Good evening and welcome to Hudson Institute policy center. Im john walters, the chief operating officer and i like to welcome our audience here out of 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 hudson media fellow marshall kosloff. We are proud of the realignment here at hudson. Podcast launched last year and i recommend aspersion for those of you who have 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, micah gallagher, Michael Doran and others. Its an Excellent Program partly because of the two people who put it together and their ability to bring up topics and to move the argument along. We couldnt be prouder of the work they have done and i want to thank them for that and we are happy to launch this Years Program with michael lind who is as many of you know prolific writer, more than a dozen books and cofounder of the new America Foundation with hutchens of distinguished fellow and strategy statesmanship, Walter Russell mead. Michael is a professor at lyndon b. Johnson school of Public Affairs at the university of texas, and important for two nights conversation he is the author of the new class war. The book which you can purchase, which is published today so we are here at the launch. Congratulations on the new book. There is a direct line between the new class war and the work that mike has been a been pursuing since the 90s, maybe best exemplified by his book the next american revolution, the new nationalism and the fourth american revolution. Sorry, the next american nation and new nationalism and the fourth american revolution. Whether you agree with this interpretation of western politics since world war ii is work demonstrates serious effort and solutions to the seemingly never ending cycle of clashes and shifting coalitions which is exactly what our realignment podcast seeks to explore. Also joining us is j. D. Vance who fittingly was the realignment premier guest. J. D. Of course is the author of bestselling and highly influential book hillbilly elegy, a powerful account of family, community and america. He recently cofounded narnia capital, a Venture Capital firm investing in people and technologies working to solve significant challenges. Is also a visiting fellow at aei. I have not, ive only started it, i said to michael, his book. I of course read j. D. s book which if you havent you should. Its an important discussion of a part of america that maybe some like Charles Murray which is outside the bubble of the elite chattering classes. At the beginning of michaels book he says demagogic populism is a symptom, technocratic neoliberalism is the disease. Democratic pluralism is the cure. Im not sure if that is a throwdown for this evening with a roomful of people in washington, d. C. , but we are pleased to start from that discussion and take on the issue with his help. We will take questions later in the program and you can email those two events hudson. Org and will get them to marshall to use as a get to that part of the program so please send them along. Everybody in your eye knows technically sophisticated so this will not be a problem. Without any further ado let me, please join me in welcoming michael land and j. D. Vance. [applause] one quick note. Michael would be available after the talk to sign books, so if you found this great, take a second to speak to reiterate the cavity questions, events hudson. Org. Sure you get sick of hearing a stock so i will speak for you. With that, marshall, why did you start us off. The book is called the new class war. First question, lets define terms. What is a class war . I class war is conflict among quasihereditary classes where your parentage is a a social wh a particular structure of occupations. We think we did end up meritocratic system but if you look at what it argued is the fundamental cleavage in modern transatlantic societies, which is educational, its not a matter of mere aftertax income, you are much more likely to get a diploma if one or both of the parents have diplomas which were kind of the new degrees of nobility than it in both of yor 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 wouldnt have been the case 40, 50 years ago but as europe has become more multiethnic, as a United States has become more secular i think theres some convergence, and what you see is arguably is widening divide, socially and politically, between the College Educated and more or less twothirds majority which does not have even a bachelors degree. Do you agree with that take . To interpret what youre saying it seems youre suggesting unlike the previous, class status has been noted by Education Matters more than income in terms of explaining like the way our society works. Yes and no. The average american was a bachelors degree has an income of about 60,000 a year. The average High School Graduate with the Higher Education is about 37,000. There is a correlation, but unlike in the past where class status was based on ownership of property, whether you were a feudal landlord and owned land or you were an ebenezer scrooge Small Business owner and you are the Owner Operator of the business, the elites in the western world today largely, their wealth and the power and their status tends to come from the position in a large bureaucratic organization. It can be a corporation, a law firm, a nonprofit. It can be the military. And access to those lucrative influential positions is largely determined by education. What you think . One of the, retorts is its not, why is it education is a great keynote of class . Michael and i were speaking talking about a plumber. A plumber could make 100,000 and get rich. Based on your own experience how do you see that cleavage in American Society . I largely agree with mike, first off let me thank you both for doing this. Next time have you on the podcast please tell me which color the couch is. [laughing] i think whats true about mikes account, i dont know i when oedipus and agree, 35 agree. What seems to be mostly true about that account is it you go to a suburb in cincinnati, ohio, and you go to a Plumbing Firm and to go to the guy who owned the firm and you go to the people who work there, then you go to the clinical staff, there is something much more similar about that group of people about their spouses, their children then there is between the city owner of the Plumbing Supply firm and a person whose majority or large shareholder at google, for example. I do think theres something about the way which Educational Status both confers but also reinforces class status the truly important in our society. Of course most people do not come across madrid people cannot earn their living off capital appreciation. There is this weird way in which what mike calls professional managerial class is sort of internally coherent even though it might not have the sort of person at the 91st the 91st pee of income scale, not the same income of the person of the 99. 9 percentile. Defined them as a class. There are different definitions, the left has the pnc, professional managerial class which refers in my mind to simply a small subsection of the managerial elite in these tend to be people in professions where you set your own hours, lawyers, doctors more in the past, podcast hosts. If you can work from home. The progressive theory is there are three classes, the working class, the professional managerial class, podcast is and professors and then capitalists and i reject this. I follow james burnham, early conservative of the 1940s who wrote the managerial revolution. He argued the independent Owner Operator who was the capitalist but also ran his own business and been superseded already by the 1920s by corporate managers but also included in the managerial class government officials, career civil servants, academics, and in a passage few people note in the managerial revolution, the uniformed military which will become more important over time as one of the most organized, long before the deep state, which he was part of because he worked for the cia a lot. I had a broader definition than a lot of people do. If you contrast it, the working class is changing its nature, part of it through loss of manufacturing on outsourcing and productivity growth. Manufacturing has shut a lot of jobs according to bureau of labor statistics all the new jobs are created in three sectors, retail and healthcare. According to the Us Government of all the top ten jobs being created in numerical terms. And from the story we are told in aspen, and actually they dont. And and they lack Bargaining Power of the kind they possessed. And theres an educational system, and you can buy the idea of Certain Industries but a war suggests a group of people that is not only looking down upon the working class 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, the committee of the ruling class gets together. When power is unevenly distributed among social groups and individuals pursue their own interests, the result, there is no coordination is going to feel as though the class is doing it when it is just the result of a loss 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 there are trade offs with trade, immigration and investment, different groups in society, some benefit, some lose. A constant den of propaganda, free trade benefits everybody, largescale, low skill benefits for everybody. This is totally unrealistic, there are winners and losers. That is part of the war. The policy that benefits the winners is the one, the only one that is defended in public, it is taboo to discuss the views of the losers that is the kind of war. What if the institutions they depended on in the recent past, make sure it has equal Bargaining Power. Classic story, labor union, privatesector labor union participation in the late 50s, it decimated merrily globalization or right to work story. It is primarily globalization. The church, classic institution that cement workingclass social fabric and ensures workingclass participants have participation in the direction of the culture and direction of policies that influence that culture. It is family. The place workingclass children grow up, and and it dropped substantially. And all these institutions were necessary, is a meaningful stake in the society they live in. They are common it is into that. It is clear who is losing. I agree with all of this. Critics of your book have come out, you are apologizing and conflating economic anxiety, the rightwing talking point or racial resentment. You counter that in a piece in the wall street journal citing an mit study. They are hit hard by chinese import competition, most likely to support donald trump and bernie sanders. If that were the case, somebody like bernie sanders, the effort to urge talking about the economic anxiety piece demonizing racism. This populist, the yellow vest revolt in france and so on. Is the spontaneous eruption of neonazi racism which was manipulated by vladimir putin, he triggered this wave of boys from brazil, white nationalists to overthrow you 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, it is about the money. It is about rising inequality. They like to have a graph, the Great Depression it goes down from the 1920s and up again but if it is just about money they have after tax redistribution and keep workingclass people checks and they will be happy. That story i tell in the new class war saving democracy from the mangerial elite it is about power, power is independent of money. Power, the ability to influence your life, to influence your society, power exists outside the narrow governmental realm, libertarians get upset at this point. There is economic power in the marketplace. You dont have the quality of Bargaining Power between most employers and most 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, you cant just found your own movie studio or found your own social media platform. That is power. Particularly for americans, the basis of the american creed, what they call republican liberty that you could not trust concentrated power of any kind. They didnt have media or political power. Defusing power and having checks and balances is good in and of itself and we lost this with this narrative of it is all about money and if we centralize power we give you a 500 tax credit or a 2,000 tax credit every year, you should be happy. I am not a fan of what i call the craft materialistic view of economic anxiety. It is more complicated and difficult than that. Not just having a good job or decent wage, and and and every single store downtown is closed up, and finding out one of your friends, kids friends died of an Opioid Epidemic it is not economic in a strict sense, and losing power, i make this point, it is important, you have to understand what the purposes, the trump voters were motivated by, if they are just racist, they are about the trump vote. It was decline of manufacturing jobs. It was heavily related and tied to the rise of depth of despair that when you see a rise in opioidrelated deaths in a Given Community you see a significant shift from raw meat to trump in 2016. If you are focused on the fact that all these people are racist and not concerned about the fact that a member of the elite that michael lind is so concerned about actually calls in Opioid Epidemic, flooded these communities with drugs, and if we are not talking about that, we are talking about trump voters racism and just participating in a class war that the elites have already been winning for the past few decades. How do we balance the race and culture issue. They point out a true fact which is the country is changing. The countrys white majority is shrinking in the places that are most experiencing that anxiety are being cross it by economic factors. How do we handle that . The one legitimate part of the critique is the idea, a big cultural shift going on. They were not doing a good job handling it. It has to be managed, i am married to firstgeneration immigrants, we didnt belong to the same national community. They are assimilating newcomers, want people from multiple generations to feel like newcomers. One of problem with the modern immigration policy in economic terms, an important piece of the story. Unless you think about intermarriage, unless you are trying to manage and control that in a way that is good for the overall population you can inflame these cultural, racial or ethnic tension, that is true across history and society. There is no good example of a society that has absorbed a very large number of outsiders quickly and easily. You can blame it on racism and it is a fact of life, if racism is what you call you have to manage it and tap it down. And suppress it in a certain way. If they are so uncomfortable talking about culture, 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 but brings challenges, if you are not smart about this, you, a lot of social strife which is what we have seen in america, worse than europe. Western europe is worth example in the United States is. 100 years ago in 1920, there was a deep deep political and social divide between old stock angloamerican protestants and White Americans of recent immigrant dissent or not so recent in the case of irish americans and germans. It gummed up the redistricting because of the battle between rural whites and urban ethnics. You had prohibition, a war between the catholics and protestants, you have beginnings of multiculturalism, people saying why shouldnt european immigrants speak english. Flash forward to the 1970s was the european diaspora collapsed in most of the big cities, moving very quickly. By the 1970s the average White American was part of british and partly nonbritish descent. We hear this about the rising nonwhite majority, that is counting every descendent of someone whos not a nonhispanic white, will be nonwhite for the next 200 years no matter what their other ancestry is. Richard alba and professor stephen treyoh have looked at latino rates of assimilation and intermarriage. Latinos lose spanish as the primary language and marry outside the group at the same rate that irish americans and germanamericans and polish americans do a century ago. I would go further. The supposed racial polarization of politics is greatly exaggerated. If you look at every group except africanamericans, 90 of democrats and 10 republicans the other groups are less polarized including Asian Americans and hispanic americans, nonhispanic whites, very evenly divided, that was Hillary Clinton and donald trump. It is not polarized in that sense, latinos and state politics in my home state of texas, 40 went for governor abbott. 29 voted for don