In 2020 — this is January of 2020, way before the election took place, before Covid, for that matter — I published a whole book about political polarization. It was called “Why We’re Polarized.” And I’ve been thinking a lot about how the polarization of this year is different from what I was tracking when I was writing that book.
The divisions are much more fundamental. When I was writing that book, so much of the arguments were about Obamacare and taxes. And now the fight is over the very legitimacy of elections, the going after enemies using the power of the federal government, the nature and integrity of the basic systems of American government.
I think that is the most important fact of politics right now. It has been the subject of many, many of our episodes this year. But it is interesting, I think, that the policy issues on which there once seemed so little room for compromise are now so much more open. From free trade to antitrust, from health care to outsourcing, from China to unions, there is suddenly a lot more overlap in at least the language of the two parties.
Not always a policy, but the language. And sometimes the overlap really is substantive. The Trump administration — it really was a break with the Obama administration on China. But the Biden administration was not a reversion to where Obama’s was. The Biden administration — it took what Donald Trump did on China, and it went a lot further.
What does that tell us? In his book “The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order,” the historian Gary Gerstle introduced me to this concept of political orders, these structures of political consensus that stretch over decades. There were two across the 20th century: the New Deal order, which ran from the 1930s to the 1970s, and the neoliberal order, which stretched from the ’70s to the financial crisis. And I wonder if part of what is unsettling politics right now is a random moment between orders, a moment when you can just begin to see the hazy outline of something new taking shape and both parties are in internal upheavals as they try to remake themselves, to grasp at it and respond to it.
And I know where we are in the election cycle. I know where everybody’s minds are. I’ve got nothing to tell you about the polls. There’s nothing I can say that is going to allay your anxiety for a few days from now. And I know that within this feeling of the moment, it feels weird to talk at all about zones of possible agreement or compromise rather than disagreement and danger.
But I think it’s worth doing this episode in this conversation now because I think they’re important to understanding why this election has played out the way it has — and I think it’s important for thinking about where politics might be going next.
This is an edited excerpt from our conversation for my podcast. For the full conversation, listen to “The Ezra Klein Show.”
Ezra Klein: So let’s begin with the big concept here. What is a political order?
Gary Gerstle: A political order is a way of thinking differently about political time in America. We focus so much on two-, four- and six-year election cycles. A political order is something that lasts beyond particular elections, that refers to the ability of one political party to arrange a constellation of policies, constituencies, think tanks, candidates, individuals who come to dominate politics for extended periods of time. And their dominance becomes so strong that the opposition party feels compelled — if they still want to remain real players in American politics — it compels them to acquiesce and to come aboard the other political party’s platform. They don’t get established that often. They usually last 30 or 40 years. Economic crisis is usually involved in the emergence of a new order and the breakup of the old. Every political order also has not only an ideology but a vision of a good life in America.
What constitutes a good life? Because that becomes really important in terms of selling the virtues of that political order to a mass base, which is something that has to be won and sustained in American politics in order for a political order to exist and thrive.
Well, let’s talk a bit about the New Deal and then the neoliberal orders.
And I want to focus here on the parts of your theory or the parts of your description that I found more revelatory. I think people have a sense of the New Deal, there’s a Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt is elected, the sort of New Deal period begins.
Archived clip of President Franklin D. Roosevelt: On the farm, in the large metropolitan areas, in the smaller cities and in the villages, millions of our citizens cherish the hope that their old standards of living and of thought have not gone forever. Those millions cannot and shall not hope in vain. I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people.
What coheres to the New Deal is that the Republicans eventually submit to it. And that happens when Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower beats Senator Robert A. Taft. So tell me a bit about the counterfactual there that you think almost happened. What led to Taft losing prominence in the Republican Party, and what might have happened if he hadn’t?
It’s the Soviet Union and the threat of Communism, and he was very slow to grasp the nature of that threat. When I teach young people today, it’s hard for them to grasp the magnitude and the seriousness of the Cold War and how it shaped every aspect of American life. And the Soviet Union represented an existential threat to the United States.
It was a revolutionary power that wanted to end capitalism everywhere, not just in the Soviet Union but all over Asia and Africa, North America, South America. They were gaining a lot of support in the decolonizing societies of Africa and Asia. America was not confident in the ability of its economy to have a permanent recovery from the Great Depression.
They needed foreign markets. America wasn’t sure whether it would have them. And the capitalist class in America was scared to death by the Communist threat, and it had to be met everywhere, and America mobilizes for the Cold War to contain Communism everywhere where it appeared. And that required a standing army in quasi-peacetime of a sort that America had never experienced before, and Taft was profoundly uncomfortable with this.
He was a Republican in a classical sense — small central government, devolved power to the states, suspicious of foreign entanglements — believing that America was protected by the two vast oceans and thus did not need a strong standing army, did not have to be involved in world affairs. And he was opposed to the New Deal.
He thought it was a form of tyranny. It was going to lead to collectivism, Soviet style. And he was poised in the 1940s to roll back the New Deal, and he was looking forward to the postwar period after the war emergency had passed. Of course, the war emergency would require a very strong state to mobilize armed forces, to mobilize the economy for the sake of fighting a world war. And he was slow to get on the bandwagon in terms of the threat of China, the threat of Communist expansion, and that opened up an opportunity for another candidate, by the name of Dwight D. Eisenhower, to enter the presidential race in 1952 and to present a very different vision. And my counterfactual is that, absent the Cold War, the New Deal, which we now regard as such a juggernaut, would be seen as a momentary blip like so many other progressive moments in American politics. And we would see it as a blip and not for what it became, which was a political order that dominated politics for 30 years.
So there’s been this conventional story of the New Deal era, which is that the fear of Communism, the fear of being painted as soft on Communism or soft on socialism, leads progressives to trim their sails, moderates the sort of left flank of New Dealism. You argue that that story misses what’s happening on the right.
You say, “If we look carefully at the politics of the late 1940s and early 1950s, we could see that the imperative of fighting the Communists caused Republicans to make even larger concessions than the Democrats did.” What were those concessions?
Well, the biggest concession was agreeing to an extraordinary system of progressive taxation.
The highest marginal tax rate in the 1940s during World War II reached 91 percent, a level that is inconceivable in America of the 21st century. Eisenhower wins the election in 1952. He has both houses of Congress. And quite extraordinarily, Eisenhower maintains the 91 percent taxation rate. One simply can’t imagine a Republican Party in the 21st century, anyone in it, doing that today.
Why did he do it? Well, there were suspicions, on the part of some Republicans, that he was a closet Democrat. His partisan loyalties weren’t that clear, but I think he was a Republican. And I think what mattered to him was the Cold War. The Cold War had to be fought on two fronts: It had to be fought militarily — international containment of Communism — and that required enormous expenditures on national defense, which meant not simply a conventional army but the nuclear arms race.
And the other aspect of that, which he appreciated, was that in the 1950s, it was not clear whether the Soviet Union or the United States could provide a better life for its average citizen. The Soviet Union was still doing quite well in the 1950s.
There was an extraordinary debate that occurred in Moscow in 1959. Vice President Nixon debated Nikita Khrushchev about who could deliver better kitchens to their consumers. And the Americans imported all the most recent household appliances from the United States, reassembled them on a stage in Moscow, and Nixon and Khrushchev went at it — including a dishwasher for the first time, when it wasn’t a common feature of American homes.
What was this about? This was the United States admitting that the Soviet Union was a serious rival not simply militarily but economically, as well. And America had to prove that it had the better system, and that meant you could not return to unrestrained American capitalism — you had to regulate it in the public interest.
Eisenhower understood that in order to win the ideological struggle of the Cold War — which was not simply an American-Soviet struggle, but it was a global struggle to convince all the peoples of what was then called the Third World to come with the capitalist way, to come with the American way. In order for that to happen, America had to demonstrate that it could give its ordinary citizens a good life.
And that meant taking money from the rich and redistributing it, narrowing the inequality between rich and poor. It meant supporting powerful labor movement and not trying to roll back the Wagner Act, which the labor movement regarded as its Magna Carta, a very strong piece of federal legislation that gave it unambiguous rights to organize and obligated employers to bargain collectively with them.
He felt that this had to be the way that America went. Maintenance of Social Security — really all the key New Deal reforms — he ended up maintaining because he thought this would be a critically important instrument for convincing not just ordinary Americans but people around the world that this would prove the superiority of the American way.
That is why he acquiesced to the New Deal order.
You describe this as being, of course, more than just Eisenhower. It’s a pervasive recognition among America’s business class. You say, “The fear of Communism made possible the class compromise between capital and labor that underwrote the New Deal order.”
And you say it wasn’t just here; this was also true in many of the social democracies in Europe after World War II. Tell me a bit about that class compromise and the role the Cold War played in it.
It is often said that socialism was weaker in America than it was elsewhere. And in many respects, that has been true.
The corollary of that is that the American business class historically has been bigger, more powerful, more unencumbered than the business classes of other nations, especially in Western Europe among America’s industrial rivals. There was no shortage of labor protest in America, but rarely could labor achieve what it wanted to achieve because the resistance was extraordinary, the resistance was legal, it was extralegal.
The history of industrial relations in America was very violent. The business class in America had a reputation of being very powerful and aggressive and unwilling to share its power with its antagonists. So what was it that got them to share that power?
I argue that it was the fear of the Soviet Union. And what did the fear of the Soviet Union represent? The expropriation of all corporate capital in the world. That was the Communist dream. And that was deeply felt. And it was felt not simply in a global setting. It was felt within the United States itself, where there was a Communist movement not on the size of the magnitude of what was occurring in Europe but significant nonetheless.
And the business class felt that it was in its interests to compromise with organized labor in a way that it had never done before. That was the grand compromise. It was symbolized in a treaty in Detroit between the three automobile makers, then among the biggest corporations in America, and the United Auto Workers — the Treaty of Detroit — purchasing labor peace by granting unions, good wages, good conditions, good pensions, good health care. Absent the threat of Communism, I think that grand compromise either would not have been arrived at or it would have been scuttled much sooner than it was.
I also find it striking how much this made its way into political language. I feel like it has passed a bit into political cliché that the Interstate highway system was labeled in the bill “the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.” You write that supporters of it argued that building 41,000 miles of new roads would facilitate both a quick transfer of military units to parts of the United States under attack and rapid evacuation of people from areas threatened by atomic bombs.
I’m doing work in this book I’m working on that sort of revolves around invention and the rise of the R. and D. state. And it’s really remarkable to look at how closely the R. and D. state was designed and sold, in terms of its ability to keep America ahead for national defense. It has its roots in World War II, and it continues building much off that rhetoric.
And so there’s this interesting way, I think we think of the New Deal in terms of Social Security. We think of it in terms of some of these individual programs. But it is this thoroughgoing expansion of the government into all kinds of areas of American life. And the thing that allows the Republican Party to get on board with a lot of that is this idea that if you don’t do that, well, the Soviets are going to do it, and they’re going to have the highways, or they’re going to have the technological or scientific superiority, they’re going to make it to the moon, etc., and then America is going to be left behind.
The national security argument is crucial to getting large segments of the Republican Party on board. For them, the greatest threat, both internationally and domestically, was the Communist threat. And thus, they were willing to extend themselves beyond a point where they otherwise would have gone. And the national highway system is one manifestation of that.
The vast education bills that are going to propel the tremendous growth of American universities in the 1960s and 1970s — which you mentioned about R. and D. — has a similar propulsion. That doesn’t mean that there weren’t other forces within the Democratic Party who were doing this for classically progressive reasons.
It’s the obligation of the government to deliver goods to its citizens. But the scale of this would not have reached the point that it did without getting a lot of Republicans on board. And the critical argument for them was national security, and a critical event was Sputnik, when Soviet Union shocks the United States by putting into orbit a satellite before the United States had done it.
And that is a shocking moment: Oh, my God, America is falling behind. We must bend every muscle to beating the Soviet Union in every way, and that requires tremendous investments because of satellite technology and R. and D., and also that becomes the foundation of what is going to become the I.T. industry and the I.T. revolution — also a product of the Cold War.
I just want to draw out some pieces of the theory here that maybe flesh out the political order. I think people have in their minds: You have the Great Depression, you have a big government response, but then you have the acquiescence of Eisenhower and the Republican Party to both the premises of the New Deal, which is a much more expansive government, regulating the market, trying to create a better life for workers and building a stronger national security state, and you have the continued pressure of the Soviet Union, which kind of keeps holding this in place. How does that order end?
There are three factors that pull this order apart. The first is race, the second is Vietnam, and the third is the major economic recession of the 1970s.
Every political order has tensions within it in the United States. And the great contradiction in the New Deal Party of Franklin Roosevelt was the treatment of African Americans. In order to have a new political economy of a big state managing private capital in the public interest, Roosevelt had to get the South on board, and the South meant the white South.
The South was a one-party state. The Democratic Party was the only party that mattered. Congressmen and senators from the South would get elected again and again and again, and they would rise through seniority. They’d be the most powerful figures in Congress. And they said: We will support you, Roosevelt, with your broader political economy, as long as you leave the racial hierarchies of the South intact. Don’t touch Jim Crow. Don’t touch segregation. Don’t promote an anti-lynching bill.
And Roosevelt assented to that. But this was also a time, especially in the 1940s, when African Americans were migrating in huge numbers to the North, and they were becoming a constituency in the Democratic Party. This was the first point of crisis, and the Democratic Party found itself unable to contain the racial conflicts that exploded in the 1960s.
That was then complicated by Vietnam, a vastly unpopular war — inaugurated and presided over by Democratic presidents who were perceived by their own constituents to not be telling the truth about this awful quagmire. It swallowed up a president who otherwise would be regarded as a great president in American history — Lyndon Johnson — and it deeply split the Democratic Party.
It also inaugurated trade-offs between funding a war and funding Johnson’s beloved Great Society. Inflation began to take off.
And then the third element was profound changes in the international political economy. One of the reasons why America was able to enter its grand compromise between capital and labor and pay labor very high wages was that America had no serious industrial competition in the world from the ’40s to the ’60s.
Most of the industrialized world had been destroyed. The U.S. is actively helping the recovery of Western European economies, Japan, promoting development in Southeast Asia, and in the 1970s, these economies begin to challenge American supremacy economically. The symbol of that is the rise of Japanese car manufacturers, who suddenly begin competing very seriously with the U.S. And the entire promise of Western Europe prosperity and American university had been premised on the flow of unending supplies of very cheap Middle Eastern oil — most of them controlled by U.S. and British oil companies. And Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing nations in the 1970s say: No, these are our resources. We will determine how much is drawn out of the ground and the prices that they will be charged.
The quadrupling of oil prices leads to a profound economic crisis, along with competition from European nations against the United States. And this plunges the United States into a very unexpected and profound — and long — economic crisis known as stagflation. Inflation and unemployment are going up at the same time. None of the textbooks say this should be happening. The tools are no longer working. And it’s in this moment of crisis, the Democratic Party — this is the third strike against it — opens up an opportunity for alternative politics, an alternative party, an alternative plan for American political economy.
I want to zoom in on something here that I’ve become more sensitive to. I think the standard account of what we now call neoliberalism or we might call conservatism or the New Right is: You have Barry Goldwater, runs against Lyndon Johnson, gets crushed. Then you have Richard Nixon, the sort of turn to the right, and then you have Ronald Reagan, the fruition of the Goldwater-Nixon movement, and then Ronald Reagan leads in a way to Bill Clinton.
And that sort of leaves out something that is happening among Democrats at this time. There’s a movement inside of liberalism. There’s the New Deal Democratic order, but you develop this New Left, and there is a movement of liberals against big government — young liberals for reasons of self-expression, for reasons of civil rights, for reasons of this feeling that they’re being fed into a bureaucracy and giant soulless organizations and eventually into the meat grinder of Vietnam, older liberals who are angry about the sort of reckless growth and the poisoning of streams and the building of highways through their communities and the sort of ticky-tacky rise of these suburbs. And this predates Reagan. It’s actually in some way something Ronald Reagan ends up running against. So can you talk a bit about the sort of troubling of the liberal consensus in the run-up to this period?
Yes, the New Left erupts on university campuses in the 1960s, and the two primary issues in the beginning are race and Vietnam. But they also quite quickly develop a critique of the established order.
Archived clip of Mario Savio: There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.
What was called at the time the system. It’s hard to believe that the system could do so much work, such an anodyne term. But it was a powerful term that was thrown around in the 1960s and ’70s.
And what was the system? The system was large American corporations who were no longer under control. And one reason they were no longer under control is they were being aided and abetted by a large federal state that was supposed to manage them in the public interest. And thus the system was meant to identify not just the corporations who were doing ill in America, but it was meant to identify a federal state that was birthed in the optimism of the New Deal and had been corrupted. So you have this fissure within the Democratic Party itself.
The other element of this is this profound search for personal freedom and autonomy that was intensely felt by members of the New Left. The battle cry of the free speech movement in Berkeley in 1964, arguably the first mass moment of protest on the part of the New Left, was, “I will not be folded, spindled or mutilated.”
Where does that phrase come from? That was a phrase printed on every IBM card. IBM was the dominant computer maker of the time. The computers were these enormous machines, mainframes, and they were seen as stultifying to human creativity. The personal computer movement was born on — as part of the New Left. Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand imagined a personal computer that would be free of the IBM mainframe, free of big corporations, big corporate power — that it would be the authentic voice of only every individual who would be using that machine.
It was a profound expression of a desire for personal autonomy, individuality, expressiveness — unconstrained by larger structures. This cry, or cri de coeur, came from the left. It was a very powerful part of the New Left, but one can see how it might suit the purposes of a rising neoliberal order because the rising neoliberal order was also intent on deregulating, freeing individuals from the grip of large institutions and allowing them to go their own way.
“Neoliberalism” is a slippery term. It’s often just an epithet. How do you define what its tenets are? What do you need to believe to be a neoliberal of the period you’re talking about?
Neoliberals believe that the best economic program is one that frees capitalism from its shackles, that allows people to truck, barter and exchange goods, that gets the government out of economic life. And the only role for government is to ensure that markets can function freely and robustly. So it runs opposite to the New Deal. If the core principle of the New Deal was: Capitalism left to its own devices would destroy itself. The core principle of neoliberalism: Remove the shackles from capitalism. That will bring us the most productive and freest world we can imagine.
I have a shorthand for describing the neoliberal world that was envisioned by neoliberal thinkers and brought by policymakers into existence. It’s what I sometimes call the four freedoms of neoliberalism: freedom of movement, people; freedom of goods to move across national boundaries; the free flow of information; and the free flow of capital across all boundaries.
In a perfect neoliberal world, people, goods, information and capital are moving freely without constraint. If we can imagine a perfect world that The Wall Street Journal wants, this would be pretty close to it. I do not want to suggest for a moment that the New Left intentionally created neoliberalism. But it turned out that the cries of freedom, personal freedom, personal autonomy that were emanating from them turned out to be very conducive to the economic philosophy of neoliberalism.
One of the things that you emphasize are these events and these movements, which I think is right — the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, stagflation. One thing that I’m curious to get your thoughts on, though, is something that feels like more of a miasma when I read it. Going back to Johnson, you begin having — I don’t quite know how to describe it. I would sort of describe it in the political memoirs I’ve read as a growing allergy to bigness and conformity in a lot of different contexts: a growing allergy in the context of the government but also in the way society is organized. There’s a lot of fear becoming the organization man — these gray faceless cogs in the corporate wheel. But you have Lyndon Johnson giving these speeches about the ugliness of America, how it has become a somewhat grotesque society visually. You have John Kenneth Galbraith, one of the great economists of the New Deal era, writing “The Affluent Society,” which is all about the problems of the society, where now there is much more plenty but what makes life worth living has been eroded.
And then you have Jimmy Carter. And I always think Carter’s just a much more ideologically interesting president than people give him credit for. And he really channels a lot of this. And I want to play a clip from his 1978 State of the Union that you note in your book.
Archived clip of President Jimmy Carter: Government cannot solve our problems. It can’t set our goals. It cannot define our vision. Government cannot eliminate poverty or provide a bountiful economy or reduce inflation or save our cities or cure illiteracy or provide energy. And government cannot mandate goodness.
Later on, Bill Clinton will say, “The era of big government is over.” But in some ways this, to me, is a much more striking statement because it’s earlier, but it’s so much more specific about what government cannot do.
What is he channeling here? What do you make of it?
Well, first, salute President Carter, who’s 100 years old and seriously ailing — and has had a more successful postpresidency than just about any other president I can imagine. So hats off to him. It matters that he’s a Southern governor.
Southern governors, on the one hand, accepted federal largesse. The U.S. federal government invested a lot of resources in the Southern states to keep the Southern Democrats on board. But there was also a deep suspicion of government power because government power, it was feared, would intrude on race relations in the South.
So Jimmy Carter is an heir to suspicion of excessive federal power. But I also think he’s grasping at this moment a point of transition in the American economy and a sense that government policy as set forth in the New Deal was not working as well as it should have been. I think it mattered that he was an engineer and he was doing a lot of cost-benefit analysis: What kind of yield are we getting for the bucks that we’re investing?
And so he’s open to this fertile moment of dissent. He’s channeling new thinkers and imagining a different Democratic Party that you are correct in saying precedes Clinton by 20 years. And the key figure in this movement is a man by the name of Ralph Nader.
And he was a key influential adviser on Jimmy Carter — which makes Jimmy Carter, in some odd ways, what we might say is he may have been accidental, but he’s also the first, in a sense, neoliberal president. Many meetings between Nader’s people and Carter’s people to begin a process of scrutinizing the federal state, deregulating where it was necessary to deregulate.
But it also needs to be said that he’s very uncertain about this path for the Democratic Party, and he’s very torn. And so one day, as in this speech that we just listened to, he’s supporting smaller government, deregulation, preaching a philosophy that government can’t solve people’s problems — but that older Democratic Party of unions, federal policy, vast programs, a welfare state is still there and still present.
And he’ll give another speech a month later where he sounds much more like an old Democrat. And I think as I evaluate the Carter presidency, I see a man really caught in the throes of a moment of transition, able to glimpse what is coming but unable to master what is coming. And so what defines his presidency, for me, is uncertainty, vacillation and, thus, failure. He’s a classical transitional figure, more controlled by than in charge of the moment.
You mentioned Ralph Nader as one of the muses in Carter’s ear and of Carter’s moment. I think, to the extent many people think about Nader now, they sort of vaguely know he helped make seatbelts into a major thing in cars and that he helped throw the 2000 election to George W. Bush.
But who is Nader then? Not just what he’s doing but, ideologically, what he’s saying, and the sort of critique that he’s making that is being taken up by so many people and who end up being very important in the Democratic Party.
Well, on the one hand, Nader is a man of the left, but he doesn’t fit in the old left or the New Left.
We might call him a man of the consumer left. For him, the key figure in American society was the consumer, and he wanted to champion the consumer. And his contributions — in terms of automobile safety, occupational safety, food safety — were immense and attracted a very large following, including among sections of the New Left who became known as Nader’s Raiders.
But he also executed a profound shift in ideology, and I’m not even sure how aware he was of the consequences of what he was generating. Because in the process of making the consumer sovereign, he deflected attention, I would say, from what was and what remains the core relationship in a capitalist economy, and that is in the realm of production and the relations between employers and employees. And he was reluctant, in some respects, to challenge corporate power if corporate power was serving the consumer in a good way. He anticipates, in some respects, a profound shift in antitrust policy, and the key figure in this is going to be Robert Bork in the 1980s and 1990s.
It had been an article of faith in American history that no corporation should be allowed to get too large, because they would inevitably exercise power in an undemocratic fashion. So antitrust meant breaking up big corporations. Under Robert Bork, the question changed. Big corporate power was OK as long as it served the consumer with cheap goods.
What Ralph Nader is not shy about confronting is the government. The sort of architecture of organizations he helps create, that sort of Nader’s Raiders staff, that generations, now, of really smart young liberal lawyers have gone into — they’re built to sue the government. To some degree, I think I’m more sympathetic to Nader as a skeptic of corporations, and it sounds like maybe you are, because I think he understands the government as the entity capable of bringing the corporations to heel. But what he builds is this huge set of documents and theorists and movements and institutions devoted to describing the ways in which the government fails and then suing it into acting differently. There is a sort of turn on bigness, and one kind of bigness is corporations. But the kind of bigness you can really attack is the government and its faceless, compromised activities.
I accept that view of Nader, and he and his supporters and his organizations deserve a lot of credit for holding the government accountable and making vast improvements in a whole host of areas — regulating the environment and other matters, regulating food — and compelling government to do the service that it does.
But it also distracts from understanding part of that which powers the rise of large corporations and gives them the ability to control government and capture regulatory agencies. And I think the results of his attacks on government have been ambivalent, in terms of their consequences: in some respects really accelerating the process of delivering goods to the American people and American consumers that they want but, on the other hand, contributing to an atmosphere of thinking the government can’t really do much that’s right.
We sort of put down the thread of the Soviet Union back with Eisenhower, but now I want to pick it back up. As you move toward Reagan, certainly part of Ronald Reagan’s appeal is his anti-Communism.
So how do you describe the role of the Soviet Union in this period of political time?
The collapse of the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991 is one of the most stunning events, I think, of the 20th century and arguably much longer.
What were its consequences? First, it opened up the whole globe to capitalist penetration, to a degree that had not been available to capitalism since prior to World War I. And this generates a tremendous amount of belief and excitement and expansion and a good deal of arrogance and hubris within the capitalist citadel, which is the United States. So that’s one major consequence.
The second major consequence is: What does it mean for Communism no longer to exist as a threat? And what we begin to see in the 1990s is capital in America regaining the power, assurance, authority, belief in its unilateral power that it had, across the years of the Cold War, if not sacrificed, then moderated. What the Soviet Union had promised, what Communism had promised, was that private enterprise could be superseded by rational planning on the part of an enlightened set of rulers who could manage the economy in a way that benefited the masses in extraordinary ways.
That whole project fails, and it fails in a spectacular fashion. And in the United States, because the collapse of the Soviet Union happened under Republican presidents, because it happened under Ronald Reagan, who was particularly hard on the Soviet Union.
Because Ronald Reagan had insisted that there was a continuum between Soviet government tyranny and what he regarded as New Deal government tyranny. They were on the same spectrum. One inevitably led to another. He and other Republicans, George H.W. Bush, the party as a whole take this as a great vindication of their core beliefs: that capitalism, which, under the New Deal, was sharply constrained, should be freed from constraint; its animal spirits allowed to soar; venture capitalists encouraged to go everywhere; investments made easy; lower taxation; let capitalists and capital drive America and the world economy, unconstrained by regulation.
And these were the core ideas of neoliberals, which have been incubating for decades. And now suddenly these ideas seem to be vindicated. This is the moment of free market triumph. And it intersects in a very powerful way with the ongoing I.T. revolution, which is also bound up with the Soviet Union’s collapse. Because the Soviet Union was very hostile to the personal computer because it required a degree, at that time, of personal freedom that the Soviet Union wasn’t willing to allow what the I.T. revolution represented in the 1990s. And this is one of the reasons that Democrats get on board with it. What it represented was a belief that market perfection was now within human grasp, that there may have been a need for strong government in the past, because knowledge about markets was imperfect, it was limited, it took time for information about markets to travel, a lot of it was wrong, not enough of it was available instantaneously.
Well, suddenly in the 1990s, you have this dream, this vision of all economic knowledge in the world being available at your fingertips instantaneously and with a degree of depth and a range of statistics and figures that had been unimaginable, and a techno-utopianism takes hold, and it’s the intersection of these two vectors — a sense that the collapse of the Soviet Union vindicates free market thinking and the I.T. revolution — that allows people to think market perfection is within our grasp in ways it never has been before, that pours fuel on the fire of neoliberal free market thinking.
You described Bill Clinton as the Dwight D. Eisenhower of neoliberalism. What do you mean by that, and what are some of the, for you, core examples?
When Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, no Democratic U.S. president had been elected since 1976. Sixteen years is an eternity in electoral politics in the United States. And the question becomes: Will he roll back the Reagan revolution of the 1980s — massive efforts at deregulation — or will he follow a path that Dwight Eisenhower followed in the early ’50s?
Eisenhower was the first Republican president in 20 years, and he has a choice to roll back the New Deal or to acquiesce to it. I think Clinton, in the beginning, is a little uncertain about what he is going to do. And he has some ambitious proposals in his first two years — most notably a vast program of national health insurance, which crashes spectacularly.
And then he gets punished for that venture severely in the 1994 congressional elections, which bring Newt Gingrich and a very right-wing group of Republicans to power — the first time that Republicans control both houses of Congress since 1952. It’s a huge achievement for the Republicans. Clinton reads that moment as signifying that the older Democratic Party of the New Deal, of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, really had to be reworked and revamped.
And the only way for him to win re-election, and the only way for the Democrats to hold on to national power and to regain it in Congress in 1996, is for him to acquiesce to some core Reaganite beliefs. And at the center of the Reaganite project was deregulation — which is a code word for getting the government out of economic affairs or curtailing government power.
Archived clip of President Bill Clinton: We know big government does not have all the answers. We know there’s not a program for every problem. We know and we have worked to give the American people a smaller, less bureaucratic government in Washington. And we have to give the American people one that lives within its means. The era of big government is over.
And so Clinton signs off on the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which effectively deregulates the burgeoning I.T. sector of the economy, makes possible an unregulated internet. He signs off on the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999.
The Glass-Steagall Act had divided investment from commercial banking and had imposed a kind of regulation on Wall Street that brought an end to the crazy speculation that had brought about the Great Depression in the first place. It was a core principle of the New Deal. He does not seek to revive the Fairness Doctrine, in terms of regulating public media, which had guided successive Democratic administrations: the idea that if a news outlet put out one side of a debate on a policy matter, they were obligated to give the other side equal access.
He becomes an advocate of deregulation and, in some respects, pushes deregulation further than Reagan himself had been able to do. And in that sense, he acquiesces to some of the core principles of the Reagan revolution rather than seeking to roll them back, and it is in that respect that I think it’s appropriate to think of him as a Democratic Eisenhower.
This happens at a time of tremendous political conflict and polarization between him and the Republicans. One thing I sort of appreciate about your frameworks here is that there’s a lot of periods — certainly in my political lifetime — when you look at them, what you remember, what stands out is all the disagreement, all the conflict, the impeachment trials, the government shutdowns.
But certainly the ’90s in the background of this, there are these huge laws being passed on a bipartisan basis, with agreements between not always Clinton and Newt Gingrich but quite often Clinton and Newt Gingrich, for all the invective Gingrich is hurling at him elsewhere.
A huge amount has been written on the 1990s by political historians, political scientists, journalists, and 90 percent of it focuses on polarization — the bitter cultural battles of the 1990s, very close in spirit to the cultural battles going on in America today, and I remember those times well. And what one remembers most about those battles is how much Clinton and Newt Gingrich hated each other’s guts. And they were seen as being polar opposites.
Clinton, the representative of a New Left America: cosmopolitan, open to the liberation movements, looking for new ways of creating a new and diverse America, embracing sexual liberations — his embrace of gay rights was somewhat limited but still significant. Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, representing traditional Victorian America, wanting to reassert the patriarchal, heterosexual family, men at work, women in the home, religious.
This battle was intense, and both men considered their opponent utterly unscrupulous. Newt Gingrich thought that Clinton was the most amoral president ever to sit in the Oval Office. So one of the surprises, to me, in working on this book, because I remember those days very well, was the degree to which they worked together — on telecommunication, on reform of Wall Street, on welfare.
Clinton would claim, and his defenders would claim, that he was triangulating. He was trying to make the best of a bad deal, that popular opinion was running with free markets, was running with the Republicans. And to some extent, that was true. But I was surprised the degree to which these two men, who loathed each other in public and in private, recognized that on political economy, they were on a similar mission, and the legislation that they put through has profoundly shaped America in the 21st century.
And the lesson that I draw from that moment is that one must refrain from always getting sucked into the daily battles over cultural issues. They are important. They are crucial. It’s not that we shouldn’t pay attention to them, but sometimes there’s a need to look underneath those battles to see if, in a subterranean sense, something else is going on.
Let me pick up on a word you used there before we move to the 21st century, which was “cosmopolitanism.” Something that was fresh, to me, in your book was this argument that in neoliberalism, you’re looking at more than just what we typically think of it as, which is an economic theory. You argue that there is a moral ethic that came alongside it, that is part of it. You talk about it as, at various times, cosmopolitan, individualistic. Tell me about it.
“Neoliberalism” is often defined, as you say, simply as being about markets and freeing them up. And “neoliberalism” is also defined as something that’s profoundly elitist in orientation, and it’s a device and an ideology used by elites to implant market ideology on a society in ways that deepens economic inequality and has the ability to strangle the democratic rights of the masses.
This is a popular view of neoliberalism. I do not deny those elements of neoliberalism, but I also say that in America, it had a profound popular base. Reagan was an enormously successful president, and by “success,” I mean he was able to excite the imagination of majorities of American voters, and his core message was freedom.
And half the time he meant freedom in terms of a free enterprise economy, but the other half of the time he meant freedom in terms of giving individuals the autonomy to go their own way. Now, he was not a fan of the liberation movements of the ’60s. But when Clinton becomes president in the 1990s, he has a profound connection to those liberation movements of the 1960s — to feminism, to sexual liberation, to civil rights.
And he detects in a world in which everyone can travel to wherever they want to go. He valorizes immigrants. He valorizes diversity. These are all values that are profoundly compatible with the neoliberal vision. The opportunity to travel anywhere, to seek out personal adventure, to seek out different cultures.
This is a world that neoliberalism makes possible, and it’s a thrilling moment for many people who have the opportunity either to mix in the world of American cities, which have filled up with immigrants, or to travel abroad and experience other cultures. A single global marketplace enables and encourages the kind of cosmopolitanism that people on the left-center side of the political spectrum in America have so deeply valued.
So you locate the end of this era in the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. Why?
The promise of neoliberalism was that it would lift all boats. There was an acknowledgment about those who were freeing the energies of the market economy that it would probably increase inequality, the distance between the rich and the poor, but that the increase in inequality wouldn’t matter because the forces of production that would be unleashed on a global scale would be so powerful and so profound that everybody would have more and everybody would have a better life.
And what the 2008-9 financial crisis exposed was first a lot of the market freedom that neoliberalism had unleashed had led to corrupt banking and financial practices that had brought the world to the edge of financial abyss of unimaginable proportions. We ended up skirting that abyss — but not by a lot.
And on the other hand, it brought into view a sense of how profoundly unequal the access to power was under the neoliberal regime. And here it’s not so much the financial crash itself but the nature of what governments did to promote recovery from the financial crash.
The object in the U.S. and also in Europe became to save the banks first. The culprits of this financial crisis were the ones who were bailed out first. If you were an American in 2009, 2010, 2011, who had assets in the stock market, you had pretty much recovered your position by 2011, 2012. If you were not one of those fortunate Americans and you were living week to week on a paycheck, your recovery did not occur.
You didn’t reach pre-2008 levels until 2016, 2017, 2018, and people understood, profoundly, the inequality of recovery, and it caused them to look with a much more scrutinizing gaze at the inequalities that neoliberalism had generated and how those inequalities have become so embedded in government policy toward the rich and the poor.
I’ve always thought that one of the identity crises in the Republican Party — one reason the Republican Party is not held together better — is that the Soviet Union was fundamental to what made its various factions stay in place. And it was also, I think, fundamental to what kept the Republican Party, which at its core has a real anti-government streak, committed in any way to real government.
And then I think there’s a sort of casting about for another enemy. I think they end up finding it after 9/11, or think they have, in what they try to turn into global jihadism, and then it falls apart — both as the antagonist and as a project and just feels to me like another part of the sort of wreckage of this period that opens a way for something new.
That new thing, I think, is more Donald Trump than it is anything else.
So I think it discredits what had been a core project of the Republican Party, which was to spread market freedom everywhere. When I teach the Iraq war, I tell my 20-year-old students that this is the worst foreign policy mistake in U.S. history, that it’s going to take the U.S. and the world 50 years to recover from. And it’s imbued with a neoliberal hubris that everyone in the world is simply waiting for the wonders of a market economy to unleash, to be unleashed upon them.
And this is where I want to bring us into the present and this election and ask this question of, OK, if that era ended, what is being born?
We spend so much time looking at the way the parties disagree. Their disagreements are very fundamental. Some of their disagreements are dangerous — when you think about the disagreements over electoral legitimacy, for instance. But there’s also new zones of agreement that have emerged. When I think about the way I covered politics in 2010, the legitimacy of elections could be taken for granted, and the legitimacy of the Affordable Care Act could not.
Now the legitimacy of the Affordable Care Act can be taken for granted — in fact, Donald Trump brags falsely about having saved it — and the legitimacy of elections cannot. But there are these new zones of agreement, of places where the two parties are working together, where they seem to have come to similar conclusions, like on China. I think China is a huge force here.
How do you think about what is emerging here? How do you think that Gary Gerstle will tell the story of this period in 15 or 20 years?
I’m a historian — so not very good at predicting the future — but I think it’s useful in this moment of acute polarization to look at some of what lies beneath the polarization.
But you’re right: On a series of issues there are intriguing conversations going on between Democrats and Republicans. China and tariffs are one area of agreement. Ironically, immigration is becoming another area of agreement, regardless of who wins the election. One can imagine that the bill agreed to in the Senate late in 2023 could easily be implemented in some form. There is an area of convergence on antitrust. Josh Hawley and Lena Khan seem to like each other and are finding some common ground on that. And the national security hawks in the G.O.P., people like Marco Rubio and Mitch McConnell, have converged with what we might call the industrial policy doves in the Democratic Party — people like Bernie Sanders — on the importance of reshoring critical sectors of manufacturing and on improving in dramatic ways the nation’s infrastructure. So we can see here a new political economy taking shape, one that breaks with the central principle of neoliberalism, which is that markets must lead and the only role for a state is to facilitate markets.
There are multiple outcomes that are still possible, and that’s a sign that we’re living in an interregnum between political orders and no new political order has established itself to the point where we can say with assurance: Yes, this will triumph.
Let’s start on the first of those you mentioned, which is China. My view is that over a long period of time now, going back into the Obama administration, before Donald Trump, China has been exerting an enormous pressure on American politics. Initially, the view is that China is taking low-cost, low-wage manufacturing by undercutting us on how much workers are paid: They have all these people, they pay poverty wages that you couldn’t get away with in America, and it’s just a cost-cutting measure.
But by the time of the Obama administration, they’re doing things we’re not doing anymore — building trains, building whole new cities at very rapid paces, beginning to move into advanced manufacturing. By the time you get to Donald Trump and then to Joe Biden, they’re dominating in certain areas, like pulling ahead of us in some ways on the ability to build low-cost electric vehicles.
They’re dominating the renewable energy supply chain. We’re worried about their sort of rising up the value chain of semiconductors. For a very long time, I think, there’s been this increasing sense that America can come up with ideas but it can’t make things in the real world and China can.
And I feel that as, actually, one of the huge points of conceptual agreement now between the parties. Does that resonate for you?
Yes, yes. And another element of that, which has been crucial to the ideological reorientation, is a new understanding of the relationship of free markets to democracy. And for the longest period of time, Americans and Europeans were willing to give China a blank check on their democracy, or on their violations of democracy, because of the belief that if market freedom and capitalist practices set down deep enough roots in China that people with economic freedom would want to add to that political freedom and that democracy would begin to flourish and that the Communist Party that rules China would either have to profoundly reform itself or see itself ushered from the political stage.
It’s hard to convince people now of how deeply rooted that belief was. No one in the Democratic or Republican Parties believes that anymore, and that has intensified the fear along with this “Oh, my God” sense that China is not simply producing ordinary goods. It’s producing very sophisticated goods. It’s cornering markets on electrical vehicles and batteries and solar panels that seemed unimaginable 15 or 20 years ago. And it has had the effect of profoundly shocking both parties.
Before Trump and Sanders in 2016, “protectionism” was a bad word in American politics. If you were identified as protectionist, you were out of mainstream politics. You were not being listened to. You were being marginalized as dangerously heterodox: Don’t you see that the period of protectionism has gone and the period of free trade has triumphed? And that has completely transformed and the word “protectionism” is not being used because it’s such a negative term, but the sentiments that lie behind protectionism, which might be described more positively as fair trade, are profoundly with us and shape conversation about U.S. economic relations with China every day of the week.
So the change has been profound in both parties, and one of the surprises of the Biden administration, although in retrospect, it’s not so surprising, given the Biden administration’s commitment to industrial policy, is the continuity we see between Trump tariffs and Biden tariffs.
There is a big gap between Kamala Harris’s proposed tariffs and Trump’s big tariffs, if he comes back into office. But still, I would say the convergence on the need for tariffs, for reshoring, for creating a whole different relationship with China — the consensus on that is much more powerful than any divergence between the two political parties.
And that was not really imaginable in 2010.
I think that’s right. I mean, there are many places where I think there is continuity between Barack Obama and Joe Biden, but China is really not one of them. I think you have to take seriously that Donald Trump changed both parties on China when we’re thinking about things where the other party acquiesced to a different view, a different idea, that Trump coming and saying, “We are losing the competition to China. They should be treated as an adversary, much more so than an ally” — that has become conventional wisdom in both parties.
And you said that “protectionism” had been a dirty word, but then you mentioned another term that has sort of also shifted, which is “industrial policy” — that China was effective at using the government to protect and encourage and subsidize industries, and in doing so, sure, sometimes things ended up being losers and not winners. But they actually were able to bring a bunch of major industries to life — and the same is actually true at this point among Republicans.
They’ve also come, in many cases, to the view that we should have much more industrial policy: the sense that if you leave it to the market, China might, by using the government to foster and supercharge certain kinds of market pursuits in China, just lap us. I think it’s become the dominant view in both parties.
I would agree with that, although I think the Republican Party is probably more deeply split on this than the Democratic Party is. The Democratic Party arranged another kind of grand compromise between the left, represented by Bernie Sanders, and the center, represented by Joe Biden, which led to a profound commitment symbolized by Build Back Better, a $5 trillion project that was going to insert industrial policy into the heart of government economic relations in a way that marks the Biden administration as profoundly different from his Democratic predecessors, both Obama and Clinton.
I think the Republican Party does not have agreement on that to the same degree. And one of the interesting things to watch if Trump wins is how that internal fight in the Republican Party works itself out.
On the one hand, you clearly have people in the Republican Party who have become deeply committed to industrial policy. I think of Marco Rubio. I think of Tom Cotton. I think of Josh Hawley. I think of JD Vance and also the rhetoric of JD Vance. I almost fell out of my chair when I listened to his V.P. acceptance speech at the Republican Party convention, which was all about putting Main Street above Wall Street and insisting that the Republican Party was going to take the steps necessary to restore Main Street to its earlier vibrancy in American life.
And core to that, Vance believes, is reshoring manufacturing, bringing back to life these abandoned towns. But it’s also true that Vance is deeply connected to Peter Thiel, to the Silicon Valley tech bros, who have a very different vision of the future of the Republican Party and the future of democracy in America, and we don’t know where Trump stands on this.
And I’ve been thinking about: What’s the significance of Project 2025, which has been a punching bag for the Democrats? I think part of it is an effort by many people in the Republican Party who know that Trump’s ideological commitments don’t run very deep to try to hold him to account. But that project is confused on this issue. It’s full of radically deregulating measures that promise to bring back neoliberalism with a kind of soft authoritarianism.
On the other hand, there are strong shoots of industrial policy coming up in that document. And I think it speaks to the internal divisions in the Republican Party on this issue, and one of the key questions is: Where does JD Vance really stand on this matter? Is he willing to back up his rhetoric with actual actions?
Can we imagine a Republican Party that is putting Main Street above Wall Street?
Well, when you talk about that JD Vance convention speech, one of the ideological shifts it speaks to, for me, is something that’s happened to both parties. And it goes back to that Carter clip I played, where Jimmy Carter says, “Government cannot solve our problems. It can’t set our goals. It cannot define our vision.”
And you can interpret that different ways, maybe saying that society has to do that. But I think both parties have come to a view they didn’t hold as strongly before, if they did hold it at all, which is that markets left to their own devices are going to trample over values, goals, visions that they should instead be serving.
So the sort of ideological strain in the Republican Party that JD Vance is part of, this sort of more populist dimension of it: What they see markets and, particularly, free trade and trade with China and immigration as having violated is the strength of communities and families. They look around, and they see broken communities, hollowed-out communities.
They see families where the male breadwinners have lost their jobs and lost their earning power, and so they’re not getting married, and there are divorces, and there are too many single-parent families. And on the Democratic side, I think there’s some of the same views. There’s a lot of broken communities.
And I also think a huge part participant in this ideologically is climate change: the sense that markets would happily make people rich by cooking the planet. The market doesn’t know if the money is coming from, the profit is coming from, burning oil or laying down solar panels. And so once again, that some goal actually does need to be set. Markets can maybe serve our goals. They can serve our vision, but they can’t be assumed to get what we want right in the world.
And so the sense on both parties that you actually do need to define goals and define vision and that, ultimately, that is going to have to happen through government setting policy and making decisions — the primacy of that kind of dialogue now, the degree to which the first conversation is: What are we trying to achieve? That does feel different.
I would agree with that. And that speaks to the decisive nature of the election of 2016, which we will see the longer we get from it as a decisive inflection point, as really marking the end of the neoliberal order. And marking the end of the neoliberal order doesn’t mean that neoliberalism disappears.
It doesn’t mean that suddenly there are no more advocates of strong free markets. I think one of the questions now and one of the key questions for the Republican Party is: Can they get serious about this? The seriousness that I see among senators in the Republican Party I don’t see in the House of Representatives among Republicans, and I don’t have the confidence — you may have more confidence than I do in this — that if the Republicans win or if they control Congress, they are going to pursue this seriously.
It requires them to have a serious program of political economy in a party that has lacked direction on political economy for quite some time.
To be clear, I have zero confidence that if Donald Trump wins, we’re going to see a cohesive ideological agenda in any of these directions. I do want to bring up another piece of it that I think Trump represents, though, which gets to that other dimension, that more moral dimension you talked about.
You describe the sort of neoliberal era as bringing this much more cosmopolitan view of ethics, of morals and of America’s relationship with the world — a more sort of urbanist view. There’s a lot of connections between what it means to live in New York and to live in London and to live in Tokyo and to live in Hong Kong.
And Donald Trump does seem to me to be a rejection of a lot of that — certainly rejection of the value of immigration and diversity. But also the people coming up behind him — and JD Vance is a good example of this — are much more skeptical of the individualistic moral structure that dominated here and that Republicans, for all the influence of the Christian right, largely left untouched.
I always think about Project 2025, Kevin Roberts making a point of saying that pornography should be banned. There is something here that’s also a moral turn. I think you see it more clearly — well, actually, let me say this. I think it’s actually very complicated in both parties because Donald Trump is himself such a poor vehicle for a return of traditionalist virtue. But there is something happening here, a sort of questioning of not just government policy and industrial policy but: Did all this individualism work? Is a world where kids are on their smartphones all the time and families are having this much trouble — and did we get something more fundamental, almost spiritual, wrong?
I think that’s right. I think the concern about the moral fiber of the American people is not new in the Republican Party. That goes back to Jerry Falwell, to some of the ministers who became popular in the 1990s and calling America back to moral virtue and identifying enemies of God.
The new element is a sense that one has to connect that concern for this kind of morality to a serious program of political economy, that it’s not enough simply to call on people to be virtuous. It’s not enough simply to pack churches on a Sunday morning and have them listen to sermons, that serious Christians, that serious conservatives have to find a way to rebuild the economic foundation that lies at the root of so much immorality and so much despair in American life.
If that develops enough of a base in the Republican Party, then there becomes an opportunity to talk with Democrats about that, about family welfare, about the welfare of children, about creating institutions, both economic and social, that have the capacity to sustain communities in ways in which they have not been sustained.
There are some issues that run so deeply on questions of morality between Republicans and Democrats, it’s hard to see how they can find common ground. And probably the most important of these is on the question of abortion and reproductive rights. And to the extent to which JD Vance and his associates take their stand on this issue, the possibilities for developing a conversation about morality with liberals and Democrats are going to be very, very slim, indeed.
So the newest element for me is not simply a recourse to this morality in a sense that individualism and permissiveness and cosmopolitanism has failed but a recognition that if America is to remoralize, there has to be an underlying economic program that gives people security, good jobs and dignity and their children a chance for a better future.
I am very struck — on the right at the moment, if you look at the kinds of people that young right-wingers read — hilariously, the Bronze Age Pervert, the Claremont Review people — the things that I think would have once been framed in terms of Christianity are now framed in terms of classical virtue. There’s a sort of rediscovery of the Stoics, not the early Christians.
And so there’s something here where — obviously, efforts to remoralize America are not new — but this idea that we have gone wrong in modernity by becoming so individualistic seems to be gathering a fair amount of force.
My read of it is that the Christian right is just too weak and not sufficiently appealing to be the vehicle for it. And so these other aesthetic and ancient containers are being searched for, but there is some kind of pushback happening. I think there’s an argument that that is reaching throughout society, and so I think you see a lot of interest among people in both parties around some of these tech regulations. But I think of that as sort of fundamentally moralistic.
One version of it might be to bring in somebody like Jon Haidt and to say that there is a sense that leaving kids to find their way with smartphones has been just a tremendous moral failure on the part of adults and on the part of government, that we have just sort of abandoned too many young people to the wilds of the internet and the wilds of technology without taking responsibility, a certain paternalism that certainly parents, at the very least, are supposed to have. But the backlash to a world that seems that we’ve just let anybody decide anything — if you’re taking the right-wing critique of this, you bring in gender ideology. You bring in quite a bit.
And I think on the left-wing critique, it has much more to do with the role of corporations in public life. But there’s some sense we’ve really gone wrong.
Well, I’m going to disagree with one part of your analysis and agree with another part. The part I’ll disagree with is that I think this does go back to the 1990s in one respect: One of the few pieces of regulation that Congress imposed on the I.T. industry in the 1996 Telecommunication Act was kind of an anti-pornography measure that then gets thrown out by the court.
So it becomes irrelevant, but it was part of the congressional package. It was one of the few elements of an attempt to regulate morality for the general welfare. And on the other side, some of the flashpoints of conflicts that we had in the 1990s over trans issues and the like today remind me very much of flashpoints in the 1990s. So I think there’s more continuity there.
But if I am hearing you correctly — I’ll rephrase this and you can tell me if I’m wrong — the Christian right has become somewhat contaminated by its blind adherence to Trump and by its too great a willingness to plunge into politics with any messenger, no matter what moral qualities they’re exhibiting.
That there is a movement among conservatives to step back from that and to ground their morality in something deeper, more widespread, something that can appeal to a greater cross-section of Americans, regardless of whether they go to church or not. If there is a moral awakening underway that is not tied to instrumentalizing churches for strictly partisan purposes, which is one way of describing evangelicalism in the last 20, 25 years, then that would be new.
And if that’s what you’re sensing, a kind of search for a different kind of moral foundation, less contaminated by politics, then that would be an interesting development, and it might create a new basis for conversation between the Democratic and Republican Parties, especially if it can transcend the religious-nonreligious divide, which doesn’t get talked about much in America — because anyone wanting to be elected president has to declare their belief in God — but is nevertheless profound.
If that’s what I’m hearing you’re saying, then that would be genuinely new and would create the basis for a different kind of conversation than the one we’ve been having.
I do think there’s some of that, and although which way it goes and what conversation it creates, I guess is to be seen.
I think that’s a good place to come to a close here. So always, our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?
Well, interesting that we talked about Christianity and Trump. Part of what I’ve been trying to understand is how sincere Christians have been able to give such incredible support to the man who I regard as the most pagan man ever to inhabit the White House.
And he may well inhabit it again. And a book that helped me a great deal is Tim Alberta’s book “The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.” He took me into a world that I otherwise didn’t have accessibility to, and he helped me to understand a great deal that I did not. So I thank him for that.
I’m always trying to read something fresh and new on the left, and I found kind of an unconventional place to study this and read about it: Tim Harper, “Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire.” And this is a book about underground radicals in East and South Asia and Southeast Asia, 1900 to 1925, looking to upend empire, looking to upend capitalism, looking to free their countries from colonial shackles, and it was a world that Tim Harper recovered that was utterly hidden from view. They weren’t that consequential in those years, but these are going to be the figures who bring Communist China into the world.
And finally, Sarah Igo, “The Known Citizen” — very different kind of book — “A History of Privacy in Modern America.” We’re talking about morality, we’re talking about community, and of course, social media has put the question of privacy and what constitutes privacy and what’s private and what’s public — such an urgent question in understanding America. And she gives us a wonderful hundred-year overview of how Americans in almost every generation have redefined the boundary between private and public, and I found that extremely useful in thinking about where America is at in the 21st century.
You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
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