Ep. 92 Transcript: Michael Lind, the Failure of Populism and the Class War After Trump
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Note: This is a rough transcript, lightly edited for clarity.
Marshall Kosloff: Michael Lind. Welcome back to The Realignment. Thanks for having me. It's been a year since we had you on the show. We spoke about your book, The New Class War a month before lockdowns and Corona virus. So the first question before we get into Joe Biden is basically going to be, how has or hasn't the development in the U.S. and the world over the course of the last year, either confirmed or refuted ideas in your book, both looking at the left and the right?
Michael Lind: In my book, The New Class War, I argued that our politics is now polarized not so much between left and right, but between insiders and outsiders. The inside culture I call technocratic neo-liberalism. And I think the response of Progressives and many centrists to COVID-19. By idealizing a scientist like, Dr. Fauci, illustrates this culture that the experts know [00:01:00] best, right? That the ignorant masses need to be kept at a distance. Also the cult of personality around Ruth Bader Ginsburg illustrates the preference of a lot of technocratic neoliberals for policy to be done by authorities that are insulated, to some degree, from the voters . Whether it's administrators or international agencies or in this case, the federal judiciary. But at the same time , in the new class, we are very critical of what I call demagogic populism illustrated in different ways by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.
And my argument is that while this can channel legitimate grievances against the establishment , in practice, demagogic populism, which has a long history in the American South and in Latin America and even in cities in the Northeast , tends to fizzle out in a cult of personality around the mayor or the governor, or in this case, around [00:02:00] president Trump.
Saagar Enjeti: I remember you saying that in January and I guess it was more taboo in order for people like us to say something like that. And it's obviously all born out Michael, exactly as you predicted. You were like, yeah, most populous or charlatans in the history of American politics and Trump's very last act as president was pardoning Jeanine Pirro’s husband of tax fraud. Like I can't help but think that was the perfect thesis.
Let's start with the Biden speech. We were talking right before the episode. The name of this podcast is The Realignment.
Is this a realignment in American politics? Is it a restoration? I was watching Biden's speech and look, there's nothing to quibble with there. He was like, I'll be a president for all Americans. It's about as hum-drum, cookie cutter of a speech. I'm not criticizing it. I think that's why 80 million people voted for him.
What do you make of that speech, the tenor, and its context within what I've seen you call the five crises of the American regime. What is that going to do? For [00:03:00] our politics in the moment that we're in right now?
Michael Lind: I wish the best for the new president, the government, and I hope our leaders can find lots of areas of consensus.
But just as an analyst, I suspect that in particular, the anti-Trump coalition peaked today. It will start disintegrating immediately because for four years you've had this incredible omnibus coalition of almost all of the power centers in American society. Of militants , neoconservatives , libertarians in some cases, radical leftists, Progressive's, and establishment third way nooliberals. They all agreed that we have to put aside our differences and get Donald Trump out of office.
He's gone now. So I think it's nothing but downhill for that coalition as the deep fissures within it become evidenced. I think much of the elite hopes this is a restoration. That is, [00:04:00] it will be like a TV show where it turns out the last few seasons were just a dream.
And we're going to go back and find a different plot, starting in 2016. But the country has changed, the world has changed, and the party coalitions have changed. Biden was pushed by the democratic establishment in part in the hope that he would win back a lot of Reagan Democrats or maybe Trump Democrats.
But in fact he did best with college educated affluent whites who are moving into the Democratic party . The Democrats lost substantial numbers of African-American, Hispanic and Asian-American voters. Even though they still get the majority of the non-white votes.
So those who hope for a restoration , I think instead we're just at a midpoint in an ongoing partisan and policy realignment.
Saagar Enjeti: So this is something I've been toying over in my mind,
Marshall Kosloff: Michael, and I'd love to
Saagar Enjeti: have your
[00:05:00] Marshall Kosloff: thoughts on it. I'm generally
Saagar Enjeti: of the mind, currently, that this was probably the high water
Marshall Kosloff: mark for any sort of
Saagar Enjeti: Trumpian nationalism.
And the reason I
Marshall Kosloff: say that is because it seems increasingly
Saagar Enjeti: clear to me are that there are two irreconcilable parts of the current Republican coalition. I'm not saying it can't change, but I'm just saying versus the iteration that we saw. You have this
Marshall Kosloff: kind of QAnon wing
Saagar Enjeti: of the
Marshall Kosloff: party which is also
Saagar Enjeti: compiled with a lot of working class voters who are there for Trump specifically. Not there for Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, tax cuts.
But. Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney and McConnell do embody, maybe let's say like 15 to 25%, of the
Marshall Kosloff: party. It seems
Saagar Enjeti: increasingly, and you could see this in the impeachment battle lines of
Marshall Kosloff: Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney,
Saagar Enjeti: Adam Kissinger, those types of
Marshall Kosloff: people, being basically
Saagar Enjeti: to the point where I don't know if they
Marshall Kosloff: can exist in the
Saagar Enjeti: same [00:06:00] literal political vehicle of the Republican party. And the way that I really
Marshall Kosloff: saw this manifest
Saagar Enjeti: was in Georgia.
Marshall Kosloff: Georgia basically
Saagar Enjeti: made
Marshall Kosloff: it where somebody like David Perdue or Kelly Loffler was screwed either
Saagar Enjeti: way. If they embrace Trump's 'stop the steel' then they lose their base, but if they continue to indulge it, which they did, they lost those suburban Republican voters who were basically like, 'screw this. I'm out, maybe not out forever, but I'm out for right now.' How do you see that current coalition of the Republican party? Am I being too bearish? Are you more optimistic? How do you see things changing in that regard?
Michael Lind: I wouldn't characterize it as optimism or pessimism. I try to be objective, but I think that the Republican party is in good shape electorally. They did much better than expected with racism across the country, and this year was elected Western election. They're picking up slowly but surely a lot of working class non-white voters, which they [00:07:00] need, if they're gonna lose college educated whit es. As long as the democratic party repels enough orders, then the Republican party will win elections . it's not a dynamic thing. It's just that they're basically seen by voters as a roadblock to stop something they think as worse. But if you think the Democrats will alienate substantial groups of voters, then that can translate into Republican votes. On the other hand, I think I agree with you, neither can win elections. The Republicans, as of now, cannot govern. They have no governing philosophy. What you call the QAnon right, but it was the Buchanan right. Research hot-button issues of any given time . Guns and abortion and so on. It doesn't make any legitimate issues. But their basic one is symbolic and tribal [00:08:00] but they're not attached to any philosophy of political economy or foreign relations or jurisprudence or any kind of coherence of viewpoints. The declining establishment in the Republican party has what I call stoked libertarianism.
That is, it's libertarianism, and then you wave some flags during the election. Essentially a celebratory party. And that's going nowhere. You see a lot of the same voters who vote for Republicans in the States, also vote for minimum wage increases and so on. We're in this weird situation where unfortunately, because you want to have two dynamic parties, the Democrats are the dominant party.
By default when it comes to actual policy, the policy disputes that matter are within the democratic coalition between the neoliberal Democrats, like Biden, the Clinton's, [00:09:00] and Obama and the Progressives to their left. And at this point the Republicans can learn and they can win back their House, maybe, and the Senate.
They can have a trifecta maybe in 2020, 2024. But they're essentially reactive.
Marshall Kosloff: You said something earlier that I want to dig into specifically relating to realignments. You said a political realignment and a policy realignment because there's a distinction there that matters, not just in terms of the show's branding, but actually as you can see of about whether or not the Republican party could be dynamic. From my perspective and my interpretation of your work, is that a huge part of America's political realignment has to do around class and education. It's not necessarily tied to race in the same way that previous ones were. And as your Biden vote is tied to whether you attended college or graduate school or not, that is going to lead to a bunch of opportunities for people on the right.
Both demagogic and otherwise to focus on the discourse [00:10:00] about elites. That's why you saw a lot of people focusing on the small businesses closing, etc. That's the political version. But there's also a policy version, which is, Republicans should win over the pan-ethnic working class through promoting the minimum wages in certain cases, etc.
My concern is that the Republican establishment will discover, and this is already happening in media circles, that you can affect a political realignment by focusing on "stop the steal," a higher IQ version thereof. You can focus on the, "it's terrible that they've locked us down and we should just not do that without having an actual alternative plan there."
How do you think of and separate the policy and the political and how do we get out of that way? Because I just don't want a world where the Right discovers they could talk about how it sucks that the democratic party is full of all the Harvard law graduates while also at the same time winking and giving their same people salt tax repeals, and the actual tax [00:11:00] cuts that were happening in 2017.
Michael Lind: I think at some point a policy of realignment will catch up with the part of some realignment within the Republicans. It takes some time. It took a generation of in the democratic party. By about 2000 , you were already seeing the Democrats were becoming the outlanding Republicans of the mid 20th century. The middle wealthy Republicans, they were internationalists, free-traders based in New England and in the areas settled by New England. They lost their traditional base of farmers and labor. But you still have these Democrats and there are a few living fossils, I admire them, but he's a relic. Like Andrew Brown in Ohio, praising FDR and Truman and farm subsidies and the labor of the steel unions. And finally, the Democrats looked around and there weren't any farmers, there weren't any steelworkers, in the whole auditorium. So they have realigned. They are now the party of off-shoring, of free [00:12:00] trade, of low wage immigration. Those were the country club Republicans 30 or 40 years ago.
The Republicans, if you look at their base, they are the Roosevelt Democrats. Their core is white southerners and white ethnics, particularly Catholic Euro-Americans ; but more and more African-Americans, particularly working class and Hispanic Americans. They have this Chamber of Commerce of Cato Institute, libertarian elite, intellectual and policy elite.
Which honestly is just in the wrong party. I looked the other day at the education statistics. All the way up until the late 20th century, the Republicans got the college educated people who are now Democrats. FDR, now this is amazing, he did very well among high school graduates and he did best among people whose education did not extend being on sixth grade.
He [00:13:00] got that K-6 vote, which was huge. So he never, ever got the Ivy league vote, or even the small-town college votes. So how will this come about? I think realignments come about ultimately, as a matter of calculation by politicians. And right now I think a lot of Republican politicians are afraid that if they anger the club for growth or these other libertarian donors, then they will be taken out in the next election.
But at the end of the day, elections are determined by warm bodies and voting booths. And if you get more and more Republicans who can survive attacks by libertarian donors, then they're going to look like a paper tiger. Now it doesn't solve the other problem, which is the think tanks are, and this is true of democratic [00:14:00] think-tanks too, think-tanks are funded by people who run the spectrum between libertarianism on the right and centrist neo-liberalism on the left. There's no Bernie Sanders think-tank. There's no Trumpism without the American context and some other small disproportionately influential outlets.
But I think that what that means is the Republicans are going to have to use the resources of government itself. If the only national institution you control is elected office, then the parties are going to have to do their thing. You can't you can't expect grant funded organizations, raising money from billionaires, to come up with something that billionaires don't like. And other parties in the Western world, the parties have their own party institutes. And they answer to the elected politicians and their voters. This may take some [00:15:00] time,but I'm surprised that it's taken so long, frankly.
Saagar Enjeti: Michael, there's one point I want you to expand on a little bit, which for our more left leaning audience, I don't think they intuit this as much. What you said is that the only debates in America which matter today are between mainstream Democrats, basically like centrist, neoliberal Democrats and Progressives. Now I think that conservatives are beginning to understand that what they think is literally irrelevant and then what they fight about amongst each other is even more irrelevant than that.
And so when all is determined by that kind of internecine conflict within the liberal coalition, not even necessarily the coalition, but between the liberal elites in terms of their discourse, what does that mean for our society? Just expand a little bit more on that.
Michael Lind: In the middle of the 20th century, a political scientist named Samuel Louisville came up with his "Sun and Moon" theory of the parties. He argued that throughout American history, we usually have a one and a half part of the system. [00:16:00] There's clearly a dominant party ,and the essential debates take place within that dominant party. And it was the Lincoln Republicans up until the 1930s. And that was the Roosevelt Democrats up until the 70's and 80's. He called that the sun party. The whole solar system revolves around it. The moon party has like the bright side of the moon and the dark side of the moon.
And the bright side, they just want the sun party policy watered down. And then on the dark side of the moon, as it were, they're just radical rejectionists. They're just against everything. And I think that's a real danger that the Democrats are becoming the de facto majority party.
And if they win all of the elections, except for the ones where you have rural over-representation in the Senate and maybe the electoral college now and then, they are the majority party. It's very difficult for the moon party, once he gets locked into that [00:17:00] position, to progress because there's this deep division between the radical rejectionists who just want a total counter-revolution and the accommodationists' who want to be accepted.
You saw this in the fifties and sixties. This is where Buckley, Goldwater, Reagan conservatives originated as complete rejection of everything. The new deal, the civil rights revolution. They are just against everything. They became more moderate over time. And at the same time they did criticize the modern Republicans, like Eisenhower and others have, of basically being watered down New Deal-ers. So it's not a good position to be in, to be the satellite of the dominant party.
Marshall Kosloff: What I like about this is, like we mentioned at the top, we're recording pretty much a year to the date after our last episode. And at the time, speaking of ideas, which have changed a bit, I was much more [00:18:00] bullish on the "there's no libertarian path out for the party" until frankly you had the lockdowns and the genuinely grassroot's.
Obviously, there was a lot of astroturfing, especially at the start. So the protest at the state Capitol, all those dynamics that a lot of that was very cokie, but moving in, at least with my social media and Saagar I want you to speak to this too, because you get this from listeners, there is a genuine small-L libertarian. Not the DC beltway variety that we all have various degrees of beef with, but there's actual people who I know back home who are like, "screw government." This isn't even about Dr. Fauci. This is like, why can the government tell me that I have to close my store or I can't keep my gym open. It's very folk.
It's very grassroots, genuinely. And I just don't see that libertarianism having any interest in using government. It's just so, the governing organs within the right are just so [00:19:00] atrophied. And the top level philosophy is just so weak. Frankly, a huge problem is that all of the folks I see on the right attempting to provide a Trumpism after Trump or giving a framework are all mostly Ivy league people who, have very degrees of inability to actually reckon with that reality. So I don't see the smart version of the anti-lockdown take, who is going to disagree with me on a million different things, but at the end of the day I know they're capable of providing a justifiable suitable alternative.
So how does that dynamic work? What I'm really getting at is if your coalition, or you're part of the coalition, has no control over the university system, popular culture, the think-tank area. How do you actually create sustainable alternatives when you don't have the incentive to do so?
Michael Lind: I'm a professor and an author and I've been accused of being an intellectual ? ? But you can actually govern a country if most of the intellectuals are against you.
And you just come up with policies among the [00:20:00] politicians and community groups and so on. The intellectuals for the most part in the Roosevelt era were either left wing socialists who thought the New Deal-ers were pawns to the capitalists' or they were conservatives at various times.
There weren't that many New Deal intellectuals. Medial policy was hammered out by these, many of them crooked, Southern small-town politicians who got elected to Congress. Urban, ethnic bosses like Carmine DeSapio. So there was no master plan that a bunch of intellectuals came up with in 1913 and implemented. And the plans they had, I've read them , were essentially tossed aside because they were planning the economy and so on.
If you look at the long hegemony of the Lincoln Republicans from the civil war and reconstruction, all the way up until Herbert Hoover. The intellectuals hated them. They were seen as just a corrupt gang of protectionists, representing manufacturing and they had some labor support and so on. [00:21:00]
They would engage in cultural war issues. Fighting the civil war, waving the bloody flag as it was called and they dominated the country in policy. So I guess I'm pushing back a little, I think if you look at the libertarian think tanks, which if I became a libertarian tomorrow, I could retire rich. There's so much in Monticello.
We could start our own libertarian think-tank, there's just so much money, but what have they accomplished in 30 years? So analysts plans for privatizing social security, toxic debt on our lives. Even when Republicans control all three branches, right?
Open borders, not going to happen. Free trade / isolationism, not going to happen. There' s more liberal trade and less liberal trade. So I think you can overrate the importance of ideas as opposed to policies.
Marshall Kosloff: So thanks for the pushback, because I want to moderate what I said.
I completely agree to [00:22:00] the, 'you don't necessarily need the intellectuals.' I'm more speaking about the folks who run the technocracy. Saagar, this is your thing you always get really jazzed up about. But in many ways, the Trump administration was doomed the second that the travel ban was written in the terrible way and was just incoherent. The Trump administration in many ways was screwed when a lot of the only people they could hire were weird racist people who were then having to be publicly let go. And then that creates a vicious flywheel where I don't want to work at DHS because there's that anti-Semite there and just goes on and on. So what I more mean is, it doesn't seem like the populist, libertarian coalition that exists right now has the capacity to even put in place folks who have an interest in or ability to implement the policy points. Because you're totally right, the libertarian, all of the work of Cato Institute and the Mercatus Center has not been put to good use for that the last 30 years.
But I do believe if you did elect Justin Amash [00:23:00] president, almost certainly I would trust them to implement all of the policies they want. I do not think the same thing is true of the Populist. And guess what, the same is true in the Populist left too. This is the general problem of populism. So now that I've redefined it, what do you think of the point there?
Michael Lind: If you're the more popular party that is frowned upon by business elites and universities and so on , the way the Democrats used to be, the way the Republicans are now-- Again, I think you have to use what you control, which is the government , so that you're not gonna get a whole lot of lot of Trumpism without Trump. Whatever you want to call it, more inclusive nationalist, less cukie program. You have to have Congress, the plum book the president appoints 4,000 some odd appointees, right? Where do they come from? For the Democrats, since they now control the commanding heights of the corporations and of the media and up the universities, [00:24:00] they have their pick and at the think tanks.
The Republicans I think, are going to have a narrower pool. It's got to be broader than Fox News. And there's no pool there. And that pool is a congressional staff and also administrative agencies. So the real problem, I think, a lot of these problems with the Republicans could be fixed. If you had a sufficiently cohesive caucus in the U.S. Congress and you had career paths for staffers. Unfortunately, Senator Hawley seems to have damaged his career by endorsing these lies about the election being stolen. People like that , their staffers have, when you have a president of your party in the White House, you've go to work in executive agencies.
When you leave probably for the foreseeable future, Republicans are not going to be that relevant. No Uber and Lyft, and it's think tanks and so on. But they could go back to [00:25:00] work for the government. In fact, if you look at the really transformative politicians, they were not outsiders.
They were not amateurs who came in at the age of 60 or 70. Washington had a career in Virginia Colonial politics. Lincoln was a career politician who practiced law. FDR, career politician more or less. But you really need what the Soviet's called the Cockroach. And so I'm agreeing with you, Marshall, that there were no contracts. In a sense, Trump was premature. That's assuming that he was trying to do something other than increase the value of his brand. It's not clear. But when Reagan came to power, you had all of these people who could be appointed. And some of them were from business and think-tanks, and a lot of them were from the House and the Senate and from congressional staffs and from state governments.
So I think that's where you have to look for your volunteers, its the government itself.
Marshall Kosloff: That's really helpful. So as we [00:26:00] are setting up the credibility and the work that you're doing, something a lot of our folks are thinking about is the future of both parties and something you said specifically, you wrote a piece in, I believe it was May. You wrote a piece in early 2016 before the general election where you said the future of both parties are Clintonism and Trumpism. Which you hear that and you think about let's focus on the Clintonian side. You hear that and you ,think that doesn't make any sense, that doesn't seem possible, but at the same time, Joe Biden won the nomination. Resoundingly. So can you speak about how, in many ways, your conception of the idea that people were underrating the power of center left, post-Reagan, neo-liberalism as a political force. Can you just speak about that evolution over four years? Because the one thing that I don't think your piece anticipated was the rise of the squad and the dynamic around that.
Michael Lind: That's the piece was back in 2015, where [00:27:00] I argued that the Democrats had a Clintonian future. And the Republicans would have been more populist and nationalist in that they strongly resemble Trump in other ways. And that's just looking at their constituents.
The partisan realignment is nearing completion. It started back in the sixties and seventies, when the Democrats started losing the white working class to the Republicans and the Democrats started getting more and more upscale people. If you look at 1972 at the McGovern coalition, it was already foreshadowing what we have today which was the top of the socioeconomic strata and the bottom. So in a way this is delayed Nixon-McGovern; there's now Clintonism -Trumpism over Bidenism and Trumpism. I was surprised by the strength of the support for Bernie Sanders. But it turns out [00:28:00] that the social base for that kind of Left is inherently weak. First of all, they're college educated, young people for the most part.
These are people who are working. They're not protesting in the streets, right? If you have a day job in an essential industry. So these are young, college educated, would-be professionals. Many of them work in the universities, in the nonprofit sector and so on.
And I think it's true here, it's true in Britain, it's true in Western Europe. This is the social base for the socialists. But here's the problem with it, Marshall, where did they get their money? Who pays their salaries? Billionaires! Billionaires pay their money through grants, either directly or indirectly through the Gates foundation, through Bloomberg philanthropies, and so on.
It's like what Herbert Marcuse, the Marxist, called 'artificial negativity.' Where you have a bunch of people [00:29:00] whodepend on billionaires, giving them grants for the denouncing the lawyers. So I just don't take it that seriously.
Saagar Enjeti: I completely agree with you, Michael.
You've definitely just pissed off a part of our audience and that's okay. When we try to articulate it, it always has to be reconciled. It's like when you find yourself marching in the streets on the same side of Jeff Bezos , are you really reading the populist revolution? Go ahead and send me your hate mail, I've heard it all before. There's something though that you said in the past, which I absolutely love and Marshall highlighted this, which is, you said "liberalism is the disease. Populism is a symptom and democratic pluralism is the cure." And one of the things I've always appreciated about your work is the advocacy for more democracy in order to solve the problems that we have. So look, we've just spent a lot of time outlining the partisan coalitions, obviously the problems, the technocratic, neo-liberal elites. That's what we've spent hours talking about here. What do we do about it? In the face [00:30:00] of Trump's basic failures, in terms of trying to do anything about it, Joe Biden was overwhelmingly elected the president of the United States, at least 80 million votes.
That's a lot of people, the most votes ever cast in American history. That is in its form of democratic pluralism. But if we're to order and reorder and try and fix our society, how are we to do it, Michael?
Michael Lind: I think the basis, and this is a project for a generation of several generations, it's to rebuild the grassroots massive membership organization.
And in the 20th century, the most important were local political mission is up until the seventies. The parties were actually national federations of local clubs. That's disintegrated now, they're labels like billionaires in New York, like Donald Trump and Michael Bloomberg can compete for.
So you have the local political missions, and sometimes they were corrupt, but they were in touch with the folks in the neighborhood. Churches were much stronger. Churches and Synagogues in the [00:31:00] middle of the 20th century. And then you had unions, and as I like to point out, the two most important civil rights leaders of the 20th century, A. Philip Randolph and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., respectably a union founder and they pastored. So if you flash forward to 2020, we had the system in which the parties are willing labels that groups of billionaire funded politicians compete for.
The intelligentsia, such as it is in the media, are owned or get grants from the same small group of billionaires. And for longterm secularization, I don't see this reversing. Fewer and fewer people are part of religious congregations. So the thing about the working class , the working class individuals have no power as individuals.
They don't have one vote, which doesn't count for much. They have no [00:32:00] prestige. They have no contacts. They have no celebrity. If you're part of the working class majority of all races, maybe immigrants, the only thing working class has is its numbers. And those numbers are powerless unless they are organized and disciplined, hierarchical organizations, not spontaneous mass rallies. It's not these social movements like occupy wall street or the tea party. A bunch of people milling around for a day or a week is carnival, right? It's like ancient Rome. It's like Latin American Catholic countries. You have carnival, you blow off some steam and then you go back and work for the boss.
So I think in a way, the answer to what ails us politically is not going to be solved directly through the electoral political system. It's going to take institution building, and this country was good at that a [00:33:00] hundred years ago. Civil society, the United Way, the the farmers lobbies, the AFL later the AFL CIO, the churches, the Catholic Legion of decency, these were all grassroots organizations. And unless those exist, then politics is going to be a spectator sport where you have a rich people and their agents, battling it out while we watch on TV.
Saagar Enjeti: I'm so glad that you said that Michael. I want to hammer this home because it's something that I actually basically stole it from you.
And I've been emphasizing it ever since. What you just said requires, and actually is, I wouldn't call it a libertarian solution, but it is a conservative solution in that what you just talked about are balancing forces which do not require the government. AKA unions allow for collective bargaining in order to negotiate a wage without having to set something from the top. Churches and others, being able to organize and put external pressure, [00:34:00] a lot of conservative grievance right now currently, is like nobody listens to us in Hollywood or elsewhere.
As you pointed out in your book, they used to listen whenever it was an organized constituency, which had real political power. But as you point to, in an increasingly secular world, and importantly, this is where the elite comes in, which is that Marshall mentioned the lockdown constituency. You have this genuine folk, libertarian uprising against the lockdown.
What does that translate into? This is what I warned of here andelsewhere. It's Steven Moore being like, see, we need to open the economy. So we never have to spend a dollar in stimulus again, because, and he said this to me, "government spending does not stimulate the economy."
And you're like, this guy is out of his mind, but he is the representative functionally of the folk libertarian movement. Half because his organization funded some of that. But also because [00:35:00] he is the one in charge of translating that into a policy answer. So it seems like a two sides of the coin problem.
So how do we create these institutions? Especially if they are to be non-governmental as citizens, like what should civic minded people who listened to this podcast do if they want to contribute to that?
A few years ago I was invited by a famous billionaire to spend the weekend in a castle outside of London with a bunch of other notables from around the world to come up with a new social contract with Western world.
And unfortunately they didn't offer me plain-fare, so I was tempted to send an email back saying 'I'd like to come, but my private jet is in the can. It needs its muffler fixed in the garage.' And it's not going to come from plans, co-founded think-tanks. Think-tanks are good for getting advice to politicians, but if you look to get effective movements that changed American history, they started off in a particular [00:36:00] place.
The Republican party started off in Ripon, Wisconsin. There was the free soil movement. There were the suffragette . There was the Southern Christian leadership conference. As the name suggests, it was Southern. There was the Grange and the Farmers Alliance which started off in my native Texas and other places.
What I tell my students is , as a university professor, the first resort should not be a law passed by Congress or a presidential executive order. Like maybe you should actually like knock on some doors of your neighbors and see if you can settle at the neighborhood level. And if that doesn't work, go up. There's some things you can only do at the national level, but you have to have an army first, right?
And there are two forces in politics. One is dollars. The other is people. And people power takes three forms. In the government it takes the form of votes or denying [00:37:00] votes. In the economy. It takes the form of boycotts, or rather in culture. You can boycott movies you don't want. You can boycott TV shows. And in the economy, it takes the form of organized labor in some form.
I'm sorry. Individual workers have no bargaining power if you're a janitor, negotiating with Microsoft corporation. It has to be organized countervailing power. And now note that the power of the organized working class is not intellectual. Okay. They're not making plans and things like that.
There's a role for policy experts. They have veto power. If something is harming them they can throw the switch and veto it; they can boycott the movie. They can sit out the election or vote for the other candidate. They can strike if they're organized. So power to the masses does not mean doing what public opinion says. But it [00:38:00] means that they are able to put the brake on something that is affecting them in a bad way. Does that make sense? So this is why I distinguished pluralism from populism. Populism says, 'okay, 51% of the people say that that should be policy.' No, it's not the argument. Pluralism is , we have a community of communities. The nation is not just a community that individuals, these communities ought to be self-governing as much as possible. And you're absolutely right. A small government conservatives should embrace the pluralist vision, as well as civil libertarian progressives, who don't want to overpowerful the state.
Michael Lind: So ordinarily the state should reign, but not rule. It should last managers and employees cobble the details of health benefits and wages, instead of trying to legislate everything from Congress It should allow religious [00:39:00] organizations, and all civil organizations for that matter, to meet with media executives say, 'Hey, look, you're portraying our people in a demeaning, stereotypical way.'
Instead of the government trying to pass a law. So the government should only step in as a last resort. But notice the difference between pluralism of this short and populism which says, there's this one guy, or maybe this one woman, who has this mystic affinity with me, the little man or woman who watches on TV.
And I believe this one person is going to save us. And that always ends in tears. Pluralism, you have lots of intermediate authorities, each within their respective sphere. Okay. So maybe the Catholic clergy is upset with pornography in the media. Okay. And then they work on that. You have labor representatives, you have various kinds of industrial representatives , and they interact in [00:40:00] their sphere.
So power is diffused through the whole system. So that kind of pluralistic diffusion of power , rather than concentration of power in the central government, particularly the central government, is captured by a small number of very well educated and very rich people. I think that's what we need to push for and we need to be wary of the false alternative of populism where some charismatic media star or tycoon, or Trump was both, is going to parachute in and save us bccause that's not the way it will work.
Marshall Kosloff: There's so much there, Mike, I want to hit a couple points. Number one, the perfect example of theoperationalization of your populism ideas. Look what happened with PornHub and the credit card companies. What happened is, and this is the key thing about the pluralistic idea, you have to think of society as sectors. You had Nick [00:41:00] Kristoff columnist at the New York times, the New York times is a institution. Obviously it's not the paper record it once was, but in the center left places that control our society, in many respects, it's still taken a serious gospel. You had activists, some who are Left and some who are Right, who then had their work. And then that work was then amplified by the New York Times and PornHub and all of the different companies that provide credit card services had to change everything within a week.
Compare that to a conservative saying, 'we're going to appoint conservative Senator to hold a couple hearings where we're going to yell at the PornHub people and expect it to make any difference.' That doesn't lead to any change whatsoever. Because once again, I'm not saying that if you're on the right and you dislike PornHub, you have to say, I love the New York Times and they're my best friend, but you have to understand them as another power structure in society.
That in certain cases you can actually form a coalition to get things done, [00:42:00] but I want to get to something that I think is going to serve as a barrier to people actually building these bigger institutions that are on two different levels. So one, I'd like you to comment on this very annoying 'occupy wall street' libertarian Left idea that organizations don't have leaders. I remember if occupy, the whole thing was we don't have a leader, we don't have a representative. And if you look at BLM today, regardless of your feelings on BLM as an organization or a movement that doesn't have leadership. But I just saw today that it's been estimated that over the course of the last several months, hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, went to BLM organizations. It's completely unclear, I will find this for the show notes, this article is in the mainstream press. It's pretty unclear what all of that vast amount of money actually went towards when there's no actual leader, when there's no actual institutions, it's impossible to actually hold anyone accountable. So [00:43:00] I would just like you to comment on, and then one final thing here.
I love your point about mass. I love your point about centralization, but we've had libertarians on the show, of I'm thinking Erik Torenberg, who are obsessed with the idea in the 21st century that everything is going to be about decentralization and getting nicher and nicher. Your goal was to get a small community of people who agree with you.
Your goal is to get a newsletter where they're a thousand people will pay you a hundred dollars a year instead of a mass market publication who doesn't pay you as good of a rate. So can you just comment on all these broad phenomenon that I think are going to serve as mental blockers to actually creating the institutions and giving people the conceptualization, they need to address these issues.
Michael Lind: Let me begin by applauding your comments. So let me start with the second point again: narrow casting and targeting and all of this, it's what disproves that in politics. [00:44:00] Church buses; if you look at the late in the 1990s and the 200's , who provided the muscle for the Republican party and the democratic party? On the Republican party, it was evangelical Protestants who were very small group of the population.
And they're not actually a huge proportion of the electorate, but they were hugely influential because church buses would bus people to the polls, get those physical bodies to the polls and the African-American church did it. They're the reason Biden is president, right? It was older church going African-American Protestants.
And if you don't physically bus them, at least you get them to get out there and vote. You have voters guides and things like that. So I think that the influence of the media , and I'm not saying you share this view, but I think it's overplayed. Most working class Americans and that's three quarters of the population, are not that politically [00:45:00] sensitive.
They get their news somewhat randomly, mostly from radio/ TV. They're not heavily online. So there's a big difference between those who go to church and don't and those who go to unions and don't. And the organizations can turn them out and have disproportionate political power. Now remind me your first question.
Marshall Kosloff: My first question was many political movements, especially in the post financial crisis space, have conceived of the idea that they shouldn't have leadership. They don't have leadership.
It's all going to spontaneously gel into something coherent. That's where I refer to this idea as Left libertarianism. I'm stealing that from Matt Stoller, but how do you respond to that conception? Because I feel as if that is what it's going to stop everyone from doing things. The point about BLM is the fact that billions of dollars were given to BLM organizations, that's perfectly fine, but ultimately there's not going to be any [00:46:00] ability to cohere that into something sustainable or into something that people could be held accountable for in the way that centralized institutions that have leaders are actually able to have.
I think that's the goal. If I'm writing the check for Citibank or Nike or whatever I want to decapitate. This potential movement by co-opting its most talented leaders. So they come up to me and say, 'I hate Citibank or whatever. Down with finance capitalism.' And we say what do you say to a few million dollars for a nonprofit and you'll be the president?
And maybe we'll put you on a board. So I think a lot of this, part of these social movements, I think our carnival I have said, I think they're just like theatrical release of frustration for most of their followers. They're also recruiting tools for the [00:47:00] national elite.
And this is nothing new. I spent a lot of time in the nineties with the people around the Clintons and Tony Blair and the Third Way neo-liberals. And if you looked at what they were doing in the sixties and seventies, they were radical. They were crying to overthrow capitalism. Now they are flying on private jets, they're on corporate boards.
Michael Lind: So to some degree, I think this is elite co-optation of protest leaders and it doesn't work with the right wing version of this. So for example, if you look at the anti-lockdown protests, these are normally small business owners, right? So what are you gonna do?
Tell Joe the plumber, 'what if we give you money to start a small social impact, nonprofit? Joe's plumbing business' to survive. But it does work on the Left of center. With the essentially channeling a lot of people who would be on the outside banging on the door and then you bring [00:48:00] them in.
Marshall Kosloff: I just had a revelation with your framework. It seems to me you have two different power centers that are driving the dynamics here. So on the Left, you have the broad non-profit apparatus and the grantees, but on the Right, you have the media. So from my perspective, the way that you would co-opt Joe the plumber. If Joe the plumber, this is a reference, especially to our Zoomer listeners, to a plumber who heckled John McCain during the 2008 campaign. If Joe the plumber heckled a person today is saying I'm a small business owner and I'm getting screwed by these lockdowns.
You what they would do? They'd offer him a Newsmax show and turn him into a useless culture warrior. That is the version of blockade, but that's obviously what you would do, right? That you would say, look, Joe the plumber. Oh, yeah, the lockdowns are terrible. We know what the real issue is here?
The real issue is the Libs and Libs are terrible and 'insert statement' and you give them a podcast. [00:49:00] But it sucks for him personally, that he came of age right before the boom of independent media and podcasting. So he didn't quite have the pivot opportunity. It's a real tragedy.
Michael Lind: I made a piece for a leftist magazine called 'The Bellows.' I distinguished between the professional bourgeoisie. That is, the college credential professionals who are afraid of being proletarian. They're afraid of sitting in the working class and they provide a lot on the muscle for the Left and the Democratic party.
And then there's the small business bourgeoisie. The Joe the plumber types who are much of the muscle and the political base for the Republican party. Now, the upshot of my analysis is these are still our links. The small business owners are a fairly small, but fairly affluent group compared to most of the public.
So are people with PhDs working at Starbucks. They're still part of the social [00:50:00] elite. We have not heard from the actual three-quarters of the population that is working class. Either last summer or Left wing, Right wing. Why? Because they're working. They can't fly across country to dress up in a Viking outfit and storm the Capitol.
They can't go from city to city with their spray paint in their Antifa outfits. As a friend of mine who was a radical, told me one time, he said your mom and dad had to have a lot of money for you to take part in the summer of love. The working class people, I don't think they're represented by small business owners, the actual number of people who own their own business in the U.S..
And I'm going to help them out of the jam. It's less than 10% of the population. The number of people with a B.A. Is about a third , even from a minor college or university. So what are these other folks doing? They're working. They're not on [00:51:00] TV.
They're not engaged in these extra political spectacles. They're pretty much ignored by the two parties. And to me, that's the real tragedy of this. Of our time in general, but if this kind of plague in particular.
Saagar Enjeti: I think that's exactly right. It's funny. I'm thinking back when you're talking in this way about the small business owners. I remember Trump and a bunch of right-wing commentators trying to meme the idea that these like boat parades, these Trump boat parades, were like this grand working class uprising.
I'm like, no, it's not. These are just these like small business owners who are actually like pretty wealthy and are culturally conservative. And didn't go to college. I'm not knocking it, but let's be honest, they'd be out there knocking doors for Romney. They were out there knocking doors for McCain, Bush, all of them.
There's like probably a little bit more obnoxious now that it's Trump. It's not representative of the the working class coalition. As you point out, like working people are [00:52:00] actually working. And so let's finish on this note, Michael. If you actually want to see the working class in America have power, how does that come about in the near term? Or is it empirically just going to be a generational project of rebuilding non-governmental civic institutions and try to reordering some of our civic life to have power once again in America?
Michael Lind: I think it's a generational project because you can have the Netherlands politicians who were backed by tycoons who have smart advisors and you can come up with good policies. But it like it says in the Bible, and then there are rose a Pharaoh who knew not Joseph. You get your good Pharaoh and then you get your bad Pharoh. So unless you have your own army, you're never quite safe.
I think, and I was of no credit of the moral majority and Pat Robertson in the 1990s. But I think at this point in history , you're more [00:53:00] likely to get faith-based organizations, churches, and synagogues, maybe druid circles. I'm open to this. I'm looking for someone socially.
They're like the last mass membership institutions in American life. Now that about 6% of the private sector workforce at unionized that's lower than it was under Herbert Hoover, and the political parties are gone as functioning, knock on the door organizations.
So curiously enough , I would not write off the churches and other religious institutions because they hved warm bodies every week and they have buses and they can get people to the polls. So it might not be the same form as the nineties evangelical religious rise.
And even if they're a minority, even though religion is declining, that's somewhat [00:54:00] overstated. Because if you look at secularization in the U.S, The decline is almost entirely among mainline protestants. But you could argue that secular wokeness is in fact the highest stage of Methodism. I'm a Methodist so I can say this. It is in fact that form of mainline Protestantism.
But if you look at Catholics, if you look at evangelicals, they're fairly stable as a part of the population. And the other thing about the Christian Church in particular, is it's trans-ethnic and trans-racial. So to the extent that we do have a problem on the right of these white nationalists sectarians infiltrating them, it's not going to happen in the churches or the synagogues for that matter. So some warm bodies. If you don't want government by dollars, then you need to have actual, physical people who can deliver [00:55:00] the votes.
Saagar Enjeti: I think that's really well said. Michael, just phenomenal return to the podcast.
Thank you for joining us, sir.
Marshall Kosloff: Thanks Michael.