It's the democracy, stupid

This week Joe Walsh and I agreed that the country is beginning to feel the real-world consequences of the Trump administration’s incompetent leadership- our economic pain, his failed war, America’s collapsing international standing.

Despite this, Congress opted to go home rather than go to work. We had some fun with that. After all, they thought protecting Pete Hegseth was more important than doing anything for any of us.

On midterms, Joe keeps finding MAGA believers who would rather vote for someone they know is a crook than ever vote for a Democrat. But we both agree that’s a smaller group than it was two years ago, and that it constitutes a current noose around GOP candidates. The ones that try to distance themselves from Trump? They get the Massie treatment and lose. The ones that cling to Trump? He’s the Titanic.

We talk about the need for Democrats to enlarge the map, and note where that is happening. We talk about what it will take for the GOP to defend Texas.

Electoral college? We both said get rid of it.

I am sure that any Democratic President, with a Democratic Congress will tear down any ballroom or Arch Trump builds. Joe isn’t so sure.

What do you think?

Every Thursday at 3p central time, Joe Walsh and I get together to talk about the news and the direction of the country. If you enjoyed this week’s conversation, I hope you’ll join us live next week!

Edwin Eisendrath: Edwin hosts “It’s The Democracy Stupid” on Lincoln Square & a weekly radio show on WCPT820AM/ Heartland Signal. He is the former CEO of the Chicago Sun-Times, a former Chicago Alderman, HUD Regional Administrator and teacher in Chicago’s public schools.

Joe Walsh: A former Tea Party Congressman and right-wing radio host, I torched my career to challenge Donald Trump & the MAGA GOP head on. Director of The Social Contract. Co-Founder of PAXIS. Founder of HopeNotFearProject.org. Conservative Democrat.

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Dr. Deb Houry served our country for a decade at the CDC. She was its Chief Medical Officer. Her colleagues described her as brilliant, hardworking, and effective. Her work earned her the AMA’s award for outstanding government service. She resigned a year ago so that she could sound the alarm about what was going on at the CDC and what it means for the public health of Americans.

When we talked recently, she described a system under strain from staffing cuts, weakened programs, reduced research capacity, and what she characterizes as ideological priorities overriding evidence and routine scientific processes.Houry warned that America’s public-health defenses are being weakened just as preventable threats are rising. Pointing to measles outbreaks, declining childhood vaccination, staffing cuts, and political pressure on science, she said the country faces a system in which “ideology’s winning out over science.”

Houry said public confidence depends on reliable information: “Data should be data and you should be able to rely on it and compare it year to year using standard definitions.” She also cautioned that cuts to federal programs leave fewer people to respond to foodborne illness, infectious diseases, and chronic-health threats.

Her solution is not simply to restore the old CDC. “We’re not going to be able to put it back. It’s been broken,” she said. Instead, she urged a rebuilt public-health system with stronger state and local partnerships, streamlined data, protected research, and a clear firewall between scientific findings and political decisions.

Edwin hosts "It's The Democracy Stupid" on Lincoln Square & a weekly radio show on WCPT820AM/ Heartland Signal. He is the former CEO of the Chicago Sun-Times, a former Chicago Alderman, HUD Regional Administrator and teacher in Chicago's public schools.

Get full access to It's the democracy, stupid at edwineisendrath.substack.com/subscribe

Ben Collins is CEO of the company that saved and now publishes The Onion, and the guy who took Info Wars from that terrible, cruel, liar Alex Jones. On his watch the Onion has become one of the largest circulation print newspapers in America. As the former CEO of the Chicago Sun Times, I know how impressive that is.

We talked about the choices Americans face. Ben said,

Once you realize your goal is… freedom, it’s incredibly liberating. I hope a lot of people understand that over the next few years, that the fight is worth it, that putting yourself in position to fight back in a way that’s public and visible and gets people on your side is worth it.

He would know. He walked away from a prestigious job in a traditional news organization to helm the Onion, and he has never regretted it.

We talked about the uses of satire, the plans for Info Wars, and what it was like when the U.S. Government fraudulently indicted his partner Kat Abughazaleh for protesting ICE in Chicago. (Kat is one of the Broadview Six.)

Ben is part of a larger group of Americans who are building community to support and to protect those on the front lines of protest, resistance, and, of course, mockery of those in power. In fact, we met at an event he hosted with Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer to discuss their book On Courage.

Ben is building a business, building community to support courageous Americans in the fight for our democracy, and having a lot of fun doing it.

For Chicagoans reading this, Ben and I also spent a few minutes talking about what a great city this is for comedy.

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Journalist and political analyst Ahmed Baba joined me on my radio show this week. I suggested we have our conversation on video, and despite dealing with an HVAC issue and a summer heat wave, he graciously agreed, and made it look easy.

We began where every political conversation for the last decade begins- with Donald Trump. I wondered whether Americans, finally, come to realize how corrupt the administration is. Ahmed didn’t need to think about that, he told me:

The grift is so apparent. It’s in everyone’s faces now, finally. I mean, we’re seeing that the con is combusting. We’ve seen in the polling last week. He had his worst ever week of polling I’ve ever seen with CNN having him at 34%, matching an all-time low, Quinnipiac having him at 32%. It was an all-time low. We had another poll from The Economist. YouGov had him at around the same amount. So he is really polling terribly.

And, his polling on the economy is down in the gutter, even lower than his overall approval. So, the American people are seeing it. Clearly, you can’t unilaterally raise prices while you’re enriching yourself to the tune of $2.24 billion last year, $1.44 billion in crypto. Profiting directly from industries that you directly oversee.

The American people see like right through it.

We talked about the Michigan primary results. His take was one we need to hear:

It’s black voters that [el Sayed] underperformed with. It’s also working-class voters.

Why is it that white, highly educated people are the ones that always gravitate towards progressives? That’s what we see in race after race. And as someone who wants to see progressive policies pass in the world, in America, you know, we have to ask ourselves these hard questions.

It’s just what the data says, and you can’t ignore it. Why are Black voters skeptical of some of these progressives? Why is it that working class voters in race after race, in primary after primary, tend to go not for the progressive when the whole message is about working class?

We went on to discuss the issue way Israel has become an issue in American politics, and how candidates can sensibly talk about that. We talked about what Dems can reasonably be expected to do if they gain control of the House and the Senate, but Trump remains in charge of the executive branch.

And, because we need to… we talked about holding the current crowd of grifters accountable.

Give a listen and let us know what you think!

Edwin hosts "It's The Democracy Stupid" on Lincoln Square & a weekly radio show on WCPT820AM/ Heartland Signal. He is the former CEO of the Chicago Sun-Times, a former Chicago Alderman, HUD Regional Administrator and teacher in Chicago's public schools.

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Ami Fields- Meyer is a senior fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School. What that means is that he held important jobs in government and likely will again when administrations change. His work there is like our work here- it’s all about democracy- how to protect and renew it. He recently co-authored with Julia Angwin, a fabulous book called On Courage, How to be a Dissident in an Age of Fear.

The book showcases examples of individuals who have faced repression and decided not to back down. Beginning with the individual facing and making a moral choice, to those threatened with harm because of their choices, to the ways community- and safety- get built by those trying to bring change, On Courage offers a practical guide for everyone engaged in the fight to realize those self-evident truths that have inspired our nation from its inception. During our conversation Ami told a few of these amazing stories.

Many of us focus on the current threat posed by the Trump regime. Of course, we are only here because we allowed the guard rails to erode over decades. As Ami explains, when our institutions are compromised, we need other develop other tools.

The lifeblood of civil resistance movements is something that [the scholar Maria Stephan] calls collective stubbornness. And one of the reasons that we wrote this book is that authoritarianism just looks different than it used to. It doesn’t come into town on the back of a coup anymore. It happens through elections, the slow hollowing out of democratic institutions. When democratic institutions are working less well, when the tools that we’ve generally used for these kinds of things, like elections, we still have elections, but they’re skewed, or they’re less free and less fair. We still have courts, but they’re stacked. We still have a media, but it begins to be more tilted.

You have to look to other tools. It’s not so that we shouldn’t keep using those. No, we have to improve them. We have to improve them. We have to shore them up. And we have to insist on them, actually, and keep winning in them. But we also need this other set of skills. And it’s the thing that you’re talking about, which is collective stubbornness, which is gumming up the works. Civil resistance, strike, boycott. These are things that the professional class that I come from, for example, is not used to. We are not schooled in these tactics. There’s a respectability. Let’s just do things the right way. And the truth is that once you hit [a moment like this, as] we learn this from communities of color, from civil rights groups, from women [a collective stubbornness turns out to be effective.]

I revere our democracy because when it works, it works for the people. But the conversation left me quite certain that when it does not work, and instead benefits only the powerful, it’s hard to ask folks to get excited about saving it.

Maybe right now a better tactic is to fight for the things democracy is supposed to deliver- a more just society, an economy where people who work hard have real opportunities, a culture where all of us are respected.

After you listen, let me know what you think.

Edwin hosts "It's The Democracy Stupid" on Lincoln Square & a weekly radio show on WCPT820AM/ Heartland Signal. He is the former CEO of the Chicago Sun-Times, a former Chicago Alderman, HUD Regional Administrator and teacher in Chicago's public schools.

It's the democracy, stupid is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Get full access to It's the democracy, stupid at edwineisendrath.substack.com/subscribe

Laura Jedeed gets published by The New Republic, New York Magazine, Rolling Stone and other places that value solid journalism and good writing. You can also find her work at firewalled media. That’s where you will find her fabulous story, The Wet and Wild Freedom Day Catastrophe, where she reports on her Fourth of July on the National Mall.

That story, and her report on the UFC match on the White House lawn for Donald Trump’s 80th birthday were the subjects of our latest conversation. Her reporting is vivid, genuine, and decidedly first-person. She writes about the experiences she has in right-wing places. She writes with a lot more empathy than irony. As she says,

It's one thing to analyze the policy, but I do think it adds something to see what it is on the ground and also just to kind of see what the people are like, because it can be complicated. It could also be very funny.

I asked her about what looked like members of the military saluting the martial arts fighters during the White House lawn cage fight. Laura served two terms in Afghanistan and explained that the soldiers were saluting medal-of-honor winners, not the martial arts fighters.

It’s despicable and clever in the worst sense of that word and dangerous. The idea that combat sports and the military have anything to do with each other. They do not. Combat sports is entertainment. It is a contest of skill between two people who are having a fight to see who’s better at martial arts. The military is a last-ditch to defend this country. It’s not always used that way, but it’s not supposed to be about individual valor or glory. It’s a job that’s unpleasant but needs doing.

Sort of like covering the Fourth of July fiasco. Laura was there all day in the heat. She stayed through the storms. She stayed through Trump’s speech. She was still there for the fireworks, and she was in the crowd as it ambled away. The experience she describes is mix of normal and crazy. She saw some booths that you might see at another Fourth of July festival. She saw a lot of Christian Nationalist propaganda. Then she found the Justice Department’s tent.

The Department of Justice booth was empty, and I don’t just mean there was no one there, I mean that it was stripped of everything except for a card table and a kind of battered backdrop. But there was an extension cord, so I went ahead and occupied the Department of Justice and used it to charge my phone.

I know that sounds like irony, but facts are facts.

The people who showed up on the Fourth of July were his base. No matter. The incompetence and thoughtlessness of the Trump administration was evident everywhere. In the dangerous and disgraceful handling of the storm. In the mismanagement of the crowds. And then there was this:

The people had settled. Okay we know we didn’t get in and didn’t hear the Trump speech, but at least there’s fireworks. Then the fireworks started and because of where we were standing the fireworks were 90 percent obscured by trees. We couldn’t see them at all.

I walked down past the line pretty close to the front. There was no point along that line of thousands of people possibly tens of thousands where you could see the fireworks. It was blocked buildings. It was blocked by bridges. You just couldn’t see them. And, by the end of it you really couldn’t see at all because it turns out that setting off 850,000 fireworks [creates] just smoke. It’s just smoke and a kind of orange glow on the horizon and crackling that sounds like bombs.

Despite being treated so poorly, these Trump supporters aren’t blaming the president. Laura explained

Trump fans are willing to forgive a lot. They’re willing to be miserable. Their tolerance for being miserable is actually kind of off the charts. It’s impressive almost.

This interview was for my “It’s the Democracy, Stupid” show with Lincoln Square on Substack Live every Friday at 12pm CT/ 1pm ET. I hope you’ll tune in for my next conversation. You can also tune in every Saturday from 1-4pm CT for my radio program on WCPT 820AM/ Heartland Signal.

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This year, the Fourth of July holds special meaning because our captured government no longer believes it is self-evident that all are created equal and endowed with rights no one can take away. Yet all across our great nation Americans are celebrating precisely that belief. What’s more, we are celebrating the idea that governments exist to secure these rights even as our own has weaponized the justice system to deny them.

I’ve written elsewhere that the American character is wedded to the idea of freedom not because Thomas Jefferson penned those beautify words 250 years ago, but because Americans have, ever since, struggled and bled to make them true.

My friend, Colette Holt has fought for decades to open up our economy to every American. She designs, implements and defends programs that make business opportunities available to everyone.

We talked about Chief Justice John Roberts and others who say racial discrimination is a thing of the past. She wasn’t having it.

I always want to ask them was well okay if the problem got fixed can you tell me when that happened? Because I missed the memo. I have worked on probably 100 statistical and anecdotal studies of minority and women businesses all across the country with all kinds of organizations- federally funded contracts, federal agencies, states, local agencies. What we see everywhere is that without some type of affirmative intervention in a marketplace that still is infected with the continuing effects of discrimination, the dollars go to very large firms and firms owned by white males. One of the most aggravating and frustrating things about having these conversations with people is that you want more competition for your work. if you’re the city of Chicago, you don’t want the same five guys passing around the contracts all the time. It doesn’t serve the public. It doesn’t serve the taxpayers.

Just because the Trump administration claims there are no racial barriers in the United States doesn’t make it so. The examples are all around us. How do you vote when your polling place moved, and no one told you? How does your company bid on a job if you don’t know the process for bidding? How does a child learn when she comes to school hungry and no food is provided?

We talked about the historic about-face of the Justice Department. Colette talked about a recent case that hadn’t received a lot of attention,

The Justice Department under President Biden was in the process of negotiating a consent decree with the state of Louisiana about what’s called Cancer Alley. There are refineries that ring the Gulf of Mexico and in poor black communities where [higher than average] cancer rates been proven using the type of statistical analysis that I’ve been using in my own work for decades. [The government] was on the verge of a consent decree then Pam Bondi comes in that’s it.

So those people are going to be sicker. And I want somebody to tell me why sicker citizens is something we want. How does that fit into both our constitutional heritage as we approach the fourth? Also just from a practical standpoint, sick people cost money and sick people aren’t productive. So, they are both ignoring the Constitution, engaging in discrimination.

Colette spoke of the rhetoric that makes everyone think the problems they face are just their own and nothing bigger. She explained how that keeps people from organizing and building the coalitions we need to gain our share of the wealth and power being horded by folks at the top.

She also talked about her dad, a Tuskegee Airman, and her grandfather, an organizer of anti-lynching efforts in South Carolina in the early 1900s. She told me they saw what our country was, but also what it could be, and were willing to die to get us there.

I’m inspired by that. Looking at the autocrat’s festival on the National Mall, the one that is attracting almost no Americans, and thinking about the millions who will celebrate elsewhere around the country, I too see what our country is and what it can be.

For the sacrifices of so many before now, for the work of so many in our own time, and for the yet-to-be-realized idea of a truly multiracial, multi-faith democracy where all are welcome fully to contribute and fully to participate there really is a lot to celebrate on this Fourth of July.

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Several times a year I get the privilege of catching up with John Nichols. John is editor of The Nation. He is also the associate editor of the Cap Times in the important and beautiful state of Wisconsin. He is somehow also the author of books that go right at the essential questions of money and power in America. This week he joined me from the stacks of the Library of Congress where he is doing research for a new book.

I began by describing the way Republicans and some Democrats are reacting to the results of the recent primary in New York, both saying the party is nominating people too far to the left to win. I knew John would want to set them straight and he did.

There’s an interesting thing that happens when progressives start to do well in primaries. Initially it was unimaginable that an immigrant from Africa who was Muslim and who was 33 years old could be elected mayor of New York City. And whoop, there you go. Mamdani is elected mayor of New York City.

Then there’s, okay well that happened because he’s got a remarkable personality or something. He’s a great communicator whatever, but it can’t it can’t be replicated. It can’t happen again. And then, of course, you saw in all sorts of special elections over the last year, and now in these primary elections, people who Mamdani has backed have won a bunch of races.

You say, oh, well, okay, then that can only happen in New York. But then Chris Rabb won down in Philadelphia.

John is not handwringing about primary results. Nor is he fooled that the results in these elections are a sign of a takeover of the Democratic Party.

The Democratic Party is a great big party. It’s a national party and you will have folks who come from different perspectives in different places.

It’s very funny to me that many of the people who say, oh, the party’s going off the rails, or it’s going to extremes or say that we’ve got to get back to the FDR, to the progressive coalition.

But if you remember the FDR coalition, it included radical folks from New York City, as well as some pretty nasty folks from, you know, some southern states. It included prairie populists from out in the Midwest. It was a very ideologically diverse party.

John provided some history going back to the founding of the Republican Party in Ripon, Wisconsin. He talked about the kind of politics that worked in America when there were two big tent parties. He described the mode of evolution that contributed to the growth of both parties and to social progress in the United States.

Then he contrasted that with the present moment where we no longer have two big tent parties. Today’s GOP is a smaller, ideological or perhaps personalists party. So, when Democrats look to compromise, John explains,

it’s compromising with extremism on the other side. It’s not compromising with the old Republican Party. It’s compromising with people who are taking very, very extreme stances, often stances that are at odds with, a fair distribution of our resources that are wrongheaded on issues of foreign policy and are very troubling as regards democracy.

As a man who writes about politics and cares passionately about America’s future, it’s no surprise that he is a fan of Thomas Paine. I asked him why Paine is still relevant on our 250th birthday.

If you read Common Sense, which I really recommend as a good activity for July 4th, it is an argument against monarchy. It’s an argument against oligarchy. It’s basically saying there’s a better way to do things.

If you read his American crisis, which is what the pamphlet that that Washington had read to the troops, it’s an argument for a patriotism that that can be difficult and demanding and challenging, but you do it because you want to achieve great things.

And if you read his pamphlet, less known Agrarian Justice, which was written in the 1790s, you find you he argued for something, that you might call Social Security. He said that we should tax wealthy people and make sure that we had a country where older people could get the care they needed, younger people could get access to education.

And why did he argue for that? because he said that’s how you achieve democracy when people have, at least some level of security so that then they can go into the great debates about the future of this country, not, in the worst of circumstances, but with a place at the table.

John sees evolution in our big political parties and in our national politics. And he sees the political fights along, brutal as they often are, as the necessary struggle to build a more just nation.

Give a listen, and as always, let us know what you think.

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Every Tuesday at noon eastern time Susan J. Demas, the executive editor at Lincoln Square and I talk about the latest news and share our thoughts about the path we are on.

Today Susan began by discussing some of the SCOTUS rulings. At one point, after noting that Alito got upset when Justice Sotomayor read her dissent from the bench Susan couldn’t have been clearer:

Alito responded from the bench because we know he’s incredibly thin skinned. He gives speeches at all of these ultra conservative groups where he just b*****s nonstop about the fact that he should be above reproach.

Nobody should dare question him and how aggrieved and oppressed he is as a rich white conservative man in America. And he clearly did not care for the fact that a fellow justice was willing to call him on his BS.

I’d say, just when you think it can’t get worse… but with Trump in the White House it will always get worse. It took 250 years to get a president this bad and Supreme Court thinks we should give him more power?

This session made one thing absolutely clear: SCOTUS thinks of itself as our supreme legislative body rather than as a court of law. They prefer laws that Congress did not pass. They dislike laws Congress did pass. So, they abuse their power to write their own.

Democrats, should they take back power in Congress will accomplish nothing unless they first rein in SCOTUS’ overreach. John Roberts has no high ground to stand on to complain when a new Congress expands the court, sends some of them to senior status, creates exceptions about what they can rule on, etc. After all, Roberts has allowed all sorts of important institutions to be transformed this cycle. Why should SCOTUS be any different?

Towards the end of our conversation, we talked about the upcoming 4th of July holiday. I’m optimistic. Americans aren’t celebrating just the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. We are celebrating the generations-long struggle to live up to it. That struggle, more than the words themselves, is what forged the determination to be free into the American character. We are far stronger that Donald Trump, John Roberts, or the MAGA Congress.

Join us every Tuesdays 12 pm eastern / 11am Central time.

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Imagine you lingering at dinner, the wine bottle is open and the conversation is turns to American democracy… that’s what where my conversation began with Tom Nichols, the Atlantic staff writer who spent 25 years teaching at US Naval War College.

We talked about the loss of a shared sense of who we are as Americans. We mused about whether the draft was a good idea, and what might replace as a way to bring us together. Tom described the ways narcissism plagues are politics and society.

With J.D. Vance and others on the right talking about western culture, Tom and I reviewed major Naval battles in the history of the west and the consequences. What we concluded was that Vance et al have no clue what western civilization is.

For fun, before you listen to this fabulous conversation, take this quick poll.

Tom explains the answer, and what these Naval battles were about. Give a listen and tell us what you think!

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