How has the shifting nature of political influence impacted journalism?

When Ronald Reagan won the presidency, in 1980, it was a victory long in the making. For almost half a century, conservatives had plotted ways to cut taxes and undo workers’ rights. Their playbook for political influence went something like this: create a think tank, publish reputable reports, build relationships with journalists and politicians, and disseminate free-market ideas to the public, creating a new common sense. 

Today, the art of political influence is rather different. Think tanks no longer claim the power they once did and, since the rise of social media, newspapers and traditional journalists have lost their grip on public opinion. Perhaps this new state of affairs was best captured by Elon Musk when, shortly after taking over Twitter, in 2023, he declared that all press inquiries would receive an automated reply with the poop emoji. That is not the move of someone who believes the press is an essential tool in influencing public opinion.

In this episode of the Journalism 2050 podcast, cohosts Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin are joined by two guests: Kim Phillips Fein is a renowned historian of American conservatism and capitalism and the author of Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan, among other books. Samuel Earle is the author of Tory Nation: The Dark Legacy of the World’s Most Successful Political Party and a PhD candidate at Columbia Journalism School. Together, they ask: How has the nature of political influence changed? What are the implications for journalism? And what, if anything, can the left learn from the right’s success?

Producer: Amanda Darrach

Research: Samuel Earle

Production Assistant: Riddhi Setty

Art Director: Katie Kosma

Illustrator: Aaron Fernandez

Music: Henry Crooks

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:07

Hello, welcome to Journalism 2050 from the Tau Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and Columbia Journalism Review. I'm Heather Chaplin. I'm the founding director of the Journalism and Design Lab at the New School.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

And I'm Emily Bell. I'm the director of the Tau Centre here at Columbia, and we're joined today by uh two um guests. Well, one of them is actually, I would say, we he's a returning guest, uh Sam Earle.

SPEAKER_00 0:35

Researcher slash guest of the podcast.

SPEAKER_01 0:37

Who is who is a PhD student here at Columbia and has also written a book called Tory Nation. So he's addressed the rise of the British right. Um and Heather, do you want to introduce our other guest?

SPEAKER_03 0:50

So today we have Columbia University Professor Kim Phillips Fine. She's the Gardner Kenneth T. Jackson Professor of History at Columbia. She is the author of Invisible Hands, The Businessman's Crusade Against the New Deal, Fear City, New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics, and a forthcoming book, Country of Lords, in which she writes about the resurgence of adamantly anti-egalitarian ideas. Welcome, Kim. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you for having me. It's great to be here. So first I have to tell you, I obviously have no idea about the sales of your book, The Businessman's Crusade, but I think that I might be personally responsible for about 50% of them. Thank you. There was a long period where I just have been routinely giving that book out to people as Christmas and birthday presents, and as these guys can attest, sort of talking non-stop, that whenever that inevitable question, like what is going on or what is this moment comes up, I say, ah, you need to read invisible hands. So I'm really excited to talk to you. It it um very quickly, you know, for for our purposes. So the book traces the rise of the right, specifically the libertarian right, as sort of as a reaction to New Deal policies and all of the very intentional organizational work that took place over almost a hundred-year period, I would say, to get to where we are. It really was the first book I read in about 2018 where I thought, okay, I got it. And for us, the reasons that it's so great to have you here is, you know, as a show focusing on the future of the free press, we can't really talk about saving journalism as much as we have to talk about how do we keep news and information circulating and a watchdog role being fulfilled in the way that America is coming to be organized. So we want you here to help us understand what is this world that we're we're moving into. And I'm hoping at first, um, we have so much we want to talk to you about, but can you indulge me and help our listeners out by your your book Invisible Hands opens with the DuPont brothers, and this is in the 1930s, uh, DuPont chemicals just being really pissed about the New Deal. So, and that sort of is the beginning of the steps that lead us to where we are. Can you tell us a little bit of that story? What were they so mad about? About what did the New Deal represent that was such an existential threat to them and their buddies?

SPEAKER_04 3:21

Well, the so first of all, thank you so much for all the the kind words about Invisible Hands. Um it's interesting because Invisible Hands was written in, I guess I it was written in the really the first decade of the 21st century. It was published uh in 2009. And it so it's interesting in some ways. We're in a very different place in a lot of ways than we are when I was working on the book. But it's great to hear that it still has relevance and insight. I mean, I I think it it it it in a way, I mean, I I think it does, but I'm glad to hear that it does for others.

SPEAKER_03 3:57

And we definitely want to talk about what's changed since then in the country of Lord. But first layout.

SPEAKER_04 4:04

Right. So I think uh the DuPonts, so this is they're they're they're a family, um, they they they own the a very large chemical-producing corporation. And it's interesting because the DuPonts themselves uh had actually had they they were uh also skeptical about Herbert Hoover and specifically about um this wasn't a Hoover policy, but about prohibition. So the DuPonts were terrified of income taxes, and they recognized that the uh part of the consequence of prohibition was that the federal government didn't collect taxes on alcohol any longer. And so, as part of their broad opposition to taxation, they wanted to see um prohibition repealed so that alcohol could be sold again. And so they were actually in the early uh in the kind of the Roosevelt election, um the the it they they supported Roosevelt quietly, um not very enthusiastically, but they did not want to see Hoover re-elected partly because they appreciated Roosevelt's opposition to Prohibition. However, uh once the new once Roosevelt was elected and once the um the rapid set of federal actions that we now think of as the New Deal began, the DuPonts and many other similar business people were horrified. And I think to understand why you have to go back a bit to the context of the 20s and the depression. During the 1920s, in some ways similar to today, business people were celebrated as gurus really for the country and for the the you know the future of humanity and civilization. Um their pronouncements were reported in the press, the stock market was going up and up. It was a time of growing easy wealth, it appeared. Um the the one of the close associates of the DuPonts, John J. Raskob, publishes an article called Everybody Ought to Be Rich, which is basically encouraging people to invest small amounts of money in the stock market and saying, you know, in this this new this future that we're in now, anybody can be rich. And the depression, so the depression when it comes is not just an economic disaster, it's not just a huge hit to the pocketbook for all of these people. It also really challenges the sense that they were in control, they knew what to do. And so the surge of legislation that comes with the New Deal, I think they experience as a profound political affront. Suddenly, the federal government is regulating the stock market, regulating securities, demanding that companies publish regular reports on their internal finances, which previously they had not been required to do by law. There is, again, the threat of taxation, which only starts to emerge more fully later in the New Deal. Um, there is the National Recovery Administration, which is doesn't last, but is this effort to compel companies to cooperate to set prices and wages. And then most of all, probably there's the labor movement and the variety, the kind of the popular protest, the back and forth relationship between popular protest and the development of American labor law, really granting workers rights in the workplace for the first time. And I think so, in some ways, it's not even any one particular piece of legislation, it's not one particular kind of immediate challenge, but this broad sense of having lost control, lost it in the public mind as well as in Washington, and a profound desire to fight back.

SPEAKER_03 8:12

And can you it's so basically I feel like it's it's a it's a bunch of guys who are really upset about uh financial regulation, income taxed, and unions. Yeah. Yeah. So unlike today.

SPEAKER_04 8:26

And also the nascent welfare state. Yeah. I mean the the development of the kind of social security and um and I think it really they might have to pay for. Right. Things they might have to pay for and just the existence of another um kind of a a a counterweight to their own power.

SPEAKER_03 8:45

Aaron Powell Sorry, I just I just want to say I I I I I know we want to jump forward in time, but I do feel like to understand where we are now, something about the Mount Pelerin society is so important.

SPEAKER_04 8:58

During the 30s, the the DuPonts um become one of the leading organizers of the American Liberty League, which both seeks which is an interesting organization because it it both has a elite advocacy side. They they help to finance and organize a lot of the early legal challenges to New Deal legislation, um, you know, all of which run through the courts. So people challenge the National Um Labor Relations Act, they challenge the legislation creating the National Cover Administration, they so they there's a whole legal challenge to the New Deal, and the DuPonts are kind of behind that and helping to finance the DuPonts, but a group of these um business opponents of the New Deal working through a group called the American Liberty League, try to organize against it. They also recognizing that, recognizing already that um they are living in a moment when the idea that this is something business is pushing for will become poisonous. They don't want to publicly finance or publicly support Alf Landon, the governor of Kansas who became um who challenged Roosevelt in the 1936 election. Um, but they do nonetheless kind of behind the scenes try to support the Republicans and support Landon. And then they also start to experiment with um a kind of more broad-based propaganda or public relations effort, um, releasing pamphlets, providing um kind of informational materials. They they are careful to present themselves, even their name, the American Liberty League. They do not call themselves, you know, it's different from the National Association of Manufacturers, which also exists at the time. But they want, and they in their public presentation, they say we're a group of business people, but also housewives and you know uh common workers and ordinary people. This is a broad-based coalition, and so they really try to present themselves as um, you know, a grassroots group. So the group has these different wings and different forms of operation. Um, however, it's pretty transparently uh a business organization. Um and by the it it goes into decline at the in the late 30s, nobody really wants to be associated with it any longer. And uh one of the things that comes about at the end of World War II is this organization, the Mont Pelerin Society. So the Mont Pelerin Society has a different impetus. I mean, it's really an intellectual organization. It is meant to bring together economists primarily, but also some other kinds of social scientists. And they have the idea that it will not be possible to return to the pre-World War II, pre-Great Depression sense of optimism about laissez-faire economics and the free market, that if these things are to come back at all, they will have to do so in a different way. A um and that they'll have to be carefully a new set of arguments will have to be made for why the free market is so important. Um, and this group, again, interestingly, it it picks up on some of the same people who had been involved in the Liberty League. So one of the people who financially supports the Montpelerin Society is a former DuPont executive, um, a guy by the name of Jasper Crane. But so it picks up some of the same people as funders, but as a group, it really operates at a much more elite level. And probably the best known person involved with the Montpellerin Society is Friedrich Hayek, um the Austrian economist who had uh who wrote The Road to Serfdom and then got a job at the University of Chicago. Um his salary paid for by a different small um think tank.

SPEAKER_01 13:13

This this sort of this um uh uh in interference of think tanks, or not interference of think tanks and this foundation of where they come from, that's something that we are experiencing still today. Um, and that's all dark money in both media and politics. Um do do you see that as a historian as a continuing wave that ebbs and flows?

SPEAKER_04 13:33

Well it's very interesting. I I do think that um you see this this uh emergence of that at this moment or around the 30s and 40s, um the kind of careful or the the people with money and resources are really starting to or really thinking politically about what can they do with this? How can they use these financial resources to shape public discourse in a particular way? Um I think it's a bit different from the present because it was not I mean another interesting thing about these early efforts is that they have not, they're not really that connected to electoral politics for one. Um and I mean they they there is a kind of you know, there there are business people giving money, but this is not this is the people who are doing this type of work, it's rather separate from the electoral sphere. It has this very long-term, I mean they they they talk about it and think about it themselves as this long-term investment and reshaping the way that people think and talk. Um and uh they so it's a a really long-term project. And um it also interestingly is not I mean, I think it it kind of exists separate from the more mundane world of business lobbying in Washington, D.C., which really expands in the 70s and 80s. And this um, you know, many companies don't have Washington offices. There are fewer trade associations kind of campaigning for sort of you know narrow more narrowly defined business goals. So there's something about this early.

SPEAKER_01 15:19

So the lobbying industry either didn't exist or just looked completely different.

SPEAKER_04 15:23

Yeah, it just was much it just I think it operated differently. It was less professionalized. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 15:30

But that's one of the things I think is so brilliant in your work, this thing Emily's raising, that you really start to see uh how strategic and careful these guys were. And and you write in Invisible Hands that free market activists understood in a way that liberal thinkers didn't the importance of ideas and the need to shape the terms of debate. And you see them, the Mount Pelorin side, which is what ends up leading to Milton Friedman, and we know what influence he had. Like you can find these through lines, the Heritage Foundation, the Enterprise Institute, that all of these people that have mainstreamed and normalized the ideas of the right, it's a continuum. They were built over time strategically and as part of a long-term strategy. And that is what I think is I just really want to draw out of the story.

SPEAKER_01 16:19

Sam Sam, you had a point.

SPEAKER_00 16:21

Well, just that um, yeah, I think like one of the takeaways from this story is that you know, we we associate political organizing with the left, but actually the right are so good at it. Um but the other thing I'm struck by in this story is a sense that political influence has changed, and the way, like, you know, the long-term strategizing is very inspiring in a way, and I've I've heard Heather say, like, people on the left can learn from this book, but this formula of so for example, if I just pivot to Britain, which has a very similar um kind of pushback to New DL esque policies, um, and Hayek is once again at the center of it. In in the Second World War, there's this man called Anthony Fisher. I don't know if you've heard of him, but he um he went to Eton, he was an RAF pilot, he comes across Hayek's Road to Serfdom, and he's like, This is what we need our politics to be. He's very worried about the direction Britain's moving in. And it, you know, it feels like a scene out of a movie, but he he goes to visit Hayek at the when he's at the LSE, and he says, Fisher says, How do we make this happen? How do we make these ideas real? Should I become a politician? And Hayek says, no, don't become a politician, that's a waste of time. All the conservatives are completely brainwashed by the New Deal stuff as well. Go and set up a think tank. Uh-huh. And he he goes, he's becomes the founder of the Institute for Economic Affairs. Oh wow. Um, which plays a pivotal role in the rise of Thatcherism. He he goes to America and he sets up, I think, the Adam Smith Institute, or at least he plays a role in a whole host of American think tanks. Right. Um, but then I I also just thought if today, you know, the equivalent of Anthony Fisher goes to the equivalent of Hayek and says, How do we make this real? Hayek wouldn't say set up a think tank. I don't know what he'd say. He'd probably say buy Twitter or something like that. But it's like, yeah, the the mode of influence.

SPEAKER_03 18:48

Well, because now we're awash in so much information and so much opinions. I have I had the same question, yeah. What would you do now?

SPEAKER_04 18:55

No, it's it's yeah, well, it is really interesting. I think another thing which um I mean, just thinking a bit about these early activists, uh they kind of provide another thing that you mentioned the um American Enterprise Institute, which was founded as the American Enterprise Association during the 50s, it has a similar trajectory in some ways. It kind of has a few wealthy funders. They do a lot of work to try to campaign to get donations primarily from business people who um they want to rally against b both against particular aspects of post-war liberalism, but also the idea of giving business a voice in Washington, and they prepare all of these policy briefs that they then give to Congress people. So you can kind of see this architecture, this infrastructure taking shape. Um and it's in a really, you know, other people aren't doing that the way that today it's you know, it's it's it's it's it's everywhere. Um yeah, what would a Hayek do today? Um would you start a magazine? No, certainly not.

SPEAKER_01 20:09

Would you I think you might have a substack.

SPEAKER_04 20:11

Right. You might he might have I'm putting it out there. I think he might have a substack.

SPEAKER_00 20:15

Maybe a school of influencers. School of influencers.

SPEAKER_04 20:20

Yeah. I mean, I it's interesting. I I do think that there's something about the way that the political party structure has changed and become um the, you know, the this the the party the political parties are so much less centralized than they used to be. And so people with a lot of money can enter much more rapidly into electoral politics than they used to. I think and so you don't you just don't need, or you can kind of sidestep, but and also the the relaxation of campaign finance laws to make it easier for people with a lot of money just immediately affect the political process. Um someone that I don't know about Hayek himself, but the people around him certainly might have uh just much more quickly gone into that. I think also, I mean, another, you know, Hayek's is also kind of interesting because his his position was paid for by, as I mentioned, by this small conservative think tank, which was essentially the fund founded by a a furniture manufacturer, I believe, William Volcker, the Volcker Fund. And it kind of paid his salary for 10 years at the University of Chicago, which accepted this position, and then um, you know, it ran out and he had to leave, so he wasn't really actually even able to stay there. Today, probably you would just buy a chair. And the university would just say, sure, here, uh, you have the money? Yes, you can have this chair. So I think there you know the a lot of ways. I mean, the the the Koch brothers are also probably um that the kind of the extensive, very extensive within the university. But with its own separate funding stream. So quasi they they are academic institutions, but they're they're kind of their own route within their own intellectual community. So that kind of thing. I I think someone like Hayek would still be interested in that long-term vision, even though there is also this space for just much more sudden disruptive.

SPEAKER_01 22:25

Yeah. So the kind of that that weird space that we've talked about quite a bit on the podcast of is it is it is it ideology, is it media, is it grift? Is it and how can it be monetized? Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_03 22:38

I was just going to say I find it so fascinating that this is a milieu that is quite hostile towards elite intellectuals or intellectualism, but the infrastructure, as you say, that allows it to grow is the ideas. And I want to know where were journalists when this was happening? Like, how often do we see the Enterprise Institute of the Heritage Foundation quoted in the New York Times with nothing about what it is or who funds it? So, like, do you have a sense that, you know, now we always talk about social media and everything has sort of usurped journalism, but I feel like that story actually starts a lot earlier with some of this stuff. And I was wondering if you could talk about that.

SPEAKER_04 23:23

That's a very interesting question. And um it would be interesting to know, especially I in the 50s and 60s. I think that a lot of the work that the that groups like the American Enterprise Institute are doing in the early years is kind of is picked up pretty um uncritically by the mainstream press. Um one interesting feature of these years also is that there is a kind of alternative press watch. I mean, uh there's a a a uh there's a a kind of a cottage industry of people who grow up to watch the right. Um and they tend to operate a little bit outside of the mainstream, but they're very attuned to what's happening. So there is this group, for example, the Group Research Institute. Um its papers are actually right here at Columbia. Um but it was um it was a really the efforts of this one individual who spent an enormous time kind of collecting material about different factions of the right. And he was interested also. This is another aspect of the story, which is actually not really an invisible hands, but the growth of the fur right also during the 50s and 60s and 70s. So the world of the John Birch society, um, of a whole network of more conspiratorial and often more overtly racist organizations that flourish at this moment as well, that are less focused on the economic side and more on they have their own preoccupations and their own criticisms of the world of the 50s and 60s. So there are these people who are monitoring and paying attention to the development of this right-wing sphere, um, which they, I mean, it's someone like uh the Group Eastern Institute is interested in the libertarian organizations as well, um, but not only. And so there are people kind of who are tracking and observing this. Um but I also think that the in the in the mainstream press, a lot of what the the material they produce is reported fairly uncritically.

SPEAKER_01 25:45

Um But it's so interesting, isn't it? Because it's such a main feature now of um if you're working in this area at all, if you're analysing what's going on either in journalism and the mass media, whatever that is these days, and you're looking at business and you're looking at politics, the absolute convergence of those forces is so much clearer. So I wondered if you could talk a bit about we mentioned earlier on this is where it started, how has it changed? And that's in in your new book, um, Country of Lords, which is not out, but we stole some we stole some galleys, so we know what's gonna be in.

SPEAKER_04 26:22

I'm very glad that the you have the galleys. Um well I think um that's funny, just you saying that actually makes me think about one more thing which is is useful to keep in mind about the world of the 40s, 50s, 60s, is that many of the newspapers, I mean though there were, you know, so many more newspapers also, and many of them did have they were associated with political positions in one way or another. So for example, the Chicago Tribune has a much more conservative perspective, which it consistently is putting forth in the editorial page, and there's no real pretense around that. In New York, um, the New York Post actually at that moment was a much more kind of liberal left paper. There is for a while PM, which is a straightforwardly left-wing public newspaper, um, but really a newspaper, I think it comes out daily at first. Yeah. So it's so there's a whole kind of the the the print media world has both more it's much more robust and it has um less of a kind of stance or i of uh expectation around um objectivity and across the board. I mean the the position of Paperlock at Times at that moment is interesting. I think it but it's it it it did have more of a sense of being a neutral arbiter, but but it isn't this backdrop of um you know a f a somewhat partisan and very lively press world.

SPEAKER_01 27:49

Trevor Burrus So how so how did we get so because I've I've had the advantage of having read um Technocracy Inc., the chapter that brings us right up to date with Peter Teal. Uh we're asking you to do a lot of work on a Friday morning.

SPEAKER_02 28:03

Right.

SPEAKER_01 28:04

Which is how if we're gonna bridge that and think about the framework for bridging that, how would we how should we do that?

SPEAKER_03 28:14

Maybe it's a how did the this technocracy grow out of the the sort of success of libertarianism, right? How did we get from Reagan or as you say Clinton? Clinton is really the peak of these guys' dream. How do we get from, okay, libertarian has won to this new thing?

SPEAKER_04 28:32

You know, I think one of the themes of Country of Lords is that and so Country of Lords is is really about the defense of inequality, of extreme economic inequality, and how that's been sustained and played out in the United States, especially given the egalitarian themes that are at least kind of an overt part of the country's intellectual political heritage. Um, the the title of the book comes from a passage in Letters from an American Farmer, the Hector St. John Creve Kerr Meditation, and in which he says this is no country of lords. But actually, you know, despite that part of the country's past, there has been both intense inequality, real material inequality, and also a parallel defense of that over the years. So that's one so one of the themes of the book, this just thinking about the present situation, people often see, and I think there is a history of the right post-1980 that focuses on the victories of Reaganism and the attacks on the labor movement, on the welfare state, on the idea of collective action through democratic government, um, and that the the the triumph of that vision in the 80s and 90s, but that that also leads to a kind of fracturing of the right, um, so that you see the rise of the paleoconservatives and then all of their descendants later on down the road, bringing us up to the present. And I think one of the themes of Country of Lords is that at first libertarianism actually had within itself a much stronger um it's not just about the free market and not just about um kind of individualism and individuals kind of interacting as equals in a marketplace. It also has uh a lot of space for a defense of inequality um and b in in different registers. So I think that's so I I think one of the suggestions of the book is that what looks like this divergence actually is a kind of re um it's another angle on themes that have a deep history.

SPEAKER_00 31:01

Yeah. I mean I think it's like how what's changed is like not necessarily how like the ideas themselves, it is how they relate to society. And and as you were just saying, it's like the the think tank model um where you write an authoritative seeming report that then gets ideally taken up by journalists, that involves a certain amount of faith in journalists to shape public opinion and therefore create a sort of new consensus around ideas. Um there's a faith in journalism that's sort of implicit in that model. Right. And there is no longer that faith in journalism that it is the sort of the key player in shaping public opinion. And like I'm thinking of again when Elon Musk bought Twitter and he made it so that any email to the pr press inquiry was replied to with a poop emoji. He did not care about PR in the old sense. Um there were other ways that he could shape the national conversation or the global conversation. And that's yeah, that that it's like the the way in which the sort of conservative elite exists within their wider society, that seems to me what has really changed. Like you have a quote in Country of Laws where um Andrew Carnegie compares himself to like a a bee that gets the honey that helps the whole hive.

SPEAKER_01 32:37

Right, right, right.

SPEAKER_00 32:38

Oh yes, effects of altru effective altruism, in fact, which is but now I just think the I mean, you know, I'm sure that you know the the the the big capitalists would still say some equivalent of it, but it's less convincing when they're they're building their bunkers in New Zealand or they're building spaceships to Mars. There's a much more um which has your book shows it's always been there, a survival of the fittest sort of mentality. But I just think it with it it no longer needs to have a sort of a wider social justification than it does. And and on the last episode we were talking about Elon Musk and his sort of shift from the the original test the car to the cyber truck. Yeah. And the cyber truck, it's now the kind of the pitch is to people the cyber truck is your safety net. Like if you can afford it, you have it. If not, it sucks to be you. Um and that feels like there's like a difference.

SPEAKER_03 33:38

I I think this the stuff about this sort of shadow anti-egalitarian strain right from the beginning of America, besides even the obvious slavery, um, is so interesting. And and you know, again when I read Invisible Hands and I also read Dark Money, and you know, really went down a hole about sort of the philosophy of those folks, and then Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Like, I think there's always a part of me that is just shocked to encounter not just that people secretly think some people are better and some worse, but it's a philosophy that it's a written about, studied about, actual, no, you're wrong. The world should be hierarchical, and Milton Friedman, right, writing in the 80s on a popular TV show that it's good that there's vast inequalities because that means we're free. It's like I think for sort of most Americans who are not part of this, it they don't fully understand that, that this is a fully functioning worldview that is opposed to the so-called liberal consensus that people in my age group grew up with. And I continually find it like, oh, oh, oh, they're not just crazy, or things didn't just happen this way. This is a worldview that has been elevated and elevated until we got to to where we are. This idea, I think you you wrote in Invisible Hands that social obligation is a myth by the weak to hamper the strong, or the corporation becomes the liberator and the state the real oppressor of the working class. Can you just talk directly at like how do you what does how did we get to that? Because it feels so illogical. If you were Milton Freeman or one of these people, how would you justify that?

SPEAKER_04 35:35

Well, at least in Invisible Hands, a lot of that view really comes organically. Uh there's maybe two ways of thinking about it. First, there's the people who for whom that is the kind of organic common sense. And I think these are people who are often small manufacturers, but not only small manufacturers, but people who kind of they they really they control um a they they control property, they control the organization of work on their property, and they have a very profound sense of their the rightness of their doing that and their need to continue doing that, and the threats to that, which come both from the state or from any kind of collective claim on that from above, uh in the form of taxation or regulation, um, and then also from below or from the workers themselves or people who might contest their absolute authority in that space of the factory. So there are people like that, and those actually are um in a way a lot of the early people who are involved in funding conservative organizations, who are involved with the Barry Goldwater campaign, who provide the initial market, for example, for a conscience of a conservative, his 1960 ghost-written book. Um, you know, this the it it's people from those circles. And then they're joined by intellectuals and um uh you know thinkers who uh uh develop these ideas in much more elaborate ways. I mean for someone like uh Milton Friedman, so I I actually was just teaching recently capitalism and freedom um in my my class this semester uh with undergraduates. And you know, I think in capitalism and freedom, he really it is an interesting book. It's different from Road to Serfdom in certain ways, um, but he really puts forward the idea that it's all economic freedom is a s the economy is a space of of freedom. And so uh any effort to regulate the taxes are ac your your your money and your resources are a expression of your power and capacity in the world. Um they aren't just, you know, they're not they're not they're kind of very intrinsic to your ability to act. And therefore, um, you know, a high fee at the local, you know, at a a national park or a tax or all these things, they're not just kind of um, they're not just they're certainly not ways of funding a common public good. Um they're not ways of creating collective resources that can be used. They're they're they're they're they're really a direct infringement on your freedom. And also, I mean, I think there is a whole idea about the importance of private property as a counterweight to uh the authority of the state, and that um probably one of the very interesting parts of um capitalism freedom is there's an extensive discussion of the Hollywood blacklist, um, which and and the kind of the blacklist of communist affiliated screenwriters, and Friedman winds up saying, well, you know, the blacklist was maybe not the greatest thing, but the thing is that all of those writers were able to go out and they were they changed their names and then they got new jobs, and so the free market wound up working. They people wanted their services, even though um, you know, they were drummed out of the business, they were still able to find a way to go out and ply their trade, albeit under a pseudonym. And so it's a sign that the power of the state wasn't um dominant there. So so I think he there there's both of those things kind of going together for him.

SPEAKER_01 39:51

So um I um I notice on Sam's piece of paper he's written down.

SPEAKER_00 39:58

Uh Henry Ford to just generating consensus or at least like influencing public opinion, Henry Ford's purchase of the Dearborn independent.

SPEAKER_04 40:12

Right, the Deeporn Independent, yes.

SPEAKER_01 40:16

Is he the first person because it's sort of the age of the industrialized press, is he the first um owner who bought a newspaper specifically to shape public opinion? I know about the Beaver Brooks and the you know the the sort of the press barons of the early 20th century, but I wondered whether he was somebody who just became a big thing. Well, that's interesting.

SPEAKER_04 40:38

Yeah, I I you know I don't know whether he I I I'm not sure he's absolutely the first necessarily, but it is a very specific and you know, in retrospect, very weird project in some ways that that you know Henry Ford decides, and he he does so, I think, really specifically out of anti-press animus. He's very angry about um so Ford uh after he this is he's he this is in the early 1920s or right after World War I. Ford had been widely mocked in the press for his um efforts to uh to to resist World War I and American entrance into World War I. Um and he kind of uh culminating in the the peace ship, which gathered together a group of people to go to Europe to campaign against the war. The press was really very, you know, people people made a lot of, made fun of this. He was very upset, very angry. And after World War I, he decides to buy the Dearborn Independent, a nearly bankrupt um kind of local Michigan newspaper. And then he, along with his associates, turns it into, I mean, kind of he famously he turns it into an anti-Semitic broadside, which publishes publishes, I think, a 90-odd part series called The International, which is then kind of collected together as a a book and published under the title The International Jew, um, which is collecting all of his ideas about uh well we can talk more about those, but the but the it's the anti-Semitic ideas, basically. Um yes, I think and it is interesting, it's really the desire to have his own newspaper. So it is coming from an appreciation of the power of the press and that the press has been harsh towards him, so he wants to be able to control it directly.

SPEAKER_02 42:30

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 42:31

Um and have a place that he can put forward his ideas. This goes along with uh the his his entrance into the kind of the world of um the emergence as a public intellectual more generally. He publishes a book, uh My Life and Work, which was again, it was co-written slash, I think really written by a journalist named Samuel Crowther, whose idea it was. Crowther had written a profile of Ford. Then Crowther's publisher, I think, proposed to him that he could write a biography or write write a book with Ford developing some of Ford's ideas about business and industry. He goes and interviews Ford several times. It's not actually a hundred percent clear that Ford, in fact, read the book, um, but it was published under his name.

SPEAKER_00 43:24

Yes. It sounds a bit like Trump.

SPEAKER_04 43:27

But it is very it does have a an echo of Trump there. So he and and the book then is is, you know, i I Crowther says I think this book could be a hit on the level of the Bible. Um and it is actually a major success, a major publishing success. Um and uh it kind of but it but it's it is so the Dearborn Independent moment is similar. Ford is looking for ways to influence public opinion and to influence popular ideas about capitalism. And I think even if Crowther wrote this book, it actually does reflect.

SPEAKER_01 44:00

Um you know, Ford's ideas about how the world should work and and uh so Kim, I want to get you out of here um so that you can do your actual day job of making sure that Colombian students are right.

SPEAKER_04 44:15

I'm going to a senior thesis event this afternoon.

SPEAKER_01 44:19

Which is um which is a a big deal uh in in in our world. Um looking at Sam as well here, who's uh currently shaping his thesis. Um so let's come to uh the present moment and as a historian, uh, and particularly one who's written quite recently about, say, in your new book, Country of Lords, about Technocracy Inc., the teal um nexus of power and money in Silicon Valley, and how their ideas are also being spread, mainly through the infrastructure that they now own. Right. How do we go for first of all, how do we understand this particular moment? And then secondly, really difficult question, how do we go forward from that?

SPEAKER_04 45:08

Well, it is just thinking about Ford and the newspaper and the books. I mean, someone like Peter Thiel on one level is um Theel's actually engaged in a fair amount of what you might think of as traditional intellectual work. I mean, so Theel has this book, Zero to One. The book itself is based on his teaching at a college classroom, um it's it's kind of lectures on entrepreneurialism. Um and Theel actually also, you know, he had been very active with the I he was a founder of the uh Stanford Review or Conservative Publication during his college days. Um and he actually has also written a fair amount just for conservative magazines. So it's funny that I mean we think of him as this, you know, we think of this group as totally uh, you know, kind of publishing, writing in this totally different forum, but actually they have relied to a great extent on the more traditional ways of disseminating ideas. Um that said, at the same time, there is no question there's also this new, and and Musk is the best example of this, this new media that they actually do control directly, kind of, you know, in a way that's similar to Ford controlling the Dearborn Independent. They they actually own this, and so it's both a um, you know, it's both part of their industry, even as it is also a uh platform and mode of communication that they are using to forcibly shape the public sphere. So what do you do with that?

SPEAKER_01 47:00

I think how how can um what what are the ways to contest it, to challenge it, to you know, can it just be used to even live outside it actually is I think a big challenge for journalists today. Yeah. If we think about AI, we're constantly being told this is a system we need to adopt. Right. It is uh it's going to change your lives in ways which are generally speaking, it seems bad if you don't actually own one of the systems. And yet in classrooms, in newspapers, and you know, with the in towns, we're we're being asked to adopt the idea that this progress is good. That is an idea that is in the and we're and we're working within that system to some extent. Help us, Kim. What do we do? How do we get out of it?

SPEAKER_04 47:49

Well, I think, I mean, I at the So with the technocracy ideas, one of the things that I talk about in Country of Lords is this the history of this idea that technology is superior to people. So the book kind of works through different ways that extreme economic inequality has been defended. And the last one is this idea about technology, that technology is um kind of is is just dominant over human creativity, capacity, intelligence, and that um the people who are closest to the technology, therefore, both are um that they're the people who deserve to profit from it the most, they understand it, they are connected to it, and ultimately in some ways, they're they're part of it. They they merge into it so that they have the they're able to partake of this superiority. I mean, I don't know how exactly to challenge all of this in a a day-to-day and uh, you know, just in an institutional way, but I think that the first thing to do is to recognize that it really is a set of ideas and a fiction, and that um it is kind of at this point coming at us from many directions, but that doesn't mean that it's true.

SPEAKER_02 49:09

Right.

SPEAKER_04 49:10

It is um I I don't believe, and I I think I am I think cultivating a healthy uh disrespect or even contempt for for things that are produced by by AI, especially writing and ideas, um, and an insistence on the importance of um the actual work that people do for each other, both as I think both both as creative, rational thinking beings, and as um people engaged in networks of care that are actually very difficult to carry out effectively with machines. So I I think kind of insisting vigorously on the um, you know, both the the uh the capacity of human beings for each other, um I think that's that's in some way and having that skepticism.

SPEAKER_01 50:09

And I think that's a great point and and possibly a great point to kind of to to to to bring this uh all together uh with this series, which is this relates to Heather's work, it relates to guests that we've had on who are working in local communities, uh which is you know the future of journalism when we talk about it is essentially human and distributed and in networks and about moving those in that that information around because you are acting as a counterbalance to an idea, a set of ideas which are essentially anti-democratic.

SPEAKER_03 50:45

Yeah, to believe in journalism is inherently to be a pro-democracy activist. Yeah. I I think that that is something I feel like that's always existed, but journalists have been so funny about activism that they don't they don't want to even hear the word. Whereas I'm not saying that means you support any particular politician, but you are on the side of democracy, and right now that is not a given. So I feel like the more that people we to think of ourselves as journalists is too narrow. We have to think of ourselves as in coalition with other pro-democracy actors, and then what does that look like? And what I can keep going back to about invisible hands is it takes organizing, it takes movement building, and we are now where those guys were in the 1930s, and so we need to be telling a different story and a different narrative and making sure that real information and news is is getting out there to people.

SPEAKER_04 51:42

Yeah, you put that really beautifully, actually. And I think there is um, I think that the importance of um, yeah, that the the importance of citizen journalism, of local journalism, and of, yeah, in some ways the idea of journalism itself, that uh and the the I don't know, just the sense that people can both report reality accurately and compellingly to each other, and that that is um the the role of people in interpreting, analyzing, reporting, and uh observing critically the reality around them, that that is um in self, in a way, a democratic project and reflects a faith in in democracy. It's interesting. I mean, I think some of these ideas about tech-free spaces, the the kind of the growth of a the sense of um the importance for higher education of having spaces that are really articulated as free of AI and free of technology. I certainly am talking to more and more teachers, faculty members who are are engaged in this. I think one question is whether that will come to be itself an increasingly elite and experience available to people in elite environments, but less so across the whole society. And there too, I think it's just very important to think about um I think some of the student journalism projects that I've seen, high school students even. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 53:13

Um yeah, campus media and high schools and the high schools, uh high school newspapers are absolutely the underpinning, I think, of course.

SPEAKER_04 53:20

Yeah, and I think they're important. I mean, in a way, it's kind of, you know, like you were saying, uh organization and development.

SPEAKER_01 53:26

It both inculcates in people, you know, a new future, potentially eventually, for journalism, but also a set of journalistic habits, a kind of a journalist mindset um towards the society that I think is is uh and I think and something else that Heather says often is you can't also just keep saying journalism is good because journalism is good. You actually do have to be out there and doing it in a different way is that connect with people and that actually show up in communities as having value to the people. Definitely.

SPEAKER_04 54:02

Yeah, and I will say just the other part of my work is that as a New York historian, and I think one of the things that I find myself thinking about constantly is how much um, you know, how much history there is to write in the city, you despite all that's been written, how much we still don't know. And the same is really true of journalism. Despite all the things that have been written, there is still actually so much that we don't know about the very world that we live in, and so much vital work for uh for journalists to do. And one of the things that is most troubling about our current situation is the way that it does not support, nurture, or um provide space for this work, which we actually vitally need.

SPEAKER_01 54:42

So I think deliberately so.

SPEAKER_03 54:45

In reading invisible hands, it you do a really beautiful job of showing how these little interventions have big payoffs. That, for example, we wouldn't get to today, but one I can't remember which organization is it that gets that General Electric starts trying to educate its middle managers into a more laissez faire perspective. Well, guess who gets influenced by that? That's Ronald Reagan. So, like little interventions can have big payoffs, and that we all have to be dropping these seeds and they will sprout. And and you get that in your book. You can follow the traces of how things sort of move through the system in a way that it's horrifying, but it's also inspiring.

SPEAKER_00 55:28

And yeah, I think with that, you know, it it politics is intrinsically something that is contested, and you see it with Trump, but also with Mamdani, that the political terrain is much more open than we can sometimes think it is on the right, on the left, it's something to be afraid of, but also something to be hopeful for. Um and yeah, you know, I think your your work, there's like a catharsis that comes with reading history and being like, okay, we have we have been here before. Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_03 56:00

Yeah, totally. Yes. And yes, and that things happen, you can see how you how things happen.

SPEAKER_01 56:06

Right. Right. And I think more more than once, and more than once actually on this on this podcast, um, when Natalia Rantilova was here, who set up her own uh newsroom um to cover technology in outside America on from a human rights perspective. When I said, What should I be telling the students to do? She said, read a history book, which I think is that's very powerful. And we I'd go further and say read Kim's history.

SPEAKER_02 56:33

Thank you. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 56:34

So thank you so much. Thank you so much, Kim, for coming in. It's been a great conversation. And Heather, I've, you know, that it's thank you very much indeed for insisting that we bring a historical perspective to this with the best person for it. Thanks very much, Sam, as well. Thank you, Sam.

SPEAKER_03 56:51

Thank you.

SPEAKER_04 56:51

Thank you so much for having me. It's been really great.