The Crossroads: How the GOP broke America and what to do about it

Inside the Hive

Vanity Fair

News

4.2 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 7 August 2020

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On this week’s “Inside the Hive," author and journalist Kurt Andersen discusses his new book, “Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History,” which is both the story of how the GOP spent the last 50 years reengineering the economy to favor big business at the expense of the working class, and also a crucial primer for the 2020 election. Andersen argues that we’re at a crossroads not unlike 1980, when Reagan ushered in the rightward tilt of our economic lives, selling the idea that unfettered greed would magically lift all boats. The plan was long in the making, a counterstrike against the 1960s, and it was all too successful. To understand what must be done in a post-Trump America — which is the only America with a future — you have to understand the crucial history that brought us here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Inside the Hive. This is Joe Hagen here. I'm here with my co-host Emily
0:08.5	Jane Fox. Hello Emily. Hi Joe, happy to have you back this week I am happy to be back we have had you know it's a long hot summer
0:17.9	It's the dog days of summer and the dogs in this case are the you know not the good kind. They're the ones
0:27.2	barking at you from the news and making you sweat even more than you're already
0:31.6	sweating. But you know occasionally good news
0:35.8	comes over the transom like it has today or bring it to us you know we just
0:41.9	found out that the attorney general of the of New York has
0:47.0	uncovered what she alleges is fraud in the NRA and has moved to dissolve the entire organization, which seems like a radical and amazing development, considering in a political and a politically significant one considering they have been one of the most
1:08.7	important funders of the GOP and you know a massive arm of propaganda in this time of
1:21.2	concern for gun violence we don't have to review because it's so obvious to all.
1:26.5	But anyway, this is certainly going to be huge narrative in this election now. I feel like this is going to introduce a whole new
1:37.0	level of much needed debate in this
1:39.9	coming election cycle. So there's that. You know what's interesting about what you just said? A lot of it is interesting. I always find you interesting, but I, um, it makes me long for a post election period, particularly if Joe Biden is president, when we can actually
1:56.8	debate things like this, when we can have substantive policy change.
2:02.8	So over the last four years,
2:04.8	we haven't had any kind of substantive policy change.
2:08.2	It's just been one fire after the other
2:12.1	that's had to be put out and we haven't really had the time and
2:15.8	the chance and the ability to focus on gun violence which is essential on
2:21.2	really coming to debate what health care should look like in society.
2:27.0	Debates over education, all the things that are normal political discourse, we haven't been able to even have a conversation about because things have been so chaotic.
2:37.0	You could hardly argue that this has been the most anti-intellectual period of our adult lives in the national discourse.
	...

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