Transcript

 

Lightly edited, and not 100% guaranteed exact. 

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Toby bold.  Larry regular  

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For several generations now, the free market or free enterprise has been at the absolute heart of the rhetoric and justificatory stories of the American right. This was what they appealed to. This was why what we were doing was wrong. It was absolutely central to everything they did and said until one day it just wasn't.

 

Joining me to discuss this is Larry Glickman, author of Free Enterprise and American History. Larry, welcome to the podcast. 

 

Thank you, Toby. I'm delighted to be here. 

 

So I was watching a talk of yours that was titled How a Contested Concept Became a Conservative Keyword. Can I just zero in on the first part of that? —contested concept. Is the free market not, or free enterprise, a dry, tightly defined economic term? 

 

Well, I would make a distinction between free market and free enterprise. 

 

Please do. 

 

And free enterprise predates the term free market. both a evolving and a contested meaning over from the 19th century to the 20th century pretty much exactly flipped meanings and one of the points I try to make in my book is that even the biggest advocates, the biggest lobbyists of free enterprise were never exactly sure what it meant. And there was even in 1944, Printers Inc., the advertising journal, set up a free enterprise definition contest where they said, ‘write in your definitions and hopefully one of you will come up with one that will stick’ and then that will be the one we use. And they got like 88 submissions, but then they closed down the contest because it didn't appear to be working. So I think one of the key points I try to make is that although we usually assume it's somewhat synonymous with the free market and often is, it's a bit of a more, I would say, it's a slightly flabbier term and also more, to do with the politics of business autonomy. And so, I mean, I think the essence of how people at the height of the free enterprise era Mania, which I would put between the 1930s and maybe the close of the 20th century, essentially, I think what it meant was allowing business to be unregulated and to be able to act as it sees fit, often with the assistance of the federal government, which is why it's not necessarily the same as free markets, I think.

 

I'd be interested in pulling that distinction apart a bit more, because I would argue, and it's a controversial claim, but I would argue ‘free market’ is essentially contestable too. There are tight, well-defined definitions within economics, perfect competition or something like that. But clearly in actual political discourse, when we talk about free markets, both supporters and opponents are using the term more broadly than the sort of narrow equilibrium defined by perfect competition. Indeed, there's sort of an argument of does perfect competition even exist in the real world? It's that narrow, you know?

 

I agree completely with that. In the History of American Capitalism class that I co-teach with my colleague Ed Baptist, we read a little bit of Karl Polanyi in the class. And one of the points he makes is that the free market is a state project. And so obviously, that's quite different from the views of libertarian economists who see free market as a project of freedom from the state. So I think you're right, that it is equally contested, and I shouldn't have suggested otherwise. 

 

Can you give an idea of what distinction you might want to make between free enterprise and free market in maybe a few sentences? Because I was thinking about that as I prepped this interview, are those two words synonymous? It feels almost like a Venn diagram, right? Like there's maybe they're sometimes used interchangeably, but maybe one has some connotations that the other does not. Could you maybe flesh that out a bit more? 

 

I think free enterprise suggests more of a political program. So people who use it often talk about a set of concepts and a set of policies of which free markets might be one of them, but not the only one. And it’s also often connected up with a traditional aspect of American life, which it isn't, but that's how it's often talked about. 

 

Now sometimes free markets are talked about the same way. So there is some overlapping things, but I think that  free enterprises, I'd say maybe more of a philosophical program that involves partly free markets, business autonomy is part of it. But it's also a philosophy of politics that prioritizes business interests as what freedom and liberty are all about.

 

Would we say —sorry, I've just started with really dry conceptual questions, but I find this interesting—would we say, continuing the metaphor of a Venn diagram, that then capitalism is a bit different again? There's definitely overlap with either free markets or free enterprise, but then that has somewhat different connotations again as like a total order of society. 

 

Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. You know, probably the most famous use of free enterprise ever was the so-called Powell Memo from 1971. Lewis Powell wrote this memo called The Attack on the Free Enterprise System. And it's now, it's a central part of my book. It's central in sort of Left histories of the United States. I actually we could talk about this later. Maybe I don't agree with the way most people talk about its meaning and importance. But one of the interesting things I'd have to look at the memo to be sure of this. But I think he even has a footnote where he says by free enterprise, I mean, the American capitalist system. So he's sort of defining them as synonymous here. And a lot of people do that, but I do think there are differences as well in why some people use free enterprise and other people use capitalist. 

 

One of them is that for long periods of time, capitalism was… um, not liked. It was not popular necessarily. And free enterprise, I think for people seemed to be a more anodyne term. One of the lectures I give in the history of capitalism class is called how capitalism got its name. And part of it is to show that it really got its name from its enemies in the late 19th century. And that many, many people denied being capitalists and probably wouldn't have denied being free enterprises, but they denied being capitalists. 

 

There was this in the 1880s, the United States Senate, did this major investigation on the relations between capital and labor. It wound up being four volumes long. They interviewed people all over the country, but one of the famous interviews was a senator asked a Rhode Island, I think he was a printer, who had a workshop and he employed like 10 people or something like that. So he said, you, the guy's name was Keogh. He said, “Mr. Keogh, you are a, you're in business for yourself?” And Keogh said, yes. He said, “you employ other people, You pay them wages. You try to make profits. So you're a capitalist, right?” And Keogh said, “no, I'm not a capitalist.” And he said the senator was like nonplussed. He's like, “what are you talking about?” And he said, “I will never, never accept that term. I started off as a worker. And to me, capitalism is about exploitation of working people. And that's not what I'm about at all.”

 

And there was kind of a recent analog of this in 2019 when you may or may not remember this event, but John Hickenlooper, who is the senator from Colorado at that time, was a candidate in the very crowded Democratic primary. He dropped out shortly thereafter, but he went on the Morning Joe show and he got famous for owning, I think, the first microbrewery in Denver, Colorado. And Joe Scarborough said something like, “you must be a very proud capitalist.” And Hickenlooper said, “I'm not a capitalist at all. What are you talking about?” And this set off a huge controversy for several days where no one could believe that Hickenlooper didn't want to call himself a capitalist. But it really reminded me of those Senate hearings from the 1880s where there is a sense that to be a capitalist maybe involves some… exploitation and immorality that was suspect for many people. 

 

Yeah, you can see that today. I mean, capitalism is certainly the go-to for sort of the various stripes of socialists who might want to run critiques of the status quo, they'd probably be more likely to use that term. It's interesting. 

 

Let's stay with the history, though. When did free enterprise really claim... When did that really get mainstream in American discourse proper? When did that claim its sort of hegemonic values position on the right? 

 

That's a great question. My argument is that it emerged as an anti-New Deal concept. Then kind of made into an American tradition—backdated into American tradition—but that it was really groups like the United States chamber of commerce and the national association of manufacturers and certain conservative politicians and intellectuals, uh, began to frame free enterprise as kind of the anti New Deal. As  the values that the New Deal was departing from. And for a very long time, this was a minority position because the New Deal was very popular, but they were very persistent in framing this idea that the New Deal and the liberal welfare state was a violation of free market principles.

 

And I would argue sometime around the 1970s, as the New Deal order weakened, as liberalism became exhausted or challenged or whatever, the free enterprise arguments that had been minority arguments suddenly took the mainstream. And and that process happened over the course of, you know, maybe 10 or 15 years, I think in the 70s into the 80s. Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 was in part, his celebration of free enterprise, his critique of New Deal liberalism, and his belief in the magic of the marketplace. These were all ideas that had been percolating for 50 years when he became president.

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I'm just going to zero in on one word you said: backdated. I really buy that narrative. I'm coming from a slightly different grounding on that in terms of the philosophic history of liberalism more than sort of economic history. But I think there's a sort of similar story unfolding there, in that what you can often get from so-called classical liberals is the idea that they represent the true and original genesis of liberalism; a sort of tight negative liberty, individual rights, free markets, dot, libertarianish liberalism. And that that was always sort of the baseline. And then progressive welfare state liberalism was kind of a perversion that sprang off at some point in the 20th century.

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And I think what myself (and a lot of other people who know more about it than I do) have argued is it's the other way around: Liberalism was already thinking much more creatively about the economy going back to John Stuart Mill's time (who by the end of his life was calling himself a socialist) Hybrid positions, were the norm. Liberalism was, even by the early 20th century, an ideology of social reform, in the 10s, 20s, beginning to envisage a much more expansive role of government, certainly by the New Deal era, or you could talk about the Attlee era in the UK.

 

And then, you get what was initially a very minority strain within liberalism—and saw itself as a minority strain—gain prominence as a backlash to that. Obviously, the name Hayek comes to mind within the liberal tradition. But you could also even someone like Berlin trying to say, "oh, it's all just been negative liberty all along". And then that position, as you said, backdates itself. "Actually, it's all been us all along."

 

And that backdating,  certainly post-Reagan and Thatcher revolutions, has been quite successful. And we sort of accept the term 'classical liberalism' without complaint, whereas perhaps we shouldn't.  In much more recent scholarship—I'm thinking my friend Matt McManus has a recent book on liberal socialism—has come back and I think correctly challenged that history.

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Yeah, it's a really fascinating story. I think in the United States, it's somewhat complicated by the fact that in early 20th century, what we would say called liberalism was often came under the label of progressivism. And, it's often said, I think it largely was the case, that Franklin Roosevelt didn't choose the phrase progressivism, but took the phrase liberalism. And it, hugely pissed off the Republicans like Herbert Hoover, who Roosevelt beat in 1932. He wrote a book called The Challenge to Liberty in 1934.

 

Hoover lived till 1964, and he spent the last 30 years of his life complaining that Roosevelt had perverted the meaning of the word liberal. And so there is a discourse in the United States on the right that, you that the New Deal liberals stole their phrase. And there are some conservatives, obviously, who never wanted to claim the word liberal and saw themselves primarily as anti-liberal. But for the more maybe libertarian stream of people who call themselves neoliberals in the 30s and 40s, I think they were partial to this story of that their term had been stolen by the social Democrats like Franklin Roosevelt.

 

But I agree with your general framing of it.

 

It's interesting because that's a complaint that goes back to the very, very beginning of liberalism. There's a series I did on libertarianism where I start with a quote from Herbert Spencer in the 1880s. And he's whining on about how liberals today have lost the true meaning of liberalism. They've lost the meaning of freedom. They've perverted it by imagining it might have something to do with aid to the poor or something. And actually, he says, it may be that the Tories are actually going to become the real champions of liberalism.

 

And I just, I read that. I changed the word "Tories" to just "the right". And I asked, "who said that?"

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Because it sounds like something a sort of Ben Shapiro or some modern, right-libertarian flavoured figure would say. It sounds so modern. And then, as you said, you've got that same complaint in the middle of the 20th century. But it's all the way back to the 1880s. People were like,

 

fascinating.

 

Yeah, yeah. Along with that, (and one thing you cover a lot) is the argument all the way through about is not just a sort of conceptual, "oh, these people have misunderstood liberty". It's that in doing so, once you get away from a tighter definition of liberty, once you get away from free enterprise, that way totalitarianism lies. Could you say a bit more about that and the genesis of those sorts of arguments?

 

Yeah. Yeah. Again, that's why I think of free enterprise as a political discourse, because it really a lot of it is rooted in a an argument that liberalism is, you know, one degree removed from socialism, which is one degree removed from communism, which is one degree removed from totalitarianism. And so this is a very, very common argument. It's very much based on a slippery slope idea that even the tiniest amount of government involvement will ultimately lead to this snowball effect where we will have totalitarianism. And it's one of the areas where as much as Trump has broken, and we'll talk more about this from the free enterprise tradition, that's an area where he is completely in keeping with it. He's constantly talking about, you know, eliding liberals from communists. He called Joe Biden a socialist. He calls the radical left, everything from, you know, maintaining Obamacare to minimal amounts of regulation are all part of the same, you know, lead to the same dangerous place. And that way, he's a complete inheritor of this very old tradition that dates back to the 1930s, even earlier. But that really takes on meaning in the New Deal era.

 

One critique you can run of that argument is, and we'll get to the modern era, but even running through the latter half of the 20th century, is it just never particularly seems to have corresponded to reality particularly well at all.

 

A key example of this would be Churchill very much ran this line against Attlee's Labour Party. He said, he gave a very famous speech where he said, this will create a British Gestapo if you empower this. Now, that didn't land because the Labour Party had been part of the war government. It was a very socialist party, but it was also a very aggressively anti-fascist and anti-communist party. There could be no doubt there. And so that didn't land, and Labour won that election and created the NHS and so on.

 

And then as you sort of march through the 20th century, it just is not the case that people who were more welfare state inclined have been more sympathetic to authoritarianism either at home or abroad. Like a lot of the restrictions on civil liberties come from the political right. The American case is complicated because the parties were both cross pressured, but it's not a simple story of the free enterprise people favored civil rights or something like that.

 

And then when you look at what the relationships were with authoritarianism abroad, neither the centre-left or the centre-right in Western countries covered themselves in glory there, but it's, again, by no means straightforward, I think, that, if anything, you look at the alliance of neoliberals, if I can use that term, with figures like Pinochet or something. There's definitely a story to be told there.

 

And yet it persists. It seems like that story that there's only negative liberty in the free market and anything else, you'll get Marxism and a parade of whores. That's never corresponded to reality particularly neatly. And yet it hasn't shaken them from it at all.

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No, I think that's exactly right. I mean, one of the things that really struck me in my research is the persistence of a discourse that didn't correspond to reality, but became central to a very popular, powerful political coalition and is still central, I would argue. I mean, look at the aggrandizement of the state in the Trump administration, which in so many ways, what the conservatives have feared is is happening in the Trump administration. We have a president who sees no constraints on his power, a state that snoops in the lives of individuals.

 

But I think it's very, very hard because the common sense has been established for so long that it is the left that produces big brother government and the nanny state, and it is the right that opposes it. And it's something that I think really is very, very important to challenge in public debate, because you're right, it is persistent.

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Should we see there then as something persistently insincere in that argument? You know, it was made again and again by people who often, I'm thinking of Reagan and Thatcher here, often seem to have not that much of a problem with authoritarians abroad, and were often happy to, at a minimum, accept the support of authoritarians at home.

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You can't ever get in people's heads, but this is a question I think people on the left debate and get into various sorts of theoretical disagreements on. To put it very bluntly, was it all always bullshit?

 

Yeah. I've been asked that when I was giving my tour of my book. I got asked that question a lot. I tend to sidestep that question. In other words, I...

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I think it's hard. I think it's a hard question.

 

I assume that most of the people I'm writing about, many of them who said similar things for a very long time, believe what they said. It's hard for me to say, I think that it's easier to make the argument now that our politics is so cynical now that people are saying things they don't believe and wouldn't defend. But my sense, you know, Ronald Reagan wrote his own radio addresses for many years and he was very consistent in what he said for a long period of time. My sense is he believed that he was sincere about these things. And and that was maybe partly why he was so effective in spreading the message.

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Yeah, and I think Thatcher did too. I think Thatcher was a true believer. Is there maybe a way of squaring the circle between true belief and the incongruence with reality, that they're kind of using words to mean different things, and they're envisaging something different? And when they talk about authoritarianism and the loss of liberty and so on, they're not picturing what we are.

 

We're thinking about the government knocking on your door at night, and they're more thinking about the violation of a hierarchical social order that is imagined to be fixed and immutable and the overturning of certain social categories with respect to race or gender or class. They're imagining their idea of what totalitarianism means that's a bit different to us. Something like that as a way of getting out of that?

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I think that's exactly right. I mean, I think they very much believe in a kind of inversion where they are the victims. Most of the people I write about in this free enterprise book are successful businessmen and politicians and so forth. But they literally compare themselves to slaves. They, you know, they they just wallow in grievance and victimization all the time.

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And and so, yeah, their angle of vision is different because they are, you know, I think they have a constrained social vision that leads them to not see that, for example, that it may be required to have the state prevent discrimination against African Americans, for example. They just see that, that's the encroachment of the state and that's communism. You read Barry Goldwater's conscience of a conservative. He's constantly going there, without really focusing. Even Goldwater goes so far as to say (and this is a move Milton Friedman used to make all the time), which is they invoke what Albert Hirschman called the perversity thesis. Which is; I agree with the goal. I don't like discrimination. I support civil rights, but the problem is when you use the government to enforce these things, it will have these perverse consequences, the exact opposite of what we intended. And we're going to wind up with a police state. Which is what the critics said before him.

 

They made the same argument about that that they did about social security in 1935 that they did about Obamacare in 2010 all of, you know, it's kind of the same argument. Which is aggrandising the state will lead to these terrible consequences, even though they may support the goals. 

 

Another example you could give was—and this was put very, very explicitly at the time—the decriminalisation of male homosexuality in the UK. There was this philosophical debate where on the one hand, you have the liberty principle. And on the other, what was argued was called the 'disintegration thesis', which is the idea that some sort of moral norms are so deeply rooted in people that if you as a matter of law overturn them, then society will disintegrate.

 

And the idea was if you allow people to have same sex relationships, this will be so offensive to moral common sense, that the whole social order will come crashing down. And okay, we legalised it. And then a generation or two later, we legalised gay marriage and like, it didn't happen. You know.

 

But it never, never seems to faze them.

 

You see very similar arguments about integration, racial integration, and so forth that we have, you know, there are customs and traditions. And if the law moves too fast, you know, this is one of the main themes of my backlash book, that if political and legal change is in the direction of equality move too far and too fast, it will actually lead to this terrible backlash that will be worse off for everyone, but particularly the victimised groups.

 

And, you know, very, very deep concern about custom and tradition, which are not cannot really be changed by law. And it's dangerous to do so.

 

You've mentioned Goldwater, talk to me a bit about the post civil rights adoption of that set of grievances by the Republican Party, and particularly to tie it back to free enterprise, the way in which many essentially racial concerns or concerns about a sort of hierarchical ordering of society, then became expressed through economic language. I mean, there's the famously Atwater quote about using coded language and dog whistles. Talk to me about that a bit, because I think that's always such a key piece of this story.

 

Yeah, the idea was that you cannot have, it's very difficult to regulate, incremental change, and that it will wind up being some sort of landslide, moral landslide, that will be very, very dangerous. And the language that they often use is that these are challenges to liberty. And, and that liberty is. What, at least in the United States case, conservatives latch on to this idea. And you might think that they would say, well, "how much liberty does an African American person have in 1963, who is prevented from voting?" There are allowed to be job advertisements that exclude black people from applying for them. Many state universities, public universities will not admit black students. So it doesn't seem like liberty, but they tend to put that in the bucket of equality, which, which they feel is a very threatening force that they don't like.

 

So oftentimes, they defend tradition as the preservation of liberty, and the challenge to tradition as an egalitarian move that will have very few limits on it and may backfire. I was just reading this morning, in the context of the, today is the anniversary of the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And because the Fourth of July celebrations are coming up, I was reading Strom Thurmond, one of the conservative opponents of the civil rights movement, very famous opponent, but he talked about the mythology of equality, and how equality is really not a fundamental American idea. Yes, it's mentioned in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, but really, liberty is what it's all about, not equality.  So I think that's part of what the arguments are.

 

So to go forward to the modern age, you've had this sort of, from the perspective of left and liberal people seeming contradiction within American conservatism, that it's its central set of values are to do with markets, enterprise, not having government overreach, but its core animating grievances seem to be about race and gender. In the last two decades, that seems to really come apart very fast. So here's the case that's always striking for me, the Tea Party movement, a sort of virulently anti-Obama movement, was very focused on sort of libertarian rhetoric about the national debt, and so on and so forth.

 

And then, like within a matter of a year or two, that, just like a snake shedding its skin, just goes away. That movement becomes the MAGA movement and just completely forgets about that almost entirely, at least at a rhetorical level. The policies endure, but at a rhetorical level just stops. What are we to make of that?

 

So many conventional histories of the United States that talk about the rise of the conservative movement in post-World War II America, talk about the threelegged stool of conservatism, which is libertarians, cold warriors, and then social conservatives or traditionalists. And I think what that elides is, first of all, racism, which is really a central connector in a lot of this, and also these kinds of arguments that are about preservation of hierarchies above all other things and the threat that they fear from the challenge to those hierarchies.

 

It's still striking, though, that the entire scaffolding has just fallen away, that the central rhetoric has just been switched out, and it doesn't seem to bother them. I don't think the Tea Party was that large a movement in terms of number of people, but it wasn't purely an elite thing. It was like an activist thing. It was like people like me on the other side, who spend too much time yowling about politics online.  

 

I guess the conventional narrative, which I do not by any means think is wholly wrong, would be that a lot of the right's activists, who were already pretty racist, got very radicalised by the fact of a Black president and that was initially expressed in a somewhat coded way, as being about the national debt or some such. Then Trump came along and just said the things, and they were like, "yeah, that's our guy." That's sort of the conventional story, right?

 

Yes. Well, I mean, it is fascinating. One of the things that I tracked was mention of free enterprise in Republican political platforms, and they're mentioned constantly. Mitt Romney, who was the last Republican candidate before Donald Trump back in 2012, his whole campaign theme in 2012, when he ran against Obama, was that free enterprise was on trial. And this was the-

 

Very traditional Republican things.

 

Yeah, exactly. And it is hard to believe that that was, what, 16 years ago or 14 years ago, and it really did stop with Trump in the sense that Trump is really the first post-New Deal Republican who has no time for the concept of free enterprise, barely ever utters the phrase. I think I found two utterances when I tried to search for him using the term, but certainly does not believe in the mythology that someone like Reagan put forward or Romney put forward, which is that the market is this miraculous system, kind of an almost impersonal system, what Hayek called the price system, which produces these miracles. And that so many Republicans, that was the rhetoric they used. And someone like Paul Ryan, who was Speaker of the House during Trump's first term or part of Trump's first term, he was someone who really talked about that all the time.

 

But then so many Republicans who always valued other things really placed their priority on those other things. I mean, there was a lot of, in the 2010s and maybe even earlier, in Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and so forth, there was really a worship of strong man leadership, a lot of stuff about, you may remember this, celebrating Putin and the Russian army being much tougher than the American army, which had become somehow feminised and so on. And the idea that conservatives were not tough enough, and that the talk radio discourse was not really intersecting with the mainstream political discourse of congressional Republicans. And all of that really flipped very, very quickly when Trump became president. And I think many people who had these other ideas on the back burner were able to just flip them and support Trump and thought, well, it's really not that hard to stop talking about free enterprise. We can do this. And they did.

 

But I think the complication is that they economically, there are obviously major exceptions like tariffs, but most of Trump economic policies are completely in the spirit of a right-wing republicanism. And so I think a lot of people were able to say, I'll make an alliance with Trump because even though he doesn't really believe in free enterprise in his heart, he does believe in the things I care most about, which are tax cuts, throwing people off their health insurance if possible, deregulation, conservative judges, anti-abortion, anti-civil rights, all these other things that really matter to them as well. But so I think Trump abandoned the architecture of free enterprise without abandoning many of the central policies.

 

And in fact, my view has always been that a lot of people say Trump changed the Republican Party, which he did. But I think he was savvy enough in 2016 to realise that even though he occasionally on this stump talked about raising taxes on rich people like himself, he never proposed any such policy. And the tax policy he put out on the campaign was a very regressive tax policy. And that's the one he passed in 2017. And I think he realised that as much as many Republican politicians were impressed by the new coalition he was putting together and the power he was having over the media and so forth, I think he realised they'll probably break with me if I actually do try to raise taxes on the rich, or if I do try to implement some sort of populist economic programme that people like Steve Bannon were promising would happen if Trump became president. He was going to be a president of the working class, and there was all this discussion about that.

 

And so it's an unusual thing in that the key catchphrase and the central device of modern conservatism just dropped off the face of the earth with very few postmortems, as you're saying. It just disappeared, and you won't find it on a Republican platform since then, and you won't find it in the campaigns. But many, many of the underlying ideas remain. So I'm not sure how we square that circle.

 

Here's how I square that circle, and I'm going to move through a few different debates fairly fast, so feel free to revisit any of them in your answer. The way I square that circle is in a sentence: Fascists don't care that much about economics. Now, I'm assuming a few things in that answer. I'm assuming we can meaningfully talk about the Trump movement as a fascist one, call it perhaps neo-fascist, but in some sense contiguous with that history. I'm also assuming that there is something ideologically distinct here from, say, the Reagan and Thatcher era, without seeing those as good, they are at least different. Traditional conservatives do care about economics, not in the same way as liberals do, but they do care about it. Liberals care about economics, socialists care about economics, in different ways, but we all care.

 

Fascists don't. They just really don't, and you see this in their early writings. Mussolini, when he's laying out his doctrine of fascism, it's pretty woolly, incoherent stuff, but he's very clear this is not about economic motives. This is about manhood, and glory, and war, and racial purity. And these are things which he's pretty straightforward on. Money can't buy, and money doesn't necessarily help with. They're interested in economics to the extent that they're interested in having armies and doing tough guy shit. Now, what that means in practise is they can veer about wildly between seeming libertarianism and seeming economic populism, but they're not really either. And in practise, what they care about is seizing the state to do performative violence and racial purity stuff, and that usually the quickest way to do that is some combination of bribing and bullying traditional business elites, so that's what they do.

 

I think they'll flirt with the idea of a socially conservative workers revolution, but actually that shit's really hard to do, and it's easier to either radicalise or beat into submission the people who are already holding powerful positions in that society, so that's what they do. And it's not that they're deeply committed libertarians either, it's just that they care about seizing the state, and that's the shortest path there. That's my answer to that.

 

I think there's a lot to that. The only thing I would say is I don't see much veering. In other words, I don't see much, really any hint of Trump embracing a potpourri of economic ideas, some left, some right. He pretty much sticks to right-wing economic ideas. The fact that he hasn't proposed raising the minimum wage is really remarkable to me. That would seem like a political no-brainer, but he hasn't. He obviously talked about giving everyone great health care, but he doesn't care enough to try to produce that, and the main thing that he and his rich patrons care about are tax cuts for the rich, and he's come through twice on that. In fact, maybe those are his only two major legislative reforms. Obviously, there's a lot of executive actions, but nonetheless, I mean, I do think you're right that Trump and many of his supporters certainly don't care about economics in the way that we think about it.

 

For Trump, I think everything is very personalised, so he does talk about things like jobs, but oftentimes, it's just very, very symbolic. We all remember him talking about bringing coal mining back, and a lot of people mentioned that there are more employees at Arby's fast food restaurant than coal mining, and he hasn't really done anything in that area or really bringing back manufacturing jobs at all. Biden did a better job than Trump at that, so I think you're right. I think there's a performance of power that people care about. There's the fact that he enacts what a lot of people think is how a rich person can live, which is that they can have gold-plated penthouses, and they can have their own planes, and they can get away with all kinds of stuff that most of us can't get away with, and so there's an appeal of that sort of power.

 

But I think that the economic programme behind that is largely fairly traditional GOP boilerplate, again, with the exception of tariffs, which is a big exception, and with the partial exception of immigration, although the GOP had been going against immigration for long before Trump came to power.

 

Yeah, but those exceptions in themselves are quite telling in that what they are not about, I would argue, is putting money in the pocket of the average American Joe at the expense of the CEO. What those are about are national standing and racial purity, national aggrandisement and racial purity. Increasingly, and you're seeing this in the UK, you're seeing this in Europe now, we talk about immigration as if that is a sort of clearly defined policy issue that is about how many visas are issued. We're talking about our racial identity, right? And again, fascists care about racial identity, and they will subordinate economics to that if necessary, and that's what you see there.

 

Now, what you don't see, I think, as you correctly point out, is any like, "we're actually going to be doing kitchen table stuff to help the plumber in Ohio" or something. That never happens. And I think-

 

If I could just jump in, the one way it does happen is Trump will use government funds to support the farmers. So it's more of an assertion of power than actually farmers are saying, you're not helping me, you're actually killing me. But he'll be able to say, you know, I'm taking this money from this pot, and I'm going to give it to farmers, because they support me.

 

But I can fit that within my narrative too, because you will get these very targeted bailouts, you mentioned coal mining. There was an interesting thing in the UK where we bailed out our steel manufacturing. And people point out there's 5,000 people employed in this sector in the UK. There's universities that employ more people, you know. But I think it's not that they're economically significant, or that that is doing a lot for a lot of people, it's that they symbolise a hierarchical order. I think to the right, something like coal mining, steel manufacturing, farming, symbolise a sort of lost manhood. That's why they care about them, right?

 

And I think there's been a lot of, when I say that they've gone back and forth, there have been a lot of elements within the Trump movement that have floated being genuinely more economically populist. Bannon's talked about it, you can think about some of the figures that have come up on the new right have sort of flirted with it. A lot of the sort of academic defences that get written, or the sort of academic investigations of the new right are very interested in this idea of like, "what if we had a culturally conservative and economically left party?" But it doesn't actually happen.

 

I think what's going on there is those academics, those elites, those people are ancillary to the movement, and they're not as powerful as they think they are. They're following the waggon, they're not leading the bandwagon. Whereas, you go back to the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, the sort of libertarian free market, free enterprise people, they were exercising power over the direction of the right. They were leading the bandwagon in some ways. Whereas today the waggon is Rush Limbaugh, and talk radio, and Ben Shapiro, and Trump, and the MAGA movement. And all these intellectuals, and so on. They're tagging along behind it, trying to keep up. They think they're leading it, but they're not.

 

Absolutely. Yeah. I think that's absolutely right. You find even some people who previously spoke in that language, and they work in the Trump administration, they begin to speak Trump's language, like Besant is Secretary of Treasury, or Lutnick, the Secretary of Commerce. There's no sense in which they are at all shaping Trump's discourse. I mean, they are completely buying into his discourse in some of the most obsequious and embarrassing ways, at least from my perspective. But I think that, it lends further support to your argument that the economic side of the equation is not particularly important to them.

 

Final question for you, and this is one I don't, I'm sort of making my mind up what I think about. It seems like in a lot of ways, as we've spent an hour talking about how the economic side is just falling away. And it's just all culture war all the time, all the way down. And yet, if you poll people on what the most important issue to them is, they say affordability. Every time, super majorities, 70% of America. And, you know, we can't just be talking people who are in sustenance poverty, 70% of America is up to what, 80, $85,000 a year? 

 

And it seems like people are very, very concerned with the economy in a way that they wern't before, and that some people controversially have argued has become untethered from the fundamentals of the economy. It seems to have accelerated post-COVID. So you have a sort of contradiction where economics has arguably been decentered from what our politicians are actually saying. And yet, that seems to be increasingly a huge focus of the electorate. Do you have any thoughts on like, what's up with that?

 

Yeah, I mean, to me, it's a huge question. And it's, I think it is partly why a lot of the pundits are predicting a, you know, a strong democratic showing in the, in the congressional elections later this year, that, you know, people are saying economic reality is finally going to catch up to Trump. And we'll see whether that's the case or not. But I, I suspect it is. And I think the only thing that would save him is the structures of the Senate and so on massively advantage Republicans. But I think, definitely, people think the economy is going badly and are furious with those in power about it. I think that's unquestionable.

 

Yeah. Yeah.

 

But I do think that there's also a, you know, partly what, you know, Trump has basically kneecapped the Bureau of Labour Statistics. And the media now, you know, so many of my conservative friends are reading a media that doesn't necessarily report this. And so, obviously, there are, you know, you go, if you go to the gas station, you see the price of gasoline, you can't hide that, and so on. But I do think the emphasis in the people's media diet also partly contributes to this. And I do think some of that is breaking through now. But I also think there is a, it seems to me that there's a sort of anti-incumbency bias that is felt, but because so many of our districts are so incredibly uncompetitive, nothing will happen in that way. But in the areas where districts are fairly competitive or demographically changing, it seems like we may see more turnover. We've already seen some established candidates, both in the Democratic and Republican Party, lose primaries or be threatened in the general. And that probably has something to do with economic dissatisfaction, but maybe more broadly, you know, we, things are very sour. And, you know, I was just, yesterday or the day before, Stephen Miller's 

 

Yeah,

 

birthright citizenship case, you know, it's presenting such a bleak picture of the country, which is that we can't even let pregnant women into the country. We have to be on guard with a fortress America. I think this discourse is quite similar in Britain. Um. And we are so close to being taken over as a country. There's a lot of disquiet and a lot of concern, whether people buy into that particular argument or not, but, um, the

 

I was just going to say

 

the kind of soothing arguments that Hillary Clinton tried to make in 2016 and so forth, uh, you know, which worked well enough to get her the popular vote, but not the electoral vote in that election and lost, you know, lost a lot of traditional Democratic constituencies. It seems harder and harder to make that argument.

 

I thought that I think the left doesn't give Biden nearly enough credit for a lot of the things he did economically and it was as if they didn't happen at all in terms of how they were portrayed in the media. And it does make me wonder about this, how one can make progressive economic arguments salient. Beyond the Democratic base, because this is this is 1st draft thoughts. This is just sort of something I'm thinking about. Do you think there's a sense in which you look at the Democrats and that all affordability all the time? Chuck Schumer says stuff like "the Iran war is a is a distraction from affordability issues."

 

Yeah, OK, fine.

 

But he is responding to something real, which is if you poll people, that is what they say is important to them. Do you think there's a thing in which maybe we're taking that affordability cost of living a bit overly literally in the what people are expressing with that?

 

Sometimes, at least, it's a sense that things are going wrong and that society feels more—even if  they earn 50, 60, 70, $80,000 a year—that society feels less ordered, less predictable, less fair than it once did? And that the reasons for that shouldn't be surprising to us, given that every sector of the political aisle is telling them that: the right is telling them white genocide and all these foreigners coming in; liberals, mainline liberals are telling them fascists are taking over the country. An increasingly loud and influential sort of democratic socialist left is telling them it's all a conspiracy of the millionaires and the billionaires.

 

You know, you go back 10 years, that wasn't as much the case. You go back 30 years, it really wasn't as much the case. It's not that like the median American is poor in a global sense. They just aren't. It's more that there's a feeling that the world is less ordered and predictable than it was. And that's how that expresses itself. 

 

I think that's a part of it. I mean, I do feel like there is a sense in which it's almost impossible to imagine big things happening or productive things happening. I mean, Trump, you know, his entire campaign was based on either these kind of crazy promises or else mostly just bearing down on fear.

 

And there's this internal, you know, he basically thematises all the stuff that dog whistles were used for before about the internal enemy. He comes out and says that there's an internal enemy in this country. And it's really the Democrats are the internal enemy. And people see a lot of social decay. Like, you know, I live in rural upstate New York and there are rural hospitals closing all the time and this sort of thing. And I think a lot of people don't, you know, they're told it's the free spending Democrats are responsible for this, or it's Obamacare or whatever

 

And so I think what encourages me about, you know, on a smaller scale of the kind of discourse that Mondani, the mayor of New York City is doing, he's sort of combining an affordability discourse with a very, very practical set of sewer socialism discourse about "we're going to fix potholes. We're going to make life a little bit easier for you." And  government has the power to do this. And the government is here to serve your interests. And I think that to me, that's a message that I think the Democrats have not really been successful at selling for some time.

 

I wrote an article about the joke that Reagan was famous for telling about the nine scariest words in the English language are "I'm from the government. I'm here to help". And what I tell my students in class when I'm teaching about the 20th century is that that was what Franklin Roosevelt said unironically during the New Deal. And people believed they believed the government could help you. And the idea that that would turn into a joke 50 years later would have surprised many people, I think.

 

And so maybe reclaiming, turning that from a joke to a slogan that people take seriously and believe is possible is part of what is necessary to because you do need economic programmes. But you also need a narrative that that encompasses those things, encompasses a story of of moral progress that we're trying to make. And it's very, very hard when you're competing with such dystopian nightmares that are projected into the media landscape of many, many people in the United States.

 

Yeah, although in the Western world mainline liberalism, too, is pretty apocalyptic right now. The average Democratic primary voter believes they are in an existential struggle with fascism for the future. And not incorrectly.

 

Yeah, well, I guess I mean, that's another irony to me, which is that the free enterprise language, which is that one of the tropes I talk about is 'it's five minutes to midnight'. That's what free enterprisers kept saying that we're right near the edge where we're about to collapse into totalitarianism. And it was always bullshit, but now it's kind of true. And so but the problem is that the left has never really in the United States has that's not been a left language. That's been a right coded language. And it is true that a lot of grassroots Democrats feel that way. And some of the politicians are trying to talk that way. But I think they haven't really found a successful language for doing that.

 

That's an interesting point. And I think that's going to be one of my takeaways for this conversation is the language of like, "if we don't act now, we will become a fascist state" has very much been a language of the right in America. And in some ways, what's a bit jarring about our current circumstances, that's flipped.

 

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And it's hard because conspiracy theories are coded right, and apocalyptic language is coded right. You know, I just have an image of my head of Obama during the Tea Party stuff saying, 'calm down, America, calm down'.

 

"The fever will break."

 

Exactly. And even Biden's thought that "if I can direct some money toward the red states, if I can, show that government can work, and so forth, the fever will break" I think even use that term.

 

But that's not what happened.

 

I just I just break with that completely the other way. You know, I get people always have the idea that the question is "how do we get people thinking in a hopeful way again? how do we run on optimism? How do we reestablish common ground?"

 

And we're not going to do any of those things. We run on fear. And we run on hate.

 

Like, just just get used to the actual water we're swimming in, you know.  The first step is defeating these people at the polls, because they're destroying us. They're destroying the country. Their platform is hateful. And and that's the first step is, you know, stopping this.

 

And I think that's where the passion is.  And that's what a lot of people are saying. And I think it's a similar discourse in your country where people are saying we want it's almost more about a fighting mentality than an ideological mentality. We want people who are going to fight and not say, like Chuck Schumer, this is a distraction. Or when the Supreme Court barely ekes out a support in favour of birthright citizenship, doesn't say, great. You know, we can now rest assured that the Supreme Court has has saved this important constitutional principle rather than saying a lot of us are scared because this is what they did with Roe versus Wade. This is what they did during Reconstruction. This is what they've done with the Voting Rights Act. And they know that they play the long game.

 

And this is pretty fast. I mean, birthright citizenship was completely a consensus position until not that long ago. And already they have four Supreme Court votes. If John Roberts, something happens to him and Trump appoints a new chief justice, you know, it's conceivable that it could disappear within a few years.

 

They are a thousand percent coming back on that one. They'd have come back if it was 8-1, but they're a thousand percent coming back on 5-4

 

Yes. Yeah. Yeah, so I think it's meeting the moment. And I think that it's been it's very hard to to combine all of these things, because you don't want to poo poo the fact that there is economic anxiety. But the idea of Schumer saying, you know, the war in Iran is a distraction from that. You want to say this war is is an outcome. of having, you know, a crazed autocratic leader and is a moral blight. So I think we're all waiting for a candidate who can package this in a way that combines these things. And I don't think we have that yet at the national level. And so that is the big challenge.

 

Thousand percent. That's a good note to end it on. Real, real pleasure, Larry. Just want to take a moment, tell listeners, if they're interested in reading more of your work, where can they go for that? And you mentioned briefly your upcoming Backlash book. I don't know if you want to say a couple more words there.

 

Sure. I write for, I'm on Blue Sky for one thing at Larry Glickman, and I also write for public facing periodicals like the Atlantic, Boston Review, and other sites like that. And I am working on a book, which I hope to finish a draft of by the end of the year, called Backlash, the First Century, 1866 to 1966, which is about how the opposition to the Reconstruction period set the template for conservative politics in the 20th century into the present.

 

Cool. Cheers again for your time.

 

Thank you. Pleasure to talk to you.