Rebecca Traister Dissects Sen. Feinstein’s Political Career

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: One woman who has continually covered violence against women in her work is writer and author, Rebecca Traister. But today, she’s here to talk about one of the most senior members of the U.S. Senate, Dianne Feinstein. In her latest profile, Traister examined the five-decade career of the 88-year-old politician. Rebecca Traister joined Michel Martin to discuss how, in her own words, the generation whose entry into politics was enabled by progressive reforms has allowed those victories to be taken away.

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Bianna. Rebecca Traister, thanks so much for talking with us.

REBECCA TRAISTER, NEW YORK MAGAZINE WRITER-AT-LARGE: Thanks for having me.

MARTIN: You just published this very comprehensive, I might say, pretty tough piece on Dianne Feinstein. She’s the oldest sitting senator. Now, there’s been a lot of reporting in recent months about concerns that she is not — she’s not up to the job anymore. That she’s experiencing some cognitive decline. Possibly age-related, possibly not. But that’s not really the focus of your piece. I mean, you touched on that issue but that’s not really the focus of your piece. So, what is the focus of your piece? What is it that you were trying to tease out in your piece? What were you looking for? What were you trying to figure out?

TRAISTER: Well, there were a couple of things that brought me to this piece. And I should say that I began it in March, before the recent round of reporting on her cognitive decline. And the reason that I took it there were — it was twofold. One, I was really interested in this politician who has, you know, been in power in the Senate for 30 years and in San Francisco politics long before that. She holds so much seniority in the Democratic Party at this point. I was really curious about her story because I think that the early part of her political life, a lot of people who know her as a senior senator do not know about the early part of her political life. And I wanted — I was very curious about the individual. But more than that, I was curious about how her individual story and her path through politics offered some illumination for her generation of Democratic politicians. Many of whom, like Feinstein, came to power either through or, like Feinstein, adjacent to the disruptive social and political movements of the mid-20th century. The civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the gay rights movement. The things that kind of changed the terrain. And that generation of leadership in the Democratic Party was the most diverse of — you know, more diverse than any that had preceded it. The bar was admittedly very low. And they have been, you know, purportedly the stewards of the victories won by those social movements. Voting rights, reproductive rights. You know, the Democratic Party sells itself as the party that is going to protect those victories that were won in the 20th century. And yet we’re living through a period in which many of those politicians who’ve been in power over these intervening decades are still presiding over the erosion and rollback of many of those victories. And I was really curious about the relationship to power and governing institutions that permitted that process and that timeline to have unfolded. And so, that’s — that was my broader systemic curiosity about Dianne Feinstein, in addition to my curiosity about the individual human being.

MARTIN: What would you say is her North Star in staying — not just seeking public office, but staying in public office?

TRAISTER: She really believes in the power of top-down authority as opposed to bottom-up authority. Again, she believes that function, rule- bound, often technocratic top-down governance can quell and serve as a bomb for what she understands to be the kind of disorder of political upheaval. And I think that was really forged in that period of the social and political movements. And it’s important to note that San Francisco, at the time that she came into political power, really was the place that was riven by violence. That in some cases was tied to political discord. And she came to understand that sort of the social and political movements themselves as divided partisan threats causing chaos and disorder and bloodshed. And I came to understand how she could have had that view. But she understood the — whether it’s city government, the police department. Dianne Feinstein loves police departments, right?

MARTIN: Uh-huh.

TRAISTER: Very much at odds with the political ethos of our current moment. She really believes in police forces. She used to dress up as a firefighter when she was the mayor of San Francisco. Put on a fire coat and go to big fires. She believed in the signifiers, the aesthetics of civic order because she believed that they could provide a bulwark against the insurgent chaos of political discord. And one of the fascinating things about writing about Dianne Feinstein in that moment as I really came to understand how she could come to that belief and why she is serving in the senate. Why she’s serving in government. Because she believes in the government’s ability to steer through chaos. But the thing that I came to think about her, and this is a critical observation, is that at times she has, seems to be unable to have seen that the insurgency was at the door and inside the institutions in which she is serving, right? So, that she has served through, for example, her colleagues on the other side of the aisle stealing a Supreme Court seat from a popularly elected president, right? This has — those are the people on the dais with her at the top. She has obviously served through a more literal insurgency, you know. Mobs coming to the door of the Capitol. And I think that perhaps her solid belief in institutions like the senate, like city government, like police departments and fire departments, as this safe bulwark against violent disorder. Actually, she continues to believe that in a moment where it has become more obvious that it — that things might not work that way.

MARTIN: Well, before we move on to the present moment, I do want to point out that she has been one of the most popular politicians in her State. So, what’s been the source of her popularity to this —

TRAISTER: Well, I —

MARTIN: — to this point?

TRAISTER: I think — there are a couple of things. First of all, she really was wildly popular in San Francisco. She also came for tremendous criticism from all segments of the community. I don’t want to pretend that she was, like, the most popular mayor ever. But there — but the other thing is, again, writing about the individual and the relationships to the systems in which they work, Feinstein believes in the Senate. And the Senate rewards seniority. The way the Senate works, the longer you stay there, the more power you have which means that the question of Feinstein, for example, the question of whether she would retire in 2018, when she could have, and chose to run again and came in for a lot of criticism at, you know, at 85, for running for another term. And was challenged muscularly from the left but won. In part, what that reflects is that Senior Senator Dianne Feinstein, who sits on the appropriations committee, has the ability to bring her State all kinds of resources. Money. That — and this is a systemic reality in the Senate. And it’s certainly not just Dianne Feinstein who’s been there as long as she has. There are so many of her colleagues over 80, Mitch McConnell, Charles Grassley, Pat Leahy. In part, because they gain authority and power to provide for their State. And the State, in turn, appreciates, in some cases, their ability to provide for voters. And so, it is in fact here — she’s embedded in and believes in an institution that off incentivizes her never leaving that institution.

MARTIN: Is this a particular challenge for Democrats? The reason I ask this, as you point out, a number of people in the Senate, in fact in the House, are elderly, you know. And so, Democrats seemed to be quite restive about this. Republicans either don’t seem to mind or have been — may — look, Mitch McConnell was just reelected.

TRAISTER: Uh-huh.

MARTIN: And he’s 80 years old. People don’t seem to have a problem with that. But they’ve also seemed to be either recruiting or attracting younger people, who also tend to be some of the most radical.

TRAISTER: Right.

MARTIN: Like Josh Hawley, for example. In Ohio, you know, J.D. Vance running for the senate. So, it’s just — is this a particular problem for Democrats?

TRAISTER: So, I think that the gerontocracy is bipartisan. There are — there’s older leadership. Mitch McConnell, obviously, is the leader of the Republican Party, and an extremely effective one. I think a lot of people would agree. The fact that there are — that senior leadership and senior members are, in fact, very old is true on both sides. My observation is that the partisan difference is in how the parties treat their younger members. A Republican Party, again, perhaps having been on the losing side of a lot of the social and political change that came in that — in the middle of — end of the 20th century, began strategizing in a very different way than Democrats. They began strategizing around winning local and State elections. Building State power. All investing in a pipeline of conservative justices to fill a judiciary. There are all kinds of things the Republican Party did over these decades. That was very different from what the Democratic Party did. Among them, the Republican Party does have a rising generation of more radical right-wing leadership in politicians. And that rising generation has, in many ways, the older generation has submitted to those politics, right? The Democratic Party, to my eye, treats it’s — it also has a rising generation of stars, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, members of the squad. You know, younger people with politics that are further left than where the party has been. But the difference, to my eye, is that the older leadership has been tremendously resistant to that younger generation. Has fought it, and in some cases, openly vilified it and its tactics and its strategy which has – – and I believe, that’s the difference. Is that you don’t — you may have older leadership in a Republican Party, but they are in fact, enacting an agenda, in many cases very effectively, in the case of Mitch McConnell, for example, that is being set by younger members and their far-right politics. On the Democratic side, you have older leadership that is, I believe in many ways, stonewalling the priorities, agenda, and tactics of its younger and lefter generation. So, that’s the way I see the difference. But there are certainly older leadership in both parties.

MARTIN: Let me — did you — you spent spend a lot of time digging into Dianne Feinstein’s, sort of, belief system and how she came to it. Did you come to understand or, at least, how does she feel about the fact that so many of the things that she fought for throughout her career are in fact being challenged if not undone? She wrote the, in advance, the assault weapons ban. It was repealed years ago. And we see the situation we now have with gun violence. It’s not solely due to that but we see that that’s certainly part of that. We see that the — her support for reproductive rights is being undone, in part, because of Supreme Court justices that she failed to stop. How does she feel about that?

TRAISTER: Well, when I spoke to her about these things, one of the things that struck me most profoundly was what felt like a distant optimism about these issues. I pushed her, for example, around Roe to talk about what was on the horizon. As we expect Roe to either be overturned or gutted in coming weeks. And what that would mean, she was somebody who, in fact, as part of early work in her 20s on sentencing and parole board in California in the 19 — early 1960s, actually determine sentence length for abortion providers in — when the procedure was illegal in California and we were talking about. And I asked her, what does it feel like to know that we are going back to? And she said, in very Feinstein, the way she had explained this in the past was, the law was the law. She had to maintain the law. She believes in the law. And in these structures and authorities and rules. And I asked or would we feel like, you know, in a few weeks perhaps, when the law will once again be the law in States around this country and abortion will be criminalized is very likely to be? And she, sort of said, well, we go through different periods in this country. And the institutions have gotten so much more progressive, which is actually factually not true. The criminal justice system has not gotten more progressive. It’s become far more expansive in part because of the kind of bipartisan work done around expanding a crucial state and the crime bill in the ’90s, which is something she strenuously supported. She — I don’t want to use this word lightly, but she struck me as being in denial about a lot of the rollbacks. She didn’t seem to me or didn’t speak as somebody who had done a lot of thinking of what it will be like in just a few short weeks or months should Roe fall. She kept — we spoke two days after the massacre in Uvalde, Texas. And she is — gun control has been the mission of her life. She instituted a handgun ban in San Francisco when she was mayor that was so controversial that it earned her a recall vote. She won, obviously, and remain mayor. But this has been an issue she’s fought for in her life. And in those two days after that shooting, she said to me in this kind of sunny way, like, oh, we’ll get it done. Don’t worry. It takes time. When every indication is over decades the assault weapons ban that she passed as a part of the crime bill in 1994 expired in 2004. And actually, its expiration — there are all different ways to trace this kind of marks the beginning of this era that we live in now, of just daily horror mass killing episodes. And — that she could’ve been so much optimism was one of the things that struck. And she said, I’m very optimistic about the future of this country. She’s still evinced a deep belief in governing structures to somehow move us forward to a better place. Even though, I think, there is a strong argument that it’s been the perversion over manipulation of some of those very same structures that have gotten us here to begin with.

MARTIN: Is it your view that that’s the emblem of her personal decline? And I understand that some people find it deeply offensive that we’re even having this conversation publicly. But she represents 40 million people and occupies a pivotal role and our governance. And I think people are — have a right to ask if she is up to that job. Is this emblematic of a personal decline on her part or is that something bigger?

TRAISTER: I would say that it was the thing that struck me hardest. And there seemed to be such a distance between her apprehension of what is happening and the terrible precipices we are on. And the — you know, the – – she didn’t seem to be deeply engaged with the crisis being faced by the country and the crisis being faced within her own workplace. And yes, that does strike me, without any kind of diagnostic, you know, verdict on cognitive health. What it strikes me as is it is a sign of somebody who is not totally engaged in the present moment.

MARTIN: Why does this matter, in your opinion.?

TRAISTER: I mean —

MARTIN: In your opinion.

TRAISTER: Well, it matters for a couple of reasons. It matters because this is who’s leading our government. Not just Dianne Feinstein, right? I really want to be careful not to single her out. I wrote about her because she’s fascinating to me. We are in — we are — as I said, in what I view and I — is inarguably a very perilous moment, not just for this country, but for the world. Climate change is bearing down on us. There are all kinds of threats, risks, and in fact, present injustice that I think, you know, is really pressing. And we have a couple of bodies. We have the house. We have the Senate. We have the White House. We have our State and local leadership. And they are the people who are able to make the regulations, pass the legislation, you know, choose the courts who then determine, you know, our rights and our freedoms. And we need to be able to look critically at them and think about their approach to how they do that work.

MARTIN: Rebecca Traister, thanks so much for talking to us about this, you know, fascinating piece and this fascinating public figure.

TRAISTER: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.