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
I mean, when the rise and fall of the New Deal order came out, The book's introduction said, the New Deal order is over, but we don't yet know what will replace it. That book came out in 1989. So we might be sitting here in a timeline where Trumpism has replaced neoliberalism in 2016, and we just don't know it.
Yeah, I don't disagree that there are fissures and tensions within the Republican coalition. I mean, one thing about the BAP and Yarvin and all this stuff, the cadres are interested in reading them, but the, you know, chief ideologists in the White House are retweeting them.
And not only is the vice president reading them, but he's saying things like, when the Supreme Court gives us an order we don't like, we should say, the justice has made his order, now let him enforce it, right? So I think you could put together some worrisome signs. I also think the strength or weakness of the opposition matters enormously in this too.
So in every place in India, in Hungary, in Israel, the reactionary right is able to rampage to victory precisely because of the weakness and division within the opposition. So none of this, I agree, is foretold. One of the things I worry about is it kind of overly rigid reliance on the kind of playbook stuff, like this isn't how it's supposed to be done.
Because I agree, he's doing different things than what Orban is doing. He's doing some Bukele stuff. He's doing some improvisation. I just woke up today and thought of something weird and put it on Truth Social. It's a hodgepodge of stuff.
I mean, Kim Lane Shepela has this term, the Frankenstate, where you can kind of Frankenstein a bunch of legitimate seeming things and make your own new form of an illegitimate state. Now, I don't think anyone would disagree that Trump is not as patient and diligent and well-read as Victor Orban. But, you know, Bolsonaro did a version of this in Brazil.
And yes, he ended up getting defeated in the next election, but he came very close to rigging it in his own favor. And Bolsonaro was not a disciplined, well-read guy either. So there's different playbooks and you can invent new ones as you go. Let me turn this question around, Zach.
Well, you could make a version of the fighting the last war argument in precisely this context, that the Democrats are learning that maybe they should have waited Trump out more the first time and not done such a big, visibly cringe resistance. And so now they're trying to play dead more than they should.
Yeah, this is where, again, I would sort of argue for a wider frame. So, like... I think that the timeline can be broad enough that it can contain something like Trump losing some or all of the tech right without him being done for. You know, for example. I'm not saying he's done for. No, no, no. But I mean, even if we're just thinking about where this ends up. Yeah.
Let's say he loses parts of his coalition. Let's say he loses Musk. That would be a big blow to him. But, you know, you've written about Shemeshka in Hungary out of it. Hungarian words are famously hard to say, so I'm sure I'm butchering that. But, you know, the Musk before Musk oligarch who was one of Orban's biggest allies, and then he lost him and he became an opponent.
And that was a blow to Orban, but it was not at all fatal to him. So I could totally see a story where... The coalition is big enough and durable enough that it can withstand things like losing the midterms. And it's already done things. I mean, you talk about the Supreme Court. We're already in a timeline where they wouldn't give Merrick Garland a hearing.
You know, again, it's like if you heard about this happening in another country, you'd say it doesn't sound super 100 percent democratic to me to not seat your opponent and then seat one of your own people on the Supreme Court. One thing we know about John Roberts is he really wants to seem even-handed.
So if you take a bunch of things to the Supreme Court that are just facially unconstitutional, they're not going to hand you down smack-down 9-0 decisions every time.
Well, I would say it kind of is changing the structures of American life in the sense that it's how you get a new paradigm. So part of what FDR was doing there was not just politics as usual. It was battering his way to a new political order. So I agree that the biggest challenge to all this is—and someone, a conservative legal scholar, said this to me while reporting the piece—
If someone were doing this on behalf of policies you like, how much would it bother you? I think that is the hardest question to answer. And we can sit here and say we would be perfectly consistent and non-hypocritical, and who knows if that's true. One key point, though, is that, yes, you work things out in the courts, you challenge the courts. The fact that that is...
an option that's available to you, to me, doesn't put it outside the realm of competitive authoritarianism. If Trump is able to break through to a new political paradigm and get competitive authoritarianism, I think that is part of how he will do it. He'll throw a bunch of stuff to the courts that says the 14th Amendment doesn't say what it says.
And I know you said discrimination against trans people was illegal, but I'm going to do it. And on and on and on and on and on. And if they let him get one out of those 10 things, that is actually how you get competitive authoritarianism. You throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks. And I agree that he's doing it in this flagrant, blatant way.
It could be incompetence and impulsiveness. It could be actually that that's part of the strategy. But either way... I don't think he's going to get it by amending the Constitution. I don't think he's going to get it by indefinite martial law. I think if he gets it, it'll be through stuff like this.
Look, I mean, I think what we can agree on is that every case is different. we're not the Hungarian case. We can't use a two-thirds majority to rewrite the constitution. But again, you know, this is what I mean about kind of writing to the end of the story instead of seeing what's in front of our nose. Netanyahu didn't win the fight over the judicial reform. Orban loses fights all the time.
We tell the story in retrospect as Orban, the great genius who got what he wanted. But we know that he loses fights all the time. This is what's competitive in part about competitive authoritarianism. It's still politics. It's still a fight. And so, look, I grant that every case is different. But Bukele did it a different way. Duterte did it a different way. Bolsonaro did it a different way.
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