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