Andrew Marantz
speaker
381 appearances
4 recordings
3 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 10 Apr
Andrew Marantz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So I don't think I'm going to jail anytime soon, but the fact that I had to think twice about it. I agree with this. I have the same experience.
Am I going to get through?
Well, and so I think we can agree that the tariffs were a bad idea and that they will have a political cost and that generally people don't like it when you tank the economy and that that might cause them to lose the midterms. And by the way, generally speaking, you always lose the midterms when you're in the White House. But by more, by more. By more.
But then the question is really, what do we mean by losing? If they lose the midterms and if Trump doesn't get everything he wants, right? If Trump doesn't get to be king for life and he doesn't get to hand the scepter and crown to Don Jr. and he doesn't get his face on Mount Rushmore, is that losing? Because I would argue that
they've already not lost in the sense that, okay, a couple of the students that they tried to put in jail have been freed. Mahmoud Khalil is still last I checked in prison. I don't mean last I checked glibly. I mean, like, I checked yesterday and I don't know what happened today. I don't think, on the flip side, that one should see as much alarm and hair on fire either everywhere you look. But...
There's a little bit of goalpost shifting that I worry about where we'll say, well, what if something really scary happens like defying the Supreme Court? And then we all watch on live TV as they sit in the Oval Office and defy the Supreme Court. And we go, maybe in the future, something scary will happen. Like, I don't know how much more. So I think that's right.
So I totally agree that you don't want to. I think... don't obey in advance includes don't treat him like a dictator before he's a dictator. And I think that's very important. And it is also what I worry about when we talk about having crossed a bright line. That's why I push back on the permanence of the death metaphor.
If we're talking about erosion or rebuilding, then it starts to be a little more clear. So I actually... If you talk about they lose the midterms or the next president is a Democrat, you say they can instantly rebuild. It's hard for me to see how we just go back to normal from here.
Part of what I worry about and part of why I worry that we're not plainly saying what's in front of us is the way in which the Trumpist regime has already gotten some of what it wants in informal ways. Precisely because it's not agreeing to the consensus of, you know, it feels very vaporous to talk about norms and institutions.
And I am very much not into the norms will save us, the courts will save us. Like I get all the critiques of that and I share many of them. But to say that Trump doesn't have the formal power to do X, Y, or Z, I think ignores the ways in which he's already done those things. So can he disappear people? Yes, he can. He already has. Can he freeze and impound funds? Yes, he has.
And you've written when he did those things.
I get it. But what I'm saying is that whether they're entrenched, to me... is not merely a measure of whether they're written down on paper in a judicial order. Whether they're entrenched also has to do with when you do them, what happens informally to you.
So all I'm saying is I don't think we're all going to end up in a gulag, but I don't necessarily think that that power is unentrenched because it is informal. So let me back up. There's this idea of political orders. I know you're a Gary Gerstle head, as am I. Gary Gerstle has this whole notion of what a political order is. It's this big hegemonic, right?
So he has this notion that there was the New Deal political order, which was succeeded by the Reagan neoliberal political order. It's not just, oh, people used to like Democrats. Now they like Republicans.
Great episode. And so what I sort of see that political order thing as doing is trying to get outside, trying to get on a much bigger timeline. And I sort of see, I don't know if Gerstle would co-sign this, I might be out on a limb here, but I sort of see it as like a structure of scientific revolutions of politics. Mm-hmm.
The structure of scientific revolutions where we get paradigm shift from, it's not like... Is it the book by Thomas Kuhn that coins the term paradigm shift? The philosopher of science who, when he's talking about a paradigm shift, he's not talking about... oh, we didn't have microscopes and now we do. What a paradigm shift. That's really useful.
He's talking about ideas that are inconceivable, unthinkable, not allowed by... Like, you don't even form them in your mind because they're unthinkable. And so if you take that into the structure of political orders and how they shift... Things that were unthinkable as an Eisenhower Republican or a Nixon Republican, you know, you don't just attack and defund the welfare state.
That's not how politics works. Then after the Reagan Revolution, all you do is different degrees of attack the welfare state, right? So in that sense, if we want to talk about the timeline of what it would mean for Trump to be winning and reshifting, I think you said, the constitutional order, part of what I think about is if the neoliberal order is cracked, as Gerstle says it is,
Then the question is, what will succeed it? It could just be that we just sort of muddle through with nothing to replace it, and it's just what Gramsci would call the time of monsters, like, indefinitely. Or it could be... Abundance? It could be abundance. Right. But so, you need a vision for what will replace it, as you know. The whole conclusion of the book is about political orders. Right.
And so... If abundance liberalism is what succeeds neoliberalism, that's an answer. If Trumpist competitive authoritarianism is what succeeds it, that is an answer. And in a way, this is like a little sort of weird to think about, but it may be the case that it's already happened and we just don't know it yet. This is kind of the Schrodinger's cat thing.
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