Spencer often talks with Joan Esposito, who interviews him about politics for her show on Chicago’s WCPT-AM. This episode of Dastardly Cleverness replays one of those conversations that’s especially relevant now.
Joan and Spencer focus on why democracy, after all its successes, is now in so much danger from authoritarianism. They talk about:
- Why so many people are choosing authoritarianism over democracy, mostly on the right but on the left too
- How the sources of America’s division go back to the Founding
- The breakdown of the moral consensus that used to hold us more or less together and how that allows demagogues to appeal to the worst in us
- What Plato, Freud, Marx, religion, and Silicon Valley tech bro’s have to do with all this
- And more.
You can hear more smart, thoughtful interviews by Joan Esposito over the air on WCPT-AM Chicago, online at heartlandsignal.com, on SoundCloud, or with any podcast app — just search for “Joan Esposito.”
About Joan Esposito
Joan Esposito is a progressive political radio talk show host in Chicago. She talks about local and national politics live every afternoon Monday through Friday on WCPT AM 820, on the tune in radio app and wcpt820.com. Before joining the radio station, she spent 20 years as a Chicago television anchor and reporter.
Web: https://heartlandsignal.com/programs/live-local-progressive/
Twitter: @joanespositoCHI
Instagram: @joanespositoChicago
Transcript
Joan Esposito: I love talking with Spencer Critchley. His book is Patriots of Two Nations. And Spencer has explained to us before exactly why people follow Donald Trump. It is not because of his intellectual abilities or it is not because of his policies. It is because something that deeply resonates with them, when he talks on a kind of a cultural, spiritual level.
Well now I’m wondering, you know, are we seeing that in Italy with the election of Meloni? You know, this Sunday in Brazil, they go to the polls, you know. Bolsonaro is on the ballot for re-election. He’s not terribly popular, but he’s very Trump-like. Spencer is here now to explain his ideas to us yet again. And also to see where he sees this kind of thing happening. Spencer, thank you for being here.
Spencer Critchley: Oh, great to be with you as always, Joan.
Joan: So, let’s set aside — we’ll get to this country soon enough — but we’ve seen a very far right, some would say fascist, woman, Ms. Meloni, being elected to the head of government in Italy. Is that because she also has that same sort of cult-like following?
Spencer: Yeah, and I don’t think we have to go all the way to cult-like. There are cult-like characteristics among Trumpists, for example — not all of them, but certainly some of them — but cultural, yes. And I think it’s a common wave of culture-based politics that’s sweeping the liberal democratic world.
So we see that now in Italy with the revival of a party that has roots, literally, in Benito Mussolini’s Fascist party. We see it with Hungary with Viktor Orbán. You mentioned Bolsonaro in Brazil. Vladimir Putin is in the same mold. Poland has seen a resurgence of its right wing. As much as Ukraine is behaving admirably and heroically, there is a fairly strong cultural right, which I differentiate from the liberal democratic right, like normal liberal democratic conservatism. The cultural right tends towards fascism in its extreme form. And certainly in the United States. Even in Canada, my birthplace, and really loved around the world for just how darn reasonable and sane Canadians are, sometimes to a fault, I would say, but it’s a wonderful fault to have. Even in Canada, they have this upsurge of the same kind of irrational, culture-driven right.
And it’s really a mix of phenomena embodied within that cultural movement. It’s not just one thing, but I think the most fundamental thing, and this is what I talk about in my book Patriots of Two Nations that you mentioned, is that ultimately it’s the result of a very deep split — in our politics, yes, but also within our culture and within our worldviews and even in our consciousness — between the post-Enlightenment, rational, liberal tradition that includes traditional conservatives and traditional liberals who were united by a belief in reason and peaceful debate, and civil society and democracy, and everything else, which includes religion, mysticism, ethnic nationalism, and all of the stuff that… basically the Freudian id, the underground of our awareness that we try to push down and ignore, but which keeps wanting to come back up to the surface. All of that is there.
And I think that our fundamental problem is [that] that division has become worse and worse over time and it’s left those of us in the world of reason and liberalism very poorly equipped to even recognize what we’re seeing, because we ourselves suffer from the same division as this kind of denied id within ourselves. And we’re sort of stuck in our heads and increasingly divorced from everything happening from the neck down.
And so we keep responding with reason, and reasoned negotiation, and ideas, and legal responses, and all of this stuff that the other side has really had it with and is rejecting, sometimes from a position of having thought it through and very often from a position of just raw resentment and rage.
Joan: Spencer, has it always been like this? Or is this a new phenomenon?
Spencer I think it has been developing since the founding of the country [which was] in Enlightenment philosophy and Enlightenment liberalism. But it’s a trend that you can trace through the history of Western civilization, at least going back to Plato and Aristotle and Socrates in the golden age of Greek civilization, back in classical Greece around the 6th, 5th, and then ending in the 4th century BC.
So yes, I guess the short answer is yes, because I would argue that all of this is in human nature. So each one of us contains, essentially, Grendel, the monster from Beowulf, lurking within us, or what Freud identified as the id — and you don’t have to be a Freudian to find that to be a useful metaphor. It’s all the dark, unreasoning, pre-conscious, just pure primal emotion, which might be love and affection and concern, but it might also be resentment and terror and hatred and the sheer joy of destruction — what Freud described as the “death drive.”
And building a society always requires finding some way to balance these different aspects of human nature and traditionally, that was just done through authoritarianism. Although you can find examples of communitarian societies throughout history, going back to prehistoric times, they’re less common than many people want to believe they are. And very often what ends up happening is basically the most powerful person and most aggressive person dominates everybody else and imposes order that way. And that was the norm throughout human history until very recently.
It took Britain about a thousand years to evolve British democracy and they were part-way along when the United States broke away from Britain in the 18th century, and then the United States founded the first modern democracy, followed shortly after by the initially failed attempt by the French in the French Revolution.
But it’s an indication of the difficulty of doing this, to replace authoritarianism of some form or another, whether it’s just a tribal leader, who just clubs people who disagree with him, or a Roman emperor, or Louis XIV as an absolute monarch, or a fascist, or a theocrat, who believes that their version of God should be in charge through a priestly class.
That’s all the norm, even in our own personalities: tyranny is the norm. “People should just agree with us, damn it,” is what it comes down to, and if they don’t, they’re just wrong or just being difficult — “When will they smarten up and see that things need to be done the way I want it to be done?” That’s the norm and achieving liberal democracy took humanity this long, and it’s only been around a short period of time, and most democracies, I believe, historically have failed, and it could be that this one will too. It’s very much in danger.
Joan: Spencer, we need to take a break, but I want to revisit something you said a moment ago. You talked about how this sort of break goes all the way back to Plato. But in those earliest of years didn’t Greece have, for at least a while, what was for all intents and purposes a functioning democracy? Don’t answer me now. I want to take a break so you have time to answer without being interrupted. Spencer Critchley. The book is Patriots of Two Nations: why we’re here and understanding the other side. We’ll be back after this.
…
Joan: I’m joined by Spencer Critchley. His book Patriots of Two Nations explains the inner workings of those people who are just blindly following Donald Trump, how it’s it’s not an intellectual thing, it’s not a policy thing, it is something that resonates at a far deeper level in their psyches. And Spencer was saying that he has, in studying this, seen this from the earliest times of our recorded history. But didn’t the Greeks have a democracy, at least for a while?
Spencer: Yes and no. The Greeks certainly pioneered democracy and the word democracy comes from the Greek: demos being “the people” and the “ocracy” part describing who’s in charge. That’s why you have autocracy, democracy. and various forms of “ocracies.” Meritocracy is what we supposedly have now in part of our society. However, and as impressive as it was in many ways, it was limited to citizens and males, it was supported by slavery to give the participants in the democracy time and leisure to be such active citizens. So it had those limitations. Now that said I mean I really think that classical Greece was an extremely impressive society in many ways and there’s a lot that we can still learn from it, and there’s a lot that we’ve forgotten that they knew that we need to rediscover.
However, the founders of the United States were actually very fearful of democracy the way it ended up developing in Greece, which was towards a direct democracy. And Plato, who’s essentially the founder of Western philosophy, or the leading light of Western philosophy — somebody once famously observed that all of Western philosophy is footnotes to Plato — hated democracy and he blamed it, I believe, for the death of Socrates, his beloved teacher. Socrates was forced to take hemlock for supposedly corrupting the youth of Athens by exposing them to the Socratic method of questioning everything.
Plato’s argument was, democracy is essentially rule by the ignorant mob and what we should have is aristocracy. And aristocracy is another Greek-derived word, from aristos for “the best people.” And Plato’s argument, and he lays this out in the Republic, was that of course society should be ruled by the best of us, not just the random mob of people, who are so easily to manipulate — manipulate by demagogues, by the way, another Greek word, which refers to people who excite the passions of the mob and use it to their own selfish ends. And that’s the exact model for Donald Trump and demagogues throughout history: you excite the passions of the mob and direct them to serve your own selfish ends.
Joan: So when you say the thinking was that we should be led by the best of us, isn’t that sort of the argument some people use to say, “Well then we should have an oligarchy, because obviously the people with the most money are the best of us.”
Spencer: That’s one way of looking at it. That’s a very strong theme in American culture and has been for a long time, especially — this all comes together, especially because of the influence of Calvinism, which identified success in the world with the grace of God. It was an indication that God must favor you if you were successful in the world. And that’s a very strong theme. That’s the roots of what’s called the “Protestant work ethic,” which is a fundamental driver of the success of American capitalism, is people working not just to make money traditionally, but to demonstrate that they were morally worthy and were among the elect who would go to heaven later on. So that’s certainly true.
And then, you know, you have people now like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and a variety of other of these Silicon Valley people who think of themselves as meritocrats, who are similarly aristocrats, I would argue. They are arguing for what’s sometimes called decentralization or decentralized politics, which would essentially be run by an aristocracy of highly intelligent, digitally connected people and I actually find this quite a chilling vision as well.
So this all, as I say, this is part of what goes back to the beginning and and within our current context, what I would point out to people is those of us who do believe in reason and liberal democracy are in the tradition from Plato in many ways, because many of us have inherited this assumption, that reason should rule the emotions, which is another thing Plato believed, he believed society and our inner life should be ruled the same way the rational mind should be on top, like the aristocrats should be running society. In his case, it would be philosopher kings. He of course believed philosophers were the best of us, conveniently enough. You know, oligarchy is rich people believe that “We’re the best of us,” you know, whichever group you happen to be in, what do you know, that ends up being the best of us. But not to denigrate Plato, he was incredibly smart. I think he was dead wrong about this, but he believed that philosophers should be ruling things.
And that belief has held on down to the present amongst today’s liberals of the left: the belief that our problems can all be solved by education. And if people just become educated enough, they’ll see that we’re right. And our belief in the meritocracy, which seems self evidently good, that of course, people who study, and learn, and learn science, and understand politics and philosophy and history, of course, we should listen to those people and ultimately they should be running things. That’s in a direct line from Plato and it is a form of aristocracy, and that is part of what Trumpism and the worldwide resurgence of ethnic nationalism tending towards fascism is a reaction against.
And that gets us back to this split I’m talking about, ultimately, in our consciousness between rationality and intuition, reason and emotion, and what Freud might call the ego and super ego versus the id. That’s ultimately, I believe what’s going on here. And the reason we’re having so much difficulty, those of us who call ourselves liberal democrats — and by liberal, I mean, liberalism, the philosophy, not just liberals of the left — that’s why we stand sort of aghast and confused at this upsurge, because we’ve in effect divorced ourselves from that part of consciousness and have even lost the ability to think about it in many ways. I’m currently working on my next book, which might take me five or 10 years to finish at this rate, because I’m —
Joan: You’ve got to do that faster. I’m too old to last that long!
Spencer [Laughs.] I’ll be getting into this, but just to sort of put a button on that. One of the metaphors, I use is Flatland, based on a book that was published in 1884, by a brilliant guy named Edwin Abbott Abbott. And he speculates about what it would be like to live in a purely two-dimensional world, where you’re incapable of imagining a third dimension. And that’s a metaphor I’m using now to describe what happened to many of us following the Enlightenment.
Much of our society, following the Enlightenment, we became disconnected from this emotional, intuitive, mystical side of consciousness to the point where it’s as if we collapsed into a Flatland and we lost that dimension and are unable unable to even imagine it now. And I think this is part of the problem that, as I say, rational liberal face in trying to understand what the heck is going on. This is not to excuse the attack on democracy that’s going on, but it’s to try to help people understand why it’s going on.
Joan: We’re gonna be taking a break, so I’m gonna give you some time after the break to respond to this. But if I’m hearing you correctly, then would it be wrong of me to come to the conclusion that the people who are really diehard Trumpers, they don’t look at him and they go, “Oh my God, he’s the smartest guy in the room, that’s why I want him to be in charge.” They look at Donald Trump and they maybe see somebody who can just take care of them, so they don’t have to think about things, somebody who gives them, I don’t know, warm fuzzies? I’m gonna hold off and not let Spencer Critchley answer this right now. Maybe I have misunderstood this. But if if if they love the way Donald Trump makes them feel, maybe they don’t care whether or not he’s the smartest guy in the room. Maybe that’s something that — we keep thinking that if we can, like Spencer said, if we can just educate these people that they will turn around, and maybe that’s not the case. I’m speaking to Spencer Critchley. His book is Patriots of Two Nations. We are going to take a break and I will not interrupt him when we come right back after this.
…
Joan: I’m joined by Spencer Critchley. His book is Patriots of Two Nations, where he talks about how part of the reason why we disconnect with the hardcore Trumpers is because they are not looking at Donald Trump if I understand this right because he is some kind of intellectual genius, but rather there’s something about him that resonates with their gut, with their instincts, with their heart. Is that correct? They don’t care whether he’s whether he’s the smartest guy in the room as long as he makes them feel, what? Taken care of? Loved, protected? Spencer?
Spencer: Yes, but there are multiple reasons why people support Trump. So during the break I was making a list in my head and here’s what I have. So I think one way to break this down is between Moderns and pre-Modern: people who are living in the world since the Enlightenment, when reason and science took over, and other people who are still living in the world before that, when we lived in a world of religion and mysticism and terror and fear of nature and helplessness, before it.
So a lot of the support for Trump is pre-Modern, and that’s what you just described, and they support them in the same way that medieval peasants might support the king or the duke or the prince who was their ruler, who they saw as God, as part of a different order of being, who must be that rich and powerful because God wants them to be that way, and living in that mystical kind of world.
So there are quite a few people who see Trump as essentially anointed by God to rescue America from the forces of darkness. And, you know, it’s easy to see that as extremely unsophisticated or to laugh at it, but there are a lot of people who live in a world like that. And when you think about the number of Americans who simply, who believe in luck, for example, including highly intelligent people, or people who believe in astrology or other things for which they have no evidence. These pre-Modern beliefs are definitely still there. So that’s, that’s a big part of the base of support.
But there there are Moderns as opposed to pre-Moderns also who support Trump. And some of those are people who honestly want authoritarianism and they’ve thought it through carefully and they prefer authoritarianism to democracy, which they don’t believe works. So Steve Bannon —
Joan: But, Spencer! Why? That doesn’t make any sense. Maybe I’m too too much in my head. But yes, I want to, I want somebody in power who’s gonna rule my life? Tell me, please, I don’t get it.
Spencer: Well, this gets back to Plato and the aristocracy idea, if you think of aristos in the original Greek meaning, rule by the best of us. So then there are many versions of aristocrats today, and I would argue there are some on the left as well.
There are people on the left who believe liberal democracy is failing as well and they don’t believe in liberalism. That’s the Marxist tradition. Marx snorted at liberalism, he thought it was a charade, and he thought politics was a charade, and ultimately there was a rational direction to history. And once that was allowed to be expressed through revolution, there’d be no more need for politics.
And that’s another persistent attitude on the left, which we see in some aspects of critical theory today, driven by either explicitly by Marxism, because critical theory grows out of Marxism, not that it’s identical with Marxism, but its roots are in Marxism. So, there are critical theorists today who believe that there are essentially rational solutions to social problems and that’s what should rule. And if you disagree with those solutions, you’re being antisocial, or repressive, or oppressive, and you should not be debated with. This is where, ultimately, what gets called cancel culture comes from. It comes from those roots, which can be traced really all the way back to Plato’s believing the philosophers should be in charge. And I think it it’s no accident that a lot of the most intolerant versions of what gets called woke culture come out of the academy, because I think there’s kind of a straight line there.
Now, the danger from that is way exaggerated by people on the right compared to the danger we’re facing from the right. But the authoritarians on the right, people like Steve Bannon: Bannon, I believe, he’s explicitly arguing for rescuing Northern European civilization, which he believes has been proven to be superior through its success through history. And he sees it as under attack by the forces of barbarism. And he thinks that our multicultural, liberal, tolerant society is corrupt and it’s sabotaging what was rightly the triumphant civilization. And so there’s a lot of people who believe that.
Then there are the sort of techno bros who want a sort of rule by Silicon Valley tech geniuses, who want this decentralized, digitally enabled, crypto-enabled society where there is no real government, it’s just radically free individuals who come together at will to solve problems because they’re so brilliant and then they go their separate ways. And people like Peter thiel would be one of those people, who’s obviously an extremely intelligent person, although I think he’s childishly unintelligent when it comes to politics, who support Trump.
And then there are theocrats like Steve Bannon, who’s got some overlap — not Steve Bannon, sorry, William Barr, the former Attorney General under Trump — who’s a Catholic theocrat, and was using Trump, I believe, as a vehicle to move America back towards a theocracy, and remove the separation of church and state. And who is another extremely smart, well-educated person, who honestly believes in what’s called the unitary executive theory of the presidency, which is essentially a king. So that once he’s elected, he should have king-like powers, because you need that kind of authoritarianism to run a society. And furthermore, in Barr’s view and many people who agree with him’s view, society should ultimately be run according to the will of God, and that’s why you need this king-like power in the president. And he again, would say — and he’s said this explicitly many times — the reason America, he believes, is in so much trouble is because it’s been secularized, and our culture is becoming more and more corrupt because of Hollywood, and the rise of new gender identities, and all of that. So they believe that their version of authoritarianism is what’s needed to essentially save America.
So you can see there are these multiple reasons for supporting Trump, all of them foreign to the liberal democratic worldview. And that’s what I think we as liberal democrats need to be able to expand our minds to be able to perceive, but as I say, because of the way our society has gone and our education system has developed, especially since the 19th century, I believe we actually, most of us, have lost the ability to even imagine what it’s like to think that way.
And you can see that at work when you watch a debate between someone like a Hillary Clinton, for example, and a Donald Trump, you’re seeing a stark illustration of this divide. Hillary Clinton is rational to a fault, I would say, she’s sort of like a human PowerPoint presentation. She’s usually right and she’s very smart, and I’m convinced her motivations are good, but it’s as if she’s become radically disconnected from everything below her neck.
Joan: And she would be the first person to agree with that. I mean, I’ve read interviews where she essentially describes herself that way.
Spencer: Yeah, I think, in retrospect, this is why I say Trump ws inevitable in the subtitle of my book is in retrospect, it looks inevitable. We had a Hillary Clinton representing one side of this great divide and a Donald Trump representing the other and they’re mirror images of each other. I mean, she’s all brain and apparently — apparently, I’m sure she has a heart — but apparently no heart, and Trump is, — well, he’s heartless, so he mimics having a heart — and he’s all guts and no brains, and they’re perfect complements to each other. It’s like a death struggle. It’s almost like a pre-Biblical kind of struggle between Babylonian gods, you know, struggling over who’s going to rule the earth
So this is what I think we’re facing as liberal democrats. Liberal democracy is essentially ecumenical. You know, it welcomes everybody. This is the genius of it, but it’s also, its incredible instability because it’s the least ideological ideology we have. It makes the fewest requirements on people as to what you’re supposed to believe. You don’t have to believe in God, any God at all or, but if you do, that’s perfectly fine. It welcomes all cultures — it’s supposed to and it’s becoming closer and closer to that — all cultures, all races, as long as you believe in equality and freedom and the rule of law, resolving differences peacefully, government by consent. You just have to believe in a short list of things and you can live in a liberal democracy.
But the trouble is people yearn for certainty, they yearn for answers, and they yearn for a meaning to their lives and liberal democracy doesn’t, doesn’t offer that.
Joan: Well, yeah, but Spencer I feel that way, but I want to be trusted to find those answers. I think you’re terrific, but I don’t want you coming into my life and saying, “Oh Joan, you have questions, I have answers. Let’s sit down and I’ll give you the truth.”
Spencer: No, heaven forbid. And my personal belief is, my personal faith is doubt, actually. I think it’s the, it’s terrifying, but it’s the path to true freedom. And true realization, ultimately, is to abandon our urge towards having some form of certainty.
However, in human nature, I think we equate uncertainty with terror. I think ultimately, because we’re born into a very frightening and dangerous world. It can be welcoming and nurturing, hopefully we’re born to a mother who loves us and cradles us and cares for us, and hopefully there’s a father as well and a family. But it’s also an extremely dangerous world, in which we are constantly at risk. And in, in that situation, I think it’s natural for humans to seek out certainty and to find reasons why things are like this. And especially when it comes down to confronting, when you grow up and realize you’re going to die and everybody you love is going to die, that becomes unacceptable.
And so people look for reasons that make that somehow acceptable. Like there’s an afterlife, or there are gods directing things, or if you get rich enough, somehow you’ll you’ll pack enough joy and sensual experience and whatever into your life that by the time you die, it’ll be okay because somehow, basically the “He who dies with the most toys wins” philosophy, which some people actually live by. So anyway, I think ultimately that’s what this is all about, is people hunger for meaning.
But liberal democracy doesn’t give that to you. And so you do have to find it on your own. But what we’re finding, I believe, is that you can’t keep a society together if you don’t have a shared moral consensus, a shared sense of what this is all about. And so when we became rationalistic and utilitarian following the Enlightenment and believed that we could build the perfect society rationally, it’s almost as if the accounting department took over the whole organization and we lost sight of everything else that makes life worth living.
And people don’t want to just live in a world that’s run by efficient bureaucrats. And, you know, you live in one place, you work in another place, you are entertained for two weeks of the year on vacation. They want to have a feeling of connection to each other and to the world and to some mysterious sense of something more. And we sort of let that go and left it up to everybody and what’s happened is now we’ve lost any kind of moral consensus.
And now we have essentially a moral junkyard of people fighting it out in a junkyard of competing moralities, or absence of morality. Some people are just driven by the pursuit of money and power, like the opportunists around Trump. There’s another reason I didn’t get to for supporting Trump, is just pure self-interest and corruption.
Joan: Well I want to I want to explore that. We need to take another break but I want to explore that point, because you mentioned Bill Barr particularly in his relationship with Trump and that whole idea of supporting him because it suits your self-interest. I’m talking to Spencer Critchley. His book is Patriots of Two Nations. We’re going to be right back after this.
…
Joan: Spencer Critchley’s book is Patriots of Two Nations. We are talking about all the reasons why people follow Donald Trump so amazingly and some of it as he just mentioned is that it suits their own particular self-interest. You said earlier that you felt that Bill Barr had his own agenda and he thought he could advance it under Trump. My sense, and I will admit I’ve done no deep dive into Bill Barr, but the feeling that I’ve always gotten from what I’ve read is that Bill Barr is a man who loves to be in the halls of power and will do or say whatever is required to put him there and keep him there. You think that maybe there was more to their relationship than that, Spencer?
Spencer: Yes, I think that Bill Barr probably sees himself as a deeply moral person, the reason being that he’s a devout Catholic and so he honestly believes, and he’s given speeches about this, that America is in so much trouble because it’s become morally unmoored and there’s no way to have a moral society that is not, ultimately, religious and he believes that the Catholic religion is the correct one. So if you put yourself in that frame of mind, if you honestly believe that Catholic Christianity is the revealed word of God, it’s the way history is supposed to be going, and anything that’s deviating from that is deviating from God’s will and tending towards, essentially, the will of Satan, then you would think it’s of urgent importance to get America back towards becoming a Christian nation.
Now, I disagree with that, obviously, but people sincerely believe that and I think that Barr saw Trump as a vehicle for that. Some Christians have this “broken vessel” argument that just like the biblical King David was in many ways a terrible person, but God chose him to lead the Hebrews to enact God’s will or during the Babylonian captivity, the same thing with the Babylonian king who treated the Jews fairly was seen as a broken vessel enacting God’s will — so, sinful himself, but enacting God’s will. So there are many Christians today who honestly believe Trump is a broken vessel. They see that he’s a serial adulterer and they probably get that he lies all the time, and probably cheats on his taxes, and cons people and stuff, but they see him as a necessary broken vessel of God’s will to achieve a ban on abortion and that sort of thing and take America back in the direction they believe it needs to go.
So I think that Barr, the reason he’s now turned on trump is essentially he’s realized Trump is no longer useful to him and he’s probably preparing to move on to Ron DeSantis or somebody.
Joan: So how would Ron DeSantis be useful to Bill Barr?
Spencer: Well, the whole point would be to move America back towards this unitary executive view of the presidency where the president is very close to being a king or a queen. And for some of these people it would need to be a king because they think feminism is another aspect of the decline of America. But in any case to use somebody who — I think DeSantis is a schemer and in many ways more frightening than Trump because I think he’s a lot smarter and more self-disciplined — but you can see somebody like a Bill Barr saying, well this will be the next horse I’m gonna ride to try to lead America back to God, essentially.
Joan: Good grief, good grief.
Spencer: But that’s just one aspect of this, a lot of it all comes together, and I think my main point really is for people who are feeling completely confused, flabbergasted, understandably so at seeing what’s going on, that my main point that I want to urge people to think about is, imagine that we woke up one day having lost the ability to think in three dimensions. And we can only think in two dimensions and we’re trying to understand what people are talking about when they talk about three-dimensional solids and stuff, because we can only think of flat squares and circles and triangles. In a way, something like that has happened to us since the Enlightenment, those of us who are primarily rational thinkers and we’ve lost the ability to understand what we’re hearing from a lot of these people and when when they say stuff like the stuff I’ve been describing, we just dismiss it as rationally wrong and we don’t realize that outside rationality, much of life is taking place outside of rational thought.
Joan: So how do we bridge, how do we build a bridge to these people, or is it not possible?
Spencer: Well, in the short term, I think what has to happen is Trumpists have to lose. The Trump Republican party has become extremely dangerous. It’s a criminal enterprise, essentially, that’s a direct threat to democracy and must be defeated, resoundingly, in election after election, until they realized that they’re just gonna keep losing. And the unprincipled opportunists who are running it right now, unpatriotic, unprincipled opportunists, who are running it right now, who know what they’re doing is wrong, they just have to lose. That’s what has to happen in the short term.
Now, pragmatically, in order for liberals to win — meaning people who believe in liberalism, which includes traditional conservatives — they have to re-learn how to win. And the question I have for Democrats and moderate Republicans — sensible, moderate, traditionally patriotic Republicans — is, “Why is it even close?” Why is it even close against somebody like Trump? The worst candidate in history? The worst president, probably, in history — there are a couple of near runners-up, like Andrew Johnson. But why is it even close in a battle between democracy and a lifelong con man who’s just the least possible, imaginable worthy candidate for president in our context. Why is it even close?
And the reason it’s close, I believe, is that liberals, and Democrats in particular, have lost the ability to communicate with a large percentage of the country. You know, roughly 40% of the country supports Trump even now and that, and that support is remarkably stable up to the most recent polls from just a couple of days ago. Why is that? Why is it why is it more than just a small fringe? And how could it possibly be that people dislike the alternative so much they would consider somebody like a Trump or Trumpist supporters.
Joan So Spencer, is this the next book? Are we leading up to the next book?
Spencer: This is part of it, yeah, and I’m doing it now, I’m sort of shouting into the wind, but I’m trying to help Democrats. I’m giving Democrats tough love by saying, “Look, you’ve got to stop being terrible at politics and realize that a lot of it is you’ve lost the ability to understand and communicate with the people you’re talking to.” And that’s not coming up with just a snappy slogan or tweaking the message. You hear people talking about messaging. It’s not just messaging, it’s realizing that when you open your mouth, it’s not the content, the way you sound, it’s the way you look, it’s all the nonverbal stuff is alienating people before you even get the words out.
Joan: I got so wrapped up the computer’s ready to cut us off! Spencer Critchley, thank you so much for being here. Goodnight.