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Oct. 9, 2024 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy
01:03:40
The Price of Comfort: How We Traded Freedom for “Free Stuff” in the West | Christopher Caldwell
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We're obviously up against a major election here in the United States of America, both the presidential election on November 5th, but also a series of elections down ballot that will determine the future of the House, the Senate, but also a series of elections down ballot that will determine the future of the House, the Senate, and So in that moment, it's tempting to only focus on the electoral dynamics in our own country.
But I've actually often found that we can somehow gain greater insight and clarity about what's going on in the United States if, on occasion, we look at Western Europe and other countries that face similar, not the same, but similar challenges, similar demographic changes, similar types of political realignments as are happening in this country.
To be able to then come back and understand our own political dynamic with even greater clarity.
Sometimes you see what's happening in the United States more clearly if you're looking at it from the outside in.
Those of us who are here on the inside may lack that opportunity, but I do think that that's something we're trying to do with today's episode of the podcast with somebody who has taken a careful look at the rise of populist leaders across different Western European democracies.
has carefully thought about what the heck is going on in Europe right now and maybe even what some of the learnings and implications might be for the United States, not just in the next several days and weeks heading into our own election, but perhaps over the next four to eight years as we think about the future direction of the conservative movement and the future direction of the America First movement and the future direction of the United States of America in the next four, five, six, seven, eight, nine years ahead.
So for that discussion, I've invited Christopher Caldwell here.
He is an editor at the Claremont Review of Books, and he is the author of the book Age of Entitlement, a fascinating title.
Chris, welcome to the podcast, and I'm looking forward to a detailed discussion with you.
Well, thank you very much.
I'm delighted to be here.
Yeah.
So, you know, I think a word you wanted to maybe kick this off, a topic that's near and dear to both your and my heart, which is The Age of Entitlement, is the title of your book, but it speaks to me.
Where I do think that the root cause, and I really mean this in sort of a root cause sense, not that it's another thing on the list of priorities, but it's pretty darn close to the existence of the root cause.
Of so many of our perils right now, and even the immigration crisis, which I think is going to be a centerpiece in our discussion, is the existence of the nanny state in the United States.
I mean, I think if you dismantled the nanny state You effectively have solved 70 plus percent of the immigration problem in the United States because that's the magnet that draws people over.
Yet what I've seen in our own conservative movement over the last 10, 20 years is that we've become reluctant to take aim at the entitlement state, but have become more vehement in our responses to the symptoms of the entitlement state.
Including the immigration crisis, but with a greater unwillingness to go to the root cause.
So that's my own diagnosis, and if I may even say self-critique of the conservative movement, but I'll use that to maybe open up and give you a chance to not only talk about your book, but to be able to get into some of the topics we had teed up for today.
Well, that's very interesting.
And I think there's some corroboration for that viewpoint in the way American immigration differs from European.
We have our problems with immigration, but there are certain problems that Europe has that we don't have.
Europeans tend to tell pollsters that they consider migrants lazy or antisocial.
And I think that even in the United States, when we have a very difficult situation with migrants in certain places like Springfield, Ohio, that is not the critique.
And part of the reason is that, just as you say, We have a nanny state that is less well developed than Europe does, or to the extent that it is well developed, foreigners, including newly arrived immigrants, have less access to it than they do in Europe.
So in Europe, every newcomer has a kind of a cushion that allows him or has traditionally had a cushion that allows him to just sort of Follow his instinct where he wants it to go.
And one of the reasons, for instance, that so many immigrants get into radical Islam is that they're sort of subsidized to do it.
I remember seeing a statistic a few years ago that two-thirds of the imams in France are on welfare.
In the United States, I mean, there's nothing wrong with being an imam, but in the United States, you are sort of forced into the workplace, which is where a lot of assimilation happens.
Yeah, I think that's a different dynamic, and it's not the same story in the US and the EU, but let's maybe talk a little bit more about some of the parallels that we do see and understand.
To what extent do you believe, first of all, I'd be curious for your assessment of this, in Europe, to what extent, if you eliminated the incentives for illegal mass migration in the EU, like the Raw payments, workforce permits, etc.
Would you see the decline in mass migration to countries like Sweden or other Western European countries?
I feel strongly about that in the US, but what's your assessment of the state of affairs in the EU? I think you would see it...
Only if you banned work for these people, because the labor shortage now in Europe has progressed to such an extent.
Europe has a, you know, it has a birth dearth, the way we do in the United States, except that it's a generation older.
I believe that deaths started to exceed births in Germany and Italy in the early 70s.
Whereas this phenomenon is just getting rolling with us.
So you have people entering the workforce who are of a small generation, already born of a small generation.
And the need for labor in Europe is almost boundless.
And you don't really see it in the tourist centers.
But if you go any place Agricultural, like Southern Italy or Catalonia.
You get off in a back road and you go into a farming area and you'll see encampments, villages full of Africans.
You don't see them on the main roads.
They ride around in bikes.
They have their local stores.
But the agricultural sector of Europe is increasingly run by migrant labor.
Yeah.
So what is your core assessment of the similarities and dissimilarities between the rise of populist reactions to this mass migration question and maybe the rise of populist reactions more generally in Europe and the United States?
And maybe you could begin with a definition of what you consider to be modern populism as well, which I think is a word that we often bandy around a little loosely.
I know.
I think that in practice, what populism winds up being is any movement that produces a political outcome that the mainstream media tends not to like.
I do think that populism is primarily a democracy movement.
It aims at a, you know, obviously we all in the West, we all live in democracies of some kind of another, okay?
But I think that there's a, at the heart of populism is a qualitative complaint about democracy, where people say, yes, we vote, but once we vote, there are all sorts of There are all sorts of tricks and ruses to take actual agency away from us.
And so I think that populism in the United States and in Europe is about that in both places.
But the ruses are a little bit different.
Part of the argument of my Age of Entitlement book Is that the civil rights state, the idea that what you vote is valid only so long as it doesn't interfere with some judge's idea of people's rights.
That has done a lot to, let's say, reduce the actual democratic content of democracy in America.
I think in Europe, I think that the European Union, which is a different type, it's a transnational grouping of 27 European countries into a trading bloc.
That has performed the same function.
Basically, you vote for something like, I want fewer immigrants in France, and you're told that you can't have it because the European Court of Justice or the Court of Justice of the European Union, there are two of them, doesn't approve of it.
That's a fascinating analysis.
It's sort of a parallel that you would draw between what you call, it's an interesting term, the civil rights state in the US versus the ECJ-imposed normative layer on top of self-governance at the national level in each of these countries.
I want to actually come back to the European point of this because I frankly don't yet understand As much as I probably should about the legalities of what say the ECJ might have over what an individual nation's policies might be with respect to mass migration.
But on the US point for a second, just to sort of double click on that, how do you draw the distinction between the anti-majoritarian protections built into the constitution Versus the statutory post-Civil Rights Act wave version of that and the jurisprudence that followed that And maybe the expansionism of skepticism of self-governance there.
How do you draw that distinction?
Because the first is inherent to the Republican form of government that we have.
We're not a direct democracy.
We're a constitutional republic, which among other things includes those anti-majoritarian protections that still are affirming of a kind of self-governance imbued with the protection of individual rights, which Can, on occasion, come into tension with one another, versus maybe the bastardization of that that we saw in more recent decades of statutory overreach and regulatory overreach far beyond what the constitutional scope originally was.
your perspective on that?
Yeah, I think statute, well, I'd look at it in a couple of ways.
One is the way I do in the book.
In the book, I say that in a lot of progressives' minds, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 stands as kind of a second constitution, And the understandings of rights in it are often at variance with the first.
And so I would say that, I mean, my own view of it is that That the 1964 Civil Rights Act basically vindicates the claims of the 14th Amendment, which is sort of equal protection of the laws, at the expense of the First Amendment, which is freedom of association, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly.
So that's one...
That's fascinating to me.
That's a big claim you just made.
I assume, well, I have my assumptions about what kind of case law you're referring to, you know, sort of, but why don't you lay it out?
You're the expert on this.
So what do you mean by, in what way, lay out an example in which the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the way it's been interpreted come into conflict with the First Amendment?
Well, I mean, there's an interpretation of Brown versus Board of Education that sort of lays out these 14th Amendment, First Amendment things.
There's a guy named, a Harvard Law professor named Herbert Wexler, I believe.
And he said that, you know, It's not really a very strong freedom of association claim to claim that people have the right to go to any school they want because other people have the right not to...
On one side are people who want an association, on the other side are people who don't want it.
And so you wind up making that choice, making what at the time was considered a First Amendment choice for people, because at the time, Freedom of association was considered that that was implied in the First Amendment.
One of the things my book does is extrapolate forward from the 64 Civil Rights Act through the broadening of the stuff that it covered.
Now, sex was in the Civil Rights Act, but the But the way people began to enforce equality for women was, I think, something that nobody had envisioned in 1964. And so you get an issue where you say a woman has the right.
You know, you have very few female executives in this corporation.
A woman has a right to be there.
It constitutes a hostile environment, something that came up in the 80s or 90s, for this man to hang a girly picture in his office because he's an executive.
And so you have a woman's right to work in that In that corporation, compromising the man's right to express himself in the corporation, which, of course, you've written whole books about, so I don't want to bore your readers by telling them stuff they've probably heard here before.
You know, one of the things I've discovered about books, you've been in the book writing business too, is that very few people relative to the general population actually buy books, and even the percentage of people who buy a book who actually read the whole thing is smaller still.
So I don't think you'd be...
I appreciate the fact that you read Woke Inc., which is my first book, and my most recent one is actually Truths, which just came out a couple weeks ago, which actually on the chapter on race in Truths actually hits on some of these very themes.
And relating to the jurisprudence in the regulatory state's overreach and its interpretation of even what the Civil Rights Act has said.
Some of the more compelling cases that I've detailed in my books is, you know, Truths just came out so I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't remind everybody to go get a copy of Truths, which I appreciate.
But engaging with some of the tougher and more controversial subject matter in this book, it's directly relevant to what you just talked about, which is that The jurisprudence here wasn't just about men hanging up pictures in their offices that made women feel uncomfortable, because some of those you may feel find First Amendment pushback to say that's not the true expression of an opinion.
But some other more interesting cases actually do involve the true expression of an opinion on the question of potential racial microaggression or hostile work environment on the question of race.
There's one instance of a woman, she was a grandmother, she would wear a red sweater and To work on Fridays in celebration of veterans.
And she was, I believe, a mother of a veteran, a young man who had served the country, and there were other people in the office who started doing the same thing.
And there was a minority employee who said that he found that to be a microaggression, created a hostile work environment, which then caused the employer to tell her that she couldn't do that anymore.
At which point she stopped wearing the red sweater and they started to stop doing the whole group thing at the office, but she still brought the red sweater on Fridays and at least hung it on the back of her chair.
So she's sitting at a desk and the sweater would be draped over her chair.
And that too was deemed by the employer, presumably because of further complaint of the employee, to be insufficient.
Insufficient to go not far enough to avoid creating a hostile work environment, at which point the employer had to tell her that she too could not, not only on Fridays, create a club that involved an employee affinity group that wore red sweaters in celebration of veterans, but could not even bring that red sweater to work on but could not even bring that red sweater to work on Fridays to hang out in the back of her chair, which does seem to be a patent First Amendment violation derived from the so-called affirmation of the 14th Amendment in the back of jurisprudence that I think far expanded even the scope of what the Civil Rights which does seem
And so, you know, I think that there's certain different questions there of the leap from the 14th Amendment to what was codified in the Civil Rights Act, but then what the regulatory state through the EEOC and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the three-letter and four-letter agencies have then created that was not even envisaged at the time the act was passed, I think has created a state but then what the regulatory state through the EEOC and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the three-letter and four-letter agencies have then created that And these are uncomfortable topics.
And so, you know, I think that there's certain different questions there of the leap from the 14th Amendment to what was codified in the Civil Rights Act, ever imagined accomplishing.
I mean, these are third rail topics you're not supposed to talk about in modern American politics.
I know, but conservatives have a great deal of actual difficulty talking about them because the old style Reagan conservatism is about, a lot of it is about business freedom.
So you say, look, a guy owns a company, he can, you know, he can set a dress code.
This woman doesn't like to wear anything she wants, but you wind up with a sort of a differential application of that law If one of the employees came in with a rainbow sweater and said that it was for Pride Day, I think he was on much shakier ground telling that employee not to wear it.
In fact, you see the same legal liability there.
If a Christian employee said that this makes me uncomfortable and is a microaggression to me and discrimination on the basis of religion and creating a hostile religious work environment, there's no way that that person would be told not to bring a rainbow sweatshirt and hang it on their chair.
Or even not to create an affinity group at the workplace in today's environment.
But the woman who wore a red sweater in celebration of veterans, if that made somebody of a different minority status feel uncomfortable, the employer perceived that to actually be what created the litigation risk in that scenario, which is interesting.
Now, I will say that the business friendliness prong, I think, badly misunderstands what business friendliness actually is because it's the legal conditions that the business is actually responding to.
So if the EEOC has created the environment for a legal claim against that business, That isn't really the business making that decision.
That's the government using the appearance of the invisible hand of the market to really accomplish what really was a goal of the invisible fist of the government, not only the government, but the regulatory state itself.
And I do think it is a shame when conservatives maybe shy away from these issues in a way that don't really have the spine to stand up to the root cause of what's actually going on here, which goes back to that nanny state.
It's a form of the nanny state to the entitlement state here, the regulatory state that gives us otherwise Puzzling outcomes of a business engaging in speech discrimination, which wasn't actually the business doing it.
It was the business responding to the legal conditions.
But it's complex because it's not about regulation, deregulation.
It's about two different, it's about unequal treatment of two kinds of behavior in the workplace, according to terms that are kind of opaque, are very legalistic and opaque to the average citizen.
So it leaves the average citizen feeling a lot of fear because what he's allowed to do has to be explained to him by a specialist, you know?
The only area where I might have a shade of disagreement with you, and I am accused probably to a fault, accurately maybe, of seeing the regulatory state as the prism, as the original sin of nearly every major problem in America, but I continue to believe that it is.
That is a core thesis of this book as well.
It's more right than wrong, let's say that.
But I'll even push, even in this particular instance of why I would put it at the feet of the regulatory state, is a lot of this comes from the EEOC's interpretation.
The EEOC is the regulatory body, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
That is part of the regulatory state, the administrative state, the fourth branch, the three- and four-letter agencies whose employees were never elected to their positions, yet, according to historical interpretations of the law, at least cannot even be removed from their positions by the people who were elected to their positions, right?
That unelected fourth-branch class of bureaucrats.
Yeah.
Yes, there is some instance in which you could say there are judges that have also come down on interpretations of the Civil Rights Act itself that have found liability for employers in such circumstances.
And so the employers are responding to those legal conditions.
But actually, that's generally against the backdrop of the EEOC's interpretation of the Civil Rights Act.
And then you combine that with Chevron deference, right, which is historically, until this year, really been the law of the land to say that courts have to defer to an agency's opinion of the law.
Exactly, exactly.
So it kind of is the administrative state and the root cause at its core, where you have the administrative state that's empowered with Congress passes this statute, which, you know, we could debate the merits of that statute.
I think that's a thing you're not supposed to do with modern American...
You're not supposed to debate certain laws that were passed in the 1960s, but for the sake of discussion, let's just say that's a law that was passed through the front door.
The law then created the ability to fashion this EEOC, unelected bureaucrats, that then are making quasi-judicial judgments about what the law actually says, which is far more expansive than ever existed or was imagined even at the time the law was passed.
In fact, the law probably would not have been passed if you had said at the time the Civil Rights Act was passed that this would mean that somebody couldn't wear a red sweater to work in celebration of veterans.
Those debates were all had.
Those debates were had.
And none of the people who voted for the Civil Rights Act imagined that's exactly what they were enacting.
Yet you've got the EEOC, which then says, no, no, this is actually, this is decades later, that's actually what the law says, is this woman can't wear the red sweater because somebody else in the workplace finds that to be microaggression.
Nobody who passed the Civil Rights Act would have imagined that that's exactly the way it would be interpreted.
But then you get a judge who says, according to the red sweater rule, this other person is entitled to do something for his office furniture.
That's exactly right.
The judge then escalates the rule by a notch, and then you get a new rule to raise it another quantum.
That's right.
You get a ratchet effect.
But all of that happens...
Without legislation.
But all of that happened in part in the judicial side of this with the judge doing it because of this doctrine, which, by the way, some conservatives, it's uncomfortable facts, you know, hard truths I talk about in this book, too.
Scalia was behind the Chevron doctrines.
I love Scalia.
I love a lot of his jurisprudence.
But it was probably one of the gravest mistakes that we made was this case Chevron, which held that judges had to at least adopt the posture of deference.
They had to defer to the agency's interpretation.
So that created an interpretation of law where the judicial branch actually was subservient to the EEOC and its interpretation of the Civil Rights Act when nobody could either remove the EEOC or vote them out.
So that created this permanence to this version of the post-Civil Rights Act nanny state, which isn't even in the Civil Rights Act, but isn't the EEOC's interpretation of it.
But what I will observe, just to give people some sense of hope and way out of this, is that this year, that doctrine was overturned, right?
Chevron deference was overturned at the Supreme Court this year, which is truly seismic in its scope for what it means for not only the regulatory state, but the entitlement state and the nanny state writ large.
And so I do think that there's an opportunity to revisit a lot of these previously accepted legal outcomes that aren't necessarily really as codified as you'd think if those federal courts, especially if you bring these cases through the Fifth Circuit or somewhere else, no longer have to defer to three- and four-letter agencies like the EEOC. And I think it's a unique moment.
It's one of the reasons I wrote my own most recent book.
And I think it dovetails.
When did you write yours?
This was in 2020. 2020. So your book, Age of Entitlement, was in 2020. The legal landscape between 2022 and 2024 has shifted so dramatically.
In my book, Truths, we actually lay out what the way forward could be out of that morass, that legal morass that we've historically accepted for the last six decades before that.
Anyway, that was a rabbit hole worth going down because it's really interesting.
But to zoom back out to say that, okay, you draw a parallel between what's going on in the United States, between what you would call the post-Civil Rights Act entitlement state and anti-state here, and what the ECJ has to say about self-governance in Europe and what populism represents as a reaction to both, which is really interesting.
What is an example of where the ECJ Has the legal authority to tell one of those European countries that you can't actually pass a statute relating to mass migration limitations in your own country, France, or pick another one.
We can...
Well, the ECJ does...
We can actually clarify the distinction between these two courts.
The ECJ antedates the European Union, and it's not limited to EU countries.
It's kind of a human rights court that sets standards for the developed world.
The Court of Justice of the European Union tells the countries what the laws of the European Union are.
I can give you there was a very interesting case just this week.
The Court of Justice of the European Union established a right to have your right against dead naming or whatever, a right to have your acquired gender recognized in other European countries.
There was a case involving, and I don't know which direction this person was going.
I think it was from female to male.
She became a male, a trans man in In the UK, which then fell out of the European Union with Brexit.
She was a Romanian-born woman.
She returned to her home country and found that they did not recognize her sex change.
And I may be getting the sex backwards here.
I beg your pardon for that.
But the court ruled that Romania actually had to, once this sex change was done in another A European country that had to give full faith and credit to it.
So it is a, I mean, that's a good example.
And it's legally binding, not overridable by the nation state.
That's right.
So it's like a federal issue.
It's a full faith and credit clause, even though they don't have a full faith and credit clause, but they're acquiring these things through judicial activism.
See, and I think that that partly explains, I think, the flair of European populism, which in some ways is even more pronounced.
In its response, then that of what we think about the populist response on the left and the right in the United States to these types of violations of self-governance is, at least in this case, these are states in a union that still represent one nation.
Whereas here, there's no sense in which anybody thinks of themselves as a citizen of Europe, right?
It's an economic bloc.
But it's the kinds of questions on which they're exercising authority is the kind of question where you think about the consent of the governed being required to actually grant it, right?
So in the United States, another way of saying this, you vote for your state elections, you vote for the federal elections, but the states are still The states are still bound by the federal constitution and their behaviors because that is the constitutional republic that created the locus of self-governing.
Yes, but this is what we resolved definitively in the Civil War.
Yeah, exactly.
I think that the trick That the designers of the European Union are trying to pull off is to present the European, there is no European public, but to present European publics with a collection of rights that resemble those of the newly independent United States in the late 18th century.
But with the assumption that those States' rights are inevitably going to disappear into a federalized, centralized authority.
And they're just running the machine to claim those rights along the way, and assuming that the people in these countries are not going to notice.
And for a very long time, they didn't notice, but now they They do.
But there's another thing that happened is that before our civil war, I think our states were arguably growing together and slavery was an obstacle to their growing together.
I am not sure the European states are growing together in that way.
So what do you think that portends for the future of the EU as an alliance, if you're to call it that?
Well, there's a struggle going on among the people who designed it to Try and build golden manacles for this thing.
One of them was the currency, the euro.
If you have a common currency, it's really harder to break up.
And if you look at the discussion that came about during the euro crisis, which was a couple of years after the finance crisis, when it became obvious that Greece and Germany could not have the same interest rate without breaking the currency apart.
When that happened, people said, well, you know, it was probably a bad idea that we designed the euro, but it's too late to change it now.
And there's an attempt to do the same thing with debt now.
The great priority for Brussels is to create mutualized debt obligations For one, are going to make it hard to disentangle the countries financially, but for another, are a tremendous stick to be waved over the head of governments.
So during COVID, Brussels created a trillion-dollar COVID recovery plan.
And basically, it put all these countries on the hook For proportionate to their population, and then paid them the money out to do not whatever plan they chose, but a plan involving green energy.
Any country could do whatever it wanted in order to build green energy.
Having control over this, Brussels said, well, look, Poland, we will give you your 60 billion dollars, which is your share of this, but only if you change your way of making court decisions and things.
So it basically created a bias towards the European centralizing forces.
You see, it kind of worked the way our Block granted federal funds to states used to work when the federal government was really irresponsible.
But anyway, there's a grip on the individual countries that Brussels has through money.
So you think they're using sort of the fiscal weakness of certain of the countries, if not all of the non-German countries?
Yeah, Germany is looking pretty weak too, fiscally.
Okay.
And to sort of effectuate a social agenda that otherwise would not have been accepted.
Yes.
But to your last point, which is exactly what you anticipated, or I was going to say, which is with Germany itself now being, I think, not exactly in the brightest spot, That means there is no fiscal backbone, right?
So the mother nanny that was providing and feeding mother's milk to the children but required it to adopt the social dictas is itself an emperor without any clothes anymore other than printing money, which they've already done that version of it too.
So they've run out of the tricks in the book for the fiscal and then as a substitute for fiscal monetary mana from on high that was the compliance mechanism In the carrot that they use to get the social compliance.
If they no longer have that, right?
If the economic lever no longer exists, what then?
There is a balanced budget amendment in Germany that Germany is trying to stick close to.
A lot of countries in the European Union are in big fiscal trouble now.
I think that Germany is two or three percent has a has a deficit of two or three percent.
France is at five.
Italy, which despite cliches, has been a pretty well run country, is now at seven.
And that's a Maloney.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I'm not sure who I'd attribute it to.
OK, but I mean, sometimes these things are complex and they involve long term, you know, long term.
issues.
But yeah, a lot of these countries are about to be disciplined by Brussels for For overshooting their deficit targets.
You get put into a disciplinary procedure if you're above 3% deficit.
But they're having a very hard time doing it because energy prices are so high.
I think the reality is that when you lose that economic lever, you lose your ability to implement and backdoor a lot of the social policies anyway, right?
So even if the people of each of these nation states are segregated, in return from my seeding governance and sovereignty, at least I get this sort of financial blanket of security.
If that financial blanket starts to wear thin or even proves to be illusory, then you start asking the question of, well, why the hell am I giving up my ability to self-govern if it's at least not even for the economic arrangement that we had?
That's right.
It sort of is a sugar daddy type relationship.
That's right.
A lot of the things you thought you were self-governing for, you wind up doing in the privacy of your own home now.
You sort of say, well, I can't go out and, I don't know, sort of Do what I used to do, but I can join a group on the internet or something.
I don't know.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Or I can't express myself, whatever, freely.
I'm going to do it in the privacy of my own home and digital channels or use a VPN or whatever it is.
And it starts to look...
But when people say you have to leave your home because you can't afford it anymore, you kind of get angry.
Yeah, yeah, right, right, right.
And I think that's really, I think, the interesting point, I think, really into Western Europe.
I'd love to probe on, but even lessons for the United States is, it's one thing if, you know, you had the woke stuff in the United States that sort of annoying, more than annoying, even reflects, I think, a cultural denigration of our heritage and who we are as a country.
You see vestiges of that emerging in Europe, but against the conditions of economic plenty, right?
In some ways, it was even a product of A Federal Reserve, and you could talk about the ECB playing a similar role in artificially creating money that didn't actually reflect underlying value.
And you have the ability to engage in this sort of cultural indulgence that then the government's actually able to sort of codify through legal or quasi-legal means.
It's another then when the tide recedes to say, okay, that stuff is here to stay.
But I also can't afford my house anymore.
And that my wages have stayed flat, but prices have gone up.
And nobody seems to give a damn, but they care about everything else relating to the way we're supposed to have moral obligations to take care of migrants or those who are disempowered when somebody tells me that I'm on the top of some sort of intersectional totem pole.
And that was annoying while I was doing pretty well, but it's downright insulting when I'm actually not doing so well right now.
And so in some ways, the buildup of a lot of the woke people Intersectional ideology in economically tolerable times becomes...
Utterly intolerable with vengeance at a moment where you actually feel real economic pain.
And that, I think, is a formula for catalytic change.
But I'd ask you for your perspective, both on the other side of the pond as well as ours, for what's really going on there.
That is my perspective.
I mean, you talk about...
Yes, I mean, we are going to reopen a lot of questions that we thought were closed.
Interesting.
I mean, people talk about, you know, the popularity of books about civilizations and how civilizations decline, both in the United States and in Europe.
And basically, we've done what our grandparents warned us against.
We've traded We've traded a certain amount of independence for comfort, which is a trade that's always available to people.
Having traded away our independence, we now find we don't have enough independence to sustain our comfort.
We're going to have to relearn some More kind of peasant-y truths, I think.
About how it's maybe more valuable to build things than to dream things up.
Or about how you have to get up in the morning and do real work and that kind of stuff.
I think that that framing is...
Interesting, right?
We've traded our independence for comfort.
Now, I think if you play this out, if you no longer have the comfort, then you're not going to trade off your independence, like not even a little bit, which creates – I think that's the backdrop of social unrest because it gets to the second part, which you said we're about to reopen a lot of questions that you thought were closed.
If the question was closed, that at least creates a status quo of stability, maybe a stable equilibrium that you don't love, but everybody at least prefers stability to not.
But if your point is that I'm no longer getting the comfort that was the backbone of that trade-off, I'm going to go back and relitigate some of those questions that we thought was water under the bridge, which is really a formula for turmoil, social turmoil outright.
Where are you seeing that in Europe?
Where do you see evidence of that in Europe?
Do you see early vestiges of that happening, or do you think this is still skating to where the puck is going a little bit, but we're not quite there?
We're skating to where the puck is going, I think.
Well, look, where I see it is that these so-called populist groups have...
I wouldn't say they've triumphed in very few countries, but they have become the top party in many countries.
And I think that these issues are being reopened.
I mean, the fact that a right wing party can be You can be elected in Germany is really extraordinary.
The fact that a right-wing party can top the polls in Austria is also extraordinary.
You have a right-wing government in Italy.
You also had a government, I think, the one that was elected in 2018, was even more right-wing than it is now.
You have Hungary.
You have the bottom falling out of the left in Ireland.
I think you have the revolt against the government in France.
You have the rise of the center-right in Belgium.
You have Geert Wilders in Holland.
You have the Sweden Democrats playing a part in the government in Sweden.
On and on and on.
And, you know, with the exception of, I'd say, England and Poland, it's a pretty...
The continent is really moving right.
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What do you make of France?
Let's just talk about the dynamic of this last year.
I have my own view on it, but you are somebody who's probably thought even more deeply about what we're to take about the original rise of Le Pen, Bartorella in the context of the first set of elections, but then the domestic elections that represented a...
In a retreat from what you saw from the same voting public.
What do you think was going on there?
Actually, there wasn't a retreat.
It was an interesting thing.
So France had European elections.
The National Front finished tops with a third of the vote.
Then, perhaps unwisely, probably unwisely, Macron called national elections, which people sort of suspected, looking at the way the polls were looking, were going to bring the national front to power.
The reason they thought that is that France has Uh, elections that follow the same system that, uh, uh, we follow in, in Louisiana, right?
You have a two round, you have an open first round, and then the top people who get over a certain threshold, which is usually either two or three people run off in the second round, which means if you're like, generally the guy who gets 37% in the first round winds up being your, your next, um, congressman.
There are many cases where there are three candidates in a race.
And what happened is that Macron and the hard left, which is a very interesting development in its own right, considerably more radical, I would say, than the national rally, the Le Pen party.
But on the left, I mean, they're very anti-Israel.
They are the party of the Muslim immigration to France.
Macron allied with them.
He made an electoral pact with them to withdraw their candidates.
Each party would withdraw their candidates strategically so that they could top the National Front.
And the result is that in the second round, the National Front still got the most votes, but they got many fewer seats.
So it took about twice as many seats To get a national rally seat, a Le Pen seat, as it did to get a popular front seat, a left-wing seat.
So it was a trick.
It was an anti-democratic move, actually.
In spirit, although it was quite legal.
It's a kind of a...
It's legal, but it was anti-democratic in spirit.
Yeah, nobody's saying it's not legal.
But the thing that really topped it off is having used the hard left to keep the right wing out of power, Macron then appointed a right-wing premier, a person on the right of the old, you know, let's call it the center-right, let's say the Mitt Romney-type romp of the French right.
He appointed a guy who would be acceptable to the national rally, because if he's not acceptable to Le Pen, the government will fall.
So it's moving every which way.
He has the...
Macron has gained the reputation of someone who will say almost anything, you know?
Right, right, right.
And he's able to walk that tightrope, but it doesn't really reflect a change in the underlying dynamics.
No, I mean, it's a presidential system.
It's like here.
Once you're elected, you're in for five years, bombing an extraordinary impeachment type event.
Right, right.
So you see a lot of this still percolating beneath the surface, right?
The reopening, the questions that we thought were closed.
Yes.
The trade-off between independence and comfort being a treaty and a bargain that no longer holds.
There's a new equilibrium, a disequilibrium, at least, coming in Europe.
But people are going to have to relearn to be peasants, basically.
Yeah.
Interesting.
What do you mean by that?
I mean that during this period of bartering away independence for comfort, people were encouraged to listen to these new schemes.
It's like, oh, here's green energy.
It's going to seem like your energy is costing more, but it's not really going to cost more because of your blah, blah, blah.
And people were looking and trying to figure out what's going which way.
And eventually, I think that they've sort of developed the sense that they've been had.
And so they're developing, voters are developing the psychology that peasants had in like 19th century novels by Balzac.
You know, someone walks up to your door and says, look, I'll offer you $10 million for your farm.
It's like, nope.
You know, nope, I'm not going to listen to you.
For me to get engaged in a sort of like conversation with you, even if you're being nice to me, even if what you are offering me seems good to me, I'm not going to do it.
I'm just going to say no.
And that's what And so I think that it's an interesting thing in this country.
You look at these two huge debates we've had in which, in each of them, one side seems to have drubbed the other, and yet they have no effect on the polls or anything.
There's nothing.
It's like people have stopped listening.
And that's a sign of something, I think.
What do you think it is a sign of?
Well, I think it's a sign of peasantization.
Of, like, people have been kind of, like, led down the garden path too many times.
And they don't...
They're just not going to...
They're going to vote as they see fit.
They're not going to listen to a plan or a project of any kind.
Because it's either not going to happen or it's going to happen for someone else's benefit.
I think that this bargain in the United States is one where...
I mean, this is...
Deep stuff.
I think for the future, even the conservative movement, in what direction we take, are we actually willing to say to the voter, you've been screwed by the nanny state arrangement, and then that involves taking some of the cocaine away, to use that as an analogy or whatever, right?
You take the coke away from the coke addict, but that actually gives you your autonomy back.
And that's really part of the dignity of the individual that we've traded off, and people feel that sense of the loss of dignity.
But we have a conservative movement, and I'm not talking about just the old right or whatever.
I'm talking about even, in some ways, one of the reluctances of the so-called new right is actually to take Real serious aim at a lot of those nanny state entitlements that were part of the barter transaction that you described,
the deal with the devil, that, you know, I think that's the real question for the conservative movement is do we just sort of, you know, reconstitute the devil a little bit that made the trade and make sure it's one that actually respects the The peasants, as you put it, with shared values that align with conservative principles,
or do we actually say, no, the arrangement was in some ways a sham arrangement from the start, and we have to undo the whole thing and dismantle the nanny state, even if that comes with some discomfort, some pleading from, like you say, coke addict, you take the coke away, the first reaction is not going to be great.
But it's what needs to be done for his own betterment in the long run.
Yes, but there's a difference because when you take the coke away, you assume that the society is still there.
The employment market is still there.
You can just keep the guy clean.
There is stuff for him out there.
But a lot of this nanny state that you described has involved our unlearning How to do these things ourselves.
How do you save for a retirement?
You think like, I didn't know I was going to have to save for a retirement.
And now I'm almost retired.
And what am I going to do?
That attitude.
You can't ask a person like that to just go.
To just go out and make that leap of faith.
This was always the problem with the welfare state, certainly with the retirement part of the welfare state, which I think is now the biggest part.
At the very start, you had a generation that got to collect without paying in.
And at the very end, you're going to have a generation that pays in without collecting.
It's just math.
Right.
So I think that what has to happen is that the...
Just punctuate that point even further.
So you have a generation that pays in without collecting, but against the backdrop of being told that they had to cede their sovereignty on issues relating to cultural matters and self-governance...
Yeah.
So it's a double whammy.
It's sort of the generation that pays in without collecting is going to be pissed off enough and frustrated enough, but may work in the context of a self-governing republic to say, okay, but at least we self-govern.
We're going to solve these problems together.
But it's another, if you've already ceded your ability to self-govern in the name of the barter transaction to say, okay, well, we're going to shower you with stuff.
Even as we take away your sovereignty, now it's a double whammy.
But I think there's enough self-government left that this can be eventually.
And it can be an electoral platform for some presidential candidate.
And it's a bad electoral platform now because we have this baby boom generation that is about 38% of the voting public that...
Has not really begun to disappear.
But once it falls below a certain demographic level and the people who are paying without collecting rise above a certain demographic level, it's going to happen almost instantaneously.
It's going to happen.
You know, it's going to be something that you didn't think of.
You know, at one point, six months later, it's going to be a fait accompli, you know, with a law and effects on your bank account, etc.
And, you know, the paying without collecting uprising, if you're calling it that, is an uprising that is more than just I got screwed economically.
It's that I got screwed in a deeper sense, which is, you know, that's real 1776 stuff right there at that point.
Yeah, but if you can get the monkey off your back of paying taxes for this, there is some scope to do something different with those funds.
I don't know.
Like what?
I don't know.
Create a new system.
Give people their money.
I mean, if you think it's the actual welfare state that's failed, you can give them the money back.
Give them the money back.
It's like a company returning dividend back to the shareholders.
You're giving it back to the people.
To be fair, though, I mean, that was George W. Bush's idea at the turn of the millennium, and it didn't work out very well.
In what sense was that his idea?
Well, I mean, his idea was that we had surpluses in the annual budget rather than deficits as we had had, you know, basically from the 60s until Clinton.
And so we should give the surpluses back.
But he got a little too enthusiastic about it.
He fought a war.
He wanted to...
I think that's actually what got in the way of it in a certain sense.
It's really interesting.
But we wound up on the way to a $34 trillion You know, debt.
You know, I do think one of the interesting moves of the neoconservative movement was in some ways the codified acceptance of the existence of the nanny state, but just in some sort of attenuated form versus kind of a paleoconservative or a pre-neoconservative vision that was just hostile to the whole project.
And, you know, it's interesting because I think in the America First right, you have a lot of hostility to the so-called neocons as it relates to foreign policy.
But in some ways, it has borrowed and even ossified in certain strains of the America First right.
And I love the view that there's two strains of the America First right ahead.
There's the more national libertarian direction and there's national protectionist direction.
The National Protectionist direction has more leaders certainly articulating that position.
I believe the National Libertarian version of it is actually going to be more lasting and successful and better for the country.
That is a core...
I mean, the title of this book is Truths, the Future of America First.
As it relates to the future of America first, that's the fork in the road that I see.
But anyway, the irony to bring it back is I think as they rail against the neocons on foreign policy, they've actually accepted the neoconservative premise, which is kind of fatalistic about the existence of that nanny state, rather than taking up the project.
It sort of is a question that we thought was closed.
And I think we may see a moment in the conservative movement ahead to reopen some of those questions that we thought were closed.
That water is not under the bridge.
The bridge is...
The bridge is falling.
Yeah, yeah.
So we're all in the water.
The water's not under the bridge.
I think that's coming.
I think it's coming, but I think it's going to challenge the protectionist version of the America First movement that sort of takes the nanny state as given, but just tries to recompose it to advance more conservatively palatable ends.
I think it's going to really put some real pressure on the protectionist pro-regulatory version of it.
I think that if you make this distinction between what's basically a domestic neoconservatism and a foreign neoconservatism, you have to remember when they arose.
I mean, the domestic neoconservatism that sort of arose in Washington and New York in the 60s and 70s was aimed at making the welfare state more.
It didn't want the government to be mismanaged.
It was, you know, people were really getting sloppy, I mean, and it was becoming a very poorly run state.
And it said, you know, you have orderly cities, you have to fight crime and all that stuff.
But that was in the middle of...
You know, that was in the heyday of the welfare state we're talking about, where the country was shared by the generation of the people who designed it, the greatest generation, and their children whom it was designed for, the baby boomers.
The state was invincible.
That was really most you could do.
Then you got the neocons who were associated with foreign adventurism.
And that just failed, and it's become very unpopular.
But now other things are possible.
I think that the domestic neocons did a good thing.
They did as much as they could do at the time to keep the country from sort of really breaking down into a poorly organized, poorly run Yeah, I mean, their point is, you know, we'll pay the taxes so long as government functions, right, and does a good job of at least, we're going to accept some element of this post-LBJ great society, okay, it's here to stay, the social winds went in that direction, but let's at least be smart about it, was the domestic neoconservative vision.
And the foreign policy version of it went on foreign adventurism, which is unclear and worth reflecting at some point.
I haven't quite gotten to the bottom of what might be the causal link of both of those strands arising at the same time.
It seems like those are two very different projects, but they arose in the same form.
I don't think they arose at the same time.
Okay, it came in sequence.
Yeah.
No, I think that the domestic neoconservatism was a matter of fixing the excesses of the great society.
I think it was a pushback against some of the real utopian stuff that was done in the wake of the Civil Rights Act.
Versus an alternative approach where you just said, shut it down, which is sort of what I... Well, that's a very interesting thing.
And that's the interesting thing, I think.
It's one of the things that made the 1970s probably the most conservative decade of the last...
Is that that is really kind of where we were headed.
And I think that a bunch of people entered the Reagan coalition who really were not as...
Hostile to this welfare state as Reagan- Nixon was mixed on it.
Nixon was mixed, I think.
Nixon was very mixed.
I mean, Nixon's instincts, I believe, were more Reaganite than we think, but his politics was very accommodating of the welfare state.
Pragmatic negotiating.
Yes, this has to do with the demographic hand he was dealt.
You know, the welfare state was fully funded and it was non-problematic in terms of actually people choosing not to have children and that kind of thing.
So Nixon did the thing that made sense for him, even if he was probably temperamentally as uneasy with the welfare state as Reagan was, or maybe more.
Yeah, I mean, it didn't really translate as much into his policy agenda.
That's a whole discussion.
Nixon's complicated domestic legacy is a discussion for probably another day.
But I do think that this question of the future of the both strands of the neoconservatism Maybe one came after the other, but actually created a cycle.
And the cycle, I think, goes something like this, where the warfare state, which ended up being the foreign policy, foreign adventurism strand of the neoconservatism, which came later on your telling of it, which I think is probably correct, actually.
The warfare state then necessitates a different kind of welfare state, which sort of goes like this.
If you invade the rest of the world, you have to invite them.
In some ways, Europe is actually the strongest argument you have if you're a European.
I care about America, so I don't want to offer them great arguments for this, but in the interest of truth, I'm going to give you sort of someone in Europe, if they want to make the best argument for America bearing a disproportionate share of NATO budgets or something like this, which...
I'm against, but if they wanted to make the argument for it, they would say, your foreign adventurism in the Middle East is what's caustic creating our mass migration crisis into Europe.
So you better darn well pay your fair share and then some, because you guys caused this problem for us.
And in some ways, our southern border crisis Is part of this too.
And so it becomes this vicious cycle.
The more you invade the rest of the world, the more you have to invite them.
The welfare state is downstream of the warfare state.
And then you have a welfare state at home, which actually draws even more of that as a magnet.
And that relates actually to the immigration crisis.
And most people don't think about this linkage between this welfare state and anti-state issues and the immigration crisis when in fact they're sort of deeply linked.
And it just sort of leads back to, I think, the unambiguous right answer for the future of the conservative movement is to take up with the late 1980s, 1990s version of the neoconservatives, which are like sort of containing the containment of the LBJ Great Society project, to then take the other approach now, even if belatedly to say the right answer is shut it down, restore actual self-governance in the true sense.
The bargain was a deal with the devil to start with.
And right now, you're about to have a generation that paid in that isn't going to get paid out.
Let's get ahead of the social upheaval that comes in front of that and just give the money back to the people, self-governance, not just economically, but even on some of the areas where their sovereignty has been ceded.
That's where I see the future.
We are tied into economic as well as political relationships with the rest of the world.
So it will probably be difficult to turn inward.
Well, thank you, my man.
It was a great conversation.
I'm excited to continue this.
I enjoyed this.
I enjoyed this quite a bit.
Likewise, Rebecca.
It's nice talking to you.
Great.
Good talking to you.
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