Offline with Jon Favreau - Can The Left Reclaim America's Story?

Episode Date: September 11, 2025

Democrats need to defend democracy without undermining it—but how? John Ganz, author of When the Clock Broke and the "Unpopular Front” substack, joins Offline to interrogate why Democrats have ceded nostalgia about the past to Republicans, how they should be resisting the America's autocratic slide, and what it says about our political moment that his “Trump is dead” tweet went viral. John and Jon discuss the pros and cons of using historical frameworks like fascism to understand contemporary American politics, how the seed of Trumpism was planted in the early 1990s, and whether Democratic leaders are falling short on rhetoric.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast. 

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That's C-I-V-T-E-C-H dot I-O slash offline to start contributing to your community's future. A quick note before we start, we recorded this episode before the news broke that Charlie Kirk was shot and killed in Utah. I'm recording this part Wednesday afternoon, so I am saying. still processing the news and am honestly pretty shaken by it, though I will just say it is horrific and I can't stop thinking about his two young kids who are around the same age as my two kids. Like a lot of episodes that we've done lately, this is about authoritarianism in America. And I think it's fair to say that we might have gone with another topic had we recorded this after the news, but in some ways, I think it's even more relevant for the exact

reason that we need to find our way out of this crisis without descending into more political violence. We need to find a way to oppose this regime without becoming this regime. Towards the end of the episode, I mentioned Martin Luther King Jr. and how he wrapped his rhetoric in the language of scripture and the country's best ideal. and I've also been thinking a lot about his incredibly disciplined and successful strategy of nonviolence, which ultimately triumphs over a state's repressive violence, even as it caused him and others their lives. So hopefully we can talk more about that in future episodes, but for now, here's this

week's offline. All politics is, at the end of the day, is speaking in public and persuading people to support you. It's very simple in a weird way. And everyone gets all in their head, this polling, and we need the Democratic version of Joe Rogan. It's like, no, you need somebody who can get people's attention and is interesting and has moving and fascinating things to say.

Joe Rogan talks about things that are stupid and crazy. like UFOs and shit like that but that captures people's imaginations it's fun it's interesting you know yeah like people are like hey i've never really thought about that so or i've always wondered about that and it's kind of bullshit but there's a reason why conspiracism is dominant in our political culture is because it is very narratively satisfying and it communicates political information and understanding and in a very compact way I'm John Favreau, and you just heard from John Gans, the author of When the Clock Broke, and the very fantastic unpopular front substack.

John's also a columnist for the nation. And he tweets, which, you know, we love tweeters here. We love a poster. I mean, his Twitter name is Lionel Trolling, right? So it's right in the handle. I have wanted to talk to John for a long time because, He has been writing a lot both before the election and after about he is a student of fascist regimes, authoritarian takeovers, and he has been more clear-eyed and I think really incisive about what Trump is, what his movement is, what it looks like, what it doesn't, and what we can expect from here on out. I would say his writing is somewhat dower, but I think our conversation was not as dower as I expected.

It was actually pretty upbeat. We had a great conversation about where Trump's movement is, at what stage of an authoritarian takeover we may or may not be in. And then we sort of talked about the opposition and what an opposition can do and what an effective opposition looks like. We even got into a discussion about polling, about rhetoric, about speeches. So it was a really fun conversation. He's such a smart guy. And I hope you like it. Here's John Gans.

John Gans, welcome to Offline. Thanks so much for having me, John. So you write a fantastic substack. I'm a regular reader. Everyone should go subscribe to Unpopular Front. I wanted to talk to you for a while about your area of expertise, right-wing populism, fascism, all that good stuff. We will get to that in a bit. I got to start with the most important thing you've written, which is a tweet from August 29th that reads, Trump is dead.

He died on Wednesday. and now has 14 million views and may have launched the entire Labor Day weekend conspiracy that Trump might have been dead. Is that right? What have you got to say for yourself about this? I don't really know. You know, I was trying to, I was on vacation and I was trying to watch the Mets game, but I couldn't watch it because it was blacked out, like the coverage was blacked out

on the streaming service where I was. So I didn't have anything to do. and then someone mentioned that Trump had been kind of MIA for a little while, like since Wednesday. So the thought just popped into my head that it would be kind of, you know, a shit post, just a funny tweet. And I tweeted it. And then I went to bed and I saw like my friends were liking it. And I was like, ah, I win. People I thought are funny were liking it.

So I was like, ah, I'm making the funny people laugh. And that felt good. And then I woke up and it had gone completely. broken containment of my followers, which are a few. Like I have like 50,000, but still like not every tweet does this. And it was getting like, had like hundreds of thousands of likes, thousands of retreats, millions of views. And the whole thing had blown up.

And people in my mentions were like furious at me. And then there were a ton of jokes about Trump dying, but a lot of people seem to kind of actually believe it. And it was creating, it was kind of driving news coverage. You know, they were like, the White House had to like issue a statement. which was extremely funny. And then people were like, it's not funny.

This is not funny. I was like, what are you talking about? It's hilarious. It's literally nothing but funny. Yeah. It was and it's, you know,

as a prophet, you know, I'm a writer and I've written a book and I've written hundreds of thousands of words on my substack and tens of thousands of words and articles probably. And I don't think anything I've written

will be as read as those, you know, a few words, which is funny to reflect on but yeah it's funny it's sad it's it's frustrating that that's where we are as a society that people who are brilliant writers can write and write and write forever and now

with the attention economy you just need one good shit post and boom you take it off yeah I think it's you know you gotta be both you have to remember how to be an idiot sometimes sometimes that's the smartest thing to do in this contemporary media environment well that's that's why we have Donald Trump as president So you wrote a piece after the election called Testing the Fascism Thesis, where you promise to

occasionally revisit whether Trump's government would qualify. Two questions. Sure. The first is, what do you find useful about trying to differentiate between the term fascist versus authoritarian versus strongman versus right-wing populist? And then two, where do you think we are right now? You know, I think the terminology is not that. important actually even though I was very insistent upon you know I have a reputation which is

deserved of being very insistent that this was you know the correct label what I was really saying was it was an extremely helpful and useful heuristic to see where the movement and the politics would go that it had certain almost predictive power and I think that that really took hold for me around the time of January 6th, right? So, you know, everyone who said it wasn't really fascism, they said, you know, that kind of thing wouldn't happen. And they were sort of mocking the people who thought that there was a potential for kind of paramilitary mob violence around the election.

And the people who said, hey, this is a fascist movement, were expecting this very kind of thing. So I was like, okay, well, this is not the worst reading. What else can it tell us? And I think basically, if you look at the history of fascist movements and the way that they try to kind of move through institutions and co-op the power of the state and how the movement has in kind of internal dynamics, it gives you, I wouldn't say an exact blueprint, but it's a very useful way of looking at things. I mean, just to say, you know, it's not the only framework. I mean, there's a lot of American history that should go into. There's other, you know, as you say, strong men, populist authoritarian regimes.

but I think it has a better record than the people who are real skeptics. So I almost start to treat it as like a scientific hypothesis. It's not pure science, but you've got to say, okay, well, if it's helping us predict what's next, it's not the worst hypothesis. Yeah. It's not the worst hypothesis. So I think that it's a useful framework that's on the purely through radical side. On a practical side, it's a little more complicated. How helpful is it politically?

I don't know. Is it too alarmist? Is it a word people don't understand anymore because it's from the past? I don't know. I think it deals with the situation we're in with the requisite seriousness it has. And, you know, it's just like, hey, you know, this is this is not dissimilar from some of the worst regimes we've seen in human history. Yeah. You know, with that being said, I try to be thought.

about it. I try to see where there's disconfirming things and not, you know, only do confirmation bias and say, oh, well, this, this, that. But I think, like, what I basically try to say is, look, I'm going to work on this theory and try to make it work, which means sometimes I'm going to explain away differences or try to deal with all the information. I might appear to be explaining away, but it's just trying to keep the theory going. And, you know, take it or leave it. If you find it helpful or useful, it's one framework among many. I'm going to argue for it as best I can. But I don't know, I don't think that it's the only interpretation of the present. I think it provides some helpful tools. That's basically my position. So where do you think we are right now?

because I was looking back at that piece that you wrote up to the election and quite a few of the things you laid out that you thought would qualify have come to pass, especially as you get towards the bottom part of the list. But where do you think we are? What has surprised you about how fast certain things have happened

and then what's surprised you about what hasn't happened yet? Well, I think basically I'm not terribly surprised. I got certain things wrong or certain predictions weren't paying attention to the actual dynamics of what might happen. So, you know, obviously in historical fascist movements at the beginning when they're coming to power and, you know, when they're in power and trying to intimidate opponents, like paramilitary organizations are a big part of it, right? So you have the brown shirts, the black shirts. You know, you have hints of that with Trump with the proud boys and the 3%, whatever they're called. Oathkeepers, yeah. Yeah.

But it's not the level of violence and the level of strength of those organizations is not huge compared to historic fascism. So I said, oh, well, if we see those kinds of groups kind of being adjuncts of the state, you have to say the theory is pretty good. And now I have to kind of revise that and say, well, it's more at the stage where he tries to create an internal organization, a kind of parallel. state um that is very personally loyal to him and his politics and you see that with the massive increase of ice yeah i wish i had seen that coming and i probably could have thought that out but i kind of was just i wasn't being lazy but i was going on some basically i was like oh well this is what it looks like historically i didn't think of what it was looking like in the present enough you know the judiciary is still functioning they haven't deployed direct

force against the judiciary so far as we know but they are conservative justices, especially on the Supreme Court, seem very inclined to be friendly. Now, this is something that if you're a believer in the fascism analogy

is something you come to expect because the whole idea of fascism is that pre-existing conservative elites cooperate with the fascist movements or require it, collaborate, make accommodations with

it because they few it as better than the alternative, as a kind of fear of a far left coming to power. Again, many critics of the fascism analogy make a great point other than the lack of, you know, huge amounts of violence, although there has been some, is that, well, the United States doesn't really have a big revolutionary left that would scare conservatives into an alliance with fascists. may be true in fact, but certainly in the imagination of the right, they're highly afraid and during the period of the George Floyd protest, during the pandemic, during the stuff

that they called wokeness, they believed they were dealing with a kind of totalitarian threat from the left akin to some kind of communist takeover, and they often called it Marxist and so on so forth. So it sounds strange because it doesn't look to liberals or leftists. It's like, yeah, maybe there were some stupid parts, but was it really so crazy? And I think in the imagination and in the emotional world of the right, truly terrifying and definitely willing to use force and extreme methods to defend themselves from their point of view and importantly to take revenge. So I think that that's, a way you can kind of keep the theory working. I will say, you know, thank God, for the most part, the rule of law has issues. You know, he's practicing politics in a democracy in a, in a very different way than we were used to seeing. But, you know, I do this as my job. I complain about him all day. I have not received any kind of threats, anything like that. I mean, even during

this saying he died, I didn't hear word one from, I'm not going to pretend that I'm some kind a dissident, anything like that. I'm exercising free speech. And the worst I get is somebody yelling at me on the internet. I'm not experiencing even the tiny bit of political repression. I mean, some people may be there are bigger figures of opposition who are. But I would say, you know, for the most part, political discussion, discourse, the press, it's distorted, it's messed up. He's trying his best to screw these things up continues. I am not afraid to go on the street and have a gang of dogs beat me up. And that would be what it was like in fascist Italy or fascist Germany. So let's keep it real. Yeah. And I think it's important to keep that in

mind because if you're interested in politics, you have to practice politics and do your civic duty and go out there, vote, speak, you know, be a citizen. And you can't freak yourself out. Fear is a is a force magnifier for them. So if they make people afraid, then they're going to stop doing politics and it makes it things easy for them. So I think people have got to be a little bit courageous. I don't know how much courage it really takes to practice politics right now, a little bit courageous. Don't get freaked out. Don't get too frightened. But, you know, don't allow the propaganda to win. You know, they seem very fearsome, but, you know, they don't have infinite power.

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into healthy adults. This is my everyday challenge. This is the keeps me awake at night, is trying to balance. We are in an information environment where it is extremely difficult to get people's attention and to keep people's attention.

And so there's a lot of people who forget about not believing that this is a fascist takeover or not. They're just tuned out. And so you've got to get people's attention because I am quite alarmed by what's going on. I know you are. Many people are who are paying close attention to this.

But then you don't want to engage in the kind of hyperbole or alarmism that's not going to like sort of meet people where they are in their perception of the country in politics and they're walking outside and everything looks nice. But at the same time, I'm like, well, then what words are we supposed to use to tell people that this is, you know, maybe everything will be fine. And maybe it's just another terrible Trump term and then we'll get out of it. Or, you know, maybe this is only, we're only nine months in, eight months in, and he's got a four-year term and things could get a lot worse. Yeah, for sure.

I think that that's absolutely right. I think, you know, it is very difficult to strike the right balance. And sometimes people say, read me, and they find it very frightening. And I don't want to discourage people. It's very much the opposite. I want to encourage people to take an active participation in political life. And I think that basically the biggest strength they would have is to demobilize people and have them kind of go away. You know, they have to make very strong attack.

Whenever there's a position to them, they don't ignore it. They have to make very strong attacks against it. So it worries them. You know, they have ways of coping. They have what they feel are tried and true attacks that work against the left. But yeah, I think it's important to continue to use your voice and to put pressure on elected officials, make sure the elected officials know there's a constituency that's angry and wants to hold them to account for all these things. And they can't just keep their heads down and ride it out. Another reason I wonder if people sort of shy away from wanting to believe, you know, that we are in an authoritarian takeover or fascist takeover, whatever you want to call it, is the history that most people know, the most common history about Hitler and maybe Mussolini and maybe others, they think about, okay, well, if that's our system right now, then usually the only way out of something like that is violence or we're just trapped in this repressive regime.

and there's nothing we can do so I don't want to believe that like how do you know authoritarian fascist regimes end that are not in a lot of violence well the two big ones the two classical ones obviously they started a war and then that kind of brought them down eventually

and that's not good but you know that wasn't the only possibility I mean normal is not exactly the right word but they functioned within constitutional systems and they had to navigate those political systems after Mussolini came to power he wasn't a dictator overnight

he had to kind of maneuver through the constitutional system and a severe crisis almost brought him down and it looked like he might not be long for the world unfortunately enough allies rallied to his side that kept him alive. We've seen that kind of stuff to have with Trump. It looked at like after January 6th might finally be it for him.

but, you know, it's still kind of made his way through it. And then in other authoritarian regimes, like, you know, Franco fell peacefully. Salazar fell peacefully. I mean, Salazar's regime was involved in ruinous wars abroad, but, you know, those regimes fell relatively peacefully. I mean, most of the regimes in the, I mean, it was a little hairy, but most of the regimes in the Eastern Bloc fell peacefully. I think only Chichescu was the communist leader who faced like a violent revolutionist country and was killed. And I think that the internal politics of the regime can be quite brittle. And as long as there is an opposition that exists and stays alive, you know, they can seize the initiative when such a regime leads itself into a crisis and is

unable to govern. You know, the problem with these regimes is that democracy is a big feedback system. If they're messing with the feedback system, they're not knowing when the population is actually getting fed up with them. Yeah, I think that's important. They are going to get high on their own supply, believe their own propaganda, believe that their

base is the only people in the country and not being really sensitive to where the political winds are blowing and they'll get themselves into trouble and the opposition party has to be ready for that and to seize on the opportunity. In the same way that the anti-democratic movement seizes on the opportunities of problems

with the old regime, with the democratic regime. Yeah. And you can already see this happening with the economy. They're trying to believe that everything's great. Even on issues like immigration, you know, like there's, I've lost kind of how many, you know, White House officials have gone on background to reporters and was like, this is an 80-20 issue for us and I hope they keep talking about this. And it's like, all right, well.

It didn't stay that way. Yeah, it was like, I would not confuse your political support for border security with the opposition to your mass deportation. right well I think this is what gets people in trouble with polling I was going to get to your polling piece which is which is great I thought polling asked very abstract questions so the question over illegal immigration sort of contains its own answer in itself right so illegal people hear the word illegal of course that's bad and it sounds unfair that people come to the country illegally the image they have in their mind about it is maybe not the way it is in reality so

then you have the reality of the way the policy is implemented, and people go, hey, this looks horrible. And they didn't think through how it was going to be their neighbors, loved ones. We get caught up in this. It's very ugly. You see, you know, the extreme suffering done to people who are just hardworking and want to be here. And I don't think most Americans are sadistic, awful people who want that to happen to

people. They say, hey, that kind of makes me feel not so great. I think that the propaganda of this regime and the way it tries to pump things out in social media is to make people callous and cruel. I don't think they're naturally callous and cruel or to justify by saying, oh, these are criminals, so on and so forth. So I do think that, yeah, you know, in practice, in theory, these policies are like, yeah, you know, I don't think that it's fair that people come here illegally. They should do things properly. but when they actually see who illegal, quote unquote, illegal immigrants are and how they're being treated, they feel a little queasy about it. And I think that goes across, you know, in a lot of things.

And now people feel really good about immigration in the country, if you want to believe the polling on it. Then this has a weird thermostatic effect. I remember during Trump's first term, people started to feel good about immigration in response to his rhetoric about immigration, which may have misled the Biden administration to think it wasn't such an important issue. and then people kind of went, I'm not so happy about it. So the public is fickle and it changes its mind and no political movement leader party able to permanently control that

unless you're in a regime where they've had a lot of practice like China or something like that. So this is what I tell people when they ask, well, when are you really scared? I said, well, if like Barack Obama was like, I'm going to get an apartment in London. and not really live in the United States anymore, you know, like when it seems like opposition

figures are kind of quietly trying to exit the country or, you know, there's some kind of high-profile use of violence against political opponents in the regime kind of is like shrugs its shoulders or is behind it. Then I would be like, okay, this is really bad. But yeah, you know, like I think everyone is planning to be midterms. right you know and it doesn't look like the republicans I mean they're definitely fuck around with them but doesn't look like they're expecting

to be able to control the federal elections they're practicing politics so and yeah and I wouldn't be surprised if you know there are troop deployments around election day and ice I think Tom Homan's already said maybe there could be ice around polling places and around election day that's horrible horrifying but I don't know if people are actually going to be intimidated

by it. That's what I was just going to get there. Yeah. Like I think that the answer to that is you go vote. Yeah. And you know, you don't have to harass them or try to get in a fight. Just go and do your duty and keep your head down and vote. It may actually have a perversely encouraging hopefully be like people might say, you know what, fuck this. I don't like this. I'm really going to go out and exercise my right to vote. I'm not going to be intimidated. You know, and the fact the matter is, if people vote on mass, there's a lot more of you than the ICE officers. Right. There's safety in numbers.

Yes. That's what the democracy is about. You're always going to outnumber these motherfuckers. That's right. The other thing I often think about with, you know, people sort of wrapping their heads around what we're going through right now is, you know, authoritarian regimes look different at different points of history in different countries. and there is something quintessentially American about Trump.

And you wrote a great book, When the Clock Broke, that draws a line from sort of the cultural, political, economic shifts of the early 90s to the rise of Trump. Yeah. What was going on in the early 90s that sort of gave rise to this? Well, you got a lot of things kind of popping up

around the 1992 election, which is the main focus of my book in the years just after and just before. that. First of all, you had the beginning of this kind of right-wing populism whose main issues were trade and immigration. You had a kind of breaking down of the norms around overt racism and politics. You had overt fascism politics. David Duke running for governor in Louisiana and winning a majority of the white vote. Pat Buchanan runs against George H.W. Bush and cripples and probably takes down his bid as the incumbent.

You have a wider kind of anti-system populism that crystallizes in the person of Ross Perrault who demonstrates that there's a great deal of dissatisfaction with the two-party system and just the general way the country is going. Are there real specifics about that would mean? It's mostly an attitude. There are some policies, but they're coming up as the movement develops kind of ad hoc. Again, trade is a big part of that, sense that the government is. not responsive to the people, that there's something fundamentally broken about the representative

system, and a kind of strong man figure needs to come in and fix things. Then you have a big changes in the media. You have the rise of talk radio. So you have a much more chaotic media environment where voices that perhaps would have been edited out of mainstream network news and the newspapers kind of begin to get a foothold. And you see that the population, is very angry and that kind of these people are stoking it, but there's a preexisting constituency or market for it. So you begin to see, get a kind of sense that the country is dissatisfied fundamentally with the way things are going. You have at the same time, you know, the first size that maybe the economy that was set up under Reagan had some serious problems with the way

it took care of redistribution of wealth and the way that it set up the productive disposition of the country. You had a big focus away from industry into finance, into companies getting short-term returns instead of, you know, planning product lines and productions over years and research and development. And, you know, they had the beginning of leverage buyouts and private equity, the kind of stripping of companies for financial reasons. And then you see financial deregulation, how.

that destabilizes institutions. So a lot of things that came to ahead around 2007-8, you see a mini version of that. It's in commercial real estate, not in home building and in residential real estate, but you have little signs of that. And then you have deregulation, finance, causing insider trading, corruption, close alliances between government and business that make people angry. So you have a beginning of the signs of what kind of cracks could happen in the way things that were set up in the previous decade. Yeah, so I think there's a collection of different factors that kind of go under the surface because the Clinton 90s are prosperous and people are generally pretty happy with where they're at and they see, okay, maybe some of the problems that

rear their heads around 1992 were solved. And then they kind of come roaring back and the kind of politics that people saw and maybe even forgot a little bit, you know, Ross Perrault became kind of punchline and then became kind of a trivia question. Pat Buchanan, if you're a real political junkie, you remember him from TV. Oh, yeah. You don't maybe remember him and maybe later not quite so successful presidential runs, but I don't think people remember just how much of a threat he was against Bush. So you see the country, you know, the things that had been kind of repressed or seemingly

dealt with, but perhaps papered over, return with a big theory. So I just found it so fascinating that you've got this kind of look into the beginnings, the seedlings of these things that I think at the time commentators knew

this is something notable, something strange that's just happening in the country, and then it all seemed to come to nothing. And everyone was like, oh, I guess that was just a weird election year. All right, quick note before we move on, we've been talking about Cricket Con for weeks now, and tickets have been going fast, but today we're excited to announce the lineup. CrookedCon is your chance to join some of the smartest organizers and least

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Message and data rates may apply. I'm wondering lately, you know, is it the great man theory? of politics or is it uh is it larger forces that uh that determine where we are and reading your book you got all these dynamics in the early 90s in that election that you described and you know how much of the the dormancy of all these trends in the 90s and 2000s had to do with um just who was running for office yeah you know because i was like you know you didn't mention there just george w bush right

We had two terms of Clinton, then we had two terms of George W. Bush, then Barack Obama for two terms. And then we get Trump. And the reason I think it matters now is how much of this current movement is all about Trump. Oh, for sure. And his charisma. And how much can, you know, Yahoo's like J.D. Vance and the rest of them maybe carry the mantle forward after he's gone. yeah weirdly i think my book kind of straddles the structural and the great man theories of history because i think i identify a number of different structures but trump personifies them all he's able to bring together the talk radio shock jock the rise of this right wing populism that's angry about immigration and trade and deindustrialization in our case you know it's not talk radio it's the internet which really accelerates and changes the media environment um you know this

kind of billionaire who says he's going to fix everything in ross perot and i have a chapter on john goddy becoming kind of a celebrity in new york um and kind of a mob boss having a having a public appeal and trump in his strange mix of all these things is sort of the perfect candidate for the moment that he arrives at even then you know he's still unpopular He has a certain cachet. He reaches deeply into the country, but not perhaps that broadly because he continues to attract a lot of revulsion as well. So, yeah, it's a complicated question for every historian.

And I think it's the certain people reflect their times or able to, you know, seem to be the right person for the time. And it kind of makes sense because the guy is almost like a nothing on some level. Like, he's a product of television, watches a ton of television, has lived his entire life in public and doesn't really have a soul in a certain way. His soul is kind of TV and radio and like he's just a product of business and politics and American public life. You know, all of his private life happened in the tabloids. Everything he's done has been publicized. So, yeah, he's kind of just a container.

And in a way, it's like, yeah, he's definitely an extraordinary talent, a very charismatic individual who's able to keep this very strange and in some ways, fractious movement together. I don't think anybody else has, like, exact charisma just because he, like, he was a weird expression of American media and American culture, yeah. And that's a common thread among a lot of these authoritarians over time, right? from Pat Buchanan to Mussolini, right? Like, I think some of these people have just, which as I know, that's a broad range.

I don't think it's that broad of a range. Now in this age, like being able to capture people's attention and sort of go over or go through sort of a lot of these institutions by just communicating on a mass scale and doing it well seems to be like a key ingredient for someone who's going to lead a movement like this. he's a very effective communicator it's what he's always done it's strange to say it but he has a real rhetorical talent and his real rhetorical talent is expressing things extremely directly and simply he is genuinely funny at times he's funny and he's he's sarcastic and he seems like a wise guy

and it's but it's like my tweet trump is dead yeah it's something like he would say right you know the simplicity of his rhetoric um is a great talent and and you if you know the issues, you go, how can, how can anybody just say that? It's not true and it's, or it's an oversimplification. But, you know, simple formulas, unfortunately, they're very successful. And we live in a very complex, I mean, all times are complicated, but the amount of information that's available is overwhelming. And, you know, to have somebody break it down for you into very simple things, these people are bad, this is the problem, we're going to get these people out of there we're going to do this we're going to do that it's appealing i mean you know

forming an opinion on every single thing being informed on every single thing it's hard i mean it's our profession but i find it overwhelming yeah what do i know i have to suddenly know about international trade laws or how semiconductors are made yeah and i have to be an authority on this all of a sudden in order to talk about politics in a meaningful way. And, you know, I can kind of keep up with it, but it's still hard. And if you're not a professional and you're not addicted to the news, I mean, these things become impossible. Yeah.

I mean, I do want to talk about sort of how the opposition handles this in a situation like this. And you wrote something, I think, right after the election, about how parties dedicated to the preservation of democracy and democratic norms face a particularly tough challenge when dealing with a party that does not. And if that party, if the opposition party continues to abide by democratic norms and fight within the parameters of normal politics, you know, they risk legitimizing and even strengthening the regime that they're trying to bring down. But if they abuse or ignore those democratic norms in service of, you know, fighting fire with fire, then they risk

undermining the democratic system they're fighting to uphold. And I do think this is, I mean, we have been seeing this play out now for almost a decade. It's a bind. How do you think an opposition handles that kind of challenge? It's hard to know when to break the norms in order to preserve the system and when you're actually leading to its degeneration. That's a judgment call that great statesmen you reflect in historical retrospect. Oh, they stretch the rules a little bit. I mean, this is what Machiavelli's the Prince is all about. I mean, it's all like, this guy, he kind of broke the rules, but you got to give it to him. He was very effective. I mean, in his cases, it's a lot of horrible things. Yeah. But like, the point is,

is that, you know, it's not necessarily virtuous to insist upon procedure when the other guy is not doing it. You have to take the initiative and use every political opportunity you have to defeat your opponent. And I think sometimes, the Democrats, they punt it themselves. Yeah. What are they going to say if we do this? What are they going to do if we do this? How's it going to look? How's it going to play in Peoria or whatever?

I know. I think Peoria is pretty blue at this point. I don't have to worry about Peoria anymore. No. I was going to ask you about this in the context of the current debate that's going on about the government shut down. Because there's this brewing fight about how Democrats should handle it. You know, and there's, first

you got the, no, we shouldn't shut the government down, that's crazy. And you don't have a plan to get out of it. You don't have a plan to declare victory. You know, everyone's going to turn against you, whatever. Then there's, and I saw you weighing in on this, which I predicted, this is where it was going to head, which is like, health care is our best issue. We're going to make it about health care. And I get that. I've seen all the polling. I am a student of polling. I know your piece, but like, I think it's, I think it's one useful tool out of many. I do think that politics is much more art than science, as you say.

So I get that that's the issue. But there is something that just feels like it's not meeting the moment to say like Donald Trump is engaging in an authoritarian takeover, ISIS throwing people in vans, and Chuck Schumer is going to win an 18-month extension of the ACA subsidies. And that's what we're shutting down the government over. I'm just like, I think that could be the both. That could be the worst of all worlds. I don't know.

Look, they need to reassert the constitutional role of Congress. The case they need to make to the people is the United States Congress has the power of the purse. We have prerogative in governing the country. It is not just the executive who does things. They need to make the case that, look, we are doing our jobs. We are not going to fund a administration that is not obeying its constitutional role. And who cares what the Supreme Court says? The whole point of the system is that the branches check and balance each other. It's time for Congress in whatever way it can to provide a serious

check on the executive. Now, are there risks in that? Yes. But if the Congress, which is already not doing much and over the past 40, 50 years really has given so much power to the executive, I mean, what kind of a system do we still have? If they rubber stamp everything that the executive is doing, then it is a dictatorship. Then it is a dictatorship. This creates a classic presidential democratic crisis, right? Two institutions in the country claim to speak on behalf of the people, right? So, unfortunately, the Republicans have majorities in both houses, but Congress says, we speak on behalf of the people. The president says, I speak on behalf of the people. This can create a very explosive situation. And usually one side wins, and it's the side

that has the soldiers, unless, you know, it creates such a constitutional crisis that the security forces don't want to break the constitution. Do you want to force the hand of something like that? I don't know. I don't know. I think that the stakes are extremely high. We're in a very dramatic situation. The other side puts things in very dramatic terms. I think it is a mistake to constantly use this dry language of issues and issue polling. I don't think anybody disagrees that we are in an extraordinary moment of crisis in the country. And it's really kind of time for some leader to speak to it. It's a rolling the dice. I mean, there's a chance the opposition is going to do things. You can't predict everything that's happening. But, you know, someone's got to do

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your polling piece really it helped crystallize for me the the frustrations I've had with this over the years because I am anyone who listens to this and knows me I'm a polling nerd a polling addict I very much you know all the data nerds who were mad at you about this I I read their stuff some data people liked it and I well and I was going to say it and I respect them a lot but I also I was a speechwriter for most of my life before I started doing this and and you basically conclude in the piece, politicians need to go back to basics to the oldest political skill, rhetoric. That is the art of combining reason with imagery that moves the emotions. And then you also said what I think the rhetorical approach

makes possible by not dividing the world into little bits of discrete reality is what the empiricists think is impossible, candidates who can be both moderate and radical. That is right on. Well, that is what Ronald Reagan did and Abraham Lincoln did

to a certain extent was to disguise or soften the extent of their own radicalism by using the great rhetoric of the American political tradition. Reagan seemed not terrifying radical that Democrats and liberals wanted to make him. He seemed a genial, you know, face of the Golden Age of Hollywood and represented all the wonderful things of that world and the sunniness of FDR, even though. with an opposite program. Yeah. And Lincoln, you know, he wasn't a fire-breathing abolitionist.

He was a, he was a considered by the radicals in his party to be hopelessly moderate and not radical enough, but the other side recognized probably more correctly that he was a serious threat and that his politics were going to be the end of them because he was extending the ambit of anti-slavery into wider and wider constituencies. And how did he do that? Well, he enlisted the help of Thomas Jefferson, basically, and said, you know, this is what the declaration means. Did Thomas Jefferson really mean that when he wrote the declaration?

It's an academic debate. I think that what Lincoln said, Jefferson said, stands the test of time. They wrote it down and they said it. So whatever was going on in their head, it is useful for us this many years later. Yeah. So I think that I would like to see the Democrats speak in the rhetoric of the American tradition in a dramatic and interesting way that talks about this as an issue of first principles. Lincoln spoke as a matter of first principles. The Lincoln Douglas debates were a debate over how the country was going to be governed and what the country meant. So I think, you know,

you can capture people's imaginations if there seems to be some kind of governing philosophy behind the Democrats. What is the philosophy of the Democrats? What is the basic ideal? It's hard to express. It's sort of like, well, we are not bad like the other guys. What do you want to hear? Because we'll tell you basically anything you want to hear. I just would like the Democrats to stand for something. Yeah. It's not going to make every radical in the the country happy, it's going to probably disappoint them. It might disappoint me. I might be too far to the left to like it. I might be like, eh, I want them to be a little bit more strong on this issue. But for someone to find that ground, I mean, it's an art and it's a talent and you can't

just pull it out of a hat. I can't, it's sort of, I'm asking for someone to be extremely talented. Now, I think there are democratic politicians who have that talent and are getting there. I mean, unfortunately, in my opinion, the best rhetoration on our side is Bernie Sanders is quite old now and is not in the position to be the leader. Chuck Schumer is not a great orator. But like, and look, it is easy to beat up on Chuck Schumer. I do the same thing myself. But look out across the party.

We talk about the gerontocracy. A lot of the younger ones still, there's plenty of duds there. Although there's some, you know, in the last couple of months, there've been some, you know, some. Everyone's always like, well, who do you think about for 2028? I'm like, no one is impressing me right now because I am thinking like you are, no one has spoken to the moment with something bigger. And the reason I've become obsessed with, and you were, I think you were one of the first people who wrote about it, is J.D. Vance's speech at Claremont, the anti-declaration speech that

you called. And then you also wrote, and I talked about last week, the Senator Eric Schmidt from Missouri, his speech at the National Conservatism Conference. Where is the Democratic response to those speeches? Yes, this is what I keep saying. This requires a strong response, and it gives an opportunity. They're using all this beautiful, I hate to say it, but very interesting imagery about the American past, painting this picture of the American past.

Where is the Democratic response that? Why don't we own the American past? They're leaving this huge opening for us by going right at the Declaration in Lincoln because someone needs to go out there and be like, you know what the Democratic Party stands for? We do believe that we are all created equal. We do believe that this is a country where if you believe that and you come here, that you can be an American because of what you believe and how you act and not like where your fucking ancestors were buried. Do you know that Reagan speech that it's like, we'll live in a country where we don't remember what it's like to be? And it's a beautiful speech.

And it was about like Medicaid or something. It was about something really small, in our opinion, being like, you thought that like that was the end of liberty in the republic. You know, or it was it was about a prosaic policy in a certain way, but he used this imagery of, you know, the eclipse of democratic and Republican rule in the country. And that's very stirring to people. Yeah. And the fucking Democrats really have to capture that. And I don't know. It's not hard.

Just pick up like, what did they learn in school? They're old enough to have learned this stuff in school. You know, didn't they learn that Gettysburg address? You mentioned this in your polling piece, but it's like, it is a, it's a brushback to like the data nerds and the center left types who were very cautious. It also is a bit of a brushback to the folks on the left who I think their problem is they want to, they want to speak their radicalness and reveal it sometimes. Like, I think that some of the most successful figures on the left, I think about King a lot

with this, right? Which is like, King had a very radical agenda at the time. And all of his rhetoric, all of his speeches, it was scripture. and it was the founding documents and the principles of the declaration. So he was able to like dress up this policy that was not popular at the time, at least when he started, with a lot of this rhetoric that spoke to the fundamental values that people defined America with. Yeah. Yeah. And also the beauty of his speech came from the knowledge of the English language that came from studying the Bible. Yes.

And I think that's why Warnock maybe is an under. rated figure for the future of the party. I'm going to say something that might upset your listeners. You know who's a great, I hate to say it, orator? Who? Is Nick Fuentes. It's so funny because Tommy Vitor, my co-host has been, he's been on the right-wing media beat and watching these.

And so he's been watching some Nick Fuentes. And he's like, that fucking Nazi is like a talented communicator. He is really good at it. And he can gab for a very long. long time and make what he's saying sound significant when he's just talking shit. He can turn a issue that takes other people maybe, you know, a minute to talk about into an entire episode. And he's very funny.

He shits on his fans. He's irreverent. He's a deeply twisted and evil guy. But like, you know, he's obviously in deep pain in some weird way. But, you know, he. He knows how to speak. The guy knows how to speak and to command attention. And I think that, yeah, like that basic skill is that all politics is at the end of the day

is speaking in public and persuading people to support you. It's very simple in a weird way. And everyone gets all in their head, this polling, and we need the Democratic version of Joe Rogan. It's like, no, you need somebody who can get. get people's attention and is interesting and has moving and fascinating things to say. Joe Rogan talks about things that are stupid and crazy, like UFOs and shit like that, but that captures people's imaginations. It's fun.

It's interesting. You know, like people are like, hey, I've never really thought about that. So, or I've always wondered about that. And it's kind of bullshit. But there's a reason why conspiracism is dominant in our. our political culture is because it is very narratively satisfying and it communicates political information and understanding and in a very compact way. It's not like, oh, there's all these systems and structures and policies.

It's like, these are the bad people. They're plotting against you. And that has always been to a certain extent, and I don't want to sing the praises of conspiracy theories here because I think that the damaging. but the implication of a conspiracy is a very early rhetorical trope because what you're saying is these guys, it's just kind of democracy at its basic. These guys stand for a minority, self-interested. We stand for the public interest.

So I think that just trying to hammer on the corruption of Trump, the fact that this is a self-dealing cabal, you know, that's going to be. helpful, the, you know, the criminality, the conspiracy that it actually is, and you can just use the facts. You don't have to dress them up in a way that's interesting. No spin on the ball needed. Not much. Not much. You know, maybe you don't have to get wonky about every single issue, but you speak in generalities about what's happening. And I think that, you know, it should not be that hard for someone to speak with a lot of drama about what's happening because it's quite dramatic.

Yeah. So where's the drama? Also, everyone asks, what is going on? How are all these podcasters and these streamers? How are they getting people's attention? They are always in these dramatic circumstances with each other and people tune into it like a soap opera, you know? Yeah, that is true.

Because people want to be entertained. And they say, oh, well, these figures are always fighting with each other and always denouncing each other and taking shots at each other. And that's what people go for. Yeah. You need some drama. You need some conflict. Generate some interest.

Drama and conflict tell a story and people are moved and compelled and persuaded through story. And that's how they understand the world. And so you need a little bit of that. Absolutely. John Gans, thank you so much. Oh, my pleasure. This was great.

Great conversation. everyone go subscribe to Unpopular Front and go check out when the clock broke. It's a really great read. So thanks for joining. Thank you so much for having me. As always, if you have comments, questions, or guest ideas,

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