News Brief: Harris’ Mid-2000s Neocon Re-Brand and Centrist Voters as Free Real Estate
Citations Needed | October 9, 2024 | Transcript
[Music]
Nima Shirazi: Welcome to a Citations Needed News Brief. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: You can follow the show on Twitter @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated, as we are 100% listener funded. We do these News Briefs in between our regularly scheduled full-length episodes. And today, Adam, we’re gonna talk a little bit about the Kamala Harris presidential campaign and its embrace of early 2000s neoconservatism. Now recently the Kamala Harris campaign lauded the public endorsements of world historic war criminals and pro-torture Republicans like George W. Bush’s former vice president, Dick Cheney and US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Harris, who said she was honored to have their support, is also going around touting the endorsement that her presidential bid has received from Liz Cheney, Dick Cheney’s daughter, and more than 200 former staffers from past Republican administrations and campaigns. Both Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, have recently boasted about these endorsements publicly during recent televised debates now.
Adam: Well, don’t forget former CIA director Michael Hayden and William Webster. And of course, the illustrious Hillary Clinton was very proud of this endorsement of John Negroponte, noted war criminal during the Dirty Wars of the ’80s. And the most notably, the US ambassador to Iraq. They’re sort of vice the viceroy of Iraq, as he was also the viceroy of various Cold War outfits, and was huge, a big part of pushing the Iraq War. So we have, we have a murderer’s row here. Now look, I want to start off by saying there’s a few qualifiers we’ll throw out here. Obviously, we just did an episode on people using popularism to launder their own viewpoints. So I want to be up-front here that it would be extremely convenient for me if what was good for the Harris campaign also happened to align with my ideology or my ideological priors, right? And it would be very inconvenient for me if her tracking right and trying to court Republicans actually ended up working.
Now, here’s what I’ll say, though, and I think this is what we talked about offline, and this kind of was the impetus for this. Weirdly, we have an A/B test. Hillary Clinton more or less did this same track. Now she won more votes, but of course, she lost the election. Biden didn’t really do this that much, and in fact, his strategy, and I understand that the election in 2020 existed in a totally different context than the election in 2016 and 2024. So with that said, pandered to and tried to co-opt and court, a less cynical term, we’ll say court, progressive causes. Black Lives Matter, immigration, abortion, a lot of anti-war stuff was pandered to. And he won the election quite, quite, quite demonstrably. So the A/B test we have, and again, obviously there’s not, it’s not perfectly apples to apples, because there’s different dynamics in the reelection. There’s covid, there’s this, there’s that. It’s a reelection versus the initial run. But more or less, Harris is just running Hillary Clinton’s 2016 playbook. And in fact, many of the same, she’s being consulted by Hillary Clinton, many of the same people are running it.
And the goal, and the strategy appears to be to try to present her as as conservative, to run away from any of the kind of progressive causes that she may have ostensibly supported, and in doing so, is overtly courting kind of the, for want of a better term, Nikki Haley vote is what they’re calling it. But really, it’s kind of a, it’s kind of the Hillary Clinton coalition. Now this, of course, coincides with, I think, her general political instincts, to the extent that she has priors or ideological foundations, she’s conservative. You don’t really become a prosecutor, elected for, you know, kind of electoral gain, unless you kind of believe in nothing. I’m cynical here, but, I mean, I’m sure she believes in some things, but for the most part, is taking takes a conservative track.
Nima: Right, but those things could certainly be incarceration and Imperial violence.
Adam: Yeah, it’s not like she was plucked from obscurity working, you know, as a defense lawyer for underfunded you know, whatever, right? It’s, lock ’em up, throw away the keys, kind of a good way to become a political stock, especially when she was started to, you know, run for office in the ’90s and 2000s that was kind of the general playbook, especially, you know, in her defense, as a woman, you have to sort of look tough. And that was probably part of the calculus in her defense. Now, fast forward to her campaign in 2024 and I know that initially, when she was selected, rather, I guess, not really selected by anyone, but became, by default, the Democratic nominee. When Biden dropped out, there was a lot of speculation about where she would stand on Gaza. Would she be better? Would she be more willing to have those conversations be open? Now, we obviously met that very skeptically and said, Well, you know, we’ll wait and see, but there’s no real evidence that that’s the case,
Nima: And that vibes and tone do not necessarily reflect policy, right? They don’t stop a single bomb or bullet. But then it was clear that that didn’t even that didn’t even mean anything. Right.
Adam: The tone itself was actually similar to what Blinken had been doing for years. So I think it’s fair to say this is now a settled question, and we can go over the various examples over the last week where she’s more overtly embraced this kind of neoconservative, which is in the sort of traditional sense, the kind of Bush administration, Iran is the Axis of Evil, the alpha and omega of all the problems. Israel has a right to defend itself, you know, with some claptrap about Palestinian civilians thrown in there for good measure, but more or less the same kind of boilerplate. There’s some acceptable number that has yet to reveal itself.
Nima: Exactly. An unacceptable number have died, which means that there’s some acceptable number. No, so. So the kind of Harris big-tent political campaign messaging of freedom and joy, right? Kind of taking those, taking those terms back, making them central to her campaign, are coupled, Adam, with committing to, say, a more militarized border, more militarized immigration and policing policies across the country. And as Harris has repeatedly said, vowing to, in her words, quote, “ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” End quote. And you know, again, bragging about getting the endorsements of some of the most bloodthirsty war criminals of our time. And this somehow is an appeal to swing voters, to white Midwest voters, whatever it may be.
Adam: Well, it’s an appeal to donors, first and foremost. But here’s the thing, right? And we talked about this offline, and this is the thing that bothers me, whether or not her courting Republicans or courting or tracking to the center is electorally sound is, you know, not particularly knowable. You can make a case in both directions. What annoys me, what bothers me, what the media does with this, and they do this all the time. We touched on this briefly in our popularism episode last week, there is zero acknowledgment that there’s any tradeoffs. There’s no sense that if you go right-wing and court a bunch of discredited neoconservatives who people anyone over the age of 33 remembers and loathes that there’s no sense that you lose anyone. It’s just seen as free money, like Republicans are just free real estate. They’re just sitting there waiting for you to take them. You were handed a bunch of chips. You walked into a casino. You’re playing with house money.
Nima: Say racist, violent bullshit about Muslims, and you can just tally up more votes on your side, and there’s nothing on the other side. You don’t lose anything by doing that.
Adam: Yeah, there’s no sense that there’s no side of the ledger you’re losing. And that’s the thing I think is fucking annoying, because when you when you say, Well, you know, this seems okay, she’s tracking right. Okay, you know, again, maybe if you sort of think that there’s some wisdom to that, or that’s where the the voter, the winnable voters are, or that’s where the donors are, and we need money to, you know, run it, whatever, like, I’m willing to listen to that. But there’s no sense it’s a calculus. It’s just free money. It’s just a perpetual motion machine of votes you get. And the other side of the ledger, the alienation, obviously, of young and progressive voters, with respect to Gaza, the alienation of, God forbid, Arab Muslim voters. But really, not even in those sectarian terms. It’s really based on age, you know, again, Jewish Americans under the age of of 40 by and large think Israel’s committing genocide. And this isn’t some sort of, you know, sectarian whodunit. It’s, these things are fairly unpopular with a broad swath of voters.
And of course, there’s just a general allergy to what’s seen as the establishment. This is something that Trump exploited to great effect in 2016 when he posed himself as being in opposition to the neoconservative Republican order. You know, he ended up kind of doing everything they wanted to do anyway. Wanted to do anyway, but they don’t trust him rhetorically. So that’s why they you know that the hanger-on, even though most of them work there, right? John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, they don’t, sort of, they think he’s a they think he’s fickle, but ultimately he just did the same neoconservative stuff anyway, so it didn’t matter. But that’s what he ran on sort of ostensibly, right, rhetorically, and I know it’s not 2016 so I think there’s not quite that dimension there. But I think with the fatigue of Gaza that kind of permeates our culture, the sense that we just have endless money for war while our country continues to fall apart, which is objectively true, I do think you see a reemergence of that, kind of skepticism about endless American imperial meddling and funding and arming us, not setting aside the sort of nonstop images of dead children that are emerging, both from Gaza and Lebanon and who the fuck knows anywhere now, now that the US says they approve of airstrikes against Iran itself, direct airstrikes, escalation of airstrikes, I think there’s a sense of like, wow, this is a little bit of deja vu.
And if we’re going to talk about the strategy of just courting Republicans and the five people at the Washington Post editorial board for whom this stuff matters, talk about what’s being lost potentially, right? What groups are being alienated? It’s the same thing in immigration, right? It’s just free real estate. You just get more. You ratchet up the racism and the xenophobia and the and then we’re gonna, you know, border in the photo ops with the cops. Okay, fine. There are some X amount of voters you gain from that, maybe, I don’t know, sure. But you also lose a lot of people. You alienate a lot of people. You make people cynical.
Nima: Right. And there’s no sense that there’s any kind of equation there.
Adam: No sense. Zero. You can read every New York Times article about her tracking right. I mean, again, show me where I’m wrong. But every media appearance, every single, like pundit game, it’s just a perpetual motion machine of getting votes. There’s no sense of a conservation of energy.
Nima: Yeah, it’s only a, like a savvy campaign move, right? There’s no sense that there’s a tradeoff.
Adam: Zero tradeoff.
Nima: Now, even more recently than bragging about Cheney endorsements, Harris has been on quite a media blitz this past week, Adam, so she gave a lengthy interview on 60 Minutes on CBS, she was on The View, the morning show, on Tuesday, October 8, and later the same day, was on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. She’s doing her media rounds now that we are just a few weeks out from the election, and so we wanted to kind of go through some of the things that she’s been saying in this latest round of interviews, and how they really do connect to this neoconservative play, which, yes, of course, they align perfectly with her actual ideology and where she wants her administration to go, or, And, or it’s also this kind of savvy campaign move. But we wanted to give a rundown of some of the things that she’s been saying, because wow, are they disheartening.
Adam: So here she is on 60 Minutes reiterating the Biden position and, frankly, the Trump position. They’re pretty much the same position, no matter what you get. Heads, I win, tails, you lose on Israel. So let’s listen to that clip now.
[Begin clip]
Kamala Harris: Well, let’s start with October 7. 1,200 people were massacred. 250 hostages were taken, including Americans. Women were brutally raped. And as I said, then I maintain Israel has a right to defend itself, we would, and how it does so matters. Far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. This war has to end.
Bill Whitaker: We supply Israel with billions of dollars in military aid, and yet Prime Minister Netanyahu seems to be charting his own course. The Biden-Harris administration has pressed him to agree to a ceasefire. He’s resisted. You urged him not to go into Lebanon. He went in anyway. Does the US have no sway over Prime Minister Netanyahu?
Kamala Harris: The work that we do diplomatically with the leadership of Israel is an ongoing pursuit around making clear our principles.
Bill Whitaker: But it seems that Prime Minister Netanyahu is not listening.
Kamala Harris: We are not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.
Bill Whitaker: Do we have a real, close ally in Prime Minister Netanyahu?
Kamala Harris: I think, with all due respect, the better question is, do we have an important alliance between the American people and the Israeli people? And the answer to that question is yes.
[End clip]
Adam: So here we have all the boilerplate cliches. Hamas is this uniquely evil, evile thing that can’t be negotiated with. But I also, kind of also want to quote-unquote, “end the war.” But clearly I don’t, because I don’t accept the premises to do so. And by what they mean by end the war and ceasefire, again, as we’ve reiterated now for going on six, seven months, is they mean that Hamas needs to capitulate on Israel’s terms, right? And they’re going to keep killing Palestinians ad infinitum until they do so. Bill Whitaker, 60 Minutes reporter, didn’t really push back. He kind of tried to. He said, Do we have a close ally in Netanyahu? And she says, Well, do we have a close alliance with the Israeli people? That’s kind of a liberal evasion to try to separate Netanyahu from the war itself, or the quote-unquote “war.”
Nima: While also specifically not even saying anything negative about Netanyahu, just pivoting, right? She’s not even doing the liberal hand-wringing about a right-wing government in Israel and yada yada, like that is all gone. It’s only just pivoting away from the actual question so that you don’t say, God forbid, anything negative about the Israeli government.
Adam: Yeah, and there’s nothing new here. This is the same boilerplate stuff. But if, for whatever reason, you’re one of the last holdouts fighting in theSouth Pacific jungles in the 1950s, this should be pretty much that, there’s nothing. There’s no difference. It’s the Biden policy. It’s the same policy. We have no indication it’ll be any different.
Nima: Right. Israel has a right to defend itself. You’re still kind of reiterating either dubious or debunked claims about what Hamas did on October 7, now that we’re a year from that.
Adam: Yeah, well, the point is, they have to be so ontologically evil you can’t negotiate a ceasefire with them, right?
Nima: Exactly. That it’s endless beheaded babies and sexual violence, whereas the IDF actually does those things, and there’s documentation of it.
Adam: Then she got a question about Iran, which was put on the online-only service. But this was also equally as neoconservative, I hate to use, you know, maybe that word’s a little dated at this point, but kind of general boilerplate, paranoid maximalist–
Nima: Yeah, real Axis of Evil stuff here. Let’s take a listen to that.
[Begin clip]
Bill Whitaker: Which foreign country do you consider to be our greatest adversary?
Kamala Harris: I think there’s an obvious one in mind, which is Iran. Iran has American blood on their hands. Okay? This attack on Israel. 200 ballistic missiles. What we need to do to ensure that Iran never achieves the ability to be a nuclear power–that is one of my highest priorities.
Bill Whitaker: So if you have proof that–
Kamala Harris: It must be.
Bill Whitaker: –Iran is building a nuclear weapon, would you take military action?
Kamala Harris: I’m not going to talk about hypotheticals at this moment.
[End clip]
Nima: I have to imagine, Adam, that the answer of Iran for the US’s greatest adversary, I mean, come the fuck on. But I think the answer to that has to be because of the recent missile attack that Iran launched on Israel a little over a week ago, and that without that, I don’t know if that would have been the answer. I think that’s still playing up this, Our support for Israel is unwavering, yada yada yada. And that had Iran not still been the only country to do fucking anything about Israel on the whole planet, that that wouldn’t necessarily have been the answer, had that been asked two weeks ago.
Adam: Yeah, I think it would have been. I think, I think it would have been, it was, it was Hillary Clinton’s answer to the question in 2016.
Nima: It sure was.
Adam: You know, because again, they view any resistance to Israel in the region, whether it be in Lebanon or Palestine or whatever. And I don’t know if they really believe this, but I certainly think they think that’s where the muscle comes from, that any and all resistance is just a kind of like appendage, you know, kind of 1880s cartoon octopus appendage of Iran, and that if you cut the head off the octopus, then, then basically it’ll be hunky dory. I mean, really, what they want is they just want basically every country in the Middle East to be a Saudi Arabia-type dictatorship under the US security apparatus.
Nima: Right. Which makes them uniquely evil. I mean, that’s exactly it like, because they are so not under the thumb of the United States security apparatus, that is what is going to make Iran the greatest threat. It’s not actual, doesn’t have to be, you know, what’s the greatest military threat? It’s actually the greatest kind of ideological or the greatest chip in the armor, right, of this, of this US hegemony and Israeli invincibility.
Adam: Well, what’s important to note is that these kinds of policy aside, this type of rhetoric, is to the right of Barack Obama. It is, it does mark, and I know the context is different in some ways, in terms of, you know, the current ongoing US support for genocide in Gaza and the escalation in Lebanon. But this kind of stuff is rhetorically far to the right of Obama. You know, it’s consistent more with Clinton, but even you can make an argument to the right of Hillary Clinton. And so that’s, you know, not a great sign. Again, I know there are those who still believe that she’s secretly super-duper, a Quaker pacifist at heart, but has to sort of put on, you know.
Nima: And the fact that she is broken in no way from Biden’s genocidal policy can dislodge that determination that she’s just, she’s just waiting, man, she’s just waiting. And she is going to be so, she is just going to be so peaceful.
Adam: And then, of course, she repeated, we won’t play the clip, but suffice to say, she repeated the every right-wing premise on immigration as well. So again, we come back to this idea of like, Okay, you know, all right, so we’re doing this again. All right, fair enough. You know this, the Citations Needed constituents, as fringe and small and obscure and powerless as it is, no offense, doesn’t really determine Democratic policy. That’s a position–
Nima: I believe in you all.
Adam: Yeah, right. This is, again, this is kind of expected to some extent.
Nima: I mean, it is, it is super-duper pablum. But I just want to note, you know, because we were just talking about her, her comment on 60 Minutes about Iran, and they echo, actually, her remarks the day Iran did launch ballistic missiles at Israel earlier this month, October 1. So she kind of had her script, right? She has her, current anti-Iran script calling the, you know, missile launches reckless and brazen. She said, quote, “Iran is a destabilizing, dangerous force in the Middle East, and today’s attack on Israel only further demonstrates that fact.” End quote. No mention of the fact that obviously Israel’s been committing genocide for now a year straight.
Adam: Well, they also, like unilaterally assassinated Iranian diplomats and officials, nonstop. I mean, the idea that, you know, Iran woke up one day and just decided to, like, attack Israel without any context, is obviously absurd. They blew up multiple Iranian diplomats.
Nima: Yeah. History always begins very conveniently right after Israel does all the things that it does. The kind of linking the messaging from this statement from October 1, with her comments on 60 Minutes, this idea of attacks on American military personnel, right? So on October 1, she said, quote:
Iran is not only a threat to Israel; Iran is also a threat to American personnel in the region, American interests, and innocent civilians across the region who suffer at the hands of Iran-based and -backed terrorist proxies.
End quote.
Adam: I mean, yeah, this is just, this is just boilerplate FDD crap.
Nima: It’s just boilerplate Bush-era, Bill Kristol, David Frum garbage.
Adam: Yeah, it’s just, it’s simplistic and cheesy. And it’s like, okay, but you just, we’re selling another, you know, $19 billion in weapons to Saudi Arabia. I mean, obviously this is all selective and silly, and no one takes it seriously. But again, this is the track she’s playing for either ideological reasons or electoral reasons.
Nima: No, exactly, exactly, and as you said, editorial board, donors, and then like, the Lincoln Project. That is the audience for this.
Adam: Now it’s, again, it’s possible, very possible, that one theory is that the people who run our campaign, I’m just throwing this out there, don’t actually possess any unique wisdom or have any kind of polling that indicates this. They literally just live in a bubble with other rich people and other rich donors. And this is the thing they think is the thing you do just possible. Don’t know that is possible. I don’t know. I think it’s possible. They just sort of all have the same brain thing, where you always go right, that’s the thing they’ve had since, you know, in 30 years. Of course, it benefits them financially in the long run. Benefits them in terms of, yeah, you know, obviously they revolve in and out of the corporate world.
Nima: It’s just sort of like a McKinsey mentality. It’s like Pete Buttigieg-ing your way into politics.
Adam: right? So that’s possible, possible. This is just a thing they never even considered not doing, right? It’s just, it’s just, it’s the received wisdom that’s taken for granted. Sure that’s the way it is, whether or not it works or not, is kind of secondary. It’s just a, it’s just a thing you do. You’re like a monarch butterfly going to, you know, Southern Mexico. You just, you don’t know why you’re doing it. You’re just going.
Nima: You’re just migrating. [Laughs]
Adam: you’re the third generation of this. And you just, you’re just going to the place debris. They don’t you just, we’re not sure what mechanism causes it. They’re just instinctually doing
Nima: it. Yeah, you’re just like, really psyched that John Negroponte and Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzales are endorsing her campaign.
Adam: Well, you know, it went viral on Tiktok. All the kids were talking about John Negroponte. So they were calling it, never Ponteposting, and never Pontechilling or vibing or something. I’m old. Anyway, so the one thing I would say is that, you know, as this election enters the final month, is that this is the sort of, even if that’s the track they wish to take. And then I have a simple, I think, humble request, which is that, is anyone in the media who interviews her and asks her about, because, again, she went on The View on Tuesday morning, and they asked if there’s anything she’s that would differentiate her from Biden. And she said, quote, “There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of, and I’ve been part of the most. I’ve been part of most of the decisions that have, that have had impact.” Unquote. She said, going on to talk about the administration’s work on capping the cost of insulin at $35 for Medicare recipients. But then she backtracked a bit later and said this:
[Begin clip]
Kamala Harris: Listen, I plan on having a Republican in my cabinet. You ask me, What’s the difference between Joe Biden and me? Well, that will be one of the differences. I’m going to have a Republican in my cabinet because I don’t, I don’t feel burdened by letting pride get in the way of a good idea.
[End clip]
Adam: Yeah, so she says she wants to put a Republican in her cabinet. All right, so we’re going on. This is obviously a campaign decision that was made. They’re going to go all in on trying to be the post-partisan, again, it’s almost exactly a carbon copy of what Clinton did and again. So there’s credit. Clinton did get more votes.
Nima: Yeah.
Adam: She just, you know, lost the election to a psychotic rapist who was on video saying horrible things and had multiple lawsuits and was a vile person with high negatives. So, you know, set the bar where you wish to set it. So I don’t know. They’re doing it again.
Nima: Yeah, they’re doing the, they’re kind of retreading the Doris Kearns Goodwin Team of Rivals, right? Like, I’m gonna be the president of everyone, and, you know, I’m gonna have a Republican in my cabinet. Who? I’m sorry. Who’s the audience for that? Like, I know I keep asking, Who the, who is the audience for that?
Adam: Maybe there’s an audience for it. Maybe there’s a voter constituency for it. I’m willing to concede that. All I ask in my humble position as a media critic and a podcaster is to acknowledge that there’s not, there’s such a thing as tradeoffs. There is not a perpetual vote-getting machine where you just say more racist and militaristic shit, and you magically get votes without like somebody, somewhere, just acknowledging that this alienates a core group of voters, and sows cynicism among voters for whom these things, for whom World War III is not high on their list of something they put great stock in. That’s all. That’s all I’m saying. I think that’s a reasonable criticism. I think it’s a very measured criticism. And I have never seen that.
Nima: No, no, because everything is treated like a smart way to gain votes.
Adam: Well, Republican votes count 50 times more than progressive votes. I don’t know how, or what the math on that is, but supposedly they do, and it’s not clear how that came to be.
Nima: Well, I think it’s because you think that the progressive votes are just guaranteed, right? It is such a guarantee. It is such a guarantee in terms of the political calculus of the Democratic Party. It’s such a guarantee the base never, base, not even the base, like but like an actual kind of more progressive and even even leftist constituency, which I would argue is not necessarily the Democratic base, or at least hasn’t been for a while, that those votes are either negligible, unimportant, or can be so written off that the gains you make by being a Republican, even though you’re a Democrat running for president, but when you neocon yourself, you are, as you said, Adam, you’re getting, you know, such an exponential advantage compared to what you could possibly lose by, you know, literally campaigning on an ideology that is directly counter to any kind of progressive ideology, right? Like, if you’re like, Dick Cheney wants me to be president, like you’ve kind of abdicated a certain level of yeah, just like a certain kind of way of looking at the world and expecting that to still pay off because of the unique evil of Trump. Or you just don’t care if you lose those votes.
Adam: You’re also divorcing Trump from the Republican brand, which, again, is exactly what Clinton did, and that has long, this is the thing. This is why the media is so obsessed with Never Trump Republicans, even though they’re less than 6% of actual Republicans. They’re a fairly fringe group of people, but yet they make up disproportionately the column space in the New York Times and MSNBC and CNN. And the reason is, is that they are, they are tasked with protecting the Republican brand, hoping to wait out Trump.
Nima: That’s right. So we can come back again.
Adam: Right. And, of course, a credible party that was countering Republicans, and a credible party that had deep ties to, you know, labor and anti-racism and all these kind of progressive pillars would work overtime to tie the Republican Party to Trump, forever. Which they are. That is objectively a factual statement. They are one and the same. There is very little difference. That is why they have to go to former representative Liz Cheney, right, who can’t even win a primary, to find one, because there really isn’t any meaningful constituency. It’s why J.D. Vance, when he was on MSNBC, yukking it up with Chris Hayes, was like, oh, yeah, Trump’s Hitler. And then the second he ran for office, what did he do? He became Trump 2.0. There isn’t really a difference. And this insistence upon, you know, insisting there is, again, assuming it has some short-term electoral value, in the long term, just does the bidding of the Republican Party.
Nima: Oh, totally, because it plays into this bullshit narrative also that, you know, Politics is working well when there are these two strong parties, and sure, there are differences, but you know, everyone has respect for the system. Do you know what I’m saying? We keep hearing from Democratic Party officials or from, even Harris herself, this idea that, Oh, there should be a strong Republican Party. It’s just, it shouldn’t be Trump’s Republican Party. It should be, what Bob Dole’s Republican Party? They talk about, like, Reagan, right? As if that was a, well-meaning, just, we kind of kindly disagreed, as opposed to that being its own kind of nightmarish vision of the world that then has since devolved through Republican politics, whether it was through the W. years or this fucking Trump era. But like, yeah, there’s this idea that then on the other side of Trump, we get back to the good old GOP, and that’s when politics return as normal, when it’s just kind of this friendly sparring, which, of course, it never actually is.
Adam: Right. If you were concerned with actually winning, you would want the GOP to be tied to Trump.
Nima: You would want to decimate that party forever.
Adam: It’s also a reflection of reality. You literally cannot win any Republican primary without Trump’s approval. That’s why John McCain sought Trump’s backing and got it when he ran in the primary in 2015, 2016. Because he knew it as well as anyone else.
Nima: Right, so it seems like the the Democratic Party calculus, the Harris campaign calculus, is effectively, not only promote the Democratic Party and win the presidency, but simultaneously promote this fantasy version of a good old Republican Party, and simultaneously do that to resurrect some sort of, I don’t know, Clinton-era two-party system where we kind of get past the Trump years and we resume politics as usual, and so the Harris campaign is trying to do both of those things at once. And you know, without any kind of public acknowledgement that, you know, maybe you’re going to lose some votes and support along the way, which is, I think, to your point, Adam, just be honest about what that means, right? [Laughs]
Adam: At least one.
Nima: Just be honest about it. You might lose a vote.
Adam: It’s not zero.
Nima: It’s true. All right. Well, that will do it for this Citations Needed News Brief. Thank you all for listening. We will be back very, very shortly with more full-length episodes in now season eight of Citations Needed. So stay tuned for those. Thank you all for your ongoing support.
Of course, you can follow the show onTwitter @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. We certainly hope you do. We are 100% listener funded. We don’t run any commercials, we don’t run any ads. We have no corporate sponsors or billionaire backers. And so we are able to do this because of the generous support of listeners like you, so please do go to Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast and help us out there if you can. But until next time, thank you all again for listening. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Citations Needed’s senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trende Lightburn. The newsletter is by Marco Cartolano. Transcriptions are by Mahnoor Imran. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again, everyone. We’ll catch you next time.
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This Citations Needed News Brief was released on Wednesday, October 9, 2024.
