Conversations with Great Thinkers

Rebel: The Fight Against Modern Oligarchy

• Jim Lanshe • Season 1 • Episode 2

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to this episode of Conversations with Great Thinkers. Our guest today is the Honorable Douglas Carswell, the President and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy. Public policy. Mr Carswell was a member of the British Parliament for 12 years and one of the intellectual driving forces behind Vote Leave, the official campaign that won the 2016 Brexit vote in Britain. Re-elected every time he stood for Parliament to secure the Brexit vote in 2014, he triggered a special parliamentary election and won with one of the largest swings in any election in British history. Douglas is the author of five books, including the one we'll discuss today, titled Rebel how to Overthrow the Emerging Oligarchy. Douglas, welcome to our podcast, Thanks.

Speaker 2:

Thank you so much for having me and thank you for having read my book.

Speaker 1:

Thanks, Thank you so much for having me and thank you for having read my book. Oh, it's a wonderful book. I want to encourage everyone who hears this to take advantage of it, because it's not only relevant to the time it was written, but really relevant to what is.

Speaker 2:

I think happening today. Can you tell us what motivated you to write Rebel in 2017. Yeah, I believe that freedom and liberty are the defining characteristics that allow humans to thrive and prosper, and I noticed, as someone with an interest in history, that you know for most of human history, until the foundation of the American Republic, life was pretty grim for most people. People would remain poor and people would have the same impoverished standard of living that their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents had. And really only in the past couple of hundred years only really since 1776, has it become the norm for people to become more prosperous in more parts of the globe. And this interests me. Why is it that the default has been poverty and why are we getting rich and prosperous? And the more I looked into this, the more I realized that actually, freedom and liberty and a society that prospers it's very rare, very exceptional and very, very fragile. Just because we're used to it in the West today, just because most of your listeners are used to constant improvements in living standards, it doesn't mean it's not precious and, if we're not careful, fleeting.

Speaker 2:

And I started to notice that actually, throughout history, there have been other occasions, other republics the Roman Republic, the Venetian Republic, the Dutch Republic, where progress was made and it was possible to think that you were living in a world where progress and liberty and the upward elevation of the human condition was the norm. But progress was snuffed out in the Roman Republic, the Venetian Republic, the Dutch Republic and I fear, if we're not careful, it could be snuffed out in the American Republic. And I wanted to write a book that drew attention to this. Really, we need to be aware of what is precious in order to be able to defend it and safeguard it and pass it on to our children and grandchildren and their children not yet born.

Speaker 2:

And I wanted to really write a book that went beyond just politics, that looked a little bit about history and philosophy, some of the ideas that I think should underline and sustain our political beliefs. So yeah, the product was rebel and how to fend off the emerging oligarchy, because I think oligarchy really is the danger. We really do risk seeing the republic founded 250 years ago almost being snuffed out by the emergence of parasitic elites. It's a real, real danger.

Speaker 1:

Well, I, for one, absolutely loved the historical arguments that you used in order to support your contentions in the book, and I think anyone who reads it will benefit from your knowledge and understanding of history immensely. You just talked about oligarchs a moment ago, but you also talk about populists in your book, and can you tell us a little bit about the tension between oligarchs and populists and your view on what threat they present to the liberal order that you've just described?

Speaker 2:

Well, oligarchy is the rule by the few, a few powerful people that emerge. I mean, what you've had historically is being in the hands of a few. Occasionally you would get a society that would emerge, usually by accident. In the hands of a few. Occasionally you would get a society that would emerge, usually by accident, in the case of the Roman Republic and the Venetian Republic, or, almost uniquely, by design, in the case of the American Republic, where power was dispersed and the powerful were constrained and wherever this happened it led to a huge flowering of human innovation and creativity and output per person. But that was always threatened by unchecked oligarchy and the emergence of a powerful few always risked provoking a sort of populist mob reaction to oligarchy. But the danger is and you see this very clearly, I think, in the case of the Roman Republic that when oligarchy begins to emerge and you get a populist backlash, often populism can unwittingly play straight into the hands of the emerging oligarchy. Many of our listeners may not be as familiar with Roman history as they might be, but in the Roman, the late Roman Republic I don't mean the empire the late Roman Republic political and economic power became concentrated in the hands of a very small number of people. This led to a sort of populist backlash under the Grouchy Brothers and in response to this sort of populist, anti-oligarchy movement, they began to create the trappings of a welfare system. They began to create welfare dependency. They began to create handouts and sort of Lyndon Johnson style federal poverty alleviation programs. You might say Johnson-style federal poverty alleviation programs, you might say. And actually, far from dissipating the oligarchy, it actually fueled it. And I fear that you may, in 21st century America, see something similar If you get a sort of populist backlash that undermines the free market.

Speaker 2:

Classical liberal when I say classical liberal I don't mean liberal in the sense of progressive, but the classical liberal order you almost always get this symbiotic relationship between the mob and the powerful elite and what they eventually end up doing is creating a sort of a new Caesar. And it always ends badly. It always destroys the virtuous republic. And I think the founding fathers were very aware of this. I mean, we know that they had read their Roman history. We know that they understood and examined in minutiae the institutions.

Speaker 2:

You know Polybius, the Greek historian. His work had been recently rediscovered and translated, and so the founding generation had discovered the architecture of the Roman Republic in great detail and understood the virtues of having the separation of powers, the dispersal of power, a series of competing magistrates, and this is why I think the founding fathers talked about. You know, we have a republic, if we can keep it because they understood that it's actually very difficult to disperse power on a long-term basis. And you know, the genius of the American system is that 240 years later, it has endured. The founders saw the populist backlash and the tyrants and the Caesars coming and it's endured remarkably well. But it will only endure if we understand how precious it is and if we revere it as much as the founding generation did.

Speaker 1:

I realize that you wrote this book, or at least it was published, in 2017. I'm not sure how long it took you to write it, but some of the terms that I think the book references include liberal democracy and classical liberalism. Do you make a distinction between those concepts?

Speaker 2:

For the purposes of an American audience. When I talk about classical liberalism, liberal in America has often come to denote the opposite of what a Briton would mean when they talked about liberal A liberal order, you know from the Latin libra free. A liberal in the classical sense is someone who doesn't believe in having a bossy Nancy Pelosi type elite telling us how to live our lives and taxing us and regulating us. Sadly, there's this confused terminology. When I talk about classical liberalism, I mean free market, I mean laissez-faire, I mean an unguided, self-ordering economic and political system, liberal democracy. Well, I mean I use that as a shorthand for the Western norm since at least 1945, the Anglo-American norm since probably at least the early 1800s no-transcript, democratic, lightly governed, not anarchic obviously, but has some sort of constitution so that the people with power are accountable for how they use the power and there are checks and balances on what they can do with it.

Speaker 1:

I think we've given the listeners a pretty good summary of some of the major themes of rebel. Looking back, do you think rebel has predicted the key trends that we've seen in Britain and America over the past eight years?

Speaker 2:

I'm afraid to say I think it has been a little bit more prophetic than I wanted it to be. I mean, through much of the book I express my concern about the corruption of capitalism. I expressed concern with what you would today, I think, call woke capitalism. I think, yes, the book preempted this idea that in a free market system where you have a capitalist order, where the people who manage companies are not the same as the people who own them, you get all sorts of problems. I think it did foresee some things. I think the book got a couple of things wrong and I probably would make some changes if I was writing it now, if I was doing a sort of third or fourth edition now. I'd make some changes. But I think, broadly, the book talks about problems that were regarded as fairly marginal a decade ago and, I'm afraid to say, have become a lot more pressing.

Speaker 1:

One of the analogies that I've heard recently in this country is that we've gone pretty far to the left. We have two wheels off the road and in order to get back to the center at least a little right of center we've got to overcorrect. We've really got to pull the wheel pretty hard to the right.

Speaker 2:

And.

Speaker 1:

I'm wondering. I know you've already touched on the dangers of reactionary populism, but do you have any thoughts about what we're seeing at the present time?

Speaker 2:

Well, one of the things I think I get wrong in the book is you. If you read the book, you probably it probably comes across that I was a bit of a Trump skeptic. Um, and I would actually say in my defense that Trump first term would rather sort of indicate that skepticism a lot of anger, a lot of energy, not much output. Trump second term I know we're only a few weeks into it, but I fundamentally changed my view of Trump. It could be because of the influence of Elon Musk, I suspect. Actually it's partly that, partly because Trump, having lost his first term, had four years to figure out how to actually deconstruct the administrative state, how to actually address woke capitalism, how to really deal with some of the problems that he was frustrated with in his first term. And I see Trump much more as a solution to these problems than a sort of ineffective backlash, a populist backlash. I actually think so far it's early days, but so far I think Trump with his executive orders perhaps shows how executive fiat can actually address some of these problems in a way that I simply didn't envisage, and I don't think he envisaged all those you know eight years ago or whenever it was. So I certainly changed my view on that. My general tendency is to always favor democratic action. When you've got judges who are using judicial power to subvert the will of the elected officials, when you're seeing the intransigence of the administrative state intransigence of the administrative state my assumption is always that actually we should use democratic means to deal with these extra executive institutions. But I've slightly changed my view. I think maybe actually Trump shows that maybe we do need to sometimes use the odd executive order. Perhaps Musk is right. Perhaps we are going to have to see some judges drummed out of office. Perhaps we've got to stop playing by the Queensbury rules.

Speaker 2:

America, over the past 30 years, has, in a way, faced a sort of a revolutionary upheaval, a revolution that was imposed on it without the consent of the people. Under the first two Obama administrations and I would say under the third Obama administration, where they basically ruled through um, through, through sleepy Joe Biden they imposed an extraordinarily leftist agenda. A leftist agenda that told us that a man could become a woman, that told us that we needed transgender admirals in the Navy. That not just an assault on America's biological laws, but an assault on America's history. Statues were torn down by Marxist mobs.

Speaker 2:

We were told that our country's history I should say your country's history was started in 1619 rather than 1776. They also tried to subvert the Constitution. They talked about packing the Supreme Court, creating new states in order to get an inbuilt majority in the Senate. We've had this sort of leftist revolution and I think what we're seeing in Trump is a sort of not a revolution, but a restoration, actually maybe a revolution in the literal sense, a revolving of the wheel, a returning of America back to what you would call normalcy. I think the intensity of the sort of leftist ideological assault on American norms over the past 15, 20 years, we've overlooked it. But Trump, I think, suddenly makes us realize quite what nonsense we put up with, and I think he shows us what we might do to correct it.

Speaker 1:

You know, you've opened a really interesting area of discussion that you touched on in your book, and that is that the danger of populist movements, as I understand it, is that they could potentially undermine institutions that governments depend on. It's probably trite, but there's the question of do you dynamite the garden to get the weeds out? And so what's the balance? We've made you the president's advisor today. He needs to get your advice. What do you think in this regard?

Speaker 2:

Don't ever exercise federal power in a way that would create a precedent for the left to do to you and to America what you would hate to see done. Don't, for example, have federal fiat to correct what you regard as progressive errors at a state level. Don't use short-term federal fiat to impose on progressive states and progressive cities conservative policy. Let them live with the consequences of voting progressive. I'm pleasantly surprised. I feared that when Trump got in, they might actually abandon the idea of getting rid of the Department of Education and instead start using the Department of Education to impose a so-called conservative education curriculum on states. I think that would be a disaster. What you would do is basically put in place the bureaucratic architecture for the left to then impose a leftist curriculum and dogma on America. So stick true to the founding idea that we're a federal system that ultimately, if California wants to vote for lunatic progressives, make sure they live with the consequences of that. Don't come riding to their rescue in the belief that that will save America and save California.

Speaker 2:

What you are simply doing is creating a precedent for an eventual leftist administration in DC to impose a progressive agenda across the rest of America. So stick true to the founding idea that let 50 different states or 13 different states, as it was back then, let different states do their own thing as much as possible. If America stays true to that, the left can never ultimately win, because however many Californias there are, there will always be a Texas or a Tennessee or a Mississippi or a Florida. To show, as an example what good conservative government looks like. To show as an example what good conservative government looks like.

Speaker 1:

Let's turn the conversation in a slightly different direction. I know that in your book you anticipated some potential solutions, and two of them that come to mind are decentralization and technology. Generally, you had some interesting antidotes in your book about how it impacted your own election, but what do you see generally in terms of?

Speaker 2:

let's say contemporary society. I think some of the things that I predicted in the book have really sort of come to pass. The extent to which we all now know that when Elon Musk took over Twitter and turned it into X and got rid of the leftist algorithms, he didn't just save free speech on one platform, because it meant that we could discuss things and debate things and talk about things and express views without being censored unless, of course, you have the misfortune to live in Europe. I would argue one of the reasons why Trump won was because long-form podcasts, a little bit like the one we're doing now, allowed him and JD Vance and all the rest of them to talk to millions of people directly, without being interrupted by gotcha interviewers on CNN or even, indeed, some of the sensationalist presenters on Fox.

Speaker 2:

And I think that technological change has shifted forever the terms of political debate in America. It's democratized opinion forming and it has destroyed the power of Ivy League East Coast elites to impose their agenda on the rest of America. That is a hugely, hugely significant change. Technology, I think, will will push the world in a more libertarian direction. I'm not sure I saw this at the time of the book. I was beginning to understand the implications of Bitcoin and the currency. I think at some point technology will disperse financial power and it will destroy the power of central bankers. So yeah, I mean I think technology is transforming politics in a way that the book predicted. But I didn't. I got the timeline wrong. I thought it would happen earlier and be less significant to change. Actually, it's turned out to take a little longer than I thought, but the consequences, I think, are far bigger than I anticipated. Sorry, I forgot the second part of your question. That was the technology.

Speaker 1:

We talked about technology, and then I asked about decentralization.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean this is really the key to maintaining a free society Decentralization of. You've got it hard baked into the American system with federalism, but technology and decentralization, you know it could transform things like education. Technology and decentralization would allow, instead of a state having or a school board district having a common approach to educating every child, you know you could decentralize control over each child's learning and curriculum to that household. And you're beginning to see this with school choice, the personalization of learning. But we need to decentralize so much public policy. The old model in the age of mass production, everything government, industry, everything was geared to providing at scale one movie or one song or one type of fashion or one type of food to an audience of millions.

Speaker 2:

What digital allows to happen is lots of niches. You see this with viewing habits on streaming services. You see it in all sorts of areas of life. You can cater to the niche, you can cater to the individual. So I think the decentralization of public services is going to be a huge theme. We're starting to see it. So I think the decentralization of public services is going to be a huge theme. We're starting to see it. I mean one of the reasons why the school choice movement is taking off and I think 12 states now have some form of universal school choice. It's, I think, unstoppable. I think technology shifts our cultural expectations so that people will expect decentralized niche services that cater to their needs, rather than a one-size-fits-all solution offered by a politician catering to a majority of the ballot box.

Speaker 1:

Perhaps it's a whole other discussion for another day, but I'd be interested to get your views on the role of AI in facilitating education, particularly if it can be customized for each student to help them with their specific situation. We don't have a great deal of time left, but if I could impose on you to maybe touch on one last area of your book that I found fascinating, we've talked about your knowledge of history, but we really haven't talked about your views on free market capitalism and economics.

Speaker 1:

And you go into quite a bit of detail about fractional banking and some of the aspects of how our economy is managed at the present time. It may be unfair to ask you to summarize some of those views in the brief time we have left, but would you mind commenting on some of those ideas?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think the Achilles heel in American capitalism, in Anglo-American capitalism, in Western capitalism is a decision made in August 1971, the year that I was born by Richard Nixon to decouple the dollar from any connection to gold. Now, often this is a footnote, often people don't really talk about it. Often it's presented as a sort of the end of a historical oddity. Actually, I think it's a profoundly significant moment with profound implications. Up until 1971, the US government couldn't just print lots of dollars. Every dollar they put into circulation had to have some gold in reserve and banks were not able to work in this symbiotic relationship with the government to just conjure credit out of nowhere relationship with the government to just conjure credit out of nowhere. Since 1971, governments have been able to essentially print money. We've had much higher inflation since 1971. Often this is seen as oh well, it's a consequence of the oil shocks, oh well, it's a consequence of central bankers making mistakes, it's a consequence of breaking the link with gold. Even more alarming, I think, is that banks have been able to conjure up what they create, which is credit out of thin air, and lend people, in effect, candy floss credit and do rather well out of it themselves. And when, of course, the candy floss credit pile collapses, which it intermittently does. Having privatized the gains, can socialize the losses with bank bailouts, and we've seen this. What it does is it number one, devalues the dollar. The dollar has declined precipitously in value. We've recently had a period of sustained inflation in America. Quite rightly, people say this is a consequence of Joe Biden and all the rest of it. Yeah, it's partly that, but it's also systemic. The reason why there are too many dollars chasing too few goods is because once you break the link with gold, central bankers can create dollars out of nothing. It debauches the currency. It concentrates wealth in the hands of the people. You get lots of venture capitalists and what have you in America? Hedge funds whose basic business model is to borrow vast amounts of money very cheaply, which they can do off their banker buddy friends, because they've got oodles of this credit at low interest rates, and they then invest, using that credit, in assets. The value of the assets increases faster than the interest rate on the loan and they become very, very rich. And we tend to think of them as frightfully clever entrepreneurs as they drive around Miami in their Ferraris. But no, they're not. Basically, they're playing a system that is anti-capitalist, that is not capitalism, that is a perversion of capitalism. And at some point this is going to come and bite us. It very nearly took down the system in 2007, 2008.

Speaker 2:

I don't think we have escaped the consequences of Nixon breaking the link with gold, and at some point you are going to get hyperinflation in America and at some point the government living beyond its means is going to become a real problem and it will lower the living standard of millions of ordinary Americans. And then I think we need to ask ourselves if the paper promises of the Federal Reserve can no longer be honored because of inflation and possibly even default. But I think Elon Musk may be cutting spending to avoid that. But at some point I think we will need to find an alternative monetary system. I suspect that it could be a Bitcoin system. I suspect that Bitcoin will become the global financial reserve, and I think, if handled properly, that could be a very good thing.

Speaker 1:

As I was listening to your explanation. It's not four square with what you were saying, but I couldn't help thinking of Silicon Valley Bank as an example of some of the things that you were talking about. Maybe one last question before we wrap up here. Can you tell us in your mind, and if you want to pause for a moment to think about it, what do you think is the most urgent lesson from Rebel that people in 2025 should take to heart?

Speaker 2:

um, I I think the thing I would want people who've either read the book or not read the book and are thinking about getting the book. I think the most urgent thing is that there's nothing inevitable in history. Who used to have this amazing free market, innovative system that made them the envy of the world and the technological center of the universe, just because they've lost all that and become a country in which people are locked up for social media posts? Just because Europe has become an open-air museum devoid of any ingenuity or innovation? There's nothing inevitable in decline. There's nothing that says America has to morph from being a republic to becoming an empire. There's nothing that says America's best days have to be behind us.

Speaker 2:

Actually, if you recognize the lessons from history, the warning signs from history, and you recognize how precious and fragile the creation of the founders is, if you realize how sublime the model they put together in that courthouse in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 truly is, then you can correct the errors, you can see off the dangerous populist solutions, you can face down the Bernie Sanders, the latter-day Gramskys, you can be wary of the idea that one strong man can come along and solve all your problems and you can stay true to that founding vision and you can stay true to that founding vision. There's no reason why the American Republic can't have another 250 years. I mean, the Roman Republic survived for 500 years. The American Republic could survive for equally long. But it takes us to understand what is precious about the past and be prepared to think beyond the narrow tribal lines of I vote blue or I vote red in order to do something about it. We're in uncharted territory and I think we need to be prepared to do things we've never thought of doing.

Speaker 2:

These are fixable problems, but they do require us to be prepared to fix them, and that is going to be a challenge, but I hope people will be optimistic. America's problems can be fixed. America has come through worse situations than we're in today, but it does require us to make sure that the next generation of Americans I was shocked to see a poll that said that only one in five young Americans is extremely proud to be American. Look, I've only been in your country for four years and I am extremely proud of America as a non-American citizen. We need to make sure the next generation appreciates America the way I, as an immigrant, appreciate America and the way that most Americans throughout history have appreciated America. What would it gain America if we had all these policy wins but America lost her own soul by not having the next generation of young Americans revere what it means to be American.

Speaker 1:

Douglas, I can only say that anyone who listens to this podcast is going to wish that if we have immigration into this country, we get more immigrants, just like you. Thank you for your reflections on your book's original ideas and assessing how they've aged and applying them to the current political and economic dynamics in Britain and America. Is there anything you'd like to say in closing with regard to telling people where they can find you and books that you've written? Anything else that you'd like to share?

Speaker 2:

Do please reach out to me. I'm Douglas Carswell at the Mississippi Center for Public Policy. You can Google our website or you can find me on Twitter at Douglas Carswell. I focus mainly on free markets in Mississippi and the southern US, but I'm interested in anyone who's interested in freedom anywhere, so if you've got any thoughts or questions, please don't hesitate to reach out.

Speaker 1:

Douglas, thank you Brilliant, absolutely brilliant.

Speaker 2:

Thank you so much.