The Daily Beast Podcast - There's More Lauren Boeberts Coming—Unless Dems Do This w/ Brian Klass

Episode Date: November 9, 2021

Brian Klaas, author of Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us, tells Molly Jong-Fast how to prevent Lauren Boeberts of the world from turning the country into a full-fledged totalitarian regime, Recount’s Slade Sohmer joins the podcast and roasts Sen. Ted Cruz—and Sen. John Kennedy—real good and Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego leaves Molly speechless after he shares war stories from his book They Called Us Lucky. If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes its just discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Molly Jongfast and welcome to The Daily Beast, The New Abnormal. I'm a left-wing pundit and an editor at large at The Daily Beast. We're here to have fun, sharp conversations with some of the smartest people in media, politics, and science that help make what's happening in the country and the world clearer. Our world has been turned up day down. On the new abnormal, we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and figure out how to get ourselves out of it. And I'm producer Jesse Kenan. I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. Today we have an excellent episode. Brian Klaus, Associate Professor in Global Politics at the University College of London,

and author of Corruptible, who gets power and how it changes us, is going to talk to us about why we are choosing the wrong leaders. And then we'll talk to Congressman Ruben Gallego of Arizona's 7th District. He's going to talk to us all about his new book, They Called Us Lucky. And of course, we will pressure him to primary, Satan herself, Kristen Cinema.

But first, we have editor, Chief of the recount, Slade Somer. Welcome back to the new abnormal Slade. Thank you. So lots of exciting stuff going on. I think that, you know, I kidded that I went to Europe to get away from all of the bad punditry

that's going on. And then this morning, which is actually the afternoon here, I looked at this mark, I found a Mark Penn editorial in the New York Times about how Democrats can win in 2022. And I was like, maybe

I'm just not coming home. Yeah. Well, you know, I think your first mistake was reading a Mark Penn op-ed in the New York Times. I was more scared that it was going to be that you heard that Big Bird got vaccinated. Yeah. Oh, can we talk about Republicans versus Big Bird? Because that is amazing. Yeah, let's get into it.

I mean, all day, all week, Occupy Sesame Street. Right. That's right. Occupy Sesame Street. Yeah, look at these liberal, communist, pinko bastards getting the vaccine. I would say my big takeaway from this story is I just learned that Big Bird is frozen in time at six years old.

How does that make you feel? It makes me feel very old. But it's funny that a lot of people were joking around and saying, what took him so long, but he was not eligible, or they were not eligible. I don't know Big Bird's pronouns. But they were not eligible because Big Bird is frozen at six.

Right. So he just got vaccinated now. Exactly. I mean, Ted Cruz really, really, really mad, a big bird. Yeah. Ted Cruz has never met a troll tweet that, you know, that he didn't love. Yeah, it's amazing to me that we have a member of Congress from one of the biggest states in the country who only wants to shit post online. Like, that's his entire reason for living. Does he have any time to do anything else?

I don't know. The easy answer to that is vacation in Cancun, but, you know, that's, that's, that's a layup. That's, that's amazing. I'm sorry. I set you up for that. Yeah. And, and, and, and, and, and grandstand, you know, the thing last week, that was hilarious where he was going off on the private jets in Glasgow, which, you know, by the way, is a decent point. Right. That he had time to stand up there and talk about private jets and hypocrisy and always opens himself up to these, you know, response tweets that are like, you should never be talking. about airplanes. But also, you know that he was with Rob Portman who has a private jet. Well, so we got an email from the Portman camp. Oh, yes, please. That Rob Portman actually does not have a private jet. What? Yes. Get this man a private jet right now. I know. If anyone deserves a private jet,

it's a retiring senator. We, he doesn't have a private jet? No, he doesn't. He just has shares in net jets? Yeah, I think that's exactly right. Yeah, he made a big point of saying that he takes Delta coach wherever he goes. Yeah, believe it when I see him there. And actually, if you listen to that press conference, my favorite thing that nobody pointed out was that at some point, John Kennedy, who was the one who yelled in, Portman has one as a joke, he then yells in to Ted Cruz. He then yells in, all right, Ted, land this jet, meaning like, shut the hell up, which was so fun. everyone hates Ted Cruz. It's incredible, even his own party and his own friends. Well, I mean,

I will say that Kennedy used to be a Democrat. Kennedy is my favorite person in the Senate for the following reason. Yeah, me, mine too. This is a man who has three degrees. He went to Vanderbilt. He went to the University of Virginia, and then he went to the University of Oxford. And all he wants to be is this dumb folksy guy, you know, who constantly gets everything wrong. and puts these weird expressions on everything. And yet he's not this dumb folksy guy. No, he's not. He's smart. He graduated Magna Cum Laude from Van der Bilt and then went to UVA and went to Oxford.

Just be a normal person who like thinks and has a brain. It just, it's crazy to me. I think he was a Democrat back then. So it was a little different. A little different. Back then it was acceptable to be a thinking person with a brain. It is kind of amazing, though. he was, he says stuff where you think, oh, this guy's an idiot.

And then you're like, no, no, he has all these degrees. He can't possibly be an idiot. But he's just like a smart person pretending to be a dumb person, which is a stark contrast to much of the Senate and Congress. Yes, it is the exact opposite. It's mostly the exact opposite of the House. I mean, for as dumb as people are in the Senate, they at least try to uphold, for the most part, this like world's greatest

deliberative body bullshit. Except for Marsha Blackburn and Tommy Tuberville. Yeah, I mean Tuberville happens to be probably one of the dumbest men on the planet. And yet, the voters of Alabama would rather have him than Doug Jones,

which is incredible. I think even from a nonpartisan perspective, that is like truly one of the biggest travesties of the last elections. Yeah, I am so impressed with how Tommy Tuberville is really just about, like, everything he says is beyond parody. It really is. I mean, he didn't know which, you know, the three branches of government.

He doesn't know how a bill becomes a law. He wasn't even a good football coach. Like, that's the thing. That's the thing that I don't get. Like, you know, if you're Alabama and you want to put Nick Sab in an office, you want to put Gene Stallings in office, you want to resurrect the ghost of Bear Bryant and put him in office, you could do whatever you need. need to do. Tommy Tuberville was a pretty dumb guy, you know, coaching football and didn't have, you know, the greatest record of all time, you know, and to put that guy in office over Doug Jones is just laughable. Yeah. It really is. I just never get it, but I guess partisanship is a hell of a drug, right? It really is. Yeah. I feel like we're sort of waiting for Trump to figure out that what happened on Tuesday was that Trumpism can win without Trump. Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

Now, I think there are other factors in play in Yonkin's win. And, you know, I truly think that Terry McAuliffe was possibly the worst candidate. Just the worst. Like historically bad candidate that they put up. And, you know, they just went after Trump and brought in, you know, the celebrities like Obama and Biden. And, you know, really tried this and tried to write off, you know, parents' concerns in schools as just critical race. theory, which it turned out not to be. You know, so there's a lot of explanations there.

But I think it's also just in the same way that everyone complains, well, the media is broken. And I always come back with like, yes, it is, but also the audience is broken. You know, I think that's also a similar case with elections where it's like, yes, our, you know, our elections are kind of stupid sometimes, but the electorate is even stupider sometimes, you know, obviously. I mean, the one thing I would say is like it strikes me. I mean, I have a lot of children in varying degrees of age. And I do think, like, parents got crazy about feeling that their kids were never going back to school. And they missed work. And a lot of people said it's critical race theory, right? And it's, you know, it clearly was actually these, I mean, I think actually it was these enraged parents about kids not going back to school. Unfortunately, I don't think it's going to translate for Republicans because this is a sort of short phenomenon.

I mean, they're back in school now. Right. They're back in school now. My only pushback to that, and I think you're right, but my only push back to that is like, Republicans know how to do this dance. You know, they know how to take a short-term issue and make it a long-term issue. Right. That is true. You know, they know how to do it really well. My comeback to all this stuff about what's happening at schools, critical race theory, all this stuff taken together is that the only voices we hear are white women in the suburbs.

And like, did we hear at all what black families, what brown families, what other families think about going back to school? Did we hear, you know, at all what they think about teaching race and history in schools? No, we only heard, you know, about white women in the suburbs. in, you know, in Lulu Lemon pants, you know, and I say this as someone who owns a pair of, like, Lulu Lemon slacks that are great. No Spod Khan on this podcast.

It's not paid for. Geez. Yeah, I was going to say, we don't do that. We're very classy here. Yeah, exactly. Well, you know, I apologize for that. You know, so my concern here is much less about the issue and much more about who's talking about the issue.

And we in the media, you know, and I am a part of this problem. I'm not saying it's everyone else is wrong and I'm right. You know, we genuinely do need to like talk about whose voices get amplified and whose voices get heard because I've had enough of the fucking diner voters in Ohio and I've had enough of, you know, the suburbs people in Virginia and what's going on in, you know, the Milwaukee suburbs suburbs or elsewhere. You know, we really just do need to have a reckoning with like, you know, who gets to have their voice heard in media. and I thought we were going to do a better job of this over the last few years,

and we just really have not. I guess, you know, post-George Floyd protests. And that has receded. And we just were back to what do white women have to say about this? Right. No, I think that's right. And I definitely think that we need to have some diversity in who we cover and how we cover it. And obviously, that's something that's always been lacking

and it's always something we should be talking about and trying to do better with. Yeah, totally. But just to come back to your original point, you know, yes, I think in some ways this is a short-term issue and it will work itself out before the midterms, but how that is spun and how, you know, the Republicans continue to, you know, to extend this conversation, you know, is something that they are better than Democrats at. Just because it's so much easier to play on, like, nativist tropes and play on kind of these visceral fears than it is to have a nuanced conversation. about it, you know, which is also a tremendous, you know, lacking in today's modern media. Well, I also think that Republicans are really good at messaging and Democrats are not. They just think, Democrats think if they do good stuff, then good things will happen. And I don't think that that has borne out. Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

And you see that in the bipartisan infrastructure deal that passed, you know, late on Friday, which the Democrats are essentially, and again, I'm going to. going to say this as nonpartisan as possible, the Democrats are essentially being penalized right now for having good faith policy negotiations within their own party, you know, that you have the left, you have the center, you have, you know, the right, all of the Democratic Party having these good faith negotiations. Now, you know, let's take Mansion and Sinema out of the good faith part, but at least in the House, you know, at least in the House and most of the Senate in the Democratic party, it's like, okay, we all believe in X, but how we get to the final result of X is worthy

of discussion. And I think most Democrats agree that it's worthy of discussion. And then there's a penalization of those Democrats for this Dems in disarray, Dems are fighting, whereas then the Republicans get this free pass of just saying, no, lower taxes, and we don't want anything. And that's essentially the Republican Party position, and then people will say, well, you know, they're united, so they must be right. You know, that's just, that makes no sense. And I, you know, I don't really understand how that happens. And then, of course, it gets passed. There will be money flowing over the next five years, you know, five hundred something million dollars. Yeah, and then they will take credit for it. Yeah, and then they will take credit for it. And then that's how this all goes. Right. I mean,

remember when Madison Cawthorn, right, was like, there's a new bridge in the district. and I did this, you know. At the recount, we did a roundup of all the Republicans who were taking credit for something they voted against. And, you know, it's both disgusting, you know, and completely normal behavior in Washington, D.C. It's wild. Yeah. And you really do see that, you know, if Democrats don't own it, they won't get credit for it.

I would, did Jim Acosta show yesterday. And he was talking about this idea that, like, if Donald Trump had managed to pass infrastructure, imagine what Donald Trump would have done. Yes. He would have been behind that truck honking the horn, you know, there would have been tanks rolling through Washington, D.C. There would have been a North Korea-style parade down the street. I mean, Trump is very on record as saying we're going to fix infrastructure. Yes.

You know, his party was behind him when he was the president. You know, now Biden's trying to, well, we'll sign that into law, at least the first part of this, the bipartisan infrastructure framework. And then, you know, now the Build Back Better Act, which is a key component, you know, to Biden's agenda, that looks like it'll be delayed a few weeks at least. I think the appetite will die and that will not end up getting passed. But, you know, hopefully. Yeah, that's what I'm worried about. Yeah. Hopefully, I'm wrong on that. But, you know, it is, it is the type of thing where it's like, you do have to learn a lesson from Donald Trump. And that lesson is not, let's be racist. And, you

you know, loud assholes about anything. You know, that lesson is you have to celebrate your successes. You have to get up there and say, this is what I have done for you, or this is what our party has done for you. And Democrats just miss every single possible moment as often as they can. But do you think what's happened right now is that Democrats are getting blamed for a lot of the COVID restrictions and what happened with the pandemic, even like the way that Trump was blamed for it, that Democrats are now being blamed for it? I don't know that they're being blamed for it. I think the word blame is my problem in that sentence. I think you're right and I think your point is correct. I think they're being penalized for it that they didn't fix it within 20

minutes. You know, but like look at the death numbers in New York City. I think one person died yesterday. You know, in cities that still have COVID restrictions, you know, in cities and states, the case numbers are way down, the death numbers are way down. And it's because there's still a level of caution there. It's not just open. You know, you talked about being in a little plague island or however you respond, whatever you call the UK, you know, their numbers are still pretty high up. And their philosophy right now is like, you know, Yvon Drago from Rocky Four. If he dies, he dies. Yeah.

It's one of those things where it's like, there are some cities and states in the United States where that is our policy right now. I was down in Florida for a wedding a couple weeks ago. There was not a single mask to be found, even amongst 80-year-olds, eating pea soup on the sidewalk. You know, it's one of those things where it's like, we can start to relax restrictions. And Democrats should, you know, should recognize that as well. Now we're going to have the Pfizer pill and the Merck pill come to market in the next few months. You know, we are seeing vaccine rates go higher and higher with this mandate. There is a world in which the next three to six months look better and we do relax a lot of restrictions. I do wonder what happens to Democrats poll numbers when that happens. So, you know, I'm not saying the midterms are lost because there's a lot of time before next November. But I do think Democrats are going to have to reckon with science and they're going to have to say, okay, we're seeing X, Y, and Z. We can now say, oh,

accordingly, no masks here. You know, school's fully open. You know, maybe there's no masks here. These little things, I do think that the Democrats are going to have to get wise to that if they want to, you know, have some juice come midterms. Yeah, I mean, the party and power always gets screwed in the midterms. There's a chance for Democrats to say, look, shots in arms, we pass legislation. We've, you know, I mean, like, one of the things that I'm always sort of laughing about is, like, I do think that the New Jersey governor's race meant that, like, Democrats were going to repeal the salt tax. Totally. Like, when that happened, I was like, oh, Democrats are going to repeal the salt tax.

I mean, the salt tax, which Jesse doesn't let me talk about on this podcast because it's so boring. But, you know, Democrats need to win these districts in these high tax states. And, like, it was a brilliant piece of legislation by Trump world as a way to punish the very people who vote Democrat. Brilliant. And, you know, everyone I know in New York City's taxes were raised. Yeah. And New Jersey. And people in New Jersey were complaining about, you know, they said they didn't want to vote for him because of the property taxes. So, I mean, it does make a lot of sense. Yeah. And look, nobody wants to pay taxes, you know. I think even Democrats, you know,

don't want to pay taxes. I, you know, mostly because everyone disagrees on where the tax money should go. You know, I know plenty of liberals who are like, I don't want to pay, you know, for $700 billion for a military. every year. And Republicans say, I don't want to pay for Eskimo poetry, you know, and art grants. I get that. At the end of the day, like, another messaging problem is that, you know, the Build Back Better Act was just scored by the Joint Committee on Taxation to be, you know, neutral and not add to the deficit, whereas the bipartisan infrastructure framework does add to the deficit. And that was something that Republicans, some Republicans at least 13 in the House and I think 19 in the Senate did get behind. So it's funny that we're okay adding to the deficit on this quote unquote bipartisan bill,

you know, but we're not okay with the Build Back Better Act that has been scored to be neutral. It's these episodes of cognitive dissonance that are essentially, you know, media malpractice, you know, lawmaker malpractice. It just doesn't make any sense. And like nobody explained why this makes sense because it doesn't. So then when people vote this way, we're all shocked. You know, it just, it's crazy to me. You know, the Murphy story is the thing that I have yet to kind of figure out exactly how that went down and why that went down. You know, I've been digging into that all weekend, you know, because I'm very cool and do work on my weekend. Right. Super cool guy. But, you know, that's the one because like everyone's like, Virginia, Virginia, Virginia. Now, if Virginia

just was an island and was alone, great. Do all the analysis you can. But Murphy was supposed to win by 14 points, you know, 10 points, whatever, whatever, and really sweat it out, you know, probably what will turn out to be a two, three point win. So, you know, how did we get, you know, how did we get there? Yeah, it's like the first time ever the problem solvers caucus has solved a problem. Ha! Right? That's great. It's never happened before and it will likely never happen again. So enjoy. it folks. It is the first and likely the last time, so enjoy

it folks. Yeah, I will leave you with this. Whenever everyone brings up the problem solvers caucus, the only thing I think of is Tracy Morgan and Jane Krakowski wearing those shirts on 30 rock that says, the problem and solvers. Right, exactly. 100%. That's right.

Also, I stole your North Korean thing for a tweet. Sorry. Amazing. No. You know, I... And I didn't credit you, Ernie. I have a very grateful dead perspective to anything. I have a very grateful dead perspective to anything I say, which is when I'm done with it, you could have it. It's certainly true. You know, no royalties do.

Let's just grow the marketplace. Hey, folks, if you haven't heard every single week, we do a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast membership program. Sometimes we interview senators like Corey Booker or the folks who explain what's happening behind the scenes in media like Jim Acosta or Soladad O'Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner, and sometimes we just have friends around to analyze what's happening in the news. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a beast inside member

where you'll support the beast fearless journalism, as well as getting full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member, head to newabnormal. Dot the Daily Beast.com. That's new abnormal. That the dailybeast. Brian Klaus is a professor of global politics at the University College of London and author of Corruptible.

Who gets power and how it changes us. Welcome to the new abnormal, Brian. Thanks for having me. So let's talk about the book. I mean, I think I know how you came upon this subject, but for the readers, explain to us how you came upon this subject. Yeah, so my career has basically been studying bad people who do bad things. And I started doing that by studying authoritarian leaders all around the world. I dabbled in U.S. politics for the last several years for reasons you can imagine as well.

And it got me thinking about bigger questions, right? So we have all these people around us who are decent, fundamentally good people who would be great in positions of leadership. And then we think about all the people we have in power and they're mostly awful. And so it's this sort of paradox of why is it that everybody I know is good and everybody who I see in leadership is behaving so awfully? And that was sort of the impetus for the book. And that's what I explore in the last several years of my research. So why is it? Yeah, it's a huge question.

And so I've written an entire book. Some of the book and three four words. So I think what we do often is we think all the time about the people who are in power, right? We're laser focused on the people we have in power. And what we're not thinking about to our detriment is who's not in power. And so I'll illustrate my answer to this question with police reform, which I think is a very hot topic right now in the United States. So we look at police reform as though we need to, you know, fix what the police do. We need to think about how we have body.

or oversight or citizen boards and so on. All of those are good ideas, right? But what we don't think about is who the police are. And that's really the problem, right? That there's actually a self-selection effect that happens with power. So the way I explain it is, you know, when you think about like a high school basketball team, you're not going to expect the basketball team to be of average height. People self-select onto the basketball team because they're tall, right? When it comes to power, the same thing is true with personality types. People who have more authoritarian personalities, people who are more of the sort of view that they're better than other people or that they should be in charge, they're the ones that self-select into these positions. And so I think

what we're not doing enough of is thinking about how our systems around power basically disproportionately recruit, promote, and keep bad people in power and basically siphon everybody else off. Right. I mean, right now we happen to be going to a period where we have a president who is the right may not like him, but he's arguably the closest thing we've ever had to a good person as president. Yeah, so there's plenty of good people in power. Don't get me wrong, right?

I'm not trying to say that like everybody around you is in power as an awful person. It's just disproportionate. It's disproportionate to the average population. Now, at the national level, and I think this is a really great point, because at the national level, there's enough rewards for power

that good people will be willing to sort of go through the awfulness that is, for example, the scrutiny that comes with high office, office in the United States or all the hoops you have to jump through, all the compromises morally you have to make to get there and so on. But I think one thing that we don't think enough about is what's happening at the local level and how that's going to change America's political fabric going forward. So like right now you look around school boards in the United

States and these meetings of, you know, you see these viral videos of these sort of insane zealots shouting at school board members for obeying public health guidance, right? And threatening their families and doing all sorts of stuff. And one of the things, that I try to highlight is that the way you set up the system of power determines who ends up putting their hat in the ring for it. And so like in Thailand, a place that I've done a lot of fieldwork in, going into politics is a way to get ruined. You can end up in jail. You might end up in exile. You might end up dead and so on. So most of the talented people just go into business or they, you know, try to cash in in some way. And what I'm really worried about is those people who are looking

around at the sort of dystopian environment that is the United States right now and thinking I'd really like to help. Right. Make this worse. Yeah, but it's not worth it. Right. Right. Is it really worth it to be a school board member if your kids are going to get death threats? I mean, right, that's the real problem. Systems of power really, really matter and we don't think about them enough. And that's where the reform should happen in my view. How would you reform it? Well, it's basically the last third of the book is 10, 10 different ideas, but I'll give you one of them, right? So all these things sort of have to happen in tandem because there's no silver bullet, unfortunately. It's a really, it's a really complicated problem that we basically have never tried to fix. I mean, I think that's one point that's worth pointing out that

we haven't really tried to systematically change this in modern history, and that's part of the issue. But let's take one thing that comes with how you deter abuse. Okay, so for example, psychological distance is this idea in psychology that when people are abstractions to you, it's way easier to abuse them. The further they are from you, the less rich your emotional connection is to them, the more likely abuses, right? Now, so I explore this in the book where I juxtapose John Yu, who was the author of the torture memos, I went out to Berkeley, California, and I interviewed him, and I asked him about the torture memo. And, you know, he said, I didn't lose any sleep about it. And he presented it as a completely logical problem. Like, you know, we could go one to

12 in terms of what kinds of enhanced interrogation, you know, what I would call torture, we could use. But somebody was going to second guess us, no matter what we chose, whether it was two or four or six, whatever, right? And so I sleep fine at night. And I'm thinking to myself, you know, I don't think John Yoo has ever witnessed somebody get put into a box full of live insects. Yeah. You know, and actually seen that. And I've interviewed torture victims. And I think, you know, we've built systems where the people in power don't have to think about the people who are affected by their decisions very much. And that's happening much more in corporate society, where you have, you know, corporate downsizing consultants to do the dirty work or, you know, Uber fired 3,500 people via Zoom earlier on in the pandemic.

So I think one of the things that's really important is to make sure that people in positions of power view those who are affected by their decisions, not as abstractions, but as real individuals. Right. It's so interesting to me because it definitely seems like a real paradigm shift. You also wrote a book called How to Reagan Election. Can we talk about that for a minute? because it feels like that is becoming the central focus of the Republican Party right now. Sure. It seems like, and I feel like you're such an important person to have on this topic, because it feels like we're spiraling into authoritarianism,

and that the Republican Party is just continually obsessed with consolidating power and not much else. Am I crazy? Are you seeing this? Is there any off-ramp? Is there a historical off-ramp for us? I mean, what should the people who listen to this podcast like me who are horrified do? Yeah, it's a great question. And it links actually the bridge between both of these books because the maddening thing about being someone who studies election rigging is that then you find yourself as a national of a country and a citizen of a country where people are making up election rigging. They're inventing it when it didn't actually happen. And there's plenty of stuff that's wrong with American elections, but the tabulation is not part of that. Right.

Now, when it comes to what's happening in the Republican Party, I think it does fit with both my work on authoritarianism and my work on power. Because there is a clear turn that happened in U.S. politics between 2015 and 2016, where the Republican Party started to embrace authoritarianism. And it's consolidated and become very, very clear as a part of the identity. It's a litmus test now, in fact, that you can't be a member of the party in good stead unless you parrot authoritarianism. viewpoints, right? Now, the problem, though, is that it's also about the individuals who are drawn into a Trumpian Republican Party, right? So when you have Trump as the figurehead for the party, the people who are thinking about public service that are on the fence that are actually sort of like, okay, I believe in conservatism and I believe in low taxes, but I don't believe in Donald Trump,

they're thinking they're going to lose the primary. So they bow out. Whereas the Lauren Bowberts and the Marjorie Taylor Greens of the world, they're full speed. head. And I think what's really worrying, you know, there's plenty of people, I'm sure, who listen to this podcast, who see people like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinsinger, and they think, you know, they're not my cup of tea. But at least they're standing up against authoritarianism. Exactly. This is the point is that you're siphoning off everybody in the Republican Party who has, you know, old school conservative views and replacing them exclusively with people who are willing to issue the Trumpian talking points. And that's going to compound itself.

So what do we do about it, right? Now, I think there's only one real answer, and that is to wield the power that Democrats have to reform the system and protect democracy. Right. Codify voting rights. Yeah, but it goes way beyond that. There's a whole bunch of reforms. I mean, the thing that's frustrating about American democracy for people who actually study it in a comparative context like I do is that these problems have been solved, right? We have issues with our democracy that just don't exist in other functional democracies because good faith people get around a table and they say, oh, we can avoid this problem. The solutions are there. Democrats have been given power. They need to wield them. Weield that power in a way to sort of create resilience for the democracy. There are a lot of people who are uncomfortable with breaking norms and rules and so on in order to achieve that. But the idea of protecting some comparatively insignificant norm while letting the rest of democracy burn.

is totally antithetical to everything we understand about how to protect democratic institutions. If you want to go back to the old norms, fine, but do it after you have protected democracy as it exists. And I think that's the existential crisis we are in today. But I also think that when you look at the state houses, the local Republican Party, the dynamic I was talking about before at the school board, we have set up a system in which the worst of us are being drawn into political power on the right, the most authoritarian. And it's not just this fight that's going to happen in 2021, 2022. This is going to be a generational problem unless we shore up the sort of defenses of democracy is so they last beyond one election or the next election.

But here's a question about this that I feel like it's the thing I ask everyone and I can't get a straight answer on. So say you do that, you codify voting rights. I mean, you do it and you put in these reforms. you make them national. You do it. You get, certainly you'll have states like Texas that will fight you. You'll have, you know, large conservative think tanks that will do anything they can to try to legislate this. Say, you know, it will be the birth of a million lawsuits, probably a billion lawsuits, all crafted by conservative think tanks. Those lawsuits will be kicked up through different circuit courts and they will hit the Supreme Court. And when they hit the Supreme Court, these conservative 6-3 Supreme Court, the Kavanaugh Court, with the moderate being Justice Kegstand-Kavanaugh, will then strike it down. I mean, what impetus do they have? Ooh, democracy? I mean, they don't care. They just want to, you know, I just don't understand if we have this conservative court,

ultimately, everything gets thrown out. I mean, they're going to look at the EPA rights right now, the right of the EPA to stop pollution. I mean, how. How do you even try to legislate when you know there's a certain Supreme Court that's just going to kick it to the curb? Yes. There's two answers I give to that. The first is that I think Supreme Court reform would be part of the agenda that I would like to see happen. I mean, I think we should just be honest about this. The U.S. has an outlier of a system where it's hyper politicized, you know, justice is appointed for life in a system that is obviously broken.

I mean, nobody of left or right can with a straight face say that the way we appoint Supreme Court justices is a good. good system and it's working in a totally fair and reasonable and equitable way. So that has to be part of the conversation. But then I also think one of the things that we have to be honest about is that it's not enough to simply legislate, even if you could get it past the court. Right now, you also have to win political power because the alternative is an authoritarian party. And until the Republican Party stops being a fundamentally authoritarian party, anytime that they win back political power, there's going to be a threat to these institutions and these reforms. So you have to have this be a long-term fight, I think that people need to understand that this is not going to end

if the 2022 midterms go well. It's not going to end if the 2024 election goes well. It has to be something that's so much of a rebuke in terms of who ends up in positions of political authority by the voters that the Republican Party starts to self-correct. And that is the only one-to-punch that solves this, is you basically, you legislate, reform as much as you can to protect the institutions, and you beat the authoritarian party at the ballot box while you still have democracy, and that's it. There's no magic bullet. People always ask me for some clever way that you solve this problem. And all of the authoritarian countries that I've studied around the world where I've watched democracy die, they have failed to learn this lesson. You have to use the power you have when you're still a democracy

to protect the institutions. Rebuilding it will take decades if you're lucky and it mostly doesn't happen. Protecting it while you have the presidency, the House, and the Senate, that's the ticket. That's the answer. There's no other option. I mean, do you believe in term limit? How would you obviously the public sentiment is against trying to rebalance this court, even though, you know, because they, whatever. But I mean, do you see a world in which term limits? I mean, is there any way or we just die this way? I'm obviously not very worked up about this or anything. The problem, of course, is that, like, there are good answers and then there's the pragmatic answer here. And one of the things that I think we fall into as a trap is by always searching for the

pragmatic answer, we stop talking about the good answers. The good answers is that you have to reform how the court functions completely, right? And this doesn't mean packing the court. It means completely changing what the Supreme Court means in American political life. Now, that's going to require constitutional amendments. It's going to require a lot of heavy lifting. That's probably extremely unlikely, at least in the short term. But until we start talking about these things and say, look, other countries don't have these problems. What have they done with their courts? Well, they're mostly not appointed for life. They're not partisan. They're mostly civil servants who effectively have risen through the ranks because they have excellent track records of being nonpartisan

Arbiters of Justice. And I understand that to listeners, that sounds pie in the sky, but I think we have to start at that point, because that's the end goal, is to have a system that's not just slightly better than the utterly broken system we have, but actually works for centuries to come. Then you start to think about how you get there in the shorter term. And yes, I mean, I think you have to have discussions about the idea of, for now, in order to get institutional reform, do we have to think about additional injustices? I don't have an answer to that, because I think that should be derive through a democratic process. But I do think it has to be discussed. And I think I think the idea that we just continue on autopilot because 200 plus years ago, this was the way it was set out in the

Constitution. The Constitution was designed to be changed. And so, you know, I think that we have to have a much broader public debate about reforms that stop putting band-aids on these problems. Otherwise, we're going to be dealing with this. I mean, you're going to be having the exact same conversation in 2024 and 26 and 28. And it's not going to solve the problem. Yeah, I mean, it's so grim. I'm really, really depressed. But this was so useful. I have one more question about Steve Bannon because he strikes me as like the very archetype of what we're talking about, right? Steve Bannon has never really been in government. He had a quick kind of turn in the Trump administration, but not much. But he has sort of risen to, even though he doesn't participate in any particular media outlet. Can you explain, I mean, him. and Postmaster DeJoy. They strike me as kind of the archetypes of the idea of bad people rising to power.

Yeah, Steve Bannon's an interesting one, though, because there's sort of personality types that are driven to power for power's sake and then power for recognition. Bannon, you know, is quite content to operate in the shadows, so to speak. And I think that's a slightly different variation of what I'm talking about. But it is true, right? These are people who power is the goal. It's not the means.

And I think what you want to design is a system for which power is something you don't actually desire, but it's a necessary evil, basically. And most people think that way, right? I mean, most of us think, like, God, if I had to deal with some of these decisions that would weigh on me and I couldn't sleep because I was thinking about what it would do to people in poverty or whatever. That's the kind of person you want to empower. So every system, Bannon is a great case because if we would live in a much better world, if every system from business to politics to sports, courts took as given the idea that Steve Bannon is going to apply for this job. He's going to be really good at getting this job. He's going to rise through the ranks faster than everybody else, and he's going to be the guy in charge.

Now, how do you design the system? Right? That's the starting point. And I think what we haven't done, we haven't thought about that. We just sort of started sleepwalking into designing these systems without thinking about the fact that they are disproportionately going to have Steve Bannonites, you know, applying for them and actually wielding power in the end. Yeah. It's so interesting. Thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks for the chat. I really appreciate it. Ruben Gallego represents Arizona's 7th District in Congress, as well as sitting on the Committee of Armed Services, as well as the Committee of Natural Resources. As the author of the new book, They Called Us Lucky. Welcome back to the new abnormal Ruben Gallego. Ola, Ola, la. I'm very excited to have you here, and I'm very excited to torture you about whether or not you're running for the scent. I'm not even to ask. I won't even

ask. I won't even ask. I'm not asking. Good try. Good try. You're asking by not asking. I get it. All I'm here to ask you, Ruben Gallego, is how much milk is too much milk? Well, I remember drinking a lot of milk growing up. And I get what people are saying about this family. So I don't think, I don't think anyone should diminish, you know, this family for drinking as much milk as they want. My biggest issue is the fact that everyone's pointing out, like, maybe the price of milk has gone up a little. But they've also been receiving almost $1,400, $2,000 per child, which probably covers easily the cost of increase in gas and food and everything else like that, which CNN didn't cover in that whole story, which I think is kind of ridiculous that they didn't give the full context of it. Ruben, Gallego, let's talk about the book. Okay.

They call us lucky the life and afterlife of the Iraq War's hardest hit unit. So you were in the hardest hit unit in the Iraq war. Let's talk about it. You know, I guess I should put context to what that means. My company took the most KIA's killed in actions since the Beirut bombing. And that's just counting the people that were in my company, not the other people that were around me in different positions. I lost my best friend. I lost a lot of other friends.

certainly cause a lot of PTSD for me, other than why I have PTSD. And, you know, it hurt a lot of the men that I served with. And, you know, the story is about us in war, after war, and how we've recovered and how someone's having recovered. And it's just a real depiction. I'm trying to give a real depiction of the war because a lot of the books that are coming out now

are trying to glamorize war when, in fact, it is nasty, it is brutish, it's disgusting and sometimes necessary. but you have to really show human aspects to this. Yeah. So let's talk about, you know, what I think is really interesting, and I'm curious to know what you think we're about the same age. Actually, you're a little younger than I am, which is very annoying. But we allow you on this podcast because you're very smart. It's interesting to me.

Like, American society has really turned against war in a way I think they never have before. But there was a lot of, like, rage at President Biden for the. pull out in Afghanistan. Even Republicans are anti-war. And they are like the pro-war part. I mean, they are how we got into all these wars. Like, do you think that there's a better narrative about what it's like to go into war? I mean, do you think that people are talking about it more?

Yeah, I think there's certainly a better policy narrative in the sense that people understand the cost of war. But I guess the way the politicians talk about it, they talk about it more on a kind of fiscal level or, you know, this is not our strategic, you know, orientation that we need to, you know, fight Russia or fight China. When I say about, you know, want to show the real human side of war, I'm really talking about everyday humans to actually be able to understand it, everyday Americans to be able to understand it, not necessarily the policymakers that have the insight into it. I think by nature, actually, Americans are anti-war. We just find ourselves

sometimes in wars and we just, you know, have politicians that react slowly to get us out of there. You know, there was a very strong opposition to us going into Iraq. I think people forget that. And there was very strong opinions that we should leave Iraq even earlier than we did. And it's just that politicians didn't follow. So the natural state, I think, of humans, I'm sorry, of Americans, is actually to be anti-war and somewhat isolationist. So it's something that actually exists already. How were you able to sort of recover from it? Well, you don't really recover. I can't ever really recover.

I still carry a lot of the mental scars of war through PTSD. You know, I have survivor's guilt. You know, I had some emptiness in my heart for many years. And not even emptiness in my heart. I just was not able to just truly be happy and fulfilled. And I was always trying to, you know, like gamblers or drug addicts, I was always trying to chase the next high. and the next high I was getting had to do with kind of more this superficial idea of success, right?

And when in fact it, you know, it was just me, you know, chasing the dragon but not, you know, not actually dealing with the sub-problem. And look, and I survive war. And I'll tell you know, it's in the book there. I survive war by mostly just pure luck. I should have been dead probably 11 times or more is what I count. Running over an IED that actually went off on my friend instead of me, getting in the right vehicle that didn't go into that wrong neighborhood.

An IED that went off that would have killed me except for this last minute sandstorm that came blowing through. Mortar rounds are just missing. All these kinds of things that, if not for just randomness and luck, that I'd be a dead man. There'd be hopefully someone else telling this story.

How do you see that shaping your personality? I think the most important thing that's helped me do is number one, in some senses, it has made me a little more adventurous, right, and makes me less fearful, especially venturing in political space, because once you've been as close to death as I have and survived, there's very few things that scare you, right? Because death is pretty scary. And seeing it every day up close becomes, you know, when we come intimately involved with death, it changes your view on everything. I mean, towards the end of the war, I actually already, I thought I was going to die

towards the end of the war. And I just kept going just because I accepted that I was going to die, but I didn't want to die being a coward, you know, just kept on going through the motions of everything. And when you think about things that way, it changes your perspective. It changes, it changes who you are. And look, I came back from the war. I was a very happy, go lucky person before the war. Afterwards, my friends told me I was, you know, for many years, very sullen, outgoing, but, you know, kind of forcing it more than anything else. I took things very serious. everything very serious involving like work. You know, I used to snap at people, you know, yelled at staff.

I was a young chief of staff back in the day. I didn't realize then that, you know, yeah, I had been, I had left the war zone about two years, but a lot of the things that skills I had learned or traits I picked up, you know, were eking and sneaking their way into my life. Yeah, I'll say. I mean, that seems like a really traumatic experience. We had Jason Kander on the podcast. And he also had similar, I mean, I think it must be that everybody has that when you live through that.

He talked about how he had kind of gotten help for that. I am curious, do you feel like you are able to be more like your pre-war self? I'm never going to go back to the man that I was before the war. I'm changed. Physically, I'm changed. Mentally, I've been changed. And, you know, there is now sciences that it actually does change the PTC will change your brain, your chemicals. I'm better than when I was before because of therapy, because of family, because of my son, my wife.

You know, they've really helped me, you know, move to a direction that I'm going to be proud of. But I'm not there. And I'll never be there again. I'll never be that man again. And one of my speeches on the House floor after the January 6th insurrection, you know, I said that, you know, I never thought that I would have to, you know, defend my country on the floor of the House of Representatives. But one of the things I said is that I left my health and I left my youth there. I really did. Like I lost my, you know, early 20s in just seven months in Iraq. Never really experienced my early 20s. I went from a 24, 25 year old man to,

I would say someone that was already in their 40s by the time they got out. Because just what had happened to my body, my soul, I just lost kind of the youthful vigor, I guess, that you have. you know, at that age. Yeah, that's really devastating. I'm sorry. What a grim thing. And then so what do you think Democrats need to do? We're going to, I'm going to totally change topics here and talk to you.

But anyway, but everyone needs to buy the book and it's called They Called Us Lucky. They Called Us Lucky. It comes out November 10th. Please. November 10th. Yes. But now let's talk about we're having some soul searching here in the Democratic Party because of Virginia and also probably because of New Jersey, which just seems like people just didn't get out there because

they thought it was a Fed accompli. But talk to us, what do you think went wrong? Look, the Republicans got out their votes. If you think that Republicans aren't going to come out to vote because Trump's not on the ballot, I think we're, you know, we're very mistaken. They are motivated. They're going to come out and vote. And we better put the coalition together. Again, that defeated Trump and won seats in 2018. And we better. have the candidates to do it and the messaging to do it. And the messaging has to be that Democrats deliver. We, I think, have delivered someone. We pull this country out of the pandemic. We pull this country out of a recession. And now we're going to put this country on a pathway to prosperity.

But we need the policies to back that out with the bill back better agenda. And I'm of the opinion that we need to get this done, land this plane, and then we could spend the rest of the year selling this program. And if we do that, we're going to do that, we're going to be. going to win seats. We're going to win seats. I mean, just on the child tax credit alone, you know, 50% of child poverty cut in half. Imagine how many families feel so much better because of that and how many of them will feel threatened if they know that Republicans come back in power, they're not going to reinstate that, right? That's how we get people out to vote. That's how we really give people a vision of what the Democratic Party is. We can't just run as anti-Trumpers.

Yeah. No, I agree. I agree. It is interesting to me. it feels like this was a bad election for Donald Trump because it showed that if you dress up Trumpism like Jeff Bush, it can scale. Right. Absolutely. Because they can easily, like these type of candidates can easily operate in two media worlds. They can go and talk to CNN and MSNBC, put their little cute little sweater vest on and use like technocratic words. And then they'll go on like these really, you know, crazy right wing shows. and YouTube channels and, you know, blogs, whatever it is, and say the crazy stuff that, you know,

Yonkin was talking about, you know, trying to scare people because we're going to teach your kids about black history, trying to scare people because of, you know, transgendered boys or girls in, you know, bathrooms. And, you know, you only heard it the crazy stuff on the crazy channel, but he never got pushed on it in your normal mainstream media. And if they get to exist in both worlds, and they'll be able to take votes from both worlds.

And that's a very dangerous combination. Yeah. I mean, the other thing I think that's worth talking about is the misinformation. And Democrats don't really have a good way to counter this misinformation. Well, we don't, but also we need to engage in the game of information. We need to be out there. Misinformation exists when there's a vacuum of any information, right? And people can make decisions about voters.

if you're not giving them enough information about policies and about who you are. McCallough, I think, was probably focusing it way too much on trying to bring down Yonkin versus trying to explain to them what, you know, he's going to do for Virginia. And would that have made the difference? Maybe it was a swing year. The fact is this is the, you know, we've always lost these elections post, you know, the Democrats picking up the seat. This is the one that we've lost the least amount by.

I doubt with the trends that are happening in Virginia. that this will happen again, but we need to learn from it what it means nationwide. Right, right, right. No, it's a good point. It's a really good point. Thank you so much, Ruben Gallego.

I hope you'll come back. And looking forward to you primary and Kristen Cinema. And you're looking forward to reading my book. They called us lucky. Buy it now. Yes, they called us lucky. Comes out Veterans Day. That's right.

Looking forward to it. Thank you. I hope you guys will learn some good things about the Marines. serve with your great man. Yeah, that's great. Thank you, Rubin. Adios. What's crazier than QAnon, more outlandish than Pizza Gate, and scarier than a Mexican getaway

with Ted Cruz? The answer is what the American right wing has planned next. Be one of the first to listen to Fever Dreams, new podcasts from the Daily Beast, tracking the conspiracy slingers, orange acolytes, and straight-up grifters pushing to retake power. Every Wednesday hosts Swin Subisang and Will Summer, checking in on the movie. of the radical right. Head to the DailyBeast.com slash podcasts or your favorite podcast player

to catch the first episode and get subscribed. That's Fever Dreams, which you can subscribe to wherever you get your podcasts. Jesse Cannon. Molly Jong Fest. Tell me what's going on across that pond. Well, I'm in the UK. Yes.

I'm very jet-lacked because I just got here on Friday and I'm leaving tomorrow. And what is incredible about this situation. As well, I was in the UK, I was tweeting, I saw this dumb tweet from one of the worst members of Congress, Tom Massey. Oh, Thomas Massey.

He gets, maybe we should give him the title of most underrated dumbass in Congress. The problem with Tom Massey is that he's actually, like, he went to MIT. But he also has some galaxy brain thought. all the time. So anyway, so he tweeted out something about how the president had mandated vaccines and how it was. And I, I tweeted something like, except for all the vaccines that were federally mandated. And I tweeted out last night because it seemed like an obvious dunk. This morning, I awoke to numerous Thomas Massey tweets as a member of Congress should, had spent the last, you know, hour and a half just tweeting furiously at me that there was a loophole.

and that in fact, there have never been government mandates for vaccines, which I don't even know if it's true, but I was like, I'm in the UK and I'm going to lunch with my crazy friends, and I cannot spend any more time on this. So I deleted the tweet. Now, deleting the tweet in Trump world means that you, I just deleted it because I don't give a shit. You've been owned, Wally. You've been owned. But it's proof that I am in fact, have been discovered and called out.

And so Thomas then tweeted 10 more tweets about my deleted tweet. And he said it's so important to call these journalists out when they lie or deceive us, which by the way, like, you know, is there a, would none of us still know if there's a federal vaccine mandate? You know, if historically there's ever been a federal, I mean, I'm sure there probably was for something. but he then just spent all this time sort of just endlessly trolling me. So he gets today's fuck that guy because it's just so stupid. And I guess he's a member of Congress. I mean, it's not like Marjorie Taylor Green. I mean, he can actually vote on things, though he votes no for everything,

but he is today's fuck that guy. Well deserved. Who is Jesse Cannon? Your fuck that guy. So my fuck that guy is basically the entire infrastructure of the geopolitics. So the Daily Beast has identified eight recently created anti-CRT groups because after seeing a member of the Carlisle group get elected governor in Virginia. And the reason I make that joke is the Carlisle group is in previous years when we would discuss conspiracy theories, particularly Alex Jones. He would be like, the Carlisle groups run and everything.

And it's like hilarious that now they're like, they've found God because they're like, we can't believe that they elected this. guy when they're all juiced up on conspiracy theories. So let's find another conspiracy theory to make. And that's the myth that the CRT is being taught to fifth graders. And, you know, I'm sorry, Bill Maher talking about five-year-olds, these made-up cases where they're being put on one side of the classroom and saying, you're a slave voter. These are slaves to the black children and just all these made-up things. They decide they're going to go all in.

And so there's all these new groups. We're going to gin up this total bullshit thing and try to make a whole new. culture war because the right always sees if they can find a culture war maybe they can win because they got nothing else to fucking run on what could democrats do i think that the easiest thing to identify is one that the democrats over and over and over again are the people on the side of here is reality these people are living in a fantasy and proved to the people that all these things are made up all the time and the republicans crying wolf over and over and again is just the whole basis of everything.

When the Republican Party is lying bigger than they ever have, Marjorie Taylor Green's Instagram account astounds me every day, show that these are the people who can never be trusted because they are making up just things out a whole cloth every single day. Right. I mean, Democrats need to sort of address these misdirections, these lies, and explain the truth. And then also, but I do think, I mean, I do think there is ultimately this issue of like Democrats need to say, like, we understand you were mad that your kids weren't in school and we are going to keep your kids in school. We now know more about the pandemic. I mean, like I think there are two different things going on here. One is crazy, ginned up anti, you know, no longer, you could no longer learn about racism because it's racist to teach about racism, some kind of bull. shit like that. But then there's also this sense in which American mothers are just mad their kids

weren't in school. That even coupled with a third thing of that American business owners are very mad about lost businesses. Earnings all figure into a thing where you can see a good deal of people not voting for Democrat cans because they decided to err on the side of safety. I think it's time to parse that out, accept that as what it is, but make a new strategy and please God, let's hope that they make a actual strategy to start actually branding these people as people who are total fucking liars because that is what they are. Right. Certainly true.

On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking to smart folks from the Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics, and science. We'll help us understand what's happening to our country and the world. We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media. Thanks so much for listening and we'll see you again on the next episode. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast at the Daily Beast.com slash podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, consider becoming a Daily Beast

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