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

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Speaker 2 So you travel more than anybody I know. You spend more days out of the country and have for more years than literally anyone I know.
So answer this question.

Speaker 2 The countries that seem to be moving backward the most quickly, this is my perception, are

Speaker 2 the white Christian English-speaking countries, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, UK, United States. Am I imagining that? What is that?

Speaker 4 Well, no, I don't. I can't really speak about the countries of what they used to call the old Commonwealth, the, the

Speaker 4 Australia and New Zealand.

Speaker 4 I've never been to those places.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 I certainly think that England,

Speaker 4 the UK more generally, but England in particular,

Speaker 4 is really in a difficult position now.

Speaker 4 I think that the diagnosis that English people generally are coming to is that

Speaker 4 they've had too much immigration.

Speaker 2 It seems like they've been overwhelmed by immigration, but you may have a better handle on the numbers. How much immigration has the UK had-ish?

Speaker 4 Well, I think that they're up around you know the the the country is

Speaker 4 the country well most recently the country's had a lot of immigration since

Speaker 4 you know since the Second World War

Speaker 4 it it had some moments of acceleration it they had a huge wave of migrants from both the

Speaker 4 the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent

Speaker 4 in the years right after the war and by a huge wave you know

Speaker 4 one you know it's it's a couple hundred thousand but more recently we've had uh

Speaker 4 even larger numbers and in fact

Speaker 4 one of the one of the things that made has made brexit so contentious in england is that the big promise of brexit the primary promise of brexit um was to limit immigration.

Speaker 4 That's what most English people thought it was for.

Speaker 4 Now, Brexit was delayed between the referendum and

Speaker 4 2020. And when Britain finally got Brexit, it had COVID.
And so it had a period of zero immigration for a while.

Speaker 4 But then something really interesting happened, which is the people who had managed to get Brexit, that is the

Speaker 4 government of Boris Johnson, sort of looked at the numbers and they were very frightened

Speaker 4 that

Speaker 4 the economy was going to continue slow after COVID. And due to the way the British government scores economic predictions, immigration

Speaker 4 comes out as, by definition, a benefit to the economy. So seriously, so they

Speaker 2 like to California.

Speaker 4 Yes. So

Speaker 4 they decided to just loosen immigration for a little bit. And the result was really extraordinary.

Speaker 4 They got,

Speaker 4 I think, 4.5 million immigrants between 2021 and 2024.

Speaker 4 4.5 million? Yes. And so we're talking about

Speaker 4 in three years, we're talking about an immigration that is 7% of

Speaker 4 the country's

Speaker 4 population. And that immigration, because

Speaker 4 the European,

Speaker 4 because Britain had left the European Union, was not European immigration. It was 80% of it came from outside of Europe.

Speaker 4 So it was a profoundly foreign immigration and the largest Britain had ever had. And

Speaker 4 it was brought about by the very people whose entire reason for being in government was to stop immigration. And it's had an

Speaker 4 extremely destabilizing effect on the politics of the country.

Speaker 2 So they

Speaker 2 according to the way British economists score the economy, more people, almost always from poor countries, make you richer or something?

Speaker 4 Yes. I mean, it's sort of like

Speaker 4 it adds a certain amount of units of labor in the country. Is that many units of labor richer?

Speaker 4 And there's not really a sufficient, without going into the economic details, there's not sufficient reckoning

Speaker 4 done of the fact that these people will age, they'll form families, and they will collect the generous and perhaps overly generous state benefits that they've been brought in to,

Speaker 4 you know, to help defray.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, is there in the history of the world a country that's had like that level of immigration from poor countries that got richer because of it?

Speaker 4 The United States, and it, but it's a very special case because we were, you know, we were

Speaker 4 we had laid claim to a, you know, a continent-wide landmass, although we didn't always do that explicitly. And we had only a very few millions of people with which to claim it.

Speaker 4 And so we really needed people. And they generally came from societies that were

Speaker 4 or let's say they came from, they might have come from societies that were richer than ours, but they came the less fortunate parts of those societies.

Speaker 4 So I think it did enhance the United States while we had, you know, a more or less virgin territory.

Speaker 4 I understand that the Indians were there, but a lot of the territory was virgin and ripe for development.

Speaker 4 As long as we were in that position, it was a benefit to us.

Speaker 4 The mistake that other countries in the world have made, and Europe more than anyone, has been to assume that if they get mass immigration, it's going to work the way it did

Speaker 4 under the very special circumstances of 19th century North America. But instead, what's happening is it's working more like the circumstances of 17th century North America.
That is,

Speaker 4 the people who are arriving from abroad are becoming

Speaker 4 the core group

Speaker 2 into the replacing the indigenous population.

Speaker 4 That seems to be what's happening.

Speaker 4 Not everywhere, but in a lot of places.

Speaker 4 If you go to London,

Speaker 4 it's incontestable.

Speaker 2 Well, it's overwhelmingly, it's like 70% non-British, right? Non-English. That's right.
That's right.

Speaker 2 So, what I mean,

Speaker 2 can that be changed, fixed, reversed?

Speaker 4 That's what the discussion in England is about now. And that's why

Speaker 4 the politics on the English right is so

Speaker 4 you know it's it's so fractured it's it's fractured but it's actually very interesting a lot of you know there's a lot of

Speaker 4 sort of like new ideas

Speaker 4 sort of popping up out of desperation you know like what

Speaker 4 they're mostly of they're mostly ones that you would recognize from you know the Trump campaign they have a lot of them have to do with deportation

Speaker 4 There's a lot of discussion of withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights and from the UN

Speaker 4 refugee treaty

Speaker 4 from the 1950s.

Speaker 4 The UN has a refugee convention from the 1950s that governs a lot of

Speaker 4 rights of asylum. And the Tony Blair government in the late 90s and the early part of this century

Speaker 4 passed something called the Human Rights Act, which made

Speaker 4 which

Speaker 4 made European human rights law and the authority of the European Convention of Human Rights binding on the UK. So there is talk about

Speaker 4 exiting those agreements and not just talk. I mean, this is the sort of thing that

Speaker 4 whenever it's brought up in a Western country, country, it's described as extreme right-wing and fascist

Speaker 4 and that kind of thing. It's not just being talked about in England.
It's being talked about by,

Speaker 4 I would say, the three main forces on the English right, which are Nigel Farage, who's in the Reform Party, Kemi Badenock, who is the leader of the

Speaker 4 Conservative Party, and Robert Jenrick, who's the main sort of like radical,

Speaker 4 let's just say, the conservative alternative within the conservative party. All of them are talking about getting Britain out of the European Convention of Human Rights

Speaker 4 to the extent where you think if there is ever a Conservative government again, it will happen. I mean,

Speaker 4 it's no less believable than Brexit was before Brexit happened.

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Speaker 2 But that's still, I mean, that's pretty tepid, really, like pulling.

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 the country's been pretty much the same for a thousand years. I mean, you can go to Stonehenge, pull up bone fragments, and trace the DNA to people living in Britain.

Speaker 2 So, I mean, for all history that we know of, it's been pretty much the same. People with something the French came a thousand years ago or whatever, but there have been some changes.
But in general,

Speaker 2 they're the indigenous population. And now in 80 years, they've been like overthrown, replaced.

Speaker 4 It's

Speaker 4 an extraordinary anthropological moment. It's like I've never heard of anything like that happening.
Well, there were these, there have been a couple of examples of,

Speaker 4 you know, what the German

Speaker 4 paleo historians call, you know, Filkewanderung, you you know, movements of peoples, you know, where, you know, people move off the steppes in Asia and

Speaker 4 into Western Europe. And then they, you know, that's how we got our independent,

Speaker 4 sorry, our Indo-European languages. Yes.
And, you know, there's movements down through Greece and onto, you know, you know, the Minoan

Speaker 4 area. I don't, I don't know exactly when it was, about a thousand or two thousand DC.

Speaker 2 The Russians and the Finns have kind of Asiatic eyes, you know.

Speaker 4 I don't know what happened when, but occasionally there are these huge movements of population. This one's a little bit different because it's enabled by technology.

Speaker 4 So it's not contiguous peoples sort of like pushing against one another. I mean, it's sort of people who are brought by boat and by and by airplane.
But in terms of its

Speaker 4 its importance, yeah, it's a it's a major

Speaker 2 but I guess what I'm saying, the reason it's unprecedented, I I mean, Genghis Khan, you know, rolled over and impregnated thousands of people,

Speaker 2 but I don't think those people's leaders asked him to come and impregnate their wives.

Speaker 2 This is like the only invasion I've ever seen that was been bidden by the leaders of the countries that have been invaded, like come and invade us.

Speaker 2 It's not like they were begging.

Speaker 4 for it, but they say they sort of created a climate of permissiveness, you know, that

Speaker 4 which people took advantage of. And

Speaker 2 it's the,

Speaker 4 I think, what you're getting at is what was the psychological state of Europeans between 1945 when they started doing this

Speaker 4 and today that's made this past.

Speaker 2 That's exactly the question. And I don't understand it.

Speaker 4 And it's a funny thing because you and I have lived through the deepest part of that transformation, and it's still kind of a mystery to us.

Speaker 4 So if anyone's watching this 100 years from now, they, you know,

Speaker 4 I hope they can see how confused we in fact were.

Speaker 4 But, I mean, I think that in the wake of World War II,

Speaker 4 something happened in the middle of the 20th century. And it's really tough to say what it was.

Speaker 4 It might be a coming to, you know, to consciousness of, you know, after the horrors of the two world wars.

Speaker 2 It's like

Speaker 4 you don't want to, you know, this is maybe too moralistic an explanation, but you know,

Speaker 4 people began to understand that there were bad things could happen if you were too judgmental about other people's or

Speaker 4 inimical. But there are other factors, such as just the technological factors, the sort of the visibility of alternative places to live through television.
And that, I think, is, I think it's,

Speaker 4 I think the technological are as, you know, and, oh, and the fact of, the fact of easy travel through airplanes and the fact that you, that the telephone, the television, and finally the internet enable you to go someplace without being cut off from your ancestral homeland.

Speaker 4 So it makes the decision to travel abroad much lower stakes. You know, I mean, the people who came to the United States in the 19th century from Sicily, they were gone.

Speaker 4 They got on, you know, for the most part.

Speaker 2 They never saw their people again.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Well, you know, in fact, in the Italian migration, a lot of them did go back.
But it was a, in general, in general, it was a big decision. And

Speaker 4 in the case of the Irish, I think they were usually here for good. Anyhow, I think it's a combination of

Speaker 4 at the level of statesmen, I think it's a discomfort with any kind of expression of hostility or lack of hospitality towards other peoples.

Speaker 4 But at the just the operational level of the individual migrants, I think

Speaker 4 technology

Speaker 4 had a lot to do with it.

Speaker 2 It's impossible. But I mean, yeah, technology for sure.
But, you know, I don't know, Victorian England had

Speaker 2 the ability to move people around the world, to control, you know, the world's biggest navy and all that. And it would have been unimaginable.

Speaker 2 They didn't want millions of non-English living in England because they were proud of England and they thought it was distinctly English and they thought that I guess what I'm getting at is it's so strange to me that

Speaker 2 the self-confidence of Western Europe collapsed after winning the war I think that's so Germany's a different case but I mean

Speaker 2 Britain France Spain Portugal I mean these are all countries that Blake had nothing to be ashamed of from my perspective, certainly England and France. Why did they lose confidence in themselves

Speaker 2 after winning?

Speaker 4 That's a sort of complex question. I'm not sure I agree that these countries had, I mean,

Speaker 4 they were all in very different positions. I mean,

Speaker 4 Germany, Austria, and Italy were the defeated powers and the malefactors in the war.

Speaker 4 France had collaborated, part of France had collaborated, and there was a tremendous amount of soul-searching and there was a tremendous amount of guilt.

Speaker 4 Spain and Portugal had kind of resolved their own civil war in the 1930s and they were kind of out of the picture.

Speaker 4 It would seem that Britain had a record that it could really be proud of, but it was dismantling an empire. And so the two main victorious non, you know,

Speaker 4 the main victorious powers were were the United States Britain and Russia Russia was communist and had its own

Speaker 4 project to propagandize but the United States and and and Britain they also had reasons for self-examination there was you know

Speaker 4 I think there was plenty of triumphalism after the the Second World War.

Speaker 4 It's a very tough thing to read. I think that the America I grew up in was really quite proud of its role in the Second World War,

Speaker 4 even as it was re-examining its own history

Speaker 4 of racism and slavery

Speaker 4 and even the

Speaker 4 settlement and the wipeout of the Indians.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 it was a mix of impulses. So I'm not sure that they were, I'm not sure these countries were

Speaker 4 as self-doubting as

Speaker 4 we think.

Speaker 2 Well, the effect was to just collapse, I mean, especially in the case of the UK.

Speaker 2 So is there any getting back to what it was even 35, 40 years ago?

Speaker 4 You know, it's funny. I heard a member of the Reform Party saying that what

Speaker 4 people really long for in England is a return to the status quo anti-Tony Blair. That is, you know, Britain had a lot of

Speaker 4 migration. There was one wave in the 40s and 50s.
There is another one that kind of coincided with the beginnings of our latest wave, which has never, which has gone on unabated.

Speaker 4 But they had a wave in the 70s and 80s that British did.

Speaker 4 But the biggest one was just was intentionally started by Tony Blair. And

Speaker 4 so the reform, this one member of the reform party says, if we could just go back to the status quo anti-Blair, that would be fine. That was only 30 years ago.
But in fact,

Speaker 4 the amount of change has been so tremendous. And it's not just that the numerator of

Speaker 4 migration is changed. It's also that the denominator

Speaker 4 of the total population of Britain has changed. That is, Britain is a very, very slow growing demographic.
So they're not really producing a lot of new children.

Speaker 4 And so a disproportionately large amount of

Speaker 4 the British people in years to come are going to be the product of immigration. So no, I don't see any

Speaker 4 in general, there's no way short of like cataclysmic developments

Speaker 4 to reverse any of that.

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Speaker 2 So it just kind of goes extinct. I mean,

Speaker 2 because there's no way that those two cultures can live and share power. I mean, one, that doesn't, that's never happened in history.

Speaker 2 One culture dominates in the end. You have a culture.
It depends on how separate they remain.

Speaker 4 I mean, let's look

Speaker 4 at the history of the settlement of North America.

Speaker 4 I mean, the British, particularly if you talk to Spanish historians and Spanish observers of this, were notoriously insistent on remaining separate in the lands they conquered. And they did.

Speaker 4 And they did dominate. In

Speaker 4 some places, they were able to settle

Speaker 4 these

Speaker 4 areas. In other places, like India, they were sent home, you know, after a long period of exploiting the place.
But

Speaker 4 there were other nationalities that tended to colonize by mixing more. And so

Speaker 4 there is a sort of

Speaker 4 a mix of cultures becomes possible. The cultures that mixed into what we now think of as,

Speaker 4 you know, different Latin American cultures were earlier on quite separate.

Speaker 4 There still is a degree of separation in South America between these different strains of like the European culture and the native culture of,

Speaker 4 but I mean,

Speaker 4 in most of Latin America, you can say that there's such a thing as Brazilian culture, there's such a thing as Mexican culture, and there will be, you know, I trust such a thing as English culture in, you know, in 50 or 100 years.

Speaker 4 but it will be a very different

Speaker 4 thing

Speaker 4 than

Speaker 4 the English culture that we recognized over the last 500 years.

Speaker 4 So it is a rupture. You're right.

Speaker 2 What happens to the, I mean, at some point, do the politics get radical?

Speaker 2 Well, that, I think, is the. And it makes me feel radical hearing about this.

Speaker 4 Well, that, I think, is what's happening in England now. And it's one of the reasons I went to England, and it's why I

Speaker 4 think it's really, it bears watching in

Speaker 4 the next few years.

Speaker 4 They had a huge,

Speaker 4 they had a lot of riots last summer. I mean, there was an episode in which

Speaker 4 the British-born child of

Speaker 4 Rwandan immigrants, who sounds like he was kind of a crazy

Speaker 4 man,

Speaker 4 went to a Taylor Swift dance party that was being held for a bunch of,

Speaker 4 little girls, and he stabbed a dozen of them and

Speaker 4 killed three of them.

Speaker 4 And the town in which he did it just blew up.

Speaker 4 And the protests spread across the country, and you had like a wave of really quite spontaneous

Speaker 4 public uprising. And that was last That was just about a year ago in August.

Speaker 4 The government, which had just entered office,

Speaker 4 the government of Keir Starmer, the Labor government, chose not to view it as a spontaneous uprising. They described it as the, you know, a reaction to misinformation and that sort of thing.

Speaker 4 That did not convince

Speaker 4 the public very much, though. And I think it contributed to the,

Speaker 4 in general, low popularity the government has enjoyed since then.

Speaker 4 It's a strange, just as an aside, it's a very strange situation in Britain where they have a landslide, this Labour government has a landslide majority, although they've won only a third of the votes.

Speaker 4 So that in itself is very stabilizing. But I think the events that we've just been, let's see, the developments we've just been discussing have made, have contributed to

Speaker 4 make Britain susceptible to radicalization.

Speaker 2 What about Germany? I mean, Germany's also been completely transformed by immigration, but that's a society with less free, even than Britain, and people can't even say it out loud.

Speaker 2 They've been taught to hate themselves and to keep that stuff inside. But you wonder at some point, did Germans say, you know, just had enough?

Speaker 4 And well, you know, I think

Speaker 4 it's worth remembering that, you know, that we had a lot to do with that, you know, German culture of denazification and

Speaker 4 sort of, let's say, German,

Speaker 4 the critical German approach that they take to their past.

Speaker 4 And so

Speaker 4 Germany has never been a real free speech society.

Speaker 4 It's not a

Speaker 4 value that is held to quite the high degree that we hold it in our First Amendment.

Speaker 4 In fact, no other culture on earth really has that absolutist idea of free speech that we treasure, I think, rightly.

Speaker 4 But so working with that German culture, which is not a pure free speech culture, I think that we reasoned, you know,

Speaker 4 the United States, partly because of the circumstances of the Cold War, wanted to reintroduce Germany into the family of citizens of civilized nations

Speaker 4 very fast. I mean, we we were talking about rearming them in the 1950s, you know, we were talking about creating, building a European army around Germany in like 1955.

Speaker 4 It was as an alternative to that that the European Union was created, because that prospect really freaked the French out.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 4 But at any rate, the United States really wanted Germany to be reintroduced to the West. And to do that

Speaker 2 a certain

Speaker 4 number of ground rules had to be laid down you know what i mean like you couldn't buy a um

Speaker 4 uh you couldn't buy a copy of mein kampf you couldn't um you eventually you you couldn't join a communist party you know what i mean there's um

Speaker 2 um

Speaker 4 so

Speaker 4 yeah germany had germany's

Speaker 4 Germany's free speech was was a little constrained, you know.

Speaker 4 It might might have been constrained anyway, but it also had this highly critical idea of

Speaker 4 German history. And

Speaker 4 again, it's understandable, but there's a lot of great stuff in German history, too. I mean, the Reformation comes out of Germany.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And it's, 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?

Speaker 4 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,

Speaker 4 you know, Gerhard Schroeder, I mean, at the time, it was fashionable to blame France for the European opposition

Speaker 4 to the American adventure in Iraq,

Speaker 4 in which Europe has been spectacularly vindicated, I think.

Speaker 4 But in fact, I think it was Germany as much as France that was driving that

Speaker 4 rebellion. And it was Gerhard Schroeder who said, who is then the chancellor of Germany, he said,

Speaker 4 the foreign policy of Germany is going to be made in Berlin and only in Berlin.

Speaker 4 I thought that that was happening then. At any rate,

Speaker 4 for a long time, people really lacked the institutions through which to express that

Speaker 4 German,

Speaker 4 you know, I wouldn't even call it pride. It's just the desire that

Speaker 4 it's partly pride, but it's just the desire that Germany be treated like a normal country again, you know.

Speaker 4 And I think now, 80 years after the war, that 80 years after the war, and

Speaker 4 confronted by certain problems that actually require a certain amount of national pride to address, I mean,

Speaker 4 Germans are beginning to talk that way again. They're beginning to say, you know, we need to be Germans again.

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Speaker 2 It's interesting that

Speaker 2 AFD, the alternative for Germany,

Speaker 2 is treated like an outlaw party by the courts in Germany. And yet it's growing in popularity.

Speaker 2 I was just reading in the largest German state, members of the party were banned from owning guns because they were

Speaker 4 North Rhine Westphalia.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Can that continue?

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 4 this is a big drama. Yes, it can continue.
It's a, you know, it's

Speaker 4 an interesting situation. I mean, the German

Speaker 4 the German, I'm not sure where in the Grundgesettes it is, in the

Speaker 4 German basic law, but

Speaker 4 the German

Speaker 4 constitution permits something called the Office for the Protection of the Constitution to monitor parties to make sure that they're not

Speaker 4 dangerous right-wing extremist parties.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 the goal of having that in the Constitution was to prevent any recruitescence of Nazism. Now, there are parties all across Europe that had certain antecedents, whether in the institution itself or

Speaker 4 in certain just personnel, you know,

Speaker 4 the way, for example, Mussolini's

Speaker 4 fascist party was ended at the end of

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 there were offshoots of it. Many of the people in it became left-wing.

Speaker 4 Giorgio Maloney started a new party, but it had some people who were in the MSI. So if you want to trace a genealogy

Speaker 4 from

Speaker 4 mid-20th century fascism to certain European leaders, you can.

Speaker 4 And people do that as a way of sort of gaining talking points against Maloney.

Speaker 2 They do it.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 European Union, by guaranteeing

Speaker 4 the debts of Greece and other failing countries, was in an invisible way taxing Germany. So it was, it was, it was built around a very recondite complaint, you know,

Speaker 4 and not a hate-filled complaint. And I remember interviewing the head of the party at the time, who was an economist named Berndt Luke.

Speaker 4 And he was just a very nerdy guy. He's left,

Speaker 4 I think he's left the party since. But the party underwent two transformations.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 into Europe and were then joined opportunistically,

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 sort of like mother of many children

Speaker 4 named Frauke Petri, said, you know what, we are the alternative for Germany.

Speaker 4 No party is

Speaker 4 arguing for an alternative immigration policy, and that has to be us. And so it became

Speaker 4 the anti-immigration party. But at the same time,

Speaker 4 it had, for similar but less noticeable reasons, it had attracted people who wanted a change in Germany for all sorts of things, including, you know, what we would call culture warriors, people who wanted to change the school curriculum to, so that it denigrated Germany less.

Speaker 4 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. And they're now, you know,

Speaker 4 they got 20% in the last election. And between elections, they tend to pull much higher.
So they're a serious party. They have

Speaker 4 at times in

Speaker 4 the last few months, since the elections in January, I believe, they have been the largest party in Germany in terms of opinion polling.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 if you have a country that calls itself, advertises itself a democracy, a country

Speaker 2 run by the people who live there.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 over time, the establishment excludes parties that represent the majority of the people. Then don't you get a revolution at a certain point?

Speaker 4 Maybe I, you know, I think I got a little off track. There's one piece I forgot to explain.
So, so there is the,

Speaker 4 there exists in the German constitution this idea of banning parties. Yes.

Speaker 4 And it's,

Speaker 4 I think that then when people understood it, 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.

Speaker 4 And that's why like there have been parties banned since the Second World War, not in a very long time.

Speaker 4 And they tend to be, tended to be, you know, tiny little groups of what we would call jack-booted thugs.

Speaker 4 The idea that that this mechanism could be used to ban the largest party in the country.

Speaker 4 And furthermore, one that was founded, one that was founded two generations after the Second World War in 2013 is not what the Constitution envisioned.

Speaker 4 Nonetheless, 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?

Speaker 2 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, you know, either you have to change the name of the system.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah, that's right. I mean, you, well, you have,

Speaker 4 you know, you have

Speaker 4 you've interviewed Callan Georgescu on this

Speaker 4 on this show. If you look at what happened in Romania and the elections

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 and managed to head off the next

Speaker 4 replacement in the second round of that election, which was delayed for many months, and got a member of the establishment into

Speaker 4 the Romanian government. It didn't really work like

Speaker 4 like a democracy. And yet when it happened, people said, well, we've defended democracy.
We've defended democracy against the voters.

Speaker 4 So it's this sort of kind of, it's the kind of thing that Bertolt Brecht would make a joke about.

Speaker 4 And yes, it's not small D democratic, but people have chosen to call this

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 description.

Speaker 4 They claim the term democracy, but I don't think they're doing so very successfully. And the parties

Speaker 4 that represent this state of emergency liberalism do not do terribly well.

Speaker 2 It just seems like the spread between what people want and what they're getting grows wider every year.

Speaker 2 People seem to hate mass migration everywhere in the world. I 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 4 a couple of things. I don't, I'm not sure that the, I think that the gap between what people

Speaker 4 want and what they're getting is wide, is wide, but I'm not sure that it's widening. I mean, the election of Trump was certainly a,

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 There have been, you know, certainly the rhetorical stance of the administration is against migration.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 2 I agree with that.

Speaker 4 If there were to be, as I've just described, a conservative government in England and

Speaker 4 it abolished

Speaker 4 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 and certainly to stopping the ongoing traffic of

Speaker 4 small boat migration in England. So I think that that's,

Speaker 4 I think it is,

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 things explode is the

Speaker 4 is discontent in numerous and dynamic classes.

Speaker 4 And that's why, you know, the Arab world was so unruly throughout the 1980s and the 1990s, because you had, this was a part of the world in which people were having like six or eight or 10 kids, and there was no place to put these young men.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 there was a lot of martial dynamism in

Speaker 4 these societies. And

Speaker 4 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.

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Speaker 4 And these are not the kind of societies that say, darn it, I've had enough. These are people who need, I mean,

Speaker 4 the demographic heart of our societies is

Speaker 4 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.

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Speaker 2 When

Speaker 2 the children of the latest wave of migrants to the United States are 18,

Speaker 2 so that'll be in 15 years.

Speaker 2 Then you're going to have a really dynamic society.

Speaker 2 You're going to have a lot of 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?

Speaker 4 Absolutely. And that, I think, is that's why

Speaker 4 I've

Speaker 4 tended to look at this, you know, what's happening now with arguments over the border and with,

Speaker 4 you know, with Trump as part of a process that will come to resemble

Speaker 4 about a century later, the process that led to the New Deal. I mean, because I think the New Deal

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 1880 and 1920.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 we look at our present demographic change and we say, oh my goodness, things are really, you know, what country has ever ever faced anything like this? And it's, it's really, there really is a,

Speaker 4 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,

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 These people who are coming know nothing of

Speaker 4 our country. How are they going to ever,

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And 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.

Speaker 4 You know, I mean, let's see, the only Americans are the ones who've already arrived. Those are the only foreigners.

Speaker 4 And that's why, you know, if you look at, it's why there are so many Italians in Argentina. They came after 1924 when the Italians could no longer go to

Speaker 4 New York.

Speaker 4 And so from there,

Speaker 4 these people had no choice but to mix together into a new kind of American.

Speaker 4 And the people who said, these people will never be able to to adapt to the old American ways, they were wrong, but they weren't totally wrong.

Speaker 4 I mean, they sort of like the country did change to reflect the identity of

Speaker 4 the new immigrants.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 mix of the, you know, of the settled Americans and the new immigrant Americans.

Speaker 4 And it knit the country into one people so effectively that by the 1950, no, the 1950s and 60s, young Americans were sort of like complaining about how boring and homogenized the United States was.

Speaker 4 You know what I mean? Yes. And so it can be done.

Speaker 2 Will there,

Speaker 2 after Trump leaves in three years, will there be like a series of Trumps? Or will the party revert to what it was?

Speaker 2 Oh,

Speaker 4 will the Republican Party revert to what it was before Trump?

Speaker 2 Oh,

Speaker 4 first of all,

Speaker 4 I think Trump is such

Speaker 4 an unusual person that I don't think he can really be replicated, even if

Speaker 4 no matter how hard anyone tries.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 2 what

Speaker 4 was required. There are other people who have sort of sort of who seem to have more of the,

Speaker 4 more of the qualifications that

Speaker 4 a politician would require. That is, like patience and like an understanding of policy and things like that.

Speaker 4 You had people like Ron DeSantis seem to be offering that to the Republican Party for a while. But it's not what the country felt it needed.
The country felt it needed brass.

Speaker 4 The country felt it needed someone

Speaker 4 to come in and insult,

Speaker 4 topple, and break the old establishment.

Speaker 2 Was that establishment broken, like after Trump?

Speaker 4 Well, it's still in progress. I mean, it's, I mean, I think, I mean, this is something you know a lot more about than I do.
But I mean, if I look at Trump won,

Speaker 4 I would say that it was an almost utter failure on Trump's own terms. That is,

Speaker 4 I mean, he used that list that Leonard Leo and others had given him to

Speaker 4 fortify the Supreme Court as a, you know, a more or less conservative

Speaker 4 force. And he'd nominate a lot of judges.

Speaker 4 But I don't think that he ever understood

Speaker 4 where the actual levers of power in the government were.

Speaker 4 And so the

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And so what has happened

Speaker 4 under Trump too is one of the most astonishing surprises in the history of American politics.

Speaker 4 Now, in Brexit, you had a guy who was kind of a genius in the workings of British government named Dominic Cummings, who

Speaker 4 was able to say, well, no, you don't need to win a majority in parliament on this one. You just need to control

Speaker 4 the cabinet office, etc.

Speaker 4 Trump never had such a person, but apparently, and the details are still not clear how, apparently he acquired one or several

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 So there's someone, I mean, maybe Steve Miller

Speaker 4 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,

Speaker 4 you know, USAID was

Speaker 4 dismantled, which in what seems to me, it was not really a cost-saving operation. It was like a purge of a certain tendency

Speaker 4 in government, was really,

Speaker 4 you know, whatever you think of it as an ideological operation, it was a tremendously expert

Speaker 4 operation in terms of, you know, government rejiggering.

Speaker 4 The executive orders that he has

Speaker 4 canceled and the new ones that he has passed in order to give a new reading to affirmative action. And I would say that

Speaker 4 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,

Speaker 4 is a constitutional revolution.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 4 yeah, this is, I mean, things are still in progress.

Speaker 4 It's very difficult to see whether for

Speaker 4 whether an operation like, say, deportations, whether that is going to accelerate or whether Trump is really running out of gas and

Speaker 4 this is going to, but 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.

Speaker 2 Can you go go back a second? How was affirmative action the key institution in American government?

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 4 I've always thought, and we've talked about this, that

Speaker 4 the passage of the

Speaker 4 Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the,

Speaker 4 you know, it created a new constitution that was

Speaker 4 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,

Speaker 4 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 to whites,

Speaker 4 you know, in public and in large companies and

Speaker 4 that sort of thing. But it wound up to be a, wound up being an incredibly

Speaker 4 versatile tool. You could use it for anything

Speaker 4 once you had declared a sort of national emergency. So like getting women onto, you know, like corporate boards or getting,

Speaker 4 you know,

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 anybody could be made, anybody was under suspicion.

Speaker 4 Let's just say incorporation.

Speaker 4 It worked publicly and privately. In corporations, anyone who ran a company that was

Speaker 4 larger than a few dozen people was understood to be under

Speaker 4 the government's watchful eye.

Speaker 4 You could

Speaker 4 avoid being sued really only by establishing an affirmative action program. And so

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 We'd like to have a look at like how you and how you've been behaving for the last, you know,

Speaker 4 for the last year and your board meetings. We'd like to know if there's there's anyone you're hiring who has kind of an animus against black people or women or gays or immigrants.

Speaker 4 And so it had a very chilling effect at every level of government and at every level of society.

Speaker 2 Is that over?

Speaker 4 It is for now, except we now have a culture in which for 50 years,

Speaker 2 people,

Speaker 4 even in the most private know, conversations, sort of have been trained to ask themselves, you know, can I say this?

Speaker 2 Or, or is this okay?

Speaker 4 Or, you know, like,

Speaker 4 you know, I'm not homophobic, but, you know,

Speaker 4 and so you have a,

Speaker 4 you have a, you have a society that has really been trained to be scared. So a lot of this,

Speaker 4 you know,

Speaker 4 yes, I think, so, so I think that institutionally it's over,

Speaker 4 but culturally, we are really not a

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 2 About

Speaker 2 things, obvious things that you notice, differences between people and differences between groups.

Speaker 4 About anything.

Speaker 2 About anything.

Speaker 4 Almost anything.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Do you see that changing?

Speaker 2 I see it changing. Do you see it changing?

Speaker 4 Yes, I do. That's interesting.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 It feels like the term racist has lost its sting, like almost completely.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 4 I would expect that to happen.

Speaker 4 I haven't really gathered any evidence about it. You know,

Speaker 4 I mean, for one thing, it's harder to

Speaker 4 sue a person when you're, you know, the government has announced that it's not enforcing affirmative action, that kind of thing.

Speaker 4 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,

Speaker 4 you know,

Speaker 2 whether through a lawsuit or

Speaker 4 a public relations campaign, no one could hire him. Do you know what I mean? It was a real

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 2 And that is no longer true?

Speaker 4 Yes,

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 However, it may become true again, depending on what happens in the in the next election.

Speaker 4 So people are wary.

Speaker 4 And I also think that people, we're not the sort of people that is comfortable going out on a limb anymore.

Speaker 4 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. I mean, I think that you can't expect

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I remember when banks introduced ATM cards, they couldn't get people who grew up during the Depression to use them.

Speaker 4 Well, that's a very good analogy. Because it was just too spooky.

Speaker 2 Do you remember a country where people spoke freely in conversation?

Speaker 2 Do you have memories of that?

Speaker 4 I remember one where people spoke

Speaker 4 more freely.

Speaker 4 And in fact, I went to college in the 1980s. I think it was pretty free.

Speaker 4 And actually, when people describe the

Speaker 4 first

Speaker 4 really mention in the wider public of so-called political correctness was, I think, think, in the winter of 1990 to 1991. Yes.
And shortly thereafter, you know, you had the Clarence Thomas

Speaker 4 hearings for the Supreme Court, which introduced the idea of sexual harassment.

Speaker 4 And I got the feeling that things were changing very

Speaker 4 quickly right then. There were a couple of incidents

Speaker 4 then,

Speaker 4 and one that I remember very clearly was

Speaker 4 there was

Speaker 4 a Dodgers,

Speaker 4 an executive for the Los Angeles Dodgers named Al Campanis, who got invited on

Speaker 4 Ted Coppel's show, Nightline, to talk about Jackie Robinson 40 years after

Speaker 4 he'd entered the big leagues. And Al Campanis had been,

Speaker 4 he was, not only was he not a racist, he was, he had been Jackie Robinson's roommate and he was one of his defenders.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 This is a guy who had like fought to bring Jackie Robinson into the major leagues. But I mean, you know, you had, he, he lost his job.
And I remember Maxine Waters, who was the,

Speaker 4 who was

Speaker 4 I don't think she was yet in Congress, actually, but she was a very active in California politics already.

Speaker 4 So she wanted to be sure that he wasn't, you know, secretly being given any benefits by the Dodgers of any kind. And I mean, he was just like, he was just destroyed,

Speaker 4 this kindly old man who had been a friend of Jackie Robinson's. And it was

Speaker 4 clearly something was something was happening there.

Speaker 4 And I think that what was happening is that these enforcement possibilities, which are in the Civil Rights Act, that

Speaker 4 lawyers

Speaker 4 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 much money.

Speaker 4 So basically,

Speaker 4 without banning speech, you were able to make speech very uncomfortable for people.

Speaker 2 Did that just play out?

Speaker 2 I mean, is it just impossible for people to live this way forever and people just decide?

Speaker 4 No, it didn't play out. It had to be rebelled against.
And

Speaker 4 the

Speaker 4 removal, the lifting of the executive orders

Speaker 4 that order affirmative action by Trump was an absolutely necessary step. The decision not to enforce affirmative action

Speaker 4 was a necessary step.

Speaker 4 By the way,

Speaker 4 it was preceded by a Supreme Court case that appeared in its mealy-mouthed way to say negative things about affirmative action programs programs in universities, but it's clear that universities were proceeding,

Speaker 4 were proceeding as best they could to maintain it. So, no, it does not play out.

Speaker 4 It's

Speaker 4 this affirmative action, political correctness woke this whole constellation of authoritarian and even totalitarian seeming rules.

Speaker 2 They are rules.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 They are enforced by the fact that if you fall afoul of these

Speaker 4 of

Speaker 4 civil rights rights laws, it can cost you your business and your reputation and everything else.

Speaker 2 What's the real purpose of them? I sense that social justice is not actually

Speaker 2 the goal.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 4 and I should add that

Speaker 4 this is just a,

Speaker 4 well,

Speaker 4 let's deal with this.

Speaker 4 I think that solving the age-old race problem in the United States was the original goal. of civil rights.

Speaker 4 But the tools that were given to solve that problem included ways to overturn

Speaker 4 democratically made decisions in the South. That tool, that ability to circumvent a democratic mandate from the American people, from any people, is such a valuable thing for politicians to have.

Speaker 4 And so they started using it for everything. As I say, you know,

Speaker 4 underrepresentation of women, underrepresentation of immigrants, underrepresentation of Hispanics, all these things

Speaker 4 become crises. And social justice actually was the name that was given to this.
But it was always, and you can call it anything you want, but it always was a way of

Speaker 4 using the government to sort of order society.

Speaker 4 And the danger of it was that you could do that at a really, really micro level.

Speaker 4 I mean, you can do it at the level of like what signs people hang in the doors of their shops.

Speaker 4 And so it became kind of like the world that Václav Havel describes in his,

Speaker 4 and that's why everyone started reading Václav Havel and Alexander Solzhenitsyn again, because our society felt like those Eastern European societies at the time of

Speaker 2 it was Soviet. It was totalitarian, I mean, in the strict sense.
It was total control over people's lives. Yeah.

Speaker 4 I like

Speaker 4 to draw the distinction that Hannah Arendt does at one point. A lot of people use totalitarianism.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 means like the state gets into the totalitary,

Speaker 4 the totality of your

Speaker 4 life. It doesn't have to be that.
There's no, right? There's no nook of your life

Speaker 4 where the state does not belong. The state wants to be at your dinner table, you know what I mean? And listening in on you.

Speaker 4 The state wants to be

Speaker 4 on your route to work and make sure, you know, the state wants to be everywhere with you in everything you do.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It was imposed on the population by the state. Now it's been rolled back by the state,

Speaker 2 run by Donald Trump. But can it be reimposed? Would people put like, could President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Casio-Cortez be like,

Speaker 2 you know, my goal as president is going to be to eliminate racism? Wouldn't people just laugh at her?

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 there might be a confrontation. I mean, as long as Trump hasn't,

Speaker 4 you know, removed these laws from the books, which he hasn't,

Speaker 4 he's merely sort of like suspended the enforcement of them and he's unwritten some executive orders, which can be re, you know, reissued. I mean, it's, it's a reprieve.

Speaker 4 So the interesting thing would be what would happen if, you know, how would the public respond with, you know, four

Speaker 4 years of living more freely if those freedoms were suddenly withdrawn? And this includes, you mentioned young people.

Speaker 4 This includes people, you know, who've had, who've never had any experience of having

Speaker 4 politically correct censorship at work or that sort of thing.

Speaker 2 And I don't know.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But you were saying maybe that's not correct.

Speaker 4 I don't know what they will have the capacity to do.

Speaker 4 You know, I don't, you know, you say, well, you know, how will people respond if President Ocasio-Cortez says, you know, we're going to have, you know, affirmative action and drag queen story hour Hour again.

Speaker 4 I just don't know. But I do, yes, I do think the Democratic Party is probably

Speaker 4 is probably

Speaker 4 going to,

Speaker 4 you know, it's going to find something to, you know, some way to radicalize.

Speaker 2 At what point do economic debates like re-emerge?

Speaker 2 I 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.

Speaker 2 Like all the oxygen's taken up by that, this, the political correctness stuff.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I, and I, I, I think it's, 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.

Speaker 4 A very interesting, I mean, but Trump is, um, Trump has really confounded a lot of the,

Speaker 4 the categories. I think that

Speaker 4 everyone has the habit of like saying, you know, talking about tax cuts for the rich and

Speaker 4 all that kind of thing.

Speaker 2 To

Speaker 4 tie this to what we've been saying with immigration, immigration is a very important part of this economic

Speaker 4 question.

Speaker 4 Trump, an interesting thing about Trump's first term is that, as best we can measure it, it was a highly egalitarian period. And,

Speaker 4 you know, we really only have accurate, undistorted numbers for the first three years of it because the final year of it was COVID.

Speaker 4 But it really appeared that the that the bottom quintile of

Speaker 4 earners advanced

Speaker 4 against other quintiles for the first time since the 20th century. And I, you know.
Really?

Speaker 2 Yes, yes.

Speaker 4 And this is in the

Speaker 4 feds numbers that came out towards the end of the Trump administration.

Speaker 4 If 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.

Speaker 4 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,

Speaker 4 there were far lower gains for the very rich under Trump.

Speaker 4 But there were relative gains for the, 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.

Speaker 4 And that

Speaker 2 his voters benefited, is what you're saying.

Speaker 4 Exactly. Okay.
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.
Okay.

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 2 that's interesting. So immigration really is a transfer of wealth to the rich.

Speaker 4 Yeah. So when we talk about Trump and immigration,

Speaker 4 that's, I think, an important thing to keep in mind.

Speaker 4 And that is why

Speaker 4 a lot of people were really surprised

Speaker 4 by the shift in votes

Speaker 4 particularly among black and Hispanic males to Trump in 2024. And people have sought to explain it through these cultural

Speaker 4 factors that we've been discussing earlier today oh it was a trump's you know endorsement by this rap hip-hop star or whatever but i think it might just be that people

Speaker 4 you know people at that part of the economy you know who tend to be you know

Speaker 4 that benefited from trump one

Speaker 4 tend to be disproportionately black and hispanic and it might just be a direct a case of of people just devoting their direct economic interests.

Speaker 2 It's a little weird if you go through the Congressional Black Caucus,

Speaker 2 certainly among the people whose names you've heard, like the famous black political leaders in this country, they're all for open borders.

Speaker 4 Huh. Well, I think that that is largely

Speaker 4 intersectionality. And, you know, people talk about, people in

Speaker 4 in universities talk about intersectionality like it's a theory about, you know, the how, you know,

Speaker 4 different types of lack of privilege intersect. Like,

Speaker 4 am I more discriminated against because I'm a black woman or because I'm a lesbian and that kind of thing,

Speaker 4 or because I'm foreign or whatever.

Speaker 4 But actually, what intersectionality is,

Speaker 4 you've used the term on your show, but what I think it really is, is just coalition building. The civil rights regime created

Speaker 4 a system in which

Speaker 4 you could do almost anything you wanted. A minority could do almost anything that he wanted with government.

Speaker 4 You could do almost anything you wanted with government in the name of minorities, but minorities remained minorities. You couldn't get the

Speaker 4 majority to do that. So what happens is minorities wind up make the beneficiaries of minority government wind up making an alliance.

Speaker 4 You know, you can't vote against immigration because you're a woman and 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.

Speaker 4 And that's where the, you know, like the much mocked non-sequiturs of intersectionality come from, like, like gays for Gaza and

Speaker 4 that kind of thing. That's my favorite.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 4 So.

Speaker 2 But really, you're just describing the Democratic Party.

Speaker 2 This is just like theoretical overlay to justify retroactively a coalition.

Speaker 4 The Democratic Party is the party of the

Speaker 4 beneficiaries of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Speaker 2 The Democratic Party is the party of beneficiaries of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Speaker 2 And the Republican Party is the party of the victims of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Speaker 4 Or those who have objections to it.

Speaker 4 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 okay yeah

Speaker 2 um

Speaker 2 interesting does that change

Speaker 4 well as i say i think it's it's in abeyance now but um but you know to if if if i could say another thing about about immigration and the economy, there is a kind of a longer term, term,

Speaker 4 there is a kind of a longer term

Speaker 4 process sort of working itself out

Speaker 2 as

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 I think people are right. I mean, I think those economists who say that

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Like the great proliferation of

Speaker 4 really nice restaurants. The idea that

Speaker 4 when this experiment in mass immigration in a nearly open border, you know, with Mexico began

Speaker 4 in the 1970s, there weren't a dozen sushi restaurants in Pittsburgh. You know, I mean, people didn't there were no sushi Pittsburgh

Speaker 2 restaurants in Pittsburgh.

Speaker 4 This stuff, we tend to think that

Speaker 4 these amenities have developed because of our

Speaker 4 improving taste, that we're just so much more discerning than our parents were. But the difference, I think, is this source of

Speaker 2 just

Speaker 4 plentiful, bountiful, really cheap labor for people who can

Speaker 4 work in back kitchens and things like that.

Speaker 2 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 had a criminal record.

Speaker 2 Everyone was white.

Speaker 4 That's interesting. But so when you when you when you tighten up that labor market and suddenly you have to pay your dishwasher a dollar more, two dollars more, three dollars more,

Speaker 4 the the the 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.

Speaker 4 They'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, I'm going to, and then the restaurant is going to close.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 It's going to have, you know, things are going to, there's going to be a lot more sameness.

Speaker 2 That's the, that's what the the world of a, of a, of a,

Speaker 4 of a low immigration, less free market,

Speaker 4 where there's less of a free market in labor. That's what a society like that looks like.

Speaker 2 The

Speaker 4 the working class gets richer. They, they move towards the middle.
Everyone gravitates towards the middle class, right?

Speaker 4 And institutions, economic institutions, begin to serve the middle class. That is, you have a

Speaker 4 a shrinking of gourmet restaurants

Speaker 4 and a concentration of restaurants in the

Speaker 4 middle of the road category.

Speaker 2 So the middle class was the dominant,

Speaker 2 you know, was the dominant

Speaker 2 portion of the country, the majority middle class country up until I think 2015.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 did that change? And then the middle class is no longer the majority.

Speaker 2 Is that because of immigration?

Speaker 4 It has a lot to do with immigration. Yes, globalization and immigration.
And

Speaker 4 I mean, I think people tend not to mention

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 2 Why is it the most important? I mean, it has affected the most changes?

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 4 And basically, whenever you measure it, it's tough to get an effect on the economy that's more than like 1%.

Speaker 4 It's so trivial.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 4 And 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 You see what I mean? I do. So it becomes a transfer from

Speaker 4 the working class.

Speaker 2 So it doesn't necessarily,

Speaker 2 I think what you're saying is it doesn't necessarily expand your economy, but it just makes the rich richer.

Speaker 4 I think so.

Speaker 2 So that would explain why rich people,

Speaker 2 these are broad strokes, but in general, hate any conversation about immigration, immediately 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.

Speaker 2 There may be other reasons too, but that seems like a big reason.

Speaker 4 Yes, those are broad strokes, but I think they're roughly accurate. There's a

Speaker 4 you know, I, I, I,

Speaker 4 there's a French sociologist named Christophe Guilouy, who's written books about how this has worked in France, and his thinking has really clarified mine on this.

Speaker 4 But, you know, you basically in France, you have 20 cities that are like nodes of the global economy. And they like, you know, like in

Speaker 4 Toulouse, you have Airbus and where they're, you know, where there are engineers and executives at Airbus, they have, you know, you know, African gardeners and, and, and there are nannies, and there are all sorts of people there.

Speaker 4 It's a global economy niche. When you get out into the countryside, none of that stuff touches anything.

Speaker 4 It's basically people, the economy consists of like returning, you know, cans to the, you know, to the grocery store.

Speaker 4 This explains why, you know, if you live in a place like Washington, D.C.

Speaker 4 or Berkeley, California, and, and, and, or Boston, people are like sincerely puzzled. They say, like, how did Trump win?

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 You know, my mother didn't vote for him. My nanny, you know, you know, in, you know, from Jamaica, didn't, you know, who's not naturalized and can vote, she didn't vote for him.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 2 So, when you give up open borders, you're really giving up

Speaker 2 like a whole way of life.

Speaker 4 You give up the solidarity between classes in your country.

Speaker 2 What does that mean? I don't know.

Speaker 4 As soon as I said it, I realized that you could look at it in a separate, in a different way. I mean,

Speaker 4 you give up a dynamic that brings the classes close together, you know, which is that

Speaker 4 the ability of

Speaker 4 working class people to withhold their labor for more money. You know what I mean?

Speaker 2 You undercut that.

Speaker 4 They become,

Speaker 4 it's why trade unions, when they were actual industrial unions and not arms of the Democratic Party, you know,

Speaker 4 were, you know, they equated immigrant labor with scab labor that was

Speaker 2 behind the immigration restrictions. Yes.
So the nice

Speaker 2 thing.

Speaker 4 So you give up that dynamic, you know.

Speaker 4 But it's very tempting, you know, it's there are other ways to look at it, but yeah, I think that's basically that's basically the best way to look at it.

Speaker 2 Will China ever decide

Speaker 2 as its economy matures and it and cools inevitably that it needs mass immigration into China?

Speaker 4 You know,

Speaker 4 I don't know

Speaker 4 much about China. I know I know a little more about Japanese.
You know,

Speaker 4 China has had a tremendous amount of internal labor migration, which

Speaker 4 is just about to come to the end of.

Speaker 4 And so its labor costs are going to rise.

Speaker 4 I don't know how it's going to react. It's very interesting that Japan has chosen,

Speaker 4 you know, a tightening economy over a diversifying society. That is, they've they've kept out immigrant labor for the most part.

Speaker 4 And where they've admitted it, they've tended to do it on a temporary basis. You know, you get a few Filipino nannies and they send them home at the end of

Speaker 4 their term.

Speaker 2 The only mass migration they've had in the last hundred years has been from Korea,

Speaker 2 which they controlled until 1945. And then the Koreans who stayed kind of pretend they're Japanese.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 This is one of the things I find quite mysterious. But if you look at the pressure that the United States, this is one of the things that I think that USAID did.

Speaker 4 I mean, it's sort of an ideological arm of the country. But if you look at not just programs,

Speaker 4 but people in the United States, diplomatic or in the State Department, were always sort of like browbeating

Speaker 4 Victor Orban in Europe, for instance,

Speaker 4 for not being more welcoming of immigrants.

Speaker 4 So I think we're at the point now where we're in a moment of

Speaker 4 transition, but

Speaker 4 Japan is

Speaker 4 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 the, it's debt to the, so it's, it should be, it should be workable.

Speaker 4 But there's still a Japan. And, you know, as we've discussed,

Speaker 4 Japan decided that it valued its

Speaker 4 cultural continuity more than European

Speaker 4 countries did. And so Japan, if you go there, you'll discover is still,

Speaker 4 I think, the Japan that people who went there 20 or 30 years ago remember it as.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 Tokyo is. And even though it's bigger, even more crowded.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And I just wonder, like, is that

Speaker 2 like, that just, that just seems like the greatest win to me?

Speaker 4 Well, I, well, they, they think so because

Speaker 4 they continue to keep this policy and there's not a lot of

Speaker 4 there's not a lot of agitation for

Speaker 4 changing it, you know, but I don't, I don't, I don't know. It's been a few years since I've been there.

Speaker 2 Last question. Are you hopeful about the United States?

Speaker 4 Yeah, you know, but I'm not sure that's saying much.

Speaker 4 I tend to want to be hopeful.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 the United States has some

Speaker 4 tremendous strengths. You know, it's got

Speaker 4 the United States has something has happened since the, I'm using Europe, which I think is the best, you know,

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 roughly the time of the

Speaker 4 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,

Speaker 4 20 or 25% from European standards of living. So it's richer.

Speaker 4 It seems to be in a period of democratic ebullition. I mean, that is

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 do the right thing.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 the public is kind of vigilant and

Speaker 4 it is reforming the country. And

Speaker 4 we've reformed before. So

Speaker 4 I'm relatively optimistic.

Speaker 2 I am too.

Speaker 2 And you make me feel optimistic. Christopher Caldwell, thank you very much.

Speaker 4 Thank you, Tucker.

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