Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "America's Next Civil War" with Stephen Marche

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"America's Next Civil War" with Stephen Marche · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  What an amazing time to be alive, what an amazing time to be watching the news and having
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  conversations about the news and consuming all kinds of bits and pieces and opinions from
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  Heather and Thither.
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  Like a little bower bird pecking around the internet and social media, trying to figure
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  out what's true and what's not, but also what an amazing time to be susceptible and vulnerable
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  to stride and see, to misinformation, to what aboutism, to people trying to distract us
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  from what really matters, jangling keys in front of our face in order to get us to look
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  over here instead of remaining stable and calm and even keeled about our own opinions, our
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  own vision of the truth.
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  Now is a moment to reach across ills, to set aside differences, to have faith in democracy,
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  to have faith in bigger ambitions and bigger things to believe in than just the day to day.
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  The only way we can do that is by having conversations that resonate with all of us, conversations
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  that make sense to all of us, conversations that are difficult, conversations that are important,
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  conversations that are as always a little bit uncomfortable.
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  On today's show, what a racing, fascinating chat with a really interesting guy.
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  This is not as depressing and gloomy and terrifying as you might think it is on the basis of
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  the title, because it is about a book called The Next Civil War, which openly speculates
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  about how the United States could descend into civil war, not just how, but sort of prognosticating
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  that it's very hard to envisage how it doesn't happen.
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  It's written by a Canadian journalist novelist essayist, but we go into interesting areas
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  about just the differences between American democracy and parliamentary democracies and
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  the psyche of Americans about their nation and about how cohesive it is and why separatism
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  might be okay in some countries like Quebec or Scotland and isn't okay for Texas.
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  It's really, this is not just if you're interested in American political division, but if
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  you're interested in how countries hold themselves together from the perspective of smart Canadian
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  and maybe almost sometimes pretends to be smart Australian, talking about a country that
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  neither of them are from.
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  Stephen March, as I mentioned, he's a writer, he's written a half dozen books, he's written
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  opinion pieces and essays for the New Yorker and the New York Times and the Atlantic
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  and Esquire, but yes, his latest book is The Next Civil War, it's terrifying, it's
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  surprising, but this conversation is hopefully even a little fun, enjoy the one and only,
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  Stephen March.
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  Well, I'm going to talk to you just for a moment because you and Andrew Yang on his podcast
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  as well, it's a great thing, stuff.
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  For an American politician, he's unflinching in his ability to look at these things, most
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  of them just are in such denial about the reality, but he is willing to look at it.
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  Yeah, he's fascinating, I wish he'd gotten more traction.
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  Well, I mean, you saw that Paul the New York Times today that I forgot the exact number,
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  but some huge number of Americans are of both parties are aware that they need systematic
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  governmental change.
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  I mean, I was quite hard by that, like I mean, I was like, they are starting to figure
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  out, like the problem is not actually Republican or Democrat, it's actually that the system
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  is so broken that it doesn't really matter who you elect, it always leads to bad outcomes
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  and bad decisions and also, you know, distrust in a sense that the country is not
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  legitimate and its institutions are not legitimate and, you know, what's needed here is
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  like ground up structural reform.
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  So, you know, he to me is a politician who most embodies that and that, I mean, I think
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  that, like if there is a breathing space here where people are not operating just out of
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  fear and loathing, you know, that, I think it could take off, I mean, like it is becoming
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  clear that that's what's needed, I mean, I'm normally not that sympathetic to that kind
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  of jadedness that is being expressed in those polls, you know, the epochs on both your
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  houses and like, oh, it doesn't matter who you vote for because I just feel like so frequently
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  that's used as an excuse to not actually engage with the possible and it allows the
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  perfect to be the enemy of the good and, you know, oh, who cares whether it's Hillary
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  or whether it's Trump, you know, they're all corrupt and, you know, it's kind of wrong.
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  But it's not that, it's that the system is broken.
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  Right, right.
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  I mean, it feels like something, there is something different going on now.
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  How did you come to this, Stephen?
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  How did you come to this topic?
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  Well, I was sent by a Canadian magazine to cover the 2016 inauguration, like the Trump
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  inauguration and it was like insane and, you know, there was this incredible tension on
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  the street and people were freaking out and there was, you know, there was, I was standing
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  on top of a limousine at one point and then limousine is lit on fire and it had a kind
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  of very fall of room vibe, if you know what I mean.
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  And so I was like, okay, well, this is clearly what I need to know now is like how bad
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  is it and like how bad is it going to get?
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  And so I sort of devoted the next four years to, you know, talking to every expert that
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  would talk to me and talking to people in the military about what intervention, you
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  know, military interventions would look like and, and, and just also, you know, going
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  around America a lot to a lot of places that I've never been to like rural Ohio and, you
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  know, Oklahoma and places like that to see how bad things were and, you know, the book
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  is kind of the result of that.
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  So as a, I mean, let's wind up a little bit before the inauguration to the election.
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  I mean, I think most of us, most of our most profound recollections of the shock and
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  trauma of the Trump election was election night rather than the inauguration itself.
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  And yeah, I was in New York.
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  I was still living in New York at the time.
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  And I remember the first podcast that I did after the election was with David Plott's
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  of the slate political gab fans.
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  And it's funny listening now because our main, I mean, we're both traumatized.
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  We're both in shock.
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  We're both kind of buying into, I think Andrew Sullivan wrote a piece saying the Republic
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  repeals itself or something, you know, something about America fundamentally rejecting itself
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  in the, in the election of Trump.
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  And yet most of what I recall being alarmed about was the possibility of international collapse,
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  the breakdown of international institutions, Trump doing something crazy with Russia or
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  North Korea, yeah, the global order being completely disrupted.
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  And he wasn't very either successful or interested in that, per se, maybe he didn't
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  have long enough to do it.
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  And then Biden came in before Russia invaded Ukraine and things have stabilized, touch wood.
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  But were you at the time most exercised by the threat to domestic democracy?
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  Because, you know, the events of January 6th and the subsequent kind of the earthquake
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  to the institutions of America was not on my radar in 2016.
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  Oh, I mean, the extra would be both.
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  You know, I mean, obviously you're Australian, yes, I just lost you, I just lost you for
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  a second.
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  Just repeat that.
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  You're, you're Australian and I'm Canadian.
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  Yeah, exactly.
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  So we both, I mean, I would have been, yeah, we know that like the international order is,
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  you know, these large scale institutions with large buy-in from international community,
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  but it's all backed up by American might, right?
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  Like we, we, we understand that instinctively, right, in a way that I think a lot of Americans
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  don't, right?
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  And so that, that was very much a worry for me.
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  But I remember like when I was at the inauguration, I was, that was some journalists and it was
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  like three in the morning and they were like, you know, come to this party in Georgetown
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  that we're all going to.
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  It's like three in the morning.
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  And we get to, we get to this house and it's, it's, it's one of those guys, he's like
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  a low level bureaucrat from the Department of Agriculture.
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  He's the kind of guy who's responsible for wheat, the price of wheat in 2050.
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  If you know what I mean, one of the, one of those guys who keeps us alive and, yeah,
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  I want.
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  And he, well, just a, just an administrator, just a government administrator and he brought,
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  he had all the presidential portraits with him and he brought his chair from work.
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  And I was like, and I was sort of sitting in that.
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  I was like, well, where did you get all this stuff?
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  And he's like, well, no one came to replace us at the Department of Agriculture, right?
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  And like, and I mean, the thing was the Department of State was like almost a third of it within
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  two years, I think, of the positions were not filled, right?
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  And so you had this, this absence of power, rather than power itself, right?
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  Yeah, right.
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  And I think that, you know, the international community sort of figured out quickly, I was
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  at the Canadian Embassy for the inauguration as well.
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  And where, you know, they have that big, it's the one big thing Canada does.
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  It has this party of the inauguration and all the spies from all the world are there and
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  they throw a big party.
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  And when he said American carnage, like the, you could, you know, that expression, their
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  faces fell.
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  Like that, I literally saw that, like they're, they're, they're jaws dropped to the floor,
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  the whole of these, these international and all these, you know, agents and so on.
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  And, but I think they really started to figure out, like, we're going to need to sustain
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  these things.
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  And I think the other thing is that Americans are so uninterested in foreign policy.
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  That it really, it was less affected than the domestic politics, which, of course, took
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  a very nasty turn almost to the media.
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  It's interesting, Steven, that you say that it was the Department of Agriculture person
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  who hadn't been replaced or who hadn't briefed his, his incoming counterparts that tweaked
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  you to this.
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  Because that's kind of the same anecdote that Michael Lewis says about in his book, The
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  Fifth Risk, where he, he, he, he is that basically the Trump administration came in and didn't
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  do the thing that every other administration has always done, which is send to the people
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  who are going to be in important positions to just meet with the, the outgoing staff
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  to go, all right, well, here's where the toilet is, here's where he make the coffee.
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  Here are the files about, you know, a bulk area out here are the files about Bangladesh.
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  There was none of that, none of that orientation.
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  And Michael Lewis's response to that was to think, oh, holy crap, there were probably a whole
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  bunch of things that are coming down the park that we haven't thought about these risks
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  that aren't even on our radar that are going to get completely missed because there's
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  no one looking after the, the shop in the, that was the scariest thing that I saw in
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  that inauguration.
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  Like Canada, Australia, parliamentary democracy, but frankly, every democracy, every country
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  has a continuous bureaucracy, right?
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  Like they have a, they have a continuous civil service that, you know, ultimately shapes
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  the, the future of the country and government can come in and do certain things, but, you
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  know, this bureaucracy is kind of forever.
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  In America, if you don't, if they're not appointed, they're literally not there.
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  I mean, Canada waited two years for an ambassador from America, right?
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  Two years.
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  We're the largest trading partner, right?
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  Yeah.
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  And so, you know what you were saying like before how we were talking about like, well,
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  these arguments are often like, it doesn't matter, they're all corrupt.
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  It's like, that's not really what I'm talking about here.
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  Like what I'm talking about here is like, if you have a government that can't appoint
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  an ambassador to your largest trading partner for two years and 11 of those months were
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  during the Biden administration, by the way, that's a broken system.
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  Like that's not a functional government, essentially.
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  Right.
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  That's actually a really important thing just to explain to people who might be listening
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  in the States or outside of the States that if you're in the States, you might not realize
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  that there's a whole army of people who run governments in parliamentary democracies
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  who are not elected, who are the brains of the implementation of government policy,
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  who understand where all the switches and dials and knobs are and who put the government's
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  vision into effect and they don't change between administrations.
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  That's the public service.
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  That's right.
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  And you know, in America, that's never going to problem, right?
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  Like Hillary Clinton, when Hillary Clinton, when she started her campaign without a dough
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  two years before, she had a complete list of everyone who was going to fill those roles, right?
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  Like, like she knew down to the level I'm talking about.
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  Like the junior.
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  But she probably had that list from the time she was eight years old.
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  I mean, she was probably riding that in her.
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  Yeah, she did what she was doing.
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  Exactly.
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  And you know, but Trump like literally did not, like if it did not appear on television,
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  he did not care about it, right?
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  And so the FDA, the Department of Agriculture, all these things,
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  I'm well, the Department of State.
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  I mean, you're talking about, you know, one of the largest militaries in human history
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  and its guidance in foreign policy is terminally understaffed, right?
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  Like that's shocking, right?
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  And it led to all kinds of crazy things that I don't think people realized.
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  During COVID, with the Canadian border and a lot of other borders,
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  like the reason airplanes were able to land is that there was no one to contact in the United States.
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  Like I have, you know, I have friends in the civil service in Canada
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  and they would be like, well, we're trying to do this thing,
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  but there's literally no one to talk to.
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  Like that person hasn't been appointed yet.
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  Wow.
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  So, you know, like it actually creates these, yeah, it's like, I mean, it's amazing to think.
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  On that, on that front, Steven, here's an anecdote that you might like,
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  which is when Donald Trump won, as you know, it's customary for all other world leaders
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  to make a congratulatory phone call to, you know, to their allies
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  when there's a new incoming leader.
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  The Australian Prime Minister tried to call Trump to congratulate him
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  and didn't know how.
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  And so, the Australian Prime Minister called Greg Norman.
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  On Greg Norman, the book was mobile phone and said,
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  mate, thank you.
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  I think you've had some, you've had some contact with Donald.
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  Having you and Greg Norman said, yeah, I've got his number in my phone.
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  I'll just text it to you.
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  Greg Norman texted the Australian Prime Minister,
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  Donald Trump's private phone number.
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  And that was how the OZPM got through to Donald Trump.
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  Like, it's a huge surprise, right?
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  It's like, Jesus Christ.
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  But, you know, I mean, I would say, like, from my reading in the book,
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  like, these stories are horrifying slash amusing,
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  or like horror, we have to come up with some word
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  that combines horrifying with hilarious.
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  But, you know, like the structure, Trump is just a symptom.
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  Like, the breakdown of government continues.
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  Like, it's not like Biden got elected, and all of this has stopped.
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  Like, it took 11 months for them to appoint an ambassador
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  because the hyperpartisan ship is so toxic
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  that they can't even do basic functions.
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  And they keep, you know, with the debt limit,
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  they keep threatening to, you know, blow up their,
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  you know, their debt arrangements.
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  I mean, they're playing a very risky game
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  with lack of government.
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  And, you know, it's extraordinary.
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  I mean, I think that's only one part
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  of what I'm talking about in the book.
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  But, yeah, let's expand on this then,
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  because there will be, there will be many listeners who say,
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  yeah, of course, the Trump administration was a shit show.
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  Everybody knew that.
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  We knew that at the time.
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  And whether they support Trump or not, you know,
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  maybe they said they regard that as being one of the liabilities
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  of having a breath of fresh air
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  that was able to sweep out some of the K Street lobbyists
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  and all of the institutional people
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  who they resented being in Washington
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  and all the handshake deals between Wall Street
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  and the establishment.
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  Maybe they think Trump was something different
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  and, yeah, it was chaotic, but whatever.
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  Or maybe they think he was a real threat to democracy,
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  but he's gone.
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  We have a new administration.
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  He might come back,
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  but that'll be four years.
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  The institutions held fundamentally.
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  America didn't die.
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  It won't die.
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  I spoke to Tyler Cowan recently on the podcast.
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  He's, he's very optimistic.
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  He's very bullish.
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  He's like, you know what?
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  People have bet against America a million times in the past.
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  We have a lot going for us.
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  We're incredibly innovative.
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  You know, we will, there will be holes
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  and there will be gaps and there will be foibles
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  and there will be stymied in ways
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  and we will not outweigh through.
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  Why do you disagree?
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  Well, I mean, the United States is a textbook
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  case of a country headed for civil war, right?
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  I mean, people will always say America survived.
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  I tend to think like, yes, you have survived,
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  but you did have a civil war that cost,
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  you know, 3% of your population died in, right?
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  Right.
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  Hang on, you've got, I think you have to elaborate.
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  You have to elaborate on the hand grenade
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  that you just threw that America is a textbook case
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  of a country primed for a civil war.
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  Why?
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  Well, there are, I mean, there are a number of reasons.
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  It's what they would call a complex cascading system.
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  You have on the one hand, the decline of trust
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  and institutions generally, which is part of what we're talking about,
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  but what we've talked about is only a tiny part of it.
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  You also have like the Supreme Court,
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  whose numbers are now below 25% of the feeling of legitimacy.
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  You have a hyper partisanship that is essentially rendered
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  basic functions of government, like appointing diplomats and so on.
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  You know, extremely extremely difficult to do.
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  You have a sense, you know, 33% of Americans of both parties think
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  that violence might be required for if their party loses the next election.
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  You have less than 20% of the country who feels that
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  the electoral system is a fair representation of the will of the people.
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  And so when you have these structures that are where you're in between
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  democracy and autocracy, like autocracies are very stable,
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  democracies are very stable.
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  But when you're in the gray zone where it's unclear which system you're in,
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  that tends to lead to huge spikes in violence.
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  When you combine that with inequality levels
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  that literally America's never seen before, like America was not this unequal
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  in 1776.
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  When you combine it with, you know,
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  fraying environmental disasters that are increasingly
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  felt and which are also tend to be a major contributor to civil war,
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  to it around the world.
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  And you also have the demographic reality of America by 2040 being a
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  majority minority country.
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  You know, everywhere in the world that that happens in India,
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  in Africa, in South America where these insider groups lose power,
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  political violence is almost, it's a correlate.
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  I mean, it's very clearly caused by that or it tends to lead that way anyway.
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  So you have all of these factors that are feeding into each other
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  and they're leading to a perfect storm.
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  I mean, you know, when I wrote this book, like it,
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  and it was before January 6th, it was before a lot of other things.
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  You know, the date that really scared me was 2040
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  because that's when America becomes the majority minority country.
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  By 2040, you know, 30% of the country will control 70% of the Senate.
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  So by that point, the idea that the American democratic system
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  represents the world, the people will be completely vanished.
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  Like, I think it's already mostly dead now, but it really is not,
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  by that point, it will be completely clear to every person on the planet
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  that America really is in a democracy.
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  You know, that, like, that was the date that scared me 2040,
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  but you know, it's accelerating much faster than I thought in the book.
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  And I think you can see that already pretty clearly.
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  You're talking about political violence almost interchangeably with civil war.
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  So let's clarify some things here.
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  Because when I hear civil war, I think Bosnia, I think Rwanda,
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  you know, if I then put it in an American context, okay, I go back to,
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  you know, the Confederates and people fighting across trenches.
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  What is the civil war in the 21st century in a rich Western democracy, like America?
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  I mean, it's very, very hard to tell.
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  And I mean, I don't want to pretend that I know things that I don't know.
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  Right? Like, I mean, that's one thing in the book that I,
• 20:44
  like, I'm very specific about the models that I'm using.
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  And they're, but I mean, you know, in the book, I say that the chances of a civil war
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  about 67 percent, because that's the, you know, coral, that's the large,
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  that's what the experts tend to agree on.
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  But how are you defining a civil war?
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  Like, would the kind of civil unrest during that late-
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  That's the year.
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  A thousand combatants that's the year.
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  Yeah, that's how preo, the peace research institute of Oslo defines it.
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  They define civil strife as 25 combatants that's the year.
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  So America has been over that for quite a while since 2008, basically.
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  But does that mean, sorry, to interrupt.
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  But does that mean that the kind of civil unrest that we saw in the,
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  in the late 1960s when Martin Luther King was shot and Bobby Kennedy was shot and you had riots and so on?
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  I mean, that would kill more than a thousand people a year if that was sustained.
• 21:30
  No, no, no, no, no.
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  The 60s, the 60s that were, were, those riots certainly would not be counted
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  among political violence, like the riots after MLK associated.
• 21:41
  Like the political, even today, like the definition of political violence is very specific.
• 21:46
  Like, for example, the shooting in Buffalo were 12 African-Americans were killed.
• 21:50
  That would not count.
• 21:52
  Like that would count that, even though I mean to me, that is very explicitly political violence.
• 21:57
  That is an ineffective pogrom, right?
• 22:00
  Or even, you know, the shooting in, in Highland Park,
• 22:04
  which also had some political dimension to it.
• 22:07
  But that would not count in any of these tabulations.
• 22:11
  So, you know, that, that, that on itself is a bit of a problem.
• 22:15
  But you know, I think you can get a little caught up in the numbers.
• 22:18
  Like, because I don't, like a thousand combatants a year,
• 22:21
  they're using that for often pretty small countries, right?
• 22:24
  Like America is an enormous country with a huge diversity and a huge geographical variety, right?
• 22:30
  So, I mean, those are the technical definitions of it.
• 22:34
  The important thing here is that trust in institutions is declining and what's taking
• 22:38
  its place is rising political violence.
• 22:40
  And those numbers are only going up.
• 22:42
  So, if you're asking me what it looks like, like, it's not,
• 22:48
  it's certainly not the first civil war.
• 22:50
  It's not like, you know, battles, lines over state lines or something like that.
• 22:54
  Like, it's not Battle of Bull Run or Harper's Ferry or anything like that.
• 22:58
  It's insurgency and counterinsurgency and the attempt to control terrorism
• 23:05
  and the attempt to control insurgency, which always leads historically to more insurgency, right?
• 23:12
  So, I mean, the worst case scenario would be something like Syria
• 23:16
  and the better case scenario would be something like Northern Ireland, right?
• 23:21
  But those are just to give you a sense of, like,
• 23:23
  I don't really mean that in terms of the scale of the violence when it comes to Syria.
• 23:27
  I'm just, I'm merely saying like insurgencies that splinter very quickly,
• 23:32
  that take on lives of their own very quickly and which are incredibly chaotic.
• 23:36
  Like, the silence is not between two sides.
• 23:39
  The struggle is between order and chaos.
• 23:41
  Right. That makes a lot more sense.
• 23:43
  And Northern Ireland is a good example during the troubles,
• 23:46
  where you might have something like an American Sinn Fein,
• 23:49
  which is committed to, yeah, committed to...
• 23:53
  It's certainly Northern Ireland that never got anywhere near a thousand combatants deaths a year.
• 23:57
  Like, never even close, right?
• 23:59
  Like, it dipped over the line of civil strife.
• 24:02
  So, I mean, if you look at political murders in the United States,
• 24:06
  they're much more sizable than...
• 24:08
  You know, people don't...
• 24:10
  Like, they're much more sizable than the numbers suggest,
• 24:12
  exactly because these things, like the mass shooting in Buffalo don't count,
• 24:16
  right? Like they don't count in the government statistics.
• 24:19
  So, you know, like, there are...
• 24:23
  I'm very specific in the book about the technical definitions,
• 24:26
  but I'm not sure how relevant they are here.
• 24:29
  The point is widespread political violence, which is horrific enough, right?
• 24:33
  Like, and legitimate insurgencies.
• 24:37
  You know, I mean, what we saw yesterday in the January 6th hearings,
• 24:40
  like, that is an insurgency, right?
• 24:43
  Like, that's what...
• 24:44
  Like, when you hear about insurgencies in other countries,
• 24:46
  like, I mean, that's what they're talking about.
• 24:48
  Yeah, yeah.
• 24:49
  So, you know, I mean, there are definitional points that I think really are important,
• 24:55
  but I think it's also important to keep, you know,
• 24:58
  the bigger picture in play here.
• 25:00
  Totally. I mean, I just think that in order to have a conversation,
• 25:03
  that people don't find ridiculous or scam-
• 25:05
  I'm wondering, it's helpful for them to have a picture in their head of what we're talking about,
• 25:08
  because if they're thinking about civil war era, civil war stuff,
• 25:12
  they might go, well, that's not going to happen.
• 25:13
  But it's what you're talking about is just living with a constant background,
• 25:19
  rate of violence, disorder,
• 25:22
  anarchy, you know, um, right wing militia groups,
• 25:26
  and who knows, um, like, woke militia groups, I don't even know,
• 25:30
  kind of, you know, blowing up cafes occasionally,
• 25:32
  and trying to storm state capitals in order to change governments,
• 25:36
  and completely mistrusting electoral counts,
• 25:38
  and, you know, trying to assassinate state officials who are counting,
• 25:43
  who are tabulating votes, and things like that.
• 25:44
  Then that becomes...
• 25:45
  And that's already their present reality, right?
• 25:48
  I mean, that's already happening.
• 25:50
  That's what I'm talking about in this book.
• 25:52
  I'm not talking about, like,
• 25:53
  I'm talking about insurgent struggle.
• 25:56
  Like, that's what I mean by the civil war.
• 25:57
  Like, yeah, I mean, it's not, um,
• 26:00
  it's not pitch battles, but on the other hand,
• 26:02
  it's still scary enough, you know what I mean?
• 26:05
  Like, it's not like, I don't feel like I need to be, um,
• 26:09
  scarier than the reality at all.
• 26:11
  Like, that was the one thing I learned doing this book.
• 26:13
  Like, there's no need to exaggerate at all, right?
• 26:17
  To, like, if you go and talk to these people,
• 26:20
  and you go, like, you go and talk to the far-right people,
• 26:23
  and you get with them, and you write down what they tell you,
• 26:27
  and you show what they do, it's all scary enough.
• 26:29
  Like, there's absolutely no need to, you know, juice up the reality,
• 26:36
  because the reality is really scary.
• 26:38
  Stephen, there can be maybe a cliche,
• 26:41
  especially outside of America,
• 26:43
  that the people who are behind January 6th,
• 26:46
  they're all wearing viking horns, and they're tinpot crazies,
• 26:50
  and they're all QAnon, and they think that Bill Gates
• 26:52
  is injecting us with 5G chips,
• 26:55
  and the vaccines are a hoax, and the pandemic was planned.
• 26:59
  And we can sort of write them off as, well,
• 27:01
  we've always had loonies around.
• 27:02
  But, I mean, one of the things that you talk about in the book
• 27:05
  is there's actually an entire cohort of people
• 27:08
  who are quite reasonable and well-educated,
• 27:10
  and have pretty clear plans about what this would look like.
• 27:15
  Who are they?
• 27:16
  Oh, yeah.
• 27:16
  I mean, if I never have, like, the scary people here
• 27:20
  are not the people wearing viking helmets, right?
• 27:24
  Like, before 2008, and 2008 was really the turning point,
• 27:28
  which we could probably talk about later,
• 27:30
  like, there were obviously these lunatics, right?
• 27:33
  Like, the Texas separatist movement before 2008 was guys out
• 27:37
  in the middle of the wilderness with too many guns
• 27:41
  who would start gun fights with the police,
• 27:43
  and then I'll get killed, right?
• 27:45
  Like, that's who they were.
• 27:47
  Now, they're a major force in the Texas Republican Party,
• 27:51
  and have actually managed to get it on the ballot, right?
• 27:54
  This is a different order of business.
• 27:57
  Like, there certainly are, like, one of the scariest things to me
• 28:00
  was like, when you're talking to these Nazis,
• 28:02
  you have law degrees, and you ask them questions like,
• 28:07
  okay, so how are you gonna build this white ethno state in Oregon?
• 28:12
  And they say, oh, well, we're modular constitution
• 28:16
  on Japan's and Israel's, and, you know, if you look at these,
• 28:19
  there's these legal precedence to do here,
• 28:21
  and we get, they actually have a system, right?
• 28:23
  It's not a guy with born to lose tattooed on his forehead,
• 28:26
  who, you know, is probably robbing liquor stores, right?
• 28:31
  Like, it's a different order of business,
• 28:35
  and one that needs to be taken with maximum seriousness.
• 28:38
  I mean, I remember when I interviewed Michael German,
• 28:41
  who was an FBI agent who worked under cover with white power
• 28:44
  for a long time, he said, you know,
• 28:47
  when they found out that he didn't have tattoos,
• 28:51
  like, serious people took him from his little gang
• 28:53
  of liquor Nazis, and said, like,
• 28:55
  you're not gonna talk to any of those people ever again.
• 28:58
  We're gonna run you on school boards,
• 29:00
  and we're gonna get you in positions of power.
• 29:03
  And then when you look at the oath keeper's list
• 29:05
  that got leaked, you know, the 40,000 names,
• 29:09
  there's a ton of them who are in police departments,
• 29:11
  who are on school boards, who are, you know,
• 29:14
  low level state senators even.
• 29:17
  Like, they have infiltrated these institutions very effectively.
• 29:22
  And, and that's why I think like,
• 29:25
  it's going to actually be very hard
• 29:27
  for the Department of Justice to deal with them.
• 29:30
  Because they, like, you know, Michael German said to me,
• 29:32
  like, you cannot, one of the things you can't do
• 29:35
  with domestic terrorism in the United States
• 29:37
  is do a watch list.
• 29:38
  Which is the single most effective way
• 29:40
  of fighting terrorism, right, of any time, right,
• 29:43
  is that you send to the police departments,
• 29:45
  the list of people to watch out for.
• 29:47
  And they can't do that in America,
• 29:48
  because if you send it to these police forces,
• 29:50
  they just tell their friends who are on the list
• 29:53
  and they, and they disappear, right?
• 29:55
  So that's a lot more troubling than,
• 29:57
  you know, the, the freaks of the past, right?
• 30:00
  So, so how does this,
• 30:02
  you can tell that to Tyler Cowell, come on.
• 30:03
  Yeah.
• 30:04
  So you know what I mean?
• 30:06
  Like, you know, so how does this happen?
• 30:07
  How does someone along through some violent,
• 30:10
  but it's also had some periods of extreme violence?
• 30:12
  Let me, let me, let me channel,
• 30:14
  let me channel the, the, the Tyler perspective then,
• 30:16
  which would be, yeah, so you've got all these cooks, right?
• 30:20
  You've got all these people who believe in the violent
• 30:23
  overthrow of a system that they perceive as going too far,
• 30:27
  or at least the, or at least being subversive towards
• 30:30
  that system, even if they're not deploying violence
• 30:32
  right now.
• 30:33
  And let's say they all, they all gang up
• 30:36
  and they get their Oregon, they want their Oregon
• 30:38
  ethno state and they've got their ethno nationalist
• 30:41
  constitution, which is only for white people
• 30:43
  and they want to clear that they are now a state.
• 30:47
  Well, doesn't the, doesn't the national government
• 30:50
  in Washington DC just go, no, you're not,
• 30:53
  and that's not happening?
• 30:54
  And as long as the Supreme Court and the military
• 30:57
  and the administration hold,
• 30:59
  doesn't that just have the power to quash anything?
• 31:02
  Did you hear what you just said?
• 31:05
  Because what you just said is if the Supreme Court
• 31:07
  and the military and the presidency hold.
• 31:10
  So that's a lot, in the United States of now, of 2022,
• 31:16
  that's a lot to ask, right?
• 31:18
  I mean, like, what happens when, like Senator Josh Hawley
• 31:22
  raises his fist in support of people who then he has
• 31:25
  to be hidden from, who are sacking the institution,
• 31:28
  that he, that the vandals who are about to sack
• 31:30
  the institution that he belongs to, he raises his fist
• 31:33
  in support of them.
• 31:35
  So, you know, yet, if we were in a position
• 31:38
  where the government and the military and the Supreme Court
• 31:41
  were all filled with people who understood inherently
• 31:44
  the threat of white terrorism and white domestic,
• 31:47
  you know, domestic terrorism as a reality,
• 31:50
  I might agree with you.
• 31:51
  I mean, that is the subject of the first chapter,
• 31:54
  like the military's plans for what to do with a county.
• 31:58
  I mean, forget a state, but like if a county
• 32:01
  decided that they were no longer part of the United States
• 32:03
  and decided on the doctrine of interposition,
• 32:06
  how they would interact, incredibly complicated,
• 32:08
  very difficult, that in a way is a best case scenario.
• 32:13
  Because it's entirely possible that you have a president
• 32:16
  who has a lot of sympathies with the white power movement.
• 32:19
  And you have a Supreme Court that's, you know,
• 32:22
  definitely in favor of supporting right wing causes generally.
• 32:25
  So if the Republican Party supports that,
• 32:27
  it's entirely possible that they would.
• 32:30
  So, you know, you're hoping that these institutions
• 32:34
  are there to prevent this from happening,
• 32:36
  but they're already going.
• 32:38
  They're not, I don't think they're in any way of work.
• 32:41
  I would not have any faith in them
• 32:44
  to resist such a movement at all.
• 32:48
  Right.
• 32:49
  So let's suppose you've got President Donald Trump Jr.
• 32:51
  or President Marjorie Taylor Greene
• 32:52
  or President Tucker Carlson,
• 32:54
  who are sympathetic towards whatever this civil unrest
• 32:58
  or insurgency is against, you know,
• 33:01
  phony claims of ballots stuffed with fake,
• 33:04
  diebold machine, you know, ballots
• 33:08
  that have been manufactured by China or Iran or something.
• 33:11
  And there's all this conspiracy theorizing
• 33:14
  and it's being whipped up.
• 33:15
  You talk about some of the flashpoints
• 33:17
  where this could actually spill over.
• 33:19
  One that I thought was interesting is infrastructure
• 33:21
  is that America has all this crumbling infrastructure,
• 33:24
  these bridges, the things that need repairing.
• 33:25
  And there are a lot of locals who disagree
• 33:28
  with the role that the federal government might play
• 33:30
  in rebuilding infrastructure.
• 33:32
  I hadn't thought about that as a flashpoint.
• 33:33
  How would that play out?
• 33:35
  Well, I mean, you know, to,
• 33:38
  whenever you have a federal government of any kind,
• 33:41
  Australian, Canadian, American involved in any project,
• 33:46
  it of course is bureaucratic and complicated
• 33:50
  and involves people being upset.
• 33:52
  And you know, like to build a bridge requires
• 33:55
  a lot of annoying paperwork and a lot of annoying system.
• 33:58
  And you know, you have to sort of have faith
• 34:01
  in the system to allow that to happen.
• 34:02
  That's completely broken right now in the United States.
• 34:06
  I mean, you just have large groups of people.
• 34:10
  I mean, I don't have a specific number,
• 34:11
  but certainly as many as 30% of the United States
• 34:15
  who have such distrust in the government
• 34:18
  that they really hate everything that it does at all.
• 34:21
  I mean, the contradiction that the American,
• 34:23
  the United States is entering right now
• 34:24
  is that it's, it has anti-government patriots,
• 34:27
  which to me is the, you know,
• 34:30
  trying to get wrap your head around the heart
• 34:33
  right in the United States is incredibly hard.
• 34:35
  But I think one thing that they do all share in common
• 34:39
  is that they consider their hatred of government
• 34:42
  to be a sign of patriotism.
• 34:44
  They love their country by hating the government, right?
• 34:48
  And, you know, so you have these group of people
• 34:51
  who love their country by hating the government.
• 34:54
  And the government comes in and says,
• 34:55
  well, we need an environmental production agency report
• 34:58
  on the viability of repairing this bridge.
• 35:00
  I mean, it's already happened in their Arizona
• 35:02
  where you have, it in several cases
• 35:05
  where sheriffs, local county sheriffs
• 35:08
  have essentially defied federal authorities
• 35:12
  on these plans.
• 35:14
  Also, you know, that's not a strictly right wing phenomenon.
• 35:18
  Like in California, they made Jeff,
• 35:22
  Jeff sessions take them to court to argue nullification
• 35:25
  for their status as refugees cities for immigrants, right?
• 35:29
  Like they were, they were essentially
• 35:32
  nullifying federal government orders when they did that.
• 35:35
  So, you know, you have, you have these contests of power
• 35:38
  where people are almost always going to side
• 35:40
  with their local government, right?
• 35:42
  And so, you know, it's not, it's not hard to imagine
• 35:46
  which is what I do in the book.
• 35:48
  Somebody, you know, a sheriff essentially resisting
• 35:51
  the government authority and then that becoming a flashpoint.
• 35:53
  That's how I imagined it.
• 35:56
  In the end, it actually ended up happening
• 35:58
  in Canada first, like, you know, with the same convoy
• 36:01
  and the COVID resistance, which is much the same thing.
• 36:06
  Right, right.
• 36:07
  You have government mandates from, you know,
• 36:09
  academics in Washington and people just don't want to listen,
• 36:13
  right? They just won't have anything to do with it.
• 36:16
  So then, so flesh this out for us, even the,
• 36:18
  so the picture is, you know, the federal government
• 36:20
  is coming in to shut down a crumbling bridge
• 36:23
  and rebuild a new one, but the locals like the bridge
• 36:25
  because it's still working okay.
• 36:27
  So they set up their local,
• 36:28
  their local sheriff and police department
• 36:30
  and maybe on the side of the militia
• 36:32
  that's holding, that holds the bridge.
• 36:34
  And then the feds don't know quite what to do
• 36:36
  and they've got orders to do one thing
• 36:37
  and the locals want another thing.
• 36:40
  And that doesn't, I mean, my instinct is still,
• 36:43
  perhaps naively that, oh, well, that just gets de-escalated
• 36:46
  because professional people will come in
• 36:48
  and they will figure out how to de-escalate.
• 36:50
  They will either stop out at the bridge.
• 36:54
  You've been, you've been your Australian heart
• 36:56
  is showing there, right?
• 36:58
  I mean, like, like, it's like, yeah, I don't de-escalate.
• 37:00
  Serious people come in there also, they'll all work it out.
• 37:03
  I mean, the grindups will arrive.
• 37:04
  The grindups will always arrive.
• 37:05
  Yeah, exactly.
• 37:06
  We're talking about the United States in 2022, right?
• 37:10
  Things don't de-escalate.
• 37:11
  Like, like, America's in a position
• 37:14
  where everything becomes political so rapidly
• 37:18
  that it's absurd, right?
• 37:20
  Like, I mean, you can buy LGBTQ-positive cookies
• 37:25
  at Oreos, you know, in the grocery store
• 37:28
  and you can buy homophobic chicken at Chick-fil-A.
• 37:31
  Right?
• 37:32
  Like, you know, literally, five times.
• 37:34
  I want bones.
• 37:35
  I don't want to just have a big one.
• 37:37
  I'm a father.
• 37:38
  That would actually be a pretty tasty meal.
• 37:40
  A little Chick-fil-A with a little rainbow,
• 37:43
  remote stuffing over here.
• 37:45
  That'd be not a bad lunch.
• 37:48
  But my point is here, like, the idea that the grownups
• 37:53
  are going to come in and solve this thing, like, that's gone.
• 37:56
  Like, the grownups are gone.
• 37:57
  The grownups are, the grownups are that guy I was with
• 38:00
  in Washington, you know, where he's like,
• 38:04
  taking the presidential pictures off the wall
• 38:07
  because nobody wants to hear what he has to say.
• 38:09
  Right.
• 38:10
  That's what I mean is minding the shop.
• 38:12
  So, you know, like, I too would love to believe
• 38:17
  that it would de-escalate it
• 38:18
  and serious people would be grownups about it.
• 38:20
  But when you look at local politics in the United States,
• 38:24
  and, you know, it's not even in these,
• 38:27
  for, like, even in things like upstate New York,
• 38:30
  the tension in American administrative questions
• 38:35
  just gets so intense, so quickly, right?
• 38:38
  Like, it threatens to blow up on the local level all the time.
• 38:42
  And, you know, like, in New Hampshire
• 38:45
  around school funding, right?
• 38:47
  There's just so many examples of this
• 38:49
  where it's like radical politics,
• 38:51
  suddenly takes this whole lot of place.
• 38:53
  What's the New Hampshire example?
• 38:54
  Just, I have a lot of connections with this,
• 38:57
  like my Indian laws are in New Hampshire.
• 38:59
  There was a new, the big story in the New York Times
• 39:00
  about a group of, what do they call,
• 39:04
  there's a special group, you know,
• 39:06
  I lose track of these far-right newsrooms.
• 39:08
  This one is where they just want no education funding.
• 39:13
  And they came over and took over a town of like 800
• 39:16
  basically cut the education budget in half,
• 39:19
  which essentially destroyed public education in this town.
• 39:22
  And there was a huge fight about it
• 39:24
  and all the locals came out and resisted this group.
• 39:27
  Which was, it's a happy story in the end.
• 39:29
  But, you know, I talked to a friend.
• 39:30
  Live free or die, baby, that's the state motto.
• 39:32
  Well, even for, but it was interlopers.
• 39:35
  It was somebody from Arizona, you know,
• 39:36
  from some southern state who come up to New Hampshire,
• 39:40
  I'd have a more kind of, like,
• 39:42
  live free or die as a good motto,
• 39:43
  but there's also like, we would like our children
• 39:45
  to be educated.
• 39:46
  Yeah, right.
• 39:47
  Live free or die, you know what I mean?
• 39:48
  Live free or die can be a good motto
• 39:50
  if it's taken in the right context.
• 39:51
  It's a bit weird for me whenever I'm there
• 39:53
  to see it emblazoned on the side of it.
• 39:55
  I know.
• 39:56
  Ah, because it seems like a threat, it's like,
• 39:57
  if you don't live free, we're gonna fucking shoot you
• 39:59
  in the face.
• 40:00
  What if I don't want to live free the way you want me
• 40:02
  to live free?
• 40:03
  How about just live free?
• 40:04
  Like, why don't you just change it to just live free?
• 40:06
  You can just all agree with that.
• 40:08
  Oh, how about live, how about live with the appropriate,
• 40:11
  you know, a level of freedom that is conducive
• 40:14
  to your flourishing?
• 40:15
  That would be the more Canadian or Australian.
• 40:17
  Oh, no, the Canadian one would be live reasonably.
• 40:19
  Yeah, live reasonably.
• 40:20
  Yeah, that's right.
• 40:21
  You know, yeah.
• 40:22
  I mean, that comes with its own downsides though.
• 40:25
  You know, the line about the revolutionary protest
• 40:28
  much in the UK where the Brits say,
• 40:31
  what do we want, slow and incremental change?
• 40:33
  When do we want it as soon as it's reasonable for everybody?
• 40:36
  Yeah.
• 40:37
  Yeah.
• 40:38
  Well, Canada, like the motto of Canada
• 40:40
  is not life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
• 40:43
  It's peace, ordering, and good government, right?
• 40:46
  Yeah.
• 40:47
  And like, I mean, I think people who are descended
• 40:50
  from parliamentary democracy as opposed
• 40:51
  to Republican democracy, it's obviously a very different,
• 40:55
  I mean, let's not say it, but it's a better system.
• 40:58
  Right?
• 40:59
  Well, the Americans say it as well.
• 41:02
  There's this whole episode of the West Wing
• 41:04
  where there's this fledgling democracy abroad
• 41:07
  that comes to the White House saying,
• 41:08
  we want your American system for us.
• 41:10
  And all the characters in the White House are like, no, no, no, no.
• 41:13
  What we always tell new countries is don't use our system.
• 41:16
  It's not a good one.
• 41:17
  There's too much power in the executive.
• 41:18
  It doesn't work properly.
• 41:20
  You have a parliament's democracy, they're much more stable.
• 41:22
  Right, yeah.
• 41:23
  Well, yeah, I mean, it was kind of offensive to me
• 41:27
  intellectually to read that the most stable,
• 41:29
  most prosperous countries in the world
• 41:31
  are all constitutional monarchies.
• 41:32
  I mean, it's upsetting.
• 41:34
  Like, it's not the kind of thing I want to particularly think
• 41:37
  that you need this ridiculous queen of change.
• 41:39
  Yeah, I mean, it's also absurd, but like, you know, nonetheless,
• 41:44
  that's, I mean, that tends to be how these things work.
• 41:47
  I mean, you know, not that I'm opposed to Republicanism,
• 41:50
  like the American system to be serious
• 41:52
  isn't, it has worked for a long time,
• 41:55
  but I mean, part of the major problem here
• 41:58
  is that they have a constitution
• 41:59
  that's nearly 250 years old.
• 42:01
  And, you know, the extraordinary thing
• 42:03
  about writing this book, I mean, everywhere I went
• 42:07
  without exception, they worship the Constitution, right?
• 42:10
  Like, you're going to talk to a Texas separatist
• 42:13
  and like, I come from a country with a really active
• 42:16
  separatist movement, right?
• 42:17
  That's nearly ended my country twice, right?
• 42:20
  And, you know, they don't in my lifetime, right?
• 42:23
  Like, you're talking about Quebec, Quebec seceding.
• 42:25
  Yeah, Quebec separatists don't say,
• 42:28
  well, we want to separate,
• 42:30
  but we want to stay true to the British North American act
• 42:32
  of 1867.
• 42:34
  Like, that's, but you talk to Texas separatists
• 42:37
  and they absolutely say we're absolutely
• 42:39
  within our constitutional right.
• 42:40
  Same for California separatists.
• 42:42
  Same for, same for oath keepers.
• 42:44
  I mean, oath keepers, that's an oath to the Constitution,
• 42:46
  right?
• 42:47
  And the same for all these far right movements.
• 42:49
  I mean, only the most extreme,
• 42:52
  the accelerationists, the Nazis,
• 42:55
  really don't believe in the Constitution.
• 42:56
  And at the same time, you know, New York times editors
• 43:01
  all worship the Constitution.
• 43:03
  It's, so I think it's, it affects
• 43:05
  become this religious document.
• 43:07
  It's like, it's like biblical commentators at this point
• 43:10
  where it's just actually divorced from reality.
• 43:13
  I mean, not that it was, wasn't a work of great genius, right?
• 43:17
  I mean, obviously it was one of the most important
• 43:19
  documents ever written by people,
• 43:20
  but it's two and a 50 years old
• 43:23
  and so much of what it says just does not apply
• 43:26
  to the realities of 21st century America.
• 43:30
  I mean, ultimately what they need here
• 43:32
  is a second republic, right?
• 43:34
  Like ultimately, you know, this, this constitution is,
• 43:38
  I mean, that's why I was hearted
• 43:39
  by what I read in the New York Times
• 43:41
  about people understanding that structural change
• 43:43
  is necessary because it's like, it's no, no one,
• 43:47
  no country could survive having this system.
• 43:49
  Like this system is just fundamentally broken
• 43:51
  from the, from the get go.
• 43:53
  Like it's, I mean, I don't think,
• 43:54
  but do you need a new constitution
• 43:56
  and the second republic or do you need to just take away the,
• 43:59
  I mean, some of the more egregious,
• 44:00
  some of the most egregiously undemocratic things,
• 44:03
  the things that were invented recently,
• 44:04
  like the filibuster being required.
• 44:06
  Why do you need a supermajority to get anything passed?
• 44:08
  There are no other democracies
• 44:09
  that require a supermajority for everything.
• 44:11
  Just don't have a filibuster, wouldn't that solve half of it?
• 44:14
  Well, I mean, I think the larger point here is that like,
• 44:18
  you know, Jefferson said a constitution
• 44:20
  only last 19 years, right?
• 44:22
  He said after that, it's a contract with the dead.
• 44:24
  I mean, when was the last constitutional amendment?
• 44:26
  I think it was 93.
• 44:28
  It was a very negligible one around,
• 44:31
  certain around the changes to the nuclear code.
• 44:35
  Like they've been able to do that,
• 44:37
  but like meaningful constitutional change,
• 44:39
  which is how a country changes direction, right?
• 44:42
  Like how it fundamentally changes its direction as a nation
• 44:46
  is inconceivable at this point.
• 44:47
  I mean, sometimes a constitutional change
• 44:50
  is the way that a country changes,
• 44:51
  but in the case of many parliamentary democracies,
• 44:53
  I mean, I think you're putting your finger on something
• 44:55
  with regard to the religiosity of the attitude towards
• 44:58
  the constitution as this kind of document handed down
• 45:01
  by Moses along with the tablets.
• 45:03
  That there's a kind, that temperamentally,
• 45:05
  there's just a kind of pragmatism in other countries
• 45:08
  that sort of regardless of what the founding document says,
• 45:12
  we kind of know that we all have to model through
• 45:14
  in the 21st century.
• 45:15
  So courts and governments just kind of figure out
• 45:18
  what the best thing is that has the largest sort of buy-in
• 45:23
  from the demos and you model through.
• 45:25
  Whereas that doesn't seem to be the,
• 45:28
  yeah, that's a very British attitude towards this.
• 45:30
  And we're going to hear it in that institution.
• 45:32
  No, that's right.
• 45:32
  And I mean, look, I don't know what the Canadian constitution says,
• 45:35
  but the Australian one.
• 45:36
  1982.
• 45:37
  I mean, it was written in 1982, right?
• 45:40
  Wow, okay.
• 45:40
  Well, ours was from 1901, but it doesn't say much.
• 45:43
  I mean, there's no bill of rights.
• 45:44
  There's most of our, most of what the freedoms that we enjoy
• 45:47
  come from common law.
• 45:48
  And that's true in New Zealand.
• 45:49
  And so I think that there's, I'm not sure,
• 45:54
  I think you're setting the bar very high to require
• 45:57
  that Americans abandon their field to the founding document
• 46:02
  and also are willing to create a new one,
• 46:04
  especially given the risks of the far right kind of coming
• 46:08
  to occupy the writing of that new constitution.
• 46:11
  I mean, who's to say that it's going to be the good guys
• 46:14
  creating the amendments that you want to see?
• 46:16
  I mean, isn't the better thing to incrementally try to turn
• 46:20
  the volume down on the culture war and find the smoothest
• 46:25
  and least revolutionary path out of the mess?
• 46:28
  Well, I mean, that would be wonderful,
• 46:31
  but like, obviously that's correct.
• 46:33
  Like, I mean, what you're saying there is like,
• 46:35
  I mean, but that's like me saying,
• 46:37
  I want to, I want to be able to dump a basketball.
• 46:40
  But like, you're right.
• 46:43
  Like, I would love to be able to dump a basketball,
• 46:45
  but I'm probably never going to be able to do that.
• 46:47
  Right.
• 46:48
  But I mean, you're probably never going to be able to change
• 46:50
  the constitution of the United States
• 46:51
  in a way that's acceptable to all parties, either.
• 46:54
  You know, that's true.
• 46:55
  But I think when you look at the other options here,
• 46:58
  which are violence and secession,
• 47:01
  you know, because you're operating,
• 47:03
  like these Australian common law practices,
• 47:06
  New Zealand common law practices,
• 47:07
  those are in countries with that are, first of all,
• 47:10
  much smaller, much less divided,
• 47:12
  much more homogenous, right?
• 47:14
  In all ways.
• 47:16
  I don't like, and I've never bought that.
• 47:18
  I find that as an excuse that Americans use,
• 47:20
  always so big and chaotic we can't come together.
• 47:23
  Australia is more multi-ethnic than America.
• 47:25
  Our cities are more multicultural than the average city.
• 47:28
  New York is 59 percent weight.
• 47:30
  Australia is more weight than that.
• 47:32
  It's less weight than that.
• 47:33
  I mean, Canada will be a big problem.
• 47:35
  Well, it depends how you know.
• 47:37
  It depends how you know.
• 47:39
  Look, half the population of Australia
• 47:41
  has arrived since the Second World War.
• 47:42
  So I mean, if you're talking purely about skin color,
• 47:45
  then maybe we can look at the edges,
• 47:47
  but it is as a nation of migrants,
• 47:50
  we actually are the nation of migrants
• 47:51
  much more than the United States.
• 47:53
  And we have had to, we'd have had to,
• 47:55
  and they're not all English, you know,
• 47:57
  we have had to create a buy-in
• 47:59
  from large heterogenous populations.
• 48:03
  And so, yeah, 25 million people
• 48:06
  is not 300 and whatever million people,
• 48:08
  but it's big enough that you could make excuses
• 48:11
  for why you can't possibly stitch this many people together.
• 48:14
  I mean, if Australia was fall,
• 48:17
  if Australia was enduring the kind of cultural
• 48:20
  and political schisms that America is,
• 48:22
  you can imagine a New Zealander
• 48:23
  in a population of three and a half or four million
• 48:25
  or whatever it is, looking across the ditch
• 48:28
  and saying, well, of course,
• 48:29
  you can't manage Australia.
• 48:30
  It's just too big.
• 48:31
  You can't do, you know,
• 48:32
  you can't bring 25 million people together.
• 48:33
  I just think you're always going to be able
• 48:35
  to fall back on that.
• 48:36
  And there are, you know.
• 48:37
  I think what I'm talking about more
• 48:38
  is like North versus South,
• 48:40
  different political realities.
• 48:42
  I mean, it's not just like racial diversity
• 48:47
  or anything like that, although that is hugely important,
• 48:49
  but you're dealing with countries
• 48:51
  that ultimately have really different frames of reverence.
• 48:53
  I mean, in the United States right now,
• 48:55
  there are countries with two totally separate realities, right?
• 48:59
  Like in terms of what information gets to them
• 49:01
  in terms of what they believe
• 49:03
  to be the facts of the universe,
• 49:07
  there are at least two totally different countries.
• 49:09
  Yes.
• 49:10
  And I think also it's worth remembering
• 49:11
  that what makes America great,
• 49:14
  like why we love it, why I love it,
• 49:16
  is it's huge openness, right?
• 49:18
  It's openness to new things,
• 49:20
  it's openness to, you know,
• 49:21
  you can really have your own facts in the United States.
• 49:24
  That's why it produces new religions all the time,
• 49:27
  Mormonism, et cetera,
• 49:29
  and new art forms all the time,
• 49:31
  whereas Canada and Australia don't, right?
• 49:33
  Like, you know, and like,
• 49:36
  that's also like,
• 49:37
  what's so horrible about this tragic really
• 49:41
  is that what makes America beautiful,
• 49:43
  that openness, that ability to think your own thoughts to,
• 49:47
  that's what's eating it up, right?
• 49:49
  Like that's what's eating,
• 49:49
  that's what's eating it up from the inside
• 49:51
  is that there's no common framework.
• 49:54
  And you know, the amazing thing is,
• 49:55
  have you ever read Washington's farewell address?
• 49:58
  No, it's an amazing document.
• 50:01
  It's one of those, at a time,
• 50:04
  it was read at every school person,
• 50:09
  schoolboy and schoolgirl would have had to memorize it.
• 50:11
  Like there was a very important document
• 50:13
  in American life for a long time
• 50:15
  before the Second World War,
• 50:16
  and then it sort of fell off after that,
• 50:18
  but it's his warning about how the Republic will be lost.
• 50:21
  And if you read it, I mean, he is,
• 50:24
  it's incredible,
• 50:25
  it's a description of right now.
• 50:26
  Like it is, he foresaw exactly
• 50:29
  how the Republic would fall.
• 50:31
  Like he warned against partisanship by geography and party, right?
• 50:37
  And like those are the things that are shredding America
• 50:41
  at the most basic level, right?
• 50:43
  This fact that neither, people on either side
• 50:48
  just hate each other so much
• 50:49
  that they can't come to any kind of agreement
• 50:51
  for the good of the country.
• 50:52
  Yeah, I wanna get to that.
• 50:53
  I wanna get to negative partisanship
• 50:55
  and like the culture was.
• 50:56
  I would just also put it on,
• 50:57
  I think it's really interesting what you say
• 50:59
  about the problem in America,
• 51:02
  not if it's not its size,
• 51:04
  then it's its diversity.
• 51:06
  And I think we sometimes misdiagnose this
• 51:08
  as ethnic diversity,
• 51:09
  or it can sometimes bleed into an almost white nationalist
• 51:13
  kind of sounding thing
• 51:14
  where we say the problem with America is there are just,
• 51:16
  like I remember Charlton Heston at the end of bowling
• 51:19
  for Columbine saying, you know,
• 51:22
  the problem with guns in America
• 51:24
  is that basically there are lots of black people.
• 51:26
  Like, you know what I mean,
• 51:27
  other countries don't have the gun problem
• 51:28
  because they don't have as many ethnic minorities
• 51:31
  or shooting each other.
• 51:32
  Yeah.
• 51:32
  And so I don't want that to become
• 51:34
  the thing that Americans get to blame.
• 51:36
  One thing that I would also note is,
• 51:39
  I mean, we can't leave out of the conversation
• 51:41
  social media,
• 51:42
  we can't leave out of the conversation
• 51:44
  right wing conventional broadcasts,
• 51:46
  like Rush Limbore and Tucker Carlson.
• 51:48
  And we can't leave out a message.
• 51:49
  We'll have to move to a more.
• 51:51
  Yeah, well, look,
• 51:53
  this may be a changing phenomenon over time,
• 51:54
  as more and more of us spend more time
• 51:56
  siloed in our own echo chambers on social.
• 51:59
  But we also can't leave out the lack of public broadcasting
• 52:02
  in the United States.
• 52:03
  I mean, I thank God I haven't moved back to Australia.
• 52:07
  Yeah, but also a space with a space free
• 52:10
  from commercial constraints
• 52:11
  and free from government interference
• 52:13
  where newsmakers can just do news
• 52:16
  and people can have conversations with themselves
• 52:19
  in like Habermass's ideal
• 52:22
  of sort of just a free open space
• 52:24
  where you're not constantly chasing clicks
• 52:26
  and you're not constantly obeying advertisers
• 52:28
  and you're not constantly obeying political functionaries.
• 52:31
  I do cherish the fact that most of our Western democracies
• 52:36
  have a BBC or a CBC or an ABC or whatever it might be.
• 52:40
  But let's just part that
• 52:41
  because one thing that I just want to come back to
• 52:43
  is you mentioned Quebec.
• 52:45
  And I haven't thought about this.
• 52:46
  Like why is Texas secession so unacceptable
• 52:51
  if I don't know what the attitude towards Quebec nationalism
• 52:54
  is in Canada at the moment,
• 52:56
  but when I've been in Quebec in the 90s
• 53:00
  and that was I guess in the lead up to,
• 53:02
  when was the referendum in the 90s?
• 53:04
  95.
• 53:06
  So it must have been just after,
• 53:07
  it must have been the year after the referendum.
• 53:10
  And I didn't think there was anything
• 53:12
  traitorous about this.
• 53:14
  And I don't think there's only traitorous
• 53:16
  about Scottish independence, for example.
• 53:18
  So why are we okay with those?
• 53:19
  But this whole conversation,
• 53:21
  well, why can't America split up
• 53:22
  if Texas wants to split up?
• 53:24
  You know, it's the legacy of the Civil War.
• 53:26
  It's one of them.
• 53:27
  I mean, you know, one of the,
• 53:28
  like the last chapter of my book is about
• 53:30
  the possibilities of secession,
• 53:32
  which I don't think at this point in American history
• 53:36
  is a worst-case scenario.
• 53:38
  Like I don't at all.
• 53:39
  Like I think it's something that should be taken
• 53:41
  very seriously.
• 53:42
  If you broke America up into four countries,
• 53:44
  they would all be amazing countries
• 53:45
  and they would be more themselves, right?
• 53:49
  I mean, what the amazing thing is
• 53:51
  when you go and talk to these people
• 53:52
  is like, and some people on the left
• 53:54
  have real trouble believing this.
• 53:55
  But like people on the right in America
• 53:58
  feel every bit as much under siege
• 54:01
  as people on the left, right?
• 54:03
  Like they feel that they are losing their country
• 54:05
  all the time, right?
• 54:07
  And they, and they, and that they're just,
• 54:12
  you're in a situation here
• 54:13
  where the political differences are so real
• 54:15
  and they're also geographically bounded, most of them,
• 54:19
  that having two countries or four countries
• 54:22
  is not, to me, is not an insane conversation
• 54:25
  to be having at all, right?
• 54:27
  You know, but the problem is like, in Quebec,
• 54:30
  because we, you know, in Canada,
• 54:31
  because we've faced this separatist threat,
• 54:33
  like we actually have worked out laws
• 54:35
  and so that we know what happens, right?
• 54:38
  Like if Quebec separates if they win,
• 54:40
  this many votes and this, on these set terms,
• 54:43
  then we're gonna separate on terms agreeable
• 54:46
  to all the parties, right?
• 54:48
  And we're gonna, it's not gonna be violence
• 54:49
  and no one's gonna try and suppress anyone, you know,
• 54:53
  like we're just gonna do this like reasonable human beings.
• 54:56
  Because of the 14th amendment
• 54:58
  and because Americans don't really understand
• 55:00
  the difficulties with the UN,
• 55:02
  that they don't, that they would be bound
• 55:03
  by those decisions of the UN.
• 55:05
  They don't really understand
• 55:06
  how bureaucratically nightmarish it would be
• 55:09
  to secede from the United States.
• 55:11
  And that's, that's by Lincoln's design, right?
• 55:14
  Like that's by the design of the people
• 55:17
  who emerged from the Civil War.
• 55:19
  They wanted to make it inconceivable.
• 55:21
  And it's a real, I mean, I would say it's even
• 55:24
  one of the causes of Civil War in the United States right now
• 55:27
  because you can't have reasonable conversations
• 55:29
  about succession, which I think are,
• 55:32
  you know, especially when you look at the aftermath
• 55:34
  of the abortion decision,
• 55:36
  like you're already gonna be in a country
• 55:38
  with essentially two legal systems, right?
• 55:40
  And or more, right?
• 55:43
  I mean, what's incredible about it is like you see
• 55:45
  the chaos on county by county lines, right?
• 55:49
  In some of these states, they're so unprepared
• 55:51
  for this eventuality that they,
• 55:54
  they don't have the legal mechanisms
• 55:55
  in place to deal with it.
• 55:57
  Or administer, never mind, you know, administering it.
• 56:00
  Like you're gonna actually send police to arrest people
• 56:02
  like on what terms?
• 56:04
  How are you gonna do that?
• 56:05
  No one has any answers to any of these questions, right?
• 56:08
  And so yeah, like I think there's,
• 56:11
  I think this is the chaos that I'm describing.
• 56:15
  Like you're reminding me of a road.
• 56:17
  When I lived in New York, I used to jokingly say
• 56:19
  that Lincoln never should have fought the Civil War
• 56:21
  because if you had the North and the South,
• 56:24
  then eventually, I think slavery
• 56:26
  would have just collapsed under it
• 56:27
  under the weight of its own moral contradictions.
• 56:30
  And then you'd have this kind of poor rump
• 56:32
  that could go about its business
• 56:33
  and you'd have this energetic, innovative country
• 56:37
  in the North that wouldn't have to worry about
• 56:39
  all these culture war issues.
• 56:40
  And I'm just remembering, I mean, I was partly facetious
• 56:43
  because I think it was a noble war,
• 56:44
  but as you say, like there's no reason
• 56:47
  why America has to in perpetuity be constituted
• 56:50
  exactly as it is right now
• 56:52
  if people wanna say bye-bye to it.
• 56:55
  Do you remember the essay that went viral in 2004?
• 56:59
  I'm just looking at up called Fuck the South.
• 57:03
  No, I didn't see that one.
• 57:04
  I mean, there've been a bunch of those.
• 57:05
  Like I saw, there was like a new Republican one
• 57:07
  and then the Federalist wrote a bunch of them.
• 57:09
  This is anonymous, it's called,
• 57:10
  it's subtitled a disgruntled Massachusetts voter
• 57:13
  who gets it off his chest here.
• 57:14
  I've just found it, I'll read it for you.
• 57:16
  The Washington Post ran a piece like last month
• 57:19
  saying Texas wants to separate good riddance.
• 57:21
  I mean, that's not a blog post.
• 57:23
  That's like the Washington Post.
• 57:25
  Right.
• 57:26
  I mean, this is what I mean, you know,
• 57:27
  I honestly believe that that piece in the Washington Post
• 57:30
  would have been inconceivable six months ago.
• 57:34
  Like, or a year ago for sure.
• 57:36
  Like they would not have run somebody
• 57:38
  on the North saying, you know, fuck this Southern state.
• 57:42
  Like this is, it's, you know,
• 57:44
  there've always been people saying this stuff.
• 57:46
  It's just, they're moving from cranks
• 57:48
  to the Washington Post.
• 57:50
  Right.
• 57:51
  I mean, I personally feel, I've always felt like,
• 57:54
  I didn't, you know, I had this in the book
• 57:56
  and then I cut it.
• 57:57
  And it's one of those like, you know,
• 57:58
  kill your babies.
• 57:59
  It was like one of those passages like that I loved,
• 58:02
  but I thought, well, I better kill it
• 58:04
  because I love it so much.
• 58:05
  And it was that every side in North America,
• 58:08
  the wrong side is one every war.
• 58:11
  Like it would have been much better
• 58:12
  if the indigenous people beat the French.
• 58:14
  It would have been much better
• 58:15
  if the French had beat the English.
• 58:18
  It would have been much better
• 58:19
  if the English had beaten the Americans.
• 58:21
  And it would have been much better
• 58:22
  if the South had won because the divisions are still there.
• 58:25
  Right.
• 58:26
  Like not to say that the South was morally right
• 58:29
  in that war obviously or that, you know,
• 58:31
  that that was a war for just cause.
• 58:36
  Obviously I'm not saying that.
• 58:37
  But what you're dealing with in the South
• 58:39
  is like in the immediate aftermath
• 58:41
  of the Civil War and Reconstruction,
• 58:44
  there's so much terrorism,
• 58:45
  there's so much insurgent conflict
• 58:47
  from the Ku Klux Klan and the Red Brookings
• 58:49
  that in effect by 1877,
• 58:51
  the North exhausted gives up anyway.
• 58:54
  Yes. Right.
• 58:55
  And then you get, yeah.
• 58:57
  And then you get the whole 20th century of Jim Crow and stuff
• 59:00
  because of Jim Crow and they get home rule.
• 59:03
  And you know, effectively that's what's happened
• 59:05
  in Canada, right?
• 59:06
  Like Quebec is technically Canadian,
• 59:08
  but they do whatever they want.
• 59:10
  If they pass a law, we don't fight it.
• 59:12
  No one in the federal government is up fighting it, right?
• 59:15
  So I want to channel this
• 59:19
  because I'm just scanning this.
• 59:20
  Listen to the, just take a couple of minutes for the listen.
• 59:23
  So this is in the aftermath of George W. Bush's re-election.
• 59:26
  This is November 11th, 2004.
• 59:28
  Fuck the South, fuck him.
• 59:30
  We should let him go when they wanted to leave.
• 59:32
  Fighting for the right to keep slaves.
• 59:34
  Yeah, those are the states we want to keep.
• 59:35
  And now what do we get?
• 59:36
  Where the fuck an arrogant Northeast deliberate elite?
• 59:39
  How about this for arrogant?
• 59:40
  The South is the real America, the authentic America.
• 59:43
  Really?
• 59:44
  Because we fucking founded this country, assholes.
• 59:46
  Those founding fathers you keep going on and on about
• 59:48
  all that bullshit about what you think they meant
• 59:50
  by the second amendment.
• 59:51
  Who do you think those wig wearing
• 59:53
  lacy shirt sporting revolutionaries were?
• 59:55
  They were fucking blue status dickhead.
• 59:57
  Boston, Philadelphia, New York, hello.
• 1:00:00
  I think there might be a reason
• 1:00:01
  all the fucking monuments are up here in our backyard.
• 1:00:03
  No, no, get the fuck out.
• 1:00:05
  We're not letting you visit the Liberty Bell
• 1:00:06
  and fucking Plymouth Rock anymore
• 1:00:08
  until you get over your real American selves
• 1:00:10
  and start respecting those other nine amendments.
• 1:00:12
  Who do you think those fucking stripes on the flag of four?
• 1:00:15
  Nine if a fucking blue states.
• 1:00:17
  Get it?
• 1:00:18
  We started this shit, so don't get all uppity
• 1:00:19
  about how real you are.
• 1:00:20
  You Johnny come lately.
• 1:00:21
  Ooh, I've been a state for almost 100 years.
• 1:00:23
  Dickheads, fuck off.
• 1:00:25
  Arrogant, you want to talk to us more decenters
• 1:00:27
  about fucking arrogance?
• 1:00:28
  Maybe I wouldn't be so fucking arrogant
• 1:00:29
  if I wasn't paying for your fucking bridges, bitch.
• 1:00:31
  All those federal taxes you love to hate.
• 1:00:33
  It all comes from us and goes to you.
• 1:00:34
  So shut up and enjoy your fucking Tennessee
• 1:00:36
  Valley Authority electricity
• 1:00:38
  and your fancy highways that we paid for.
• 1:00:40
  And the next time Florida gets hit by a hurricane,
• 1:00:42
  you can come crying to us if you want to
• 1:00:44
  but you're the ones who built on a fucking swamp.
• 1:00:46
  Let the Spanish keep it.
• 1:00:47
  It's a shit hole, we said.
• 1:00:49
  But you had to have your fucking orange juice.
• 1:00:51
  The next Dick Ward, who says it's your money,
• 1:00:53
  not the government's money,
• 1:00:54
  is gonna get their ass kicked.
• 1:00:55
  Nine of the 10 states that get the most federal fucking dollars
• 1:00:58
  and pay the least, can you guess?
• 1:01:01
  That's right, motherfucker, they're red states.
• 1:01:03
  And eight of the 10 states that receive the least
• 1:01:05
  and pay the most is too easy, they're blue states.
• 1:01:08
  It's not your money, assholes, it's fucking our money.
• 1:01:11
  What was that real American value
• 1:01:13
  you were spouting a minute ago?
• 1:01:14
  Self-reliance?
• 1:01:15
  Try this for self-reliance.
• 1:01:17
  Buy your own fucking stop signs, asshole.
• 1:01:19
  Let's talk about those values for a fucking minute.
• 1:01:22
  You and your southern values can bite my ass
• 1:01:24
  because the blue states got the values
• 1:01:25
  over you fucking real Americans every day
• 1:01:27
  of the goddamn week.
• 1:01:28
  Which state do you think has the lowest divorce rate?
• 1:01:31
  You marriage-hyping dick wards.
• 1:01:33
  Can you guess, it's fucking Massachusetts.
• 1:01:35
  The fucking center of the gay marriage universe.
• 1:01:37
  Yes, that's right, the state you love to tie around the neck
• 1:01:39
  of anyone to the left of Strom Thurman
• 1:01:41
  has the lowest divorce rate in the fucking nation.
• 1:01:44
  Think that's just some aberration about this.
• 1:01:46
  Nine of the 10 lowest divorce rates are fucking blue states, asshole.
• 1:01:50
  And most are in the Northeast
• 1:01:51
  where our values suck so bad.
• 1:01:53
  And where are the highest divorce rates?
• 1:01:55
  Care to fucking guess?
• 1:01:56
  10 out of 10, a fucking red ass,
• 1:01:58
  red ass, we're so fucking moral states.
• 1:02:01
  But two guys making out is gonna fucking
• 1:02:03
  ruin marriage for you.
• 1:02:04
  Yeah, it seems like you're ruining it pretty well
• 1:02:06
  on your own, your little bastards.
• 1:02:07
  Oh, but that's okay because you got a church, right?
• 1:02:09
  I mean, you do, right?
• 1:02:10
  Because we get to fucking hear about it every goddamn
• 1:02:12
  year at election time.
• 1:02:13
  Yes, we're fascinated by how you get up every Sunday morning
• 1:02:15
  and seeing and then you fucking towers
• 1:02:17
  of moral superiority.
• 1:02:19
  Yeah, that's a workable formula.
• 1:02:20
  Maybe our fucking northern is don't talk
• 1:02:22
  about religion as much as you
• 1:02:23
  because we're not so busy sending.
• 1:02:25
  Everything of that, you self-righteous assholes.
• 1:02:27
  No, you're too busy erecting giant stone tablets
• 1:02:29
  of the 10 commandments in buildings paid for
• 1:02:31
  by the fucking Northeast liberal elite.
• 1:02:33
  Well, this gravy train is fucking over.
• 1:02:35
  Take your liberal bashing, federal tax leaching,
• 1:02:37
  Confederate flag waving,
• 1:02:38
  holy of them now hypocritical bullshit
• 1:02:40
  and shove it up your ass.
• 1:02:41
  And no, you can't have your fucking convention
• 1:02:43
  in New York next time.
• 1:02:44
  Fuck off.
• 1:02:48
  That's Massachusetts for you, eh?
• 1:02:50
  Yeah.
• 1:02:52
  I mean, I haven't read that in 18 years.
• 1:02:54
  Oh my god.
• 1:02:55
  Some of the red states could say exactly the same thing.
• 1:02:58
  In fact, they do.
• 1:02:59
  They do all the time.
• 1:03:00
  I mean, I just think when a marriage gets to this point,
• 1:03:02
  you sit the kids down and say like, you know,
• 1:03:05
  it's over.
• 1:03:06
  Mommy and daddy don't love each other anymore.
• 1:03:08
  Like they just like, or they maybe they love each other
• 1:03:11
  but it's just not working.
• 1:03:12
  Like they just can't make it work.
• 1:03:13
  Like, I mean, you know, I would just say like
• 1:03:17
  the South also has its grievances, right?
• 1:03:21
  And like they could say the same thing about
• 1:03:23
  whole host of things that they feel
• 1:03:27
  are going their own way.
• 1:03:30
  And so it's, you know, I just think,
• 1:03:33
  you need a little distance from this.
• 1:03:35
  I mean, I also think like America as it currently exists
• 1:03:38
  really prevents these places from enacting
• 1:03:40
  their political realities.
• 1:03:42
  It keeps them in a state of political schizophrenia
• 1:03:45
  in a real way.
• 1:03:47
  Like, I mean, you're a foreigner like me.
• 1:03:48
  Like, do you ever go in New York or California
• 1:03:51
  and think like, my god, what would this place be like?
• 1:03:53
  Like if they had health care and gun control?
• 1:03:55
  I mean, they don't want it.
• 1:03:56
  They don't know it's what they should have, right?
• 1:03:59
  And like if they had it, these places would be truly,
• 1:04:04
  I mean, even more paradises than they are, right?
• 1:04:06
  Like what could stop them with that?
• 1:04:08
  And similarly, like I think one of the things
• 1:04:10
  about the Southern United States and the red states is
• 1:04:13
  that they are in such resistance to federal authority
• 1:04:17
  that they, it's kind of stopped them
• 1:04:19
  from enacting their own political visions, right?
• 1:04:22
  With the exception of Texas, which really has enacted
• 1:04:24
  its political vision quite, but I think of it
• 1:04:27
  as a separate, as a separate reality,
• 1:04:30
  a separate political entity than the South generally,
• 1:04:34
  because it's so successful as a,
• 1:04:37
  like it's a huge economy, it's the biggest economy.
• 1:04:40
  Yeah, I mean, Texas could be a country in its own right.
• 1:04:43
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:04:44
  I mean, and it's a fully diversified economy
• 1:04:46
  and it has a fully integrated tech sector.
• 1:04:51
  So it really would function, even though it has no property taxes
• 1:04:56
  and no, I think it's about to get rid of property taxes.
• 1:04:59
  It doesn't have income taxes.
• 1:05:02
  So we have property taxes and income taxes,
• 1:05:04
  where's it going to get us money from?
• 1:05:06
  I have no idea.
• 1:05:08
  That's not, that's really my idea.
• 1:05:09
  When you can tax oil companies, but only so much
• 1:05:12
  before you run out of cash.
• 1:05:13
  Yeah.
• 1:05:14
  Look at that, Stephen, I want to come back
• 1:05:17
  to negative partisanship.
• 1:05:19
  So if the South, let's suppose that the person
• 1:05:21
  that's someone in the South, here's the fuck the South,
• 1:05:22
  and they go, well, I can write exactly the same thing
• 1:05:25
  about you forcing us to, yeah, exactly.
• 1:05:28
  You forcing us to bake your fancy gay birthday cakes.
• 1:05:31
  Like, fuck off, we don't, we leave it up to the States
• 1:05:33
  to figure out what to do with abortion and gay marriage.
• 1:05:35
  Why are we being spoken down to by these wizards
• 1:05:38
  in robes in the Supreme Court and by Washington?
• 1:05:42
  Fuck you.
• 1:05:43
  What role of the culture was playing in this?
• 1:05:45
  And what culpability does the left have
• 1:05:48
  for focusing on things that are intentionally,
• 1:05:51
  or at least predictably, going to antagonize large swathes
• 1:05:55
  of the country?
• 1:05:56
  Well, the technical term for is complementary radicalization.
• 1:06:02
  It's how fringe members of the left
• 1:06:04
  radicalize fringe members on the right,
• 1:06:06
  which then leads to more extremism on both sides.
• 1:06:10
  I mean, I don't think the culture wars,
• 1:06:13
  I think the culture wars are really a symptom
• 1:06:15
  more than a cause.
• 1:06:16
  Like, what I worry about in this book are violent groups,
• 1:06:19
  which are marginal, they're not people having arguments
• 1:06:23
  about transgender issues.
• 1:06:24
  And they're not, that's a gateway to them, right?
• 1:06:28
  Like, that's a gateway to those paths.
• 1:06:32
  I mean, I feel like, you have to look at what the cause
• 1:06:35
  of the culture war is, right?
• 1:06:36
  And why other countries don't have anywhere near the same
• 1:06:40
  kind of ferocity in their culture wars
• 1:06:42
  as the United States does?
• 1:06:44
  And I think the reason is that if you want
• 1:06:46
  to change political policy and you're in Canada or Australia,
• 1:06:50
  you have legitimate chance of doing it, right?
• 1:06:52
  Like, if you want to actually go and work for a political party
• 1:06:56
  in Canada, I mean, it'll be the most boring thing
• 1:06:57
  in the world, you have to drag chairs around and stuff.
• 1:07:00
  But like, you know, we've had an election
• 1:07:02
  where university students were elected to parliament, right?
• 1:07:05
  People working in bars, ecologists were elected to parliament,
• 1:07:08
  and they were making decisions, right?
• 1:07:10
  That was 10 years ago.
• 1:07:12
  Whereas, to actually change policy in the United States
• 1:07:15
  is virtually impossible, even at the highest level,
• 1:07:17
  even if you're the president.
• 1:07:19
  Yeah, yeah, that's right, even if you get elected.
• 1:07:21
  I mean, we just had an election.
• 1:07:22
  Let me do, is they scream at each other.
• 1:07:25
  I mean, instead of, abortion is actually
• 1:07:28
  an incredibly perfect example.
• 1:07:30
  Because if your political objective
• 1:07:33
  is to have less abortion, right, decline
• 1:07:37
  in the number of abortions, which I personally
• 1:07:39
  don't feel as an illegitimate political goal at all,
• 1:07:42
  the very last thing you should do is outlaw it, right?
• 1:07:45
  Like, the Goodmacher Institute showed that, you know,
• 1:07:49
  abortion rates in the United States declined 17%
• 1:07:53
  between 2010 and 2018.
• 1:07:54
  So that's, and you know what the reason for it is?
• 1:07:57
  Planned parenthood, education.
• 1:07:59
  Like, if you want to lead to declines in abortion rates,
• 1:08:01
  what you do is you educate girls and young women
• 1:08:04
  and young men, right?
• 1:08:06
  So that's a policy solution.
• 1:08:08
  Like, there's an actual policy solution
• 1:08:10
  that can be enacted and was working, right?
• 1:08:13
  But they don't want to do policy.
• 1:08:14
  What they want to do is scream at each other's face,
• 1:08:17
  life, one side wants to scream life,
• 1:08:20
  and the other one side wants a scream choice.
• 1:08:22
  And so what they do is scream at each other a lot.
• 1:08:24
  And the Supreme Court decision, of course,
• 1:08:27
  far from satisfying the question,
• 1:08:30
  or answering the question, is gonna create chaos forever.
• 1:08:35
  They're gonna be screaming in their faces
• 1:08:37
  in each other's faces for the next 50 years.
• 1:08:39
  They're not gonna be a persistent policy at all.
• 1:08:41
  That it's gonna, even within these states,
• 1:08:44
  and certainly on the borders between these states,
• 1:08:46
  there's going to be huge agony about it.
• 1:08:49
  So when you're in this post-policy phase,
• 1:08:52
  what you replace it with is cultural politics, right?
• 1:08:56
  Like, you can't make a difference through government.
• 1:08:58
  So you think if you humiliate enough people on Twitter,
• 1:09:01
  you might have made some kind of difference, right?
• 1:09:04
  And, or if you've, you know,
• 1:09:06
  and certainly both sides do that.
• 1:09:09
  It's the political failures that limited the culture.
• 1:09:12
  Do you see what I mean?
• 1:09:13
  Yeah, I do, but I'm not.
• 1:09:16
  There's something about the easy authoritarianism
• 1:09:21
  of Supreme Court decisions,
• 1:09:22
  the way that they've been made in the United States,
• 1:09:24
  that to my perspective, as an inhabiter
• 1:09:28
  of a parliamentary democracy,
• 1:09:29
  seems like a slightly perverse or shortsighted way
• 1:09:33
  to try to resolve thorny issues.
• 1:09:35
  Like, how is abortion ruled on in Canada?
• 1:09:38
  Is it a provincial thing or a federal thing?
• 1:09:40
  There is literally no,
• 1:09:42
  it is strictly a matter between a woman and her doctor.
• 1:09:45
  And...
• 1:09:46
  Right, but who made it that is it?
• 1:09:48
  Is it federal?
• 1:09:48
  With a liberal government,
• 1:09:49
  what are you saying?
• 1:09:50
  No conservative is opposed to abortion in this country?
• 1:09:53
  Yeah, same here.
• 1:09:54
  But I'm just asking about the,
• 1:09:56
  is it a state-based issue,
• 1:09:57
  or is it a national, is there a national code?
• 1:09:59
  It's, well, there are provincial rules,
• 1:10:01
  but actually it's mostly the medical associations
• 1:10:05
  who make those guidelines, like it's a medical issue.
• 1:10:08
  It's just not an issue, right?
• 1:10:10
  It's like no one in the government has consulted, right,
• 1:10:13
  about what is happening.
• 1:10:15
  No, but it must be,
• 1:10:15
  it must be a crime to like a,
• 1:10:17
  a border baby one day before it's born.
• 1:10:20
  I have no idea.
• 1:10:21
  I, I think there's literally no federal law on that at all.
• 1:10:24
  Right.
• 1:10:25
  I think there might be provincial laws.
• 1:10:27
  Well, I think there,
• 1:10:27
  there's the medical association won't do things
• 1:10:30
  with doctors at a certain point.
• 1:10:31
  And remember, all doctors work for the same.
• 1:10:33
  They all work.
• 1:10:34
  Right, I see.
• 1:10:35
  Because it's all, ah, yes.
• 1:10:36
  Because it's nationalized, right?
• 1:10:38
  You can't just go and find a random doctor who's not.
• 1:10:40
  Yeah, I see.
• 1:10:40
  They're all paid for by the government.
• 1:10:42
  Yeah, I forgot.
• 1:10:42
  Yeah, so it's like the British system,
• 1:10:44
  whereas in Australia we have a private,
• 1:10:46
  if, you know, every doctor is a,
• 1:10:48
  is a private, a small business person
• 1:10:51
  who gets reimbursed by the government,
• 1:10:52
  but doesn't work for them.
• 1:10:53
  So here, I mean, here we've always had it as a state issue.
• 1:10:57
  It's never been a hot, a very hot political issue,
• 1:10:59
  but up until 2019, in New South Wales,
• 1:11:02
  the most populated state,
• 1:11:04
  it was technically illegal to get an abortion,
• 1:11:07
  except for exemptions for the health,
• 1:11:09
  for the mental or physical health of the woman.
• 1:11:12
  And the exemptions for the mental and physical health
• 1:11:15
  of the woman were interpreted as being so wide,
• 1:11:17
  you could drive a truck through it
• 1:11:18
  and basically, you could get an abortion.
• 1:11:20
  And that was just the, and then in 2019,
• 1:11:23
  they left it up to the doctors.
• 1:11:24
  Yeah, exactly.
• 1:11:25
  You had to go to the doctor who was willing to say
• 1:11:27
  this is an every single, every single doctor would.
• 1:11:30
  Yeah, but they probably wouldn't for a day before, right?
• 1:11:33
  Exactly.
• 1:11:34
  But then now we, now we have it codified
• 1:11:36
  as a certain number of weeks,
• 1:11:38
  because the state parliament wanted to guarantee that
• 1:11:41
  that is what the United States now has.
• 1:11:44
  There is nothing that crazy.
• 1:11:46
  I mean, I am absolutely in favor of a woman's right to choose.
• 1:11:48
  I, like you, I think this should be a medical consideration.
• 1:11:52
  But I don't, like the, the kind of sky is falling
• 1:11:56
  like hysteria about the United States
• 1:11:59
  reverting to a position that should be the more democratic
• 1:12:02
  of the positions where people are allowed
• 1:12:06
  to aggregate themselves into communities
• 1:12:08
  that can decide how things are going to happen.
• 1:12:09
  Now, it sucks big time to be a woman in that community,
• 1:12:12
  but it sucks big time to be a woman
• 1:12:14
  in like a lot of Arab countries.
• 1:12:16
  Or like, I mean, you know, we, we do,
• 1:12:18
  we do somehow the right of the community
• 1:12:22
  to figure it out.
• 1:12:23
  But you, you'd rather ruin your own port by saying,
• 1:12:27
  like, yeah, like communities in the Middle East.
• 1:12:29
  I mean, that's exactly what we don't want, right?
• 1:12:32
  Like what we, like, I think the, who's we?
• 1:12:35
  I mean, if you live in Alabama and you want it,
• 1:12:37
  maybe that's it.
• 1:12:38
  That's the question, who is we?
• 1:12:40
  Right? That's exactly the question.
• 1:12:42
  And there, and the answer used to be we're Americans.
• 1:12:46
  I'm not sure that is the answer anymore.
• 1:12:48
  Right. Like I think there are a lot of people out there
• 1:12:50
  thinking, am I an American?
• 1:12:52
  And not just in, you know, Tennessee or in rural Oregon.
• 1:12:57
  I think a lot of people in New York are thinking,
• 1:12:58
  am I an American?
• 1:13:00
  Like, is that, is that my identity?
• 1:13:02
  Is that what I want to be?
• 1:13:03
  Right? Is that what it, like, you know, what, what,
• 1:13:08
  to what am I loyal?
• 1:13:10
  Right?
• 1:13:11
  And, you know, treason, of course,
• 1:13:13
  is only a matter of dates, but as Hugo said,
• 1:13:17
  but in America, that's the extreme chase, right?
• 1:13:19
  I mean, these are people that, like, this is a country
• 1:13:21
  founded on betraying the king.
• 1:13:24
  I mean, that's a very Canadian point of view of it.
• 1:13:26
  But, you know, like, it's a, but it is a country
• 1:13:30
  formed by revolution and on making political decisions
• 1:13:34
  that are not tied to anything that are tied to
• 1:13:36
  inalienable rights, right?
• 1:13:38
  They're not tied to any tradition at all, right?
• 1:13:40
  So that's, and you know, that that is how the first,
• 1:13:44
  so that's how the Confederates thought of themselves
• 1:13:46
  in the first civil war.
• 1:13:48
  They absolutely thought that they were in the continuous
• 1:13:50
  tradition of the founding fathers.
• 1:13:52
  They were just separating from a political entity
• 1:13:54
  as they have, right?
• 1:13:55
  So those are conditions that don't apply in Canada
• 1:13:58
  or Australia, right?
• 1:13:59
  Like, we're still humble children of the queen, right?
• 1:14:03
  And, and with a lot of things that goes with
• 1:14:05
  Roger, Roger, we are humble.
• 1:14:08
  But, but like, you know, like, so, and that's,
• 1:14:12
  that's a difference.
• 1:14:14
  We're subjects, they're citizens.
• 1:14:16
  There's a big, I mean, it's a big difference.
• 1:14:18
  I think it seems subtle, but when you think of,
• 1:14:21
  when you actually talk to how they think
• 1:14:23
  of their political agency, especially with oath keepers,
• 1:14:27
  especially with people sort of on that middle part
• 1:14:30
  of the far right, like people who aren't in
• 1:14:33
  clueless clan or anything like that, but are sort of
• 1:14:36
  anti-government patriots, more broadly,
• 1:14:41
  they feel that absolutely that tradition.
• 1:14:44
  That's a lovely, it's a lovely insight
• 1:14:46
  into the Canadian political mentality to say
• 1:14:48
  that we're still subjects and the Americans are citizens.
• 1:14:50
  I think Australia is neither.
• 1:14:52
  Australians definitely don't see,
• 1:14:53
  Australians have a huge chip on their shoulder
• 1:14:55
  about the mother country and definitely don't see
• 1:14:58
  themselves as subjects, but certainly do see themselves
• 1:15:00
  as a community of mates who are, who are abandoned
• 1:15:05
  and stranded on the wrong side of the globe
• 1:15:07
  and are trying to model things out in a hearty
• 1:15:09
  and independent way together rather than the American
• 1:15:12
  ethos of doing it independently individual.
• 1:15:15
  Well, how many Australians would want to overthrow
• 1:15:17
  the government?
• 1:15:18
  I mean, you could count them on my hands.
• 1:15:21
  Exactly, right?
• 1:15:22
  Like that's how many?
• 1:15:24
  I mean, certainly in the tens of millions
• 1:15:27
  in the United States, right?
• 1:15:28
  Like without any exaggeration, that's a low number.
• 1:15:33
  Like I mean, it could be as high as 30%.
• 1:15:38
  Like, I mean, what's the, what's the path out?
• 1:15:40
  What's the path out?
• 1:15:42
  What is the path out, Stephen?
• 1:15:44
  Well, I mean, the thing about Americans
• 1:15:46
  is that they're incredibly capable of change.
• 1:15:50
  Like this openness that we talked about
• 1:15:52
  this revolutionary spirit that they have,
• 1:15:54
  I mean, I think it's real and it allows them to,
• 1:15:58
  they're a country of reinvention, personal reinvention
• 1:16:01
  but political reinvention as well, right?
• 1:16:03
  And I think if anyone to get out of this stuff,
• 1:16:08
  like I'll give Tyler a count not much, right?
• 1:16:10
  Like they are the people who could escape that.
• 1:16:13
  But I think at this point, it's gonna require
• 1:16:16
  broad change.
• 1:16:17
  Like it's not the kind of thing where it's the 60s
• 1:16:20
  and there's all this violence and then, you know,
• 1:16:22
  it all works out and it's all quailudes and hot tubs
• 1:16:25
  and key parties and, you know, lava liners
• 1:16:27
  and whatever else, right?
• 1:16:29
  Like it's not gonna stumble along
• 1:16:32
  into better times because the path
• 1:16:33
  that it's stumbling down is in fact very dark indeed.
• 1:16:36
  But the possibility of radical change
• 1:16:38
  or also some kind of highly defederated state
• 1:16:43
  where people really are in their states
• 1:16:45
  rather than part of a unified country
• 1:16:48
  and their political realities are totally determined by,
• 1:16:52
  you know, and the Supreme Court
• 1:16:54
  and the Congress are really kind of
• 1:16:55
  rather military and not a lot more.
• 1:16:59
  I mean, you're talking about Canada,
• 1:17:00
  you're talking about the United Kingdom.
• 1:17:01
  I mean, look at Wales and Scotland and Northern Ireland.
• 1:17:04
  I mean, it was only by, it was only when Tony Blair
• 1:17:07
  allowed Northern Ireland the autonomy
• 1:17:08
  that it wanted and allowed citizens of the Republic of Ireland
• 1:17:12
  to be part of the European Union
• 1:17:13
  and have European passports and everything.
• 1:17:14
  And all, you know, by devolving power back to local municipalities,
• 1:17:18
  that was how they avoided, how they ended the Civil War
• 1:17:21
  and how they, why the United Kingdom is still together.
• 1:17:23
  Maybe you do need a model like that in the United States.
• 1:17:26
  I mean, that doesn't seem to me impossible.
• 1:17:30
  The problem is that the violence has already started, right?
• 1:17:34
  And like if they could, that may be a path
• 1:17:39
  at the end of the violence, right?
• 1:17:41
  But I mean, you know, nothing is certain, right?
• 1:17:43
  Like I make projections in this book
• 1:17:46
  off the best available models.
• 1:17:48
  But you know, as the statisticians say,
• 1:17:51
  like all models are wrong, some are useful, right?
• 1:17:54
  Like these are just there to demonstrate the direction
• 1:17:56
  that's it's going in.
• 1:17:58
  But you know, there's a lot of,
• 1:18:00
  there's a lot of, there's a lot of different paths
• 1:18:03
  that this could go on.
• 1:18:04
  Unfortunately, I mean, to me,
• 1:18:06
  every trend points to more political violence.
• 1:18:08
  I pray that I'm wrong.
• 1:18:10
  Like I mean, I genuinely hope that instead it comes
• 1:18:15
  to some kind of like at least tacit agreement
• 1:18:18
  of something like that.
• 1:18:20
  But you know, it seems pretty unlikely.
• 1:18:21
  Like whenever people have federal power,
• 1:18:23
  whichever party has federal power in the United States,
• 1:18:26
  they impose their will with it, right?
• 1:18:29
  Like they don't sit on their hands.
• 1:18:31
  They make executive orders on immigration.
• 1:18:35
  And you know, Congress is essentially moot at this point.
• 1:18:38
  They're so useless and the Senate is so,
• 1:18:41
  you know, no laws get through anymore.
• 1:18:45
  So executive orders are what they could do,
• 1:18:46
  but that's still a lot of power.
• 1:18:49
  Hmm.
• 1:18:52
  Stephen Marsha is a bracing vision of the future.
• 1:18:56
  I hope you're wrong, but I can't figure out why you're wrong.
• 1:18:59
  So that frightens me.
• 1:19:00
  That's exactly the position I found myself in.
• 1:19:03
  It's great.
• 1:19:04
  It's great to talk to you.
• 1:19:06
  You know, let's check in after the Civil War.
• 1:19:08
  Well, when we're standing atop the steaming ruins
• 1:19:11
  of the United States and see where you went right
• 1:19:13
  and then where you were.
• 1:19:14
  Yeah, so we'll count it up.
• 1:19:15
  Yeah, hopefully.
• 1:19:16
  Yeah.
• 1:19:17
  Thanks Stephen.
• 1:19:18
  Great to talk to you.
• 1:19:24
  Uncomfortable conversations is produced by Stefan Postuma.
• 1:19:27
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• 1:19:29
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• 1:19:30
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• 1:19:34
  your enemies generous and your conversations perfectly,
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