Tocqueville Road Trip: 1. Game of chance

23:32John Prideaux:And her lifestyle definitely tends towards the aristocratic. Glittering soirees, upscale friends, nights watching Così Fantutti and Rigoletto. I really enjoyed giving money to the opera. I really did. Those chandeliers, that was expensive. And it's in perpetuity. I mean, I was so proud. I sit under the chandelier, the biggest chandelier. I sit right there next to the placas at the window. I love the fact that I was able to do that. But look closely and you can find all sorts of democratic forces at play here. For one thing, Barbara isn't trying to hoard her money or shore up a dynasty. She seems intent on spending it all before she dies.

24:28John Prideaux:As well as her philanthropic activity, she recently commissioned an artist called Machine Dazzle to design a tomb for her, or to be precise, for her and her late husband, who died in 2021. It will be a seven-foot-long wave of love, decorated with a shield of Achilles, crossed skis, books, a violin and a running horse. He learned how to ride for me. I learned how to ski for him. That's his urn. This is mine, which I will fill up when I get gone. It's easy to imagine Europeans of a certain class scoffing at this. So trashy, so American. But I think Tocqueville would see something else here. He was deeply impressed by America's estate laws.

25:15John Prideaux:These ensured that fortunes didn't simply pass on to the eldest son, as they did in aristocratic societies. Instead, they had to be shared among all surviving children equally. The idea that wealth is something to be earned, enjoyed, and then broken up and redistributed is equality of conditions in action. And we can find it woven into other parts of Barbara's story too. Because she didn't inherit her fortune from her parents. She trained as a secretary when she was a young woman. And she told me about how she hustled her way up the career ladder starting in the mid-1950s.

25:54I walked into Condé Nast. I said, I want Vogue. and I want$85 a week. She's looking at this kid wearing an outfit she made herself, because I did, I made all my own clothes. And she says, we'd hate to lose you on account of salary. I said, what do you want to pay me? She said,$65 a week instead of$85 a week.

26:27John Prideaux:I said, okay. Through a mixture of grit and talent, Barbara rose to become the editor of Brides magazine in the mid-1960s. Then, in the early 1970s, she found her own perfect match, Donald Tober. Donald and I used to dance everywhere. Oh my God, we danced. We were famous. Here come the Tobers. Oh my God, it was so fabulous. He was so cool, smooth, fantastic, great dancer. He went to Poly Prep. They taught him how to dance when he was a kid.

27:06John Prideaux:Donald was a businessman and the scion of the Sugar Foods Corporation. If you've ever been to an American diner, you probably will have encountered one of their products, small pink sachets of a sugar substitute called Sweet 'n Low. You know, he'd go into a little diner and he'd say, you know, here's the Sweet 'n Low and Sweet 'n Low doesn't have any calories. Oh, well, we want to have that. I imagine Tocqueville looking slightly bemused at the idea of a Park Avenue fortune based on tiny parcels of not sugar. But he'd certainly have recognised the democratic forces that made it all possible.

27:54Would you like to see something amazing?

27:58John Prideaux:Yes. Will you follow me, please? I will show you something amazing. From the library where we're talking, a door leads through to another room that Barbara has redone since Donald's death five years ago. There's a large table covered in trinkets, invitations and photographs. I love it here. I come here every day. I talk to him. I feel complete. And I feel sorry for people who just, you know, pack somebody away and that's the end of it. Because there's something very beautiful about the essence of this place.

28:48John Prideaux:Barbara has made a shrine to her late husband and to their previous lives. Looking back, she sees a place of opportunity where wonderful things could happen. Perhaps never more so than when an actual movie star was in the White House. Reagan was the best. Reagan was... Reagan wanted all of us to make money. I mean, he could feel it. I mean, he wanted us to have fun and go out and make money. and yeah, he was applauding us the whole time while he was president. You could feel it. That was then. The present moment feels quite different. Oh, now everybody wants you to cut back and think about the rest of the world.

29:48I don't know. We're all on a diet.

29:56John Prideaux:I'm sure that Tocqueville would see Barbara as a descendant of the New Yorkers he encountered, restless, outgoing, unapologetic about making money and spending it. But there are also notes in this story that would be new to him, things that he didn't hear from Americans when he was here. A gnawing sense that the present is worse than the past, and that some newly apparent flaw in American democracy has something to do with it. Oh, God almighty, there's got to be somebody out there. Now we've got this mayor in New York. I don't even want to go there. But politics is really amazing these days. It really is.

30:43I'm throwing the dice. I mean, that's where we are, just throwing the dice.

30:57John Prideaux:My fellow New Yorkers,

31:03John Prideaux:today begins a new era. I stand before you, moved by the privilege of taking this sacred oath. A few days before I met with Barbara, Zoran Mamdani was inaugurated. We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. If our campaign demonstrated that the people of New York yearn for solidarity, then let this government foster it.

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32:16Or as we call it, a delicious operational burrito. Yes, we do. Experience a one place for all your HCM needs, besties. So start now at paylocity.com slash one. Paylocity.com slash O-N-E.

32:37John Prideaux:This is a strange moment for New York, the first time in the city's history that it has elected a socialist mayor. And it's hard not to read Mamdani's election as a sign that lots of people think America's basic deal with its citizens, work hard, get ahead, no longer exists. Polling bears this out. Only 30 % of Americans aged under 30 think they'll be better off than their parents. and more than 60 % say that American democracy is either in trouble or has completely failed. Barbara's response to this has been to withdraw into the past.

33:18John Prideaux:But as I continue in Tocqueville's footsteps, I'm about to meet a wealthy New Yorker who's taken a different approach, one whose story takes us closer to a vision of America's future. What happened is, he went over and asked her to dance with her. And me and Hillary were standing in the corner, watching. And everybody else circled all of them and watched the two of them dancing. It's a public holiday, but John Katsimatidis is in his office in Midtown Manhattan. He's busy showing me some of his favourite photos. This is the White House. It's just like in the movies. This is Margot. So there's Margot, your wife, dancing with President Clinton.

34:08John Prideaux:Yes. Almost all of these pictures feature John, or members of his family, next to famous American politicians, from both parties. It's like a who's who of powerful Americans. Mario Cuomo, that's about 30 years ago. One of our stories. There's Ronald Reagan, again. and Henry Kissinger, and Barack Obama. This was a sit-down meeting with the president or whatever. John is a heavyset man in his late 70s, wearing a rumpled black suit, blue tie with Greek columns on it, and a fleece vest. Tocqueville might have called it a gilet. His office is not what I imagined a billionaire's workplace to look like.

34:50John Prideaux:A desk that looks like a hand grenade detonated nearby. Screens and wires everywhere. an old iPhone repurposed as a clock. For someone who could quite literally buy anything he wants, John seems delightfully unfussed about appearances. But he clearly is proud of the status that his wealth has afforded him. And you know, the library at Camp David is named after my daughter. The bigger the check, the bigger the naming rate.

35:21John Prideaux:John Katsimatidis wasn't born into a world of presidential libraries and million-dollar fundraisers. In fact, he wasn't even born in the US. He was born on the island of Nisiros in Greece. He arrived in the US by boat in 1949. He was six months old. John grew up in an apartment block in West Harlem. No elevators in this one. I never knew we were poor, because we always had food on the table. My father worked seven days a week. My mother did whatever she had to do. He came up through a different kind of New York to Barbara's, but still with the same central themes. Hard work, perseverance, and upward social mobility.

36:07I learned how to speak English through a five-inch television set. Because my parents didn't speak English.

36:14John Prideaux:John also turned out to be good at maths. He got a place at NYU to study electrical engineering. After his first year, he came home for the summer. I was ready to plop down on the couch and watch television for the next 13 weeks. But his immigrant parents had other ideas. And my mother went to Tony's store on 137th Street and got a job for me. Come home, my mother threw me off the couch and said, you're going to work. Well, I spent 80 hours a week working for Tony. And I learned a little bit about the supermarket business and I enjoyed it. This was the late 1960s. John dropped out of college and bought his own grocery store, which he named Red Apple.

37:02John Prideaux:Before long, there were 10 Red Apple stores scattered along Broadway, and he was reportedly making a million dollars a year. Over the coming decades, his Red Apple Group expanded its operations into aviation, oil refineries and real estate. Most recently, Red Apple has been moving into media. We're speaking in the offices of WABC Talk Radio, which John acquired in 2019. He's now reportedly worth a little under$5 billion, making him one of the 400 richest people in America. His rise and rise makes me think of another famous quote from Democracy in America. The American inhabits a land where everything is constantly moving and each movement seems to be progress.

37:48For an American, one's entire life is spent as a game of chance.

37:56John Prideaux:John has been playing the game of chance since he arrived here on the boat from Greece. Each movement has seemed to be progress. And he has no plans to slow down. He's constantly checking his phone. And I say this and it's a terrible thing to say. You retire, you die. our creator who created us. If there's no purpose in living, you die.

38:31John Prideaux:Viewed through one lens, and this all looks very Tocquevillian, a quality of conditions at its finest. But, as with Barbara, there are also things about this story that my travelling companion would find concerning. When Togville was here, there were just a handful of ultra-wealthy Americans, most of them holdovers from the colonial era. He didn't see this small group of people as a threat to the fabric of the country, but he warned that future generations should keep a close eye on America's industrialists, because if a new kind of aristocracy was going to rise from anywhere, it would be from here.

39:10The friends of democracy ought constantly to turn their anxiety in this direction. For if ever permanent inequality of conditions and aristocracy are introduced anew into the world, one can predict that they will enter by this door.

39:32John Prideaux:When Forbes started publishing its 400 richest Americans list in 1982, there were 13 billionaires in the country, and the total wealth of all the people on the list was$260 billion in today's dollars. Today, every single person on the list is a billionaire, and their collective wealth is$6.6 trillion. That's about a fifth of America's entire GDP. This new billionaire class is served by an industry of estate planners, tax attorneys and lobbyists, helping ensure that their families remain wealthy in perpetuity, just like the aristocrats of yesteryear. Many of them are also using their wealth to influence politics.

40:20John Prideaux:And that brings us back to John Katsimatidis, because as well as all of those people in the photos on his wall, it may not surprise you to learn that this chronically online billionaire New Yorker, is friendly with another one. President Trump I've known for 45, 50 years, and he's a common-sense businessman, and he's a tough businessman. You have to be tough to survive in New York. They're still in close contact. At one point during our interview, John shows off a recent text, signed President DJT. I think what he's trying to do is become a tough business man on behalf of the American people. American people first are allies and friends in the free world second.

41:13John Prideaux:And for me, at least, things are about to get a whole lot Trumpier. I'm interviewing you because you interviewed me. This is really uncomfortable for me because I host a podcast as well. It's my day job. And so it's much easier being on the side of the microphone where you ask the questions rather than answer them. Tocqueville's arrival in New York was a big deal for the local media. Newspapers boasted that the King of France had sent distinguished envoys with first-rate talents to learn from their new republic. I'm pretty sure the King of England is unaware of my visit, and I didn't see any write-ups in the papers.

41:49John Prideaux:But it's 2026, so John's invited me on his podcast. We had visitors this week. And one of our visitors is John Perdo. He's the US editor of The Economist. Other guests the week I'm on include Lara Trump and Newt Gingrich. And right out of the gate, John picks a talking point that I had not seen coming. I grew up where the sun never sets on the British Empire. Tell me, how do you feel of what's happened in the last 50 years? And is the sun setting on the British Empire versus we've had a discussion where I felt that we're about to have the 250th year of the United States of America. And that if we didn't have the right president, that I didn't believe that we might not make the 300th year.

42:46John Prideaux:Yeah, I was really struck by that. the idea that the country might not make it to its 300th birthday is alarming for me. What happened with the British Empire? Well, I think after the Second World War, the country was kind of on its knees and also took the position that the parts that made up the British Empire should all have the opportunity to determine their own futures. They should all be able to decide for themselves if they wanted to be part of the British Empire, if they wanted to be independent. And so Britain's unusual, I think, in having given up an empire relatively peacefully. And I think that was mainly a good thing.

43:27John Prideaux:Often when I do media interviews, I have a slightly out-of-body experience. But this is surreal in a new way. America is about to celebrate 250 years since the Declaration of Independence. And here I am, defending the idea of self-determination to a billionaire pal of the president. Now it feels like we might be back in an age that's a bit more like the 19th century, where countries are building empires. And that feels a lot more like a return to a kind of imperial age that Britain thought it had left behind. A similar thing happens when our conversation turns to another issue of the day. For pretty obvious reasons, John considers himself pro-immigration.

44:10I was vice chairman of the Ellis Island Foundation.

44:17John Prideaux:But his views have hardened. I think the Europeans gave a disease to the Americans. Because you guys, the Europeans, allowed Europe to be invaded. and I don't know, you're British. I said one of the problems with Great Britain is they woke up one day and they were invaded and they were down to 47 % non-Brits. I've checked this figure and according to the most recent UK census, 84 % of Brits were born in the UK. The country is also 82 % white, making it much less diverse than America. London, my home, is an outlier. 40 % of its population was born abroad. This is a talking point that the far-right influencer Tommy Robinson likes to repeat, so perhaps that's where John heard the number.

45:18John Prideaux:But it's striking that someone so successful and well-connected, who owns their own radio station, could be so fixated on a piece of misinformation. The same thing happens off-air, back in his office, when we discuss the new mayor of New York. John tells me about a guest he recently heard talking on WABC.

45:43His philosophy was that all the foreigners we were invaded by, invaded by the last six, seven years, and the foreign-born voted for this guy to make him mayor and that a majority of citizens were not really in favour.

46:15John Prideaux:The idea that Zoram Amdani won because of an influx of foreign-born voters is also evidence-free. But it feels true to John, for whom a belief that the West is being invaded by migrants has become melded with an existential fear for America's survival. And it's a talking point you hear repeated a lot on his radio station. John has hosted an Obama fundraiser in his apartment. He was on the finance team for Hillary's first run for president. His wife danced with Bill. This is a man who arrived in America on a boat and ended up owning an airline. But now he's certain that in 2024, because of their stance on immigration, the Democrats were within a whisker of bringing America to its downfall.

47:05If Harris won the election, we were close. You know what song we play on my five o 'clock show every day on WABC? we were on the eve of destruction. We were very close.

47:30John Prideaux:On the way out of the building, I noticed a poster of the Lone Ranger. Before the TV series or the movies, the radio show was a favourite on WABC and on dozens of other stations across the country.

47:47John Prideaux:In the middle decades of the 20th century, millions of Americans would gather around their wireless sets and listen to stories in which a masked hero fought for the ideals on which their country had been founded. Nowhere in the pages of history can one find a greater champion of justice. Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear. From out of the past come the thundering hoofbeats of the great horse Silver. The Lone Ranger writes again.

48:17John Prideaux:The Lone Ranger's Creed could have been lifted straight from Tocqueville. That government of the people, by the people and for the people shall live always. That men should live by the rule of what is best for the greatest number. That all things change but truth and that truth alone lives on forever.

48:53John Prideaux:Tune into WABC now and you'll hear MAGA loyalists railing against migrants and wokesters. Or choose a left-wing podcast and hear the same story, but with the roles reversed. Indeed, it sometimes feels like the only thing Americans agree on is that something has gone badly wrong. This has certainly been my experience in New York. Barbara and John should have every reason to feel optimistic about the country that's given them so much. But instead, they both find themselves lamenting the turn the US has taken. And the data tells a similar story. In surveys, most Americans say they would prefer to live in the past.

49:38John Prideaux:Their country is also the only one in the West where a majority of people view their fellow citizens as morally bad. As the United States turns 250, the place seems haunted by a sense of loss. Tocqueville would be deeply saddened to learn this, and I think he'd also quickly see that inequality is only part of the problem. Because while America does seem to have developed a blind spot on inherited privilege, and while the rise of a billionaire class does make the country measurably less fair than it was even a few decades ago, it hasn't stopped equality of conditions from being the defining force here.

50:20John Prideaux:And in lots of ways, gender, race, access to education, the US is far more equitable now than it was when Tocqueville visited, or even than it was when my parents were born. Objective measures show a country that's doing better than ever. Life expectancy has never been higher. Unlike in Europe, the economy here is growing. Wages of those at the bottom end of the labour market have been rising. So why have so many people lost their faith in the country? In order to get closer to an answer, we need to press on.

51:03Hey, Yetis. This is Nick and Jack from the Best One Yet podcast. Now, the last company we worked at, they used Paylocity and everything just worked. It wasn't until launching our own media business, this show, that we realized how rare that is. Because Paylocity is one delicious burrito of operational needs. They roll up HR, finance, and IT seamlessly into one delicious bite. When everything wraps together like that all at once, your workforce, your tech stack, your business. You don't need more tools. You don't even need cilantro. You need one solution. And that is why Paylocity built a single platform to connect HR, finance, and IT with AI-driven insights and automated workflows that simplify the complex and power what's next.

51:40Or as we call it, a delicious operational burrito. Yes, we do. Experience a one place for all your HCM needs, besties. So start now at paylocity.com slash one. Paylocity.com slash O-N-E.

51:59John Prideaux:Tocqueville's trek into the interior involved bumpy stagecoaches and creaking paddle steamers. I'll have the relative comfort of planes, trains and rental cars. My journey will span more than 3 ,000 miles and will touch many of the same places he visited. I'll go to small towns and grand institutions. I'll talk to people who are battling for survival and others who say they've never been better. And for my next stop, I'm heading up the Hudson to a spot that now lies just beyond New York City's limits, a place that amazed Tocqueville when he was here, a prison that gets its name from a Native American phrase meaning stone upon stone, Sing Sing.

52:46John Prideaux:And I remember thinking like, damn, we can't, we can't, like, we just not built for this kind of stuff. Like, you know what I mean? They put this stuff out here for certain people. We're not that people. You can listen to that episode now for free wherever you get your podcasts. To hear the rest of the series as it comes out, you'll have to be an Economist subscriber. Go to economist.com slash podcasts plus for our best offer.

53:21John Prideaux:Tocqueville Road Trip was made by Imogen Svotka, John Shields, Pete Norton, Claire Reid and me, with additional editing by Rosie Bloor and Sam Colbert. Wei Dong Lin is our sound designer, Darren Ung composed the music, and Nico Rofast voiced the extracts from Tocqueville. I'm John Priddo. This is The Economist.