

Speaker 2 But by the end of this four years, we won't really recognize the country. And

Speaker 2 that's sort of what. what I felt in just thinking about that, these sort of like,

Speaker 2 we're already at the point where we're talking about whether there'll be blowback if donald trump uses the security state to kill people's clearances causing them to lose jobs thereby causing potential whistleblowers inside the government to be afraid to come forward we're already at we're already at the politics of that which we should be i mean it's a reasonable place to be we are at the politics of that but what we're talking about is the the politics of quasi authoritarian governance we're we're already there.

Speaker 2 So that was my big,

Speaker 2 like, am I worried about the targeting of immigrants and how far that goes? Yes. Am I worried about the targeting of LGBT people? Yes.

Speaker 2 Am I worried about what happens when inevitably protests start happening and Trump crosses the Rubicon of deploying troops and we start debating the approval rating of that decision?

Speaker 2 Like, yes, I'm very worried about all of these things.

Speaker 2 But in general, I'm worried about now what happens when Trump, fully in control of the Republican Party, fully in control of the executive branch, makes decisions and it is just processed as normal politics.

Speaker 2 That's, that's, that's what I was feeling today.

Speaker 1 Yeah. That's why I like having you.
So I thought we would be, we're a good pair for this because my, like, my brain goes in a completely different way from that into like crisis communications mode.

Speaker 1 Like I go into crisis mode, right? Which is like, okay, we're here, right?

Speaker 1 And it's like, what is not acute you know maybe there's a distant threat to gay rights or whatever as you mentioned lgbtq but like it's not acute right like maybe there's a distant threat to some of trump's enemies or like a future protest that he cracks down on but like it's not acute and like like the real thing is like there's a small handful of people who i worry about like who i i think particularly kind of were involved in the in the impeachments and the prosecutions against him that I think might be targeted initially.

Speaker 1 And I worry about them and some of them I know personally. And then I worry about this.

Speaker 1 I want to play for you what the discussion between Sean Hannity last night and the new czar of deportations or whatever the fuck they're calling him.

Speaker 3 Well, for those others, the non-criminals, you want to self-deport, I'm all for it. Because when they self-report, they can put their orders, put everything in order,

Speaker 3 their family business, if they got homes or whatever, they can put all that in order and leave with their family altogether. It makes perfect sense for the ones that are not criminals.

Speaker 2 How are they going to get home? How do they get home?

Speaker 3 Well, the ones we're going to arrest them, we'll put on an airplane and send them home.

Speaker 3 And the ones that want to go home on their own, they found their way across the world to come to the greatest nation on earth. They can find their way home.

Speaker 3 Either that or I'll give them a free airline ticket that we put them on our airplane and we'll take them home. It's either way.
It's up to them.

Speaker 3 If we arrest them, they come on our airplane uh sean if they if they want to go on their own airplane i welcome it so like

Speaker 1 to me it's like okay that is what i can't like not think about that right i mean like you you're like at this very meta which is you're right you're like at this very meta like man like we might be so debased by 2028 that we don't even have a society anymore and like that's true that's something that i that is in my brain somewhere but then on the flip side i'm like we've got sean hannity being like don't you think you should be a little bit more humane when the deportations start?

Speaker 1 And the deportations are being like, Nah, actually, Sean, no, I don't think we should. I think everybody's got to go.

Speaker 2 Yeah, no, I saw that clip, and

Speaker 2 obviously, it's

Speaker 2 like it's chilling for a number of reasons.

Speaker 2 First of all, we have Sean Hannity pitching immigration policy to this former acting

Speaker 2 ICE guy who basically just wants to use it as an opportunity to reassert the kind of

Speaker 2 aggressive anti-immigrant position that they want their message to be.

Speaker 2 And it's like,

Speaker 2 this is the power center now, right?

Speaker 2 This is the marketplace of ideas. That's obviously terrifying.
If you listen to Homan in that clip, right?

Speaker 2 He kind of postures in this hyper-aggressive anti-immigrant way while also avoiding what Hannity is specifically asking him.

Speaker 2 And to me, like, this goes to the politics of this, which is they are signaling.

Speaker 2 So if you go back and listen to Trump in 2016, when he was talking about deportations, obviously Trump in both 2024 and 2016 talked about deportations in a messy, confusing, vague way, meant to allow you to draw any policy conclusion about what he might want to do.

Speaker 2 But the difference, I think, between how he spoke in 2016 and how he spoke in 2024, 2016, he was mostly talking about securing the border and then deporting criminal,

Speaker 2 undocumented people. That was their stated policy goal.

Speaker 1 Right. Like that they committed crimes beyond beyond the crime of crossing the border illegally.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 And by the way, they purposely allied that distinction as well, right?

Speaker 2 They refer to criminal, undocumented people, but they consider every person as having broken into the country, which is a crime, of course. So they can make that vague as well.

Speaker 2 But what he's doing there is he's saying, we're going to go after the worst of the worst. And

Speaker 2 that is going to be something, look, most Americans, when asked about it, favor mass deportations. Not clear if they really mean that, right?

Speaker 2 They may be thinking more about just getting border under control, the number of deportations under Biden versus Trump, right? Trump did some interior enforcement.

Speaker 2 Biden, his deportations are more focused at the border. So when people think of deportations, they may really be in their mind picturing just getting control of the border.

Speaker 2 But what I worry about right is that Trump starts under this guy, Homan, doing a bunch of deportations, claiming it is the worst of the worst criminals.

Speaker 2 We start to see reporting that it is in this dragnet, just sweeping up a bunch of other people who just came to this country for a better life. By the way, because we built an economy on their backs,

Speaker 2 I have this constant tension. And I don't know if you feel the same thing, as long as we're talking about feelings and indulging ourselves, which is

Speaker 2 things that I feel like should go without saying, but then maybe they shouldn't. And one of the things that should maybe not go without saying is,

Speaker 2 because I hear this, right?

Speaker 2 You hear this from a lot of people who ostensibly take a somewhat moderate position in immigration, which is they support immigration, they believe there's immigration, but these people should go to the back of the line, or these people broke the law.

Speaker 2 And it really is

Speaker 2 just

Speaker 2 the laws targeting the most vulnerable people.

Speaker 2 We built an economy on undocumented labor. Okay, it is ostensibly against our laws.
For 50 years, we have basically invited people to come.

Speaker 2 We have told them if they come to this country, if they, we have not said this explicitly, but our entire system was built on it.

Speaker 2 If you make it here, you can live here, you can work here, your children can get a better life here. Our economy relies on you.
And the bargain was you get a chance to make money in America.

Speaker 2 You don't have the protections of our laws. You don't have the protections of our labor laws.
If your boss screws you, you're pretty well fucked, but you get to have a better life. And you paid less.

Speaker 2 And you get paid less.

Speaker 1 You paid more than you would at home.

Speaker 2 You get paid more than you would at home. You get more of, you get the benefits of living in the greatest country on earth.

Speaker 2 Your kids will have opportunity, and we as Americans benefit because we get services and products at a much cheaper cost because of this giant pool of basically second-class citizens providing this labor.

Speaker 2 And by the way, you're going to pay into Social Security, you're going to pay into Medicare, but you have no hope of ever redeeming it.

Speaker 2 You'll actually contribute more to the tax code than you will take out. And so, what are we going to do to fix that? Well, there's a compromise to fix that comprehensive immigration reform.

Speaker 2 It is humane. It does require some people to pay back taxes.

Speaker 2 And it acknowledges the breaking of the law, but also the fact that this was a broken system that we all collectively built and benefited from. And now we're just going to visit all that pain on

Speaker 2 people

Speaker 2 who did what we basically told them to do and scapegoat this problem on their backs. And it's fucking disgusting.
And

Speaker 2 all that's a way of saying, sorry, I'm being indulgent. No.

Speaker 2 They want this. They want to have a bunch of protests in defense of undocumented people so that they can point out the fact that they're deporting the worst of the worst.
They want that fight, right?

Speaker 2 And they want that fight so that there's a whole news cycle about how they're going to say Democrats, it probably will just be activists, are defending the most violent and awful people who don't belong in this country.

Speaker 2 That will generate the stories that they want as they slowly ramp up further and further deportations.

Speaker 2 And then when they are now just rounding up people

Speaker 2 who have committed no crime other than coming into into the country illegally, and they are separating families or giving families the choice whether to leave together to a country they've never lived in for the kids or not.

Speaker 2 We will have already kind of done this round of protest and indignation, and it will be old news. And I don't know how you deal with that.
I don't know how you deal with that.

Speaker 2 But like, that's what I mean when I talk about the bloodless ticky-tack politics. And then the slow degradation.

Speaker 2 And it goes to something deeper, which is, I said this at Love It or Leave It at the live show after. And it's like Republicans go around saying, you're not wrong to care about this, right?

Speaker 2 You're not wrong to be mad about the border. You're not wrong to be mad about undocumented immigration.
You're not wrong to care about pronouns.

Speaker 2 You're not wrong to be annoyed by this, whatever it may be.

Speaker 2 And then we as Democrats, we as this big, broad coalition of the small deed democratic movement, go around telling people, you're wrong not to care about this. You're wrong not to care about norms.

Speaker 2 You're wrong not to care about democracy. You're wrong not to care about Elon Musk getting on a fucking call with Zelensky and like this new oligarchy of ours.
And we beg people to care.

Speaker 2 And I don't know the way out of it, but I'm fucking sick of it. I'm sick of it.

Speaker 1 Being on the caring side is hard. Yeah, this is the immigration thing you just got.

Speaker 1 I don't why it just to me is, I mean, we could do the whole thing on this, so I'm not going to, but just like my final thought on that is that it is a perfect storm where there's this, there's an acute crisis.

Speaker 1 People are going to suffer, but it's probably a political winner for them. And so it's like, it's the one area where they actually know what they're doing, kind of.

Speaker 1 I mean, they will still be totally corrupt and

Speaker 1 ham-fisted and executing it, but like they know the basic rules about how they can get around this.

Speaker 1 Like, there are a couple of like nativist freaks that have been like going through the 1798 alien and sedition law. Like, they actually know what their limits are at this time.

Speaker 1 So they know what they're doing, which is not going to be true in other areas. Yeah.
And

Speaker 1 the harm is going to be tangible and real to people, and the harm is going to be tangible and real to people that like don't vote and that just fundamentally most Americans don't care about.

Speaker 1 So that's, that's bad.

Speaker 2 But then you think, well, Donald Trump did family separation and they defended and they, you know, obviously as a political ideology, don't believe in acknowledging mistakes or apologizing.

Speaker 2 But Trump rescinded that order. Right.
He bowed to the politics of family separation.

Speaker 2 And so I do think that taught them, I think they learned the wrong lesson from it, which is if they want to do this, they have to do it more subtly and they have to ramp up to the worst aspects of the policy.

Speaker 2 But I do think that that clearly had an impact on their thinking about this, which is why I think you see, even though Trump said we're going to deport everybody, you see them talking about going after the worst of the worst, which is what they said the first time and then did family separation, which actually, by the way, like

Speaker 2 Even on their own terms, they failed, right? And part of the reason they failed is because they weren't targeted enough.

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Speaker 1 This takes us to

Speaker 1 what will be kind of the ongoing, at least bulwark debate, I'm sure, you guys and other places.

Speaker 1 And it's kind of a silly debate because it doesn't really matter because nobody, Donald Trump, doesn't care what we think.

Speaker 1 And the fates of global geopolitical and economic forces don't care what we think.

Speaker 1 And yet, I mean, isn't just this answer to all of the problem that you just laid out, the thing that you worry the most about, about just this degradation of four years and what that impact has on our society and what that impact that has in this case in immigration across a million other verticals, like isn't the answer that they just need to fuck up really bad and there really needs to be pain.

Speaker 1 And then you have this guilt inside of you about whether you want them to have bumpers on their misdeeds and their corruption or whether you want them to have like bad luck and happen to catch a global recession while they're in there?

Speaker 2 Yeah. You know, I've seen people talking about this, right?

Speaker 1 I wrote down in the notes, there's this accelerationism.

Speaker 1 Like, right, this is, this is what the fucking, so it's a bad sign when you're thinking maybe the neo-Nazis have a point, but the Civil War guys, the, the, you know, they're, they are accelerationists, right?

Speaker 1 Like, they wanted a race war, right? That was like the term that they used because it would bring about quicker or whatever the white national society they want.

Speaker 1 And so I guess the question to me, like, the words I wrote down was accelerationism or resistance, right?

Speaker 1 Like, do we we want resistance and limits on the suffering, or do we want to accelerate it so that people can see how bad it is?

Speaker 1 But maybe the answer is we lived through a pandemic and we're back here, so maybe there is no, you know, so maybe like pain, pain isn't actually a teacher. I don't know.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 you have to separate out to me, I think, two pieces of that. First of all, it's not clear to me Democrats

Speaker 2 have an ability to do anything to curtail what Donald Trump does over the next

Speaker 2 four years

Speaker 2 beyond using our platforms to make arguments, right? I mean, that's really, right at the federal level, that seems to be what we'll be limited to. We'll have

Speaker 2 some say in the Senate around the filibuster, one hopes. The House will have a very slim majority.
And so

Speaker 2 they will not have the ability to lose really any House Republicans, especially if they get Stefanik. You'll have 80 days where that seat may be vacant.

Speaker 2 But some doors lock behind you, you know?

Speaker 1 And I feel like which door locked behind us.

Speaker 2 Well, the Supreme Court locked behind us, right? When Ruth Bader-Ginsburg dies, and

Speaker 2 basically two presidents who didn't win the popular vote appoint however many justices that have shifted this country to the right and made democracy and progressive governance so much harder.

Speaker 2 But I'm not a believer in accelerationism

Speaker 2 because

Speaker 2 the pain is real and guaranteed, but the political shifts are perspective and hypothetical.

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 I'm not really a fan of that kind of politics. I also just have this old-fashioned notion, I guess, that winning begets winning, that

Speaker 2 stopping Trump on the Affordable Care Act, right? It didn't stop the Trump movement from becoming unpopular and making wins in 2018 possible, right? Like, like we beat them in 2018.

Speaker 2 We beat them even though we stopped some pretty bad stuff in 2017 and 2018. I don't think that lesson would tell us that we should just stand back and

Speaker 2 let Trump fail. I think we have to be a full-throated

Speaker 2 arguer for something better. That means fighting Trump wherever we can, scoring whatever victories we can, and presenting ourselves as a viable alternative.

Speaker 2 I think the part of what makes this moment feel so awful, right? We say all the time, like,

Speaker 2 you know, how did Trump get close?

Speaker 2 How is Trump palatable to so many people? Do we know our country? And the reality is, like, Trump's movement is weak, and the Democratic Party is weak. We have two weak,

Speaker 2 in terms of popular support, are pretty weak. I think a normal Republican would would have absolutely destroyed Joe Biden and I think would have destroyed.

Speaker 1 I don't think that's necessarily true.

Speaker 2 You don't think that's true?

Speaker 1 I mean, normal Republicans did worse in the Senate races than Trump. A lot of people went and voted and just checked Trump and then left.

Speaker 2 Right, but I don't think that's because.

Speaker 1 And I don't think any normal Ron de Sanctimonius wasn't going to win over a bunch of younger Latino black men, was he? Or at least not the same rate as Trump, I don't think.

Speaker 2 I guess that you're right. That That is an unknowable question.

Speaker 2 And I think what my takeaway is, is the reason that you see this divide is there are a lot of people that wanted to vote for something different. They just didn't like the Biden administration.

Speaker 2 They don't like inflation. They're furious about it.
And so they were going to pull the lever for the alternative. And Downball was different.
But I don't know. Maybe you're right.

Speaker 1 Well, that takes us to another, like the question of

Speaker 1 we're getting closer and closer to the bone of our feelings one topic at a time, but like the existentialist question of like does this any of this fucking matter then like what are we doing here like you and me besides just hanging out with each other because like if that's true right if it's true there's just like

Speaker 1 people checked the box called change because a pandemic happened because of you know a fucking leak out of a lab or a bat bit a person whatever in a wet market and then four years later there was global inflation and then donald trump the bullet missed him by a centimeter and he was able to get positive momentum from that and people were upset about inflation and so they just clicked a box called change and they would have clicked the box called change for anybody.

Speaker 1 That doesn't make me feel good.

Speaker 1 I mean, not that I think that I'm like the central character of who's the president of the United States or not, but it does create a engender a sense of helplessness, if that's the, if that's the analysis, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 You know, you and I talked about this before, that like that we were betting on politics. We were kind of betting on the power of campaigns and the fact that like politics was going to matter, right?

Speaker 2 That like

Speaker 2 that Joe Biden, because he was so old and had basically lost the ability to be an effective communicator, that we have a better case. If we have somebody that can make that case, we're happier, right?

Speaker 2 So we're going to bet on just politics of a person who can work from morning till night and telling a story and trying to make an argument.

Speaker 2 Now, that didn't work,

Speaker 1 right?

Speaker 1 That didn't work.

Speaker 2 But why, right? Like, I mean, I guess, hold on.

Speaker 1 I guess I just will, I'll object to one point. I guess it worked if we believed a leak that Joe Biden was going to lose 400 electoral votes to Donald Trump.
I believe that.

Speaker 1 I mean, it worked in the sense that, yeah, so it worked in the sense that politics was better than no politics at all.

Speaker 2 Okay, but like, what does that tell us? So

Speaker 2 John shared that on PSA. I have the same information.
So what does that tell us?

Speaker 2 It tells us that Kamala Harris climbed back from what would have been a potentially like blowout on the par of like Nixon

Speaker 2 to what amounts to a very close race in which

Speaker 2 it swung by a point or two, causing us to lose all seven swing states.

Speaker 2 But the race was closer in those swing states.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I am not a fatalist. Like, oh, there was no way for Kamala Harris to win.
I don't necessarily believe that.

Speaker 2 I don't believe that a race in which a point or two in seven states wasn't something that she could have overcome. That's not to say that I don't, that I blame the Harris campaign after the fact.

Speaker 2 Of course, you can look back and say, well, if we wanted to win, this is what we had to do differently. But I think they did a great job in the limited time that they have.

Speaker 2 But it does tell me that had Joe Biden decided not to run and there had been an open primary, maybe a Democrat without all the burdens of incumbency could overcome the benefits of the desire for change that people clearly voice, plus the benefits that come uniquely with Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 I mean, this wasn't a blowout. Like, I know we are kind of, because we expected if Trump to win, for him to win by 5,000 votes in Georgia, we're like, oh, my God, oh, my God.
It wasn't a blowout.

Speaker 2 It was a winnable race. It was a winnable race.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 But you don't have a, there's nowhere inside your little brain that's like, this is all fucking pointless. No.
This is stupid.

Speaker 1 Like, we were running against the stupidest person in the entire country whose campaign was like, he's talking about Arnold Palmer's cock

Speaker 1 and like his outreach to black voters was like, Look at these gold shoes and how great they are. Don't you guys like shoes and mug shots?

Speaker 2 I know.

Speaker 1 And like, yeah, he had some message that he like, and after he'd done all the shit, we don't have to list, then he wins.

Speaker 1 And on the other side, like, you spend a billion dollars, you have the best strategists in the world, you have people knocking doors.

Speaker 1 You haven't spent an hour in bed in the last week being like, this is all pointless. Actually, we just need a recession.
And that would be much better than me

Speaker 1 knocking on doors and raising money and talking.

Speaker 2 No, honestly, no.

Speaker 2 I sometimes feel like what we're doing right now, this specific is pointless. That I, well, that, that, that we are,

Speaker 2 that we're, you and I, you and I having this conversation for a hyper-engaged, very smart, progressive, or at least kind of liberal with a small L audience, that

Speaker 2 this

Speaker 2 is

Speaker 2 kind of a collective

Speaker 2 distraction from the larger fight, which is to figure out how to get beyond this bubble of whatever you can put, you know, let's say edges of it, a third of the country.

Speaker 2 And I do think you can say it's a third of the country, not that a third of the country is

Speaker 2 listening to the Bulwark and Ponzi of America, but the third of the country, that a third of the country is kind of hyper-anti-Trump, cosmopolitan, engaged in politics, and disgusted by the election results.

Speaker 2 Some of them are paying closer attention than others, but they all feel comfortable in this conversation. And

Speaker 2 they are stunned and shocked by anybody that could even consider voting for Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 And I do think one lesson from this, right, is like, I think about the last week before the vote and all this conversation about Tony Hinchcliffe.

Speaker 2 And we knew, we knew that we've done this before, that the kind of bad jokes, kind of

Speaker 2 Trump's dumb, mean, vicious, authoritarian, hateful comments that we find so abhorrent, that those don't always, if ever, move the needle. And we need to focus on what he's going to do.

Speaker 2 We need to focus on what he represents and what it actually means in the day-to-day of people's lives, that the actual threat, the actual menace.

Speaker 2 And yet in that week before, it was like, well, there are these WhatsApp group chains where people are turning out and we're hearing anecdotally that this is moving the needle and it's changing people's minds.

Speaker 2 And here's the thing. I think that all might have been true.
I think that all might have been true.

Speaker 2 But there was this huge mass of humanity of America that we weren't hearing from and that we weren't talking to. And

Speaker 2 they were in a throw the bums out mindset.

Speaker 2 And most of them, you know, I think about all the different ways in which I thought it was the right way to talk about Trump, to say, aren't you sick of this?

Speaker 2 Aren't you ready to move on from the noise and the nonsense and the chaos and the thinking about Trump all the time?

Speaker 1 They weren't thinking about Trump all the time. They had nothing to move on from.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's not their life. They're not paying that close of attention if they're paying attention at all.

Speaker 2 But for me, like, is that a reason to throw up our hands and be like, well, I guess none of this mattered? Like, actually, no.

Speaker 2 It means that we have this huge problem of this broken media system. We have this huge problem of tens of millions of people truly not

Speaker 2 part of this big debate about the threat Donald Trump poses and

Speaker 2 not really getting political news at all

Speaker 2 and getting any news via osmosis from kind of entertainment. Like, yeah, that's all bad news.
But it tells me that actually,

Speaker 2 no, this isn't the country coming together and saying we choose Trump, we choose authoritarianism, we choose this bullshit. It's

Speaker 2 something else.

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Speaker 1 What prompted this little dialogue, I've been spending more time with you, John Lovett, than I ever thought I could have imagined back in 2007, was I texted you on Wednesday morning on this front, and I thought I felt like you were putting on a brave face.

Speaker 1 Because I was like, the text was basically, how do I do this? How do I care about this anymore?

Speaker 1 How do I wake up every day and give one fucking rat's ass, whether it's Little Marco or Rick Grinnell in Foggy Bottom?

Speaker 2 Like, who cares? Yeah. Like, how do I care about this?

Speaker 1 And your answer was like, well, because we have to and we're going to. I'm not, it was actually.
more touching than that, but I'm not, I'm not going to get in my feelings quite yet.

Speaker 1 But I kind of thought you were just bucking me up, but it sounds like right now that you really feel that way.

Speaker 2 You know,

Speaker 2 I think I do. It's a little bit of faking it till I make it.

Speaker 2 It's hard to see the water we swim in.

Speaker 2 The world had a global pandemic, a once in a century

Speaker 2 traumatic event.

Speaker 2 It has reshaped us. It has changed us.
It has made us coarse and weird. People drive worse.
People are meaner. People feel like they lost something.
It was unfair.

Speaker 2 And they're going to take it back somehow. Whatever that means, whatever that looks like.
And by the way, that's not necessarily a pejorative.

Speaker 2 It's people trying to, people have tried to find new hobbies. People are in therapy that weren't in therapy before.
But the ways in which the pandemic

Speaker 2 manifests, I think, are is unpredictable. And so when you say, like, oh, does none of this matter? Well, you know what? In the face of a giant

Speaker 1 political, cultural,

Speaker 2 physical health crisis, no, like we may be beholden to events, right? Like that's real. That's what may be our lot right now, right?

Speaker 2 Like we are in the aftermath of something awful and we are trying to be tactical in what is a kind of historic, epical event.

Speaker 2 And so I think, well, like, what's our job in the wake of that? And it's like, are we,

Speaker 2 you and I, like, I don't know what the future holds for us. You know, I don't know how bad this second Trump term will be.

Speaker 2 And by the way, I don't, we don't know the long-term impact on our politics, right? How much of an aberration it will be.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 it just can't be that like that we just succumb so quickly. Like, maybe give us a couple years before we give up.
I'll give you want to give up in a couple years.

Speaker 2 You can give up in a couple of years, but you don't get to you don't get to give up now.

Speaker 1 I don't want to give up. I don't want to give up.

Speaker 1 I'm not interested in giving up. I'm just,

Speaker 1 it beats you down, you know? It beats you down to watch

Speaker 1 the worst people in the world. Maybe this is more of a personal thing.
I don't know.

Speaker 1 Maybe other people, maybe this resonates with people, maybe it doesn't, but maybe it resonates with me more because I just know these people.

Speaker 1 To have the worst people in the world just continue to get rewarded for bad actions. Like, it's almost something something if it's like if the person is, um,

Speaker 1 if the person's faking it, you know, if you're like, that person's slimy, you know, but they're pretending to be nice. They're playing the game.
They're buttering people up.

Speaker 1 I hate that person, but at least there's something to be said for pretending. Like, these people didn't even pretend.
They indulged their worst impulses and instincts.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And as a result, they got everything that they wanted.

Speaker 2 That's tough.

Speaker 1 That's tough, you know? I mean, maybe that's just life. It might just be life.

Speaker 2 It's funny because, like, as I'm getting more defiant, like, I am getting emotional about it.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it does,

Speaker 2 oh, fuck you. It does.

Speaker 2 It does, like, I, it does make me want to go pretty big with it, which is,

Speaker 2 yes.

Speaker 2 The worst people are happy and the best people are sad.

Speaker 2 The worst people are vindicated and believe their worldview has been validated by this. And the best people are uncertain and scared and angry and confused.

Speaker 2 But the truth is the truth.

Speaker 2 And I do think one of our jobs during this time is to remember.

Speaker 1 Look.

Speaker 2 Maybe there's no one that will ever keep the score, right? Who knows how bad things get.

Speaker 2 But,

Speaker 2 like, I believe in the ledger

Speaker 2 where the wins and losses are written down, and that ledger is kept. And

Speaker 2 we got pretty fast and loose in the last couple of days of that election comparing Donald Trump to Hitler.

Speaker 2 And in part, you know, J.D. Vance once compared Donald Knight.
John Kelly did. Because John Kelly did,

Speaker 2 but J.D. Vance did as well.
And there's this speech I always think about.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it was a speech by Otto Wells, who was the leader of the Social Democrats in Weimar, Germany, in the run-up to Hitler's ascent. And

Speaker 2 I believe this is after the Reichstag fire. Hitler is in power.
He is, I believe, chancellor at this time. The Reichstag fire has just taken place.
What is the name of the

Speaker 2 German parliament, whatever it it was called, is meeting in the

Speaker 2 opera house in Berlin.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 the communists and some of the social democrats have already been arrested.

Speaker 2 Hitler has his brown shirts walk into the opera hall, and they have their truncheons, their rubber bats, and they basically surround the inside.

Speaker 2 They kind of stand along the walls, kind of hitting their bats against their hands. And then they march the parliament in and basically say, vote for the enabling law or else, you know.

Speaker 2 And Hitler gives a speech to that effect. He says, some version of, we're under attack.
I need the approval of this enabling law. If you don't give it to me, I don't know what I'll have to do.

Speaker 2 I don't know how bad this will get. You just need to approve this enabling law.
And Otto Wells gets up and he gives this speech and he says,

Speaker 2 basically,

Speaker 2 you can say whatever you want, and you can describe this however you want, and you can claim all these vivid, patriotic notions about what you're trying to do.

Speaker 2 But history will remember what you did here, and we will know, and the truth about what happened here will be known.

Speaker 2 And I stand with everybody fighting you, I stand with all the people who know this is wrong, and there will be a brighter future. And then, you know, that was a great personal arrest.

Speaker 2 He could have been arrested right there on the spot. He gives that speech, he, I believe, escapes to Prague, or he leaves Germany thereafter.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 there are people who have felt this in far worse

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 far worse circumstances, who have dealt with far worse and who have, this person didn't know how bad things would get and also felt just as unmoored and unsafe. And I just,

Speaker 2 I don't know, we are in a very privileged position.

Speaker 1 There's no doubt about that.

Speaker 2 But I just like, I think about that kind of courage, like that real courage in the face of genuine fascism in full. And like,

Speaker 2 how how dare we be kind of

Speaker 2 cowed by this? I just, how dare we? Yeah. People have faced so much worse.
And like, yeah, we faced a very, very big setback. The harm will be dramatic.

Speaker 2 The difference between what we thought the future could be and what it will be for the next couple of years is dramatic.

Speaker 2 The effect on the climate, on our healthcare system, on basic rights, like it is dramatic and it is awful. But like,

Speaker 2 we're just going to take our ball and go home. I don't know.
I just, we got to keep going.

Speaker 1 All of that stuff is tangible. The Germany thing, thinking about all this, there's one other, I have one other dark thought I want to get through.
And then

Speaker 1 maybe we can do a minute of yelling before we close. I don't know.
I might need to yell after.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 the other thing for me is

Speaker 1 like the door that locked behind me,

Speaker 1 to use your phrase, I think was like a view of America

Speaker 1 that I had

Speaker 1 that is another thing that's made me sad this week. And it's kind of hard to enunciate, but I kind of felt like him winning once,

Speaker 1 you know, there was a chance for rejection and renewal. And to me, it's kind of like he's going back into the White House.

Speaker 1 And I know that America wasn't fucking perfect and we sinned and we had slavery and we did all this stuff, but like there was still like a

Speaker 1 trajectory, like a positive trajectory. And I had like a real belief in the specialness of America that I just don't

Speaker 1 know if I have anymore. And I just think about my kid and I'm like, I don't like,

Speaker 1 it's just hard for me to imagine like driving through DC in 20 years, even if the best happens, like even if he just kind of like slowly recedes into dementia and they infight with each other and they don't actually do anything.

Speaker 1 And fucking whoever your imaginary best Democrat president comes in in 2028, like even then, it's hard for me to imagine like in 2040 like having chills thinking about the American experiment anymore.

Speaker 2 So, this is why I do think like

Speaker 2 you right now don't have perspective.

Speaker 2 I don't either. I don't either.

Speaker 1 I don't either. I certainly don't have perspective.

Speaker 1 But, like, that's why I'm doing that's why I'm verbalizing this. Isn't this what you're supposed to do when you have no perspective and when you're

Speaker 1 totally myopic and silly and stupid? Aren't you supposed to say it to hundreds of thousands of people?

Speaker 2 I just referred to a speech given after the Reichstag fire. I don't know how perspective either.
But the

Speaker 2 like, first of all, like, I've never been an arc of history person, Ben Store Justice. I find that quote

Speaker 1 silly. Was that John or Rhodes that did that?

Speaker 2 I mean, it was Martin Luther King. Yeah, I know.
That re-upped. But everybody's pulled it.
Every Democrat has pulled it.

Speaker 2 I think maybe there'll be some value in Democrats casting aside their just so stories about America. Like, I'm good on that stuff.
You know, there have been periods of terrible backsliding.

Speaker 2 One thing you'll hear all the time is someone will say, oh, that's the first black ex since Reconstruction.

Speaker 2 That's the first black person from this state, a representative or senator since Reconstruction. Well, why do you have to say since Reconstruction?

Speaker 2 Well, because the South backslid horribly after Reconstruction. There have been periods of retrenchment.
There have been periods where the reactionaries win

Speaker 2 and it's brutal and awful. And there are people who, you know,

Speaker 2 spent the best years of their life watching America get far worse around them. That's just the truth of our history.
That was always there. We didn't like to talk about it.
We really don't. Like,

Speaker 2 there are Civil War movies, there are World War II movies, there are civil rights movies. There's no Reconstruction movies.
We have a couple pretty much.

Speaker 1 There really aren't.

Speaker 1 Let's do a Reconstruction movie.

Speaker 2 America loves a tragedy with a happy ending.

Speaker 2 And so we don't like, we'd like to tell stories about America that skip over the parts where people were born and died in slavery while everything got worse around them. In South Carolina,

Speaker 2 in the run-up to the Civil War, South Carolina made open-air slave markets illegal.

Speaker 1 Why?

Speaker 2 Because they were disturbing and abhorrent and embarrassing to slave owners.

Speaker 2 And Northerners would come and write about it. And so they decided that they were going to put those things behind closed doors.

Speaker 2 But in the run-up to the Civil War, as Southern reactionaries decided to make the claim that slavery was not only a necessary evil, but a moral good, they reopened the outdoor open-air slave markets.

Speaker 1 Sick, sick.

Speaker 2 But like, that is our history, too. And so

Speaker 2 if you were able to drive by the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial and have a song in your heart, it was a song that it's in there. The truth was always there.

Speaker 2 It was part of America's story. So, either maybe

Speaker 2 it wasn't as real to you as the trajectory of justice and equality, because we lived through a period of progressivism. If Donald Trump, he exists in part as a reaction to incredible progress.

Speaker 2 Like, that is what that, if there's anything that animates this reactionary segment of Republicans today, it is a response to progress, to you being able to get married and have kids, to the success of Barack Obama as a black president, to the complete cultural victory of progressivism in the boardrooms and on television.

Speaker 1 And to maybe the overshoots of progress that maybe progressed a little too far.

Speaker 2 Sure, but whether or not it's too far, I don't think it is. There is a revanchist

Speaker 2 response to that. That's always been true.
That's always been true. And it's scored a victory because Donald Trump is the luckiest fucking man on earth.
He's He's the luckiest man.

Speaker 1 He's so fucking lucky. It's just unbelievable how lucky he is.
Can we catch one break? Can we just catch one lucky break? Yeah, I hear you. I know.

Speaker 1 It's just a tough lesson to learn at 42.

Speaker 1 You can see how vulnerable I am right now that I shared my real age. You know, because it is reminiscent, we were texting.
I was reminiscing about,

Speaker 1 you know, like the Catholic Church, like, you know, my gayness is being rejected by the Catholic Church and then the and then, you know, the the kid didddling of the altar boys, like, that all kind of happened around the same time.

Speaker 1 And it's kind of like,

Speaker 1 it's just over for me, you know, like, there's no coming back from it, right? Like, there's no, like, even a good pope getting in there, like, doesn't really do anything.

Speaker 1 Like, despite the fact that I have, like, fondness, the stories, and, like, the feelings, and this nostalgia, like, it's over. And I feel that parallel to this now.

Speaker 1 And I know that you're, you are correct, that it was based on like a, you know, kind of fantastical story that I told in my head, but those are important too, right?

Speaker 1 Like, we need to tell ourselves uplifting stories, right? Because otherwise, if we're just in the like Hobbesian mindset, like that's pretty tough.

Speaker 2 Well, yeah, I mean, there is like Steve Martin in one of his books had this line that I always think about, which is, delusions of grandeur will help get you between moments of genuine inspiration.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 you talked about like

Speaker 2 this idea of America. And

Speaker 2 I do think that like

Speaker 2 elites held it, really did. I do think that there was a like elites really believed in this idea of America.
And

Speaker 2 it led to

Speaker 2 these institutions.

Speaker 2 Like I think about Trump, it's such a small thing, but I think about Trump putting Elon Musk on the phone with Zielinski and all that. It's a small thing.
Well, it's a small moment. Yeah, got it.

Speaker 2 But I think about

Speaker 2 all the kind of breaking that has to happen for that moment to take place.

Speaker 2 One being that, hey, we used to all kind of acknowledge that, no, you don't let a billionaire oligarch who sponsored your campaign be in the room with you as you govern.

Speaker 2 Like even the most corrupt American presidents, even the most corrupt politicians on earth, they do those calls separately.

Speaker 2 They don't do them in parallel. They do them serial, you know? You do the call with the oligarch, then you do the call with the foreign leader, you know? But the influence and also just the like

Speaker 2 the breakdown of systems. Like we built this kind of collection of rules for how we want our government to function, and they were good rules.

Speaker 2 And it turns out the only thing keeping them in place was a kind of elite

Speaker 2 consensus that they were important and valuable that yeah that the system could be stodgy and Byzantine and that there are huge problems in the bureaucracy, but that there was value in what these rules, this collective set of norms did.

Speaker 2 And it turns out the only thing keeping that in place was a collective belief in them because normal people, regular people watching, just don't know about them, don't care about them.

Speaker 2 It's not affect their daily lives. And when one half of our elite decided to say, we don't give a fuck anymore, they all came crumbling down.
Does that mean they're gone forever?

Speaker 2 Does that mean we were wrong? I don't think so. I don't think so.

Speaker 2 But I think it points to the fact that like people were so angry and are so dissatisfied and are so mistrustful and are so cynical that if we want to put those kinds of basic rules in place, we have to figure out how to win power and govern in a way that we have a broad enough support for our agenda that the people that don't care about that kind of thing don't get anywhere near power again.

Speaker 2 But that's a decade, that's a long-term project now. It's a long, hard slog now.

Speaker 1 It is a long, hard slog. And we're not, we're not picking fruit.
We're not picking fruit worrying about immigration raids. We're not coal miners.
So we'll just wake up and do it tomorrow.

Speaker 1 But while we have a final moment of self-indulgence, is there anything else you need to get off your chest? Any other feeling? Or do you just want to grunt? Or just want to do a lion's breath?

Speaker 1 Like, oh.

Speaker 2 Can I tell you one thing that I've just been trying to figure out here? Because like, Yeah.

Speaker 2 I'm trying to make it, see if, like, what am I, am I focusing on the things that I want to focus on anyway? Because these are kind of things I think about and care about, right?

Speaker 2 Like, everybody's looking at this big historical moment and saying, oh, the three things that have been on my mind a long time are the reason this happened.

Speaker 1 Bogus, populism, whatever.

Speaker 2 But I'm curious what you think about this, which is like,

Speaker 2 like, why are people so upset? And, like, obviously, cost of living is real. It's a real problem, right?

Speaker 2 But that doesn't necessarily mean they'll vote for someone like Donald Trump, as you said, right? That's not to say that, you know, I'm not

Speaker 2 an economic denialist, like that, like, actually, it's a media creation. I don't believe in that at all.
But I'm starting to think about whether or not, like,

Speaker 2 there was a bargain that we all made when we decided to eviscerate local businesses and replace them with giant corporations basically everywhere.

Speaker 2 Like, when we decided to get rid of smaller pharmacies and replace them with CVSs, and we got rid of grocery stores and replaced them with chains, and got rid of local restaurants and replaced them them with tons of Panera breads and Subways and all the rest.

Speaker 1 One of America's biggest advocates for chilies.

Speaker 1 You shouldn't knock it.

Speaker 2 But like, I wonder if part of this, too, is that like we all kind of made a bargain.

Speaker 2 And the bargain was that like we would give up on having common spaces with Seoul in exchange for cheap, reliable, replicable convenience.

Speaker 2 And when the cheap went away, people got fucking pissed.

Speaker 2 That the cheap mattered more when what they were looking at was the same stretch of stores that they could see in every, like basically drive 30 minutes one way, you see the same stretch of stores, drive 30 minutes the next way, you see the same stretch of stores.

Speaker 2 That like the bargain for this convenient, cheap life was the cheap.

Speaker 2 And once that went, people like the soullessness of the economy we've built, yes, the way it's like hollowed out certain industries is like part of it too, but like the soullessness of it, the ugliness of it, I don't know.

Speaker 1 i do think there's something deeper there too i want to do a full hour on atomization with you because i want to think about that okay i think it's also this thing the phone yeah i think it's like there's no there's no reason why this period of inflation caused a political backlash greater than periods of worse economic times and greater inflation that doesn't seem that doesn't include the phone but i want to pray on both of those things and i just want to close by giving you one positive note from my husband who I was telling him you were on today.

Speaker 1 And he said this, and I wrote it down in real time.

Speaker 1 He's like, you know, I just got to say that had John Lovett survived that first episode of Survivor, I think that he would still be in the game because there's no reason to think the challenges would have gone different because the other guy wasn't very athletic either.

Speaker 1 And they've only voted off one person from their tribe since, and she was unlikable.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 1 So hopefully that's a little bit of uplift for you from a survivor expert. I appreciate you being my shrink for the hour.
Do we have a date to do it soon? Because I think I might need it.

Speaker 2 Would love to.

Speaker 1 Would love to.

Speaker 2 Thank you for saying that, Tyler. I appreciate that.
But I will say Annika is great.

Speaker 1 Sorry, Annika. I don't watch the show.
Nothing personal about Annika.

Speaker 2 I do think that

Speaker 2 maybe the fact that I couldn't hack it with a group of Gen Z

Speaker 2 normies. was a signal of the problems to come.

Speaker 1 Okay, so the next hour,

Speaker 1 whether that signal was there, the atomization of our society, big box doors and phones with John Lovett. I hope you guys will be back for that.
We'll be back tomorrow. We're back.
We're doing it.

Speaker 1 We're doing the show all over again.

Speaker 2 You're doing it, Tim. You're doing it.
Hey, Tim.

Speaker 1 We're doing it together. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I want you to know that winner or lose, I'm grateful to you.

Speaker 1 I appreciate you a lot, buddy. We'll be seeing you soon.
Everybody else will see you back here tomorrow. Peace.

Speaker 1 What's poppin' listeners?

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