The New Yorker Radio Hour - Rachel Maddow on the Fascist Threat in America, Then and Now

Episode Date: November 4, 2024

It made news when the retired general John Kelly, Donald Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, said that the former President fit the definition of a fascist. The MSNBC host Rachel Maddow could hardly be blamed if she said, I told you so. Maddow’s podcast “Ultra” and her book “Prequel” detail the history of Nazi and far-right movements in America in the twentieth century—and the people who fought them. “When we talk about making America great again and we talk about the threat of an authoritarian takeover in the United States in the form of Trumpism, it is not something foreign,” Maddow explained to David Remnick last week at The New Yorker Festival. “It is something that’s coming from a fascist place that is a recurring, ebbing, and flowing tide that we’ve faced in multiple generations.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The word of the day in this election is no longer vibes or joy. It's a much darker word. Fascist. The retired four-star generals Mark Millie and John Kelly, who both served under Donald Trump, came out and said it. Rachel Maddo could hardly be blamed if she said, I told you so. Maddow has been warning of authoritarianism at home for a very long time. This is not normal American stuff. This isn't American at all.

This is strongman authoritarian form of government stuff, which our constitution protects us from explicitly. I mean, what Trump is proposing to do here in America to the media is what Putin, of course, has already done in Russia. Maddo's podcast, Ultra, and her book prequel, Take the long view on far-right movements in America, going back to 1939, when a pro-Nazi group called the German-American Bund held a huge rally in New York City. What we are actively fighting for under our charter, first, a social trust white, Gentile, the rule of the United States. Second, Gentile controlled labor union, free from Jewish Moscow, direct domination.

I sat down with Rachel Maddo on stage the other day at the New Yorker Festival. Rachel, let's start with something incredibly cheerful. About a mile up the road at Madison Square Garden, I could tell because on the subway down here I was surrounded by people who were not going here alas, but going to Madison Square Garden. You could tell by the hats. Something very, um, ominous is occurring. There's a rally, a MAGA rally, a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden.

I'd like you to describe what you think the resonances are of that rally at Madison Square Garden. So lots of things have happened at Madison Square Garden. It is, I think, it's telling that when Trump announced it, immediately people started talking about February 1939 and the German-American Bund holding their rally there, which I want to say it was infamous or their very famous rally there. It actually wasn't that well known. It wasn't sort of a cultural touchstone in American life until fairly recently. There was a beautiful short film that was made about it that raised awareness about it, but also people just started talking about it and citing it and incorporating it into our popular history of what's happened in this city and in this country in the past. And

century, and that historical presence of that Boond rally is itself an interesting thing. Because I think 10 years ago or 15 years ago, most Americans would not have known that happened. And now we find that Trump is doing one of these final closing argument rallies, and he's doing it there, and we all think of that. So it tells you kind of where our heads are. It also tells you, I think, something important about history, which is that we tell ourselves the stories from our history that we think we know. need today.

So we're talking a lot about authoritarianism, fascism. We're talking a lot about Hitler. We're talking a lot about stuff that was considered to be off the deep end in terms of mainstream electoral discussion not that long ago. But we're doing it because we are trying to grasp and put in real context the threat that this very new type of American politician represents in 2024. So I am not afraid of the Madison Square Garden rally. In 2004, Madison Square Garden is where the Republicans all wore band-aids as a joke to mock John Kerry's war wounds.

1964, actually this date, 1964, 60 years ago today, was Barry Goldwater's closing argument rally before the 1964 election in which he railed against desegregation, got a 28-minute standing ovation and proclaimed that he was about to win the presidency and the greatest upset in the history of American politics. He did not. Ten years before that, in 1954, there was a huge rally, 13,000 people at the garden, to try to head off the censure of Joe McCarthy. And Roy Cohn spoke at that, and Gerald L.K. Smith, one of America's all-time Hall of Fame anti-Semites was there. William F. Buckley was there. Members of Congress were there.

It was organized, in terms of the crowd, organized in large part by the National Renaissance Party, which was a uniformed stormtrooper-style Nazi militia that wore swastika armbands. So Madison Square Garden is at its moments. And you may choose one of these analogies instead of the 39 rally. But I think it tells you something about where, heads are at, that those are the kinds of things we're looking for. We're certainly not thinking about

the Knicks, that's for sure. But when you watch Marshall Curry's short film, I think it's about seven minutes long, and it evolves the head of the German-American Bund speaking, and by the way, being attacked by a counter-demonstrator, and then this guy's beaten into submission. What's amazing is the stagecraft is right out of what would be a Lainey-Riefenstahl movie. It was Nazis. people wearing armbands, doing the Nazi salute, the rest. If you were to propose this to Donald Trump, he would say, oh, come on, get over it. I was president from 2016 to 2020. This business of fascism and authoritarianism is just wildly overblown.

What say you? I mean, the thing about Curry's film that I think made it land so viscerally is that it seemed really foreign, right? I mean, the film features Fritz Kuhn, who was the head of the German-American Bund, who did fashion himself, wanted to be America's furor. Part of the problem, the reason he never did was because he spoke with an unpenetrably thick German-American accent. It's kind of put people off a little bit.

It was very reassuring. It was reassuring in a way. Oh, this is a foreign thing. But actually, if you look at Ken Burns' film on America and the Holocaust, he features not just footage of Cune, but also of other figures in the German-American Boond who did not have accents at all and who were preaching the same anti-Semitic bile. And part of our dissonance there is,

how is this America? This seems like such a foreign thing. But then you see the George Washington banners that are hanging on the opposite sides of the stage. Actually, the National Renaissance Party, that group that I just referenced from the 1954 rally at the Garden, the leader of the National Renaissance Party published a book titled Adolf Hitler, Europe's George Washington.

So there's this effort to take foreign fascism and make it seem American, and our dissonance there is in, you know, how can this possibly be homegrown? And when we talk about making America great again, and we talk about the threat of an authoritarian takeover in the United States in the form of Trumpism, it is not something foreign. It is something that's coming from a fascist place that is a recurring ebbing, flowing tide that we face in, we've faced in multiple generations. Is Donald Trump a fascist? Yes. To reassure you, Liz Cheney said the same thing sitting in that chair yesterday.

Liz Cheney and I obviously have always agreed on everything. So we go. I thought that's true. We go way back. I mean, But if he's a fascist, is he a self-conscious one? I don't think it matters. I mean, I think that Robert Paxton's definition of fascism is the most useful. And he describes sort of the messaging that brings fascists to power and then what happens once fascists are in power. And I think Paxton's key insight was to say their policies don't matter. Like what they say they want to do with government doesn't matter.

And they never hold to what they say they're going to do with government. And so if you can sort of set that aside and look at the way they claim power, it's almost always the same messaging. It is, we are a nation in decline. We used to be great. We're no longer great. We have been humiliated. Everybody's laughing at us. We've been victimized by traitors within, stab in the back. Who has sold us out? Who is the explet? Who provides the explanation for why we are no longer great? Well, it's an all-powerful enemy that is within. that we need to root out and normal tactics don't work against them. It's somebody, it's a group that is among us and also above us and they're scheming against us and we need to turn our force against

them, the immigrants, the liberals, the Jews, whatever, whoever you want your scapegoat to be. And once you've defined this superhuman enemy that has ruined the nation that needs to be opposed, Well, you can't do that with electoral politics. You can't do that with democracy because what is democracy? Democracy is the process by which we all as equal citizens participate in a group decision about what we want going forward. You can't have that if there's an enemy among us who is subverting everything that's great about this nation. They can't participate. And so therefore, we can't use democratic means.

We're in an emergency situation. We need an extraordinary means. Maybe we'll get democracy back someday, but we can't use it now. And you know what? It might have to get a little bloody. We might need a little bit of violence just to save the nation just this once. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come.

You wrote a book called Prequel. You wrote it with a purpose. You titled it with a purpose. A little on the nose with the title, I know. That's fine. And came out to some degree, I think out of the podcast, Ultra as well. Tell me about the generation of that book. and it's your intent.

I want us to understand previous fights with fascism, domestic fascism in this country, not because I want to make us feel like, oh, we're never going to beat this thing, but because I want us to be proud that we have beat it in the past, and I want the Americans who were good at fighting previous generations of fascists to be famous. and almost none of them are.

In prequel and in Ultra, this podcast that I've done a couple series of, almost none of the good guys or people anybody have heard of. And I'm just trying to, I'm their PR agent. I'm going back in finding dead anti-fascists in American history

who did good work. What's radically different between the history described in prequel and the history that we're living through now is that in prequel, the bad guys are plenty powerful. Henry Ford, huge industrialist, Charles Cochlin, Father Cochlin had how many listeners on a given night, 30 million? I mean, in a time we only had 130 million people in the country. He was getting 20 and 30 million people listening to him weekly. So more than Tucker

Carlson. Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think inarguably the most dominant media figure there's ever been in American history. But they weren't present. of the United States. That seems to be the, the elemental difference between prequel and sequel. What are the origins of Donald Trump, in your view? I'm going to say something that is not nice, which is that I don't care about Donald Trump as a person at all. I mean, I care about him as, you know, I care about him as my fellow man. Like, I think we all, you know, need to recognize the humanity in everyone. Up to a point.

Well, yeah. But I don't, I mean, you know, failed watercolorist or whatever Hitler was, right? Like Bonito Mussolini, like small fried journalist, okay, you know. Do I care? I don't care. I don't think it's the most important thing about them. Are there things in their individual biographies that might explain why they developed the yen that they had to try to become strong men leaders and oppressors?

Maybe. What I think is the importance of Trump is his message. So he's telling, he's, you know, I will, I will protect you. But if, I can interrupt Rachel, forgive me. What I mean is the social conditions that allowed him to be, in other words, wait, wait, wait. If you looked at it, in this case of Hitler, there's the Treaty of Versailles, the humiliation post the first world, war, economic conditions, Weimar, all that. What's the analogy here? There isn't one. I don't think that authoritarianism rises out of economic conditions.

I think that there are complicated, difficult, and in some cases, incredibly oppressive economic and social conditions that give rise to all sorts of things. The question is whether or not authoritarianism will rise. And authoritarianism, rises because you get a talented demagogue who uses the constant grievances that are always there and channels them into a simple solution. I will take care of you. I will be your protector.

All of these things in politics that vex you and that you worry about and that we've been fighting about for so long, you will no longer have to worry about them. You will no longer have to think about them. They will be settled. You will not have to vote again. The people who annoy you and who make you uncomfortable and who disagree with you will disappear. And the really vexatious ones, the ones who really bug you, we may execute them on television, and it'll be fun. It is a future in which politics doesn't exist because the good guys won and they're going to rule forever. And you can sell that to people who are in great need of relief economically or socioeconomically or have faced various kinds of oppression, but you can also apparently sell it to billionaires.

the richest person in the country, I think the richest person in the world, Elon Musk has already established his bona fides within MAGA, jumping up in the air, contributing tens of millions of dollars. The other day, I think is the second wealthiest person in the country in the world. Jeff Bezos decided it would not be a good idea for the Washington Post, which he owns, to publish a endorsement essay. What does that portend? not just for the Washington Post, but for the country, should Donald Trump win?

I think if the plan is to count on the benevolence and wisdom and courage of billionaires, that's a bad plan. I think it's a bad plan for any industry. I think it's a really bad plan for any country. Yeah, I mean, I just... Some of the stuff that I've worked on

in the past year or so, some of the interviews and stuff that I've done, I just think about a person like Lev Parnas, right? Or a person like Stormy Daniels, or a person like Cassidy Hutchinson, Ruby Freeman and Chey Moss. I think about people like that, Americans like that, who have nothing and who have no institution behind them,

and who have no one supporting them, no one backing them up, they do not have bodyguards, they do not have protection, they do not have money. And I think about those people standing up and saying, this is a truth that I know and that you all ought to hear about. And Trump and his movement are going to be very angry for me to be sharing this, but you need to know.

And I think about the bravery of those people, of those Americans. And then you contrast it with Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, these guys who have more than anyone has ever had in history, and they're so afraid. They are so afraid of losing any tiny little bit of what they have that they're willing to take the, you know, being called and being universally recognized as sniveling cowards because they're so afraid that they might lose some of what they got. So what do you do if you're a reporter at the Washington Post or you're on the editorial board. You, you, you, what do you do?

Your fear is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is not helpful to anyone. And the power of the authoritarian is your fear. It's a conscious choice to not be afraid. And ultimately, these authoritarians, their message is based on a lie, right? Trump is not going to be your protector. the people who make you uncomfortable or disagree with you are not going to disappear. There isn't a secret cabal that we can scapegoat and blame for everything. Doing something about immigrants, locking up tens of millions of people in camps,

is not going to do anything about the price of child care. If it is going to do something to the price of child care, it's not going to be what he expects. It's based on a lie. And these guys are just crooks and thieves. And nobody's afraid of crooks and thieves. disgusted by them and want them done with. And that psychological message of strength and refusing to play their game, refusing to be afraid, to me is what I've learned from all of those regular Americans I was describing that I've been trying to do projects with and trying to focus on

and trying to interview and trying to showcase. We're not going to be led here by whoever the good version is of Jeff Bezos, right, or whoever the good version is of Elon Musk. We're going to be led by regular people by Ruby Freeman and Chey Moss. We're going to be led by Rusty Bowers. We're going to be led by Liz Cheney, frankly. By people who are willing to not be afraid and to act on it and to treat these guys with the disdain they deserve. Opposition matters. I want to, so you're going to be on an election night panel, and I want to know, and you've done this before, the stakes have been high. before, but never so high as now. What are you feeling when you're sitting there with the little

magic camera there and you're surrounded by your colleagues? What's in your, not just your brain, but in your Kishkas? How are you processing this, as they now say? I left my body halfway through the primaries, and I will not rejoin my body until inauguration day. So I, After we get done covering inauguration day, I will go home and drink and cry, no matter who wins, because I have been holding my feelings at bay. I think this whole crowd's going to join you. For months now, yes. Rachel Maddo, thank you. Rachel Maddo leads MSNBC's election coverage, and her books include prequel about the fascist movement in America.

I'm David Remnick. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. At New Yorker.com, you can find a timeline of the most consequential moments of this election. as well as the magazine's endorsement essay on Kamala Harris. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards,

with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Summer. with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Deccett. Special thanks this week to Catherine Sterling, Amanda Miller, Nico Brown, and Michael Etherington. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.