The Daily Beast Podcast - Why Project 2025 Is Much Scarier Than Biden Being Re-Elected

Episode Date: July 14, 2024

The New Abnormal team says Americans are being distracted by talk about Biden’s age and are not focusing on the potentially dangerous consequences of Project 2025. Plus! Danielle Moodie speaks with Vox journalist Zach Beauchamp on his book The Reactionary Spirit: How America's Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World. 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. Welcome back to another all-new bonus episode of the new abnormal, and we thank you so much for being here.

We have an extra special guest today with Zach Beauchamp, a senior correspondent at Vox, and he's here to tell us all about his new book, The Reactionary Spirit, how America's most insidious political traditions swept the world. But first, let's have some fun. Are you guys ready to listen to some clips? Clips? Clips. Clips. I am the only one who had any energy, including you, Jesse. That's true because I know what's coming.

Here we have friend of the show, Tim Miller, on the Bullwark Daily podcast talking to former Congressman Adam Kinsinger. And I found this super interesting. So let's listen. The rhetoric and the text messages and the emails that are going out to mega Americans, a lot of them elderly people, is just the world is ending. The world is on fire. You need me to save you. All of it is going into Donald Trump's pocket. in Donald Trump's lawyer's pocket.

It wasn't actually doing anything. And, you know, he banked millions. And now they are all doing it again. They're just robbing people blind with lies about the rigged justice system. You know, one of the things we saw on the January 6th committee was actually that the number of emails people were getting during the stop to steal, sometimes up to 10 or 15 a day with headlines like Pelosi wants to kill your family kind of stuff, actually did as much to radicalize people as anything.

You imagine that message 10 times a day, you know, in your email inbox. eventually that's going to radicalize you. This is elder abuse, Tim. When you radicalize senior citizens to believe that they are defending their grandkids by giving to Donald Trump because Nancy Pelosi wants to kill them, that is elder abuse. And in many cases, they're dipping into their social security checks when they can't pay for medicine and food to give money to Donald Trump because they have been radicalized for a decade on a steady diet of Rush Limbaugh and then Fox News.

And families, Tim, are being blown apart. Yeah, yes to all of that. I never thought about it like that before. Like elderly abuse, I honestly did not think about it in that kind of extreme perspective, but he's not wrong in the ways that people on social media and going into people's emails and telling them, you know, because they're not as technologically savvy, right, to give me your credit card number or give me this, that, and the other thing. And people are, you know, duped all the time.

And so this is actually even more sinister. Yeah, I agree, wholehearted. That was a really great perspective I haven't heard or seen. The radicalization thing to really, really hit home to me that, like, I help people with email marketing all day. And one of the things that I think people don't discuss enough is clickbait headlines, and I know this is ironic considering what we use, if they're not done responsibly, it can be really, really, really toxic and bad for society. Absolutely.

And look, I know I know people. I would venture to guess that a lot of people know people who have had relationships with their parents incredibly strained because their parents subsist on a steady diet of Fox News, Newsmax, OAN, and get these emails and these texts, these nonstop emails and texts from the Trump campaign, from the RNC, but I repeat myself. And so it is absolutely a fact of life. you know, yeah, it's anacdata or whatever, but look around and you see it time and time again that people have said, you know, I can't talk to my dad anymore or, oh, my God, my mom thinks there's

a caravan of illegal immigrants coming here with machetes storming across the border. And it's just, it's absolutely undeniable. And everything that Adam Kinziger said is 100% true. Mm-hmm. Agreed. Oh, Jesse, that was a good clip. Well, well, it's about to get really bad. Of course.

I've been here for years, but I feel like this is the first time that was ever good. Also, we knew it was about to get really bad after that. Right. Like, why don't you ever do the bad first and end with the good? This episode's a little bit more like waves. We're going to go up and down, up and down. Oh, wow. Great.

Did you take drama me and Andy? I didn't. Here we have former congressman Bratt filling in for Steve Bannon because he's in jail. He's in jail. And they're talking to Kevin Roberts, the head of the head of the head. Heritage Foundation, who you may know from Project 2025, and let's hear what he has to say. And let me speak about the radical left. You and I have both been parts of faculties and faculty sentence and understand that the left has taken over our institutions. The reason that they are

apoplectic right now, the reason that so many anchors on MSNBC, for example, are losing their minds daily is because our side is winning. And so I come full circle in this response and just want to encourage you with some substance, that we are in the process of the Second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be. Yeah, we talked about that last line earlier in the week, I think. You know, we've been saying for a while there's no quiet part anymore. That really just sums it up. When you're introduced as somebody's Christian brother, but you have no values that align with Christianity whatsoever, which one of the fundamentals is to love thy neighbor, it doesn't say, say if thy neighbor looks like you or loves like you or has as much money as you do,

it just says love thy neighbor. But your entire platform is about tearing down other Americans that you deem to be unworthy. People need to pay attention. Like these people are not in it for it. Like I cannot tell you how many of these Republican fascists have talked about bloodshed. From Donald Trump's inauguration on, from folks talking about there are more guns. guns on our side. They want war. They want bloodshed. They want America to be this Christian fundamentalist Gilead shell of itself, where women stay home, black people move off sidewalks to let Massa walk through and LGBTQ plus people don't exist. And if they do, they're criminalized and thrown in jail. This is what these people want. And I don't know why shit like this isn't trending and being

discussed for two fucking weeks. Instead, we talk about Biden's age when what is more dangerous is what these people are saying out loud because they're no longer afraid of repercussions. Very, very well. And really, his tone there, it's so striking. How confident he is that this is okay to say out loud. I would not blame one of my apolitical friends for thinking that I was playing them a fucking clip from the purge if I showed that to them. Yeah. because that's what it fucking sounds like. I mean, this to me is, you know, again, there is no quiet part. They are using a bullhorn.

You couple that with white supremac marching proudly in Nashville. Well, not that fucking proud because they still have their faces covered because they're fucking cowards. But like, when you listen to these people and how they are justifying the policies that they want created through the lens of their God, there's no length that they're not willing to go to in order to make. that happened and seem justified in the process because of their religious convictions. That to me is what is scary. So, mm-mm. All right.

Well, now the wave's going to go down. Let's have some fun. So Trump's daughter-in-law, aka R&C head, Lara Trump, was asked what music she'd like to walk out to and what's good walkout music. It's going to get weird. Oh, no. Gosh, there's so many good ones. I feel like, um,

I feel like a good, like entry song. It's like hell's bells, ACDC. It kind of starts off slow when you hear like the ding of the, the bell. And then it picks up and then it like gets going.

That girl said how. Well, the auto play on that one was something working out to chat about it. Yeah, yeah. That was probably the funniest auto play on Twitter I've ever gotten. Mm-mm.

Hell's Bells. If a Democrat said something like this, the Q&Oons would be like, look, they're demonic. They're demonic. I can hear Alex Jones shitting his pants from here. If you're into evil, you're a friend of mine. That's a line from Hellsbells. Satan's coming to you. Look, it works for me.

I just can't believe she didn't choose, if she's going to choose an ACDC song, big balls, come on. Just wow. All right. This one, fun but poignant. Here we have actor-comedian D.L. Hulie talking about Trump's VP pick, which, since we pre-tape this show, you all may know who he's picked by the time you hear this, but we do not know that at present time. So let's give a listen to this because it's still poignant. I think he obviously has a right to his opinion, but where I stand on it is this precisely the Republican National on Monday. And we have a Republican nominee. who's picking a vice presidential candidate

that he has to replace because he had to have him killed. He tried to have him killed. And rather than talking about that, we're talking about replacing a nominee who had, whether you like this or not, President Biden has had the legislative agenda that would rival FDR.

You know, let me tell you something. D.L. Hughley is not fucking wrong. Like, he's not wrong. Like, we have no conversation in mainstream media. about the fact that 40 of Donald Trump's 44 cabinet members wouldn't endorse him. For the first time in American history, a former vice president of the United States is not endorsing the president of the United States because he said that he cannot endorse somebody that puts themselves above the Constitution of the United States and had asked me to do the same. Like we don't talk about that because it's just, oh yeah, Donald Trump is just going to pick another running mate.

Yeah, because the guy that he picked, he tried to fucking kill. It's almost cartoonish. In the fact that we don't discuss it, it's just like, oh, well, that's how America is now. Ugh. Yeah. And look, I mean, the fact that, you know, as we record this, it's a few days before the Republican National Convention starts. And Trump still hasn't named a vice presidential pick. In a way, we're all like Mike Pence.

He's just, he's leaving us hanging. Oh, shit. Folks, I am so excited to. welcome to the new abnormal journalist and author of the new book, The Reactionary Spirit, How America's Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World. Zach Beecham, Zach, it has been such a long time since the hallways of the Center for American Progress and Washington, D.C., and all of that. Talk to me about this book and why, I mean, I don't know.

if you knew where America was going to be headed when you started sitting down to write it, but boy, is this on time. Thank you. I appreciate that. The book has been in the works for quite a few years now going through different versions of it. I've been on the democracy beat primarily for, God, I don't know, going on eight years or so now. What really made me feel like I needed to get it out before this year is I had a sense that over the course of 2024, right, not just from the American election, but from the scheduled Indian election, a whole host of contests around the world, that this was going to be a pivotal year, not just in the sort of year term for politics,

but in the entire future of the democratic world, that a lot was going to hinge, right? The very survival of democracy itself would be affected by what happened this year. And I needed to, or at least I felt the need to explain why I thought the stakes were so high right now, where the sort of origins of the threat to democracy were coming from, because in part because I think no one had really gotten it right until now. I don't want to come across the sounding too arrogant, but there have been a lot of books on this topic. I think all of them have missed really the sort of fundamental dynamic

that's reshaping our world. And I felt the need to say something about it. No, and I think that it's so important. I think that, too, the global focus, that what we are experiencing right now in the United States as we have less than four months until the election has been something that has been seated and happening all around the globe. We'd been watching elections take place in Italy, Hungary.

What recently, and I want to get your thoughts on, what just happened in France and in the UK, that there has been this rise in anti-democratic leaders who want to reorder the world in a kind of, I don't know, maybe it's say a 20th century or pre-20th century version of itself, where there aren't freedoms, where there is a, concerted minority that has the ability to oppress, right, the majority of people or compress them into their ideology. And so when you look at what's been happening around the world, I think that Americans have kind of seen themselves up until the last eight, nine years of Trumpism as better than that. Oh, we won't fall for that. This kind of rise in ideological shift or things

that happen in other places. Yeah. And the funny thing about that is that, that a lot of what's happening around the globe started here in the United States, right? We were the first example of what's going on right now. But to back up and explain what I mean by that, right? So there's a fundamental tension inside democracy, right? There is on the one hand what we take to be democracy's promise of equality for everybody of not, you know, necessarily in a material sense, but at least of everybody participating as equals in selecting who's going to rule all of us. That's what voting is supposed to do. Right. And so that's based on this idea that there's something equal about all of us, right? Declaration of independence, all men are created equal.

But then you get into that line, and as you well know, and everyone knows at this point, well, there were some exceptions when that line was written. And hence the contradiction, right? That's not just an American thing. It's that all democracies came into existence in the context of traditional social hierarchies, not just magically disappearing the moment that you started having elections. Right? They don't just make oppression structured on the basis of race, gender, caste, religion, all of that still existed after elections started, even though those elections were premised on equality, an equality that was denied by the social structures of particular societies. And so that sort of raised a question for people who really believed in those inequalities,

for whatever reason, right? Maybe it made them rich. Maybe they thought their religion taught them that they needed to, things needed to be in a certain way. Whatever, whatever the reason, they have a choice, right? Democracy has this tendency to empower people who want to level social hierarchies, right, people who win and want to change the way that wealth and power are distributed. And they can either accept that some of that will happen and try to mitigate its consequences or they can turn against democracy itself. And that latter choice, the impulse to make that, to overturn democracy in the name of protecting social hierarchy, in the book, that's what I call the reactionary spirit,

right? That's where the title comes from. And that, I argue, you know, it really has been visible in the United States since the beginning. That was the point about that line in the Declaration of Independence. but it started to play out across the rest of the world as the rest of the world is democratized. And so what we're seeing today, both in the United States and around the world, is primarily. I say primarily because lots of other things have mattered due. You don't get crises like this because of just one cause.

But at the heart of all of it is a global resurgence in the reactionary spirit. And it's a reaction to this idea that if I am in the top 1%, for instance, I don't want, a democratization of our economy. I want to be able to hold and squeeze as much power and productivity as I can. And so is it greed that is pushing the reaction? Is it also religious ideology and zealotism that's pushing this overt reaction to democracy's ideals? Like, what are some of the things in your book and in your research that we can look at as the causes? Yeah. So, historically it's been all of those things at different points, right? It's whatever attracts someone to a particular vision of the way that society ought to be ordered along to a certain degree

hierarchical lines. But their negative and positive spins on that, right? Like when you say, when someone doesn't like immigration, they feel that something is wrong because society is changing, you can describe that as xenophobia, right, as just fear and hatred of immigrants. Someone more sympathetic to that person might say, well, wait a minute, there's nothing wrong. There's nothing wrong. with thinking it's weird when you go to the bank and you can't speak your own language and, you know, foods changing and you're confused and you're dislocated. Now, that's not my view, right? But I'm saying that there are a variety of different ways of describing the impulse at the heart here. But my view, the sort of language that I would choose, is that it's really a sense

of cultural alienation, status anxiety is a kind of unlovely academic phrase, but one I think that really captures it, right? There are a lot of people in democracy. in different places who believe that their group status is being threatened by changes in the social structure, right, by changes in certain laws governing social relations and changes in even democratic practices themselves and the kinds of people who get elected. Sometimes in political initiatives that would change who controls particular sectors of a society. One example I use in the book is Israel, which, you know, before the current Gaza conflict, You know, we're talking decades before here in the 1990s, Israel was on the verge of a peace agreement

with the Palestinians. And Israel's reactionary spirit was really born out of sectors of Israeli society who felt threatened by the liberalization trends inside Israel, crystallized and exemplified by the idea of giving up the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and developing a more equal relationship with the Arabs who lived there. That to me is one of the crystal clear examples of the reactionary spirit at work. And it was so aggressive, in fact, that the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, who was leading the peace push, was assassinated by a reactionary ideologue. So the reactionary spirit can take a lot of forms. But today, a lot of the harder edges of it, the kinds that might sound out overtly racist or overtly fascist, have been sanded off because there's a sense that

saying that is unattractive, that when you openly state extreme right positions, things that, you know, would have been perfectly sayable in the 1930s and 40s, that that alienates large swaths of people that you might otherwise be able to persuade. So that's a victory in and of itself, right? It shows that democracy has advanced beyond the point that it was several decades ago. I mean, just look at the kinds of casual racism and sexism that are acceptable in public life. But it also means that these political movements have developed really sophisticated ways

of speaking to people who share their status anxiety and some who could be undeniably described as bigots without outright using that language, right, using dog whistles, coded language, even sometimes the language of democracy itself to redescribe what exactly they're trying to do. I would push back only a little bit in terms of the dog whistles because I don't think that particularly, and I'm just looking at the United States right now, that there are actual dog whistles that are being used. I mean, you have former elected officials referring to the vice president of the United States as a quote unquote DEI vice president. You had the New York Post do exactly the same thing. We know what they mean when they're saying DEI. And I've said it many

times on this show that they don't have the courage to actually say what is that they want to say, which is the N word. They don't cross that line. So they're like, oh, let us say DEI. But you also have, you know, most recently on a national syndicated show, the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts saying that we're in the midst of an American Revolution that will remain bloodless if the left allows it. That's not a dog whistle. That is a bullhorn and a call to violence if they don't get their way. What I like about the Roberts quote is it illustrates exactly how the game is played by more

self-conscious practitioners of it. Because after that comment blew up, there Roberts wrote this very long series of tweets explaining how what he's doing wasn't calling for violence in any form. It was merely just describing what was likely to happen in the event that the left was did whatever nefarious things that he suggested it was going to do, right, and explain, no, I would never call for violence. I would never do anything like that. I believe in a Second American Revolution through law, through policy, through, you know, you get my drift, right? That to me is an example of precisely the dynamic I'm describing, right, is that Roberts was trying to tow this line. He's a very, very radical person. I've been reading about him

and on his career recently. I'm kind of shocked by the degree to which he's taken this turn in the past few years, but he is really on the far edge of mainstreaming of reactionary ideology, and he slipped up. And that also is another thing that I talk about in the book, right, is when confronted with a movement that uses this kind of coded language, how you win, is you catch them when they slip up. And you show that there's an actual, unambiguous, contradiction between the kinds of ideas that they're espousing and the democratic norms that they claim to believe. And when you can point out the tension, most people are still on the side of democracy. Most people believe in power being determined at the ballot box. And so if these

movements, and this has worked in a variety of different countries, we can talk about them, if comments like Roberts has become more mainstream, they'll serve or can be made to serve by a competent Democratic Party as an albatross around anti-democratic it's next. You know, what I find really interesting, too, I guess, about, you know, his backpedaling is that it inside of their right-wing echo chamber, they all say the same things in various ways. And I understand what you're saying, like, well, our job in media, right, is that when they slip up or they say the quote-unquote quiet part out loud to draw attention to it, to make it headline news so that people understand where their ideology lies. You've been on the beat of democracy,

like you said, for so long. And I'm wondering still if people in this country really understand what democracy means. Because in order to understand that it is under attack and at stake in this election, you have to really understand what democracy is. And I hear too often, people say it's just too much of a big concept to sell. You know, what's going to be the talking point for this election? So from your vantage point, as somebody that has written about this, covered it and has now written a book on it, do you think that Americans understand what democracy is and that it is fundamentally at stake and that what comes in its wake is going to be something that they could have never imagined outside of science fiction? I think there's sort of two things that you can mean when you say understanding democracy. The first one is, you know, really getting the details of philosophical, practical, institutional details of what democracy is, how it operates, and why something like Project

2025 is a threat to those sort of very particular liberal democratic principles. And I think most people don't know that or experience it on an abstract level. It's the kind of thing that media people and academics obsess over, but ordinary people, not so much. but what they do know and what they do share is kind of a baseline, almost instinctive, gut commitment to democracy. You know, I've read a lot of conservative political philosophy for when I was writing this book to try to understand the difference between conservatism in a healthy democracy

and reactionary anti-democratic conservatism. And there's this interesting concept in Edmund Burke of prejudice. And he doesn't use prejudice in the negative way that we use it, right? he uses prejudice to mean just sort of the instinctive beliefs that we come into a situation with, our prejudgments, our basic principles about the world. And prejudice in that sense, I mean, most people have a pro-democracy prejudice. Just being inculcated and raised in a democratic society, they really believe the kinds of things like we the people are sovereign, that elections are sacrosan, that we should be able

to determine who rules us, that other people controlling you without your consent. in government is raw, right? And that's the terrain under which our politics has been fought for such a long time. Right. Now, Trump has changed the game. We can say that this has been coming for a while, and I do argue that there are signs in the Republican Party that it was moving in this direction since at least Obama's first election. There has been a kind of move towards concerted anti-democratic effort at the national Republican level with few precedents. But that also has become an electoral problem for them. Right. If there's any one, lesson to take from the 2022 midterms. It's that extremism was a real, real, real drag on the Republican

party's fortunes. And by extremism, I mean a combination, a combined sense of the party's threats to the integrity of elections, right, to the willingness to overturn election results, even by force as on January 6th, and a willingness to use power grabbed in this way to curtail people's freedoms, the Dobbs and the abortion decision being the key example of that. I talked to some some pollsters who worked on this, and the basic gist of it was the combination of that message. The sense that under Trump, the Republican Party, had gone into extreme, illiberal, anti-freedom territory, had become a really powerful message against candidates who took a Trumpist line. Not all Republicans, again, but the ones that really tied themselves to Trump.

And you can see this in the data to a pretty significant degree, even in some races where people lost. Someone like J.D. Vance, who won a Senate seat, underperformed pretty dramatically compared to the non-Maga Ohio governor, which was a pretty clear statement of how much his willingness to tie himself to the more extreme factions of the Republican Party ended up hurting him, even in Ohio, which is a red state at this point. People do get it, but they get it on a different level than the level that a lot of people who, well, I mean, to be self-critical here, people who write books about democracy are trying to speak to them on. Right. So one thing I try to implore people to do in the book is to meet others where they are. Whether you're in the United States or you're in Israel or you're in

Hungary or you're in India, which are the sort of four big case studies in the book, you need to figure out what a shared vocabulary is, one that's, you know, commonly used and commonly understood among ordinary citizens of a country. And explain democracy in those terms. And again, it differs from context to context. It differs. from election to election even. But there is, in most countries with a decently entrenched democratic tradition, a kind of democratic language that's widely understood like real language, right, and bind citizens together. And that's what you need to find and that's how you have to reach people.

And it can work. It really can. You know, what I will say as we close out is that I really hope that it does work. I really hope that this time around it does because I don't know if we get another shot, if we don't understand that what is being articulated out loud by the right is not hyperbolic. It is their pledge. It is their blueprint. And in order for people to stop it, they have to understand it from where it starts. So, Zach, I thank you so much, one, for making the time for the new abnormal,

but for writing this book and making it right on time. It is the reactionary spirit, how America's most insidious political tradition, swept the world. You can pre-order it now. And Zach, congratulations. It's wonderful, wonderful to see. Thank you very much. I really appreciate that, Danielle. And I love being on and talking about this with you. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of the new abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going. This podcast is a Daily Beast production with production by Jesse Cannon and Seamus Calder.

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