Bonus: Adam Gopnik on James Carville and America's Future

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1:16My guest on Ruthie's Table 4 this week is James Carville. And in this bonus episode, I'm sitting down with my friend Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker magazine. Adam is in New York. I'm in London. Adam, can I start by asking about James Carville and his role in U.S. politics? Well, James Carville is a political consultant, political commentator. He became famous as Bill Clinton's campaign manager in the 1992 election when Clinton, no one any longer remembers, very much against the odds, defeated the first George Bush to become president. Carville is famous in part because of the efficacy of that campaign, but even more because he has a unique personal style.

1:59He comes from Louisiana, speaks with a strong Cajun-style accent, and doesn't represent the normal run of California, New York, Ivy League politicians who tend to dominate the Democratic Party. And as a consequence, he has a kind of common touch and common sense, which are sadly too often rare on the side of progressive politics. He first became famous as Clinton's campaign manager because of a simple slogan that he was legendary for having plastered on the computers. We weren't yet quite in the laptop age of every one of the young people who were working in the campaign. And that was, it's the economy, stupid.

2:41He wanted them to focus on that. People sometimes misunderstand that, Ruthie, because it wasn't that that was the only issue in the election. It was that was the one that the kids who were working passionately for Clinton at that point were likely to forget because it wasn't necessarily at the forefront of their attention. And he was one of the people who said already back in 2020 that we are disabling ourselves if we use language like defund the police or obsess about pronouns. He was, you know, he has that Cajun accent. He said, you know, that stuff is for the Sarah Lawrence Faculty Club. It's not for politics.

3:18And he was proven right time and time again, and he was trying constantly to divorce the rhetoric of liberal politics, Democratic Party politics, from, and I hate this term, woke, but let's say from the progressive pieties that had infected it, because he recognized that they were a barrier to communication. Somebody very smartly said once, Ruthie, that the thing that you have to remember at every moment in American politics, particularly presidential politics, is that the median American voter is a white man over 50 who only graduated from high school, who never went to college. That's the median voter.

4:01That's the voter you're trying to reach. And you have to, at every moment, think about how what you're doing is going to appeal to that voter. And Carvel is brilliant at understanding what that voter is thinking, feeling what frightens him or what doesn't. And so he recognizes that a politician like Bill Clinton, for instance, Obama appealed to that voter. So how did Obama win? Well, Obama was very conservative on so-called social issues. It seems shocking to us now in retrospect, but Obama was not in favor of gay marriage. Obama was very cautious. He was in favor of civil partnerships. He wasn't in favor of gay marriage.

4:43And it was Joe Biden, ironically, who led the move for gay marriage, which was eventually endorsed by the Supreme Court for a variety of political and personal reasons. So Obama was very appealing to those voters. It could be made appealing. You know, you don't have to win all of them. You have to win a significant chunk of them. If you don't win any of them, you can't win an election. You don't have to win a majority of them. You just have to win enough of them. And Obama was somebody who had a magical gift for being able to speak to almost anyone. You know, if you ever watch early videos of Obama giving restaurant reviews on a local Chicago station, you can find it on YouTube.

5:24The young Obama was on some local cable station, and he was giving restaurant reviews. And you could see, oh, this guy is appealing. Everybody found him appealing because he, you know, he spoke forthrightly, spoke with charm. He said, you know, he was reviewing some, I think it was a rib joint. And he said, no, I don't go to this place expecting amazing flavors or revolutionary cooking. That's something solid. He just had it exactly right. So I think that was part of Obama's great, great gift. So it's not undoable. And let's remember too, Ruthie, because, and this is something I'm trying to say to all of my Democratic friends.

6:03Democrats are depressives. They just are naturally depressives. And so they're treating this last election as though it was some overwhelming defeat. It was a hugely depressing defeat. But the margin of the popular vote was tiny, the smallest ever. And the numbers in the key states, cliche phrase, swing states, the numbers were quite small. If you had changed 100 ,000 votes in those states, you would have changed the course of the election. So the notion that there's this kind of overwhelming wave of Trumpism is a complete historical fiction. And American elections are close, and the oscillation of parties in power is the most normal thing to have happen.

6:45What makes this election so unusual, and this approaching inauguration so potentially sinister, is that Trump is not a conservative politician. He comes from a a dangerous authoritarian tradition. It's very, very different. You listened to my conversation with James Carville. Did you agree with him? Absolutely. I think because, you know, what he was saying in the conversation you and I listened to together was much more tactical than it was, I don't know how to put it, philosophical. In other words, what he was saying is that if Biden had stepped down in 2023 and that there'd been a real primary that could have brought someone else who was not attached to the Biden administration to the fore.

7:28It could have been Gretchen Whitmer, or it could have been Josh Shapiro, or it could have been my favorite, Pete Buttigieg, the Secretary of Transportation. So someone of that kind. I have a prejudice, Ruthie, in favor of over-educated, short men whose fathers were university professors of English, which is Buttigieg's. I can't imagine. It's just my class interests. Anyway, the point is that someone of that kind would have emerged and would have been independent. I'm simply parroting the point that Carville was making, and would have been independent of the Biden White House, which fairly or unfairly, rightly or wrongly, and politics isn't fair, had become wildly unpopular.

8:09And Biden and the people around him, with what seems in retrospect to be scandalous, almost criminal irresponsibility, refused to pay attention to what was transparently obvious to everyone, that they had lost the confidence of the country. Did they deserve to lose the confidence of the country after many accomplishments, including navigating the inflation and the risk of a recession better than anyone thought? No, they didn't deserve it. But Jimmy Carter, who died last week, didn't deserve to lose the confidence of the country either. He had done a very good job. He had brought an abiding peace Treaty to the Middle East.

8:48People now forget that all of the things that Ronald Reagan has given credit for, deregulation, for instance, that was all Carter's initiatives. Even the appointment of Paul Volcker, who was the head of the Federal Reserve and helped to limit inflation, that was a Carter initiative. So did he deserve to lose? Had he rescued the hostages, he probably would have been elected. Politics are a business of contingencies in that way. In any case, I think Carvel's point that had Biden stepped down in 2023, there's a very real chance that a Democrat would have won the election relatively easily. I think that's true.

9:25Before the election, you wrote a New Yorker article looking ahead to a Trump second term. Tell me about it. I wrote in the weeks before the election, I wrote a long piece about what I thought were the stakes in the American election. And the piece, which I think doubtless baffled as many people as it informed, was really about the bizarre nature of American reality, where everything that seems to us clownish and chaotic and grotesque and things that have actual real consequences in the world are so tightly tied together that it's very hard for us to distinguish between the two. Trump is the prince of that kind of disorder.

10:05and he'll say deranged things like we're going to invade Greenland. And in part, it's meant to be entertainment. It's like professional wrestling. And his followers feel it that way. Isn't that great? You know, the timid liberal politicians, you know, won't say anything. And Trump, old Trump is saying, I'm going to invade Greenland. And in that sense, it's a grotesque game like professional wrestling. But it's a game that actually could have very real consequences and catastrophic ones in the world. So that's always the question with Trump. In that piece, I distinguish between Trump minimalists, some of them extremely smart, progressive-minded people who think, remember that famous quote of Maya Angelou's that everyone is always repeating, when someone shows you who they are, believe them.

10:55Now, we normally use that as a kind of lefty slogan. But people have pointed out, look, Trump has already been in power. And what he showed you was that he's a con artist. He's a blowhard. He says he's going to do a million things. But in fact, the only thing he really wants to do is get attention, get approval, get high ratings, and get tax breaks for his billionaire friends. That's what he really wants. And the rest of it is a con man's blowhard fuck. That's the Trump minimalist view. And to be fair, also the Trump minimalist view is that the Democratic Party in power has made countless mistakes, which you can't minimize.

11:37You know, I did a book tour two years ago, did 30 cities. And, you know, I love to walk. So in every city, I would walk home from the venues, bookstore, university, occasionally a church to my hotel. And in every American city, Seattle and Portland, Philadelphia and Dallas, the level of social disorder evident on the street was real and appalling. And I had done a book tour 10 years before, and that wasn't the case. People blamed Democrats for that level of social disorder. Again, fairly or not doesn't matter. That politics isn't about fairness. It's about the intensity of perception. So the Trump minimalist case is Democrats screwed up, Trump is a blowhard, will survive it and rebound.

12:28The Trump maximalist case, which is the case, unfortunately, I believe in, is that the pattern of authoritarian takeovers of democratic states follows a pattern. And that pattern is that you have someone who seems clownish, like a clownish populist, who turns out actually to be a genuine menace. That's the pattern. And one of the key signs of it is already in place, Ruthie, which is the readiness of corporate tycoons who despise the leader. All of the billionaires who, paths I've crossed and more billionaires I'm sure have come into the River Cafe at one time or another, have contempt for Trump.

13:09They think he's a clown. But they think they can use him. They think they can manipulate him and control him for their own ends. And they've already begun the pattern of bribing him. That's what happens in third world countries. That's what happens in Russia. So the pattern, frighteningly and potently, is already taking place. And what do you think about Elon Musk's increasing prominence? Musk is, you know, there have always been, Ruthie, we used to call them plutocrats. Now we call them oligarchs. Whether it was John Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller, or Mr. Frick, there have always been plutocrats intimately involved in American politics and British politics as well.

13:51So that's not entirely new. But there's something about the transnational nature of it, which is a reflection of the internet and of social media and so on, that is scary. And there's something brazen about it that's particularly frightening. Musk makes no secret of his view that he, a completely unelected oligarch, has a right to affect and even dictate policy. As I say, it's not a new thing for very wealthy people to have an undue influence. sadly, in democratic politics, but it was always previously, it was always sort of insulated, bounded about, made acceptable by rules of conduct, right?

14:38You couldn't overtly bribe the president of the United States. You couldn't give money to a far-right British politician in order to undermine the elected government of the country. And now that's happening. It's happening openly. And it happens not just through the timidity of the politicians and the benumbing of the populace. It happens through the open participation of the other plutocrats, right? When plutocrats become oligarchs, right? When they stop thinking of themselves as wealthy men who have an investment in the rule of law and in an equitable society, that that's good for them in the long run, then they become oligarchs and they have no thought except their proximity to power.

15:22And that's all the people, you know, you and I both know, because of the nature of our work. A lot of people that kind of decent, good, wealthy businessmen and executives who once upon a time believed that they had to side with democracy because it was in their interest to do it, because they made their money because they lived in a well-governed, broadly rule-of-law country. And when they stopped believing that, we're really in a catastrophic state. And Elon Musk, I think, represents the complete unmooring of money from a faith in the rule of law. Is normalization a problem? Do you think people are just retreating from politics now?

16:08This is a moment to recuperate and rebound and all of that. And it's not clear that resistance and protest was necessarily the most effective way of dealing with it. but there's an enormous risk of undue passivity, which we're calling normalization in our response to Trump and Trumpism. And the wisest students of authoritarianism, Timothy Snyder wrote a book on tyranny, and Applebaum all make the point that authoritarians depend on your passivity. They depend on your telling yourself, oh, well, it will pass. What can I do about it anyway? it's your passivity in the face of normalizing January 6th and so on that is part of the cost.

16:54It can be as small a thing as not starting an argument when a rich person you know says, oh, I'm in favor of Trump because I think Trump is good for business and I can't stand woke politics. And you have to be willing to speak up at that moment and not be a passive participant in the acceptance of authoritarianism. We always end our podcast, as you know, with a question about comfort food. And even though this is a bonus edition, I'd like to know what you're planning on eating in the next few months. So the truth is, is that, and it pops right out of the blue cookbook from the River Cafe, is I do a matriciana.

17:35Everybody loves a cupboard meal. You know, you come home, you haven't shopped, you just have to make dinner. And there's always a bit of pancetta or bacon in the fridge. I'm perfectly content with bacon. And tomatoes in the cupboard and a little olive oil. And there's always pasta someplace from back when sitting there. And you make that, you know, and it makes everybody completely happy. And, you know, there's much to be said for pasta and tomato sauce as the staple of life. So I suspect we'll be having much more of it. And at the price of seeming a little unduly virtuous, we live in a city here where there are a lot of unhoused and a lot of unfed people.

18:25And so a big part of our obligation has to be to participate in all the good causes and the positive places that houses the people who don't have one and feeds the people who are going hungry. And so making a commitment to those small virtues. You know, I called my book about politics, A Thousand Small Sanities, because I think that's where good work gets done. So we have to have a thousand and one in the approaching years. Thank you, Adam. It was great to talk to you.

18:58Thank you for listening to Ruthie's Table 4 in partnership with Montclair.

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