27: Overcoming Authoritarianism with Thomas Zimmer

Jen Rubin's Green Room

Politics, News Commentary, News, Society & Culture

4.8 • 578 Ratings

🗓️ 15 November 2023

⏱️ 72 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Jen welcomes historian and democracy activist Thomas Zimmer to investigate the Right’s descent into ethno-religious authoritarianism and how to defeat it. They break down how media bubbles have allowed the lies driving radicalism to flourish, and the ways the white christian nationalist minority is trying to gain control by using raw power to subvert our institutions. Critically, they pivot to the steps that the Biden administration has taken to build a broad and diverse coalition around the defense of democracy, the need to resist fractures on other issues, and what can energize voters to create a vibrant pluralist majority capable of moving us forward.

Get More From This Week’s Guest:

Thomas Zimmer:
Twitter | The Guardian | Substack | Georgetown | Is This Democracy Podcast

Get More From Jennifer Rubin:
Twitter | WaPo | Author of “Resistance: How Women Saved Democracy From Donald Trump”

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, this is Jen Rubin, and this is Jen Rubin's Green Room.
0:10.6	Well, I just got back, and I mean just got back from the March for Israel on the Ball.
0:17.9	It was extraordinary. The diversity of people, the geographic spread of the crowd,
0:26.6	the age, the race, the religious affiliation of people was truly remarkable. The place was
0:35.2	packed. It's very hard when you're in the middle of the crowd to kind of
0:38.6	see how big it is, but I am certain they have cleared the 100,000 mark and perhaps the 200,000
0:45.3	mark as well. So coming back from that, and I was sort of thinking, what did I take away from this?
0:52.4	What was my kind of sense of the event? And in some ways,
0:57.9	it was the reminder of, you know, what Nixon used to call the silent majority, that most
1:04.1	Americans are not those crazy pro-Hamas demonstrators who are tearing down the posters of kidnapped victims.
1:12.7	Most Americans are not chanting from the river to the sea, meaning the extermination of Israel and
1:19.9	all the Jews. Most Americans are pro-Israel. Most Americans are horrified by the terrorists.
1:26.8	And most Americans are not anti-Semites.
1:30.3	And I think this was an extremely healthy thing to remind the majority of America,
1:37.9	not only that Jews are here, but that normal people are here.
1:42.6	And there were many Christians in the crowd.
1:44.4	They had signs, Christians for Israel.
1:47.0	There were many people who probably have very little Jewish affiliation who were there.
1:53.2	But it's a reminder not only to the Jewish community, I think, but the larger community
1:58.2	that the most radical, the loudest, the nastiest, the meanest voices
2:03.4	are not a majority of the population, not even close.
2:08.3	And in fact, when you get down to some real number crunching, they're not even a significant
	...

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