From his seasonal perch in a rural corner of West Tisbury, Richard North Patterson has spent more than 30 years writing 25 books. They include legal and political novels that traverse terrain that runs far from the Island, as well as a trilogy of novels that explore family dynamics right here in the rolling hills and rugged shorelines of Chilmark. More than 20 of Patterson’s books have been bestsellers. He has also written political analysis for the Boston Globe and many other publications, and served as a trial lawyer.
His most recent book is a work of nonfiction: “Tripwires: 15 Twenty-First-Century Events that Undermined American Democracy — and How to Reclaim It.“ The book examines 15 key turning points, or “tripwires” as he describes them, when America has stumbled and fallen into democratic decay and autocracy. Among them are: the 2000 Supreme Court intervention that resulted in the election of George W. Bush over his Democratic challenger, Al Gore; the ascension of John Roberts as chief justice of the Supreme Court, a conservative who has led the majority on reshaping many aspects of the American democracy; the subprime mortgage crisis that spurred the economic breakdown, and the housing crisis that hit when subprime mortgages came due. “Tripwires” concludes with a carefully drawn roadmap on how to sidestep the tripwires and restore a constitutional democracy.
At the Martha’s Vineyard Times, we have gotten to know Patterson, or “Ric,” through his long-standing and generous participation at our Islanders Write gathering, and his public speaking. He has always professed a great love for the Island’s beauty and the eclectic mix of extraordinary talent and power that is drawn here. In his spare time, he enjoys painting and golfing, and by his own assessment, does both badly. I caught up with Patterson to talk about his latest book on a phone interview from his home in Jackson, Fla. Here are lightly edited excerpts from our Q and A.
Charles Sennott: Your book offers a step-by-step explanation of how we got to this point we’re in. Why is it important to understand the process that way? Why do we need to go step by step?
Richard North Patterson: The first thing is to dispel the illusion that Donald Trump did this all by himself, or that he came from nowhere. And so what I want people to understand is the environment from which he sprang. Look at the first decade of the new millennium, which I think was one of America’s historic worst. In the presidential election, we have Bush v. Gore, in which the Supreme Court intervened in a Florida recount, essentially picking the president. And then it all flows from there. Maybe 9/11 would or wouldn’t have happened under a Gore administration. We don’t know. What we do know is that we had the Iraq War, which created enormous distrust, and fractured Iraq, which gave rise to ISIS, which empowered Iran. The Bush tax policies uber-charged our deficit, which added to the suffocating class divide we already had. We had the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008, in which ordinary people got sucked into mortgages with rates that essentially bankrupted them. Then interest rates were raised. Then [Supreme Court Chief Justice] John Roberts drove the revolutionary decision in the Citizens United case, which allowed unlimited money from corporations and wealthy individuals in politics. And so you look at all of that, and Trump had nothing to do with any of it, but it all created the conditions of discontent and destabilization on which he bred.
CS: Why is it important for us to understand that historical pattern that led to this moment?
RNP: It’s important to understand why this happened, and the stages that brought us here, if we’re going to recover our democracy and reinvigorate our belief in the American destiny, and make it actually more inclusive than ever before. I would argue that as bad as Trump’s racism was, in making people paranoid, angry, and rallying people to his side, the economic divide is something that we have to address to create a wider sense of opportunity for people and their kids before we get them to worry about democracy. So I think those are my true reasons.
CS: If I am hearing you correctly, you are saying there may be a danger if we heap disproportionate blame for our decline as a country only on Donald Trump. Why do you believe it’s so important to be distributive in the blame, and where is the peril in pinning it on Trump?
RNP: The notion that if we simply get rid of Donald Trump, we will dispel all our problems is delusional. And let me make another point here. Where has half of the Republican Party gone in the past 25 years? It’s an angrier party. It is a less well-educated party than it was when our parents were, perhaps, Republicans. It is more economically threatened. It is more racially anxious, in part because of immigration, in part because of racism and a backlash against having a Black president. And so we have to understand the Republican Party is now a seedbed for not just Trumpism, but for autocratic leanings. There is a belief that what we need is an authoritarian government to dispel all the enemies that we imagine we have, and to provide simple solutions unimpeded by Democrats, democracy, or anything like that.
CS: Another point you make is to encourage readers to understand and reflect on the economic divide as a driving factor for how we got where we are. This Island that we love, Martha’s Vineyard, is one of those places of great economic divide. So what would you have to say to Islanders in this regard?
RNP: You know, the Martha’s Vineyard summer crowd, in particular, is a very privileged group, and they have their own ideological leanings. I mean, watching MS NOW is like a warm bath, OK? But that’s not necessarily where you want to get your news … However one feels about immigration, it is clear that we have broken borders. It is clear that a sound border is part of an indispensable sovereignty. And once we understand that, we can have the meaningful reform of our immigration policies that we need. Also, it’s perfectly reasonable for the parent of a high school kid to be concerned with their child competing against a transgender athlete. It’s perfectly OK for the mother of a third grader to wonder about the kid being taught about sex. It’s perfectly valid for one to wonder about the medical and psychological effects of transitioning for adolescents and early teens. Now, I think those issues are not nearly as important as Republicans make them out to be, but it’s also true that we cannot be scornful of people who have different takes on things than we do on some issue or another, so that they feel excluded. And part of the liberal problem, as surely Martha’s Vineyard knows, is that it is so precious. It is so rarefied that you simply can’t accept that other people believe differently than you.
CS: Is some of your purpose in this book to try to help us all get past some of that rigid ideology, to think about this in a new way? How do you navigate that here?
RNP: Well, I would say the preciousness I spoke of is not a quality shared by everyone, but there is certainly enough. It goes to the broader analytic tools they bring — or don’t bring — to considering the quality of the electorate writ large. And I also, frankly, avoid some of it. Because there’s only so much that you need to hear, because it’s not new. And I avoid, for example, email exchanges about political opinions. I remember once voicing not just an opinion, but the awareness that there was a substantial skepticism in Washington about Kamala Harris’ political abilities and policy chops. And when I put that out, I got a lot of, Well, what do you know? Well, actually, in that case [I knew] more than they did, and I think my concern was somewhat vindicated during the campaign, as well as she did in lots of ways. So I don’t partake broadly in conversations with people who are sort of locked in to what I would call white liberalism because it simply doesn’t go anywhere.
CS: One of those intersections that you’ve navigated in interesting and bold ways is that question around Israel, Palestine, that one that is probably of all of these dividing lines that we navigate all the time, can get to be the most emotional, and perhaps the hardest to navigate. How do you look at that? You’ve written books about the Palestinian perspective on this exile, a political thriller, very much humanizing the Palestinian experience. How have you managed that? Are we slipping in our ability to hear each other on that issue specifically?
RNP: You know, there are so many layers to it. First of all, Jewish people and Israelis are not the same as the Netanyahu government. And so we have to start with that to say, just as Americans are not the same. as the Trump government, OK? That’s an easy one, but lots of people seem to fail to grasp it. You know, the second thing is when you criticize the settlers on the West Bank, who are fundamentalist bigots, a lot of them, and prone to violence, and seem to believe that God is a real estate agent, who gave them the West Bank. For a lot of people, that’s undermining Israel. It’s not. It’s simply having a decent regard for the rights of the Palestinians who live there in the West Bank, too. Similarly, I am horrified when I see college students recite the slogan “from the river to the sea.” Apparently, either blissfully adopting it or blissfully unaware of what it means. Or what it came from. It’s from a Hamas slogan, and it literally means that Israel should be purged from what is now Israel. Now, how you can say that without feeling that you’re embracing basically a genocide, when you just use the word genocide with respect to Gaza, I fail to understand. And so to me, a lot of what I hear and read and see about the tragedy in the Middle East, you know, is a simplistic form of thinking, which is ultimately also terribly inhumane.
CS: I want to give readers a good sense of where you’re going and where this book seeks to lead them through the tripwires. Do you ever put a hierarchy on these 15 different causes of where we are right now? Do you see some that need to be more focused on than others?
RNP: Well, I would say that there’s a collective of five tripwires, which involve the Supreme Court. John Roberts is involved in four of them as an agent of our democratic decline. Start with the intrusion on the election by Bush v. Gore, then go to the Citizens United case. So now Elon Musk was able to give $130 million [in PAC funds, an estimate later revised up to $250 million] to Donald Trump.
So we have, in 24 years of Supreme Court decisions, really degraded democracy in a lot of ways. You know, it’s kind of remarkable that the Supreme Court has been such an agent of democratic degradation. I would argue that next to Donald Trump, John Roberts is the single person most responsible for the perilous state in which we find our democracy.
CS: It’s really interesting that the whole nexus of the arguments of “Tripwires” is that the Supreme Court, actually should be the instrument that we use to disentangle ourselves from those tripwires. Is the undermining of our democracy inevitable at this point? Can we stop it? And what’s the first step to turning it around?
RNP: The first step is economic equity. What do you say about a country in which we have a minimum wage of $7.25, which hasn’t changed in 16 years? We spent a lot of that time, in fact, shoveling money upstairs with aggressive tax cuts that go really only to the wealthy. So we have to address economic inequities in a variety of ways. We have to make people more secure, you know, whether it’s daycare or tax credits or antitrust laws that provide more competition for workers. Among other things, we have to redo our tax code, and ensure that people at the upper end pay their fair share. We have to worry about funding local education, Head Start, our public schools, free community college for two years, higher Pell grants. We need to aggressively make our middle class more secure, because they’ve become increasingly less secure and more economically marginalized. If you look at how our class system breaks down, the top 10 percent, particularly the top 1 percent, can live where they want, they can buy their house where they want, they can send their kids to school where they want. They know the gatekeepers of success. That’s not the world in which most Americans live.
CS: After finishing this book, do you end up hopeful that we can in fact accomplish the goal of reclaiming our democracy?
RNP: Well, you know, [the whole process of] writing this book is an act of hope …
