A Unified Theory of Trumpism

25:22Like, uh, and so there was this like, Hey, we're all in on liberalism. We don't like this authoritarianism stuff. And I, because of when I was born and, you know, my, the, my political upbringing just thought, okay, so that's America. And so this Trump stuff is new and different. It's not really. It's much closer to a reversion to a strain of American political thought, which actually ran for a very, very long time. It just happened to have come to an end right before I was born. Does that make sense? Yes. Well, no, it does. It does. It does make sense. You know, whether it's the ways that and, you know, I think there was downsides to this version of a liberal consensus, the the the kinds of topics that were acceptable.

26:11right the kinds of people that were considered respectable like there was a there were real downsides to this actual strange period in which also in the media there was a there was a real narrowing of kind of the bounds of the debate and there are positive aspects to what happens when an entire culture is built around a kind of narrow debate that there's not as much difference it's not as much in front like all of that is certainly true but you see kind of an emergence of right-wing media during this time that slowly starts building power and influence, in part because there is this, you know, there is this sort of darkness in us, in people, right, in our culture and in people.

26:50And there was clearly, whether it's, you know, Coughlin and then to Limbaugh, right, like there were people that realized, like, there's a need that's not being met in a pretty broad way. How much causal effect do you give the sort of right wing media ecosystem as it evolved in where we are now? Because I'm never sure. Like, clearly, there's some it has some effect, right? I wouldn't say it has no effect. It has some effect. But I don't know how much like if you snapped your fingers and it all went away. Would things be a lot different? I don't know. What are your thoughts on this? Here's what I've been thinking lately.

27:25A lot of what we're seeing is a result of a kind of permission Like what is fascism, right? It's a hard thing to define For people it's it's a little bit murky and I think part of the reason it's so murky is You know, there were a lot of people during trump 1.0 be like oh stop calling him a fascist That term doesn't apply look at everything's working, right? And I increasingly just I don't think it is best to think about it as an ideology a goal It is permission to a kind of evil that we all feel, which is I will give into my ego completely. I will not accept any kind of injury. I will not have to admit to any kind of fault.

28:04I will not have to be wrong. I will not have to accept discomfort. I will not have to accept nuance. The reason there was a pandemic is because Fauci. The reason I was stuck at home is because of the liberals. The reason people died is because of China. The reason I'm not happy right now is because of AOC or Mamdani or whatever. And that is intoxicating. It is an intoxicating way to go through life. Forbearance, religious virtue, civic virtue, is a bulwark against those ideas. We all feel them. Some are better than others as naturally showing a discipline against them. Some are, you know, when you say someone, oh, they don't have a bad bone in their body, It's actually very hard for them to go in that way.

28:49We're all on that spectrum. And decades and decades of media slowly telling people to just let go. Just let go. It's fine. You can feel whatever you want to feel culminates in Trump. Did the media follow the people? Did the people follow the media? Is Trump a symptom? I don't know. But at root, I think it is that thing inside of us. It is as old as people. And we will always have to fight it. And it will come and go.

29:40We'll see you next time.

29:47monthly fees, no minimum balance fees. You get 5 % cash back on ChimeCard in a category of your choice, like gas or groceries, all while building credit through regular everyday spending. No credit check required. You can also grow your money faster with a savings rate that's nine times the national average. And if you're ever in a pinch, SpotMe lets you overdrafts up to$200 fee free. Join the millions who are already banking fee free with America's number one choice for banking. Head to Chime.com slash crooked. That is Chime.com slash crooked. Sign Sign up now. It only takes a few minutes. Chime is a fintech, not a bank.

30:18Banking services and Chime card provided by Chime's bank partners. Qualifying direct deposits required. Terms and limits apply. Go to Chime.com slash disclosures for details. Every company is investing in AI, but most only have a small group actually using it, and a large group who tried and didn't see the value. Superhuman fixes that. From the makers of Grammarly, Superhuman brings AI into every tool your team already uses for instant help with drafts, finding information, and more. So habits and proficiency form naturally. When every person on your team works at their best, that's when your AI investments start to compound.

30:53See what Superhuman can do at superhuman.com.

31:00So this is, I have a very similar view about the parties in that one of the things that the Republican Party was able to do when it was strong was prevent people like Donald Trump from ever being presented to voters, at least at the presidential level. Right. And so even if voters would have wanted something like that, it wasn't on offer. They got Bob Dole. They got Mitt Romney. They got more, you know, guys like that. And once Trump appeared and it was like, you know, when he got big cats in captivity and you know like they get a taste for live meat and all of a sudden they won't like take the stakes that you throw them anymore that's what it what it's like with with trump and republican voters now that they have like oh i could have that i could have the guy who talks about shooting illegals and says only in the panhandle i can have a guy who encourages political violence who says go ahead and knock that guy out i'll pay for your legal bills oh yeah you know That's the real dope for them.

32:05And that's why I have a hard time seeing how we go back, because the parties aren't strong enough to prevent people like that from coming in anymore. I mean, just the structure of our party systems are too weak. They're both too strong and too weak. They're too strong to be killed and to have a new party pop up in their place, but too weak to prevent things like these sorts of takeovers. And so you wind up in a sour spot and voters have a taste on vote. Republican voters have a taste for this because they were offered Trumpism. And then you saw when when they were offered DeSantis, which was basically Trumpism without the violence, without the physical violence.

32:46They're like that guy. What are you talking about? Well, yes. Also without Trump, which is who is a charismatic figure. And, you know, I think there's here's where I would say there's like a little reason to be a little bit less pessimistic because I think there's a little step. Bass. I think there's a step in there that's important as part of this, which because I. It's not it's not this idea that Trump suddenly appears and they can have this kind of, you know, it's like, oh, I don't want to be on burger. I don't want I want the red meat. Right. That's certainly true. But there is a moment in you and it plays out during that first primary 2016 where you see Trump doing what Trump's doing.

33:28You see Rubio just doing what Rubio is doing and Cruz doing what he's doing. And everybody kind of looks around first and they look around at each other and they're like, is it OK if I do this? Like I want I'm in. I'm kind of interested. This is attractive to me. But I know it's wrong. It's still by the I know what's wrong is everywhere still to this day. It is the understanding that what we're doing is wrong. It is inside of it is the unspoken part of everything. It's everything across the media. It is about assuaging the people who know they're doing something wrong. You know, when you see that you never see a liberal, you never see a liberal say some version of this is just a political disagreement.

34:12We should still treat each other as friends. Right. Like that's something conservatives, there's a conservative effort to say versions of that to kind of make what they've done be normal. But the reason I say all that is because that moment of looking around is a corrective that still exists. Like if you, there are two, if you go, there can be two gates side by side at an airport and two different airlines operating that gate. And at one gate, everybody is obeying the rules of when you board. And at the other gate, nobody is. Why? It is a combination of the culture of the flyers, the expectations of the flyers, and the rules of the airline.

34:52Do they enforce? Do they send anybody back if they come up with their boarding group that they're not in? And also, hey, is this an airline where everybody lines up? Or is this an airline where we all crowd the fucking thing like we're trying to storm the best deal, right? What kind of vibe is this? And people look around. And maybe there'll be a transgressor and others will follow. Maybe there won't. It's luck. It's a little bit of luck and happenstance. Somebody's got to throw the first brick. But that moment of corrective is still available even now. Or is that wrong? I don't know. So I yesterday I wrote a piece about about this conference that the Trump administration did two weeks ago.

35:32So they did a conference on the resurgence of political terrorism. and it was all, I mean, it's, it's about, of course, irony is dead, right? The, the, the, the people who reintroduced political violence into America after like a 30 year hiatus basically, uh, are now like all, Oh my gosh, there's violence. Right. But the only violence they care about is, is left-wing violence. That's, that's the big thing. And you had Stephen Miller and Marco Rubio both give speeches, which were, and I say this in a measured way, indistinguishable from something Goebbels or Hitler would have said in the thirties.

36:13And I just went and pulled quotes like from, from Hitler and Goebbels speeches. And they're talking about, uh, this is Rubio and Miller about the ugly people who, I mean, they're like, they're really getting into the, how do you say is it physiognomy physiognomy you know yeah the calipers like uh you know oh you can tell the dysgenic types the intermensch i am on record uh predicting a phrenology comeback uh five years ago yeah i agreed yeah so uh you know like and this is this is so why is marco ruby rubio who is supposedly the responsible one who is the secretary of state giving a speech at a conference in which he is talking about Americans.

36:57This is what he's talking about. Americans, the protesters, you know, the left wing terrorists and all this as being ugly and deformed and who, you know, spiritually, all they can do is destroy the work of the great men and the great culture that the Aryans have built. And it just, you know, and I just think, I don't know, like Rubio is a pretty shrewd diviner of what people want from him in any moment. And he seems to think that this is what Republican voters want. I don't know, man. It was pretty. I was pretty worked up about this because, I mean, it's one thing to like rhyme with Nazis. It's another thing to like copy them.

37:38It is. There is a difference between like the Miller rhetoric is as fascist and as as as you could imagine, even where it's sort of like, you know, what is good and beautiful and true. Right. There's a kind of I don't even know. Can I read the passage? Yeah, let's hear it. I've got it in front of me. Let's hear it. Hold on. Because it's really amazing. It's not a coincidence that when you look at these violent Antifa demonstrations and you see any photograph of those who are assembled, to be blunt, not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person. Not one looks normal. They're all deformed in some way in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism.

38:14Why is that? Why? If you look at two photographs and you see a normal American in the street and you see an Antifa protest, why do the people that are violently demonstrating, why is there not one normal looking person among them. Every one of them through the course of their life and their decisions has scarred their body and their appearance in many different ways to the point where their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred. Trust your instincts to all people and across all civilizations. You know what normal is. You know what beautiful is. You know what good is. You know that families are right.

38:50You know that children are precious and beautiful. must be protected, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This is so much deeper than issues about taxation and regulation. It's about normal, healthy, ordered living. Like this is you. You can you see like vermin, dysgenic type. You can see right there. You could see like Goebbels looking at that and being like, hey, I think we got to turn this down a little bit. I think we're getting a little bit. Hey, guys, I know I know we're the Nazis, but this is getting a little crazy. Yes. But so what's interesting about that, I saw that passage. And if you turn on Fox News at many points during the day, you will see a kind of brightly colored, over -the-top aesthetic, including face work and changes to the body that are all meant to be.

39:43Like there is that, that, that like you, you stop and you read that and you're like, what are you talking about exactly? What are you, what are you saying exactly? Because when you look, there is the other side of that is an aesthetic to fascism, right? Like with what a kind of extreme aesthetic to what it means to be beautiful. Right. And it does flow from this idea of, which is like one of the lies at the core of, of fascism itself, which is in the same way, you do not need to admit to any flaw or fault or mistake and you can dominate and actually to lose is always embarrassing, to concede is always embarrassing.

40:16One place where we all must concede is to time and death itself, right? Like we must concede to the fact that we are all - Not if Peter Thiel has his say in this. Yeah, the techno fascist for sure. But like that, like that we all have bodies, right? And that actually we all experience pain and we all experience loss. And part of like that rhetoric is around convincing a bunch of people to deny their own kinds of pain, right? To like, to model a kind of a strength in which the reason it's okay to support Trump, even though he actually does nothing to improve the country, is that your dissatisfaction, your pain doesn't matter because you actually are sort of a tool of this operation.

40:59Do you know what I'm saying? Like, there's a kind of like, yeah, there's a, there's a, an, there's a kind of ask that they make of, of their own people to kind of like deny themselves, like their, their own humanity and how they kind of approach the world. During Trump 1.0, there was a New York times piece written. Um, it was like, there was some storm down in Florida and Trump had like done jack shit for people. And the times reporters like down interviewing Trump supporters who had been like, you know, hurt by, by the storm There's a quote from a woman who says that she was disappointed in Trump because she said he's not hurting the people he's supposed to hurt.

41:39And to me, this was like the Rosetta Stone of Trumpism. Like this is, as you say, like they can't stop their own mortality, can't stop their own pain. But Donald Trump promises to hurt the people that they hate. That's really good. But there's a lot of debate about what Democrats should be calling for, what reforms should look like, how we resolve a tension, which is if we are able to retake power, there will be a great incentive to use the new executive powers to fix what Trump has done while at the same time collectively understanding that limiting the power of the presidency, returning some prerogatives to the legislature and the courts is a good thing.

42:26Pete Buttigieg, I think, said something interesting about this that you wrote about, which is basically some version of there's places where we need to strengthen the presidency. Basically, we need to strengthen it on the stuff you want me to do. And we need to weaken it on the stuff you don't want me to do. Like we have to be stronger going after inequality and fighting the corporations. And but we need to be the president should be weaker when it comes to invasions of privacy and violations of the rule of law. Okay, fine. I agree with that. How are you thinking about executive power and what it means sort of post-Trump to kind of protect the country from another one?

43:04Yeah, I don't, I mean, I don't know the answer. You can see like three different pathways for this. And it's not clear to me which is wisest. There was a bunch of debate about this when Biden took office. and he chose to try to like, hey, look, Trump was an aberration. That's not who we are. And what we're going to do is we're just going to go back to being normal and we're going to fake it till we make it. You know what? That wasn't a crazy view. That was not a crazy view. It was totally defensible. It was a real theory of the case. It did turn out to be wrong, though. And we just need to say that.

43:45Like it was wrong and it wasn't a little bit wrong. It was a lot wrong. um biden had a successful presidency he he had a pretty good economy unemployment was below four percent almost the entire time he beat covid we had about a 13 or 14 month period with very high inflation but then he achieved a soft landing i mean this is this is as good as it gets we did not have a recession we did not have a big unpopular foreign war and at the end of it people chose Trump again. Yeah. Even with the, I mean, so Biden's theory of the case was wrong. What could Democrats do if they take power again? Well, they could try some version of we're going to reform everything.

44:30And so we're going to go after the big institutional problems which led to Trumpism. Things like the Supreme Court, things like the Electoral College, things like the Senate. Um, they could, instead of that, they could pursue accountability. They could say, look, the system is what the system is, but we're going to make sure that everybody who broke any law during that period that just happened, whether they were a member of the government doing things that were legal or whether they were private corporations who were participating in illegal things, you know, with, you know, doing, doing frauds and whatnot, Everybody pays a price so that people see going forward that if you get another strong man, if you go along with him, there will be consequences.

45:21Right. That's one thing. Or they could say, hey, you know what? People don't care about process. People don't care about all that stuff. They care about the bottom line. Kitchen table issues, John. And you know what? We're not going to get distracted by worrying about the past and fighting the old fights of the old generation. we're going to look forward to building something new, something that really matters to people's lives. And look, you know more about Democrats than I do. But my sense is they're going to pick door number three if they ever get into power again. And I'm like, great, good luck.

45:52Part of it is like, I worried about that. I worry that there is going to be polling that says very clearly, you know, some version of, do you want to look backwards or do you want to go forwards? And people are going to say, gosh, I want to go forward. Always. Yep. And that will be a real there will be a lot of pressure on Democrats to say this. And then you will have the Democrats that are the smart messengers who say some version of we kind of walk and chew gum at the same time. You know, they're going to say it on this show. They've said it before they say it again. John, we've got to walk and chew gum at the same time.

46:20So we've got to look forward. But also we have to fight for accountability. But all of it to me is avoiding what I think I think in like in the Democratic heart. Right. Like what is what is what a Democrat What would the kind of engaged Democrats who have kind of been part of this debate for a long time, what are they really saying that they want? What they want, or what I imagine some version of this is what people think we need, but find it hard to articulate is, we need a period in which we have some version of another founding, right? Like we've been through several foundings in which we have a big debate about authority and limits.

46:57in that period of friction, there's a lot of room to operate. And then laws and norms kick in, and it gets constrained, and you get stuck in that for a long time, right? That's what happens after the revolution, the constitution, the civil war, and the civil rights movement. And we're kind of where maybe we're due. And what that looks like, right, is to the Buttigieg point, you kind of want a period where you can have a president who can operate like Trump, tear down the ballroom, kind of remove all the executive orders. Oh, you've all come around? You've all come around with me on the ballroom?

47:29You know what? I'm going to put your values to the test right now. Would you tear down the new Dulles? There's a new Dulles? He wants to build the new Dulles airport. He wants to get rid of the people movers. You're going to tear that down too? I mean, to what end? Well, it would be another - To what end is this? To fix the fact that Dulles sucks. Is this an infrastructure thing? Yes, he announced this week a giant plan to - He is he personally has approved the designs for for new terminals at Dulles, which include getting rid of the people movers and a 32000 foot parking structure. Now, should the president be walking through the details of a new parking structure when we're at war with Iran and have no control of the Strait of Hormuz?

48:09No, he should not. But he did do that. Yeah, that's closer to like highway planning infrastructure, though. Like I am not in the like Donald Trump built a Donald Trump's transportation department built a bridge in West Virginia. And so we have to tear that down. That's not where I am. I'm in the the ornaments and the personal monuments to himself, which are things like the art. Oh, that's the ballroom. Yes. The name on the Kennedy Center. Well, that's that. My view is that anything that that looks like a presidential palace gets pulled down. Yes. Anything, anything. Because you have to show that there's no throne there.

48:44You know, show the next guy. Anything, any part of his infrastructure where you could imagine Uday and Kuse walking out. to say hello, I think you gotta tear it down.

49:22including AA through H, and half cup sizes you won't find anywhere else. Get$15 off your first purchase at thirdlove.com with code PODCAST15. Saving money on your summer project at Menard. Transform your garage with rock-solid floor coatings. Complete your project with a showroom-quality finish in one weekend. A one-car kit covers up to 250 square feet. Get everything you need to complete your project with rock-solid floor coatings. Our knowledgeable team is ready to help bring your dreams to life. one gallon at a time. Plus, check out our weekly flyer on Menards.com for all the great deals happening now.

50:05But but back back on this, that that you want to do a court expansion, get rid of the filibuster, pass some sort of, you know, repeal the big, beautiful bill tax. It's a lot of sort of big, strong executive leading the Congress towards a singular goal. But then at some point, you also want to reassert the Justice Department as an independent body, which I think at this point, depending on the court, you have to do through law or constitutional amendment. You want to reassert Congress's prerogatives over the national security state, which requires legislation, maybe at this point also a constitutional amendment.

50:40There's a bunch of ways in what you want is a period of time where the Democratic president operates like Trump before a whole set of rules kicks in in which there can never be a Trump again, which is exactly the kind of thing that dictatorships are made of. Right. Like that. You know what I'm saying? Like that is what people want. And yet that is the problem. That is the problem. That's the tension. That's what they think they got with Trump. That's the tension. And the other, I mean, there is also a false sense of security here, which is that if the people in a democracy want a Trump, they will get a Trump regardless of what Democrats build in the guardrails, right?

51:19Because the guardrails are people. And if America wants authoritarianism, it's going to get authoritarianism. It's going to get a strongman. So you can't fix that part of it, right? And so that, honestly, that does. I was making fun of the, you know, Democrats who just want to look toward the future. Maybe that is the answer. I say, I don't come to you with answers, John. Maybe the answer is you do have to look to the future so that you build something so that people don't think, yes, I want a strongman. Maybe that's I don't know. I don't know. To me, that doesn't feel like satisfactory, but that doesn't mean it's it's not the right answer.

51:52Well, there's a there's also I think I think your story of Biden and I am a great critic of Joe Biden is a little, I think it's a little bit overdetermined in that if Joe Biden, Joe Biden's theory, right, was we have to demonstrate what a democracy should look and sound like. We have to reassert some normalcy. We have to achieve some big policy goals to demonstrate that government can work. And because there was an insurrection and he's such a pariah, the Republicans will move on and they will have a primary that sits where you end up with someone somewhere between Trump and what Rubio sounded like in 2014.

52:33And you kind of muddle through, right? Like, you know, there have been plenty of cases with history where the kind of charismatic leader goes away and everybody kind of, you don't go back to where you were, but it mattered that there was one charismatic leader and without them, people kind of go back to old habits. The problem was to me, two things. One, Joe Biden was way too fucking old. And as a result, kind of became very, couldn't communicate. And his weaknesses as a leader became evidence of his age. His age became evidence of his weaknesses and became a downward spiral. Kamala for her best efforts was unable to get out of that for various reasons.

53:11The other is you could have had Joe Biden doing exactly what Joe Biden did. And you put Adam Schiff at DOJ instead of Merrick Garland or somebody gave Merrick Garland, you know, some Adderall in his oatmeal every day without his knowledge. And suddenly you have some prosecutions happening faster. Trump is unable to run for office and the world looks very different. Possible. And I mean, I should say in all this, it is also possible that everything just kind of fixes itself on its own. Right. It's possible that none of the things that we've talked about happen. And yet a decade from now, things aren't worse than they are right now.

53:56They may not be a ton better, but like we haven't continued sliding into authoritarianism. We're only like a third of the way there, the way we are now. Um, so like, that's also possible. I'm, you know, I'm open to that. I'm open to all possibilities, John. We often find ourselves in the trap of saying, well, what was the real reason? And the, uh, what I use is like murder on the Orient Express. Who did it? All of them did it. Right. And it is it's Biden was too old and Trump was charismatic and Merrick Garland didn't act, you know, with enough enough impetus. Like it's all of those things together.

54:33But it's also like and the Supreme Court was pretty clearly going to try to make sure Trump could run again like that. They wanted Trump to be able to run again. They were going to do whatever they could to do that. Right. And so you are in this, uh, physics, physics, people call it a simple complex system, right? It's not a, it's not a fully complex, like complex systems are like ecosystems. They're gigantic, uh, and they're incredibly resilient. Um, but a government is a simple complex system, which is to say, uh, it's like an engineered biosystem. And those sorts of things, simple complex systems are actually really delicate.

55:13because they don't have all the redundancies and self-governing features built into them that true complex systems have. And I think one of the things we've learned over the last decade is that the American experiment is a simple complex system, not a truly complex system. The guardrails are not real guardrails in that if the people go rotten or like sort of lose their minds temporarily or decide they want something bad, they will get it. and, uh, you know, maybe you don't need all the people, maybe you just need 47 % of them distributed in the correct way or something like that, but you know, they're going to get it.

55:53And so I, I wish I knew what the answer was to all this, uh, virtue. The answer to this is virtue. Let's, let's, let's invite, let's end by talking about virtue, uh, for a moment because I, I, It does seem to be, you step back from all of this and it is just a collective, like you can blame the elites, you can blame the voters, whatever you want to do. There is a sense in which we've just sort of lost a kind of muscle memory for the importance of making virtue a big part of identity. right? Just like, I remember when I, there was a, there was a, there was something that would happen on sitcoms when I, that was just a part of sitcoms all the time, which was, there was a character who would drive back to the bank with the 20 bucks.

56:38Oh, they got an extra 20 bucks. And that character would always drive back to the bank with 20 bucks. And even in that, it was a cheesy thing. It's obviously a cheesy thing about, but like, there is a like kind of, and maybe Trump is a reflection of it. He also makes it worse. I think about Fauci, when public health officials said, you don't need masks, right? They were doing it because they wanted health in a crisis. They're worried about the health system coming apart. They're worrying about first responders dying of COVID. They're desperate to get those people masks. And public health had a choice.

57:11And the choice was between trusting the American people with the truth or doing a kind of nudge because you want to make sure that the PPE gets to the hospitals. They chose to lie because they didn't. Not lie, heavily lawyered. I would say this. So I've done the Fauci thing a whole lot. Fauci didn't lie. What Fauci did was a very lawyerly, depends on what the definition of his is. Yes. So I want to be clear. Anthony Fauci was somebody that devoted his life to public health. He's being smeared to be blamed for the entire pandemic because these people are being fundamentally dishonest. Donald Trump was president.

57:53He was lying the whole time. He was a man that did his best in a massive emergency. And I'm not just saying him. Collectively, the goal was to convince Americans that they did not need masks when they did because, and I think rightly, they knew that if you said to the country, don't buy masks right now, they're life-saving and we need to save them for the people that are in the shit right now, I don't think that they were wrong. Right? I don't think they were wrong. Agree. And to me, that is at the root of this. That sort of politicians and officials not trusting the voters, the voters not trusting those people in return.

58:30I just don't know. The question is, what does a virtuous cycle look like in which you're kind of getting back to a common sense of high trust society versus low trust? I wish I knew. honestly, I wish I knew John, because I think you're right about the general public. But at the same time, the general public is made up of all of those nurses and orderlies and techs and docs and who showed up to hospitals taking care of people, especially in New York. I mean, I don't know if people remember. Everybody is like this, this mass, you know, forgotten, this mass forgetting about COVID because like nobody wants to remember it.

59:10But New York looked like fucking doomsday. You know, like there were just like mobile refrigerators with bodies just, you know, stacked inside the in the alleys outside hospitals. It was it was like seeing one of these virus movies. And the hospitals were full of people who just went in and tried to save lives and put themselves at risk anyway. You know, all these essential service workers who were like people who worked at just delivery and logistics, people who worked in grocery stores, you know, checkout lines and stocking things like that's true, too. Like those people did that. That was virtue.

59:50And so it's become so hard to understand. Well, why is it that these people will exhibit such true virtue at the individual level? but then when we ask do you think people respond collectively in the right way or would they have run out and just like hoarded you know like hoarding toilet paper every time there's a warning about snowstorms and i don't know how to square the circle there and i you know maybe maybe the answer is like you just have to trust people and if they make the wrong choice so be it and everybody lives with radical candor i i don't know the answers and i wish i did i think Part of it is I do think it matters that Donald Trump had been president for several years.

1:00:37And like he makes these kind of he makes mistrust and cynicism more true of us. And I do think maybe the answer like it's in the same way. Why do I think you and Sarah and Tim and others who have had profound disagreements over the years stepped up when others didn't? Well, I think part of it is these virtues aren't just something you believe in. I think everybody would claim to believe in them. They were part of your identity, right? They were part of your identity. And a politics in which Democrats find a way to make those kind of virtues central to how we talk about ourselves, how we talk about what it means to be an American, I do think is kind of points to the way out because I think the difference I do genuinely think the difference is is what are you are you a Republican are you a conservative are you a Texan are you an American are you moral are you righteous are you honest are you somebody that is good at are you fair dealing right like do you cut lines or do you understand why you shouldn't even when you see others doing it right like these kind of simple things are like kind of I think part of what Trump makes less salient to people.

1:01:55And I think maybe that's part of the way, whether inside the Republican Party or in the Democratic Party, a return to that kind of moral language is maybe part of what has to happen next. Yeah. And I wish, again, I don't have any of the answers on this stuff. I think a lot about kindness because kindness is one of these values that sort of sands over vices. You know, like if you can fix kindness as your North Star, that cuts across. You don't have to be, you know, a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim. Like, it's universal. Everybody understands kindness. And to the extent that we could try to just model that and be me talking about kindness.

1:02:38I know. It's hysterical. You're rumored to be a very kind person. That's what the rumor is. Don't believe it. I mean, whenever they let you out of that room you're in. But I strive for it, right? I mean, it is something. I think it's something we can all strive for. We can all be aspirationally kind. And maybe that collectively leads us back somewhere less terrible. And I will also just note, too, that in politics, these kinds of virtuous words aren't always going to be on the list of polling questions or the list of topics that rise to the top. But I will remember when Hillary Clinton was campaigning in 2016, and I know every losing campaign did everything wrong and every winning campaign did everything right.

1:03:19And we shouldn't have Pokemon went to the polls. But when she would say what we need is love and kindness, it was electric. It was the most electric thing that came around her in a campaign that was kind of more in the kind of neoliberal language of kind of technocracy. that idea of kindness did like kind of bring something out of people. So I do think it's a very good place to leave it. Jonathan V. Last, it has been so good talking to you, you know, and I hope you felt I was kind today. This was so great. I loved hanging out. I would do a show with you every single week. You, me and Alex Wagner.

1:04:00Wow. This is great. Okay. Yeah. I got to talk to my bosses oh wait we're an independent media company uh you mean alex what are we gonna do we'll do a show about pinball let's show about comic let's get on the blower whatever you want yeah we could talk about we by the way we could talk about watches too uh are you a watch guy i'm a watch guy i got i got a grand seiko going right now oh which one it's i got i got the it's the it's the uh it's the cherry blossoms it's the cherry blossoms oh the shun bun oh you know it's a classic Grand Seiko is a, if you love Grand Seiko, then you really love watches.

1:04:32I'm a nerd. This is for those, this is a, this is a nerds, this is a nerds watch. And it, and nerds stop me on the street because they know, because they know, but everyone was like, oh, that's a Seiko. No, no, no, no, my friends. It's a Grand Seiko. And the story of Grand Seiko. Zaratsu polishing, my friend. And what people don't know is that there was a period of time where Seiko wanted to compete with the Swiss. And so they had two factories, Grand Seiko and King Seiko. And they said, fight to the fucking death, boys. And you know what? They did. Grand Seiko won. It's the Japanese way. It's the Japanese way.

1:05:04Jonathan, so good to talk to you. Everybody, go subscribe to The Bulwark. Go subscribe to The Triad, his newsletter. And subscribe right here on this channel. Help us build a pro-democracy ecosystem to get good information to people. And that prize is kindness. How about that? Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. Our show is produced by Austin Fisher, Saul Rubin, McKenna Roberts, and Farrah Safari with Reed Cherlin, Elijah Cohn, and Adrian Hill. Our team includes Matt DeGroat, Ben Hefcoat, Jordan Cantor, Charlotte Landis, Kirill Pellaviv, David Tolles, Mia Kelman, Ryan Young, and Naomi Single.

1:05:37Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.