 I've said since this election that if Donald Trump offers up a 1 trillion dollar moonshot to cure cancer, we tell him to shove it where the sun don't shine, and I'm not talking about Seattle, Washington. Do a recount, fight Trump every step of the way, nip him in the bud before he even swears on the Bible. Stop any person or party that uses racism and xenophobia and misogyny to seize power, really seizing power for the sole purpose of enriching his loyalists, his thuggish loyalists. There's a piece in the week entitled, It's Time for the Democrats to Fight Dirty. It's upsetting a lot of conservatives, including the National Review. The National Review was appalled by what our guest, Professor David Farris, has to say. In Professor Farris' opinion piece for the week, he says that Democrats must take a page from the GOP playbook and say no to everything, and that means everything. He says that Democrats need to understand that the American voter respects and rewards parties that demonstrate oppositional behavior. That defiance is not what weakens the GOP but makes it stronger, which is why the Republican Party has more power now than at any other time since the Great Depression. Professor David Farris teaches political science at Roosevelt University. He's the author of Descent and Revolution in a Digital Age, Social Media, Blogging and Activism in Egypt. That's the title of the book. Descent and Revolution in a Digital Age, Social Media, Blogging and Activism in Egypt. He's a frequent contributor to informed comment and his work has appeared in the Chicago Sun Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and Indie Wiki joins us today from Chicago. Thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. There's a potential gambit to get Merrick Garland on the Supreme Court if the Democrats displayed a pair of Cajonas. Who is Merrick Garland? Why is that outrageous that he's not even being considered for the Supreme Court? And what could the Democrats in the Senate do before Trump gets inaugurated? Merrick Garland, of course, is President Obama's nominee to fill the vacant Supreme Court seats that was left open when Scalia died earlier this year. And before Scalia's body was even cold, the Republicans said that they would not even hold hearings for anyone that Obama nominated. The line was that, you know, we want to make sure that the American people have a chance to choose the next Supreme Court justice. That's a novel reading of a constitutional doctrine. And it's really unprecedented because never before in modern history has a Supreme Court nominee been blocked like this in the sense that the opposition party won't even bother to hold hearings on him. And that was really, I think, an outrageous escalation of the kind of procedural warfare we've been seeing in the Senate and the House of Representatives over the last 20 or 30 years. It was a very serious escalation because what it allowed the Republicans to do is to effectively steal the swing seat on the Supreme Court, that is, and all likelihood Donald Trump will be able to fill that seat with one of his nominees, and they're likely to be kind of an arch-conservative like Scalia was. So it's a tragedy from the perspective of progressive governance, but it's also outrageous. You know, there's no law that says presidents only get X number of Supreme Court nominees per term, right, that's not in the Constitution. So how many you get to fill is dependent on, you know, how many vacancies there are during your presidency. And Obama was lucky enough to have three, and he only got to fill two. If the Democrats took a page from the GOP playbook, as you suggest, what could they do before the inauguration? I've read a piece by David Waldman who says before the incoming senators are sworn in on January 3rd, the actual composition of the U.S. Senate, that is, the people whose terms have not expired, is 67 senators, 34 of them Democrats, or 32 of them Democrats and two independents. So what could conceivably be done is that the remaining members of the Senate, the Democratic Senate, could gavel in a session on January 3rd before the new senators are sworn in and confirm Merrick Garland with their 34 seat majority, and they would have a quorum. And so that's a pretty, that would also be an escalation of the kind of constitutional hardball we've been seeing. Give me this again. So how does this work? So how many United States senators would there be at the time of this vote? At the time of this vote, there would be 67 U.S. senators, because the Senate reelects about a third of its membership every two years. Yeah, it just so happens that the Republicans were defending more seats this year. That's why we thought, that's why we thought we had a very chance of taking the Senate. There are 33 senators missing, because there aren't 33 new senators about to be sworn in, are there? No, but even if you're reelected, you have to be re-sworn in, like your term expires, and then you have to be sworn in to take your seat in the U.S. Senate. So for instance, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, his term will expire. And so before he's sworn back into the Senate, there's technically nobody in that seat, if that makes sense. Oh, I see, I see. And has this ever been done before? Absolutely not, no. Okay, so this is never going to happen. And it would, in all likelihood, it would probably cause a constitutional crisis of some sort. Obviously this is never going to happen. Would the Republicans do that, though? That's the question. I mean, if the shoe were on the other tiny foot, would the Republicans do it? Yeah, I'm at the point where I'm, you know, I'm not sure that there's anything that the Republican Party would not do to take advantage of some of the procedural quirks of the Constitution to get their way. A larger question, maybe for another show, would be if it would precipitate a constitutional crisis, maybe that's a good thing, right? I mean, you teach political science, there's something wrong with our Constitution. Yeah, there's a lot of things that are deeply wrong with our Constitution. I mean, but the overarching problem to me is that we're, you know, we're using an operating system for a huge complex 320 million person modern society that was designed in the 18th century before the Industrial Revolution. And many of the elements of our Constitution are not spelled out. You know, the Constitution has a set of formal rules. One of them is, of course, that the Senate gets to provide advice and consent on the President's nominees. But it doesn't do anything else to guide us about what are their obligations, just to have to happen in a timely fashion. Is it possible for the Senate to just say we will not consider this person? These are normative rules, right? These are expectations rather than obligations. And the fact that so many of the procedures that we use to pass legislation in this country and to appoint people to particular offices, the fact that those are norms rather than rules makes them very vulnerable to exploitation and obstruction, which is precisely the process we've been seeing over the past 30 years. And it's not exclusively a Republican phenomenon. The Democrats did escalate things between 2007 and 2009. But the Republicans think it's just a completely different level. Yeah, are you optimistic? I have so many questions I want to ask you, and this is not what I wanted to ask you, but there's a part of me that is optimistic that this creaky old Constitution that doesn't work might actually thwart Donald Trump. Well, there is an extent to which, unless the Republicans are willing to completely eliminate the filibuster in the U.S. Senate, that the Democrats will have some power to obstruct his legislative agenda. The filibuster isn't part of the Constitution, right? No, it's not. The filibuster is just a Senate rule. And Senate rules can be discarded by just the majority. And it's the filibuster is, of course, one of those norms that throughout most of the modern history of the United States, the filibuster was used only in very extraordinary circumstances and generally to make a point about for a piece of legislation that the senator thought was outrageous or really wanted to draw attention to something. And often the use of the filibuster was often used by people like Strom Thurmond to obstruct progressive goals. And it wasn't until really the 1990s that the filibuster started getting used to obstruct what used to be really routine stuff. And I'm thinking of nominations to the federal judiciary, to the district courts. That's the lowest level of the federal court system. And Republicans started holding these nominations up under President Clinton. And, of course, they've just really escalated that under President Obama. So that processes that used to take a few days now take weeks or months even. The average waiting time for a judicial vacancy under Obama was 120 days. And that's just absurd. That's not at all what the framers of the Constitution intended. It's not in keeping, I think, with the functional democratic society to have your legislators holding up nominations for no reason, right? Just the purpose is to slow things down. So with the Senate... It doesn't need any ideological goal. The filibuster only works on certain bills that require 60 or more votes, right? If it's a majority vote, then the filibuster has no power. Well, the filibuster can be used for anything, really. You could threaten a filibuster on a certain bill. If that bill only needs a majority in the Senate, that threat has no power. No, I mean, actually, the way things have developed is that you no longer need to go out onto the Senate floor and read from war and peace for 15 hours to filibuster. What you do is you notify the Senate leadership and writing through what's called a hold in the Senate that you intend to filibuster a bill. And then it really places the onus on the majority to produce the 60 votes, that is, to produce enough votes to invoke clouture rather than on the minority to hold the floor with 41 or more votes. And so this practice has really metastasized in recent years where senators will just place a hold on almost every bill and almost every nomination that goes to the Senate. Somebody puts a hold on it, you know, and that really slows down the business of the Senate, I think, in a deeply unnecessary way. In spite of the article that I wrote, I am deeply in favor, generally, of getting the leadership of the parties together and really doing some deep reform of how the U.S. Senate works. I just don't want that to be right now. When the Democrats are in charge. Right, or I mean, if the kind of thing it's like I'd be willing to do, really pervasive reform of Senate rules to make things easier for this majority even if there was some kind of compromise candidate put through the Supreme Court, right? Absent that I'm in favor of pretty, pretty obstructive partisan warfare for at least the next two years. For the next two years, you write, do nothing. You write, the Democrats must not give the imprimatur of legitimacy to the hands the Info Wars Acolyte who's about to take the oath of office, not to get some highways built, not to renegotiate NAFTA, not to do anything. So you're saying what I believe, which is no, no, no, no, just nothing. Give them nothing. Absolutely, yeah. I mean, it helps to me that I don't think that there's going to be much of anything worthwhile to say, to say yes to. I think that there was some hope that maybe Trump would put forward some sort of an infrastructure bill that Democrats have wanted for a long time. But stories that have leaked out suggest that any Trump infrastructure bill would be heavily structured around public private partnerships of the kind that have been so destructive here in my city of Chicago where previous mayors of this town sold off pieces of public infrastructure to private investors, you know, to fill like a one-time hole in the budget. But these things are not generally speaking in the public interest. So I do think that in almost every case, the democratic obstructionism will in fact be in keeping with the values of the party. Like nobody's going to be putting a serious progressive or humane immigration bill before Congress right now. So it's not like Democrats are going to be tempted to work with Trump, but I think his cabinet appointments suggest that he is in the process of putting together one of the most right-wing administrations in the history of this country. Yeah. In 2009, President Obama passed a $900 billion stimulus bill. And a lot of those projects had to be shovel-ready. And Joe Biden was in charge to make sure there was no corruption. Right. Cylindra, notwithstanding, that was a pretty successful stimulus bill, right? There was very little corruption that they were able to prove. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, the Obama administration was very sensitive to the perception of corruption. And I do think that they worked very hard to keep graft to the absolute minimum, I think, that's possible in our system. And I think most economists, most mainstream economists, look at the stimulus and they argue that it was one of the factors that prevented us from falling into either an even deeper recession or perhaps another great depression. So I think all things considered that that stimulus bill was very successful. But that's because money was being spent, right? I mean, if the player needs to have private companies investing in infrastructure, you're really just empowering a set of rent seekers who will be profiting off of public money, but over whom we will have very little control over how these things get built and where they get built. And I just think it's really it's the wrong way to go about infrastructure spending. You know, it doesn't it doesn't keep me up at night. The thought of saying no to that doesn't keep me up at night. We have desperate infrastructure needs in this country. But I don't think that the people running the country as of January are at all interested in making those investments where they really need to be made. They want to do what George W. Bush did after Katrina, which was reward Halliburton. Absolutely. Yeah. And it's particularly troubling because the president elected the United States has so many ties into different sectors of the economy. I don't know if you saw this this morning, but he went on a Twitter rant against Boeing of all companies saying that the contract for the next Air Force One set of aircraft was too expensive. And of course, the facts that he used were wrong, but he also affected the stock price of Boeing. And because we don't really have any real insight into Donald Trump's internal financial universe, we have no idea whether he has an interest in other airplane construction companies or if you have a beef with Boeing. And this is the kind of conflict of interest that we're just going to be dealing with constantly over the next four years. And it's almost impossible for me to see him overseeing an infrastructure bill that doesn't explicitly and purposefully benefit his allies in some way. His nominee for defense sits on the board of directors of General Dynamics. So I would assume General Dynamics will profit from defense spending the same way Halliburton profited from Dick Cheney's eight years as president. Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, I think that the next four years are going to make the Bush years look like a model of clean governance. You know, I think that the problems are about to get so much worse. They're going to get so much. At another moment. Yeah, they're going to get so much worse because one of the things we've learned from Clinton was to a paper dump on a Friday, you know, give them everything. If the special prosecutor wants information, give them so much stuff they can't even process or deliver 10,000 cardboard boxes. Yeah, the office, right? And sort through it. And what Trump is doing right now, and it's just pure evil, is Rex Tillerson, the CEO of Exxon, is now being considered for state. I know, it's absurd, like through the looking glass stuff, you know. And the fact that the evil genius of that is it just makes our heads spin so much that we can't really pay attention to what he's really doing, that he's just throwing. We're all, yeah, we're all sitting through an episode of The Apprentice right now, you know, the Secretary of State stuff is just it's absurd. You know, we're heading towards mid December here. And I think he's using this process, particularly the state process as a kind of subterfuge to keep us distracted in as many directions as possible. Yeah, I don't think we have institutions anymore that are equipped to deal with this. This is what's so terrifying about it, is you really cannot trust the institutions. The same way you couldn't trust Rince Priebus and the Republican Party to stop Trump. Everybody said, oh, don't worry, don't worry. There are levers, control in place at the Republican Party to stop Trump. There's no there there. No, absolutely not. And the Republican Party, at least its elected leaders, they folded like cheap beach chairs, you know, one by one. Once it became clear that he was going to be the nominee, then since he's been elected, of course, even more have come on board. What about Elizabeth Warren? You write in your piece that Elizabeth Warren is willing to work with Trump. I found that disappointing. Well, you know, the same thing happens after every election, right? Is that the people who were just elected or the leaders of the parties, they got up and they, you know, they pay lip service to bipartisanship. I don't remember Mitch McConnell speech after after 2012, I think it was. He got up and he gave this beautiful speech about, you know, how he was willing to work with the other party and ready to get to work. And of course, none of that was true. And I do think there's an extent to which, you know, Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and this is sort of the institutional leadership of the Democratic Party, they do have to get up in front of the cameras and say, like, you know, of course, we're willing to work with President Trump when the opportunity arises. Like I don't think that they can get up and explicitly say that we're going to sit on our hands for years and do nothing. I don't think that they will sign off. Like I don't think that the party is going to sign off on a set of really bad bills to make them slightly worse. I think that there is sort of an emerging realization in the party that Republican obstructionism worked under Obama, and particularly because Democrats are in the minority in both the Senate and the house. You know, on a lot of stuff, the Republicans aren't going to need any of our votes to make things happen. So I don't see the at least while we're in the minority in both chambers, I don't really see the cost of kind of sticking together, offering the American people a very clear alternative and making Trump look as hapless as possible. Of course, he's going to do a lot of that on his own. But I think that we can we can do a lot to make him look worse by slowing things down and making it look ugly and imprecise it the way that the Republicans just, it does. One of the reasons I called you this article was just amazing. But this is the. But this is something that I've never read before. And it's something that infuriates me whenever I talk to my liberal friends, and that is my liberal friends constantly say, you know, if we give George W. Bush enough rope, he'll hang himself. If we give Trump enough rope, he'll hang himself. And you write that the Democrats have learned the wrong lessons from the government shutdown in 95 and the impeachment of Bill Clinton because that seems to be the Rosetta Stone of give them enough rope and they'll hang themselves that that all my liberal friends point to Newt Gingrich and then the impeachment as an example of what happens when you give the Republicans enough rope. You write that's not what happened. Right. And, you know, I think this is the danger of drawing really firm conclusions about American politics from one or two examples. You know, if you if you look at the government shutdown in 95, there's really absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the voters cared about this at all, or that they they marched to the polls in 96 a year later to punish the House Republicans for their misbehavior. I think the the the data suggests, in fact, the opposite, that voters were were really just endorsing a growing economy under President Clinton. That's the reason that he was popular. That's the reason he won the election by eight and a half points. I don't think voters even remembered by the time they voted in 96. I very seriously doubt that there was more than a handful of voters in the entire country who got out of bed that day on election day 96 and said, I'm going to go vote for Bill Clinton to punish Newt Gingrich. I just don't think that that's what happened. If you look at 98, you know, it was unusual in the sense that the president's party did not lose seats that year. In fact, gained a few seats. And the lesson was, you know, the voters are punishing the Republicans for impeachment. Well, OK, maybe they were. Then you could say that the impeachment of Clinton was unnecessary. It went too far. It was suicidal because Clinton was popular at the time. But that doesn't say anything about all of the other sort of routine ways that parties can obstruct legislation that's making its way through Congress without actually impeaching the president, you know. And I think if you look at the 2000s, all of this sweep for the last 16 years, I don't think that you get any confirmation of the idea that voters punish obstructionist behavior in Congress. In fact, the opposite, if you look at the first few years of Bush's presidency, Democrats were very cooperative in the first couple of years of the Bush presidency. You know, not in the sense that they were endorsing every single thing that was coming down the pike, right? But I think that there was, particularly in the wake of 9-11, more cooperation than usual between the two parties. And the reward that they got for that was they got slammed in the 2002 midterms. And then they lost the 2004 election and they saw all of these sort of vulnerable blue dog Democrats, people like Max Cleland, lose their seats in spite of sort of maintaining the centrist position of being willing to work with the Republicans and so on and so forth. And so once the Democrats really kind of woke up in my mind and started acting like a parliamentary minority, that is sort of unified opposition to Bush after the 2004 elections, that's when they started to win. You know, that's when they won in 2006. There was no economic crisis in 2006 that could explain the Democrats sweeping into power in Congress. It was the unpopular to the Iraq war, primarily. And the fact that the Democratic caucus in the Senate and the House was able to maintain unity against the war and against Bush's policies, I think is what brought them to power. What role did Dennis Hastert turning a blind eye to Mark Foley's pedophilia in 2006? What role did that play to the Republicans losing the House? I think, you know, I don't think that I don't think that they lost the election because of Foley. I think that they I think they lost the election primarily because of the Iraq war. I think that the perceived corruption of the House Republicans at the time was definitely a factor. You know, this was during the Abramoff years. You know, there's all these stories about the various financial scandals from the House majority. And I do think that that costs them. And certainly one of the things the Democrats want to be very careful about as they they head to the minority for the foreseeable future is to stay as clean as possible. And then that's easier because they're not running anything. But I think corruption is a different issue than obstruction, right? That is, can use the procedural quirks of our Constitution to slow things down for Trump. You can offer the American people a very clear alternative in terms of the set of policies to pursue. But if you're seen as corrupt, right, that's that's a different issue. And I do think that the Democrats should be ruthlessly publicizing any instance of perceived corruption, either in the president himself or in the ways that the House and Senate majorities are are implementing his agenda. That needs to be one of the primary things that they highlight. But it was president's corrupt and the Senate is corrupt and the House is corrupt. And the good thing is, I think that all three of those things will actually be true. Yes. Jason, I always have a block on pronouncing his name. Jason Chaffetz, he's the chairman of the House Oversight Committee. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't think he's going to be doing much overseeing of anything over the next couple of years. Chaffetz is really, you know, the ringleader in my mind of a group of House Republicans who simply did not take their oversight, roll very seriously after they took the majority in 2010. The obsessive focus on, you know, what I think is a very minor tragedy in Benghazi, not to say it wasn't a tragedy, but it certainly did not need to take up, you know, four years and counting of House oversight time. They didn't take it seriously. There were things to oversee in the Obama administration, right? I think the drone warfare policy desperately needed to be to be ran down or overseen by Congress and they simply did not want to do that. They wanted to harp on these these quote unquote scandals until such time as they did, they did actual damage to Hillary Clinton and damage to the the Democrats reputation. What is the Freedom Caucus before Trump's I guess his election, if you want to believe the want to believe what you're reading, the Freedom Caucus was losing all its power in the lead up to the presidential election. What is the Freedom Caucus and is it going to have power? The Freedom Caucus is a is a group of we're not going to know how many people exactly are in it until the new Congress takes its seats. But a group of about 40 House Republicans who are sort of extreme hardliners about the budget. The Freedom Caucus was the driving force behind the sort of brinkmanship around the debt ceiling. They were the driving force behind shutting down the federal government in 2011, sorry, 2013. And there they seem to be a set of folks who are who are willing to shoot the hostage. You know, I mean, they got Baynor pretty much quit show business because of the Freedom Caucus. Right. And there's a there's some irony there, right? I mean, John Baynor was one of the the Gingrich radicals. And by by 2012, he was one of the more moderate people in the House unbelievably. So it's the Freedom Caucus folks have really outflanked what remains of the of the moderate wing of the Republican Party. How old is the Freedom Caucus? You know, I don't I don't know that off the top of my head. But it's it's a new there. It's a relatively new phenomenon. Yeah, it's it's an outgrowth of the Tea Party. So that is post post 2010. You know, there's a history of more radical groups forming in the House and then eventually attaining leadership, you know, Gingrich was was originally part of a small group of sort of more radical Republicans in the House during Reagan, who deeply resented the way that the Republican minority leadership was working with Tip O'Neill and the Democrats and wanted to take the Republican strategy in a different direction. Right. Gingrich had his vision was always that you had to make you had to make Congress look as bad as possible in order to get people to turn against their own representatives because there's a there's a kind of a central paradox of American politics, which is, you know, the approval rating of Congress is like what 10%, 9%, 11% has been drifting around in the teams for years. That is, you know, those are like stalling levels of approval. And yet, and yet incumbents in the House win election at rates exceeding 90%. Right. So people hate Congress, but they go to the polls and they send their own representatives back into power. And Gingrich, who was like really like a dark genius in his time before he became super corrupt, was one of the first people to intuit that if you wanted to sweep some of these people out of power, you had to make Congress look corrupt, you had to turn the American people against it. And then finally they'd be willing to take a chance on somebody else. And that's I think exactly what happened in 94. Growing up Kissinger to me was, you know, a war criminal, my parents, you couldn't even say the name Kissinger in our house. And yet for Donald Rumsfeld and Cheney, when when Kissinger was national security advisor, I think state under Gerald Ford, he was too liberal for Donald Rumsfeld. And then when Reagan took office, there were these neoconservatives who were Reagan Democrats who felt that Reagan was too liberal. The Republican Party just keeps getting further and further to the right. Just it gets hijacked each election cycle, it seems hijacked by more extreme politicians. And the more extreme they get, the more popular they seem to be. But are they really that popular? I mean, if you look at the votes, but for gerrymandering, there would be a democratic house. Well, I think it's, you know, you're right to a certain extent. I don't think it's just gerrymandering. We do have a huge gerrymandering problem. But we also have a problem called partisan sorting, which is the sort of increasingly likelihood that you're that you're going to live around people who think exactly the same as you do. This is the the infamous bubble that we're all getting scolded about right now. But there's some truth to that and the extent that if 80% of the Democrats in Illinois live in Chicago, there's almost no way to draw the district lines in such a way that you'd have partisan balance in each one of those districts. But if you added up the number of Americans who voted for a Democratic congressman, maybe a couple million more votes for a Democratic House than a Republican House. Yeah, and they're still counting, but that seems likely to be true this year was true in 2012. Is that always true? I mean, do we know going back? Is that always seem to be the case that more people prefer a Democratic House? But because of gerrymandering, we don't have one? Well, it's not that frequent. No, it's this year. It's 2012. But in fact, in 2014 and 2010, Republican House candidates got far more votes than Democrats. So it's something that happens sometimes, but not always. So are we going to take the wrong lessons is our side? The Democrats are conducting a postmortem. You say that we shouldn't be talking about identity politics, that that's not what destroyed the Democratic Party. How do you do a postmortem on a body that's still very much alive? I mean, Hillary has two and a half million more votes than Trump. More people voted for a Democratic House than a Republican one. Maybe we did everything right, but we're not pulling the proper, we're not fighting, as you say in your article, dirty enough. Yeah, I mean, I think there's definitely, there's a real danger here of over learning the lessons of this election. Right, I mean, it's worth pointing out that that our presidential candidate got more votes, that our House candidates are gonna end up with more votes. And our Senate candidates are gonna end up with more votes. And one of the reasons that progressives and Democrats have such a challenge in front of them is that many of the institutional features of our Constitution give more power to people in rural areas than they do in cities. And they give more power to small states than they do to big states. Nowhere is that more true than in the US Senate, where the 39 million people of California have the same representation as like the 500,000 people of Nebraska, right? And that's a structural challenge. And I do think it's worthwhile for Democrats to think really hard about how we can get people in places like Nebraska to vote for us. And that doesn't mean, in my mind, abandoning our core commitment to minorities and women and LGBTQ folks. I think it's it's incredibly important that we maintain our commitment to those groups in order to keep our coalition together. But in my mind, there's nothing preventing us from doing rural outreach and and coming up with some economic ideas that might appeal to people in these areas to convince them that a more interventionist state is actually in their in their interest. But it's a challenge. It's extremely frustrating, as I'm sure you know, to win more votes in an election and to come in second to democracy on the face of the earth that does this. That's why I defend the electoral college because I think there's something wrong with our side. I think that we've been hijacked by people who truly are out of touch. I think the Hollywood liberals, the Goldman Sachs, Wall Street types have taken over the Democratic Party. They're horrible human beings. People in Hollywood who vote for Clinton and Barack Obama, these are horrible, horrible human beings, people like Ariana Huffington, horrible people who treat individuals like crap, and then indemnify themselves by saving the planet. That's to me is the genius of the electoral college, because the people in Nebraska know that about our party and our side. You say that identity politics isn't what we need to focus on. I think even though we won, I think maybe it's time to take the lesson from Bernie Sanders, you know, when when the Black Lives Matters people took the microphone from them and said you're not concerned about us, they were right. But he was right to and maybe more right in that if you want to win an election, you got to lump all 99% of us together in one basket. That's that to me is how you win a national election, not with the identity politics. I mean, I don't disagree with you. I mean, I think there can be a question of emphasis, you know, there can be a question of how do we speak to people? I do think that we need to maintain our commitment to say systemic criminal justice reform. But there are real questions of strategy about how you emphasize that to different audiences. I think one thing to keep in mind is that one of the big mysteries of American politics is, you know, there were roughly 85 or 90 million eligible voters who chose not to vote in this election. And we, you know, everybody always says they seem so certain about the composition of the electorate, you know, like there's this many white people, there's this many Latinos. The truth is, you know, we don't know who these people are that are not voting. We don't know what kind of message might reach them. Certainly true that Bernie may very well have been right, that a politics that's broadly committed to clean governance to a vision of joining together and addressing some of our most deeply rooted economic issues. Maybe that would have brought more people out to vote. Maybe they would have voted for us. I think he would have won. And here's my apocalyptic hellscape that I envisioned for the next four years. That, you know, we never see the disaster coming. We think we see it, but we don't we don't understand what causes the end of a republic. I think all of us, including the people who are suffering, don't understand the depths of the despair that 99% of Americans feel. There are people who are in severe debt, who are $500 away from losing everything. And when we look back, and we're sitting in a just as I said, some kind of bleak, post democratic, post republic society four years from now, we'll all be saying we never really grasped the desperation of the American people because we were all lying to each other and ourselves about our economic frailty, because pride got in the way. Well, I don't think we're going to be able to die that much longer. I mean, particularly as the as the baby boomer generation retires, there's going to be enormous economic stress placed on on their children who who have to support them. There's not that many people that have things like long term care insurance. And that's why they're comfortable are not actually comfortable. If the parents get sick, or they get sick, that is why Trump is so dangerous. Because we think that there are institutions in place to protect us. We think that there are professors, there are journalists, there are bureaucrats. Well, everybody is in debt, is in trouble, and is looking out for themselves. And when you have a country where everybody is afraid of losing their job, everybody is compliant, everybody will have faith that somebody else will fix this. And we'll go along and say, Well, give it two more years. And that's why Trump is so dangerous. And I'm not going to bring up Nazi Germany, because you're not allowed to God went off. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm not going to bring it up. But when everybody is broke, when hyperinflation destroys your pension, when everybody is insecure, they give lip service to the rule of law, but they're concerned about themselves and their family. That's why this is a very dangerous point in American history. Very absolutely, I agree. And I agree with what Andrew Sullivan, who called this potentially an extinction level event, you know, I think Americans are very complacent about their democracy. You know, I think there's an assumption that authoritarianism couldn't happen here because our institutions are too robust. And I think that that's a huge mistake to be complacent about the overall health of our democracy. And I think it's why the Democrats really need to use their time in the minority to come up with a set of ideas that really addresses the overarching crisis of our time, which is the inability of ordinary human beings to share in broader economic prosperity that seems to be going on the top, you know, the kind of Uber, Uber application of everything. That is you have, you know, the elites in Silicon Valley, who are profiting off of technological innovation. And then you have this broad swath of people who seem to be just like unnecessary, right? And what do we have to say to those people? And what was the message of our campaign this year to those kind of people? I think we really need to think hard about that. You right. And when this moment finally presents itself, you're talking about the Democratic Party finding its roots, you say in 2022 or 2024, 2028, you say that the Democrats must have an extraordinarily radical agenda ready to roll. You say a massive amnesty that would be for undocumented workers. Yes, yeah, a new Voting Rights Act, sweeping criminal justice reform, Medicare for all, higher education whose cost is truly nominal, a Marshall plan for climate change, basic income for all Americans. Is that didn't Nixon talk about something like that? I do think Nixon kicked the idea around remarkable in retrospect, what a liberal Nixon wasn't in comparison to the Republicans. What do you mean a basic income for all Americans? What does that mean? A basic income is, you know, at this time, a fairly radical idea. But the idea is that the state provides a sort of assistance level income to everyone in society as a way of fighting things like homelessness and poverty. It remains radical, and it remains largely an untested idea. But there are economists who think it's a good idea. And it's about to, it's about to get a tryout in Finland, starting next year. So we should have some evidence about how this will actually work from our friends in Scandinavia, who have been pioneers now have so many different kinds of progressive policies. And I think it would be an extraordinarily difficult sell. But I also think people who say that we need to start off with extremely bold proposals before we compromise on them really have a point. You know, I think a basic income is one of those ideas, something like a Robin Hood tax is also another idea that I think the Democrats really need to get behind and push that the tax, you know, a tiny little tax on every financial transaction as a way of redistributing wealth away from the sort of Wall Street crowd to ordinary human beings that we can use that money to spend on things like infrastructure. I agree with you on compulsory voting. Why not a draft? Why not everybody has to serve in the military for two years? Yeah, I'm not opposed to some kind of national service. You know, my fear from a draft is, I personally want to make the military apparatus in this country any larger, I'd rather see, I'd rather see people drafted into, you know, some people drafted into the military and some people have to perform a couple years of service to the country in other capacities after they turn 18. So, you know, 18 to 20, you'd either be in the military, you'd be doing some kind of service, you know, like a domestic Peace Corps or something like that. No, no, with all due respect, Professor, if you want to make the military smaller, and if you want to stop adventurism overseas, everybody has to serve in the military for two years. Everybody has to see how incompetent our generals are. Everybody has to learn that the military can't keep its promises. Because of World War Two, we had an entire generation of men and women who knew how dangerous the people in charge were because they served under them. Sure. That's that's the benefit of a mandatory draft. Well, I can go on and on and I often have. Professor David Ferris has a great article in the week about saying no to everything Donald Trump wants. And I agree with you 100%. He's a professor of political science at Roosevelt University. And his latest book is Descent and Revolution in a Digital Age, Social Media, Blogging and Activism in Egypt. How can people buy that book? You can just proceed straight to Amazon. There's a paperback version of that book out. It's still obscenely upset, expensive by by ordinary standards. But the scholarly publishing industry is what it is. But yeah, it's on Amazon. It's still available, as far as I know. Great. And if people want to follow you on Twitter, on Twitter, yeah, I'm at David M. as in Michael David M. Ferris. Yeah, I encourage everybody to follow me on Twitter. It's either a fun space or the darkest place on the face of the earth. Thank you for you were very generous with your time. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me on the show, David.