The Daily Beast Podcast - John Roberts May Be the Worst Chief Justice in Supreme Court History

Episode Date: May 28, 2024

Lisa Graves, the host of a new Supreme Court-focused podcast called Grave Injustice, joins The New Abnormal to discuss an alternate vision for the high court. Plus! A conversation with music critic Steven Hyden about his new book, “There Was Nothing You Could Do: Bruce Springsteen's ‘Born In The U.S.A.’ and the End of the Heartland.” 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 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 Kedden, 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. Our 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.

Legal expert Lisa Graves is here to talk about her new podcast, The Graven Justice, and do a deep dive on everything going on with the Supreme Court. Then, music critic and author Stephen Heighton joins us to talk about his new book, There Was Nothing You Could Do, Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA and the End of the Heartland. But first, let's have some fun. So I want to play you two clips so that we can try to take in where we're at in this election. First, we're going to have Steve Batted talking about Project 2025. We mock your fear. We want you fear. It's going to be accountability.

We are taking apart the administrative state. We're going to destroy the deep state. And we're going to hold everybody responsible that put this republic in the situation it's in today. Accountability, responsibility. and that will come with authority. The authority of Donald John Trump as the 47th president of the United States. All right, and then I'm going to play this clip

of AOC being interviewed by Medea-Hsan. What do you say to a young progressive or an Arab American who says to you, I just can't vote for Biden again after what he's enabled in Gaza. What do you say to them? I mean, I think everyone comes to this prospect in this conversation with a different history, different background, what they bring.

You know, for an individual Palestinian-American that has had their family killed, there is nothing, I mean, I am not here to lecture anyone. I also think that this election is more, in my personal view, I believe this election is about more than the president. And also, it's not just one election that's happening. We're having hundreds of elections. the balance of Congress, the balance of the House, the balance of the Senate, and the presidency. And I have a vested interest in protecting democracy, not just here domestically, but globally. And it isn't, I truly do not believe this as a lesser of two evils type of situation.

I think about what conditions do I want to be organizing under in the next four years. Discuss. Yeah, I mean, look, I think she's absolutely right, and I think juxtaposing it with the Steve Bannon clip perfectly embodies that and proves her point. You have one party that wants to take over this country and rule by fear and get vengeance on their supposed enemies. And you have, you know, another party, which is horribly imperfect. But ultimately, and I really like the way she put that, that, you know, you would rather. be organizing and trying to move things in a better direction under a democratic government right now than under a Donald Trump administration. It's maybe an obvious point, but I also think it's a

really good one, and I think it's a really good way of putting it. What Steve Bannon said should send chills down people's spines. Their vision of America, since Donald Trump offered his vision at inauguration in 2017, was about the carnage, was about darkness, bloodshed, fear. Their vision of America is so repulsive. It's so disturbing. And for anyone that thinks that they could bypass it somehow because they were able to hang on for four years during Donald Trump,

I mean, check your anxiety levels now. I haven't felt right since 2016. And the idea that these people would somehow operate inbound of the law is laughable. Once they take power and control, they are going to weaponize it and wield it against everyone that does not look like them, love like them, dress like them, lie like them, show up like them. And for the rest of us, it will be a health scape. And they will laugh at it all the way to the bank, all the way to fill their coffers at the expense of everyone else. And so what AOC offers is really fucking clear.

organizing under Biden and pushing for him to do better when he doesn't have another election to run or to lose will be easier than trying to, oh, I don't know, protests in front of moving tanks. But, you know, take your pick. 100%. And I really do think that's the bottom line. And I think people who in this year, particularly, also in 2020, who want to sort of say, well, it really is the lesser of two evils or it's not a real choice. I think they're diluting themselves. I think for some of those people, it's a real place of privilege for them to think, well, but nothing bad will happen to me and sort of overlook what will happen to groups that they are not a part of and people who are members of those groups. So there's that.

But I also do think that there are people who legitimately will suffer far greater harm under Trump than Biden. I don't know how you come to a conclusion in 2024 that there's not a stark deal. between the parties and what the election of one party over the other will mean for this country. And I don't want to downplay the atrocities going on in Gaza and our role in it, which, you know, just speaking personally, I think is shameful. You hate to hang a butt on the end of that, but I'm going to. And the butt is what is going to happen to this country.

First of all, things are not going to get better for the Palestinians under Donald Trump. So already, if you think that, then I don't know what to tell you. But things are going to get markedly worse for Americans, particularly Americans who are not white, straight, Christian, cishead male to just overlook that or to sort of ultimately shrug it off because I really do think that's what you're doing if you say, well, there's no real choice here. And, you know, I can't vote for either of these guys. I really do think that you're shrugging that off. This is my opinion, and I know there are people who strongly disagree with me. People who I respect strongly disagree with that take. But that's my take.

Yeah. They are telling us everything that they are going to do. So it's not as if you're like inauguration January 2025, Donald Trump is president of the United States. And then everyone's in shock about what transpires over the next 100 days when they have been telling you what they are going to do to this country. They've been telling you who they're going to get rid of. They've been telling you who they're going to try in jail. They've been telling you like what books that they're going to ban and what they're going to do to women's bodily autonomy. They're telling you and they are doing it as Steve Bannon had said, state by state, city by city, village by village.

The shit that we're talking about that's happening in Louisiana, things that are happening in Virginia, in Tennessee, in Alabama. Project 2025 is already happening. It's just not nationalized. I'd be curious what you two think. I see Biden as the most responsive to the left and the base of any Democratic president in my lifetime. And when I think about both, one, that this administration seems to have finally gotten the memo that they need to actually appease the base to get reelected. And two, that Trump, when he reappoints Alito and Thomas, when they inevitably retire if he gets elected, that that's 30. years of trying to organize and having a Supreme Court swat it down if for some reason people don't vote

for Biden. It's absolutely right. When you're looking at the fact that Alito and Thomas, they will retire if Donald Trump is elected. And so what you're going to see then are the 30 or 40 year old versions of those two people. And then you're talking about, as you said, 30, 40 years of right wing totalitarianism vis-a-vis the court, Donald Trump will have appointed, what, five justices? Yeah, a majority.

Give me a fucking break that people are thinking about rolling the dice on that. That shit is wild to me. Yeah. I'm not interested in relitigating Plessy versus Ferguson. I just want to fucking say that. No, for sure.

And I mean, look, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Connie Barrett are all fairly young in Supreme Court years. You then, like you said, you then appoint two. more who are, you know, the same age or younger, and who could serve on a court for 30 years or whatever. And that's, that's five. That really, that is a majority. You've already got your five that you need. And you've also got John Roberts. So, you know, you're right. That is the ballgame right there,

all the other stuff aside. But there's a lot of other stuff, too, as we've been talking about. And Jesse, I do, to a large extent, agree with you that on domestic issues, Biden has been fairly responsive to the more progressive elements of the Democratic Party on labor issues and on a host of other things. He's been all right. There are areas where he maybe hasn't, immigration, and, you know, we touched a little bit on foreign policy. But I do think that, look, in many ways, Biden has done more for the left than I would say Obama did. So as if the Republican Party has not made it very clear what their plans are for women, for pregnant people. Louisiana, you know, the state of, hold my beer, I have something more ruinous for women, has decided to reclassify Mithepristone, which is, you know, being heard before the Supreme Court right now.

But to reclassify Mitha Pristone as a legal drug, you know, like cocaine. or heroin, which can be criminalized, throw you in jail for wanting to have control over your own body. So they are actually stepping in this before the Supreme Court even makes their determination, which I assume that they're going to get rid of Mitha Pristone that was, you know, certified by the FDA, what was it, 26 years ago or so. But that's where we are. And again, I keep saying Republicans are using these states as their little test labs, as their petri dishes, until they have the ability to nationalize their violent, wicked, cruel plan against women and people with uteruses. What's amazing about this is that these drugs, Mipipristone and Misaprostol, what Louisiana has done is reclassify them as Schedule for drugs. That's the same classification as opioids. And it requires, as Elizabeth Nolan Brown reports at Reason Magazine, she is one of the handful of good people still writing at Reason.

To dispense Schedule 4 drugs, a doctor needs a special license. Everything is highly tracked by the state. And this is basically what folks down there are saying and what experts are saying, this is the entire point of this law. Because abortion is already illegal in Louisiana, meaning that a doctor cannot prescribe Mifapristone or whatever for the purposes of abortion. But Mifapristone and the other drug are both used. They have other uses. Mitha Pristone, for example, it's used for people who have Cushing syndrome. And what they want to do here is make it real tough for doctors to prescribe this drug because they are afraid that women are going to get it and use it for the purpose.

purposes of medicated abortion. They want to make that almost impossible. Again, these are people who will talk about buzzwords like freedom and liberty, but all they want to do is take away people's freedom and liberty. And that, it seems to be the entire point of this is to stop doctors from prescribing these drugs for other reasons that they are allowed to prescribe them for because of their fear that women will use them for medicated abortions and will do an end run around the heinous abortion bans in the state. I continue to say that there isn't a huge decision to be made in 2024. You either want to have bodily autonomy or you don't. I am terrified for these women that live in these states, but understand that living in a quote unquote blue state

right now is up in the air in the next couple of months on if we will have safe havens anymore for women and people with uteruses. People need to see what is happening. Stop putting all of our attention into Donald Trump and put it on these states that are rolling out Project 2025's plans for subjugation of women, forcing women into what do we talk about the other day? The three M's, marriage, mortgage, and maiden, because he couldn't think. of the other proper M to go along with that, but that's what they want. Telling women, don't get degrees, you know, have a bunch of babies that we're actually not going to help you take care of after they come out of your uterus.

Like, it's sick, it's twisted, it's v. And it's happening on the daily since the overturning of Roe v. Wade. They will not stop ever. No, absolutely. And look, we should be clear that this is not yet law in Louisiana. It's past the House. But it's going to pass the Senate.

I mean, nobody even thinks. there's a prayer of it not passing. So when we're talking about this as a done deal, we may be getting ahead of ourselves from a, you know, strictly legal standpoint, but it is going to pass. The Louisiana Senate is not some, you know, last bastion of liberalism in the state. So this is going to be the law in Louisiana. It is a law that completely contradicts the federal law. Drugs that are usually on this schedule are highly addictive. Or there are drugs that can be abused and drugs that cause dependence. We're talking Xanax, Valium, Ambien, stuff like that. And this drug clearly has no place being put in the same category as those kinds of drugs. But, you know, there is no level

low enough that they won't stoop to to try to push their anti-woman and anti-choice agenda forward. I'm 100%. Folks, I am so excited and happy to welcome to the new abnormal legal expert Lisa Graves, who has a new show, the grave injustice that is out now. The first episode has launched, and it is a deep dive into what I like to refer to as the legal hell we all live in now in America, where every time a decision comes down from the Supreme Court or frankly any court, it wrecks havoc on what we have believed America to be, which is a land where we're able to have bodily autonomy, you know, carve out our own paths in life. Lisa, welcome. Tell us a bit about your new show. Oh, well, thank you so much for having me on. It's really an honor to be part of

your show. I'm just really thrilled to have had the chance to work with Courier on this new podcast, Graven Justice. It's about what's happening with the U.S. Supreme Court, how it's harming all of us and how we got here. What are the forces that are driving this extreme agenda? And, you know, also what can we do about it. But so far we've had three of the votes issued. And the most recent one is on the Voting Rights Act, the decision that just came down by Sam Alito, by the six right-wing judges on the Supreme Court. And we go into a bit of an examination on what's at stake and what this decision means. And unfortunately, it came out against the people of South Carolina who'd won below in the federal courts. It just seems to me, Lisa, that this Supreme Court is wayward, weaponized,

and radicalized. And every time that I hear a story come out, so whether it is Alito and his white supremacist, Christian fascist flags that he's hanging out in front of his home, whether it is Clarence Thomas's grifting or his wife's affinity for insurrection, we hear these stories, we all are outraged, and then we go back to business as usual because there is no recourse in dealing with a weaponized, radicalized Supreme Court and a group of black robes that now exist above the law. How did we get to this place, this place of absolutely no recourse where we have somehow given the black robes carte blanche over our society and over our democracy? Well, I think we do have recourse. It's a little bit hard to see given what's been happening and how aggressively this court has been moving. It does feel at

times like we lack power to hold this court accountable, but what we actually lack is a significant majority in the House and the Senate willing to hold this court accountable. And the American people get it. The polling about the court show that the public confidence in the court has plummeted. The court is not respected. The court is seen as a corrupt body. And yet, we do not have sufficient progressives, basically in Congress, to reform this court. But we could and we can. if we demand it. And I think we have to demand it because what's happened is that there's been a program, a deliberate program over the past few decades to pack the U.S. Supreme Court to ensure that we don't have fair judges, to basically ensure that we have people who are aligned with this extreme

agenda, to rip down the core precedents that gave our Constitution real meaning and real enforceability during the 20th and early 21st century. And the John Roberts Court is on a path of destruction. As you said, it's wayward, it's weaponized. It's out of control, but it doesn't have to be this way. It can be rebuked. It can be redressed. And what we need is, you know, action. We need the leader of the Senate, Senator Schumer, to demand that the Senate Judiciary Committee hold hearings on Alito's, you know, flying of these insurrectionist flags, this Christian nationalist, you know, Catholic Integralism flag idea that they want to impose theocratic rule in America. We need to have a hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee and more. We need to demand that Alito resign. He won't. And then ultimately,

we're going to need to impeach him. That can't happen with this House of Representatives, but it could happen with the different House of Representatives. And then, you know, the Senate is its own issue in terms of impeachment. But you have to start somewhere. You can't just throw your hands up, and I'm not saying you, but we just cannot allow politicians to throw their hands up and say nothing can be done. Because this court is, is now a singularly destructive force when it comes to the freedoms that Americans treasure. And that they want and need in order to thrive and to be able to live, you know, lives of freedom. And so, you know, I'm very, very upset and concerned about what this court is doing. But I refuse to give in to the idea that we can't do anything about it.

I too want to believe that there is recourse, that there is hope that I'm not just waiting on a group of evil actors and wrongdoers to die and do so under the tenure of a Democratic president in order to see justice restored in America. What I'm watching is a Democratic Party that seemingly has not learned anything over the last nine years, let alone over the last several decades, where Republicans have been building up a machine to take apart our country vis-a-vis the courts. Where is the left's Leonard Leo that has constructed a way for progress to move in this country uninterrupted regardless of who's in the White House? because that's exactly what the right has done, regardless of who is in the White House, they've constructed a court that will ensure that women are subjugated, that people of color have no route out of oppression, that LGBTQ people are forced back into the closet, that workers

have no rights. I mean, I don't understand, and maybe you can explain it to me. How is it that we've gotten to this place? And yet, as we are months away from an election, I do not hear. Democrats or the Biden administration or campaign talking about the importance of the courts. Well, you know, I think, you know, part of it, it certainly there has been this disconnect going back a number of years where Democrats were perceiving the courts as neutral, wanting to put people on the courts who are perceived as neutral, like Merrick Garland. And the right has not approached the

court that way. The right has approached the court as pawns in their chess game. They have not chosen people because they think they'll be fair. They've chosen people because they think they will not be fear. They think they will be loyal to this extreme agenda. And so it's taken a while for the Democrats to basically let go of this exaltation of the court, in part because the court for a brief period, you know, really from Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 for a couple of decades, was actually reading the Constitution, as it said, that we should have equal protection of the law under the 14 Amendment and that we were going to enforce that through decisions like Brown versus Board of Education and the Voting Rights Act, that we, you know, that you have a right to counsel. And what does that

mean, you have a right to actual legal counsel, you have a right to a jury, all these rights that had been in many ways disregarded by the judges of the 19th century, judges who were beholden to the robber barons of that era. We had this brief window in our lifetimes where the courts were actually acting in a way and really in some ways beyond the party of the person who appointed them, that Brownworth's Board of Education decision was a unanimous decision. But now we're in this period and it really has come on by really, you know, force and essence. Since Robert's nomination to the Supreme Court in 2005, the fact that Leonard Leo helped get George Joey Bush's first choice removed and got Sam Alito installed, the fact that they blocked

the confirmation hearings for Merrick Garland and then held that position open under the false claim that you can't confirm an election year, gave that seat to Neil Gorsuch, a notable right-winger from his youth, someone who was just extreme from the very beginning, the son of Anne Gorsuch, who was also an extremist in the Reagan administration, then, you know, pushed through Brett Kavanaugh, despite the serious testimony against him and my evidence about him lying under oath, pushed through Amy Coney-Barrant as Americans were voting Donald Trump out of office. And obviously, Clarence Thomas, who Leonard Leo also helped get confirmed back in the early 1990s, despite the serious allegations against him. So you have this court that's been packed. And I think in some ways,

the Democrats have been slow to take on that reality and sort of had hoped that these judges would behave as judges. They haven't. You know, right out of the gate, John Robert started changing the law, centuries of law on gun policy to make it easier for people to carry deadly weapons and kill other people. He immediately, within a few years, orchestrated the striking down of the McCain-Feingold citizens, you know, in the city united decision, which unleashed this torrent of dark money by these right-wing forces. Orchestrated literally wrote the decision destroying key enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act, despite Congress's reauthorization of that important law. to protect Americans' right to vote, and in particular African-Americans' right to vote,

and then has been involved in these decisions to make it harder for us to even have fair maps. And on top of that, then we've seen them move to this extremist substantive agenda to destroy a constitutional right to access abortion, to suggest that they're about to overturn marriage equality and people's ability to marry the people they love, and then also to take on the notion that we even have a right to access contraception. Those are just the tip of the iceberg of what this Roberts Court has done. But you're right, the Democrats overall have not acted fast enough and with enough intensity to help frame in the mind of the public, you know, that this can be changed. And in fact, the American public is ahead of the Congress. But there have been leaders,

like Senator White House on the Senate side, Rep Braskin and other representatives on the House side, like Representative Johnson, who have been standing up and speaking out. But they've been in the minority. They have not been in a leadership, a driving role. to really drive this issue forward. But the fact is that the American people at each turn since 2016 in the 2018 election and the 2020 election and the 2022 election in the elections last year, the American people have understood what's going on, what's at stake in our country. And they have been rejecting this strain of authoritarianism.

And certainly after Dobbs, there's been an overwhelming response in state after state, red state, blue state, purple state, rejecting these efforts to try to strip Americans of their rights to access, you know, health care, ordinary health care for people who are pregnant, if they want to remain pregnant or if they don't. And so the American people are demanding action. And what we need to do is make sure Senator Schumer is hearing, that people demand action, that we want there to be a hearing and we want more. We want other consequences for Sam Alito and for the others involved in the corruption and the distortion of our law at the U.S. Supreme Court. I mean, I just find it extraordinary that there are just but two members of Congress,

two members of the Senate that you named that like see this as an important issue that they need to be speaking out on. And it's like if we are, if our elected officials are so despondent when it comes to what the future generations have access to in this country, then how are people, how are regular average Americans supposed to know that like these changes can happen if our representatives have just kind of shrugged and said, well, I guess that's what we have now? Like it just doesn't make sense to me that there is not a collective amount of outrage directed at this Supreme Court and demanding better. When, you know, when Justice John Roberts was called in to sit before the Senate judiciary, he said, yeah, nah, I'm not coming and didn't. And there was nothing. It just,

the story just went away. I think John Roberts is going to go down in history as one of the worst chief justices of the United States, one of the worst justices in the United States. He's done everything he can to try to manipulate the process, to avoid and block efforts by the Senate, to hold the court accountable, to insist that it abide by just common sense ethical rules that every other court in the country had to follow. And like you said, he thumbed his nose that the Senate Judiciary Committee and refused to come to that hearing. And the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Durbin, let him get away with that. The fact is, is that it didn't, again, it didn't have to be that way. He could issue subpoenas. Right now, the Senate's Judiciary Committee could demand that

Alito come and testify before the Senate. And if he refuses, issue subpoenas insisting that he and his wife testify about the flying of these flags and about his failure to recuse himself from these January 6 cases. But not just him. Also, Clarence Thomas, who has failed to recuse himself from cases involving, you know, directly implicating his wife's role in trying to stoke the insurrection and the effort to, you know, have a coup in our country and nullify the results of the 2020 election. They should be called to testify along with the billionaires who've been bankrolling their luxury lifestyles. And John Roberts himself should have to testify. Or Congress should take action to have consequences for them. They can change their budget. They can impose term limits on these

judges. They can begin in the House impeachment proceedings. Of course, they can't proceed with the House being dominated of Republicans, but they can file those measures, you know, try to get that ball rolling. There are a lot of things that these members can do. And as you point out, one of the most important things they can do is be talking to the American people about what's at stake. One of the worst, worst set of election spending I've ever seen in my life, where the ads that were running in 2016 in Wisconsin against Ron Johnson telling him, Ron Johnson, do your job.

Get Merrick Garland a hearing. That message did not convey the people of Wisconsin. What was at stake if the next president was Trump and if he appointed the type of extremists that were on his list? I don't know how many tens of thousands or possibly millions of dollars went into ads against those Republicans with that message that had no content did nothing to tell the American people that we really were on the brink of losing Rovers' Wade, that we really were on the brink of losing additional key protections for voting

rights and for fair maps. Since then, though, in the 2022 election, in the 2023 election, there has been a vigorous pushback by state-based groups to really make it clear that this court is coming for our rights and we need to ban together against them. So there has been some messaging. But unfortunately, we have not seen the leadership in the Senate insist that we have the kinds of hearings, the kind of accountability, the kind of pushback, the kind of calling back that's necessary in the face of this kind of corruption, the face of this bias. And actually, as you point out, the real broader extremist agenda that this court is unfurling as if it were a court and not just a bunch of a handful of politicians, handpicked by Leonard Leo and his billionaire backers in order

to destroy our rights and destroy our freedoms. So we have a lot of work to do to get that message out, to get people to demand action by the Senate and to support people like Senator Blumenthal, who's done that terrific investigation of the RV and more. But that's not enough. We have to have more leadership from the Senate and from the House in order to take back our courts. Tell me something. What's the end game for Leonard Leo for Roberts? What do they want? Well, these men have a repressive agenda. They want to roll back the precedents of the 20th century.

They want to sort of reestablish as a matter of law, the sort of robber barren dominance in American society that was rejected by the New Deal and by the courts of the mid-20th century. They want an America that is dominated basically by white men. You know, when you look at the decision, like the decision today, to say that this state legislature in South Carolina,

which specifically plucked out 30,000 black voters out of the Gola community, out of Charleston, in order to deny their representation and basically secure the election and re-election of Nancy Mace. On racial grounds, that that's okay as long as they have a partisan purpose, this court is engaged in a pattern of racist decision-making. You can also see that in their ruling on affirmative action and the way they have approached that issue. You can also see that, in my opinion, in John Roberts' decision in the Voting Rights Act.

He rejected the findings of Congress that the Voting Rights Act needed to be reauthorized for 25 more years back in 2006, 2007. There were only a handful of legislators who even voted against the reauthorization of Voting Rights Act because everyone, other than a right-wing Supreme Court justice or their fan boys or fans, knows that we have a continuing issue of structural racism in America. and we have a continuing desire by one particular party, the Republican Party, to make it harder for African Americans to vote. And John Roberts was eager, eager to destroy that component of the Voting Rights Act that he first worked on right after he graduated from law school. He is the type of person who has an extreme agenda, despite his smile or his claims of neutrality, he's not neutral. This court is not behaving as a court. It's behaving like a star chamber. and it absolutely has to be reformed.

And some of these people literally need to be removed from office, whether that's by term limits or impeachment or other lawful methods. Well, Lisa, we will have to leave it there today. I appreciate you so much making time for the new abnormal. And folks, the grave injustice is out now, and you should definitely go and listen to it wherever you listen to your pods. Really appreciate you, Lisa. Oh, Danielle, thanks for having me on.

I really appreciate what you do. you know, week in and week out to help tell these stories and really speak truth to power. The new abnormal is a really, really important podcast, and I'm just honored to be part of your show. Thank you. Stephen Hayden is one of my favorite music and culture critics and the author of books about Pearl Jam, The Black Crows, and one of the best books about Radiohead. This isn't happening, Radiohead's Kid A in the beginning of the 21st Century. His new book out today is there was nothing you could do.

Bruce Springsteen's born in the USA and the end of the... Heartland. And he's here now to tell us about it. Stephen, thanks so much for being here. Thank you so much. That was such a nice introduction. I wasn't sure if you wanted to talk about the sixth strokes album, because this is called the new abnormal. No, let's stick with the boss for now. We can talk off air about the strokes. Okay, so this is a political podcast. So I'm going to focus on the more political and cultural parts of the book, but I do want our listeners to know that the book is much more than that. Does that sound fair? Yeah, and I appreciate you saying that. Yeah. It's a music book, but it touches on larger cultural.

issues as well, which I think is really interesting. Absolutely. So in terms of politics and culture, the overarching theme of the book seems to be that, yes, Springsteen has always had leftist leanings, but he's also considered himself and wanted to be sort of a uniter, not a divider, a seeker of common ground, at least temperamentally. He is sort of that most dreaded of words for many people, a centrist. Right. Yeah. I think with Bruce, we all know where he is. coming from politically these days. He's been pretty outspoken in the last 20 years in terms of endorsing candidates and stumping for certain issues. But back in the mid-80s, when he had this

just huge phenomenon with born in the USA, I think he was someone that, whether you were on the left or the right, he was a bit of a Rorschach test. Like, you could take what you wanted from him, the things that align with your own point of view. So obviously, if you were on the left, you could look at his lyrics and say he's writing about the common man, working class people. This can be contextualized. in Reagan's America, tricking all economics, how people are being squeezed in that way. But if you're on the right,

you can look at him and say, he critiques America, but he still believes in the American dream. He still believes in hard work, these bedrock American values. There were people on the right that upheld him as an example of American ingenuity done right. Like,

he was a good product that was well assembled. That was how he was talked about by a lot of people. His ability, I think, to simultaneously appeal to, people on either side of the political divide, I think, especially in retrospect, makes him a very unique rock star in history. Yeah, absolutely. And he really was back in the 80s around the time of born in the USA. He was exactly the uniter that he sort of wanted to be politically, culturally, musically. I mean, to the point where I am a huge Springsteen fan, I still can't really listen to

Born in the USA, the album anymore because it was just, it was so tattooed into my brain back then. But as you say early in the book of the first time you heard born in the USA as a kid, on cassette, naturally, you say the tape sounded like the beginning of something when I first heard it. But it wasn't. It was a harbinger of the end. And the end is where we are now. And as I read this, I thought it might not even be possible for folks who weren't around back then to really understand just how everywhere this album was. I know Taylor Swift is, you know, you could probably say she's a bigger star now than even Bruce was in the 80s. But because we're not a monoculture anymore, she's kind of avoidable, if you so choose, in a way that he really wasn't. Or is this just the demented rantings of an out-of-touch Gen Xer? I think you're on to something there. I mean, when I've done interviews for this book, people bring up Taylor Swift. And I write about Taylor Swift in the book and how the way that she, for a time, I think,

tried to be above politics in the same way that Bruce Springsteen was in the mid-80s. At some point, she wasn't able to do that. You know, after Trump got elected, there were all of these. editorials coming out, blaming Taylor Swift because she didn't endorse Hillary Clinton as if, like, if she had done that, the election could have been turned. I mean, that's just a snapshot of like how crazy I think the media was in the late 2010s. With Bruce, in this album in particular, I mean, it's an interesting record for him because he was already a big star before born in the USA came out. But he wasn't someone that a six-year-old like I was was listening to. I think when

you reach that level of stardom where it's not just music fans, but it's little kids, it's old people, it's your neighbor, it's the person who doesn't follow music at all. If they're aware of this artist, they've reached another level of acclaim. And with Bruce, what I think is so fascinating about born in the USA is that, this is one of the central, I guess, points of the book is that I really feel like if you look at his career before that record, you can see it as him building up to having that kind of moment where he was going to be like an Elvis or a Beatles type phenomenon and how it wasn't a straight line because I think there was a lot of ambivalence that he felt about achieving that kind of stardom.

And then the period afterward, you know, this 40-year span of time, there's been a lot of moments in his career where you can tell that he's actively trying to back away from the image that he built up as this macho, all-American guy in the mid-80s, especially like, you know, that late 80s into the 90s period? I mean, I think that was an extended period where he was rejecting that. I mean, you look at the cover of tunnel of love. He's wearing the suit and the bowelot tie. I mean, that's about as far away from a blue collar image as you can get. So I think it's an interesting study of his career looking at him as someone who wants to be in the center of the public, but there's also a part of him that I think feels some conflict about that.

Yeah, we should also be clear, as you are very much so in the book, the sort of deification of Bruce that we saw in the 80s, much like, you know, what was done with Elvis before him as the savior of one America and all of that. That makes a lot of assumptions and leaves a lot of people out, for example, people of color. Right. Exactly. And that's something that even people at the time writing about born in the USA. I mean, not everyone noted that, but there were instances where people looked at the audience at his concerts and it was like, oh yeah, this is overwhelmingly a white audience. So he definitely wasn't a uniter in terms of like different racial groups in the same way, I think like Michael Jackson was in the 80s. I mean, I was a little kid in the 80s. And if you were

in grade school, like, you were issued a copy of thriller from the government. Like everyone, everyone had a copy of thriller. You know, and that's the first album that I remember being aware of. And then born in the USA, it was probably, you know, the second or third. That's another interesting thing about the 80s. And we talk about Taylor Swift again being this huge stadium-filling star. But like, there were multiple versions of that in the mid-80s. I mean, Michael Jackson, Prince, Madonna. Even someone like Huey Lewis in the news was like a huge multi-platinum band. It wasn't all in one person in the same way that it feels like it is with Taylor Swift these days.

But, yeah, Bruce was definitely like the rock star version of that in a way that we don't see a rock star at that level anymore. You know, someone who, you know, playing a guitar, writing songs in the same way that Bruce is, you have to look at country music as being the closest equivalent to that. but certainly like no rock band is achieving that level of success these days. No, for sure. And along with all of the mythologizing that came along with Born in the USA, the album, and what you say almost inevitably led to unbelievable misreadings of a song like Born in the USA, misreadings that we still see to this day. And you say that there's really no way around that, much as Woody Guthrie's this land is your land once it became popular,

was destined to have the same fate. Yeah. It's funny that you talk about how people still misread born in the USA as this jingoistic or pro-patriotism song. I think I saw a story recently, like, where people were doing a counter protest to a pro-Palestinian rally at some college campus, and they were blasting born in the USA. These frat bros were blasting that song. So it's amazing, like 40 years later, people are still doing that. Yeah, I mean, the thing with that song, that is interesting, because you have a couple different levels of, like, misinterpretation or misappropriation.

You have like the basic political level where you had Ronald Reagan wrapping his arm around Bruce Springsteen and saying, you know, this guy's an example of the American spirit. You can hear that in this song, which is just pure, I think, political opportunism. You know, like I'm going to align with this hot new thing. And I think he gave that speech in New Jersey. So definitely pandering to the audience by bringing up Bruce. So there's that, which in a way doesn't even feel like misinterpretation just feels like we're going to cynically take this song and make it ours. But then there are, I think, the millions of people who hear that song and they don't listen to the lyrics and they just hear the chorus and they think it's a pro patriotism song. And I have to say that, I mean, I don't think that's a crazy leap to make because the thing with that song, and I think this is what makes it such a fascinating, complicated work of art is that you do have lyrics where you have a Vietnam vet who's disaffected and he doesn't feel like his country remembers him anymore.

But then you have the chorus, which is so rousing. Right. Like, you can't even sing that chorus. You shout that chorus. You fist pump that chorus. And it gets the blood pumping. And then you put it in a stadium. And Bruce is playing that song in front of the American flag.

I don't think it's outrageous that people just hear the chorus think it's one thing that maybe it's not. To me, that's just one of the fascinating things about arriving at that kind of cultural moment that Bruce arrived at where I think he wanted that kind of impact. He wanted to move people. He wanted to do what Elvis was able to do and the Beatles were able to do this sort of psychgeist across culture. I'm a big tent and everyone's going to get under whatever it is I'm doing.

The flip side of that is that once you get that big, you don't have control over how your art is discussed or contextualized or what people think of it. You know, like when he was just a guy in the late 70s with darkness on the edge of town, like he knew his audience. And his audience knew him. and there was a connection there. But if you're playing like RFK Stadium in front of like 60,000 people or 80,000 people, a good number of those people are just coming in off the street because they saw you on MTV.

And they don't really understand your music. They just like it because that's the thing that's popular right now. For someone like Bruce, I think that was really difficult at some point, you know, to know that people like me, but maybe not for the reasons I want them to like me. But you also write, and I found this really interesting, you write that at least some of this misinterpretation and this sort of view that arose of Springsteen as a nonpartisan, you know, just American hero, that part of it wasn't inevitable and that that sort of denies Bruce's role in all this. And you say that quoting from the book here, the truth is that Bruce created a

rhetorical void that commentators were inclined to fill. And that appears to be wholly intentional. And you also write that Bruce in that era did not make his audience choose a side. Yeah, I mean, you know, 1984 of the year the album comes out. out, it's an election year. Ronald Reagan versus Walter Mondale. And I think a lot of people could look at Bruce Springsteen and probably guess which candidate he would have supported. But he was asked directly at the time as a Rolling Stone interview that Kurt Loder did, where Loder asks him, like, about the election and who do you support? And Bruce is very noncommittal about it. He's even noncommittal about voting. In the interview, he says, like, I haven't voted since George McGovern

in 1972. So that would have been a dozen years earlier. And he has this line in the interview that he refers to human politics. And this is something that he's used this phrase in other interviews around that time. And it's politics beyond politics. This politics where, you know, he would go on stage and he would talk about food banks, you know, support your local food bank. You know, this idea of like sort of charity where you can help people without entering the political world and dividing into Republicans or Democrats. Because like, Who's against the food bank? You've got to be a pretty crazy person not to support donating food to poor people.

It's a cause that anyone can get behind. And that was something that he talked about. And again, if you compare that to where we are now, I talked earlier about Taylor Swift, like how in 2016, she didn't make a public statement about one candidate or the other. And then she was attacked afterward for doing that. In 84, as far as I can tell, there wasn't like a big movement to blame Bruce Springsteen because Walter Mondale just got destroyed in the 1984 election. I mean, I think it was a different time.

Artists back then were obviously political. They were activists. I mean, there's numerous examples of that. But the idea of like a pop star giving an endorsement like your local newspaper, I don't think that that was as commonplace as it feels like it is now. I think there is a different expectation that we have of pop stars than we did back then. But yeah, to get that to your question, yeah, certainly I think Bruce in concert, he wasn't a partisan.

The ideals, the messages that he was putting forth, they really were the kinds of things that I think anyone could agree with, you know, that hard work is good. You should be a part of a community. You should respect other people. You know, we all need love and understanding and empathy. These are platitudes that I don't think anyone would disagree with. You know, they're all just sort of general matters of decency.

Yeah. So that's not something that Bruce becomes a part of until really the 21st century. You know, there's the vote for change tour that he was a part of in 2004, which was ostensibly about voter registration. But like, no one on that bill was supporting George W. Bush. I mean, it was a pretty anti-Bush show. And everyone knew that going into it. It was really about sort of jinning up excitement for John Kerry. I believe, like, in every subsequent election, I mean, Springsteen's made it known, like, who he supports and who he's going to vote for.

But that's not something, again, that was really coming into play back. in the Born of the USA era. Yeah, there was a really interesting theme that you had in the book that you came back to several times. And you point out sort of the juxtaposition of Springsteen's born in the USA era, credo of nobody wins unless everybody wins. And then three years later in 1987, you have Axel Rose in Guns and Roses and Welcome to the Jungle saying you can have anything you want, but you better not take it from me.

And you had a really interesting sentence in that. there, you write that when Donald Trump won the presidency and nobody in the media understood why, I wonder if any of those people had listened to Welcome to the Jungle. Right. Right. We've all heard the song, but if you ever actually like listen to that song and like the place that it's coming from, because, you know, Axel Rose and Izzy Stradlin, which has anyone ever said Izzy Stradlin on this podcast before?

I don't think so. No. Hopefully I'm the first person to reference. I think you are. To reference Izzy. But, you know, Axel Rose comes from Indiana. That's, you know, dead center in the middle of the country. And he's really expressing a point of view that I think a lot of people in that part of the country feel like,

which is that there are unseen forces that control my life that are against me, that are going to keep me down. And I'm going to be poor. My kids are going to be poor. And my children's children are going to be poor. And there's really no opportunity for upward mobility. And I think if that is your mindset and that's your world, the message of a song like, Welcome to the Jungle resonates more than maybe what Bruce was talking about on the Boren in the USA tour, which was more of an idealistic message, a message of we can all take care

of each other. We're all part of the same community. We just have to bond together as people, and we can rise each other up, which is, again, a classic American sentiment. I mean, I think if you say that to people as an idea, like all Americans would be in favor of that. But with a song like Welcome to the Jungle, I think it just probably felt more real to people. You know, this is a of a reflection of what my life is like. And yeah, I'm going to get mine and you can get yours, but it better not affect me because then it's going to be a problem. That's a different kind of community. It really kind of predicated more on the self. And look, I mean, a lot of like what the book deals with is my own sort of struggle with how I look at America. Because one thing I

realized writing this book is that Bruce Springsteen is not only one of the big artists of my life someone I've listened to almost as long as I've been on the planet. He's really shaped my worldview in ways that I don't think I fully appreciated until I wrote this book. And one of those ways is that I am a person who believes that, oh, if we could all just get together and reach across the aisle and talk, get out and see that we're more similar than different, then the world would be a better place and I think we can get there. Like, that's something I believe in my heart of hearts, even though I've reached the point where that doesn't feel real. You know, is that just the dream of America that was put in my head at some point because you just feel like there's so

much evidence to the contrary to that, you know, that we're not a country that's the community. We're just a bunch of individuals that happen to live in the same landmass. And we're all just trying to get our own thing. And if I can help you and help myself, that's great. But if I have to screw you over to help me out, then I'm going to have to do that. So it's really about wrestling with that. Stephen, it sounds like you're asking, is a dream a lie? if it don't come true.

Right. Exactly. Well, that's something I allude to at the end of the book, that famous line from the river. And the conclusion I come to is that there's something worse in that line is not having a dream at all. You know, like not believing in something bigger. That feels so cold to me. And that's how the book ends. And it's just figuring out where to go from there.

Because I don't really have the answer to that. I don't think anyone does. It probably isn't an answer to it. But I think the title, the end of the Heartland, really in the book, Heartland, it's not just the middle of the country or really the middle of the country at all. It really is that dream of like what America is supposed to be. And whether that's just a fiction and grappling with the, I guess, ramifications of that. For sure.

And there's a, I should point out to our listeners, there's a great chapter in the book about Heartland Rock. Oh, man. That I absolutely loved. I'm glad you called that out. That's like my favorite thing I wrote in the book. Yeah, no. It's so good to hear you talk about Bob's. Seeger and Tom Petty and John Cougar Malencamp and whatever.

Stephen, thank you so much for being here. The book is, there was nothing you could do. Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA. It is out today, and I couldn't recommend it more highly. Stephen, thanks a lot. Andy, thank you so much. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of The New Abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday.

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