The Tucker Carlson Show - Christopher Caldwell： Is It Too Late to Save the English-Speaking World？

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00:00:39.000 So you travel more than anybody I know.

00:00:41.000 You spend more days out of the country and have for more years than literally anyone I know.

00:00:44.980 So answer this question.

00:00:46.740 The countries that seem to be moving backward the most quickly, this is my perception, are the white Christian English-speaking countries, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, UK, United States. 0.86

00:00:58.220 Am I imagining that?

00:01:00.260 What is that?

00:01:01.300 Well, no, I can't really speak about the countries of what they used to call the old Commonwealth, the, you know, Australia, New Zealand.

00:01:11.300 I've never been to those places.

00:01:13.160 But I certainly think that England, the UK more generally, but England in particular, is really in a difficult position now.

00:01:27.880 And I think that the diagnosis that English people generally are coming to is that they've had too much immigration.

00:01:38.420 It seems like they've been overwhelmed by immigration, but you may have a better handle on the numbers.

00:02:03.380 How much immigration has the UK had-ish? 0.97

00:02:05.800 Well, I think that they're up around, you know, the country is, the country, well, most recent, the country's had a lot of immigration since, you know, since the Second World War.

00:02:20.780 It had some moments of acceleration.

00:02:23.620 It had a huge wave of migrants from both the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent in the years right after the war.

00:02:35.320 And by a huge wave, you know, one, you know, it's a couple hundred thousand.

00:02:40.200 But more recently, we've had even larger numbers.

00:02:46.200 And in fact, one of the things that has made Brexit so contentious in England is that the big promise of Brexit, the primary promise of Brexit, was to limit immigration.

00:03:01.200 Immigration, that's what most English people thought it was for.

00:03:06.200 Now, Brexit was delayed between the referendum and 2020.

00:03:11.900 And when Britain finally got Brexit, it had COVID.

00:03:15.660 And so it had a period of zero immigration for a while.

00:03:19.140 But then something really interesting happened, which is the people who had managed to get Brexit, that is the government of Boris Johnson, sort of looked at the numbers and they were very frightened that the economy was going to continue slow after COVID.

00:03:39.800 And due to the way the British government scores economic predictions, immigration comes out as, by definition, a benefit to the economy.

00:03:54.240 So seriously, so they decided to just loosen immigration for a little bit.

00:04:02.380 And the result was really extraordinary.

00:04:05.200 They got, I think, 4.5 million immigrants between 2021 and 2024.

00:04:16.820 4.5 million?

00:04:18.060 Yes.

00:04:18.720 And so we're talking about, in three years, we're talking about an immigration that is 7% of the country's population.

00:04:29.780 And that immigration, because Britain had left the European Union, was not European immigration.

00:04:39.860 It was 80% of it came from outside of Europe.

00:04:43.520 So it was a profoundly foreign immigration and the largest Britain it ever had.

00:04:49.480 And it was brought about by the very people whose entire reason for being in government was to stop immigration.

00:04:59.900 And it's had an extremely destabilizing effect on the politics of the country.

00:05:07.240 So they, according to the way British economists score the economy, more people, almost always from poor countries, make you richer or something?

00:05:20.480 Yes.

00:05:20.960 Yes.

00:05:21.480 I mean, it's sort of like it adds, it adds a certain amount of units of labor in the country.

00:05:27.280 Is that many units of labor richer?

00:05:29.920 And there's not really a sufficient, without going into the economic details, there's not sufficient reckoning done of the fact that these people will age, they'll form families, and they will collect the generous and perhaps overly generous state benefits that they've been brought in to.

00:05:49.680 To, you know, to, you know, to help defray.

00:05:53.900 Yeah.

00:05:54.540 I mean, is there in the history of the world, a country that's had like that level of immigration from poor countries that got richer because of it? 0.83

00:06:05.180 The United States, but it's a very special case because we were, you know, we were, we had laid claim to a, you know, a continent-wide landmass,

00:06:18.020 although we didn't always do that explicitly, and we had only a very few millions of people with which to claim it.

00:06:27.300 And so we really needed people, and they generally came from societies that were, or let's say they came from,

00:06:35.260 they might have come from societies that were richer than ours, but they came from the less fortunate parts of those societies.

00:06:41.220 So I think it did enhance the United States while we had, you know, a more or less virgin territory.

00:06:49.160 I understand that the Indians were there, but a lot of the territory was virgin and ripe for development.

00:06:55.520 As long as we were in that position, it was a benefit to us.

00:07:00.760 The mistake that other countries in the world have made, and Europe more than anyone, has been to assume that if they get mass immigration,

00:07:11.820 it's going to work the way it did under the very special circumstances of 19th century North America.

00:07:20.860 But instead what's happening is it's, it's working more like the circumstances of 17th century North America.

00:07:29.580 That is the, the people who are arriving from abroad are becoming the, the core group.

00:07:38.720 They're replacing the indigenous population. 1.00

00:07:41.360 That seems to be what's happening.

00:07:42.780 Not everywhere, but in, in a lot of places.

00:07:45.500 But in Great Britain.

00:07:46.060 If you go to London, if you go to London, you, it's, it's incontestable.

00:07:50.700 Well, it's overwhelmingly, it's like 70% non-British, right? 1.00

00:07:54.380 Non-English.

00:07:54.760 That's right.

00:07:55.560 That's right.

00:07:56.820 So what, I mean, can that be changed, fixed, reversed?

00:08:02.860 That's what the discussion in England is about now.

00:08:06.440 And that's why, um, the politics on the English right is so, you know, it's, it's so fractured.

00:08:15.180 It's, it's fractured, but it's actually very interesting.

00:08:18.580 A lot of, you know, there's a lot of, um, sort of like new ideas sort of popping up out of desperation.

00:08:27.680 Like what?

00:08:28.120 But they're mostly of, uh, they're mostly ones that you would recognize from, you know, the Trump campaign.

00:08:35.480 They have, a lot of them have to do with deportation, you know.

00:08:39.340 Um, uh, there are, there's a lot of discussion of withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights

00:08:47.820 and from the UN, um, you know, refugee treaty, um, from the 1950s.

00:08:55.560 I, the, the, the, the UN, um, has a refugee convention from the, the 1950s that governs a lot of, um, rights of asylum.

00:09:05.080 And the, uh, Tony Blair government in the late nineties and the early part of this century, um, passed something called the Human Rights Act,

00:09:14.160 which made, um, which, uh, uh, made European human rights law and the authority of the, uh, European Convention of Human Rights binding on the UK.

00:09:27.000 So there is talk about, about, um, exiting those agreements and, and to not just talk.

00:09:34.180 I mean, this is the sort of thing that, that, that whenever it's brought up in a Western country,

00:09:38.840 it's described as extreme right wing and fascist and, and, and, and, and that kind of thing.

00:09:43.660 It's not just being talked about in England, it's being talked about by, I would say, the three main forces on the English right,

00:09:52.240 which are Nigel Farage, who's in the Reform Party, uh, Kemi Badenoch, who is the leader of the, um, of the Conservative Party,

00:10:01.260 and Robert Jenrick, who's the main sort of, like, radical, let's, let's just say,

00:10:06.000 the conservative alternative within the Conservative Party.

00:10:10.740 All of them are talking about getting Britain out of the European Convention of Human Rights

00:10:16.140 to, to the extent where you, you think if there is ever a conservative government again, it will happen.

00:10:23.020 I mean, it's no, it's no less believable than Brexit was before Brexit happened.

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00:13:49.260 But that's still, I mean, that's pretty tepid, really, like pulling.

00:13:52.780 I mean, the country's been pretty much the same for a thousand years.

00:13:57.480 I mean, you can go to Stonehenge, pull up bone fragments,

00:13:59.460 and trace the DNA to people living in Britain.

00:14:01.580 So, I mean, for all history that we know of,

00:14:03.920 it's been pretty much the same.

00:14:05.060 People was something the French came a thousand years ago or whatever, 0.89

00:14:07.320 but there have been some changes.

00:14:08.620 But in general, they're the indigenous population,

00:14:12.620 and now in 80 years, they've been, like, overthrown, replaced.

00:14:17.140 It's extraordinary.

00:14:18.320 This is an extraordinary anthropological moment.

00:14:22.160 It's like...

00:14:22.740 I've never heard of anything like that happening.

00:14:24.180 Well, there have been a couple of examples of, you know,

00:14:29.520 what the German paleo historians call, you know,

00:14:37.340 Völkerwanderung, you know, movements of peoples, you know,

00:14:40.720 where, you know, people move off the steppes in Asia.

00:14:44.360 Exactly.

00:14:44.780 And into Western Europe, and then they, you know,

00:14:47.840 that's how we got our independent, sorry, our Indo-European languages.

00:14:52.180 Yes.

00:14:52.580 And, you know, there's movements down through Greece and onto, you know,

00:14:56.640 you know, the Minoan area.

00:14:59.620 I don't know exactly when it was, about a thousand or two thousand BC.

00:15:03.340 The Russians and the Finns have kind of Asiatic eyes, you know.

00:15:07.620 I don't, you know, I don't know what happened when,

00:15:10.560 but occasionally there are these huge movements of population.

00:15:15.220 This one's a little bit different because it's enabled by technology.

00:15:19.220 So it's not contiguous peoples sort of like pushing against one another.

00:15:24.440 I mean, it's sort of people who are brought by boat and by airplane.

00:15:30.340 But in terms of its importance, yeah, it's a major.

00:15:35.660 I guess what I'm saying is the reason it's unprecedented.

00:15:38.600 I mean, Genghis Khan, you know, rolled over and impregnated thousands of people.

00:15:42.820 Well, but I don't think those people's leaders asked him to come and impregnate their wives.

00:15:50.380 This is like the only invasion I've ever seen that was been bidden by the leaders of the countries that have been invaded.

00:15:56.820 Like, come and invade us.

00:15:58.580 It's not like they were begging for it, but they sort of created a climate of permissiveness, you know,

00:16:06.840 that which people took advantage of.

00:16:10.760 And I think what you're getting at is what was the psychological state of Europeans between 1945 when they started doing this? 0.92

00:16:24.180 Yes.

00:16:24.620 And today that made this possible.

00:16:26.620 That's exactly the question, and I don't understand it.

00:16:28.660 And it's a funny thing because you and I have lived through the deepest part of that transformation,

00:16:34.420 and it's still kind of a mystery to us.

00:16:36.780 So if anyone's watching this 100 years from now, you know, I hope they can see how confused we, in fact, were.

00:16:46.120 But, I mean, I think that in the wake of World War II, something happened in the middle of the 20th century,

00:16:54.600 and it's really tough to say what it was.

00:16:57.080 It might be a coming to, you know, to consciousness of, you know, after the horrors of the two world wars.

00:17:03.860 It's like, you don't want to, you know, this is maybe too moralistic an explanation,

00:17:12.280 but, you know, people began to understand that there were bad things could happen if you were too judgmental about other peoples or inimical.

00:17:22.380 But there are other factors, such as just the technological factors, the sort of the visibility of alternative places to live through television.

00:17:34.080 And that, I think, is, I think it's, I think the technological are, is, you know, oh, and the fact of easy travel through airplanes,

00:17:44.160 and the fact that you, that the telephone, the television, and finally the internet enable you to go someplace without being cut off from your ancestral homeland.

00:17:57.760 So it makes the decision to travel abroad much lower stakes, you know.

00:18:03.200 I mean, the people who came to the United States in the 19th century from Sicily, they were gone.

00:18:08.660 They got on, you know, for the most part.

00:18:10.060 Or saw their people again.

00:18:11.140 Yeah, well, you know, in fact, in the Italian migration, a lot of them did go back.

00:18:17.360 But it was a, in general, it was a big decision.

00:18:21.040 And in the case of the Irish, I think they were usually here for good. 1.00

00:18:25.840 Anyhow, I think it's a combination of, you know, at the statesman, at the level of statesman,

00:18:31.840 I think it's a discomfort with any kind of expression of hostility or lack of hospitality towards other peoples.

00:18:42.060 But at the, just the operational level of the individual migrants, I think technology had a lot of, had a lot to do with it.

00:18:50.540 So it's impossible, but I mean, yeah, technology for sure.

00:18:56.140 But, you know, I don't know, Victorian England had, you know, the ability to move people around the world to control, you know, the world's biggest navy and all that.

00:19:05.300 And it would have been unimaginable.

00:19:07.000 They didn't want millions of non-English living in England because they were proud of England and they thought it was distinctly English.

00:19:12.720 I guess what I'm getting at is, it's so strange to me that the self-confidence of Western Europe collapsed after winning the war.

00:19:24.700 I think that's so, Germany's a different case.

00:19:26.900 But I mean, Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, I mean, these are all countries that, like, had nothing to be ashamed of from my perspective.

00:19:36.460 Certainly England and France.

00:19:37.900 Because why did they lose confidence in themselves after winning?

00:19:44.780 Oh, that's a, that's a sort of complex question.

00:19:47.920 I'm not sure I agree that these countries had, I mean, they were all in, they were all in very different positions.

00:19:55.040 I mean, Germany, Austria, and Italy were the defeated powers and the malefactors in the war.

00:20:04.380 Right.

00:20:04.500 So, France had collaborated, part of France had collaborated, and there was a tremendous amount of soul searching, and there was a tremendous amount of guilt.

00:20:18.200 Spain and Portugal had kind of resolved their own civil war in the 1930s, and they were kind of out of the picture.

00:20:24.120 It would seem that Britain had a record that it could really be proud of, but it was dismantling an empire.

00:20:31.480 And so the two main victorious non, you know, the main victorious powers were the United States, Britain, and Russia.

00:20:41.440 Russia was communist and had its own project to propagandize.

00:20:47.400 But the United States and Britain, they also had reasons for self-examination.

00:20:54.480 There was, you know, I think there was plenty of triumphalism after the Second World War.

00:21:01.700 It's a very, it's a very tough thing to read.

00:21:04.140 I think that the America I grew up in was really quite proud of its, its role in the Second World War.

00:21:10.040 That's what I remember.

00:21:10.980 Even as it was re-examining its own history, you know, of racism and slavery and, and, and, and, and even the, you know, the settlement and the, and the wipeout of, of the Indians, you know.

00:21:24.280 So it was a mix of, it was a mix of impulses.

00:21:28.180 So I'm not sure that they were, I'm not sure these countries were, were as self-doubting as we, as we think.

00:21:36.880 Well, the effect was to just collapse.

00:21:39.380 I mean, especially in the case of the UK.

00:21:42.380 So is there any getting back to what it was even 35, 40 years ago?

00:21:47.140 You know, it's funny.

00:21:49.120 I heard a member of the Reform Party saying that what people, what people really long for in England is a return to the status quo anti-Tony Blair.

00:22:04.520 That is, you know, Britain had a lot of, of migration.

00:22:09.320 There was one wave in the 40s and 50s.

00:22:11.600 There is another one that kind of coincided with our, the beginnings of our latest wave, which has never, which has gone on unabated.

00:22:19.440 But they had a wave in the 70s and 80s, the British did. 0.97

00:22:22.760 But the, but the, the biggest one was just, was intentionally started by Tony Blair.

00:22:28.560 And the, so the Reform, this one member of the Reform Party says, if we could just go back to the status quo anti-Blair, that would be fine.

00:22:38.640 That was only 30 years ago.

00:22:40.360 So, but in fact, the amount of change has been so tremendous.

00:22:45.140 And it's not just the, that the numerator of, of migration is changed.

00:22:51.520 It's also that the denominator of the, of the, of the total population of Britain has changed.

00:22:58.660 That is, Britain is a very, very slow growing demographic.

00:23:03.640 So they're not really producing a lot of new children.

00:23:08.240 And so the, a disproportionately large amount of the, of the British people in years to come are going to be the product of, of immigration.

00:23:18.700 So, no, I don't see any, any, in general, there's no way short of like cataclysmic developments to, to, to reverse any of that.

00:23:30.600 So, we're sorry to say it, but this is not a very safe country.

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00:23:35.360 Yeah, yeah, good luck.

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00:25:40.820 So it just kind of goes extinct.

00:25:42.860 I mean, because there's no way that those two cultures can live and share power. 0.99

00:25:49.740 I mean, that's never happened in history.

00:25:52.220 One culture dominates in the end.

00:25:54.100 You have a culture.

00:25:55.440 It depends on how separate they remain.

00:25:58.240 I mean, let's look at the history of the settlement of North America.

00:26:05.460 I mean, the British, particularly if you talk to Spanish historians and Spanish observers of this,

00:26:11.540 were notoriously insistent on remaining separate in the lands they conquered.

00:26:18.580 And they did dominate.

00:26:21.540 In some places, they were able to settle these areas.

00:26:26.700 In other places, like India, they were sent home, you know, after a long period of exploiting the place. 1.00

00:26:33.420 But there were other nationalities that tended to colonize by mixing more.

00:26:42.420 And so there is a sort of a mix of cultures becomes possible.

00:26:48.760 The cultures that mixed into what we now think of as, you know, different Latin American cultures were earlier on quite separate.

00:27:00.380 There still is a degree of separation in South America between these different strains of like the European culture and the native culture.

00:27:08.400 But I mean, in most of Latin America, you can say that there's such a thing as Brazilian culture.

00:27:15.620 There's such a thing as Mexican culture.

00:27:18.160 And there will be, you know, I trust such a thing as English culture in, you know, in 50 or 100 years. 0.98

00:27:26.940 But it will be a very different thing than the English culture that we recognized over the last 500 years. 0.98

00:27:36.760 So it is a rupture.

00:27:38.300 You're right.

00:27:39.800 What happens to the, I mean, at some point, do the politics get radical?

00:27:44.840 Well, that I think is the interesting.

00:27:46.220 Because it makes me feel radical hearing about this.

00:27:48.640 Well, that I think is what's happening in England now.

00:27:51.480 And it's one of the reasons I went to England.

00:27:53.540 And it's why I think it's really, it bears watching in the next few years.

00:28:00.140 They had a huge, they had a lot of riots last summer.

00:28:06.360 I mean, there was an episode in which, you know, the British-born child of Rwandan immigrants, who sounds like he was kind of a crazy man, went to a Taylor Swift dance party that was being held for a bunch of, you know, little girls.

00:28:28.340 And he stabbed a dozen of them and killed three of them.

00:28:32.980 And the town in which he did it just blew up.

00:28:37.080 And the protests spread across the country.

00:28:43.260 And you had like a wave of really quite spontaneous public uprising.

00:28:50.480 And that was last, that was just about a year ago in August.

00:28:54.380 The government, which had just entered office, the Starmer, the government of Keir Starmer, the labor government, chose not to view it as a spontaneous uprising.

00:29:04.780 They described it as the, you know, a reaction to misinformation and that sort of thing.

00:29:09.900 That did not convince the public very much, though.

00:29:14.540 And I think it contributed to the, in general, low popularity the government has enjoyed since then.

00:29:23.040 It's a strange, just as an aside, it's a very strange situation in Britain where they have a landslide, this labor government has a landslide majority, although they've won only a third of the votes.

00:29:34.940 So that in itself is very stabilizing.

00:29:37.720 But I think the events that we've just been, let's see, the developments we've just been discussing have made, have contributed to make Britain susceptible to radicalization.

00:29:50.960 What about Germany?

00:29:53.240 I mean, Germany's also been completely transformed by immigration, but that's a society with less free even than Britain and people can't even say it out loud. 0.97

00:30:02.100 They've been taught to hate themselves and to keep that stuff inside.

00:30:05.300 But you wonder at some point, did Germans say, you know, just had enough?

00:30:10.900 Well, you know, I think it's worth remembering that, you know, that we had a lot to do with that, you know, German culture of denazification and sort of, let's say, German, the critical German approach that they take to their past. 0.55

00:30:32.860 And so Germany was not, Germany has never been a real free speech society.

00:30:40.840 It's not a, it's not a, a value that is held to quite the high degree that we hold it in our First Amendment.

00:30:50.580 Yes.

00:30:50.900 Very, in fact, no other culture on earth really has that absolutist idea of free speech that we treasure, I think rightly.

00:30:59.220 Um, but so working with that German culture, which is not a pure free speech culture, I think that we reasoned, you know, the United States, partly because of the circumstances of the Cold War, wanted to reintroduce Germany into the family of citizen, of civilized nations very fast.

00:31:25.960 I mean, we were talking about rearming them in the 1950s, you know, we were talking about creating, building a European army around Germany in, in like 1955.

00:31:38.720 It was as an alternative to that, that the European Union was created, because that prospect really freaked the French out.

00:31:48.120 Okay.

00:31:48.540 But at any rate, the United States really wanted Germany to be reintroduced to the West.

00:31:55.560 And, and to do that, a certain number of ground rules had to be laid down.

00:32:02.500 You know what I mean?

00:32:03.520 Like you couldn't buy a, um, uh, you couldn't buy a copy of Mein Kampf.

00:32:08.380 You couldn't, um, you, eventually you, you couldn't join a communist party.

00:32:12.900 You know what I mean?

00:32:13.820 There's, um, um, so yeah, Germany had Germany's, Germany's free speech was, was a little constrained.

00:32:24.800 You know, um, it might've been constrained anyway, but it also had this highly critical idea of, of, of, of German history.

00:32:35.480 And again, it's understandable, but there's a lot of great stuff in German history too.

00:32:42.120 I mean, um, the Reformation comes out of Germany.

00:32:45.460 Germany was the most cultured country in the world with the, you know, with the arguable exception of, of Britain at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th.

00:32:54.920 Century.

00:32:55.360 And it's, it's, I mean, I don't have to go through the, through the list.

00:32:59.020 It was only a matter of time before Germans said, well, like, can't we talk about the good things in our, in our culture too?

00:33:06.900 I thought that that moment actually was coming around the time of the Iraq war.

00:33:14.260 And I think that that was a, to a, to a, you know, Gerhard Schroeder, I mean, at the time it was fashionable to blame France.

00:33:24.560 For the European opposition of, uh, uh, to the American adventure in Iraq, in which, in which, you know, Europe has been spectacularly vindicated, I think.

00:33:36.480 Yes.

00:33:36.680 But in fact, I think it was Germany as much as France that was, that was driving that, you know, rebellion.

00:33:43.780 And it was Gerhard Schroeder who said, you know, who is then the chancellor of Germany, he said the, you know, the foreign policy of Germany is going to be made in Berlin and only in Berlin.

00:33:53.940 Um, I thought that that was happening then at any rate for a long time, people really lacked the institutions through which to express that German, you know, I, I wouldn't even call it pride.

00:34:13.100 It's just, it's the, it's the desire that, it's partly pride, but it's just the desire that German, Germany be treated like a normal country again, you know?

00:34:23.020 And I think now, 80 years after the war, that, um, 80 years after the war and confronted by certain problems that actually require a certain amount of national pride to address.

00:34:39.420 I mean, the Germans are beginning to talk that way again. 0.99

00:34:43.980 They're beginning to say, you know, we need to be Germans again.

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00:34:55.500 Weakness is their goal.

00:34:58.020 No, thanks.

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00:37:10.220 It's interesting that AFD, the alternative for Germany, is treated like an outlaw party by the courts in Germany.

00:37:22.660 And yet, it's growing in popularity.

00:37:24.820 I was just reading, in the largest German state, members of the party were banned from owning guns because they were caught under a lie.

00:37:31.180 North Rhine, Westphalia.

00:37:32.820 Yeah.

00:37:34.520 Can that continue?

00:37:36.520 Well, this is a big, this is a big drama.

00:37:40.500 Yes, it can continue.

00:37:41.600 It's a, you know, it's, it's an interesting situation.

00:37:45.640 I mean, the German, the German, I'm not sure where in the Grundgesetz it is, in the basic, German basic law, but, but the German, the German constitution permits something called the Office for the Protection of the Constitution to monitor parties to make sure that they're not dangerous right wing.

00:38:14.980 And the goal of having that in the constitution was to prevent any recrudescence of, of Nazism.

00:38:25.860 Now, there are parties all across Europe that had certain antecedents, whether in the institution itself or in certain, just personnel, you know, the way for the, the way, for example, Mussolini's fascist party was ended at the end of, of World War II.

00:38:48.640 But a lot of its members went and they joined the MSI, the Italian social movement, and that sort of continued after the second world war.

00:38:57.480 And then there was, there, there were offshoots of it.

00:39:00.000 Many of the people in it became left wing.

00:39:02.200 Georgia Maloney started a new party, but it had some people who were in the MSI.

00:39:10.100 So if you want to trace a genealogy from, to, you know, from mid 20th century fascism to certain European leaders, you can.

00:39:21.020 And, and, and people do that as a way of sort of gaining talking points against Maloney.

00:39:25.720 They do it.

00:39:26.120 Yeah.

00:39:26.780 However, the interesting thing about, about the AFD though, is that the AFD is not one of those parties.

00:39:33.740 The AFD was founded in 2013 by a bunch of academic macroeconomists who were worried that the European Union by guaranteeing the, the debts of Greece and other failing countries was in an invisible way taxing Germany.

00:39:57.200 So it was, it was, it was, it was built around a very recondite complaint, you know, and not a hate filled complaint.

00:40:05.200 And I remember interviewing the head of the party at the time, who was an economist named Bernd Luka.

00:40:13.200 And he was just a very nerdy guy.

00:40:15.820 He's left, I think he's left the party since, but the party underwent two transformations.

00:40:23.700 The first came in 2015 when Angela Merkel invited immigrants, you know, from fleeing the, the Syrian civil war to come to Germany.

00:40:35.860 And they began streaming overland into Europe and were then joined opportunistically, as you may remember by a lot of Pakistanis and Iraqis and Iranians and Afghans and just a whole huge human wave.

00:40:51.820 And a woman in the party, a very charismatic sort of like mother of many children named, named Frauke Petri said, you know what, we are the alternative for Germany.

00:41:06.980 No, no party is arguing, arguing for an alternative immigration policy and that has to be us.

00:41:15.480 And so it became the, the anti-immigration party.

00:41:22.020 But at the same time, it had, it had for similar but less noticeable reasons, it had attracted people who wanted a change in Germany for all sorts of things, including, you know, what we would call culture warriors.

00:41:37.160 People who wanted to change the school curriculum to, so that it denigrated Germany less.

00:41:44.040 And then it became a whole big grab bag of parties, of, of, of tendencies, which it is today, although they are a much more united party than I think a lot of people think.

00:41:56.320 And they're now, you know, they're, they're, they, they got 20% in the last election and between elections, they tend to pull much higher.

00:42:04.500 So they're a serious party.

00:42:06.660 They have at, at times in the last, in the last few months since the elections in January, I believe, they have been the largest party in, in Germany in terms of opinion polling.

00:42:19.940 So if the, if you have a country that calls itself, advertises itself a democracy, a country, you know, run by the people who live there, and over time the establishment excludes parties that represent the majority of the people, then don't you get a revolution at a certain point?

00:42:37.640 Maybe, you know, I think I got a little off track.

00:42:39.680 There's one piece I forgot to, to explain.

00:42:42.180 So, so there is the, there exists in the German constitution, this idea of, of banning parties.

00:42:50.880 Yes.

00:42:51.060 And it's, I think that then when people understood it, it was something that was supposed to be done in like 1948, whenever like a gang of people, you know, got together in one city.

00:43:05.300 And that's why, like, there have been parties banned since the second world war, not in a very long time.

00:43:12.840 And they tended to be, you know, tended to be, you know, tiny little groups of what we would call jackbooted thugs.

00:43:20.700 The idea that, that this mechanism could be used to ban the largest party in the country, and, and furthermore, one that was founded, one that was founded two generations after the second world war in 2013, is not what the constitution envisioned.

00:43:41.220 Nonetheless, you can see the appeal of it for two formerly big national parties that are now shriveling up and want to get those votes back or want to keep from being swept away, you know?

00:43:56.360 Well, of course I can.

00:43:57.740 It's just such a violation of the core principle of a democracy that I just don't think, you know, either you have to change the name of the system.

00:44:05.220 It's just, you know, it's an autocracy run by people with power and everyone else shuts up, or you have to stop doing that.

00:44:12.440 Yeah, yeah, that's right.

00:44:13.740 I mean, you, well, you have, you know, you have, you've interviewed Callan Georgescu on this show.

00:44:25.260 If you look at what happened in, in Romania and the elections last, you know, last November, where he was simply disqualified because someone in the government asserted without presenting proof that, that there had been a Russian campaign to, to elect him.

00:44:43.020 And, and, and, and, and, and managed to head off the next, you know, his replacement in the second round of that election, which was delayed for many months and got a member of the establishment into, into the Romanian government.

00:44:59.000 It didn't really work like, like, like, like a democracy.

00:45:03.400 And yet when it happened, people said, well, we've defended democracy.

00:45:07.220 We've defended democracy against the voters.

00:45:09.520 So it's the sort of kind of, it's the kind of thing that, that Bertolt Brecht would, would make a joke about.

00:45:15.740 Right.

00:45:15.860 Um, and, and, and yes, it's not small D democratic, but people have chosen to call this, this form of government, which is, uh, you might call it like state of emergency liberalism, which is basically the, I think the most accurate description of what it is for, for, uh, they, they, they, they claim, they claim the term democracy, but I don't think they're doing so very successfully.

00:45:43.360 And the, the, the parties that, that, that, that, that represent this state of emergency liberalism do not do terribly well.

00:45:52.240 It just seems like the spread between what people want and what they're getting grows wider every year.

00:45:58.580 People seem to hate mass migration everywhere in the world.

00:46:02.400 I don't think there's a single person who likes mass migration really.

00:46:05.720 And you can tell by their behavior.

00:46:07.600 Certainly true in this country.

00:46:08.940 I think people have an expectation of sovereignty, which almost no country has, like a country gets to make its own decisions, but that's not in practice happening anywhere with only, again, a few exceptions.

00:46:22.700 And so there's so much frustration about that, that I just, I'm wondering what's the point where it bubbles up into something unmanageable?

00:46:29.660 Well, a couple of things I don't, I'm not sure that the, I think that the gap between what people want and what they're getting is, is wide, is wide, but I'm not sure that it's widening.

00:46:42.840 I mean, the, the, the election of Trump was certainly a, was certainly a call for more action against mass migration.

00:46:53.560 Yes.

00:46:54.220 And since he's been elected, the border has been pretty much closed.

00:47:00.180 There have been deportations.

00:47:02.660 There have been, you know, certainly the rhetorical stance of the, of the administration is against migration.

00:47:08.880 I mean, Trump may disappoint his voters on other things, but on that one thing, which I think we agree is like a really central issue, actually the, the will of the, the, the people and the actions of the government have kind of converged.

00:47:24.300 I agree with that.

00:47:24.760 If the, if there were to be, as I've just described, a conservative government in England and the, and it abolished the, the Human Rights Act, which would allow Britain to act in a fully sovereign way, then the way would be wide open to deporting people who did not have the right to be there.

00:47:47.860 And certainly to stopping the ongoing traffic of, of small, small boat migration in England.

00:47:56.220 So I think that that's, I think it is, I think it's possible things are getting better from a democratic point of view.

00:48:06.140 You also said, okay, so at what point does this explode?

00:48:09.420 I'm not sure it does because one of the things that makes things explode is the, is the, is discontent in, in numerous and dynamic classes.

00:48:25.400 And that's why, you know, the, the Arab world was so unruly throughout the, the 1980s and the 1990s, because you had, this was a part of the world in which people were having like six or eight or 10 kids and there was no place to put these young men. 1.00

00:48:42.260 And, and, and, and there was a lot of, there was a lot of martial dynamism in the, in these societies.

00:48:50.980 And, um, uh, when, in fact, wherever you have a lot of young people, if you look at the United States in the, in the sixties and seventies, you have a lot of disorder and rebellion, but we're not societies like that anymore.

00:49:04.840 We are top heavy societies full of old wobbly people and, and, and not, these are not the kind of societies that, that say, darn it, I've had enough. 1.00

00:49:16.560 These are people who need, I mean, the, the, the, the, the, the, the demographic heart of, of our societies is in the, in, in people who are of an age where they need care, not where they're going to run out into the street shaking their fists.

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00:52:14.740 When the children of the latest wave of migrants to the United States are 18, so that'll be in 15 years, then you're going to have a really dynamic society. 0.62

00:52:30.080 You're going to have a lot of people born in this country to immigrant parents who feel like they want a piece of it and you're going to have massive change, wouldn't you think? 0.98

00:52:41.840 Absolutely. And that, I think, is, that's why I've tended to look at this, you know, what's happening now with arguments over the border and with, you know, with Trump as part of a process that will come to resemble about a century later, the process that led to the New Deal.

00:53:04.260 I mean, because I think the New Deal was the consolidation of a new governing system in a way that took account of the waves of migration that had changed the country between 1880 and 1920, you know.

00:53:20.820 And, you know, we are, we look at our present demographic change and we say, oh my goodness, things are really, you know, what country has ever faced anything like this?

00:53:33.280 And it's, it's really, there really is a, there are really a lot of points of contact between what has happened with us and what happened to the country between 1880 and 1920.

00:53:46.360 You have, you know, people from, you know, the initial argument is, look, you know, it's all well and good to receive people, but this country is about a certain set of values.

00:53:56.920 It's about, you know, it's historically determined, these people who are coming know nothing of our, of our country.

00:54:03.700 How are they going to ever, you know, assimilate into it?

00:54:07.620 It's exactly the same arguments that you got in the 1880s, 1890s.

00:54:12.080 Then you get demands for, you know, like closing the border and it just doesn't happen and doesn't happen and doesn't happen until 1924 when it suddenly happens.

00:54:24.100 And then suddenly the only people who can come here are the people who are already here.

00:54:29.940 You know, I mean, let's see, the only Americans are the ones who've already arrived. 1.00

00:54:32.680 Those are the only foreigners. 1.00

00:54:33.880 And that's why, you know, if you look at it, it's why there are so many Italians in Argentina. 0.69

00:54:40.260 They came after 1924 when the Italians could no longer go to, to, to New York.

00:54:46.200 Um, and so from there, these people had no choice but to mix together into a new kind of American.

00:54:57.340 And, and, and the people who said these people will never be able to adapt to the old American ways, they were wrong, but they weren't totally wrong.

00:55:06.300 I mean, they sort of like the, the country did change to reflect the identity of the new, of the new immigrants. 1.00

00:55:13.060 And then in 1932, when Roosevelt came to power on the heels of an event that discredited the old elites, which is the crash, then he claimed the authority to basically reorganize the country in the name of this new mix of the, you know, of the settled Americans, the new immigrant Americans.

00:55:40.220 And it, it, it knit the country into one people so effectively that by the 1950s and 1950s and 60s, young Americans were sort of like complaining about how boring and homogenized the United States was.

00:55:56.860 You know what I mean?

00:55:58.040 Yes.

00:55:58.440 And so, so it can be done.

00:56:00.180 Will there, um, after Trump leaves in three years, will there be like a series of Trumps or will the party revert to what it was?

00:56:14.720 Oh, you will be, will the Republican party revert to what it was before Trump?

00:56:18.340 Oh, um, first of all, I, I think Trump is such a, an unusual person that I don't think he can really be replicated, even if, um, no matter how hard anyone tries.

00:56:35.360 He, he, he was, uh, he, he was, uh, I, I, I, I, I, I, I mean, he, he, he came to prominence because he had an incredible amount of, you know, what used to be called brass at a time when brass was, was what, what was required.

00:56:55.620 There are other people who have sort of, sort of, who seem to have more of the, you know, more of the qualifications that, that a politician would require.

00:57:08.560 That is like patience and, and like an understanding of policy and things like that.

00:57:13.920 You had people like Ron DeSantis seem to be offering that to the Republican party for a while, but it's not what the country felt it needed.

00:57:21.780 The country felt it needed brass.

00:57:24.240 The country felt it needed someone to come in and insult, topple, and, and break the old establishment.

00:57:35.180 Was that establishment broken, like after Trump?

00:57:39.200 Well, it's still in progress.

00:57:40.980 I mean, it's, I mean, I think, I mean, this is something you know a lot more about than I do, but I, I, I, I mean, if I look at Trump one,

00:57:50.320 I would say that, that, that it was an almost utter failure on Trump's own terms.

00:57:57.580 That is, I mean, he, he used that list that Leonard Leo and, and others had given him to, to, to, to fortify the Supreme Court as a, you know, a, a more or less conservative

00:58:15.180 force and, and, and, and he nominate a lot of judges.

00:58:21.380 He, but I don't think that he ever understood the, where the actual levers of power in the government were.

00:58:30.880 And so the, the same deep state that he had complained about went on, was as strong on the day he left office as it was on the day that he arrived.

00:58:41.500 And so one had the impression that he'd learned absolutely nothing.

00:58:46.500 And so what has happened in, under Trump too, is one of the most astonishing surprises in the history of American politics.

00:58:58.420 Now, in Brexit, you had a guy who was kind of a genius in the workings of British government named Dominic Cummings, who was be able to, was able to say, well, no, you don't need to win a, a majority in parliament on this one.

00:59:13.940 You just need to control the, the, the cabinet office, et cetera.

00:59:17.580 Um, Trump never had such a person, but apparently, and the details are still not clear how, apparently he acquired one or several in the course of, um, in the course of his four years out of power.

00:59:32.720 I think Steve Bannon is correct to say that the four years out of power were in, in Trumpian terms were, were a great blessing for him.

00:59:41.820 So there's someone, I mean, maybe Steve Miller is an, is a candidate for this, who has the most tremendous Machiavellian understanding of what can be done inside government.

00:59:57.520 I mean, the speed with which, um, you know, USAID was, was dismantled, which in, in what seems to me, it was not really a cost saving operation.

01:00:11.140 It was like a purge of a, of a certain tendency in, in, in government was really, you know, whatever you think of it as an ideological operation.

01:00:21.720 It was a tremendously expert, um, operation in terms of, you know, government rejiggering, um, the, the executive orders that he has, you know, canceled and the new ones that he has passed.

01:00:37.760 In order to give a new reading to affirmative action.

01:00:41.840 And I would say that the, that affirmative action was in many ways, the key institution of American government of the last half century to render it inoperative. 0.67

01:00:55.060 Even if, even if he hasn't fully killed it, is a, is a, is a constitutional revolution.

01:01:02.640 So, yeah, this is, I mean, things are still in progress.

01:01:07.080 It's, it's, it's very difficult to see whether for, uh, whether an operation like say deportations, whether that is going to accelerate or whether Trump is really running out of gas.

01:01:19.520 And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and this is going to, but it's, it's, it's hard to see how it will proceed from here, but it's been a huge change.

01:01:26.380 He's turned out to be a very significant president.

01:01:31.180 Can you go back a second?

01:01:32.720 How was affirmative action, the key institution in American government?

01:01:36.140 Well, I, you know, I've always thought, and we've, we've talked about this, that, that the passage of the, um, Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the, you know, it created a, a new constitution that was, was really at odds, a de facto new constitution that was at odds with what we thought of as our real constitution.

01:02:03.780 And as, you know, uh, you know, what it basically tried to do was sort of like create a more, you know, create a society in the South where, you know, blacks could live as equal citizens to, to whites, um, you know, in, in public and in, in large companies and, and, and, and that sort of thing.

01:02:26.560 But it wound up to be a, wound up being an incredibly, um, versatile tool.

01:02:34.160 You could use it for anything, um, once you had declared a sort of national emergency.

01:02:41.000 So like getting women onto, you know, like corporate boards or getting, um, you know, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, bilingual education into schools, getting, you know, protecting, you know, transgender story hour.

01:02:57.100 I mean, it just, it just ramified into every corner of American life.

01:03:02.100 And, um, um, anybody could be made, any, anybody was under suspicion, um, and, you know, let's, let's just say incorporation, it worked publicly and privately in corporations, anyone who ran a, a company that was, you know, larger than a few dozen people was understood to be under, you know, the government's watchful eye.

01:03:27.820 Um, you could, you could, you could, you could avoid being sued really only by establishing a, an affirmative action program.

01:03:39.600 And so it became, it became the, the means through which the government could approach any institution, public or private and say, you know, we'd like to have a look at your hiring practices.

01:03:52.420 We'd like to have a look at like how you, you know, how you've been behaving for the last, you know, um, for the last year and your board meetings.

01:04:01.100 We'd like to know if there's anyone you're hiring who has kind of an, an animus against black people or women or gays or, or immigrants.

01:04:08.680 And so it had a very chilling effect at every level of government and at every level of, of society.

01:04:16.900 Is that over?

01:04:17.900 It is for now, except we now have a culture in which for 50 years, people, even in the most private, you know, conversations sort of have been trained to ask themselves, you know, can I say this or, or is this okay?

01:04:40.720 Or, or, or, you know, like, um, you know, I'm not homophobic, but you know, um, and, and, and, and so you have a, you have a, you have a society that has really been trained to be scared.

01:04:54.160 So a lot of this, you know, yes, I think, so, so I think that institutionally it's over, but, but culturally we are really not a, a people that has sort of like learned to use freedom.

01:05:11.200 And that will take a long time.

01:05:13.260 It'll take a long time to get an easy freedom of conversation back.

01:05:19.120 About, about things, obvious things that you notice, differences between people and differences between groups.

01:05:24.940 Yes, about anything.

01:05:25.820 About anything.

01:05:26.820 Almost anything.

01:05:27.940 Yeah.

01:05:28.160 Do you see that changing?

01:05:31.000 I see it changing.

01:05:32.220 Do you see it changing?

01:05:32.820 Yes, I do.

01:05:33.420 That's interesting.

01:05:34.280 Yeah.

01:05:34.460 Um, it feels like the term racist has lost its sting, like almost completely.

01:05:39.220 Um, yeah, I, well, I would expect that to happen.

01:05:46.480 I'm, I'm, I don't, I haven't really gathered any evidence about it, you know?

01:05:50.640 I mean, for one thing, it's harder to, you know, sue a person when you're, you know, the government has announced that it's not enforcing affirmative action, that kind of thing.

01:06:01.860 So, I mean, if you can, it used to be that if someone could just, if you could just successfully attach the word racist to a person, um, you know, whether through a lawsuit or a, or a, or a, or a public relations campaign, no one could hire him.

01:06:23.520 Do you know what I mean?

01:06:24.100 It was a real, um, and it, and it, and it was sort of like, it was not as different from the, the Chinese social credit system, which we liked to deplore as we like to think. 0.51

01:06:41.300 And that is no longer true?

01:06:43.500 Um, yes, I think, I think that is no longer true.

01:06:48.740 I think it's no longer true that institutionally you can destroy a person with that kind of imputation.

01:06:58.160 However, it may become true again, depending on what happens in the, in the next election.

01:07:04.960 Um, so people are wary and, um, I also think that people, we're not the sort of people that is comfortable going out on a limb anymore.

01:07:16.840 We've become a very conversationally cautious people, or at least anyone who's like lived the last several decades in this country.

01:07:27.280 You acquire habits.

01:07:28.800 I mean, I think that, that you can't expect, um, a person who's had these very self-protective habits beaten into him over, over decades to give them up in the same way that, you know, like, you know, people who lived through the depression maintained their habits of frugality for 60 years after that.

01:07:53.620 Yeah, I remember when banks introduced ATM cards, they couldn't get people who grew up during the depression to use them.

01:07:59.840 Well, that's a very good analogy.

01:08:01.480 Because it was just too spooky, you know?

01:08:03.740 Yeah.

01:08:03.960 Um, do you remember a country where people spoke freely in conversation?

01:08:07.840 Do you have memories of that?

01:08:09.460 I remember one where people spoke more frequently, more, more freely.

01:08:13.600 I remember, and, and in fact, I went to college in the 1980s.

01:08:17.240 I think it was pretty free.

01:08:18.440 And I, and, and actually, when people described the, um, the first, um, really mentioned in the wider public of so-called political correctness was, I think, in the winter of 1990 to 1991.

01:08:35.480 Yes.

01:08:35.800 Um, and shortly thereafter, you know, you had the Clarence Thomas, um, hearings for the Supreme Court, which introduced the idea of, of sexual harassment.

01:08:46.340 Um, and I, I got the feeling that things were changing very, um, quickly right then.

01:08:53.700 Um, there were a couple of incidents, um, then, um, and, and, and, and one that I, I, I remember very clearly was there is a, there was a, a, a Dodgers, uh, an, an executive for the Los Angeles Dodgers of, named Al Campanis.

01:09:11.580 Yeah.

01:09:12.020 Who got invited on, um, on, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, Ted Koppel's show Nightline to talk about Jackie Robinson 40 years after, um, you know, he'd entered the, you know, big leagues.

01:09:25.960 And, and, and Al Campanis had been, um, you know, he was, he was, not only was he not a racist, he was, he had been Jackie Robinson's roommate and he was one of his defenders.

01:09:36.100 He was great, but he said a few things kind of the wrong way, you know, like he gave a wrong answer to the question of why aren't more blacks managers.

01:09:45.300 And he was ruined. 0.88

01:09:47.340 He was ruined.

01:09:48.300 This is a guy who had like fought to bring Jackie Robinson into the major leagues.

01:09:53.220 But I mean, you know, you had, um, he, he lost his job.

01:09:57.820 And I remember Maxine Waters, who was the, uh, who was already in, I don't think she was yet in Congress actually, but she was a very active in, in California politics already.

01:10:08.460 So she wanted to, so she wanted to be sure that he wasn't, you know, secretly being given any benefits by, by the Dodgers of any kind.

01:10:15.920 And I mean, he was just like, he was just destroyed this, this, this kindly old man who had been a friend of Jackie Robinson's.

01:10:25.180 And it was clearly something was, something was, was happening there.

01:10:30.840 Um, and I think that what was happening is that these enforcement possibilities, which are in the civil rights act, that, that lawyers were getting, were getting more adept at using them for a growing number of things like saying, well, of course you have freedom of speech.

01:10:51.160 But if you say that in the company you own, you will create a hostile environment for your, your employees and therefore they'll be able to sue you for this much money.

01:11:02.460 So basically without, without banning speech, you were able to make speech very uncomfortable for people.

01:11:13.700 Did that just play out with, I mean, is it just impossible for people to live this way forever?

01:11:20.020 And people just decided?

01:11:21.180 No, it didn't play out.

01:11:22.760 It had to be rebelled against.

01:11:24.920 And the, and the, um, the, the removal, the lifting of the executive orders that, that, that, that order, um, affirmative action, um, by Trump was an absolutely necessary step.

01:11:41.680 The decision not to enforce affirmative action, um, was a necessary step. 0.97

01:11:48.780 Um, by the way, it was preceded, it was preceded by a Supreme Court case that appeared in its mealy mouthed way to say negative things about affirmative action programs in universities.

01:12:03.100 But it's clear that universities were proceeding, um, were proceeding as, as best they, they could to, to maintain it.

01:12:12.540 So, no, it does not play out.

01:12:16.300 It's, uh, it's, uh, uh, uh, uh, this affirmative action, political correctness woke this whole constellation of authoritarian and even totalitarian seeming rules.

01:12:31.460 They are rules.

01:12:32.900 They are not part of the culture.

01:12:34.720 They are not the result of, you know, a lot of people deciding we really ought to be nicer to trans people.

01:12:43.040 They're, they are enforced by the fact that, that if you fall afoul of these, uh, of, of, of, you know, of, of civil rights laws, it can cost you your business and your reputation and everything else.

01:12:57.860 What, what, what's the real purpose of them?

01:13:00.340 I, I sense that social justice is not actually the, uh, the, the goal.

01:13:04.600 Well, I, no, I, you know, uh, you know, I, and, and I should add that, that, that, you know, the, this is just a, well, let's, let, let, let's deal with this.

01:13:16.720 I think that, that solving the age old race problem in the United States was the original goal of civil rights.

01:13:27.140 Yes.

01:13:27.400 But the tools that, that were given to solve that problem included ways to overturn, um, democratic, democratically made decisions in, in, in the South.

01:13:44.220 That tool, that ability to, to circumvent a democratic mandate from the American people, from any people is such a valuable thing for politicians to have.

01:13:59.520 And so they started using it for everything, as I say, you know, um, um, you, you know, under representation of women, under representation of immigrants, under representation of Hispanics, all these things become, become crises. 0.90

01:14:16.520 And social justice actually was the name that was given to this, but it was always, and you can call it anything you want, but it always was a way of, of using the government to sort of order society.

01:14:33.940 And that's, and that's, and the danger of it was that you could do that at a really, really micro level, you know, I mean, you can do it at the level of like what signs people hang in the doors of their shops, you know?

01:14:46.480 And so it became kind of like the world that, you know, Václav Havel describes in his, um, and that's why everyone started reading Václav Havel and Alexander Solzhenitsyn again, because our society felt like those Eastern Europe, European societies at the time of.

01:15:03.080 No, it was, it was Soviet.

01:15:04.720 It was totalitarian.

01:15:05.880 I mean, in the, in the strict sense.

01:15:07.640 That's right.

01:15:08.100 It was total control over people's lives.

01:15:10.180 Yeah.

01:15:10.640 I like the, to, to draw the distinction that, that Hannah Arendt does at one point.

01:15:16.740 A lot of people use totalitarianism to mean like a really, you know, I mean, Mussolini originally used it to mean, you know, like the state can, you know, like can be all competent.

01:15:28.840 And a lot of people in our time use it to mean like a really, really, really bad dictatorship.

01:15:34.540 But the way Hannah Arendt uses it means like the state gets into the totalitary, the totality of your, of your life.

01:15:44.860 It doesn't have to be violent.

01:15:45.980 Right.

01:15:46.300 There's no nook of your life, um, that the state, where the state does not belong.

01:15:52.060 The state wants to be at your dinner table.

01:15:54.820 You know what I mean?

01:15:55.840 And, and, and listening in on you, you know, the state wants to be, you know, on your route to work and make sure, you know, it, the state wants to be everywhere.

01:16:04.380 They're with you in everything you do.

01:16:07.160 Can we go back to that?

01:16:08.940 So you said that this was not organic.

01:16:12.760 The population never cried out for total control of its personal conversations or anything else.

01:16:18.260 It, it was imposed on the population by the state.

01:16:21.520 Now it's been rolled back by the state.

01:16:24.660 Right.

01:16:25.280 Run by Donald Trump.

01:16:26.780 But can it be reimposed?

01:16:29.080 Would people put, like, could President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez be like, you know,

01:16:33.840 my goal as president is going to be to eliminate racism?

01:16:37.400 Wouldn't people just laugh at her? 0.91

01:16:39.220 Yes.

01:16:39.920 But there, there, there might be a confrontation.

01:16:42.360 I mean, as long as Trump hasn't, um, you know, removed these laws from the books, which he hasn't, um, he's merely sort of like suspended the enforcement of them.

01:16:53.780 And he's unwritten some executive orders, which can be re, you know, reissued.

01:17:00.100 I mean, it's, it's a reprieve.

01:17:02.500 So the interesting thing would be what would happen if, you know, how would the, the public respond with, you know, four years of living more freely if those freedoms were suddenly withdrawn?

01:17:17.240 And this includes, you mentioned young people.

01:17:19.700 This includes people, you know, who've had, who've never had any experience of, of having political, politically correct censorship at work or, or that sort of thing.

01:17:30.020 And I don't know.

01:17:32.080 You were saying last night at dinner that people often say the democratic party, when it takes power again, as it will at some point will be a lot more radical, but you were saying maybe that's not correct.

01:17:43.980 I don't know what they will have the capacity to do.

01:17:49.360 You know, I don't, you know, you say, well, you know, how will people respond if president Ocasio-Cortez says, you know, we're going to have, you know, affirmative action and, and drag queen story hour again.

01:18:03.140 Um, I just don't know, but I do.

01:18:06.580 Yes, I do think the democratic party is, is probably, um, is probably going to, you know, uh, it's going to find something to, you know, some way to radicalize.

01:18:19.240 At what point do economic debates like reemerge?

01:18:26.840 And notice we've, you know, as we've been talking about drag queen story hour and race and sexuality and all this stuff, there's been in a way that would have been weird 40 years ago, but almost no conversation of like macroeconomics in public.

01:18:40.800 Like all the oxygen is taken up by that, this, the political correctness stuff.

01:18:46.440 Yeah.

01:18:46.680 I, and I, I, I think it's, it's a very welcome thing that economics is coming back.

01:18:51.800 You hear a bit of it when we talk about the tariffs, you know, a very interesting, I mean, but Trump is, um, Trump has really confounded a lot of the, of the categories.

01:19:03.440 I think that, that everyone has the habit of like saying, you know, talking about tax cuts for the rich and, and, and all that kind of thing to tie this to what we've been saying with immigration.

01:19:17.900 Immigration is a very important part of this economic, um, question.

01:19:22.660 Trump, an interesting thing about Trump's first term is that as best we can measure it, it was a highly egalitarian period.

01:19:35.240 And, um, you know, we really only have accurate undistorted numbers for the first three years of it because the final year of it was, was COVID.

01:19:45.400 Um, but it really appeared that the, that the bottom quintile of, um, of, of earners advanced, uh, against other quintiles for the first time since the 20th century.

01:20:01.760 And I, you know.

01:20:03.480 Really?

01:20:04.180 Yes.

01:20:04.840 Yes.

01:20:05.180 And this is in the, the, the feds numbers that came out at, towards the end of the, the Trump administration.

01:20:11.400 If you look at total economic performance, like the way we tend to measure it, okay, we tend to measure it by the mean, that is the GDP per capita.

01:20:24.520 Economic performance was much better, or it was better under the Obama administration than it was under Trump.

01:20:31.120 The economy grew more.

01:20:32.820 However, if you look at the distribution of it, it was, there were far lower gains for the, the very rich under Trump.

01:20:41.980 And, and, but there were relative gains for the, there were absolute gains, let us say, for the people in the lower quintiles.

01:20:49.780 I think the four bottom quintiles did quite well under Trump.

01:20:53.640 Um, and that.

01:20:56.840 So his, his voters benefited is what you're saying.

01:20:59.120 Exactly.

01:20:59.820 Okay.

01:21:00.360 So there's, I mean, it's hard to say why that happened.

01:21:03.820 I think immigration did go down, but mostly immigration was talked down.

01:21:09.280 Okay.

01:21:09.660 When you have high immigration, high immigration is like a direct transfer payment from those who compete with immigrants to those who use immigrants, you know.

01:21:22.000 Um, but.

01:21:24.960 That's, you know.

01:21:26.220 That's interesting.

01:21:27.460 Yeah.

01:21:27.540 Immigration really is a transfer of wealth to the rich. 0.90

01:21:31.080 Yeah.

01:21:31.420 So, um, when we talk about Trump and immigration, that's, that, that's, I think an important thing to keep in mind.

01:21:38.560 Um, and, and, and, and that is why, um, a lot of people were really surprised, um, by the shift in votes, um, among, particularly among black and Hispanic males to Trump in, in, in 2024.

01:21:55.240 And people have sought to explain it through these cultural, you know, factors that we've been discussing earlier today.

01:22:03.580 Oh, it was a Trump's, you know, endorsement by this rap hip hop star or whatever.

01:22:08.760 But I think it might just be that people, you know, people at that part of the economy, you know, who tend to be, you know, that, that, that benefited from Trump one, tend to be disproportionately black and Hispanic.

01:22:23.020 And it might just be a direct, a case of, of, of people just devoting their direct economic interests.

01:22:29.800 It's a little weird if you go through the Congressional Black Caucus, um, certainly among the people whose names you've heard, like the famous black political leaders in this country, they're all for open borders.

01:22:40.720 Huh. Well, I think that that is largely intersectionality and, you know, people talk about, people in, in, in universities talk about intersectionality.

01:22:54.940 Like, like, it's a, a, a theory about, you know, the, how, you know, um, different types of lack of privilege intersect.

01:23:03.940 Like, you know, am I, am I more, um, discriminated against because I'm a black woman or because I'm a lesbian and, and that kind of thing.

01:23:12.160 Um, um, or because I'm foreign or whatever, but actually what intersectionality is, you've, you, you've used the term on your, on your show, but I, what I think it really is, is just coalition building.

01:23:24.460 The civil rights regime created a, a system in which you, um, you could do almost anything you wanted.

01:23:35.000 Um, a minority could do almost anything that he wanted with government.

01:23:39.800 You could do almost anything you wanted with government in the name of minorities, but minorities remained minorities. 0.98

01:23:46.060 You couldn't get the, the majority to do that.

01:23:49.800 So what happens is minorities wind up make the beneficiaries of minority government wind up making a, an alliance.

01:23:58.720 You know, you can't vote against immigration because you're a woman and, you know, women's rights are immigrant rights. 1.00

01:24:05.000 And immigrant rights are human rights and human rights are gay rights.

01:24:08.840 And, and they're all wrapped up together.

01:24:11.120 So, and that's where the, you know, like the, the much mocked non sequiturs of intersectionality come from like, like gays for Gaza and, and, and, and that, and that kind of thing.

01:24:25.360 My favorite.

01:24:26.280 Um, yeah.

01:24:26.880 So.

01:24:27.200 But really you're just describing the democratic party that, that this is just like a theoretical overlay to justify retroactively a coalition.

01:24:35.000 The democratic party is the party of the beneficiary, beneficiaries of the civil rights act of 1964.

01:24:43.360 The democratic party is the party of beneficiaries of the civil rights act of 1964.

01:24:49.960 And the Republican party is the party of the victims of the civil rights act of 1964.

01:24:54.200 Or those who have objections to it on, you know, I mean, if you count among the victims, those who feel their liberties constrained by it.

01:25:05.520 Yeah.

01:25:05.940 I would say curtailing someone's liberty is to hurt somebody.

01:25:08.560 Yeah.

01:25:09.540 Um, interesting.

01:25:12.600 Does that change?

01:25:13.840 Well, as I say, I think it's, it's in abeyance now, but, um, but, you know, to, if, if, if, if I could say another thing about, about immigration and the economy, there is a kind of a longer term.

01:25:31.960 Um, there's a kind of a longer term process sort of working itself out as we create this, um, as we create through border enforcement, a tightening of the labor market on the bottom of the income distribution.

01:25:51.760 It should do some very good things for the, for the country.

01:25:56.320 If you believe, as I think you probably should believe that, that inequality is one of the biggest problems confronting the country, it's going to alleviate that somewhat, but it's going to do it in a kind of a, it's going to do it in a way that is going to hurt in places.

01:26:14.720 I think people are right.

01:26:16.320 I mean, I think those economists who say that, that, that immigration, that curtailing immigration is inflationary are right.

01:26:26.020 And it's inflationary in a lot of ways that affect the, not just the upper middle class, but also the middle class lifestyle, like the great proliferation of, um, of really nice restaurants.

01:26:41.340 The idea that, you know, the idea that, you know, when this experiment in mass immigration in, in a nearly open border, you know, with Mexico began in, in the 1970s, there weren't a dozen sushi restaurants in Pittsburgh, you know?

01:26:58.720 I mean, people didn't, there were no sushi restaurants in Pittsburgh.

01:27:03.120 This stuff, we tend to think that, that this is, that these amenities have developed because of our, you know, improving taste that we're just so much more discerning than our parents were.

01:27:15.820 But the difference I think is this source of, of, of just plentiful, bountiful, really cheap labor for people who can, can, you know, work in back kitchens and things like that.

01:27:28.940 So there's no doubt, when I worked in a restaurant as a dishwasher 40 years ago this summer, it was a diner in New England.

01:27:36.100 Everyone was white in the kitchen.

01:27:37.840 Everybody, everyone had a criminal record, everyone was white. 0.98

01:27:40.380 That's, that's interesting.

01:27:41.860 But so when you, when you, when you tighten up that labor market and suddenly you have to pay your dishwasher a dollar more, $2 more, $3 more, the, the, the, the meals in your restaurant are going to get more expensive.

01:27:56.400 So there aren't going to be, you know, like sandwiches, gourmet sandwiches for $11.99 anymore.

01:28:03.900 They're going to be like $28.99, you know, and people are going to say, I'm going to bring my sandwich to, to work, you know, I'm going to, and, and then the restaurant is going to close.

01:28:14.500 And the country is going to become much more like it was, like what you saw the tail end of, um, in your diner in New England.

01:28:24.400 It's going to have crumbier food.

01:28:26.180 It's going to have, uh, you know, things are going to, there's going to be a lot more sameness.

01:28:30.100 That's, that's the, that's what the world of a, of a, of a, of a low immigration, less free market, where there's less of a free market in labor.

01:28:42.440 That's what a society like that looks like.

01:28:45.600 The, the working class gets richer. 0.86

01:28:49.940 They, they move towards the middle.

01:28:52.220 Everyone gravitates towards the middle class, right?

01:28:55.060 And institutions, economic institutions begin to serve the middle class.

01:28:59.940 That is, you have a, a, a, a shrinking of, of gourmet restaurants and, and a, and a concentration of restaurants in the middle of, you know, the middle of the road category.

01:29:12.460 So the middle class was the dominant, um, you know, was the dominant portion of the country.

01:29:20.060 Right.

01:29:20.540 Was the majority middle class country up until I think 2015.

01:29:23.600 In, did that change?

01:29:28.280 And then the middle class was no longer the majority.

01:29:30.160 Is, is that because of immigration?

01:29:32.600 It has a lot to do with immigration.

01:29:34.820 Yes.

01:29:35.320 Globalization and immigration. 0.91

01:29:37.180 And, um, I mean, I, I think people, people tend not to mention, um, immigration.

01:29:44.220 I mean, people tend to say it's a mix of globalization.

01:29:46.500 That is free trade and technology, you know?

01:29:50.540 But I think that the most important part of globalization is immigration.

01:29:55.320 Why is it the most important?

01:29:56.680 I mean, it has, it affects the most changes?

01:29:58.560 George Borjas, the Harvard economist, has said that, you know, immigration, people always talk about, you know, is immigration good for the economy or bad for the economy?

01:30:09.480 And basically, whenever you measure it, it's tough to get an effect on the economy that's more than like 1%.

01:30:16.620 It's so trivial.

01:30:18.600 I, I, I, I mean, but what the huge effect is, which is like dozens of times larger than the effect on the economy as a whole, is the transfer effect.

01:30:28.600 The sort of loss of jobs by people who need $15 an hour to wash dishes to those who will do it for $8 an hour, okay? 0.56

01:30:39.680 And the benefit to people who used to be paying their gardener, you know, $30 an hour, but now find it can be done for $6 an hour.

01:30:49.100 Or, more likely, they pay a guy who's got a team on his truck, and they pay him, you know, $30 an hour and let him sort out how this is done.

01:30:59.900 And he does it much quicker, and they save money.

01:31:02.860 You see what I mean?

01:31:03.500 I do.

01:31:03.800 So, it becomes a, it becomes a transfer from the, from the working class.

01:31:07.680 So, it doesn't necessarily, I think what you're saying is it doesn't necessarily expand your economy, but it just makes the rich richer.

01:31:15.040 I think so.

01:31:17.460 So, that would explain why rich people in, these are broad strokes, but in general, hate any conversation about immigration.

01:31:27.440 Immediately go to motive, you're a racist, and just aren't at all interested in talking about it at all.

01:31:33.800 And why working class people really resent it.

01:31:36.440 There may be other reasons, too, but that seems like a big reason.

01:31:39.820 Yes, those are broad strokes, but I think they're roughly accurate.

01:31:42.600 There's a, you know, I, I, I, there's a French sociologist named Christophe Giloui, who's written books about how this has worked in France, and his thinking has really clarified mine on this.

01:31:58.860 But, you know, you basically, in France, you have 20 cities that are like nodes of the global economy.

01:32:05.980 And they like, you know, like in, in Toulouse, you have Airbus, and where the, you know, where there are engineers and executives at Airbus, they have, you know, you know, African gardeners, and, and, and there are nannies, and there are all sorts of people there.

01:32:21.280 It's a global economy niche.

01:32:23.760 When you get out into the countryside, none of that stuff touches anything.

01:32:28.200 It's basically people, the economy consists of like returning, you know, cans to the, you know, to the grocery store.

01:32:35.740 Um, this explains why, you know, if you live in a place like Washington, D.C. or, or Berkeley, California, and, and, and, or Boston, people are like sincerely puzzled.

01:32:51.180 They say like, how did Trump win?

01:32:53.320 I don't know anyone who voted for him, you know, and they say, they'll say something like, no, really, I've talked to people of all classes.

01:33:00.000 I didn't vote for him, you know, my mother didn't vote for him, my nanny, you know, and, you know, in, you know, from Jamaica didn't, you know, who's not naturalized and didn't vote, she didn't vote for him.

01:33:11.420 And the answer is, the, the dividing line is, is not between rich and poor.

01:33:16.760 It's between the beneficiaries of, and the excluded from, the global economy, right?

01:33:23.420 That's the dividing line in the politics.

01:33:25.600 So, when you give up open borders, you're really giving up, like, a whole way of life.

01:33:35.660 You give up the solidarity between classes in your country.

01:33:40.340 Huh, what does that mean?

01:33:41.700 I don't know.

01:33:42.600 As soon as I said it, I realized that what, you could look at it in a, in a separate, in a different way.

01:33:48.080 I mean, you, you give up a dynamic that brings the classes close together, you know, which is that the, the ability of, of working class people to withhold their labor for more money.

01:34:05.260 You know what I mean?

01:34:05.840 You undercut that.

01:34:07.080 They become, they become, it's why trade unions, when they were actual industrial unions and not arms of the Democratic Party, you know, were, you know, they, they equated immigrant labor with scab labor.

01:34:23.460 That was what your brother.

01:34:23.900 Well, they were behind the immigration restrictions.

01:34:25.800 Yes.

01:34:25.980 Of the 1920s.

01:34:27.020 So, um, so you give up that dynamic, you know.

01:34:30.580 Um, it's, but it's very tempting, you know, it's, there, there are other ways to look at it, but yeah, I think that's basically, that's basically the, the best way to look at it.

01:34:40.960 Will China ever decide, um, is it, as it's, you know, economy matures and it, and cools inevitably, that it needs mass immigration to China?

01:34:51.860 Um, you know, I don't know much about China.

01:34:56.920 I know, I know a little more about, about Japanese.

01:34:59.360 You know, China, China has had a, China's had a tremendous amount of, of internal labor migration, which it is just, which is just about to come to the end of.

01:35:12.900 Um, and, and, and so its labor costs are going to rise.

01:35:17.620 Um, I don't know how it's going to react.

01:35:19.660 It's very interesting that Japan has chosen, um, you know, a tightening economy over a diversifying society.

01:35:30.720 That is, they've, they've kept out immigrant labor for the most part.

01:35:35.080 And where they've admitted it, they've tended to do, tended to do it on a temporary basis.

01:35:39.940 You know, you get a few Filipino nannies and you, they send them home at the end of their, of their, of their term.

01:35:46.880 The only mass migration they've had in the last hundred years has been from Korea, um, which they controlled until 1945.

01:35:56.120 And then the Koreans who stayed kind of pretend they're Japanese. 0.97

01:35:59.620 Yes.

01:36:00.120 So, uh, you know, I think that, you know, and.

01:36:03.400 How's that trade worked for them?

01:36:05.060 I think it's worked well for them.

01:36:06.780 I mean, I think it's worked for them.

01:36:08.580 I mean, the United States is constantly, the United States has brought tremendous pressure on Japan to, to admit immigrants.

01:36:18.440 And this is one of the things that I find, exactly, this is one of the things I find quite mysterious.

01:36:23.340 But if you look at the pressure that the United States, this is one of the things that I think that USAID did.

01:36:28.800 It's, I mean, it's sort of an ideological arm of the country.

01:36:32.220 But if you look at not just programs, but, but people in the United States diplomatic or in the State Department were always sort of like browbeating, um,

01:36:43.400 Victor Orban in Europe, for instance, for not, for not being more welcoming of immigrants.

01:36:50.640 But I, so I think we're at the point now where we're in a moment of, of transition, but I, I, you know, Japan is, is deeply in debt.

01:37:01.700 I believe they have the largest per capita debt in the world, although it is all to themselves, you know, so it's the, it's debt to the, so it, it should be, it should be.

01:37:13.400 It should be workable, but there's still a Japan. 1.00

01:37:17.080 And, um, you know, as we've discussed, Japan decided that it valued its cultural continuity more than European, um, countries did.

01:37:30.960 And so Japan, if you go there, you'll discover it's still, I think the Japan that people who went there 20 or 30 years ago, remember it as.

01:37:40.780 So that, I mean, they seem like the only smart country, like in the world, because that does seem, no one's starving in Japan.

01:37:48.960 Actually, Japan is infinitely nicer than New York, for example, sorry.

01:37:53.560 And Tokyo is, and even though it's bigger and more crowded.

01:37:57.600 Yeah.

01:37:57.740 I, and I just wonder, like, is that, like, that just, that just seems like the greatest win to me.

01:38:06.080 I, well, I, well, they, they think so because they continue to, they continue to keep this policy.

01:38:11.920 And, and there's not a lot of, um, there's not a lot of agitation for, for changing it, you know, but I don't, I don't, I don't know.

01:38:22.460 It's been a few years since I've been there.

01:38:26.460 Last question.

01:38:27.460 Are you hopeful about the United States?

01:38:32.600 Yeah, you know, but I, I, I'm not sure that's saying much.

01:38:36.160 I, I, I tend to, to, to want to be hopeful and, and, and, um, the United States has some, um, tremendous strengths.

01:38:46.300 You know, it's got, um, the United States has, something has happened since the, I'm, I'm using Europe, which I think is the best, you know, frame of comparison here.

01:38:59.060 You know, the United States has got a lot richer than Europe in the last 15 years.

01:39:05.400 I don't know why that's happened.

01:39:06.600 And the two societies seem to be converging up until, you know, roughly the time of the, the, you know, the, the, the, the financial crisis of 2008 and then the Euro crisis that followed it.

01:39:20.320 And since then, the United States has peeled away by like, I don't know, 20, 20 or 25% from, from European standards of living.

01:39:30.240 So it's, it's, it's richer.

01:39:32.120 It seems to have a, it seems to be in a period of democratic ebullition.

01:39:38.040 I mean, that is the, the, the, the, the, the populace is engaged.

01:39:43.020 This doesn't mean that, you know, they've made a right choice with Donald Trump or that he's always going to do the right thing.

01:39:51.420 But, but the, the, the, the, the, the public is kind of vigilant and, and it's, it is reforming the country and we've reformed before.

01:40:04.000 So I'm, I'm relatively, I'm relatively optimistic.

01:40:09.000 I am too.

01:40:10.720 And you make me feel optimistic.

01:40:12.220 Christopher Caldwell, thank you very much.

01:40:14.120 Thank you, Tucker.

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The Tucker Carlson Show - August 27, 2025

Christopher Caldwell： Is It Too Late to Save the English-Speaking World？

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