We are now just days away from the 2024 presidential election, and the outcome remains uncertain. With the possibility of a new Trump administration around the corner, the question of how we got here is more pressing than ever. Rick Perlstein and Bill Fletcher Jr. join The Marc Steiner Show for a look back on the mistakes of liberals and leftists that helped nurture the MAGA movement, and what the path to progressive victory in the long-term might look like.
Studio Production: David Hebden
Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
Transcript
Marc Steiner: Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us.
This election is almost upon us. It finds us at a moment when the nation is deeply divided, more pronounced than at any time, perhaps, since the Civil War. Elements of the right wing have proven themselves to be highly organized and prepared for the moment, and for the arrival of Donald Trump. The mainstream Democrats and Republicans were not, are not prepared, and we find ourselves on a precipice, even though they brought us to this moment.
Our country, the planet, and those living on it are facing a real danger. How did we get here? Capitalism and our system have failed us, and the Grim Reaper is waiting in the wings. How should we respond to it? What could the future hold? If the right wing seizes power, taking control of the White House, perhaps one or both houses of Congress, it could alter our very existence.
As we approach this election, I asked two colleagues whose ideas, activism, and writing I respect deeply. Those voices have been heard here before numerous times on The Real News. Bill Fletcher Jr., former union leader, scholar, author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, and those examining the heart of our political society.
And Rick Perlstein, the author of a four-volume series on history of America’s political and cultural divisions, and the rise of conservatism from the 1950s to Ronald Reagan.
Gentleman, welcome. Good to see you both. Good to have you here.
Rick Perlstein: It’s good to be here, Marc. Why can’t it be better circumstances?
Marc Steiner: [Laughs] Well, we are on the cusp of this election. Obviously nobody knows what’s about to happen. I’m going to take a step backwards, and really am interested in hearing from both of you about why we’re here, and how we got here, and how you bring that analysis to the fore of how these last 40 and 50 years bring us to this point.
Bill, can I start with you?
Bill Fletcher Jr.: You know, Marc, part of the answer, to me, is that periodically in US history, the ruling class’s consensus breaks down. Whether you’re looking at what led up to the Civil War, the breakdown at the end of Reconstruction, or the breakdown in 1932 and the emergence of Roosevelt and the pushback from the far right, including the coup attempt when they tried to enlist Smedley Butler, the ruling class after World War II, in part because of the Cold War that it initiated, was able to build a unity that held very disparate segments together.
In the absence of the Cold War, or the end of the Cold War, much of what justified keeping these segments together evaporated. But then you add onto that the shifting economy, the growth of neoliberal globalization, the victory of the various progressive social movements, and an orchestrated effort beginning in the late ’60s to build what has now resulted in MAGA. It started as being called a New Right. So all of these factors contributed to this.
But then there’s one other factor, which is that, among liberal and progressive forces, there was a linear view of history, summarized to a great extent in a peculiar way by the intent of Martin Luther King’s famous statement, “The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.” And that’s beautiful, except it’s wrong. The arc of history is long, that’s true. It doesn’t bend in any particular way. The way it bends depends on us.
But many of us thought that, for example, Roe v. Wade, it would never get overturned. There might be this or that battle. It would not get overturned. Most of us didn’t think there’d be a fascist that’d be running for president. Many of us thought there might be a military coup at some point, but not a fascist.
And I think this linear sense of time has undone us, and that’s what we’re up against.
Marc Steiner: A linear sense of time. I’m going to come back to that. Rick?
Rick Perlstein: Yeah, there’s nothing Bill said I disagree with. I’ll just propose a separate framework for my own way of thinking about these enormous questions that, of course, will only really become clear to us in the fullness of time, but here we are now.
I refer to the infernal triangle as the matrix that creates this mess we’re in now. The three corners of the triangle are the increasingly authoritarian Republican right, which, of course, I’ve written the history of. We saw a lot of its incipients in McCarthy, and Goldwater, and the new right of the 1970s, and aspects of Reaganism and Newt Gingrich, all the same, all that stuff.
The second part is the inadequacy of the Democratic Party to come up with a persuasive alternative. Its complicity with meeting the Republicans halfway out of the trauma of Reagan’s two landslides.
And yes, also a linear sense of history. I really think that there’s a lot to that, this idea as expressed in the idea that the rise of a majority of Americans being nonwhite would somehow, like magic, deliver us to the new Jerusalem and defeat conservatism forever.
But the last corner of the triangle is the fecklessness, and failure, and institutional calamity that is the elite media that provides us about as good a picture of the reality we’re living through as Pravda did in the Soviet Union back in the day, and can only see the world according to these rigid genre conventions. We refer to it sometimes by the shorthand “both sides journalism”.
Which really was, and again Bill gets at it, kind of a product of the Cold War in which the idea that America was united and at peace with itself was just a profound ideological imperative to express, and didn’t prepare us for these periodic outbreaks of rage, which can always exist just below the surface.
During the Cold War, the high Cold War of the ’50s and the ’60s, to talk about this, again, linear idea of history, the South, and what was going on in the South, and the violent terrorism and anti-democratic authoritarianism there, was seen as a vestige. It was going to go away.
Instead, the kind of politics that marked the South, one-party politics, first from the Democrats and then from the Republicans, conspiratorial thinking, fetishization of violence, extreme embrace of hierarchy, all kinds of conning of economic elites, of working-class people, was nationalized.
The most profound prediction of the future, the one in which I use to just explain what’s happened to the right, came during the 1964 convention when one of the Southern delegates told a reporter, when Goldwater was nominated, “We’ve taken the Mason-Dixon line and we’ve moved it up to Canada.”
So that was the part of America that won, or is winning. It’s up to us whether the final victory happens. And we find ourselves, like you say, at a precipice.
Marc Steiner: So there are a bunch of things both of you said I want to pull out here. When we see this moment when America is deeply divided politically, that there is no really organized opposition on the left in any way to confront this, except maybe in some of the union work and some of the stuff going on on the progressive side of the Democratic Party, there’s not a lot else, at least that I see, that’s really standing up to it. Bill’s going to disagree, which is good [laughs].
I think that we’re seeing this weird, strange dynamic where race and racism in America is fueling a lot of this, even though it’s not spoken about enough, and B, how much of the white working class in America has ended up on the right and been seduced by it.
Bill, what were you about to say?
Bill Fletcher Jr.: Well, one thing, Marc, is that the white working class’s gravitation to MAGA has been actually exaggerated. The MAGA is a white movement overall. It is deeply rooted, as was the Tea Party, in the middle strata, and that includes kind of the upper element of the working class. But it’s not like the white working class is disproportionately pro-MAGA compared to other segments of white folks.
I think that that’s important because, if you don’t get that, you can end up coming up with the wrong strategy about how to deal with this, as well as who are potential enemies and friends that we’re dealing with.
The other thing is that there is opposition all over the country, but it’s largely in small groups. There are groups ranging from at the national level, the Working Families Party, to the local level, groups like New Virginia Majority or Florida Rising. So there are these groups that are there. They are, unfortunately, less than the sum of their parts.
And what we have not been able to accumulate is something that I’ve dreamed about for years, which is a new Rainbow Coalition that was thinking at the national level, and that also was aiming to build power at the state levels.
Now, some of the groups I mentioned are trying. New Virginia Majority and Florida Rising, I know that they’re trying. They’re trying to build this work, and I’m not here to criticize them. But I think it’s important, as the man said, “Tell no lies, claim no easy victories,” we have to be clear that we are not where we should be. That’s all. And I think that we have failed to understand that the right wing, the extreme right, or elements within it, developed a multi-decades plan to win.
And our movement, the left and progressive folks, have really vacillated on the issue of fighting for power. When we often think about and have thought, particularly since the ’70s, about fighting for power, it’s either utopian in a sense of the only thing we can do is fight for socialism, that there’s no intermediate thing, or you get this variations of abstentionism, or what the Green Party is doing, with all due respect to them.
So I think that’s what infuriates me, that we’ve wasted an immense amount of time because we don’t pay attention as a movement to strategy and organization.
Marc Steiner: Rick, do you want to jump in? I’m going to expand on what you just said there, Bill. But what were you about to say, Rick?
Rick Perlstein: Why don’t you take the lead there, Marc, and I’ll go where you go.
Marc Steiner: Okay, fine. So the question is then, what can and should be the response at the moment? If we see in the next few days that the MAGA right has seized political power in Washington, or even if they don’t and the Democrats should win, the struggle is still going to be really intense, and probably more intense. Whichever way it goes, it will take different forms.
What were you about to say, Rick?
Rick Perlstein: So you know I do this weekly column in The American Prospect.
Marc Steiner: Yes.
Rick Perlstein: My one that I just filed for Wednesday, it’s called, “What Will You Do?” It’s a series of questions about what all sorts of people will do. I didn’t really get into this, should either Trump win or some kind of low-grade Civil War happen in the next few months.
The questions I ask are existentialist ones, the kind of thing a Camus or Sartre might come up with in a movement of resistance that many of us may face choices that may be life-changing.
If you are a government bureaucrat and you’re asked to sign off on some deportation order. If you find yourself on a jury and one of these abortion trafficking laws passes, like the one that’s pending in Tennessee, which makes it illegal to drive someone over the border to get an abortion, and some grandma’s arrested driving her granddaughter, and she goes to court, and she’s nailed dead to rights, are you going to be a jury nullifier? If you’re a cop, if you’re a National Guard member, if you are a bureaucrat at the NSA, and you’re asked to spy on one of Donald Trump’s opponents.
So the organizational questions are profound and probably above my pay grade, but a lot of what will happen next is the questions that all citizens face under situations of authoritarianism. And as far as I can tell, this is the first time people have started asking these questions. There was one piece by Bob Kuttner in The American Prospect that said, what about civil disobedience?
So what happens when all these things that we know can happen because the Trump people say they’re going to happen, what if they begin to mobilize the military to deport millions of people? They can’t do that without complicity.
And you start to think about that movie about Auschwitz, about the family that lives next… The people who are just living their lives over the other side of the fence. And I think everyone listening to this has to ask what risks they’re going to be willing to take. These are very hard questions, and they suddenly seem to be dropping from the sky with no warning.
Bill Fletcher Jr.: I want to build on that. You mentioned a movie. One of my favorite all-time films is Seven Days in May with Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Ava Gardner. For your listeners or viewers that may not be aware of this, the screenplay was Rod Serling from The Twilight Zone, 1963.
It was interesting because it turns out that they were able to get access to The White House because Kennedy thought that the idea of a military coup was not beyond belief. He thought that conditions were such that there could be a coup.
But I mention it in part because of what you’re saying, Rick, that what’s interesting in the film is the role of individuals that make certain choices. An admiral, for example, that decides, I’m not going along with this coup. The director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, played by Kirk Douglas, basically agrees with his boss, Burt Lancaster, but is absolutely opposed to violating the Constitution.
So a lot will come down to, as you’re saying, what individuals will do. But I would add this: in the absence of organization, it becomes much easier for individuals to collapse and to feel isolated.
That’s why — And Marc, you and I have been talking about this for years — We need organization. Not small sectarian organizations, but we need organization. We need a broad front that people can identify with and look to because there will be…
Like you mentioned about immigrants. One thing that was raised with me a few months ago was, if there was an attempt to deport, what if there was a repetition of May Day 2006, a day without immigrants, when you had this massive stay away? But that takes organization. So we’ve got to be thinking about organization in order to give people the backbone to take the stands that they need to take.
Rick Perlstein: People do [inaudible], spontaneously they can do a lot. If you’ll recall one of these evanescent moments of the early Trump administration when he did announce the Muslim ban, and here in Chicago, people filled O’Hare Airport and said, do it past our bodies.
And it happened, but, yes, where did it go after that? Was anyone collecting the emails? Was anyone [inaudible]?
Marc Steiner: It seems to me, depending on who wins this election, what you just raised, Bill, could take different forms. But what’s clear is that there is a very powerful, manipulated right-wing movement in this country that is prepared to move. Let’s explore from them what their response can be, and what it might be, depending on who wins this election.
50 years ago, whenever that was, 60 years ago maybe, a long time ago, when I was part of the underground smuggling people out of this country during the Vietnam War, there was an organization that they didn’t crack, and we were able to get people out. It was a fairly… Disorganized is not the word. It was not centrally organized.
I think about that, and I think about my cousins who talked about being in the resistance during World War II in Poland. And those things are coming back to me because I think that’s a moment we could be facing.
Bill Fletcher Jr.: Yes.
Marc Steiner: That’s a moment that could be upon us. What were you about to say, Bill? Let me stop.
Bill Fletcher Jr.: No, I’m agreeing with you. See, I think one thing that we’re up against, Marc, is that too many people still have the pendulum view of history. The pendulum has gone to the right, it will inevitably go back to the left. Yes, there’s extremes now, but people will get over that. And that’s not the way things operate. So I think you’re right to be posing those questions.
There’s getting people out of the country, there’s things like that. I would say, though, the immediate thing is that we need to have local and state coalitions that actually are doing a lot of coordination and communication. One of the important things is going to be networks and narratives.
Marc Steiner: Narrative? Is that what you said?
Bill Fletcher Jr.: Narrative. Narrative, yeah. Because the right wing, just like they’re doing with Fox News, they’re going to spin stuff. We have to have a counter to that that explains to people what the hell is going on. We have to keep people abreast of various forms of repression that are taking place.
Then there are practical decisions that are going to need to be made about what forms of resistance to undertake. There will be, inevitably, ultra-left people that will think that you just get out there and start throwing rocks or something. And we’ve got to be thinking about what’s the tactical menu that we look at?
Then the other part is something programmatic. What exactly are our demands, and how do we muck up the system so that it can’t implement some of the things that they’re proposing?
That’s one of the reasons that, like with Project 2025, they clearly want to purge the civil service system so that they have more people, more operatives that can move things quickly.
Marc Steiner: And if they win, they could begin implementing that.
Rick Perlstein: Yeah.
Bill Fletcher Jr.: Yes.
Rick Perlstein: Well, and the word “win” is actually kind of —
Marc Steiner: I mean win the election.
Rick Perlstein: Right. Because, as I point out, anyone who’s thinking about this election only in terms of votes is not doing their job. We already, as I pointed out to you off mic, Marc, in both Washington state and Oregon, people have started burning ballot drop boxes. The narrative that they’ve primed their followers to follow, believe in, with a religious fervor, for decades, has been that the Democrats can’t win an honest election so they always cheat. I’ve said, I might write something about this if I’m not a Civil War correspondent.
There’s millions of Americans who do not believe that it’s actually possible for Kamala Harris to win the most electoral votes. And as I pointed out, you can’t have your horse race journalism if the MAGA boys burn down the track.
So one thing we have to be prepared for is the confusion that they’re going to try and sow in the event they don’t get the most electoral votes. And one of the kinds of complicity that they’re hoping for is that the elites basically give up in the interest of order, an 1876 situation when basically the electoral college was tied, and the Democrats who were a Southern reactionary party said, okay, we’ll let a Republican be president, but he’s got to take the military out of the South.
All these things require… First, I like that Bill mentioned narrative because it has a role for us people who sit on our couches and type, like me. I’m not an organizer. People have to be very… There’s a lot of waking up that has to happen. People who should know better are not accepting what’s happening.
I’m seeing a lot of discourse about this fascist rally that happened at Madison Square Garden last night and saying it devolved into a racist thing, as if somehow there’s some kind of… I read someone who said Trump was supposed to make his closing argument, but it devolved into a bunch of racist rants. So people are in denial that it’s this kind of American exceptionalism, it can’t happen here, of what we’re facing.
Marc Steiner: I watched what happened over at Madison Square Garden, watching pieces of Trump and that rally, and then I was watching the rally that took place when the Nazis held their rally at Madison Square Garden. The similarities were pretty glaring and frightening, other than the uniforms.
You mentioned, Bill, when we talked about what happened in the 19th century in 1876, launched into almost 100 years of racial segregation and terror against the Black world in this country. So people always say these things can’t happen here, but they can happen here.
Bill Fletcher Jr.: They already did.
Marc Steiner: They already did, exactly. I’m not a pessimist by nature, but I’m very clear-eyed about the forces arraigned against the future and against us, and they’re very powerful and they’re much more organized.
So, there’s no telling what’s going to happen after Election Day. But I wonder, Bill, you talked about some strategies, and given the lack of unity, let’s say, between moderates, and liberals, and progressive Democrats, and people organizing on the outside, there’s nothing that brings them together in opposition to what we face. Maybe I’m being a bit hysterical. So, speak to that.
Bill Fletcher Jr.: It’s not that there’s nothing. I think that to gel a real broad front, you have to have the right collection of people that are convening something, or you have to have a strong organization that is setting the pace.
So one of the things that we’re up against is that centrist Democrats fear both the right and the left, and they are desperately hoping for a return to normality. They see us on the left — I mean the real left. I’m not talking about people like Bill Clinton or something like that, but the real left. They look at us as the disruptors, so there’s this reluctance to reach out to forces on the left on their part.
Within the left, part of the problem that we’re up against is purism, and organizations and individuals, as we’ve discussed, that don’t want to entertain the idea that a broad front needs to be larger than a VW bug [Steiner laughs].
Rick Perlstein: Yeah, I think about this a lot. Since the Republicans are such inveterate norm breakers, the story a lot of mainstream Democrats say in return is that we have to uphold norms. If something bad is happening, you do the opposite of that bad thing.
There was a wonderful piece in New Republic by the Pulitzer Prize winning historian Jefferson Cowie who’s… If you haven’t read his Freedom’s Dominion about how the word “freedom” became an alibi for coercion in American history through the experience of a single Alabama county, he pointed out that every time democracy truly won a structural victory against the forces of reaction or stagnation, it was through a brazen act of norm breaking.
If you think about the fact that the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and the military reconstruction of the South, the laws that enabled that passed before any Southerners were let back into Congress. Can you imagine how the Obamas and Clintons would freak out if you said, oh, well, we need to defeat fascism by ignoring the votes of the states that have become fascist?
If you look at something like Roosevelt’s court-packing plan, nothing in the New Deal would’ve happened unless he had threatened, basically, the existing Supreme Court, the incumbent Supreme Court, with political dissolution, unless they allowed something like the Social Security Act to be declared constitutional.
Then finally… This is a very obscure thing in history. Most people don’t know about this, but it’s probably one of the most fascinating things that ever happened. In 1961, JFK realized that no liberal legislation would ever pass because the Rules Committee and the House of Representatives was ruled with an iron fist by a guy, you might remember this name, Judge Howard Smith, a very reactionary Virginia conservative, and a coalition he had of Democrats and Republicans who just turned it into a graveyard for every liberal legislation.
So he arranged for the size of the Rules Committee to expand and added three members, without which the Civil Rights Act never would’ve passed, the voting rights never would’ve passed, Medicare never would’ve passed, Medicaid never would’ve passed, any liberals’ legislation would’ve passed, and it was just by cheating, really.
So unless we figure out this… Within the realm of under the Capitol dome, top-down institutional Democratic Party stuff, unless they get over their Boy Scout attitude and realize some judicious norm breaking might be required, we might be stuck in this miasma for all of our lifetimes.
Marc Steiner: Were you going to say something, Bill?
Bill Fletcher Jr.: Let me just say this, Marc. Another way of putting what Rick just said is that when Michelle Obama said, “When they go low, we go high,” that was wrong [Steiner laughs]. When they go low, we snap the rug from under them and let them collapse.
Rick Perlstein: Right. When you meet them halfway, that makes it easier for them to spit at you.
Bill Fletcher Jr.: That’s right. I think that the problem, Rick, you just summed it up so well, this assumption of normality, the assumption that we have to be the adults in the room. You remember the example I gave to you once, Marc, about the Battle of the Crater, Petersburg, Virginia?
Marc Steiner: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes.
Bill Fletcher Jr.: You remember that?
Marc Steiner: Yes.
Bill Fletcher Jr.: I don’t know if you ever heard this story, Rick. Have you ever heard about the Battle of the Crater?
Marc Steiner: It’s worth telling. Go ahead.
Bill Fletcher Jr.: So what happened is, 1864, Union troops surrounded Petersburg and the Confederate defenses were very formidable. So the Union troops developed a brilliant idea of building this tunnel underneath the Confederate defenses, loading it up with high explosives. And the idea was you’d set those off and blow the Confederate line. In the explosion we saw massive… It would not only kill, but it would throw the Confederates into disarray.
So they do this, and the explosion was massive, and it created this crater. The Confederate forces that survived were running chaotically back towards Petersburg as a result of this.
The Union troops went into the crater and stopped, and they sat there and they looked around in marvel at the extent of this devastation, body parts and everything else. And at a certain point, the Confederates realized they weren’t being chased. They reorganized, came back, and massacred the Union soldiers.
The Obama administration blew a giant hole in the Confederate line, the Republicans. And instead of us going through and chasing these guys to extinction, we sat in the hole marveling over this great historical event, the election of the first Black president, and him playing the role of the braided belt in the living room. We missed the moment and allowed the Confederates to reorganize, and they came back as the Tea Party. And we’ve been paying the price ever since.
Rick Perlstein: When your opponent is drowning, throw them an anvil.
Bill Fletcher Jr.: Right. Right.
Marc Steiner: So in the time we have here, I’m going to go backwards for a minute, and then I’m going to go forwards. I’m going to go backwards to have both of you give us an analysis of how we got here. Why are we facing this right now? What brought us to this moment? It’s not the first time in America, we all know, where right-wing racists have taken power, that their forces were very strong and organized. But, how did we get here? Why are we here right now?
Rick Perlstein: Well, you got to wait for my book in 2026.
Marc Steiner: I can’t wait that long, man [laughs].
Bill Fletcher Jr.: I think we gave the answer actually, Marc, in the beginning. I think that we laid out a summation, a kind of convergence of forces on the other side, plus our own misreading of the situation, and a series of very, very big mistakes on a part of progressive forces have gotten us to this.
But even the level of denial that exists among liberals, I think, exists within large segments of the left. This will go nameless, but when I hear people saying, well, I’m going to vote for Cornel West, or, I’m going to vote for Jill Stein, and I’m going to be making a statement, and you say, well, what do you think about Project 2025? Oh, it’s never going to happen.
And when you have that, in this moment in 2024, that tells you something about why we’re where we are.
Rick Perlstein: I think that it’s really important to be gracious in this moment of defeat and realize that everyone is at fault. The left is at fault. The Democratic center is at fault. The establishment of the Republican Party is at fault. The media is at fault. These are massive, roiling and overlapping institutional failures. In response, they require an openness, and a creativity, and of backbone, and a valor of the sort we haven’t seen since these great moments in history. Hopefully we’re up to the task.
Marc Steiner: So let me ask this final piece here about where you think we go from here. I love the analogy that you gave us just now, Bill. If the Democrats win, how do you not just sit in the bloody hole? How is that pushed, and pushed so that movements build and change begins to happen, and you’re confronting the power on the other side, and people sitting in the crater?
And B, if Trump and the right wing should win, this has to be a really strong response. You can’t just sit there and go, oh no, this is terrible. What am I going to do? So what do you think about the day after?
Rick Perlstein: Maybe Bill can speak to the bottom-up grassroots piece, and I can talk about the Washington top-down piece.
Marc Steiner: All right. So just talking, Rick, why don’t you start with top-down, and then we’ll go to the bottom-up. However you want to do it. Go ahead.
Rick Perlstein: The Democratic Party and the people in charge of the Democratic Party, they need to do what Obama didn’t do and call for an accounting. Famously, Obama, after the George W. Bush administration, said, we don’t look backward. We have to look forward — We have to look backward.
The original sin in this case was the Ford partner, Richard Nixon, when elites realized that they were too big to fail and they wouldn’t have to pay for their sins. The next thing you know, these bankers are crashing the economy and getting away with it. There has to be a reckoning. There has to be some truth and some reconciliation. And the Democratic Party cannot go back to, oh, we won and now we can go back to normalcy.
Bill Fletcher Jr.: I agree 150%. I would say that one of the things that became very obvious in the Obama presidency was the failure of most social justice movements to really attempt to pressure the administration. LGBTQ folks and immigrants, immigrant rights movement, to a great extent did pressure, and that was very, very important. The Black Freedom Movement did not. The organized labor basically did not. In the Black Freedom Movement, you had to take a blood test before you could criticize Obama.
So the problem is that the failure to actually put pressure on these people was based on this illusion, this idea that the only kind of pressure would be coming from us, as opposed to understanding that these individuals, whether it was Obama then or Harris next week, will not be under pressure from other forces. Harris is going to be under pressure from the Republicans who have aligned with her. Don’t deceive yourself. These people are not disappearing on Nov. 6, 7, 8.
Rick Perlstein: Yep. It’s hard.
Bill Fletcher Jr.: I think they correctly are uniting with her, and I think she was right to bring them on board. But you have to understand, they are not disappearing.
These other forces, the people in Silicon Valley who are reluctantly supporting her, they could go any number of ways. So if we are not creating pressure at the base — Which, again, necessitates new forms of organization and pressure on existing groups, we’re going to find ourselves in two years and in four years in exactly the same situation.
Now, I actually happen to be optimistic. I think that Harris is going to win. I do think that there’s going to be a violent response, I don’t know on what scale. But, I think she’s going to win. And I think that there’s many forces that have learned from the last number of years, but there’s going to be this incredible undertow that’s there to try to pull us away from the beach, and to pull us back into deep water.
It’s going to basically be saying that we need to give the administration more time. We need to not put a lot of pressure on. That we need to be more understanding. This is the first woman president. This is an Afro Asian president. Why are you all beating her up? She’s got to have space, and we need to say, no. We’re going to give her plenty of support. We’re going to be one nose length away from her so that she can never turn around.
Marc Steiner: I think that’s a very powerful way to end this conversation. To close this conversation, I think that it would be really important, in the coming weeks, is for us and others to come together about where we go and how we pull people together to build a different world. We’re still going to be confronting…
As you said, the right’s going to be there, and who knows what they’re going to do in response if Harris should win. And there’s a huge tendency for those Democrats that go, okay, we won. We’ll just sit here for a while and do nothing. So I think that we need a chapter two, and we’ll take a chapter two after we see what happens on this Election Day coming up.
I want to thank both of you, Bill Fletcher, Rick Perlstein, for the work you do, willing to come on here, the show on The Real News and Marc Steiner Show. It’s always great to talk to you both, and we’ll continue this conversation.
Bill Fletcher Jr.: Same here. Thanks very much for inviting us.
Marc Steiner: Once again, let me thank Bill Fletcher Jr. and Rick Perlstein for joining us today. We will link to their work so you can hear and see more of what they’ve been working on.
Thanks to David Hebden for running the program today, and audio editor Alina Nehlich for working her audio magic, Rosette Sewali for producing The Marc Steiner Show, keeping me on task, and the tireless Kayla Rivera for making it all work behind the scenes, and everyone here at The Real News for making this show possible.
Please let me know what you thought about what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you.
Once again, thank you to Bill Fletcher Jr. and Rick Perlstein for joining us today. We’ll look at what happened on Election Day with them and others in the coming weeks. We’ll see what happens. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.
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