He is a Being Made of Television

There is not a morning that goes by without some story about the impact of social media. The power of Facebook or Twitter, or Instagram. With all of that, it’s easy to forget the power of television. Its impact on our lives growing up, its power today and what it has wrought. It’s given us Ronald Regan, Josiah Bartlet, and Donald Trump.

Howard Beal laid it out for us in Network, but James Poniewozik gives us the contemporary context in his new book Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America

My conversation with James Peniewozik:

How Women are Changing American Politics

Our founders devised a political system that was inherently difficult to change. They saw almost every aspect of the desire for change as needing to be cooled before even the most white-hot desire for progress could be codified. With respect to race and gender, it’s been even more difficult. Those were the prejudices and stereotypes baked into the founding documents themselves.

This is certainly one of the reasons it has taken so long for people of color and for women to be a full part of the political process.

Hillary Clinton talked about those tens of millions of cracks in the glass ceiling. But the safety glass that is history, made those cracks very hard to break. In fact, perhaps it was only with the elections of 2018 that we have seen some of those cracks become full-blown breaks. Even though women have made political progress, the terms of the debate and the campaigns have been based on the historical precedents set by white men.

All of this is changing as is documented by Caitlin Moscatello in her new book See Jane Win: The Inspiring Story of the Women Changing American Politics.

My conversation with Caitlin Moscatello:

How Our Republic Collapsed and How it Might Be Saved

How many times a day do you hear or read someone opining on what’s wrong with America and American politics? As is too often the case we love to look for the simple solution. The one answer that will explain it all. The unified field theory of American politics.

But unlike physics, the answer to understanding politics, the business and the interaction of people, is more nuanced, more complex and more like evolution than physics.

Layer upon layer of behavior, decisions, and leaders have lead us to where we are today. To a politics not just of polarization, but of pure primal tribalism

Longtime journalists and author Michael Tomasky tries to peel back these layer in is his new book If We Can Keep It: How the Republic Collapsed and How it Might Be Saved.

My conversation with Michael Tomasky:

If You Spend Hours Watching Cable News, You Are Just A Political Hobbyist

Partly as a result of 24/7 cable news and its unending political coverage, politics today is simply another form of entertainment. A spectator sport at best.

We know the names of all the players. Nate silver homogenizes sports and election statistics as if we all had political bookies. We’re angry and we want purity tests for our candidates.

What we’ve lost sight of in all of this is what politics is actually for. It is, at its core, only about the wielding of power to accomplish something. Success comes not from shouting, or self-righteousness, or the sanctity of one’s views, but from the ability to muster the requisite number of votes.

This is true whether it’s about pre-existing conditions and guns or about filling a pothole or paving a road in your community.

Political science professor Eitan Hersh explains this in Politics Is for Power: How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change.

When Did We Start This "Division Thing?"

We wonder why millennials are different. Imagine growing up in our current highly partisan, polarized political environment, and not knowing anything else. Not knowing an America where compromise is possible, where division within the political parties produced candidates that moved to center. They did not watch Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neil work across the aisle, or Lyndon Johnson exhibit political courage by championing civil rights legislation.

Imagine if all you knew politically was Rush, Hannity, and Maddow? For a brief and shining moment, we tried something else. Barack Obama captured it. Rather than being radical or progressive, he really was the person who we looked to make America great, to bring back the better way it used to be.

Instead, the opposite has happened.

It seems that every day we are fighting the same battles. Boomers in a kind of one last hurrah are relitigating the fights of the 60s and ’70s and things only get works, as the center cannot hold. These are the divides examined by Julian Zelizer and Kevin Kruse in Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974

My conversation with Julian Zelizer & Kevin Kruse:

The Week Politics Went Tabloid: A Conversation with Matt Bai about Gary Hart and THE FRONT RUNNER

For those that study and write about politics, the holy grail is to find those seminal moments in the nation's public and political life that change everything. And while the antecedents of those events may be years in the making, they usually create a perfect storm that results in an event that is a kind of tipping point; one that marks a permanent tectonic shift in the political landscape. Sometimes we have to let time pass, before we appreciate or even understand those moments.

The televised Nixon-Kennedy Debate, Watergate, the Nixon’s resignation and the Vietnam war piped into our living rooms, are such event. And, according to longtime political journalist Matt Bai, the implosion of Gary Heart's presidential campaign in 1987, was also such a moment. One that Bai captures in all its complexity,  in All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid.  The book has been turned into the recently released movie THE FRONT RUNNER, also co-written by Bai.

It's about a time when politics became a plot-line, when the personal became both political and public, and when Who, What, Where and When, became Gotcha. This conversation, while it originally took place in 2014, shows the blueprint of how Trump got elected and how we got to where we are today.

My conversation with Matt Bai:

Is Hope or Change Ever Possible After Trump?

Once upon a time, hope and change formed the basis of our political discourse. That now seems so long ago. Remember a time when the Koch brothers were the enemy, when we thought John McCain was the far right, when those of us on the left thought the FBI and the justice department needed watching?

In just ten years, we’ve gone through the looking glass. Now up really down, down is up, black is white and our enemies are embraced.

Our divisions over culture, politics, race and class have been weaponized. And demographics, geography, social media and technology make it so we seldom have to interact with anyone that disagree with us.

In this atmosphere of tribalism on steroid, is any kind of positive national politics still possible? Clearly on a local or community level, there is some reason to be optimistic. However on a national level, have we digressed to a point where even the instruments of our founding father, may not bring us back.

Dan Pfeiffer is a bit more optimistic in his new book Yes We (Still) Can: Politics in the Age of Obama, Twitter, and Trump

My conversation with Dan Pfeiffer:

Why Art and Artists Matter...Now More Than Ever

In the US. or anywhere else around the world, when freedom is threatened, when liberty is under siege, it is often the artist that comes to the rescue. Not necessarily in the realm of changing politics, but in reminding us why that freedom is important, inspiring us to remember what matters, amidst the fear and noise of repression.

In a new book entitled It Occurs to Me That I Am America: New Stories and Art, Jonathan Santlofer, has brought together some of the most profound artists and writers of our time, to do exactly that.

My conversation with Jonathan Santlofer:

A Look At What A Real President Was Like

I’m not sure when politics became a dirty word. But there was a time when it was a noble profession. When the best the the brightest sought to serve, and when differences of opinion were about how to better the lives of all people, not just those at the top, or those at the margins, or those in power.

To successfully engage in politics tooks a very special skill set, that was about understanding people and what they wanted, and forming coalitions to compromise and get things done. How far we have fallen from that ideal.

It was Bismarck who said that “politics was the art of the possible.” Few understood this better than the 32nd President of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt. Presidential historian Robert Dallek takes a deep dive into the political Roosevelt, in  Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life

My conversation with Robert Dallek:

Is Identity Politics Just Coalition Building or Something More Sinister

Back in 1964, a full fifty-three years ago, a novel came out entitled The 480. It was about the social and political effects of slicing and dicing society into 480 specific groups; by socioeconomic status, location, origin, etc. Creating computer simulations to manipulate public consciousness and win elections.

Today, such ideas are fully backed into our system. Big Data companies like Cambridge Analytica, make what was once a futuristic novel, a political fact of life. It’s the ultimate form of identity politics. Since the 1960’s, this has been the underpinnings of Democratic politics.

But does it work anymore? Does the focus on dividing the electorate run counter to what the Democratic party needs to win both local and national elections?

Columbia University Professor Mark Lilla looks at exactly this in The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics.

My conversation with Mark Lilla:

Behaving Badly: The New Morality in Politics, Sex, and Business

If you are listening to this, I suspect you’ve said to yourself, or aloud, many times over the past couple of years, how did we get here?

The late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in talking about the life of our cities, talked about how we were “defining deviancy downward.” Today we have defined downward almost every aspect of society and of the social order.

Our discourse is less civil, our moral underpinning are now transactional, and where once we relied on or at least trusted thinkers, leaders and even important institutions, today we’ve eschewed all of it in favor of a kind of siloed, self reinforcing smugness, in which we alone are the center of our own moral and intellectual universe. This cannot end well.

Eden Collinsworth takes a look at where we've been headed in Behaving Badly: The New Morality in Politics, Sex, and Business

My conversation with Eden Collinsworth:

What Can History Teach Us About Our Current Political Climate

How many times have we heard that this election is like no other? That this is an extinction level event, threatening the very fabric of the republic. And yet history tells us that we’ve survived far worse. Be it the civil war, McCarthyism, violent labor strife at the turn of the last century, political assassination and of course, the chaos of the 1960’s

To try and put all of this in context, in the home stretch of this political season, I spoke with Julian Zelizer. He is a Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton and the author, most recently of The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society.

My conversation with Professor Julian Zelizer:

Religion, Politics and Culture...Oh My

It is the job of historians and journalists to take contemporary information and give context and connection to events far beyond the time in which they happened. This is true for wars, for politics and for religion.

It’s true even in these highly polarized times, when we all hear the admonition, especially around get togethers of family and friends, to make sure you never discuss politics or religion.

So what is it about both of these subjects that are so personal, so internal, so potentially inflammatory and have been so powerfully connected both historically and right here in America.

This is part of what Ken Woodward examines in Getting Religion: Faith, Culture, and Politics from the Age of Eisenhower to the Era of Obama..

My conversation with Ken Woodward:

The Future We Want

Think about how much the world has changed in just the past 25 years and then think about how little our politics has changed. Not just that we’re still talking about Clinton and Bush, but that the issues, the ideas and the ways in which they are discussed has not changed. One does not have to throw out the principles of our Founders to retool the political process. In fact, it is precisely those tools that should be used to reshape everything about our politics.

The good news is that this effort is being midwifed by young people with new values, who believe in transparency and honesty as opposed to duplicity. Who believe in fairness not obfuscation. Who see that the future is not about fixing the old car, but blowing it up and taking Tesla or Uber.

We are at what some have called the millennial moment. When power shifts from parents to children. When adults brought up in a different era realize they've lost touch with what's going on.

Clearly, "there's something happening here" and few understand it better than journalists Sarah Leonard (The Nation) and Bhaskar Sunkara (Jacobin,) author of The Future We Want: Radical Ideas for the New Century.

My conversation with Sarah Leonard and Bhaskar Sunkara:

What does the GOP do now?

After its loss in the Presidential election of 2012 the Republican Party felt it needed to do its own after action report. In the end, it was determined that all was basically ok and that the party only needed to broaden its tent and do a little better with Hispanic voters. Enter Jeb Bush.

How did that work out?  Not so well!   What we are seeing today is a total repudiation of a Republican establishment that for 40 years has held onto many of its voters with cultural, racial and religious issues, while delivering nothing of economic value.  For the GOP, today the chickens have come home to roost and we understand exactly "what’s the matter with Kansas."

Covering all of this and telling the story from those first days after the 2012 election is BuzzFeed's McKay Coppins in his new book The Wilderness: Deep Inside the Republican Party's Combative, Contentious, Chaotic Quest to Take Back the White House.

My conversation with McKay Coppins:

Barney Frank

One of the big things missing in politics today is historical and institutional memory. The sense of collegiality, of institutional respect and the positive value of public policy, seem to have been replaced by gotcha politics, partisan positioning and the effort to achieve petty political advantage.

Former Congressman Barney Frank has born witness to this change and he’s seen it from all sides. He helped usher in our renewed respect and acceptance for gays and lesbians in public life and fought in the civil right issue of our time, for gay marriage. He used the best of the public policy apparatus to bring forth financial reform, but he’s also seen the ways in which our political process has become mired and disconnected from the realities of 21st century life.

He understands that principals must be part of politics and that “to legislate” is not a dirty word.

He shares some of that life experience in his new memoir Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage

My conversation with Barney Frank:

Dan Savage on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics

Few controversial issues in contemporary American life have seen the kind of rapid sea change in public opinion that we’ve witnessed on the subject of gay marriage. In fact, recent polls show almost 60% of the American public, in support or acceptance of same-sex marriage. Even members of the GOP, like Sen Rob Portman and numerous party operatives, have expressed support.

The gay magazine The Advocate had a recent cover saying that “gay is the new black.” But is this debate really similar to race, or does the issue have its own politics, tied to broader themes of sexuality? And if so, how will this current debate impact these broader issues of sex and sexuality and might it perhaps move us beyond American puritanism.

Standing for years on the ramparts of all of these issues is prominent sex advice columnist Dan Savage, most recently the American Savage: Insights, Slights, and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics.
author of

My conversation with Dan Savage:

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Geeks takeover political campaigns

Technology and creative destruction have impacted every aspect of society; from how and what we buy, to the movies we see, how we listen to music, get mail , go shopping, and do virtually everything. It should come as no surprise then, that it’s also changing the way we do politics. The only question is, why has it taken so long, why hasn't it been reported, and how will it impact those who lead us and the kind of democracy we have?

In his new book  The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns, journalist Sasha Issenberg reveals the increasingly technical and micro-targeted tactics and strategies being employed by major political campaigns, including those of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

My conversation with Sasha Issenberg:

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