Transcripts For CSPAN2 Michael Lind The New Class War 20240713

Good evening and welcome to the Hudson Institute policy center. Im john walters, the chief operating officer and and i wod like to welcome our audience here at our pennsylvania avenue headquarters, and our cspan audience to our first ever podcast keeping that is both live and marks the Second Season premiere of podcast of the Second Season of the realignment, hosted by henson media fellow marshall kosloff. We are proud of the realignment here at hudson, podcast launched last year and i recommend a special for those you who havent been following it that you take a look at the episodes from last year, particularly the conversation with secretary of state mike pompeo, josh hawley, mike micah gallagher, Michael Durrant and others, but its an excellent program, partly because of the two people put it together and the ability to bring up topics and to move the argument alone. We couldnt be prouder of the work they have done. I want to thank them for that, and were happy to launch this Years Program with michael lind who is as many of you know prolific writer, more than a dozen books, cofounder of the new America Foundation with hutchens own distinguished fellow and strategy, Walter Russell mead. Michael is a professor at lyndon b. Johnson school of Public Affairs at the university of texas, and import for two tonit conversation he is the author of the new class war saving democracy from the managerial elite. The book which you can purchase was just published today so we are here at the launch congratulations, michael, on the new book. Theres a direct line between the new class work and the work michael has done and has been pursuing since the 90s, maybe best exemplified or known by his book the next american revolution. What our podcast seeks to explore. Also, joining us is jd vance who fittingly was the reassignments premier guest. Jd, of course the author of the influential book of hi hillbilliolo hillbilliology. And he invested in a capital firm, and fellow visiting. And michael, his book, jd vances book, if you cant, its an important discussion of a part of america that maybe someone like Charles Murray would say is outside the bubble of the elite chattering classes. At the beginning of michaels new book he says, demagogic the symptoms democratic pluralism is the cure. Im not sure if thats a throwdown for people in washington d. C. Were pleased to start with that discussion and take on that issue with his help. Well take questions later in the program and you can email those to events hudson. Org and well get them up to the to marshall to use as we get to that part of the program. Everyone is technically sophisticated so this will not be a problem. Without any further ado let me please join me in welcoming michael lind and jd sands. [applaus [applause] one quick one, michael will be available after the talks to sign books. If you found this great take a second to get some of those afterwards. If you have any questions, at hudson. Org, im sure youll get sick of hearing us talk and ill speak for you with your questions. With that, marshall, start us off. The book is new class war saving for the elite. What is a class war . A class war is a conflict among quasi heredity classes and a structure of occupations. We think we lit in a meritkra meritcratic system. Its not a matter of after tax income. If theres any youre much more likely to get a diploma if one or more of your parents have a diploma, than if both did not. So i argue that in europe as well as the United States, i think both sides of the atlantic are similar enough now to make robust generalizations. That wouldnt have been the case 40, 50 years ago, but as europe has become more multiethnic, as the United States has become more secular, i think theres some convergence and what you see is arguably theres a widening divide socially and politically between the College Educated and the more or less twothirds majority which does not have even a bachelors degree. Jd, do you agree with that take . It seems youre suggesting unlike in earl aeras, classes yes and no, the average american with a bachelor degree has 60,000 a year and average High School Graduate around 37,000, theres a correlation. Unlike in the past where class status was based on ownership of property, whether you were an feudal landlord or an ebenezer scrooge Owner Operator of a business, the elites in the western world today largely, their wealth and their power and their status tends to come from their position in a large bureaucratic organization, it can be an operation, it can be a law firm, it can be a nonprofit, it can be the military. And access to those lucrative influential positions is largely determined by education. What do you think, jd . Because i think one of the common retorts, why is it education is the great denoter of class. Michael and i were speaking this morning and talking about a plumber, a plumber making 100,000 can be rich and working class. Ooh based on that, how do you look at society . I largely agree with mike. First of all, let me thank you for doing this. Next time you have me on the podcast please tell me which couch. [laughter] i think that whats true about mikes account, i donten that i 100 agree with it, but like 95 agree with it. What seems to me mostly true about that account is that if you go to, you know, a suburb in Cincinnati Ohio and you go to a Plumbing Firm and you go to the guy who owns the firm and go to the people who work there and then go to the clerical staff, theres something much more similar about that group of people, about their spouses, about their children, than there is, you know, between lets say the owner of the Plumbing Supply firm and a person who is a majority or large shareholder at google, for example. So i do think that theres something about the way in which Educational Status both conifers you, but also reinforces and signifies class status thats really important in our society. Of course, most people do not i mean, the gross majority of people cannot live off Capital Appreciation so theres this weird way which mike calls the professional managerial class is sort of internally coherent even though it might not have, you know, the sort of the person at the 91st percentile of the income scale is not going to have the same as the 99 of the income scale. To tie a bow on this, on the managerial class, people throw that around. The democratic left, who are these people . A large bureaucratic organization, the corporate elite, government in the transatlantic sense what defiance them as a class . There are different seems, the left has the pmc, than thats the managerial elite and tend to be people in the professions where you more or less set your own hours, lawyers, doctors, more in the past than present, professors. Podcast hosts. [laughter] if you can work from home basically. There are three classes, the working class, the professional managerial class, the podcasters and the professors and then the capitalists, right up there, and i reject this. I follow james burnham, the trotskiist and earlier conservative who wrote the book the managerial revolution. He argued that the independent owneroperator who was the capitalist, but also ran his own business, had been superceded already by the 1920s in the u. S. And europe by corporate managers, but he also included in the managerial class government officials, career civil servants, academics and in a passage that few people note in the managerial revolution in 1940, he said the career military. The uniform military which would become more and more important over time as one of the most organized long before the deep state, right . At which he was kind of part of because he worked for the cia a lot in the ensuing decade. So i have a broader definition of it, than a lot of people do. But again, its and then if you contrast it with the working class, the working class is changing its nature because of the changing competition of composition of jobs. Through outsourcing and productivity growth. Manufacturing has shed a lot of jobs. If you look at the labor statistics, its in three sectors, leisure and hospitality, retail and health care. And according to the u. S. Government of all of the top 10 jobs that are being created in number numerical terms only nurse requires education beyond a High School Diploma. What were told at davos and the jobs of the future require advanced education and all that. Actually they dont. Americans and their counterparts in working class counterparts in europe are underpaid. They are not overeducated and my argument in the new class war is theyre underpaid because they lack Bargaining Power of the kind that they possessed 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago. So before i move on, i think the thing i havent quite understood yet from the conversation is the war part. Right. So what is it . We could buy that theres an educational system that preferences systems with people with degrees and buy the idea that there are certain favored over others. The war, suggests theres a group of people, the elite not only looking down on the working class, but causing harm the book is not a Conspiracy Theory since the elders of zion. I dont think theres a secret office in washington, new york or San Francisco where the committee of the ruling class gets together, its just that when power is unevenly distributed among social groups and individuals pursue their own interests, the result, even though its not in theres no coordination, is going to look as though the class is doing it when in fact, its just the result of lots of individual actions. If you look at Public Policy from the 1990s to the present globalization, one of the things that amazes me as a student of politics all my life is the unwillingness of people to acknowledge that there are tradeoffs with trade, with immigration, with investment, that different groups in society, some benefit, some lose. Theres this constant den of propaganda, free trade benefits everybody. Large scale, low skill immigration benefits everybody and you just think, well, this is totally unrealistic, there are winners and losers, but its because so thats part of the war. When the policy that benefits the winners is the one that is just the only one that is defended in public and only one you hear and it becomes taboo to discuss the views of the losers, thats a kind of a war. I want to spend some time on this. And about this, marshall, one of the institutions that the working class is dependent on in the recent past, actually, ensure that it has equal Bargaining Power, at least equal measure of Bargaining Power. Classic story, labor union and in the 50s, 33, 35 now 6 , basically decimated and thats primarily global story, not right to work. Im not a fan of right to work, but primarily a global story. And church, cements working class social, the social fabric and also ensures that working class participants have some meaningful participation in the direction of the culture, the direction of Public Policies that, you know, influence that cultur culture. Working class participation has fallen off since the 1950s. The third one is the families, the place where working class children grow up in hopefully stable, healthy, happy homes and we know that marriage is a luxury, and the working class family dissolution has dropped substantially and family stability, maintain the levels, with a slight decline from the 1950s and 60s. And all of these are necessary that working class can live happy lives, but have a meaningful stake in the society that they live in have basically disappeared or become weakened. The addendum to this if theres a class war who is losing. I agree with all of this, and critics, specifically of your book, michael and of this, jds, say you are apologizing and conflating economic anxiety, which they say is the right wing talking point, for the actual just racial resentment, but you counter that in a recent piece in the wall street journal citing an mit study, and more likely to support donald trump and Bernie Sanders, and so if that were the case, then why would they be supporting somebody like Bernie Sanders and jd, i want you to get you in on this after to talk about the economic anxiety piece being really, you know, demonizes apologizism for racism. There are three things on the trump uprising and yellow vest revolts in france. One is the spontaneous eruption of neonazi racism from Vladimir Putin in the kremlin and triggered this wave of boys from brazil nationalists about the overthrow democracy and the u. S. And u. K. And france and so on. You can tell what i think of that. Thats a thats a partisan alibi for the loss of Hillary Clinton and jeremy corbin, its not a serious story. More serious story, its about money. Its about rising inequality and progressives in particular, they like to have this graph of the great compression and it goes down from the 1920s, then goes up again. And if its just about money, then you have aftertax redistribution and you give these working class people checks and theyll be happy. And the story i tell in the new class war, its about power. Power is independent of money. That is power, the ability to influence your life and your society, and power exists outside of the narrow governmental realm and libertarians get upset with me for this point, but there is economic power in the marketplace. You do not have equality of Bargaining Power between most employers and employees. There is cultural power in the media. If you dont like the offer for your children that you find on tv or in the movies or whatever, you know you cant found your own movie studio or social media platform, thats power. And particularly for americans, the basis of the american creed was what in the 18th century they called republican liberty, that you could not trust concentrated power of any kind, economic, they didnt have media back then, but or political power and diffusing power and having checks and balances is good in and of itself. And i think weve kind of lost this with this narrative about its all about money, and if we centralize and hoard power, but we give you a 500 tax credit, 0 are a 2,000 tax credit every year, then you should be happy. Right. Yeah, please, jd. I was going to say, so, im not a fan of what i would call the craft materialistic view of economic anxiety led to trump. I think its much more complicated than that. Its not just not having a good job or a decent wage, but looking outside your door and see a Community Thriving 20, 30 years ago and now every single store downtown is closed up or finding out, yet again, that one of your friends or one of your kids friends has died of an opioid epidemic. Thats not economic in a strict sense, but its very much much about losing power over your own life. The related point i make about this and i make this point a fair amount, but i think its important to make it here again, you have to understand what the purpose is of the narrative. The trump voters were motivated by pure racism or if theyre just racist and bad people you dont have to care about their things and worry. We know two things about the trump vote. One, is that it was really related to the climate of manufacturing jobs primarily caused by the china shock which what other folks have written about. We also know it was heavily related and tied to the rise in what folks called the depths of despair. When you see a rise in opioid related deaths in the community. You see a shift from romney to president trump. If you say these people are racist youre not concerned about an em m of the elite mike lindh is so concerned about, actually calls an opioid epidemic, Purdue Pharmaceuticals flooded with drugs and if were not talking about the trump voters racism were participating in the class war that elites have been i think winning for the past few decades. How do we in good faith balance the race and cultural issue. The things that the critics, what theyre doing out is true fact the country is changing. The countrys white majority is shrinking and the places that are most experiencing that anxiety are also being crosshit by the economic factor. How do we handle that . So how do we because i think one legitimate part of the critique is the idea that there is actually this big cultural shift going on and its unclear that the american right is doing a good job of handling that. I think part of that, it has to be managed in a particular way, right. So im married to, i guess, a first generation immigrant. Ive never felt once in my life that we didnt belong to the same national community. Thats important. You want people who feel like they themselves are assimilating if theyre newcomers. You want people here for multiple generations want them to feel the newcomers they themselves assimilating as well and i think one of the problems with our modern immigration policy we talk about in economic terms and thats fine and its an important piece of the story, but unless youre sort of thinking about marriage rates and unless youre managing and controlling that good for the overall population and country, i think you can inflame some of these racial tensions. Theres no good example of a society thats absorbed a very large number of outsiders, quickly without you can blame it on racism, its a fact of life. If racism is what you call it you have you have to manage it, deal with it, tamp it down and sort of suppress it in a certain way. American elites are uncomfortable talking about cultural assimilation. We stop trying to build a unified nation out of the multiracial democracy that we have. I like that multiracial democracy, i think it brings a lot of benefits you about it brings some challenges, too, and if youre not smart about the challenges, r you can cause socially strive what weve seen in america. Weve seen worse in europe. Western europe has much more of a problem than the United States. What do you think, michael. In 1920, there was a divide between the old stock Anglo American protestants or some of descent in the case of the irish and germans. It gummed up redistricting because the the battle between the rural lights and the urban socalled ethnics. You had prohibition, a war between the catholics and the protestants. You had the beginnings of multiculturali multiculturalism, why should the european immigrants speak english. And Flash Forward to the 1970s, the european diasporas had collapsed and mostly in the north and moving quickly. By the 1970s, the average american is partly british and partly nonbritish descent. We hear about the nonrising white majority, but thats counting every descendent of someone who is not a no nonhispanic white, will be nonwhite for the next years. And at university of texas in austin looked at latino assimilation rates in intermarriage. Latinos lose spanish as the primary language at the rate that the irish americans, german americans and italian americans did a century ago. The supposed polar racialization of politics is greatly exaggerated. If you look at every group except for africanamericans, who have this kind of 9010 pattern. 90 with the democrats and maybe 10 with republicans, the other groups are less polarized including asianamericans and hispanicamericans and nonhispanic whites. Nonhispanic whites are very evenly divided that was Hillary Clinton and donald trump. So its not polarized in that sense. Latinos, depending on state politics in my home state of texas about 40 went for governor abbott. 29 voted for donald trump. Well, if you if your definition of polarization is anything thats not 5050, thats polarized, but its not enormously polarized. I think thats important parts of the story. I want to shift to populism, advocate for populism. Thats not what are doing here, but you guys are shouting at the system, you just want to tear everything down. Youre actually sympathetic to that view. Tell us why do you think it is that populists themselves are not good at governance. Im a critical of that, we dont want a doom loop, insider politics, wellconnected establishments and the occasional outsider who comes and represents protests. Thats a terrible situation to be in. It was the politics of the american south, between reconstruction and the civil rights revolution. Youve heard of the southern demagogue, right . When you get a condition when much of the population is just disconnected from everything and excluded from politics and from cultural authority, youre going to get demagogues arise to represent them. I think this is dangerous. The demagogues, if you look at the southern example, if you look at latin america, in the north you find this with the socalled white ethnic politicians in the northeast. Mayor michael curly has everyone ever heard of mayor curly from boston, represented the irish americans and power structure. In the south huey long, poor whites against the establishment. They almost always fail because the odds are stacked against the outsiders, right . They dont have the money, power or connections so they can get elected once or twice, but they lose. They dont have the people willing to work for them who are insiders, because thats a career suicide. When they do succeed, often its through dubious a combination of criminality and charlatanism. They have to be financed somehow. You get one of this eva perron situation. In my state of texas two popular governors, james and Mariam Ferguson succeeded each other in the 1920s, known as pa and ma ferguson and they did good things for the farmers who were frozen out, but financed themselves selling pardons to the parents of criminals in huntsville prison. Huey long in louisiana couldnt get any money for his populist insurgency so he went into business with the slot machines. And huey long with slot machine money and the deduct box. Every two weeks, a certain portion of every state employees pay was deducted and put in it was actually a chest. It was a box and when he was assassinated, it was like the Atomic Nuclear football with the president. So, i think its a at best, populism introduces new themes and outsiders, but you have to have some kind of reconstruction program. Lets talk about that, jd. If somebody has a foot in both worlds. How do you enact what is needed for populist reform . What do you think of michaels prescription, the cure he proposes later on for an actual settlement . Yeah, well, i do think, you know, on the one hand there are some specific policy ideas out there. And one thing im a fan of orin casts views with the pressures that exist economically and legally try to make them less confrontational and more compromising and give them more legal institutional benefits that actually survive in the 20th century hyper globalized economy. I agree with i think that most of the details what the modern, call it populist, call it class compromised politics are there, we have to figure that stuff out. I will say i worry about the sort of political economy piece of this. This goes to your question about navigating various worlds. Mike and i were talking about this earlier, if you were to sort of collect the, call it right populist people who can engage with a quantum economics paper. Maybe 40 are on the stage. Take out orin cast and another and its a small group. Theres a way in which the institutions of this town in particular i think are just not wellsuited to this particular moment. I really worry about the fact that we dont actually have enough of the sort of think tank intellectuals. We dont have enough of the administrators. We dont have enough people who would actually work in government. Theres a lot missing, a lot of Institution Building that needs to be done. I think the criticism that there arent a whole lot of populist policies are fair, i think to build these things you have to first sketch out a general way to settle the issues and hopefully start to build the institutions out from there. Were still pretty early days on that. So, i think to sort of sum up the idea of that, michael, is that post world war ii, we see the framers three different ways. Economic power, cultural power and economic power. On the economic side working on your union, you can check corporate power. On the cultural size, you had censorship organizations that checked hollywood and actually would produce a lot bad cultural stagnation and some bad movies came out. At the same time if we look at movies financed by Chinese Company and throw up our hands and say i guess tom cruise is going to be antijapan now, nothing we can do with that. And on the political side to reconcile you had the sort of local corrupt political strongmen back in the state legislatures, we see on one hand as corrupt and the system apart, but on the other hand they were much better capable of checking political power in washington. Why did that whole status quo fall apart . Look, there were Different Reasons for these different realms and the realm of censorship. Let me preface by saying the working class exercised its power by veto power, it did not have the resources, or the expertise, you know, to come up with its own plans. The strike or the threat of a strike is a veto that forces management to reconsider. The catholic legion of decency got the hollywood producers to run hollywood scripts past them in advance. Right . They could say no, they didnt write movies themselves. The local political bosses could say no to a candidate, right . We didnt have selffinance candidates. The local political bosses were important because this is this was someone you could go to see in your neighborhood, if you had a problem that connected you with the state party and the national party. Many of them were quite corrupt. A friend of mine used to go around the 1960s with Bobby Kennedy giving suitcases of Walking Around money to Carmine Desapio the boss of the bronx and the equivalent in the south in the courthouse gangs. The only thing worse than the local Party Power Brokers is not having them. Because when they all vanish then the party becomes a label that billionaires like tom steyer and Michael Bloomberg and donald trump can buy. Just out before coming here a few days ago i went to the website of the Democratic Party out of curiosity, so my grandmother who grew up on a farm in central texas, she and her africanamerican friends after the civil rights revolution, very similar backgrounds, high school educated, they were part of the Travis County Democratic Party, you know, and they were part of the precinct machinery and all of that and did election work and so on. So i went to the Democratic Party to see how i could join and they just had a donate button. Tried the national and the state and the county and it was donate. Right . Which kind of tells you something about the structure of politics now. Its a spectator sport unless youre a donor, a pollster, or a candidate. To finish up then, what does in both your views, a new 21st sken class settlement look like, whether thats politically, economically or culturally, the last thing on top of that. I like to say theres no victory in these wars, its about settlement. Theres no war, conservatives win everything or liberals win everything, what does a settlement look like . In the class war i argue you want another class treaty, class peace. Industrial capitalism is the in the economic history. You dont want the it to run amok. If the managerial class was too weak and organized labor too powerful i would have written a different book. What i say we need to have the functional equivalent of some of these membership organizations and in the new class war i called them the ward, that is the local political entity of some kind. It doesnt have to resemble the old political machine, the congregation which can be a secular creed, not necessarily a religious creed, if it becomes more secular like western europe and i use the term the gild to encompass all kinds of alternative labor organizations of the kind that jd was talking about, in connection with warren casss ideas. So these things would not look like the unions and churches and political machines in 1950, but they would serve some. Same purpose, mainly in pooling the numbers of working class people. Because if youre working class you dont have access to financial resources, you know, to influence society. You dont have expertise to influence policy, all you have is your members and unless those numbers are organized in an institutional way, you lack power. And jd your settlement idea. What type of mental break does this require from a kind of baked in ideology that has been on the right now for decades to even consider these as Viable Solutions to help the working class . Five seconds or less. [laughter] well, i think that it, first of all, you know, it requires us to think about i think it requires us to imagine a world in which effective government is actually better than no government and i think it requires the willingness to acknowledge that Public Policy at Different Levels actually might be useful in solving some of these problems. I do think that weve undergone this weird transformation in the last 30 years and i grew up in this world reading conservative publications, being influenced by them, where we made some leap from the private sectors, generally the right engine to do things, the Public Sector is always the wrong engine to do things. Thats a pretty terrible way to think about the world when youre engaged in politics and Public Policy, like surrendering before you start the conversation. So, you know, my answer on class settlement, i mean, i dont know that i have a very good answer. I would say that it probably looks like Something Like mike just said it looked like, you had invigorating institutions and some rise in participation, in whether its church or something thats local and communal. Its that you have actual worker organizations that can push for their interests and advocate for their membership. But i do worry, you know, and when i think about this book, which by the way i think is excellent. I encourage everybody to buy it and read and engage with. I worry that were incapable of actually solving a lot of the problems that mike writes about and if im going to put my pessimist hat on for a little while, its not that we reached the sort of juncture, five or 10 years from now where we start to solve things, but that we get to undergo, 10, 15 years period of managing to decline and hopefully able to solve those things. I do think that theres just a way in which our politics is so fundamentally broken, the institutions are broken, the i dont know what Congress Actually does right now. I mean, its apparently sort of, you know, looking at turn on the tv. Yeah, it seems sort of its late roman republicish and that really worries me and i dont know what the answer is out of that conundrum, but i think that if there is an answer, that were willing to push for, then we, you know, we should be paying attention to this guy. Can i add one optimistic note . We need those. [laughter] and thats a bleak assessment. Well, theres a story of the economist and philosopher adam smith who had a Young Research assistant who was reading the newspaper one day and the british fleet had suffered a reverse with the french somewhere and excited he came to professor smith and he said, britain is ruined and professor smith said, young man, theres a great deal of ruin in a country. [laughter] so, more to come. [laughter] so were going to move on to q a, ive got actually really Great Questions here. One of the names i think we only talked about him once was donald trump, and its interesting on this podcast a political realignment sparked by the president of the United States. How actually often we dont end up talking about him and i think that this is one of the central questions ive seen about this administration, this question is, is trump still at the forefront of the realignment or has he governed more like a pretrump republican, tax cuts, business needs, and im assuming high scaled workers is what they went here, et cetera. How do you think of trump within the context of the new class war . Let me say that ive from the beginning i thought trump had less to do with mussolini and hitler than with Arnold Schwarzenegger and his friend jesse ventura, trump and ventura tried to take over the reform party, ross perots reform party. When you get the outside celebrity president s two choices, if they run nominally as one of the leaders of the two parties, they can govern as conventional republicans or democrats or triangulate between the two. From the very beginning trump became a republican. He had not been a republican for most of his life. Evidently a democrat or independent, but that was the fundamental strategic decision i think he made with the tax cut, with a lot of other things with one exception, the exception is Foreign Policy, where the president has far more discretion than in domestic policy where if youre much more dependent in our own party in congress. And there, i think, he has made a difference, that is as george w. Bush left the country with two ongoing wars in afghanistan and in iraq. Obama was elected because he was going to end the wars, so he added three more in syria, in libya and in yemen. To date, despite the iran thing, trump has not added a, you know, a sixth war. And he seems to favor theatrical displays of force as an alternative to deeper engagement, right, kind of postponing it. And the other area where i think he has shown his own predilections is trade by bringing in robert lighthizer, very accomplished tr, who is a democrat, right, hes not a republican up until he switched in 2016 or 2017. So, i think, you know, trump, and im just inferring this from his actions, decided, okay, im going to write a blank check to the bushryan republicans in congress on domestic policy, but im going to push my priorities in Foreign Policy and particularly in trade. What do you think, jd. Yeah, i think that the first couple years of the administration definitely illustrated the institutional weakness that weve been talking about this evening where the apparatus of republican domestic policy, this is not heritage in 1981 that was like ready for the reagan revolution. This was a group of people largely blindsided and when they got the opportunity to govern, they went back to the old play book. I dont think youve seen a substantial sort of realignment in how things have actually gone. The political piece of it still continues. I think that you see the shifts. I think the republicans now in 20 of the poorest congressional districts in the country theres a weird way the policy hasnt quite caught up to the politics and one thing i would add as a specific iteration of what mike talked about with trade and bob lighthiz lighthizer,shifting the national conversation, its tough to overstate how elite concensus was in 2014 relative to today. We all sort of get with the exception of maybe the Democratic Front runner, that china is a significant problem, both economically and in a National Security sense. And i really think the credit for changing that conversation and narrative goes largely to the 2016 election and donald trump. I think thats absolutely right. You see even on the democratic stage, only one candidate said he would take away the china tariffs and most said they would vote for a straight deal with nafta. If thats not a political realignment, im not sure what is. This is an interesting one, which asks about what are some of the least i do just want to this is like a lightning round. Sorry. What are the least economic disrupters that could be implemented to restore a more even balance of power between capital and labor. I guess well keep it to one. Tight labor markets. There you go. Labor naturally wants to have a sellers a buyers market in labor, right . I mean, a sellers market in labor and employers want a buyers market in labor. Theres the basic thats why from the 1820s until the 1990s, the American Labor movement tended to be for more restrictive immigration policies and the employer elite wanted a looser and more generous immigration policies as the normal Country Club Republicans have become the new, you know, coastal democrats, or their children and grandchildren have. You have seen that shift and the Employer Perspective versus the but even if you dont do anything else for labor, if you have tight labor markets and its not simply immigration, its paid vacations. Its maybe early retirement, things like that, anything that makes employers compete for workers is can help their Bargaining Power. I agree with that. I mean, if i was going to give a second answer, its maybe a substantial increase in r d. I think if the working class is doing getter in the country we have to restart productivity. Its sort of stagnated the past 20 or so years and i think thats largely a lack of Technological Innovations and would i argue more spinning on r d so we can get the economy in a position like it was in the 50s and 60s. So the next question is incorporating working class these are wellresearched and written, thank you. Very impressed is incorporating the working class majority in democracy not just an attempt of saving capitalism as fdr assured the system remains viable. And if we redistribute power and money would it just not make the current winners losers and the current losers winners and not correct anything . Michael . I agree with the fdr parallel and also churchill 1945, oddhour in germany and Charles De Gaulle in france. And having gone through war n they had a vision at least for a while as partners in a common project in national and regional reconstruction, they were not battling to the death. Obviously, marxists on the left and some libertarians on the right. We can go back to that. The people who benefit from this in the long run are the privileged if they can preserve their privileges by making strategic concessions to the working class. Theres stories about joseph kennedy, the financier father of john f. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy, and why he supported Franklin Roosevelt and the new deal, he said i would give half my fortune to keep the other half. What do you think . I agree with mike and i would say historically if you look at the post war and postdepression and call it societies engaged in whatever well call it corporatism or compromise. The u. K. And the United States stand at the top of the list. If you look at societies that refused to engage in that compromise you would include russia, italy and germany and we know how it went for those guys. Theres something predictable if political instability and best in general to try to reform the system as best you can as opposed to assume that one group is going to triumph because they typically dont. Even if they do, its not necessarily good for everybody. Another theme we talked about realignment with the ref lewis ongoing, computers, social media, communications, et cetera, talk about the cumulative on the class war how you describe is losing in influence, michael. Frame it in a big tech and the internet specifically. Yeah, i think you theres a radical difference how media are used by the social classes. There are all of these studies showing that people on twitter are overwhelmingly College Educated people. The working class gets much more of its information from oldfashioned television and from podcasts, of course. Yes. No, i think this is probably more the first group. And from radio because theyre in their cars, you know, in their jobs. I wouldnt exaggerate the role of media that much because first with television and then with, you know, the internet, theres this tendency to think that people are terribly malable and can be hype advertised by the media the whole basis of the russian Conspiracy Theory, that russian means brain washed africanamericans not to vote for hillary and this other group for trump. I remember back in the 70s there was a study that norman lears all in the family came out to promote liberal values. Most of the people who watched it thought that archie was the hero, archie bunker, and that the show was to make fun of the collegeeducated meat head. I maybe more conspiratorial to worry about the i. T. Than mike. When i go to a restaurant with my family and see basically half of the table, all the kids are sort of staring and their devices and parents are staring at their devices and not speaking to each other and then you recognize that fundamentally the modern i. T. Business model is largely built on what others called information arbitrage. Every second youre staring at the device as opposed to a book or communicating with your family, is a dollar they make. You stare at those as long as possible. I think theres something very disturbing about the way that it captures our attention, about the way that it makes us less productive, about, you know, ive talked to a lot of entrepreneurs who are really worried about the effect that it has on productivity in their work force, that people are working eight, nine hours, but maybe theyre only actually working four or five hours because theyre so absorbed in their devices. So i do worry about this and i think that one way of taking power away from the working and middle class is to hypnotize them. I dont know thats what were doing, but probably truer than treating cell phones at the last question about education, is education the crosscutting and how are we defined an Equitable Society that doesnt share the same level of education, what do you think, michael . It depends if the education is useful to people or not. As i pointed out earlier, arguably americans are overeducated inasmuch as different studies show 10 or 15 of jobs being done by people with bas do not require anything more than a high school education. And so, i think if anything, its worse for so side to have people have this sense of disconnect between their highfalutin agrees and theyre perfectly respected jobs, but theyre degraded because its not the status that they expected. In terms of, theres a kind of version of progressivism that says, well, if every if professionals make more money, well make everyone a professional and everyone will make more money. If you do that, if you give everyone a ba it then becomes like a High School Diploma or a g. E. D. And you get a society of don quixotis. And he was an hildago, an aristocrat who had no money and you dont necessarily want that society. Im skeptical that our elite educational system works well he will. Whether its primarily signaling or capital development. If you want to look at the accumulatism, go to Yale Law School. A class of 200 of course where i went to school and tell the administrators there, tell the students, the donors, the people who are alumni that we should triple or quadruple are the size of the Yale Law School class. If its such a great education, and Human Capital we should be giving it out to as many people as possible. Of course that deflates the value and exclusiveness of the degree and so much what were doing with modern education is social signaling, if we dont get out of that trap and spending so much money, i think were just screwed. Well, on that note on that very optimistic note, its been an optimistic evening. Thank you all. [applause] thanks again. Appreciate it. [inaudible conversations] coming up here on cspan2, kim ghattas who spent 20 years covering the middle east for the bbc and Financial Times and wrote the book, black wave on the 40 year rivalry between iran and saudi arabia. And comparing academic debates of the 1960s to those happening today followed by Jack Goldsmith former assistant attorney general of the george w. Bush administration on the life of his stepfather who was an associate of teamsters leader jimmy hoffa. Youre watching a special edition of book tv airing during the week while members of congress are in their districts due to the coronavirus pandemic. Tonight, memoirs. First holocaust survivor max eisen reflects on his life and imprisonment at auschwitz during world war ii. And a story about prisoner to advocate working on juvenile sentencing guidelines. And nikki haley looks at her time as u. N. Ambassador to the Trump Administration. Now and over the weekend on cspan2. This weekend on book tv, saturday at 6 p. M. Eastern, richard cord dre, former director of financial Protection Bureau. Its about consumer and problems they face. Its about Consumer Finance and how its changed and about the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in the role and importance of the work that it engages in to protect people across america. Sunday at 12 30 p. M. Eastern, h. R. Mcmaster, former Trump Administration National Security advisor. The United States and other free and open societies ought to do everything we can to protect ourselves against the efforts of the Chinese Communist party to subvert our free market economic systems and our democratic form of governance. And at 6 20 p. M. , ruth gilmore, author and City University of new york professor on mass encores incarceration in the u. S. To see that we could be closing prisons already and jails already if we just cut by two weeks and three weeks and four weeks, much less years, the kinds of sentences people are serving. Watch book tv, this weekend, on cspan2. [inaudible conversation [inaudible conversations] good evening, im the director of the schoolcroft National Affairs at bush at texas a m university. Id like to welcome our special guest, kim ghattas, the resents