Democrats need to defend democracy without undermining it—but how? John Ganz, author of When the Clock Broke and the "Unpopular Front” substack, joins Offline to interrogate why Democrats have ceded nostalgia about the past to Republicans, how they should be resisting the America's autocratic slide, and what it says about our political moment that his “Trump is dead” tweet went viral. John and Jon discuss the pros and cons of using historical frameworks like fascism to understand contemporary American politics, how the seed of Trumpism was planted in the early 1990s, and whether Democratic leaders are falling short on rhetoric.

For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast.

As the U.S. slides into autocracy, Americans need to be reminded that liberalism can still solve the problems that Trump uses to fear monger. Jerusalem Demsas, founder and editor in chief of “The Argument,” joins Offline to explain what solutions for immigration and the economy would look like, her beef with the post-liberal left, and why she’s staying on Twitter...and maybe you should too. Plus, what she’s seeing on the ground at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, DC—aka the place JD Vance gets his crazy blood and soil ideas.

For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast.

 Ben Rhodes—bestselling author, Pod Save the World co-host, and fellow Obama administration alum—joins Offline to explain how America is being torn apart by short-term thinking and the technology that stokes it. Ben recently wrote a piece for the New York Times on the topic, and he and Jon connect the dots between big tech, the attention economy and domestic dogmas, drawing on fifty years of foreign policy to explain how we got to a place where no one can focus on the worst of what Trump’s doing—let alone agree on a national narrative.

For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast.