#124 - Michael Lind - Why Britain And America Keep Betraying Their Working Class

Michael Lind is a political theorist, historian, and one of America's most rigorous independent analysts of class, democracy, and political economy. He is a Professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, a co-founder of the New America think tank, and a visiting professor at the University of Austin. He has taught at Harvard and Johns Hopkins and previously served as an assistant to the Director of the Center for the Study of Foreign Affairs at the US Department of State.

His books include The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite, Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States, The Next American Nation, and among more than a dozen works of non-fiction, history, and political theory. His writing has appeared in UnHerd, Tablet, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, American Affairs, and The New York Times, among many others.

This is the first episode in a four-part Thinking Class series on social class in Britain and the West.

In this conversation, we think out loud about: 

• What the managerial class actually is and how it displaced the old bourgeoisie  
• Why Brexit and Trump were intra-capitalist conflicts, not working-class revolts 
• How Britain's failure to properly industrialise shaped its class settlement
• Why AI will automate the credential class before it automates the working class 
• What the working class once had — and what was taken from it 
• Whether anything can dislodge the managerial settlement in Britain or America

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Buy Michael Lind's books: https://amzn.to/4tkJFHB

Follow Michael Lind's work at UnHerd: https://unherd.com/author/michael-lind/

About Thinking Class: Thinking Class is a long-form interview podcast exploring the cultural, historical, and moral forces shaping England, Britain, and the wider Western world. Hosted by John Gillam, the show features serious conversations with historians, legal scholars, economists, theologians, and public intellectuals — concerned with long-term patterns over headlines and hot-takes.

If you value serious conversations about Britain, the West, and the forces shaping our future, why not subscribe: 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class. I'm John Gillam, and in this episode, I'm speaking with Michael Lind. Michael is a political theorist, essayist, and one of the most rigorous analysts of power and class in the English-speaking world. He is the author of The New Class War, The Next American Nation, and Land of Promise, among many other books, and he is a regular contributor to Unheard. In this episode, Michael and I think out loud about how the nature of class war is frequently misunderstood, and why this misunderstanding means the problem never gets solved. We how a credentialed managerial class claimed to hmm how a credentialed managerial class came to control the institutions of governance, media, education, and corporate life on both sides of the Atlantic, why Brexit and Trump were not working class revolts, why Brexit and Trump were not working class revolts, but intracapitalist conflicts, why the working class in Britain and America keeps voting for change and keeps being betrayed, what the destruction of extra-parliamentary institutions, unions, churches, local parties have cost ordinary people, and what could dislodge the managerial settlement. If you value serious historically grounded conversations about England, Britain, and the wider West, and the forces shaping our future, please subscribe to Thinking Class on YouTube, Spotify, and Substack and share this episode with someone who ought to hear it. Enjoy the show, classmates, and now Michael Lind. Welcome to Thinking Class. Thanks so much for joining me. Thank you for having me. It is my pleasure, and I wanted to talk today about Class War, something that your work has been synonymous with over the years. It's true to say that class war has always been with us. Every age has had its own version. And the complaint is typically that the lower orders they want too much, they expect too much, they presume too much, and apparently they just don't understand. And uh some sections of those who who run the show, the the the those in the positions of authority, pull up the ladder. Not all of them, some want to put it down, but some pull it up. And that's simply what overclasses have done throughout history. And working people have had to build their own power in some way. And I suppose in the 18th, 19th, 20th centuries, that would have been through unions, mutual aid societies, political parties, and they would extract concessions from uh those above them. The dignity was in the doing. And in some sections, that capacity seems to be on the wane for various reasons, and and we can see a more passive atmosphere in some sections. Um a hope where hope exists at all might be in a politician being able to come and fix it. And uh perhaps soon there may be something more aggressive instead of passive if things don't uh change, if if votes keep on being um ignored in some way or suppressed. So I think as a final talking point, the world order that's produced all of this seems to be being torn apart. And I suppose the most important question of our time is uh if a world reorganises itself around the nation rather than globe, what does the nation owe to the people who live in it? And you've been asking that question longer than most and more rigorously than most. So I'm glad that you are here to talk about it. And and I think we could perhaps begin with um some of your work. You you wrote a book called The New Class War. And I think we should talk about the framework you introduced within that so people have it clearly in mind before we go any further. So you you've described a conflict not necessarily between capital and labor in the old Marxist sense, but between two classes defined by an educational credentialism and institutional location. Could you set out what you mean by what you call the managerial elite and how it is they relate to the working classes, not just economically but institutionally?

SPEAKER_01 4:06

Certainly. I draw on the thinking of uh James Burnham, who was one of Trotsky's deputies in the US, who became an anti-communist founder of the American right uh in the 1950s. Uh, but there were also people like uh Bruno Rizzi, an Italian thinker, who wrote about the bureaucratization of the world. Burnham called it the uh managerial revolution. Uh John Kenneth Galbraith, who uh was influenced by Burnham, uh, the economist Galbraith spoke of the technostructure uh in the 1960s, and they were all talking about the same thing. Uh as a result of industrialization, we saw the bureaucratization or the managerialization of all of these elite institutions which had previously been run by a few people. So, for example, in your classic Dicensian British Industrial Revolution, uh, the owner was the operator and the manager, right? I mean, that was your classical bourgeois enterprise, might have had a dozen or a few dozen employees, uh, but it was it was the owner-operator was the dominant figure. And that was the classic bourgeoisie. And what Burnham and Ritzy and others uh saw happening before them uh at the same time, and this happened in the late 19th, early 20th centuries in the US and Britain and Western Europe, was the growth of enormous organizations, gigantic corporations, uh, initially in the railroads and then in steel and other mass production industries. But at the same time, this liberated so much wealth that and concentrated it that it could be plowed into higher tax revenues. So there was a massive expansion of government, uh, both military and domestic in the same period, uh, and it was bureaucratic government. Uh, you know, and and if you go, if you look at the difference between the 20th century and the 19th, uh you're astonished by how informal and small scale things were. So, for example, charities were mostly local. Uh you had uh you know the rich patron, you know, and would either make his own decisions or or you know have a few advisors. Uh, but by the 20th century, you get not only giant corporations, you get giant uh nonprofits, giant bureaucratic philanthropies like the Rockefeller uh Foundation and the Ford Foundation, recycling this wealth from managerial industrial capitalism. Uh, and then of course you get the bureaucratization of government. Uh and so I've I've used the term managerial revolution, which was the title of uh James Burnham's classic book in the 1940s. But sometimes I think Bruno Ritzi's title, The Bureaucratization of the World, uh, was a bit more apt. Uh, and if if you look at elites, what really happens is that everywhere in the world, in Europe, in Asia, North and South America, landed elites uh whose uh income came from property they owned, you know, think of Dalton Abbey, right? Think you're classic aristocrats. Uh ultimately their revenue is coming from land farmed by peasants, one way or the other, under some system, slavery, serfdom, you know, free labor, contract labor. Uh they get replaced by bureaucrats, uh, with one exception I'll get into, but for the most part, uh if you look at the 20th century, you get this new nobility, as it were. Uh and it's a it's not a titled nobility, it's not based on who your parents were, it's a credentialed nobility. Uh it's the technocrats who, whether they're corporate managers, whether they're uh nonprofit executives, whether they're mid-level civil servants, uh, their claim to power and to income comes from their positions in these gigantic bureaucracies. And those positions, they're not necessarily meritocratic. There's still an element of political patronage and family connections everywhere. Uh, but at least in theory, it's based on being good at exams uh and working your way up the rums of one of these institutions. Uh now I said that uh there was another elite that you get at the same time. Uh and and well, of course, there's more than two elites because the landlords still exist to a certain extent. Certainly in Britain, they own much of uh the property of the UK. Uh and then that's true in the United States too, but they get displaced as the dominant elite unless they can adapt, you know, and put on a suit and tie and you know pretend to be uh you know corporate managers or something. Uh but the other elite that you find, and this is particularly true in the U.S., uh, you get entrepreneurs, that is, the founders of corporations, uh, who become incredibly wealthy. Uh, and it's not through some kind of sinister conspiracy or something. It's just that if you're Andrew Carnegie, uh, steel is a mass production industry with natural economies of scale. So in a perfectly competitive market, you may start off with 100 steel companies, you're gonna end up with one or two, or maybe these giant bureaucratic Leviators because they're more efficient. But what that means is that if you own most of the shares of the corporation and you're the founder, you become incredibly rich. And this was true of uh John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. It's true of Bill Gates, uh, it's true of Elon Musk and others. And so these entrepreneurs have a sort of uh uh combative relationship with this new managerial elite, uh, even in the private sector. Uh so on the one hand, their enterprises become so vast and sprawling, uh they simply can't run them day-to-day. They have to hire people to do it, and the people to do it tend to be trained professionals with with you know business degrees and and uh uh specialized university training. Uh but at the same time, uh you know, they they they tend to think themselves uh as being superior people uh because of their commercial success, even though in most cases they got there just in time. You know, if it had if if Bill Gates had not had this software that was bought by IBM, somebody else would have come up with it or IBM would have done it itself. So uh so what we're seeing in in the Western world right now, I think is misdiagnosed as populist rebellion against the managerial elites. Uh the populist rebellion is real. It's it's quite real. That is, the working classes have lost most of the institutions that gave them some kind of countervailing power uh in the private sector, in the public sector, and even in the nonprofit sector. So in the middle of the 20th century, in the US and Europe, you had powerful churches, you had powerful trade unions, uh, and you had political parties, which in most countries, uh, including the United States, were federations of state and local parties. Uh and these institutions uh have pretty much disintegrated uh to varying degrees in varying Western countries. The union private sector unions have almost been destroyed in the United States. It's down to less than 6% of the private sector workforce is unionized. The uh public sector survives uh to some degree. Uh religious affiliation and attendance is in long-term decline in every Western country. I think that's unlikely to be reversed. It's not because of some kind of political thing. It just seems to be the evolution of urban industrial societies. Uh and uh uh in terms of political parties, they've become brands. Uh the they're not grassroots organizations anymore. Correct me if I'm mistaken, but I think the actual memberships of the Conservative Party and and other parties in the UK are really pretty small, aren't they? I mean, they're not.

SPEAKER_00 12:47

Yeah. Uh about uh uh I think the Tories and Labor both have around 130,000 each. Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 12:55

That may that may be more than the Democrats and the Republicans in the U.S. At this point, under very strange judicial rulings, the Supreme Court has said that if you call yourself a Democrat, you're a Democrat. So periodically we have Nazis and Klansmen and other people like that running as Republicans or Democrats, and there's nothing the parties can do. So at this point, it's essentially a shell. And you see this with the career of Donald Trump. I mean, he was uh apparently a Democrat, at least in his donations, uh, for most of his life. Then he tried to take over Ross Perot's reform party and failed uh around 2000. And then he decided he'd try to take over the Republican Party. Uh so so but that's increasingly true. These are simply brands. And to be a politician, you you just declare that you belong to one of the teams, and then you raise money, and then you hire strategists and PR people. Uh so but so there's a real alienation on the part of most people in Europe and the U.S. who are working class. That is, they don't go to university. Although in Europe it's almost half now of some college education. Uh so the real divide may no longer be whether you go to college, but whether you go to graduate school or professional school or something more intensive like that. Uh and one popular interpretation was that uh the the rise of uh these would-be tribunes of the people, like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson uh a decade ago, and you know, Nigel Farage and and uh Maloney and in Italy and so on, that this was a working class rebellion. And we've had 10 years of this at this point. Uh and this analysis looks more dubious. Uh for one thing, the uh conservative parties in the US and Europe had been getting more and more working class voters for a long time. It didn't all just there wasn't a sudden explosion in uh uh with Brexit and with uh Trump. Uh but the other thing we've seen is, and it's dramatically illustrated with the second term Trump administration, uh, these so-called populists they pose as champions of the working class while they campaign, right? So, you know, Trump invited uh you know a union leader to address the Republican convention. He dressed up as a McDonald's worker and passed out fries and hamburgers and so he's a right, great champion of the common man. Uh and then when he's inaugurated, he has Gates and uh Zuckerberg and all the American oligarchs sitting in the front row at his inauguration. He then puts the richest man in America and the world, Elon Musk, my fellow Austinite, I live in Austin, Texas, uh, in charge of dismantling the federal government, right? Which is not what these blue-collar working class people were asking for. Uh and and I think in the case of Boris, Johnson, uh, you know, he posed as a populist, uh defending Brexit. Uh, and you then got the Boris wave, as it's called, right? More mass immigration. But well, but wasn't Brexit about reducing immigration? Uh so so I so what is going on here? I think the way to understand it is the managerial revolution uh has not eliminated the older bourgeoisie owner operators, and it also does not eliminate the entrepreneurs. So on the one side, you have the uh the career professionals uh in in business in big corporations, let's say IBM or something like that, right? And uh they simply work their way up, they're risk averse. They have these giant corporations, lots of stakeholders. They tend to try to be on good terms with all parties. They they bow to social fads like DEI. Uh these are basically organization men and women. Uh on the other side, in in the UK and Europe and the US, you still have the small businessman or small uh businesswoman. Uh, you know, you have the family farmer. They still exist, they're important politically. Uh they don't have that kind of money. Uh and then you have this other group of tycoons, to use the old term, you know, like uh Musk and Zuckerberg. Uh and they've gotten rich usually from one of these mass production scalable industries. And once they pass from the scene, uh, as if this already happened with Apple and Steve Jobs, and and I think it was succeeded by Tim Cook, then you get ordinary managerial types will inherit the empire, right? It's not going to be the children, it's going to be, you know, some kind of professional managers. But while they are still alive, uh if if they they have many of the prejudices of the small, you know, uh uh shop owner in a small town in Britain or the US or in Germany or France, uh, and they don't like unions. Uh that raises their labor costs. They don't like government regulations, uh, and they find allies in these billionaires who are kind of, and I think it's legitimate. I mean, they're kind of kindred kindred spirits, right? Because, you know, the billionaire hates trade unions too, and hates government regulations as well, right? And thinks, you know, I'm an entrepreneur, you know, I didn't have to negotiate with these trade union bosses, you know, I don't need to be kicked around by these petty civil servants. So I think now from the perspective of 2026, 2016, you could have said this is a populist grassroots revolt. Uh, but from 2026, I think it's pretty clear it's an intra-capitalist battle. The so-called capitalists are actually the what used to be called the petty bourgeoisie, uh the smaller independent proprietors, uh, and their billionaire entrepreneur friends and allies uh against the common enemy, the technocrats.

SPEAKER_00 19:36

Well, ta that's a very good a very good segue, actually, future of technocracy, because I suppose the the striking thing about your framework is how precisely it it it just sees the domestic class wars across Europe map onto the global economic settlement uh of the recent decades. And those who have benefited from free movement of capital, production, labour by being part of the bureaucracy, the technical experts that oversee it all, that manage it, the managerial elite, as we've just described it, they're effectively um bought in to this global order, continuing. And um as you say, that being part of the credentialed class gives them a status, which means they can move around these big organizations, uh, they can do very, very well out of it, be company people, and uh live the good life in a way that isn't afforded to those who work with their hands, as David Goodhart would say. Um, but I suppose what we're seeing now, Michael, is we've got two things going on. We have um a global order starting to, the tectonic plates are shifting. Uh it seems that we're moving towards these regional blocks again. Um, there is uh great power rivalry spilling out both into proxy wars and real wars. And then on top of that, we have this rise of um the use of artificial intelligence in these workplaces, which are part of the technocratic order. And I have seen firsthand uh decisions be made about not needing people at a junior level from the graduate schemes. I've seen partners be let go from consultancies on the basis of work slowing down. And um and no, just looking at the United Kingdom uh job uh market that the big four auditing firms, Deloitte, PWC, KPMG, um Ernst ⁇ Young, they have reduced the number of graduate openings uh by something like 50% over the last two years since ChatGPT got all of its capabilities. And this seems to show no signs of stopping. And and now it it you can see noise being made from the white collar work. Is going, oh, what's going on with AI? How are we going to stop our jobs being taken? Which, of course, is the same clarion call that's been made by the working classes through the years to automation and mechanisation. So my question to you is all of this disruption to the prevailing order of recent decades, does this represent a structural opening for the working class, or are we simply going to see a new set of managers taking over? Or as Joel Kopkin might say, we just have a coming of neo-feudalism where the the gains will just be made by another smaller number of people?

SPEAKER_01 22:39

Well, I think of myself as a as a realist, that is you uh the working class majority, and the before the Industrial Revolution, it was the peasant majority. They can have local revolts. But you only get a revolution when you get dissident members of an elite uh decide to take join sides with them and lead them and maybe exploit them as the new elite. Uh so I think you uh hi history's largely and and I'm sort of with James Burnham on this, it's it's like a cycle of the rise and falls of particular elite groups of various kinds. And depending on local contingencies, the peasants or the working class may or may not have the leverage to extort concessions from the elites, but they're never going to be elites for the most part, right? Most of it can kind of blackmail the elites into treating the better or paying the better. But to address the two things you were talking about, uh I think it's very important. Uh and I'll I'll go backwards from your second point about uh AI wiping out a lot of these professional jobs. Uh and clearly they're not long for this world because if you think of paralegals or junior lawyers at a firm, what are they doing? They're looking up cases. Uh you know, I I studied at uh Middle Temple in the 1980s, right? You're it's uh uh the lawyers owned the books. They literally owned the books, right? You cannot go to the library and look all of this stuff up. Uh and the biggest capital investment of a law firm in the U.S. or Britain or elsewhere was just these long rows of law books and precedents. And then you you had junior uh partners and paralegals look things up. Uh if this can be done by AI in a microsecond, if it can go through and summarize all of the precedents, then you maybe you still have some partners who are lawyers who are generalists and can argue cases and write briefs and things like that. But but you don't need what is essentially clerical labor. Uh and we've had several generations where people who are basically clerks, uh, whether it was in the in businesses, in nonprofits, in government, they thought they were professionals. They thought they were elite professionals, even though they're just doing kind of routine, you know, clerical intellectual labor, and they're gonna be gone. Uh and they're going to suffer the fate of uh factory workers, because even if the U.S. and other Western countries reshore a lot of manufacturing, it's largely going to be automated. You know, it's just like most agriculture in the industrial West is mechanized now, and and a few percent of the population grows more than enough food uh for the rest of society and then has export surpluses that dumps on the world. Uh so I think that if the archetypical managerial 20th century uh organization was a factory, not just a car factory or a steel factory, but also a law factory, an academic factory, that's basically what universities were, you know, a public school factory, everything was organized along kind of factory lines, right? And with a hierarchy of supervisors and higher ups and lower downs and so on. Uh if you wipe out much of that, then the archetypical uh productive institution looks more like an oil well uh in my native Texas. Uh and the oil business from Rockefeller onwards was always a capital-intensive business without much labor, right? You had some roustabouts and you had a small crew, but there were there were not enormous numbers of workers who could shut it down. It was basically a single very expensive uh piece of equipment uh that was owned by one person or by a corporation or by partners or something. So I think what happens in that case is uh it strengthens the capitalists in the classical sense, that is, those who own the productive assets, right? Uh it makes it easier for them to dominate their firms. They don't have to depend on 10,000 underlings carrying out their work and trying to crack down, make sure they're doing what the capitalist wants. Uh it's more kind of like a skeleton crew and this very effective piece of equipment. It may even just be virtual, it may be software in the case of a bank in the city of London. Uh so I think you get kind of a sort of third-world type uh system. Uh, and this was the system in the U.S., in the South and the Southwest, and so on, where you had these two economies. There was the modern economy, based largely on resource extraction of oil uh and gas. And this was just like Saudi Arabia today. This was an incredibly technologically advanced, highly scientific thing. It was based on RD. I just can't tell you, you know, how sophisticated this is this was from the 1900s onwards. So you have to have scientists, engineers, fairly small number of workers, and lots and lots of capital. All right. But then in the surrounding society, uh mass unemployment in big productive industries is just there's they're not hiring, right? And they're not hiring in these big paper-cushing bureaucracies, academic and legal and medical. Uh so I think there you have two things. Uh for one thing, you you do get maybe kind of a renaissance of the small proprietor, uh, simply because with uh what one of the side effects of this AI revolution, and it's not just AI, it's also rapid prototyping, you know, so called 3D printing. Uh it means that you've got things that could only be done by gigantic factories with 10,000 workers half a century ago. Maybe you can do it in your garage, right? I mean, there's some things that's not possible. It's not going to work for automobiles or aerospace, but but I think you'll get a lot of small-scale production will be very, very sophisticated. And thanks to the internet, you can do marketing, right? If you're a small producer in a way you could not in the past. So uh, and the other thing I think you'll see in this society with a landscape where there are a few high-tech, large-scale industries that are very capital-intensive, but light on the labor on the one hand, and that's where the real fortunes will be made. Uh, then you'll have this kind of mediocre majority where uh they're self-employed or working for small firms with a few people. And then the final part of the picture, it's something that actually we had in the U.S. for most of history and maybe in Britain as well. It's uh government as the best employer in the country. Uh in rural America, and it may have been this way in rural Britain, uh getting a job with the post office, you know, if you're living in a farming county, that was a great thing. That was everyone's dream, right? To go be the county clerk or to work for the post office. It paid well, right? Easy hours. It was much better than chewing horses or uh scrambling for your next uh uh cobbling job or something like that. Uh so I do think we we may see an expansion of uh government, not necessarily central government. It may take the form of local, municipal, and regional governments. Uh and what form would that take? Uh I think it would largely take the form of health care jobs, which are funded by government because uh individuals don't make enough money uh to pay for their health care or their elder care or child care in some cases. And so by default, if if you want everyone in your society to have this minimum access to health care, to elder care in old age, and so on, the government's going to pay for it. Now, it may pay provide it directly, it may pay private contractors to provide it, but but the money will come from the uh uh the government. And where will the government's revenues come from? Well, if I'm right, it will come from the capitalists. Uh and and another group, which we tend to forget about, uh Michael Hudson, who's a radical economist, is very good on this. Uh if you go back to the 19th century and and Adam Smith and uh David Ricardo, uh Malthus, uh they do not treat landlords as capitalists. Uh landlords are rentiers, right? They're they're they're basically, as J.S. Mill, who despised them, said, they make money as they sleep, right? And so they have this great business model where they own land and everything has to be done on land, and they can charge a toll, right? They can charge rent for the land. Uh and Ricardo was very pessimistic. And this interestingly, uh Marx built on Ricardo, but he came to different conclusions. Ricardo thought capitalism might be doomed because over time the capitalists would drive down wages to the point of mere subsistence. Uh so and then that's where Marx stops, basically. And at that point, the workers rebel and they have a revolution. But Smith went one step further. I mean, Ricardo went one step further. He said, but the landlords are watching how much money the capitalists are making. And they will raise their rents to suck up most of the profits of the capitalists, of the factory owners. Uh so in the so in this rather pessimistic Ricardian vision, the uh uh the industrial capitalists impoverish the working classes, but then the greedy landlords impoverish the uh industrial capitalists. So I think it's quite possible uh that uh the the that capitalism as we know it, where the dominant elite uh is a group of investors or owners who invest in in making products, goods and services that are sold in a market, either domestically or abroad. Uh that's been a a small blip in history. For most of history, the landlords have been in charge. And and it's easy to imagine a future in which the profits or the returns from uh industry drop to the point that the most important asset owners are not just people with money, right? They have to invest their money somewhere physical. It's not factory owners, it's uh landlords.

SPEAKER_00 34:41

And and do we think that the governing model of technology that is as built up across the globe, um maintains itself in any way. So for example, we look at central banks, obviously, there's always gonna be a place for them, but you think about um some of the regulatory agencies, NGOs, we think about the IMF, WTO, uh in the UK, the Office for Budget Responsibility, we had Sage for the COVID era. These are all staffed by these technocratic credentialed experts, which, as we've just talked about, you know, AI is going to be doing quite a lot of that job. We think there could be some kind of a change of economic model, even if it's not a top-down planned one. And so this, I suppose, exquisite irony that um that the the the the technological efficiency so championed by these people are about to potentially render quite a few of them redundant. And I don't say that with any glee, I'm I'm one of them, um, though I can I can see it coming. Um but I I suppose d do we see any way that that's going to continue? Uh because presumably, if the processing power um is is increasing, um, that this computing processing power and it can be utilized by these institutions to continue to push policy and all the rest of it, that presumably even if we're going to lose large numbers of people from them, they're still going to maintain institutional power and presence, or does it become untenable in the changing economic world we're moving into?

SPEAKER_01 36:24

Well, I I think that industrial society produces such wealth, whether it's capitalist or communist uh or fascist for that matter, that different countries have a great deal of leeway in how they structure their elites, and they can maintain totally parasitic, unproductive drone elites for generations, right? So uh if you look at uh the historian Arno Meyer has a very good book on the ancient regime, and he pointed out that everybody talks about the bourgeois revolution of the 19th century. There's no bourgeois revolution in continental Europe, and it's limited in Britain. The aristocracies kept running everything all the way up until World War I, right? You know, in Austria-Hungary and in Prussia and the among the Hohenzollern and so on. So kind of obsolete social classes, if they controlled the government and void the military, they can keep going indefinitely, right? Uh so uh there's no necessary happy ending where uh Thorstein Weiblen, great American sociologist and a great realist, but but his one utopianism was he thought the future belonged to a Soviet of engineers, right? So the the people who know actually how to make things and fix a microwave would be in charge, not like the rich guy or woman who inherited money and bought the microwave company, bossing the engineers around, hasn't happened, and there's not necessarily any reason to believe it will happen. And the other elite that we have not spoken about yet, I I worked in the landlords, uh, it's the military. Uh in much of the world to this day, the government exists or falls at the whim of the military. Uh and at the and ultimately whether your government functions depends on whether the military will take orders. Uh and the military, as a coercive institution based on taxes, uh, you know, uh is not necessarily subordinate to capitalists. On the contrary, they can turn around and tell the capitalists, you know, you're going to share your wealth with me, it's as uh Putin did as done with the uh oligarchs, uh, and they either flee or they go to prison, uh, or they mysteriously fall out of windows and so on. Uh so coercive power is independent of wealth. Uh and in and uh it and it gives the organizers of coercive power, who include civilian politicians whose base is not dependent on campaign donations, along with military officers, uh they can decide either to replace the capitalists or they can simply shake them down, which is the more usual model, right? You know, uh and and and that's always been the question I spent 30 years in Washington, D.C. And I came to the conclusion that weak politicians can be bought by corporations and rich individuals. Powerful politicians extort them. Right. So if you're the chair of the uh Senate Finance Committee, right, uh, you don't have to do what the Wall Street lobby tells you to do. Right? You can say, well, nice little industry you got there, and we have these regulations coming up. It'd be terrible if something happened to your bank. But if you put my niece on your board of directors, right, and you make a contribution, right, and uh my wife is a sculptor and you buy her sculpture and you know, so on, uh, then maybe we can try to try to protect your your little business there. Uh and and so I think this is true in every society, democratic or non-democratic. Uh one of the interesting things that political science and political philosophy kind of is ignored is the fact that, and we know this now looking at regimes of all kinds in the 19th and 20th centuries, uh security elites tend to become economic elites. Uh, and the reason is obvious. So they're, let's say it's the SS or the NKVD in the Soviet Union, KGB. So they're arresting all these people, sending them off to the gulag, you know, executing them. Well, what becomes of their property? Well, a lot of it sticks to the fingers of the police. Uh, and so uh, and sometimes the police extort, right, the dissidents or or the minorities or whatever, and say, well, you know, I won't arrest you, but you have to, you know, give me your business or give me your mine or whatever. So you end up with these uh secret police in particular, but sometimes the armies, owning stores, malls, warehouses, mines, factories. You see this in Iran. Uh I'm not an expert on Iran, but I would guess that one of the reasons why uh the Iranian regime has survived is because the uh revolutionary guards in the army became economic owners of the Bazaar, as they called it, you know, decades ago, right? And so the naive Americans and Western Europeans think, well, the freedom-loving bourgeoisie will rise up, right, and overthrow the tyrannical secret police, but they're in business with the secret police. Or maybe the secret police are the capitalists. So I guess there's a long-winded way of saying I think there are all kinds of different ways to structure uh the elite. Uh, there's there's another way, by the way, while I'm on this, and this is a philanthropy. Okay. So if I'm correct, and power will shift towards capitalist asset owners, at least in the short term, away from the big corporate managers. The uh, you know, the tycoons, the Gateses and Zuckerbergs and so on, they still want, I mean, most of them come from a professional class background. I mean, they weren't born rich. They were born into the upper middle class or you know, college-educated professional families, and they became billionaires. Uh, so they'll want their children and grandchildren to have these kind of comfortable, affluent jobs, right? Not necessarily to inherit them. Uh, and I think one way you can interpret the explosion of these billionaire-funded family foundations in the U.S. uh is essentially make work jobs for their children and grandchildren and the people who went to college with them at Harvard and Vassar and Oxford or whatever. Uh and and here again, the possibilities are limited only by the imagination. I remember reading this biography of uh Cardinal Woolsey, uh, you know, Henry VIII's uh uh prime minister. Uh and and in in Tudor England, there wasn't that much material comfort. The king did not, you know, have great indoor plumbing and all of that, and neither did the cardinals and the aristocrats. So the f the status took the form of retinues. And whoever had the bigger retinue had the higher status. And so when Cardinal Rolsey would go on a procession through Britain from London to some other town, he would have his hundreds of servants parade down the country road in front of his carriage, and each servant would hold a pillow, and the pillow would have one golden spoon or one silver pot or whatever.

SPEAKER_00 44:31

Don't give my wife any ideas. We're going to cut this bit out.

SPEAKER_01 44:35

Just to show the population that you were but we're really here, it's kind of like Frank Sinatra with his his uh Italian-American uh uh retinue everywhere and his entourage, right? So I think a lot of this wealth could be incorporated into entourages. And in fact, what you see uh among wealthy people in in the Western world is the richer you get, the more servants you have. Right? You know, you're outsourcing more and more of your daily tasks. Uh, and so you have uh in instead of raising your children, you have a nanny uh or an au pair, uh, you have a cook, you know, you have a maid, uh, you have a chauffeur. Uh, and eventually you you could get to the kind of system you had with uh Louis XIV where all of the aristocrats stand in line while you take your bath, and one hands you a towel, and the other one puts on your vest, and the other one puts on your socks. Uh so so I I guess what I'm I'm trying to say is I don't think we should assume, in thinking about the future, that it's a straight-line extrapolation of the the 19th and 20th centuries. You know, I think there are all kinds of possibilities. I don't think we're going to be absorbed into a computer overmind that say silicon god. I'm skeptical about that. Uh but I think we need to think about uh other historic kinds of elites which uh do not make their their income is not derived from either capitalism in the modern sense or socialism in the the Marxist-Leninist sense.

SPEAKER_00 46:19

Fascinating, fascinating uh uh take there. Not not one I've uh heard, but it it uh it makes it makes intuitive sense, uh you unpacking it. A bit of a clunky gear shift, but we we'll we'll move specifically over to uh your nation's affairs. And um I think specifically we should talk about how Trump has has remade conservatism. Um it's certainly something you have done analysis on to say that um he he added a different leg to the conservative stool, so to speak, uh, because he he brought those voters of of Ross Perot, as you mentioned before, back into the Republican coalition. And he and he did this because he he brought protectionism into the fold, he he brought immigration enforcement into the fold, and then he he left a lot of that anti-government architecture in place from Reagan and and Bush. Um but you you'd you'd identified instability in this. Um and you you basically have gone on to say that the working class voters who have put Trump in the White House aren't necessarily Trumpians through and through, they're actually more likely swing voters. Um, and they can also be driven away by various things. And and do you suppose they can be driven away by militarism? They can be driven away by too much libertarianism and too much um uh godly evangelical rhetoric as well. And um on a militarism front, well, need we say that we have the Iran war, um libertarianism, we've talked about him surrounding himself with the tech bros who are typically quite into that, um, whilst he's also dabbled in the evangelical rhetoric. So, what what happens, um, I suppose, to the working class voters, if this is the end of their dalliance perhaps with with Trump, I have no idea if it's going to be, because what I'm quite interested in is this realignment you've talked about, which has gone on for for much longer than is usually supposed, is that if people look around and realise that the people they've bet the horse on is no longer uh coming through uh for them, they're going to start looking elsewhere. And it would be quite interesting to know how those um political lines might start to demarcate again and where they might look, because um, in the States, for example, the Democrat Party doesn't seem to have learned from the reasons why the vote is turned against them. And so um what's your understanding of all this?

SPEAKER_01 49:04

Well, let me begin with what I think was was a mistaken interpretation. That was the idea that that there would be this new working class party, right? Trump some years ago spoke of the Republican Workers' Party, it was, you know, and and some of the populists in Europe are sort of like that. Uh I just think that was an analytical mistake because historically uh the working class has been split between parties in the US and the UK and continental Europe, but for obvious reasons. Uh if one party had the capitalists and one party had the workers, the workers' party would win all the time. By 60 or 80 or 90 percent, depending on the country, right? There aren't that many capitalists, and there aren't many, that many professionals. So the only reason we have multi-party systems is the parties get some working class votes, all of them get some working class votes. And it may be on economic appeals, but it can be on religious appeals or ethno, you know, racial appeals or or you know opposition to foreign policy or support for foreign policy, because you know, working class people don't are not just economic automatons. I mean, they have other identities as well. So I uh so if you look at why working class power is lower now, I don't think it's because of the absence of a working class party. Even in the UK, the labor Labor Party was always a coalition of upper middle class and some business types with with the trade unions of working classes from the 20s and 30s onwards. Uh you have to look outside of the electoral system, outside of the formal political system to institutions which, even if they're led by educated people, are answerable directly or indirectly to working class constituents. And those are the ones I mentioned earlier. It's trade unions, it's uh party federations, uh, and to a lesser degree now, it's uh religious uh institutions. Uh where uh and and without those extra parliamentary institutions, as they've sometimes been called, uh then m uh having working class citizens vote every in the United States every two years or every four years for a candidate who was selected in a primary election that only 15% of the voters voted in. Uh and the only reason that candidate was in the primary election was he or she had persuaded rich people or corporations or nonprofits to fund his or her campaign. It's just ratification. I mean, it and and to make it worse in the U.S., but this is true to some degree in all democracies, uh, there are lots of safe seats. There are lots of safe areas. So there are only a few swing states in the U.S. And if you look at the swing states, it's actually swing counties and swing neighborhoods. And what in the United States, we say we have a two-party system because of the first past the post system that we inherited from Britain. Uh we actually have two regional one-party systems. Uh and it used to be the north and the south. Those were the two regional parties. Now it's the big cities and the rural areas and suburbs are the two parties. But in most of the U.S., it doesn't matter whether you vote or not. Uh a Democrat's going to win the general election. You might have some minor influence uh if you vote in the primary, but again, the only people that you can vote for are the ones who have won the money primary.

SPEAKER_03 52:54

Right?

SPEAKER_01 52:55

You've got rich people to back them. Uh so why was it then? And I think it's correct that there's this belief that working class people have more agency in the 50s and 60s and 70s than they do in the 2000s and 2010s and and 2020s. It's because of these extra-parliamentary institutions. If you want to really influence politics in Washington or Whitehall or wherever, uh it's not just a matter of voting between elections. During the years between elections, you need lobby. You need lobbyists showing up, uh, you know, informing electors. And then lobbying is perfectly legitimate. You know, it's it's not necessarily corrupt in informing the politicians, reminding that you exist, giving them your proposals. Uh and as and you and you can have working class-based groups can lobby like that. So so in the old days, if you were a union member in the US, uh in a union district, you weren't just represented between elections by the winner of the election. Uh your union was breathing down the neck of the elected representative during the entire period of two or four years, or six years in the case of senators, right? You know, you want to help us or we'll remember you in the next election. Uh so if it's out of sight, out of mind, then you can do like Donald Trump, right? You can put on a McDonald's uniform and you know, uh pass out fries to people through a car window, and then forget about the labor vote, the working class vote, you know, uh forever in his case, if he doesn't try to become president for life. Uh but uh uh so so I I think focusing on elections, there's really like two kinds of representative democracies. There's choosing the formal political representatives, and then there's uh riding herd, as we say in Texas, on the uh representatives between elections.

SPEAKER_00 55:08

Well that is actually a much more uh pro-agency way of of looking at things, as you as you heard in my opener, uh one of my concerns is that uh so many people have become disengaged from it all because of undelivered promises, or uh as you mentioned, though not in these terms, it's me paraphrasing a betrayal of the original intent to deliver for certain sections of people and then aligning themselves with the oligarchy. And it and it's something I think about quite a lot here in Britain because we actually did once upon a time have um uh a working class that was pretty self-educated and and educated to a great degree. There's a wonderful book that I'm interviewing the the chap who wrote it 25 years ago uh in a few weeks called The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. And it was written by Professor Jonathan Rose at Drew University, and it is it takes up 2,000 sources of of um of working class people's diary entries about what they were reading and and what they did at school and the ways that they organized and that their level of literacy, uh, both across the classics, across the various uh religious texts, uh and the classics being philosophy and the great literary works, far outpasses even our cognitive elite today. And uh lots of these people became dignitaries in their own right. Ramsay MacDonald, the first Prime Minister of the Labour Party, was someone who was effectively uneducated in school. He didn't have any uh grades, but he was part of um not only this autodidact culture, but they had mutual improvement societies where they all chipped in for books and they shared them amongst the community and they met up and they debated and they learned effectively how to be operators in the political sphere without even being openly political. And and whilst I've I've gone off on a bit of a tangent here, is whilst I think there are big challenges to that kind of world coming back, not least because we're also addicted to various technological developments and an autodidact culture isn't really there, is that there are enough lessons for us to learn about having not been um necessarily um uh treated with the utmost fidelity by politicians we have backed in the polls that suggest maybe we could take matters into our own hands in the m in the manner you suggest. How do you organize and lobby? How do you actually uh come to learn how to be a better self-governing individual yourself? So then you can perhaps go and govern, given that so many people think we're governed by our inferiors who don't have their interests at heart. So I I I do uh that is one of my hopes, though. I don't know whether it's totally unfounded. Uh I don't know if I can see any green sheets of recovery, but I do think it's it's uh it's wonderful to hear someone actually float the suggestion that, by the way, there are other things to do than just showing up at the voting booth. There are many ways that we can we can actually collaborate and and lobby.

SPEAKER_01 58:24

Well, and you you've put your finger on something important, which is uh the role of the post-Gutenberg era. Uh and and Marshall McLuhan uh uh uh you know was predicting this in the 1960s, right? That that uh literacy would give way to this audiovisual culture in the future. Everyone thought he was hip and left-wing. He's actually a very conservative Renaissance humanist. Uh but his point was for most of, let's just look at Western history, uh, the basis of education was rhetoric and logic for the upper classes. But that was also entertainment for the masses. Uh one of uh uh Lyndon Johnson's childhood friends and growing up in the small town of Stonewall, Texas, uh, Emmett Redford, who went on, Johnson became president, uh, Emmett became president of the American Political Science Association. Uh, I asked him one time, well, what was there to do for entertainment in rural Texas in the 1930s? There's no radio, no TV, no movies in the town. And he said there were three forms of entertainment. Uh, one was going to the courthouse and watching a trial, uh, and the other was listening to politicians speak and debate. And the third was listening to a sermon. And this actually was a very highly sophisticated form of entertainment. You know, in the 19th century U.S. on the frontier, people would pack picnics. And it uh, if you look at the Lincoln Douglas debates, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, these went on for hours. And people brought food and they listened to it and they followed the arguments, right? And the students, uh uh, the elite students were trained in logic and rebuttal and and uh syllogisms and all of this. Uh so that I so I'm I'm actually optimistic. I think that the era of text-based silent reading, according to McLullen, it really only starts around 1900. Before then, if you go back to the 19th century, you you had reading in family circles, uh, right? Like the mother or the father or the eldest child would read the Dickens novel to the families. Obviously, it had to be, you know, it couldn't be terribly X-rated or subversive, but uh Britain, one of its great contributions to civilization was the uh adult education movement, where people like Matthew Arnold would lecture to workingmen's audiences at night. Uh and I'm not I'm not convinced that this won't come out uh come around in some form. On the contrary, I think that uh the l lowering costs of audiovisual technology symbolized by this podcast, uh, you know, uh the the concentration, the expense of uh of 20th century mass media really did lead to a dumbing down, in my opinion, right? I mean, if you go back and look at stuff on YouTube of TV shows from the 50s and 60s and so they're stupid. I mean, they really are. Uh uh any TV show now, this began with cable, but now it's spreading, uh, is better written and more literate, right, than these things you know from 50 years ago with this mass common denominator audience. And it may seem kind of paradoxical, but I think that the very interest of people in the more inflammatory podcasters, uh present company accepted, uh, that it's kind of, I don't know, this could be a phase. I think it could be healthy. So when you first get the Gutenberg Print Revolution, you get 100 years, and all of the books are, you know, the Pope is the devil's whore. No, Luther is the devil's whore, right? And it was really bad poetry, and yeah, all terrible stuff. You you had Swift and uh Pope despising the printing press, right? You know, it's you'd taken this gentlemanly literature, and now the masses have their grub, literally it's grubstreep, right? They called it. Uh but what happened after a few generations, I think audiences they just got tired of this. And you had institutions like book reviews, right? And and you know, could sift through what's garbage, what's useful. Uh you had newspapers and you know, sort of like what is important news, we're gonna curate this for you. Uh so I'm I'm kind of optimistic about that. And I've tried to do this in my limited university teaching career, uh try to uh require students to do public speaking to stand and give extemporaneous talks. And uh and the UK is much better on this than the US because your your public school tradition and and of course Parliament, uh your politicians are much better spoken and and much more articulate than than most of our teleprompter reading politicians in the US. But I I can see us going back, you know, to uh the typical you won't be reading an essay necessarily or a bound book. You will press a button and a hologram of John Gillam will materialize and then give one of these three-hour Ciceronian addresses that these people you know have learned they can follow these complex arguments. Uh maybe not, maybe not, but but I just I'm I have apocalypse fatigue. Uh because as as long as I can remember, uh things have been going downhill, if you if you listen to the to to the media and to the intellectuals. And at any given time, some things are dying, some things are growing. There's there aren't green sheets, and there's like brown decaying collapsing trunks, and so you know it's a mix. You may give an error.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:43

Well, the h hologram image you just painted of me, uh maybe the next time we speak I shall wear a toga just to really bring it bring it to life for you. Um we we've we've talked a bit about the states. Uh I I know um British politics is not necessarily something you would say is your forte, but you certainly know your way around it to be able to expound on it. Is let's bring the British dimension into this. So uh deindustrialization um has led to a post-industrial Britain that I've just been around on a road trip around England and and have seen I've seen the effects of um uh a jobless communities, um, welfare dependence, um, increasing levels of dereliction, uh, and and and places that need uh dignity and not just bestowed upon them by elites, but some of the things we've spoken about as well, being able to find their own agency too and be able to organize and all the rest of it. Um, but we've talked a lot about this professional managerial class um uh infrastructure that's delivered services to, I suppose, a clientele uh of not just working classes, but just about everyone. And um In the British context, uh people had become quite sick of this um economic settlement, and you have said that the Brexit vote was effectively a working class veto on the managerial settlement. Um our political class didn't really want to update its priors after that, and hasn't really, uh, as you can see through our current government cosying up with the EU and what have you, um, not wanting to put that back to vote. But if we start to think about uh post-managerial politics in a British context, you know, what what do you think um would needs to happen for uh those people done down by the system, inverted commas, um, to be able to uh move things forward for their own communities in a way they haven't been able to so far?

SPEAKER_01 1:06:53

Well, at the risk of being banned from Britain in the future, I spent a lot of time there. Uh I think the problem with Britain is it's quite different from the U.S. It never actually had managerial industrial capitalism. Uh I had uh Corelli Barnett wrote a trilogy of uh books. One of them was called The Audit of War, where he made the case that it was actually the power of the landed gentry and aristocracy and the Church of England and the bankers, the City of London, which kind of killed British industrial capitalism because it was seen as vulgar and grasping, and it didn't have the prestige it did in the U.S. or in Germany or in Japan. Uh uh Alfred Chandler, great American economic historian in one of his books, he looks at minutes of meetings from US, UK, and German corporations from around 1900, and and they're making hiring decisions. And according to Chandler, the Germans and Americans want to know if he did a good job in his last employment. The British, this is good according to Chandler, I'm just just, you know, I'm just not native. The British wanted to know did he come from a good family? Did he go to the right public school? Right, and so on. Uh and one of the problems, so you had that element of snobbery, and the other problem you had was scale. Uh uh John Maynard Keynes, people neglect this, but he was convinced that Britain fell behind uh German and American industry because there were too many small firms in industries with increasing returns for scale. Uh Keynes spent a lot of time, if memory serves, trying to persuade the government to forcibly consolidate cotton mills. There were all these little tiny cotton mills, and they weren't productive, and they're just being wiped out by foreign competition because they couldn't reap economies of scale. Now, the British government did try to do this in the 50s and 60s and 70s. One of the goals of nationalization was to create these big national champions, uh, and it just failed, I think, for other reasons. But but it really is amazing that Britain was one of the most important it was still is one of the most inventive societies in history. I mean, in the 20th century, the British invented the jet engine, a lot of nuclear uh technology, television, all kinds of things. Radar, uh, early computers. Uh, but they could, unlike the Americans, uh, they just did not have big corporations that could then mass produce this on a huge scale. Uh, you know, they they pioneered commercial jet travel, made a few accidents, and they never recovered. But but so uh so I think the roots in this are very deep. And uh when you look at deindustrialization in the U.S. and Britain, these are two quite different things. The U.S. was the wolves manufacturing superpower. We were like China as recently as the 60s and 70s. Uh and it was a decision of our corporate elite and the government to dismantle all of these factories in order to exploit cheap labor in Mexico and China and Thailand and Vietnam. That was a conscious decision. Uh in the UK, you never really got that level of scale with the technologies of the second industrial revolution of steel and chemicals and so on. And so now as I said earlier, even countries that re-industrialize, most of the jobs are not going to be manufacturing jobs. But it still makes a huge difference whether you have uh tradable goods industries, that is, manufacturing industries that can sell to other countries as well as your own. Uh let's say you're making uh well one of one of the the uh Britain still makes aircraft engines, right? Uh so if you sell an aircraft engine and there are going to be billions of Africans and Asians flying an aircraft, it's a stream of money pouring into Britain, right? Every time you know some Chinese or American or Brazilian company buys an aircraft engine uh from uh uh uh from from British manufacturers. Uh if it's non-traded goods and services, whether they're low-end services like nursing and elder care, or uh even high-end services like finance, where one person and maybe a few deputies and some AI can do Lloyd's insurance around the mall, uh the money may come in from abroad and in the high-end profession, but it's going to be expended not through works, workers and and local warehouses and trickling down that way. It's going to be spent on Mary Poppins and on Jeeves and on the country estate of the banker, right? So uh this might this may make me unpopular in the UK, but I think that Britain needs more industrial capitalism, less financial capitalism, and less landlordism. Uh and even though most people will not work in the industrial capitalist sector, uh if you if you look at Britain compared to South Korea, I mean it's amazing. Why why Britain could have been like South Korea or Japan? Right? So you don't you don't have to be as it helps if you have hundreds of millions of people in your home market like the US or China. But but look at these medium-tier countries like that.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:56

Well, I I actually think that would make you quite popular amongst a fairly large section of our society because uh you you may well have heard of them, though they they've got a small footprint, but they're probably one of the more sensible on this topic. But the Social Democratic Party, which which came about from the the split between um Labour and the Liberals back in the 80s, um, a friend of mine, he leads it, Will Clouston, and uh this is this is their big thing is look, we we we need to re-industrialise. We can't just have a totally uh um unresilient national economy where we rely on everyone else. And so we should bring some of these back because if you go to the pubs up and down the country, everyone will say that it was a very bad thing to get rid of them. And you know, you just need to go and watch any footage of people who've even been down the mines. We that we might not like that work, but the reality was is that lots of people got uh a lot of um a lot of community spirit out of it. They were devastated when they closed down and they they caused health issues, of course. I'm not saying that we're gonna bring the mines back, but but so so do the deaths of despair that we see in welfare dependency are NHS can't stop treating people for the the bad health people are in. Of course, m mining and all the rest of it isn't the only thing that we we can do. You've you've mentioned some of it, you know, whether it's aerospace engineering and what there are data centers.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:24

There are, you know, uh what one of the great uh job generators in this century is going to be medical complexes. The the world's biggest is the Houston Medical Center in Texas. Uh and it's basically a city. Uh and it's all kinds of medicine at all levels. It provides jobs for brain surgeons, for janitors, for nursing aides, uh, you know, for for construction workers. And I think that these medical complexes may uh be kind of like the automobile factories of the uh the 20th century with an aging population. And as populations, as as the cost of goods like phones and computers fall, people in society spend more on health because that's the good that makes other goods possible. Britain is cap is one of the great leaders in biomedical research. And it would be very easy, being at the crossroads of Europe and and even Africa and the Middle East and North America, to have you have you have medical tourism in the U.S., people fly in from all over the world, right, for advanced operations. Uh and and it most of this, by the way, would take place on greenfield sites or sometimes brownfields. I mean, you're not going to build like a supergiant high-tech hospital or data center in downtown London. It's too expensive. Uh, you know, it's going to be in the left-behind areas of the UK. So you could tell a story where you have a mix of uh advanced manufacturing, but then you also have this expanded uh medical industrial complex that provides jobs for all people of all levels, of all incomes, all kinds of education. Uh and and it's it's kind of an optimistic story. It's not like, well, we lost the coal mines, so now we have to be delivered bikers, right? You know, it's it's it's it's not like that. I don't know much about them, but there's this grid called the Anglo-futurists, right? Uh and I they may be far right for all I know, but but the idea that you kind of want to have this national pride in the past, but also this high-tech vision, I think that's very attractive. The uh the Clinton campaign asked me for advice in 2016, uh, and I told them a fairly high-ranking person who went on in in her and uh the butt in the Obama I mean the Biden administration. Well, you tell a story about how your country was great in the past, it's fallen on hard times, and we'll make it great again in the future. And so being technocrats, they said, Well, no, we really want revenue neutral, like small, realistic tax credits and things like that. So I gave them a few, and then a few months later, along comes Trump. Make America great again. Right? So without some kind of vision of your patriotic past and your patriotic future, you know, that that inspires people, uh, then to simply say we're going to cut your drug prices by 500 pounds or you know,$200 or whatever, you're not going to mobilize people. I mean, uh identity politics is part of human nature. And and so when you get and there's some people I I respect them on the left. They say, well, when you get rid of identity politics, just talk about economics. Well, no, you have to replace one kind of identity politics that's divisive with an inclusive identity politics. And the most inclusive identity politics in the modern world is national. Uh it can be defined in terms of culture, it doesn't have to be defined in terms of race and religion, but there has to be some criterion of community where there are insiders and outsiders. Uh, and you have a duty to your fellow insiders that you don't have to outsiders. So uh so there's liberal nationalism, there's inclusive nationalism, and there's exclusive, racist, and and religious nationalism. But nationalism itself is the most powerful force in the modern world. It destroyed all the dynastic empires, it broke up the multinational communist states like Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, it's not going anywhere. Right? If anything, what's going to fade away is anti-nationalism. Uh and if if uh centrist thoughtful people don't have an inclusive nationalism to offer, if they're saying we should be citizens of the world, uh, you know, or members of our little diaspora group or our little sectarian tribe within the larger country, then you're gonna get very nasty reactionary, illiberal forms of nationalism are gonna prevail.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:37

It is certainly human nature and um uh you know, national feeling is uh is strong. You you can't keep it down, and that's what led to the breakup of these large multinational projects in the end, which had someone else who was higher up in the packing order overseeing things and governing at the top. Michael, you've been uh very, very generous with your time today. I couldn't stop picking your brain. Just before I let you go, I'm gonna ask you the question I ask all of my guests, which is what you've changed your mind on during the course of your life. It could have been uh political convictions, something that was a moral absolute, maybe something more quotidian. And what was it that made you change your mind?

SPEAKER_01 1:20:18

Well, it was basically economic liberalism, because when I was growing up, you know, free trade, all economists agreed it was good, right? Open border. I mean, I believed all this. I mean, that was what all educated people believed. And what changed my mind was simply history. Uh, because I began learning more about U.S. and Western history, uh, and I learned that the US was the most protectionist power in the world between the U.S. Civil War and World War II. Uh, and behind this wall of tariffs, we uh caught up with Britain and then surpassed it by World War I. So if if industry was going to collapse thanks to protectionism, it's curious that the two great powers in the early 20th century eclipsing Britain were protectionist America and protectionist Germany. Uh, and then the other thing on immigration, it was simply the fact that uh uh just because of family background, you know, I I come from a New Deal-liberal, you know, civil rights family, uh, and unions and uh also African Americans uh in the US were always skeptical about large-scale immigration because they saw this as a tool used by employers to weaken unions and to suppress wages. Uh and so I rethought that. Uh and this has made me very unpopular with many uh conventional uh types on on both the neoliberal right and the neoliberal left. Uh and but I think I think in terms of trade, the battle has been won because of great power conflict. That is, if we're in a new Cold War that will last for some time with China and Russia, obviously you can't outsource your factories to China and Russia, right? It could be to allies, but it can't be to rivals. So I think at least in that, in a narrow sense, strategic trade, militarily strategic trade, I think that's gonna be the new consensus. Uh immigration is a class war issue. Because uh if you're you're an upper middle class professional in a big city and you depend on low-wage servants and service workers, you're gonna be for more immigration. If you're one of the working class people who competes with them, you're gonna be for less. Right apart from any ethnic um uh hostilities. And there I think um I think the elites may win. They may win uh uh over over because uh in it, if you look at Trump, uh he never proposed imposing e-verify on all businesses. That's a computer registry that checks to see if you're hiring legal residents. Uh and in both of his uh two terms, he actually uh expanded on free guest workers, indentured servants brought in from foreign countries to labor in the U.S. without a path to citizenship, kind of like in Dubai or Saudi Arabia. So I I think on trade, my heresy will be vindicated. On immigration, I think that the economic elite is going to keep importing cheap way, but anyway it can.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:36

Well, uh I think there are many who hope that is not going to be true uh because we can see how unhappy it makes quite a lot of people, and for all the reasons you mentioned, both from an economic point of view, but also cultural belonging. I know it's uh something that we um see quite a lot from our um leaders of our institutions, as they they care a lot about the cultural belonging of new arrivals, recently arrived at diasporas, but that same understanding of the human need for cultural belonging isn't extended to the people already there, uh, and indeed they're they're asked to move out of the way, which makes them even more unhappy. And um, yeah, I I I I turn this over in my head all the time is how's this going to end? Because you know, in Britain, we've effectively voted generation after generation for less immigration, and we just get more and more of it no matter what. And as you mentioned, Boris Johnson ended up um engaging uh in an act of uh demographic vandalism in in some way, um uh at a at a scale even greater than Cameron and Blair, who went before, and he he ran on the opposite ticket. Um, and it makes you wonder you know, can you actually dislodge these orthodoxies in our His Majesty's Treasury? Uh or are we effectively just going to keep pushing this way? And and particularly as I see that we get more and more people not just hooked on welfare dependency, but make them less likely to be able to live self-governing, agentic lives, and then they people choose not to as well. You know, we have about six million working-age people uh effectively not working and on benefits, and yet we import a great deal of people here into Britain. Ireland, I think, have had set uh something like a million people in the last seven years. That was that you know 20% of their population. Uh this is it seems untenable for this to be able to continue, but um, like you've mentioned, it makes it makes money. And um what what can we do against it?

SPEAKER_01 1:25:40

Well, the only permanently valid law of of uh human sociology, of politics and political science was enunciated by an American economist with a sense of humor uh named Herb Stein in the 1970s. He's the father of the comedian Ben Stein, who inherited a sense of humor. And Stein's law is if a trend cannot continue forever, it stops. So nothing is eternal. Uh there's the story of the king who asked a wise man, give me a sentence that will be true in all places and all times. And the wise man said, This too shall pass.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:26

Well, you said you weren't into apocalyptic uh tones, Michael. So we're gonna cling on to that hope for dear life based on the type of things that we're interested in. We would like this too to pass. Uh, Michael, before I let you go, uh I know you don't have social media handles. Uh however, where can people find your work? And uh are you writing any more books? What else can we expect from you?

unknown 1:26:49

Michael Kahneman.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:50

Well, no books at the moment. Uh they can find my uh uh work on my Amazon page under Michael Lind, and uh including my latest poetry collection. This is sort of uh anachronistic in the 21st century, but but uh uh and I'm right frequently now I'm a contributor for uh Unheard. Uh so I have a couple of essays uh for that magazine once a month.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:15

Well, uh I highly recommend it. Uh people should go and get your fill, and uh I highly recommend getting your books. They are uh prescient to say the least. Michael, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for being so generous with your time, and and I hope we can speak again in the future. Thank you. All the best.