The Rebels of the Left & the Right with Joshua Green

0:04Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci and this is Open Book, where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word, from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know, I can roll with the punches, so let me know.

0:38Anyways, let's get to it.

0:47My guest today, Joshua Green's last book, Devil's Bargain, chronicled the rise of economic populism on the right, led by the likes of Steve Bannon and Donald Trump. His latest bestseller, The Rebels, looks at the parallel that has played out on the left with Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez leading the uprising and becoming national icons. Let's get into it.

1:18I'd like to take a second to recommend my friend Andy Ostroy's great podcast, The Back Room. Every episode is a fun, incredibly honest take on our society and the political situation, along with some brilliant guests. I've been honored to join Andy on the show, and you know anywhere that accepts me with no filter deserves a shout out.

1:46So joining us now is Joshua Green on Open Book. He is a bestselling author. He's the national correspondent for Bloomberg Businessweek, and he's written a couple of great books. The most recent one is the rebels elizabeth warren bernie sanders alexandria ocasio cortez and the struggle for new american politics i thought you were going to say they were the axis of evil for american politics but we'll get into that where he's written about one polar point of evil uh and the devil's bargain nice to be on now what do you like to be called joshua or josh oh we'll just go with josh unless you're angry yeah you feel like a josh you know i mean your mother probably calls you, Joshua.

2:25Only when she's mad. Only when she's mad. It's only mom and the book byline. Those are the only times it's Joshua. Every other time it's Josh. Fair enough, Josh. But you've written two great books. And obviously, before we started the show, I said, what's wrong with you? You don't like moderates? You go from the hard right to the hard left. But in all seriousness, they're chronicling things that are happening in America. And I want to start there. When I finished your book, I said, okay, what's going on in America where we are creating this political extremist, Josh? You know, to me, the starting point for this book was the 2008 financial crisis and the aftermath.

3:05Because I was working here at the time, I was covering politics in both parties, and that's when things broke. That was the real earthquake. And, you know, my last book, Devil's Bargain, as you mentioned, was about the rise of the populist right, Steve Bannon and Donald Trump. And I don't think any of that happened without the anger that came in the wake of the financial crisis. But the interesting thing to me was, you know, afterwards, I was spending a lot of time with Elizabeth Warren, because I used to be a political columnist for the Boston Globe. And she was, you know, local, well thought of Harvard professor.

3:37She was an overseer of the big Wall Street bailout after the 08 crisis. And so I think that the fallout from that crisis also caused a populist uprising on the left. And we see that in my three characters sort of in succession, you know, first Warren, then Bernie Sanders, and then eventually AOC. So to my way of thinking and to answer your question about why I'm only writing about these crazy extremists is I think that that set off the extremism or at least antagonized the extremism in both parties that goes a long way toward defining and explaining why the state of our politics is what it is today.

4:14Okay. So I have a theory. I want to test you on it. You tell me if my theory is a good theory, a bad theory. It's not a theory I fully understood until I got my ass kicked by Donald Trump. Once I got my ass kicked by him, I think I dropped my battle armor to take a look around. So my theory is the political class has abandoned the country. And what I mean by the political class, the moderate political class, the baby boomer political class, the left and the right have both decided, you know what? We're good. We're going to just focus on ourselves. The Republicans bringing corporate tax cuts. The left stopped focusing on the white lower middle class worker that voted for Lyndon Johnson or voted for Franklin Roosevelt.

4:59And we're going to do things like pronoun denunciation or transgender bathrooms and things like that. So it was a very, very large group of people that got left out. When the crisis came, those two establishment politicians, they gave whatever money the big corporations and banks wanted. And boy, that really upset a lot of people. And they splintered into those two groups. And I'll just point out one last fact. I think the Bernie Sanders voter is actually was very similar in 2016 to the Donald Trump voter. Absolutely. He got a lot of crossover. So what am I missing, sir? What did I miss? No, I think you hit the nail on the head.

5:34I mean, to me, the story I tell in the rebels is sort of how and why the Democratic Party, the Democratic establishment, I think you're referring to, lost touch with its historic base of voters, right? Traditionally, Democrats were the party of labor. They were the party of working class. They were the party of FDR and so on. But I start my book in the Carter White House in 1978, oddly enough, because my argument is that's when the Democratic establishment began to split from the labor class and really line up with Wall Street in a way that Democrats had not in the past. And so you see over the 80s, 90s, the rise of neoliberalism, of new Democrats, of third way, of people like Bill Clinton.

6:19You know, and all of a sudden we're living in a world where you can have, you know, chairman of Goldman Sachs can be a treasury secretary in a Republican administration. Now he can be a treasury secretary in a Democratic administration too. That kind of thing had never happened. So I tell the deep history in the book of how the Democratic Party kind of came under the sway of Wall Street, which I think goes a long way toward explaining why Democrats did such a bad job of putting together a recovery from the crisis. A lot of that money went to Wall Street banks, as you very well know. And a lot of people in the middle class felt like they got left behind.

6:56It took seven years for the country to recover the jobs lost in 08 and 09. And a lot of people were angry about that. And what you saw as a result of that anger was a backlash in American politics on the right and on the left. And Elizabeth Warren, you know, in my narrative was the first person because we all remember she was the bailout cop before she was a Democratic senator. She's a Harvard professor whose job was to oversee how the Democratic administration was spending this bailout money. And she went right after Barack Obama and Tim Geithner in a way that no Democrat was willing to do publicly.

7:31And it really started a movement that changed the nature of democratic politics, that split the party from an establishment wing and gave rise to this new left populism wing that I write about in The Rebels. She also, I guess it was a consumer protection finance board too, right? She created that whole piece of the government, right? Yeah, I mean, she had a whole theory about what democratic government should be doing that differed from like a Bill Clinton, which said, you know, we're going to we're going to defer to the free market. We're still we're still liberals. We still want to achieve liberal social goals, but we're going to let the market direct the course.

8:06Warren was much more of an old style. We want the government to take a firm intervention, not just in the economy, but also in people's lives. And so with the Consumer Protection Bureau, you know, if your mortgage blows up and you lose your house, the government should have been looking out for that. We're going to take a stronger hand to make sure that kind of thing doesn't happen. And Anthony, in the wake of the crash, a lot of people were open to that message because they were suffering economically, either because they lost their house, their retirement account, their job, maybe all three.

8:36There was a lot of economic anger. And I think Warren and her brand of left populist politics really spoke to that, as did Trump's right-leaning brand. We see these politicians. politicians, there's a lot of different types of politicians and a lot of different styles of leadership, but this style of leadership is coming in hot. There's a thermostat of leadership and there's a thermometer. What do I mean by that? If it's hot in the room and I'm a thermostat, I'm going to reflect the heat in the room. If I'm a thermometer, I'm going to reflect the heat in the room. If I'm a thermostat, I'm going to try to bring the heat down.

9:12I'm going to try to guide people a certain way. If you read anything about FDR, he was that way. He tried to lead people to understand that they were going to fight a great war against fascism. He tried to lead people to understand, yes, they're fearful, but dial back your fear. We can figure this out. So he was more of a thermostatic leader. These are all thermometers, whether it's Trump, Warren. What does that say about our current leadership though? Are they going to fix anything or are they just going to chant the anger back to the base that they're getting voted in from? Look, I think that the constant in Americans' view of leadership since the 08-09 financial crisis is that it isn't up to the job and that it isn't looking out for ordinary American workers.

9:58And so, you know, you can see the kind of embryonic form of this in the Tea Party movement and Occupy Wall Street. But then if you flash forward a couple of years, you also see it beginning in 2015. when Donald Trump comes down the escalator, when after Elizabeth Warren decides not to run for president, Bernie Sanders gets in the race and takes off like almost overnight. The fact that these guys are filling stadiums and really connecting with people on a message, as you point out, not all that different, especially Trump back in 2015, 2016. People forget this. They think it's all about immigration and Muslims and all that kind of stuff.

10:36Trump in that campaign talked as much about Wall Street establishment and bankers and politicians ripping you off as Bernie Sanders did. And so I don't think it's any accident that it kind of activated similar types of people. But, you know, I'm up here in New Hampshire right now talking to voters. Donald Trump is going to romp, going to be the Democratic nominee. And the reason is that people are still angry. People are still angry at the political establishment in both parties. They're angry at Joe Biden. You know, he did what a lot of Democrats wanted him to do, and he got Donald Trump out of the White House, but he hasn't really restored things to people's satisfaction.

11:12And so I think as long as that that mood of dissatisfaction permeates the country, you're going to have that thermostat pointing toward people like Donald Trump who come in hot, get people riled up and for better or worse, divide the country because people are just in a really divisive mood when you talk to them on the ground. Governor DeSantis dropped out and he endorsed Donald Trump almost immediately. Now, Donald Trump had meleed Governor DeSantis and literally ran a steamroller over his face. It was almost like watching one of the Looney Tunes cartoons when we were kids growing up. We just destroyed him.

11:48But yeah, no problem. I'm a total sycophant. He goes into Trump's camp. But he said something that resonated and it made me think of both of your books. He said that the Republican Party is done with the corporatists. What do you mean by that, Josh? That Republican – well, part of Trump's power, as we were just talking about, was not just that he's going to kick illegal immigrants out of the country. It's that he's going to smite the entire political and financial establishment. So the corporatists would be the people like, you know, right now, that's the name that Trumpers are calling Nikki Haley.

12:28You know, people who are there first and foremost to do the bidding of Wall Street banks, wealthy plutocrats, that sort of thing. And by extension, don't have any real interest in helping ordinary workers in the middle class, even though they may pay lip service to it. You know, what voters want is, you know, I hung out with Tim Geithner for about six months, like way early on. And I tell the story in The Rebels. But Geithner had a famous line. I know you remember. He said, well, you know, I know people are mad about the financial crisis. I know what they want is what Geithner called Old Testament justice.

13:04But I'm not going to give it to that because we want to keep the bank stable. We want to keep markets happy. That's the best path forward. What became clear to me over the last few years is that what people wanted, God knows right, they wanted Old Testament justice and they got it. And Donald Trump and Democrats, at least in supporting Bernie Sanders. And I think that still hasn't gone away. So when you talk about corporatists, I think that's Trump and Trump's mini me knockoff, Ron DeSantis, trying to make that same point now that they were making back then. And certainly what I see on the ground talking to reporters and I are talking to voters in Iowa, talking to voters in New Hampshire, is that there's still that feeling.

13:43I don't think the anger at banks is anything quite like it was in 09 and in 10. But there is anger at a kind of broad financial overclass that voters hold responsible for things like inflation, can't get a job like they want, you know, mad that college tuition has gone off. You name it, just the regular kitchen table. The man's exodus of manufacturing. Exactly. The corporatists are the people that cared less about me and more about their own wallets. And so I want to hire somebody that will wreck them. Yeah. And I think one of the things Biden has done well, no evidence that he's getting any political credit for this, but he's listened to the left-wing populist that I write about when it comes to things like, all right, this time around, we're going to have a more robust response to the economic crash, this time the one that followed COVID.

14:33multiple rounds of stimulus. We're going to forgive student loans. We're going to give all those small business loans. We're really going to try and prop up the middle class. And we're going to pass a ton of money to reshore manufacturing and start to build factories in this country again. I think those are all good impulses for Biden. And they show the influence that Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and AOC are having on the Democratic Party, even though none of them is in the White House. But I don't think that it is filtered through yet to the awareness of the average voter. Because if you look at right track, wrong track numbers, and Biden's favorability ratings, the economic numbers, as you know, are turning around in a pretty substantial way.

15:14And yet Biden is still viewed negatively by like, you know, 55, 60, 65 % of the country. Yeah, no, it's fascinating because the economy is quite good. I want to, you know, again, out of your book, you know, I'm a little bit of a pundit. I watch and read. I, you know, Lincoln was a failed a few times, obviously didn't get elected at the House of Representatives. You know, Harry Truman failed as a haberdasher, had to go bankrupt. Both ended up being pretty good presidents as judged by history. Here comes Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. She's a bartender. She's wayward, I would say, in her professional career.

15:54But then she finds this unbelievable knack for politics. By the way, I don't necessarily agree with her politically, but I am ridiculously impressed with her work ethic and her political instincts. So tell viewers and listeners something about her that you learned in writing this book. You know, the thing that struck me the most in writing this book, you know, I, like everybody else in politics, had never heard her name until she knocked off Joe Crowley, who we all expected to be Nancy Pelosi's successor as the next Democratic speaker. You know, and the other thing I knew about AOC was that she came in even before she was sworn in, occupied Nancy Pelosi's office, which was pretty, pretty gutsy and hilarious.

16:36You don't see that kind of thing in Washington every day. And that she was viewed as as a radical who was going to reshape the Democratic Party. What I learned doing this reporting, though, and I think this gets to your point, is that lover or hater, she is a very, very talented politician, much more so, I think, than the other members. And she's an incredibly hard worker. Incredibly hard worker, too. Yeah. But if you look at if you look at her career and I tell I tell her story in The Rebels, you know, for the first six months, she was out there tweeting at people, live streaming on Instagram, really hitting Democrat or Democratic colleagues, threatening to primary them.

17:14But she wasn't making any progress in terms of policy. And I think I think she genuinely cares about about liberal and leftist policies. And after six months, Nancy Pelosi pulls her into this private meeting, says basically like, listen, you're not going anywhere until you figure out how this place works. And AOC, to her credit, wound up firing all the radicals on her staff. And since that point has really morphed into a different kind of politician. She hasn't turned into a squish or gone centrist. But I think of her almost as like an Elizabeth Warren 2.0. I mean, if you look at her in a hearing, she has that talent, that capacity to be able to make a banker or a government official at a hearing squirm and kind of create those soundbite moments that go viral.

17:58And at the same time, she's figured out how to work with Joe Biden and his administration, who clearly they don't share the same politics. But if you look at, for instance, like her big issue of climate and the Green New Deal, people don't seem to pay attention to this. But Biden passed a$300 billion climate bill that was very much influenced by AOC and her environmentalist cohort. It just wasn't advertised that way. It was part of the Inflation Reduction Act. And so I give her credit for figuring out, coming into a new environment, figuring out, you know, protesting and occupying isn't going to get the job done here.

18:33What do I need to do to succeed? And going out and figuring out how Congress works, how she can get a piece of what she wants. And that's what she's managed to do. And I think the fact that she didn't decide to challenge Biden for the Democratic primary because she turns 35 in October. So if she wanted to run as Bernie 2.0, fly that flag, start a big ideological fight in the Democratic Party, she could have done it. Instead, she's figured out, you know, I'm going to start putting pieces of my agenda into place, but I'm going to do it through Joe Biden and the Democrats who are in power. I think that that tells you that she's got real political smarts.

19:08And it's going to be interesting to see how that plays out over the next 10, 20, 30 years, because she's one of the few Democratic young people that's around. More impressive than Senator Warren, though. I mean, obviously, Senator Warren has got the fiery rhetoric. She's captured the imagination of some people, but she really hasn't gotten a lot of legislation through. Has she, Josh, or am I wrong? You know, I think she has. I mean, I think she's a genuinely important historical figure because she came in in 2009, even before she was in the Senate, and really kind of built up this populist wing of the Democratic Party that later took off.

19:42You can look at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which wouldn't exist if it weren't for Warren. That's true. But I think more broadly, you know, the way I look at it is Joe Biden was in the White House in 08, 09. They had a fairly small recovery package, and most of it was directed at banks because that's where Democrats thought it should go. Joe Biden is in the White House again in 2020, 2021, in the wake of the COVID crash, and it's entirely different. That money is focused at the middle class, PPP loans, eviction moratorium, student debt forgiveness. Each one of those things was something that Elizabeth Warren wanted the Obama administration to do back in 2009, and they didn't do it.

20:21But Joe Biden by then had kind of wised up, and I think the party had evolved in a way where they saw that a lot of her criticisms back then actually made sense, that if you ignore the middle class and the working class, there's going to be a backlash that's going to lead to people like Donald Trump. And so the thing to do is to respond and adjust. And I think the best thing you can say for Biden as a president is that he managed to do that, that if you look at where we are economically, the jobs from the COVID crash, which was deeper than the financial crisis, we got them all back in two years instead of seven years.

20:51And today, unemployment is like what it was in the Eisenhower administration. When I meet mad, like I said, I'm up here in New Hampshire. When I'm talking to people on the campaign trail who are mad about the economy, I say, hey, have you checked your 401k lately? And a lot of them will sort of sheepishly be like, yeah, it's actually, it's doing pretty good now. So things have turned around. And I think a lot of that is credit that owes to Warren, to Bernie, to this wing of the party that rose up and really left mainstream Democrats no choice but to embrace them, certainly on the economic front.

21:22Now, in the 2020 primaries, we could see other facets of this, defund the police, decriminalizing border crossings that were not as astute politically and that Americans rejected. And that's why Joe Biden became the nominee, not Warren or not Sanders. But in terms of economics, the Democratic Party has gone a long way toward embracing what my characters began pushing 15 years ago. Well, look, I mean, you make a persuasive case. I guess, you know, probably spent too much of my time as a Republican to really like Elizabeth Warren. I also don't like her stance on crypto. I just think it's ridiculously uninformed.

21:59But let's go to let's go to your favorite subject. At least I think it's still your favorite subject. That's Uncle Steve Bannon. OK, do you know why I believe in God, Josh? I ever tell you why? I don't think we've had this conversation. No, tell me. So, yeah, well, I mean, you know, if I ever have a shaken faith, I'm a Catholic. but if I ever have a shaken faith, I look to Bannon. Bannon is articulate and he's charismatic, but God made him so ugly, Josh, to save the civilization from Steve Bannon. He's got the contemporary hobo look, the bulbous nose. He's the human walking disaster of fashion.

22:37Thank God. I thank God. And I believe in God as a result of that complexity to Bannon's personality. And he made him look like a movie villain. Yeah, exactly. He's a James Bond villain. If he wasn't a James Bond villain, he'd probably be running for president and we'd be dealing with his nonsense. But, you know, there's a lot in the book, Devil's Bargain. And you've heard this question before, so I know you're ready to answer it, but I want to pose it anyway. You know, the premise that Bannon or the book is making that he's really the vessel. Trump is a vessel and it's Bannon's brain that is driving the, you know, operating.

23:16Bannon's the software. Trump is the hardware. But I was there. You know, when Bannon joined the race, Steve actually asked me to put a memo together for him, which, of course, I did. This is before him and I started fighting with each other. But he joined the race in August. Trump had already won the nomination. So do you really think he was that important to Trump's rise? Yeah, I do. And for two reasons. The first is that, you know, love him or hate him. And regardless of what you think about his appearance. Do you love him, Josh? I sort of feel like you do love him a little bit. You love him a little bit.

23:49I love him as a narrative character. Remember, I'm a magazine writer. I'm a book author. What we're looking for are larger than life characters. And if you were a fiction writer, you couldn't come up with Steve Bannon or a Donald Trump. So from a like anthropological sense, yes. No question about it. But I do think that Bannon is important for a couple of reasons, and you probably don't get Trump without him. Number one is, you know, back before anybody had ever heard of him, he was beating the drums for this kind of right-wing populism through Breitbart news and all that kind of stuff at a time when the Republican Party was controlled by the likes of John Boehner and Paul Ryan.