Photo by Max Litek
4.03 | 09.15.20
Donald Trump will not be president forever. Whether he leaves office in 2021 or 2025; whether he leaves peacefully or not; whether he’s replaced by a Democratic president or a Republican one—he will leave. And then the country will face the immense task of restoring democratic norms and facing up to the failings that allowed a populist, white-nationalist demagogue like Trump to reach office in the first place.
In this episode, with help from University of Chicago political scientist Will Howell, we look at the leading explanations for Trump’s rise and the competing ideas about ways to move forward after Trump. (Howell, along with Stanford political scientist Terry Moe, is the author of the new book Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy from the University of Chicago Press; he’s also a co-host of the excellent Not Another Politics Podcast from the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.)
Assuming Joseph R. Biden wins in November 2020—which isn’t a safe assumption, of course—should the next administration focus on structural reforms to make government more effective, so that Washington can then fix people’s real problems and take the oxygen out of populist anger? Or should it push forward with a program of cultural transformation that recognizes, and tries to root out, the deep strains of racism, xenophobia, and nihilism that fuel Trumpism and today’s Republican party?
It turns out (unsurprisingly) that your preferred prescription depends on your precise diagnosis of the country’s ills. Howell makes a strong argument for a reformist approach that puts good government and pro-social policies first. Other scholars fear that a deeper reckoning with Americans’ illiberal leanings will be required. As you’ll hear in the episode, I’m still of two minds. But I also hope there’s a middle way.
Mentioned In This Episode
Soonish Episode 4.02, Unpeaceful Transition of Power
William Howell and Terry Moe, Relic: How Our Constitution Undermines Effective Government, and Why We Need a More Powerful Presidency (Basic Books, 2016)
Wiliam Howell and Terry Moe, Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2020)
Jason Stanley on the 'ten pillars of fascist politics' and media coverage of federal forces in Portland, Oregon, Reliable Sources with Brian Stelter, July 24, 2020
Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (Random House, 2018)
American Fascism, Then and Now, Talking Politics, June 18, 2020
Sarah Churchwell, American Fascism: It Has Happened Here, New York Review of Books, June 22, 2020
Stuart Stevens, It Was All A Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump (Knopf, 2020)
Ezra Klein, A devastating indictment of the Republican party from a GOP insider, Vox, August 10, 2020
George Packer, America’s Plastic Hour Is Upon Us, The Atlantic, October 2020
Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Harvard University Press, 1999)
Mark Chrisler, Apocalypse Now and Then, The Constant, August 11, 2020
Additional Reading and Listening
Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith, After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency
The Lawfare Podcast: Goldsmith and Bauer on ‘After Trump’, Lawfare, September 18, 2020
Not Another Politics Podcast, co-hosted by Will Howell at the Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago
Jamelle Bouie, Trump’s Perverse Campaign Strategy, The New York Times, September 15, 2020
William Howell and Terry Moe, How a stronger presidency could lead to more effective government, The Washington Post, September 14, 2020
Paul Krugman, The G.O.P. Plot to Sabotage 2021, The New York Times, September 14, 2020
Robin Wright, Is America a Myth?, The New Yorker, September 8, 2020
Katrin Bennhold, Trump Emerges as Inspiration for Germany’s Far Right, The New York Times, September 7, 2020
Ibram X. Kendi, Is This the Beginning of the End of American Racism?, The Atlantic, September 2020
Timothy Snyder, Trump thinks he’ll be better off as things get worse, The Washington Post, September 7, 2020
Amanda Taub, The rise of American authoritarianism, Vox, March 1, 2016
Chapter Guide
00:00 Content Warning
00:16 Soonish Opening Theme
00:30 Donald Trump Barrage Montage
01:13 What Is Donald Trump?
02:36 Never Another Trump
04:22 Disaster Response
05:07 Introducing Will Howell
07:30 Connecting Back to “Relic” and our Failing Constitution”
09:23 Defining Populism and its Harms
11:20 Once and Future Populist Demagogues
13:19 The Conditions for Populism, and How to Change Them
15:59 Institutional Reform or Policy Reform?
17:58 Redesigning the US Presidency
19:31 The F Word (Fascism)
20:13 Jason Stanley on Fascist Movements
21:09 Sarah Churchwell: “This Is What American Fascism Looks Like”
22:12 The Party of White Grievance
23:48 Will Howell Responds: Forces Working in Tandem
26:43 The Reformist Left and the Cultural Left
28:01 A Middle Way
28:45 Structural Reform or Detrumpification? Priorities for the Next Administration
31:31 Best-Case Scenario
33:33 End Credits and Acknowledgements
35:12 Recommendation: The Constant
Notes
The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.
Additional music is from Titlecard Music and Sound.
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Trump doll photo by Max Litek, shared on Unsplash. Thanks Max!
Full Transcript
Wade Roush: A quick heads up: there’s some crude language in this episode. But it’s nothing you haven’t heard from the President of the United States.
Audio montage: We can have the future we want, but we have to work for it.
Wade Roush: You’re listening to Soonish. I’m Wade Roush.
Audio montage of Donald Trump:
You know, you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever…
I don’t know what I said, I don’t remember…
And then we fell in love. No, really! He wrote me beautiful letters…
You want to see a bird graveyard? Go under a windmill someday…
Russia, Russia, Russia…
It was a total witch hunt…
Just so you know, the call was perfect…
Yeah, no, I don’t take responsibility at all…
You can test too much, you do know that?...
People think that goes away in April, with the heat….
You gotta clean your floors, you gotta clean your forests…
I’m a very stable genius…
I would give myself an A plus…
Can you believe I’m a politician?...
It was all bullshit.
Wade Roush: What is Donald Trump?
I mean, we know he’s an insatiable narcissist and a serial liar. We know he sucks up to Vladimir Putin and cheats at golf and hates dogs, and that he thinks exercise is bad because it drains the body’s finite supply of energy.
What I’m asking is, how should we classify Donald Trump as a political animal? He’s not really a Republican, although he has managed to take over that party and reshape it in his image. He’s definitely not a Democrat, although that was his party affiliation for a while back during the George W. Bush years.
So, is Trump a populist? A nationalist? An authoritarian? Or is he something even darker, like a fascist and a wanna-be dictator?
The real answer might be some mix of all of these. And in one sense it won’t matter which label the historians ultimately confer, since it won’t turn back the clock on the Trump years and their sickening history of lies and graft and nepotism, the attacks on the free press, the meddling by foreign governments, the coddling up to autocrats, the stonewalling of Congressional inquiries, the openly racist language, the violent assaults against peaceful protesters, and the bungled response to a pandemic that’s killed nearly 200,000 Americans.
But in another sense we do need to talk about exactly what kind of threat Trump and Trumpism represent. Because I think the answer will help determine what happens after the election.
In this season of the podcast I’ve been talking less about our technological future and instead bringing you a series of conversations engaging in what you might call political futurism. In the episode right before this one, legal scholar Lawrence Douglas gave us an alarmingly long list of the ways Trump and his forces could try to hang on to power this fall by exploiting the structural weaknesses in our election system. So today I’m gonna go in the other direction and make some crazy-optimistic assumptions. Namely, that Joe Biden is eventually declared the winner. That Trump yields power, whether peacefully or not. And that we finally have a sane and rational person sitting behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.
The question I’m going to look at, with help from a political scientist named Will Howell, is this: what could the next president do to make sure that there’s never another Donald Trump in our future?
Because, let’s face it, even if Biden beats Trump and Democrats retake the Senate, it won’t magically cure the polarization and resentment that are tearing this country apart. In fact it might make them worse.
Unless we take deliberate action, Trumpism as a movement could outlive Donald Trump’s presidency and just take on a new face. That’s why the country’s future depends on fixing the problems that Trump exploited to gain power.
But which problems?
Maybe you think Trump won in 2016 by tapping into economic anxiety in the working class. People felt left behind by a changing economy and alienated from their own democracy, so they voted for a disrupter. If that’s your point of view, then your first priority might be fixing the failures of government that left people feeling that way.
Or maybe you think Trumpism is something more sinister—that it draws energy from white nationalism, or even that it’s a new variety of fascism. In that case you’d probably want to work on ways to discredit Trump and deradicalize his supporters.
Here’s why we need to talk about this now, before the election. The way I see it, Trump’s presidency has been an ongoing disaster for our democracy, one as damaging in its own way as any storm or pandemic or act of terrorism.
And like any major disaster, this one is going to require a coordinated response, to make sure that our democracy survives and gets back on its feet. If we flub the response, like we did with 9/11 and Katrina and the coronavirus, then next time around we may not have a nation left to clean up.
So we need to do some serious disaster response planning right now. And that starts with understanding the actual nature of the disaster and the man behind it.
I knew Will Howell could help us pin that down. He’s teaches at the University of Chicago and he and his writing partner, a Stanford political scientist named Terry Moe, have written two very important books together.
The first one is called Relic. It came out in 2016 and it looks at all the reasons why the design of our government, as laid out in the Constitution in the late eighteenth century, is keeping us from solving the highly complex problems we face in the twenty-first century.
And this year Howell and Moe published a sequel of sorts called Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy. The new book shows how our flawed constitution set us up for failures so big they left an opening for someone like Trump.
And it talks about what kinds of changes we could make to stop the damage and start building back.
I’ve been reading a ton of books lately about how we got to this moment and what we can do about it, and this one was so blunt and lucid and smart that I felt like I had to call up Howell and go deeper.
Wade Roush: Will Howell, thanks so much for joining me on Soonish.
Will Howell: Thanks for having me, it’s a pleasure.
Wade Roush: How would you summarize the book for the benefit of a non-political scientist, you know, a non-expert who needs to know more about the current situation?
Will Howell: Sure. So the book starts with the recognition that our democracy is under threat. The norms and practices, beliefs that kind of provide a foundation of our democracy are corroding. They're under attack. And and it tries to take stock of why that is and where it comes from. And what we want to say is, is that, look, the most immediate embodiment, embodiment of that threat is Donald Trump. But that what we ought to be thinking about Donald Trump is less as him as a central actor and more as him as a symptom of something much larger, which is the rise of populism in American politics. And the book take stock of where populism comes from. In particular, it focuses on the ways in which ineffective government, a failure of the government to solve problems that our country has faced for a long time, lays the groundwork for an outsider like Trump to come forward and provide these sweeping indictments of American politics that are kind of wholesale in orientation. They're about how everything is rigged, everything is broken, and that that provides a pretext then for attacking democracy. Because the system, as an anti-system candidate, is a democracy.
Wade Roush: Ok, so the failure of our government to act effectively on behalf of the majority of citizens and voters is rooted in some deep structural problems that you talked about at much greater length in your in one of your previous books.
Will Howell: The previous book that Terry Moe and I wrote together, which came out about four years ago, called Relic, points out that our government is not especially good at solving problems. And that's true by design. It's look, there are lots of contributors to government ineffectiveness, polarization, money in politics, but not a whole host of recent phenomenons impede problem solving. But it also is baked into the Constitution itself and that the constitution that we live with today by design was not meant to meet the kinds of modern, profoundly challenging, highly complex problems that we as a country face. And and then it calls for deep institutional reforms with a focus on the presidency. Those we and and there's a whole host of reasons why we should be focusing on the presidency, because if we want to do is get into the business of problem solving, we need to think about how to redesign the American presidency and leverage the kind of leadership that can come from it in ways that are responsible.
And it's particularly pressing, again, when you see the rise of populism. And so it's thinking about how a what the consequences of failing to meet these problems is not just that our climate is getting warmer or that debts are skyrocketing or that our immigration system persists, and all the costs that are associated with it and continues to fail to attend to, you know, 11 million people who are here who are undocumented and what's to happen to them. And on and on and on and on. Yes, there is all of that. But then it also sets in motion these larger political dynamics and that these larger political dynamics, namely the rise of populism, then threaten the very foundations of our democracy.
Wade Roush: Could you explain in what sense Trump is a populist and maybe even just offer us a definition of populism? Because I'm not sure that most average folks use it in the same way that political scientists do.
Will Howell: That's right. I mean, we're using a very conventional term among scholars, but not a conventional term among the broader public. In the broader public, we're accustomed to talking about populists as being individuals who stand up for the little guy. Right. And who say, you know, you have been ignored or hurt in one way or another. And I'm going to find a way to offer redress and and break through kind of an elitist system in order to give you a voice. And there are elements of that for the kind of sort of the way that scholars, the way political scientist think about populism, but that's really the least of it, because what populists do as scholars think of them is they provide a wholesale undifferentiated critique of a political order. They talk about it as being broken and rigged. And they speak in such undifferentiated terms that it doesn't leave any room for constructive redress, constructive engagement. So the populist comes in and points at the wreckage, right, that is this contemporary political order and says, I'm not a part of that. I'm on the outside. And two things follow. One is the system that they're pointing to, while broken, is also a democratic system. All their critique implicitly is of democracy itself. And …what they come forward and they say is vest your hopes and aspirations and ambitions in me, the individual. I alone can deliver. Which is precisely what Trump did. And so they assume this defiant posture . That’s their sort of ticket to rising to power. And then they maintain it once in power. So any time there’s any kind of obstruction within the democratic order, it's cause for stoking additional outrage.
Wade Roush: This isn't the first time those strains have been felt here in the United States. But earlier populists like Huey Long or Father Coughlin or George Wallace or Joseph McCarthy weren't able to ride those waves nearly as far as Donald Trump has. So why do you think it's happened this time? Why has he somehow been able to figure out the populist formula? Even though we don't think of him as somebody who really studies or is a student of anything, he somehow has been able to intuit how to how to be very effective working from this populist playbook.
Will Howell: Yeah, and you've put your finger right on it, which is that he's playing by a playbook. Populists traffic and conspiracy theories, populists routinely, not just here, but, you know, abroad as well. They call for their enemies to be locked up. They run roughshod over democratic norms.
There's another piece to your question that's worth underscoring, which is that you're absolutely right, populism has kind of periodically, you know, taken hold in American politics, but it's never ridden all the way to the White House and that's consequential twice over. One, because it speaks to the depth of these anti-democratic strength in American politics. It speaks to the strength of populism generally. But what it also means is that Trump in office can use the powers of the presidency, the position that he now occupies, in order to fortify the movement, which is why we've seen this radical alteration of the Republican Party. Which is why he's able to use the powers of the office of the presidency, through pardons, through these unilateral powers that are available to him through the declaration of national emergencies, through the bully pulpit that he occupies in order to stoke those flames, in order to advance his cause. And that's really consequential. It isn't just it doesn't just speak to the strength of populism. It contributes to it.
Wade Roush: Now, you make an argument, you kind of explain in the book that the conditions for populism don’t come out of nowhere, that the conditions for a populist leader to arise don't come out of nowhere. You argue that supporters of populism tend to be the losers in modernization. And by modernization, you're including everything from globalization to technology change to increasing cross-border immigration. Your argument is that the best way to take the air out of the tires of populism is to first acknowledge this is happening, that there is there are losers from modernization…that that there is a large segment of people, the white working class in this country, who feel economically insecure and therefore anxious and angry about politics. And that, and your larger point is that it's crucial to think about how to reform government in ways that will enable government to respond to those fears and bring down that anxiety and anger. So, if we can't stop modernization, first of all, what kinds of policies do you imagine would help people feel more secure in the face of ongoing modernization?
Will Howell: So, once again, you put it exactly right, and I want to underscore again what's behind the question I think that you're asking, which is that if what you were if you are worried, as you should be worried about the rise of populism, the question is what do we do about it? And if we recognize that populism has to do with the failure of government to solve profound challenges that are set before it caused by these huge structural changes in our economy and global immigration trends and structural changes and disruptions to local communities, the answer is not going to be to, you know, put a pause or stop on those changes. Right. That isn't going to happen. And so what to do? Well, there are all kinds of things to do. We can then think about systemic immigration reform, what we can get a handle on, who is coming into the country and what does a pathway to citizenship look like and how do you attend to the needs of business and commerce on the one hand, while also attend to and speak, I think, forthrightly to the kind of cultural anxieties that are felt by many citizens. That carries over to, if you think about like, aid to communities that have felt disproportionately affected by globalization has been paltry. We've done very little in order to step in and say, you, community in Pennsylvania or in West Virginia or in Michigan who's just been decimated by rises in globalization, we're going to offer compensatory aid in one form or another. The efforts of the government to do this has been have been really weak.
Wade Roush: When you talk about making government more effective and enacting some institutional reforms that will help us then put in place solutions to problems like immigration or economic insecurity or the impact of globalization on rural communities, that's all great. But if you do the institutional reform first, so that you can then do the policy reform, that sounds like the kind of thing could take an entire administration four years to even begin to scratch the surface.
Will Howell: Yeah. You've put your finger on it. On the one hand, in order to get good policy, we need institutional reform. But institutional reform is hard. And so what do we do? We do we do that for I mean, four years, I think is is being optimistic. Right. This is the work of a generation, to reset our politics. What we saw in the progressive era, it was a 30-, 40-year undertaking. And we can't, in the face of climate change and covid and economic job losses, just sort of say, all right, ‘Hold on, we've got to get our institutions right. On the one hand. But on the other hand, if what we all we do is set to work on passing lots of bills that attend to those things, they're likely to underdeliver. There are reasons why we haven’t made headway on climate change, and they have to do wit the structure of Congress. Three are reasons why we can’t get a handle on debt or entitlement reform. And so what do we do here? I think we have to do all the above. At the same time, we set to work on the acute problems that people are feeling. Right now. It's about covid and job loss. We’ve got to get after that in a big way. The incoming administration, if Biden wins, and I think he knows this, we've got to set to work. Those seem to be the number one and the number two priorities. But we also need to set to work on modernizing, rehabilitating our government. We don't have the luxury of just focusing on one and ignoring the other. We've got to build this plane while we fly it.
Wade Roush: In their book Howell and Moe lay out a whole series of steps that could restore the government’s ability to help people. They don’t spend much time on Congress, because they see it as a lost cause. They think it’s irreversibly wired to pay attention to special interests above the national interest. So most of the changes they suggest focus on the powers of the president.
In Howell and Moe’s view, the president is the only actor in our federal system who’s incentivized to think about the needs of the entire country, rather than just his or her home district. Presidents also care about their legacies, and so they tend to think about the long term in a way that Congress just can’t.
So what kinds of changes are we talking about? One would be taking the fast-track legislative authority that the president already has in the area of trade and making it universal. The president could present any piece of legislation to Congress and force them to vote up or down, with no amendments. That would give White House a way to set the agenda and enact broad, long-term reforms that aren’t so diluted or weighed down by special interests.
At the same time Howell and Moe are totally aware of all the ways the Trump administration and other administrations have tried to overreach and abuse their power. So they also argue for some new constraints on the executive branch, like reining in the president’s emergency powers and making the Justice Department and the intelligence agencies more autonomous, and insulating them from presidential meddling.
I think all of this really persuasive. I agree that there are some very deep design flaws baked into the US Constitution. I’ve talked about a lot of those right here on the show. I’m also a policy wonk, so of course I love thinking about ways to get government working again.
But even before I talked with Will Howell, I felt like there might be something missing from his analysis. It goes back to my opening question about what Donald Trump really is. If he’s just a very successful populist demagogue, then maybe all Democrats would have to do to deflate Trumpism would be to create lots of new jobs, level the economic playing field, and come up with reasonable policies on immigration.
But what if the roots of Trumpism are deeper than that? What if the strongest currents inside Trumpism aren’t about jobs and economic security but are more about nationalism, and the loss of white privilege? There’s a debate raging in academic circles over that exact question, and you can find historians, philosophers, and political scientists on every side of it.
Jason Stanley: I've constantly been saying, ‘Stop using the term populist.’
Wade Roush: That’s Jason Stanley, a philosopher at Yale University, talking with journalist Brian Stelter back in June on CNN’s Reliable Sources podcast.
Jason Stanley: Both movements, both kinds of politics are criticisms of the elite. This is true. But what we're facing is a nativist proto-authoritarian kind of politics that has nothing to do with giving everyone health care.
Wade Roush: Stanley wrote a book in 2018 called How Fascism Works, and in that podcast he and Stelter spent some time talking about the term fascism and whether it applies to Trumpism.
Jason Stanley: Fascism is an ideology based on power, loyalty and fear of the other, where the other is defined ethnically or racially. And we are represented by one leader who represents us against the other….What I do is I focus on fascist forces rather than individuals….I'm not saying the Trump administration is a fascist regime. It's not. We do not have a fascist regime. We have fascist, perhaps a fascist social and political movement happening.
Sarah Churchwell: This is fascism. This is what American fascism looks like.
Wade Roush: That’s Sarah Churchwell. She’s a professor of American literature and humanities at the University of London and the author of a recent article titled “American Fascism: It Has Happened Here.” Here she’s speaking with editors at the London Review of Books for their podcast Talking Politics.
Sarah Churchwell: We don't have a kind of litmus test for fascism. But when you start to compile ways in which the Trump administration's behaviors conform to classic ideas of inter-war fascism, you know, we've already mentioned things like the kind of regenerative mythologies of making the country great again.…This idea that some Americans are real Americans and other Americans are not real Americans…So the issue becomes…whether we acknowledge that it is useful and reasonable to think about American nativist, conspiratorial, anti-Semitic, racist, xenophobic groups as being in some way understandably and recognizably fascist.
Wade Roush: Whether or not helps to identify Trumpism a form of fascism, there’s no denying that the movement taps into a deep well of racism and anti-immigrant feeling in this country. For evidence of that, you can just look at Trump’s record, from his persecution of the Central Park Five to the birther madness to his defense of the white-supremacist marchers in Charlottesville to his remarks about quote-unquote “shithole” countries in Africa and Central America.
Or you can look to people like Stuart Stevens. He’s a political strategist who spent his whole career getting Republicans elected to Congress, governors’ offices, and the White House and finally became disillusioned about the party once Trump got nominated in 2016. This year Stevens published a book called It Was All A Lie, and it in calls Trump “the most openly racist president since Andrew Johnson” and accuses the GOP of being the party of white grievance.
Stuart Stevens: The Republican Party is predominantly a party that is appealing to white people. Now, t here was a period there where we admitted that was a failure and we aspired to do something else. We don’t do that anymore.
Wade Roush: That’s Stevens speaking on the Ezra Klein podcast back in August. In the book, Stevens explains how Trump’s campaign built on the work the Republican party had been doing ever since the Nixon years to convince voters that every measure to boost and protect African Americans came at the cost of white Americans.
And I’ll read from the book here. Quote: “So many Republicans embraced Trump’s view that they were victims because they had actually believed this all along. Theirs was a white birthright, and the rise of nonwhites was an unjust usurping of their rights.” Unquote.
If Stevens is right that amplifying this sense of victimhood and fear of the other is a core feature of Trumpism, then it’s hard to see how you can counter that movement just by tinkering with the functions of the executive branch. And that’s sort of how I put it when I pressed Will Howell on the question.
Wade Roush: Why do you think that addressing the economic insecurity of the losers from modernization would be enough to defuse the populist threat, when there's also this whole aspect of the problem that really is about race and race conflict in this country?
Will Howell: Yeah, and the fact that our last president was black. I guess I would say a couple of things. One is there's no one kind of singular contributor to the rise of populism. These two forces can be working in tandem with one another and be fortifying one another. And I think that we see that happening. The failure of the government to roll out systemic immigration reform, which is an institutional problem, it's a policy failures, induces, on one level, anxiety about jobs, right, but also, two or three steps out, anxieties about what it means to be America. And then unleashes all kinds of racial animus, as well.
We aren’t presenting those who lined up behind Trump in 2016 and continue to line up behind him now as pure victims of larger structure forces who now brought into the fold and attended to. There's all kinds of ugliness there for sure. And part of that has to do with, again, the rise of anti-democratic strains, but also the profound racism that has taken hold in the Republican party and that Trump feeds off of and that he stokes.
So, look, a key thing to do, and it’s not that this recovers everybody, but a key thing to do, that we can do is, set to work on building institutions that can actually solve problems, that can actually get after these harms that are done. There is more to do, of course, involving matters involving race. But we want to point to is that if we can get a handle on some of these problems, that that can lower the temperature. It then can speak in a basic way to core harms that people are experiencing and provide us a kind of a productive way forward.
Wade Roush: That idea of lowering the national temperature does sound pretty smart right about now. And I agree with Will that getting the government back in the business of actually helping people would be a big plus. But still, I don’t feel ready to let go of the other critique. The one that says Trumpism is built around a fear of the other.
We’re in a moment right now when we’re finally talking about system racism and what we would have to do to deliver on the promise of Reconstruction and the civil rights movement. So of course I want to see that reckoning continue. I don’t want to just give people jobs and fill their stomachs. I want to change their minds.
I spent a long time pondering that dilemma and trying to figure out where I’d come down in this episode. But just as I was about to finish the script, The Atlantic magazine published an essay by George Packer that helped me understand these warring impulses in my own mind.
Packer’s piece is called “America’s Plastic Hour is Upon Us” and it’s all about the opportunity we have in this moment to rethink government and rescue our democracy. And in it he points to a distinction first outlined by the philosopher Richard Rorty in the 1990s between what Rorty called the reformist left and the cultural left.
The way Packer sums it up, the reformist left pursues justice through existing democratic institutions; the cultural left seeks justice in a revolution of consciousness. Quote, “The reformist left wants to make police more accountable; the cultural left wants to confront America with its racist essence,” unquote.
Those are both valid ways of seeing things. But the point that both Rorty and Packer wanted to make is that liberals and leftists like me tend to trip ourselves up whenever we let the cultural critique get out ahead of the practical reforms. That’s when people on the right and even people in the middle start to feel antagonized by the language the left is using. Everything dissolves into acrimony and the possibility of real change dries up.
Sarah Churchwell: So there's a kind of urgent question about will calling Trump fascist do us any good?
Wade Roush: That’s Sarah Churchwell again.
Sarah Churchwell: Will it get us anywhere? Will it change people's minds? Will it help remove him from office? Or will it merely solidify existing political divides? Does it just become reciprocal name calling where we're just going, ‘No, you're a fascist. No, you are.’
Wade Roush: George Packer’s point is that in order to make any headway, a Democratic administration would have to avoid this kind of name-calling and find a middle way between cultural transformation and institutional reform. That feels right to me, but it’s going to be a big challenge. I finished up my conversation with Will Howell by asking how he thinks the next administration should handle it.
Wade Roush: Assuming a Democratic win, there's going to be a call for some kind of detrumpification, if you like. And that's going to be a very strong temptation. And on top of that, there will probably be calls for investigations into abuses of power during the Trump administration, which could lead to extended prosecutions, investigations, hearings, all of that. And yet we have all these burning issues that we have to deal with from structural reform to the actual emergencies of things like climate change, right, and covid. OK, how do we manage all that? And where is our energy best placed? Do you see a way through through that particular thicket?
Will Howell: You're putting your finger on all the hard stuff, and characterizing it, to my mind, exactly right. It is a thicket. There is not a world in which Trump goes quietly into this night, even if he accepts defeat, even if and that's an if, right. Even if he comes forward and says, you know, good on you, Biden, you beat me. Right. He is going to continue to be a voice in our politics and as will his surrogates. Even if you could find a cave to put Trump in and that he would go there and you could silence him, what's to keep a Tucker Carlson from coming forward or, you know, you know, a Don Jr. From coming forward and assuming the mantle? Because as long as the government remains ineffective, is long as these kind of strains of populism are flourishing, there's an opportunity for people to assume this mantle and to, you know, and to pick up where Trump left off.
And the person who does may not have a penchant for golfing. May not have an interest in watching TV all day. They may focus a lot harder and be much more disciplined in their efforts to unravel our democracy. Lord, help us then.
So, what does it mean to productively move forward? I think a place to start is to get a handle on covid, right. We need to do that. A place to start is to recognize the longstanding failures of government, to not sort of say, you know, government is good and great in every way and that, you know, government is just somehow misunderstood. No. Government has failed. And that we need to speak forthrightly about that, just as we then set to work on rolling up our sleeves and attending to it, which is the thing, again, that distinguishes the populist from the non populist. The populist never rolls up his sleeves and says, all right, now let's set something right in the aftermath of offering this deep critique. Whereas there's an opportunity for Biden to set to work. It's a profound challenge. It's not something that's going to be resolved in a year or two. It's something that we have to kind of brace ourselves for, for a long time to come.
Wade Roush: I guess a best case scenario might be one where, where Biden wins, first of all; where Democrats enjoy an ongoing demographic advantage; and maybe they also undertake the kinds of structural reforms that you're talking about; and they start to legislate in ways that would win back the support of disaffected white working class voters; and the Republican Party opts to pursue internal reform and stop being simply the party of blocking everything…Well, it becomes a pretty long list. W hen you talk about all those things having to happen together in order to get us to a better place, it starts to feel a little less likely. But maybe just one or two of those things would be enough, right?
Will Howell: Those are independent of one another. If there's a big electoral defeat for Trump, that then puts the Republican Party on its heels long enough for some constructive action to be taken both on the policy front and on the institutional reform front, [and] that that then creates a space that you can then build on and build out from such that little wins can beget other little wins. It's not going to happen all at once. But then you set in motion a more productive politics, a more constructive politics.
That's the thing that I'm rooting for. We're not going to set this right in 100 days and we're not going to immediately get that full constellation of a reformed Republican Party and a commitment by the Democratic Party to rebuild the government and a public that's going to reward Democrats for undertaking that effort and a New New Deal all at once. But we can begin I mean, just as now we're in this bad equilibrium where in, you know, every democratic, small-d democratic setback begets more small-d democratic setbacks. Can we turn that around? And there's a chance that we do. There's a chance that we do.
Wade Roush: Soonish is written and produced by me. Our opening theme music is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.
And all of the other music in this episode is by Titlecard Music and Sound in Boston. And I can’t really say enough good stuff about Titlecard. They’re not just great composers who understand the audio business, they’re great people. Check them out at Titlecard.com.
You can follow Soonish on Twitter at soonishpodcast. At our website, soonishpodcast.org, you can find the show notes and a transcript for this episode, as well as a link to Will Howell and Terry Moe’s book Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy.
As a bonus this week I’ve also put together a feature on the website called the Soonish Save-the-Future Kit. When I started working on this show in the summer of 2016, I wasn’t setting out to do a podcast about politics. I just wanted to make a show about how part of being a good citizen is being more conscious about the way we use technology. But then Trump happened, and I found myself coming back time and again to stories that were really about how our democracy works, or doesn’t work. In the Soonish Save-the-Future Kit I’ve collected all those episodes into a playlist with some notes that shows how they’re all connected. I’ve also collected links to some resources that can help you be more informed and prepared as we enter this perilous election season. You can find all that right on the front page at soonishpodcast.org.
Soonish is an independent podcast supported in part by you, the listeners. If you’d like to contribute, please go to Patreon.com/soonish and check out the cool thank-you rewards we offer at every level. Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps this ship going!
Soonish is one of 10 indie podcasts that banded together over the last three years to form the Hub & Spoke audio collective. And this week I want to recommend a Hub & Spoke show called The Constant, from Chicago-based playwright and genius storyteller genius Mark Chrisler.
If all the real apocalypses of 2020 have been getting you down, from the pandemic to the Western wildfires to the ongoing spectacle of the Trump presidency, then you might enjoy a few fake apocalypses—namely the long list of incorrect predictions about the end of the world that Mark lays out in his August 11 episode, Apocalypse Now and Then.
Mark Chrisler: The economy is in the toilet. The president is talking about not having an election. And the coronavirus is still ravaging the planet with no signs of abatement. It feels sometimes like we're living through the end of the world. Right? Well, here's the silverest lining I can give you. As best as I can tell, it has always felt like we're living through the end of the world. Spin a wheel, roll some dice, throw a dart, whatever year you pick in all of human history. I will bet you somebody thought it was the last one. And for better or worse, they've all been wrong so far.
You can find that episode and the entire run of The Constant at constantpodcast.com. And you can check out all the other Hub & Spoke shows at hubspokeaudio.org.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for listening and I’ll be back with a new episode…soonish.
