Wide Asleep in America: Citations Needed, Episode 33: Liberals' Obsession with the Phantom Reasonable Republican

Wednesday, April 11, 2018

Citations Needed, Episode 33: Liberals' Obsession with the Phantom Reasonable Republican

Jeffrey Goldberg, Leon Wieseltier, and James Bennet

The unlikely rise of Trump in the past three years has created a chasm in the Republican party: those who embrace the President’s wild, unorthodox, nativist style and those who––with much posturing and self congratulation––reject his brand of conservatism. The latter group, generally called “NeverTrump” Republicans occupies a special, protected status in Serious Centrist media––despite representing only 5% of the American population.

Major outlets like The Washington Post, The Atlantic and the New York Times employ roughly 20 #NeverTrump conservatives between them; there is no greater affirmative action policy in U.S. media than for anti-Trump conservatives. So long as they reject Trump, #NeverTrump pundits can get away with the most odious points of view––anti-Arab racism, climate change denial, literally suggesting women be hanged en masse for having abortions.

What accounts for this? Where does the institutional obsession with finding a Reasonable Republican come from and why is there such a widespread denial that Donald Trump does, in fact, actually and accurately represent the GOP as it exists today?

We are joined by Slate's Osita Nwanevu.

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The Show

Episode transcript available here.

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The Guest

Osita Nwanevu is a staff writer at Slate.

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Citations Needed is available on iTunes, Soundcloud and LibSyn (here’s the RSS feed). You can also check us out on Twitter and Facebook.

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Citations Needed is a media criticism podcast, hosted by Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi, political commentators and media analysts working to call bullshit on (usually corporate) media’s ubiquitous reliance on and regurgitation of false and destructive narratives, tropes and stereotypes.

Citations Needed is produced by Florence Barrau-Adams. Our Production Consultant is Josh Kross. Our research assistant is Sophia Steinert-Evoy. The theme is ‘Nonphenomenal Lineage’ by Grandaddy.

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Words of the Wiser

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."
- Mark Twain

"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people."
- Howard Zinn

"I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I'm a human being, first and foremost, and as such I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole."
- Malcolm X

"The roots of violence: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, politics without principles."
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

“When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.”
- Frantz Fanon

"When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

"The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing."
- Albert Einstein

"Whatever fosters the growth of civilization works at the same time against war."
- Sigmund Freud

"We must join with the tens of millions all over the world who see in peace our most sacred responsibility.
- Paul Robeson

"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."
- Anne Frank

"Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice."
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn

"Safeguarding the rights of others is the most noble and beautiful end of a human being."
- Kahlil Gibran

"The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them."
- Ida B. Wells

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
- Abraham Lincoln

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive...those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
- C.S. Lewis

"Fascism is capitalism plus murder."
- Upton Sinclair

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
- Frederick Douglass

"If I sit silently, I have sinned."
- Mohammad Mossadegh

"One must always try to be as radical as reality itself."
- Vladimir Lenin

"They must find it difficult, those who have taken authority as truth, rather than truth as authority."
- Gerald Massey

"Social equality is the only basis of human happiness."
- Nelson Mandela

"I don't want them to believe me, I just want them to think."
- Marshall McLuhan

"Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged against provisions against danger, real or pretended from abroad."
- James Madison

"If you can't eliminate injustice, at least tell everyone about it."
- Ali Shariati

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rock fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty."
- Henry David Thoreau

"The problem is not changing people's consciousness but the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth."
- Michel Foucault

"There can be no peace until the forces of oppression are overthrown."
- Albert Luthuli

"Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization."
- Eugene V. Debs

"The civility of no race can be perfect whilst another race is degraded. It is a doctrine of the oldest and of the newest philosophy, that man is one, and that you cannot injure any member, without a sympathetic injury to all members."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
- George Orwell

"There's no hope, but I may be wrong."
- Pete Seeger

"I'm witnessing this chronic, insidious genocide and I'm really scared, and questioning my fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature. This has to stop. I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop."
- Rachel Corrie

"Fear can only prevail when victims are ignorant of the facts."
- Thomas Jefferson

"To protest in the name of morality against 'excesses' or 'abuses' is an error which hints at active complicity. There are no 'abuses' or 'excesses' here, simply an all-pervasive system."
- Simone de Beauvoir

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."
- Arthur Schopenhauer

"Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights and keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose. To that high concept there can be no end save victory."
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt

"Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it."
- Blaise Pascal

"No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny."
- Hannah Arendt

"A state too expensive in itself, or by virtue of its dependencies, ultimately falls into decay; its free government is transformed into a tyranny; it disregards the principles which it should preserve, and finally degenerates into despotism."
- Simón Bolívar

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
- Voltaire

"People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster."
- James Baldwin

"You have to understand that people have to pay the price for peace. If you dare to struggle, you dare to win. If you dare not to struggle then god damn it, you don’t deserve to win. Let me say peace to you, if you’re willing to fight for it."
- Fred Hampton

"The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
- Milan Kundera

"All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it."
- Alexis de Tocqueville

"Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial."
- Herman Melville

"Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made."
- Franz Kafka

"Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied."
- Arthur Miller

"Everyone gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country."
- Michel de Montaigne

"Fascism itself can only be turned away if all those who are outraged by it show a commitment to social justice that equals the intensity of their indignation."
- Arundhati Roy

"Those who do not move, do not notice their chains."
- Rosa Luxemburg

"The basic principle, rarely violated, is that what conflicts with the requirements of power and privilege does not exist."
- Noam Chomsky

"Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right."
- H.L. Mencken

"The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human."
- Aldous Huxley

"Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do."
- Bertrand Russell

"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor."
- Desmond Tutu

"Every empire...tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate."
- Edward Said

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."
- Dante Alighieri

"When fascism comes to this country, it will be wrapped in the flag, carrying a cross."
- Sinclair Lewis

"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious."
- Smedley Butler

"The real difficulty is with the vast wealth and power in the hands of the few and the unscrupulous who represent or control capital... This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations.
- Rutherford B. Hayes

"Hard are the ways of truth, and rough to walk."
- John Milton

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
- Max Planck

"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
- Benjamin Franklin

"With the establishment of a relationship of oppression, violence has already begun. Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiators, if they themselves are the result of violence? How could they be the sponsors of something objective whose objective inauguration called forth their existence as oppressed? There would be no oppressed had there been no prior of violence to establish their subjugation."
- Paulo Freire

"The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment."
- Robert M. Hutchins

"I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring."
- Erich Maria Remarque

"The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding."
- Albert Camus

"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."
- Thomas Paine

"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men."
- Edward R. Murrow

"If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal."
- Emma Goldman

"Dissent is what rescues democracy from a quiet death behind closed doors."
- Lewis H. Lapham

"We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

"The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off."
- Gloria Steinem

"Activism is my rent for living on this planet."
- Alice Walker

"More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly."
- Woody Allen

"My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music."
- Vladimir Nabokov

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Wednesday, April 11, 2018

Citations Needed, Episode 33: Liberals' Obsession with the Phantom Reasonable Republican

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