How white identity politics won the Republican civil war

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Vox Media Podcast Network

Society & Culture, News, Politics, News Commentary, Philosophy

4.6 • 10.8K Ratings

🗓️ 18 July 2019

⏱️ 85 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Tim Alberta’s new book American Carnage documents “the Republican Civil War”: a decade-plus struggle over whether the Republican Party would build itself around white identity politics or try to reach out to a changing America. Trump’s election settled the argument, and Alberta’s book tracks the way top Republicans processed that resolution — and submitted to their new reality — in real time. The profiles in courage are few and far between; the capitulations, however, are everywhere. Alberta takes us deep inside that process, and the quotes and stories he’s revealed already have top Republicans at each other’s throats. This is a conversation about what the Republican Party has become, why Donald Trump won the fight for the party’s soul so decisively, why so many conservative politicians abandoned their loathing of Trump to embrace the power he offered, and what comes next. Alberta brings the receipts, and if nothing else, it’s a helluva portrait of how principles are traded for power. Book recommendations: The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright War by Sebastian Junger Moneyball by Michael Lewis ******************************************************* Want to get in touch with the show? Send us a message at [email protected] The Ezra Klein Show has been nominated for best Society- culture podcast in this year’s People’s Choice Podcast Awards! Cast your vote for The Ezra Klein Show at https://www.podcastawards.com/app/signup before July 31st. One vote per category. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The country has changed so much in such a short period of time that when you layer that
0:05.2	cultural change on top of that, you know, socioeconomic disruption, on top of all the political
0:10.6	dysfunction, I think it sort of builds to a powder keg and we knew that it was going to
0:14.8	explode sooner or later.
0:16.7	We just didn't know that Donald Trump was going to be the one to light the match.
0:31.0	Hello, welcome to the Clanchon, the box media podcast network.
0:34.1	I guess today's Tim Alberta, who's a chief political correspondent at political magazine
0:37.9	and author of the new book, American Carnage, which is an unbelievably deeply reported,
0:42.2	deeply sourced look at their Republican parties' elites processing, what their parties
0:47.0	become in real time over the past 10 years.
0:49.9	At the core of this book is this fight over what their Republican party really is and
0:53.6	what it should be.
0:55.1	Is it a party of conservatism, particularly Washington DC conservatism, low taxes, deregulation,
1:02.5	something, something, Koch brothers or Milton Friedman, or is it a party of white identity
1:07.2	politics?
1:08.2	Is it a party about the fact that this country has been a white Christian country in terms
1:13.2	of its political majority for a long time that is changing and that change comes, brings
1:18.4	with it dislocation and cultural dislocation and those people want a party that is going
1:23.9	to protect their interests and want a party that is going to fight for them and fight
1:28.4	to make that change not happen.
1:30.7	So this book is interesting, part of the context of the past couple of episodes with George
1:34.9	Will, who I think of as representing that conservative, that DC conservatism tradition,
	...

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