Pushkin Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show where we explored the stories behind the stories in the news. The biggest stories in this part of twenty twenty one are really stories of politics. There were the offseason gubernatorial elections in which the Democratic governor of Virginia was, surprisingly to everybody, defeated, and the Democratic governor of New Jersey barely scraped by, despite the fact that in New Jersey, as indeed in Virginia, Joe Biden had defeated Donald Trump handily. These issues themselves playing to the question of what Joe Biden's national accomplishments are and whether any and he knows about them. And then the deeper and more sustained political issues about the depth of polarization in our politics, the rise of violence, and the long term future of politics in the United States. What kind of a guest, you may be wondering, would be eager to talk and share views about every single element of these if a most unrestrained, direct and colorful way possible, Who, indeed but James Carville, the man who became known is one of the great political strategists of the modern era. After crafting Bill Clinton's nineteen ninety two presidential victory. James started working in politics long before that, and he continued working in politics long after. He's a sought after commentator, an analyst, a political adviser, and, in the deepest and most positive sense, a character. He says what's on his mind without fear or favor, and that makes him about the most entertaining podcast guest you could begin to imagine, in addition to having things to say that are potentially deeply significant and insightful for where we are and where we're going. James, thank you so much for being here. I want to get into the deep trends that are facing changing political life and in our country today, but I want to start off with something more local, which is the gubernatorial races, both in New Jersey where Democrat Film Murphy barely survived and then Virginia where Terry mccaugh the Democrat, went down. And I want to ask you what your interpretation is of those results. Well, I think it speaks to a large issue for reasons that are complex, and I don't quite understand, people have become willing to believe anything about Democrats. We are immunocompromise where people are willing to believe the most outlanderous things because a small segment of people who associated to Democratic Party come up with these crazy ass ideas that gained currency, and we dive into that because I have two part answer to that. The first is Donald Trump. He taught everybody that you can assert anything and people who want to be on your side will listen to you. But that's not going to be enough here because a lot of those voters in the places you just mentioned who went Republican themselves were anti Trump, So that's not quite enough. The other element has got to have something to do with the internal politics of at least the publicly facing discussion, where I do think that what's happened is that super prominent, especially younger voices on the left side of the party, have tremendous sway in the public conversation, as more moderate voices just say okay, I hear you, but don't stand up and argue against that side of the party because they think, well, we have the votes anyway, we have the power in the party anyway, there's no point in wasting our energy in fighting with you publicly. And what's more, you'll bring us down. So we're just not going to do that. And then when a Republican goes out and says you have to believe this about the Democrats, the public says, Okay, I guess we do believe because you haven't been we don't visibly see you fighting with the left wing of your party. So, by the way, I'm not a modern Democrat. I'm allible Democrat. And I take all of these little exams online, you know, Yeah, there's a thousand of them. Then I always come out like an eight point two or something. All right, But what I'm not is a leftist. But you got to understand it. That is part of the Democratic coalition. It's not a big part at all, all right, not at all. I could fight you election after the election in Manhattan, in New York City, in Cleveland and New Orleans and anywhere you want to look, and they are in my view, and you have a lot of it in academia. To me, they're kind of silly, all right. They're not evil. They're just I think, silly and try to change the language, and people just resist and don't want to talk about the significant part of their party is out now evil I mean, I mean, I mean, none of it in a fruitcake. Yeah, yes, yes, yeah. Supposed you have a grandchild of a niece, a nephew and they come to you and they say, I'm gonna I'm gonna work in the LC's office. It will be the deputy communications person. You would your reaction would be, well, that's fine, you're gonna meet some interesting people or probably some of the things that you have Kate and I can't go along with, but there'll be a hell of an experience. Please do it. If your niece, your grandchild comes you and says I'm going to work from Martrey Taylor Green, you jump off the bridge. Your life is open. It's not a comparable event. They're not comparable people. But the thing is it gives a it gives the equivalence caucus. Well, yeah, you got them, but we've got that. Yeah, you got some silly people, we got some criminals. Okay, that's a difference between all right having a silly idea and Sam in the goddamn capital. Okay, it's too different. I could not agree with you more that we're talking about radically different things. One thing it really strikes me is that, you know, when I was first learning about politics, the Republican Party was self presenting itself as moral. They called themselves moral. They had a group called the Moral Majority, and Democrats were the party of liberalism, which was a party of tolerance, where we didn't preach that we were moral. On the other side was not moral, that said. A lot of the most deeply committed activists on the left of the Democratic Party, or some of them called themselves democratic socialists, are highly focused on a politics of morality. They think that supporters on the other side are not just wrong, but are bad, and that worldviews that they disagree with are not just wrong, but our evil, our racist or grounded in racism, or our capitalist in a way that's not excusable. And that seems to me to drive a lot of the debate in which liberal Democrats or moderate Democrats don't want to get into it. They don't want to fight over these questions. But I understand that. Okay, it's a small part of the Democratic Party. Agreed. Agreed, They're a big part of the culture, and they're given a much bigger megaphone than their votes deserve. They lose every freaking election. The only election that can never win is primary in some poor old Democrat in a plus Cook plus PBI forty district. They don't run against Republicans. All they run is in Mouth, all right, that's what they experts at and in people don't want to live like that. So when people live in fear, they just don't do it. And I was steaching two lane, and I said, look, the only reason that I'm not inviting David Duke to speak to this class because I just don't want the president university crap of pineapp apple. And you know i'd call it, but philosophically, I'm an old liberal, like even Bernie Sanders. As much as I tussle with Bernie, he's the same way. And a lot of old line a clu Ada Democrats that are. And I'm bored to come bore out of the Southern Democratic tradition. But this shit makes me uncomfortable at some level. But I'm not uncomfortable enough to challenge it because it'll just scream it out. I haven't gotten any significant pushback from a democratic strategist, opportunites, consultant, whatever you want to call them, saying your misdiagnosis, James. No, yep, they're just that. No one, no one believes that. But I'm gonna draw back a little bit because I'm tired of fighting with other Democrats because I think the country's on the go the wrong fucking way here. All right, this is not that was gonna be. That was gonna be my next question, Um, what is your assessment of the odds of genuine disaster in twenty twenty two and twenty twenty four to Yeah, if you go in and you're having a medical test, all right, and what's the odd that you say, fuck this, I don't want it. It's way hard that Okay, if that's going in and doing a heart cast or something in the dodge that I was gonna die, age highs that we have a genuine catastrophe in I say, I should I just die of a heart attack? Man to stay away from me. Yeah, I can't put a number on it, but it's unbelievably for the fear that people like me have, We're not We're not. It's not crazy to be that a fred And it's not crazy for people to say at some point we're such a danger. We just got to stop fighting with each other, all right. And I'll be the first. I've always been willing to criticize, and I think justifiably, don't get me wrong, but sometimes you got to subjugate, which you really think for the greater good of the country. And I think we're entering a period like that. I really do. Well, let me ask you about that, because I like to say that too. I always say, you know, and things get bad enough, we reach and recognize that we have enough in common that we have to pull together. But you know, pandemic, national shutdown, economy through the floor, that all just happened, and it did not pull us together. It did not produce any kind of unification. And what's more, in some way, we got through it. I mean, I'm not saying we're all the way through it. We're not. I'm not saying we're not through it without consequences. There are consequences. But we did get through it. And so that sort of makes me wonder what did it take. What would it take for us to actually say we got to pull together. I don't think we saw it all right. I mean, we exist, and you know, the Kenya treasury is still with the benchmark of the world. But I'm not sure that we food yesh. I mean, we had a insurrection, which is one of the great criminal acts, political criminal acts, and since what's something and we're still dealing with it. I don't think we threw it at all. In the aftermath of that insurrection. We've had a total breakdown in the capacity of our institutions to blame anybody for it. And you know, we've got centure that has no effect on members of the House who are centured money off of it. Yeah, exactly, they turn around and raise money off it the next day. Forty three percent of this country doesn't want it to get better, and I'm afraid another eight percent have just checked out. Yeah. So if that's the case, I'm not clear on what it takes to so that the kind of the grand talk that I believe in of being able to find our way back to the middle. I'm I worry that I'm wrong. I'll do too. I'm worried at you all wrong. Yeah, Okay, Yeah, I mean I'm really worried. I'm not saying that is going to end poorly, but I'm saying the odds of that happening are way too high. One thing that made me optimistic is too strong, but made me makes me feel positive is looking at Stacey Abrams and what she accomplished in Georgia using turnout in twenty twenty, and I was really curious to hear your view about that. I mean, she in her case, it's a multi year strategy with a theory, an operation to try to bring it about and at least under those election conditions, really impressive results on presidential election and then both Senate seats. I worry a little bit we're too dependent on those Senate seats. But but I want to hear what you think about that, the Stacey Abrams strategy and how it's been executed. So I have a lot of thoughts about that. First of all, we p to Peacia academic research, the lead research. I want to say to Stoppel, who's at hard news data from the ninth and it basically compared Stacy in Georgia. Shoot, I think it was Reverend Barba North Carolina. Wait, in, this is my real issue with these left issues. They don't want to engage in politics. They think it's like a dirty business. If you're not willing to engage in politics, you're just full of shit, all right. Reverend Barbara North Carolina, he organized around idealism and Stacy organized around politics, and like went out campaign for like like Democrats brought up bills, etcetera, etcetera. Georgia's voted blue in twenty twenty and North Carolina didn't. And it's it's a very compelling piece of research, and it's a compelling piece of political science. I recommend it to everybody. You have to get your hands dirty, and you've got to compromise, and you gotta push, and you gotta do this. And once you start thinking that you have to wear a condom anytime you're around politics, you've lost the game. And I think that is in her cohorts research showed that very demonstravely. I have a very high opinion of politics. But I do think the problem is one side, I go back to my central thesis, is out of their goddamn minds, literally accepted of criminality, and the other side is caught up in what I would say is not particularly productive, almost theological view of the world, a zealous thing that they called the dictatorship of the politarium. This is the dictatorship of overwhelmingly over educated whites trying to dictate to the rest of the country's something that they're not interested in buying. When you investigate this to few people, and they're very good. They did, like a four thousand sample divide America into nine different subgroups for Democratic, for Republican, one independently. In the Democratic Party, the extreme left was like eleven percent of the party. It was the only majority white part of our coalition. That'll tell you something. Somebody's got a call this for what it is, right, Yeah, and that is I mean that also fits into the stay Abrams approach. I mean she won over and got turned out from black voters, not by running to the left of the of the party, but running things back towards the center right. And she did also a little better around the state with the whites, you know, particularly in like northern you know, some of these areas not not great. You know, we had a theory in twenty twenty. We've spent ninety million dollars and seventy seven counties in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and we actually changed the boat those counties by somewhere between three and six. That changes sea level. Yep, that changes sea level. Once they have this sort of urban strategy that we're gonna have educated whites and by park it's at the ADI just not enough because they're not enough. They're not enough white people. They're not enough white people of that very strategic and located. And by the way, the black indigenous people of color becoming, if anything, slightly less democratic. In eighteen percent of the people in this country elect fifty two senators. Right, So unless you're willing to just throw the unless the Senate doesn't count, your strategy is stupid. It's not gonna happen. Yeah, what about those proposals that I think of frankly is crazy to break up big democratic states and create more states, which obviously the Republicans could retaliate with Texas at least. But when you hear that kind of thing, when I hear it, I just think crazy talk. Don't waste my time. It should I be more realistic about that. Yeah, you should be more. You should be worried. In Batterygees where I grew up, Corville was twenty miles south of bat Rage. I went to college, and they just have this thing where it's just kind of white part of South batter Rouge wants to break off from the parish because they don't want to support schools in non white districts. I mean, it's a pretty clear what the motivation is. It's very popular, and you can just see as you see these polls and you're started to dimiss them, like thirty eight percent succession, really succession? You can wait a minute. You know, urban areas. You know, I grew up in Louisiana, though all in versus the rest of the state. I cut my teeth in Pennsylvania politics, it's always Philadelphia versus the rest of the state. And boy, if you look at Texas ship eighty percent of the growth in Texas is all in quote, democratic rural counties unquote. I mean, it's all in Harris and Dallas and Tarrant and Travis and Bayer and there's everything else. And so that this is a it's a dangerous, dangerous idea that's taken more hold than I would like. We'll be right back, James. Another topic I wanted to ask you about, which is only obliquely related to this, is executive privilege. So you've got Steve Bannon, who's you know, about as unpleasant a person as you can imagine, just been federally charged for contempt of Congress for asserting that executive privilege would protect him from having to testify with Donald Trump telling him so, and you know, as a matter of existing law, he is wrong, and presumably if it gets to a jury, he'll be convicted. But it does raise an underlying question, which is, and you've had this experience yourself of being a close advisor of presidents. So how much should communications between the president and senior advisors continue to be protected even when the next president says I waive the privilege. I'm happy for the information to come out. Well, I mean it should be protected pretty vigorously. Okay, Now if he should not be protected, right, Okay, that's the bright line. That's that's the bright line. You know, if you say, look, if we negotiate this, or you know, this guy wants a postmaster and Shoeboygan, and so we can give him a postmaster ship and Seboygan and we can get his vote on that, that that obviously should be protected. To the Instagram. Yeah, I think executive privilege does have a pretty solid place in the law. But by the way, I think if any if he goes to jail to be his cellmate, you could make a good Eighth Amendment Cruel and unusual punishment. Can you mand what he smells? Like, oh my God, you had to said his name. Sell that Jesus, he'd have people looking looking for the gas chamber. I'm not I'm ever going to touch that one, although I'd be very surprised if he sees the inside of a prison, very very surprised, but not impossible. Do you think, by the way, speaking of Bennon, do you think that as a kind of intellectual father of Trump is um because you know, tru himself did not invent Trump. Isn't that much as clear And although success as a thousand fathers, it's clear that Bennon is one of them. Is he someone whose political insights, in your view, were powerful? I mean they're bad. I don't think there's any question about that. They're very bad. But what is he someone you put in the kind of short list of people who, like you, have the kind of political clarity and vision to see what's coming down the road? I mean Karl Rove, whose politics I don't particularly care for, and neither do you. I think he clearly does fall into that category. But does Steve Bannon fit in that category? I think Bannon's genius was he saw a dormant narrating that people would just really ready to respond to. And I hate to say it. I hope that Bennonism's crushed, But again, I don't know. He could. He could be one of the more relevant people in next not American consulting. Yeah, I hate giving a guy. Clearly, you have this kind of Thanksgiving Day table, you know, Uncle Joe spouting shit off. It was a lot more popular than you didn't We would have liked. Yeah, yeah, what do you think explains it having been dormant for as long as it was, Because that's one thing that's fascinating about it. Like you said, it's not really that new and narrative in its essence. That's why you call it dormant. It was there all along. We just people like like us thought to ourselves, Yeah, there's Uncle Joe, but that's not how you win elections in the United States. There's certain things that you can't say, even if you're the Republican candidate running for president. You can have a whistle dog whistle to racism, but you can't overtly be a racist. Turns out not true, right, You can say a lot of things openly that we thought you couldn't say, and not just we, but everyone in the political game thought you couldn't say it openly, So why why was that? Why don't we get as long a period in which these things were inappropriate to say or believed to mean a rope to say politically as we actually got said. It kind of started the obligation kind of started with Lee at Water. He said, you know, you used to be able to stand up and say blah blah blah, but now you got to say busting of urban you from And what the balance of the world said is no, you don't. You just go you go right for the jugular. And you know, the Republican Party for a long time was sort of more interested in service and capitalism's needs. But again, yeah, I think that we we don't speak in coded languages so much anymore. And I actually kind of like coded languages. That's the kind of language is dangerous. It is really dangerous because dangerous people hear it and believe it. That's a danger and that something does And look, you could go a long way in America feeling to people's prejudices and fears, and it's really a if you stop and you think about it, product, there have an idea that they and I hear this all the time. I hear from family members, I hear from people I grew up with. You know, James, this is not the same country we grew up in. I said, of course it's not. It's not going to be just named country. And there's some idea that there's some restoration. And you're right, if you're a white male, your status in American society has been severely disminished. Yeah, people like you and I are not particularly distressed about the changes that are coming to the country. We think we bring a lot of people to the table that wouldn't be there before, and as opposed to relying on a talent pool of just college educated white males, we have this drawing on this enormously vast and increased talent book. Right, But you gotta understand that people are very fearful of that, sure, and they think there's a way that we can go back to the old ways. That's that's what's really at work at American politics is that people like us are kind of enthusiastic about the kind of demographic changes that are happening in the United States. But there are a lot of people that are very fearful of these changes, and they are abstracting a price at to voting boom is that this is my last sort of big picture question, is that what's behind the polarization that we see at the deepest level, you know, is the polarization a story of the gradual rise of recognition by white men and a lot of white men that they're losing and things have changed, in which case this polarization is not going to go away for a long time, or are there some other factors going into the partisan polarization that might be reversible without a kind of Dottle royale where white men finally accept that things have changed, you know, configured Vane, Max close are the best theoretical fit. Physics is not named Einstein. Yeah, Max. He said, science does not triumph because it convinces its opponents. Science triumphs because its opponents eventually die. Science advances one funeral at the time, Okay, which I think is a pretty Yeah. That's a depressing thing for a guy seventy seven, not, I hear. But the truth of the matter is, if you are a white male, particularly an old white male, you're such a loss is real. And by the way, it's not just economic class, it's cultural lass. There used to be TV shows made about you. There used to be movies made about you. You're contund being told that you mattered. Yeah, right, and it's a dangerous problem. But you know, we're a race with the actually er tables right now. Do you think that if the Court, as it seems very plausibly likely to do, overturns rov. Wade, that that's going to generate meaningful organizational support for Democratic candidates in a way that has any meaningful long term success, Because they're obviously the justices are thinking about that, and it's part of their strategic calculus. You know, if they think that they're gonna that there's going to be court packing after they do that, that's going to give them pause. But if they think that the Democrats won't get the kind of bump out of that, then they're going to vote their conscience, and in the case of more than five justices, their conscience is that Roe v. Wade should be overturned. So I think this, and I've thought it for some time, and I've become more convinced. The most significant moment and my American history was Bush Gore and the region it was they told them they could fucking get away with anything you wanted to do. All right, they're just went end and just stole an election right in front of you. And they did it. But like an opinion and Scottish and blah blah blah and put in the Democrats. What did the country Doah? Well, you can see the times in the post and everybody. Well, the justices have spoken, and ye Gore to be applauded for recognizing the official transfer of power, although there have been a lot of recounts of those votes that suggested that actually it was going to be really close that in the counties that that that Gore asked for, but the Florida Supreme Court was getting ready to have a statewide recount which would have not been close. And they knew it. Yeah. No, Look I was there. I was a baby lawyer working for the Gore campaign. We felt we were we had it stolen from us, no question. Well, you did the logic cases they suffered no political consequence. You're right, No, they didn't and they and they said they. But you don't think that there is a counter argument that the right to choose is so much more visceral, immediate, and powerful than a presidential campidated al Gore, whom, let's be blunt, not too many people were super enthusiastic about to be in with George. George W. Bush was not the George W. Bush that he came to be seen by later. Then he was the compassionate conservative. You know, it didn't seem like the end of the world to a lot of people, and this I think would seem like the end of the world to a lot of young people. It did not seem like the end of the world. But it kind of was. I hear you, Okay, events happened in history that are not recognizing it was. It was. But but what they would say is they never the allis bluster and talk we've done nothing to when they're getting and they're getting and decide if fuck these guys ain't gonna do anything about I did just kind of screaming, yeah, when you know, we're just going and we'll enforce our view of corporatocracy in America and you know, whatever it is they do, and it's not an unreasonable view for them to have. And when people, when people do, when the Democrats do go out there, if and when this happens and try to motivate the base by saying and women, especially by saying we have to win back the Congress because we got out and the presidency because we got to pack the court, which is where we're headed. They're going to have to argue for that. Do you think it has any legs or does it have doesn't have any legs where it takes an election to do that. No, that's what I'm saying. I think if this happens, it will happen next summer, and so it's four elections, but you have you have to win the election in which you have to run on. Is people's views on a Washington conflict, you know where they're not conflicted? Or Row? Yeah, all right, Row is a seventy three percent deal. So if they overturn Row, which there's a real probability that they will this summer, then it depends on the strength of organizing and people what kind of appeals are going to make. But I do think if you if if a court imposes a solution, it has twenty five percent support in the country. The question is the depth of how much people are willing to support rope. Is it one of these things about rich people can get around it? And I don't know the answer to that. But they've gotten away with a lot, and the response from people like us has been feeble, all right, it just has. And I think that I actually think that twenty twenty one is one of the most significant years in American history. I think people have a viewed that, well, it's just I'll ball down in partisanship and ship nothing happens. Man's a lot of shit happened in twenty twenty one, and no one has done a very good job, myself included, because I can go get a headline attacking these goofy leftists, all right, and everybody wants to have that conversation. But the country really doesn't know. This has been a pretty transformation. You know. People that noticed shit tell me this that this corporate minimum tax. I had never thought anything like that could have happened in this substantial it's substanti substantio. It comes in so far are very meaningful accomplishments. The question is is anybody hearing that or is anybody noticing that? The larger question is anybody telling people that no one wants to be in sales, all right, everybody wants to be in policy. Everybody wants to be a theoretician. No one wants to go door to door with the pots and pants. Okay, give me a door to door a knife salesman from nineteen No One, But Stacy Abrams she's willing to go toter door again. I'll go back to data. You show she went out and organized, She traveled to all of these places, and she she got her hands dirty. And you know, we got cabinet members that are so good as stunning. Try miss Andrew. Miss Andrew is the best communicator I've seen my wife not named Bill Clinton. I'll promise you I'm not just saying that because I try Gena romalto to the commerce is incredible. She is amazing. Jennifer Grennell, take every person in that cabinet that is evil runs the statewide office. I'm saying, I want your ass out there on television. We'll get some bureaucrat to run the details. Get out there himself. He's got really, he's got cabinet people and people in his administration that have world class skills. Get them out there. Yeah, I don't I don't know. They're not using because they're worried about what if Biden can't run In twenty twenty four and Kala Harrison has sees them as competition cares. We don't know, we're gonna be here in twenty twenty four. Fair and fair, I mean, just get get out there and sell. Yeah. You know, my mother she sawd World book Encyclopedias, but she never called him Encyclopedias. She called him education and materials. And so she would put me out that'd be like thirteen years old, and we'd ride around south of young and she says, ball, we're gonna look for two things, a bass boat and a bicycle, because that tells us two things. This house has disposable income and they have a child. Yep, said knock on the door. This is late nineteen fifties, Louisianelade, come in, miss Carhood. Are you doing. She started talking about these educators and said, James, this is a capital of Vermada, say mont Pillion, Oh god, And she gonna, what's the capital of art and said, oh shit, is a genius. But how did he ever notice? But he bought these educational materials. Said then they would inevitably bring the man of the house in because that was the way it was. And you know that she made up pitch and the guy would say, well, almost card. It seemed like it's very good, but you know we've got school voting, and don't you come back? And four months and she said, you know, sir, I find it interesting that you can afford a basketboat for yourself, which can't afford educational materials for your children. That was just like a pile of fucking soul. Okay, he was signing anything eighty one years. He just wanted to get out of there because he'd been so humiliated in that kind of pitch. You know that that kind of pitch always stuck with me. Yeah, all right, I thought there was. By the way, if thought World Book was a good product, I know it is. She was doing good. She was selling a good product, good to people if they and if they opened it, they learned. Yes, and there's nothing wrong being a pitch man. Thank you very much for pitching for all these years, for analyzing, for pitching, for calling it like it is, and for sharing your inimitable perspective. Thank you so much. All Right, we'll proud for good. Look to you. Thank you, Jordan. We'll be right back when you talk to James Carville. You can't possibly agree with everything the man says, But you do realize that you have to take everything he says seriously, even and in fact, especially when you may not exactly agree with it. James Carville's assessment of where we are right now in American politics is in a sense a story of contradictions. On the one hand, he believes, I think with good reason the Joe Biden's accomplishments in twenty twenty one have been meaningful, significant, and potentially long lasting in terms of their policy effects. At the same time, he believes that the Democratic Party, the party he loves and supports, the Party of Coalition, is doing a terrible job of going out and selling its ideas. He holds out Stacey Abrams, whom regular listeners of the podcasts know, has been with us as a guest on the podcast, as the model of what good, real political engagement looks like. If we do more of what Stacy is doing, he thinks Democrats can have future successes. Yet, the threats to the fundamental structure of democracy he considers to be real ones Trumpism, beyond just Donald Trump, he sees as a genuine, serious, fundamental threat to the capacity of the American political system to operate he sees it as growing out of white male frustration at decline in social status, in power, and the share of economic life. And he says that the combination of partisan gerrymandering the structure of the Senate where fifty two seats can be chosen by eighteen percent of the party plus the electoral college, means we do face the genuine possibility that a relatively small number of Americans with Trump's political sympathies can hijack the political process and block the access to a fair share of political power deserved by everybody else. Last, but very much not least, James has been an outspoken critic of the left wing of the Democratic Party for the specifics of its cultural politics, which he believes lose the party votes nationally. That's of a piece with his preference for pragmatism, coalition, and compromise, all of which inevitably mean giving up on a more moralized narrative of doing the right thing in American politics. In this sphere, we know the Democratic part is just beginning to enter a period of deep introspection. What comes out of that introspection is going to have a major impact on the politics of the national election in twenty two and in the presidential election of twenty twenty four. Beyond, James Carville wants to be a profit of pragmatic possibility, not a profit of doom. But there were moments in this conversation where it's sometimes sounded like he felt we should be honest about recognizing that things could go terribly wrong in the years ahead. Until the next time I speak to you, Breathe deep, think, deep thoughts, and if you have any hope left, have a little fun. If you're a regular listener, you know I love communicating with you here on Deep Background. I also really want that communication to run both ways. I want to know what you think are the most important stories of the moment, and what kinds of guests you think you would be useful to hear from. More So, I'm opening a new channel of communication. To access it, just go to my website Noahdashfeldman dot com. You can sign up from my newsletter and you can tell me exactly what's on your mind, something that would be really valuable to me and I hope to you too. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Mo Labor. Our engineer is Ben Taliday and our showrunner is Sophie Crane mckibbon. Editorial support from noahm Osband. Theme music by Luis Guerra at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton, Lydia, Jane Coott, Heather Faine, Carlie mcgliori, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weisberg. You can find me on Twitter at Noah R. Felder. I also write a column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at Bloomberg dot com slash Feldmer. 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Pushkin Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show where we explored the stories behind the stories in the news. The biggest stories in this part of twenty twenty one are really stories of politics. There were the offseason gubernatorial elections in which the Democratic governor of Virginia was, surprisingly to everybody, defeated, and the Democratic governor of New Jersey barely scraped by, despite the fact that in New Jersey, as indeed in Virginia, Joe Biden had defeated Donald Trump handily. These issues themselves playing to the question of what Joe Biden's national accomplishments are and whether any and he knows about them. And then the deeper and more sustained political issues about the depth of polarization in our politics, the rise of violence, and the long term future of politics in the United States. What kind of a guest, you may be wondering, would be eager to talk and share views about every single element of these if a most unrestrained, direct and colorful way possible, Who, indeed but James Carville, the man who became known is one of the great political strategists of the modern era. After crafting Bill Clinton's nineteen ninety two presidential victory. James started working in politics long before that, and he continued working in politics long after. He's a sought after commentator, an analyst, a political adviser, and, in the deepest and most positive sense, a character. He says what's on his mind without fear or favor, and that makes him about the most entertaining podcast guest you could begin to imagine, in addition to having things to say that are potentially deeply significant and insightful for where we are and where we're going. James, thank you so much for being here. I want to get into the deep trends that are facing changing political life and in our country today, but I want to start off with something more local, which is the gubernatorial races, both in New Jersey where Democrat Film Murphy barely survived and then Virginia where Terry mccaugh the Democrat, went down. And I want to ask you what your interpretation is of those results. Well, I think it speaks to a large issue for reasons that are complex, and I don't quite understand, people have become willing to believe anything about Democrats. We are immunocompromise where people are willing to believe the most outlanderous things because a small segment of people who associated to Democratic Party come up with these crazy ass ideas that gained currency, and we dive into that because I have two part answer to that. The first is Donald Trump. He taught everybody that you can assert anything and people who want to be on your side will listen to you. But that's not going to be enough here because a lot of those voters in the places you just mentioned who went Republican themselves were anti Trump, So that's not quite enough. The other element has got to have something to do with the internal politics of at least the publicly facing discussion, where I do think that what's happened is that super prominent, especially younger voices on the left side of the party, have tremendous sway in the public conversation, as more moderate voices just say okay, I hear you, but don't stand up and argue against that side of the party because they think, well, we have the votes anyway, we have the power in the party anyway, there's no point in wasting our energy in fighting with you publicly. And what's more, you'll bring us down. So we're just not going to do that. And then when a Republican goes out and says you have to believe this about the Democrats, the public says, Okay, I guess we do believe because you haven't been we don't visibly see you fighting with the left wing of your party. So, by the way, I'm not a modern Democrat. I'm allible Democrat. And I take all of these little exams online, you know, Yeah, there's a thousand of them. Then I always come out like an eight point two or something. All right, But what I'm not is a leftist. But you got to understand it. That is part of the Democratic coalition. It's not a big part at all, all right, not at all. I could fight you election after the election in Manhattan, in New York City, in Cleveland and New Orleans and anywhere you want to look, and they are in my view, and you have a lot of it in academia. To me, they're kind of silly, all right. They're not evil. They're just I think, silly and try to change the language, and people just resist and don't want to talk about the significant part of their party is out now evil I mean, I mean, I mean, none of it in a fruitcake. Yeah, yes, yes, yeah. Supposed you have a grandchild of a niece, a nephew and they come to you and they say, I'm gonna I'm gonna work in the LC's office. It will be the deputy communications person. You would your reaction would be, well, that's fine, you're gonna meet some interesting people or probably some of the things that you have Kate and I can't go along with, but there'll be a hell of an experience. Please do it. If your niece, your grandchild comes you and says I'm going to work from Martrey Taylor Green, you jump off the bridge. Your life is open. It's not a comparable event. They're not comparable people. But the thing is it gives a it gives the equivalence caucus. Well, yeah, you got them, but we've got that. Yeah, you got some silly people, we got some criminals. Okay, that's a difference between all right having a silly idea and Sam in the goddamn capital. Okay, it's too different. I could not agree with you more that we're talking about radically different things. One thing it really strikes me is that, you know, when I was first learning about politics, the Republican Party was self presenting itself as moral. They called themselves moral. They had a group called the Moral Majority, and Democrats were the party of liberalism, which was a party of tolerance, where we didn't preach that we were moral. On the other side was not moral, that said. A lot of the most deeply committed activists on the left of the Democratic Party, or some of them called themselves democratic socialists, are highly focused on a politics of morality. They think that supporters on the other side are not just wrong, but are bad, and that worldviews that they disagree with are not just wrong, but our evil, our racist or grounded in racism, or our capitalist in a way that's not excusable. And that seems to me to drive a lot of the debate in which liberal Democrats or moderate Democrats don't want to get into it. They don't want to fight over these questions. But I understand that. Okay, it's a small part of the Democratic Party. Agreed. Agreed, They're a big part of the culture, and they're given a much bigger megaphone than their votes deserve. They lose every freaking election. The only election that can never win is primary in some poor old Democrat in a plus Cook plus PBI forty district. They don't run against Republicans. All they run is in Mouth, all right, that's what they experts at and in people don't want to live like that. So when people live in fear, they just don't do it. And I was steaching two lane, and I said, look, the only reason that I'm not inviting David Duke to speak to this class because I just don't want the president university crap of pineapp apple. And you know i'd call it, but philosophically, I'm an old liberal, like even Bernie Sanders. As much as I tussle with Bernie, he's the same way. And a lot of old line a clu Ada Democrats that are. And I'm bored to come bore out of the Southern Democratic tradition. But this shit makes me uncomfortable at some level. But I'm not uncomfortable enough to challenge it because it'll just scream it out. I haven't gotten any significant pushback from a democratic strategist, opportunites, consultant, whatever you want to call them, saying your misdiagnosis, James. No, yep, they're just that. No one, no one believes that. But I'm gonna draw back a little bit because I'm tired of fighting with other Democrats because I think the country's on the go the wrong fucking way here. All right, this is not that was gonna be. That was gonna be my next question, Um, what is your assessment of the odds of genuine disaster in twenty twenty two and twenty twenty four to Yeah, if you go in and you're having a medical test, all right, and what's the odd that you say, fuck this, I don't want it. It's way hard that Okay, if that's going in and doing a heart cast or something in the dodge that I was gonna die, age highs that we have a genuine catastrophe in I say, I should I just die of a heart attack? Man to stay away from me. Yeah, I can't put a number on it, but it's unbelievably for the fear that people like me have, We're not We're not. It's not crazy to be that a fred And it's not crazy for people to say at some point we're such a danger. We just got to stop fighting with each other, all right. And I'll be the first. I've always been willing to criticize, and I think justifiably, don't get me wrong, but sometimes you got to subjugate, which you really think for the greater good of the country. And I think we're entering a period like that. I really do. Well, let me ask you about that, because I like to say that too. I always say, you know, and things get bad enough, we reach and recognize that we have enough in common that we have to pull together. But you know, pandemic, national shutdown, economy through the floor, that all just happened, and it did not pull us together. It did not produce any kind of unification. And what's more, in some way, we got through it. I mean, I'm not saying we're all the way through it. We're not. I'm not saying we're not through it without consequences. There are consequences. But we did get through it. And so that sort of makes me wonder what did it take. What would it take for us to actually say we got to pull together. I don't think we saw it all right. I mean, we exist, and you know, the Kenya treasury is still with the benchmark of the world. But I'm not sure that we food yesh. I mean, we had a insurrection, which is one of the great criminal acts, political criminal acts, and since what's something and we're still dealing with it. I don't think we threw it at all. In the aftermath of that insurrection. We've had a total breakdown in the capacity of our institutions to blame anybody for it. And you know, we've got centure that has no effect on members of the House who are centured money off of it. Yeah, exactly, they turn around and raise money off it the next day. Forty three percent of this country doesn't want it to get better, and I'm afraid another eight percent have just checked out. Yeah. So if that's the case, I'm not clear on what it takes to so that the kind of the grand talk that I believe in of being able to find our way back to the middle. I'm I worry that I'm wrong. I'll do too. I'm worried at you all wrong. Yeah, Okay, Yeah, I mean I'm really worried. I'm not saying that is going to end poorly, but I'm saying the odds of that happening are way too high. One thing that made me optimistic is too strong, but made me makes me feel positive is looking at Stacey Abrams and what she accomplished in Georgia using turnout in twenty twenty, and I was really curious to hear your view about that. I mean, she in her case, it's a multi year strategy with a theory, an operation to try to bring it about and at least under those election conditions, really impressive results on presidential election and then both Senate seats. I worry a little bit we're too dependent on those Senate seats. But but I want to hear what you think about that, the Stacey Abrams strategy and how it's been executed. So I have a lot of thoughts about that. First of all, we p to Peacia academic research, the lead research. I want to say to Stoppel, who's at hard news data from the ninth and it basically compared Stacy in Georgia. Shoot, I think it was Reverend Barba North Carolina. Wait, in, this is my real issue with these left issues. They don't want to engage in politics. They think it's like a dirty business. If you're not willing to engage in politics, you're just full of shit, all right. Reverend Barbara North Carolina, he organized around idealism and Stacy organized around politics, and like went out campaign for like like Democrats brought up bills, etcetera, etcetera. Georgia's voted blue in twenty twenty and North Carolina didn't. And it's it's a very compelling piece of research, and it's a compelling piece of political science. I recommend it to everybody. You have to get your hands dirty, and you've got to compromise, and you gotta push, and you gotta do this. And once you start thinking that you have to wear a condom anytime you're around politics, you've lost the game. And I think that is in her cohorts research showed that very demonstravely. I have a very high opinion of politics. But I do think the problem is one side, I go back to my central thesis, is out of their goddamn minds, literally accepted of criminality, and the other side is caught up in what I would say is not particularly productive, almost theological view of the world, a zealous thing that they called the dictatorship of the politarium. This is the dictatorship of overwhelmingly over educated whites trying to dictate to the rest of the country's something that they're not interested in buying. When you investigate this to few people, and they're very good. They did, like a four thousand sample divide America into nine different subgroups for Democratic, for Republican, one independently. In the Democratic Party, the extreme left was like eleven percent of the party. It was the only majority white part of our coalition. That'll tell you something. Somebody's got a call this for what it is, right, Yeah, and that is I mean that also fits into the stay Abrams approach. I mean she won over and got turned out from black voters, not by running to the left of the of the party, but running things back towards the center right. And she did also a little better around the state with the whites, you know, particularly in like northern you know, some of these areas not not great. You know, we had a theory in twenty twenty. We've spent ninety million dollars and seventy seven counties in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and we actually changed the boat those counties by somewhere between three and six. That changes sea level. Yep, that changes sea level. Once they have this sort of urban strategy that we're gonna have educated whites and by park it's at the ADI just not enough because they're not enough. They're not enough white people. They're not enough white people of that very strategic and located. And by the way, the black indigenous people of color becoming, if anything, slightly less democratic. In eighteen percent of the people in this country elect fifty two senators. Right, So unless you're willing to just throw the unless the Senate doesn't count, your strategy is stupid. It's not gonna happen. Yeah, what about those proposals that I think of frankly is crazy to break up big democratic states and create more states, which obviously the Republicans could retaliate with Texas at least. But when you hear that kind of thing, when I hear it, I just think crazy talk. Don't waste my time. It should I be more realistic about that. Yeah, you should be more. You should be worried. In Batterygees where I grew up, Corville was twenty miles south of bat Rage. I went to college, and they just have this thing where it's just kind of white part of South batter Rouge wants to break off from the parish because they don't want to support schools in non white districts. I mean, it's a pretty clear what the motivation is. It's very popular, and you can just see as you see these polls and you're started to dimiss them, like thirty eight percent succession, really succession? You can wait a minute. You know, urban areas. You know, I grew up in Louisiana, though all in versus the rest of the state. I cut my teeth in Pennsylvania politics, it's always Philadelphia versus the rest of the state. And boy, if you look at Texas ship eighty percent of the growth in Texas is all in quote, democratic rural counties unquote. I mean, it's all in Harris and Dallas and Tarrant and Travis and Bayer and there's everything else. And so that this is a it's a dangerous, dangerous idea that's taken more hold than I would like. We'll be right back, James. Another topic I wanted to ask you about, which is only obliquely related to this, is executive privilege. So you've got Steve Bannon, who's you know, about as unpleasant a person as you can imagine, just been federally charged for contempt of Congress for asserting that executive privilege would protect him from having to testify with Donald Trump telling him so, and you know, as a matter of existing law, he is wrong, and presumably if it gets to a jury, he'll be convicted. But it does raise an underlying question, which is, and you've had this experience yourself of being a close advisor of presidents. So how much should communications between the president and senior advisors continue to be protected even when the next president says I waive the privilege. I'm happy for the information to come out. Well, I mean it should be protected pretty vigorously. Okay, Now if he should not be protected, right, Okay, that's the bright line. That's that's the bright line. You know, if you say, look, if we negotiate this, or you know, this guy wants a postmaster and Shoeboygan, and so we can give him a postmaster ship and Seboygan and we can get his vote on that, that that obviously should be protected. To the Instagram. Yeah, I think executive privilege does have a pretty solid place in the law. But by the way, I think if any if he goes to jail to be his cellmate, you could make a good Eighth Amendment Cruel and unusual punishment. Can you mand what he smells? Like, oh my God, you had to said his name. Sell that Jesus, he'd have people looking looking for the gas chamber. I'm not I'm ever going to touch that one, although I'd be very surprised if he sees the inside of a prison, very very surprised, but not impossible. Do you think, by the way, speaking of Bennon, do you think that as a kind of intellectual father of Trump is um because you know, tru himself did not invent Trump. Isn't that much as clear And although success as a thousand fathers, it's clear that Bennon is one of them. Is he someone whose political insights, in your view, were powerful? I mean they're bad. I don't think there's any question about that. They're very bad. But what is he someone you put in the kind of short list of people who, like you, have the kind of political clarity and vision to see what's coming down the road? I mean Karl Rove, whose politics I don't particularly care for, and neither do you. I think he clearly does fall into that category. But does Steve Bannon fit in that category? I think Bannon's genius was he saw a dormant narrating that people would just really ready to respond to. And I hate to say it. I hope that Bennonism's crushed, But again, I don't know. He could. He could be one of the more relevant people in next not American consulting. Yeah, I hate giving a guy. Clearly, you have this kind of Thanksgiving Day table, you know, Uncle Joe spouting shit off. It was a lot more popular than you didn't We would have liked. Yeah, yeah, what do you think explains it having been dormant for as long as it was, Because that's one thing that's fascinating about it. Like you said, it's not really that new and narrative in its essence. That's why you call it dormant. It was there all along. We just people like like us thought to ourselves, Yeah, there's Uncle Joe, but that's not how you win elections in the United States. There's certain things that you can't say, even if you're the Republican candidate running for president. You can have a whistle dog whistle to racism, but you can't overtly be a racist. Turns out not true, right, You can say a lot of things openly that we thought you couldn't say, and not just we, but everyone in the political game thought you couldn't say it openly, So why why was that? Why don't we get as long a period in which these things were inappropriate to say or believed to mean a rope to say politically as we actually got said. It kind of started the obligation kind of started with Lee at Water. He said, you know, you used to be able to stand up and say blah blah blah, but now you got to say busting of urban you from And what the balance of the world said is no, you don't. You just go you go right for the jugular. And you know, the Republican Party for a long time was sort of more interested in service and capitalism's needs. But again, yeah, I think that we we don't speak in coded languages so much anymore. And I actually kind of like coded languages. That's the kind of language is dangerous. It is really dangerous because dangerous people hear it and believe it. That's a danger and that something does And look, you could go a long way in America feeling to people's prejudices and fears, and it's really a if you stop and you think about it, product, there have an idea that they and I hear this all the time. I hear from family members, I hear from people I grew up with. You know, James, this is not the same country we grew up in. I said, of course it's not. It's not going to be just named country. And there's some idea that there's some restoration. And you're right, if you're a white male, your status in American society has been severely disminished. Yeah, people like you and I are not particularly distressed about the changes that are coming to the country. We think we bring a lot of people to the table that wouldn't be there before, and as opposed to relying on a talent pool of just college educated white males, we have this drawing on this enormously vast and increased talent book. Right, But you gotta understand that people are very fearful of that, sure, and they think there's a way that we can go back to the old ways. That's that's what's really at work at American politics is that people like us are kind of enthusiastic about the kind of demographic changes that are happening in the United States. But there are a lot of people that are very fearful of these changes, and they are abstracting a price at to voting boom is that this is my last sort of big picture question, is that what's behind the polarization that we see at the deepest level, you know, is the polarization a story of the gradual rise of recognition by white men and a lot of white men that they're losing and things have changed, in which case this polarization is not going to go away for a long time, or are there some other factors going into the partisan polarization that might be reversible without a kind of Dottle royale where white men finally accept that things have changed, you know, configured Vane, Max close are the best theoretical fit. Physics is not named Einstein. Yeah, Max. He said, science does not triumph because it convinces its opponents. Science triumphs because its opponents eventually die. Science advances one funeral at the time, Okay, which I think is a pretty Yeah. That's a depressing thing for a guy seventy seven, not, I hear. But the truth of the matter is, if you are a white male, particularly an old white male, you're such a loss is real. And by the way, it's not just economic class, it's cultural lass. There used to be TV shows made about you. There used to be movies made about you. You're contund being told that you mattered. Yeah, right, and it's a dangerous problem. But you know, we're a race with the actually er tables right now. Do you think that if the Court, as it seems very plausibly likely to do, overturns rov. Wade, that that's going to generate meaningful organizational support for Democratic candidates in a way that has any meaningful long term success, Because they're obviously the justices are thinking about that, and it's part of their strategic calculus. You know, if they think that they're gonna that there's going to be court packing after they do that, that's going to give them pause. But if they think that the Democrats won't get the kind of bump out of that, then they're going to vote their conscience, and in the case of more than five justices, their conscience is that Roe v. Wade should be overturned. So I think this, and I've thought it for some time, and I've become more convinced. The most significant moment and my American history was Bush Gore and the region it was they told them they could fucking get away with anything you wanted to do. All right, they're just went end and just stole an election right in front of you. And they did it. But like an opinion and Scottish and blah blah blah and put in the Democrats. What did the country Doah? Well, you can see the times in the post and everybody. Well, the justices have spoken, and ye Gore to be applauded for recognizing the official transfer of power, although there have been a lot of recounts of those votes that suggested that actually it was going to be really close that in the counties that that that Gore asked for, but the Florida Supreme Court was getting ready to have a statewide recount which would have not been close. And they knew it. Yeah. No, Look I was there. I was a baby lawyer working for the Gore campaign. We felt we were we had it stolen from us, no question. Well, you did the logic cases they suffered no political consequence. You're right, No, they didn't and they and they said they. But you don't think that there is a counter argument that the right to choose is so much more visceral, immediate, and powerful than a presidential campidated al Gore, whom, let's be blunt, not too many people were super enthusiastic about to be in with George. George W. Bush was not the George W. Bush that he came to be seen by later. Then he was the compassionate conservative. You know, it didn't seem like the end of the world to a lot of people, and this I think would seem like the end of the world to a lot of young people. It did not seem like the end of the world. But it kind of was. I hear you, Okay, events happened in history that are not recognizing it was. It was. But but what they would say is they never the allis bluster and talk we've done nothing to when they're getting and they're getting and decide if fuck these guys ain't gonna do anything about I did just kind of screaming, yeah, when you know, we're just going and we'll enforce our view of corporatocracy in America and you know, whatever it is they do, and it's not an unreasonable view for them to have. And when people, when people do, when the Democrats do go out there, if and when this happens and try to motivate the base by saying and women, especially by saying we have to win back the Congress because we got out and the presidency because we got to pack the court, which is where we're headed. They're going to have to argue for that. Do you think it has any legs or does it have doesn't have any legs where it takes an election to do that. No, that's what I'm saying. I think if this happens, it will happen next summer, and so it's four elections, but you have you have to win the election in which you have to run on. Is people's views on a Washington conflict, you know where they're not conflicted? Or Row? Yeah, all right, Row is a seventy three percent deal. So if they overturn Row, which there's a real probability that they will this summer, then it depends on the strength of organizing and people what kind of appeals are going to make. But I do think if you if if a court imposes a solution, it has twenty five percent support in the country. The question is the depth of how much people are willing to support rope. Is it one of these things about rich people can get around it? And I don't know the answer to that. But they've gotten away with a lot, and the response from people like us has been feeble, all right, it just has. And I think that I actually think that twenty twenty one is one of the most significant years in American history. I think people have a viewed that, well, it's just I'll ball down in partisanship and ship nothing happens. Man's a lot of shit happened in twenty twenty one, and no one has done a very good job, myself included, because I can go get a headline attacking these goofy leftists, all right, and everybody wants to have that conversation. But the country really doesn't know. This has been a pretty transformation. You know. People that noticed shit tell me this that this corporate minimum tax. I had never thought anything like that could have happened in this substantial it's substanti substantio. It comes in so far are very meaningful accomplishments. The question is is anybody hearing that or is anybody noticing that? The larger question is anybody telling people that no one wants to be in sales, all right, everybody wants to be in policy. Everybody wants to be a theoretician. No one wants to go door to door with the pots and pants. Okay, give me a door to door a knife salesman from nineteen No One, But Stacy Abrams she's willing to go toter door again. I'll go back to data. You show she went out and organized, She traveled to all of these places, and she she got her hands dirty. And you know, we got cabinet members that are so good as stunning. Try miss Andrew. Miss Andrew is the best communicator I've seen my wife not named Bill Clinton. I'll promise you I'm not just saying that because I try Gena romalto to the commerce is incredible. She is amazing. Jennifer Grennell, take every person in that cabinet that is evil runs the statewide office. I'm saying, I want your ass out there on television. We'll get some bureaucrat to run the details. Get out there himself. He's got really, he's got cabinet people and people in his administration that have world class skills. Get them out there. Yeah, I don't I don't know. They're not using because they're worried about what if Biden can't run In twenty twenty four and Kala Harrison has sees them as competition cares. We don't know, we're gonna be here in twenty twenty four. Fair and fair, I mean, just get get out there and sell. Yeah. You know, my mother she sawd World book Encyclopedias, but she never called him Encyclopedias. She called him education and materials. And so she would put me out that'd be like thirteen years old, and we'd ride around south of young and she says, ball, we're gonna look for two things, a bass boat and a bicycle, because that tells us two things. This house has disposable income and they have a child. Yep, said knock on the door. This is late nineteen fifties, Louisianelade, come in, miss Carhood. Are you doing. She started talking about these educators and said, James, this is a capital of Vermada, say mont Pillion, Oh god, And she gonna, what's the capital of art and said, oh shit, is a genius. But how did he ever notice? But he bought these educational materials. Said then they would inevitably bring the man of the house in because that was the way it was. And you know that she made up pitch and the guy would say, well, almost card. It seemed like it's very good, but you know we've got school voting, and don't you come back? And four months and she said, you know, sir, I find it interesting that you can afford a basketboat for yourself, which can't afford educational materials for your children. That was just like a pile of fucking soul. Okay, he was signing anything eighty one years. He just wanted to get out of there because he'd been so humiliated in that kind of pitch. You know that that kind of pitch always stuck with me. Yeah, all right, I thought there was. By the way, if thought World Book was a good product, I know it is. She was doing good. She was selling a good product, good to people if they and if they opened it, they learned. Yes, and there's nothing wrong being a pitch man. Thank you very much for pitching for all these years, for analyzing, for pitching, for calling it like it is, and for sharing your inimitable perspective. Thank you so much. All Right, we'll proud for good. Look to you. Thank you, Jordan. We'll be right back when you talk to James Carville. You can't possibly agree with everything the man says, But you do realize that you have to take everything he says seriously, even and in fact, especially when you may not exactly agree with it. James Carville's assessment of where we are right now in American politics is in a sense a story of contradictions. On the one hand, he believes, I think with good reason the Joe Biden's accomplishments in twenty twenty one have been meaningful, significant, and potentially long lasting in terms of their policy effects. At the same time, he believes that the Democratic Party, the party he loves and supports, the Party of Coalition, is doing a terrible job of going out and selling its ideas. He holds out Stacey Abrams, whom regular listeners of the podcasts know, has been with us as a guest on the podcast, as the model of what good, real political engagement looks like. If we do more of what Stacy is doing, he thinks Democrats can have future successes. Yet, the threats to the fundamental structure of democracy he considers to be real ones Trumpism, beyond just Donald Trump, he sees as a genuine, serious, fundamental threat to the capacity of the American political system to operate he sees it as growing out of white male frustration at decline in social status, in power, and the share of economic life. And he says that the combination of partisan gerrymandering the structure of the Senate where fifty two seats can be chosen by eighteen percent of the party plus the electoral college, means we do face the genuine possibility that a relatively small number of Americans with Trump's political sympathies can hijack the political process and block the access to a fair share of political power deserved by everybody else. Last, but very much not least, James has been an outspoken critic of the left wing of the Democratic Party for the specifics of its cultural politics, which he believes lose the party votes nationally. That's of a piece with his preference for pragmatism, coalition, and compromise, all of which inevitably mean giving up on a more moralized narrative of doing the right thing in American politics. In this sphere, we know the Democratic part is just beginning to enter a period of deep introspection. What comes out of that introspection is going to have a major impact on the politics of the national election in twenty two and in the presidential election of twenty twenty four. Beyond, James Carville wants to be a profit of pragmatic possibility, not a profit of doom. But there were moments in this conversation where it's sometimes sounded like he felt we should be honest about recognizing that things could go terribly wrong in the years ahead. Until the next time I speak to you, Breathe deep, think, deep thoughts, and if you have any hope left, have a little fun. If you're a regular listener, you know I love communicating with you here on Deep Background. I also really want that communication to run both ways. I want to know what you think are the most important stories of the moment, and what kinds of guests you think you would be useful to hear from. More So, I'm opening a new channel of communication. To access it, just go to my website Noahdashfeldman dot com. You can sign up from my newsletter and you can tell me exactly what's on your mind, something that would be really valuable to me and I hope to you too. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Mo Labor. Our engineer is Ben Taliday and our showrunner is Sophie Crane mckibbon. Editorial support from noahm Osband. Theme music by Luis Guerra at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton, Lydia, Jane Coott, Heather Faine, Carlie mcgliori, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weisberg. You can find me on Twitter at Noah R. Felder. I also write a column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at Bloomberg dot com slash Feldmer. 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