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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nTrump supporters cheer as the President wins Florida during Marin County Republicans watch party at Trek Winery in Novato, Calif., on Tuesday, November 3, 2020. Scott Strazzante\/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The political crisis that has gripped the US over the past decade is the outgrowth of this country\u2019s peculiar political history. Just as the hard right turn of the 21st century GOP can be traced back to the failures of post-Jim Crow desegregation, so too can the Democrats\u2019 failure to uphold any \u2018left\u2019 politics worthy of the name be drawn back to a betrayal of labor decades in the making. Few are as equipped as Rick Perlstein<\/a>, historian of the post-1980s conservative movement, to place our current conjuncture in the context of the long arc of US history, as he does in his new column The Infernal Triangle: Authoritarian Republicans, Ineffectual Democrats, and a Clueless Media<\/a>. <\/em>Perlstein joins The Marc Steiner Show<\/em> for a discussion on his work and the present political moment as the US enters yet another election year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Studio \/ Post-production: David Hebden<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Marc Steiner<\/strong>: Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show<\/em> here on The Real News. I\u2019m Marc Steiner, it\u2019s great to have you all with us, and let\u2019s get ready for another episode of Rise of the Right<\/em>. We talk today once again with Rick Perlstein, who\u2019s renowned for his books like, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan<\/em>, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America<\/em>, and before that, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus<\/em>. His latest article in Prospect Magazine<\/em> has an ominous title, \u201cYou Are Entering the Infernal Triangle: Authoritarian Republicans, ineffectual Democrats, and a clueless media.\u201d Let\u2019s talk about what\u2019s happening now, the future, where it may be taking us, and what we might do about it. Welcome back, Rick.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rick Perlstein<\/strong>: Hi, Marc. It\u2019s good to be here. I feel like every interview I do, it\u2019s like when you go to a funeral, I wish we could meet under better circumstances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marc Steiner<\/strong>: [Laughs] I thought about the same thing as we started this. This whole series I do on Rise of the Right<\/em> sometimes could drive me to drink.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rick Perlstein<\/strong>: Well, at least you have your Israel-Palestine series too \u2013<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marc Steiner<\/strong>: Right, that, too. I pick the most uplifting subjects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rick Perlstein<\/strong>: \u2013 Tell me about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marc Steiner<\/strong>: But you\u2019ve been covering this for a long time. This has been part of what you\u2019ve been talking about, rising in America, for decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rick Perlstein<\/strong>: I started working on this stuff in 1996. Right at the beginning of \u201996, I started my Goldwater book. It\u2019s like if I had chosen a different subject, my life would\u2019ve been very different. But I picked a winner, Marc. It turned out to be something that was at the center of America\u2019s and the world\u2019s prospects. Now I am mostly writing about much more recent history, and it\u2019s like an emotional live wire for me. It\u2019s a lot easier to write about dead people, even when they\u2019ve had a profound influence on the present.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Join thousands of others who rely on our journalism to navigate complex issues, uncover hidden truths, and challenge the status quo with our free newsletter, delivered straight to your inbox twice a week<\/strong>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marc Steiner<\/strong>: Exactly. I understand. Before we jump into \u201cThe Infernal Triangle,\u201d let me play on what you said here for a moment. It seems that many of us grew up in the era that started during the Depression with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, took us through Kennedy, and the Vietnam War, and so there\u2019s this illusion America was moving to a progressive world and then something shifted. Talk a bit about that shift historically and what exactly happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rick Perlstein<\/strong>: There\u2019s this, really, really wonderful historian, who makes me look like a piker, named Jefferson Cowie. Blessed that he won the Pulitzer Prize this year for his book on this county in Alabama since the 1830s and tracing how the word \u201cliberty\u201d became an alibi for domination. Anyway, he wrote a book called The Great Exception<\/em>, and he points out that this time, which seemed like it was the way America was going to go and more and more of a progressive direction, turned out to be this strange exceptional window. And he says a couple of fascinating things about why this period from 1932 \u2013 I\u2019ll give you a very specific date \u2013 To 1965, was able to have this window in which America became much more of a social democracy, much more of a multiracial democracy. There are a couple of things: There\u2019s one thing he says and one thing that I will say, Marc. What happened in 1965? A lot of things. But what might\u2019ve happened to \u2013 If I can get Socratic \u2013 And this exception of tolerant, cosmopolitan, progressive, social, democratic, liberalism in America?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marc Steiner<\/strong>: You\u2019re asking me to answer that question?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rick Perlstein<\/strong>: It\u2019s a mind-blower [Marc laughs].<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marc Steiner<\/strong>: Well, we had the Voting Rights Act.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rick Perlstein<\/strong>: Right? That is definitely one contributing factor. Remember that Kevin Phillips said, don\u2019t worry about the Republicans winning the South. We\u2019ll win the South because of the reaction against the Voting Rights Act.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marc Steiner<\/strong>: Exactly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rick Perlstein<\/strong>: And in fact, it has happened that the counties that have the most African-American voting are the ones that have the most strong conservative movements. But there\u2019s another thing that happened in 1965, another landmark piece of legislation, and that was the one that opened up immigration to the non-European world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marc Steiner<\/strong>: Right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rick Perlstein<\/strong>: Between 1924 and 1965, America had very few \u2013 Unless you were Chinese, Chinese Exclusion Act \u2013 Immigration laws at all. You showed up and proved that you weren\u2019t infectious, and the next thing you know, you\u2019re working at a factory or a push cart or whatever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1924, the Johnson-Reed Act, inspired by the Ku Klux Klan, made it impossible for anyone who wasn\u2019t from Western Europe to immigrate to the US. In 1965 that was repealed. The very dark, tragic point that Jefferson Cowie makes is that it was that window of relative ethnic homogeneity that gave Americans the trust to let down their guards and feel like they could share more creepy stuff. Another point I would raise that helped lead this reaction goes a little further. It\u2019s the post-World War II prosperity that did seem like it would live forever. America went from something like 20% of the world\u2019s exports to like 50%. We bestrode the world like a colossus, and, as every leftist knows, that broke down. And the neoliberal era of this era of the \u201970s was driven by falling corporate profits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To give an excellent example of how that enabled a progressive imagination, do you know how the \u2013 Not to get Socratic again \u2013 Freedom Budget, which was what Martin Luther King was fighting for when he did the poverty encampment on the mall?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marc Steiner<\/strong>: I was there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rick Perlstein<\/strong>: Well, the whole idea of how the Freedom Budget worked was \u2013 I don\u2019t want to get too deep in the weirds \u2013 Do you know what the Taxpayer Increment Financing System is? The people who wrote it, economists and civil rights activists like Bayard Rustin, the idea was they would take the amount of tax revenue America had in 1968 and all the tax revenue above it as America grew and grew and grew and grew. Because we \u2013 Again, bestrode the world as a classist \u2013 Would be committed to things like building community centers, income supports, all this stuff. It wasn\u2019t this idea that they were going to expropriate the rich. It was the idea that America was going to be so rich we would make sure that the excess went to the people who needed it most.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So once you get to 1973, 1974, and 1975, and you get stagflation, and you get recession after recession after recession, that idea that America\u2019s bounty could be redistributed in a freer and fairer way is out the window and you get this zero-sum idea about economics. You get the idea that this guy next to me wants to take from me and if he looks different and smells different and eats different foods and looks different, well then I better protect me and mine against him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So that\u2019s, in a nutshell, the Reagan era. And the thing about that that\u2019s so disconcerting now is one of the things \u2013 And, of course, from [inaudible] trial, and I talk about what happens to the Democrats, too \u2013 The Democrats feel like they need to get on board with the neoliberalism. And a lot of it is bad faith rich people who want to have a hand in both parties, but a lot of it is, wow, this New Deal stuff doesn\u2019t work anymore. Look how stagnant the economy is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marc Steiner<\/strong>: I would maybe \u2013 As you\u2019ve written about as well \u2013 Add to that the civil rights struggle and race and how that affected all of this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rick Perlstein<\/strong>: Yes, and it\u2019s a real paradox. Progress does beget reaction. I look at how it\u2019s our moral imperative as human beings born within the geographical confines of the US that we repair this breach. But it has consequences. It makes it harder for people to let their guard down. Those basic, lower down on Maslow\u2019s Hierarchy of Needs and people get very defensive. They get very sharp elbows. And the apotheosis of that is they\u2019ve stolen our birthright, make America great again. And that\u2019s why we have a left and we have a left to fight the right, but we have a left also to make sure the Democratic Party doesn\u2019t become the tool of the right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marc Steiner<\/strong>: I want to jump into \u201cThe Infernal Triangle\u201d here but I have to ask you one quick question. Your analysis about how the deindustrialization of America feeds into that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rick Perlstein<\/strong>: Right. It\u2019s quite fascinating. You might know a Marxist historian named Judith Stein.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marc Steiner<\/strong>: Oh, sure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rick Perlstein<\/strong>: She passed away. The book about Clinton\u2019s neoliberalism that came out with Nelson Lichtenstein, another great historian of labor, called Fabulous Failure<\/em> was written with her notes. But she wrote a book on the \u201970s in which she pointed out that because of this prosperity, it\u2019s like we will develop the economies of our Cold War allies, but there was never really any thought for the consequences of giving them a piece of the industrial pie. And she gives this amazing example of this guy, George Ball, who\u2019s one of the good guys in the Johnson administration who fought the Vietnam War, but during the Kennedy administration, he was a trade representative and he would have these meetings with textile union representatives in which he would show off his British suit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Or if you look at how America industrialized Japan, said, we need this Cold War bulwark in the East against the Chinese monster. And it wasn\u2019t that there wasn\u2019t enough to go around, it wasn\u2019t that the whole world doesn\u2019t deserve to develop, it was that they didn\u2019t spare a thought for the blue-collar industrial factories. It would take care of itself. It was one more constituency that the Democrats took for granted. Then you get Jimmy Carter who had no interest in unions, completely sold them out consistently, and then you get NAFTA. And you look at what Bill Clinton said when he signed NAFTA, he said it was going to create 5 billion new jobs. Who doesn\u2019t want that? Right? It\u2019s a combination of reasonably good intentions, bad intentions, tragic outcomes, unintended consequences, intended consequences, and history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marc Steiner<\/strong>: Now we find ourselves in this \u201cInfernal Triangle\u201d that you talk about, which I thought was a brilliant way to look at it. Let\u2019s break that down for all of us in what those three parts are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rick Perlstein<\/strong>: So what I\u2019m doing with my life now \u2013 Happy days \u2013 Is writing a book about America since the year 2000, since Bush v Gore. And I try and create a portrait of what got us to the Trumpian moment that has three broad moving parts. One I\u2019m most associated with is what I call the \u201cauthoritarian ratchet\u201d of the Republican Party. I have a theory about why and what it is about conservatism that makes it more and more and more authoritarian over the years. We all know about that. The inadequacy of the Democrats in responding to it, whether they are Boy Scouts who refuse to play hardball, or whether they take their working class and minority base for granted. This goes all the way back to the \u201950s. You should see what Adlai Stevenson said about the idea of national healthcare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This idea that they\u2019re aloof and above the grubby give and take of real hardball politics, the neoliberalism, all these things we associate with the failures of the Democratic Party, that\u2019s the second side of the triangle. But the third part is the one I obsess over most because I find it the most depressing, and it\u2019s the media. In that first column, I compare, for example, the way the media performs a little trick of affirmative action on behalf of Republicans when you take as the structural bedrock of your professional ideals as a journalist that each side has to be treated the same, but one side lies, cheats, and steals far more than the other side which tends to act like boy scouts, then you\u2019re biased towards the people who lie, cheat, and steal. You\u2019re not depicting reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I compare that to the picture that Americans get from the mainstream media and resembles, in its accuracy, the picture that people get in an authoritarian country where the media is not free. And I use the word profta. To take an example from 2004, because the right did such a good job of vilifying Dan Rather who accurately reported that George W. Bush went AWOL from the Texas National Guard, but he used a forged document, which for all we know was a [inaudible] that was forged by Karl Rove. And that became normalized as an issue of debate by the mainstream media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was a poll that more people thought CBS was biased against the Republicans than Fox was biased against the Democrats. And you see that all the time. Barack Obama passed a tax cut that covers 99% of wage earners. For all of Barack Obama\u2019s flaws, he created a tax cut that gave the average family $1,200 for the 2009 tax year. And then in 2010, CBS did a survey: 53% of Americans think that their taxes were the same, 23% think under Obama they went up, and only 11% say they got a tax cut. That\u2019s because the media depicted the right-wing tea party doing what they said they were doing. They said they were fighting high taxes from Barack Obama. So they laundered a lie, they became the conveyor belt for disinformation. So you combine all these things together and there\u2019s a very narrow aperture for building a mass public for multiracial democracy, social democratic policies, cosmopolitanism, science, truth, and all the things that I\u2019m proud as a left-leaning liberal to say that we need in order to have a healthy functioning society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marc Steiner<\/strong>: I\u2019m curious where you think this takes us. As we have this conversation today, David Smith of Sinclair Broadcasting, who is a right-wing demagogue, bought The Sun<\/em>, which is Baltimore\u2019s daily newspaper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rick Perlstein<\/strong>: It\u2019s as if Rupert Murdoch took over the Washington Post<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marc Steiner<\/strong>: Exactly. Right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rick Perlstein<\/strong>: So, yes. The Sun<\/em> is a newspaper. There was an old joke, it was on Family Guy<\/em>, and the dog told his 20-something that he was dating and she asked what a book was, and he said, it\u2019s like a blog made out of trees. This was the early-2000s or something. But, young people don\u2019t read newspapers, and young people \u2013 And this is very much my friend Jeff Charlotte\u2019s rift, too \u2013 Are going to save us. The young people who are willing to walk into a church and yell at the president about Israel-Palestine, the young people who are willing to put their bodies on the line when the State Department is talking with energy executives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the tragedies of the Democratic Party is that it holds not only its activist base but its next generation of politicians in such patronizing contempt. There\u2019s a new book by Ryan Grim about The Squad and the way Nancy Pelosi treated AOC. Your jaw will drop. It is like fear and contempt of 80-year-olds for 30-year-olds. But if there\u2019s a dialectical turn, it\u2019s obviously going to come from the people who\u2019ve gotten the shit end of neoliberalism, the shit end of climate change, and understand that the old institutional arrangements don\u2019t work. When you pedal the bicycle the chain does not catch on the gear and they\u2019ll do their own thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The fact that the Democratic Party has never had the wit to realize that you invest more in the younger members of the party than the older members of the party who are going to die anyway, that\u2019s a paradox of the Republican Party. They love bomb young people. I read a memoir by a young reporter named Tito Wen, who was formerly on the right, and the stuff about the money they showered on her to go to journalism camps, paid internships, all this stuff, that the investor class to the Democratic Party doesn\u2019t want to have anything to do with it \u2018cos they can\u2019t control it. But young people find their way to the right values anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marc Steiner<\/strong>: So, given what you laid out in \u2018The Infernal Triangle,\u201d you\u2019ve given the three parts that you broke down for us a few moments ago, one of the things I\u2019m going to throw out to you as thinking about this is that it seems as that left-liberals, the Democrats in general, have forgotten how to organize.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rick Perlstein<\/strong>: Yes, totally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marc Steiner<\/strong>: And we, as a former union organizer, community organizer, we invented that shit. We invented that, we did that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rick Perlstein<\/strong>: And they freely admit that they stole it all from us. Stupidly, they think we still do all this stuff. There\u2019s lots of projection but this Tina Nguyen memoir is heartbreaking. She spends all this time on the right, then she becomes the correspondent covering the right for Vanity Fair<\/em>, and she goes to her editor and she\u2019s like, well, I want to do this for the left. I want to cover Democratic Party organizations. And the guy\u2019s like, great, go for it. And she\u2019s like, wait a sec. There aren\u2019t any. It\u2019s absolutely gobsmacking because she\u2019s naive, she doesn\u2019t know much. She\u2019s young.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She expects to find the Alec of the Left. She expects to find the Federalist Society of the Left, and they try and create these pale limitations, but they\u2019re so tepid and Boy Scoutish. She wants to find the CPAC of the left. CPAC, it\u2019s free for kids to go there, it\u2019s like Heritage Foundation, they have their own door. I have a brilliant nephew who\u2019s desperate to get a job within the activist world, on the left, an analysis job, think-tank job, whatever, and he\u2019s done so much, he has so many fascinating things on his resume, and he won an award for his thesis and he can\u2019t even get an interview.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marc Steiner<\/strong>: In the time we have left, let me hit two things here before I come back to where \u201cThe Infernal Triangle\u201d may take us as we can close out on that. Why do you think we got here?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rick Perlstein<\/strong>: The biggest, highest level principle is\u2026 Do you remember Old Sam Rayburn, the former Speaker of the House?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marc Steiner<\/strong>: In Texas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rick Perlstein<\/strong>: From Texas. He was one of these classic, he is probably racist but he gave a lot of white guys jobs, and then with these New Deal programs he built a lot. He had a saying, he passed it along to his protege, Lyndon Johnson, who really took it to heart: Any jackass can knock down a barn. It takes a carpenter to build and a lot of what the right does is entropy; They destroy. They destroy people\u2019s faith in government, they destroy regulatory organizations, and they destroy anything that\u2019s a countervailing power against corporations. Building those things is much harder. Building those things requires trust, it requires reciprocal effort, it requires leadership, and it requires also a media that plainly explains what\u2019s going on. It\u2019s like, here\u2019s this for generations, we learned, oh, well, the Democrats sold out blue-collar factory workers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Well, Joe Biden, for all his awful qualities is creating all these factory jobs for white guys in the South. The CHIPS Act. But it\u2019s so far gone, that people don\u2019t even connect the idea that government can do anything to help them. I once read an article about a guy talking about how he was going door to door \u2013 This was a long time ago in the 2004 election for John Kerry\u2019s campaign with undecided voters \u2013 And he would say, oh, John Kerry wants to lower your health insurance premiums. And he said people would look at him like he said John Kerry wants to fix your deck. The idea that you hire people in the government to help you, that\u2019s another one of these chains that slip the gears. We don\u2019t even think that way anymore. And that\u2019s a project of building and it\u2019s happening but it\u2019s something that is a generational project. We don\u2019t have much time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marc Steiner<\/strong>: Well, picking up on that \u201cwe don\u2019t have much time\u201d theme, I think about all the stuff you\u2019ve written and you talk about the Republican Party ratcheting and moving towards authoritarianism, Democrats who have lost their way and seem to have no \u2013<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rick Perlstein<\/strong>: Chutzpah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marc Steiner<\/strong>: \u2013 That\u2019s a good word. Chutzpah. Yes. And then you have the media who\u2019s not doing their job. So none of us are with crystal balls but we do have analysis. You do have a worldview of where we\u2019ve been and when there were movements that moved us forward. What do you think it takes us now? What do you see happening given that inferno in the next generation?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rick Perlstein<\/strong>: I don\u2019t want to be glib. I\u2019ve already been a little glib by saying the [crosstalk] but there are so many geostrategic things that are going on around the country. I could see a World War happening. Maybe it\u2019s an 1860 movement, maybe it\u2019s a 1660s movement, maybe it\u2019s an 1830s movement. This is a big, big moment in history. And may you live in interesting times, that supposed old Chinese curse. We all have very meaningful jobs to do and it ain\u2019t fun. It\u2019s like we\u2019re living in the woods, living off the land, and fighting the resistance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marc Steiner<\/strong>: It does feel like that. I think about this piece that I worked on a few years back which was making an analogy between the Civil War and the post-Civil War reconstruction period and the period we\u2019re in now, and what form that takes. I can\u2019t tell, but it feels like from, and also what you\u2019re saying, that\u2019s where we are. We\u2019re at one of those precipices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rick Perlstein<\/strong>: One more thing. I got to use this because the person who told me it didn\u2019t give me permission to use it in my book [both laugh]. So I\u2019m going to put it out there and pretend you didn\u2019t hear it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marc Steiner<\/strong>: Okay, got you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rick Perlstein<\/strong>: Someone told me about how their partner grew up in a conservative home and their father would wake them up every morning with a catechism: What is liberalism? Liberalism is a mental disease. That way we have a generation of people who\u2019ve grown up in that world then now they\u2019re trying to destroy us. And by the way, liberal means left, too. This is a working alliance. If you\u2019re a leftist and you think liberals are your enemy, I have no time for that. If you\u2019re a liberal, and you think the left is your enemy, I have no time for that. This is popular front time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marc Steiner<\/strong>: This is a time for what in my parents\u2019 generation, they called a united front.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rick Perlstein<\/strong>: That\u2019s right. United front.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marc Steiner<\/strong>: Rick Perlstein, as always it\u2019s a pleasure to talk with you. It really is. And your analysis is amazing. Your articles are amazing. We\u2019re going to link to all of them here, on this page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rick Perlstein<\/strong>: And if you go to prospect.org, a splash page will come up and it\u2019ll say, this is not a paywall. Then you go down to the bottom. You can click on my column and sign up for it every week, every Wednesday morning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marc Steiner<\/strong>: Well worth the read as well. And I look forward to many more conversations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rick Perlstein<\/strong>: Yes, thank you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marc Steiner<\/strong>: I want to thank you so much for your work, Rick, and we\u2019ll stay in touch. Thank you for this. This is really an important piece of work you\u2019ve been doing, so thank you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rick Perlstein<\/strong>: Thank you, Marc. Bye-bye.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marc Steiner<\/strong>: Thank you all for joining us today. And a special thanks to Dave Hebden for running the show today and editing this program, the tireless Kayla Rivara for making it all work behind the scenes, and everyone here at The Real News for making this show and our other shows possible. And we want to thank Rick Perlstein for joining us. We\u2019re going to link to Rick Perlstein\u2019s stories on the American Prospect<\/em> on our set here at The Real News. You can catch up with what he\u2019s saying. He\u2019s always well worth the read.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Please let me know what you think about what you heard today and what you\u2019d like us to cover. Write to me at, mss@therealnews.com and I will write to you immediately. Stay tuned for more conversations and stories about the\u00a0Rise of the Right<\/em>\u00a0here on The Real News and\u00a0The Marc Steiner Show<\/em>. We have a fight on our hands for our future, our children\u2019s future, the nation, and the world\u2019s future. It\u2019s all at stake and we here at The Real News will do our part and bring those stories to you. So for the crew here at The Real News, I\u2019m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Host, The Marc Steiner Show<\/strong> Historian Rick Perlstein\u2019s new column examines how Republicans, Democrats, and a hapless media have created a perfect storm of political crisis. BY\u00a0MARC STEINER JANUARY 30, 2024 (therealnews.com) Trump supporters cheer as the President wins Florida during Marin County Republicans watch party at Trek Winery in Novato, Calif., on Tuesday, November… Continue reading \n
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MARC STEINERHOST, THE MARC STEINER SHOW<\/a><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Marc Steiner is the host of “The Marc Steiner Show” on TRNN. He is a Peabody Award-winning journalist who has spent his life working on social justice issues. He walked his first picket line at age 13, and at age 16 became the youngest person in Maryland arrested at a civil rights protest during the Freedom Rides through Cambridge. As part of the Poor People\u2019s Campaign in 1968, Marc helped organize poor white communities with the Young Patriots, the white Appalachian counterpart to the Black Panthers. Early in his career he counseled at-risk youth in therapeutic settings and founded a theater program in the Maryland State prison system. He also taught theater for 10 years at the Baltimore School for the Arts. From 1993-2018 Marc’s signature \u201cMarc Steiner Show\u201d aired on Baltimore\u2019s public radio airwaves, both WYPR\u2014which Marc co-founded\u2014and Morgan State University\u2019s WEAA.
marc@therealnews.com
@marcsteinerMore by Marc Steiner<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"