The Fight That Could Decide 2028

25:28I mean, as soon as he got the stimulus, he tried to get more stimulus. He got every dollar he could get out of Congress. You You could make an argument that he could have gotten more if he tried different methods. But he was trying to get he understood, first of all, that the recession was deeper than they grasped at the time they passed the stimulus. So they calculated the size of the hole and they figured out, OK, how close to filling up the hole can we get? And then it turned out the hole was even deeper than they thought. So then they immediately were trying to get more money and they did get more money.

25:58They got more tax credits. They pulled out more stimulus here and there. But they did not get enough stimulus and the recovery was too slow. And that was the main lesson that they needed to not repeat that mistake. But the problem is they just erred in the opposite direction under Biden. So the left theory of the Obama presidency is Obama didn't do enough and therefore the working class got mad and they voted for Trump and it's Obama's fault. I mean, you can explain Trump's victory through normal political arguments. You don't need to summon this crisis of capitalism that produced Trump. It's hard to win a third consecutive term for any party.

26:36Hillary Clinton was a less talented politician than Obama. She was challenged from the left by Bernie Sanders. And her response to that challenge was for herself to move leftward still. So the candidate who ran in 2016 under difficult conditions for any candidate was not running as Obama's third term, but she was running significantly to the left of Obama's third term with less political skills. Obama left office with a 60 % approval rating. Obama, had he been able to run for president for a third time, would have wiped the floor with Donald Trump. There's just no reason to believe that Donald Trump was a repudiation of Obama, who was and is very popular and far more popular than Trump.

27:23I have a really brain-dead theory of what happened that ignores all the personalities and so on. This is my theory of how Obama led to Trump. The economy returns to pre-crisis levels of output and employment in 2014, pre the crisis of 2007-8. So we're back at 2014 to where we were in 2007, although the growth trajectory is lower. At that point, respectable opinion says, right, Obama's been running these big deficits. This could lead to inflation if unchecked. Now is the time for the Federal Reserve to tighten interest rates. And that was not a crazy decision. That's a very conventional, normal decision.

28:02The crisis is over. I mean, we're back to where we were, tightened now. And it turns out the economy was still in 2014, not healthy yet. And when you tightened in 2014, instead of saying, okay, the growth continues as it did when you tightened in the middle eighties, instead what happened is the employment growth slows. And so you have very, not recessionary conditions in 2015, 2016, but disappointing conditions. People do not feel continuing improvement. And they weren't just grateful to be pulled from the sea to the shore. They wanted to resume the normal trajectory from the shore, and that didn't happen.

28:39And so the incumbent party lost. And then the Federal Reserve recognized its mistake, loosened in 2016, and the economy accelerated in 2017, 2018, 2019. We had three good years before the COVID pandemic. Right. They thought we were at capacity. There was a debate about, are we at capacity? Are we about to hit the point of accelerating inflation in 2014? And we weren't. And we found that out in Trump's first term that there's actually plenty of slack left in the labor market, plenty of room to grow. You're right. That was an important moment. And that could well have made the difference because the 2016 election was so close.

29:12Just a little bit more growth in those last two terms could have made the difference. A lot of things could have could have made the difference. But I would just point out in the overall macro situation, Obama was popular. Obama's popularity was not the problem. I mean, if he was even more popular, it would have helped more, but he was overall popular. Now in 2026, we have this attack on Obama from the left. He's now become quite a demon figure. And what is the left case in 2026 against Obama? Why is Obama now bad? Well, the main thing that they will say that Obama did badly was bailing out the banks in 2008.

29:51Obama's 2008 bank bailout. 2009. 2009. 2009. No, no, no, 2008. Now, of course, the bank bailout did occur in 2008. Obama did not become president until 2009. But when I point this out, people will never believe me. I've been pointing this out for 15 years and no one will believe me. So I think I just have to accept that I'm wrong and that Barack Obama actually was president in 2008. And he's therefore responsible for the bank bailout that occurred in 2008. I think the bank bailout was good. And whoever was president in 2008, which turns out to be maybe a more difficult question than I'm sorry to have interrupted you because I thought it was an easy question.

30:27But as you say, as the question, who was president in 2020, it turns out to be quite hard. So leaving aside the mysterious question of who was president in 2008, why is it if you're the left and you love Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who saved the banks, why do you hate whoever was president in 2008, who saved the banks? Yeah, I've brought up this point many times. It's very hard for me. I want to faithfully reproduce their criticisms. So I don't want to just be battling straw men. But it's very hard for me on this point because I feel like so little sense can be drawn from the criticisms they make.

31:06Like I said, the number one point they make is the bank bailout. That's by far the most common critique they make of Obama. The second most common they make is failing to jail anyone for the crimes of the financial crisis. What actually happened was they looked at it and said, well, they didn't commit any crimes. The problem is all this stuff was legal, so we need to change the laws. And so they passed the Dodd-Frank financial reforms, which were the strongest regulations of Wall Street since the 1930s. At the time, those reforms were celebrated by progressives. If you ask any of the progressive experts in financial regulation, they will say that's a very powerful law set of reforms that were formulated.

31:48It looked at all the problems of the financial crisis, really regulated all of them. It also created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But they blame Obama for not imprisoning anyone for activity that was only subsequently made illegal. I know I'm sort of attacking arguments that sound like straw men, but these really are the most common attacks made on Obama. Take a step beyond the attacks, because often when people say things, they are applying imperfect words to deep feelings. Okay, so maybe they don't have good rationalizations, but where does it come from? What is the mentality that says, I revere Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but I hate Barack Obama?

32:27Where does that mood come from? Where does Bernie Sandersism, what is the emotional need that it meets? I think there was significant difference between Obama and the organized progressive movement. Do you remember when Obama's spokesman derided the professional left? That was a somewhat notorious comment, but it really did capture a hostile relationship between the organized progressive movement and the Obama administration. And he thought that these organized progressive lobbies were unrealistic, didn't have good ideas. And he had better ideas for messaging and for policy strategy. So they were always on the outs with him and they resented that.

33:12Biden, by contrast, was so deeply enmeshed with the progressive movement, the professional left, as they were called under the Obama era, that it was almost impossible to draw any distance between them at all. Biden did whatever they wanted. And so even though Biden had dramatically less legislative success, the progressive movement really celebrated Biden's administration all the way till the end when they decided that now Gaza was the only thing that mattered and Gaza was the reason that he was a failure. But really, Up until that moment, they were celebrating Biden as the heir to Roosevelt, Biden as the progressive hero, and Obama as the sad, weak appendage to the Reagan era.

33:57Is there something going on, too, that if you're on the real left, that you regard Trump as not the worst possible outcome? because if you're on the real left that trump is obviously he's so it isn't that they like him but they know the the working class they will sooner or later see through the folly of trump so all we have to do is eliminate um the false messiahs um and then and give them our true messiah and then they will see through uh the right and turn to the true messiah and in fact an interval of right-wing government maybe or a trump government whether whether you call it right is a necessary step in the process.

34:35Just as Hitler led to the triumph of communism in Germany, not to compare Trump to Hitler, but this is the thinking. The far right gets its turn, then we get our turn. We just need to exclude the middle, and then we win. This was also the thinking of the communist left in Weimar Germany. They saw Hitler's constituency as their own constituency. They really thought that there was this fluidity between the far left and the far right, I don't think that was correct at all. But at the intellectual level, there's something to that. I mean, we all know people, and we could name them if we wanted to, who do seem to move very easily between far left and far right.

35:13And these are people who are very well-educated, who care a lot about politics, care a lot about ideas. You'll hear them say, I'm a progressive, but I feel at home when I talk to these ultra mega people, because we both hate bankers, we both hate Ukraine, we both hate Israel, We have so much in common. And that must apply at the voting level where people vote for reasons that are less ideological. That's right. It's the same error. And that's why in sub-level, you're right that Trump's election filled them with hope that they really saw this proletarian uprising that they've been longing for, but were dejected that was not happening.

35:51Finally, glimmers of it happening because you could see elements of Trump's populist rhetoric as reflecting their own. So I think you're spot on on that. So how much of your life do you spend defending the Obama legacy to people who want to detract it from the left? Too much. Too much. I'm planning to write something maybe early next year. I've got to just put it all in one place. But it's gotten to the point where I have this alternate history that only I and a handful of deranged lunatics are aware of. And we're living in an alternate universe in which everyone else has settled on a completely different interpretation of what happened during those years.

36:34So I've got to just put it all in one place, I think. Let me ask you about your native Michigan now, because these issues are being played out in real time. Why is the Michigan Senate race, in your view, so much attention was focused on Maine? Now Maine is fading from the center of the discourse, the cameras swiveling to Michigan. Why is that Senate race so important? There's a Democratic Senate primary. Abdul El-Sayed is the left wing candidate. Haley Stevens is sort of the mainstream center left candidate. They're both. No, Gary Peters is the incumbent Democrat who's retiring. So there's there's an open seat.

37:10How competitive state is Michigan? It's a slightly blue state, although Trump won it in 2024 and in 2016. So it's it's very close at the presidential level. Democrats have usually won the Senate races and have usually won the gubernatorial races most of the time. But Donald Trump did win it a couple of times. And it's close enough that the Democrats could lose a Senate seat even in a wave year if they really screw things up. And they seem to at least be putting that possibility on the table. So now there's an open Democratic nomination. There is a Republican candidate who's competed before, who's a strong candidate, who's not a loony at all.

37:50And the Democrats will soon vote to choose one of two candidates. So tell us about the two Democratic choices. There's Haley Stevens, who's a kind of center-left traditional Democrat, who would basically, if you took all the Democrats of one Senate races in Michigan in the last 30 years and put them in a blender and poured them out, you'd get Haley Stevens. She's just an amalgamation of the traditional center-left Democratic Party in the state of Michigan. Abdul El-Sayed is very left wing for the Democratic Party. He would be the most left wing Democrat in the Senate, I think, even to the left of Bernie Sanders.

38:31He would be as far left maybe as people like Ilhan Omar, Rashid Tlaib. He's just across the board left on every issue. He's really emphasized opposition to Israel as a campaign theme. But he's trying to do what Graham Plattner seemed to be on the road to doing in Maine. But I think he's even doing it in a more confident, ideologically confident fashion. And he said that if he wins the primary and wins the general election, he is going to start carrying out purges of other Democrats who he thinks can be beaten in primaries. And he seems to be a less psychologically troubled person than Graham Plattner.

39:20And although this is maybe in videos, probably more intelligent than Graham Plattner. I actually have come to question some of his political judgment recently. I feel like he's played this shrewdly, but aggressively, you know, really pushing up against the edge of how much he can get away with. But I feel like recently, you know, it's like a gambler who's on a winning streak and is just overplaying his hands. I'll give you an example. Gretchen Whitmer endorsed Haley Stevens over the weekend. Gretchen Whitmer is the governor. The popular governor of the state of Michigan, popular with Democrats and popular with voters on the whole.

40:00If you're El-Sayed, you just want to just take your lump and walk away from it, you want to minimize the impact of this. This is not going to be a good story for you. The only question is how much attention it's going to get. But then he goes and attacks Gretchen Whitmer. He takes a shot at her management of the roads, which was one of her original campaign slogans, just fixing the roads, and says the roads haven't been fixed. So now you've given every reporter covering this race a license to extend the story and write about El-Sayed's, you know, vendetta against Whitmer. And you've invited Whitmer to weigh into the race once again on Stevens' behalf.

40:40And her approval rating among Democrats, I think, is 88%. So you have a tiny number of Democrats who agree with El-Sayed that Gretchen Whitmer is a corporate sellout, which he also thinks and has been saying. But the vast majority love her. So he's managed to skate by without really bringing to the surface the degree to which he rejects the entire Democratic Party and its entire philosophy. And he's trying to get a lot of loyal Democrats to a side who just want someone who will fight harder against the Republicans and don't fully understand the ideological extremism that he is bringing to the table.

41:19So why is this a story outside Michigan? So the Democrats may be about to nominate someone who's more to the left and has a high level of personal aggression and really, really, really hates Israel. And that's issue number one for and now she hates Israel. So suppose he wins. Why is this a story outside Michigan? His plan is he will then become the leader of the left. And he said this, and a lot of other leftists have said this, that he will become their standard bearer. Bernie Sanders is getting old now. If he can win, he will prove something that they've never been able to demonstrate before, that a left-wing candidate can win in a purple state, right?

41:56You've had DSA candidates winning in New York City. You have Bernie Sanders up in Vermont, which is a little bit idiosyncratic. And you have some other House candidates. You have some mayors, but you've never had anyone in a purple state winning on a platform this far left. And while El-Sayed is not in the DSA, he is supported by the DSA and he is aligned with the positions of a lot of DSA candidates. So that will completely change the perception of what is electable within the Democratic Party. One of the things that matters outside Michigan is that the left has probably given away the Maine Senate seat.

42:36And Susan Collins looks like, at this point, if you had to guess, she probably survived. Even in Maine, a mostly blue state. I'm not sure I agree. It's a chance. There's a chance. It's a risk. But something that should have been an easy pickup is now very contested. Michigan is also very, again, as you say, blue state, but one that does elect Republicans, also could be at risk. Is there any way to a Democratic Senate majority without both Maine and Michigan? No, no, I don't think there is. And the truth is, if you want to think about it from a politically sophisticated perspective, Michigan should have been an easy, easy hold, right?

43:13In a blue wave off your election, a state that almost always elects Democrats to the Senate, not by huge margins, but pretty reliably by, you know, three or four points, should have been an easy hold. And the outcome that I think a lot of moderates are afraid of is that El Sayed runs, say, four points behind the National Democratic Party, underperforms due to his extremism, but still gets in because it's such a huge wave. And then the left turns around and says, see, this shows that our agenda is popular and we need to implement it everywhere all the time. And so then and then the Democrats lose in 2028 to J.D.

43:49Vance and his program of of urbanism in the English language. Right. This is going to become the main proof point that's being used in this interfactional war within the Democratic Party. So if El-Sayed wins, it will be the proof point that the Democratic Party needs to run as far as it can to the left. And that will not impair their ability to win the election in 2028. And I think, well, actually, actually is going to be quite important in terms of the presidential outcome in 2028. In fact, it might even be El Sayed himself because they are so enthusiastic about his candidacy. He could, you know, like Obama went from a first year senator to presidential candidate.

44:23El Sayed could could easily be on that trajectory. That's how that's how powerful he's become within the movement so quickly. Well, people worry about the loss of consensus in American life and the polarization. But if you have an El Sayyad versus J.D. Vance ticket in 2028, at least we can have a consensus about the danger of the Jews. That would be – the two parties could agree on something. Right, right. And then Bloomberg will run a third-party race and get 2%, you know, all Jewish. So what's at stake here is not just the 2026 outcome but the 2028 outcome as well. I think that's correct, yeah.

44:57Yeah, so it's tremendously consequential. So I'm going to ask you a somewhat personal question. Forgive me if I overstep here. But one of the reasons why Republican moderates lost first to the Tea Party and then to Trump. And there was very little resistance to the Tea Party. There was a lot of resistance to Trump, but it was overwhelming. Was that people of moderate views, understandably, have moderate personalities. They don't like conflict. They don't like trouble. They always believe in compromise, that you can work things out. And so you get these kinds of soft, you have moderate ideas backed by soft personalities.

45:32Fred Siegel, who was a great urbanist, used to be at the Manhattan Institute, had this praise of Rudy Giuliani. And whatever you think of Rudy Giuliani personally, this is, I think, a great phrase. He described Giuliani as an immoderate centrist, which is he had centrist views, but he was just, he was full of aggression. Right. Which actually won out over the centrism. Yeah. So that, that, I think you've, this is the part that I was going to put you in. I mean, you are kind of an immoderate centrist. You're, you're ready to, you're a centrist, you have centrist views, but you're ready to brawl.

46:02But, um, but do you see, as you look at the democratic party, there's something about the, the moderate, they will not fight back. And therefore that they're abdicating by default to people who can, who are going to end up empowering Trump and whoever Trump's successor is probably J.D. Vance and all the J.D. Vance means for the future of American democracy. Absolutely. Look, it's an old problem, right? The definition of a liberal as someone who's too broad-minded to take his own side in an argument. This has been something that liberals have noticed about ourselves and have been complaining about ourselves without doing anything to change for generations.

46:37You know, you can find historical exceptions. Sometimes we point to the post-World War II moves by Arthur Schlesinger and Walter Ruther to form Americans for democratic action and to exclude the communists, to keep the communists out of the New Deal coalition and to fight for civil rights and fight for the New Deal values. But that's maybe more the exception than the rule in some ways. I mean, there really is something inherent to liberalism that's necessary to liberalism, which is an openness to critique, to not want to become so confident in yourself that you shut out all challenges, right? So I think there is a strength to that quality of liberalism that allows us to be supple, to change our positions with new facts, and I think has made liberalism enduring.

47:30Where is Obama in all of this? It's his legacy that is under attack. He's both institutionally, but also quite personally. Will he stand up for himself in an argument? Why doesn't he make himself heard? In a lot of these states, if the choice is Bernie Sanders versus random local Democratic official, Bernie Sanders may win. If it's Bernie Sanders versus Obama, we know how that fight goes. Is it because he's an ex-president who doesn't want to return to the muck and mire of politics? Where is he? I think he's calculated that he can have the most influence by operating behind the scenes. And you'll notice that the Bernie people absolutely despise Obama, specifically not not just for his presidency, but for his role in 2020, when you had this sudden coordination of the non-Bernie opposition.

48:17The Bernie Sanders strategy in 2020 was to win the Democratic nomination with under 50 percent by just having his opponents stay divided all the way through the convention. And he would never have to win a Democratic Party majority and you could get the nomination anyway. And then all of a sudden, just everyone realized they couldn't win and dropped out and endorsed Biden. And Obama played a role there and they hate him for that. So Obama will take an active role, but he doesn't want to play this factional leadership role that Bernie Sanders plays, where he goes into every contested primary and endorses the most left-wing candidate.

48:49I think he's calculated that will reduce his ability to influence people across the party, that will just make him a much more narrow factional figure. That doesn't seem like a crazy calculation to me. I can't say for sure it's right, though. I'm reading this summer Kay Bird's new biography of Roy Cohn, which is okay so if you're reading the book you'll know what i mean and one of the one of the anecdotes that bird tells in this book so president eisenhower kept coming up with very convincing very ingenious plausible arguments for not taking on joe mccarthy directly and the first time he says it and the second time he says it you think you make a point the third and fourth time you get to think you're just unwilling possibly you're scared but you're unwilling to take the risk And actually, you're not acting for good statesmanlike motives.

49:38You're acting for self-preservationist and maybe unworthy motives. When McCarthy starts to attack the army and to attack Eisenhower's friends, not just George Marshall, who he attacked in 52, but he attacks John J. McCloy in 53 and 54. And Eisenhower keeps trying to do things indirectly and has some success, partly because McCarthy is a desperate alcoholic and becoming very sick. But if McCarthy had not been a desperate alcoholic, it's not clear that Eisenhower's methods would have worked so well. And he just was making things easy for himself. And I wonder whether with all the subtlety and ingenuity you attribute to Barack Obama, whether he's also just trying to make things easy for himself.

50:15You might be right. I'm trying to explain what I think his calculation is. I can't say for sure that the alternative course of action wouldn't work, that if he really was willing to fight back and defend his legacy. He does do it in bits and pieces, but he really has allowed the left to win this argument about his legacy and he hasn't put up much of a fight. I mean, I was making the point during his presidency that his support for education reform, which was really something he cherished, began to disintegrate when the teachers unions and the left fought back against it. And he just kind of let them do it.

50:52And, you know, he didn't defend it. And by the time Hillary Clinton came along, it was really no longer viable ground to defend it in the Democratic Party. So I think you're right that there is this passivity. When you say that's what he thinks will work, one of my rules of politics is, in fact, none of us know what will work. We are always guessing, and we're usually looking in the mirror and projecting our own wishes. We're very poor judges of what will work. But we can be very good judges of what's the right thing to do. And we also can be, if we really look inward, we know when our reluctance to take a risky action is prompted by truly a prudential calculation.

51:28And when there's just a certain element of, it'll be a lot of trouble, a lot of hardship. It'll be easier for me if I take the softer course. And now I will persuade myself, well, the softer course, that's also the smart decision. But we never know what the smart decision is. We only know what the right decision is. I can't improve on that. Wow. Well, that's very collegial. Jonathan Chait, thank you so much. I'm sorry. I'm going to take pocket the rare positive review and put it in my pocket. I'll want something to criticize you. Don't worry. Okay. I know. Thanks so much for joining me today. Thank you, David.

52:06Bye-bye.

52:14A few months ago, I invited Atlantic staff writer, Charlie Worzel, onto the David Frum Show. As podcast hosts, we talked about the pressures and temptations of the medium. Outrage often gets rewarded. Nuance does not. Charlie doesn't take that bait. On his show Galaxy Brain, he covers the ways technology is changing how we think and how we live. Not just the obvious stuff, but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe, how we talk to each other, how we see ourselves and our neighbors. If you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online, Galaxy Brain is worth your time.

52:51It's thoughtful, surprising, and a little unsettling in the very best way. Find it wherever you listen or watch.

53:13Atlantic. And I'm Julie Beck, a staff writer at The Atlantic. This season, we're exploring the often fraught, always changing relationship people have with technology and examining the ways our devices affect our connection with one another. New episodes of How to Touch Grass come out every Monday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks so much to Jonathan Chait for joining me today on The David Fromm Show. As I mentioned at the top of the program, my book this week is a work of history, 1177 BC, The Year of Civilization Collapsed by Eric Klein, published in 2014 by Princeton University Press.

53:48Now, I have not yet seen The Odyssey. I may be alone on my block. It sounds wonderful, and I'm keen to get to it. But one of the things that I am remarking with admiration is that as people have gone to see The Odyssey, they have become fascinated by this question of the transition from one period of civilization to another. A character, I think it's Odysseus himself, says in the movie, Our Age of Bronze is Collapsing, which is maybe a little on the nose for movie dialogue, but is right. The Odyssey is a story set in the Bronze Age, written in the Iron Age, but measured by which metal was the predominant metal that went into weapons of war and other kinds of tools.

54:25And there was a big collapse in between the two. And Eric Klein's book, 1177, The Year Civilization Collapse, is a study of the collapse in an attempt to explain why it happened. As I understand, and again, I haven't seen the movie, but the great theme of Christopher Nolan's Odyssey is that this collapse is, first and foremost, a moral collapse. One civilization has had the kind of life energy seep out of it and is giving way to a new and successor civilization that will be guided by different rules and different values. And indeed, there really was, across the eastern Mediterranean, a remarkable collapse around the year 1177 BC.

55:02The Hittite Empire, which was the superpower of the time based in what is now southern Turkey, that vanished entirely and its capital disappeared. Across the Mediterranean city-states vanished. The Minoan civilization vanished. The new kingdom in Egypt didn't quite vanish, but it lost a lot of its military power and never again exerted the kind of power over the region that it had before about the year 1200. Mycenaean Greece, which is where the characters in the Iliad and the Odyssey supposedly come from, that civilization utterly collapsed. It even lost the ability to read and to write for hundreds of years, only to reemerge later as an Iron Age civilization.

55:38And so it is through up and down the Levant, into the islands, Cyprus. So why did the bronze, what happened? Eric Klein tries to give us an answer, but the key thing to keep in mind as to the background that enabled all this is that bronze, which is the weapon that the heroes of the Iliad and the Odyssey used for the metal that they used for their weapons, and that was the main form of armor and tools. Bronze is a compound of copper and tin. So copper was relatively abundant in the Mediterranean world. There were copper mines in Cyprus and in other places. But tin was scarce in that part of the world and had to be brought to be united with the copper from very far-flung places, as far as Cornwall in Great Britain and Afghanistan in the center of Asia.

56:20So when you're committed to bronze, you're committed to very global trade routes. And because the trade routes are so extended, you build large states. Because you have large states, you need ways to manage the states, including organized religion and reading and writing and some kind of numbering system. How do you keep track of how much tin has moved from Afghanistan to Babylonia and when it moved and who moved it? You need some form of writing. And you need a bureaucracy. You need comparably sophisticated and elaborated states. Something happened around the year 1177, and Klein makes a good case that it's a compound of ecological effects.

56:58Droughts and earthquakes that weakened the states, ended their ability to import tin, reduced the availability of the bronze alloy made from copper and tin, and set these stakes reeling backwards and made them militarily vulnerable to invaders and small bands that otherwise they would have just brushed off with superior strength. So through the Bronze Age, people knew about iron, but iron was a more difficult material to work. Particularly, it required a lot of heat. And it just seemed that bronze, which was easier to work with and had a lot of prestige attached to it, that was a natural medicine, metal of choice.

57:36But once the bronze is no longer available because the tin has become hard to get, people are forced back to figure out ways to work with the iron. And once they do so, they find that iron is a dramatically superior weapon of work, makes sharper, stronger swords, spears, and arrowheads. And so iron replaces it, and the world never looks backward to bronze. Bronze is from then on used primarily for statuary and art because it remains a prestige material, but it's not a workable material. But the Klein story is one of environmental change leading to material innovation, not a story of moral decay.

58:10It wasn't that people somehow lost faith in themselves and therefore turned away from bronze and then found a new faith and therefore turned to iron. They had very practical problems. Now, I don't want to dispute the importance to art of telling stories about moral decay and moral regeneration. But as we're trying to understand why civilizations actually change, morality surely plays a part in it. Anyone watching the crisis of American democracy right now has to face that the greatness of a society and the ebb of greatness can be attributed to moral defects in that society. But we also need to pay a lot of attention to ecological changes that force change upon society and to the material responses to environmental change.

58:50Because while we're not doing a great job in 21st century America to adapting to our moral challenges, we're doing an even worse job of adapting to climate changes. And if climate is what failed the Hittites, and as other historians will tell us, if climate is what failed the Romans, and if climate is what, as other historians again tell, failed the Ming Empire and led to the rise of new civilizations in China, then climate, if we don't pay attention to it, it could be the falling of us. So as we enjoy the movie, as we absorb its powerful moral lessons, we also need to keep our eye on the material world, the world of climate and weather.

59:25Maybe we can't control it, but we'd best learn to adapt to it, because if we don't, it will be the end of us. Thanks so much for watching the David Fromm show this week. I hope you will share the program and like it on whatever platform you use. As ever, if you're minded to support the program, the best way to do so is by subscribing to The Atlantic and support all of my colleagues, including my colleague Jonathan Shate. See you next week on The David Fromm Show. Bye-bye.

1:00:13This episode of The David Fromm Show was produced by Nathaniel Fromm and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grine. Our theme is by Andrew Edwards. Claudine Abad is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Baldez is our managing editor. A few months ago, I invited Atlantic staff writer Charlie Warzel onto the David Frum Show. As podcast hosts, we talked about the pressures and temptations of the medium. Outrage often gets rewarded. Nuance does not. Charlie doesn't take that bait. On his show Galaxy Brain, he covers the ways technology is changing how we think and how we live.

1:00:58Not just the obvious stuff, but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe, how we talk to each other, how we see ourselves and our neighbors. If you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online, Galaxy Brain is worth your time. It's thoughtful, surprising, and a little unsettling in the very best way. Find it wherever you listen or watch.