Hey everybody it's Joe Trippy and welcome back to that Trippy show.

Today we welcome Norm Ornstein, author,

contributing editor at the Atlantic, and scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

He's been tracking the rise of extremism in America for years now.

And as we are preparing for the 2022 facing down this authoritarian movement,

I thought Norm's perspective would be really useful.

You know, Norm, I'm going back and I remember reading things that you were writing

about Congress in the 80s. It was one of the things that got me sort of focused on

politics but lately there's a couple books that I think are really important. You written several with Thomas Mann, but it's even worse than it looks how the American constitutional system collided with the new politics of extremism, which was like 2012 I think, was

really way ahead of everybody else seeing where all this might go. And now, in your last book out in 2017,

One Nation after Trump that you wrote with Thomas Mann

Nee J. Dion, I think again, was so prescient about where we are again, it was a guide for the perplexed,

the disillusion, the desperate, and not yet deported.

Norm, it's just great to have you with us. I want to get your perspective on where you see things now

So Joe, we're in a dark place. I expected we would be in a dark place, but it's darker.

You know, John McCain used to have as one of his favorite sayings,

it's always darkest just before it turns completely black. And we would laugh, but we're getting blacker.

And the fundamental reason is, of course we've known that these extreme forces were around. We knew going back more than a decade

that the Republican Party had toyed with them, had tried to exploit them, exploit their anger, incite their anger, and use it to gain power, but really

expected that they could then co-op them.

And they've been co-opted.

And the fundamental reality now that makes this so particularly dangerous

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