🎧 How to Strengthen American Democracy
A proud Never Trumper and a founding editor at The Dispatch, Jonah Goldberg believes that capitalism and liberal democracy have long been the foundations of America's success. But as the country fractures, Goldberg fears we’re throwing all that away - and threatening to crash American democracy itself.
In this week’s episode, Yascha Mounk and Jonah Goldberg sit down to discuss the meaning of the assault on the U.S. Capitol, the future of the GOP, and whether to impeach Donald Trump.
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Email: goodfightpod@gmail.com
Twitter: @Yascha_Mounk
Website: http://www.persuasion.community
Podcast production by John T. Williams and Rebecca Rashid
🎧 How to Strengthen American Democracy
I absolutely loved the finale (at 54:25) in which Mounk and Goldberg layout why they see a silver lining in the Capitol riot. When a friend called and told me what was happening, my first reaction was, “I think this will be a good thing.”
My reasoning had not been as insightful as Mounk’s and I did not make my point with Goldberg’s vehemence. His imagining of the climactic events as an over-the-top Oliver Stone documentary is not to be missed.
I now feel reassured that I was on the right track — the riot proves once and for all how dangerous Trump was and where he was heading. And as expected, it damaged Trump and his Republicans.
Overall, this is an excellent podcast and it’s a great start to filling in the missing week of analysis (which feels like an eternity) here on Persuasion. So the whole thing is worth a listen.
I would have liked more clarification of what to make of the rioters. Yes, condemn the violent leaders, and condemn all participation. As Goldberg says, of the argument that you can’t make this into a big deal because it makes the right-wing snowflakes feel like victims — “screw that.” But there is a huge difference between condemning what they did and condemning who they are. And neither Mounk nor Goldberg discusses this.
This difference is the result of Trump’s stolen-election conspiracy theory, which was effective and resulted in a brainwashed mob honestly believing they were protecting American democracy. These people know Trump was leading them on, and they know that a day later he threw them under the bus. This opens the door to many interesting questions and to strategies for dividing Trump from his base. Perhaps in the next podcast ...
Goldberg is right on when he says that Trump's appeal is psychological, rather than ideological in nature. The phrase itself, "Trumpism" always seemed off to me. His speech feels as though someone trained Open AI's GPT-3 model on a corpus of used car commercials. How could such a man, with so little interest in abstract ideas or concrete policies be the originator of any kind of "ism" at all? Everything about Trump feels so much more intuitive if we all just accept that his profession is and has always been marketing and branding, all style and no substance.