No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen - Big news from Brian Tyler Cohen

Episode Date: August 13, 2024

Elex Michaelson interviews Brian Tyler Cohen about the release of his new book, Shameless: Republicans' Deliberate Dysfunction and the Battle to Preserve Democracy.Order today! https://www.harpercollins.com/pages/shamelessShop merch: https://briantylercohen.com/shopYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/briantylercohenTwitter: https://twitter.com/briantylercohenFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/briantylercohenInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/briantylercohenPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/briantylercohenNewsletter: https://www.briantylercohen.com/sign-upWritten by Brian Tyler CohenProduced by Sam GraberRecorded in Los Angeles, CASee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

I am not Brian Tyler Cohen, and this is no lie. Look who's here, the man himself. Brian Tyler Cohen is the guest this week. I'm Alex Michelson, and we're here to talk about the best book out right now by far. Shameless, Republicans deliberate dysfunction and the battle to preserve democracy. The author is Brian Tyler Cohen. Congratulations. Thank you so much.

I'll tell you what, for somebody who cares a lot about control, controlling his environment. I'm seating all control to you right now, and I'm just going to sit back. can be the guest. Okay. And there's plenty to talk about. So let's let's talk about what is shameless. I wanted to explore the ways in which Republicans have relied for so long on their historical branding to give them cover to act in a way that's completely antithetical to that branding. So for so long, they've presented themselves. They've hidden behind this glossy veneer that they're the party of the Constitution, of family values, of states rights, of law and order, of fiscal responsibility. And in fact, they're not. They're none of those things. But the quicker that we

are able to expose the reality of who they are and the quicker that we're able to expose the reality of how the media has been helping them pretend that they're that way, the better off will be moving forward. So you've wanted to write a book for a long time. You're an English major, right? And this has always been a dream of yours. And congrats. It's finally here. Thanks. Why of all topics was this the topic that you wanted to write about? I just thought it was so important because Republicans, they give themselves permission by leaning on this historical branding to act the way that they're acting right now. And I see so many Americans out there who are just, well, you know, they're better on the economy. And so we're just going to keep voting for Republicans.

And yet you look at the actual economy and at no point in my entire lifetime, in your entire lifetime, has the Republican Party had left office with a lower employment rate than a Democratic administration? At no point in our entire lifetimes has the Republican Party left office with better economic output than a Democratic administration. So on issue after issue, on jobs is the same thing. At no point in our lifetimes, have the Republican Party an administration created more jobs than a Democratic administration. So it's long past time that we kind of debunk these fallacies that have helped bolster up

the Republicans and have acted to the detriment of Democrats who are actually doing the work, who are actually adding jobs, who are actually helping the economy. And, you know, when people see the title shameless, they may think that you're just talking about Donald Trump, but you go much deeper than this. You say that he's just part of this sort of long thing. You go back to really FDR, right? And the fight against him, the fight against LBJ in the 60s, the expansion of Social Security and Medicare,

the creation of all of that and this deliberate effort that's been happening for decades to push back against the very concept of whether government itself can solve problems. And it can. And we've seen that over and over from the days of FDR all the way to today. With the same slim majority that Republicans currently enjoy in the House, Democrats were able to pass the American Rescue Plan, the Inflation Reduction Act, the Chips Act, the Bact Act, the bipartisan infrastructure law, the gun safety law,

violence against women act, codified marriage equality into federal law, all while adding 16 million jobs and bringing the unemployment rate down to a 50-year low. So when government is filled with people who want government to work, government can work. It is only when people are in charge whose sole goal is expressly to break it that it, in fact, crumbles because of course it does. That would happen anywhere else in our lives. If you walked into a company and you tried to break the company, guess what? It's probably going to break.

And that's what we're seeing over and over when Republicans take control and their ranks are filled with people like Marjorie Telegreen and Jim Jordan and James Comer and Donald Trump, whose sole goal is to break government so they can point to it and say, look, that doesn't work, elect us because we want to shrink government down to nothing. And you argue that some of this goes back to Ronald Reagan, who of course famously said, government is not the solution of the problem. Government is the problem. And part of what he did, you point to, was get rid of something called the fairness doctrine,

which was essentially saying that the media, in order to have this license, we're giving you the airways, we're kind of giving you a monopoly, but you need to show both sides, show various perspectives. And Reagan said, no, we're taking that away. And that led the way to a right-wing media infrastructure. A rightway media infrastructure where Democrats didn't have an answer until very recently. And I argue in this book why it's so important for Democrats to continue building up the progressive media ecosystem and in large part the independent media ecosystem because we've seen the failings of the mainstream media,

the aspect of it that I call the both sides media, which is solely focused on equating every bat-shit crazy thing that Republicans do with every misstep that Democrats do because, God forbid, they ever seem like the liberal media. And so we're going to bend over backwards and kowtow to the right just to prove to them that we're not liberal. And maybe that'll garner us some goodwill. And, of course, it never garners them any goodwill. Republicans will always call the New York Times and the Washington Post and CNN fake news. But still, these news outlets continue to grovel at their feet because they think they're going to finally capture this elusive acceptance from the right.

Well, I don't know if some of it's that. some of it is like actually being a reporter. You've got to interview multiple people and it's not necessarily the mainstream media's job. It's actually not their job to be on either side. Correct, correct, which is again why it is so important that we have a progressive media ecosystem whose job is to make sure we focus on what Democrats are doing.

And look, it shouldn't be up to the mainstream media to carry water for any political party. But the fact is that there is an asymmetry because on the right, we have all of the right-wing outlets from Fox to OAN to Newsmax to Daily Washington. A long time ago, it started with Rush Limbaugh. And those outlets were focused solely on acting as propaganda arms for the Republican Party.

We had no equivalent on the left. And you make it tell an interesting story also about the evolution on how we got to Trump. And some of that was with Obama. So let's take you back to 2009. Barack Obama's being inaugurated. I was there in Washington. There was so much hope.

Two million people come to the National Mall. Democrats have a super majority. majority in the House and in the Senate. Republicans are in the wilderness and they get together at this party you talk about with Frank Luntz, the pollster and strategist, Newt Gingrich, the former speaker, and then familiar faces like Kevin McCarthy and Paul Ryan and others, where the fuck do we go now? And they decide one word is the way to respond to Barack Obama. And that is no. They decided in that moment to become the party of no. And then they would exist to block the function of government. Barack Obama came into office with the express notion

that he was going to work across the aisle with Republicans. And tried really hard. And he tried hard. Maybe tried too hard. If you think about what he did with Obamacare. That's exactly what I was going to say. The way that he kind of was able or attempted to water down the ACA in an effort to show some goodwill to Republicans who all of whom voted against it anyway. And so it goes to show that there is no point in showing goodwill to a party that isn't looking. to act in good faith from the beginning. But what Republicans sought to do is just to block Democrats at every turn to make sure that government couldn't function. And that was really the beginning of the end for the functionality of government as we know it today. And for their leaning into this

idea that they would, as I mentioned before, break it so that they can point to the thing that they just broke as evidence that Republicans should be in power. It was the end of really any type of compromise of working for their, I mean, of working for their constituents. That should be the whole point of this. But they viewed it as merely a struggle for power for themselves. And so in order to consolidate power for themselves, they had to make sure that Democrats were perceived as poorly as possible from the beginning. And part of that was Mitch McConnell, who at the time said his legislative goal was to make Barack Obama a one-term president. And speaking of the title, shameless, you talk about Mitch McConnell's shamelessness in terms of not

necessarily following principle. You point out, of course, during the Supreme, court fight when there was an opening during the end of the Obama administration. He said you have to wait a year in an election year. And then when Trump gets an opening eight days before the election, all of a sudden that rule no longer is something that he follows. And Mitch McConnell, you write about kind of lets people know that he's in on the joke too. He literally laughs when he's asked the question about this notion that if a Supreme Court vacancy came up when he had the opportunity to fill it.

even if it was just days before the election, would he fill it? And he laughed it off and said, of course I would. And so that's the moment where the shamelessness was put on full display because there was no pretense anymore of even trying to follow some coherent principle. It was just we want power and it's almost funny to us at this point. Okay, so let's go back. So they're going to be the party of no in 2009. That works for them in 2010.

They run against the Affordable Care Act. The Tea Party comes in. You see this whole different side of the Republican Party that's a little more angry, more in that mode of, let's be dysfunctional. In 2012, they run Mitt Romney, sort of a classic country club Republican. He loses, not huge, but loses. They realize that they did really poorly with Latinos. There's this autopsy where we're going to reach out to Latinos. The party leaders want Jeb Bush with an exclamation mark to be the answer, a more compassionate

a conservative, married to a Latina. And then down the escalator comes Donald Trump and he says, nope, and takes the party in a very different direction. What is that direction that he takes the party and why is he so effective at winning over their support? That was a doubling down on the base and that's as we see it today. And that was no longer reaching out to to broaden the coalition, to bring in Hispanics or people of color. That is just, that is just, leaning into the most, I guess, base instincts of the Republican Party. And in large part, it's the natural conclusion of the kind of acrimony and hostility that we saw from the Newt Gingrich's of the world decades ago.

It works because Donald Trump saw that he could kind of exacerbate the nativist ideas that were beginning to simmer under the surface with, again, Newt Gingrich and all of those people previously. And so he just leaned into that. And clearly, there was potency, especially in the aftermath of Barack Obama, having just been elected our first black president. Well, and you think of the name, shameless. Donald Trump, who had donated to Democrats,

donated to Kamala Harris, had Bill and Hillary Clinton at his wedding, had been all over the place, thought about running for president as a libertarian, had argued that we should be pro-choice, and then he's the guy that appoints justices that take away the right to an abortion in terms of a constitutional right.

I mean, principles has never really been a thing for him. Exactly. It's wherever the wind blows, he saw there was an opportunity to exploit a Republican base, and he said whatever he needed to say to consolidate power among those people. And if that means he has to change his position on abortion, on taxes, on social issues, that's exactly what he's going to do. Because, again, it is not about following any longstanding principles or values or morals.

It is about the consolidation of power by any means necessary. And in large part, that shows that Donald Trump isn't necessarily the problem. He's a symptom of a broader problem that started, again, to harken back to that night in 2009. Well, and he was able to utilize that right-wing media infrastructure that had been built and the mainstream media industry that was already in place, which he had been courting for several decades as well. You say that Democrats can learn from Trump. What do you think Democrats can learn from Trump in terms of utilizing the media to get out a message more effectively? So I want to be clear that we are not heaping too much praise onto Donald Trump here. But to his credit, I actually think he was very effective at 2,000.

things. One was making sure that his messages were simple and to the point. I write in the book about how Al Franken has this joke where Democrats bumper stickers always end with continued on next bumper sticker. And we fall into the depths of talking about Medicare Part D when we're explaining Obamacare. It ain't going to work. There is also the fact that he repeated his messages so many times to the point where it just seers itself into the brains of the people who are listening to him. How many times have we heard lock her up, make America great again, build the wall? And Democrats didn't have an equivalent to that. And in fact, we hadn't had one until just recently with Kamala Harris, where we started hearing, we're not going back, for example. And think about

how many people have heard that over and over and over again. And it's a testament to the fact that these short, clear, concise, effective messages work and that repeating them over and over and over again is going to work as well. And the media infrastructure is different now than even 2020 when Joe Biden ran. You are a master of this. You every single day, at what's trending online. What are the lessons do you think that Democrats can learn from the work that you do in terms of messages that hit and messages that don't hit? I think the number one thing I would say right now is that Democrats have to be on offense for so long, for years. I feel like the entirety of my career in political media, we are just

rebutting, swatting back disinformation that's coming at us from the right. And that is the whole Steve Bannon model of flooding the zone with shit. And we've seen that over and over over and over again. It's what Medi Hassan calls the Gish Gallup. And he wrote about that in his book, and he spoke with me about that in this book when I interviewed him for it. But we are just constantly trying to claw our way back amid this deluge of disinformation from the right. And now, for the first time, we are the ones on offense. And you see how Republicans, and Donald Trump especially, just crumbles when he is put in a defensive position where he starts desperately calling up news conferences at Maralago so that he can even further

Meyer himself in disrepair by claiming, for example, that his crowd size on January 6th for the insurrection was bigger than Martin Luther King's crowd size for his I Have a Dream speech. I mean, this is not something that's going to help the guy, but he did it

out of desperation, and that's because Democrats for the first time that I can remember are finally on offense. And they're using not the old mainstream media for this. She hasn't even done an interview with anybody yet. This is all social media rallies you know we talk about vibes a lot but but why how do you think they're doing that because you see her and she looks good she looks younger than she is every time you look at

Kamala harris she's smiling she's got great outfits on you know Tim walls looks like a you know the dad of the year from the Midwest there's a reason they're calling him coach can you talk about the the strategy that's going on and the way that not just the democratic operatives but a lot of young people on social media seem to be pushing this right now. I think largely the fact that the mainstream media is becoming less and less of an important messenger is a testament to the fact that for a long time, people are tired of the both sides framing and the both sides narrative. And there came a point where we realized that we have some agency here and everybody has

followings online and everybody can talk to people online. The whole world is online. And so recognizing that we have the issues on our side, which is especially important, the issue of climate change, the issue of health care, the issue of guns. gun safety, the issue of workers' rights, of unions, of making the rich pay their fair share, of protecting democracy itself, of abortion rights. All of those issues are issues that young people agree with Democrats on. And so now with a candidate who's actually able to prosecute this case, and for as good

a president as Joe Biden is, he's not a good candidate. But Kamala Harris is showing that she's able to prosecute this case on the campaign trail. And so now we can really drill down on the issues, on the differences between these two candidates. And when you have an effective messenger at the top, as Kamala Harris has shown to be, then not only is it easier for those messages to filter down to the people like me who are trying to spread them on social media, but it also just gets people excited. And they're on top of that. We're talking about a race where Kamala Harris and coach Tim Walls are really spreading optimism and hope and joy for what the future of this country could look like, while the other side

is spreading fear and demagoguery. And it's hard to get people excited about a campaign steeped in retribution and vengeance and fear of basically leaving your house on a daily basis. Yeah, because elections traditionally are about the future. And it is hard to have an election about the future when you have a candidate who's in their 80s. And so that was a tough message for Biden to talk about the future because he was defending his record, Trump defending his record. She looks like she's moving things forward. Correct. Yeah. And I think, you know, that's not the kind of thing you can fake. That's not the kind of thing you can buy. That's not the kind of thing you can manufacture.

It has to be organic, which is why the second that she entered the race, we saw all of these young people and artists and actors and musicians come forward and endorse her. And that shows that these people were waiting for somebody who would be able to articulate that case from Charlie XX to Katie Perry to Beyonce. And now that Kamala Harris is able to effectively make that case, look at the way that people are following. So in terms of just talking about you for a moment as we. wrap things up. How is it being an author? How does this feel for you to see your baby finally come to fruition? Tell your audience that's sort of the process of making this whole thing. Yeah, the process was, the process was interesting because obviously I, you know, do everything that I do on YouTube and all my other social media platforms. So a lot of the

writing happened between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m., I'd say. So not really the best feeling to finish a full day of work and know that you have to then dive into something that's going to be memorialized. forever, especially something that I hold in such high regard as a book. But to see it done now, I'm very proud of the way it turned out. I'm proud of the team that was assembled for this thing, from Dan Pfeiffer to Medi Hassan, Pete Buttigieg, Jen Saki, Heather Cox Richardson, Al Franken, Mark Elias. So an absolute all-star team. Jamie Raskin wrote the foreword. I've done a few interviews where I was sitting there and my heart was pounding. Interviewing President Biden was one of them. And I was like, if I could just get through the

first question, I know I'll be okay, but just don't stumble on the first question. And then it's off to the races. That's how I felt today. Go ahead. Probably, probably aside from the Biden interview, the most nervous I was was asking Jamie Raskin to write the forward.

Because the second that I, the second that I, yeah, that's right. We spoke about that. The second that I knew that I was going to write this book, I wanted Jamie to write the forward. And so I was just holding it for as long as I could because I didn't, in the event that he said,

no, I didn't want to have to sit with that for too long. So I waited a long time, but he ultimately said yes. So even if not for me, at least grab it so that you can read the forward by Jamie Roskin. Well, not that we're competitive or anything, but we want to make this book number one. So all of you folks out there that are into the no-lie community, that follow Brian's work, that love Brian, this is your chance to show him how much you love him.

Go buy the book, order it. You can get it in a bookstore, help a local bookstore, order it on Amazon, wherever. Shameless, Republicans Deliberate Dysfunction in the Battle to Preserve Democracy by Brian Tyler Cohen. Congratulations. Congratulations. So happy for you, so proud of you. Thank you so much. And thanks for taking over. I think maybe I'll take a month off. Okay. Well, I don't need another job. Thank you.

You've been listening to No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen. Produced by Sam Graber, music by Wellesie, and interviews edited for YouTube by Nicholas Nicotera. If you want to support the show, please subscribe on your preferred podcast app and leave a five-star rating in a review. And as always, you can find me at Brian Tyler Cohen on all of my other channels, or you can go to Brian Tyler Cohen.com to learn. more.