Tony Kushner: If democracy is absolutely always going to be about making compromises with people with whom you are in radical disagreement, what are you willing to give on? How do we make common cause with people who we recognize are adherents of something that will fundamentally do damage to the idea of democracy?

Rachel Maddow: I feel both sides of that equally strongly. First of all, I think, particularly for writers and people in the arts, it creates this very interesting, very pressing question about how important it is to help everybody in the country, non-fascists and anti-fascists, understand the appeal of fascism.

How important is it for us to know why that line—“You don’t need to worry anymore. I’ll be your protector”—why that works. At Trump rallies now, the chant is no longer “Lock her up.” It’s “Send them back,” talking about deporting people. They started chanting this for legal immigrants as well. He started to say it’s not just illegal immigrants that he wants to do this to, it’s legal immigrants.

What’s the narrative or storytelling imperative behind helping everybody understand why that appeals, and what is it about Trump saying he wants camps for millions of people that appeals to his followers? And what is it about him saying he wants to take the broadcast licenses of any news organization that criticizes him and wants to bring a lawsuit against David Muir for having moderated the debate? Why do these things work? What do they like about him?

That’s one part of it. Do you risk translating or sane-washing what he’s doing and risking it having more appeal to talk about it and try to decode it? The other side of it is, “Is there a line in a democracy over which you stop trying to make common cause,” and you say, “Actually, we’re all in this together. We’re all making these decisions, but you are not.” In postwar Germany, they called that militant democracy.

I said we had early neo-Nazi groups. A lot of Americans, a surprising number of Americans, were involved in advising and serving as agents for something called the Socialist Reich Party, which was going to be a successor to the Nazi party in Germany. In occupied postwar Germany, the Allies had to approve every candidate and party that was going to be standing for office, and that lasted for a few years.

But we’re trying to stand up West Germany on its own, and so then we stopped doing that. As soon as we stopped doing that, in 1949, the Socialist Reich Party emerged. And instead of swastikas, it was Black Eagles, but all the rest of it was exactly the same. The German Constitutional Court, under great pressure from the United States, ruled that the Socialist Reich Party was illegal and could not mount candidates for office, excluding them from the democratic process, which was very controversial because there’s lots of people in Germany at that point who still believed in this way of doing things.

If they’re excluded from the democracy, that sets them up to wage war on the democracy. Should democracy include them, so that they’re competing by way of voting, or should it exclude them because their whole stated purpose is to get in power using the democratic system and then destroy the democracy once they’re in it?

What they decided in 1952 was that the Socialist Reich Party could not be allowed in, and it would just be illegal, and it would be essentially treated that way. The German Constitutional Court has only done that for two parties ever. The other was the Communist Party.

That question is very live to me. If somebody is stating, “We are going to get elected, and then once we are elected, we are going to turn the government into a one-party machine that essentially abolishes elections and gets rid of the system of government,” do you say, “Come, brother, let us reason together?” Or do you say, “You’re outside the democratic system. If you’re waging war on democracy, then you can’t be part of it?” I don’t know.

I find it heartening to know that this is a tide that comes in and out, and it’s not a rogue wave. We have always contended with strong and occasionally very well-connected antidemocratic movements in this country.

My question to you, Tony, is: Learning that we’ve done it before, does it inure us at all to its effect when it comes around again?

TK: Personally, I don’t feel that it makes for a callousness about it. I think about something that you said to me way back, when we first started talking about the film version of Ultra, that our motto needs to be “Make fascism boring.” That it’s a movement unlike democracy, which I think has a history of generating rather magnificent new ways of thinking about the problems of human existence. There’s a way in which democracy lives in a kind of beautiful and fecund relationship to the human imagination, and it has ever since the idea really began to grow and develop. Whereas fascism is a contraction and a retreat and sort of arteriosclerotic. Things begin to harden, and synapses have to snap in order for it to make sense.

There is a grimness to it that is most violently manifest in his inauguration speech in 2016. Everybody’s saying that Tim Walz is the first person to use the word “weird” to describe them, but the real first person is George W. Bush. At the end of Trump’s inauguration speech, they’re all sitting in the rain, and apparently Bush stood up and said very loudly—loudly enough for reporters to hear—“Well, that was some weird shit.”

Even in that terrible debate, there’s some part of Biden that’s saying, I cannot believe that I’m standing on a debating stage with the Republican nominee, presumptive nominee at that point, and he’s talking about America like this. It’s that patriotic blather that we can get silly about. We’re America, we’re the chosen nation, and we’re the light of the world and everything. But there is an important element of that that I think has to do with an expansion of the soul when confronted with the possibility of what Lincoln called “the last best hope of earth.”

To me it’s a very important, sometimes painful but important thing to re-encounter. The ways that the democracy’s antithesis manifests, as we say at Passover, in every generation. There’s a pharaoh that rises up and has to be opposed, and it’s a cycle.

RM: And some of what is most creative—and, at times, I think, beautiful—about democracy and its defenders are when they are fighting the antithesis. What calls for the best of us—and I don’t just mean going abroad and fighting the fascists over there but fighting antidemocratic forces here—is a painful and difficult thing that doesn’t always have obvious immediate payoffs. But it does call for a kind of solidarity, creativity, and deep investment in who we are as a country. A going deep to the wells of citizenship that is, I think, very, as you put it, fecund.

It’s a rich environment in which to get stronger as a country. And so when we come out on the other side of this authoritarian threat, in this generation having defeated it, we will be a better country for having done it because we will be better citizens. We will know more about what it really is to act not just for a democracy but in a democratic way. To use the system of government to stand up for it.

It occurs to me that a lot of what is the appeal of a strongman system of government is: The appeal is based on the idea that there is an emergency.

You have to say it’s American carnage. You have to say we’re a nation in decline. You have to say we’ve been destroyed. The world is laughing at us. They’re eating the cats and dogs. You have to get us to the point where we believe that we’re dangling over the abyss in order to say, “So, OK, we need to do things a little differently now.”

We need emergency powers. We need somebody who’s going to suspend things temporarily. I’ll just be a dictator for one day. But that idea that there’s a temporally specific emergency, that means we just need to do something really different for this one next step, and don’t worry about what comes next—that seems to me to be very much linked to that type of mindset. You can’t convince anybody that that’s a good idea if that person is capable of thinking two and three steps ahead.

So what happens after the emergency? So you want to build camps for millions of people? OK, you’re going to stuff camps full of millions of people, and then what are you going to do with those people? And then what happens after you’ve done that? You have to have a flexible enough brain to think through all of those things to realize what’s wrong with this idea. And so counting on us to only see this far ahead is an authoritarian tactic.

And it means that dramatists and writers and artists sort of have a job to do, which is to pry our line of sight off of our feet and put it back up on the horizon, so we can see further ahead and make broader better decisions.

TK: It’s very, very, very difficult. I mean, because everyone is guilty, to one degree and another, of cauterizing thought at a point where it’s going to push you into—I mean, only saints and geniuses and a few incredibly great heroes are really willing to live with the profound discomfort of having what they call ego dystonia. Of really walking around feeling profoundly unsettled all the time. And it’s something that everybody has to stay vigilant about. And I think it’s absolutely the value of a lot of serious art to bring us in. We’re safe because we’re sitting in the dark, and we don’t have to kill our children like Medea. We can watch Medea kill her children and think through what that means about passion and love and revenge and so on. These sort of nightmares that we can witness as an audience. And also history is the same thing. The braver we are in trying to absorb the lessons of history, the more resistant we will be.

In terms of creating crises, it’s not just enough to say American carnage and they’re eating the dogs and cats. The Reichstag has to burn down so you can say, “Oh, look, there really is a crisis.” And the Republicans have created a crisis in this country.

Before they managed to do the whole Federalist Society project of taking over the judiciary, they had completely demolished one of the three branches of government and the one that in some ways is the most significant because it makes the laws and legislature, I mean, by paralyzing Congress, by stocking it full of lunatics. And I mean drunks and wandering id fragments like Marjorie—

RM: “Wandering id fragments.” I just want to make sure that’s good for the transcript.

TK: With the majority of Republicans, the quality that most Republicans admire most about Donald Trump, in poll after poll after poll, is his sense of humor, which tells you a lot. And when you watch Trump sort of continuing to do better the more appalling he gets, you realize that there’s a way in which there’s some part of his base that is excited by his inappropriateness, his clownishness—the faces, the clown tie, the suit, the hair, the whole thing. The idea that people have turned this into a kind of reality-show spectacle is very frightening to me because it feels like a kind of mass psychosis.

RM: On the point of people liking Trump’s sense of humor, I just want you to close your eyes for a moment and think about the last time you saw Trump laugh. He’s not joking, but it’s a form of stealth, right? And it’s actually something that you see in white nationalist, pseudo-race science neo-Nazi stuff online culture. That everything is a joke. So you say very offensive, very racist, very antisemitic Holocaust denial things, but you couch them in such a way that you can then later explain that “it was a joke and, oh, you’re just a killjoy.” But you break down people’s resistance to hearing these things, including the N-word and antisemitic slurs by couching it as something that you can disguise as a joke. It gives you a defense, but it also gives you sort of a way in, and it desensitizes people to that stuff.

And so the carnival-like—whether it’s humor-driven or drama-driven—sense of being swept up in something that’s transgressive and that breaks things and that offends and that gets lots of attention, I think, is universal. The thing that’s dangerous about it is that you can’t compete with it. You can’t say, oh, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz bite the head off a bat. Go on, do something crazy. Right. Break some rules. You can’t fight fire with fire in that way.

But the clownishness, I think, for those of us who are observing it and thinking about how to combat it, is something that we shouldn’t let distract us into thinking that something isn’t serious just because it’s funny.

TK: If you are looking to your president as a source of entertainment, it means that what this person is going to be elected to do can’t possibly be of any real meaning to you. And if it is of no real meaning to you, I mean if the federal machinery of government is meaningful and you want it to be run by a clown, it says something really terrifying.

There’s the old saw that communism is the politicization of theater, fascism is the theatricalization of politics. Politics being theatricalized is scary, because theater is all about illusion and reality. The whole point of it is to bring people together, to show you something that’s not real that acquires the semblance of reality for whatever other lessons it’s going to teach you. It’s going to teach you that, with everything you encounter in the world, you have to ask, “Is this real? Is this false? Is it made by human beings? Is it a naturally occurring thing? What went into this? What kind of ideologies?”

It is teaching critical consciousness. Whereas you really don’t want to have the category that we call reality come to seem like it’s some sort of a game show, because at some point you’re going to discover that it’s not a game. When that point arrives, it’s way too late, and you’re really dying.

RM: And the dramatic theme that Trump is spelling out—and I think this is particularly true for the 2024 campaign and not true so much for his previous campaigns—is that this is it once and for all. That we’re going to vanquish our enemies, our nation’s enemies, once and for all. He says that a lot. That idea works dramatically for a bad play, right? That there’s a bad guy, and there’s a good guy and the good guy slays the bad guy and then the play is over. In reality, if you were talking about vanquishing your enemies, something happens next, something happens thereafter, and there is no permanent victory in democracy.

TK: It’s a process.

RM: It’s a process. It’s not an outcome. And so one of the things that small-d democrats have to get great at articulating is that there’s a way to lose and survive that in our politics. You concede, you go to the swearing-in of your successor, and you compete again in the next election.

And in politics writ large, whether or not you’re running for office, sometimes your side wins, and sometimes your side loses, and you stay in the game and you continue to compete along these fair lines. It’s a very simple, not dramatic story. It doesn’t have an end. And that’s how we got to be 250 years old as a democracy.

But what he is offering is an end, that you’ll never have to fight again, because we’ll fight once, our enemies will be—fill in the Mad Lib—and we’ll rule forever.

TK: As we know, the end is death. So that’s really what he’s offering. I mean, he is.

RM: That’s a nice place to land.