The Daily Beast Podcast - Historian Rick Perlstein Shares Why He Refused to Go on Steve Bannon’s Podcast

Episode Date: December 31, 2024

This week on The New Abnormal, historian and author Rick Perlstein shares why he turned down an offer to go on Steve Bannon’s infamous podcast. Plus! Author David Daley joins the program to discuss how right-wing control over the Supreme Court will shape Americans’ lives for the next generation—or more. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits pretty comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. What a great show we have for you today. We're still

on vacation, but that doesn't mean we didn't record an extra special episode just for you. David Daly, the author of Anti-Democratic, inside the far-rights 50-year plot to control American election, joins us to break down the rights judiciary power grabs, long-term threat to democracy, and where Democrats went wrong. Then, Rick Perlstein, historian and author of Reaganland and many more chronicles on American conservatism explains the wrecking ball appeal of Trumpism and how Democrats need to address the root causes before it's too late. But first, let's have some fun. So as is new abnormal holiday tradition, what we like to do around here is ask you some questions to let the listeners get to know you guys a little better. Who would you name 2024 as person

of the year? What's the criteria? You know, a person you think deserves some recognition as being, having done some great stuff this year. Oh, okay. Good. You know, I just didn't know if we were using Times definition of person of the year. I feel like I have recent bias on this, too. Yeah, it's tough. I'm going to say Danielle Moody. Shut up, Andy. All right, you guys ready for my gag one?

Yeah, yeah, I want yours. So, you know, sometimes they do really ridiculous things they don't do with a person, and I'm going, the podcaster. The podcaster is the person of the year? Listen, it's the podcast election, I'm telling you. I'm going the podcaster. Okay. No, no opportunism here at all.

No, no whatsoever. No, no whatsoever. I would never do such a thing. Oh, God. This is really tough. Andy, who do you have? Well, I had you. Oh, my God.

Oh, my God. We spend so much time on this show talking about bad people. I know. It's really hard to think about somebody that did something, like, really good. I feel like there's something we're completely overlooking that is like very embarrassing. I'm struggling, but I will say this. Okay. And I don't really know if it's really truly my person of the year.

But I do think, fuck. I was going to say the vice president. And I was going to say the vice president, Kamala Harris, because for 107 days, we had what we hadn't had in years, which was hope, was the possibility that America could do something extraordinary. And that campaign, I thought, was one of the best campaigns I'd ever seen run in a very short amount of time. And regardless of the outcome, I think that being at the convention this year, having not gone to Biden's convention, obviously because of COVID, and having not experienced another convention before that other than Hillary's, It was exciting to be like to be hopeful, to be excited again about politics, which I hadn't been in a very long time.

So for for that reason, even though it was brief and clearly did not have the outcome that I wanted, she did that. She was able to do that. And I really miss following Kamala HQ on social media, which was one of the best trolling accounts that I'd seen in a long time. Yeah. So that's that's mine. Do you guys have New Year's resolutions? I don't believe in them. I just set intentions for the year.

I'm not even going to say it. Mine is to send you guys the questions for these advanced questions. Thank you very much. So that it's not so painful? There's a reason you did that last year after 2022's debacle. I think mine is just to continue being an amazing ally. Continue being the white man we can trust. Thank you. Thank you.

Okay. You keep doing that. I'm going to put in my blue sky bio, I'm just going to say, the white man you can trust, Danielle Moody. Yeah. Yeah. You're welcome. There's no better blue check you could get.

Do they have a black check? Does this mean I can post on black sky? Yes. Yes. I didn't know that was the thing. Oh, yeah. Hashtag Black Sky. Yeah.

What was a movie you really enjoyed this year? I keep thinking about the substance, even though it's been over a month since I saw it. I thought that that was a really, really incredibly imaginative movie. Which one? The Substance with Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley. Oh. I think you'd like it, Daniel. It's a very good look at aging and beauty standards and a very good lens in critique of how stupid it all is.

Oh, okay. I like that. That's good. One of the more smart movies where lots of people do very dumb things with that type of movie. Again, I'm terrible here. Every time that my girlfriend asked me to go to the movies,

it's usually like, no. I will go with challengers. Yeah, what my other favorite? Yeah, which was absolutely amazing. I thought Civil War, Alex Garland's movie was fantastic. Amazing. The first omen,

which I assumed was going to be terrible because it's a prequel to the omen turned out to be one of the better movies of the year i saw the tv glow was really good i know i'm forgetting some i watched heretic not long ago and really liked it loved it and i liked long legs i like strange darling i liked alien romulus conclave i really enjoyed oh i actually want to see that yeah it's good i feel bad leaving Jesse's favorite movie of the year off the list, but Trap wasn't bad. For the listeners, I think I all caps Dandy when I got done with Trap about how much I hated it. Okay, how about album of the year or a album you really enjoyed?

I'm going to go with Kendrick's album. Yeah. That he dropped, GNX. I thought it was fantastic, and I'm very much looking forward to the Super Bowl half time. I think that from start to finish, it's like, it's a rap album that you listen to from start to finish. Really just so good. So good. And I will also say The Cure.

Yes. The Cure's album. Songs of a Lost World. That's mine. That's my pick as well. Oh, really? Yeah. You guys alerted me to the fact that they had an album that dropped.

And yeah, and I loved it. Love, love, loved it. To 65-year-old man making music that good. is a wild thing. Yeah, I loved both those albums. I would also add Chromacopia by Tyler the Creator. Unbelievable record. Yeah, so good.

Oh, Godspeed, you Black Emperor put out an album with the title. No title as of 13 February, 2024, 28,340 dead. I'm a big fan of Godspeed, you Black Emperor, and I thought this album was fantastic. The other person I got really into this year, which is thanks to Jesse, is McGee. Oh, yeah. But I think that album came out last year?

I think it's this year, actually. Is it this year? If it's this year, then he's definitely on my list. Guys, phenomenal. Yeah. The last one I will say too is, because I didn't know if it came out in 2023 or 2024 fucking blur, is Cowboy Carter, which I was not, like, excited for because country music is, if you ask me what genre of music do you hate and it would only be one and it is country for me.

But this album was phenomenal. the storytelling, the vocals. It was very inspiring. Yeah. Classic, like, in so many ways. So I love that. That's me. Great record.

The album I secretly liked from this year is The Secret of Us by Gracie Apems. Oh, yeah. Folks, I am very excited to welcome to the new abnormal, acclaimed author, David Daley, who is the author of several books, but his most recent entitled Anti-Democratic, Inside the Far Right's 50-year plot to control American elections. David, welcome. Thank you for having me again. So we've arrived. We've arrived at the 50 year mark. It's taken half a century to get to this place where we have a six to three Supreme Court. We have a number of MAGA right wing federal judges. And it seems to be full steam ahead as we are now headed into the second Trump term. I just want to get your thoughts. I've watched a interview that

you did a couple of months ago where we still had hope back in September. Remember hope? Remember hope? That wonderful thing back in September where you were talking about and painting the picture of what would happen in a second Trump term, particularly to the courts. So I just want to get your thoughts and reaction to where we find ourselves now that the plan that's been concocted for all this time has now arrived at its grand finale. Welcome to Hungary, right? I think that is what we have arrived. We have landed in a really bleak and dark place from which there is not going to be any return any time soon. And I hate to be the bearer of dark news on the holidays. I am the guest with the stocking full of coal. But Republicans will now control the U.S. Supreme Court,

likely well into the 2060s, perhaps even beyond that. If Alito and Thomas resign, if they're replaced by new 35, 36-year-olds to go along with the coterie of right-wingers that Trump appointed in his first administration. If something befalls any of the liberals on the court over these next four years, this is going to be a extreme right-wing MAGA court for the rest of our lifetimes and probably well into our children's lifetimes. The lower federal, courts also are going to continue to have that far right tinge to them. What we have seen is that conservatives have taken over entire circuits, really, and made these courts something far different from a court. They've made them partisan super legislatures that have a speedway to the U.S.

Supreme Court. So you see someone like Matthew Casmaric down in Texas, right? Conservatives know that all they need to do is file one of their crazy cases, whether it's on the abortion pill or whether it's Elon Musk. All they have to do is file one of these cases down there and they will get one of their Federalist society, MAGA judges to issue a wild anti-legal decision. And then it will go straight on appeal to the six three super majority that Republicans have established on the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court is the basis of all Republican political power. And we are about to see it truly flex its muscle. This was not inevitable. And that is what really, gets me is that this power grab over this slow walk of 50 years was not inevitable. And you could see it

happening. And yet Democrats did nothing to stop it. I wonder from your vantage point, you know, I hate to do the coulda, woulda, shoulda, but like, I think that it is informative, particularly as next generations who come up will be doing battle to your point with the, these courts for the rest of their lives. And I wonder what you think that Democrats could have done and should have done in order to stop us from getting to this place where now America is basically going to be held hostage for the rest of our lifetimes by Maga Right Wing extremists. And their whatever flight of fancy that they have where this morning I woke up and saw, oh, a group of legislators in South Carolina are going to want to issue the death penalty for women who seek abortion care.

That's just the beginning. So I wonder what you think Democrats could have done and should have done. The coulda what a shoulda is really important because it should infuriate all of us. Because this has happened before our very eyes over the course of these several decades. and it's the story I try to tell in anti-democratic. Conservatives and the right had a specific coordinated plan to capture and hijack the federal courts and the U.S. Supreme Courts. And step by step, they have enacted that plan.

They built the Federalist Society as a judge minting apparatus. They have created an entire flotilla. of dark money organizations that fund these justices, that fund the litigation that they put in front of these justices, that creates the amicus briefs that they use to base their decisions, they fund the law schools that create the legal theories that populate these decisions. They have built an entire set of institutions to support a, far-right judicial theory that most Americans disagree with, and yet they have been able to enact anyway. When you look at what the Roberts Court has delivered to Republicans over the last two decades, you almost have to say that John Roberts is not so much the Chief Justice of the United States as he is the most effective Republican politician in decades.

if not of the last 50 years, because what Roberts has awarded to Republicans, whether we're talking about abortion, voting rights, the reproductive state, gun control, on all of these topics, Roberts has awarded Republicans victory after victory that they never, ever could have achieved through the political process. And this has happened before our eyes. while Democrats have not found any language to oppose this judicial takeover, even though most Americans would like to see change and reform. There are issues like binding ethics codes or term limits for U.S. Supreme Court justices

that have 75% approval ratings amongst. American voters. The U.S. Supreme Court and the American judicial system is at its lowest level of confidence and faith that Americans have had in it in its measured history. And we just emerged from a political campaign in which I barely heard Kamala Harris and the Democrats talk about the U.S. Supreme Court. At all. At all. You could go back to 2016 when Mitch McConnell and Leonard Leo held the nomination of Merrick Garland to the court hostage. We barely heard a peep from Barack Obama and the Democratic Party during that period of time. Americans are deeply frustrated and outraged in many ways with the kind of theft of political power that this court and Republicans

have engineered. We have a U.S. Supreme Court with a six-three Republican supermajority. Five of them who have been appointed by Republicans' presidents who lost the popular vote, confirmed by a U.S. Senate that does not adequately reflect the American people because it is weighted towards smaller, whiter, more rural states. And these justices, quote unquote, are handed lifetime political power to effectively rule on decisions that are made by the elected branches of government. They have no ethical code. They have no accountability.

If they want to accept millions of dollars in gifts. Which they have. Billionaire benefactors, if they want billionaire benefactors to buy their mother's homes and allow her to live in it, rent-free, if they want vacations around the world to luxurial, resorts. Sometimes these justices even have the insurrectionist flag flown outside of their home or their wife works on the Stop the Steel campaign. This is wildly unacceptable.

Americans know that it's wildly unacceptable. And the only thing that I would say that is on the level with how bad it is that one political party has engineered this to happen, is that the other one has allowed it to happen barely raising a peep. That to me is what hits harder because Republicans were always going to do what they were going to do. But when you put your faith and hope in the other party in our two-party system to be the force of resistance, to be the crusaders for American democracy, and they then just lay down and acquiesce their responsibility to the republic. And is it that they just didn't see it coming,

even though all of us lay people were watching it unfold? Is it that we don't have the billionaire class in our pockets that are willing to fund a clear strategy, of resistance? What do you think that it is that has Democrats laid down? And frankly, this would be the reason why you had millions of Americans stay home and not vote in the last election because they look at these parties and they say, what are they actually doing for me? Nothing. So while I am a staunch supporter of people voting, because you're voting whether or not you cast your ballot. The fact is that Democrats have just given up their responsibility,

and I want to understand why. It's a great question. And I think you have your finger on some of the answers. I think you're right that they didn't really see it coming, even though so many of us watched it all happen in real time. Democrats, we often. We often talk about how Democrats have a West Wing fantasy when they talk about the White House and the executive branch and the romance of it all. There's a similar fantasy that has fueled Democrats and the U.S. Supreme Court, especially in our lifetimes, it's the fantasy of what happened in the 50s and 60s under Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren and the Warren Court, which is really the only window in American history in which one could say we had a U.S. Supreme Court that was focused on

liberty, justice, and expanding rights for everyone, really breathing life into the reconstruction amendments of the post-Civil War that, to my thinking, are the most important articulation of American democracy and multiracial democracy that we have. And so many senators and prominent figures in in the liberal academy, believe in the goodness of the Supreme Court because they grew up in the era of the Warren Court and the decisions on electoral reform and Roe v. Wade and so many of the things that happened in that in that time. Well, Republicans did not like what was coming out of the court, and they launched this five-decade effort to capture the court in order to push it into their pockets. While Democrats were still in this sort of lullaby reverie state,

Republicans did the work of building the institutions and taking the court back. And there are still, to this day, far too many Democrats who believe. believe in the robes and they believe in the setting, and they don't recognize that it's become hijacked and corrupted and dirty and grubby, that it is just another form of politics. Those justices ought to be wearing red and blue robes, not black ones. They ought to have to have the patches of the billionaires who fund their vacations on them like their NASCAR race drivers, we should strip some of the majesty from this court because this court is not deserving of that majesty. And they show it time and again. And yet we keep awarding it

to them. We talk about conservatives and liberals on the court when they are Republicans and Democrats. We need to begin the process of really talking honestly about what this court has become, a nine-person unelected supermajority given final veto-proof power over all of our lives. And that is unacceptable in any kind of representative democracy. We need to begin the conversation about how we fix and reform. this, the American people are on our side, but we don't have a political party that seems willing to step up and take on this fight. Yeah, and that to me is where we find ourselves, which is that you've laid out so very clearly that we are locked in to MAGA ideology and policy for the

rest of our lives. And I don't think that that has sunk in with the majority of Americans, but it will as the new regime comes in and we see just how quickly our day-to-day lives change. I think you're absolutely right. And I think the key thing to understand here is that we will still elect a president in four years. We will go back to the polls in November of 28 and maybe even elected Democratic president. But what's far more important than four years of Donald Trump is that the right and the Republican Party have solidified their control over our politics for probably two generations through the courts. And they've done this by hijacking the least democratic institution in American politics. And there's practically

no way out of that with the results of this election. And so Donald Trump is terrible. Donald Trump's return to the White House will be massively consequential in all sorts of awful ways. But if we only are focused on Donald Trump, we are missing where this power has really come from and how it will be exercised. And it's going to be exercised through the courts and through the U.S. Supreme Court. And that is going to continue long after Donald Trump has led. left the political stage. Well, we will have to leave it there today, David Daley. I thank you so very much for your insightful analysis and for the work that you're doing

with your writing to help educate the public. Folks, the book is anti-democratic inside the far rights 50-year plot to control American elections. David, thank you so much for making time for the new abnormal. Really appreciate you. Anytime. Thank you so much for having me on. My next guest is a journalist historian, and I would say the foremost chronicler of the modern era of American conservatism in a four-book series that includes Before the Storm, Barry Goldwater, and the unmaking of the American Consensus, Nixonland, the Invisible Storm, and Reaganland. He also has a regular column at the American Prospect. Joining me now is Rick Perlstein. Rick, thanks so much for being here. It's a pleasure, and I'm ready to swear.

Excellent. And I would like to start by thanking you for coming on the show and not equating me with Steve Bannon. Backstory, you want to go into that? No, I just, I know you turned down. They asked you to come on, what is it, the war room or whatever it's called? And you politely told them to take a hike. Yeah, well, I said that it was one of their kind of factota who responded to this tweet of mine that I think you're going to want to talk about. And she's like, let's cat. I said he, she called, she called them their faction populace.

And I say, how can you call yourself populace? Let's, we need to discuss this. And so she, you know, kind of. slipped into my DMs and said, why don't you come on the war room and discuss it? And I just said, I'm not going to go on this show, someone who brags about lying as a political strategy. And I was referring to his famous quote that the way to win is you flood the zone was shit. And I'm perfectly happy to engage with people who disagree with me, you know, in a public forum. But, you know, not when the guy who, you know, controls the microphone, um, admits to being a propagandist. And she said something like,

you know, oh, we play it totally straight, no gamesmanship. Yeah. It feels like it would be like playing a basketball game where the other team gets the hoop to be at like five feet and yours has to be 10. Right. Well, I like to think that I flood the zone with Poe-Pourri, so we'll take it from there. So, yeah, I do want to start with something that you've been posting about on social media. And that is the reaction that we've seen to the killing of the United Healthcare CEO. One of the things you wrote, you said, if you address systematic inequity, you said, if you address systematic

in equities through politics, no one will fantasize about solving them through violence. And I've seen similar thoughts from other people. Can you expand on that, though? Because the fact that so many people, at least online, responded to the gunning down of a health insurance executive in Midtown Manhattan in broad daylight. I think the response was fairly unprecedented in our time, it feels like. Yes, I think it was. I mean, people have kind of compared it to something like what outlaws, like Bonnie and Clyde and John Dillinger and joined in the early 30s, which we should note, it's kind of a coincidence, but they both died in 1934. And so we never, you know, kind of saw whether that kind of cult would have outlasted, in fact, the early years of the Roosevelt administration

in which the kind of policy responses to populist anger were actually being tried and really, you know, brought the nation into a, you know, a kind of unity out of this crisis that very much different than this kind of fearal terror that we often fear. So the whole thing started when I wrote something, you know, you never know when you do a tweet. And I stay on Twitter. I mean, I'm not going to go on bad, but I don't think, you know, that I'm going to let lies go unpast on Twitter. I once interviewed a guy who spent a lot of time in the 80s and 90s doing journalism on neo-Nazis out in Idaho. And him and his editor when this neo-Nazi group, the order started terrorizing their town said, well, maybe we shouldn't give them the attention because that's really,

what they want. And he pointed out that they just got more and more savage and started, you know, murdering people and doing bankruptries because they took the silence as consent. And I think that if you, people are saying crazy lies on Twitter and people who are not necessarily acclimated to the cult yet, you know, kind of pick up these lies and don't hear anything else. So I'll just assume that, you know, you know, the lies are the truth. So I'm going to stick around. And you never know when you, you know, just kind of tweet something off the top of her head if 10 people are going to be interested or in this case, you know, I think like something like 5,000 people give the little heart symbol. And the tweet was simply that the fact, you know, I took one little detail, but now we know there are

lots and lots of details that people are buying this jacket that the guy we know and know as Luigi Manjone wore. Some people made very silly responses, who cares what jackets they buy? And I said, no, well, if you actually look in social media spaces in which nurses discuss things with each other, they all are talking about how they wanted to marry the guy, right? the people who see the damage of self of health care happening all the time. And I said, you know, the fact that there's this popular passion in favor of his act or at least kind of picking up the energy of what he did just suggests that there was a lot of that public anger that the Democrats could have picked up on as a political resource in November

in the way that Franklin Roosevelt did, you know, kind of take hours there'd be. And the response was mostly positive, but some very loud voices, including, you know, a billionaire like Mark Andreessen and said, oh, this just shows you that these people want murder as a political strategy, right? And that was kind of the right-wing trolling response, but I got from a lot of Democrats too. And, you know, the kind of almost systematic misunderstanding, you know, some of it might be trolling. Some of it might be people don't get it. You know, so I clarified. And the clarification, you know, I'm going to quote a really wonderful labor historian named Eric Loomis. He's one of the people I kind of reached for and responding to this. What the Democrats need to do is stop pretending that

the system is working and to quit defending the system and instead simply accept what the voters are telling them that the system, for them, the system is not working. And that doesn't mean you blow it all up. You know, you use that speaking to the mood of the people, which might not even show up in polls. And I give this example all the time of how limiting basing your political actions on polls can be because a lot of people who are suffering, say, from denial of service, from health insurers, you know, have just given up on politics, right? They're going to be completely alienated. And other people who might be involved in politics can't even imagine either political party making a credible promise to fix these problems. So they don't even see it as a really a political issue. So, you know, if you use this kind of intuition of public anger, which is not something, you know, the kind of kind of bean counters of politics might be able to pick up and advise you, then you can win. And then after you win, you know, Democrats can do what they always do in power. They can keep the parts of the system working that work well, right?

I mean, think about something like FEMA, right? You know, Reagan destroyed federal emergency management in America by privatizing it and Clinton fixed it, right? You can have lots of complaints about Clinton, and I did. But Democrats, you know, the economy always does better under Democrats because they just hire competent people because they believe in government. But much more importantly, you know, Democrats can have the valor of tearing down the parts of the system that have been captured and corrupted by private greed like health insurance, you know, like pharmacy benefit management systems, which are just completely parasitic ways of making drugs more expensive. You know, the parts of the systems that don't work that make people enraged, that again don't necessarily show up in polls, instead of, you know, the Hillary Clinton response that, you know, America has always been great, you know, or the Harris response where they kind of back.

act away from the kind of energy of a Tim Walts, who said these people are lunatics or are going to destroy things. And just had this sort of America is still great. We just need an opportunity economy, which is, you know, like a terrible message because it's just saying, it's just saying, we're not going to give you anything. You've got to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, kind of in the democratic language. So, you know, the fact that, you know, this guy is becoming this Robin Hood like folk hero, and you can see it as a political potential, right, to actually make the party of progress, the party of, you know, government in charge of everything, is, to me, self-evident. I mean, the Democrats, because they're actually the only political party in America right now that actually

know how to govern a country or state or a city and care about people, right, should be winning every election. And the way they need to do that is to speak to, you know, people's anger about, you know, systems that are failing them. Yeah. And one of the things you said is, you said, FDR is thus the hero of this story for addressing systematic inequities through politics. Yeah, people don't have to, like, think about shooting people or cheering or shooting people because no one needs to get shot, you know, 4% profits into the 40% profits, right? Yeah. Do you think the Democratic Party, as it exists in 2024, is even capable of recognizing this

message? Do you think it wants to? Or is it just happy to be sort of this almost like, in many ways, Republican life? party that tries to cater to quote unquote moderates? That's, you know, an important question. And a lot of people say those sorts of things in responses in which they say, why do you place any faith in the Democratic Party at all? And I respond, well, you know, in 1924, which is literally 100 years ago, right?

The Democratic Party during its convention split in two between the pro-KKK faction and the anti-KKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK. And then four years later, they, you know, they nominated a campaign. Catholic, and then four years after that, it was FDR. All through the 1950s, both in 1952 and 1956, they picked Southern segregationists as the running mate, right? Because the Democrats were the party of the segregation itself. But by 1964, you know, a Democratic president was, you know, outlawing segregation. So, you know, the Democrats have always proven a capacity to change. I mean, Joe Biden and largely turned his back for all his flaws on, you know,

the policies of neoliberalism. And if you just withdrawing, off from the Democratic Party, you're just withdrawing your voice and power to help guide that change. Now, what's going to happen next? I mean, I think that, you know, one of those bellwether canary in the coal mine type battles is the one between, say, AOC and this 74-year-old congressman who's been there, you whatever, like 50 years over who's going to take over the House Oversight Committee? The guy's, you know, 74, and, you know, he thinks that it's due. And AOC is going around and saying, if our seniority system is keeping power away from the people who want to reorient the power of the party in a way that can make it relevant to this kind of popular anger,

screw the seniority system, right? So we're kind of seeing people that are trying to change the Democratic Party. And it's always been a complicated coalition. And it's always been a battle between the populist wing and the corporate wing. And to just say that it just belongs to the corporate wing, I find profoundly irresponsible. Definitely they can change. Definitely they have changed.

And definitely they have to change. Yeah, look, believe me, I agree with you. I think the Democratic Party is what we're stuck with. Look at a guy like Tim Walls, right? In a lot of ways, the fact that Joe Biden took this kind of COVID-era government supports that really made life livable for millions of people. And then under pressure from the corporate wing just withdrew them. Right?

So it's like basically the Democrats, are taking away something that made it possible for your family to, you know, get over was a terrible thing. But, you know, it's very encouraging that they tried to make someone a heartbeat away from the presidency, who was the governor of Minnesota. The first thing he did when he had, you know, tri-afect of power in his state was return. That basically, you know, kind of money to the people, right, who basically, ideologically is a Scandinavian-style social Democrat. And, you know, the fact that they didn't kind of let a rip, well, that's on them. But, you know, it just shows that There are lots of Tim Walzes in the party and that it's a complex party and that basically

we're in the fight for our lives not only for the country but for the Democratic Party. For sure, I 100% agree. I want to pivot to a piece you wrote back in early 2017 from Mother Jones. And the piece was called Peter's Choice. Explain who Peter is. So I had a really remarkable experience of teaching a seminar in the fall which election was, you know, rounding into the final turn in Oklahoma. at the University of Oklahoma.

It was honor students from all over Oklahoma, which is, you know, this very poor state, but in many ways has been intentionally made poor by the people who run it, who are basically fossil fuel magnets. I found some astonishing statistics in the course of researching this, that, you know, there are like, you know,

5,000 families or something like that who get public assistance in the whole state, and it's like, you know, $200 a month, right? And by the way, I'll just point to, the people who run my column, the American prospect, they had this amazing special issue in November on basically red states against blue states for the battle for kind of state government.

And there's an article comparing Connecticut, which has the most progressive social policies in Oklahoma, which has the least. And, you know, people live a life expectancy of 76 years in Oklahoma and like 82 years in Connecticut, right? It's like we have two nations, right? Here I am in this state that, you know, was kind of the epicenter of the Trumpian upsurgents.

And most of the people in my class were young African-American women. But there was one guy who was a white MAGA supporter. But he was really charming and he was really sweet. And one day, I had them write essays about the theme of the class. And he wrote this brilliant, beautiful, clear essay about why the people in his community like Donald Trump. He used a metaphor. that we've kind of heard a lot of time since then, which is that we want to take a wrecking ball to the system. You know, again, this kind of, you know, Luigi Manjone idea that everything is rotten,

so we have to tear it down. And he told a story about his town, which is very familiar. It's kind of the economic anxiety story about Trumpism, that it used to be thriving economically, but now it isn't. People are living in trailers and, you know, people don't just hunt for sport, but they also hunt for food. And he read it to the class. And the class, and the class, was really impressed. They applauded. They never quite heard that argument made so well. And really is kind of like, you know, now they talk about strong arguments, which make the other side's argument as weak as possible. This was the Trump argument in the steel man. And I did actually push back to him. At a certain point, he said it's really important for the federal government

not to push its ideas on the rest of the country because that doesn't work. Just look at Reconstruction. And I was like, oh, well, you know, that's interesting because the reason reconstruction didn't work for people who kind of follow any history written in the since the 60s is that the Ku Klux Klan and violent state governments tried to make sure that, you know, multiracial democracy didn't work in the South because, you know, the South was a place a lot like Oklahoma. They wanted it a cheap labor economy, right? They didn't want, you know, an educated black populace, just like the Oklahoman population. And, you know, I mean, a lot of this comes across in the novel that won the Pulitzer Prize a couple of years ago, a demon copper head, which is about kind of Appalachia.

And when you compare it to a similar book, Jane Vance is Hillbilly Elegalogy in which he blames the poverty that people there and there are moral failings. The fact that they were made poor by an extraction economy. So telling me a story about slavery and the Civil War, which was similar to what kids learned. learned in school in kind of the 1950s, which is that basically things were great until the Yankees came in. Again, with perfect civility and thoughtfulness and kindness, he revealed a story about the world which much more resembled the racist part of the mega appeal rather than the kind of economic anxiety of the mega appeal. And so I wrote this piece and published it, you know, right at the beginning of 2017. And I think that I'm very proud of it because it kind of nailed a lot of

both Trump's appeal, which is that we can go back to this world before people were pushing this woke agenda on us. The kind of myth of the appeal just is this honest, good faith attempt to create economic security for places like this. And how seductive this wrecking ball idea is. I mean, does that pretty much get across what you took away from the piece? Absolutely. And it was a really good piece because you talked about, you know, this is a kid who was absolutely sincere. Oh, and his parents, it turns out were rich lawyers, by the way. Oh, right. But he absolutely believed everything he was saying to you, and it didn't matter that, you know, you could point out that the tax rates in his town were actually really low. So it was basically a kind of a neoliberal kind of the people who rule deserve to rule and lies by the actual corporate forces that run the state, but by these people who are pushing these, you know, liberal social values on them.

Right, exactly. I wish I had a lot more time to talk to you, but unfortunately, I am out. So I would encourage people just do a Google search for Peter's Choice and Rick Pearlstein and read the whole piece because it's really fascinating. And then your new piece at the American Prospect that you talked about as part of this Blue States versus Red States thing is called Maga's Way or the Highway. So go to the American Prospect website and check that out. Rick, thank you so much for being here. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. Cheers. Be well. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of The New Abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going. This podcast is a Daily Beast production with production by Jesse Cannon and Seamus Calder. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast at the

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