Factually! with Adam Conover - The New Red Scare with Corey Robin

Episode Date: April 16, 2025

Just months into Trump’s second term, we’re already witnessing the rapid erosion of fundamental American rights. Legal residents are being detained and deported simply for expressing support for Palestinians. Political expression in the U.S. hasn’t felt this dangerous since the Red Scare—and all signs point to things getting even worse. To help make sense of this chilling moment, Adam speaks with Corey Robin, political theorist and professor of political science at Brooklyn College.SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a HeadGum Podcast. Hey there, welcome to Factually, I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again to talk about this frightening new period of American history that we live in. You know, people are being kidnapped and disappeared from the streets of America right now for speaking their minds. That's not something that I thought could happen in the America that I live in or the America that I was told that I live in or the America that I was

Told that I live in but it is it is occurring around us every day Columbia University student and Pro Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil is facing deportation Despite being a legal permanent resident and a Turkish graduate student named Rumeysa Oz Turk Apologies if I'm mispronouncing that was picked up off the street and detained by armed people, was shoving her into the back of a van for the crime of writing an op-ed supporting Palestine. That means that our rights of free expression in this country are evaporating, plain and simple.

And it is hard to overstate how horrible this is and how big a change this is in American society. This is nothing less than racist authoritarianism at work. It is the crumbling of our moral and legal edifice. This is not America as far, at least it's not the America that I wanna live in, not the America I thought that I was living in. And it's the kind of horror that we associate with,

honestly, the past or with other places. It's kind of like when you watch a know a movie about the bad old days about McCarthyism or the Red Scare Or you know a period of time where people would be imprisoned just for the crime of being black or gay and You know the implication of the movie is hey good thing. We've moved past that we're not like that anymore, right? Well it turns out that yeah, we fucking are. We are living in a moment of authoritarianism and repression in this country that we have not seen for decades. And we need to ask ourselves, how did we get here?

What political circumstances led to it? And how are we going to dig our way out of it? At least we need to ask those questions as long as we still can before the thugs come and shove me in the back of the van. And that is what we are going to do on the show today. We have an absolutely incredible guest who I cannot wait for you to hear from. Before we get to that, I just want to remind you if you want to support the show,

you can do so on Patreon. Patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every single one of these conversations ad free. You can also join our online community. We would love to have you. And if you'd like to come see me on the road, I'm touring my brand new hour of standup comedy. Coming up, actually on the very day this episode releases, April 16th, I'll be in Vancouver, British Columbia. I'm also there on the 17th, though that show is sold out.

Then April 18th and 19th, I'll be in Eugene, Oregon. And then May 9th through 11th, I'll be in Charleston, South Carolina. After that, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Oklahoma, Tacoma, Washington, Spokane, Washington. And we got a bunch of other dates that I'm going to be able to announce very soon. If you want to go check them out, head to adamconovert.net for all those tickets. And now let's get to this week's episode. My guest today is an absolutely brilliant political theorist and writer.

It's his second time on the show. The first time he appeared, we talked about what the left gets wrong about the right. Today we are going to talk about how the right-wing authoritarian movement took control of this country and what that means for the future of America. He's also the author of an essential book

on the right-wing movement called The Reactionary Mind, and he's a professor at Brooklyn College and CUNY. Please welcome the brilliant Cory Robin. Cory, thank you so much for being on the show again. Thanks for having me back. Your last episode that you were on was a big hit for us about what the left misunderstands about the right. You're a scholar of the conservative movement and politics in general.

I remember last time we spoke, it was during the Biden administration, but I was reading you during the first Trump administration when I was trying to make sense of everything. You were very helpful. You argued often during the first Trump administration that Trump was kind of a weak president and that perhaps he was not fascist in totality

to some degree. How has your opinion changed during the second Trump administration in its early days? Yeah, I mean, I've been very surprised at how forceful they've come out on a whole bunch of fronts, particularly the mass firings of government workers. That for me was one of the biggest alarm bells because it has a long history in American politics,

which we can talk about. But it's the multiplicity of fronts really. It's the government workers, it's immigration, it's the attack on universities, and then most recently the trade stuff. And what I was thinking, you know, during the first administration, when people were very frightened about authoritarianism

and it came up a lot, I always felt like it was somewhat overblown that he was a pretty constrained president. And he was in retrospect. But this time it's been, you know, all fronts that they've waged this war and it has been very surprising. I think the other thing that has been very shocking and surprising to me, which it shouldn't have been, is just how weak the opposition has been and how everybody's fallen down.

And so what has happened between the first and the second term and how it came about is something that I'm still, I think a lot of us are still trying to figure out how we got here. What do you think has changed between the two administrations? I think a bunch of things. I think the first thing, and we can't really underestimate it, is the battle over Israel and Gaza.

I think that it really divided the Democrats, it divided the left, and it became a kind of Trojan horse for a lot of people within the Democratic Party to start accepting a whole bunch of authoritarian policies that would have been previously unthinkable. So I think that was a real problem. I do think also-

Tell me more about that, I'm sorry. How did you see the left accepting authoritarian policies as a result? Oh, I meant mostly in in the combination of the Democratic Party and universities, the the collusion that really began between the Biden administration and universities to start cracking down on dissent

over over the over the politics of Israel. I mean, the campuses were the epicenter. And in fact, I remember at the tail end of the Biden administration, when it still seemed unlikely that Trump was going to win the election, I was thinking that this alliance had formed in a lot of urban centers between powerful hedge

fund guys like Bill Ackman, real estate people, and universities and cultural leaders of cultural institutions in the Democratic Party to really crack down. And it was a terrible move and it made them extremely weak to be able to deal with a much more virulent form of authoritarianism that we're seeing now. Because now the Trump administration is coming in and saying, oh, you universities are actually anti-Semitic despite the fact that they crack down using authoritarian power against them revoking their funding, disappearing their students off the street. And now those universities are unable to respond. In fact, they're acquiescing

because they had sort of pre acquiesced during the Biden administration to that sort of wielding of government power. I got it. Absolutely. And it's just been an absolute disaster. And it's long standing. I don't wanna put it all on the fight over Israel and Gaza,

but there's just absolutely no doubt that mainstream Democrats and mainstream liberals developed a kind of muscle of acquiescence, to use your word, around this issue that has made them very ill-prepared to deal with what's happening now. As opposed to defending the free speech rights of their students, creating space for that debate

or even taking the issue of the war on genocide in Gaza, seriously at all, any of those things they could have done and that would have lived by their values and democratic values and human rights and et cetera, but instead they did what they did and we all saw it. And not just one other thing is that when, you know, those three university presidents were hauled before congressional committees and were caught like deer

in the headlights. I mean, the Republicans obviously smelled blood on that issue and they ran with it. And so the whole thing from beginning to end in retrospect, I don't think I saw it so clearly at the time. I wouldn't claim that I did, but in retrospect, in retrospect, it was just all heading in this direction. And it's that that's true. And in fact, the Republicans were able to hound out college presidents

out of office before Donald Trump even took power by creating a sort of I think we're getting to a Red Scare atmosphere, right? Like those those hearings were McCarthy-esque, right? And and bizarre and being supported by The New York Times. Like I remember reading The were McCarthy-esque, right? Um, and, and bizarre and being supported by the New York Times. Like I remember reading the New York Times going, Oh man, Claudine Gaye is in kind of a pickle. And I was like, that's not what's happening here. Like this is government power being wielded against a research institution. Um, so that's one change. I cut you off before though, you were, we were discussing what,

what has changed between the two administrations, the two Trump administrations. The other thing is the, there's just something odd about the Democratic Party. It came in very strong with the Biden administration. People were talking about FDR style realignments and Biden came out fairly strong with a set of policies. The Democratic Party seemed very united and then something happened. I think

really was the fight with in the way that Manchin and Sinema were able to just completely trip the Democrats up over the combination of spending and taxing policies, which really when the inflation thing started happening, really made the Democrats very flat-footed and unable to push through the kind of policies that they were done. I'm not going to say that had they been able to push their policies through, everybody would have been loved and been excited. But again, it just showed the Republicans that these people, there's blood in the water,

they're not united around this stuff, they're weak and they were very vulnerable on the inflation issue. And it wasn't just that the inflation happened, it was that they had no narrative, they had no story, they had no politics to be able to deal with it. And I think that showed that we, to the Republicans and probably to the Democrats themselves,

that in ways that we did not realize we're still in the era of neoliberalism, we're still in the era of Jimmy Carter, we still have that shadow hanging over us. And again, it just it empowered them. So I think I would say those two things, I again, I think people always attribute far more agency to the right. And I think these are dynamic systems where the right and the left, you know, or the Democrats and the Republicans, whatever you want to call it, are back and forth.

And I think when the right saw that, you know, that they were able to make hay of that, they were able to run with it. So you had these two issues. And I just had thought of this, but, you know, really reprises the Carter administration because it's got inflation on the one hand and a problem in the Middle East

on the other hand. And the Republicans were able to kind of put that playbook together all over again and really run with it. Yeah, but I mean, look, you said we often give too much agency to the right, but the right clearly has a lot of agency right now. And it seems to me like, tell me if this matches your analysis at all, the

difference between the first and second Trump administration. To me, it seems like the first Trump administration, nobody in politics really knew how he got there. It was a surprise. They sort of, you know, did a little bit of an immune response, you know, tried to keep them in a box and get some of their priorities done and ended up being some bad shit happened, you know, but a lot of it was politics as usual. But it seemed like in the four years since,

the far right of the right-wing movement saw Trump as a way to achieve like decades long objectives. Like the destruction of the administrative state, well, all the project 2024, 2025 stuff, obviously. But that they sort of agreed with, they'll say, we'll make an agreement with Trump's authoritarian impulses and made a bargain between basically the Heritage Foundation,

the ethno-nationalists and Trump. And now they're just executing the wish list of the far right by, they create a very focused political vehicle in Trump, whereas before there had not been that much focus, either from him or the rest of the party with what to do once, when he was in power. Yeah.

Does that match? Yeah, absolutely. No, I totally agree with that. When I was talking about the agency, I just, I meant that people don't look at these things in a dynamic relationship. They just think that they're right. Just is like vermin and its own Petri dish. And there's

some truth to that. But it's always in relationship to what's going on on the other side. But I think you're absolutely right. And then actually, the you're just reminding me the last thing I would add, I do think the Silicon Valley musk thing has been a huge, you know, catalyzing agent for the right. And I think in particular, it's not just that, you know, Silicon Valley and Musk came over to Trump. And it's not just what happened on Twitter and all the rest of it. But the and here we're starting to get to what they did. I think the impact of those firings and the way that they've gone about it. It's really Ronald Reagan and the air traffic controllers

just on steroids and. Yeah. Which for those who don't know was like a sort of shocking, the air traffic controllers went on strike, Reagan dismissed all of them en masse and it was sort of indicated open season on unions and on the federal workforce across the society. And it's often said in the labor movement,

it's like this watershed moment of where everything changed. Right? Absolutely. And, but he did this Reagan, I'm sorry, Trump did this. Yeah, has done it with Musk on a, just a much, much wider scale. And there's something about the way that Musk does this with having all this access to the government documents and agencies, and just to be able to go in and do it almost as if it's an army, although it's three or four guys. I think that's,

it's not just that people often talk about with Trump, you know, the spectacle, the shock flooding the zone. But this was a very material thing that that he and Musk have managed to do. And there's nothing just spectacular about it. And it really has left the left feeling like they have no levers at their disposal. Yeah, the courts and that's a very weak position to be in. So I think that, you know, when you start really firing people like that,

and you feel like you have nothing at your disposal to fight back, it's just been, you know, it's been terrible. Well, it seems like the procedural levers that they're using, it reminds me a little bit of, you know, I've read years ago Robert Caro's, you know, books about LBJ and talking about how LBJ would figure out new ways to wield power within the Senate, right?

New levers, or also Robert Moses, obviously, I'm a normie who read those books and was deeply influenced by them. But like, you know, if you do things in a certain way, you can force a system to change when it doesn't want to. And I'm reminded of that when I look at the way that Trump has done the firings. Like he fired, you can force a system to change when it doesn't want to. And I'm reminded of that when I look at the way that Trump has done the firings.

Like he fired, you know, the democratically appointed FTC commissioners, you know, Lena Kahn stepped down, but there's two other FTC commissioners, I think out of five. And the other two that were appointed by Democrats, Badoja, and I forget the name of the other one, he fired them.

Those two commissioners are saying, we are still the commissioners because we were illegally fired. I'm on their mailing list because we had Chair Khan on the show a couple of years ago and I ended up on their mailing list. They're emailing me saying, we are still the commissioners in absentia.

We have not actually been fired. And yet I imagine they're like locked out of the building. I imagine that they don't have email access or whatever. So it's a it's it's an illegal firing from their point of view They've filed in courts. We're gonna go to court over it. Yada. Yada. The the functional effect is they are still fired The functional effect is still chaos Trump and Musk still win but even though it's illegal now put that across like dozens of departments and you have an effective strategy for,

well, if you just ignore the law and don't bother with the procedural, you can make a change that's big enough that the opposition cannot respond, that like logistically there's almost no way to respond. And that is really, it feels very new in American history to like weaponize the system in quite that way.

I mean, what you're saying actually reminds me of how employers fight unions and have fought unions for the last 50 years all the time. It's actually interesting. There is a whole legal process in place with the NLRB, there has been in place. But if you read the way the employers, the punishments are fairly minimal. And so they just break the law. They know that they'll be

hauled into some kind of court. It could drag on for 20, 30 years. It doesn't matter because by the time it's resolved, even if the workers win, they've all moved on. And this has been a very painful lesson that the labor movement has had to learn over decades and decades and decades. And in a way, I'm not trying to say that this is what the playbook that they're operating from, because I get the sense and I think your point about Moses and Johnson is well taken that they're in a process of discovery, they're finding new things, some of it they figured out in advance. But some of it, it seems like they're just figuring it out as they go along. And it involves that level of just absolute disdain for the law and the institutions. And in a way, they've picked up on something that obviously was

already there. You can't go into a system and just do this unless there are, as you said, a lot of weak points along the way. And they have a nose for that weakness. And I mean, Trump clearly does. And now we're just seeing the massive effects of it. But it does remind me an awful lot of how American employers fought the American

labor movement was they figured out where the weaknesses were and they figured out that courts and procedure, far from being always and only an instrument for the protection of rights, can be very much a vehicle for delay and obstruction and ultimately for power to win and and we're seeing an awful lot of that and the other thing that you reminded me of when you're talking about these commissioners who are been kicked out and are claiming that they're still the rightful legitimate authority but don't have keys and email acts it's you know it is like the polish government in exile just saying we are the right, during World War II, just, you know, these are words, that's what they are.

And with no army on your side to back you up. Yeah, it's brute power is what Trump is using. It's, you know, you can say, I'm still the commissioner of the law, I think I'll win a court case in three years. But if you can't get into the building, you don't have power. And that is what Elon has been using.

People are like, is this guy appointed to anything? Does he have any official role? Well, he's got some people who will listen to him and he's showing up with federal marshals. And you know, there's people with guns and the door is now locked. And what the fuck are you gonna do? Turns out that he did have the power

regardless of what the system said that he did. But that does seem to be, at least part of the essence of authoritarianism, right? Is the use of that brute power to get one's way and destroy a system and pervert a system regardless of what the law actually says and what the system actually says. Is it, do you think it's new at all

that the Republican Party has accepted this way of doing business, this brute use of power? Because, you know, it used to be, even Mitch McConnell is like using the law to get his way, right? Using, he's not just like showing up with a baseball bat and smashing pinball machines and taking the money out, you know?

Yeah, I mean, it is and it isn't. And let me talk about the way that it is and why I've been caught off guard, to be honest with you with this second term, because in addition to writing an awful lot about conservatism in the right, I've written a lot about the politics of fear and the politics of repression.

And one of the things you learn in American history is that contrary to what we're taught in high school and civics classes, the constitution has oftentimes, and the law and these institutions, have been instruments for fear and repression. You didn't have American slavery as a system in violation of the constitution.

It was completely woven into the constitution, into the system. And so one of the reasons I was always so skeptical during the first term, particularly of people who were scholars of comparative politics and would point to Hungary and all the rest of it, they would always claim that he's gonna violate

the constitution and therefore be authoritarian. And I said, no, the constitution is a weapon of authoritarianism in ways that we don't imagine. But so that's, you know, so that is what's new here is that Trump has turned out to really throw that traditional playbook of intimidation and repression out the window. And as you say, is using much, much more coercive brute

force. And that's very new. On the other hand, I was just reading this morning Richard Hofstadter's classic, The American Political Tradition. And you read about the Gilded Age guys. I mean, it was a fairly brutal, very illegal system. I mean, it was based on bribery, bribery and corruption.

It was, yeah, I mean, the spoil system. And they were they weren't they didn't hide it. It was it was very out in the open. So I do think there are precedents in American history for this. But it's it's kind of the clusterfuck of it all. And the coming together of all these different, like terrible moments of American history in one, that's what feels very different and very new.

Well, and what's funny is that, you're right, there is that president for the late 19th century, early 20th century, this incredibly corrupt time, where, you know, I always say, you look at the list of presidents, and when you look at the ones from the late 19th century, you're like, I don't hear much about those guys. And that's because they were all,

they were corrupt criminals, a lot of them. Or they were just the vassals of, you know, I don't know, the railroad industry or whatever the fuck. But Trump literally harkens back to them. He literally, you know, he's, I love McKinley, I love the late 19th century. He loves the Gilded Age, right? He is explicitly saying that we're going back

to this time of corruption. Can I say one thing about that? Just because I just did a thing on the New Left Review about McKinley and the tariffs and Trump. And do you think there's something interesting there that is worth thinking about? I spent the last week reading a ton about the tariffs and the Gilded Age.

And what is interesting is that McKinley and the Republicans, they used the tariff. It was not for economic purposes at all. That wasn't their foundational commitment. But the reason they used it was that it was a way of building their coalition and buying off support. It was actually a political protection racket, not a form of economic protection. And what's weird about Trump, I think, and the tariff. And this is what makes me think this situation is a lot more fluid than it might seem to be, is that he's using the tariff. He's not building a coalition with that tariff.

If it's blowing it apart, I mean, you know, it's one of the big defeats we've already seen for him. And so it makes what he's up to much, much more unpredictable and unintelligible. But also I do think there's a lot more cracks and weaknesses there that he's opened up in ways that he doesn't realize. He's really in some ways, despite loving McKinley,

he's kind of the anti-McKinley because McKinley used that tariff to really solidify the Republican hold on power And with Trump it looks like it could very well be starting to you know I don't want to say break apart because that's too soon for anything like that, but it's a definite Real fissure there that is only I think they get deeper as with time Yeah Well, he's got you know the Republicans and his side out there supporting the tariffs sort of just in pure deference to him and pure loyalty.

If we, if we go against him, he'll destroy us. So yes, we'll nod our heads and say it's okay. But you know that there's a lot of them who don't like it, who are worried about their stock portfolios, who are getting phone calls from their richer constituents. And if you look at say, you know, the UAW, for instance, as a union, came out and had some limited support of the tariffs at first. Hey, we're not against tariffs because we're an American manufacturing union, but then very quickly have had to turn against them because, oh my God, this is crazy. We'd be for some form of tariff, but not really

this, you know, et cetera. You know, Sean Fain's out there giving a pretty nuanced critique. I think whatever, people could disagree with him. My point is that the UAW is not as a result getting on the Trump train. They're not joining the coalition because of the tariffs. Exactly, and that to me is, Trump really could build a pretty big hegemonic coalition if he were smart about the way he was doing all of this.

But again, this is the exact opposite of what the Republicans did during the Gilded Age. He's using it in a way that's just splitting off. And even Ted Cruz has come out against the tariffs. I mean, Ted Cruz of all people. There are seven Republicans, I know that's not a huge number in the Senate, but seven Republicans who are signing onto legislation

to claw back that tariff power from the president. So if you assume all the Democrats are going to go for it in the Senate, you know, you're starting to get, it's very early, but you're starting to see the beginnings of some real nervousness. And I don't know what it means about Trump. I don't know what the hell he's doing. You know, there's a thousand theories about the tariff, but what does seem very clear is that rather than using to build the coalition, he's just, he's ripping it apart. And for ways, in ways that I don't think we quite can see

the full ramifications of yet. Yeah. It's funny that we have this constant urge to figure out the reason behind the tariff when it's, what's most remarkable about it to me is it seems like he just likes tariffs. He got he got the idea in his head in the 80s. He read some paleo con stuff about, you know, trade. It stuck with them.

And now he's an old man who like refuses to change the channel. You know, it's like trying to argue with grandpa. He's set in his ways. like refuses to change the channel, you know, it's like trying to argue with grandpa. He's set in his ways and it's Remark when we were talking about authoritarianism. It's just literally the whims of this one. Yeah one old crazy guy That are changing the world economy like it's such a small thing about him that is having such a massive Effect on everybody like the reason sort of doesn't matter. It's something about him. It's buried in his psyche,

but who the fuck knows what it is. But the effects are so huge. It's a butterfly flapping its wings. Absolutely. I mean, you're reminding me, Adam Tooze, the historian of Columbia, who has a very big substack that everybody follows. He talks about, I think the term he uses is

sane washing or something like that. Like, you know, there's always this desire to put this all through the funnel of some kind of political or economic rationality and to say, oh, no, no, no, it all makes sense. But I think, you know, and with certain things, I think that is true. But I think you're absolutely right with the tariff. In fact, I don't know if it was Jason Furman or Larry Summers, of all people this morning and the Times there was a big conversation they said you know this has become a toy for an old man and it's got to be taken away and I think that's right and it is interesting you know there's probably like eight theories out there about why he's doing the tariffs and you know whatever he does one thing one day and does the exact opposite the next day and everybody said oh yeah this is this is exactly what I predicted. Well, you know, it's very mercurial.

And as you say, it is the kind of the whims of this autocratic kind of figure. Yeah, when he took them off, he said the reason was, you know, the administration went out and tried to say, oh, this was his plan, he got the art of the deal. And then he personally said, people were just getting too yippy out there. Eh, eh, I saw, I don't know,

the stock market went down too much. Eh, you know, like that was his, that was the only rationale that he himself gave. Yeah. Yeah. Folks, this episode is brought to you by Alma. You know, the internet helps us accomplish so much, but between constantly being online

and juggling everyday life, it's easy to feel disconnected from what we really need. Meaningful human connection. And when it comes to mental health, that connection matters more than ever. That's why I want to tell you about Alma. Alma makes it simple to find a licensed therapist who gets you, someone who can offer support tailored to your specific needs and goals. In fact, 83% of people who see a therapist through Alma

say their provider is the right fit. And Alma therapists bring real experience to the table. On average, six years of it, with 20% practicing for over a decade. Their easy-to-use directory lets you filter by things like gender specialty, ethnicity, and more so you can find someone you truly connect with. You can even schedule free 15 minute consultations

to make sure it feels right before committing to a full session. Better with people, better with Alma. Visit helloalma.com slash factually to get started and schedule a free consultation today. That's helloalma.com slash factually. If you ever Googled yourself and found your phone number, home address,

and even your family member's names just out there, that's not just a glitch. It's data brokers. These are companies that collect and sell your personal information online without you even knowing it. And beyond just feeling creepy, it's dangerous. If you've ever shared strong political opinions online, had a public-facing job, or just existed on the internet, you could be putting a target on your back.

Data brokers make it easy for bad actors to harass, stalk, or even steal your identity. And you know what? I have had it happen to me. And that is why I now use Delete Me. Their team works to remove your personal data from these sites and they keep doing it all year long. It is the easiest way I have found

to take back some privacy in a world that makes it feel impossible. I can tell you from my firsthand experience, it really works. And get this, you can get 20% off your Delete Me plan when you go to joindeleteem.com slash Adam and use promo code Adam at checkout. That's joindeleteem.com slash Adam, promo code Adam.

at checkout. That's joindeleteme.com slash Adam, promo code Adam. Well, let's come back to talking about his coalition a little bit. I wanna talk about the Red Scare piece of it. You had a big interview in N plus one a week or two ago that went viral, kind of rare for an interview with an academic in a literary magazine to go viral, yet this did,

talking about how we are in another Red Scare moment. So what typified the Red Scare and what resembles it today? Well, I'm glad you used the word Red Scare because we oftentimes call it McCarthyism and it's a very misleading term to call it McCarthyism because it focuses on Joseph McCarthy. And it makes it about one individual when in fact, it was a really very comprehensive, often bipartisan assault on not just well, first and foremost, the Communist Party, which was a presence, I mean, people forget

this. But it was a real presence in the labor movement and the federal government. And so it was first and foremost an assault on the Communist Party and then radiated out from there to the left and kind of left liberalism. Liberalism has a really bad odor today and everybody just thinks it means kind of Bill and Hillary Clinton. But in the 1940s, left liberalism, well, you're in LA. I mean, it was like it was a real force in Hollywood. These were people who were big union people. They were strong anti-fascists. Movies like Casablanca come out of that culture. It was a real presence and the right hated it. This is

how Richard Nixon gets his start in American politics and they come back very strong in 1946. This is a midterm election. The Republicans win, Richard Nixon's elected to Congress, and they start going after the labor movement in Hollywood and the culture industry in general. And it is very powerful. And it forces and pushes the hand of a Democratic president. This is where I think the parallels between Biden, Israel, and Gaza become kind of interesting.

Because the Red Scare begins under a Democratic president, under Harry Truman. And he starts this massive purge of the government to hound out communists. But it becomes a real force, a real attack on the New Deal, the progressive New Deal. And it goes with the government, Hollywood, universities, the culture industry, and the labor movement. And it's comprehensive. And at the height of the Red Scare, historians disagree about the exact numbers,

but the estimate is anywhere from one to two out of every five American workers is subject to a kind of political surveillance investigation for their beliefs. Wow. So you're talking like almost, you know, the high end of the numbers, 40% of the American workforce. And again, I think the parallels with Musk and Trump are doing with the federal government becomes very clear. With DEI, right? That's what it sounds like. Musk and Trump are doing with the federal government becomes very clear.

With DEI, right? That's what it sounds like. That's the comparison that immediately comes to mind. Oh, hold on a second. Did you ever participate in a diversity program? Exactly. Like those questions, yeah. And the sanction for having participated is firing.

And this is the other thing. When we think of political authoritarianism and political repression, we tend to think of violence. We tend to think of imprisonment. We tend to think of those forms of really overt kinds of political persecution. In the United States, one of our most repressive moments, it was economic sanctions that were the primary instrument.

Very few people went to jail over McCarthyism, because of the Red Scare. But what happened was people lost their jobs, they were blacklisted. That's obviously, in Hollywood, is a very tender issue to this day. For my union, the Writers Guild, it was like the Writers Guild members participated in it,

and then it was like 10 or 20 years before the Guild issued a statement sort of acknowledging its role, et cetera, it's a black mark in the history of Hollywood labor, because a lot of people and a lot of institutions, including the unions, acquiesced to it. Absolutely, and that's the other part of it that I'm glad you brought up,

which is that, again, when we think of political repression and authoritarianism, there's this view of the strong men at the top and that everything goes out from them. But also in the United States and repressive movements, there's always a bottom-up angle where actors, institutions, either acquiesce or willingly participate. And the Blacklist is just an amazing, you know, story in the culture industry, because it wasn't just Richard Nixon, it wasn't just the FBI, it was all of these institutions, employers, unions, private Blacklusters, private freelancers, investigating people. And again, the parallel with what's going on with, you know, people who protest around Israel today is interesting

because where is the government getting the names of these people from? It's these private blacklisting websites like Canary initiative, say, oh, this person said X, you know. And then their name comes up in the hopper and suddenly you're being deported or being prepared for deportation to just another country. But to your point about liberal institutions

creating the environment, even before the Trump administration, I had friends in Hollywood who were fired by their agencies, these giant talent agencies, because they were posting on their story about what was happening in Gaza. Friends of mine who are, you know, work in Hollywood were just going,

add to story, add to story, hey, you know, I'm doing a fundraiser for Palestine. Pretty anodyne stuff, you know? And were literally, you know, their agents would call them on the phone, scream at them, and say, we won't represent you anymore. And people lost jobs for that purpose.

It wasn't as organized as the blacklist was, but it was the beginning of that. And again, this happened during the Biden administration. Yeah, and then, I mean, there's two things I wanna say to that. The first, just to bring us back to the McCarthy era is that all of this begins in 1946. Nobody's heard of the name Joseph McCarthy. He doesn't become a name until 1950. All of this stuff is happening over a four-year period before he comes onto the scene. So you can just see the

way the preparatory stage happens before the big name. But to your point about your friends and such, you're reminding me about 10 years ago, I'm a professor at Brooklyn College, our department co-sponsored a panel on BDS, you know, the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions Movement. We just sponsored a student panel that had been organized on this. And the power establishment, not just in Brooklyn and New York City, but all the way up to Washington, came down so hard on this. Chuck Schumer signed letters, Jerry Nadler, you know, really liberal Democrats. And there was a letter that was signed by a bunch of New York City council threatening to take away the funding from, listen to this, because it's very reminiscent, threatening to take away the funding from, listen to this because it's very reminiscent,

threatening to take away the funding from Brooklyn College in CUNY because a department was sponsoring a panel discussion about BDS, taking away the funding, threatening to take it away. This was getting bigger and bigger till finally one sane voice in New York City said, if you want to go to have the government tell the university, what kinds of curriculum and what kinds of

conversations are going to happen on a campus, go to North Korea. The name of the person who said that was Mike Bloomberg. And there was these voices of sanity from this, you know, oligarch that finally, you sense into these idiot Democrats who were threatening to do and promising to do back in 2013, I think this was, these things have a way of germinating long before. And it was a telling moment. I mean, at the time I thought, well, of course, Bloomberg would whip some sense into them because this is insane. You don't threaten a university's funding because you don't like the conversation that's

going on on the campus. Well, lo and behold, look, now this is where we are. But when you said that was 2013, that was while Bloomberg was mayor, right? Yes. I wouldn't expect the mayor of New York to do that now. The political climate is so different. I certainly wouldn't expect a Republican billionaire oligarch mayor. Really makes you get kind of nostalgic for, I mean, look, there's no good billionaires, blah, blah, blah. But as far as billionaire oligarchs go,

Bloomberg was pretty benign compared to a lot of them. Remember when he solved this mystery of the maple syrup smell? That was one of my favorite moments of the year. Do you remember this? He got up and he was like, there's a strange smell in New York. And we found out it's a factory in New Jersey. And he was learning Spanish,

and billionaires used to be kind of cute. Now we're much worse off. Yeah, well, let me ask you this, because it's something I've been puzzling about. When you, please go ahead. Sorry, just what are the, you just, I mean, I was telling you about the Hofstadter chapter about these oligarchs in the 19th century.

In a way, what's happened is we've really reverted to that type. I mean, Hofstadter describes them as like incredibly crass. They have no pretensions, no sense of no bless oblige. Like these are really like cruddy people in the 19th century who become millionaires at the time. And in a way, that's really what's happened. Like the Bloomberg types, they were part of a kind of different set of wealth.

And it is amazing that they now seem like from another age, and that we've reverted to this other really fuggish type that was not the dominant type of, let's say, of the millionaire. Yeah, that's such a good point. I mean, Bloomberg made such a big deal about democracy in general, kind of. He really tried to operate as a proper politician in a way.

He was unbound from a lot of the political system because of his money, and he could be, you know, control things a lot more than other folks could, but he didn't have this my way or the highway sort of thuggish aspect that we see so often now. He was a technocrat, right? He was like, oh, the scientists say that if your cup of Coke is too big,

you'll drink too much Coke, you know, which is true. And he was doing stuff like that. He was like reading, you know, his advisors were telling him, reading him studies. And of course he was developing the hell out of New York because he's a real estate developer, blah, blah, blah. Well, one of the things that I've been trying to make sense of politically is the fixation on Israel on the right

as well as on the left. You know, like, because when I look at Trump's coalition, there's a lot of anti-Semites in his coalition, right? They just announced a couple days ago that DHS is going to be investigating the social media of people applying to visas for quote anti-Semitism, which obviously means if they've tweeted about, you know, justice for Gaza, justice for Palestinians,

that they're not gonna be allowed into the country, right? Which is clear, obvious Red Scare territory, right? We're gonna put a political litmus test. If you support the wrong side, in our opinion, in a foreign war, we are going to deny you entry into the country. And I saw right-ers on Twitter saying, well, we hate this because it proves

that Jews run the world, right? That was, they're winking at it a little bit, but I saw this explicitly from like, big right wing influencers. So it's not obvious to me, especially when the Democrats really were going after supporters of Palestinians. Why has it also been a fixation for Trump? Is it the pure authoritarianism of it? Is it a pretext by which they can deport people or do they really have some skin in the game there?

Well, there's a couple of different levels to this. There's the connection between Trump and Netanyahu and that's, you know, when during the first term when people were talking about this rising authoritarian movement around the world, they always mentioned Russia, Hungary, but they never mentioned Israel, which is clearly constitutively an authoritarian society, but even more so under Netanyahu. So I think there's a clear relationship there, you know, among sort of authoritarian regimes and Trump and Netanyahu. I think that there's a deeper issue there.

I wrote a piece over this past summer in The New Yorker about Jewish politics in America. And the interesting thing about Jewish politics in America is that from the get-go, Jews in America, from the very beginning really, pioneered a very different kind of political style from the Jews in Europe. It was much more embracing of democratic democracy and pluralism. And Jews really, from a very early time, saw that the way to create a different kind of society was to ally with other minority groups and build

a kind of democratic society. And this was very different from how Jews had managed to survive in Europe, where what they did in Europe was to build alliances with kings and sovereigns. And there's a term that comes out of that tradition called the court too. And you know, you'd protect your community, not by building alliances with people around you, who are often very anti-Semitic, but instead by getting protection from the court. And in a way, it seems like we've really reverted and Trump is the like end point, but Biden in a way pointed in this way too. And I'll tell you about that in a second, but we've really reverted to this old European model where like Jews look for their protector from from not from building alliances with

African Americans or trade unions and all the rest of it, but instead with a kind of a strong man in society. And I think that's really what I see going on with groups like the ADL and APAC and so forth. They don't represent the rank and file of American Jews. But it's a it's a weird old pattern that has never really worked out particularly well for the Jews in Europe, I should say. And it's a kind of real betrayal. But in a way, and I think this is your question, you know, Biden, But in a way, and I think this is your question, you know, Biden, again, was very similar in this regard. I mean, he would go around constantly and say to Jewish groups, you and I both know that in the end, the only protection for Jews in any country, including this one, is the state of Israel. And people would applaud and they loved it. And he said this when he was vice president. He said this when he was president and that. Right.

There is a real confession of the bankruptcy of democracy, because what you were saying to a minority group with a history of persecution is the only protection you really have is not from living in a democracy, not from living under the rule of law, but living under a state, under a state, go somewhere else, basically. Yeah. You're not safe here. You're not safe here. And I remember reading this and thinking, I'm Jewish. I'm not Israeli.

Like, what are you telling me? I'm not going to go into the state of it. Well, they probably wouldn't have me at this point, but you know, it's, uh, it's a really, um, it's a really fucked up kind of relationship that I think later historians and certainly the next generation of Jewish people, the younger Jews really see what's so bad about this. And I think this is why you see so many younger Jewish students supporting the cause of Palestine because they realize in it's not just a moral cause and it would used to be, but it's really become a foundational political cause because there's no accident that the most authoritarian, revanchist, regressive

force in American politics today supports the state of Israel the loudest and the most strongly and is at the same time as you said extremely anti-Semitic itself. This is the worldview that they all have which is we are divided up into tribes, you belong to your tribe, and you should live where your tribe lives. And American Jews, even though, you know, you'd have to go back to my great grandparents to find somebody who was not born in the United States, and it was only one of my great grandparents. But you don't really belong here.

You belong over there. And I do think that's, you know, when I get very dark about the world and Trump and all the rest of it, like, that's the that's the real move. It's not even, you know, it's not democratic nation states. It's really these thuggish tribal states that we all belong to. And you should go over there and you should go over here and you know, you guys should definitely not come over here. And so I don't think it's that much of a surprise that, you know, these, you know, really fuggish anti-Semites are so strongly in support of the state of Israel. I mean, the just the last point on this people forget before there was the Holocaust,

you know, the Nazis were experimenting with lots of different projects. And one of them was Zionism. There was all kinds of negotiations going on between the Nazis and Zionist organizations, because it totally fit the Nazi paradigm before they were into extermination, which was just get them, get rid of them, get all the Jews out of Europe, let them have their own homeland, but then go somewhere else. We don't want them here. So there's a very dark history there. And it's not surprising to me that Republicans and the hard right are doing this. What is surprising to me is all the Jewish groups that are going along with it. And I can at best can only think they don't know

what the kind of fire they're playing with. And it's very dangerous. Yeah. Thank you for that. You really illustrated for me how those concepts are connected that, you know, it's anti-Semitism, but more broadly, ethno-nationalism that is compatible with Israel. That is why an anti-Semite can also support

the state of Israel in a really clear way. ["Sympathy for the Dead"] When we talk about these student abductions, right, which are to me the most obvious connection to the Red Scare, you know, that it seems like it's all of these trends coming to a head, everything that we've talked about so far, the attack on higher education as a liberal institution and as a source of resistance to Trump, the fight against anti-Semitism and against protests about Palestine,

and then just the pure authoritarianism of being able to disappear people off the street and the anti-immigration, right, that don't come here. Seeing these people as sort of a weak point that they can use to scare away other immigrants. Even a student at an expensive school who paid a lot to be here, who went through everything, went through, fulfilled that every form correctly.

Well, they wrote an op-ed, so now they're in a freezing cold detention center somewhere and they're about to be sent out of the country. I mean, a lot of press has been spilled about these, but it seems like not even enough. Like it is to me the most shocking thing that's happened over the last month. How do you view it?

The disappearances are, I mean, and just the word alone, of course, that comes from Argentina and the dirty war. That was the use of the word to disappear as a verb, as an intransitive or transitive verb. I can't remember my grammar there. But you would do that to somebody else is it really is shocking.

And it's so visible. And then also on top of that, the sadistic glee that the Trump people take and they post about this on Twitter and then the sending to El Salvador to these horrible prisons, the whole thing is, it does really kind of transcend a lot of the most gruesome moments. You know, you'd really have to go back to the 19th century under slavery and sort of the backlash against Reconstruction, to this level of violent terror and state terror like that.

And it's not just the individuals who are the victims of this. I mean, just imagine if you're in any way, shape, or form a student who's either not a citizen or is here on a student visa from abroad. It's just incalculable, the chill that this sets in. And, you know, in a way, to go back to the Red Scare, this is the part that's the most upsetting, I think, is the long term ramifications of this, because that's, you know, that's, we know, like wartime trauma, the kind of impact that has on the person who's on that battlefield.

But it's the reverberations that continue afterwards around everybody who, you know, around that. It just, it doesn't go go away. Like this is like some real damage. And I just you know, it's hard to know how you recover from that. And to even talk about recovery at this point is is is sort of obscene because we're still in the middle of it. Or maybe just at the beginning of it. So yeah, I mean, I think it's not something that has gotten enough attention, but what I would like more attention is,

so how is that cohort around them? What are they feeling and saying? And I bet it would be hard to even get those stories because people would be too terrified to talk. And that's, you know. I mean, what is the long-term damage that you see? I mean, at the very least to American higher education, like is this gonna be a place that students

from other countries want to come, right? I mean, I'm not enough of an expert on all of that. And there's a lot of people who come for American higher education, not to, they're not interested in politics at all. And so maybe this doesn't affect them. I don't know. Although, they could also feel like,

they would be just caught up in this drag. And we were seeing it already with tourism. I mean, there's been a huge drop in people just traveling. So you can imagine what the cost would be in terms of students coming here. But again, I don't think it's just higher education. People go through these institutions, they get an education. And what's the education they're getting now. It's not just what's going on in the classroom, it's how you behave and act as an adult, as

a citizen. You're being acculturated. That's what these institutions are about. They're not just about what you learn in the classroom, it's how you act. Um, and so they're being told not just by Trump, and this is the really insidious part, but by their leaders in those institutions, their deans, um, you know, and probably their professors. I mean, if I had a student come to me and said, should I go to this protest? You know, I'm, I'm in a difficult

situation there because everything as a professor and as a citizen says, of course. But as the person, you know, who they're coming to for advice, you know, in a kind of counseling sort of a way, I can't tell them that it's gonna have no effect if they go to a protest around Israel. I mean, look what happened before Trump came in to students

who were doxed and all the rest of it. So these things go very deep. And we talk about the impact on higher education and the decline of research and all the rest of it. But you're talking about building a set of political culture, a set of reflexes that are very deep in people's muscles and their nerve endings. And once those, that wiring is there, I don't like to use this kind of biological language, but once it's there, it's hard to undo it. And, and, and that's the real cost.

How permanent do you think that damage is? Because look, my belief growing up in America, the America I was told that I grew up in was in America where that sort of thing doesn't happen. People are not disappeared off the streets for attending a protest or for writing an op-ed. And, you know, I grew up watching movies where, you know, whatever, Joseph McCart, you're watching a movie about the Red Scare.

You're watching a movie about the late 19th century, about how things are bad. And the implication is it's not like that anymore. We worked our way through it and we live in a different America now. Now you could argue that, hey, America's always been like that, yada yada. You could make that argument, maybe I would agree with you,

but we have had a belief among the American people and a belief among most of the people around the world that America is a free society that does not do that. And I would argue the belief is important, even if it's not always true, right? Our self-conception of ourselves as a free society where you can speak your mind without being put into a van is important.

And I worry about that being permanently changed for a lot of people. I'm curious, as a scholar of the Red Scare, where it was a many, probably a decade long period in which that was not the case. We did recover from that as a society and sort of become a free society again and decide, oh, that was wrong.

Maybe that was the blip and we went back to normal. Do you think this is something we can come out of or do you really fear that there's like a permanent change to, you know, the American culture here? You know, I, it's hard. It's hard to predict. I know the part for the future. Let me just say a couple of things that first of all, the freedom that I think you rightly associate from growing up. I don't think that was a myth. But those were very hard fought. We talked about the Gilded Age. The United States really didn't have a really robust,

to use that word, conception of the First Amendment, free speech, easily until the 20th century. And it was labor unions who fought like hell and were clubbed and killed and imprisoned. And it was an, I mean, it's an extraordinarily violent history that produced this thing that we call the people's darling privilege of the First Amendment. I mean, it was always there,

but it was not really used until much, much later. So if you are aware of the amount of violence that it took to get those things, you have to be aware, without thinking of Hungary and other countries, just how vulnerable they can be to violence in the opposite direction. So that's the first thing I would say is, is that these things can be taken away and we're seeing it.

But the second thing is what you brought up about the Red Scare and that, the consequences for that were really felt for an extremely long time. The blacklist wasn't broken until the 1960s. And, you know, I'm not an expert on Hollywood film, but there's been a lot of scholarship about what effect McCarthyism had on the kind of culture that was produced and or the red scare, I should say, that was much more quietistic and much more conformist. And again, these are like in people's nerve endings, they go just very, very

deep. And, and, you know, one thing that people don't reckon with enough is that there's some evidence, you know, one of the things that the Red Scare really purged is the State Department and the people who were experts on East Asia, they were the term at the time was the China hands. They were the experts on what was going on and they were kind of left leaning and they were all gotten rid of. And there's an argument that people have made that this was one of the reasons why the United States kind of one of not the only stumbled into Vietnam was that the people who actually knew

was that the people who actually knew what was going on in East Asia, they had been purged and weren't available. And that's a massive conflagration, the Vietnam War, that killed millions of people. And then when I think about this in the context of things like climate change, where you're really declaring war on experts and the consequences could be huge. It's pretty sobering. And again, it's one of the many reasons why I've had sort of a change of heart about what's going on here. But it can last a long time. And we're at a moment where we don't have a lot of time, particularly when it comes to climate change. Yeah.

And, you know, I, so I, I would feel, it's not just that it's hard to predict things. I would feel, you know, my imagination of disaster is not up to predicting what could be on this one. When you look at the destruction of state capacity, right? The destruction of the firing of all these many, many scientists, it happened so quickly, right? It's already over. The Noah's scientists have all been fired, right?

The ones who I interviewed for my last show, the G word, right? Who work on climate change, the teams at the NIH who are trying to cure sickle cell and all these different diseases. All of these people fired. And you literally have the president's cabinet out there saying, oh, well, all those fired government employees, those are gonna be the people who do the manufacturing jobs

when the tariffs bring back iPhone manufacturing government employees, those are gonna be people who do the manufacturing jobs when we, the tariffs bring back iPhone manufacturing to the US. They'll be the ones screwing in the tiny screws for less than minimum wage. Which I saw somebody point out on either Twitter or Blue Sky, that's literally Maoism, right? We're gonna take the scientists out of the university and we're gonna make them, like put them in the factories.

out of the university and we're gonna make them, like put them in the factories. Yeah. That's like, it's such brute authoritarianism in a way that is, I still don't think we're grappling with. Well, and I'll just add something to that. It's, in addition to the brute authoritarianism, there's like a kind of de-civilizational impulse at work here.

Yes. They're like, they are not building. I mean, for all the talk of building, they are, they're not. They're like, it's very hard, honestly, as somebody who has studied the right, there's always been this utopian element to the right. They were always future oriented and thought of themselves ironically as progressive agents. They never thought of themselves as going backwards, the right.

This is something we didn't really, people haven't really understood. But these guys really do want to undo. Like, yeah, of course they wanna undo civil rights. Of course they wanna to undo civil rights. Of course they want to do trans rights. That's the traditional part of the rights playbook. But the attack on, not just the attack on experts, because again, the right has always had a very uneasy relationship with knowledge and experts, but when it comes down to things like diseases and climate change, like real basic survival questions,

it's very hard for me to kind of grapple with that, except to say that there's a kind of primitivism. And it goes with that tribalism that I was talking about before. It's like a real desire to return to some kind of pre-civilizational world. That I just, I think is very difficult to understand. Yeah, like the question is why would they want to fire the scientists who are trying to cure cancer? Everybody gets cancer. Everybody's mom had breast cancer or somebody that you know had breast cancer, right?

And like the reason that person you love survived breast cancer, I have like half a dozen breast cancer survivors who I know personally, is because of the NIH and all of the other government science. That's why it's no longer a death sentence like it was 50 years ago.

And so why would that be something that you wanted to end? What is the possible rationale? Nobody is even saying, oh, private business should be doing the cancer research. No one is even talking about what's gonna happen with cancer research. It's just gone. And so like, what is that impulse?

I think you're just sort of a primitivism. Like we're wanna, just wanna go back to a time of ignorance. So there's some lust for non-existence on their part. Well, yeah. And I really want to be careful here because like I've dedicated my career to saying kind of the opposite about the right, that we don't see all of their modernizing tendencies.

We don't, we fail to see their futurism. We failed to see their utopianism. And I've, and that they do have a kind of Theory of knowledge and all this kind of stuff and I think I was right about the right for most of the time But so when I say there's a kind of de-civilizing Primitivism like I don't i'm not i'm not an msnbc liberal who's like, oh they just hate facts and they hate science like there is something Really weird here about this. That is, you know, just a quick story about this, because about you

were saying something about the kind of like death wish or something like I can't remember the phrase you use. There was, I don't know how old you are, I'm 57. And when I was growing up in high school, there was a big show, oh god, the day after, and it was about nuclear war. And it was a TV show, and Jason Robards was in it. And it was a big deal. It was like a big event.

It was 1983. I was like a sophomore, I think, in high school. And not only was it a big event, like there were school conversations. Everybody was really terrified about nuclear war. And there was Ted Koppel, who was the host of Nightline. It was an institution back then. He had a big conversation the day after it was shown on ABC. And it convened.

It had Elie Wiesel, Henry Kissinger, Warren Scoker, like all the Worth Scott, like a big, all the worthies and William F. Buckley. And at some moment in the conversation, somebody said something about like, well, in 10 years, blah, blah, blah, and Buckley interjected, and he said, Oh, 10 years, you're saying the world's gonna be around in 10 years. That's pretty good. I would think we'd be happy about that.

And he was being very buckly-ass. But Koppel interrupted and said, well, that might sound nice to you or me at our age that there's another 10 years in the future. But how does that sound to somebody who's a teenager or a young person? And this has always stuck with me that there is something in the right that is kind of like, you know, after us, the flood kind of a thing like we don't care. And Trump and the Trump is like they seem to have pushed this like, to the nth degree, like, it's not just like, well, we'll see what happens in 10 years. It's almost like they're cleaning us forward

to that encounter for reasons that I find puzzling. And it's, that's a really interesting thread you pull out because something that I've noticed among young people of whom I'm sort of at an interesting age in my early 40s. Like I know people of all ages at this point. I feel I can talk to 23 year olds as well as I can talk to 73 year olds. And young people, one of the dominant ways they feel is,

ah, the world is ending. I'll never have a house. I'm not even gonna make it that long. It's sort of like the equivalent of, don't trust anyone over 35 back in the 60s, except it's, I'm not going to make it to 36, right? It's this fatalism, which is not true, right? Like the world is gonna continue, you're gonna be alive.

I mean, you could personally die, but you probably won't. You're probably gonna live in a world, you're gonna have to make your way in it. Like it's an absolution from having to do anything now. It's a nihilism, it's nothing other than nihilism. And maybe when you look at the turn towards Trump, part of it, among young people, part of it is that, is the nihilism of young people,

even young people on the left, who gives a shit? Climate change is coming for me, who gives a fuck? You know, going in that direction. It's... You know, and you bring up the left and, you know, the one hopeful thing could be that people are willing to take some political risks. Yeah. Precisely because the game of calculation and costs and

benefits have been, has been thrown, you know, asunder in so many ways, but that's not what's happening. Instead, people are, you know, hunkering down. And so it's a really bad situation. And I think you're right about that nihilism. And it's interesting. When I've thought about that Buckley moment and what you're talking about, I called it, sorry, this is a little bit pretentious, but Rambo conservatism, which is not Rambo the guy, it's the French poet Rambo. And who was. I really liked it when he grabbed a machine gun and shot all those soldiers. The French poet Rambo, he did so well speaking verse. Go ahead. I'm sort of embarrassed saying it, but it is like this, you know,

like it is this kind of weird like French, you know, like it is this kind of weird, like French, you know, poets, 25 year olds, like vision of the world kind of come into an end, except it's the president of the United States and the Republican party and, you know, big business. And, yeah, I don't know. I have a, just quickly, I have a friend, Greg Grandin, who's a great historian. He's got a book that's coming out, you know, you should have him on about America.

It's called America, America. He his previous book, The End of the Myth, won the Pulitzer Prize. He's just but he's now working on a new book. He writes books all the time about Columbus. And what's interesting is, is the apocalyptic apocalypticism of Columbus that they thought the world was going to end, but also the venality and the desire for money. And like those two things, like, don't seem to go together. You'd think you'd want money for like the long term. Right.

And it's, and I don't want to give away his argument. This is all my friend Greg. This is not me. So, and read his stuff. But it's like, we're like going back to the beginning, like 1492 of just like, the world is coming to an end and get as much gold as you can. Right, I mean, why does Elon think that we need to leave Earth and also wants to make that much money? And why would he support disemboweling NASA, right?

Why would he try to privatize space flight instead of these two things seem to be at war with each other? Staying on the theme of nihilism and talking, now turning back to the political coalition, I find what the Republicans are doing, what Trump is doing really interesting in that, obviously there's been a big strain on the right in the Republican party that wanted to destroy the state, destroy the administration, administrative state,

or just cut it, right? Well, there's too much bureaucracy, blah, blah, blah. They've wanted to do it for 50 years. And in my view, what they've run into is just procedural roadblocks. Oh my God, we can't cut social security because too many people like it. We can't even cut the ag department because too many farmers like it. We can't cut NOAA because there's some senator

in a red state who knows that those are the people who predict when the hurricanes come, so he gets in our way, right? And so what do they do? Trump comes in, they have such frustration about their inability to cut this stuff. They just take a baseball bat and they say, what if we just smash everything simultaneously

before anybody can do anything about it? And they're doing it with glee, because oh my God, we're finally doing it. We're finally destroying everything, no matter what happens. We're taking money away from every school district in the country, even the red school districts. But I wonder, do you feel that the destruction,

is this going to come back to earth at some point, right? That they're in this sort of frenzy of destruction right now, enabled by Trump and Elon, they're in this little moment. But like, at the end of the day, Republican voters do send their kids to public school and the public schools are going to go, hey, we have a $40 million budget shortfall this year

because of what happened. And, and so this, you know, the football program is being cut, right? Like shit like that is going to start happening. Yeah. Do you feel that there, I've often thought these small C conservative forces in America, just suburban people wanting to not be bothered

would bring Trump back to earth have been wrong so far. But like, is it is it ever going to happen? Well, I mean, I think they did bring him back to Earth during the first term. I mean, there was tons of defeats he suffered, and most of them were not because of the Democrats or the left. It was because, you know, the right was fractured. So it has happened before. But I think I guess I

would caution us is that um I do think there's we all have it this an assumption that like at some point as you say like reality has to hit people send their kids to school they want their social security checks you know all this kind of stuff we did also also just go through COVID, where a couple million people died, and nevertheless, people were like, I don't want those vaccines. And so you have that on the one hand, like you do have some kind of weird dead ender thing on the one hand.

But I think the bigger problem, and this is a problem for the left is, you have to be able to put this stuff together into a narrative for people. You have to be able to say, I mean, you said, like, I send my kid to public school, we have a $40 million deficit because of what they did. This is the problem is, is that we don't have a real political force that is able to kind of narrate those steps and, and put it together for people and to, and to explain it. Um, and, or, or if they are there, they don't have enough organizational connection. I mean, I, you know, this is a whole kettle of fish that is probably way beyond my pay grade to understand, but I do think it's a

mistake to assume that reality But I do think it's a mistake to assume that reality translates politically in an unmediated way. Sorry, that sounds very fancy. I don't mean it that way. But like, you need people to translate reality to politics. It just like, it has to happen. And if they are not there, then you do end up like reverting to a kind of like tribal, take care of your own, get your guns. I mean, and this frankly, some of the reporting that I've seen

on guns, what's frightening to me is it's not the right in the guns. It's not like left and liberals and women of color getting guns. And it's like, that's telling you something about where this society is going and what people think is the way to preserve and protect themselves. And unless you have a political party or organization or trade union or something that can translate these

things to people and then give them a recipe for action. That's more than just, well, vote in the midterms or give me money. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know what to tell you. Like you're describing a lot of what we're trying to do on this show is just figure out what the, what the story is. Right. And, and what we, what people can be doing, you know, it's what, what I've

been a lot of my work over the past couple months has been to describe the failure and describe what we can do instead and how we can actually make the political change, but it's hard. It's hard in this moment. Right. I can, I mean, I really have a lot of empathy for people like you because the other part of it is that every day it's a different atrocity. Yeah.

And I mean, I remember the first week of Trump, I was like, let's focus on these plane crashes. Like everybody travels by plane. Right. And like, come on and put the pieces together for people. And then, and I was like, and don't get caught up in the news cycle. And then the next thing, you know, they're firing thousands and tens of thousands of people. And I'm like, that's the story. And that's like McCarthyism.

And then they're picking kids up off the street and deporting them. I'm like, I don't know. I don't know except, yeah, I don't know. I remember when a plane crash used to get a month of coverage. Like if a passenger plane crashed and everybody aboard died, that happened when I was a kid on Long Island.

There was one, like I don't remember what year it was, but it was a relatively, you probably find it on Wikipedia in 10 seconds if you wanted to. It had its own Wikipedia article. It was like a horrible tragedy, right? It was pre-9-11, but it was, you know, this is, oh my God, this must never happen again.

And what happened two months ago? I don't even remember which city anymore because it was in the news for three days. And then Trump said it was because of DEI and that literally changed this. I was like, this is ludicrous that they're just putting DEI on this and the news cycle bought it.

And then the news cycle immediately became, was it DEI or not? I cannot believe that this is where we are. And you're right that there is nobody on the left at all putting the pieces together or telling the story. I mean, we have some, you know, Bernie and AOC are doing their rallies, doing a better job than,

at least they're making the effort to do so. So this brings me to my final question. Why do you think it is that the right has had, I think we have to say, so much more success than the left over the last 50 or 70 years? We're looking at right now, the far right part of the right-wing movement runs the country, they got their wish list,

they are doing things that they never even thought possible, and people are just shrugging and saying, yeah, they get to do that. Some of us don't like it, but oh well. If you imagine had Bernie become president any of the times that he ran, and he tried to do item one on his agenda, the amount of pushback that he would have gotten, right?

To do Medicare for All or whatever it would have been. Oh my God, what a disruption. Like the difference that we can imagine versus what we are seeing, why is it that the right has been able to do this and the left has not? the difference that we can imagine versus what we are seeing, why is it that the right has been able to do this and the left has not? Is it structural or is it just an accident of history? Big last question to ask you, I apologize.

No, no, it's the right question. It took the left. I mean, I hate to take this kind of length of the long view, but I don't know how else to explain it, but it took the left, I would say, through the trade movement, the trade unions to black freedom. And they built an infrastructure of collective action, of an interpretation of society that were kind of interdependent, like what you do affects what I do. You can't just, you know, get as much money as you want. And this was like a pretty violent struggle. And they came out of it with real organizations and real institutions that disciplined capital and white supremacy and disciplined it in like a really hard way.

And it was an epic struggle that people don't really know about. And the right by the 1930s and 1940s began to understand that. And they developed a counter, a set of counter institutions that went first and foremost after the trade unions to just kill them. And I don't think you can overestimate what a loss, like that wasn't just about workers losing wages and benefits and all that kind of, it goes way beyond that. It's, remember we talked earlier about how students

are being educated and acculturated today. That's what unions like, you know, that's what this long arc of American history did was to educate and acculturate people who didn't know very much about like, what is the economy and didn't really know much about, you know, all these things, but it gave them instruments. It was a really a popular form of education, how I don't know how else to put it, and these were instruments of civilization. And they're very precious and they're, you know, they're very precarious and the right just when it destroyed that infrastructure, which it did from starting the 1940s with that red scare up through, you know, we brought up the air traffic controllers like that was really like the end point that wasn't the beginning of the assault on labor. That was the final victory. Yeah. And with that, you lost an analysis but also a kind of in order to discipline capital, you have to be disciplined. And the right, sorry, the left, we're not, we don't have that anymore. And so it's not so much that the right is, I mean, they are

powerful, but it's in a way it's like they've walked through an open door, a door that had been shut, or we thought had been shut temporarily. So I think that I look at it more that way, that it's not so much their extraordinary power, but we're living in the long shadow of the left's defeat and with that, like I said, all these civilizational instruments. And I feel like the Democrats and liberals have had the role to play in this

because I think they thought, okay, you get the trade unions, they're making us less competitive. They saw unions in a very narrow way. They didn't see them as these kind of laboratories and classrooms of democracy that they were Yeah, and so what has happened since you rely on judges you rely on nonprofits You rely on litigators and lawyers and you know, here we are

This is like that's all we've got and you know, you you brought up that thing before about Elon Musk and the people the commissioners who you were talking to, and, you know, they don't have access, they don't have the keys. You know, what's interesting about that story is like, that's what the trade unions used to do. That's what sit down strikes were, you sat in the factory, you stopped the machines, and capital couldn't get in. Like they just could not get in.

And now it's the right that has that tactile, material sense of power. So that's how I would describe what's happened. What needs to be done? Do you have any? To reverse a half century long trend like that? We still got 10 years, that doesn't look so bad. All I will say, and I think this is where we ended

maybe the last time I was on your show, is that the truth of the matter is the left didn't discover this stuff like as a miracle, it learned it through very painful experience and lots of defeats. And I do think that's, you know, if the right time horizon is like we're all going to die and, you know, go back to whatever, like we need a longer time horizon and I shouldn't say this to people on the left because parts of the left love defeat and and are like in love you know and thrall do it but um but I do think

we need a longer time horizon and that it's you know it's not about winning a news cycle and it's not just about winning an election cycle but it's not about winning a news cycle and it's not just about winning an election cycle, but it's really about developing real infrastructure. And I don't know what it looks like, but it has to be something like those classrooms and agents and instruments of democracy and civilization that the left did not inherit, but built for itself in the 19th century. We need a view of a future that we can build.

Like we need a program and we need a sense of something can be done and there's a future world that we can get to. We need a fundamental optimism, which is in short supply right now. Well, Corey, I can't thank you enough for being on, man. I've kept you long enough, but I love talking to you and I could talk to you for a thousand years.

So thank you so much for being here and we'll bring you on again next year to talk about whatever fucking horrendous fascism we're living under under that point. Where can people find you and what's your most recent writing that people can dive into? Sure.

CoreyRobin.com, C-O-R-E-Y, R-O-B-I-N. I blog there a lot. I'm on Facebook. And I just have a piece out today in the new lift review about the tariffs. I think it's called notifications, which if you read the piece, you'll understand why. It has to do with the Arabic origins of the word tariff

which Trump might not be happy to learn about so Cory, thank you so much for being on. Thank you Well, thank you once again to Cory Robin for coming on the show. That was an absolutely incredible conversation That's why it went on for so long I just could not stop talking to him if you want to support this show and all of the conversations we bring you every single week Please support the show on patreon patreon.com Adam con over five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad free for 15 bucks a month I'll read your name in the credits and put it in the credits of every single one of my video monologues this week

I want to thank Marcella Johnson Matthew Bart Bartelsen, aka The Bunkmeister, Kelly Nowak, Anthony and Janet Barclay, David Sears, VG, Christian Bauer, Christian Brower, excuse me, Tank Guy, Damien Frank, Matthew, Robert Miller, Griffin Myers, Oh No Not Again, Sam Biggins, Taylor Kennefick, BK, Ryan Copselroth, Robin Ward, Alex Womack, Grant King, and 90 Miles From Needles. Thank you, all of you, for supporting the show. Thank you for letting me read your silly usernames. If you'd like me to read your silly username, once again, that URL is patreon.com slash Adam Conover. If you wanna come see me on the road,

all of my tour dates, once again, adamconover.net. Come see me, I'd love to see you and give you a hug at the meet and greet after the show. Thank you so much for listening. Oh, I wanna thank my producers, Sam Roudman and Tony Wilson. Everybody here at Headgove for making the show possible. I got to get out of here because I'm fucking up my outro. So we'll see you next week on Factually.

That was a Headgum Podcast. Hey, I'm Jake Johnson and I host the HeadGum Podcast We're Here to Help with my partner Gareth Reynolds. We're Here to Help is a call and advice show, think car talk from back in the day. We're determined to help fix life's dumbest problems. We also have guest helpers join us from the entire cast of New Girl to Michael Cera, Andy Sandberg, Jimmy Kimmel, just to name a few. So do me a favor and come check out an episode and then bounce around our catalog.

We're over 150 episodes so far, so there's plenty of stories for you to discover. Subscribe to We're Here to Help on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday, and bonus episodes drop on Wednesdays. Hi, I'm Rachel Billson. And I'm Olivia Allen. on Wednesdays. And we talk about all the things you would talk about with your best friend. Like your periods.

And mental illness. And the food you ate for lunch. Most importantly. Listen to Broad Ideas on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.