Latest / The Nation Podcasts / How The Internet Broke America w/ Garrett Graff | American Prestige

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How The Internet Broke America w/ Garrett Graff | American Prestige · The Nation Podcasts

• 0:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: Hello, Prestige heads and welcome to American Prestige.
• 0:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm Danny Bessner here all alone and very sad this week, but still I am excited to welcome to the podcast today, Garrett Graff, Garrett's a historian, oh, sorry, and historian, author and journalist who's been nominated for several prestigious awards, including the Pulitzer and Peabody.
• 0:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: And we've invited him to talk about his recent podcast called The Long Shadow, which he is the host of and it's been going for a bit and the most recent season is on the internet and we've invited him to talk about that.
• 0:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: So Garrett, thank you very much for joining me.
• 0:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: It is a pleasure to be here with you today.
• 1:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: Cool, so I guess the first question we'll just start with is why the internet, I guess it's a basic of course, but why not start with the internet?
• 1:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, why come to the internet at this point?
• 1:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: And what do you think is crucial about setting the emergence of the internet as a phenomenon?
• 1:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: Obviously, it's reshaped our lives in numerous ways, but what are you bringing to this story that has been examined in some detail?
• 1:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 1:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: So every season on Longshadda, we tried to pick a pressing issue in public life and go back and look at why America is the way that it is today.
• 1:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: And our second season was on the rise of the American far right.
• 1:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Last year we did the rise of gun violence and sort of evolution of gun policy in America.
• 1:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this year as we were thinking about what is the sort of most pressing and important crisis in American society today, it is the crisis that has been brought on by really the rise and fall of the social media algorithm.
• 2:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is the story of how we have arrived at this moment
• 2:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: and, you know, sort of a collapse of trusted institutions and collapse in really the basic agreement of what is truth and what are facts and so we were curious to look at how
• 2:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: this tool that was supposed to bring us together, that was supposed to democratize information, that was supposed to help drive accountability and transparency in politics and official life.
• 2:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Has instead become the primary tool
• 3:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: to drive and exacerbate polarization and partisanship in the United States.
• 3:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I think... Let me jump in there because I think this is actually really crucial in what is analyzing the internet.
• 3:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: The degree to which the internet is an epiphonaminon and the degree to which the internet is actually the cause of something.
• 3:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I think this gets into really...
• 3:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: deep questions because if you were coming from a more Marxist perspective, one could argue that the internet is a tool and it could have gone in different directions and one of the reasons that it's engendered, so the polarization is because it's essentially a function of in a quality in sort of the emergence of the oligarchy that is defined the last 30 years, the increasing
• 3:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: inequality that defines capitalism both in terms of salary, but also in terms of wealth and above all, in terms of equity and because when you have this sort of dislocated social structure, then the internet is going to be put in all of these prefers directions.
• 3:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: The other side could be that no, actually the tool itself.
• 3:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: is what channeled these forces in the particular direction.
• 4:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: It was the algorithm of Facebook that started getting everyone bad by pushing, by pushing these sorts of like angry news stories and putting this in your feed and not that in your feed.
• 4:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: And of course, in actual reality, it's both, they inform each other.
• 4:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: But I'm curious how do you think that the material realities of the last 40 years of US history, particularly since the end of the 1970s and then the emergence
• 4:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: Normal people in this country reshared like push the internet in a particular direction or do you think it was mostly the internet itself?
• 4:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so
• 4:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: There are a bunch of different questions, obviously, wrapped up in that, and I've written about some of them in my, in the books that I do separate from the podcast and wrote a history of Watergate that was, you know, really sort of looked at the rise of, you know,
• 5:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: you know, sort of the post-Watergate era of accountability on the one hand and also the collapse of faith and institution.
• 5:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: That five year era where Congress asserted itself and by now.
• 5:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
• 5:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's so wild.
• 5:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's like a five from the War Powers Act to like Reagan.
• 5:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then it's like, no, we're done.
• 5:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: The president could do what they want.
• 5:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: We're seeing what that ever results in now, of course.
• 5:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then, you know, I think part of the internet question
• 5:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: I really started my journalism career in the early 2000s and came of age in this moment where we really thought social media was going to be a good thing for American society.
• 5:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, I remember the early years of blogging and social media and Facebook and Twitter and
• 5:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: YouTube and these tools that we really thought were going to drive a sea change in the relationship between people and power.
• 6:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it sort of like for brief moments like that happened like one of our episodes in this season of long shadow.
• 6:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: looks at the Arab Spring and that sort of brief moment where I'm obviously oversimplifying this, but sort of we were like Twitter is going to bring down authoritarian dictatorships all over the world.
• 6:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then what I think becomes so interesting that was the most revelatory part of this reporting this season was coming to understand just how much of the polarization and partisanship that we now experience online.
• 6:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: the spread of conspiracies online, you know, on everything from UFOs to COVID to QAnon to pizza gate.
• 7:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: has been driven by specific choices that companies made in specific moments over really the course of the 2010s and the way that you can watch these companies, you know, historically now.
• 7:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: make these choices where, you know, they're like, hey, we need to maximize revenue, you know, we're going public and we need to maximize revenue.
• 7:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that means maximizing eyeballs and we'll maximize eyeballs and it is things that outreach us and that,
• 7:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: you watch, particularly Facebook, make this very cynical series of choices over the course of the 2010s, to, we're in one of our episodes we talk about it as, um,
• 8:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Enragement equals engagement that in the Twitter algorithm that comes to really, sorry, the Facebook algorithm that really comes to power the news feed and people's insurance on Facebook, they see Facebook makes the, basically the equivalent of the dislike button.
• 8:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: five times more powerful in its rankings than the lake button.
• 8:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so, if you really don't like something, you actually see more of it online and that this begins to drive and exacerbate this rabbit partisanship that we see online, this polarization across the
• 8:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: and further weaponized by, you know, Russian internet trolls and internet, I would question all other kinds, yeah.
• 9:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: So why do you think Americans were prone to conspiracy?
• 9:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: Because I think to me, that's the real question.
• 9:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: Because I just do not think like philosophically, you could put a million things in front of someone if they're happy, if they trust their government, if they like their lives, they're not going to buy bullshit's conspiracy theories like you and on.
• 9:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: Right.
• 9:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: To me, QAnon is someone who actually, I also wrote about QAnon.
• 9:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: It was such like a sense of like societal dislocation and collapse and lack of faith in anything that made people prone to dislike something and want to believe the conspiracy.
• 9:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: So to me, my question is, what do you think made them prone to that sort of manipulation?
• 9:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think you need to actually even take a couple of steps back from the internet.
• 9:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this is what I was starting to say is that I wrote a book about Watergate.
• 10:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: which is really the fracture in American society.
• 10:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Americans always had strains of conspiracies.
• 10:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we have always, you can read books by people like Kurt Anderson that talk about, sort of how America has always been this.
• 10:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: sort of more mystical country religiously and spiritually and politically than many others.
• 10:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it's really just moment in the 1970s where we see the, not just watergate, but the Pentagon
• 10:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: America sort of wakes up to this moment where they're like, oh wait, like, the government will lie to me.
• 10:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: But also the industrialization and the emergency neoliberalism, right?
• 10:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think that is also what's happening in the 70s.
• 10:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: So the economic is like the totaled collapse of the American industrial base happens at this exact moment.
• 11:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm sorry, please continue.
• 11:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: I just want to underwent that.
• 11:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that, you know, this, this just becomes this fracture across all of society.
• 11:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's, you know, that you have, you know, part of, like, what's funny about watergate is, you have, you know, part of the reason watergate takes so long to play out is the Democrats are resistant to impeaching Nixon.
• 11:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you have these Democrats saying things that are literally,
• 11:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, he's the president.
• 11:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: He wouldn't lie to us.
• 11:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: If he says, you know, he's not engaged in any of this, he's not engaged in any of this.
• 11:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you see, and I actually wrote the book I wrote after Watergate was a book about UFOs and the UFO sort of government search for alien life here and out there,
• 11:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: a oddly apt sequel to a book on watergate because UFO conspiracism really takes off in the 70s and 80s after you have this moment where sort of Americans wake up to the lies that government tells and you see not just
• 12:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: uh... UFO conspiracies take off in the late seventies and in early eighties i mean this is really where roswell takes takes hold in in american life um... even though i've been in his papers courtesy of a did receive a letter in like nineteen forty seven about roswell so uh... i was was i was surprised to learn he's like no blah blah that's sorry i'm sorry that you see you see at the same time you know the uh... you know
• 12:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: the idea of the Bermuda Triangle takeoff.
• 12:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: You see the, you know, the Philadelphia experiment.
• 12:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sort of all of these other sort of related conspiracies.
• 12:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the seeds of what I, what we would now recognize, they didn't call it then, but the seeds of what we would now call the deep state.
• 13:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the idea that there is this sort of permanent, you know,
• 13:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: hidden government working at cross purposes with elected officials and the American public.
• 13:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: and play that partially true.
• 13:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, this is the problem.
• 13:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: I study the emergence of the national security state.
• 13:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: If you go back to the late 40s, that's why they created the national security state.
• 13:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, they say it.
• 13:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: They're like, we don't trust the public.
• 13:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: We don't think the public after World War II is going to fight a Cold War.
• 13:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: We need to essentially isolate decision-making from Congress and the public.
• 13:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's not a good
• 13:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's not a conspiracy, they literally say it and create the national security council where someone like Henry Kissinger is able to get into office because he's appointed and not confirmed by the Senate partially because they don't trust ordinary people.
• 13:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: So there's a grain of truth.
• 13:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, it's not like this sort of it's more boring and bureaucratic and sort of like where you stand is where you sit, cite type stuff.
• 14:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's not like New World Order.
• 14:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: But there's a truth there that actually Americans don't get to stay over what their country does.
• 14:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: Just look at Gaza.
• 14:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: Actually Americans don't get to say about what their macro economy is.
• 14:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: And that to me is what's compelling about the conspiracy.
• 14:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: But again, sorry to interrupt.
• 14:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 14:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think the part of the challenge of conspiracies is that there are grains of truth at the bottom of all of them.
• 14:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: And that, I think, Well, except Jew lasers, as a Jew, I say, that's not true.
• 14:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: I do not have access to the lasers.
• 14:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: That I think you see sort of throughout this period, the effect of, you know, de-industrialization, as you mentioned, you know, I think the rise of the,
• 14:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: permanent military industrial complex on the other side of that, I think you see, you mentioned deregulation in the Reagan years that in some ways and by the way, I think that this is a
• 15:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: but this is a big part of the roots of Trumpism in the modern moment is like many Americans, particularly working class Americans are not wrong that they are being screwed by the system today.
• 15:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this is sort of the weird, I'm a vermonner.
• 15:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: So we have our Bernie Sanders here.
• 15:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: We're now in boys.
• 15:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: I did hear a new Hampshire.
• 15:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh yeah.
• 15:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're dist but most understandable crossover in American politics are the like Sanders Trump voters who anti system anti system this has been fucking them over and they're right about that and so they're voting for anti systemic candidates.
• 15:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, totally
• 15:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that I think you see sort of all of these things hit in the, you know, late 2000s, early 2010s, where
• 16:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: all of these different trends are really hitting, you know, also 2008 financial crisis is a part of this, you know, I'm sort of a firm believer still that American politics would look pretty differently if Eric Holder had perp walked a handful of Wall Street executives, you know, down the steps of federal courthouses.
• 16:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's also a bomb and it's just give private companies a ton of money to do things like buy every media corporation.
• 16:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, just very you were in journalism, you saw the collapse that was just five.
• 16:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's actually we're exactly where I was going because that that all of these things sort of hit late 2000 or early 2010s, where you are also simultaneously watching the collapse of.
• 16:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: you know, a shared information ecosystem, which and I'm not someone who sort of over lionizes the day of like Walter Cronkite giving us the evening news as the sort of one great truth in American life.
• 17:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: But you do see the the part is anization of media,
• 17:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: at the same time that you see the fragmentation of American media, and sort of what's left is this rubble of sort of social media algorithms where everything looks equal in your newsfeed, whether it's a article from the blaze or an article from the New York Times.
• 17:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: No, I get it.
• 17:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's actually really interesting when you look at it, and I mean, you're a historian, when you look at it in a long term sweep, it's actually much more of a turn to the norm.
• 17:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: As I'm sure you know, in the 19th and really early 20th centuries, the press was much more bifurcated, it was much more explicitly extraordinarily partisan, and it's really the sort of cold war era that was unique, and I think
• 18:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: to some degree, the way that I understand Trump is that he's taking a part that cold work in senses.
• 18:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: Or really, the cold work in senses had been coming apart and Trump, the Democrats, are too weak.
• 18:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: The DNC is too corrupt to take advantage of it by supporting a Sanders, but the Republicans, for whatever reason, we're allowed to Trump or Trump was skilled enough to conquer the party.
• 18:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: So we're actually returning much more to the 19th century American norm where if you go to like a wild west town, they have three newspapers, a Democrat, a Republican,
• 18:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: and then neutral one, they all kind of shit on each other, so it's kind of interesting within the long sweep of American history.
• 18:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: But then my question is, isn't this just a natural consequence of a capitalist press?
• 18:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: This was a criticism made in the 1970s by a lot of what were then called third world, but we would call it global south activists.
• 18:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: They're like, yeah, the capitalist press is just going to
• 19:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: search for profits.
• 19:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: And that's what it's going to do.
• 19:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: And so when Facebook realizes it needs to keep on growing because we live in a political economy where you need to keep on growing in this sort of cancer at the heart of the system, like a cancer, you need to keep on growing to survive.
• 19:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's what it's going to do.
• 19:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: So how do you get out of that without just super regulating all of these media companies, which is also never going to happen because we live in
• 19:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 19:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, that's like, that's just like $64,000 question of our age.
• 19:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's the like $13 trillion question of our age.
• 19:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I don't know that there is a
• 19:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's certainly not a short path out of this.
• 19:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is, I don't think that there is, you know, I don't know.
• 19:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, the comm is like slightly regulating the economy and everyone's like slightly regulating the economy and everyone had a nervous breakdown.
• 20:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Right, and I think that sort of part of this is also like,
• 20:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: This, this is like part of what we've tried to do at long shadow both in our rise of the far right season, our gun violence season and now the internet season, which is these are like 50-year stories that are playing out in this exact moment.
• 20:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there is not a six month fix for Democrats where they're like one hit podcast away from dethroning Joe Rogan and then everything will be right in American society again.
• 20:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: all of these issues.
• 20:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: We have to think of them as a, you know, multi-decade story in American life and that the answer is, you know, a thousand small things.
• 21:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, some of this is, you know, we need to rebuild the civic architecture of local communities, you know, and support
• 21:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: But nothing in capitalism points toward that, right?
• 21:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: So we have this system that points exactly opposite that.
• 21:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: And so this is my problem with a lot, not just yours, but like I've studied the media with a lot of media critique.
• 21:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: The media is a function of these much deeper, tectonic things happening at the level of political economy.
• 21:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: Which is like they deregulated the economy and now private equity on anything hedge funds are allowed to get together into both packs and they could just buy fucking anything and then strip it for parts That's not what hedge was super whatever.
• 21:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know the three big asset management firms own 8% of every company on the S&P 500 so like I don't understand not but like that to me Is like you're not going to rebuild the media not going to rebuild civic anything unless you attack that and that just seems totally impossible
• 22:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's where I think some of this is just American's realizing that these are interconnected stories.
• 22:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, that Meg Greenwell actually has one of my old wired colleagues has a great new book called Bad Company that is about the pillaging of American society by private equity.
• 22:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that is as much a story of the collapse of
• 22:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: America's information ecosystem as, you know, anything having to do with social media algorithms, you know, your comment about deregulation and de-industrialization, you know, NAFTA is as much a part of this story today in American society and the rise of Trumpism as, you know, anything that is, you know, that Facebook has done.
• 23:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think
• 23:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: The thing that Trump has done very well is diagnosed the problem.
• 23:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: one of the things that I wrote after the 2024 election was I think that even more so than in 2016, the vote for Trump in 2024 was a Burnett down vote.
• 23:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: Absolutely.
• 23:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he didn't want to
• 23:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: really Democrats.
• 23:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think have the the bigger challenge is things are wrecked right now more than they can be fixed in any two year or four year cycle.
• 23:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so, you know, you can argue about Biden's various priorities and agendas, but
• 24:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: He put in place some efforts that over a longer time period would have had a chance to take and work and been reinforced by, you know, for a 12 more years of
• 24:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, similar policy making decisions would have actually begun to build and sort of turn some of this curve, but, but people didn't feel that in their daily life to the point, but it is like semi-flake right down.
• 24:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: But it was like reindustrialization, which is kind of a semi-fake thing because we're just not in an industrial economy anymore.
• 24:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: And with the rise of artificial intelligence, it's just not really, it's what's happening.
• 24:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: Why everyone is freaking out about AI is that deindustrializations coming for the white-collar workers who never thought it would come for them.
• 24:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: right, it's literally the exact same thing.
• 24:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: So this is my criticism of, I mean, I agree on one hand, yes, like it would have been better certainly than Trump.
• 25:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: Trump is really bad and doesn't give a shit and is really just about enriching himself and his family.
• 25:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: Absolutely.
• 25:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: So it's better than that.
• 25:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: But to me, it, it, it, it, it just again reflected the democratic parties lack of vision of what is actually happening at the tectonic level of the political economy of this country.
• 25:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: Is that we're entering an era where there's just going to be less work.
• 25:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: But everything in capitalism, particularly like it's association with labor and disciplining of labor blah blah blah blah says that you're going to have to work.
• 25:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: But there's no jobs.
• 25:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: So this fake sort of infrastructure investment and reindustrialization just seems to miss the forest for the trees and no one in our political classes actually talking about what's happening at like,
• 25:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is the equivalent of 1850.
• 25:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, not it's been going on for a long time.
• 25:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's a 50-year-long process, like you said, but no one's addressing that.
• 25:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: And why not?
• 25:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: Is it just like a total lack of vision?
• 25:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: The Democratic Party has just been so captured by an elite that goes to the same 15 schools that comes from such privilege that they have no idea what's actually going on at the level of ordinary people.
• 26:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: Why is the Democratic Party proven so unable?
• 26:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: to recognize what's actually going on in this country, to the degree where everyone hates them.
• 26:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: Even if on like a, even if the average person doesn't understand why they hate the Democrats, like Americans are not stupid, they smell something, they smell Hawaii.
• 26:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: And that is I think what's going on with the party.
• 26:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: Why do you think they've been unable to do anything with that?
• 26:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Again, there's a lot to unpack there and I think, you know, the shortest possible answer to that is, I think some of what you diagnose, which is I think the capture of a sort of focus group tested consultant class by the party, you know, one of the things that like really stuck out for me last summer was.
• 26:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: these sort of first two weeks of Kamala Harris's campaign with both in what she was saying and then particularly Tim Walls when he came on the campaign and was, you know, giving these interviews about like JD Vance is just weird, like just these guys are just weird.
• 27:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: that that struck me as a much more authentic and compelling message sort of in those first couple of weeks.
• 27:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then you could almost watch sort of day by day as basically like the consultants and professional political class who hadn't been around Kamala and Tim walls because
• 27:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they weren't supposed to be the people running for president, sort of began to sort of like box them in and sort of redirect them down the same set of train tracks.
• 27:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think have they sort of been left a little bit more, um,
• 28:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: to their own devices and left a little bit more unfiltered, that might have ended up making the difference.
• 28:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, I think what the combination was, I mean, a perfect example in the anti-democracy.
• 28:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: That was really a truss just how that happened.
• 28:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: That was not a democratic.
• 28:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: method by which to anointed.
• 28:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I also do think that the stench of lying about Biden's obvious mental decline, like don't let your lying guys deceive you, is bad on the part.
• 28:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: Again, even out on unconscious level, it just seems like they're liars.
• 28:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: Everyone could see that he's been in mental decline for years, even in 2020.
• 28:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: I don't care what anyone's and you could tell.
• 28:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: Sorry, please.
• 28:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but I think the point that I think you were going toward, which is the one that I think is the really interesting challenge right now and one that Donald Trump has no answers for himself is, you know, what we watched from, you know, roughly 1970 to the early 2000s is the sort of gutting of opportunity for blue collar America that, you know, you sort of watched the,
• 29:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: you know, opportunity for a middle-class lifestyle with a high school education disappear and that what AI is about to do is about to do that to sort of all of the entry-level jobs in white collar life as well and that this sort of
• 29:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: ladder of opportunity and prosperity in America that has been the engine of our, you know, economic edge of money and sort of superpower since World War II is just going to get pulled sort of further and further up in a way that I think we are completely unprepared for it's a society.
• 29:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: So just to get back to the Internet, what in an ideal world, what would happen to them?
• 30:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: If we're saying that like maybe it's not the major cause of American blah, blah, blah, but it's not great and it certainly pushes people in the particular direction.
• 30:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: What should be done with these internet companies?
• 30:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I think part of the answer is we needed all along to be better at regulating them.
• 30:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Part of what really worries me now is that I think we are watching our country, our society, our world.
• 30:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: sleepwalk into all of the same mistakes with AI that we made with the internet and the rise of social media in the 2000s and 2010s and you know it's it's
• 31:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's striking to me to watch all of these interviews with the AI leaders that are basically them being like, yeah, this is a pretty terrible technology, it's really not ready for prime time and really could destroy the whole world, but man, we are just going to keep shugging
• 31:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's like a level of honesty and cynicism.
• 31:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: and danger that we never even saw for many of the social media companies in the 2000s.
• 31:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like they at least had this like super positive vision for the thing that they thought that they were trying to do.
• 31:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, that's a different liberalism.
• 31:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think liberalism as an ideology has declined no one believes in it any longer.
• 31:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: So you can't basically make arguments about a liberal future and expect people to believe you.
• 32:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: And so I think that's a reflection of that.
• 32:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: They're just like, we're not gonna bullshit you without Facebook saving the world.
• 32:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: Obviously, that's horseshoe, but they wanted to do was make money.
• 32:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I think this is that reflects the sort of end of liberalism as an ideology.
• 32:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: Just throwing my two cents in there, please continue.
• 32:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: Sure.
• 32:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: So given that, your, your podcast is focused on these really intense 50 year-long processes, what do you think you'll focus on in the future?
• 32:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: And what do you think the state of American sort of politics and society is in the 2020s?
• 32:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: What do you think are the major issues facing us?
• 32:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: And where do you think we could go from here?
• 32:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm a very naturally optimistic and happy person and I have very little optimism about what the next couple of years holds for America, you know, I think much of my work day to day now is focused on
• 32:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, the backsliding of democracy here, you know, I think we are watching the rise of a fascist and authoritarian regime in Washington.
• 33:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: in the Trump administration and, you know, I have a lot of concern about whether we are going to be able to pull ourselves out of the trajectory that I think our country is on right now.
• 33:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, for a thousand of the reasons that we have talked about already in this podcast,
• 33:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: in a pretty dark place politically and that neither party has
• 33:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: particularly good or compelling answers for America's future.
• 33:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I don't even think the Republican Party is trying at all.
• 33:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think the Republican Party is sort of content to watch the country burn for reasons having to do with profit and power.
• 34:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, I think for me, most of my day-to-day journalism right now is focused on trying to document what is taking place in our country right now and sound the warnings about sort of what history can teach us about where things like this go in the world and it's nowhere good.
• 34:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: Actually, that leads us to one more thing, and then I have one final question that I'll let you go.
• 34:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: I always like when people say let you go, like I'm keeping you prisoner, you can go whenever you want, you can just sign off.
• 34:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: But the Trump thing to me also reflects just the institutional, I mean, the president he's doing what presidents have been given power to do.
• 34:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: over the course of 250 years, really over the course of the last 80 and really over the course of the last 30.
• 34:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: So how do you address that?
• 34:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: And as I'm sure you know a lot of stuff that Trump has been doing has significant precedent, the Mexican repatriations of the 1929 to 1939, the constant sweeps of immigration enforcement both pre and after Isopcitizens and permanent residents.
• 35:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: So how do you reign in the power of the presidency?
• 35:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: That seems to me what you would actually
• 35:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: to prevent a Trump from doing what he does now or Trump like figure from doing what they do in the future and again, that just seems literally impossible.
• 35:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, that would be a good thing.
• 35:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: That would be a good season, the power of the president.
• 35:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: How do the president basically become an elected monarch?
• 35:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and I think there's a simpler answer to what you're talking about than I think most people realize.
• 35:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: I actually wrote about this earlier this spring, which is, you know, I think the media wrongly labels a lot of what we're living through right now is a constitutional crisis.
• 35:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's not because a constitutional crisis implies that the branches of government are intention with one another.
• 36:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we're actually not seeing that.
• 36:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think what I wrote about was I think we're living through a constitutional crash in the sort of medical sense.
• 36:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: which is we have a whole system of checks and balances that are supposed to rain in the power of the presidency and, you know, vice versa across the three branches.
• 36:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: None of the other
• 36:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: branches of government right now are treating their power as co-equal to the president.
• 36:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that we sort of, you know, the founders never imagined that we would have a Congress who just didn't care that the president is ignoring their congressional prerogatives and, you know, statues and- They were worried about the Congress and the president.
• 36:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you go back, they were worried about the Congress, which was-
• 36:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, which by the way, was how America really operated until the post-war era that it was really the slightly over-simplifying 20th century American history.
• 37:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was really up to FDR where Congress was the more powerful branch that it was really the thing that drove American policy and then sort of the president was more the implementer of it.
• 37:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: and we have, of course, seen that reverse in a major way, and we've watched a judicial system that is at the Supreme Court level, sort of happy to write a blank check to the president that
• 37:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, effectively was unimaginable in American history until now, you know, when Richard Nixon said when the president does it, it's not illegal, you know, Richard Nixon was the only person in American politics who actually believed that to be true and now we have a Supreme Court decision basically saying exactly that.
• 38:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it's a really a lot of deep issues.
• 38:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: So thank you everyone for listening.
• 38:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: Thank you, Garrett, for joining us and everyone, check out Long Shadow.
• 38:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: You'll be sure to enjoy it.
• 38:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: We'd love to have you back again.
• 38:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Great, thanks for having me.
• 38:39
  [UNKNOWN]: You