The NPR Politics Podcast - What Were We Thinking? : Carlos Lozada On The Trump Era

Episode Date: January 16, 2021

For our inaugural NPR Politics Book Club pick, NPR's Danielle Kurtzleben talks to Carlos Lozada about his book What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era. Want to join the discussion for our next book? Head to n.pr/politicsgroup.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Listen to our playlist The NPR Politics Daily Workout.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Danielle Kurtzleid and I cover politics. And today we're doing something a little different. It is a scary and confusing time right now, ever since the attack on the U.S. Capitol last week. Here on the podcast, we've been trying to make sense of this violent and painful moment. And for this special episode, we're taking that on through our brand new book club. It's a chance for our listeners to connect over books about politics. We read them together and discuss them in our podcast Facebook group. And our first pick is particularly,

perhaps painfully, timely. We chose Carlos Lozada's What Were We Thinking? A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era. Carlos is nonfiction book critic at the Washington Post and has won a Pulitzer for that work, and as a result of it, has read 150 books about the Trump administration. This book is his attempt, through all of those books, to document how we as a country, as a world, process the Trump presidency. Carlos, it is so good to have you. Thank you so much for having me. Very quick housekeeping before we get going. First of all, we are recording this on Tuesday. And by the time you hear this, any number of things may have happened in this country,

particularly an impeachment vote in the House. So there are a few of those things we won't be able to address here. But let's just start, Carlos, by talking about current events. There was something I saw you tweet after the attack that I really wanted to ask you about. You said, has Trump changed America or has he helped reveal it more clearly? Would you consider that a main theme, the main theme of the books that you read during the Trump presidency? It is, but it's probably only a theme that I really was able to articulate for myself in hindsight. And part of the way that you see that theme materialize is in this constant refrain of,

we're better than this. This is not who we are, right? There's a sort of self-confidence in that refrain that may not always be warranted. It's something that came up in very dark moments of the Trump presidency, whether it was Charlottesville, whether it was the family separation policy at the border, and whether it was the events of January 6th. It's both this lament and this vote of confidence as if what's happening now is an aberration. It's a deviation from a long-held American norm.

I think, though, that it doesn't have to be an either-or kind of question. The act of revealing itself changes America. Right. Well, let's zoom out then, because we had a lot of questions from our listeners, our people in our Facebook group. Again, if you're listening right now, you can join that group at n.pr slash politics group. You write quite a bit about this, the economic anxiety versus racial resentment argument that raged throughout the Trump administration about, okay, why do people

support Trump? Is it X or Y? And you note how, in your opinion, the best books on the topic don't make it either or they combine both, like the book Identity Politics, which talks about racialized economics. Why do you think it was hard for people to hold both of those ideas in their head at once or to meld them? I think that's part and parcel with how people have viewed politics in this period overall. Trump became this utterly dividing force, really almost as if there were nothing else, right? Like, you know, there's the resistance and there's the base. You know, you're pro-Trump or you're against him. And that's a fine dividing line, but it's certainly not the only dividing line in American politics.

But it seemed to overpower everything else. And the economic anxiety versus racial prejudice argument became part of that. If you were sympathetic to Trump and his supporters and were willing to buy into this more economic argument. Look, people are suffering. People are having a hard time. That's why the economic populism argument is attractive to them. Versus if you think it's just rank prejudice and racism, then you think the first argument is a cop out, right? That, you know, that's not it at all. And so I think that that became a dividing line that was a pro versus

anti-Trump dividing line. Right. Well, I want to change the direction we're looking at now, because you, of course, wrote a lot about conservatism, the Trump movement. But there was also a, you have a really fascinating chapter on, for lack of a better word, resistance lit, resistance books. You had a bit of, you had some frustration with it. One memorable quote you write, simply because Trump's moral compass is broken, does not mean yours points unerringly north. Is what you're saying there that a singular focus on opposing Trump kept some of these writers from greater self-reflection? How would you put it? The initial response to the Trump campaign in 2016 and to Trump's election coming from the sort of progressive left.

And again, this is purely through the prism of the books, was deeply emotional and understandably so. It was anger and fear and a sort of retrenching into your own silos. I refer to these as how awful I felt on election night books, which just kept coming out again and again. And there were largely collections of essays. And, you know, when you have an opponent who seems to be espousing all these, you know, truly retrograde positions and values, you know, it's easy to believe that simply moving in the direct opposite direction is the right thing. And so Trump, in a sense, enabled the move toward more sort of purist or

extreme positions on on that left, that may not necessarily be where the majority of Democratic voters want to go. But you know, in the face of a dire situation and dire opponent, it's easy to tell yourself that that's where you need to go. You know, when you have an administration that is separating children from their families at the border, it's easy and tempting and maybe rational to think that, well, you know, the most open version of immigration policy that I can think of is the right thing, because know, the most open version of immigration policy that I can think of is the right thing, because that's the opposite of what Trump is doing. And that may or may not be the case. Right. There are a lot of books sort of in the moment that come out one

after another during the administration from, say, Bob Woodward, some of your colleagues at the Post, from journalists, people who are on the White House or campaign beat day after day, where do those fit in the universe of Trump books? And do they matter in the moment? Are they a historical record? Are they useful in looking at after the fact? I do think that they are invaluable for the historical record. And I think, in a sense, you almost have to look at them collectively. They build on one another. But in some ways, Fire and Fury, which was the first big one by Michael Wolff, set a template for some of these books, whereby it became this contest for who had the craziest you know oh my god anecdote about what trump had said or done you know like he asked if he could have a moat with alligators at the border right

or people were stealing you know treaties off his desk or you know or important documents off his desk um you know and it's all this like ah i can't believe this is happening. And if you focus so much on that kind of story, which, again, is important, is part of the historical record, you know, you may spend less time, relatively speaking, on, well, what are the big consequences of what we're seeing here, of all this mayhem in the White House. And so, you know, books like Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes' book, Unmaking the Presidency, that try to get at that deeper question of, well, okay, yes, Trump is breaking all these norms. You know, if there's one thing we've learned, it's that norms matter, right? But what does that mean? Where do these norms come from? You know, what's the impact when they're undermined? Some of the best books of the Trump era are not about Trump at all. And they reveal so much about the moment because they're not beholden to the moment. They can afford to think more broadly. And so I read, I tried to read, you know, all different kinds of books, but I put together

and sort of an epilogue to my book, the dozen or so books that I think were most helpful to me personally. And I think you end up seeing a preponderance more of the latter kind of books, of the books that try to tell a bigger picture beyond the day-to-day minutia. Okay. We're going to take a quick break. And when we get back, we'll talk about whether there's a path out of partisanship. The news moves fast. Listen to the NPR News Now podcast to keep up. We update stories as they evolve every hour. So no matter when you listen, you get the news as close to live as possible on your schedule.

Subscribe to or follow the NPR News Now podcast. And we're back. We had multiple questions in our Facebook group also about closing the partisan divide, about polarization. And, you know, as a person who has read, like I've said a few times, a whole spectrum of books,

what advice do you have for someone who's trying to understand the opposite side? How much value is there in a conservative person trying to read a book by a liberal politician or activist, or vice versa? I think there's enormous value in that. I wish that more readers, more citizens would do that. Recently, I reviewed five books together that deal with political polarization.

They include a book by David French called Divided We Fall. He's more on the conservative side. Pete Buttigieg's book, Trust, is about this. Ezra Klein's book, Why We're Polarized, is about this. One of the books that a lot of them cite is a book by Liliana Mason, a political scientist who wrote a book called Uncivil Agreement. And it's funny, what she and, well, it's not funny, it's kind of tragic, but what she and some of these other writers say is that what we need is a sort of galvanizing crisis sometimes that can help bring people together in some way. And of course, we just had one. We're in the middle of one with the COVID crisis.

And that itself became a dividing line, that itself became a culture war. So there's not a ton of hope in some of these books, even as they attempt to chronicle what those dividing lines are. Just sort of as a side question to that, do you think that your position in reading, absorbing all of this, makes you more or less hopeful than your your average american about about how much we can overcome this kind of divide we have in this country well i i would

i would very much put myself in the in the average american category i don't think that that being a book critic makes me makes me you know um you know puts me in some kind of different different stuff and and i'm only very recently an American citizen too. I'm new to this, but I think that, you know, I don't, I don't know what the counterfactual is. I don't know how I would have felt if I hadn't, you know, if I had just lived through the Trump presidency, you know, being a movie critic or something or doing something different. But I, I, I don't think it's given me a greater sense of optimism. And I know that's a bummer. And people always try to have these conversations at the end say like, you know, but it's all going to work out, right?

Like tell us, you know, tell me about the rapids, George. Tell me how it ends. And so, you know, but I see the books that are attempting to find those kind of avenues out of this. And they often are more persuasive at showing us why we're stuck than at really showing the way out. only thing that I can think of that has given me some, I don't know if it's optimism as much as just kind of understanding, is that there are many books that have come out in this period that show that a lot of the bitter fights that we've been having in the Trump era are just ever present in the American experience. That may be more sobering than encouraging, but a book like America for Americans by the historian Erica Lee is a book that shows how alongside the tradition of America as a nation of immigrants is an equally strong tradition of xenophobia and rejection of outsiders. A book like Jill Lepore's

These Truths is a book that shows how failing to live up to our self-evident truths of the Declaration is a constant feature of America, is a constant shortcoming, how America is that battle to live up to principles and often to fail to live up to principles. And so in that sense, you know, I feel like this is our turn as opposed to feeling like somehow we're in this, you know, utterly uncharted place. You know, these battles are ever-present in the American story, and maybe that's as optimistic as I can get. Yeah. Well, on that semi-hopeful note, I want to thank you so much for joining us.

This has been fantastic. This has been such a wonderful conversation, Carlos. Thank you. It's an honor to kick off your book club. I can't wait to see which book you pick next. Thank you. Neither can I. Well, again, listeners, please join our Facebook group at n.pr slash politics group to see more of our discussion with Carlos about this book. And so you can be there and ready when we announce our next book. Until then, I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, and thank you for

listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.