Being unraveled by a new class war. Good evening and welcome to the policy center. I am john walters chief operating officer and id like to welcome our audience here at the pennsylvania headquarters avenue and or cspan audience to the firstever podcast taping that is both live and marks the premiere of the second reason of the realignment posted by hudson media. We are proud of the realignment that the launch last year and i recommend especially for those of you that havent been following it to take a look at the episode from last year particularly the conversation with secretary of state mike pompeo, mike gallagher, mike durand and others. Its an Excellent Program partly because of the two people that put it together and their ability to bring out topics and move the argument along so we couldnt be more proud of the work theyve done and we want to thank them for that and we are happy to launch this Years Program with michael lind to as many of you know is a prolific writer of more than a dozen books and cofounder of the new America Foundation with the distinguished fellow strategy Walter Russell mead. The professor at the lyndon b. Johnson school of Public Affairs at the university of texas and imported for tonights conversation, hes the author of the new class war, saving democracy from the managerial elite you can purchase it was just brought in today so we are here at the launch. Congratulations on that ther ths a direct line between the work of michael has done and been pursuing since the 90s. Maybe best exemplified by this book the next American Revolution avenue nationalism and the fourth American Revolution. The next american nation for nationalism in the fourth American Revolution. Whether you agree with the interpretation of western politics since world war ii, this work demonstrates an effort to understand the causes and solutions to the seemingly neverending cycle of clashes and shifting coalitions which is exactly what the realignment of podcast seeks to export. Also joining us is jb fans debate speedy 11 author of the book hillbiliology. He recently cofounded Venture Capital firm working to solve significant challenges and also a visiting fellow at aei. Ive only started on his book. If you havent, you should. Its an important discussion of a part of america that maybe a roomful of people in washington, d. C. And we are pleased to start from that discussion and take on that issue with his help. We will take questions later in the program and email those to events hudson. Org. If you have questions we will get to those afterwards. To reiterate. I will speak for you and if not. First question defined terms what is the cost for. It is a conflict among it is your parentage associated with a particular structure of occupations but if you look at what i argue is that fundamental transatlantic society. You are much more likely to get a diploma. I argue that in europe as well as the United States i think both sides of the atlantic are similar enough now. As europe has become more multiethnic as the United States has become more secular. Therethere is a divide socialld politically but more or less two thirds which doesnt have a degree. Do you agree on that take us to interpret what youre saying it seems what youre suggesting is the class status is denoted by education in terms of explaining the way that society works. Yes and no. The average american with a bachelors degree has an income of about 60,000 a year. The average High School Graduate is no Higher Education is about 37,000 so there is a correlation, but unlike in the past where the class status was based on ownership of property or if you are a landlord and own land or in ebenezer scrooge and you are the owner or operator of a business that belief in the western world today largely the wealth and power and status tends to come from the position of the large bureaucratic organizations that can be an corporationincorporation, law fm profit, it can be the military and access to those influential positions is largely determined by education. I think one of the common stats is why is that education is the great denoted of class. We were speaking this morning and a plumber could make money and be rich and still work in class and based on your own experience, how do you see that in American Society . I largely agree with mike and thank you both for doing this. Next time you have me on a podcast tellme [inaudible] i think that what is true i dont know that by 100 i 100 b agreed it seems to be true about that account is that if you go to a suburban Cincinnati Ohio did you go to a Plumbing Firm and the guy that owns the firm there is something more similar about that group of people and their spouses and their children then there is between the supply firm and a person who is a majority or a large shareholder of google for example, so i do think that theres something about the way in which Educational Status confers but also reinforces and signifies the class status. Its important in our society and of course most people do not buy the gross majority of people cannot earn their living off of the Capital Appreciation and so there is a weird way in which we might call the professional managerial class is one of internally coherent even though we might not have the sort of person at the 91st percentile of the income scale isnt going to have the same income as the 99 . To tie a bow on the managerial class its like a slur who are these people in particular in the large bureaucratic organizations is that the corporate elite, government, or the transatlantic what is it that defines them as a class. Dont left has the professional managerial class to a small subsection indices tend to be people in the professions with doctors more so in the past and the present professors and podcast hosts. This kind of progressive theory is theres the working class cant professional managerial class and the professors and those are the capitalists. I follow the trotsky early conservative movement of the 1940s who wrote the book the managerial revolution who argued that the independent Owner Operator who was the capitalists also ran the business had been superseded already by the 1920s into the u. S. And europe by corporate managers but also included in the managerial class government officials, career civil servants, academics and in a passage that few people note in the managerial revolution in 1940, he said the career military, the uniform military which would become more and more important over time before the deep state at which he was kind of part of because he worked for the cia o lost in the decade. So i have a broader definition of it and a lot of people do but again, its if you contrast it with the working class, the working class is changing its nature because of the changing composition of jobs. Part of it through the loss of manufacturing and outsourcing but also the productivity growth in manufacturing has shed a lot of jobs if you look at the United States according to the bureau of labor statistics, almost all of the new jobs are created in three sectors, it is the hospitality retail and healthcare. According to the u. S. Government of all of the top ten jobs that are being created on the registered nurses require education beyond a High School Diploma so the story that we are told at volvos and aspen and not here of course the jobs of the future require advanced education. Actually, they dont. Americans and their counterparts are underpaid and my argument in the class war is they are underpaid because they lack Bargaining Power of the kind they possess 20, 30, 40 or 50 years ago. Before we move on, what hasnbut hasntmoved on as the. Of the war suggests that there is a group of people not only looking down upon the working class but actively trying to harm them to benefit themselves. Im curious what your take is on that also. The book is not a Conspiracy Theory. I dont think there is some secret washington or new york or San Francisco where the cavity of the class gets together. Its just when the power is unevenly distributed among the social groups and individuals pursue their own interests, the results even though it is not in coordination is going to look as though the class is doing it when its just the result of the individual actions. If you look at the Public Policy from the 1990s to the present globalization, one of the things that amazes me as a student of politics all my life is the unwillingness of people to acknowledge that there are tradeoffs with trade, immigration, investment. Free trade benefits everybody. Large scale, low scale immigration benefits everybody, and you can think this is totally unrealistic there are winners and losers but its because thats part of the war. The policy that benefits the winners is the only one that is definitive, the only one you hear them it becomes taboo to discuss the views of the losers, that is the kind of war. What are the institutions in the recent past that have equal Bargaining Power, so classic story, labor union, the union participation its been decimated as premier of the authorizatioglobalization. Social fabric also ensures the direction of the culture. Its fallen off the cliff since and third is family in which the working class children grow up in stable, healthy, happy homes. The professional class formation and stability is maintained more or less a level with a slight decline of where it was in the 50s through the 60s. It were to be a meaningful state that they lived in and either disappear or become substantially weakened in the past few years its been a class or its been pretty clear whos losing. In the economic anxiety which is a rightwing talking point for the resentment that you counter that in a recent piece in the journal citing they are hit hardest where they are most likely to support donald trump and Bernie Sanders and so if haf that were the case, then why would they be supporting somebody like Bernie Sanders and i want to get you to talk specifically about the economic anxiety peace being demonized. There are three narratives about this populist uprising that has produced trump in the u. S. And france and so on. One is a spontaneous abruption that maybe was manipulated by Vladimir Putin and he triggered this in the u. S. And the uk and france and so on. More serious is the story that its about money. Its about rising inequality and progressives in particular like to have a graph that goes down from the 1920s and then it goes up again. Then you have the aftertax redistribution and give them checks and they will be happy. The story that i tell is about power and its independent of money. Its powered the ability to influence your life and your society and it exists outside of the narrow governmental realm and libertarians get upset with me for this point that there is economic power in the marketplace. You do not hav have equal to the Bargaining Power between most employers and wisdom for years. There is cultural power in the media. You cant just count your own movie studio particularly for americans, the basis was the republican liberty that you could trust concentrated power of any kind economic. They didnt have media back then were political power and i think weve kind of lost us with this narrative but its all about money and if we centralize power but they give you a 500 tax credit or a 200,000 tax credit every year then you should be happy. I am not a fan of the view of economic anxiety. I think it is much more complicated and difficult than that. Its not a decent wage or enough money to afford the things you need. Thats part of it is also looking outside your door and seeing a Community Thriving years ago and now every store is closed or finding out yet again one of your kids for insight and an Opioid Epidemic. Thats still very much about the feeling of losing agency and losing power over your own life. The point id make about this and i will make it again you have to understand the purpose of the narrative they were motivated by racism and anxiety. We know two things very substantially about the trump vote. One is that it was really related to the decline of manufacturing jobs which one of the folks have written about. We also know that it was heavily related and tied to what the folks have called despair and you also see a significant shift from romney to trump. If you are focused on the fact that all these people are racist if you are not concerned about the fact that a member of the elite actually caused the Opioid Epidemic and pharmaceuticals, flooded the communities of drugs, killed a lot of people and if we are not talking about that if we are talking about the trump voters racism then we are participating in what they believe have already been winning for the past few decades. How do we balance the cultural issue because things that critics are doing is a true fact that the country is changing. Those places experiencing the anxiety how do we handle that . The legitimate part of the critique is the idea that it was a big cultural shift going on and it is unclear that the american right right now is having a good job of handling that. I think part of it is that it has to be managed in a particular way. Im married to a firstgeneration immigrant and never felt we didnt belong to part of the same community because that is important. You want people who feel like they are assimilating with newcomers and you want people that have been here assimilating as well. I think that the problems we talk about in economic terms it is an importanits an importante story but unless you are sort of thinking about other metrics of assimilation and trying to manage and control but in a way that is good for the overall population of the country you can sort of and claim these tensions that is true across history and society there is no good example of a society that has absorbed a large number of outsiders very quickly and easily. You can blame that on racialism if you want to but its a fact of life and if this is what youre going to call it you have to deal with it and try to tap it down, and i think sort of suppress it in a certain way. We start trying to actually build a unified nation out of the multiracial democracy that we have com, and i like that. I think it brings a lot of benefit, but i also think that it brings some challenges to if you are not smart about the challenges you can cause a strike which is what we have seen in america and much worse than europe its worse than the United States. 100 years ago in 1920, there was a deep political and social divide between the old stock angloamerican protestants and immigrant descent with irish americans and the germans. In the redistricting because of the battle between the socalled ethnics had a prohibition between the catholics and protestants the european diaspora had collapsed in the big cities in the north or were broken very quickly but the 1970s the average White American was partly of british and partly of non british descent so my question is we hear about the nonwhite majority but that is counting every new descendent of someone who has a Nonhispanic White for the next 200 years no matter what their other ancestry is. At the university of austin theyve looked at the assimilation of marriage and they lose spanish as the primary language and marry outside of their group but its the same as the irish americans and german americans did a century ago so i would go further i think the supposed racial polarization of politics is quite exaggerated. If you look at every group except for africanamericans but the kind of 9010 pattern the other groups are less polarized including Asian Americans and hispanic americans and Nonhispanic Whites that are very evenly divided. That is Hillary Clinton and donald trump so is our polarized in that sense. Latinos depending on state politics in my home state of texas about 40 went for Governor Abbott 29 voted for donald trump. Thats an important part of the story. One of the criticisms of populism and people who advocate for the populist politics you are shouting at the system and you dont advocate for anything. You dont want to you just want to tear everything down. You are somewhat sympathetic to that view so tell us about why you think it is populists themselves are not actually good at governance between the politics of the wellestablished politics and occasional outsider prisons protest thats a terrible situation to be in. If the politics of the American South between the reconstruction youve heard of the southern demagogue when the population is disconnected from everything and excluded from politics and cultural authority, you are going to give the rice to represent and so i think that this is dangerous. The demagogues, and if you look at the southern example, if you look at latin america, in the north you find this in the northeast. Has anyone heard of mayor curley from boston, they were going against the mayflower protestant power structure. In the south it was representing the establishment they almost always fail because the odds are stacked against the outsiders. It is a career suicide. When they do succeed it is through a dubious combination of criminality because they have to be financed somehow. In my own native texas we had populists governors who succeeded each other in the 1920s and they did some good things for the farmers that were frozen out. Huey long in louisiana could get any money for his populist insurgency so he went into business with Frank Costello of the chicago mafia and brought in slot machines so the patronage as a governor with the money that was also called. Every two weeks a certain portion of every employee is put into a box its like the Atomic Nuclear football. I think at best it is introducing new theme is that you have to have some kind of a reconstruction program. How do you navigate the professionalism needed to enact populist reforms and what do you think of what he proposes later on from an actual settlement . To make them a little bit less confrontational compromising. I think that the policies are in some ways out there and most of the details of what the modern populist or class compromise would look like when its not there we have to figure that stuff out i would worry about the political economy part of the spec is t as to the question about navigating if we were to sort of collect populist people who can engage with the quantitative paper may be 40 of them are on the stage right now. They are not really suited to this particular moment. I worry about the fact we dont actually have enough of the think tank or the administrators are peoplor people working in te government. Theres a lot thats missing and Institution Building that needs to be done. I think that to build on those things you first have to sketch out a general way of thinking about how to settle these issues and then hopefully start to build the institutions out from there. You have economic power, cultural power and political power. You have censorship organizations that check hollywood and produce stagnation we throw up our hands saying i guess tom cruise is going to be antijapan now. This is another matter that is hard for me to recognize what we have as a local corrupt political strongman back home in the state legislatures. They are better capable why did that. Fullstop this quote fall apart . Connected there were different reason for these brown. Let me preface by saying the working class exercised its power by veto power. It didnt have the resources or expertise to come up with its own plans it forces management to reconsider. The legion of decency go to hollywood producers to run hollywood scripts passed them in advance. They can say no to a candidate. We didnt have the self financed candidates. The local political bosses were important because this is some one you could go to see in your neighborhood if you have a problem. With Bobby Kennedy giving suitcases to the boss of the bronx and we had the equipment in the south and courthouse said they only thing worse than having these local power party brokers is not having them because then they all vanish than the party becomes a labeled billionaires like toms steyer and michael bloomberg. Before coming here i went to the website of the Democratic Party out of curiosity and my grandmother grew up on a farm in Central Texas and her africanamerican friend after the civil rights revolution very similar background they were part of the precinct machinery and all that so i went to the Democratic Party to see how i could join. Unless you are a donor, a pollster or a candidate. In the 21st century class settlement whethecentury classss politically, economically or culturally. On top of that but i would like you to see if there is no victory in this war is about settlement. To preface that in the new class war it is the greatest engine of Economic Development in history so you do not want the employer class to run amok that you dont want the working class to be so powerful it stifles growth. We need the functional equivalent of some of these membership organizations and in the new class war i call them the war that is the political entity of some kind. I use the term to encompass all kinds of alternative labor organizations at the kind jd was talking about so these things would not look like the unions into churches and political machines in 1950 but they would serve some of the same purpose mainly in pulling the numbers of workingclass people. All you have is your numbers. One thing i would like to get to you before you launched your idea is what type of mental break does this require and the ideology that has been on the right for decades and considered as viable solution to help the working class. I think that first of all it requires us to imagine a world in which effective government is actually better than no government weve undergone a weird transformation in the last 30 years into the publications being researched by them when they made a leap from a private sectors in gentoo do things to the Public Sector is always the wrong way to do things and that is a pretty terrible way to think about the world when you are engaged in politics and Public Policies surrendering before you even start the conversation. So, my answer on the class settlement, i dont know that i have a good answer i would say that it probably looks Something Like what mike just said it looks like you had reinvigorated Community Institutions of the working class level and a rise in participation. It can abdicate for the membership. I worry tha that we are incapabf solving the problems its not that we have reached this research is all things but they undergo ten to 15 year period of managed decline. I do think there is a way in which the politics are so fundamentally broken. I dont even know what Congress Actually does. That really worries me and i dont know what the answer is out of the conundrum but if there is an answer that we are willing to push for we should be paying attention to this. Reading the newspape newspapn they the british elite had a battle with the french is somewhere in the so he can to the professor and said britain is ruined into the professor said young man, theres a great deal of ruin in the country. [laughter] i have some Great Questions here and i think one of the names was actually donald trump and its interesting on this podcast the political realignment start date for start how often do you dont end up talking about it and i think that this is one of the central questions ive seen about it in this administration. His trump still at the forefront of the alignment or has he does with its more like a pre trump republican prioritizing tax cuts and calling for immigration and Business Needs and im assuming high skilled workers is what they meant here. How do you think in the context of the new class war . From the beginning i thought that he had less to do with mussolini and hitler bandwidth Arnold Schwarzenegger and his friend Jesse Ventura tried to take over the reform party and when you get these celebrity outsider president s, the two choices. One is if they run nominally as the leader of one of the two parties in the United States, they can either govern once they are elected or they can try to triangulate between the two. Before trump became a republican, evidently he was a democrat or independent, but that was the fundamental strategic decision he made i think with the tax cut and a lot of things with one exception. The exception is foreignpolicy where the president is far more discretion you are much more dependent in your own party in congress and the fair i think that he has made a difference george w. Bush left the country with two ongoing wars in afghanistan and iraq and obama was elected because he was going to end the war so he added more in this area, libya and yemen. To date despite the iran thing, we get a sixth or and he seems to favor this as an alternative to deeper engagement. Kind of postponing it. So i think on the domestic policy but im going to push my priority is in foreignpolicy and trade. This is what we have been talking about this evening the apparatus of the republican domestic policy isnt heritage in 1981 it was the reagan revolution and a group of people that are largely blindsided and when they got the opportunity to govern they went back to the old playbook its how things have gone. The there is a way they havent caught up to the politics and i would add it to service remarkable credit for shifting the national conversation. Its tough to overstate how different the elite consensus was in 2014 even. China is a significant problem both economically and in the National Security sent into the credit for changing that narrative goes largely to the 2016 election and donald trump. Thats right even on the democratic stage even one candidate said he would take away and one said they were going to vote for the trade de deal. This is an interesting one. Labor wants to have a sellers market for a buyers market. It tends to be far more of the strict immigration policy and the employer delete. We have seen a shift but even if you dont do anything else is tight labor markets it is paid vacations and its baby early retirement and things like that, anything that makes employers compete. If i was going to get a second answer is a substantial increase and i do think that is the working class we have to start productivity the past 20 or so years. Its incorporating the majority of the democracy not just a similar attempt making marginal adjustments to ensure that it remains viable and if w a viablo redistribute power and money with it off making the current winners losers and corrupt losers winners and not actually correct anything. I disagree with that in having gone through the war they had a vision at least for a while capital and labor as partners in a common project of regional reconstruction that were battling to the death obviously that was the vision i think we can go back to that. People that benefit from this in the long run are the privileged if they can preserve the privileged by making strategic concessions to the working cla class. The financier father of kennedy he was asked why he supported Franklin Roosevelt and the new deal. If you look at the post war postdepression that engaged the corporatism the uk and the United States are at the top of the listing if you look at the society that refused to engage in that compromise you include russia, italy and germany so we know how it worked for those guys at its best in general to try to reform the sys a best you can as opposed to assume one group is going to triumph because they typically dont its not good for everybody. Computers, automation, etc. Talk about the cumulative impact of the information revolution on the class war as yo described in losing power and influence. There is a radical difference in how the media argues that the social classes. Studies show people on twitter are overwhelmingly collegeeducated people. This is more the first group and from radio because they are in their cars and in their jobs. I wouldnt exaggerate the role of that very much because first with television and then the internet and it can be mesmerizing devised by the media. This is the basis of the whole russian Conspiracy Theory it seems they are not voting for hillary and this other group voting for trump. They thought that archie was the hero and the whole point of the show was to become of the collegeeducated the people can vote for the media. They have mentalities and cultures of their own. When i go to a restaurant with my family and i see half of the tables kids and parents staring at their device is not speaking to each other and then you realize fundamentally the modern it Business Model is largely built on what others have called information arbitrage. Every second you stare at the device as opposed to communicating with your family and the dollar of revenue they make hi them and they are good t making devices that make you stare at boosting is as long as possible. And i think that there is something very disturbing about the way it captures our attention and makes us less productive and ive talked to a lot of entrepreneurs who are really worried about the effect it has on productivity and the workforce and people are working eight or nine hours, but maybe only working four or five hours because they are so absorbed in their devices. And it depends if the education is useful. And if those are overeducated and those that are those that dont require anything of a high school education. It is worse for society to have a sense of disconnect and they are perfectly respectable workingclass jobs possess that what they expected from the degree or the status that they expected. So of that progressivism and professionals make more money we will make everyone a professional. But if you do that for everyone now its like a High School Diploma or the ged. So then you remember the aristocrat who had no money. I am pretty skeptical. And those that they were primarily signaling in the law school has an average class side of 100 to tell the donors and the people who are alumni and it such a great education but that deflates the value exclusiveness of the degree dealing with modern education is signaling and then. [laughter] on that note. [applause] [inaudible conversations] the greatest achievers these are just 44 that we looked at of the first africanamerican president they did something pioneering as the quiet innovators. Every morning the Washington Post ve my doorstep seems like a fresh argument of secession percolate grits with contempt on the other side. I think what i is a tolerance and understanding of people in the small towns around america in the rural areas, people are walking on a tight rope. One miss and they fall per car there is no safety net. It has been vastly overdone with personal responsibility for those who fall off the tight rope for those catastrophes that follow. s thank you for coming to politics and prose and for a full list go to our website or pick up our event calendar. Please turn off your cell iphones and its time for q a. Please speak clearly into the microphone