Mm.

Just, just extraordinary.

That's what you call a mandate, and that's what gives one party the confidence that they can do big things, and the other party has the fear put in them that they have to acquiesce to part of what that party wants to do simply in order to survive.

The US is so polarized now that that kind of victory is unattainable at this moment.

Part of what I try and explain about Biden is why, given the sophistication of his programs and the ambitions and the good that it could potentially give to the US, why was he so roundly rejected, uh, by the American people? And with Trump, there are, were glimmers in 2024 of him building a broader base, and I think there is actually a modest MAGA project of w- of the center right as opposed to the far right, which would have allowed him to build a much larger base of support in American society.

And he, he's so consumed by transactionalism and wanting to perform power and aggrandize himself that he was ab- unable to follow through on that.

So his fallback position, and this may still be the future of political order in the United States, is to turn to Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and there are very close connections between the Trump administration and the Orbán administration in, in Hungary.

[laughs]

Mm.

Just, just extraordinary.

That's what you call a mandate, and that's what gives one party the confidence that they can do big things, and the other party has the fear put in them that they have to acquiesce to part of what that party wants to do simply in order to survive.

The US is so polarized now that that kind of victory is unattainable at this moment.

Part of what I try and explain about Biden is why, given the sophistication of his programs and the ambitions and the good that it could potentially give to the US, why was he so roundly rejected, uh, by the American people? And with Trump, there are were glimmers in 2024 of him building a broader base, and I think there is actually a modest MAGA project of, but of the center right as opposed to the far right, which would have allowed him to build a much larger base of support in American society.

And he, he's so consumed by transactionalism and wanting to perform power and aggrandize himself that he was ab- unable to follow through on that.

So his fallback position, and this may still be the future of political order in the United States, is to turn to Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and there are very close connections between the Trump administration and the Orbán administration in, in Hungary.

[laughs]

Like what we do in this moment has an outstated impact, especially when an order is in is in is not yet congealed right there's the sort of moments in history that you've identified as being so critical for those who are acting in this moment what are what are some of like what are you from your understanding of history what are uh things to fight for ways of working ways of campaigning movements to build places to be that you think could be impactful

well i think uh The future that I want to fight for and that I think probably many people who are with us today want to fight for is a progressive democratic future.

There are aspects of today that resemble the 1930s when democracies were down to single digits, number of countries with functioning democracies, and those countries had a fight and lead the world to a kind of democratic renaissance, which occurred in the post-World War II period.

So I think fighting for democracy is very, very important.

And I think one needs to find other points of struggle.

I can talk most concretely about some of the hopeful developments in the United States.

I think the actions of the citizens of Minneapolis have been extraordinary.

Yeah, yeah.

So, so I guess my question is do, do, do you still see that tension, um, you know, between the sort of local and federal, as it were, um, the state level and the federal level, as being constitutive of American politics as it, as it still operates, or has that now been entirely subsumed into this, um, you know, this, this, this politics of the executive?

Well, Trump wants to entirely subsume this politics into the politics of the executive.

But the tension between the power of the states and the power of the central government is still alive.

The Republican Party under Ronald Reagan, uh, wanted to strip the central government of many of its powers that were not military, uh, and to insist that the moral regimes that m- many Americans want, uh, have to be legislated and fought over by political parties at the level of the states.

So he was someone who was interested in, in respecting states' rights.

And the Warren Court, uh, which stands alone almost as, uh, a liberal Supreme Court in American history, it tried to break states' rights and the police power of the states, which was very, very extensive, in order to Deliver on the promise of the amendments of the Civil War, those that free- ended slavery in America, and insisted that there could no longer be any discrimination on the basis of race.

Most of the laws governing racial injustice, white supremacy in America were state laws in the United States, and the Warren Court, which was a very liberal court, felt that it had to take whatever measures it could to break the power in order that the 14th Amendment, and arguably after the first 10, the most important amendment in, in American history, would be honored and that there would be no more racial discrimination in the United States.

Yeah

We're gonna send a p- p- a petition out saying, actually, if you give us devolution or Devo Max, we might be able to come to an agreement." How does that harden into independence, actual independence, by the early summer of 1776?

Well, as you mentioned, there is military conflict in the spring of 1775 in Lexington and Concord.

What Ralph Waldo Emerson called "The shot heard around the world." Not quite the shot heard around the world, but a significant shot.

Uh, and there are fights that are continuing after that time.

The colonies, in response, call the First Continental Congress.

So this is the first Congress that assembles all of the colonies in North America into one assembly, so that is a very significant step because the colonies were deeply independent of each other, and for many of the colonies, their relationship to London was much closer to, than to their neighbors in the North and South.

So they are developing a sense of themselves as a nation by calling this Continental Congress.

That, that, that, that makes a difference, doesn't it?

I think one of the things that is easy to forget about the end of the, the liberal, the first liberal order, uh, is how violent it became as a result of this massive wealth inequality.

[lips smack] Well, there was a comp- a steel company in Chicago called Republic Steel that had an arsenal that was greater than the entire Chicago Police Department.

This was in the 1930s.

They were arming themselves to defend themselves against their own workers, and it speaks precisely to a sense of, uh, deadly conflict, anger, uh, at, um, the division between the classes and the rich and the poor in American society.

Uh, American capitalism, left to its own devices because it's gone through periods of such little regulation, has been the most powerful capitalism in the world.

That has...

A- and there have been long stretches of time where workers felt they had no mechanism for redress, and so increasingly they felt they were driven to take up arms.

Right

So from what we've seen so far, how would you compare Trump 2.0 with Trump 1.0?

Well, I'm thinking of a pithy way to put this.

I see Trump as someone with authoritarian aspirations, someone with not a lot of respect for the American Constitution, the division of powers between different branches, wanting to accumulate as much power to himself and the executive as he possibly could.

But when he was elected in 2016, even though he had aspirations to be a king, he didn't expect to win.

He had no real policy advisors.

He did not have much influence in the Republican Party.

He had no idea how Washington worked.

Yeah, will we ever see a diverse administration, bureaucracy again?