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He's not even concerned about the popular vote. He's campaigning and focusing on 8-10 states. And that's a horrific commentary on our electoral system, that 8-10 states determine the election and 40 odd states are irrelevant.
Paul Jay
So Biden is doing it differently. He's spending a ton of money in the swing states. He's going to the swing states. But why is it even close in the swing states? Why is the polling relatively close?
Allan Lichtman
I'm 73 years old. I've been observing politics since the Eisenhower administration. I've been studying politics since the founding and revolutionary era. And I cannot understand why two-thirds of the American people are not voting against Donald Trump. How can you possibly want this situation in America to continue? A pandemic totally out of control, that Trump couldn't care less about and is doing nothing about, racial injustice and protests across the land that Trump has no clue whatsoever about, a president who has trashed almost every one of our sacred democratic traditions, who has lost us prestige and standing around the world, who kneels at the feet of the Russian dictator. [Editor's note: I don't agree with this statement about Trump and Putin and I'll address it in a separate podcast. See the comments section for a short take on the issue.]
Forget about Biden. Is this what the American people could possibly want as a continuation? It baffles me. I've never seen anything like this. You know, whether I disagreed or agreed with other presidents and other candidates, I've seen the basis for voting them. I could perfectly well understand why some would vote for Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, even though I might have disagreed with their policies. No problem with that. I do not understand how anyone could support Donald Trump and still believe in our democracy and our Constitution and our domestic tranquility, our national security.
Paul Jay
Well, there's two things there. One, I understand the disillusionment with the Democratic Party. I understand the disillusionment with the Obama Biden administration. I understand why people didn't vote for Hillary. I understand why people may have stayed home. What I don't understand very well is people voting for Trump. I can get why some might not want to vote at all. But I don't get how you vote for Trump, except there's some very deep kind of psychological thing happening here.
There's a really interesting essay by Wilhelm Reich titled "The Mass Psychology of Fascism." I don't know if you've read it, but he talks about why so many Germans supported Hitler, and he talks about sexual repression, and the need to transcend the daily sufferings of life through focusing on a hero, identifying with a savior. I think there's a similar phenomenon going on here, and the failures of the economic policies of the Democrats helped create the conditions for it.
Allan Lichtman
No question.
Paul Jay
I made a documentary film about professional wrestling, where wrestlers play heroes and villains, they play characters.
And in fact, Trump learned a lot of his politics from Vince McMahon and the World Wrestling Federation.
In fact, Trump actually played a character in the wrestling show where he wound up in a wrestling ring and fighting with Vince McMahon in "a whoever wins gets to cut the other guy's hair off" match. I mean, Trump actually got to feel what it's like to be the center of that kind of attention. And he learned how to play a kind of character that appeals to this kind of good and evil scenario.
And in some ways, and this is true in wrestling, the more flawed the character, sometimes people cheer more. Like in wrestling there's a thing about getting pop from an audience and it's all about the pop. And sometimes you get more pop when you're playing the heel. That is a villain people love to hate so much, they actually love them. They love them more than when somebody's playing the face. That's the good guy.
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