Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Tom Nichols:

The one thing that the government can’t do … and this is where I part with my Liberal friends … it cannot provide your life a sense of meaning. I think too much of what happens in a democracy that is successful like ours is that we lose a sense of meaning.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Tom Nichols. He’s a writer at The Atlantic and the author of the book Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy. He’s also a professor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the US Naval War College and has a special interest and expertise in Soviet and Russian affairs. You may remember that some months ago, Tom tweeted some spicy thoughts about Indian food, which resulted in the two of us live tweeting a meal together and raising money for COVID relief in India. We’ll get to that. Tom is worried about the collapse of our democratic systems, and he says there’s plenty of blame to go around. He joins me this week to talk about the urgency of saving our democracy, what happened, who’s at fault, and where we go from here. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

Preet Bharara:

Before I get to your questions, I just wanted to remind folks to sign up for the CAFE Brief, our free weekly newsletter. It features articles that analyze issue at the intersection of law, history, and policy, including every week an essay by Elie Honig and our newest project, Office Hours, a series of conversations with experts that explore undercover topics. To get it in your inbox free each Friday, head to cafe.com/brief to subscribe. That’s cafe.com/brief.

Preet Bharara:

Now, let’s get to your questions. This question comes in a tweet from Johnathan who asks, “Why wasn’t Bannon immediately arrested after being indicted? Why was he allow to set the terms of being taken into custody?” Well, that’s a good question and it comes up all the time. As you sometimes see in news reports, often, arrests are made at 6:00 in the morning. A number of police officers or FBI agents or DEA agents or whoever the law enforcement entity is wants the element of surprise, they want to control the situation, particularly in circumstances where the person doesn’t know that they are potentially being arrested and they may be violent, they may have a weapon in the home. In those circumstances, that’s standard operating procedure for law enforcement.

Preet Bharara:

On the other hand, in cases of white collar crime or nonviolent matters, and especially in circumstances where the person knows that they’re under investigation and they’re likely to be arrested, as was true in this case, the decision is made as a matter of protocol that you can self-surrender. Now, sometimes this causes controversy. We would sometimes have discussions with the FBI when I was US attorney about why some people were seemingly treated more softly than other people. It basically came down to an issue of risk, an issue of risk and of danger.

Preet Bharara:

Remember, whatever you think of Steve Bannon, it’s a misdemeanor charge. He’s facing not more than a year in prison, and although, obviously in some ways, the thing that’s being inquired about is his involvement with a violent insurrection, I don’t think there’s an argument that the government would accept at this moment that he is in an immediate sense violent or a risk of flight in a serious way. So in this case, given the nature of the charges, the fact that he was expecting to be arrested, the idea of going in at 6:00 in the morning didn’t make a lot of sense.

Preet Bharara:

I got a lot of questions … a lot … about the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot and killed two people and injured a third in Wisconsin. Lots of people are following this trial closely. This is a question from a tweet posted by Bernie. “Are there a lot of judges like the one in the Rittenhouse case that don’t even try to hide their bias, and is there anything the prosecution can do to appeal any of his rulings? Are they able to request another judge at any point?” Karen also tweeted this: “Hi, Preet. Can we discuss the judge’s behavior in the Rittenhouse trial? Is this normal behavior? #askpreet” And we got a lot more questions in that vein, and actually, in my personal life, people are asking those questions as well. I’ve had conversations with Joyce and others about the conduct of the judge.

Preet Bharara:

Let me say a couple of things at the outset, and I can’t address every issue, but I’ll address a couple. Number one, this judge, Bruce Schroeder, is an elected jurist. He’s not a novice, so you can’t ascribe his conduct to being new on the bench or being a stranger to high profile cases. He’s done a number of high profile cases in Wisconsin before. He’s been there, I think, since 1983. The other general point I’ll make … and I make this point in my book, Doing Justice … the judge is supposed to be a background figure. And whatever you think of particular rulings … and I think some of them have been correct and some of them have not been correct … but whatever you think of the judge, if you have a trial in which the judge is making more news than the lawyers or the facts or the evidence, I think that’s, on its face, a problem. Imagine watching professional sports and an umpire or referee is getting more attention than the players. That clearly signifies a problem.

Preet Bharara:

Let me say also as a general matter, you can be right about a ruling or incorrect about a ruling, but the fact that you’re admonishing in a way that’s very, very notable one side or the other, whether it’s the prosecution or the defense lawyers, that’s also a problem. And I understand that judges are human beings. I understand that as much as anyone does. But you have to control your temper. One thing that you have to be as a judge is someone of proper temperament. And every once in a while, one of the parties may provoke your anger, and an occasional lashing out makes sense and it happens all the time. It’s happened to me personally. But you’ve got to control that. It can’t be a daily occurrence, and that’s a problem, too.

Preet Bharara:

Now, with respect to some of his rulings that have caused some people to say that he’s biased against the prosecution, there may be some truth to that, but not all of the rulings bear that out. For example, there’s a point which Judge Schroeder got very mad at the prosecution for making a comment about the post-arrest silence of Kyle Rittenhouse. Well, that’s a no-no. I don’t know any lawyer who thinks that that was an appropriate thing for the prosecution to do. Did Judge Schroeder have to take the tone he took? Did he have to excoriate the prosecutors as he did on a number of occasions in front of the jury? No, absolutely not. I think that was a mistake and that’s not proper. But that ruling made sense to me, and the nature of his anger with the prosecution is also somewhat understandable.

Preet Bharara:

There was another occasion where the prosecutor decided to talk about something that was ruled inadmissible by the judge. Now, whether you thought that ruling was proper or not, correct or not, it was a ruling of the judge, and anybody who’s practiced in any courtroom in the country understands that the quickest way to make a judge angry at you is to talk about something that he has ruled you can’t talk about. So that’s two points for the judge, tone aside. On the other side of the coin, there are lots of comments that he’s made and conduct he’s engaged in which don’t make a lot of sense. There was a moment on Veteran’s Day where he called for everyone in the courtroom to applaud people who had served in the Armed Forces, and it turned out the only person who had served was an upcoming defense witness. That’s weird. That’s improper.

Preet Bharara:

There was another ruling in which he refused to allow an image on an iPad to be blown up because he believed the weird defense argument that that would distort the image. That doesn’t make sense either. He’s made weird jokes about lunch. He’s done other things that have caused people to raise their eyebrows, including a long pause when he was giving jury instructions on obvious points that he should be very well acquainted with, and on more than one occasion, has not seemed to understand the law very well, notwithstanding his long service on the bench.

Preet Bharara:

Then, of course, there was his very controversial ruling that’s gotten a lot of attention that happened even before the trial began. It revolved around the question of whether or not the prosecutors could refer to the people who had been shot as victims. Lots of folks slammed the judge for that, and I initially did also. In my experience … and my experience is limited to the Southern District of New York … we routinely referred to people who had been the victims of crime as victims. But I’ve talked to a number of defense lawyers, and some other defense lawyers who I respect have commented on the case and said in many courts, that’s a standard motion that the defense makes, the argument being that, well, the very question of whether or not someone was a victim is at the heart of the matter and shouldn’t be preordained by giving them the label, “victim.” And to hear them argue that way makes some sense to me.

Preet Bharara:

It’s odd in this case because there’s no dispute that there are dead people. There’s no dispute that they were shot, and there’s actually no dispute that they were shot by Kyle Rittenhouse, which, however you slice it up, they’re victims. The question is whether or not they deserve to be victims or not. Does the defense of self defense hold up, or does it not hold up? And so I would not have ruled that way, and I think that the label of “victim” is applicable and not especially prejudicial. But if you look at it in another way … and it maybe makes the ruling seem a little bit less crazy if you’re open minded about it.

Preet Bharara:

Imagine a circumstance in which a husband is charged with poisoning to death his wife, and the defense of the husband is that the wife died of natural causes, some health problems. In that circumstance, it would not be crazy for a judge to rule that the prosecutors couldn’t refer to the wife as a victim because the defense is that she was not a victim at all. That’s slightly different from the Kyle Rittenhouse case, but you can imagine a circumstance in which it’s not insane for people not to be able to refer to folks as victims when that’s one of the major issues in the case and part of the defense of the defendant.

Preet Bharara:

I’m recording this on Wednesday morning. The Rittenhouse jury is still out, still deliberating. The other general comment I will make is that no one in the case really … the defense, the prosecution, or the judge … have really bathed themselves in glory. We’ll see what happens.

Preet Bharara:

There’s another question I get a lot, and there are various versions of it. Here’s how one listener put it. “Will we survive without a civil war?” A question that haunts me, and one reason I’m answering it is because of who it is that asked the question. Usually, in this space here, I answer questions from ordinary people who I don’t know. But in this case, the person asking the question is quite special. It is Henry Winkler. Yes, that Henry Winkler who tweets from the handle @hwinkler4real, the original Arthur Fonzarelli from Happy Days, and more recently, star actor from Barry. Who by the way, is a lovely person who cares about the country and by all accounts is essentially the nicest guy in Hollywood. And so I thought I would briefly, but probably unsatisfactorily, address The Fonz’s question.

Preet Bharara:

What makes this question so powerful and so scary is that I don’t have an answer, and I don’t know that anybody really does. We have seen violence. We have seen the propagation of violence. We’ve seen the promotion of violence. We have seen the excusing of violence. And we have seen people angling for more violence in the future. But I think the more that good people worry about it and try to inject some truth in our politics and inject some fairness in how we go about doing things, the less chance there will be the kind of violence that Henry Winkler is asking about.

Preet Bharara:

Stay tuned. There’s more coming up after this.

Preet Bharara:

Our democracy is at a breaking point. The 2020 election of Joe Biden was by no means the end of Trumpism. The solution, my guest Tom Nichols says, starts with every one of us taking a good, hard look in the mirror. A former Republican, Tom has some thoughts about what is going on in American politics and how we got here. Tom Nichols, thanks so much for being on the show.

Tom Nichols:

Thanks for having me, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t think we’ve spoken since we had our somewhat famous Indian food summit a few months ago. Have you been okay since then?

Tom Nichols:

Yeah. I’ve had many people offering to send me more lamb biryani now that everyone knows how much I love that. But you and I, other than the occasional message here and there, we haven’t seen each other since the greatest feast I’ve been to in months.

Preet Bharara:

That was a lot of food, yeah. And we raised … my people, we raised $130,000 for COVID relief in India. So it was a good cause. You were a very good sport about it. I’m glad I changed your mind. But I put a lot of time and effort into the strategy there, kind of like what you must teach sometimes at the college.

Tom Nichols:

Absolutely. You prepped the battlefield well. You had reinforcements show up right on time.

Preet Bharara:

You had no chance.

Tom Nichols:

No. Speaking of lambs, I was a lamb to the slaughter, absolutely.

Preet Bharara:

This, of course, is referring to the time when you proclaimed not only your dislike for Indian food, but the suggestion that everyone was pretending to like Indian food. It was a silly thing to say. You mention in the book … we’re going to talk about your book in a second … but the Indian food summit, I guess, came along too late to include in the book. It would have been a nice postscript. The one thing I remember that you were concerned about, because you’re a man of integrity in this regard … you were worried that when you started to like some Indian food, people would think you were pandering to me and you were making it up. And you kept saying to me over and over again at the dinner, “Don’t these people know? I wouldn’t lie about that.”

Tom Nichols:

Well, and if people were paying attention … and you can verify this as a witness … we ordered practically everything on the menu, and there were times when you said, “Okay, how’d that go?” and I shook my head and said, “Nope. Not liking that.”

Preet Bharara:

You remain anti curry, and since then, people have speculated that maybe this is an issue. There are some people who just can’t tolerate different kinds of foods, and curry is maybe not something for you. But I was happy that you liked the lamb biryani and a number of other dishes as well.

Tom Nichols:

Absolutely.

Preet Bharara:

In the update to your book when it goes out in the paperback, you need to update it with our summit.

Tom Nichols:

Absolutely, because it did show … I mean, as a more serious point, the outrage itself showed how vicious and insane social media can be. I mean, I grant you, it was a silly thing to say because it was just a kind of toss-off comment to a silly question-

Preet Bharara:

It was worse than silly, but you should not have gotten death threats. You should not have gotten death threats over your culinary preferences.

Tom Nichols:

Well, that’s the thing, right? I mean, it was worse. And it was also kind of a classic only child thing. I mean, it’s one of many comments I’ve made where if I don’t like something, nobody could like it because that’s just the way my curmudgeonly tastes go. But yeah, when I started getting accused of genocide and that I should die and get death threats … But on the other end, what came of it when it was over showed that the same mechanism that can produce all that bile and bad feeling can also produce a lot of good feeling and fellowship and a charitable outcome that’s going to help a lot of people. So I think we kind of showcased both ends of it, you know?

Preet Bharara:

I think you tweeted a few minutes ago … One of the dictionary websites was talking about the different ways you can say “curmudgeon” or “cranky,” and you bemoaned that you have a brand, Tom.

Tom Nichols:

Something like that.

Preet Bharara:

I guess is your brand crank or curmudgeon?

Tom Nichols:

I’m going to draw the line and say I accept and embrace curmudgeon. I am not a crank because I don’t think I embrace nutty, kooky ideas. I’m not the guy in the back of the room yelling about election conspiracies and vaccine microchips, so that to me is a crank. But I’m a … I’ll sneak in an ad for my new newsletter, which is named after John Adams’s farm, Peacefield. I think I chose that because I figured I’d go with the OG Massachusetts curmudgeon, John Adams, who, as the musical told us, was obnoxious and disliked. It could not be denied.

Preet Bharara:

That’s fair. So you’ve written this book, I think your eighth book, called Our Own Worst Enemy. It features very dramatically a match lit on fire as the O in Worst. Subtitle, The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy. We’re going to talk about a bunch of things you say here, but at the risk of alienating my guest right at the start, let me make a firm criticism of the book, and that is that you quote from Ian Bremmer far too much. What’s up with that?

Tom Nichols:

Well, I’m going to give Ian some credit here, because part of the reason I wrote the book came from a couple of debates that I’d had with him. I say not just friendly debates, but where we had gone in public on MSNBC and for the Carnegie Council, because Ian had staked out early on the idea that a lot of what we’re seeing with the rise of illiberalism, particularly in the United States, was a response to globalization and to economic change and it was a very kind of economically-driven argument. In my book, I think he’s just wrong, but I thought to give Ian his due, because he made that argument well and he made it cogently. That’s partly why he’s there, because I felt like I was responding at least in part to his argument.

Preet Bharara:

Just to be clear, you said the rise of illiberalism, correct?

Tom Nichols:

Correct.

Preet Bharara:

And when you say he’s wrong and other people who talk about the situation we face being a part of globalization, automatic, economic anxiety, when you say that that’s wrong, do you mean it’s completely wrong and it doesn’t fuel any of this? Or are you saying it’s just not a full enough explanation for at least some subsets of people who feel disenfranchised?

Tom Nichols:

Right. I think a good social scientist never says that nothing matters. I mean, unless we’re talking about the temperature of the animals at the Washington Zoo. But globalization is a huge social and economic change, and of course it matters, and of course it has some impact on this. What I bristled about was that the explanations that you would expect to come from economic change and depravation and income inequality and other things didn’t match the data we were seeing about who was supporting these illiberal movements in the United States and in other places.

Tom Nichols:

I think one place that I think the book makes a contribution is that I pulled back a little bit … I pulled the camera back a little bit to say this is happening in the United States and the UK and Italy and Poland and Turkey and Brazil and India, and the economically-driven argument that this is all about poverty and empty factories in the Ohio Valley just doesn’t explain it. It doesn’t explain it very well. It explains some of it, I grant you, but not enough that you can really hang what’s happening in the world on that explanation, in my view.

Preet Bharara:

Can we define what we mean when we talk about this, the state of affairs, when you say illiberalism, this thing that we’re seeing in the United States and in other countries? How do you define it? How do you describe it? And then we can get at what’s causing it.

Tom Nichols:

That’s a really important thing, because I think when people talk about things like, well, the anger of the masses who aren’t working, for example, or the hollowed out towns … And we can talk about that more, because I actually think that we have a weird nostalgia about when that actually happened that I think people are wrong about. But it’s one thing to demand better policy from your government, and we’re seeing a big upsurge in that, of people saying, “Look, we need more infrastructure, income redistribution,” the kinds of things we’re seeing now. That’s very different from the rise of illiberal movements that say, what we really want is an end to liberal government, an end to constitutionalism and the rule of law and equal treatment before the law. We really have movements now that are much like the Latin American authoritarian position of, “For my friends everything, for my enemies, the law.”

Preet Bharara:

Right. But can we pause there for a second?

Tom Nichols:

Sure.

Preet Bharara:

The question I have is, with respect to that movement in this country, which I assume you would associate with Donald Trump’s base, they don’t use that language. They say they embrace the rule of law. They say they embrace the Constitution.

Tom Nichols:

For themselves.

Preet Bharara:

For themselves, but not for thee.

Tom Nichols:

Right. That’s why I say, “For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law.” And when you see people saying, “Well, we’re here …” For example, the language. And by the way, I think it’s important to note I did not write this book about Trump. I mean, this is something that’s been kicking around in my head for some years now, and I think is actually a longterm corrosion. And I talk about that in the book, that there are longterm trends that are even more important than globalization or other economic issues. But they say things like, “Well, we are protecting the rule of law because we think that means making sure that voting is harder for people of color, or overturning an election.”

Preet Bharara:

They would say they’re just trying to make it fair.

Tom Nichols:

Yeah. Well, I mean, whoever … That’s like Rodney Dangerfield handing money to the guy in Caddyshack and saying …

Audio Clip:

Hey tiger, here. Keep it fair, keep it fair, will you?

Audio Clip:

No, I can’t accept that.

Tom Nichols:

They don’t really want to keep it fair. They are trying to keep it wrapped around their priorities, and that’s happening in a lot of countries.

Preet Bharara:

But you say in the book that you’re pessimistic, and you’re very up front about the level of pessimism in the book. I think that’s important. I think people need to have their eyes opened, so I don’t mind pessimism. But what’s interesting about your current pessimism, to me at least, is that it follows not too long after you were somewhat optimistic. And a lot of people were optimistic about liberal democracy, most notably at the end of the 20th century when there seemed to be this flowering of democracy. The Soviet Union fell and lots of other democracies started to flourish, and it looked like America was doing very well. Obviously, we have our problems and the other Western countries in Europe as well, but the largest democracy in the world, India, America, large parts of Europe, things were looking up. What happened? And it’s not that long a period of time, by the way. We’re talking about 20 or 30 years.

Tom Nichols:

No. And I was so swept away by this. I mean, I was 31 years old when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. I actually argued for embracing Russia and bringing them into the Western community even more tightly, accession to the G8, NATO observer status, all of that. Because I said, “Look, this is a fledgling democracy trying to get off the runway. This proves that the natural state of a human being is that they want to be free.” And even when Putin … I mean, biggest blown call of my career. When Putin took over, I said, “Yeah, not optimal to have the presidency handed over from one guy to another, but this guy seems like he’s okay. He worked in the democracy movement at St. Petersburg. He’s kind of a gray bureaucrat, could be a caretaker government as they move on to deeper democratization.”

Tom Nichols:

I was just wrong, but that was partly that huge swell of optimism that … I mean, I’d spent my whole life studying the Soviet Union. The idea that there would be a complete collapse of Soviet Communism in my lifetime, when what I had really been expecting was an all-out nuclear war, was really something.

Preet Bharara:

But were you right? Just to pause on that for a second, as you look back on it, there are some things that you think back, “Well, there were other signs that should have shown me that I shouldn’t have been as optimistic as I was.” But then sometimes, there’s just no data available and decision trees occur and different things happen and there are shocks to the system within countries and globally, and so some things could not have been predicted. Going back to 1990 and that timeframe with the benefit of hindsight, are you hard on yourself and on others who were so optimistic?

Tom Nichols:

Well, that’s such a great question, Preet, because the people who study the Soviet Union and Russia, this is kind of the … Two drinks in at the bar when we’re all talking to each other, we kind of look around and say, “Were the pessimists right in 1991? Or were we right in seeing things that were hopeful and yet something …” When we talk about Putin, one of the great disputes that always … I shouldn’t say disputes. One of the interesting discussions we have is, was Putin always a bad guy waiting to happen, or did something happen and Putin changed? Was the Putin of 1990 the same Putin of 2002, for example?

Preet Bharara:

Because not all things are predictable.

Tom Nichols:

Right. I don’t put a lot of stock in the pessimists who say Russia was never going to be democratic, because these are the same people who said the same thing 100 times until they day they were right. And I don’t think you get a lot of credit for just being kind of … It’s like the people who said every six months starting in 1950, “The Soviet Union is going to fall.” Well, yeah, okay-

Preet Bharara:

Eventually.

Tom Nichols:

It’s like being a … What does the tombstone of a hypochondriac say? “I told you I was sick.”

Preet Bharara:

I’ve not heard that one.

Tom Nichols:

Yeah. That’s every hypochondriac’s tombstone. “I told you I was sick.”

Preet Bharara:

You just have to live long enough …

Tom Nichols:

Right. Exactly.

Preet Bharara:

… to opine on a particular result.

Tom Nichols:

“Doc, I think I’m dying.” Yes, well … Christopher Hitchins, when he had cancer, people would say, “How are you?” and he would say, “I’m dying, but then so are you.” So at some point, just having these reflexive predictions that democracy could or couldn’t make it or that the Soviet Union would or wouldn’t fall … I actually think there were changes. I think Putin, like every mafia boss, gets to the top, thinks about stepping down, realizes, as Tony Soprano once said, that, “For a high profile guy like me, you end up either dead or in the can.” I suspect that somewhere … If I had to say where it was time to let go, I think somewhere around 2007, 2008 when he decides to come back to power, that’s when I think this situation becomes irretrievably authoritarian. But I think the longer explanation … Because that really doesn’t explain the rest of the United States. I mean, Russia fails.

Preet Bharara:

That just tells you Russia. It doesn’t tell you about all these other countries. So what happened?

Tom Nichols:

Well, Russia fails for a lot of reasons, including economic problems and poorly institutionalized democratic practices and so on. I think what happens in the United States … I’ve often been saying how I quote Andy Bacevich here, and over the years, I’ve come to the point where I agree with Andy about almost nothing. But I love Andy’s metaphor here that after 1991, the Americans were like people who had won a lottery, that so many things went right at once … the end of the Cold War, this mild recession ends, we start heading into a period of great prosperity. And as anyone can tell you, lottery winners almost uniformly come to a bad end, that people who win tons of money in a lottery almost invariably end up broke and miserable and that it’s bad for you. And I think on this-

Preet Bharara:

Well, because they’re not prepared. And one reason for that is, lottery winners didn’t really earn it. They got lucky, if it’s a true lottery, and they weren’t working towards it. As opposed to someone … I mean, maybe a different example is someone who’s struggling at their craft as an actor or as an athlete for years and years and is working hard and then gets their break and then becomes famous and rich and wealthy, they sometimes end poorly too, but not always.

Tom Nichols:

Right. The guy who finally has the breakthrough role and becomes a gazillionaire in a hit movie and three months later is dead from a heroin overdose. I think there was a sense there that we didn’t know how to handle that prosperity. I will dissent from Andy here and say that the bigger problem for us is that we were released from any sense of seriousness about the world. I think that Andy and people like Andy who have made this argument, it’s suddenly we were looking for the Lexus in our driveway and the peace dividend and all that. There’s kind of a more Marxist critique there about what happens with people and money. I think there was a bigger issue of seriousness. Without a Soviet Union, without the constant sense of existential dread, it paved a path to the, “LOL, nothing matters, smiley face emoji,” of the politics that we have today.

Preet Bharara:

But haven’t there been other times like that when we haven’t had this specter? We haven’t always been in a cold war. I mean, I guess maybe-

Tom Nichols:

I guess you could say the Roaring Twenties, and that didn’t turn out so well.

Preet Bharara:

I was literally going to say the Roaring Twenties.

Tom Nichols:

Yeah. I mean, I don’t know that that ends well either, except that we were a more traditional society and that other institutions that might have been guardrails like religion-

Preet Bharara:

Well, we also didn’t have social media, and we’re going to come to your views on that in a moment. But here’s the way you describe the issue, which is kind of astonishing on its face, so I would like you to defend this. There’s a few things like this, but this in particular, and I wonder if you just meant it to sound dramatic and not believable, or do you really think it stands up. You say, “Democracies can’t cope with peace, affluence, and progress.” I’ve been thinking about that since I read it in your book. That’s one of the most pessimistic things you can say or think, because it’s like life in democracy or in the world is, “Heads I win, tails you lose.” Democracies can get destroyed through all sorts of other things. Democracies are fragile. Even when they succeed to the point of bringing peace, affluence, and progress, according to Tom Nichols, you can’t cope with that either. I hate that.

Tom Nichols:

Well, I think the full quote was something like, “It may be that we’re going to find that the only things we can’t cope with,” are those things.

Preet Bharara:

Oh. Let’s go to the book. Let’s see. This is maybe another change you want to make in the paperback.

Tom Nichols:

Or I’m rewriting it in my head so that I’m not quite as trapped by what I said. But I do think there’s something to that, and I think the way democracy is-

Preet Bharara:

Well, it’s a provocative point. Oh no, you have a caveat. You have a caveat. My bad. You say, as every good scholar does, you say. “Democracies, it seems, cannot cope with peace, affluence, and progress.” But I think that’s kind of a BS caveat, so I stand by what I said.

Tom Nichols:

Yeah, that’s not enough of a caveat to make that less that I shouldn’t have to defend it.

Preet Bharara:

So go.

Tom Nichols:

And so I will. I think democracies need a sense of purpose. I think one place where people who have argued for liberal democracy as a thing in itself argue that simply being free is the end result of democracy. I would say on an individual level, that may be true, but as a community … I was thinking about this. I was walking through Logan Airport in Boston and they had a big thing up of John F. Kennedy, and one of my … I am not a huge Kennedy fan, but I do love the quote where he says, “We choose to go to the Moon and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

Preet Bharara:

They are hard, yes.

Tom Nichols:

And I think democracies, when we don’t need … And I say this in the book point blank. I’m not arguing for some sort of blood and iron solution here. That’s kind of where the Trumpers are with this kind of nationalist populism nonsense. But I think if we really want to be a democracy worthy of the name, a liberal democracy, we can say, “Okay, we won the Cold War. We have length in lifespans. We have a high standard of living. Now it’s time to form a more perfect union, to do better at instituting justice, to make sure that our people have healthcare, that they have a roof over their heads.”

Tom Nichols:

But the one thing that the government can’t do … and this is where I part with my Liberal friends … it cannot provide your life a sense of meaning. I think too much of what happens in a democracy that is successful like ours is that we lose the sense of meaning, that we become adrift in leisure activities and self-fulfillment and it makes us … a word I use a lot in the book … it makes us narcissistic. And I will just say, as a final comment on this, I am not the first person to worry about this. Eric Hoffer worried about it in 1951. Francis Fukuyama talked about it again in 1992 where he said, “Without some sense of purpose, people in a liberal democracy may well turn on democracy.” And Neil Postman warned that we were amusing ourselves to death, which I think is also happening.

Preet Bharara:

But here’s my reaction to that sentiment, which I don’t necessarily disagree with. But it leads me to a place of even greater pessimism and grief, because one of the reasons you were optimistic in the past, separate and apart from what was happening in the 90s, is you said, “Look, the way this country tends to work is as it did in World War II and as it has done at other times. When there’s a great national crisis or a global crisis, we come together and then that can provide the meaning or the cause or the issue to which men and women of good faith apply themselves and become good citizens and build up civic virtue,” which is important in your reckoning in the book.

Preet Bharara:

And then COVID happened and that didn’t come to pass. There was no unity. There was after 9/11. No unity in COVID. In fact, I think arguably, we’re more divided. Even though there was this nonpartisan disease that has affected the entire country … in fact, the entire world … what gives there?

Tom Nichols:

Yeah. It’s another failed prediction on my part, because when I wrote The Death of Expertise, the book about why we don’t agree on basic facts and listen to experts and so on, I said, “Well, the three things that’ll probably kind of snap us out of this will be a war, a depression, or a pandemic.” And I did not … Actually, right now, I think … Preet, you said we are arguably more divided. That’s a very good lawyerly word.

Preet Bharara:

It seems.

Tom Nichols:

We are divided.

Preet Bharara:

But I was going to say, Tom, we are, it seems, more divided. It seems.

Tom Nichols:

It seems. I always tell my students that when an academic said, “One would argue,” he means himself and he’s right.

Preet Bharara:

That’s the one.

Tom Nichols:

And when he says, “Some have argued,” he means other people and they’re wrong. So one would argue that we are actually more divided. I didn’t count on … and I talk about this in the book … the role of political entrepreneurs who could literally hijack … I shouldn’t say literally … who functionally hijack something like a pandemic and turn it into a vessel for political activity, as Trump and the Republican Party did. And I think now we are at the point where we are so divided that if World War III broke out and there were Russians landing in Alaska and Chinese paratroopers in Los Angeles, the first thing that would happen is we’d all have a big fight on cable TV about who’s to blame and which one of us caused this, rather than rallying the country to defend ourselves. I mean, we have become so divided that we would rather be right than be healthy or alive or be a country.

Preet Bharara:

We’ll be right back with more of my conversation with Tom Nichols after this.

Preet Bharara:

I want to talk more about other aspects of your thesis. You talked about narcissism and you talked about winning the lottery and how there are a lot of people who are just bored, and there’s an affliction of boredom. Which I have problems with the thesis. I tend to agree with you that economic anxiety, globalization, those kinds of things don’t explain everything. But your explanation is useful to talk about and I want to discuss it with you, but I think you’re on to something there. And by the way, you used my favorite word that’s very underutilized in the English language, ennui. E-N-N-U-I. Can you tell us what your theory of boredom is? Then I want to push back on it a little bit.

Tom Nichols:

Well, you know the saying, “Good writers borrow, great writers steal.” I wish I could tell you that I invented this, but I stole a great … and I did it with attribution. Since I’m talking to a lawyer, I’ll just tell you I did it with attribution, but Eric Hoffer, in his 1951 book, The True Believer. Hoffer warns … he talks about the rise of authoritarian mass movements and he says, “Look, poor people being poor can cause mass movements, and usually it’s for redress of particular grievances.” He says, “But it’s far more dangerous for the political order when you have a bored middle class that has lost any sense of meaning in its life and is looking for great crusades.” He talks very much about what happens, and you can see it, by the way. I mean, you read Hoffer talking about people finding a holy cause and a great crusade, and you can overlay this right on top of QAnon, and “the Big Lie,” and, “Stop the Steal.”

Tom Nichols:

Going back to where we began with this conversation about who’s really driving these illiberal movements, the people that are most set on attacking the Constitution, supporting the January 6th, the seditionists, this violent insurrection, these are not poor people. These are middle class people. These were real estate agents and accountants and dentists.

Preet Bharara:

Can I quote from you?

Tom Nichols:

Sure.

Preet Bharara:

Because on this boredom theory, I was more skeptical at one point and then I read what you said about the insurrectionists. Because a lot of people talk about them as being the victims of economic anxiety, et cetera, et cetera, and you point out, and there’s data to back this up … and we have a lot of data because a lot of them have been arrested-

Tom Nichols:

Right, because they were all arrested.

Preet Bharara:

They have to provide biographical information, and I think you actually recite the statistics of how many are unemployed, what their income levels are, and you write this: “The January 6th rioters were the most extreme example of the stupefying level of narcissism. These insurrectionists were not disenfranchised or oppressed people trying to engage in a peaceful assembly. Rather, the whole event was a day camp outing for middle aged, middle class, gainfully employed Americans who wanted to be heroes storming Congress.” I actually put that quote to Fiona Hill, who was on the podcast a few weeks ago, who has written her own terrific book where she talks a lot about dislocation and economic anxiety. I was trying to come at her from the other angle and say, “What do you think about this thing that Tom Nichols and others are talking about?” And she conceded, “Yeah, you’re right. There’s a point.” So you won an acknowledgement from Fiona Hill.

Tom Nichols:

And I quote Fiona in the book. You mentioned how much I have Ian in there, but there’s a section of the book that’s heavily autobiographical, and I brought in Ian and Fiona Hill-

Preet Bharara:

For having grown up in poverty.

Tom Nichols:

Yes. We were all working class kids. I did not come … and I think it’s important for people that don’t know me listening to this. I did not come from a childhood of privilege. I came from a working class, blue collar, very difficult childhood in a pretty tough city in the 1970s, and so did Fiona, and so did Ian at different … We’re not quite the same age. And I agree with them that the misery and the … I mean, my mom was an alcohol, and had she died of her disease … which, thank God she didn’t … she would have been classified in the 70s as a death of despair, no doubt about it. I mean, homeless as a kid, all kinds of terrible things in her life. But that doesn’t explain what happened. It explains the people that are agitating now for, again, better policy, for, “Throw the bums out, pass bills.”

Tom Nichols:

That doesn’t explain a well off middle class guy living with his mom buying tons of expensive cosplaying military gear, driving or taking a chartered jet to DC to go through stink bombs and smear poop around the halls of the Capitol. These are two different things that are happening, and it’s okay to say that they’re both happening. But to conflate them as the same thing, to me, is a tremendous error.

Preet Bharara:

Can I read something else?

Tom Nichols:

Sure.

Preet Bharara:

So we’re talking about these insurrectionists, and some people say economic anxiety. You make, I think, a very legitimate point. That doesn’t explain much of it or any of it, given their backgrounds and the evidence we have about them. Then you talk about boredom they face and a worry about the country changing. Well, why isn’t the real issue … xenophobia, racism, ethnophobia on the part of people who think they have a particular right to a particular kind of non-multicultural pluralistic society … Doesn’t that explain a lot of it, too?

Tom Nichols:

Yes. I think a huge amount of this is white anxiety, and that-

Preet Bharara:

But white anxiety is something distinct from narcissism.

Tom Nichols:

You know-

Preet Bharara:

Or are they bound up with each other? I’m just trying to understand how you think about those things.

Tom Nichols:

I think narcissism … As I say in the book, social psychologists have found that narcissism, I mean, it’s not even arguable. It’s an empirical reality that narcissism in developed nations has been on the rise at least since the early 1970s. I mean, you and I are both old enough to remember. What was the nickname of the 70s? The Me Decade. I just don’t think the Me Decade ever ended, and so I think that sense of, “What I care about … Other people are not people,” I think that’s where it threads into the white anxiety problem, that other people are not really people, that other people are simply raw material for me to process how I feel about the world.

Tom Nichols:

And look, I mean, we can take some time to talk about the narcissism of the left. I mean, I quote Mark Lilla, who is a man of the left and yet he’s kind of on the outs with a lot of the Progressive movement because he’s said some unpleasant things. I love his … and I put this quote in the book … where he talked about identity politics. He basically said, “Identity politics is Reaganism for lefties.” It’s the animating sort of central proposition for people on the left. But I think eventually, we’re going to end up here moving to talk about social media because a lot of this cultural and racial anxiety is driven by the way that social media and cable news puts all of these disparate cultures in direct and constant contact with each other so that you have people in Montana somehow believing that there are caravans pouring over the border who are going to march into downtown Bozeman in 48 hours. And-

Preet Bharara:

Defies the space-time continuum, also.

Tom Nichols:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s created a kind of … I’ve been working on a piece I’m eventually going to do where I think the country has become in every way and across the board, but especially on the American left and especially among kind of middle aged white guys, there’s kind of a mass psychosis at work here, just believing things that are fantastically crazy.

Preet Bharara:

Wait, so you don’t think … Notwithstanding what you said about not being a huge fan of John F. Kennedy, are you looking forward to JFK Jr. coming back to Earth and running for public office?

Tom Nichols:

Look, the guy’s been crashing on my couch for a week and I wish he would just get on with it because you wouldn’t believe how much this guy eats at his age.

Preet Bharara:

But by the way-

Tom Nichols:

And it’s getting a little pricey here.

Preet Bharara:

What I always say when we talk about this is, it has always been true that significant percentages of people in this country … and I think higher percentages in many some other countries … but significant percentages of people in this country believe crazy shit. I’m just going to say that. Like the flatness of the Earth or the fakeness of the moon landing, in more recent times, not believing that 9/11 was actually perpetrated by Al Qaeda. I mean, hasn’t there been truth throughout history, particularly before there was widespread education? The difference now is that those people’s disassociation from reality is being embraced, celebrated, and encouraged. Isn’t that the difference?

Tom Nichols:

I think there’s two things going on. One is … and in the book, I quote a humor writer named Yevgeny Simkin who says, “Every town had a sandwich board wearing end-of-the-world guy.” He said, “What social media made possible is that every end-of-the-world guy in every town can now know every other one of those guys and they’ve formed a union. Now it’s a movement.” So no matter what town … I mean, my hometown, as kind of gritty and dirty as it could be in some places also had very Norman Rockwell … We had a local diner and the local barbershop and all that stuff, and we had the local crank. I mean, he was a member of my extended family. He was the guy that believed no matter what you told him, it was opossum. “You know those moon rocks, they’re looking shady.”

Preet Bharara:

Right, but do you think there are more of them?

Tom Nichols:

No.

Preet Bharara:

Or do you think they are now united through social media and they have more power as a union that way?

Tom Nichols:

Well, I said no very quickly, which means no, but.

Preet Bharara:

No, but. Right.

Tom Nichols:

But I think yes, they are amplified and they now have vastly more … They punch above their weight class in the national debate because now they are a movement. I was thinking of this a while back. The New York Times had a story about a convention of people who had gotten together who believe they are being watched by the government, who believe they have NSA surveillance on every … People that we would have understood in an earlier time to be emotionally disturbed, and now they have a big piece on themselves in The New York Times saying, “Here’s this big convention where everybody got together and said, ‘I think I’m being watched, too. Don’t you?’ ‘Yes, I do.'”

Tom Nichols:

The other thing that’s happened though, is that, again, very clever, very cynical, very unprincipled, and I would even say in some cases flat out evil political entrepreneurs and public figures have figured out how to monetize this craziness and feed it and grow it and amplify it and sell ads every 10 minutes while they talk about it.

Preet Bharara:

The monetization part of it makes it a difficult thing to undo because it’s not just a political or ideological exercise. There’s money to be made.

Tom Nichols:

Well, the moment where … I was just watching a commercial. I was traveling and, of course, as we all know, you’re just trapped in a hotel with a TV for a long time. I was channel surfing and to me, the apotheosis of this, the beautiful embodiment of this is Mike Lindell doing a My Pillow commercial while beginning it with, “Cancel culture is real and I have been canceled because of all the things I know.” So there it is in one 30-second spot. “I am an entrepreneur. I’m a gazillionaire. I’m selling pillows, and also, you need to buy my pillow because I am being canceled because of my crackpot conspiracy theories.” And I thought, “This is America. This one ad with this crank …” You asked about the difference. There’s a crank with this crackpot selling pillows while telling you that you should buy his pillows because he’s been silenced for his brave stand on all this crazy shit. Really captures the monetizing of nuttiness in 60 seconds.

Preet Bharara:

This is further depressing to me, though, because-

Tom Nichols:

I’m not here to cheer you up, Preet. I wish I could.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t know how you … I mean, you say with respect to social media … and intuitively, it seems like it shouldn’t be true … but something like overconnection can destroy democracy. And maybe you can try to have misinformation taken off these platforms, but man, the cat is out of the bag and technology is going to allow for the unionization of all these people who have conspiracy theories. I don’t see any way to undo that. And as you’re talking, I think to myself, are we just all in some massive Black Mirror episode?

Tom Nichols:

Wow. Boy, you thought I was going dark.

Preet Bharara:

Well, we’re going to get to some good stuff in a moment, but I think it’s important for people to understand, it’s not a good spot we’re in.

Tom Nichols:

No, and it’s not going to be over any time soon. There is a kind of dark tunnel we’re going through here, and I think some of it can only be remedied from generational change. And I think the people that are my age, 60-ish, that are just spending hours going down rabbit holes on YouTube, they’re not coming back. You’re not going to change their mind at Thanksgiving. They’re not going to suddenly wake up and say, “Gosh, what have I been thinking? What have I been doing? Who have I been voting for?” That’s just not going to happen, and you’re going to have to outvote them until they age out of the population. As cynical and as sparing as that sounds, I think they have simply climbed too far up that tree to get down, and that happens in every generation where there’s always a fringe.

Tom Nichols:

But again, you have people who have monetized it. You have people that … I mean, and I actually think the people who monetized it have lost control of it. I think Tucker Carlson, who I think is clearly one of the worst human beings in public life now … Carlson could come out tomorrow and say, “Listen, I was just bullshitting you. None of this was real.” And his audience would say, “Oh no, they got to him. Blink if you need help, Tucker.” They wouldn’t believe it at this point.

Preet Bharara:

Or they will kill him. The same is true, I’m sure you would agree, with Donald Trump. He lost the thread. Donald Trump got vaccinated. Donald Trump, at some point, he was proud of the fact that the vaccination came about very quickly and wanted to take credit for that. He’s now no longer in a position to advocate in any public way for the vaccine even if he wanted to. He’s constrained, is he not?

Tom Nichols:

Right.

Preet Bharara:

If he cares to keep his base, I mean.

Tom Nichols:

And I think one interesting and possible way out of this, and one thing I’ve been recommending to people, is stop arguing about it because when you argue about it, you’re forcing these folks to double down and triple down and quadruple down. Maybe the thing … I mean, I am a big fan of ostracizing people, just shunning them. I mean, the uncle who comes to your Thanksgiving dinner who wants to ruin it by saying, “I don’t care what you stupid college kids think. I got to tell you about Venezuelan voting machines.” If you turn and say, “Uncle Ed, you can sit here by yourself with the mashed potatoes and we’re all going to go in the next room, or we can be a family,” I think in some way … and this is the really important part of this point … they may be relieved to be let off that hook. Because it’s amazing that they constantly feel the need to defend this crazy stuff.

Preet Bharara:

That’s so interesting to me, because I think a very difficult, practical intellectual tension that we all face … I certainly face it, and I have a platform and you have a platform … and particularly, if you have a platform you face it, and that is when someone says something crazy, whether it’s J.D. Vance or Ted Cruz or Donald Trump or someone else, do you take the position that some people do who I respect a lot, and I sometimes do this myself, which is you can’t normalize this. It can’t be normalized. You can’t let this become the way things work and the way people speak and the way people believe things. You have to call it out loudly and strongly if you care about truth and democracy and the American way, et cetera. Or do you do the thing that you’re saying, is you don’t give it oxygen, you don’t amplify it, you leave it alone hoping that it’s like one of the forest fires that will burn itself out, versus a forest fire that will take over the entire community.

Tom Nichols:

But I’m going to say that I staked out a middle way here. Because remember, Preet, I’m the guy who wrote a whole article in The Atlantic calling J.D. Vance an asshole, literally.

Preet Bharara:

Yes, you did. I was going to get to that.

Tom Nichols:

I mean, I didn’t dance around it. I just went right to it.

Preet Bharara:

So sometimes you engage, sometimes not. When do you engage?

Tom Nichols:

But not on their terms, and I’ve found that what I have said most to people who are … And I’ve lost friendships over this. I mean, we all have. But I have literally said, “You’re wrong. You know that you’re wrong. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, and we’re not going to have this conversation because it would demean us both.” That’s it. Not to say, “Well, I’m not going to engage with you and I’m not amplifying you.” No, I’ll amplify you. I will amplify you enough to say, “You’re wrong and you know you’re wrong, and you ought to be ashamed of yourself.” And here’s what you’re saying … And I just put it out, like when I do this on social media or when I write a piece about something, I just put it out there and say, “Look at what this person said. This is not worth arguing with, but it is worth mocking and shaming it.” And I’m glad you brought up Vance, because he knows better. That’s the thing that makes so many of these people so absolutely horrid, is that they know better.

Preet Bharara:

So I think I know the answer to the question. The people who know better and espouse this nonsense are morally inferior and capable of being judged more so than those who seem to believe it.

Tom Nichols:

Yes, absolutely. I mean, again, I had a beloved member of my family who once got so wound up about conspiracy theories when I was working in the Senate. It was literally a family dinner and he said, “Everybody in Washington’s corrupt.” And I turned and I said, “I’m in Washington.” And without blinking, he went, “You’re corrupt, too.” And I’m like, “You’ve known me since I was a baby. I’m 30 years old. I’m sitting here at Thanksgiving dinner with you.” And he went, “Well, you know what I mean.” And I said, “Yes, I know what you mean. Pass the potatoes.” And I think that person is less culpable … This is a case where you can say, “Look, I love you and you’re a member of my family, but I’m not going to talk to you about this because it’s not good for either of us.”

Tom Nichols:

But with somebody like Vance or Carlson or Mark Levin or the talkers, yeah, they are vastly more morally culpable because they know. They’re looking at you out of the side of their eye saying, “Don’t call me out, because we both know how full of crap I really am.” And that’s why I think those people react in public to their critics with the greatest hostility, because nobody’s angrier than somebody who’s been caught.

Preet Bharara:

I’m going to go back to something that we just hit on quickly and see if you want to talk about the issue differently from how you’ve sometimes talked about it, and sometimes you do it on Twitter and people don’t get the full measure. Do you agree that racism is a problem in this country?

Tom Nichols:

Yes.

Preet Bharara:

Do you agree that people of good faith and who care about the country … white, Black, brown, no matter who they are … should care about, think about, and work towards making racism go away?

Tom Nichols:

Yes. Of course. That’s one of those great projects. If you’re a democracy, you can say, “This is one of the things that motivates us together.”

Preet Bharara:

I just want to make clear that that’s the position from which you come, because there have been times, I think, and I saw a couple of Twitter threads where I think you’re making a more subtle point …

Tom Nichols:

About strategy.

Preet Bharara:

… about strategy. And I think you’ve said … and correct me, and you answered the question and described your position, and it is that maybe … and I might be getting this wrong, so in fairness, correct me. It seems to me that you sometimes think race and racism shouldn’t be talked about in connection with important political campaigns because it rubs certain people the wrong way. They’re not going to be persuaded. And at a time of such constitutional crisis with democracy hanging in the balance, be strategic and smart and maybe don’t upset people with some of your talk about systemic racism. One question is, is that sort of a fair way of characterizing what you’ve said? And did you understand why that might upset people, for whom racism is a core problem in the country, and it’s a feature of why we have income inequality and so much other inequality? Can you just address that?

Tom Nichols:

I think that’s a 90% solution of what I’ve said. The one place where I disagree with it is to say, well, don’t talk about it because it rubs some people the wrong way. I think there’s a bigger problem here, which is that the people who don’t want to talk about racism are not amenable to being part of the pro-democracy coalition in the first place. So what brought on that Twitter thread was somebody who said, “Well, what do you suggest we do to educate people about systemic racism?” And my answer was, not during every campaign on every issue, because that’s just not going to happen. You’re actually going to alienate people that are already in your coalition.

Tom Nichols:

This was the point I was really trying to hammer. When people are already voting for the person you want, simply saying, “Now, remember. We’re going to do this infrastructure bill, and I want you to really understand that on top of this infrastructure being good for all Americans, we’re going to have a discussion now about how the bridges we’re replacing were there because of systemic racism.” And I think you find people … It’s not that it rubs them the wrong way. It’s that they tune out.

Preet Bharara:

Although you have said … But I just want to make sure that your record is clear for folks to agree with or disagree with and write you letters. Write the letters to Tom.

Tom Nichols:

Great. Thanks, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

That when Pete Buttigieg made a point about historical racism that’s baked into bridges and tunnels, and the great Robert Caro, who’s been on the program, talks about a lot of this in his book about Robert Moses, that transportation policies that seem very neutral and just about cars, bridges, tunnels, et cetera, have deep roots in racist views and who should be served by public transportation and who shouldn’t, you said Pete Buttigieg is correct on the history, but what?

Tom Nichols:

Pete Buttigieg is correct on the history, but be a politician and say … Because April Kyle asked him that question, basically said, “Talk about how these bridges were too low because they were built to stop buses from going to the beach,” and so on. And I think the right answer from a savvy politician would be to say, “April, that’s right. A lot of bad decisions were made in the past. The Build Back Better program is about the future. Here’s how we’re going to solve these problems. Here’s the things we’re going to do.” Instead, Buttigieg went around and said, “Yeah, I think we should talk about how this was meant to stop Black and Puerto Rican kids from going to the …” and there was this kind of … Again, it’s a discussion between people who agree with each other about a thing that everybody wants done, and I said, “But you’re not talking about the positive aspect of the plan that you’re asking people to vote for. You’re simply reminding them that people who lived 60 years earlier than them were bad people who did bad things.”

Tom Nichols:

And I’m sorry, I don’t think that’s good politics. You are literally trying to win elections and pass a bill, and I think that that was a clumsy response to a question that … I’m not sure what the point of the question was other than to raise the issue, which is fine, because again, it’s historically a correct issue. But every single question about infrastructure in America cannot come back to systematic racism, because again, people … It’s not that you rub them the wrong way. It’s that they tune you out and they say, “Ah, you know what? The Democrats really are just a single-issue party about a single thing and they’re not really about jobs or the economy or infrastructure. Everything has to be about racism.” And I don’t think you win elections that way. And at a time when democracy is hanging by a thread, the Senate is split, I think muddying the waters with every single thing becoming a discussion about racism is just bad strategy.

Tom Nichols:

I’m not making comment about the morality of the issue and how we should strive to be a better country. I’m simply saying, if you’re going to talk about an infrastructure bill, it’s okay to talk about the infrastructure bill and not have to talk about Robert Moses in 1955. I think it’s okay to do that.

Preet Bharara:

What I would love to see … The way I think about this hearing you speak is I’d like to see some data on how often it’s the case that when infrastructure is discussed, people bring up race. I’ve been watching television nonstop for weeks now, and most of the time on the cable news channels, there’s a different problem. They’re not talking about what’s in the bill … and this was a different debate. They’re talking about is the bill going to get passed and is Nancy Pelosi going to look good and what’s the polling for Joe Biden, ostensibly talking about the infrastructure bill. I wonder if from time to time, people all across the spectrum politically and strategically in how they think about things, have a skewed view of how often something comes up. And do some people misunderstand how often something comes up in one direction versus another direction? I do think that some of this conversation would be helped by having one of those people who watches every television program and does keyword searches and sees how often people talk about stuff, but I appreciate your making the point.

Tom Nichols:

And I appreciate that you gave me a chance to clarify this, because I took a lot of arrows of, “Well, you just don’t want people of color to ever speak,” which that’s the kind of stupid Twitter imperative that every issue has to be-

Preet Bharara:

But also, you need to understand a little bit, I think … There’s certain issues that are important … what the tax rate is, what tariff policy should be … and there are other issues that strike at the heart and core of people’s souls. And it’s a little bit hard, I think, sometimes for people to talk sort of coldly about strategy and tactics on issues of a certain kind. Fair?

Tom Nichols:

You know, Preet, that my … And I have really made heads on the left explode when I’ve said, “Be like Mitch McConnell. Be ice cold about strategy.” I’m sorry.

Preet Bharara:

Jim Carville would say that. Jim Carville.

Tom Nichols:

Carville did say it. I mean, Carville blew up about this the other day. And, of course, everybody’s coming after me-

Preet Bharara:

And he took arrows, too.

Tom Nichols:

Yes. People say, “Well, former Republicans like you,” and I’m like, “I don’t remember seeing James Carville at any of the conventions, bro.”

Preet Bharara:

They mean future Republicans like Carville.

Tom Nichols:

Yeah. So I think to be ice cold about strategy, particularly in … and I’ve said this many times … in a condition of existential threat … That’s why I said elegiac discussions of the racist roots of everything are a luxury for when democracy is safe. I don’t mean that that means you don’t talk about racism ever, but I mean that literally having a conversation … I mean, let’s face it. The discussion about the kind of racist history of New York City infrastructure is a pretty niche discussion when what you’re really trying to do is sell a bill that will rebuild big chunks of New York.

Tom Nichols:

And by the way, I’m going to add one other thing that one of my friends pointed out. Even that discussion itself kind of goes a little awry because a lot of the neighborhoods that we’re talking about that were segregated in the 50s are actually full of white people now. I mean, we’re talking about this as though the demography of New York City hasn’t changed since 1958, and it’s almost like a conversation that gets stuck in time. So my point is, when you’re trying to push the politics of the popular front … which a lot of my friends, former comrades on the right, a lot of Conservatives, they have said point blank, “I want nothing to do with a popular front policy.” I believe in a popular front of the widest possible coalition against this authoritarian movement there can be, and popular front politics are difficult because not everybody’s issue is at the forefront. There can be only one issue at the forefront, and that is the Constitution and the preservation of democracy itself. That makes people upset, but I will keep arguing for that, even if people keep yelling at me about it.

Preet Bharara:

Well, I’ve kept you long enough. Tom Nichols, thanks so much for the discussion. Congrats on the new book, Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy. Thanks again.

Tom Nichols:

Thank you, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Tom Nichols continues for members of the CAFE Insider community. To try out the membership free for two weeks, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider.

Preet Bharara:

Lately, there seem to be too many legal stories to count. But there’s an important one that I want to make sure you didn’t miss this week. It involves, arguably, the most odious and disgusting liar in America. No, not Donald Trump, though Trump thinks highly of this guy. The person I’m talking about is Alex Jones. I’m sure you know him. He’s the founder of Infowars, the far-right website that’s infamous for spreading outlandish conspiracy theories and fake news. Let me give you a few examples.

Preet Bharara:

He has a long history of spewing racism and antisemitism online, like when he said on The Alex Jones Show that the Jewish mafia “run Uber, they run the healthcare, they’re going to scam you, they’re going to hurt you.” Alex Jones was largely responsible for spreading the conspiracy called Pizzagate, the 2016 era lie that Hillary Clinton and other Democratic operatives were running a child pornography ring inside a Washington DC pizzeria. Remember that? The conspiracy spread like wildfire on the far-right site and was nearly fatal. A man by the name of Edgar M. Welch, an Alex Jones listener, based on the conspiracy theory, took it upon himself to walk into the pizzeria armed and fire off bullets into the store. Thankfully, no one was hurt, and Welch is currently serving a four-year prison sentence.

Preet Bharara:

Alex Jones’s dangerous conspiracy theories have no apparent limit. He has denied that former president Obama was born in the US. He’s asserted that Obama and Hillary Clinton are quite literally demons from hell, saying he’s received reports that they smell rotten like sulfur, which apparently, is the smell of hell. News to me. He’s falsely claimed that Muslims in New Jersey cheered when the Twin Towers fell on 9/11. He literally makes a living on the misery of others. Because of his vile behavior online, Jones was banned from all major social media platforms … Facebook, YouTube, Apple, and Spotify … in 2018. As you know, Donald Trump has long said the mainstream media is the enemy of the people. But what does he say about Alex Jones? He told Alex Jones in 2015 that his reputation was amazing and promised, “I will not let you down,” about the 2016 election. That was after Jones told him proudly that 90% of his listeners were Trump supporters.

Preet Bharara:

So why am I talking about Alex Jones? Well, among the most disgusting things Jones has ever said was repeating a lie about the tragic 2012 Sandy Hook shooting. He has said that it was staged and the shootings were fake. He said that the victims were crisis actors who were arranged by a government conspiracy just to get tighter gun control. Now, remember Sandy Hook. That attack took the lives of 20 children and 6 adults. Jones said on his show about the shooting that, “We’ve clearly got people where it’s actors playing different parts of different people. I’ve looked at it and undoubtedly, there’s a coverup. There’s actors. They’re manipulating. They have been caught lying and they were pre-planning before it and rolled out with it.”

Preet Bharara:

So in 2018, a number of Sandy Hook families sued Alex Jones and entities owned by him for defamation. The suit states, “Jones is the chief amplifier for a group that has worked in concert to create and propagate loathsome false narratives about the Sandy Hook shooting and its victims and promote their harassment and abuse.” Once sued, Jones took to his show to call the suit “the modern Lexington and Concord, and the modern fight where they’re coming to take it all.” He said it was an attack on him and his First Amendment rights. So though he later claimed the denial of the shooting isn’t what he quite meant by his statements, the plaintiff’s lawyers argued that any reasonable person … and I think they’re right … would understand his statements to mean that the shooting was fabricated.

Preet Bharara:

This brings me to the news of the week. A Connecticut Superior Court judge ruled against Jones and in favor of Sandy Hook families on Monday, saying that he and other defendants failed to comply with the discovery process, and so by default, he’s liable for damages. He’s lost the case. This, by the way, is now the fourth defamation suit Jones has lost related to his Sandy Hook conspiracies brought by the families of victims. So as we await the verdicts in some other high profile cases, I think we can applaud the judgment in this case.

Preet Bharara:

Let me repeat again. The former president of the United States has said that the mainstream media is the enemy of the people. But he told this guy, this despicable liar, Alex Jones, to his face that his reputation is amazing and that he wouldn’t let him down. After all the damage Alex Jones has done, it’s a relief to see this legal victory against him, and I hope it gives the families of Sandy Hook victims just a fraction of the peace and justice they deserve.

Preet Bharara:

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Tom Nichols. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me @preetbharara with the hashtag, #askpreet. Or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-24-PREET. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com.

Preet Bharara:

Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The senior producers are Adam Waller and Matthew Billy. The CAFE team is David Kurlander, Sam Ozer-Staton, Noah Azulai, Nat Weiner, Jake Kaplan, Chris Boylan, Sean Walsh, Chelsea Simmons, and Namita Shah. Our music is by Andrew Doss. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. Stay tuned.