Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…rren didn’t run for president was a feeling of most people on the left. And so, Bernie Sanders was the guy who’s been saying the same thing for decades, but in the wilderness and nobody was listening. And now, he still has the instincts of somebody who understood that the most important thing was to find a place where people were listening, where they would let you talk and even better let you talk for a while. I think the candidate who’s going to do well in 2028 is going to have an instinct like that, but even right now, I think the question is, one of my big questions is I’m booking for my show is just I want someone who has a perspective on this moment, who feels like they have had a thought that is about right now and who we are right now and what the story of America is right now. I think what’s really important is what Ezra said, it’s about having something to say. We wanted to talk to you and talk together about how much we wanted to talk to you because we got something to say. We wrote a 300-page book about how much we have to say. We love going on podcasts and television shows and radio and then doing live events to tell people what we have to say. We think this idea of abundance isn’t just important for redefining what the American left means. We think that the outcome of thinking abundantly about housing and energy and science and technology is what politics is all about. It’s about people, the good life, and we think this is the path toward it. So certainly, one thing that’s profoundly motivated us is having something very concrete that we just want to get out there in the world. My sense as a writer, as a thinker is I want my software running on as many pieces of hardware as possible. I want to get my ideas out there as much as possible and who gets credit for them and where the idea goes, and that’s all secondary. I believe on ideas because they’re important. And so, I want to talk to people who have large platforms about those ideas because how else is the idea getting into the mainstream except through those large platforms? That’s how broadcast technology works in the first place. So maybe one thing that you’re touching on is a little bit of ideological ambiguity. Maybe a part of this is this sense that people don’t know exactly what it is they have to say for three hours. All I can say for sure is that we know. hing on is a little bit of ideological ambiguity. Maybe a part of this is this sense that people don’t know exactly what it is they have to say for three hours. All I can say for sure is that we know. There’s also a reality, and I mean the book is trying to enter into this reality. I think one thing you’re saying is that people have coded you. And so, Donald Trump is really excited to do it and maybe left with politicians are not. One thing that we think is that we’re in a period of realignment. The last chapter of the book, we talk about an idea that is picked up from a historian named Gary Gerstle, which is an idea of political orders. And political orders are periods that have a sort of structure of consensus and a structure of a zone of conflict, but it’s more or less agreed on by the two sides, even if only tacitly. So, you have a new deal order, new deal order is founded by FDR. It is entrenched when Dwight Eisenhower accepts the New Deal as part of the US proving that it can treat workers better than the Soviet Union. So those are sort of right there. The three ingredients typically have an order. You have a party that starts it, opposition party that accepts key premises. Dwight Eisenhower doesn’t come in and say, “We’re going to roll back the whole New Deal,” and it’s often held in place by an external antagonist. In that case, the Soviet Union. You then you have in the 70s stagflation, the Vietnam War, series of problems that the New Deal order no longer seems able to handle. So, you have the rise of what he calls the neoliberal order. And the neoliberal order is if you’re going to choose a founder, it’s going to be Reagan on that one. It’s much more about markets. It’s very concerned with things like inflation, and it really is entrenched by Bill Clinton, the era of the government is over. And partially, it’s entrenched also by the fall of the Soviet Union. The fall of the Soviet Union is like this proof point that the capitalists are right, that markets are the way of the future, government does not know what it’s doing, and that becomes the governing set of assumptions. And so, there are arguments about what the markets should be doing. Obamacare is about creating markets and health insurance. You can use markets very progressive ends. We want to use markets for lots of progressive ends, but the neoliberal order basically collapses amidst a financial crisis and climate change and China. And those are the three things that grow a little, but also separately we think kill it, which is the neoliberal order does not have an answer to the financial crisis, and it botches in many ways. na. And those are the three things that grow a little, but also separately we think kill it, which is the neoliberal order does not have an answer to the financial crisis, and it botches in many ways. The answer to the financial crisis puts too little demand into the economy, lets a recession linger and a very slow recovery linger for too long, it doesn’t know what to say really about climate change. Markets have made a lot of people rich by doing a lot of things that are very, very damaging for the environment, very damaging for the future of the human race potentially. And you have the rise of China and the neoliberal order said you integrate China into the global economy. You bring them into the WTO, you trade with them, you help them build their industrial base, you help them pull their people out of poverty, which that part is good, and they’ll become more like the West. They will liberalize. They’ll have a free press. The richer we make China, the more China’s going to become like us, and that proves totally wrong. China becomes more authoritarian over time, but it also develops an industrial base. It becomes as it does not become more like us, becomes dangerous, at least in our view. You don’t want to ever have a conflict with another country who you’ve outsourced your key industrial base to. And so, you have the sort of fall of that order. And then again here, things that would’ve been ridiculous at one point in American politics then become possible. Bernie Sanders is one of them, right? The idea that you’d have somebody, a self-described socialist running for president and coming anywhere near the Democratic nomination, that was unthinkable in 2004. And by 2016, it almost happened. And Donald Trump is another thing. Donald Trump runs like headlong into the failures of neoliberalism in the Republican Party. He runs against trade. He runs against a sort of Paul Ryan more open immigration. George W. Bush and John McCain were both very big on liberalizing immigration policy. He runs against the Iraq war and foreign adventurism, and there’s an isolationist instinct that coexist very awkwardly now within a territorial expansionist instinct, but at least to 2016, it was more isolationist. And so, Donald Trump and his sort of reimagining of the Republican Party as a right-wing populist, more like sort of some Christian democratic parties in other countries up in that quadrant of socially conservative, economically populist, that becomes something that’s possible.…

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