927 - Americas, The Beautiful feat. Greg Grandin (4/21/25)

All I wanna be is ill jumping.

All I wanna be is ill jumble.

All I wanna

Hello, everybody.

It's Monday, April 21st, and we've got some choppa coming at you.

On today's show, Felix and I are privileged to be joined by a historian whose work, I have just said, we have both knowingly and unknowingly expressed and been informed by throughout the entire course of our show.

It is our distinct privilege to be talking with Greg Grandin today.

Greg, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

I'm a big fan.

Greg,

in preparing for today, and obviously you have a new book coming out tomorrow, America, America, a new history of the new world, which is a sort of a hemispheric portrait of the last 500 years or so of this side of the planet and sort of how North and South America are sort of the histories and destinies are very much intertwined and inform one another.

In preparing for today's interview, I was thinking like, well,

how should I kick things off?

Well, I don't want to say today when I woke up offered, you know, a bit of good news, but I'll say it's a bit of tragic comic kismet that I awoke this morning to the death of Pope Francis.

And I guess I'll begin there, Greg.

Pope Francis is mentioned in the book, and I'm just wondering what you see in his life and career as sort of like embodying a lot of the currents of history and politics and the sort of tensions and contradictions between them.

What do you see in the life and career of Pope Francis and his passing?

Yeah, I I mean,

it sums up a lot of the arguments of the book.

I mean, you know, he died right after meeting J.D.

Vance.

I guess the main question is whether Vance killed him or he just lost the will to live after

meeting him.

I don't know

one or the other.

But I mean, you know, I mean, there's a lot to say about Francis because he does kind of embody so many different currents.

And one that's often overlooked is that he was an Argentine.

And he was a, you know, I don't know if he was a Peronist, but he grew up in Peronist Argentine when the working class was entering the political arena demanding, you know, social citizenship.

And that had a big effect on him.

And certainly he lived through the worst of the fascist

counter-revolutionary terror of the 1970s.

There's a little bit of a murky history there about his role.

He possibly collaborated with the Argentine junta in the 70s.

You know, I've just been having this Twitter fight with people because I posted, all I did was post say, all I did was post to say we shouldn't forget that, you know, there's this question out there, no, and it's murky, and nobody really knows, but, you know, history changes people, and obviously history changed this person for the better.

And then I got attacked.

There's no history.

Everybody recanted.

He had nothing to do with anything.

I mean.

It is a very murky history.

You know, some people say he protected his Jesuits.

Some people say that there were two particularly troublesome one that he couldn't protect, but did what he could.

Other people, you know,

so the Jesuits, the one that can only move diagonally, yeah,

yeah, exactly.

Yeah, yeah.

There's the joke about the Dominicans, the Franciscans, and the Dominicans, the Franciscans, and the Jesuits, but I guess that's not really.

Well, the lights go out.

The Dominicans say, let's meditate on the meaning of light and darkness.

The Franciscans say, let's sing a song

to the light and darkness.

And the Jesuits say, let's go change the light bulb.

So,

no, so you know, the point is, it affected him.

It must have had some

just the violence itself of that time, whether he was complicit or not.

You know, obviously.

And he was a Latin Americanist, and he embodied a kind of Latin Americanist sociality.

That I don't want to deny that there's the opposite of that.

There is

a deep-seated right-wing reactionism

that is there also.

But Francis, I think, brought to the papacy a certain kind of humanism that is the subject of the book.

The subject of the book is how do you explain the existence of these two things in Latin America?

A deep-rooted dehumanism, dehumanization that goes back to the conquest, and an equally

deep-seated humanism that the book actually argues emerges from the conquest, conquest, that the terms of modern political theory are set in the conquest of the new world

and in the critique of the conquest by a handful of theologians and lawyers that have enormous influence going forward that's often unacknowledged.

So, yes, it is a history.

The book is a history of how intertwined the Americas are, but there's been other books like that.

Oh, we're all American and all of that.

But this book makes a further argument.

One is that you can't understand the liberal international order that is now being undone by Donald Trump.

You can't understand it without understanding the history of the New World and the ideological competition between the United States and Latin America, and before that, the ideological competition between British colonialism and Spanish colonialism.

Yeah, I mean, you mentioned

the Pope meeting with J.D.

Vance a day before he died.

I mean, I guess I was struck by, because a big part of your book is about sort sort of

the Spanish Catholic Church mission to spread the gospel and to spread the Catholic Church into the new world.

And obviously, missionary work has been a huge part of the Catholic Church's history.

I just wonder if in meeting a Catholic convert like J.D.

Vance, the Pope was like, you know what, I sound depecaden.

Bye-bye.

It's all over.

It's all over.

Well, I mean, J.D.

Vance represented the other side of the schism that is deep and deeply rooted

within the Catholic Church.

You know,

it has a profound ideological,

irreconcilable.

I wouldn't even say it's a contradiction.

It's almost more like a paradox because it's unbreakable between a certain kind of hierarchical,

un-egalitarian, patriarchal

tradition and an emancipationist tradition.

And there they were, both of them.

There's Vance who thinks, you know, who wants, who is part of the Catholic manosphere.

You know, and or if they would let him in, I don't think they'd let him.

And Pope Francis, who,

you know, without romanticizing him at all, because obviously he said a lot of things that we, a lot of cringeworthy things, you know, as an ideal type did represent a more humanist tradition.

Well, Greg,

I want to get into the book and a lot of the history in it, but like, since since we're talking about like saying being prisoners of the present moment,

I do have to ask you, as a historian of American Empire and a longtime observer of American Empire, I have to ask, where are we at now?

Like, what stage of empire is this?

And it's like, what are your thoughts on the last two years of American history or the first couple months of the Trump administration that really does begin, like, you know, people are beginning to feel like we are being occupied by our own government in this country.

Is this the empire finally coming home?

Is this the culmination of a lot of the books you've written?

Yeah,

I would say that they confirm everything that I've written.

They would say that I have been proved 100% right.

Prematurely so.

I've been saying this since the 1980s.

And

yeah, I mean, there's a lot there.

You know,

obviously the big question is, is this the unraveling of the U.S.

Empire, particularly the loss of, or the potential loss of the dollar as fiat currency, which, you know, which let it do?

I mean, if the United States was as fucked up as it was when, because it had a fiat currency in which everybody put their monies into the dollar when there was a crisis, and therefore it allowed the United States to print as much money as it want and borrowed as much money as we want.

If we were as fucked up as we were then, when we had that ability to do that, imagine what we're going to be like when that's taken away from us.

It ain't going to be good.

I mean, it's a lot of things.

You know, obviously, the end of the myth is an argument about what happens when an empire founded on limitlessness as a way of organizing domestic politics hits limits.

And, you know, and the real, you know, the meta-argument of that is that there has been no empire in world history that so almost perfectly matched the dynamics of capitalism in terms of growth.

Right.

I mean, you know, that's the real argument of end of the myth is that, you know,

capitalism and the United States go hand in glove.

And expansion is part of that.

And if capitalism can't expand, if the United States can't expand,

where are we?

And the argument, of course, was that

the polarization that the United States has had the privilege of exporting has come home.

And now we can no longer export our political polarization.

And also the psych war that the US has been running on the world for the last 75 years has come home.

I mean, this is what disinformation is.

I mean, there's a lot of reasons for the systemic crisis, semantic crisis that we're in.

And some of it has to do with technology.

Some of it has to do with, you know, but certainly, you know, the U.S.

has been running a psych war on the world since George Cannon's 1948 memo, and that's come home.

You know, it's the war.

It's not just the war that has come home.

We've had for expression.

You know,

it's the psych war that's come home.

I was thinking about one aspect of this psych war and that like I wanted to talk to you about is represented by Trump's trade policies and this back and forth on tariffs.

And if I could describe like an idea behind them, which may be generous, it's that all of the countries in which all of the resources and labor that comprises like our consumer economy actually exist.

that they are the ones that are ripping us off.

That we're getting the shit under the stick in the global free trade regime that we created.

Like, is this part of a psych war, or where does this idea come from and what does it lead to?

I mean, you know, I don't know if it's part of the psych war, but it's the craziest thing because it seems like there's 10 ideas within Trumpism

that are on their own kind of coherent, but when you put them together, they just kind of consume each other and eat each other up.

And so, and then nothing ever happened.

I mean, the tariff war,

you know, the idea is that we're going to go back to creating value-added industry and have an industry, you know, and have manufacturing here.

I mean, we're only going to do that with the magic of tariffs.

We're not going to do that by reining in financial capitalism and forcing it to invest in productive industry, wage-paying industry.

We're not going to do it by strengthening unions to force better wages.

We're not going to do it, you know, by investing in

the technology that, you know, that underwrites the creation of industry.

It's such a crazy idea that just tariffs are going to bring us back to

the world that Donald Trump grew up in, you know, in Queens.

And he's been saying this for so long.

Well, the thing about Trump is that he's kind of coherent when he makes that argument.

You can go back to the 1980s and listen to these interviews with...

Donahue and Oprah where, you know, he's like, they ask him about Reagan.

Oh, he's a great president, but I'm not a fan of his trade policies.

And there was some crazy interview where Donahue even asked him about your father,

your father worked with the federal government to build housing for the working class.

He didn't make mention anything about it, it was just white working class, but he said to build housing for the working class.

And it was a partnership and they built this great middle class.

And Donald Trump said, well, you can't do it under this trade regime, you know, because it's all finance and it's all deregulated.

And there's a kind of coherent argument there, you know, so his critique of it, but then of course he doesn't want to do anything else that would that would go along with that because he's so embedded in the in the culture war right that you know we talk to go back to it it's a psych war the psych war is is the culture war it gets all crazed and and escalated in those terms yeah it leaves the um the autarky of his mind

And the second it like it makes contact with the world.

I mean, I think people overuse this term cargo cult, but it it like i there's nothing else to describe it because it's like we need to have these tariffs to protect domestic industry okay what domestic industry besides pharmaceuticals and weapon systems right the fuck it the fucking industries that will pop up once the tariffs are there okay

right exactly i know i know without and then of course nobody's going to be investing in any popping up industries considering how back and forth they go that's another question Markets love uncertainty.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There is this there is this weird thing, the fetish of tariffs is quite, is quite remarkable.

Well, I mean, whatever it is,

it's hurting the economy.

I mean, regardless of what you may feel about whether the economy represents the

best reflection of the health and safety of the people of this country is another question.

But like,

Matt, when I was talking about this interview,

he had a question.

He wanted to say, like, are there any historical parallels parallels in American leadership for something that's suicidal?

You know,

I mean,

I don't think so.

I don't think so.

I can't think of anything.

I can't think of anything that is so self-destructive.

I can't think of anything that is so incoherent.

I can't think of anything that is so, I mean, we could point to all sorts of things in which the malice and

the suffering was comparable.

I mean,

Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears, but

his nation-building project was coherent.

We could look to Woodrow Wilson

and the first Red Scare and the deportations and denaturalizations,

and I don't know how many thousands of leftists he threw in jail,

breaking up the IWW, the Socialist Party.

But again, Wilson represented

a certain moment in which the United States was moving out into the world.

But it's hard to find anything

in which the cruelty is comparable to

the incompetency.

Well, I was just talking about cruelty and incompetence.

And like

we talked about

that Trump's economic policies could be seen as suicidal.

But I want to talk about sort of what led to this in the last year and a half years or so of something that I've described on the show as a murder-suicide pact.

And that is this country's relationship with Israel and what it's doing to Gaza right now.

And I'm just like,

once again, like, as a historian, when you observe like

the last two years of the Biden administration, his decision to leave the race and then Kamala getting in there and their steadfast refusal to do anything to rein in a client state that's massacring hundreds of thousands of people that in all likelihood did in fact cost them the election and led to this current moment with Donald Trump being president again.

Once again, like, are there any historical parallels there?

And just what do you make of this situation where, like, Israel is not popular in America.

This policy is not popular, but we have a political system that seems to be entirely captured by the interests of a foreign country.

And I guess one has to ask, like, who's leading who here?

Is this American policy or is this Israeli policy?

Or it does it not matter?

Well, I mean, if I mean, in terms of parallels, of course, you could say Vietnam,

the way that both the Democrats tied itself to Vietnam and then and then and destroyed themselves as a result of it.

But, you know, I agree with you completely.

I think Gaza is, there is, there is no reconstruction of the Democratic body unless Gaza is confronted.

You could see that in, I mean, Camilla Harris had to run a center-right campaign because she couldn't move an inch away from Biden's Gaza policy.

It's not that Gaza itself, it was, it was that what Harris couldn't do or say because of Gaza.

She couldn't run a center-left campaign like Biden did in 2020, that won him the election.

She had to run to the center-right because Gaza was such a limiting, you know, limiting variable that wouldn't let her move.

I think Gaza is absolutely key.

Again, to go back to End of the Myth, you know, the argument is that, you know, and this is drawn from political science.

You know, political scientists have these theories about political realignments that every fifth or sixth presidency or every couple of every couple of decades as a you know rather than polarization and conflict breaking out you know the contradictions of of america's political and economic systems that results through changes get worked out in political realignments within the two-party system and so the you know, the Democrats become the party of the working class and political liberalism and so on and so forth.

And,

you know, I think there's a lot to that argument, to that way of thinking about things, but they don't really talk about foreign policy.

That's what makes those realignments possible is the promise of limitlessness and is the ability of expansion in all sorts of ways.

And I think Gaza is just a kind of concrete example of what I was talking about: about the, you know, there will be no political realignment in the United States.

There will be no new emerging,

the Trump Trumpism isn't a stable political coalition that will govern the United States the way the New Deal did, the way the new right did.

It's just a manifestation of the constant chaos.

And the Democrats won't be able to rehabilitate themselves to create a new governing coalition.

And largely...

Largely right now, it is because of Gaza, because you can't talk about Gaza.

I mean, who's going to, you know, and what can't be said because of Gaza in all sorts of other policy realms?

I mean, you see the contradictions.

It's heartbreaking, Bernie Sanders and AOC on, you know, these rallies, which are inspirational, but then they're throwing, you know, protesters, and then the police come and take the protesters away about Gaza.

That's not going away, you know, and it's a contradiction within the Democratic Party that is inherent in, you know, Clinton's turn towards neoliberalism and tying the party to big donors and to consultants.

And so if you were, if the Democrats were to confront that contradiction and really break with Israel, you know, it would, it would be tectonic and it's, you know, loss of funding, loss of donors, the hand-wringing.

I mean, can you imagine?

I mean, you know, but on the other hand, they also need the activists.

They need the people who are angry.

Well, yeah, but as you said, like, on the other hand, there is no future for them in this country if they don't come to terms with what they've done.

Yeah.

And like, there's no, there's not going to be be any electoral coalition for them.

And I guess like, well, I mean, you mentioned like the tectonic shift that this would result in, not just in terms of our foreign policy, but in terms of the way our domestic politics are structured.

What would it look like to come to terms with not just not just our support for Israel, but just Gaza specifically?

I mean, are we going to like, do we really, we need like a truth and reconciliation committee in this country for starters?

But like,

and like, you know, outside of Gaza.

We're not taking responsibility for it.

Yeah.

I mean, we haven't taken responsibility for Iraq.

We're going to take responsibility for Gaza.

I mean, don't hold your breath.

I mean, there's Iraq, there's Libya.

I mean, like,

you know, I mean, there's Afghanistan during the Cold War.

I mean, you know, there's Central America.

I mean, you know, we like, you know, Jimmy Codd has said the destruction was mutual.

All right.

Greg,

to turn

attention to your book,

you mentioned this idea of the American frontier, which was the topic of your last book,

The End of Myth.

And you write about how the frontier has always been kind of this pressure release valve for the contradictions and violence of the American project.

It's free real estate.

In the new book, like, how does Latin America differ?

I mean, you state that Latin America, because it didn't have a frontier in the same way,

was forced to kind of confront a lot of these internal contradictions in the lives of the people who live there in a way that the United States didn't.

When you say, like, Latin America doesn't have a frontier, didn't have a frontier in the same way America did.

Like, what do you mean by that?

Does you mean geographically, mythically, politically?

What makes Latin America different?

All of those things.

Okay, so there's a lot of caveats, historical caveats, obviously.

I'm talking in ideal terms and I'm talking heuristically, but

the United States came into the country basically like a single nation, a single pup, you know, and

no other siblings.

And it imagined, it wasn't true.

Just Romulus, no Remus.

Yeah, exactly.

All those gates were open.

Yeah.

And it imagined an empty continent.

Obviously, Spain was still there,

Native Americans, obviously.

But it, you know, and it revived the, it literally revived the doctrine of conquest in order to justify its sovereignty.

When Latin America breaks from Spain, it breaks from Spain as seven independent republics.

It came into the world already a League of Nations, already a United Nations that had to learn to live with each other.

They didn't have to.

I mean, Argentina could have said, oh, we're going to adopt the United States model and we're going to

drive to the Pacific and take over Chile and treat Chile

as if they're the Nava or whatever.

And of course, they couldn't do that because

they were settler colonial nations they had to respect.

So and the thing about Latin America is that coming into the world all at once

meant that each nation both threatened and legitimated the other.

They legitimated the other is that each, because every nation legitimated the idea that

a republic can throw off the shackles of Spanish Catholic colonialism and claim their independence.

So if Venezuela and Colombia can do it, then so could Chile

and it's legitimate.

But they threatened each other because under the old laws of war,

what was to stop, as I said, Argentina saying we want the Pacific or

Colombia from saying

we want Peru.

Bolivar and a lot of other people, but I'll just use Bolivar as proxy for

the whole bunch of founding fathers, intellectuals,

came

with this idea of reviving an old Roman law doctrine called ute

poseditis, meaning as you possess.

It was a doctrine of war.

It meant that you got to keep what you took in a war.

Like, well, you know,

we're going to grab, you know, whatever.

We're going to grab Iberia.

We're going to grab the, yeah, and keep it.

And as you possess, so shall you possess.

Bolivar and other Latin Americans turned that into a doctrine of peace.

They said, we're going to accept.

the colonial boundaries as they existed, the viceroyalty boundaries, and we're just going to accept them and be and.

So we don't have to fight any new wars over changing them.

Yeah.

There was no, and so um now in reality there was there were resources on one side or the other that the lines weren't you know there were but every conflict was mediated with the presumption that

posed was a legitimate doctrine, so it reaffirmed the doctrine.

And Latin America has, I mean, Latin America is one of the most peaceful continents in world history.

I mean, like, it was the first continent of nations.

I mean, Europe wasn't on the continent of nations.

Europe was a continent of of empires you know flitting around the world doing whatever they wanted latin america was the first continent of independent nations with fixed borders and that becomes basically the model for the world that we live in and so ideals of sovereignty ideals of non-aggression ideals of the the premise that um it's cooperation and shared interests that should govern international relations rather than, you know, competition.

Latin America both both critiqued the United States's revival of the doctrine of conquest and critiqued Europe's balance of power vision of international relations because they thought that if you didn't have a transcendent value higher than that, the idea that nations shared considered interests, that were all, that all the nations, all the people of the world as one, then what you were going to have is just constant warfare because, you know, nations pushing against other nations and stability established through that pushing is not is not a very stable thing.

And so they had a critique of Europe's balance of power.

They had a critique of the United States' doctrine.

And they came up with basically all of the ideas that Wilson floated for the League of Nations and that other people floated for the United Nations basically were already in place in Latin America.

And so the book, you know, teases that out and argues for the importance of Latin America

in that creation of the so-called rules-based order, which of course gets violated.

But then Latin America becomes one of the strongest critics of all of those violations because most of them are happening in Latin America anyway.

I mean, you talk in the book about how of like the nationalism of Latin American countries and how important the idea of nationalism is to them.

In an American and European context, nationalism is often associated with like aggressive right-wing politics and culture.

But like,

is the key key distinction here a nationalism that's based on nations founded by overthrowing imperial colonialism and those that found their nationalism by doing imperialism and colonialism?

Well, I think that Latin America's nationalism is different.

Latin Americans never developed a toxic eliminationist nationalism.

Their nationalism was like a stepping stone to a universalism.

You know, there's a little bit of nationalism.

Nobody likes the Argentines, you know,

and

things have gotten bad recently.

Dominican Republic is, you know, the racism directed at Haiti sharing on a shared island is horrific.

There's now tensions between Colombia and Venezuela.

But for the most part, Latin American nationalism, I mean, just think of that.

Che Guevara, a young medical doctor, gets on that motorcycle, you know, with new technology, new roads, and he rides around Latin America and he realizes that Latin America is one.

The idea that Latin America is one, even as it isn't one,

is deep, but it allows for a more generous nationalism.

This idea that the communities, the nations of the world are, you know, the foundational premise is that we have interests in common and cooperation should be.

And I'll step back even a second because the book deals a lot with intellectual history and theology.

And this is in some ways, and maybe my childhood Catholicism coming out.

But Catholicism itself, despite the horrors of the conquest, and again, those horrors of the conquest generates

this very strong moral critique against the conquest.

But the colonial state that emerges is both presumably universal because it's Catholic and Catholics believe that they were universal.

They represented universal history.

But they also acknowledged differences.

Catholic colonialism had no presumption that they were ruling over an empty land like the Anglos did.

The Anglos were like, oh, where did everybody go?

This is, I mean, this is great.

A good part of the first section of the book is, as you rightly point out,

the shared experience that leads to this sense of a kind of cooperative nationalism or like a humanist ethos comes from the really unspeakable barbarism of the Spanish conquest of the New World.

And, but, like, there's the brutality of it, but, like, there's also a moral and philosophical revolution that accompanied it in Spanish Catholicism.

And, yeah, one of the main figures of the early part of the book is a man named Bartolome de las Casas.

Um, could you talk a little bit about who he was and this kind of road to Damascus moment he had accompanying a Spanish expedition to pacify the the island of Cuba.

Like, what did he encounter there?

Well, he's well known.

I mean, you know, this is nothing new.

He's often presented as somebody who's most famous for writing a small pamphlet that was finally published in the 1840s and 1850s and then quickly translated into English so the English could say, look how bad the Spaniards are.

You know, it became part of what's known as the black legend that the Spaniards were particularly cruel.

And de las Casas is known as being a humanitarian and known as as being, you know,

somebody who recognized the humanity of Native Americans.

He has a famous line, all humanity is one.

The more proper English translation would be, all human lineage is one, meaning we all came from Adam and Eve, but we're all equal.

But I go a little bit beyond that, arguing that that critique of equality and that critique that there's no such thing as a natural slave and this insistence that

he eventually comes to the point where

he says that the

Spanish Empire has no right to dominion over the Americas and much less the right to enslave Native Americans,

that that was absolutely foundational

to this

basically the beginning of modern political theory that human beings are equal.

And then he was accompanied by other Dominicans and jurists and theologians, people like Francisco Vittoria,

who created a very powerful way of thinking about the world that came to be known as the Salamanca school.

And so later on, when the Dutch and the British are trying to get into the imperial game, they know these arguments are going on in Spain.

hyper-aware of them.

There's a document from 1607 by the company,

the London company, London Colonial Company, in which the shareholders are sitting around thinking, you think we should put out a, you know, a statement, a pamphlet, maybe justifying our colonialism in North America?

And they debate the question for a while and they keep on talking about what's going on in Spain.

And they said, you know, those Spaniards, they've been arguing about this for a century.

And they still can't find a decent justification for dominion.

So maybe we shouldn't say anything.

Maybe we should just keep it quiet.

And And that's a tension in the book, right?

Between an Anglo-evasion with the reality of history and colonialism, and where you're pushing the Native Americans to the frontier, and a Spanish colonial state that makes Indians the main thing.

They are the people extracting the money, the minerals, wealth that creates the world's first universal currency, but they're also the main moral center of the whole justification of the thing.

So that reconciliation of, you know, creating an empire that claims to be universal, but that

is founded on the administration of recognized difference is, I think, what is the foundation of a certain kind of more capacious vision of humanity that later leads to things like one, social rights and two, a left that doesn't get bogged down in all the bullshit that get the left gets bogged down here about whether it's race or class or gender or, you know, let's all hate on the chopo guys because of what you know, you know, because

they're all broken.

Yeah, yeah, if it wasn't for them, Hillary Clinton would be president.

Like, you know, I'm not saying that these debates didn't, these tensions don't exist absolutely in Latin America, but but there's a left in Latin America that that is more easily that's that more easily reconciles political economy and the fight for, say, abortion rights and gay rights.

You know, not everywhere, you know, in every country, but in a lot of countries.

The culture war bullshit that happens in the United States,

Latin America has long been exempt from it.

But an important caveat, no longer, because it's been imported into the United States.

Do you see Claudia Scheinbaum as a manifestation of what you're talking about?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

She's a perfect manifestation of that.

She's, I mean, she's an immigrant.

She represents, I mean, she represents the Mexican Revolutionary's humanist legacy

because

the Mexican Revolution took in immigrants.

They took in Jews.

They took in communists.

And yeah, she talked, you know, and she absolutely is.

And she's able to, she's able to speak in a vernacular that, you know, well, she's a woman.

She's she's Jewish.

She's Jewish.

I mean, very popular in a country that's overwhelmingly Catholic.

Yeah.

Or by some lights could be seen as

socially conservative, shall we say?

Yeah, and that's because Morena, the party that she's involved in, led by Amlo,

her predecessor,

has built the party.

It's taken a long, long time.

But the...

you know, not just the general humanism and social democracy that I'm talking about, the specific one tied to the Mexican Revolution had deep roots

and they weren't dead yet and they've been resurrected.

And, you know, she has her limits because we live in a world of limits.

And, you know,

she's presiding over state with pockets of enormous immunity and wealth, thanks to neoliberalism, thanks to privatization, which created all those super billionaires.

But she's doing what she can to re-enliven an ideal of social citizenship.

you know and and i think she's you know i think she's she's remarkable yeah if i if i could return again to to

the age of conquest, and, you know, you mentioned the sort of moral revolution.

Like, I mean, like the quote-unquote discovery of the new world represented a kind of like apocalyptic concept to Christendom at the time.

Like, to discover a second half of the planet in which nobody living there for thousands of years had ever heard of Jesus Christ or the New Testament is presented sort of an opportunity and a problem philosophically and spiritually.

Now, in the example of De La Casas, you talk about a moral revolution that said, like, the subjugation of these people cannot be justified.

You cannot justify enslaving the native populations because we are all equal in Christ.

Like you said, the shared human lineage.

But you also talk about there's a corresponding

sort of reactionary moral revolution that tried to create a language and philosophy that was based around sort of an attempt to categorize societies by their stage of development and thus to justify the subjugation of a less developed culture by the more developed culture.

Could you talk about

how elites came to sort of hew to that point of view?

And do you see, again, like, can you trace the lineage of that philosophy of a kind of a slaver morality in the 21st century?

Yeah.

I mean, Las Casas did a number of amazing things.

One, he avoided the idea that there was such a thing as natural slaves.

He thought there were more people in the new world.

It is an idea that goes back to Aristotle.

He's been hoping on this in Western civilization for a long fucking time.

And I know, and the Catholic Church revives it.

And Aristotle said it's the most ridiculous thing in the world.

Anybody who believes in the idea of natural slaves must hate God because why would God make a majority of the world's population inferior to a minority?

He was under the wrong impression that there were more people in the new world than there were in all the world.

That wasn't true, but there were a lot.

And

then there were people like Vittorio who came up with very absolutist notions of like every, you know, Native Americans have, they have reason, they can possess,

they have the right of possession, and they do possess, and they, and they also enter into political societies.

So therefore, they are human and they have natural inherent rights that that questions the validity of the Spanish conquest.

Okay,

so there's that kind of moral absolutism and very strong scholastic arguments that the Spaniards lay out.

But then, you know, the New World also allowed for the beginnings of a kind of new ethnography.

And there was one Jesuit, Jose Acosta, who traveled across the Americas and he wrote a book saying, you know, there's actually degrees.

There's the Aztecs, there's the Maya,

there's the Quechua, the Inca, and yes, they represented societies.

But then there was, he basically said there were three categories.

Then there was this, you know, then there were societies of formation, and then there were those that were still kind of like huntering and gathering.

And the English and the Dutch, people like Hugo Goethe and other late, you know, a century after De Las Casas, who when they were coming up trying to find just a bit,

the trick with the Anglo-legal theorists is that they had to find a political theory that would justify their ability to colonize while delegitimizing the Spanish.

And they seized on

Acosta's book.

They loved Acosta's book.

I mean, John Smith had a copy of Acosta's book when he sailed into Chesapeake Bay.

John Locke cited the great works of Joseph Acosta.

And

what Acosta was saying was, yes, yes, Indians do have society and they do have the capacity of possession and they do have

organized in hierarchical societies and with their own princes.

Some of them do, and not all of them.

He relativized that.

It provided all of those other thinkers a way out.

Right.

So like, so people like Locke and Groutis could seize on the fact that nobody less than the great learned Acosta said that there were vast tracts of the Americas in which there were like a third category.

I mean, they were human.

Nobody's saying they're not human.

They just weren't yet organized into civil society.

And those were the people

we could subjugate.

I'm wondering, something I've noticed recently that's sort of coming back in vogue on the sort of

new Catholic right, I guess I would, the Catholic convert right, I guess you might call them,

that looks at the brutality of the Aztec Empire as a justification for the Spanish conquest being cool, good, and actually like a humanitarian mission.

I'm wondering what you make of that in light of like, I think you cite something in the book that something like within 100 years, the population, indigenous population of the new world had dropped by something like 80 or 90 percent through disease or just genocide.

Yeah.

I mean, that's a, that's an old, I mean, that's not just the new Catholic new rite.

That's been an ongoing trope about the horrors of the Aztecs justifying the, you know, European colonialization.

But yeah,

demographers don't know exactly how many people were in the Americas.

They estimate between 90 and 100 million people,

and they estimate that within a century, 90% of them were gone.

And, you know, by the

end of the 1500s, the beginning of the 1600s, there was such a crisis.

The Spaniards weren't sure where they were going to get labor.

It was around that time the population began to stabilize.

Most of this was through epidemics.

You know, there was the first wave of violence from the conquest, from dislocation, from slavery, from the destruction of

communities and polities.

But then, you know, what came after were wave after wave of European brought diseases that just, you know, wiped out people in the millions, epidemics that wiped out people in the millions.

And so some historians call it, some demographers call it the greatest mortality event in

human history.

And one of the things that I want to emphasize is that the book makes a big contrast in comparing North and South America and Anglo and Spanish colonialism is that Spanish colonialism, they had their moral crisis at the beginning of the conquest, as the conquest was happening, right they had their doubts and their questions and the dissenters and their challenges that so they had their moral crisis as the conquest was happening Protestant America I mean they're fine at the beginning they don't have their moral crisis until three centuries later in the 19th century and when they do it's limited specifically to chattel slavery That's the moral crisis.

If you want to compare moral crises within Catholicism and Protestantism when it comes to the New World.

And

it makes a huge difference whether you have your moral crisis at the beginning of the conquest when you acknowledge that there are actually people there, or you have it three centuries later when you reify it to one particular kind of oppression,

as horrid as it was, African chattel slavery.

It singles it out as a particular evil, but then it's hard.

then it makes it hard to to to kind of expand that emancipationist impulse to other forms of exploitation since it's so reified in the in the institution of shadow slavery well i i suppose like uh if you choose the uh the one form you know african shadow slavery that you've already made billions of dollars off of and then you're like well it's time to wrap this up uh but like when you describe the like anglo-colonization is like it was sort of like the opposite of a moral crisis because they genuinely believe like oh look here's a land without people where do they all go i don't know let's start jamestown Absolutely.

They came up with, John Winthrop came up with a whole, there was a Latin phrase, Vasilium.

How do you pronounce it?

I don't, my Laddin is despite that I've typed the word.

Okay, this is a bad pronunciation show.

So just spit.

Just go with it.

Well, I'll just use the English language, but empty houses.

They used a Laddin term for empty houses because what happened was when

the Mayflower shows up

in the early 1820s, the area had already been visited by Europeans, Portuguese whalers, and the Dutch and the Spaniards and

even the English.

And they unleashed a disease, which they're not really sure what it was, but it's colloquially known as rat fever.

They think it was in the ballast, when they dropped the ballast, it went into the streams and it entered the bodies of Native Americans through their feet, maybe.

And so the early descriptions, John Smith talks about like New England almost the way Las Las Casas talked about Hispaniola, that it's, you know, beautiful, stocked with people, you know, this game, it's well organized.

And yet when the Mayflower gets there, it's empty.

It's gone.

It's dead.

And the pilgrims are hungry.

The Puritans are hungry.

They start digging up the graves because, you know, in the hope that they buried food with them.

There was no suggestion that there was survival cannibalism, but who knows?

But

but

cannibalism plays a big, big role in justifying a lot of conquest, conquest, yeah, right?

Yeah, so but they come up with this whole idea that God gave us the land, God set, you know, within 20 years, they had developed a whole legal theology that God had set the great pestilence down to clear the land for the saints.

And that's a, that's a very different way of thinking about colonialism than than what the Spaniards were.

And again, as an historian, it's like, do you want to give, you want to be, you know, a vulgar, you know, it's all just colonialism and it's all just brutality?

Or do you, or do you think that these differences matter?

I do think they matter because I think

it creates the terms for evasion, moral evasion

that runs throughout U.S.

history.

And it's there from the beginning.

And so this, you know,

the concept of an empty house, which is interesting because that was also the way that they talked about dead bodies.

Without a soul, the soul had vacated the body.

And there's a kind of gory equation there between death and colonialism.

Well, there's Spanish colonialism and Anglo-colonialism.

But I think one of the funnier parts of the early section of the book discusses the French attempts at colonizing the New World.

And you use an example of a colony that was set up on an island off the coast of Brazil, composed of French Calvinists and French Catholics and the indigenous population of the island.

And

it was a really amusing section of the book because like the contrast between the Calvinists and the Catholics and like how they related to the indigenous population is like, well, if you're a Calvinist and you believe 100% in predetermination, missionary work is really why bother?

But like the Catholics, which do believe in that, you essentially said had such hatred and contempt for the indigenous that they didn't bother trying to convert any of them.

They started to just try to convert the Calvinists, and they just started like dueling the missionaries against each other before just packing it all in and going back to France.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, Levi Strauss talks a lot about Claude Levi-Strauss talks a lot about this episode.

And yeah, apparently

the French king had this idea of like shipping off the Calvinists and the Catholics together, and maybe they would find a way of getting along.

And they basically just started having intense theological arguments about themselves and

paid no attention whatsoever to the Native Americans.

And, you know,

and the only thing that came out of this was

it was an intense solipsism of

the Europeans just arguing with each other as Native Americans are dying around them from European diseases.

And I think the only pro thing that actually came of it, that the lasting effect was that the Europeans brought back a bunch of parrots that could curse in Portuguese

curse in front and in French I'm sorry not Portuguese curse in French

I mean I guess to return to the the present day Latin America has has seemed like a sort of providing example of a potential way forward for democracies in the world in terms of like social democracy and like you said, social rights, political rights really not meaning anything without social rights.

But a lot of it is kind of like a similar story as well.

Like, are you paying, I'm sure you're paying attention to what just recently happened in Ecuador with basically the coup that just happened there.

Could you talk about that and some of like the pressures that are being faced by left-wing governments in South America, South and Latin America at the moment?

Yeah, I wrote a kind of, you know, it was hard writing this book because it was before the election, so I wasn't really sure, you know,

it would be a different, you know, different kind of accent if Biden, well, not Biden, Paris won and or Trump won.

And

obviously, Trump won.

And I wrote a follow-up in the intercept about this, about the possibilities of a kind of pan-American Trump.

There's certainly a social base for Trumpism in Latin America over the last, you know, 10 years or 15 years.

The right in Latin America, which found itself completely unable to compete with the post-Cold War left.

Latin America came out of the Cold War, and after the dictatorships gave way to constitutions, and once Latin Americans were allowed to vote their preferences, lo and behold, they tended to vote for social democrats.

You know, they liked the, you know, despite the best efforts of the Chicago boys, they did not think that socialized medicine will lead to the gulag.

they did not believe that like cash transfer to the poor would lead to the you know to the death camps they thought that uh citizenship meant social citizenship and democracy meant social democracy and that social rights were as important a component of of democracy as economic rights and the the old Cold War right was completely completely caught off guard by this like they thought you know the debt squads did it they thought the debt squads did it their work and, you know, and they'd be in charge.

And

lo and behold, they, you know, throughout the 2000s and 2010s, the return of the left during a moment of the United States's, you know, of course, globe post-9-11 militarism, you know, basically emerged and was speaking in a very rhetorically strong voice.

Chavez in Venezuela, you had Kircha in Argentina, you had Lula in Brazil, you had Morales

in Bolivia, you had, you know, across the continent.

Every left tradition was represented in a presidential palace.

You know, the right learned quickly how to regain

its footing, and it regained its footing by importing a lot of the culture war bullshit from Latin America.

You know,

right-wing evangelicals, of course, had a strong presence in Latin America during the Cold War, but even more so.

You have all of the stuff about grooming, you have, you have this, all of a sudden you have a gun fetish.

Bolsonaro

in Brazil started talking about the Second Amendment.

Now, I don't know Brazil's Constitution very well, but I doubt very much its Second Amendment says anything about guns.

It probably says something about, I don't know what.

And then, of course, like Bush was very bad at containing the cold post-Cold War Latin American left, you know, but Obama played a very strategic long game, mostly by turning the United States into a major energy.

All of that oil drilling and fracking and getting Canada to send its oil to the United States.

A lot of that had to do with containing Chavez because Chavez was Chavez was the, in Venezuela, was using oil in the kind of 1970s vision as a tax on the as a attack on the first world to fund social solidarity and programs in the third world.

And coups happened in Honduras, in Paraguay, and then there were law fair cases again that destroyed the Workers' Party in Brazil under Obama.

So, Obama played a very good job, Obama did a hell of a job containing the Latin American left, but still,

leftists get elected, but they're more constrained now.

And then

they're fighting over what to do with Venezuela because, you know, Maduro's not Chavez, he doesn't have the, he doesn't have the oil money, he doesn't have the charisma, Nicaragua is Nicaragua, Ortega, you know, whatever.

And

so, you know, the left is still very strong in some places, but

it doesn't command the rhetorical hegemony it did.

It's the right that's starting to fill up that space, that vacuum, with this world-making conspiracism.

It's almost like left hegemony has given way to right-wing world-making conspiracism.

And you see it, it's the same shit that's happening in the United States:

The QAnon,

the pedophilia, the Bitcoin, the and average citizens are a little bit, you know, things are bad.

Crime is really bad.

And you mentioned Nicaragua, you mentioned Ecuador.

It basically

Nobia wants to basically turn Ecuador into another El Salvador, you know, in the sense of, you know,

an outpost for the United States.

So Trump has a lot, a strong social base, but he also undermines his own possibilities, right?

So that's the thing about Trump, where, you know, I mean, Trump could very easily consolidate a pan-American Trumpism if he wasn't so busy undermining the Pan-American Trumpism, like the Canadian conservative guy or the, you know, by talking about invading Panama.

People don't like that, even, even, you know.

And if he wasn't like very grossed out by Malay, like very evidently.

Is that true?

I didn't notice that.

How is he grossed out by Malay?

Look at the guy's hair.

Well, their first, their first personal encounter was

at a CPAC thing.

I think like the last CPAC before the election.

Right.

Before the election year.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Well, before that.

And it was Malay had a video.

He like, either Trump or Malay video called in.

One of them was, you know, they're in person.

One was on video.

Probably Malay was on video.

And he basically like weeped.

He was like, Oh my god, I love you so much, please help save America, save Argentina.

And like, Trump is like, you've seen his more like human moments when he's like talking to kids, like the you know, Santa's marginal thing, all that, or like, yeah, you know, he has these like very odd

outer borough moments with various types of

uh humanity, but with Malay,

there were he was just like, What the fuck is that?

Like,

what?

And I don't, I still don't think Millay has been invited to the White House.

It may never happen.

I know, can you imagine?

It's like,

if I could, if I could suggest a reason for Trump's displeasure with Millet, Millier, I think it's Millier's bizarre fixation and obsession with his dogs that he keeps cloning over and over again and wants to be buried with and like loves more than any human being.

I think for Trump, being a dog is like the worst insult, being associated with dogs.

Yeah, he doesn't like Christmas Stewart.

Like a dog.

People who are like really into pets and animals, I think Trump has contempt for.

And Millet is like this weird guy who weeps over his mastiff that died 30 years ago.

And well, he's now cloned it over and over again.

Going back a bit, that was a really interesting point you brought up about Obama's energy nationalization policy, because

I'm cursed with a very good memory of Bush era liberalism, despite being a middle schooler at the time.

But

one of the big early policies, sort of, do you remember one of the first controversies of the Bush administration, the second Bush administration, was drilling in Alaska.

That was one of the big things before 9-11.

And energy policy was always, it was in the background of the Bush administration.

And there was sort of like a liberal, a national liberal argument for it, which was basically like, look,

these Saudi guys probably fucking did 9-11.

Do we really want to give money to these guys who are so closely linked to Bush?

And of course, that has roots in the last Saudi king to actually

commit to an embargo for, you know, kind of moral reasons in Faisal under Carter.

But it was sort of like a

carve-out that the Obama types would give to the remaining Wellstoneites of the party going forward.

Like, okay, we're going to find a way to uh like nationalize our energy supply not nationalize in the way that everyone would like but you know become a net exporter yeah um and not rely on these gcc countries

little did we know what he meant was so we can like try and starve any of these petroleum exporting latin american states yeah that was probably the plan all the fuck all along well it was certainly a an element of it you know i don't want to make an absolutist case that Flake Chavez was the main driver, but it certainly was a key thing.

You know,

Hillary Clinton was in Mexico trying to get them to privatize Pemex.

This was before Omlo.

You know, that stalled, that's now stalled on the Scheinbaum.

But they did turn Canada into a gas station for the United States.

And Chavez wasn't the whole thing, but

Chavez's vision was very much about

rehabilitating the new international economic order of the 1970s.

And oil revenue was key to that.

And, you know, the idea that they were naive enough to think that Saudi Arabia was going to deposit its petrodollars in some kind of world bank that could then be socialized.

You know, of course, that wasn't going to happen.

Kissinger, you know, Kissinger

basically...

you know, turned them into private currency accounts

and deposited them into

German, British, and U.S.

banks, you know, and that

kicked off the debt crisis, which then kicked off

restructuring.

But the idea for a while was that all of this oil was going to, was going to, they wanted to create an energy bank and Chavez and Chavez, Chavez's vision was very close to the new international economic order.

People don't realize how much that influenced what he was doing.

And of course, that's the last time, and I suppose, thankfully, that anybody is going to try to use fossil fuels to create a kind of third world international solidarity.

But you can understand why he would do it.

I mean, yeah, I think the first story that I read in 2009 that gave me an indication of what the

Obama doctrine might be was

Lanny Davis, that old Hillary Clinton barnacle, when they quickly unearthed his emails pertaining to the coup in Ecuador at the time.

Honduras?

Or Honduras.

Sorry.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But yeah, no, that was a sign of things to come in an overall Obama policy.

Yeah.

I was in Paraguay and Democracy Now said, you want to do a debate with Lonnie Davis of Honduras?

And I'm on the phone and like it's a four minute, four second delay.

I said, okay, sure.

And they said, yeah, he's a very calm guy.

He's a nice guy.

You know, it'll just be a polite debate.

completely caught off guard by what a pit bull he was.

Like, I just wasn't, I, and plus, I had to wait a couple of seconds, uh, you know, to hear what he was saying.

So, I was, I was, I was not a good defender of

the anti-coup forces in that debate, but I did, I am very proud that I got him, that at one point he said, my name is Laney, not Lonnie.

He didn't like the way my, I was, my Brooklyn pronunciation of his name, Lonnie Davis.

Lonnie or Laney or I don't know, however you say it.

It's so weird that they said to you, he's calm.

Well, it was just

a producer who, I guess, had spoken with them on the phone, you know,

if you're going to do a debate with someone and they preface it by saying, don't worry, he's calm.

You can guarantee that the guy they're talking about is foaming at the mouth on the other.

Yeah.

And I was doing research for empire necessity, and I was, I wasn't really paying that much attention to Honduras.

So I was like, sure, okay, I'll come on and talk.

I was like, I was completely blown away.

Greg, I mean, in terms of things to come, or rather, things not to come, I was struck by something you recently said that contrasts both like the right and the left in the United States, the right and left parties that we have there, like the Democratic and Republican parties, with, you know, their counterparts of earlier historical eras.

And you said that like the main difference is that like whether it was Woodrow Wilson or FDR, they all had a positive, they had a positive vision of the future, which is something that is now totally absent from both the right and the left of American politics.

No political party articulates or even seems to believe in that there is such a thing as the future or that like the state has any role to play in what the future will look like.

Could you expand a little bit more on that sort of oblique note?

Well, this goes, this is a deep point of the end of the myth in some ways, the previous book, but also this book.

But, you know, that the United States never had to have a positive good

of citizenship, the idea of like, you know, of creating

a community in which people have health care and good education.

And, you know, because they could always, it's always was the promise of limitlessness was a way of deflecting towards, you know, having a positive vision of a common wheel.

And I think that, you know, once that limitlessness is taken away, once the wall is hit,

you know, there is no vision of a future.

There is no, you know, I mean, like a vision of the future.

It's not that hard to think of a good vision of the future.

I mean, FDR had it.

Everybody should.

be able to eat they should be they should have health care they should have a good place to live you know and um and it should be spoken in very strong clear language and and it could be spoken about in the terms of social rights.

We have the right to education, we have the right to healthcare, you have the right to live in dignity, you have the right to,

you know.

But because that

we hit that wall with limitlessness, they don't know how to articulate a vision of the common of the future because the future was always tied to

expansion.

And so, and so now we just have these politicians that like that bungle around.

I mean, abundance, I get abundance, I guess.

Abundance is

I actually wanted to bring that up.

I I was thinking about this earlier that in the context of talking to you, the abundance idea, which to their credit is at least an idea of a future, but the idea that we're going to like do some zoning tweaks and have some like technological revolution to unleash a bunch of stuff, it really is feeling like they're like flipping over the couch cushions, being like, there's got to be some frontier left in you.

There's got to be some future left.

Where is the frontier?

And then, and then, you know, I was thinking, like, right after they leave.

When am I going to read the Democrats Need a Project 2029?

You know, somebody has to write that and it's and should say healthcare, it should say housing, it should say all like these basic, good, you know, a vision of like what, you know, like positive, you know, strong vision we're going to defend do pro even political rights.

And I think, I mean, forget defending social rights.

Now we just need a vision of defending political rights.

But aside from that, when the New York Times finally publishes an op-ed, the Democrats Need

a Project

2029.

And then, I don't know if you read it, it was about changing like zoning laws and

making the government more like

a consumer agency.

I was like,

this is really going to capture the imagination.

I mean,

the writers putting forth the civilizational struggle.

And then the Democrats are talking about like, you know,

we have to make it easier for you to.

I mean, it was unbelievable, like, that, that, that essay.

I don't know if you saw it.

Yeah, it was like if, like, you're in Berlin after World War I, and you're like, this is terrible.

Like, they're gonna, they're going to fucking make us pay for the whole thing.

We're gonna have to like give up all these, all, all this territory.

Everyone fucking hates us.

What if

we change the fire code?

What if more people can come to a beer hall?

I know.

I mean, like, we talked a little bit about like a national 311

health market.

Well, I mean, that's better.

That's better than what I saw Dr.

Oz say the other day, which is that We said unhealthy people do not have a right to health care, but we should help them by giving them physicals at, quote, in a carnival setting.

A festival.

A festival-like

festival-like setting.

It's like

a 15-minute physical.

A 15-minute physical in a festival-like setting.

I know.

It's like, you know, it's like the red is, it'll be like the renaissance or something.

I immediately thought of Monty Python.

I'm getting better.

No, you're not.

You'll be stone-dead in a moment.

Like some festival in which bring out your own health.

Phil is telling you to bend over.

Bring out your autisms.

I know.

I know.

It's unbelievable.

What if your doctor is like a carny?

Yeah, I know.

Festival.

That's kind of what Dr.

Oz is.

You must be this sick to ride.

I mean, that's the vision of like a common good, like everybody coming together and having like.

I don't know, but Greg, like, we mentioned the Clinton administration.

And to me, I just like, I'm thinking about, I just come back to back to them.

We're like, they inherited, like, they came into power at the end of the Cold War, like right after the Cold War ends.

So like, you know, our gigantic defense budget, like rather than now that the Cold War is over, return the productive forces of our society to the people.

No, it was just the Pentagon budget has grown steadily ever since then.

And along with it, Clinton was like, deregulate Wall Street and then also greatly ramp up like this police and surveillance state.

And then we're in a situation situation now where it's just like nobody's happy, everyone's sick, everyone hates each other.

And the answer is just like a trillion-dollar Pentagon budget to what, I don't know, take over Canada and Greenland to fight Palestinians.

Yeah.

But like, and like a total police and surveillance state to deal with the, you know, the violence and anger that such a society is want to produce.

Yeah.

And

I write that at the end of the book.

I said Clinton comes to power.

You know, there's not an enemy in sight.

The Soviet Union's wiped off the gone, completely wiped off the face of the map.

He's inaugurated in the middle of one of the longest economic expansions in history.

And what does he do?

He treats the country as if it's an occupied nation and it's citizens belligerents.

I mean, all of those laws, the terrorism law, the deportation, all of these things are the...

the mechanisms of what Trump is using to, you know,

you get a speeding ticket, you can get, you lose your green card.

This is all Clinton.

You know,

the welfare law, the ant, you know, and of course the deregulation and the, and I say this in the book too.

Every other nation, you know, wealthy nation restructured to deal with the changing political economy.

No other nation.

simultaneously gutted the institutions that could have ameliorated that restructuring to the degree the U.S.

did, that so gleefully destroyed unions, so gleefully destroyed welfare,

and so gleefully destroyed small towns through its agricultural policy.

I mean,

it's really amazing.

It's like, has any empire that was so victorious, you know, basically stand on top of the hill and take out its sword and then stick it in its heart?

It's like, you know,

it's really kind of, I say this, I also say this in the book, too, about war.

And I spent a lot of time in End of the Myth and in America, America on this.

War

is the main social institution of the United States.

It's where social rights are.

Since 1948,

but even through that, even before that, and it was, you know, it's where African Americans had a little bit of upward mobility

since 1898.

And so every war, veterans returning home, whether it be from pacifying the West or beating the Seminoles in Florida, whether it be World War I or World War II or Cuba, they came home to a nation literally being built, you know, being, and, and a social compact being extended fitfully and not fast enough, but being extended to more and more people.

That change in the, well, kind of changes with Vietnam, but not really.

It's really the first Gulf War where veterans come home and they're coming home to a nation that is being taken apart.

I mean, it's literally its factories are being dismantled and shipped elsewhere and its social compact is taken apart.

And, you know, of course, of course, that anger and, you know, is going to, and with that, you know, as the Democrats are

moving to a suburban

with no.

With no politics to address this, what you get is, like you described earlier, like the psych war, this kind of globalizing conspiracy theory to explain why everyone is so miserable and deprived and angry and sick all the time right right especially since a lot of the yeah a lot of the conspiracies are true you come out of iran contra we come out of you know you know you you hear so it's it's yeah the funny thing is i'm i'm watching the x-files with my daughter you know and i actually never watched that show from the beginning and i didn't realize how much they incorporated real things into it like operation paperclip and operation mk ultra like they really like incorporated all of that stuff into the mythology with with the aliens.

So I'm trying to explain to my daughter, he's like, there really was an Operation Paperclip.

They brought the Nazis over.

They brought the Nazis over,

not to work on aliens,

not to work on chemical, to work on chemical weapons.

They really did that.

Well, let me know when you get to Confessions of a Cigarette Smoking Man episode, which is really be the earth.

Yeah, that was the vicar.

That was the statement.

I always, with wording the the vector for like any advancement, or I always think the most American thing is how

we accidentally invented the solid state video camera during the course of inventing a glide bomb in the 1960s.

I didn't know that.

The AGM 62 walleye.

They were making

one of the first TV guided bombs.

And they were like, oh, holy shit.

It's a video camera that doesn't weigh 300 pounds.

That's amazing.

I didn't know that.

But yeah, sure.

Of course, all the technology that comes out of war.

Well, and the other thing, what's weird, I was thinking about this the other day.

It's like, you know,

speaking about Germany and resentment about the terms of the settlement, you know, the military itself was a vector of revanchism, right?

The aristocratic.

But in the United States,

the U.S.

military loses two major wars, Vietnam and Iraq, and its response is to become

more bureaucratized, more rational, more woke

after Iraq.

The revanchism comes from outside.

It comes from the veterans, not from the military itself, which is interesting.

I don't know where I'm going with this, but it's interesting that the right

is targeting the military.

This is one of the things that they want to do is why they're stripping all vestiges of

Colin Powell or anybody with any kind of, you know, no, yeah.

I've, I mean, we've thought about this a lot because another matt thing, um, I think we pioneered it when we were literally our episode for our TV series talking about the X-Files, about why there isn't a TV show like this good anymore.

And we were talking about, you know, because this was after the 2020 primary, what would need to happen?

And we said,

okay, American Gaddafi, we need the, we need some officer who's charismatic out there who's listening to this.

But it is, I have thought about that a lot.

There's been a lot of the military is like infamously kind of difficult to poll because it's a lot of people in very disparate locations that are moving around a lot.

And we have the existing problem with modern polling, which is who answers a fucking landline phone call.

But it like institutionally at least, it seems like the one remaining like federal institution that that can kind of like drag its heels against whatever the fuck this is.

How long they can do that,

I don't know.

I mean, I don't know if people saw the

Harvard dust up between the Trump administration and Harvard, but we're reverting to a sort of Trump one pattern.

The Trump one people

yelled at Harvard because they didn't pick up their phone, I guess, after

they already told them to fuck off and like got more money and donations from their incredibly wealthy donors than they were getting from the federal government.

But I do feel like we are, I'll probably eat these words soon, but like we sort of saw the apogee of they've expended a lot of their momentum for this kind of like bureaucratic knife fighting.

Yeah.

And I

would be interested to see how it plays out with the military because you're right, it is like, especially since Iraq, they have like

in true military fashion the most efficient form of like hr cover your ass wokeness yeah which is really amazing considering how how much vietnam really was a you know how the race race war here was transported into the into vietnam you know murder of martin luther king made it clear that whites were waived you know basically because between 1889 and i guess vietnam the the the the military was the way the south you know re-entered the nation,

and that's an argument made in Empire,

the end of the myth.

But I guess somehow, sometime after Vietnam, it solved that problem, right?

Because

if you go to Michigan and you see an African-American and a white guy sitting at a bar together,

they're in the military.

So it's interesting.

And so there must be a reaction to this, like, we're not going to show any, we're going to strip

everything everything that has to do with African Americans out of the military.

I mean, it's unbelievable.

There's the whole Jackie Robinson thing at Arlington Cemetery.

They remove it back from the website.

Yeah.

It's unbelievable.

And

their new thing for like when

it's a particularly embarrassing thing, like when they take away something that like, it, you know, used to be like a consensus that consensus.

Like Jackie Robinson.

Yeah, like Jackie Robinson, something that even like Trent Lott would be like, yeah, no, build a statue of him.

They'll,

The term they have for that when like people are following their orders and like do something that's embarrassing even to them is malicious compliance, which is following our orders, but in a way that makes us look bad.

Yeah.

Fucking way is there.

They were not the heavy right man.

Craig,

just to close out here, I wanted to talk about something, something that you said in a recent interview with The Nation.

And this gets back to the book and potentially,

what lessons can

people in the United States or political formations in the United States, what lessons can they take from Latin America?

And one thing that you said is one lesson we can take from Latin America is that you don't beat autocrats by complaining about their autocracy.

And I thought that was like such, it was like, that was a perfect way of summing it up.

So like, it's not enough to just point at autocrats or the oligarchy and say, Look, we're ruled by oligarchs, we're ruled by billionaires, but you need to have a component of social rights.

And you mentioned that in the countries in Latin America that have constitutions, all of them guarantee health care in their constitutions.

So, like, maybe that would be a good place to start, and not, for instance, zoning regulations.

Yeah, yeah, not like thinking about the government, how they could deliver better services.

But, um, yeah, definitely.

I think that I think if

the United States was at least aware that, like, I mean, even Bernie Sanders, I think, should explain this better, that like, yes, other countries have healthcare systems because they believe in social rights.

And the United States has this fetish of individual rights.

And if we could just confront that, you know, even no matter how long that takes, that would be a good thing.

The mechanism in which Latin America helped socialize the United States is no longer existent, I think, to some degree.

I think the United States and Latin America has separated.

I think the Latin, you know, Latin America, except maybe Mexico.

But you're going back to

World War II, it was exactly that.

It was investing liberal.

I mean, FDR came to power with liberalism exhausted.

And what he did was he basically turned to Latin America and

embraced the Mexican Revolution and embraced.

you know, if he didn't use the phrase social rights, he reinvested liberalism with the notion of, you know, that it had to provide material goods.

It had to have a political economy.

And he gets a lot of that from Latin America, which I talk about in the book.

And so, yes, I think Latin Americans know that the way you beat fascism is not by calling fascists fascist, but by investing liberalism with social rights.

And,

you know, everybody has an ideology.

You beat an ideology with an ideology.

Nobody doesn't have an ideology.

We all live in a world of meaning and we've got to give people meaning.

Yeah, and I like what you said, you don't beat fascists by calling them fascists.

And I guess like this gets into like this meta debate about is Donald Trump a fascist?

Why aren't you calling him a fascist?

He's not a fascist.

To me, like this is beside the point.

I think the lesson is, as liberals, it only goes so far to say Donald Trump is a fascist when the liberalism that you're trying to defend is also very clearly fascist or like, let's just say very like tinged by fascism as well.

Yeah, it was, it has to be offers no solution or remedy to

that misery in the most

enormous waste of intellectual energy at a critical moment.

That fight over fascism.

I mean, Latin Americans use the word fascism.

They call everybody a fascist.

You know, they've been calling, you know, every right-wing government from, you know, they understand basically that World War II was basically just transposed over to Latin America and the fight continued with the Cold War.

And now the U.S.

was spacking the fascists.

So, everybody, you know, Pinochet was a fascist, and Vadella was a fascist, and, you know, and Riosmont was a fascist, they were all fascists.

And so, they happily used the word fascist.

But to get into semantic arguments, the nominal arguments, I mean, in terms of how it relates to the United States,

and obviously, there was a strong current among liberals who liked to use the word fascist as a way of covering up and not talking about neoliberalism and not talking about history as history, as movement, you know, that the way that Clintonism creates the conditions for Trumpism.

Like, that's not the way they like to think about it.

So, if you talk about the fact that they're not going to be able to

do that,

of course.

And if you're not, that's enough.

Yeah, yeah.

And if you're not willing to,

you know, to think about history as, you know, in those terms, then it's just a nominalist argument about names and typologies.

Greg Grandon, I want to thank you so much for for your time.

The book is America, America, A New History of the New World.

It will be in bookstores tomorrow.

Greg, thank you so much for just your time and just all the work you've done, which has so greatly informed the content of this show, credited or not.

Thanks so much, Will.

It's been great.

I'm a big fan.

And yeah, and

it's nice to know that

somebody's listening.

Somebody's reading.

Other historians aren't, but at least you guys aren't.

Well,

the book is,

it's a big one.

So if you're looking for like a book to carry you through the beach all summer long, I recommend America.

Yeah, but it's an easy read.

It's an easy read.

The Irish Times said it compared me to Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

A Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

I don't know which one.

Maybe there was another one he was thinking about.

all right uh once again thank you to greg grandon that does it for today's show everybody till next time bye bye bye-bye thanks thanks everybody