PODCAST: Democracy on the Edge (1)
ANNOUNCER: Welcome to Moyers on Democracy. The Supreme Court needed only one sentence this week to reject Republican efforts to overturn Joe Biden's victory in Pennsylvania. It was a resounding rebuke of President Trump's scheme to steal the election and stay in power. Trump's now lost or withdrawn some 50 lawsuits, yet still refuses to concede, instead hurling a daily tirade of lies and misinformation as raw meat to his most rabid fans, prompting them to turn on democracy, by any means. To discuss all this, Bill Moyers is joined by the noted lawyer Steven Harper and the distinguished historian Heather Cox Richardson. She teaches American history at Boston College and has written several acclaimed books about the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, and the Republican Party, including her most recent HOW THE SOUTH WON HE CIVIL WAR: OLIGARCHY, DEMOCRACY, AND THE CONTINUING FIGHT FOR THE SOUL OF AMERICA. She writes the popular must-read daily digest of events LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN that has earned a large following. Steven Harper retired after thirty years as a litigator at Kirkland and Ellis LLP and now teaches at Northwestern University Law School. He created and curated the Pandemic Timeline, and with his daughter Emma S. Harper, the Trump-Russia Timeline, both available on Billmoyers.com—and both valuable resources for keeping up with the crises of the Trump Administration. Steven Harper wrote THE LAWYER BUBBLE: A PROFESSION IN CRISIS as well as the novel and legal thriller THE PARTNERSHIP, among other works. Here to talk with them is Bill Moyers.
BILL MOYERS:
I'm so grateful to both of you. I sent out an SOS because, frankly, I need help in sorting out this atmospheric craziness that is going on. The Arizona Republican Party posted several inflammatory tweets early Tuesday morning amid President Donald Trump's corrupt efforts to subvert the 2020 election results. The party's official, official Twitter account retweeted a report from a pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” organizer declaring, quote, “I'm willing to give my life for this fight.” He is, the GOP account responded: Are you? Asking all of the people who read this official site about an hour later, the party posted a clip from the action movie RAMBO in which the titular character threatens to shoot another character in the face with an arrow. The state's GOP account quoted Rambo's line in the clip, quote, ‘This is what we do, who we are. Live for nothing, or die for something.” In other words, are you people willing to risk your life to change these election results? Something is going on collectively in the psychology of apparently millions of people in this country. What is it? What's happening to us?
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON: Millions of people are not necessarily reading the Arizona GOP Twitter feed. And there is a lot of posturing going on I think in this particular moment. So, I think that the fears that I see of people thinking that we are in fact on the verge of a civil war are probably overblown. That being said, I do think we have a real problem in this country and have had one at least since the overturning of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. And possibly from before that, with the rise of Ronald Reagan, and maybe even before that with the concept of William F. Buckley Jr., for example, that rather than making arguments based in fact, what we really need to do is indoctrinate people to believe a certain narrative about the way America works. And what we really have now is a whole bunch of people who no longer are in a relationship with reality, if you will. And they really do want to have their lives mean something. They want to care about something. They want to be important. And they are laying their ideology on the line in this moment to say that they're going to fight for what they believe is America. Now, that being said, we've been here before. We were here in the 1850s, and after 1860, when, in fact, our leaders did manage to bring those people into a civil war, they discovered pretty quickly that what they were fighting for was not some version of America in which ordinary Americans would go ahead and be able to have a future. What they were fighting for was the very wealthy, who essentially walked away from that war and left that entire Southern region devastated. And that's the thing I always worry about, is so many of these keyboard warriors are really brave until the rubber meets the road. And then they discover that they're actually burning down their own homes. It's all fun and games until the actual shooting starts, as people like Kyle Rittenhouse found out.
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HEATHER COX RICHARDSON: It was in Wisconsin.
BILL MOYERS: Whatever their motive, nonetheless, they're willingly and publicly, these who speak out, are willing to ignore the law, break the law. Doesn't that threaten everything you're about, Steve Harper?
STEVEN HARPER: Absolutely. And to your larger question, which is what's happening, well, it could be that the philosopher/historian Hannah Arendt captured the essence of what's happening now. Hannah Arendt would say when you're bombarded with lies, repeatedly, the purpose of the lie is not really to get you to believe the lie. It's to persuade you to doubt everything. And with such a people, you can do as you please. And so what we've seen, when shortly after Trump was inaugurated, something that I, frankly, thought would be a name and shame kind of approach to Trump. Which is to say to the people who were supporting him, don't call them Republicans anymore. Make them walk hand-in-hand and join them at the hip. Call it the Trump Party. Call them Trump people. That's now become a badge of honor. He's completed his hostile takeover. There is no real Republican Party anymore, it's the Trump Party. The impeachment proceedings and the Senate so-called trial made that abundantly clear. And what I worry about is that I think it understates it. I think that pundits have understated it, and really underestimated Trump for a long time by referring to the things he does as “breaking norms.” As if a norm is not a big deal. But one of the norms that this country has stood for, and what makes the country what it is, is respect for the rule of law. And if you shatter the rule of law, which is what's been happening again and again and again under Trump, what's left? If you eliminate truth, if you eliminate facts, if you let people believe whatever they want to believe, if they confine themselves to the comfortable bubbles of people telling them what they want to hear, I don't think democracy survives that.
BILL MOYERS: We have over 15 million cases of the virus in the country. And 284,911 deaths the last time I looked early this morning, with more than 2,000 people dying every day. When Donald Trump's not on the golf course, he's spending all of his time trying to reverse the outcome of the election he's lost. He's sowing rancor and confusion, and he's inciting violence against election officials honestly doing their duty. What manner of man is this? What manner of man is he?
STEVEN HARPER: Well, I would say we have an alien in the White House. He is a man who is by all accounts completely without empathy. I think that the three words that best capture what he's about right now are survival, because the minute he leaves office he's open to criminal prosecution on several different fronts. Second, revenge. He is a vindictive, Roy Cohn protégé. Cohn used to say, if you're hit, hit back ten times as hard. And I would say the third word is resurrection. He's certainly posturing or acting in a way that leads you to believe that he's, at some level, recognizes that his days in the White House are numbered. And all of those things are coming together to produce behavior that's extraordinarily dangerous. Because at the end of the day, he cares about nothing but himself. And the truth is, if he were just an ordinary person, Heather, you, or me, Bill, walking the streets, he'd be under indictment. He'd be facing trial in several different courts. He'd be worried about the complete loss of his fortune, whatever funds he had in the civil suits that are facing him. And he'd be seriously considering what it would be like to be spending the rest of his days in an orange jumpsuit. And that's a very real problem.
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON: I think that this is a really interesting moment in the country. Because I do think that women and people of color perceive this moment very differently than white men do. Because we have all worked with a Donald Trump. Not literally with Donald Trump, but he is a domineering abuser, essentially, who is used to dominating people. And his real mistake was taking that to a national scale, where there were going to be people who were examining what he was doing to the women that he was sexually assaulting, or to his underlings, or to the law. He was really abusing and putting his own dominance over the system– the idea of destabilizing a population. The word for that in abuse is “gaslighting,” which you've seen around ever since Trump was elected. So, you look at this moment when you are essentially seeing an abuser being told no. And as everybody who studies that will tell you, this is when they really get dangerous, because he's trying to reassert control over the people he no longer controls. But I am less interested in what he is doing right now, even though he's trying to get people on his side, the same way a schoolyard bully does. I am far more interested in what everybody else is doing. Because this is the moment where he either manages to pull out a win by convincing the Arizona GOP or any of the many people standing in front of the Michigan Secretary of State's home, for example, threatening her, this is the moment where he either says to them, “Take to the streets and raise me up over your head,” or he really loses. When that happens, the coming together of people who have thrown off that gaslighting is enormously powerful. From everything I can see, and I'm watching it really closely, for all that they are really dramatically stirring the pot on One America News, and certainly trying to do some stuff on the Fox News channel, and absolutely doing it through Facebook, I'm not seeing huge numbers of people in the streets. And they're losing in court again and again and again. Now, it's going to be messy as can be until inauguration, but I have a hard time seeing this win. And when I think about what it's going to look like going forward, I certainly see him trying to complain to the world that he's been badly treated. We're in a very unsettled period, for sure. But I do not see it as the end of American democracy so much as an extraordinary chance for its rebirth.
BILL MOYERS: Well, I think you're certainly right in many of those points. But in the meantime, there are fearful people in the country. And I want to see what your fears might be, despite what's happening out there that's positive. I mean, one prominent liberal economist and writer wrote this week that it's evident to him, Trump is, as the English say, barking mad.
