Bob examines the claim that our heroes are being forced “to choose between their God and defending our freedoms.” The only thing wrong about the accusation is … everything.

In which Bob, now that he is a gentleman of a certain age facing yet another New Year, attempts a self-audit of his worthiness. It’s a journey, that’s for sure.

Bob Garfield sits down with private equity tycoon and author David Rubenstein to discuss his latest book, The American Experiment: Dialogues on a Dream, consisting of interviews with scholars and other notable Americans.

TEDDY ROOSEVELT: Surely, there never was a fight better worth making than the one which we are in.

BOB GARFIELD: Welcome to Bully Pulpit. That was Teddy Roosevelt, I’m Bob Garfield, with Episode 23… “The Botched Experiment.”

In his day job, David Rubenstein is a private equity tycoon who made his fortune buying undervalued companies, restructuring them into profitability for his investors and earning huge management fees as a steward of their stakes. The Carlyle Group, which he founded, has enriched him to the tune of $4.5 billion. 

Rubenstein also has many side hustles, from philanthropy to amateur historian to T.V. interviewer of the rich and powerful. In these excerpts from Bloomberg T.V. we hear George W. Bush and Oprah Winfrey.

RUBENSTEIN: Over much of the past three decades I’ve been an investor, the highest calling of mankind, I’ve often thought, was private equity, and then I started interviewing. 

GEORGE W. BUSH: (laughs)

RUBENSTEIN: When I watch your interviews I know how to do some interviewing. 

OPRAH: (laughs)

His conversations with cultural, political and business icons have been edited into two books, the latest being The American Experiment: Dialogues on a Dream. Collected within are conversations with the likes of Madeline Albright, Ken Burns, Henry Louis Gates Jr. Wynton Marsalis and Billie Jean King.

While acknowledging inequities and fault lines in our society, these conversations are in all a celebration of the so-called “American experiment,” which Rubenstein compares to the unique assortment of genes that determine the nature of the societal organism. Had they not converged, he says, “we would not be who we are, we would not be who we are. Rubenstein joins me now. David, welcome to Bully Pulpit.

RUBENSTEIN: My pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

GARFIELD: Your book takes these 13 genes and kind of divides them up among various scholars and cultural icons. What's on the list? 

RUBENSTEIN:Well, the genes are ones like the belief in the democracy, the belief in the importance of voting rights, the importance of of things like the military should not be in control of the civilian government, the civilians should control the military, the belief in the importance of diversity and importance of the belief in and then having elections and the right to vote. Those are the kind of things I think are parts of our culture; now, increasingly, the belief in diversity is a very important part of our culture, and the belief in the American dream is an important part of our culture. 

GARFIELD: I want to begin, as you do in the book with the Democracy Gene and your conversation with Harvard professor Harvard Professor Jill Lepore, author of the staggering 900 page survey of American democracy, titled These Truths. She has two insights which blew me away. One was the democratizing role of permitting personal bankruptcies, non-corporate bankruptcies — which was unknown to the world — and which played out as a safety net for entrepreneurial risk. Right in your wheelhouse, that one.

RUBENSTEIN:Yes, her point is that when individuals couldn't pay their debts before they were put in jail as opposed to be allowed to be bankrupt, and that the fact that that was changed was an incentive for people to try to take greater risks than they might have taken before. So, yes, it's a very good point that she made. 

GARFIELD: Yeah, freedom of religion it ain't, but has taken an outsized role in the development of the democracy, but also the American form of capitalism. 

RUBENSTEIN: That's correct. You know, remember in our country we started, which started for religious freedom, but only to make sure that people could worship the way that those people wanted to worship. The Puritans and pilgrims didn't really want people to worship any way other than theirs. Now we have a system where people can worship the way they want it. But our Founding Fathers honestly didn't believe so much in the idea that you could worship any religion you wanted.

GARFIELD: Yeah. Hold that thought because we will return to it. Lepore’s second poignant observation was the grotesque collateral damage of the victorious American Revolution and that damage being the perpetuation of slavery, which the British had vowed to abolish. Instead, slavery and its associated injustices have been with us now for 400 years. You used the term original sin. Now, at least in Catholic doctrine, that is something inherent that permanently corrupts our nature, and it has sure done that, slavery has. Now you are in the valuation racket. Was the independence from Britain worth the incalculable human cost? 

RUBENSTEIN: Well, counterfactuals and history are always difficult to come up with and give definitive answers. I think they — if we had not won the Revolutionary War, I suspect we would have become like Canada, a member of the Commonwealth of Britain, and basically had pretty much the country we've had. But I think that the British probably would have ended slavery quicker than we did, though, because Britain had ended slavery in its country before. But I don't know that it was going to be that easy to end slavery that quickly in the 1700s; the economy of the South increasingly depended on it.

GARFIELD All right. So if the slave trade was, as you put it, our original sin, after 150 years came the the bloodbath of the Civil War and after that, the reconstruction of the South, brief, as it was. You spoke to Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., about the ruinous backlash to reconstruction from the infamous compromise of 1877 that effectively obliterated reconstruction and laid the foundation for Jim Crow and white supremacy to the retrograde Plessy v. Ferguson “separate but equal” decision. Gates also told you something I'd never heard of that, the newly restored white power structure called itself “Redemption” — that was how they described the the end of reconstruction. It occurs to me that maybe this foreshadows today's Christian Right using biblical text to whitewash what to my eyes are obscene ideas. With redemption like that, who needs sin? 

RUBENSTEIN: Well, the redemption that he was referring to was basically the belief that they had restored the white order that had existed before the Civil War. Their so-called lost cause of those in the South was what they believed in, that they had a cause — not to preserve slavery, that was what they were saying they weren't fighting for as much as preserving the southern way of life. But in the end, it was really to preserve slavery. But they believed that they were restoring the original sin or restoring the Southern Order was what redemption was all about. 

GARFIELD: Now, since the end of World War Two, there have been acts of legislation and judicial decisions now enshrined in law — the principles of the founding documents codified: women's suffrage, desegregation, the Miranda decision about the rights of the accused criminals, removing prayer from public schools, marriage equality and so on, as the United States followed a general Western path towards liberal democracy. These very advances have infuriated conservatives for 60, 70 years, because they believe that their values and their hegemony are under attack. Make America Great Again seems to share a viewpoint with Redemption. Which country are we, do you think? Are we open hearts or are we closed minds? 

RUBENSTEIN: Well, that's a difficult question to answer. I would say that the beginning, the rhetoric, of the Founding Fathers was wonderful: all men are created equal. But as we all know, we had slavery; we didn't allow women to have certain rights, including the right to vote; so we've been trying to live up to the rhetoric over the 250 years, and we still have a long way to go. Many people in this country, as you suggest, are not happy with the idea that minorities have the same rights that majorities have, that women have the same rights as men have, that people of different skin color are to be treated the same as whites. There are many people who think that that's not necessarily the way the country should be. In my view, that's a mistake, but that's the way that many people look at the situation.

GARFIELD: A mistake? I would say a nightmare — an ongoing nightmare. To what extent do you believe that what we haven't done as a nation to fulfill our founding promises has corrupted the American experiment?

RUBENSTEIN:  The American experiment has been evolving over 250 years. It still has a long way to go. We still are a country that more people want to come to than any other country. Forty-seven million people in this country are immigrants. Very few people leave this country voluntarily, so it's still the best country on the face of the Earth. But we have these challenges that are just endemic. One of the challenges is income inequality, racial discrimination, also homelessness and illiteracy. We have an enormous amount of illiteracy in this country. It's hard to believe that such a wealthy country can have 14 percent of its population being functionally illiterate. But anyway, that's the case. So I would say that we are a country of — it’s a tale of two cities, as Charles Dickens might say. We have the wealthy people, the internet-connected people, the people that are well-educated, and then we have the underclass. And I think the gap between those two is getting wider and wider. 

GARFIELD:  Well, we shall return to this. And in fact, let's turn now to the subject of capitalism, which you discussed with author Bhu Srinivasan. He says that the notion, and we discussed this earlier, the notion of religious pilgrims fleeing persecution and putting down roots in the new world is at best exaggerated, such as in this educational video.

NARRATOR: About 400 years ago, 13 years after the first English settlement in America called Jamestown, there was another group of travelers who came to America in search of religious freedom. They wanted to worship God in their own way and separate from the Church of England.

That America was a capitalist endeavor, an explicitly capitalist endeavor from the get-go, supercharged by the industrial revolution, the invention of the cotton gin, the Louisiana purchase and, of course, slavery. And we know it has all yielded a superpower of unimaginable wealth and influence in the world. Yet you have these regrets about inequity and you regret those who, in your terms, have been left behind. How so? 

RUBENSTEIN: Well, many people in this country have believed in the American dream and have lived the American dream. I feel I have lived the American Dream coming from very modest roots and to be more successful in life than my parents ever dreamed possible. But many people have given up on the American dream, and they think that they can't catch up to where they should be or where they'd like to be. And therefore, we have lots of poverty, lots of inequities, and it's a real challenge. 

GARFIELD: Yeah, Kristin Lems’s song comes to mind.

LEM: (singing) It’s $1200 a month before the SSI and tax, the take-home pay is 900 and a half, and the rent takes half of that leaving $475, and a hundred for the groceries to keep us all alive…

RUBENSTEIN: Overall, I think the American experiment has worked reasonably well, but not perfectly well. And I think right now the country is assessing whether we can move forward together or whether we're just going to move forward in a divided way if move forward is the right verb. Because right now the Congress is divided. We have a very difficult time getting anything through Congress, and social progress is made very, very sparingly right now and it's been hurt a lot by COVID because a lot of people have been left further and further behind than they were before COVID.

GARFIELD: [00:11:48] Yeah, well, more details on the collateral damage: In the past 50 years, as the inflation-adjusted GDP has grown 400 percent, real wages have grown 10 percent. Now, you've just enumerated some of the reasons that society has failed its citizens. You say “regrettable,” I'd say “s**t show.” But turning it to you, not as an author or interviewer or a businessman, but to you as a citizen: I've gone through your writings and I don't see you advocating for more regulation of banks, or high marginal tax rates or higher minimum wages, or a far more robust social welfare system to provide for working parents or universal preschool or free higher education or other entitlements such as Europe largely provides. I mean, if we were to accept your DNA analogy — and it's a pretty good one — must we not also recognize the fact of genetic mutations, changes or errors in the DNA that can make the organism adapt or just go completely haywire? As a video from HealthTree University explains:

MAN: Every once in a while a mistake occurs in a gene, in which one of those bases, one of those coding segments, gets altered and if it gets altered in a gene that causes more cells to more rapidly divide, that’s a mutation we want to know about.”

GARFIELD: Such as: campaign finance, systemic racism, gerrymandering, deregulation, vilification of the free press, stripped away voting rights and what I see as the broken founding promise to promote the general welfare. In short, David, you've achieved the American dream, but what the hell has happened to so many others? 

RUBENSTEIN: Well, obviously, the American dream hasn't worked for everybody, and we have lots of social challenges here. We are not likely to go to the European style of social capitalism or socialism that many European countries take great pride in; it's just not endemic to our American system. Capitalism has been ingrained in our system, and capitalism leaves a lot of people behind. So I just don't think we're going to change it dramatically. I haven't written on all these issues because that's not my role in life, probably, to address every social issue as possible. And I, you know, my basic mission in life has been to kind of move forward my career. I'm now giving away all my money, but giving away all my money is not going to solve our social problems, I don't have enough money to solve those problems. So I'm trying to point out some of the challenges, but I don't claim to be a great reformer and I don't claim to be a politician. If I had the answers to all these problems, I would have been in Iowa and New Hampshire a long time ago.

GARFIELD: All right. We will continue momentarily, but please let me remind you what we are trying to achieve here with Bully Pulpit and the other BooksmartStudios.org podcasts. We are here to coalesce a community of listeners who value complexity over glibness, argument over doctrine, curiosity over certainty.  It’s a community, in other words, built around both skepticism and  intellectual honesty. But as our friends in public broadcasting also incessantly remind you, it is a costly enterprise. Our content is largely free of charge, but our future hinges on your willingness  to pitch in. Please consider a paid subscription, which gets you not only our basic offerings, but bonus content from all three shows and my weekly column, which is a really, really good MRI of my tortured soul. Eighty-four bucks a year — less than a preowned 1985 Cabbage Patch doll on eBay. Please consider investing in BooksmartStudios.org, and please, please rate us on iTunes. Those ratings and reviews really matter. Now then, I was about to ask David Rubenstein my next question.

You say that you don't see us going towards the European model of —

RUBENSTEIN: That's correct. 

GARFIELD: — socialist capitalism or capitalist socialism, where there's greater entitlements, the welfare state is much more robust. Now, apart from our particular political problems of the moment, why do you think we’ll not veer in that direction?

RUBENSTEIN: Because I think the country is not, in its DNA, a socialist country. We’ve experimented with things that are maybe not as capitalist-oriented as we currently have and during the Great Depression, there was a view that maybe socialism would be the better system, but we've rejected that in the country by and large and I would say right now, it's hard to see any interest in the kind of socialist capitalist system that they have in Europe. If anything, we're probably retrogressing and providing fewer social benefits in some ways than we provided in the past. 

GARFIELD: Although, It was never great. Here’s an excerpt from the Phil Donahue Show in 1979, where an audience member challenged economist Milton Friedman — the high priest of trickle-down economics. I’m cutting off his answer; it’s the questions that still resonate:

WOMAN: Why is it we have so many millionaires and everything in the United States and we still have so many impoverished people who try to get up into the world. Why is it we have this lack of money where people who can’t support themselves decently and get a decent job, where all these big men are up on top making oodles and oodles of money — they don’t need it, they can only eat that much. 

FRIEDMAN: And what do you suppose they do, if they don’t need it and don’t use it —

WOMAN: They hoard it.

GARFIELD: And what about business regulation and soaking the rich? Well, at least at the highest marginal tax rates.

RUBENSTEIN: Congress clearly reflects the fact that it doesn't want to do that. All the efforts to increase marginal tax rates don't seem to be getting very far. And I suspect that Congress is just not going to get there. Remember, the Congress is dividing pretty much 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans, and it's generally thought that the Republicans will win Congress for the midterm elections, so I don't see any of those kinds of changes that you're talking about likely to happen. 

GARFIELD: This conversation on Bully Pulpit will follow a two-part series with Anne Nelson, who has written about the Council for National Policy, which I guess is an anodyne-sounding name for the great right-wing conspiracy. They have stuck to their knitting and put their shoulders to the wheel for 60 years to kind of hack the democratic system, to take advantage of gerrymandering and the Electoral College to create a kind of permanent majority in legislatures for what is, by the numbers, clearly a minority party. Does it concern you that these archaic structures of democracy are subverting democracy?

RUBENSTEIN: Well, it's interesting. We believe in democracy, but actually, when the Founding Fathers created it, they didn't let American citizens vote for senators; the state legislatures did that. And we created the Electoral College, which is anti-democratic, you could argue. In fact, I think of the last seven presidential elections the person who got the most majority — the most votes — didn't necessarily become President. George W. Bush didn't get the majority of popular votes when he was elected President, and obviously Donald Trump didn't get the majority of popular votes when he was elected President. And so we've got a system where people who are minority, in terms of popular vote, often get elected President. It's not a perfect system, but it's not going to change. To change the system of electing presidents requires a constitutional amendment which requires two thirds of each house and three quarters of the states. And it's inconceivable that you're going to do that.

GARFIELD: Such as in this educational video:

MAN: “Of the nearly 7000 amendments proposed in the centuries since, only 27 have succeeded.”

GARFIELD: There's a chapter in your book that is particularly dear to my heart: your conversation with Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor on the subject of civics education. 

RUBENSTEIN: Right.

GARFIELD: I myself am a co-founder of an organization called the Purple Project for Democracy, which seeks to address the plummeting faith and trust in American democracy and an accompanying appetite for extreme politics, including violence. It's my belief, and Sotomayor's, that a big problem is that Americans have lots and lots of opinions about government, but vanishingly little knowledge of even the most basic facts of how it all is meant to work and how it does work. Is that fixable? 

RUBENSTEIN: It's fixable, but we have to remember a couple of things. One, it has been a problem for some time. It's not like all of a sudden people don't know much about government. If you go back to surveys 50 years ago, it was a similar problem. Secondly, you're pointing out the reality that ninety one percent of people who take the citizenship test to become citizens who are foreigners pass, whereas a majority of Americans cannot pass these tests, whereas given by an organization recently in 49 out of 50 states, a majority of Americans couldn't pass the basic citizenship test that foreigners have to pass. So it's a sad situation. We don't teach civics very much anymore, as you know, in school and people know very little about the way our government works and operates.

GARFIELD: And so there's ignorance; I don't mean that pejoratively, there's just a lack of basic knowledge. And there is the tidal wave of misinformation and disinformation, which competes very well against no information. Any thoughts about —

RUBENSTEIN:Well, yes. Yes, look, I'm involved with a lot of civic education efforts and will announce some more projects that I'm going to support to do that. But right now, we have not only misinformation and disinformation, but we have I-don't-care information, which is to say some people put information out, they don't really care whether it's true or not, they just think it's politically helpful to them. And so we have another factor where a lot of people aren't really checking whether these facts are true when they say something and people are being misled, in my view, dramatically.

GARFIELD: All of what we've discussed has made me look at America's future with a sense of doom. You don't see it that way.

RUBENSTEIN: I don't think doom; I would say we've always had challenges. The Civil War was a big challenge, we got through that; the World War II was a big challenge, in many ways, we got through that. But clearly, the most recent stress-test of the election and the January 6th event is not a cause for optimism. So I think we have to address it, but I think we can't put our head in the sand and just say, “woe is me, the country is falling apart”; we have to try to do the best we can as you're doing and others are doing to educate Americans and basically inform them on the theory that the best informed democracy will be a better democracy. So we want to make our citizens well-informed. But it's not going to happen overnight. 

GARFIELD: Would you go long in American democracy? Would you short it? What?

RUBENSTEIN: It depends on what period of time, of course, but I think generally nobody betting against American democracy has generally made a lot of money. America is going to be a strong country and a very powerful country for quite some time. Our democracy is not quite as beautiful as many people would like it to be, and many people around the world question whether our democracy is as good as we say it is. We say to people around the world, “Follow our system,” but many people say, “Well, your system isn't working so well, look what's going on in your country.”

GARFIELD: One last thing, David. Over Thanksgiving, you hosted the President and the First Lady for a few days at your bungalow, is it Martha's Vineyard? I don't remember where your summer place is. But before they left, did they strip the beds? I mean, were there wet towels all over the place? Was Biden blasting his Motown playlist all night?

RUBENSTEIN: Well, actually they used the place that I owned. They used it before, when he was vice-president. I was not there, so I can't talk about the issues that you're asking me about. But, you know, I did see him since then. I saw him at the Kennedy Center Honors over the weekend, he said he had a very good time. And he does listen to Motown a lot, as he said in his remarks at the White House recently.

GARFIELD: Uh huh… So you don't know if he's a good houseguest. He didn't burn it down. 

RUBENSTEIN: I never heard any complaints from any of the people that have been working there. So I think he's a very good houseguest and I'm sure you know you'll be enjoying having him as your house guest at some point if you invited him.

GARFIELD: Uh, well, it's a thought. It's a thought. Let's see. What can I say that would be even remotely funny? (Mumbles in Bob.) You know, I don't think it's possible. I don't think — I use 2% milk and I don’t; I think he's a whole milk kind of guy. David, I want to thank you so much.

RUBENSTEIN: My pleasure. Thank you very much.

GARFIELD: Private equity billionaire David Rubenstein is author of The American Experiment: Dialogues on a Dream. 

All right, we’re done here. Bully Pulpit is produced by Matthew Schwartz and Mike Vuolo. Our theme was composed by Julie Miller and the team at Harvest Creative Services in Lansing, Michigan. Bully Pulpit is a production of BooksmartStudios.org. I’m Bob Garfield.

SPECIAL WAR BULLETIN

24 DEC 2021

Not since Edward R. Murrow has a reporter so bravely brought home the terrible soundscape of war.

Happy New Year! In the warm and generous spirit of the holidays, we’re offering 30% off a subscription to Booksmart Studios until the end of the year. You’ll get extra written content and access to bonus segments and written transcripts like this one. More importantly, you’ll be championing all the work we do here. Become a member of Booksmart Studios today. Thank you for your support.

* TRANSCRIPT *

TEDDY ROOSEVELT: Surely, there never was a fight better worth making than the one which we are in.

GARFIELD: Welcome to Bully Pulpit. That was Teddy Roosevelt. I’m Bob Garfield with Episode 22: Live from the War on Christmas.

[RADIO STATIC]

ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt this program to bring you a special report. Bully Pulpit’s Bob Garfield is on the battle lines of a terrible conflict, which is setting the world afire. In the midst of the mad fray, without care for his own safety, Mr. Garfield recounts the sights and sounds of war. We now take you to the North Pole.

[THE SOUNDS OF WAR]

GARFIELD: This is the North Pole. Last night, some young reindeer fetched me here. These heroes, Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid and — with grim and  fantastic irony — Donner and Blitzen, describing the very scene that in this benighted duchy now unfolds. The pilot on our journey was called Rudolph, his caribou nose casting light through the smoke and darkness. The team was determined, for here resides the greatest center of holiday production. The shooting of cannon and ack-ack guns, the shrill roar of a diving airship, fills the night with a deathly din.

A reporter cannot help but cower in the ruins. The secular humanists, in league with communists and cosmopolitans, are upon us. These are the sounds of the war on Christmas.

From my icy shelter (the frozen remnants of a leveled doll factory) the fury seems fantastical. The insurgency began only 13 years ago, in what seemed to be flailing propaganda against a dubious oppression. This is when America first heard from the defenders of Jesus Christ about the godless machinations of the Macy’s department store.

BILL O’REILLY: This year they are touting Santa Claus who will help you “with your holiday wishlist.” So here’s my question to Macy’s: What holiday is Santa celebrating? The winter solstice? The birthday of a reindeer? What?

GARFIELD: That lowly broadcaster, whose name is now lost to history, used his bully pulpit to speak of conspiracy against not just a persecuted religious minority, but a way of life.

O’REILLY: Everything was swell up until about 10 years ago when creeping secularism and pressure groups like the ACLU began attacking the Christmas holiday. They demanded, demanded the word “Christmas” be removed from advertising and public displays, and many people caved into that. 

GARFIELD: It all began in a series of small partisan skirmishes

O’REILLY: I’m like a guerilla fighter in the war on Christmas. You know what I do? I put little shepherds right in front of city hall in my town. Or if I know that there’s a secular person in my town or the town neighboring me, I’ll put a little baby Jesus on their windshield. 

GARFIELD: For years he would strike small blows against the Godless conspiracy, then melt away to his sacred country club. But like all guerilla fighters, armed with little but his half wits and audience of seething nativists 5 million strong, he incited rage against the false prophets of basic respect. In time, he would all but vanish from the fight. Smeared by the secularists for merely trying to spill his heroic seed wantonly among the faithful, he retired to a life of falafel and shame. Still the movement grew and grew, gathering the momentum history rewards for the zeal of the righteous. From fellow broadcasters…

GRETCHEN CARLSON: I am tolerant! I’m all for free speech and free rights, just not on December 25th!

GARFIELD: …to more fellow broadcasters…

SEAN HANNITY: Welcome to Hannity. The War on Christmas is upon us again.

GARFIELD: …to the emotionally-disturbed imbecile aspiring-dictator community.

TRUMP: And speaking of Christmas, you're gonna be saying “Merry Christmas” again, okay? You’re gonna say “Merry Christmas.”

GARFIELD: Suddenly the dirty gray clouds turn white and the advance grows merciless. The Jews and Muslims and Satanists pour through the outer searchlight defenses. Aloft, a flying machine tumbles toward the pole, ablaze. It is a great, golden, slow-moving meteor slanting earthward. Yellow flares shoot up in bright relief, revealing the airship to be a sleigh, whose desperate escape has been foiled in a hail of flak. The pilot, intrepid Rudolph, with his shiny nose, lights the spiraling path to oblivion. 

What I am witnessing is a calculated, remorseless campaign of destruction. Now the little men, brave bantams one and all, are ragged and shivering in the final battle wondering what is it all for. They are but elves, laboring amid the chaos to meet quota. Moments ago, just as a projectile burst in the sky, I witnessed a little gnome utter his last words. In the strange argot of these industrious pixies, and in a squeaky impish voice, he declaimed: “FML. We have product to turn around.” And then he fell, his slippered toes curled toward the blazing heavens.  

[RADIO STATIC]

ANNOUNCER: You have been listening to Bob Garfield in an eyewitness report of his experiences at the North Pole. Now I see we have received a telegraphed dispatch from Mr. Garfield. I quote directly from his wire:

“The North Pole has not fallen. Repeat: not fallen. [stop]

“The advancing cosmopolitans were not waging war against Christmas. [stop]

“It appears to have been some sort of celebration, with fireworks, in the spirit of seasonal good tidings that grace the world. The war on Christmas, it must now be reported, is a figment, neither waged nor declared. [stop]

“Perhaps I was feverish with Omicron, or brainwashed, but assessing the aftermath what I have discovered is evidence only of a very big party. [stop]

“No elves have died. The casualties were limited to an Amazon warehouse, where some workers simply collapsed from exhaustion. [stop]

“Christmas is alive and unmolested the world over. The birth of Jesus Christ is on the lips of billions.

[CHURCH BELLS]

“I can hear the bells. I can hear the bells. [stop]”

GARFIELD: All right, we’re done here. Bully Pulpit is produced by Matthew Schwartz and Mike Vuolo. Our theme was composed by Julie Miller and the team at Harvest Creative Services in Lansing, Michigan.  Bully Pulpit is a production of BooksmartStudios.org. I’m Bob Garfield. Merry Christmas.

TRUMP: They are saying “Merry Christmas” again, we got that. That was a big part of what I was doing. I would say it all the time during that period, that we want them to say “Merry Christmas,” don’t shop at stores that don’t say “Merry Christmas,” and I’ll tell you what, we brought it back very quickly.

Part 2 of Bob’s conversation with author Anne Nelson about the Council for National Policy, which has spent decades exploiting bugs in the system to gain minority control of our politics — and our future.

* TRANSCRIPT *

TEDDY ROOSEVELT: Surely, there never was a fight better worth making than the one in which we are in.

GARFIELD: Welcome to Bully Pulpit. That was Teddy Roosevelt, I'm Bob Garfield. With Episode 21, “The 60 Year Coup: Part Two.” 

DONALD TRUMP: Together, we're committed to protecting the American people, preserving American values, defending America's heritage, and keeping America safe, strong, prosperous, and free.

GARFIELD: That was Donald Trump, hat in tiny hand, singing for his supper before the Council for Domestic Policy, the umbrella group of evangelical Christians and big energy interests, that for decades has been the patient and ruthless architect of the great right wing conspiracy. In last week's episode I spoke to Anne Nelson, research scholar at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, and author of Shadow Network: Media Money and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. In part two of our conversation, we'll consider the powerful synergy of CNP and a pathological demagog and the destruction that that synergy wrought. Anne, welcome back.

NELSON: Thank you.

GARFIELD: All right. Let's now turn to the more-or-less present: the rise of Trump and the now violent assault on democracy. How was CNP involved in Trump's ascent?

NELSON: The CNP was involved with Trump, initially, very reluctantly. He wasn't one of them, he had no particular religious background, he was multiply divorced, and he really didn't reflect their values in many ways. Their favored candidate was Ted Cruz, but they had a problem - which was that Cruz had a tremendous charisma deficit, and as he lost the primaries, they realized that either they supported Trump, the primary victor, or they lived with Hillary Clinton's presidency, which was unacceptable to them.

GARFIELD: Oh, I - I'm sorry, I just - I just have to interrupt to remind you what then Senator Al Franken (laughs) said about Cruz.

AL FRANKEN: I probably like him more than most of my other colleagues like Ted, and I hate him (laughs).

NELSON: That is the case. Cruz is a formidable intelligence and strategist. He was not a winning candidate outside Texas. So the fundamentalists convened something, like, a thousand leaders and representatives in New York City in June of 2016 at the Times Square Marriott. They brought Trump out to parade him before them, and they had a number of leaders from the Council for National Policy there on the program. And publicly, what that event was about was to sell Trump to this thousand fundamentalist leaders, many of whom had been Never Trumpers, and they were like, “This is going to be your guy. You need to go home and tell your flocks that this is the plan.” But the second part of that agenda involved meetings where they cut a deal with Trump. They said, “You don't have a war chest, you don't have ground troops for the election canvassing, you don't have a strategy. And all indications are you're going to get creamed.” So we have all three of those that we can put into your service. But in return -

GARFIELD: We have a shopping list. 

NELSON: We have a shopping list, and it's basically got three items. The first one was enact some of our policies by executive orders. So when suddenly the Republican platform has this new anti-trans, anti LGBT language that was literally written by the president of the Council for National Policy, Tony Perkins, Trump enacted the anti-trans policy for the Pentagon against the Pentagon's wishes, which, you know, the Pentagon said, “This is disruptive of our operations and trans people are not a problem,” but Trump had to deliver on his deal. The second part was to create an evangelical advisory council. Obama had a religious advisory council, but it included Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims. This one was 100% Protestant, and none of these other religions needed to apply. The leadership of this council were in and out of the White House on policy discussions and photo ops on a weekly basis. The third was by far the most important, far reaching, and devastating to our democracy. And that was when they got Trump to agree that any federal judges he nominated would be approved from a list that was submitted by three organizations run by members of the Council for National Policy. These were the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and the National Rifle Association. Now, what business the NRA has in recommending federal judge nominations? I do not know, but that's how it played out, and after his first confirmation, he invited the representatives of these groups, most of them from the Council for National Policy, for a little victory luncheon at the White House.

GARFIELD: So that was the origin story of Trump's deal with the devil, a man with not only no religion, but no ideology to speak of creating himself in the image of his political and financial sponsors. Over the ensuing - well, so then he was elected, more or less - and then over the ensuing four years, many of Trump's 30,000 lies, big and small, find their provenance, what do you know, in the CNP. So, can we just tick a few of these off beginning with the COVID hoax, and the savior drug hydroxychloroquine?

NELSON: So if you get to the beginning of 2020, the Trump campaign is in trouble and the Council for National Policy recognizes it. They had hoped that the 2020 elections would be won with a popular vote, that was cast into doubt. COVID set in a couple of months later, and the whole strategy of the Trump campaign had been built around mass rallies and data harvesting from attendees of the rallies and building on that to secure a victory. Well, mass rallies became impossible because of COVID restrictions, so there was a critical phone call that involved the president of the Council for National Policy and members of the Trump campaign staff, where they said, “We need to open up society, get the economy roaring again, and people are afraid of COVID, but they trust doctors. We have a group of doctors who will say that COVID is a hoax, will argue for the reopening of society and the mass rallies.” So that summer, these doctors were convened by Jenny Beth Martin in Washington. Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of Tea Party Patriots and a leading figure in the Council for National Policy. At that point, the point person - when Dr. Simone Gold announced that hydroxychloroquine was a cure for COVID - she was put on partner media platforms of the CNP, including the Charlie Kirk Show and the Christian Broadcasting Network, spreading this disinformation 

SIMONE GOLD: With the tyranny of medical apartheid nipping at our heels, rise up. Rise up. Rise up.

NELSON: And that has now expanded into a small army of unethical physicians who are continuing the hydroxychloroquine hoax. They've added ivermectin as a cure and, in fact, they have online prescription services charging money to people who are ordering ivermectin as a COVID cure.

JAKE TAPPER: Poison control centers are reporting that their calls are spiking in places like Mississippi and Oklahoma because some Americans are trying to use an anti parasite horse drug called ivermectin to treat coronavirus, to prevent contracting coronavirus. What would you tell someone who is considering taking that drug?

FAUCI: Don't do it.

NELSON: There's no evidence that it helps against COVID and, in fact, there are several cases of deaths. Not just from COVID and the failed approach of ivermectin, but people taking overdoses of ivermectin. At the same time, they're discouraging vaccination, and the purpose that lies behind this is, I believe, to discredit any federal agency, to discredit the CDC and the NIH, and to have their followers distrust any kind of fact based authority. Whether it's science, whether it's professional journalism, whether it's federal agencies, and work them into this stoked anger and frustration that is then politically mobilized, and so is chaos.

GARFIELD: And not just because they're elites and look down at the silent majority, as Nixon called Middle America, but because there is a vast conspiracy to make money for Bill Gates or to turn children against their country, or to put right wing political dissidents into concentration camps or, you know, whatever the crazy talk is. It wasn't enough just to make people suspicious of - of expertise and authority, but to brainwash them that they were actually active enemies of the people.

NELSON: I would say that the strength of the Council for National Policy is to figure out what I call the raw nerves of our culture and to further inflame them. So right now, parents - with kids in public schools - are stressed on so many levels. Are the schools open or are they not open? Are there mandates? Are there not mandates? Can working mothers go to work if their kids aren't in school? Right? These are real, real issues. And then you put on top of that our very difficult conversation nationally about race. When the Black Lives Matter protests happened, the way that the CNP's media and other media systems played it was, “these are violent riots,” and they cherry picked photos of buildings and flame and violence in the streets and amplified it and exaggerated it. These were not invented or doctored photos, these things happened, it's just that they happened as very, very few cases and very small percentage of the peaceful protests. But that's not what their audience saw.

TUCKER CARLSON: This may be a lot of things this moment we're living through, but it is definitely not about black lives. And remember that when they come for you, and at this rate, they will.

NELSON: Their audience saw these violent images repeated across multiple media platforms. Then they saw it repeated on Fox News and Sinclair stations. They heard it referred to on the fundamentalist radio stations. That makes all of these appeals for advancing racial justice sound to them like condoning violence.

MAN: The black thugs are burning our cities down.

NELSON: So we have a real problem in this country with these parallel media systems that don't reflect the same reality. And I really do fault a lot of the more prestigious media organizations and companies and corporations that have allowed the local news media in the middle of the country to die off. And all too often, the answer is, “Oh well, The New York Times and The Washington Post are national news organizations and they've increased their circulations.” That does not fulfill the need for the trust and the hometown newspaper that reflects the local interests and values. And that's something that urgently needs to be addressed.

GARFIELD: All right. Indulge me once again, please, in a brief pause to remind you what's happening here. Bully pulpit and the other Booksmart studio shows are here for you, specifically for an audience of listeners who value curiosity, skepticism, dimension, rigor, scope, and an honest argument about things that matter. God knows if you crave doctrinaire or simplistic rhetoric, you have a zillion options for validating your worldview. Many fewer programs tackle complexity, but like public broadcasting, our future hinges on a community of people willing to pitch in. Please consider a paid subscription which gets you not only our basic offerings, but bonus content from all three shows and my weekly column, which is sometimes about horse vending machines, sometimes about political insanity, and sometimes about life and death. And what a gift for your loved ones, or for your Secret Santa partners, or for your employees. Eighty four bucks a year, less than the cost of a HP 414, a black ink toner cartridge. Please consider investing in Booksmartstudios.org and please, please rate us on iTunes. Those ratings and reviews really matter. Now, I was about to ask Anne Nelson my next question. We were ticking off the list of CNC successes: abortion rights and marriage equality. Tell me what they accomplished there.

NELSON: Well, abortion has been a particular interest of theirs. And ironically, as of the 1970s, southern Protestants were not that far away from everyone else in terms of opinions on abortion policy. And I would say that there's been consistently general agreement that abortion in the first trimester for various reasons is regrettable, but acceptable. Abortion in the third trimester should be only under the most extreme circumstances. That reflects the reality. But what happened in the years following Roe vs. Wade, people connected to the Leadership Institute and other Council for National Policy partners realized that there was a way to play this and again to mobilize these Protestants in a new way. They found a term, partial birth abortion, which does not exist in medicine. You know, it's an invented term, but it is a term that evokes a very visceral response. And they found that if they told their audiences that Democrats supported partial birth abortion, they could use this as a wedge issue. Then they built on that, and this is all about emotion. This is not about medicine. This is not about scientific fact. They created these videos, which I've seen, which show animated drawings of so-called abortions. And of course, they had to use animated drawings because they were not based in reality, of the abortionist reaching into the womb and tearing the fetus apart limb by limb. And they showed these in church sanctuaries as part of their organizing activities.

GARFIELD: And who is the “they” in this “they”?

NELSON: So the Council for National Policy works with various groups connected to religious organizations. One of them is the Family Research Council. The Family Research Council has what they call a ministry of pastors that is a national organization that claims tens of thousands of pastors across the country. And this group is called Watchman on the Wall. They have an entire film and video production enterprise, as well as voter guides that are placed in the church bulletins. These churches, these Protestant churches, they may be fundamentalist, they may be Pentecostal, et cetera, have been an untapped voting block. And this is how they've tried to mobilize them, and they've done so with a great deal of success. They've accessed church directories through this organization, compared it to voting rosters, organized Get Out the Vote drives in these churches and even driven the Republican voters to the polls from the church. And the most recent development of this has been the language, “birth day abortion on demand.” And they claim that Democrats approve the execution of newborn healthy babies.

JACKIE WALORSKI: That's why we need to be able to vote on H.R. 962, the Born Alive Abortion Survivor Protection Act. I’ve long fought to defend the unborn. I'm shocked that we are now defending the right to life of newborn infants, and it's something that we have to stand together. This is extreme.

GARFIELD: That was Republican Indiana Congresswoman Jackie Walorski.

NELSON: So the idea of birth day abortion is that a woman has her full term child healthy nine month pregnancy, and she changes her mind and can go into an abortion clinic and say, “Terminate it now.” And that's just not - that doesn't exist. But, “birth day abortion on demand” is the slogan they're selling and people buy it.

GARFIELD: And the president of the Family Research Council?

NELSON: Tony Perkins, and by the way, “birth day abortion” is a phrase that's been used not only by Ted Cruz, but by Donald Trump as well.

GARFIELD: Well, you can knock me over with a feather. 

NELSON: And by the way, as part of my research I get mailings from the Family Research Council that shows the rosy cheeked little newborn baby saying,”Democrats want to kill this baby.”

GARFIELD: And as Roe v. Wade stands very much in jeopardy before the court, Trump appointees Barrett, and Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch are certainly not expected to be abortion rights warriors in the judicial debate.

NELSON: Well, let's remember that all three of the Trump appointed judges were chosen from the list provided by Council for National Policy Affiliates. So there was definitely a litmus test involved there. The challenge to the Texas law is whether individual citizens can serve as vigilantes in enforcing the law. And so, it's not clear how abortion rights will be determined on a legal basis moving forward, but I would say that they are certainly more under threat than they've been since Roe vs. Wade.

GARFIELD: All right, let's get now to the apotheosis of right wing conspiracy, and that is Stop the Steal and the insurrection that flowed from it. It all began with attempts by the council to suppress minority votes leading up to the 2020 presidential election, and eventually mutated into creating suspicion and rage over a supposedly rigged election. As I understand it, there is smoking gun evidence that this pivot to questioning the election results was planned at the CNP before the election ever took place.

NELSON: The way I describe it is that a year in advance of the elections, when the CNP realized that Trump's reelection was not a done deal, they over time develop Plan A, Plan B, Plan C, Plan D, Plan E. Plan A was he wins the popular vote in the Electoral College. Great. Plan B was he loses the popular vote, as he did in 2016, but he wins the Electoral College. And his majority in the Electoral College was a matter of some seventy seven thousand votes in three states, the equivalent of a not very big town, (laughs) right? He won by a narrow margin, in terms of the Electoral College, against losing three million votes in the popular vote. Plan B was a repeat of 2016, but then the Electoral College started to come into question and they were losing certain critical states. So they said, “Well, how do we keep him in power if he loses the popular vote and the Electoral College?” That's when they began to explore ways that they could challenge fraud in the election, get Republican legislatures to substitute their own electors, as opposed to those that resulted from the state election -

GARFIELD: To literally subvert the election process.

NELSON: Well, it would counteract the electoral process, but it turns out that in our constitution, our elderly constitution, there is a clause that involves the independent state legislature doctrine, where the founders said, “maybe you can't trust the voters and the state legislature needs to step in when there are charges of fraud.” So there were these moments of tension after the election and pressures on state officials, including Republican state officials, but they just were not able to implement it soon enough. Then the next step in our electoral process was the certification of the Electoral College votes, January 6th. In the weeks leading up to this date, Ali Alexander was starting the Stop the Steal movement; he had been on the roster of the Council for National Policy. Ginni Thomas, who is in a leadership position, wife of Clarence Thomas, tweeted her support for the January 6th protest. Charlie Kirk tweeted that his organization would be sending protesters to Washington on January 6th. I believe that the House Investigatory Committee will be coming out with a lot more details on this, but what is obvious is that the CNP was actively supporting the events of January 6th. We don't know how many of them, and how far they were going, but I will say that Jenny Beth Martin, the Tea Party Patriots co-founder and a - and a very active leader in the CNP, was on the program for January 6th. And Simone Gold, the doctor leading the hydroxychloroquine hoax, made the incursion into the Capitol, and she has recently been named a member of the CNP and has been leading anti-vaccination rallies in critical states. So they're all over the event.

GARFIELD: And then there was Cleta Mitchell, who was a former Oklahoma politician, who was in the thick of Trump's attempts to get state officials, notably in Georgia, to audit their elections and dig up the votes that would be required to overturn the Biden victory.

NELSON: Yeah. Dig up or create, (laughs) or -

GARFIELD: Here Mitchell is infamously on the phone with Trump and Georgia state officials. 

TRUMP: You have all these different people that - that voted, but they don't live in Georgia anymore. Uh, that was that number, Cleta, it was a pretty good number too. 

MITCHELL: Well, the - the number that - the number who had registered out of state after they moved from Georgia. Um, and so they - they had a date when they moved from Georgia. They registered to vote out of state, and then they - it's like forty five hundred. I don't have that right in front of me, but it’s something like that - 

TRUMP: And then they came back in and they voted!

GARFIELD: And Mitchell has CNP ties, no?

NELSON: Oh yes, she's a longtime member and she's an astute lawyer who knows a lot about election law, which makes her especially adept at subverting it. She's been a specialist in terms of their strategy, and she's still going strong.

GARFIELD: All right, so here we are. At this critical juncture for the future of American democracy. And, you know, we can draw a straight line back to the late 70s, early 80s and the convergence of fossil fuel interests like the Koch brothers, and the then nascent religious right. Does that alliance still represent the core of CNP?

NELSON: The religious right and the fossil fuel interests are very, very powerful in the CNP, and I think that what's really happened is that they have converted the religious right into basically a political organization. The longer they go, there's less recognizable religion, and some of the trappings of some sects of Christianity are used as recruitment measures. But (laughs), I would say it's far more political than spiritual in nature, and in some ways it's ferociously intolerant.

GARFIELD: It is now increasingly understood that Christian nationalists are way more nationalists than they are Christian, that they're - they're nativists and they're often explicitly white supremacist, and that the Christian part is just sort of a - a way to get their foot in the door for really ugly nationalism.

NELSON: I have esteemed colleagues who use the term Christian nationalist. I don't favor it because ultimately a lot of the people we're talking about are voters, and there are a lot of people who are being misled and lied to and don't have a clear ideology. They might be working class people, they might be rural people, and farmers who are in information starved environments. So assuming they are operating from an ideology when they're actually acting from a deeply flawed information environment, it may mean that you - you lose the chance to connect with them and to engage and talk to them.

GARFIELD: Well, I hear you, and certainly the news desert that has formed in many communities that hitherto were well-served by local newspapers and other outlets has contributed to the dominance of right wing media and social media in feeding misinformation and disinformation to the - the civically and politically undereducated, right? On the other hand, you know, cops, bunco squad cops, people who investigate frauds on individuals. Historically, they don't show a whole lot of sympathy for the people who get conned because they think that they were predisposed to try to get something for nothing.

EDDIE JONES: Grifters got an irresistible urge to be the guy who’s wise. There's nothing to whippin a fool. Hell, fools are made to be whipped.

GARFIELD: Don't you think that these fascist emotions reside deep in the nerve roots of the society, and some people are just predisposed to be propagandized to and to be demagogued?

NELSON: Hmm, interesting question. I think every society has aberrations in many of its pockets. And if somebody is a true psychopath, you don't want to put them in a position of power (laughs), you know? And when you have violent dictatorships, that's often what happens - is psychopaths and their allies achieve positions of power and have their way with the population. But otherwise, I do believe in the incredible power of propaganda, and one thing that breaks my heart is that these people are preyed upon from their better instincts. They want those little babies - those little newborn babies to live. That's a kindness. And if they're being told, I mean, if I were told that Democrats wanted to execute all the newborn babies, I would abhor that as well. It's just not true.

GARFIELD: No, they only want to execute a relatively small percentage of the newborn babies.

NELSON: (laughs) But when they're being blanketed by their media systems with this and surrounded by people who are repeating these things, you know, it's all confirmation bias, right? 

GARFIELD: Yes. 

NELSON: Then they don't have much of a shot at the correction. And as you said, the news deserts are a huge part of this.

JOHN OLIVER: The newspaper industry today is in big trouble. Papers have been closing and downsizing for years, and that affects all of us. Even if you only get your news from Facebook, Google, Twitter or Arianna Huffington's block quote junction and book excerpt clearinghouse, those places are often just repackaging the work of newspapers. And it is not just websites.

NELSON: When I was growing up in Oklahoma, our newspaper had, in our small town, had a substantial circulation percentage wise, and the front pages carried stories from The Associated Press, and the New York Times Syndicate, and people were more or less working from the same page of facts and reporting. Now that newspaper is struggling to survive and many of the other newspapers in the state have gone under. And what has rushed in to fill that breach are these right wing radio talk shows, Sinclair, Fox, all of these organizations that are not working according to basic journalistic principles. I see it as a huge part of the problem.

GARFIELD: I think it's fair to say the various tentacles of the Council for National Policy, arm in arm with Trump, have entirely taken over the Republican Party, or nearly entirely. There are a few so-called moderates remaining. I don't know how moderate they are, but I guess they're not Trumpistas. Now, with the understanding that you can't fight napalm with rhetoric, I ask you this very basic question: Where the f**k have the Democrats been for four decades while this has been going on? Why haven't they built machines to fight, you know, Koch brothers dark money to win in legislatures, to play the long game the way these right wingers have? Why aren’t they using software so cleverly? Why aren't they finding new ways to educate and inspire voters? Where the hell have they been?

NELSON: I think following the triumphs of the Democrats, you know, with the New Deal, they thought they'd identified their MO’s and they were relying on trade unions, and they were relying on the major media to tell their story correctly. And they also became complacent regarding demographics. They could point to the numbers and say it's clear that the United States is becoming younger, more diverse, both racially and religiously, and all of that works in our favor. That was true. It left them playing defense, and on the other side, they said, “All right, so in order to snatch victory away from the demographics, we have to work twice as hard, be twice as smart, and have a plan that truly understands the actual mechanics of our government, not the aspirational ones.” A lot of people in the United States still think that we've got a democracy that rests on the popular vote. That is simply not the case. Our system is a patchwork. Much of it's obsolete. The role of the state legislatures and the differentials in the election law from state to state, oh my goodness, it takes years of study to even understand how it works, and it doesn't work the way you were told it worked in your civics class. It's much more complex and manipulable than certainly I thought in the past. So I see signs that Democrats are starting to take data more seriously. The Koch brothers funded this massive data operation called i360 that's been a major help to the Republicans, and the Democrats are just now coming up to speed on the use of data. The other thing is that the Democrats have donors and strategists, they certainly do. They don't have the same kind of nonpolitical party ground troops, and their dependency on the trade unions has been a problem because trade union membership in this country has plummeted over the last few decades, including in industrial states, which is why Democrats start having trouble in places like Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

GARFIELD: And the political sympathies of the rank and file, the working class rank and file, have also drifted towards Republicans.

NELSON: Well, there are a lot of reasons for that. They see Democratic policies, trade policies and others, even environmental policies, right, as taking something away from them. For example, in my home state of Oklahoma something like a quarter to a third of people are employed in various capacities at the oil industry. And if you say, all right, we're doing away with fossil fuels now for the sake of the environment, they say, well, what will happen to us? And I don't hear a lot of answers to that question and that questions legitimate. I mean, I'm all in favor of great policies on climate change, but you need to talk to the affected population and show them that they are in the picture, that they're looking out for them, they're going to have a life in the future, or they're not going to vote for you. I also feel that a lot of the conversation about white nationalism sounds alienating to many voters who don't consider themselves racist.

MAN: I don't have a racist tone in my body, I never have.

MAN: You know, giving me a fair shake, I'm not a racist. You know, I don't have a racist bone in my body. I never have.

WOMAN: President Trump today declared, “I don't have a racist bone in my body.” 

NELSON: They think they're not racist, but they're told that they're racist, whether they think they are or not. And then they feel that there's this adversarial dynamic going on and then, “vote for us, even though we've just been calling you a racist.” And - and that formula doesn't doesn't work very well.

GARFIELD: (laughs)

NELSON: Engagement and inclusive language may take longer to accomplish in reforms, but they may be more effective in the long run.

GARFIELD: All right, so there's this question I sometimes ask at the end of conversations like this. I ask it for two reasons: One, I just have no other way to conclude because I'm not that good at my job. 

NELSON: (Laughs) 

GARFIELD: But the other is that I believe I know the answer and I despair of it. And the question is: Anne, what's going to happen?

NELSON: Well, over the next 11 months, I believe this country is going to have the greatest moment of truth it's had, certainly, in my lifetime. I think of it as a battle royale. The radical right realizes that this is perhaps their last chance to seize power and, if they succeed, they will change enough more laws in terms of gerrymandering and voter suppression that they will consolidate their hold on power for the foreseeable future. They'll have more time to prepare the way to substitute electors in 2024 if they need to. And at that point, if they can secure Congress, the executive branch, and the judiciary, they can institute the equivalent of a one party state. Will that happen? It depends on what everybody else does in the meantime. If everybody else goes into a non-strategic approach to the elections, where they think that acting out anger on the streets in protest is going to win votes in swing states, then it's playing into their hands. If people who want to defend democracy look at the electoral map and figure out what needs to be done, in which districts, with which parts of the electorate then there is a chance of a reprieve, which would be long enough to enact some of the reforms that would need to happen in order to forestall a virtual dictatorship in the future.

GARFIELD: There were two rulings early in the Roberts court which seem to have gotten the GOP about 80 percent towards their goal. One was to regard political money as political speech and, therefore, pretty much out of the purview of Congress to limit it, which was a big, fat gift on a platinum platter to the Koch brothers and others of their ilk. And the other was to say the federal government no longer was needed to police voting rights in certain southern states, which after the Voting Rights Act of, I believe, 1960 were required to pass federal scrutiny so as not to systematically keep mostly black people from the polls. Those are now the law of the land. Is there any way to recover from such fundamental aberrations in the administration of government?

NELSON: Not without winning some elections and making some compromises in states that we're not used to talking to. There's a project called Issue One that I recommend, and it's made up of many former congressmen, Democrats and Republicans, who are concerned with saving democracy. And I think that it is very important to frame it like that, and not devolve into this animosity and labeling and name calling, but saying, you know, what is democracy? What is the biggest tent we can manage where we don't have to agree on specific policies, we never have in our history. But we have to agree on the process of negotiation. That is our political system. And if we lose that and have religious dominionists who want to exert dominion over the rest of the population without that kind of process, then we've - we’ve lost a lot. So I think it's important for people to really rethink how they approach our national conversation and reach across state lines or political lines and engage and listen to each other. If that can happen, there might be some hope.

GARFIELD: (Sighs) From your lips to God's ears. And thank you so much.

NELSON: Hope he's listening! 

GARFIELD: I hope she is. 

NELSON: (laughs) 

GARFIELD: Anne Nelson is a research scholar at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and author of the newly updated, and couldn't be more zeitgeist book, Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. All right, we're done here. Bully Pulpit is produced by Matthew Schwartz and Mike Vuolo. Our theme was composed by Julie Miller and the team at Harvest Creative Services in Lansing, Michigan. Bully Pulpit is a production of Booksmart Studios. I'm Bob Garfield. 

Bob speaks with author Anne Nelson about the Council for National Policy, which has spent decades exploiting bugs in America’s system of democracy to gain minority control of our politics... and our future.

Once upon a time, Bully Pulpit’s Bob Garfield played the role of amateur linguist on a delightful show called Lexicon Valley. Today, to celebrate the re-release of ten vintage Lexicon Valley episodes — remastered and ad-free — Bob and Mike Vuolo bring you a special reunion episode filled with banter, history, poignant father-son moments and quite a number of words. Are you happy now?

This week only, you can get a subscription to Booksmart Studios for just $4.90/month, or $49/year. As a subscriber you’ll get extra content, including bonus segments, access to full written columns, and all the remastered Lexicon Valley originals. Become a supporter today.

How do you get the media to be your confederates in a phony redemption story? Criticize Trump, no matter how transparent your hypocrisy.

Guided by the Rule of Three, Bob demonstrates that the age when marketers start infantilizing you is going down, down, down.

In Part I, CERN physicist Steven Goldfarb attempted to explain to Bob the difference between leptons, muons, and quarks. In Part II, Goldfarb tackles a thornier question: In this age of so much disinformation, when scientific fact seems to carry no more weight than opinion, does science even matter?

Plus: A very special epilogue.