Christopher Caldwell: Is It Too Late to Save the English-Speaking World?

30:17It was as an alternative to that that the European Union was created because that prospect really freaked the French out. But at any rate, the United States really wanted Germany to be reintroduced to the West. And to do that, a certain number of ground rules had to be laid down. You know what I mean? Like you couldn't buy a copy of Mein Kampf. Eventually, you couldn't join a communist party. You know what I mean? There's, so yeah, Germany had, Germany's free speech was a little constrained, you know. It might have been constrained anyway. But it also had this highly critical idea of German history.

31:14And again, it's understandable, but there's a lot of great stuff in German history too. I mean, the Reformation comes out of Germany. Germany was the most cultured country in the world with the, you know, with the arguable exception of Britain at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. And it's, I mean, I don't have to go through the list. It was only a matter of time before Germans said, well, like, can't we talk about the good things in our culture too? I thought that that moment actually was coming around the time of the Iraq war. And I think that that was a, to a, to a, you know, Gerhard Schroeder, I mean, at the time, it was fashionable to blame France for the European opposition of, to the American adventure in Iraq, in which, in which, you know, Europe has been spectacularly vindicated, I think.

32:14But in fact, I think it was Germany as much as France that was driving that rebellion. And it was Gerhard Schroeder who said, who is then the chancellor of Germany, he said the foreign policy of Germany is going to be made in Berlin and only in Berlin. I thought that that was happening then. At any rate, for a long time, people really lacked the institutions through which to express that German, you know, I wouldn't even call it pride. It's just the desire that, it's partly pride, but it's just the desire that Germany be treated like a normal country again, you know. And I think now, 80 years after the war, and confronted by certain problems that actually require a certain amount of national pride to address, I mean, Germans are beginning to talk that way again.

33:22They're beginning to say, you know, we need to be Germans again. So the people trying to wreck our civilization want you to be passive. They want you weak so they can control you. Weakness is their goal. No, thanks. Our friends at Beam, a proud American company, understand that our country can only be great if its people are strong. And that's why they've created a new creatine product to help listeners like you stay mentally sharp and physically fit. People like to mock creatine. CNN doesn't like creatine at all. But people buy it because it works. Beam's creatine can help you improve your strength, your brain health, your longevity.

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34:46We strongly recommend it. It's interesting that AFD, the alternative for Germany, is treated like an outlaw party by the courts in Germany. And yet it's growing in popularity. I was just reading in the largest German state, members of the party were banned from owning guns because they were court under the law. North Rhine, Westphalia. Yeah. Can that continue? Well, this is a big drama. Yes, it can continue. It's an interesting situation. I mean, the German, I'm not sure where in the Grundgesetz it is, in the German basic law, but the German constitution permits something called the Office for the Protection of the Constitution to monitor parties to make sure that they're not dangerous right wing extremists.

35:54parties. And the goal of having that in the constitution was to prevent any recrudescence of Nazism. Now, there are parties all across Europe that had certain antecedents, whether in the institution itself or in certain just personnel, you know, the way for the way, for example, while Mussolini's fascist party was ended at the end of World War II, but a lot of its members went and they joined the MSI, the Italian Social Movement. And that sort of continued after the Second World War. And then there were offshoots of it. Many of the people in it became left-wing. Georgia Maloney started a new party, but it had some people who were in the MSI.

36:48So if you want to trace a genealogy from mid-20th century fascism to certain European leaders, you can. And people do that as a way of sort of gaining talking points against Maloney. Constantly they do it. Yeah. However, the interesting thing about the AFD though, is that the AFD is not one of those parties. The AFD was founded in 2013 by a bunch of academic macroeconomists who were worried that the European Union, by guaranteeing the debts of Greece and other failing countries, was in an invisible way taxing Germany. So it was built around a very recondite complaint, you know, and not a hate-filled complaint.

37:43And I remember interviewing the head of the party at the time, who was an economist named Bernd Luka, and he was just a very nerdy guy. He's left, I think he's left the party since, but the party underwent two transformations. The first came in 2015 when Angela Merkel invited immigrants, you know, from fleeing the Syrian civil war to come to Germany, and they began streaming over land into Europe and were then joined opportunistically, as you may remember by a lot of Pakistanis and Iraqis and Iranians and Afghans and just a whole huge human wave. And a woman in the party, a very charismatic, sort of like mother of many children named Frauke Petri said, you know what?

38:42We are the alternative for Germany. No party is arguing for an alternative immigration policy, and that has to be us. And so it became the anti-immigration party. But at the same time, It had, for similar but less noticeable reasons, it had attracted people who wanted a change in Germany for all sorts of things, including what we would call culture warriors, people who wanted to change the school curriculum so that it denigrated Germany less. And then it became a whole big grab bag of parties, of tendencies, which it is today, although they are a much more united party than I think a lot of people think.

39:34And they're now, you know, they get 20 % in the last election. And between elections, they tend to poll much higher. So they're a serious party. They have at times in the last few months since the elections in January, I believe, they have been the largest party in Germany in terms of opinion polling. So if you have a country that calls itself, advertises itself a democracy, a country run by the people who live there, and over time the establishment excludes parties that represent the majority of the people, then don't you get a revolution at a certain point? Maybe, you know, I think I got a little off track.

40:17There's one piece I forgot to explain. So there exists in the German constitution this idea of banning parties. Yes. And it's, I think that then when people understood it, it was something that was supposed to be done in like 1948, whenever like a gang of people, you know, got together in one city. And that's why, like, there have been parties banned since the Second World War, not in a very long time. And they tended to be, you know, tiny little groups of what we would call jackbooted thugs. The idea that this mechanism could be used to ban the largest party in the country, And furthermore, one that was founded two generations after the Second World War in 2013 is not what the Constitution envisioned.

41:19Nonetheless, you can see the appeal of it for two formerly big national parties that are now shriveling up and want to get those votes back or want to keep from being swept away. you know? Well, of course I can. It's just such a violation of the core principle of a democracy that I just don't think, you know, either you have to change the name of the system. It's just, you know, it's an autocracy run by people with power and everyone else shuts up, or you have to stop doing that. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. I mean, you, well, you have, you know, you have, you've interviewed Callan Georgescu on this show.

42:03If you look at what happened in Romania and the elections last, you know, last November, where he was simply disqualified because someone in the government asserted without presenting proof that there had been a Russian campaign to elect him and managed to head off the next, you know, his replacement in the second round of that election, which was delayed for many months and got a member of the establishment into the Romanian government. It didn't really work like a democracy. And yet when it happened, people said, well, we've defended democracy. We've defended democracy against the voters. So it's the sort of kind of, it's the kind of thing that Bertolt Brecht would make a joke about.

42:53Right. And yes, it's not small d democratic, but people have chosen to call this form of government, which is, you might call it like state of emergency liberalism, which is basically, I think, the most accurate description of what it is. It's a great description. They claim the term democracy, but I don't think they're doing so very successfully. And the parties that represent this state of emergency liberalism do not do terribly well. It just seems like the spread between what people want and what they're getting grows wider every year. People seem to hate mass migration everywhere in the world.

43:40I don't think there's a single person who likes mass migration, really. And you can tell by their behavior. Certainly true in this country. I think people have an expectation of sovereignty, which almost no country has. Like a country gets to make its own decisions, but that's not in practice happening anywhere with only, again, a few exceptions. And so there's so much frustration about that that I just, I'm wondering what's the point where it bubbles up into something unmanageable? Well, a couple of things. I don't, I'm not sure that the, I think that the gap between what people want and what they're getting is wide, is wide, but I'm not sure that it's widening.

44:21I mean, the election of Trump was certainly a call for more action against mass migration. Yes. And since he's been elected, the border has been pretty much closed. There have been deportations. There have been, you know, certainly the rhetorical stance of the administration is against migration. I mean, Trump may disappoint his voters on other things, but on that one thing, which I think we agree is like a really central issue, actually the will of the people and the actions of the government have kind of converged. I agree with that. If there were to be, as I've just described, a conservative government in England and it abolished the Human Rights Act, which would allow Britain to act in a fully sovereign way, then the way would be wide open to deporting people who did not have the right to be there.

45:26And certainly to stopping the ongoing traffic of small boat migration in England. So I think that that's, I think it is, I think it's possible things are getting better from a democratic point of view. You also said, okay, so at what point does this explode? I'm not sure it does because one of the things that makes things explode is discontent in numerous and dynamic classes. And that's why the Arab world was so unruly throughout the 1980s and the 1990s because this was a part of the world in which people were having like six or eight or ten kids and there was no place to put these young men. And there was a lot of martial dynamism in these societies.

46:28And in fact, wherever you have a lot of young people, if you look at the United States in the 60s and 70s, you have a lot of disorder and rebellion. But we're not societies like that anymore. We are top-heavy societies full of old, wobbly people. And these are not the kind of societies that say, darn it, I've had enough. These are people who need, I mean, the demographic heart of our societies is in people who are of an age where they need care, not where they're going to run out into the street shaking their fists. So most of what the big health companies sell is loaded with sugar and fillers and synthetic junk.

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47:53which is good. Everyone here has felt the difference. Better sleep, more energy, smoother mornings. It has helped a lot of people here, and it can help you too. You get 20 % off for life, for life, when you start your first month. Go to peaklife.com slash Tucker, peak, P-I-Q-U-E, life.com slash Tucker. Highly recommend it. When the children of the latest wave of migrants to the United States are 18, so that'll be in 15 years, then you're going to have a really dynamic society. You're going to have a lot of people born in this country to immigrant parents who feel like they want a piece of it and you're going to have massive change, wouldn't you think?

48:40Absolutely. And that, I think, is... That's why I've tended to look at this, you know, what's happening now with... arguments over the border and with, you know, with Trump as part of a process that will come to resemble about a century later, the process that led to the New Deal. I mean, because I think the New Deal was the consolidation of a new governing system in a way that took account of the waves of migration that had changed the country between 1880 and 1920, you know, and And, you know, we are, we look at our present demographic change and we say, oh my goodness, things are really, you know, what country has ever faced anything like this?

49:31And it's really, there really is a, there are really a lot of points of contact between what has happened with us and what happened to the country between 1880 and 1920. You have, you know, people from, you know, the initial argument is, look, you know, it's all well and good to receive people, but this country is about a certain set of values. It's about, you know, it's historically determined. These people who are coming know nothing of our country. How are they going to ever, you know, assimilate into it? It's exactly the same arguments that you got in the 1880s, 1890s. Then you get demands for, you know, like closing the border.

50:14And it just doesn't happen and doesn't happen and doesn't happen until 1924 when it suddenly happens. And then suddenly the only people who can come here are the people who are already here. I mean, let's see, the only Americans are the ones who've already arrived. Those are the only foreigners. And that's why, you know, if you look at it, it's why there are so many Italians in Argentina. They came after 1924 when the Italians could no longer go to New York. And so from there, these people had no choice but to mix together into a new kind of American. And the people who said these people will never be able to adapt to the old American ways, they were wrong, but they weren't totally wrong.

51:04I mean, the country did change to reflect the identity of the new immigrants. And then in 1932, when Roosevelt came to power on the heels of an event that discredited the old elites, which is the crash, then he claimed the authority to basically reorganize the country in the name of this new mix of the, you know, of the settled Americans, the new immigrant Americans. And it knit the country into one people so effectively that by the 1950s and 60s, young Americans were sort of like complaining about how boring and homogenized the United States was. You know what I mean? Yes. So it can be done. Will there, after Trump leaves in three years, will there be like a series of Trumps or will the party revert to what it was?

52:12before Trump. Will the Republican Party revert to what it was before Trump? Oh, first of all, I think Trump is such an unusual person that I don't think he can really be replicated, even if, no matter how hard anyone tries. He was a, I mean, he came to prominence because he had an incredible amount of, you know, what used to be called brass at a time when brass was what was required. There are other people who seem to have more of the qualifications that a politician would require. That is like patience and like an understanding of policy and things like that. You had people like Ron DeSantis seem to be offering that to the Republican Party for a while.

53:17But it's not what the country felt it needed. The country felt it needed brass. The country felt it needed someone to come in and insult, topple, and break the old establishment. Was that establishment broken, like after Trump? Well, it's still in progress. I mean, this is something you know a lot more about than I do, but if I look at Trump won, I would say that it was an almost utter failure on Trump's own terms. That is, I mean, he used that list that Leonard Leo and others had given him to fortify the Supreme Court as a more or less conservative force. And he nominated a lot of judges. But I don't think that he ever understood where the actual levers of power in the government were.

54:29And so the same deep state that he had complained about went on, was as strong on the day he left office as it was on the day that he arrived. And so one had the impression that he'd learned absolutely nothing. And so what has happened under Trump too is one of the most astonishing surprises in the history of American politics. Now, in Brexit, you had a guy who was kind of a genius in the workings of British government named Dominic Cummings, who was able to say, well, no, you don't need to win a majority in parliament on this one. You just need to control the cabinet office, etc. Trump never had such a person.

55:18But apparently, and the details are still not clear how, apparently he acquired one or several in the course of his four years out of power. I think Steve Bannon is correct to say that the four years out of power in Trumpian terms were a great blessing for him. So there's someone, I mean, maybe Steve Miller is a candidate for this, who has the most tremendous Machiavellian understanding of what can be done inside government. I mean, the speed with which USAID was dismantled, which in what seems to me, it was not really a cost-saving operation. It was like a purge of a certain tendency in government.

56:13was really, you know, whatever you think of it as an ideological operation, it was a tremendously expert operation in terms of, you know, government rejiggering. The executive orders that he has, you know, canceled and the new ones that he has passed in order to give a new reading to affirmative action. And I would say that affirmative action was in many ways the key institution of American government of the last half century to render it inoperative, even if he hasn't fully killed it, is a constitutional revolution. So yeah, this is, I mean, things are still in progress. It's very difficult to see whether an operation like, say, deportations, whether that is going to accelerate or whether Trump is really running out of gas and this is going to.

57:19But it's hard to see how it will proceed from here. But it's been a huge change. He's turned out to be a very significant president. Can you go back a second? How was affirmative action the key institution in American government? Well, I've always thought, and we've talked about this, that the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the, you know, it created a new constitution that was really at odds, a de facto new constitution that was at odds with what we thought of as our real constitution. And as, you know, what it basically tried to do was sort of like create a more, you know, create a society in the South where, you know, blacks could live as equal citizens to whites, you know, in public and in large companies and that sort of thing.

58:24But it wound up being an incredibly versatile tool. You could use it for anything once you had declared a sort of national emergency. So like getting women onto, you know, like corporate boards or getting, you know, bilingual education into schools, getting, you know, protecting, you know, transgender story hour. I mean, it just it just ramified into every corner of American life. And anybody could be made any anybody was under suspicion. prohibition um and you know let's let's just say incorporation it worked publicly and privately in corporations anyone who ran a a company that was you know larger than a few dozen people was understood to be under you know the government's watchful eye um you could you could you could avoid being sued really only by establishing an affirmative action program.

59:37And so it became the means through which the government could approach any institution, public or private, and say, you know, we'd like to have a look at your hiring practices. We'd like to have a look at like how you've been behaving for the last year in your board meetings. We'd like to know if there's anyone you're hiring who has kind of an animus against black people or women or gays or immigrants. And so it had a very chilling effect at every level of government and at every level of society. Is that over? And it is for now, except we now have a culture in which for 50 years, people, even in the most private, you know, conversations sort of have been trained to ask themselves, you know, can I say this or is this okay?

1:00:38Or, you know, like, you know, I'm not homophobic, but, you know, and so you have a. You have a society that has really been trained to be scared. So a lot of this, you know, yes, I think that institutionally it's over. But culturally, we are really not a people that has sort of like learned to use freedom. And that will take a long time. It'll take a long time to get an easy freedom of conversation back. about things, obvious things that you notice, differences between people and differences between groups. Yes, about anything. About anything. Almost anything, yeah. Do you see that changing? I see it changing.

1:01:30Do you see it changing? Yes, I do. That's interesting, yeah. It feels like the term racist has lost its sting, like almost completely. Yeah, well, I would expect that to happen. I haven't really gathered any evidence about it. I mean, for one thing, it's harder to sue a person when the government has announced that it's not enforcing affirmative action, that kind of thing. So, I mean, if you can, it used to be that if someone could just, if you could just successfully attach the word racist to a person, you know, whether through a lawsuit or a public relations campaign, no one could hire him. Do you know what I mean?

1:02:22It was a real. Oh, I do know what you mean. And it was sort of like, it was not as different from the Chinese social credit system, which we liked to deplore, as we like to think. And that is no longer true? Yes, I think that is no longer true. I think it's no longer true that institutionally you can destroy a person with that kind of imputation. However, it may become true again, depending on what happens in the next election. So people are wary. And I also think that people, we're not the sort of people that is comfortable going out on a limb anymore. more. We've become a very conversationally cautious people, or at least anyone who's like lived the last several decades in this country, you acquire habits.

1:03:27I mean, I think that you can't expect a person who's had these very self-protective habits beaten into him over decades to give them up in the same way that, you know, like, you know, people who lived through the depression maintained their habits of frugality for 60 years after that. Yeah. I remember when banks introduced ATM cards, they couldn't get people who grew up during the depression to use them. Well, that's a very good analogy. Because it was just too spooky, you know? Yeah. Do you remember a country where people spoke freely in conversation? Do you have memories of that? I remember one where people spoke more freely.

1:04:11I remember, and in fact, I went to college in the 1980s. I think it was pretty free. And actually, when people describe the first really mentioned in the wider public of so-called political correctness was, I think, in the winter of 1990 to 1991. Yes. And shortly thereafter, you know, you had the Clarence Thomas hearings for the Supreme Court, which introduced the idea of sexual harassment. And I got the feeling that things were changing very quickly right then. There were a couple of incidents then, and one that I remember very clearly was there was a Dodgers, an executive for the Los Angeles Dodgers named Al Campanis.

1:05:09who got invited on Ted Koppel's show Nightline to talk about Jackie Robinson 40 years after he'd entered the big leagues. And Al Campanis had been, not only was he not a racist, he had been Jackie Robinson's roommate and he was one of his defenders. He was great. But he said a few things kind of the wrong way, you know, like he gave a wrong answer to the question of why aren't more blacks managers? And he was ruined. He was ruined. This is a guy who had like fought to bring Jackie Robinson into the major leagues. But I mean, you know, you had, he lost his job. And I remember Maxine Waters, who was already, and I don't think she was yet in Congress, actually, but she was very active in California politics already.

1:06:06So she wanted to be sure that he wasn't secretly being given any benefits by the Dodgers of any kind. I mean, he was just like, he was just destroyed, this kindly old man who had been a friend of Jackie Robinson's. And it was clearly something was happening there. And I think that what was happening is that these enforcement possibilities, which are in the Civil Rights Act, that lawyers were getting more adept at using them for a growing number of things. like saying, well, of course you have freedom of speech, but if you say that in the company you own, you will create a hostile environment for your employees, and therefore they'll be able to sue you for this much money.

1:07:00So basically, without banning speech, you were able to make speech very uncomfortable for people. Did that just play out? I mean, is it just impossible for people to live this way forever and people just decided? No, it didn't play out. It had to be rebelled against. And the removal, the lifting of the executive orders that order affirmative action by Trump was an absolutely necessary step. The decision not to enforce affirmative action was a necessary step. By the way, it was preceded by a Supreme Court case that appeared in its mealy-mouthed way to say negative things about affirmative action programs in universities, but it's clear that universities were proceeding as best they could to maintain it.

1:08:10So, no, it does not play out. It's this affirmative action, political correctness, woke this whole constellation of authoritarian and even totalitarian seeming rules. They are rules. They are not part of the culture. They are not the result of, you know, a lot of people deciding we really ought to be nicer to trans people. They are enforced by the fact that if you fall afoul of these, of civil rights laws, it can cost you your business and your reputation and everything else. What's the real purpose of them? I sense that social justice is not actually the goal. Well, I – no, I – you know, and I should add that this is just a – well, let's deal with this.

1:09:16I think that solving the age-old race problem in the United States was the original goal of civil rights. Yes. But the tools that were given to solve that problem included ways to overturn democratically made decisions in the South. That tool, that ability to circumvent a democratic mandate from any people is such a valuable thing for politicians to have. And so they started using it for everything. As I say, you know, underrepresentation of women, underrepresentation of immigrants, underrepresentation of Hispanics, all these things become crises. And social justice actually was the name that was given to this.

1:10:19But it was always, and you can call it anything you want, but it always was a way of using the government to sort of order society. And the danger of it was that you could do that at a really, really micro level. I mean, you can do it at the level of like what signs people hang in the doors of their shops. And so it became kind of like the world that, you know, Vaclav Havel describes in his, and that's why everyone started reading Vaclav Havel and Alexander Solzhenitsyn again, because our society felt like those Eastern European societies at the time of communism. No, it was Soviet. It was totalitarian.

1:11:03I mean, in the strict sense, it was total control over people's lives. Yeah, I like to draw the distinction that Hannah Arendt does at one point. A lot of people use totalitarianism to mean like a really, you know, I mean, Mussolini originally used it to mean, you know, like the state can, you know, like can be all competent. And a lot of people in our time use it to mean like a really, really, really bad dictatorship. But the way Hannah Arendt uses it means like the state gets into the totalitary, the totality of your life. Exactly. It doesn't have to be violent. Right. There's no nook of your life that the state, where the state does not belong.

1:11:50The state wants to be at your dinner table. You know what I mean? And listening in on you. You know, the state wants to be, you know, on your route to work and make sure, you know, the state wants to be everywhere with you in everything you do. Can we go back to that? So you said that this was not organic. The population never cried out for total control of its personal conversations or anything else. It was imposed on the population by the state. Now it's been rolled back by the state. Right. Run by Donald Trump. but can it be reimposed? Would people put, like, could President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez be like, you know, my goal as president is gonna be to eliminate racism?

1:12:35Wouldn't people just laugh at her? Yes, but there might be a confrontation. I mean, as long as Trump hasn't, you know, removed these laws from the books, which he hasn't, he's merely sort of like suspended the enforcement of them and he's unwritten some executive orders, which can be reissued. I mean, it's a reprieve. So the interesting thing would be what would happen if, how would the public respond with four years of living more freely if those freedoms were suddenly withdrawn? And this includes, you mentioned young people. This includes people, you know, who've had, who've never had any experience of, of having political, politically correct censorship at work or, or that sort of thing.

1:13:28And I don't know. You were saying last night at dinner that people often say the Democratic Party, when it takes power again, as it will at some point, will be a lot more radical, but you were saying maybe that's not correct. I don't know what they will have the capacity to do. You say, well, how will people respond if President Ocasio-Cortez says, we're going to have affirmative action and drag queen story hour again? I just don't know. But yes, I do think the Democratic Party is probably going to, you know, it's going to find something to, you know, some way to radicalize. At what point do economic debates like reemerge?

1:14:24And notice we've, you know, as we've been talking about Drag Queen Story Hour and race and sexuality and all this stuff, there's been in a way that would have been weird 40 years ago, but almost no conversation of like macroeconomics in public. Like all the oxygen is taken up by that, this, the political correctness stuff. Yeah. And I think it's a very welcome thing that economics is coming back. You hear a bit of it when we talk about the tariffs, you know. A very interesting, I mean, but Trump is, Trump has really confounded a lot of the categories. I think that everyone has the habit of like saying, you know, talking about tax cuts for the rich and all that kind of thing.

1:15:10To tie this to what we've been saying with immigration. Immigration is a very important part of this economic question. Trump, an interesting thing about Trump's first term is that as best we can measure it, it was a highly egalitarian period. And, you know, we really only have accurate, undistorted numbers for the first three years of it because the final year of it was COVID. But it really appeared that the bottom quintile of earners advanced against other quintiles for the first time since the 20th century. And I, you know. Really? Yes, yes. And this is in the Fed's numbers that came out towards the end of the Trump administration.

1:16:09If you look at total economic performance, like the way we tend to measure it, okay, we tend to measure it by the mean, that is the GDP per capita. Economic performance was much better, or it was better under the Obama administration than it was under Trump. The economy grew more. However, if you look at the distribution of it, there were far lower gains for the very rich under Trump. But there were relative gains. There were absolute gains, let us say, for the people in the lower quintiles. I think the four bottom quintiles did quite well under Trump.

1:16:54So his voters benefited is what you're saying. Exactly. OK, so there's I mean, it's hard to say why that happened. I think immigration did go down, but mostly immigration was talked down. OK, when you have high immigration, high immigration is like a direct transfer payment from those who compete with immigrants to those who use immigrants, you know. um but that's you know that's interesting yeah immigration really is a transfer of wealth to the rich yeah so um when we talk about trump and immigration that's that that's i think an important thing to keep in mind um and and and that is why um a lot of people were really surprised by the shift in votes, particularly among black and Hispanic males to Trump in 2024.

1:17:53And people have sought to explain it through these cultural factors that we've been discussing earlier today. Oh, was it Trump's endorsement by this rap hip hop star or whatever? But I think it might just be that people, you know, people at that part of the economy, you know, who tend to be, you know, that benefited from Trump one, tend to be disproportionately black and Hispanic. And it might just be a direct case of people just devoting their direct economic interests. It's a little weird if you go through the Congressional Black Caucus, certainly among the people whose names you've heard, like the famous black political leaders in this country, they're all for open borders.

1:18:38Huh. Well, I think that that is largely intersectionality. And, you know, people talk about people in universities talk about intersectionality, like it's a theory about, you know, how, you know, different types of lack of privilege intersect. Like, you know, am I more discriminated against because I'm a black woman or because I'm a lesbian and that kind of thing or because I'm foreign or whatever. But actually what intersectionality is, you've used the term on your show, but what I think it really is is just coalition building. The civil rights regime created a system in which you could do almost anything you wanted.

1:19:33A minority could do almost anything that he wanted with government. You could do almost anything you wanted with government in the name of minorities. But minorities remained minorities. You couldn't get the majority to do that. So what happens is minorities wind up make the beneficiaries of minority government wind up making an alliance. You know, you can't vote against immigration because you're a woman and, you know, women's rights are immigrant rights and immigrant rights are human rights and human rights are gay rights. And they're all wrapped up together. So and that's where the much mocked non sequiturs of intersectionality come from, like gays for Gaza and that kind of thing.

1:20:23My favorite. Yeah. But really you're just describing the Democratic Party. This is just like theoretical overlay to justify retroactively a coalition. The Democratic Party is the party of the beneficiaries of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Democratic Party is the party of beneficiaries of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And the Republican Party is the party of the victims of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Or those who have objections to it. I mean, if you count among the victims, those who feel their liberties constrained. by it. Yeah. I would say curtailing someone's liberty is to hurt somebody.

1:21:06Yeah.

1:21:09Interesting. Does that change? Well, as I say, I think it's in abeyance now. But if I could say another thing about immigration and the economy, there is a kind of a longer term process sort of working itself out as we create this, as we create through border enforcement, a tightening of the labor market on the bottom of the income distribution. It should do some very good things for the country. If you believe, as I think you probably should believe, that inequality is one of the biggest problems confronting the country, it's going to alleviate that somewhat. But it's going to do it in a kind of a – it's going to do it in a way that is going to hurt in places.

1:22:12I think people are right. I mean I think those economists who say that immigration – that curtailing immigration is inflationary are right. And it's inflationary in a lot of ways that affect the – not just the upper middle class but also the middle class lifestyle. Like the great proliferation of really nice restaurants. The idea that when this experiment in mass immigration in a nearly open border with Mexico began in the 1970s, there weren't a dozen sushi restaurants in Pittsburgh. I mean, people didn't. There were no sushi restaurants in Pittsburgh. This stuff, we tend to think that these amenities have developed because of our improving taste, that we're just so much more discerning than our parents were.

1:23:13But the difference, I think, is this source of just plentiful, bountiful, really cheap labor for people who can work in back kitchens and things like that. When I worked in a restaurant as a dishwasher 40 years ago this summer, it was a diner in New England. Everyone was white in the kitchen. Everybody, everyone on the criminal record, everyone was white. That's interesting. But so when you tighten up that labor market and suddenly you have to pay your dishwasher a dollar more, two dollars more, three dollars more, the meals in your restaurant are going to get more expensive. So there aren't going to be, you know, like sandwiches, gourmet sandwiches for$11.99 anymore.

1:24:01They're going to be like$28.99, you know. And people are going to say, I'm going to bring my sandwich to work, you know. And then the restaurant is going to close. And the country is going to become much more like it was, like what you saw the tail end of in your diner in New England. It's going to have crummier food. It's going to have – there's going to be a lot more sameness. That's what the world of a low immigration, less free market, where there's less of a free market in labor. That's what a society like that looks like. The working class gets richer. They move towards the middle. Everyone gravitates towards the middle class, right?

1:24:53And institutions, economic institutions begin to serve the middle class. That is, you have a shrinking of gourmet restaurants and a concentration of restaurants in the middle of the road category. So the middle class was the dominant portion of the country. It was the majority middle class country up until I think 2015. and did that change and then the middle class is no longer the majority is is that because of immigration has a lot to do with immigration yes globalization and immigration and um i mean i think people people tend not to mention um immigration i mean people tend to say it's a mix of globalization that is free trade and technology you know but i think that the most important part of globalization is immigration.

1:25:53Why is it the most important? I mean, it has effects the most changes? George Borjas, the Harvard economist, has said that, you know, immigration, people always talk about, you know, is immigration good for the economy or bad for the economy? And basically, whenever you measure it, it's tough to get an effect on the economy that's more than like 1%. It's so trivial. I mean, but what the huge effect is, which is like dozens of times larger than the effect on the economy as a whole is the transfer effect. The sort of loss of jobs by people who need$15 an hour to wash dishes to those who will do it for$8 an hour, okay?

1:26:37And the benefit to people who used to be paying their gardener, you know,$30 an hour, but now find it can be done for$6 an hour. Or more likely they pay a guy who's got a team on his truck and they pay him, you know, $30 an hour and let him sort out how this is done. And he does it much quicker and they save money. You see what I mean? I do. So it becomes a transfer from the working class. So it doesn't necessarily, I think what you're saying is it doesn't necessarily expand your economy, but it just makes the rich richer. I think so. So that would explain why rich people, these are broad strokes, but in general, hate any conversation about immigration.

1:27:25Immediately go to motive, you're a racist, and just aren't at all interested in talking about it at all, and why working class people really resent it. There may be other reasons too, but that seems like a big reason. Yes, those are broad strokes, but I think they're roughly accurate. There's a French sociologist named Christophe Giloui who's written books about how this has worked in France, and his thinking has really clarified mine on this. But basically in France, you have 20 cities that are like nodes of the global economy. and they like, you know, like in Toulouse, you have Airbus and where there are engineers and executives at Airbus, they have, you know, African gardeners and there are nannies and there are all sorts of people there.

1:28:19It's a global economy niche. When you get out into the countryside, none of that stuff touches anything. It's basically people, the economy consists of like returning, you know, cans to the, you know, to the grocery store. This explains why, you know, if you live in a place like Washington, D.C. or Berkeley, California or Boston, people are like sincerely puzzled. They say like, how did Trump win? I don't know anyone who voted for him, you know, and they say, they'll say something like, no, really, I've talked to people of all classes. I didn't vote for him. You know, my mother didn't vote for him.

1:29:02My nanny, you know, you know, in, you know, from Jamaica didn't, you know, who's not naturalized and didn't vote. She didn't vote for him. And the answer is the dividing line is not between rich and poor. It's between the beneficiaries of and the excluded from the global economy, right? That's the dividing line in the politics. so when you give up open borders you're really giving up like a whole way of life you give up the solidarity between classes in your country oh what does that mean i don't know i'm as soon as i said it i realized that what you could look at it in a in a separate in a different way i mean you you give up a dynamic that brings the classes close together, you know, which is that the ability of working class people to withhold their labor for more money.

1:30:03You know what I mean? You undercut that. They become, it's why trade unions, when they were actual industrial unions and not arms of the Democratic Party, you know, were, you know, they equated immigrant labor with scab labor. Well, they were behind the immigration restrictions of the 1920s. So you give up that dynamic, you know. But it's very tempting, you know. There are other ways to look at it. But yeah, I think that's basically the best way to look at it. China ever decide as its economy matures and cools inevitably that it needs mass immigration to China? You know, I don't know much about China.

1:30:55I know a little more about Japanese. You know, China has had a tremendous amount of internal labor migration, which is just about to come to the end of. And so its labor costs are going to rise. I don't know how it's going to react. It's very interesting that Japan has chosen a tightening economy over a diversifying society. That is, they've kept out immigrant labor for the most part. And where they've admitted it, they've tended to do it on a temporary basis. You get a few Filipino nannies and they send them home at the end of their term. The only mass migration they've had in the last 100 years has been from Korea, which they controlled until 1945.

1:31:54And then the Koreans who stayed kind of pretend they're Japanese. Yes. So, you know, I think that, you know, and... How's that trade worked for them? I think it's worked well for them. I mean, I think it's worked for them. I mean, the United States is constantly, the United States has brought tremendous pressure on Japan to admit immigrants. And this is one of the things that I find, exactly, this is one of the things I find quite mysterious. But if you look at the pressure that the United, this is one of the things that I think that USAID did. I mean, it's sort of an ideological arm of the country.

1:32:29But if you look at not just programs, but people in the United States, diplomatic or in the State Department, we're always sort of like browbeating Viktor Orban in Europe, for instance, for not being more welcoming of immigrants. But so I think we're at the point now where we're in a moment of transition. But, you know, Japan is deeply in debt. I believe they have the largest per capita debt in the world, although it is all to themselves. You know, so it's debt to the – so it should be workable. But there's still a Japan. And, you know, as we've discussed, Japan decided that it valued its cultural continuity more than European countries did.

1:33:28And so Japan, if you go there, you'll discover it's still, I think, the Japan that people who went there 20 or 30 years ago remember it as. So that, I mean, they seem like the only smart country, like in the world. because that does seem no one's starving in Japan. Actually, Japan is infinitely nicer than New York, for example. Sorry. Tokyo is. And even though it's bigger and more crowded. Yeah. And I just wonder, like, is that, like, that just seems like the greatest win to me. Well, they think so because they continue to keep this policy. And there's not a lot of agitation for changing it, you know.

1:34:18But I don't know. It's been a few years since I've been there. Last question. Are you hopeful about the United States?

1:34:30Yeah. You know, but I'm not sure that's saying much. I tend to want to be hopeful. And the United States has some tremendous strengths. You know, it's got, the United States has, something has happened since the, I'm using Europe, which I think is the best, you know, frame of comparison here. You know, the United States has got a lot richer than Europe in the last 15 years. I don't know why that's happened. The two societies seem to be converging up until roughly the time of the financial crisis of 2008 and then the euro crisis that followed it. And since then, the United States has peeled away by like, I don't know, 20 or 25 % from European standards of living.

1:35:28So it's richer. It seems to be in a period of democratic ebullition. I mean, the populace is engaged. This doesn't mean that they've made a right choice with Donald Trump or that he's always going to do the right thing. But the public is kind of vigilant and it is reforming the country. And we've reformed before. So I'm relatively optimistic. I am too. And you make me feel optimistic. Christopher Caldwell, thank you very much. Thank you, Tucker.

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