January 16, 2025 • 18 mins
In this bonus episode of Ruthie’s Table 4, with the inauguration approaching, Ruthie joins friend and writer for The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik, to discuss James Carville, the election and America’s future.
Ruthie's Table 4, made in partnership with Moncler.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
You were listening to Ruthie's Table four in partnership with Montclair.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
With a presidential inauguration fast approaching, we're turning our attention
from food to politics. My guest on Ruthie's Table four
this week is James Carville, And in this bonus episode,
I'm sitting down with my friend Adam Govnick of the
New Yorker magazine. Adam is in New York, I'm in London. Adam,
can I start by asking about James Carville and his
(00:28):
role in US politics?
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Well, James Carvill is a political consultant political commentator. He
became famous as a Bill Clinton's campaign manager in the
nineteen ninety two election, when Clinton no won anyone longer
remembers very much against the odds, defeated the first George
Bush to become president. Carvill is famous in part because
(00:49):
of the efficacy of that campaign, but even more because
he is a unique personal style. He comes from Louisiana,
speaks with a strong Cajun style accent, and doesn't represent
the normal run of California New York Ivy League politicians
who tend to dominate the Democratic Party, And as a consequence,
he has a kind of a common touch and common sense,
(01:13):
which are sadly too often rare on the side of
progressive politics. He first became famous as Clinton's campaign manager
because of a simple slogan that he was legendary for
having plastered on the computers we weren't yet quite in
the laptop age of every one of the young people
(01:33):
who were working in the campaign, and that was it's
the economy stupid. Wanted them to focus on that. People
sometimes misunderstand that, Ruthie, because it wasn't that that was
the only issue in the election. That was the one
that the kids who were working passionately for Clinton at
that point were likely to forget because it wasn't necessarily
at the forefront of their attention. And he was one
(01:55):
of the people who said, already back in twenty twenty
that we are disabling ourselves if we use language like
tofund the police or obsessed about pronouns. He has that
Cajun accent, and he said, you know, that stuff is
for the Sarah Lawrence faculty club. It's not for politics.
And he was proven right time and time again, and
(02:16):
he was trying constantly to divorce the rhetoric of liberal
politics a democratic party politics from and I hate this
term woke, but let's say from the progressive pieties that
had infected it, because he recognized that they were a
barrier to communication. Somebody very smartly said once Ruthie, that
(02:41):
the thing that you have to remember at every moment
in American politics, particularly presidential politics, is that the median
American voter is a white man over fifty, who only
graduated from high school, who never went to college. That's
the median voter. That's the voter you're trying to reach,
and you have to moment think about how what you're
(03:02):
doing is going to appeal to that voter. And Carvell
is brilliant and understanding what that voter is thinking, feeling,
what frightens him or what doesn't. And so he recognizes
that a politician like Bill Clinton, for instance, Obama appealed
to that voter.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
So how did Obama win?
Speaker 1 (03:22):
Well, Obama was very conservative on so called social issues.
It seems shocking to us now in retrospect, but Obama
was not in favor of gay marriage. Obama was very
cautious in favor of civil partnerships. He wasn't in favor
of gay marriage. And it was Joe Biden, ironically, who
led the move for gay marriage, which was eventually endorsed
(03:46):
by the Supreme Court for a variety of political and
personal reasons. So Obama was very appealing to those voters
could be made appealing. You know, you don't have to
win all of them. You have to win a significant
chunk of them. If you don't win any of them,
can't win an election. You don't have to win a
majority of them. You just have to win enough of them.
And Obama was somebody who had a magical gift for
(04:08):
being able to speak to almost anyone. You know, if
you if you ever watched you know, early videos of
Obama giving restaurant reviews on a local Chicago station, you
can find it on YouTube. The young Obama was on
some local cable station and he was giving restaurant reviews
and you could see, oh, this guy is appealing. Everybody
(04:28):
found him appealing because he you know, he spoke forthrightly,
spoke with charm. He said, you know, he was reviewing
sign I think it was a rib joint. And he said, now,
I don't go to this place expecting amazing flavors or
revolutionary cooking. It's something solid. He just had it exactly right.
So I think that was part of Obama's Obama's great,
(04:49):
great gift. So it's not undoable. And let's remember too, Ruthie,
because and this is something I'm trying to say to
all of my Democratic friends. A Democrat are depressives. They
just they're naturally depressive. And so they're treating this last
election as though it was some overwhelming defeat. It was
a hugely depressing defeat. But the margin the popular vote
(05:13):
was tiny, the smallest ever, and the numbers in the
key states cliched phrase swing states, the numbers were quite small.
If you had changed one hundred thousand votes in those states,
you would have changed the course of the election. So
the notion that there's this kind of overwhelming wave of
trump Ism is a complete historical fiction. That's not And
(05:34):
American elections are close, and the oscillation of parties in
power is the most normal thing to have happened. What
makes this election so unusual, of this approaching inauguration so
potentially sinister, is that Trump is not a conservative politician.
He comes from a dangerous authoritarian tradition. It's very, very different.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
You listen to my conversation with James Carville. Did you
agree with him?
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Absolutely? I think because you know what he was saying
in the conversation you and I listened to together was
much more tactical than it was. I don't know how
to put it in philosophical and others. What he was
saying is that if Biden had stepped down in twenty
twenty three and there have been a real primary, that
could have brought someone else who was not attached to
(06:21):
the Biden administration to the four could have been rich
and Whitmer, or could have been Josh Shapiro, or it
could have been my favorite peak, Booty Judge, the Secretary
of Transportation. So someone of that kind. I have a prejudice,
Ruthie in favor of over educated short men whose fathers
were university professors of English, which is Booty Judges. I
(06:43):
can't imagine, it's just my class interest. Anyway. The point
is that someone of that kind would have emerged and
would have been independent. This is I'm simply parroting the
point that Carvel was making, and would have been independent
of the Biden White House, which fairly or unfairly, rightly
or wrongly, and politics isn't fair. Had become wildly unpopular,
(07:04):
and Biden and the people around him, with what seems
in retrospect to be scandalous almost criminally irresponsibility, refused to
pay attention to what was transparently obvious to everyone that
they were, that they had lost the confidence of the country.
Did they deserve to lose the confidence of the country
after many accomplishments, including navigating the inflation and the risk
(07:28):
of a recession better than anyone thought. No, they didn't
deserve it. But you know, Jimmy Carter, who died last week,
didn't deserve to lose the confidence of the country either.
He had done a very good job. He had brought
an abiding peace treaty to the Middle East. People. Now
forget that all of the things that Ron Reagan has
given credit for, deregulation, for instance, that was all Carter's initiatives.
(07:50):
Even the appointment of Paul Volker, who was the head
of the Federal Reserve and helped to limit inflation, that
was a Carter initiative. So did he deserve to lose
had he rescued the hostages, he probably would have been
elected politics or business of contingencies in that way. In
any case, I think Carville's point that had Biden stepped
(08:12):
out in twenty twenty three, there's a very real chance
that a Democrat would have won the election relatively easily.
I think that's true.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
Before the election, you wrote a New Yorker article looking
ahead to a Trump second term. Tell me about it.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
I wrote in the weeks before the election, I wrote
a long piece about what I thought were the stakes
in the American election. And the piece, which I think
doubtless baffled as many people as it informed, was really
about the bizarre nature of American reality, where everything that
seems to us clownish and chaotic and grotesque and things
(08:51):
that have actual, real consequences in the world are so
tightly tied together that it's very hard for us to
distinguish routine the two. Trump is the prince of that
kind of disorder, and he'll say derange things like We're
going to invade Greenlander, and in part it's meant to
be entertainment. It's like professional wrestling, and his followers feel
(09:14):
it that way, and that great. You know, the timid
liberal politicians you know, won't say anything, and Trump, old
Trump is saying I'm going to invade Greenland and in
that sense, it's a it's a grotesque game like professional wrestling,
but it's a game that actually could have very real
consequences and catastrophic ones in the world. So that's always
(09:35):
the question with Trump. In that piece, I distinguish between
Trump minimalists, some of them extremely smart, progressive minded people
who think remember that famous quote of Maya Angelou's that
everyone is always repeating when someone shows you who they are,
believe them. Now, we normally use that as a kind
of lefty slogan, but people have pointed out, look, Trump
(09:56):
has already been in power, and what he showed you
was that he's a con artist, He's a blowheart. He
says he's going to do a million things, but in fact,
the only thing he really wants to do is get attention,
get approval, get high ratings, and get tax breaks for
his billionaire friends. That's what he really wants, and the
rest of it is a con man's blowhard fuck. That's
(10:19):
the Trump minimalist view. And to be fair, also the
Trump minimalist view is that the Democratic party in power
has made countless mistakes which you can't minimize. You know,
I did a book tour two years ago did thirty cities,
and you know, I love to walk, so in every
(10:41):
city I would walk home from the venues, a bookstore
or university, occasionally a church, to my hotel. And in
every American city, Seattle and Portland, Philadelphia. In Dallas, the
level of social disorder evident on the street was real
and appalling. And I had done a book tour ten
(11:02):
years before and that wasn't the case. People blamed Democrats
for that level of social disorder. Again, fairly or not,
doesn't matter that politics isn't about fairness. It's about the
intensity of perception. So the Trump minimalist case is Democrats
screwed up. Trump is a blowhard, will survive it and rebound.
(11:24):
The Trump maximalist case, which is the case unfortunately. I
believe it is that the pattern of authoritarian takeovers of
democratic states follows a pattern, and that pattern is that
you have someone who seems clownish, like a clownish populace,
who turns out actually to be a genuine menace. That's
(11:45):
the pattern, and one of the key signs of it
is already in place, Ruthie, which is the readiness of
corporate tycoons who despise the leader All of the billionaires
who pass I've crossed, and more billionaires I'm sure come
into the River Cafe at one time or another, have
contempt for Trump. They think he's a clown, but they
(12:06):
think they can use him. They think they can manipulate
him and control them for their own ends. And they've
already become the pattern of bribing him. That's what happens
in third world countries, that's what happens in Russia. So
the pattern, frighteningly and potently is already taken place.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
And what do you think about Elon Musk's increasing prominence?
Speaker 1 (12:30):
Musk is you know, you know, there've always been Ruthie.
We used to call them plutocrats, now we call them oligarchs.
Whether it was John Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller or mister Frick,
there've always been plutocrats intimately involved in American politics and
British politics as well. So that's not entirely new. But
there's something about the transnational nature of it, which is
(12:52):
a reflection of the Internet of social media and so on,
that is that is scary, that is scary, and there's
some brazen about it that's particularly writening. A Musk makes
no secret of his view that he completely unelected oligarch
has a right to affect and even dictate policy. As
(13:16):
I say, it's not a new thing for very wealthy
people to have an undue influence, sadly in democratic politics.
But it was always previously. It was always sort of insulated,
bounded about, made acceptable by rules of conduct. Right, you
couldn't overtly bribe the president of the United States. You
(13:38):
couldn't give money to a far right British politician in
order to undermine the elected government of the country. And
now that's happening. It's happening openly, and it happens not
just through the timidity of the politicians and the benumbing
of the populace. It happens through the open participation of
the other plutocrats. Right. When plutocrats become oligarchs, right when
(14:02):
they stop thinking of themselves as wealthy men who have
an investment in the rule of law and in an
equitable society, that that's good for them in the long run,
then they become oligarchs and they have no thought accept
their proximity to power. And that's all the people you know,
you and I both know because of the nature of
(14:22):
our work. A lot of people that kind of decent,
good wealthy businessmen and executives who once upon a time
believed that they had to side with democracy because it
was in their interest to do it, because they made
their money, because they lived in a well governed, broadly
(14:43):
rule of law country. And when they stopped believing that,
we're really in a catastrophic state. And Elon Musk I
think represents the complete unmooring of money from a faith
in the rule of law.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Is normalization a problem? Do you think people are just
retreating from politics now?
Speaker 1 (15:04):
This is a moment to recuperate and rebound and all
of that. And it's not clear that you know, resistance
and protest was necessarily, you know, the most effective way
of dealing with it. But there's an enormous risk of
undue passivity. We're calling normalization in our response to to
Trump and trump Ism and the wisest students of authoritarianism
(15:25):
Timothy Snyder wrote a book on tyranny and Apple Bam
all make the point that authoritarians depend on your passivity.
They depend on your telling yourself, oh well, it will pass,
what can I do? What can I do about it? Anyway,
it's your passivity in the face of normalizing January sixth
(15:46):
and so on. That is the is part of the
part of the cost. It can be a smaller thing
as not starting an argument when a rich person you
know says, oh, I'm in favor of Trump because I
think Trump is you know, good for business, and I
can't stand woke politics, and you have to be willing
to speak up at that moment and not be a
passive participant in the acceptance of authoritarianism.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
We always end our podcast, as you know, with a
question about comfort food. And even though this is a
bonus edition, I'd like to know what you're planning on
eating in the next few months.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
So the truth is that, and it pops right out
of the blue cookbook from the River cafe. Is I
do in a Matrechiana. Everybody loves a cupboard meal. You know,
you come home, you haven't shopped, You just have to
make dinner, and there's always a bit of penchetto or
bacon in the fridge. I'm perfectly content with bacon and
(16:43):
tomatoes in the cupboard and a little olive oil. And
there's always pasta someplace for you know, from back when
sitting there and you make that, you know, and it
makes everybody completely happy. And you know, there's much to
be said for pasta and tomato. Sauce is the staple
(17:04):
of life. So I suspect we'll be having much more
of it, and at the price of seeming a little
unduly virtuous. We live in a city here where there
are a lot of unhoused and a lot of unfed people,
and so a big part of our obligation has to
be to participate in all the good causes and the
(17:26):
positive places that houses the people who don't have one
and feeds the people who who are going hungry, and
so making a commitment to those small virtues. You know,
I've called my book about politics a thousand Small sanities
because I think that's where good work gets done. So
we have to have one thousand and one in the
approaching years.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
Thank you, Adam, it was great to talk to you.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
Thank you for listening to Ruthie's Table four in partnership
with Montclair Oo
You were listening to Ruthie's Table four in partnership with Montclair.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
With a presidential inauguration fast approaching, we're turning our attention
from food to politics. My guest on Ruthie's Table four
this week is James Carville, And in this bonus episode,
I'm sitting down with my friend Adam Govnick of the
New Yorker magazine. Adam is in New York, I'm in London. Adam,
can I start by asking about James Carville and his
(00:28):
role in US politics?
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Well, James Carvill is a political consultant political commentator. He
became famous as a Bill Clinton's campaign manager in the
nineteen ninety two election, when Clinton no won anyone longer
remembers very much against the odds, defeated the first George
Bush to become president. Carvill is famous in part because
(00:49):
of the efficacy of that campaign, but even more because
he is a unique personal style. He comes from Louisiana,
speaks with a strong Cajun style accent, and doesn't represent
the normal run of California New York Ivy League politicians
who tend to dominate the Democratic Party, And as a consequence,
he has a kind of a common touch and common sense,
(01:13):
which are sadly too often rare on the side of
progressive politics. He first became famous as Clinton's campaign manager
because of a simple slogan that he was legendary for
having plastered on the computers we weren't yet quite in
the laptop age of every one of the young people
(01:33):
who were working in the campaign, and that was it's
the economy stupid. Wanted them to focus on that. People
sometimes misunderstand that, Ruthie, because it wasn't that that was
the only issue in the election. That was the one
that the kids who were working passionately for Clinton at
that point were likely to forget because it wasn't necessarily
at the forefront of their attention. And he was one
(01:55):
of the people who said, already back in twenty twenty
that we are disabling ourselves if we use language like
tofund the police or obsessed about pronouns. He has that
Cajun accent, and he said, you know, that stuff is
for the Sarah Lawrence faculty club. It's not for politics.
And he was proven right time and time again, and
(02:16):
he was trying constantly to divorce the rhetoric of liberal
politics a democratic party politics from and I hate this
term woke, but let's say from the progressive pieties that
had infected it, because he recognized that they were a
barrier to communication. Somebody very smartly said once Ruthie, that
(02:41):
the thing that you have to remember at every moment
in American politics, particularly presidential politics, is that the median
American voter is a white man over fifty, who only
graduated from high school, who never went to college. That's
the median voter. That's the voter you're trying to reach,
and you have to moment think about how what you're
(03:02):
doing is going to appeal to that voter. And Carvell
is brilliant and understanding what that voter is thinking, feeling,
what frightens him or what doesn't. And so he recognizes
that a politician like Bill Clinton, for instance, Obama appealed
to that voter.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
So how did Obama win?
Speaker 1 (03:22):
Well, Obama was very conservative on so called social issues.
It seems shocking to us now in retrospect, but Obama
was not in favor of gay marriage. Obama was very
cautious in favor of civil partnerships. He wasn't in favor
of gay marriage. And it was Joe Biden, ironically, who
led the move for gay marriage, which was eventually endorsed
(03:46):
by the Supreme Court for a variety of political and
personal reasons. So Obama was very appealing to those voters
could be made appealing. You know, you don't have to
win all of them. You have to win a significant
chunk of them. If you don't win any of them,
can't win an election. You don't have to win a
majority of them. You just have to win enough of them.
And Obama was somebody who had a magical gift for
(04:08):
being able to speak to almost anyone. You know, if
you if you ever watched you know, early videos of
Obama giving restaurant reviews on a local Chicago station, you
can find it on YouTube. The young Obama was on
some local cable station and he was giving restaurant reviews
and you could see, oh, this guy is appealing. Everybody
(04:28):
found him appealing because he you know, he spoke forthrightly,
spoke with charm. He said, you know, he was reviewing
sign I think it was a rib joint. And he said, now,
I don't go to this place expecting amazing flavors or
revolutionary cooking. It's something solid. He just had it exactly right.
So I think that was part of Obama's Obama's great,
(04:49):
great gift. So it's not undoable. And let's remember too, Ruthie,
because and this is something I'm trying to say to
all of my Democratic friends. A Democrat are depressives. They
just they're naturally depressive. And so they're treating this last
election as though it was some overwhelming defeat. It was
a hugely depressing defeat. But the margin the popular vote
(05:13):
was tiny, the smallest ever, and the numbers in the
key states cliched phrase swing states, the numbers were quite small.
If you had changed one hundred thousand votes in those states,
you would have changed the course of the election. So
the notion that there's this kind of overwhelming wave of
trump Ism is a complete historical fiction. That's not And
(05:34):
American elections are close, and the oscillation of parties in
power is the most normal thing to have happened. What
makes this election so unusual, of this approaching inauguration so
potentially sinister, is that Trump is not a conservative politician.
He comes from a dangerous authoritarian tradition. It's very, very different.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
You listen to my conversation with James Carville. Did you
agree with him?
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Absolutely? I think because you know what he was saying
in the conversation you and I listened to together was
much more tactical than it was. I don't know how
to put it in philosophical and others. What he was
saying is that if Biden had stepped down in twenty
twenty three and there have been a real primary, that
could have brought someone else who was not attached to
(06:21):
the Biden administration to the four could have been rich
and Whitmer, or could have been Josh Shapiro, or it
could have been my favorite peak, Booty Judge, the Secretary
of Transportation. So someone of that kind. I have a prejudice,
Ruthie in favor of over educated short men whose fathers
were university professors of English, which is Booty Judges. I
(06:43):
can't imagine, it's just my class interest. Anyway. The point
is that someone of that kind would have emerged and
would have been independent. This is I'm simply parroting the
point that Carvel was making, and would have been independent
of the Biden White House, which fairly or unfairly, rightly
or wrongly, and politics isn't fair. Had become wildly unpopular,
(07:04):
and Biden and the people around him, with what seems
in retrospect to be scandalous almost criminally irresponsibility, refused to
pay attention to what was transparently obvious to everyone that
they were, that they had lost the confidence of the country.
Did they deserve to lose the confidence of the country
after many accomplishments, including navigating the inflation and the risk
(07:28):
of a recession better than anyone thought. No, they didn't
deserve it. But you know, Jimmy Carter, who died last week,
didn't deserve to lose the confidence of the country either.
He had done a very good job. He had brought
an abiding peace treaty to the Middle East. People. Now
forget that all of the things that Ron Reagan has
given credit for, deregulation, for instance, that was all Carter's initiatives.
(07:50):
Even the appointment of Paul Volker, who was the head
of the Federal Reserve and helped to limit inflation, that
was a Carter initiative. So did he deserve to lose
had he rescued the hostages, he probably would have been
elected politics or business of contingencies in that way. In
any case, I think Carville's point that had Biden stepped
(08:12):
out in twenty twenty three, there's a very real chance
that a Democrat would have won the election relatively easily.
I think that's true.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
Before the election, you wrote a New Yorker article looking
ahead to a Trump second term. Tell me about it.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
I wrote in the weeks before the election, I wrote
a long piece about what I thought were the stakes
in the American election. And the piece, which I think
doubtless baffled as many people as it informed, was really
about the bizarre nature of American reality, where everything that
seems to us clownish and chaotic and grotesque and things
(08:51):
that have actual, real consequences in the world are so
tightly tied together that it's very hard for us to
distinguish routine the two. Trump is the prince of that
kind of disorder, and he'll say derange things like We're
going to invade Greenlander, and in part it's meant to
be entertainment. It's like professional wrestling, and his followers feel
(09:14):
it that way, and that great. You know, the timid
liberal politicians you know, won't say anything, and Trump, old
Trump is saying I'm going to invade Greenland and in
that sense, it's a it's a grotesque game like professional wrestling,
but it's a game that actually could have very real
consequences and catastrophic ones in the world. So that's always
(09:35):
the question with Trump. In that piece, I distinguish between
Trump minimalists, some of them extremely smart, progressive minded people
who think remember that famous quote of Maya Angelou's that
everyone is always repeating when someone shows you who they are,
believe them. Now, we normally use that as a kind
of lefty slogan, but people have pointed out, look, Trump
(09:56):
has already been in power, and what he showed you
was that he's a con artist, He's a blowheart. He
says he's going to do a million things, but in fact,
the only thing he really wants to do is get attention,
get approval, get high ratings, and get tax breaks for
his billionaire friends. That's what he really wants, and the
rest of it is a con man's blowhard fuck. That's
(10:19):
the Trump minimalist view. And to be fair, also the
Trump minimalist view is that the Democratic party in power
has made countless mistakes which you can't minimize. You know,
I did a book tour two years ago did thirty cities,
and you know, I love to walk, so in every
(10:41):
city I would walk home from the venues, a bookstore
or university, occasionally a church, to my hotel. And in
every American city, Seattle and Portland, Philadelphia. In Dallas, the
level of social disorder evident on the street was real
and appalling. And I had done a book tour ten
(11:02):
years before and that wasn't the case. People blamed Democrats
for that level of social disorder. Again, fairly or not,
doesn't matter that politics isn't about fairness. It's about the
intensity of perception. So the Trump minimalist case is Democrats
screwed up. Trump is a blowhard, will survive it and rebound.
(11:24):
The Trump maximalist case, which is the case unfortunately. I
believe it is that the pattern of authoritarian takeovers of
democratic states follows a pattern, and that pattern is that
you have someone who seems clownish, like a clownish populace,
who turns out actually to be a genuine menace. That's
(11:45):
the pattern, and one of the key signs of it
is already in place, Ruthie, which is the readiness of
corporate tycoons who despise the leader All of the billionaires
who pass I've crossed, and more billionaires I'm sure come
into the River Cafe at one time or another, have
contempt for Trump. They think he's a clown, but they
(12:06):
think they can use him. They think they can manipulate
him and control them for their own ends. And they've
already become the pattern of bribing him. That's what happens
in third world countries, that's what happens in Russia. So
the pattern, frighteningly and potently is already taken place.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
And what do you think about Elon Musk's increasing prominence?
Speaker 1 (12:30):
Musk is you know, you know, there've always been Ruthie.
We used to call them plutocrats, now we call them oligarchs.
Whether it was John Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller or mister Frick,
there've always been plutocrats intimately involved in American politics and
British politics as well. So that's not entirely new. But
there's something about the transnational nature of it, which is
(12:52):
a reflection of the Internet of social media and so on,
that is that is scary, that is scary, and there's
some brazen about it that's particularly writening. A Musk makes
no secret of his view that he completely unelected oligarch
has a right to affect and even dictate policy. As
(13:16):
I say, it's not a new thing for very wealthy
people to have an undue influence, sadly in democratic politics.
But it was always previously. It was always sort of insulated,
bounded about, made acceptable by rules of conduct. Right, you
couldn't overtly bribe the president of the United States. You
(13:38):
couldn't give money to a far right British politician in
order to undermine the elected government of the country. And
now that's happening. It's happening openly, and it happens not
just through the timidity of the politicians and the benumbing
of the populace. It happens through the open participation of
the other plutocrats. Right. When plutocrats become oligarchs, right when
(14:02):
they stop thinking of themselves as wealthy men who have
an investment in the rule of law and in an
equitable society, that that's good for them in the long run,
then they become oligarchs and they have no thought accept
their proximity to power. And that's all the people you know,
you and I both know because of the nature of
(14:22):
our work. A lot of people that kind of decent,
good wealthy businessmen and executives who once upon a time
believed that they had to side with democracy because it
was in their interest to do it, because they made
their money, because they lived in a well governed, broadly
(14:43):
rule of law country. And when they stopped believing that,
we're really in a catastrophic state. And Elon Musk I
think represents the complete unmooring of money from a faith
in the rule of law.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Is normalization a problem? Do you think people are just
retreating from politics now?
Speaker 1 (15:04):
This is a moment to recuperate and rebound and all
of that. And it's not clear that you know, resistance
and protest was necessarily, you know, the most effective way
of dealing with it. But there's an enormous risk of
undue passivity. We're calling normalization in our response to to
Trump and trump Ism and the wisest students of authoritarianism
(15:25):
Timothy Snyder wrote a book on tyranny and Apple Bam
all make the point that authoritarians depend on your passivity.
They depend on your telling yourself, oh well, it will pass,
what can I do? What can I do about it? Anyway,
it's your passivity in the face of normalizing January sixth
(15:46):
and so on. That is the is part of the
part of the cost. It can be a smaller thing
as not starting an argument when a rich person you
know says, oh, I'm in favor of Trump because I
think Trump is you know, good for business, and I
can't stand woke politics, and you have to be willing
to speak up at that moment and not be a
passive participant in the acceptance of authoritarianism.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
We always end our podcast, as you know, with a
question about comfort food. And even though this is a
bonus edition, I'd like to know what you're planning on
eating in the next few months.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
So the truth is that, and it pops right out
of the blue cookbook from the River cafe. Is I
do in a Matrechiana. Everybody loves a cupboard meal. You know,
you come home, you haven't shopped, You just have to
make dinner, and there's always a bit of penchetto or
bacon in the fridge. I'm perfectly content with bacon and
(16:43):
tomatoes in the cupboard and a little olive oil. And
there's always pasta someplace for you know, from back when
sitting there and you make that, you know, and it
makes everybody completely happy. And you know, there's much to
be said for pasta and tomato. Sauce is the staple
(17:04):
of life. So I suspect we'll be having much more
of it, and at the price of seeming a little
unduly virtuous. We live in a city here where there
are a lot of unhoused and a lot of unfed people,
and so a big part of our obligation has to
be to participate in all the good causes and the
(17:26):
positive places that houses the people who don't have one
and feeds the people who who are going hungry, and
so making a commitment to those small virtues. You know,
I've called my book about politics a thousand Small sanities
because I think that's where good work gets done. So
we have to have one thousand and one in the
approaching years.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
Thank you, Adam, it was great to talk to you.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
Thank you for listening to Ruthie's Table four in partnership
with Montclair Oo
Host
Ruth Rogers
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