The Cycle- On Substack

Today’s pod is with Rachel Maddow producer and editor of Maddow Blog Steve Benen and his important new book Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republican’’ War on the Recent Reality.

Benen’s important book documents how Republicans managed how to rewrite the history of recent events like January 6th and COVID to make millions of people believe in a false reality for something they saw with their very own eyes.

Despite the deserved attention on Republicans efforts to white wash American history, very little scholarship has explored how Republicans use their propaganda system and coordination to shape public narratives that have no basis in reality. That makes this work critical.

Although the presidential race remains a toss up, advantage Harris, I for one think it is prudent to consider a Trump win scenario and what it might mean both in the short and long term.

I want to be clear, by acknowledging Trump can win, I am not suggesting he will win, but as my good friend Edna says “luck favors the prepared.”

Benen’s book documents how Trump and MAGA media disappeared recent history for millions of Americans, right before their own eyes and will be a valuable tool for that brave new world should we end up living in it.

Catch our conversation and buy the book!

Its Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Not only did Hitler and his Nazis murder 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, its HOW they murdered them you should know more about.

After first being dispossessed of their businesses and homes, then being "ghettoized," the Jews began to be "deported East." Deported East meant being packed like sardines into a cattle car sometimes for a week or more with NO WATER, let alone food. People died standing up and the trains were full of excrement.

Once they arrived they walked into a carefully laid trap. They didn't know it, but they faced the first of what would come to define the life of the people who ended up with the Auschwitz tattoos: selection. At Auschwitz, between 10-30% of each train load was "selected for work." The rest, men, women, children, and babies were "selected" to be gassed.

At its height in 42/43, the German's killing machinery was performing at its peak, murdering and burnings thousands of humans a day. To make their murder machine work, they needed to keep their victims docile. So, using Jewish prisoners to unload and process those "selected for death" into the gas chambers, these "Sonderkommando" were forced to calm those condemned to death with lies about getting showered and deloused and about what would happen next. If they did not, they would be immediately murdered themselves.

The Nazis actually staged the train platform with fake "to the showers" signs and even went so far as to tell people with just seconds left to live to fold their clothes and make sure they can refind them. Anything to get their 1,000 or so victims to walk willingly into the shower room with its fake faucets. If you were "lucky" in the Holocaust, the Nazis selected you to be worked till death. Selected for work was what stood for "luck" in Auschwitz.

The most important thing you need to remember this year is that what happened to the Jews happened by the intentional "othering" of the Jews by a tyrannical despot. There was nothing special about the millions of Germans who became silent accomplices to the near total destruction of European Jewry. There was nothing special about the Germans then, or us now. We must stop Donald Trump and his MAGA movement here, now. The whole world is watching.

In Episode 2 of Shadowboxing the Apocalypse Ep. 2: How the Nazis Seized Power I bring historian and author of The Death Democracy Benjamin Hett back onto the pod to discuss how Hitler went from being sworn in as a weak chancellor on January 30, 1933 to suspending the German Constitution and outlawing the opposition in less than 60 days.

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Some of you may know I am also using twitter (which is by far my biggest audience) to try to draw attention to the parallels between our current crisis and the fall of democracy in Germany. This work, which I call Project 1933 is tied to the Republican Party’s Transition to Autocracy plans laid out in the Heritage Foundation’s Manual for Leadership, more commonly known as Project 2025. I’ve been tweeting the Nazi’s quick rise to fascist autocracy in real time as events unfold in Germany in 1933. Please check it out if you are not already and if you are already, PLEASE RT THOSE TWEETS!!

(Editors Note: If you are not familiar with Project 2025 yet, please AT LEAST read this which will cover the most important points).

Have you read my book, which is reshaping how Democrats do elections?! Well, what are you waiting for?!

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https://arkansasadvocate.com/2022/10/05/study-more-republicans-than-democrats-likely-died-of-covid/

Researcher Max Taves closes his analysis in David Cay Johnston’s DC Report by asking a very important question:

“Republican politicians can talk all they want about how pro-life they are, but these data defy and belie their rhetoric. Facts are stubborn things.

So what does it say about a political party which incessantly promotes its respect for life and yet whose states’ policies overwhelmingly and repeatedly produce the highest rates of death from cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, Alzheimer’s, influenza, diabetes, traffic accidents, guns, workplace accidents, suicides and murders?

How pro-life can Republican states be when their own constituents literally get less life?”

Taves’ analysis comparing health and death outcomes between Red and Blue states reveal a shocking and inescapable conclusion: Republican policies kill people.

Pick any metric, from covid death rates, to heart disease and diabetes, cancer, car accidents, to gun suicides, Taves shows that Red State’s offer their residents a plethora of ways to die younger and poorer than folks in Blue States.

As I always say, the data don’t lie.

As soon as Heather Cox Richardson’s new book Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America came across my algorithm I reached out and invited America’s favorite academic back onto the show.

HRC’s newest book lays out how a small group of wealthy men financed and developed a right wing propaganda machine that 54+ years later, stands to topple America’s nearly 250 year old democracy.

But perhaps even more importantly, Cox-Richardson lays out how marginalized Americans of the past have risen up to meet their own historical moments and saved the American experiment in the process.

Heather’s right: if you have ever wondered what you would do during the Freedom Rides, WWII, the fight to end segregation, or the effort to hold America together during the Civil War, Heather deftly reminds us all: you’re doing it right now.

Folks!

We’re down to ONE WEEK before Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at their Own Game is released and I have BIG NEWS for you!

Penguin Random House has given me special permission to give YOU a special preview of the book! Watch for that in the coming days and pre-order your copy RIGHT NOW!!

Like all good lefties, I cut my teeth in progressive politics learning all about the horrors of America’s massive military industrial complex.

In one of my very first college classes ever at the local community college, a passionate instructor who spent his spare time organizing peace marches against the Iraq War made sure each of his students left his class well-versed in America’s overinvestment in defense spending and underinvestment in well, everything else.

20 years ago I had zero appreciation for the reasons why America had amassed such tremendous military might. Like everyone else, I found America’s disproportioned military budget to be one of our country’s greatest sins.

It was only 18 years later, after I undertook my exhaustive study of world history that I came to fully understand the antecedents that led American presidents of both parties to leave something called isolationism behind and lead America into creating by far the world’s most powerful military.

Instead, administration by administration, America fully embraced the concept of internationalism by building and continually reinforcing a military apparatus larger than the next ten countries combined. One large enough to “police” the entire world.

So, before before you dig into this incredible conversation with Politico national security reporter Alexander Ward about his new book The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy After Trump I want to be sure you have a solid working definition of both these concepts:

Isolationism: a policy of remaining apart from the affairs or interests of other groups, especially the political affairs of other countries.

Interventionism: Interventionism is characterized by the use or threat of force or coercion to alter a political or cultural situation nominally outside the intervenor's moral or political jurisdiction.

In short, in the early 20th century, isolationism became the dominant attitude among Americans who came to believe U.S. involvement in World War I was unnecessary, a product of messing in affairs isolationists believed had no impact on Americans and killed thousands of American men.

The use of the word ‘believed’ here is intentional because as appeasement (isolationism) failed to stop Hitler’s aggressive plans to occupy and rule Europe it became obvious how war and turmoil abroad impacts Americans. Then the surprise attack by Japan on Pearl Harbor put a finer point on it: America ignores the rest of the world at its own peril.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Throughout 2024 I plan on highlighting core grassroots organizations working on the frontlines of the Democratic Party’s messaging revolution.

Now, maybe you think the word “revolution” is too strong, but trust me, moving a party away from approaching voters with wonky policy appeals and achievements to focusing on making sure regular Americans know what the modern GOP has planned for them is no small reform. It requires a revolution of thought based on the cold, hard, realities of the American electorate i lay out in the book.

In my forthcoming book Hit Em’ Where it Hurts: How to Save Democracy By beating Republicans at their Own Game I highlight the other massive problem that hampers Democrats in terms of message distribution.

You can have the greatest messaging in the world but it doesn’t do s**t if no one sees it and folks, as I keep using google trend data to show how little Americans care about news and politics, no one sees it.

This is the fundamental flaw behind the White House’s efforts to lift Bidenomics: paid ads, speeches, and social content will never replace the ability of the right wing echo chamber to propel things, even false things like Joe Biden has dementia, to top-of-mind awareness which is what Democrats would have to accomplish to make voters responsive to Biden’s record.

Yes, message distribution is a tough nut to crack because it requires money, lots and lots of it. Which is why I want to talk to you today about something I call digital direct mail, but what you likely call memes and gifs.

Direct mail is a staple expenditure for competitive campaigns and often voters in swing contests receive plenty of it even if you never do.

In the book I highlight how much better Republicans tend to do with direct mail because they understand the target, the average voter, knows next to nothing about civics, cares even less, and will give the same direct mail your team agonized over for hours about 3 seconds of a glance before it is tossed directly into the recycling bin.

Republicans understand voters and have constructed their direct mail to deliver the main message in just that one glance using very little copy.

A rigorous direct mail campaign, one that targets voters with the multiple contacts research says voters need to actually show up and vote, easily runs l into the tens of thousands. It is expensive to produce and then distribution direct mail through the USPS.

But when you strip down direct mail to its purpose, delivering a message, it is easy to see that the internet creates a massive message distribution advantage if campaigns choose to see it as such.

That is why I’m delighted to introduce you to the Freedom Writer’s Collaborative and one of their dedicated grassroots volunteers, marketing strategist Yvonne Brandon. Yvonne joins me to talk about the ready-to-use messaging toolkits created with the also awesome folks at DemCastUSA where the meme that leads of this post was pulled from.

I hope you will consider using these toolkits, and even more importantly, getting your friends, family, and followers to do the same.

Whether your network is 150 people, or 150, everyone is an influencer. FWC makes it easy.

The first time I posted about the harsh reality of America’s collapsing democracy, it seemed like many folks were genuinely surprised to see that America is not actually the Greatest Democracy on Earth.

According to the democracy index compiled by the EIU and published annually by The Economist, America is actually a “flawed” democracy.

The United States was downgraded from “full” to “flawed” democracy after half of America handed the keys to the White House to a wannabe dictator-con man who immediately began to roll back civil liberties and ignore the rule of law.

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Sadly, America’s not even the best “flawed” democracy.

Technically we’re only the 6th best “flawed” democracy, one spot behind Israel (a state folks who have been mainlining antisemitic propaganda from Hamas for the past decade describe as an “apartheid state” of “colonizing” “oppressors” committing “genocide.”)

That’s why the very second I saw the topic Steve Levitsky’s and Daniel Ziblatt’s latest book, Tyranny of the Minority I knew I had to get them onto the show.

In Tyranny, Levitsky and Ziblatt, who are both professors at Harvard and are also the authors of another important book you should definitely read titled How Democracies Die, have put their fingers right onto the pulse of something you need to understand: America’s institutions are failing and must be reformed for our democracy to ever flourish again.

Our institutions were brilliant constructs of an 18th century world and a newly born country with one common fear among its creators: too much consolidation of federal power.

Thus, America’s Constitution was constructed to remove the creation of policy from the direct control of its chief executive, which is why most Americans are familiar with the terms “checks and balances” and “separation of powers” even if they’d be hard-pressed to specify what it means exactly, or how it actually works, in any meaningful way.

So concerned with the centralization of national power were the Founding Fathers that they codified checks and balances and separation of powers within each branch of government too.

As America is painfully learning right now, the House of Representatives was given sole “first mover” power in the appropriations process even though the “power of the purse” was granted to Congress at large. We can not fund the government without the House of Representatives which is why having it closed for 3 weeks while the Republican Party fights over custody of the kids is so damaging to our domestic and foreign policy interests.

Its why federal judicial appointments and treaty approval power belongs solely to the Senate.

Its why Chief Justice John Marshall wasn’t laughed out of the room when he asserted that the judicial branch had a “right of review” of actions taken by the legislative and executive branches in what went on to be called “judicial review.”

Yes, the Founding Fathers were positively OBSESSED about centralized power and did everything they could to gum up the works and force compromise in a system designed with one main goal in mind: to avoid creating a tyranny of the majority.

American institutions are designed to have a bias against action. It is very easy to propose legislative goals and very hard to actually enact them. This was true in America’s best of times and this, my friends, is not the best of times.

Fast forward 236 years and the very same institutional checks and balances that were supposed to protect us from a king have left America all but paralyzed on policy formation. Name a pressing policy problem and you’d be hard pressed to find Congress effectively legislating it despite robust public opinion begging for action on issues like immigration reform, climate change, and gun safety.

So what happened? Why have the institutions that served our young Republic so well, for so long, suddenly feel like they’re in danger of collapse?

Listen and find out.

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What if I was to tell you the Republican Party’s villain-in-chief, the main protagonist in the Republican Party’s “Democrats are socialists” Big Lie, Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez is an ideological moderate serving in a likewise still moderate Democratic Party?

Understandably, you wouldn’t believe me, so I would have to present some pretty compelling evidence to change your mind.

Enter that evidence: VoteView.

What is VoteView?

VoteView is a data analysis tool built by a group of now famous political scientists that measures the ideological behavior of members of Congress, from it’s very first session to the current 118th.

It does so in an innovative way. Rather than look at members’ campaign platforms, policy position memos, ads, and stump speeches for their stated ideology, VoteView populates its ideology scores using the non-unanimous roll call votes of members of Congress.

Each vote, on each contentious bill, by each member of the House, and each senator, enters a model as a series of meaningless 0s and 1s which indicate whether each member who voted on a vote voted yeah or nay.

This means the model calculates an ideological score without even knowing who the member is, what each vote was about, which party the member serves in, or whether they serve in a swing or safe seat.

The scores range from -1 to 1 with -1 being the most liberal score and 1 being the most conservative. I

It is important to understand how to interpret VoteView scores. -1 to +1 is a narrow scale, the difference so between a 0.5 score and a 0.8 score is substantial! In VoteView a score equal or less than 0.5 (positive or negative) is a “moderate” score. A score like positive or negative 0.8 means the member is a strong ideologue.

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Unlike member scores from GovTrack, VoteView is blind to the topic of the vote AND (and this is very important) plots ideology for each member as they relate to every other member of both parties.

This means that we can get a full, largely unbiased, measurement of each member’s ideology, but we can also measure ideological change across both time and chamber of Congress (House or Senate). In plain English, that means we can compare how polarized Congress has been across different points of America’s 236 years of constitutional history.

As you can see from the graph below (which does not yet include the current 118th session) the ideological distribution of each party in the House and Senate has changed considerably across time. The gaps between the red line (Republicans) and the blue line (Democrats) have narrowed and enlarged at different points of American political development. A large gap between the red and blue lines means high levels of polarization.

Now, look closely at the two yellow loops I marked out and you will see we are currently as polarized as we were in the 1850s heading into Civil War.

Good times!

You should also be able to see that Republicans have moved further to the right than Democrats have moved to the left. The data don’t lie: Republicans have polarized more than Democrats in Congress.

Mapped Ideology of the Legislative Branch: 1st session to the 117th Session

Now, lets take a look at what VoteView data can tell us about the ideological make-up of the 118th Congress, our current Congress.

Ideology of the 118th House of Representatives

Ideology of the 118th Senate

What you are seeing above are two plot graphs that show the ideology scores for each of the 435 current members of the House and 100 members of the Senate. Again, the blue dots are Democrats, the red dots are Republicans.

The axis of relevance here is the X axis (the bottom axis) which displays a dot for each member of each respective chamber to show where they fall along that -1 to 1 ideology score range.

Two things that should stand out are the number of red dots versus blue dots that are on the respective ellipses (ends) as well as proximity of each cluster of dots to the middle of the plot because that middle reflects ideological scores close to 0 (perfect moderation) while the ellipses are scores that max out as very conservative/very liberal.

If you look closely, you should see a clear asymmetry between the parties in terms of ideological extremism.

Here’s a fun fact: there are 7 Republican senators who are more conservative than Elizabeth Warren is liberal (Schmitt, Tuberville, Paul, Lee, Vance, Cruz, Braun) and although Warren is by far the most liberal Democrat in the senate (liberal score of -0.752) she is nowhere near as liberal as Mike Lee and Rand Paul are conservative (0.891, respectively). She is an outlier, they are an entire caucus.

As for AOC?

AOC is just the 180th most liberal Democrat in the House of Representatives. Given that there are only currently 212 Democrats, that’s pretty damn moderate!

Now, you might be wondering, “Rachel, what does this even mean?” It means that America doesn’t have a “both sides” problem, it has a Republican Party problem.

And that, my friends, brings us to my conversation with David Corn about his recent book American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, which is the feature of this Finally Back from Summer pod.

As many of you know, Corn is the DC Bureau Chief of Mother Jones magazine and an intrepid investigative reporter who’s so inside the Beltway he’s outside it. What you may not know is that David offers a newsletter called Our Land which you can subscribe to here.

So, how exactly did the Republican Party go crazy?

It’s a long story that begins…

BIG NEWS!!!

My magnum opus Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at their Own Game (Crown 2024) is available for pre-order RIGHT NOW!

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I first learned about Way to Win when they published an analysis after the 2020 cycle empirically demonstrating the weakness of the Democratic Party’s messaging strategy against the GOP’s in the 2020 cycle.

While Republican’s focused on branding Democrats as dangerous socialists intent on destroying America, Democrats were branding Republicans as good friends they just couldn’t wait to work with it!

The poll-tested value of telling swing voters how great the other party is and how much you can’t wait to work with them is pretty high, but the electoral viability of such a strategy is low, very low.

In 2020, Democrats running on bipartisanship underperformed in “down ballot” elections losing 13 seats in the House and dropping winnable senate races in North Carolina and Maine that would have given Democrat’s the power to reform the filibuster.

So, heading into 2022, I was hyper-focused on getting Democrats to understand that because most Americans don’t follow the news, especially not political news, if you want them to know the Republican Party has collapsed into a dangerous cult that’s coming after their health, wealth, and freedom, you damn well better tell them yourself!

Way to Win is on the frontline of groups working to bring that exact message to the masses and played a key role in helping to push Democrats to run on the Supreme Court’s evisceration of Roe.

In this episode I talk with Jennifer Ancona, co-creator and VP of Way to Win, about Way’s MUST READ analysis of 2022 midterm messaging and how new messaging strategies helped Democrats defeat the Republican Party’s “red wave” against all the odds.

If you want more Democrats to find a Way to Win, donate to support Way’s CRITICAL work right now!

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If you want to get someone out of a cult, Dr. Steven Hassan is your man.

Inspired to a career focused on cults by his own personal experience being tricked into joining one, Dr. Hassan has spent decades researching, writing, and talking about cults and is skilled at getting folks out of them.

In fact, he literally wrote the manual on understanding and breaking cult allegiance, Combating Cult Mind Control (4th edition), which I strongly urge you to check out, ESPECIALLY if like me, you’ve lost friends and relatives into the Cult of Trump.

Dr. Hassan has also created an excellent free resource called Freedom of Mind Resource Center which provides a wealth of information on how to help someone escape a cult. Especially compelling is Dr. Hassan’s recent Ted Talk How to Tell If You’re Brainwashed where you will learn some easy to implement techniques to bring your MAGA relatives back to reality.

Please keep in mind, our Republican friends and relatives are victims of a targeted, intentional, well-funded multi-decade propaganda operation. They are NOT going to fix themselves.

As the good Dr. points out, the only people that can save victims of the Republican’s propaganda system are the people they have long term personal relationships with.

In other words, if not you, who?