John Avlon: Is the Center Finding Its Spine?

Speaker 4 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovny, and Carise Van Houten.

Speaker 8 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 3 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 11 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 1 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 10 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 8 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 1 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

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Speaker 12 I'm not going to get through the show without using the word cluster fuck. I apologize.

Speaker 13 That's fine. I'm not going to do this.

Speaker 13 Okay.

Speaker 12 I just want to make it clear, John, before we actually begin, that I was hoping to avoid using the word cluster fuck, but we're probably going to use the word cluster fuck.

Speaker 12 I'm just, and I'm warning the audience as well. Hey, welcome to the Bulwark podcast.
I'm Charlie Sykes. It is October 20th, 2023.

Speaker 12 And I confess that I am actually, even though I do this for a living, I'm running out of words to describe the goat rodeo of the Republicans in the House of Representatives.

Speaker 12 So I actually was sort of like going through my file this morning, you know, Omni Shambles, Fubar, Quagmire, Snefu, Goat Rope, Massacre, Shitstorm, Hot Mess, Train Wreck, Shipwreck, Imbrolio, if you pronounce it that way, Foul-Up, Fizzle, Snafu.

Speaker 12 John, I need a wordsmith like you to help me to describe how absolutely mind-bogglingly

Speaker 12 what

Speaker 12 this whole Jim Jordan fiasco is.

Speaker 13 I mean, you need a bigger thesaurus, Charlie. You need a bigger thesaurus.

Speaker 13 This is a self-inflicted shitstorm that doesn't only reflect on the Republican Party, although it's a Republican Party problem, but it reflects on our democracy.

Speaker 13 I mean, this is Congress can't get itself organized because the Republican Party created this problem and continues to light itself on fire. So I'll go goat Roadie or a shitstorm, either one you want.

Speaker 12 Okay, so today. This will take place before people actually hear this podcast.

Speaker 12 Jim Jordan is going to the floor or allegedly going to the floor for a third vote to see whether he succeeded in coercing, intimidating, and bullying enough of the squishes to vote for him.

Speaker 12 Spoiler alert, I think that's very, very unlikely. And he started the day with this very strange press conference.

Speaker 12 Even Republicans are kind of scratching their heads and saying, I'm not quite sure what that was all about. His attempt to use the bully pulpit to round up support.

Speaker 12 But this is the way Jim Jordan began his press conference. Just listen to this.
I think the American people are thirsty for change. I think they are hungry for leadership.

Speaker 12 And frankly, they know that the White House can't provide it. They know the Senate won't lead.
And they are looking for House Republicans to step up and lead and make change on these important issues.

Speaker 12 John, I do not think the American people are thirsty for more Jim Jordan. I do not think they hunger for more Jim Jordan.

Speaker 12 I think the American people, as they're looking at this, are saying, you know, I would prefer an enema.

Speaker 12 I warned you on this.

Speaker 13 I mean, look, Meth.

Speaker 13 look, he's high on his own supply, but that's the problem with folks on the far right, the far left as well, though that's not relevant to today's conversation.

Speaker 13 When you get in these hermetically sealed kind of hot house environments, they constantly mistake themselves, their increasingly narrow ideological interests for the national interest.

Speaker 13 It's got nothing to do with it. And there's a million different ways you can poll test that.
You could just judge it on simple accomplishments and functionality, whatever you want.

Speaker 13 Jim Jordan doesn't represent leadership. He can't unite the Republican Conference.

Speaker 13 This is a guy that I've been pointing out on air who his fellow Ohioan, his fellow Republican, John Boehner, described as a legislative terrorist because all he has done in his time is destroy, not build.

Speaker 13 And now he wants to sell this idea of a new Jim Jordan who's going to make concessions and deals.

Speaker 13 Don't believe it for a second.

Speaker 12 Well, Republicans aren't believing it.

Speaker 13 No.

Speaker 12 Let's talk about what happened yesterday because, okay, so it's pretty clear that he's not going to get to 217. He had lost 21 votes.

Speaker 12 So it looked like for a while that he was going to sort of tap out and say, all right, I'm going to support this compromise measure that would empower the acting speaker, Patrick McHenry.

Speaker 12 And then, and by the way, talk about a Rube Goldberg thing. So he would stay, follow me here.
He would stay as speaker designate, which is not a thing.

Speaker 12 But McHenry would have certain powers to get things done between now and January. It actually seemed like the least awful of their various options.

Speaker 12 And by the way, can you imagine what the GOP leadership meetings would have been? You'd have the speaker, the speaker designate, you'd have Kevin McCarthy, you'd have Steve Scalise.

Speaker 12 Who is actually the leader of the party? I mean, just let's set that aside, like what a goat rodeo that meeting would have been. I mean, who's in charge here? Who do we listen to? Who's the leader?

Speaker 12 The answer is nobody. So they go into the house conference, turns into a complete shitstorm.
People are yelling at each other, screaming at each other.

Speaker 12 Everybody hates Matt Gates, and they decide they're not going ahead with this compromise that it would at least allow the House of Representatives to function.

Speaker 12 John, give me your sense of what happened, why they didn't take the modest off-ramp that even Jim Jordan seemed willing to accept for five minutes.

Speaker 13 I think it's because...

Speaker 13 They have so deeply drunk their own Kool-Aid that any form of compromise, even within themselves, is seen as collaboration. That's the red.
And that, of course, undercuts the basic idea of democracy.

Speaker 13 And this is what frustrates me so fundamentally, right? Go back to the, I don't know, the Constitutional Convention.

Speaker 13 The system we have of a Democratic Republic is based on constructive compromise. Compromise is not collaboration.

Speaker 13 You can be principled and still find areas of common ground and figure out how to give and take and build on it.

Speaker 13 Republicans can't even do that within their own conference, let alone with the Democrats. And that's the obvious way out of here.

Speaker 13 I just got to tell you, you know, the obvious way out of this is for the Republicans to, the center to grow a spine, stop getting rolled, liberate themselves from the far right, and make a deal with just enough Democrats to have stable governance.

Speaker 13 That would be a revolution within a revolution. It would be a great new beginning.
I know it sounds like an Aaron Sorkin script brought to life, but it's not impossible.

Speaker 13 It's only impossible in this version of Washington that they've all been inculcated and where they're terrified of losing a closed partisan primary so they can't think about the national interest.

Speaker 13 They can't even govern.

Speaker 13 And so the reason they couldn't deal with this is because they view any compromise, let alone working with the opposition party, as a fatal sin because of fear and because of greed.

Speaker 13 And that's where the threats come in, where I think you saw the deployment of threats.

Speaker 12 There does seem to be sort of a general consensus that everybody hates Matt Gates.

Speaker 12 A lot of members of this caucus obviously look at the idea of Jim Jordan becoming a speaker as both absurd and dangerous.

Speaker 12 But as you point out, as absurd and dangerous as Jim Jordan is, or going through this complete paralysis, the red line, the thing that apparently they're most afraid of is cutting a deal with some Democrats because this is the culture that we live in.

Speaker 13 It's not the culture we live in. Yes.
It's the culture they live in.

Speaker 12 Okay, fair.

Speaker 13 And what I mean by that is we, the vast majority of the American people, go to work every day with people we probably don't agree with on many things, some political, and we find a way to work together because that's how democracies work.

Speaker 13 It's this particular culture that's been created inside the Republican Party.

Speaker 13 Because remember, Nancy Pelosi had a similarly narrow margin, no problem governing, no problem getting bipartisan legislation done. So this is not a both sides deal.

Speaker 13 This is specifically the culture created inside the conservigentsia, and it has come to this.

Speaker 12 And you've been chronicling this for well over a decade.

Speaker 12 You know, when you wrote wing nuts, it's not just the Republican Party, it is this ecosystem, this alternative reality ecosystem that has changed all of the incentives.

Speaker 12 You know, historical comparisons are always difficult to say that this is worse, but I'm watching this Republican Party being this badly fractured.

Speaker 12 And I'm not going to say that it was worse than the Whigs back in the 1850s or whatever, but I was actually at, believe it or not, the 68 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Speaker 12 So I've seen, I've seen parties rip themselves apart. There were actually riots.
I was a page to the Wisconsin delegation.

Speaker 12 I was on the floor when Abe Ribakoff was yelling at Mayor Daly or Mayor Daly was yelling at Abe Ribakoff, whatever that was. See, this is how old I am.

Speaker 13 Didn't Daly say thinker or, you know? Yeah, yeah. That's amazing.
You were there. I was there.

Speaker 12 So I'm not going to say that this is the most divided I've ever seen a political party, but I'm really tempted to say that because this is as divided a political party.

Speaker 12 I mean, these people, the level of anger, the level of distrust, the level of hatred of one another, the way they are treating one another, the culture of, I mean, this is really a remarkable moment, particularly because, as you point out, the Democrats are united.

Speaker 12 And Democrats have a long tradition in this country of being very, very fractious. Republicans have a long reputation of falling into line.

Speaker 12 So this is really kind of an extraordinary inversion of the polls, isn't it?

Speaker 13 But I think a really important one to understand.

Speaker 13 When I started writing Wingnuts a decade ago, I began writing it in 09, came out in 2010, and it was based on my reporting it then, what was sort of this idea of an extremist beat, which hadn't really become a thing yet.

Speaker 13 But what I noticed was a lot of the Tea Party activists were co-opting quite consciously Saul Alinsky, right, who's that sort of leftist agitator academic.

Speaker 13 And under the rubric of like, they did it, now we will. So there became this conscious mirroring.

Speaker 13 And indeed, you look at the 68 convention, I would argue that Republicans now are more divided and dysfunctional than Democrats were then, which is saying something.

Speaker 12 Very interesting.

Speaker 13 They've inculcated a lot of this fracturousness, the whataboutism that justifies threats of violence, if not outright violence.

Speaker 13 And they've taken it to a deeper extreme because I'm not a a fan of identity politics, period, but white identity politics is more pernicious because of the simple numbers and culture in the country.

Speaker 13 It's more dangerous. All these things are poster children for why these ideas are dangerous.

Speaker 13 Extremes hijacking a political party in a process as opposed to reasoning together under the rubric of a Big Ten.

Speaker 13 Rationalizations of violence or threats to get what you wanted, to push through a narrow political agenda without trying to persuade people to win majoritarian support, trying to undercut majoritarian support because of various crusades, I'll say, that any of these individuals may be on.

Speaker 13 Employment of identity politics and tribal politics to divide the country into us against them, divide to conquer, but then ends up becoming about dividing your own party.

Speaker 13 And this narcissism of small differences becomes really, I mean, feudal fights.

Speaker 13 You know, the old, I think it was the life of Brian Lynn about, you know, the Judean People's Front versus the People's Front of Judea. You know, die heretic.
That is a classic, right? Yeah.

Speaker 13 All this sort of stuff. And so we see it now, that mirror image, and it has become absolutely embedded in the right.
Fascinating.

Speaker 13 If you go to the history of conservatism, the opposite of conservative, as you've pointed out many times, is storming a Capitol to overturn an election. You'd think.

Speaker 13 You know, that's got nothing to do with Edmund Burke, whoever else you want to cite. I think this rot is profound.
It is deep.

Speaker 13 It's reflected in the fact the Republican Party seems likely to renominate someone who tried to overturn an election on the basis of a lie who's been indicted in 91 counts.

Speaker 13 But it's also reflected here. That's why I think the world on fire, fire, house on fire is a very real problem we're confronting.

Speaker 13 This is a bad advertisement for democracy, but we need to not let it reflect on ourselves as a country because it reflects on one political party at this particular point in our history.

Speaker 12 Hey, folks, this is Charlie Sykes, host of the Bulwark podcast.

Speaker 12 We created the Bulwark to provide a platform for pro-democracy voices on the center right and the center left for people who are tired of tribalism and who value truth and vigorous yet civil debate about politics and a lot more.

Speaker 12 And every day, we remind you folks, you are not the crazy ones. So, why not head over to thebullwork.com and take a look around?

Speaker 12 Every day, we produce newsletters and podcasts that will help you make sense of our politics and keep your sanity intact.

Speaker 12 To get a daily dose of sanity in your inbox, why not try a Bullwork Plus membership free for the next 30 days? To claim this offer, go to thebullwork.com/slash Charlie.

Speaker 12 That's thebullwork.com forward/slash slash charlie we're gonna get through this together i promise

Speaker 14 some moments in your life stay with you forever in a special segment of on purpose i share a story about a book that changed my life early in my journey and how i was able to find the exact same edition on ebay years later there are certain books that don't just give you information they shift the way you see the world.

Speaker 14 I remember reading one when I was younger that completely changed me. Years later, I found myself thinking about that book again.
I wanted the same edition back.

Speaker 14 Not a reprint, not a different cover, that exact one. So I started searching.
And that's when I found it on eBay. That's what I love about eBay.

Speaker 14 It's not just a marketplace, it's a place where stories live. Shop eBay for millions of finds, each with a story.
eBay. Things people love.

Speaker 14 Listen to on purpose on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 4 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 8 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 3 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 11 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 1 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 10 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 8 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 1 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 12 One of the themes of the last week has been the campaign of bullying and threats against the centrists and the moderates, the squishes, however you want to call them.

Speaker 12 And, you know, as I mentioned yesterday, these threats have worked in the past with Republicans, and we'll talk about whether, you know, centrists are growing a spine here.

Speaker 12 But it has gotten uglier and uglier and uglier. And on your network, on CNN, they played a voicemail of a call to the wife of a congressman.
Let's play this.

Speaker 12 I want to get your take, John, because I think you can kind of parse through this.

Speaker 13 But this is just a taste of what Republican members of Congress congress are getting from fellow republicans why is your husband such a pig why would he get on tv make an asshole of himself because he's a deep state prick because he doesn't represent the people

Speaker 13 um

Speaker 13 so what we're gonna do is we're gonna

Speaker 13 come follow you all over the place we're gonna be up your ass

Speaker 13 non-stop we are now Antifa

Speaker 13 We're gonna do what the left does because your f ⁇ ing f ⁇ ing of a husband gets on TV. Oh, the bad guys, they did.
So I'm going to vote for Kevin McCarthy, a piece of shit who everybody knows. And

Speaker 13 for his piece of shit ass, talk about Americans who are actually fighting for Americans as the bad people, says everything about him. So

Speaker 13 you, f your husband, and we are going to, we're not like the left, we aren't violent, but we're going to follow your ass, every appointment you have, everything you

Speaker 13 do.

Speaker 13 Your husband's an asshole. You should talk to his stupid ass.
We're at war. Israelis being killed.
And your dumb husband is acting like a two-year-old. No wonder.

Speaker 13 He's a fucking war-mongering piece of shit. So listen, you're going to keep getting calls and emails.
I'm putting all your information over the internet now. Everybody else's.

Speaker 13 And you will not be left alone because your

Speaker 13 husband,

Speaker 13 Jim Jordan, or more conservative, or you're going to be molested like you can't ever imagine. And again, non-violently, you won't go to the beauty parlor.

Speaker 13 You must be a bitch to marry a ugly mother like that.

Speaker 12 Sounds nice.

Speaker 12 You know, bless his heart. Only the best people.
Only the best people. Let us now pray.
Because this is how we restore Christian America or something. I don't know.
So, John, what'd you hear there?

Speaker 13 It is so important to play all of that and to listen to it. I think it actually demands a close reading.
I'm actually working on a column on this because I heard it.

Speaker 13 Jake Tapper aired that exclusively last night on CNN. There's so much to work with there.

Speaker 13 So, first of all, Jim Jordan or more conservative is the first thing, or we are going to molest you. Non-violent.
Non-violent, right? Okay. So, that

Speaker 13 there's a lot to work with here. So, first of all, that reflects the fact that this person has been inculcated, right,

Speaker 13 via some version of the conservative internet, you know, media, or Donald Trump, frankly. There is the language of threats and intimidation, which is the abandonment of reason and persuasion.

Speaker 13 There is an ideological agenda, Jordan or more conservative. This isn't conservative.
Jim Jordan's not conservative. This is conservative populism.
It's a radicalism. It is a tribalism.

Speaker 13 It's nothing conservative about it. But you can see where he's going, right? Jordan or more conservative.
Even Kevin McCarthy isn't good enough. That's part of the insult.
We're going to molest you.

Speaker 13 That's a language of sexual assault. Yeah.
Yeah. Right.
And then that little lawyer on his shoulder, Donald Trump saying peacefully on January 6th, say nonviolently, of course.

Speaker 13 And the rationale for the violence and the intimidation and the doxing he is threatening is We're going to be like Antifa, right?

Speaker 13 This sort of, you know, conjuring up the phantom menace to justify whatever is done.

Speaker 13 Remember, you know, the initial story that Matt Gates and other people pulled on the floor to Congress on January 6th, that it was Antifa had attacked the Capitol. Right.

Speaker 13 This is someone who's been inculcated.

Speaker 13 This is learned rhetoric and learned behavior where he feels utterly justified and empowered to call up the wife of a congressman and to threaten her physically to get an ideological and leave a tape of his voice.

Speaker 12 I mean, that's the other thing.

Speaker 13 Reason left the building a long time ago on every level, right?

Speaker 13 But this is really important because this is up, you know, Congresswoman from Iowa got a credible death threat after changing her vote on Jim Jordan.

Speaker 13 These are the kind of threats that are getting mainstreamed inside the Republican Party right now, or they're in danger of becoming mainstream because threats are part of the language of politics on the far right right now and the far left.

Speaker 13 But again, they're asymmetric. And we can talk about that, you know, if you want.

Speaker 12 And this has been building, right? I mean, this has been building, you know, for.

Speaker 13 During the second impeachment, Charlie. Right.
You remember this? There are members of Congress, and we see this too much. People don't always appreciate it unless you cover politics closely.

Speaker 13 They know what the right thing to do is, but they're afraid to do it in critical moments.

Speaker 13 And in that moment, there were members of Congress who said, look, I know he should be impeached, but I'm afraid for the safety of my family if I vote that way.

Speaker 12 Okay, part of this background noise is to this point.

Speaker 12 Now, you may say these people are cowards or they should have done it anyway, but the reality is, is that they have created this atmosphere of fear, and people are are concerned about their family.

Speaker 12 They're concerned about their children. They're obviously concerned about their careers.

Speaker 12 But I remember this going back into 2016, how people would go, well, I'm not going to go along with this or we can keep this under control.

Speaker 12 But the drumbeat of threats and insults and harassment wears people down. And it comes to a point where you say, it's just not worth it.
Right? I mean, it's just not worth it.

Speaker 12 And the normies, the decent people are just driven out.

Speaker 13 This is one of the key points that I think we need to understand. This is

Speaker 13 the rally. Think back to Jon Stewart's rally to restore the center or a common sense in 2010, ill-fated as it was.

Speaker 13 Part of the danger for our democracy that we face is that there is a conscious attempt to make politics so dangerous and indecent and ugly that good people, normies, as you say,

Speaker 13 just normal average Americans

Speaker 13 find that they've got to abandon the public square because it's just too ugly. It's too messy.
This is by design.

Speaker 12 They leave. That's happening.
It's happening.

Speaker 13 And that's what we need to consciously push against right now. Everybody's got to grow a spine, especially the center.
My favorite

Speaker 13 Abraham Lincoln quote is: I'm an optimist because I don't see the point being anything else.

Speaker 13 But that is just to say that now is exactly the time we all need to strengthen our civic backbones, particularly in the center, and push back upon the craziest because that's what they're a very small percentage, but they know that if they are loud and intimidating, they can create the illusion of being a majority and harass the good people to get out of politics right and therefore leave the field to them this is a classic ban in sort of you know worldview stuff and this is absolutely what needs to get pushed up against by average decent americans particularly from the center

Speaker 14 some moments in your life stay with you forever In a special segment of On Purpose, I share a story about a book that changed my life early in my journey and how I was able to find the exact same edition on eBay years later.

Speaker 14 There are certain books that don't just give you information, they shift the way you see the world. I remember reading one when I was younger that completely changed me.

Speaker 14 Years later, I found myself thinking about that book again. I wanted the same edition back.
Not a reprint, not a different cover, that exact one.

Speaker 14 So I started searching and that's when I found it on eBay. That's what I love about eBay.
It's not just a marketplace, it's a place where stories live.

Speaker 14 Shop eBay for millions of finds, each with a story. eBay, things people love.

Speaker 14 Listen to on purpose on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 4 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 8 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 3 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 11 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 1 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 10 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 8 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 1 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 12 Since you have introduced a note of optimism under this podcast, an unusual note of optimism, and you said this last night, you said the center needs to grow a spine.

Speaker 12 Is there a little bit of evidence that the center or whatever you want to describe? And maybe the center is misleading because a lot of these people are quite concerned.

Speaker 12 That in fact, you are seeing a little bit of this pushback because Jim Jordan is not the Speaker of the House of Representatives. You do have close to 10% of the Republican caucus saying, screw that.

Speaker 12 We may be crazy, but crazy enough to go along with Donald Trump, but not crazy enough to go along with Jim Jordan. And there is this pushback against the culture of threats.

Speaker 12 You know, I heard Adam Kinzinger yesterday say, hey, you know what? Liz Cheney and I got lots and lots of death threats.

Speaker 12 And I don't remember any of you people speaking up about that, but I'm going to speak up now.

Speaker 12 Okay, these folks who were upset about the threats should have spoken up earlier, but they are speaking up now. So what's happening now, John? Is this like a green shoot?

Speaker 13 This is a green shoot. This is a sliver of hope.
And I'm on the Keep Hope alive here. But you need to do it with strength.
Okay.

Speaker 13 And that means speaking up and calling it out and not trying to play it close.

Speaker 13 This is part of the screwed up incentive system in our politics where everyone's terribly, in the absence of competitive general elections for the vast majority of House seats, everyone's afraid of losing a close partisan primary.

Speaker 13 So the center becomes silent for their own self-interest. And that is just a cannibalizing of the country.
I'm hopeful because there has been.

Speaker 13 an effort to say, you know what, we're going to stop getting rolled.

Speaker 13 We're not going to go down a Speaker Jim Jordan route under this feeling of artificial urgency to unite the conference, you know, under threats, literal threats. But it needs to hold.

Speaker 13 You know, the Republican Party, if you look at its ideological spectrum, is three-quarters conservative, and there's a lot under that rubric, one-quarter moderate.

Speaker 13 So you're not talking about a lot of folks, but it's not even about ideology.

Speaker 13 There are decent, honorable people who are very conservative, who have a degree of trust with members of the opposite side of the aisle because of their temperament, because of their perspective.

Speaker 13 You You know, I mentioned a couple of them last night who could be utterly credible Republican and conservative speaker nominees who could probably get some Democratic votes enough. At least,

Speaker 13 you know, people like Tom Cole, Don Bacon, Mike Gallagher. Those people exist and they're not like, you know, Chris Shays, you know, card-carrying, you know, Rockefeller Republican moderates.

Speaker 13 Those folks don't even exist anymore. Right.
But that's what needs to happen. The center needs to stop getting rolled.

Speaker 13 It needs to grow a spine, particularly on the center right, and realize it's in the country's best interest and it's in their and the republican party's best interest we need to be able to function you know people say well what would democrats ask something pretty modest i would have a feeling you know like a joint funding bill for israel ukraine taiwan and the border something for everyone yeah okay regular order not shutting down the government in november and then everyone can hash out their differences of which there will be many right but we need to take the power back from the extremes the far left is in terms of sheer political power largely a fan of menace.

Speaker 13 I did this statistic, and I don't know if I mentioned this to you before, but it's one of my favorite ways of representing where we are.

Speaker 13 Last Congress, there were, by my count, seven Democratic members of Congress, mostly freshmen, who supported the world's dumbest political policy as a branding mechanism, defund the police. Seven.

Speaker 13 Seven. Okay.
And there were 137 House Republicans who voted to overturn the election after the attack on our Capitol. Right? It's not that it doesn't exist.

Speaker 13 There is a feedback loop, but it is exaggerated and it doesn't reflect relative political power.

Speaker 13 A party that topples its own speaker for the first time and then tries to jam through Jim Jordan, that's a whole different deal. And again, Democrats have no problem.

Speaker 13 There are 300 pieces of bipartisan legislation passed in those first two years of the Biden presidency, with Nancy Pelosi having a similar narrow margin. So yes, the center does need to hold.

Speaker 13 We need to show that. We need to show that in defense of our democracy.
Mike McCall made this point the other day. You know who loves this kind of self-inflicted division and dysfunction?

Speaker 13 China, Russia, Iran, because that autocracy gets to say, see, democracies don't work. Doesn't work.

Speaker 13 And actually what doesn't work is ideological extremes capturing democracy, undercutting the idea of majority rule, which is a concerted effort.

Speaker 13 North Carolina and Wisconsin, still that fight going on. And so it does require the center growing a spine and standing up and actually asserting the real weight.

Speaker 13 There are more moderates in this country than folks on the far right or the far left.

Speaker 13 And that includes center right and center left, people who may be good people, but don't think you should burn it all down if you don't get what you want 100% of the time.

Speaker 12 The Freedom Caucus, the Jim Jordan crowd, has basically had power because they were prepared to strap on the suicide vest and say, you know, if you don't go along with us, we will blow you up.

Speaker 12 And everybody said, oh, we have to do what they want. But as you're pointing out, there is, in fact, a centrist coalition that could run the Congress that is divided as we are.

Speaker 12 Let's just take a vote, like, for example, on Ukraine and or Israel, but Ukraine's more divisive.

Speaker 12 I'm guessing that if you had an up or down vote in the House of Representatives on Ukraine, it would probably be 300-plus votes in favor of it.

Speaker 12 You'd have some Republicans, maybe a majority of Republicans voting against it, but it would be an overwhelming majority of the House of Representatives, an overwhelming majority of the United States Senate.

Speaker 12 Same thing with Israel. So there are these pieces of legislation that if they're allowed to come to the floor, would pass.

Speaker 12 And the eight Matt Gaetes of the world, the Marjorie Taylor Greens, they in fact are a rump of a rump. Correct.

Speaker 12 And it's only because they have convinced people that they are bigger, louder, and scarier than in fact they are that they have been considered relevant.

Speaker 13 That's exactly right. And those votes you just described would also reflect, not incidentally, the will of the people.
Right. I.e.
take a look at polling and see where things are.

Speaker 13 You know, we are not nearly as divided as our politics make it seem, but our politics are structurally set up with a screwed up incentive structures we've got to dilute the will of the people and undercut the idea of majority rule, which is at the heart of the idea of democracy.

Speaker 13 So that's the problem. That's the structural problem.

Speaker 13 And we can work on the structural issues and God knows we need to, but we also need more people in the arena to show spine and to push back on this comparatively small number of people who are loud, extreme, employ the threats of violence to get what they want, to create an illusion that they're somehow a nascent movement.

Speaker 13 Unfortunately, the Republican Party, because of the rise and persistence of Donald Trump, they've managed to hijack that.

Speaker 13 But that doesn't mean it can't be taken back.

Speaker 13 And we desperately need, if you are patriotic and care about the country and care about the promise of democracy and majoritarian rule and reasoning together across the aisle, this is a time for choosing, particularly if you're a Republican.

Speaker 13 These moments come, and people in recent history have rationalized them away. I think about Mitch McConnell not basically giving the green light.

Speaker 13 Three votes from stopping impeachment, none of this would have happened. Mitch McConnell knew it was the right thing to do, but he was afraid of primaries on some folks on his side.

Speaker 13 So he didn't do it. The January 6th Commission vote.
You know, another thing. Unnecessary.
We're almost there.

Speaker 13 A little bit of spine at the right moment could have tipped history in a very different direction. This is another one of those moments, those pivot moments in American history.

Speaker 13 And if we let this pass because people are afraid of what might happen to their primary, Republicans will reap the whirlwind even more. So I hope to God this is this opportunity is taken.

Speaker 13 And then Democrats help Republicans give birth to this new kind of politics in this regard.

Speaker 12 Okay, so what will they choose? Because this is one of those crises that, you know, something that can't go on forever won't go on forever.

Speaker 12 This one can't because the House of Representatives is paralyzed. I mean, no matter how many partisan games you want, at some point you have to resolve all of this.

Speaker 12 Now, you can either resolve this by rolling over and electing Jim Jordan, which seems increasingly unlikely, or what you are describing, some sort of a compromise.

Speaker 12 At the end of the day, maybe not today, where are we going to end up here? Are we going to end up with some Jerry-built Rube Goldberg speaker designate, Speaker Emeritus, triple five

Speaker 12 schism popes out there?

Speaker 12 What are we going to end up with?

Speaker 13 Well, this is why it's a time for choosing, and people need to think about the big picture. It shouldn't be revolutionary and risky to think about what's actually in the national interest.

Speaker 13 Wow, but it is. That actually should be the table stakes.

Speaker 13 And that's not being pollyannish about the past or saying, you know, I love historic parallels, but sometimes they break down.

Speaker 13 Except if you really look at how, you know, republics have fallen in the past.

Speaker 12 I know.

Speaker 13 Which I wrote about in Washington's farewell and is something that I think people should study more. I wrote a column about this at CNN, and there is a solution to this.

Speaker 13 And the solution is, and Hakeem Jeffries Jeffries wrote an op-ed opening the door to a bipartisan coalition, the solution is, is that the majority of Republicans need to liberate themselves from the disproportionate influence of a handful of loud folks on the far right.

Speaker 12 And that would feel so good for them. By the way, if they made that choice, that would be so liberating for them.

Speaker 12 It would feel so good for

Speaker 13 them and the country. Yes, yes.
And by the way, They would be leading by example to show that there's a new kind of politics that are possible.

Speaker 13 And I'm not saying don't elect a conservative who has the, you know, a conservative, but then you have enough Democrats support these folks, not because they're in ideological agreement, but because there's an atmosphere embodied in the character of the person in the speaker's chair where there's trust and mutual respect, if not agreement.

Speaker 13 You don't have to agree in a democracy. We should have great disagreements, but there should be a baseline of trust and mutual respect, which has been utterly.
intentionally eroded.

Speaker 13 That's the way to create a stable circumstance. What's the alternative circumstance you just said?

Speaker 13 We could have a situation of rotating interim speakers where everybody's under threat by eight votes on the the far right. Patrick McHenry might not even be there through the end of the year.

Speaker 13 In the next, you know, 14 months, we could end up having, what, five, six speakers.

Speaker 12 You know, as you pointed out last night, since 2010, every single GOP speaker has been pushed out or jumped because they couldn't corral the knuckle-draggers and the anarchists. Right.

Speaker 13 Which is, by the way, John Boehner's terms for that crazy company.

Speaker 12 Right. So we're in the second decade of complete dysfunction when it comes to the GOP speakership.

Speaker 13 Because of the same thing, because of this dynamic that the Republican Party has inculcated, there's this rationalization. Boehner tried it.
You know, McCarthy tried it. Brian tried it.

Speaker 13 We'll corral the crazies in a constructive direction. Don't worry.
We can do that. We just need to harness their passion, right?

Speaker 13 And sure, they may be kind of crazy and think that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim socialist Manchurian candidate, but it's okay. We'll be able to corral them.
Gollum always turns on its creator.

Speaker 13 Always.

Speaker 13 How many times do we need to learn this? We need to employ that learning now to give

Speaker 13 a hope that there is an alternative way to govern to defend our democracy.

Speaker 12 I don't mean to douse this exuberant optimism, but it's tempered up. Here we have the time for choosing in Congress, but we also have the time for choosing for the presidency.

Speaker 12 And we have, this is Donald Trump's party.

Speaker 12 Even the quote-unquote centrists are going to line up behind Donald Trump. Jim Jordan was Donald Trump's candidate.
What does it say? I mean, give me your sense because I'm watching this.

Speaker 12 I'm watching Donald Trump decompensate in real time.

Speaker 12 And yet, the polls would indicate that he is either tied with or maybe even leading Joe Biden.

Speaker 12 We are living in a country where half of Americans are at least willing at this point to tell pollsters that they think that Donald Trump should be returned to the Oval Office.

Speaker 12 I don't want to dent your optimism here. I'm just trying to put it in perspective.

Speaker 13 Let's say a couple things.

Speaker 13 First of all, within the Republican Party, there's a morality play going on where fear and greed, those ancient biblical net negatives are driving a lot of people's decisions and the question of course is who persuadable washington post had a poll out you discussed this in the past and i will say the bulwark is a favorite here in the hoovalon household we listen to you guys all the time they said that basically okay a third of the republican party roughly are hardcore trumpers and they will follow him anywhere right by anywhere i mean anywhere anywhere right including overturning democracy and attacking the capital around 25

Speaker 13 are never Trumpers, i.e., this guy doesn't represent conservative values. He doesn't represent the reason they became Republicans, you know, Reagan, era, Bush era, you know, go on, go on, go on.

Speaker 13 And the rest are persuadables.

Speaker 13 Persuadable means, obviously, that they can be persuaded by another candidate that there's another path forward for the party if they feel not intimidated into silence or going along with the crowd.

Speaker 13 Okay, so. You know, the whole Randrew Jackson line, one man with courage makes a majority, that's worth remembering.

Speaker 13 The other one is one of my favorite political aphorisms by bill clinton who said people will vote for strong and wrong every time

Speaker 13 right yeah which is to say that all these folks who are tiptoeing around donald trump for fear of offending under some kind of consultant driven rationale are part of the problem so there's a supermajority that is opposed to donald trump a minority of the republican party which comes around by the way 10 11 12 of the country if you net it out third, third, third math in terms of Republican, Democrat, Independent.

Speaker 13 That's nowhere near a majority. That's around 10%.

Speaker 13 But they're loud and they've intimidated the Republican Party into silence until and unless an alternative comes up who is strong and provides an alternate path forward.

Speaker 13 I don't want to be polyandish about it. I'm just saying we haven't started voting yet, and sometimes we treat all this stuff as a done deal.
And I think that disrespects the issue.

Speaker 12 That was Ron DeSantis' theory, right?

Speaker 12 I mean, Ron DeSantis figured if I basically gave him Trumpism without the Trump, if I just give an alternative, surely if he is indicted all these places, they will turn to me as an alternative, right?

Speaker 12 I mean, wasn't that the theory? Wasn't that Ron DeSantis?

Speaker 13 Well, the theory is also that people wouldn't realize that he doesn't like people and doesn't know how to sort of he makes Richard Nixon look like a people person in addition to who knew that would be a problem.

Speaker 12 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 13 So I want to just keep that aspect open. The right-wing media ecosystem is very good at message repetition.

Speaker 13 And that itself has a way of cowing people who are not really sure where they stand on issues and drags them into those things, right? Biden's governance.

Speaker 13 has been to a large extent sort of the new low no labels fantasia. Again, 300 pieces of bipartisan legislation in the first two years.

Speaker 13 I do worry that no labels, which I co-founded over a decade ago, and I have nothing to do with it now, but because I've always been focused on how do we overcome hyper-partisanship and how can we restore strength in the center, that the independent candidates can make the ball bounce in unpredictable ways in an election.

Speaker 13 And there's no plan to win Congress in that circumstance. The persistence of Donald Trump, I think, is about strong and wrong.

Speaker 13 It's that he's captured one political party that doesn't seem to have the conscience to stand up to him and offer an alternative.

Speaker 13 And the Democrats have doubled down on an incumbent president who's been a consequential president, but who the polls suggest would be one of our greatest one-term presidents, but people have concerns about what a second term would look like, just on the issues of perceptions of vigor, not policies, I would argue.

Speaker 13 But until we get through this stage, that is still a point of maximum peril for the Republic, not just the Republican Party.

Speaker 13 Because if Donald Trump is returned to power because there's some weird no one hits 270 and Republicans control a majority of House districts and they decide to to fall in line because they make all the rationalizations that say, well, we'll be able to corral the crazy and implement our own policies and get back in power.

Speaker 13 That's a giant gift wrap for the autocratic alliance that still exists here in the 21st century. So this is about strengthening democracies.
And those are the stakes in the election.

Speaker 13 You know, it may be that there are unexpected twists and turns. There probably will be between now and the election.

Speaker 13 But I just think that folks who treat this all as a fait accompli or think that we're going to have some default into an apparent sort of stasis election, Trump v. Biden, round two.

Speaker 13 That's one of the riskiest things we can do. But the risk is all on the Republican side right now.

Speaker 13 Democrats are a little bit in denial about Joe Biden's negatives, but he has been a consequential and effective president, judged by the policies, and policies that actually represent what used to be called the vital center to a large extent.

Speaker 12 So one more thing here as we look ahead to at least something that I'm anticipating, or we can anticipate something I'm looking forward to, is what I want to say.

Speaker 12 Have you read about Mitt Romney's Burn book? This is the McKay Coppins book, which is coming out shortly.

Speaker 12 We're going to have McKay on the podcast.

Speaker 13 McKay's great. One of the best writers of his era.

Speaker 12 New York Times headline, Mitt Romney's Sickest Burns book reveals harsh views of fellow Republicans. Now, this is the phenomenon that we keep talking about.

Speaker 12 What do Republicans say in private about one another? Now, Mitt Romney is, I mean, he stands alone. One time after another, it has been Romney alone.
But it is interesting.

Speaker 12 I mean, I always thought of Romney as a little bit white breaddish, you know, and a little tapioca, but apparently he's much spicier than that. So, Mitt Romney on Ron DeSantis.

Speaker 12 There's just no warmth at all. On DeSantis posing for selfies with Iowa voters, he looks like he's got a toothache.
On Newt Gingrich, a smug, know-it-all, smarmy, and too pleased with himself.

Speaker 13 Not wrong.

Speaker 12 Ted Cruz, frightening, scary, a demagogue. Mike Huckabee, a huckster, a caricature of a for-profit preacher.

Speaker 13 Not wrong again.

Speaker 12 Bobby Jindo, a twit. Rick Santorum, sanctimonious, severe, and strange.

Speaker 12 Which, of course, if you've ever met him, yeah, you know. Rick Perry, Republicans must realize that we have to have someone who can actually complete a sentence.

Speaker 12 John Kasich, lack of thoughtfulness, lack of attentiveness, ego. No wonder he and Chris Christie spark.
And then he has some things to say about Chris Christie, too.

Speaker 12 But it is kind of interesting because as you're reading this, you're going, so it's not just us.

Speaker 13 No, no, eyes.

Speaker 13 What a clown show.

Speaker 12 I mean, the Republican Party, you know, used to have people who were serious individuals, and you just sort of look at the horizon and one

Speaker 12 loser and clown after another, the Charlatan caucus.

Speaker 13 And this is, again, because of the screwed-up incentive structures and the structural problems in the party. Right, right, right.
There is no incentive structure.

Speaker 13 set aside to try to win the reasonable edge of the opposition or to even have the ballast to appeal to the reasonable Republicans. It's all about playing to the far right, playing to the base.

Speaker 13 And that leads to this sort of clown car crash that we've seen in every primary since at least 2010.

Speaker 13 And my only regret about that list is I think if Mitt Romney had had the courage to be his most authentic self, which we saw glimpses of in that great documentary that came out after the election or we're seeing in the Senate, he could have won the presidency.

Speaker 13 But he was, I think he'd been disciplined by a lot of different things to sort of, you know, have a have a veneer in place. And he's been liberated, I think, to say what he really thinks.

Speaker 13 And we see that he's an intelligent, deeply principled man. I'm excited for McKay's book.
He's one of the best journalists of his generation.

Speaker 13 The quote that jumps out to me isn't about, you know, I mean, recasting Mitt Romney as some kind of latter-day Truman Capote saying, you know, catty things about other Republican candidates is less interesting than him saying, quite frankly, that a majority of my party or a great percentage of my party doesn't really believe in the Constitution.

Speaker 13 And you start collecting comments. And this is the folks at the bulwark, a lot of Republicans who are warning about what's been happening in their party.
Take a look at.

Speaker 13 I did this on CNN in a digital interview with Alyssa Farrah Griffin almost a year ago, probably, where we looked at then all the former Trump administration alumni who were meaning clearly and loudly that re-electing their former boss would be a threat to the Republic.

Speaker 12 Yeah, this is not Rachel Maddow. This is not NPR.

Speaker 12 This is not the Democratic. These are voices coming from inside the room.

Speaker 13 100%.

Speaker 13 And what's troubling to me is that the Donald Trump super fans who've never met the man are willing to, I think for reasons of face-saving and the dynamics of sort of tribal politics,

Speaker 13 not listening to the people who know the man best, who worked with them, who were warning in clear language. And these are not Democrats.
These aren't even independents.

Speaker 13 These aren't even, you know, centrist Republicans who didn't want anything to do with Donald Trump. These are people who worked with him.

Speaker 13 And that's the moral urgency we should be feeling about sleepwalking towards this election. And I think Romney's voice is as clarion call clear as any.

Speaker 13 We got to recognize this is a structural problem. It's going to need structural fixes, but it's going to start when people have the spine to stand up the stochastic terrorism that we're dealing with.

Speaker 12 We're almost out of time here, and we haven't even gotten to the president's very rare prime time Oval Office address about Ukraine and Israel. It's getting good reviews.
What were your thoughts?

Speaker 12 I had just one criticism, really, which is that I wish he would have done this earlier. He has been a consequential president, but he has not effectively used the bully pulpit.

Speaker 12 And a speech like this, I think, was necessary to rally the nation behind the aid for Ukraine a year ago. So you have this speech, which I think was effective, not perfect, but effective.

Speaker 12 Why has he not done this more? Why has he not done this earlier? That's my one criticism.

Speaker 13 What is your thoughts? He should be doing it more. Even

Speaker 13 Britt Hume praised the speech on Fox.

Speaker 13 I'm generally suspect when people blame communications for lack of political success, but I do think that the Biden administration's communications have not been sticky enough, soundbody enough, rooted in stats and fact enough, and leaning into new platforms to spread the messages of accomplishments.

Speaker 13 This was a very good speech by the president. He actually, I thought, used his hands effectively, you know, visually.
He had a decent amount of energy by him.

Speaker 13 He was crisp and clear and spoke with a sense of moral conviction about American leadership in the world. That's the kind of conversation we we should be having as a country.

Speaker 13 I think it's notable because of all the crazy and dins in our politics that often the most responsible voices don't get their share of the oxygen, even when you're the president of the United States.

Speaker 13 And that's why I don't think you should over-index some of the noise. I think the signal-to-noise ratio is very difficult to determine in our politics right now.
It was a good speech.

Speaker 13 He should have given it more. And I'll give you a small example of something I noticed.
I watched it again last night when I came home because I was listening to it in transit.

Speaker 13 The White House website did one of those things where it was an hour and 38 minutes or something like that, but the first 40 minutes were just waiting for the president.

Speaker 13 They didn't take the time to edit it. So when you clicked on it after the fact, the speech would begin.
It's these little unforced errors of presentation and clipping that cut into the resonance.

Speaker 13 That's a really small thing. I don't mean to harp on it.

Speaker 12 There's no margin for error anymore, though.

Speaker 13 Not at all. And instead, you really do need to...
to think about how people are getting their information and lean into those ways.

Speaker 13 I had a conversation with a lower level appointee appointee in the Biden administration.

Speaker 13 And I said to this person, you know, that things like, oh, there are 300 pieces of bipartisan legislation in the first two years. And this person said to me, really? Yeah.

Speaker 12 That is a problem. Yeah.
I mean, you said it earlier. Even I thought, that's kind of extraordinary.
I mean, that sort of cuts against almost all of our narratives.

Speaker 12 How did that happen given everything that's been going on here? That's an amazing number.

Speaker 13 And that's your reality, Check. Yeah.

Speaker 12 John Avalon is senior political analyst and anchor at CNN. His most recent book is Lincoln and the Fight for Peace.
He's also a former editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast.

Speaker 12 Thank you so much for spending so much time with us and coming on the Weekend Bullwork podcast.

Speaker 13 My pleasure, Charlie. You know, we're huge fans of what you and your colleagues are doing at the Bulwark here, my wife Margaret and I, and our whole family.
So thanks.

Speaker 13 Keep fighting the good fight, buddy.

Speaker 12 Thank you. And thank you all for listening to this weekend's Bulwark podcast.
I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back on Monday and we'll do this all over again.

Speaker 12 The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.

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