October 4, 2021 • 21 mins
When New Yorker Staff Writer Evan Osnos, a veteran foreign correspondent, returned to the U.S. in 2013 he found a country that was unrecognizable from the one he'd left 11 years earlier. Suddenly, it was a place with deep political fissures and little to no common ground. Evan's new book "Wildland: The Making of America's Fury" is the result of his efforts to explain what had happened.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
From the recount on Marina Ninan and you're listening to
the Recount Daily Pod Today's Monday, October four. You had
this broad liquefaction of American confidence in the government, and
that opened the door to somebody who was, in this
case Donald Trump, who was essentially running against government. That
was Evan osn No, staff writer at The New Yorker
(00:29):
and author of wild Land, The Making of America's Fury.
We'll get into Evan's new book a little later on,
but first your morning headlines, we begin with COVID. The
United States reached another dark milestone over the weekend, passing
seven hundred thousand deaths from the pandemic. According to The
New York Times, the majority of the one hundred thousand
(00:50):
people who died in the last three and a half
months were unvaccinated. Dr Anthony Fauci shared his reaction about
the death toll on CNN. We do have inter actions
in the form of a vaccine, to prevent infection, to
prevent severe disease, to prevent death. So when you see
a number like this, I would hope people would say, well,
(01:11):
we have a tool to not let that get any worse. Israel,
a country that's had remarkable success in fighting COVID. Introduced
new rules for determining coronavirus vaccination status in Israel. To
be considered fully vaccinated, you have to receive your second
dose within the last six months or tested positive for
COVID in that time period. They're also requiring booster shots
(01:34):
six months after your second dose for anyone twelve and older.
The Israeli government has been using the Fiser vaccine. Next
to Florida, which has become a hot spot for pro
abortion activism, Thousands gathered across the state caring signs with
slogans like don't Texas My Florida in an effort to
stop a Republican proposal that would ban most abortions. That
(01:58):
proposed law would allow private citizen to sue anyone aiding
an abortion procedure, which is currently the law in Texas.
Unlike the Texas law, the Florida proposal allows for exemptions
for rape, incest, or medical emergencies that threatened the mother's life. Finally,
we end in California, where officials warned of a potential
(02:18):
ecological disaster after a hundred and twenty six thousand gallons
of oil leaked from an offshore rig. The leak was
initially reported on Saturday afternoon. It's the largest oil spill
in the state's history. The leak has been patched up,
but isn't completely plugged. Despite efforts to contain the spill,
dead fish and birds covered in oil have started to
(02:39):
wash ashore in Huntington Beach. The leak caused officials to
cancel the final day of the popular air show that
normally draws one and a half million visitors. And now
to our daily deep dive. When New Yorker staff writer
Evan Osnos, a veteran foreign correspondent, returned to the US
in two thousand thirteen, he found a country was unrecognizable
(03:01):
from the one he'd left in two thousand two. Suddenly
it was a place with deep political fissures with little
to no common ground. Evan's new book, Wildland, The Making
of America's Fury, is the result of his efforts to
explain what had happened. I want to welcome my friend
Evan Osinos. Evan, thanks for joining us my Pleasure Arena.
Thanks for the invitation. I know you've been working on
(03:23):
this book for quite some time, and you've thought there
so many things our country in such a different point
than it was for decades. What really motivated you to
write this book? I think the truth is that I
was alarmed by coming back to my country after a
decade away. And it wasn't just that there was obviously
gridlock in Washington or a level of polarization. It felt
(03:47):
to me as if we had really lost this specific
American thing. And I don't want to romanticize it, because
it was never a perfect, good, old Golden age, but
we have had this ability to see the country as
larger than the sum of its parts, and in the
grandest terms, that's eplura us unum. But the idea that
we can do that, and what really struck me when
(04:08):
I came back was it felt as if that vision
had failed us and we were less than some of
our parts. And that struck me as a sort of
demanded some closer looking actually try to document what it
means to be American in the early twenty one century.
So what were the questions you were hoping to answer
(04:28):
with this book. I wanted to go at the question
of political culture. I wanted to understand things like what
do people trust and what do they not trust? What
are the sources of security and insecurity in their lives.
What are the ways in which they feel as if
the country is fulfilling or not fulfilling their their values.
(04:50):
I mean, honestly, Rena, I think it's closer to how
a foreign correspondent approaches a country than typically how we
look at our own country. And that was partly by design.
I mean, I wanted to do something that was a
little bit of a step back. So I'll give you
one example. I mean, I wanted to understand in particular
segregation in various parts of the country. By that, I
(05:12):
mean racial segregation, but also segregation by class and segregation
of the mind, the way in which we have receded
into these pockets of American experience, How all of these
different kinds of segregated experience were contributing to that broader
sense of disillusion. You spent six years reporting this book.
(05:33):
You focused on three major American cities, Greenwich, Connecticut, Clarksburg,
West Virginia, and Chicago, Illinois. These are all places where
you've lived. But why these particular places. I thought they
would give me very different impressions of America, and that
proved to be the case. I mean, just in brief terms,
they are quite different places. Clarksburg, West Virginia, is a
(05:54):
small city in the northern part of the state. It's
coal country. I lived in Clarksburg for my first job
out of college, and it's a place that has been,
in its own way, sort of tumbling through the last
forty years of American economics. And it is also a
place that has transformed politically from being mostly all Democrats
to being almost entirely conservative, and I wanted to understand
(06:17):
why and how. In Chicago, of course, which is a
place that my family is originally from, I worked at
the Chicago Tribune for nine years. It's the place in
America that is perhaps the most durable and in many
ways maddening demonstration of the effects of segregation, particularly racial segregation,
(06:39):
on health and wealth and outcomes. And then Grantwich, Connecticut,
which is where I had grown up as a kid,
is a wealthy New York City suburb, and it's also
in some ways the engine room of American capitalism. It's
a place going all the way back to the nineteenth century,
you can get a window into the decisions and the
values that are guiding American economic decision making. So all
(07:01):
three of these places. They have all played some role
in my life, and I suppose it was just the
most wildly unoriginal thing to go to three places I've lived,
But I felt as if I could actually have some
sense of change over time by going there, rather than
just parachuting in for the first time and trying to
understand what makes it so. Your book follows three people
(07:21):
as they sort of navigate these varied landscapes of century America.
What do you think it is that their stories reveal
about the United States in various ways they convey I
think the sense of precarious nous and that curiously enough
applies not only to people at the bottom, but also
(07:43):
to people at the top, because the sense that the
stakes of winning and losing in this country economically, politically,
the sense that those stakes have become so large, pushes
people to make frantic choices. I'll give you an example.
I think we usually associate that with, let's say, desperate
(08:04):
people in the economy who voted for Donald Trump because
they imagined that he would somehow deliver on fantastical promises
to revive their jobs. That we've sort of already built
into our understanding of the Trump phenomenon. But I think
actually the more surprising example is somebody in Grantwich, Connecticut
who I interviewed, who was a lawyer who ended up
(08:26):
being arrested in the college admissions case known as Varsity
Blues because he had paid seventy five thousand dollars to
change the results of his daughter's college entrance exam. And
he was on a FBI wire taps saying the moral
element of this doesn't bother me. And I interviewed him
(08:46):
for this, and I said, what possessed you? And he said,
I honestly thought that I was in a corrupt system
and if I didn't do something to advantage myself and
my family, that we would be disadvantaged. For me, there
was a learning from that, which is that the sense
that America's permission of a certain kind of corruption in
(09:07):
American life has created a sense of desperation, and that
breeds all kinds of other trouble down the line. Speaking
of other trouble, in the book, you mentioned that in
nineteen sixty four of Americans said that they generally trusted
the government. By two thousand fourteen, only eight percent. Did
(09:28):
what happened here two different things happened that are both important.
One is that, particularly among a certain brand of conservatism,
there was a determined effort to undermine confidence in the
state and to say the government is not going to
protect you. In fact, it's going to impede your ability
to prosper That became a certain kind of call it
(09:51):
small government prosperity gospel. And then there's this other thing
that happened, which is that among other people on the
political spec trum, there was a gradual loss of confidence
in the ability of the state too to tell the truth,
to deliver on its promises. And you could identify that
(10:12):
with a couple of things, some statistical, some chronological. I mean,
so in ninety, for instance, if you were born in
the United States that year, you stood a nine chance
of out earning your parents, but by the beginning of
this century that number had dropped more than half. So
that was a feeling of some kind of loss of
confidence in the apparatus. Then there was another thing, which
(10:35):
is that you had things like the invasion of Iraq,
which of course was based on misrepresentation of intelligence about
weapons of mass destruction. And I think over time those
moments contributed to a gradual loss of confidence, and the
effect was that you had this broad liquefication of American
confidence in the government, and that opened the door to
(10:56):
somebody who was, in this case, Donald Trump, who was
essentially running against government. That was his platform. We've got
to take a quick break. We'll be right back with
Evan os Nos, author of wild Land, The Making of
America's Fury. You're listening to The Recount Daily Pod. Welcome
(11:17):
back to the Recount Daily Pod, a podcast from the
Recount and I Heart Radio. I'm here with Evan os Nos,
author of wild Land, The Making of America's Fury. I
want to talk to you a little bit about the
election of Donald Trump. You refer to it as a
joint venture between working class voters and well healed executives.
Break that down for us. I think often when we
(11:40):
talk about the Trump phenomenon, we focus on the populist
edge of the people in places like Clarksburg, West Virginia,
which did, after all, vote for Trump in large numbers.
And it's true that he did appeal to that. I
think you have to also acknowledge there was a racist
message in his campaign that appealed to people, and some
people responded to it. There's just no question about the
(12:01):
role that he had. But then there was this other
thing going on at the top, which was that there
were establishment Republicans who, at the very beginning said, I'll
never vote for this guy. He's out of step with
my values, he's crude, he's totally out of step with
where we imagine the Republican Party should be. But by
the end they had changed their mind and had put
(12:22):
themselves in league with him. And I was especially struck
with it in Greenwich because in some ways it's the
homeland of the Republican establishment. The Bush family literally is
from Granwich, and so it caught my attention when people
started to throw their support to him, and I wanted
to understand how that happened, Why it is that they
imagined that he might be someone who could advance their
(12:43):
interests and the interests of the party. I want to
ask you about January six, you were actually there at
the Capitol. What did you see, what was going through
your head, and how did this insurrection unfold in front
of you? Well, I went there as a reporter, of course,
for the New Yorker, and I was I was, I
was staggered. Honestly, you know, I did not expect to
(13:05):
ever see something like that unfolding here in the city
where I live, in the country that I imagine to
be immune from those kinds of moments, those expressions of
total unbounded rage that I have seen and covered in
so many other places. It took a moment for me
(13:25):
to calibrate my instruments and sort of get my bearings
that morning. But the thing that really struck me about
it was not the very angry guys who were running
around in camouflage and so on. In some ways, I
had come to expect that. I knew there was always
going to be this fringe of people who are participating
in a kind of political delusion about the idea that
(13:47):
they're going to overthrow the government. But what really surprised
me was actually the Grandmother's the people who were there
who on a Monday morning would get up and go
to work, and they in fact had been drawn into
this big lie about the idea that the election had
been stolen from Donald Trump. And it was when I
(14:08):
met them, actually that I was really shaken, because I
began to realize that this had leached out into the
broader population to a degree. I hadn't fully appreciated, and
that was the first indication. I don't think I knew
it then, but that was the first indication of the
fact that his phenomenon was going to last beyond his
presidency and that we'd be contending with a metastasizing threat
(14:30):
which we now face today. We've got to take a
quick break. We'll be right back with Evan os Nos,
author of wild Land, The Making of America's Fury. You're
listening to The Recount Daily Pod. Welcome back to the
Recount Daily Pod, a podcast from the Recount and I
Heart Radio. I'm here with Evan os Nos, author of
(14:51):
wild Land, The Making of America's Fury. You talked about
this metastasizing threat, you know, all the porting you did
for this book. What really surprised you? I guess the
thing that really surprised me, and this is an encouraging fact,
is that we have this weird capacity in this country
(15:13):
to recognize when something is getting really dangerous. And it's
not as if we, you know, all pulled together and say,
well enough of that, now, let's all get back to democracy.
But there is on a level that we don't even
I think process day today a self corrective mechanism. And
(15:34):
I rely a bit in this case on the scholarship
of people like Robert Putnam at Harvard, who wrote a
book recently with Shylen Romney Garrett about how the Gilded
Age gave way to the Progressive era. And that's a
fascinating little scene in history, because it's a moment when Americans,
and particularly very privileged Americans, began to look and realize
(15:57):
that the system that they believed they had triumphed in
was in fact falling apart, and that they had to
figure out a way to repair it. And they did. Actually,
the real history is that they looked at how desperately
insecure people felt in this country, and there was an
(16:18):
effort to begin to repair the system, not just on
the political or policy level, but really on the moral level,
to peer into the abyss and say, how did we
get into this mess, How did we lose the capacity
or did we ever really have it to be empathetic
towards people unlike ourselves, and what can we do to
make it a little better. I was amazed as I
talked to people who were, you know, scholars and philosophers
(16:40):
and legal activists who are involved in some of the
hardest problems around the weaknesses in American democracy are actually
some of the people who say no, no no, no. The
encouraging fact is we know what some of the solutions are.
They're not hiding from us. And you're beginning to see
the germination of what I think of as antibodies to
(17:01):
the problem, to the illness in American democracy. And I
described in the book how that is beginning to take shape.
And I came out of it feeling better than I
expected to. I got to ask you, did you come
away with any thoughts on how American society might heal?
Were there any beacons of hope? Yeah? Actually, I mean
I was struck by a few things. There is this
(17:24):
thread that runs through many people's experience of the power
of national service as an ingredient in generating a sense
of common good. I mean to give you one example
in the state of Virginia in the twentieth century. Lynwood Holton,
who was the governor of the state, was the person
who implemented brown versus Board of that against the resistance
(17:47):
of a lot of people in his own state. And
he was a white governor, and people said, why are
you implementing the integration of schools, and he said, well,
because a g I who served alongside people who did
not look like me, black, white, Latino, and none of
that mattered. And in fact we were part of this
larger thing, this larger project. And I think there is
(18:09):
a power in national service beyond just the idea that
it is contributing in a material way, whether it's military
or civilian. It puts you in league with people who
are so different than you are that it forces you
to imagine yourself as part of something larger than the
individual parts. And I think there has been bubbling up
over the last few years, a push by people like
(18:30):
people Buda Judge and others to really try to create
avenues for much greater national service. And some of this
is a matter of law and policy, but also it's
really about culture. It's about valorizing it. One of the
proposals on the table right now is a National Climate Core,
in this tradition of the Civilian Conservation Corps after the
(18:51):
Great Depression, that would take young people and put them
into work alongside one another to mitigate the effects of
climate change. And it's a powerful idea. Evan os Nos,
author of wild Land, the making of America's fury Evan,
Thanks so much, my pleasure. Ina, Thank you, and now
to the look ahead. Here's what else we're watching Today.
(19:13):
The U. S. Supreme Court returns for its first in
person arguments since March. Attorneys are expected to wear at
nine mass in the courtroom except when presenting arguments. Only
those with negative COVID tests will be allowed in. The
rules were in place before Friday's announcement that Justice Brett
Kavanaugh tested positive for COVID. All Supreme Court justices have
(19:34):
been vaccinated since January. This will mark the first time
that Justice Amy Coney Barrett will be physically in the
seed once held by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Expected cases
over the coming weeks include challenges to abortion rights, gun regulations,
and whether the death penalty applies to Boston marathon bomber.
(19:55):
Britain will begin deploying military tanker drivers to help deliver
fuel in London in southeast England today. The goal is
to stabilize a national supply after a week of panic buying.
The fuel shortage is partially due to a driver shortage
caused by Brexit, and also due to an aging workforce
and the coronavirus pandemic. Today marks the anniversary of the
(20:18):
construction of Mount Rushmore in South Dakota in an effort
to promote tourism. Historian Dwayne Robinson came up with the
idea to celebrate the first one hundred and fifty years
of American history. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and
Abraham Lincoln were each chosen because of their role in
preserving the Republic and expanding its territory. It took over
(20:40):
four hundred workers and a little over fourteen years to
finish the project. Have a great day, everyone, I'll see
you back tomorrow. This is a Recount Daily pod at
podcast from The Recount and I Heart Radio Or Thanks
to Evan Osnos, staff writer at The New Yorker and
author of Wildly and the Making of America's Fury for
(21:02):
being on the show. If you like this episode, I
hope you'll subscribe to The Recount Daily Pod and do
leave us a rating on the Apple podcast app. I'm
your host, Briana Nina
From the recount on Marina Ninan and you're listening to
the Recount Daily Pod Today's Monday, October four. You had
this broad liquefaction of American confidence in the government, and
that opened the door to somebody who was, in this
case Donald Trump, who was essentially running against government. That
was Evan osn No, staff writer at The New Yorker
(00:29):
and author of wild Land, The Making of America's Fury.
We'll get into Evan's new book a little later on,
but first your morning headlines, we begin with COVID. The
United States reached another dark milestone over the weekend, passing
seven hundred thousand deaths from the pandemic. According to The
New York Times, the majority of the one hundred thousand
(00:50):
people who died in the last three and a half
months were unvaccinated. Dr Anthony Fauci shared his reaction about
the death toll on CNN. We do have inter actions
in the form of a vaccine, to prevent infection, to
prevent severe disease, to prevent death. So when you see
a number like this, I would hope people would say, well,
(01:11):
we have a tool to not let that get any worse. Israel,
a country that's had remarkable success in fighting COVID. Introduced
new rules for determining coronavirus vaccination status in Israel. To
be considered fully vaccinated, you have to receive your second
dose within the last six months or tested positive for
COVID in that time period. They're also requiring booster shots
(01:34):
six months after your second dose for anyone twelve and older.
The Israeli government has been using the Fiser vaccine. Next
to Florida, which has become a hot spot for pro
abortion activism, Thousands gathered across the state caring signs with
slogans like don't Texas My Florida in an effort to
stop a Republican proposal that would ban most abortions. That
(01:58):
proposed law would allow private citizen to sue anyone aiding
an abortion procedure, which is currently the law in Texas.
Unlike the Texas law, the Florida proposal allows for exemptions
for rape, incest, or medical emergencies that threatened the mother's life. Finally,
we end in California, where officials warned of a potential
(02:18):
ecological disaster after a hundred and twenty six thousand gallons
of oil leaked from an offshore rig. The leak was
initially reported on Saturday afternoon. It's the largest oil spill
in the state's history. The leak has been patched up,
but isn't completely plugged. Despite efforts to contain the spill,
dead fish and birds covered in oil have started to
(02:39):
wash ashore in Huntington Beach. The leak caused officials to
cancel the final day of the popular air show that
normally draws one and a half million visitors. And now
to our daily deep dive. When New Yorker staff writer
Evan Osnos, a veteran foreign correspondent, returned to the US
in two thousand thirteen, he found a country was unrecognizable
(03:01):
from the one he'd left in two thousand two. Suddenly
it was a place with deep political fissures with little
to no common ground. Evan's new book, Wildland, The Making
of America's Fury, is the result of his efforts to
explain what had happened. I want to welcome my friend
Evan Osinos. Evan, thanks for joining us my Pleasure Arena.
Thanks for the invitation. I know you've been working on
(03:23):
this book for quite some time, and you've thought there
so many things our country in such a different point
than it was for decades. What really motivated you to
write this book? I think the truth is that I
was alarmed by coming back to my country after a
decade away. And it wasn't just that there was obviously
gridlock in Washington or a level of polarization. It felt
(03:47):
to me as if we had really lost this specific
American thing. And I don't want to romanticize it, because
it was never a perfect, good, old Golden age, but
we have had this ability to see the country as
larger than the sum of its parts, and in the
grandest terms, that's eplura us unum. But the idea that
we can do that, and what really struck me when
(04:08):
I came back was it felt as if that vision
had failed us and we were less than some of
our parts. And that struck me as a sort of
demanded some closer looking actually try to document what it
means to be American in the early twenty one century.
So what were the questions you were hoping to answer
(04:28):
with this book. I wanted to go at the question
of political culture. I wanted to understand things like what
do people trust and what do they not trust? What
are the sources of security and insecurity in their lives.
What are the ways in which they feel as if
the country is fulfilling or not fulfilling their their values.
(04:50):
I mean, honestly, Rena, I think it's closer to how
a foreign correspondent approaches a country than typically how we
look at our own country. And that was partly by design.
I mean, I wanted to do something that was a
little bit of a step back. So I'll give you
one example. I mean, I wanted to understand in particular
segregation in various parts of the country. By that, I
(05:12):
mean racial segregation, but also segregation by class and segregation
of the mind, the way in which we have receded
into these pockets of American experience, How all of these
different kinds of segregated experience were contributing to that broader
sense of disillusion. You spent six years reporting this book.
(05:33):
You focused on three major American cities, Greenwich, Connecticut, Clarksburg,
West Virginia, and Chicago, Illinois. These are all places where
you've lived. But why these particular places. I thought they
would give me very different impressions of America, and that
proved to be the case. I mean, just in brief terms,
they are quite different places. Clarksburg, West Virginia, is a
(05:54):
small city in the northern part of the state. It's
coal country. I lived in Clarksburg for my first job
out of college, and it's a place that has been,
in its own way, sort of tumbling through the last
forty years of American economics. And it is also a
place that has transformed politically from being mostly all Democrats
to being almost entirely conservative, and I wanted to understand
(06:17):
why and how. In Chicago, of course, which is a
place that my family is originally from, I worked at
the Chicago Tribune for nine years. It's the place in
America that is perhaps the most durable and in many
ways maddening demonstration of the effects of segregation, particularly racial segregation,
(06:39):
on health and wealth and outcomes. And then Grantwich, Connecticut,
which is where I had grown up as a kid,
is a wealthy New York City suburb, and it's also
in some ways the engine room of American capitalism. It's
a place going all the way back to the nineteenth century,
you can get a window into the decisions and the
values that are guiding American economic decision making. So all
(07:01):
three of these places. They have all played some role
in my life, and I suppose it was just the
most wildly unoriginal thing to go to three places I've lived,
But I felt as if I could actually have some
sense of change over time by going there, rather than
just parachuting in for the first time and trying to
understand what makes it so. Your book follows three people
(07:21):
as they sort of navigate these varied landscapes of century America.
What do you think it is that their stories reveal
about the United States in various ways they convey I
think the sense of precarious nous and that curiously enough
applies not only to people at the bottom, but also
(07:43):
to people at the top, because the sense that the
stakes of winning and losing in this country economically, politically,
the sense that those stakes have become so large, pushes
people to make frantic choices. I'll give you an example.
I think we usually associate that with, let's say, desperate
(08:04):
people in the economy who voted for Donald Trump because
they imagined that he would somehow deliver on fantastical promises
to revive their jobs. That we've sort of already built
into our understanding of the Trump phenomenon. But I think
actually the more surprising example is somebody in Grantwich, Connecticut
who I interviewed, who was a lawyer who ended up
(08:26):
being arrested in the college admissions case known as Varsity
Blues because he had paid seventy five thousand dollars to
change the results of his daughter's college entrance exam. And
he was on a FBI wire taps saying the moral
element of this doesn't bother me. And I interviewed him
(08:46):
for this, and I said, what possessed you? And he said,
I honestly thought that I was in a corrupt system
and if I didn't do something to advantage myself and
my family, that we would be disadvantaged. For me, there
was a learning from that, which is that the sense
that America's permission of a certain kind of corruption in
(09:07):
American life has created a sense of desperation, and that
breeds all kinds of other trouble down the line. Speaking
of other trouble, in the book, you mentioned that in
nineteen sixty four of Americans said that they generally trusted
the government. By two thousand fourteen, only eight percent. Did
(09:28):
what happened here two different things happened that are both important.
One is that, particularly among a certain brand of conservatism,
there was a determined effort to undermine confidence in the
state and to say the government is not going to
protect you. In fact, it's going to impede your ability
to prosper That became a certain kind of call it
(09:51):
small government prosperity gospel. And then there's this other thing
that happened, which is that among other people on the
political spec trum, there was a gradual loss of confidence
in the ability of the state too to tell the truth,
to deliver on its promises. And you could identify that
(10:12):
with a couple of things, some statistical, some chronological. I mean,
so in ninety, for instance, if you were born in
the United States that year, you stood a nine chance
of out earning your parents, but by the beginning of
this century that number had dropped more than half. So
that was a feeling of some kind of loss of
confidence in the apparatus. Then there was another thing, which
(10:35):
is that you had things like the invasion of Iraq,
which of course was based on misrepresentation of intelligence about
weapons of mass destruction. And I think over time those
moments contributed to a gradual loss of confidence, and the
effect was that you had this broad liquefication of American
confidence in the government, and that opened the door to
(10:56):
somebody who was, in this case, Donald Trump, who was
essentially running against government. That was his platform. We've got
to take a quick break. We'll be right back with
Evan os Nos, author of wild Land, The Making of
America's Fury. You're listening to The Recount Daily Pod. Welcome
(11:17):
back to the Recount Daily Pod, a podcast from the
Recount and I Heart Radio. I'm here with Evan os Nos,
author of wild Land, The Making of America's Fury. I
want to talk to you a little bit about the
election of Donald Trump. You refer to it as a
joint venture between working class voters and well healed executives.
Break that down for us. I think often when we
(11:40):
talk about the Trump phenomenon, we focus on the populist
edge of the people in places like Clarksburg, West Virginia,
which did, after all, vote for Trump in large numbers.
And it's true that he did appeal to that. I
think you have to also acknowledge there was a racist
message in his campaign that appealed to people, and some
people responded to it. There's just no question about the
(12:01):
role that he had. But then there was this other
thing going on at the top, which was that there
were establishment Republicans who, at the very beginning said, I'll
never vote for this guy. He's out of step with
my values, he's crude, he's totally out of step with
where we imagine the Republican Party should be. But by
the end they had changed their mind and had put
(12:22):
themselves in league with him. And I was especially struck
with it in Greenwich because in some ways it's the
homeland of the Republican establishment. The Bush family literally is
from Granwich, and so it caught my attention when people
started to throw their support to him, and I wanted
to understand how that happened, Why it is that they
imagined that he might be someone who could advance their
(12:43):
interests and the interests of the party. I want to
ask you about January six, you were actually there at
the Capitol. What did you see, what was going through
your head, and how did this insurrection unfold in front
of you? Well, I went there as a reporter, of course,
for the New Yorker, and I was I was, I
was staggered. Honestly, you know, I did not expect to
(13:05):
ever see something like that unfolding here in the city
where I live, in the country that I imagine to
be immune from those kinds of moments, those expressions of
total unbounded rage that I have seen and covered in
so many other places. It took a moment for me
(13:25):
to calibrate my instruments and sort of get my bearings
that morning. But the thing that really struck me about
it was not the very angry guys who were running
around in camouflage and so on. In some ways, I
had come to expect that. I knew there was always
going to be this fringe of people who are participating
in a kind of political delusion about the idea that
(13:47):
they're going to overthrow the government. But what really surprised
me was actually the Grandmother's the people who were there
who on a Monday morning would get up and go
to work, and they in fact had been drawn into
this big lie about the idea that the election had
been stolen from Donald Trump. And it was when I
(14:08):
met them, actually that I was really shaken, because I
began to realize that this had leached out into the
broader population to a degree. I hadn't fully appreciated, and
that was the first indication. I don't think I knew
it then, but that was the first indication of the
fact that his phenomenon was going to last beyond his
presidency and that we'd be contending with a metastasizing threat
(14:30):
which we now face today. We've got to take a
quick break. We'll be right back with Evan os Nos,
author of wild Land, The Making of America's Fury. You're
listening to The Recount Daily Pod. Welcome back to the
Recount Daily Pod, a podcast from the Recount and I
Heart Radio. I'm here with Evan os Nos, author of
(14:51):
wild Land, The Making of America's Fury. You talked about
this metastasizing threat, you know, all the porting you did
for this book. What really surprised you? I guess the
thing that really surprised me, and this is an encouraging fact,
is that we have this weird capacity in this country
(15:13):
to recognize when something is getting really dangerous. And it's
not as if we, you know, all pulled together and say,
well enough of that, now, let's all get back to democracy.
But there is on a level that we don't even
I think process day today a self corrective mechanism. And
(15:34):
I rely a bit in this case on the scholarship
of people like Robert Putnam at Harvard, who wrote a
book recently with Shylen Romney Garrett about how the Gilded
Age gave way to the Progressive era. And that's a
fascinating little scene in history, because it's a moment when Americans,
and particularly very privileged Americans, began to look and realize
(15:57):
that the system that they believed they had triumphed in
was in fact falling apart, and that they had to
figure out a way to repair it. And they did. Actually,
the real history is that they looked at how desperately
insecure people felt in this country, and there was an
(16:18):
effort to begin to repair the system, not just on
the political or policy level, but really on the moral level,
to peer into the abyss and say, how did we
get into this mess, How did we lose the capacity
or did we ever really have it to be empathetic
towards people unlike ourselves, and what can we do to
make it a little better. I was amazed as I
talked to people who were, you know, scholars and philosophers
(16:40):
and legal activists who are involved in some of the
hardest problems around the weaknesses in American democracy are actually
some of the people who say no, no no, no. The
encouraging fact is we know what some of the solutions are.
They're not hiding from us. And you're beginning to see
the germination of what I think of as antibodies to
(17:01):
the problem, to the illness in American democracy. And I
described in the book how that is beginning to take shape.
And I came out of it feeling better than I
expected to. I got to ask you, did you come
away with any thoughts on how American society might heal?
Were there any beacons of hope? Yeah? Actually, I mean
I was struck by a few things. There is this
(17:24):
thread that runs through many people's experience of the power
of national service as an ingredient in generating a sense
of common good. I mean to give you one example
in the state of Virginia in the twentieth century. Lynwood Holton,
who was the governor of the state, was the person
who implemented brown versus Board of that against the resistance
(17:47):
of a lot of people in his own state. And
he was a white governor, and people said, why are
you implementing the integration of schools, and he said, well,
because a g I who served alongside people who did
not look like me, black, white, Latino, and none of
that mattered. And in fact we were part of this
larger thing, this larger project. And I think there is
(18:09):
a power in national service beyond just the idea that
it is contributing in a material way, whether it's military
or civilian. It puts you in league with people who
are so different than you are that it forces you
to imagine yourself as part of something larger than the
individual parts. And I think there has been bubbling up
over the last few years, a push by people like
(18:30):
people Buda Judge and others to really try to create
avenues for much greater national service. And some of this
is a matter of law and policy, but also it's
really about culture. It's about valorizing it. One of the
proposals on the table right now is a National Climate Core,
in this tradition of the Civilian Conservation Corps after the
(18:51):
Great Depression, that would take young people and put them
into work alongside one another to mitigate the effects of
climate change. And it's a powerful idea. Evan os Nos,
author of wild Land, the making of America's fury Evan,
Thanks so much, my pleasure. Ina, Thank you, and now
to the look ahead. Here's what else we're watching Today.
(19:13):
The U. S. Supreme Court returns for its first in
person arguments since March. Attorneys are expected to wear at
nine mass in the courtroom except when presenting arguments. Only
those with negative COVID tests will be allowed in. The
rules were in place before Friday's announcement that Justice Brett
Kavanaugh tested positive for COVID. All Supreme Court justices have
(19:34):
been vaccinated since January. This will mark the first time
that Justice Amy Coney Barrett will be physically in the
seed once held by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Expected cases
over the coming weeks include challenges to abortion rights, gun regulations,
and whether the death penalty applies to Boston marathon bomber.
(19:55):
Britain will begin deploying military tanker drivers to help deliver
fuel in London in southeast England today. The goal is
to stabilize a national supply after a week of panic buying.
The fuel shortage is partially due to a driver shortage
caused by Brexit, and also due to an aging workforce
and the coronavirus pandemic. Today marks the anniversary of the
(20:18):
construction of Mount Rushmore in South Dakota in an effort
to promote tourism. Historian Dwayne Robinson came up with the
idea to celebrate the first one hundred and fifty years
of American history. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and
Abraham Lincoln were each chosen because of their role in
preserving the Republic and expanding its territory. It took over
(20:40):
four hundred workers and a little over fourteen years to
finish the project. Have a great day, everyone, I'll see
you back tomorrow. This is a Recount Daily pod at
podcast from The Recount and I Heart Radio Or Thanks
to Evan Osnos, staff writer at The New Yorker and
author of Wildly and the Making of America's Fury for
(21:02):
being on the show. If you like this episode, I
hope you'll subscribe to The Recount Daily Pod and do
leave us a rating on the Apple podcast app. I'm
your host, Briana Nina
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