Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / PREMIUM: "Trump, the Left, and the Future of Liberalism" with Yascha Mounk

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PREMIUM: "Trump, the Left, and the Future of Liberalism" with Yascha Mounk · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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Get a humans welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
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Here's a dangerous idea for you.
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You can have all the great policies in the world.
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You can have a brilliant set of ideas about what you want to do if you get into government.
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But if you lack a paradigm, a framework, a narrative, a grand story which your policies
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inhabit, you'll never win over the voters.
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You'll never win hearts and minds.
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And that fundamentally is the pickle that the Democratic Party finds itself in.
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It has been inside a paradigm of social justice.
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Before that it was inside a paradigm of economic justice and class warfare.
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And now it finds itself somewhat listless, disrupted and disoriented by the Trump phenomenon.
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A lot of people on the American left have taken heart from recent elections in Australia
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and Canada and the UK.
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It's noticing that there's a sort of anti-Trump liberalism, a center leftism that is
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resurgent and wondering if Democrats in the US can capture some of that energy.
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But can they do so without a real reckoning about what Democrats have gotten wrong and
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what the paradigm of the future ought to be?
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Any time I want to mull on questions like this I turn to one of my favorite thinkers about
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political liberalism and democracy in multi-ethnic modern societies, Yasha Mung.
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He has a fabulous sub-stack.
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I wanted to get his thoughts about the broader culture, the fate of wokeness, what's
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the next paradigm for the left, how we should think about immigration and multiculturalism
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and infrastructure and an abundance agenda and nimbyism versus yimbyism and Obama's legacy
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and big versus small government in the next chapter of American political life.
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He's also written a provocative sub-stack post about the fact that Americans are now
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so much richer than Europeans in terms of GDP per capita, that residents of Mississippi
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are richer than Italians.
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Can that be true?
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He and I get into an argument about that and a lot else I hope you're enjoying.
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The one, the only, Yasha Mung.
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Where's your head at, Yasha, at the moment in terms of Trump's 100 days, there was a lot
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of bloviating and hysteria about how active those 100 days had been and whether or not
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this is the start of a new American authoritarianism, and I've got to say I kind of just hunkered
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down during it.
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I don't want to reason why I don't live in the United States at the moment.
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I don't want that to occupy my brain.
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I mean, I think it occupies Americans' brains too much and I certainly don't want it
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to occupy the rest of the world's brains, but tell me how it's occupying yours.
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Well, certainly I think one of the underwritten tragedies of this moment is just how much
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damn effort has gone for 10 years into understanding the state of mind, the intention, the obsessions,
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the ideological pro-delections of one man by the name of Donald Trump and I really hope
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that we wouldn't be in for another four years of having to obsess over this.
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I called my piece about 100 days, not the first 100 days, but the next 1,360 days because
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we only had the very, very beginning of this presidency.
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So I mean, this point will be, you know, 145 or something, but yes, that's what it was
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100 days in.
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Now, you know, I sort of remembered the speech that Trump gave, that the Republican National
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Convention.
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I was thinking about that as always reflecting on the first 100 days and what was striking
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about that was, you know, there had just been this horrible attempt to assassinate him
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in Butler, Pennsylvania.
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You know, he had this incredible political instinct of, you know, rising for the cameras
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and saying fight, fight, fight to the audience.
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You know, he sort of let it be known that he was a changed man and that he would try to
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reconcile the country and he came out in stage in, I believe it was Milwaukee.
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And for first half an hour, he kept to the script.
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He had a speech for his relatively conciliatory, there's all of his coverage at the time of
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a vibe shift, not just the way from workness and so on, but towards Trump.
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And it looked like he might be unbeatable, it looked like if he presents himself in that
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way, he might really expand his coalition in a very, very big way.
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And then of course, after half an hour, he went off script and he kept talking for an
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hour, another hour and a bit and he kept replaying the biggest hits of, you know, what he
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tells people at his rallies and the various obsessions of very online people on Twitter
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or on truth social.
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And by the end of it, I fall in sleep, I wanted to actually listen to the speech to
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write about it.
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I literally fell asleep at some point during this speech.
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So, you know, there's something where Trump had this opportunity to really incarnate a
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big political shift, but because he, you know, reacted to the ways in which the American
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left is really out of step with the American mainstream in ways that themselves are so
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much out of the mainstream, he sort of squandered that opportunity at the ANC.
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And I think that the first 100 days were sort of similar.
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I think the country has approval ratings for first days into his presidency were higher
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than they had been at any point since he entered politics, including the first days of his
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first presidency.
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I think there was a real sense of exhaustion with a democratic party which had some, you
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know, record lows for its approval ratings, you know, stories about the extent of Biden's
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mental incapacity were continuing to seep out.
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You know, Trump had an opportunity to actually really reshape what America might look like.
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But rather than doing that on, you know, the basis of traditional American values, including
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the rule of law and the American constitution, and the basis of, you know, cultural values
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of preoccupations that not every American, but 60% of Americans might agree with, he decided
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from the beginning to use his presidency to, you know, impose the vision of the MAGA online
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right.
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And that has led to a first 100 days that have been very effective, where he did a lot
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of things, but which have also, I think, not only weakened him as a politician, but the
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United States, but have, you know, made allies in Canada, in Australia, in Western Europe,
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in East Asia, very, very concerned about whether they could rely on the United States, that,
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you know, briefly through the markers into incredible turmoil on so-called liberation
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day when he, you know, announced all of these tariffs.
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I do love Leasha.
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I love that you're framing it as if he had this choice to make, where he could choose
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to either be the conciliatory candidate, the bigger man, the, the unifier, and he chose
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not to.
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This is treating him like a rational political actor, instead of what he is, which is
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a racoon who's gotten into your attic and is, he can't, the racoon can't stop.
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The racoon, you can't, you know, you can put a little tuxedo on the racoon and tell
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the racoon to stand up and read a teleprompter for 30 minutes, but the racoon's going to
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be a racoon eventually.
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You know, he, he, and the racoon will, will keep you up all night and then we'll be happy
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that, you know, he's done his job properly because everybody's paying it, everybody's
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hunting for the fucking racoon.
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I'm stealing this analogy somewhat from Malcolm Gladwell who has a great episode of his
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latest podcast, which is, as it just has an aside, about the, the difference between rats
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and racoons in a clinical behavioral science setting and the origin of our use of rats
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in psychology as the template exemplar of how mammals behave and how behavioral psychology
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and stuff.
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Because there was a real live debate back when in the BF Skinner days about apparently
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whether or not you would use rats or racoons as, as lab test animals in psych, psychological
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tests.
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And you couldn't use racoons because the psychologist wants the animal to either press
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the lever and get the sugar candy or, you know, run on the treadmill or something, but
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the racoon just devours the treadmill and like shits all over the lever.
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And, and so psychologists were like, the racoons are terrible, they don't work for studies.
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We need rats because rats are conscientious and hardworking and single-minded in their
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focus.
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But the hypothesis that Gladwell is, is putting forward is like rats are a terrible analogy
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for humans.
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We're more like racoons because human beings are actually much more like racoons.
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Yeah, and the whole reason you can't study racoons is the reason it's very hard to study
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human beings as well because we're unpredictable, we're heedless, and, you know, we don't
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follow, we don't like to follow rules and be told what to do.
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So all of our, all of the, all of the foundations of behavioral psychology are flawed because
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they're based on this mammal, which is very temperamentally, very unlike people simply
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because for that reason it's easy to study.
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So that long and fascinating aside, aside, you know, the question now is we are essentially
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hostage to a racoon and the first 100 days have shown that he, well, what have the first
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100 days shown because there are a couple of interpretations, right?
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One is he is stealthily installing a soft authoritarianism in the United States along
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the lines of hungaries or turkeys.
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And this is the end of American democracy unless we fight and resist.
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The other is he's throwing a tremendous amount of shit at the wall and flooding the zone
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with whatever he can.
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And then he's just going to walk through the wreckage and see sort of what works and what
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didn't work and, you know, what he can make you serve and what he can't make you serve.
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And then when he's done, we will patiently reassemble it all and everything will be fine,
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which universe do we live in?
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I love his whole racoon analogy by the way.
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And I think now you're the one that's humanizing Trump since he's saying, but he's a racoon
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that, but all of us humans are racoons and just on a side note, I know.
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He's a human, yeah, he's the uber.
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He's the uber.
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He's the uber mentioned, but, you know, have the ear to be a human ear rather than rather
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than the beard.
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Yes.
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He's probably the uber.
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He's not a bad analogy either, even if I have my doubts about Freud's taxonomy.
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Look, you know, the first 100 days were very impactful.
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You know, unlike in 2016, Trump has full control of a Republican party has a very large
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number of loyalists who he's been able to place in important positions in the, you know,
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federal bureaucracy came in with a real plan about what to do.
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And so, you know, there is this incredible, you know, fire of one executive order after
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another trying to transform the state.
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The second thing is that it's quite clear that he is willing to dismantle very basic democratic
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norms.
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When you look, for example, it is attacks on law firms, which I think are really one
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of the most shocking things, but he's that when you look at the way in which he's revoked
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and not security clearance, but security protection for some very high ranking former officials
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who in his mind crossed him in some kind of way.
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I mean, opening up for possibility, but they might, right, security clearance is petty
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and that makes it hard for him to earn a good living or something security detail.
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I mean, you know, we're talking about people like former secretary of state.
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I mean, you know, if a foreign adversary is going to assassinate a former Mark and secretary
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of state or kidnap a former secretary of state because Trump can't security clearance
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for him.
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I mean, that is just an incredible act of self-destruction.
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And of course, he's tested so far the courts.
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He hasn't I think quite cross-brewed become on this.
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He's gotten close to saying I'm not going to listen to the courts, but on a bunch of important
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things he is for now or being courts, right?
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It's clear that he has the willingness to really dismantle the rule of law in the United
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States.
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There's a different question about whether he's going to succeed.
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And I'll just say two things about that.
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The first is that in places where the rule of law ended up really being dismantled, it
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normally took a long time, right?
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In Venezuela, in Hungary, in Turkey, no doubt in those places that the leaders had the
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intention of dismantling the rule of law and were capable of following through on it.
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But it took a long time.
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It didn't take four years.
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It didn't take two years to eight, 12 years until they'd really managed to fully control
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the political system.
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Now, you might think that in the United States, which is more federal, more dispersion of
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political power across regions, you know, more veto points in the House of Representatives,
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the Senate, the Supreme Court, etc.
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That might take even longer than in some of those places.
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And the second question is, are they going to be able to keep up with pace?
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anecdotally, I spoke to somebody who has some friends in my world and who was at a dinner
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in the sea where some, you know, mid to low ranking members of the administration were
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really depressed because they have felt like we've done what we could.
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We've put in place all of the executive orders.
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Now the sand is starting to gamma figures and actually will just be mostly staying around
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for the next years.
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We don't actually have a plan.
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We don't actually know what we're doing.
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And a lot of them are also resigned, Yasha, to losing the midterms in next year's election.
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So they know that they probably only control both houses of Congress for another year-ish.
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And that's not a foregone conclusion that it seems like the Democrats will win.
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And part because, you know, the conventional wisdom in American politics always was, it's
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a foregone conclusion for me simply because I just think that my trajectory, my expectation
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of Trump's popularity is that it will continue to decline massively and that he'll leave
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office as one of the most important.
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I mean, your word and goods here, I think that we really need to be careful about assuming
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that we know too much in any direction.
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To me, it's incredibly hard to project whether Trump's approval ratings in the summer
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over four of 2028 are going to be 60 percent or should be very unusually high or, you
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know, 10 percent, which would be very, very unusually low.
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I could imagine anything in between those.
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And just to say, I mean, the most damaging thing that Trump has done to his own popularity
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is liberation day, right?
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People are very worried about these tariffs.
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They saw the markets crater quite quickly.
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More Americans now have, as Harry Anten has pointed out, own some stock, then on full-time
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employment by an era margin.
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And so that had an immediate impact on perceptions of Trump and you see that that's really when
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his approval rating started to sink.
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Now, when he's sort of semi-post or undead liberation day, who knows what exactly is going
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on with that right now, and the stock markets went back up.
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We are market market, at least as of 24 hours ago, was higher than it had been at the beginning
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of the year.
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Trump's approval ratings have started to inch up again.
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So if you look at Nate Silver's tracker of Trump's approval rating, he's negative
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by about five points.
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That's a pretty narrow margin.
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So I don't know what it's going to look like in 28.
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Well, of course we don't know.
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I should clarify my statement.
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So when you say you can imagine a universe in which he's anywhere between a 10% approval
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and a 60% approval, I can imagine that universe, I can imagine a universe where he's at 100%
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approval or a 0% approval.
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My expectation is that unless my expectation, so there are two forces I think that are going
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on in Trump in Trump, right?
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One is the showman, the carnival Barker, and really the amazing and effective communicator.
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The A.B. tester who goes out to rallies and has a keen, intuitive sense of what people
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want to hear, throws a million different lines at them from crooked Hillary to poker
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haunt us to this to that seat to the wall and sees what gets the crowd riled up and has
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like a showman's sense of what direction he should weave in order to maximize his popularity
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and influence and acquisition.
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He's like a stand up in that way, right?
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Like a stand up, if you see a stand up working out, I once saw, I'm like my name, very famous
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comedian, you know, work out his material and he was terrible, right, because he was just
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starting out with his jokes and like half of them fell completely flat.
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But he took the ones that worked and by the time you see the special on HBO, it's amazing.
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That's right.
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So there's that in Trump.
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There's also this cloistered paranoid power hungry, avaricious, resentful antagonistic
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person who people hate working with and who in a sense reminds me a bit of Putin during
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COVID, just locked up the king in his castle, sort of locked up and detached, you know,
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getting paranoid and pouring over our canary in Putin's case.
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It was like, you know, old historical tombs about, you know, the history of Ukraine and
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Russian empire.
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And in Trump's case, it's truth, social and mean coins and, you know, the Saudis and
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this and that.
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And I can absolutely, all I'm saying is that on a balance of probabilities, I suspect
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that within the context of a second White House surrounded only by yes men, he's going
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to be undone somewhat by the latter phenomenon than bolstered by the former, which is his
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super power.
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You say it could go either way.
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I mean, I'm not a Southseyer.
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Sometimes when I am falling asleep, I'll put on an audio book of PG Woodhouse in the
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background.
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Investors amazing novel of PG Woodhouse, which is about Hollywood.
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And, you know, he has the boss of the studio surrounded by these yes men and the literally
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yes men, the literally people play your page to say yes.
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Invest.
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The senior yes and the junior yes and then there's a group of nodders, right?
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They're even more junior, they just get to nod along and, and yes, you absolutely feel
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like, you know, Trump has a senior yes and his junior yes and then a whole chorus of nodders
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on truth.
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Yeah.
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And you're right, but that by the way is one of the general dangers.
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I don't think Trump is an autocrat quite yet, for he certainly doesn't have with respect
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for the institutions of the American Republic, but that in general is one of the great dangers
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of autocracy that people end up being so surrounded by the senior yes men, junior yes men
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and the nodders that they lose touch with reality and I'm making very bad decisions, including
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very bad decisions on economic policy, but then make them deeply unpopular.
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So I think absolutely that is one of the possible pathways.
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I am just a little bit concerned when I talk to people who are critics of Trump, people
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who are worried about American democratic institutions, and the whole theory of action is premised
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on the fact that Trump is going to grow to be incredibly unpopular and they say, look,
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we just need to, we just need to wait out and say super unpopular and then, you know,
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we don't have to be poor with a democratic party, we don't have to think about how to have
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a popular appeal, we don't have to think about how to resist some of it for a time take
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over because, you know, we'll just wait until he's super unpopular and when everything
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is going to fall into our lap.
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I'm like, there's a world in which there's a snow in which that's happens, but to rely on that
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is I think a very dangerous thing.
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Totally. Yes, I mean, I think we should be careful about maintaining what you might call
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an ontological claim about his subsequent, you know, popularity versus a strategic claim
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about his future popularity, you know, hope for the best and prepare for the worst.
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Don't use your expectation that he will be unpopular as a rationale for not getting your
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own house in order and you and I have spoken many times on previous podcasts about the need
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for the left to get its house in order and start reconnecting with heartland, both values
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and economics and focus more on economic justice than on, you know, the minutiae of social justice
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into Nissan battles. I want to add one thing to what you were just saying about why we may not
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be on the precipice of authoritarianism. You said in countries that do go down that path,
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it usually takes quite a long time to get there. I would also throw in another couple of things
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that give me hope, which is in countries that do go down that path, you tend not to have had
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robust centuries of democratic liberal tradition, right, that are getting overturned in a heartbeat.
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And you also tend to have an authoritarian who's extremely popular and who can go into every
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battle with the institutions of state, the judiciary and the legislative branch with a sort of
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quorum behind him of the people and can really plausibly speak on behalf of the popular.
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And you have neither of those conditions in the case of America, which makes me sort of
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cautiously optimistic that three and a half years is not going to be enough to undo American
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democracy. How do you feel the rest of the world responding to this moment? Yeah,
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sure, because we had an election in Australia a couple of weeks ago, one week before that,
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it was the Canadian election in both cases, reasonably surprised landslide winds for the center
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left parties, fueled certainly in Canada's case by anti-Trump sentiment. In Australia's case,
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I'm just contemplating whether to bother going into that. I will go into it because some of your
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subscribers might find it interesting and some of mine may not have heard me a pine on it,
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but I was asked by a few international news outlets, you know, after the election,
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how, whether I thought Trump was a factor here. And I think it was overplayed in the international
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press, the extent to which Trump was a factor in the domestic election. He didn't come up much,
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and there was no overt talk about him. But my sense was that the kind of anti-incumbent,
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anti-establishment, like anti-institutional rebellion that he represents and that Farage
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represents and that Brexit represents and that the Far Writing Europe represents has turned off
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the heartland in Australia so much that they went towards, they defiantly. And when I say landslide,
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this was not just like a once in a decade landslide, this was like a once in a half century landslide
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toward, it was the largest, I think, win of an incumbent Prime Minister in decades and decades and
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and I think that, and that was not, this is a reasonably uncharismatic, only moderately popular,
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dumpy middle-aged straight white man running against another dumpy middle-aged straight white man,
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neither of whom have a particular vision for the country. But I do think that there was a sense of,
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of just noticing what happens when you get too cute with playing around with rebellion,
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and it was a status quo vote of like, you know what, we can all have complaints about the way things
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are going, but look at what's happening in America and we don't want to, we don't want to play around
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with that. I mean, one of the benefits of living in a medium-sized country that's a long way away
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from everywhere else is that you get to watch what the other similar countries are doing and we're
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always a few years behind. So we get to sort of look at what America's policies have been on guns
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and then when we have a horrible mass shooting go, well, okay, so we don't want to be like that,
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we don't want to have our schools getting shot up and our cinemas and shopping centers getting
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shot up all the time. So let's do a take a different path or you, you know, on a COVID, you see,
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you know, what, that kind of chaos that's happening in New York and Northern Italy and you go, okay,
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well, let's get serious before it gets here. And similarly, I think there was, there was a sense
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in Australia that like, you know what, things are good enough. So it is not a, it is not a risk-free
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proposition to just try for something else because hey, liberal democracy has failed us,
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so let's just throw some shit at the wall. We've seen the shit and we're like, no, thank you.
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So that's my sense, that's my long-winded way of sort of framing for non-Australians what
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the Australian result was about, not directly about Trump but about the phenomena that gave rise
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to Trump. And this has led some people in America to be optimistic that actually maybe Trump
24:04
is, it contains the seeds of his own undoing and what we're seeing in the rise of the center right
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that said to left rather in the UK and Canada or in Australia will come to America's shores.
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What do you make of that question? Well, let me say a few things. I mean, first, I don't want to
24:17
underplay the danger and the risk to a market democratic institutions. I just don't think it
24:22
happens in three or four years. I don't think that Trump will have won by 2028. And so a lot
24:27
depends on whether or not he's able to win real action in 2028 and that depends on how
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popular he's going to be at that point and in part and whether the next Republican actually has a
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Trump is a Trumpist, right? Yes, if it's Don Jr. or that is. Of course, I mean, if it's Glenn
24:43
Youngkin or somebody like that, great. I don't think that's very likely. But it's not, you know,
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again, a lot of things can happen in three years and I don't think we should rule out the
24:50
possibility about modern Republican somehow becomes a nominee in 2028 but certainly doesn't seem
24:55
likely. And so that election is going to be very important because again, it usually takes
24:59
eight, twelve years for democratic institutions to really truly be undermined.
25:04
But that's there's a real danger of that. I mean, they could win again in 2028 and that I think
25:09
would put a mark on a pretty dangerous trajectory. Now, part of what often happens is that most
25:14
people can't really articulate, you know, I'm a philosophical liberal, you know, I care about,
25:21
you know, the idea that the state shouldn't prioritize, you know, one set of ideas sort of
25:28
conceptions of the good life over another, you know, we must protect you process and freedom of
25:33
speech. There are a few people talk like that, right? But I do think that in countries that have
25:38
been ruled broadly by liberal principles for a very long time, a lot of people have a liberal
25:44
instance. They might not be able to put that into words. They might not call themselves
25:49
philosophical liberals. But when they see really unfair things happening, they say,
25:54
hang on a second, that doesn't quite seem right, right? They might not have any particular
25:58
sympathy, for example, for pro-Palestinian protesters, but when they see some graduate
26:03
student being deported because she wrote some op-ed in a student newspaper, they might say,
26:09
doesn't seem right, right? They might think that we need real control over the southern
26:13
border of Mexico and the United States, but the Biden administration really screwed up on
26:17
basically having an open border. But they might also say, well, hang on a second, you know,
26:22
Gaita II artist that somehow gets swept up in some kind of drag net and treat it like he's a member
26:29
of, you know, a terrible criminal gang when very clearly he's not, you know, that doesn't seem
26:34
like the way that we should treat people here in this country, right? And so I do think that sort
26:38
of the more you see those kind of authoritarian policies, et cetera, the more you also have a
26:44
country reaction against that. And that's a hope for the United States. And of course, as you're
26:47
saying, there is definitely something we've seen internationally. Canada was a very clear case of
26:52
that. You know, Canada is most threatened by the United States because, you know, it has a
26:57
very, very long border of the United States. Most of Canada's population is right across the United
27:01
States. The majority of Canada's foreign trade is with the United States. So the country has been
27:06
experiencing very, very strong whiplash. And the leader of the conservative party who looked like
27:12
he was going to win that election was initially to reluctant to criticize Trump was seen by some,
27:19
I think it's quite different profile, but we've seen a some by some as a kind of Canadian Trump,
27:23
you know, and that very clearly is what caused him the re-election, what allowed this kind of very
27:28
maribund liberal party, you know, until recently led by Justin Tudor, who to really outstate his
27:34
welcome would become very unpopular to just reinvent itself, you know, under now Prime Minister
27:41
Kani, really remarkable thing. You know, much more about Australia than I do, so they
27:45
seem to hear from you what's going on there. I should also just throw in there. I'm glad that
27:50
you raised the economic question because of course I should have included that in my explanation.
27:54
The United States is not a massive trading partner for Australia. It's not a huge, like for a
27:58
Canada, it is absolutely indispensable. It's like, it's just it's the elephant in the room.
28:03
For Australia, you know, we sound like we're trying to find a problem, you know, and around Asia.
28:08
And like, exactly, we have a very, very big problem and it will grow as a problem, you know,
28:13
strategically in coming years, but that is a very different problem from, you know, exporting
28:19
the majority. You know, the United States is significant, but you could wipe it, you could wipe
28:23
the US off the map and Australia would be fine. Australia's economy would be fine. Well, you might
28:27
did a couple of other places where the sort of right-wing populists have not one recently.
28:32
Romania had an election yesterday in which the sort of centrist mayor of Bucharest was somewhat
28:38
surprisingly elected. The betting markets had the kind of far right candidate ahead, so that was
28:44
very interesting. Now, having said that there's some places where you see the right continuing to
28:50
rise quite rapidly and Britain elected, you know, a centrist labor prime minister last year,
28:58
but in these local elections a few weeks ago, labor did terribly. The conservatives did really
29:04
badly, and it was neither for Rajas reform party, which is, you know, pretty explicitly allied with
29:11
Trump, that, you know, looks set to potentially become the party that replaces the conservatives
29:19
on the right to the British political spectrum, and it couldn't do some recent polls, wins an
29:24
outright majority in the next parliamentary elections. Far away, who knows what's actually going
29:29
to happen? It's certainly premature to assume that not for Rajas going to be the next prime minister,
29:34
but that is a remarkable development. And we haven't seen a third party come this close to a
29:40
clipsing one of the two main political parties since labor took over from the liberals about a
29:45
century ago. Let me just throw something in there because this will bring us to one of your fields
29:50
of expertise, which is multiculturalism and immigration. Trump, Farage, and I would say the AFD,
29:58
the alternative for Deutschland in Germany, are probably the greatest threats of the far right,
30:04
as I would estimate, in the big liberal democracies, correct me if you see it differently. And
30:09
they all exist in countries that have made enormous left wing progressive blunders about their
30:17
borders. The reason why the far right does not exist in Australia, touch lots of wood, knock on
30:24
wood, is because there's been a consensus. I mean, I will say all of the dual of the necessary
30:30
clothe throat clearing about it being a lot easier if you're an island than if you're not an island,
30:35
but the United Kingdom is also an island and Australia is Australia's closest large
30:42
neighbour is one of the most populous and densely populated, the largest Muslim country in the
30:47
world, Indonesia, and has a very, very thorough and robust people smuggling operation,
30:52
funneling people from South Asia down through Southeast Asia to Australia and it's not far in a
30:58
leaky boat to get to Australia. And the the fausty impact the Australians have made for decades
31:05
is that we will impose an extremely harsh brutalizing, probably criminal under international
31:11
law, technically regime of patrolling the seas and turning back every single boat,
31:18
bribing tiny South Pacific island nations to build gulags on them where we're going to ship
31:23
those people while their refugee status is processed and then try to bribe and control other
31:29
friendly nations to take those people under the pledge to people smugglers and to would be asylum
31:35
seekers that if you arrive illegally, you will never set foot in Australia, even if you're found
31:40
to be a refugee, you will be resettled somewhere else. The only way that you will ever make a life
31:44
for yourself in Australia is to come through the front door. And then to say we will also have one
31:49
of the highest refugee resettlement rates in the entire world. We'll be one of the one of the highest
31:54
per capita immigration rates in the world. And we've sustained that not just for years, but for decades
32:00
with massive rates of immigration and a public that generally cops enormous demographic change
32:08
because they have a sense that we could turn off the speaker if we needed to. We know who's coming
32:12
in. We understand, you know, that we're selecting people along criteria that we've all sort of
32:18
tacitly agreed upon. And I don't think it's a coincidence that Australia has so much less
32:25
of a powerful far right than countries that just unilaterally either declined to defend their
32:30
borders, like the United States, or made hair-brain policies like Angela Merkel just snapping her
32:36
fingers and saying that we're going to have a million Syrians come in. No, I think you're
32:41
should be right. I mean, I was really struck when I visited Australia that I kind of expected
32:46
a more proletarian version of England with better weather, which is perhaps what the country was
32:51
50 years ago. And to find a very diverse, very multicultural society, as you're saying,
32:57
Australia has had very high levels of immigration. And it's now a very ethnic and religious
33:04
diverse society in the same, of course, is true for Canada. And so why are those two of the only
33:10
countries that don't have a very significant far right? Well, in large part, as you're suggesting,
33:14
I think that's absolutely right, because they have control over their own borders. And even for
33:18
the high levels of immigration, they select who comes in. And they don't select on the basis of
33:23
race, they don't select on the basis of religion, but they do select on the basis of scale and the
33:27
basis of need and of other kinds of things. And so it seems to me that what democratic
33:33
publics want is a very strong control over their own borders to decide who comes in and who doesn't.
33:39
And then you can win the argument for why red-view high levels of immigration
33:44
can actually be to a country's benefit. And that's really striking. And the other thing,
33:48
but I will just say, is that...
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