Transcription
In the opening chapter of Maria Gashot's book, Crime and No Punishment: Wealth, Power, and Violence in America, a chapter titled Social Murder, she writes, "The United States is an exceptionally militarized, lethal, and violent country. The growing concentration of economic, political, and military power is draining America of vital resources to sustain healthy and peaceful communities. It is pushing more people to the margins where a police officer, a prison cell, a tent, a military recruiter, or a deadly dose of fentanyl laced heroin is waiting for them. Rates of homicide, gun violence, suicide, drug overdoses, incarceration, traffic deaths, poverty, and police use of force are exceptionally high in the United States compared to those of other Western countries."
She continues, "In a historic reversal, US life expectancy has fallen below that of much poorer countries as a growing number of people in this country are at risk of losing their homes, health, livelihoods, and savings. Tens of millions of US gun owners are locked and loaded, ready to take the law into their own hands or turn their guns on themselves, and escalating political violence has put the electoral system and democracy in America in mortal danger."
She warns that the United States is increasingly unable or unwilling to stem violence in its many forms. Powerful economic and political interests are rendering less powerful groups and individuals in the United States more susceptible to premature death and other harms or what Frederick Engles calls social murder.
Joining me to discuss her new book, Crime and No Punishment: Wealth, Power and Violence in America is Professor Marie Godshock. She is the Edmund Kaine Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania as well as the author of Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics. So, Maria, I I said before we went on the air, I thought your book was just a compendium of all of the uh political and historical missteps that have resulted in the rise of the cultlike figure uh of Trump. Um you open the book uh by looking at um the the kind of twin evils of uh state violence at home and imperial violence uh abroad. I'm just going to read I thought it was a really precient uh little section before I ask you. You say the country's deep investment in its overseas empire, including the massive military budget and the unassalable assumption that the United States is the indispensable nation destined to police the world has compounded the problem of violence in America. Can you talk about that inner link between imperial violence and violence at home?
>> Yeah, there's so many links. I studied mass incarceration for many years and we focused on that how you know we can shift money from policing uh to social welfare issues and defund the police but we ignore the fact that defunding the police is not going to solve the fundamental issues in the United States and that uh for all the talk about polarization the giant military budget goes through every year almost without any significant opposition and that the as a society those resources are not available to be tapped. So the first thing is just where the money is going. The second thing is that there's blowback from the empire that we see um that the policing that is done overseas and the what we learn about policing overseas, how policing developed since the early 20th century was very much intertwined with what the American military was doing and also of recruiting uh veterans to go into our police forces to use high level military training in our police uh forces. uh it was military equipment and so this kind of blowback from the empire and after 9/11 we talked about blowback whether it was going to increase threats of terrorism at home but we've ignored the blowback from uh policing and also the disparit impact of the empire on certain parts of the country. uh it's very easy today to disparage rural areas and to say that this is the heartland the support of um MAGA but in many ways rural areas have carried some of the heaviest burdens of the empire uh many people from rural areas have gone for two three four uh trips overseas served in the military they've come back um deaths have been lower than other wars but uh uh casualties injuries uh PTSD D mental health problems, opioid problems related to overseas service are astronomical in many of these communities.
You uh you make the link to between the um uh the kind of law and order agenda pushed through by the you know in large part by the Clinton administration. and at the same time the deregulation and uh kind of uh lack of oversight of of corporate crime, corporate malfeasants, but for those two issues for you are also interrelated.
>> Yeah, it's fascinating to me and it's I have to admit it was a major blind spot of myself teaching mass incarceration. I just focused on crime in the streets and didn't really focus on I mean I sort of knew there was crime in the streets but I didn't intensely focus on it and I didn't see these as two important twins that go together. And so while we're all focusing on mass incarceration and the no increasing number of people for crime in the streets or in US prisons putting the US really to be the world's warden almost the highest uh incarceration rate of any country in the world and yes you're right to finger the Clinton administration. At the same time we have these crime waves from corporate America and we have this phenomenal decriminalization of crime in the streets. So we have a uh evisceration of our regulatory units. We have the financialization not only of the secretary uh treasury the secretary the SEC taking people from the financial industry but increasingly during during the Obama administration to some extent Clinton administration you have people from the financial sector who are staffing key positions in the department of justice. And so what we've seen in is a lightening up on corporate crime both in investigating it in prosecuting it. And we had this in intensification of punishing people for street crimes.
>> Well, there's a quote in the book because all they do is slap [snorts] fines on them. Nobody's ever really sent to jail unless they're Bernie Maidoff and that's because he stole from the rich. Um, but there's a quote in the book, I think it was from Jamie Diamond. He says, "Go ahead, find me. I don't care what's $15 million whatever it he doesn't care, >> right? And it it was um a cl a quote directed at Elizabeth Warren when he was testifying, right? And if you see some of these fines from the financial crisis are they look like a lot of money, billions and billions of dollars, right? But often they they don't even equal the quarterly profits of these corporations. Uh, the corporations are able to often deduct these from their taxes. And many times the government doesn't even follow up whether they've paid these crimes uh these fines or not. I think the other thing important to focus on are these so-called uh deferred prosecution agreements. These this was a mechanism dates back to the early 20th century and it was to help young juveniles who got in trouble with the law to say look you stay clean. You you don't get in more trouble. We'll just not charge you. We'll not prosecute you. Well, beginning uh towards the tail end of the Clinton administration and then really taking off in the Bush administration and Obama administration, these became the mechanism of choice to deal with corporate America. And these are basically negotiated agreements between corporate law firms and the Justice Department. Um, if you break the deferred prosecution agreement, you're supposed to be prosecuted. That's what it is, a deferred prosecution. But it's often like Britney Spears, oops, I did it again. I break the agreement and I'm given another deferred prosecution agreement. These agreements are often not monitored in any close way. And uh, we you know, so with crime in the streets we obsess about are people who commit robbery or people who commit uh burglary are they going to recidivate again? But we have major corporations who are repeat recidivators and they get deferred prosecution agreements. The other thing about these agreements is you have a shift towards prosecuting the corporation rather than the uh corporate executives, right? And so that even if you would you have these, it's still not directed at the individuals but rather it's directed at the corporation which is a big change in the United States.
Um, talk about the the political effects as you as these huge corporate entities acrewed more and more wealth and more and more power. You do also write about of course the rise of the American oligarchic class. How did that affect our political system?
I think we have not fully reconciled with the enormous impact of the great recession and that we said the great recession was over. Obama campaigned in 2012. The economy is back. We're back. But for many parts of the country, we were not back and many parts of the country understood that this traumatic economic event happened. Millions of people lost their homes. We had the biggest mass migration of people since the great depression. People lost their pensions. Um, people lost their health care and it was a rebound from the great recession that was very unequal and that the coastal areas, the high-tech parts of the country rebounded while many other parts of the country were mired in this economic distress. Uh, tax bases were eroded. Public spending didn't come back. public spending on public health didn't bounce back and I think that was for many people a crystallizing event of experiencing this economic uh trauma and nobody was to blame for it and many of the elite uh the head of the Fed the head of uh corporations uh treated it like it's an act of nature it's an act of god it and yet we knew that there were many reports it was coming and that people that something had to be done and it wasn't done and many people in the United States understood that nobody went to jail for that nobody was charged for that and I think that that has been a very powerful undermining of trust in government uh and also that there was no reckoning with the banks the banks the largest banks came out stronger than before uh people understood that hundreds of billions millions of dollars went to save the banks. But the Obama administration supported a very shoddy foreclosure plan that as Timothy Gitener uh the secretary of the treasury we now understand said oh well the only plan the only reason for that was to foam the runway for the banks so to slow down the foreclosures a little bit so they could process them. it wasn't really to help the people who were in threat of losing their homes. And I think this we focus on lack of trust in Congress, but there's a fundamental lack and trust in corporations right now. And the public opinion polls are very interesting in that increasingly people uh don't trust corporations. They don't have a trust in capitalism. They have increased favorable views of socialism. And if you know we we look at the current president running 45 running in 2016 and then coming back again in in 2024 and we want to all blame this on this kind of misogynist racist uh dis deplorables that he's appealing to. And I think they're much more econ complicated reasons that yes, he's got this, you know, rage uh that he appeals to um from certain parts of the country, but there's also a powerful economic rage that then has been um directed towards immigrants, towards women, etc., etc. But I al also think it's directed towards increasingly the economic elite. It was a little interesting for me footnote in the book which I didn't know until I read it and I'd like you to address it and that is the spiraling mass incarceration rates in rural areas.
>> Yeah. So we often think of um mass incarceration as an urban phenomenon and one that prim primarily affects African-American men. And what we've seen over the last decade is a kind of shift in that your chances of being incarcerated have actually uh are higher in rural areas and suburban areas than they are in urban areas right now. And so even though we're overall in some states seeing the incarceration rate go down, it's often driven because the incarceration rate in urban areas is going down and meanwhile in rural areas uh it's go it's going up. And so it's misleading to say, you know, we finally um are going to have a downward trend incarceration rate that there's actually great variation across the c country in this.
>> And this is also accompanied by which I didn't know until I read your book a rise of police violence in rural and suburban communities. you write uh which have accounted for about 3/4 of such fatalities in 2020. The fact is not widely known for several reasons. Research on police homicides overwhelmingly focus on large cities even though most of these fatalities occur in communities with fewer than 100,000 people. Furthermore, major cities tend to have more political networks, organizational resources, and media outlets. So police killings in urban areas are more likely to attract public attention. Indigenous people are the most at risk of being killed by the police, but their deaths, which typically occur in rural, underpop populated areas without witnesses to record the deadly encounters on smartphones, do not garner wider public attention.
>> Yeah, you know what I'm trying to do here is to talk about police as state violence and to see that it's not just an urban phenomena and also to understand some of the deeper structural roots and causes of that. And it's remarkable to me that we really we have very good data on how many police get killed each year. But we don't
>> which I just want to interrupt you. I know from your book almost none are are charged or they're charged with very minor offenses. I mean, it's staggering. I I think I think if I remember you had a there was like one per I mean you you know the figures but it's kind of shocking.
>> Right. Right. Very few get charged. Uh, very few get convicted and then even if they get convicted the sentences are are pretty nominal. Right. Um, even in in departments that have banned choke holds, you can have police who use choke holds and sometimes the p they won't get charged and the internal punishment might be taking some of their vacation days. But trying to look at rural deaths and to see state violence as something that spans the United States, right, is a very important way to try to think about the coalitions to challenge state violence and that certainly African-Americans are more are disproportionately killed by the police, but in many parts of the country being in a rural area Being a white person in a rural area will put you at high risk for being killed by the police. And it's often how we think about racial disparities. Uh, white people are less likely to be killed by police than African-American people are. But white people in the United States compared to white people in the United Kingdom or Germany are very high at risk for being killed by the police because we have such high rates of police violence. And the police violence is probably even higher than what we know because we don't collect good data on police killings of civilians.
>> And as you write, more white people are killed by US police officers each year than people from any other racial or ethnic group, eight of the 10 states with the highest rates of fatal police shootings are in the West, where black people constitute barely 3% of state populations on average. As for the other leading states, one is West Virginia, which is one of the whitest and least diverse states. The other is Louisiana, one of the most racially and ethnically diverse states. White people make up the majority of people in rural areas in nearly every state and also constitute twothirds of the people killed by the police and rural communities. That that that that those statistics I were completely unknown to me.
>> Mhm. Yeah. It's they're unknown to a lot of people, right? Because we think that if we just fix our urban police departments, we're going to fix this problem. I think the other piece that I don't emphasize enough in the book though I do mention is many of these rural areas are run by sheriffs and sheriffs are a whole force onto their own. They're elected. Um, they are above the law in many ways and they are a prime recruiting ground now for this constitutional sheriff's movement which is that we can interpret the law the way we see fit because we are elected and we are they argue the the prime representation of the public will.
Well, you compare it to police systems in Europe, not only in terms of training, which is much more extensive, but also the the you know the vast variety of law enforcement entities that you know exist throughout the United States, which are disperate which are not connected.
>> right and you know how do you have you know some places you have a police force that's one person right and the average police force is 10 or 12 people how do you get high quality training training. In many states, we have more extensive training required for a hair stylist or a manicurist than we require for someone who's going to carry a gun and be able to shoot and kill someone.
>> Oh, it's a matter of weeks, isn't it? What did you say? It's like 11 weeks.
>> Yeah, 11 weeks is the average. Uh, and if you in Europe, uh, some countries it's three years of training. And in some of the Scandinavian countries, getting into a police training program is as hard as getting into an elite university in the United States.
I want you to talk about what you call the fetish of secrecy.
>> The fetish of secrecy is we don't know what the police are doing, right? We don't collect good data on civilian deaths. Uh, and we often focus on civilian deaths and we forget that there many more times uh shootings, sexual assault, uh beatings, o all other kinds of abuse by the police and there much of the data that we have on police abuse is collected by enterprising journalists uh citizens. Uh, it's no national database on what the police are doing. Uh, the 1994 crime bill said that police department should do collect this data, but there have been no real strong incentives like we'll take away federal funding if you don't collect this data. So we don't have even good databases to track this information.
You also write about non-fatal police violence and abuse. You say, "While killings by the police have become a major issue in recent years, other types of police violence and abuse have received comparatively little national attention, sexual assault, and sexual misconduct are among the most frequently reported forms of police misconduct, second only to excessive use of force. Lowincome LGBTQ people, black women, and members of other historically disadvantaged groups are most likely to be victims of sexual assault and sexual misconduct by law enforcement. Police officers across the country conduct roadside digital anal and vaginal exams on the thinnest of pretexts. Furthermore, school officials and police nationwide persist in strip searching students from preschoolers to high schoolers in violation of the Constitution because courts cannot bring themselves to impose a penalty upon them for doing so."
>> Yeah, it's pretty remarkable, isn't it?
>> Yeah, but it again it's this culture of impunity.
>> It is a culture of impunity and The reasons why first we don't prosecute and then the second reason is if you want to bring a civil lawsuit, we have this thing called qualified immunity which essentially is uh has immunized most of the police from really ever facing serious civil lawsuits. And even if you're able to get your lawsuit into court, and even if you win, uh the police themselves usually don't even pay the uh penalties or this the cost of the civil lawsuit, the fine.
You you also write about police unions. Uh, of course, you have a notorious police union in Philadelphia where you teach,
>> which can often resemble a white hate group. Um, but uh, these uh police unions bestow you right political endorsements. They run their own candidates. Uh, it goes far beyond the traditional role of enforcing established policies. Talk about the role of police unions.
Police unions are a very powerful force and some police commissioners say, you know, we don't even have control over our unions, right? And so that uh many, you know, if there's a shooting, uh often police have the right, for example, if there's video of that shooting to see the video ahead of time before they're interviewed, right? So they can make their stories align with what the video is there. um that they have uh ne often aren't interviewed right away when uh there's a shooting of a civilian. um, it's many of these things go to arbitration and the arbitration is very heavily tilted towards the police. Uh, so it's very difficult to discipline police uh to fire to fire police um to impose new strictures on the on the police.
When did this begin? And I mean you had Rizzo in Philadelphia. It was the 1960s, right?
>> Yeah.
>> Uh, and I think at one point Philadelphia had the most in terms of per capita was killing more people and of course the whole Mamia Abu Jamal case. But what is it that in in your view that triggered this culture of impunity, this ability of the police to carry out uh lethal violence and and non-lethal abuse?
I think you have to go back to the 20th century and really going back again to the empire actually and bringing military back into the United States at a time when there's more attention on developing police forces because at that time capital didn't really want to pay for police forces. uh they had their own private police forces. But increasingly with labor unrest, uh rising um concerns about income inequality, political mobilization with the populace, uh capital began to think maybe we need professional police forces. Maybe we need to pay for those police forces. That was the same time that the United States was going out as an empire and then bringing back veterans who had developed policing tactics overseas. And there was this idea that we should make professional police and professional police should be autonomous and they should behave like the military. And so these roots of this militarization of the police and its autonomy stretch, you know, are intertwined with the development of of the empire. But there was a backlash. I mean, certainly in the 60s. I mean, wasn't there a certain period of an an attempt at a corrective or not?
>> Yeah, it's it's really really interesting. We think about um Lynden Johnson and the big crime bill and the kerner commission and saying that we need to invest more in jobs and health care and the social safety net and things like that. But the other thing that came out um of the the crime bill of 1968 was actually that we need to have more professional police. And here professional police was defined by more equipment, more more training and more autonomy for local police because one of the ways that local police bought into, okay, we might get this infusion of money from the federal government was that we'll take that, but we need to have autonomy. And so you you give a lot of this military equipment, but you're also having rising autonomy of the local police. And again, you also see the blowback from the empire because this was a period of let's use develop non-lethal weapons. But many of these so-called non-lethal weapons uh that were used overseas during that period obviously Vietnam, many of them were actually quite lethal. Uh, tear gas that was used in Vietnam that was imported back here was very very lethal, rubber bullets, things like that. But we began to use the language of non-lethal weapons even though these were actually um could kill you and if didn't kill you, they could seriously harm you. So we talked about this new professional policing with non-lethal weapons, but it was highly militarized policing.
Can you talk about the parallels between de-industrialization and the militarization and excessive force by police and of course the huge expansion in the Carcel state?
So, one of the reasons that we got the caral state, I was served on the National Academy of Sciences Commission on the causes and consequences of mass incarceration. And one of the causes we came to as a committee to agree upon was that you had de-industrialization in the cities in the 1950s and60s. And there was rising fears that people didn't have jobs and that that might be a threat in some ways to the stability of cities and with the decline of jobs um decline of uh social services things things like that in the cities and so there was a sense that you needed to assert more control over cities. Uh, there's a common thing that if employment goes unemployment goes up then disorder will follow. That isn't always true, but it's a really common belief. And so there's an idea about cracking down. Uh, if you if you think that that's one of the things that fueled increased police and increased incarceration, then we can think that something like that is hap happening at a delay in rural America. as you got NAFTA, as you got um more industry that was in rural areas and in the heartland moving overseas, you had this wave of de-industrialization. You know, 50s and 60s, many companies moved out of the cities, moved to green field building green field sites where they didn't have to deal with labor unions, uh fewer environmental protections, cheaper labor, all that kind of stuff. Then they started moving to Vietnam, to China, to Mexico. And with this de-industrialization in these areas, um, you have some of the, uh, same fears that you had in urban areas that helped to fuel mass incarceration in urban America.
I just want to read a passage you wrote about the Obama administration because it seems to me uh, that this passage explains how the Obama administration really paved the way for the arrival of Trump. The Obama administration failed to reverse the remarkable inversion in the criminal legal system of the last five decades. That is the vast expansion of the carceral state to punish street crimes, drug offenses, and immigration violations since the 1970s and the accelerating de facto decriminalization of highlevel crime in the suits since the 1990s. as nonprosecution agreements and deferred prosecution agreements proliferated to settle cases stemming from the financial and foreclosure crisis. These get out of jail free cards became even more deeply legitimized and institutionalized to deal with all kinds of corporate crime under Obama and his successors. Furthermore, Obama's mortgage relief program ended up being a boondoggle for leading banks and mortgage servicesers who turbocharged the foreclosure crisis, turning millions of people out of their homes and illegally repossessing many properties. An estimated 9 to 10 million families would end up losing their homes, about twothirds of them to foreclosures. many people simply walked away from their devalued properties as you said earlier returning the keys to the banks and action that would destroy famil family's credit for years.
Um, I I I think that the you make this point in the book. I mean, you people who turned to Trump had at one point supported Obama.
>> Well, and at one point had supported Bernie Sanders too after Obama. Right. And so, you know, there's a common argument that, you know, the the support for Trump is largely racially driven, but there were millions of whites who voted twice for Obama. And, you know, Obama won states like Indiana, which we can't imagine the Democrats right now winning, right? But he won Indiana. And many of the a good n proportion of the Sanders voters, we understand, then moved over moved over to Trump. And if you listen to Trump's final commercial, his main commercial in the 2016 election, it s it could be a commercial by Bernie Sanders except that the voices unmistakably Trump's, but it it's pictures of Bill and Hillary Clinton, the so-called global elite, the oligarchy, and it's interspersed with this multicultural um workingclass people of seemingly all different races, ethnic backgrounds, etc. And it's a very very powerful commercial about this perception that uh these people have been abandoned in the United States.
I want to add one other thing about Obama. The book I what I don't want people to come away with is thinking corporations have always had all this power. There is no choice. There's nothing we can do about it. And what I try to do in the book is say yes, corporations throughout American history have disproportionately had power, but it's waxed and it's waned. And I try to identify moments when it was possible to do something else. So after the savings and loan crisis, George HW Bush was forced to put some regulations in. The Clinton administration stripped down those guard rails and let let the economy rip and be deregulated. uh crashed and burned with the great recession. Obama comes in and we read back now and say it was always polarized with Obama. Yes, it was very polarized about the Affordable Care Act, but there was remarkable support ranging pretty broadly across the political spectrum to restructure the banks to do not just window dressing about uh economic reform, but something much more uh penetrating so that you wouldn't have these banks become too big to to fail. uh that you would make them pay in some certain way that you would make them uh keep high reserves in in in uh compared to previously. And the Obama administration blinked on that and Obama's justification he said if we sent these corporate executives to jail and we use the criminal system he says in his memoir that would have been violence to the social order. I think about that. I think about the violence to so many Americans who lost their homes, who lost their pensions, right? But but this would be violence to the social order. So what Obama sort of argues is, okay, we're going to do regulation, right? We're not we're going to just let our Department of Justice close its eyes to what's going on and instead we're going to do regulation. And then he supported a very weak regula uh economic reform regulation of the banking industry. Uh, he delayed in in what side he was going to come out on that. By that time capital had regrouped. They were back on a roll. The largest banks had consolidated. They used the hundreds of billions of dollars um in the TARP money to to come back u to buy up smaller banks. and that then at that point uh Obama had missed the moment and yet there were there were opportunities legislation in Congress to take a much stricter uh position with the financial industry and it didn't happen and Obama justified it. Okay, we're going to do regulation. We're not going to do criminal. But he didn't really do either.
And let's talk before we talk about Trump the media a little bit and and the fact that you have this handful of oligarchs buying up Larry Ellison Bezos and others and what that has done that kind of corrosive effect on our political life.
You know I mean I'm a journal I'm a professor today in part because I used to be a journalist and I sort of saw some of what was happening. I work for an independent newspaper. It got bought up by Guanette. We tried to organize a union. I watched what happened when an independent
>> Which paper was it?
>> The Burlington Free Press.
>> Oh yeah.
>> It was a really fine newspaper that then, you know, shrunk its news hole, didn't do as much investigative journalism, etc., etc.
But the problems with the press predate, you know, just Bezos, right? That in fact, we've had this consolidation of the media for several decades now. We have not had administrations willing to use antitrust law, the FCC to uh prevent those consolidations that are going on. We've also not had a good push to support local journalism like you have in in other countries where you know people pay a tax and they see it as a public service that you should have good local journalism, right? You that's what you have in Norway and that's what you pay you pay for it. like you pay for roads, you pay for good local journalism. What we've seen now is this all happening on steroids. And the other piece of it, and again goes back to Clinton administration, the Clinton administration let private equity rip after the um 1980s and the um crisis that we had with with some of the corporate raiders. Um, private equity recoiled a bit, but then Clinton, some deregulation that happened during the Clinton administration allowed private equity to blossom again. And private equity has been very corrosive to journalism. And one of the things I'm trying to do with the book is to say that we need to think of all these aspects, right, of of what is corroding our society and not just look at at at Trump either Trump 45 or 47 and one of them being journalism.
Well, Trump is he's the symptom. He's not the disease,
>> right? Uh, and I think you know by the end of your book you you I think you do a good job of explaining why we have a figure like Trump, a con artist, demagogue. Um, because the one thing he did was tap into that very legitimate sense of betrayal uh by both parties, a sense of anger. Um, and uh in some ways the kind of mask that has has been ripped off and we're seeing all of the poisons that you document in the book being turbocharged by the Trump administration.
We are. You know, I I think and you know, people say to me like, "How could all these Americans have voted for Trump in 2016?" And I said to many Americans, Hillary Clinton looked like a shill for Wall Street,
>> which she was,
>> which right to many, right? And when it came, you know, her $100,000 speeches that she was getting
>> for Goldman Sachs,
>> for Goldman Sachs, you know, her fancy home in the Hamptons, etc., etc. um and her saying, you know, when Bill and I left the White House, we were penniless and then their net wealth was being in the tens of millions of dollars. And so, you know, people saw that. And I don't think we should underestimate what they may not know every in and out of the the great recession and the financial crisis, but they can pick up on some of that. and especially when Trump came down his elevator and made his announcement and he he stoked some of those uh concerns. So now, you know, the the the deregulation, the destruction of watchdog agencies, uh, you know, just the the entire edifice that provided ineffective, but at least largely ineffective, but at least some protection are just being ripped apart. Uh, of course, the uh Trump administration has uh no respect for the system. I mean, they tried to overturn the when he lost the first presidential race. When he ran this time, he said that if he lost in 2024, it would he wouldn't acknowledge the results. He's talking about a third term.
Where are we?
Where are we? I guess it's who's we, right? I think the elite in the Democratic party are there were good days. We need to go back. And Obama looks better when you compare him to Trump. Biden looks better when you compare him to Trump. George W. Bush looks better when you compare him to Trump. Right? Until we, the elite, finally reconcile with what their responsibility was for where we are, we can't go start rebuilding. And it's not about going back. And in some ways it's about a reckoning with what the wrecking ball was from both parties and the elite of both parties. And then it becomes this is not just going to come by putting somebody else in the White House. And the the takeover of the Republican party was not just about Donald Trump. This has been a decadesl long project to figure out how to shift the polity in the United States and this didn't come out of nowhere. And if we think we're just going to elect somebody new in 2028 to clean it up, it's not going to happen. And there isn't I don't sense that energy in the elite levels of the Democratic party to really reckon with this. I think there are um, you know, the the grassroots that they've been trying to trash in the Democratic party for a long time or trying to contain it those forces. Um, but there does seem to be this kind of that, you know, bring back the good old days without recon recognizing that the gold days were the Clinton years of deregulation where Obama having this phenomenal moment, this political moment. Um, got himself to a veto for a short time, a veto proof uh, Senate. And what did he do with it? Right. He squandered that moment.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's the tragedy of it. Um, it's kind of like the sterility of late the late VHimar Republic. Um, it's extremely worrying. Um, I think the I think you'd probably agree the Democratic Party's sabotaging of the Bernie Sanders campaign was um, you know, one of the greatest political sins because he was speaking to those issues. Um, and his commitment to the working class, unlike Trump's, of course, is real. Um, uh, and and as you mentioned even on university campuses, there's a paragraph in your book about the shutting down of the encampments, the closure of free speech on university campuses.
Well, this is something that's very near and dear to me because and even at my own university, the narrative is well, we just have to weather what's going on in Washington and it's all just happening down in Washington. And we forget the really tragic year we had in universities in 2023, 2024, and really that we're living in right now of a complete chill and lockdown for open expression on universities. And we're right now going to impose possibly some very permanent draconian open expression rules at my university that um I can't believe might actually pass. And be imposed here. And these are pre-Trump. These are things that happened under Obama. And even at my own university, I talk about in the book, we called out my public security people of a SWAT team looking for a student who allegedly threw paint on the statue of Benjamin Franklin. Like, how did that happen? And that is and how do we allow like the outrage, right, that we're calling out SWAT teams on our students for something so minor like that? And that again is also a public reckoning. Likewise, at my own university, um, we essentially had attempt for a hostile takeover of our board that ended up, you know, losing our president at our university. And that was not all about just what's happened in Washington, but it is the tentacles of these larger political forces that many people just think, including many administrators at my university, that we can just get below the radar, wait this out, maybe things will be better in 2026 midterms in the 2028 election, and not really see that democracy is in peril and that we're both all of fault and we all have to save it rather than kind of cowering which is what I see with many of the elite universities including my own.
Yeah, it's really quite tragic. I know I spent 20 years overseas and you know once they shut down the universities universities are always the last readout of free expression you know real political debate once they shut those down it's almost uh unfortunately terminal um that I You know, I was at Harvard and the Dartmouth students would always come and dump green paint all over John Harvard every year. Um, so I can just imagine the SWAT teams coming for them. Uh, thank you very much, Marie. Uh, and I want to thank, uh, Sophia, uh, Max, and Melena who produced the show. You can find me at chris edges.substack.com. Hey, >> thanks much, Chris. >> [music] >> What did we do?