Overtime – Episode #618: Richard Reeves, Maggie Haberman, Fareed Zakaria

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Yeah, aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series, real time with Bill Ma.

Okay,

here we are, back.

Richard, this is for you.

Is the term toxic masculinity itself toxic?

Oh, look at that curveball you got thrown.

Is the term toxic masculinity itself toxic?

Yes.

Why?

What we're really talking talking about, I think, is immature masculinity.

It's kind of this acting out that you see among anybody who's met teenage boys knows that they have some growing up to do.

But to label that kind of behavior as toxic, it suggests there's something intrinsically wrong.

It's something that can be exorcised, you know, some sort of right of exorcism.

If we could just expunge that bit of you,

then you'd be okay.

And that seems to me to push men away.

All the evidence is that it doesn't invite boys and men into the conversation to talk about which bits of them are toxic and which aren't.

It does have that feel of original sin about it.

How can we get that out of you?

And so it pushes them away and I think what it means, it's a term now that frankly I think has come to mean any kind of behavior by men that the person using the term disapproves of.

And once it's that broadly defined, it's lost all of its usefulness.

Yeah, because it's not just teenage boys that get accused of talking about that.

I mean that's right.

If it was just that, I don't know if it would be that big of an issue.

We expect it from teenage boys, but I think there is the issue of a much older men acting badly in that.

Very badly, in some cases criminally, disrespectfully, etc., and should be held fully to account for all of that.

But the trouble with the term toxic masculinity is it's now being applied with such a broad brush that it actually does capture everything from really egregious criminal behavior to teenage boys making a list of girls they find attractive or not.

And once a term has been defined that broadly, it's useless, and worse than useless, it's actually pushing boys and men men away from us and towards online figures who at least appear to be listening to them.

And isn't making a list of girls we find attractive how Facebook started?

I think that's exactly right.

Isn't that exactly how Facebook began?

Yeah.

Reading them.

And who better than Mark Zuckerberg, by the way?

The most socially awkward person in the world to have invented social media.

Okay, Maggie, based on all the times you interviewed Trump, what do you think a second Trump term would look like?

A lot like what 2020 would have looked like had COVID not happened, because he was gearing up to put in place people at the NSC who would do what he wanted.

He was gearing up to put at the Defense Department people who would do what he wanted.

He was gearing up to put, he thinks everything is personnel.

And all these people who were stopping him at various other points in his term were suddenly going to see their mirrors,

gone, and he was going to put in people who would do his bidding.

I think another Trump term would be a lot of spite.

He still has to get people confirmed by the Senate, but if there is a large majority in the Republican Senate in 2024, after that election, he's not going to have that hard a time.

So it will be.

I hear he's going to

announce his next run.

Quite soon.

Very soon.

Yes.

Is that?

That's accurate.

It is.

I mean, I've been saying all along, there's no way he's not running again.

I mean, he never really stopped.

Do you think he'll get the nomination?

Of course.

I think he is the odds-on favorite for it, even if he gets indicted, which is a possibility.

Oh, that'll only make him more popular.

And it enhances his appeal with some people.

He's the most narcissistic man in the universe.

What is more ego-gratifying than to be at the center of the world stage?

Yeah, that's the main thing.

But he also thinks that running gives him insulation against an investigation.

And that's a big piece of it right now.

He is facing significant investigations in the Justice Department and in Georgia, and he thinks this only helps him.

He'd run anyway.

But I totally agree with you.

I think he would run anyway.

And very likely win.

And even if he doesn't, like I said,

do you agree with what I was saying there?

We have a constitutional crisis.

That was an intriguing idea.

We have a constitutional crisis in 2024, because either he wins or he claims he won.

Either way, it's going to be a

shit.

No one's allowed to say it's going to be a shit show, but it's going to be a shit show.

I don't know how you get it back.

And it's happening, you know, it's not like we haven't seen it happen in other countries.

It's like, that's what I was saying.

It's like, can't happen to us.

That's what we said about 9-11 and terrorism coming.

It can't happen to us.

This is something that happens to other people.

Everything that happens to other people is going to happen here, too, if you don't.

Well, and all these institutions that we think are going to save us, you know, Emerson has this great line, institutions are just lengthened shadows of people, of men, and women.

So if people stop behaving well, if there's no Brad Rafsenberger, there's no magic institution that stops

the election from being fraudulent.

Well, because the institutions did hold before, but will they continue to hold?

They were stressed.

And he's also told people that part of why he's endorsed some of the people he endorsed, like Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, is that he believes that Mehmet Oz would support him in a 2024 contested election, that he would approve of an election for Trump, and that he would not convict him in the Senate if he were to win and then get impeached again.

He's making decisions with that kind of thing in mind.

That's something people need to be aware of.

Okay, Farid, is our primary system broken?

Would it be better to go back to the days of party bosses choosing the nominees?

Well, when you look at who the primaries are selecting, you know, people like

Herschel Walker.

No party bosses would ever have selected Herschel Walker.

Or Fetterman, quite a bit.

Well, I I think the way to think about it is this.

First of all, we're the only democracy, basically, in the world that has a primary system.

Every other place, the party chooses, and then you have a real election.

So it's not like people are not given a choice.

People just don't have an election before they have an election.

And what do we mean by an election?

This is the crucial part.

About 10 to 15 percent of registered Republicans vote in that primary and the same Democrats.

So it's the most, and it's not a representative sample.

No.

These are

the crazies.

Extreme.

And so what we've done is we've created a system where you necessarily force the political debate to the extremes.

Who were the party bosses?

We keep using this phrase smoke-filled rooms and party bosses because they both sound very bad.

It used usually elected officials.

It was aldermen, mayors,

governors.

These are people who had been elected by the mainstream, but the general public.

They had a good good sense for

who would work.

This is how every European country picks.

It's these

party.

It's something we do at the conventions.

Super delegates, isn't that what they call them?

I mean, that's what those are.

But they are weaker and weaker.

So basically, we've made it so that the party is now in hock to its most extreme 10%.

I mean, we've gone pretty much full circle from where the founding fathers were, which was they didn't even like parties.

And they certainly didn't like the people.

They keep it away from the people.

The oclocracy, mob rule.

That's what they were most likely to say.

Madison said if men were angels, government wouldn't be necessary.

The whole point of government is to restrain the, you know, inherently.

Well, I'm sure everything will turn out just great.

Thank you very much, everybody.

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