The 20th century's defining political division was economics (free market vs. state control), but the 21st century has witnessed a fundamental realignment where the primary dividing line has shifted to nationalism versus cosmopolitanism. This new fault line centers on attitudes toward globalization, immigration, and cultural identity, with nationalists viewing global integration as a threat to their identity and cosmopolitans embracing it as beneficial. This realignment has caused traditional political coalitions to fracture, with both major parties in the US experiencing internal revolts from their traditional bases. The new right's core beliefs include protectionism, nativism, and American unilateralism, while the new left emphasizes progressive social values. Economics has become a secondary issue for many voters, who now prioritize cultural and identity concerns over economic policy.
The Old Political Order Is Dying: Stephen Davies on the Great RealignmentAjouté :
Hello and welcome to the political orphanage, a home for plucky misfits and problem solvers. I'm your host, Andrew Heaton. Probably doomed to be politically homeless in any time or place, but particularly in our era. In large part because we find ourselves in the middle of a great political realignment.
Many people who came of age in the 20th century and understood their corner of a given political coalition now have the unsettling experience of feeling their coalition shift and break apart right under their feet. Republicans and Democrats who used to hate each other are now to their mutual battlement bedfellows.
While ursw allies within the major parties are pulling the knives out for each other. We are living in the midst of a great realignment, but not the first. If we were arguing about politics in the 1780s, we weren't arguing about capitalism or socialism. Economics was of secondary import to governance. Are you in favor of modernizing the state, giving the power of the aristocracy to republican government, curtailing the king, defanging the power of bishops, or are you on the side of the ancient regime and protecting the old institutions, hierarchies, and privileges from modernity and chaos?
By the 19th century, modernity had won out. The debate was no longer the Enlightenment versus the ancient regime.
In the United States, it was about slavery. Your position on tariffs, tax rates, infrastructure spending, women's rights, public education, these were all of secondary import to the singular division of the day, slavery.
In the 20th century, around the world, the defining division became economics.
Do you want a free market and private enterprise or the state to control the heights of industry? That was the relevant primary organizing principle of politics during my childhood. What balance of capitalism and individual action against socialism and regulation do you want? Consider for a moment all the other things which did not constitute your position on the supposed leftright spectrum. Let's say you were pro-choice and in favor of gay marriage, but you wanted to cut tax rates and shrink welfare. How would people define you in the year 2000? I'd say almost everyone would say that you were center right. Very few people would look at that person and say they're leftwing.
They just happen to be economically very conservative because economics was the primary dividing principle. Or let's flip it. If you were a staunch union guy, a New Deal Democrat who wanted to reign in corporations and tax the rich, but you were also pro-life and against gay marriage and in favor of a strong interpretation of the second amendment in the year 1990, would you be left-wing with conservative social positions or right-wing with economically progressive positions?
Almost everyone would define that theoretical person as left-wing or center-left or a fix some kind of asterisk to leftwing. Economics was the noun. Everything else was a modifying adjective.
But now, well into the 21st century, that predominant organizing division of economics that defined the 20th century is no longer the relevant bright line.
In the same way that the fision point of coalitions is no longer modernity or feudalism, slavery or abolition, the premisy of free enterprise versus state intervention is fading, surpassed, replaced by something else, the next big argument, the new bright line which defines the politics of our age.
Part of why current politics seems so tumultuous and baffling to pundits like myself is that we're trying to understand everything in terms of an increasingly irrelevant fissure. We're looking at the old paradigm that I grew up with. All while new coalitions, new political alliances are realigning around the next big argument, the division that will define politics of the 21st century. That realignment is what we're going to discuss today right here on The Political Orphanage.
But first, The Political Orphanage is made possible by its own listeners. You can become a patron by going to patreon.com/andrewheaton or on Substack at the political orphanage.com.
This week's bonus episode is about space and capitalism and Elon Musk. Dr. Rainer Zidleman, who first appeared on this program to walk us through how the Nazis thought about economics, has returned with a new book on space capitalism. He joins to discuss how there's actually quite a lot of money in space if we get the incentives right, how the incentives are currently wrong, and we spend a decent amount of our time analyzing Elon Musk's contributions to space exploration. Is he a shyer, a government contractor with better PR, or is he the Henry Ford of rockets? That's this week's bonus episode which you can find by going to patreon.com/andrewheaton or substack atthepolitical.com.
Thanks.
My guest today is Steven Davies. He is a senior academic fellow at the John Lockach Institute and senior education fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs. He writes regularly for the daily telegraph uh daily telegraph but his latest book is the great realignment why the new right is here to stay which I loved and gave me a completely new lens with which to look at politics. I am a big fan of it very excited to talk to him. Hello Dr. Davies.
>> Hello and thank you for having me on the show.
>> My pleasure. Well let's let's kick this off. If you if you could not use the term conservative or progressive or Republican or Democrat, how would you describe the political landscape today?
What are the relevant blocks and coalitions?
>> Right. Well, in most countries, it's quite clear that there are two primary blocks of voters. Now one block that you can call mainly nationalists uh and the other that you can call broadly cosmopolitans.
Now the nationalists and cosmopolitans live in very different places and they've got very different outlooks on the world and it's the split between those two blocks of voters that is transforming things like liberalism and conservatism and driving most contemporary politics. What you can also see in many countries is the gradual emergence of a kind of third block of voters who are if you like a combination of moderate nationalists lean that way, moderate cosmopolitans leave the other way, but who also I think share a common kind of aversion to the style of both of the the bulk of the nationalists and the bulk of the cosmopolitans.
>> Who I I I think I know how the the first two map out in the United States. Who would fall into the third category? Can you can you talk about a politician?
>> If you want to think about the United States and now I will have to use some of those party names and things that you mentioned.
>> Um essentially there I would say there are four broad political traditions in the United States. There always have been actually uh which you corral within two big parties. Uh these are progressives uh liberals, conservatives and uh populists if you will. And essentially for most of the 20th century uh the Democratic party was controlled by liberals but had most progressives in it. Uh the Republican party was controlled by conservatives but got a lot of votes from populists. What has happened at the moment in uh both of those parties, certainly in the Republican party, but increasingly in the Democratic party as well, is there's been a kind of revolt of the steerage class voters. Uh the progressives and the populists, the populists have captured the Republican party via Trump and MAGA. Uh the progressives are having a go of it in the Democratic party through people like Mumani and others.
And that means in a way the um the kind of traditional Reaganite fusionist conservatives and many classical liberals on the one hand are the kind of new center right if you will and they have increasingly a kind of an overlap with the kind of traditional liberals particularly the maybe abundance agenda liberals Ezra Klein's type so that would leave you with you know four maybe three blocks because you'd have on on the one hand the populist right on the other hand the you know radical progressive left uh divided as I would argue over this issue of nationalism versus cosmopolitanism basically and then in the middle you've got this uh kind of two other groups which are the people from the old way of thinking about things who deeply dislike the kind of populist uh politics that you find in both the other two groups uh all of that makes sense to me and I I'll add that as of today Bill Crystal a rather famous Republican and one of the architects of the war in Iraq registered as a Democrat. Nobody would have seen that coming about 20 years ago.
>> He's now such Okay, so the steerage class has revolted. Does this mean that if we fix economics, we make housing affordable? We shore up gaps in healthcare. Uh we take care of the things that have cost more over the last 10-15 years in your country and mine. Do the nationalists go away and we return to the old coalitions or is something other than economics driving this?
Uh I'm afraid unfortunately it's it would not go away. That's the reason for the subtitle of my book why the new right is here to stay. It would be very good and very welcome if it was the case that we could fix the economic problems and then the angst and the anger that is driving this kind of populist politics would vanish because I don't think it is being driven by that. Um it has an ultimately economic cause in my view.
It's the the way the world economy has been transformed since the 1970s. But most people react to this and view it through a non-economic lens. They're not they are bothered about the fact that their housing costs more, their grocery bills are going up. They are upset about that undoubtedly. But what they're also bothered by is what they see as a loss of identity. The fact that the demographic makeup of the places where they live is being transformed. the fact that nothing that they recognize seems familiar or you know something they grew up with. The world around them is changing too much as far as they're concerned and in ways that they don't welcome and so they see themselves their whole identity their sense of what they are as being threatened and that's not an economic concern. uh even if they were uh you know able to buy a house and things of that sort they would that would make them a bit less exasperated and irritated with the powers that be but they would still be very upset by what they see as a radical cultural uh and demographic transformation which they do not like and uh that's a fundamental kind of division and it's as much a division of sensibility uh if you like as it is of ideology so then what what is the new bright line what is the fissure uh who who are these camps of nationalists and cosmopolitans. What is the difference?
>> Well, there are a number it's basically a division between people who are comfortable with uh or positively supportive of an increasingly integrated globalized world in various ways including things like large scale population movements across national borders but other things as well such as a highly integrated uh global economic system. And on the other hand, people who see that as threatening uh not just economically, but more, as I say, more profoundly to their identity. And the threat to the identity isn't just about immigration. It's also about, for example, losing certain kinds of work, manufacturing, jobs, things of that kind, uh because of the way the integration of the world economy goes.
So you've got people who f welcome and are comfortable with a highly integrated global economy on the one hand and you've got people who on the other hand want to reassert the primacy of very thickly defined specifically geographic and often specifically ethnic identities against that kind of global governance.
Now this manifests in a couple of very sharp issues. The red lines you talk about one of them obviously is immigration. How do you feel about immigration? On the one extreme, you've got people who want um open borders, which is something I'm sympathetic to myself. Uh but it's still very much a minority view, or who are just relaxed about immigration or think that you need certain high levels of immigration. On the other side, you go from people who think that you need immigration controls and expulsion certainly of illegal migrants to people who think that what you need is to actually expel large numbers of people who have legal entitlement to live in say the United States or Great Britain. And even at the really far fringe, people in the US, for example, who think that you can't be a proper American, a heritage American as they call it, unless you have ancestors who were in the United States before the Civil War, which means that apparently Tony Soprano is not an American. You know, uh, go figure that. Uh, so that's the kind that's one bright dividing line. The other big one is the question of the degree to which national governments should be bound by international law and treaties. uh so that even if you elect in a government that wants to do X, it may not be able to do so because the treaty obligations that its predecessors have entered into preclude they're doing what it is that the voters want. That's not so much of an issue in the United States because being the world's paramount power until perhaps very recently, you're not in a position like that. But in most European countries, that's a very big issue. uh so people feel that they can't for example pursue the migration policy they want or the criminal justice policy they want or even the economic policy they want because uh governments over the years have bound themselves by all these undertakings. So the question of how far the the courts which in who enforce these laws should be able to override democratic majorities is the other big red line. So immediately Victor Orban springs into my mind when you say that Vic Victor Orban famously asserted and advocated for an illiberal democracy which to the American ears sounds contradictory but I I think the idea here would be um look we like democracy we like the will of the people we're going to enact that what we want to get rid of are constraints of the elite that are stopping the majority from doing what it wants to do competing majoritarian rule, something like that.
Yes, precisely that. Um that that's exactly his line and his argument. And his his argument essentially is you have dem democratic politics, but because of all these international rules, you can't have any kind of content to that democratic politics except liberalism.
That's his argument. Um his other argument, by the way, is that the culture is too strongly liberal. And what he thinks you should do or thought since he's no longer in office was that you should have a government which tried to create a non-liberal form of culture, a much more traditional um household oriented uh much more conservative with a small C uh set of social values and things which politics would then support. So he rejects the idea which is central to liberalism of course that the state should be neutral between different versions of the good life. He thinks that what he means by an illiberal democracy is that you should have a democracy which actively and deliberately promotes certain ways of living and discourages others. Yeah. You you say in the book a core feature of the new right uh excuse me a core feature of the new right politics is a reassertion of the centrality of politics and rejection of the argument that some areas of life and policy should not be decided by it. What what do you mean by that? Well, uh, the idea is, this relates to what we've just been talking about, because the idea of a lot of liberal politics, and this has always been true of liberalism as an ideology going way back, uh, is that there are certain areas of life which you simply don't subject to majority decision. Uh, because there are individual rights that trump what a majority wants, no matter, uh, know how large that majority is or because there are certain areas of life which are just not the business of government. uh notably uh questions of what the right way to live is or what kind of religion you should practice and you can trace this all the way back to say the bill of rights in the United States or many many other kind of documents of that era the early 19th century. Now what the new right believes is that actually you have to have a politics which is devoted to a kind of collective or common good. uh so that although individual rights matter and I don't think most of these people are you know kind of full-on fascists I mean there are the odd fringe of one who is but most of them are not but what they do think is that you should subordinate individual life projects to a larger collective one and also that politics can and should be concerned with whatever the voters think or regard as being a matter of collective concern. So the voters collectively decide that it is a matter of concern to them whether or not people should behave in a certain way sexually or a certain kind of family formation should be encouraged and they then decide that they want to do something about it then they should be able to do so. Uh and this runs contrary to the idea that there are things like guaranteed spheres or expectations of privacy which has driven a lot of you know recent jurist prudence and things like that.
>> Yeah. I mean, I I think kind of a bedrock belief in liberalism is that the cellular unit of civilization is the individual. And we might curtail individual rights, but the individual is always the paramount decision-making body within liberalism. And it sounds like the the new right is embracing a more like is the family the cellular unit? Is it just that society is the important thing? Where's their head at?
>> Uh I think it's both of those things. I mean, for example, you mentioned Victor Orban. He was very explicit that for him it was the household, the family that was the constituent unit. And to be fair to him historically that is the normal way of thinking about it. It's only really since well quite an early date in the United States case but in Europe it's only since about the 1890s 1900s that we've moved to this idea that the individual is the constituent uh you know building block of society. So part of it is very much the idea that the family should be the uh constituent element that's associated with a very strong agenda and belief in many cases that you need to reassert traditional intrafamilial relations or in other words you should go back to having families in which the man the husband is the head of the household and the head of the family not the boss of course. um and that basically you should reassert you should push back very strongly against feminism and female liberation but also uh certain kinds of trends in parenting. But at the same time there's the belief that the nation should be understood uh as being a kind of large family or gathering of families. uh and so there is also a larger collective which is prioritized which is the interests which is this the nation which is seen as being a natural and organic community uh that you know a very long maybe immemorial existence so that yes that is the core kind of thing that's what I mean by that >> so you you bring up in your book thick nationhood versus imagined communities and I I feel like this that goes into this what what is the difference between thick nationhood versus an imagined community. Okay, the term imagine communities goes back to a book of that title by a man called Benedict Anderson.
And the basic thesis which is very popular in a lot of political science is that modern nations are essentially imagined communities. They are created by an act of first of all political imagination and then by an act of particular will to bring about that uh imagined community into existence. So the kind of quintessential example of this would be it Italy and Italians. And so when Kavore after Gary Baldi had overthrown the Borbons and Italy had become united in 1867, Count Cavore, the man who'd done as much as anybody to bring it about said, well, we have now created Italy. We must now make Italians. And that's a kind of expression of that. And the argument would be that prior to certain people in the 1830s imagining an Italian identity, the people that later became Italians thought of themselves as Cianese, Florentine, Lechesi, Melanazi, Venetians and all the rest of it, you know. Um, so that that's the kind of Benedict thesis. The contrary view is the view which the new right has is the idea that is associated perhaps with a scholar called Anthony Smith and that is that um nations are actually essentially large tribal communities which are have existed for a very very long time and so the argument is that there's been a recognizable English nation uh or Castellian nation or Catalan nation for example uh for a very very long time you can trace it as a kind of conscious identity you know self-aware identity and community you know back for hundreds of years long before the emergence of the modern nation state. So those are the two conflicting views. So in the second view, nations are not imagined communities. They are organic communities which spring out of the fact that you are descended from people who have lived in roughly the same territory for a prolonged period with others to whom you are in some distant way genetically related whom you share certain things like a common language, common culture, common historical experience with. Uh now I have to say this is this makes much more sense in Europe perhaps although actually I think it doesn't make sense even there but it makes much more sense in Europe than it does in the United States. Uh in the United States it's highly problematic for obvious reasons you know given the history of your country to think in this way. uh it would be pretty difficult to do it like you could I understand the perspective of uh hey in Poland we want to be Polish we want to be friends with everybody we would love for you to come on vacation and if you if if 20 or 30 people want to marry Polish people and learn Polish and become Catholic we'll let them a few of them in but we all want to be Polish here we'll be friends with everybody else let's have let's have a mosaic patchwork of our tribes and and we'll but we're all going to kind of stay in our area I understand the logic of that. I don't think it makes any sense in an American context.
Like we're we're so multicultural. We always have been. We have so many different ethnicities. There's there's no way to do that unless you split up the country or you sent 40% of it away.
>> I couldn't agree more. And also, you know, you move around so much. I mean, one of one of the key parts of this uh thick notion of rational identity is that people don't move around a lot. you have a strong kind of ancestral attachment to a specific location on the planet's surface and the whole history of America is driven by you know in Huckleberry Finn's words lighting out to the territory and you know leaving the widow Douglas and civilization behind and going off out to the new a new patch and that's a constant theme in American history and society is is this the underlying rankor with immigration from the new right and I ask this because I I tend to see things socioeconomically, but it seems like even if I could convince a very Trumpy person that immigrants are good for you economically, they would still be opposed to it. Is is it this idea that look, we have to be homogeneous as a people, otherwise we're not a people anymore. Therefore, immigration is an existential threat to our homogeneity.
What's going on?
>> I think it is partly that. And and I think also it's important to point out that with these these so-called populist new right movements like the MAGA movement in the United States and elsewhere there's also very often a distinction made between different kinds of immigrant. So in Portugal for example, there's a rapidly growing party, second largest party in Portugal now called Chega, which means enough in Portuguese and they're an anti-immigrant party. But um the evidence is that Czecha voters make a clear distinction between migrants from Brazil and also Angola or Kabu or Guinea who they're you know pretty okay with actually and migrants from uh the Indian subcontinent or the Middle East or who are they very much not okay with uh because the first category of migrants speaks Portuguese has a historical connection with Portugal through the Portuguese empire uh whereas the second lot do not.
Similarly in France for example um a lot of the people who support Marian Le Pen and the RN they're fine with migrants from parts of you know former Frank Franklin Empire Africa who are Catholic or at least nominally Catholic u drink wine eat cheese uh >> smoke cigarettes like pretentious art house films this kind of thing. Yeah.
But then they have problems with migrants from the Marreb from you know Algeria particularly or Morocco who obviously don't drink are definitely not Catholics don't eat cheese and therefore are not culturally French. Uh and so there's a what the what the there appears to be a feeling that when you have large scale movement of people who are seen as being sufficiently different from you in some important respect and which may be linguistic, it may be religious, it may be cultural, could be all number of reasons then that is when it comes to that migration comes to be seen as a threat to the identity and this is actually you know this kind of nativism is a recurring phenomenon in American history. So back in the uh you know 1850s with the no nothing party it was all about Catholic immigration and Irish immigration in particular in the late 19th century lots and lots of complaints about migration by supposedly lowerass Mediterraneans you know Italians basically uh and know as opposed to Nordic stock uh that was one of the big factors behind the passage of the 1924 immigration control measures in in the US. So this is a recurring phenomenon. Uh right now the people who seem to really wind up the kind of Trumpy people you're talking about are Indians. Uh it's quite striking the hostility that seems to have suddenly appeared in the last 18 months towards Indian migrants. Now there is an element of economic economics in this because I suspect that a lot of the animists against Indian migration in particular using H-1B visas is because they're seen as being economic competitors for jobs that are you know highly desirable. But I think also it's simply because these are people who come from a completely different civilizational tradition.
They're not Christians. They don't speak English initially. uh and so they're seen as being a threat in a way that say maybe migration from of a no someone from Latin America who can speak English and is a Christian would not be even though that would also irritate many people as well. I was recently in a literal smoky backroom Republican hangout and one of the people smoking cigars was with a prominent conservative publication and he was extremely opposed to Indians coming over and also would say they're going to take white jobs and I would kind of look at him and go do you mean native jobs like the but there was clearly some ethnic stuff going on but it's that he >> to put a good faith argument forward. He has a thick nationhood view of America that uh you need to be culturally sympatico you know from a Christian country etc etc that if if not you can't integrate whereas the the imagined community would be look nothing to do with ethnicity not even really culture it's just there are abstract ideals that we all adhere to plus procedure so if you believe in freedom of speech liberty individual rights plus majority rule and you fill out the paperwork you can be an American we don't really care what religion or ethnicity you are that's the other end of That's the other end of the spectrum.
Yes. I mean there's this this is the idea of America as a proposition nation.
Uh where the American identity is defined not by a specific ethnicity or anything like that but by adherence to a set of shared ideals. The ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. That's why Ronald Reagan in his you know I think it was his farewell address said one of the great things about this country is that anybody can come here from anywhere in the world and become an American. uh and you know that that's a very clear statement from him of that other ideal.
Now in the European context because we don't have a kind of you know propositional model for nationality the way you do um the idea of the imagined community is rather that the imagined community is one that is inclusive if you will one that people can opt to join. Um and you you know this is so-called civic nationalism where essentially national identity is defined primarily by the fact that you uh pay taxes and live in work in a certain area and have human relations with people.
You don't have to have been born there or anything. Uh so that that's the kind of form that that propositional identity takes or imagined community takes on the other side of the Atlantic.
>> Okay. That's >> it's happening in other parts of the world as well by the way. I mean this is a big feature of Indian politics right now. Narendra Modi who's very much one of these new right politics has the idea that you can't be truly Indian unless you're a Hindu and that's all part of his stick. Yeah. That okay that that's really interesting and harder for me to to neatly sus out in a British context or a European context. So, uh, I I spent a lot of time in Scotland and the idea there there's there's not really a we believe in the declaration of, you know, there there's the declaration of our growth, but there's not really a a clear ideological this is what the Scots believe ideologically. Uh the idea would be it's a civic identity of if if you're on the imagined community and you move to Glasgow and you pay your taxes and you're a good neighbor. You are you are procedurally a Scott as opposed to the thick idea which would be you got to like tartan got to like haggus kind of pasty. Uh you don't believe in God but you don't believe in the Protestant God like that kind of thing.
>> Exactly. Yes. And also uh you've had ancestors who've lived in Scotland you know for a long time. you know, you're not the you're not even the children of someone who's just moved here. So there is that idea of like ancestral attachment to the soil and that sort of thing as well. So yes, that is precisely it. Now Scottish nationalism, the SNP is very much the first thing you described.
Uh the Scottish National Party is very much committed to a civic nationalist uh imaging community version of Scotland uh and not to an ethnic idea of Scottishness. Uh the same is true now of say Shinfane in the Irish Republic.
Although what we have seen recently in the Irish Republic at a popular level uh without party representation is a kind of reemergence of a strongly ethnic notion of Irish identity which has taken the form of these big street protests against migration that you've seen over the last 2 three years in Ireland. Well, I'll bring it back to my side of the Atlantic. You make the claim in the book that Trump is typically portrayed as being impulsive, all all impulse and rudderless and feckless. I've said this many times myself over the last 10 years. Uh >> within the using the lens that you're using of of your book, he's not he's not ruerless. There's actually a coherent ideology. It just doesn't map onto the old leftright spectrum. What is what are his core beliefs? How does he fit into this?
>> Well, yeah. I mean at the moment he is giving us a lot of evidence for the case that he is impulsive and you know doesn't know what he's doing that um >> that might be a better way to put it. He is impulsive and narcissistic and and all sorts of things we can throw at him but there are underlying presumptions that he's got on top of that that just don't map onto the old left right spectrum.
>> Precisely. Yes. And it's very easy to see what these are because one thing you you cannot say about Donald Trump is that he's a dissembler. He's always very upfront about what he thinks and he has been in interviews repeatedly since way back to the 1970s, even before he became a reality TV uh star. So, what are they? Well, one of them is protectionism. He's always been an economic nationalist who favors protectionism and a kind of active national development strategy, if you will. So he's always been really a kind of, you know, really old style Republican of the kind of McKinley era.
Uh, which is one of the reasons why he likes McKinley. So that's one of them, a big one. He's always been a protectionist and economic nationalist.
Two, he's always been a nivist. He's always been an immigration skeptic who uh follows the kind of Pat Buchanan line uh which is that you you know to the extent that you do want any immigrants you don't want ones who are going to fundamentally change or shift the the content if you like of the nation's population away from what it was before.
Uh so that's his second thing nivism.
And the third thing has always been American unilateralism. Now, he's often described as being an isolationist, and I think it's fair to say quite a lot of his followers are isolationists. Uh, I think the vice president, um, who must be a very miserable man right now, I think he would probably fit into that category, but that's never been Trump.
Trump's always been of the view that the American, the United States should be a global power, just that it should do so on its own because he sees allies essentially as being um basically a cost that the United States is bearing rather than as being something that actually magnifies its power. Uh and so those have been those are his three core beliefs. They always have been. I that that your your book really helped me understand what's going on with with Trump and MAGA in that capacity. So on foreign policy, I tend to think in in terms of are you a neocon or an intervention skeptic or or isolationist if you'd like. Uh but basically are you prone to conflict in adventuring or are you inclined towards restraint? That that tends to be the model I have. And it it finally clicked for me that's not how Trump's thinking. Trump is thinking unilateral versus multilateral. He's thinking uh should America be able to do whatever it wants or should it have to be in entangling alliances of NATO, NAFTA, the WTO? And he's very much it's not that he's against going into a country or staying behind. He just wants America to be able to do it on its own without being encumbered by input from other countries.
>> Precisely. Or maybe with help from just one country where there's a closely allied interest. Plus also um perhaps from his time in New York real estate I think he does see the world as being basically run a know arena for competing great powers. He does have a multi-olar view of the world. He thinks America should be number one. Uh but he also thinks that maybe the way to you know carry on in the future is to cut deals.
And I think it's pretty clear that the kind of strategy that was worked out and articulated in the you know defense strategy documents uh quite a while ago now is that essentially the United States should concentrate on being the hegmonic power in the western hemisphere uh and you know cut deals with people like Russia, China elsewhere in the world. Of course that overlooks the you know as we've seen since the uh other parts of the world notably the Middle East but that seems to be his view. If five families can run New York and the New York real estate sector, then you know you can have the equivalent of five families running the world between them.
That that's his view of the world, which is highly transactional. And again, this there's there's no secret to this. He's he's always been like this forever, you know. So, okay, we we've got this this fault line between cosmopolitans and nationalists and and the idea of thick nationhood, heritage, ethnicity, attachment to place, culture, religion versus uh imagined communities, abstract concept, ideals, proceduralism. Uh that explains why immigration is such a a fault line and flash point for all of this. We've got foreign policy. It's really the new the new debate is unilateral versus multilateral. uh in in terms of economics, >> is it just not important anymore? Is it just a secondary thing where like I I look at the Republican party presently?
It's unfathomable to me in the '9s that they would become the protectionist party and and even today like I I was arguing with a friend recently about Lena Khan and antitrust law, anti- monopoly law, and Lena Khan, who's an extremely progressive Bernie Sanders type person, uh JD Vance and Josh Holly really like her. So what what is the economic perspective of the new right or or is it just completely up for grabs as long as you are a nationalist?
>> Well, I think there are actually two competing economic perspectives amongst the new right. Uh one of them is what you might call capitalism in one country to adapt a well-known slogan.
So the the idea here is that you have things like protectionism against the rest of the world, but you then have a a radical free market policy within the United States, let's say. Uh this is the kind of policy also that you get with people parties like the Confederacy in Poland or Eric Zamor's uh laonet in France. So it's it's a sort of as I say libertarianism or economic libertarianism anyway in one country.
Now the other view which people like Josh Holly um and uh JD Vance espouse is that of a national development state which is the idea that what the state should do is to develop national power and productive capacity through the kind of policies which uh really the Chinese state has given us the exam you know template for recently uh government control of the credit system government control of a whole range of areas of investment so as to encourage deliberately through various kinds of uh measures and the power that things like its purchasing capacity gives it.
Encourage investment in certain sectors rather than in others. Promote national champions. Develop uh large firms that can act as global champions in the sectors you want to succeed in. So the model or template as I say is China or prior to that the ministry of international trade and industry in in Japan uh during the Japanese glory years before 1990. And so there's this kind of conflict within the MAGA coalition I think between two different groups between one group who actually combine the nationalism and social conservatism with really pretty left of center economic views highly interventionist.
Uh and on the so someone like Sora Bamari for example would be an example of the intellectual side of that. And on the other hand, people who think, well, no, we still want, you know, low taxes, smaller government, cuts in spending, although somehow mysteriously never cuts in spending that affect the elderly. And uh but we, you know, we want to have tariffs around the United States. Uh and you know, not engage in a kind of global economic order of any kind. Uh personally I think that the first of those two the one that say Holly or Vance advocate is the one that's going to win out simply because there's more votes in it.
>> Yeah.
>> Uh andically votes in critical states and critical places. Uh and this is what you see in country after country by the way. Parties of this kind typically appear on the kind of capitalism in one country position, but over time they almost universally migrate to the they may become more strongly nationalist, but they migrate to the left on economics because that's where the votes are. So then if we were to make a a prediction of the trajectory of the Republican party moving forward, it is likely to become or remain anti-immigrant uh nivist um uh probably more unilateral like we'll probably have a really big debate over whether whether or not to stay in NATO within the next 10 years whether to drop out entirely.
The Republicans will be the anti-NATO party but then economically uh they are likely to become uh increase welfare. Uh let's have let's big scary corporations. Let's let's stop the big scary corporations from pushing around the little guy. Like the old Reaganite free market model is likely to fade away with the Republican party. I I agree with that. Yes. Now this will not happen without a huge fight. So I because not least because the more regularite wing of the party um they they the conservatives if you will as opposed to the populists they do have a lot of money and so what you will get is uh you know like a re I think a really fractious primary season uh when it comes to choose whoever runs to replace Trump. Um but I think eventually yes that will win out simply because the states where the Republican party is strong are the states where that kind of uh com you know voting position sorry voter position is very strong. There'll be a similar story in the Democrats. uh there's going to be a knockdown dragout fight on that side of the aisle between people who support the kind of democratic socialist of America radical interventionist agenda like Zoran Mandani uh and on the other hand more kind of traditional mainstream liberals of the Ezra Klein variety with you know the kind of agenda that he's now starting to try and push and develop on that side. Uh in that case, I think probably the Liberals are going to come out on top simply because the progressive voters, while there's quite a lot of them, uh they're very geographically concentrated. Uh they're concentrated a small number of major uh metropolitan areas. New York City, Greater LA, the Bay Area, maybe metro Atlanta, that's about it really. And and so not even Chicago land. And so they're going they're going to I think lose out because they simply the they don't have the votes or the distribution of votes in the way that the more radical you know nationalist uh economic right does in the Republican side. Will this ultimately matter? What I what I mean by that is is I understand the thesis in your book. There's always a a dichotomizing issue. There's always a fissure issue that creates a a a binary of coalitions. But yeah, but there can be secondary and tertiary distinctions within those coalitions. So if we go back to the 1990s, it's it's still or let's say the 1980s, it's are you free market low taxes or are you state intervention higher taxes, but once you decide which side of the spectrum you're on, you can be for guns or against guns.
You might be a little bit out of sync, but we're not going to give you trouble about that. You can be progay progay marriage or anti-gay marriage. That's as long as you're voting the right way when it comes to taxes. That's what we care about as a coalition. So, moving forward, I gather that economics will just kind of become a secondary consideration unless it's a part of this nationalist versus global uh or immigration versus nivist. I think it will become a secondary issue. In fact, my argument essentially is it has become a secondary issue for a critically large number of voters. Um, so you can see this in voters who are perfectly willing to consciously and knowingly vote for and support policies that will make them worse off economically because they like the other benefits as they see it that those policies bring like lower immigration. So I which shows you tells you they think that immigration is more important than economic well-being. not that they want to be poor, they'd like to be better off, but they they've downgraded the importance of economics from primary to secondary. And I think that um there always is a secondary there are typically secondary issues which divide the two broad coalitions.
So you end up typically with four broad blocks of voters. Uh but the the secondary issues um can change over time. So in the period you mentioned roughly the 1970s through to about the 1990s the secondary issue was uh cultural conservatism versus cultural liberalism. Were you for example pro or anti-abortion? You know pro-life or pro-choice? Uh how did you feel about gay rights? How did you feel about gay marriage? Uh what was your view on pornography and you know anti- obscenity laws? This kind of thing. So those that was the big secondary issue. And so you had on the pro market side a split between consistent libertarians who were you know both anti-government intervention in the economy and anti- um government intervention in these other areas.
>> Milton Friedman and that whole lot precisely the Milton Freeman kind. Yeah.
About 16% of voters by most reckonings.
And then on the other hand you had the people the kind of classic Republican of that period who was pro market but also uh you know anti-gay marriage and traditional values. Similarly on the yours had a similar split on the democratic side because you got you had on the one hand um you know obviously voters who were both uh liberal on the social liberal scale and also interventionist on the economic scale but you did have a significant block of voters who were actually quite often quite e le you know economically left but who were also very culturally traditionalist most African-Americans for example fall into that category but that shows you that at that time the economics was primary because they they voted that uh and they you know ignored the fact that the people they were voting for didn't share their highly conservative you know social beliefs. So what's going to happen in the future I suspect that economics is actually going to fade a lot more as a major dividing issue and I think the new issue that is probably going to appear in the next 5 to 10 years is technology and how we feel about technology. So I think the debates that are starting to take shape about AI and how we feel about it and about modern technology and the effect it's having on human life if you will I think that's going to become the really big secondary issue going forward and again it cuts right across the other one because if you look at the nationalist side uh people like for example uh Elon Musk or Peter Teal are transhumanists they they basically think we should upload ourselves into computers or go and colonize Mars and transform the human species through genetic engineering. Uh they are complete technopiles, technomaniacs you might even say. Whereas on the other hand, someone like JD Vance, uh this is something he's actually quite interested in. He's very much a technoskeepic on these kind of things, hence his hostility towards the tech companies.
And similarly on the left you've got the same kind of divide between the kind of technophilia of people like say Ezra Klein on the other hand the uh deep technoskeepticism of a lot of the radical more green kind of environmental left. So I think that's going to become the big secondary issue and it will replace economics as the major secondary issue while we still have this big primary division uh between nationalists and cosmopolitans and I think that's the big primary division because it grows out of and reflects the fundamental structural tensions in most modern societies. Do you have a guess as to which whether technology will become red or bluecoated in that context or will it just cut across the the spectrum? I think it may just cut across. I mean, I honestly have no idea about that. It it's um be very interesting to see how that works out because you you couldn't say predict at the moment. you would tend to say technoskeepticism coded left, you know, uh, technophiliac coded right. But the rise of what you might call a very clear technoskeepic rights um, in recent years is, you know, really putting that into question. I think >> okay >> people like Rod Dreer for example I mean Rod Rod Dreer is an example you know quite a prominent right-wing intellectual and politicist who's very clearly on the kind of technoskeepic side >> so okay you've made me rethink Trump and I you've made me rethink the current political dichotomy I want to see if there's any other notions that I should overturn and update while you're here uh I have hitherto looked at the culture war mostly as a byproduct of lazy hacks that just it's it's very easy to get people riled up about culture war stuff and it even an idiot can understand culture war stuff therefore hacks go for it because it's mass appeal and it's evocative. Is that right or should I should I reinterpret this as part of the new realignment?
>> Um he's part of the new realignment I'm afraid. I mean there is an element of truth in what you say there. I mean >> uh there is the sort of Richard Hanania idea that basically I mean I know he's extremely annoying but on the other hand he he's quite >> I like Richard. I read him on Substack.
like him.
>> Yeah, I do too. So, he does have this idea that basically a lot of this kind of pol politics is politics for stupid people as you know. That's his that's his notion. Uh and there's no doubt that we have a media environment at the moment which rewards provocative um stirring to use a good British expression uh where the idea is to rile and annoy and wind up as many people as possible. uh so you know the more people used to try and avoid flame wars now it seems that the whole idea is to provoke them and there's undoubtedly something about the modern media that does that however what I would say is that there's an underlying fire which is then being blown up into a blaze by that media context but the underlying fire has a deeper structural cause and it's the fact that a lot of people are you know deeply um uneasy should we say you you know good old German but angsted for that kind of thing about the way the world around them is changing. Uh they find it fundamentally discombobulating and disturbing in a way that makes them feel very threatened and anxious and that's what makes them angry. And then what you get is the media operators who come along and fan that anger and and stir it up and you get political entrepreneurs who act as the voice for it. Now, part of the problem is that the mainstream, if you will, have simply refused to engage with this kind of feeling of uneasy. It's just, oh, you shouldn't feel like this. This is just a sign that you're ignorant, you know. Uh, and not surprisingly, that doesn't go over well.
So, when somebody then comes along and says, oh, yes, you know, you're quite right to feel angry like this, and here's why. uh they then they then like that you know so it's not a smart move that okay >> uh one of the things you know the more creative way to go forward is to say well you know I understand you you you find these kind of things uncomfortable but you know here are what reasons why you know you shouldn't feel so uncomfortable you know you actually speak to the person and say yeah you don't agree with them or give ground to them but what you do do is take their uh concern seriously and say well yeah I understand your concern here's why you should not be concerned is so is is the culture war the flash points in the culture war which tend to be um really gender related. I think most of the most of the stuff is either trans or feminism or manosphere. 90% of the stuff I see is something to do with that. Uh but the green Eminem is a Like it like somehow that'll be a thing we're all arguing about for a week. Is is the idea that they're just sort of uh a a more e ephemeral manifestation of this? this is the traditional tribal uh structure that we've got versus this is the weird pointy-headed uh esoteric belief that got cooked up at Berkeley and we're going to fight about which which one of these two ideas is uh like it becomes emblematic of like hyper cosmopolitan versus the tribe is it something like that >> it is it is like that yes the thing is this the precise content of culture war at any one time is changing so right now it's a lot about trans stuff back in the uh you know when this first began to emerge as a division in politics about things like gay marriage uh pretty soon maybe it's going to move on to something else. The point is that what all these different instantiations of culture, war, conflict have in common is a contrast between an idea of the traditional um settled and established and in quotes because although I shouldn't put in quotes because they don't see it as that way, natural as opposed to the esoteric as you say elite generated academy and university generated and novel and therefore unwelcome uh set of ideas about these things. So that's the and of course there sometimes good reasons to be you know bothered about it. Not all these ideas are uh at all correct or even sane sometimes. Uh but that's the nature of that is the nature of um intellectual discourse really lot all sorts of stuff is going to be floated and then some of it will stick and will succeed and others will not you know this is what this is what happens. So but the point is that that's what the division is. Yes. So it's it's a division of how you feel about cultural, social, intellectual change essentially.
And if you are somebody who is interested in at least exploring or considering these new ideas regardless of where they've come from, uh then you're you're going to be, you know, relaxed about this. And if on the other hand, you see this as alien to you because it comes from a kind of world that you don't inhabit and which you have very little understanding of or sympathy with, then you're going to see it as threatening. uh which is not helped by the fact that the people who are generating the ideas do tend to condescend to you and look down on you as a kind of ignorant hick which is you know say not going to endear uh the objects of that condescension to whatever the ideas the condescenders are advocating. So I I I think I have a pretty good idea of how it works on the the traditional end in that capacity of you know we've got we we have these established gender roles and there's some wiggle room there and you know like of course we're we're in favor of women being able to have jobs and of course of course of course we just think that you shouldn't get rid of gender roles entirely that that's crazy like I I follow the logic there. On the flip side, I tend to think of, for lack of a better term, uh, wokeness or evangelical political correctness or whatever is a kind of mirror universe leftist Southern Baptist evangelical character. Is that how I ought to interpret that or is >> Yeah, very much so. I think that's exactly what it is. It's a kind of distinct subculture of a distinct geographical location, set of scattered locations across the United States and distinct social context in the same way that Southern Baptist uh subculture is.
That's precisely what it is. Um you can also argue about what the sociological function of wokeness, evangelical wokenesses. And my own view is that it's a product or rather its current level of intensity um if you will is a product of um elite overprouction which is one of the major social problems of our time in my view which you know this is Peter Turin's notion that uh the problem is you have quite simply way too many graduates and qualified people for the number of positions that actually require that kind of qualification and so you have lots and lots of people frantically competing anything to show that they have more merit than their competitor. And in many industries and sectors, one of the ways to show that you have merit is to adopt the latest most fashionable views, fashionable with that subculture because that's uh how you indicate you're closer to the vibe, more pure, more meritorious. And so I think that a lot of the spiral purity spirals we've seen in the last 10 years uh the so-called great awakening which is maybe dying down a bit right now it was driven by the increasing intensity uh of competition for increasingly you know vulnerable and fragile roles because this has gone along with a big shift towards casualization in industries like publishing academia and the like. uh you know the number of people who can't get a tenure or tenure track job and have to become itinerant adjuncts is remarkable for example that's casualization in the academy but it's true in a lot of areas this is something I worry about you don't want a society with a lot of unemployed lawyers if you have a lot of unemployed lawyers they're going to stir stuff up you don't want that you want to make sure they got jobs >> oh absolutely I mean as Peter Turin says uh this kind of elite over production has never ended well uh it's always very very challenging. So if you look at the French Revolution, all the major revolutionaries, the jackabins, what were they? They were all unemployed lawyers who had you know gone to law school and thought they were going to get a job in the royal administration and they hadn't and you know they were pretty pissed off. Similarly English Civil War we Oxford and Cambridge turned out an enormous number of theology graduates who just weren't enough ecclesiastical livingings for them. So they decide, no, we're just going to like, you know, cut off the king's head and, you know, overthrow the Church of England, purge it, you know. So this is this does not end well. You >> you note in the book, culture widely defined as now political because it has been politicized by the political left or alternately by the globalist establishment. What What do you mean by that? And does does that mean that the traditionalists are just responding to something that happened in the Ivory?
>> They are responding. uh they are responding in a way because the the ideas to which they are reacting are ideas that have been generated by the radical cosmopolitan left and by the ivory tower of the academy and so on. Um it's not that. Now let me explain though what is going on is this. You get the ideas initially if you like coming out of the radical cosmopolitan left in the academy and elsewhere. There's then a hostile reaction to reject it. But that in turn sparks off a kind of consideration thinking on the reactive rights which leads them very often the more sort of like intellectual members of that you know community to arrive at positions that are much more reactionary than the anybody would have held a few years ago. So you mentioned you know examp push back against feminism for example gender roles and things of that sort. So initially you get kind of radical ideas about transgenderism and also about you know complete doing away with gender roles within the household and you get a push back saying no no you know we want the trad wife and cottage core culture and all this kind of stuff.
But what you then also get is people saying well maybe we've already gone too far in getting rid of gender roles.
Maybe we really want to go full back into gender roles. Uh, and we you start to get people coming up with stuff like, "Oh, it was a big mistake to, you know, uh, give women the vote. We we should repeal the amendment."
>> I know a couple of people that are in favor of repealing the 19th amendment, which sounds insane to me, but for some reason, they hold those views.
>> Yeah, indeed. And that's what that's what it happens. And so this is what what has happened is that the propagation of radical ideas from one side has actually tended to produce um not just push back but even more radical assertions on the other side you know and this is partly a function of the way in which divisions over questions like that are coming to define what the two sides are. Uh and so you end up with people saying well people say oh you believe in traditional generals. Well yes I do and I think we should also take the vote away from women.
uh you get a kind of escalation of the stakes on both sides. Um now this can't go on forever uh for all sorts of obvious reasons but it can go on for quite a long time before you start to get mutual exhaustion if you will or before the people in the middle who think this is nuts uh manage to you know get themselves heard in the middle of all the debate.
So, I I know it's probably very difficult to determine who's going to win the new war uh between nationalists and cosmopolitans. This is a very big if, but I'm I'm trying to wrap my head around the the sort of fundamental flaws in both camps. So there's a there's a school of thought that I am open to as a neoliberal that neoliberalism ultimately by virtue of integrating markets and by virtue of bringing in labor and capital that it just sort of corrods cultural cohesion. And for that reason it will always invite it will always invite kickback from the people that want to have a monolithic coherent idea that it's self-defeating. But on the flip side of the coin, at least in America, I don't know how you could ever really have a a functional nivist system because it's just it's too diverse. The starting point is too diverse. There's no way you can do that in Hungary and kick out, you know, the 10% of the population that that isn't Catholic or whatever. But I I don't know who where where are the weaknesses as you see them in both of these camps.
>> I think that's a pretty good summary really. I think the both sides um on the uh cosmopolitan side the weakness is that I think the people who buy into that and broadly support that set of political positions just have no emotional sympathy with the people on the other side. They do not understand why it is that they're mad and upset and the their lack of understanding leads them to portray them in certain ways and respond to them in certain ways that then enrage them still further. uh it's a kind of self-righteousness if you will which is never a good look uh and certainly not in politics. Uh plus also I think the big problem the cosmopolitans have is that a central part of the vision of society that they want to have the neoliberal vision if you want to call it that is of a particular kind of international economic and political order and that international political order is basically coming apart as we speak nearly. And so the problem is that they're increasingly defending something that for structural geopolitical reasons is on the way out. And I think what they need to do uh I would say we need to do since that's broadly the side I would put myself on uh is to radically rethink what a functioning liberal international order looks like uh and how you do indeed deal with things like the kind of mass migration that is inevitably going to happen in my view. Now the big weakness on the other side it seems to me is the kind of more generalization of the problem you correctly identify in the American case which is that there's an aspiration for something which is simply not realistic. Uh because the people who advocate certain things simply haven't thought through or un not prepared to face up to what it would imply and require. Uh and so for instance, you get people I mean here in the United Kingdom who talk about things like oh we need to remigrate which is a wonderfully euphemism expel in other words minimum 2 million people uh who have legal right to stay. They've been granted legal >> right it's going to be a long weekend to get all those people out of there. A I don't think anybody the people who talk stuff like that have no idea just how expensive and physically difficult that kind of operation is going to be.
Impossible in my view also. But they also believe uh despite anything you could say to them, this is going to actually have no significant economic consequences like you're going to remove know a million people from the labor market basically and this isn't going to have any significant labor market effects which is means you think well what planet are these people living on.
Now you raise the question who is going to win this argument. Well, the trouble is that it could well be that the ultimately the cosmopolitans win, but the nationalists win in the short run, but they find out that what they want doesn't work.
And this is what happened before because we had a big reaction against a previous episode of cosmopolitan globalism in the inter war years. Now, that did not end well. Now, I I hope and trust that we will not end up with a world war again.
But on the other hand, we could still have some pretty bad stuff uh before we come out at the other end of the tunnel.
But I'm quite confident, I think, that I'm more confident that the ideas of the cosmopolitan side will ultimately succeed because they seem to me to have a firmer basis in the reality of the world that we are in. Unless you are an apocalyp apocalyptic person uh and you think that the whole you know existing civilization is going to collapse and you know we're all going to go back to I don't know what barbarian dark ages Europe or something like that.
Uh but that's not what most of the people on the nationalist right think.
They think you can have a modern world but divide it up into uh nations and run through this thick nationality. And I think they're going to find out hopefully not too painfully that that is simply not a practical politics. Uh and what they will have to settle then for is a much more constructive kind of politics of how you can reassert and sustain certain kinds of national identity and cultural traditions and ways of living that people value and want to see continue in a world that is more broadly cosmopolitan and that would be a more constructive kind of politics than we have at the moment. Yeah. You mentioned in the book that uh countries can have two of the three following things. They can have economic growth, low immigration, and cultural homogeneity. You get to pick, which you can't have all three. You can have two of the three. So like Japan went, we're going to go with homogeneity, and we're going to keep our low birth rate, and our economic growth is going to drop down. Now, they could have shuffled that and said, we're going to keep >> uh homogeneity and have high econ growth, but you'd have to dramatically scale up the amount of people born, which nobody's figured out. So it to to map this on to say the American experience, it might be that the na uh the the nationalists take over. We we have low birth rate. We we quit bringing in immigrants, which is the only reason we have a replacement birth rate right now. Uh we have low economic growth. And then they haul me out of the the mothballs. And I go, "All right, what if we bring in more immigrants, but they're high-end immigrants that are going to start more c more Google companies and things like that?" we kind of arrive at a position where there's there's a release valve on top of what they want.
>> Yes, exactly it. I mean, I think actually that is the issue that is going to derail the nationalist agenda because I think sooner or later in one country or another, somebody is going to try this remigration unfortunately.
And what they're going to find is that with the demographic age distribution we now have, you just can't do that unless you're prepared to uh you know default on your obligations to the elderly, which you know uh may well happen anyway mix because they're unaffordable. But certainly you would have to do that. But also um you know you might actually say well you've got to look after your parents. You've got to have your parents come and live with you. uh and you know that's the only way to square the circle because otherwise it's just impossibly costly uh and would mean that almost your entire economy would be devoted to running services and care for the elderly which would destroy other kinds of private consumption. So, I think that is going to be the thing that they they simply can't get their heads around and they'll have to accept that you simply can't have a population without demographics uh and economic homogeneity, you know, um unless you're prepared like Japan to have zero economic growth uh and therefore a much lower standard of living than you would otherwise do. And Japan has the advantage of being a highly uh cooperative society where uh major shifts away from personal consumption are much easier to sell to voters because what they have done is reduce you know private consumption has not grown very much in Japan at all over the last 20 years partly because instead a lot of actual effort has gone into looking after their very large elderly population.
Uh, can you help sort some cognitive dissonance I've got in my mind on this within an American context? I am firmly in the cosmopolitan camp. I am yay immigrant. I live in a city. Uh, while I am not a evangelical woke person berating other people. I'm deeply pluralistic. So if you want to drop acid with your throppple, have a good time.
As long as you mow your lawn, I don't really care what you're doing inside of your house. So I'm I'm on that side of it over here.
>> Yeah. When I when I'm in Scotland though, I am a lot more I'm a lot more sympathetic to that nationalist position because America was founded as a grabag.
So if you add more people into it, you're not changing the nature of the grab bag. We just get more cuisine.
Terrific. Works out really well for us.
In Scotland though, like I it would kind of bug me on some level if like 20 million Chinese people moved into the Highlands. Nothing against them. It would just it would change the nature of the Highlands if if it just if you had that huge migrant in. So am I just selectively racist? What's going on? How do how do I deal with this?
>> No, I mean this is true. I mean the fact is um that large scale really large scale migration of that kind uh is obviously going to transform the whole society to what something it was not before. And so to the extent that you're attached to the previous identity, you're not going to like it. Uh now there are several responses to that. One is to say that well actually as a matter of practicality you do need to control the migration. You can't simply have you know 20 million people moving into the highlands in a country of you know 5 million population. Um even not you'd suffer the fate of sake. Sakee is what used to be a little country north of India and over the years so many nepoese and Asamese people migrated into it that the original indigenous population the lecture became only 10% of the total population. Alternatively another way of dealing with it would be to say well you can is to drop the Dubai model. You can come and live here. You can come and work here. You can enjoy all kinds of civil and legal rights, but you're not a citizen. Yeah.
>> That's what Switzerland does, right?
Switzerland is just like, "Come on over and work. The second we have a downturn, we're kicking every one of you out."
Like, but >> that's the that's another way of doing it. And so, what you can do then is have a close you separate a whole lot of like economic and civil and you know, basic rights from political rights, citizenship rights which are very tightly constrained, which are very difficult to get access to. That's another way of dealing with it. Another way of dealing with it which is easier in some countries than in other is to look at and quite deliberately create uh collective rituals uh which reaffirm traditional identity in which newcomers can participate in as well as established uh residents and which sustain a feeling that well you know it's the same thing every year. I mean in the British context this should be things like well everyone listens to the king's speech on Christmas day or the whole country stops to watch the boat race or the FA Cup final. You know in the American context would be well you can say you know maybe we have all these differences but we're all going to watch the Super Bowl. We're all going to blow up stuff on the 4th of July. Uh this kind of stuff. Yes. So you could say like shared public rituals could play a major part. And I think we underemphasize the importance of ritual, you know, uh, as a thing that does actually bring people who otherwise may be very desperate together. So that's a third strategy that you can use.
>> Yeah. You know, I I think you're on to something there. I mean, like in a Scottish context, if you had a very large influx of Chinese immigrants and the attitude was, "Welcome to Edinburgh.
Here's your tartan. You'll be going to a on Mondays." Like, it would it would take the edge off that. I did karaoke here in Virginia. Uh uh a couple of days ago, the only two guy, me being from Oklahoma, this resonates with me. The only two guys in the room that had cowboy hats were an Asian dude and a black dude. And I was like, "Oh, my guys." Because they were in cowboy hats.
So even though they were different race than me, I was like, "Oh, well, we're part of the same cultural millu. I don't know about these other people, but the guys in cowboy hats were like I could go hang out with them in the parking lot after this." So there is something to that. Um I got two questions left for you. Uh the the uh penultimate question for you is I realize that they are a reasonably small part of the American political electorate, but am I right in thinking that this new cosmopolitan versus nationalist fault line goes right through the middle of the libertarians?
And I ask this because I find that I have libertarian friends that I used to get along super well with and now they're at each other's throats. And it seems to me that it's along lines of immigration and nationalism.
>> Precisely. Yes, it is. I'm afraid. Uh and I I've seen this is what actually gave me the idea in the first place because um I first began to formulate this idea as a prophecy way back around the year 2000 after I read a book by Jenny Postrell called the future and its enemies where she pointed out that if you looked at the anti-globalization protests at that time there was a strange affinity or similarity between Pat Buchanan on the one hand and those radical black block protesters in Seattle >> the other and at the same time it began to notice that the um fusionist coalition of the Reagan years was fraying quite badly and I thought well what is going on here and that's what led me to develop the theory. So I think that yes what has happened is that the fusion the Reagan coalition has completely come apart basically but it's the libertarians who are particularly on the sharp end of this because they more than anyone else have to really answer the question well what matters more to you uh classical liberalism and economic liberty or uh something else and it basically has torn it apart and there's all sorts of reasons why that split exists. One of them is for some people your politics and that political identity is defined in negative terms in not being somebody else. And so if you define your politics as being not the left or owning the libs or whatever it is, uh then you're going to basically identify and shift your own views on specific issues to accommodate whatever the dominant trend in the not the left is. On the other hand also the other question is well um is what matters to you as a libertarian pure purely free markets is do you define your political identity purely and simply in terms of lower taxes smaller government level spending because if you if that's all that matters to you then you might be tempted to throw your lot in and go along as a fellow traveler of the nationalist nivist right uh on the grounds well this is the way to win elections you don't want Zoran Mani as the president, you know, whatever. Uh, you know, better to hold your nose and vote for Trump or JD Vance. Um, you might at least have a chance there.
That's the argument. Uh, and what happens when you make that kind of accommodation is that very rapidly you adopt the arguments and the identities of the people you decide to throw your lot in with. Conversely though, you might feel that actually although you do believe in the low taxes, the small government spending and all the rest of it, your real commitment is to individualism, the rule of law, social liberal principles, cosmopolitan pluralism, if you will. Uh, and in that case, well, you you'd rather, you know, throw your lot in with some people on the left. Not the radical left. You'll still post them as you ever were, but certainly maybe people on the more center left. Uh and so that's how you get this kind of sorting out which is one of the things that happens when you have realignments. Um people find out that people they were on the same side with are suddenly you know bitter opponents uh daggers drawn and all that and people that you used to dislike intensely. You suddenly find you're on the same same side. It's happened many times historically. I I think that the never Trumpers are going through that right now. There's a lot of old Reaganite uh Republicans that are going I think I'm a Democrat, which is unfathomable. Like on my end, I was born in ' 84 and I'm I'm ethnically Republican. That's my background. And then I became a Democrat in college and I I thought I would just go back to being a Republican at some point. And uh the last 10 years I've felt pretty at home with either moderate libertarians, gay Republicans, or abundance Democrats.
and the gay Republicans are kind of dying. Like that that whole like not that he was gay, but the Romney wing of like kind of moderate Republican, that thing is really fading. And I I now find that that the room full of Democrats used to like really irritate me and make me feel not at home. And now there's like a 50% chance that I'll end up hanging out with the Ezra Klein crowd and we'll just like markets are good and like ah fine, I I'll get a cocktail.
>> Oh yeah. Or Matty Eiglazius or someone like that. that's you know >> someone you can have a reasonable conversation with uh you know whereas on the other side you might bump it to Charles Haywood.
>> So uh final question for you most of our conversation today and your book has been descriptive looking at the the overall system and and how it works and I I've really enjoyed that. I am curious given the overhaul that we're doing here intellectually in terms of what defines the left and the right and the fault lines uh in this massive descript have you changed any of your prescriptive opinions have you altered any of your beliefs on what what we should be doing politically or economically uh well yes I mean uh in the sense of politically prudential judgments yes I have changed them one of the things I think that if you're a classical liberal now I I think one of the things you have to uh do is to become uh more open to egalitarianism uh more open to uh rosian kind of arguments or which are critical of excessive concentrations of wealth basically uh or very large concentrations of wealth. Uh so I I think that there are both pragmatic and actually good intellectual reasons at the moment for adopting that kind of position. So that's a shift I've definitely seen in my own kind of views recently. But broadly speaking, my prescriptive politics haven't changed at all. Um, and my view about what you need to do to respond to this is that you just need to know who your friends are and who your enemies are. And for me now, the enemy is quite clearly the illiberal democrats of the of the nationalist right. Uh, these are the real threat to what I regard as the fundamental values which are the liberal values I listed a moment ago. And so the question is the thing is to advocate them very very strongly and to realize in doing so you're going and attacking the people who are currently the major threats to it. You're going to be in alliance with the kind of moderate uh left as often as you are with people in the kind of you know moderate Republican side. Uh and you the people you're definitely going to be against are the kind of the Trump Trump worshippers the MAGA group but also the kind of really radical left the the DSA and so on. So you're you're going to be able I think to define your politics quite clearly and that's the gen the other thing I would say is that what needs to be done very badly as an intellectual project is to rediscover the kind of connection that there used to be between things like free trade, peace, uh radical theories about international relations because as I said the problem we have is that for 40 years or so liberals did not have to think about international relations because we were first in the cold war and then we are in the kind of episode of US hegemany after the end of the cold war and that's all over now and that whole system of treaties agreements international institutions was built up then is falling apart in a world a very dangerous world of great power competition and uh in that context I think you have people have to move away from thinking well it's a matter of producing technocratic global organizations to on impersonal global rules. You have to come up with a more kind of radical uh approach to this which will actually speak to people in the locality where you can borrow a lot of ideas from the radical left actually but many of which are though however um ideas that were originally first formulated by radical liberals back in the mid 19th century. So I think there's also a task of intellectual both archaeology and further development of ideas to be done about that kind of uh issue in politics. All right, I'm going to get on that. Uh, Stephen Davies, it's been a pleasure talking to you. I really enjoyed your book. I think you've given me a very, very helpful mental blueprint. Uh, there's a lot of the book that we didn't get to. I recommend that people read it. It is The Great Realignment: Why the New Right Is Here to Stay. Thank you so much.
>> Thank you for having me.
>> That's the show. Thanks for listening.
Until next time, I've been Andrew Heaton and so have you.
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