Sponsored by wells fargo. Tv critic for National Public radio, and im here with a couple of very esteemed authors, Christopher Caldwell, an american journalist, former Senior Editor for the Weekly Standard and author of the age of entitlement, america since the 60s. Hes joining from washington, d. C. We have historian, journalist, wall street journal columnist and author of the people no of the war on populism and democracy joining us from kansas city. I am in st. Petersburg florida. We are going to make this happen through the magic of video chat. So thank you for coming. I appreciate it. It seems your books in different ways are describing how we have landed in this crazy political time that we are in right now where we are understanding how the movements and politics. What i would like each of you to do is give a thumbnail synopsis of durable and what it might say about whether or how america sort of landed on the road to populism. What do you think . Its more like the railroad for populism. Im joining from kansas city about 20 miles from where it was invented. It was a pretty straightforward party that corresponded to the labour party in england and australia and it was a leftwing group that came together, challenged the locals then as it is today. The populists had a brief movement about five years nationally speaking, challenged the Economic System of the country and after 1896, which i hope we will talk about at some point there was a certain populist tradition like the 1930s with the new deal and you see that in the 1960s there are the people that have hated and as i mentioned it was welcomed into the world with a campaign of sort of upperclass hysteria where the academics and societies came together to denounce the movement as an uprising. It was class war. You see this critique of populism in those days always from the right and from the financial establishment in the e beginning of the 1950s there was a critique of populism got adopted by what we would call the centerleft and that is where it remains to this day it was a stereotype invented in the 1890s to suppress the leftwing populist movement. Tell us a little bit about your book and how it may relate to this theme of the road to populism . My book is the history of the United States from the kennedy assassination in 1963 to the trump elections in 2016. I think i share tom franks definition. It wasnt really captured very well by the spectrum of left versus right. Its the kind of Democracy Movement that arises in a very well developed and well articulated political system. It tends to have been in advanced political systems where youve put up a high degree of trust and complexity which leads people to interest a lot of the business to judges and regulators and experts of different kinds for the run on the basis of the kind of insight information and distrust tends to grow. Populists tend to have the same solution which is to return the authority to the ballot box and take it away from the boards and committees and obviously i would say we are living a version of this populism right now. The left is ms. Identifying populism and when it looks at trump in america for example, it should be called Something Else like authoritarian conservatism or Something Like that. So, lets just say you are right about that. Is it a larger issue that we have to grapple with whatever this is that seems to be winning . I have been writing about this kind of rebirth of the right for many years. Whats the matter with kansas was way back then. You are talking about in general working class people specifically with some of the te Traditional Party of the working class and instead they moved over to conservatism and the idea that i made they are signing up for this party that has done this matter of economic harm that just gets worse and worse every year but the question is why its happening and one of the reasons i mentioned and elaborated in the book this is as much due to the vision presented as its also due to the betrayal by the Democratic Party. The traditional champion of the working class theres a complete turn away from the populist tradition in the 60s into the 70s. Theyve become the party that tells us the experts are always right there is an affinity amog the elites. A. I would imagine some democrats would say they push for the extension of Voting Rights to the end of the voter suppression. They are pressing for greater insurance and medical care. How is that a reflection of supporting the elites . Now i think we get into an area that has a certain overlap with my book. When you talk about Voting Rights and that sort of thing, the civil rights legislation which is a major theme that runs through my book did extend democracy, but it also extended to ththe oversight of the federl government over americas democratic life and it removed particularly as time went on more and more things from democratic consideration. So, when things become right they become things you cant vote on and i think from the point of the initial consensus around civil rights, it was used for more and more things, things like guaranteeing bilingual education or admitting women to mens clubs. The different jobs than the original job defending segregation in the south. And over time i think people felt more and more was removed. If you look at the latest example of this just a few weeks ago there is a set of rules about how to deal with people in the workplace but its really no business of americans to decide. Its a kind of natural thing for someone who objects to that to say i want this back at the ballot box and taken out of the courtroom. Thats the populist aspect. Whats nice if to me about what you just said, if i believe that children should be able to have relationships with adults and there is a law that says you cant do that, theoretically im being prevented from doing something attached to personal liberty, but society has decided the harm is greater than my freedom to do what i want. What you are talking about and society always does, that your freedom to discriminate against homosexuals is outweighed by the need to allow people to have the freedom to work at jobs they are qualified to work at. It is what society does. The differences in the way that it does it. We have laws against adults having relationships with children in this country. Theyve been voted by legislatures. They are not the product of a degredecree so they do reflect whatever the consensus of the public happens to be at the time. Its the means by which the law is brought about rather than the act of the lawmaking itself. Some of them have been voted. Prohibiting discrimination against have been voted into law. I want to give tom the chance to talk. Im sorry i cut you off. You mentioned two different things, Voting Rights and obamacare. The franchise for everyone. I have a chapter about Martin Luther king talking about populism and the Civil Rights Movement and things like john lewis that added the flavor to them. Of the part of most americans dont know is how blacks were disenfranchised the first time. Its a fascinating story and it happened in a lot of states in the south as a reaction to populism because it tried in the 1890s to reach out to black farmers and say your classes the same as these white farmers and if we rise up in this aristocracy we can do something good for ourselves and so they rolled out the White Supremacy campaign and they succeeded after populism was down the disenfranchised and a huge parf the population. Anybody that is true to the populist heritage. But obamacare is a different field. That is rather than having a universal Healthcare System like they do with canada, they sat down with entrance lobbyists and worked out a deal to give people a semblance of universal healthcare and weve had it now for a number of years. It was denied to ensure the profits of the insurance industry. Im sorry that is until you heal the national Healthcare System. Its completely backwards but it is affinity among the elites. A. I think some democrats would say that its what was possible. My response would be to say that this is a man that came into office and i was a huge supporter. I believed in him. He came in with a kind of unprecedented support. He had this whole country at his back and he didnt use his power and mandate in a way that i think he could have had all sorts of things if he pushed for it. He was poorly advised. He was fairly new to washington and i think by the end of his time in office he understood. Republicans were good at obstruction. His own advisors. He outsourced to a senator from south dakota. It was a disaster from start to finish. It wasnt what was possible. He could have done any number of things. He had an extraordinary mandate at that moment. It was a tragedy that happened in my opinion. A. I dont want to get into a conversation like that because i feel like the fact he took office when the economy was falling apart and job number one was to get the economy back on the rails and also try to get obamacare passed before they lost the control of congress and there were democrats in vulnerable constituencies that wouldnt let them advance fillable healthcare policies they wanted to. That is absolutely right but to sell themselves as workingclass heroes and explicitly remember all of these republican appeals going back to nixon are about social class. Thats at the same moment of the Democratic Party was moving away when the democrats decided to wait and kids on the campuses with that class and at the very moment republicans saw their opportunity, clever players as we all know and they saw the opportunity and they stepped right in with appeals based on social class. Begins with nixon with pat buchanan and the culture wars and the call described as a populist reagan was constantly described as a populist in the early days of his presidency. He was a late to hang around with people with calluses on their hands and then as president the epic tale of deregulation do unionization and the tax cuts. He hopes to crush manufacturing and do you organize labor in america but he is a stunning way of speaking and hanging out with people with a callous on their hand. There you go. But are you faulting the left for trying to describe that . Guest thats a fair description. When people say right wing populism that is what they mean . Guest not trying to be a policeman about the word populism. My wife said that she is the original attachment she said the word is gone. Let it go. You cannot control it. She is right. That is true i cant in the course of my studies i came across this aspect which is much more interesting which is the notion of anti populism. Is not just that the word has been flipped. It has. Who did it . Why did they do that . Thats an interesting story. I disagree it has been flipped if you look at populism in the context of expertise were by expertise a educated ruling class who are quite ingenious in terms of thinking, culture, and everything there are people who understand the infectiousness model from the cdc understand in a way the average voter does not and they come up with a set of rules that have to be good to the public. To go against those rules, in the eyes of the ruling class, it goes against logic and common sense. A populist becomes a lunatic is a very natural way for a ruling class in the expertise based stage look at the people who disagree with it. You saw that or elements of that in the anti roosevelt forces in the thirties for strongly in the upper reaches of the Democratic Party today. Guest another way to describe what you described is a government where the elected people, regardless of their elite status have a cadre of experts to help them around the country and then when the pandemic happens they listened and the democrats would say they do. Guest when he says that is true there is a lot of contempt for the lower orders in the political tradition. The authorities was an extraordinary time so was the 1890 and the americans Liberty League and the centerleft. But the original populist do not dislike expertise they understood the movement as a university educating farmers having giant gatherings to bring in speakers from all over the country to educate the farmers about the gold standard. The educated elite of america the president of ivy leagues hated and despised populism and sought as an uprising of the lower order because that threat and orthodoxy that is the key concept. It into the gold standard. That was the key to upholding the entire economy at the time also it has to help out farmers so the leading American Academic stay in a sociologist at yale said are you kidding me cracks do you know the government owns the people . Zero. We are you absolutely nothing. So it was the same conflict now very similar to that fifties an extremely interesting twist of the powerpoint how the word populist got flipped academics calling themselves the consensus intellectuals and the leading historian of his day Richard Hofstetter wrote a book called the age of reform in 1955 massively influential described as the most and what influential work of history ever published he decided he was frightened by fascism and mccarthyism that was ongoing at the time and he just decided almost out of thin air the root of this was to be found in populism of the former movement and he tried to prove that. He cherry picked evidence and basically used the exact same stereotype that chris described that opponent said in the 1890 s that it was a lower order who does nothing and in the grip of Mental Illness and that they were anti semites as well. Some of them were and some of our racist but hofstetter said this was the main frame in American Life which is a preposterous accusation and massively was just from the very years after his book appeared in his entire take on populism was demolished by other historians in a very short amount of time they were entire books refuting single chapters of his work at populism. I could go into that in detail you dont want to hear it. When he did this it wasnt just a work of history but a manifesto for his generation of intellectuals the 19 fifties the great moment the rise of the professional class of the american hierarchy now people are running great corporations phds with the departments in washington. Scientist are running the pentagon the University System is expanding dramatically it is a moment of triumph the professional managerial class and his argument was you dont want mass movements of reform like populist its dangerous when working part class people get together they dont get anywhere or do anything same with the Labor Movement and dont achieve anything but a bunch of people like me and my friends, ivy league, phd and mba and is in charge s it around the mahogany table we come to decisions and consensus thats how you get reform and manage the economy that should be the model going forward. He said looking to describe what he and his generation were displacing them out what is populism in the redefinition totally caught on even though the historical vision was smashed his definition is what we see now in the New York Times and Washington Post were in a european newspaper one more thing and then i shut off shut up there is a study based on a mistake on hofstetters complete misunderstanding of history. Host i think that is a good summary. But i do think there is a reason why people fear and tolerance from populist movements and antisemitism because there is an overlap perhaps not in a majority of cases between the populist idea of a remote delete so i would agree antisemitism by no means is a dominant impulse behind 19th century populism but there was a crossing of paths i think other movements did not have. It seems as if you are saying in your book with the Civil Rights Movement that the changes that are brought, the price engendered from American Society was too high to create a group of disaffected americans who have now become the core of trump space in my oversimplifying . I think youre overstating it a bit. Is not a defense of the system before the civil rights act. I do not say the price was too high a. However the system has proved much more dynamic than what people thought they were getting. I believe most americans thought what they were buying into in the 19 sixties was a settlement. Like a reshuffling, a new deal proceeding into the future on the basis but it turned out to be a dynamic system to embrace much more the country than it did originally. It has come to embrace more groups than i did originally and the active. The mediation has lasted longer than people think. So you do will get resentment out of that and its worth but tom is talking about you have civil rights system speaking in the most general terms offers remediation and led directly to blessing for School Integration and directly to affirmative action and creates all sorts of bureaucracies so that if you have a transgender person working in your company there are government authorities who take an interest in that. The system covers pretty much all ethnic minorities it covers women in theory and gate entrance gender women one people in theory and that blanket coverage is a right everyone had except the straight white mail and that is the overlap in the situation that tom describes because theres another hierarchy of rights and privileges which is the economy. If you are a wealthy person generally you have an interest in the system as it exist whatever it may be so in an economic way you have the private means to make the system work for you which creates a wedge of people not covered by their own private means were this government project which is the white working class. When we all probably agree that is the central focus of populist energy in the country right now. Host i imagine those that disagree with you bring up to ideas. Number one, all of this b