Show Transcript

Peter Sacks: Is America's Democracy Under Attack?

[00:00:00] Hey guys, welcome to the Lean to the Left podcast, where we dive into the key social issues of our times with just a little Lean to the Left. Now today we're with Peter Sacks, author of "Libertyland", a new thriller that plunges readers into a chilling scenario reminiscent of January 6th, entwined with philosophical insights akin to Ayn Rand's exploration of individualism.

[00:00:26] So stay with us. 

[00:00:28] Now the Liberty Land story follows Carson McCready, former Navy SEAL who becomes the prime suspect in the most devastating domestic terrorist attack on American soil since 9 11. Carson's quest to clear his name uncovers a clandestine society of libertarian billionaires bent on establishing a ruthless capitalist utopia, regardless of the cost.

[00:00:56] Sounds a little too close to today's reality, if you ask me. Anyway, Peter Sachs is an award winning author and social critic. His philosophical thriller, Libertyland, was published in February, and his book, Tearing Down the Gates, Confronting the Class Divide in American Education, won the Frederick W. Ness Book Award from the Association of American Colleges and Universities, and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

[00:01:24] Peter also is the author of Standardized Minds, The High Price of America's Testing Culture, and What We Can Do to Change It. His articles and essays on education have appeared in a variety of prestigious publications, and several have won awards, including a Pulitzer Prize nomination. His lectures include appearances at the Harvard Club, University of Notre Dame, and Columbia University.

[00:01:50] Peter, we're delighted to have you with us today on the Lean to the Left podcast. 

[00:01:55] Delighted to be here, Bob. Thank you. 

[00:01:58] Hey, tell us a little bit about your background, Peter, and what prompted you to write Liberty Land? 

[00:02:04] Professionally, I started out as the, an economist. 

[00:02:08] I worked back East for a consulting firm in DC.

[00:02:12] I worked for the state of Washington and, as, and the university of Oregon. And so my training was in, Pretty much straight down free market economics. 

[00:02:27] Okay. 

[00:02:28] And I felt Magister Ludi in Herman Hesse's novel, so removed from the real world in this pursuit of manipulation of economic formulas and mathematical symbols and this and that.

[00:02:45] And I switched to journalism, went back to graduate school in journalism, and I started working at newspapers and I became an investigative business and economics reporter. Okay. And this all kind of led to, a more more passionate appreciation of how politics and economics danced with each other and blended together. And eventually I started writing nonfiction books about the education system and the way that class and economics influenced educational outcomes so dramatically.

[00:03:28] So I wrote a couple of books in that vein, including Tearing Down the Gates. I was very deeply deeply passionate about that work, about how the disadvantage in our society could not get a fair shot at a decent education. So I eventually shifted to writing fiction.

[00:03:52] And I thought, how could I tell a story in a fictional account that gets to larger truths more dramatically and maybe more impactfully than my nonfiction work? So I thought of this story, Liberty Land. 

[00:04:08] Okay. 

[00:04:10] And I observed in my exposure to economics and observing, the political system in the United States, that this sort of Ayn Rand influence is really impacting the political system.

[00:04:24] Okay. So I think, in the Republican Party, for example, I think we have a bunch of Ayn Rand wannabes who are pimple faced Ayn Rand teenagers growing up wherever they grew up in the, in the heartland of the U S and now they're taking these ideologies and try to hoist it on everyone else.

[00:04:41] Yeah. 

[00:04:42] And and in my characters in Liberty land, a guy becomes a billionaire, but he's always wanted to be a character in an Ayn Rand novel. And his name is Garrett Cripps, and he becomes a professor of, computer science at MIT. And he ends up starting, a company and leads to great wealth and connections in that billionaire class.

[00:05:11] And he meets a graduate student. Her name is Suzanne Drivis, and she's from New York, and she grows up believing what her parents believed in that, everyone in America should have a fair shot. regardless of their their economic background, but she gets enamored with this guy, Garrett Cripps.

[00:05:32] And his 40th birthday, she gifts him. She writes a satire of libertarian ideology and calls it the liberation manifesto and gives it to him for his 40th birthday. And they have a few laughs and she does it because he wants them to be closer as a couple, and yeah. He takes it, gives it to a friend of his who has a father who's connected to this deep roots in Wall Street, and they love this book, right?

[00:06:03] It kind of blossoms from there and becomes this sort of underground movement of this secret society. And they eventually take themselves so seriously that They decide to take it from, ideology. An abstract idea to an actual real conspiracy to overthrow the United States government.

[00:06:27] So that was the, the setup and the premise for the novel. 

[00:06:31] Okay. I presume that your book was inspired by current political events, right? 

[00:06:38] Over time, yes. It turns out that the real political event in my life converging My life and my ideas are converging into the same spot. So I started Libertyland actually before Trump got elected.

[00:06:55] Oh, wow. 

[00:06:56] Yeah. I started it in And probably in two, sometime in 2015, I started, thinking about writing this novel. And then as I'm writing it, I'm finding that Garrett Cripps and and some of these characters in Trump world start to merge into the same thing. 

[00:07:20] That's funny. 

[00:07:22] I won't lie and say that, the Trump phenomena didn't have some influence on, how the book came out, but so far I found no Carson McCready in the real world. To match the character I invented in Liberty Land. And Carson McCready is the former Navy SEAL who ends up being caught up in this conspiracy. I won't give away the whole plot, but 

[00:07:49] Okay. 

[00:07:50] It's up basically trying to figure out why he seems to be part of this conspiracy through no action of his own.

[00:08:02] So he rises up to battle against it. 

[00:08:05] Alright tell us about the themes explored in your book. Did you cover that pretty much, or do you have more you want to talk about? 

[00:08:14] Themes in the book there is one thing that, I was steeped writing this book during COVID, a big part of it, and, I was living in Idaho, and it may be similar to your environment in South Carolina, in that I'm surrounded by a whole, mentality, ideology that says my personal freedom matters more than your personal freedom.

[00:08:41] My personal freedom to infect you with a disease matters more than your freedom to protect yourself with a mask. And my personal freedom matters more than your need for me to wear a mask to protect not only you, but to everyone around me. 

[00:09:05] Right. 

[00:09:06] This extreme version of personal freedom struck me as very childish, it's thinking solely about me and not about the people around me at all.

[00:09:22] And this drove me nuts, it drove me freaking nuts and it aligned with my observations about these, libertarian ideology. Is that my greed matters more than the collective impact of that greed on the country I live in. 

[00:09:50] Right. 

[00:09:50] And what met, this bumped into the satire, and so I explore, through the characters, the philosophy of freedom .

[00:10:01] In America, we've been sold a kind of a bill of goods influenced by, by, I think this this popularization of what freedom means, rather than a deep understanding of what freedom means as a citizen in a democracy. And there's a conversation between Suzanne Dreyfus and Garrett Cripps at one point.

[00:10:28] Where they're talking about freedom and he's saying, what about, you're talking about freedom in economic terms, but what about freedom in humanitarian terms, some of the great figures in history. Loved freedom, like Gandhi he loved freedom, but it wasn't about his own personal, personal agenda.

[00:10:53] It was about the freedom or Martin Luther King. Love freedom. 

[00:10:58] Right. 

[00:10:59] Think about freedom in a humanitarian way, not necessarily in an economic way. 

[00:11:04] Right. 

[00:11:05] And these are the kinds of themes I try to explore. I would love this book to be required reading for high schoolers or, or college students, although the first chapter is a little bit racy.

[00:11:17] Maybe they could, maybe the censors wouldn't approve that, but

[00:11:20] Yeah we have all this stuff that's going on with the Republicans attempting to restrict what can be read in school libraries. It's read in libraries, not just school libraries, it's just ridiculous. Anyway I cannot wait to read Liberty Land. I need you to tell me why it is that you switched from your award winning nonfiction to doing this novel.

[00:11:46] I know you covered that a little bit, but it's gotta be a big switch for you. 

[00:11:52] Yeah, the fiction is a lot different than writing nonfiction, but I had a I've written fiction, all my life, but it never really, in terms of short stories and this and that, but I've never written it for a publication.

[00:12:06] Okay. 

[00:12:07] But the big impetus, frankly, was I had a book proposal approved got to a very high level of it got into the University of Chicago Press system pretty deeply. And they have a peer review system. One peer reviewer loved the idea for this book that I wanted to write, and the other one, the other reviewer had some nitpicky Negative comments that could have been easily addressed, but because they require unanimity in the approval process, they decided to decline on the book.

[00:12:45] Okay. And this was a book that I tentatively called, Why Why Capitalism Needs Socialism Now More Than Ever. Because Again, we have this crazy ideas about what socialism is in the United States, and we have a corporate power treating the word socialism as a dirty word that most Americans don't understand what it means.

[00:13:17] Right. 

[00:13:17] And they don't, even though They're on, social programs as they get older or as they get poorer or whatever. We don't think of that as socialism in the United States. 

[00:13:29] Right. 

[00:13:30] And in the United States, most people don't distinguish between what happens in Venezuela and what happens in Sweden or Denmark.

[00:13:37] And anyway, in my view, You can't have a capitalist system without some degree of socialism providing a framework for that, for the rules of capitalism to thrive. It's a ying and yang sort of thing. And when you really think deeply about it, you can't have a purely capitalist system or a purely socialistic system.

[00:14:02] You really need a marriage of both in one system to make people better off and also lead lives that are accessible to those who don't necessarily have a lot of money. And it's a, it's a balance, right? So I wrote a, this book was basically an attempt to make that argument.

[00:14:25] Okay. Brilliant idea, great book, for some reason, at that particular moment in time That book was not going to see the light of day. So that's when I decided to turn to fiction and write Libertyland. 

[00:14:40] Okay. 

[00:14:41] And to, some of these ideas would see the light of day through fiction. 

[00:14:45] Right. 

[00:14:46] And the passion that I had And my writing in my nonfiction carries forward in the fictional world through my characters.

[00:14:56] And my characters are telling, making these arguments and telling these stories. And it seems to me so much more powerful in a way that I don't have to do it. I let my characters do it. 

[00:15:08] That's cool. That is cool. Yeah. 

[00:15:11] So I think of Liberty Land as the literary answer to Ayn Rand.

[00:15:18] Okay. Okay. 

[00:15:19] Yeah. 

[00:15:20] Now you say in, in your blog that you wrote to introduce Libertyland, you say it's a reflection of your own experience grappling with the tapestry of modern American life and the ideals that shape it. Can you explain that a little bit? What you mean there? 

[00:15:39] Already said in the sense that, As a human being I have a for whatever reason, I was born with a sense of of justice, economic justice, educational justice, social justice.

[00:15:52] Not sure how it, how that matriculated in my personality, but it's there. Okay. Like maybe a lot of people on the left and I see the world as it has evolved, through, through the Vietnam War, through Watergate, through Iran Contra, through, the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and I see how corporate power and the rise of the billionaire class and, The lone voices of economic justice through somebody like Bernie Sanders or, Elizabeth Warren. These voices are constantly being drowned out by the voices of pragmatism and what is electable.

[00:16:47] And the Democratic Party, for example, Seems to shoot itself in the foot by going for what is electable rather than what people really want. And and we ended up with these candidates in the Democratic Party, for example, that are, sort of half measures. They don't really reflect the popular, the true progressive popular blood and voice and passion.

[00:17:18] And then we end up with these very measures that, for example, I think Bernie Sanders would have beat Donald Trump hands down. But because Hillary Clinton was a very divisive voice, he had a lot of working class, moderate types of voters on the, in the independent realm or in the, the sort of lean slightly conservative that never would have voted for her in a million years.

[00:17:44] But they would have voted for Bernie Sanders because he's such a true authentic voice for the working people. 

[00:17:50] Right. 

[00:17:51] These are the issues that drive my passion for writing about the things I do. Whether it's a novel, Liberty Land, or whether it's a nonfiction work, Tearing Down the Gates.

[00:18:05] You led me into this next question, and I just wanted to ask you about your thoughts about the state of politics in the United States today, and what we're facing with this coming election, and everything that's, Related to that.

[00:18:19] Yeah I think when we elected Biden, he adopted a lot of Bernie Sanders ideas to, to basically try to meld the centrists with the progressives in the Democratic Party. Okay. And Biden was a compromise candidate in the beginning, and we are now, we are now progressives in the Democratic Party are now, the Democratic Party is now paying the piper for that compromise that was made in the beginning.

[00:18:51] And Biden is fighting for his life to distinguish himself from this unelectable candidate, this, patently disqualified person named Donald Trump. And it shouldn't have to be that way. The given who Trump is, the Democratic Party should be overwhelmingly dominant in terms in the electoral process right now, but it's not.

[00:19:23] And you got to ask yourself, why is that the case? 

[00:19:27] That is a good question. What's the answer? 

[00:19:30] I think it goes back to those compromises that were made, to pick the most quote unquote electable person rather than the most, passionately pro progressive candidate that reflected the real values of the, the vast majority of working people in America.

[00:19:47] This is the problem that you run into when you compromise. 

[00:19:51] Yeah, and here we are now today with this election coming up. 

[00:19:55] And it's much closer than it should be or needs to be. 

[00:19:59] Yeah. 

[00:19:59] And it's really tragic. 

[00:20:02] Peter, to what extent do you believe Trump and his MAGA movement have harmed our country?

[00:20:10] Basically, they again, It's it's this crazy notion of what freedom means in a personal level which I'm not discounting it to the extent that, look I love my personal freedom. I have a car, I drive it, as much as I can, cause I love to drive and I,

[00:20:32] I have responsibilities, though, to make sure that I'm not abusing my freedom to the extent that it harms other people. A guy like Trump, that notion is just completely alien to his his personhood. He grew up, he was born a billionaire, a multi millionaire at birth, and he became a playboy, a reality TV star, he squandered his wealth, and he nowhere in his history has he done anything.

[00:21:16] And yet, mysteriously, the great political mystery of our time is how a working person in a rural Republican, part of Idaho or South Carolina can think he's the second coming of Jesus. 

[00:21:33] And he can 

[00:21:34] do no wrong whatsoever. 

[00:21:36] It's frickin crazy. It is. 

[00:21:38] Yeah. 

[00:21:40] I, right here in South Carolina where I live, if you drive into the, I live in Myrtle Beach, which is more of a tourist area.

[00:21:48] But if you go into the countryside. You find these broken down old trailers people are living in with old crappy looking pickup trucks out front with great big Trump signs. Now, to me, that is just absolutely a contradiction because this guy doesn't give a crap about the issues that confront these folks.

[00:22:16] These folks that are living on the edge of on the economic edge in our society, he doesn't care about them. And I don't understand why it is that they care about him. It's because it, I guess it's because they listen to his lies and his bullshit and they just believe him. Is that right?

[00:22:34] Yep. Is that what you think? 

[00:22:35] They listen to his lies, they listen to his bullshit, they believe him, and they The, to me, Somebody I know made the analogy that the, the high school cafeteria and you have the different kind of social breakdowns that kind of, congregate in the high school cafeteria.

[00:22:55] And you have the bully and you have the, everyone else that kind of accedes to this bully and, mike Tyson once said famously, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. 

[00:23:11] Yeah. 

[00:23:12] Trump has never been punched in the face. No one has ever taken that bully and punched him in the face.

[00:23:18] Yeah. 

[00:23:19] And he's gotten away with everything in his life. He's never did hell account to anything he's ever done. And the people who follow him, those who follow the bully, I've never seen that they see him as always, above it all, never being held to account. So they begin to attach magical qualities to that.

[00:23:43] Maybe he is, the second coming and maybe, maybe there is something, special and magical about him that, and maybe the The commies and the socialists are picking on him and, Biden is the is the the, the traitor to the people trying to bring down, our savior, Donald Trump.

[00:24:04] And, 

[00:24:06] When it comes to, why this happens I think the education system. It has just been an abject failure at teaching, we're great at classifying kids and breaking them up and putting some into the special classes and some into the high powered, elite classes and breaking people up.

[00:24:27] And we very terrible at teaching kids about history and about their own country about, civics, how the constitution works, what the constitution is, 

[00:24:38] right? 

[00:24:38] So that this gap in knowledge, you're able to get, tyrants and totalitarians and fascists like Trump to replace that gap in knowledge with bullshit.

[00:24:51] And there's another wrinkle in the Trump story in that his ties to Russia. Even the Republicans right now in Congress are admitting that many of the talking points, even spoken on the floor of the House of Representatives, are Russia talking points. And these, it gets filtered down so that the guy in the trailer and the Trump flag, in the rural part of South Carolina now gets, now forms his opinions based on Putin propaganda, and they believe that it's coming from, God himself, from Jesus himself, rather than Putin.

[00:25:37] This is real, a real problem. 

[00:25:39] Do you feel like there's a danger that we're headed to a an autocracy or a dictatorship if Trump should win this election? 

[00:25:48] Oh, absolutely. I've blogged about it Project 2025 the plan for when Trump takes over If he's elected. The Heritage Foundation is working with members of the trump team and the republican party to totally take the so called deep state.

[00:26:06] This is a joke with, the civil services is being termed the deep state, some evil force in America. When, it's staffed with people like you and me and, and, Your mother and uncle and grandparents who work as federal employees for the United States government since this country was founded almost, and now it's being called the deep state.

[00:26:31] And their plan is to take this deep state and totally, or this, the civil service, and totally politicize it so that nobody will, it will be a purge, and nobody will work for the federal government who isn't a Trump loyalist. very much. Yeah. So the government, basically it will turn into what we, essentially the communist party or the former communist party in the former Soviet Union.

[00:26:56] If you're not a party member, and a loyalist, you will not be even hired to work as a federal employee. 

[00:27:03] Yeah. And I did an interview a couple of weeks ago with a guy who He's a former military police officer and he had a long history of working in the federal government.

[00:27:15] And he believes that MAGA has really infiltrated already the federal workforce, especially when it comes to law enforcement officers within the federal government. And Absolutely. And that to me, that's just really dangerous. That really is. Now what about the threat of violence if Trump is ultimately convicted of his crimes or loses to Biden again?

[00:27:41] What about that? 

[00:27:44] He definitely encourages it, doesn't he? 

[00:27:46] Yeah, he does. 

[00:27:46] He does nothing to discourage it, 

[00:27:49] like 

[00:27:49] we saw during January 6th and the insurrection. I have to believe that there is under underground movement as we speak, that is at work cause a heck of a lot of trouble when Biden wins.

[00:28:06] Yeah. And Trump, of course, will repeat the same story that the election was stolen, but this time he won't be an incumbent and he won't be able to manipulate, the office of the vice president to try to To get the votes changed during the the the process in which the vice president ceremoniously, approves the electors.

[00:28:30] However, there are now stories that if this independent run by JFK could throw, could result in enough enough could result in an electoral tie if that the election would be thrown to the House of Representatives. And as currently structured the House of Representatives could, this Republican House of Representatives could throw the vote in Trump's favor.

[00:28:56] Yeah. 

[00:28:56] So this is the the ideology the scary ideology of MAGA is the same scary ideology we've seen in totalitarian takeovers in other countries in history. Particularly Nazi Germany where fear of the minority dominates public officials policies. We saw that in the Trump impeachment trial when Mitch McConnell threw his weight of the Senate to acquit Trump.

[00:29:29] And that basically he basically argued that the criminal justice system will take care of Trump. We've seen that the when Trump tries to declare total absolute immunity, that the criminal justice system may or may not hold Trump accountable. And with the Supreme Court giving Trump a look to, to decide whether or not this immunity claim holds, they have effectively allowed him to escape justice. 

[00:30:03] So far, that's for sure. Okay. Have you got anything else you'd like to add before we close this up?

[00:30:11] I will say one thing about Libertyland. 

[00:30:13] Okay. 

[00:30:13] And that is, it's gotten great reviews, and people say it's a page turner. Good. And that it that was very nice to hear as an author, that people can't put it down, 

[00:30:25] where can people find it? 

[00:30:28] The usual bookstores, outlets, Amazon, Barnes Noble, Goodreads.

[00:30:34] Yeah. 

[00:30:35] All right. Listen, I thank you so much, Peter, for being with us today on the Leading to the Left podcast, and I'm looking forward to getting a hold of Liberty Land and having a look at it myself. It sounds like it's a great book. Thank you, Bob. Yeah. Appreciate that. I do appreciate it. Yeah. And you guys listen, and take care.

[00:30:55] If you have an opportunity, pick it up, because this guy knows what he's talking about, and I do appreciate you being with us today Peter, very much. Thank you. 

[00:31:04] Thank you, Bob.