It’s not hard to see that the Republican party was the Party of Trump during the four years he was president. But what kind of party are they now? Honestly, it’s hard to tell. “When you looked at the platform for the 2020 election, they didn't create one,” says New Yorker writer and professor Jelani Cobb. There is one thing about today’s GOP, however, that is very clear: “They've doubled and tripled down on a type of politics that is very appealing to disgruntled white people or white identity politics.” If history repeats itself, as it often does, this tactic will bite them in their behinds. In this episode of The New Abnormal, Jelani chats with Molly Jong-Fast about the major similarities he sees between the current state of the GOP and parties of the past that no longer exist. Oof. “The Republican party [are] the modern version of the Whigs,” he explains. “They broke apart over debates about the expansion of slavery, and they could not figure out where they stood on these fundamental questions. They were incoherent internally. And so what was notable to me was the extent to which all those dynamics are present within the current Republican party.” And capitalizing on “white desperation,” is one of the ways it’s trying to remain in power, he adds. This explains the Jan. 6 riots and there’s some bad news: “It might be reasonable to look at January 6th as the onset of a particular kind of political violence rather than the culmination of something that's already concluded,” he says. Then! Molly asks Jelani about the Voting Rights Act and its fate, and he shares a history nugget that many people might not know about (Abraham Lincoln basically gave Black people the right to vote to offset white supremacists in the South, which he saw as a “direct threat to American democracy.”) History strikes again. “A lot more is at stake than we generally acknowledge,” says Jelani. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Republicans are terrified—with good reason. Utah Sen. Mike Lee went viral this week when he sputtered earlier that one of the new voting rights bills making its way through the House was “written in hell by the devil himself.” And Lee’s GOP colleagues didn’t exactly knock the notion down. “They should be scared of it,” Rep. Eric Swawell, the California Democrat, tells Molly Jong-Fast on the latest edition of The New Abnormal. “What we saw this past election in Georgia and Arizona —states that have historically made it harder for African-Americans and Latinos to vote—was that when you expand access to the polls, Democrats can win. And so I'm sure it was not comfortable for Georgians and Arizona leaders to certify the results for Joe Biden and [Sens.] Mark Kelly, [Raphael] Warnock and [Jon] Ossoff.” “But instead of doing the right thing and standing on the integrity [of the election], they're learning the wrong lesson,” Swalwell adds. “What they're doing now is they're going back and saying, ‘Well, we don't ever want to do that again. We don't ever want to certify a Democratic victory. So let's just change the rules... Let's get rid of early voting. Let's get rid of Sunday voting, which benefits the faith-based communities of Georgia. Let's make it a misdemeanor if you pass out food or water to a long line.... And that way we can protect ourselves from another Democratic victory.’” “If we do not pass HR1 and HR4—the two voting rights bills—you will see this institutionalized across the country, and the results will be devastating,” he continues. “HR1 gets rid of the dirty maps of redistricting, gerrymandering, and the dirty money. It strips down to the studs as much as you can legislatively the Citizens United ruling. HR4, The John Lewis Civil Rights act really puts back in place what's called pre-clearance—requiring approval from the courts before you can move polling places or purge voter rolls. And so if there was ever a reason to break the filibuster, which was put in place to block voting rights, it would be to advance both voting rights. It's almost a perfect completion of the circle.”Then, Justice Democrats spokesperson Walid Shahid talks about how President Biden can avoid the traps that snagged Obama. And Carl Zimmer—a top science reporter for the New York Times and author of Life’s Edge: the Search for What It Means To Be Alive—joins Jong-Fast to discuss the pandemic, and the botched response that we are only now beginning to counteract.“People knew this was coming for 20, 30 years, and yet we didn't prepare well enough,” he says. “If you look at countries like Nigeria or Senegal, and look at their case rate, their death rate, and all the rest, they have done incredibly well. And, and I was recently listening to a Nigerian disease specialist, talk about why this is. And one reason is that they'd been through Ebola and been through other outbreaks. They know what a virus can do when it goes berserk. And so they coordinated very early lockdowns and everyone was on board and they had good, consistent public health messaging. They didn't have a lot of money, they didn't have a lot of resources, but they were coordinated and effective. And I think we could learn a lot from them. And we should also look to ourselves and say, ‘well, why did we in the United States that makes such a spectacular mess of it.’”If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.