Responsibility narrative, blaming people who fall off the tight rope for the catastrophes that follow. Watch kevin meredith, nicholas kristof, this weekend on booktv on cspan2. In his next booktv discussion, michael lind says democracies are being unraveled by new class war. Welcome to the Hudson Institute policy center. I am john walters, chief operating officer. I would like to welcome our audience here to our Pennsylvania Court is an cspan audience to our first ever podcast taping that is both live and marks the Second Season premiere of podcast, the Second Season of the realignment, my hudson media fellows. We are proud of the realignment. The podcast launched last year and i recommend for those who havent been following it that you take a look at the episodes from last year particularly the conversation with mike pompeo, josh holly, Mike Gallagher and others. It is an Excellent Program partly because of the two people together who bring out topics into moving the argument along. We couldnt be proud of the work they have done and we are happy to launch this Years Program with michael lind who as many of you know is a prolific writer of a dozen books, cofounder of the new america foundation, a very distinguished fellow at walter russell. Michael is a professor at lyndon b. Johnson school of Public Health a is at the university of texas and he is the author of the new class war, saving democracy from the managerial elite. It was published today. We are here at the launch. Congratulations, michael. There is a direct line between the new class war and the work michael has done that is best exemplified by the next american revolution. The new nationalism in the fourth american revolution. The next american nation. Whether you agree with his interpretation of western politics since world war ii his work demonstrates an effort to understand the causes of and solutions to the seemingly neverending cycle of clashes and shifting coalitions which is what our realignment podcast seeks to explore. Also joining us is j. D. Vance, author of the bestselling and influential book hillbilly elegy, powerful account of family, community and america. He recently cofounded narnia capital, Venture Capital firm investing in people and technologies working to solve significant challenges, also a visiting fellow at aei. His book, i have read the book which is if you havent you should, an important discussion of a part of america someone like Charles Murray would say is outside the bubble. At the beginning of the new book, he says demagogic populism is a symptom, technocratic neoliberalism is the disease, democratic pluralism is that your. I am not sure if that is a throw down for a room full of people in washington dc, but we are pleased to start from that discussion to take on that issue with his help. We will take questions later in the program and email those to events hudson. Org and we will get them to marshall to use that part of the program. It will not be a problem. Without any further a do please join me in welcoming michael lind and j. D. Vance. [applause] michael is going to be available after the talk. Just to reiterate if you have any questions, at that point i will speak for you. With that, why dont you start us off, marshall kosloff. The new class war, saving democracy from the managerial elite. Lets defined terms. What is a class war . A class war is conflict among quasimilitary classes. Your parentage is associated with a particular structure of operations and we think we live in a meritocratic system but the fundamental cleavage in modern transatlantic society is educational, not a matter of aftertax income, you are more likely to get a diploma if one or both your parents had diplomas. Than if both of your parents did not. I argue that in europe as well as the United States, both sides of the atlantic are similar enough to make robust generalizations. That would not have been the case 40 or 50 years ago but as europe has become multiethnic as the United States has become more secular there is some convergence. What you see is arguably a widening divide socially and politically between collegeeducated and more or less two thirds authority. Do you agree with that take . Sounds like you are suggesting unlike in Previous Year as class status Education Matters more than income in terms of explaining the way our society works. Yes and no. The average american has a bachelors degree, and income of 60, 000 a year. The average High School Graduate with no Higher Education is 37, 000 so there is a correlation. Unlike in the past were class status was based on ownership of property, if you were a feudal landlord and dont land or if you were ebenezer scrooge Small Business owner and Owner Operator of the business the elites in the western world today largely their wealth and their power and status tends to come from their position in a large bureaucratic organization. It could be a corporation or law firm or a nonprofit. It could be the military. Access to those lucrative influential positions largely determined by education. One of the common retorts, why is it a d note or of class, we talk about a plumber making 100, 000, rich and still workingclass. Based on your experience how do you see the cleavage in American Society . I largely agree with mike. Let me thank you for doing this next time you have me on the podcast, tell me what code the couch is on. I think what is true, i dont think i 100 agree but 95 agree. What seems to me mostly true about that account is if you go to a suburb in cincinnati, ohio, and go to a Plumbing Firm as go to the guy who owns the firm and the people who work there and the clerical staff, there is something much more similar about that group of people, their spouses, their children, than there is between the owner of the Plumbing Supply firm and a person, a large shareholder at google for example. I think there is something about the way Educational Status confers but also reinforces and signifies class status that is important in our society and most people, the gross majority of people cannot earn their living off of capital appreciation. There is a weird way in which mike calls the professional managerial class is internally coherent even though it might not have the person at the 90 first at the 91st percentile of the income, as the 99 . On the managerial class, the progressive left, the progressive managerial class, who are these people in particular . A large bureaucratic organization, corporate elite, government or the transatlantic sense, what is it that defines them as a class . There are different definitions. The left has the professional managerial class which refers to a small subsection of the managerial elite and these tend to be people in the professions where you more or less set your own hours, lawyers, doctors, more in the past and present, professors, podcast hosts. If you can work home basically. There is workingclass, the professional managerial class, podcast or is and professors and then the capitalists. I reject this. I follow james burnham, and early conservative movement of the 1940s who wrote the managerial revolution. He argued the independent Owner Operator who was the capitalist but also ran his own business was superseded by the 1920s in the us and europe by corporate managers but also included in the managerial class government officials, career civil servants, academics and what few people noted, the career military which would become more important over time, one of the most organized along before the deep state which he was part of because he worked for the cia a lot in the ensuing decades. I have a broader division and a lot of people do but if you contrast it with the working class, the working class is changing its nature because of the changing composition of the jobs. Part of it through loss of manufacturing through outsourcing and ordinary productivity growth. Manufacturing shut a lot of jobs. Look at the United States according to the bureau of labor statistics almost all the new jobs are created in three sectors, hospitality, retail and healthcare. According to the us government, of the top ten jobs that are being created in numerical terms only registered nurse requires any education beyond a High School Diploma so the story we were told in davos and aspen. The jobs of the future require advanced education. Actually they dont. Americans and their counterparts and workingclass counterparts in europe are underpaid. They are not overeducated. My argument in the new class war they are underpaid because they lack Bargaining Power of the kind that they possess 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago. Before we move on, the thing i havent understood from the conversation, what is it, we could buy that there is an educational system preference, where is the war . A war suggests a group of people, this elite, not only looking down on the workingclass but actively trying to harm them to benefit themselves. The book is not a Conspiracy Theory. I dont think there is a secret office in washington or new york or San Francisco where the committee of the ruling class gets together. It is just that when power is unevenly distributed among social groups and individuals pursue their own interests, the result even though it is there is no coordination, is going to look as though the class is doing it when it is the result of individual actions. If you look at Public Policy, from the 1990s to the present, globalization. One of the things that amazes me is having been in politics all my life, the unwillingness of people to acknowledge that there are tradeoffss with immigration, investment, that different groups in society, some benefit, some lose. There is a constant den of propaganda that benefits everybody, largescale the low skill immigration fits everybody. This is totally unrealistic a are winners and losers but it is because that is part of the war. The policy that benefits the winners is the one, the only one defendant in public and really when you hear because it is taboo to discuss the views of the losers. The one about this, what are the institutions the working class is dependent on in the recent past to ensure Bargaining Power . Classic story, labor union, participation in the late 50s, 6 persons, primarily globalization, right to work story. I am not a fan of right to work. It is a globalization story. The church, classic institution that cements workingclass social fabric and ensures workingclass participants have participation in the direction of the culture and Public Policies that influence that culture. Workingclass Church Participation has fallen off a cliff. Third, the big one is family, the place in which workingclass children grow up in healthy and happy homes. We know marriage is becoming a luxury good, workingclass family formation, workingclass family dissolution, professional class family formation has maintained the level with a slight decline where it was in the 1950s or 60s. These institutions are necessary to ensure workingclass people are able to live happy lives and have a meaningful stake in the society they live in, have basically disappeared or become substantially week in the last few years was the addendum is if there has been a class war it is clear who is losing. From that perspective i agree with all of this but the critics, especially of your book have come out, and said you are apologizing and conflating economic anxiety, rightwing talking point or racial resentment. You counter that citing an mit study, counties that were hit hardest by chinese import competition and and Bernie Sanders, if that were the case, why would you be supporting somebody like Bernie Sanders and i want to get you in on that. Being demonized for racism. There are three narratives about this populist uprising that produced trump in the us and in france and so on, when is it is just the spontaneous eruption of neonazi racism which was manipulated by Vladimir Putin and he triggered this wave of white nationalists to overthrow democracy in the us and so on. You can tell what i think of that. That is a partisan alibi for the loss of Hillary Clinton in germany. It is not a serious story. More serious is it is about money. It is about rising inequality and progressives like to have this graph and it goes down from the 1920s and up again and if it is just about money you have aftertax redistribution where you give workingclass people checks and they will be happy. The story i tell in the new class war is it is about power, power is independent, the ability to influence your society and power exists outside the narrow governmental realm and libertarians get upset with me for this but there is economic power in the marketplace. You do not have equally of Bargaining Power between most employers and most employees. There is cultural power. In the media. If you dont like the offer that you find on tv or in the movies or whatever you cant just found your own movie studio or your own social media platform, that is power. Particularly for americans the basis of the american creed, you could not trust concentrated power of any kind, they didnt have the media back then or political power, and diffusing power and having checks and balances is good in and of itself and we have lost this with this narrative of it is all about money. If we centralize power we have a 500 tax credit, then you should be happy. I was going to say i am not a fan of what i call the materialistic view of economic anxiety that led to trump. It is more difficult than that. Not just having a decent wage or enough money, that is part of it but looking outside your door and seeing a community that was thriving 20 or 30 or 40 years ago and now every store is closed up or finding out one of your friends are one of your kids friends died of an Opioid Epidemic. That is not economic. It is very much about this feeling of losing power over your own life. I make a point a fair amount. You have to understand what the purpose is of the narrative trump voters were motivated by pure racial anxiety. If they are just bad people that you dont have to care about their concerns or worries. We know two things substantially about the trump vote, one is it was related to manufacturing jobs caused by the china shock. We know that it was heavily related and tied to the rise of death of despair. When you see a rise in opioidrelated deaths, you see a significant shift from romney to trump in 2016. If your focus on the fact that all these people are racists you are not concerned about the fact that a member of the elite actually caused an Opioid Epidemic of flooded communities with drugs, killed a lot of people and if we are not talking about that, we are participating in class war that the elites have been winning for the past few decades. How do we in good faith balance the cultural issue . The critics point out a true fact which is the country is changing, the countrys white majority is shrinking and the places most experiencing that anxiety are being hit by economic factors. How do we handle that . The one legitimate critique is that there is a big cultural shift going on. It is unclear the american right is doing a good job handling it. It has to be managed in a particular way. I am married to a firstgeneration immigrant, we didnt belong to the same national community. You want people who feel they themselves are assimilating, newcomers want people who have been here for multiple generations to feel like the newcomers they themselves assimilating as well. One of the problems with our moderate immigration policy, we talk in common terms about an important piece of the story but unless you are thinking about intermarriage rates or metrics of assimilation, unless you are trying to manage and control that in a way that is good for the overall population in the country, you inflame these cultural or racial or ethnic tensions that is true across history and across society. There is no good example of a society that absorbed in a large number of outsiders, very quickly, very easily, you can blame that on racism if you want to but it is a fact of life and if racism is what youre going to call you have to manage it and deal with it and tamp it down and suppress it in a certain way. One thing american elites are uncomfortable talking about, that we stop trying to manage it, stop trying to build a unified nation out of the multiracial democracy we have. I like the multiracial democracy. It brings a lot of benefit, it brings challenges too. If you are not smart about those challenges, what we have seen in america, western europe is a worse example of this problem than the United States. 100 years ago in 1920, there was a deep political and social divide between old stock and american protestants and White Americans of immigrant dissent or not so much. In the case of irish americans and germans. It gummed up redistricting because of the battle between rural whites and ethnics. You had prohibition, a war between catholics and protestants and the beginnings of multiculturalism, why should european immigrant not speak english . Flash forward to the 1970s was the european diasporas had collapsed in the big cities in the north. By the 1970s the average White American was partly british and partly of nonbritish descent. We hear this about the rising nonwhite majority, but that is counting every descendent of someone who is a nonhispanic white, will be nonwhite for the next 200 years no matter what their other ancestry