Saagar Enjeti: disagreement

Transcript context

…One of the reasons I’m a big fan of yours is you’re a student of history, and so, you’ve recommended a bunch of books to me. And they and others thread the different movements throughout American history. Some movements take off and do hold power for a long time, some don’t. And some are started by a small number of people and are controlled by a small number of people, some are mass movements. And it’s just fascinating to watch how those movements evolve, and then, fit themselves, maybe, into the constraints of a two-party system. And I’d love to talk about the various perspectives of that. So would it be fair to say that this election was turned into a kind of class struggle? Well, I won’t go that far because to say it’s a class struggle really implies that things fundamentally align on economic lines, and I don’t think that’s necessarily accurate. Although, if that’s your lens, you could get there. So there’s a very big statistic going around right now where Kamala Harris increased her vote share and won households over $100,000 or more, and Donald Trump won households under 100,000. You could view that in an economic lens. The problem again that I have is that that is much more a proxy for four-year college degree and for education. And so, one of my favorite books is called Coming Apart by Charles Murray. And that book, really, really underscores how the cultural milieu that people swim in when they attend a four-year college degree and the trajectory of their life, not only on where they move to, who they marry, what type of grocery store they go to, their cultural, what television shows that they watch. One of my favorite questions from Charles Murray’s is called a Bubble Quiz. I encourage people to go take it by the way. It asks you a question. It’s like what does the word Branson mean to you? And it has a couple of answers. One of them is Branson is Sir Richard Branson. Number two is Branson, Missouri, which is like a country music tourist style destination. Three is, it means nothing. So you are less in a bubble if you say country music. And you’re very much in the bubble if you say Richard Branson. And I remember taking that test for the first time, I go, “Obviously, Sir Richard Branson, Virgin Atlantic. Like what?” And then, I was like, “Wait.” I’m like, “I’m in the bubble.” And there are other things in there like can you name various different military ranks? I can because I’m a history nerd, but the vast majority of college educated people don’t know anybody who served in the United States military, they don’t have family members who do… The most popular shows in America are like The Big Bang Theory and NCIS, whereas people in our, probably, cultural milieu, our favorite shows are White Lotus, The Last of Us, this is prestige television with a very small audience, but high income, high education. So the point is that culture really defines who we are as Americans, where we live. And rural, urban is one way to describe it, but honestly, with the work from home revolution and more rich people and highly educated people moving to more rural suburban or areas they traditionally weren’t able to commute in, that’s changing. And so, really, the internet is everything. ution and more rich people and highly educated people moving to more rural suburban or areas they traditionally weren’t able to commute in, that’s changing. And so, really, the internet is everything. The stuff that you consume on the internet, the stuff that you spend your time doing, type of books you read, whether you read a book at all, frankly, whether you travel to Europe, whether you have a passport, all the things that you value in your life, that is the real cultural divide in America. And I actually think that’s what this revolution of Donald Trump was activating and bringing people to the polls, bringing a lot of those traditional working class voters of all races away from the Democratic Party along the lines of elitism, of sneering, and of a general cultural feeling that these people don’t understand me and my struggles in this life.…

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