Good evening and welcome to the policy center. I am john walters chief operating officer and id like to welcome our audience here at the pennsylvania headquarters avenue and or cspan audience to the firstever podcast taping that is both live and marks the premiere of the second reason of the realignment posted by hudson media. We are proud of the realignment that the launch last year and i recommend especially for those of you that havent been following it to take a look at the episode from last year particularly the conversation with secretary of state mike pompeo, mike gallagher, mike durand and others. Its an Excellent Program partly because of the two people that put it together and their ability to bring out topics and move the argument along so we couldnt be more proud of the work theyve done and we want to thank them for that and we are happy to launch this Years Program with michael lind to as many of you know is a prolific writer of more than a dozen books and cofounder of the new America Foundation with the distinguished fellow strategy Walter Russell mead. The professor at the lyndon b. Johnson school of Public Affairs at the university of texas and imported for tonights conversation, hes the author of the new class war, saving democracy from the managerial elite you can purchase it was just brought in today so we are here at the launch. Congratulations on that ther ths a direct line between the work of michael has done and been pursuing since the 90s. Maybe best exemplified by this book the next American Revolution avenue nationalism and the fourth American Revolution. The next american nation for nationalism in the fourth American Revolution. Whether you agree with the interpretation of western politics since world war ii, this work demonstrates an effort to understand the causes and solutions to the seemingly neverending cycle of clashes and shifting coalitions which is exactly what the realignment of podcast seeks to export. Also joining us is jb fans debate speedy 11 author of the book hillbiliology. He recently cofounded Venture Capital firm working to solve significant challenges and also a visiting fellow at aei. Ive only started on his book. If you havent, you should. Its an important discussion of a part of america that maybe a roomful of people in washington, d. C. And 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 email those to events hudson. Org. If you have questions we will get to those afterwards. To reiterate. I will speak for you and if not. First question defined terms what is the cost for. It is a conflict among it is your parentage associated with a particular structure of occupations but if you look at what i argue is that fundamental transatlantic society. You are much more likely to get a diploma. I argue that in europe as well as the United States i think both sides of the atlantic are similar enough now. As europe has become more multiethnic as the United States has become more secular. Therethere is a divide socialld politically but more or less two thirds which doesnt have a degree. Do you agree on that take us to interpret what youre saying it seems what youre suggesting is the class status is denoted by education in terms of explaining the way that society works. Yes and no. The average american with a bachelors degree has an income of about 60,000 a year. The average High School Graduate is no Higher Education is about 37,000 so there is a correlation, but unlike in the past where the class status was based on ownership of property or if you are a landlord and own land or in ebenezer scrooge and you are the owner or operator of a business that belief in the western world today largely the wealth and power and status tends to come from the position of the large bureaucratic organizations that can be an corporationincorporation, law fm profit, it can be the military and access to those influential positions is largely determined by education. I think one of the common stats is why is that education is the great denoted of class. We were speaking this morning and a plumber could make money and be rich and still work in class and based on your own experience, how do you see that in American Society . I largely agree with mike and thank you both for doing this. Next time you have me on a podcast tellme [inaudible] i think that what is true i dont know that by 100 i 100 b agreed it seems to be true about that account is that if you go to a suburban Cincinnati Ohio did you go to a Plumbing Firm and the guy that owns the firm there is something more similar about that group of people and their spouses and their children then there is between the supply firm and a person who is a majority or a large shareholder of google for example, so i do think that theres something about the way in which Educational Status confers but also reinforces and signifies the class status. Its important in our society and of course most people do not buy the gross majority of people cannot earn their living off of the Capital Appreciation and so there is a weird way in which we might call the professional managerial class is one of internally coherent even though we might not have the sort of person at the 91st percentile of the income scale isnt going to have the same income as the 99 . To tie a bow on the managerial class its like a slur who are these people in particular in the large bureaucratic organizations is that the corporate elite, government, or the transatlantic what is it that defines them as a class. Dont left has the professional managerial class to a small subsection indices tend to be people in the professions with doctors more so in the past and the present professors and podcast hosts. This kind of progressive theory is theres the working class cant professional managerial class and the professors and those are the capitalists. I follow the trotsky early conservative movement of the 1940s who wrote the book the managerial revolution who argued that the independent Owner Operator who was the capitalists also ran the business had been superseded already by the 1920s into the u. S. And europe by corporate managers but 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 before the deep state at which he was kind of part of because he worked for the cia o lost in the decade. So i have a broader definition of it and a lot of people do but again, its if you contrast it with the working class, the working class is changing its nature because of the changing composition of jobs. Part of it through the loss of manufacturing and outsourcing but also the productivity growth in manufacturing has shed a lot of jobs if you look at the United States according to the bureau of labor statistics, almost all of the new jobs are created in three sectors, it is the hospitality retail and healthcare. According to the u. S. Government of all of the top ten jobs that are being created on the registered nurses require education beyond a High School Diploma so the story that we are told at volvos and aspen and not here of course the jobs of the future require advanced education. Actually, they dont. Americans and their counterparts are underpaid and my argument in the class war is they are underpaid because they lack Bargaining Power of the kind they possess 20, 30, 40 or 50 years ago. Before we move on, what hasnbut hasntmoved on as the. Of the war suggests that there is a group of people not only looking down upon the working class but actively trying to harm them to benefit themselves. Im curious what your take is on that also. The book is not a Conspiracy Theory. I dont think there is some secret washington or new york or San Francisco where the cavity of the class gets together. Its just when the power is unevenly distributed among the social groups and individuals pursue their own interests, the results even though it is not in coordination is going to look as though the class is doing it when its just the result of the individual actions. If you look at the 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, immigration, investment. Free trade benefits everybody. Large scale, low scale immigration benefits everybody, and you can think this is totally unrealistic there are winners and losers but its because thats part of the war. The policy that benefits the winners is the only one that is definitive, the only one you hear them it becomes taboo to discuss the views of the losers, that is the kind of war. What are the institutions in the recent past that have equal Bargaining Power, so classic story, labor union, the union participation its been decimated as premier of the authorizatioglobalization. Social fabric also ensures the direction of the culture. Its fallen off the cliff since and third is family in which the working class children grow up in stable, healthy, happy homes. The professional class formation and stability is maintained more or less a level with a slight decline of where it was in the 50s through the 60s. It were to be a meaningful state that they lived in and either disappear or become substantially weakened in the past few years its been a class or its been pretty clear whos losing. In the economic anxiety which is a rightwing talking point for the resentment that you counter that in a recent piece in the journal citing they are hit hardest where they are most likely to support donald trump and Bernie Sanders and so if haf that were the case, then why would they be supporting somebody like Bernie Sanders and i want to get you to talk specifically about the economic anxiety peace being demonized. There are three narratives about this populist uprising that has produced trump in the u. S. And france and so on. One is a spontaneous abruption that maybe was manipulated by Vladimir Putin and he triggered this in the u. S. And the uk and france and so on. More serious is the story that its about money. Its about rising inequality and progressives in particular like to have a graph that goes down from the 1920s and then it goes up again. Then you have the aftertax redistribution and give them checks and they will be happy. The story that i tell is about power and its independent of money. Its powered the ability to influence your life and your society and it exists outside of the narrow governmental realm and libertarians get upset with me for this point that there is economic power in the marketplace. You do not hav have equal to the Bargaining Power between most employers and wisdom for years. There is cultural power in the media. You cant just count your own movie studio particularly for americans, the basis was the republican liberty that you could trust concentrated power of any kind economic. They didnt have media back then were political power and i think weve kind of lost us with this narrative but its all about money and if we centralize power but they give you a 500 tax credit or a 200,000 tax credit every year then you should be happy. I am not a fan of the view of economic anxiety. I think it is much more complicated and difficult than that. Its not a decent wage or enough money to afford the things you need. Thats part of it is also looking outside your door and seeing a Community Thriving years ago and now every store is closed or finding out yet again one of your kids for insight and an Opioid Epidemic. Thats still very much about the feeling of losing agency and losing power over your own life. The point id make about this and i will make it again you have to understand the purpose of the narrative they were motivated by racism and anxiety. We know two things very substantially about the trump vote. One is that it was really related to the decline of manufacturing jobs which one of the folks have written about. We also know that it was heavily related and tied to what the folks have called despair and you also see a significant shift from romney to trump. If you are focused on the fact that all these people are racist if you are not concerned about the fact that a member of the elite actually caused the Opioid Epidemic and pharmaceuticals, flooded the communities of drugs, killed a lot of people and if we are not talking about that if we are talking about the trump voters racism then we are participating in what they believe have already been winning for the past few decades. How do we balance the cultural issue because things that critics are doing is a true fact that the country is changing. Those places experiencing the anxiety how do we handle that . The legitimate part of the critique is the idea that it was a big cultural shift going on and it is unclear that the american right right now is having a good job of handling that. I think part of it is that it has to be managed in a particular way. Im married to a firstgeneration immigrant and never felt we didnt belong to part of the same community because that is important. You want people who feel like they are assimilating with newcomers and you want people that have been here assimilating as well. I think that the problems we talk about in economic terms it is an importanits an importante story but unless you are sort of thinking about other metrics of assimilation and trying to manage and control but in a way that is good for the overall population of the country you can sort of and claim these tensions that is true across history and society there is no good example of a society that has absorbed a large number of outsiders very quickly and easily. You can blame that on racialism if you want to but its a fact of life and if this is what youre going to call it you have to deal with it and try to tap it down, and i think sort of suppress it in a certain way. We start trying to actually build a unified nation out of the multiracial democracy that we have com, and i like that. I think it brings a lot of benefit, but i also think that it brings some challenges to if you are not smart about the challenges you can cause a strike which is what we have seen in america and much worse than europe its worse than the United States. 100 years ago in 1920, there was a deep political and social divide between the old stock angloamerican protestants and immigrant descent with irish americans and the germans. In the redistricting because of the battle between the socalled ethnics had a prohibition between the catholics and protestants the european diaspora had collapsed in the big cities in the north or were broken very quickly but the 1970s the average White American was partly of british and partly of non british descent so my question is we hear about the nonwhite majority but that is counting every new descendent of someone who has a Nonhispanic White for the next 200 years no matter what their other ancestry is. At the university of austin theyve looked at the assimilation of marriage and they lose spanish as the primary language and marry outside of their group but its the same as the irish americans and german americans did a century ago so i would go further i think the supposed racial polarization of politics is quite exaggerated. If you look at every group except for africanamericans but the kind of 9010 pattern the other groups are less polarized including Asian Americans and hispanic americans and Nonhispanic Whites that are very evenly divided. That is Hillary Clinton and donald trump so is our 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. Thats an important part of the story. One of the criticisms of populism and people who advocate for the populist politics you are shouting at the system and you dont advocate for anything. You dont want to you just want to tear everything down. You are somewhat sympathetic to that view so tell us about why you think it is populists themselves are not actually good at governance between the politics of the wellestablished politics and occasional outsider prisons protest thats a terrible situation to be in. If the politics of the American South between the reconstruction youve heard of the southern demagogue when the population is disconnected from everything and excluded from politics and cultural authority, you are going to give the rice to represent and so i think that this is dangerous. The demagogues, and if you look at the southern example, if you look at latin america, in the north you find this in the northeast. Has anyone heard of mayor curley from boston, they were going against the mayflower protestant power structure. In the south it was representing the establishment they almost always fail because the odds are stacked against the outsiders. It is a career suicide. When they do succeed it is through a dubious combination of criminality because they have to be financed somehow. In my own native texas we had populists governors who succeeded each other in the 1920s and they did some good things for the farmers that were frozen out. Huey long in louisiana could get any money for his populist insurgency so he went into business with Frank Costello of t