Fear and Fascism: How America Reached a Political Breaking Point

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Lincoln Mitchell teaches in the School of International and Public Affairs and the Political Science Department at Columbia University. He writes the popular Substack Kibitzing with Lincoln. You can learn more about Lincoln at his website www.lincolnmitchell.com

Summary

The podcast episode covers a wide-ranging discussion on the rise of fascism in the United States, with a focus on the 2022 US midterm elections and the broader political and economic challenges facing American democracy. The speakers analyze the characteristics of fascism, including the reliance on a strong leader, the targeting of minority groups, and the complicated relationship with the economy. They also discuss the failures of the media and political establishment to adequately confront the threat of fascism, as well as the need to build a stronger consensus for democratic values and institutions. The discussion touches on the role of race, class, and economic inequality in shaping political outcomes, and the speakers offer potential policy solutions to address the root causes of social and political unrest.

Transcript

Rob Johnson (00:00:00):

I’m here today with my neighbor, a friend, an inspiration Lincoln Mitchell, professor at Columbia University, extraordinary baseball writer from the San Francisco Bay Area, and he teaches at Columbia. And I have, how would I say, had the good fortune of seeing him on the street, reading his materials, reading some of his books, whether on baseball or on what’s happening in Russia, Eastern Europe, and other places like Africa. So it’s a delight to have you on the podcast, Lincoln, and it’s a delight for me to be able to share all the insight and wisdom that you’ve shared with me with our audience. Thanks for joining.

Lincoln Mitchell (00:01:24):

Thank you for inviting me. Rob. Thank you for that very kind introduction, especially the baseball part.

Rob Johnson (00:01:30):

It’s right on. And so we won’t talk too much about baseball today, at least online, but you wrote an article that got me just shivering about November 8th called America Chooses Fascism. And in the tensions following what you want to call the discord or the discomfort following the presidential election, I felt like you went in and disaggregated explored and illuminated many, many things for us as a country to have a real understanding of where we are and why things happened. So I turn it over to you and you can paint the picture of what you’re trying to impart to us. And then we can talk about, I would want to tell our audience this is not a new lightning bolt that happened on November 8th. He has articles going back to 20 16, 20 17 that I’ve reviewed that foreshadowed the kind of challenges in the kind of experience that we’re having right now. So anybody at Lincoln deep dive? It’s up to you.

Lincoln Mitchell (00:02:54):

Okay. I think I want to begin by discussing what we mean by the F word fascism. And it took me a while to start using it. During, when Trump was president, I was much more comfortable with the framing of democratic rollback, which means an active effort by the government to restrict and limit democratic space, which is what we saw during the first Trump presidency. But I’ve, I’ve become comfortable and so many others with this term, fascism, and let me kind of explain what I think are the key components because otherwise it just sounds like a nasty word, like calling someone a name almost to me, there are several key components. One is that we don’t solve problems that we face through policy, through looking at data and crafting policy, we solve it through a strong man. The strong man comes along and solves the problem.

(00:03:42):

So in 2016, that takes the form of the slogan. I alone trumpet the Republican convention, I alone can fix it. That is something that nobody who believes in small D democracy would ever, ever say. Democracy is a group activity in the polling place in the legislature when we implement policy, et cetera. The second is othering, finding a group of people who you can blame for anything in every problem. And Trump did that. This campaign focusing on two groups, migrants and trans people. Every problem in America could go back to migrants and trans people. The third is a relationship between the nation. And I want to be clear here, going to sound like a political scientist, not the country, the nation, which in American means the white Christian segment of the American population and the leader and elevating them above everyone else and then using language poisoning the blood was a phrase he actually used.

(00:04:40):

I mean that’s exactly out of the fascism textbook. In addition, it’s a relationship with the economy that is complicated because fascism is not communism, it’s not the state takeover of the private sector, but in a fascist system, there is no real private sector because there is no economic power independent of the leadership. And the leadership has the ability in a fascist system to create havoc with individual businesses that go against ‘em. Particularly large businesses, they tend to be less concerned with the bodega on the corner. And that’s why we have to look at this tariff issue. You’re an economist, right? So if someone says tariffs, you might think about Smoot hawley or you might think about increased inflation or anything like that. But for Trump’s base, it’s a cultural term. Tariff is a way of saying, I am one of you. I hear your problems.

(00:05:35):

It is not about economy, but it’s also a way to bring the private sector to his side because the risks of pushing against Trump or he puts a tariff on your sector or triples the tariff on your sector. But I want to make maybe a thought experiment here because all of this was evident in 2016. If let’s say in 2016 something different happens in the primary, and let’s say Jeb Bush or John Kasick, I don’t really care, Marco Rubio. Lindsey Graham becomes the nominee. And then there’s an election, and excuse me, Donald Trump runs as a third party candidate and Hillary Clinton wins that election. And let’s just make the math simple, 50% for Hillary and 340 electoral votes, 40% for Kasich or Cruz or whomever with the remaining electoral votes. And then Donald Trump gets 10%. If that had happened, the media, the punditry, academia on the Democratic and Republican party would’ve been asking how could 10% of Americans vote for fascism?

(00:06:35):

But what happens is because he won the first time, they couldn’t confront that this election was different. There was a growing sense that he was a fascist threat, and then he wins. And within hours it’s covered like a normal election for the most part by the punditry, but much of academia by the media. And it just goes back to that deeply American and deeply wrong historical notion that it can’t happen here because we want to believe that. But that doesn’t make it true. So the illogic of this is that the evidence that Trump isn’t a fascist is that he won the election. But if you know anything about how logic works or ever taken an advanced math class, there’s no logic there. So I wrote this article because America chooses fascism should have been the headline in every major newspaper and in the runup to the election, we pointed at the cowardice of the Washington Post because Jeff Bezos knew. But the real cowardice here is every newspaper that’s beginning to normalize this because they’re afraid. And that’s what fascism is and that’s where we are now. But the other thing I wanted to do in that article, and I want to make clear, is that the notion that Americans prefer democracy and that there’s a consensus for democracy in the United States, there’s no real historical evidence for that. That’s also a story we tell ourself.

Rob Johnson (00:07:53):

And when you say democracy, metaphorically, that means all people, all members. Whereas the tensions between race, gender, and all kinds of things have always defined who has the power within our society?

Lincoln Mitchell (00:08:10):

Democracy means a set of institutions beginning but not ending with elections, a set of protections and the basic sense that every citizen is equal. We have, there’s never been a consensus on that in America. Think of it this way, in shorthand, the first election we had in the US where basically everyone could participate was 1968. That’s within your and my lifetimes. That’s the first time. And until then, most white people didn’t seem to think that was a problem. And that’s pretty strong evidence of the lack of consensus here. And I understand the arguments that I’m hearing these pundits make, which is inflation and the economy. And that may be true, but a voter who looks around and says Inflation is out of, and then votes for a fascist is prioritizing stopping inflation over maintaining democracy. And that’s why I want to use the word choose the voters who voted for Trump. We have to put that in the active voice. Fascism doesn’t happen. Fascism is something that people choose. A majority of people choose it when it becomes strong at the expense of the weaker and the minority, which is may see how the next four years will play out.

Rob Johnson (00:09:22):

Let’s talk a little bit about what you might call the distortion or refraction of the role of democratic media, what you might call business power when the economics and political economy come to the surface. What do you see, say from the decisions made by the LA Times and the Washington Post or other newspapers that didn’t make quite the headlines but are still in those force fields?

Lincoln Mitchell (00:09:51):

Well, there’s a couple points here. The most powerful media platform in the United States is owned by Elon Musk. The second most powerful media platform is owned by the Chinese Musk is a important node in a transnational fascist movement. So is Donald Trump. The Chinese Communist Party has done a lot of impressive things in China, many of which are good but are not good, but they’re no friend of American democracy. So before we even turn to the Washington Post or the New York Times, we have to look at those platforms. So this election to some extent, once Elon Musk bought Twitter, the whole ball game changed. Now the question here for the rest of the media, and you could call that legacy whatever you want to call it, is will they continue to identify the government as fascist now and the president is fascist. Now the issue is two things.

(00:10:45):

One, they are afraid. Jeff Bezos undoubtedly has business in front of this government. The LA Times a little different, but the media is afraid because Donald Trump has made it clear that he’s very comfortable harassing free media, limiting free media, limiting the space for liberalism, which is a classic thing that fascists do. But the other is, it’s a cognitive dissonance. The analogy, I’m going to talk a little bit baseball here just for one second. I want you to imagine hypothetically that you love, this isn’t hypothetical for me that you love or for you that you love baseball and that every Saturday you go to the park near your house and you bring your bat, your ball and your glove, and you play a pickup game of baseball, and this is fun. And then one Saturday you go down there and you got your bat, your ball and your glove, and everyone’s playing cricket.

(00:11:29):

And you look around and you say, what’s going on here? That’s what happened in 2016. The game switched and the media didn’t catch up. And now in 2024, you’re going down there with Hussain bat your ball and your glove and they’re playing rugby and you really don’t know what to do. So what the media is doing, the way they’re responding is not learning how to write about rugby. They’re just throwing the baseball up in the air and catching it. The only thing they know to do, and I know that’s an odd extended metaphor, but the point is the media has to adjust. They have missed the biggest story in America for the last eight years and perhaps the biggest story in America really since the end of World War ii, which takeover of a major party by a fascist movement. And they haven’t covered it, not in part.

(00:12:14):

Now maybe it’s out of fear, but also because of the cognitive dissonance. Every one of the people who you see, the David, what’s his name, Konecky David Axelrod. I’m not even talking about the ones the Joe Rogans or the Elon Musk, but the good liberals, they have come up in this system where it’s red team and blue team. It’s Yankees and Red Sox, and that’s how we write about elections. And that helped ‘em get where they are and it explains so much, but it doesn’t anymore. So this begins Alexander Sosa Nitin in one of the volumes of the Gulag Archipelago, which I don’t know if all your listeners have read. It’s only about a 2,500 word trilogy about Soviet prison camp. So it’s neither light nor cheery reading, but I think it’s important reading. And he says he was an academic before he was sent to the camps. And he says, the road to the gulag starts when someone says something that you know is wrong in a faculty meeting and you nod your head anyway. And there’s a lot of that going on here.

(00:13:17):

A major problem here is after January 6th, 2021, when anybody with any sense knew exactly what was going on, the speed with which they normalized the Republican party, every time Ted Cruz and I pick on Ted Cruz because he’s such an unpleasant character, but pick any major Kevin McCarthy, any Republican member of Congress came on television, it should say after their name complicit in an attempt to disrupt a free and fair election. But they didn’t because they have to tell a story of both parties that they worship at this altar of false partisan equivalency. And that’s not because they’re being intimidated, that’s because that’s where their faith takes them.

Rob Johnson (00:13:57):

Interesting, interesting. Now you saw a whole lot of things that you mentioned in your article. For instance, the choice versus pro-life tensions and how many women in many states, I guess it was what seven or seven or eight states voted to have pro-choice, but many of those states, the women, particularly the Caucasian women, voted for Trump. In addition, how can they separate those issues from the two candidates?

Lincoln Mitchell (00:14:39):

I would also add another data point from the information we have now, which I think there’s still a few votes to be counted, but I think we can say this thing in Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada, the voters chose a Democratic senator and Donald Trump. So that’s four states compared to only one state in 2020 where we saw that division. And obviously the Senate matters a lot for things like Supreme Court confirmations, right? So there’s a couple points here. One, we must recognize that Donald Trump is a uniquely popular figure. I was going back and forth on email in a friendly way with my close Republican friend, and I said to him, I emailed to him and I said, listen, you probably know I’m not a real big fan of Donald Trump, but those of us who don’t like Donald Trump, we have to recognize and accept that many of our fellow Americans do.

(00:15:24):

So Trump. But the other point from a tactical perspective is the Harris campaign didn’t seem to able to communicate that the reason the Dobbs decision passed was because of justices that Donald Trump put on the court. So that’s another piece of it. But I want to just go back to this data here because there’s something else here that’s more important. That’s I think more important component of this or very important component of this. The data we have is that Trump among white women, Trump beat Harris 53 45. That’s an eight point disparity. So while we talk about the gender gap, particularly among younger white people, the real issue here is the racial gap. White people are very happy with this fascist guy regardless of their gender. But I want to probe this a little more. I want to break down the numbers a little more. Two groups of white women voted overwhelmingly for Harris Jewish white women and lesbians.

(00:16:21):

The latter doesn’t surprise you. The former would surprise you only because huge Jewish voted about four to one for Harris. And that’s something that neither the left nor the right wants you to know. But if you take those women out of the picture, so you only include straight white women who don’t affirmatively identify as Jewish. Now, and I can explain the back of the envelope math here. I dunno that I have to, but now that jumps to about 55, 37, and that is a maybe 55, 39. That is a huge margin. And the only way I can identify that is by pointing at something that we’ve seen over and over and over throughout American history at the polling place and other places, which is that white women are driven more by their racial identity than their gender identity. And Kamala Harris was hoping it wouldn’t break this way this year, and she did everything she could to change that, in other words, to make it go her way.

(00:17:23):

And I’ll tell you just my view on this both politically, but also personally. A couple days before the election I was out in Central Park. We both lived near Central Park, walking my dog with a guy and friendly with up there who was supporting Harris out. And he said, and I said, Harris’ run as close to a perfect campaign as possible. And I said that before the election. Now nothing is perfect in this world. So everyone makes small mistakes and she lost. I didn’t expect her to lose. I thought she would win by a hair. But we have to point fingers that if she had done this, if she had done that, is willfully focusing on the trees because we don’t want to confront the forest she lost because Americans chose fascism. And we have to have the moral and intellectual courage to say that. Then we can break down as to how the ball might’ve bounced this way and not that way. But let’s not bury the lead here.

Rob Johnson (00:18:16):

And so let’s talk about what’s suppressed, what’s as Carl Jung called the shadow that needs to be excavated for us to make the best of this profound challenge for the future of democracy.

Lincoln Mitchell (00:18:38):

Well, I think there’s kind of three directions we need to go here. The first is what do we need to do to make this period to stop the worst from happening? And our colleague, Laura Ed and I wrote a piece in the New Republic about this back in the spring and what we said is when if Trump wins, this was when Biden was still in the race. If Trump wins, we have to recognize there are things he’s going to do that any Republican will do. Massive tax cut for the rich, appointing conservative people to the federal bench. Those are things that Mitt Romney would do. It’s not unusual. And while I may not agree with those things, those aren’t kind of crimes against democracy, but going door to door to round up undocumented workers is creating camps for people, is trying to sue or harass free media out of existence is passing laws that even more meaningfully limit the freedom of women, is empowering police to violate civil liberties.

(00:19:49):

I can go on and on and on. One thing I’m very concerned about is, and I was watching the returns with a friend of mine on election night who’s gay guy, and he was saying, what do you think in terms of violence, where does this lead? And I said, where this leads is that the proud boys commit an act of violence with a nod and a wink from the federal government. So stopping those things, organizing, using the powerful institutions we have, whether that’s faith institutions, whether that’s the labor movement, university student groups nationally to stop those things, that’s one thing we can do.

(00:20:24):

The second thing we can do is I’m not interested now in any discussion about who should Democrats should nominate in 2028. I think it’s way too early for that. I’m not even interested in what the key Senate races are for 2026. The election focus needs to be how do we ensure that we have free and fair elections in 2026 and 2028? Because if we can get there, if we free and fair elections, I’m enough of a small D Democrat to believe, you know what? Let’s try hard and win them next time. That’s my view on this. And the third issue is the harder one, maybe the hardest. How do we build democracy? How do we build a consensus, a demand for democracy in the United States? And it begins by some real honesty among those who believe in democracy. Starting with that we have to go out and do this work, rather we could see support for an undemocratic force as an aberration, or we could see it as something deeply in the American political character.

(00:21:23):

But there’s a saying out, people will say, pundits will say, we take our democracy for granted. And what they mean is we don’t go out and defend it. But what I mean is that we take it for granted that we are a democracy and we don’t probe that. And unfortunately, and perhaps the biggest barrier to this in some structural sense is the constitution ultimately. So I tell my students sometimes that if aliens landed from outer space and blew up the White House and blew up the capitol, some former assistant Secretary of State would go on television and say, we’re approaching a constitutional crisis. The constitution is the crisis. What the founders did to stop the kind of Moby that they were afraid of has created this crisis.

(00:22:11):

Briefly, because I’m not interested in the Senate map, we’re never going to have a good senate map for the Democrats because there are 20 states or 15 states that elect 13 Republican senators and combined a fewer people than California. So what do we do about structural problems like that? What do we do about a constitution that allows money to buy elections? What we have here is legalized bribery and here citizens united, which is huge at the national level, but also at the local level in cities like San Francisco where I pay a lot of attention to. And then we have the Second amendment and we should all know, and everyone knows this in their heart, the second amendment only applies to white people. White person can walk into a Walmart with an R 15 strapped to their back and a black person gets shot for talking on a cell phone because it looks like a gun. These are things that happen in America. So we have these undemocratic structures baked into the Constitution, and then we have a culture that refuses even among the people who want to recognize how weak the demand is. So we have to change those things. And that’s not a project of one election cycle, maybe not even one decade, probably maybe not even one generation, but we don’t start, we’re never going to finish.

Rob Johnson (00:23:31):

It feels to me like I am hearing as I’m listening to you, the word fear, that fear is the magnetic field that pulls us away from doing that which we should be doing for democracy. We acquiesce to fascistic authority as though it will create a safety despite violating those principles. But violating those principles in the long run may jeopardize our safety even more. And we’re not acknowledging that,

Lincoln Mitchell (00:24:08):

Right? So fear works two ways here. One, for the supporters of the fascist regime, they’re driven by fear. So Donald Trump’s message is be afraid of that brown person. Be afraid of that trans person, and I can protect you from that. That’s how fear works. The other side is that people who oppose the system are afraid to do anything about it because they think something will happen to them. I have described democracy as two things. It’s a collective leap of faith, it’s a collective leap of faith, but it’s also the triumph of fear over hope of hope, right? But hope over fear for democracy. And when I’ve worked in countries where I’m trying to help people make that democratic breakthrough, you really see that, and that’s where we are now, or that’s maybe where we end up right now. I think that there’s, and Trump understands that. So there are a couple of points here where I think are really worth interesting, worth watching. Trump has flirted with and said he will use federal troops to put down demonstrations, right? If that happens, that will terrify people legitimately, right? Imagine if the military comes out and shoots people at a demonstration like it’s Tiananmen Square or something. So we have to build that hope now while we can to get past that, because creating fear is the fascist playbook.

Rob Johnson (00:25:29):

You’re from northern California. I remember reading a book when I was younger by Gerald Polsky from Sausalito called Love is Letting Go of Fear. How these crosscurrents are very, very powerful and how the suppression of desire creates a feeling of shame, which then makes things travel to the unconscious. You don’t want to acknowledge your own shame for not defending what I’ll call proper ethics. So what would you recommend to scholars, to the media, to others to help us address that challenge? How do we challenge the things that produce and magnify fear?

Lincoln Mitchell (00:26:20):

So the first thing I would say is don’t normalize this. If you’re in the, don’t normalize this, I’ve already just this week or since the election turned down two media opportunities to speculate who’s going to be in the cabinet because that’s normalizing this. Stop talking about this. It’s just, and secondly, I mean, I don’t know what your listeners might think. I hope some will hear this and think, I need to think about this. The guy gave me something to think about. Some might think this guy’s crazy. I mean, I hope they don’t think that, but some people might. I know from the feedback I get online that some people certainly on Twitter think that, but we have to talk about these things if you don’t allow yourself to call it what it is, particularly for those of us who have some influence in the world, what we’re telling other people is to be afraid of what it’s, I’m afraid of calling it that.

(00:27:17):

I don’t mean to pick on the New York Times, but it is my hometown newspaper. And the subtext of their headline is We are afraid and you should be too. So we have to demonstrate that we’re not afraid. Demonstrate that we are okay calling fascism when we see it. History is on our side. The majority might not be, but history will be. History is, and it’s a cliche, but it’s true, but it’s true. This interview, when we both shuffled off our mortal coils, hopefully many decades from now, or at least a few decades from now, I’m in no hurry there. Our children, I want them to look at this, your children and my children and say, my father was on the right side, not my father gave into fear, especially those of us who come from positions of some privilege. I mean, I don’t mean to say this, but I used to do a lot of work for U-S-A-I-D.

(00:28:24):

I get a sense that whoever Donald Trump’s Republican and Secretary of State’s going to be, I’m just not going to get on any of those bids anymore. That will cost me some money, but that’s going to be okay. I’m fortunate enough. Those of us who are in that situation, we can’t continue to put our careers our and ahead of doing what’s right. Phil Oaks once said, you can do what’s right or you can do what you are told. And the riff on that today is you can do what’s right or you can do what feels easiest. And we all know what’s right here. And if you see this our way, we all know what the right thing to do here. And the right thing to do is when you’re in that meeting with somebody and they say, well, we were talking to the Trump administration, it’s okay to say, do you mean the fascist Trump administration?

(00:29:20):

Trump won this election? You say you have to say, yes, he did, and he won it on a fascist platform. We have to normalize talking about fascism, not in the way as some kind of scary buzzword, but spelling it out to people. When we see the democratic rollback happen, we have to continue to talk about it. I remember in 2020 when Biden won, obviously people were very happy, many people, and they say democracy prevailed. And I said at the time, no democracy hasn’t prevailed. The hope for democracy prevailed. And I wrote about Kamala Harris this time. The hope for democracy prevails would’ve prevailed if Kamala Harris won. That hope never goes away, but it’s a lot more distant now than it was. But if you believe it’s worth democracy’s worth walking in the polling place and putting a tick mark next to Kamala Harris’ name, it’s also worth fighting for when the ball doesn’t bounce our way.

Rob Johnson (00:30:13):

Now, you’ve been quite a deep diving expert into the realm of Russia and the former Soviet Union. We’ve seen the dynamics between Trump and Putin. We see the Ukraine crisis now, and I’m wondering how you envision that will play out and what ramifications it will have for the China relationship to the western world.

Lincoln Mitchell (00:30:41):

Well, the Ukraine conflict is obviously the highest profile conflict in the region, but my greatest expertise in that region is in Georgia. And Georgia had elections like 10 days before ours. So I was not only focusing on that on our election and the World Series, but also the Georgian elections. And after Trump won, a Georgian friend of mine, we were in a chat group together, said, we’re living in, this is Putin’s world now. So Trump will wrap up, almost certainly wrap up that war in Ukraine in a way that is very good for Putin. And I want to just make one point geopolitical point clear here. During this conflict, many have described that many here in the US as a proxy war between the United States and Russia, that was never true. This has been a proxy war between the United States and China. Russia is a Chinese proxy.

(00:31:33):

And Ukraine, I mean, they’re fighting for the independence of their country. They’re fighting to stop Putin and Russia from taking over the country. I’m very clear on that. But without the United States support, they couldn’t do this. So it’s a proxy war between us and China. And when Putin invaded began the full scale invasion of Russia, of Ukraine, sorry, back in February of 2022, the world looked to see what the United States would do and what Biden did sent a very clear message to Beijing, right? Which is, you’re not going to get away with this if you try this in Taiwan. Now, there’s a couple points here. One, I’m not sure what the American people actually think about Taiwan or Ukraine, but I know that China saw that and they said, oh, we have an American president here who’s is not going to let us do what we want.

(00:32:21):

And then the early victories, because they saw that our American weaponry that we were giving Ukraine our used weaponry, because we were not giving the new stuff, was better than what Russia had. Now the problem is that over time, Russia’s begun to push back and they’re kind of deadlocked for now. And now Trump’s going to break that deadlock by weighing in on Putin’s side, and that’s going to send a message to China that if you try something in Taiwan. Now the difference is that Trump has been very explicitly hawkish on China. But there’s another issue, there’s a couple of other issues here. One is Trump is an agent of chaos and instability. Trump is an agent that accelerates the big picture decline of the United States, and that is not lost on Beijing and the other thing. And Leonard Cohen wrote a song called Everybody Knows, and there’s a line in that song.

(00:33:22):

Everybody knows that you’ve been faithful, give or take a night or two. And I’m not on the show to give relationship advice, but just for the record, if you’ve been faithful, give or take a night or two, you haven’t been faithful. And the reason I say that is because our allies are looking at the United States of America right now, and they’re saying, our allies now, not China, but our allies. And they’re saying America is stable and a good partner, give or take in administration or two. And if you’re stable and a good partner, give or take in administration or two, then you’re neither stable nor a good partner here we’re talking about in the geopolitical sense, and that weakens America dramatically. Look, we have the most powerful military in the world. We still have the world’s biggest economy. But along with those things, we had a reputation for stability, a reputation for stability, frankly, beginning in the late 18th century through 2016, that was the envy of the world. And the images of January 6th, 2021 tarnished that forever, and Biden had to come in and try to rebuild it. But I talked to enough European diplomats and people in their foreign ministries over there that they’re looking and saying, but what if Trump comes back? And then he did. And that is very, very damaging for us.

Rob Johnson (00:34:50):

Well, the number of people that I talked to in the economic realm are saying that all kinds of issues were put on the table on the progressive side that didn’t deal with the core, what I’ll call working class dysfunction that they had experienced. And I saw some data from the Economic Policy Institute, which said, if your starting date was 1985, productivity skyrocketed. And 83% of Americans have a lower standard of living now than they had in 1985. And that’s where the stress comes from is the

Lincoln Mitchell (00:35:31):

Right. That’s a really important data point, particularly because of the starting point, 1985, that’s almost 40 years ago. So that stress that you’ve identified is a constant, not a variable. So one, it means that incumbents are never going to sit that easy. We have not had two incumbent presidents lose an election in a row since Ford and Carter in 76 and then 80, but Ford was barely a president. So really in our history, I don’t think we’ve ever had this happen. And we may have it happened again if we have a free and fair election, it may happen again in 2028. So that instability is a constant, not a variable. But I also think that part of the problem here, and there are people, I mean, I was on an email exchange with a member of Congress, a progressive member of Congress, who said, we need to outline these progressive economic plans. I thought Bernie Sanders’s tweet on this was frankly idiotic. We did not lose this election because we didn’t offer enough left of center economic because what the message that people have gotten is the Democratic Party can’t solve these problems either. So to comment at the last minute with a bunch of good proposals wouldn’t have solved the problem. Now, if you want to get in the weeds in the kind of postmortem,

Rob Johnson (00:36:37):

Which I don’t, lemme just ask you come with a bunch of those proposals, it wouldn’t solve the problem. Is it because people don’t believe they will implement those proposals because of the, what I’ll call political economic money politics? Or is it, I’m trying to understand where their lack of confidence comes from

Lincoln Mitchell (00:36:56):

Because nothing has worked because we’ve been a steady trend for 40 years. So nothing has really worked. But there’s something else here. President Joe Biden, he used to, I dunno if you remember him, he used to be a senator from Delaware, but Joe Biden had the most progressive economic program as president, successful economic program of any Democrat in LBJ. And now this is, I don’t want to get into the weeds here, but it’s worth noting that Donald Trump, part of the appeal of fascism is simple. You keep it simple. And what Trump repeated by 2023, he had created a consensus I gave, by late 2023, I Trump gave you the greatest economy ever. Biden gave you the worst economy ever. Neither of those statements were true. But if you pound your table hand on the table so metaphorically and say it loud enough and frequently enough people begin to believe it. And then we had a president who was too ill to go out there and defend his record.

(00:37:53):

And we had a White House team that was committed to concealing that illness from the American people. And then we had a vice president who becomes a nominee in late July and has to run with this. And she was never going to catch up with that. Now again, I don’t know that this would’ve changed it, but I want to also point out that even if Harris had won, we still would have a massive fascist threat here because there’s no way that Donald Trump was getting less than 47% of the vote, 75 million people voted for him. Let’s say Harris sneaks by and 76 million and 300,000 votes in the key states. Go the other way. This threat is still there. So I think to some extent, why did Harris lose? I mean, obviously your listeners may have figured out that I supported Harris, but it wouldn’t have solved the problem. It wouldn’t have made fascism go away. And what it would’ve done is had people stop talking about it for a while, which is exactly what we don’t need to be doing.

Rob Johnson (00:38:54):

Yeah, and I sense that you said that Biden’s program was the most progressive economics in quite some time, but it was starting from a deep ditch and it hadn’t solved everything. So it wasn’t was a work in progress. It wasn’t bragging rights for a completed process,

Lincoln Mitchell (00:39:16):

But there’s some things you could have said, right? He just couldn’t defend his record at all. And the other thing that to me, which is very strange, is that it seems like elites of both parties decided they weren’t going to discuss Covid. I, and one of the more frustrating things I’ve heard, even people on the left is look, we survived the first Trump period. It wasn’t that bad. It was just a lot of talk. A million people died, half of those people while Trump was president and the other half after from Covid and due to a couple of things, one was his complete inability to bring a focused policy approach to this. Two, his and his people’s willingness to turn this like everything else into a cultural war issue. And three, a disinformation campaign starting in the White House around how to just, COVID isn’t really there. Basically covid denial and then transitioning after he left into essentially vaccine denial, we lost more people to covid than of all of our foreign wars combined. And no one wants to talk about that. So when we say we survived, I don’t know. I have close family relatives who didn’t survive. We’re both here in New York, here in New York, almost everyone can say that.

Rob Johnson (00:40:24):

Yep. And I remember the schools became dangerous because of the constellation of families and who’s vaccinated, who’s not.

Lincoln Mitchell (00:40:35):

Right? In many states, people bringing Covid back to their grandparents and killing ‘em, right? I mean, it’s not funny. And again, those of us who don’t like Trump, we now have to recognize that in the last half century, maybe more, there have been three extraordinary political talents at the national level. Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump. And they’re all totally different in almost every way except for all three are men. And that is Trump. And we underestimated that again. And part of it is because he, there’ve been fascist demagogues in American history before. We can name George Wallace, Huey Long Father Coughlin, but you’re from Michigan. So Father Coughlin, but also Donald Trump was the most effective. I mean, I tell my students, you mentioned, I’m specifically from the city of San Francisco. So we take pride in being from, we call it the city where I come from.

(00:41:40):

It’s not the Bay, I’m not from the Bay Area, I’m from the city, but about a 10 minute walk from where I went to grade school, there is now a post office. This is about if the buses are running well, this is a 20 minute ride from my childhood home and about a five minute drive from where my mom lives now, there’s a post office where that post office stands, used to be a church. When I was in middle school, the members of that church left because their pastor basically ordered them to, and they went to Guyana, and a few years later, they were all killed. They were forced to drink flavor aid, not Kool-Aid. Everyone says Kool-Aid, but it was FLA aid lace with cyanide and people called a mass suicide. But it really was a mass massacre, mass murder because they were forced to at gunpoint.

(00:42:29):

And so I’m obviously talking about the People’s Temple and Jim Jones. And the reason I raised this is that for me, that dynamic, that building AOC cult following, who will do anything for you, who block out other information willfully and then not knowingly, that undermines that. That’s what Trump does. So effectively, to go back to what you were saying about the media, he’s created this media echo chamber, whether it’s the extremes of the manosphere and the incel movement, whether it’s Joe Rogan, whether it’s Twitter, whether it’s the Endless Fox and OAN. I’ll give you one example that really struck me. I was knocking on doors in Janesville, Wisconsin in the run up to the election last few days. And one guy came, when you get an undecided voter, it’s so unusual and just kind of fascinating. So I was asking this guy, it was clearly he wasn’t really undecided.

(00:43:20):

He was a Trump supporter, but at one point we were talking about this and that, and he points to his driveway. This is a middle class house. I mean, this was not, we fetishized the poor whites, but this guy was not, this guy obviously was employed, made a decent living and lived in a nice, not fancy, but a nice enough house. And he said, well, I like to drive whatever car I want to. And he pointed at his garage where there are two cars presumably. One was his, one was his wife’s, and he had a pickup truck, it’s blue collar guy, and then another sedan. And I said, yeah, well, so do I. And he said, but they’re going to make me buy an electric car. And I said, no, no one’s going to make you buy an electric car. And he said, yes, they’re going to make me buy an electric car.

(00:44:01):

I like driving this gas pickup truck. And I said, no, what the Inflation Reduction Act does is it incentivizes. And once I got said the word incentivize, I couldn’t even finish the sentence. He said, all right, that’s it. Incentives. And he walks and slams the door. And what I learned there was that somewhere in the right wing media sphere, the word incentive, they’ve taught them to respond to the word incentive as a liberal buzzword. And that’s the power of the communication, the power of the cult that those of us outside it don’t understand. So one thing I would say is when you ask what we can do, and here I’m picking on the work of David Hassan a little bit, or building on the work of David Hassan a little bit. I have a close, I have an uncle, and he says to me that two of his brothers, my father was one of his brothers, my father died are Mara supporters.

(00:45:01):

What should I do? He says, and what I tell him, and I’m very close with his uncle, and I say, don’t talk to ‘em about politics. Don’t argue with them, but keep the lines of communication open. Talk to ‘em about sports. Because at some point, when they begin to want to get their way out of this, the lines of communication has to be open. The way cults work, and this is how the MAGA movement works, is they instill suspicion in anybody who’s telling you everything else. And they want you to cut yourself off from that. With my friend I was telling you about earlier, we talk about politics only this week and the rest of the time we talk about our kids and what our kids are doing. They’re both, well, his son’s college age, mine just graduated, and we talk about the Giants because we were both giants fans or mutual friends from high school or grade school. But we have to find a way to keep communication without arguing because no one who voted for Trump is open to hearing what really happened. Anybody who voted for Trump gets five minutes into this discussion and probably logs off or whatever, but we have to find a way to keep talking about other things so that when they bring it up, we could be there for them.

Rob Johnson (00:46:08):

You need inspiration, not incentives, because incentives are coercion or inspiration, and they take a negative view. There’s a gentleman from the Bay Area, Scott Adams, who created the Dilbert Comics trip, and over the last few years he talked about he had been trained by a man named Pierre Clement on these persuasion techniques. And he had been actually in a class with Steve Jobs who became very famous as the ambassador building Apple. But he talked about in 2015 that he thought Donald Trump had had this kind of training, and he created a website which talked about all the different textbooks and what he referred to as the, we may call the father of these awareness or the research mean Milton Erickson. And it was all about what he called neurolinguistic programming. And I remember I was at a dinner in Berkeley area where Scott was talking about that, and then I followed his website. And it does resonate with the way you were talking about how the whatchu might call magnets get ignited and achieve the outcomes that the Trump Coalition has fought for years.

Lincoln Mitchell (00:47:34):

Yes. And it happens in ways that if you’re not in that world, you don’t even know. That’s what makes it so complicated. And I’ve heard people also talk about Trump, and as a younger man, the church where he went to, but he, I’m not a medical doctor. My sense is that Trump is in a state of advanced decline for some neurological breakdown. So he’s not as effective as he once was, but to a certain proportion of American people. He’s an extremely effective communicator. And part of that is think one, the very simple language. Very simple language. He doesn’t talk down to people because to some extent, he doesn’t have the linguistic skills. He couldn’t if he wanted to. He just doesn’t have a vocabulary like that. Secondly, the repetition. Repetition in politics is so important. We outside the MAGA world, look at the meandering, wandering, strange rallies. But if you think about both his campaign and the paid campaign, the TV commercials, it was inflation, tariffs, migrants, and trans over and over and over again. So simple, repetitive. And then what we should also is the humor, right? The humor that breaks through to people. And while Kamala Harris evoked and ev convinced a kind of happiness and joy, she’s not funny. I mean, maybe she’s, I’ve never met her, but she didn’t come off as funny in the public.

(00:49:09):

Clinton. And Obama did a little bit more, particularly Obama, like Obama could be funny at times. And Biden certainly isn’t. So the way, and what that humor does is it softens the extremely harsh edges. The humor is often cruel. It’s often mean spirited, but it’s still humor. He’s a little bit like a bors belt tummler to you, and that makes it, if you put his So Reagan, go back in time. Ron Reagan, very harsh message, very angry, right-wing politics. But he smiled, he chuckled. Alistair Cook once said, Ronald Reagan chuckled through eight years of the presidency. Now Trump is much more overtly, but he also is funny and makes his base laugh, which makes them more comfortable with their meanness. And that’s pretty powerful political combination, communication strategy.

Rob Johnson (00:50:04):

One of the areas that I’ve been concerned about, I worked with my friend David Smick, who I made a podcast with recently on a film called America’s Burning. Is this the second Civil war? And as I see this outcome, I am wondering how, which might I call the legalization of guns and tensions in the, what I’ll call intimidation rather than inspiration will play a role in the next phase of America. How do you see that realm?

Lincoln Mitchell (00:50:36):

Well, one thing I tell people is that when this question, are we going to have a civil war comes up, don’t answer that question. Ask a different question. How is this civil war going to end? I think that’s a better way to think about it. Where does this end? And there’s a lot of work on this. My sense is that I think it’s much more appropriate to think in terms of instability and civil disorder rather than civil war. Because for American Civil War evokes the blue and the gray, and it’s 1863 again or something like that. And the role of guns here is enormous. I mean, I am talking to many people who are liberals who are asking the, do I get a gun question? But those of us, if you have any kind of a social media presence, we’ve all gotten that tweet. Don’t forget, we’re the ones with the guns. And that is real intimidation. I mean, I think that within, there are already large parts of the country where people are uncomfortable going, not because they look at them funny, but they might get killed. And my fear again is that that violence will be met with a wink and a nod from a federal government and also from state governments.

(00:51:50):

So the guns are a big part of that, but the ubiquity of guns, remember, Trump doesn’t care about instability. He’s fine with that. So this is just another, like, of course, they want gun laws because that destabilizes things, because that makes it harder to use, democratic means to solve problems. Because the kind of people that want to solve these through democratic means that believe in pluralism are not the kinds of people who pick up. They might pick up guns to go hunting, and they might pick up guns as a, I don’t know. I don’t believe this makes you any safer, but because they’re concerned about crime or something, but they’re not going to pick up guns to solve these problems. And what we’ve seen already, I mean, I’m really struck by the Republican member, Steve Scalise, Republican member of Congress, who was shot at obviously a congressional baseball game by somebody who was a Bernie Sanders supporter is terrible.

(00:52:39):

And he almost died, but he survived, thank goodness. And within minutes of him being shot within minutes of the information about who the shooter was, all of the kind of liberal people you could think of, Bernie Sanders, this was Trump was president at the time, Nancy Pelosi, people like that all tweeted out, this is terrible, wishing him recovery prayers if they were religious. And then they said, this is not how we solve our problems. And at the same time, the right wing was tweeting out, why won’t Nancy Pelosi, Bernie Sanders, et cetera, say this? But they’d already said it. And the reason I bring this up is that compare that to the attack on Paul Pelosi, which again happened a few blocks from where I went to high school. I went to high school with Paul Pelosi’s kids and Nancy, the same high school and grade school and the ongoing republic.

(00:53:30):

It’s still perfectly all right to make jokes about this, to create odd conspiracy theories about this. And that reveals something about how the two sides of this evolving civil war see the role of violence. And that’s very concerning. And I would just go back to one more point of this. January 6th, 2021, Mike Pence, after four years of extraordinary sick offense, does the right thing and certifies the election making Biden president. And one thing we heard from the media is if he hadn’t done that, Trump would’ve remained in office and stolen the presidency. But that’s not true. If he hadn’t done that, we would’ve been plunged into instability because the people wouldn’t have stood for it. And that for me is a reminder that Trump is perfectly comfortable with this instability if it gets him what he wants.

Rob Johnson (00:54:24):

My sense is that a lot of the deep fear and angst is related to the economic, which you might call non progress or growth, that the vast majority experience, they feel like they’re paying more for college. They feel like they’re afraid that AI is going to come in after they take out a student loan, get a college degree, and get replaced by a machine, and that there is a small group of people that profit from everything and they don’t know how to get back onto what I’ll call a hopeful trajectory. What can we build in the economy? What can we build in the politics about the management of the economy that alleviates fear and creates, which you might call a desire and a faith for a next phase of America?

Lincoln Mitchell (00:55:20):

Well, I think there’s some truth in what you say, but it’s not the whole truth. In other words, I think you’re right about the economy, but I think if we fall into this trap of, the problem is we didn’t offer enough to working class people, we’re going to have a problem. If we phrase another way, which is an economy like this one is not consistent with democracy. I think to me, that’s axiomatic, right? The enormous wealth gap is simply not consistent with democracy. The extraordinary lack of economic mobility, which used to be something we prided in which we prided ourselves. We don’t have that anymore in the United States. These are not consistent with democracy. So how do you solve these problems? One, you begin to talk about them. Wealth inequality was never discussed in this campaign. It’s never discussed anywhere outside of left economics, but it is a huge determinant here.

(00:56:14):

The top quintile in the United States, regardless of party or anything else of wealth, live a life that is totally different than the other 80%, but the top 20% is a community of 70 million people, which is bigger than almost any country, not bigger than China or India, but bigger than almost any other country. So if you’re in that 70 million, you just think that that’s not what most Americans are experiencing. So how do we solve this? I think one, we begin to talk about wealth inequality, and I insist that we talk about wealth inequality, not income inequality. These are two totally different things or very different things. Then my sense is that the way we solve from a policy perspective, it’s increasingly clear to me that we have to have universal programs. So rather than figuring out whose college loans are forgivable and who’s, what we should do is universal free community college, the federal government will make that promise to you because one community college can train you for a lot of good working class jobs, good blue collar, high paying jobs.

(00:57:17):

Secondly, a good community college means half of your college education is free in the state of California. I mean, my friends who have college aged children out there, one of the things they think they always talk about is they start their kid at community college, child gets good grades for two years, goes to uc, which is the best public university system in the world. So programs like that that are not, we’re going to target and help these people so substantially increasing the minimum wage. I think that is, and the fact that they didn’t try to do that, but rather than this absurd discussion, are we going to tax tips or not? If you say, we’re not going to tax tips, do you know what that does that makes the 90% of us that don’t work for tips even more angry when every time we buy a cup of coffee, we get that thing?

(00:58:01):

Do you want a tip? 18%, 20%, 140% Create economic problems that bring people together. Don’t drive them apart. Now, you could say that someone maybe in my income bracket, I don’t need to, I can pay for my kids to college. Why would I want free community college? So what? You get a few people who could otherwise pay, but you create support rather than pit people against each other. And then I think we have to really talk about a tax system the rest of the world had, the rest of the industrial world has, what is, I mean, these Republican tax cuts are terrible, but Kamala Harris said the word tax cuts for billionaires a lot during this campaign, and it didn’t break through. And I’m reminded of a book Richard Reeves wrote called Dream Hoarders a couple of years ago, about 10 years ago. And the point he makes is that most of us don’t know any billionaires.

(00:58:52):

Most people in America have not met any billionaires, but they all know somebody in the top 20%, and that’s where the resentment really lies. And then that top 20% is caricatured inaccurately as all being liberal Democrats, and that’s the real class resentment in the United States. But we have to make it possible to both get into the top 20% to expand it to maybe the top 40% who don’t have this crushing one step at a time. Eventually, we want to get to a hundred percent community college. We have to Medicare for all, which there is a consensus. It’s complicated, but you have to figure out a way to get from here to there. One easy thing is you begin by lowering the Medicare eligibility age by five years. Right? There, you bring it all. Who’s going to really care whether someone is 58 gets Medicare, but you’re there.

(00:59:40):

You’ve made a lot of people’s life a lot easier. I think that at this federal government should find a way to make public universities cheaper to really subsidy. If you are enrolled in a four year public university and getting a certain amount of grades, we will subsidize your education there not, or we’ll pay you a check at the end of the semester for whatever, some chunk of your tuition, but make it for everybody, not you have to qualify because as soon as you say some people get this, some people don’t. The racial politics that have always stopped us from happening kick in because even if the group targeted is representative of the American people with regards to race, they’ll be portrayed as this is for black people. And that racial subtext is always, always there.

Rob Johnson (01:00:27):

Yeah. Yeah. It’s very interesting. I mean, even within, my father went to University of Michigan and within the Big 10 when you go online and you watch sports scores and there’s comments and people betting the hostility towards the Wolverines as though they’re the Big 10 school that went to that upper ladder and it’s a privilege place and they want ‘em to lose in basketball and football as a result.

Lincoln Mitchell (01:00:58):

And I think the University of California is a little bit different in this way. I mean, when I was at the University of California, it was for middle class kids and it’s not anymore. And I think Jerry Brown gets a lot of credit for that, the former governor, because he really, in his second, second eight year period really focused on that. And so our elite public universities should be ways to create a middle class, not to cater to the middle class, and that means making them affordable. But incidentally, the public city university system here in New York started charging tuition when people of color began attending in large numbers. And the University of California started raising tuition when people of color started attending in large numbers. But the pattern is the same. As soon as it becomes open, what white people find a way to close the doors, again, we have to keep pounding those doors and recognize we’re going to get nowhere under this administration.

(01:01:52):

So these are bigger picture issues. These are issues we can think about at the state level. But again, in the last 10, 15 years, the lived experience of being in a red state and a blue state has begun to diverge in a way where the opposite was happening since about the 1960s. And so we see this, I’m not a big believer in two geographical Americas, but we see cities and states thinking about things like universal healthcare, living wages, universal basic income. These are all things we should be thinking about at the national level. We’ll never think about the national level with this administration. So the lived experience, I mean, think about would you want your child going to school in a state with open carry laws and restrictive reproductive freedom as opposed to in a state like California. These are things that slowly tear the country apart.

Rob Johnson (01:02:49):

Yeah, yeah. Well, you’ve covered a lot of ground here and I like the way in which you take me deeper with the kind of questions I ask, your sense of where the real focal points or tipping points are is very, very impressive. Do you have any final thoughts, things that you’d like to share that we haven’t touched on today or you’d like to revisit?

Lincoln Mitchell (01:03:20):

My first final thought is that thank you for the opportunity. It is excellent, and I appreciate having these opportunities to go into some depth with this rather than 45 seconds here or 900 awards there. My sense is that we talked a little bit about, my final words would be this. We’ve talked a little bit about the need, the way that fascist forces use fear and try to take away hope. And we just can’t let that happen. As my grandfather used to say, keep the faith.

Rob Johnson (01:03:56):

Well, how would I say when I’m looking for a new North star? I’ll be thinking of you. Thank you. And it is, how would I say, nourishing of hope and of potential and for understanding how to navigate in the cross currents that have perhaps been misunderstood or mismanaged. I know Gary Gerstel, who made a podcast with a long time ago on the rise in decline of the neoliberal order, and he talked about how both parties in our, what I’ll call money, politics and power system made, which my contributions to distress, distress that fed us to the on-ramp of fascism as a, what do you call, source of relief, at least false consciousness, but a source of relief. And I think figuring out now how to work our way forward and deliver to our children the kind of country you would want them to live in, is an enormous task and responsibility that we all share. So thank you very much. I hope to have you on again and keep me posted when you see things that are interesting that our audience can, how would I say be inspired by or add to the energy that you’ve created. I’ll cite your name every time, but you are creating a ladder.

Lincoln Mitchell (01:05:43):

Well, you very much appreciate the conversation.

Rob Johnson (01:05:46):

Me too. Bye-Bye for now. And check out more from the Institute for New Economic Thinking at ineteconomics.org.