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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.

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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.

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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?

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Two years or so again I began an extensive research project into the totalitarian movements of the 1920s and 1930, with a heavy emphasis on Germany and Italy whose totalitarians regimes hailed from the political right.

When I started this research project I knew very little about the process by which the National Socialists actually rose to power, this despite holding both a college degree and a PhD in political science. My general knowledge was limited to the major battles of WWII and what was by far the Nazi’s worse crime: the systemic slaughter of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust.

With the tail end of the chaos of the Trump Administration and the Republican Party’s attempt to seize power after the 2020 election, what I wanted from my research was to feel better about the durability of democracy in America.

Instead, it made me feel worse. MUCH worse.

Turns out, how fascism rises is a tale as old as time, and its one that has profound implications for America’s current democratic woes.

That means it’s a tale that must be told.

This is the first in a series of episodes designed to bring what I’ve learned the past two years to you and hopefully from you, to your friends, relatives, and other associates. To assist with this effort, I’m teaming up with real experts on the Third Reich and on authoritarianism to talk about different aspects of how exactly, the Nazis seized power.

Today’s expert is Benjamin Hett, Professor of History at Hunter College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, author of the must-read book The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic.

Whether it is the Weimer Republic in Germany, pre-Mussolini Italy, modern Hungary, or most Cold War Russia, the common thread behind every successful totalitarian movement is underreaction by the rest of society while there is still time to stop them.

Once the crisis is obvious to everyone, it is already far too late.

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Leigh McGowen, of IamPoliticsGirl and The Politics Girl pod fame, intrinsically gets the purpose, the proper forms, and the distribution realties of modern messaging.

That’s why I was jazzed to bring my fellow messaging (and messy bun) aficionado onto The Cycle to talk about her rise as one of the Democratic Party’s brightest and best messaging stars.

Leigh has launched Politics Girl on YouTube so PLEASE SUBSCRIBE NOW. You’ll find links to all of her great messaging content in one convenient space!

So, what happens when you bring two fiery suburban mom messaging reformers together in one pod? You’ll have to listen to find out.

Spoiler Alert:

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If you find polling interesting or frustrating (or both!) this is the episode for you!

U-Mass Amherst pollster and Associate Professor Alex Theodoridis is on the pod to talk about challenges facing modern polling and how to properly conduct and present survey results given the impacts on mass behavior of hyperpartisanship, which you should think of as partisanship, but on steroids.

In addition to the above conversation I want to make damn sure you see Alex’s data drop from their latest poll, which quite clearly illustrates the effect propaganda is having on rank and file Republicans (and ONLY on them) in regards to mainstreaming the very dangerous Great Replacement Theory. Right wing media has been working hard to lay down the antecedents to the same type of dehumanizing “othering” perfected by Joseph Goebbels for the Nazis and folks, IT’S WORKING.

What you are looking at is data being properly reported out to account for the reality that political survey data must now be analyzed broken down by party, with each party’s independent “leaners” added to the pool of admitted partisans. You see “All respondents” which is the collective responses from everyone surveyed, followed by the responses by party group.

The poll question, “Do some elected officials want to increase immigration to bring in obedient voters to vote for them,” is derived from a narrative increasingly common on top-grossing Fox News shows such as Tucker Carlson’s show.

The first graph, subtitled “all respondents” shows the collective opinion of all people surveyed and finds 37% of all respondents agree, or strongly agree, with the statement.

It is important to note that Alex and team, quite shrewdly in my estimate, left their question free of a partisan “nudge.” There is nothing in the survey question that provides a partisan “clue” as to which party is for, or against, the viewpoint because partisan cues are so powerful I once used an experimental survey design to demonstrate I could move support for cap & trade by 40 points among Republican respondents simply by telling respondents Republicans proposed the policy!

Thus, this pool of respondents were given NO HINT of the “proper” partisan position. This is why the data reported is especially notable because as we look at the responses broken down by party, nearly half of Republicans and their leaners STRONLY AGREE with the statement. The best point of comparison is the “pure” independent pool (no leaners) where just 21% of respondents strongly agree.

Two main takeaways here, folks. One, Great Replacement Theory is now a mainstream, near majority, attitude among rank and file Republican voters That’s REALLY bad because as we’re already seeing that when you’ve been brainwashed into thinking your facing an existential race crisis, you do crazy s**t like armed insurrections and ordering drive bys on Democrats.

But its also important because it quite clearly quantifies what I will call the GOP’s propaganda effect. It is real, it is measurable, and it is coming for democracy.

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When you have to google the spelling of “cuckold",” you know you’re about to drop a hot pod!

The Liberty Way reads like some kind of modern Footloose, forcing students to adhere to a moral code so strict, you expect the punishments to include stoning.

That’s why the revelation that when “America’s largest Christian university’s” President Jerry Falwell Jr. and his wife Becki Falwell have a “cuckold” itch, they sneak off to South Beach to scratch, its a REALLY BIG DEAL.

And because Falwell Jr. had the good sense to be exposed as the world’s biggest religious hypocrite during the heavy news cycles of the Trump Administration he helped create by handing America’s evangelicals to Donald Trump on a silver platter, this particular scandal may have slipped past you.

That’s a damn shame because it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving person, which is why I’m deeply grateful to Miami filmmaker Billy Corben not only for making a doc about Falwell’s sex scandal, but making it so compelling you have to watch it all.

And as Billy says, “good night and good cuck.”

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