The Ben Shapiro Show - Matthew Yglesias | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 99

00:00:00.000 This is probably not the Ben Shapiro show audience, but you know, my progressive friends will want me to acknowledge that some bad things happened across the settling of the West and all that kind of stuff.

00:00:10.000 But you know, it was done for a reason.

00:00:11.000 And I'm basically arguing for a continuation of that kind of vision that, you know, the United States is great and should want to be great and powerful, and that that means having more people.

00:00:25.000 Amidst the growing outrage, mobs, and the increasing frequency of individuals being cancelled... We feeding the internet trolls and we reward them.

00:00:31.000 I'm not gonna do it, man.

00:00:32.000 Harper's Magazine published a letter on justice and open debate in July of this year.

00:00:37.000 Signed by thought leaders, cultural figures, and writers, the letter criticizes the strict orthodoxy of the left, stating, quote, the free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society is daily becoming more constricted, and adding, quote, we need to preserve the possibility of good faith disagreement without dire professional consequences.

00:00:55.000 Many outspoken progressives signed on to the letter, including J.K.

00:00:58.000 Rowling, Steven Pinker, Noam Chomsky, Gloria Steinem, and one Matthew Iglesias.

00:01:03.000 Iglesias, one of the co-founders of Vox and host of Vox's podcast, The Weeds, ended up being called out by his own company on cue for his participation.

00:01:11.000 Critic at large for Vox, Emily Vanderwerf, accused Matt of supporting anti-trans dog whistles because the letter closely followed outrage about J.K.

00:01:18.000 Rowling's stance that trans women are not the same as biological women.

00:01:21.000 Fellow Vox co-founder Ezra Klein added on Twitter, quote, A lot of debates that sell themselves as being about free speech are actually about power.

00:01:28.000 And there's a lot of power in being able to claim and hold the mantle of free speech defender.

00:01:32.000 Matt and other signatories to the Harper's letter speak to how far the retribution has spread.

00:01:37.000 Today, we'll get into where Matt finds himself in that controversy, and where we go from here in this age of intolerance.

00:01:43.000 Plus, we get into Matt's 2020 election thoughts and his new book, One Billion Americans, in which Matt makes the argument that the U.S.

00:01:49.000 population needs to get a whole lot bigger if we're going to be the winners of the future.

00:01:56.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is sponsored by Express, a VPN unit.

00:02:05.000 Your data is your business protected at expressvpn.com slash Ben.

00:02:10.000 Welcome to the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.

00:02:12.000 Today, we feature a very special guest, Matthew Iglesias.

00:02:15.000 Just a reminder, we'll be doing some bonus questions at the end with Matt, and the only way to get access to that part of the conversation is to go become a member.

00:02:21.000 Head on over to dailywire.com, become a member, you'll have access to all of the full conversations with every one of our awesome and fascinating guests.

00:02:28.000 Matt, thanks so much for joining the show, really appreciate it.

00:02:31.000 Oh, thanks for having me.

00:02:32.000 So I'm really eager to get into your book, One Billion Americans, because it really is a lot of content, a lot of solutions, some of which, obviously, I'm going to agree with, and some of which I disagree with.

00:02:40.000 But before we get to the book, and again, I want to get into it in depth with you, let's talk a little bit about the big controversy of the last several months that you were involved in, and that was this controversy surrounding this Harper's Weekly letter.

00:02:52.000 So I was a fan of the Harper's Weekly letter, obviously.

00:02:56.000 I'm an opponent of what has been termed cancel culture.

00:03:00.000 You got some blowback on it.

00:03:01.000 I kind of want to start by asking you what you perceive to be the definition of cancel culture, because this has obviously become extremely contentious.

00:03:08.000 Yeah, I mean, that's not really a word that I use.

00:03:11.000 It's not a term that appears in that letter.

00:03:13.000 I think it's a little bit confused and people start sort of arguing about terminology.

00:03:19.000 You know, when I certainly see, right, so we're recording this, it's on September 11th, and I remember, you know, in the months after that happened, Some, you know, some nice things happened to America.

00:03:31.000 But we also had, you know, the House of Representatives wanted to change the name of French fries.

00:03:36.000 We had the Dixie Chicks, you know, people were smashing up their CDs, because they didn't like something they said about George W. Bush.

00:03:42.000 And more recently, you know, we had Colin Kaepernick sort of blacklisted because people were angry about His political statements.

00:03:50.000 So I kind of reject the construct that there's like a specific left wing phenomenon that we could call cancel culture.

00:04:01.000 But I mean, I do think it's true that you know, this happens in all kinds of perspectives that people Lose it over, you know, somebody doing something that they disagree with politically.

00:04:12.000 They'll say, we got to cut this person out of our lives entirely.

00:04:15.000 I can't watch, you know, a show anymore, because I don't like something the actor said.

00:04:20.000 And, you know, it's an unfortunate trend.

00:04:22.000 So I want to kind of dig in there a little bit as to what actually constitutes a canceling and what sort of activity is appropriate and what activity is not.

00:04:30.000 So you mentioned a couple examples, some of which I agree with you sort of constitute what people would term cancel culture and some of which I probably don't.

00:04:38.000 So, you know, not wanting to watch a show because you don't like the politics of it, that seems to me like, okay, so you turn off the show.

00:04:43.000 Trying to get somebody fired, like, for example, if you actually tried to blacklist Colin Kaepernick and said he shouldn't be able to play in the NFL despite his skill set because of his perspective, that seems to me much more kind of in line with cancel culture, or somebody doesn't like your show or my show, so they instead decide that they're not going to turn off our show, which is perfectly fine.

00:04:58.000 They decide instead they're going to go after the advertisers.

00:05:01.000 On the show, because the advertisers are somehow not trying to just reach the listeners.

00:05:04.000 It's the advertiser's fault.

00:05:06.000 They've somehow endorsed the content of the particular show.

00:05:10.000 And I kind of wanted to get your take on that.

00:05:12.000 And then I want to move, and then I want to also ask you about what you think the Overton window should be.

00:05:16.000 Because we're, I think we're both discussing, you know, content that's inside what the Overton window is.

00:05:21.000 So I want to clarify that in a second.

00:05:23.000 But first, what do you think about that definition of what canceling constitutes?

00:05:27.000 Yeah, I mean, there's something to be said for that.

00:05:29.000 I mean, look, obviously it's difficult, because I don't think you want to say, you know, nobody should ever go after anyone's advertisers for anything, right?

00:05:37.000 Like, there's boundaries to decency and polite society, things like that.

00:05:41.000 To me, what's actually most disturbing that people sometimes do is the suggestion that there should be this kind of second-degree shunning, right? So like, maybe Ben Shapiro says some stuff that I really disagree with, right? It's really bad, you know, because we talk about politics. These are important questions.

00:05:58.000 So like, don't go on his show, right? And like, that to me is not reasonable.

00:06:04.000 You know, I mean, in my book, I cite a lot of people who I have a lot of very serious disagreements with, but I've learned important things from them, right?

00:06:12.000 And we have points of agreement.

00:06:15.000 And, you know, you want to have an intellectual culture, or at least I want to have an intellectual culture, in which people engage with each other, they argue respectfully, they try to change each other's minds, but also they just admit that, like, It's fine in life to have points of agreement and points of disagreement, and the disagreements are serious, they're about important things, but we don't need to drive people out of public life over disagreements, or try to, because ultimately it doesn't work, right?

00:06:43.000 I mean, in the internet age, you can't Stop people from having an audience like on their podcast, on their YouTube, whatever.

00:06:50.000 Or you can try, right?

00:06:51.000 But it's, it's ultimately futile.

00:06:53.000 We're not in a world of three television networks.

00:06:56.000 And if you convince like two stakeholders, somebody is going to be like gone and shunned from the public sphere.

00:07:02.000 So you know, we might as well try to live with that reality most of the time.

00:07:07.000 There's some stuff, you know, that's out of bounds.

00:07:09.000 I mean, I think that's sort of common sense.

00:07:10.000 We don't need to have, I don't know, like Nazis on cable or what have you.

00:07:15.000 But You know, I think most reasonable people can actually sort of agree on that, and then the problem becomes in the application of a specific case.

00:07:23.000 Yeah, I mean, I agree with that completely.

00:07:25.000 And especially, this is a funny conversation, because you and I have been probably throwing slings and arrows at each other for, what, 20 years online?

00:07:31.000 It's a while!

00:07:32.000 Yeah, it's been a long time.

00:07:34.000 I mean, since, like... We used to be young, and, you know...

00:07:38.000 Exactly.

00:07:38.000 Now here we are and we're old and we're still doing it, but that reaches the question as to what constitutes the Overton window.

00:07:44.000 So I think that we can agree on, you know, the cases that are well outside the Overton window.

00:07:48.000 You mentioned, you know, overt Nazis. 0.70

00:07:50.000 But one of the arguments now becomes where does the Overton window shrink too much?

00:07:55.000 And this is why I think you've seen people on the right look at the left and say you're shrinking the Overton window too much.

00:08:00.000 So the Harper's Weekly letter Started off with all this content about President Trump, some of which I agree with, some of which I disagree with.

00:08:05.000 But there was not a single person, so far as I could tell, on that list who voted for Trump.

00:08:10.000 It's a list of probably 150 center-left to radical left, including people like Noam Chomsky, intellectuals.

00:08:16.000 But there wasn't anybody who was probably either a registered Republican or a Trump voter.

00:08:21.000 And I thought that actually weakened the impact of a letter.

00:08:23.000 It seems like if you're going to have a bipartisan consensus that we shouldn't go around excising people from public life, That the Overton window has got to be a little bit broader than mainstream Democratic Party and left.

00:08:34.000 Yeah, it's interesting.

00:08:35.000 I mean, I wasn't involved with, you know, the selection of who to be invited on it.

00:08:39.000 George Packer spoke to me.

00:08:42.000 It seemed like a reasonable letter.

00:08:43.000 I was happy to sign on to it.

00:08:44.000 You know, I think maybe if I... I don't think I'm going to be organizing any sign-on letters in the future, but you know, if I were to...

00:08:52.000 I might think about it a little bit differently from how they did.

00:08:55.000 That being said, I mean, I think if you read that letter, right, it's an intervention into some arguments that are happening inside progressive spaces and not really about things that are happening on the right, you know, which is like a fine way to put it.

00:09:11.000 But, you know, also neutral principles are important.

00:09:13.000 And, you know, as I say, like, we've had, I think it was just you know, a couple days ago, President Trump was on TV saying like, this reporter and that reporter and that reporter should all be fired. So, you know, it's, there's a lot of bad stuff happening in the world, or at least elements of bad behavior.

00:09:32.000 You know, and I think that part of consensus of most of the people who signed that letter, most people on the left, whatever disagreements we have with each other, is that President Trump has been involved in some very disturbing efforts to clamp down on free speech.

00:09:47.000 I mean, including using real powers of the presidency, right?

00:09:51.000 There's been a lot of suggestions that he's trying to retaliate against Jeff Bezos's sort of personal business interests, because he doesn't like Washington Post coverage.

00:10:00.000 And that's a, it's like a different, it's a different kind of thing from, you know, people yelling at college professors.

00:10:07.000 And, you know, I think deserves to be treated somewhat separately.

00:10:10.000 I mean, we can get to President Trump in a second.

00:10:12.000 I'm sure we'll get to President Trump a fair bit in the upcoming minutes.

00:10:15.000 It's hard to avoid talking about him these days.

00:10:17.000 Yeah, he's the black hole of American politics around which everything revolves.

00:10:20.000 We'll get to that in just one second.

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00:11:27.000 So Matt, you talk about President Trump there and sort of his treatment of the press.

00:11:31.000 I've decried when he has said that members of the press are enemies of the people.

00:11:34.000 I think it's ridiculous when he suggests that reporters ought to be fired for disagreeing with him.

00:11:39.000 I mean, it also happens to be true that President Obama was not particularly wonderful in regards to certain aspects of the press.

00:11:45.000 I mean, he attacked pretty regularly Fox News.

00:11:46.000 He also Sick to his justice department on the Associated Press.

00:11:52.000 Unfortunately, this has become, as the executive power grows, it seems like there's become a bipartisan trend of attempting to clamp down on people with whom you disagree.

00:12:00.000 In the cultural sphere, it seems like because the press, maybe it's just because the press tends to lean more left, there's a lot more push for X has to be cancelled because they disagree with the left.

00:12:11.000 In the cultural sphere, although in the governmental sphere, obviously Trump is the president, so he's the person from the right doing it.

00:12:16.000 I mean, look, we have a lot of polarization along different demographic lines in politics, right?

00:12:16.000 Right.

00:12:22.000 So young college graduates skew much left of the overall population.

00:12:28.000 And so in spaces where young college graduates are, you know, very numerous, like in the media or in academic world, you have a very sort of left skewing debate.

00:12:38.000 And the tendency is for people on the right to want to appeal to sort of neutral principles, free speech, et cetera, because they're the local minority there.

00:12:47.000 In the electorate, you know, older people, working class people actually punch above their weight because of the way the Senate works, because of differential voter turnout.

00:12:56.000 You know, so in the political sphere, we have a very empowered conservative movement at the moment, you know, holding the presidency.

00:13:03.000 And liberals are more likely to say, oh, you know, we need to have freedom, appreciate the value of that.

00:13:09.000 You know, something I say to college professors who are left-wing, you know, particularly working at state universities, is, look, like, the median faculty member is way to the left of the median state legislator.

00:13:21.000 And so they have an interest in mounting a principled defense of academic freedom and sort of neutral speech principles.

00:13:28.000 And I think the students don't always appreciate that.

00:13:31.000 But it's important for the faculty and the administrators to, you know, I mean, To not just have sound principles, but to actually understand how the game works, right, ultimately.

00:13:40.000 Which is that I think progressives benefit a lot from academic freedom in a traditional sense, although also conservative professors do.

00:13:48.000 I mean, it's a good system, but I mean, it's genuinely worth fighting for.

00:13:52.000 Yeah, Matt, one of the things that I appreciate about what you're saying here is that, you know, there is this tendency on, I would say, both sides of the aisle at this point to move away from even the concept of applicable neutral principles.

00:14:03.000 The idea is, on the left, that free speech is actually just a guise for power politics in some circles, that, you know, things like You know, the ability to speak freely on a college campus, well that's only enshrining the power hierarchies that are already implicit in the system.

00:14:19.000 Actually, we saw a little bit of this when you were criticized for signing that letter from Harper's Weekly.

00:14:23.000 There was a tweet actually from Ezra suggesting that some of the criticisms of cancel culture are coming from power hierarchies, which, you know, I generally object to that kind of language, whether it comes from the left or the right, because you see the right Some people on the so-called common good conservative right tend to do this a little bit too, where they will suggest that neutral principles are not being upheld by the left, therefore abandon the neutral principle and let's just duke this thing out.

00:14:46.000 That seems to me incredibly dangerous and a way for the country to basically break.

00:14:49.000 If we can't agree that there are such things as neutral principles that ought to be applied neutrally, then it's hard to see how we're going to stick together as a country.

00:14:57.000 No, I mean, I think that's right.

00:14:58.000 I mean, you know, neutrality is difficult, and people always disagree about it, and there's something to the kind of hermeneutic suspicion about these kind of things.

00:15:06.000 But I think, you know, these ideals are worth upholding and thinking about and trying to adhere to.

00:15:12.000 And, you know, you were talking about, we're holding a large, diverse country together, right?

00:15:17.000 And that's, like, it's not It's something I was thinking about a lot, actually, as I worked on this book, right?

00:15:23.000 Which is, you know, what do we have as a country, right?

00:15:27.000 How can we think about what we have in common?

00:15:30.000 And, you know, what's valuable about America?

00:15:33.000 What holds American people together?

00:15:35.000 Because, you know, there's plenty that divides us.

00:15:37.000 We have plenty to disagree about.

00:15:38.000 It's important to have sort of political arguments amongst ourselves.

00:15:41.000 That's the nature of democracy.

00:15:43.000 But also, like, the United States has succeeded, insofar as it has succeeded historically, by having some sense also of togetherness.

00:15:51.000 We have a sort of strong civic nationalist tradition that, you know, I think...

00:15:57.000 gets eroded from both sides all the time, but also, you know, has pulled us together historically and has been a real strength of this country.

00:16:05.000 So what do you think are those things that hold us together?

00:16:07.000 So I have a book in which I posit that basically in order for a nation to survive, you have to have at least a certain level of a common version of American history. You have to have a certain level of adherence to a common culture. You have to have a certain baseline level of philosophy that you agree about neutral principles, for example, like freedom of speech or freedom of religion.

00:16:23.000 And it seems like a lot of that is coming apart.

00:16:27.000 Your approach is, in your book and generally, I think is much more technocratic about what we can do together in order to achieve certain ends.

00:16:34.000 But I guess my question is more about the ends, because it seems like right now we may in fact be divided about the ends that we are seeking to achieve, not merely the means for achieving those ends.

00:16:43.000 Yeah, I mean, it's possible.

00:16:44.000 I don't really think that that's true, though, fundamentally.

00:16:47.000 You know, I think when we look big picture, right?

00:16:50.000 Like, I think— When you see things like these concentration camps in Xinjiang, for example, I think a really broad swath, not everybody in America, but a really broad swath of Americans look at that and they're like, you know, that's pretty bad.

00:17:05.000 Or they look at, you know, the crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong, and they say, oh, that's pretty bad.

00:17:10.000 Or they look at something like an NBA coach saying that crackdown is bad, and then they see the league sort of taking China's side.

00:17:19.000 And we know why, right?

00:17:20.000 Though it's not because, okay, all those NBA players are, like, bought into Chinese Communist Party ideology.

00:17:28.000 It's just money, right?

00:17:29.000 And there was an incident a few years before that when somebody in marketing for Mercedes-Benz, I don't know why they did this, but they, like, threw a quote from the Dalai Lama on, like, an ad for a fancy car.

00:17:41.000 And the Chinese government freaked out.

00:17:42.000 And the CEO of Daimler did this, like, groveling apology.

00:17:46.000 And again, I mean, it would be interesting if Western societies were being like torn apart by Chinese Communist Party ideology, but that's not what's happening, right?

00:17:55.000 It's just the market power of China has this kind of big growing influence in the world.

00:18:02.000 But I think all kinds of people, liberal people, conservative people, look at that stuff and you're like, you know, this is like actually pretty troubling, right?

00:18:09.000 Something we actually agree on is that it would be good for Americans to be able to, you know, make gestures of solidarity with oppressed people in Hong Kong without facing backlash from their employers.

00:18:21.000 But there's a real question, like, you know, what do we do about that?

00:18:23.000 Or do we even do anything about it?

00:18:25.000 Because so far, I mean, I see all kinds of tutting from all sides of the world, but not a lot of concrete action or real ideas about how to handle these challenges.

00:18:35.000 So that does bring us to the topic of your book, One Billion Americans.

00:18:38.000 So one of the things that's really interesting about the book is that it sort of backs a thesis that Neil Ferguson has advanced, that maybe America survives simply through opposition, meaning that maybe we were better off during the Cold War when there was a USSR that provided a sort of existential threat to the US, where we could look at the USSR and say, well, you know, we may not like each other very much, but at least we're not those people, right? 0.51

00:18:58.000 At least we're not living under Soviet communism.

00:19:01.000 And Yael Ferguson has pointed to China, as you just did, and said that, you know, Americans may disagree about an awful lot ranging from the status of race relations to economics, but one thing that we're all pretty much agreed on is that Chinese communism and imprisoning a million and a half Uighur Muslims and oppressing an entire region in Hong Kong and threatening Taiwan, like that stuff is bad.

00:19:19.000 And so maybe we need the existential threat from the outside in order to sort of unify us internally.

00:19:24.000 What do you make of that concept?

00:19:25.000 Yeah, I mean, I think that there is a lot to that.

00:19:28.000 I mean, I think the United States has always sort of does better as a unified entity when we think about our role in the world and our kind of mission in the world.

00:19:37.000 And, you know, external threats can play that role very effectively.

00:19:41.000 And it doesn't need to be, you know, quote unquote, existential, right?

00:19:45.000 Like, I don't know, there's not going to be, like, Chinese tanks rolling down Fifth Avenue.

00:19:50.000 But there's a challenge to American primacy in the world that I think is quite real, and that when the vast majority of Americans look at it, they will find it disturbing.

00:19:59.000 And it's not just that you see what we have in common with each other, but you see that we have an interest in making our institutions work, right?

00:20:06.000 I mean, part of the essence of this culture war politics is that, you know, people just disagree about stuff.

00:20:12.000 And that's life. And we live different lifestyles. And I know people who, you know, my wife's from Texas. So I know lots of people down there, they drive pickup trucks. We have a Prius here in DC, right. And that correlates really strongly with your voting behavior. But it's not a political issue, right?

00:20:28.000 Like, it should be allowed to buy a pickup truck, and it should be allowed to buy a hybrid sedan. And people should be allowed to live in the countryside. And people should be allowed to live in the city. And none of that's really controversial, right. But, you know, opportunists, demagogues looking to get clicks looking to get votes.

00:20:44.000 You can sort of pick at these scabs of cultural division between us, or you can look at a situation and say, okay, we've got serious problems, right?

00:20:52.000 And we need to actually try to address them and focus on, like, what are choices that we need to make?

00:20:57.000 And what are questions where we can really just say, like, live and let live?

00:21:00.000 Like, it's a big country.

00:21:02.000 And that's, like, part of the genius of America, right?

00:21:04.000 It's just, like, literally a big place with a lot of different stuff going on, and that's fine.

00:21:09.000 Well, that does raise the question of what it means to have the systems work.

00:21:13.000 So from a conservative or classical liberal perspective, one of the things that works about the American system is that it's actually very hard to get things done.

00:21:19.000 If you're sitting in my chair, you're very happy with the fact that there are checks and balances, the fact that there's subsidiarity, that most things that are done are supposed to be done at the local level, that it takes an awful lot of agreement originally, at least under the constitutional structure, in order for everything to get done, which is why you have different constituencies in the House and the Senate.

00:21:35.000 And the presidency is supposed to be checked by both the judiciary and the legislature and all of the rest.

00:21:41.000 It seems like a lot of the talk, really, since the beginning of the 20th century, has centered on how if we just make government more unitary, either through a bureaucracy or through alleviating some of these checks and balances.

00:21:52.000 There's talk now about reconstituting the Senate, adding particular states to make for broader majorities, or getting rid of the filibuster, how this gets things done.

00:21:59.000 And that may be a very basic root question that You know, needs to be answered.

00:22:05.000 And the reason I say that is because you've kind of posited a couple different visions of the country.

00:22:09.000 One is things we need to get done together and one is things where we need to leave each other alone.

00:22:12.000 And it seems to me that very often those two things are very much in conflict.

00:22:15.000 And if I have to opt for one of those things, especially in a broad, diverse country, I'm going to opt for a government that is not empowered to invade our ability to leave each other alone.

00:22:24.000 And that an attempt to impose from above actually is going to exacerbate a lot of the divisions we're feeling.

00:22:30.000 I mean, there's something to that.

00:22:31.000 I mean, you know, what I was really thinking of, though, is the tendency, right—and, like, President Trump is a huge practitioner of this, although not by any means unique—to just sort of inject cultural controversies into the political sphere, right?

00:22:44.000 Sometimes often without any real policy content to it at all, but just to say that, like, okay, now what we all need to be doing is, like, yelling about what these guys over here are doing.

00:22:55.000 You know, your point about sort of veto points in the U.S.

00:22:57.000 constitutional system is a good one.

00:22:59.000 I was actually, I was talking to Ezra Klein, good friend of mine, I believe a guest on your show, about some of, you know, his work on the Senate.

00:23:07.000 And I was trying to say to him that, you know, I think libertarian minded people, classical liberal people, see the policy stability that the U.S.

00:23:16.000 system provides as a sort of good in and of itself, right?

00:23:19.000 So it's not neutral to say, okay, we should have more kind of get things done-iness.

00:23:25.000 You know, one argument that I would make on the contrary is that it's not 1790 anymore, so we have done a lot of stuff, right?

00:23:33.000 And so one of the things that we now make it hard to do is, like, repeal any old rules or...

00:23:39.000 you know, re-examine anything.

00:23:41.000 So it's not totally obvious to me which way this does and doesn't kind of work.

00:23:46.000 But the main point that I think is most relevant today, right, is like, what level of decision you make things on has an impact on outcomes, right?

00:23:57.000 So one thing that people have been arguing about lately, that again, President Trump has brought up, but that is featured in my book, and you know, is important, is like, Do we make housing policy decisions at this incredibly local level, which is what we do right now, right?

00:24:12.000 It's super localized, a lot of neighborhood control.

00:24:15.000 And that's a big reason that in places like California, places like New York, to an extent here in DC, the regulation is so incredibly tight, right?

00:24:23.000 And we have incredible scarcities, there's huge affordability problems where you live in particular.

00:24:30.000 And so, you know, that's an example where subsidiarity leads to high levels of regulation.

00:24:34.000 Right?

00:24:35.000 Whereas if you make the decisions at a higher level, you get a lower level of sort of regulation there.

00:24:40.000 And you have to make a decision like what's most important there, right?

00:24:43.000 This kind of vision of community control, or a vision of a more market oriented kind of society.

00:24:48.000 You know, in that case, I think clearly we need higher level decisions, we need less regulation, we need more abundance of housing.

00:24:56.000 But you know, these different principles just come together and apart in different ways at different times.

00:25:00.000 So in a second, I want to get more into your book, One Billion Americans, and ask, why a billion?

00:25:04.000 Where did the number come from?

00:25:05.000 We'll get to that in just one second.

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00:26:16.000 So 1 billion Americans is about the principle that we should have more Americans.

00:26:20.000 This is something that I totally agree with, by the way, on any number of levels.

00:26:24.000 But why 1 billion?

00:26:28.000 You're on a super precise calculation.

00:26:29.000 You know, I went to the lab, I crunched the numbers.

00:26:33.000 Look, so, you know, obviously on some level it's a nice big round number.

00:26:36.000 Also, if America had the population growth of Canada and we sustain it for the next 80 years, we'll be at a billion in 2100.

00:26:44.000 So that's a kind of nice way to think about it.

00:26:46.000 It would also give us the population density of France.

00:26:49.000 France is a country a lot of people are familiar with.

00:26:51.000 It's a kind of nice place.

00:26:52.000 You know, they've got some vineyards, they've got a nice coast.

00:26:55.000 Because, you know, when I say this, right, a lot of people's reaction is like, oh my god, you know, it's going to be like Kowloon Walled City everywhere.

00:27:02.000 And I want people to understand that the United States is just a very sparsely populated kind of place.

00:27:09.000 It used to be even more sparsely populated, right?

00:27:11.000 When our founding fathers, you know, were here in this land, they were like, oh, we better get some more people.

00:27:17.000 Because they wanted the United States to be a major power in the world, right?

00:27:21.000 They didn't have our contemporary language of international relations.

00:27:24.000 But You know, shining city on a hill, and Abraham Lincoln in his 1864 message to Congress, you know, he says, we should get some more immigrants here.

00:27:32.000 It's going to be part of how we rebuild after this tragic Civil War.

00:27:37.000 You know, this is probably not the Ben Shapiro show audience, but you know, my progressive friends will want me to acknowledge that some bad things happened across the settling of the West and all that kind of stuff.

00:27:48.000 But, you know, it was done for a reason, and I'm basically arguing for a continuation of that kind of vision.

00:27:54.000 That, you know, the United States is great, and should want to be great and powerful, and that that means having more people.

00:28:01.000 So, I'm perfectly willing to acknowledge the tremendous evils visited upon Native Americans by— Okay, I mean, just so we're— We're all in agreement. 1.00

00:28:10.000 Yeah, no, we should all be.

00:28:11.000 I mean, that's an easy one.

00:28:12.000 This seems like a pretty easy one.

00:28:14.000 But it is also important to mention that America was, on an average basis, extraordinarily sparsely populated at the time of westward expansion, which is, I mean, that's just factually true.

00:28:23.000 So when we talk about, you know, one billion Americans, one of the things I was going to ask about is population dynamics.

00:28:28.000 So you put a lot of focus on, for example, China and the Chinese population.

00:28:33.000 It's expected to peak in about 10 years, and then it's expected to start to decline pretty rapidly after that because of their misbegotten one-child policy.

00:28:39.000 So they're going to end up with about 750 million people, supposedly, by the end of the century.

00:28:45.000 And if you look at sort of the list of countries with high populations, it goes India, China, the United States, Pakistan, Indonesia.

00:28:53.000 Obviously, there doesn't seem to be a tremendous correlation between a country's power and the size of its population.

00:28:58.000 We're not supremely worried about India overtaking the United States, and they have a larger population than anybody else.

00:29:03.000 We're not supremely worried about Pakistan or Indonesia these days.

00:29:05.000 So why focus on the number of people living in the country?

00:29:08.000 Well, you know, I mean, aggregate GDP, right, is like population times per capita income.

00:29:15.000 It's not the only thing in the world, by any means, right?

00:29:17.000 I mean, for a long time, China was just desperately poor.

00:29:20.000 So even though it was a huge population, it was still not that important of a country.

00:29:25.000 But we're now at a point, you know, China is still a fairly poor country.

00:29:29.000 It's about on a par with Mexico, Bulgaria, depends how you measure it.

00:29:32.000 But because the Chinese population is so large, right, they have now this incredible clout on the world stage.

00:29:38.000 And we were talking about the NBA, there was this great Pan America report two weeks ago about how Chinese censors now dictate the content of Hollywood movies, because they've got the largest, you know, domestic box office.

00:29:50.000 You know, There's also hard military power in which the aggregates, you know, really matter, right?

00:29:55.000 You can get it together, build aircraft carriers, build, you know, missiles that can attack our ships, these kind of things.

00:30:01.000 So, you know, we can hope that China stumbles, right?

00:30:05.000 They have some serious demographic headwinds there.

00:30:08.000 You were talking about the legacy of the one-child policy.

00:30:10.000 There's also questions as to how sustainable their rapid economic growth will be.

00:30:15.000 It's totally possible that we'll just kind of Fall into some good luck, right?

00:30:19.000 And between the aging of their workforce and some economic problems and maybe they make some policy mistakes here and there and America stays number one anyway.

00:30:27.000 But, you know, one of my premises in this book is we control our own destiny much more than we control their destiny.

00:30:33.000 Right?

00:30:34.000 And if we have ways to grow our population that are consistent with prosperity, obviously, we don't want to shrink to, like, Pakistan living standards. 1.00

00:30:42.000 And if that was the choice, I don't think we would make it.

00:30:45.000 But the argument of the book is that by, you know, supporting parents and children, and by being smarter, but also more open to immigration, we can sort of, you know, have our cake and eat it too.

00:30:55.000 So I want to talk about a variety of kind of tactics that you talk about in terms of increasing the population.

00:31:00.000 We'll get to immigration in a minute because it's really fascinating.

00:31:02.000 But let's talk a little bit about some of the measures that you discuss in terms of making it easier to raise kids.

00:31:08.000 So when we look at sort of the demographics in the United States and who actually is having kids, it seems that there's very little relation between sort of the benefits that government provides and the having of children.

00:31:19.000 What I mean by that is that a lot of the benefits that you advocate for, in terms of broadening and deepening the social safety net, have been undertaken by virtually all of Europe.

00:31:27.000 Europe, all of it, has a lower birth rate than the United States.

00:31:30.000 The United States' birth rate is driven largely by immigrants and religious people.

00:31:33.000 I'm religious, my wife's religious, and so we have three kids.

00:31:37.000 We plan on having more kids.

00:31:39.000 The religious population of the United States continues to have many, many children.

00:31:42.000 And as the United States secularizes and as it gets more prosperous, there tend to be fewer and fewer children born.

00:31:48.000 So why do you believe that broadening the social safety net or adding sort of marginal benefits, or even maybe not so marginal benefits, to people who are having one or two children is going to lead them to have more children?

00:31:59.000 I mean, I just, as a person with a lot of kids, it's never occurred to me that I'm going to have or not have a kid based on whether the government provides me a slightly increased earned income tax credit.

00:32:10.000 Well, look, I mean, I think it's very clear that religiosity is the sort of biggest variable here, right?

00:32:15.000 That, you know, if you see, like, why do Americans have more children than Europeans? 0.92

00:32:19.000 It's because we're much more religious.

00:32:21.000 And that's clear if you look internally to the United States.

00:32:24.000 But then when you look at Europe, right, which is very secular society, it's true that the more generous, you know, Nordic, Scandinavian countries, France, people have larger families there than they do in Spain, Italy, Southern European countries that tend to be stingier with their benefits.

00:32:40.000 You know, I mostly rely for my sort of math on this by the work of a guy named Lyman Stone, who's a religious person himself, a conservative person.

00:32:48.000 You know, when he argues that cash benefits to parents, when you look internationally, makes a real difference to fertility and to what it is people do.

00:32:56.000 There's also an interplay between these kind of things, right?

00:32:59.000 So one issue that, you know, conservative people have paid more attention to than progressive people is the way aspects of the welfare state create marriage penalties for working class people in particular.

00:33:12.000 So because I'm a liberal person, I advocate getting rid of these penalties by making the benefits more generous.

00:33:18.000 It's also possible to eliminate the penalties by making the benefits stingier.

00:33:22.000 You know, if you want to write that book, more power to you.

00:33:26.000 My book says more generous.

00:33:27.000 But either way, right, if what you're concerned about is family policy, it's the existence of the penalty, which is a problem.

00:33:34.000 And there's an interplay, right, between material factors and cultural factors.

00:33:38.000 People who have children are more likely to go to church.

00:33:41.000 People who get married are more likely to have children, right?

00:33:43.000 These things kind of come together in a sort of cycle.

00:33:47.000 I was on Tyler Cohen's show and, you know, he asked me, like, should we make people be more religious?

00:33:51.000 And I don't know, I mean, maybe?

00:33:55.000 But it's like, well, what are you going to do, right?

00:33:57.000 Like, it's a free society.

00:33:59.000 So, I don't think we have that lever to pull, exactly.

00:34:04.000 But I mean, I definitely agree that religiosity is the number one relevant variable here, and not, like, stuff in the welfare state.

00:34:13.000 So in a second, I want to ask you about some of the incentivizations in some of the programs that you're talking about, because it's definitely interesting stuff, and it does kind of crosscut some political lines.

00:34:22.000 So we'll get to that in just one second.

00:34:24.000 First, let's talk about hiring and firing in this economy.

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00:34:58.000 I mean, let's be real about this.

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00:35:29.000 Alrighty, so let's talk for a second about some of these policies.

00:35:32.000 So one of the policies that you recommend is essentially free childcare.

00:35:37.000 This has been recommended by people, including Ivanka Trump, the kind of increase in childcare policies.

00:35:42.000 And there are a lot of quote-unquote common good conservatives who believe in this also.

00:35:45.000 I mean, I think that, for example, Tucker Carlson would probably advocate For something like this.

00:35:50.000 Elizabeth Warren actually made a pretty interesting argument against this back when she was in her more, I think, philosophically interesting days, when she was more heterodox, let's put it that way, in the two-income trap, back when she was at Harvard Law School, in which she suggested that it actually provides a certain disincentive to people to have lots of kids, to provide free childcare, because it actually incentivizes two parents in the workforce.

00:36:13.000 Two parents in the workforce means that moms cannot actually afford to stay home And if you're in the workforce, you tend to have fewer kids. 1.00

00:36:19.000 So the idea there would be that you're actually providing a sort of inchoate penalty for people who are staying home and taking care of many children, for example.

00:36:30.000 Yeah, I mean, this is, I think, an area where I disagree with some of the current democratic thinking, which is exclusively focused on putting people in center-based childcare, right?

00:36:41.000 I think that if you're going to have a viable politics around this, you need a kind of home care version.

00:36:47.000 You need a way for stay-at-home parents to access those benefits for themselves.

00:36:52.000 The question of exactly how you want to design a system like that is a little bit challenging, but I agree.

00:36:59.000 More broadly even than the sort of technical details, right?

00:37:03.000 I think because the people who craft politics and policy for the Democratic Party are almost by definition, like, successful, career-oriented people, you don't get to, like, write policy ideas for Elizabeth Warren without being You know, like really into your job.

00:37:19.000 It's a hard job to get.

00:37:21.000 And so they'll talk about it in those terms, right?

00:37:23.000 There was a Democratic debate in which they talked about child care affordability problems.

00:37:28.000 And every single person who spoke about it, they spoke about the risk that the expense of child care will force mothers out of the workforce.

00:37:38.000 Which is a real thing that happens, and it's a thing that, you know, bothers people.

00:37:43.000 But most Americans, you know, work to live, right?

00:37:47.000 They don't live to work.

00:37:48.000 They don't have careers.

00:37:48.000 They have jobs.

00:37:50.000 And if you want to do family policy in a sensible way, you need to speak to those people.

00:37:56.000 You know, and so there's a lot of Mommy War content that you can access on the internet if you want.

00:38:01.000 If you look at polls, you know, there's a large slice of women who say they'd like to be home full-time. 0.99

00:38:07.000 It's a large slice of women who say they'd like to work full-time, and then the median woman, I guess, says she'd like to work part-time, she'd like to spend some time with her kids. 0.95

00:38:16.000 It's tough, right?

00:38:17.000 This is one of these things where it's a big country and you can't make everybody happy all the time.

00:38:22.000 But I think, you know, you should try to design a system that facilitates some optionality there, right?

00:38:29.000 That creates childcare centers that, you know, have quality, have some merit, have some economies of scale to them, but that also gives financial benefits to people who are trying to spend time at home with their own children.

00:38:40.000 So when we talk about increasing the social safety net and various programs designed to make life easier for people who are having children, this also raises the issue of immigration in a different way.

00:38:50.000 So one of the things that has been fairly true about the Scandinavian countries particularly are these vast debates that have happened.

00:38:56.000 Over levels of immigration, where you've seen populist right-wing parties actually winning increasingly in the Scandinavian countries that were largely known for their social progressivism, and largely on the basis of immigration.

00:39:06.000 People saying, you know, we've set up these broad social safety nets, and now we have a lot of people who are coming in specifically to take advantage of those social safety nets.

00:39:12.000 And that's also creating some massive cultural division, because when you have broad numbers of people coming from cultures that are not Swedish culture, for example, then you end up with enclaves that actually divide the country further. 0.74

00:39:24.000 So when it comes to immigration, you're an open immigration person.

00:39:28.000 I tend to be libertarian on immigration with a couple of exceptions.

00:39:31.000 One, I think there should be some real rules about who gets to access the social safety net.

00:39:35.000 Two, I think that you should have some general warmth toward basic American principles like freedom of speech.

00:39:41.000 I don't think that we should be sort of in the... Let's put it this way.

00:39:46.000 I think that people come to the United States with sets of pre-existing values, and those values don't always match the values of the Declaration of Independence.

00:39:54.000 But overall, on an economic level, I'm fine with increased levels of immigration, particularly through the legal immigration system.

00:39:59.000 Do you worry that increasing the social safety net does have to come with some of the countervailing concerns about immigration that we've seen in other countries?

00:40:08.000 Well, I mean, we have plenty of concerns about immigration in our country.

00:40:11.000 You know, and I mean, I think, yes, I mean, like, I think you need to try to address these concerns, right?

00:40:16.000 I mean, my biggest point about immigration in the book is that the value of immigrants and immigration is really high, and it's in fact higher than most people think.

00:40:25.000 But people have a lot of concerns about immigration, and that's okay, right? 1.00

00:40:28.000 We can't just yell at them and say, like, hey, like, stop being so racist, man.

00:40:34.000 Like, because, I don't know, you know, people think what they think, and they have their reasons to worry.

00:40:39.000 But we should try to address those concerns, right?

00:40:41.000 So something some Republicans in Congress say is, well, we should have a points-based system for immigration instead of doing it on the basis of family.

00:40:49.000 So I say, fine.

00:40:50.000 But then they say, well, and we should cut the flow of legal immigrants in half. 0.97

00:40:54.000 So I say, well, maybe let's not do that.

00:40:57.000 If we could select immigrants better, if we could say, okay, these are more skilled people, they're going to have a more positive contribution to the tax base, then that's all the more reason to have more immigrants.

00:41:09.000 But also I think we should be open to cultural concerns.

00:41:12.000 If we want to say, look, there's native English speakers in the world, whether that's from the Bahamas or Canada or New Zealand, maybe it can be easier for them to come because we care about English, we like English.

00:41:24.000 And I think we should think about, you know, even sort of favored groups abroad, right?

00:41:30.000 That, you know, something that happened back when Obama was president, and there was this big to-do about Syrian refugees.

00:41:37.000 And, you know, a lot of Republicans, I don't even remember why, but they were like, well, we don't want to have any refugees from Syria. 0.99

00:41:44.000 And then some people were saying, well, you know, there's all these Christians, actually, in the Middle East, and some of them are in the refugee pool.

00:41:51.000 And I think somebody said, I think it was Ted Cruz, was like, well, maybe we'll get a special program for Syrian Christians to come.

00:41:58.000 And everybody just yelled, because it's discriminatory.

00:42:02.000 So what we wound up doing was, I mean, it wasn't that we became more generous to Syrian Muslims, right?

00:42:07.000 We just, like, had almost no people.

00:42:10.000 I don't think it would be crazy to say we have a sort of special fondness for Middle Eastern Christians and want to bring them into the United States, that they are, you know, minorities in their own sort of cultural milieu there, might have more resonance in the United States.

00:42:27.000 There's a lot of Arab Christians historically have come to the United States, settled in Michigan, have done very well here.

00:42:33.000 I mean, I'm not Christian myself, neither are you, but that's the majority culture.

00:42:38.000 in this country. And, you know, and I think something that Jewish people, like ourselves, have gotten used to, to some extent, is that like, America's like, been been very good to the Jews.

00:42:52.000 But it's also been a Christian country, right?

00:42:54.000 It's like, Christmas is a day off, and Passover isn't, and it's a little inconvenient to go see your family.

00:43:00.000 But, you know, like, you make do, right?

00:43:01.000 Like, all things considered, it's fine.

00:43:04.000 And so making some affordances for that kind of cultural chauvinism in the context of continuing to be open to immigration, to me, you know, it makes a fair amount of sense, even if it's not my personal preference.

00:43:18.000 Like, you've got to work with the public that exists in a way that I think people are sometimes too resistant to.

00:43:23.000 Yeah, speaking of that, I mean, one of the things you talk about in the book, and this is a really fascinating part of the book because it really is, there's so many kind of wholesome debates in the book.

00:43:31.000 You talk about the attempt to repopulate kind of dying areas of the country, these old steel towns that have fallen apart, and various incentive programs that can be used to repopulate those areas.

00:43:40.000 I want to talk about that in just one second.

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00:45:10.000 Enter Shapiro.

00:45:11.000 So let's talk for a second about the attempts to revivify certain parts of the country that seem to be dying.

00:45:17.000 So I will freely admit that I am of the Kevin Williamson mindset, which is, if your town is dying, you should pick up and you should leave.

00:45:24.000 I've been pretty clear about this, that one of the great tragedies, in my view, in terms of sort of the American mentality, is that it used to be considered fairly rote that when you became an adult, There'd probably be a lot of movement.

00:45:36.000 Americans are now traveling less than they ever have in terms of leaving home for a job.

00:45:40.000 Travel is easier than it's ever been, or at least was until COVID.

00:45:43.000 You could pick up and you could move certainly just physically more easily.

00:45:46.000 You can move to different areas of the country.

00:45:48.000 There was more mobility.

00:45:49.000 And until very recently, there were a lot of jobs in various sectors that were available.

00:45:55.000 And yet we seem to have kind of inculcated in people this certain level of expectation that they should be able to continue to live in the town where they grew up and the jobs will simply come to them.

00:46:05.000 You talk about some programs for revivifying some of these towns where the economic base has left.

00:46:10.000 I wonder if you could talk a little bit about those because, again, I wonder whether we are making allowances for badly governed towns as opposed to actually, you know, driving people toward governing their towns better.

00:46:22.000 Well, you know, so there's sort of two things that I talk about.

00:46:24.000 One is the idea of trying to move some government agencies out of the D.C.

00:46:29.000 area, and possibly some other kinds of—deconcentrate some other economic sectors, technology in the Bay Area, things like that, move them to places where the cost of living is lower, and there's frankly more desire to see jobs.

00:46:42.000 I mean, one of the most striking things was when Amazon did that, like, HQ2 raffle.

00:46:47.000 And they were like, all right, we're going to come to New York.

00:46:49.000 And all these New Yorkers were like, eh, we don't want you. 0.97

00:46:53.000 And you know, that's New York for you, to an extent.

00:46:57.000 It's a really big city.

00:46:58.000 It's really crowded.

00:47:00.000 I grew up in New York, so I know it well, and I love it.

00:47:04.000 New Yorkers think they don't need anybody.

00:47:07.000 There are so many places that would be thrilled to have a giant Amazon office manifest itself in the middle of their downtown.

00:47:14.000 To facilitate things like that happening would be a useful role for the federal government.

00:47:19.000 There's an idea that the U.S.

00:47:21.000 Conference of Mayors sort of endorsed that's been in a couple different presidential campaigns, and that's to sort of let localities that want to sponsor extra visas for immigrants who, you know, could come and live in Akron, or Toledo, or Cleveland, or I should probably name some cities that aren't in Ohio.

00:47:40.000 But, you know, those are the ones that are... I've got Ohio on the brain.

00:47:45.000 You know, and come, because, you know, you look at, say, like, I don't know, Buffalo, right?

00:47:50.000 Buffalo, it's just like, it's really cold there, man.

00:47:54.000 And people, all else being equal, like, they don't like to live in cold places.

00:47:59.000 And, you know, it had some original rationales for being there related to industry, and I think the Erie Canal, and something to do with waterfalls.

00:48:07.000 I don't even know.

00:48:08.000 But you know, it's fallen on hard times.

00:48:10.000 But in the global scheme of things, like, Buffalo is an amazing place to live.

00:48:15.000 Like, there's so many places that are so much worse than any American, you know, mid-sized cold weather city, right?

00:48:22.000 And to let those places take advantage of that kind of asset by bringing more foreign-born people over that can help stabilize the economy and create some opportunity there, to me, makes a lot of sense.

00:48:34.000 So no, you mentioned the idea that like, maybe people should just leave.

00:48:38.000 That used to be me.

00:48:39.000 If you go back, you look at my slate archives, I was full of like, you know, like, F this town, man.

00:48:45.000 Like, we just got to get people out of here.

00:48:48.000 I think it's proven to be a little bit of a political dead end, right?

00:48:52.000 I mean, I think Donald Trump, one of the things he did that really resonated with people was to speak to the desire to see revival in their communities.

00:49:02.000 And from a technical standpoint, what I think is correct about that is that the scope to of places that are losing population right now is too broad, right?

00:49:12.000 It's something like a third of our rural counties are losing population.

00:49:16.000 It's dozens and dozens of sort of small cities across the Northeast and also the Midwest.

00:49:22.000 And it can't be that like each of those places is making bad decisions.

00:49:27.000 It's that the overall pace of growth in the American population is just so low that for any place to grow fast, the way, you know, like Austin and Nashville are, other places have to be losing. And when you're losing people, it creates real problems. I mean, I think it's sad to see all that built infrastructure kind of waste away, good cultural amenities wasting away. And And, you know, we need to try to do something to bring opportunities to people where they are.

00:49:53.000 Now, one of the things that you recommend in the book that, a lot of what you've just said I actually agree with, and one of the things you recommend that I also agree with is the idea of putting universities in some of these towns.

00:50:02.000 You've got a state that's building a university anyway, why not put it in a place where you can actually uplift the, I mean, it's a state project anyway, that's fine.

00:50:09.000 But if you're talking about, one of the things you talk about is the federal government putting restrictions on the ability of localities to sort of offer goodies to various companies to come in.

00:50:18.000 Now, I, on an ideological level, object to, you know, various towns offering goodies.

00:50:23.000 I don't like the idea of subsidizing companies.

00:50:25.000 It seems like cronyism to me.

00:50:28.000 But one of the things that is not exactly a goody is just localities offering lower tax rates.

00:50:33.000 So one of the reasons you're seeing this mass outflow to Nashville and Austin, two cities that you've mentioned, is because there are 0% tax rates in the states in which those cities are located.

00:50:42.000 And you're seeing the same thing in Florida.

00:50:43.000 You're now seeing a net outflow from places like California to places like Nevada, to places like Arizona, to low-tax states with an urban base of people who can work there.

00:50:54.000 And I wonder if that's not a good thing.

00:50:56.000 Meaning that it seems like a lot of the places that are losing population are places that are in fact overtaxing and overregulating and there's a natural movement of business away from those places to places that are more conducive to doing business and why is that a bad thing?

00:51:10.000 I mean, I think it's actually probably a more regulatory thing than a tax thing.

00:51:14.000 You know, it's not...

00:51:15.000 bad exactly that there's some competition.

00:51:17.000 You know, so you look at California, you live in California, right?

00:51:20.000 And taxes there for high-income people are quite high.

00:51:26.000 And I think this is a successful show, and I know there's a lot of technology people, Hollywood people are doing well, and they're paying very high taxes.

00:51:35.000 Also, there's a lot of people leave California, but it's not actually rich people who leave California.

00:51:41.000 It tends to be working class people are leaving California, and it's because the housing costs in California are incredibly high.

00:51:49.000 And, you know, I mean, I've written extreme length about that.

00:51:53.000 I mean, it's a regulatory issue.

00:51:54.000 It's a huge crisis.

00:51:55.000 I think by far the biggest failing of the sort of progressive, you know, coastal America is those kinds of things.

00:52:02.000 And that's fine, right?

00:52:04.000 I mean, it's...

00:52:05.000 The best thing would be for, you know, New York and California and New Jersey, Connecticut to get their act together and, you know, be more affordable places to live.

00:52:14.000 But it's great.

00:52:15.000 I mean, one of the incredible strengths of the United States compared to a country like the UK or France is that we have these multiple centers, right?

00:52:24.000 So, if New York and Los Angeles become overregulated the way London and Paris are, like, you can go to Houston, right?

00:52:31.000 We have lots of different big cities.

00:52:34.000 And that kind of optionality has been one of our big strengths here.

00:52:37.000 I think that's different from when cities get into these bidding wars for each other, where it's like, I'll give you whatever special tax break to move your headquarters here.

00:52:47.000 Actually, one of the reasons to try to clamp down on that sort of thing is to encourage places to compete on the fundamentals, which is You know, either you have your taxes low or else you're providing some kind of service in exchange for the taxes that's, like, really good, right?

00:53:02.000 I mean, in theory, that's what they would say they're doing in New York is, you know, we have these awesome public services.

00:53:08.000 And, you know, I do challenge people sometimes, like, is that...

00:53:12.000 How true is that, right?

00:53:13.000 You know, there's elements where it is true, and there's unique amenities there that people don't have elsewhere.

00:53:19.000 But that's exactly what's wrong with this kind of like, let me throw, you know, a billion dollar special property tax exemption at you, right, to move in here, is that places should be competing on the basis of some kind of value.

00:53:33.000 I totally agree with this.

00:53:34.000 I mean, they should be competing on the basis of broad value.

00:53:36.000 And here's my prediction.

00:53:37.000 Over the next couple of years, you're about to see high-income people leave California in massive numbers.

00:53:42.000 And spoiler alert, by the time this broadcasts, I am one of them, and so is my entire company.

00:53:48.000 But putting that aside, the That does raise a different sort of broader question, which is the book relies on, as you mentioned, aggregate GDP as sort of the measure of the strength of the country.

00:53:59.000 And there are two ways to go about aggregate GDP, obviously.

00:54:02.000 One is to increase the population.

00:54:03.000 You and I actually agree on a lot of those things.

00:54:05.000 I think that our moral positions on abortion may be a separator there.

00:54:08.000 But that's more of a moral issue on an individual level than it is an argument.

00:54:11.000 Like, I'm not arguing anti-abortion because I want population growth.

00:54:14.000 I'm arguing anti-abortion for a variety of other reasons.

00:54:17.000 But the other way to obviously grow aggregate GDP is just grow GDP, period.

00:54:24.000 Meaning that the great separator, historically speaking, between the United States and, say, Russia or between the United States and China or between the United States and India, Indonesia, Pakistan, has been a very robust free market system.

00:54:36.000 And so why focus, if we're focused on competitiveness with other nations, why focus on the production of children and the incentivization of that, as opposed to focusing on relief from regulation, making this a friendlier business climate, making it easier to start a business in big states with heavy talent bases like California or New York?

00:54:54.000 I mean, you can only write one book at a time.

00:54:57.000 So the United States is, you know, we're a world leader in productivity already, which is great.

00:55:00.000 Yeah, so the United States is, you know, we're a world leader in productivity already, which is great.

00:55:08.000 We should try to do better in that regard.

00:55:10.000 One of the things, though, about the challenge of China is that the population there is so much larger than ours that they don't need to really match us or even come close to matching us in productivity in order to sort of exceed us in the aggregates.

00:55:25.000 When we were doing the Cold War with the Soviet Union, Soviet population is a little bit larger than the U.S.

00:55:30.000 population historically, but it's close, right?

00:55:33.000 And so if the U.S.

00:55:34.000 economic system is in fact better than the Soviet one, You know, we win. 0.99

00:55:39.000 Whereas if communism is better, you know, they're gonna win, right?

00:55:43.000 And so you have this, like, famous standoff with Khrushchev and, you know, the kitchen, and we're gonna bury you.

00:55:48.000 And there was this moment, I think, when some economists thought capital accumulation in the USSR was proceeding so rapidly that they really would catch us, but they didn't, right?

00:55:59.000 You know, a lot of other stuff happened in the Cold War, but fundamentally, Our system really was better, and that's sort of truth told out in the end.

00:56:08.000 But China's got three, four times as many people as we are.

00:56:11.000 We can't count on the fact that our system is superior to be good enough to sort of give us that margin.

00:56:18.000 But of course, we should do what we can to improve economic growth, you know, domestically in the country.

00:56:24.000 And a lot of the arguments of the book are about things on housing, about things on immigration that can help sort of facilitate that.

00:56:30.000 But of course, there's there's more to it, right?

00:56:32.000 I mean, like the healthcare sector is an important topic for discussion.

00:56:38.000 We could I'm sure you've done many shows on them.

00:56:40.000 People write books about it all the time.

00:56:42.000 It doesn't even come up in my book.

00:56:45.000 There's plenty we could do to sort of improve ourselves and that we ought to focus on, and also plenty we should argue about, right?

00:56:51.000 I mean, one of my big themes is I want us to have joint projects.

00:56:54.000 I want us to have a sense of national purpose together.

00:56:57.000 Of course, there's just always going to be disagreements, though, about how you should do things.

00:57:01.000 Abortion, very important issue.

00:57:03.000 People have a lot of strong feelings about it.

00:57:05.000 I think we disagree, but I think this is like a book that aims to have ideas that can appeal to people who also disagree about those other things.

00:57:13.000 So in a second, I want to ask you about how we get to the kind of discussions that you have in the book, as opposed to the discussions we're currently having in politics, which are vastly different, as I think we can both agree.

00:57:23.000 We'll get to that in just one second.

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00:58:32.000 So let's talk about the fact that, you know, we've been having a very nice conversation here about all the various policies and it's and honestly, it's fun.

00:58:39.000 I mean, it's fun to talk about various policies that we can try and that we can see whether they work and sort of the underlying philosophical basis for this.

00:58:45.000 This obviously doesn't happen very often in American politics.

00:58:49.000 In fact, most of American politics seems to be much more about impugning the intent of the other guy for whatever policy he is proposing.

00:58:56.000 So if you are a Democrat, then Republicans will suggest that you're doing this because you're a big government authoritarian who wants to control everybody else's life.

00:59:03.000 And if you're a Republican, Democrats invariably suggest you're doing whatever you're doing because you're a racist.

00:59:07.000 So how do we get beyond the identity conversation and the impugning of people's motives?

00:59:14.000 And listen, we all fall victim to it sometimes, and sometimes it's true.

00:59:17.000 But how do we get to a broader conversation about the policies and beyond the conversation about what we suspect other people's motives are?

00:59:28.000 You know, it's hard, but I always want to remind people, right?

00:59:30.000 Politics is a zero-sum conflict for power, right?

00:59:36.000 Only one person can win the presidential election.

00:59:38.000 Only one person can hold a given Senate seat.

00:59:41.000 Policy isn't like that, right?

00:59:43.000 Sometimes there are areas where we just disagree and it's irreconcilable.

00:59:47.000 But most of the time, people on the left, people on the right, care about slightly different things or have slightly different priorities.

00:59:54.000 And it's possible to come up with good ideas that move the ball forward on both grounds.

00:59:59.000 And something that I reflect on sometimes, because I can be a feisty partisan person.

01:00:05.000 We've gone at it before.

01:00:06.000 And I like to fight with people on the internet.

01:00:08.000 I'm not going to try to say I'm more high-minded than this.

01:00:11.000 But if you look back in history, at different major epics, so little really turns on who was correct in some random house race in 1811.

01:00:25.000 Like, it's not that those disputes don't matter, but we did advance over time by having a better consensus, right?

01:00:35.000 Like, the overall idea's improved.

01:00:38.000 It wasn't just that one person or the other kind of won out.

01:00:41.000 And it makes me sad sometimes.

01:00:43.000 I really like Hamilton, you know, as a lot of people do.

01:00:46.000 It's great songs, things like that.

01:00:47.000 But getting people—sometimes people start looking at the past like that, and they apply just, like, modern partisanship and want to argue, like, Jefferson or Hamilton?

01:00:59.000 Who would I vote for in the 1804 election?

01:01:02.000 It doesn't matter.

01:01:03.000 That's not an intelligent way to think about the past.

01:01:06.000 All those people had a lot of ideas that, by today's standards, we would think are terrible.

01:01:12.000 And they also had some important insights, and we just kind of moved forward through a process of gradual improvement.

01:01:19.000 And it's just important to me to try to make space for some conversations that aren't just about the next election, right?

01:01:27.000 Because when we're talking about the next election, ultimately we've got to pick, right?

01:01:30.000 There's only one candidate.

01:01:32.000 When we're talking about ideas, like, we can talk about ideas.

01:01:34.000 We can disagree about things.

01:01:35.000 We can agree about things.

01:01:36.000 We can have interesting synthesis.

01:01:38.000 We can learn from each other.

01:01:39.000 And to me, personally, that's more fun, right?

01:01:42.000 I look at what's selling right now, and I think the top three books on the bestseller list, they're all these books about why Trump is bad.

01:01:50.000 And I agree.

01:01:51.000 I think he is bad.

01:01:53.000 I don't know how many books about that liberals need to read for themselves, though.

01:01:57.000 It's a little boring.

01:01:58.000 I wanted to try to write a book that...

01:02:00.000 I don't expect anybody in America is going to pick this up and say like, I am on board for 100% of this.

01:02:06.000 But I do hope that everyone can learn something from it just as you know, we can we can learn from going on each other's podcasts.

01:02:13.000 So let's talk about now that we've said that we shouldn't talk about the election, let's talk about the election.

01:02:17.000 So obviously, right now, As we record this, the heavy favorite to win the presidency is Joe Biden.

01:02:24.000 The only real way that you could argue otherwise is if you were arguing that the polls are systematically not taking into account rural first-time voters, essentially, in some of the swing states, which is possible but unlikely.

01:02:37.000 I mean, it happened sort of in 2012 with Barack Obama and first-time black voters in major urban areas.

01:02:41.000 It could theoretically be happening this time, but again, absence of evidence is not an actual case that it's happening at the time.

01:02:49.000 With the race stacking up the way it is, let's say that Joe Biden wins the presidency, let's say that he takes the Senate along with him.

01:02:55.000 How hard do you think a Biden administration pushes for some of the policies they've been talking about?

01:03:00.000 Because there is this real split between, and this always happens, between how Democrats talk publicly for elections and then how they talk sort of behind the scenes.

01:03:08.000 Like Joe Biden's presentation to the American public during prime time of the DNC was certainly not the presentation that was being put forth in sort of the discussion sessions of the DNC earlier in the day.

01:03:17.000 So what does it look like if Joe Biden is president and the Democrats take the Senate?

01:03:22.000 Do they kill the filibuster? 0.97

01:03:23.000 Do they end up trying to add a couple of states to the union?

01:03:26.000 Do they pack the courts?

01:03:27.000 Like all these things have been discussed.

01:03:28.000 What do you think this actually looks like?

01:03:30.000 Yeah, I mean, you know, I don't think that stuff is gonna happen ultimately.

01:03:34.000 I mean, because to do anything, right?

01:03:36.000 I mean, you saw this when Trump took over, right?

01:03:38.000 Not just him personally.

01:03:39.000 You know, Republicans had the Senate majority, but it was a narrow majority.

01:03:43.000 And so there were lots of things that, quote unquote, Republicans wanted to do that Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski didn't want to do.

01:03:51.000 And so the people who were going to hold the veto points, if Democrats have a majority, it's going to be people like Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema, you know, maybe Mark Kelly, some other people who would have to win.

01:03:51.000 Right?

01:04:03.000 And I just don't, in my reporting, see an incredible amount of appetite among those people for Big procedural changes, in part because they don't have a lot of appetite for big substantive changes.

01:04:17.000 And it's going to be frustrating to people on the left who do want to see that stuff.

01:04:21.000 And it's possible—look, if Bernie Sanders had won the nomination, And then he had faced the slings and arrows of what would have been a very difficult general election campaign for him, but then he won?

01:04:32.000 Like, I think a lot of Democrats would be spooked in the way that Republican elected officials were spooked by Trump.

01:04:39.000 And they'd be saying, oh my god, like, you know, my people aren't who I thought they were exactly, and I'd better go for it. 0.91

01:04:45.000 But Biden was clearly the most conservative person in that field.

01:04:49.000 He ultimately won the primary quite handily.

01:04:52.000 And I think it makes the more moderate Democrats in the Congress feel confident in their own position and saying that they can flip the bird to people on the left.

01:05:03.000 And in some cases, I'm going to find that disappointing.

01:05:06.000 I thought there was a lot from that more ambitious progressive agenda, particularly on health care, that I think is a good idea and where Biden is leaving leaving on the table, frankly, useful, necessary things.

01:05:18.000 There's also a lot of areas where it's, I think, probably for the best that the left is not going to be in the driver's seat of policy after the election.

01:05:26.000 So do you think that there is going to be unrest after the election?

01:05:29.000 And if so, which side do you think it's going to come from?

01:05:31.000 Because it's been very interesting.

01:05:32.000 I think there have been a bunch of articles in the last couple of weeks foreseeing widespread right-wing violence in the streets if Joe Biden should win narrowly or if Trump should win on election night.

01:05:41.000 And then the mail-in ballots come in, and it turns out that Biden wins fairly broadly, which is quite possible considering the level of mail-in balloting that we're going to see this time around.

01:05:50.000 Do you foresee that?

01:05:51.000 It seems to me, honestly, like everybody is engaged in a little bit of cosplay.

01:05:55.000 The amount of actual violence in the streets, the appetite for it is pretty low and it seems like pretty small groups of people statistically who are actually engaging in it.

01:06:04.000 Yeah, I tend to agree with that.

01:06:05.000 I mean, I think, you know, it's sort of fun for my... the opposite, right?

01:06:10.000 If I wrote an article and I was like, probably the election will be peaceful.

01:06:13.000 Like, I don't think a lot of people would read that story.

01:06:16.000 It's a little boring, right?

01:06:17.000 And so it's not just like, well, what gets what gets the clicks there?

01:06:20.000 But it's like, you know, the people most interested to write articles speculating about post election violence are people who in total good faith, like really believe in it.

01:06:30.000 But I think that stuff is pretty overblown.

01:06:33.000 America is a Somewhat aging, somewhat complacent kind of place.

01:06:38.000 I mean, it's been, you know, it's been disturbing to see some of the things that have gone on in a couple cities, both in terms of, you know, people rioting in the wake of protests, and then, like, armed gunmen driving in from other more conservative places to take charge.

01:06:52.000 I mean, I see why people are bothered by that stuff, but in historical context, it has actually not been that bad, and is also pretty detached from, like, actual electoral politics.

01:07:04.000 You know, it's mostly being perpetrated by people who are not, like, engaged with the electoral system.

01:07:10.000 So I don't really think the election would be expected to trigger big problems.

01:07:15.000 So as a person on the left, one of the big kind of things that's bothered me about the modern left, and I mean, mostly the hard left, and I do make a distinction between sort of the traditional Democratic Party in this iteration, And a more radical version that you see in, for example, The Squad.

01:07:31.000 That is the focus on identity politics.

01:07:32.000 I had this conversation, obviously, at length with Ezra Klein, because he writes a lot in his book about his definition of identity politics.

01:07:39.000 What do you think of identity politics in the Democratic Party?

01:07:42.000 Is it here to stay?

01:07:43.000 Do you think that that identity is mainlined around or pegged to ethnicity in inherent characteristics?

01:07:50.000 Because it seems to me there should be a pretty vast category difference made between Identity that you are able to change, and identity that you're simply not able to change, like race or sexual orientation or something.

01:08:02.000 Yeah, I mean, look, I think identity has always been an important part of politics, including ethnic identities in the United States.

01:08:09.000 I mean, I was reading about, I forget what it was, you know, it was the Army of the Potomac in 1863, and Lincoln has some particular general in charge of the 11th Corps, Because most of the people, most of the soldiers serving in there were German immigrants or first generation immigrants.

01:08:25.000 So it was important to have this iconic German freedom fighter from 1848 in charge, even though he wasn't very good at military command, right?

01:08:33.000 So it's easy for us to look back at it and be like, you're gonna lose a war over identity politics, man?

01:08:38.000 And like in the 1860s, but also like that's the nature of politics and society.

01:08:44.000 And there's always a balance between, you know, making people feel incorporated by acknowledging their identity and valuing it and going too far so that you're creating divisions rather than than kind of healing them.

01:09:00.000 And, you know, I think We go to war on, like, a second-order level over the idea of identity politics at this point, while at the same time, like, people on the right very much practice forms of identity politics, right?

01:09:13.000 The sort of backlash to Happy Holidays, you know, is a kind of Christian identity politics in the United States, and I find it a little bit Deplorable, or I guess that's not the word to use.

01:09:29.000 I don't love to see it, right?

01:09:32.000 Because I feel like the happy holidays, right?

01:09:34.000 That's an effort to acknowledge people like you and me who are not celebrating Christmas.

01:09:38.000 At the same time, I'll say Merry Christmas to people if it's going to bother them.

01:09:42.000 I think the form of identity politics I'm talking about is more the kind of, you are Pathologically incapable of understanding people like me, right?

01:09:50.000 And you see that a lot in politics right now, is that you haven't had this person's lived experience, therefore you can't discuss this issue.

01:09:57.000 And that to me is the death of politics, because literally if you cannot at some point have a conversation with somebody who hasn't had your lived experience, you'll never be able to have a conversation with another human being about politics.

01:10:07.000 None of us have had the same lived experience.

01:10:10.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:10:11.000 And, you know, you see people taking this way too far, putting these, like, categoricals on, and they say, look, you've just got to only listen to people who are like this.

01:10:18.000 Like, you can't even weigh in.

01:10:20.000 You can't have an opinion.

01:10:21.000 At the same time, you know, earlier today, there was an interesting thing where Paul Krugman said something like, there was no backlash against Muslims after 9-11.

01:10:30.000 And then lots and lots of Muslim people, or South Asian people who aren't Muslim but were mistaken for being Muslim, they kind of, like, testified.

01:10:36.000 They were like, no, this happened to me, and that happened to me, and that happened to me.

01:10:40.000 And, you know, that's valuable, right?

01:10:42.000 I mean, it's not helpful for, like, me and Paul to sit around as, like, bearded secular Jewish guys on the East Coast saying nobody said anything mean to Muslims.

01:10:53.000 Like, you have to listen to what people are saying about their lives.

01:10:56.000 And, you know, I have heard from young—from African American men about their experiences with the police, especially when they're young, and that makes an impact.

01:11:06.000 And, you know, it's— The fact that Tim Scott is in the Senate Republican Caucus makes a difference on that issue, because he speaks to personal experiences that other people in that caucus don't have access to, right?

01:11:20.000 So there's real insight to the idea that diversity of perspectives matters, that it's useful to listen to people and to hear what they have to say about their actual lives, because we don't know.

01:11:30.000 At the same time, I am 100% somebody who stands firm on the view that objective statistical data is really important, and that we can't just listen to people speaking their truth from their heart.

01:11:45.000 People disagree, right?

01:11:46.000 Like, you know, Jewish people in America don't all have the same experience, the same identities, the same Black people, Latino people, Muslim people.

01:11:54.000 So there's no way we're going to just, like, quote-unquote, listen or use lived experience.

01:11:59.000 We have to look to data, we have to look to facts, we have to have arguments, we have to let everybody participate.

01:12:05.000 So, you know, I guess I have a wishy-washy view on this.

01:12:09.000 So, I want to ask Matt Iglesias a few questions, a few final questions, starting with exactly how journalism should be pursued, since we both helped found journalistic outlets.

01:12:18.000 If you'd like to hear Matt's answers, you have to be a Daily Wire member.

01:12:21.000 Head on over to dailywire.com, click subscribe, you can hear the rest of our conversation over there.

01:12:25.000 Well, Matt Iglesias, the book is One Billion Americans.

01:12:28.000 Be sure to check it out.

01:12:29.000 Matt, this has been a blast.

01:12:29.000 Thanks for coming by.

01:12:31.000 Okay, thank you.

01:12:32.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is produced by Mathis Glover.

01:12:45.000 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.

01:12:47.000 Our technical director is Austin Stevens, and our assistant director is Pavel Lydowski.

01:12:51.000 Associate producer, Nick Sheehan.

01:12:53.000 Our guests are booked by Caitlin Maynard.

01:12:55.000 Editing is by Jim Nickel.

01:12:56.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.

01:12:58.000 Hair and makeup is by Nika Geneva.

01:13:00.000 Title graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.

01:13:02.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a DailyWire production.

The Ben Shapiro Show - September 20, 2020

Matthew Yglesias | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 99

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