00:01:40.680Of course, you know about the fog that came in, and the Royal Navy did not cut off the retreat.
00:01:45.000And I want to thank everybody for the last couple of days who's been here to talk about really the beginning of the Revolutionary War, starting 27 August, continued on and from there on in for many years, six, seven years, nothing but fighting.
00:02:03.140The Declaration of Independence was brilliant, obviously, and the declaration that we were independent, but eventually you got to fight for it.
00:02:11.700Honored now to be joined by Kurt Anderson.
00:02:13.800Anderson. Kurt's got a new novel out called The Breakup. I guess it's a dystopian. People
00:02:19.300describe it as a dystopian novel about the future, set in the future. But you had a piece in the
00:02:24.980New York Times the other day about the soft succession. So this novel, I think, deals with
00:02:29.580the civil war and then the aftermaths of a civil war as seen through the framework or the framing
00:02:35.720of a marriage. But talk to me, you wrote this really incredible piece about we're kind of
00:02:41.420already in a soft secession in this country between, I guess, blue states and red states.
00:02:46.460Could you walk through just that concept?
00:02:49.260Sure. Happy to. So I hadn't really noticed, put together these things that had happened over the
00:02:57.500last dozen years, legally and quasi-legally, that amount to a soft secession. And it's not my term,
00:03:04.140it's that of scholars and so forth. But, you know, beginning in, I don't know, let's say 2010,
00:03:09.64010, 11, when certain cities, certain big cities declared themselves sanctuary cities for immigrants, illegal immigrants.
00:03:20.600And in quick succession, states, a couple dozen states and a thousand counties have named themselves, called themselves, declared themselves and passed laws making themselves Second Amendment sanctuary places.
00:03:36.580It's, of course, a play on the Sanctuary Cities idea.
00:03:41.180There's these interstate climate alliances that are ways to manage cap and trade for the Northeast.
00:03:49.720Health alliances now, more than ever, to have their own alternative to the CDC and public health recommendations.
00:03:58.320All these things had amounted, had been happening, and they're all kind of, in a certain way, boring and bureaucratic.
00:04:05.480But to it taken together in the aggregate, I realized as I was beginning to research the breakup, which is fiction, of course, that this soft secession was already underway.
00:04:19.060And nobody was talking about actually a quote unquote national divorce.
00:04:24.520It was just, OK, there are these differences in the way people in different places want to be governed, want to govern themselves, so forth.
00:04:32.340And, you know, anti-democratic federal governments when there were democratic federal governments and vice versa, certainly under Trump of the last year and a half.
00:04:42.600And so this was emerging as I was beginning to write this book.
00:04:48.260I didn't really talk about that in the book because by 2045, it's the pretty distant past.
00:04:54.300And a lot of stuff happens in my backstory between now and then.
00:05:03.800It's through this couple who have their own political differences and have been married for 23 years.
00:05:08.340They're middle-aged Gen Zers, which gave me great pleasure to think about young people being middle-aged eventually.
00:05:16.560And it's all seen through their and their family, their kids' eyes, who have been living in Tennessee, outside Nashville, for the last 10 years when the novel takes place.
00:05:27.360So they were kind of on the front line, both of the pre-war division and the post-war division, as this incredible logistical feat of cutting up the country into two, has just about finished in 2045.
00:05:57.360year and a half. Let's go back. In the article, you talked about, hey, America's gone through
00:06:03.140this before, kind of. You said that, I guess, John C. Calhoun and the folks in South Carolina
00:06:08.420is about the tariffs and Andrew Jackson, all that. I guess in what, 1832, roughly, there was
00:06:14.500a kind of a successionist movement then that, hey, federal law doesn't apply to us. I think
00:06:20.560Calhoun was the vice president. He actually resigned. And I think Andrew Jackson said, hey,
00:06:25.000I'm going to who is a unionist, said, although a Southerner and a slave owner, he said, if I have to, I'll send the army into South Carolina to enforce, I guess, tariffs.
00:06:36.860And and if John C. Calhoun doesn't like it, he'll be the first one we hang from a lamppost.
00:06:41.540So this has happened before. We've had this kind of soft successionism. But there, despite all the efforts to try to hold us together with a lot of very smart individuals on both sides, compromise after compromise after compromise, it eventually devolved in the Civil War the first time, correct?
00:07:01.780Correct. Exactly right. And the thing about that is that struck me as fairly uncanny in terms of—I'm a big believer that history doesn't necessarily repeat, but rhymes—that, you know, as you say, 2032, it took another 20 years, really, when this was part of the discourse and part of these differences tending toward irreconcilable, until the 50s when it all started coming apart faster.
00:07:29.460It's like the old Hemingway line, you know, about bankruptcy that, you know, how did it happen?
00:07:34.480Well, it happened gradually, then suddenly.
00:07:47.460And as I started writing my story of the breakup, it began seeming less far-fetched, the story I was telling.
00:07:56.680I still don't think it's probable necessarily, but there are all kinds of, you know, radical transformations of our governing system and apparatus that could be done short of violence.
00:08:12.300But I thought it was both made for a good story about our possible future and, you know, it should be there on the table, I think, as a plausible scenario.
00:08:27.460let me through it just one more time this you're saying right now and i think it's it's i think
00:08:35.920it's more defined than it was back in the 18 1832 because you could argue back then it was part of
00:08:43.420the south there's really this landed aristocracy people i don't think realize that charleston was
00:08:48.320one of the richest cities in the world i think they had more per capita what you would call
00:08:52.720billionaires at that time than than anywhere else, certainly in the in the United States,
00:08:57.800but maybe in the world. But now when you talk about this soft secessionism, you've got blue
00:09:02.460states that are rejecting federal law on immigration, particularly mass deportations
00:09:08.480and immigration law. You've got a ton of red states that whether it's guns or other things
00:09:13.840are coming to their own conclusions and are rejecting federal law. So today, you think it's
00:09:19.480more defined than it was in the run-up to the Civil War the first time? You think this soft
00:09:24.880succession has already happened, and it's only building momentum here? Well, it is different,
00:09:32.440as I say. History rhymes. It doesn't repeat. I think that these kinds of formal arrangements
00:09:39.500of states forming their own compacts, it did not happen then, right? And in fact,
00:09:45.060when South Carolina and Calhoun and the rest brought this nullification crisis to a head
00:09:50.740in, as you say, the early 1830s, it didn't immediately then say, okay, everyone here
00:09:58.140in the South believes in secession. That wasn't the way it worked. But by kind of softening the
00:10:05.260ground legally, politically, psychologically, yeah, I think we're on a track that I say,
00:10:13.640could go to this end state, might not, probably won't, perhaps won't, but could. So yeah,
00:10:21.560here we are. And I also think, you know, there comes a point where it seems to me some spasm
00:10:32.980of economically, your idea of an imminent crash, you're in many people's ideas of some kind of
00:10:38.080imminent giant economic crash, or violence or whatever, where, you know, instead of just
00:10:45.480people going on television and yelling at each other on news channels, they come and sit down
00:10:52.460and say, okay, this is not working. Like in a bad marriage, the differences are irreconcilable.
00:10:58.500Let's figure this out. And, you know, what that figuring out can mean is all kinds of things.
00:11:03.740In that Times piece, I sketch out some ways that it's been done in Europe.
00:11:33.380we don't want to think about that. That's not real. And I think that's changed somewhat.
00:11:39.700The other thing about the analogy to the Civil War in the 1860s, of course, is that that was
00:11:45.100pretty easy. You had the Mason-Dixon line, you drew it, south, north, border states,
00:11:51.200the fight over the west and whether slavery goes there or not. But here, obviously, if this were
00:11:57.480to happen, as I had to figure out how it could maybe happen in the novel, it's cities and states.
00:12:05.220And so, you know, it's Atlanta and the other big cities of Georgia versus the rest of Georgia.
00:12:10.300It's Nashville and Memphis versus the rest of Tennessee, and my hometown of Omaha versus
00:12:15.200and maybe Lincoln versus the rest of a lot of Nebraska. So it's the logistical,
00:12:22.840massive continent-wide gerrymandering effectively that would be required is is something
00:12:28.460people forget in 2021 i mean on the right ben shapiro it wasn't just marjorie taylor green but
00:12:36.560it's something what we consider the thought leaders they're saying we're so divided you
00:12:40.940know maybe we just divvy it up and we were adamant about hey we had a long experiment
00:12:47.320this project's been going for a while and we held it together uh we're going to have to hold it
00:12:52.120together now because i think people at least at that time it's very different now a lot a lot
00:12:56.080has happened over the last couple of years and i think that's why people ought to get if they get
00:13:00.260a chance to get your novel the breakup and and read it because you're you're giving a uh a viewer
00:13:06.080the future through fiction and through novelistic devices but it's pretty grounded in uh in in
00:13:11.640research like i said back in 2021 this was for a moment there was a ton of talk oh we just got to
00:13:17.460break it up and we just go to the red states and it's just not that easy and particularly
00:13:21.460Given, as Burke says, we owe as much to the past as we owe to the future, everybody that's thrown in and tried to make this project work for 250 years and on today commemorating the American Dunkirk on Brooklyn Heights and what the revolutionary generation would do and what the Continental Army went through is pretty extraordinary.
00:13:43.140OK, we're going to take a short commercial break.
00:17:52.640Yeah, well, that's the husband and wife.
00:17:55.880That was one of the husband, Asher, Zimbalist's chapters.
00:18:01.240They go back and forth with a couple of other characters narrating the story.
00:18:06.840So he was raised in Los Angeles, a city you know well,
00:18:13.300Part of a son, grandson, actually, of a show business kind of mid-level success, somewhat schlocky show business family in Los Angeles, but very well educated, very well to do.
00:18:29.020Went to Pomona College out there and then becomes an academic and an economist and a professor and has that career at a very high profile level.
00:18:38.400That's him. And he's a absolutely, you know, check, check, check, check liberal, lefty liberal.
00:18:47.200His wife is named Natalie Zimblis. Natalie Ramirez Frederick Zimblis. She was born in Cuba,
00:18:55.840came here with her parents at two, grew up in East Tennessee with her father, who had worked in the
00:19:02.880a Soviet-sponsored Cuban nuclear facility that never opened in Cuba, came here and got a job at
00:19:09.580Oak Ridge, the nuclear facility there, U.S. nuclear facility there. So they grew up middle0.92
00:19:14.440class. And she loves America. She loves being here. She loves the story of it. She's educated.
00:19:19.760She's a writer. She's a poet, successful poet. So that's them. And they have their differences.
00:19:25.140She can't stand technology, never could. And even as a teenager, as a Gen Z teenager,
00:19:31.880she couldn't and she still can't, her husband embraced it. They lived in an exurb of Tennessee,0.51
00:19:41.000rural Tennessee outside Nashville. He ran the business school at Vanderbilt. While the war
00:19:47.000happened, he just moved. They had just moved to San Francisco where he's got this big new job,
00:19:54.300they and their kid. She couldn't stand San Francisco and had all kinds of other issues
00:20:00.040with him and the state of the world as this union, as I call it, of the United States
00:20:06.240and the two countries is about to happen.
00:20:08.320And so she skedaddles back to Tennessee to try to figure out what's going on with her
00:20:14.140marriage as America is once and for all divorcing.
00:20:20.580By the way, two books that I've read of yours in the past, Fantasyland and Evil Geniuses,
00:20:26.540obviously i don't agree with all the content but they're brilliantly written and they're kind of
00:20:31.360page turners why did you and their works of uh non-fiction at least i would say non-fiction some
00:20:39.280of your critics on the right may say they're fiction why did you choose because i look at this
00:20:44.140and maybe i'm looking at wrong this is kind of like the third this is now a trilogy why did you
00:20:50.780choose fiction to tell this story? It's a good question. And I've considered nonfiction because
00:20:57.980those two books, Fantasyland and Evil Dungeons, did quite well. And I'd never written big,
00:21:02.520written a little nonfiction book years ago called Reset, but I'd never written big ones,
00:21:06.320histories that I took, you know, a couple of years to research and a year or two to write.
00:21:10.740And they did well. So, oh, maybe I should do another one about the future.
00:21:14.700I realized, no, I mean, I could take the past, the facts of the past, and connect dots in
00:21:21.480different ways that I hope gave a fresh look at the last 500 years of American culture
00:21:27.720and the last 50 years of American political economy, and that's what those are.
00:21:34.700But the future, I mean, in a nonfiction way, I don't know.
00:21:39.000I mean, that would just be quoting experts or saying, I think this.
00:21:41.980And, you know, to me, that's not good.
00:21:46.480So I said I should return to the novel I'd started 10 years earlier about the future.
00:21:51.500And this time it has this central different thing in its backstory, which is this disunion, which is this secession, which is this civil war.
00:21:59.920And write that because I realized, too, that the future is by its nature fiction.
00:22:08.480You know, and whether you think there's a multiverse and multiple timelines or whatever you think, it hasn't happened, then we don't know it.
00:22:13.800Therefore, it's imaginary until it happens.
00:22:15.600So I thought that fiction and looking at, you know, A, one family that I think is relatable and seems real and did my best to make it seem that way, in this very realistic future was the way to do that rather than saying maybe this, maybe that.
00:22:32.960My opinion is this about what will happen because who cares when I think about that or anybody, really.
00:22:37.960the central one of the parts that we just heard is that there are a lot of liberal and progressive
00:22:45.860people that just love living in red states right and maybe that's getting more and more untenable
00:22:51.380given certain political pos you know policies there's also tons of of uh of uh people uh
00:23:00.280conservatives crackers rednecks maga ultra maga that love living in blue states whether it's0.51
00:23:06.720Minnesota or Oregon or Washington, just places that they are just, even if they're not from0.82
00:23:11.800there, they just have an affinity for the places that they happen to have to move there and work.
00:23:15.020How does that work out? It sounds like in that dialogue, that's one of the central
00:23:19.280undercurrents of this story. Yeah, it is. And by the way, let's not forget that when
00:23:26.020you and I were adults and not that young adults, nobody thought of red states and blue states.
00:23:30.960Yeah, you lived in Tennessee or you lived in Nebraska where I grew up, or you live in New
00:23:33.860York, where I live most of my life now, or wherever. You didn't think, oh, it's a red state,
00:23:38.500but I'm a blue person. That was not a thing. I mean, people would say, oh, I disagree with
00:23:42.440this governor. A bunch of rednecks live here, or a bunch of liberal jerks live here. But it wasn't1.00
00:23:48.640the first thing. And that's one of the things that my character Natalie just can't stand,1.00
00:23:52.420nor can her husband, that everything in their adult lifetimes, which is to say this century,
00:23:58.640becomes a political action. What you eat, what music you listen to, where you go,
00:24:04.080what you think about anything, it becomes political. And that's just, to me, no way to live
00:24:10.360or be as a society or as a person, which isn't to say one avoids politics. Of course, I was raised,
00:24:16.480you know, talking about politics and religion. And, you know, that had its downside. But like
00:24:21.580the idea that everyone, you see somebody out like, oh, they're not my tribe. I don't like them.
00:24:27.500That's just awful. And also, if you spend time in the real world, as I try to, you realize you have neighbors, and I don't know what they think about this or that, but they're decent and we're friendly, and that becomes secondary.
00:24:47.700Now, you know, and so that is the greatest argument against like, well, we don't have to split up.
00:24:56.440But the way our politics works, the way our economy has worked for the last, certainly since the, well, this century, really, and late 20th century, it's hard to imagine it getting back to normal despite those individual human lives of civility between red and blue.
00:25:16.460But yeah, as you say, I mean, people, you know, I mean, I spend half my time in Northwest Connecticut and, you know, there are lots of people around here who like being Connecticut, even if they, you know, voted for Donald Trump three times.
00:25:31.580And, you know, people, individuals are far more complicated than, you know, social media and the news channels make it seem.
00:25:42.440And they, you know, exacerbate the problem, it seems to me.
00:25:45.820Not so much, well, yes, some of the news channels, one of the news channels, in my view.
00:25:49.720But, you know, the business models of these big tech corporations is to keep everybody angry.
00:25:58.680And that's a problem, among other problems, of having a few companies control the world and our world and our information ecosphere to the extent those do.
00:26:12.300I want to get into in the next part about your book, Reset, and about the financial crisis, which I think was the triggering event of this populist nationalist movement we called MAGA or whatever you call it.
00:26:24.360but i don't want to give too much of the book away because i want to make sure we have a pretty
00:26:28.500good track record of we have a big reading audience of people buying it but i'd like to
00:26:33.440i don't like these two-hour three-hour ipods where the guy gives or the guy gives the entire
00:26:38.640book away so people don't need to don't need to read a lot of spoilers a lot of spoilers here one
00:26:44.900could give away so i don't want to careful yeah that's why i want people but after the civil war
00:26:50.740We got about, I tell you what, I want to do this on the other side because we're playing a, we're doing a tribute over the last couple of days to Dolly Parton.
00:26:58.040I want to make sure we get to all her music.
00:26:59.620I really want to thank the staff for going back and getting so much of her original music and some of the greatest music she did with Porter Wagner and some of the others in the early days of it.
00:27:13.980The book is The Breakup. It's about a coming civil war and then a post-civil war kind of two countries as seen through the framework or the framing device of a marriage, a modern marriage.
00:27:25.800Short commercial break. Kurt Anderson on the other side.
00:30:01.960interesting that old yeah no she's so amazing i had the great privilege and pleasure of interviewing
00:30:08.600her once for about an hour when i had a radio show she's amazing and that she died as i'm out
00:30:14.220talking to people about this book about the breakup of the united states uh you know is it's
00:30:21.200it like couldn't help strike me as a it's a metaphor like the great modern embodiment of
00:30:28.300like, hey, we can all get along across all kinds of cultural class divides. And just all it takes
00:30:36.080is openness and lovingness and all that she embodied and great talent and hard work and
00:30:42.040bring herself up by her bootstraps, all that. She's just like a, she was amazing. And the fact
00:30:47.160she's gone, you know, I don't, it doesn't mean anything, but it's, you know, seems like an app
00:30:54.540metaphor but but for the book i mean natalie comes from cuba her father's obviously an incredibly
00:31:05.000well at gha got to get a job up at uh up at the you know in the nuclear facility the famous nuclear
00:31:11.700facility in east tennessee but she does fall in love with that culture right as she's obviously
00:31:17.460very tied to her cuban roots uh but she falls in love with the east tennessee culture i think
00:31:22.740that's what we've been playing and principally over the last couple of days the roots of dolly
00:31:27.360parton's music maybe not so much the modern stuff but really uh really got her going but
00:31:32.400your character falls in love and that's kind of the it's the values of the la values versus the
00:31:37.660east tennessee values that are throughout one of the tensions in the book correct completely and
00:31:43.560and you know and again she's a poet she has a mfa from brown university she went to the university
00:31:49.220Virginia. She's, you know, she's no longer, but she has, she grew up with and went to, you know,
00:31:56.700grotty public schools before her family got enough money to move into Oak Ridge. And yeah,
00:32:02.540she knows these people and doesn't hate them and doesn't necessarily, you know, and when she
00:32:07.860doesn't agree with them about things, which is true of a lot of things, she lets them know.
00:32:11.500But but but her her love of her idea of America, which, you know, she has this came with this undiluted immigrant love is is, you know, she spent her first 18 years.
00:32:27.360Well, her age two through 18 in East Tennessee.
00:32:31.720And so, yeah, she is she is sympathetic to them.
00:32:34.480And and Asher, he's not a bad guy at all.
00:32:37.720And, you know, I share opinions and all kinds of things, more background with him than I do her.
00:32:43.140But he's just like, you know, he's lived in, you know, show business L.A. his entire life and then academic northeast.
00:32:53.180And he has his beliefs and she has hers.
00:32:56.540And she tries to be kind of an ambassador, if you will, between her writer, academic network friends, mostly her friends these days, and where she came from.
00:33:10.840And kind of gets in trouble right before the war happens by publishing a book of essays that people, as soon as the war happens, say, oh, look at this person.0.61
00:33:19.420She's been a secret agent of the right all along.
00:33:22.060and it's and and she's not i mean she's you know she's a she's a person she she you know votes
00:33:29.580democratic but she's she she's she's during the woke period she was very anti-woke and got in
00:33:36.340trouble with her people around her for that so she's a complicated normal human and american
00:33:41.980and and and that's their so it's not like a MAGA person versus a TSA person but it's it's you know0.98
00:33:48.980Most people you one can imagine being married.
00:33:51.040One knows people like this who are married.
00:33:52.640And and that's not their only issue, but it's part of their issues in their marriage.
00:33:57.700It has been since 2023 when they got married.
00:34:03.560So when they get married, we've already started kind of, you know, today you got dating services that are only, you know, for MAGA people.
00:34:10.960You've got others for for for progressives.
00:34:14.800You've got now, you know, certain liberals, progressives won't use Twitter because of Elon Musk, et cetera.
00:34:21.900At the beginning of their marriage, is it that politicized or has that happened through that you get this concept that you're on one side or the other?
00:34:29.580And even even if you have even if you love somebody or even if you have friends that have heretofore been that the increasing kind of partisan nature of all culture driven, I'm sure, by algorithms is one of the things that separates people here.
00:35:00.640And she kept going and put on a character because she's kind of an improv person.
00:35:05.840And it's like a, you know, he loved her for it.
00:35:11.760But then she said, well, but I kind of actually do believe this.
00:35:14.840And I kind of do believe a lot. There's a lot of fake news. And I kind of do. And I really don't.
00:35:18.720I think abortion is a morally problematic thing and on and on. So that's who she is.
00:35:23.220But her point, and it's true. And again, in this, she's like, I would say, most Americans.
00:35:28.860She doesn't care about politics that much. It's not. It doesn't fill up her day like it does yours or maybe mine or like lots of people in thinking about it.0.90
00:35:37.940she just doesn't care that much. It's not her main thing. And it's not to say she's apathetic
00:35:44.980or she doesn't know things. She does. She's just like, not my main jam, you know? And so that's
00:35:52.760who she is more than, oh, I'm this and I disagree with you. They do. And often it's loving and
00:35:59.560joking, at least from her. She has a better sense of humor than he does. And she's funnier than he
00:36:06.020is. So she gets the best of it a lot. But it's like, just don't talk to me about Trump so much,
00:36:13.640she says to him, you know, when he's out of office and they're first married, you know.
00:36:19.700And then, for instance, now in the backstory, the late 20s, well, this Trump administration,
00:36:26.860which she also can't stand, even though she, you know, was not as so freaked out by him until now
00:36:33.960in the backstory uh finally they have a few years where they're not bickering so much right and then
00:36:39.120it starts again you know in in in uh when the democrats come back in power later in this decade
00:36:44.540talk to me about you know we pride ourselves here of uh being part of the almost the
00:36:52.940decelerationist movement against these oligarchs on on on tech we fought the fight and kind of led
00:36:57.780the right, the populist right, on starting this movement of, and now so many people in the center
00:37:04.940and particularly on the left are joining in this anti-data centers. You wrote this book, The Reset,
00:37:11.220about the financial crisis. And we talk every day about the impending financial crisis you can see
00:37:16.000in the bond market, coupled with this kind of convergence of this kind of out-of-control
00:37:21.040oligarchs in big tech. Did did the does that first off your book, The Reset, you laid out
00:37:29.740kind of it was, I guess, a tongue in cheek, as you call it, 12 step program. And this book came
00:37:36.120out, I believe, because I was making a film about the collapse at the time. I think it came out in
00:37:40.180May or June of 20 of 09. Right. It was right. Correct. President Obama's first couple of months
00:37:46.200office. Do you think we reacted, given what you were saying that you thought we should do and get
00:37:52.580back, because it's always been boom and bust, and America, you know, the way it doesn't come
00:37:57.340apart, the pragmatic people kind of take over after these collapses, and the hard-hitted kind
00:38:04.140of common sense of Americans coming through. Do you think we handled the financial collapse
00:38:09.980of 2008 correctly? No. I mean, in the short term, we kept the whole world economy from collapsing.
00:38:17.200Good thing. But no, we didn't. And, you know, it was, I was thinking at the time, I think by then,
00:38:24.940Rahm Emanuel, who then, of course, worked for President Obama, was saying, oh, you know,
00:38:29.560you don't want to wait, there's no, as president, you don't want to waste crises, right? You use
00:38:34.760them. And that's the way it works, right? I mean, the Great Depression, FDR was able to transform
00:38:40.280the United States and the idea of what the US government will do and all that.
00:38:45.320So, but I think it was wasted. I think this, you know, it was like, this thing happens,
00:38:51.580this near death experience effectively. And like, you know, okay, we passed some laws to
00:38:57.140more to regulate Wall Street. But like, you know, the half-life, which is a thing that
00:39:04.460Natalie in the book talks about a lot, was short, really. And no, nothing remotely like a radical
00:39:11.340transformation or rethinking happened. And of course, there's a reason that from the left,
00:39:17.140Occupy Wall Street followed by a couple of years, and the Tea Party. And so, no, it wasn't. The
00:39:24.800The consensus, the neoliberal consensus, where, you know, Democrats and Republicans for 30 years, the national figures and agendas hadn't differed very much economically, right?
00:39:40.620As the Democratic Party abandoned its labor history, working class history, and they didn't differ so much.
00:39:48.320And, you know, you talk, of course, you talk about you're the whatever of the populist movement around the world today.
00:39:55.440I think it's so important to distinguish between economic populism, which I am an economic populist, and cultural populism, which I'm not so much.
00:40:05.060And I think it's really important rather than lumping them together as populist, because, you know, there's lots of independent candidates, some Democratic candidates running for office now who are culturally not so progressive.
00:40:17.160but economically very populous. In my home state of Nebraska, Dan Osborne, for instance,
00:40:22.800is that. And I think it's an important distinction rather than these
00:40:27.020shorthands of, oh, you're left or you're right, you're populist or not. Well, I'm a lot on
00:40:34.820economics and much less on culture. So I think that's important. Anyway, Reset began as a cover
00:40:44.760Story on Time Magazine and turned in this little book. And it was like, let's use this. This is our
00:40:52.080moment to remake how we think about America, how we think about immigration, how all of it,0.81
00:40:58.700and, you know, rediscover our—well, I said Americans have always been ants and grasshoppers,
00:41:06.040you know, the hardworking, sober, New England Puritan ants who just put it together, and the
00:41:13.920grasshoppers who party, let's get on it. And good, that combination works great,
00:41:19.640has worked great for America. But we had then certainly been through a manic grasshopper
00:41:28.860dream state period where like, oh, this is going to last forever. Oh yeah, this is going to be
00:41:36.940great. Oh, all houses are going to keep rising in value and all that stuff. And like, whoops,
00:41:41.600Nope. And no, I don't think we did learn our lesson. And there's just bigger things to do and those to change systemically that have not been properly addressed.
00:41:57.600Like, for instance, you know, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders co-sponsoring bills with Josh Hawley and Tim Scott to control government and control monopolies and control big tech and build more housing and cap interest rates.
00:51:05.540250 years ago this evening, the beginning of the American Dunkirk.0.87
00:51:11.360Make sure you check out Revolution.0.66
00:51:13.200Of course, Patrick K. O'Donnell's great books about it, his amazing books about the Glosterman and all of it.
00:51:19.580The Marvel Head Men, the Marvel Head Men, Patrick K. O'Donnell.
00:51:22.300I want to thank everybody that's been around and helped us out for the last couple of days in the commemoration of the 250th commencement of the Revolutionary War, the hard part.
00:51:33.200We're going to leave you now with Dolly Parton, a song that she wrote for Porter Wagner.
00:51:37.760We're up on social media all weekend, and we're back here at 10 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, Monday morning.
00:51:42.920See you back then when you'll be back in the world.
00:51:52.300I would only be in your way, so I'll go, but I know I'll think of you each step of the way.