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The Party of Chaos w/ Paul Heideman | American Prestige · The Nation Podcasts

• 0:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hello, Prestige heads and welcome to American Prestige.
• 0:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Danny Bessner here as always with my friend and comrad Derek Davison and we're very excited to welcome to the podcast today, Paul Heiderman, Paul is a researcher and writer and he's also the author of the excellent rogue elephant, however, publicans went from the party of business to the party of chaos recently published with Verso Paul, thank you very much for joining us.
• 0:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for having me on.
• 0:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Um, so the first question that I want to ask is just a broad view.
• 0:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: what do you consider to be the state of the Republican party today?
• 0:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: And feel free to take this as broadly as you like because of course one of the long-standing questions of American history and American political science is the nature of the American party system because it's kind of unique in world history.
• 1:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's not a parliamentary system you have these like gigantic collections of interests set are very different from what you see in the UK, Germany or France or
• 1:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, what is the Republican Party and what is it today?
• 1:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, yeah, if you were to put the Republican Party today in historical perspective, on one level, you might say not much has changed.
• 1:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like if you were to tell someone in the 1920s that a century from now, the Republican Party will be extremely anti-immigrant and will love tactics for the rich.
• 1:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: They would say, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
• 1:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: But on the other hand, there are a lot of elements of the party today that really look pretty strange and historical perspective.
• 1:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: One of them, and one that's pretty central to my book, is that the relationship of the party with business over the past two decades has become quite tumultuous to the point where, you know, in the last, I think since 2008,
• 2:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: uh... the democrats have really out fund raise the republican on the presidential level and every year in every election uh... and and have collected and certainly in twenty sixteen twenty twenty twenty four have collected by far the bulk uh... business contributions so that's
• 2:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's kind of an interesting development.
• 2:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: The other one that I think has really come into focus in the last couple of years has been the element of kind of personalist control that Donald Trump wields over the Republican Party, which is very unusual in American history.
• 2:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, we've had presidents like Lincoln or FDR who have been beloved and have stood above party to a certain extent.
• 2:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: But we've never had someone whose word was law in their party to the extent that Trump is
• 2:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: So these seem to be some pretty exceptional features of the Republican Party today as compared with most of its history and really with most of American political history as well I think.
• 3:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Before we get into the history of it, how do you think that this strange personalism and the turn away from all business or is it turn away from large corporations?
• 3:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the infamous jet ski owner, or the used car dealer owner.
• 3:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: And how would we disaggregate that?
• 3:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: So just repeat personalism and what do we mean by business here?
• 3:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so typically, you know, for most of the 20th century, the Republican Party was the default party of most of big business in the United States.
• 3:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, you can look at the 20s and the party of Melan and the Morgan interests.
• 3:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: You can go into the mid 20th century and Eisenhower's links to, you know, the entire kind of Eastern establishment network, all the way up to Clinton and the relationship, or I saw hell.
• 3:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: with Bush, and the relationship with really every big sector of business in the United States.
• 4:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: So for most of the 20th century, it was really a party of most of big business.
• 4:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: There are always elements that support the Democrats that were closer to the Democrats, but if you were basically surveyed the Fortune 500 for most of American history, for most of the 20th century, at least.
• 4:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: you know, most of them would clearly say the Republicans are their preferred element.
• 4:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that that has clearly changed.
• 4:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, after January 6th, firms representing about a quarter of American GDP announced a boycott of the Republican Party, kind of an extraordinary moment.
• 4:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it is, as you say, worth desegregating that and that the kind of what Patrick Wyman has called the local gentry of the United States, people who own firms that are important in their locality, but that no one, you know, over a hundred miles away has ever heard of.
• 4:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, the putty's parody constituency from Friday night lights.
• 4:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: I always think of like he's the paradigmatic.
• 4:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: sort of like local, like hefe, you would call it Atlanta, you know, like sort of like a chief.
• 5:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: But no one knows about him, you know, two counties over.
• 5:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
• 5:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
• 5:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, those kind of people have been the real mass based of the Republican Party this entire time, right?
• 5:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, the Fortune 500 is obviously a fairly small group of people.
• 5:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's those at the top of it.
• 5:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so those people continue to be very closely linked to the party today, absolutely.
• 5:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: And and continue to be very strong supporters of the party and our real important electoral based and a kind of social based for the party, but in terms of finance, they can't make up for the amount of money that the real top of the pyramid can contribute.
• 5:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so what we've seen is, you know, people like Thomas Piketty talk about kind of the barbell shaped coalition of parties in Europe of like,
• 5:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: you know, these parties of the marginalized and highly educated.
• 5:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: In some ways, the money that supports the Republican Party today from business looks like that.
• 5:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: You have a lot of money coming from, again, yeah, these local happys.
• 6:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then you have truly astounding amounts of it coming from a very few highly ideological billionaires at the top, like Elon Musk and the U-lines.
• 6:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: you know, like the the concentration of money at the top has become extraordinary.
• 6:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I think that what's happened is over the past eight years, Trump has alienated huge sections of the business class.
• 6:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now that he's come back into power, he's been able to re-establish a clientelistic relationship with many of them.
• 6:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, all, you know, Zuckerberg, Bezos, although people you saw bending the need to Trump at the inauguration, none of those people
• 6:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right, none of those people were donating to him before the election.
• 6:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: So there's a distinction.
• 6:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think that's worth making between the kind of field he's able to command in power and on this transactional base that's right now and what the kind of first order preferences of business before the election were.
• 7:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: So.
• 7:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's a complicated situation and the one hand extensive support from small and medium size business across the United States alienation of that kind of a large some of the largest blocks of capital, but able to conduct transactional politics with them, which I think has its own kind of disorganizing impact very very successfully.
• 7:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Okay, I think it might make sense to talk about how this came to be, how did the Republican party transform from, as you say, the party of business into the party of chaos?
• 7:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And let's start with this phenomenon.
• 7:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: You refer to it as a tectonic shift in American politics, which is the disorganization of American employers.
• 7:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what do you mean by that?
• 7:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: When did it begin?
• 7:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And how should we understand this process?
• 7:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think, you know, those are what the on the left often operate with a kind of simplified mental model of business and, you know, the state is the executive committee for the bourgeoisie and, you know, the bourgeoisie can kind of get together and tell what the state tell the state what to do and then it all works very smoothly.
• 7:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I think about complicated model pays dividends in a lot of respects, and that the degree of organization of capital is variable.
• 8:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's variable historically within a country, and it's variable across countries at a given point in time.
• 8:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think really a key to understanding American history is that the historic dominance
• 8:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: of employers in the United States, the fact that they've never been challenged in the way that capital was challenged in most of Western Europe with the rise of the socialist and communist parties and the union movements there, the fact that American capital has been able to maintain this dominance has always meant that they haven't had to be as organized, that business organization, yeah, go ahead.
• 8:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: I actually do have a question because this is like one of the big lefty everyone lefty as their own answer.
• 8:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: What do you think that is?
• 8:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is it just my my preferred answer which big land and land basically serves as the escape valve of class conflict in the cities and that from much of the 19th and even into the early 20th century?
• 9:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: you could move people west and they could become property owners and then from property owners comes employment and the whole every American is a temporarily embarrassed millionaire thing but why do you think employers were never challenged in the same way in this country that they were throughout Central and Western Europe?
• 9:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I would put it a little bit, I think it is related to the land question, but I think it actually goes back before the formation of a proletariat, even in the United States, and that, you know, in the first quarter, really, of the 19th century, you know, extensive, small holder land ownership is, typical in the United States, and
• 9:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because of that, you don't have a, you know, a uker class or something similar to that in the United States that depends, except, of course, in the Philippe holding south, where, you know, in some ways, you get a very classic European land owning class, but in the north and, and yeah, outside of the slave holding states, you get this very extensive land holding, that doesn't,
• 10:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: really threatened to lead interests and so there is much, much less resistance to democracy from American elites than in Europe, right?
• 10:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: For the landholding a lead of Europe, democracy was death because the peasants would vote themselves all kinds of rights.
• 10:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the United States, it wasn't death for the elite in the same way to allow mass suffrage.
• 10:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's why you get, you know, by really 1825, 1850, and they're right, like you have basically white male democracy in the United States.
• 10:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that that plays a really important role in, then when you do get the development of kind of an urban proletariat, there,
• 10:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: immediately politically incorporated into already existing parties that are dominated by elites.
• 10:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Whereas in Europe, the working class has to struggle for political representation, form its own parties, and I think that has a really big effect on class consciousness in the United States, and results in a more fragmented, less confident working class, that in turn is less able to challenge capital and so capital doesn't need to be as organized.
• 11:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: I really, I do think that the wide distribution of land in the United States and the effect that has on both elites and the subordinate classes is really key to this question on the American exceptionalism.
• 11:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and then you get, of course, the European immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th century bringing the ideology here to the working class in a way that it never quite developed and digitally started to wrap your story.
• 11:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so so that leads employers don't need to be as organized.
• 11:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's go for.
• 11:39
  [UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
• 11:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 11:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: Employers in the United States are able to maintain their dominance without organizing amongst organizing together.
• 11:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so, you know, in the United States, like national business level, business organization is this kind of strange thing where like the chamber of commerce is like actually comes out of organizing in the commerce department in the 19 teams.
• 12:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's not this like push from capital, same with the National Association of Manufacturers in the 1890s,
• 12:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: kind of a project of McKinley campaign.
• 12:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're kind of a spin off from the McKinley campaign effort to organize capitalist behind them.
• 12:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Which is a progressive campaign, which is like trying to be like rational and reasonable, and so organized capital.
• 12:24
  [UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
• 12:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, exactly exactly and so you don't have like business organizations that whose whose kind of purpose is to sort out the differences among capital such that they can present a unified face against the demands of workers right which which is.
• 12:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: more what you see elsewhere, and then this divergence becomes even starker after World War II where you get the development of more or less degrees of kind of corporate institutions in much of Western and Northern Europe that really institutionalize a place for these peak-level business organizations because you know business has to come and sit down at a table and say these are demands, needs to be workers, these are the demands of business as a whole, these aren't the demands of general motors or
• 13:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: because the whole class is being represented at that table.
• 13:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: In the United States, you get this brief kind of moment of quasi-corporatist institutionalization in World War II in the aftermath, but it very quickly falls apart.
• 13:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Largely in the face of employer resistance employers say that we're not interested in this, where we don't have to come together like this.
• 13:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: We want to settle our affairs one by one.
• 13:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this is, I think, and tell me what tell me if you think I'm correct, my understanding is the United States is itself so dominant, and it is so productive that you could actually have that system benefit workers.
• 13:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: So there's not like mass worker unrest that you would have seen elsewhere because the United States is the famous statistic half of world manufacturing.
• 13:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 13:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that you could have employers be like, we don't want to take part of this in
• 14:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think that's right.
• 14:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, that's why you see like the UAW pushing for privately bargain health care benefits, right?
• 14:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: You get the the rise of the kind of private welfare state as people call it in this era because yeah, they can win that, right?
• 14:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they can get it.
• 14:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's not like the loss of a higher level of bargaining is leaving them just completely deprived.
• 14:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're actually getting quite a bit.
• 14:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think that's exactly right.
• 14:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: So then what happens and maybe could tell us just briefly what happens between World War II and the 70s, but the 70s is really the big moment.
• 14:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think when there's a hitch point, but I don't want to miss out on sort of the height of Fordism.
• 14:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: What happens during the height of Fordism and then what happens in the 70s?
• 14:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: So in terms of business organization, after World War Two, you don't get the kind of peak level organization that you see in Europe of these organizations who are really trying to be encompassing of basically the entire capitalist class.
• 14:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: In the US, the organization that you get is the committee for economic development.
• 15:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: which is formed kind of starts being formed in networks of basically kind of liberal more or less new deals supporting business leaders who want to ensure that after World War II we don't see a return to kind of Hooverism and the Republicanism of the 1920s that's really not what they want.
• 15:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: They see that the kind of class compromise of the new deal is actually what's best for American capitalism.
• 15:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: And this becomes a very, very powerful and influential group of basically the leaders of many of the largest corporations in the United States.
• 15:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: But there's always a big divide between it and groups like the Chamber of Commerce, which represent more kind of medium and small businesses.
• 15:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the Chamber of Commerce at some point says the like the CED is communist, you know,
• 15:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: and then in the absurdity of it.
• 16:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: But so the CD has a huge impact on policy.
• 16:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Everything from, you know, organizing around NSC68 to the Treasury Fed Accord in the 50s.
• 16:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: I just like really, very, very important in laying some of the groundwork for the political economy of this period.
• 16:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Very, very, very influential group.
• 16:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so up until the 70s, the CED is the most influential business group in the country, and again, they're very powerful, but they don't represent business as a class.
• 16:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: They represent a certain sector of the largest companies in the country.
• 16:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: In the late 60s and 70s, you have a series of crises that challenge the position of business in various ways.
• 16:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: You have the crisis of inflation that develops in those years is absolutely central.
• 16:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: rooted, of course, in class conflict and various ways, and fight over the division of that pie that we were talking about.
• 17:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's also the rise of the consumer movement, and kind of Ralph Nader, and that sector, there is this new push for environmental and workplace safety regulation, and that is the general kind of international economic turbulence of these years.
• 17:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: And all of these things, convince whole sectors of business,
• 17:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: that they need a more encompassing and combative approach to organization.
• 17:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so this is the period in which you see the formation of the business roundtable, which is very explicitly conceived as representing businesses interest as a class, not the interests of individual corporations or certain sectors or certain political tendencies within business, but business as a class.
• 17:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's the language they actually use in their memos.
• 17:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the roundtable comes on to the scene, and in the second half of the 70s, inflicts a stunning series of defeats on the kind of liberal labor coalition, which in the first couple years of the Carter administration, looked poised to kind of continue the momentum of the great society, right?
• 18:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like a liberals under Carter think we're going to get national health
• 18:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: care.
• 18:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're going to get a guaranteed full employment law.
• 18:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: We are going to get labor law reform.
• 18:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: We are going to get some like really strong consumer protection bodies.
• 18:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: And on every single one of these fronts, even though the Democrats have a majority in Congress, have the presidency, they lose.
• 18:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the advocates for this are stunned and say like we had no idea business was capable of this kind of organization.
• 18:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: So in the 70s, when business faces this kind of more precarious position,
• 18:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: You do see the kind of class-wide encompassing organization develop in response to this crisis.
• 18:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so how do they become tied to the Republican Party and the 80s and the 90s?
• 18:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: What happens there?
• 18:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: So in the 70s, business wins in part by forging links with these parts of the Democratic Party, right?
• 19:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like it's actually by convincing congressional Democrats that they win in the 70s.
• 19:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Then, when Reagan comes to power, and this is, you know, seen as a massive triumph for this, this kind of newly organized business class, and Reagan's tax reform in 81 is going to be kind of the ultimate pro-business of fiscal policy.
• 19:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: And what actually ends up happening during that process is the Reagan administration is so accommodating to the demands of business that firms start to figure out.
• 19:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: They don't have to restrict themselves to those demands that own that have support from the class as a whole.
• 19:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: They can actually start fighting for those things that would just benefit their firm or their sector.
• 19:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so, particularly in the tax expenditures of that law, I mean, Reagan's budget official David Stockman, who's himself a free market sell it, you know, no small distinction.
• 20:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: says it was like pigs at the trough, like the like every firm was just greedily grabbing everything.
• 20:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the result is that this tax policy becomes this massive peace time deficit increasing a law.
• 20:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so the unity that business had in the face of challenges in the 70s really starts to break down when you get this executive who is happy to give business whatever they want.
• 20:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so then over the course of the Reagan administration, you see a business becoming less and less organized.
• 20:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so you have people from the Chamber of Commerce saying, you know, it's become hard to sell memberships to people, because people say, well, what's Reagan in the White House?
• 20:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Why do we need to be a member of the COC, right?
• 20:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, what are you getting us?
• 20:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so you start to see the unity break down because the Republican Party is just so acquiescent
• 21:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: the man.
• 21:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: I want to talk about Gingrich and the 90s and how this transforms the Republican Party.
• 21:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: But before we do, you have a very interesting chapter on the history of the political party.
• 21:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't think we have time to really go into it.
• 21:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: But maybe you could give us a summary of what is a big takeaway when we're trying to understand political parties in the United States and particularly political parties in the last 40 or so years.
• 21:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think the big picture is that party is over the course of the 20th century have become much weaker as institutions in various ways.
• 21:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now, one of the kind of forces propelling that was the rise of the primary system.
• 21:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right, primaries deprive parties as institutions of the ability of choosing who will sit on their ballot.
• 21:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so in the United States, you know, you have this really weird situation where someone can run on a primary of a party that does not want them, that largely opposes them.
• 22:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: And can even win.
• 22:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, right, Zara and Mamdan, he is a great example of that.
• 22:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: If the Democratic Party in New York at their way,
• 22:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: They would have kept him off the ballot and they wouldn't have allowed him to run, but there was no way for them to do that.
• 22:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: So that has weakened the ability of the party again as an institution to kind of make decisions and control its fate.
• 22:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: And this was accelerated in the 1970s by the massive increase in the cost of campaigning as campaigning shifted from a door to door in person endeavor to one that was conducted on television through advertising.
• 22:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right, essentially, you know, in the 50s and 60s, political parties had this crucial role because the most important resource in campaigning was volunteers, right?
• 22:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: By the 70s and 80s, the most important resource is now money.
• 22:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you don't necessarily need the party to get the money.
• 22:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: So parties have been weakened as institutions by these transformations, and when Dingrich comes on the scene in the 80s, his great genius is to understand this and understand that now whoever controls and distributes money within the party has the power.
• 23:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: regardless of whether they kind of currently have a position of leadership in the party.
• 23:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so, Gingrich builds this network of fundraising in the 80s and 90s that comes to challenge the National Republican Congressional Committee in its extent.
• 23:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he kind of uses various legal loopholes to do this, to redistribute money.
• 23:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: But he very quickly establishes himself as the absolute center of the congressional Republican conference because of his ability to redistribute money across it.
• 23:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like everyone knows by about 1990 that like if you need money, you can talk to new and he'll send donors your way.
• 23:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so, Gingrich institutionalizes fundraising as the principle of leadership in the Republican Party.
• 23:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: To the point that by like 92-94, if you want to sit on the finance committee in the house, you have certain fundraising requirements that you need to meet, right?
• 24:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like there's, it basically becomes an explicit pay-to-play system in the kind of latter of congressional leadership.
• 24:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: And as Gingrich develops that, that's very quickly copied by the Democrats as well, by the end by the 2000s, both parties have posted prices for congressional leadership positions in terms of fundraising and redistribution that's necessary to attain a given position.
• 24:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: what's the explanation?
• 24:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, looking at, you know, when this all started in the 70s, the decision not to say there's a public service, you know, requirement for networks that you have to show, you know, political content or something.
• 24:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: But instead to just make it a free for all and say, you know, people can pay media companies, pay networks as much as you can afford, just shell out advertising money.
• 25:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: and not do this in a, you know, more controlled way that might have alleviated all the demand for money.
• 25:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: Was there a debate about this at the time?
• 25:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like I'm curious, you know, what the discussion was when this trend was first starting?
• 25:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 25:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a couple of different things that come together.
• 25:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: First, there's the campaign finance reform of the 1970s, which is actually like a response to watergate in a lot of ways.
• 25:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right.
• 25:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: The kind of scandals of watergate and Nixon's use of campaign money on those fronts.
• 25:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: And there's an effort to really regularize campaign finance.
• 25:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Before, I mean, before this, the 70s packs are of unclear legality in the United States.
• 25:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, like the legal status of a political action committee is not exactly clear.
• 25:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's not entirely clear that they're legal.
• 25:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so in the 70s, you get this rationalization of law.
• 25:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: And actually, in the original campaign finance law in the 70s, you had restrictions on kind of spending and things that were, that would, you know,
• 26:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: That would have if they persisted, put us a little closer to like the Canadian system where there's very strict spending limits and and limits on on what parties are able to do, but those were struck down by the Supreme Court in the 70s and in a case brought by William F. Buckley's brother actually by by Christopher Buckley.
• 26:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so that was one part of it, I think, was the reforms of campaign finance law.
• 26:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: And also, I think those reforms are important because they established the candidate committee as kind of the legal atom of campaign finance in the United States.
• 26:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: So money goes through a individual's committee, not through the party.
• 26:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's another kind of important moment in the the weakening of parties.
• 26:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: The other part of that is I think the telecommunications reforms of the Reagan administration and the Reagan administration's FCC, because in the start of the 80s, there still was these kind of fair time laws about like that.
• 27:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's why you can watch like Lyndon LaRouche on Good Morning America, right?
• 27:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because he was running for president and there were laws that like if someone's running for president, you got to have Montiveen, you got to give him some space, right?
• 27:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, the Reagan administration's FCC did away with all of that.
• 27:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we just saw all of that completely wiped away.
• 27:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I think there's kind of multiple institutional streams that are converging in the 80s to make it that like televised advertising is the principle way that kind of political messaging is conducted.
• 27:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: What are the ideological contours of what's going on in the 1990s?
• 27:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, there's a famous contract with America, but everyone basically seems to be in the allibrials.
• 27:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: When you look back on it from today, I mean, it's so culture war really begins to dominate here, but what is business doing?
• 27:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: What are the ideological sort of, I already said, up at contours of what's going on here?
• 27:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, business is big project in the 90s is globalization, right?
• 28:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's what you see the most decisive business organizing around in the 90s, and the most encompassing forms of business organization, pushing for NAFTA, pushing for fast track for China, that kind of thing, right?
• 28:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: Those are like some of the holy causes of business in the 1990s and the United States.
• 28:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And of course, radiological dimensions of that, of a certain story about globalization and the end of history and all of that come along.
• 28:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: with it.
• 28:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: At the same time, other aspects of the Clinton administration's policy are very widely supported by business.
• 28:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you know, if you've read Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein's book about the Clinton administration, they make a very interesting case that
• 28:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Actually, in the first two years of the Clinton administration, they kind of were trying to do something different, including a healthcare reform that was much, much more ambitious than Obamacare actually, much further left than Obamacare and what it was proposing.
• 28:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: But as all of that's defeated, you get this shift to the kind of hard neoliberal policies of welfare reform and
• 29:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: telecommunications reform and Clinton's telecommunications bill is what gives us Fox news at the end of the day what allows for this kind of media consolidation that gives us Fox news and so so business is behind this kind of ship to the right and then in the first couple years of Clinton when when these kind of reforms are being discussed business organizes very hard against them it organizes hard against Clinton's health care plan against the kind of quasi industrial policy
• 29:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: trade moves that are being made with regard to Japan, things like that, American businesses, aside from the manufacturers that would directly benefit are not very interested in that.
• 29:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they're really supporting the hardball tactics of a gang rich in the Republican opposition.
• 29:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, when I went into this research, I expected to find that business in the 90s was like these government shutdowns are
• 29:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: crazy, what are the Republicans doing?
• 30:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I didn't find that at all.
• 30:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: I found business, the Chamber of Commerce is just a plotting, a gain-rich, and the congressional Republicans for the government shut downs.
• 30:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: Even as they ultimately don't accomplish anything, like it was so important to have this fight and get this out there.
• 30:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they support welfare reform very clearly.
• 30:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: So business really supports the kind of Republican agenda in the 90s.
• 30:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: the policy aspects of that were actually pretty distant from popular consciousness in a lot of way.
• 30:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like in 1994 when when Gingrich finally wins back a Republican majority in Congress after 50 years as the opposition, most voters in that midterm didn't know about the contract with America.
• 30:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right?
• 30:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like people people actually just didn't know about this guy that the whole policy agenda.
• 30:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: for it plays an even bigger role because the kind of popular neglect of it creates space for business.
• 31:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: So the 90s are this moment I think where business is kind of getting everything they want from both the Clinton administration and the Republicans, like both sides are united in service.
• 31:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what happens during front of the pod, George W. Bush's term?
• 31:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because that's the last moment that, I mean, normal is the right term because everything is always changing, but really it's under Bush.
• 31:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: it's the pre-lapse today and I don't know and to deluvian moment before we get the modern thing that's happening.
• 31:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what happened with Bush?
• 31:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, this is the era of Carl Roe, this is the Bengali of the Bush administration.
• 31:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is the famous 2004 election where he runs on anti gay marriage as a way to sort of overcome the failures of the early war on terror.
• 31:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what's happening to the party under Bush?
• 31:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 31:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: So to appreciate Bush's achievements, I think you need to understand some of the splits that had developed in the Republican Party in the 90s.
• 32:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, in 1988 and 92, of course, you have George H. W. Bush, who is kind of business Republicanism personified, right?
• 32:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: But you also have Patrick Buchanan making this primary challenge in 92 and giving a speech at the Republican National Convention that was talking about the culture wars and, you know, sounded like it should
• 32:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: various ways.
• 32:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: And this split in the party throughout the 90s was there.
• 32:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you have like in California, you have the Republicans going on this incredible anti-immigration push.
• 32:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: While at the same time, George W. Bush, as governor of Texas, is like
• 32:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: refuses to oppose bilingual education really reached out to Spanish language voters.
• 32:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so the party is kind of exhibiting some splits on these various kind of culture war issues.
• 32:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's also a big divide over engagement with China.
• 32:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: The evangelicals and the Christian Fundamentalists hate it.
• 32:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: They don't want to see any kind of opening up towards China, whereas the business Republicans are drooling over the prospect of the Chinese market.
• 33:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so Bush is real accomplishment as president is to unite those wings of the party that by the end of the 90s, or you know, we're starting to look like there was no way to bring them together.
• 33:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: And Bush as an evangelical himself is kind of able to speak the language of the Republican right, even as he actually doesn't really give them what they want on policy a lot of the time, or at least he doesn't.
• 33:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: He doesn't give them what they want when it would necessitate breaking from the business Republican coalition.
• 33:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: So Bush is able to bring these wings of the party together in his first term, and the war on terror is, of course, absolutely central to that.
• 33:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Both wings are firmly united around, you know, imperial adventureism.
• 33:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: So Bush's first term, it looks like the party, has been sutured together in these divides of the 90s, are not really relevant anymore.
• 33:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: But his second term shows that they ran deeper than anyone had thought, and they basically destroy his administration, you know, so that by the end of, by 2008, no one is saying, I'm a George Bush Republican, right?
• 34:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: You have this massive fight over immigration reform, which Bush and the business community want, basically a massively expanded guest worker program,
• 34:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: path to citizenship for undocumented people already living in the United States, and, you know, I mean, I think the business investment and that kind of thing is often underplayed.
• 34:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like actually, you know, banks were really huge backer of regularization of status for current undocumented immigrants because they're like, look, these undocumented immigrants have all of this money and savings that they just keep in cash.
• 34:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: And if you regularize their status, now they can make deposits at banks.
• 34:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: So financial industry loved a path to citizenship.
• 34:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: And but the Republican right really went crazy over this.
• 34:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, James Sensenbrenner from the the suburbs of Milwaukee, sponsored this incredibly draconian bill attacking the rights of undocumented citizens.
• 35:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you saw the resurgence of Republican xenophobia that I think a lot of people thought
• 35:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: had been defeated when George W. Bush became the nominee in 2000.
• 35:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: And of course, this is followed by the financial crisis in which the Republican Congress members refused to back a bailout of the financial system at a time when it's really looking apocalyptic.
• 35:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: And
• 35:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: After they voted down, and you see the biggest stock market tank in a generation, enough of them come on board that the bailout ultimately passes, though it's mainly with democratic votes that it passes.
• 35:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you have George W. Bush calling up every single Texas Republican in Congress and asking them to vote yes, and not a single one of them changes their votes on it.
• 35:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: right so so by the end of the Bush administration the party is totally divided Obama has come in with this massive mandate and this massive majority and the party is really lost in the wilderness.
• 36:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Do you think that's due to ideology?
• 36:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Why is the party so divided?
• 36:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: I obviously have the failures of the war in terror, the financial crisis, everything we just talked about, but usually parties aren't that divided, right?
• 36:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's kind of unique.
• 36:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what is the reason for that?
• 36:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is it actually
• 36:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I think that there's an institutional foundation in the kind of fundraising structures I was talking about earlier in that you can just, you know, like if you can raise enough money, you can totally defy party and congressional leadership in a way that was much, much harder to do and had a much higher price a few decades earlier.
• 36:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, so I do think you have a
• 36:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: This kind of decentralization of power in Congress, that plays a big role in this, that like congressional leadership can't just tell people what to do the way they could before, right?
• 36:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because if you're raising money, if you're redistributing money to other members, you are an alternative power center, and you know,
• 37:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: an underappreciated part of this, I think, is Tom Delay, who was a real master at this game, getting indicted in the mid 2000s.
• 37:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: And after he's indicted, he's the one who tells sense and Brenner go nuts on immigration.
• 37:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sense and Brenner had been an immigration moderate before that.
• 37:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so, you know, in terms of the kind of contingent feed dimension, Tom Delay is downfall,
• 37:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think does set in motion a decentralization and a fragmented of Republicans in the house because he had kind of ruled with an iron hand before that.
• 37:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, so I think that the role of fundraising and giving people an independent power base is very important in allowing them to defy their party leadership.
• 37:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, I mean, there absolutely is an ideological dimension to this.
• 37:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: even like talk radio and people like that were, you know, Rush Limbaugh and Hannity and these kind of people were starting in this period start to be a little afraid of the anti-immigrant sentiment from the Bayes and and learn that like if you even like tapedly push back on that it's not going to go well for you.
• 38:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because some of them are like, look
• 38:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: George W. Bush got a record number of Latino votes, like it's actually bad for the party to do this.
• 38:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: But they just, they learn that posing that doesn't pay dividends.
• 38:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, I do think there's an ideological dimension as well.
• 38:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that like, I think the disaster in Iraq, which by this, you know, by 2006 is totally manifest, really,
• 38:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: to diminish the Bush administration's ability to crawl Republicans and create a situation where lots of congressional Republicans wanted an opportunity to create space between themselves in the administration because the administration was starting to look like an anchor weighing everyone down.
• 38:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: So Obama gets selected, and the arc of history has been to toward progress.
• 39:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: What happens to the Republican Party?
• 39:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Why is this the moment where there is this total fracturing?
• 39:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're pretty messed up at the end of the Bush administration.
• 39:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is it anti Obama racism?
• 39:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is it the effects of the financial crisis?
• 39:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: I imagine that it's all,
• 39:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: of the above, but what happens between 2008 and 2016 that allows someone to go from like the hyper institution list George W Bush to total outsider Donald Trump.
• 39:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, yeah, I mean, I think among the kind of the Republican electorate, racism against Obama is certainly important as a mobilizing factor in that kind of thing, but I think it's easy to forget just how racist the party was in the 90s.
• 39:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, this is the party of Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, like the party in the 80s and 90s, is led by men who were genuine segregationists, who for most of their life had thought
• 40:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: you know, like there was a real racism in the party going back.
• 40:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I'm skeptical of the argument that like the party becomes kind of more racist in this period.
• 40:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think there's an evolution of Republican racism, but I don't think it's really the driving factor.
• 40:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, this is the big question really of the last 20 years.
• 40:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is that, I mean,
• 40:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: this this question is like the Republican party is is home to many racists, but there's also strange coalition where people of minority descent vote for Donald Trump.
• 40:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think there's like rooms of books to be written about this phenomenon.
• 40:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think we're just getting a handle on it.
• 40:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yeah.
• 40:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: I totally agree.
• 40:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: But to go back to kind of the fraction of the party in this period, the emergence of the Coke network as a kind of fundraising network in the Obama administration is really, really crucial.
• 40:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now that the Coke brothers have been active in kind of libertarian party politics in particular in the 80s and 90s and kind of libertarian think tank world, but it's in the 2000s.
• 41:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: that they really start coming into a Republican fundraising.
• 41:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: They start working with a few Carl Roe of Initiatives during the Bush administration.
• 41:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: But once the Bush administration goes down, they really emerge as a network that is challenging the kind of Carl Roe of Institutions for Control of the Party that wants the Party to be much, much more agree.
• 41:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: aggressive and uncompromising in its opposition to welfare programs and any kind of regulations, et cetera.
• 41:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they hold these seminars where people can come and listen to like Fremark and economists talk about things and then they pledge money to these seminars.
• 41:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the amount of money raised at these kind of events by like 2014 or so is starting to actually rival
• 42:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: National Republican Congressional Committee and the Chamber of Commerce.
• 42:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like the Coke Network has become a central figure, a central kind of institution in Republican fundraising.
• 42:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: And this, I think, is what leads to the total chaos.
• 42:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: You see in Republican Congress in this period, where, you know, basically Republican Congress members,
• 42:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: force John Banner to try a government shutdown against his will.
• 42:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: He absolutely doesn't want to.
• 42:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: They push him into it anyway.
• 42:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: You get this brinksmanship over, you know, the debt ceiling, and this kind of thing, right?
• 42:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you get a period over the next decade where
• 42:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: Three Republican speakers of the House in Raro are removed by their own members, basically Banner, Paul Ryan, and Kevin McCarthy are all brought down by internal dissent and that's just completely unheard of in American history for a congressional party to have that kind of instability and internal fractiousness.
• 42:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that the ability of the Koch brothers to kind of challenge the party, it's a provide alternative fundraising for people who Carl Roe wanted to turn the Spigget off for is really, really central to that story.
• 43:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Just before we continue, because I obviously want to talk about this more.
• 43:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Why not the Democrats?
• 43:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is it just that they aren't because they are in hawk to business?
• 43:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: They are in hawk to a different type of business.
• 43:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: So why doesn't you see a similar fracturing happening there?
• 43:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I, and you still see it today.
• 43:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's a Chuck Schumer and Hawking Jeffries.
• 43:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, very institutionalist figures, whatever you may say about them.
• 43:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: So like, why not the Democratic Party?
• 43:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I think a fundamental reason is simply that, you know, if you think of the distribution of business political opinions that has a long tail to the right and not a long tail to the left, right, like there aren't huge business institutions pushing for the Democrats to be more left-wing.
• 44:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right?
• 44:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: That doesn't exist.
• 44:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: The kind of the sector of business that supports Democrats has a pretty unified political ideology, all things considered, where the sector of business that supports Republicans runs from like a high degree of overlap with the sections of business that support Democrats to people who are total lunatics, like, you know, the U lines today.
• 44:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, we're the main funders of like the stop the steel initiatives and things like that right so and they're a few there they're one of the biggest donors in American politics I think you know they're there that family is the biggest political donor in American politics right now so so I think just that basic fact of like there's.
• 44:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: a very wide array of kind of right-wing positions among business and a smaller array of kind of left-of-center kind of liberal opinions among business means that like there's no money that is backing up people who want the Democratic Party to move to the left where there is a huge amount of money backing up the people who want to take the Republican Party further to the
• 45:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: During the Obama years like holding the presidency and having a president who kind of maintains control over the party in a pretty effective way also puts a limit on it during the like it's easier to fragment when you're the opposition.
• 45:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think.
• 45:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, I have just a very quick question about that.
• 45:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: So like you do see like Soros, the Soros Foundation funding, like prosecutorial reform, things along those lines.
• 45:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is a fairly progressive, particularly in the 2000s, like drug reform and things like that.
• 45:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I just have a question, is there a difference of the nature of funding?
• 45:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Are like,
• 45:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: more right-leaning funding efforts like more sweeping, whereas like the Soros effort is like very targeted, and not Soros is just unusing him as sort of like a strategy for a larger thing, but is there a different type types of funding or is that Ms. MMI just incorrect?
• 46:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, no, I think there's a difference.
• 46:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think the co-network is much more focused on actual funding of politicians, you know?
• 46:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Whereas Soros and his network, their funding non-profits and things like that, right?
• 46:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: So there's kind of, I think the effects of Soros are more second order in the Democratic Party.
• 46:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: They run through the non-profit network and the Think Tank World rather than going kind of directly into campaign finance.
• 46:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: I also think that like there's there's just less of a kind of sharp battle in the Democrats over things like, let's say, you know, criminal justice reform.
• 46:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: All I can do in the Republican Party, a battle over whether you do government shutdowns or not as an effort to cut the welfare state is in and that's a battle that has like very cool.
• 46:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: clearly defined interests on both sides, you know, like there's there's people who like for whom the instability that that threatens is not worth the potential payoff of the the kind of welfare reform that you get and then there's people who's who's kind of interests are the opposite.
• 47:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: And in the Democratic Party, like you have kind of ideological fights over criminal justice reform and people who kind of want to still run on a sort of like centrist politics of like, you know, I think criminals should be thrown in jail, you know, and I'm a liberal like back about kind of thing, but it's not, I don't think you have like it's not a battle of interest in in quite the same way.
• 47:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's linked to interest, of course, people have all kinds of institutional linkages and their groups like police unions and construction firms that want to build more prisons that play into all of this.
• 47:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: But like I think the basic contours of the conflict aren't as sharply defined as they are in the Republican Party and don't kind of immediately touch on vital interests of core constituencies and quite the same way.
• 48:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: As a prelude to Donald Trump coming in and taking over this very fractured party and turning it into his cult of personality, how important is the Romney Ryan ticket in 2016?
• 48:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, this was like, if you could go into a lab and design the perfect pro business, it can take it.
• 48:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: It would be this one.
• 48:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it was so off-plotting.
• 48:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: it's just really like it not land with with almost anybody.
• 48:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, yeah, and and you know, there was that moment after the first debate where everybody's like, oh, Obama didn't do so well, maybe, you know, but really like these guys had no no purchase outside of a narrow
• 48:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: kind of, you know, part of the Republican Party.
• 48:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: But how important was this, is like the last gas of that, that, you know, kind of respectable Wall Street business crowd before the real, you know, gates opened and, you know, Trump and the rest poured it.
• 49:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: And just very quickly the thing about that is Paul Ryan leaves politics relatively quickly there after make money.
• 49:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, like there's nothing that that was everyone's like this is the future of the party.
• 49:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Remember there was that book with him on the cover and what's his name from Virginia, Eric.
• 49:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh God, I forgot his name.
• 49:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yep.
• 49:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it was him, Ryan and someone else and like.
• 49:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: Or even the pictures of him like working out.
• 49:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it was like, yeah, I'm happy.
• 49:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm happy about him.
• 49:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 49:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 49:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the fact that he left is just so indicative of you know it pre-saged where we go, but please, Paul.
• 49:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, the Romney ticket was Carl Roves dream, right?
• 49:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like that's Carl Rove getting everything he wants from the presidential party.
• 49:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: This Romney Ryan ticket, you know, that this total kind of blue blood business Republican out the top of it.
• 50:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: seemed like he was doing really well at that time.
• 50:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, vis-a-vis, is a adversaries.
• 50:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the defeat of that ticket, I think, opens the floodgates in various ways, right?
• 50:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like that, Rove gets everything he wants, and they really expected to win.
• 50:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: that race.
• 50:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, like, I think there's a story about like Paul Ryan's kids crying on the night of the election because they were like so excited to like move to DC and stuff like, um, you know, like they were shocked that they lost.
• 50:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: They really thought they had it in the bag partially because they build this massive business coalition behind them.
• 50:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, the business opened their wallets for Romney in a way that's just extraordinary.
• 50:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: But Obama's used to kind of a small dollar donation actually still manages to outfund raise him.
• 50:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's this kind of a poch elliptic moment.
• 50:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: for this kind of yet institutional establishment Republican politics that that roe represents.
• 51:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: And myth really is the moment where Roe starts to kind of exit the scene.
• 51:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: In 2014, he has one last kind of great war against the Tea Party.
• 51:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: But after that, he's basically gone.
• 51:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I think it plays a really important role in discrediting establishment Republicanism even among people who might not be as ideologically kind of committed as most of the Tea Party.
• 51:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because they can't win.
• 51:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: It looks like they can't win.
• 51:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you know, it's so like, if you want, if you're a Republican, you want to win, Carl Rove doesn't have a monopoly on the argument anymore.
• 51:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: The argument is no longer like, okay, we have a better chance of winning with Rove, but maybe we get more of what we want with the Tea Party.
• 51:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now, you know, the Tea Partyers can say, look, you try it with him.
• 51:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now, try it our way.
• 51:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's when, you know, they begin preparing for Ted Cruz in 2016. Who they think, well, we'll just kind of clear the field for them.
• 52:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, so why doesn't that happen?
• 52:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: Why is it Trump?
• 52:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, what's the coalition that Trump brings in, you know, he eventually, I think gets a lot of the old Tea Party support.
• 52:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: The Republican establishment fractures, but the important thing is the establishment Republicans who like go over to the never Trump or even Democratic side don't bring anybody with them.
• 52:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like Bill Crystal did bring anybody with him when he came over to the Democrats, you know, Liz Cheney didn't bring anybody with her.
• 52:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: So what you get is Trump with this disparate, I think, I mean, you've got, you know, the, the, the outright xenophobes, you've got people who are, as we've talked about in the show, like just scrambling, who never recovered from the 2008.
• 52:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: economic meltdown who are just looking for a solution like any port in a storm.
• 52:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: You've got like this wide array of kind of seemingly disparate folks all coming with Trump to take over this very broken institution.
• 52:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: Talk about how that happens.
• 53:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think, you know, in acoustics, there's the phenomenon of destructive interference, where two sound waves cancel each other out and the results is silence.
• 53:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that's what happened with the war, between the establishment and the Tea Party and the 20 times leading up to Trump, is that you have this tremendously divided kind of Republican leadership.
• 53:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the result of that was neither side was really capable of sending and a kind of reliable signal to the party base in terms of like this is where the party is going.
• 53:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: There wasn't an ability of either side to direct the base.
• 53:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: In the way that like in 2020, when like establishment democrats line up behind Biden, like that was a signal to the party base that like this is where we want the party to go.
• 53:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: primary voters followed them in that.
• 53:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: There was nothing similar could happen in the 2010s because they had been at each other's roads for so long.
• 54:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: And Trump's great ability was essentially to totally sidestep this debate.
• 54:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you know,
• 54:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's really important to his victory that he was seeing both in the general election and in the Republican primary that he was seen as a moderate on economics he was not seen as a budget cutter he was not seen as a text cuts for the rich guy right he was seen as someone is going to protect social security protect Medicare not go crazy with the Republican agenda on the this stuff so on the one hand he had this kind of moderate fiscal policy.
• 54:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then, he has, of course, the kind of grievance politics and xenophobia that are coming out of the Tea Party.
• 54:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he's able to kind of benefit from the way that the Tea Party had turned up the discursive temperature in the party over the past few years.
• 54:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I think what happens is, since neither side is able to kind of send a reliable signal to voters and Trump,
• 54:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: kind of embraces the politics that neither side was really going for.
• 55:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, after 2012, both the Tea Party and the Establishment are like, look, we got a back-off on immigration, Trump or Obama just absolutely crushed us with Latino voters.
• 55:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is killing the party of the GOP Autopsy report that's saying this, that's basically saying our economic policy is fine, voters like our economic policy.
• 55:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's just this immigration stuff is killing us.
• 55:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: And Trump comes in and does the exact opposite of what the autopsy says and sweeps the Republican primaries with it and then is able to squeak out the general election.
• 55:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: I let's talk about that.
• 55:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Why were they so wrong?
• 55:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, this is, this is to me seems like one of the major questions of modern politics.
• 55:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: It did seem that for a time in American history, party elites had more of a sense of what's going on with their bases.
• 55:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, democratic party, I think it's just the professional managerialism and sort of the credentialization of people who now work for the party.
• 55:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: very disconnected from ordinary people.
• 55:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm just curious what if one if you think that's correct, if you see the Dems and two like why do you think there's such that this autopsy, which God knows how much time and money was spent on was just totally wrong.
• 56:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like why is there such a disconnect?
• 56:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, I think to answer that question, you partially have to answer what was going on in Latino politics in the United States.
• 56:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: And to me, this is something of an unanswered question.
• 56:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that like in the Bush administration, when you have this major xenophobic push from the Republicans and the Centon Brunner Bill, and that kind of thing, you have an
• 56:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely massive mobilization in 2006, 2007, the day without an immigrant marches, I mean, you know, like Spanish language radio is just on fire with mobilizing people to go to these marches to do that.
• 56:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's this huge, huge wave that I think is quite politically important in discrediting the Republican Party after Bush had put so much effort
• 57:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: You don't see anything similar at any point either before Trump is elected or after words and I think that's really important and I haven't seen a good explanation of that and I would really like to see one of what is going on with with kind of Latino politics organizing around immigration in the United States.
• 57:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think the absence of that lessens the penalty, the political penalty, for the Republicans of embracing the most extreme versions of anti-immigrant politics.
• 57:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, I mean, you know, one person who got this right at the time was Theta Scotchbull, right?
• 57:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: She writes a book about the Tea Party, where she's like, look, if you go ahead and talk to these people,
• 57:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Actually, it's ethnonationalist politics that they want to talk about.
• 57:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's not fiscal policy when you go and talk to the Tea Party.
• 57:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: So so there were some people, I think, who saw that like the, you know, at the base of the Tea Party, right, like I mean the Koch brothers who are funding it.
• 58:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: are pro-immigration, basically, right?
• 58:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're not anti-immigration, but at the actual kind of social base of it, the kind of ethnic resentment politics are absolutely central.
• 58:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, they're a sociable side of the Republican autopsy people did not.
• 58:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think, you know, I think the reason that they part of the reason that they couldn't see what was going on was that there was just a consensus
• 58:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: attacking the welfare state, tax cuts to the right like both the division between the tea party and the establishment on these questions is quantitative not qualitative right like it's a degree it's a question of how much and and so you have this unity of party elites around a fiscal policy that they're unwilling to question and so then it's like okay well what can we change and in some ways immigration is kind of like the default answer there I think that's part of it
• 58:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, the essence of the Tea Party go on, you can go back to the Rick Santelli rant cable, was that somebody undeserving is going to get a bailout.
• 59:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like somebody who's not me, who I think shouldn't get this is going to get, you know, some benefit from the government that I'm not getting.
• 59:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: And, like,
• 59:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's very easy to turn that to immigration.
• 59:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's very easy to switch to flip, to focus on immigrants as the undeserving population.
• 59:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that's what animates this is this fiction that they're getting all these great benefits from the government and they're voting and elections.
• 59:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, sarapticiously, they're getting, you know, the Obama-fony and go all the way back to the Obama-fony, they're getting all these benefits.
• 59:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I'm not getting that, but these people are, and that, yeah, I mean, it seems like a natural kind of segue into anti-immigrant politics.
• 59:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think another crucial part of that, that's not as widely recognized, is national security as a dimension of this.
• 1:00:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: So Tom Ten Crado forms like the House Immigration Reform Caucus in the late 90s, and it has like five members.
• 1:00:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then like a year after 9-11, it's got like 40.
• 1:00:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: like that the securitization of immigration as a kind of policy domain, I think is really crucial for the kind of re-legitization of xenophobia in the Republican Party, right, on the national security is now is now part of immigration policy, which in the 90s, it really isn't, you know, but 9-11 enables that.
• 1:00:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I think those those two streams come together in the aftermath of the recession.
• 1:00:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's interesting because you get, I mean, nothing ever really seems to change, right?
• 1:00:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: Because there is this, like, you know, we touch the stove and got burned in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• 1:00:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: So instead of worrying about, you know, going overseas and fighting wars, let's, you know, let's just keep the, you know, the immigrants out here and, you know, kind of, you know, shelter in America.
• 1:01:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: And yet, you know, this is Trump's,
• 1:01:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: campaign.
• 1:01:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is his pets.
• 1:01:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: These are his people.
• 1:01:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's going to bomb Iran in a couple of weeks.
• 1:01:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like, you know, I'm he's still doing the same bullshit, right?
• 1:01:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like he's he wants regime change.
• 1:01:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, he kidnapped the president of Venezuela, because he wants regime change in Iraq.
• 1:01:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like,
• 1:01:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, on the business side, like, you know, we're, we're getting away from being the party of, of plutocrats, except, you know, the four front row seats at Trump's inauguration, where the four, you know, wealthiest men in the world, and it was the, the Musk Trump administration for the first, you know, nine months or whatever before they fell out with each other.
• 1:01:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like, it's, it's the same bullshit.
• 1:01:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like, it just keeps recycling.
• 1:01:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, totally.
• 1:01:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, what I think what's happened with business is to start at the end there is like the business base for Trump is narrower than it has been for the Republicans since any time since Goldwater, right?
• 1:02:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: But.
• 1:02:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: That doesn't mean it's not absolutely essential.
• 1:02:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean without Elon Musk's $250 million super PAC, I am not necessarily sure Trump wins this election, right?
• 1:02:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like the political scientist, Adam Bonica, who tracks campaign finance data, I'm more close to then anyone just showed that among the top 400 donors to the campaign and both the campaign committee and super PACs, for the Trump campaign in 2024, those donors,
• 1:02:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: contributed 60 percent of all money that the campaign got.
• 1:02:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: And if you go before 2024, the highest number ever was about 30 percent.
• 1:02:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, the Trump administration is absolutely dependent on this alliance with business, but it is dependent on an alliance with a much smaller slice of business than ever before.
• 1:02:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's because business is more liberal.
• 1:02:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Why is that?
• 1:02:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't think it's about like liberalism per se.
• 1:03:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it's about kind of instability, like business and the US hates the tariffs.
• 1:03:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: They don't want these tariffs.
• 1:03:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: These tariffs are terrible for them, right?
• 1:03:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like they don't want the instability of January six of impeachment and all of that kind of stuff, right?
• 1:03:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like they want policy making where you go in, you do your lobbying and you get as much as you can get.
• 1:03:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: They want that kind of transactional politics.
• 1:03:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what's to say about capitals and that they're not able to do this?
• 1:03:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, this is, I have two big questions and that's one of them.
• 1:03:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was going to ask that last, but let's ask that one.
• 1:03:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: What does this say about the stage of capitals and that business is not controlling things?
• 1:03:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it's just like, it's all everyone's alienating, even the capitalists are alienating.
• 1:03:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: The system is just functioning as it is and there's five people who control all the money and that's that.
• 1:03:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: But, you know, we're good left to see her.
• 1:03:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is published with Versa, what's your take?
• 1:03:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think that the disorganization of business that kind of preceded since the 80s is key to explaining why they've been unable to discipline Trump, you know, it's why like business is is not.
• 1:04:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: practice at kind of a disciplined collective action of the sort that you saw in the 1970s that would have been necessary to oppose Trump after January 6, 2021, right?
• 1:04:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: That boycott that I mentioned earlier falls apart in a matter of weeks, right?
• 1:04:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like by March, various companies are saying, like, look, we're not going to hold off on all donations through Republicans.
• 1:04:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: And actually, we might even donate to people who voted to decertify the election
• 1:04:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: completely collapses so fast.
• 1:04:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Over like, you know, the greatest threat to democratic capitalism since watergate at least, right?
• 1:04:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: And democratic capitalism is a system that has worked very, very well for the American capitalist class.
• 1:04:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, so that, yeah, that to me kind of really, really highlights what is clearly an incapacity on the part of business.
• 1:04:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think in this- We need our capitalists to organize, all the leftist listening,
• 1:05:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, you know, there's a funny inverse to that as well, and that at various times in the early 20th century or late 19th century capitalists wanted their workers to organize because it would make it easier for them to organize.
• 1:05:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: So this is this is the dialectic, right?
• 1:05:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: But, um,
• 1:05:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: And in Trump's second administration now, the kind of like explicit, uh, just open quit pro quo politics, vis-a-vis business, has I think made it harder for business to call a last because there's all of this one on one firm level transactional stuff happening so like you're like firms that would oppose the Trump administration kind of collectively instead strike individual deals.
• 1:05:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's what they do, right?
• 1:05:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like if you're if you're in video, right?
• 1:05:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like do you try and come together with other firms and figure out what you're common interests are and try and organize or do you have a meeting with Trump promise him some money and you know bizarre equity stakes and get everything you want that way.
• 1:05:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right?
• 1:06:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like Trump, the revival of Cliental of Politics under Trump has maintained business disorganization.
• 1:06:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think in spite of what could have been quite powerful spurs, two more classified organizations like the tariffs that were announced on deliberation day.
• 1:06:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's like boss tweet, you know, it's like New York City, machine politics brought to the White House, 19th century.
• 1:06:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then just Derek, I've got one final question, and then Paul, I'll let you go.
• 1:06:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: We got to talk about the fact that he won this non-consecretive term, that wasn't done since the Guild of Age and Growup Cleveland.
• 1:06:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, what does that say about the party?
• 1:06:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: That to me is so wild.
• 1:06:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, as I've already said on this podcast, I do not agree with the liberal resistance was right, because if they were that one in the map,
• 1:06:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: But what what explains I mean it is it is so almost unprecedented I I feel like people don't appreciate how truly big of a deal That was to lose like that to have January six to have the most progressive president until the genocide of our lifetime Joseph our Biden come in and then to win again I mean how do you explain that
• 1:07:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think there's two things that need to be explained there.
• 1:07:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: One is Trump's persistence and the Republicans after January 6, because after January 6, people were writing his political obituary.
• 1:07:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: People were like, that man, Biden is one.
• 1:07:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: Trump has just totally disgraced himself.
• 1:07:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is the end of Trump and the Republican Party, right?
• 1:07:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Lots of people were saying that.
• 1:07:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it turned out to be totally wrong.
• 1:07:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think on that level, what we've seen since then is that Trump is the glue of the Republican Party at this point.
• 1:07:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Aside from him, there isn't a coalescing principle in the party.
• 1:07:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: How dare you say that about J.D.
• 1:07:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Vance?
• 1:07:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Our future for the past.
• 1:07:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, I think Vance is a learning that the lesson of the Trump administration, both of them, is no one but Trump gets out alive on these things, you know?
• 1:07:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I think that Trump's personalism and his personal rule of the party and the principle that he's right, that's what holds the party together at this point.
• 1:08:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's the only thing everyone agrees on, right?
• 1:08:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think we're likely to see increased instability in the party because of that.
• 1:08:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then his ability to win in 2024, I think, had to do partially with immigration, being both a lower salience issue in the period of inflation and that kind of like cost of
• 1:08:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: That decrease in the salience of immigration helped him and helped just just like in 2020, I think he actually benefited from it from immigration being a low salience issue like immigration and xenophobia is very important for Trump's base, but it's not enough for him to win right like the people that he wins over aren't one over by that.
• 1:09:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: right like the you know I mean that the people in like Chinatown in New York that voted for Trump in huge numbers right they're not voting from because he's anti immigrant primarily right like they might be okay with that but there's a whole host of other issues um
• 1:09:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so unfortunately, I mean, the first time people were confronted with his actual immigration policy, which is to send jackbooted thugs out of the streets to track people down, they're horrified by it.
• 1:09:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like, you know, for lack of a better term, are horrified by it.
• 1:09:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: So the first time that rubber actually hits the road, it's it's to his detriment.
• 1:09:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we haven't seen Steven Miller in a while, right?
• 1:09:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Am I misremembering that?
• 1:09:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: I feel like he was out in front and at the time of recording.
• 1:09:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: He hasn't been out in front.
• 1:09:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I haven't.
• 1:09:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean, that's a good point.
• 1:09:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: I didn't think of that, but you really haven't seen him.
• 1:09:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think there's something of a reshuffle happening inside the administration right now.
• 1:09:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think for most of the last year, basically, the inner circle in the administration has not had any people who care about winning elections at all.
• 1:10:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, I don't think Steven Miller thinks at all about winning elections.
• 1:10:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right, like, and I think as the midterms are getting closer and, as like he said, immigration has been such a disaster for the administration, you're seeing some re-chuffling out.
• 1:10:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, you know, Kristi Nome's status is precarious these days.
• 1:10:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, yeah, and Miller, I think, you know, I think Miller is a skilled enough sycophant that he won't be booted from the administration, but I think he may stop serving
• 1:10:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: the effectively prime minister, that sort of thing.
• 1:10:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I wouldn't be surprised if we see a reshuffle as like, you know, I think people like Susie Wiles is basically job is to like make sure that the people who want to win elections are part of conversations and I think over the last two months the need for that to happen has become much clearer to the administration.
• 1:11:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, I suspect we'll see some changes over the next few months
• 1:11:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: in the 20th or 26 mid-terms comes more and more into focus.
• 1:11:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: They're all such cartoon characters, like it's so wild, like you press on these guys, and they just are complete flakes, like Christy knows flying in private jets with Cori Lundowski doing, you know, I don't want to speculate, but
• 1:11:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: like, you know, Pam Bondi goes to Congress and has this complete meltdown on tip, like in front of everybody TV and everything, just like shouting and people, but I think, you know, I don't know, Danny, maybe, maybe this is a good way to grab.
• 1:11:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the
• 1:11:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: looming implosion like post Trump, you know, whatever reckoning is coming for the Republican party is happening at a time when the whole electorate has lost its mind.
• 1:11:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: And again, like we could go back to 2008 and then not written the non-recovery and people just lurching from party to party searching for an answer to the problems of their life that neither
• 1:12:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'll bring back, you know, we had we had we've had this four year chaos rain and vote for me and I'll bring back normal see and just the you know the way things used to be and everything was kind of you know you have to think about politics all the time and everybody wasn't so angry and that's what I'll do and a like he failed to do that because it was chaos by the time he left but be I think the parts of normal that he brought back people realized that this is the shit I voted against the 2016 I don't like this.
• 1:12:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: So it's just like I don't know like I feel like the chaos instead of containing the chaos within the Republican party or dealing with it within the Republican party.
• 1:12:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's now expanded to the whole country and the whole electorate, which probably doesn't vote well for what happens next.
• 1:13:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, I think the pathology is an instability of American politics are unlikely to change outside of an Epical election, like 1932 or 1896 or something like that that really produces a whole new kind of political economic slash electoral order.
• 1:13:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, you know, and then that way, yeah, we, we are in the guilty age, right?
• 1:13:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, that like this, you know, the guilty age was a, a period of very close elections, Constance switching of partisans control, um, and yeah, I, I think that, that analogy holds in, in a lot of ways, unfortunately.
• 1:13:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it ended with World War I.
• 1:13:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, on that note, all, thank you so much for joining us.
• 1:13:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Everyone check out his excellent rogue elephant, however, publicants went from the party, business to the party of chaos, and we would love to have you back on again soon.
• 1:13:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much.
• 1:13:50
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