Rick Perlstein: The Alternative Is Apocalyptic

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Speaker 4 Hey, everybody, lots of stuff happening in politics. Don't know if you noticed.
So we've got some new folks listening.

Speaker 4 On Wednesdays, I try to have step-back conversations, kind of bigger picture about either policy or ideology or history, because over on the next level feed, we're doing just the rank punditry, you know, the political gossip, all that stuff you're looking for.

Speaker 4 So if you want that, head over to the next level feed for me, Sarah, and JVL every Wednesday.

Speaker 4 Today, I've got Rick Perlstein, one of the most incisive writers about the history of the conservative movement

Speaker 4 coming from a left perspective.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 So, I think this is 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.

Speaker 4 So on the other side, stick around for Rick Perlstein.

Speaker 4 All right, I'm back with the great Rick Perlstein.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Yeah, he he wrote the famed Nixonland, now writes for American Prospect. What's going on, man? Been wanting to do this for a while.

Speaker 3 It's a pleasure to be here, Tim. I'm a fan.

Speaker 4 Some of my old conservative friends don't like it. Let's keep that under wraps.
All right. The fandom.

Speaker 4 But I have to tell you, as I said, I've been wanting to kind of have a big picture convo with you about

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 You wrote a 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.

Speaker 4 That article came out May 29th.

Speaker 4 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, you know, I hope you have your SSRIs.

Speaker 3 Yeah, what happened in May? I didn't even remember what I was suppressed about that day.

Speaker 4 Exactly. I'm telling you, I was like, what was it that I wanted to originally talked about? I went back and read the article, and and it felt like a time capsule from the Mitromni era.

Speaker 4 At the time, there was frustration about kind of in the fallout of the Gaza protests, there was this left-wing, lefty online

Speaker 4 notion that was in vogue of like,

Speaker 4 you can't vote for Biden. Biden's terrible.
You know, he's committing a genocide. You know, the no difference between the sides.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 were not seeing the stakes of the threat.

Speaker 3 Yes, that was the melancholy du jour, right?

Speaker 3 But I mean, why do you have to take me there?

Speaker 3 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 coconuts and all is good.

Speaker 3 When October 7th happened, I was like, if I were, you know, the prince of 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,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And a lot of my work is like, well, let's think about things that wedge the Republican coalition.

Speaker 3 And this, you know attack and you know the predictable mass slaughter and response by the israeli defense forces and you know think 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 uh divide my side you know, just clean down the middle and make us all hate each other.

Speaker 3 And it just seems so of a piece with kind of all all the institutional failures that have been a regular feature of our lives, you know, really since, you know, 2020.

Speaker 3 You know, we don't have the journalism we need, you know, in order to fight fascism because of,

Speaker 3 you know, the greed of the people who own journalism companies. You know, the Democratic Party was hived into, you know, global warming, you know, COVID, you know, every day was a kind of a new thing

Speaker 3 that kind of was driving us headlong into apocalypse and kind of that was sort of rock bottom for me and i saw it as an opportunity just to really explain the stakes of you know 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 returning to an imagined innocence, right?

Speaker 3 Make America great again. When 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.

Speaker 4 When was things great? When you were a teenager.

Speaker 4 It was the best TV shows back then. The movies were the best.
The music was the best.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 It might be when you were a teenager, but it's impossible, right?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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,

Speaker 3 you know,

Speaker 3 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 else civilization collapse, I call it the impossible imperative.

Speaker 3 It's imperative that you return to a free lapsarian state of innocence, but it's also impossible. How could that not kind of drive you crazy?

Speaker 3 So, you know, by the time Trump 2 comes, you know, we're really staring down the barrel of the worst possible social calamity we can imagine.

Speaker 3 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 Netanyahu, who is also a fascist and just trying to stay out of jail with this war and saying, hey, BB, why don't you

Speaker 3 just finish the thing? You know, you guys got nukes, right? Oh, Lord.

Speaker 3 So it would be so much inconceivably worse with Donald Trump, which is a hard sell to make, you know, but politics is about choices.

Speaker 3 Like, you know, a recently retired politician said, you know, don't compare me with the Almighty, compare me with the alternative. And the alternative is apocalyptic.

Speaker 4 It is. And it's just, it did feel like there was this period of time kind of between October 7th and Sunday, I guess.

Speaker 4 You know, there was that perfect storm of wedges, right?

Speaker 4 Where you're talking about the Israel Gaza, yeah, 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 and who four years ago was sort of able to be the Goldilocks that everybody could stomach from Bernie to Liz Cheney.

Speaker 3 But it's not a wartime consiglieria, a consiglier, as they said in the in the godfather, not the guy you want with you in the trenches. And uh,

Speaker 4 then oh, happy outcome, hopefully, knock wood i was admiting your output on this and you uh you have all this experience of writing with the 1968 election having done nixon land and uh you amusingly write always the people are always like isn't this kind of like 1968 and then i'll leave this year where it's like okay there are some parallels some weaknesses but i enjoyed you the dnc chair jamie harrison was uh 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.

Speaker 4 And like, we can't worry about this. And we got to press forward.
And you replied, does the DNC chair really think like this? Has he ever read about 20th century European history?

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 There's an accurate parallel, at least in the kind of failure of imagination of the left.

Speaker 3 Yeah, the failures of imagination. I mean, I kind of have to ask you.

Speaker 3 I mean, it's, you know, and a pleasure and an honor to be with someone who's really kind of been, you know, with these people at the top of the game.

Speaker 3 Maybe not the Republicans, 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.

Speaker 3 Does he believe that? Or was that just kind of like 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.

Speaker 3 Oh, well, they'll, you know, they'll just automatically vote against the bad guy because he's a bad guy. But, I mean, what was going going on there? Was he just kind of like blowing a fuse?

Speaker 4 Yeah, no.

Speaker 3 I gotta tell you.

Speaker 4 Was it Twitter brain? Yeah, it's Twitter brain.

Speaker 4 And it's responsiveness brain.

Speaker 4 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 talk to in Washington, politicians, strategists, are just so responsive to like what is happening right in front of their nose.

Speaker 4 And it's like very challenging to get them to be like, wait a minute, this could end up going very badly.

Speaker 3 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 right you know 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 know the master of whisperers who's just kind of like you know moving things into place and not just acting like a teenager dealing with um

Speaker 4 you know the latest blow-up in gym class i mean that's terrible if 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 and i do think that some of it is is tribalism, right?

Speaker 4 Which I, you know, I wrote about.

Speaker 4 Some of it is just like, once you've put on a jersey and you're like, the other, everything about the other side is bad, then kind of the necessary, you 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, that they're defensible, even if they're not good.

Speaker 4 And so then it's hard to say, like, to step away and be like, wait a minute, actually, no,

Speaker 4 this is not happening.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 4 okay. All right.

Speaker 3 So let's, you know, we'll just kind of

Speaker 3 one more thing to keep us up at night, you know?

Speaker 3 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 worth of checks and 60,000 new donors, you know, on the, on, on this desk in the morning, and he can do no harm.

Speaker 4 You know, sometimes momentum is in your favor.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 3 It's sluck sometimes. Yeah.

Speaker 4 I mean, if you have Carl Rove and David Plough 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 So hire me, 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?

Speaker 3 When the Never Trumpers, you know, 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.

Speaker 3 You guys, you know, promote him or you hire him next time.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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 of years ago, the bright young boys talked about popularism.

Speaker 3 We'll just follow the electorate where we, where they are in this very moment.

Speaker 4 Popularism catching strays right now. Uh-oh.

Speaker 3 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 uh, not stray bullets.
I'm, well, we won't use any martial metaphors now, you know.

Speaker 3 But 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.

Speaker 3 You know, inherently makes you someone you can't trust. You know, I've been saying it, you know, for about 20 years now.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 4 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.

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Speaker 4 All 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.

Speaker 4 You're in Chicago, you wrote Nixon Land. Like,

Speaker 4 what are

Speaker 4 landmines you see? Like, what are parallels you see? What are weaknesses in the parallels?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 4 There's something weird about, I think it's the boomers that did this.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 I mean, what happened in 1968 was very specific to the Chicago of that time and the police force they had.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And they were guarded by a constabulatory that was full of people who wanted to crack heads.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 You know, just walking around Milwaukee last week, which is where I grew up, I was able to count 37 different police jurisdictions, you know, everything from McAllen, Texas to Game Warden, you know, and it's run by the Senate Service.

Speaker 3 Well, and that's, that's actually is a problem.

Speaker 3 It's a huge problem because what you're referring to is 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And then the other thing is, this is kind of a fascinating, now we're getting kind of into my wheelhouse of how history works, right?

Speaker 3 And how history, historical understanding is always changing when you have new evidence. And one of the stories people tell about 1968 is,

Speaker 3 well, Lyndon Johnson was hounded out of office by these, you know, civil rights protesters, anti-war protesters. And look what happened, Nixon won.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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 Julius Weig.

Speaker 3 It's 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 4 The political science pop historians are like, never before in history has this happened.

Speaker 3 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 two

Speaker 3 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 yeah all right i'm ranting all right i like rants i'm gonna take a deep breath because I'm counseling calm and not just being frantic and

Speaker 3 going off a handle. The people who

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And what is happening now is different. It's strange.

Speaker 3 You have to be in that uncomfortable place, right?

Speaker 3 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:

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 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 that they never have been before.

Speaker 3 You can say, you can go with this party that sold you out, or you can go with a party that actually cares about your well-being, right?

Speaker 3 And if you just kind of say, oh, abortion politics works this way, abortion, you know, voters vote this way, you're going to miss that entire new dynamic.

Speaker 4 Well, 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.

Speaker 4 It could be so deep-seated that like that Trump has alibied on this with them, right? And they think about something else.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Because,

Speaker 4 you know, you wrote a lot in those books kind of about like the white backlash, particularly in the upper Midwest, right? And I think one of these unspoken

Speaker 4 elements of why Biden wasn't stepping aside was that people are like, okay, the blue wall are the key states. If we put a black woman at the top of the ticket,

Speaker 4 there are all these racists there. And so I just, I kind of wonder how you, how you think about that, how Democrats might think about combating that, dealing with it.
And take it any place you want.

Speaker 3 Sure. I mean, I remember, you know, my wife and I have a fishing cabin in a rural part of Illinois.

Speaker 3 And I asked my next-door neighbor, who is kind of classic, kind of crusty old, you you know, kind of, you know, conservative guy who, you know, knows how to fix a car, you know.

Speaker 3 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, you know.

Speaker 4 Big problem in rural Illinois.

Speaker 3 It's psychological stuff, right? 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 that him.

Speaker 3 So, you know,

Speaker 3 I get that. I get that, right?

Speaker 3 And, you know, there was a lot of glibness.

Speaker 3 I have a piece coming out with a historian named Geraldo Cadera in a couple of weeks about the golden age of believing that demographics were going to create a, you know, a permanent democratic majority, right?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 That's how we're going to 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.

Speaker 3 So, you know, that is a dynamic, but it's another thing that's completely in the air.

Speaker 3 I mean, remember last week, you know, 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.

Speaker 3 You know, everyone acts like they're, you know, Billy Bean running the Oakland A's. You know, that's not civics.
You know, that's...

Speaker 3 You know, that's horse race stuff.

Speaker 4 Do you know Matt Zeitlin, the writer?

Speaker 4 He did a meme making fun of the Billy Bean thing the 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.

Speaker 4 We're going to place their output with two players. And it was Obama, it was the one player they were replacing with Kamala and Josh Shapiro.

Speaker 3 Well, it just kind of shows how silly it all is, right? America is not, you know, a white male republic anymore. You know, that ship has sailed.
I mean, Josh Shapiro is Jewish.

Speaker 3 You know, Kamala is, she has, you know, Indian and Jamaican parents. You know, you just have to, you know, balance it out with an old white guy, right?

Speaker 3 And, you know, as far as the backlash, I mean, there's a very dominant interpretation. I think it's very intuitive to a lot of people.

Speaker 3 It makes a lot of sense that what drove the right crazy and kind of turned the Obama movement in the Tea Party movement was that, you know, just having a black president just kind of blew a fuse in kind of white America and conservative America.

Speaker 3 I talk about that authoritarian ratchet and people are so trained on the right. You know, I know I have a friend whose partner, you know,

Speaker 3 her dad would wake her up every morning and say, remember, Rebecca, just making up my name, liberalism is a mental disease.

Speaker 3 So a generation of people who grew up like that,

Speaker 3 black, white, it doesn't matter. They're still the party of black people.

Speaker 3 And I think that if Joe Biden 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.

Speaker 3 Don't forget, Bill Clinton was supposed to be the guy who talked Arkansas, right? He could do the Bubba thing.

Speaker 3 He was supposed to solve that problem. Well, lo and behold, he was Satan too.
And

Speaker 3 they had no problem backlashing against him as the guy who was going to destroy civilization and eat babies in 1994. And no problem impeaching him for this consensual sex.

Speaker 3 So I mean, if it's not one thing, it's another.

Speaker 3 They're always going to find something.

Speaker 3 The point is, these guys are feral.

Speaker 3 They think like Lennonis. They want to destroy.

Speaker 3 I mean, it's like once you came over to the other side, side and you saw how, you know, it's one big, one of my favorite things that I discovered in Nixonland was a detective novel written by E.

Speaker 3 Howard Hunt, you know, and kind of under a pseudonym. Oh, yeah, of course.
And the plot turns on kind of this Ted Kennedy figure who

Speaker 3 secretly is involved in these kind of underground pagan rituals in which he worships Baal, B-A-A-L. You know, I mean, it's like they were preparing for QAnon for decades.

Speaker 3 You know, we're the bad guys, we're evil. And you came over here and you saw that's exactly what they said.

Speaker 4 How is E. Howard Hunt as as a writer? He kind of comes off as a dummy.

Speaker 3 Yeah, you know, it's it's uh really bad.

Speaker 4 You know, they yeah, the HBO,

Speaker 4 the White House Plumber series that was on. Yeah, these guys are so stupid, it's unbelievable.

Speaker 3 Okay, that's what Dietrich said in Elder King's Men. These people are stupid and they got out, they went too far.

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Speaker 4 I want to do the project 2025. You wrote a good article about how, you know, there was also project 1921, 1973, 1981.

Speaker 4 But before that, you've mentioned the ratchet twice, which you talked about in your writing. For listeners, explain that, because I think it's really quite clarifying.

Speaker 3 Right. It means, you know,

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 conservatives. You can

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 It's a revolution that eats its children.

Speaker 3 And liberals will always say, oh, the last generation of conservatives were so gentle and kind and thoughtful.

Speaker 3 So there's this longing for innocence, this longing that somehow we'll return to this kind of safe equilibrium. Americans don't want to talk about the stuff that's really ugly and divides us.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 You know, it's like in Manaqua, Wisconsin, you know about Manaqua brewing?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And I get, you know, emails, letters when I write these columns about how ugly it is out there.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 You know, all my neighbors are cleaning up guns in the front yard all the time i mean it just really is nasty out there and you know the fever is not going to break until we defeat it you know 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 where did the ratchet start that's a tricky question it's kind of built into the philosophy of conservatism itself you know this kind of this idea that oh conservatism is burkey and it it kind of seeks out this Edmund Burke, the 18th century kind of theorist of the French Revolution.

Speaker 4 Oakshot, Oakshot, kind of small.

Speaker 3 Oak shot was similar, right? This idea that what conservatives try to do is create a nice kind of stable society in which

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 I mean, he's this bitter, resentful guy who sees conspiracies everywhere. So it's kind of built into the project.

Speaker 3 I think really when it happens is when conservatives start getting power and the things they promise the electorate, which are not just policy things.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 You know, Newt Gingrich, you know, naturally becomes the Tea Party. The Tea Party naturally becomes the Donald Trump.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 You know, we're going to have this completely made-up thing.

Speaker 3 I mean, we're at the point where, you know, why isn't it 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

Speaker 3 strikes unifying tone because these absolutely hack incompetent journalists literally wrote their front page articles.

Speaker 3 The Associated Press article on the speech was literally written from the press release. They're literally republishing Republican press releases.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 And you can see that the scroll stops moving for like 10 minutes while he goes onto a, you know, wander jar and promises that America is going to be paradise the day after I become elected.

Speaker 3 And somehow these reporters didn't, you know, report that the speech he filed, you know, wasn't the speech he gave. But anyway, he's promising all these fantastic things.

Speaker 3 And if you like, actually go through a donald trump's think and look at the things he promises that are all impossible to achieve yeah right imagine the serial disappointment you know when reality intrudes you know that's what really sets the authoritarian ratchet in emotion 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 the the grassroots the base we need someone more tougher we need guns.

Speaker 3 You know, we need to get rid of these people who stand in our way. And, you know, these stories do not end well.

Speaker 4 All right. We have an ongoing conversation here, though, the bulwark about whether, and I think you're on the bad side of it.

Speaker 4 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 end point of all this, like that it was ending here and then in kind of this quasi-authoritarian place.

Speaker 4 That's the side you're on?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I'm absolutely. I mean, if not Trump, you know, someone else.

Speaker 3 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 were they their their their natural end game was a idiocracy you know my um my famous article the the the big con about you know um 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 he 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.

Speaker 3 You know, they kind of descended from Mount Olympus and actually called a thing what it was because they were so disgusted with all the lying he was doing.

Speaker 4 Okay, okay. I hear you.
I hear you. But it's not like there aren't liberals that lie.
People lie.

Speaker 3 He lied because he was repeating the stories that were part of the Republican firmament.

Speaker 3 You know, the idea he had one that, like, you know, marriage has become obsolete in, you know, Scandinavia or, you know, it's like this is Mitt Romney when he announced for president in 2008.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 4 That was an awkward dad joke. Okay.
That was an awkward certificate.

Speaker 4 Of all the places that we are right now,

Speaker 4 that was an awkward dad joke. You can watch a whole video of awkward dad jokes.

Speaker 3 But that's the point.

Speaker 3 Mitt Romney is not as bad as Donald Trump. Right.

Speaker 4 So the question is, was the endgame necessarily Trump, or did Trump bring some unique thing?

Speaker 3 I mean, it wasn't necessarily Trump. Trump definitely brings in a unique thing.
But the authoritarian ratchet would have kind of found its way to click itself

Speaker 3 in two or three notches in a more authoritarian direction. I mean, I was in...
you know, New Hampshire in 2016, and I was driving down the street, and Glenn Beck told me that

Speaker 3 Ted Cruz had been sent here by God to redeem mankind.

Speaker 3 It's a weird God.

Speaker 3 It's a very weird God, but you know, and then God works in mysterious ways, though, right? Yes, he does. Very mysterious guy.

Speaker 3 Now, I don't really mean to pick on you with the Mitt Romney thing, but one thing that happened was

Speaker 3 all these conservative talk radio guys said Mitt Romney is a sellout. He's, you know, the 2012 version of Deep State.
Right. And you saw it.

Speaker 3 You know, as soon as he won the nomination, they all lined up behind him. You know, that's an authoritarian mentality, too.

Speaker 4 You know? Yeah, no, no, I hear you. And you can go, you can analyze all this stuff.
I just think that there's something that's true.

Speaker 4 I like the ratchet theory directionally really resonates with me, right? That there's this notion that there's something in conservatism.

Speaker 4 It's like if you're always promising these unachievable goals and you always have to be more contrarian, more angry,

Speaker 4 amping it up to feed people more. It's similar to that.

Speaker 4 I use the drug analogy a lot and why we did it.

Speaker 3 I buy it. And the self-deceptions, you know, the internal twisting in order to justify it, it kills your soul.

Speaker 4 I mean, there's some elements of that, though, that are not that aren't missing from the left, right? Like

Speaker 4 making promises that are never going to come to pass.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but we don't make them our presidential candidates.

Speaker 4 People just, you know, pretend like somebody who's unable to talk is still ready to be the president, right? Like there are some elements of that still on the left, right?

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 I mean, in a way, what happened with Joe Biden is just, you know, so normal.

Speaker 3 It's like all these different kind of constituencies within the party, whether it was the donor base, which is his own, you know, pathology, but also just kind of like, you know, the world of black black sororities and fraternities.

Speaker 3 Or just kind of like

Speaker 3 normal people calling their congressmen. They were saying like calls were going like 30 to 1 against supporting Joe Biden continuing.

Speaker 4 Tweets were going 30 to 1 for Joe Biden, which makes me wonder how authentic that was. Right.

Speaker 3 Right, exactly. So, I mean, what we have is just kind of a normal political process.

Speaker 3 And then 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.
It's just, oh, I'm not going to be president anymore.

Speaker 3 They're like, oh my God, conspiracy. You know, no, you got what you want.
You know, you, you, you.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And then it's like, oh, wait, he 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.

Speaker 4 We're running out of time. And I keep wanting to get to Project 2025.
We keep going down rabbit holes.

Speaker 4 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,

Speaker 4 they're lying because it's so dense and boring.

Speaker 3 The undersecretary of the assistant secretary should be in this subsection D. I mean, it's just no way.

Speaker 4 You had a couple of things I flagged, things like, I don't think I've seen it reported that MAGALAN's very own General Jack D.

Speaker 4 Ripper is trying to lubricate every last high schooler's path to the nearest local military entrance processing station at the order of

Speaker 3 that, don't I, Tim? Yes, that's basically every high schooler in America under the ideal Heritage Foundation world will have to take the military entrance exam. That's in the Pentagon chapter.

Speaker 4 That's a little weird.

Speaker 4 Workers should only have one day off because God ordained a Sabbath. Sadly, this was one of my former colleagues that wrote this part.

Speaker 4 Families should decide whether their children should do dangerous jobs

Speaker 4 because of labor shortages and kids might want to do the work.

Speaker 3 That guy's cuckoo. Was that the DHS guy or the labor department guy?

Speaker 4 Labor. It's the labor guy.

Speaker 3 Right. Yeah.
The DHS guy was the guy who said working husbands are really important,

Speaker 3 so we can't have these people living with quote-unquote boyfriends. That was the weirdest one I'd seen.

Speaker 4 Yeah. The DHS guy, I don't know personally, but 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

Speaker 4 the shit.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, there's lots of crazy stuff in there.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 But a lot of Project 2025 stuff was in Project 1980.

Speaker 4 So yeah, so talk about that.

Speaker 3 It certainly was in Project 2016.

Speaker 3 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 farmers rely on to kind of plant their crops.

Speaker 3 And it's absolutely one of these kind of

Speaker 3 things that people need, it's free weather information. And they want to charge for it.
And they tried to do that.

Speaker 3 They tried to make the guy, the head of the National Weather Service during the Trump administration, who was the head of AccuWeather, you know, and they wanted to basically give him a shovel to kind of start like, you know, kind of shoveling up kind of gold coins from every American, you know, basement.

Speaker 4 Sounds entrepreneurial. I don't know.
That sounds entrepreneurial to me, Rick.

Speaker 4 Why can't we inject a private sector kind of spirit into the National Weather Service?

Speaker 3 Because the economy will collapse.

Speaker 3 Anyway, sometimes you got to take yes for an answer. And it's great that people are realizing

Speaker 3 that they're trying to turn the expert civil service into a political cadre. But Nixon tried to do that too.

Speaker 3 So having looked at it i don't want to put words in your mouth but you've gone so deep into the this kind of movement conservatism and know all these players and 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 it's right it's a grab bag it's a grab bag of all of that and kind of like sometimes in one chapter by the way yeah i mean my favorite chapter is the one on trade you know 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 i quoted you know um Patton in the movie with George C.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 4 You know, no, showing people who these folks are.

Speaker 4 Well, 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.

Speaker 4 And this motivates a lot of the tech bro.

Speaker 4 You had an interesting comment about your dinner with Mark Andreess.

Speaker 3 JD Vance's best buddy.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 lefty progressives in Silicon Valley that annoy them and they simply don't want these people to have power.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 3 So basically, Mark Andreessen and Elon Musk are kind of the equivalent of like kind of Michelle Mulkin going to college in Oberlin. Yes, yeah, that's my theory.

Speaker 3 I mean, that's part of it, but I think it's much more simple, much more basic.

Speaker 3 These guys see themselves as aristocrats, they see themselves as terrestrial gods, they see themselves as people with all the answers.

Speaker 3 They think like engineers and they think they deserve what they have. You know, they deserve their $150 million

Speaker 3 houses,

Speaker 3 and they've so retreated into their private worlds and their 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.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 Like the hydrogen bomb? You know, I mean, it's, it's very, very cracked stuff, and it's more than just kind of vibes based on vibes.

Speaker 4 I've also hung out with Mark a little bit, and

Speaker 4 there is a

Speaker 4 godlike element to it.

Speaker 4 Godlike. Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 3 It's kind of a meritocratic version of the French aristocracy.

Speaker 4 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 want 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 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 ship get out of the way Right.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Yeah.
And, you know, they, like they say,

Speaker 3 they see themselves as this Imperian realm. You know, they can't be seasteadders.
They're stuck with the rest of the country.

Speaker 3 And they see Trump as, you know, like Winston Churchill said, you know, they're all people who want to like, you know, ride the alligator and think that the alligator is going to eat them last.

Speaker 4 People should read your article about Andreessen. I'm obsessed with Andreessen.
I'm obsessed with the tech manifesto.

Speaker 3 Probably my most widely read article.

Speaker 3 I'm obsessed with it.

Speaker 4 I think it's extremely important because, you know, there's a line on the podcast Charlie liked to use about how clowns with a flamethrower still have a flamethrower, which is true.

Speaker 4 And 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.

Speaker 3 Well, he'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, you know?

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Everybody go out and read Nixon Land and the rest of Rick's ooh. Um, appreciate him so much for coming on the podcast.
We'll see you all back here tomorrow for another edition of the Bullwork podcast.

Speaker 4 Peace.

Speaker 4 Let's get ratchet, let's get ratchet, let's get ratchet.

Speaker 4 Big big old booty, big old booty, get it clappin'. Finesse these out them dollars, that's it tellin'.
I want some money, want some money, boy, it's happening.

Speaker 4 Don't want no wonder who be acting, who be cappin'. I'm on some real ratchet,

Speaker 4 pull up to your crib.

Speaker 3 Scope out everything, tell my cup my s where it is.

Speaker 4 Put a straw in the fifth, hot girl shit. If the ain't bottom, then she can't be in it.

Speaker 4 Drinking Henny out the bottle, let's get ratchet.

Speaker 4 Shake that ticket for a shot, get it clappin'.

Speaker 4 Pop that, pop that for my thumb, don't be acting.

Speaker 4 Let's get ratchet, let's get ratchet, let's get ratchet. Ayy, let's get ratchet.

Speaker 4 Let's get ratchet.

Speaker 4 Let's get ratchet, let's get ratchet, let's get ratchet, ay, let's get ratchet,

Speaker 4 let's get ratchet.

Speaker 4 Let's get ratchet, let's get ratchet, let's get ratchet, ayy.

Speaker 4 The Bullard podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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