America at the point of no return. Welcome. You might know michael from his previous work he wrote 93 election. He was working the private sector at the time under a pseudonym until he was outed and then went to work for the Trump Administration and the National Security council. That work it is safe to say as an existential question and now you tell us we are at the point of no return. Ive attempted to ask at the top what do you consider to be an alarmist but i look around and see what is going on all around us right now. What is going on. What is your general assessment i would agree. The question is am i right or am i wrong. Im comforted somewhat by the fact people have come around and said i dont know or even im now completely convinced to be vindicated by that is only somewhat comforting for everything to turn out okay. So, i wrote the bulk of the book before the lockdown before for the 1619 riots, and they serve as a further indication the country is headed in a bad direction but its an indication i would rather not have. Id rather be proven wrong and everything become harmonious and i can go down in history as the crank that will wrote an inaccurate thing. Everyone else would be a lot happier. [laughter] both of these books are about elections. Is it such are all going to be of this magnitude or is this a temporary thing . Its definitely temporary but that is also not a comforting answer because one way you could solve the problem is to have one more election, the Democratic Party, let the amnesty if you read the joe Biden Immigration plan, essentially there is a promise to bring in through a combination of amnesty rules 52 million americans on the naturalization citizenship. The highest correlation of liberal or democratic voting for a district whether its the Congressional District or the state, county and they know this. The more come into the country in certain states and this would be a great way to build the majority. So that is one thing on the table in 2016 and 2020. So in california the states have every gubernatorial because they know the outcomes are a foregone conclusion and whoever wins will have to take the same program as everybody else. The country could become like that shortly is what i am most worried about. One more general question. Is it more existential if you will and i preface that by pointing out the founder of the transition integrity project, which is a Bipartisan Group with john podesta they said you should be treated as such. Well, he was executed for working with the nazis. Was his more heightened than 2016 it was for writing an article, without a trial and this person has been criticized by a lot of our friends and has refused to apologize or duck down, so it is totally justified and wellfunded in the think tank he works for they have no problem with him putting out death threats. So one thing to tell us about where we are to win by a landslide they expected the transition to a oneparty state to be smooth and uneventful in which they could just begin the implementation of the program and the election of trump and the resistance in the country, and theyve been a very angry mood since the 2016 election and that mood has hit a fever pitch in 2020, and i fear that if they get total power in 2020 i believe the transition if it hadnt occurred would have been smoother and less eventful and i think it will be extremely turbulent if they get it now because they will be out to settle scores. One person whom i have known has actually called for a, quote on quote, truth and reconciliation commitment and this is something totalitarian dictators should follow if you dont want to put everybody in jail you at least try to paper over the differences and having people come forward and confess. What crimes are there to confess making an argument for the president and for his program if we are talking about a truth and reconciliation commission, there are no Democratic Politics or justified opposition. Its just one side and that is the way they see it. Lets back up and work through the book and get to the argument. The flight 93 election was now more and extensive work to think through some of the underlining problems that we face. You open the book with an extended essay if you will with a chapter on california. You present california as a study of americas possible future, so backing away, do you see a larger trend going on . California effectively had a oneparty rule for decades notwithstanding not to go into the weeds but Arnold Schwarzenegger spent less than two years trying to govern as a centerright conservative who was defeated in every respect and spend his time governing as a liberal democrat although he never formally switched parties and had a super majority and the congressional delegation Something Like 457 overwhelmingly democratic. Oneparty governance at the state level, city level and pretty much every county level with a large population. But those counties and people there were millions of them they had no effective vote or say. California shows what happens when the Democratic Party is on the modern left and takes complete power of what they do. Its illustrative because the Democratic Party has left our, especially well represented by california, by finance interests and tech interests and the managerial class, the socalled knowledge economy workers, these are the people that cram that little ribbon up and down the california coast and then impose them on the rest of the state. It is a very its not in all of warped portrait by felix california all of these things everybody hears that. Im just saying underneath the tip of the iceberg is the rest of the iceberg. And dk people dont hear about and they need to know about. What makes the example of where things are going . Obviously theres cultural questions and how it actually operates. I almost begin the book with michael bloomberg, former mayor of new york city and very briefly a president ial candidate in the democratic primary, while he was running came to california and said this is the model for the future. He is a typical kind of oligarch addict type. I dont know how much money he has come 50 billion and founded a company, not to take away from his success, but he is all very much about the knowledge economy, the finance economy, the hightech economy, and with no concern for the middle class, for manufacturing and so on. His vision of new york he used to call it the luxury product meaning yes it is expensive to be here and all kinds of things dont work, but it works for those at the top and thats what matters in the global economy. He doesnt seem to care about the rest of the country in any significant way. Michael bloomberg was a candidate for the coastal elite and the parts of california that they were praising. I would say the same about gavin and mark and schwarzenegger and all of those you think of when you think about the great california Success Story as long as palo alto and San Francisco and laguna beach and a handful of other places are doing okay. California is doing okay, modesto, the cascade mountains, the high desert, the low desert, not only do they not care about those places but they dont even know that they are there. So now there is this sense you also talk about the old regime and a certain juxtaposition in your book between this new regime which californias model of where things seem to be going and this other regime. I want to come back later to your analysis, but i want to talk about those two models you layout the california model, but this regime we talk about, the older america, tell us more about how you analyze that and talk somewhat about the confusion with the left and the right over that. The main thrust of chapter two and Chapter Three is to say this is how we are supposed to be governed but we are not any moranymore and in a way it is maddened to revere the constitution and the declaration of independence bill of rights northwest ordinance and amendments. But its kind of owning up to the fact the United States is no longer governed by these states. On the left wing attacks its been amply covered elsewhere including by many scholars and myself but the right wing havent gotten as much attention. Lets dig into those a little bit because in hildale among other places, we spent time talking about the founding and the principles behind it, the declaration and the constitution. We think those are very important, but its also the case the futures are talked about many times but you go into some depth about how theres been a debate within the right over how to understand the founding. To what extent has that kind of taken the conservatives, the defenders of the founding on the wrong path . There is the attack that says im trying to speak to those that look at the world of 2020 and say i dont like this, something has gone wrong and needs to be fixed. When we sit down and make the list what is a list of things you dont like, mine and theirs looks about the same. How do we get here and then they will say one of two things to oversimplify. Founding, all men are created equal. And the related attack is the enlightenment or the founding of the byproduct. I dont mean to disparage, but basically he caricatures america in that book that came out in 1987 as nothing but a kind of lock in a petri dish. Neither of these charges is true. Its not adherence to the founding principles and the founders in fact were not a straight up lockeans or libertarians concerned only with the private satisfaction of appetites and things like that and building of a regime. Weve heard all of these critiques before. They were doing the best they could with the circumstances that still prevail today and in the modern world as opposed to the we live in a world in which civil and religious law has been separated. I dont want to get into the philosophy to deep but many do not prevail and the answers performed are things that i think are unreliable and i think they know that because they never spell them out. They chip away a lot of the founding and hit on ma maybe its throne and altered. Maybe it comes from meacham and i find all of those satisfactory. I find some aspects of some of those things reasonable if they are interpreted in the right way and if they are included with other elements, and i try to sketch this out. So its im trying in the chapter not to bash the rightwing critics of the founding to get 2020 correct because i dont see how that helps anything. Im trying to say im with you on the diagnosis. I dont think you are right on the cure. Youve got to hear me out. From what ive heard people say i havent felt this through and ive been on the fence about it but i was convinced by that. Its literally like five people that have told me that. But thats an important aspect i think. We will come to your serious criticism of current politics and conservatism and modern aspects of the movement if you will, but that stems from a misunderstanding or failure to comprehend the grounding the thing that is the most original about chapter two is putting it all in one place and trying to directly address the criticism over the last ten years, so im not going into old debates between the paley okons and neocons from the 70s. Im not going into any of that. This is all about addressing serious rightwing critics of the regime as it has developed in the last couple of decades. A regime which i oppose and its a far deal from what it should be but i think diagnosed the reasons why inaccurately. Lets talk about on the left then a little bit say we had the 1619 project, the first 1716 project. What do you make of that . Its the root of what has gotten us here. That is a good question the root of whats gotten us here. I believe two movements, the capital progressivism and the kind of 60s leftism and beyond. The original what anyone thinks of them but i find some good in them what i find good in them is none of them are antiamerican. They wanted to kind of reinterpret. Think of them as somebody coming to a stateoftheart computer and finding software from 64 on it. They loved the machine and wanted to bring about progress. It arises from a kind of irrational passion of utopianism and marxism. Some of it i think also arises from critiques such as we have been telling our history one way and people have been left out. Remember a lot of it begins with an argument for conclusion. Why are we telling this story and not of that story. Then it becomes you are right you should tell all of the story and then its why are we emphasizing, until you finally get all the way through we are not going to tell the story anymore or only in a disparaging way and everything has to be about the stuff formally excluded. It culminates into i wont say this about the project if youve been watching the last couple of days they had a rough week or two where they are starting to deny that they have ever said some of the most radical things that they said on the project and have even gone so far as to disingenuously retroactively change websites and take things down but as they say the internet is forever. These things are captured somewhere and its thrown back in their faces. I will make a distinction you make it here between some intellectual shifts going on but then also some kind of structural practical things happening. One of the things our friends and scholars point out is what they call the Administrative State. Theres structural things happening below the intellectual critiques and arguments. To go back to the software analogy its old software for a machine thats too complex but we will come up with new software. Part of the problem is now the old software said that the people decide all these questions. Cant have that anymore because the questions are too complicated for people to decide. They need to be decided on the basis of expertise or Scientific Authority and then implemented in a nonpartisan way. And in order to do that, we have to build a credible apparatus. They do it cleverly only three branches of government. Theres the Administrative State not quite but almost entirely built within the executive branch but it becomes an unaccountable Fourth Branch people that work are not elected and are not really responsive to electoral authority. On paper there is a chart which the executive branch the president is at the top and then everybody has little lines to the boxes and if you are the ceo of a company you think all of these people report to me and as the ceo actually that is more or less true. You have more leeway. The Administrative State has been so insulated from Political Authority so here we see the breaking away if you will of the apartheid regime, the regime of the founders which was intellectual and also practical and in different ways there was a break with progressives even though there were some things that were not quite as radical as what comes later. It takes a while to build these things. Sometimes these movements dont go anywhere and sometimes they do, but you only noticed because when thnotice becausewhen the pe talking about it, they push through the reform. They do all of that legislatively. It takes a while before you get to the point where an Unaccountable Agency can say we are passing this regulation, congress has nothing to say about it if you are found in violation you will be found by one of our agents and then you can be brought up before an administrative judge in other words all three powers vested in one branch where they can charge you, sentence you, fine and within one system. It takes a long time to be built. The very definition of tyranny. Almost to the point people are surprised that they didnt know it was happening and then its just kind of there. So is that in evolution, the slow change or is it a change in the tide . We will come back to that. Let me put it this way. You may remember this comment. The power and balance of those that believe in the old order which is on the books i send my students down to the National Archives every year to make sure that its still there and it is. So on the books the old order is still great and fundamental, but the power and balance between those of that believe and those that uphold and enforce the new order is vast. We have almost no power over the system and they have almost all the power, therefore on the one since we passed the rubicon. Lets say that the epa says i inadvertently killed an endangered insect in my yard and they want to do whatever. They charge me and its not a sworn officer of the law. I get called before an administrative judge in a proceeding with no precedent and then i get convicted. They can do that. On the one sense, the old order is there but on the other, i am bambi and they are godzilla. He would be defeated rather easily. Part of it is a shift of political power from the elected branches and delegation to the state which begins with the progressives themselves, so there is a structural thing going on but you also introduce another element. We are talking about the shift of power which we would call the Administrative State. I know what the ruling class was and it was the land of the has democracy and high clergy. In our sense, the ruling class is they have one fundamental thing in common. They all get the same education and so the senior members of the ruling class are the people that run the corporations and foundations and universities. The junior members, and some of them are extraordinarily rich, the junior members of the ruling class or people who went to middlebury or overland. They are well indoctrinated and instead of being a managing director at Goldman Sachs or assistant at the treasury or senior manager at facebook, they end up as fact checker at fox y making six figures, cant even afford a closet for his condo on the west side of manhattan. This isnt a successful person, but in a way, that person is an incredibly important part of the class. So, it is that populace push against those that are currently in control in the washington establishment. There seems to be more to it. That included the bureaucrats. But its not merely that. Its an intellectual thing. Its much broader than a populist complaint against who is currently in power. The most fundamental defining characteristic of the class is how they are educated and what they believe. So, i dont think that there is a mixup [inaudible] but how he thinks and the opinions that he holds and the things he wants to see done and what is just and unjust and how he thinks power is justly used to enable certain ends. There is no difference between him and that low sixfigure internet click bait author. They think in the same way. You make some distinctions. I call them the ruling class. They are the ruling class army. Perhaps the loaded term i try to qualify but they are fundamentally people whose interest in the system is to get free stuff. The system is unfair to me and i dont know how to get more unless so im going to make the government. There are more true believers that dont necessarily feel in fact i would say the defining characteristic is they are not in it because they think theyve been harmed but they feel a kind of religious sense of but america has harmed people and thats terrible and im going to dedicate my life towards addressing that. And the others think that america has harmed them personally for their Demographic Group more broadly and there is a cosmic ledger that needs to be squared away and it requires the certain segments of the population. This is a Bipartisan Group if you will according to pretty much all three of the parties. [inaudible] its more a description of where the liberalism has gone. Its liberal or leftist but its a kind of leftist that has no problem with billionaire concentration. If we are going to think about a partisan divide today, whose conservative, whose liberal, whose conservative and a democrat, who dominates the red states versus the blue states, blue and left democratic overwhelmingly. Do you think that there is a consensus, a stable consensus . I dont think its stable and the turbulence of our time shows that its not. I think they realize that the instability ultimately requires further coercive measures on their part and that is what they are gearing up for. Whatever the outcome if they manage to retake the white house somehow. Is it fair to say we use to speak in terms of the old left and the new left, old democrats and new democrats. There is a sense in which the new democrats, the new left, the new progressives have come to dominate and the old parts are no longer controlling it. Were they just went over to the republicans. The old democrats, the backbone of the old Democratic Coalition was a non collegeeducated union working class heartland, or in the big cities, but the big cities dont have non collegeeducated. They dont have manufacturing anymore and have become i dont mean that entirely, but mostly true, they have become havens for knowledge workers, finance, tech and the managerial class. So that type of democratic voter they are either independent or they dont vote. Many have voted for trump which caused the surprise of 2016. And then the battle between the new left and the old left one within the Democratic Party. How do they win the voters over anymore . Perhaps the old left that have voted trump old left maybe too much. Like these organized cells. If you are that committed to the left youre probably not a trump voter. Somebody that is a recruitment, a lot of them are trump voters. A lot of the same people or maybe their children i think are trump voters. You have a number of things in the book where you talk about how it operates with the mechanisms of the left and you talk about the narrative. I think the number one tool for ruling the left right now america isnt entirely, or maybe just a little bit. Its ruled by propaganda. There is a disturbing element that has been the extent to which we have seen more outright coercive measures. I want to mention this one thing which is disturbing to me. We see a lot of violence on the streets. And by the mayors and governors refusing to do anything or encouraging it. The few times we have seen Law Enforcement get a candlelit under them and leap into action is to go after people that exercise the natural constitutional right. That is starting to act in a tyrannical way that we hadnt seen before that worries me a lot. Ive never seen so much of it as ive seen in 2020 and its in a bad direction. That said mostly the way they rule is through propaganda and broadcasting only one narrative on a subject and extraordinarily high decibel so any channel you are only hearing one thing. The narrative is all police shootings, no matter what happens they are unjustified. Lots of stuff the case is initially presented by the narrative as being sympathetic, its a no knock warrant, shot in cold blood, it turns out there was a knock, boyfriend under indictment for something, felony warrant out for something. He shot at the police. Everything is complicated and the shooting was justified. Its not inevitable anymore, but in this case theres a refusal to bring down indictments at least two of the three and the one that comes down is not for murder but a much lesser charge. The narrative of course fuels and says this cant possibly be justified. Every time this happens the police are at fault and the victim is totally innocent. The megaphone blares that out on every channel. Wherever you click, whatever you read that is all you will hear and see. The few places that try to tell a different side of the story, they get censored on social media or accusations of being racist and so on and so forth. Its hard to get the alternative story out. That is the chief way by only telling one story, one side of one story, by telling it everywhere constantly and as loudly as possible, and by suppressing other versions and attacking the platform of those that try to get out. And of course the idea of a narrative was itself a long history in the kind of liberal and academic thinking to shift away from the history and truth to a narrative, the kind of way of doing things. You use to hear this argument in academia theres perspectives thats too sophisticated for them now. Now the truth that the police are out for blood to kill innocent people, they are not just saying thats my truth, thats the truth. And honestly as stupid as i find the argument it depends on your perspective and its a little bit smarter than saying this is the truth when you have a whole pile of facts i can show but you still insist this is the truth and you pretend the facts are not there or you are a bad person for bringing them up. The kind of naive sense that the kids are learning relativism. They are learning a kind of woke religion and being radicalized in it. Five years ago they were saying the colleges have a problem. Remember how long ago was it when for instance we had that crazy meltdown. They put out a notice like be careful what kind of costume you wear because you might offend people. The students went crazy and it was all caught on videotape, then screaming at the professor and his wife. Several smart liberals at the time said colleges are doing a disservice because what happens when they get out to the real world and have to do real jobs and get results, they are going to get eaten alive. It turns out the joke was on them because they went out into the real world and a to the companys alive. When 2020 rolls around, any time there was a controversy putting a 50yearold Senior Management the effect of the academy which has been a subject of criticism for decades now what were seeing now is a pushback on that. Definitely. Whats shift to Chapter Eight which is how this can possibly be saved here. How we might turn that around in another way. I want to get back to a particular chapter in the book on immigration. We talk about a number of things that might be a different way of looking at these questions as a criticism of the modern parties. My own view is trying to make cultural unity and civic unity the First Priority because it isnt permanently not reached, but fairly far at the moment. So we need to create economic unity. I think that the country is more economically divided, but its more culturally. For the wage gains the way that it has in the last several decades, to make housing more affordable for people and having to save forever and have a first down payment at age 40 i had a lot of help putting that chapter together. I wrote it myself but i did get ideas from people just as a way to abandon fre freemarket and freetrade absolutism and say inequality doesnt matter. And its a mode theyve been in for 30 years that requires the party to realize the tech sector is in their friend, its the enemy and it requires them to realize that its wall street needs to start thinking about serious regulations and the further financial i position of the economy only benefits the blue cost at the expense of the red mill. A serious reassessment of the party is is the Republican Party the vehicle . It might be. Right now the Republican Party is divided. The Republican Leadership played nice because they look at the polls and they see 96 approving but many of the leadership in the Republican Party are waiting for trump to go away and think they can go back to the consensus. It isnt going to do us any good in 2020 or 2024. Setting aside you have the Republican Party that is the vehicle of concern for the consensus. Parties change. Youve made a couple of points about the intellectual ground or that coalition behind it, the reagan coalition, the 80s were the conservative movement today, libertarianism, traditionalism, how do you see those things coming together in a very different way it needs to operate differently behind the party. The old standard way of looking before the policy hox ts and economic libertarians and conservatives. Lets take that in reverse order. I think the Republican Party still is and needs to be the party of the social conservatives. The problem is it doesnt deliver victories. It then rolls over onto everything so think about the enormous social change we have seen over the last even five years against which the Republican Party claims to be standing, but again its also been entirely ineffective. It needs to stand up and i accuse the Republican Party of being cynical on the score about social issues to get votes and donations but knows it cannot take on the power of the media and Administrative State and judiciary so it asks for the money cynically on that piece it is less a disagreement and more a criticism of followthrough. Yes. And not just political will that lets get rid of the cynicism. People are not just talking a good game because they feel they have to but they believe it and they are going to fight on it. On economics, this has to be the biggest change in that the party is going to be its not 1980 anymore. Its not 70 . In this crisis the government isnt the solution to the problems, it is the problem. We are in a different crisis and the government can be the solution. It can help with outsourcing i think that they want philosophically as a college student, but after a first term of trying to use diplomacy to redress the trade imbalances and being shined on by the trading partners, he started building the stick in the second term and got results. He did that reluctantly. Most of the tradition isnt necessarily about 45 miles from Hillsdale College under a tree that ive seemed it was a party from the point of the presidency all the way up to the great depression. That raises the question the second point you make that it is an intellectual point you are making which is the notion that the markets and trade are extremely important but those are credentials to work for the citizenry at the time. The doctrinal are the problem and interestingly the freetrade absolutism i dont know how many republicans realize this, they inherited. Americas current freetrade stands after world war ii as a way of helping rebuild the economies of europe and its what the democrats argued for. Its the socalled we have to do this because if we dont these economies in europe wont be rebuilt and they will be subject its mostly democrat even though they have this big Union Democratic base to which they say when we control this portion of the economy youre still the strongest economy in the world. The republicans take over to the point where the famous vote in 1993 bill clinton wins as a democrat and the democrats are still considered to be the tariff party. Essentially he has to rely on the republicans. And then so on the republicans have become the rigid freetrade party and only trump has shaken that up and i think that is going to be a tough one. As we have seen we have to be tougher on the trade negotiations and think about these issues that there isnt a deep strain of that. Even though there is in the Republican Party dna going back to lincoln, there isnt much present in the party today. This should be an easy year one it was much more inclined to restraint but its also this term that is made famous from about 20 years ago that i assigned it to my students that identified as the jacksonian tradition as we will leave you alone as long as you leave us alone and dont expect a proportional response if you blow up one tank we wont blow up one, we will blow up a hundred. It crystallizes the thinking if you explain that to the republican voter they are not going to go around picking fights or certainly get into the foreign war overseas or nationbuilding or humanitarian reasons that we will defend ourselves and if we get hit we will hit back ten times as hard. And otherwise, try to get along with everybody and leave everybody alone. To a lesser extent than with freetrade they think know we have an interest everywhere in the world we have to be active and engaged we are running out of time here but just to close that, do you think there is a coalition there. It seems that question depends on whether or not a Foreign Policy platform can pick up significant lower middleclass voters enough to eat into the Democratic Coalitions. 28 of hispanics which is also not great because of other republicans they have done better. If that pans out and there are successors. Its going to put more money in the pocket and healthcare cheaper and better. You didnt bring up any of the fun doomsday scenario you will have to read the book to find out about those. I talk about things conservatives or anybody dont like to talk about. I think things are very rocky and rough now in a way they havent been in a long time and if we dont start thinking through the possibilities, civil war, authoritarian rule or a kind of forced federalism where they say thats what you said, washington, im not leaving the union im just not going to implement. See if you can force it on me. We will have to get into the book and read it. Thank you, michael. The book again is the States America at the point of no return. From rug during publishing and its a great read. Ive read it many times through the process and i would encourage everyone to get a copy. Michael, thank you for joining us. For those of you here tonight and watching online. During a Virtual Program hosted by the library of congress, astronaut green reflected on her time participating in a simulation of living on mars. Here is a portion of that conversation. It is a complicated thing and you really want to practice as well as you possibly can here on earth before you send an astronaut out on the Space Adventures or exploration, so in the early days, mercury, gemini, apollo missions, nasa was looking for ways to train astronauts or how to do things in zero gravity and prepare them and that is where we get to the neutral buoyancy lab if youve ever seen pictures of astronauts and space pursuits and a giant pool in houston, that is a simulation of training. The idea of going to the moon for a long time, which some people are talking about, and then going to mars, that isnt just about figuring out how to fix something on the exterior on a space station, it is all sorts of challenges and largely psychological. I mean, of course there are huge psychological challenges with that but if you are on a mission to mars, you are two and a half years away from earth and that sort of isolation is something that has never occurred in human history, so far away for that long. So it looks at the ways groups of people, astronaut subjects come together and work as a team and the challenges they encounter as they are isolated from earth. To watch the rest of the program, visit the website, booktv. Org. Use the search box at the top of the page to search for kate green or the title of her book, once upon a time i lived on mars. Welcome. I directed. Before moving on to the discussion of carl hoffman, a little bit of history. Founded in 1927 by benjamin on fourth avenues book row from union square until after over 93 years a sol soul survivor now ry thirdgeneration
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