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 and the naacpieces. Florida's openly hostile and
Speaker 1: travel advisory is slamming Desantas. Yale professor Jason Stanley, author
Speaker 1: of How Propaganda Work, stops by to talk about.
Speaker 2: Where he sees our politics heading.
Speaker 1: Then we'll talk to the New Yorkers Adam Gopnik about
Speaker 1: his latest book, The Real Work on the Mystery of Mastery.
Speaker 1: But first we have legendary campaign manager the Lincoln Project,
Speaker 1: Stuart Stevens. Welcome back to Fast Politics. Stuart Stevens his
Speaker 1: for asking the party. Why great to be you know,
Speaker 1: I continue to be a fan and friend. I w
Speaker 1: want to talk to you about at the Republican primary contest.
Speaker 2: It's heating up.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I've done five of those. One was on the
Speaker 3: winning side four times, lost one.
Speaker 2: What was the winning one, Bob Dole?
Speaker 4: Okay, that's right against our truly triumphant victory against Pat Buchanan.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was a good one.
Speaker 4: After losing New Hampshire to Pat Buchanan, we finally began
Speaker 4: to beat him when he started holding large caliber weapons
Speaker 4: over his head at photo lot in Arizona and wearing
Speaker 4: a cowboy hat. If you can imagine any guy lived
Speaker 4: his entire life in DC, you know, a classic Catholic family,
Speaker 4: wearing cowboy hat and holding like a Winchester over his head.
Speaker 3: It was sort of absurd. Then I worked for George Bush.
Speaker 4: I moved down to Austin in ninety nine, where we
Speaker 4: brilliantly managed to take a sixty five point lead into
Speaker 4: New Hampshire and lose by nineteen Don McCain out spending
Speaker 4: in three to one.
Speaker 3: I have to say, you really have to get up
Speaker 3: very early morning and work at that. It does not
Speaker 3: happened by chance.
Speaker 2: I went wrong.
Speaker 4: McCain made the decision to only focus on New Hampshire
Speaker 4: and basically run for governor of New Hampshire and the
Speaker 4: way that all life imitates high school, when people like you,
Speaker 4: you liked them, and he completely ignored Iowa. I predicted
Speaker 4: at the time that by winning Iowa, whoever went Iowa,
Speaker 4: you would get a bump, and that would compensate for
Speaker 4: any sort of slingshot you above what was happening already
Speaker 4: in New Hampshire.
Speaker 3: That theory proved.
Speaker 4: To be sort of like gravity is a regional phenomenon.
Speaker 4: Bush won New Hampshire and went Iowa not very prettily nightmare.
Speaker 3: We did the whole Iowa.
Speaker 4: Caucusstant but we did the Iowa straw Pole thing the
Speaker 4: year before, which is one of the great scams. And
Speaker 4: then we went to New Hampshire and McCain this was
Speaker 4: at its peak when he was doing the Straight Talk Express.
Speaker 4: We would go, we would sneak away, like me and
Speaker 4: mart McKinnon and our crowd, you know, we'd sneak away
Speaker 4: and go to McCain rallies and then we go to
Speaker 4: our Bush rallies and we're like, oh, they're having so
Speaker 4: much more fun.
Speaker 3: Actually, it's an interesting little moment there. You know.
Speaker 4: For reasons that are complicated, we stopped polling at the
Speaker 4: very end, in part.
Speaker 3: Because we didn't know what we were going to do.
Speaker 4: Differently, I got a call from the other side, as
Speaker 4: you know, I have a lot of friends over there
Speaker 4: working for McCain on the day of the election from
Speaker 4: their poster good friends saying look, I'm you know, I'm
Speaker 4: sorry about this. This is you know, I'm not going
Speaker 4: to be easy. I said, well, I said, yeah, we're
Speaker 4: going to lose, and then those kinds of a policy goes,
Speaker 4: Oh you don't understand, do you? I said, what you're
Speaker 4: going to get crushed? I said, well, like more than five,
Speaker 4: there's another loan, polsy go is. The question is will
Speaker 4: it be twenty?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I was like, oh, okay, great.
Speaker 4: So you know I went and told the governor and
Speaker 4: our little crowd and Bush actually did it. You know,
Speaker 4: I was going around Saint Ronald Reagan won New Hampshire
Speaker 4: and fired everybody.
Speaker 3: We're sucked.
Speaker 4: And Busch got a little group together of us that afternoon,
Speaker 4: and by then exupposed were coming in to confirm it,
Speaker 4: and he said, look, and I screwed this up.
Speaker 3: You guys screwed this up. It's gonna be a really
Speaker 3: bad night.
Speaker 4: But the only thing that's gonna pissed me off if
Speaker 4: I hear anybody else in this room bad mouth to
Speaker 4: anybody else in this room, it's just my fault. We're
Speaker 4: gonna lose. We're gonna go down to South Carolina, we're
Speaker 4: gonna win. And a year from today, all you guys
Speaker 4: are gonna come to the White House and we're gonna
Speaker 4: laugh about this, and you're gonna get drunk I don't
Speaker 4: get drunk anymore. But we're gonna put this behind us,
Speaker 4: so forget it. It's over. And it was, you know,
Speaker 4: one of those moments when the campaign could have fallen apart.
Speaker 4: You know, you walk out of that room just for
Speaker 4: morning to like kill for the guy.
Speaker 3: He was right.
Speaker 4: We went down the South Caroline one and then I
Speaker 4: did Bush when he ran it wasn't really much of
Speaker 4: a race. Where running a race for re election in
Speaker 4: the primary. And then I worked for Romney in two
Speaker 4: thousand and eight. I got involved late in the campaign.
Speaker 2: That was after Mark left because Mark had a deal.
Speaker 2: Was meant he wasn't going to help him run against Obama.
Speaker 3: That was only for McCain.
Speaker 2: Oh, that was only for McCain.
Speaker 3: He was learning for McCain.
Speaker 4: And then we lost, and then to my surprise, Romney
Speaker 4: decided to run again.
Speaker 3: Romney was not planning to run.
Speaker 4: People think, oh, you know, Mitt Ronney must have immediately
Speaker 4: started planning to run. It's really not the case. You know,
Speaker 4: the guy ran, he lost, he dealt with it. He
Speaker 4: decided he wanted to write a book. And they've bought
Speaker 4: this place out in California, sold a house where they
Speaker 4: brought up the kids like a typical thing, you know,
Speaker 4: the five kids.
Speaker 3: That all graduate, all left the house. They're empty nesters.
Speaker 3: And he was happy as a clam sitting there.
Speaker 4: I used to go down and visit him there down
Speaker 4: in La Jolla, and then his kitchen by the beach,
Speaker 4: right in this book, and I never thought he'd run again.
Speaker 3: He only ran again, really because the economy was so bad.
Speaker 1: We're in this different time right now in American history
Speaker 1: that seems very dark in a lot of ways.
Speaker 4: Oh that is like saying in eighteen sixty, I don't know,
Speaker 4: maybe bad things will happen.
Speaker 2: Let's dig into that a little bit.
Speaker 1: I mean, it seems so crazy that we were going
Speaker 1: through normal political machinations when one side really doesn't believe
Speaker 1: in democracy anymore.
Speaker 4: I've been working on a new book. I've been thinking
Speaker 4: about this a lot and reading a lot about this
Speaker 4: a lot. And one of the keys when democracy slide
Speaker 4: into autocracy is the ability for autocracy to use the
Speaker 4: freedoms of a democracy to kill that democracy. And a
Speaker 4: case in point would be the Trump town hall. They
Speaker 4: want disappearance of normality. And to me, this is a
Speaker 4: great challenge for journalists in the twenty and twenty four race.
Speaker 4: It has the patina of being a normal political race.
Speaker 4: You have both parties, yet they still call themselves the
Speaker 4: same thing, whereas one has become an autocratic movement and
Speaker 4: one has no basis in truth our system. And you
Speaker 4: know this better that I of journalism always the greatest
Speaker 4: good with objectivity, and it is not equipped to handle this.
Speaker 4: All my journalist's friends and you have more and closer
Speaker 4: than I are struggling with this. It's not a normal race.
Speaker 4: And one of the challenges is how to talk about
Speaker 4: it without sounding alarmist. And you know I always say
Speaker 4: it's like a pandemic. Whatever you say at the beginning
Speaker 4: of sound alarmist and in the end of be inadequate.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a good point.
Speaker 4: It is the greatest danger we faced since eighteen sixty.
Speaker 4: It's not a Trump phenomenon because the party has now
Speaker 4: become trumpest. If this played out according to sort of
Speaker 4: classic form, Trump wouldn't be the nominee and they would
Speaker 4: probably going to DeSantis because it's typical autocratic movements to sort.
Speaker 3: Of in their next stage, move to a more cleaned
Speaker 3: up version.
Speaker 1: Right exactly this week, I did a bulwark event with
Speaker 1: those guys, and I am constantly having this same fight
Speaker 1: with Sarah Longwell again and again, which is she says
Speaker 1: that DeSantis is less dangerous than Trump, and my argument is,
Speaker 1: actually he's ten times more dangerous because if you see
Speaker 1: what he's done in Florida, Trump could never have done that,
Speaker 1: could never have figured out how to do that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I had a back and forth with David from about this,
Speaker 4: because David wrote a piece basically saying the same thing
Speaker 4: for The Atlantic. The plus side that I hear and
Speaker 4: you talked to Sarah, you can tell what she said
Speaker 4: is he's not crazy and he will function like a
Speaker 4: normal politician.
Speaker 3: I don't think not being crazy is really the standard.
Speaker 2: But also the fascistic attitudes are still there.
Speaker 1: Now I'm going to pull back and ask you a
Speaker 1: question because you know, yesterday had red fleece fested. Glenn
Speaker 1: Youngkin burst onto the scene not having announced, but having
Speaker 1: a video that certainly looks like he's about to announce.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I mean, Glenn Younkin is a parable of what happened
Speaker 4: to the Republican Party. He's the kind of guy at
Speaker 4: the time in my life I would have loved to
Speaker 4: have as a client. Seems like a normal human being,
Speaker 4: had a lot of money, nice to film. But look,
Speaker 4: so what happens. What happens to Glenn Younkin. So here's
Speaker 4: the guy you know, comes out of corporate world. Carl
Speaker 4: ol come saying, guy, but to advance in this party
Speaker 4: ends up in Arizona standing next to a total fucking lunatic,
Speaker 4: Carrie Lake, knowing that Carry Lake is a lunatic, and
Speaker 4: you have to do that. It's not that Youngkin changed
Speaker 4: Terry Lake. Terry Lake changed Younkin. And this is what
Speaker 4: the party demands. You cannot advance in this party. You
Speaker 4: get a debate up there. First question I would ask
Speaker 4: is is Joe Biden. Was he elected an a legal,
Speaker 4: unfair election? And that will be interesting. Asa Hutchinson, another
Speaker 4: former client of mine, will say yes. I think that
Speaker 4: Trump will say no. And what will Youngkin say? Maybe
Speaker 4: he never would have gotten too a competitive primary in Virginia.
Speaker 4: He was able to get the nomination by this convention
Speaker 4: system that they have, so he never had to go
Speaker 4: in front of the general Republican electorate. He ran a
Speaker 4: racist campaign while he was out there attacking Margaret Walker.
Speaker 4: He's sending his son to Georgetown Prep, which has seminars
Speaker 4: to Margaret Walker.
Speaker 3: Right, he knew what he was doing. So you can't
Speaker 3: do this halfway.
Speaker 4: You can't be sort of for democracy while you're trying
Speaker 4: to rise in an anti democratic party.
Speaker 3: You have to just confront it.
Speaker 4: The only person really who's there's really no one doing that,
Speaker 4: and you know, they very cleverly have said that you
Speaker 4: can't get in a debate unless you'll endorge the nominee.
Speaker 3: And this is where the whole language of.
Speaker 4: This Molly is is very same because saying I will
Speaker 4: support the nominee of a party, it's like saying nice
Speaker 4: to meet you when you're meeting someone you're really not
Speaker 4: glad to meet. It's just it's just a social convention almost,
Speaker 4: I'll support the nominee of the party, but now harmless whatever.
Speaker 4: But it's not when that person wants you to story
Speaker 4: a democracy.
Speaker 3: How do you deal with this?
Speaker 4: So Asa Hutchinson, who I think has run in Canadas,
Speaker 4: he's run the most honest campaign. I don't know if
Speaker 4: you've been following, but he's the one when Trump was
Speaker 4: indicted in New York he said we have to respect
Speaker 4: the jury system. He's a former US attorney. But I
Speaker 4: heard an interview with him and he was saying that
Speaker 4: he wants to be in the debate, and yes, he
Speaker 4: will say that he will support the nominee of the party,
Speaker 4: because you have to say that to be in the debates.
Speaker 3: So what is Chris Christy going to do?
Speaker 4: Another former client of mine, is he going to say
Speaker 4: he'll support the nominee. The irony of this is the
Speaker 4: party is being destroyed by abandoning the vagus that it
Speaker 4: claimed to say that it was for. You know, this
Speaker 4: will the party that was the Character Counts party. Peggy
Speaker 4: Newman wrote a book when character was king, and had
Speaker 4: it believed in that and stuck by it, it would
Speaker 4: never have accept the Trump.
Speaker 2: But once you go down that road, you can't go back,
Speaker 2: you yeah know.
Speaker 4: And that's why you know what I thought when I
Speaker 4: was working in the party were values turned out to
Speaker 4: be marketing slogans?
Speaker 3: Right? You know?
Speaker 4: I was the idiot that like when you know Chevrolet
Speaker 4: runs and ed saying that they're the heartbeat of America.
Speaker 4: I was taking my Chevy to like a cardiologist.
Speaker 1: So let me ask you. In Florida, you have DeSantis
Speaker 1: fighting with Disney. We're finding ourselves in this you know,
Speaker 1: Republican v capitalism versus capitalism kind of debacle.
Speaker 2: What do you think about that?
Speaker 3: Well, it's insane.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 4: I heard an interview with Larry Hogan, another client of
Speaker 4: my former client. You know, I was just a little
Speaker 4: lavy about it, like is there a governor of America
Speaker 4: that doesn't want Disney? It is the most anti conservative imaginable.
Speaker 4: And Desantas is a quintessentially sort of small damaged person.
Speaker 4: Trump is sort of a quint essentially big damage person.
Speaker 4: You're both damaged to go out and attack the Happiness company.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: It's almost like we were setting up a Saturday a joke,
Speaker 4: like what if the governor Florida attacked Disney? You know,
Speaker 4: you've got in a fight with Mickey Mouse and he's losing.
Speaker 4: I mean it used to be so we go from
Speaker 4: mister Gorbatrov, tear down this wall to I'm going to
Speaker 4: fight with Mickey Mouse. It is the smallness of it.
Speaker 4: It is the bathroom and bedrooms party.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 4: Ron Desanta spends more time talking about the bathrooms and
Speaker 4: the genitalia of underaged girls and boys to anyone who
Speaker 4: is not on a watch list or not a convicted pedophile.
Speaker 3: It is just weird. Normal people don't do this.
Speaker 2: But they think it's a winner for them.
Speaker 1: I mean that they're responding to the someone has told
Speaker 1: them this idea is a winner for them, right, I
Speaker 1: mean they're not just coming up with this out of nowhere.
Speaker 4: Well, someone has said it's a winner in a Republican primary.
Speaker 3: I think they're wrong.
Speaker 2: Is that Bannon?
Speaker 3: You know, I'm not in that room.
Speaker 4: I wouldn't be surprised if it is de Santus and
Speaker 4: his wife. You know, the whole idea that ron to
Speaker 4: Santas won Florida by nineteen points, so therefore he has
Speaker 4: great skill as a national politician.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 4: I worked for Bill Well, Massachusetts Republican governor. He won
Speaker 4: reelection by thirty three points in a blue state in Massachusetts.
Speaker 4: That didn't mean that the Republican Party had changed and
Speaker 4: he could take over the Republican Party. Rick Perry won
Speaker 4: reelection by double digits in Texas.
Speaker 3: And how did he do.
Speaker 4: When he ran for president in two thousand and twelve
Speaker 4: and he's running again.
Speaker 3: Yeah, mcbromney took him apart in one debate.
Speaker 4: DeSantis ran against Charlie crist Charlie crist was a client
Speaker 4: of mine. I did all of Charlie's races when he
Speaker 4: was a publican, and he won everyone. But in the
Speaker 4: history of modern politics in America, no Switcher has won
Speaker 4: a race for his former job, so Charlie law. So
Speaker 4: they take that there is just a need to invent
Speaker 4: DeSantis by the National Review crowd. He knows switch fork
Speaker 4: to pick up. He is well educated. You know, he
Speaker 4: won't embarrass you. He won't talk about having sex with
Speaker 4: his daughter in public. But that's where the threshold sort
Speaker 4: of is. But here's a guy talks about physically assaulting Falci.
Speaker 4: I want to throw this little elf across the Potomac.
Speaker 4: I mean, there was a time just saying that in
Speaker 4: himself would be disqualifying. A governor talking about taking a
Speaker 4: doctor who's saving millions of lives, who has saved millions
Speaker 4: of lives and assaulting them, and he would say that space.
Speaker 4: The essence of this whole trans thing is a way
Speaker 4: to refight same sex marriage, and it never was accepted
Speaker 4: by a lot of Republicans. They just got quiet about it,
Speaker 4: and they're trying to relitigate that. It's very much a
Speaker 4: party about going back to the past, afraid.
Speaker 3: Of the future.
Speaker 4: Iowa was a We're gonna have a whole conversation. I've
Speaker 4: done all these Iowa primaries. It's like thirty three thousand
Speaker 4: votes to win Iowa, right, It's like a little more
Speaker 4: in the student body of the University of Texas. Jeff
Speaker 4: row is running that campaign. He ran Ted Kruse's campaign.
Speaker 4: He has a list of the people who voted for
Speaker 4: Ted Cruz and nobody moves in Iowa. So and Mitt
Speaker 4: Romney had run in two thousand and eight and coming
Speaker 4: second in Iowa caucus in twenty twelve. Our plan initially
Speaker 4: was to skip to Iowa caucus and used to call
Speaker 4: it to Lebrea tar Pits of politics, it's.
Speaker 3: So easy to go in, hard to get out.
Speaker 4: But we had this list of everyone who voted for Mitt,
Speaker 4: and we kept going back to this list, thinking that
Speaker 4: they would drop off if Mid wasn't out there campaigning,
Speaker 4: And by kind of the end of November, they were
Speaker 4: still fer Mit.
Speaker 3: So it was like, Okay, we'll do it.
Speaker 4: So Mitt Romney campaign eight days in Iowa and want
Speaker 4: it more or less, that's a path to victory potentially
Speaker 4: for Trump. For the chances to take the cruise list
Speaker 4: and run a very nuts and bolts campaign.
Speaker 3: He could win Iowa.
Speaker 2: Stuart Stevens, thank you so much.
Speaker 3: Great to smalk.
Speaker 1: Jason Stanley is a Yale professor and author of How
Speaker 1: Fascism Works.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Fast Politics. Jason Stanley, Thank you so much.
Speaker 6: It's really great to be in conversation with you.
Speaker 1: Well, very excited and you have two books.
Speaker 2: But you know you're a brilliant academic.
Speaker 1: But how fascism works and how propaganda works?
Speaker 2: Why are you the person of the hour?
Speaker 6: Was my first piece for The New York Times in
Speaker 6: twenty eleven, I think, was on birtherism, Trump's conspiracy theory
Speaker 6: about Obama. So I've been tracking this kind of rise
Speaker 6: and disturbing propaganda means like conspiracy theories that unify figures
Speaker 6: against the enemies and are sort of problematic in liberal
Speaker 6: politics and liberal democratic politics. And I had always been
Speaker 6: studying fascist propaganda. That sort of my interests have been
Speaker 6: in My training is in philosophy, language and linguistics, and
Speaker 6: I really got interested in the structure of propaganda, how
Speaker 6: lots of different versions of propaganda work, and fascism was
Speaker 6: of course part of that background. And it's something familiar
Speaker 6: both from being a US citizen and.
Speaker 2: Parents' background.
Speaker 1: Yeah, talk to me a little bit about your parents' background,
Speaker 1: because I mean, I certainly, as a Nepo baby, have
Speaker 1: found myself very affected by my parents' stories.
Speaker 2: But your story is pretty interesting, Litosa.
Speaker 6: That I'll begin with my mother. My mother was through
Speaker 6: both my parents survived arts of the Holocaust. My mother
Speaker 6: was in the Gulag in Siberia from nineteen nineteen forty
Speaker 6: five and then, which she always talked.
Speaker 2: Up as well she should, I mean, yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 6: So because she wasn't being murdered along with her cousins
Speaker 6: and aunts and uncles in.
Speaker 2: Poland, how did she end up in the Gulag and.
Speaker 6: Not shot over ditches? After the Multi Ribbon Trope packed,
Speaker 6: they split Poland and the Nazis took half, Salin took
Speaker 6: the other half.
Speaker 3: And Stalin took one hundred.
Speaker 6: And thirty thousand Polish Jews into the Gulag in Siberia
Speaker 6: and eighty thousand survived. And it is the largest group
Speaker 6: of Polish survivors of the Holocaust once who survived in Siberia.
Speaker 6: So they were repatriated back to Poland in nineteen forty
Speaker 6: five where they encountered a tremendous amount of anti Semitism, hatred, beatings,
Speaker 6: and killings. And then nineteen forty eight many of them left.
Speaker 6: My mother left it eight years old to New York City,
Speaker 6: and my father is German Jewish from Berlin, and he
Speaker 6: was seven when he left Berlin in July nineteen thirty
Speaker 6: nine and arrived in New York City August third, nineteen
Speaker 6: thirty nine, so just in the nick of time. But
Speaker 6: he experienced castalinofft Both of them experienced very difficult childhoods,
Speaker 6: which is always bad when you're complaining to your parents
Speaker 6: about violence, that's right.
Speaker 2: But it did, but it obviously made an impression on you. Yes,
Speaker 2: I think.
Speaker 6: I think a key moment, a key sort of lynchpin,
Speaker 6: is that my mother worked for forty four years in
Speaker 6: Manhattan criminal court. She was a Red Center Street during
Speaker 6: the Central Park five case, and so through her I
Speaker 6: learned about racial fascism in the United States. I think
Speaker 6: that was one of my key I learned. She would
Speaker 6: always talk about the parallels she saw with how the
Speaker 6: criminal justice system treated Black Americans and her own experience
Speaker 6: as a child. So that was something you know she
Speaker 6: was the first to tell me the Central Mark five
Speaker 6: were completely innocent. For instance.
Speaker 1: Oh interesting, even during that time when people thought they
Speaker 1: weren't right.
Speaker 6: Like as you and I know, at the time, very
Speaker 6: few people thought they were innocent, but everyone one hundred
Speaker 6: center Street knew they were innocent.
Speaker 2: Oh, so interesting. How you know.
Speaker 6: My mom was disgusted with me when I didn't realize that.
Speaker 6: She's like, it was a horrible crime, and their sentences
Speaker 6: were so low. How could you not figure out that
Speaker 6: we all knew they were innocent?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 2: Interesting?
Speaker 6: Because there was no physical evidence, right, no evidence at all.
Speaker 1: We had one of the exonerated five on this podcast
Speaker 1: because he's running for office in.
Speaker 5: The district I'm sitting here right now.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And he's incredible, and it has so much forgiveness
Speaker 1: in his heart.
Speaker 2: I don't know how you have that kind of forgiveness
Speaker 2: in your heart.
Speaker 1: After Yeah, but that speaks to this idea that you
Speaker 1: write about, this way in which Trump was able to
Speaker 1: capture a hard mentality the same way.
Speaker 2: So talk us through sort of how that happened.
Speaker 6: First of all, we have this history of racial fascism here. Yeah,
Speaker 6: we sort of got rid of it in our national
Speaker 6: politics in the nineteen sixties around the civil rights movement,
Speaker 6: and Trump has always been leaning into this past and
Speaker 6: the vilification of supposed black crime and black corruption Frump
Speaker 6: CNN town Hall, he again reiterated the lies that in
Speaker 6: black in cities with large black populations, there was massive
Speaker 6: corrupt voter fraud, so, which is just straightforward racist trope
Speaker 6: dating back to Reconstruction when they said black politicians were
Speaker 6: too corrupt right democracy. Now we're getting a much more
Speaker 6: sort of explicitly fascist structure. The highlighting of Ashley Babbitt's
Speaker 6: killing January sixth, he's representing her as the Nazis represented
Speaker 6: a forced vessel. Yes, the stormtrooper who was valorized as
Speaker 6: a martyr, and the person he shot, Ashley Babbitt, was
Speaker 6: block so if you noticed, Trump called him a thug,
Speaker 6: of course, the accepted code word for black people. So
Speaker 6: Trump has continuously leaned into this kind of familiar white
Speaker 6: supremacy that is part of American history, but also combines
Speaker 6: it with a kind of patriarchal machismo that is going
Speaker 6: to bring in a multi racial coalition as we're seeing
Speaker 6: behind the kind of macho sprouting authoritarian and now we
Speaker 6: have this kind of valorization of January sixth, Instead of
Speaker 6: being a coup against democracy, it's being presented as a
Speaker 6: great patriotic moment in American history. All that is credibly dangerous.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I would think, explain to me how multi racial
Speaker 1: fascism works, because it runs so counterintuitive, but it's clearly
Speaker 1: something you talk about.
Speaker 2: Go on.
Speaker 6: First of all, patriarchy, right, lots of groups have macho
Speaker 6: men threatened by feminism, LGBT, et cetera. Patriarchy has always
Speaker 6: been central to fascism. It's it's you know, Ruth ben
Speaker 6: Guillot's book Strong Men isn't about fast, but she emphasizes
Speaker 6: the sort of macho, strutting male figure that's so appealing
Speaker 6: for authoritarian minded voters. Secondly, when you think about American fascism,
Speaker 6: you have to think about what is the underlying group ideology,
Speaker 6: social identity. That is, as it's basist in Germany and
Speaker 6: Nazi Germany, it was at the Aryan rings here it's
Speaker 6: Christian nationalism. So the way white Christian nationalism works is,
Speaker 6: you know, you're told about the great achievements of the founders,
Speaker 6: and you're told the founders were white Christian men, and
Speaker 6: then you're given a list of white Christian men and
Speaker 6: great achievements. Then you think, oh wow, it's the white
Speaker 6: Christian men who made this country what it is, and
Speaker 6: that's the structure of what we see. But white Christian
Speaker 6: nationalism is also going to be Christian nationalism, and so
Speaker 6: Christianity is going to draw a lot of people in.
Speaker 6: Certain fascist movements succeed when they can gather different groups
Speaker 6: together in an electoral coalition. The different groups often of
Speaker 6: conflicting agendas. Group of white supremacists, another group anti semites,
Speaker 6: another group billionaires who want to use all that stuff
Speaker 6: to get their taxes cut. So fascism succeeds at the
Speaker 6: ballot box when a fascist leader can convince multiple groups
Speaker 6: that authoritarianism is preferable to democracy.
Speaker 1: Say you're black, I mean you just identify with the
Speaker 1: misogyny more than the racism.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you identify more of the misogyny than the race.
Speaker 6: And it's not just patriarchy, it's also anti socialism. It's
Speaker 6: sort of libertarian capitalism. We're going to protect private property.
Speaker 6: The Nazis were obviously anti capitalists because capitalism was a
Speaker 6: global system, but they were very strongly protective of private property.
Speaker 6: They didn't believe Jews deserve private property. They constantly attacked
Speaker 6: institutions as Marxists and represented the Weimar Republic and government
Speaker 6: institutions as threats to private the private property of Arians.
Speaker 6: And so we find that dynamic here where it's also
Speaker 6: anti socialism. That's part of it, and that's going to
Speaker 6: attract libertarians. It's going to attract libertarian minded people of
Speaker 6: all races.
Speaker 2: If you were to.
Speaker 1: Game this out in your head and you were to think, like,
Speaker 1: what would in your mind the smartest thing for Biden
Speaker 1: to be doing right now? Because remember it's like he's
Speaker 1: running against Trump. This Republican Party has embraced all of
Speaker 1: these tenants now, so this is no longer right, Like,
Speaker 1: is Trump more fascist than DeSantis?
Speaker 2: I mean, they seem the same to me.
Speaker 6: Correct. What we have is a fascist social and political movement.
Speaker 6: In the literature, you divide the social and political movement
Speaker 6: phase from the regime phase. We don't have a fascist regime. However,
Speaker 6: we've allowed many of the states in this country to
Speaker 6: become little hungaries.
Speaker 2: Right, Florida is the best example, but Texas too.
Speaker 6: Florida, Texas, North Carolina. What you know, the Florida voters
Speaker 6: voted to give former felons back their rights voting rights,
Speaker 6: which would have enfranchised over a million Floridians. Desantas simply
Speaker 6: overruled that. All the voter suppression. You have super legislators
Speaker 6: of Republicans in fifty to fifty Republican Democrat states like
Speaker 6: North Carolina, so you have authoritarianism. None of that is democrodict.
Speaker 6: I had allowed that to happen. So then the question
Speaker 6: is why is Republicans are quite frankly reasonably saying why
Speaker 6: can't we do that at the national level. So that's
Speaker 6: what's going on, So what can be done against it?
Speaker 6: So a lot of us, in communication with the various
Speaker 6: people in the Biden administration, I think there was a
Speaker 6: strong urge to sort of go new dealersh in response,
Speaker 6: what when's the last time the United States faced a
Speaker 6: sort of concerned explicit fascist movement? I mean, I think
Speaker 6: Jim Crow is a fascist regime if that lasted very long,
Speaker 6: to some extent still lasts. But in the thirties we
Speaker 6: faced explicit fascism and we beat it because of the
Speaker 6: supposedly that's the sort of commonly held belief. We beat
Speaker 6: it because of the New Deal, which was oune of
Speaker 6: money going to the white working class, the poor white
Speaker 6: said du Boyce's sense. And so I think they administration
Speaker 6: has taken that tactic as the Inflation Reduction Act wards
Speaker 6: and all is an enormous expenditure on green jobs. It
Speaker 6: spent a ton of money to working class Americans. That's
Speaker 6: been the tactic of the Biden administration. Unfortunately, we're in
Speaker 6: what I've called fascism's legal phase, where they've taken over courts,
Speaker 6: they've taken their changing the laws to make minority rule
Speaker 6: a permanent thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I'm watching it happen in real time.
Speaker 2: How do we stop this?
Speaker 6: Welly, Unfortunately, I'm not an expert on how do we
Speaker 6: stop it? Really good at describing what's happening, what will
Speaker 6: happen if we don't. If you look at the literature
Speaker 6: and look at you know, fighting racial fascism in the
Speaker 6: United States, fighting fascism abroad in Europe, Latin America, labor
Speaker 6: unions turned out to be key. It's something that sort
Speaker 6: of I spent a lot of years grappling with in
Speaker 6: the literature. But then you see it in real time
Speaker 6: right now, you see the labor unions fighting the attack,
Speaker 6: the teachers' union fighting the attack on education. You see
Speaker 6: labor movements across the country gaining more popularity for labor,
Speaker 6: and fascism is always intensely anti labor union. So we
Speaker 6: see that in the South. We see in the South
Speaker 6: all these states are anti harshly anti labor. It goes
Speaker 6: with the racism. So the labor movement has to be
Speaker 6: central in the response here.
Speaker 1: So interesting, So talk to me about propaganda, how propaganda works,
Speaker 1: and a little bit about how you got there and
Speaker 1: how we're seeing propaganda right now.
Speaker 6: So earlier I talked about how my mother, who's a
Speaker 6: Holocaust survivor, recognized parallels between the criminal justice system and
Speaker 6: what was happening to Black Americans the criminal justice system
Speaker 6: and what she experienced as a child. James Baldwin says
Speaker 6: this at one point in his essay, Negroes are anti
Speaker 6: Semitic because they're anti white. But brilliant where he says
Speaker 6: he's talking about Jewish people, He's like, we know you're
Speaker 6: glad not to be us. So I grew up and
Speaker 6: in like twenty ten, once I started to realize the
Speaker 6: scope of my mass incarceration and that many of us
Speaker 6: white Americans had lived through the nineties thinking it was
Speaker 6: a great decade, when when it goes, it was like
Speaker 6: a horrific decade for our fellow black citizens. And you know,
Speaker 6: nineteen ninety one, the crime rate starts dropping precipitously. And
Speaker 6: then we had super predator theory. We had the Clintons
Speaker 6: leaning into qulification black Americans to win votes at the ballots.
Speaker 6: And I realized I had been subject to propaganda, like
Speaker 6: I had completely missed a human rights disaster.
Speaker 2: It was happening in front of you.
Speaker 6: Happening in front of me. Tim Snyder and I teach
Speaker 6: a course mass incarceration in the United States and the
Speaker 6: Soviet Union.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, I wanted to take that class. That sounds amazing.
Speaker 6: It is, it is great. So trying to figure out
Speaker 6: how my country, my home country, the United States, became
Speaker 6: the world's largest incarcerator, how the formerly in twenty fourteen,
Speaker 6: the formerly enslaved population of the United States was ten
Speaker 6: percent of the world's prison population. And wondering how you
Speaker 6: could sort of wander around to the streets of America
Speaker 6: thinking this is a free country when it's a giant
Speaker 6: prison state. Was what got me into the topic of propaganda,
Speaker 6: and it led me to think about the nineteen thirties
Speaker 6: in Germany, which was a happy time for many Germans
Speaker 6: who saw on out of the corner of their eye
Speaker 6: what was happening to my family and others, But you know,
Speaker 6: it was a great time for most Germans. I started
Speaker 6: to think about how propaganda can mask for us what's
Speaker 6: going on right before our eyes. A lot of people
Speaker 6: when Trump happened, they were surprised, but I wasn't surprised
Speaker 6: because I was working on this history of the United States.
Speaker 6: And when you're kind of brutalizing one portion of the
Speaker 6: population with militarized police and prison, massive prison, why wouldn't
Speaker 6: you that move to sort of general authoritarianism. You already
Speaker 6: kind of lawlessness for part of the population. And Trump
Speaker 6: is leaning into the American tradition that justify that sort
Speaker 6: of raises hysteria about you know, cities engulfed in crime,
Speaker 6: which Trump, of course has been doing his whole life,
Speaker 6: supposed black crime, and raises the ancient fears that white
Speaker 6: people need to protect themselves.
Speaker 1: So where does this go? We're out of time, but
Speaker 1: just give me a quick where this goes?
Speaker 6: Well, one thing that's optimistic is these are old forces.
Speaker 6: We shouldn't think that we're facing something new, because when
Speaker 6: aism comes, it repeats the practices of the past. So
Speaker 6: we see ron dessentism, foringly, going back to sort of
Speaker 6: scrubbed up versions of Jim pro tactics, voter suppression, massive
Speaker 6: policing of the schools, so you have a white education
Speaker 6: that places white Christian nationalism center stage. So we face
Speaker 6: this before, so we have historical.
Speaker 3: Understanding of what to do.
Speaker 5: We will need.
Speaker 6: Mass protests, possibly at a certain point, and you'll need
Speaker 6: to raise alarms something like the Civil Rights movement, where
Speaker 6: you raise alarms about the loss of democracy, where ultimately
Speaker 6: I think we have to make sure that all the
Speaker 6: states in the United States are actual democracies. We've let
Speaker 6: the authoritarianism go too far.
Speaker 1: Those mass protests actually work, I mean they've worked in Israel.
Speaker 1: But we're at a time. Please, Jason, I hope you
Speaker 1: will come back.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, I'd love to anytime.
Speaker 6: Hi.
Speaker 1: It's Molly, and I am wildly excited that for the
Speaker 1: first time, Fast Politics, the show you're listening to right now,
Speaker 1: is going to have merch for sale over at Shop
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Speaker 2: You can now buy shirts.
Speaker 1: Hats, hoodies, and toe bags with our incredible designs.
Speaker 2: We've heard your cries to spread the word.
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Speaker 2: Thanks for your support.
Speaker 1: Adam Gopnik is a writer at The New Yorker and
Speaker 1: author of the Real Work on the Mystery of Mastery.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Fast Politics, Adam Gottnik.
Speaker 5: It's wonderful to be with you, Molly. It's been a joy,
Speaker 5: you know, having known you so long, to have watched
Speaker 5: your evolution and to be listening to you all the
Speaker 5: time doing this and now to be a discipline is
Speaker 5: a special pleasure.
Speaker 1: Well, I am very excited to have you here, and
Speaker 1: I feel like you have also had many iterations. You
Speaker 1: have been doing this a long time, and you have
Speaker 1: an incredible breath of knowledge, and you have also more
Speaker 1: importantly a new book out. But first let us talk
Speaker 1: about what the hell happened last night?
Speaker 2: Would that see in town Hall?
Speaker 5: You know, I was out actually seeing this new production
Speaker 5: of Oliver with Rola Sparza, and I was on a
Speaker 5: real high because it's wonderful, and then came back and
Speaker 5: idly did what none of us should ever do, which
Speaker 5: is see but how did that go? And then became
Speaker 5: aware of it. A million people can itemize all of
Speaker 5: the vile absurdities of the thing. What I will say is,
Speaker 5: and I say this not in self congratulation, but in
Speaker 5: perpetual warning that back in twenty sixteen, when people were
Speaker 5: so Trump, I was writing urgently, desperately in the New
Speaker 5: Yorker where I work, in a note of political excitation,
Speaker 5: that it was not typical for me about how dangerous
Speaker 5: this guy was, how uniquely dangerous he was. Now I
Speaker 5: sound like Trump. I may have been the first person
Speaker 5: to say I actually think I was that he was
Speaker 5: a fascist. Now we can argue forth Molly about you
Speaker 5: know how what we want to call fascists and whatnot.
Speaker 5: Key point about making that point is not that Trump
Speaker 5: is on an absolute moral plane with Hitler or a Mussolini.
Speaker 5: It's exactly when you know, you go see the dermatologists
Speaker 5: to show him a mold, to ask if it's a
Speaker 5: melanoma or just a pimple. Not because it's already stage
Speaker 5: four cancer, because you want to know what the pathology
Speaker 5: is and what the outcome is likely to be. When
Speaker 5: you recognize that Trump is essentially part of an ongoing authoritarian,
Speaker 5: right wing nationalist movement that we should call for short, fascist,
Speaker 5: you recognize how dangerous he is. And back in twenty sixteen,
Speaker 5: when I was saying that, saying that he represented that
Speaker 5: he was an absolutely hostile figure against anything one could
Speaker 5: recognize as the liberal democratic order, I was perpetually as
Speaker 5: I'm sure you were too, and as other Pressian people
Speaker 5: were mocked and derided and alarmist by the full range
Speaker 5: of New York Times conservatives, and I was right.
Speaker 1: We all were writing, Yeah, I want to read a
Speaker 1: line you have here, So you have this paragraph. The
Speaker 1: Murdoch media congomerate has been ordered to acquiesce. It's no
Speaker 1: surprise that it has. But Trump's other fellow travelers, including
Speaker 1: Roger Stone, the Republican Political Operative, and Dirty Trickster. And
Speaker 1: then and you mentioned Alex Jones, a ranting conspiracy theorist
Speaker 1: who believes in a global plot where in an alien
Speaker 1: force out of this world is attacking humanity. Not to
Speaker 1: mention Jones marketing of the theory that Michelle Obama is
Speaker 1: a transvestatee who murdered Joan Rivers. But I think this
Speaker 1: is the line. These are not harmless oddballs Trump is
Speaker 1: flirting with. This is not the lunatic fringe. These are
Speaker 1: the lunatics.
Speaker 5: Thank you, Molly. I like that line, and I wrote
Speaker 5: it a long time ago, seven years ago, and it
Speaker 5: was ever more true last night. This is not the
Speaker 5: lunatic fringe. Every political party has got a center and
Speaker 5: a left wing and a right wing, and it's got
Speaker 5: nuts around the edges, and we can recognize it, whether
Speaker 5: it's the Labor Party in Britain or the Democratic Party
Speaker 5: in the United States, take your pick. This is not
Speaker 5: the lunatic fringe that Trump is flirting with. These are
Speaker 5: the lunatics whom he speaks for it, you know, and
Speaker 5: we I'm so acclimatized to it. And to use a
Speaker 5: word that I know is overused but is essential here.
Speaker 5: It is still so much in the process of being normalized.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 5: Of all the things I read this morning about it,
Speaker 5: I thought that what Michael fanone is that how you
Speaker 5: pronounce his name?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The police officer.
Speaker 5: The police officer was the shrewdest and the most acute.
Speaker 5: He said, what happened last night is that you're setting
Speaker 5: up the idea that accepting or not accepting the results
Speaker 5: of an election is a choice. Politicians choose to accept
Speaker 5: the results of election or not. You can say, oh,
Speaker 5: it's you're wrong, But then he answers, I'm right, and
Speaker 5: therefore you have set up right away a kind of
Speaker 5: ping and pong. Well, maybe he's a little bit right.
Speaker 5: And so we've never before had in American history, at
Speaker 5: least since the Civil War, a figure who was aggressively
Speaker 5: and unmistakably an enemy of the democratic constitutional order. And
Speaker 5: to continually treat this guy as a political phenomenon, as
Speaker 5: CNN did last night, as The New York Times, since
Speaker 5: this I'm doing day after day as simply one more
Speaker 5: figures on this spectrum as well, maybe flirting with the
Speaker 5: lunatic fringe but not actually embedded with the lunatics, I
Speaker 5: think is just an historic mistake of such enormous proportions
Speaker 5: that I fear the consequences, and I fear them particularly Molly,
Speaker 5: because I wrote a piece early on in the Biden
Speaker 5: administration called Biden's Invisible Ideology, and what I was trying to.
Speaker 5: It was meant to be a kind of sympathetic account
Speaker 5: because what I sensed, with no inside knowledge, was that
Speaker 5: Biden and the people around him, who deliberately did not
Speaker 5: take on all of Trump's Michigoths about the election and
Speaker 5: the rest of it, had a smart, intuitive sense. There's
Speaker 5: a great old boxing coach named Charlie Goldman who once said,
Speaker 5: never play a guy in a game he invented, because
Speaker 5: he didn't invent it to lose at it. And that's
Speaker 5: very wise, right. And if you played Trump's game, you lose,
Speaker 5: because that's Trump's game. I understand the logic of that.
Speaker 5: And they decided to invest in restoring and renewing institutions,
Speaker 5: which I profoundly believe in, and in lowering the price
Speaker 5: of insulin. When Trump was screaming about his wall and
Speaker 5: the rigged election, I recognized the decency of that, and
Speaker 5: I recognize a certain kind of logic in it too.
Speaker 5: But in every historical struggle between institutionalists and fascists, the
Speaker 5: fascist win because they do not respect the institutions, and
Speaker 5: these sists are left looking around at the end saying, hey,
Speaker 5: what happened here? We did everything right? We did everything correct,
Speaker 5: and they're shocked that they have lost and that the
Speaker 5: institutions they were trying to defend and protect have been destroyed.
Speaker 5: And I am terribly frightened that we are seeing this
Speaker 5: year and what happened last night was one more episode
Speaker 5: in the destruction of liberal institutions.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Jesus, all right to talk to me about the book.
Speaker 5: Well, the book is actually my new book. The real
Speaker 5: work on the mystery of mastery is actually in an
Speaker 5: odd way that I've been trying to articulate out on
Speaker 5: the road, and I am the Willy Lowman of American literature.
Speaker 2: Molly the Mystery of mastering exactly.
Speaker 5: I go from town to town with my satulate books,
Speaker 5: trying to be well liked, like welly and selling them.
Speaker 5: One of the things I've learned on the road is
Speaker 5: people ask me often because my last book, A Thousand
Speaker 5: Small Sanities was explicitly a defense of liberalism, by which
Speaker 5: I mean not just the progressive wing of the Democratic Party,
Speaker 5: but the much broader moral adventure of trying to have
Speaker 5: democratic procedures and egalitarian institutions in the world. That that
Speaker 5: was what that last book was about. And people say,
Speaker 5: this new book, where are the politics in this new book,
Speaker 5: because it's all about my own exotic adventures in learning
Speaker 5: to do new things in middle age. I learned to drive,
Speaker 5: I learned to draw, I learned to box with my
Speaker 5: daughter Olivia, who you know well, to dance, which is
Speaker 5: the climax of the book, is Olivia and I dancing
Speaker 5: out in the esplanade, real dancing foxtrot and waltz with
Speaker 5: the teacher to Sinatra records out in the Esplanade in
Speaker 5: Central Park at the height of the pandemic. That's the
Speaker 5: image of the book ends on Oh wow. So the
Speaker 5: question people have asked is, well, is this sort of
Speaker 5: a diversion from that, you know, kind of saying whoo,
Speaker 5: we got through that by the skin of our teeth, perps,
Speaker 5: we did. So now we can go out and elves
Speaker 5: and improve ourselves. And that's not really my intention at all.
Speaker 5: On the contrary, and forgive me if I sound a
Speaker 5: little pretentious about it, what I was trying to do
Speaker 5: was talk about pluralism because the key I think, the
Speaker 5: key idea, the key concept for liberal democracy, is the
Speaker 5: idea of pluralism. It's as important, if not more important,
Speaker 5: than the idea of democracy. Or the idea of equality,
Speaker 5: or it's about the idea that we accept the known
Speaker 5: that many, many different kinds and classes and creeds can
Speaker 5: coexist without killing each other, which is a very new
Speaker 5: idea in the history of humanity. The preceding idea was
Speaker 5: always that, well, all of those creeds and classes and
Speaker 5: kinds will war with each other and mascuer each other
Speaker 5: until somebody dominates. That's the core ideology, by the way
Speaker 5: of Trumpism, as it is of all fascism, that all
Speaker 5: of life is simply a contest for domination, and somebody
Speaker 5: will win, and someone will lose, and the winner will
Speaker 5: destroy the loser will exterminate the loser. And the core
Speaker 5: idea of liberalism as it's grown up since the Enlightenment
Speaker 5: is exactly the idea that you can coexist, that you
Speaker 5: can not only accept but embrace a pluralism of different kinds.
Speaker 5: You know. The image I used in the book is
Speaker 5: when I like you know, you go out on a
Speaker 5: Friday night into Williamsburg in Brooklyn, and the sat Mars
Speaker 5: are celebrating in their way, and the Labovators in their way,
Speaker 5: and the hipsters in another way, and sometimes can't tell
Speaker 5: the hipsters from the Hastam right, because they dress a like.
Speaker 5: That's the glory of a liberal city like New York
Speaker 5: is we coexist. We sometimes, we have difficulties, often we do,
Speaker 5: but basically we accept that principle of pluralism. The point
Speaker 5: I'm trying to make in this book is that principle
Speaker 5: of political pluralism rests on a principle of a pluralism
Speaker 5: of pleasures. That we only can get to a pluralism
Speaker 5: of opinions if we're rooted in things we genuinely like doing,
Speaker 5: if we're rooted in all the little activities that bring
Speaker 5: us together as people across classes and kinds, that show
Speaker 5: us in advance that it is possible to coexist. You know,
Speaker 5: my hero in this regard, and it's funny, you know
Speaker 5: I mentioned that the book ends with Olivia and I
Speaker 5: dancing together in Central Park is Frederick Law Olmsted. And
Speaker 5: it was the great designers appoint of at Homestead that
Speaker 5: he was oho a journalist, a writer for he was
Speaker 5: a park designer, and he went south to the Slave
Speaker 5: States and he said, not only is this and obviously brutal, cruel,
Speaker 5: oppressive culture, but it oppresses the masters in its own ways,
Speaker 5: not to mention, obviously the slaves. And one of the
Speaker 5: ways it does is that it eliminates the possibility of
Speaker 5: what he called beautifully commonplace civilization, that is, all the
Speaker 5: small ways in which people interact with each other on
Speaker 5: a daily basis, because if you live in a society
Speaker 5: of fear and terror, you can't have those kinds of interactions.
Speaker 5: And he wanted Central Park to be a place for
Speaker 5: commonplace civilization, a place where people, a park for people
Speaker 5: of very different backgrounds, very different kinds, very different pleasures
Speaker 5: could all coexist in a pluralistic way. And this book
Speaker 5: by talking about my own pluralism of pleasures. Learning to
Speaker 5: drive from an Ecuadorian immigrant, learning to draw from an
Speaker 5: inspired but kind of crazy old style reactionary not crazy
Speaker 5: but determinedly backward looking, learning to do or at least
Speaker 5: observing magic with a brilliant, irascible Brooklynite. It's all about
Speaker 5: how every time that in every everything we do, we
Speaker 5: are necessarily everything we are. You know, when you learn
Speaker 5: to do something like driving, you are forced into the
Speaker 5: broader society of drivers. You're forced to confront the way
Speaker 5: that cities are self organizing, that we amazingly if you,
Speaker 5: like Molly, we sort of obey traffic laws even when
Speaker 5: nobody is enforcing them, because we recognize that it's the
Speaker 5: only way all of us can coexist in traffic is
Speaker 5: through those things. So that in that own steady and sense,
Speaker 5: a pluralism of pleasures always has to be the foundation
Speaker 5: for pluralistic politics, and that's very much what this book
Speaker 5: is about.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so interesting. What was the thing that you learned
Speaker 1: where you were like, I'm not going to.
Speaker 5: Be able to learn this well, drawing, you know, classical drawing.
Speaker 5: I'd say at some point in the book that what
Speaker 5: we basically do in life, we like to tell ourselves, oh,
Speaker 5: I'm just concentrating on the things I'm good at. Basically
Speaker 5: what we do is we banish the things we're bad
Speaker 5: at so we don't have to think about them. And
Speaker 5: you know, we spend our time elementary school just being
Speaker 5: you know, shamed and humiliated and pained every day by
Speaker 5: everything we can't do. We can't do algebra, we can't
Speaker 5: do trigonometry, we can't do drawing, And then we find
Speaker 5: a niche in life where nobody asks us to do
Speaker 5: those things, and then we think we've actually gotten good
Speaker 5: at something. We haven't. We've just banished the bad. And
Speaker 5: drawing is one of those things for me. You know,
Speaker 5: you put me in front of a sheet of paper
Speaker 5: and I stab away as though like Lady Macbeth with
Speaker 5: a dagger. And I had a wonderful teacher, Jacob Collins,
Speaker 5: and he got me to loosen my wrist and to
Speaker 5: draw underhand instead of overhand, and step by step he
Speaker 5: got me relaxed enough so that I could begin the
Speaker 5: business of drawing nude bodies in half light. That was
Speaker 5: the most resistant thing, because when I first tried it,
Speaker 5: I just had tears in my eyes. I thought, I
Speaker 5: will never be able to do this, and I never
Speaker 5: can claim to be good at it. But I'm certainly
Speaker 5: better at it than I was when I started. And
Speaker 5: that was the single most sharing thing. Driving is well,
Speaker 5: you know, I didn't learn to drive until I was
Speaker 5: in my fifties. And Luke and I got our licenses
Speaker 5: literally not just on the same day, but within the
Speaker 5: same hour from the same driving judge, from the same
Speaker 5: driving inspector. And I think that may be the only
Speaker 5: time in New York City history where a fifty five
Speaker 5: year old father and a twenty year.
Speaker 2: Old life I'm sure it's not.
Speaker 5: No, probably not.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because it is New York.
Speaker 5: This is everything has happened at least once. There's nothing
Speaker 5: so peculiar that it has happened many times.
Speaker 1: That's part of the joy.
Speaker 5: Of living in New York. Actually, nothing singular can happen exactly.
Speaker 5: I want to.
Speaker 1: Ask you because I have relatives, close relatives suffering from dementia.
Speaker 1: There's some evidence that learning new things can actually grow
Speaker 1: these pathways in your brain and can make you less
Speaker 1: likely to become demented.
Speaker 5: I too have a close relative struggling with dementia. And yes,
Speaker 5: that is one of the things that comes up again
Speaker 5: and again in the literature. I don't want to hold
Speaker 5: it out as some kind of pantacea, because it isn't.
Speaker 5: It doesn't have that form. But what is certainly and
Speaker 5: arguably true is that the lives of the aging are
Speaker 5: immeasurably enriched by pursuing new activities, even if they're they're
Speaker 5: at war with their own brains as tragically so many
Speaker 5: I did a piece Molly about the science of aging
Speaker 5: and the tragedy of it is that medicine has given
Speaker 5: us twenty years of extra life gross on motive, but
Speaker 5: has nothing to do yet for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. But
Speaker 5: what's certainly true is that our access to happiness through
Speaker 5: our absorption in a new activity is just as profound,
Speaker 5: if not more profound, at sixty five or seventy or eighty,
Speaker 5: as it is when we're kids. You know the basic
Speaker 5: rhythm of accomplishment, which is the thing I'm writing about.
Speaker 5: Whether you're learning, you know, beatle guitar chords when you're
Speaker 5: twelve years old, or you're learning, as I did, to
Speaker 5: box when you're in your sixties, the basic rhythm is
Speaker 5: always the same. You break it down into its smallest parts.
Speaker 5: You know, boxing, you don't unleash your beligion insurance. My
Speaker 5: boxing teacher is an incredibly sweet, cool guy named Joey Contrada,
Speaker 5: and he once said, very un self consciously, oh, it's terrible.
Speaker 5: The other day in the boxing gym, a fight broke out. Instead,
Speaker 5: you've learned this very tight choreography of jabs and crosses
Speaker 5: and slips and undercuts, and that's what boxing is about.
Speaker 5: And it's very exhausting at first, because none of that
Speaker 5: sequence will make sense to you. You know, you're thinking about
Speaker 5: it all the time, but with passion and perseverance, it
Speaker 5: turns into overtime, a somewhat seamless sequence, and where you're
Speaker 5: not any longer thinking about throwing the right punches in
Speaker 5: the right order. They're just coming, They're happening, and the
Speaker 5: high we get, you know, psychologists sometimes call that the flow,
Speaker 5: that we enter into the flow, but I just think
Speaker 5: of it as happiness, because what's happiness, after all, except
Speaker 5: absorption in some activity, meaningful activity outside ourselves. That's when
Speaker 5: we all feel happiest, including sex, one might add, but
Speaker 5: and taking in everything else's well, and that's always available
Speaker 5: to us. And if there's a kind of message for
Speaker 5: those of us who are who are entering middle age,
Speaker 5: to put it politely, that the book wants to send,
Speaker 5: is that pursuing a passion a new accomplishment imperfectly provides
Speaker 5: you with every bit as much of that flow, every
Speaker 5: bit as much of that cognitive opiate of absorption as
Speaker 5: anything we did when we were twelve years old.
Speaker 2: So interesting, Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 1: Adam Gopnik, tell us what the book is called again,
Speaker 1: I will do it in the intro too.
Speaker 5: It's called The Real Work on the Mystery of mastery
Speaker 5: by me, and as I say, it's an account of
Speaker 5: my adventures in learning and struggling. It's in the mystery
Speaker 5: of mastery. I don't claim mastery, but I claim some
Speaker 5: insight into the mysteries of mastery. And as your listeners
Speaker 5: now know and no one else does, it's undergirding is
Speaker 5: to be about how pluralism of pleasures underlies pluralistic politics.
Speaker 5: So saying thank you, Adam as you're talking to Molly always.
Speaker 2: A moment, Jesse Cannon, Molly John Fast what do you
Speaker 2: see that this death ceiling thing? I think people are
Speaker 2: starting to get a little nervous.
Speaker 1: It's a completely fake thing that Republicans have decided they
Speaker 1: can do to make life hard for Democrats. It started
Speaker 1: in twenty eleven. When there's a Republican president, Republicans pass
Speaker 1: the dead ceiling. When there's a Democratic president, Republicans don't
Speaker 1: pass this dead ceiling. And so we know it's bullshit.
Speaker 1: And for that, as Republicans to keep the entire federal
Speaker 1: government hostage, they are our moment of fuckery. That's it
Speaker 1: for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday,
Speaker 1: and Friday to hear the best minds in politics makes
Speaker 1: sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard,
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Speaker 1: conversation going. And again, thanks for listening.