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June 9, 2023 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy
37:58
The Rise of the Managerial Class with Michael Lind | The TRUTH Podcast #32
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Time Text
I think one of the great
underappreciated divides in our country today is not that between Republicans and Democrats, but between the managerial class and the everyday citizen.
It is a managerial class that isn't just limited to government, permeates every other institution now increasingly in private sector life in America as well.
And they're the stewards of institutions that often co-opt that institution's workings for their own gain.
I'm focused on that in the federal government.
Talk a lot about the fourth branch of government, the administrative state, which I intend to dismantle.
We have three branches of government, the United States, executive, legislative and judicial.
There's no fourth codified in the Constitution.
The last time I read it, it's that fourth branch that actually operates with the greatest power today.
But this is just a symptom of a deeper cultural trend in America where the managerial bureaucrats have gained far more control of every institution, our universities, increasingly our companies, nonprofit institutions, and yes, government too.
That I think reveals a deeper skepticism of individuals and the ability of individuals to not only govern themselves in a constitutional republic, but but to come together in any institution to realize its purpose without being intermediated by the actual managers who are entrusted with safeguarding that institution.
Sort of reminds me of a story I first read in high school.
It was...
Dostoevsky's The Grand Inquisitor, that was the chapter out of The Brothers Karamazov, one of his great works.
And the way the parable went was, Christ came back to earth in the middle of the Spanish Inquisition.
And he was spotted on the street performing miracles.
And then the Grand Inquisitor of the church heard about this.
And when he was spotted on the street, he had Christ arrested.
And the peak of the chapter is the dialogue between the Grand Inquisitor and Christ in that prison cell, where the Grand Inquisitor tells Christ that we the church don't need you here anymore.
In fact, your presence here impedes our work, and he sentences Christ to execution the next morning.
What do I mean when I'm talking about the managerial class?
I'm talking about the Grand Inquisitor, the one that Dostoevsky wrote about in The Grand Inquisitor.
And so anyway, that's the conversation we're going to have today about the rise of the managerial class and maybe a little bit weaved in there about crushing not only the will of the everyday citizen, but if we have time for it, a little bit of the discussion about the suppression of wage growth in America as well and what's going on there.
These things are all related.
And I'm happy to say I probably have like, you know, probably the best person in the country to talk about this unique nexus of issues.
I know this because I've read some of his work.
I quoted it in my first book, Woke Inc.
He's not a political partisan by any stretch, but he's an intellectual, somebody whose work I've enjoyed.
I've been looking forward to meeting for a long time and have a chance to meet today.
So Michael Lind, it's good to meet you.
Welcome to the podcast.
And I've been looking forward to this conversation.
Thank you for having me.
So, I want to talk about not your most recent book yet, though if we have time we'll get there, but the one before.
The Rise of the Managerial Class that I talked about that is in deep tension, in deep form of almost cultural warfare with the everyday citizens and or individual constituents of institutions they're supposed to represent.
You've written extensively about this.
Why don't you get some of your views on the table?
In some ways, you came before me.
Woke Inc.
was written after you wrote your book, so I think you get to go first here.
Tell me about the perspective.
The new class war, saving democracy from the managerial elite.
I build on the mid-century American thinker James Burnham's idea that a new class of managers Not only in big corporations and banks, but also in bureaucratized nonprofits and in government agencies, was replacing the capitalists of the 19th century, the owner-operators, the so-called bourgeoisie of Marxist theory.
Burnham had started off as a disciple of Leon Trotsky, but he concluded that Trotsky was wrong.
The old-fashioned capitalists were indeed giving way But to a new group of bureaucrats, both public and private, not to the working class, not to the proletariat.
And over time, Burnham, his views moved to the right.
He became a founder of National Review with his friend William F. Buckley Jr., one of my mentors when I was young.
But his essential analysis, I think, was correct.
And there have been others, including Milovan Jilas, a great Yugoslav communist dissident, who talked about the new class.
The liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith talked about the technostructure.
But what all of them were saying was that in modern societies, You get the bureaucratization of what were fairly small-scale intimate organizations in the 19th century, in the 18th century.
So the company goes from being a small company with the owner-operator capitalists running it to this massive bureaucratic organization, where in some cases, ever-fluctuating shareholdership makes ownership Impossible to identify.
The same thing happens in the 20th century with gigantic bureaucratic philanthropy like the Ford Foundation or Rockefeller or these other enormous foundations where the donors don't control them.
In many cases, they're long dead.
It's simply a self-perpetuating group of bureaucrats.
The bureaucratization of the university and so on and so on and so on.
If Burnham is correct, contemporary Marxists who say you have two classes, capitalists and workers, are 100 years behind the times.
They're ignoring the rise of these private and public and non-profit bureaucracies as a self-perpetuating oligarchy.
And it's actually becoming an aristocracy because you have to have university credentials To participate in these public and private nonprofit bureaucracies.
And the best prediction of whether you will graduate with a bachelor's degree is whether you had one or more parents who did so already.
So we have these two things going on.
One is the centralization of social power.
Government, the culture, and the economy in very centralized bureaucratic organizations.
And the other is the use of university educations to screen out potential people in these organizations.
So it's interesting that you focus on that axis more than wealth, actually.
And that's where the departure is maybe from the classical Marxist to look at green pieces of paper, whereas you're looking at sort of the new currencies, I guess if you could call it that, to wield power in a way that a Marxist in some ways ought to be worried about if they were really solving for the real thing.
Well, that's actually the Marxist criticism of my views.
And of this Burnhamite approach to the managerial elite in general has been, oh, well, the capitalists are still in control.
The managers are merely their employees.
Well, with a lot of corporations, that makes no sense because you have thousands of dispersed shareholders and they may be changing day to day.
So the CEO really is in charge, right?
You know, it's not the fluctuating shareholders.
Moreover, in American law, and the same is true in European and Asian, The shareholders do not really own the corporation.
This is a myth that was spread by Milton Friedman, the economist who is not a lawyer.
If I own shares of a corporation, even if I own majority shares, I can't just go in and fire the secretary, right?
You have to go through all of these legal procedures.
You know, with the CEO and the board of directors and all of that.
So my answer to the Marxists is, let's have a thought experiment.
All of the rich people in the US, the capitalists, people who live off of investments, they vanish tomorrow.
Society more or less continues to function because most of the managers are salaried employees.
They may own shares, but they're very well paid salaried professionals.
Now let's do the opposite thought experiment.
Suppose that all of the CEOs, all of the staffers, all of the foundation program officers, all of the university administrators just vanish overnight, but the capitalists and the working class remain.
Our society would disintegrate.
The basis of power in the United States and in Western Europe and in Japan and so on Is not money directly.
It is a position of power in a powerful bureaucracy.
So, you know, if you're the chair of Goldman Sachs, you may not be the richest person in the world, but you have vastly more power and influence.
Right?
Than like a Walmart heir or heiress.
Totally.
Totally right.
It's a good analogy.
So how do you define, I mean, I think you and I know both know it from habituation and experience, but is there like a definition that you would offer of the member of the managerial class?
What does that mean?
Well, the closest and the test that I use in my book, The New Class War, is a college education.
Because about a third of the country has a college, at least a BA now.
The real serious managerial class at this point, you need a PhD or an MBA. A graduate degree of some kind.
And as I said, these are not because of your skills, it's because these are screening devices.
But so the comparison, and I'm showing my age as an old cold warrior, in all the communist countries you have what is called a nomenklatura.
These are the party members.
Now, there are millions of them in the country.
They're a minority.
They're less than 10% in the old Soviet Union and in modern China.
What do you call them?
The nomenclatura.
The nomenclatura.
From nomenclature.
Okay, the nomenclatura.
Got it, got it.
Yeah, and it literally meant the nomenclature.
They were the list of names from whom officers could be chosen.
Now, the vast majority of the communist nomenklatura of the party members were not terribly powerful.
They weren't terribly wealthy.
They were like the junior commissar in Kazakhstan or whatever.
And if you looked at them, they weren't necessarily vastly well-to-do compared to the non-elite in the Soviet Union.
But the Politburo, the actual small elite that's governing things, Could only be chosen from their ranks.
George Orwell in 1984, he has the outer party and the inner party.
So the outer party is a minority of the population, and most of them are not terribly powerful, but they have perks that the proletarians don't have.
The inner party are the people who really run, you know, the Big Brother system, but they are all selected from the outer party, even though they're vastly more powerful and better connected than members of the outer party.
So what distinguishes our outer party From the working class is basically university education.
Now, what we see as I talk about in my new book, Hell to Pay, from credential inflation, the BA is being denatured.
Too many people are getting BNAs and losing its scarcity value.
And so therefore, maybe by the 2030s or 2040s, it will actually be the graduate degree.
That is, the BA may become the new high school degree.
Even for the outer party.
Even for the outer party.
Yes, that's right.
Yeah, yeah.
So here's kind of how my sense of describing it is.
I think we're describing the same thing.
I even feel right now the college degree is almost over-inclusive of people who are really part of the managerial class, as I think you and I mean it.
I think about it as the pool of people from which anything, any entity that has a board of directors, could be a nonprofit, could be a company or whatever, could be a university.
But if there's such a thing as the title of a board of directors, The people who are eligible to sit in that role constitute today's managerial class.
It's a somewhat narrower version, but it's an excellent version because executives are constrained by boards legally in terms of power.
Oh, absolutely.
And even – I mean, people like myself or – you could think of certain quirky entrepreneur types sort of cringe at like the idea of sitting on a board.
It's not a particularly appealing activity.
I've not particularly enjoyed doing it every time I've done it.
So it's not like a wealth thing even though quirky entrepreneurs – I've enjoyed playing wealth creation through the businesses I've started, et cetera.
It's not – It's not quite that.
You can be...
And also, just because you don't have a lot of wealth doesn't mean that you can't be included in that club.
In fact, you can if you come from the right sort of social standing in the world of media or academia or other management roles.
But I think the pool of people who would be considered eligible to sit on a board of directors, whatever that board of directors is, to me is the managerial class in America.
Yeah, and C. Wright Mills, the 1950s Marxist and a fellow Texan, spoke about interlocking directorates.
And I think one of the reasons, and you may have seen this in your own experience, I've seen it, I've witnessed it up close.
Boards of directors are conformist forces.
Oh yeah, they are.
Because you start bringing in people who don't – they really are not interested in your quirky entrepreneurial idea.
They want your organization to win general approval of their social circle, right?
And at minimal risk to themselves.
At minimal risk to themselves.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it has a stifling effect on innovation and on creativity in my opinion.
Why adopt that system of governance at all, right?
Our institutions were so in the West, and the law sort of creates the conditions for it, but we're bound up by whatever proper governance is in an organization has to take the form of a board of directors.
It doesn't really make sense, actually, if what you're solving for is creating things that don't exist in the world, and to serve people who are outside of that special club.
What's your take?
Well, actually, this is relevant to the James Burnham theory because it made sense In 1900. Why?
Or in 1920. Because the board of directors was the rich guys who owned them.
Oh, that's right.
Yeah, fair enough.
They were the owners.
But, you know, US Steel or whatever had gotten so big that Carnegie could not, you know, manage it directly.
So you hired managers.
But the theory was you would have a small number of people would own all the stocks.
And they would, you know, hire and fire the managers.
They were like a condo association.
So it made sense already by the 1930s when Adolph Burley and Gardner Means write about the modern managerial corporation.
The board of directors no longer really reflects people with a stake in the organization.
You know, they may nominally be elected by shareholder elections, but unless the founders, as some tech founders have done, you know, keep most of the shares for themselves or have class A and class B and so on, you get this really weird anomalous thing.
And you find the same thing in nonprofits, where according to law, the board of directors has all power.
Even if they don't raise any of the money for the nonprofit.
And they were just, you know, some random friends of the president who got appointed years ago.
So it's a very strange legal structure.
And as I say, it tends to promote conformity among elite organizations.
Now, here's just an interesting question for you.
I guess, like, I'm not on the left, but assume it's a challenge coming from the left, which is...
Why is – so far what you've offered and what we've been covering so far is a descriptive account.
It's not saying this is good or bad.
Why is that model of power distribution – Worse or less desirable than one in which it was just the capitalists that were wielding the power instead.
Like if you did substitute in the blank and said that the thought experiment was such that all the rich people disappear and all the managerial class disappear.
In sequence, it would actually be that society falls apart in the case of the rich people, you know, the Ayn Rand vision of the world or whatever, the Atlas Shrugged vision of the world.
Okay, like that would be – that's a different worldview, but it's a different group.
Some overlap, but not entirely overlapping group of people who hold the keys to power.
Why is that?
Oh, I think that there's no doubt that managerial capitalism in sectors where it's relevant, such as manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, aerospace, automobiles, in the productive economy, it's far superior to old-fashioned small proprietor capitalism.
You can't have lots of mom-and-pop aerospace companies and automobile companies.
You have to have massive organizations.
It is better, in my opinion, that they be capitalist to some degree rather than simply being government bureaucracies.
So there's a strain on the right that wants to use antitrust to break up everything big.
Well, that's the end of your country as a technological and manufacturing power and also as a military power.
So then the question becomes, how do you check the power And we're just talking about the private economy now, okay?
Because you can structure the nonprofit sector and education in much more radically different ways.
But okay, so let's say you have Ford Motor Company, you have Boeing, right?
And you have Apple.
There were historically two ways to deal with this if you rejected antitrust, breaking up Boeing into 150 little tiny mom and pop airplane companies.
One is regulation.
And the other is what John Kenneth Galbraith called countervailing power.
So regulation assumes that you have a wise, benevolent government elite, which will win an election.
Maybe they're elected politicians.
Maybe they're appointed regulators.
But they will do the right thing.
They will just give orders and they will keep these giant concentrations of industry, which we need, in line, you know, focused on their work and not abusing workers in the environment and so on.
A much more skeptical view informs the idea of countervailing power, which is you can't trust massive concentrations of private power, but you also can't trust massive concentrations of public power.
And when they're the same class, when the regulators and the CEOs went to the same prep schools and the same Ivy League universities and so on, and their kids all go to the same kindergartens, then it's just really one elite.
I mean, even though it's nominally public and private.
So the countervailing power theory says ordinary people need to be able to pool their efforts.
To have organizations, mass membership organizations, that can bargain on their behalf without hoping that elected officials will altruistically govern on their behalf, but also give them some bargaining power with corporations.
And historically in the United States and in Western Europe, the two most powerful mass membership organizations were churches and trade unions.
Because these were extra-governmental organizations that were accountable to their members.
They weren't necessarily democratic.
You know, if it's the Catholic Church, you don't elect the Pope.
But, you know, they were accountable.
And, you know, so what has happened in the third group was local political party machines.
Which up to the 1970s, the parties in the United States from Martin Van Buren in the 1830s onwards have been federations of local chapters.
They were clubs.
They were federations of clubs.
That all disintegrated with the primary system in the 1970s.
So you flash forward to the 21st century, these three organizations that were not formal government organizations, but they acted as lobbies.
On behalf of working class people in particular who didn't have money and they didn't have social connections, they didn't have influence.
The churches, the trade unions, and the local political machines, they've largely fallen apart or died out.
And that just means that the managerial elite can kind of do what it wants to, and we've seen that's what it's been doing for a couple of decades.
There's nobody on the outside who's going to stop them.
So what do you think is the solution to this?
Well, I'm kind of pessimistic.
I think the solution has to be to build up some new versions.
It doesn't have to be old versions.
The existing National Labor Relations Act union system is dead.
It can't be revived.
You know, people are leaving churches.
It's kind of hard without the religious revival to change that.
But what you need is reformers within the managerial elite itself and also capitalists who have the resources to be heretics sometimes.
You have to have a reform faction within the elite and it needs to set up structures That will mobilize ordinary people and give them power.
So you would have this reformed faction of the managerial elite actually trying to empower working class people to check the authority of their fellow managerial class.
And this has happened throughout history.
Whenever you've had the extension of the suffrage, you've had extension of civil rights, it was always led to some degree by members of the existing elite.
And often they did it for political reasons.
It wasn't just out of altruism.
It was to create new voters.
We're to create new supporters.
So that's how I think it happens.
Otherwise, you're limited to two things.
One is ordinary people can vote every couple of years, and maybe they will, maybe they won't.
And most Americans, as you know, live in single-party districts where your vote doesn't count because it's not a swing district.
And you can hope that the person elected in the all-Democratic or all-Republican district will do something for you.
But, you know, it's kind of a – if you're working class, I don't think there's much hope there.
The alternative is that you just try to persuade the managerial elite itself out of the goodness of their hearts to try – and that, you know, these are not bad people.
No, no, no.
Most human beings are good – by nature, good people.
Yeah, the problem with oligarchies and aristocracies is they only talk to each other.
A certain mayor of New York, whom I will not name, but there aren't that many possible alternatives, told me one time that he kept in touch with the man on the street by talking to his bodyguards in his limo.
Okay.
At least he was trying, right?
I'm not sure how accurate a reflection they were.
But it's a problem.
It's a problem, you know, not to be in a bubble of other managers.
It's an interesting distinction.
One of the observations I would make, I'm just curious about recent political history is, you talked about the decline of mass member organizations to stand up to that concentration of power.
It feels like the MAGA movement is in some ways a mass member organization that filled the void created by the death of trade unions, local political party machines, churches.
I mean, Trump in 2016 in particular, and Trump today is something else, but Trump in 2015 or 2016 created a sort of mass member organization that stood up Well,
in my book, The New Class War, I argue that it's easy to get locked into a doom loop In which you have the technocratic neoliberals with the managerial elite.
And they just run things most of the time and pay no attention to the public.
Then you get large sections of the public get very alienated.
And they look for demagogues.
They look for demagogic populists.
And some of them are good, some of them are bad.
I'm just using this as a technical term.
And we've seen this.
They can be good ones.
They can be good demagogues.
And we've seen this in where you have very weak mass membership institutions.
In the American South, between the Civil War and the Civil Rights Revolution, you've got these demagogues like Huey Long.
And they did some good things, you know, sometimes.
In South America, you had Juan Perón in Argentina.
You had Vargas in Brazil.
And they were semi-dictators, semi-popular.
But the problem with these demagogues, and even when they're very well intentioned and very accomplished, It tends to be an evanescence, not a lasting structure.
It's not a lasting machine.
So it evaporates.
It's a cult of personality.
And when the personality is removed, the whole thing crumbles.
Or, as happened with Huey Long and happened with various other demagogues, it becomes family members.
So essentially, they create a family dynasty, which then joins the existing elite, the children or the brothers or the sisters or nephews or nieces or whatever.
But again, it sort of fizzles out.
So I think, you know, often the demagogues, if you're a successful demagogue, You are filling a void in public discourse, right?
The voice of the people is what it means in Greek.
And so Trump seized on various issues that were being excluded by the elite bipartisan consensus.
Bernie Sanders, who's a sort of demagogue of the left, did the same thing.
So you can introduce those issues into general discussion, but unless there's some kind of organization that isn't just a cult of personality around one individual or one family, then it's all too easy for the establishment just to wait until that person goes away.
As the establishment is fervently praying, Trump will go away.
Right?
And as the Democratic establishment pretty much did in Bernie Sanders in 2020s by rallying everybody against him and getting the progressives to drop out of the race.
So, you know, it's like they say in Vegas, never bet against the House.
If you have an outsider populist demagogue coming up against this interlocking bureaucracies that control, you know, much of the corporate world, banking, media, universities, and nonprofits, well, you know, my money's going to be on the establishment.
Yeah, I mean, that's as a betting man.
The question is, as a normative compass, you know, what do we do about it?
I think I... I think part of the ticket out is not just the creation of the mass member organizations because that's still – and this is such an interesting conversation.
That takes time, but I think there's even a normative current that – like this is where – I think on the descriptive account, you and I are locked in arms.
I think on the normative account, I think this is where – I don't think we're in disagreement, but my view is a little bit orthogonal to yours where – I think that embracing the individuality of the individuals who occupy the members of the managerial power structures is likely our way out.
And I do think that we live in a moment where, you know, we human beings, what makes us human?
We're Able to believe in something bigger than ourselves.
We were able to embrace ideals.
Ideals that we all share in common.
And that's what makes us different than animals.
Animals respond to needs.
They, you know, can't believe in things.
Part of what makes America appealing, I think, ought to make America appealing, is that it calls on our humanity.
It's a nation founded on a set of ideals.
And so, I guess I'm wondering whether a form of nationalism That calls on the common thread of ideals that we share as individuals and spheres of our lives that go outside of the social power relation prism of viewing the world that we've sort of been talking about is closer to being our way out of this quagmire than conceding that the relationships are governed by power relations at all.
I mean, we started with the Marxist example.
Now we're saying that locus of that power relationship is You know, in the form of bureaucratic power and managerial power, when maybe we just need to get rid of the, you know, I don't know what label you put on it, Foucault, Post-Foucault, whatever, you know, power structure-laden view of human relations to...
Try on a different prism that asks whether power relations are even the way we ought to be looking at this.
And even though that could be a source of concern and there's truth to that account, there can be truth to a different account too that dilutes the problems of the first account to less prominence, if not dilutes it to irrelevant by calling on The power of our common idealism as human beings,
as citizens of a nation, say, that make the inequalities be it through wealth or through bureaucratic standing limited to such a small scope of importance.
That the civic equality that we all bear as citizens are actually what grounds us in a true, deeper, normative equality.
And I don't know how much you followed in the last week when I sort of – it was an idea that's neither here nor there for our conversation really, but it is in a little bit of a way.
I said we'd raise the voting age from 18 to 25, but you still vote at age 18 if you either perform national service in the form of six months in the military or first responder role or else pass the same civics test that an immigrant has to pass.
In a sense, whether you're a kid of a billionaire, whether you're a kid of a college-educated person or whether you're not, that's what determines whether as a young person you get to participate in selecting who governs the country.
Anyway, I bring that up through this ramble.
Well, no, that's relevant.
I ghost wrote much of William F. Buckley Jr.'s book on national service.
Oh, really?
I was 26, I think.
So it can be done right and it can be done wrong.
So the right way to do it is to make it universal and mandatory for everybody.
The way that it's often been discussed is if you get student loans, if you get any kind of government aid, you have to do national service.
Oh, I reject that.
But if your parents can just write you a check, then you don't.
It doesn't make any sense.
Yeah, and that was Bill Buckley's view too.
It has to be universal.
It has to be universal.
I mean you understand the proposal that I made which is – it's a much more diet version of that.
But it is universal in the sense that nobody can vote at 18 if they don't do it and you can vote at 18 if you do do it but at least has like a civic empowerment.
But it's – regardless, there's no buying your way out of it.
Well, so here's the big – I know all the arguments for national service, for and against.
So what kills it – Is two things.
One, organized labor tends to oppose it, saying that employers are going to use these, at least civilian national service.
That is, if you allow people to do civilian work, like being nursing aides, then the fear is that you're not going to hire 45-year-old nursing aides with kids, right?
You're going to hire 18-year-olds.
Same fear of AI, except it's being supplied by unpaid labor of a different kind, yeah.
And the other explanation is simply that it's tyranny to do this in peacetime.
Now, to me, the answer really would be to do it through a militia-type system, not a right-wing militia, but, you know, classic, you know, colonial era.
Early Republican militia and just do it at the state level.
But I think it has to be connected to national security.
And I think that in the modern world, it would be very easy to do this because if there are serious direct assaults among great powers in the 21st century, the US, Russia, China, they're going to try to shut down each other's infrastructure before they do anything else.
So I think you could come up with things that you could do without going to serve in foreign combat that would be true national defense.
Shipbuilding, where we have a short – I mean, we could shipyards.
So – I think you and I are very similar wavelengths here.
Here's something I learned in this conversation is that it turns out I've quoted not one of your books, but two of your books.
I just thought I was quoting Buckley, which is in the same book, Woke Inc., that I wrote.
It was a different part of the book.
Well, Bill wouldn't mind.
He was asked when Reagan became president.
They said, well, if your friend Ron Reagan becomes president, what cabinet post would you accept?
Bill said, ventriloquist.
I really like that.
Well, you know, I think there's a role for everyone to play, right?
And so that doesn't take away.
Well, Reagan had a great line that you get a lot done in politics.
You get a lot done in politics if you don't care who takes the credit.
Yes, yes.
I'm in for that model.
I agree with you.
I think that get the right person saying the right things that Any person saying the right things really doesn't much matter as long as we have a way of getting them done.
Well, Michael, we could go on for a long time.
This is a good introductory conversation.
I take it you and I are going to be chatting for some time to come.
And I'd ask you to think about a more real – I don't know, more realistic.
Anything can be realistic, I suppose.
But maybe a good first step towards the service model may not – Like you, I'm not for this buying your way around it because then it just doesn't work, but maybe tying it to civic privileges at least.
So it's not at behest of imprisonment, but at behest of civic privileges like determining who gets to run the country, for example.
Maybe a bridge that actually in the American context gets there in a way that, you know, in South Korea or Israel, it might work the other way, but in the American context, this might just be our way of doing it, tying the privileges of citizenship to the duties.
And so that's a thought I'd leave with you.
Well, I think the 15th Amendment might – you'd have to revise the 15th Amendment.
That's why it'd have to be done by constitutional amendment, no doubt about it.
And so – But you can recreate, I think, something like a national service.
Without amendment.
I got you.
Yeah, I got you.
Yeah.
But I think the political consensus around, you know, tying into civic privileges may be more attuned to the, it immediately sidesteps the tyranny argument, which is the main argument otherwise.
And great discussion, Michael.
Really enjoyed it.
And I hope this is the first of several that we have.
Looking forward to it.
Thank you.
I'm Vivek Ramaswamy, candidate for president, and I approve this message.
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