A Nazi on Wall Street Podcast
A Nazi on Wall Street Podcast
The End of an Era: Paradigm Shifts in US History
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There’s only one thing historians know for sure: times change. But how would you know if a new era was unfolding before your very eyes? Join Dr. Jay Weixelbaum and EJ Russo as they discuss the idea of “paradigm shifts” and what they mean for our current times. It’s also the end of an era for the Nazi on Wall Street Podcast--this is the final episode of Season One! Jay and EJ tie together everything you’ve heard over the past nine episodes. Stay tuned, though—Season Two is right around the corner.
Bill Murray is FDR. What the heck is the name of that film? Must Moscow on the Hudson? No, that's a high high-tech on the Hudson. Thank you.
Speaker 2[inaudible]
Speaker 3Welcome to a Nazi on wall street podcast because every time history repeats the press goes,
Speaker 1I am Dr. Jason Weichselbaum. I'm a filmmaker and historian and expert in us companies doing business with Nazi Germany
Speaker 3And I'm EGA Russo. I'm just a regular guy who got freaked out by the last administration and is just trying to figure out what the heck is really happening. Jay and I created this podcast in part to help promote his project, a Nazi on wall street, but to also discuss troubling events and give them historical context. Jay, my friend, it has been 10 episodes. We have made it
Speaker 1Here. We are at the finish line of sorts. Hopefully people have followed us on this very interesting, uh, adventure and are going to be clamoring for more, which we will hope to deliver in the future.
Speaker 3I'd like to thank the three people from work that now I've noticed it's been a journey so far. I didn't actually think that we were going to be able to get through it. When we set the 10 episode goal in the beginning, I thought that we would maybe get, you know, maybe three or four in, but you were really steadfast with getting guests and making sure that we stuck to the schedule. And you were really instrumental in getting me information so I can research stuff because I don't know what the heck I'm talking about. And it was a great process to develop with you and see this through. And, and now we're here and now we get to talk about even more screwed up things.
Speaker 1Um, as much as it, uh, it would be nice to, uh, to take all the credit credit really goes to the elusive films team back at, at the beginning of the lockdown, I put out the call to friends on, on social media, screenwriters, uh, researchers, producers, composers, uh, graphic designers, all sorts of folks, you included EJI and people came and stepped up and have made my, my crazy idea reality. And I, uh, I just take this opportunity not to get too sappy, but to say I'm super grateful for everybody. Thank you so much to the team
Speaker 3Alert. No, I just wanted to cut that positive emotion out right there. That's what, I'm what I'm about.
Speaker 1That's no, that's perfect.
Speaker 3The warm fuzzies were too much for me.
Speaker 1That's grounded man founded, uh, it's it's a crisis out there. That's what we're going to talk about. Put on your helmet, get in the trench.
Speaker 3So throughout every, almost every episode, I think you kept bringing up this idea of a paradigm shift and you kept saying that we are in the middle of a paradigm shift. I firmly believe that you have said that exact sentence on a number of different episodes. And so I guess to lead off this episode is to ask, what do you mean by that? What is a paradigm shift and why do you think that we're in one right now?
Speaker 1The term paradigm was popularized by a philosopher of science by the name of Thomas Kuhn. Basically he was just talking about scientific revolutions. He wrote a book called the structure of scientific revolutions, which kind of took the scholarly world by storm in the sixties. And basically what he was saying is that like, there's kind of a status quo, kind of like a set of norms that way people understand the world, at least in the science community and they're dealing with problems. And then at some point there's kind of this period where, where people are, are kind of intensely working on issues and difficult problems. And then out of that comes a new status quo, a new paradigm. And the paradigm is just a stand in for what people perceive as kind of like, this is normal.
Speaker 3We're basically talking about the transition from one era of a certain status quo into another era of a different status quo. And the paradigm shifts that shift is the, the transition part. And each of those areas can be as long or as short as however they last. But when you're referring to a paradigm shift, you are referring to the actual period of time between status quos.
Speaker 1Yeah. Yeah. It's the transition, it's the transition. And what, I mean, what happened with Thomas Kuhn's idea immediately kind of was carried out of the scientific world. And people started really thinking about it in terms of a lot of other major transitions, including, uh, political transitions, a paradigm shift in politics. And that's really, when I talk about it in our, in our episodes, a lot of times I'm referring to a political paradigm shift, mostly with a U S politics, but of course, that could apply to any politics.
Speaker 3So the term paradigm shift can really refer to a number of different things. For instance, I can have a paradigm shift in my pants.
Speaker 1Uh, I, I guess you could. Yeah. There's a, there's a change that occurs. I hope it's the new paradigm is not worse than the previous one.
Speaker 3It depends on who you ask.
Speaker 1I perception is perception is reality, right. Uh, but yeah, I've been thinking about this concept a lot more recently. I mean, I've obviously studied history a long time and also think a lot about like the way speaking perception, like the way we as humans understand change and history. I think especially today, you know, it sounds trite or silly at this point because we've heard it so much for the era of social media and kind of this immediacy that like whatever's happening right now. It's kind of like the static picture that we project infinitely into the future that shapes the way we feel about it. Like something bad is happening right now. Oh, it's going to be bad forever. We should all feel horrible. Or if this is really good right now, and that means everything's going to be good for either one of those is kind of a dangerous way to think about it. It's one of the things that really annoys me a lot about punditry in general is that that's kind of like their practice, but historians don't. I mean, if we're doing it right, I think historians don't really look at things that way.
Speaker 3I think I had the same belief whenever I eat a good piece of pizza or a bad piece of pizza. Every time I eat a good piece of pizza, it's like, oh my God, this is the best piece of pizza. All pizzas after this will be just as good. But if I eat a bad piece of pizza, then all pizza sucks. Yeah.
Speaker 1Yeah. And I am not an evolutionary psychologist, but apparently, but this is kind of the way our brains have been wired. You know, we, we still have the kind of same brains. We had many thousands of years ago when we lived in a completely different way when we were hunter gatherers and we kind of needed to have that sense of immediacy that helped us survive. But now we don't live in that, in that way at all anymore.
Speaker 3But also keep in mind that for thousands of years there wasn't a lot of change from generation to generation. There was a huge, huge period of time where everything stayed the same, this whole concept of each generation improving over the last generation or succeeding more than the previous generation is a very new concept in humanity. So our brains are kind of set into thinking that the situation we are in now is going to be the norm,
Speaker 1Right? This speaks to the other challenge or thing. I've been thinking a lot related to paradigm shifts is that with technological change and cultural change and all, all the innovations that have made humanity, where it is today, things are moving so much faster. So these, these changes seem to compress more and more in time, you know, it's like industrial revolutions, right? It may have taken a very long time to get to the point where we could, we could start automating the making of textiles. And then, you know, it was a much shorter period of time. So we came up with some steam power and then electricity discovering germs, you know, nuclear power computing, quantum mechanics. It's just like these technologies often a good metaphor to think about the speed in which, in which we are changed. But of course that's not the only layer. We also, we also evolve politically for better or worse and economically for better or worse. Uh, and culturally, you know, and all these things are connected.
Speaker 3I remember when camera phones started coming out and I'm like, why does anyone need a camera on their phone? And now I'm like, oh, wait a second. My iPhone only has 12 megapixels after that. Okay.
Speaker 1Right. And I mean, to get serious here for a minute, you know, the camera phone, uh, has been a big part of the new civil rights movements recently, you know, with the tragic killing of George Floyd. And of course all the other folks that have died tragically by the hands of police, you know, to reflect on like then, and now, like, you know, many of the images that came out of the sixties in the civil rights movements, you know, police using dogs and fire hoses on people. And now it's finally projected into TV screens and in white suburbia, that was when like a lot of the nation was like, oh, there's an issue. And it started to really change minds. The technology is so much faster that creation being able to capture on your phone and then being able to post it to millions of people is, is so much quicker now that the pace of change and the reaction to it culturally, politically is much more immediate and much faster and greater.
Speaker 3So now that we have a little bit of a understanding of what a paradigm shift and that there are many different types of paradigm shifts, whether it be political, scientific, technological, and from what I'm gathering, there can be multiple paradigm shifts that affect other paradigm shifts. Could you give me some major examples starting, you know, a hundred years ago of some of the major paradigm shifts that we have witnessed and the possible effects on the world that they have had. So we have an understanding of what these paradigm shifts look like and hopefully, and what I think you're going to get at by the end of this is an understanding of how we can observe the paradigm shift that we are currently,
Speaker 1There's a status quo. And then there's a buildup of, I mean, the, the fancy word it's entropy, but basically chaos. There's lots of stuff happening, lots of, um, things that are causing issues, causing problems. And they build up over time, the problems compound themselves. One problem leads to more problems. And then until there's kind of a critical mass of problems and a critical mass of people trying to address it. And then that leads to the next paradigm, the creation of the problems and the process of addressing them, reacting to them. So you finally come out of it and that's like, that's like a big slice of time that I was thinking I'm seeing about political parties and the way they've changed over time, you know, we used to have a party called the wigs, right? What happened to them? The major problem that was happening politically in the U S was slavery. It affected everything in the United States. It affected the anti-political political reality, the economic reality and the cultural reality as like the U S itself expanded. And like there were debates over, you know, which states would it have allows slavery and which weren't, and that, you know, these competing political entities, groups, individuals like fighting over that, and it kind of came to a price this point in the 1850s, right before know the decade prior to the civil war in which the wigs couldn't really withstand this kind of political chaos things kind of splintered the political parties kind of splintered. Could you explain
Speaker 3A little bit what major political parties existed in the United States government? That point, I don't really know much about the wigs and were the Democrats a party at that point? We weren't weren't they the, the slave owners and yeah,
Speaker 1Yeah. The Democrats are the party of the south and slave power. And the wigs had kind of come out of a, of an earlier crisis, the original kind of two parties. There was the Federalist parties. And, and now you're really testing my, my earlier American history, but, um, ultimately that crisis played out and then you ended up kind of with this binary, with the wigs and the Democrats. And, and just as an aside, you know, the way the electoral college and the way the American political system is set up at the federal level, you always kind of end up with two parties because of the way the math works out as my inelegant way of putting it right. So there's a crisis. And then there's a splintering where like this two party system can't really withstand the political pressure that this political problem is putting on it. So then the wigs kind of split up and then there's this group called the no nothing party that kind of shows up in one of the gaps. They're upset about waves of immigration that are, that are coming into America at that time. They're xenophobic, nativists, they're against all that. Some wigs, you know, maybe part of that, some wigs want to stick together. Ultimately a good portion of the wigs decide. They want to form a new party. The Republican party whose first major candidate is Abraham Lincoln. But by then, there's such a crisis point over slavery that, that leads to, I think, what we could all imagine as a paradigm shift, when everybody knows it's a paradigm shift is a, this us civil war. The Democrats did not recognize the legitimacy of Abraham Lincoln's when they did not recognize that. And then they started fighting.
Speaker 3Well, that sounds kind of familiar right now, doesn't it?
Speaker 1Yeah. Yeah. It's a little disturbing. And, you know, I mean, right now we have some Republicans who don't want to bend the knee to Donald Trump saying they might form a new party. They've just ousted a Liz Cheney who is probably one of the most prominent Republican leaders, uh, to, uh, to stand up against the big lie that, uh, Trump says that, uh, he won the 20, 20 election. When, of course he did not. Joe Biden won, you know, the paradigm shifts have been happening for a while. So we've been on our way to that. But now we're at the eye of the storm. Everybody's kind of aware that, that we're in this, this shift moment
Speaker 3Before we get too far into that rabbit hole. I want to go back to the wig party a little bit. How much did the wig party resemble? What inevitably turned into the new Republican party? What were the philosophical beliefs, the political beliefs that built up that party. And you said that there was splintering with this no-name party, right? It was no name. No,
Speaker 1I know nothing's there. No, nothing's there. All the thing was like, you know, if somebody asked them what they believed in or anything, they'd be like, I know nothing. I know not that was like their stick. Right. Um, and they had lots of secret meetings and it was really just about like meeting in secret to complain about immigrants. So there was
Speaker 3Phobic conservative party, the wigs I'm assuming where the conservative party as well, but they were also abolitionists.
Speaker 1Uh, some of, some of the wigs were, you know, they, they were against, uh, the growth of slave power. They were, they were more, um, democratic leaning. It kind of came out of the period. Uh, when Andrew Jackson became president the political paradigm in America, it really changed that the original group of so-called founding fathers who were occupied the, the office of the presidency that had waned. And now you have this new kind of populist leader that shook the American political system to a significant degree. So, so the wigs come out of that, they, they were more interested in free, uh, free soil, free labor, uh, to, to quote, uh, uh, the great historian, Eric Foner. They were more interested in infrastructure, both in terms of like, you know, um, roads and, uh, and eventually, uh, you know, railroads, but also, um, national banking, especially in the democratic south, you know, it was very much still kind of this feudalist approach. You know, it was like we have these plantations, we have slaves. Uh, and we just want to expand that paradigm throughout America, where there's just kind of, everything is built by slave power. So, you know, the wig base is really, you know, entrepreneurs, professionals, some social reformers. You have a lot of, uh, urban folks kind of like, uh, the very small, but expanding middle-class in the United States. They don't want this kind of feudalist vision that the democratic party had at that point for, for the U S so over time, this becomes a crisis because we're still establishing states across the continental, what would eventually become the continental United States? And that was, that was a problem.
Speaker 3Was there a divide between conservative and liberal, like there is today is because today that's the main dividing line. Are you a conservative, or are you a liberal, well, if you're a liberal than you are a fall on this side of the line graph, and if you are conservative, you must fall on this side of the line graph. So back then, it sounds like there's a lot more gray area between liberal and conservative as much less based on, on that, like Seesaw between left and right then a number of different political stances on things.
Speaker 1I mean, it's tricky. We historians and pundits get into trouble when we project our modern conceptions on the past. I'm going to say something controversial here. I think we have to do that to some extent, because I am a creature that lives in 2020. And by virtue of being that creature, I am going to see history through that lens. You know, I can't physically travel through time that said we're supposed to use as much rigor as possible to kind of like look at what's happening. And it's a way that said, you know, at least for me, it depends on you, how you, how you define liberal and conservative. I think at its core liberal ism is kind of a defiance of traditions. Democracy itself is a liberal idea because it was opposed to kind of the old way of doing things with Kings and Queens, right. And royalty and peasants, the founders of the United States were, you know, were against all that. So, you know, we want a representative democracy. And of course that meant mostly, you know, white landowning men. So eventually that, even that idea was liberalized over time. It was like, oh, we have to defy tradition in that, you know, the woman's place is, is in the home and has no political representation. And, you know, they get suffrage to, and of course then people of color and so on. So it was a liberalization over time versus, and this is very much, I think, an issue today and that we need to talk about and think about, is that what is conservatism conserving? Well, it would seem to be the, you know, white male power of wealth. Right. And so Christian. Yes, absolutely. So these kind of historically dominated forums, and I think, I think the conservatives, if you pull away some of the rhetoric and they're trying to justify it, but it was like, it wasn't necessarily earned domination. It was just domination. You know, it wasn't like, oh, we all got together and decided that rich white Christians were better than everyone else. And that's really the implicit argument that are making that they have the right to rule. And that's still, I think the argument that they're making, I think, you know, we'll get it, we'll talk about this a little bit, but you know, the politics we've seen from like say the seventies and especially the Reagan revolution going forward is basically a lot of rhetoric. And[inaudible], uh, that's a big word, but like a parlor tricks, rhetoric bait and switch. That's the word, that's the term I'm looking for, where it's like, you strip all that away. And really it's still the same argument, right? It's still white supremacy and patriarchy and you know, Christian nationalism, right. That is behind that. It's not big government is the problem. It's that white supremacy is what we want. So now
Speaker 3It's in the 1860s and the wig party is now transmogrified into the Republican party and they just elected their very first presidential candidate and Abraham Lincoln. And now we have the Democrats, the Southern Democrats who do not recognize Abraham Lincoln's legitimacy as the president. And so I'm assuming that these fishers lead toward the path of civil war.
Speaker 1Yeah. If a paradigm shift is like a hurricane and you know, you have a, the hurricane is approaching, there are these problems building up in our system. And then the first part of the hurricane disk hits us. And the chaos is building up. If we were to use the metaphor in pre-Civil war America, people are shooting each other in Kansas, these acute political problems as like one side is trying to, uh, hold territory and physically with physical violence over the other territory. You know, John Brown is going, trying to liberate slaves until you get to this crisis point. And the eye of the storm comes over us. And then everybody knows that we are in a paradigm shift. And in this case, my metaphor is the eye of the storm is, is the U S civil war itself. Democrats don't respect the legitimacy of Lincoln and then firing on Fort Sumter war breaks out and you have four years of the bloodiest conflict the us has ever seen. And then the eye sort of moves past us, right? And now the hurricane's still over us because now you've got the other side of the disk. Still, all this chaos is now things have to kind of work themselves out now that we are moving into the new paradigm, the new status quo, okay, well, Republicans need to send, literally send troops into the south to make sure that the new paradigm is upheld and that freed slaves, newly freed black citizens have the rights that they've been promised the right to engage in our political process have the right not to be killed, but it's, it's messy and chaotic. And some, you know, the factions in the Republican party, some of them are really they're called the radical Republican. Some of them really are very fierce about wanting to punish the south about wanting to, um, compensate, give reparations to former slaves.
Speaker 3And I've heard that there's still some argument of whether they should have punished the south much more harshly than they did, because from what I remember in high school history class, it was decided that all of the former Confederate officers and soldiers and leaders could just go home and start their life. And now in the reconstruction period, you start seeing a lot of these groups like the KU Klux Klan forming, and what led to Jim Crow laws, like all of these people that still hold these Democrat plantation, slave owning beliefs never, ever had to apologize or feel bad. Like for instance, some Germans had to do post world war II.
Speaker 1Yeah. I mean, there's definitely a comparison there with, um, the Confederacy post civil war and Germany post-World war war, because Germany was never actually occupied by allied troops. And that gave right-wingers eventually, which Adolf Hitler emerged to make the argument that they hadn't lost and gave them this kind of political rhetorical space to argue that it was everybody else's fault. And that, you know, if they just had another chance, as opposed to at the end of world war II, where Germany was occupied, and there was this massive Dean ossification process, but in part, because of the lessons of world war one, likewise, there's lots of debates among historians. And I'm sure if there are historians listening to this podcast and listen to me talking about the parties and these things called history of graphical debates where historians debate each other over time. But one area of consensus is that reconstruction this era, after which you just referred to EJI, uh, after the civil war failed. And that's the unfortunate part of this new paradigm that comes out of this political chaos period we're describing is that there was a, in the decades following the civil war, the debates amongst this kind of the Republican party that was ascendant in us politics eventually kind of left our black citizens behind. And that there was a, there was a contested election in 1877 and ultimately the compromise to, uh, to get through, which is kind of like the end of the storm passing and the new paradigm really coming into the fore. If people are following me along on this metaphor that they pulled troops out of the south, and that Democrats were allowed to Institute home rule and they were allowed to Institute white supremacy and they were allowed to put in Jim Crow laws. And, and then the Klan came out to enforce that reality.
Speaker 3So let's outline this then. So the first wave of the hurricane, the feeder bands that are first coming in in the category, four storm in this paradigm shift is everything leading up to the civil war. You have the violent conflicts that you start seeing uprising start starting to be seen. You see the Whig party splintering and turning into the Republican party. You see Abraham Lincoln being elected, and then the war of Northern aggression starts. And that is the eye of the storm right there, even though the, if you
Speaker 1Follow my metaphor.
Speaker 3Right? And so after the more ends, the reconstruction period is the back end of the hurricane. And everything that's involved with that are things like the reconstruction, the KU Klux Klan, and this new paradigm, this new status quo that essentially leads to the new paradigm shift of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Yeah.
Speaker 1Yeah. Ultimately that's one layer of paradigm shift. A historians have written extensively about Dubois writes about this in the thirties, staying a second reconstruction is needed. There's kind of a very unfortunate consensus among white scholars of the civil war following the decades of the civil war. That really like, it was a bad idea to, um, give black people the right to vote and to free slaves that into some extent, uh, reconstruction was ill-conceived and kind of a way to justify the failures and the reinstituting of white supremacy. And then meanwhile, more and more as we get into, especially in the aftermath of world war II and the horrors of the Holocaust and desegregating our military and other things, it's like, okay, the, the consensus had shifted by then, and we really did fail. And that way we really do need to readdress civil rights. And that's of course, right after that in the fifties, that's when the civil rights movement really starts to pick up steam.
Speaker 3So then is it futile to discuss the chronological history of these major paradigm shift of events? If we don't start by doing it categorically. So instead of just saying, okay, well, what are the major paradigm shifts of our last century? We now say, okay, what are the paradigm shifts of the American civil rights movement, or what are the paradigm shifts of right-wing populism, or what are the paradigm shifts of Christian nationalism? What are the paradigm shifts of liberal democracy? What are the paradigm shifts of Skoll revival?
Speaker 1It depends on who you ask and what we're talking about. I mean, this, this is the, a Nazi and wall street podcast. And one of, one of the major exercises is not completely limited to, but one of the major exercises we're doing here is we're kind of comparing the era in which, um, the Nazi and wall street, uh, story that takes place, which this podcast is, is to help build support for the Nazi and wall street story, even as American businessmen, who did business with Nazis and dramatic stories of spies and being chased by Jewish FBI agents and really interesting stuff. But like also how important kind of looking back at the 1930s and forties and these major changes politically economically. And to some extent, culturally, uh, in the U S have these parallels to what's happening now, it's not just us here on this, on this humble podcast, but I mean, a major media pundits have been speaking a lot for a while now about how the lessons of the 1930s, a crisis of, of the, of the crash and the great depression, FDR coming into office has some parallels to what's happening now. And it's understanding what happened then helps us kind of unravel some of the stuff that happens now, you know, history doesn't repeat neatly, but it does echo. We can at least try to use the, the utility of history is at least trying to figure out what's going on. So that the kind of neat mental construction we can have is this thing called a paradigm shift, understand what was going on in the 1930s and forties, and kind of apply it to what's going on now, there's obviously a storm that's just gone over us, right? We've had a Trump administration and a pandemic, and now we have a new administration that people are comparing to FDR and the storm is still over us. So then would you call the storm hurricane Donald, or would you call it hurricane Ronald? Ah, I'm glad you brought that up. So a excellent segue. This storm didn't start with Donald Trump, but it certainly seems to, uh, concluded with him. I was, uh, I was digging around in preparation for this episode, thinking about that, what, what is now known as the Reagan revolution and, you know, where did that start? And of course there's a very rich and, and energetic field of, of, um, history of conservatives in the United States. And I think, I think generally historians would probably agree that, you know, there was this thing called the Southern strategy that came out, uh, more explicitly in, in 1968 with, uh, Nixon and that the parties were really realigning in response to the civil rights acts of the 1960s. And so you get, you get kind of this new energy in the Republican party in the late sixties. And especially in the seventies when I was digging around, I, I noticed that both the Cato Institute and, uh, the heritage foundation were founded just within a few years of each other. And both of these institutions are like major, major conservative and, uh, think tanks that are essentially making similar arguments, that government big, big government's the problem and that it needs to be reigned in, it needs to be reduced. But that, as I mentioned earlier, this kind of rhetorical flourish, this fig leaf for conservative ideology is really just to say, we need something to say, instead of just saying, we want white supremacy because they're reacting to the civil rights movement, and they're not happy about the expansion of, of suffrage and the expansion of democracy to groups that they didn't feel, uh, had the right to it, right. That they had the right to rule. So the argument they end up making is that big government is the problem because in parentheses government is giving things to people. We don't want to have power, right. Especially after, um, it's not just the new deal, but it's also the LBJ administration. And we're expanding the, uh, the social safety net to people who are not white. Um, we're expanding and it's not just, it's not just men. Also, there's a, there's a women's liberation movement. Feminism is an idea that is now percolating among the masses. And so, uh, white men, wealthy men feel very threatened by this. So they're building political power and they're building organizations like Cato, like heritage they're winning elections with Nixon. And this is of course, the period of time when somebody named Ronald Reagan became governor of California. And you start to see this real push towards a slick well-oiled marketing strategy. Ronald Reagan was an actor who I think was most famous for being in a movie with a monkey, you know, like he's not a, uh, from the, you know, his and have like a political pedigree here. But, um,
Speaker 3But I think to the average Republican American, he embodied John Wayne. And you put that image with someone like Roger Ailes, who was a major contributing factor of promoting not only Nixon's image, but Ronald Reagan's image in the media, then you have a huge unstoppable force.
Speaker 1This is the creation of this massive, very effective political media machine. The cowboy imagery is by design. It's not a mistake. It's domination, uh, you know, the Cowboys out there, uh, to make the land work to his will. He's fighting people, native Americans who live there who have been there before him, he's subjugating the land. He is a white man. He's not, he's not spreading democracy. He's spreading his will through the end of a gun specifically through violence, right? And, and this is a very, this is very popular in American culture. We, you know, we very much have this kind of white supremacist colonialist part of our culture, you know, w whether we like it or not, it's there, you know, and it's, it's very satisfying because you get to be the part of the winning team that like goes in and rides with, uh, the lone ranger, the lone ranger, uh, one man to rule them all. It's not democratic. So, yeah, so this is highly highly effected. So in this kind of transitional period between the late sixties and 1980, the Reagan revolution is ready to sweep America. And it does by gangbusters, 1980 was one of the biggest sweeping electoral victories in us political history. Now, with Reagan ascendant,
Speaker 3A result of that big landslide victory, you had a president, a conservative president who probably built one of the biggest governments in the country has ever seen. In fact, that's something that I've found very interesting about conservatives. Once they get into power, they increase government size. I mean, I think it was Lichtman who mentioned that the president who grew the federal government, the largest was actually George W. Bush. And he made the further point that conservatives claim to hate big government. They just hate big government when they're not in charge. Right.
Speaker 1And that's why, you know, again, not to belabor the point here, but like their argument was always just rhetorical. It was always just a marketing strategy for their interest in, in rule their spin to get people on board, which was highly effective because yeah. That the national debt skyrockets and really, I mean, you can think about the reason we call it kind of the Reagan era and the Reagan revolution is because, you know, the folks that come into power in 1980 are the same folks that are in the George H w administration following two terms of Reagan. And then a lot of those folks end up with, uh, George W. Bush in the first years of the 21st century. So yeah, it's all, it's all the same, the same people with the same idea and the same kind of political rhetoric, rhetorical strategy of saying, you know, big government's bad when you do it. Now, when I do it, and that it's really, it's really about maintaining this conservative ideology, which we now know is really at its core. When you strip away all the words about white supremacy and about their, their right to rule that no one else is legitimate. So when we get to Donald Trump, that's where I think a lot of political observers, historians, scholars, and others really saw Trump has kind of an end point that started with 1980, that it was, you know, they were always kind of heading in that direction where it was like, it was never about democracy. It was about their right to rule, you know, and saying whatever they need to say to people, uh, to get them to support that. And then along the way, of course, doing things like dismantling the social safety nets that Democrats put up dismantling anything that was helping the people, they didn't believe had a stake, had a right to a stake in, in American democracy, which meant basically everybody but wealthy white Christian men who are heterosexual.
Speaker 3So if this storm is called hurricane Ronald, and we're referring to the Reagan revolution here, where are we in that point? Where is the eye of the storm? And I mean, is the eye of the storm nine 11 is the eye of the storm. The great recession is the eye of the storm, Donald Trump and the insurrection. Where exactly are we here?
Speaker 1We're making this up. As we go along, we use metaphors, uh, as shorthand to understand the world, uh, because we're not, uh, we're not teaching a whole class and us political history here, although may people may think we are. So, so, you know, it depends on, it depends on what we want to call it. I mean, obviously I think most people perceive a crisis point from the time Donald Trump is elected, especially when the pandemic hit and especially when Biden won the election. And there was an insurrection. I think that is probably a good, reasonable comparison to an eye of the paradigm shifting hurricane storm, that we've reached this moment where now everybody is aware that we've hit this political crisis point, this, this inflection point, this turning point. And so now we're kind of starting to deal with what the aftermath means. The other side of the storm, as we sort out the shift from what was the old reality, this, this kind of Reagan era, at least in the, in the political realm and this, this new era, which we can name in many things, but we're still, it's still so new. It's kind of futile to do
Speaker 3With all this talk about storms. I just want to start spewing Q and non terms like, you know, like just disinfect is necessary
Speaker 1And they've got they, they got their finger on the zeitgeists those cute,
Speaker 3Cute folks, you know, trust the plan.
Speaker 1Nothing's inevitable. One thing I want to stress I think is really important. And it's funny, a friend of mine brought this up yesterday. I don't know if people are game of Thrones fans or whatever. This, this character named little finger. I call him mayor little finger. Cause he was also the same actor. It was in the wire who plays the mayor of Baltimore. But, um, you know, he says, uh, chaos is a ladder. And you know, this, the moment that the crisis moment in the middle of the paradigm shift, that's the most chaotic where the most entropy, the most problems are kind of crisis is building up in the system, uh, means there's a lot of room for what historians call contingency opportunities, small things to have big, big changes, big effects because we don't, you know, history is not set in stone. We don't know what's going to happen in 20, 22 yet as we record this and we don't, we don't know. So, uh, even small things that are happening right now in the, in kind of this acute transitional moment may have major ramifications down the road. You know, we're, we're talking a lot about centers, mansion and cinema. What they do and decide could have a major effect on what happens. You know, let's say, let's say mansion wakes up tomorrow and says, Hey, you know what, actually, we really do need to abolish the filibuster so we can pass the voting rights law. That is a huge deal, right? Or he can decide not to do that. Also a huge deal. Or we get this out infrastructure, bill pass and, and voters are happy enough to not do what they've done throughout the Reagan era and punish a party in the white house. They award the party and we actually flip more Senate seats, which means maybe mansion and cinema don't have as much power as they have right now, because now we got more Democrats in the Senate. Those are things that can happen, but we're right in this chaos moment where anything goes, we don't, we don't know where it's going to lead.
Speaker 3So if we are in the beginning stages of the post eye of the storm, part of this, this paradigm shift, and we don't know what's going to happen in the next 2, 5, 10, 20 years in order for us to gain a little bit more perspective here, are there any recognizable historical analogies that we have witnessed that is most alike, what we're going through right now? So we can better understand what might happen in the future.
Speaker 1That's an excellent question. And it really, uh, it really is gonna depend a lot on who you ask. You're asking me, so I'm going to give you my, my take on it. I think 1940 is in us politics and beyond is a good comparison because this, this was a moment where, you know, we already had a lot of the hurricane has already arrived. The hurricane hit land when the stock market crash. If you're following my metaphor here, the stock market crash happens. And that sweeps the Hoover administration out of power. It also of course affects things all over the globe. Adolf Hitler becomes chancellor in the same period of time, almost exact same period of time. As FDR becomes president to kind of give you some parallel tracks here. And FDR is really sets to transform the federal government and profoundly changed the relationship between American citizens and their government. By putting in these kind of backstop, these safety nets to curb, the excesses of capitalism that were obviously necessary, that people were demanding this a major landslide election that brought FDR and was, was the American people demanding that these changes happen. And the reason we have the first 100 days as we discussed before is because no president since has done more to kind of transform the government. So, okay. But then I said, 1940, right? So then there's the spirit of transformation, right? Things seem to get better for a while, but trouble is still brewing all over the world. Trouble is still brewing in the United States, extreme right-wing populism people reacting to the dislocation and anxiety of how traumatic the depression was, is still there. And war is brewing worldwide. And there's this moment, at least for me in 1940, where it looks like the world may go back into recession, which is really, really freaking everybody out because of the memory of how bad the depression was. And Adolf Hitler has just started a war and here by invading Poland, of course, uh, we, we often as, as Westerners and white people do not recognize that world war II had already started in Asia, that Japan had already invaded China a few years earlier at that point is all I already like really bad stuff happening there. The mass, uh, sexual assaults and Nanjing things were not good worldwide. And meanwhile, there's another election coming up. FDR is still very popular, but there's people like Charles Lindbergh out there, Charles Coughlin, which we've discussed and after has got a lot of pressure from his own party, not to get involved in the world because of the memory of world war one. There were lots of conservatives that did not want to engage the rest of the world. But meanwhile, kind of on the sly, FDR is starting to really shift his position. He wants to give aid to a beleaguered, a UK because now, now that because of the Alliance system, now Germany is fixed on expanding the war to them and they need help. There's this great film. Bill Murray plays a plays. FDR, have you seen this Hyde park, which is kind of in some ways characterized as the moment, right? You have the British monarchies coming over to stay in Hyde park to beg America for support. And it's not clear that, you know, America is going to be neutral or not. And you know, it's not clear who had saw it, you know, and then there are all these American businessmen who might end up signing with the Nazis. You know, people like Jim Mooney and others are like, ah, healers, not so bad, they just need some living space. Right? And so it's this transitional moment. But what ends up happening is the attack on Pearl Harbor is kind of a major catalyst. Japan attacks us. And then because Germany has allied with Japan, Germany declares war on the United States. And that's what brings America into the war. America had not declared war on Germany. So now we're in this turning point and now the paradigm has truly shifted. America's involved in the war and everything else that happens, which I think takes place over many years is sorting out what that means because America's place in the world that which affects our politics at home and abroad is really profoundly changed and gave the U a lot. I mean, a huge amount of power. I mean, the world we live in today, the postwar world is still shaped. I think by that moment. And of course not to continue to toot our horn, but like the Nazi and wall street story takes place in 1940 for a reason because Nazis are sending spies to New York city to try to get these powerful Americans as leaders of American industry to side with Germany. And many of them are kind of leaning that way. And they're Nazis marching in the streets. There's this huge, huge rally. The Nazis marched down downtown New York. They had a huge rally in Madison square garden. It's they putting big posters of George Washington next to swastika banners. It's Jewish guy runs up on stage to protest their fights. They beat them up. It's it's chaotic. It's scary. It's, it's gross.
Speaker 3Sounds like Tennessee.
Speaker 1There's a reason they're reasonable comparisons to make, uh, these days, you know, we're looking at the insurrectionists, we're looking at these guys that follow the former disgraced president twice impeached, uh, individual, uh, one,
Speaker 3You mean the 45th president of United States.
Speaker 1Of course, of course. I love how he has stationary. It's like, he's still like the office of the 45th. Like you don't, you don't have
Speaker 3Not. According to Linwood, he is still the president and he has the military hotline that he can call and drop the bombs at any time. And Wood's a little bit,
Speaker 1My first knee-jerk retort was yes. And, uh, and the tooth fairy was real and left money under my,
Speaker 3Not to cut you off here, but if we're using 1940 as the historical analogy to the paradigm shift, we're currently going to, that's not really giving me a lot of optimism because that ended in a huge gigantic world war. And a lot of people died and two atomic bombs were dropped. So could you help?
Speaker 1Right. Thanks for making sure to bring that up too. I mean this paradigm shift, it's not just rhetorical, it's, it's real profoundly mindbogglingly, terrible things that happened. And you know, you, you can walk out of Casablanca and also Nash, which is supposed to take place in 1940 and not necessarily feel like things are going to go well and or today, you know, people look around and the pandemic may be abating, but it's like, we're traumatized. Okay. So I wanted to take this opportunity just for a minute for our listeners to talk a little bit about hope and opportunity for change. And, you know, I study this era and I've had to study the Holocaust quite a bit as a related topic. And, uh, I came across the story that really, it took a while. It probably, it planted a seed in my mind and maybe it, maybe it will for some of our listeners too, looking at all of this and trying to try to make sense out of it and not be full of despair. And the story that I came across was about this, a guy named Rudolph Verba VRB, a he wrote a book called I escaped Auschwitz, which is a little bit of a spoiler, I guess, just to indulge me. And let me tell you briefly what happened and how it affected me. And my, um, my philosophy of hope is that, uh, verbal was, was picked up and carted off to Auschwitz. And the way I show it's functioned typically was that especially as they were, they were still building the camp, oh, it was in construction for most of its history and was that they get young and strong people and the Nazis put them aside and they kill everybody else typically. And, but the young and strong people are kind of like the skeleton crew that runs the camp, this like a slave labor force that helps the Nazis run things. And Verba was, was a young man at that point. And so they bring them in and it's, it's an absolutely horrible, horrible situation. One of the worst, I mean, we know this is, you know, some of the worst things humanity can endure, right? And Verba sees his cohort. The people that come in with him, uh, one by one, they die. It's very physically challenging. It's very easy to get cholera. There's not much food can die of malnutrition easily. Uh, if you look at a guard the wrong way, maybe they just shoot you or maybe a guard randomly chooses you to go on a body duty, which, you know, you can get sick very easily from handling deceased people and their bodies in the end, you can die easily from then one of the profound things, at least for me, that urban notices is that people around him in his cohort, many of them are starting to lose hope they're despairing. And of course they are, this is a period of time where they're, they're hearing rumors of like German victories in the east. They seem to be unstoppable. They're just rolling through Russia. You know, they're winning, they're winning all the battles. They're building an electric fence around the whole perimeter of Auschwitz, which makes escape pretty much impossible. They're watching as they're just Harding, like huge numbers of, of families and stuff through these gas chambers and killing, killing so many people. So there's every reason not to have hope in this situation, but what happens is, is that one by one, his, the people he's with, you know, they lose hope. And then they succumb to these various, uh, physical challenges until he's basically the last one left of his group. And he makes a decision. I think he's like, I, I'm going to have hope as like kind of an active defiance against this situation. This is going to keep me alive as a survival trait. I'm just going to survive this and I'm not going to give in to despair. And so once he kind of made that choice, he is able to, uh, get a job in like one of the Nazi offices. He's, he's able to kind of figure out where they haven't finished the electric fence. He's able to organize with, with various other prisoners, um, how to get some civilian clothes. He wants to warn people. What the hell is going on here? They're talking about liquidating in air quotes, the entire Hungarian population of Jews, which had already been kind of shunted into these ghettos. They were going to send them in, in trains to Auschwitz and kill them all, which unfortunately is what happened, but he wants to warn it hasn't happened yet. And so he manages to organize some papers, some passports and money and stuff. And then he basically gets this plan where he's gonna hide in like a trash bin, near an area where the fences and completed yet. And of course the guards know he's missing. They're searching for them, the dogs and everything. He has to like hide in there for like a couple of days. And then he escapes one of the very few people ever to escape from this terrible place to get out and warn people. Like I said, I was exposed to that story and it took a while for it to kind of sink in for me. And then of course, a few years later in my life, we came upon the Trump era and then the pandemic and the insurrection and everything. And I'm thinking a lot about this story and about Verba, if you're living in early 20, 20, there's a lot of reasons not to have hope you've got, this would be dictator who's incompetent as he is venal and awful. There's a raging pandemic. Lots of people are starting to die. There's been an economic collapse. There's not a lot of reasons to be hopeful in that situation, but I'm thinking of like, okay, this hope is like an act of defiance at this point. This is, this is how I'm going to survive this situation, this paradigm shift, if you will, it's transitional moment. I think we often think that hope is like, I'm going to look at the facts of a situation. And if fact, a plus fact B plus Factsy equals it's going to be okay, then I can have hope. I don't think hope actually works that way, or it doesn't have to work that way. It can work in the way it's like, you can just, as a personal act of a will, I guess you want to call it, you can have a hopeful attitude to survive or to even be if you want to be in defiance of the people and the events that are causing the awfulness and that we know from somebody like Rudolph Verba, that that can help you survive. Some of the worst things human beings have ever had to experience. And so thank you to everyone who's listening and EGA letting me get on a soapbox and tell the story, because I think that's so important for the way we frame these political events that we're talking about here, that people can survive this attitude. It means a lot. And so let's take a lesson from Rudolfo and know that the only constant in the world is change. Things are going to change pundits, take the static image and projected into infinity. And that's not the way history works. And so if you can survive this moment, if it's bad, now it may be better later. I'm building
Speaker 3My vision board right now.
Speaker 1Does it have a good slice of pizza on it?
Speaker 3Let's hope that all pizzas from now on are the best pizzas ever. That's what I'm talking about.
Speaker 1If you've eaten a bad piece of pizza, now it is stands to reason that you going to eat a better piece of pizza later, as long as you have hope and continue to engage in pizza, eating well,
Speaker 3I'm definitely going to engage in future pizza, eating. This is the greatest analogy that we have created regarding historical events,
Speaker 1Pizza that's right. Who knows what's going on next? You know, this is the tail end of the season. One of the Nazi and wall street podcast. At this moment, it's not clear what's going to happen in us politics. I am optimistic know it could have gone many different ways in the 2020 election. It went a certain way. I think it's a good sign where we're at a moment where we're about to hit. What's called exponential decay. I believe at least in many CDC models in our pandemic, which means in regular parlance, that just means case counts and P the number sheer number of people getting infected is going to drop dramatically in the coming 60 to 90 days, which is not a long period of time in the very near future. I think that's likely to happen. There's still a lot to do in the world, especially in the terrible suffering and hotspots and India and Brazil, and let's not sugar coat it. We also are here at a moment where there's a terrible violence in Gaza and other places, and there's a lot to be sorted out here. Uh, you know, America's relationship with countries in the middle east, Israel included has shifted as oil. The oil paradigm is now moving into the rear view. That's going to have major political consequences for geopolitics, I think for the better, to be honest, you know, so there's a lot of storm left.
Speaker 3We began this series by concluding one of our episodes, quoting Franklin D Roosevelt, its famous line about fear. And so I'd like to do a lesser known quote here by the same man, which is the only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts
Speaker 4Of today.
Speaker 2[inaudible],
Speaker 4Uh, Nazi on wall street. It's brought to you by elusive films maker of the, uh, Nazi on wall streets, film and television series. It was recorded and edited by DJ Russo. Original music was written and performed by Joseph Mulholland. We can't bring these stories to life on screen without your support. So please consider donating to our crowdfunding campaign@elusive-films.com that's elusive hyphen films.com for Jason Wexel bound. I'm EGA Russo. Thank you. And we will see you next episode.