When Political Economy Mugged Us
S1: Biden, Harris and the rest of the socialist world fundamentally change this nation, they want open borders, closed schools, dangerous amnesty, and will selfishly send your jobs back to China while they get rich.
S2: Today, almost 80 percent of Planned Parenthood abortion facilities are strategically located in minority neighborhoods, the greatest prolonged economic expansion in American history, the lowest unemployment rate in nearly 50 years. We have not forgotten the incredible people who are willing to take a chance on the businessmen who had never worked in politics.
S3: Hello and welcome to Dreamcast, I’m Virginia Heffernan. I am increasingly obsessed with this photograph of Kimberly Guilfoyle. Of course, you all know her as the consort to the president’s eldest son, Don Jr., very proper and normal person who left his wife and five children in twenty eighteen and came out as Guilfoile escort around the same time. But the photo of Guilfoile I’m obsessed with, it’s not from 2018 or even 2020 and definitely not from Monday night at the Republican National Convention, where she shouted to the heavens like Medea, about something apocalyptic and terrifying and worthy of extreme volume, I’m sure, but something I didn’t get the content of because I watched with the sound off and only the parodies. Anyway, quickly, I turned to this other photo from way back. In 2004, it’s part of a glossy, expensively shot spread in Harper’s Bazaar of what the magazine called at the time, the new Kennedy Camelot. There she is, the new Jackie Kennedy. Kimberly Guilfoyle herself, looking just like she does today, if slightly more mammalian. She’s lying on what looks like a very scratchy but opulent Tabrizi rug surrounded by antique chairs. I can’t identify, but let’s just say luchadores. And the room is entirely Trump, though. Through the window, you curiously see that Manhattan, not D.C., but San Francisco Bay. And there’s Don Jr., who’s holding Guilfoile in his arms while they’re both on this scratchy multimillion dollar to rug, looking slightly weird. Actually, the more I look at Don Jr., yeah, OK, he’s clean shaven, doesn’t have the beard of now, but he’s got the same haircut, maybe his hair is lighter. And then here I am zeroing in on his face. And it is not Don Jr. at all. If the new Jackie of 2004 is the beautiful Kimberly Guilfoyle and a shoulder length black dress on that scratchy rug, the new Jack Kennedy of 2004 was Gavin Newsom, Democrat, then the mayor of San Francisco and married to Miss Guilfoile. Now he’s the governor, Gavin Newsom. And you know this. He’s the governor of California, the bluest of blue states, while his now ex-wife, Kamelot, it couldn’t last it, stepping out with Don Jr. in the reddest of red events at the Republican National Convention. And yet what hasn’t changed in two decades is that the ruling class still makes Pawni love to each other on an getting scratchy tibias rug in their Loui Catorce penthouses. And Kimberly Guilfoyle is apparently always at their side. So that was around four hundred words I just gave you on this photo, and it’s worth at least a thousand. So get into Google and find this new some Guilfoile photograph and I’ll leave the last six hundred words to you to produced what in hey, though, I ask you, has changed since 2004 if a Democrat Newsome and a trumpet Don Junior can pose in the same hideous style room with the same woman and the same reigning conceit of glamour and how can we change? Give the Botox a rest, stop being preserved in amber so that this photo comes to represent finally an obsolete set of aspirations as obsolete as an image of Marie Antoinette or one of those fat cats of the 19th century in waist coats. This, in many ways, is the topic of my conversation with Kurt Andersen today. Kurt is the host of the late great Studio 360 and author of a zillion books, most recently Fantasyland How America Went Haywire and Evil Geniuses The Unmaking of America. That’s the recent book, and it is currently a New York Times best seller. I’m going to ask him about everything, including that hideous photograph. Kurt, welcome to Dreamcast.
S4: Happy to be back. I am so glad you’re here. And I admit I had to read this book quickly, but it was easy to bolt down because you don’t really want to look away. It is a shipwreck that you’re describing, but it’s familiar, and yet your descriptions make it new again. And that is the fate of America over the past. I’m going to say I think you do it about 40 years.
S5: Well, I do a quick American history for a couple of few centuries in a couple of chapters. But really, the the focus begins. We you know, if a screenplay, we would say nineteen seventy exterior, you know, nineteen seventy to to two thousand is the meat of it. But I go on to the present day and talk about what I always thought was a thing that just happened, which is to say how unequal and insecure and, and bad our system got for most of its people. But then I realized no, it was a lot more like a strategic class war than I ever realized, partly because I was doing fine, not being on the side of the people fighting the class war, but certainly benefiting from the class war, you know.
S4: Yeah. So this book, Evil Geniuses, is a kind of companion or an answer to or works in concert with your last book, Fantasy Land. So give us the fantasy land thesis and then tell us how it rolls into the thesis of the new book.
S5: I shall do that. Fantasy Land was I mean, both of them began with thoughts I began having around. The turn of the century is like, wow, how did America get this way? And then how did America get this way? The fantasy land. What happened was how did we become so a crazily religious as opposed to simply religious as a country. And so unlike the rest of the rich world in that and and more generally, how did this I can believe anything I want super subjectivity get so out of control. And I just finished when I started saying, OK, I’m going to do this, I’m going to try to do a book about this. I just finished a novel, much of which was set in the late sixties. And I thought, oh, maybe. I think it’s a lot of us started in the late sixties, which I do think in which I wrote about. But then I realized, no, it’s it’s a lot bigger and older, longer standing than that. This American I will invent myself. I will invent a country. I will think anything I wish, despite what the elite thinks, obviously goes back a lot longer. So it’s the end. And America invented modern entertainment. And so the kind of falsehoods, fictions of entertainment jibed nicely with Americans natural predisposition to believe falsehoods and delusions if they were entertaining enough. So that’s what Venezuelan’s about, how how that piece of our national character, which was a kind of chronic condition, became an acute illness and went out of control over the last forty or fifty years. But then as I finished it and as I was doing all that research, and then as I was talking about it to people and realizing, well, that’s just really half the story of how we got so fucked that the other half of the story is this very not this kind of ambient irrationalism, but this very deliberate effort by these very rational people marching after Milton Friedman and economic libertarianism changed the whole political economy and how people thought about the market and and what was important and that profits were all that were important and changed enough Americans. About that thing that they change the system and made us yet again, unlike any other rich country and how unfairly we we treat seventy five percent of our fellow citizens in economic terms. So that’s how they do. They are, you know, companion volumes, really about about how we went from a country that seemed when I was a child, when I was young, fairly equal and was and fairly contented and boats rising together. And yes, people were religious, but they didn’t try to bring it into the public sphere all the time to this mess we’re in now.
S4: Yeah. I mean, and you also and these are central questions for Dreamcast that have been, you know, is Trump and Trump ism crazy or crazy, like a fox. And it’s always been a question for the show. And Fantasyland has sort of the crazy part or it’s like profusion of superstitions and supernatural beliefs, kuhnen kind of stuff. And then this book is I don’t know if it was any less fun to write that these are less amusing people, at least the characters that populate the book that are, as you say, actually highly rational and doing something that was difficult to detect. That kind of surgical operations in the 80s and 90s toward what we were told, frighteningly, was deregulation. And as like as a kid in the 80s, I just couldn’t be very afraid of deregulation. Well, exactly. You know, when my mother told me breaking up, you know, the big bell, AT&T was the worst thing that ever happened. I just you know, I couldn’t quite keep my eyes open. Like, didn’t we have the Russians to fight?
S5: And you were a board child by all this tedium. And I was a board young man with all this change. It was death by a thousand cuts. I mean, there was this big idea of, oh, let’s make America like it used to be like a small town like Bedford Falls. Right. Ronald Reagan will lead us there and then not enough people. I mean, let’s stipulate I didn’t vote for Reagan. I always voted for Democrats. I was a liberal, but we didn’t quite look at the fine print of how this was going to be done, nor. Oh, yes, of course, Reaganism was all about gigantic, unprecedented tax cuts for the rich and big business right away. So that was a big thing. But they didn’t end Social Security and Medicare or or or stop the environmental protection regulations. So it wasn’t like it. It’s so bad. Right. But what they did in so many ways that I was unaware of as you were with deregulation, they they did so many things that I really didn’t know until I went back to do this research. I hadn’t realized that it was this this war on many, many, many theatres of war and many fronts and and special ops and in in so many ways of changing laws and regulations and codes and norms. We talk about norms so much these days and being broken. But but my gosh, in a generation and certainly in two, they just they transformed this economy and didn’t end the New Deal. We still have a minimum wage law. Just minimum wages are not half what they were. We still have Social Security, but they just it doesn’t rise as much as it used to. So they didn’t and the New Deal, but they ended the kind of American consensus that the New Deal and a kind of social democracy was a good thing.
S4: So as you were looking into the thousand cuts, you know, and getting very into the weeds of what some of these changes were, what are some that struck you? I mean, that that that we might not have noticed at the time. You know, the way that that movie, The Big Short tells, you know, of specific moment KRUX moments that led to the 2008 crisis. So what are the ones that going back over that you hadn’t noticed at the time but that you believe has been consequential?
S5: Well, and much of which I didn’t notice as people did start noticing things like crazy inequality growing by the mid 90s, I was doing fine. So whatever, I don’t know. But for instance, the Davos person, let’s just admit, I never I never went to Davos. So when and they line us up and shoot us, I think I’ll I’ll get to the second or third week because I was never in Davos, you know.
S4: Ted, Ted, did you go to Ted Horse?
S5: OK, Ted. Right. With my fellow scientists and intellectuals. OK, exactly.
S4: And none of whom had any contact with Jeffrey Epstein or MIT money that came not not high personally. The revolution, it’s going to be difficult because it’s really hard to be untainted. If you stepped if you got near Larry Summers at Harvard, you’re in trouble.
S5: Yeah, but to your point, as you know in this book, one of the the slices of cheese on its sandwich is my Mayakoba. I, I, I taught myself I. Call myself a liberal, useful idiot. But anyway, what surprised and shocked me, I mean, just one little thing I remember thinking when I first heard in the 1980s that the companies were buying their own stock to make the price go up, thinking, wow, that doesn’t sound kosher. Is that legal? One. But I ignored it and moved on and didn’t think about it anymore. Right. So stock buybacks until this quiet little sec rule change in nineteen eighty two, it was you couldn’t do it that was illegal in America for a company to buy shares of stock to pump up the stock price. Then as of now go ahead and do it. And if anybody abuses it, well, we’ll take care of it. Well, thirty eight years later, they have never the in the federal government have never said, no, you can’t do that. No. You’re abusing. No, that’s wrong. And it has become this crazily main engine of the the the the rich people’s economy that now I didn’t know until I did the theoretical geniuses that most of the earnings profits of most big companies is spent on this now that most of the of the stock bought by Americans in any given year is this is companies buying their own stock. So it’s really like, well, that’s nuts. Aren’t you supposed to be building your businesses and creating new jobs and innovating and doing that rather than just this kind of Ponzi scheme, self dealing machine? Your stock look more valuable by spending money for it, but that’s where we are. So that amazed me.
S4: That is a fantastic detail because though it looks like fantasy land is about storytelling and and the icing on the cake in this book is more about political economy and the sort of deep, deep currents that have led us to this pretty pass. In fact, they’re they’re knotted together. I mean, if you’re trying to make the stock price look big, inflating. Yeah, inflating your value is a very Ronald Reagan actor thing to do, you know, and and gets to the PACs around this sort of semi religious idea that we’ll all just believe we’re bigger and more powerful and whatever than we are and and commit to a series of prosperity gospel. So be buying your own stock would seem to be kind of getting high on your supply. Prosperity Gospel one. No one believe you’re rich and you’ll be one hundred percent.
S5: And I make that very comparison. It’s like, you know, charismatic Christians who feel the feel the spirit within them and speak in tongues to show how much how much they believe in in the word of God. And it seems kind of the same thing. It’s a show off Fakhoury charlatanism to me and and to the point of religion. I mean, yes, we are a free market economy. Always have been are maybe always will be. But the degree to which as part of this project of my evil genius is the degree to which the free market, as it’s done here in the United States, became this quasi religious faith, really, rather than just like not works pretty well and we don’t know it, OK? And other countries do it differently. But the the religiosity of of of extreme free markets where all that matters is profit and all that matters is share price. And that’s a whole other history of how that how that was changed, that didn’t, you know, up until the eighties. That just wasn’t true, and Milton Friedman published this amazing thing called the Friedman Doctrine in the New York Times magazine in 1970, where you could have published your own Heffernan doctrine and changed the world. But he did in 1970. And it really did begin this change of how. Americans and certainly American business people thought what their obligations were, which is to say that after the 70s, they decided we have no obligations to anything but profits by any means necessary and our personal wealth to whatever extremes we want to push it, you know?
S4: OK, so I want to go back to the 70s and maybe this is a little maybe pull the pins out of the story a tiny bit by saying it’s the 70s. My mother’s extremely concerned about deregulation and intercontinental ballistic missiles and how horrible Reagan’s going to be. And we’re doing disarmament marches. My brother and I have said on this show before sat on the streets of Hanover, New Hampshire, and posed as the two last children after the nuclear apocalypse in a play called No Last Flower, and sort of passed the hat for, you know, to raise awareness of how close we were to the apocalypse. And out of the corner of my eye in Hanover, Dartmouth College was there at the corner of my eye, the Laura Ingraham’s of the world and the Dinesh D’Souza is where we’re we’re creating this much more fun version of life. And I heard about I bankers, investment bankers, and they were clean cut and they weren’t stoners and they were somehow more energetic than stoners. I don’t know. Probably they just worked out a lot, but maybe they took cocaine. But they certainly looked like happier than our malaise. Carter people that kept telling us it was times like how great things had been before Reagan was elected. And I looked around me and thought things look pretty great now. I felt even television of the colors on the television screen became more vivid, you know, and there was less mumbly, stumbly 70s acting in movies that you couldn’t hear really as a kid. I just remember thinking, you know, that verité style of American filmmaking. And I just want to clean clear heroes and villains. And I also thought, I don’t know why my parents and all the liberals I know are telling me things were great under Carter and now things are really bad. When I kept turning on the TV and seeing handsome Ronald Reagan looking like he was going to sweep us off our feet. And even when you say, well, things were good, they were getting more equal in the 70s, that was a depressing time.
S3: That was also a time of stagflation. It was a time that when you look back, it was just felt like it was everybody was just getting divorced and getting sad. That’s what it felt like. And what’s weird now is we have massive deregulation and we have the the circumstances for what should look like a Reagan’s America.
S4: To my child, I was like, we’re going great guns. And all it had to happen was they had to take the shackles off me. And I you know, I didn’t have to be beholden to these kind of slave morality. And these are some ideas from the New Deal, whatever the hell that was, that we’re just going to make it so that I couldn’t live the life of a young person making a ton of money in New York. That’s all they wanted to do was clip my wings. That’s what I thought of the 70s. So now we have a time where you might be that way again with with Trump in charge and supposedly empowering all these people to pick up guns and make money.
S3: And yet we have those suicide numbers again, like the 70s. We have this like a culture of despair. So I what I, I guess I don’t get is when were the good times and what did the why did the 80s managed to skate through all the way through the end of the Cold War and make it look like progress?
S4: And then why are we in this in the second iteration, the more grotesque iteration of Reagan? Why are we kind of grounding out right now?
S5: There’s so much to unpack there, Virginia. OK, so that means it was a bad no. I mean, as you know, you can do something with it. I mean, much, much of what you young Virginia felt and saw in the 70s and early 80s, I think was this this year, certainly in the 70s, was this hangover from the sixties and and like, oh, my gosh, OK, we’re all exhausted. Yeah. Maybe we liked everything that happened in civil rights, the beginning of feminism, but. Oh, it’s exhausting, which but it seemed as though liberalism was still. You know, the Hedgeman and that you couldn’t turn back. Yeah, you could have some some course corrections in the 70s and 80s, as they did in Sweden and the rest of know social democratic Europe and everything. But it wasn’t going to be this crazy right. Turn this anything because nothing like that has ever happened. And and and liberals, because they ran the media and culture and the political economy and Washington, you know, it was like, don’t don’t sweat it. It’s not really going to change. And then Ronald Reagan got elected. OK, Ronald Ronald Reagan elected. But it’s going to be one of these course corrections like we had in the late forties and early fifties, where briefly there was a Republican Congress and and McCarthy. But then it went back to normal. And and Dwight Eisenhower was was was one of his big pride points of pride was how aggressively hit enforced antitrust and, you know, nothing. And really, it was still the New Deal consensus. But so but, you know, what we didn’t know is is what was about to happen. So the fact that American economic equality had risen just consistently as the middle class became this gigantic thing and everybody thought they were middle class and kind of were and and all and prosperity was grand, even though rich people were taxed highly. And all this from from nineteen thirty eight to nineteen seventy six. When America achieved its maximum economic equality of all time, things were good. But this late sixties like hangover, end of the acid trip, you know, did too much coke last night. Whatever pick your metaphor gave, among other things, my evil geniuses the chance because they were also the coffee generation. The your point, that was a phrase at the time, the chance to build these new institutions and and do their damnedest at Dartmouth and elsewhere to change the way the chattering class, the intelligentsia and normal people thought about how fair the system should be. Or more to the point, not that it didn’t need to be fair. We didn’t need to enforce fairness. We didn’t need to work. How big corporations got, you know.
S4: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think maybe part of the reason it also clicked with the tired, tired, 70s hungover crowd is that, um, Reagan, one of the things I keep going back to you in this in the debate over statues, you know, these Confederate statuary is that it was 1980 when Reagan got Maya Lin at twenty one, authorized her to design the Vietnam Memorial. Reagan Reagan did not get. Well, all right, OK. But I mean, it was on his watch that it was Bill.
S5: I wrote about it. I was there.
S4: OK, good point. Good point. But I’m sorry it didn’t get but she she but on his watch it was Bill and he certainly wasn’t taking it apart. And, you know, and that was as we know, it was meant to be a scar. It was meant to represent the grief and shame. And there was debate about it, but it still got built, you know, right smack in the middle of Washington. And the idea that the this is what I mean about the maybe our 70s consciousnesses were not so immediately affronted by Reagan because he had some truck with with the arts, even with it to some extent, even with free, even with California stuff, you know, free love and free speech and all these things that were later co-opted by the right. Right. Second Amendment kind of thing. I was I mean, not to just go down. I want to hear your stories, not mine. But I was writing about John Searle, the philosopher, recently, and discovered that he, like a lot of free love people, his his work in free love and free speech came out of panty raids of the 50s and 60s. They would recruit people appalled by coeducation who were basically driven crazy by a guy who stole lingerie from girls dorms to say, well, let’s make this your these are your politics. That’s right. And and that it somehow goes with feminism. And so then you end up with, like, you know, these really strange kind of avant garde figures like like Roger Stone, you know, doing all this performance art in public space. And you could sort of say to yourself, well, deregulation. That sounds good.
S5: Well, there you go. You know, there you go. That that is a big thing in my story that happened, which is to say the late 60s, 70s and on thing of liberty, ultra individualism, I can get high. I can wear jeans all the time. I can have as many guns as I want. I can make as much profit and pay my employees. As little as I want, I can marry somebody of my own gender. It was all like, wow, find your own truth, find your own bliss, do your own thing. Yeah, but, you know, once once people like Laura Ingraham got a hold of that and and the Milton Friedman writes, it was like, yeah, that applies to us too. And and, you know, you do your thing and I do my thing. And if we meet it’s beautiful. Applied to all these bad, you know, you know, economic, the economic war, the class war, as well as having as many guns as you want, all the cultural parts of the right, the project of the right. It was the dark flip side of, you know, dude, I’m going to do whatever I want, you know?
S4: Yeah. So I want to talk to you. I talk about you now as a beneficiary and a witting, unwitting idiot. No useful, useful liberal idiot. Because I think it’s probably I mean, nobody has a completely morally defensible career. But I think that, you know, all of us former neoliberals now, probably now like lost in the wilderness types who’ve had our our worlds remade are having to contend with, you know, how much we invested in certain institutions and how much we benefited from, if not Darvas, from Ted or from the idea that, you know, in my case that startups were going to disrupt all these institutions and that hacking them was the way of the future up to and including some kind of Cambridge Analytica thing and how clever that kind of thing could be.
S5: Or and the Internet met democracy and the Internet.
S4: Right. And the Internet and connectivity was a given good. And that it would. Right. And that it would it would advance the liberal agenda while also being a lot of fun. And I think I’ve had to rethink all those things and have moved to the left. I don’t know if you have to.
S5: The story of this book is how on economics, certainly in this century, the last decade or more, I have absolutely no for the left from you know, I grew up as a Gary Hart, Bill Clinton, Bill Bradley, Bob Kerrey, they’re all fine. The New Democrats were fine by me. But that that’s exactly the problem is, is that there ceased to be an economic left up anywhere close to power in America. Used to be the unions and the Democratic Party. And then it wasn’t the Democratic Party and the Democrats. The New Democrats were just liberal Republicans as literal liberal Republicans ceased to exist. You know, I mean, basically nobody. Yes. You know, yeah. We want to keep welfare a little more than you do, but like we all agree, right?
S4: Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah. We’re sort of on the same page. And we were sort of saying this before the show that, you know, you were everyone in New York at least was sort of, you know, maybe one degree of separation, one or two degrees of separation from someone that like, you know, thought Trump might be OK, you know, or would be good for the markets or even more than that. Had worked for Ivanka Trump for a long time and actually thought she was a moderating influence or maybe all the way to has always voted Republican and so voted Republican. And those were the people that you were in the same room with that New York magazine and know they were the people that bought New York magazine, you know, and kept everybody in business. And this is where I want to get back to to you know, I don’t know if you’re owning it as complicity, but what things were sort of invisible to to you, to us, to the media in the nineties, in the arts and even that, you know. Let us try to not to predict Trump and also to be on our back foot when he was finally elected.
S5: Well, I you know, I know nobody predicted Trump. I mean, that’s effectively true. So beyond Trump and as the as the final Frankenstein come to life apotheosis of Republicanism of 50 years, you know, it was if if you were earning a decent income and having fun as a member of the creative class in the 1980s and 90s, certainly whatever, like, oh, that’s too bad about what’s happening in Pennsylvania in the steel mills. Oh, that’s too bad. What’s happening in Detroit to the auto industry, that’s all. Look, all these jobs are being offshore and automated. That’s too bad. But like it it wasn’t there wasn’t it was barely on the political table as as a set of issues other than it’s too bad. And shouldn’t we retrain the steel workers to be computer programmers? You know, I mean, as I say, there seems to be a left and economic left in the vicinity of power. And we were doing fine. The quarter of us or whatever the the college educated third of America. And so you kind of shrugged and and said, yeah, those people should get college educations and then they’d be doing fine, too, you know, that that was effectively how we were, if not blinded to the hijacking of our economic system, at least like shrugged and let it go and and didn’t say, yeah, you know, Jesse Jackson in 1988, you really have it right. Your critique of the system. And he did. I mean, he’s the one guy, as I look back at the electoral part of this whole thing, 1988, Jesse Jackson, man, he was, you know, the Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders of his time, you know, thirty two years ago, we all took it too much. It’s like, oh, this is just how it happens. This is industrial revolution. This is how it happens. It worked out OK back in the early eighteen hundreds. It worked out OK again. In the early nineteen, hunters and people went from farms to factories and then to offices in all. Somehow it’ll all work itself out, right? Well, it didn’t and it isn’t. And then the other thing I did as I researched this book is, you know. You know. Oh yeah. There’s health care, universal health care in all the rest of the rich world. How many times have we heard that? We know that. But it’s true of everything. It’s true of higher education, of parental leave, of of all the social safety nets that exist in the rest of the world and not here. It’s just bizarre over the last 40 years how what an outlier America has become. And and then we had Donald Trump, who ran for president as a guy who would make health care more universal than ever and raise taxes on rich people and get rid of Wall Street and drain the swamp. Well, it was a big lie.
S4: Yes. Sometimes I feel like he picks you know, we think he’s so erratic. But I think when he chooses what he’s going to say, he looks at a kind of circle. And there’s a point, Don, it’s like a color wheel where the truth is. And then he picks diametrically opposite. That’s just fun, because if he you know, because it is actually so cleanly the opposite of the truth that he says, you know, when if something’s terrible, it’s the best it’s ever been. You know, there’s just there’s something very you know, you can I think Bandele has sometimes said, you know, what he says about the no puppet, no puppet. You’re the puppet. Yeah. The projection thing is so clean that you can say he’s saying yes. Puppet, yes, puppet. I’m the puppet. Yes, the exact opposite.
S5: Well, although he also does this thing and I and I’ve I’ve maintained this when people say he’s a compulsive liar and his supporters say he’s the most honest person ever. Well, both are true. And it’s not just like some quantum crazy idea. He is absolutely honest in revealing his bigotries and and hatreds. And and that’s the honesty that people are responding to, even as everything else is. Everything else is a giant lie. I mean, to your point of the opposite, this opposite town this week in the the convention, it’s like let’s spend a lot of time talking about what a great job he’s done on the pandemic. What I know.
S4: Exactly. Exactly right. Yeah. No, no, no shame about making it kind of conform to ordinary sentences and cognitive processes, just like just blast off into outer space. So but so do you think there’s been something and this has been a thesis or a sort of sub thesis of this show for a while that there has been something cathartic about the Reagan ideas kind of reaching and reaching there? I don’t know, Frankenstein apotheosis? I don’t know. I’m thinking of like a kind of Waterloo or, you know what it is like that movie where you finally when a boat breaks down, you finally understand how it works, you know? And so since we don’t have a liar like Reagan when we don’t have someone like Reagan saying. We did our right with the pandemic, but I mean, we’ve we’ve done some things right and something’s wrong and we need to be thoughtful about moving forward and we’re so careful and, you know, or we of course, we’re going to take in immigrants, but we just need to, you know, be sure that that crime against women is to watch on the border. And then he might do the same policies. He might build a wall like Trump, but he would say it in another, you know, he’d say it in another way and deregulating to help the little guy who, you know, can’t be hamstrung when he has to hire his first five employees. Do you mean if they were normal Republicans, like normal Republicans and they would paper it over, they paper over the racism, they’d sideline the Stephen Millers. They do all the operations that Max Boot and others have described so well, which is just make this thing look humane, you know, at all costs. Since Trump does not make it look humane anymore and doesn’t bother, is there some possible hope in that that we won’t go re-enter fantasy land where you and I are moving closer to? Well, you know, we misjudged him. He he really did the best he could with with coronavirus, you know, the kind of things that we might have done in a postmortem on Reagan and Bush, you know, kind of started to try to make it take it back and make it normal. We can’t do that.
S5: Now, you’re suggesting do I think that’s going to happen? Like, oh, finally. No, I don’t write. What I think is that actually, especially beginning with the 2008 2009 financial crash and recession, you know, that was the point at which the big lot people started saying, oh, my God, this is screwed up. This is screwed up. And and inequality became a thing and a word we were talking about. So I would say since then, when there was this silver lining of people beginning to say, wait, something’s wrong here, that, as I say, Donald Trump campaigned on in 2016 combined. And now here’s this other inflection point, this other set of crises made worse, unnecessarily worse, that do their business. That also revealed to more and more people. I think that what’s going on here, I mean, the facts to the point to the main economic points of my book, the fact that Donald Trump and the rights and the Coke freedom works know Americans for Prosperity right from the very get go in February. We’re worried, helped by liberal, useful idiots like Tom Friedman in The New York Times that like, oh, my God, the stock market’s going to crash. We got to that’s what we got to do. Let’s get back to work in two weeks. Tom Friedman wrote in March. You know, so and again, Tom Friedman is not the worst guy in the world, but it’s my whole story of we liberal, useful idiots saying, yup, the stock market is so important is the most important thing. So, yeah, I do think that the pandemic and the economic horrors that it has wrought will, you know, knock would wake people up to the systemic problem. I mean, we have spoken and thought, thank goodness much the last few months about systemic racism. Well, the other systemic thing that we need to think about as a systemic problem is our economy is our political economy. And it’s not just about I distinguish between our political economy, meaning the climate as versus the economy. Like what’s unemployment today? What’s inflation like as the weather. Right. And like damit problem. And it’s not just like, oh, look, jobs went up a little bit last quarter or, oh, look, growth is a little faster or whatever. No, no, no, no. I mean, we want faster growth. We want employment. But it’s a systemic problem. And you got to go back to when it was changed and unchanging, I’m sure.
S4: Read about Max. But that’s kind of reckoning with himself, where he went back to the very beginning of when he became a young conservative and said, you know, kind of what do you know? The racism has had corrupted this at the root from the beginning, which I thought was actually I mean, you know, obviously Twitter doesn’t it doesn’t really tolerate people getting it late or whatever, but I actually thought that was really powerful because the usual move is like Thomas Friedman to is like to gun it until the end of time rather than look back at where you went wrong. And with political economy, the same thing is happening with the sort of rereading of Keynes, you know, which is like we just went the wrong direction when two roads diverged with the New York Times article, New York Times Magazine article. What? Sorry, what was that? What was it again? Lovely doctrine. September 30th, 1970. Right. Not Thomas Friedman. Just to be clear. Milton Friedman. Yeah, Milton Friedman. And then on the other hand, we have we have the Keynes thing. And recently people have started to say and they sound a little like Max Boot. Keynes was actually right. You know, oh, that’s too bad. We really took the wrong path. We saw two options and. Damn it, we went the wrong way, but I mean, that is, you know, there have been people just feeling like Cassandra all along saying how in the world did we move so far away from the New Deal liberalism? The same idea that we need like a very strong welfare state to counterbalance runaway capitalism. It just seems like common sense. And now it’s gone.
S5: Yes. And but antitrust enforcement, again, which is a whole antitrust, I know what that means. But like like you as a young person, I mean, whenever I’m kind of this kind of boring, I don’t really get it. But Robert Bork, another person I’d heard of him, I knew he was a right winger who we was dating from the Supreme Court in 1987, but I didn’t know that he. Not quite single handedly, but was the most important person in America to change the way the old for the first time, practically one years of its existence, the antitrust laws were enforced and how they were supposed to be enforced. And boom, in nineteen seventy eight, he published a book that changed that and the Supreme Court started quoting it in opinions and it was changed. So like it was. It was. And again, sure, there were Cassandras. And and if they were saying this, I mean, Bernie Sanders has every right to say it to me, like, yeah, you were terrible or complicit, whatever, in the 80s and 90s. But but, you know, and a reason a lot of Bernie Sanders ites didn’t like Elizabeth Warren was because she too, of course, was she she was not just a Republican. And she says she never voted for Reagan, but she was part as a young law professor and young lawyer of this, the main right wing movement that was taking over the law at the time. I mean, there was the Federalist Society, which we all know about, but there’s this thing called law and economics that she was affiliated with. So to me, because I had my own journey and my own my own road to Damascus epiphanies and everything, I the fact that she saw what was going on and saw that these Republicans don’t believe in a free market. They believe in wealth and power for the for the rich and powerful and their mind in the 90s and aughts. And, you know, so I get why the actual Burnie’s of the world, the old people who were who were on the correct side of history back in the day are going like, thank God it’s about time, as opposed to the young people who were born in nineteen ninety seven who said, yeah, why weren’t you socialist back in 1986?
S4: Yes. Yes or yes. Or some academics who sat it out and didn’t try to publish trade books and spent the whole time reading their Marx and Frederick Jamieson and that maybe they can be smug. But it also lets why Elizabeth Warren, I think was such a breath of fresh air, is that she had done she had she understood that there was some headiness of really wrestling with the Chicago ideas. I mean, that’s when I when I heard Bernie Sanders across as Burlington mayor and I knew there was a socialist mayor in in Vermont and that in New Hampshire we were on the right at the time that I thought, yeah, but he doesn’t know. He hasn’t read anything. Like he keeps not referring to interesting economic ideas or even interesting cultural ideas like Bloom or Alan Bloom or, you know, and just that that idea that the intelligence was all on the right and the soft, you know, the like the bleeding heart thing that is gone from liberalism now. But I definitely in the 80s thought this was, you know, I wanted to be on that side of things. I wanted to be with the like. I wanted to be with people that weren’t crying for Allentown and Glory Days, which seemed like a pop music. A pop music can see that these factories were going to factories where we’re falling apart and some white dudes didn’t have their jobs. I thought progressiveness lay more in act up in kind of feminism and take back the night in these kind of 90s movements that were about, I don’t know what if we thought of it as exactly as diversity, but they were about a version of feminism that had to be very carefully distinguished from, like gross old feminism and certainly didn’t touch on income inequality. I mean, we did exactly right. Doing progressive politics.
S5: Exactly. And so what happened, the simple version of it politically that happened, I believe, is after the seventies and eighties and nineties, a generation of the white working class, whatever their is of racism or misogyny or whatever, they looked at the two parties and began saying this thing I always objected to as a good liberal, like now there’s no difference between the parties. But on economics, there was not much difference between the two parties starting around the nineteen eighties and certainly through Bill Clinton and even through Barack Obama. There wasn’t this big difference as there is on all of those other issues, all the cultural issues, all the identity politics issues. There’s huge differences. Always has been. I don’t elect a Democrat because the Supreme Court. True, true, true, true, true. But meantime, there was not much difference. And the Democratic Party, with rare exceptions, was not presenting a distinct economic vision of not just inequality, but insecurity. And all of these things that I catalogue in this book that like. Well, and so just imagine your hypothetical quasi fictional New Hampshire neighbor. Looking at these parties and saying, well, I don’t, but these guys over here, they hate the hippies and the professors here in Hanover and so do I. So I guess I’m going to be for them. I mean, you know.
S4: Yes, right. Right. And I must say, I made a similar cultural decision, which is like these are for the hippies with long hair and then they’re the short hair guys in New York with gel in their hair. And I want to go where they’re going because they are eating steaks or whatever. So I sent you a photograph before you came on the show. It’s a 2004 image from Harper’s Bazaar magazine. Harper’s Bazaar did a kind of photo essay and a profile of Gavin Newsom and his then wife, Kimberly Guilfoyle. And the images we would have I mean, I think I would have just leafed past them, maybe kind of zeroed in on them a little bit in 2004 when it came out. I think I might even remember this profile. They were called the new Kennedys and they were meant to encapsulate every part of the amusing and fraudulent dream of that period for the left, which is that you could be extremely rich and connected to people like the Gettys and own the greatest real estate and the best views in in San Francisco and Sacramento and Los Angeles and New York. And also have your heart on the right in the right place and be a Democrat like a Kennedy. Right. And like devoted to somehow public service. Kimberly Guilfoyle, we now know their marriage only lasted three years, feel like it lasted long enough to get that photo taken, basically.
S5: Well, by the way, when you said the photograph said is interesting. Let me let me check out the dates on this. It was a September 24 issue of Harper’s Bazaar divorce, January twenty five.
S4: Wow. So their marriage fell apart. And Kimberly Guilfoyle, I think adventured around a little bit and is now the consort of President Trump’s heir apparent, Don Junior, and showed up and gave, I think, the most striking maybe speech at the Republican National Convention and seems like in some ways a very different person than she is in that picture and in some ways completely unchanged. And you are so good at talking about the a photograph that you looked at from from 20 years ago, I think. And anyway, say something about the photograph, which I hope we can include with the show notes.
S5: I’m really glad you sent me the picture both because I have held Gavin Newsom’s marriage to Kimberly Guilfoyle against him, despite all the good that he does as a liberal in California, because I don’t know, I just don’t forgive even that youthful indiscretion. But it’s an extraordinary picture because, in fact, it’s from roughly the time that I saw my picture of fashionable people that about which I had a certain epiphany that was two thousand, six or seven that I saw my picture. This is the end of 2004. And the epiphany I had when I looked at that then was it was a picture of of of this of the staff of this of Morgens Hotel, which was one of the the kind of or prototype boutique hotel in New York City that had started in the mid eighties. And it was 20 years later, more than 20 years later. And I thought, look at all these stylish young people who are groomed and dressed just the same as people today in two thousand seven. That’s weird, because when I was young and before I was born, in the modern times in America especially, everything changed like crazy. Within one decade, you could say, oh, that’s that’s thirties. That’s forties. Oh, that 60s or 70s. And and like, you know, I mean, as I talk about in the book, Qanun comes on at Woodstock at the end and they go, look, everybody goes crazy. Oh, look. Outdated and hilarious. That is from 10 years ago. Right. And so I thought, like, wow, everything used to change in terms of the material culture. But more just sensibilities changed quickly decade to decade, certainly in twenty one years, which was how old this picture was when I looked at it. And I thought, that’s weird, what’s happened, what caused this status and stagnation. And eventually as I was writing evil geniuses and doing my unified and fantasyland and my unified theory of everything, I realized that it was connected. Not that the evil geniuses are so on this planet in this dimension. So they’re not so powerful that they also did this. But what was first a kind of plunge into nostalgia, wholesale nostalgia in the 70s and the 80s, and then became this weird stagnation where since hip hop, nothing changed serves their interests first. The nostalgia did in mourning in America that allowed Ronald Reagan to sell himself as a cowboy war hero guy from fiction who would, you know, was also Jimmy Stewart and would make, you know, it’s a wonderful life happen again. But then this has happened and it. Reinforces everybody’s idea that despite computers and cell phones and the digital revolution, despite all that, everything’s really the same. You know, music doesn’t change that much. The way things look doesn’t change that much. I’m still sitting in the chair. I was doesn’t look dated. You know, if literally if people time travelers came down the street from 2000 and you were you cast them, you wouldn’t go, holy cow, look at those who are the actors, are they what as you would have if somebody from 1955 had walked past you in 1978 or any decade. So it has this affected like. No, nothing. Nothing has changed and nothing is changeable. Radical change doesn’t happen anymore. Yes. And if it doesn’t happen on this kind of superficial cultural level, it certainly can’t happen on an economic or political level, can it?
S4: You know, there’s a line in Howards End or I don’t know, it may just be in the movie, but I think of it in Anthony Hopkins voice like the poor, a poor one is sorry for them. There it is. It’s like the poor boy poor. Oh, thank you. Yeah. I always shout I’ll try to do. You brought up Jimmy Stewart and I almost busted in with my Jimmy Stewart impression. Anyway, the poor poor one is sorry for them. There it is. And the rich are equally in your photograph, preserved in amber, preserved with botulism toxins, botox shot into their heads and they look the same year after a year at a certain point. And that because those two things, the poverty of the majority and the and and the riches of of this small minority of the one percent just need to be look like eternal verities that can never change. And somehow inscribed in our mind is the idea that right left Kimberly Guilfoyle married to Don Junior or married to Gavin Newsom on totally opposite sides of the political aisle. The and get rug under them is the same. They LOUI caterers or whatever it is, look as the same.
S5: And the beautiful spa like view with the San Francisco Bay in the background until your deeper point of like, oh, you know, political star of tomorrow with his hand around this, you know, babe on the floor. Right, saying babe on the floor as now yelling at us at the Republican convention. Yes.
S6: Curt Anderson is the author most recently of Evil Geniuses. You can find it and should find it on Amazon. It’s currently a New York Times best seller. Thank you so much for being here, Curt. Thank you, Virginia. It was a pleasure. That’s it for today’s show. What did you think? Give us a healthy, hearty, robust, bouncing rating on your podcast app and then come to us on Twitter.
S4: I’m at page 88. The show is at Real Dreamcast.
S6: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for being a slate plus member. We really couldn’t do this show without you. Our show today was produced by Melissa Kaplan and engineered by Richard Stanislao. I’m Virginia Heffernan. Thanks for listening to Trump cast.
