Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…I’ll say the fact that she came as close as she did to being president is pretty goddamn insane if you ask me. But yeah, the Democrats are a mess. They’re a mess like I’ve never seen a political party before, but that in itself is I think a very good thing. And what comes from here is there’s a lot of possibilities now. I don’t know who the person is. I don’t see anyone out there that I could think of that would fill this role, but there’s never been a more ripe time for someone to Donald Trump the Democratic Party now. What Donald Trump did, people tend to forget this, because now it’s also because the accusation from the Democrats is that, “The Republican Parties are all a bunch of Trump cultists,” or something like that. But I’m old enough to remember 2016, and what actually happened was that Donald Trump came in and just really resonated with the voters and the establishment of the Republican Party hated it. They were openly talking about changing the rules at the Republican National Convention to deny him the nomination in 2016. What they were saying is that they were going to raise the number of delegates required so high that nobody could hit it and then say, “Hey, since nobody hit it, we select Mitt Romney again and we’re going to run Mitt Romney again.” They were openly, openly conspiring to steal the thing from him, and eventually he just had so much support on the ground that they couldn’t do it. Right now, if someone could totally do that to the Democrats, but the thing is, it would have to be somebody outside of the three-letter agency control, because that’s what everyone’s rejecting right now. But if you were to actually sit there and go … And even policies I don’t necessarily agree with, but there are a lot of policies that if it was actually a pro-labor, working class party, you could … Bernie Sanders showed you a little bit of what’s possible, and this was from an 80-year-old socialist who didn’t really have the balls to go through with it at the end of the day. If somebody younger and a little bit more with the current zeitgeist we’re able to do that, that could happen. I mean, I would generally think that AOC can develop into that candidate. She might not be there yet, but I think she can develop into that. And it could be out there, it could be- I don’t know. I don’t see AOC being the one to do it, but I could be wrong about that. She’s got some qualities, unlike almost all the other ones you could think of. I don’t see anyone right now who I think could be that person, but I never would’ve … I mean, if you had asked me in 2014 who’s going to come take over the Republican Party, I never would’ve guessed Donald Trump was going to come do what he did. So it might be the person we’re seeing who we’re not even thinking of, or it might just be some unknown. Same with Obama was an unknown. I mean, obviously he had very powerful people behind his presidential run. It’s not like he was a true just grassroots guy, but he wasn’t anyone we would’ve been necessarily thinking about. I mean, he gave that big speech at the 2004 DNC, but that was it. That was the thing he was known for, is he gave one great speech at the … Besides that he was a state senator and then a junior senator. No one was thinking he was going to be the next president.…

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