Episode 9: Talking About Migration, Part 2: The Coming Wave

In Part 2 of our deep-dive on migration, writer Sohrab Ahmari continues to explore the future of global mobility and what it means for democracy, culture, and the American common good. As climate shocks, conflict, and economic pressures displace millions worldwide, Ahmari and host Matt Levinger ask a sharp, urgent question: How do we manage a world on the move without losing our political sanity? This conversation ranges from climate-driven displacement to party polarization, from the limits of technocratic solutions to why genuine democratic debate, not executive orders or expert decrees, may be the only path forward. What this discussion ultimately delivers is not agreement, but orientation, and a renewed sense of how to navigate a future shaped by movement, memory, and hard choices.

Host: Matthew Levinger – Host of the America’s Why Podcast and Professor of Practice of International Affairs at the George Washington University.

Guest: Sohrab Ahmari – Writer, public intellectual, and U.S. Editor of UnHerd.

Explore more of Sohrab Ahmari’s writing at UnHerd:
https://unherd.com/author/sohrab-ahmariunherd-com/?edition=us

Visit our website to learn more about the America’s Why Project and join the conversation: americaswhyproject.com

Listen on: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Amazon Music

The views expressed in the podcast are those of the speakers and do not necessarily represent those held by the America's Why Project team or the George Washington University. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the America's Why Podcast.

SPEAKER_01 0:17

Hello, I'm your host, Matt Levenger. I'm joined again today by Sorab Amari. Sorab is the uh U.S. editor of Unheard. Uh, and prior to that, he founded Compact Magazine. He also spent a decade as an editor and columnist with the Wall Street Journal opinion pages in New York and London, and as the op-ed, the op-ed editor of the New York Post. Uh if you listened to last week's episode, you will remember that I started out uh offering a list of questions for us to deliberate, and after about 40 minutes, we'd gotten through only three of those questions, uh, which I took as evidence that this is a very complicated topic. And uh Sorab has humored me by agreeing to come back for a second round of an interview. And and as we were talking last time about the complicated nature of uh contemporary immigration policy and immigration debates in the United States, I wanted to take time uh in this session to continue the conversation by looking to the future and thinking about what is likely to unfold in terms of both immigration numbers and not only immigration numbers to the United States, but global migration numbers in general, uh, and how immigration and migration trends are currently evolving, how they're likely to be evolving over the next generation, and what the consequences of these trends are for US and international policy on managing global migration flows. So, Sora, um as as you'll certainly recall, we we started last week's discussion with um a question that I posed about uh a fundamental tension or or even paradox in your own thinking about uh about immigration, namely that you and your family uh immigrated to the United States uh from Iran under the family preference visa program. Uh and you have uh made tremendous contributions to uh the success of the of the American enterprise, if you will. You know, you've you've both realized your own American dream and you've also given so much back to the nation. Uh and at the same time, as you have started to think further about immigration and migration globally more generally, you've begun to conclude that there are serious downsides to uh this policy in particular and to unrestricted immigration uh in in general. Uh is that fair to say?

SPEAKER_02 3:21

Yeah. I mean, I I I don't see it paradoxical, I guess, I uh or as sharply paradoxical as you do, because look, I I come over, and if I fully want to become American, then I have to think about the common good of the society that's given me refuge. Now I use refuge in informally, I'm not a refugee. But um, and and that means not just thinking about the abstract rights of would-be potential people like myself out there, although they that's part of the claim. They have a claim, um, but also the claims of existing workers in terms of uh potential downward pressure on their wages and access to social welfare, national security in terms of who's coming in, what sorts of views they're bringing, are they compatible with with the American way, if you will? Um, and brought more broadly, like the issue of cultural cohesion, um, which used to be, I mean, now it's almost exclusively identified with the right and maybe the hard right. Um, but there were uh there was like an earlier generation of progressive thinkers, kind of democratic thinkers, capital D democratic thinkers and politicians who worried about the same thing. I I mentioned last time, but I think it's a kind of remarkable career arc. Someone who I greatly admire is Arthur Schlesinger, the great mid-century liberal historian, um, began his first book uh that really put him on the map and won him the Pulitzer. And I'm I'm amazed that he was 28 years old and working as a spy, you know, with what used to be called the OSS when he was 28. Um, and ended his career with a with a book uh essentially a Jeremiah, and I mean that in the good sense, against multiculturalism. Um so anyway, uh again, that's just a that's just some perhaps defensively on my part to say I don't see it as contradictory or paradoxical, but I can see where you're coming from.

SPEAKER_01 5:21

Well, well, thanks a lot for that clarification. And perhaps I've I've drawn the point too sharply. Uh uh, but I think it is fair to say that that uh that there are certainly some productive tensions within within this conversation. And this is a conversation that's become highly polarized. To me, one of the most interesting aspects of our conversation last week was precisely your point that many strong New Deal Democrats uh and you and uh and post-New Deal Democrats like Paul Krugman, the the uh uh former New York Times columnist, uh, and and uh labor organizers like Cesar Chavez uh um and and so forth, were very concerned about the potentially deleterious effects of undocumented immigration uh on uh on uh the well-being of US workers and potentially also on cultural cohesion within the United States. And so I think what I think where uh we found some common ground was around the idea that there's a real balancing act uh uh among values that that are uh that are difficult to reconcile. Uh and um so as we start our conversation today, I I guess what I'd like to um talk about is what I do see as as fundamentally a kind of paradoxical phenomenon, given that there are a lot of stresses uh in uh the global economy right now, rising levels of violent conflict in many in many regions of the world, and and as we know, violent conflict is one of the main drivers of immigration. Uh there are uh impacts from from natural disasters, uh we're at the uh we're encountering increasing climate uh effects. So so for example, one recent study concluded that about uh 230 million people globally live within a meter of sea level. And so if we start to see rising sea level over the coming decades, uh that may force people to leave their homes and move elsewhere. Likewise, if there's rising desertification, you know, for example, in in West Africa, Lake Chad is driving drying up and forcing people to move to uh different regions in their own countries or to different uh different countries altogether. And so there are a lot of factors that are leading to higher levels of mobility around the world. And this is a problem that, if anything, is likely to get worse over the coming uh decade. So so what I see as um the potential paradox here, if you will, is that the types of steps that one could imagine the United States uh and other countries adopting in order to protect the economic well-being of their people and to protect the uh cultural cohesion, if you will, of their national communities could potentially have very negative effects on that very economic well-being and and cultural cohesion. Uh so as a as a kind of parable, let me start with uh um uh um a uh 2015 novel. Uh it's kind of uh science fiction or cli-fi climate fiction, uh a book called The Water Knife by Paolo Bacci Galluppi. Uh and the premise of this book is that it takes place sometime in the near future, and the Colorado River is drying up. Uh, and uh aquifers in the American Southwest are being depleted. And so there's rising competition over water supplies. What this means is that there are huge numbers of displaced people in Texas who are fleeing to Arizona and various other states. Uh there is this ongoing battle between Arizona and uh and uh Nevada over who controls the water. Uh and uh and there are militias on the borders. For example, Utah has set up these militias to shoot to kill anybody from Arizona who tries to come in without the proper documentation and so forth and so on. And so it's this very bleak story about one potential trajectory, which uh we can be very grateful is not the case in the United States today, but it is in fact the case in other regions uh of the world already today, this kind of conflict. Uh and the in this podcast, what we're really trying to do is to get at the question of how can we tell stories promoting cooperation that are equally compelling as the stories that we tell about conflict, about that promote conflict. Uh because to resolve the type of thing that's going on in this work of climate fiction, we would need to have better institutions capable of managing conflict in more productive ways. Uh and one concern that I have about the immigration debate in many countries today is that it is very much a conflict-centered debate that we're saying it's either us or them. And when you very sharply start drawing lines between the in-group and the out-group, it's very, very difficult to find productive solutions that are going to address the needs on all sides. So uh I've offered you a little bit of musing. I wonder if you if if you would like to speak to any of what I've said just now.

SPEAKER_02 11:40

Yeah, some uh uh kind of messy, messily organized thoughts come to mind. Um, but I'll I'll share them in as coherent fashion as I can. Um one is broadly speaking, you know, the sort of cooperative frame that you put forward as the other, at least the other half of what political discussions of this kind should look like, um, is one I find very congenial and and not just congenial in a kind of softy way, like, wouldn't it be nice if we could cooperate, but oh, too bad the world is so um sort of savage and cruel that we can't. But rather, as a kind of part of my background worldview, is this idea that human beings are naturally political. And that's a very um it's a very significant claim to say that. That is, that human beings are not, in fact, built to be um savage, brutal, um, but for at some point making an agreement premised on the idea that, well, we could kill each other or we could agree to have society. That's a sort of early modern view that colors a lot of still of our constitutional uh thinking, and I mean small c constitutional are a kind of um it it supplies or furnishes much of the the the language of our of our day-to-day politics as well. Um but the classical view, uh the Aristotelian view, which then the church takes up as its own, um, is that is that order, orderliness, cooperation, this quest for the common good comes naturally to the human being. Now there's we also have other appetites, and therefore there's a need for authoritative institutions to help us fulfill what is already embedded in us, which is that um willingness to cooperate and seek the common good. Um and so that's like on a broad sense, I think I'm I'm I'm with you on the need not to just tell stories about uh brute competition and and kind of enity. That said, you know, the other thought that comes to my mind are, you know, and not necessarily contradictory ones, but they have to be sit alongside each other. One is, I mean, the picture that you painted of climate crisis and so on, I have no reason to question the picture itself. But the the thought that comes to my mind is something that my friend Michael Lynn often says, um, and um uh he's also, I mean, I think I find it very interesting because he's a kind of unclassifiable figure who, to my mind, is the closest link we have to that kind of New Deal tradition that we've been talking about. And the thing that he says is infinity immigration can't be the answer, right? And it's jokey, it makes it funny, but the idea is that you know, theoretically, if there is an obligation to um take in anyone who is fleeing a planet that's falling apart and so on, theoretically that means infinity immigration. And that's obviously doesn't it's uh it it it's a reductio ad absurdum of a certain kind of mentality that is the kind of um pro-open borders view. Um and so that's one thought is like as we try to cooperate, as we try to address the crises that challenge the common good, um just thinking, well, I am an individual, or so X person is an individual, they are facing climate crisis, therefore open the borders can't be rational. Including in the again, the kind of common but cooperative frame that that I laid out earlier. Um the second one that comes to my mind is um a general suspicion of attempts to solve problems of this kind by circumventing the political. And here again, the political, I mean our hum our our capacity to um contest, yes, compromise, uh to deliberate, and not just our as a general sense, but of ordinary people's capacity to do that and and and to say, well, expertise has determined that we need this much migration, you know, or that uh sort of a narrowly and abstract juridical mentality demands as a matter of right that people be allowed to move rather than allowing ordinary people to again deliberate, to contest in that kind of corporate way. And when I say corporate, I mean into sort of various social bodies. So a lot of decision making, I think, in the United States, especially over the past two generations, in the era that coincides with the rise of the neoliberal model, has been to uh disim has led to the disempowering of various corporate bodies. Mass political parties have been hollowed out. Labor union, of course, has been hollowed out. Um, a lot of civic organizations have been hollowed out. And so what remains is uh, and and what the the group that has gathered strength, as everyone else at all these other social bodies have lost power, are is the kind of expert class, a juridical class, economists, and so on, making uh kind of narrowly, narrowly rational determinations based on their own disciplines, um, and that being sort of imposed on populations. And that's how you get the politics of backlash. One thing I said last time that I would like to reiterate is my fear, what one reason that I take the positions that I do on immigration is that I worry that there, that like that bleak kind of shootings at the border type of politics that you described as you kind of offered a synopsis of the novel is coming. Like much more, much uglier versions than what people might think of, like the Trump administration could be in the offing if if there isn't a you know, a kind of genuine political encounter on this question, where ordinary people, through their various corporate bodies and as voters, are allowed to say, well, here's what my community can handle, here's what we need. Maybe we do need some migrants on this or that, but we don't need such and such group of migrants, and we have to find some other solution for those people. But basically, to say kind of the um NGO-type catastrophe narratives that then result in depoliticizing questions like, well, look, it's we've we're facing climate. What's what there's a kind of term for it, like climate migration. What can you do? Like, no, let's turn that, let's be political about that in the old-fashioned way. Political contest, compromise, debate. And you know, sometimes that means you you reach better solutions as a result of these kind of multiple voices coming into play, rather than a certain kind of NGO, expert class, you know, narrative or narrowly expert determination that finds politics annoying, that finds like the person in Arizona who's just the homeowner and now happens to live near the border and under the Biden administration was facing people like just coming over the border. And it creates a sense of chaos that that created over the over the course of the Biden era leading to the election of Donald Trump. That person, we want to hear what he has to say on immigration questions. And if things are framed as, look, it's a climate catastrophe, people are on the move, you know, we and and we have to cooperate, and cooperate really means um, like I said, infinity immigration, then no.

SPEAKER_01 20:02

And and do what the technocratic state says as opposed to what the people want. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I I love that answer, Sorab. And I also really uh love that you have uh called me on the uh NGO-focation, if you will. That's not a word, but uh but uh I because I I've given you an apocalyptic novel, which is a novel of the left, because it it posits climate change. But you know, we could go with any number of uh apocalyptic novels and TV series uh that are all over the map uh politically. I mean, we we could take uh The Last of Us, where it's not water that goes away, but it's uh but it's fungi that take over people's brains and so forth and so on. But but in any case, I think what you see in a TV show like that, in a in in a video game like The Last of Us, is this sense that uh there's no room for politics. It's all just survival. And to the extent that you have a community like Jackson, Wyoming that's able to pull together and build the barricades around the town until it's nearly wiped out by um uh zombies, uh that the possibility for constructive political action is very highly constrained. And uh and the fear narratives, the narratives of the zombies coming over the walls, through the gates, whatever, uh overwhelms the um the more positive uh uh feeling fellow uh elements of fellow feeling that allows you to solve problems together.

SPEAKER_02 21:52

So I guess I I so if I could jump in very quickly to to kind of agree with you or or or say Something I think you'll find congenial is you know, actually that the the Trump administration, in two areas where I'm broadly sympathetic to what it's done, one is the border or immigration generally, and the other is um tariffs, which is not the subject of our discussion, has still gone what I what I consider a kind of relatively anti-political route of doing everything by executive order, which, first of all, as in its own terms can be self-defeating, because three years from now, if a Democratic president comes in, stroke of a pen, everything goes away, and it creates this unstability in our politics, which is every four years like a wild swing to this direction on the border or that direction on the border. Um, tariffs, especially, like the way to have done tariffs, and I called this out at a time, again, it's not our topic, but it's analogous, is to do it through Congress. Like every we we should just do some more things through Congress, right? Like we have this body which isn't meant for uh, you know, people to practice becoming Fox News and MSNBC pundits. They're supposed to make law. And so if you wanted, for example, what is the immigration solution? I don't even care what the contours are, although all the serious people I know on both the restrictionist side and the more uh um or the less restriction side kind of know what there's is there's a deal and it just takes political courage to do it. But sit down and have, again, those corporate bodies, yes, bring in the uh the growers who want uh farm labor, right? Bring in the restrictionist advocacy groups, bring in the immigrant rights communities, bring in the this and that and that, and let's have a kind of hammering out of that's like what we used to do. Um and so there's there's like a right-wing version of expertism as well, very much in the air. This idea of like a Caesar, a red Caesar who comes in and just fixes problems with brute executive rule, um, is also anti-political and ultimately defeats even the right's own purposes, I think, in the long term.

SPEAKER_01 24:06

Can you can you speak just very briefly to the question of what is the deal? You you say that there's a deal available. Presumably you weren't that enamored of the deal that the Biden administration uh tried to reach with Congress uh a few years ago. Um what's the deal you like?

SPEAKER_02 24:24

Yeah, I mean the the issue with that was that it ratified, you know, it it went by X many. I think initially it was five uh 5,000 um crossings, like average daily crossings. That's when this authority would be triggered for the president to close the border. And the problem is that the under the 1965 Act, uh, the president already has authority to close the border. So, like, what why does it require this? And technically, theoretically, that meant ratifying as many as like a million point something newcomers if you add the math of daily average crossings, um, before you would take steps to close it. Um, but I'm and that's by the way, that has to do with illegal immigration. Um, but a holistic deal would be, and I talked to people in the United Farm workers who favor this, and I know I know restrictionists who who favor this uh in that kind of community. And it's something like you know, get tough at the border, which is kind of already happening, but it's happening not in a legislative way, it's happening just executive order for the most part. Get tough at the border. Um, but then you do have people who've worked who've lived here for 10, 20 years or more, typically, especially in the this area that I care about is migrant farm workers who are, you know, like actually it would the exploitation that's rife in the in the agricultural sector would diminish if they were like recognized, given a path to citizenship. Maybe it requires a background check and a go touch base home, and then you can reapply whatever technicalities. I'm not a I'm not a kind of policy, you know, kind of granular guy, but have that, and these people who are here and give them a deal where they can continue to live here in safety and and dignity and actually take them out of the shadow workforce. Um and and and then but going forward, uh, you know, more restriction is at the border. You know, could you can have H1B visas, in theory, I'm not opposed to them, but I mean we can get into the details of this. But there are actually four categories of H1B. These are like specialty, supposedly special workers that the economy, domestic economy cannot supply right now, so you have to bring them in. Um there are like there's like the genius level, then there's like a very, very skilled level, and then the bottom two levels that are often like office drones. Um, and guess which two are used the most? It's the latter two, the the kind of the bottom group of people. So you're really just you're bringing in people who are um willing to accept kind of servitude because they know that their ability to stay in the country is dependent on this one job. Um so it's it's a I see it as a kind of latter-day indentured servitude. Get, you know, sort of stop the abuses on H1Bs, um, maybe broadly shift immigration towards skills-based, as a lot of our pure Western democracies do, rather than uh emphasizing family reunification so much. These are kind of little nice little sweetening the deal kind of thing. But I think the core of it is restrict illegal immigration, a path to for those who who uh you know are have clean criminal records and have been here for a long time, a path to a dignified, open life in the United States. That's what I hear uh from, and I hear that, believe me, from some of the toughest immigration groups you can imagine. They know that if they want a permanent deal, they have to give on the you know some settlement for those already here who are not lawbreakers, and you know, that kind of thing. And the and the less restrictionoist camp, I don't want to call them open borders camp because that may be unfair, but whatever you want to call them, they recognize that a tougher border is the requirement of getting what they want, which is um uh a settlement for those already here. Labor people also talk about this. In fact, um the AFL CIO put out a document, I want to say in 2006, 2007, some sometime around then, kind of outlining where their position is. And it was kind of what I just outlined, but don't don't quote me on that because I I only sort of vaguely remember this the document that was put out at the time.

SPEAKER_01 28:44

Well, that's extremely interesting, Sorhab. And what uh I take from from that answer is there is a path toward a political solution should people want to go down that road. If it's not uh if it's not such a third rail that productive conversation on this topic uh is just not possible.

SPEAKER_02 29:05

But the thing is it hasn't happened, and there's a there's a sort of courage block on both sides. Um, you know, that that you know, each each worries that giving in to the other will cause a rebellion on in their own most fervid base, respective base. That's I mean that's the that's the problem. One idea I heard a while ago from from a gentleman who's a great um who's on the restrictionist side, but he's a very thoughtful man. I don't want to quote him because he's he's still doing this work, presumably, and probably doing it behind the scenes, um, is to just have town halls in every in big communities and small ones, just the the old-fashioned kind of civic town hall uh where you you build toward, you know, this is a kind of outcome embedded in it where you want to reach a deal, and you ask different ordinary Americans to weigh in, and then over time you kind of collect a consensus of where the country is and you take that to Congress, and that you know, like I and that sounds very idealistic and sort of Civics 101 type of thing. But um, I actually really am a big believer in all that, and I I um, you know, on my own side, the right, one thing that I find very worrisome, and I'll repeat myself is this kind of their version of we are demographically besieged, you know, we need like really harsh, scary solutions and dah-da-da-da, instead of like trusting the American people to negotiate through their representatives, bargain, negotiate, compromise, contest, and make law. Um, you know, so so if the if there's a kind of NGO fear version of climate catastrophe requiring us to open the floodgates to everyone, the right-wing version is the more extreme versions of oh, you know, this is like a demographic take takeover engineered by liberal elites to replace our populations and so on. Um and it's it it's catastrophic and it ultimately leads to a kind of executive-level politics rather than calm, broad, consensus-based, legislative solutions.

SPEAKER_01 31:25

Well, you've really anticipated uh my my next question, which is how do you get to a political approach that will address this? You you're saying that the experts are not going to solve this for us. If we live in a democracy, the people have to be engaged in solving this constructively. Uh there is not a technocratic solution that is really going to lead to a lasting uh uh and durable solution to the immigration uh um uh debate. And that what we need is a genuine participatory politics that will uh uh uh engage the voices of people on various sides, but not just on various sides, just to try to understand the perspectives that can potentially enable us to find some common ground. Uh and so basically my question is given this deficit of courage that you're talking about, where nobody wants to take that first step uh uh to listen uh to the other side and acknowledge some truth to the other side's concerns, yeah. How do you get there?

SPEAKER_02 32:40

Great question, but it really is about it becomes less about this particular issue than improving American democracy, which has reached certain dysfunctions. As great as the system is and as enduring and resilient as it is, it's it's hit some sort of impasse. I mean, I don't know, maybe you have experiences like this, and I don't want to, again, I don't want to sound Pollyanna, but I have yeah, I'm sure you have conversations with people, and you're like, this is like the ordinary American is so sensible often, you know, like there's like the online American who who who believes that Brigitte Macron, the French uh you know, for uh first lady, it was was born a man, you know, and just all these, but then you talk about like actual problems of the community with your people who you know. And I saw I one of my friends is this uh he's a restaurateur in New York. He um uh owns several, you know, different kinds of establishments across the city. And he's like, look, I don't like the kind of quality of the city that came about during the Biden years, where you have, you know, sort of just just the kind of migrant camps and and and then the sort of sense of chaos that that created and this fear of who's coming in. I don't like that. At the same time, you know, a lot of my people who work for me in my restaurants are migrants and they're good, hardworking people. Some of them have been here a long time, and one of them was just targeted by ICE. And so I'm I'm out of my own pocket hiring an immigration lawyer for him to try to keep him. And I, you know, like can't we find a reasonable way where we don't have that kind of sort of mass, unregulated movement across the border, but also my guy who hasn't committed any crime, works really hard, uh, has been here 10, 20 years, isn't like suddenly facing this kind of uh pressure. And so I just think like ordinary Americans are that in that kind of deliberatively kind of compromise-making you know, politic Aristotelian, you know, uh politics comes second nature to them, and it's really beautiful. And so we just need that to be reflected in the system. And I think my diagnosis, which is not original, uh others have put this as well, but something's happened where political parties, the two major parties, have lost the capacity to listen to the people who vote for them and are rather beholden to different kinds of donors, i highly ideological donors. Um it's kind of NGO crats and what around the time of the 2024 election came to be called the groups in the Democratic Party. So the sort of uh uh network of academia, civil society NGOs, uh, you know, uh podcasters, magazine editors, etc., that set the agenda on the left and can be very often very kind of outre cultural left politics that don't resonate with the rest of the country. On the right, from my experience, it's like the the right has this uh the few billionaires with their own um uh crackpot ideas, which I there's this great you know quote from John Kenneth Galbraith where he said regarding what's the John D. Rockefeller saying, like, there's no reason that um John D. Rockefeller's views, which don't rise above uh you know those of a mediocre college sophomore, should be listened to, but for the fact that he's very rich. Um so I think that's the blockage, is the reason, whether it's on immigration or any other kind of really hot button issue that's created a democratic, small Democratic impasse, is that like ordinary congressional processes and deliberation and humdrum contestation is beholden to different shadow parties. This is John Judas and and Roy Tachiro had this great book a while ago, What happened to all the democrats? Or Where did all the Democrats go? And they're they focused on the Democrats, but I totally know the kind of Republican analog of this, which is the shadow parties, the sort of the donors, the NGOs, et cetera, et cetera, that are really singularly uncompromising and they have their issues, and it they their way of thinking doesn't reflect, I think, how you and I would approach issues, or how like my friend who owns the restaurants that I told you, he's like, I don't like border chaos, that needs to stop, but don't persecute my cook either. He's a good guy, he's been here 14 years working for me. I you know, like I just think that blockage needs to be cleared where representatives are a little bit more uh close, I guess, close to the people. They're a little bit more um they're they're not so I mean, campaign finance reform would help them if if the fact that you know, in order to win, you either need to mobilize XYZ foundation on the left or whatever, or on the XYZ billionaire on the right, because you know, diminish the power of those might be an idea. Now I'm sounding very much like a you know fine gold uh liberal.

SPEAKER_01 38:02

All right, that's that's okay. I won't I won't hold it against you. Uh uh and uh uh and also you you described yourself as uh as Pollyanna-ish uh in some of in some of your views on this topic. And and I would say that although we aspire on this podcast to be hard-nosed realists uh and to be focusing solely on the art of the possible, we also are dyed in the wool idealists in that we are really looking for pathways where we can really have a transformative approach toward political contestation. Uh and uh uh and as we come to the close of our time together, at least for today, uh I would just love to hear uh any closing thoughts that you may have on uh uh you know this broader question of how do we how do we build a better world together?

SPEAKER_02 38:59

Yeah, I mean, so I here I can't uh you always mention what you're most recently um working on. And so I'm writing this book. Actually, it was due in June. We are now recording this in almost uh uh the end of 2025, and I'm so I'm delayed. But I'm really truly I'm reaching the conclusion, I'm writing the conclusion, and it's about normal. The title is The Triumph of Normal, and I don't need to summarize the whole book, but very briefly, normal is not a forever word. It's not a word like uh justice. Every language has some version of justice or fairness that goes back time immemorial. Normal, as we use it, is only from the 19th century, and it comes from the world of medicine and the world of statistics. Um, in the medicine, in 19th century French medicine, um, they started to talk about the normal state of an organ versus its pathological or abnormal state. In statistics, there was beginning to map populations on all sorts of um characteristics and this sense that there's an average person or an average man. Um, and those two discourses come together in the late 19th century, early 20th century to create normal as we use it. So that if in the mid-19th century you went to a restaurant and said, well, it's a quite a normal restaurant, an ordinary educated American or an educated European would have been befuddled. They wouldn't know what I mean normal. But now it's become so common. So my argument is the reason that normal has took off and has now become like inextricable from our language, the ordinary language. Like we use it all the time. If you go to your washing machine, there's a normal setting. If you, you know, the reason that is that it um it stealthily carried certain Aristotelian teleological conceptions of what a human being is and how a human person flourishes. And what I mean by that is that there's a kind of built-in in the Aristotelian way, there's a built-in set of rules, adherence to which, even though we fail most of the time, but typically adherence to which leads to a normal human life, and I just said it, a good human life. And I say, you know, looking at the ancient tradition or the classical tradition, I identify kind of four essential partnerships that are related to these rules. One is religion. Human beings are just fundamentally religious animals. Even the most secular societies can't help but recreating religious structures. One is domesticity, the pairing off of the genital parabond man and woman. One is uh politics, which is I the last one is creativity. But the one that I wanted to, in answer to your question, is this deep belief in political contestation and a suspicion, which I think is the healthiest part of populist movements on the left and the right that have erupted since roughly the mid-2010s, is this willingness to say, hey, like I don't it's good that there's an expert at the World Economic Forum or the United Nations or whatever kind of large transnational organization, World Health Organization, who says this and that. But politics is this art of prudence. And it's really about the statesman and in our system that the democratically elected statesman or woman who kind of has to make decisions and in response to various social organs contesting with each other. And I just think like that's what was lost, especially in the neoliberal era in the beginning of the late 1970s through the populist moment, whenever you mark as the birth of that, mid-2010s is my date. Um, and it's coming back and it's good, but it's gonna be messy because political man, homo politicus, is messy. He is selfish, he can be he can he can mistake his own narrow interests for like the good of everyone at large, etc. etc. He's and then he can join the mob and then recoil when the mob comes after him. These are all very typical political behaviors, but we need to trust in them and reach for them in all of our issues. Um like repoliticization is my deeper kind of answer to a variety of issues of which immigration is but one.

SPEAKER_01 43:19

So your final answer, if you will, is that we need to rediscover politics as the art of prudence. And contestation and compromise. And contestation and compromise. Sorab Amari, thank you so much for your time. This has been an incredibly stimulating conversation. I hope to have you back again as a guest on one of our future episodes. I'll promise to be less long-winded. It's truly been a delight. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 43:51

You're listening to the America's Why podcast. Our music is by James Fernando. For more information and to join the conversation, please visit our website at America's Why Project dot com. See you next week.