Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Obama, Trump & the Great American Contradiction" with Pulitzer-Prize-winner Paul Starr

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"Obama, Trump & the Great American Contradiction" with Pulitzer-Prize-winner Paul Starr · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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But hey humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
1:56
It's a doozy of a question.
1:58
How did the United States of America vote for Barack Obama twice and then Donald Trump twice?
2:05
In fact, in some cases it was the same people.
2:08
I mean, there are Americans living breathing alive Americans who voted for Barack Obama
2:13
and for Donald Trump.
2:14
Well, there is a now a new explanation in a brand new book by a guy who knows what he
2:20
talks about, which is called American contradiction, revolution and revenge from the 1950s to now.
2:27
Paul Starr, its author argues that in Obama and Trump, we can really see kind of examples
2:33
of an ongoing contradiction, an ongoing founding contradiction in American public life
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and politics that he traces all the way back through the 20th century and back to the
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founding of America.
2:44
It's fascinating to dig into and Paul is the man to do it.
2:46
He's a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist.
2:50
He won the Pulitzer for his book, The Social Transformation of American Medicine because
2:54
he was very interested in healthcare and in fact worked in the Clinton administration
2:58
on Bill Clinton's healthcare plan.
3:02
We talk about that, we talk about his friendship with Robert Reich, we talk about the missteps
3:06
of the Clinton administration of Democrats in the 1990s, of the changes to the Republican
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Party since the middle of the 20th century, NAFTA, Nixon, China, MLK, Paul is a professor
3:18
of sociology at Princeton University and he is the co-founder of the iconic American liberal
3:24
political magazine, The American Prospect.
3:27
I hope you enjoy as much as I did the one, the only, the legend, Paul Starr.
3:35
I'm always interested whenever I'm speaking to someone who has won an Academy Award, I know
3:41
the Pulitzer Prize or a Pulitzer about the actual experience of winning such an award,
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how did you win a Pulitzer?
3:48
How do you find out that you're in the running?
3:52
I did not know that I was in the running, there were no nungu nations at that point announced
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and that was only when I was 33.
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It was for a book on the history of medicine, a book called The Social Transformation
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of American Medicine.
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I found out from a call from the Associated Press and totally out of the blue.
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They were asking you for a quote?
4:20
Yeah, well, I was in shock when I heard news, things I had no clue that it was about to happen.
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Amazing.
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Is there any kind of ceremony for the Pulitzer, or do you just get it?
4:34
Yes, yes there is.
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So actually Columbia University is where I went to college and Columbia University gives
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out the Pulitzer Prize.
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And so it was a return for me to the campus where I had been a teenager person.
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People often have dreams of like some day coming back to their school or campus as the honorary
5:00
speaker or being fated in some way.
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That's quite the distinction when you come back and you're like, okay, I'm only 33 and
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now I got the Pulitzer.
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I guess it was worth it.
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Certainly it was worth it, but you know there's a problem.
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It defines you.
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It drags after you for the rest of your life and that's the worst thing to drag off to
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you for the rest of your life, Paul.
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Right, it doesn't mean being a convict, I acknowledge that.
5:33
But really, I've written a lot of books since and this new one, American Contradiction,
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is I think my own opinion.
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It's as good as the one that I won the Pulitzer for, but not many people are likely to take
5:48
my view of the thing.
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No, you're the most unreliable person to review your own books.
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It is interesting though.
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It's a great book.
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I mean, the basic thesis, well, do you want to describe it instead of my describing it?
6:04
Yes, so I called it American Contradiction really for two reasons.
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The first is the immediate head snapping changes that Americans have experienced.
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First of all, electing Barack Obama.
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Many people before I thought it was inconceivable that Americans would elect a black man president
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and then electing Donald Trump.
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And in a sense, that is the American Contradiction in a nutshell, the America of Obama, the
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America of Trump, both of them, I argue in this book, expressions of deep social and
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historical forces in the United States.
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My argument goes back, and this is the larger story here, my argument goes back to the
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founding of the country and the founding of the country in a contradiction, the contradiction
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between freedom and slavery.
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And the United States has been haunted by that.
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We have had a series of conflicts taking different forms in our history.
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And I believe this most recent phase, this is a book that runs from the mid-20th century
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to the present, that started with the Civil Rights struggle.
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It became enlarged with the struggles of other ethnic and racial groups, with the feminist
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movement, with what was originally the gay rights movement, and it became a struggle over
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freedom and equality in America and drew, of course, an enormous backlash.
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And that's kind of the central story of this book.
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And in just in case people misunderstand your analogy between slavery and freedom and
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Trump and Obama, the claim is not that Trump represents slavery in some way, but that there
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is a force of what you call fear and also revenge in Trump that one can trace back through
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the history of American political life a long way.
8:06
Is that right?
8:08
Yes.
8:09
I mean, if you look at the regional split in the United States, there's continuity.
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The South, the heart of the Confederacy, is still the heart of the party of the right
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here.
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And there are long continuities in other respects.
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It's, of course, it's not the exact same struggle as it was back then.
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I'm not saying that.
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Well, no, especially since the left was the party of slavery back in the time.
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It was the Democrats on the South until Johnson.
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That is true.
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Yeah.
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So how do you see the left and the right in light of that?
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Because this is something you'll hear a lot from Republicans.
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We are the party of Lincoln.
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We are the party of emancipation.
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We are the party of individual liberty and reason and the others are the party of collectivism,
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egalitarianism and slavement.
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Yeah, I don't accept that version.
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The Republican Party in the United States has been through two transformations since the
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mid-20th century.
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So the first one runs from Goldwater, Barry Goldwater, the presidential nominee in 1964,
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who lost the lens of Johnson, runs from Goldwater to Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980, and that
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involved the triumph of the conservative wing of the party over what was earlier, really
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a progressive wing within the Republican Party, and let me just mention this because many
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people might not know this.
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The Civil Rights Act, passed in 1964, had a higher percentage of Republican votes than
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of Democratic votes.
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And there's more Republicans in Congress in 1964 voted for the Civil Rights Act than
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Democrats.
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So that's a measure of how different the Republican Party was at that time.
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And let me just mention one other thing, the Supreme Court in the United States has an
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enormous degree of power in this country.
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And the Chief Justice in the Liberal Hay Day of the Supreme Court, the Chief Justice
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in the 1960s, responsible for the decision requiring school desegregation, responsible
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for a whole series of other decisions, key liberal precedents.
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That Chief Justice was Earl Warren.
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He had been elected three times the governor of California as a Republican.
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And he was the Republican Party's nominee for vice president in 1948.
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He was a very popular Republican.
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And then the leader in the Supreme Court in these major landmark decisions.
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But by 1980, the Republican Party had moved very far away from Earl Warren's politics.
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Yeah.
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Do you want to just also mention Nixon while you're making this case?
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Yes.
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Okay.
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So I have an unconventional treatment of Richard Nixon.
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He certainly won election in 1968 by courting the forces of racial backlash.
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Absolutely.
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That's true.
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But in office, he actually supported what were predominantly liberal policies.
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And many people don't realize that, don't remember that.
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But I make a very strong case that he was actually more effective in those liberal policies.
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In some ways, then either John F. Kennedy or Lynda Johnson.
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And Democrats might remember that he had supported a nationally guaranteed income.
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Like we call a UBI, now a universal basic income sort of.
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And also a form of a barna care on steroids.
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Yeah.
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Absolutely.
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So Nixon, again, that this was at that time a very different Republican Party.
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So anyway, just to go back to the whole story here.
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The first transformation of the Republican Party is to Reagan's conservatism.
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But then I argue there's been a second transformation.
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What we're seeing with Donald Trump is really not conservatism.
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Certainly not the kind of conservatism that Ronald Reagan represented.
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And it's really something much more authoritarian.
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It's quite different.
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I mean, Reagan was, again, even though Reagan represented the triumph of much more conservative
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policy, but he was much more conciliatory.
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For example, he signed an immigration bill that included an amnesty that allowed three
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million people who would come to the United States illegally to become citizens.
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It's unimaginable that Donald Trump would ever signed such a bill.
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Right.
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Yeah, he also believed in a world without nuclear weapons and a whole bunch of things that
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are currently regarded as being airy, fairy, lefty, hippie, hippie, hippie policies.
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The portrait of Nixon as the last effective left wing president is a striking one.
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When you look at the environmental protection agency about regulations that he introduced
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about a whole host of things that would be considered deaf and firmly on the American
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left today, but setting aside the authoritarianism of the Trump administration and just looking
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at what voters are voting for when they're voting for Trump, because I don't think the
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average Trump voter loves the authoritarianism bit.
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Like that wasn't the selling point, right?
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The selling point was some kind of cultural reaction against what they felt was disempowering
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them, whether or not that was economic or what the left was offering.
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How does that pivot happen?
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The pivot from the Reagan goldwater era to this culture-focused Republican party.
14:15
Yeah.
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So here, let me talk about what is really the second half of this book, the second half
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that I call sleepwalking into revenge.
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There's a real turn, I think, during the 1990s.
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So that's when the Cold War was over, and you might have thought that that would mean
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an era of good feeling, after all, the United States had triumphs in the Cold War, but
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instead, we went from Cold War to culture war, and a lot of the energies that had been
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projected outward in the Cold War got projected inward now in this increased belligerence.
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I think a key figure in that was the Republican leader of the House, Newt Gingrich, who turned
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his back, convinced Republicans to turn their back on a more conciliatory bipartisanship
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that had earlier prevailed in Congress, and instead adopt a much more confrontational
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accusative kind of politics.
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And it worked.
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It was successful.
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Yeah.
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I suppose it's also for people who aren't, American politics wants to be aware that Gingrich
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was coming into an environment in which Democrats had controlled Congress for something like 40
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years, right?
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So it's not like he was just making up something that he pulled out of his bum for no reason.
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This was a moribund party, congressional, and his vigor and the contract with America,
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in a sense of like we can fight, was inspiring for a lot of people on the right of American
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politics.
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And so the claim, your claim is basically correct me if I'm wrong, that Newt Gingrich and
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Fox News and Rush Limbaugh essentially used the culture war as a replacement for the
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Cold War in the sense that it was strategically, you know, it gave Republicans something to fight
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against, which they had lost with the fall of the Soviet Union.
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It gave them a mission as defenders of the American way of life.
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And I do believe it was strategically in their interest to, I mean, it was an advantage
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for them to take that position and to open up a whole new series of fronts in their battle
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against the Democratic Party.
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And now I, but I think there's other aspects of this because I think during the 90s,
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that's when Bill Clinton was president, and I should be clear here, I worked in the
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Clinton White House in the first year.
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I worked on health care reform.
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It was a failure.
17:24
And that was in 1993, and then Democrats lost control of Congress in 1994, and some people
17:35
blamed that whole effort to reform health care, you know, as being responsible for what
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happened.
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During the 90s, first of all, Clinton was a very gifted politician.
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He won that 1992 election against George Bush.
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Many people were shocked.
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That was just after the success of the United States in the Gulf War against Saddam Hussein.
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And a lot of other Democrats refused to run.
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Clinton succeeded in winning that election.
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And then he won re-election in 1996, actually is the first Democrat to win re-election since
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Franklin Roosevelt, you know, almost half a century earlier.
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So it's a, Clinton was a very gifted politician.
18:22
He made, however, I think, a historic mistake in joining with Republicans in the free trade
18:31
policies, the North American Free Trade Agreement called NAFTA, and later the opening to China.
18:38
Though both of those resulted in very significant losses of manufacturing jobs.
18:45
And that the first agreement NAFTA particularly affected working-class jobs in the South,
18:53
and the second one in case of China, that really had a big effect in the Midwest.
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And the Democratic Party ended up losing support in these regions.
19:04
And I think these agreements were very important in that.
19:08
And moreover, they convinced a lot of working-class voters that the Democratic Party was no longer
19:16
looking after them, that the Democrats no longer had their priority, when no longer making their
19:23
interests a priority.
19:24
So you have to put that together with the other policies regarding race and gender.
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And I think there was a basis for many white working-class voters,
19:36
feeling that the Democrats had abandoned them, and they looked elsewhere for political support.
19:46
And ultimately, Donald Trump was the beneficiary.
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I mean, it's tricky, isn't it, playing the game of Monday morning quarterbacking not you,
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because you were actually there.
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But me, in the sense that it's easy to criticize Clinton's third-way sort of centrism.
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And it happened in other countries as well.
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You had Tony Blair in the UK, and you had the hawk government in Australia,
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which was a sense of left government in the 80s, but was sort of doing similar things.
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And the sense now is, well, they should have remained truer to those white working-class people
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who have now been snapped up by Trump.
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But as you say, at the time, a Democrat hadn't won reelection in a generational more.
20:30
So whatever it was that Clinton was doing, he was tuning into something that people seemingly
20:34
wanted more than social democracy.
20:40
In the short run, he was successful, and at the time, I'm not saying that at that time,
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I had such great foresight.
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I did not.
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I'm saying now, we can see what the consequences were.
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And then there's just one further point about, so I kind of see this whole 30-year period
21:02
going from the 90s up to now as fitting together.
21:08
This has been an era in the United States with very close elections.
21:14
The 2000 election, Al Gore versus George Bush, was decided by 527 votes in the state of
21:25
Florida.
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That was the final margin.
21:29
Or nine votes in Washington, D.C., depending on who you ask in the Supreme Court.
21:35
Yeah.
21:36
One vote in the Supreme Court.
21:39
And actually, Gore won a majority of the votes, but lost it in the electoral college.
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This institution that we have that no other modern democracy has, that dates from the
21:53
18th century, and results in sometimes the loser of the popular vote winning the presidency.
22:03
And then that happened again in 2016 with Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton.
22:08
So this is another part of the story in this book.
22:15
The United States has some very old institutions.
22:19
It has a constitution that is very hard to amend.
22:23
And so we're kind of stuck with these provisions.
22:28
And it just happens now that the way the U.S. Senate works, the way the electoral college
22:34
works, both of those are skewed in favor of Republicans.
22:40
I'm not saying that this was designed in the 18th century for this purpose.
22:44
It's just worked out that way.
22:45
Well, it was designed.
22:46
And wasn't it for a purpose which could be regarded as a proxy for that, which is that
22:51
it was designed to give disproportionate consideration to smaller and more rural and
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regional populations.
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And those tend to be Republican now.
23:01
Would that be fair?
23:02
Yeah, well, the electoral college was particularly at the behest of the southern states of the
23:07
slave states.
23:09
So there is, I don't want to overemphasize this because, again, I don't think there is
23:14
some grand vision that somehow in the 21st century, this was going to have the effect that
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it's having, it's to some extent just an after effect of a very antique constitution
23:27
that we have.
23:29
And so it's part of the argument of the book here that we have had a changing people
23:34
in the United States, a changing people in the sense that people have developed new ideas
23:40
about identity and about rights.
23:43
We have had an infusion of immigrants.
23:45
We've had younger generations, particularly women who have different ideas about how they
23:51
want to live from their parents or grandparents.
23:53
So we had a changing people, but we have what I refer to in the book as a resisting nation.
23:58
We have this old structure, these old institutions and those institutions, it just happens, tend
24:05
to be biased in favor of an older version of America.
24:11
Just before we get off the 1990s in Clinton, I'm just curious about your time working for
24:17
the government then.
24:18
What were your first experiences of meeting Bill Clinton?
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What did you make of the guy when you first heard that he was running?
24:28
So my connection to Clinton comes through a friend of mine who was a friend of his.
24:38
And that's Robert Reich, who became a secretary of labor under Clinton.
24:44
And he and I lived near each other at the time.
24:47
We both taught at Harvard.
24:49
And we had mutual friends and it was his result of that connection.
24:58
So I was working in those years on healthcare issues, on health policy.
25:04
And I had written the draft of a book about healthcare reform.
25:12
And Bob Reich was a close advisor of Clinton's and he was involved in writing.
25:20
So we often have in the United States during a political campaign candidates issue a book,
25:26
a campaign book.
25:29
And the book that Clinton was going to issue was called putting people first.
25:37
And so that Bob Reich was working on this, they came to the section on healthcare.
25:43
They weren't sure what they wanted to put into it.
25:45
And so he asked to see the draft of this manuscript of mine.
25:50
And that's how I then became involved in the in Clinton's campaign in 1992.
25:58
And a week after the inauguration, I found myself working in the White House on these very issues.
26:05
And it was an extraordinary experience.
26:10
You asked what I thought of Clinton.
26:13
So I had advised some other political candidates.
26:16
There was nobody else I had run into in politics who was as knowledgeable about these issues.
26:24
And it was as smart as he was.
26:27
He's the absolutely stood out.
26:30
I had this experience when I'd be making a presentation or leader when I was making presentations
26:36
of decision memos to the president about healthcare reform.
26:40
These two page memos couldn't be longer than two pages.
26:43
And you have to explain very concisely what the options are.
26:49
And there were other people in the room, but I always had the sense that Clinton was five
26:56
steps ahead of everybody else, impatient to get there, and really had an idea of what he wanted to do.
27:05
So I was, yeah, I was very impressed by him.
27:10
And where did you work when you were working for him?
27:11
Were you actually in the White House?
27:13
Well, how does that, how does that function like are you going in for a, for, that you have
27:16
a desk there?
27:17
Are you?
27:18
Are you remote?
27:19
What does it look like?
27:20
There's, there's the White House itself and there's a building next to it, which at that time was called the old executive office building.
27:29
And it's, you know, just, it's within the White House complex.
27:34
And that's, that's where the office of the vice president is, various other people.
27:40
And that's that's where I, I work.
27:42
I was not in the West Wing.
27:43
It's, yeah, yeah, got it.
27:44
And so I was speaking of the vice president, what did you make of Al Gore at the time?
27:50
I didn't actually have much contact with him and really had, but, you know, so I, he was, he was there.
27:58
And part of these, of these discussions, but, but this, in this, this particular policy issue.
28:06
So the, from the public's point of view, it was Clinton's wife, Hillary Clinton, who was supposed to be in charge of this.
28:13
I was going to ask about that, whether that's true or not.
28:16
No, it was not true.
28:17
Bill Bill Clinton was in charge from the start.
28:21
She was there and, and, and, and she was much more the ambassador to the public.
28:31
But, but in the actual decision-making process, it was unquestionably Bill Clinton.
28:37
I sat making presentations to him and that's her.
28:40
And what was the model that, that Clinton then, then took for health care?
28:47
Yeah, so we were trying to find a, an approach that could win moderate democratic.
28:59
And I've not heard Republican votes.
29:02
And so it was not going to be just a government plan.
29:08
It was going to involve public financing, but competing private plans, competing private plans under a cap.
29:18
So the idea was there'd be regulation on the total spending, but that we'd have private firms competing for enrollment in each region of the country.
29:34
And there'd be a lot of state flexibility.
29:37
A lot of the functions would be devolved on the states to work this out.
29:41
You know, but there would be, it would be a national plan in the sense that individuals would have a right to health care, citizens, whatever right to health care.
29:51
How is that right being delivered?
29:53
Is that through subsidies or through, they're being a public option that the government can, that you can buy into, which is a government plan or?
30:01
No, we had no public option actually at the time.
30:04
We, we had private plans competing.
30:08
We, we had public subsidies.
30:11
But and, and I have to mention this, there was an employer mandate.
30:19
There was a requirement for employers to contribute a certain amount.
30:23
So it was a joint employer employee arrangement, plus other people being brought in with subsidies.
30:31
And was there an individual mandate, did everybody have to have health insurance?
30:35
You know, that's very interesting.
30:37
That issue really didn't come up at that time.
30:42
That's an issue that developed later under Obama.
30:46
I actually, the Republican, so actually I should step back.
30:51
In contrast to our employer mandate, the Republicans in the early 90s were supporting an individual mandate.
31:00
We didn't think it was necessary.
31:02
We thought that under the subsidies, this would be so attractive that, that, you know, people would readily sign up.
31:10
Right, right.
31:12
What happened to health care in America in the interim that has both made it so expensive?
31:20
And like, you can stop the clock at about a care if you want to, but how do you view that period in American health care?
31:27
Well, it was already very expensive by the early 1990s.
31:32
We were responding to a very widespread sense that health care was becoming unaffordable.
31:40
That fewer employers were providing the kind of health plans they had provided in the past.
31:46
There was enormous amount of pressure on the system.
31:48
And that's so we were not just kind of inventing this idea of reform.
31:52
There had been a lot of discussion before about different approaches to doing this.
31:57
In fact, I had written at the time that there was a kind of negative consensus that people agreed in polls
32:04
that there was a crisis that something fundamental needed to be done that came out of poll after poll.
32:10
But there was no positive consensus.
32:12
There was no agreement about which direction to take.
32:15
And we were trying to get from the negative to the positive consensus.
32:20
And we failed to do that.
32:21
We failed to create that consensus behind the alternative that Clinton introduced.
32:28
And what has happened in subsequent decades is that costs continue to go up.
32:34
And fewer people have been getting health insurance from their employer.
32:41
And so of a tremendous variety of different programs.
32:50
For seniors, for low income people, for children, I can go on, there's an enormous amount of complexity in the US health care system.
33:01
So much complexity that many people find it incredibly hard to navigate.
33:08
They are bewildered by this complexity.
33:11
And it's actually very expensive.
33:13
The US has by far the heaviest bureaucratic overhead.
33:18
Because of all the complexity in the US has since from all these different plans, policies layered up of one another.
33:25
And not just the government plans, but I mean the private companies are incredibly complicated.
33:29
Do you have anyone who's lived in the United States, I can say from personal experience,
33:33
like dealing with the health insurance companies and then trying to figure out what a thing is going to cost.
33:38
And the health provider won't tell you what it's going to cost.
33:41
And the insurer won't tell you what they're going to rebate until after the thing has happened.
33:45
You never know what the out of pocket is going to be.
33:47
You never know what the final bill is going to be.
33:49
You never know how much you're going to have to fight for some particular code item on it.
33:54
It is a lot easier, I must say, having a universal public publicly provided Medicare for all in Australia.
34:02
You don't have to think about it.
34:04
Yeah, I mean, this is the irony because Americans have been afraid of a public system on the grounds that it would be more expensive.
34:13
But all the evidence indicates that our system is the most expensive.
34:17
And it's partly the most expensive because of all that complexity.
34:22
Yeah, I mean, there is an uncomfortable truth here to some extent,
34:26
which is that when I talk to my left-wing American friends,
34:28
they do seem to be under the impression that Medicare in countries that have universal
34:34
Medicare like Australia and Canada is as opulent and unrestrained as American health care is.
34:41
I was struck in the States by when I had a good employer and I was on a gold plan,
34:46
just how much stuff was covered and how few gatekeepers there were between me
34:51
and going to a physical therapist who would give me a massage and the whole thing would be reimbursed by my health insurer,
34:56
which really would just not cut the mustard in Australia because it would have to go through my family doctor,
35:02
my general practitioner, and it would have to be, have to meet a certain threshold of necessity in order to get approved.
35:08
So there is, I think Americans who are in favor of universal health care do have to understand
35:12
that there is a rationing involved and it is spasa when it's fairer and cheap.
35:19
I mean, a part of the cost blowout in the States is just that there's no restraint.
35:25
Well, there are restraints, but if you're among those people who have very good insurance,
35:33
and if you're close to a major medical school, major hospital,
35:41
you are going to get very good medical care.
35:43
I don't want to say anything to the country.
35:45
Yeah, yeah.
35:46
I mean, I wouldn't necessarily say it's always, you are going to get good care,
35:50
but I'm saying there's also a cost to the unnecessary care that is,
35:54
you would not regard as necessarily being good, but there's a lot of it.
35:59
You know, there may be unnecessary tests or unnecessary procedures.
36:02
So just pivoting to the international globalization, free trade move that the Democrats undertook in that period.
36:12
Robert Rice, your friend has become much more left-wing and opposed to those reforms and critical of that period
36:21
and that trend in the Democratic Party.
36:24
The Democrats on a mass don't seem to have shaken it completely
36:28
with the exception of notable Bernie Sanders style figures,
36:31
but not at the top level of politics.
36:35
What do you now make of globalization and free trade?
36:41
Well, there have been technological changes that were going to create problems
36:54
for many working class voters who had jobs in manufacturing.
37:00
That was, even without free trade, there would have been very significant reductions
37:07
because of automation.
37:09
So to some extent, free trade gets the blame for a long-term process that would have happened anyway.
37:17
And if the United States, if Trump's tariffs bring back some manufacturing to the United States,
37:24
those factories are not going to have that many jobs.
37:27
They're going to be so highly automated.
37:29
So we're not going to get back to the situation that we had before and that's an illusion.
37:38
So I don't think that undoing that now is going to return us to some earlier period.
37:47
One thing that was distinctive in that earlier period is that there was a very high rate of unionization in industry.
37:57
And now, those unions have almost disappeared.
38:05
A very small percentage of American workers belong to unions today.
38:10
And so I'm less concerned really about trying to get back to where we were.
38:18
I don't think that's possible.
38:20
I do think we need a system where workers have more leverage.
38:27
They have greater clout in relation to companies.
38:32
And it's hard to see how that's going to happen.
38:36
But that's really what's required to get back to a situation where ordinary people have some kind of security and can raise a family.
38:49
And when you talk about the discrediting of the liberal vision of America and the rise of this new form of right wing politics in the Republican party in this century,
39:02
you make the point that the decline of manufacturing employment had a couple of big impacts on the hopes of left wing Americans.
39:12
The first being that in the 1970s, the loss of industrial jobs led to black family breakup and the crack epidemic,
39:22
which sort of discredited liberal great society reforms.
39:26
And then a second wave in the early 2000s when it hit white working class people caused the opioid epidemic and push them to the right.
39:37
Do you want to reflect on that?
39:39
Yes, so the basic idea here is that when you have loss of jobs on a large scale in particular communities, the consequences are not just economic.
39:52
They're social and this has happened in two waves.
39:58
I'm suggesting there.
40:00
So it first hit black Americans mid-1970s on through the 80s, the loss of industrial jobs really closely related to family breakup, single parent families, drug use,
40:19
the whole pattern of pathology that many Americans then attributed to blacks culturally.
40:29
And then what happened in the early 2000s is that we saw exactly the same sequence in white working class communities,
40:38
the loss of those jobs in the Midwest in Ohio and Pennsylvania and other states and the social consequences, very much the same kinds of social consequences, single parent families, drug use and so forth.
40:54
And these have been, it's been a kind of tragic unfolding of economic change and political change.
41:03
And, you know, I, so we have a, there's a term that two of my colleagues introduced deaths of despair and the, the, they've written, this is Angus deepen and his wife and case.
41:25
And they've written about the pattern of growing rights of suicide, drug abuse and alcoholism and the close association of these with these, you know, with the, with the economic devastation.
41:50
And the United States, if you look back, you know, into the 20th century, we had rising life expectancy and that was true for lower income people as well as higher income people, there was a general increase in, in life expectancy and, and well being.
42:12
And in the 20th century, in the 21st century, this century, that stopped and, and certain groups are actually really suffering from a decline in life expectancy and really measurable if you look at these things in terms of well being in terms of disability rates and so forth, all kinds of things indicate a real decline.
42:35
So, basically what I want to suggest is that there is real suffering going on, it's not just, you know, made up, real people are suffering from these changes.
42:50
And I understand why, if, you know, in that context, you would look back and you said, well, things were better in the past, why you might feel nostalgic, why you might be attracted to a politics of nostalgia, you know, making things great again, make America great again.
43:08
It was once better for us, why can't it be better again, why, and that's a, that's a reasonable thing for people to think, but they're misattributing the cost, you know, it's not, they bringing back factories, that's not going to solve the problem, blaming immigrants is not going to solve the problem.
43:26
So, there's this, you know, I think tragic way in which it's, it's working out.
43:34
The, let's just chart the civil rights of the 20th century as you depict them in the first half of the book because it's good to get us to a place at which the Democrats and the left in America may have fumbled the opportunity of trying to win over these populations.
43:50
So, you talk about feminism and the black civil rights movement and also the gay rights movement. How do they fit into your grand narrative of American political history?
44:01
My grand narrative. Well, I think post-war America, the America that existed in the, in the 1950s, 1960s, it was a kind of mixed pattern.
44:16
You know, many people look back at it now and they think about how repressive it was, you know, culturally and sexually and so forth.
44:24
But in many ways, it was a very admirable period. Americans built a lot of schools, later they built a lot more prisons.
44:36
There was, there were actual, you know, real improvements and way of life, everyday experience for a lot of working people.
44:45
This is, this is a period when, when, when working class incomes grew faster than the incomes of the rich.
44:51
So, that's, and I think that hope, that sense of improvement contributed to the belief that, well, now, now is the time when we should deal with this historic injustice to black people.
45:07
And, and I think that contributed to the sense that let us redeem the promise of this country for the people who were not allowed to share in its bounty.
45:21
And, and, and we did begin to do that. And, and I, I think that's really one of the, you know, great things about what happened in that era with the attempt to achieve integration and, and open up opportunity for, for many black people, for many low income people.
45:44
That movement, the civil rights struggle, led then, I think, to other groups thinking, we too have been denied any full share.
46:00
We too have not been given equal respect. And, and the, so the black movement created a kind of model. I actually referred to black Americans as a model minority. They were a model for all these other groups that said, yes, let's, let's, let's, let's get a share of that.
46:21
And, and there's direct spillover that I trace from the black civil rights movement to the movement among originally Mexican Americans, the Hispanic Americans, also to the women's movement, the whole idea that there's something called sexism, which is analogous to racism.
46:46
And that develops in this period. So it's this enlargement that's going on, this sense of, of rectification, of old injuries, some old abuses.
47:04
And, you know, you may, and find lots of things to criticize in it. I, I, I don't want to say it was all good. But on the whole, I believe this was a, you know, fundamentally just set of movements and, and, and, and impulses to try to, to try to achieve the, the quality that is promised in the declaration of independence.
47:33
So the, the progressive view of the 21st century is, and I can, I can feel it, sort of oozing from the pages of, of your book is incredibly for wrong.
47:47
And, there is that the backlash that Trump represents is part of a long lineage of reactionary right wing politics that has always objected to uppity, upstart minorities trying to assert their place at the, their seat at the table and trying to find, you know, an equal footing.
48:10
That it's analogous to opposition to the civil rights movement in the 1960s.
48:17
The counterargument from non-crazy Republicans would be, we want equality. I mean, John, what would John Roberts say, right? You know, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
48:33
Something along the lines of equality was the point. That's what made Martin Luther King, Jr. So great. That's what, that's why I signed off on a burger fell for gay marriage.
48:47
But what's happened to the left in the past couple of decades, especially the last decade, is that the Martin Luther King Nelson Mandela vision of a universalist left that wants everyone to be treated equally and wants to turn the volume down on our difference has been replaced by a more tribalistic finger wagging,
49:12
identitarian left that is obsessed with privilege, oppression, race, sexuality, policing, language, thinking about America as a set of communities that disempower individual flourishing and are actually antithetical to the colorblindness of the civil rights era.
49:38
And that it's actually the Republicans who are the defenders of Lincoln and MLK. What do you make of that worldview?
49:48
So I don't deny that there are some people who, you said finger pointing, who want to call out every minor transgression, every micro aggression, every, you know, and have these ideas.
50:04
That's what people call wokeism, but that is not really the Democratic Party as a whole. That is a phenomenon on the left on the cultural left.
50:18
But I think of wokeism compared to Trumpism as a flee is to an elephant. It's a nuisance, but it's not really a serious threat to equality in the United States.
50:39
I mean, you say that it's not the Democratic Party and true enough, it is just the cultural left that was behind, you know, social media mobs and getting journalists fired for, you know, I don't know, reporting on concerns about pediatric transgender medicine or something like that.
50:55
The problem was from this perspective that the Democratic candidates and Democratic politicians and Democratic staffers and Democratic policymakers are all on Twitter and seemed quite cowed by that movement.
51:10
And there weren't a lot of people really post Obama on the left, whether it was all of the prominent progressives from AOC to Gavin Newsom to Kamala Harris were to Joe Biden himself seemingly beholden to making sure that they didn't trigger any trip wires or try to, you know, that they were gentle with that wing of the party and made sure that they said all of the right things about
51:40
these new catechisms and the theory of the case here is that that just pissed a lot of people off necessarily and even if it is just a flee, it's a flee that voters found to be revealing about the actual priorities of this cultural movement in America, which is that they care more about patting themselves on the back for being on the right side of history and being in the right tribe than they do about working people.
52:07
I don't I don't deny that there's some truth to what you're saying it just really has to do with the scale of the phenomenon and and would.
52:18
Yeah so I I was a letter that appeared at Harper's magazine some years ago yeah criticize I signed that letter criticizing the very impulses that you're talking about the very phenomenon that you're talking about so I don't share that.
52:33
But I don't believe it measures up to the kind of threat that I see coming now from Trump.
52:43
Well, no, certainly not. But yes, I mean, now we're in a completely different, you know, topsy-turvy upside down universe, but in terms of interrogating the causes of the success of the cultural right in the 2010s and 2020s.
52:57
I'm interested in whether that's part of the jigsaw puzzle.
53:01
Yeah, so I took as a section of the book on diversity as an ideal and the like the diversity trainings that some companies introduced that seem to have had no positive effect whatsoever, but did irritate people.
53:21
And I know exactly what that was was about, you know, companies introduced these because their legal councils told them it would prevent them from getting successfully sued for discrimination.
53:36
So they subjected their workers to these trainings and and and alienated a lot of people in the process and didn't really achieve anything at all.
53:48
So there's something to this and I I do I do discuss some of that in the book.
53:54
I guess it just comes down to the fact that I don't I don't see it. I mean, I recognize it as a cultural phenomenon, but I don't think of it as really having been a primary cause of what has happened in recent years.
54:09
Right, right. Yeah, it may not be primary. It may just give a permission structure to the 1% of the population that you that is all that tips the balance in a presidential election these days to go with the person who's saying screw all of this bullshit rather than the person who seems beholden to it.
54:27
But I guess that's a common factual will never be able to run.
54:31
Sleepwalking. Yeah, I just don't see very much of that today.
54:35
No, I would say that's on my own campus. I mean, there was several years ago.
54:41
The graduate students were all putting their pronouns, you know, after their names.
54:48
Now they're not doing it. I just think there's been, you know, a shift back.
54:56
Yeah. Well, I mean, in part, I think because if there is any truth to the idea that the reason why there's so much oxygen and energy on the far right is in retaliation to this behavior, then it would obviously be prudent to turn the volume down on this behavior.
55:14
If you don't want to empower Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump, Jr.
55:20
You mentioned sleepwalking into revenge, the second half of the book, which you break down into a bunch of different ideas, immigration and race and, yeah, the difficulties for working class Americans.
55:34
Do you want to just talk about, talk briefly about each of those sort of demographic contributions to where we are?
55:43
Right. Well, first of all, what we've already talked about, the free trade agreements, the Democrats who voted and the Republicans who voted for those agreements.
55:52
I really, I think had very little conception of what the consequences would be really didn't appreciate that for many of them, it would mean the end of their own political careers.
56:03
But it was actually not in their interests to do it. So that's a kind of sleepwalking.
56:09
But I go through the whole history of immigration policy from the mid 20th century until recently.
56:20
And when until 1965, Congress passed the Immigration Nationalities Act that eliminated the old quotas that dated from the 1920s on mostly Southern and Eastern European immigrants.
56:43
These are originally adopted clearly to limit the number of Catholics and Jews coming to the United States.
56:49
And when reforms were adopted 1965, that's what most people were thinking about eliminating those national origins quotas.
56:58
But the law also eliminated the ban on nation migration to the United States and introduced other changes.
57:09
When was this point? When was this? Sorry, what date? 1965, 1965.
57:17
And there's really very little indication from the congressional hearings. I went back and I read the hearings and public discussion that people really understood what a significant effect this would have on the makeup of the country.
57:34
They just did not grasp what the long run consequences would be.
57:40
And there were very good reasons for that because the law gave a preference to family unification so that immigrants who had family in the United States already would get preference.
57:52
And they thought that would mean this new immigration law would just keep America the way it was.
57:58
And of course that is not what happened. And I look at the other immigration reforms and look at the testimony what people were thinking repeatedly.
58:10
They did not understand what the consequences would be. So this enormous change that's taken place demographically.
58:19
I don't think really was consciously thought out.
58:24
If they're passing a bill that says we're no longer going to restrict people of color from coming into America, then they must have understood that people of color are going to come into America.
58:37
So when you say people of color, let's take the example of Asian migration.
58:42
They, no, I don't think they had any reason to think that the testimonies of time was there'd be a little bit, but there's no reason to expect any.
58:56
And again, you have to go back to see what the what the law actually said. And in the short run, by the way, there wasn't a big change.
59:05
Okay, it's really it took time. It took decades to build out. So there were certain economic preferences in the law.
59:14
People with certain skills. And indeed, that's how the Asian migration began with skilled immigrants. And then they brought their family and so forth.
59:24
So they didn't they didn't have a good understanding of what later we came called chain migration.
59:29
And what change should they have? Well, once you have families and communities of particular ethnic group in a country, then others will come in because they have.
59:44
They have kin, they have a community where they will, you know, find a positive reception.
59:49
And that is what gradually over time led to this increase in in in migration.
59:57
So I know I've had this discussion with other people. Of course, they must have understood this, but no really.
1:00:05
There was I I I've also gone back to the academic journals. There was almost no research on immigration in the mid 1960s.
1:00:16
This simply wasn't a subject that got a lot of attention in the social science world.
1:00:25
Amazing to think about that now, but really it didn't.
1:00:29
And and so there were in fact, there were no social scientists who testified at those congressional hearings back in 1965.
1:00:38
So they didn't they really just didn't understand it.
1:00:41
I mean, why explanation for that is that they didn't understand it, but it couldn't another explanation, Paul, be that because the story we are told about America is that I mean, the statue of liberty was up.
1:00:51
It talked about the huddled masses yearning to breed free. Like we are the other explanation would be that it was so understood as part of the fabric of the American experience that it was a migrant country that it didn't need to be explicitly investigated.
1:01:05
Well, but they thought the new immigrants would be like the old immigrants.
1:01:08
Right.
1:01:09
They really thought it because because of the way the law was structured.
1:01:13
Right.
1:01:14
Really, it seemed that it wouldn't shame.
1:01:17
It would not change the ethnic makeup of the country.
1:01:20
I'm virtually voting the chairman of the committee.
1:01:23
Oh, yeah.
1:01:24
Didn't JFK literally say as much?
1:01:27
It was actually Ted Kennedy, brother.
1:01:30
Okay. Yeah.
1:01:31
The ethnic makeup of America would not change.
1:01:34
Yeah.
1:01:35
So then I think just to go ahead with this argument about people not understanding the consequences.
1:01:44
When Obama was elected, a lot of people thought, well, now that is going to mark this movement away from race in America.
1:01:55
We're going to have a post racial country.
1:01:57
We're going to we're going to be able to put race behind us.
1:02:00
That was the hope of a lot of people who voted for Obama who supported Obama.
1:02:05
But what we know now, I think, from a lot of research is that Obama's election intensified racial feeling in the country instead of reducing it.
1:02:16
So that's what I mean by sleepwalking into and to revenge.
1:02:20
It's just not understanding how certain policies or how the election of a president might have very different.
1:02:29
It might have very different effects from the ones that people who supported these things and expected.
1:02:36
The missing piece of the puzzle there, it strikes me in immigration is the inability of American politics to deal with illegal versus legal immigration, which it always struck me in America.
1:02:49
A too often conflated and it's quite tricky to articulate a xenophilic, pro immigrant, pro migration, welcoming vision of America that is also tough on illegal migration.
1:03:07
That is a vanishingly small sliver of the American conversation.
1:03:12
We're in a country like Australia. That's a much, much bigger quorum here where we have a longstanding consensus to be totally brutal about illegal immigration in order to win over a large retain enough public support for very generous rates of refugee resettlement and very high rates of immigration.
1:03:31
That's the pact that Australia seems to have made with itself. It's obviously a lot easier when you're an island than when you have a continuous land border with Mexico.
1:03:40
But what do you make of the inability to grapple with that?
1:03:46
Well, the position we were describing is the position that I've supported. Generally supportive of immigration, but saying absolutely we should limit illegal immigration. We should have a secure border.
1:04:01
And so the difficulty here is partly that the people who have supported that policy and I'm thinking now there's a commission decades ago that adopted exactly this view and was chaired by a Democrat has a bipartisan commission.
1:04:27
But carrying out that policy always ran into an obstacle and that obstacle is that a lot of businesses in the United States benefited from illegal immigration.
1:04:45
They were able, these were agricultural, a lot of a lot of agribusiness, a lot of farm labor, but also textiles, a lot of other things, a lot of businesses were highly dependent on cheap labor from illegal immigrants.
1:05:09
And despite the fact that the Republican Party now stands for tough immigration laws, they didn't actually vote that way on the key questions about enforcement.
1:05:22
Well, they still don't, they still don't, they still not in favor of actual real punishments for companies.
1:05:30
And if you find companies hundreds of millions of dollars, or if you just set up the tax system such that they could deduct the wages of workers in a way that was more profitable for them to, you know, more punitive for them to be keeping someone off the books, then putting them on the books, or having a proper ID system so that your social security card.
1:05:50
I don't know what it is today, but when I got my first social security card 15 years ago, it was literally a piece of cardboard with a typewriter stamped number on it right with no, you know, with the Department of Immigration not talking to Department of Labor or whoever overseas employment.
1:06:10
I mean, there's a million things that you could do that Republicans don't support while they are supporting ICE agents going in and rounding people up.
1:06:17
Right, right, but they're not doing that on the farms that depend on those, you know, illegal immigrants. I mean, that's what they're a very high percentage of agricultural workers.
1:06:32
And if they were really to be deported, there'd be another kind of crisis in the United States, all that food riding in the fields.
1:06:42
Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, everyone always says that, you know, what would happen to Americans orange juice if they could, if orange just weren't being picked by illegal immigrants because Americans don't want to do that job.
1:06:53
And I always point out to Americans that we do have orange juice in Australia and other countries that do not have widespread illegal labor workforces orange juice would be more expensive.
1:07:04
Those jobs would have to pay more and there are some, some kinds of farming that you would probably phase out in favor of other high value.
1:07:12
Yes, exactly, exactly.
1:07:15
So that's immigration. Yeah, I think I think that brings us up to today. The final sort of piece of the jigsaw that I thought was interesting that you flag is this the way that immigration and that the changing demography of America intersected with this post cold war moment that we were talking about.
1:07:34
Earlier when the gingriches and the and the fox newsers were in the rush limboors were making such hay out of cultural concerns and giving painting Republicans as the defenders of the American way of life that those sort of demographic challenges also created an anxiety on the right that they were just going to be swept out of power forever because America was going to become a majority minority country.
1:08:02
Where whites were a minority and you know people of color will always vote Democrat.
1:08:08
I assume because they're lazy and they want government handouts is the thinking and Republicans will never win an election again what happened.
1:08:18
Yeah, well, I don't think I think that fear really did grip Republicans and I think it was a fear partly about this demographic change and the idea that it created this inexorable political change.
1:08:34
None of that I think was really true and and but also you add to that the cultural changes going on that that intensified that anxiety among among conservatives now I just want to explain one one thing about that idea that whites would become a minority.
1:08:54
I I've written a lot about this separately from the book and I have a little bit about it in the book I think those demographic forecasts were wrong.
1:09:01
I think they were very misleading.
1:09:05
The they assume that they treat all people of Latin American descent as non white even though about half of them self identify as white and the rate of intermarriage between Latinos in the United States and Anglos is very, very high.
1:09:25
And actually a lot of the evidence indicates that they're adjusting to the United States. They're assimilating in ways that are very similar to those European immigrants in the in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
1:09:38
And I think really the long run likelihood is that that the white population rather than contracting will encompass a lot of the people of of Latin American descent.
1:09:53
And and actually I think that's true. There's a very high rate of intermarriage between whites and Asians and I just think the definition of what's white is likely to it's changed in the past when the Italians and to the United States a lot of people didn't think they were white.
1:10:11
And I think it's just likely to happen all over again and that we're not going to see white white's becoming a minority in the United States.
1:10:21
So not to mention in the case of Hispanic Americans, I don't know if it's apocryphal, but isn't Reagan claimed to have said that Latinos are Republicans, they just don't know it yet.
1:10:32
Because in his view, they're hardworking, they believe in family, they're culturally conservative, you know, they have tight knit communities, they believe in tradition, they were religious.
1:10:44
And I think a great many who come to the United States believe in the United States, they believe in the American dream. I think that's actually what a lot of the research shows.
1:10:55
And so I make this distinction between the way people so how people identify and who they identify with.
1:11:04
And I think a great many immigrants actually identify with white Americans, they want to become like them.
1:11:12
And they want to enjoy what white Americans have said, I don't think these fears about immigrants were really well founded, but they became a very powerful motivation.
1:11:25
Does the left bear any blame for that poll? And the sense that yes, the right was ringing its hands about it, about the future of the Republican Party in a minority white country.
1:11:38
And yet, if you think about which side of politics, I mean, at the same time Democrats were crowing about it. I mean, I remember Rachel Maddow talking about how Republicans are never going to be elected again during the Obama administration.
1:11:52
And if you had to pick which side of politics was likelier to be talking about racial identity as a kind of fixed marker of privilege or disadvantage or trauma or lived experience or voting behavior, it would have been the left at that time.
1:12:07
Now we've got open fascism on in corners of the right.
1:12:15
But yeah, I'm not sure the right made up the idea of minority.
1:12:20
There was a lot of demographic triumphalism on the left. And it was very poorly thought out.
1:12:31
It doesn't really reflect the history of immigrants in this country. And the way they have assimilated, there was assumption that these immigrants are not going to assimilate.
1:12:44
But actually, there's a great deal of research on this. They are assimilating. They are adapting to the United States and becoming integrated into the country.
1:12:55
What do you attribute the fact that most immigrant communities and also African Americans voted for Trump more the second time than they did the first time?
1:13:09
The Hispanic vote was still more democratic than Republican, more for Harris than for Trump.
1:13:19
He didn't lose anything.
1:13:24
So the Hispanic vote has oscillated a great deal of George Bush in 2004 got between 40 and 44% of the Hispanic vote.
1:13:36
What Trump got was in that same neighborhood. It was a shock. It was a shock given all the things that the Trump was saying.
1:13:43
But it was actually in line with this variation among in the Hispanic vote. And I would just say that in our most recent election, just earlier this month, there seems to have been a return of the Hispanic vote to the Democrats.
1:14:03
So I don't think what happened in 2024 was necessarily an indication of a long-term trend. I would just say there's a lot of there's a lot of heterogeneity among the Hispanic people in the United States.
1:14:19
Cubans, Mexicans, those from Latin America.
1:14:24
There's just a lot of some of them very conservative. They're refugees from communist or socialist countries. They don't like the parties to the left.
1:14:34
But others vary. So people were too quick to generalize from 2024 about what the future of these demographic patterns is going to be.
1:14:46
Is there any soul searching to be down on the left though about why a left that has been extremely focused for 10 years about the rights of traditionally disenfranchised minority communities and how important it is to think about our own whiteness and about the lived experiences of people of color.
1:15:06
Why that which if you spoke to a, I don't know, one of your graduate students might seem to be a slam dunk for American multiculturalism did not only not appeal but appeal less than it had in the last cycle to the people who the left is claiming to speak on behalf of.
1:15:26
Oh, yeah, I totally agree with that. I mean, whenever I hear somebody use the term Latin X, you know, there's been surveys of, you know, Hispanics and they overwhelmingly don't use this term, don't understand it.
1:15:42
Why would, why would academics begin talking in a language that makes no sense to, you know, the people who, who they're talking about. So I, you know, I don't disagree with.
1:15:52
Yeah, also, I mean, they speak a language where, you know, chairs have a gender. So it's not crazy that human beings would have genders if you speak a language where tables have genders.
1:16:02
What do you make just thinking forward as we wrap up the future of Democrats in the future of America of the debate as you say.
1:16:10
Walkness, I think we've, we've passed peak woke. I don't think this, I think it's clear that that level of identitarianism and sensoriousness led nowhere.
1:16:20
So there's obviously a battle over the future of the ideas of ideas on the left and what is going to be appealing.
1:16:26
Is it Zoran Memdani slash IOC slash Bernie? Is it some kind of Ezra Kleini abundance, maybe Gavin Newsomey sort of like let's make things happen agenda.
1:16:42
Let's be the party of doing things instead of the party of personality, legalistic challenges to anyone who wants to have a vision, a big vision.
1:16:52
What do you say the low hanging fruit politically for the left?
1:16:58
The low hanging fruit is the issue that was in the forefront in this election, not just Memdani, but also in my state and Virginia as well.
1:17:12
This is the issue of affordability. It's the immediate basis on which Democrats from the center to the left can agree on.
1:17:23
So that's that's the low hanging fruit.
1:17:26
I think what many people have to come to terms with is that a lot of old issues are now effectively dead.
1:17:35
We're not going to be able to go back to race conscious affirmative action. This is not going to happen when the Supreme Court overturned it.
1:17:46
There was no significant movement to restore it. I mean, it was just it was that's the end of an era.
1:17:53
So people have got to recognize that we've turned the corner on some things. We're not likely to revive them.
1:18:02
I think the same thing is true of free trade. I'm not saying the Trump's tariffs are popular. They're not.
1:18:08
And I think people will welcome it if the Supreme Court overturns the tariffs that he's introduced on this very large scale.
1:18:20
But free trade. We're not going back to free trade. That too has changed.
1:18:26
And there's a recognition. I think this also came out of the pandemic.
1:18:31
When there were real problems with supply chains, you know, that we couldn't just trust the global market to give us what we need.
1:18:39
So there's both sides of the Democratic Party need to recognize that we're in a new period in and need to figure out a common ground.
1:18:52
There's no way for this party to win unless the centrist and the progressives can figure out a common ground.
1:19:02
Now, they don't have to agree in between New York and, you know, the Midwest, there's not going to be the same, you know, politics that will win elections in different parts of the country.
1:19:13
But when it comes to a presidential candidate, that candidate is going to have to figure out a way to get both parties, get get both wings of the party on board.
1:19:26
And I think that's going to mean a much more economically focused policy.
1:19:33
It's going to be focused on this issue of affordability. And it's going to be focused on the issue of security.
1:19:40
And in the longer term, Paul, the American contradiction that is the title of your book, and which, you know, you say dates back to the founding of the country between subjugation on the one hand and freedom on the other.
1:19:52
You know, fear and revenge being whipped up in reaction to aspirational visionary, you know, ideals about egalitarianism.
1:20:02
What does that contradiction get resolved at some point in America's future? Should it get resolved or when it resolves to America go up in a puff of smoke and cease to be America?
1:20:13
I don't want to make any prediction that this is going to get resolved. You know, when Obama was first elected, I really did think we had turned the corner.
1:20:23
I made my own mistake about this. You know, I thought this is the beginning of the end of the American contradiction, but it wasn't. It was another phase.
1:20:32
So I don't know that we can close the book on this. And, you know, but, but I'm also not saying that we're condemned to the kind of conflict that we're seeing right now.
1:20:47
And that we're not, you know, I don't have a fatalistic vision of it either.
1:20:53
Are you optimistic that Trump will be a blip in American history? A pivotal one, but that this trajectory will not end very badly.
1:21:04
You know, so I worry now about the ways in which we might get a self perpetuating government in the United States, partly through a Supreme Court that has endorsed an enormous expansion of presidential power unparalleled in the past.
1:21:25
And so there's a real risk here of authoritarianism. I mean, there's no other way to describe it. That's, you know, and so we can't just assume that we're going to revert back to the kind of fair elections and free play of institutions that we had in the past week.
1:21:50
We can't assume it. I believe we have to fight for it.
1:21:54
Well, I hope you guys make it out alive because the rest of the world needs you to be doing well as well. Paul, it's great to talk to you. Thanks so much for your time.
1:22:03
Okay. Well, thank you so much.