Matthew Iglesias joins the show to discuss the Harper's Weekly Letter, the backlash from the letter, and his new book, One Billion Americans, which argues that the U.S. population needs to get a whole lot bigger if we're going to be the winners of the future. Plus, we get into Matt s 2020 election thoughts, and why he thinks the country needs to have a lot more people. The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is sponsored by Express, a VPN unit. Your data is your business protected at Expressvpn.com/ProtectYourData. Your data, your business, and your intellectual property are protected by the First Amendment. Ben Shapiro is the host of the conservative podcast, The Weekly Standard, and is a frequent contributor to The Daily Wire. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times, The Huffington Post, and The Daily Caller, and has been featured on CNN, NPR, and NPR. He is the author of several books, including "One Billion Americans" and "One Nation: A Billion Americans." He is also a frequent guest on the radio show, "The View From Above" on SiriusXM's Morning Mashup, and hosts a podcast called "The Real Reel Talk" and hosts the podcast "The Reel Reel Radio Show on Sirius XM's Morning Drive with John Rocha. Subscribe to his new show on the Real Talk Radio and The Real Talk Network. Learn more about your ad choices and access to the latest trending topics on social medias, including Craigslist and other major search engines. Visit cnn.fm.me/TheReelvesxr to find out who's getting the best deals in the best places to get the most interesting in the most authentic and trending on the best ones in the greatest places in the world. And don't forget to subscribe to their newest podcast on the on social media? and subscribe on Apple Podcasts and other social media accounts! Subscribe and comment on the Podulx to hear from you can vlogs and more! Subscribe on iTunes and discuss what s going on everywhere else! Subscribe on the podulx and other great things going on around the internet? Subscribe? , , and more like this and more on this is going to go to your ad-free version of The Real Real Realist Podcasts in the Hustler podcast? and other things going down there!
00:00:00.000This 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.
00:00:10.000But you know, it was done for a reason.
00:00:11.000And 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.
00:00:25.000Amidst the growing outrage, mobs, and the increasing frequency of individuals being cancelled... We feeding the internet trolls and we reward them.
00:00:32.000Harper's Magazine published a letter on justice and open debate in July of this year.
00:00:37.000Signed 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.
00:00:55.000Many outspoken progressives signed on to the letter, including J.K.
00:00:58.000Rowling, Steven Pinker, Noam Chomsky, Gloria Steinem, and one Matthew Iglesias.
00:01:03.000Iglesias, 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.
00:01:11.000Critic at large for Vox, Emily Vanderwerf, accused Matt of supporting anti-trans dog whistles because the letter closely followed outrage about J.K.
00:01:18.000Rowling's stance that trans women are not the same as biological women.
00:01:21.000Fellow 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.
00:01:28.000And there's a lot of power in being able to claim and hold the mantle of free speech defender.
00:01:32.000Matt and other signatories to the Harper's letter speak to how far the retribution has spread.
00:01:37.000Today, we'll get into where Matt finds himself in that controversy, and where we go from here in this age of intolerance.
00:01:43.000Plus, 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.
00:01:49.000population needs to get a whole lot bigger if we're going to be the winners of the future.
00:01:56.000The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is sponsored by Express, a VPN unit.
00:02:05.000Your data is your business protected at expressvpn.com slash Ben.
00:02:10.000Welcome to the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.
00:02:12.000Today, we feature a very special guest, Matthew Iglesias.
00:02:15.000Just 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.
00:02:21.000Head 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.
00:02:28.000Matt, thanks so much for joining the show, really appreciate it.
00:02:32.000So 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.
00:02:40.000But 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.
00:02:52.000So I was a fan of the Harper's Weekly letter, obviously.
00:02:56.000I'm an opponent of what has been termed cancel culture.
00:03:01.000I 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.
00:03:08.000Yeah, I mean, that's not really a word that I use.
00:03:11.000It's not a term that appears in that letter.
00:03:13.000I think it's a little bit confused and people start sort of arguing about terminology.
00:03:19.000You 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.
00:03:31.000But we also had, you know, the House of Representatives wanted to change the name of French fries.
00:03:36.000We had the Dixie Chicks, you know, people were smashing up their CDs, because they didn't like something they said about George W. Bush.
00:03:42.000And more recently, you know, we had Colin Kaepernick sort of blacklisted because people were angry about His political statements.
00:03:50.000So I kind of reject the construct that there's like a specific left wing phenomenon that we could call cancel culture.
00:04:01.000But 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.
00:04:12.000They'll say, we got to cut this person out of our lives entirely.
00:04:15.000I can't watch, you know, a show anymore, because I don't like something the actor said.
00:04:20.000And, you know, it's an unfortunate trend.
00:04:22.000So 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.
00:04:30.000So 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.
00:04:38.000So, 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.
00:04:43.000Trying 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.
00:04:58.000They decide instead they're going to go after the advertisers.
00:05:01.000On the show, because the advertisers are somehow not trying to just reach the listeners.
00:05:06.000They've somehow endorsed the content of the particular show.
00:05:10.000And I kind of wanted to get your take on that.
00:05:12.000And then I want to move, and then I want to also ask you about what you think the Overton window should be.
00:05:16.000Because we're, I think we're both discussing, you know, content that's inside what the Overton window is.
00:05:21.000So I want to clarify that in a second.
00:05:23.000But first, what do you think about that definition of what canceling constitutes?
00:05:27.000Yeah, I mean, there's something to be said for that.
00:05:29.000I 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?
00:05:37.000Like, there's boundaries to decency and polite society, things like that.
00:05:41.000To 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.
00:05:58.000So like, don't go on his show, right? And like, that to me is not reasonable.
00:06:04.000You 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?
00:06:15.000And, 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?
00:06:43.000I mean, in the internet age, you can't Stop people from having an audience like on their podcast, on their YouTube, whatever.
00:06:53.000We're not in a world of three television networks.
00:06:56.000And if you convince like two stakeholders, somebody is going to be like gone and shunned from the public sphere.
00:07:02.000So you know, we might as well try to live with that reality most of the time.
00:07:07.000There's some stuff, you know, that's out of bounds.
00:07:09.000I mean, I think that's sort of common sense.
00:07:10.000We don't need to have, I don't know, like Nazis on cable or what have you.
00:07:15.000But 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.
00:07:23.000Yeah, I mean, I agree with that completely.
00:07:25.000And 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?
00:07:50.000But one of the arguments now becomes where does the Overton window shrink too much?
00:07:55.000And 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.
00:08:00.000So 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.
00:08:05.000But there was not a single person, so far as I could tell, on that list who voted for Trump.
00:08:10.000It's a list of probably 150 center-left to radical left, including people like Noam Chomsky, intellectuals.
00:08:16.000But there wasn't anybody who was probably either a registered Republican or a Trump voter.
00:08:21.000And I thought that actually weakened the impact of a letter.
00:08:23.000It 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.
00:08:44.000You 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...
00:08:52.000I might think about it a little bit differently from how they did.
00:08:55.000That 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.
00:09:11.000But, you know, also neutral principles are important.
00:09:13.000And, 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.
00:09:32.000You 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.
00:09:47.000I mean, including using real powers of the presidency, right?
00:09:51.000There'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.
00:10:00.000And that's a, it's like a different, it's a different kind of thing from, you know, people yelling at college professors.
00:10:07.000And, you know, I think deserves to be treated somewhat separately.
00:10:10.000I mean, we can get to President Trump in a second.
00:10:12.000I'm sure we'll get to President Trump a fair bit in the upcoming minutes.
00:10:15.000It's hard to avoid talking about him these days.
00:10:17.000Yeah, he's the black hole of American politics around which everything revolves.
00:10:21.000But first, let's talk about the fact that you do need to protect your online data.
00:10:25.000Why should you care about encrypting your data?
00:10:27.000Well, it's often easy for a hacker to bypass Wi-Fi security and steal your information, which is why I use ExpressVPN to stay secure online.
00:10:34.000It's hard to know whether your device or network is vulnerable, and if you ever use Wi-Fi at a hotel or shopping mall or any place public, You're sending data over an open network, meaning no encryption at all.
00:10:42.000That's the easiest place for hackers to steal that information.
00:10:45.000The best way to ensure all of your data is encrypted and can't be read by hackers is to use ExpressVPN.
00:10:50.000Just download the ExpressVPN app on your computer or smartphone, tap one button to secure 100% of your network data, and then use the internet just the way you normally would.
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00:11:27.000So Matt, you talk about President Trump there and sort of his treatment of the press.
00:11:31.000I've decried when he has said that members of the press are enemies of the people.
00:11:34.000I think it's ridiculous when he suggests that reporters ought to be fired for disagreeing with him.
00:11:39.000I mean, it also happens to be true that President Obama was not particularly wonderful in regards to certain aspects of the press.
00:11:45.000I mean, he attacked pretty regularly Fox News.
00:11:46.000He also Sick to his justice department on the Associated Press.
00:11:52.000Unfortunately, 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.
00:12:00.000In 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.
00:12:11.000In the cultural sphere, although in the governmental sphere, obviously Trump is the president, so he's the person from the right doing it.
00:12:16.000I mean, look, we have a lot of polarization along different demographic lines in politics, right?
00:12:22.000So young college graduates skew much left of the overall population.
00:12:28.000And 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.
00:12:38.000And 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.
00:12:47.000In 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.
00:12:56.000You know, so in the political sphere, we have a very empowered conservative movement at the moment, you know, holding the presidency.
00:13:03.000And liberals are more likely to say, oh, you know, we need to have freedom, appreciate the value of that.
00:13:09.000You 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.
00:13:21.000And so they have an interest in mounting a principled defense of academic freedom and sort of neutral speech principles.
00:13:28.000And I think the students don't always appreciate that.
00:13:31.000But 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.
00:13:40.000Which is that I think progressives benefit a lot from academic freedom in a traditional sense, although also conservative professors do.
00:13:48.000I mean, it's a good system, but I mean, it's genuinely worth fighting for.
00:13:52.000Yeah, 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.
00:14:03.000The 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.
00:14:19.000Actually, we saw a little bit of this when you were criticized for signing that letter from Harper's Weekly.
00:14:23.000There 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.
00:14:46.000That seems to me incredibly dangerous and a way for the country to basically break.
00:14:49.000If 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.
00:14:58.000I 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.
00:15:06.000But I think, you know, these ideals are worth upholding and thinking about and trying to adhere to.
00:15:12.000And, you know, you were talking about, we're holding a large, diverse country together, right?
00:15:17.000And that's, like, it's not It's something I was thinking about a lot, actually, as I worked on this book, right?
00:15:23.000Which is, you know, what do we have as a country, right?
00:15:27.000How can we think about what we have in common?
00:15:30.000And, you know, what's valuable about America?
00:15:43.000But also, like, the United States has succeeded, insofar as it has succeeded historically, by having some sense also of togetherness.
00:15:51.000We have a sort of strong civic nationalist tradition that, you know, I think...
00:15:57.000gets 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.
00:16:05.000So what do you think are those things that hold us together?
00:16:07.000So 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.
00:16:23.000And it seems like a lot of that is coming apart.
00:16:27.000Your 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.
00:16:34.000But 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.
00:16:44.000I don't really think that that's true, though, fundamentally.
00:16:47.000You know, I think when we look big picture, right?
00:16:50.000Like, 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.
00:17:05.000Or they look at, you know, the crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong, and they say, oh, that's pretty bad.
00:17:10.000Or 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.
00:17:29.000And 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.
00:17:41.000And the Chinese government freaked out.
00:17:42.000And the CEO of Daimler did this, like, groveling apology.
00:17:46.000And 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?
00:17:55.000It's just the market power of China has this kind of big growing influence in the world.
00:18:02.000But 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?
00:18:09.000Something 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.
00:18:21.000But there's a real question, like, you know, what do we do about that?
00:18:25.000Because 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.
00:18:35.000So that does bring us to the topic of your book, One Billion Americans.
00:18:38.000So 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?
00:18:58.000At least we're not living under Soviet communism.
00:19:01.000And 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.
00:19:19.000And so maybe we need the existential threat from the outside in order to sort of unify us internally.
00:19:25.000Yeah, I mean, I think that there is a lot to that.
00:19:28.000I 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.
00:19:37.000And, you know, external threats can play that role very effectively.
00:19:41.000And it doesn't need to be, you know, quote unquote, existential, right?
00:19:45.000Like, I don't know, there's not going to be, like, Chinese tanks rolling down Fifth Avenue.
00:19:50.000But 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.
00:19:59.000And 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?
00:20:06.000I mean, part of the essence of this culture war politics is that, you know, people just disagree about stuff.
00:20:12.000And 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?
00:20:28.000Like, 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.
00:20:44.000You 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?
00:20:52.000And we need to actually try to address them and focus on, like, what are choices that we need to make?
00:20:57.000And what are questions where we can really just say, like, live and let live?
00:21:02.000And that's, like, part of the genius of America, right?
00:21:04.000It's just, like, literally a big place with a lot of different stuff going on, and that's fine.
00:21:09.000Well, that does raise the question of what it means to have the systems work.
00:21:13.000So 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.
00:21:19.000If 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.
00:21:35.000And the presidency is supposed to be checked by both the judiciary and the legislature and all of the rest.
00:21:41.000It 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.
00:21:52.000There'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.
00:21:59.000And that may be a very basic root question that You know, needs to be answered.
00:22:05.000And the reason I say that is because you've kind of posited a couple different visions of the country.
00:22:09.000One is things we need to get done together and one is things where we need to leave each other alone.
00:22:12.000And it seems to me that very often those two things are very much in conflict.
00:22:15.000And 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.
00:22:24.000And that an attempt to impose from above actually is going to exacerbate a lot of the divisions we're feeling.
00:22:31.000I 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?
00:22:44.000Sometimes 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.
00:22:55.000You know, your point about sort of veto points in the U.S.
00:22:59.000I 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.
00:23:07.000And 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.
00:23:16.000system provides as a sort of good in and of itself, right?
00:23:19.000So it's not neutral to say, okay, we should have more kind of get things done-iness.
00:23:25.000You 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?
00:23:33.000And so one of the things that we now make it hard to do is, like, repeal any old rules or...
00:23:41.000So it's not totally obvious to me which way this does and doesn't kind of work.
00:23:46.000But 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?
00:23:57.000So 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?
00:24:12.000It's super localized, a lot of neighborhood control.
00:24:15.000And 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?
00:24:23.000And we have incredible scarcities, there's huge affordability problems where you live in particular.
00:24:30.000And so, you know, that's an example where subsidiarity leads to high levels of regulation.
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00:26:16.000So 1 billion Americans is about the principle that we should have more Americans.
00:26:20.000This is something that I totally agree with, by the way, on any number of levels.
00:26:52.000You know, they've got some vineyards, they've got a nice coast.
00:26:55.000Because, 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.
00:27:02.000And I want people to understand that the United States is just a very sparsely populated kind of place.
00:27:09.000It used to be even more sparsely populated, right?
00:27:11.000When our founding fathers, you know, were here in this land, they were like, oh, we better get some more people.
00:27:17.000Because they wanted the United States to be a major power in the world, right?
00:27:21.000They didn't have our contemporary language of international relations.
00:27:24.000But 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.
00:27:32.000It's going to be part of how we rebuild after this tragic Civil War.
00:27:37.000You 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.
00:27:48.000But, you know, it was done for a reason, and I'm basically arguing for a continuation of that kind of vision.
00:27:54.000That, you know, the United States is great, and should want to be great and powerful, and that that means having more people.
00:28:01.000So, 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.
00:28:14.000But 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.
00:28:23.000So when we talk about, you know, one billion Americans, one of the things I was going to ask about is population dynamics.
00:28:28.000So you put a lot of focus on, for example, China and the Chinese population.
00:28:33.000It'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.
00:28:39.000So they're going to end up with about 750 million people, supposedly, by the end of the century.
00:28:45.000And if you look at sort of the list of countries with high populations, it goes India, China, the United States, Pakistan, Indonesia.
00:28:53.000Obviously, there doesn't seem to be a tremendous correlation between a country's power and the size of its population.
00:28:58.000We're not supremely worried about India overtaking the United States, and they have a larger population than anybody else.
00:29:03.000We're not supremely worried about Pakistan or Indonesia these days.
00:29:05.000So why focus on the number of people living in the country?
00:29:08.000Well, you know, I mean, aggregate GDP, right, is like population times per capita income.
00:29:15.000It's not the only thing in the world, by any means, right?
00:29:17.000I mean, for a long time, China was just desperately poor.
00:29:20.000So even though it was a huge population, it was still not that important of a country.
00:29:25.000But we're now at a point, you know, China is still a fairly poor country.
00:29:29.000It's about on a par with Mexico, Bulgaria, depends how you measure it.
00:29:32.000But because the Chinese population is so large, right, they have now this incredible clout on the world stage.
00:29:38.000And 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.
00:29:50.000You know, There's also hard military power in which the aggregates, you know, really matter, right?
00:29:55.000You can get it together, build aircraft carriers, build, you know, missiles that can attack our ships, these kind of things.
00:30:01.000So, you know, we can hope that China stumbles, right?
00:30:05.000They have some serious demographic headwinds there.
00:30:08.000You were talking about the legacy of the one-child policy.
00:30:10.000There's also questions as to how sustainable their rapid economic growth will be.
00:30:15.000It's totally possible that we'll just kind of Fall into some good luck, right?
00:30:19.000And 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.
00:30:27.000But, you know, one of my premises in this book is we control our own destiny much more than we control their destiny.
00:30:34.000And 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.
00:30:42.000And if that was the choice, I don't think we would make it.
00:30:45.000But 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.
00:30:55.000So I want to talk about a variety of kind of tactics that you talk about in terms of increasing the population.
00:31:00.000We'll get to immigration in a minute because it's really fascinating.
00:31:02.000But let's talk a little bit about some of the measures that you discuss in terms of making it easier to raise kids.
00:31:08.000So 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.
00:31:19.000What 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.
00:31:27.000Europe, all of it, has a lower birth rate than the United States.
00:31:30.000The United States' birth rate is driven largely by immigrants and religious people.
00:31:33.000I'm religious, my wife's religious, and so we have three kids.
00:31:39.000The religious population of the United States continues to have many, many children.
00:31:42.000And as the United States secularizes and as it gets more prosperous, there tend to be fewer and fewer children born.
00:31:48.000So 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?
00:31:59.000I 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.
00:32:10.000Well, look, I mean, I think it's very clear that religiosity is the sort of biggest variable here, right?
00:32:15.000That, you know, if you see, like, why do Americans have more children than Europeans?
00:32:19.000It's because we're much more religious.
00:32:21.000And that's clear if you look internally to the United States.
00:32:24.000But 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.
00:32:40.000You 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.
00:32:48.000You 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.
00:32:56.000There's also an interplay between these kind of things, right?
00:32:59.000So 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.
00:33:12.000So because I'm a liberal person, I advocate getting rid of these penalties by making the benefits more generous.
00:33:18.000It's also possible to eliminate the penalties by making the benefits stingier.
00:33:22.000You know, if you want to write that book, more power to you.
00:33:59.000So, I don't think we have that lever to pull, exactly.
00:34:04.000But I mean, I definitely agree that religiosity is the number one relevant variable here, and not, like, stuff in the welfare state.
00:34:13.000So 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.
00:34:22.000So we'll get to that in just one second.
00:34:24.000First, let's talk about hiring and firing in this economy.
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00:35:29.000Alrighty, so let's talk for a second about some of these policies.
00:35:32.000So one of the policies that you recommend is essentially free childcare.
00:35:37.000This has been recommended by people, including Ivanka Trump, the kind of increase in childcare policies.
00:35:42.000And there are a lot of quote-unquote common good conservatives who believe in this also.
00:35:45.000I mean, I think that, for example, Tucker Carlson would probably advocate For something like this.
00:35:50.000Elizabeth 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.
00:36:13.000Two 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.
00:36:19.000So 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.
00:36:30.000Yeah, 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?
00:36:41.000I think that if you're going to have a viable politics around this, you need a kind of home care version.
00:36:47.000You need a way for stay-at-home parents to access those benefits for themselves.
00:36:52.000The question of exactly how you want to design a system like that is a little bit challenging, but I agree.
00:36:59.000More broadly even than the sort of technical details, right?
00:37:03.000I 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.
00:37:21.000And so they'll talk about it in those terms, right?
00:37:23.000There was a Democratic debate in which they talked about child care affordability problems.
00:37:28.000And 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.
00:37:38.000Which is a real thing that happens, and it's a thing that, you know, bothers people.
00:37:43.000But most Americans, you know, work to live, right?
00:37:50.000And if you want to do family policy in a sensible way, you need to speak to those people.
00:37:56.000You know, and so there's a lot of Mommy War content that you can access on the internet if you want.
00:38:01.000If you look at polls, you know, there's a large slice of women who say they'd like to be home full-time.
00:38:07.000It'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.
00:38:17.000This is one of these things where it's a big country and you can't make everybody happy all the time.
00:38:22.000But I think, you know, you should try to design a system that facilitates some optionality there, right?
00:38:29.000That 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.
00:38:40.000So 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.
00:38:50.000So one of the things that has been fairly true about the Scandinavian countries particularly are these vast debates that have happened.
00:38:56.000Over 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.
00:39:06.000People 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.
00:39:12.000And 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.
00:39:24.000So when it comes to immigration, you're an open immigration person.
00:39:28.000I tend to be libertarian on immigration with a couple of exceptions.
00:39:31.000One, I think there should be some real rules about who gets to access the social safety net.
00:39:35.000Two, I think that you should have some general warmth toward basic American principles like freedom of speech.
00:39:41.000I don't think that we should be sort of in the... Let's put it this way.
00:39:46.000I 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.
00:39:54.000But overall, on an economic level, I'm fine with increased levels of immigration, particularly through the legal immigration system.
00:39:59.000Do 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?
00:40:08.000Well, I mean, we have plenty of concerns about immigration in our country.
00:40:11.000You know, and I mean, I think, yes, I mean, like, I think you need to try to address these concerns, right?
00:40:16.000I 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.
00:40:25.000But people have a lot of concerns about immigration, and that's okay, right?
00:40:28.000We can't just yell at them and say, like, hey, like, stop being so racist, man.
00:40:34.000Like, because, I don't know, you know, people think what they think, and they have their reasons to worry.
00:40:39.000But we should try to address those concerns, right?
00:40:41.000So 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.
00:40:50.000But then they say, well, and we should cut the flow of legal immigrants in half.
00:40:54.000So I say, well, maybe let's not do that.
00:40:57.000If 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.
00:41:09.000But also I think we should be open to cultural concerns.
00:41:12.000If 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.
00:41:24.000And I think we should think about, you know, even sort of favored groups abroad, right?
00:41:30.000That, you know, something that happened back when Obama was president, and there was this big to-do about Syrian refugees.
00:41:37.000And, 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.
00:41:44.000And 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.
00:41:51.000And 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.
00:41:58.000And everybody just yelled, because it's discriminatory.
00:42:02.000So what we wound up doing was, I mean, it wasn't that we became more generous to Syrian Muslims, right?
00:42:10.000I 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.
00:42:27.000There's a lot of Arab Christians historically have come to the United States, settled in Michigan, have done very well here.
00:42:33.000I mean, I'm not Christian myself, neither are you, but that's the majority culture.
00:42:38.000in 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.
00:42:52.000But it's also been a Christian country, right?
00:42:54.000It's like, Christmas is a day off, and Passover isn't, and it's a little inconvenient to go see your family.
00:43:00.000But, you know, like, you make do, right?
00:43:01.000Like, all things considered, it's fine.
00:43:04.000And 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.
00:43:18.000Like, you've got to work with the public that exists in a way that I think people are sometimes too resistant to.
00:43:23.000Yeah, 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.
00:43:31.000You 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.
00:43:40.000I want to talk about that in just one second.
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00:45:11.000So let's talk for a second about the attempts to revivify certain parts of the country that seem to be dying.
00:45:17.000So 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.
00:45:24.000I'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.
00:45:36.000Americans are now traveling less than they ever have in terms of leaving home for a job.
00:45:40.000Travel is easier than it's ever been, or at least was until COVID.
00:45:43.000You could pick up and you could move certainly just physically more easily.
00:45:46.000You can move to different areas of the country.
00:45:49.000And until very recently, there were a lot of jobs in various sectors that were available.
00:45:55.000And 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.
00:46:05.000You talk about some programs for revivifying some of these towns where the economic base has left.
00:46:10.000I 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.
00:46:22.000Well, you know, so there's sort of two things that I talk about.
00:46:24.000One is the idea of trying to move some government agencies out of the D.C.
00:46:29.000area, 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.
00:46:42.000I mean, one of the most striking things was when Amazon did that, like, HQ2 raffle.
00:46:47.000And they were like, all right, we're going to come to New York.
00:46:49.000And all these New Yorkers were like, eh, we don't want you.
00:46:53.000And you know, that's New York for you, to an extent.
00:47:21.000Conference 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.
00:47:40.000But, you know, those are the ones that are... I've got Ohio on the brain.
00:47:45.000You know, and come, because, you know, you look at, say, like, I don't know, Buffalo, right?
00:47:50.000Buffalo, it's just like, it's really cold there, man.
00:47:54.000And people, all else being equal, like, they don't like to live in cold places.
00:47:59.000And, 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.
00:48:08.000But you know, it's fallen on hard times.
00:48:10.000But in the global scheme of things, like, Buffalo is an amazing place to live.
00:48:15.000Like, there's so many places that are so much worse than any American, you know, mid-sized cold weather city, right?
00:48:22.000And 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.
00:48:34.000So no, you mentioned the idea that like, maybe people should just leave.
00:48:39.000If you go back, you look at my slate archives, I was full of like, you know, like, F this town, man.
00:48:45.000Like, we just got to get people out of here.
00:48:48.000I think it's proven to be a little bit of a political dead end, right?
00:48:52.000I 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.
00:49:02.000And 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?
00:49:12.000It's something like a third of our rural counties are losing population.
00:49:16.000It's dozens and dozens of sort of small cities across the Northeast and also the Midwest.
00:49:22.000And it can't be that like each of those places is making bad decisions.
00:49:27.000It'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.
00:49:53.000Now, 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.
00:50:02.000You'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.
00:50:09.000But 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.
00:50:18.000Now, I, on an ideological level, object to, you know, various towns offering goodies.
00:50:23.000I don't like the idea of subsidizing companies.
00:50:28.000But one of the things that is not exactly a goody is just localities offering lower tax rates.
00:50:33.000So 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.
00:50:42.000And you're seeing the same thing in Florida.
00:50:43.000You'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.
00:50:54.000And I wonder if that's not a good thing.
00:50:56.000Meaning 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?
00:51:10.000I mean, I think it's actually probably a more regulatory thing than a tax thing.
00:51:15.000bad exactly that there's some competition.
00:51:17.000You know, so you look at California, you live in California, right?
00:51:20.000And taxes there for high-income people are quite high.
00:51:26.000And 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.
00:51:35.000Also, there's a lot of people leave California, but it's not actually rich people who leave California.
00:51:41.000It tends to be working class people are leaving California, and it's because the housing costs in California are incredibly high.
00:51:49.000And, you know, I mean, I've written extreme length about that.
00:52:05.000The 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.
00:52:15.000I 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?
00:52:24.000So, if New York and Los Angeles become overregulated the way London and Paris are, like, you can go to Houston, right?
00:52:34.000And that kind of optionality has been one of our big strengths here.
00:52:37.000I 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.
00:52:47.000Actually, 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?
00:53:02.000I mean, in theory, that's what they would say they're doing in New York is, you know, we have these awesome public services.
00:53:08.000And, you know, I do challenge people sometimes, like, is that...
00:53:13.000You know, there's elements where it is true, and there's unique amenities there that people don't have elsewhere.
00:53:19.000But 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.
00:53:37.000Over the next couple of years, you're about to see high-income people leave California in massive numbers.
00:53:42.000And spoiler alert, by the time this broadcasts, I am one of them, and so is my entire company.
00:53:48.000But 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.
00:53:59.000And there are two ways to go about aggregate GDP, obviously.
00:54:03.000You and I actually agree on a lot of those things.
00:54:05.000I think that our moral positions on abortion may be a separator there.
00:54:08.000But that's more of a moral issue on an individual level than it is an argument.
00:54:11.000Like, I'm not arguing anti-abortion because I want population growth.
00:54:14.000I'm arguing anti-abortion for a variety of other reasons.
00:54:17.000But the other way to obviously grow aggregate GDP is just grow GDP, period.
00:54:24.000Meaning 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.
00:54:36.000And 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?
00:54:54.000I mean, you can only write one book at a time.
00:54:57.000So the United States is, you know, we're a world leader in productivity already, which is great.
00:55:00.000Yeah, so the United States is, you know, we're a world leader in productivity already, which is great.
00:55:08.000We should try to do better in that regard.
00:55:10.000One 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.
00:55:25.000When we were doing the Cold War with the Soviet Union, Soviet population is a little bit larger than the U.S.
00:55:30.000population historically, but it's close, right?
00:55:34.000economic system is in fact better than the Soviet one, You know, we win.
00:55:39.000Whereas if communism is better, you know, they're gonna win, right?
00:55:43.000And so you have this, like, famous standoff with Khrushchev and, you know, the kitchen, and we're gonna bury you.
00:55:48.000And 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?
00:55:59.000You 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.
00:56:08.000But China's got three, four times as many people as we are.
00:56:11.000We can't count on the fact that our system is superior to be good enough to sort of give us that margin.
00:56:18.000But of course, we should do what we can to improve economic growth, you know, domestically in the country.
00:56:24.000And a lot of the arguments of the book are about things on housing, about things on immigration that can help sort of facilitate that.
00:56:30.000But of course, there's there's more to it, right?
00:56:32.000I mean, like the healthcare sector is an important topic for discussion.
00:56:38.000We could I'm sure you've done many shows on them.
00:56:40.000People write books about it all the time.
00:57:03.000People have a lot of strong feelings about it.
00:57:05.000I 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.
00:57:13.000So 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.
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00:58:32.000So 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.
00:58:39.000I 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.
00:58:45.000This obviously doesn't happen very often in American politics.
00:58:49.000In fact, most of American politics seems to be much more about impugning the intent of the other guy for whatever policy he is proposing.
00:58:56.000So 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.
00:59:03.000And if you're a Republican, Democrats invariably suggest you're doing whatever you're doing because you're a racist.
00:59:07.000So how do we get beyond the identity conversation and the impugning of people's motives?
00:59:14.000And listen, we all fall victim to it sometimes, and sometimes it's true.
00:59:17.000But how do we get to a broader conversation about the policies and beyond the conversation about what we suspect other people's motives are?
00:59:28.000You know, it's hard, but I always want to remind people, right?
00:59:30.000Politics is a zero-sum conflict for power, right?
00:59:36.000Only one person can win the presidential election.
00:59:38.000Only one person can hold a given Senate seat.
01:00:47.000But 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?
01:00:59.000Who would I vote for in the 1804 election?
01:01:39.000And to me, personally, that's more fun, right?
01:01:42.000I 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.
01:01:58.000I wanted to try to write a book that...
01:02:00.000I don't expect anybody in America is going to pick this up and say like, I am on board for 100% of this.
01:02:06.000But 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.
01:02:13.000So let's talk about now that we've said that we shouldn't talk about the election, let's talk about the election.
01:02:17.000So obviously, right now, As we record this, the heavy favorite to win the presidency is Joe Biden.
01:02:24.000The 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.
01:02:37.000I mean, it happened sort of in 2012 with Barack Obama and first-time black voters in major urban areas.
01:02:41.000It could theoretically be happening this time, but again, absence of evidence is not an actual case that it's happening at the time.
01:02:49.000With 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.
01:02:55.000How hard do you think a Biden administration pushes for some of the policies they've been talking about?
01:03:00.000Because 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.
01:03:08.000Like 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.
01:03:17.000So what does it look like if Joe Biden is president and the Democrats take the Senate?
01:03:39.000You know, Republicans had the Senate majority, but it was a narrow majority.
01:03:43.000And so there were lots of things that, quote unquote, Republicans wanted to do that Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski didn't want to do.
01:03:51.000And 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.
01:04:03.000And 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.
01:04:17.000And it's going to be frustrating to people on the left who do want to see that stuff.
01:04:21.000And 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?
01:04:32.000Like, I think a lot of Democrats would be spooked in the way that Republican elected officials were spooked by Trump.
01:04:39.000And 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.
01:04:45.000But Biden was clearly the most conservative person in that field.
01:04:49.000He ultimately won the primary quite handily.
01:04:52.000And 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.
01:05:03.000And in some cases, I'm going to find that disappointing.
01:05:06.000I 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.
01:05:18.000There'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.
01:05:26.000So do you think that there is going to be unrest after the election?
01:05:29.000And if so, which side do you think it's going to come from?
01:05:32.000I 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.
01:05:41.000And 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.
01:05:51.000It seems to me, honestly, like everybody is engaged in a little bit of cosplay.
01:05:55.000The 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.
01:06:17.000And so it's not just like, well, what gets what gets the clicks there?
01:06:20.000But 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.
01:06:30.000But I think that stuff is pretty overblown.
01:06:33.000America is a Somewhat aging, somewhat complacent kind of place.
01:06:38.000I 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.
01:06:52.000I 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.
01:07:04.000You know, it's mostly being perpetrated by people who are not, like, engaged with the electoral system.
01:07:10.000So I don't really think the election would be expected to trigger big problems.
01:07:15.000So 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.
01:07:31.000That is the focus on identity politics.
01:07:32.000I had this conversation, obviously, at length with Ezra Klein, because he writes a lot in his book about his definition of identity politics.
01:07:39.000What do you think of identity politics in the Democratic Party?
01:07:43.000Do you think that that identity is mainlined around or pegged to ethnicity in inherent characteristics?
01:07:50.000Because 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.
01:08:02.000Yeah, I mean, look, I think identity has always been an important part of politics, including ethnic identities in the United States.
01:08:09.000I 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.
01:08:25.000So 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?
01:08:33.000So it's easy for us to look back at it and be like, you're gonna lose a war over identity politics, man?
01:08:38.000And like in the 1860s, but also like that's the nature of politics and society.
01:08:44.000And 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.
01:09:00.000And, 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?
01:09:13.000The 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.
01:09:32.000Because I feel like the happy holidays, right?
01:09:34.000That's an effort to acknowledge people like you and me who are not celebrating Christmas.
01:09:38.000At the same time, I'll say Merry Christmas to people if it's going to bother them.
01:09:42.000I 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?
01:09:50.000And 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.
01:09:57.000And 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.
01:10:07.000None of us have had the same lived experience.
01:10:11.000And, 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.
01:10:21.000At 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.
01:10:30.000And 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.
01:10:36.000They were like, no, this happened to me, and that happened to me, and that happened to me.
01:10:40.000And, you know, that's valuable, right?
01:10:42.000I 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.
01:10:53.000Like, you have to listen to what people are saying about their lives.
01:10:56.000And, 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.
01:11:06.000And, 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?
01:11:20.000So 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.
01:11:30.000At 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.
01:11:46.000Like, you know, Jewish people in America don't all have the same experience, the same identities, the same Black people, Latino people, Muslim people.
01:11:54.000So there's no way we're going to just, like, quote-unquote, listen or use lived experience.
01:11:59.000We have to look to data, we have to look to facts, we have to have arguments, we have to let everybody participate.
01:12:05.000So, you know, I guess I have a wishy-washy view on this.
01:12:09.000So, 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.
01:12:18.000If you'd like to hear Matt's answers, you have to be a Daily Wire member.
01:12:21.000Head on over to dailywire.com, click subscribe, you can hear the rest of our conversation over there.
01:12:25.000Well, Matt Iglesias, the book is One Billion Americans.