Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
Speaker 1: where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
Speaker 1: today's best minds.
Speaker 2: We're on vacation, but that doesn't mean we don't have
Speaker 2: a great show for you Today. Director Matt Tiradaur examines
Speaker 2: how we see Gourvidal through today's political lens. But first
Speaker 2: we'll talk to author Broadclass about how we fortify ourselves
Speaker 2: for Trump two point zero.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Fast Politics.
Speaker 3: Brian, Yeah, thanks for having me back.
Speaker 1: I feel like it's one of those moments that you
Speaker 1: have written about so much.
Speaker 4: Explain to us.
Speaker 1: There's so many headwinds and tailwinds and so many unknowns.
Speaker 4: Explain to us where we are.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I think there's sort of a couple
Speaker 3: parallel stories happening, and the ones that I'm paying the
Speaker 3: most attention to first is the sort of absolute meltdown
Speaker 3: of norms and guardrails where stories that used to be
Speaker 3: five alarm fires in twenty sixteen are now just simply
Speaker 3: shrugged off before the day is even halfway done, right,
Speaker 3: I mean, there's so many crazy appointees who would have
Speaker 3: instantly been done out of arrival in early twenty seventeen
Speaker 3: that now are likely to be confirmed. And I think that,
Speaker 3: along with the politicization of rule of law, is what
Speaker 3: people like me had been warning about would happen if
Speaker 3: Trump returned to the White House, and I think we're
Speaker 3: on the sort of precipice of that happening. The second
Speaker 3: story that I'm looking at is how the Democrats are
Speaker 3: responding to their loss and the sort of ways in
Speaker 3: which the party is trying to think about not just
Speaker 3: how to reposition itself, but how to end up being
Speaker 3: an effective tool at blocking the worst machinations of the
Speaker 3: Trump machine. And I think that's the sort of calm
Speaker 3: before the storm as we all get ready for January twentieth.
Speaker 1: You know, it's interesting because last time there was a
Speaker 1: feeling in the mainstream media that Trump was a sort
Speaker 1: of five al on fire. But in the end Democrats
Speaker 1: were able to block a lot of Trump's more heinous instincts,
Speaker 1: so you know, he didn't end up deporting as many
Speaker 1: people as Obama did. I mean, certainly there was a
Speaker 1: terrible payandemic and a million people died, and they did,
Speaker 1: in fact have refrigerated trucks in front of hospitals, but
Speaker 1: some of his worst instincts, he was not able to
Speaker 1: engage in. It feels like that's not going to happen
Speaker 1: this time.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So I think there's two ways that responded that. The
Speaker 3: first is that I separate out of my mind the
Speaker 3: worst of Trump's behavior and the threat he poses to
Speaker 3: the country into two camps. One of them is policy
Speaker 3: that's reversible. Right, So, this is the kind of stuff
Speaker 3: where you pass legislation and then if the Democrats win
Speaker 3: in a couple of years, they could undo it. Right now,
Speaker 3: that stuff is very bad, potentially, like a lot of
Speaker 3: the policies he's proposing are awful, but it is reversible.
Speaker 3: The stuff that's not reversible is the destruction of democracy
Speaker 3: and the erosion of democratic institutions and norms, which can
Speaker 3: take literally generations.
Speaker 5: To rebuild, if at all.
Speaker 3: And so I think the thing that the mainstream media's characterization,
Speaker 3: as you put it before, of the sort of first
Speaker 3: Trump presidency as not as bad is that, yes, some
Speaker 3: of the policy stuff was blocked, but the erosion of
Speaker 3: americans civic life, the erosion of democratic norms, it's so
Speaker 3: clear that that has happened for precisely the reasons I'm
Speaker 3: talking about where we're now thinking about putting, you know,
Speaker 3: a person in charge of health who's an anti vaccine,
Speaker 3: person who beheaded a whale. I mean, you have aspects
Speaker 3: where you have sexual offenders up and down the list
Speaker 3: of nominees, and that's viewed as something that's not just
Speaker 3: acceptable but actually being cheerleaded by a lot of the
Speaker 3: Republicans in power. And the sort of just normalization of
Speaker 3: attacks on the press and talking about shutting down news organizations,
Speaker 3: the politicization of rule of law, etc. So what I
Speaker 3: worry about is that the second term is going to
Speaker 3: have both of those things. It's going to have a
Speaker 3: lot more terrible policy and a lot worse violations of
Speaker 3: democratic norms and attacks on institutions. So you know, I
Speaker 3: think that there is a way in which Democrats can
Speaker 3: try to block some of this stuff because of the
Speaker 3: really narrow majority the Republicans have in the House, for example,
Speaker 3: But you know, they're prepared this time. The agenda is
Speaker 3: much more set, and I think I think that Trump
Speaker 3: also is not going to be as hesitant with his
Speaker 3: instincts in power, because I think he thinks that his
Speaker 3: first term was was sort of hampered by the fact
Speaker 3: that he didn't go far enough.
Speaker 1: So what do you say to people who say, and
Speaker 1: I am one of these people, and I think I'm
Speaker 1: probably wrong because I've decided that optimism has been my
Speaker 1: achilles heel when it comes to political prognosticating. I mean,
Speaker 1: not prognosticating, but because we don't want to prognosticate here.
Speaker 1: But what do you think about the idea that somehow
Speaker 1: public markets will provide some kind of check on Trump?
Speaker 3: Well, I think that the problem with that is that
Speaker 3: there's a lot of authoritarian regimes that make a lot
Speaker 3: of money. What we're talking about, and this is where
Speaker 3: I think it's important to sort of highlight what people
Speaker 3: like me are talking about when they say that a
Speaker 3: country is going to become, you know, semi authoritarian or
Speaker 3: lose its democratic institutions. I'm not envisioning, you know, a
Speaker 3: situation like a lot of people picture where you have,
Speaker 3: you know, martial law and tanks rumbling through the streets
Speaker 3: and all this type of stuff. When I went to
Speaker 3: when I've gone to authoritarian regimes and lived in regimes
Speaker 3: to study them, what you realize that life sort of
Speaker 3: goes on. It's just that people don't have a meaningful say,
Speaker 3: in politics anymore. Right, So what's the big difference is
Speaker 3: the reversibility and markets are able to adapt to this
Speaker 3: as long as they have some level of predictability, so
Speaker 3: you have you know, obviously it's terrible, right, I'm not
Speaker 3: trying to sugarcuat authoritarians. It's a terrible, terrible system that
Speaker 3: stifle's freedom of expression, crushes rights, is really bad for
Speaker 3: the economy over the long term, is terrible for innovation,
Speaker 3: and is awful for freedom. But at the same time, like,
Speaker 3: there are a lot of companies that I think would
Speaker 3: adapt to a semi authoritarian regime in which you know,
Speaker 3: you can't criticize the presidents as openly, or judges are
Speaker 3: simply overtly partisan and going after political enemies. I think
Speaker 3: there's a lot of companies that would still make money
Speaker 3: in that situation. And so while I think that your
Speaker 3: rights in terms of things like there might be pushback
Speaker 3: on you know, millions of people getting deported if it
Speaker 3: was going to hurt GDP and hurt the labor force
Speaker 3: and so on, that's slightly different from you know, how
Speaker 3: much is Wall Street going to react if you have
Speaker 3: judges and henchman from the FBI who are going after
Speaker 3: Liz Cheney, and I suspect the answer is probably not
Speaker 3: that much, which is the sort of dark side of
Speaker 3: how capitalism and authoritarianism can sometimes work together.
Speaker 1: I'm more thinking about, Like, again, the Liz Cheney stuff
Speaker 1: is for sure coming down the pike.
Speaker 4: That seems inevitable. The thing that gives me pause.
Speaker 1: Here is the idea that actually America has done this.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, I am a person whose grandfather
Speaker 1: was jailed by a Republican president for his political beliefs,
Speaker 1: so you know, I wasn't born yet because I'm only
Speaker 1: thirty six. But the idea that America is a benevolent force.
Speaker 1: First of all, if you live in the Middle East,
Speaker 1: that's never been true. But even like, the idea that
Speaker 1: America's a benevolent force to Americans is a pretty new ideology,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 4: I think it's a very worrying development.
Speaker 1: It also strikes me that, I mean, you even see
Speaker 1: in this admin, in this coming admen, that they are
Speaker 1: going to go for laws that are still in the books,
Speaker 1: right like Jim Crow era laws, Victorian era laws. This
Speaker 1: is the America we know. Not to be too Synegalue.
Speaker 3: I think there is a truth to that, which is
Speaker 3: that there's a way in which the past is romanticized. Right,
Speaker 3: So like when we talk about like the sort of
Speaker 3: America of the past, we tend to think about many
Speaker 3: of the good bits. We talk about d Day, but
Speaker 3: we don't talk about Jim Crow, or we talk about
Speaker 3: you know, Abraham Lincoln. But you know, there's a lot
Speaker 3: of stuff in the aftermath of the Civil War that
Speaker 3: was disastrously terrible for a significant part of the country,
Speaker 3: particularly minorities. And so I think this is the kind
Speaker 3: of stuff where, yes, there is a romanticization of the past.
Speaker 3: What I will say though, is that much of American
Speaker 3: institutions in the modern era have been broadly speaking democratic,
Speaker 3: And what we talk about when we study, you know,
Speaker 3: the breakdown of democracy and so on, is really about
Speaker 3: institutions which base means are you able to have fair
Speaker 3: rules in politics such that if a different party comes
Speaker 3: to power, can they undo what has been done before?
Speaker 3: And I think that's the stuff that's really scary. That's
Speaker 3: the stuff that you see in Hungary and Poland and
Speaker 3: the Philippines and Russia over time and so on, where
Speaker 3: it's like, at some point it becomes what is deemed
Speaker 3: as you know, competitive authoritarianism, where there's sort of an
Speaker 3: aspect of competition where parties do compete, but basically the
Speaker 3: field is not level.
Speaker 5: In other words, it's a rigged game.
Speaker 1: Which is what's happening right now in North Carolina. Right
Speaker 1: North Carolina, the governor is about to take over. It's
Speaker 1: another democratic governor. The state House is freaking out, and
Speaker 1: so they're trying to pass non democratic norms. I just
Speaker 1: wonder how much this was cooking under the scenes before Trump.
Speaker 1: Isn't this in some ways like the work of John
Speaker 1: Roberts as much as anyone.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, so you have to have a certain
Speaker 3: level of permissive factors before.
Speaker 5: He gets destroyed.
Speaker 3: Right, So in other words, you know, Trump didn't create
Speaker 3: the situation where US democracy was vulnerable, but he is
Speaker 3: the person who's likely to burn.
Speaker 4: It down exploit it. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, There's so many things that American democracy has obvious
Speaker 3: need of reform. I mean, jerrymandering is a classic one.
Speaker 5: You have an.
Speaker 3: Aspect with the electoral college, which is unique in modern democracies,
Speaker 3: where you have a person who gets fewer votes wins
Speaker 3: the presidency. You have the Supreme Court justices in a
Speaker 3: political appointment for life that doesn't exist in most other democracies.
Speaker 3: You have the role of money in politics, right, which
Speaker 3: is again the US is a major outlier. So all
Speaker 3: of these things are areas where the US is like
Speaker 3: completely different from most quote unquote normal, advanced democracies. And
Speaker 3: what Trump is doing is he's exploiting this such that
Speaker 3: you could have potentially minority rule for the foreseeable future,
Speaker 3: where even if Republicans lose future elections, their policies might
Speaker 3: continue because, for example, the Supreme Court knocks them down.
Speaker 3: Or you could have Trump overtly committing crime and not
Speaker 3: be held accountable because his Supreme Court, which he largely appointed,
Speaker 3: is saying he's immune as law as an official conduct.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 3: This is the kind of stuff where the danger zones
Speaker 3: are created by the sort of breakdown of norms and
Speaker 3: these sort of steady slow shifts, and then Trump is
Speaker 3: the person who takes advantage of it and knocks democracy
Speaker 3: down in a much bigger way in a shorter period
Speaker 3: of time. So I agree with your characterization, like there's
Speaker 3: a huge number of vulnerabilities, but I still think that
Speaker 3: like if Hillary Clinton had won, or if Kamala Harris
Speaker 3: had won, that those vulnerabilities would sort of stumble on
Speaker 3: weak but not destroyed. And now there's I think there's
Speaker 3: a risk of some of.
Speaker 5: The institutions getting destroyed.
Speaker 1: If you are a Democrat in the Senate right now,
Speaker 1: what would you say they should be doing? Because I'm
Speaker 1: seeing Klobashar do a fucking bill about the ball devil.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I think you know, this is the kind
Speaker 3: of stuff where you need to have both moral clarity
Speaker 3: that you don't get how because you lost an election
Speaker 3: and you need to pick your battles. And I think
Speaker 3: this is the kind of stuff where despite the fact
Speaker 3: that I, like you, have been at times overly optimistic,
Speaker 3: I still believe that there's a significant majority of Americans
Speaker 3: who look at someone, you know, if they knew about
Speaker 3: Pete Hegseth's police report or his past misconduct, that they
Speaker 3: would care about that, right, And like, this is the
Speaker 3: kind of stuff where you have to you have to
Speaker 3: draw lines in the sand and say these people are
Speaker 3: not fit for for office. It's not a question of,
Speaker 3: you know, whether we agree with their policies or not.
Speaker 3: It's that how can we not agree that this person
Speaker 3: is not qualified? To lead the most advanced, you know,
Speaker 3: fighting force the world has ever seen. And it's the
Speaker 3: kind of thing where I think the Senate Democrats really
Speaker 3: need to get together with one voice and not engage
Speaker 3: in sort of overtures of fake by partisanship like the
Speaker 3: Bald Eagle Bill, but really really be a clear and
Speaker 3: sort of selective fighting force that actually goes against the
Speaker 3: worst of the Trump machinations. But this does require and
Speaker 3: this is something that I think needs to be different
Speaker 3: from the first term. It's something I've learned personally. You
Speaker 3: don't need to chase every single you know, shiny object,
Speaker 3: and you know, I simultaneously think that it's important to
Speaker 3: highlight a lot of the crazy behavior that Trump does
Speaker 3: that's disqualifying. I also think that you have a case
Speaker 3: where you can only get so much of your message
Speaker 3: through and so the Senate Democrats really need to focus
Speaker 3: on a couple things that are really really important and
Speaker 3: that they're going to win on politically.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. That is the flooding
Speaker 4: the zone, right, They've fled the zone.
Speaker 1: They make so much outrage that you can't keep the
Speaker 1: outrages straight. And the reality is right now, it's his inauguration,
Speaker 1: then it will be these cabinet hearings. Then it will
Speaker 1: be something else, right, I mean, so here's another question,
Speaker 1: and again remembering our optimism problem, you and I, there
Speaker 1: is a CR, a continuing resolution. It is sitting on
Speaker 1: the desk of Mike Johnson to pork Laiden bill. It
Speaker 1: is also the only chance to keep the government funded.
Speaker 1: It expires in March. Elon is mad about it. The
Speaker 1: Vague is furious. Neither of those guys work in the
Speaker 1: federal government in any capacity. But it does show that
Speaker 1: Donald Trump has many, many, many people who put him
Speaker 1: in office, all of whom are going to want their goodies.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, I think this is an issue though
Speaker 3: where what's going to happen is what happens to most
Speaker 3: populist parties who are actually given the chance to govern.
Speaker 3: Is that what you say in a tweet, as Elon Musk,
Speaker 3: he knows very little about how the government actually operates
Speaker 3: or what you promise on a campaign is very different
Speaker 3: from what actually happens when you govern. And you know,
Speaker 3: I think at some point reality is going to bite
Speaker 3: here when these people talk about two trillion dollars of cuts.
Speaker 3: I mean, the delusional. Right, It's like simple basic math
Speaker 3: that if you were going to do this, it would
Speaker 3: require you to do some of the most politically unpopular
Speaker 3: things in a century. And so maybe they do it
Speaker 3: and it blows up in their face, or maybe it
Speaker 3: just becomes another one of those empty promises. But I
Speaker 3: think this is the kind of stuff where at some point,
Speaker 3: you know, I am of two minds on this, because
Speaker 3: the Democrats can only block so much. And I think
Speaker 3: that if you end up having a situation where the
Speaker 3: Republicans try to govern and catastrophically fail at doing so,
Speaker 3: that over the long term, that might actually be beneficial
Speaker 3: for American democracy to show people this truly does not work.
Speaker 4: And that's a ten million dollar question.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And the question is how much harm is going
Speaker 3: to have to happen in the meantime. Right, That's the
Speaker 3: debate I think Democrats are having is that if you
Speaker 3: block everything, you might muddle through and you might still
Speaker 3: get blamed for everything.
Speaker 1: You can't block everything. The good news is that's a
Speaker 1: false choice.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 1: They don't control the House, they don't control the Senate.
Speaker 1: There is no blocking, right. I mean, that's the other
Speaker 1: thing is like there, it's sort of just a triage situation.
Speaker 4: What I'm wondering when we talk about.
Speaker 1: Like, you know, the thing that I'm so struck by
Speaker 1: is they want to cut the federal government but don't
Speaker 1: exist right because Republicans want to keep these tax cuts
Speaker 1: for billionaires.
Speaker 4: I mean, you know, they could just let the tax
Speaker 4: cuts expire. I mean nobody is talking about that. Why
Speaker 4: is nobody talking about that?
Speaker 3: Well, this is the kind of stuff where like the
Speaker 3: Democrats have a really easy and actually like good form
Speaker 3: of populism that they can run on, right, that they
Speaker 3: can actually highlight what exists in this moment for most
Speaker 3: Americans is anger at elites and also grotesque inequality that
Speaker 3: people are really fed up about, right, And so I
Speaker 3: think it's kind of one of these things where you
Speaker 3: have this bizarre situation where a series of ultra rich
Speaker 3: people are sort of self dealing, right, whether it's through corruption,
Speaker 3: funneling stuff to the Trump organization and trying to make
Speaker 3: money off government, or Elon Musk trying to get you know,
Speaker 3: much better advantages and also doubling his wealth after the election.
Speaker 3: Apparently all this type of stuff at the same time that,
Speaker 3: as you say, they're trying to cut taxes for rich people,
Speaker 3: and you know, the Democrats have to focus on the
Speaker 3: sort of core aspects of this that this is something
Speaker 3: where you know, the idea that the Republicans are seeing
Speaker 3: to be the ones burning down the system, when in
Speaker 3: fact they're basically entrenching this system of inequality that's gotten
Speaker 3: steadily worse since the nineteen eighties is a failure of
Speaker 3: political messaging. And so, you know, I think that's the
Speaker 3: issue where Democrats really need to dig their heels on
Speaker 3: what is truly important and pick three or four messages
Speaker 3: and just have the discipline to hammer them over and
Speaker 3: over and over. And Trump, for all of his failings,
Speaker 3: the one thing he's very good at is getting through
Speaker 3: to people what he stands for. And he's always been
Speaker 3: the immigration guy, and like Democrats or Republicans know that
Speaker 3: about him, no matter all the crazy things he says.
Speaker 3: And I think there's a lot of voters who don't
Speaker 3: know what the Democratic Party at its core stands for
Speaker 3: right now. And that's the problem.
Speaker 1: Well, and Democrats did a very stupid thing by not
Speaker 1: elevating AOC who is their best messenger. But instead of
Speaker 1: putting Jerry Connolly in the leadership seventy six year old
Speaker 1: through cancer patient Jerry Connolly, which as much as we look,
Speaker 1: I mean, my husband had cancer. This is you know,
Speaker 1: a real thing that people can get through. But it's
Speaker 1: still like here we are in a desperate moment in
Speaker 1: American life where Democrats have told us that we are
Speaker 1: on the precipice and they're just elevating their fracts.
Speaker 3: You can't really get away with as a party arguing
Speaker 3: that this is an existential threat to democracy, which I
Speaker 3: think it is, and then focus your time on like
Speaker 3: bald eagle bills and having old guard figures that don't
Speaker 3: fire anybody up run these committees. I mean, you have
Speaker 3: to fight. You have to if you say that this
Speaker 3: is an existential threat to democracy and then you sort
Speaker 3: of don't fight. It's like, well, hold on, there's one
Speaker 3: of these two things is wrong, and either your behavior
Speaker 3: is wrong or your diagnosis of the problem is wrong.
Speaker 3: And I the other false choice that I think is
Speaker 3: being put before the discourse as it were around the Democrats'
Speaker 3: response to the election is like was this bad or
Speaker 3: was this not so bad?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 3: Well, okay, it was a narrow loss in the in
Speaker 3: the sort of popular vote that doesn't mean you shouldn't
Speaker 3: be smart about politics right like it means it doesn't.
Speaker 3: It doesn't mean change nothing. And I think what's clear
Speaker 3: about the Democrats is there, Chris, I think rightly as
Speaker 3: a party that mostly is governed by older people and
Speaker 3: you know, doesn't have a lot of really sharp talent
Speaker 3: that is, you know, super super visible on a daily basis, I.
Speaker 1: Think that's wrong. I would say they have a lot
Speaker 1: of talent. They're just I mean, even Hakem.
Speaker 3: I said I think perceived. Though I said perceived. I
Speaker 3: think there's tons of talents in the Democratic bench.
Speaker 5: I'm thinking that.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure that's right though, because I think I mean,
Speaker 1: I think that, look, there's a there's a gerontocracy that
Speaker 1: is desperately trying to grasp on and keep those young
Speaker 1: people down. But fundamentally the leadership is still significantly younger.
Speaker 1: I mean, Mike Johnson is young, but Mike Johnson is
Speaker 1: It may not even be able to pass this CR
Speaker 1: but I do agree that there is for sure. I mean,
Speaker 1: whatever they're doing, this is not the way to do it.
Speaker 1: I really appreciate you coming on. I hope you will
Speaker 1: come back and we can talk about this more.
Speaker 3: Yeah, sounds great.
Speaker 2: Hours the director of Carvil Witting is Everything and Where's
Speaker 2: by Roy Cohne.
Speaker 4: Welcome back to Fast Politics, Matt.
Speaker 5: Thank you great to be here.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 1: I really wanted to have you on because besides your
Speaker 1: incredible Carvel doc which everyone should watch it is really fun,
Speaker 1: is just awesome, you have done a bunch of other
Speaker 1: movies and also including a really brilliant Roy Cohen movie.
Speaker 4: But I was hoping you would talk for twenty minutes
Speaker 4: or two. But who's scanting about a person that I knew?
Speaker 4: But you really knew Gorby.
Speaker 5: Daal Loadly, you know, it's funny. Your mam, I know,
Speaker 5: was friends of Gorbie Dolls and they were literary stars
Speaker 5: at the same time, and growing up, I thought he
Speaker 5: was just extraordinary and I started reading his books when
Speaker 5: I was very young, and he was the type of
Speaker 5: public intellectual who was always on The Big Cavage Show
Speaker 5: and the Johnny Carson Show. And this was an era
Speaker 5: that I really miss in American cult. Sure me too. Yeah,
Speaker 5: And I encourage listeners to google Habits shows with the
Speaker 5: Doll and Mailer and even Capodi and Buckley and all
Speaker 5: these guys. Were always beating publicly, but the conversation compared
Speaker 5: to today, was so high blinded, and I think the
Speaker 5: doll was the highest minded of them all. I would
Speaker 5: have been jealous of someone like you who was born
Speaker 5: into having a Gorvi doll in your living room at
Speaker 5: a cocktail party when you were six years old. Always thought, Oh,
Speaker 5: if only my parents would get Gorvy doll over here.
Speaker 5: That's how strange a child I was.
Speaker 4: Tell me how you met Gorbidal, Well.
Speaker 5: That's what I'm getting at it, because it eventually what
Speaker 5: I realized is that medium on my own power was
Speaker 5: better than you know. Not to take anything away from
Speaker 5: your pixy.
Speaker 4: Dutch sprinkle childhood, please do.
Speaker 5: The medium on my own power was even more thrilling.
Speaker 5: I had been a writer for Vidanity Fair. Graydon Carter
Speaker 5: tapped me at a thirdly too young an age to
Speaker 5: write features for the magazine, and it was the ultimate
Speaker 5: candy store of journalism at that time. And Vidal being
Speaker 5: one of my cultural and literary heroes, he wasn't writing
Speaker 5: for Vanity Sayer. He was writing all these for the
Speaker 5: Nation and the New York Review of Books, and I
Speaker 5: thought he should be in Vanity Sayre and I'd ask
Speaker 5: grading part of if I could approach him, and I did.
Speaker 5: He had a piece that he wanted to get published,
Speaker 5: and it was on It seems prescient now, and many
Speaker 5: of the teachers that he did with me, editing them
Speaker 5: in vanity fairs, seemed really prescient. Now we fall on
Speaker 5: the destruction of the Bill of Rights. He was really
Speaker 5: on to this moment we're having in this country, a
Speaker 5: generation or more ahead of when it came to pass,
Speaker 5: which was that the Bill of Rights was being trashed
Speaker 5: and that there was going to be an uprising of
Speaker 5: populism in the country because it was becoming an oligarchy
Speaker 5: and a kleptocracy. And I well, that piece was in
Speaker 5: the mid nineties. But if you go back and look
Speaker 5: at the collective essays of gord Udal, which there are
Speaker 5: many volumes, there's one called United States, which is the
Speaker 5: big kahuna that I recommend that highly. You'll see essays
Speaker 5: from the seventies and eighties called the Day America ran
Speaker 5: out of Gas, and even an entire volume of essays
Speaker 5: called the Second American Revolution, which was mostly about or
Speaker 5: predicting a moment like this, And he frequently called for
Speaker 5: and I think tried to create a constitutional convention. I
Speaker 5: think he was part of an organization with doctor Spock,
Speaker 5: the pediatrician, not the fictional character of Star Trek, and
Speaker 5: some other lefty activists to do a new constitutional convention,
Speaker 5: which this is now being talked about from the populace
Speaker 5: right mostly I'm hearing about it now, But Vidal was
Speaker 5: onto that. But basically he was kind of holding his
Speaker 5: deathoscope up to the nation, the body politic, and he
Speaker 5: was hearing bad things and he was warning about them constantly,
Speaker 5: and that was I think one of the great contributions
Speaker 5: that he made. He was a very strange blend of
Speaker 5: and ROOSEVELTI in upper class liberalism with some strange of
Speaker 5: conservatism and populism as well. He kind of made his
Speaker 5: own brew that way. But boy did he have traction.
Speaker 5: I mean, he was on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carrson.
Speaker 5: He sold millions of copies of books, both historical fiction
Speaker 5: and kind of experimental nonfiction. He was a household name.
Speaker 5: He was incredibly glamorous. And then the last thing I'll
Speaker 5: say before about it back to you is that he
Speaker 5: was gay. And he was very ahead of his time
Speaker 5: in being a voice for what then would have been called,
Speaker 5: I think kind of creepily gay lib. It got shortened
Speaker 5: to gaylib at the time, but it actually termed that
Speaker 5: he didn't like gay liberation, but it was about It
Speaker 5: was about human rights and equal rights, and not so
Speaker 5: much gay marriage, which I don't think he would have
Speaker 5: been in favor of, which is why I think he's
Speaker 5: very out of fashion today, which is something I will
Speaker 5: want to talk about with you because I think that's
Speaker 5: really important. I think my diagnosis as to why is
Speaker 5: that he was the ultimate unidentitarian. He did not really
Speaker 5: think identity politics, which didn't have a name when he
Speaker 5: was in his prime, was a good thing, and that
Speaker 5: included being tagged as a gay writer or a gay
Speaker 5: thinker just didn't appeal to him. He thought that homosexuality
Speaker 5: was just a normal fact of human nature and didn't
Speaker 5: need to be called out or demagogue as an identity,
Speaker 5: that it was just a fact of life. He was
Speaker 5: very ahead of his time with that, but he's also
Speaker 5: very out of that right now.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's interesting.
Speaker 1: I actually wanted to talk to you about how out
Speaker 1: of fashion he is because almost all of those public
Speaker 1: intellectual of that time are out of fashion Mailer.
Speaker 4: I'm trying to remember who else we were just talking about.
Speaker 5: Well, you know, Capodi wasn't really so much a public intellectual,
Speaker 5: but they were all grouped together that they were literary superstars.
Speaker 5: And the more public intellectual ones that got on TV
Speaker 5: were Janet Lanner, who was of corresponding for The New Yorker.
Speaker 5: Sometimes journalists, new journalists such as gay to Lead, Tomwold
Speaker 5: were all on TV blogging their book, but they were
Speaker 5: talking about ideas and talking about politics.
Speaker 4: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1: But Mailer and those guys, those public intellectuals are sort
Speaker 1: of lost to history. And if you think about I
Speaker 1: was actually watching the Best of Enemies, there really is
Speaker 1: a sense in which those kind of people, they're just
Speaker 1: no longer read the same way, right.
Speaker 5: Correct, It was a species. It was perfect for the
Speaker 5: mid century muscular network universe that twentieth century, the late
Speaker 5: twentieth century people were raised in That's the way it was.
Speaker 5: That's why publishing and network television were so strong and
Speaker 5: wildly profitable because the way they were organized at that time,
Speaker 5: it wasn't atomized. They were programmed basically by gatekeepers and editors,
Speaker 5: and their books were acquired by these publishing houses, and
Speaker 5: there was then the greed upon agenda. And you can
Speaker 5: argue with whether the greed upon agenda mid century United
Speaker 5: States was exactly perfect, but I would argue that the
Speaker 5: people that took their role seriously in that, at least
Speaker 5: from my perspective, as I'm on the left side of
Speaker 5: the spectrum, and there were figures on the right as
Speaker 5: well who were gave up. And plenty of oxygen blamed
Speaker 5: by Buckley Junior, et cetera. Not on They're Barring, which
Speaker 5: took place in the pages and on the airwaves of
Speaker 5: the legacy media, was just epic. It was really like
Speaker 5: now it seems like Jurassic Park, but it was really
Speaker 5: like the Land of the Giants. And you know the
Speaker 5: last one, by the way, I want to call out
Speaker 5: the title of the movie that you referenced, and the
Speaker 5: Best of Enemies, which is a movie by Morgan Neville,
Speaker 5: a friend of mine, which is very good and I'm
Speaker 5: a talking head in it, kind of standing up for
Speaker 5: Vidal and Vidalism, and I'm proud to be in that film.
Speaker 5: Worth watching, and you'll see that era depicted in it.
Speaker 5: But I think the last person who was of that
Speaker 5: ill is Christopher Hitchin, who died more than ten years
Speaker 5: ago now I think just ten years ago, and he
Speaker 5: was very related to Vidal. In fact, it was Hitchin
Speaker 5: who formally introduced me to Gore because Christopher and I
Speaker 5: were colleague. Then he's there and Vidal had This is
Speaker 5: actually a fun literary fact about a feud. Vidal had
Speaker 5: kind of annoyed Hitchins, his successor, and made a big
Speaker 5: deal about it, and people did things. Then he called
Speaker 5: him the Dafahn and said that he would take the
Speaker 5: doll's place when he passed from the stage. That was
Speaker 5: Vidal talking about him. Well, that was not going to
Speaker 5: work because some of them. An ego as big as
Speaker 5: Gore had immortality, I think as part of his plan
Speaker 5: and the idea that Christopher was out there getting more
Speaker 5: attention at times than he was, and also he was,
Speaker 5: you know, at least twenty years older than Christopher wasn't
Speaker 5: going to sit well. Ultimately. I think those of us
Speaker 5: who knew them both saw this at the slow motion
Speaker 5: car accident that was unfolding our eyes. Then they they
Speaker 5: had an epic falling out that took place in the
Speaker 5: pages of Vanity Fair, where Hitchens wrote a takedown piece
Speaker 5: of his former idol call in the headline was vidal Loco,
Speaker 5: which was the play on the Vita Loca song of
Speaker 5: the moment. Sort of embarrassing it now to talk about
Speaker 5: that got a lot of attentions for the last gas
Speaker 5: of the time when these two people would spar But
Speaker 5: another point I want to raise that's absolutely baffling to me.
Speaker 5: And I love Christopher, and I think Christopher the treasure,
Speaker 5: but Christopher Hitchens is not out for some reason. The
Speaker 5: message of Hitchens and the persona of Hitchens really clipped
Speaker 5: with millennial and gen On Neilson's gen Z. And I
Speaker 5: think the thing that would hurt orvide all the most
Speaker 5: if you were around today is to know that someone
Speaker 5: in their twenties actually knew who Christopher Hitchims was and
Speaker 5: said the name Lord. He is trying to summon a
Speaker 5: lightning bolt from above or below to send it back
Speaker 5: to the living world, to show us how leasy is
Speaker 5: about that.
Speaker 1: Yes, and I have to say, as someone who knew
Speaker 1: Gore not nearly as well as you, that sounds one
Speaker 1: hundred percent right.
Speaker 4: But it's also that was how my grandfather was, That
Speaker 4: was my mother was.
Speaker 1: That you know that that kind of literary shot was
Speaker 1: such a typical outgrowth of those people's egos.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and you know, I'm having a thought based on
Speaker 5: your thought right now. I think in a pre social
Speaker 5: media age, it was the precursor. It was sort of
Speaker 5: like the err version of picking fights on Twitter. Yeah,
Speaker 5: and they just had to do it on a much
Speaker 5: bigger stage because that was the stage that they had.
Speaker 5: And someone's doing a PhD thesis on all of this
Speaker 5: right now.
Speaker 4: Oh good, excellent, It'll be eager to read it.
Speaker 1: One of the things I'm struck by with Gore was
Speaker 1: that he was both very, very very left wing, probably
Speaker 1: as left wing as say come, but also very much
Speaker 1: a product of the Washington d C.
Speaker 4: He grew up in. Will you talk about that?
Speaker 5: This is a deep thing here, PM Black, and has
Speaker 5: to do with the entire scope of twentieth century politics. Really.
Speaker 5: He was the grandson of a populist senator who was
Speaker 5: one of the first senators of Oklahoma, Tomad Pryor Gore,
Speaker 5: and he was very proud of this fact, and he
Speaker 5: used it to launch his pedigree in that period. He
Speaker 5: was the Gorvidal you have to realize, was byronic, almost
Speaker 5: like a modern Lord Byron. He was very handsome and
Speaker 5: so brilliantly spoken, made for television and radio, a literary master.
Speaker 4: And it came from a grand upbringing.
Speaker 5: Too grand, but relatively impoverished, which is even better, right
Speaker 5: he marketed all of this. He was step in to
Speaker 5: Jacqueline Kennedy o'nassis because they shared the same stepfather, who
Speaker 5: was a very wealthy.
Speaker 4: Man, jack Black Bouvier.
Speaker 5: Right, well, no, that was Jackie's father, but the mutual
Speaker 5: stepfather was you B alcin Claus, who was compared to
Speaker 5: a standard oil fortune. And Jackie's mother married Aufkins laws
Speaker 5: and with Janet alkin class. But the previous Missus Alcinclaus
Speaker 5: was Nina or Vidal, who was Gorvidal's very beautiful mother
Speaker 5: who was a DC socialite in a flapper in mid century.
Speaker 5: And out of this background comes this matinee idol looking
Speaker 5: World War two veteran who surprised the world with a
Speaker 5: galar first novel called Willa Waugh in forty eight, I
Speaker 5: believe when he's eighteen or nineteen years old, well, one
Speaker 5: of the first war novels. And that's where Mailer made
Speaker 5: his name. He had a war novel The Naked and
Speaker 5: the Dead I believe was that one. But then something
Speaker 5: very significant occurred, and this was his genius. And this
Speaker 5: is why I think that's unfair that he is out
Speaker 5: of fashion right now. In nineteen forty eight, I think
Speaker 5: was the third book. The first one was earlier forty six,
Speaker 5: and that was called The City and the Pillar. I
Speaker 5: highly recommend it. It was, believe it or not, that
Speaker 5: late in the game, the first novel in English to
Speaker 5: have an openly gay storyline to it. So the protagonist
Speaker 5: of the book is homosexual, so they would have said then.
Speaker 5: And it was a bit of a romong the Clay.
Speaker 5: It was sort of a bit of a biographical novel,
Speaker 5: and it shocked the world. I mean, it was planted
Speaker 5: like a bombshell, and Vidal became infamous as this kind
Speaker 5: of out a pretty boy in nineteen forty eight and
Speaker 5: was on all the bestseller lists. But it was sort
Speaker 5: of prescribed as a dirty book. This is where I
Speaker 5: think he and Erica Jong your mother might have had
Speaker 5: some ominality in their literary relationship, because no one quite
Speaker 5: knew what to do with her with fear of flying,
Speaker 5: If I'm correct, it was sort of like it's bestseller,
Speaker 5: done with dueled by its naughtiness, it's dirty bookness, but
Speaker 5: it was also intrinsic to it, and it was also
Speaker 5: regarded as a really good book too, So we'all had
Speaker 5: had that happen to him some twenty five years before
Speaker 5: twenty years maybe, And he becomes infamous, and this is
Speaker 5: the best kind of thing if you can manage it.
Speaker 5: It's very Lord Byron. Really Byron was infamous in his
Speaker 5: own day. And then right at the you know, on
Speaker 5: cute TV happened and he becomes a TV writer and
Speaker 5: a TV personality on the talk shows of the era,
Speaker 5: and he become this kind of eybrid hop literary hero
Speaker 5: TV star, but also really respected intellectual who was also
Speaker 5: an essayist and then later a playwright. He did it all,
Speaker 5: and he was a self made person who made all
Speaker 5: his fortune on his own, even though he had the pedigree.
Speaker 5: He was a political candidate. He ran for Conference and Senate,
Speaker 5: both unsuccessfully, with very close friends with Jfpa and part
Speaker 5: of the early days of what was called Pamelot the
Speaker 5: Kennedy port all seems so ridiculous now.
Speaker 1: And.
Speaker 5: Another feud with Bobby Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy took Bobby's side,
Speaker 5: and he had a big falling out with that part
Speaker 5: of his family, and he never let anything go to waste.
Speaker 5: He publicized that and wrote about it, and then turned
Speaker 5: on them violently and wrote this hilariously evil, cruel essays,
Speaker 5: all the while making good points about the dynasty of
Speaker 5: the Kennedys. And these things were on the cover of
Speaker 5: Escor magazine at the time, and then they were all
Speaker 5: repurposed in these best selling essay collections. But why this
Speaker 5: guy's out of fashion? I think it really has to
Speaker 5: do with the vogue for identity politics. I think if
Speaker 5: you look at the positions he took about the what
Speaker 5: it meant to be an American, which was an obsession
Speaker 5: of his, it was really not about identity politics. And it,
Speaker 5: oftentimes the discussion of same sexuality, as he would have
Speaker 5: put it, led because he was one of the few
Speaker 5: people's willing to talk about it publicly, and he was
Speaker 5: saying that homosexuality was negligible as a trait. It was
Speaker 5: the difference he said the son. In fact, the CBS
Speaker 5: special about homosexuality that was hosted by Mike Wallace and aired,
Speaker 5: I believe it was called the homosexuals. I encouraged people
Speaker 5: to watch it on YouTube. It's kind of creepy with
Speaker 5: Mike Wallace.
Speaker 4: I bet that's insane.
Speaker 5: Grilling Goorvidal on beIN full lifestyle, and he does famously
Speaker 5: to all that his sexuality or anyone's sexuality, and the
Speaker 5: devian from the norm, which he called the heterosexual dictatorship,
Speaker 5: with only the difference between blue eyes and brown eyes.
Speaker 5: People didn't want to hear that.
Speaker 4: It's such an interesting and important story of Gorvidal.
Speaker 1: Hopefully he will come back into fashion at some point.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much, Matt.
Speaker 5: Thank you.
Speaker 3: That's it for.
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