Media. We are proud of the realignment here at hudson. The podcast launched last year and i recommend especially for those who havent been following that you take a look at the episodes from last year. Particularly the conversation with secretary of state mike pompeo, josh holly. Chris rinaldi. Mike gallagher. Mike durand and others. Its an excellent program, partly because of the two people that put it together. Their ability to bring out topics and move the argument along. I want to thank them for that. We are happy to launch this Years Program with Michael Michael lind. A prolific writer of more than a dozen books. Michael is a professor at lyndon b. Johnson school of Public Affairs at the university of texas. Important for tonights conversation, he is the author of the new class war. Saving democracy from the managerial elite. The book was published today. So we are here at the launch. Congratulations on the new book. Whether you agree with his interpretation of western politics, his work demonstrates a serious effort to understand the causes of and the solutions to the seemingly neverending cycle of classes and shifting coalitions. Which is exactly what our realignment podcasts seems to explore. Also joining us is who fittingly was the premier guest. Is the author of [indiscernible]. He recently cofounded a Venture Capital firm investing in people and technologies working to solve significant challenges. Also visiting fellow at aei. His book, i have a course read jd vances book. If you havent, you should. Its an important discussion of a part of america that maybe someone like Charles Murray is outside the bubble. At the beginning of michaels book, he says demagogic populism is a symptom. Is the disease. Im not sure thats a throwdown. But we are pleased to start from that discussion and take on that issue with his help. We will take questions later in the program and you can email those to events hudson. Org. People get them to marshall and sandra to use as we get to that part of the program. This will not be a problem. Without any further a do, join me in welcoming michael lind and jd vance. [applause] one point know, michael be here until after the talk to sign books. You can get some of those afterwards. If you have any questions, events hudson. Org. With that, marshall, why dont you start the talk . Rex the book is called saving democracy from the managerial elite. First question, what is a class for its conflict among quasihereditary classes. Where your parentage is associated with a particular structure of occupations. We think we use in a system. But if you look at what i argue is the fundamental cleavage in the transatlantic societies which is educational. You are much more likely to get a diploma if one or both of your parents had diplomas. Which are the new degrees of nobility. Then if both of your parents did not. I argue in europe as well as the United States, i think both sides of the atlantic are similar enough now to make robust generalizations. That would have been the case 4050 years ago. Europe has become more multiethnic as United States has become more secular. There is some convergence. What you see is, arguably, this widening divide. Socially and politically between the College Educated and the two thirds majority. Which does not have even a bachelors degree. Do you agree with that take . It seems like youre suggesting that unlike in previous euros, class status denoted by Education Matters more than income. Yes and no. The average american who has a bachelors degree as an income of about 60,000 a year. The average High School Graduate with no Higher Education is about 37,000. So there is a correlation. Unlike in the past, where class status was based on ownership of property. Whether you were a futile landlord or you were in ebenezer scrooge Small Business operator of a business. The elites in the western world today, largely, their wealth and status seems to come from their position in a large bureaucratic organization. It can be a law form, nonprofit. It can be the military. Access to those lucrative influential positions is largely determined by education. What do you think jd . One of the common retorts is, why is it education as the great keynoter of class. The blessed a plumber could make 100,000 and be rich. Based on your own expense, how do you see that in American Society . I think i largely agree with mike. Let me thank you both for doing this. Next time you have me on the podcast, please tell me what color the couch is. I think whats true i dont know that i 100 percent agree but i 95 percent agree. What seems to be mostly true is that if you go to a suburb in cincinnati, ohio. And you go to a Plumbing Firm and you go to the guy that owns the firm versus the people that work there and the clerical staff. Theres something much more similar about that group of people. About their spouses, children then the owner of the supply firm and a person who is a majority or large shareholder at google for example. I think theres something about the way in which Educational Status conference but reinforces and signifies a class status. Most people, the gross majority of people cant earn their living off capital appreciation. There is this weird way in which what mike calls the managerial class is internally coherent. Even though it might not have the person that the 91st percentile of the income scale isnt going to have the same income as on the managerial class, the progressive left, its like a slur. Who are these people in particular . Is it a corporate elite. Government. Or in the transatlantic sense. What defines them as a class . There are different definitions. It refers in my mind to a small subtraction. These tend to be people in the professions we more or less set your own hours. Lawyers, doctors. More in the past and present. Podcast hosts. [laughter] if you can work from home. So theres three classes. The working class, the professional managerial class. Then theres the capitalists. And i reject this. I follow james burnham. The early conservative movement. Who wrote the book the managerial revolution. He argued the operator was the capitalist but also ran his own business have been superseded already by the 1920s in the u. S. And europe. But he also included government officials. Career civil servants. Academics. And in a passage that few people note it said a career military. Which would become more important over time. Which he was kind of part of because he worked for the cia a lot. I have a broader definition of it then a lot of people do. If you contrast with the working class. The workingclass is changing its nature because of the changing composition of jobs. Part of it is loss of through manufacturing. Manufacturing has shot a lot of jobs. If you look at the United States, almost all of the new jobs are created in three sectors. Retail, healthcare. According to the u. S. Government. Of the top 10 jobs being created in numerical terms. Only registered nurse requires any education beyond a High School Diploma. The story we are told at davos and aspen. Not here of course. The jobs of the future require advanced education. Americans and their counterparts in europe are underpaid. They are not overeducated. My argument is that there are underpaid because they lack Bargaining Power of the kind they possess. 2050 years ago. Before i move on, the thing i havent quite understood is the war part. We can buy theres an educational system that preferences people of degrees. Certain industries. But wheres the war . A war suggest theres a group of people that is not only looking down upon the workingclass but actively trying to harm them to benefit themselves. Im curious what your take on that is too. The book is not a Conspiracy Theory. And i dont think the committee of the ruling class gets together. Its just that when power is unevenly distributed amongst social groups. And individuals pursue their own interests, the result, even though theres no coordination is going to look as though the class is doing it when in fact it shows the result of individual actions. If you get Public Policy from the 1990s to the present. Globalization. One of the things that amazes me is the unwillingness of people to acknowledge there are tradeoffs. With trade, immigration. Investment. Theres this constant propaganda. Just think, this is totally unrealistic that there are winners and losers. Thats part of the war. The policy that benefits the winners is the only one that is definitive and only when you hear. It becomes taboo to discuss the views of the losers. The way i think about this marshall is one of institutions the working class has depended on in the recent past to ensure it has equal Bargaining Power. Classic story, privatesector reunion. Basically has been decimated as globalization. Sort of a right to work story. The church, classic institution that both simmons or class social fabric and how to ensure the workingclass participants have meaningful participation in the direction of culture and Public Policies that influence the culture. It has fallen off a cliff since the 1950s. I think the big one is family. The place in which workingclass children grow up hopefully in stable happy healthy homes. We know that marriage is increasingly becoming a luxury. It has dropped substantially. Professional class family formation. So all of these institutions are necessary and ensuring workingclass people live happy lives but also have a meaningful stake in the society that they live in. Have basically disappeared or become substantially weakened. The addendum i would say is if theres been a class war in the past 5060 years, its pretty clear whos losing. I agree with all of this. To say you are apologizing and conflating economic anxiety which they say is a rightwing talking point for just racial resentment. You counter that in a recent piece you wrote citing and mit study. Counties hit hardest by chinese competition were most likely to support donald trump and bernie sanders. If that were the case, why would they be supporting someone like bernie sanders. To talk specifically about the anxieties being really the a demonizes its this spontaneous eruption of neonazi racism. Which maybe was manipulated by Vladimir Putin and he just triggered this wave of voice from brazil White Nationalist to overthrow democracy and the u. S. And france and so on. You can tell but i think of that. Thats a partisan alibi for the loss of Hillary Clinton in germany. Its not a serious story. More serious is, its about money. Progressives in particular like to have this graph. It goes down from the 1920s and then up again. If its just about money, then you have aftertax redistribution. Just give them checks and they will be happy. The story i tell is its about power. Power is about independence of money. The ability to influence your life. And there and powered outside the narrow governmental round. Libertarians get upset with me for this point. But there is economic power in the marketplace. You do not have equality between most employers and employees. There is cultural power in the media. If you dont like the offerings for your children that you find on tv or in the movies. You cant just cofound your own movie studio. Thats power. Particularly for americans, the basis of the american creed, 18thcentury the call republican authority. You could not trust concentrated power of any kind. They didnt have media back then. Or political power. Diffusing power and having checks and balances is good in and of itself. I think weve lost this with this narrative of, its all about money. If we centralize power but we give you a 500 tax credit or 2000 tax credit every year. Then you should be happy. I was going to say, im not a fan of what i would call the craft materialistic view of economic anxiety. I think its much more complicated than that. Its also looking outside your door and seeing a community that was driving 2030 years ago and now every single store downtown is closed up. Are finding out yet again that one of your kids friends has died of an opioid overdose. Thats not economic. It still very much about the feeling of losing power over your own life. The point i make about this and i make this point a fair amount. I think its important so i will make it again. You have to understand the purposes that trump voters were motivated by pure racism if theyre just racists, just bad people, and you dont have to care about their concerns or worries. We know two things very substantially about the trump vote. One is that was really related to the climate. Manufacturing jobs. We also know it was heavily related and tied to the rise what folks called depth of despair. When you see a rise, you also see a significant shift from romney to trump in 2016. If you focus on the fact that these people are racist and not concerned about the fact and member of the elite actually caused the opioid epidemic. Purdue pharmaceuticals flooded these communities with drugs. Killed a lot of people. If we are not talking about that hour talking about trump voters racism then we are just participating in the war. How do we in good faith balance the race and cultural issue. The critics the country is changing. The white majority is shrinking. The places that are most experiencing that anxiety are also being by economic factors. How do we handle that. I think the one legitimate part is the idea of this big cultural shift going on. The american right is doing a good job of handling that. I think has to be managed in a particular way. Im married to a first generation immigrant. Never felt that we didnt belong to the same national community. You want people who feel like they themselves are assimilating if their newcomers. What people have been here for multiple generations. I think one of the problems with our modern immigration policy. We talk about it in economic terms and thats fine. But unless youre thinking about intermarriage rates. Other metrics of assimilation. Unless youre trying to manage and control that in a way thats good for the population. I do think you can inflame these cultural or racial or ethnic tensions. Thats true across history and society. You can blame that on racism but its a fact of life. If racism is what you will call it, you have to manage it. You have to tamp it down. And suppress it in a certain way. I think one thing with american ecs, we are so uncomfortable talking about culture that we stop trying to manage it. We stopped trying to actually build a unified nation out of the multiracial democracy we have. I think it brings benefit. I also think it brings challenges too that youre not smart, can cause a lot of social strife weve seen much worse in europe. Western europe is a much worse example of this problem then the United States is. 100 years ago in 1920, there was a deep and political social divide among angloamerican protestants. And White Americans of recent immigrant descent. Sometimes not so recent. It comes up redistricting because of the battle between the rural whites and the socalled ethnics. You have prohibition there was a war between catholics and protestants. Beginnings of multiculturalism. And why should european immigrants speak english. Class lowered to the 1970s. The european diasporas had collapsed in most of the cities in the north. By the 1970s, the average White American was partly of british and nonbritish dissent. My question is, we hear this about the rising, nonwhite majority. But thats counting every descendent of nonnonhispanic whites that will be nonwhite for the next 200 years. Richard alba, looking at latino rates of assimilation in interracial marriage. Latinos lose spanish as the primary language and marry outside their group at exactly the same rate that irish americans in the polish americans did a century ago. The suppose it racial polarization of politics is greatly exaggerated. If you look at every group except for africanamericans will have this 90 10 pattern. The other groups are less polarized, including Asian Americans and hispanic americans and nonhispanic whites. Nonhispanic whites are very evenly divided. Its not polarized in that sense. Latinos, depending on state politics, 40 percent one for governor abbott. 29 percent voted for donald trump. If your definition of polarization is anything thats not 5050, thats polarized. But its not enormously polarized. One of the criticisms of populism. People that advocate. Not saying thats what youre doing. Are you guys are just shouting at the system and you dont advocate for anything. You just want to tear everything down. You are actually sympathetic to that view. Tell us about why do think it is that populists themselves are not Good Governance . Im a critic of populism. We dont want to do insider politics to wellconnected establishments. Thats a terrible situation to be in. It was the politics of the American South between reconstruction and the civil rights revolution. When you get a condition where much of the population is disconnected from everything and excluded from politics and cultural authority. You are going to get them a box. This is dangerous. The demagogues, if you look at the southern example. Look at latin america. In the north you find the socalled white ethnic politicians in the northeast. Mayor michael currently. As anyone heard of mayor curley from boston . He represented irish americans going against the Anglo American wasp mayflower protestant power structure. In the south it was she we long. They almost always fail because the odds are stacked against the outsiders. Theyll have the mad money or power or connections. But they lose. Dont have the people willing to work for them that our insiders because thats a career suicide. When they do succeed, often its through dubious a combination of criminality and charlatan is in. You get this situation. In my own native taxes, we had two populist governors. James and miriam ferguson. They succeeded each other in the 20s. I think its good things for the farmers who were frozen out. She we l