Aaron Powell: Welcome to Free Thoughts.
I'm Aaron Powell.
Trevor Burrus: And I'm Trevor Burrus.
Aaron Powell: And joining us today is Jacob
Levy.
He's the Tomlinson Professor of Political
Theory at McGill University.
Welcome back to Free Thoughts.
Jacob Levy: Thank you.
Thank you for having me back.
Aaron Powell: It’s the big question that's
on everyone's mind as we're 100 days or so
into the new regime.
How did we get Trump?
How did this thing happen?
Jacob Levy: There's a lot [00:00:30] that's
very idiosyncratic.
I want to start by talking at some of the
things that maybe aren't so idiosyncratic.
In the long recovery from the financial crisis,
there was a real deinstitutionalization of
politics in the US and across the liberal
constitutional democracies.
One of the things that really stands out to
me in retrospect about the Obama administration
was the rise of Occupy and the Tea Party [00:01:00]
simultaneously and the way in which there
was real activist energy that was taking place
almost entirely outside the traditional institutions
of party of life, and there are real costs
and disadvantages to that.
Parties do important work of mitigating and
moderating and channeling a lot of kinds of
activist energy and of putting the energy
into conversation with institutional traditions.
[00:01:30] What was happening in both Occupy
and in the Tea Party, and then in important
ways in the Sanders campaign and the Trump
campaign even though neither of them is a
direct lineal descendant of those two movements,
was that the party structures were really
breaking down and voters got access to messages
and had access to what they took to be avenues
of change that were so far outside [00:02:00]
of the traditional institutional norms that
the generic election season appetite for Change
with a capital C spun out of control in a
very different way.
I think that we have seen that and are continuing
to see that across a lot of the liberal constitutional
democracies in the post financial crisis era.
I think that we've seen that now with Brexit.
There's some chance as we are talking now
that it will [00:02:30] swallow French politics
with the election of Le Pen, though that's
not especially likely, and it's happening
in countries that are less consolidated constitutional
democracies like Hungary, like Turkey, like
the Philippines, where just the sheer desire
to have things be different is creating openings
for very aggressively authoritarian kinds
of politics that seem to show people [00:03:00]
I'm doing things, and there's an appetite
for great powerful leaders who look like they're
doing things.
Some of it, some of how we got Trump is because
the United States isn't immune to and in some
ways because the financial crisis started
here was ground zero for that radical deinstitutionalization
of [inaudible 00:03:19] creates a real opening
for aggressive, populist authoritarianism.
Trevor Burrus: Well it seems, it's interesting
that these things happened simultaneously
in many different countries.
[00:03:30] You'd have to come up with an explanation
that deals with how citizens in many different
countries ... I mean, maybe they feed off
each other.
Maybe it begins with Brexit and then Trump
voters are like, wow, it could happen, they're
mobilized by that.
Now you move over to Le Pen and you have France,
but insofar as it is a worldwide movement,
could be a sign, a causal chain that's even
deeper than deinstitutionalization of the
financial crisis such as just [00:04:00] the
schismatic information gathering that people
are now experiencing on the internet, like
the death of centralized media authorities
and the ability to kind of learn about conspiracies
like pizzagate and all the crazy things that
your uncle used to send you in emails that
seem to be believed wider than they were before.
Jacob Levy: I'm going to go with the financial
crisis as a more major determinant there.
It's [00:04:30] certainly the case that the
internet has made possible certain kinds of
extra-institutional political organization
that for Occupy and the Tea Party in particular
did make a big difference, but the shared
appetite for extra-institutional and anti-institutional
just sheer shaking things up, that's not I
think something that's very specific to the
circumstance of political organization in
the United States.
If [00:05:00] there's commonality as I think
there is between Trump and Orbán in Hungary
and Erdoğan in Turkey and Duterte in the
Philippines, that's not because the Philippines
and Turkey are equally well-wired or equally
well-prone to online organizations and conspiracy
theorizing.
There's a tradition of conspiracy theorizing
in Turkish politics in particular that long
predates the internet.
The question is why do those [00:05:30] undercurrents
in political life take the form that they
take across these countries now, and there
I think that constitutional democracies rest
for a lot of their popular legitimation on
the ability to deliver relatively steady economic
growth and the long sputtering recovery from
the financial crisis combined in Europe with
the Euro crisis in particular did [00:06:00]
real damage to popular willingness to accept
traditional institutional practices and to
trust traditional elites to be able to keep
things managed well.
Aaron Powell: Sanders is pretty clearly a
direct outgrowth of the Occupy Wall Street
movement.
He speaks the same language as the Occupy
kids, but Trump doesn't look very Tea Party.
In fact, the most Tea Party candidates [00:06:30]
tended to lose in the primary, so I guess
I wonder how much of Trump's success was him
riding that wave versus how much of it was
simply the fact you've always had disaffected
people.
We've had cultural shifts in this country.
They don't have anything to do with the financial
crisis but just changing demographics, changing
complexion of the country [00:07:00] away
from white and towards more minorities, and
so you have a disaffected white voter base
that's upset about the cultural shifts.
Then you have a guy who has a 30-year established
brand.
His voters have seen him on television.
They know him on television.
He's got a personality that, I'm guess I'm
saying, matches [00:07:30] their own in the
way that he talks, the way that he seems to
upset the coastal elite types.
Then you have a primary process that was,
say, not run well from the party's standpoint.
Like people did not drop out when they should
have, so that you couldn't organize opposition
around him, but Trump was never terribly popular
even among Republicans.
He continues to not be terribly popular even
among Republicans.
He [00:08:00] lost the popular vote by 2 1/2
million.
I think he got fewer votes than Romney did,
so he just happened to luck into running against
one of the worst candidates in modern history.
How much of it is like that it's just that
these kind of like almost black swan events
happening around this guy and aren't really
this line from the financial crisis to the
Tea Party?
Jacob Levy: [00:08:30] Some of the details
of that I would quarrel with.
The characterization of the Clinton candidacy
in particular I know that that's solidifying
into a kind of conventional wisdom and I think
it's genuinely mistaken about the character
of the Clinton campaign, but we can trace
a line of descent from the Tea Party that
doesn't require Trump to have been the Tea
Party candidate.
There was a catastrophic failure of Republican
party institutional and structural [00:09:00]
leadership during the primary campaign.
That catastrophic failure had to do with the
real structural weakness of the party, and
I think the Tea Party had contributed to that.
The fact that the last candidate standing
in opposition to Trump was Ted Cruz, who couldn't
buy endorsements from his Senate colleagues
to save his life because he had made such
a profession out of being an anti-institutional
contrarian, not understanding [00:09:30] how
the rules worked, just self-promoting bomb
thrower.
That itself was a sign of how badly damaged
the traditional Republican norms of succession
to the presidential nomination had been damaged
and of course Cruz was squabbling with other
people for the title of Tea Party leadership.
Cruz was engaged in this really very, very
dangerous dance with Trump that badly blew
up on him, spending the first part of the
primary [00:10:00] hugging Trump as closely
as he could so that when as he thought was
inevitable Trump dropped out, he would inherit
all of Trump's voters.
Cruz and some of the other candidates too
were willing to dance very close to the edge
of institutional legitimacy and their attempt
to channel Tea Party anger was part of what
I think so badly impaired the Republican party,
that elites couldn't do what party elites
normally do, which is [00:10:30] to prevent
the party from being hijacked and taken over
from the outside.
It's certainly the case that Trump appealed
to some things in American political life
that are always there, the toxic white nationalism
in particular is always there, and there's
been genuine increase in anti-immigration
sentiment among some parts of the white population
over the course of the last 10 years or so
in ways that are at significant odds with
the facts [00:11:00] since actual net immigration
has been steadily falling.
But in the wake of the financial crisis, economically
disadvantaged white populations look for scapegoats
and immigrants and ethnic minorities are routinely
chosen as the scapegoats under circumstances
like that.
So I do think that Trump's ability to get
as far as he did, to get within the flutter
of a couple of butterfly wings of the presidency
and [00:11:30] those arise out of causes that
we can meaningfully trace to what had happened
over the preceding eight, nine, ten years.
The butterfly wings, they then do matter and
the Comey letter coming when it does and things
like that.
You can't shake the dependence of events on
other events, on details or in circumstances,
but Trump's ability to get that close, that
was a sign of real structural damage to the
normal [00:12:00] institutional structural
functioning of American political life.
Trevor Burrus: Insofar as there's a distrust
of institutions the way you described it the
post financial crisis, but I think that for
a while we've seen Americans having less and
less trust in the federal government.
You see that in some polling.
I think Congress was below the Mendoza Line
I think of like seven, 12% or something.
I think it was [inaudible 00:12:26] who said
that in the '50s, that they were as high as
80% approval rate [00:12:30] for Congress,
which is like mind-blowing.
For my entire life, it's been a well-known
fact the kind of thing that Jay Leno or late
night comedians just we all know they're crooks,
we all know they're not really working for
us.
You have shows like House of Cards that people
think is a documentary or actually Veep, which
is a documentary.
We do live in a Veep world of being a seven-year
resident of D.C., and no one really thinks
that these things are making a stretch in
terms of how this town works.
In the face of that building [00:13:00] up
distrust of Congress and libertarians, I mean,
I've thought this for a very long time.
Like these people are not working for you.
They're working for them, and you should understand
this and maybe we can change something.
Then you get outsiders.
You get people like Trump, and there's often
outsider candidates who come in and say, I'm
not one of them.
I'm coming from a different thing.
This is not new.
I mean, we elected someone who has never held
elected office, but I'm not sure that there
was any reason that would never happen, especially
given [00:13:30] what Aaron said about the
popularity of Trump.
Don't forget that just knowing his name was
a huge boon for him.
Can we just sort of say this is sort of the
culmination of a lot of anti-government sentiment,
and maybe libertarians would be like a little
bit, maybe not in the form of Trump but could
do something with this anti-government sentiment
if we align ourselves correctly?
Jacob Levy: I think that the collapse of institutional
trust and institutional norms is very [00:14:00]
different from healthy distrust of governmental
overreach and what we're seeing in the rise
of populist, nationalist authoritarianism
in the various countries that I've named is
a desire to see power quickly and ruthlessly
exercised.
What is it people distrusted about Congress?
It's not that Congress passed too many laws.
Gridlock, after all, was one of the traditional
names for what people hated about Congress.
[00:14:30] People in Congress spend all their
time talking and they spend all their time
not doing their jobs and they take too many
vacations.
The things that libertarians complain about
with respect to over-powerful national legislatures,
these are not the things that are associated
with the low levels of public trust and the
late night comedian jokes about what life
is in Congress is like.
Open market societies, a free and open civil
society, the liberal order, [00:15:00] they
depend on a certain level of institutional
functioning.
The state is one of those institutions.
The state should be a very restrained one
of those institutions and I do think that
there would be the possibility for greater
institutional trust that went along with a
retrenchment in state activity and state purposes,
but the instrument of let's just get people
to hate the organization [00:15:30] and to
think that there is widespread corruption
or ineptitude or disfunction, that instrument's
too blunt, and what it gives rise to at a
popular level is not a healthy liberal desire
for more trustworthy institutions.
It is instead something that gives rise to
a very illiberal desire to see great leadership.
Trevor Burrus: So you're genuinely concerned.
Jacob Levy: I'm genuinely concerned.
Trevor Burrus: On a broad level.
This is something new, it's [00:16:00] not
politics as usual, and it's worldwide.
Jacob Levy: That's right.
You're right that there are precedents.
As we came out of the '90, 1991 recession,
there was both the Pat Buchanan candidacy
for the Republican party and the Ross Perot
candidacy for the general election, and they
appealed to similar constituencies as one
another and they appealed to similar constituencies
as Trump's base, but of course the Republican
party leadership in 1992 was powerful enough
to protect its [00:16:30] even pretty unpopular
incumbent president, George H.W. Bush, against
the fiery, populist, racist upsurge revolt
of Pat Buchanan.
Well, events just turned out wrong for Perot.
Perot turned out to be too erratic at the
wrong time of the season to still be posing
a credible threat in the fall.
Whereas the, by capturing the Republican party,
Trump put himself in a position to always
[00:17:00] be within arm's reach of the presidency.
Once he had the nomination, there was always
the chance that things would go this way because
voters tend to consolidate around partisan
identity, which is different from trusting
parties [inaudible 00:17:16], but they did.
They tend to vote their team, and elites have
a certain tendency to line up behind their
team.
So Trump had a robustness to his candidacy
that Perot didn't.
When Perot went [00:17:30] off the deep end,
he self destructed.
He exited the race for six weeks, and once
he came back into the race, no one was going
to give him as serious a hearing because he
had shown himself to be erratic and unreliable.
Trump showed himself to be erratic and unreliable
and would suffer a two or three day dip in
the polls and then stabilize again.
Trevor Burrus: But a lot of these things,
yes, he is erratic, and I really am profoundly
not a fan of Donald Trump, so I find it weird
that I'm [00:18:00] defending him.
I'm not.
I'm putting that in stair quotes, but I do
think he's more normal than a lot of people
are concerned, and I think probably you, in
the sense that a lot of his policies have
been tried before.
It's not, he didn't pull these things out
of thin air.
Aside from his kind of muddled communication
style and his ability to say whatever pops
into his head, and if you listen to the Nixon
tapes for example.
If you let the recordings of him, what he
discussed in his office, [00:18:30] it's absolutely
shocking and it sounds quite Trumpish.
He just had the ability with the lifelong
in politics to just turn that off and put
on a different persona and Trump doesn't,
so that's the only big difference.
Maybe it's not that concerning, and on top
of that, we also don't know the level of underlying
support for Trump supporters in the issue
that voting is a coarse instrument.
It could be that 70% of Trump voters were
saying, [00:19:00] okay, negative 1,000 to
Trump, but negative 1100 to Hillary, so I
guess I'll vote for Trump.
As opposed to I really wish Trump was wearing
a military uniform and creating a coup and
maybe some Trump supporters thought that,
but we don't know that underlying support.
Jacob Levy: I wonder what you mean when you
talk about Trump's policies as having been
tried before.
Trevor Burrus: Or at least stated.
I mean, anti-immigration is, comes back perennially
often with the number of foreign-born [00:19:30]
people in the United States.
There have been wars on the press by FDR,
by LBJ.
LBJ, FDR, JFK used the IRS against their political
enemies.
There's just almost every single thing you
can list someone having done.
Anti-trade.
Jacob Levy: My question wasn't about the precedent.
My question was about your sense that there
are Trump policies.
Trevor Burrus: Oh, well, good point.
Yes.
There are two at least I can think.
I mean, he is.
He's thin skinned, so we're afraid of him
using the government [00:20:00] against his
enemies.
That's been done a lot.
I mean, FDR was horrendous on that level,
and people who are paragons of liberalism
behind the scenes were totalitarians I would
say and very, very unsavory people.
That's been done, so he wants to attack the
press, he wants to attack immigrants.
That's been done.
Immigration, trade, those seem the things
that are two beliefs that he has.
Jacob Levy: Those are core beliefs of his.
That's right.
Trevor Burrus: Being thin skinned about the
press.
No, that's not new.
Jacob Levy: But you said something important,
which [00:20:30] was behind the scenes.
Politics is partly created by public speech.
Politics is partly how we live out in the
world where we set norms by what we say out
loud, and Trump's willingness, his eagerness
to say the most toxic and poisonous things
out loud even when he doesn't then as it were
cash the policy check.
That's something that in my lifetime [00:21:00]
is pretty new and dangerous.
Trevor Burrus: I invite you to go read FDR's
economic royalist speech, which is a shocking,
it's almost the murderer's rapist, but two
rich people in the United States and not forget
that FDR banned gold, the private ownership
of gold via an executive order.
He tried to influence the Supreme Court through
a court packing plan.
Jacob Levy: I said in my lifetime, but-
Trevor Burrus: Not in your lifetime.
Jacob Levy: The 1930s are a moment of global
crisis in liberal constitutional democracy.
Trevor Burrus: Good point.
[00:21:30] Good point.
Touche.
Jacob Levy: To say that the United States
was not immune to the crisis of the 1930s,
that to me sounds like an even more pessimistic
version of what I'm saying now, which is the
United States is not immune to the crisis
of the 2010s.
Trevor Burrus: But we made it through.
Aaron Powell: I have become over these 100
days, less scared than I was.
I still, I dislike Trump profoundly.
I think he's not emotionally or cognitively
fit [00:22:00] to hold the office.
I don't think that he can change or improve
in any meaningful way, but I guess my sense
of the amount of damage he can do has been
in decline.
Tell me if I'm I guess wrong in my optimism
here.
My sense is Trump, so he's been by any objective
standard wildly ineffective in his 100 days.
He's failed in almost everything and most
of that is on [00:22:30] him.
He's not a very good negotiator.
He doesn't understand the policy.
He doesn't have the perseverance to actually
do anything, but the thing that I've noticed
is and we heard about this during the campaign,
is that he's exceedingly impressionable.
He'll parrot whatever the last person who
talked to him.
I see that now, so that the one that springs
to mind is his we're going to withdraw from
NAFTA.
That looked like him, he needed something
big for his [00:23:00] 100 days because he
hadn't had anything, and so he, we're going
to pull out of NAFTA, but then within a matter
of days, it was no, no, no.
NAFTA's great, and that's almost certainly
because one of his advisors said, no, no,
no.
NAFTA's pretty good in all these ways.
If that continues, and again I don't think
that Trump is the kind of man who can change,
then it feels like what we may end up with
is four years, because I don't think he's
going to run again, but four years of a guy
shooting his mouth off [00:23:30] on Twitter
and saying lots of things that may spook markets
and spook allies, but in the end the adults
in the room are going to pat him on the head
and say that sounds good, but we should try
this other thing.
Trevor Burrus: Sound and fury signify nothing.
Jacob Levy: Insofar as politics is partly
constituted by our speech in our shared space
and sound and fury is always damaging in its
own right, with respect to international diplomacy,
spooking allies isn't an aside [00:24:00]
to brush off.
It would be hard to overstate how badly those
couple of days were received in Canada and
Mexico and by America's other key trading
partners and allies in addition.
Aaron Powell: But if the trend continues,
then we can ignore what he says and listen
to what Tillerson says or other people.
Jacob Levy: But so here's the question about
the impressionability and the willingness
to parrot the last person in the room.
How much are we willing to bet [00:24:30]
that the last person in the room will always
turn out to have been the one who is, as you
put it, one of the adults in the room?
I have some concern about that.
I don't think there are actually a lot of
adults in the White House.
There are some in the Cabinet who've been
scattered around, but there are not many in
the West Wing who know what they're talking
about.
I think that we got lucky with who talked
to him in what order with respect to NAFTA.
There are going to be a whole lot of things
[00:25:00] over four years, so to say, well,
sometimes we'll get lucky.
Sometimes the erratic-ness will leave the
last position standing is a relatively status
quo one.
Is that more optimistic than saying everything
will always go as badly as possible?
Yes.
Is it grounds for much optimism?
I think not.
That he's ineffective was partly a matter
[00:25:30] of an orientation towards staffing
and legislation, and one thing that presidents
learn over time is what are the areas in which
they can act in a pretty unconstrained way.
They can act in a pretty unconstrained way
with respect to foreign peace, and they can
act in a pretty unconstrained way with respect
to withdrawing from trade treaties.
Those are areas in which the willingness to
shoot his mouth off does relevant damage to
[00:26:00] how our allies, how our trading
partners and how our rivals understand what
the United States is up to and sheer erratic-ness
is very much not a virtue in any of those
domains.
Trevor Burrus: On the shooting-his-mouth-off
point, you've written about authoritarianism
and post-truth politics.
It's always an interesting point made by people
like Hannah Arendt and George Orwell that
authoritarians speak in a particularly [00:26:30]
bizarre way, make you believe 2 + 2 = 5, or
that there isn't even such thing as truth.
I was reading your essay on that, and I was
thinking about something that in the beginning
of Trump I thought a lot about, but now I
think I've kind of clarified my thoughts on
this, but the question of whether or not he's
a live wire just doing whatever comes into
his head or he's crazy like a fox and he knows
exactly what he's doing.
I can't figure out.
He's saying, well, which one is more concerning,
is someone [00:27:00] who has no idea what's
going on and just says everything, or when
he called the Taiwanese president, was that
ignorance or is that real sly scheming?
It's somewhere in between.
It's more, I'm more on the, he's a live wire
who just says whatever pops in his head, but
on that point, you seem to imply in your essay
that the diminishment or almost re-definition
of the truth is intentional or [00:27:30]
that that's what he's going for.
Jacob Levy: I try to be careful not to say
that.
I think that what he has is a lifetime of
learned habits that he developed over the
course of the very unusual kind of local and
familial power that his businesses were about.
Trevor Burrus: And he uses his giant brain
and his common sense as he always says.
Jacob Levy: Yes.
He also built up a certain kind of self-image
[00:28:00] that he does believe to a certain
... I do think that he believes that he's
an extremely smart man, which is terrifying,
but the willingness to make, he might think
of them as, aggressive claims with respect
to the underlying facts, and to use them as
loyalty tests to see who among his immediate
circle is willing to really go out and stand
up for what the boss said and who's not, that's
something that you could acquire in a kind
[00:28:30] of instinctive way that doesn't
require careful calculation.
He's not going to change.
He is who he is, is the thought that we keep
returning to.
The habits that he learned over the course
of this strange kind of business where he's
never really answered to stockholders.
He's answered to certain kinds of investors,
but in a way that meant he often had them
over a barrel as much as they had him.
Someone who is constantly aggressively talking
down and writing down his debt [00:29:00]
and threatening bankruptcy if he didn't actually
declare bankruptcy.
All of those character traits are things that
he more or less unconsciously cultivated in
the kind of brash, kind of bullying world
of being a New York City real estate developer
turned reality TV character.
Those I think are compatible with a willingness
to go farther than he thinks the facts [00:29:30]
bear him out on.
Trevor Burrus: Do you think he believes it?
Jacob Levy: Let me get this one more thought
out before I forget.
One of the most really frightening interviews
that he's given since he was elected was the
one in which he talked about how often he
turned out to have been right.
He gave a speech in which he said something
about the terrible thing that happened in
Sweden last night, and there wasn't anything
that had happened in Sweden last night.
Then something kind of vaguely related happened
in Sweden a couple days later.
[00:30:00] He says, oh, it turned out I was
right.
What that means is he feels, and he said,
that I don't know how it happens, but this
turns out to be the case all the time.
He feels confident in saying things for which
he doesn't have any warrant or any support,
going far beyond what the facts will allow,
and he thinks that the world will see to it
that he turns out with his giant brain to
have seen the future coming.
Aaron Powell: He's just been taking the spice
melange.
Trevor Burrus: [00:30:30] Yes, but does he
believe it?
That's the interesting question.
How much of it is knowing lying, do you think?
Some of this stuff, you bring up the three
million illegal voters.
I have crazy uncles who, I mean they're not
uncles, but I have crazy people in my family
who believe that, who have thought that was
just the way the world works for a very long
time.
If you were ever part of a conservative email
chain, [00:31:00] hopefully you're not, but
you'll see.
They really believe it and they say, well,
illegals are voting all the time.
It's the only reason.
I think he believes this stuff, Trump.
Jacob Levy: I think that he knows that he's
going beyond what he has any clear evidence
for.
We saw it replay about the wiretapping of
Trump Tower.
He has to know that when he's just retweets
[00:31:30] things that he's hearing out of
the corner of his ear watching Fox News every
morning, that the details often aren't going
to be right.
People who have an orientation toward truth
learn from that to say, ah, maybe I ought
to check something once before I just repeat
the thing that I thought that I heard.
He has no reason that he's acquired over his
career to second guess himself that way.
Once he's [00:32:00] said something, he's
willing to double and triple down on it, but
how much he believes it when he says it as
opposed to finding it a convenient thing to
say, a way to score a point against whoever's
annoying him that day, at some level that's
a mystery.
I genuinely don't understand how his mind
works.
But I do think that if he cares at all about
accuracy, then he knows that he doesn't [00:32:30]
speak accurately.
Trevor Burrus: I just want to point out that
FDR, I'm currently working on a long piece
about FDR and Trump, but he was also a well-known
liar to his staff.
Some of his friends by the end of his few
terms had become very distrustful the way
he would actually play his people against
each other.
He also kicked people out of the White House
press briefing room and Nixon had an aide
call CBS after he won in '72 to tell them
that he would break their network because
they didn't play ball in the first term.
Aaron Powell: [00:33:00] Going forward with
Trump, do you think he represents like, so
is there ... I guess, put it this way.
Is there something such as Trumpism as a political
ideological force in American politics in
the sense that, do you think that we will
see whether in upcoming congressional elections
or in upcoming presidential elections Trumpist
candidates who continue [00:33:30] to do,
if not winning the presidency, do well enough
to be scary and well enough to exert a meaningful
influence on American politics going forward?
Jacob Levy: I think so.
I think that this is something that Stephen
Bannon has been right about, to say there
is such a thing as Trumpism at some level
and it's more or less continuous with the
Jacksonian tradition in white American populism.
It is [00:34:00] anti-elite.
It is anti-trade.
It is anti-foreigner.
It is anti-black.
It is populist in the sense of being oriented
toward wholism and saying the true people
is a unified American whole, and anyone we
identify as not part of that whole, therefore
as such is not genuinely American, is something
like an enemy, is something to be treated
with contempt and disdain and outside institutional
norms.
The Republican party has [00:34:30] been riding
that particular tiger for a long time, but
Republican elites were for a long time in
control of what it was they were doing with
that voter sentiment.
This is something that became almost a cliché
about Republican politics was the difference
between what sentiments they would cultivate
on the campaign trail and what their governance
then looked like in Washington.
With the breakdown of the ability of the Republican
elites [00:35:00] to control their nomination
process, a tremendous opening I suspect has
been created for candidates who are much more
genuinely committed to that Jacksonian bi-populist,
nationalist tradition.
Yes, I think we're going to see Republican
candidates for Congress and Republicans elected
to Congress who are instinctively anti-trade,
instinctively anti-immigrant, have very little
affection for the rule of law or for constitutional
traditions as such.
Aaron Powell: [00:35:30] So then does this
... That group of people, that group of voters,
the people who would be, so white working
class, anti-trade, anti-immigrant are a relatively
small demographic compared, and a shrinking
one.
They're also a demographic without a lot of
economic might, and that's going to probably
accelerate as we see more automation take
more of those jobs [00:36:00] and as we see
as more immigrants come in and more people
move out of those small towns to the coasts
and become more culturally ...
Trevor Burrus: Whole Foods-ish.
Aaron Powell: Whole Foods-ish, yes.
Does that mean that that movement is not sustainable?
Because we have a kind of all or nothing system
in the US, like we can't have them [00:36:30]
take some minority party status, they can't
carve out as much of a chunk, and certainly
not successful at the presidential level,
and then does this provide an opening for
the Democrats to take over as the party of
cosmopolitanism, as the party of trade and
an open society?
Jacob Levy: I think the answer to the last
question is yes.
I think that some of the answers to some of
the premises leading up to that [00:37:00]
are more ambiguous.
For one thing, the Senate doesn't get reapportioned
as population moves around and as it were
the Jacksonian populations, there's a certain
number of states that they are just going
to continue to be overwhelming majorities
in and the Senate will provide a relatively
long-term public and powerful representation
for them.
Another thing is that it's not just the white
working class.
It remains [00:37:30] true that there was
an income gradient for willingness to vote
Republican in the last election, and within
states or within regions, you could get a
relatively strong income gradient.
Richer people were still more likely to vote
for Trump.
Some of the strongest support for Trump was
from local business elites in rural or exurban
or post-industrial or non-coastal places.
There was a significant donor class that was
associated [00:38:00] with all of that.
That is to say there are people who are going
to continue to have economic resources they
can divert to the support of causes like that.
It's not just the people those people employed.
It is their employers in all of the non-coastal,
non-cosmopolitan, non-elite parts of the country.
Then finally, constitutional democracy works
better with two relatively functional parties
and [00:38:30] in a presidential system in
a two-party system, there's going to be a
certain amount of alternation in power.
Political scientists emphasize the difficulty
of winning a third term in a row.
There's an amount of voter fatigue that sets
in.
This by the way is one of the reasons why
I think that Hillary Clinton is getting a
bad rap for having been a bad candidate.
Compared to political science models about
where the economy was and about seeking a
third consecutive term for the same party,
she did just fine.
[00:39:00] But eventually there will be party
turnover, and if one of the two major political
parties is in the grip of anti-institutional,
anti-constitutional, anti-rule of law, anti-alliance
and all the rest authoritarian sentiments,
then you're always one mistimed recession
or one mistimed FBI letter away from a very
bad outcome.
Trevor Burrus: You've written about the political
correctness thesis, which is obviously a very
nebulous term, [00:39:30] whatever that means,
but it's also related to identity politics.
You push back saying that political correctness
is not, and identity politics is not the cause
of this.
It actually maybe paradoxically for liberals
in the small L sense, identity politics is
a good thing.
Why is that?
Jacob Levy: There were a couple of different
moving parts to that essay.
One of them was the explanation of the election
itself.
There were [00:40:00] a lot of people who
had written in the immediate aftermath of
the election essays that had the conclusion
that eventually got reduced to a cliché that
said that's how you get Trump.
Trevor Burrus: Yes.
"This is why Trump won" is the new "Thanks
Obama."
Jacob Levy: Yes.
So that's how you get Trump because, well,
black people or gay people or trans people
or women or some cultural elite or member
of Hollywood society said something relatively
aggressive in demanding recognition for [00:40:30]
or accommodation for some minority interest.
It's a morally toxic argument insofar as it
treats the white conservative voters as passive
responders.
They are merely objects who when they are
acted upon, they will lash out.
One of the things that I said a number of
times over the course of the last year and
before the election was [00:41:00] the voters
who feel so insulted by coastal, cosmopolitan
and minority elites, I'm not sure that anyone
had said anything as bad about them as, you
in a fit of pique will elect the presidency,
someone who is mentally and emotionally incapable
of holding the office and who has no relevant
competent experience, and who is a serial
sexual assaulter and who is a serial adulterer,
a bankrupt and a ... The idea that they were
[00:41:30] other elite, the other insults
going around that were bad enough to justify
that, which was a much worse thing to do than
what they were being charged with in the first,
that seems to be just a very strange account
of morality and social morality.
But more importantly, when you look at the
polling over the course of the campaign, Trump's
moments of most aggressive political anti-correctness
or incorrectness were the moments [00:42:00]
when his poll support cratered.
His attacks on Judge Curiel for being incapable
of hearing a case against him because he's
Mexican, his attack on the Khans, the speculation
that Mrs. Khan was not able to speak because
she's a Muslim and Muslim women aren't allowed
to speak, and the Billy Bush tape, those are
moments when his poll results really cratered
very quickly.
That, it seems to me, is just fatal for the
thesis that says what [00:42:30] we had was
a sheer hunger for political correctness and
for telling feminists and minorities what's
the what and for making them back off.
It was a close election that he lost the popular
vote for and where his ability to cut across
the finish line was in detail, well, it was
about the timing of the Comey letter.
It wasn't because he had bravely stood up
to the forces of feminists or ...
Trevor Burrus: So why is identity politics
okay, though?
Jacob Levy: [00:43:00] Because identity politics
provides a way to channel the energy of knowing
where the shoe pinches.
The populations that are injured or disadvantaged
by state policy very often in the United States,
for example African Americans, they rally
and they organize and they put political energy
into things because they understand at a basic
level when they are being [00:43:30] targeted
and mistreated.
We've read, we in this building, have read
policy document after policy document for
as long as any of us have been politically
literate about the evils of the drug war,
about the evils of civil forfeiture, about
the evils of over-incarceration.
Terrifyingly little happened or things got
worse and worse and worse.
Then Black Lives Matter [00:44:00] happened
over the course of the last several years
and for the first time in my lifetime, there
was a real political movement about over-incarceration,
about police mistreatment, about the drug
war that provided enough political cover that
the Obama administration's Justice Department
was finally in about year six of his presidency
able to start making tiny but in the right
direction changes.
After a generation [00:44:30] of every change
being in the wrong direction, it seemed to
me that Black Lives Matter was doing real
work at channeling and organizing black political
energy because people get emotionally invested
in things when they sense at an inchoate level
that it really matters for them, for their
lives, for their communities.
More good got done over a couple of years
on police, on prisons, on the drug war as
a result of Black Lives Matter [00:45:00]
than as a result of policy paper after policy
paper after conference after workshop among
libertarians who understand the evils of those
things but who don't have the same kind of
ability to organize and channel a mass political
movement around them.
Aaron Powell: We're recording this right now
as the building around us is in a festive
state celebrating the 40th anniversary of
the founding of the Cato Institute.
What does we've discussed [00:45:30] today
so far say about and for the future of the
libertarian movement that Cato is a part of?
Does Trump's victory and the forces that led
to it change the way that libertarians should
approach our overall mission?
Does it say that we've somehow failed in that
mission?
Should we be at least, is there any [00:46:00]
cause for optimism about the future of Liberty?
Trevor Burrus: Or I had one more question.
I was actually talking with Matthew Feeney,
a sometime cohost of Free Thoughts, which
is, should we worry about if we don't resist
the regime we'll be considered like a Vichy
government that are collaborators with when
Trump goes away?
We'll just resist it with all of our might
and never try to work with them.
Jacob Levy: Yes, I do think we should worry
about that.
I absolutely think that we should have an
orientation toward [00:46:30] very, very firm
and clear opposition throughout the Trump
presidency.
Trevor Burrus: Even on things that we might
agree with him on.
Jacob Levy: I think it's important not to
chase little shiny objects and not to say
because one person we like, someone we've
been going to meetings with for a long time,
someone who says things like what we say got
appointed to one position, or because in Trump's
erratic random descriptions [00:47:00] of
various things, one day the stopped clock
happens to say something relatively deregulatory
that suddenly we say, well, we will cooperate
on areas of shared interest.
If you understand that the Trump administration
is basically erratic, basically lawless, basically
opposed to the free and open society, if you
understand that there's never going to be
a serious deregulatory movement as much as
there's going to be just a kind of chaotic
[00:47:30] under-enforcement of regulations
that will remain on the books, thereby significantly
increasing regulatory uncertainty because
you never know when you're breaking the law
and when you're not.
If you understand that tax cuts and deregulation
combined with increasing trade barriers are
really very rarely a net improvement in market
conditions, then the stance has to be one
of very clear, consistent, principled opposition.
[00:48:00] Even more profoundly than that,
libertarians are a part of the liberal, Democratic,
constitutional market center in an important
way.
This is something that I have been thinking
about and taking a lot more seriously not
just since Trump but in the wake of the populist
uprisings around the world.
I do think that libertarians have underappreciated
how much our vision [00:48:30] for a free
and open society is one that is situated within
the institutions of liberal constitutional
democracy, and that which is bad for liberal
constitutional democracy is bad for our vision
of the free and open society even when there's
an occasional as it were haphazard policy
win.
We need to care about the health of the political
institutions that keep at bay the forces that
would destroy the whole system that we are
aiming for.
Aaron Powell: Thanks for listening.
This episode [00:49:00] of Free Thoughts was
produced by Tess Terrible and Evan Banks.
To learn more, visit us at www.libertarianism.org.
