Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / PREMIUM: “American Political Violence” with BBC Foreign Correspondent Nick Bryant

Transcript

PREMIUM: “American Political Violence” with BBC Foreign Correspondent Nick Bryant · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  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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  Political violence is intrinsic to the American experience.
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  It is fundamental to American history, it is not something that we should be surprised
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  by, it is something that Americans must live with and perceive as part of the fabric of
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  their nation.
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  That is basically the thesis of Nick Bryant, who is one of the BBC's greatest foreign
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  correspondence.
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  He lived in New York for many years, he lived in Washington, he's lived in South Asia
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  as well.
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  He's written for the economist, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the Sydney Morning Herald,
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  the age.
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  One of his books is currently in the Oval Office, Joe Biden is a fan, it's called When America
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  Stopped Being Great, A History of the Present.
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  Nick's latest book is called The Forever War and tells the story of America's political
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  polarization over the last 250 years.
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  We wanted to check in with Nick about what he thinks about the current political climate,
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  the current election, and how it fits into the history of American politics, please enjoy
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  as much as I did.
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  You want to know the Nick Bryant?
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  So we were just talking before we started about your fairy rights, Brooklyn Heights, from
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  Dumbo, down on the Manhattan Bridge over Pass, to the UN, you had an office in the UN?
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  Yeah, I was working for the BBC in New York at the time, and I had an office there.
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  What?
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  What?
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  Why were BBC offices at the UN, so they...
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  Well, we've always had an office at the United Nations.
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  There's a whole kind of two stories of press gallery at the United Nations.
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  Well, it's fascinating.
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  You know, so you've got the big news organizations like Reuters and the New York Times and
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  8P and all that kind of things, and the BBC's always had a presence there, and we also
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  had an office in Grand Zero, actually, or overlooking Grand Zero, and one of the offices there,
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  that was an extraordinary place to be as well.
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  Was it there prior to 9-11, or did you...
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  No, we were very competitive, actually.
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  We kept on moving around.
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  We were in Midtown for a while, and then we came downtown, and to Lowman Hatton, and
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  yeah, it was a good place to be, actually, yeah.
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  And surrounded by so much history, you know, I mean, that's what's always struck me about
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  my commute to work.
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  I mean, I would literally cross the water, that George Washington staged his escape from
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  the British, and then you got a Wool Street, which is the site of the Wool Street crash,
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  and Wool Street was also where George Washington was sworn in as president.
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  You know, you had Grand Zero day, you had 9-11 unfolded, you had the court complex where
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  Donald Trump was arraigned early this year, you know, there was so much history.
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  I always felt that, not just history, I mean, you're talking about when it comes to things
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  like Donald Trump or 9-11, you're talking about contemporary, it being a contemporary
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  epicenter.
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  I mean, it felt like Rome to me, like at the peak of the Empire, you know, it's a place
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  where shit happens.
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  Even when a space shuttle blasts off into orbit, it's happening in the same time zone,
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  at least, if it's going from Cape Canaveral.
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  You know, there was a sense that there was always a sense that...
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  Well, even crossing the Brooklyn Bridge.
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  Now, the Brooklyn Bridge was kind of seen as the moonshot of the 19th century.
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  It was where America kind of made this statement.
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  We were building bigger bridges than anyone else in the same way that we could build rockets
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  that got to the moon and got back again.
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  And so you were building power.
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  And the biggest skyscrapers.
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  Exactly.
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  All that kind of stuff.
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  So, no, I mean, there was so much history packed into that small...
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  And I mean, you know, you think about the things that led to Trump, you know, the 2008
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  financial crash, you know, that was a Wall Street event.
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  And even the night of Trump's election, I was in New York, and, you know, Hillary gave
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  her concession speech, which wasn't really a concession speech, because in New York...
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  What you did that night?
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  She did it the next day.
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  Yeah, that's right.
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  It was who came out, someone, one of her handlers came to the city.
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  Yeah, it was John Pedestria actually.
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  Yeah, I was there that night.
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  I mean, they had this amazing setup if you remember it.
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  They're in this conference center, the Jacob Javits center.
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  And they erected this beautiful stage.
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  It was shaped like America.
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  And it was underneath a glass ceiling.
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  And of course, that was the glass ceiling that figuratively she was supposed to shatter
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  that night.
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  But the night began with the kind of celebratory movement that Clinton campaign really
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  thought they got it.
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  Then you saw those early results.
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  And you come through from Florida and a couple of other states.
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  I mean, and then came that sort of shocking news that Trump won, Pennsylvania, and he
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  said, wow, he's won.
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  And everybody in that press room, and I've never known a mood like it, Josh.
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  It was extraordinary.
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  People who are paid to speak for a living, people who are paid to write for a living,
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  I think we're absolutely speechless.
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  There was a kind of somber mood.
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  Partly, I think, because we all realized we got it wrong.
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  And if we got it right, we'd have been just a few blocks away at the Hilton where Donald
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  Trump was having his celebration in mid-time.
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  But it was an extraordinary moment.
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  Yeah.
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  I mean, that was the point that I was making both of the speeches were there in New York.
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  So there was a sense of like, it's actually happening here.
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  And Americans often find this funny because they think of their country as new.
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  They think of Europe as old.
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  And America as new.
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  My experience coming to New York was that it was ancient in comparison to Australia.
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  That it was the cobblestone streets and like the sense of it.
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  Yeah, exactly.
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  I mean, it's some beautiful sort of architecture.
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  Yeah.
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  And the building where George Washington was sworn in, it's not even there anymore.
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  I mean, it's that old.
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  It's been torn down and something else has replaced it, which is equally pretty old but
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  not as old.
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  Yeah, there's a massive amount of history.
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  The idea that America hasn't got history is just kind of ridiculous.
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  Yeah.
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  Yeah, I mean, the point in my book is they can't escape this history at the moment.
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  So much unresolved history.
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  Yeah.
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  I mean, half a millennium has quite a long time to have been a country, which is basically
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  how long people have been in North America.
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  Europeans have been in North America.
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  So yeah, when let's just start with Trump then, that Trump election and we can go back
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  and we go around wherever you want to, but did that make you re-evaluate things or did
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  it reaffirm any preconceptions that you had?
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  What did you make of it in the days afterwards after the shock and subsided?
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  That's a great question.
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  Because I think that Trump's victory in many ways kind of defied our idea of American
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  history, that it was a history of continual progress and advancement, you know, if you've
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  had an African American president and you're going to have a female president, that's the
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  next sort of advancement, that's the next act of progress.
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  And of course, you know, Trump made a sort of question, well, maybe we've got history
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  a bit wrong.
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  And this idea that Trump sort of came out of nowhere, I thought was wrong.
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  I thought that he was the beneficiary of all sorts of trend lines that sort of came
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  together in that shock victory.
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  I mean, one of them was an economic trend line.
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  I mean, when Trump said the American dream is dead, that really resonated in the empty
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  factories and the derelict still works at the rust belt, you know, the seedbed of Trump
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  ism.
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  You know, nobody really believed anymore that their kids would be better off than they
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  were, which is the essence of the American dream.
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  I mean, I think we'd like to think that Barack Obama's success was proof that America
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  had sort of absolved the original sin of racism, but Trump made his name as the head of
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  the birth of movement.
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  Trump made his name by saying a black presidency is illegitimate.
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  And not all of his supporters like that, but a lot did.
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  You know, if you look at the culture of the moment, you know, what were we watching from
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  the turn of the century onwards?
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  It was a reality TV show.
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  It was the star of reality TV.
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  It was Donald Trump, you know, technologically, Twitter and Facebook and Instagram had put in
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  his hands ways of bypassing the media, but he didn't need to bypass the media because
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  we amplified his message anyway, because there was another kind of post industrial landscape
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  that he was appealing to, and it was the sort of decimated newsrooms of America.
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  And here I came this sort of candidate.
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  There was a clickbait candidate to end all clickbait candidates.
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  And when you add all those things together and you introduce the element of the Electoral
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  College, which is this mechanism, obviously, which allows you to win the presidency without
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  winning the nationwide vote, which is what happened with Trump, of course, Hillary Clinton
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  got three million more votes.
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  You kind of have this historical, perfect storm, although I kind of don't like using the
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  permanence, the perfect storm analogy, because that suggests the storm will pass.
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  This is America's permanent weather system.
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  Now?
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  Yeah.
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  Yeah.
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  Why?
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  Well, because he's still viable.
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  Well, what if in a few months time he's not?
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  Well, the fact that he is still viable shows that all of those sort of historical trendlines
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  are still there.
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  Right.
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  And I mean, what I'd argue is the historical trendlines go much further back, you know?
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  It's not just a sort of 50-year history of the rise of Trump.
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  It's a 250-year history of the rise of Trump.
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  So even if he loses, he'll lose by a small margin.
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  I mean, I think this was a sort of mistake that some people made in 2020 when he lost.
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  They thought, oh, well, that's kind of the end of Donald Trump.
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  I mean, clearly it wasn't.
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  And clearly all the factors that led to Trump's emergence in 2016 were there to a certain
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  extent in 2020.
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  I mean, if it hadn't been for COVID, I think he would have won the election.
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  And then now, I mean, he's still viable as a presidential candidate.
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  He still sends a really strong chance of winning, even after being the architect of January
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  the 6th, even after being an American president who incited a mob to ransack the capital
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  and the attempt to overturn an election.
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  All of those problems that led to Trump are still there and he's still the beneficiary
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  of them.
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  I mean, I hope that we're talking about just slightly different time frames, because when
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  you ask whether or not this is a storm or whether this is just now the weather or the climate
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  moving forward, I do regard most of the things that you talked about there.
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  In terms of the economic disruption of globalization and deindustrialization, the cultural and technological
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  risks of social media, those things as being like thunder claps that will, at some point,
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  have to sort themselves out.
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  Now, a lot hinges on what, at some point, to the means, whether that certainly doesn't
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  mean in three years, but I hope that in 30 years that we've figured out how to live
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  with social media algorithms and a globalized economy and artificial intelligence.
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  I hope so too.
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  And then the industrialized manufacturing base, and we don't just end up with an endless
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  succession of Sylvia Herbirlis-Goni's or worse future.
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  What I'm worried about, Josh, is that automation was a huge part of this.
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  Trump sort of blamed China, he tried to blame Mexican immigrants, but the major job losses
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  in the Rust Belt, 75% of the Rust Belt jobs were lost because of automation.
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  And I was always struck by going to the Rust Belt.
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  I spent a lot of time in the Rust Belt in 2016, and I would go and be driven around by
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  Uber drivers sometimes on the way back from the airport, who would lost their jobs and
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  the still works, so they'd become Uber drivers, you know, and that was the way they were
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  making their living.
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  But what struck me about Pittsburgh was, Pittsburgh was exactly the place where Uber was actually
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  developing driverless cars.
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  So these poor guys were going to be hit by the next wave, they were going to be hit by
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  the wave of artificial intelligence.
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  And there is this concern that artificial intelligence will do to white college jobs,
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  what automation did to blue college jobs.
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  And, you know, we're going to have to figure out a way of making the economy work for everybody,
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  because I think political polarization over the last 50 years or so has very much been
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  a product and got in tandem with income polarization.
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  These more extreme sort of inequalities in wealth between people who are really doing
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  well at this economy and people just aren't doing well at all, and then there's a kind
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  of missing middle.
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  And I think one of the reasons there's a kind of missing middle in politics right now is
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  there's a kind of missing middle in the economy as well, so yeah, I mean, hopefully we
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  can figure all this out, but we're kind of not at the moment.
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  There are still those big discrepancies between income, and I think that's what's fueling
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  a lot of this.
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  I mean, there's a huge educational divide, as you know, in America right now, people who
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  are winning in this economy, because they're pretty educated, they can, they're computer
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  literature, all that kind of stuff, and a lot of people who, the deployment divide, and
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  people who aren't navigating this new economy, as well as they'd navigated the economy.
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  Yeah, I mean, Hillary Clinton got a lot of flak after the election, you remember when
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  she gave that speech, and she said that like 70 or 80% of the US economy voted for her.
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  Like if you look at the economic output of the country, yeah, I mean, the cancers are
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  voted for her with the cancers that are generating all the wealth that she won in the
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  world, producing parts of the country, and she won the popular vote.
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  And if you look at the map, I mean Trump used to love this map in 2016, he put it up
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  on the wall of the White House, it was like sort of political pornography for him, which
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  showed that America is basically red, right, I mean, because all the cancers, all the rural
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  cancers are red.
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  But nobody lives there.
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  And then he got these three cows, and they can't vote at the moment.
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  So, and then you have these little blue blobs, but these little blue blobs are the ones
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  with all the people in it.
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  And they're often the blue blobs that are generating the wealth.
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  And that's funny.
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  You talk about the incoming equality and like the divide.
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  I was talking to a libertarian friend of mine recently, we were getting to an argument
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  about why Australia is comparatively successful just in terms of it was because he was American
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  and he was visiting Australia and he was like, wow, so crime free and it seems like it's
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  not dirty and it seems like clean and friendly and everyone seems kind of well informed about
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  things.
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  Right.
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  And then everything like it's very middle class.
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  And I was like, we got into an argument about why was sort of defending the welfare state
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  and defending, you know, the social compact that Australia has that's probably closer
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  to Western European one than an American one.
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  And he was pushing back on it and I said, listen, at the end of the day, if you want
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  to have a happy country, you have to pay, how did I put it very politically and correctly,
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  you have to pay stupid and lazy people lots more money than they're worth.
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  If you want to put it in stark libertarian terms, that's your trade off because if you
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  run a free market and you allow everybody who's going to sink to sink, they're going
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  to shit on the sidewalk and they're going to occasionally, you know, do stuff that you
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  don't like.
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  I mean, I think one of the problems of American exceptionalism is this denial that other
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  countries do things better, right?
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  And it's actually sort of meant that America just doesn't sort of embrace ideas from a
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  broad, which will make the situation at home a lot better in the classic examples, obviously,
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  of public health care, you know, this scene is this kind of European socialized medicine,
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  all this kind of, you know, it's a threat to America, they use an Americanism to sort
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  of go up against Europeanism, which is, you know, a freedom to, you know, be sick basically
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  with an adequate freedom to go bankrupt if you get exactly if you end up in a kind
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  of, you know, E.R. ward and you haven't got the health care, yeah, no, it's, and there's
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  a kind of arrogance attached to this American assumption isn't that we're, you know, we're
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  just better, we're just superior.
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  And, you know, you don't have to travel far these days to find countries who are doing
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  it much better.
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  In fact, you just crossed over the border into Canada, you know, we just got kind of sensible
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  gun laws, you know, far better sort of social welfare net, but America and its idea
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  of an exceptional America sort of stops them embracing ideas, doesn't it?
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  Does it not maybe need to have that myth about itself in order to be the kind of engine
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  of ingenuity and prosperity that it is, you know, you wouldn't want Canada developing
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  all of the world's AI and, you know, with bank cancer medications, you want, you want
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  A country to have, to be shooting for the stars.
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  Yeah, look, those bits of American exceptions and the kind of work for it and bits that
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  don't aren't there.
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  And I mean, although I don't, you know, I kind of sort of push back against this idea
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  and you often hear it from presidential candidates, you hear it from, you know, Kamala Harris
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  at the moment, you know, my story could only happen in America, you know, on the daughter
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  of Jamaican economics professor and an Indian cancer researcher, you know, and here I am
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  running for the presidency.
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  That can only happen in America, whether it's not true anymore, you know, there's a lot
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  of countries where people are having these stories of extraordinary immigrant success.
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  But yeah, no, I've always, you know, I've always been seduced by that idea of the American
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  dream.
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  And I mean, I, you know, as you say, I mean, it does create this sense of possibility.
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  It does create this great energy.
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  It does create this sense of an animating purpose behind it all.
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  Yeah, I love that.
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  I love that about America.
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  I love that about America.
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  There's something about America.
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  There's something about America as an idea then.
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  He not even has a reality.
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  I remember, P.J. O'Rourke was asked this question.
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  He opened one of his books, the great, you know, sort of libertarian satirist.
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  He opened one of his books with the line, right now is the best time to ever have been
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  alive.
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  And America is the best place to be alive, something to that effect.
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  And an interviewer said, that's a bit heberistic, isn't it?
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  This was an English interviewer, you know, and he rattled off all of these statistics
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  about, you know, Americans don't live as long as the people, you know, Americans have
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  higher inequality, you go to me, you know, more deaths and so on.
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  And P.J. thought for a moment and then he said, well, okay, but try changing the sentence
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  and swapping out America for Belgium.
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  Wouldn't everybody laugh just a little if you said today is the greatest time to be alive
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  and Belgium is the greatest place to be alive?
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  There's something about the conceit of America.
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  Yeah.
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  And a lot of the countries which are the best places to live haven't got that conceit,
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  you know, and that's, you know, maybe why they're, what they do so well in the world.
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  Maybe.
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  I mean, some of them are, some of them really are nice places to live, Denmark or it's
• 17:37
  come to.
• 17:38
  Yeah, well, Australia, I mean, I was thought, you know, when I first came to Australia,
• 17:42
  I thought one of the reasons I loved it was because it, it seems to be a bit of a mix
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  of Britain and America with that is taking out the bad bits.
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  So you didn't have the snobbery of Britain, you didn't have the kind of oppressive class
• 17:50
  system.
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  I know there is a class system in Australia and, you know, had many things, I loved about
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  America with that, the kind of crazy things like you can buy automatic guns in supermarkets,
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  you know, and I came to realize, semi-automatic, semi-automatic, and I came to realize afterwards,
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  of course, that, you know, Australia is this wonderful, the malgum of all sorts of cultures
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  from all over the world and added to the kind of great indigenous tradition as well.
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  So it's this wonderful coming together.
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  Yeah, I mean, cultures sometimes need to believe in myths, you know, I kind of, it
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  sustains them, it gets them through difficult times.
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  I think one of the things though that Trump showed, especially in 2016 that, you know,
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  like I said, when he said the American dream was dead, I think that really did resonate,
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  you know, a lot of people just could not see how their kids were going to enjoy the same
• 18:39
  sort of lifestyle, have the same sort of opportunities as they did.
• 18:44
  Well, when you say a lot of people, it was a lot of people in those red counties with
• 18:48
  three cows in them that represented the 20% of the economy that didn't vote for Hillary Clinton.
• 18:53
  That was a big chunk of it, but even, do you know what, I mean, I was, you know, we were
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  living in an affluent part of New York City.
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  We both happened to be living in New York at the same time, we were living each other.
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  We lived a stone stroke from each other, we were probably sort of trying to drink the
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  same coffee from the same Australian barista.
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  This is this is what I was talking about.
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  I was just going to colonize the planet, as you know, and colonize strange bits of America.
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  I mean, I remember running into an Australian barista in South Dakota all places and getting
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  a flat white that was delicious.
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  But what struck me was it was not just those kind of blue collar people who were kind of
• 19:30
  starting to question the American dream.
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  I think, you know, there are a lot of middle class people who were struggling to pay for
• 19:38
  their kids to get a college, and then the kids were going to college and struggling to
• 19:41
  pay their student debt.
• 19:43
  There were a lot of kind of middle class people who didn't have adequate healthcare anymore.
• 19:48
  And it wasn't just the kind of low pay jobs in the middle.
• 19:52
  It was the kind of the well paid in the bottom strut, strut, it was some of the well paid
• 19:58
  jobs in the middle that just didn't exist anymore in the same way that had in the 70s
• 20:01
  and the 80s.
• 20:03
  I thought that was more, not universal, but certainly more widespread, just these sort
• 20:08
  of pockets in the respite.
• 20:09
  Yeah, but I think they would not diagnose the problem in that Trumpian way of saying
• 20:15
  the American dream is dead.
• 20:16
  I think they would say, at least my middle class friends in New York would say, you know,
• 20:22
  the American dream is alive and well, but we have these dysfunctional systems that mostly
• 20:27
  Republicans continue to make ever more dysfunctional and under, under service and underfunded.
• 20:32
  That should be able to make life easier than instead are infuriating to deal with.
• 20:37
  Yeah, look, American dream is dead.
• 20:40
  Yeah, I think for some that phrase really did nail it.
• 20:43
  I think for others, maybe the American dream has been deferred.
• 20:47
  Yeah.
• 20:48
  Well, like for the American dream has become harder to fulfill.
• 20:52
  Yeah, I think there was a kind of a range of kind of American dream kind of problems,
• 20:59
  depending from the death of it to the kind of, it was really hard to, to some people who
• 21:04
  were living it.
• 21:05
  I mean, you know, I was, you know, whenever I was getting depressed about America, I just
• 21:09
  knock on the door of my neighbors because they had this extraordinary story.
• 21:14
  You know, parents, he was Asian American.
• 21:17
  His parents had come from China, him and his wife, she had had a blue collar background.
• 21:21
  They set up a dot com company that, you know, just did fantastically well around the turn
• 21:26
  of the century that had a daughter who was making it as an actress in Hollywood.
• 21:30
  I mean, they were literally the kind of archetypal American dream family.
• 21:34
  So it was happening, but it wasn't happening as much as when I first went to America,
• 21:39
  which was in the mid 80s.
• 21:40
  It was just on the eve of the LA Olympics.
• 21:42
  It was that kind of summertime of American resurgence after Vietnam, a war to go in the
• 21:46
  Iranian hostage crisis.
• 21:48
  And it was that summer where Reagan came up with that ringing line.
• 21:51
  It's morning again in America.
• 21:53
  He won 49 states out of 50 in the election that year, a landslide.
• 21:58
  It's morning in America.
• 21:59
  It was the, the map that Trump thought that he had, the 49 state, nobody gets even plus,
• 22:05
  I mean, the last one to get 40 was George Herbert Walker, but nobody gets landslides
• 22:08
  anymore in America.
• 22:10
  But yeah, I mean, for me, it was kind of okay.
• 22:14
  It's morning again, America.
• 22:15
  We've gone from that to American carnage, you know, it's kind of that.
• 22:18
  Was it, is it true and how much of it is a narrative because, of course, at that
• 22:22
  time being openly racist was much more okay, was actually okay in a way that it's completely
• 22:28
  unacceptable.
• 22:29
  Now being homophobic was fine.
• 22:32
  Game marriage wasn't even a dream.
• 22:34
  Yeah.
• 22:35
  You know, Rodney King riots.
• 22:36
  I'm not going to praise Rodney Reagan.
• 22:38
  I mean, you know, Rodney Reagan literally launched his 1980 campaign with a dog whistle
• 22:43
  to the south.
• 22:44
  He went to this fairground in Mississippi, just down the road from the Mississippi burning
• 22:51
  killing site where these three civil rights workers were killed in the in the 60s.
• 22:55
  And he placed his support for states rights.
• 22:58
  And our state's rights was basically telling the white sat that, you know, you can pretty
• 23:01
  much do what you want on rights, you know, without the federal government sort of overbearingly
• 23:06
  telling you what to do all the time, you know, it was basically a dog whistle.
• 23:10
  And, you know, he demonized welfare queens, I mean, all that kind of stuff.
• 23:14
  I mean, during the AIDS crisis, Reagan was appalling, you know, Reagan had opposed the
• 23:18
  1964 civil rights act, which was the act that actually ended segregation in the south,
• 23:23
  you know, so racially break it.
• 23:24
  There was a sunny side to Reagan, but there was a dark side of Reagan as well.
• 23:27
  It's also worth just remembering that at that time in 1984, like the civil rights act
• 23:32
  was only 20 years ago, right?
• 23:34
  I mean, it was only, so like the 1960s were as recently as the, as 2009 is to us today.
• 23:42
  Yeah, right.
• 23:43
  You know, it's like amazing to think of how recently that was that, you know, man had
• 23:47
  landed on the moon.
• 23:48
  You know, I'm strong landed on the moon in the equivalent of 2009.
• 23:51
  Yeah.
• 23:52
  If you were in today's years and what the civil rights movement did and what the civil rights
• 23:57
  era did.
• 23:58
  And, you know, Josh, you know, this, you know, the political trophy of America, it totally
• 24:01
  upended it.
• 24:02
  I mean, up until that moment, the, the south had been reliably democratic, in fact, solidly
• 24:07
  democratic.
• 24:08
  We used to call it the solid democratic south.
• 24:11
  And then Lina Johnson signs the United States.
• 24:14
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• 24:17
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• 24:19
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• 24:26
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• 24:31
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• 24:39
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