PREVIEW： Brokenomics ｜ America First & Regime Change with J. Burden
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Summary
As you may have detected from my recent coverage, I have some slight concerns that the burgeoning American empire and the American First movement are perhaps possibly possibly incompatible. So in order to discuss this issue, I invited on long-term political observer and commentator and interviewer, Jay Burden, who has recently gone full-time in the sphere.
Transcript
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Hello and welcome to Brokonomics. Now, as you may have detected from my recent coverage,
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I have some slight concerns that the burgeoning American empire and the American First movement
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are perhaps possibly incompatible. So in order to discuss this issue, I've invited on long-term
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political observer and commentator and interviewer who has recently gone full-time in the sphere
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after a very successful sort of fringe interviewing thing, which blossomed to be a mainstay of our
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sphere. Jay Burden. Jay, thank you very much for coming on. Yeah, thank you so much for having me
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on, Dan. It was very kind. So you've recently gone pro. Tell us about what you're doing and where
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people can find you. Sure. So my primary output is the creatively named Jay Burden show, which you can
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find on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, anywhere you listen to podcasts. Dan, I've obviously had you
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on my show a handful of times. Pretty much everyone else from the Lotus Eaters. Yeah, just top tier
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guests. So all of your favorites, you can find them there. And as Dan has intonated, this is what I do
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now. So there is both a free and a premium version. The business model should seem familiar to Lotus
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Eaters. But the difference is all of the content is on both. You just get it early and ad-free if you
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throw me a few bucks. Excellent. Well, I hope people check that out. So, Jay, the reason I kind of wanted
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to speak to you because there is this question of the soul of the GOP. And, you know, it wasn't really
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that long ago, certainly for most of my lifetime, the GOP was pretty much basically just a neocon
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party. And now that descriptor fits significantly less well. It's gone through a transition. Can you
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tell us about how the GOP made that transition and where you think it lies today?
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Sure. So when we're talking about the American empire, everything goes back to FDR. Much like the
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French, we have a sequence of technically contiguous republics. But really, it is a new, completely new
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empire. Obviously, you have the founders. It is remade with Andrew Jackson, remade during the Civil
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War, and then very much so remade through FDR. As I'm sure you know, he made a number of sweeping
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economic changes. He brought in our sort of pension pyramid scheme that's still a millstone around our
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neck. But also, he is what launched the American empire from a regional to a international superpower.
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Right before then, we still had colonies, but they were, you know, tiny little islands no one cared
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about. We were still invading foreign nations, but they were mostly within our hemisphere, right north
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and central American countries. And so that's really what launched America as an empire. We know it
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today. And so because of that, the Republican Party, the conservative movement writ large,
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its first real identity, because before FDR, there really were no conservatives in America.
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It was what flavor of progressive were you? And so the original conservatives, so to speak,
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existed in opposition to FDR. You have figures like Garrett Garrett, kind of what we call now the old
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right who existed in opposition to FDR sweeping changes. Just for example, FDR made owning gold
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illegal. He stole all of the gold in America. Not many people remember that, but effectively,
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we had our great 20th century dictator the same way that Germany and Russia did. You see this in Orwell,
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right? The idea of these three national superpowers, they're kind of the same. And obviously,
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I'd much rather live in FDR's America than Stalin's Russia. But fundamentally, we did a lot of the
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same things. We had effectively a controlled economy. If you want to look into this, you can
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look up the NRA, not the rifle one, an earlier one, which was an attempt by FDR to set price controls
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for everything. Now, that got struck down. It was one of the few things he lost on, but that indicates
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the direction he was going. So the reason I bring this up is to say that the conservative movement
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in America does not have a particularly old tradition. It doesn't go back to the founding
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of America and claims that it does are kind of a cope. So as we've said, right, there are a number
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of republics and we are still in FDR's America, right? This is the way that our country justifies
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itself. You may have noticed that every time we've picked a dictator to pick a fight with,
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he is likened to a certain Austrian painter. That is the myth that justifies the American empire.
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We saved the world from Mustache Man, and so we get to control everything.
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So the conservative movement really has its, I guess you could say, second kind of rejuvenation of
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life in opposition to the Civil Rights Act, right? That is another kind of step forward in the growing
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evil of the American empire. And in response to that, you get figures like Richard Nixon,
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who was extraordinarily popular. We're still being rocked by anti-ice riots. Even now,
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it's not quite as much in the news, but it's still going on. And many people have brought up
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Kent State when U.S. National Guard, I believe, ended up shooting eight protesters. And while that
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moment was sort of immortalized in the protest movement, you can read songs about it from Buffalo
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Springfield and others. But what's not often discussed is that propelled Nixon to two of the
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greatest electoral victories in history. The conservative movement, what we see now in the
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Tea Party and then the MAGA base, is very much Nixon's coalition, what we call the silent majority,
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the people who were opposed to what was the woke of their day. And so after Nixon, that base,
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which sort of became the Republican Party, and you can even hear leftists talk about this with the
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great party switch, when areas like the American South swapped from, effectively, you know,
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They can never put a year on it, though. They can never put a year on this switch, yeah.
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Or show anyone who actually crossed the floor or anything like that.
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Right, exactly. But point is, that became, that group became the Reagan coalition. And with that,
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the kind of driving thread of that party, that political tendency, became the Cold Warriors. And that
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continued up until the wall fell. And through this entire time, you've got to remember,
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America has been effectively at war since World War II. The whole government, the whole society is set
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up to fight the Cold War. That's why we exist. And so when the wall falls, we have a dual loss of
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purpose. Both, what is the point of this country? What is the point of this economy? Which again,
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is a war economy. And also, well, what is the purpose of the Republican Party and the conservative
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movement? And you have a split then. And the reason we have the neocons and their opposition,
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the paleocons, is those are two different reactions to the wall falling. The neocons say,
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awesome, we did it. We defeated the Reds. Now we get to rule the world. We need a new enemy to fight.
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And that enemy first became the militia movement, domestic. It became figures like Tim McVeigh,
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became Waco. It became that. And then very quickly morphed into the scourge of radical Islam,
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quote unquote. And the paleocons said, no, no, no, we did it. You told us this is why we were doing
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all of these things that in another time would be considered unwise or unsensible. It's because
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we were fighting a war. Now we are a normal country again. We don't need to control the world
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because communism is dead. It was a good faith reaction. And unfortunately, those people were
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politically defeated. I would argue until now, there's a great interaction with Paul Gottfried.
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I was talking to a friend of mine, and he obviously was one of the original paleocons back in the early
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90s. And when asked about him versus his opposition, he said, well, there's one thing that I feel quite
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good about. My friends are getting younger. My enemies are getting older, right? So the neocons won,
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but now look at them, right? You've seen an immense brain drain. I mean, look at the difference
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between Irving Kristol and Bill Kristol. Irving Kristol, regardless of your opinions, was a competent
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guy. He's very smart. Bill Kristol is stupid, like a very stupid man. So that tendency has died as a
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voted force, right? It's not alive. It's not living anymore, but they still have an immense amount of
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power. And so the reason that I'm going through all of this is to say America as an empire exists to
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fight a war. And obviously, as this regards the economy, we still kind of have a command economy.
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We've sold off an immense amount of our industrial base, and that happened during the 70s and 80s
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under these kind of neoliberal or neoconservative economics. But what we do have as far as
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manufacturing is entirely high-end defense manufacturing. So an example I think of,
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there's a town not too far away from me called Radford, Virginia. Other than having a very
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unimpressive university, what do they have there? They have a missile plan, and that is the only
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good-paying local job that isn't connected to the university. So one of the devilish things about this
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is, like I said, when people talk about military Keynesianism,
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we do effectively still live under an economic system where the government decides to spend money
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on things, and that effectively creates a jobs program. And so that's the really thorny issue,
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right? Well, why do we always pick wars? Well, one of it is because we have bloodthirsty psychopaths
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at the wheel. That's definitely part of it. Another part of it, and this is why there's such a deep
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divide in the Republican Party, is in a lot of red states, in a lot of rural areas, what good jobs
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there are, are defense contractors. And this goes down to, obviously, the high-end stuff like planes
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and missiles, but even small things like, you know, who makes the, you know, the boxes for trucks,
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and who does all of these things? So a slight diversion here, but it is relevant. You say you've
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got the high-end stuff, and I agree you have, but a lot of the basic components going into these
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things are now manufactured in China. That's true. But remember, right, I think it's called the
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Berry Amendment, but there's a requirement at how, made in America, any piece of gear, any piece of kit
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the US Army uses. And obviously, you're 100% right. And this is a very real problem. And even under
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Biden, you saw a desire through the CHIPS Act to return that sort of specialized manufacturing to the
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US. I think that that pivot is real. But on the other end, it goes down to, I mean, things you
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would never even think of, like nylon, web gear, stuff like that. There are a million different
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mom-and-pop shops with, you know, five to 100 employees that make some specialized piece of kit
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in some town you've never heard of. And that is the cornerstone of the economy. And to go back to my
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point that the US exists to fight a war, a very valid question is, why do we keep making tanks?
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We make tanks all the time. And what do tanks exist to do? Well, effectively, the M1 Abrams is designed
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to fight in Germany against the Russians. It's not designed for what we've been doing since the Cold
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War, which is, you know, kicking over mud huts and blowing away goat farmers. Which, I mean, look,
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I don't have sympathy for many of those goat farmers personally, but you can look at something
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like the M1 Abrams and say, well, that's not what you do. Yeah, it's not the right tool for the job.
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We do that because, one, we sort of just never stopped preparing for the Cold War. And two,
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that's a huge economic engine. Those things are incredibly expensive. It takes a lot of effort
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to make them, all the way down to the shells that they fire. And no one really wants to get rid of it.
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And so it creates this sort of devilish problem where we are constantly preparing for a war
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and need to justify this massive military expenditure. So getting back to the war in Iran.
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Well, okay, it's not officially happened yet. It seems as if it's happened, or it's about to happen,
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rather. So let's look at kind of our immediately preceding horrible, stupid neocon war,
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war in Afghanistan, right? That cost us, depending on who you ask, roughly $3 trillion, an immense
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amount of money. Going back to the fall of the Berlin Wall, that is the last time we as a country
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had a budget surplus. I don't particularly like Bill Clinton for any number of reasons. But when
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he talks about the freedom dividend, right, that surplus we had by no longer needing to fight the
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Cold War, that was an option to be a normal country again. We could have some semblance of
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The only thing I would add to that is that Clinton also got lucky in that that period just happened to
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be peak workforce participation. So that was the peak number of boomers of the peak generation
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who happened to be in work at the time. So you would expect from the demographic flow for that
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A hundred percent. And this will be relevant. So what happened is after that, we sort of entered
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shall we say a mutually agreed upon insanity, where the left massively ratcheted up the welfare state,
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the right massively ratcheted up defense spending, and no one really wanted to touch taxes because
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that's an uncomfortable thing for everyone involved. And so you have things like obviously the global
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war on terror, which just Afghanistan alone cost several trillion dollars. And that doesn't count
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the sort of knock on effects, like how much the VA costs, the other things. And the left launched a
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massive expansion of social welfare. I mean, look at the sort of ninja loans that created the housing
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collapse. Look at Obamacare, look at any one of these things. And so if you look at a graph of the
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U.S. debt to GDP ratio, we're currently sitting at 1.23 debt to GDP. Obviously that-
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Oh, geez. Yeah. Okay. So point is quite a lot. And I'll be honest, I am not one of these,
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the sky is falling people, because at least in my entire life, the debt has always been a problem.
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And sure, there are very real hard limits to that. But if you make everyone in the world use your
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money and have a giant stick, you can kind of get away with things that normal countries can't.
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We could argue about to what degree is that system kind of coming to an end. But to get back to your
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original question, and I realize this is 20 minutes into an answer.
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When we talk about that split all the way back to the 90s between the neocons and the paleocons,
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the paleocon movement has gone through several instantiations, right? We obviously had the
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original paleocons, Pat Buchanan, people like him. And the next time that comes around is the tea party.
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You may remember this is when I was kind of in grade school, an early teenager. And look,
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this was effectively the same silent majority coalition. You can look at the rallies and see
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normal, hardworking, predominantly white Americans. And what did these people organize around?
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Well, it was one, anti-war, because there were certainly a very small but vocal conservative
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opposition to those wars that grew over time. And also, the tea party in particular was extremely
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opposed to Obama and his spending, right? It was a budget hawk movement. And when that movement was
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sort of absorbed into MAGA, it kept some of its tendencies. MAGA cares much less about the budget,
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really, than previous versions of this did. Trump and, you know, Besant and people like him are much
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less concerned about debt than Republicans have been previously. Now, an objection would be to say,
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how much did the Republicans really care about the debt? The answer is not very much if we look at
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their actual revealed preference. But that's sort of gone by the wayside. But what he has kept from
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the Buchananite right is, one, a desire to return manufacturing to the US. We see this dismissively
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referred to as protectionism, but also an opposition to war. That's really where Trump launched himself
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is by attacking the Bush family, by saying all of these wars are stupid and wrong and haven't worked
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out in our best interest. And so to me, the split that you're talking about, if Trump goes ahead and
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does it, if he says, you know, America is going to back up Israel, that will 100% shatter the MAGA base.
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Because, look, there certainly are those neocons, those boomer conservatives who don't really care,
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who would be just as happy voting for another George Bush and just like that Trump talks tough.
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But also, there's a large portion among the MAGA base, particularly younger voters who won Trump
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the 2024 election, who are very much opposed to this. I realize this is by definition an anecdote,
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but I talked to quite a lot of global war on terror veterans, right? The people who actually were at
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the front lines of this conflict. And almost to a man, they are furious with the idea that Trump is
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going to take us back. If you look at Trump's speech in 2020, when he was leaving power, what did
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he say was his legacy? He said, the thing that I am, and this is a paraphrase, not a quote, the thing I am
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the most proud of is I was the one US president who didn't start a war. And fair enough, right? That was seen
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by the man himself as an integral part of his legacy. Why many people liked him, why he was
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able to open up a new segment of support Republicans were not traditionally able to access. And to see
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that thrown away effectively for nothing, we're not going to gain anything from this. We're very
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unlikely to actually turn Iran into some sort of Western style democracy. I can't even say it without
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laughing. It's very, very upsetting, genuinely, and it will 100% splinter his base. One of the
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other things that we need to talk about is that Trump is in sort of a rough spot. The economy is
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not very good. I'm sure you've discussed that before in America. There have been gains in certain
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areas. It seems like the housing market is starting to cool, but it's still incredibly high cost of living.
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That brings up certain, I mean, that puts pressure on any precedent. Also, we need to acknowledge the
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fact that Trump's ICE raids are divisive. I happen to support him, but they have hurt his popularity
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among certain demographics. And look, I get it. Trump is probably not running for another term.
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So this may be indeterminate to him, but there is a very real possibility that if he gets us into a war,
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particularly a war for Israel, which is extraordinarily unpopular, he could effectively
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hand the entire rest of government in the upcoming elections to the Democrats because he's effectively
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self-sabotaged. So sorry, Dan, I realize it's basically a 25-minute answer to a very simple
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question, but nonetheless, that's sort of where I see it.
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No, I think that depth is probably necessary. But so getting to the heart of what many people are
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seeing is a betrayal, what were they sold with America First? I mean, what are the key tenets of
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Yeah, so effectively, America First applies to both economic and foreign policy. The economics is
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pretty easy to see, right? When Trump launched his sweeping tariff regime, right, that we were all
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assured was very briefly going to bring the world to its knees. The deal was, and honestly, it was much
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more generous than it was sort of portrayed in the media, but it was basically a system of reciprocal
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tariffs, right? If you in Vietnam tariffs our goods at 93%, guess what? That's what you're getting
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from us. It's funny, I attempted to buy a suit during the middle of it. It's actually remarkably
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difficult to get a made in America suit for less than the price of a cheap used car. But when I went to
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checkout, and it's funny, this was going around social media, and I just completely missed it.
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There was a 193% tariff added on to the price of that. I don't know where they were sourcing it from,
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but it took my suit from being something I could afford to, again, two or three months of mortgage
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payments. And all of a sudden, it didn't seem so appealing. So that's part of it, right? A system of
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reciprocal tariffs. And one of the things that, I'll be honest, I am very anti-war, but I would
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almost take the trade of another war in the Middle East if Trump actually made good on his promise to
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end income tax. I realize that sort of compromises my principles, but it's a pretty good bribe.
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Yeah, it's one you have to consider. But the reason I bring it up is because Trump had basically said,
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or at least talked about, there's a chance that we could, because we are one of the biggest markets
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in the world, we could replace our income tax with tariffs. And look, that hasn't happened. It
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seems rather unlikely. Again, I will lose my mind if it happens. I will be MAGA for the rest of my life
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if he doesn't. But it's basically saying, well, if you want access to our massive capital markets,
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you're going to have to pay us for the privilege. And this is in stark contrast to the neocons or
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the neoliberals who were free traders, who were globalists, who basically said, we want to
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maximize the velocity of capital by removing any barrier to entry.
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Now, what's interesting about this is this is another area in which Trump is sort of on a knife
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edge about whether he is going to betray that or not. One of the things you may or may not know
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about America is that we have massive federal holdings of land, particularly west of the
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Mississippi. These are things obviously like the famous Yellowstone National Park, but there are
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dozens and dozens of others. This is untouched wilderness. Some of it has kind of light
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agriculture on it. We will let cows graze on it, as you saw with the kind of Bundy standoffs of 10 to
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15 years ago. But there is a, and I'm struggling for lotus eaters friendly words here. There is a,
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shall we say, rhino, Republican in name only, senator from Utah who is very much trying to get
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Trump to privatize this land with no provision for U.S. national purchase. So effectively selling
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out our birthright to BlackRock, to the Chinese, to other people like that.
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Oh, I was going to say, if he's selling it to farmers, I'd be okay with that.
00:23:40.680
Of course not. That would make entirely too much sense. And also, let's be honest, a lot of this
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land is unsuitable for agriculture. It's, you know, mountain ranges, it's deserts, it's things that are
00:23:52.360
very beautiful, right, that form the kind of birthright of America. But realistically, unless
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you want to put housing for H-1B visas or strip mine it, it's not particularly useful. But the
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reason I bring that up is that's another area where we could potentially see another betrayal.
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But one of the positive things, and I think this is a bill put forward by Raskin and, weirdly enough,
00:24:16.780
Senator John Fetterman, right, the mentally retarded Democrat from Pennsylvania.
00:24:22.660
But weirdly, a Democrat who's received a sufficient head injury that he actually talks sense a lot of
00:24:29.500
Yes, it turns out you can have a stroke and technicality come out smarter on the other end
00:24:36.040
of it. But the reason I bring that up is they're putting forth a bill to do the opposite, to basically
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say to limit the amount of land that Chinese in particular, but also other foreign adversaries
00:24:46.660
can buy in the US, particularly around US military bases, which has been a major problem, particularly
00:24:52.220
under Biden. And so the reason I bring this up is to say that while Trump has been America first on
00:24:57.940
certain aspects of the economy, right, setting up kind of terriers, tariff barriers, expressing a
00:25:04.620
desire to return manufacturing to the US, there are other areas that are undecided, right? Similarly,
00:25:09.560
are we going to erect a barrier to capital? Or are we going to become a sort of international
00:25:17.960
So I'll give Trump currently, you know, by the America first standard on economics, sort
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of an incomplete, right? We haven't seen this come out. There are very major decisions to
00:25:29.120
be made. But given his past track record, it seems as if this is something he wants to go
00:25:34.540
through with. Now, the foreign policy, Trump 1.0 had a remarkably good, in the grand scheme
00:25:41.240
of things record on this. And in fact, there were cases like we saw with Syria, where he
00:25:47.160
was better than what we actually got. We have generals admitting, oh, we just lied to the
00:25:52.820
president. We just said we took all our troops out of Syria and did it anyway. So fair enough,
00:25:58.220
you can't really fault him for that. He thought he was doing something America first, right,
00:26:02.480
pulling us out of this useless foreign war. But he was lied to. I can't really blame him for that,
00:26:06.920
especially the first time around. I mean, according to your civics class, that just doesn't happen.
00:26:12.700
But it turns out, in the state of exception for a certain sort of partner country on the
00:26:18.140
Mediterranean coast, that happens, right? Okay, let's look at Trump 2.0. Well, we've seen some
00:26:24.540
strong signs, right? He very much wanted to end the war in Ukraine. It seems as if Russia has decided
00:26:32.540
they don't want to end it. So again, he wasn't in power for the last four years. He signaled an
00:26:39.140
intention to end that war. Fair enough. You know, I can't blame him for something that is very much
00:26:45.000
out of his control. But we started to see worrying signs with the Houthis, right? And on one hand,
00:26:52.720
I get it, right? We are the world police. We are the empire. And part of that, as I'm sure as a Brit
00:26:59.120
with a saver on the wall behind you, you're aware, that involves protecting international
00:27:03.520
shipping. That's part of the deal. That's why you're in charge. The Houthis had blocked off
00:27:08.400
that street. And so... I mean, that is explicitly why dollar is the world's reserve currency. It's
00:27:14.480
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