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0:01:17 We’re nearly six months into Donald Trump’s second term as president.
0:01:21 A lot of us are still trying to figure out what that actually means.
0:01:25 Not just politically, but culturally.
0:01:28 What kind of country are we living in?
0:01:31 And what kind of future are we heading toward?
0:01:34 These are not easy questions to answer.
0:01:36 I get that.
0:01:36 I get that.
0:01:39 But the Trump era has forced them upon us.
0:01:43 And so, we have to wrestle with them whether we want to or not.
0:02:02 When Zach Beecham, a Vox colleague of mine, and the author of the newsletter, On the Right, was last on this show in November,
0:02:08 He laid out a pretty stark view of what a second Trump administration might look like.
0:02:18 He talked about mass deportations, a purge of the federal government, and a general retreat from liberal democracy.
0:02:25 And I wanted to bring Zach back on the show, to talk about what he thought would happen, and how things have actually played out.
0:02:30 Has Trump governed the way he expected?
0:02:34 Has our political system been more resilient than he anticipated?
0:02:37 Is our democracy secure?
0:02:39 And where are we going as a country?
0:02:45 This is a conversation about where we are, but it’s also about what might come next.
0:02:49 And the various paths we might take to get there.
0:02:56 Zach Beecham, welcome back to the show.
0:02:58 Hey, Sean.
0:02:59 This is great.
0:03:00 It’s good to see you, buddy.
0:03:09 You are back for what I guess we can call a follow-up to our last chat, which was back in November.
0:03:14 And during that chat, you said a lot of smart and interesting things.
0:03:24 One of the things you said was that Trump is walking into his second term with a pretty clear agenda for what he wanted to do.
0:03:28 And there were three things, like in particular, you listed.
0:03:40 It was mass deportations, tariffs and trade disruption slash warfare, and basically remaking the federal government, right?
0:03:45 Which includes purging critics and taking over the civil service as much as possible, that kind of thing.
0:03:47 Let’s just start there, right?
0:03:50 You know, we’re 100 plus days into the administration.
0:03:51 How are you feeling?
0:03:59 Well, that makes me sound perhaps more prescient than I thought I was, because those are the big themes of the Trump administration, right?
0:04:03 And they’ve pursued them to varying degrees of success.
0:04:18 But it’s very clear, right, that like those three areas that you outlined, aggressive use of immigration enforcement, aggressive use of tariff powers, and aggressive efforts to centralize power in the president’s hands by remaking the federal government.
0:04:25 Like those are the three big stories of the Trump administration so far, I think the three biggest and most defining ones, right?
0:04:30 With the – there being, I think, significant interconnections between all of them.
0:04:52 In a way, I don’t think anyone fully anticipated, and I guess I’ll elaborate on what I mean by that, which is that Trump has pursued his remaking of the government and his exercise of power to a degree and in a manner of lawlessness that I don’t think anyone anticipated.
0:05:01 And all of these different things, right, they all fall under and are all related to this general goal of power centralization, right?
0:05:02 Remaking the federal government, it’s very obvious.
0:05:05 But think about Trump’s use of tariff powers, right?
0:05:13 The way in which he’s done it is by claiming emergency authority when there’s clearly not an emergency, right?
0:05:17 It’s just the emergency is that Trump doesn’t like the way the trade works right now and he wants to change it.
0:05:28 That is a very aggressive interpretation that a court recently smacked down, right, of what the emergency powers given by Congress to the president are.
0:05:34 And if allowed to be unimpeded, they will end up, you know, centralizing a lot of authority in the president’s hands.
0:05:36 And immigration is very similar, right?
0:05:45 All of these amount to, right, all of these different areas, which are the key policy priorities coming in, have become vehicles for a gigantic power grab.
0:05:53 And that is the fundamental story of this administration, is the president saying, I can do whatever I want.
0:05:54 Try and stop me.
0:05:59 Well, now that you’ve congratulated yourself on nailing it, I should at least ask.
0:06:00 I said I didn’t anticipate that.
0:06:05 It said you made me sound Russian and then I undercut myself.
0:06:15 I kid, but seriously, is there anything – I was going to ask, has anything really surprised you up to this point in a good or bad way?
0:06:19 But maybe another way to ask that is, has anything unexpected happened?
0:06:30 I think I was trying to get at that, which is the brazenness of the way in which they have attempted to disregard the law to accomplish this power centralization end.
0:06:31 It was stunning to me.
0:06:39 And one thing I got wrong, if we want to keep doing this, is I wrote a piece saying, you know, my predictions for the Trump administration, and I do think they’ve mostly been right.
0:06:43 But the one that I got wrong is that I said Elon Musk would be less important than it seemed like he would.
0:06:46 And that was just like completely, totally incorrect.
0:06:49 Elon Musk defined this lawlessness.
0:07:08 It’s sort of a defining feature of the Trump era in lots of ways that things seem to be both completely broken and somehow kind of all right at the same time.
0:07:17 And in your newsletter, you know, you wrote that this administration has proven very, very good at breaking things.
0:07:22 What do you think they’re actually breaking this time around?
0:07:24 I think it’s two things, right?
0:07:25 Two related things.
0:07:33 The first is breaking the U.S. government as an entity that’s designed to deliver discrete services, right?
0:07:35 It’s just like a thing that does things.
0:07:38 It is now much worse at doing things, right?
0:07:39 And that’s one thing.
0:07:51 And second thing that’s related to that is breaking the idea that’s been part of the U.S. government since the Pendleton Act, which reformed civil service, right, around the turn of the 20th century.
0:08:12 So for over 100 years, it’s this notion that civil service should be a truly civil service that is not something that you can distribute as spoils to your political allies to govern in accordance with partisan interests, but rather a nonpartisan professionalized system designed to deliver government goods for all of us.
0:08:18 And they’ve really been upfront about thinking that that norm is bad.
0:08:21 And the reason they think it’s bad is that they think it’s a lie, right?
0:08:27 They think that the civil service is shot full of Democrats who just do things for democratic purposes and are basically agents of the deep state.
0:08:29 This is not true, right?
0:08:30 It’s false.
0:08:31 I want to be clear about that.
0:08:33 But that is the stated rationale.
0:08:40 And so the end result, the solution, they think, is, well, if it’s already been politicized by them, we can politicize it too.
0:08:50 And so we staff administrative positions all throughout the federal government with people that they think are politically reliable, right?
0:08:53 And because they’re politically reliable, not because they’re competent.
0:09:01 I mean, I just saw a story this morning about someone appointed to a high-level counterterrorism post who’s a 22-year-old whose work experience was working at a grocery store and as a gardener.
0:09:07 He was an intern at the Heritage Foundation after that, which is a right-wing think tank in D.C.
0:09:15 And now he has a high-level counterterrorism post at the Department of Homeland Security helping coordinate U.S. efforts.
0:09:17 Well, take that DEI, right?
0:09:19 Another W for the meritocracy.
0:09:21 So much winning.
0:09:23 I see stories like that.
0:09:28 And then to even – that’s not even getting into, like, permanent civil service, right?
0:09:29 That’s a political appointment.
0:09:43 But people whose job it is, their careers, are to work on something like public health, who RFK has just shuffled off because he either doesn’t think their positions are important or wants to put some kind of, like, Maha ideologue in that job.
0:09:53 And you just – it becomes much harder for the government to do stuff when the people who know how to do things are being removed for political purposes.
0:09:58 This isn’t just, like, me extrapolating, right, based on, like, sort of first principles.
0:10:03 It’s that we’ve seen this movie before in lots of other countries, right?
0:10:13 People get rid of administrators who know what they’re doing in revolutionary regimes, and they replace them with people who, you know, I don’t know, was, like, a sergeant in the revolutionary army.
0:10:18 And that sergeant has no idea, not to dunk on sergeants in specific.
0:10:26 It’s anyone who’s a low-level or even a high-level military person is not necessarily qualified to administer the EPA, right, or to administer a clean air program.
0:10:30 And that’s – like, we’re doing the equivalent of that, right?
0:10:37 Like, taking revolutionary cadres and installing them in government, regardless of whether or not they know how government works.
0:10:38 And that’s just going to make things worse.
0:10:40 Yeah, that’s bad.
0:10:46 But, look, breaking and broken aren’t exactly the same thing.
0:10:47 So let me ask it this way.
0:10:54 I mean, of all this stuff, you know, what is happening, what might happen, that can’t be repaired with an election victory.
0:11:03 You know, what might a Democratic Congress, a president, or even a serious well-intentioned Republican, for that matter, not be able to rebuild after this?
0:11:06 So that’s a good question.
0:11:09 I’m trying to think through the answer because we don’t know, right?
0:11:12 We don’t – we’ve never been in a position like this before.
0:11:14 And I don’t mean just the United States.
0:11:31 I mean there has never been a wealthy democracy that has had an established and competent governing apparatus that has had it torn down intentionally and replaced, like, getting rid of people who have institutional knowledge and putting in people who do not but are politically reliable, right?
0:11:35 No government like this has experienced something like this.
0:11:38 We’re just way, way, way, way, way outside of the history books.
0:11:43 And so it’s hard for me to say what’s going to happen because it’s so unprecedented.
0:11:46 There are a few things that you can say concretely, right?
0:11:51 So it is very, very hard to restart programs that have been broken.
0:12:00 So when you cut off huge amounts of scientific funding, as they’ve done so far, those research agendas can’t just be restarted four years later, right?
0:12:02 It’s that all of the progress has been lost.
0:12:03 Maybe a sample has decayed.
0:12:06 Maybe they’ve lost contact with the people that they were tracking for the study.
0:12:14 Maybe the researchers had to, due to financial imperatives, move on to something, maybe even go into a different career entirely, right?
0:12:22 And the scientific knowledge that would have been produced as a result of current funding, and there are lots of key areas where scientific funding has been hampered.
0:12:26 For instance, the development of an HIV-AIDS vaccine, you know, like important stuff.
0:12:28 That, you can’t just restart it.
0:12:37 Yeah, I think this in particular is one of those stories, and there are probably several of them, that we’re going to look back on and go, that was a pretty big deal.
0:12:40 That was an underappreciated big deal.
0:12:47 You can’t even predict which ones it’s going to be, right, of these different scientific developments.
0:12:56 It just, it feels like they’re intentionally tearing this apart for no good reason, right?
0:13:09 It’s a, the common phrase that I’m starting to hear now is suicide of a superpower, which ironically is very close to the name of a Pat Buchanan book about the United States under, you know, its previous liberal democratic regime.
0:13:20 And Buchanan was bemoaning the way in which, you know, policies of multiculturalism and open trade degraded what he saw was good about the United States.
0:13:24 And obviously Buchanan is the ideological predecessor of Trump in many ways as a political figure.
0:13:40 And what we’re seeing is that the Buchananite policies being pursued by the administration are the ones that are actually eroding the foundations of American, I mean, American global leadership is putting it too mildly, right?
0:13:54 Like America’s ability to be the engine of global human progress, whatever you think of American foreign policy specifically, its economic dynamism and scientific research have really powered tremendous amounts of,
0:14:05 of global good, of helping the world develop new technologies that have improved human welfare, of keeping people, getting people everywhere richer, right?
0:14:13 It’s like global economies are interconnected and US demand purchasing goods from poor countries has helped bring a lot of people out of poverty.
0:14:32 And like, I’m listing all these things, not because, you know, I think that they’re the only things that matter, but rather to underscore how massive the scope is here of the damage that’s being done and how difficult it is to predict what we’re going to remember in the history of books as like the worst part, right?
0:14:39 We’re, we’re, we’re, we’re, we’re talking about fundamental building blocks of the world in which we live being torn down by, by a, like gigantic toddler.
0:14:40 Yeah.
0:14:43 And a lot of things you, you, you won’t appreciate until they’re gone.
0:14:53 Um, well, you know, me, uh, the audience knows me, I am a pathological optimist and, uh, and you, sir.
0:14:55 Well, I’ve got the right content for you.
0:14:59 Hopefully the audience gets that joke.
0:15:00 Yeah, they will.
0:15:05 We’ve probably done half a dozen episodes on my, on my cynicism that I’m trying to conquer.
0:15:11 Um, but you, sir, recently gave me some reasons to feel better.
0:15:24 And I want to talk about that a little bit, because despite the fact that it often feels like Trump is demolishing everything, um, and he is actually demolishing quite a few things.
0:15:30 But you have argued that he is actually failing on the most important fronts.
0:15:32 So let’s talk about that.
0:15:34 Lay out your case for us.
0:15:35 Sure.
0:15:42 So when I say most important front, uh, when, when you say that, what I meant specifically is American democracy, right?
0:15:48 Is Trump successfully replacing democracy as we know it with some other kind of system?
0:15:50 I think the answer to that question is no.
0:15:53 I think the answer is first of all, that he’s trying.
0:15:54 I think that’s fairly clear.
0:15:56 And we can discuss why I think that’s clear.
0:15:58 Uh, but second, I, I don’t think it’s working.
0:16:06 And I think that’s essential to all of the other issues that we’ve been talking about because, you know, I just said, I don’t know what one can do to repair certain things.
0:16:11 Well, you won’t know until somebody is in a position to actually do that reparation.
0:16:11 Right.
0:16:19 And that means you need to be confident that we’re going to have a fully democratic election in 2028.
0:16:29 And the question is, are Donald Trump’s efforts to centralize power in his own hands successfully undermining the conditions for free and fair elections in the United States?
0:16:31 The answer so far, I think, is no.
0:16:36 It’s not that he’s not trying to do that, right?
0:16:47 It’s the, the attacks on, uh, universities, the efforts to wield immigration policy against people who criticize Israel for some reason, not even the Trump administration, but Israel.
0:16:57 Uh, these are the efforts to, uh, intimidate media, you know, punishing the Associated Press for, uh, not calling the Gulf of Mexico Gulf of America.
0:17:12 Uh, these are all examples of the kinds of policies that you see in countries like Hungary or India or Israel, where the leader has been hell-bent on trying to cement their own ability to rule indefinitely to varying degrees of success.
0:17:22 But what’s interesting about the Trump versions of these policies is they are, uh, in the words of a political scientist I spoke to, the stupidest version of this imaginable, right?
0:17:24 They are doing it badly, right?
0:17:38 Because it is one thing to say, we’re going to make it hard for the U.S. government to conduct key administrative functions, be it funding scientific research or, you know, managing the health of our rivers and other pollution-related things.
0:17:46 Or even the, the basic competence of the U.S. military, which Pete Hegseth seems to be, uh, very busily, very busy destroying for basically cultural war purposes.
0:17:58 Um, but it’s actually an entirely different thing to build an effective system for repressing dissent and controlling the outcome of elections.
0:18:06 Right, that’s building, right, that’s building, that’s an affirmative project, and you need to create state institutions and policies that deliver that particular outcome.
0:18:08 So you can’t just do vandalism there, right?
0:18:18 You need to break some elements of the democratic political system, uh, and replace them with ways of imposing your will on the voters.
0:18:21 And they’ve not done that very well.
0:18:28 To imply or say that he’s failing or losing is to suggest that he’s not achieving his goal.
0:18:29 Right.
0:18:32 Do you feel like you have a clear sense of what that goal is?
0:18:35 I mean, do you, do you really think it’s regime change?
0:18:39 Yeah, I think it’s full consolidation of power in his own hands.
0:18:50 It’s the ability to act unfettered, uh, and the ability to control and corral the opposition such that they don’t present a meaningful threat to his personal exercise of power.
0:18:51 Right.
0:18:55 I think that, and the opposition here is broadly construed, right?
0:18:57 It’s not just the democratic party.
0:19:00 It’s the press who he hates and sees as an enemy.
0:19:02 It’s, uh, cultural liberals.
0:19:07 I mean, he recently called for an investigation into Bruce Springsteen and his political activities for no reason.
0:19:08 There’s nothing.
0:19:11 Springsteen has done nothing that merits investigation.
0:19:11 Yeah.
0:19:13 Yeah.
0:19:13 Go check it out.
0:19:14 Why is he going after Bruce?
0:19:15 What did, what did Bruce do?
0:19:20 He criticized Trump or something like that, or maybe he worked with the democratic party on a fundraiser.
0:19:22 I forget the exact specifics of it.
0:19:29 Um, but I mean, this is, this is like really, truly not so authoritarian stuff.
0:19:32 Just randomly picking somebody who is aligned with the opposition and targeting them.
0:19:40 It’s exactly the way that an authoritarian leader might try to assert power, making an example out of somebody who’s a prominent dissenter.
0:19:51 Uh, and he just, he really clearly, like judging not, again, not just from statements, though they matter, but from actions, right?
0:19:55 From the way in which he has attempted to exercise power without fetters, right?
0:20:02 To do things that are in direct contradiction of the laws, wants to be able to do whatever he wants, right?
0:20:04 And wants to be able to change all sorts of policies.
0:20:10 I mean, he’s talked quite a lot about changing election law, even though Trump doesn’t have election interests, like he can’t run again.
0:20:12 Although maybe he would, right?
0:20:14 Maybe in this, he’s, he’s talked about that too, right?
0:20:18 And the way that he’s governed unlawfully means that all bets are off.
0:20:25 So maybe this stuff about changing the electoral system to eliminate the non-existent fraud in 2020, right?
0:20:34 Which is to say changing the electoral system to bet in ways that benefits Republicans and makes it easier, would make it easier for Donald Trump to win again, were he to run in 2028.
0:20:36 Which I get to, I don’t think is going to happen.
0:20:41 I think we, for, this is sort of the premise of this conversation, that I don’t think he’s going to be able to get what he wants.
0:20:46 But what he wants has been spelled out in multiple different ways through word and deed.
0:20:53 And it amounts to, not like a systematic plan, which I think is part of the problem for Trump, actually.
0:21:01 He doesn’t have a vision for like what the Trump regime looks like, what its ideological scaffolding is, what its bureaucratic offices are.
0:21:03 The man doesn’t think like that, right?
0:21:09 But what he does think is, I want to do what I want, and I want to crush the people who have opposed me.
0:21:11 I want to get revenge on all the people who have hurt me.
0:21:17 And that would produce, if it were successful, an authoritarian political system.
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0:25:40 One of the red lines in a constitutional system like ours has always been refusing to obey the courts.
0:25:47 And, you know, for all the bluster, it does appear that they are doing that for the most part, right?
0:25:54 And something you pointed out in one of your pieces is that, you know, there’s over 200 lawsuits against various Trump policies.
0:26:00 And, you know, a good deal of them have been, you know, rejected or temporarily paused.
0:26:06 So the courts do seem to be holding up, you know, and for all the fretting about the Supreme Court in particular.
0:26:10 And certainly I was one of the people making noises about that.
0:26:19 Right now, though, in this moment, it does seem like they are not rolling over for Trump in the ways we might have anticipated.
0:26:22 And these are reasons to be hopeful.
0:26:26 I think the courts are critical to the entire picture, right?
0:26:31 Because they are, in a system like ours, they’re the enforcement mechanism for laws.
0:26:34 And by enforcement mechanism, I don’t mean like they implement the laws.
0:26:37 I mean they’re the ones that ensure the rest of the system is complying with them.
0:26:43 But, as you suggested, court authority only comes from willingness to obey, right?
0:26:47 It’s essentially a norms or principle-based thing.
0:26:49 Or, if you want to put it a little further, a fear-based thing.
0:26:52 What are the fears of crossing the courts, right?
0:26:52 What would happen?
0:26:59 How would the rest of the system and the mass public react if you just declared court authority null and void?
0:27:06 And there are, again, there are clear cases of them trying to get around what the court is doing that I think constitute disobedience.
0:27:10 They’re not most of the cases, right?
0:27:12 If you look at most instances.
0:27:25 So, one micro-level example is the U.S. Institute of Peace, which Doge shuttered and then used as like a hangout headquarters they’re building at this like august U.S. government-sponsored foreign policy think tank.
0:27:31 Like these 20-something dudes were hanging out and smoking weed and by that I don’t just mean like metaphorically.
0:27:38 I mean that when people are cleaning it up, they actually found bags of weed lying around in the U.S. IP offices.
0:27:45 But they were cleaning it up because a court ruled that shuttering U.S. IP was unlawful and the Doge bros had to go find somewhere else to get high.
0:27:59 And like that, to me, is an encapsulation both of the ridiculousness of the situation, but also the ways in which like that ridiculous incompetence is not working for them.
0:28:03 The ridiculousness is the thing.
0:28:05 Well, not the thing, but a thing.
0:28:12 And part of the problem, and it is kind of hard to articulate, is this line between appearance and reality with Trump.
0:28:19 You know, Trump is the master at appearing to do things, which is not the same thing as actually doing things.
0:28:27 And I think he really just wants to run a good television show and doesn’t really care all that much about anything else.
0:28:35 And that vacuousness has been a gift to the country because it’s probably prevented him from doing as much damage as he could if he was a serious operator.
0:28:45 And I don’t know, you may disagree with this, but to me, Trump isn’t really succeeding all that much in legislative or material terms because I don’t really think that’s his measure at all.
0:28:50 I think he thinks he’s succeeding if we’re talking about him and he’s making money.
0:28:55 And I think his gamble is that most people aren’t really aren’t really tracking things.
0:28:57 It’s hard to do that, even if it’s your job.
0:29:05 So he just stages spectacles and constantly performs the role of a big transformative president doing big transformative things.
0:29:08 But so much of it really is just that, a performance.
0:29:11 And it’s kind of hard to untangle all of it.
0:29:15 And he’s like the most aggressively postmodern president I could imagine.
0:29:16 True, true.
0:29:18 Anyway, that was a lot of words.
0:29:29 No, no, it’s, I find it fascinating in the sense that the man’s whole shtick can be boiled down to the apprentice, right?
0:29:40 And this isn’t just, I have this on the brain because I read a study today that showed that the perceptions of Trump based on apprentice viewing was like meaningful.
0:29:50 So the people who were more in the areas where there was like higher apprentice viewership due to this random design had a higher assessment of Trump’s competence.
0:30:02 And here’s the kicker, he did better in those places in the Republican primary than in the ones that were demographically similar but didn’t have that exposure to the apprentice.
0:30:08 The apprentice, if you didn’t watch it, you know, it’s Trump being in charge of all these business people and he says, you’re fired.
0:30:17 And when he thinks somebody is doing a bad job and generally is treated by everyone on the show as a master businessman, except he wasn’t, right?
0:30:31 We know from like a number of investigative looks into his business practices that he really was not very good at the actual nuts and bolts of making money, right?
0:30:44 He started out with a lot of money and by one assessment, he probably wouldn’t have before, before his time in politics, have made more money than he would have had he just like plowed his money into the stock market that he got from his dad when he started, right?
0:30:45 Basically a break even for all shenanigans.
0:30:50 At one point he managed to bankrupt a casino, which I just like, I don’t even know how you do that, right?
0:30:52 The house always wins unless the house is Donald Trump.
0:31:01 The point is the apprentice created this persona of who he was, aggressive competence, a business genius, respected by everybody.
0:31:09 And that stuck with a lot of people and was actually materially significant in terms of his rise to power, right?
0:31:11 We were not just speculating about this anymore.
0:31:13 We have cold hard evidence that it was.
0:31:17 And that has been the trick throughout his time in public.
0:31:21 This is a long-winded way of saying, I think you’re right about this.
0:31:23 I think that there is a lot of performance.
0:31:34 And saying what is performance and what is actual, you know, really important developments is an essential task for those of us whose job it is to like interpret the world for everybody else.
0:31:41 Yeah, I think that performative aspect actually does help obscure some of the very real dangerous shit that he’s doing.
0:31:51 But let me just get back on the tracks here a little bit, because I think the key point up to this part of the conversation is that we’re holding the line, as it were.
0:31:55 But American democracy is by no means safe, right?
0:31:57 The cracks are there and they’ve been there for a long time.
0:32:04 And Trump has done at least one service in really exposing them, which I think leads to a question without a clear answer.
0:32:07 What kind of regime are we actually living in right now?
0:32:18 This is still a democracy, but are we close to some kind of hybrid system with elements of democracy and authoritarianism or what political scientists sometimes call competitive authoritarianism?
0:32:26 Yeah, so that is a term that I think is really useful, and it’s worth focusing on to try to understand what it means, right?
0:32:33 It’s coined by Stephen Levitsky and Lucan Way, two leading political scientists who focus on comparative democracy.
0:32:49 And they defined a competitive authoritarian system as one that is, they have free elections in the sense that they aren’t rigged, like the ballot boxes and stuff, but they’re not taking place on fair grounds, right?
0:32:58 The playing field is tilted in the incumbent party’s direction so heavily that it’s very difficult for the opposition to compete meaningfully.
0:33:18 So elections are not rigged, but they also aren’t really, truly elections that give voters a choice because so many voters are for a variety of reasons, you know, government control over the media, gerrymandering, campaign finance rules that make it difficult for the opposition to fundraise, you know, go on down the list, right?
0:33:27 Like a variety of different things that erode what one might call the background conditions under which elections operate fairly, right?
0:33:42 So that’s, I think, it’s the main model for how you take a country that was once a democracy and turn it into an authoritarian state in modern times, because it gets around the problem of having to declare, you know, well, we’re just abolishing elections.
0:33:43 Democracy doesn’t matter.
0:33:44 That’s not very popular anymore.
0:33:47 People who live in democracies generally want to keep democracy.
0:33:53 And so you need to be able to convince people that all you’re doing is just democratic reform, right?
0:33:55 And that is very much the Trump rhetoric.
0:33:57 You know, we’re getting, we’re rooting out the deep state.
0:34:00 We’re dealing with the fraud in 2020, right?
0:34:05 We’re making so the elites are no longer controlling you, the people, right?
0:34:06 This is their rhetoric.
0:34:08 It’s their policy aim.
0:34:09 It’s the best way to understand what they’re trying to do.
0:34:19 So, like, we are in a democratic system in the sense that elections still matter, and we still have the background conditions that are essential for them to be fair.
0:34:34 You know, free and fair media, rule of law, sort of, and, you know, certainly nonpartisan local election administration still exists in a lot of places, and, I mean, I think generally, right?
0:34:49 There’s no allegations of fraud in the 2024 election that were meaningful, but we are currently being governed under an authoritarian logic, by which I mean the president is acting as if the rule of law is not real,
0:34:55 is acting as if there are no constraints, acting as if he is free to attack the background conditions that make democracy fair.
0:34:57 So, it is a kind of hybrid system.
0:35:07 It’s that we have, we are a democracy, but the president is just ignoring the things or trying to ignore the things that keep a democracy a democracy.
0:35:18 And so, the question is whether that logic, that authoritarian governing logic, is capable of actually breaking through and making systemic changes to those background conditions.
0:35:27 And when I say he’s failing, I think that’s what I mean, right, is so far acting like an authoritarian is not yielding authoritarian dividends, but it’s complicated.
0:35:37 One scary thing about democratic backsliding is how banal it can be, you know, it’s not necessarily fireworks and chaos.
0:35:46 You know, sometimes it’s slow and steady and piecemeal, and life can seem very normal, even though the political ground has already shifted beneath your feet.
0:36:03 You know, and America is unique for a thousand different reasons, but how does our situation compare to a place like Hungary, where you’ve done some great reporting, and Hungary is sort of the clearest example, or the default example, of what a modern, illiberal democracy can look like?
0:36:06 To me, to me, it’s the textbook case of success, right?
0:36:16 Like, when an authoritarian takeover of a democracy works, right, it looks a lot like what happened in Hungary between 2010 and today.
0:36:20 And, you know, there are some parallels, right?
0:36:35 One of them is that they did a lot of things really early on that were designed to cement power in Orban’s hands and make it difficult, Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the Hungarian leader, and make it difficult for the opposition to object to future moves, right?
0:36:40 And that has some parallels, significant ones, with the Doge power grabs early in Trump’s administration.
0:36:46 But there are a number of important dissimilarities between the two cases, right?
0:36:51 In fact, there are ways in which Trump didn’t properly learn the lessons of Hungary.
0:37:00 And one of them, an obvious one, is that Trump doesn’t have a legislative majority large enough to rewrite the Constitution, right, which was essential to Orban’s strategy for taking power.
0:37:02 And we have nothing like that in the U.S.
0:37:05 And without that, he gets into a lot of trouble with the courts.
0:37:08 That wasn’t a problem in the same way for Hungary, right?
0:37:12 We don’t – I mean, amending the U.S. Constitution is basically impossible, which is normally a bad thing.
0:37:17 But in this case, it’s a pretty effective bulwark against authoritarian takeovers.
0:37:30 But the second thing, which I think ties in directly to what you were saying, is that Trump ignored the central importance of making things feel normal, right?
0:37:33 Yeah, like daily life in the U.S. is still pretty normal.
0:37:40 But politically, he hasn’t let any of these changes fly under the radar, right?
0:37:45 They are often very bombastic, done publicly and loudly, right?
0:37:57 Like when they sent those people to El Salvador, there was a video that the Salvadoran government put out of people taken from the United States in chains, getting their heads shaven and thrown into a gulag.
0:38:00 And it’s like they aren’t trying to hide what they’re doing, right?
0:38:06 Which is the way that authoritarians really succeed in modern politics, right?
0:38:13 As they do it subtly, so subtly that it won’t generate resistance from the press, from the courts, from the opposition parties.
0:38:16 That they don’t even know where to start, or from the public.
0:38:27 And there has been significant mass public resistance by one metric, more protest events, individual protest events, than there were during Trump’s first term, right?
0:38:32 At this point in time, which when everyone was talking about the hashtag resistance and stuff like that.
0:38:50 So by being so brazen in their lawbreaking, rather than trying to disguise what they’re doing through clever PR campaigns, embedding it in complex bureaucratic rulings that are difficult for anybody to understand.
0:38:54 No, they just like yell this stuff, and say what they want to do, right?
0:38:56 We’re going to destroy Harvard, right?
0:38:58 We’re going to take it over, right?
0:39:00 Literally, that’s one of the demands they issued to Harvard, right?
0:39:08 Is to put yourself in, functionally, the government’s control until we’re satisfied that you’ve made yourself into whatever ideological outpost we want you to be.
0:39:10 And it’s just like, this is all so dumb.
0:39:15 It’s exactly the wrong way to go about accomplishing your ends.
0:39:18 Yeah, but this speaks to my point earlier, right?
0:39:23 One difference with Orbán is he’s not running a television show, whereas Trump is.
0:39:29 And so there’s that incessant need to perform the thing and do the spectacle.
0:39:33 And I think that can get in the way of, you know, it’s incompatible with low-key operating.
0:39:35 You know what I mean?
0:39:40 Subtlety doesn’t work on television or social media, for that matter.
0:39:47 It’s like he wants to be an authoritarian, but doesn’t have a plan for how to do it in a systematic way, like the Hungarians did.
0:39:57 We have Project 2025, but a lot of that stuff, when it’s been implemented, has been done very loudly and not in an especially subtle fashion, right?
0:40:05 And in some ways, Trump has been more aggressive in counterproductive ways than what was listed in that document, which is a kind of wild thing to think about.
0:40:14 For all these reasons, do you think now the main cleavage in American politics is between liberalism and illiberalism?
0:40:19 I mean, is this the political fight that Trump has forced on the country?
0:40:26 Yeah, I mean, it is the defining fight of our era, right, between a defensive liberal democracy and its opposition.
0:40:30 Whether the public sees it that way is a more complicated story.
0:40:39 Because I think that modern authoritarian movements operate best when their followers believe that they actually are fighting for democracy.
0:40:46 And I think, sincerely, that’s what a lot of Republican primary and MAGA voters believe.
0:40:50 They believe that they’re saving the American system of government from an elite liberal plot.
0:41:02 And they don’t believe that as a, you know, comfortable fiction to hide that they’re a lie that they’re telling themselves when they know better.
0:41:08 No, it’s their sincere and deep belief, as I’m sure, Sean, that you can testify to having conversations with people like this.
0:41:10 I just, I don’t think it’s a front.
0:41:19 And I think that if you don’t understand that, then you don’t really grasp why this is such a complex and difficult fight.
0:41:26 So much less straightforward than, you know, something like rallying the American public against Nazism was.
0:41:34 There are people around Trump, people like Steve Bannon, and you’ve reported on this, who point to Hungary as a model.
0:41:35 Yes.
0:41:37 For America.
0:41:40 So it is not as though we are reaching here, right?
0:41:40 No.
0:41:45 These are comparisons that the people in that orbit are self-consciously making.
0:41:50 A thing that’s important, I think, is that a lot of these people say that Hungary isn’t an authoritarian state.
0:41:52 I think some of them are lying about it.
0:41:55 I think some of them have convinced themselves that this is true.
0:41:59 But, I mean, it very clearly is, right?
0:42:01 There’s no debating that at this point.
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0:44:11 All of this has been leading to the final thing I wanted to talk to you about,
0:44:16 which is the appeal of Trumpism and the story.
0:44:19 The right, the American right, is selling right now.
0:44:25 And the struggles of the left to undercut that with its own story.
0:44:30 Why do you think the right seems to be winning the narrative battle right now,
0:44:31 especially with younger people?
0:44:38 So, I think what Trump has done narratively,
0:44:40 and I want to distinguish this from electorally, right?
0:44:46 Because swing voters are not really the story of the Trump movement,
0:44:48 of why Trump managed to become so powerful,
0:44:51 become in charge of one of our two major political parties,
0:44:56 to come back from the catastrophic, seemingly political death,
0:44:59 inflicted on him after January 6th, right?
0:45:00 That’s a much deeper story.
0:45:02 And it’s about this narrative thing that you’re mentioning, right?
0:45:06 His ability to connect with people and create a base,
0:45:10 a cadre so powerful that they can assert their will
0:45:12 on a Republican party that wanted to get rid of them.
0:45:17 And that story that Trump grasps at a very fundamental level,
0:45:23 that what drives people who are deeply engaged with politics today
0:45:26 is a story about who we are and who belongs,
0:45:28 what our future is, and how it should relate to our past.
0:45:37 This reactionary vision saying that social liberalism has gone too far
0:45:40 and has wrecked what made America great,
0:45:43 and that the United States need to be restored to its former glory
0:45:47 at an unspecified time by building a political community
0:45:54 that returns to more quote-unquote traditional ways of living,
0:45:57 or that reverses some of the changes that were made
0:45:59 in the late 20th century.
0:46:01 That is the story that’s being told.
0:46:04 It’s building community through a shared sense
0:46:05 that something has gone wrong.
0:46:08 And you wrote a piece recently sort of making the case
0:46:10 that the left is missing some of this
0:46:12 because it is attached to a model of politics
0:46:17 that focuses on economic self-interest,
0:46:18 material conditions like that.
0:46:22 And look, I don’t know what it is with the left,
0:46:23 but as I’ve gotten older,
0:46:25 I think I’ve just become more aware
0:46:29 of the spiritual and psychological needs of human beings
0:46:31 and how we will look to satisfy those needs,
0:46:33 whether it’s in conventional religions
0:46:35 or in political ideologies,
0:46:37 which in many ways are secular religions.
0:46:42 But I think we agree that you just can’t have a model of politics
0:46:44 that doesn’t center these things.
0:46:44 And if you do,
0:46:47 you will fail to understand what animates people
0:46:48 at the deepest level,
0:46:51 and you will lose to people who do understand this.
0:46:53 And I feel like that’s what’s happening now.
0:46:54 I think that’s right.
0:46:55 And I think that’s a big problem
0:46:57 with the modern socialist left in particular.
0:47:00 I think they’re, as a matter of ideology,
0:47:04 deeply wedded to a materialist view of human motivation,
0:47:05 right?
0:47:07 A way of basically,
0:47:09 not a rejection of what you just said exactly,
0:47:11 but a sense that all of it is,
0:47:13 in some important way,
0:47:14 secondary to,
0:47:16 or in the most extreme cases,
0:47:20 downstream from people’s material interests
0:47:23 and their material experiences.
0:47:25 I mean, there are ways in which that’s true, right?
0:47:26 Like in a war zone,
0:47:29 people are primarily thinking about survival.
0:47:32 But the conditions of life
0:47:35 in a modern advanced democracy aren’t a war zone, right?
0:47:36 For most people,
0:47:38 they’re nothing like it, right?
0:47:40 It’s a question of
0:47:42 how to deal with the fact
0:47:46 that we live in a time of unprecedented prosperity
0:47:47 relative to most of human history,
0:47:49 one that still has real
0:47:50 and meaningful material struggles for people.
0:47:52 I don’t mean to be denying that, right?
0:47:54 But we live in a politics,
0:47:55 a political world,
0:47:58 where a lot of conflict is post-material, right?
0:47:59 It’s about these questions
0:48:00 of meaning, belonging, identity
0:48:03 that I think liberalism
0:48:06 is like theoretically well-equipped to address.
0:48:06 Like there are,
0:48:09 these have been major concerns of liberal theory,
0:48:11 but they’re not ones in which we have
0:48:14 a concrete application of said ideas
0:48:16 that makes sense for today’s politics.
0:48:18 We have liberal philosophy.
0:48:20 We have liberal politics.
0:48:21 What we don’t have is a liberal ideology,
0:48:24 something that connects these philosophical ideas
0:48:25 into a narrative,
0:48:26 shapes into a narrative
0:48:28 that connects to everyday experiences
0:48:30 that people have.
0:48:32 I think there’s a huge opportunity there
0:48:33 for somebody,
0:48:34 maybe some groups of people
0:48:36 to try to figure out what that looks like.
0:48:37 I agree.
0:48:41 We’ve covered a lot of ground here.
0:48:45 Is there anything else you want to say?
0:48:47 Anything you want to leave people with?
0:48:48 Anything?
0:48:50 Yeah, anything at all?
0:48:52 I mean, I guess the thing
0:48:53 that I really want to emphasize
0:48:55 in our sort of long arc conversation
0:48:56 about the Trump administration
0:49:00 is like nothing is foretold.
0:49:03 Nothing is predestined one way or another.
0:49:05 Like when I say Trump is failing,
0:49:07 I mean, Trump is failing right now.
0:49:09 It is very possible
0:49:10 that he could start succeeding.
0:49:12 Conversely, when I say Trump
0:49:12 is breaking the government,
0:49:15 it means he is breaking the government right now.
0:49:16 It is very possible
0:49:18 that given a series of court rulings
0:49:19 or effective political activism
0:49:20 or legislation,
0:49:23 that that destruction
0:49:25 could be reversed in a timely fashion
0:49:28 or stopped from proceeding further.
0:49:30 And that means that
0:49:32 no one should be fatalistic
0:49:34 or overly optimistic.
0:49:35 You should feel,
0:49:38 if I can tell anyone how to feel,
0:49:39 you should feel galvanized.
0:49:42 Like, if you care
0:49:43 about the future of American democracy
0:49:44 and its survival,
0:49:46 if you care about the ability
0:49:47 of the United States
0:49:49 to govern itself
0:49:50 in an effective fashion,
0:49:51 like now is the time
0:49:52 to go do something about that.
0:49:53 Zach Beecham,
0:49:54 as always,
0:49:55 a pleasure, my friend.
0:49:56 Thanks for coming in.
0:49:57 Sean, this is great.
0:49:59 I always love doing your show.
0:50:07 All right.
0:50:08 I hope you enjoyed this episode.
0:50:09 As always,
0:50:11 we want to know what you think.
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0:01:17 We’re nearly six months into Donald Trump’s second term as president.
0:01:21 A lot of us are still trying to figure out what that actually means.
0:01:25 Not just politically, but culturally.
0:01:28 What kind of country are we living in?
0:01:31 And what kind of future are we heading toward?
0:01:34 These are not easy questions to answer.
0:01:36 I get that.
0:01:36 I get that.
0:01:39 But the Trump era has forced them upon us.
0:01:43 And so, we have to wrestle with them whether we want to or not.
0:02:02 When Zach Beecham, a Vox colleague of mine, and the author of the newsletter, On the Right, was last on this show in November,
0:02:08 He laid out a pretty stark view of what a second Trump administration might look like.
0:02:18 He talked about mass deportations, a purge of the federal government, and a general retreat from liberal democracy.
0:02:25 And I wanted to bring Zach back on the show, to talk about what he thought would happen, and how things have actually played out.
0:02:30 Has Trump governed the way he expected?
0:02:34 Has our political system been more resilient than he anticipated?
0:02:37 Is our democracy secure?
0:02:39 And where are we going as a country?
0:02:45 This is a conversation about where we are, but it’s also about what might come next.
0:02:49 And the various paths we might take to get there.
0:02:56 Zach Beecham, welcome back to the show.
0:02:58 Hey, Sean.
0:02:59 This is great.
0:03:00 It’s good to see you, buddy.
0:03:09 You are back for what I guess we can call a follow-up to our last chat, which was back in November.
0:03:14 And during that chat, you said a lot of smart and interesting things.
0:03:24 One of the things you said was that Trump is walking into his second term with a pretty clear agenda for what he wanted to do.
0:03:28 And there were three things, like in particular, you listed.
0:03:40 It was mass deportations, tariffs and trade disruption slash warfare, and basically remaking the federal government, right?
0:03:45 Which includes purging critics and taking over the civil service as much as possible, that kind of thing.
0:03:47 Let’s just start there, right?
0:03:50 You know, we’re 100 plus days into the administration.
0:03:51 How are you feeling?
0:03:59 Well, that makes me sound perhaps more prescient than I thought I was, because those are the big themes of the Trump administration, right?
0:04:03 And they’ve pursued them to varying degrees of success.
0:04:18 But it’s very clear, right, that like those three areas that you outlined, aggressive use of immigration enforcement, aggressive use of tariff powers, and aggressive efforts to centralize power in the president’s hands by remaking the federal government.
0:04:25 Like those are the three big stories of the Trump administration so far, I think the three biggest and most defining ones, right?
0:04:30 With the – there being, I think, significant interconnections between all of them.
0:04:52 In a way, I don’t think anyone fully anticipated, and I guess I’ll elaborate on what I mean by that, which is that Trump has pursued his remaking of the government and his exercise of power to a degree and in a manner of lawlessness that I don’t think anyone anticipated.
0:05:01 And all of these different things, right, they all fall under and are all related to this general goal of power centralization, right?
0:05:02 Remaking the federal government, it’s very obvious.
0:05:05 But think about Trump’s use of tariff powers, right?
0:05:13 The way in which he’s done it is by claiming emergency authority when there’s clearly not an emergency, right?
0:05:17 It’s just the emergency is that Trump doesn’t like the way the trade works right now and he wants to change it.
0:05:28 That is a very aggressive interpretation that a court recently smacked down, right, of what the emergency powers given by Congress to the president are.
0:05:34 And if allowed to be unimpeded, they will end up, you know, centralizing a lot of authority in the president’s hands.
0:05:36 And immigration is very similar, right?
0:05:45 All of these amount to, right, all of these different areas, which are the key policy priorities coming in, have become vehicles for a gigantic power grab.
0:05:53 And that is the fundamental story of this administration, is the president saying, I can do whatever I want.
0:05:54 Try and stop me.
0:05:59 Well, now that you’ve congratulated yourself on nailing it, I should at least ask.
0:06:00 I said I didn’t anticipate that.
0:06:05 It said you made me sound Russian and then I undercut myself.
0:06:15 I kid, but seriously, is there anything – I was going to ask, has anything really surprised you up to this point in a good or bad way?
0:06:19 But maybe another way to ask that is, has anything unexpected happened?
0:06:30 I think I was trying to get at that, which is the brazenness of the way in which they have attempted to disregard the law to accomplish this power centralization end.
0:06:31 It was stunning to me.
0:06:39 And one thing I got wrong, if we want to keep doing this, is I wrote a piece saying, you know, my predictions for the Trump administration, and I do think they’ve mostly been right.
0:06:43 But the one that I got wrong is that I said Elon Musk would be less important than it seemed like he would.
0:06:46 And that was just like completely, totally incorrect.
0:06:49 Elon Musk defined this lawlessness.
0:07:08 It’s sort of a defining feature of the Trump era in lots of ways that things seem to be both completely broken and somehow kind of all right at the same time.
0:07:17 And in your newsletter, you know, you wrote that this administration has proven very, very good at breaking things.
0:07:22 What do you think they’re actually breaking this time around?
0:07:24 I think it’s two things, right?
0:07:25 Two related things.
0:07:33 The first is breaking the U.S. government as an entity that’s designed to deliver discrete services, right?
0:07:35 It’s just like a thing that does things.
0:07:38 It is now much worse at doing things, right?
0:07:39 And that’s one thing.
0:07:51 And second thing that’s related to that is breaking the idea that’s been part of the U.S. government since the Pendleton Act, which reformed civil service, right, around the turn of the 20th century.
0:08:12 So for over 100 years, it’s this notion that civil service should be a truly civil service that is not something that you can distribute as spoils to your political allies to govern in accordance with partisan interests, but rather a nonpartisan professionalized system designed to deliver government goods for all of us.
0:08:18 And they’ve really been upfront about thinking that that norm is bad.
0:08:21 And the reason they think it’s bad is that they think it’s a lie, right?
0:08:27 They think that the civil service is shot full of Democrats who just do things for democratic purposes and are basically agents of the deep state.
0:08:29 This is not true, right?
0:08:30 It’s false.
0:08:31 I want to be clear about that.
0:08:33 But that is the stated rationale.
0:08:40 And so the end result, the solution, they think, is, well, if it’s already been politicized by them, we can politicize it too.
0:08:50 And so we staff administrative positions all throughout the federal government with people that they think are politically reliable, right?
0:08:53 And because they’re politically reliable, not because they’re competent.
0:09:01 I mean, I just saw a story this morning about someone appointed to a high-level counterterrorism post who’s a 22-year-old whose work experience was working at a grocery store and as a gardener.
0:09:07 He was an intern at the Heritage Foundation after that, which is a right-wing think tank in D.C.
0:09:15 And now he has a high-level counterterrorism post at the Department of Homeland Security helping coordinate U.S. efforts.
0:09:17 Well, take that DEI, right?
0:09:19 Another W for the meritocracy.
0:09:21 So much winning.
0:09:23 I see stories like that.
0:09:28 And then to even – that’s not even getting into, like, permanent civil service, right?
0:09:29 That’s a political appointment.
0:09:43 But people whose job it is, their careers, are to work on something like public health, who RFK has just shuffled off because he either doesn’t think their positions are important or wants to put some kind of, like, Maha ideologue in that job.
0:09:53 And you just – it becomes much harder for the government to do stuff when the people who know how to do things are being removed for political purposes.
0:09:58 This isn’t just, like, me extrapolating, right, based on, like, sort of first principles.
0:10:03 It’s that we’ve seen this movie before in lots of other countries, right?
0:10:13 People get rid of administrators who know what they’re doing in revolutionary regimes, and they replace them with people who, you know, I don’t know, was, like, a sergeant in the revolutionary army.
0:10:18 And that sergeant has no idea, not to dunk on sergeants in specific.
0:10:26 It’s anyone who’s a low-level or even a high-level military person is not necessarily qualified to administer the EPA, right, or to administer a clean air program.
0:10:30 And that’s – like, we’re doing the equivalent of that, right?
0:10:37 Like, taking revolutionary cadres and installing them in government, regardless of whether or not they know how government works.
0:10:38 And that’s just going to make things worse.
0:10:40 Yeah, that’s bad.
0:10:46 But, look, breaking and broken aren’t exactly the same thing.
0:10:47 So let me ask it this way.
0:10:54 I mean, of all this stuff, you know, what is happening, what might happen, that can’t be repaired with an election victory.
0:11:03 You know, what might a Democratic Congress, a president, or even a serious well-intentioned Republican, for that matter, not be able to rebuild after this?
0:11:06 So that’s a good question.
0:11:09 I’m trying to think through the answer because we don’t know, right?
0:11:12 We don’t – we’ve never been in a position like this before.
0:11:14 And I don’t mean just the United States.
0:11:31 I mean there has never been a wealthy democracy that has had an established and competent governing apparatus that has had it torn down intentionally and replaced, like, getting rid of people who have institutional knowledge and putting in people who do not but are politically reliable, right?
0:11:35 No government like this has experienced something like this.
0:11:38 We’re just way, way, way, way, way outside of the history books.
0:11:43 And so it’s hard for me to say what’s going to happen because it’s so unprecedented.
0:11:46 There are a few things that you can say concretely, right?
0:11:51 So it is very, very hard to restart programs that have been broken.
0:12:00 So when you cut off huge amounts of scientific funding, as they’ve done so far, those research agendas can’t just be restarted four years later, right?
0:12:02 It’s that all of the progress has been lost.
0:12:03 Maybe a sample has decayed.
0:12:06 Maybe they’ve lost contact with the people that they were tracking for the study.
0:12:14 Maybe the researchers had to, due to financial imperatives, move on to something, maybe even go into a different career entirely, right?
0:12:22 And the scientific knowledge that would have been produced as a result of current funding, and there are lots of key areas where scientific funding has been hampered.
0:12:26 For instance, the development of an HIV-AIDS vaccine, you know, like important stuff.
0:12:28 That, you can’t just restart it.
0:12:37 Yeah, I think this in particular is one of those stories, and there are probably several of them, that we’re going to look back on and go, that was a pretty big deal.
0:12:40 That was an underappreciated big deal.
0:12:47 You can’t even predict which ones it’s going to be, right, of these different scientific developments.
0:12:56 It just, it feels like they’re intentionally tearing this apart for no good reason, right?
0:13:09 It’s a, the common phrase that I’m starting to hear now is suicide of a superpower, which ironically is very close to the name of a Pat Buchanan book about the United States under, you know, its previous liberal democratic regime.
0:13:20 And Buchanan was bemoaning the way in which, you know, policies of multiculturalism and open trade degraded what he saw was good about the United States.
0:13:24 And obviously Buchanan is the ideological predecessor of Trump in many ways as a political figure.
0:13:40 And what we’re seeing is that the Buchananite policies being pursued by the administration are the ones that are actually eroding the foundations of American, I mean, American global leadership is putting it too mildly, right?
0:13:54 Like America’s ability to be the engine of global human progress, whatever you think of American foreign policy specifically, its economic dynamism and scientific research have really powered tremendous amounts of,
0:14:05 of global good, of helping the world develop new technologies that have improved human welfare, of keeping people, getting people everywhere richer, right?
0:14:13 It’s like global economies are interconnected and US demand purchasing goods from poor countries has helped bring a lot of people out of poverty.
0:14:32 And like, I’m listing all these things, not because, you know, I think that they’re the only things that matter, but rather to underscore how massive the scope is here of the damage that’s being done and how difficult it is to predict what we’re going to remember in the history of books as like the worst part, right?
0:14:39 We’re, we’re, we’re, we’re, we’re talking about fundamental building blocks of the world in which we live being torn down by, by a, like gigantic toddler.
0:14:40 Yeah.
0:14:43 And a lot of things you, you, you won’t appreciate until they’re gone.
0:14:53 Um, well, you know, me, uh, the audience knows me, I am a pathological optimist and, uh, and you, sir.
0:14:55 Well, I’ve got the right content for you.
0:14:59 Hopefully the audience gets that joke.
0:15:00 Yeah, they will.
0:15:05 We’ve probably done half a dozen episodes on my, on my cynicism that I’m trying to conquer.
0:15:11 Um, but you, sir, recently gave me some reasons to feel better.
0:15:24 And I want to talk about that a little bit, because despite the fact that it often feels like Trump is demolishing everything, um, and he is actually demolishing quite a few things.
0:15:30 But you have argued that he is actually failing on the most important fronts.
0:15:32 So let’s talk about that.
0:15:34 Lay out your case for us.
0:15:35 Sure.
0:15:42 So when I say most important front, uh, when, when you say that, what I meant specifically is American democracy, right?
0:15:48 Is Trump successfully replacing democracy as we know it with some other kind of system?
0:15:50 I think the answer to that question is no.
0:15:53 I think the answer is first of all, that he’s trying.
0:15:54 I think that’s fairly clear.
0:15:56 And we can discuss why I think that’s clear.
0:15:58 Uh, but second, I, I don’t think it’s working.
0:16:06 And I think that’s essential to all of the other issues that we’ve been talking about because, you know, I just said, I don’t know what one can do to repair certain things.
0:16:11 Well, you won’t know until somebody is in a position to actually do that reparation.
0:16:11 Right.
0:16:19 And that means you need to be confident that we’re going to have a fully democratic election in 2028.
0:16:29 And the question is, are Donald Trump’s efforts to centralize power in his own hands successfully undermining the conditions for free and fair elections in the United States?
0:16:31 The answer so far, I think, is no.
0:16:36 It’s not that he’s not trying to do that, right?
0:16:47 It’s the, the attacks on, uh, universities, the efforts to wield immigration policy against people who criticize Israel for some reason, not even the Trump administration, but Israel.
0:16:57 Uh, these are the efforts to, uh, intimidate media, you know, punishing the Associated Press for, uh, not calling the Gulf of Mexico Gulf of America.
0:17:12 Uh, these are all examples of the kinds of policies that you see in countries like Hungary or India or Israel, where the leader has been hell-bent on trying to cement their own ability to rule indefinitely to varying degrees of success.
0:17:22 But what’s interesting about the Trump versions of these policies is they are, uh, in the words of a political scientist I spoke to, the stupidest version of this imaginable, right?
0:17:24 They are doing it badly, right?
0:17:38 Because it is one thing to say, we’re going to make it hard for the U.S. government to conduct key administrative functions, be it funding scientific research or, you know, managing the health of our rivers and other pollution-related things.
0:17:46 Or even the, the basic competence of the U.S. military, which Pete Hegseth seems to be, uh, very busily, very busy destroying for basically cultural war purposes.
0:17:58 Um, but it’s actually an entirely different thing to build an effective system for repressing dissent and controlling the outcome of elections.
0:18:06 Right, that’s building, right, that’s building, that’s an affirmative project, and you need to create state institutions and policies that deliver that particular outcome.
0:18:08 So you can’t just do vandalism there, right?
0:18:18 You need to break some elements of the democratic political system, uh, and replace them with ways of imposing your will on the voters.
0:18:21 And they’ve not done that very well.
0:18:28 To imply or say that he’s failing or losing is to suggest that he’s not achieving his goal.
0:18:29 Right.
0:18:32 Do you feel like you have a clear sense of what that goal is?
0:18:35 I mean, do you, do you really think it’s regime change?
0:18:39 Yeah, I think it’s full consolidation of power in his own hands.
0:18:50 It’s the ability to act unfettered, uh, and the ability to control and corral the opposition such that they don’t present a meaningful threat to his personal exercise of power.
0:18:51 Right.
0:18:55 I think that, and the opposition here is broadly construed, right?
0:18:57 It’s not just the democratic party.
0:19:00 It’s the press who he hates and sees as an enemy.
0:19:02 It’s, uh, cultural liberals.
0:19:07 I mean, he recently called for an investigation into Bruce Springsteen and his political activities for no reason.
0:19:08 There’s nothing.
0:19:11 Springsteen has done nothing that merits investigation.
0:19:11 Yeah.
0:19:13 Yeah.
0:19:13 Go check it out.
0:19:14 Why is he going after Bruce?
0:19:15 What did, what did Bruce do?
0:19:20 He criticized Trump or something like that, or maybe he worked with the democratic party on a fundraiser.
0:19:22 I forget the exact specifics of it.
0:19:29 Um, but I mean, this is, this is like really, truly not so authoritarian stuff.
0:19:32 Just randomly picking somebody who is aligned with the opposition and targeting them.
0:19:40 It’s exactly the way that an authoritarian leader might try to assert power, making an example out of somebody who’s a prominent dissenter.
0:19:51 Uh, and he just, he really clearly, like judging not, again, not just from statements, though they matter, but from actions, right?
0:19:55 From the way in which he has attempted to exercise power without fetters, right?
0:20:02 To do things that are in direct contradiction of the laws, wants to be able to do whatever he wants, right?
0:20:04 And wants to be able to change all sorts of policies.
0:20:10 I mean, he’s talked quite a lot about changing election law, even though Trump doesn’t have election interests, like he can’t run again.
0:20:12 Although maybe he would, right?
0:20:14 Maybe in this, he’s, he’s talked about that too, right?
0:20:18 And the way that he’s governed unlawfully means that all bets are off.
0:20:25 So maybe this stuff about changing the electoral system to eliminate the non-existent fraud in 2020, right?
0:20:34 Which is to say changing the electoral system to bet in ways that benefits Republicans and makes it easier, would make it easier for Donald Trump to win again, were he to run in 2028.
0:20:36 Which I get to, I don’t think is going to happen.
0:20:41 I think we, for, this is sort of the premise of this conversation, that I don’t think he’s going to be able to get what he wants.
0:20:46 But what he wants has been spelled out in multiple different ways through word and deed.
0:20:53 And it amounts to, not like a systematic plan, which I think is part of the problem for Trump, actually.
0:21:01 He doesn’t have a vision for like what the Trump regime looks like, what its ideological scaffolding is, what its bureaucratic offices are.
0:21:03 The man doesn’t think like that, right?
0:21:09 But what he does think is, I want to do what I want, and I want to crush the people who have opposed me.
0:21:11 I want to get revenge on all the people who have hurt me.
0:21:17 And that would produce, if it were successful, an authoritarian political system.
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0:25:40 One of the red lines in a constitutional system like ours has always been refusing to obey the courts.
0:25:47 And, you know, for all the bluster, it does appear that they are doing that for the most part, right?
0:25:54 And something you pointed out in one of your pieces is that, you know, there’s over 200 lawsuits against various Trump policies.
0:26:00 And, you know, a good deal of them have been, you know, rejected or temporarily paused.
0:26:06 So the courts do seem to be holding up, you know, and for all the fretting about the Supreme Court in particular.
0:26:10 And certainly I was one of the people making noises about that.
0:26:19 Right now, though, in this moment, it does seem like they are not rolling over for Trump in the ways we might have anticipated.
0:26:22 And these are reasons to be hopeful.
0:26:26 I think the courts are critical to the entire picture, right?
0:26:31 Because they are, in a system like ours, they’re the enforcement mechanism for laws.
0:26:34 And by enforcement mechanism, I don’t mean like they implement the laws.
0:26:37 I mean they’re the ones that ensure the rest of the system is complying with them.
0:26:43 But, as you suggested, court authority only comes from willingness to obey, right?
0:26:47 It’s essentially a norms or principle-based thing.
0:26:49 Or, if you want to put it a little further, a fear-based thing.
0:26:52 What are the fears of crossing the courts, right?
0:26:52 What would happen?
0:26:59 How would the rest of the system and the mass public react if you just declared court authority null and void?
0:27:06 And there are, again, there are clear cases of them trying to get around what the court is doing that I think constitute disobedience.
0:27:10 They’re not most of the cases, right?
0:27:12 If you look at most instances.
0:27:25 So, one micro-level example is the U.S. Institute of Peace, which Doge shuttered and then used as like a hangout headquarters they’re building at this like august U.S. government-sponsored foreign policy think tank.
0:27:31 Like these 20-something dudes were hanging out and smoking weed and by that I don’t just mean like metaphorically.
0:27:38 I mean that when people are cleaning it up, they actually found bags of weed lying around in the U.S. IP offices.
0:27:45 But they were cleaning it up because a court ruled that shuttering U.S. IP was unlawful and the Doge bros had to go find somewhere else to get high.
0:27:59 And like that, to me, is an encapsulation both of the ridiculousness of the situation, but also the ways in which like that ridiculous incompetence is not working for them.
0:28:03 The ridiculousness is the thing.
0:28:05 Well, not the thing, but a thing.
0:28:12 And part of the problem, and it is kind of hard to articulate, is this line between appearance and reality with Trump.
0:28:19 You know, Trump is the master at appearing to do things, which is not the same thing as actually doing things.
0:28:27 And I think he really just wants to run a good television show and doesn’t really care all that much about anything else.
0:28:35 And that vacuousness has been a gift to the country because it’s probably prevented him from doing as much damage as he could if he was a serious operator.
0:28:45 And I don’t know, you may disagree with this, but to me, Trump isn’t really succeeding all that much in legislative or material terms because I don’t really think that’s his measure at all.
0:28:50 I think he thinks he’s succeeding if we’re talking about him and he’s making money.
0:28:55 And I think his gamble is that most people aren’t really aren’t really tracking things.
0:28:57 It’s hard to do that, even if it’s your job.
0:29:05 So he just stages spectacles and constantly performs the role of a big transformative president doing big transformative things.
0:29:08 But so much of it really is just that, a performance.
0:29:11 And it’s kind of hard to untangle all of it.
0:29:15 And he’s like the most aggressively postmodern president I could imagine.
0:29:16 True, true.
0:29:18 Anyway, that was a lot of words.
0:29:29 No, no, it’s, I find it fascinating in the sense that the man’s whole shtick can be boiled down to the apprentice, right?
0:29:40 And this isn’t just, I have this on the brain because I read a study today that showed that the perceptions of Trump based on apprentice viewing was like meaningful.
0:29:50 So the people who were more in the areas where there was like higher apprentice viewership due to this random design had a higher assessment of Trump’s competence.
0:30:02 And here’s the kicker, he did better in those places in the Republican primary than in the ones that were demographically similar but didn’t have that exposure to the apprentice.
0:30:08 The apprentice, if you didn’t watch it, you know, it’s Trump being in charge of all these business people and he says, you’re fired.
0:30:17 And when he thinks somebody is doing a bad job and generally is treated by everyone on the show as a master businessman, except he wasn’t, right?
0:30:31 We know from like a number of investigative looks into his business practices that he really was not very good at the actual nuts and bolts of making money, right?
0:30:44 He started out with a lot of money and by one assessment, he probably wouldn’t have before, before his time in politics, have made more money than he would have had he just like plowed his money into the stock market that he got from his dad when he started, right?
0:30:45 Basically a break even for all shenanigans.
0:30:50 At one point he managed to bankrupt a casino, which I just like, I don’t even know how you do that, right?
0:30:52 The house always wins unless the house is Donald Trump.
0:31:01 The point is the apprentice created this persona of who he was, aggressive competence, a business genius, respected by everybody.
0:31:09 And that stuck with a lot of people and was actually materially significant in terms of his rise to power, right?
0:31:11 We were not just speculating about this anymore.
0:31:13 We have cold hard evidence that it was.
0:31:17 And that has been the trick throughout his time in public.
0:31:21 This is a long-winded way of saying, I think you’re right about this.
0:31:23 I think that there is a lot of performance.
0:31:34 And saying what is performance and what is actual, you know, really important developments is an essential task for those of us whose job it is to like interpret the world for everybody else.
0:31:41 Yeah, I think that performative aspect actually does help obscure some of the very real dangerous shit that he’s doing.
0:31:51 But let me just get back on the tracks here a little bit, because I think the key point up to this part of the conversation is that we’re holding the line, as it were.
0:31:55 But American democracy is by no means safe, right?
0:31:57 The cracks are there and they’ve been there for a long time.
0:32:04 And Trump has done at least one service in really exposing them, which I think leads to a question without a clear answer.
0:32:07 What kind of regime are we actually living in right now?
0:32:18 This is still a democracy, but are we close to some kind of hybrid system with elements of democracy and authoritarianism or what political scientists sometimes call competitive authoritarianism?
0:32:26 Yeah, so that is a term that I think is really useful, and it’s worth focusing on to try to understand what it means, right?
0:32:33 It’s coined by Stephen Levitsky and Lucan Way, two leading political scientists who focus on comparative democracy.
0:32:49 And they defined a competitive authoritarian system as one that is, they have free elections in the sense that they aren’t rigged, like the ballot boxes and stuff, but they’re not taking place on fair grounds, right?
0:32:58 The playing field is tilted in the incumbent party’s direction so heavily that it’s very difficult for the opposition to compete meaningfully.
0:33:18 So elections are not rigged, but they also aren’t really, truly elections that give voters a choice because so many voters are for a variety of reasons, you know, government control over the media, gerrymandering, campaign finance rules that make it difficult for the opposition to fundraise, you know, go on down the list, right?
0:33:27 Like a variety of different things that erode what one might call the background conditions under which elections operate fairly, right?
0:33:42 So that’s, I think, it’s the main model for how you take a country that was once a democracy and turn it into an authoritarian state in modern times, because it gets around the problem of having to declare, you know, well, we’re just abolishing elections.
0:33:43 Democracy doesn’t matter.
0:33:44 That’s not very popular anymore.
0:33:47 People who live in democracies generally want to keep democracy.
0:33:53 And so you need to be able to convince people that all you’re doing is just democratic reform, right?
0:33:55 And that is very much the Trump rhetoric.
0:33:57 You know, we’re getting, we’re rooting out the deep state.
0:34:00 We’re dealing with the fraud in 2020, right?
0:34:05 We’re making so the elites are no longer controlling you, the people, right?
0:34:06 This is their rhetoric.
0:34:08 It’s their policy aim.
0:34:09 It’s the best way to understand what they’re trying to do.
0:34:19 So, like, we are in a democratic system in the sense that elections still matter, and we still have the background conditions that are essential for them to be fair.
0:34:34 You know, free and fair media, rule of law, sort of, and, you know, certainly nonpartisan local election administration still exists in a lot of places, and, I mean, I think generally, right?
0:34:49 There’s no allegations of fraud in the 2024 election that were meaningful, but we are currently being governed under an authoritarian logic, by which I mean the president is acting as if the rule of law is not real,
0:34:55 is acting as if there are no constraints, acting as if he is free to attack the background conditions that make democracy fair.
0:34:57 So, it is a kind of hybrid system.
0:35:07 It’s that we have, we are a democracy, but the president is just ignoring the things or trying to ignore the things that keep a democracy a democracy.
0:35:18 And so, the question is whether that logic, that authoritarian governing logic, is capable of actually breaking through and making systemic changes to those background conditions.
0:35:27 And when I say he’s failing, I think that’s what I mean, right, is so far acting like an authoritarian is not yielding authoritarian dividends, but it’s complicated.
0:35:37 One scary thing about democratic backsliding is how banal it can be, you know, it’s not necessarily fireworks and chaos.
0:35:46 You know, sometimes it’s slow and steady and piecemeal, and life can seem very normal, even though the political ground has already shifted beneath your feet.
0:36:03 You know, and America is unique for a thousand different reasons, but how does our situation compare to a place like Hungary, where you’ve done some great reporting, and Hungary is sort of the clearest example, or the default example, of what a modern, illiberal democracy can look like?
0:36:06 To me, to me, it’s the textbook case of success, right?
0:36:16 Like, when an authoritarian takeover of a democracy works, right, it looks a lot like what happened in Hungary between 2010 and today.
0:36:20 And, you know, there are some parallels, right?
0:36:35 One of them is that they did a lot of things really early on that were designed to cement power in Orban’s hands and make it difficult, Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the Hungarian leader, and make it difficult for the opposition to object to future moves, right?
0:36:40 And that has some parallels, significant ones, with the Doge power grabs early in Trump’s administration.
0:36:46 But there are a number of important dissimilarities between the two cases, right?
0:36:51 In fact, there are ways in which Trump didn’t properly learn the lessons of Hungary.
0:37:00 And one of them, an obvious one, is that Trump doesn’t have a legislative majority large enough to rewrite the Constitution, right, which was essential to Orban’s strategy for taking power.
0:37:02 And we have nothing like that in the U.S.
0:37:05 And without that, he gets into a lot of trouble with the courts.
0:37:08 That wasn’t a problem in the same way for Hungary, right?
0:37:12 We don’t – I mean, amending the U.S. Constitution is basically impossible, which is normally a bad thing.
0:37:17 But in this case, it’s a pretty effective bulwark against authoritarian takeovers.
0:37:30 But the second thing, which I think ties in directly to what you were saying, is that Trump ignored the central importance of making things feel normal, right?
0:37:33 Yeah, like daily life in the U.S. is still pretty normal.
0:37:40 But politically, he hasn’t let any of these changes fly under the radar, right?
0:37:45 They are often very bombastic, done publicly and loudly, right?
0:37:57 Like when they sent those people to El Salvador, there was a video that the Salvadoran government put out of people taken from the United States in chains, getting their heads shaven and thrown into a gulag.
0:38:00 And it’s like they aren’t trying to hide what they’re doing, right?
0:38:06 Which is the way that authoritarians really succeed in modern politics, right?
0:38:13 As they do it subtly, so subtly that it won’t generate resistance from the press, from the courts, from the opposition parties.
0:38:16 That they don’t even know where to start, or from the public.
0:38:27 And there has been significant mass public resistance by one metric, more protest events, individual protest events, than there were during Trump’s first term, right?
0:38:32 At this point in time, which when everyone was talking about the hashtag resistance and stuff like that.
0:38:50 So by being so brazen in their lawbreaking, rather than trying to disguise what they’re doing through clever PR campaigns, embedding it in complex bureaucratic rulings that are difficult for anybody to understand.
0:38:54 No, they just like yell this stuff, and say what they want to do, right?
0:38:56 We’re going to destroy Harvard, right?
0:38:58 We’re going to take it over, right?
0:39:00 Literally, that’s one of the demands they issued to Harvard, right?
0:39:08 Is to put yourself in, functionally, the government’s control until we’re satisfied that you’ve made yourself into whatever ideological outpost we want you to be.
0:39:10 And it’s just like, this is all so dumb.
0:39:15 It’s exactly the wrong way to go about accomplishing your ends.
0:39:18 Yeah, but this speaks to my point earlier, right?
0:39:23 One difference with Orbán is he’s not running a television show, whereas Trump is.
0:39:29 And so there’s that incessant need to perform the thing and do the spectacle.
0:39:33 And I think that can get in the way of, you know, it’s incompatible with low-key operating.
0:39:35 You know what I mean?
0:39:40 Subtlety doesn’t work on television or social media, for that matter.
0:39:47 It’s like he wants to be an authoritarian, but doesn’t have a plan for how to do it in a systematic way, like the Hungarians did.
0:39:57 We have Project 2025, but a lot of that stuff, when it’s been implemented, has been done very loudly and not in an especially subtle fashion, right?
0:40:05 And in some ways, Trump has been more aggressive in counterproductive ways than what was listed in that document, which is a kind of wild thing to think about.
0:40:14 For all these reasons, do you think now the main cleavage in American politics is between liberalism and illiberalism?
0:40:19 I mean, is this the political fight that Trump has forced on the country?
0:40:26 Yeah, I mean, it is the defining fight of our era, right, between a defensive liberal democracy and its opposition.
0:40:30 Whether the public sees it that way is a more complicated story.
0:40:39 Because I think that modern authoritarian movements operate best when their followers believe that they actually are fighting for democracy.
0:40:46 And I think, sincerely, that’s what a lot of Republican primary and MAGA voters believe.
0:40:50 They believe that they’re saving the American system of government from an elite liberal plot.
0:41:02 And they don’t believe that as a, you know, comfortable fiction to hide that they’re a lie that they’re telling themselves when they know better.
0:41:08 No, it’s their sincere and deep belief, as I’m sure, Sean, that you can testify to having conversations with people like this.
0:41:10 I just, I don’t think it’s a front.
0:41:19 And I think that if you don’t understand that, then you don’t really grasp why this is such a complex and difficult fight.
0:41:26 So much less straightforward than, you know, something like rallying the American public against Nazism was.
0:41:34 There are people around Trump, people like Steve Bannon, and you’ve reported on this, who point to Hungary as a model.
0:41:35 Yes.
0:41:37 For America.
0:41:40 So it is not as though we are reaching here, right?
0:41:40 No.
0:41:45 These are comparisons that the people in that orbit are self-consciously making.
0:41:50 A thing that’s important, I think, is that a lot of these people say that Hungary isn’t an authoritarian state.
0:41:52 I think some of them are lying about it.
0:41:55 I think some of them have convinced themselves that this is true.
0:41:59 But, I mean, it very clearly is, right?
0:42:01 There’s no debating that at this point.
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0:44:11 All of this has been leading to the final thing I wanted to talk to you about,
0:44:16 which is the appeal of Trumpism and the story.
0:44:19 The right, the American right, is selling right now.
0:44:25 And the struggles of the left to undercut that with its own story.
0:44:30 Why do you think the right seems to be winning the narrative battle right now,
0:44:31 especially with younger people?
0:44:38 So, I think what Trump has done narratively,
0:44:40 and I want to distinguish this from electorally, right?
0:44:46 Because swing voters are not really the story of the Trump movement,
0:44:48 of why Trump managed to become so powerful,
0:44:51 become in charge of one of our two major political parties,
0:44:56 to come back from the catastrophic, seemingly political death,
0:44:59 inflicted on him after January 6th, right?
0:45:00 That’s a much deeper story.
0:45:02 And it’s about this narrative thing that you’re mentioning, right?
0:45:06 His ability to connect with people and create a base,
0:45:10 a cadre so powerful that they can assert their will
0:45:12 on a Republican party that wanted to get rid of them.
0:45:17 And that story that Trump grasps at a very fundamental level,
0:45:23 that what drives people who are deeply engaged with politics today
0:45:26 is a story about who we are and who belongs,
0:45:28 what our future is, and how it should relate to our past.
0:45:37 This reactionary vision saying that social liberalism has gone too far
0:45:40 and has wrecked what made America great,
0:45:43 and that the United States need to be restored to its former glory
0:45:47 at an unspecified time by building a political community
0:45:54 that returns to more quote-unquote traditional ways of living,
0:45:57 or that reverses some of the changes that were made
0:45:59 in the late 20th century.
0:46:01 That is the story that’s being told.
0:46:04 It’s building community through a shared sense
0:46:05 that something has gone wrong.
0:46:08 And you wrote a piece recently sort of making the case
0:46:10 that the left is missing some of this
0:46:12 because it is attached to a model of politics
0:46:17 that focuses on economic self-interest,
0:46:18 material conditions like that.
0:46:22 And look, I don’t know what it is with the left,
0:46:23 but as I’ve gotten older,
0:46:25 I think I’ve just become more aware
0:46:29 of the spiritual and psychological needs of human beings
0:46:31 and how we will look to satisfy those needs,
0:46:33 whether it’s in conventional religions
0:46:35 or in political ideologies,
0:46:37 which in many ways are secular religions.
0:46:42 But I think we agree that you just can’t have a model of politics
0:46:44 that doesn’t center these things.
0:46:44 And if you do,
0:46:47 you will fail to understand what animates people
0:46:48 at the deepest level,
0:46:51 and you will lose to people who do understand this.
0:46:53 And I feel like that’s what’s happening now.
0:46:54 I think that’s right.
0:46:55 And I think that’s a big problem
0:46:57 with the modern socialist left in particular.
0:47:00 I think they’re, as a matter of ideology,
0:47:04 deeply wedded to a materialist view of human motivation,
0:47:05 right?
0:47:07 A way of basically,
0:47:09 not a rejection of what you just said exactly,
0:47:11 but a sense that all of it is,
0:47:13 in some important way,
0:47:14 secondary to,
0:47:16 or in the most extreme cases,
0:47:20 downstream from people’s material interests
0:47:23 and their material experiences.
0:47:25 I mean, there are ways in which that’s true, right?
0:47:26 Like in a war zone,
0:47:29 people are primarily thinking about survival.
0:47:32 But the conditions of life
0:47:35 in a modern advanced democracy aren’t a war zone, right?
0:47:36 For most people,
0:47:38 they’re nothing like it, right?
0:47:40 It’s a question of
0:47:42 how to deal with the fact
0:47:46 that we live in a time of unprecedented prosperity
0:47:47 relative to most of human history,
0:47:49 one that still has real
0:47:50 and meaningful material struggles for people.
0:47:52 I don’t mean to be denying that, right?
0:47:54 But we live in a politics,
0:47:55 a political world,
0:47:58 where a lot of conflict is post-material, right?
0:47:59 It’s about these questions
0:48:00 of meaning, belonging, identity
0:48:03 that I think liberalism
0:48:06 is like theoretically well-equipped to address.
0:48:06 Like there are,
0:48:09 these have been major concerns of liberal theory,
0:48:11 but they’re not ones in which we have
0:48:14 a concrete application of said ideas
0:48:16 that makes sense for today’s politics.
0:48:18 We have liberal philosophy.
0:48:20 We have liberal politics.
0:48:21 What we don’t have is a liberal ideology,
0:48:24 something that connects these philosophical ideas
0:48:25 into a narrative,
0:48:26 shapes into a narrative
0:48:28 that connects to everyday experiences
0:48:30 that people have.
0:48:32 I think there’s a huge opportunity there
0:48:33 for somebody,
0:48:34 maybe some groups of people
0:48:36 to try to figure out what that looks like.
0:48:37 I agree.
0:48:41 We’ve covered a lot of ground here.
0:48:45 Is there anything else you want to say?
0:48:47 Anything you want to leave people with?
0:48:48 Anything?
0:48:50 Yeah, anything at all?
0:48:52 I mean, I guess the thing
0:48:53 that I really want to emphasize
0:48:55 in our sort of long arc conversation
0:48:56 about the Trump administration
0:49:00 is like nothing is foretold.
0:49:03 Nothing is predestined one way or another.
0:49:05 Like when I say Trump is failing,
0:49:07 I mean, Trump is failing right now.
0:49:09 It is very possible
0:49:10 that he could start succeeding.
0:49:12 Conversely, when I say Trump
0:49:12 is breaking the government,
0:49:15 it means he is breaking the government right now.
0:49:16 It is very possible
0:49:18 that given a series of court rulings
0:49:19 or effective political activism
0:49:20 or legislation,
0:49:23 that that destruction
0:49:25 could be reversed in a timely fashion
0:49:28 or stopped from proceeding further.
0:49:30 And that means that
0:49:32 no one should be fatalistic
0:49:34 or overly optimistic.
0:49:35 You should feel,
0:49:38 if I can tell anyone how to feel,
0:49:39 you should feel galvanized.
0:49:42 Like, if you care
0:49:43 about the future of American democracy
0:49:44 and its survival,
0:49:46 if you care about the ability
0:49:47 of the United States
0:49:49 to govern itself
0:49:50 in an effective fashion,
0:49:51 like now is the time
0:49:52 to go do something about that.
0:49:53 Zach Beecham,
0:49:54 as always,
0:49:55 a pleasure, my friend.
0:49:56 Thanks for coming in.
0:49:57 Sean, this is great.
0:49:59 I always love doing your show.
0:50:07 All right.
0:50:08 I hope you enjoyed this episode.
0:50:09 As always,
0:50:11 we want to know what you think.
0:50:13 We’ve received some really good messages
0:50:14 in recent weeks.
0:50:15 They mean a lot.
0:50:16 We read them all.
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0:50:22 at thegrayareaatvox.com
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0:50:37 This episode was produced
0:50:38 by Beth Morrissey,
0:50:39 edited by Jorge Just,
0:50:42 engineered by Christian Ayala,
0:50:44 fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch,
0:50:45 and Alex Overington
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0:50:48 New episodes of The Gray Area
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We’re nearly six months into Donald Trump’s second term as president, and a lot of us are still trying to figure out what that actually means. Not just politically. But culturally. What kind of country are we living in? And what kind of future are we heading toward?
In today’s episode, Sean and Vox senior correspondent Zack Beauchamp try to answer these difficult questions. They discuss Trump’s successes and failures, how he appeals to his supporters, and how the left can respond to the Trump administration.
Host: Sean Illing (@SeanIlling)
Guest: Zack Beauchamp, Vox senior correspondent and the author of the On the Right newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Listen to Sean’s previous interview with Zack about the state of right-wing politics here.
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