Rick Perlstein: The Alternative Is Apocalyptic

Hey everybody, lots of stuff happening in politics. Don't know if you noticed.
So we've got some new folks listening. On Wednesdays, I try to have step back conversations and a bigger picture about either policy or ideology or history, because over on the Next Level feed, we're doing just the rank punditry, the political gossip, all that stuff you're looking for.
So if you want that, head over to the Next Level feed for me, Sarah and JVL every Wednesday. Today, I've got Rick Perlstein, one of the most incisive writers about the history of the conservative movement coming from a left perspective.

So, you know, we hash out a few disagreements, but his understanding and grasp of the history of the movement is really unparalleled from somebody that comes from outside a conservative world.

So I think it's a very valuable conversation that ties directly to everything in the news right now, Project 2025, potential for a Nixon-style backlash to a Chicago convention,

much to discuss. So on the other side, stick around for Rick Perlstein.

All right, I'm back with the great Rick Perlstein, journalist and historian, is the author of a four-volume series on the history of America's political and cultural divisions, particularly

on the right and the rise of movement conservatism from the 1950s to Ronald Reagan. He wrote the

famed Nixonland, now writes for American Prospect. What's going on, man? I've been wanting to do this

Thank you. rise of movement conservatism from the 1950s to Ronald Reagan.
Yeah, he wrote the famed Nixonland, now writes for American Prospect. What's going on, man? I've been wanting to do this for a while.
It's a pleasure to be here, Tim. I'm a fan.
Some of my old conservative friends don't like, let's keep that under wraps, all right? The fandom. But I have to tell you, as I said, I've been wanting to kind of have a big picture convo with you about, you know, the arc of conservatism.
News has intervened. You wrote something that was called my political depression problem that

spurred us to reach out to you and do this ASAP. You wrote granular study of the ever more

authoritarian right didn't demoralize me as much as the reaction from the left.

You talked about how demoralizing the news was. That article came out May 29th.

I kind of like want to fly back in time to May 29th, Rick, and just be like, bro, it's getting uglier from here. So I hope you have your SSRIs.
Yeah, what happened in May? I didn't even remember what I was depressed about that day. Exactly.
I'm telling you, I was like, what was it that I wanted to originally talk about? I went back and read the article and it felt like a time capsule from the Mitt Romney era. At the time, there was frustration about kind of in the fallout of the Gaza protests.
There was this left wing, lefty online notion that was in vogue of like, you can't vote for Biden. Biden's terrible.
You know, he's committing a genocide. You know, the no difference between the sides.
I did an interview with Dan Savage about this kind of phenomenon around the time. And you were writing about how kind of demoralizing that was, that even folks on your side did not, were not seeing the stakes of the threat.
Yes, that was the melancholy du jour, right? But I mean, why do you have to take me there because for the first time in you know months you know my enemies are divided my side is united you know and we're feeling joy and and coconuts and all is good when october 7th happened i was like if i were you know lies, Satan, and I wanted to, you know, make sure that everything was so chaotic that America, the enemies of fascism in America couldn't possibly get their stuff together and fight side by side, I would create a terrorist attack on Israel, you know, in Gaza. And, you know, I mean, you know, wedge issues, I talk about them all the time, I think about them all the time.
And a lot of my work is like, well, let's think about things that wedge the Republican coalition. And this, you know, attack and, you know, the predictable mass slaughter and response by the Israeli Defense Forces.
And, you know, off the charts, you know, polls in Israel, you know, 98% thought that either it was the appropriate amount of violence or there should be more violence was just the perfect tool to divide my side, you know, just clean down the middle and make us all hate each other. And it just seems so of a piece with kind of all the institutional failures that have been a regular feature of our lives, you know, really since, you know, 2020.
You know, we don't have the journalism we need, you know, in order to fight fascism because of, you know, the greed of the people who own journalism companies. You know, the Democratic Party was hived into global warming, COVID.
Every day was a new thing that was driving us headlong into apocalypse. That was rock bottom for me.
I saw it as an opportunity just to really explain the stakes of what happens what happens if trump gets another term and i introduced a concept from a book that i'm writing called the infernal triangle what i call the authoritarian ratchet and it's kind of my theory about why when you have an ideology that is really about kind of uh returning to an imagined innocence right make america great again when was was America great? You know, someone just did a bunch of interviews, Amanda Marcotte and Slate, and everyone basically said back when they were kids. When was things great? When you were a teenager.
The best TV shows back then, the movies, the music was the best. Teenager? Are you kidding? That was a nightmare.
I mean, when you're kind of like, you know, barefoot and, you know, hanging out with the dog and doing the huck finn thing maybe or whatever it might be when you were a teenager but it's impossible right and when you're kind of serially disappointed by that you know you always just have to kind of ratchet up the stakes you know like things weren't pure enough you know we were sold out and you know the process that i've been monitoring and studying is you know kind of the modern american right just becoming more and more extreme and i was just kind of saying that that you know the the end state of this really is an attempt at totalitarianism because when your goal is something that can't be achieved but it's also imperative that it be achieved or all civilization collapse i call it the impossible imperative it's imperative that you return to a free lapsarian state of innocence but it also impossible. How could that not kind of drive you crazy? So, you know, by the time Trump too comes, you know, we're really staring down the barrel of, you know, the worst possible social calamity we can imagine.
And, you know, if we want to bring Gaza into it, you know, I can really easily see, you know, Donald Trump getting on the phone with Netany who is also a fascist and just just trying to stay out of jail with this war and saying hey bb why don't you uh you know just finish the thing you know you guys got nukes right so it'd be so much inconceivably worse with donald trump and which is a hard sell to make you know but politics is about choices recently retired politician said, you know, don't compare me with the almighty, compare me with the alternative. And the alternative is apocalyptic.
It is. And it just, it did feel like there was this period of time kind of between October 7th and Sunday, I guess, you know, there's that perfect storm of wedges, right? Where you're talking about the Israel-Gaza,

talking about the left being unhappy,

and then you kind of have the person as the figurehead.

Yeah, then the Joe Biden issue.

Yeah, anti-democratic movement who can't do it.

Like who four years ago was sort of able to be the Goldilocks

that everybody could stomach from Bernie to Liz Cheney.

But it's not a wartime consigliere,

consigliere as theyliere, as they said

in The Godfather. Not

the guy you want with you in the trenches.

And then

happy outcome, hopefully.

Knock wood. I was reminding your output

on this, and you have all this

experience of writing with the 1968

election, having done Nixonland, and

you amusingly write always, people are always

like, isn't this kind of like 1968?

And then this year, it's like, okay,

there's some parallels, some weaknesses, but

Thank you. election having done Nixon land and you amusingly write always the people are always like isn't this kind of like 1968 and then I'll know this year it's like okay there's some parallels some weaknesses but I enjoyed you the DNC chair Jamie Harrison was during this this interregnum where Biden was still stubbornly sticking around he was like you know he was tweeting about how this country the 10% of key voters are never going to vote for the fascist.
And like, we can't worry about this. And we got to press forward.
And, and you replied, does the DNC chair really think like this? Has he ever read about 20th century European history? Reminds me how in the 60s and 70s, how some Democrats and pundits said polls indicating a Nixon landslide couldn't be accurate, you know, because people would never vote for a crook. Thisok is an accurate parallel at least in the kind of failure of imagination of the left yeah the failures of imagination i mean i kind of kind of have to ask you i mean it's you know a pleasure and honor to be with someone who's really kind of been you know with these people at the top of the game maybe not the republicans or but maybe you know you're kind of hanging out with some of these decision-making democrats i'm just sitting here on my couch in chicago you know typing yeah does he believe that or was that just kind of like a a tactic that he thought would be a good idea which was not a good idea by the way because i mean it's just stupid because it's demobilizing oh well they'll you know they'll just automatically vote against the bad guy because he's a bad guy but what i mean what was going what was going on there? Was he just kind of like blowing a fuse? Yeah, no.
Was it Twitter brain? Yeah, it's Twitter brain. And it's responsiveness brain.
My biggest observation going all the way back to 2015, when I was in the very first anti-Trump super PAC was like, everybody that I talked to in Washington, politician strategists are just so responsive to like what is happening right in front of their nose. And it's like very challenging to get them to be like, wait a minute, this could end up going very badly.
You know what the opposite of kind of making every, you know, fraction of a second, you know, conflict into something that occupies all your energy and is a fight you have to win. The opposite of that is wisdom, you i mean is there no one in washington you know like the giants of old you know who just kind of you know just calmly sat back and i mean think about you know i don't know game of thrones you're the master of whispers who's just kind of like you know moving things into place and not just acting like a teenager dealing with um know, the latest blow up in gym class.
I mean, that's terrible. That's the way it is in Washington.
I mean, it kind of one more institutional failure, you know? Yeah, yeah. Nancy Pelosi and Ezra Klein, it seems like were the two that showed wisdom over the past six months.
Everybody else is just like, I've got to fight. And I do think that some of it is, is tribalism, right right which i you know i wrote about some of it is just like once you've put on a jersey and you're like the others everything about the other side is bad then kind of the necessary you know rationalization for that is that things that are happening on my side are good or that they're okay even if they're not good you know that they're defensible even if they're not good to say, like, to step away and be like, wait a minute, actually.
No, this is not this is not happening. Does the guy I mean, I don't know.
I don't know a lot about him. Does the guy who's running the Democratic National Committee have like a strategic bone in his body? I mean, that was OK.
All right. So, you know, we'll just kind of one more thing to keep us up at night, you know.
Hopefully he's running a turnkey operation now where he's just you know kind of turns the lights on and there's like 100 million dollars with the checks and 60 000 new donors you know on the on his desk in the morning and he can do no harm you know sometimes momentum is in your favor let me tell you in politics you know the favorite thing of people to do in politics is they'll look at somebody and be like, you know, hey, you lost that campaign.

You're an idiot.

Or you've never won a campaign.

You're an idiot.

But politics is not like, you know, it's not like playing a game of one-on-one basketball where the better player wins 100 out of 100.

Right.

It's luck sometimes.

Yeah.

I mean, if you have Karl Rove and David Plouffe working together for one candidate and you

have the average listener of this podcast as the lead strategist of the other candidate like the average listener of this podcast will win like 45 times yeah i hate the whole incentive structure of the consultant biz in which they're all kind of like claiming i'm the guy who moved it i'm the one in 50 plus one so hire him pay me a million dollars so i can take a cut of all the tv commercials you know you know i mean you guys right when when the right? When the Never Trumpers kind of got inside the Democratic tent, you looked around, and I think a lot of you were kind of quoting the guy who said, wow, when the Republicans, when one of our guys loses an election, we cut his head off. You guys promote him, or you hire him next time.
Anyway, I don't know if you want to get into the morass that is the consulting business, but the big picture, the question of, you know, what a victory means in politics is, you know, Democrats, one of their structural dilemmas, and it really kind of goes back to, you know, when I was studying them, what they did, you know, back in the 70s, is they're addicted to short term thinking, tactical thinking, you know, what can win the next election. And often, you know, the whole idea of triangulation is, you know, we'll follow the or, you know, what they used to what they, you know, called a couple years ago, the bright young boys talked about popularism, we'll just follow the electorate where we where they are in this very moment, popularism catching strays right now.
well and it's it's i mean i'm gonna i'm no i'm gonna like ready aim fire you know i'm not stray bullets i'm well we won't use any martial metaphors now you know but um the idea that you follow you know you change your position all the time based on where the electorate seems to be at that particular moment you just look like someone who changes your position all the time. You know, inherently makes you someone you can't trust.
You know, I've been saying it, you know, for about 20 years now, you know, the Democrats just need, you know, structures, goals, messages that don't change from election to election. So they seem like someone you can count on.
I do think the contrast between that and like kind of the long march of the abortion movement on the right is pretty stark anti-abortion movement all right i want to do conservative history for most of the rest of this but i would be remiss while we're on the democrats to not at least kind of talk about 68 you're in chicago you wrote nixon land like what what are you know landmines you see like what are parallels you see what are the parallels? I mean, it's just a stupid parallel. I mean, it's like if no one in 1968 was saying, wow, this is just like 1916.
You know, it's just like ancient history. And there's something weird about, I think it's the boomers that did this.
It's a fetish. It's totally a boomer thing.
You know, it's like they were told since they were born that they were the most important thing for people on Earth. And yeah,, I mean, I think that's really a big freaking part of it.
But, I mean, let me just, you know, very simply two things. I mean, what happened in 1968 was very specific to the Chicago of that time and the police force they had.
And, you know, the left of that time that was saying things like, you know, we're going to dump LSD into the water supply. And, you know, like, basically trolling the entire city of Chicago, which was, you know, a lot of, you know, kind of very conservative people, you know, folks who lived in factories and just wanted to kind of, you know, get their picket fence and move to the suburbs.
And they were guarded by a constabulary that was full of people who wanted to crack heads. You know, a lot of it was they weren't allowed to unholster their weapons that previous spring during riots after martin luther king was assassinated so like we'll show them this time right and as you know because you go to these conventions it's not like you have like one racist police force running things like in 1968 these are national security events you know just walking around milwaukee last week which is my where i grew up i was able to count 37 different police jurisdictions you know everything from mckellen texas to game warden you know and it's run by the columbus guys had a little problem well and that's that's actually is a problem it's a huge problem because what you're referring to is the the unhoused guy who was shot to death because he felt scared and threatened by these strangers had close relationships with the local police force in milwaukee and it wouldn't have happened so i'm not saying it's better i'm just saying the idea that a convention could get out of control like it did in 1968 it's just ignorant and then the other thing is this is, this is kind of a fast thing.
Now we're getting kind of into my wheelhouse of how history works, right? And how history, historical understanding is always changing when you have new evidence. And one of the stories people tell about 1968 is, well, Lyndon Johnson was hounded out of office by these, you know, civil rights protesters, anti-war protesters.
And look what happened. Nixon won.
Well, it just so happens that Lyndon Johnson was not hounded out of office at all. Now, you know, we have Lady Bird's Diaries, which came out like 10 years ago.
The full diaries. There's a wonderful biography of Lady Bird Johnson, the first lady who turns out to be this brilliant kind of force behind the throne, basically.
Her name is Julia Zweig. It's called Hiding in called hiding in plain sight one of the things she shows in that biography was lyndon johnson and lady bird johnson were planning for him not to run for re-election as far back as 1964 he chose not to run for election in 1968 not because of all the chaos but just because that was their plan they didn't want to do it anymore so that kind of like throws out the window 80 million tweets who are like, look what you guys did in 1968.
Left, you know, stop doing this. Right.
The political science pop historians are like, never before in history has this happened. You know, if you're a social scientist, in 1952, a Democratic president withdrew.
The Truman because of a war in 1968, you know, LBJ withdrew because of a war. How many cases do you have? have two but that's the way people think about history they think it's just kind of this little like kind of card you can pull out of your pocket and it's you know it drives me crazy history is rich it's contradictory and especially in times like this yeah nothing is for sure even the basic categories of analysis are up for grabs here's the problem tim all right i'm ranting all right i like rants i'm going to take a deep breath because i'm counseling calm and not just being frantic and you know going off a handle the people who you know run campaigns we're all amateur pundits we're all amateur strategists history often serves as an alibi for not looking at what's happening now.
And what is happening now is different. It's strange.
You have to be in that uncomfortable place, right? Where the basic ways of thinking about things that we've inherited from the past don't really work anymore. My column that came out this morning, I don't know if you had a chance to see it, was, holy cow, since there's no abortion in the Republican platform, all these Republicans who've spent their entire lives convincing themselves that abortion is murder and it was going to destroy civilization are suddenly being told to shut up about abortion and that it's not a problem anymore right that just completely rewrote the strategic arena on the issue of abortion you know puts you know kind of christian right voters up for grabs in a fascinating way they never have been before you can say you can go with this party that sold you out or you can go to the party that actually cares about your well-being.
Right. And if you just kind of say, oh, abortion politics works this way, abortion voters vote this way.
You're going to miss that entire new dynamic. Your point is it could go either way.
Right. Like these these voters, these evangelical voters.
You don't know. Yeah.
It could be deep seated. It could be so deep seated that like that Trump is alibied on this with them.
Right. And they think about something else.
One other thing that I do kind of wonder how you think about, and then I want to get into the nitty gritty of kind of the policy trajectory of the conservative movement, but how you think about with regards to 68 and just that era and what we're about to see with Kamala Harris, because you know, you wrote a lot in those books kind of about like the white backlash, particularly in the upper Midwestwest right and and i think one of these unspoken elements of why biden wasn't stepping aside was that people are like okay the blue wall of key states if we put a black woman at the top of the ticket they're right there are all these racists there and so i i just i kind of wonder how you how you think about that how how democrats might think about combating that dealing with it, and it take it any place you want. Sure.
I mean, I remember, you know, my wife and I have a fishing cabin in a rural part of Illinois, and asked my next star neighbor, who is kind of classic kind of crusty old, you know, kind of, you know, conservative guy who, you know, knows how to fix a car, you know. And I was like, what do you think of Joe Biden? He's like, yeah, I kind of like him, but I'm just worried about this border thing.
Big problem in rural Illinois. It's psychological stuff.
But the point being, he was willing to give Biden a listen because Biden looked like him. Biden sounded like him.
Biden seems like he has the same values as him. I get that.
There was a a lot of glibness i have a piece coming out with a historian named geraldo cadera in a couple weeks about the golden age of believing that demographics were going to create a you know a permanent democratic majority right because you know like somehow barack obama resolves all the contradictions of 250 years of american history in his very person right and there was it was it was glib it was another kind of fantasy and you know they forgot you know something that kevin phillips you know taught nixon in the 60s which is that the voting rights act is great that's how we're going to capture the south because there's going to be so much anger and backlash you know against black people voting that you know it'll empower us so you that is a dynamic, but it's another thing that's completely in the air. I mean, remember last week, Trump was going to get all these black male voters and suddenly maybe they won't, right? There's no rule book for this kind of thing.
Everyone acts like they're Billy Bean running the Oakland A's. That's not civics.
That's horse race stuff. Do you know Matt Zeitlin, the writer? He did a meme making fun of the Billy Bean thing the other day that had Kamala and Josh Shapiro.
And it was the Billy Bean line from Oakland, which is like, we're not going to replace this player with one player. We're going to replace their output with two players.
And it was Obama was the one player they were replacing with Kamala and Josh Shapiro. Well, it just kind of shows how silly it all is, right? America is not a white male republic anymore.
That ship has sailed. I mean, Josh Shapiro was Jewish.
Kamala, she has Indian and Jamaican parents. You just have to balance it out with an old white guy, right? And as far as the backlash, I mean, there's a very dominant interpretation.
I think it's very intuitive to a lot of people it makes a lot of sense that what drove the right crazy and you know kind of turned the obama movement in the tea party movement was that you know just having a black president just kind of blew the blew a fuse in kind of white america and conservative america i talk about that authoritarian ratchet and people are so trained you know on the right you know i know i have a friend whose partner you know her her dad

would wake her up every morning and say remember rebecca just making up my name liberalism is a

mental disease you know so you know a generation of people who grew up like that you know black

white it doesn't matter there's still the party of black people right and i think if joe biden

you know had been the nominee in 2016 there would have been just as much hatred and vituperation

Thank you. matter.
There's still the party of black people, right? And I think that if Joe Biden, you know, had been the nominee in 2016, there would have been just as much hatred and vituperation and there would have been a Tea Party against him. I don't forget, Bill Clinton was supposed to be the guy who, you know, talked Arkansas, right? He could, you know, do the Bubba thing, right? He was supposed to be, he was supposed to solve that problem.
Well, lo and behold, he was Satan too. And, you know, they had no problem backlashing against him as the guy who was going to destroy civilization and eat babies in 1994 and no problem you know impeaching him for this consensual sex you know so i mean if it's not one thing it's another you know they're always going to find something the point is you know these guys are feral you know they think like leninus want to destroy i mean it's like once you came over to the other side tim you saw how you know it's one big one of my favorite things i discovered in nixon land was a um detective novel written by e howard hunch you know and kind of under a pseudonym oh yeah of course turns on kind of this ted kennedy figure who um secretly is involved in these kind of underground pagan rituals in which he worships ball, you know, B-A-A-L, you know, I mean, it's like they were, they were preparing for QAnon for decades, you know, we're the bad guys, we're evil.
And you came over here and you saw that's exactly what they said. How is E.
Howard Hunt as a writer? He kind of comes off as a dummy. Yeah.
You know, it's, it's really bad. You know, the, yeah, the HBO, the White House Plumbers series that was on.
Yeah, these guys are so stupid. It's unbelievable.
That's what Deethro said in Elder King's Men. These people are stupid and they got out.
They went too far. I want to do the Project 2025.
You wrote a good article about how, you know, there was also Project 1921, 1973, 1981. But before that, you've mentioned the ratchet twice, which you talk about in your writing.
For listeners, it's a good article about how you know there was also project 1921 1973 1981 but before that you've mentioned the ratchet twice which you talk about in your writing for listeners explain that i think it's really quite clarifying right it means you know you know remember barack obama used to say after the republicans did something crazy the fever will break we'll return to this kind of you know responsible equilibrium of kind of main street you know kind of conservatives so You can, conservatives who can kind of count on to just these kind of fantasies of consensus and decency. The fact of the matter is it's kind of built in structurally to what American conservatism is, that it's a revolution that eats its children.
And liberals will always say, oh, the last generation of conservatives were so gentle and kind and thoughtful. So there's this longing for innocence, this longing that somehow we'll return to, you know, this kind of safe equilibrium.
Americans don't want to talk about the stuff that's really ugly and divides us. And it's unpleasant to talk about the fact that we have, you know, one of our great American political parties, you know, is really just, you know, racing headlong into not just authoritarianism, but an attempt at totalitarianism.
You know, it's like in Minocla, Wisconsin, you know about Minocla Brewing, the red, you know, Republican town fathers have literally tried to hound the one town liberal out of business, his brew pub, just because he's a liberal. You know, that's the kind of thing we're going to be seeing in communities across America during Trump too.
You know, I like to say, you know, horse race journalism is great. It has its place, but it doesn't matter if the boys in the red MAGA hats blow up the track.
You know, people will feel permission structure to do things that are truly terrible. And I get, you know, emails, letters, when I write these columns about how ugly it is out there, people from small towns saying, I can't go to church anymore because all they do is talk about Trump like he's the Messiah.
All my neighbors are cleaning our guns in the front yard all the time. I mean, it just really is nasty out there.
And the fever is not going to break until we defeat it. And get rid of their strategic capacity to do harm.
They're not going to go away, but we got to get rid of their strategic capacity to do harm. How far do you go back with the ratchet? Where did the ratchet start? That's a tricky question.
It's kind of built into the philosophy of conservatism itself. You know, there's kind of this idea that, oh, conservatism is Burkean.
It kind of seeks out this Edmund Burke, the 18th century kind of theorist of the French Revolution. Oakeshott, Oakeshott kind of small.
Oakeshott was similar, right? This idea that what conservatives try to do is create a nice kind of stable society in which everyone kind of knows their place in the order, which is kind of creepy in itself. But if you actually read Edmund Burke, yeah, it's kind of like reading 18th Century Fox News.
I mean, it's this bitter, resentful guy who sees conspiracies everywhere. So it's kind of built into the project.
I think really when it happens is when conservatives start getting power and the things they promised the electorate, which are not just policy things. You know, it's not like we're going to take something from the 1980 platform, which is also in Project 2025.
We're going to get rid of the Department of Education. We're going to outlaw abortion, right? It's not just policy things.
It's what those policy things are for and what they are promising on a grand scale. I mean, getting rid of abortion is supposed to get rid of kind of the fear we have that our daughters aren't going to rage out of control.
so once conservatives get in power and promise these things, and they can't possibly deliver them, I think that's when the ratchet kind of starts into motion, because the next generation, you know, says, well, they weren't conservative enough, you know, we didn't really try the whole program. So, you know, Reagan naturally becomes Newt Gingrich, you know, Newt Gingrich, you know, naturally becomes the Tea Party, the Tea Party naturally becomes Donald Trump.
And Donald Trump naturally becomes when, you know, I mean, think about the things he's promising. Something like, you know, I made a joke about this, you know, Iron Dome.
You know, we're going to have this completely made up thing. I mean, we're at the point where, you know, why isn't on the front page of every newspaper, you know, Trump makes up a bunch of terrifying things that he can't possibly deliver?

No, it was Trump's, you know, strikes a unifying tone because these absolutely hack incompetent journalists, you know, literally wrote their front page articles. The Associated Press article on the speech was literally written from the press release.
They're literally republishing Republican press releases. You know, when you're out in these galleries, the press gallery during the conventions, you can literally see the giant teleprompter that the candidates are reading off of, right? And you can see that the scroll stops moving for like 10 minutes, while he goes on to a, you know, wander jar and promises that America is going to be paradise the day after I become elected.
And somehow, these reporters didn't, you know, report that the speech he filed wasn't the speech he gave. But anyway, he's promising all these fantastic things.
And if you actually go through Donald Trump's think and look at the things he promises that are all impossible to achieve, imagine the serial when reality intrudes, you know, that's what really sets the authoritarian ratchet in motion. Oh, Trump must have been betrayed.
Oh, it must have been a conspiracy. It must be the deep state, right? It really is seductive to everyone.
You know, it's the grassroots, the base, we need someone more tougher. We need guns.
You know, we need to get rid of these people who stand in our way. And, you know, these stories do not end well.
All right. We have an ongoing conversation here, though, the bulwark about whether, and I think you're on the bad side of it.
You're not the bad side. You're on the side of it that we don't like to hear, that Trump was the inevitable kind of endpoint of all this, like that it was ending here and then in kind of this quasi-authoritarian place.
That's the side you're on? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if not Trump, you know, someone else.
You know, I mean, like, I mean, a lot of it is just kind of context. I mean, what are you inheriting? What kind of structures are you inheriting? Poppy Bush and John McCain and Mitt Romney weren't taking us here, were they? Their natural endgame was an idiocracy.
You know, my famous article, the big con about, you know, Republican grifting. You know, it starts literally, Romney lied so much during the 2012.
I'm sorry, you worked for him, right? Yeah, it's okay. You can be mean to Mitt Romney.
lied so much during the 2012 election that the new york times literally used the word lie in an editorial to describe what he was doing you know they kind of descended from mount olympus and actually called the thing what it was because they were so disgusted with all the lying he was doing okay okay i hear you i hear you but it's not like there aren't liberals that lie people lie he lied because he was repeating the stories that were part of the republican firmament you know the idea he had one that like you know marriage has become obsolete in you know uh scandinavia or you know it's like this is mitt romley when he announced for president in you know 2008 he did it next to an electric car and talked about how we needed a green future by 2012 he's a global warming denier he did say no one had to look at my birth certificate that was an awkward dad joke okay that wasn't all the places we are right now that was that was an awkward dad joke you can watch a whole video of awkward dad jokes but that's the point he's mit romney is not as bad as donald trump right so the question is was the end game necessarily trump or did trump bring some unique thing i mean it wasn't necessarily trump trump definitely brings in a unique thing but the authoritarian ratchet would have you know kind of found its way to click itself two or three you know notches you know in a more authoritarian direction i mean i was in you know uh new hampshire in 2016 and i was driving down the street and glenn beck told me that um ted cruz had been sent here by god to redeem mankind you know it's a weird god it's a very weird god but you know and then god works in mysterious ways though right yes he does very mysterious guy now i don't really mean to pick on you with the Mitt Romney thing, but one thing that happened was all these conservative talk radio guys said Mitt Romney is a sellout. He's the 2012 version of Deep State.
And you saw it. As soon as he won the nomination, they all lined up behind him.
That's an authoritarian mentality, too. Yeah, I hear you.
And you can go, you can analyze all this stuff. I just think that there's something that's true.
The ratchet theory directionally really resonates with me. There's this notion that there's something in conservatism.
It's like if you're always promising these unachievable goals and you always have to be more contrarian, more angry angry amping it up to feed people more it's like heroin it's similar to the drug i use the drug analogy a lot and why we did it i buy and the self-deceptions you know the internal twisting in order to justify it it kills your soul i mean there's some elements of that though that are not that aren't missing from the left right like making making promises that are never going to come to pass. Yeah, but we don't make them our presidential candidates.
We'll just pretend like somebody who's unable to talk is still ready to be the president, right? Like there's some elements of that still on the left, right? So what I'm trying to tease out is like, what are the unique pernicious elements that are not just about how politics is corrupting, but about how conservatism is corrupting? Well, I mean, the Democratic Party, you know, is just a normal political party, you know, it has kooks in it, it has boring people, it has DLC people, it has, you know, self-described socialists. I mean, in a way, what happened with Joe Biden is just, you know, so normal.
It's all these different kind of constituencies within the party, whether it was the donor base, which is his own pathology, but also just kind of like the world of black sororities and fraternities. Or just kind of like normal people calling their congressmen.
They were saying calls were going like 30 to 1 going like 30 to one against, you know, supporting Joe Biden continuing. Tweets were going 30 to one for Joe Biden, which makes me wonder how authentic that was.
Right. Right.
Exactly. So, I mean, what we have is just kind of a normal political process.
And then, you know, compare it to the other side, where they're like, this guy can't possibly be president. It's disastrous for this guy to be president.
And it's just, oh, I'm not going to be president anymore be president anymore they're like oh my god conspiracy you know no you got what you want you know you or the better or the better example is the other side is this guy is hitler this guy might be hitler this guy's the worst person in history the courts should deal with him and then it's like oh wait they got nominated again actually you know let's put on gold shoes and praise him and make a statue to him outside of the convention all right right, we're running out of time. And I keep wanting to get to Project 2025, but we keep going down rabbit holes.
So you wrote a needles in Project 2025 haystack, which I really liked, because it is like this long ass boring thing. Like nobody, anybody who really tells you that they've read it, they're lying.
Because it's so dense and boring. The undersecretary of the assistant secretary should be in this subsection d i mean it's just no way you had a couple things i flagged things like i don't think i've seen it reported that maga land's very own general jack d ripper is trying to lubricate every last high schooler's path to the nearest local military entrance processing station at the order i do lay down thick don't i tim yes that's um basically every uh high schooler in america under the ideal heritage foundation where we'll have to take the military entrance exam that's in the pentagon chapter that's a little weird um workers should only have one day off because god ordained a sabbath sadly this was one of my former colleagues that wrote this part families should decide whether their children should do dangerous jobs because of labor shortages and kids might want to do the work that guy's cuckoo was that the was that the dhs guy or the labor department guy labor it's the labor guy right yeah the dhs guy was the guy who said working husbands are really important so we can't have these people living with quote-unquote boyfriends that was the weirdest one i'd seen yeah the dhs guy i don't know personally but uh you know comes off as like literally a hitler youth the labor department guy is like a very earnest catholic who's like gone way just way too deep into the into the shit yeah yeah so i mean there's lots of crazy stuff in there and but i've gotten into trouble for pointing out that project 2025 is really useful you know and i should be really grateful that people understand finally you know how devious and diabolical these people are in their plans but a lot of project 2025 stuff was in project 1980 so yeah so talk about that in Project 2016.
I mean, for example, one of the things that people are just discovering, which is great because I don't have to say no one's talking about this, is, oh, they want to privatize the National Weather Service and charge people for the basic weather data that, you know, farmers, you know, rely on to kind of plant their crops. And, you know, it's absolute one of these kind of things that people need, know it's free weather information and they want to charge for it and they tried to do that they tried to make the guy the head of the national weather service during the trump administration who was the head of accu weather you know and they wanted to basically give him a shovel to kind of start like you know kind of shoveling up you know kind of gold coins from every american you know basement sounds entrepreneurial i don't know that sounds entrepreneurial to me rick why can't why can't we inject a private sector kind of spirit into the national weather service because the economy will collapse anyway sometimes you got to take yes for an answer and it's great that people are you know, that they're trying to turn the expert civil service into a, you know, political, you know, cadre.
But, you know, Nixon tried to do that, too, you know. So having looked at it, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but you've gone so deep into this kind of movement, conservatism and know all these players.
And really what Project 2025 is, is like this Frankenstein of Buchananism.

It's all these different pieces put together.

Yeah.

It's a mess.

Yeah.

It's not Trumpism, really.

It's not Buchananism.

It's not William F. Buckleyism.

Right.

It's a grab bag.

It's a grab bag of all of that.

Sometimes in one chapter, by the way.

Yeah.

I mean, my favorite chapter is the one on trade, which is written by two authors. And one says, yay, free trade.
And the other one says, boo, free trade. Right.
So if you think Project 2025 is, again, this book of spells that they reach into to destroy America. Well, you got to kind of think about, wow, maybe it's just evidence that they aren't nearly as coherent and they don't have their stuff together nearly as much as they think.
Right. You know, I quoted, you know, Patton in the movie with George C.
Scott. He looked, you know, he defeats General Rommel, you know, the great tank general of Germany.
And he says, you bastard, I read your book. Well, these guys are giving us their book, you know.
And, you know, so this is a strategic opportunity. It's not all just like, oh, my God, this is terrifying.
Let's poop ourselves's poop ourselves. No.
Showing people who these folks are. A big voting motivator, which ties to the last topic I want to get to, is people don't want to vote for somebody that they think is going to be surrounded by people that are annoying and weird and freaky.
And this motivates a lot of the tech bro. You had an interesting comment about your dinner with Mark Andreessen.
Sadie Vance's best buddy. Yeah.
I want you to explain why you think that these kind of socially liberal tech bros fit in the MAGA world. But my theory is that they are exposed to lefty progressives in Silicon Valley that annoy them.
And they simply don't want these people to have power. and that if maybe we expose people more to the guys writing project 2025 who you know don't want you to be able to have live-in boyfriends so basically mark andreessen and elon mosk are kind of the equivalent of the kind of michelle malkin going to college in oberlin yes yeah that's my theory i mean that's part of it but it's much more simple, much more basic.
These guys see themselves as aristocrats, they see themselves as terrestrial gods, they see themselves as people with all the answers. They think like engineers, and they think they deserve what they have, you know, they deserve their 150 million dollar houses.
And they've so retreated into their private worlds, and the other own kind of silos in which, you know, they have all the answers for civilization that they've kind of driven themselves insane. They've self radicalized.
I mean, these are the guys who, you know, are buying, you know, 100 foot deep bunkers in New Zealand, right? It's not just they're worried about, you know, their daughters who are, you know, changing their gender identity. No, I think that they're actually much, much more malign and frightening than that.
I mean, if you actually read something like Mark Andreessen's tech optimist manifesto, he's like, technology has never created a problem that technology can't solve. I'm like, really? Like the hydrogen bomb? You know, I mean, it's it's it's very very cracked stuff and it's more than just kind of vibes based on vibes i've also hung out with mark a little bit and uh there is a um a god-like element to it and i think yeah that's right it's kind of a meritocratic version of the french aristocracy you know it's like trump for them i think i guess maybe a more accurate way of me psychoanalyzing what i was saying earlier is they like the fact that trump trolls the people that they annoy and that the people that they annoy loathe trump because they have but they also you know like what what grover norquist wanted which was basically a strong right arm that will sign the legislation they send him correct i mean he doesn't understand about you know or not sign the legislation they don't send him more appropriately particularly with at this moment in history with ai and crypto like they just don't want anybody in their shit get out of the way right yeah yeah and yeah they like they said they they see themselves as this imperial realm you know they they can't be seasteaders they're stuck with the rest of the country and they see trump as you know like like well like winston churchill said you know they're all um people who want to like you know ride the alligator and think that the alligator is going to eat them last people should read your your article about injuries and i'm obsessed with and with injury i'm obsessed with the tech manifesto probably my most widely read articles yeah i'm obsessed with i think it's extremely important because you know, there's a line on the podcast Charlie liked to use about how like clowns with a flamethrower still have a flamethrower, which is true.
When we discuss the clowns a lot on the podcast, Andreessen's not a clown. So I think it's important to understand what these guys want.
It's like Charles Foster Kane. He's this rich guy who lives in this mansion with a bunch of priceless art that he looks at and gets bored by.
But he's a smart umpteen billionaire with a flamethrower.

So that's a little bit more dangerous.

All right, brother.

Appreciate that very much.

Everybody go out and read Nixonland and the rest of Rick's oove.

Appreciate him so much for coming on the podcast.

We'll see you all back here tomorrow for another edition of the Bullard Podcast.

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