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