Impolitic with John Heilemann

John welcomes Naomi Klein, arguably the left’s most prominent and influential public intellectual, to discuss her new best-selling book, “End Times Fascism,” co-authored with Astra Taylor. Klein—whose 2000 book, “No Logo,” became a manifesto for the turn-of-the-millennium anti-globalization movement, and whose 2008 tome, "The Shock Doctrine," introduced the concept of “disaster capitalism”—explains that “End Times Fascism” is the apotheosis of all her work to date; how an unlikely coalition of religious fundamentalists, Silicon Valley tech barons, and far right ethno-nationalists has embraced varying forms of apocalypticism and taken center stage in our politics; and how that alliance can be defeated.

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John welcomes back Alex Wagner, host of Runaway Country for Crooked Media and senior political analyst at MS Now, to discuss her new book, “The Steal: Four Right-Wing Hard-Liners, One Republican Presidency, and the Raid on America's Courts.” Alex examines the half-century genesis of the conservative takeover of the federal judiciary, its resemblance to a heist movie, and the quartet of thieves—Paul Weyrich, the mastermind; Ed Meese, the inside man; Robert Bork, the public face; and Joe Coors, the money—central to the caper. She also assesses a raft of recent developments: James Talarico’s trolling of Ken Paxton in Texas, Hasan Piker’s ongoing bedevilment of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, and Donald Trump’s blithe reaction to the rampant fears in the AI industry that its products may kill us all.

John welcomes Jacob Weisberg, co-founder of Pushkin Industries and former editor of Slate, to discuss his new book, “Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era.” Weisberg explains how he took the format and framing of “Profiles in Courage,” John F. Kennedy’s classic examination of moral leadership in politics, and turned it inside out, focusing not on the admirable but the culpable; and why some of America’s best-known and most powerful public figures—from Jeff Bezos and Stephen Schwarzman to John Roberts, Megyn Kelly, and Mitch McConnell—became complicit in a signal feature of Donald Trump’s second term: the remarkable degree of capitulation to a president few of them like or respect and many once resisted.

John welcomes back Searchlight Institute president Adam Jentleson to discuss the post-Labor Day Senate battleground map and his new book, “Supermajority: How Democrats Can Build Lasting Power.” Jentleson explains why cautious optimism is in order about his party’s prospects of retaking the upper chamber; how the strength of James Talarico and Rob Sand (in the Texas Senate and Iowa governor’s races, respectively) are rooted in the sort of ideological heterodoxy Jentleson champions in his book; why the razor-thin margins and slim majorities of our time are historical anomalies; and the degree of compromise Democrats will need to accommodate to build governing coalitions broad enough to last.