If The Dream Is Over That Means We Were Asleep To Begin With

Menaker: Going back through the whole nightmarish, dark comedy of this campaign season…you talk about how the press didn’t know what to make of a populist movement on either the Left or Right. In the epilogue of your book you talk about what the populist movement on the Right looks like, and you talk about the end of the liberal era that you clock at beginning with the March on Washington in 1963 and the rise of a kind of Right-wing populism or the alt-right. The whole end of the book is about the rise of this White identity politics and tribalism that has filled the void from the collapse of the liberal order that we have seen. Could you talk a little more about that?

Taibbi: Sure. One of the things I got wrong during the campaign was if you went to the Trump’s rallies, the alt-right guys weren’t there…

Christman: (interrupting) They’ve got gaming to do!

Taibbi: Right, they are campus conservatives and they think of themselves as the same way the Bolsheviks thought of themselves in relation to the peasantry—they are the vanguard of this other movement. So, I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to them until Steve Bannon enters the picture as the second most powerful person in the country. And their belief system coincides with a lot of the stuff Trump talked about—it was all culture first, and ‘we don’t really believe that people are eventually going to get along’ and there the ‘racial holy war’. It was actually a subtext to the campaign all along. We had this unspoken idea that the ‘I Had a Dream’ speech was the model for how we were supposed to think about race relations. And that’s over now.

Menaker: Well even conservatives would pay lip service to that and claim him for themselves. Or at least not openly despise everything he stood for. 

Taibbi: Right, and now all bets are off. They have permission to dismiss that. And now we are ‘considering other models’ for how we are gonna get along haha.

Felix: It was interesting. For the past 25 or 30 years, the concessions that Republicans and Democrats at the federal level got out of each other just by co-existing socially, on the Republican side they got Democrats to say ‘well yeah we believe in a strong defense, fight all foreign enemies, and stand behind the president in a time of war’—you know all this bullshit that would give a blank check to the deep state. Whereas the only thing Democrats could get out of Republicans was for them to vaguely speak to this ‘I have a dream’ idea. But that speech isn’t even what we culturally understand it as. The ‘Letter From Birmingham Jail’ is a more comprehensive representation of what King believed. 

Taibbi: Well there was a reason for that. He didn’t want to over sell. 

Felix: Right, but even if you read that speech, the message of that speech is that ‘I don’t see race’. So that was the concession that Democrats yanked out of Republicans by living in the same bubble, which was for them to speak to this very surface level repudiation of racism while still enacting voter suppression and fucking everything else. 

Taibbi: And now we don’t even have that!

Menaker: So the alt-right as a political movement, do you think the press is giving them too much press or not enough?

Taibbi: Well I never thought they were the driving force of all this hatred and anger—you know the same way Leviticus isn’t the reason people hate homosexuals. I just think they are appropriating things that are already out there. And because they are a bunch of college educated people—self-described ‘smart guys’—they are gonna weasel their way into government, they will be the people who end up with positions of power. And their gonna have an ability to impact things much more than anybody else. 

Menaker: Well they have a think tank now.

Felix: The Nationally Punched Institute!

Menaker: Well you bring up Bannon, and we know he’s obsessed with Lenin and sees him as a political model, basically. 

Taibbi: They have all of the elements for the same Leninist pattern. You have a huge population of people that are pissed off and easily manipulated. Then you have a small group of really obnoxious, heartless intellectuals who have no scruples about doing anything. And that’s how you get a disastrous historical movement.

Menaker: All of our tankie listeners are now are going ‘You heard it here, he called Lenin obnoxious!’

Felix: I mean it is kind of funny. These agoraphobics who never leave the house are like ‘Everyone agrees with us. America was not racist before we started posting!’

Christman: People are just ‘White folks voting Republican are just more self-consciously voting for Whiteness’.

Taibbi: Right, there’s no code words anymore. It’s not that far from—well I hate to do the whole Nazi thing—but they are using a lot of language that is pretty similar.

Menaker: Well Trump did say ‘America First’ twice in his inaugural speech. And you close out the book with this paragraph that I thought was very poignant, you say “Meanwhile the pessimism of Trump’s revolution is intentional, impassioned, and ascendant. They placed a huge bet on America’s worst instincts and won. And the first order of business is to wipe out a national idea in which they never believed. Welcome to the end of the dream.” I mean, it’s tough stuff, but it’s all right there. And that liberal dream that I’ve lived in my entire life, that era is over now.

Taibbi: Right, we never knew anything else.

Menaker: If the dream was over, that means we were asleep to begin with. So, now we are awake, and what we do counts. Or we should try to make it count. 

Taibbi: No, I mean, it was incomplete before, and the vagueness of that—this sort of weird nervous détente allowed us to exist for some time—and now it’s ‘V: The Final Showdown’. Something has got to give during this era. But the problem is, I’m not hugely confident in—well the fact that Trump—

Menaker: Haha, well don’t underestimate the ability of these people to just trip over their own dick. 

Producer: Well not only that, but I was talking with a friend last night who is a labor organizer who is really despairing, not only the thing we have been talking about with Trump but also the state of the Left. And what I thought is that Obama was a dangerous thing for the Left in many ways; he made the old guard kind of complacent and he made the young guard—a whole eight years’ worth of people who might have entered into a more antagonistic relationship with politics—they just sort of felt well…he’s kind of got this. He’s a good guy, he may not do everything perfect, but he seems like me. But that left everybody wide open to confront what it feels like to think ‘I need to get fucking involved’. There wasn’t that urgency under Obama. And now there is this greater emergency with Trump in power. 

Menaker: Well Matt, another point you make in the book is that this idea of the Obama coalition that you and probably myself as well put undue faith in…the fact that America has elected a black president twice and his name is Barack Hussein Obama, isn’t thatweird, so this is just gonna keep going. And I feel like there is this sort of pattern in American history that people think that these old—you know Ralph Steadman caricatures—they’re extinct, they will just go away, but they keep coming back. You know these crew cut, fat, hick fascists—they’re still there! 

Published 1/29/17. Abridged transcript of “No Country For Gorilla Men”, Episode 77 Chapo Trap House.