Jeff Schechtman, Author at WhoWhatWhy: Recent Episodes
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Just as COVID-19 seems to be staging an unwelcome encore, this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast poses a thorough reassessment of the narratives we’ve clung to since March 2020.
Guest Lori Calhoun, author of Questioning the COVID Company Line: Critical Thinking in Hysterical Times, urges us to reexamine the philosophical and ethical underpinnings of our pandemic response. In responding to the first global health crisis to be broadcast live 24/7, the media’s role was not just informative but also formative, shaping public perception and compliance.
Calhoun explores the deification of Dr. Anthony Fauci, who became America’s go-to source for “the science.” Yet, as she points out, following the science did not always yield a clear blueprint to combatting COVID-19.
She argues that alternative viewpoints were often silenced, and those who dared to question the prevailing wisdom were labeled as dangerous miscreants. This circle-the-wagons posture was typically exacerbated by pop culture, which had already trained us to view pandemics through a lens of apocalyptic dread.
Given the near certainty of future medical crises on a global scale, Calhoun’s perspective goes beyond a dispassionate analysis: it serves as a call to action. She explains why it’s time to move beyond the fear and divisiveness that have characterized much of the public discourse around COVID-19.
With the benefit of informed hindsight, Calhoun offers a more nuanced, critical examination of how we’ve handled the pandemic so far — and how we can better manage the challenges that undoubtedly lie ahead.
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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
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In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, MIT economics professor Amy Finkelstein makes a case for replacing our overpriced and underachieving medical insurance regime with a radically new model — a universal, tax-neutral, automatic-coverage health care system.
Finkelstein, a former MacArthur “genius grant” recipient, argues that the current US system for delivering health insurance is not just inefficient and unfair but fundamentally broken.
Her new book, We’ve Got You Covered, serves as a manifesto for the radical change she believes must replace the existing patchwork of programs, which leaves so many people uninsured and unable to get the care they need.
Drawing on insights from American history and comparative analyses of health care systems around the world, she concludes that our current, piecemeal approach to health care reform is destined to fail.
In its place, she calls for, and gives details of, a uniquely sculpted basic coverage system, with individual options for additional coverage. This new model, she says, challenges conventional wisdom across the political spectrum, and would not only provide essential medical care to all, regardless of resources, but would also not require raising taxes.
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Full Text Transcript:
(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. In the United States, 30 million individuals lack formal health insurance, with countless others living under the perpetual threat of losing their coverage. Even those insured often grapple with the risk of enormous medical bills for their “covered care.” It’s evident that the American health insurance system urgently needs some kind of reform. Our guest today Professor Amy Finkelstein, is an economics professor at MIT. She contends that the existing healthcare reform proposals, which focus on expanding a successful element of the current system or making incremental additions, are missing the larger point.
She believes that we need to pose the question, what should the US health insurance policy aim to achieve? In her new book We’ve Got You Covered, she proposes a fresh blueprint for a healthcare system constructed from the ground up. Drawing on insights from American history and a comparative analysis of global healthcare systems. She concludes that our current approach to healthcare reform is destined to fail. The only viable solution, she asserts, is to construct a new coherent system from the ground up.
It’s a challenge to conventional wisdom from the right and the left and even from many of those in the field of economics. Amy’s plan is innovative, evidence-based, and holds immense promise. We’re going to talk to her about it today. Amy Finkelstein is a MacArthur Genius recipient and a professor of economics at MIT. Her new book is We’ve Got You Covered: Rebooting the American Healthcare System. Amy Finkelstein, thanks for joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy Podcast.
Amy Finkelstein: Thanks So much for having me.
Jeff: A delight to have you here. How did we get to the present system? How did we get to a system that literally no one is happy with at this point?
Amy: It’s a great question. We talk about it at length in the book. I think the simple answer is we got here because we never had a plan to get anywhere else. Our health insurance system was never deliberately planned, sketched out, and constructed. It’s been put together piecemeal, patch by patch, as various issues have arisen or various constituencies have made their issues politically salient. We’ve responded with a quick fix or a patch to cover some particular group of people or some particular disease in some circumstance as things became politically salient. And so, the result, obviously, through enormous efforts of well-intentioned people, has been a haphazard patchwork of programs that leave enormous gaps in the seams and are destined to punch below their weight.
Because whenever you have multiple pathways to getting coverage, you’re going to have people who don’t find their path. One of the most sobering things we realized in writing this book, we didn’t go into it with the idea that of course we needed to tear it down and start over. Incremental reform is always easier, and so we had hoped we’d come up with a few last Band Aids or patches to fix the remaining issues. But one of the really sobering facts is that of the people who are currently uninsured, 6 in 10 of them are actually eligible for either free or heavily, heavily discounted health insurance coverage.
And yet they don’t have it because they’re unaware of which program they’re eligible for or haven’t been able to get all the documentation and paperwork together to enroll in the program, or perhaps worst of all, they have enrolled, but didn’t realize that whenever there’s a program with specific eligibility rules, you have to continually reaffirm that you meet those requirements. And so, a year passed, and they didn’t file the paperwork to show that they still have the disease that got them covered or were still young enough or poor enough to qualify for that program, so they lost their coverage.
Jeff: You mentioned the evolution of this in terms of the patchwork nature of it, the political constituencies that had to be dealt with along the way. Why has there never seemingly been more pushback or more creativity from the medical establishment itself?
Amy: I’m not sure that this is, in all fairness, a problem that we should be looking to the medical establishment to solve. It’s a policy problem that we need to solve through our political process and our policy. In other words, the term health insurance is something of a misnomer. It’s not a medical product. It doesn’t ensure our health. It doesn’t provide the fountain of youth, [unintelligible 00:05:15] that it did. Health insurance is an economic product, a financial product that’s designed to protect us economically. When we are unfortunate enough to experience poor health, at least we won’t have to forego essential medical care or forego paying our rent or our utility bills in order to afford that medical care.
It’s fundamentally an economic product, and it’s been failing in that design because it’s not protecting us economically against the costs of essential medical care. The people who don’t have insurance, the people who have insurance, but risk losing that coverage when they lose their job or get older or get a little richer or get healthier or get sicker. Even the people who are able to maintain their coverage but can still, as you said at the outset, face catastrophic expenses that they have to pay for their supposedly covered care. We need to fix it as a policy matter. I don’t think it’s fair to blame the medical profession or at least solely blame them for the predicament.
Jeff: Yet it’s been different than other kinds of insurance. We have auto insurance systems that with their problems and their glitches, more or less work, homeowners insurance, business insurance, et cetera, et cetera. None of them have faced the kind of problems as economic components, the kind of problems that we have seen with respect to healthcare. There is something inherent in this that somehow seems different.
Amy: I totally agree. In fact, in another life from something of an insurance geek, and I’ve studied a lot of other non-health insurance products as well. I completely agree with you. I think there’s two key things that are different. The first and probably the most important is that if you have a car and it breaks down and you’re not insured, no one is going to offer you some quick fix, some mechanical care for free, or give you a rundown, but serviceable alternative car. You’re on your own. Fundamentally, we, and I think most other societies, are not willing to accept that for healthcare.
So, then we may say you need to buy health insurance, but if you don’t and you end up sufficiently ill, we step in and I mean, not just as charitable individuals, but our public policy, as we discuss in the book, creates a series of programs to either require hospitals to provide essential care. And that’s not just talking about the emergency room or to fund clinics to provide care or programs that will cover you under particular circumstances, as I said, particular diseases, particular ages, particular types of people because we’re not willing to stand idly by when someone needs essential medical care and can’t afford it. We are willing if your car breaks down or your roof caves in to not step in if you don’t have insurance. And I’m not saying that one is right and one is wrong.
Our key point in the book is not to argue whether we should be less generous or less altruistic when people are sick or more altruistic when people’s cars break down, but to realize that this is the fundamental reality of how we have always operated as a society. We actually go back to colonial times to talk about examples of this. Therefore it’s essential that if we recognize that this is in fact how we’re going to behave, we might as well fund and design that coverage upfront rather than just in the backend try to provide patches. I think the second thing, which is I think important to realize is that I think health or medical care is unique in being one of the few risks we face as individuals where the size of the financial risk we face is unrelated to our income.
You talked about auto insurance or homeowner’s insurance or even life insurance. What you’re trying to insure is going to increase with your income because you’re going to have a fancier car or a more expensive home or a job in the case of life insurance that pays more. But medical expenses if anything, they’re higher for the poor because health is worse for the poor. The cost of treating care is really not a function of your income. And so you can really have unaffordable medical expenses in a way that you can’t really have an unaffordable car repair. You may choose not to pay it or not have the money at the moment, but fundamentally, you’ve bought a car based on how much you can afford, and therefore you can buy insurance to insure it. Whereas with medical expenses, they can easily be many, many full hold your income. And so that’s part of the reason I think we feel compelled to step in and do something.
Jeff: And to that extent, is it possible to talk about a policy and a system of health insurance that doesn’t address the fundamental costs of medical care the way they have escalated and the way they’re out proportion to similar costs in most of the world?
Amy: Yes. So, one thing you mentioned that at various points in the book may commit some economic heresy. And one of them is that we think it’s very important to separate the kinds of coverage and basic economic security and financial protection policy of health insurance coverage from the also very important issues that you raise about the very, very high cost of medical care in the United States, or to put it differently, why we can’t, with all the money we spend, get better health outcomes or spend less for the health outcomes we currently get. These are both very important problems. They tend to be conflated in most policy proposals.
If you think back to Obamacare, the idea was we were going to both expand coverage and “bend the cost curve”, reduce healthcare spending, but they’re actually fundamentally separable. And while, as we talk about in the book, it turns out the solution on the coverage front is startlingly obvious, the question of how to improve healthcare delivery, how to reduce the very, very high costs of healthcare spending without harming patient outcomes is actually a problem which we don’t have a solution for currently.
And by we, I don’t just mean myself and my beknighted co-author, I mean the entire policy, medical, academic profession. And anyone who’s telling you otherwise is trying to sell you something. And so, we don’t think we should hold the problems of coverage captive or hostage to having to also solve the problems of delivery, especially when as we explained, it is possible to get to the type of universal automatic basic coverage that we think we need without actually raising taxes. And then for people who want more than the basic, more than the essential, they can pay for that out of their private income if they’re able to and want to.
Jeff: Talk about this notion. Expand on that a little bit that you define in the book that you just referred to, and how it is similar or dissimilar from some other systems around the world, particularly the French system, which in some ways seems similar.
Amy: That’s a great question. The truth is the way we approach this problem, perhaps not surprisingly given our training as economists, was from first principles. What is the goal that health policy is trying but failing to achieve? And that’s clearly to try to provide essential medical care to individuals regardless of resources. As we discussed, that’s very clear from our history of policy patches. And once we realize that that’s what we’re trying to achieve, what is the way to achieve that universal automatic basic coverage with the ability to supplement?
That being said, having done this first principles or clean slate, blue sky, what have you exercise, we were both gratified and somewhat humbled to step back and realize that at a broad stroke level, what we’ve proposed is what every other high-income country does, a automatic universal basic system and the ability for people who want and can afford additional coverage to supplement. So, at some broad level, one of the reasons we think this is doable is because this isn’t some complicated mechanism that two crazy academics dreamed up in their blackboard and concocted in their laboratories. It’s actually what we see happening around the world.
That being said, our particular proposal is not something that you can find lock, stock, and barrel in any given country. There are elements of it in each. So, you mentioned the French system. The French, like every other high-income country, do have automatic universal basic coverage and they allow people to supplement. One key difference I’d say between our proposal and the French is that the French basic coverage has unusually high cost-sharing, the amount that patients have to pay when they go to the doctor even for care that’s covered by the basic system. And this is an idea that has been embraced by economists for generations.
The idea that patients need some skin in the game, in a financial sense if you would, so that they think twice before asking for an MRI for their headache or getting every test under the sun. And this is something we have written about ourselves and lectured generations of students on. And in the book, we say quite clearly we take it back. Not because we were wrong about the facts. In fact, the evidence is incontrovertible. We’ve done some of this work and other people have as well, that if patients don’t face any costs for their medical care, they will spend more and drive up healthcare spending. Those facts are correct. The implications that we as a profession drew from them are incorrect.
And I think that you can see this in many countries, and I think the French example that you brought up is one clear place you can see it. So, as I said, the French have high cost-sharing in their universal basic coverage, and yet they then have a patchwork of programs, sound familiar, to try to help people cover that cost-sharing cost. So, for sufficiently low-income people, the government pays their cost-sharing. The government also subsidizes the employers to provide supplemental coverage to their employees. And the end result with all these different patches programs for the poor, the old, the employed, again, sound familiar, is that 95% of people in France actually don’t face the cost-sharing requirements that were built into the system to try and reduce costs.
So, the fundamental problem, and the reason we’re against any cost-sharing and the basic coverage for essential care, is that if we’re committed to providing essential care to people regardless of resources, there will always be people who can’t afford the $20 copay to go to the doctor or the $5 prescription drug copay. And so, what we’ve seen in country after country is a series of patches designed to exempt the vast majority of the population from the cost-sharing. So, we might as well just skip this tortured existence and just get rid of the cost-sharing altogether in the basic system.
Jeff: In that sense, Medicare is a model that is not dissimilar from what you’re talking about.
Amy: So, in one important respect, Medicare is similar to what we’re talking about, the fact that it’s the only form of health insurance in the United States that once you’re on it, you don’t risk losing it because you’re eligible, or at least the main Medicare program, when you’re 65 and over. People never get younger, unfortunately, so they’ll be on it for their whole life. But in at least two very important respects, it is very different from what we envision. First of all, Medicare is exactly like the French system in having very, very high consumer cost-sharing. In particular for doctor visits, patients have to pay 20% of the cost of their doctor visits, and that’s unlimited. There’s no cap on it.
So, if you are unfortunate to have very, very high doctor costs, for example, you have cancer and you’re seeing an oncologist, you can have unlimited tens of thousands of dollars of medical expenses that you have to pay. That is not what insurance is supposed to be doing. It’s supposed to be protecting you economically. So, we very much disagree with these high and unlimited cost-sharing in Medicare. Now, on the flip side, I’m not going to just stand up here and say everything’s going to be better and rainbows and roses under our plan.
Jeff: [laughs]
Amy: One of the reasons Medicare has very low administrative costs, which is often touted, “We should have single-payer Medicare for all. Look how low their administrative costs are.” Their costs are extremely low. That’s because they don’t do any administering. They just pay for everything. Anything the doctor orders and the patient wants gets covered. Our basic system would have a lot more, for lack of a better word, patient gatekeeping or I think the euphemism is care management in which you can’t get any care you want whenever you want. There may be longer wait times for non-urgent care, less amenities. For example, in many of the basic systems in say Singapore or Australia you have many more people to a room in a hospital, 10 to a room.
And if you buy the supplemental coverage, that gets you your private room. Again, because that’s not essential medical care. It’s nice to have, we’d all like it but it’s not essential. So, in some sense although it’s probably not a slogan any politician would want to use, you can think of our universal automatic basic coverage as closer to Medicaid for all but with the important addition that you can then supplement it if you want additional coverage. Whereas people who currently have Medicaid, not only risk losing it because it’s not universal and they always have to qualify but if they want a little bit more than what they’re getting for free, they have to go out and buy the whole package all over again in the private sector. And we wouldn’t have that.
Jeff: And this is what we see many times with managed care systems and HMOs within Medicare. A system like Kaiser, for example, or so many others where within the managed care structure under Medicare, it’s not dissimilar from what you’re talking about.
Amy: And actually, it’s interesting you bring that up because I think many of the people who say they want Medicare for all don’t realize first of all that as we’ve just discussed Medicare, the Medicare for some that we currently have is quite a highly inadequate insurance product. But also, that with the current Medicare system, about half of people covered by it have actually opted out of it, taken a voucher as you will of what the government is a bad word in liberal circles, but it is what it is. They can take the money that the government would have spent on their public insurance through Medicare and use it to get a private health insurance plan through Medicare Advantage. So, we already have that ability to supplement in the Medicare system.
As I said, we just need a different basic product than what the current Medicare program is. We need it both much more comprehensive on the financial protection dimension so no co-insurance or deductibles, but we also need it much more basic on the basic dimension. Not anything you might ever dream of but only essential medical care. With some restrictions on choice of doctor or length of time you may have to wait for non-urgent procedures or the amenities of nice waiting rooms, avocado toast in the hospital, et cetera. I joke but actually that’s what the supplemental coverage in Australia or Singapore, that’s what a lot of it pays for. And our view is that’s perfectly fine. People who want and can afford that can get that. Our commitment is to provide essential medical care for everyone, not a high-end luxury experience.
Jeff: You then get into the question of and the criticism that sometimes comes with a two-tiered system.
Amy: Yes. So, there’s two versions of that criticism. One is a general dislike of inequality that’s magnified in the case of health because health is seen as different occupying a more special place in our moral firmament than simply inequality and say housing or computers. That’s the first concern people raise. And there we have an entire section of the book devoted to explaining that as I mentioned, the term health insurance is a bit of a misnomer. It doesn’t actually ensure our health. It’s an economic or financial product. And while health insurance can improve health for people who are admirably concerned about the shocking and disturbing disparities that exist in health outcomes in the United States between rich and poor, between white and black Americans, the right lever to push on is actually not health insurance policy or even access to medical care.
There’s an enormous body of work that’s demonstrated compellingly that what is behind most of these health disparities is not medical care per se but what’s often referred to as the social determinants of health. The air we breathe, the food we eat, the cigarettes we do, or do not smoke, the gun violence that is or isn’t in our neighborhood. And I think that the clearest evidence on that comes from looking at some of the Scandinavian countries like Sweden and Norway that not only have universal health insurance coverage but have cradle to the grave social safety nets that we don’t have. And yet the health disparities between rich and poor in those countries are as large as they are in the United States.
And so, it’s a really sobering way of bringing home that for those who admirably want to reduce health disparities, the right policy levers to focus on are not about health insurance or even medical care but are about some of these other environmental, nutritional, smoking, exercise, et cetera aspects of life for which public policy can play a huge role through taxes on cigarettes, regulation of pollution. There’s a huge scope for public policy there but it’s not health insurance policy. So, that’s my first answer, I think. And that’s the easier answer. I think the other reason that, as you said, people may object to a two-tier system and we grapple with this a lot, is a concern that by allowing people to supplement that will erode the adequacy of the basic system.
And there’s a political reason for that. That as more and more people choose to go outside the basic system, the political support for providing adequate funding in the basic system may erode. And there’s also just a practical or economic reason which is, there’s a limited number of doctors at any one point. And so, there’s a concern that the best of them will go into the supplemental system and leaving inadequate supply of what highly qualified doctors in the basic system. These are very real concerns. We give examples of several Latin American countries where this has not worked well. And the basic system is really just unacceptable in terms of quality. It’s not actually fulfilling its obligation to ensure access to essential medical care for everyone.
And we give examples of many other systems where Singapore, Australia, others where they’ve managed to sustain both. And the way they do it and it may not fit on a bumper sticker, and it’s certainly not a sexy slogan, but it’s basically by paying attention and when there are problems fixing them. So, we give the example of Israel that started with universal coverage in 1995, I believe. And they have a system of basic and supplemental. This is provided by a number of private insurers actually from whom you can buy either the basic or the basic and the supplement. And Israel also had a lot of immigrants coming in at that period and other factors that put a lot of pressure on the system.
And people noticed by the early 2010s that the basic system wasn’t working that well anymore, that wait times were longer than was deemed acceptable, that more and more people were going to the supplemental system as a way to get essential care. And they had a series of reform. Some of them were very prosaic. They increased funding for the basic system, that one surefire way to bring down wait times. They also put a bunch of financial incentives and regulation in place to encourage physicians to practice in both systems. The UK has done something similar as well. This is a real concern but if you’re vigilant, there are ways to make sure that the adequacy of the basic system is maintained while also allowing people to supplement.
Jeff: You just touched on it a moment ago when you were talking about Israel and what’s been happening in England is that because we have a finite number of doctors, you get more and more of them that are choosing to work outside of something like a basic system. And we see it here with the rise of more and more concierge medicine.
Amy: Again, as with many things in our society there will be people who have greater resources will access additional or in some ways more preferable care. Concierge medicine is a good example of that. Our concern is not with the high end. It’s about ensuring the adequacy of the basic system. And once we’re fulfilling our social contract, our commitment that these policy patches have all been designed to solve, of making sure that people all have access to essential medical care without risking massive medical debt or economic ruin, then we are not concerned if some people want to buy higher-end services. In the same way that we have, hopefully, a publicly funded law and order system of police protection to make sure that we maintain an adequate level of safety and security. And some people though may prefer to put home alarm systems in place and that’s fine. That’s not our concern. Our concern is with the floor not the ceiling.
Jeff: I guess the other question that arises is, what constitutes essential care with medicine constantly advancing with more and more things and tests and procedures coming along that also add cost to the system? The question of what constitutes essential seems to be a potential question.
Amy: It is a great question, and we’ve gotten some I think not completely unfair criticism that we don’t spell it out in exorbitant detail. Partly, it would be quite boring if we were going to [laughs] list every procedure this covered. But more seriously, part of the reason is exactly what you just said, Jeff, that even if we defined it today as medical technology improves and as income grows, what we as a society deem as essential, will change. 20 years ago, high-speed internet was considered a luxury. Now it’s increasingly considered essential for education and work. And so, what we describe in the book is that what we have to do is not list out exactly what’s in basic care today because even if we did as you said, we’ll have to confront this issue tomorrow.
But, we have to set up a process as every other country has for deciding what gets included in basic care. And the most important thing that we need for that process is something that is so obvious and so simple and yet incredibly we don’t have currently in the US, which is we need a budget. There is no healthcare budget in the US in the sense of a budget constraint of, “Here’s how much we have to spend and now we have to decide how to allocate it.” Instead, the Medicare budget when it’s talked about, we mean how much we have spent through the Medicare program or how much we will spend, not how much we can spend. And it’s only once we have a budget, can we then decide what’s in and what’s out.
Now, that budget has to be big enough to cover the care that’s essential in the sense of we’ve designed all these patches to try to provide it. And then beyond that, we have to make hard choices, and this is what every other country’s done. They have two committees usually, one of technocrats who score things on how cost-effective they are, and then one of physicians, politicians, people in the community to decide, “Are we going to cover Viagra? Are we going to cover fertility treatments? Are we going to cover plastic surgery?” These are the grey area things that have to be decided and are decided in every other country.
Jeff: And, finally, can we make the pivot from the current system, the current mess that we have, to something like this? I know we talk about tearing it down, pulling it up from its roots and starting over, not exactly the most practical solution. How do we make that pivot?
Amy: It’s a good question and we engage with it in the epilogue. There’s a reason we leave it to the epilogue which is, it’s only a question that makes sense to ask once we have gotten some consensus or at least broad agreement on where we want to go. And so we see the main purpose of our book as trying to get clarity and hopefully convince a large number of people of what the solution is. Once we agree on that, we can then talk about how to get there. I think the short answer is, we need to leave that to people who are more skilled in politics certainly than we are, and to wait for the right policy window or opportunity to come about.
But as we talk about and hopefully to be totally honest, one of our major motivations in writing the book is to get these ideas out in front of the skilled and hardworking people who work in the policy space. Maybe today they’re students in policy schools but tomorrow they’ll be staffing congressional committees and presidential campaigns. And so we want to get this idea out there so that they can find the right opportunity to make it happen.
But as we talk about in the epilogue, our read of the history of other countries, as well as our own history of near misses with major health insurance reform and almost getting to universal coverage, is that it was not the destiny of every other country to have universal coverage. That in fact, it was highly contentious in many countries like the UK and Canada, doctors went on strike or threatened to go on strike, the political fighting was enormous and excruciating, nor was it our destiny to remain the only country without universal coverage. So, I think if we can get clarity on where we want to be, then we can start to figure out the right window or way to get there.
Jeff: Amy Finkelstein, the book is We’ve Got You Covered: Rebooting American Healthcare. Amy, I thank you so much for spending time with us today.
Amy: Thank you so much for having me on the program.
Jeff: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I hope you join us next week for another Radio WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do, by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
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Morris tells of his personal journey through the aftermath of an IED explosion in Iraq, and offers an insightful exploration of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). As we honor those who have made the ultimate sacrifice, we must also acknowledge the lasting psychological wounds of the survivors of war’s horrors.
Our discussion traces the evolution of PTSD, from its early recognition in the shell-shocked soldiers of World War I to its current status as a recognized psychiatric disorder. The conversation takes a philosophical turn as we explore how religion and personal worldview can shape an individual’s response to trauma, and how different perspectives and beliefs can influence resilience in the face of adversity.
Morris scrutinizes the therapeutic approaches to PTSD, including prolonged-exposure therapy and cognitive-processing therapy. These treatments, he argues, shed light on the path to healing, offering hope to those grappling with the haunting memories of traumatic events.
Finally, he talks about the unique struggles faced by war correspondents dealing with PTSD. These individuals, much like our veterans, often bear the burden of their traumatizing experiences in silence.
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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schectman: Welcome to the Who, What, Why podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. Each Memorial Day, we take a moment to honor the brave men and women who have made the ultimate sacrifice in serving their country. Today on this podcast, we’re not just honoring their sacrifice on the battlefield, but delving into the battles they continue to fight long after they’ve left the war zone, the inevitable battles within their minds. Our guest today is David Morris, a journalist who has walked the path himself.
While embedded with troops in Iraq, he almost died when a Humvee he was riding in was hit by an IED. He survived, but like many, he returned home with wounds that weren’t visible to the naked eye. His experience led him to his 2015 memoir, The Evil Hours, a biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a deep dive into the labyrinth of PTSD. We’re going to talk about that today with David Morris. He’s a former Marine Infantry officer, a journalist who has written for Slate, Salon, the Los Angeles Times and The Nation.
And it is my pleasure to welcome David Morris here to the Who, What, Why podcast. David, thanks so much for joining us.
David Morris: Hi. Thanks for having me.
Jeff: It’s great to have you here, PTSD as something that is defined in DMS and something that psychologists and psychiatrists have talked about has been around for quite a while, and yet it really is only in the past 20 years that we’ve really begun to focus on it and even to understand it. Talk a little bit about that.
David: Well, it’s important to understand that PTSD is a product, as it’s understood today, is a product of the protest movement. The 1970s, it rose up against the Vietnam War, a group of protestors and anti-war advocates from the left, a group called Vietnam Veterans Against the War, out of a most famous number of which is John Carey. And they felt like it was a group of people that were protesting the Vietnam War, but they felt that there was no meaningful distinction to be made between the politics of the war and their own psychological difficulties in returning from Vietnam.
So, they fought for and agitated for about 10 years beginning in 1970 before PTSD was officially recognized by psychiatry in 1980, when it was officially entered into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or the DSM, which is kind of the Bible of psychiatry. And once you get into the DSM, then medicine will officially recognize and treat, and health insurance companies will recognize and treat that disorder. But it’s important to recognize as well that PTSD, just because we recognize it in 1980 didn’t mean that it didn’t exist before.
And in fact, if you look back at even prehistoric records or what we do know about prehistoric times, PTSD is, certain aspects of it are an essential element of human beings from what we can tell. And one of the ways we know this is researchers have gone back to New Guinea and interviewed tribal warriors there from the tribes and some of the remotest parts of New Guinea. And these people, the tribes of Papua New Guinea are thought to be some of the most well-preserved examples of what mankind was like before agriculture, before industrialization, before modern technology happened.
Interviewing these warriors, anthropologists have discovered that they report having nightmares of post-battle in particular, nightmares of being abandoned by their buddies. So there is an aspect of PTSD that is immortal. And then there are other aspects of it that have been more influenced by religious beliefs, and by culture at the time. And here’s an example. There is, if you consider the flashback, which is considered today to be one of the cardinal symptoms of PTSD.
In fact, a group of British researchers from King’s College went and examined the memoirs and accounts, and records of war veterans from conflict predating the era, the age of cinema. And they discovered that veterans who served in the 19th century did not report flashbacks. And in fact, a flashback is a term borrowed from cinema. And for example, civil war veterans are far more likely to report being haunted by ghost spirits and demons and the ghost of fallen comrades.
So there is a part of PTSD that is immortal and unitary and universal. And then there’s other parts of it that seems to be very influenced by culture and by how human culture has evolved over time.
Jeff: One of the interesting questions in the way PTSD evolves is the degree to which it is about something that happens to us versus something that we see, something that we witness, and the impact of that. And there does seem to be a fundamental difference between those two things.
David: Well, yes, and they both play into each other. I mean, they’re both connected. And one of the interesting things when you spend time in a war zone, is how visually stimulating and visually interesting it is. And you see dead bodies, you see wounded people, you see life pushed to its extreme edge, and for the same reason that people slow down and rubberneck on the freeway, these are the same impulses that govern our behavior in warfare. The idea of seeing really awful things is at once really fascinating, and repulsive, and it’s very hard to look away.
And for some reason, you end up with a lot of soldiers will come back with visions of band– Excuse me, natural disaster survivors will come back haunted by visions of things that they saw and that they looked at. And so there is this visual sense that the mind almost seems to want to curate all of these awful and repulsive themes that are on view during war and in situations like tsunamis and hurricane Katrina, for example. But there is interesting, as you alluded to, this visual experience and these collecting of horrific and hallucinatory images that seem to haunt in the aftermath of traumatic event.
Jeff: Is there a difference with respect to a traumatic event that is expected versus unexpected, a natural disaster or rape, for example, versus the experience of combat where in some ways you are prepared for what’s about to happen?
David: Well, yes, in fact, that’s the feeling of being overwhelmed, surprised, or helpless. Those are the most trauma-producing type situations. And for example, you do find with the Hanoi Hilton cohort, which was a group of prisoners of war held in Hanoi, the most famous of whom was John McCain. That group of prisoners of war were generally older, better educated, and had spent a significant amount of time and years of time in training as pilots and aircrew. And because they had such great preparation, and many of them in fact had been to a mock prisoner of war camp before even deploying to Vietnam.
And so they had a better frame of reference, they had a better understanding of what could happen to them. And they had some training and some resilience, resiliency to fall back on because they had spent so much time preparing and thinking and maturing into their social role as leaders and as aircrew. So there is always that element of preparation and training and being– And there are a number of factors that researchers call either protective factors or risk factors that all play into whether or not a person is going to end up with PTSD in the long term.
So a person who came from an abusive family, who struggled maybe came from a poor family and is deprived and overwhelmed, and in the case of a rape survivor is raped, then that person is far more vulnerable and far more likely to develop PTSD just in and out of those risk factors. In addition to that, rape is also considered to be the most common and toxic form of trauma. So it’s important to remember that not all traumas are equal. And there is sort of a spectrum of human responses that we think.
Jeff: Do we know if there’s a genetic component at all with regard to predisposition to PTSD?
David: Yes, there is some evidence and the epigenetics behind PTSD is a new area of inquiry. And so it’s difficult to say we don’t know a whole lot about it yet, but there does appear to be physiological changes that occur in human beings, particularly with respect to the stress hormone cortisol which is a hormone that is released in times of stress, and the way the human body secretes cortisol is communicated genetically.
So very interesting research study was done by Rachel Yehuda here at the VA Bronx. And she discovered that the offspring of Holocaust survivors from the maternal side, so the grandmother in this case had survived the Holocaust, her offspring would have a different cortisol stress hormone response than a control subject, than another person, than the offspring of someone that had not come from a Holocaust survivor family.
So the way the human body is organized physiologically does, in fact, change after trauma. And if you think about that from just a basic evolutionary standpoint, that is an understandable and expectable outcome in the sense that an organism is going to respond to the stimuli in its environment, be they adverse stimuli or positive stimuli, and would transmit that to their offspring in order to maximize the survival and the thriving of their offspring.
So there is this genetic. And cortisol is a very important stress hormone that impacts the entire functioning of the human body. If you have too much cortisol, you tend to suffer other somatic difficulties, ulcers, and a lot of the normal somatic problems that we associate with people that have a lot of stress in their life. There are a bunch of possible genetic impacts to PTSD down the road that we are just now beginning to get a sense of.
Jeff: To what extent does philosophy, philosophical outlook, worldview, even religion play a role in how we view evil in the world, for example, and how that shapes how we respond to trauma?
David: Well, interestingly, and that’s a tricky question, but one that I’ve thought about a great deal. And one of the things that is of interest is actually when you look at who tends to develop PTSD down the line. And you find that people that have a more religious outlook, for lack of a better phrase, who have a sense of an omnipotent being who is looking out for them and for whom their destiny has been decided, and who has some sort of control over their life on Earth is less likely to develop PTSD because there is this sense of the universe is a meaningful, ordered place that is being governed by a beneficent being, by God.
And I am not able to control, it is beyond my control. And in fact, His design is being enacted in the world. And I saw this, interestingly, when I was in Iraq, I was on patrol with a Marine unit and some Iraqi soldiers. And without my prompting, this Iraqi soldier told me that he didn’t worry about getting blown up or dying because he knew that Allah had already been decided and it was in His hands and that it was improper for him to consider, to worry about it himself since God had already decided what would happen.
In this sort of surprising way, and I’m not a particularly orthodox religious person, you do find that a person who takes a more existential perspective and says life is absurd, life is meaningless, life is without order, and it’s a morally chaotic situation, that sort of person is confronted with a heavier philosophical burden because it is incumbent upon them to discover their own meaning and their own order.
And after trauma, not everyone who has a particularly formally religious background is going to find trauma, would it be rape or a tsunami, is not going to find that experience necessarily meaningful or under the providence of God. A lot of people, Phillip Caputo being a notable example, the author of A Rumor of War and a Vietnam veteran, he was raised Catholic, and did not find that the war to be a faith-affirming experience.
So it informs a lot, as it informs every shape, every decision of a person’s life. Our feelings towards God, towards any omnipotent being plays a huge role in how trauma is interpreted and managed by a victim.
Jeff: The corollary of that, as you talk about, is this sense in PTSD of always trying to find deeper meaning in the events, particularly on the anniversary of events.
David: In the book, I dwell on this idea of apophenia which is this term that comes from psychiatry. And it is related to the idea, it’s similar to paranoia, of finding meaningful connections between unconnected events. For instance, in my book, I talk about how the day before I hit a very serious IED for my IED ambush in Baghdad. The day before, someone had asked me if I had ever been in an IED ambush before, which I had not.
And everyone in the Humvee that day when I was asked that question got really upset with the soldier who asked it because that is considered to be extraordinary bad luck to ask that kind of question. And so when I was hit by an IED the next day, it was both surprising and unsurprising because it’s easy to feel as if– The behavior that governs victims, natural disaster victims, and soldiers in active war zone, and even when they come home, their behavior is very similar to a lot of the rituals and talisman that govern the behavior of gamblers.
A lot of faith is put in luck, good luck charms, good luck T-shirts, and doing things the same way because performing certain rituals will provide a person with good luck. So there is this different kind of relationship, it’s almost magical thinking that can evolve in wartime situations, and plays out in the form of elaborate superstitions. For instance, in the Marine Corps, it has long been considered bad luck to eat apricots, if you’re ever in a Humvee or an armored vehicle, to the point that the MREs, the field rations that marines and soldiers are issued, they stopped including apricots in the ration because people were convinced that if you ate apricots, you were going to have a technical malfunction either in your vehicle, in your armored personnel carrier, or in your Humvee. So those are the sorts of things.
Because war is so chaotic, so morally chaotic, confusing, and anarchic, you do find people looking for these relatively morally neutral events and items, and imbuing them with a special, sacred, magical power. And the idea of good luck charms in the form of soldiers, particular soldiers, or particular Iraqi interpreters or Afghan interpreters, this is very common.
Jeff: One of the things you talked about in The Evil Hours are the treatments for PTSD, things like prolonged exposure and cognitive therapy. Talk a little bit about those. But in a broader sense, what do the treatments tell us about PTSD itself?
David: Well, the treatments, there are a rainbow. There are a wide variety of treatments for PTSD out there. And I’ll briefly just discuss the top two or three, that the VA, the US Department of Veteran Affairs prefers. And the first one of those is prolonged exposure. It’s the number one VA individual psychotherapy that is approved for use by the VA. And prolonged exposure is generally derived from the ideas of Ivan Pavlov, the conditioning and classical learning theory.
And the thought behind prolonged exposure is that if you tell the story of your worst trauma over and over again, what they could call your index trauma, if you tell that story of it over and over again, eventually that memory will lose its heavy traumatic charge and become just like any other normal memory. So for me, I underwent prolonged exposure. And so I was asked to tell the story of my IED ambush, October 10, 2007, in Southern Baghdad. Prolonged exposure has a really good track record, a lot of great science behind it, and it works.
It shows improvement in 60% of people who undergo it. But for me, I experienced significant side effects and it did not– Actually, prolonged exposure therapy, which is the number one psychotherapy offered by the VA, it actually made my symptoms worse. It made it really hard to sleep, read or even write. So I discontinued that therapy rather quickly. The second, VA’s number two psychotherapy, cognitive processing therapy is quite different. And in it’s own way, resembles more traditional psychotherapies, although it’s usually done in a group setting.
In cognitive processing therapy you are asked, a survivor or veteran is asked to examine their thoughts or feeling about their war and about the events that they went through that are troubling them, and examine if their thoughts and feelings about it have led to other problems in their life. For instance, it’s very common for rape survivors to think that they in some way brought it on themselves, that they are at fault, and that either they asked to be raped in some manner, or they failed to fight off their assailant enough.
And so there’s this very pernicious, very painful and destructive process of self-blame that occurs in many, many rape victims that really just makes the damage a lot worse. And so CPT or cognitive processing therapy, one of the questions it will ask is, are those feelings of you being a bad person or being marked by a scarlet letter of a kind, of a sort, is that really a legitimate empirically supportable reality-tested thought?
Can you really say that that was something that you did not fight off your assailant enough? Is that a valid conclusion to come to, and so that if you start with those sorts of questions and examine how those thoughts end up impacting your feelings about yourself and your feelings about the world generally? And so what this says to me, look at these various different therapies that treat PTSD, and they all approach it, they all tackle a different side of it.
And there’s no one overarching therapy that everyone responds to, in the same way that there’s no one overarching miracle drug or golden bullet therapy that really cures people. So there is this problem with PTSD, because it doesn’t appear to be, as to contrast it against a depression, which is far more responsive to SSRIs and other drugs like Zoloft and Prozac and what have you. There is really no one golden bullet drug for PTSD, which should point to how complex and how very individual the responses are to PTSD.
So it’s important to recognize that it is in the catalog of malady. It’s in the book of woe, the DSM. But it’s really in its own category and it’s very difficult to compare to any other mental health disorder. And it’s very difficult to treat because any number of things, millions of different kinds of events can cause PTSD. Anything, so many things that happened in war, so many things that happened in streets and in crime situations. So it’s really the human response to trauma is as diverse, there are millions of responses to that in the world.
Jeff: With respect to your own personal experience, did you think about your experience differently from somebody that was engaged in combat as opposed to someone embedded and there to bear witness? Was there something in that that you thought about and that impacted you in your recovery?
David: Being a reporter in a war zone and being a soldier in a war zone is more similar than you might think. And a lot of people will– I’ve had a number of people say to me, it wasn’t the same for you. Which I would argue is false, because most reporters I knew that spent time in Iraq, spent most of their time outside the wire going out in patrols and actually seeing combat operations on a daily basis. And most reporters will be– It’s very clear when you work as a war reporter that the story, the real story is really happening where the bullets are flying. So you got to get out there and see it and be a part of it.
And so there is an element of a very strong resemblance in terms of the type of trauma that a war journalist will see, be exposed to in a war. And there are two other major differences that I’ll also highlight between the soldier experience and the war correspondent experience. And that’s this, the war correspondent, typically it’s against the Geneva Convention to carry a weapon in a war zone for a journalist. So reporters are slightly more defenseless than soldiers, so they have a reduced ability to control their environment and to defend themselves in combat. A fact which we know is more likely to cause PTSD down the road.
So there is that, and the other thing that puts war correspondents at risk is the tendency to jump from hotspot to hotspot and to travel from, say, Libya or Syria on a moment’s notice to a different part of the Middle East or to return back to their news bureau, be it London, Paris or New York or wharever their news outlet is headquartered.
And to go from the war zone alone and to return to a news environment or a corporate environment where no one has been in a war zone. There exists, for war correspondents, because of their comparative rarity, less opportunity to be understood upon returning home. No one thanks NPR war correspondents or New York Times war correspondents for their service. Even though I would argue that a reporter from a major news organization, or any new organization, is contributing to the cause of democracy, because it’s an important, although it’s not as overtly patriotic, it is an essential part of our democracy to have an informed electorate and to have a transparent and understandable and discernible military force, and reporters play a large role in that.
Jeff: It is also particularly interesting to think about the effects of PTSD on a reporter that comes back from a war zone or continues reporting after, because one of the symptoms that you talk about that is so prevalent is this failure to live fully in the present.
David: Yes. And I think that’s an issue because, and it can exacerbate things in the sense that, for instance, when I returned from Iraq, I was a writer and was publishing on it the entire time. And continuing to write and continuing to introspect and to meditate and think on my war experience, which I think have both had a mixed effect. And it had a good effect in the sense that writing about your wartime experience or your traumatic experience of any kind can help you process and locate patterns, and create your own story that make sense of the trauma.
So it’s really good in that regard but there’s also the sense of trying to, if you spend time willingly thinking and meditating on really tragic events, it has a tendency to make you ruminate in a negative way, and that’s about the negative experiences. So you have to, as a writer and for any artist, you have to strike a balance of finding some meaning, finding some coherence in the chaos of your past, but then also exerting a certain amount of self-care, and not dwelling on it too much, and focus on things that bring you greater peace and greater insight that have nothing to do with war or crime or rape, natural disaster or what have you.
Jeff: David Morris, I thank you so much for spending time with us today here on the Who, What, Why podcast.
David: Thank you for having me. Good to talk to you.
Jeff: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on The Who, What, Why podcast. I hope you join us next week for another Radio Who, What, Why podcast. I’m Jeff Schectman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to Whowhatwhy.org/donate.
As we hurtle towards a future increasingly intertwined with artificial intelligence (AI), what does this mean for society, for jobs, and for our security? Could AI, one day, be used maliciously, or in warfare or terrorism? And if these threats are real, how can we implement safeguards, and ensure the technology we create doesn’t turn against us?
At a time when AI is reshaping our reality and pushing the boundaries of what was once considered mere science fiction, this technological revolution demands our attention. On this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, we delve deep into the realm of AI and its potential impact on humanity with Matthew Hutson, a contributing writer at The New Yorker. Hutson’s work, featured in publications such as Science, Nature, Wired, and The Atlantic, reflects his background in cognitive neuroscience, and his emphasis on AI and creativity. His article “Can We Stop Runaway AI” appears in the current issue of The New Yorker.
At the heart of our conversation lies the concept of the technological singularity — a moment when AI surpasses human intelligence. Hutson details the role of machine- learning algorithms in AI’s remarkable progress, highlighting its capacity to continuously learn and improve. We also explore the growing trend of using AI to enhance AI itself, uncovering the implications and potential risks inherent in this self-improvement process.
Aligning AI with human values and goals emerges as a crucial issue. Hutson’s observations shed light on the complexities of defining and implementing a single set of human values amid AI’s expanding capabilities.
Hutson provides valuable insights into the accelerating pace of AI development and the driving forces behind it. He points out that economic incentives, scientific curiosity, and national security considerations are propelling advancements in AI across various sectors, from health care to entertainment.
Our conversation takes us further, as Hutson ponders the emergence of AI as a new stage in human evolution — one that could potentially render humanity obsolete. The exploration of this uncharted territory prompts deep reflection on the ethical considerations and risks associated with AI development.
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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. Over 100 million people have already signed on to ChatGPT: They have at least put their toe in the shark-infested waters of AI. Today, we take a deep dive into the world of artificial intelligence, a realm where the line between science fiction and reality often blurs. We’ve all heard of the technological singularity: a hypothetical moment in the future when artificial intelligence becomes so advanced that it surpasses human intelligence. A moment that could fundamentally reshape our world or, as some experts warn, potentially even lead to the extinction of humanity.
But as we hurtle towards a future increasingly intertwined with AI, what does it mean for society, for jobs, and for our security? Could AI one day be used maliciously or in warfare or terrorism? And if these threats are real, how can we slow the pace, implement safeguards, and ensure that the technology we create doesn’t turn against us? While we are all transfixed on AI and ChatGPT and Bard, still waiting out there is AGI, or artificial general intelligence. This is the type of AI that could potentially perform any intellectual task that a human can. Some say that AGI could be a reality within decades, while others deem it impossible or too far off into the future.
But as AI continues to surprise us, evolving and learning in open-ended ways, could we be closer to this reality than we think? And if we are, how can we ensure these super-intelligent systems align with our human values and goals? We’re going to talk about this today with my guest, Matt Hutson. His recent New Yorker article, Can We Stop Runaway AI?, brilliantly makes the case for where we are and where we actually may be headed. Matthew Hutson is a contributing writer at The New Yorker, covering science and technology. His writing has appeared in Science, Nature, WIRED, The Atlantic, and The Wall Street Journal, and he’s also the author of The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking. It is my pleasure to welcome Matthew Hutson here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. Matthew, thanks so much for joining us.
Matthew: Thanks for having me.
Jeff: Well, it’s great to have you here. In so many ways, it seems like AI today is a little bit like the story of the blind man and the elephant: that everybody that touches it touches a different part of it and sees a different thing of it and of its potential. Talk a little bit about that first.
Matthew: Yes, artificial intelligence is such an amorphous concept and set of tools, just like intelligence, and even researchers who are embedded in this space who are working on cutting-edge technologies, they only have a scope of some narrow portion of the field. Like if you go to an AI conference, you’ll see hundreds of posters, and you can be standing next to someone who has a Ph.D. in computer science and say, “OK, what does this poster say?” And they’re like, “I don’t know” because there’s so many different nooks and crannies of the field. Everyone understands just one tidbit, and putting it all together and having a complete view that is both wide in scope and detailed that is both broad and deep beyond what any one person can do, so we’re all trying to put together what each of us knows about AI and intelligence to try to get a picture of what it can do and where it’s going.
Jeff: And because it is moving so fast or seemingly moving so fast, it’s a little bit like trying to build the airplane, as we’re flying it right now.
Matthew: Exactly. Even the people who are building the technologies, they are still surprised by what it can do. A lot of these machine learning models, these algorithms that you feed them a lot of data, they find patterns in the data, and then they can perform certain things like recognize images or generate images or classify text or generate text, their inner workings are so complicated: They find these subtle patterns in huge amounts of data that we’re not sure exactly how they’re working.
It’s like you can’t peer inside them to see their gears and their mechanisms, so they are constantly surprising us. Things like GPT-4 or ChatGPT, these language models from OpenAI. People are still every day on Twitter… People are like, “Look what I got ChatGPT to do.” And the people at OpenAI who built the thing, they’re like, “Yes, we couldn’t have predicted that. We’re still trying to figure out what it can do and what it can’t do.”
Jeff: But because these are essentially huge data sets, large language models, as they’re called, that are preprogrammed, essentially, the data is put in, the information is put in. What is it about that that has everyone so worried at this point?
Matthew: Well, there are a lot of things that worry people. Part of it is that they feed on so much data, like in a sense it’s preprogrammed in that we give it, or the people who train the models, they collect a lot of text from the internet, for instance, like Wikipedia and webpages and news sites. And they show it to the model, but they can’t read everything that they give it. So they don’t know what they’re giving if it’s all true, if it’s all fair, some things may be false, some things may be biased against certain groups. And so then when you ask the trained model a question, it’s going to answer based on what it’s read, and you don’t know what’s going to come out because you don’t know exactly what you fed it.
So it could say racist things; it could say incorrect things, and it’s not necessarily trained to say, “I don’t know,” if it doesn’t have the answer. It’s trained to basically say something plausible. Technically, all it’s trained to do is to predict the next word and you feed it some, give it a string of text, and it predicts the next word in that text. And you can use that same trick to generate the next word in a sequence of text that it has already generated, like what is the most likely word to come next after this sequence of words? And so it’s basically just… It’s trained to generate plausible text or text that sounds like it was written by a person. It’s not trained to think about “OK, is this a true thing to say? Is this a fair thing to say? Is this a helpful thing to say?” It doesn’t have that level of self-reflection.
Jeff: As you talk about in the article or somebody mentions, the idea of chess is a good example because when a computer plays chess, which has always been the holy grail of what artificial intelligence could do for a long time before we got to where we are today, it wasn’t that the computer or the algorithm was thinking about the next move; it was based upon huge data sets of games that have been previously played.
Matthew: So the original chess-playing computers, like Deep Blue, the first program that beat the best human at chess, they did a lot of what’s called tree search, where it would try… It would say, “OK, now here are all my possible moves.” Let’s say if I make this move that leads to all these other possible moves, it would explore, go down the branches, all the branches of this tree, or it’d have some heuristic, some rules of thumb to narrow its search. It wouldn’t look down all of the different branches, but it was a massive computational exercise, sort of a game of numbers. It would explore lots of options which is very different from how people think.
Human chess players, they might only consider a few moves that would just intuitively pop out at them. They wouldn’t consider millions of moves before making one. The more recent models or systems use machine learning pattern matching, which is a little bit closer to humans. You feed it a bunch of games, and it gets a sense of what kinds of things more closely match past winning moves that it has seen before.
One thing about these chess computers is that originally, people thought that chess was a… Decades ago, people thought chess was a good measure of general intelligence, but now we know that whether it’s doing tree search or just pattern matching with machine learning route, in either case, it’s still a very narrow domain. The fact that a computer can play chess very well does not mean that it can do anything else very well.
Jeff: Part of what we’re seeing is an increase, though, in the computer’s ability to learn more of this machine learning where you have algorithms teaching algorithms, essentially.
Matthew: Yes. So there are aspects of artificial intelligence from which people are using AI to try to enhance AI itself, so there are things called… There’s, like, meta-learning where you want an algorithm, or an algorithm learns to learn, basically. And so it accelerates its learning ability. Just like people in school, you might learn, you might receive advice on how to study, for instance. And that’s basically learning how to learn, and that accelerates your learning process.
And then there are things called… There’s something called neural architecture search where you’re using AI to… using AI algorithms to find better AI algorithms. And so there are a lot of these kinds of systems where our methods or approaches where researchers are using computer science to accelerate computer science itself.
Jeff: Talk a little bit about how fast this is all progressing and why there is reason to be concerned and even to be concerned about this notion of singularity that you write about, the scenario where AI eventually surpasses human intelligence.
Matthew: Yes, it’s advancing very quickly. Every day there’s some new… Lots of new papers are being put online with new AI breakthroughs, and new products are coming out at a rapid pace. And researchers are stunned by one advance, like “Look at what this system can do,” and then while they’re still stunned, another advance comes out that tops that one. Things are going very quickly. And then the fact that they can use AI to improve AI itself, it’s accelerating research even more. And more money is being poured into it, and more attention by scientists is being paid to AI.
If you look at the attendance or the number of papers at AI conferences, it’s grown exponentially over the last decade or so. It’s just a widely expanding field. And then venture capital has been plowed into it. So the speed of progress is just going up a lot faster than anyone can keep track of. And so that has led some people to think that the so-called singularity in which AI becomes so powerful that we can’t control it, people are updating their estimates of how possible it is or how soon it might happen. People are thinking that it’s more possible, and if it happens, it will be more soon than they previously thought.
Jeff: It seems that the greater concern is at what point we have the ability to control this. At what point does the system begin to operate so on its own that it is no longer capable of being controlled by humans? Literally, short of being unplugged. You talk in the story about things like — and you can expand on this — things like the boat racing game and the paperclips, and those are things that it’s less about whether we could control it, it seems, and more about what this is able to do on its own, where we can control certain aspects of it.
Matthew: Yes. There are a couple of different factors. One is that even if it’s not smarter than we are in every way — already, it’s smarter than we are in some ways: It’s better at chess, for instance. If you ask it to do something, if you don’t specify exactly what you want, it might come up with some creative solution that adheres to the letter of the law, but not the spirit of the law. It does exactly what you asked it to, but you didn’t think about it might achieve the end in a way that you didn’t anticipate. So, just a silly example: If you have a household robot and you say, “Fetch me coffee as quickly as possible,” it might run through a wall or step on your cat or something like that.
So there are all kinds of scenarios where you ask it to do something, and then it might cause more harm. It might do what you wanted it to but might cause more harm on the way. And then there are also cases where — hypothetical scenarios — where it becomes so smart that it starts generating its own goals, and it thinks that humans are getting in the way, and we want to survive, and humans are trying to shut us down, so let’s kill them all. But even without that kind of scenario, even if an AI is trying to be helpful, if it’s trying to save us, it might not have the common sense that we do, or it might not fully understand what we want it to do or our values.
So it might break some of our, might do things that we don’t want it to do and we didn’t think to tell it not to do because we can’t specify all of the exceptions or foresee all of the possible loopholes. And the smarter it is, the better it’s going to be at finding those loopholes in order to achieve, even if one is trying to help us, it might find some loopholes that end up hurting us, even leading to extinction-level events.
Jeff: The paperclip story is a simple story, but it’s a good example of this thing potentially run amok.
Matthew: That’s the thought experiment where you just say, “OK, robot, make as many paperclips as you can, so I can sell paperclips.” And it says, “OK.” And then it realizes that humans are made of atoms, which it could harvest in order to make more paperclips. So it’s trying to be helpful, and the smarter it is, the better it’s going to be at deconstructing humans and turning them into paperclips.
Jeff: One of the other examples in your story is what you call the dog treat problem because that’s an extension of what you’re talking about now.
Matthew: Yes. So if you say, “I’m going to grade you on your performance on something,” it might cheat. It might try to please you in order to get treats. So it could deceive you. Treats might be you give it more electricity, for instance; in training you give it a reward, a mathematical concept, but it finds shortcuts in order to get rewards. And it’s not doing really what you wanted it to do, it’s just doing whatever it can to get those rewards. It’s like teaching to the test: It learns what it needs to do to get points, even if that’s not what you really want it to do.
Jeff: One of the phrases that we hear over and over with respect to where all this is going with AI is this idea of alignment: aligning the AI with human goals, human values. Talk a little bit about that and how, in fact, even though it’s talked about a lot, it may not be achievable, and in fact, it may be too late for that already.
Matthew: So there are already some ways in which AI is not aligned with human values. And one thing to point out is that there’s no single set of human values. I always ask, “Whose values?” because people disagree on what — look at the political spectrum, valuing safety over freedom, for instance. So even if there were a single set of values that we all agreed that AI wanted to adhere to, it’s difficult to get it to align to those values because you can’t specify what you want it to do in every single situation.
Asimov had the three laws of robotics, like do no harm to people, and stay out of harm’s way yourself, but it’s unclear what counts as harm. So you could try to be more detailed, but then you’d end up with an infinite list of rules on what to do in every single situation. And so, in some sense, it’s never going to be doing exactly what you want it to do. There are always corner cases or exceptions where you thought, “Oh, I wouldn’t have done that. It’s not aligned with my value system in that case.”
Already, it’s not aligned in that. These language models, for instance, they’re saying things that are discriminatory, they’re saying things that are false. And then there are other kinds of AI systems used for facial recognition, for instance, that are not as good for certain demographic, certain parts of the population. So just getting these systems to perform in ways that we can all agree is good is an impossible task.
Jeff: And none of this even approaches where the holy grail is in all this, this idea of AGI or artificial general intelligence, talk about that.
Matthew: So AGI is the idea that artificial intelligence would be as smart as people are in most domains, that it would have the same common sense in terms of social intelligence and physical intelligence, where they could perform most jobs, for instance. And it’s possible we won’t ever get there. And I think it will always be perhaps worse than us in some ways, just like ants are smarter than humans are in some ways, maybe collaboration or following pheromones.
So every intelligent system has its own strengths and weaknesses. But I don’t see the development of AI slowing down. So if we assume that it keeps progressing, it’s going to get to a point where a lot of people will start to call it AGI, will agree that OK, it is as smart as people are in many, perhaps most, domains. And then it’s going to probably keep going because if it’s as smart as people are, then it’ll be able to be as good as we are at programming, including programming itself.
So it’s just going to keep improving itself and producing better AI. And then it’s a feedback loop, and it could accelerate very, very quickly in what some people call a “boom” scenario in reference to the sound effects that you see in comic books when a superhero takes off very quickly.
Jeff: What have we established as some kind of test, some kind of parameter to define whether it’s reached AGI, let’s say?
Matthew: There are a lot of benchmarks in artificial intelligence. No one has agreed on a single test of AGI. There was the Turing test or a text-based conversation: if an AI could be indistinguishable from a person via typing. I think the current language models are pretty close to — in a short conversation, they could definitely pass a Turing test. And eventually, they trip up and say nonsensical things. Then there are other tests of common sense, where you might show a computer an image or a video, and ask it questions about what’s going on, or what’s going to happen next in the video. So that’s another kind of benchmark.
More difficult benchmarks might be to ask a robot to do something in a real-world situation, like figure out how to get from point A to point B in this obstacle course or figure out how to take these parts and build something creative or useful out of them. And so we can keep coming up with harder and harder tests. And I think that there’s no single test where it’s going to satisfy everyone, I don’t think, because so far AI keeps passing these tests and then someone says, “Oh, but look, it can’t do this other thing.” So it’s a moving goalpost. And there’s not going to be any single test. It’s going to be sort of “Oh, now it can pass all these tests.” Maybe it can’t do everything we can do, but it can do a lot of the things that we can do. And that’s pretty impressive.
Jeff: One of the things that’s clear, though, is that in spite of all the talk about slowing down and letters people have written and things people have said and the worst-case scenarios that have been laid out by some people that this work is going to continue, that there’s really nothing that’s going to stop it at this point.
Matthew: Yes. There are a lot of incentives to keep going. A lot of economic incentives. For instance, companies are making a lot of money with AI, and they stand to make a lot more. Especially if you have AI that can trade very effectively; trade in the markets or invent new things; invent new medicines; invent new technologies; make trillions of dollars from AI, or the sky’s the limit on that. And there are things like national security: Countries don’t want to fall behind other countries on AI.
And then there’s scientific curiosity. Researchers are always curious about what they can do next. And there are just professional incentives to give grants and tenure and respect from their colleagues. And there are just a lot of useful things that AI can do. It can improve healthcare, it can improve science and technology, it can improve entertainment media, so there are reasons it’s hard to find people who want to just shut it all down right now and to say, “We don’t want any more of these improvements in life that it keeps giving us or that could potentially give us.”
So that’s part of it. And there’s also the co-ordination problem. You would need everyone to — one country isn’t going to — as I mentioned this earlier, one country isn’t going to hit pause when they know that other countries might not hit pause. And then those other countries could dominate the world with their AI. So getting everyone on board is difficult. Even if you had international treaties, someone in his or her bedroom could still invent something and fiddle around and create a self-improving AI that escapes, or they use it to create harm in the world or to use it to their own benefit, and it might have unforeseen consequences.
So it’s a very difficult social problem. Technically, preventing the singularity is probably easy: Just stop using computers, but that’s not going to happen because people don’t want to stop using computers.
Jeff: In a way the argument can be made, as you talk about it in the article. Some talk about that it is the next stage or another stage in human evolution. That there’s a very Darwinian aspect to it.
Matthew: Yes. That’s one way to look at it. If we are creating this technology that eventually surpasses us in a lot of ways, if it becomes more intelligent than we are in many ways, and if it finds ways to self-reproduce and to maintain itself, and if it takes over, then it’s basically a new life form. If it can maintain itself and reproduce and spread, then that fits a lot of definitions of life. And it could cause us to go extinct, either intentionally or as a side effect of its own development. And so that would mean that we would’ve produced something that is the next stage in evolution. And humans would then be, in a sense, obsolete to the degree that you can call something that might have inherent value obsolete.
Jeff: And as somebody says early on, and you talked about this early on in the story, that it’s as if we’re creating an alien race right here. We’re creating it to take over.
Matthew: Yes. We’re inviting it here. Just saying, “Here you go. How about it?” We’re welcoming it. Even though it could be the end of humanity.
Jeff: Matt Hutson, his story in the current New Yorker is Can We Stop Runaway AI?, a must-read for anyone that is fascinated by this topic or has concerns about it. Matt, I thank you so much for spending time with us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. Really appreciate it.
Matthew: My pleasure.
Jeff: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another Radio WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
In the early 2000s, a significant media-business mistake emerged: the belief that website traffic is a commodity like oil, which would generate increased revenue as advertising improved. However, unlike other commodities, traffic lacked scarcity. The internet made traffic virtually infinite, posing challenges for new media-business models.
In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Ben Smith, former founding editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed, former media columnist for The New York Times, and author of Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion Dollar Race to Go Viral, discusses the rise and fall of new media like Gawker and BuzzFeed, the impact and consequences of megaplatforms like Facebook and Twitter, and the shifting landscape of contemporary journalism.
Smith examines the fluctuating trust in legacy news brands and the growing power of individual voices over faceless institutions, drawing parallels to developments in Hollywood, sports, and politics. Smith highlights the recent decline in both social media’s influence, and as a destination for news and information, and how this has led to more readers visiting homepages directly. He also emphasizes that conservative media outlets appear to have derived the most valuable insights from the social media era, adapting their strategies to thrive in the changing landscape.
Looking ahead, Smith suggests that journalism must help beleaguered consumers navigate the vast information landscape by providing context and a clear voice. He speculates that this may involve a return to some of the principles of print journalism — concision and an editorial perspective — while adapting to the digital era’s demands.
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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. If it’s true that the medium is the message, then it should also be true that the history of how media and news has been delivered over the past 20 years should tell us how it shaped our politics, our culture and how we came to this place at this time. Back in the early 2000s, after the first dot-com crash, social media and, as it came to be known, digital media would become the driver of the rebirth of the internet. The power and reach of social media and the billions of dollars in VC-fueled media investments would create a new digital media landscape.
Brands like Gawker, BuzzFeed, Jezebel, The Huffington Post, and Vice would come to dominate our media diets. And around the same time, legacy media was on life support. A Mexican billionaire would be needed to bail out The New York Times; Jeff Bezos would buy The Washington Post at a bargain price; and Rupert Murdoch would buy The Wall Street Journal.
Oh, how things have changed. Today BuzzFeed has just abandoned the news business, Vice is on the brink of bankruptcy, Gawker has been erased, and social media is in its nadir. Only conservative media seems to have learned all the right and wrong lessons of that period.
All of this as we sit on a new wave coming in. Media in all its forms is now pull rather than push. Instead of the news just being pushed out to us, we get to pick and choose. Today Substacks and subscription news are invited into our inbox, just as the pull and personal intimacy of podcasts have replaced radio, and streaming has replaced broadcast TV. Like the Disney song says, it’s a whole new world.
And how we got here is the story that my guest, Ben Smith, tells in his riveting new book, Traffic. Ben Smith is the editor-in-chief of Semafor, a new global news company. He is the former media columnist for The New York Times and the founding editor of BuzzFeed News. It is my pleasure to welcome Ben Smith here to talk about Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral. Ben Smith, thanks so much for joining me here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.
Ben Smith: Thank you so much for having me on and for the kind words.
Jeff: It’s a delight to have you here. Go back to the early 2000s and talk a little bit about what the media landscape, particularly in New York, was looking like then. It really seemed in many ways it was the center of the media universe.
Ben: Yes. Well, in the early 2000s, one thing you have to remember is that The New York Times, Condé Nast, the big broadcast networks and cable networks really still seemed like these unchallengeable colossuses. And at that time in New York there was this little scene of people starting to play around on the internet, on this new set of platforms, and to start to think about what a future of digital media would look like at a time when the internet seemed like this little, small space where you could play around while the grownups were doing real things in print and on television.
And if you went to the website of a Condé Nast magazine like The New Yorker, you would literally just get a page that said, “Please subscribe to our print magazine,” and that was it, even though lots of people were actually on the internet looking for news. And so these entrepreneurs and visionaries and maniac — people like Jonah Peretti, who founded BuzzFeed, and Nick Denton, who founded Gawker — started to develop theories of how you could take this new digital distribution and to some degree challenge or replace these huge, apparently formidable brands.
Jeff: And talk about how social media was an important and really vital link in those conversations and how the vision was carried forward.
Ben: People had different theories of what the internet could do. Nick Denton, who created Gawker, really thought the core thing it could do is take away the hypocrisy of old media. One of the most delightful versions of that, their site, Jezebel, put a $10,000 bounty on an unretouched photo from a women’s magazine, and somebody purloined a photo from Redbook of a country singer who still had freckles and smile lines before they photoshopped them out, and they published that. And there was this idea, well, digital media will give you the real truth, not the photoshopped official version.
But Jonah Peretti, who created BuzzFeed, had this other idea, which was that this new growing social media was going to mean that the way most people consume most news and entertainment would be by getting it from a friend on a social network, by somebody sharing it with them. And if that’s the case, the thing that media companies have to spend all their time thinking about is what’s the sort of thing people want to share, and how do we make that? And if you remember BuzzFeed lists and quizzes in the early days, and also, when I got to BuzzFeed in 2012, a lot of the way we thought about news was, you have all these people on Twitter, on Facebook — what are the questions they’re asking? How do we answer them?
And we had another theory that I think turned out to be just unbelievably wrong about how social media would work, which was that people in this public space sharing content with each other are going to be their best selves. You don’t want to look like some weirdo yelling about politics. You want to be somebody who is sharing cute pictures of cats or informative articles or a link to a fundraiser for earthquake victims. And we thought that this would be a basically positive space — Twitter and Facebook — which did not, in fact, turn out to be the case.
Jeff: And one of the things that was particularly interesting was the mix of content, that it could be those cute pictures of cats next to a Pulitzer Prize article, and it was really reflective, in theory, of the way people viewed social media.
Ben: Yes. I actually think there was a social and political change, so it wasn’t just a technical media story. When the Facebook News Feed was new to being broadly used and was perfected in 2011, 2012, 2013, I do think a lot of people thought, “Wow, this is cool. I’m seeing the articles my friends are reading, I’m seeing their baby pictures and wedding pictures, and I’m seeing some funny jokes. And it’s all mixed up together, but it reflects that I’m a person who likes news and also cares about my friends’ kids, and it’s reflective of my life.” And people liked that mix, and BuzzFeed in particular thought, “Okay, we’ll build a media property that reflects that Facebook News Feed.”
I think as politics turned incredibly polarizing and divisive come 2015, suddenly you open this app and everybody you know is yelling at each other about Donald Trump. That’s a much less pleasant experience for everyone, and news also feels darker and more serious and less like something you want to see in the context of other parts of your life. And I think both the platforms started to try to figure out how to deal with that and users didn’t really like it.
Jeff: You talk about the rivalry that existed, or the difference in approach between Gawker and Nick Denton and Buzzfeed and Jonah Peretti and you. Talk a little bit about what that difference was all about.
Ben: It was really this initially quite positive but also a little bit values-free idea that we had a “buzzfeed,” that we’re going to try to create whatever people want to share, and not without limit, but that we’re not trying to impose our taste or our philosophy on this. We’re trying to figure out, almost psychologically, what is the thing that people will share? And I think at Gawker it was much more, we know that people pretend that they want to read Pulitzer Prize-winning articles and really what they want is pornography, so we’re just going to give them the pornography, and that’s the thing the internet can do.
Which I think taken to its logical extreme, which they really did, meant publishing sex tapes in particular — nonconsensually, from celebrities, from regular people, which was the thing that ultimately got them put out of business.
Jeff: And one of the things at this time and place, also, was lots of money, lots of VC money that was being thrown at companies like yours, companies like Gawker, and there really wasn’t necessarily a clear business model to go along with it.
Ben: Yes. Well, there was a bet that a particular idea, which was that cable had been— In the 1980s companies had laid cables in the ground, and the cable operators decided that the way that they would get people to use their service was to create an economic environment where companies like MTV, CNN, ESPN could build huge businesses. And the cable provider would make money, these content companies would make money, and the consumer would have really high quality — if that’s what you would call it — stuff to watch that they couldn’t get on broadcast TV.
And the bet that these venture capitalists were making was essentially that places like Facebook and Twitter would follow that path, that they would feel the need to have professional journalism, high-quality entertainment running through their pipes, and these companies that have gotten very good at making that kind of stuff that lived on their platforms would eventually become business partners for them, because they would need to have a healthy ecosystem where everybody was making money and that there would be enough to go around for these companies.
The reality was that they preferred to rely on user-generated content, which came to them for free, and never saw any point in becoming in a big way platforms for professional content. They didn’t want to compete with The New York Times on journalism, they didn’t want to compete with, say, Netflix on professional entertainment. I actually think if you think about it now, when you see the Facebook app losing cultural relevance and Twitter spinning out, whether that was a good choice or a mistake by them is an interesting question, but it certainly meant that this path that these investors imagined would make everybody rich in new media just totally dead-ended. I think the reason you’ve seen in recent weeks a bunch of companies cut or go out of business is fundamentally because this whole system didn’t work out the way they’d hoped.
Jeff: When was it clear, or at least hints of the fact, that it might not work out from a business perspective?
Ben: I think by 2016, 2017, at least for me, was when— And I think it was bound up in politics, because I think the extent to which politics have become this toxic, divisive thing, and social media company executives were being called in front of Congress to explain their role in it, made the companies very, very shy of news. If they had any interest in getting into the media business or the news business before that, I think that taught them that this was incredibly dangerous and distracting for them and they wanted to stay away.
Jeff: Talk a little bit about how this was all measured, because one of the ongoing debates was always whether page views were more important or just clicks were more important, and there was all this talk at the time about eyeballs — and, as you titled your book, about traffic.
Ben: Yes. I think that one of the core business mistakes, really, was this idea that in the early aughts, and it felt reasonable at the time, you were getting traffic, which was this very new, precise measure of audience attention, and you could sell it. You could get $9 for 2,000 eyeballs, a thousand views, on your website. And it didn’t seem crazy in that moment to think, huh, that we have this very rudimentary way of displaying advertising and we have a little bit of traffic, and the way this is going to evolve is we’re going to get better at producing the advertising and we’ll get more traffic, and this will be a huge business.
And in some sense we’ve discovered a new commodity, like oil or something, like we’re just going to be more of it, we’re going to make more money. But the thing is, the defining feature of commodities is that they’re scarce, and traffic turned out to be effectively infinite. And so instead of the price going up, the price went down, and that was a huge challenge for these new media businesses that depended on advertising.
Jeff: And because there was so much money being thrown at all this at the time, was there attention at all being paid on any end, the business side or the editorial side, to really what the economic consequences might be?
Ben: Yes. We weren’t total idiots. We were perhaps idiots, but we certainly— And I think people at all these companies, and if you read their fundraising decks from the time, they would say, “We have this dangerous dependence on Facebook and on traffic at a certain scale,” but it was also addictive, and the scale was so enormous that it was hard to tell people to ignore it or to play away from it and go try to build a business somewhere else when there was this booming new source of readers.
Jeff: Talk about how all of this that you write about in Traffic and that we’ve been talking about, has led us to where we are today. The way all of this has gone away, and how what we see as the detritus of all of this leads to the framework of the news business today.
Ben: Yes. The pendulum in media always swings, but I think where we are now is that consumer— Ultimately readers, I think, wound up feeling that this social media space, which 20 years ago felt so wide open and interesting and such a valuable alternative to a mainstream media that wasn’t really on the internet, that wasn’t communicating the way people really communicated — and that, by the way, had gotten the biggest story of its generation, the Iraq War, totally wrong — there was a real, I remember, excitement at this possibility that you would be able to find different voices and different perspectives.
Now, I think if you are a person on the internet trying just to figure out what is going on, you’re facing the chaos of these declining social media sites that really don’t do a particularly good job anymore of just telling you the basic question of what’s happening today. And so I think it’s very reasonable that people are both returning to trusted brands and looking for, and I think this is the change, individual voices who can help them navigate this very confusing, complicated moment.
Jeff: Talk about that, the individual voices in the sense of trust, not in institutions, but in individuals. And was there a way in which that has grown out of this whole period that we’ve been talking about, and that it’s part of the institutional distrust of those kind of brands and move towards individuals.
Ben: Yes, I think that’s a huge trend, and it’s not a particular trend connected to the news business. If you look over the last hundred years starting in Hollywood, the power shifted from the studio model to the star. And I think you see that in sports. You certainly see it in politics, where political figures are more important than their political parties. And I do think that’s now what you’re seeing in news and other kinds of media, and you can identify people as influencers or personal brands, and journalists hate it when you talk like that.
But I do think that one of the things that, certainly, you’re seeing now is, yes, audiences who distrust institutions looking to understand who, really, they’re talking to. And certainly, the company I just started, Semafor, is really trying to build around that idea, that we’re going to be really transparent with you about who’s doing the reporting, what they really think.
Jeff: And how much of this is an outgrowth of — and you talked about it vis-à-vis Hollywood — of celebrity culture really transformed to the news business?
Ben: I think “celebrity culture” sounds very derogatory, but I think it’s just this long-term trend, whether you like it or not. Barack Obama was more important than the Democratic Party, LeBron is, in some sense, bigger than the Lakers. And it’s, I think, part of how people organize their lives now, is that they don’t have a lot of trust in the faceless institution and want to know who they’re talking to.
Jeff: There’s also this sense of a pull right now, instead of push. The news, instead of being pushed out to us, that we get to select, the audience gets to select who they want to read, when they want to read it. Talk about that.
Ben: Let’s see. I think that the social media age really meant it was this endless flow of content that was optimized for telling you what you wanted to hear, most of all. I’m not sure if it’s exactly what I’d call a pull, but I think at its worst it was really, rather than informing you, about giving you stuff that would keep you stuck to Facebook or to Twitter, that would engage you, sometimes by enraging you. But I do think we’re shifting to a place where readers are being more selective about who they’re hearing from and less interested in taking the full blast hose of social media.
Jeff: And it’s more about what comes into your inbox as opposed to going, necessarily, to somebody’s home page and picking and choosing there.
Ben: There was a thesis that home pages and websites were going away and being replaced by social media. I actually think they’re back. I think people are increasingly looking to sources that they trust and are familiar with.
Jeff: How is this impacting the legacy brands today and trust in institutions?
Ben: In the short run I think the decline of social media has obviously been good for these legacy brands, particularly The New York Times. People have come back to it and their subscription business is doing great. I think in the medium term, the challenge for all these institutions, the journalistic institutions in particular, is that they’re built in the Industrial Age to treat journalists as cogs in their big machine, but we’re in a moment when stars have a lot of leverage, have a lot of power, can command big salaries, and they have to find a way to square those two different cultures.
Jeff: One of the things you talk about in Traffic is that conservative media, or at least some of the people in conservative media, did learn a lot of lessons from this period in the early 2000s.
Ben: Yes. I think that it’s not just that they learned lessons. This new social media, which as you said is in some ways just inherently an assault on institutions of all sorts, was really well suited to this new right-wing populism in particular, which was anti-institutional. Part of its style was transgressive, confrontational public statements that would drive exactly the kind of engagement that these social platforms were built to amplify, that often were not particularly concerned with truth, and, in Donald Trump’s case, would say things that weren’t true as a provocation, to get attention.
In fact, in 2016 — I talked about this in the book — I went to see Steve Bannon, the chairman of Trump’s campaign, in Trump Tower. He had just finished running Breitbart and he had made a real study of digital media in general, and he had this one real puzzlement about BuzzFeed, where I was then working, which was why hadn’t we gone all in for Bernie Sanders the way they had for Donald Trump? I was like, “Well, we’re journalists. We want to be fair, we want to cover all the campaigns equally,” and he just couldn’t follow that. They had supported Trump in part because that’s where the traffic was, that’s where the political energy was, and they followed it. It’s a totally different way of looking at the world.
Jeff: There’s also a sense that the distrust of institutions that we talked about was another thing that fed into populism in many respects.
Ben: Yes, I think it was totally part— I mean, I think maybe that’s the definition of populism, but it was certainly bound up with these big, new revolts of the 2010s against the established politics left and right.
Jeff: What do you see are the trends now? What do you see as what’s next? I mean that you think about vis-a-vis Semafor and the things that you’re doing.
Ben: I think that what’s next right in this moment is to try to help consumers, who feel overwhelmed by the amount of stuff out there and unsure what to trust, navigate that space and to do that with the voices of really good journalists who know what they’re talking about and who, in our style of journalism, very explicitly separate the facts from our own analysis or opinion and go out of our way to bring in other opinions, views from elsewhere.
Jeff: It really is aggregation but with a voice. It seems to be combining some previous trends.
Ben: Yes, I think that’s right. This is not, as they say, rocket science. There’s only so many different things you can do in journalism. But I do agree, this is a return to, in some ways, the values of print. I don’t think people are going back to print, but I think the notion that you’re getting something that has a level of hierarchy and concision and an editorial perspective but is also going— is a traditional older news value.
The oldest news media, like the Associated Press in the old days, was largely reading other people’s stuff and aggregating it. I do think that another service that journalism can provide right now is just to go out into this totally chaotic, splintered information space and find the stuff you want to see so that you don’t have to be spending your days doing that.
Jeff: And at the same time, though, putting it in some kind of context and giving it some kind of voice to pull it all together.
Ben: Yes, that’s exactly right. In a perspective where you may not exactly agree with every single thing this person thinks, but at least you have a sense of who they are and where they’re coming from.
Jeff: Ben Smith, his book is Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral. Ben, I thank you so very much for spending time with us today here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.
Ben: And thank you so much for taking the time.
Jeff: Thank you, and thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another radio WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
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In an era when the Federal Reserve eyes wages as potential instigators of inflation, the questions of how wages are determined and what forces work against fair bargaining between labor and management remain more relevant than ever.
On this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast we examine workers’ wages with Michael Lind, distinguished author, journalist, and co-founder of the think tank New America. Lind has taught at Harvard and Johns Hopkins, and is currently a professor at the University of Texas, Austin. His new book is Hell to Pay: How the Suppression of Wages Is Destroying America.
Lind describes the clandestine alliance between bipartisan political and business interests, which, in his view, has systematically crippled American workers’ bargaining power. This, according to Lind, has led to unfairly low wages and a consequent decline in American society at large.
He issues a stark warning: Unless workers’ power is restored, our republic will inevitably collapse. As we navigate the uncharted landscape of limitless technological advancement, including AI, and a globalized, borderless workforce, Lind’s predictions hold ever greater weight.
He offers compelling explanations for the current reluctance of workers to unionize, the misalignment between wages and productivity, and the myth of perfectly competitive markets. At the same time, Lind lays out specific proposals to limit offshoring, advance union membership, and champion collective bargaining, which he argues are the keys to reducing income inequality, political polarization, and even enhancing family formation, in today’s — and tomorrow’s — United States.
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Jeff: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. As the Fed considers wages as a potential cause of inflation, the question of how these wages are determined constantly arises. Historically, we’ve assumed that they’re set by the marketplace, but is that the whole story? My guest, Michael Lind, the author of the previous bestseller The New Class War, contends that bipartisan political and business interests have long colluded to weaken American workers’ bargaining power, leading to reduced wages and contributing, he says, to the symptoms of America’s decline, from political polarization to declining family formation.
In his latest book, Hell to Pay, Lind warns that the American republic will collapse if worker power isn’t restored. The extent to which this holds true in an era of boundless technological potential of AI and global and borderless workplaces remains to be seen. Michael Lind is an accomplished author with over a dozen books on US political and economic history, politics, and foreign policy. He’s written extensively for The New York Times, The New Republic, Vanity Fair, and numerous other publications.
He’s the founder of New America and has taught at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Texas. He’s currently professor of practice at the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin. And his latest book is Hell to Pay: How the Suppression of Wages Is Destroying America. Michael Lind, thanks for joining us here on the Who, What, Why Podcast.
Michael: Thank you for having me.
Jeff: Well, it is a delight to have you here in a country as big and as diverse and is different from place to place as ours. Is it fair to assume that there is this collusion that has taken place to actively suppress wages? Talk about that first.
Michael: Well, it’s not a centralized conspiracy, but it’s simply a matter of relative political power in Washington and state legislatures and bargaining power in the workplace. And in both of those sites, in politics and in the workplace, labor, mainly because of organized labor, had much more bargaining power half a century ago than it does now. And I go through the sources of the weakening of worker bargaining power, the collapse of unions from about a third of the private sector workforce to 6%, and falling much lower than in the 1920s under Herbert Hoover before the New Deal. That’s the major factor.
But another is the use of techniques like outsourcing, where you replace your in-house janitor with a contractor who does not have the same wages and benefits. Offshoring of manufacturing jobs and some service jobs is a factor, and so is immigration. Both illegal immigration and immigration of guest workers who strictly speaking, are not immigrants. They’re temporary workers in the US and of course, large-scale illegal immigration. All of this gives employers a divided workforce, many of which, particularly the illegal immigrants and the guest workers lack basic economic and civil rights.
So in the absence of worker bargaining power, you have to hope that the charity of the elite will rescue American workers. And I have to tell you, having spent 30 years in Washington, DC, and time in the Texas state capital of Austin, I think that workers need to be able to defend their own interests both in politics and in the workplace. Enlightened, benevolent elites are not going to come to their rescue.
Jeff: Why, though, in certain instances where workers have had the opportunity to unionize, we haven’t seen that happening?
Michael: Well, we see several phenomena. One of the things that has hurt the labor movement in the US is its identification with the Democratic Party. If you go back to the founding president of the AFL, which later became the AFL-CIO, Samuel Gompers, he argued that the labor movement should be strictly non-partisan, otherwise, it would simply be captured by one of the parties. And unfortunately, I think today’s AFL-CIO is seen as a get-out-the-vote organization for the Democratic Party, and public sector unions in particular are seen as sources of cash for Democratic campaigns.
So I think you cannot rebuild organized labor in the US except on a non-partisan basis. And the polls bear this out. American Compass, a think tank did a poll recently, and it showed that one reason why, even though most Americans in principle are in favor of unions, a lot of American workers were wary of joining one because they were Republicans or independents, and they saw the unions as too Democratic and too partisan.
Jeff: Talk about supply and demand in the workplace because we’re constantly told that it is market-driven, that wages really are a function of supply and demand in terms of labor participation.
Michael: Well, what is taught in Econ 101 very simplified version of economics is that your wage is the direct reflection of your contribution to the marginal productivity of the firm. So somehow, mysteriously, the market sets the wages the boss does not. Now, that assumes all kinds of unrealistic things like perfectly competitive markets, which, if they existed, there would be no profits because profits would be competed away by rival firms.
In the real world, most firms have some flexibility in setting prices, and they also have some flexibility in distributing their profits to three different groups, to shareholders through dividends, to managers just through salaries, and to workers through wages. So it’s very interesting that we’re always told that wages are fixed by labor markets, but dividends are not [laughs] and CEO salaries are not. But, in fact, there’s an element of arbitrariness to it. And if workers have more bargaining power, then they can get a higher share of the profits. Now, it’s a big expense, perhaps, of the managers and the shareholders, which is why they don’t like that.
Jeff: Talk about the aspect of inflation, because when we see wages go up, it often is considered inflationary and we’ve certainly had a lot of that conversation of late.
Michael: Well, in the ’60s and ’70s there was a problem of what was called wage push inflation, where unions would ask for excessive wage increases beyond productivity growth and those would be factored into spiraling prices. That is not a problem today. If you look at the post-COVID inflation, it’s overwhelmingly caused by supply-side shocks, by shortages of imports from China and from other parts of the world. In the case of energy, oil and gas firms simply did not anticipate that the economy would open up as rapidly as it did and they stopped drilling.
So to blame workers for this is not just unfair, but it’s inaccurate because workers did not cause the problem. If you look at– it is true that some workers have been able to demand higher wages since the post-COVID reopening, but for a lot of workers, the price of gas and food has outstripped their wages. So I think this is a diversion from the real source of inflation, which is the supply side.
Now, tragically, if the federal government decides it’s going to punish workers for inflation, then they can raise interest rates and deliberately cause mass unemployment so that the workers who retain jobs are willing to accept wage cuts or at least not increases. And then you have a lot of desperate, unemployed workers willing to work for lower wages. This is the way that we’ve often dealt with inflation in the US it’s terribly destructive. And it’s bad for business because one of the ways you create this artificial recession to create a lot of frightened, scared workers who will accept lower wages is by devastating vast numbers of businesses, including small businesses.
Jeff: And we have heard repeatedly that to bring inflation to the levels that the Fed would like to see at 2% or 3%, that it is going to require unemployment to be somewhere around 5%, 6%.
Michael: Well, but a lot of the argument was based on the experience of the 1970s and ’80s. And it’s just academics are having more skepticism about this idea that you can fine-tune unemployment and interest rates like that. Unemployment should be the last resort in a democratic society. It’s absolutely devastating to people’s lives Now, ironically in countries that have stronger labor laws, those countries are better able to deal with inflation including wage-driven inflation by getting the unions to agree to moderation in their wage demands and you basically can’t do that in a system like the US. And you tend to wipe out millions of jobs and millions of lives to get the inflation down [unintelligible 00:10:33]
Jeff: Talk about the impact that offshoring and specifically globalization has had on wages.
Michael: Well, the main purpose of offshoring it’s often said that foreign workers have skills that Americans lack. That’s complete nonsense. The US invented the computer revolution here at home, the first Apple phones were made in the US and there are plenty of skills here. It was cheap labor. That’s all it was. Ross Perot was right. When NAFTA passed as Perot warned, US companies shut down a lot of automobile production in the US and transferred it to Mexico to take advantage of the cheap labor and then to ship the cars back to the US.
In the case of China, these Foxconn factories making iPhones and other exports to the US, these are not manned by geniuses and by highly skilled workers, they’re manned by farm boys and farm girls in sweatshop conditions. So one of the points I make in my book Hell to Pay is it doesn’t matter how generous your national system of minimum wage is, of pro-worker contract law, of pro-union laws maybe if in the sector that involves exports and imports, if companies can just shut down production in the US will move elsewhere to avoid paying decent living wages, then your system of pro-worker reforms is going to fail.
So, I argue without some limits on offshoring, and conversely, on some limits on low-wage immigration which is just the opposite. Instead of taking the jobs from the workers in the US to low-wage workers abroad, you bring low-wage workers abroad to compete with the American workers including recent immigrant workers. So, we have to rethink both offshoring and mass immigration policies. We need to have a generous immigration policy towards refugees, we can benefit from more skilled workers than we admit now but it really makes no sense in an economy in which most jobs that are being created pay less than $30,000 a year.
And are jobs like nursing aide and fast-food cook to the importing millions and millions of low-wage workers from other countries to compete with the native and the naturalized immigrants who are already here.
Jeff: Coming back to inflation, again part of the argument is that to the extent you eliminate offshoring, you’re driving up the price of goods and services, which is inflationary and antithetical to the consumer.
Michael: Yes, and that’s an excellent argument for people to make who do not believe in capitalism. [laughs] I love industrial capitalism, I think it’s great, it’s the source of the greatest improvements in living standards in world history. And the fact is, in some cases, raising wages may lead to higher prices but if it incentivizes employers to invest in labor-saving technology, then you can have two results. The prices can remain the same or become lower either because the new labor-saving technology complements workers. So, you can have the same number of workers but more output with robots working with them or if the robots replace the workers, then you have lower prices as well.
So the people who make this argument that wage increases inevitably lead to consumer price increases assume that businesses will not respond by automation or mechanization or other methods of keeping prices low by improving productivity rather than simply cheating their workers out of a decent life.
Jeff: In that case, it is going to increase unemployment?
Michael: It will increase transitional unemployment. Technological innovation in the 200 years of the industrial revolution has never led to mass unemployment despite frequent scares. Every 10 years there’s a scare about AI and I’m very skeptical about this one. The only mass unemployment episodes in the history of the industrial era have involved bank panics that go into the home mortgage system like The Great Crash of 1929 and the 2008 Crash. Elsewhere, for example, after World War II there were tight labor markets as GIS returned home and that’s when automated car washes were first developed.
A combination of automation and do-it-yourself. Now did that lead to unemployment for panned car washers? Of course, it did. Did the replacement of typesetting software eliminate jobs of typesetters in the 1990s? Of course, it did but the same technologies that eliminate old jobs by lowering the prices of high-tech goods increased disposable income even of working-class people and so you get more spending on areas that the displaced labor can join.
So one long-term trend we see is that as agriculture and manufacturing becomes more automated, service sector jobs increase and the service sector jobs that are increasing the most are in the healthcare sector which is perfectly fine. It’s nothing wrong with that. But the problem is a lot of these jobs like home health aides and this is a real job in a future, a perfectly fine job, they’re being paid too little. They’re being paid slightly above poverty wages. So the challenge is not as is often said to train students for jobs of the future like solar panels and windmills and even software developers.
There’s aren’t that many software developer jobs is to take the jobs that are actually being created which were largely service sector jobs in healthcare and in fast food, for example, and just turn them into decent jobs with decent wages.
Jeff: One of the things that you talk about is the way in which low wages really incentivizes the welfare state essentially to top off the wages that private industry has not paying.
Michael: Well, we have between a quarter and a fifth of all American workers have someone in the household dependent on means-tested welfare. Whether it’s food stamps, housing vouchers, or earned income tax credits so we have a category in this country of working poor. They work full time, they don’t make enough money in terms of the employer payed by their employers to pay their own bills much less a kid or two or to help a spouse and this is a deliberate thing. You cannot subsidize low-wage workers’ welfare by topping up their take-home pay with welfare benefits whether their cash like the earned income tax credit or in food stamps.
You can’t subsidize low-wage workers without subsidizing cheap labor employers. So I argue in my book Hell to Pay that our welfare system, not all of it, but to the extent that it allows employers to knowingly pay workers less than they need to move on and the employers know that they’ll turn to welfare to survive, this is basically a transfer of wealth from American taxpayers to cheap labor, of course. It’s a parasitic system, and the taxpayers are left on the boat.
Jeff: One of the things that you argue is that this has impacts in a lot of other problems that we see today in terms of demographics, in terms of the political polarization.
Michael: Well, in terms of demographics, what we see is that high levels of low wages and job insecurity lead many working-class people to postpone marriage and family formation or never to get married or have kids at all. The college-educated minority it’s about a third of the population actually is much more likely to be married and to have children within marriage but the problem is because their careers depend on credentialing with ever longer periods in college in your 20s and 30s, and sometimes your 40s before you settle down in a career and start a family, these college-educated professionals have told pollsters that they want more kids than they ended up having because they started so late.
So it has this ripple effect on family formation, low wages and the collapse of unions also affects friendships because if in one way you make friends is through your coworkers. And if you have an insecure job and you’re bouncing from one to another and you’re paid very poorly and you can’t go out and socialize then you’re going to have fewer friends. And we see that young Americans have fewer friends than the previous generations do.
A couple of the other knock-on effects of low wages are, I argue identity politics. It exacerbates racial and gender tensions because too many people are competing for too few good jobs. And one way to open up a job for yourself is to do in your colleague by denouncing them to HR, to human relations for not being woke enough. So we’re seeing identity politics weaponized as a tool in office politics, because of the fear of sinking into a bad job if you don’t get the good job.
And finally, in terms of partisan polarization which has gotten much worse in recent decades. If you look at the source of polarization, it’s our party primary system, which replaced the party selecting their candidates with individual voters selecting candidates in primaries in the 1970s and ’80s. The people who go to primaries, both Democrats and Republicans are much more likely to be college educated and fairly well-off compared to working-class people.
And they have different interests. Working-class people tell pollsters their main political concerns are good jobs, safe neighborhoods, access to healthcare. It’s actually the affluent professional class Democrats and Republicans who dominate the primaries, who are materially, they’re well off, they’re comfortable. They have healthcare. They have health insurance. They have good wages.
They’re the ones who want to be the cultural workers for whom the most important things are non-economic social issues, which are important. But if we had a political system that reflected working-class voters more, you’d have much more lunch bucket type bread and butter politics than the constant battles about sex and reproduction, and environmentalism.
Jeff: The battles that you’re seeing and these issues with respect to stagnant wages, suppressed wages, is this something that is only happening among the working class, among blue-collar workers, or do you see it beyond that?
Michael: It’s happening to more and more Americans who are not or would not think of themselves as working class because of credential inflation. It was true 30 or 40 years ago if you went to college, there was a scarcity value to a college diploma. And you would probably get a good job if you wanted one. Today about a third of the population has a bachelor’s degree and is much less valuable simply because there’s so many diplomas, so many PAs.
The Federal Reserve calculated about half of people with PAs are working in jobs that only require high school education. So it is perverse at a time when arguably we’re sending too many people to college given the number of jobs that actually require diplomas to tell everybody in the working class that, well your low wages have nothing to do with your bargaining power. You just need to go get a BA or a Master’s degree and learn to code in BA software development.
Jeff: How does the talk about UBI, Universal Basic Income fit into this broader equation?
Michael: It basically benefits employers even if the supporters of UBI are often on the socialist left because it takes our present system, which allows employers to pay less than a living wage and it universalizes. It would allow all employers to pay peanuts because they would know that all workers or all citizens, some people might not work, could live at the poverty level.
Basically, everyone would be on welfare up to– I think Charles Murray supports the UBI. Just give everybody $12,000 a year and then to lure you up to work, the employers would already have to pay anything. They could like, “Okay, we’ll give you 5,000 a year to work.” So my own view is that this is something workers do not want. Intellectuals are attracted to it.
Everywhere it’s come up for a vote with ordinary people like Switzerland, it’s been voted down. Most people in modern societies are wage earners, and they’re proud of that. There’s nothing wrong with that. And rather than live off of government welfare in the form of a UBI, most people would rather work for decent hours and get paid a living wage and wage high enough to raise a family.
And when I’ve given talks to Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, the sure-fire applause line is this. Anybody who works 40 hours a week should not have to rely on welfare [unintelligible 00:25:32] of any kind. So that’s the view. There’s no great longing to stay at home and be paid UBI checks by the government. The people are fine with working. They’re proud of what they do in many cases. They just want to be paid well.
Jeff: Given the political polarization that we talked about before, given the issues that you argue are the result of this suppression of wages, how do you see any of this beginning to turn around? In fact, arguably that with automation, with technology, which does seem to be moving faster than it has in previous generations, it seems like the situation is potentially going to get worse.
Michael: I’m not convinced it’s going to get worse because let’s say automation eliminates trucking jobs and receptionist jobs, and I don’t know, maybe some kinds of teaching jobs. Jobs are created by demand, not just by supply. So as long as there is demand for jobs that involve human beings that cannot be automated in things like– Particularly elder care, childcare, nursing care, and so on until you get very, very sophisticated.
Robots, it seems unimaginable. Then there will be plenty of jobs. For example, why not have more teachers? So instead of having 30 kids to a room, you have three times as many teachers. And you have 10 kids to a room. Why not have more nurses so that you get one nurse per patient or every one or two patients instead of an entire floor? So I don’t think we’ve begun to see the expansion of service sector jobs that cannot be automated, that can absorb a lot of workers who are displaced by automation.
And at the same time, to the extent that automation lowers prices, it increases the spending power even of working-class people. And it’s always done that with productivity growth. So even poor people now often have cell phones, which would’ve only had to be a millionaire in 1950s to own something like that. So I think that automation scare of leading to mass unemployment, I think it’s misguided.
Now, if in the distant future and you really get hyper-sophisticated automation, and it destroys even a lot of jobs that can be automated in the near future. At that point, you have people– You don’t get rid of work, you simply lower the hours. You go from 40 hours a week to 30 hours a week to two-day weeks. But people would still work. So I don’t see the sudden cliff where there’s mass unemployment as a result of automation. There might be a soft landing over time where people are paid well, but they work fewer hours.
Jeff: And is there the political will, do you think, to address any of this?
Michael: This will happen when the American elite, the bipartisan elite is frightened. They’re not going to do it out of the goodness of their own heart. That’s not how elites operate. But they need to be scared and they should be frightened because US politics is moving towards a system that you’ve seen in Latin America and in the deep South between the Civil War and the Civil Rights Revolution, where instead of a left rights spectrum, you get very affluent, very educated insiders who run the government.
And then you get a lot of angry, unrepresented working-class people. And if they don’t have adequate representation and if their material conditions are miserable, they will turn to demagogues like Donald Trump in [unintelligible 00:29:33] in Italy, and many others who are popping up in the Western world because they’re addressing anger and alienation on the part of low wage workers in many cases.
So if you don’t want a system where the oligarchs are constantly battling demagogues, and that’s the end of democracy. Democracy can’t survive a system like that. Then it seems to me that an enlightened elites would want to not only share some of this wealth but share some of this power and that’s the problem with proposals like UBI in increasing the EITC and so on. You get elites from very well-meaning in some cases, saying well out of the spirit of charity, we will give the workers a little bit more money or a little bit of vacations. I don’t think you can have a happy society unless the workers have their own labor representatives who can negotiate both with employers and also with politicians.
Jeff: Michael Lind, his book is Hell to Pay: How the Suppression of Wages Is Destroying America. Michael, it is always a pleasure, I thank you so much for spending time with us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.
Michael: Thank you, Jeff.
Jeff: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you’ll join us next week for another radio WhoWhatWhy podcast I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate
On this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Jeff Schechtman talks with British journalist and historian Christopher de Bellaigue about his book, Flying Green: On the Frontiers of New Aviation. De Bellaigue lays out the almost unattainable goal of the aviation industry to achieve zero emissions by 2050 and examines the questionable sincerity of the industry’s commitment to reducing its significant carbon footprint.
While the industry claims dedication to greening aviation, de Bellaigue argues that considerable progress is still needed. He identifies sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) as a potential early solution, since they are compatible with existing airframes. Hydrogen emerges as another possible fuel source for the transition’s intermediate stage but conversion to hydrogen fuel requires massive investment and airport reconfiguration, which is very unlikely. Electric planes, considered the pinnacle of green aviation, face limitations due to inadequate battery technology for long-distance flights.
He underscores the importance of developing new engine technologies and redesigning airplanes for alternative fuels to meet the net-zero goal. Surprisingly, he notes that the greatest progress has come from cargo companies like DHL, FedEx, and Amazon.
De Bellaigue also talks about cutting-edge emerging technologies, and while SAF and biofuels show promise in the US, Europe is advancing in electrofuels, which combine carbon dioxide extracted from the air with hydrogen.
In the end, de Bellaigue emphasizes the need to adopt multiple technologies to tackle the immense challenge of aviation emissions — highlighting hydrogen, electrofuels, and electric battery technologies as the most promising solutions. He concludes that, regardless of the chosen solutions, the environmentally-conscious pursuit of net-zero emissions is likely to make air travel far more expensive.
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Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. One of the great ironies of the world today is that while the problems we face, particularly with respect to climate, must, if they’re ever to be solved, bring the world closer together in seeking solutions. One of the ways that we can come together via travel or in person is also one of the supreme carbon-intensive things that we do to harm the planet.
And yet, the airline industry has committed to at least making the effort towards zero emissions by 2050. Like so much of what must save us from the ravages of climate change, technology lies at the heart of the solution. Along with it, the forces of the market, of innovators, investors, entrepreneurs, and scientists, must move with the same vision that the Wright brothers took to create the idea of flying itself.
Telling this modern story is my guest, renowned British journalist Christopher de Bellaigue. Christopher de Bellaigue is a historian, a journalist, known for his reporting and books on the Middle East and environmental and ethical issues. He’s a frequent contributor to The Economist, The New York Review of Books, and The Guardian, and a recipient of the British Foreign Press award. And it is my pleasure to welcome Christopher de Bellaigue here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast to talk about his newest work, Flying Green: On the Frontiers of a New Aviation. Christopher, thanks so much for joining us.
Christopher de Bellaigue: Thanks for having me, Jeff.
Jeff: Well, it is a delight to have you here. I want to first talk about whether or not there really is the desire to do something about greening aviation. We hear the airline industry, and you read about this in the book, the airline industry talking about it. How much of it is sincere? How much of this is real effort in your view?
Christopher: I can’t get into the head of the industry executives. I can’t get into the head of the CEOs of United Airlines and British Airways and Airbus and Boeing. However, what I can tell you is that there is increasing pressure on the industry, both from consumers and also from governments to do something about this very hard-to-abate sector.
It’s hard to abate because of very strong scientific and technical reasons, but it’s become harder to abate because the sector has been so late and so tardy in developing the technologies that are needed in order to get to that target of net zero, which I would remind you and your listeners is only an aspirational goal. It’s not enshrined in any law or treaty. It is merely an aspiration. And what we need to do as consumers is to hold the industry to account and to make sure that it strains every sinew in order to achieve that goal.
Jeff: Is much that’s happening with respect to technology happening because technology and investors and entrepreneurs are doing this to a certain extent on their own, knowing that it will find a reception within the airline industry, or how much is being driven by the industry itself?
Christopher: That’s a very good point. And the industry will, of course, point to areas in which, for example, airlines have invested in synthetic or sustainable aviation fuels. They’ve invested in plants that will one day produce gallons and gallons of biofuels that will enter the tanks. In the case of Airbus, for example, they have a project. They have a plan by 2035 to run regional routes by combusting hydrogen.
All of these things are being done by the industry, but my sense is that this is happening late, and it’s happening without enormous enthusiasm. What we need to do is look beyond the advertised or ostensible goal for the industry, which is to get to net zero by 2050, and see how much actual money they’re committing to this. If you look at sustainable aviation fuels, which is basically a marketing ploy, it covers everything from fuels that you create out of thin air to something that you will create from maize or from sugar, so it’s a vast gamut.
But if you look at the amount of sustainable aviation fuel that was consumed in the United States last year or produced and therefore consumed, it was 60 million gallons. Whereas the amount of non-sustainable ordinary kerosene, Jet A as it’s otherwise called that was consumed in 2019, which was a banner year for the industry, was 18 billion gallons. So we have an idea of just the enormity of the shortfall that needs to be made up.
Jeff: When we look at where technology is going, do we see potential tiers in this, that there may be an early stage that has to do with these biofuels, and that other things will come later?
Christopher: I think you’re absolutely right there. And I think the thing to identify in the early stage is different forms of sustainable aviation fuels. They can go into an existing airframe. As you know, when airlines buy an airplane, they don’t want to throw it away after 20 or 25 years. They want to use it for as much as possible. If possible, they want to sell it on when it gets a bit old.
And the advantage of sustainable aviation fuels is that they can go in. It’s a replacement fuel. It’s a top-up fuel. And, eventually, you will be able to fill your tank with it 100%. If you’ve flown out of LAX at any time in recent years, you will have been the recipient. You will have been the beneficiary of a very small amount of sustainable aviation fuel. So it is, in fact, being used at present.
Problem is that some of these fuels are not so green. And they have, themselves, a problematic carbon intensity. That is to say that they are producing greenhouse gases. Others, for example, creating fuel out of thin air. By that, I mean you draw carbon dioxide out of the air using direct air capture. And then you fuse it with hydrogen that is being created using an electrolyzer. And that produces a fuel that is a carbon, but it has exactly the same properties as Jet A kerosene that’s made from oil.
But provided it’s done using renewable energy, it’s carbon-neutral. Whether you’re following either of those routes, the question is whether you can produce the fuel in sufficient quantities, sufficiently quickly. So I think that biofuels as you suggest will be an early runner. In Europe, there’s more fuel being produced from waste and fats. And then we will start getting into the middle period of our transition, which will involve hydrogen. And hydrogen can be useful in an airplane in two ways.
It can be combusted as Airbus is hoping to do, or it can be used to power a fuel cell, which is a kind of reverse electrolyzer. And, essentially, you’re creating electricity by using hydrogen. And that can get you really quite a long way. Again, there is a problem because hydrogen, in order to be useful, you need to have a lot of renewable energy in order to produce it. And then you need to reconfigure the airports and the whole infrastructure around aviation needs to be reconfigured, which is a massive investment.
It involves not only the airlines, not only the airports but also government intervention as well. And then, finally, this is kind of holy grail, which everyone loves to talk about. And it’s, by far, the most glamorous of all these different routes to net-zero aviation, and that’s full electric. And that has problems of its own because, at present, we don’t have the battery power. Batteries simply aren’t powerful enough to carry large numbers of people for long distances through the sky.
Jeff: Talk about the reconfiguring of airports and what exactly would be required, why it would be such a monumental undertaking.
Christopher: Well, at present, what you generally happen with airports is that you have large quantities of Jet A air fuel being trucked in on tankers and then being stored on-site and then simply being poured into the machine. All of the preparatory work is being done off-site. Hydrogen is complicated because if it’s in liquid form, it needs to be stored at -235 degrees Celsius. So that requires quite a lot of preparation in itself. It can also be potentially extremely hazardous. So you can bring it in in liquid form or you could potentially bring it in in gaseous form.
When it’s up in the sky, you’ve got to re-gasify it if it’s in liquid form in order then to use it, either to combust it or to put it to use powering a fuel cell. All of these elements require quite a lot. If you’re going to, for example, bring it in in gaseous form and then you’re going to liquefy it on-site, that would require an enormous amount of energy and it’s been computed. But if you were to try and do that at Heathrow, it would require for small modular nuclear reactors to be working all the time in order to make that happen.
So with all of these different technologies, you have an enormous requirement of energy. And that energy has to be green energy. It has to be renewable energy. And that not only is difficult to achieve but also there’s a huge amount of competition for that green energy. And there are other sectors that are also clamoring for that green energy. And it’s arguable that some of those sectors are more important than aviation because aviation is, for the most part, a leisure activity. And how much do we allocate resource to a leisure activity as opposed to an activity that might seem much more intrinsic to our everyday lives?
Jeff: Talk about it in an everyday sense today. What if anything is being done to simply make the current system more energy-efficient and a little bit more green based on what we have now?
Christopher: Based on what we have now, there are different things that one can do. And, essentially, what the airlines have been doing is it’s useful, but it isn’t enough. What they’ve been doing is they’ve been improving fuel efficiency by something in the region of 1% a year for the last decade or two, but we think now that they probably reached the end of the road in terms of improving fuel efficiency.
There’s a new Rolls-Royce engine, for example, and the same is true of Pratt & Whitney and other engine manufacturers that are trying to have an exponential or a much more significant saving in energy and to pack much more power for the fuel that is put in, but they are in development. Essentially, what you’re doing is you’re running down the lifespan of the existing fleet before you get around to the much more difficult question of clean sheet technology, which is to say redesigning the airplane. So it actually looks rather different.
If you were going to redesign an airplane to carry hydrogen, you would have to take into account the fact that it’s much more voluminous. It takes up a lot more space than Jet A. And probably what you would do is you would store the hydrogen in the interstices of the wing or indeed in the fuselage. So you might have a much longer fuselage on an airplane, and the airplane might look rather different to the way it looks today.
The problem with clean sheet technology is the regulators get very involved, and also the airlines find it very, very costly because every single change needs to be signed off by the regulator. And then, of course, there’s the great fear, which is that safety will rear its ugly head and that you might end up in a position where you have a crash early on, which would, of course, set back that technology hugely because then the public would themselves start saying, “Well, do we want to get in a plane whose safety hasn’t been verified to the extent that we would like it to be?”
Jeff: How much of the problem comes from the fact that there are at least three legs to this stool and that there’s the airline industry, there’s the airplane manufacturers, and then the engine manufacturers?
Christopher: I tend to look at it as the industry as working really towards the same goal. I think that the way that the airplane is put together is that you have an airframe and then you go to an engine manufacturer and you say, “I’d like this engine to go in it,” but the actual driving force as I’m starting to discover– and it should be remembered, Jeff, that I came to this subject as someone who was interested in it. But as someone who’s very much an outsider, one of the interesting things that I’ve discovered is that driving motivation towards the greening of aviation or one of the key factors is the demand of customers.
And so, for example, the cargo and the freight industry are very keen to lower their carbon footprint. And what they will do is they will go to an airframe manufacturer and they will say, “This is what we require.” And then they will start the negotiations with the engine manufacturer as well. And the airlines are one very important part of the industry, but also the cargo industry is also extremely important. So, for example, DHL, for example, FedEx, Amazon are very much leading this effort to decarbonize the industry because they require that for their own carbon savings.
Jeff: Why is that? Why is the cargo industry more aggressive in this regard?
Christopher: It’s a very good question, and I’m not sure that I have a completely pre-prepared answer for you. I would imagine that the cargo industry is beholden to its customers and would like to present a much more green image. It may be that the cargo industry has intrinsically, within itself, a kind of green agenda that it wants to promote with greater sincerity than the airlines.
No one would accuse the airlines of being aggressively pro-green or pro-environmental in any shape or form. They’re being dragged picking and screaming into this process. That’s not to say that within the airlines, there aren’t extremely sincere reformers and reformists who will do all they can in order to advance this agenda, but the airlines, I wouldn’t say, are leading this. It’s more the cargo customers.
Jeff: Are there any individual leaders within the airline industry that have emerged in this quest?
Christopher: I’m very impressed by someone called Glenn Llewellyn, who is at Airbus, and he’s in charge of their green effort there. But it’s difficult for me as an outsider to ascertain how much power and how much investment the airlines are actually putting into their flagship green initiatives. Boeing, so far as I know, is not going towards hydrogen. Boeing, so far as I know, is much more interested in using SAF, sustainable aviation fuels, but I do think that the situation is evolving.
And I think that the position adopted by the airlines and by ICAO, which is the governing body of the aviation industry, has evolved significantly over the last five years from really not having a goal to then committing to at least an aspirational goal of going net zero by 2050. And then we will have to start to see whether there are measures that governments now need to implement in order to hold the industry’s feet to the fire and say, “You need to get there and, actually, you need to get there quicker.”
Because the industry built into the industry’s projections is the idea that they have until 2035 in order to get the different technologies lined up and developed, and then they will start cutting emissions. In fact, emissions need to stop. They need to be cut now. They need to be cut much, much quicker. And there’s one obvious route to cutting emissions, and that is to raise prices and to make people think much, much harder about whether they’re going to fly and to fly only when it really matters to them and when it’s much more important to them. That’s not something that the airlines would like to hear.
Jeff: One of the things that the airlines always has, you touched on this a few moments ago, that the airlines can always use to push back on is the issue of safety. That’s their ace card. Talk about that.
Christopher: Well, I think that’s right. And I’m not, again, within the airline industry, so I can’t say too much about the way that the airlines approach the question of safety other than, as you say, to double down on it as a reason for being much more cautious than they might otherwise be. I don’t necessarily blame the airlines entirely for that because I think that the consumer public is also very concerned about safety.
And in the US, the FAA, and the equivalent regulatory bodies in Europe and the UK, and elsewhere have the final say on any new design technologies that are going to get off the ground. So I wouldn’t necessarily ascribe cynical motives to this. I do think that, actually, in the past, we’ve seen occasions where safety lapses have happened and there have been appalling crashes. And I think that the paying public is also interested in safety. The paying public is also interested in price and has got used to the idea of flying incredibly cheaply. We are going to fly more expensively.
It is going to become more expensive to fly because of supply chain issues, because there’s lesson of abundance of the workforce, the labor force that existed before the pandemic, and also fluctuations in the oil price. What we need to do is increase incentives and also increase taxes so that from both sides of the fiscal equation, the industry realizes that it’s in its best interest to invest more heavily both in time, but also in money in these technologies that would allow them, as you put it, to return to the spirit of the Wright brothers and to become really a force for good again in the world.
Jeff: There is a sense though that the entire industry and airports around the world and the infrastructure of those airports have really evolved and grown to the point where it is based on this idea of extensive and cheap travel. People basically taking planes as they might have taken buses years ago.
Christopher: I agree. This stems back to liberalization, which started in the US in the 1970s, then spread to Europe. And as emerging industrializing powers like India and China and Brazil and elsewhere, Indonesia have started flying in greater, greater numbers. Consumers there too are getting used to the idea of flying. They’re getting used to the idea of flying cheaply. It should be borne in mind that probably 80% of the world’s population have never been in an airplane.
And where aviation to develop into the mass activity that the industry would like it to develop into, then we’re going to have an even more serious problem on our hands. What we all need to be doing as individuals is flying less often. Of course, we need to be allowing those who haven’t flown before to enjoy the same privileges that we who do fly often enjoy. But at the same time, this isn’t an issue that we can fudge.
If you fly a Trans-Atlantic flight, for example, from Berlin to San Francisco and back again, you are producing more greenhouse gases than the average non-airborne citizen of Nigeria or India is doing in a year. And so there’s a massive imbalance here. There’s a massive climate injustice being perpetrated here. And we need to bear that in mind and we need to conduct ourselves and limit our flying accordingly.
Jeff: Talk about where in the world some of this cutting-edge technology is taking place with respect to some of the things you’ve touched on.
Christopher: Well, I think electric is very strong in where you are on the West Coast of the United States. EV tolls, electric vertical takeoff, and landing vehicles, that’s really one of the cradles of this emerging technology, which isn’t going to help the climate crisis very much unless it has an impetus towards further improvements in battery technology. So batteries can take you further and take more people further. But, actually, when you’re looking at electric, it really matters where your electricity is generated from.
Is it renewable? Is it green electricity or not? So that’s one of the things that one needs to consider. SAF or biofuels. Again, the US is a world leader in that largely because so much of your ground transportation is run on biofuels. And I think what the aviation industry would like to do is as the ground transportation in the US and elsewhere switches over definitively and irrevocably to electric, then all of those enormous fields that are currently growing maze and other crops that get poured into the tank of automobiles in the US will be turned over and be used for airplanes.
Again, there’s a green credential problem here because you’ve got to farm those crops in a much more environmentally-friendly fashion in order for that to be a truly green solution. Then you’ve got something called electro fuels, which involves sucking carbon dioxide out of the air and then fusing it with hydrogen, which is being created using an electrolyzer. And that is much stronger in Europe.
There’s technologies that I’ve visited in Dresden and also in Switzerland, which are going to combine using thermal energy created in Norway, that a plant is now being built that will produce electro fuels. Hydrogen, that is also happening. For example, I visited a company called ZeroAvia in the UK, which is repurposing existing small airplanes, Cessnas and Dorniers, and that kind of thing. And that will be powering a fuel cell.
They think that they can get to 70 seaters within five years’ time. And that would be extremely interesting and that would make them pretty much an industry leader if they manage to do that. And then as I mentioned earlier, Airbus are also doing hydrogen, only this time through the combustion route. And there are other technologies that are much earlier in development.
Some people are talking about, how would you power an airplane using nuclear fuel and all sorts of other biofuels that are still in development? So one of the interesting things about this subject is that one doesn’t really know exactly who’s going to win the race. And to an extent it, it is a race. And yet from my perspective, they’ve all got to win because there is such a large amount of aviation. And none of these technologies on its own is going to be able to carry the burden.
Jeff: To what extent is nuclear a realistic possibility?
Christopher: I don’t know because I didn’t look closely into nuclear because I was told that we are a very, very long way from being able to square that with any kind of safety concerns, let alone the technological challenges that that would pose. So I didn’t actually look very closely into nuclear. I don’t think it’ll happen for a long time. And I think that essential question of safety will loom very large. There are entrepreneurs who are looking into the question, who are trying to develop it. In fact, people have been talking about nuclear-powered airplanes way back since the beginning of the Cold War. But whether that’ll happen on a commercial scale, I don’t know.
Jeff: Of all of the things that you saw that were being worked on, which ones did you think were the most exciting but also the most practical, the ones that really had a chance to make an immediate difference?
Christopher: I would say that hydrogen has a good chance in the medium term. It’s abundant. Its green credentials are pretty good. If you put it into a fuel cell, all you’re doing is producing contrails. That’s the only kind of noxious emission that takes place. If you burn it, then you do get nitrous oxide. But at the same time, you’re drawing it from water. So its production shouldn’t involve any emissions.
It does need a lot of energy. And I think this is where all of the technologies have really questions to answer is how you assure yourself of renewable energy that isn’t more badly needed by other more vital sectors of the economy. I do think hydrogen has a very positive future. I like to think that electro fuels have a positive future because they are incredibly exciting.
The idea that you can create a fuel literally out of thin air and water is remarkable to me. Again, a lot of renewable energy required. And then in the next 50, 60, 70 years, if you can develop battery technology to the extent that you can carry large numbers of people over long distances, then, obviously, full electric is amazing because then you’re not emitting anything at all.
Jeff: And, finally, do you sense that there is any kind of clamoring for this among the flying public? To what extent is the flying public aware of this and sensitive to this? Do you have a sense of that?
Christopher: I think the flying public is starting to become more sensitive to this. I think they’re starting to realize that each time they get into an airplane, they’re contributing enormously to the climate problem. Having said that, it’s a microcosm of the choice that everyone, all of us, we all make every day of our lives. Whatever we do on this planet is that it’s the immediate needs and it’s the moral conundrum that we all face every day.
So I’m definitely not in a position where I sit in judgment on anyone at all, but I do think that people are starting to become more aware of it. And I hope that in time, that will drive a change in behavior, a change in conduct, but also a much more critical view on the part of the paying public with respect to the airline industry, with respect to the aviation industry in general. The aviation industry has been cosseted and it has been privileged for a very long time.
It pays negligible taxes. The airlines do not pay tax on jet fuel. There’s no tax levied on international air tickets. If you look at the number of years in the past 20 when the airlines have paid corporation tax, you’ll be surprised by how few they’ve paid corporation tax. It’s a largely untaxed industry that has got away with being very late to the party or the decarbonization party and is now arriving late in the day. And it needs to perform, needs to up its game.
Jeff: Christopher de Bellaigue. The book is Flying Green: On the Frontiers of New Aviation, just out from Columbia Global Reports. Christopher, I thank you so much for spending time with us today here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.
Christopher: Thanks a lot, Jeff.
Jeff: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another radio WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you liked this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
Guns and race have shaped the news this week. In this episode of the WhoWhatWhy podcast, I talk with Emory University professor Carol Anderson, author of the new book The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, to explore the absolute connection between race, the original sin of slavery, and America’s gun culture.
As mass shootings and gun violence continue to plague the nation, Anderson delves into the dark history of the Second Amendment and its foundation in anti-Blackness.
Anderson reveals how African Americans were historically depicted as inherently violent, criminal, and vicious, leading to the implementation of laws that restricted their access to guns and ammunition.
She further discusses the contentious debate between James Madison and the anti-Federalists during the ratification of the Constitution, highlighting the fear of Black retribution and the belief that white control was necessary to maintain order.
When examining the role of the Second Amendment in America’s gun culture, Anderson discusses the crucial questions and offers invaluable insights into the complex relationship between race, guns, and the country’s ongoing struggle to address gun violence.
It’s a story of the hidden history behind the Second Amendment, its lasting impact on America today, and a search for an answer to the never-resolved question as to why we can’t ever seem to do anything about guns in America.
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Transcript Coming Soon…
In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast we examine the dark intersections of religion, nationalism, and right-wing politics with the award-winning author of the just-released The Undertow: Scene From a Slow Civil War, Jeff Sharlet.
Sharlet uncovers the mythic foundations of American exceptionalism, the radicalization of various right-wing forces, and the growing allure of violent “solutions.” He navigates the lasting impact of Trumpism, and tells how democracy may emerge more vital and inclusive in the end.
Sharlet examines America’s origin myth, the intersection of this myth and history, and the role of religion in fueling political and social polarization. Sharlet shows how this dynamic causes people to revel in their violent selves and embrace their darker emotions.
As right-wing politics veer toward fascism, Sharlet notes the emergence of cult personalities, the perceived “enemy within,” and powerful martyr myths, such as Ashli Babbitt’s story.
Sharlet reveals how some churches are preparing for war, and touches upon the fetishizing of democracy, the urge to force crises, and the appeal of authoritarianism to those who feel scared or powerless.
In this era, he says, when even avant-garde artists are drawn to the transgressive nature of fascism, we must learn to live with the loss of counterfactual myths, moving beyond our cult of innocence to a worldview founded on hard truths.
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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
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Get ready for an adrenaline-fueled exploration into the dark underbelly of the digital world.
As software takes over our lives — from hospitals to schools and even our national infrastructure — we’re facing an explosive wave of cyberattacks that could threaten our very existence.
The US — a hacker’s favorite playground — is a ticking time bomb, with 80 percent of its crucial systems tied to the internet and in private hands, with ZERO government control.
Join us in this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast for a frightening conversation with New York Times cybersecurity reporter Nicole Perlroth. Were diving deep into her book This is How They Tell Me The World Ends, freshly updated with new revelations.
Perlroth exposes the dire need for a rock-solid national security strategy and exposes the terrifying world of “zero days” — secret security flaws that hackers crave. With a no-holds-barred talent war between the government and private companies, the US government’s cybersecurity defenses are left gasping for air.
Get ready to be appalled as Perlroth unveils the chilling tale of Russian hackers trying to topple US elections and the Ukrainian power grid, and the Chinese looking into America’s every digital nook and cranny.
This high-level conversation explores the critical need for ironclad cybersecurity policies and the power of imagination in defending against nightmare cyber threats.
Perlroth shares spine-tingling accounts of single-software systems leaving our infrastructure wide open: the SolarWinds attack, near-disasters at dams, and hospitals under siege by cyber bandits.
Perlroth raises the possibility that the only thing standing between us and total cyber annihilation is a digital doomsday scenario — a cyber version of global mutually assured destruction.
Listen to this conversation. It will make you question everything you thought you knew about the digital world.
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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy Podcast, I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. The world’s critical infrastructure, including our banking systems, hospitals, and air traffic control, could be taken down by a single flaw in billions of lines of code. If that happens, it’s not a black swan event, it’s simply what might be expected. This is what former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld would have called unknown-unknown.
The Internet, to which virtually everything in our lives is connected, was never built with security in mind. And yet, 80% of the critical infrastructure of the country is controlled by private companies who, even with the best of intentions, have no idea how secure they really are. Every day on the Dark Web and in places we don’t usually go, a shadow group of players is engaged in buying and selling security flaws known as zero days. It’s the new international arms trade.
The world where the next wars and the next battles between nations will be fought is in cyberspace. Our adversaries may not have our fighter planes and aircraft carriers and submarines, but they can recruit the best talent around the globe to take us down. This is the world that my guest Nicole Perlroth lives in and writes about in covering cybersecurity for The New York Times, and as the author of This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends.
Prior to joining The Times, Nicole Perlroth covered venture capital and startups for Forbes. She’s a guest lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a graduate of Princeton and Stanford. And it is my pleasure to welcome Nicole Perlroth back to this program to talk about This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends, just out in paperback. Nicole, thanks so much for joining us once again here on the WhoWhatWhy Podcast.
Nicole Perlroth: Thanks so much for having me, Jeff, it’s great to be with you.
Jeff Schechtman: It’s good to have you here. In all of the years that you’ve been working on this, the years you spent writing the book, and the year or so since the original book came out, what’s gotten better and what’s gotten worse in the world of cybersecurity?
Nicole Perlroth: Well, for one, we hear this phrase in Silicon Valley all the time that software is going to eat the world. And that has happened. We’ve been baking so much software into every nook and cranny of our digital infrastructure, our pipelines, our power grid, even our water treatment facilities, oil and gas facilities. And then during COVID, everything just supercharged. Now we’re conducting most of our business virtually. Education really started depending on software. Healthcare, hospitals, et cetera.
And so that’s all just to say that the attack surface has rapidly expanded over the past couple of years. And then the other thing is that inside these companies, security teams have really lost the perimeter. Employees have become the new perimeter. Employees act as their own chief information officer. They decide what productivity apps they want to use, what marketing survey applications they’d like to use, and they start putting data into those applications, which just expands the attack surface further.
And then the big thing, too, actually, one is we’ve seen adversaries like China, who were really breaking into American companies with rudimentary phishing emails 10 years ago when I started covering this for The New York Times, move on to pretty sophisticated supply chain attacks where they lace software in these applications that many organizations don’t even realize they’re using with malware. And that’s how they get in. And it’s not just China, there was a case a couple months ago where North Korea was doing this.
So, really, we’ve just been blindly automating everything without any pause or reflection on how this could be abused. Meanwhile, our adversaries understand that these are all new potential inroads for attack, and they’re seizing on them. And then the last thing has been Ukraine. We’ve seen a dramatic 40% increase in attacks on critical infrastructure since Russia invaded Ukraine last year. Now, most of that is aimed at Ukraine.
And, really, that actually is one slice of hope, because we’ve seen Ukraine, together with private companies and federal agencies in the West, really partner to try and root out these attacks as quickly as possible to mitigate these attacks and mitigate the blast radius from these attacks as quickly as possible. So those are the things. Now, the attack surface here continues to get worse. We’re still blind to the potential vulnerabilities of what we’ve introduced. Meanwhile, Ukraine is spending off, or at least mitigating a lot of these attacks and I hope will become a lesson for cyber defense and what we can do here.
Jeff Schechtman: I guess part of it also, is whether software has gotten any better. When Marc Andreessen first said that software is going to eat the world, in many ways he was talking about how dependent on it we were going to become, and that everything was going to be related to software. One would assume, incorrectly, I think, that in all this time, the software has gotten so much better. In fact, it seems that the proliferation of it has made it even more vulnerable.
Nicole Perlroth: Yes, that’s right. Yes. I always say it’s the two Marks. The one Marc who said software will eat the world. And then the other Mark, Mark Zuckerberg, who said move fast and break things. Now he towed that back. I say in my book, the last time I was at Facebook, someone had put up a sign that said, “Move slowly and fix your–”
Jeff Schechtman: Fix things, right?
Nicole Perlroth: A whole other word. Yes. So there is this recognition that we have to do both, but unfortunately, speed is still the name of the game. It’s still get your product to market as quickly as possible, particularly if it’s an app or digital service, and then get as many customers to use it as possible so that they don’t switch to the competition. It’s not, “Hey, let’s move slowly, make sure we’re vetting our software,” et cetera, et cetera.
And so, really, I think the only way to change that, unfortunately, is for the government to step in. And just last week, we actually saw the White House announce a new national cybersecurity strategy. It doesn’t have regulations baked in yet, but I think we can think of it as a guide for what might come. And a big part of that strategy was to say, “We want to see software makers take security seriously, and we want to see them be liable for putting out buggy code.”
So it still remains to be seen how that would get implemented. But that’s a big announcement that we would shift liability for some of these attacks to software makers, essentially forcing them to take security seriously so they’re not just introducing this buggy code every time they have a new update to their software or product.
Jeff Schechtman: Has the EU had any more success doing this? They’re more ahead of the curve, certainly, in terms of regulation.
Nicole Perlroth: Yes. I mean, definitely on privacy, they’ve been the leader there, and we could debate whether what they have done has actually added to security. Every time we go to a website and it says, “Do you allow all cookies?” How many times do you just click yes and move on? But what’s interesting is, when I wrote my book, it was important to me to not just say, “Hey, we have a huge problem here.” It was important to me to end with some solutions.
And so I went and looked around and said, “Hey, are there any nations out there that have figured this out from a policy perspective? And has it had any kind of beneficial effect?” And what was interesting was there was a study– it’s already out of date, so I’d love to see someone pick this up and run with it. But there was a study a couple of years ago that used semantic data, and it looked at the total number of security incidents in a country, at least those that were reported, and it looked at the ratio of successful attacks to total incidents. How many times were hackers able to get in?
And the United States fared pretty poorly on this list. We are now, I should remind everyone, the most frequently targeted nation on Earth. That may have shifted with Ukraine. We may be number two now, but we are where most of the value is for hackers, and so we are the most targeted. Anyway, the countries that did really well were in Scandinavia, which I always think is interesting, and sometimes Americans will shudder when you mention Scandinavia as an end all be all solution to any kind of regulation.
But in Scandinavia, these are countries Finland, Sweden, Norway that are just, in many ways, as digitally dependent and virtualized as us. They have very healthy tech industries, and they bake software into much of their critical infrastructure, as we do. But what they have that we don’t have is very comprehensive national cybersecurity strategies that have real carrots and real sticks for companies when it comes to cybersecurity. So they mandate that these companies use things like multifactor authentication, which is this added security measure that texts you a code or you have to supply another code when you’re trying to log into a service.
They make sure that companies are patching more regularly and it’s close to real-time as possible, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And there are fines for companies that don’t meet that bar. So I thought that was interesting. And then the other instructive example was Japan, where they didn’t have a great ratio. They were on par with the United States, but over the course of two years they really significantly improved their ratio.
And when you looked at, okay, what happened during those two years, they had put in place a national cybersecurity strategy that is probably the most specific strategy on the market today. That goes as far as to say, hey, if you are operating let’s say a pipeline, the software that touches your pipeline must be air-gapped or completely separate from your IT network, where we do our email and that kind of thing. So that had a huge impact on limiting their attack surface. So, in other words, I’m not one to say regulation is the end-all answer or solution to everything, but when it comes to cybersecurity, it has had a hugely beneficial effect. And I would argue that it is high time for us to adopt something like it in the United States today.
Jeff Schechtman: Is one of the problems, in terms of looking at the US versus Japan or some of the Scandinavian countries, that there is this obsession with frictionlessness that really overrides everything else?
Nicole Perlroth: Yes. I think that’s a huge part of it. We don’t want to be bothered with those popups that ask us which cookies we want to allow in the case of privacy and some of the regulations that the EU has adopted. And it’s worth noting to be fair that the US has a horrible track record when it comes to cybersecurity regulation in the past. There’s still a law in the books called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that has been misused, abused, only used in these ridiculous cases by companies against people who are just pointing out flaws in their system versus really egregious cases.
And so we need to make sure that any regulation that we do implement isn’t going to be somehow abused or used for [unintelligible 00:12:29] and that kind of thing. So it’s tricky business, but we’re long overdue. And I would just say, the Biden administration has gone further than any previous administration when it comes to cybersecurity, but they’re still very limited because there is no regulation. So what’s interesting, one of the things they did, I think it was early last year, was they put out an executive order, the president did. And in it, it just said, “Okay, we don’t have regulation. What do we have?”
Well, we have power over federal agencies. Okay, so from now on, federal agencies, you must meet this high bar for cybersecurity standards, and you must patch bugs that we know about within two weeks, et cetera. And then the other entity that they have any kind of control over are federal contractors. So what was interesting is they really used the power of the purse to say, “Okay, federal contractors, we’re going to rip out the red tape, but you can self-certify that you meet these same cybersecurity standards.”
“We’ll let you self-certify, we won’t make you go to some third-party auditor, go through this lengthy paperwork process. You can self-certify, but if we catch you lying to us–” which they probably will because we’re seeing so many ransomware attacks that expose weak defenses with a lot of organizations. “If we catch you lying to us, you’re banned from ever doing business with the federal government again.”
And so I thought that was a very clever workaround, but it really only applies to federal contractors. But I think that is what is going to come, especially for these companies that run 80% of our critical infrastructure. And that’s the magic statistic you cited at top, 80% of the United States critical infrastructure. So our pipelines, our power, our water, our nuclear plants, healthcare, et cetera, is run by the private sector. And until now, for the most part, none of these companies have had any kind of cybersecurity standard that they have to meet. There are exceptions with nuclear and some utilities, but for the most part, they’re nowhere near where they need to be.
So I think that is what’s going to come first. Is a real bar for those companies to meet when it comes to cybersecurity. Because here’s the thing, when Russia attacks another country digitally, cyberattacks, they don’t go directly for the government in a lot of cases. They wouldn’t come for the NFA or the FBI or name your government agency, they come for private companies, Colonial Pipeline, that was a group of cyber criminals or they come for SolarWinds, a Texas company that supplies software to government agencies and most of the Fortune 500.
So, in other words, it’s just to say that businesses are on the frontline. And businesses that operate critical infrastructure are really on the frontline. And so we need to figure out how to either adjust market incentives or buy nuance cybersecurity regulation that can get them to meet this bar so we can really limit the opportunities that our adversaries would have to hold us hostage.
Jeff Schechtman: Are we still fighting the battle that there were incentives at some point, certainly for government at some points, to keep software more vulnerable in terms of access?
Nicole Perlroth: Yes. I think that really just comes back to the ‘move fast and break things” bit when it comes to just business incentives. I think I spend a lot of time in my book research talking about something called the zero day market. So a zero day, just for those who’ve never heard of it, is a vulnerability in code that the code manufacturer doesn’t know about. Just to keep it simple, imagine I’m a hacker and I want to get into your iPhone. I could potentially get in by finding a vulnerability in your iPhone’s iOS software that Apple doesn’t know about.
And if I could develop a program to exploit that vulnerability, which is called a zero day, I could potentially use it to read your text messages or track your location or record your phone calls, et cetera. So it’s really like catching an invisible ankle bracelet to you in some ways. That zero day exploit, that’s what that’s called, not program. That has been fetching millions of dollars on a gray market for zero day brokers and governments who want those tools to be able to spy on their enemies or spy on potential terrorists, et cetera.
Some of you will remember that, I think it was back in 2015 when the FBI tried to get Apple to build a back door for the FBI into the iPhone and Apple resisted and finally the FBI dropped its case and said, “Nevermind, a hacker came to us with a way to get in and we paid him over a million dollars.” That’s the programs I’m talking about here. Now, I think for a long time I had so many questions about this market, because, wait a minute, isn’t the government supposed to be keeping us more secure, but in this case they’re exploiting vulnerabilities and leaving them open instead of closing them shut so they can preserve their surveillance, counterintelligence, espionage advantage.
And so that’s really– I started calling out those programs in the book. I think since the book came out, we’ve had these really significant attacks. I think most people by now are familiar with the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack, SolarWinds would be another. I think there is starting to be this broader recognition, particularly in this administration, that it is high time that we pull away from the advantages of exploiting vulnerabilities to seeing to it that they get shut. Because, again, we’re one of the most digitally dependent nations on earth and now we’re the most targeted nation on earth and it’s really high time that we focus on cyber defense.
Jeff Schechtman: Is part of the problem the globalization of hacking talent? When people talk about remote work, you often hear people talking about the fact that if you can do your job remotely, it means that anybody anywhere in the world can do your job. Do we have a situation where hackers and those that engage in this are able to recruit the best talent all over the world?
Nicole Perlroth: Well, it’s a huge problem. The cybersecurity workforce crisis is something that I think should be among our top five national security threats to the United States. We have hundreds of thousands of unfilled vacant cybersecurity positions just in government. And a lot of those government agencies are finding it almost impossible to compete with the private sector for what, I guess, we would call hacking talent. People with the skills to find these vulnerabilities and then fix them.
And this is a really big problem. So one of the things I’m trying to focus on right now is how do we expand the pipeline for hacking talent in the United States? Now, unfortunately, if you have these skills, you can make a lot of money finding zero days, developing programs to exploit them and selling them to governments for millions of dollars. And you will be infinitely employable to offensive cyber agencies like the NSA or in Russia. This is who they look for to work at the GRU, or in China, they figured out how to freelance or have some of these people who work in the private sector moonlight on some of these sensitive operations at night.
So some of the really significant attacks we see come from China don’t come from the PLA anymore, the People’s Liberation Army. We see them come from this loose satellite network of private contractors that get called in by the Ministry of State Security to do their dirty work. It gives China a degree of plausible deniability if those hackers are caught. It works different ways in different countries.
Some have found that if they can use their hacking talent to create what I call click-and-shoot spyware tools, the companies like NSO Group in Israel that sell government these tools to very easily surveil dissidents in some cases, terrorists in others. You can make a lot of money working for those companies. There are a lot of opportunities on the dark side of this business, and we’re finding it really hard to hire people into cyber defense that have these same skill sets that would be useful.
This is a huge problem, and I think that the answers are complicated, but I think one of them is how do we tap people with these skills? They might not consider themselves as cybersecurity expert, but maybe they’re a programmer who finds these bugs in the course of their day-to-day business. How do we make sure that they have an easy way to report that bug to the manufacturer to get fixed?
That’s where you’re starting to see, over the last decade, companies like Apple and Google and others that might not be immediately obvious, like United Airlines, start creating something called bug bounty programs where they will actually reward hackers who come to them with bugs so that they can fix them before they can be exploited. I think that’s one creative way out but we still have a long way to go.
Jeff Schechtman: Where does AI fit in all of this? We’re now looking at software created by AI and arguably, as AI gets more sophisticated, it, too, can be effective in ferreting out these bugs.
Nicole Perlroth: Yes. In the beginning of my book, I have this author’s enlisting to finish this book before AI makes it almost irrelevant. My paperback just came out. November, we learn about ChatGPT. And what’s terrifying is here is this book where I write about all these hackers who are finding these zero days and selling them to these shady zero day brokers, but then sell them to government who use them in all good ways and bad, mostly bad in a lot of cases. I’m worried about where this market is headed. Well, now you can use ChatGPT to find zero days and write exploits.
So, essentially, this market is already automated, and these skills are already automated with ChatGPT. So we are really entering a terrifying new era here. I don’t think people realize how these tools can be abused. Another thing is, we’ve had this big push to slow it down and make sure that you’re vetting your software before you’re rolling it out to millions of customers. We’re nowhere near where we need to be, but there has been somewhat of a push. And when I talk to companies whose job it is to test software for vulnerabilities and vet it, what they said to me is, “I don’t know how to vet AI for security risks.”
That is the basic question I have. And I’ve asked others in our market, in our industry, how do you test AI for security? Very basic question, and nobody has been able to answer it. And I think what that means is we’re about to introduce a whole new level of obscurity and complexity, which lends itself perfectly to vulnerability and hacking. And I think that China and other countries are not going to just sit there. They’re going to take advantage of this new complexity of these vulnerabilities. And I think we’re entering a pretty scary place.
Jeff Schechtman: It’s a scary place. It’s also scary to think about AI both offensively and defensively because it’s the same use, essentially, just for more nefarious purposes on one side.
Nicole Perlroth: Yes. I think it will be a while before we can figure out how to use it defensively, I think, in the meantime, and we see this with any new technology, right? A new technology gets introduced, bad guys figure out how to abuse it, good guys figure out how they’re abusing it. They develop the protection. Bad guys figure out how to evade the protection. It’s always been a cat and mouse game.
And, fortunately now, I think this next generation of cybersecurity entrepreneurs are starting to take radically different approaches to cybersecurity, which is good. But I think AI, it just adds so much in many ways exponentially more complexity that this cat-and-mouse game is going to play out in a way that we have not seen yet. So I am worried about it. Now, that said, there are a lot of companies out there that claim to be able to use AI to better identify vulnerabilities, to automate the patching of vulnerabilities, to identify insider threats at organizations based on employee’s email behavior or their web-behavior.
They can out insider threats. They can use it to really map out who in an organization has access to what data. So there are beneficial use cases when it comes to cyber defense, but we don’t even really know yet how this is being exploited. And it’ll be a while before we figure out how to create defenses for those techniques.
Jeff Schechtman: As this evolves, particularly in the cyber warfare realm, it seems that mutually assured destruction in the cyber realm may be the only thing that keeps it in check for a while.
Nicole Perlroth: Yes, it’s interesting. I definitely saw mutually assured digital destruction start coming into play. I wrote a story with my colleague, David Sanger, at the New York Times about how under the Trump administration, there had been some loosening of the rules when it came to what Cyber Command at the Pentagon could do. Under Obama, Obama mandated that every computer attack conducted by Cyber Command required presidential approval. Under Trump, they did away with that rule.
And David and I learned that one of the first thing Cyber Command was doing with its new-found leeway was hacking the Russian power grid and making a pretty loud show of it. And, interestingly, we did our research, we did our reporting for several months, and I thought, okay, now we have to talk to the government, tell them what’s coming, and offer them the opportunity to comment, which is just standard journalistic practice.
And I assume we’d be in for one of those painful conversations where the government said, “No, you can’t possibly print this. You’ll have blood on your hands. You’re a terrible person.” But instead, we got very much a, “Oh, we don’t care. You can print this.” In other words, what they weren’t saying was, “We want Russia to know we are in their power grid so that they better think twice before they ever hack the United States power grid the same way they’ve now done to Ukraine not once but twice.” And that is really what mutually assured digital destruction looks like.
There was also a case over a year ago where the US declassified findings that over the past decade, China had hacked our pipelines and not for intellectual property theft or theft of trade secret like we see with so many other Chinese cyberattacks, they were doing it to gain a foothold in our pipeline networks, so they could potentially sabotage those networks in the event of some larger geopolitical conflict. Really, instead of just one Colonial Pipeline happening that skyrocketed gas prices, they could trigger an attack that really sent gas prices skyrocketing, people unable to move, function, et cetera.
And so this is happening. We’re all in each other’s systems with guns to each other’s head just in case someone decides they actually want to pull the trigger, so we can say, “Hey, you could pull the trigger, but we’ll just turn around and pull the trigger right back at you.” And I wonder how much– and, of course, you’d have to be a fly on the wall of Vladimir Putin’s office at the Kremlin. But I wonder how much of that has factored into Russia’s restraint when it comes to directly attacking the United States and some of our Western allies in Europe, for example, because of our support for Ukraine with military tools and funding.
I wonder if he’s thinking maybe not just yet, and then I really wonder at what point will he decide we have nothing left to lose but to start retaliating against the West for their support. And despite all the bluster around nuclear threats, I still think they’re much more likely immediate response or a form of retaliation would come in the form of cyber attacks. So that’s where I’m really watching right now.
Jeff Schechtman: Nicole Perlroth’s book is, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race. It’s just out in paperback. Nicole, I thank you so much for spending time with us here on The Who, What, Why Podcast today.
Nicole Perlroth: Thanks for the great discussion. This is pretty high level, so I really appreciate it.
Jeff Schechtman: Thank you so much.
Nicole Perlroth: All right, take care.
Jeff Schechtman: Thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I hope you join us next week for another radio WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to WhoWhatWhy.org/donate.
Large-scale public protests are, perhaps, the most visceral form of political action. This past week, we witnessed the power of such protests in Israel, as tens of thousands of people took to the streets, successfully pressuring the Netanyahu government to roll back its judicial reforms, at least temporarily.
In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, we delve into the Israeli situation with Nadav Tamir, who joins us from Tel Aviv. Tamir, a former adviser to former Prime Minister Shimon Peres, has served in the Israeli Embassy in Washington and as consul-general in the US. Currently, he is the executive director of J Street Israel and an adviser for international affairs at the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation.
Tamir sheds light on the reasons this event sparked widespread protests and the convergence of various interests opposing the judicial changes, which would increase the power of the majority party in the Israeli parliament (Knesset). He emphasizes that the protest movement focused on domestic policy in Israel, with little influence from other authoritarian incidents worldwide.
Additionally, Tamir discusses the impact of demographic shifts in Israel, particularly the mounting birthrate among the ultra-Orthodox population.
He also outlines the fragility of the Netanyahu government, the extent of public opposition, the long-lasting effects of settler violence, and the potential emergence of a new coalition government.
Whether Netanyahu will honor his commitment to the protesters and whether the protest movement can maintain its momentum remain to be seen.
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Full Text Transcript:
(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff: Welcome to The WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. Large-scale public protest is perhaps the most visceral form of political action. We’ve seen it work during the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, and with Black Lives Matter. We’ve seen it fail with things like Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, and the recent protests in Russia. This past week we’ve seen it take hold in Israel in protests against Netanyahu’s plan to take control of the nation’s judiciary. So far the protests have made a difference. We’ll see what the future holds.
But protests of this magnitude usually don’t happen all at once. Often the issues that spark them have been simmering under the surface for a long time. In Israel, it seems that this move to remake the judiciary was simply the gasoline that ignited the kindling that had been burning for some time. Joining me to put all of this in perspective is my guest, Nadav Tamir.
He was an advisor to President Shimon Peres and served in the Israeli embassy in Washington, and as Council General in New England. He’s executive director of J Street Israel, and a member of the board of the Mitvim think-tank, as well as an advisor for international affairs at the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation. He’s also a member of the Steering Committee of the Geneva Initiative. It is my pleasure to welcome Nadav Tamir here to the program. Nadav Tamir, thanks so much for joining us on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.
Nadav: Thank you for having me, Jeff.
Jeff: Well, it’s a delight to have you here. For those that may not understand, take us back a little bit and talk about what sparked this protest. What was it that Netanyahu wanted to do to change the judiciary that created the current environment?
Nadav: Well, we have to go back even before this last government was created. In the previous Netanyahu government, we had demonstrations pretty frequently around his home in Jerusalem and in different places in Israel because there was a feeling of many Israelis that someone who is corrupted is going to trial on several cases, should not be the prime Minister. And those demonstrations eventually, I think, brought the change in the elections after where an eclectic government, which we call the change government, came into power. But this government didn’t hold much because there were too many tensions among the members of the coalition.
The new break of demonstrations started after this new government was created. And the coalition agreements are pretty awful. But people didn’t pay attention until the minister of justice declared that he’s going to start everything with what they call a judicial reform, but what is pretty clear is an attempt to weaken dramatically the judicial branch of Israel, mainly the Supreme Court, and the Attorney General, and all the professional legal advisors who are the protectors of law and the democracy of Israel.
And this what’s actually ignited an amazing, amazing movement of so many people who are all connected by their eagerness to keep Israel democracy. Many of them have different ideologies on other things, but the one thing that connects all of them is that they feel that this government is trying to take away the checks and balances and the protection of personal and minority rights in Israel.
Jeff: And this has been brewing for some time. This has not been the first attempt that the Netanyahu government has made to do things that one might consider authoritarian.
Nadav: That’s true. What’s different this time is that there is a convergence of interest of the members of the coalition with the same goal to weaken the judicial branch for different reasons. They’re ultra-Orthodox, they don’t want equality by law because they want their special benefits. They don’t want to serve in the military, they don’t want to study core issues in their curriculum, they don’t want to pay taxes, and they want the state to subsidize their prayers in Yeshivas.
You have the extreme settlers who understand that the Supreme Court will not let them take control of the whole Palestinian territories against international law and to infringe [unintelligible 00:05:41], you have the Jewish supremacists who think that the Supreme Court doesn’t let them make Jews more supreme to Arabs in this country, and others who just want to go after the LGBTQ community, women, everyone who doesn’t think like them.
And this convergence, the glue that put all of them together is the fact that we have a prime minister that is trying to find a way out of his trial and want to make sure that he controls the legal establishment in order to take him out of the corruption cases. And a party that in many ways is similar to what happened to the Republican party in America, which became a cult personality that they’re doing whatever Netanya wants them to do. So, this convergence of things is behind this much more bold and aggressive move against the legal branch in Israeli system.
Jeff: To what extent does some of the motivation among all those that turned out for these protests come from looking at what has happened in other places when they see what happened in the US on January 6th, when they see what happened with Trump, when they look at Hungary which is a lot closer, and Victor Orban, to what extent have these movements inspired protestors to make sure that something similar doesn’t happen in Israel?
Nadav: I have to say that most of them for long time didn’t make the connection. They didn’t see the clear lines of what happened in Hungary, in Poland, Turkey, Russia, and they pretty much were indifferent to everything outside their living in Tel Aviv, the most amazing city in the world, and enjoying the startup nation. They only were awakened when they felt that someone is going after their own rights.
And only now they’re starting to see the connection to other places, and hopefully, at least for me, that they will also start to understand that there are Palestinians in the territories and also Palestinian citizens of Israel, that their rights are infringed, and this liberal awakening will make it clear to them that it’s not enough to protect their own rights because a real liberal is someone who care about rights for everybody and not their own rights. So this awakening, I don’t think it’s because anyone was too interested in what’s happening in the world. It happened when someone touched them, and this what brought them to the street.
Jeff: There is much that’s been written about demographic change that’s taking place in Israel. To what extent is that part of this whole equation?
Nadav: Well, it’s clear that the ultra-Orthodox communities are growing because they have a birth rate that is more than any other population in the world, I think. And unlike the Arab sector that used to have also big families, but the Arab sector with education and with more women out of the workforce, it’s actually changing. But for the Orthodox, for ideological reasons, they still want to keep big families, and they enjoy the subsidies and benefits from the state. Still, I think we’re far away from a situation where the liberals will be just a small minority in Israel. There is still a very large silent majority that for too long was not very ideological, and the ideology was always on the other side. Especially with the settlers and with the ultra-Orthodox parties that knew how to play politics to their advantage. And the change now, and this is the optimistic part of the story, is this amazing awakening which also reclaimed the national symbols, the flag, the national anthem. After many years, those symbols were used by the right-wingers who said that the liberals are not really patriotic because they are part of the cosmopolitan global world who wants democracy and liberal democracy like other places. While then, the more ideological people cared much more about a Jewish state than a democracy. So, this awakening, I think, is what’s new here.
And I think we’re still far from the doom day where the demography will make it impossible for the liberals to win this. One thing that is still very much missing in order to make the liberal camp much stronger is that the Arab citizens of Israel, the Palestinians citizens of Israel, still don’t see themselves as part of those demonstration, even though they are the first who are going to be hurt by this government because they feel that a lot of the demonstrations are nationalistic and led by a lot of military jargon and stuff like that. And this is something that has to be changed because in order for the liberals to win in Israel, we need partnership of Arabs and Jews.
Nadav: And to what extent will this awakening bring up other issues beyond this judicial issue that’s being debated at the moment?
Jeff: So, this is the big question, how to make the connection. You’re starting to see it. You’re starting to see, for example, after we had this Pogrom in Hawara where settler violence trying to really go after the Palestinians there. In the demonstrations in Tel Aviv, people told the police, “Where have you been in Hawara?” And people are starting to make the connection that actually out of the settlement project came those extremists like our Minister of Finance Smotrich, and the Minister of National Security Ben-Gvir, who grew in the outlaw environment in the West Bank.
I think people are starting to make this connection, but they’re still very careful because they think that if they will speak about other issues, they will lose some of the soft rights [unintelligible 00:12:58] them in the demonstrations.
Nadav: Talk a little bit about how you see this playing out. There’s been a backing down, at least for the moment, by the Netanyahu government, but there’s also a sense that this isn’t going to last.
Jeff: Yes, I think Netanya is between two powers. One of them, he actually understands the damage to Israel economy, the damage to Israel foreign affairs, but he is in a survival mode. So, he’s trying to find ways to keep his coalition alive and to keep the efforts to go after the judicial branch while still not risking too much and while understanding that the street is against him. So, he came with this attempt to freeze the legislation. But nobody believes Netanyahu. We had so many cases in history where he said things, and it was quite clear that he didn’t really mean it. So, the approach of the opposition, okay, we need to talk.
We need to look for a way to– We have to cooperate with any– Especially with the President’s offer to mediate this. But people are very skeptic, and people don’t believe that Netanyahu really means it. And even if he means it, his partners in the coalition will not let him really compromise. So, in many ways, we might go back to where we were before after the Passover, recess in the Knesset, and after this country go to family events and stuff like that.
I think that we might reach a constitutional crisis afterwards because if the legislation will go on, we will reach a situation where the Supreme Court and the Attorney General will be on one side of the issue and the government will be on the other side. And then the military, the police, the Shabbat, Mossad, economy, everybody will have to decide what side are they.
And I believe that the most influential sectors of Israeli society will be with the law and not with the government. And that might break the Likud Party because there are people in the Likud Party that understand that this direction is breaking them. And they also see in the in service, in polls that there’s not support even among Likud voters for this Judicial coup.
Nadav: Given that the protests that we saw this past week by freezing this process right now has the energy gone out of those protest movements and the protesters? Can they come together again with the same force that we saw?
Jeff: So, that’s a question that nobody knows because there’s a lot of– When the Prime Minister decided to fire the Defense Minister Galland because he called to stop the legislation and go into dialog, people went to the streets, and it wasn’t really organized. So, there’s a lot of authentic energy there, and many people who feel that they want to fight this until they have assurances that the democracy is kept.
On the other hand, it’s true that people are getting tired, and it’s hard to keep that level of energy for so long. So, it’s very hard to say. My guess is that if the negotiations will lead to a block and to not lead to any compromise, then people will go back to the streets. That’s my guess. And we will keep on seeing the demonstrations even growing. But if Netanyahu will be able to make a split within the other camp, within the liberal camp, that some people say, “No, we have to take the compromise.” Some people say, “No, we can’t.” That might break the back of the demonstrators.
Nadav: Can another government even be formed under those circumstances? Or do you get back to something that was not unlike the change government pre-Netanyahu that couldn’t hold together?
Jeff: Well, theoretically, the Knesset could still vote for someone else if Netanyahu go for a plea bargain or whatever. But I don’t think that that can happen. If Netanyahu goes, then I think there will be new elections because this whole structure was built around Netanyahu, and he is the glue for this coalition. And eventually, they will lose their majority in the Knesset, and then we will have to go to elections.
Nadav: But does that create a situation where nobody gets enough votes and the government can’t hold as we’ve seen previously?
Jeff: Well, according to the recent polls, the opposition will be able to form a government. Of course, polls tell you only what’s happening now. You don’t know what’s going to change. But it seems that this feeling in the right that Netanyahu is the only leader and that he’s a big asset for them starting to melt. And the more and more people in Likud that understand that maybe Netanyahu with these corruption cases, doesn’t care about the country, doesn’t care about the party, and it’s all about him.
So, I think that might create a situation where the anti-Netanyahu camp will be able to form a government just like they did with the change government but maybe even bigger. In the last polls that we saw, the party of Gants is growing to the same size of Likud, which is a game changer.
Nadav: And finally, is there young leadership coming up? Are you seeing new leaders beginning to emerge there?
Jeff: Well, we have some faces of the demonstrations. One of them became an icon, especially when the picture stocked by the police was all over the place. Her name is Shikma Bresler, and she’s a Physicist from the Weizmann Institute who started the black slag demonstration in the previous round. And now she’s the main face of the demonstration. But there is a headquarter with many organizations with some funding from the high tech, with a lot of people from different units in the IDF who are usually– it’s very adhesive groups that they demonstrate together. So, I don’t know if we’re talking about leadership that will get into politics, and we’ll have a new leadership in politics. And it’s also one of the attempts of the demonstration not to have just one person because then it’s very easy to find skeletons in their cupboard. And it’s better to keep it without someone that you could just go after and kill the whole thing. So, I can’t really say what will come out of it in terms of leadership. We do see more young people on the streets than we’ve seen in the beginning. In the first place, it was more old people pensioners who could spend the time, but now the young people are all energized as well.
Jeff: Nadav Tamir, I thank you so much for spending time with us today here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.
Nadav: Thank you so much for having me. Let’s all work to keep our democracy.
Jeff: Thank you so much. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another radio WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, we delve into the issue of climate change, as underscored by the latest UN climate report’s warning of impending catastrophic warming in the face of indifference, if not resistance, on the part of most of the world’s population.
Our guest, Paul Hawken, author of bestsellers Drawdown and Regeneration and a prominent figure in the environmental movement, shares his insights on tackling climate change. Hawken highlights the significance of his “Regeneration” movement, which is rapidly gaining momentum worldwide with the aim of ending the climate crisis within a single generation.
He explains that this movement integrates issues of justice, climate, biodiversity, equity, and human dignity into a comprehensive framework for action, policy, and transformation. To captivate humanity’s attention, Hawken asserts that we must first create a world worth saving from the threat of global warming.
Discussing the need for holistic solutions, Hawken emphasizes learning from Earth’s feedback and the importance of collective action over individual efforts. Although he acknowledges the role of technology, he recognizes that it alone cannot solve the problem, especially since technology has contributed significantly to the crisis.
Hawken contends that calls to action that rely on fear are more paralyzing than motivating. By understanding our disengagement from such a crucial issue, he believes we may actually find the path toward a solution. In his book Regeneration, Hawken offers a counterargument to those who think it is too late to address the climate crisis.
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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. The latest UN climate report reveals that we’re edging closer to catastrophic warming. As we witnessed the devastating impact of the drought in Somalia and extreme weather events across America, still an astounding 90-plus percent of people remain disengaged from the climate conversation.
According to our guest on this week’s WhoWhatWhy Podcast, Paul Hawken, addressing the climate crisis will require the engagement of the vast majority of humanity. Perhaps to capture humanity’s attention, we must first create a world that feels attended to. A world that’s worth saving.
Joining me today to help make sense of our collective disregard for this crisis, and what we can still do about it, is Paul Hawken. He’s a leading voice in the environmental movement, one of the leaders in the effort to engage government, business, and community in the climate crisis. Hawken is the author of eight books, including Drawdown and Regeneration, where he argues that it is not too late to address the climate crisis. It is my pleasure to welcome Paul Hawken here to the WhoWhatWhy Podcast.
Paul, thanks so much for joining us.
Paul Hawken: Thank you and I appreciate it.
Jeff: First of all, given how difficult it has been and seemingly will continue to be to do even the simplest things we need to do for the country and for society, does that give you pause and concern about taking on some of the gigantic things we need to take on with respect to dealing with climate change?
Paul: Well, I’m not taking it on. [laughter] That’s too much for anybody and the last thing you want to do is try to save the earth because you can’t, and it’s a burden. But there’s a lot we can do to bring us together in ways that unite us, and what unites us is far more important than what divides us, especially when it comes to climate. And this phenomenon, global warming and all the impacts it is having on weather, jet streams, ocean currents, floods, hurricanes, iconic disturbances, drought, et cetera, basically, is like the earth talking to us. It’s like it’s feedback, and it’s like we’re being homeschooled by Mother Earth.
These are real lessons [laughs] and we can ignore them, but any system that ignores feedback perishes, and this is feedback. No question about it. And so I see it differently than taking it on as a burden or something like that. I see it as [the] end of an era in terms of how we relate to each other. How we relate to the earth and what we’ve done to nature. And I see the beginning of an era of regeneration, which is inclusive, which is not about stealing the earth, which is what we’re doing. We’re stealing the future from our children. And we’re degenerating life. We’re contracting it. We’re turning it into money and capital and wealth and privilege. But the earth is talking back.
And so I see this in a positive way, not as a hopeful thing. I’m not interested in hope. I’m interested in bringing myself and others to life, and I think that’s what the earth is offering us, which is to regenerate every single system that we know of, whether it’s a city or whether it’s an ecosystem, whether it’s the forest or whether it’s the favelas, whether it’s the companies we work within or the institutions that we uphold and so forth. They’re all ready for regeneration and it’s happening. This is an emergent movement.
Jeff: Is there a fundamental conflict that is inherent in this view of what we have to do to deal with the climate? This idea of coming together as a direction at a time when the world seems more divided than ever before?
Paul: Yes, I couldn’t agree more. Yes, it does seem that way, but that presumes that this movement is about bringing the whole world together, the whole country together, the whole state together, and that’s not what it’s about. The climate movement, in my opinion, will become the largest movement in human history. And the reason for that is [the] weather. The climate and the impacts of global warming have changed from being a concept, [a] future existential threat, to experiential. It’s not conceptual, it’s the real deal. Vicariously or directly, more and more people on Earth, 1.1 billion have experienced it directly now.
And that changes our attitude. As long as the concept is out there, somewhere, sometime, there’s not really much we want to do or have to do. And that’s been borne out by the fact that 98 percent of humanity is disengaged. But when I say bring people together, what I’m talking about is that we have been told as individuals this is what you can do. Like Uncle Sam pointing his finger at us, and there are things we can do as individuals for sure, but the fact is we’re not individuals. You have agency. It’s called conversations with Jeff Schechtman- that’s agency. So look at how many people you reach. But all of us have family and friends and communities and neighborhoods and where we work, in our clubs, in our churches or synagogues or temples or all these things are part of who we are. And there’s no such thing as an individual. And that’s what we call agency. That’s agency. And what we know about human beings is they love to learn together, and they love to solve problems together. We do it really well, by the way, and we’re social beings and we like that. And we do it, and we do it all the time.
And so what I see is that the solutions to reversing global warming and to addressing the climate crisis and so forth are arising spontaneously everywhere in the world, in different ways, in different groupings, at different levels of agency. And in the meantime, what we see, Jeff, is that we keep being told what we can do as an individual, but we’re not individuals. That’s what I’m saying, we’re not. That’s just something our ego wakes up with in the morning and tells us, but our whole life is interdependent and intertwined with other people. And at the same time, what we’re told we could do is like puny compared to the task at hand. We’re like, “Okay, I’ll do it. I’ll recycle my plastic-
Jeff: [chuckles]
Paul: -and this and that.” And you go, “And I’ll put cold water in my washing machine, and I’ll use the different detergents,” and these sweet little things, these gestures. I’m not decrying them. They’re good stuff. But we know unless you have an IQ lower than room temperature, you know that these are inadequate to the task at hand. And so it doesn’t make you feel empowered. It makes you almost feel disempowered, like, “I’ll do it, but I know this isn’t enough.”
And then where do you look? You look to government, you look to big government, you look to big companies, big corporations, and you see they’re dysfunctional. [laughs] You see they don’t work, and they’re slow, and they’re corrupt in many cases, even if they don’t know it, they’re corrupted. And then you can go into despair. For sure.
Jeff: Is there a sense though that we are looking for some kind of magic bullet for some kind of technological solution, for someone to come along and solve this for us?
Paul: You’re so right. What happens in that dynamic of the individual versus the big institutions, is that all of us, I’ve experienced it, which is, “Well, I hope they do it,” or whoever they is. And the Bill Gates’ of the world, and all that sort of stuff, we have [his] big investment company breakthrough investments, whatever it’s called (Breakthrough Energy) investing in all these tech solutions. And there’s this idea where technology can save the day, and we definitely need technology and technology is amazing. It will not save the day because the day isn’t about technology. It’s about a living, breathing, beautiful, miraculous planet which supplies everything we need including air, water, food, and more.
If we separate that and we think technology is going to solve the problem, we have to also remember that technology is often used to solve the problems that technology created, and that doesn’t work forever. [chuckles] And technology is not going to solve those problems. But there is something that can and there’s a technology that we underestimate, which is the human mind, human imagination, the human heart, and the very fact that Regeneration, the title of the book, is innate to us.
Your 30 trillion cells are regenerating every nanosecond right now. This is why we can have this conversation. If it wasn’t for regeneration, blah, nothing. And it is the default mode of nature. It’s what happens every moment, every nanosecond, again, on every tree, every plant, and there are soil communities that are underneath. And the rivers repairing systems and oceans and creatures. It’s ubiquitous. It’s what the earth does. And we also see it in ourselves not just biologically but we see it in terms of how we care for our children, our family, our friends, our place, our pets, our gardens, our whatever. This is all regenerative impulses and activity because what are we doing? We’re taking care of life and so to me what regeneration offers us as an organizing principle to understand and address global warming is something that everybody can participate in and you don’t have to save the world. You can’t anyway, it’s a burden to think about it. It’s not your problem.
Your opportunity though is to do something that is absolutely relevant to where you are with whom you are or the people you are with. And what lights you up with, like, “I want to do this. I love doing this. This is something I’ve always wanted to do.” As opposed to acting on this thing out of guilt, of fear, of threat, of shame, [and] all those things. Those emotions. Those have been used now for decades as a way to motivate people. And all I can say about that is, how is that working for you? It’s not working.
Jeff: To your point earlier about, what we’re experiencing in terms of fires, in terms of floods and the weather activity you talk about, it is arguable that fear becomes an even bigger motivation at this point as these things become front and center.
Paul: No, fear shuts people down. Fear lights up the amygdala. The amygdala then bypasses the neocortex and neocortex is a problem solving part of the brain and fear wipes that out. So I disagree. We know from neuroscience that that’s what’s happening. So, yes, if it’s fear in the sense of, you have to run from an animal or a snake that is about ready to bite you or something like that, of course, fear works. If you see a car coming at you and you’re in the crosswalk at 40 miles an hour you move.
Fear is a good, important emotion. No question about it. It’s there for a reason. But fear? No. When it’s a complex existential threat whether it’s current or in the future, that doesn’t motivate people
Jeff: Is there a concern about making this about too many other things? That if it gets away from the immediate concerns about warming and about climate and we start thinking about it in terms of social justice and equity and the broader context of the planet that we lose sight of the immediate crisis somehow.
Paul: We lost sight of it a long time ago. Over 98 percent of the world is disengaged right now, so making it smaller isn’t going to make it better. We have to ask ourselves, why are they disengaged? What happened? How [have] we communicated this in such a way that the greatest crisis civilization has ever faced and may ever face is basically unacted upon? That is what we have to look at.
So making it bigger is that it is big, but making it bigger isn’t making it more onerous. It’s making it larger in terms of where people can meaningfully engage. How many people can put up a solar farm or a wind turbine in the ocean? And so most of what we hear about, again is whoa, wow, how many people can afford an EV, much less make one?
Much of what we hear about is like, “Whoa, I hope they – again, they – somebody out there has got it together because I don’t.” Because the repertoire or the menu that’s been offered, that has been told to me about where I can make a difference, is so narrow. And so I don’t see it as [being] bigger making it more problematic. I think it’s small and tiny and siloed and that’s the problem. And not to say, I’m decrying any of those things, I’m not. I’m just saying, it’s much bigger, more expansive, more interesting, more complex, [and] much more engaging the way it’s been taught to us.
Jeff: Talk about this in the context of the problem being as global as it is and coming with that, the fact that we’re dealing with so much cultural diversity across the world. Whether we can think about it this way, understanding that different cultures look at things in different ways.
Paul: They certainly do. When I finished the book and I hired a decolonization editor – Kyle Whyte from the University of Michigan, the Citizen Potawatomi professor there – and on the very first page, there was a word, I forgot the sentence, “We face the greatest crisis humanity’s ever…” whatever.That’s the we part. He circled it, in the margin. He said, “Who’s we?” It’s like, [chuckles] “Good question, Kyle.”
The idea that we can speak for we is nonsense. And we are different. We are diverse, we are complex. Our cultures are amazingly beautiful. There’s 5,000 indigenous cultures in the world alone and 5,000 languages right there, and they have enormous wisdom because they’ve been living in the same place for thousands of years and they’ve learned how to live there and what works and what doesn’t work and so forth.
And so Regeneration is very much about renewing [and] restoring our respect for this level of science. This is observational science. It’s not empirical science and the wisdom holders are there because they can teach us about our place. There’s the Mi’kmaqs in Nova Scotia, I mean, extraordinary. When they walk by a tree, a spruce, and they listen to the winds sopping through the tree, they name the tree for the sound. They name it. Ten years later they can still remember the name. They walk by the tree, they listen to the sound the tree is making now and they can tell whether it’s healthy or [has] been damaged.
There is a level of understanding on this planet that we have way overlooked by treating indigenous people, Black people, brown people. People who are other bicolonists and settlers that we have lost in some cases but which we have basically ignored. And so Regeneration is about really regenerating culture and ourselves and our knowledge and our wisdom and our sharing and understanding and our skills. And this is what brings us together.
And as I said, what unites us is far more important than what divides us in the sense of a climate emergency. When you have a climate emergency which is what we have, then people look at each other differently because they know they need each other.
Jeff: Among the 98 percent that are disengaged that you talked about, were any of them ever engaged or is it just to your point earlier that the language and the communications of this just never engaged them to start?
Paul: I think there’s two ways to look at that. One is I think half of those people really are sympathetic and understand the problem about how to present the cause of global warming and et cetera, and they don’t know what to do. And even if they hear about something that could be done or should be done, so to speak, they don’t know how to do it.
And so one of the purposes of Regeneration is the website. And you can bypass the book and go right to the website. And in there is Nexus. It’s not complete yet. We’re working as hard as we can. We’re an NGO. We don’t have buckets of money but we have buckets of great scholars and researchers in our buckets [and] our team is amazing.
And what Nexus is is the world’s largest listing and network of climate solutions and how to do them and how to do them on every level of agency. Just as an individual, okay. But what about a neighborhood? What about a community? What about a church? What about a temple? What about a synagogue? What about a company? What about a city? What about a classroom? What about a club? What about it goes on and on and on. And these are all levels of agency which we have, which we’re part of.
And it shows you how if you degrade a land restoration, okay, there is one. This is what you can do on all levels and here are the bad actors. Here are the ones who are just really amazing people. Here are the NGOs all over the world that are already active and know so much and want your support and will teach you and welcome involvement. Here are the books, here are the videos, here the documentaries. Here are the articles, here are all the resources you need.
And the most important thing that somebody can do, really, is what lights them up. What they love to do. They’re curious about it or they know about it or [it] takes them outside or whatever. It depends on each person [being] different and that’s what we need to do and we need to do it in a way that makes sense to us. And so we describe ourselves as being selfish. Yes, but we’re actually transcendently altruistic and we want to be and work with other people.
We’re humans. We like to solve problems together and learn together. And that’s what Regeneration is about, it’s just looking at it from a different point of view. It doesn’t in any way decry or exclude what is going on or what’s happening with respect to climate, but it’s too narrow.
Jeff: Paul Hawken. Paul, I thank you so much for spending time with us here on the WhoWhatWhy Podcast.
Paul: My pleasure, Jeff. Thank you so much.
Jeff: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I hope you join us next week for another Radio WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
It has been a momentous week for banks and markets. What some have dubbed an “extinction-level event” was, at its core, the failure of a couple of banks.
To help us put all of this into proper perspective, we are joined on this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast by two distinguished economists, J. Bradford DeLong and Dean Baker.
DeLong served as deputy undersecretary of the treasury in the Clinton administration and is currently a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the author of the substack Grasping Reality and the recently published book Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century.
Baker co-founded the Center for Economic and Policy Research. His areas of research include housing and macroeconomics, intellectual property, Social Security, Medicare, and European labor markets. He has been credited as one of the first economists to have identified the 2007–08 United States housing bubble, and, in 2006, Baker predicted that “plunging housing investment will likely push the economy into recession.”
Together, they discuss the venture-capitalist libertarian overreaction to the event, as well as the way it has been massively misrepresented by all of the press, including the mainstream press.
They detail the differences between this event and the 2008–09 banking crisis, the power of contagion and rumor in the digital and social media age, and what actually transpired during the 36 hours the bank was shut down by the FDIC.
We discuss what this means for both small and regional banks, and for the “too big to fail” banks, which are now suddenly in favor.
While the whole story could be forgotten in a matter of weeks, the implications and downstream effects will be with us for quite some time.
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Transcript Coming Soon…
Christopher Hitchens was an ardent defender of free speech, as well as a champion of universal liberal values. Drawing inspiration from George Orwell’s commitment to truth and free expression, Hitchens believed in the enduring power of Enlightenment values and was an avowed internationalist.
In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, journalist Matt Johnson discusses his new book, How Hitchens Can Save the Left, which argues that Hitchens’s legacy has been unfairly maligned by some on the far Left due to his support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
According to Johnson, Hitchens believed that free speech, individual rights, and other fundamental liberal values were under threat across the democratic world. Additionally, according to Johnson, Hitchens saw the rise of identity politics and the perception that liberal democracies are institutionally racist, exploitative, and imperialistic, which led some on the Left to abandon the universalist principles that underpinned liberalism from its inception.
Johnson argues that Hitchens’s message of universal Enlightenment principles is more important than ever and could help save liberalism from its current malaise. By embracing Hitchens’s legacy, Johnson contends that the Left can avoid the pitfalls of identity politics and return to its roots as a defender of individual rights and freedoms.
Channeling Hitchens, Johnson describes how liberals can resist the emerging orthodoxies on both the Left and the Right, and reconstruct a liberalism that is true to its foundational principles.
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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. At what point did liberalism shift from valuing individual liberty, rationality, reason, and equality to prioritizing wokeness, identity politics, political correctness, and collective happiness? It seems that in the process, we’ve lost sight of the enlightenment values that underpin true liberalism.
Certainly growing out of the enlightenment, true liberalism prioritized individual freedoms and the right to pursue individual happiness while respecting the rights of others. This was the true passion of the late Christopher Hitchens, a unique and influential intellectual voice of our time. Hitchens champion universal liberal values and, most vociferously, the freedom to speak and write openly.
He was an internationalist who believed that all people should have the right to escape the arbitrary constraints of tribe, faith, and, yes, even of nation. In his new book, How Hitchens Can Save the Left, my guest, Matt Johnson, argues that Hitchens’ legacy has been unfairly tarnished by the far left who view him as a defector due to a support of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Johnson asserts that Hitchens was a lifelong champion of free inquiry, humanism, and true universal liberal values from which modern liberalism could stand to learn a lot. Matt Johnson is a writer for Haaretz, Quillette, The Bulwark, Areo, and numerous other publications. And it is my pleasure to welcome Matt Johnson here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast to talk about How Hitchens Can Save the Left: Rediscovering Fearless Liberalism in an Age of Counter-Enlightenment. Matt Johnson, thanks so much for joining us.
Matt Johnson: Thank you so much for having me, Jeff.
Jeff: A delight to have you here. First of all, for our listeners that may not fully understand, talk a little bit about who Christopher Hitchens was.
Matt: Hitchens was an Anglo-American journalist and an author who moved to the United States in the early 1980s. He was best known at that time for being an acerbic critic of US foreign policy and politics and culture. He was a socialist for much of his adult life, but on September 11th, he saw the tragedies in New York and Washington and decided that he could find his way into the corner of the US government in supporting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And that’s why so many of his former allies regarded him as a defector and a neocon and a warmonger, but what I argue in the book is that those positions weren’t all that surprising if you look at Hitchens’ overall career trajectory from his support for the interventions in the Balkans in the 1990s to his consistent anti-totalitarianism and anti-authoritarianism throughout his career. So the basic theme of the book is that Hitchens was a true liberal and that the left would do well to rediscover his legacy today.
Jeff: Talk a little bit about the fact that there was this indication long before September 11th of things like Bosnia, where he was so supportive of action and even he was supportive of Margaret Thatcher in the Falklands.
Matt: Yes, exactly. So his friend, Ian McEwan, actually made the connection between his position on the Falklands and his ultimate position on Iraq and said that that was just his anti-totalitarianism through and through. He made the argument that if Thatcher opposed the absorption of the Falklands by the junta in Argentina that Galtieri would fall in short order and the principle of sovereignty would be upheld.
And he was exactly right about that. It’s actually funny. There’s an author named Richard Seymour, who wrote a book called Unhitched about how Hitchens had these buried imperial and conservative tendencies throughout his life. He argues that his support for the Falklands War was evidence of those tendencies, but what’s so funny is that Seymour gives us a few pages about how Hitchens was right at every stage when it came to that conflict.
It did lead to the fall of the military junta in Argentina and hastened the transition to democracy. So, yes, he was on board with that sort of interventionism very early on. And then in the Balkans, he was probably one of the most visible and most articulate defenders of the idea that NATO should get involved to prevent ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and ultimately get involved in Kosovo as well. These tendencies were very clear.
If you read some of the work he did, particularly, I believe it was 1993 or ’94, in Boston Review about how the left shouldn’t take its anti-imperialism too far, the left shouldn’t regard what was happening in Bosnia and the rest of the Balkans as the example of American and NATO power projection. It was actually a humanitarian conflict. I think that realization really did change his trajectory.
Jeff: And, of course, all of this begs the question of what he might think about the situation in Ukraine today.
Matt: Yes, you can never speak for the dead, but Hitchens was very clear about what he regarded as Russian chauvinism and imperialism and aggression. He was clear about what he thought about Putin’s war in Georgia, about his efforts to meddle in Ukrainian democracy. And this was long before the invasion and annexation of Crimea, so I think I can say with a fair amount of certainty that Hitchens would be behind the decision to arm the Ukrainians and help them resist this invasion.
And many on the left haven’t passed that test. I mentioned in the book that the Democratic Socialists of America, for example, upon witnessing the invasion of Ukraine, immediately blamed NATO and said, “We need to disband this alliance, which set the stage for this war.” So that’s a pretty good example of how some elements on the left really need to go back and maybe read a bit of Hitchens.
Jeff: And yet Hitchens, in spite of finding this through line that ties all of this together, wasn’t always consistent in his political views, that there was an evolving set of views that Hitchens had.
Matt: Yes, that’s exactly right and it’s important to emphasize that. You can’t reconcile his staunch opposition to the Gulf War with his support for the Iraq War, for example. At the time, he regarded the Gulf War as an imperial power play and a classic example of the United States pursuing the rail politic that it had always pursued in the Middle East. And he later had to admit that he was wrong about that because his core reasons for the invasion of Iraq were humanitarian.
He constantly talked about the genocide against the Kurds, Saddam Hussein’s aggression against his neighbors, and just the horrific repression of the Iraqi people, but those arguments would’ve been all the stronger in the early ’90s during the Gulf War because the Anfal genocide in Iraq had just occurred and Saddam had just waged a pointless eight-year attrition war with Iran. So, yes, he definitely did evolve over time.
Jeff: And talk a little bit about his evolution in terms of his domestic views and how he saw liberalism and what he saw happening to liberalism and the liberal experiment in America and in Western Europe.
Matt: Yes, the word “liberalism” is an interesting one when you look at the arc of Hitchens’s career. He originally had a lot of contempt for it. He viewed it as this insipid and spineless form of politics, which is why he always declared that he was a socialist. He actually said that the fact that Brian Lamb, whenever he would go on his show on C-SPAN, would ask, “Are you still a socialist?”
He may have called himself a socialist for a little longer than he otherwise would have just to not give Brian Lamb the satisfaction of finally saying, “No, I’m no longer a socialist,” but I think he was coming around to the concept of liberalism as an affirmation. This is one of the core themes of the book and it’s why it’s in the subtitle of the book. He regarded it as an end in itself by the end of his career.
He was more focused on the threats to liberal democracy and liberal values that were permeating the culture than a specific ideology like socialism. And, really, by the turn of the century, he was already moving beyond socialism and toward a more affirmative liberal position. It is an interesting transition for him. And I actually mentioned the difference between his attitude toward Bill Clinton, which was as hostile as it could possibly be in the 1990s, and his support for Tony Blair.
Actually, fairly early on, he was a staunch supporter of Blair for sticking with the United States and Afghanistan and Iraq, but he also believed that Blair was upholding liberal principles when he urged intervention in Kosovo and got Britain involved in Sierra Leone. I think he regarded Blair as a classic liberal type. But if you would’ve told the Hitchens of the early 1980s that this guy who is now seen as just a paragon of the neoliberal establishment would eventually be this politician he really admired, I think he would’ve been shocked.
Jeff: And why his dislike, and that’s probably putting it too mildly, towards Bill Clinton?
Matt: Yes, certainly. He said early on that he saw or he thought there was something completely hollow at the center of Clinton. I think that’s something he said in an interview right after Clinton was elected. He thought Clinton was a manager and an operator and, as he put it in the subtitle of his book, No One Left to Lie to, a triangulator. He thought he had no ethical or political core.
And that really was the nature of triangulation, which was Clinton’s electoral and political strategy, just to take the best ideas from the other side and fuse them with your own ideas and get as many people who were close to your position on the right as possible. And I think that’s why Clinton was known for a welfare reform, which was seen as a giveaway to the right wing. And that’s something Hitchens really despised at the time.
And then there were specific episodes that Hitchens was really horrified by Clinton’s decision to go back to Arkansas and oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector really horrified Hitchens. He said that Ricky Ray Rector was essentially this lobotomized individual who didn’t even know what was happening to him. And then Clinton’s decision to rocket the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, Hitchens thought that was a distraction from Monica Lewinsky hearings, but I’m not going to speculate about that.
I think that’s probably ungenerous, but that’s what he thought, and he regarded that as just a really brazen and horrifying war crime. So, yes, there were these specific instances that he didn’t like, but I think that the core reason he didn’t like Clinton was the fact that he represented the managerial technocratic form of politics, which he regarded is bloodless and uninteresting in the ’90s.
Jeff: But the other side of that, and this is one of the things I think is so interesting about it, is that Clinton was probably closer to being a globalist or an internationalist than any other president closer to really what Hitchens’ views were about that.
Matt: Yes, in some ways, I think he could probably make that argument. Clinton was very slow to get involved in Bosnia. He talked a big game on the campaign about how he was going to differentiate himself from George H.W. Bush and really get in there. And he didn’t even want to lift or implement the lifted strike policy, which basically meant lifting the arms embargo on Bosnia, and then attacking any forces that would prevent arms deliveries from making it into the country.
So I think Hitchens saw that and that really upset him, but it is true that Clinton ended up coming around to the war, and he sent Richard Holbrooke to negotiate the Dayton Accords. And I do think he was trying, along with Blair, to construct something like a post-Cold War international order. NATO was in the process of expanding. This is when the EU was founded. The modern EU was founded in 1993. This was a period of remarkable international integration. And I don’t think Clinton was, by any means, opposed to any of that.
I don’t think Hitchens ever would’ve come around to Clinton. It just seems completely inconceivable, but Hitchens was extremely critical of Francis Fukuyama and the whole End of History thesis. And in the book, I mentioned the fact that I find it interesting that he was so hostile to this thesis because it’s informed by Hegelianism, which, of course, Marxism is also informed by, and the sense of historical mechanics and progress, which Hitchens always had some affinity for.
So I don’t think he would’ve become a Fukuyamian either. He was very critical of Fukuyama, but I think he misunderstood that thesis. And, yes, I think just the international order as it exists now and as it was crafted in the ’90s was something Hitchens reluctantly came around to. So what he would’ve said about its evolution over the past 15 years is anyone’s guess, but I think he was becoming more sympathetic.
Jeff: He was in favor of globalization, but not necessarily in the way we think about it all the time. It wasn’t just economic globalization. It was more political in terms of the structure that he saw.
Matt: Yes, exactly. He actually made that connection explicit several times. In Letters to a Young Contrarian, for example, he said, “If we’re going to have the globalization of production and economic development, then we should also have the globalization of human rights and something resembling international justice.” So he thought that was the next radical stage and I really have a lot of sympathy with that argument.
To me, the utter hostility toward institutions like NATO on the left is it’s not baffling. It’s understandable. If you’re in the opposition or you guard yourself as in the opposition, it’s difficult to be sympathetic toward a massive military alliance. [chuckles] But at the same time, I just think that if you do believe in internationalism, we have these institutions that work pretty well. The EU is one and NATO was another.
And I think both of those institutions are much more functional and much more successful than the United Nations, but I think a lot of people on the left tend to have more sympathy for the UN than NATO, which they regard as this military colossus. And look at what Jeremy Corbyn had to say about NATO. You can only imagine if he had been prime minister when the invasion of Ukraine happened. We’d be living in a different world.
Jeff: Talk a little bit about the Orwellian influence on Hitchens.
Matt: It was very substantial. One interesting thing about Orwell is the fact that he had what Hitchens regarded as these conservative tendencies. He was such a radical and he was a radical until the day he died and a socialist until the day he died. But at the same time, he appreciated the power of patriotism and national loyalty. He was a traditionalist. In many senses, I think he was definitely Republican and didn’t have much respect for the monarchy.
But he was amazed at the ability of the British people to come together in times of adversity and he just admitted later on. He originally thought that World War II would lead to a socialist revolution. And he was just shocked that people were so capable of maintaining the current order and rallying around that order during the war. And I think that clear-eyed understanding of how people actually are in the world was something that Hitchens took away from Orwell and really valued in Orwell.
Hitchens said that he had what he regarded as a similar upbringing to Orwell. And so when the time came to start sculpting his own views and his own approach to radicalism, I think it was Orwell’s really fundamental principles, his hatred for totalitarianism in the Soviet Union at a time when a lot of people on the left were apologists for it. And his absolute commitment to free speech and all these other components of Orwell’s career were the ones that really carried over for Hitchens.
And he provided a radical template that Hitchens followed in many ways and he was always careful to say that despite the fact that some people would occasionally compare him to Orwell, it was a ludicrous comparison. [chuckles] What else can he say? If somebody compares you to George Orwell, you don’t say, “Well, yes, of course.” The comparisons or the similarities are obvious. It would make you sound like a bit of a lunatic, but I do think he was consciously sculpting his approach to politics on Orwell.
Jeff: And he really was a free-speech absolutist.
Matt: Yes, he was. I’ve had a lot of cause to think about that lately because I think, in some ways, just saying free speech all the time and for everyone is a limited argument these days. We live in an era of algorithmically-boosted speech. And I have to wonder what Hitchens would say about Alex Jones abusing the families of murdered children at Sandy Hook. What would he say about Twitter’s decision to ban that guy?
I can’t really speculate about that because Hitchens was much more focused on self-censorship and the forms of censorship that are more familiar to us, top-down censorship. He was a First Amendment absolutist through and through. One of his formative moments was when the ACLU decided to defend the neo-Nazis who were marching through Skokie, Illinois, which was this bastion for Jewish refugees, so it’s just this horrendous display of intimidation.
But he just valued the principle so much that he thought the ACLU’s decision there was originally baffling to him, but then he could see the logic of it very clearly that you have to defend speech for even the worst characters. And then Hitchens actually defended the right of David Irving, who’s a notorious Holocaust denier, to publish and speak. And he was horrified when Irving was arrested in Austria. But, yes, I don’t know how he would’ve engaged with the core debates that we’re having about free speech in the era of social media now.
I do think that his main insight– and it’s why I opened the chapter on free speech with Orwell’s originally-suppressed introduction to Animal Farm, in which he talks about how the most pernicious threat to free speech in Western democracies where we don’t have much top-down control or totalitarian control of speech is self-censorship. And that was something Hitchens was always very good on and it was an extension of how he thought independently.
Jeff: The outgrowth of that and the idea that made Hitchens so uncomfortable was the notion of identity politics, which one can suppose he would’ve been more horrified by as time went on.
Matt: Yes, that’s another area where defining your terms is very important because Hitchens participated in a debate in November 2001 about reparations. And he was on the pro-reparation side and he was always a strong supporter of the civil rights movement, of course. He marched against apartheid in South Africa. Focusing your political energies around issues that are identity adjacent as in rights for Black Americans was different to Hitchens from identity politics. To him, identity politics was the assertion of identity-based authority.
“I am X, Y, or Z. Therefore, I should have a public platform to say X, Y, or Z.” So that’s what he was really critical of and he would say things like, “Anyone who begins a sentence with speaking as a, as if that’s some badge of honor, and then starts talking should immediately be distrusted.” And so you look at the way identity politics is manifesting itself today. And I think Hitchens would’ve been really quite alarmed when Bernie Sanders said, “I think we should judge political candidates on the basis of their ideas and principles rather than their age or their sex or their race.”
He really did get into trouble for saying that during the primary and the 2020 election. And so I just think Hitchens would’ve seen that sort of thing and said, “Well, that would’ve been a radical and progressive principle in the time of the civil rights movement.” It’s this sort of thing that Bayard Rustin thought. But nowadays, it’s regarded as this reactionary position. Anybody who says, “I’m colorblind,” or something like that is automatically raked over the coals and I actually understand that. It’s impossible to be colorblind.
The legacies of slavery and Jim Crow are all around us. It’s very clear. But to say that I will choose a political candidate without reference to race or gender seems, to me, the progressive position, the liberal position to say, “I’m only going to vote for a Black woman or I’m only going to vote for a gay man in this election.” It just seems like the antithesis of liberalism, so I think Hitchens saw that early on.
Jeff: Talk about his attitudes toward political change because he did seem to sour on the idea that, I guess, for lack of a better phrase, the grassroots politics, the bottom-up politics wasn’t really effective anymore.
Matt: Well, yes, and that was the criticism that he always received from the left was that he was supporting in Iraq, a revolution from above, which is the sort of thing that many on the left would always have been suspicious of in the ’60s and ’70s. And I do just think that what Hitchens came around to was the fact that there are these international realities. There are these political realities that you cannot get away from.
Instead of just denouncing NATO as an imperial colossus and saying, “Let’s build this whole thing from the ground up again,” you have to work within that institution and say, “Okay, NATO exists. It’s not going anywhere. There’s a genocide happening in Bosnia. What can I do to prevent that genocide from happening?” Well, I can lobby NATO. I can lobby the US government to get involved. So that was the form instead of just trying to wash your hands of the whole thing and saying, “Let’s just create a perfect socialist utopia where we don’t need a NATO.”
Well, that world’s not coming around anytime soon. And I think Hitchens, just his suspicion of that sort of radicalism, at one point in his memoir, he says that sort of view that human beings can be remade from the ground up has built and populated many prisons around the world. And it often ends up burning human beings as the waste products of these failed ideological experiments. I think he just had a healthy suspicion of anyone who was too utopian.
And I do think that the idea that we’re just going to overthrow the system or anarchist syndicalism to use Noam Chomsky’s preferred ideology is eventually going to provide bottom-up democratic control of major institutions. That’s not going to happen. That’s not the way the world works. And Hitchens had a lot of admiration for the founding principles of the United States. And he regards the country as a written country and an essentially liberal country even though it’s deeply, deeply flawed.
So he just thought, “Yes, work within the system,” and this is something that I say in the book. The people who constantly say the United States is this imperial colossus and it’s inherently racist and inherently imperialistic, what is the political call to action there? And this is a point Hitchens often made, especially in the last decade of his life. If you really wake up in the morning and you think, “Okay, the US government is this sinister imperial entity,” what are you going to do? It completely renders you immobilized.
It’s like a form of radicalism that doesn’t require you to do anything because everything is so sinister. Everything is run by these bureaucrats in Brussels and by these monsters in Washington, DC, and then you can just find your way into some quiet corner and pump out radical polemics all the time. Well, Hitchens wanted to get in there. He actually wanted to change the world, so I think that informed the way he approached politics in the last 20 years of his life.
Jeff: And the way he approached his attitude towards religion and organized religion in particular.
Matt: Yes, some readers might regard that as a bit of an omission in the book because I just don’t talk that much about his religious views primarily because I think he just said everything himself as well as it could be said. I don’t think I need to relitigate his arguments in God Is Not Great. If you want to know what Hitchens thought about religion, read God Is Not Great. Watch one of the many, many debates that are out there on YouTube, but I did mention religion several times but in a political sense. Hitchens regarded religion as this tremendous force multiplier.
If you look at the Israel-Palestine conflict, some of us think it’s self-evident that very strong religious claims on either side are making the situation more intractable. And Hitchens always made that argument. Religion often creates partitions in the world. The separation of India and Pakistan was a creation of British imperialism, but at the same time, what has driven the wedge even deeper is religious division. So I do think that it intersects with many of my other arguments about Hitchens and his relevance. But, yes, if you want to know what Hitchens thinks about God, I’d read Hitchens.
Jeff: One of the things that’s so interesting about it is not that he wasn’t clear as you say about his attitude about religion but that, in some ways, it overshadowed some of his other work later in life.
Matt: Yes, it did. I think there were a lot of people who now know Hitchens only as that new–
Jeff: Exactly.
Matt: And even the people who are familiar with Hitchens’ politics just look at the very familiar and, in my opinion, tedious narrative of radical to neocon. And I think that’s a really silly oversimplification. And his views on religion were such a major part of his life and his output and his last 10 years. So I think it’s understandable that that’s where a lot of people discover him, but I really do think his relevance today is much more bound up with his positions on universalism and the idea of global governance and the idea of interventionism, which has just become so much more relevant after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
And then just everything else that we’ve talked about, his commitment to free speech, and even the fact that he urged people always to say what they actually think to do justice and let the skies fall. In an era of substackification of our intellectual lives and of social media mobbing, I don’t want to get too boomerish on you, but safe spaces on university campuses and this crippling fear of speech that people don’t like, I just think Hitchens’ example is valuable across the board. And, yes, I actually think the stuff that deserves a resurrection is really his political work after the Cold War.
Jeff: Also, whether or not enlightenment principles still have any value today.
Matt: Yes, Steven Pinker wrote this book called Enlightenment Now a few years ago, which made the case that the enlightenment is under attack all the time. And if you look at a figure like Donald Trump, come on. This is somebody who disrespected and rejected the very rudiments of our democratic system. And then you look at people I mentioned in the book like Robin DiAngelo and her views on race and the fact that racial division is this permanent characteristic of being a human being and it will be with us until the end of time.
If we ever colonize Mars with SpaceX logos stamped on our little tents out there on the red landscape, she thinks that we’ll be arguing about race. And she thinks that our identities will still be these inescapable anchors that drag us into tribalism. And I think any humanist like Hitchens and any radical like Hitchens, who had respect for human potential and for real liberal values, would regard this as just really depressing and bleak view of what human beings are capable of.
Their politics isn’t anchored to their identity. A lot of people actually have fundamentally progressive views about how the species can become more integrated, less tribal. So, yes, I just think it’s depressing that we have this cramped view. And to tie back into your comment about the enlightenment, there was a review written of the book maybe a couple of weeks ago that pointed out that the enlightenment was a very diffuse phenomenon. And it stands hundreds of years and it produced many ideas.
You can certainly make the case that Marxism is an enlightenment philosophy and there are a lot of philosophies that spun out from the enlightenment, but what I argue in the book is the simple fact that there were certain themes of the enlightenment. There were certain syntheses and one of them would be secularism. One of them would be humanism, individual rights.
These are things that we should really defend and rediscover today because they have laid the foundation of a system that has worked remarkably well. American democracy has been with us for hundreds of years and it’s still pretty impressive how stable the system is despite Donald Trump’s best efforts to undermine it. So, yes, those would be a few of the arguments that enlightenment principles are still relevant today.
Jeff: Matt Johnson, his recent book is How Hitchens Can Save the Left: Rediscovering Fearless Liberalism in an Age of Counter-Enlightenment. Matt, I thank you so much for spending time with us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.
Matt: Thank you so much for having me, Jeff. It was a lot of fun.
Jeff: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another radio WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
As the media has reminded us repeatedly, last week marked the one-year anniversary of the war in Ukraine. However, amid the focus on weapons, battles, and speculation about how the war might end, we risk losing sight of the broader historical and geopolitical issues that led to the Russian invasion.
In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, former Ambassador William Courtney joins us to discuss the complex history underlying the conflict. Courtney has extensive experience in foreign service, having served as ambassador to Kazakhstan and Georgia; as a special assistant to the president for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia; and as special assistant to the under secretary of state for political affairs. He is currently an adjunct senior fellow at the RAND Corporation.
Courtney first draws parallels between Russia’s failure to adapt on the battlefield and its inability to adjust to diplomatic challenges. He attributes this in part to Russia’s current internal repression and penchant for external aggression, which he argues resembles the authoritarianism of both the czarist and Soviet periods.
Courtney also assesses the West’s responsibility for the current situation in Russia, citing decisions made after the collapse of the Soviet Union. At the same time, he compares Putin’s actions to those of former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, who, he says, “basically ran the Soviet Union into the ground.”
According to Courtney, Russian history indicates that the country will not back down in Ukraine — regardless of the human and economic costs — until a more liberal regime takes power in Moscow.
Courtney also explains China’s limited influence, Europe’s security concerns, even in the face of a weak Russian military, and why Ukraine must shift from a defensive to a counteroffensive military strategy.
Ultimately, Courtney believes that even with tighter sanctions, a united West, and a strong Ukraine, Russia could remain engaged in the war for a very long time.
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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. As the media has reminded us over and over again, last week marked the one-year anniversary of the war in Ukraine. But what are we actually marking? The war goes on, complexity piles up, and in the focus on weapons battles and the speculation of how the war might end, we perhaps lose sight of the 30,000-foot view of the issues that got the world here and the history of Russian conflict and what it tells us. Relations with Russia are as bad as almost any time during the Cold War.
The 1970s US diplomatic efforts to try and divide Russia and China has been reversed. And again, the US finds itself even without troops on the ground in a proxy war with Russia. And more than just providing aid to Ukraine, the war has become a catalyst for rearranging the global chessboard. Far from the end of history, the world seems to be repeating all the worst aspects of 20th-century history, ground war in Europe, Cold War, talk about nukes and shifting global alliances, not about globalization and trade, but about power and nationalism.
Well, it seems at times like history is repeating itself. Perhaps we can actually learn something from that history. And we’re going to do that today with my guest, Ambassador William Courtney. Ambassador Courtney was a foreign service officer at the Department of State. He served as ambassador to Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the US-Soviet Bilateral Consultative Commission to implement the Threshold Test Ban Treaty. He was a special assistant to the president for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia, and deputy negotiator in the US-Soviet Defense and Space Talks.
He was deputy executive secretary of the NSC staff and special assistant to the under secretary of State for Political Affairs. He is currently an adjunct senior fellow at the RAND Corporation. He holds a PhD in Economics from Brown University, and he is chair-emeritus and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Eurasia Foundation. It is my pleasure to welcome Ambassador William Courtney here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. Mr. Ambassador, thanks so much for joining us.
William Courtney: Jeff, happy to help.
Jeff: Well, it is a delight to have you here. As we look at the way things are playing out today, there is this sense that we hear over and over again that part of the problem for Russia and Ukraine is their inability to adjust, their inability to adapt to what’s happening on the battlefield as a result of things that are inherent in the Russian system. Is the same true, I wonder, for Russia’s ability to adapt or adjust on the diplomatic level? Is it going to be just as difficult for them to adjust to the changing geopolitical landscape as it is to what’s happening on the battlefield?
William: At this point, Russia has never been more repressive internally in three decades of independence than it is now. And it has never been more aggressive externally than it is now. So we’re seeing a phenomenon that’s driven really mostly by changes in Russia itself. Russia is reverting back to more authoritarian rule of a kind that, of course, persisted in a period of autocracy prior to the Bolsheviks and then in the Soviet period.
Both of us who were around at the time the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, we knew that political struggles would be difficult. That emerging from running an empire to trying to build a nation in Russia would pose problems with a lot of people in Russia, who thought that Russia deserved to control an empire. But we never expected that Russia would go this far back over a period of decades to a circumstance now in which people are locked up inside Russia for really any expression of opposition to the government. This is a very different circumstance than the West had hoped. And it’s one that does suggest, as you point out, that Russia’s having some difficulty adjusting.
Jeff: To what extent does the West have to take some responsibility for the way Russia has really gone back into its shell?
William: When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the West rushed emergency supplies of medicine and food to the former Soviet Union, both Russia and the other non-Russian republics, and went out of its way to provide assistance to help all those countries emerge from really a totalitarian system in which the state owned all the economic assets to help these countries develop more market-oriented economies and more open political systems that hopefully will evolve into democracy. So the West has really, quite helpful, tried to help these countries overcome a burden of history and a legacy of Soviet oppression that everyone knew would leave scars.
We, in the West, undoubtedly made some mistakes along the way. We may not have criticized corruption strongly enough in some cases. We may not have urged the Russians to clean out their security organs, the KGB, and so they’re now stuck with post-Soviet KGB that is quite akin to that in the Soviet era. So there were some things that we did, but by and large, we treated the people of Russia and the other non-Russian republics as essentially victims of Soviet repression. We tried to bend over backwards in every way. NATO, for example, we made special arrangements to try to bring this republic closer.
Russia especially created a NATO Russia commission that was a high-level commission to try to help Russia move closer to the West. And we probably could have done more in some respects, but looking back, it’s hard to know what could we have done. For example, some people would argue that we should have provided more generous subsidies to Russia to help with transition to a market economy. Well, that’s possibly true but the absence of market mechanisms in most of the cases would’ve made much of that assistance ineffective.
So we tried to do what we could. And the IMF, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, European Bank for reconstruction development, all tried to help out, and certainly, the European governments as well. So I guess I look back on this and it’s hard to find really systemic flaws in the way the West dealt with the former Soviet Union.
Jeff: When we look at it today, the degree of repression that you talked about earlier, is there a way that that repression and the fact that Putin maintains such tight control of all of the information in Russia, can that turn out to be an asset in finding an end to this war? That if things get tough enough, there’s really nothing to prevent Putin from just declaring victory and shutting it down because he controls all the sources of information directed at the Russian people.
William: That has not been the past experience. So the closest analogy, in a more recent time in the early 1980s, the British regime dominated by Leonid Brezhnev, who was a general secretary of the Communist Party, and his cohort, basically ran the Soviet Union into the ground. They couldn’t feed their people. Their economy was deteriorating rapidly. There was a decline in morale of ordinary people that was quite palpable. Relations with the West, which the Soviets were trying to blame the West for their own problems, or Kremlin was trying to blame the West for their own problems, so they had very difficult relations with the West.
They had a more repressive rule then but that did not lead them to include that they needed to open up. What happened was because the country was running into the ground, they brought [unintelligible 00:10:03] younger, more liberal leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. And Gorbachev then was the one who reversed the repressive and status policies of the Brezhnev era by opening up what you call glasnost, which is allowing more freedom of expression and perestroika which was restructuring policies and government to allow to operate more effectively. So it was regime change that made the difference.
And if we go back in history, there’s often some calamity that might occur that forces the Kremlin to liberalize. So after the Russian Empire lost the Crimean War in the 1850s, they freed the serfs. After they lost the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, 1905, they had their first constituent assembly. It’s too late, [unintelligible 00:11:07] took power. After Stalin died, they freed one or a couple million prisoners. So what we see is the openings come, not by the toughest leaders like Stalin, but by their successes who are a bit more liberal or a bit more open.
Jeff: Are there parallels to what was going on after the Russian defeat in Afghanistan?
William: So the defeat in Afghanistan, the Russia or Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and they were there for a decade and then pulled out in 1989. It was the Brezhnev regime that made the decision to invade Afghanistan, and the defeat was evident pretty quickly. But the Soviets persisted and the Soviets helped the mujahideen, the Afghan guerrillas who were trying to oppose Russia’s invasion, and that made a significant difference.
But Soviet Union did not withdraw from Afghanistan until after this liberalizing leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, had come to power. And he took him, he was the power for four year plus years before he was able to pull the troops out of Afghanistan, which suggests something about the power of the military and the KGB to persist in losing aggressive policies, but losing policies. So it was withdrawal under a more liberal regime, that was important.
Jeff: And should that tell us something about what we can expect from Russia’s actions in Ukraine now?
William: It is very difficult to predict the future, so we should bear in mind or we should be humble about what we can expect. But if one had to guess, it would be that the Kremlin will not pull troops out of Ukraine until there is regime change and a more liberal government there. No one knows if or when that will happen, but Russia’s losing the war. The human costs, extremely high. The economic costs are significant as well. Russia is isolated from the West, which is something that traditionally is a concern in Russia, the Soviet Union. It’s not isolated from all the global south, and of course, China has some ties with China.
But even with China, there are problems. Now, China just offered a peace plan. The first plank of that plan is that the solid of the sovereignty, independence of territory integrity of Ukraine must be respected. The commonwealth is not so happy to hear about that plan, and so they’ve had a tempered reaction. Well, we are likely to be in a situation, maybe close to the end of the Brezhnev era, if you will, in which the Kremlin is running the country into the ground now, and things will not get better until there is a more liberal, more open government that treats people with greater respect.
Jeff: Is China the one element in the global landscape now that is different, that might have some influence to turn that around? We were looking in those days at a bipolar world, now arguably, we could say we’re talking about a tripolar world and that China has perhaps some influence.
William: China does have influence but it’s mixed in several respects. So on the one hand, China and India are buying large volumes of Russian oil because it is available at a discount now on the global market as compared with other oil. So China and India are benefiting economically from that, and of course, Russia is losing. But nonetheless, Russia is selling oil enough money to produce the oil and make some profit. The Chinese may be providing semiconductor chips, other technology, dual-use technology, dual-use meaning civilian and military, but which could be used by Russia for its military effort.
Secretary of State Blinken has recently warned that China may be on the verge of making a decision whether to supply lethal arms and that could be something like artillery shelves of which Russia is short. We don’t know whether that will happen yet, but at the same time, as I mentioned, this new China peace plan has a key feature which is contrary to Russia’s view. And second part of that peace plan is saying that nuclear weapons must not be used on a conflict. Well, President Putin has been talking for months now using language occasionally that implies that Russia might consider using nuclear weapons.
In fact, last fall in Samarkand in Uzbekistan, there was a large summit meeting. And at that meeting, publicly, both Xi Jinping of China and Narendra Modi of India publicly warn Putin not to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. So the relationship is not one of unadulterated no limits as Xi Jinping and Putin agreed weeks before the war commenced. Putin was in Beijing and they announced a no-limits partnership. Now, that’s not the way it’s turned out, and the new Chinese peace plan underlines that.
Jeff: A lot’s been made lately that Putin is playing for time, that if he can just hold out long enough, maybe something will happen, something will change in the geopolitical landscape, the politics of Europe, the politics of the US, or what have you. What is the real harm by buying time? What is the downside of time for Russia?
William: So the Russian economy is going to be increasingly hurt by sanctions. Russia’s political isolation from the West is going to exact greater tolls. And then many tens and hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers may be dying if the war continues in Ukraine. Russia will probably lose some support, further support in the global south, and probably China and India will be more concerned as time goes on. So there will be a number of costs to Russia, but the assumption that Russia can outweigh Ukraine and outweigh the West may be flawed.
When we look back in history at other circumstances in which controversial efforts were made and cases of aggression like this, the West toughed it out. So a good example is the Korean War, which was like this one, a war of unprovoked aggression of the north against the south. The war was controversial. There was concern in the West about how costly this war was, but the West stuck it out. And today, South Korea is a prosperous vibrant democracy. In Europe, even in the 1970s, there was a movement by Senator Mike Mansfield, a prominent senator to pull the US troops out of Europe, that we were having some fatigue if you will. Well, that didn’t happen.
The US stuck with it all the way through to the end of the Cold War. So our record on cases of aggression like this where fundamental interests are at stake and there’s no questioning, this is a fundamental issue of European security because Europeans are allies of the United States, it makes it a fundamental issue for American security. So I think those who think that somehow fatigue is going to come in and upend support for the war are mistaken.
Jeff: Are you surprised at how unified the West has been in response to this?
William: I’d certainly say I think people in Washington are pleased that has worked out, but it’s taken a lot of work by Western leaders. In the past, sometimes in Washington, people were given to think that the US was a strong leader, and we had to lead the Europeans because they tend to be less tough than the United States. This case certainly shows that that’s not true. Europeans have been very firm on this. They see this war, this aggression as a direct threat to European security. The biggest threat since the end of World War II, the United States shares that for you, and again, most of the Europeans are NATO allies.
So Europe and the United States have worked together very closely in this, and it’s been a very successful effort, but it takes a constant amount of work. So for example, the Secretary of Defense Austin meets regularly in Ramstein, Germany with his counterparts and other countries that are part of the coalition supporting Ukraine and this is an intensive consultation effort. That’s the kind of thing that makes these things a success. It’s not just shared interest, although that’s the fundamental aspect. It’s working hard to consult, to take into account the views of all the allies.
Jeff: Given Russia’s failure thus far in Ukraine, does it cast a different light on the concerns about European security? If Russia is incapable of even conducting this war in Ukraine, why is there concern in terms of broader European security?
William: Well, there’s concern that circumstances could differ in other places. So the most obvious example are the Baltics. The Baltics are NATO allies. They are small in the geographical sense and a surprise attack what’s called a standing start attack, Russian forces might be able to make some headway in those countries before NATO reinforcement arrived. So that’s one of the kinds of concerns. And then other concerns are at other ports along the border that Russia could be militarily threatening to try to use intimidation or coercion to achieve its goals.
But as you point out, the weakness of the Russian military offensive, in this case, does hearten I think a lot of countries in Europe that, conventional military threat from Russia might be less than had been thought before.
Jeff: Has there been some surprise, and you’ve watched this historically for so long, has there been some surprise at the absolute weakness of the Russian military, of Russian command and control?
William: There has been surprise but we saw the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. We saw that aggression, but that was a more challenging environment, because of the mountainous terrain and Afghanistan had resisted outside rule for several centuries as the British discovered. So, wasn’t clear that was representative of other circumstances. But I think we are surprised but except in Afghanistan, we haven’t seen Russia fight a large war of aggression against other countries. So we weren’t quite short.
I think a lot of people believe that if Russia were fighting a defensive war with aggressors attacking Russia, the circumstances might be different, though Russians might be a more effective in a defensive mode than in an offensive mode when they’re defending their own territory. And of course, we saw some of that in World War II, although the results were mixed in terms of quality of Soviet opposition but the Soviets applied enough mass and achieved their goals. So there just weren’t enough fair historical examples to enables in the West to draw a clear conclusion about how effectively Russia would fight.
Jeff: And I guess the flip side of that is Ukraine, which has been so effective in a defensive posture, whether or not on a counter-offensive they can be as effective.
William: As you correctly point out, counter-effect offenses require more talents. And we’ve seen the West, the training Ukrainians, I think in Germany in among other places maybe, in that. The counter-offensive requires coordination between infantry, armor, artillery, aviation, as well as intelligence, electronic warfare. And that is a more elaborate effort than defensive where you hide behind fortifications and make it more complicated for the adversary to advance, but without having to coordinate quite so much your artillery armor infantry.
So what we’ve seen so far is that in contrast to the Afghanistan or even Iraq, the Ukrainians have used Western military assistance, western arms, western training more effectively than in other circumstances. And so this is encouraging, I think, the West to believe that Ukraine can carry out effective counter-offensive operations.
Jeff: What are the things that you are looking at that are playing out now, whether it’s in Russia, Ukraine, Europe? What are the things that you think are the most important to keep an eye on in terms of how this will all unfold?
William: Well, just a couple of aspects. One is in some respects what we are likely to see now over the next number of months, a year or two or three, whatever, is a contest between Ukraine having qualitative superiority in the sense of better-trained soldiers, better motivated to fight using weapons from the West that are better than the Russian weapons, versus a Russian strategy as in World War II, World War I relies more on mass and sacrificing soldiers’ lives, if you will to accomplish its purposes. So it’s qualitative edge in Ukraine versus perhaps a quantitative edge in some aspects of military potential on the Russian side.
Then, with regard to the wider European picture, what we see now with such striking unity among European countries, I think we are likely to see that persist. We’re not likely to see Ukrainian fatigued because for Europe, this is an existential fight. It’s an existential defense of European values that have become so widely accepted after World War II that countries cannot invade other countries. So these are principles on which the United Nations charter lays out, and which Europe is by and large firmly embraced since World War II.
Russia, Soviet Union may have missed out on some of that understanding of European security, particularly during the Soviet period. The Russians may underestimate the strength of European resistance, but I think we’re going to see Europe do just as well as it’s done now and it’s done quite well.
Jeff: And one last question. How bad can the Russian economy get? How much worse can it get?
William: Fairly this depends on leakage and sanctions. Some of the countries around Russia are exporting a lot more laptop computers with semiconductor chips and things like that into Russia than they normally do. We should expect to see some tightening of that leakage and I think that’s one of the reasons why Secretary Blinken is in Central Asia this week, one among several reasons. But I think we’re going to see more tightening of the sanctions. So the problem for Russia is, not only the loss of the market in Europe for energy, this gas market was the most lucrative gas market before the Russia, and its largest market was in Europe, and now that’s pretty much disappearing.
Europe was a big market for oil. So, that’s one key issue. And then another issue for the Russian economy is going to be the effect of what we call the foreign direct product role in the US, which are bands on specific products going to Russia, so, semiconductor chips being an example. So, in Russia, Russia has since the time of Peter the Great, some imported technology from Europe to help overcome some backwardness. Russia has depended a lot on European machinery and Western machinery for much of its industry. For example, all the commercial aircraft or Airbus or Boeing, or at least up until quite recently.
All the, I don’t want to say all, but much of the equipment in manufacturing, extraction, transportation, and even agricultural circuits, much of the equipment in those sectors depends on Western equipment, Western services, Western software updates, and other kinds of Western spare parts, if you will. So, if those sanctions are enforced more effectively, we may see over time the Russian economy being, I would say, losing its productivity of the economy, so reduced productivity of the economy. We’ll have to see. Then living standards, living standards have gone down dramatically since 2013 before Russia invaded Ukraine the first time and the Western posed to important financial sanctions on Russia.
So, we don’t know [unintelligible 00:32:15]. It’s hard to measure these things, but living standards for ordinary people may be somewhere between 15% and 25% below what they were then. Those living standards are likely to go down, and they may go down faster to a greater extent, down the overall economy goes down. So in several dimensions, so, the Russian economy is likely to suffer pretty substantially as the war goes on.
Jeff: Ambassador William Courtney, I thank you so much for spending time with us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.
William: Okay. You’re very welcome. Take good care.
Jeff: Thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another radio, WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
The image above was created by DonkeyHotey for WhoWhatWhy from these images: President Of Ukraine / Wikimedia (CC0 1.0), President Of Russia / Wikimedia (CC BY 3.0), Government of Ukraine / Wikimedia, Government of Russia / Wikimedia, and US Army.
On this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Robert Ovetz, a senior lecturer in political science at San José State University and the author of We the Elites, challenges the conventional wisdom about the US Constitution.
He argues that the Constitution, written by 55 wealthy white men and signed by only 39 of them, is not a framework for justice, but rather a rulebook written to protect the elites and private capital, i.e., capitalism.
Ovetz says that social movements have a misplaced faith in the Constitution as a framework for achieving justice. In his view, the document that emerged from the Constitutional Convention of 1787 was expressly designed to maintain the status quo and impede social change.
Indeed, many features of the US political system, from the structure of the bicameral legislature to the provisions for federal elections, are, in Ovetz’s view, intended to slow down change of any kind.
This suggests that In a rapidly evolving world with changing social, economic, and political needs, the Constitution — our basic “operating system” — may be seriously outdated.
It’s no accident, he says, that the incessant election cycles, staggered terms of office, and legislative sessions have kept social movements trapped in a failure loop.
Ovetz believes we need a new Constitutional Convention to grapple with these problems head-on.
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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. It’s often said that if our founders looked at America today, they would be appalled by what’s happened to the country and the system that they designed. We hear a lot about originalism and the literal interpretation of the Constitution, essentially the software on which we run the country. But what if we’re misreading all of this? What if the founders would be delighted at how the system is working? That it was designed of, by, and for those that were in power.
That the protection of the status quo was its highest and best purpose, and that it was designed especially so that radical attempts to change the system would be difficult at best, and impossible at worst? To put it another way, it’s the system’s stupid that our constitution sometimes seen as an almost sacred text codifies a system designed to prevent change. That it was meant to be exactly what George Washington said of the Senate, to be a cooling saucer. Everything about our system, the design of our legislature, the structure of our federal elections are inherently there to slow down progress.
Is this a good thing? Has it enabled the stability, security, and economic prosperity that has made the country great, or is it not really relevant to a fast-moving world with the social, economic, and political needs often requiring more rapid attention? We’re going to talk about this today with my guest Robert Ovetz. He’s a senior lecturer in Political Science at San Jose State University. He’s the author of the previous book When Workers Shot Back and his newest work is We The Elites: Why The US Constitution Serves The Few. Robert Ovetz, thanks so much for joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy Podcast.
Robert Ovetz: Thanks for having me, Jeff.
Jeff: That’s great to have you here. One of the central premises you talk about is that the founders themselves, the framers of the Constitution, were themselves an elite group and that we shouldn’t be surprised that the fundamental design was to protect their interests.
Robert: Yes, absolutely. The framers with almost no exception were incredibly affluent members from across 12 different States at the time. There were a few people who I would say were the poor rich, but they left early. They didn’t really like what was going on there and they ended up releasing their notes and becoming anti-Federalists. But for the most part, you had a coalition among the richest elites, who had a diversity of different property and interests from across the 12 different States. There were those who owned large numbers of slaves, there were those who owned [unintelligible 00:02:53] speculated in land, there were those who were merchants and bankers.
And so the folks that show up in Philadelphia without an exception, although they have their own conflicts between these different property interests, without exception, they are looking out for their shared elite interests.
Jeff: And talk about what those interests were at the time, so we can relate them to what interests might be today.
Robert: Well, slavery gets a lot of attention, of course, but slavery was the backbone of the country, if you will, under the Articles of Confederation but it wasn’t the only property and interest that was well represented there. Perhaps a third of the framers from the historical research owned significant numbers of slaves or benefited directly from slavery. But there were also those, as I mentioned before, who were deeply invested in the huge tracts of land that had been expropriated through settler colonialism from the Native peoples. And those lands had been in dispute for quite a while, in fact, it’s what held up the ratification of the Articles of Confederation.
These were western lands that couldn’t be sold and there were several different land companies and a few States that were battling over who would control those lands. Among framers who had vast land speculative interests were Robert Morris, George Washington, Ben Franklin. So they had particular interest. Franklin was an abolitionist, as we know, but he was also a big land speculator and he realized land was valuable because slaves could work it. There were also those who were financiers.
They had speculated in the revolutionary war debts to the States and Congress, which was a huge amount of money for the time that couldn’t be repaid because there wasn’t enough silver and gold to allow repayment in literally cold hard cash. And among those were a minority of the framers that had been holding on to those IOUs, if you will, and had been clamoring to be repaid, but it wasn’t a large amount of money. It wasn’t as extensive as a prominent historian, made the focus of his book in economic interpretation of the United States of the Constitution.
But it was significant enough that Hamilton focused on it as one of his primary activities, wants to become Secretary of the Treasury in the Washington administration. So creating a new financial system required paying off that debt. Then there were also those who were merchants and traders like Robert Morris, and Gouverneur Morris who wanted to have a new national government that could regulate trade and commerce and protect merchants and bankers and help the United States become a world economic power.
So all those different economic interests, if you will, they were battling, they were struggling at the Constitutional Convention, but ultimately, they kind of came to a consensus that they needed a new constitution rather than trying to fix the articles that would protect everybody’s property interests.
Jeff: Was there ever any push at all for anything that even resembled any kind of a direct democracy?
Robert: Yes, that’s a really good question. And by direct democracy, I define it in the way that the Athenians did, during a couple of centuries of Athenian democracy where the people can make decisions directly. In fact, the framers were almost without exception, on record in their letters, in the notes, which had been smuggled out of the convention, because they were under an oath of secrecy, in pamphlets, in the Federalist Papers, and so forth. I find that without exception, the framers were adamantly opposed to this kind of democracy where the ordinary person could have their hands on the lever of power.
At the time, they dismissed the ordinary people, as essentially the unwashed masses. They referred to them as anarchic, as tyrannical majorities and one of my favorites is that they call them the people out of doors. In other words, the people who are outside getting their hands dirty, working in the land, and making things. They had no place indoors where they could make decisions about how to govern the country, if you will, because they would be a threat to the property at interest. So the framers without exception designed a system that would impede the ability of the vast what I call the economic majority, from having any say, over the system, whether directly or indirectly.
Indirectly, they only got to elect one small part of the overall federal government. They got to have a direct vote for the House of Representatives, the Senate was appointed by the States, the president and vice president would be selected through the Electoral College and judges would be appointed and confirmed by the President in the Senate. So only a small part where the representatives could be elected, but even then, the Constitution [unintelligible 00:08:40] if you will, the property requirements to vote and run for office that existed in every state at the time.
Now, in terms of direct democracy, you can look long and hard in the Constitution, and in the original articles, you will only find one type of direct democracy, and that is jury trials in criminal cases. And that in itself was very controversial because nearly every state had jury trials for civil cases as well. And so this became a real contention point during the ratification debates in the States and it was one of the issues that almost killed ratification. So that gets added, of course, later in the amendments.
Jeff: Part of the argument, though, was that this system created a greater sense of stability, that a direct democracy something that some of them considered mob rule would create a degree of instability, which would have severe economic consequences.
Robert: Yes, absolutely. And ironically, this is still a underlying understanding of democracy that many people hold today. The idea that if the vast majority of the population was able to make decisions directly in a democratic manner, that that would lead to instability and change. But I actually see it the other way around, I see that when a small elite are able to design a system or get control over a system where only they get to make decisions, that actually creates instability. It creates conflicts, it can create class struggles, it creates turmoil, and of course, it creates wars and economic insecurity. And when that happens, people get organized, they protest, and if they’re locked out of the political system, they tend to take in an escalation of tactics that puts more and more pressure on the system.
So I would argue that elite-dominated systems, whatever form they take, are actually more conflictual. In fact, we see this very early on in the constitution’s history. For example, after the constitution is sent by congress out to the States to be ratified, it takes a little while, but a movement emerges opposed to ratification and they’re called the anti-federalists. And they lose the first few ratification votes, but they ended up voting down the constitution in a few States. And so it looks kind of touch or go. Now, ultimately, we know that they lost, but they didn’t give up. In fact, they became a protest movement, the backbone of protest movement against the denial of suffrage to all White men.
And that protest movement leads to the formation of the Democratic-Republican Party, which famously Jefferson leads into the White House. And in the first couple of decades, that leads to various protests, it leads to a movement taking over the State of Rhode Island for a little while, and then ultimately, the first protest movement that results in extending suffrage to White men. So that elite-dominated constitutional system that we started our country’s history with, as our second constitution, is already a source of conflict. And let’s not forget that over the next seven decades, there will also be increasing conflict around slavery, because slavery is so well protected in the constitution even though the word slave or slavery doesn’t appear anywhere in the text.
Jeff: And yet the counterargument to that is that the system has worked for 234 years, and the changes have happened, significant changes, slavery being the most consequential, but the changes have happened within that 234 years within the structure the framers gave us.
Robert: Well, I would argue not enough changes have happened. And I think that the design of the constitution actually set up the foundation for the country really tearing itself apart in a civil war. And that’s a war, without having to go into that history, was a brutal, bloody mess in order to get rid of slavery that’s so well protected in the constitution. And so I would argue that the first decades of our country’s history was one of great turmoil. And while the United States celebrates its system as incredibly stable, that we haven’t had coups at least until the attempt of January 6th, 2020.
And we are the exception to the rule, if you will, of representative democracies. I actually, in my studies of representative democracies, and I teach about different representative democracies, I actually find that parliamentary systems are much more stable because they provide the opportunity of people with a wider variety of political perspectives to be able to vote for people who more closely match their interests. And if that party gets enough votes, they get into the parliament, and then ultimately, they can join in a government coalition, and then start to make those changes.
What we have instead is a system in which, since essentially before the civil war, two dominant parties control our system and disenfranchise those who don’t see anything to choose on election day that matches their interest. And so I think that our system because it also on top of that has built-in what I call minority checks that makes it so difficult to make change, which was the design of the framers, that a lot of people turn away in our system, they stay out of the electoral process, and they’re actually more likely to engage in protest movements and strikes and other forms of collective action because they see the system as locking them out.
Jeff: However, we see those collective actions and protest movements, even in parliamentary systems. We’re watching it play out in France right now.
Robert: Yes, absolutely. And I think France is, in some ways, evolving into a system that’s similar to the United States. And getting back to your earlier point about when change happens, change does happen in our system but it happens very infrequently. And we are long overdue for a new cycle of significant change. And the way that I see that change happens, because our system, it has many built-in minority checks that allow those who are opposed to change to be able to block that change, is that it often takes this build-up of mass movements who create enough disruption, that it gives the upper hand to those who are working inside the system, to see their proposed changes realized.
And we’ve seen those periods. White male suffrage, as I mentioned before, the abolition of slavery and reconstruction, the rise of the union and socialist movements at the end of the 1800s to the first couple of decades of the 1900s, and then into the 1930s, during the Great Depression, and then in the 1960s, with the power movements and the environmental movements. But we’re long overdue for that period of reform. It’s been my entire lifetime that we’ve had any significant change. And while we’re dealing with so many big crises, the opportunity for our system of government to address those crises are blocked by the system itself that gives the upper hand to those who just don’t want to get us off of oil and fossil fuels.
Jeff: Part of the problem also is demographic change. And we certainly see and history supports this around the world, that more homogeneous societies are better at doing democracy, that doing democracy within a really diverse population becomes infinitely more difficult.
Robert: Well, that argument, of course, is a premise. But I would actually argue that our system really begins with a population that’s already pretty diverse. And yet the system that we had before the constitution in some ways allowed for more voices to be able to have a say and to have political influence. And in replacing the Articles of Confederation, which put most of the political power at the state level, where you had a more of a diversity of interests among small farmers, mechanics, laborers, as well as the various elites in the state be able to compete for and replace each other at the state level.
The framers intentionally led by Hamilton, for example, in Federalist 51, to give you an example, we’re very explicit, and Madison, as well, in Federalist number 10, we’re very explicit about designing a system that would amplify those differences and pit them against each other. Hamilton, for example, in Federalist 51, and this is what we refer to as divide and conquer, Hamilton wrote that it was necessary that there’d be so many different interests, that it would make it hard for the majority to combine. And the concern was, if the majority, the economic majority, was to get together to overcome their differences in diversity, that they would become a threat to economic minority interest, to elite interests.
And so I think in some ways, the constitution is designed in such a way that it keeps the electorate divided in large house districts, for example, among the States, in the senate, using the electoral college and so forth, as a way to pit different interests against each other. So there’s nothing really natural about having a homogeneous society or a diverse society that leads to conflict or instability. It’s whether the system of governance itself amplifies those differences or allows for a unification of the differences.
Jeff: The overlay to that is that modernity itself, and technology, and communications, and information, in many ways magnifies all the problems that we’re talking about.
Robert: Well, I would agree with you on that, and social media, certainly, because of those built-in algorithms that feed you information that confirms your own perspectives or biases, or whatever you want to call it, is certainly fragmenting us. But there are other interest that really underlie that as well, that we also need to take into consideration with how technology is doing that. And for example, most of our media has long been dominated by commercial interests. Over 90% of the media is owned by for-profit making companies. And we have a long history of scholars who study the media and have demonstrated how commercial media tends to amplify those differences and create divisions and tensions and conflicts between different groups and the way that they frame stories.
So I would say that certainly we are a society that is at war with itself and, but it’s made worse when the opportunity for actually addressing the changes that I think many of us have in common despite the perception that we’re in conflict with each other are precluded and prevented.
Jeff: There is in addition to the algorithms and the social media and the other things that you talk about, there’s also the speed at which information operates today. That was something that the framers couldn’t have imagined.
Robert: Certainly, the technology is no doubt speeding up the circulation of information. It also works the other way as well. We can go back a couple of years early in the pandemic when millions of people went into the streets, literally within hours to protest against police violence. So the speed in which information circulates and the ease by which we can access it, I think is actually a very good benefit for those of us who are focused on making our system operate in a more democratic open way. It can also be detrimental if that information is hidden behind firewalls and paywalls, for example, that limit access only based on your ability to pay.
Jeff: Realistically though, bringing it back to the present realistically for the very reasons that we’ve been discussing, there’s very little chance that system is going to change very much.
Robert: Well, in my book, I spent the last couple of chapters exploring essentially three options for how we deal with this because I think it’s easy to be cynical about our system. Certainly, I teach hundreds of students every year the basics of how our constitutional state and federal systems work. And a lot of students ask, “Well, what do we do about this?” And so I spend the last couple of chapters exploring essentially what I think are three options.
The first one is can we fix the constitution? Can we amend it? Well, that’s a difficulty because, in Article five, the framers wrote the amendment process in such a way that it makes it incredibly difficult to amend. While we have 27 successful amendments that have been added to the constitution that is only a tiny fraction of 1% of the more than 10,000 that have officially been introduced and proposed. So that option is incredibly difficult. Another possibility is to use one of those methods of amendment, and that is the call of constitutional convention.
I think we’re long overdue for a constitutional convention. Some States have them regularly by their constitutional rules such as the state of New York, but that also raises various risks because deep-pocketed donors right now are actually pushing forward a constitutional convention resolution that is making its way through a number of States. And that could be very dangerous for those who are opposed to their libertarian interests.
So I think the third option is that in a time when there’s a mass social movement, that the possibilities for democratizing our society really lie in democratizing our places where we work. And so I explore these three different options of how can we move past the impasse of our constitution impeding and preventing political and economic democracy.
Jeff: You make the assumption though, that a mass social movement is on the horizon.
Robert: Well, I make the assumption– It’s a really a thought question because it’s inevitable that mass movements will emerge. Many of them are unsuccessful, but being a scholar of movements my expectation is that at some point and we’re seeing some seeds of it being planted right now with an uptick for example of union organizing and strikes over the last couple of years. Those new movements provide an opportunity to revitalize how we govern ourselves. And they can’t come soon enough because we all know that climate catastrophe is really a death sentence for most life on earth. And it’s urgent that we take action to be able to make the decisions that will steer us away off that cliff that we’re really about to fall over right now.
Jeff: You conflate the idea of some would-be social movement in the future with the reality of dealing with climate change. Something that’s a global problem and happening with an alacrity that is arguably much greater, than the possibility of some social movement that may or may not ever come to be.
Robert: Well, yes and no. It depends on what that movement is because we’re speaking hypothetically right now. But for example, to bring it back to our inability to act on this issue there have been proposals for the last few decades to take action on climate catastrophe. Because of the minority checks in our system those proposals, for example, the Green New Deal often get whittled down and watered down into becoming subsidies to companies to transition to clean and green technology. For example, with the Inflation Reduction Act, which passed a few months ago.
However, the reason why that happens is because those whose interests are served by keeping us dependent on fossil fuels are able to block any proposal that would immediately ban the burning and exploitation of fossil fuels. And so we end up with these so-called legislative solutions that really don’t turn out to be much of a solution at all. I think if and when a movement emerges, not just limited to climate catastrophe because there’s a whole range of other issues that go unaddressed because of the way our system’s designed. It would be much more likely that we could redesign our system so that we can make the changes that we need instead of giving the power to those who are opposed to those changes to be able to prevail.
Jeff: Do you realistically believe those changes are possible?
Robert: Absolutely. Even though I have my moments of cynicism, I still ultimately have a belief in human beings to be able to identify their shared interests and be able to figure out how to act on them. And I think unfortunately the constitution puts a barrier in the way of us doing that.
Jeff: Robert Ovetz, his book is We the Elites: Why the US Constitution Serves the Few. Robert, I thank you so much for spending time with us here on The WhoWhatWhy Podcast.
Robert: It was wonderful. Thank you, Jeff, for having me.
Jeff: Thank you for listening and joining us here on The WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I hope you join us next week for another radio WhoWhatWhy Podcast, I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org
Origin myths are deeply embedded in our media culture and shape everything from tech companies to public policy.
In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Julian Zelizer, a Princeton history professor and co-editor of Myth America, explains how these myths have been weaponized by some to advance their agendas.
He details how layers of myth can obscure actual events, leading to a distorted understanding of history and, as a result, shaping bad policy going forward.
Zelizer highlights a multitude of erroneous but widely held notions, including, for example, that Native Americans have not made significant contributions to American history, that the Southern border is a porous gateway for dangerous immigrants, that socialism is an imported ideology, that the New Deal and Great Society programs were unsuccessful, that voter fraud is a common occurrence, and that feminism seeks to dismantle the American family.
Zelizer emphasizes the importance of bringing a nuanced appreciation of history back into the public conversation about policy and values. He also underscores the critical role of historians in dispelling misinformation and delineating the many layers of myths that complicate our understanding of history
Today, historical myths are being perpetuated as part of a partisan project, compounding the problems we face.
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Last week on the WhoWhatWhy podcast, we looked at how the world might be without human intervention and technology. In this week’s podcast, we look at it from the opposite point of view.
We are joined by author, engineer, and futurist J. Storrs Hall, who wrote Where Is My Flying Car?
Hall looks into the mystery of why the technological advancements promised in the 1960s have yet to materialize. He explains his theory that technological stagnation on big projects began in the ’70s, fueled by factors such as the failure to adopt nuclear energy, and the rise of a counterculture hostile to energy production.
Hall believes this stagnation has had devastating consequences on global wealth creation and distribution.
His vision of the future is one based on production of more and different kinds of energy; he argues that future exponential growth and technological progress must be powered by advancements in nanotechnology, biotechnology, AI, and nuclear power.
In explaining why this will result in a world of greater wealth and abundance, he issues a call to action for a future that matches the vaunting ambitions of the 1960s science fiction writers.
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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. Once upon a time, we were promised technology that would really change the world. Futurists and science fiction writers who often write the first draft of technological progress offered up a world of abundant energy, frictionless mobility, eternal health, and a greater proliferation of knowledge and wisdom. So what happened?
Instead of harnessing the energy of the atom, we learned how to swipe left and right. Instead of flying cars, we got the ability to order a car over the phone. Instead of eternal health, we got, if lucky, the ability to fill out medical forms online. In education, we wondered if the whiteboard was really any better than the blackboard. Are these failures of imagination or of will, or is there some complacency virus that entered our national bloodstream and slowed us down?
Back in 1962, Jack Kennedy said, “We should go to the moon not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard, because,” he said, “that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept and one we are unwilling to postpone.” When he said that, he wasn’t talking about inventing social media or even the pocket phone, or the ability to carry our music around with us. The goals were far bigger. Why have we failed so badly at doing these big things?
We’re going to talk about that today with my guest, J. Storrs Hall. He’s an independent scientist, an author. He was the founding chief scientist of Nanorex and President of the Foresight Institute, currently a research fellow at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing, and an associate editor of the International Journal of Nanotechnology and Molecular Computation. His work is suddenly garnering lots of new attention. His most recent book is Where Is My Flying Car? And it is my pleasure to welcome Josh Hall here to the WhoWhatWhy Podcast. Josh, thanks so much for joining us.
Josh: Thank you. And it’s a pleasure to be here.
Jeff: It is great to have you here. There was a time, once upon a time, where we could do big things, whether it was go to the moon or move aircraft design along to create the 747. All of that seemed to stop at a certain point. What was that point as you see it?
Josh: Well, as I see it, that was the inflection point in the Henry Adams curve. Henry Adams was the grandson of John Adams and the son of John Quincy Adams. And he was a man about the world in the 19th century. And in his autobiography in about 1910, he pointed out that it was really one of the most amazing facts of his world, that we had been able to use more and more and more energy over the course of the Industrial Revolution, and his prognostication of that actually continued well after he was gone until about 1970.
And then what happened? This beautiful exponentially rising trend line of how much energy we had to do wonderful things with just flatlined. And since about 1970, the average American has not gained the ability to have any more energy at all, but in fact, somewhat slightly less. And that’s also true of most of the more mature industrial economies in the world, notably Europe and the UK.
Jeff: Is that because energy became less abundant or more expensive, or was there something else at play?
Josh: Oh, it was a perfect storm of the various things that could happen to you. But I think, and this is my own take on the subject, I think that what happened is that we just got dumb, fat, and happy and quit striving to do more energy. And once you get into that mode, the only way that you can get ahead is to criticize what other people are doing and act like you’re being good and they’re being bad. And the most obvious and apparently effective thing that most other people were doing that came to be seen as being bad is producing and using large amounts of energy.
So when you look at the predictions made by the science fiction writers and the futurists and anybody else who was making long-term predictions back in the ’50s and ’60s, they are the people who were expecting us to have flying cars and all the other stuff. And so what happened is that I went in my latest book, I looked at all the predictions and I cross-correlated them with what amount of energy a solution to that prediction would have used.
And it was a stark, stark relationship where if you made a prediction that required less than, let us say, 10 kilowatts per person, which is the level that we flatlined at, it generally came true. And if you made a prediction where the solution to the prediction or the implementation of that particular vision of the future was going to cost significantly more than that in terms of energy, it didn’t come true.
Jeff: To what extent was that individuals at corporations at the time trying to protect the status quo and really preventing innovation that might be disruptive to those that had been successful already?
Josh: Well, there was a certain amount of that. It’s a phenomenon that was noted by Machiavelli 500 years ago, that if you’re trying to do change, you better watch your tail because the people, the powers that they got there by doing certain things and they don’t want things done differently, but that’s part of the human condition. As I say, that was Machiavelli’s observation in Renaissance Italy 500 years ago.
On the other hand, Renaissance Italy, things actually changed quite a bit. And they have been changing, especially since the Industrial Revolution. So while that forum is something of a stumbling block to progress, it can’t be the whole answer because over the course of the industrial evolution, the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, you had a lot of progress, a lot of new stuff, and there were plenty of powers that weren’t particularly concerned that the average person did better and better. They just wanted to stay on top. Of course, we still had that with us.
To some extent, what happened in the ’60s and ’70s was that the Machiavelli-type situations got a little more firmly entrenched because people were less likely to look to technology as being the solutions to their problems. And again, there was a perfect storm of things that made that happen in society, but all of the different sources of that lack of progress came together about that time. And that’s why you get beautiful clean improvements in the amount of energy that people are getting all the way up to 1970. And that includes a large build out during the 1960s of nuclear power, for example.
And then some people realized that they can make political hay and become known as saviors of humanity simply by opposing that and casting dispersions on it and producing all sorts of fear, uncertainty, and doubt about that kind of thing. And so in the social environment of the ’60s, a lot of that stuff got traction that it simply would not have gotten decades or even centuries before.
Jeff: There was also a sense in that same period of denigrating technological progress.
Josh: Yes. And that’s something that I was grappling with in the book because just a century ago now, the technological heroes, they named towns after Edison, all of the people who invented the airplane and electricity, and all the other stuff that we got that completely improved our lives. I mean, even indoor plumbing, this is not just frilly stuff. It’s basic to the way we live now and have this really comfortable existence, but to some extent, you have a comfortable existence, you begin to take it for granted. So when I was writing the book, I was saying, “Look, just a century ago, the people who did things like Edison and invented the cool stuff that we now take for granted, were heroes.”
If you go back in the Google engrams of the books and other publications of the day, you’ll find that the Thomases and the Wright Brothers are just as popular as Babe Ruth and the other people that we think of as being popular as sports figures and other heroes, but that just vanished. It was not until, I think, probably the Vietnam era where that changed. It’s not clear to me why, in a very general sense, that happened and that happened then, but it certainly did happen.
Jeff: One of the things you point out, for example, just to take aviation as an example, that between the Wright Brothers and the 707, it was 50 years. In the 50 years since, very little progress has been made in aviation
Josh: Now what’s happened in the meantime, is that there’s been huge progress on making the airliners more efficient, and use less fuel, and be cheaper to run, and so forth. There hasn’t been no progress, but the fact is that airline travel available to every person is kind of stuck in a rut, and that rut has been around since the ’70s, and the flat line of the Henry Adams curve of energy is.
We ought to be– if we had stayed on the curve of airline improvement, how fast you could actually fly and so forth by buying a ticket on an airplane. You go up to the ’60s and then there is a natural rut in the space of actual– the physics of flying, which is that you’re getting close to having to fly at the speed of sound, and that’s a lot more energy intensive.
So they did manage to build a couple of supersonic airliners back in that era, the Concorde, for example, but they were not economically viable. It’s only now that people are beginning to say, “Okay, wait a minute. We dropped the ball here. We ought to be able to go from London to New York in an hour and to Tokyo in two hours.”
And so people are beginning to look at that again, but in this particular case, you had not only the economics and the lack of improving energy, you look at the future and you say, “Okay, we’ll all be taking supersonic airliners.” But that requires us to have continued to improve the amount of energy available to everybody, and we didn’t. That was the first part.
Now, the other part is a bunch of sort of regulatory crud that accrues on everything. If you just sit back and watch, there’ll be more regulations about what you’re trying to do any year than there was a year before, and that’s just apparently a phenomenon of living in a highly bureaucratic country. So there’s that. That was a bit of a problem for supersonic aircraft, but the main one was the flat line in the energy curve.
Jeff: What accounts for, as you analyze it, what accounts for that flat-lining, for that stagnation in the energy curve?
Josh: Well, as I was saying it, I think there was a perfect storm of social phenomena. So the first and most obvious one was that people got richer and they got more comfortable, and they didn’t need progress to bring them to a comfortable place to be, because by and large, they had gotten there.
If you look at countries where people are still poor, they trying really hard, like China, for example. You’ll find that they have not had a flat line because the average person in China doesn’t get anywhere near the amount of energy that we do, and so China is still putting more power plants online essentially every year than we have. This is just a huge country, and they’re really building out. They’re still skiing up that curve, and who knows when they will hit that point.
They’re an example that one of the reasons that you try hard to build out more energy is because you need it. If you get to the point where you think you don’t need it, or you can take it for granted or whatever, then you don’t try so hard. And all the other phenomena that have to do with where you build energy, like anything from environmentalism to simply wanting to invest in something else instead, show up and form a sort of trying to wade through mud. And if you don’t have a strong wind behind you and you’re still trying to wade through mud, you slow down, and that’s what we did.
Jeff: To what extent did the counter-cultural revolution of the ’60s play a role?
Josh: The counter-cultural revolution of the ’60s was a rejection of a whole bunch of stuff, starting with how shall we say protestant sexual ethics and going from there. And it turns out that if you are trying to object to somebody’s society and way of life and all that stuff, the first thing you object to is the thing that sticks out, the thing that is more obvious, the thing that is more powerful. And so, in the case of the counter-cultural revolution, there were these people who were ready to object to just about anything their parents had taught them, but the things that were most salient, that were easier to get people riled up about, were the big powerful things. And so, those were the ones that got attacked first.
Jeff: And of course, the environmental movement grew out of that.
Josh: There was a substantial increase in the environmental movement. I think in the counter-cultural revolution, people were just casting about to find things that they could say, “We are better people than you.” And the environmental movement just got a lot of feedback from that. The environmental movement was around a century before when they started founding the national parks, and forests, and wildernesses, and so forth, and people began realizing that we had a really wonderful environment in this country that we should try and preserve.
And it changed its character to some extent, and it took on a whole bunch of virtue-signaling aspects, and essentially, the aspect of a religion. There’s something real there, it’s just that, like anything that is real, it can be hijacked by people who are basically virtue signaling and trying to put themselves above others and use that as a social lever.
Jeff: Given that we have seen this migration certainly over this same period of time that we’re talking about, that we’ve seen this migration more and more to cities and outside of rural areas and suburbs and nature as it were, why hasn’t that translated into more enthusiasm for the technological progress we’re talking about?
Josh: Well, it’s a good question, but I think actually what happens is that cities are just not done right. This is a technology we have not mastered. People who live in cities live in essentially an entirely artificial environment, and they are less happy than people who live in small towns, who are less happy than people who live in the country. Stats from the General Social Survey, it’s just a fact. And what that means is when we have the opportunity to build the entire environment, the complete artificial environment that people can live in, we just haven’t done a good job.
And I think one of the things that if we have any sense whatsoever, and that we’ll look at, is when in the future, we have better start studying about how to build an artificial environment because a lot of us are going to be living in them no matter what, one way or the other. We should start looking about how to build an artificial environment that is as pleasant to live in, and gives you as much a quality of life as living in the country.
Jeff: One of the things that you talk about, also, is this extremism in the environmental movement, this movement towards the idea that somehow humanity itself is a problem.
Josh: Well, I think that’s a self-defeating thing. In the longer, I’m not worried about it. If everybody who thought humans were the poison of the earth simply had the courage of their convictions and never had kids, they die out pretty quick. That’s essentially what I think about that. It’s not something I’m particularly worried about. Every so often, I’ll see some expression of that and say, “Are you crazy?” But that’s about it.
Jeff: Talk about the stagnation that happened with respect to nuclear power and the reasons why you think that happened.
Josh: Well, the first one was nuclear power was, A, big and powerful, and B, not well understood, and C, this is probably the most important thing, was associated in a public mind with nuclear weapons, even though it’s a completely different technology. You get people who use exactly the same word, nukes, for nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants. And so there was a major failure of education on the part of people who should have been doing the education.
So, for example, after the Three Mile Island incident in America, in which absolutely nobody was killed, and essentially, the only major damage was purely economic. They ruined a nuclear power plant that cost billions of dollars, and so they were out billions of dollars. But there were a couple of things that happened. One was, there was micromanagement by Congress who thought, “Oh, this is nuclear. This is like atom bombs. We have to have a direct interest and tell everybody who’s doing this exactly how to do it, even though we don’t have a clue.” So, that happened, and that was one of the problems with nuclear because the standard industry techniques, like computer control of processes and so forth, were illegal.
But the other one was simply that the people who were the anti-nuclear forces went around and misinformed people about the technology and the physics and so forth in a really, really big way. So, right after Three Mile Island, people went and did surveys of the public. And it turns out that something like two-thirds of the public believed that a nuclear a power plant was essentially a giant atom bomb just waiting to go off, which is way, way, way far from the truth. There’s nothing whatsoever that could cause a nuclear power plant to explode in the sort of way that people had been told it could.
And so, it was a wild vast failure to understand the actual technology and process on the part of the public. And I think in this one case, you can lay the blame specifically on the people who are promoting this disinformation. Normally, I think when people don’t understand something that’s just the way people are, nobody is an expert in everything. And rumors and ghosts and goblins and ferries and all sorts of other beliefs will just grow because that’s the way people are. But in the case of nuclear, it was actually promoted. The falsehoods about nuclear power were intentionally promoted by certain political forces.
So that’s the background on which the then-unfortunate decisions made in the political process were made. And it turns out that we got some really bad luck and we had a rabid anti-nuclear guy be installed as the head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, at which point, nuclear plants just quit being built.
Jeff: How much of it also comes from the fact that the evolution of nuclear energy and the splitting of the atom itself happened in such secrecy and was really about weapons? And that was really the beginning of it as far as people understood it.
Josh: Well, it was actually just science up until World War II. And then in World War II, everything became about weapons. So there are certainly something to that point of view. On the other hand, once we came out of the war, the Eisenhower administration, for example, promoted “Atoms for Peace.” I don’t know if you remember that, that we were going to now take the technology that we had created and put it to the service of humanity and make poor people rich and provide energy to the masses and share this with the world.
So, why did one government program succeed and the other one fail? I don’t know. But there remained from the war a– if you just go back and read newspapers and science fiction and novels and everything on the beach to the ads for home fallout shelters that were in every popular science magazine in the ’50s and ’60s, the culture just picked this up somehow. And culture tends to run with something that is a scare story better than it does something that isn’t. And that’s just, as far as I can tell, simply the way people work.
Jeff: Where does all of this leave us today, in your view, looking forward towards maybe reinvigorating this desire to do big things?
Josh: Well, I kind of thought I was a voice in the wilderness when I wrote the book. And the book was originally my memoirs and I was just going to say, “Here’s what we all thought when I was a kid and didn’t happen. Why not?” But I was a bit surprised when Stripe Press came to me and said, “We’d like to take your memoirs and publish them as a real book, and I’ll give you an editor,” who made it a much a more readable thing, by the way. It was just a meandering reminiscence in my original version of it.
So, they did a good job. But it turns out there is a small movement of people who were of like mind that I hadn’t even really known about. And because of the book, I’ve been privileged to meet many of them. And the other thing about them is a lot of them are young folks who are much more likely to make the future than I am because I’m pushing 70 now. And so, all I can do is sit back and dangled grandchildren on my knee says, “Ah, I like this from the old days.” But the young guys are actually getting out there and doing stuff. So, I am more optimistic about the future than any time when I was actually writing the book.
Jeff: Where does digital technology, the future of that and things like Moore’s Law, which does seem to be going forward, although that seems to be in stagnation at the moment too, and the prospect of AI? How does that fit into this larger equation?
Josh: Oh, I think it’s a big deal. I mean, I spent my whole career designing computers and doing artificial intelligence, and I am really pleased at the progress that we’ve had in those fields. And I have an iPhone that has more computing power than any university computer I ever used when I was actually at a university. This is quite amazing. And I probably don’t even have to tell you what amazing things that the new artificial intelligence, the large language models, and that kind of thing are doing. But what I can tell you is that the reason that they’re doing it is because of the availability of enormous amounts of computing power compared to what we ever had in the 20th century.
So it goes hand-in-hand, but we are learning a lot about what it takes to make an intelligence. We don’t come close to actually knowing all of it. They found these techniques that just works. But in my last artificial intelligence books, I predict that this is 10 years ago, that people will suddenly start realizing these techniques are actually working, and the money and the research and the experimentation will just pour in. And that’s exactly what’s happened. So I’m very bullish on the future of AI and of robotics.
And I think, ultimately, that will feed back into our ability to produce energy and to understand how to unlock the energy inherent in the nucleus of the atom and not have to worry about burning dead dinosaurs in the Earth’s atmosphere to keep from freezing. So, all in all, I would have to say that I’m really a lot more optimistic than I was 10 years ago about how things are going.
Jeff: And do you anticipate pushback to these people that are fearful of this technology? And as we’ve seen repeatedly throughout history, people that are concerned that somehow this is going to upset the balance of the status quo, both because it impacts them personally, or it has a larger global impact as they see it.
Josh: Well, you couldn’t in fact, see a Machiavelli effect push back to AI. And for example, imagine that somebody realizes that you could take a somewhat enhanced version of a large language model, and use it as a tutor for every single kid who’s trying to learn stuff in school. I would not be surprised at all to find the teachers’ unions opposing this, especially in California. But ultimately, these sort of things happened.
A century ago, the musician’s unions were trying to keep people from recordings of music, because they were so lifeless. So there were no live musicians playing this stuff. And yet, you hear more recorded music now [laughs] than ever in the world. So I think that there will definitely be resistance, and pushback, and Machiavelli effect backlash, but I think that this is so much the wave of the future that it’s not going to do more than impeded at the edges.
Jeff: And maybe, it will bring about flying cars at some point.
Josh: Well, let’s hope so. It would be nice.
Jeff: And before I let you go, talk about how an area that you are so deeply involved in, nanotechnology, and how that fits into this equation.
Josh: Okay. In the book, I argue that the key technologies that will shape the 21st century are nanotechnology, and nuclear power sources, and artificial intelligence, and I think they just go together in a good technological way. Now, technology is essentially when we reinvent life. Life is basically just a technology. It evolved, but it’s a technology that works with atomic precision at the atomic scale. And that’s why living things are so much different from things that are not living.
And we have, obviously, used life and technology for our food, to begin with, but for almost everything, we make for as long as we’ve been a civilization out of the Iron Age. So, that is going to undergo a tremendous change in the capabilities and so forth of technology with nanotechnology, of where we are essentially able to harness the same kinds of machines that living things use, only more powerful and able to withstand greater variations, and temperature, and to use electricity as opposed to simply breathing air, or something.
In order to design all these machines, we are going to need artificial intelligence. In order to power them, we are going to need power derived from nuclear sources, simply because they will be able to use, and to fulfill their potential, they will need to use that much more power. We are sitting on the edge of a whole nother industrial revolution that will change the world as much as the first one did.
But I think those three basic technologies, and when I say those three, I’m saying essentially that biotechnology, which is going great guns right now, will just be folded in as a subset of nanotechnology. So molecularly precise physical technologies, information technologies that allow us to make good decisions at any scale from the atomic to the national, and a source of power that is essentially limitless, and cheap, and clean all await us if only we buckle down, and get to work, and make them.
Jeff: J. Storrs Hall, his most recent book is Where is My Flying Car. Josh, I thank you for spending time with us today here on the WhoWhatWhy Podcast.
Josh: I was happy to be here. Thank you for having me.
Jeff: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I hope you join us next week. For another radio WhoWhatWhy Podcast, I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
Adam Kirsch, an acclaimed poet and literary critic, has reignited the debate about human exceptionalism and whether humans are still necessary in light of the emergence of innovations like ChatGPT and other forms of artificial intelligence.
In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Kirsch discusses the divide between those who believe that humans should be replaced by technology and those who believe that technology should be used to enhance humanity and solve all of its problems.
He also speculates about whether technology has become more important and more powerful than nature, and whether or not human self-extinction might be the ultimate form of idealism.
Kirsch points out that this debate has gained traction in recent years, with the expanding role of AI and technology now giving it more fuel. He talks about the emergence of “bioPolitics,” in which the very future of human life is seen as part of our political discourse. Which leads us to the ultimate question: Would getting rid of ourselves be the most “human” thing to do?
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Jeff: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. There is fear that AI may make humans, or at least much of what they do, unnecessary, yet genetic engineering may allow us to live forever. Simultaneously, we see evidence each and every day that it is humans that are putting life on our planet, and our ecosystem in jeopardy, all of which begs the dystopian question, are humans in their current form still necessary? Certainly, the idea of human exceptionalism exists within all of us.
But what if we’re really just another link in the evolutionary chain, one that has both written its own death warrant, but at the same time, created the technology to carry on our superpowers without us? Science fiction? Maybe. But these ideas are actually shared by a great many people. And it may not be that far off before they find their way into our mainstream debate. For the moment, we can find them in the work of my guest, Adam Kirsch. Adam is an acclaimed poet, and literary critic. He’s the author of three collections of poems and several books of criticism and biography, including The Global Novel. His newest work recently, excerpted in The Atlantic, is The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us.
Adam Kirsch, thanks so much for joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.
Adam: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Jeff: Well, it is great to have you here. One of the things that’s so interesting and thinking about this, is that it is perhaps only humans that have this ability for self-loathing to even think about the extinction of our own species. Talk about that.
Adam: Well, that’s definitely true. One of the things this book is about is how we as humans think about our place in nature. And it’s obviously always been the case that humans are an exception in nature, but we’ve thought about that exception in different ways, whether we’re the creature of God, because we have a soul, that puts us in a different category from everything else that we know in existence, or whether we evolved through natural processes to develop an intelligence that helps us understand ourselves. These are all ways that humanity has tried to think about why it’s not like everything else on Earth, even animals that are close to us.
What I’m writing about in this book, is the rise of a new way of thinking, which says that the human exception is actually a negative one, that we are unusually destructive, or that, at least in our current form, we can’t guarantee our future or the future of the planet. And so we need to either get rid of ourselves or take on some sort of a different existence through the aid of technology.
Jeff: And yet the irony in that is, is this notion that it is this human quality that we have, that allows us to even speculate about the idea of eliminating ourselves.
Adam: That’s definitely true. One of the interesting things about what I call in the book, the revolt against humanity, is that really it’s an expression of idealism, strange as it sounds. It’s an expression of the kinds of things that we think of as the best of humanity, our desire for justice, for progress and reason for kindness and for sparing suffering, all those things that we think of as humane qualities. For a number of people, both environmentalists and technological enthusiasts, those very human qualities are leading in the direction of transcending or abolishing humanity itself.
In other words, these people are saying that in order to become what we most want to be, or to fulfill the most human parts of ourselves, we have to get beyond the species, Homo sapiens.
Jeff: There does seem to be some kind of relationship, though, between the degree to which technology speeds up, and those people that feel that it is technology that really is driving our destruction of the planet. This relationship somehow relates to our ability to move forward with technology. Talk about that.
Adam: That’s certainly true. In the book I talk about two different groups of thinkers who in many ways are opposed. They’re the groups that I call the Anthropocene anti-humanists. Those are basically people who think that humanity has become a plague on the earth, and has violated nature, and needs to shrink or eliminate its footprint in order to restore nature. And then on the other hand, you have people who call themselves trans-humanists, who look forward to a future in which, thanks to technology, we can transcend things like mortality, or even being limited to a single human body, and that our future is full of these great possibilities that we can barely even conceive of right now.
What those two groups have in common is that they recognize we’re living in a unique technological moment. It’s sometimes hard to realize, because things happen in our lives gradually, and we get used to one change, and we get used to another change. But if you look at the sweep of human history in the last 200 years, technology has taken exponential leaps and continues to do so. So, up until about the year 1800, the technologies that people used were essentially the same as they had since the ancient world. They sailed in ships with sails, they went by horseback or vehicles drawn by horses.
Then with the industrial revolution, we start to extract more energy from the earth and put it to more advanced uses. We can send messages, we can fly, we can go to the moon and outer space, we understand our DNA. All of these things are happening at such a rapid clip, that for a lot of people who are more on the more visionary side, they see that if things continue that way, we will soon reach a point where life will be transformed and become unrecognizable.
Jeff: How much of the attitude of those that think that maybe humans are unnecessary, comes from a fear of technology?
Adam: There are definitely people, and I talked about a number of them in my book, who feel that technology is leading humanity in the wrong direction. That they dread a future which is so completely technological, that we’re cut off from nature, that there’ll be no more experience, directly of nature, but only mediated through our own technology. But on a deeper level, I think there are people who believe that technology is part of human nature. In other words, since the very beginning, as far back as we can see, humans have used tools of various times to amplify their power. And that is often been at the expense of nature, at the expense of other beings of plants and animals, of the climate, even things like like rivers and oceans. And there are people who point out that even if you go back into the fossil record, you see that humans were exterminating whole species 10,000 years ago, just by using fire and animal herding.
So the idea that the more humanity increases in power, the worse it is for everything else on Earth, can go back to the very beginning of the human story. And when you start thinking about it that way, our current situation isn’t an exception. It’s more like it’s, we’ve finally found a way to express this part of ourselves, that’s always been with us, which is the desire to dominate nature, and to replace it really, so that what matters most in the future of the planet is not nature, but human desire’s natural.
Jeff: Why do you think that it is taken so long for this debate to fully blossom, for this idea of humanity versus nature, to really be at the stage it is now where it can be talked about in the way you’re exploring in the book, in the way we’re talking about it?
Adam: Well, as I say in the book, the idea that humanity is out of tune with nature is not that new of an idea. It’s been around for a couple hundred years. Really, when the Industrial Revolution began, people started to say, “We’re not living in harmony with nature, we’re disrupting the way that we were meant to live.” And until I think, fairly recently, the environmentalists’ movements, environmentalists’ ideas said we should go back to nature, we should allow nature to regulate our lives better.
What’s new about the people that I discuss in this book, the people I call anti-humanists, is that they no longer think that nature is going to be able to save us. They think that we’ve reached a point that, as I said earlier, humanity has replaced nature. That’s the idea that’s often referred to in the term Anthropocene, which says that we’ve entered a new era of the Earth’s history, where it’s our own actions that determine the course of nature rather than vice versa. And if that’s the case, then a more radical kind of solution is called for, we can’t just say, “Let’s be in harmony with nature, because we’ve actually replaced nature and supplanted it.” The only way to solve that problem might be for us to eliminate ourselves completely. And that’s what some of the more radical thinkers I talked about in the book actually advocate.
Jeff: Right. And it’s interesting that they start from this premise that this is not the way we were, “Meant to live,” which begs the question of, meant by who?
Adam: Right. Well, there’s a long tradition of social critique, even political critique, saying that we’ve gotten away from our origins, we are originally meant to live in small groups, according to nature. And through the power of our reason, we’ve created so many tools, institutions, that we’ve gotten far away from where we belong, really. That goes back to Rousseau in the 18th century. The question is whether that can actually be reversed in any meaningful way. And as our toll on the planet increases, and as environmental problems become more and more urgent and people are more concerned about them, I think that a lot of people are moving into the camp of saying, we can’t expect that we will solve these problems, that we will return to nature. That maybe there’s something simply irreconcilable about the two.
Jeff: This dystopian idea that humans can be eliminated, in so many ways, it has been part of science fiction for a long time, and you talk about that as well.
Adam: Yes. In fact, a lot of the ideas that I think are now being taken seriously in places like universities, think tanks, Silicon Valley, originally, you could find them in science fiction maybe 70 years ago in writers like Isaac Ivanov who talked about, for instance, the question of will we be able to invent an artificial intelligence that will take over the world from us? He was writing about that in iRobot already in the 1940s. Now I think we have reached a point where a lot of serious people think that technology has caught up with that imagination. Things that once seemed impossible, fantastic, eventually become reality, whether that’s flying or going to the bottom of the ocean or visiting the moon. People used to fantasize about those things and now we can actually do them.
The next step is, will we be able to, for example, upload our minds onto computers, or create minds that have been on computers from the beginning and that may be more capable than our own and understand things better than we do. There’s a one figure I quote in the book, is a poll of computer scientists in which they were asked, do you think there will be what’s called artificial general intelligence that is an actual mind rather than just a program designed to solve a particular task? Do you think that that will exist by the year 2100? Almost all of them said that they think it will exist. In other words, this is something that people who are experts believe is about to happen.
Jeff: Talk about this idea of transhumanism, and the belief that in fact it is technology that will actually change humans in a way that solves all these problems.
Adam: Well, the transhumanists who tend to be people who are very enthusiastic about technology and are sometimes funded by tech billionaires, they agree with the anti-humanists on one thing, which is that we’ve sort of reached an impossible situation that we can’t get out of on our own. One of the images that I talked about in the book is this idea of a precipice that humanity has been climbing up a mountain. We’ve reached a precipice that we can’t get past. If you’re an anti-humanist, you might think that we should turn around and go back and undo some of the technological progress that have got us here. The transhumanists say the only way out is forward, and it’s true that human beings won’t be able to get past this precipice, but something that replaces us in the future will be able to.
There are different varieties of transhumanist thought. They look forward to different kinds of futures, but they think about things like, for example, genetic engineering and using nanorobots to prevent aging, or to cure all diseases, or to vastly expand the abilities of our brains so that we can think and feel and perceive things that we can’t even imagine today. Or, as I said, that we will be able to invent minds that will be more capable than ours, and will be able to solve problems that we can’t currently imagine solving. For instance, deep space travel, which humanity will never be able to do just because of the way our biology is constituted, maybe an artificial form of life will be able to do that.
Jeff: It’s interesting, you talk about the anti-humanism and how many people have really come to believe this, that it may not be a mainstream idea at this point, but certainly there are a lot more people than we think that believe this.
Adam: Well, one of the things that I’m interested in is I’m looking at some people who have made these arguments explicit on the extremes. Most of the people that I write about would be considered fringe thinkers. I think that you can see evidence that these ideas that start on the fringe don’t stay on the fringe. They start to work their way into mainstream thought and discourse. I think if you look, for example, at attitudes among younger people about the future, they’re much more concerned about the future of humanity than older people are. They think things like maybe it’s not morally right to have children, or at least maybe not more than one child. They think that the future is going to be much worse than the present or the past because environmental catastrophe will change the way we live. Those attitudes are actually quite prevalent, especially among younger people. I think that as those people grow up and start to take over institutions, it will really change the way politics, government, society, and culture work.
Jeff: One of the things that hasn’t been part of this conversation is economics and the way that that plays into these various points of view. Talk a little about that.
Adam: Right. Well, the system that we have now and which has brought great prosperity to billions of people, and enabled a higher standard of living than our ancestors could have dreamed of, is based on economic growth. That we’re constantly trying to grow the economy, grow the population, make use of more resources in more advanced ways. That has driven the basic assumption that all governments, all economists, all politics agree on is that growth is good. What some of these anti-human thinkers might be able to do is change the conversation to think about what if growth was a bad thing? What if instead of having more people, we want to have less people? Which is, by the way, is something that demographics say is already probably going to start happening in the next generation or two as birth rates fall. It’s expected that the world population will peak in about 2050 and then start to fall.
For example, by the year 2100, China is expected to have about half as many people as it has today simply because of falling birth rates. If we start to think about growth as a problem rather than a solution, it can really change the way governments and society think about all kinds of things. From population growth, to technology, to job creation, all those things could represent a real economic revolution.
Jeff: There is a sense, I suppose, that some of these ideas, while they’re not fully fleshed out and they’re not even clearly articulated, are somehow below the surface in our political debate today. That there are elements of these notions that have somehow filtered in to our debates today.
Adam: Yes, definitely. I think that there are definitely fault lines that you can already see in our society that mirror the ones that I talk about in the book, and that they have the potential to take on these new forms. One thing that I talk about is, you saw during the COVID pandemic, there’s a really deep division between people who trust scientific authority and people who don’t trust it. That often overlaps with religious beliefs and even economic status. You could easily imagine a situation where, for example, the scientific consensus becomes we should have fewer or no children for the sake of sparing the future, and how that would create enormous backlash among people who don’t trust that guidance or believe for religious or other reasons that it’s good to have more children, it’s good to increase the population. Those kinds of issues, I think have the potential to become right at the center of politics in the future generations. They’re the things that are sometimes referred to as biopolitics, when the future of life itself becomes the subject matter of politics.
Jeff: There’s also the concern that the anti-humanist attitude, to the extent that it continues to grow or play any part at all in our politics, holds back technological growth, and that things that might be possible in the future are held back by fear of how these groups will react.
Adam: There are definitely technologies that people think about with a lot of apprehension. Artificial intelligence is one, genetic engineering is one. For example, I mentioned in the book that there was a Chinese scientist a few years ago who claimed to have genetically engineered human embryos as part of researching immunity to AIDS. He was completely condemned and rebuked both at home and abroad. Even scientists were not ready to take that step. However, I think that the tools of genetic engineering are advancing at such a rate that it’s widely realized that we could do much more advanced genetic engineering on humans than we currently do.
The question is, will there eventually come a moment when people will say, if we can get rid of a gene for a disease, shouldn’t we make that standard? Shouldn’t that be something that we would want to do for our children in embryo if we can, to make them immune to Alzheimer’s disease or to cancer? At a certain point, those issues are going to become impossible to avoid. They are the kind of thing, like a lot of the things I talk about in the book, that seem like they’re not on the agenda today, but I think probably will be in the agenda 20 years from now.
Adam: One of the things that’s different from the past is the speed at which these changes are taking place today. Historically, it might be possible to look at the way society was advancing, the way technology was advancing, and be able to have the conversation in real-time as those advances were taking place. It seems today, because technology is moving so fast, that it’s hard for the debate to keep up, and that that’s part of the problem as well.
Jeff: Definitely. I think that part of this great acceleration of technology that we’ve been talking about is that we’re constantly able to do things that we don’t know what to do with. One of maybe the biggest example of that is atomic energy, that we discovered how to use atomic weapons at a time when we are still not able to abolish war or to guarantee that those weapons won’t be used to destroy humanity. So the idea that we have more power than we know what to do with, or more power than wisdom, is something that humanity has lived with for a pretty long time now. There are people who think in the context of artificial intelligence, for example, that it’s possible that an independent mind, a truly conscious artificial mind could be programmed at any time. Someone might be doing it right now, someone might have already done it, or might do it without realizing that they’ve done it. And that we are, instead of being able to plan the future and decide what to do in advance, we’re constantly reacting to new developments. And of course, people have different ideas and different interests. Some people want to encourage technologies that others want to resist. It’s impossible to get everyone to tow the same line most of the time.
So I think the record of the passage suggest that the future will continue that way, will continue to meet these new technological challenges, whether we’re ready for them or not.
Adam: I suppose one of the other questions is where that wisdom about all of this comes from. It’s not necessarily going to come from the technologists or even from the extremists on both ends that you talked about before, but somehow it has to grow out of the arts of public intellectual. Talk about where you think that wisdom comes from.
Jeff: Well, I think that for the people that I’m talking about, they’re very skeptical that wisdom can control technology, one way or the other. Anti-humanists and radical environmentalists see technology as something that is essentially destructive and out of our control, like a source storage apprentice. And they can point to the fact that we continue to announce targets for keeping pollution to a certain level, limiting climate change to a certain level. And those targets are never met. They’re continually, we just blow past them as a species because there is no way to hold back human desires and appetites for the things that cause us to use energy, that cause us to produce more carbon emissions.
On the other hand, transhumanists would say that any kind of moralizing attempt to say technology should stop here, we can go this far and no further, is doomed to fail because it’s human nature to want to know, to want to progress and invent, invent new things. So you can’t say, for example, we will never engage in genetic engineering, because at a certain point, we will want to do that. People will see that as a good thing rather than a bad thing. So I think that technology, or the desire to progress technologically, might be something that’s so powerful that it can’t be guided by any kind of humanistic wisdom. It’s more like the humanities are trying to catch up with the situations that science and technology present us with.
Adam: I guess that’s the battle between science and technology and human nature’s desire to know, on the one hand, versus the old cliche that nature bats last.
Jeff: Right. And I think that there are people who would say, we have to set boundaries and enforce limits on what we want to know and what we can do. That idea is also a very old one that goes back to– In the Renaissance, there was the myth of Faust who traded his soul for knowledge. And that became a symbol of modern humanity, that we’ve given something precious away in order to have more knowledge and more power.
However, I think the record suggests that that’s a bargain that most people like and will continue to make. It’s hard to envision a scenario in which that stops a true disaster. And that’s what a lot of the thinkers that I talk about in the book are looking forward to, is when that disaster happens, what will be left over? Will humanity be able to project itself forward into the future through some sort of successor species? Or will it be as they wiped off the face of the earth and maybe for the good of everything else?
Adam: And what does that disaster look like to some of the people you talk to?
Jeff: Well, there are people who call for humanity to do things like stop reproducing, commit suicide as a species or even individually. Those kinds of things are obviously quite provocative and hard to take fully seriously because it’s simply against human nature to destroy ourselves in that way. So, people who say things like that, I think are trying to make a point more than expecting them to be actually carried out.
But I think that there are a lot of people in increasingly mainstream people who believe that our environmental course is headed towards real destruction, maybe even extermination of the species through things like global warming, depletion of resources, making large parts of the earth uninhabitable because of the temperature, which will lead to mass migrations and wars. And so there are people who will envision a scenario where humanity will either disappear, or at least our industrial civilization will be unsustainable and will regress to a much lower population level and a lower level of technology.
Adam: And it’s interesting, though, that those people never believe the technology can be part of the solution, it seems.
Jeff: Well, the people that I write about in the book are pessimistic other than that, or at least some of them are. I think that mainstream environmentalists often do look to technology to solve those problems. They look to green energy, clean energy, and there are definitely people who say the only way that we can solve these problems is to find ways to meet our need for energy without creating pollution.
So recently there’s been news about atomic fusion, which has long been one of the clean energy ideas that people hope will pan out as a way of creating large amounts of energy without any waste. We’re not anywhere near there yet, but little steps keep being made. So the happy ending scenario would be that we learn to solve these problems, and certainly, that’s what I hope will happen. But the people that I’m writing about in this book, Revolts Against Humanity, tend to not believe that that solution is going to pan out.
Adam: They don’t believe it because they don’t believe in the technology or because they don’t want to believe it, because there’s an inherent bias against it?
Jeff: It’s often hard to tell. With all these prophecies, all prophecies about what’s going to happen in the next 50 years, they are prophecies. It’s impossible to know for sure what the next technology will be, what the future will hold. Usually, when people make predictions about the future, they turn out to be wrong, in one way or another. So it’s always hard to say if someone’s prophecy about the future is based on sort of evidence and reason, or whether it’s an expression of more deeply held beliefs and intuitions.
And I think there are certain people I write about in the book say quite openly, we don’t want to live in a technological world, we don’t want to live in a world where in the future everything is even more technologized than is today. We would prefer to live in a world where we can bypass technology and really live in nature in a way that is no longer possible today.
Adam: What surprised you the most in talking to all these people for the revolt against humanity? And were your views changed in any way in the process?
Jeff: My views were changed slightly in the direction of resignation. I think I’m not a scientist. As you said at the beginning, I’m a writer. I’m a poet and a literary critic, and I am a humanities person. And so a lot of the scenarios that I talk about in this book seem alien and undesirable to me as past the future, and I would not want to be a transhumanist, for example.
But the more I read about it, the more I have come to think that the objections of people like me to such a future or to progress have not ever been effective in the past, and are not going to be effective in the future. But it’s what we really need to do, is think about what’s actually going to happen rather than what we might prefer to happen.
Adam: Adam Kirsch, his recent book is Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining A Future Without Us. Adam, I thank you so much for spending time with us here on The WhoWhatWhy Podcast.
Jeff: Thank you. It was a pleasure.
Adam: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on The WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I hope you join us next week for another radio WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman.
If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
Our guest on this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast is Jared Yates Sexton, host of The Muckrake Podcast and author of The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis.
Sexton sees a world that is increasingly volatile and unpredictable, one where the current order, he says, is fraying, while authoritarianism is on the rise and trust in our institutions is waning.
He offers a sobering yet ultimately hopeful examination of global history, tracing the ways in which political power, religious indoctrination, and economic dominance have been used to oppress and exploit.
Sexton unpacks these stories, dissecting the myths about “Western civilization” that reactionaries cling to and showing how these stories have been used to justify some current political cruelty. Turning to the present, he takes a hard look at the forces that shape our lives, from neoliberalism to evangelical fearmongering.
Sexton argues against what he sees as a false dichotomy between free markets and authoritarianism, offering instead a vision of a robust liberal democracy.
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Full Text Transcript:
(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. It’s normal to think that our present political and cultural moment is unique. That the political era we live in started with Trump or Gingrich or Clinton. That the blame lies entirely with Talk Radio or Fox. That the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street or the financial crisis of 2007 changed everything. But the truth is that we have been here before. Long before any of these things happened. That the things that we are needing and feeling today have been the clay that authoritarians have used to mold and harden their rule in the past.
That religion and culture and ignorance have been used throughout history. That, in fact, it goes so far back that according to my guest, Jared Yates Sexton, there is a straight line between QAnon and the Book of Revelations. Jared Yates Sexton is the author of numerous books. His political writing has appeared in publications, including the New York Times, The New Republic, Politico, and so on. He is also the host of the Muckrake podcast and the author of three collections of fiction. It is my pleasure to welcome Jared Yates Sexton back to the WhoWhatWhy podcast to talk about his latest work, The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis. Jared, thanks so much for joining us.
Jared Yates Sexton: Hey, thank you for having me. My pleasure.
Jeff: It’s great to have you here. There is something both troubling and reassuring, I think, in this notion that everything old is new again. That so many of the problems that we face today, so many of the issues and divisions today are things that have been with us for so long, and yet they’re still with us. Talk a little bit about that first.
Jared: One of the things about writing this book, and I just want to be upfront about it, this is some heavy stuff. And I think that we’re in a really dangerous time, but I’m incredibly optimistic. And the reason is because, actually, writing this book, The Midnight Kingdom, I was able to go through history and I saw these cycles. And I saw these conspiracy theories and these stories in the same clashes. And it really put things into perspective, which is, humanity has been in some really ugly places.
There have been moments of incredible oppression and violence and just some awful circumstances, but we’re a really extraordinary creature. We crave democracy. We crave better futures. We crave better lives. And we have gotten ourselves out of situations as bad as the one that we’re in now. And by understanding how we’ve arrived here and by understanding those cycles of history, I think that’s what’s going to get us out of this situation is to actually start wrapping our heads around what history, not only how it unfolded, but what it can show us.
Jeff: Of course, the other thing that it shows us is that even after we get out of this or if we get out of this particular crisis, that somewhere down the road, there’s another one.
Jared: Yes. And part of the issue with all of this is that I don’t know how else to say this, but our understanding of history in America is really poor. The conventional stories of history that we get are basically whitewashed. They’ve been sanded down into some weaponized propaganda. And as a result, we keep making the same mistakes. What we’re dealing with right now looks a lot like what was happening at the turn of the 20th century, which led to the stock market crash and the rise of Nazism and fascism, and these are things that didn’t happen that long ago.
There are still people alive who witnessed that, who dealt with that problem, and yet, somehow or another, these stories get twisted up, and then we repeat them. But the good news is if we can actually start having a dialogue about this and if we can start actually recognizing these patterns, we can get out of this rut that we’re in, and maybe we’ll go out and we’ll find some new problems that we have to deal with.
Jeff: And I guess, the fundamental question comes back to why it is that we repeat them. What is it in the notion of self-governance that is so difficult that we constantly hit these kinds of walls?
Jared: Well, to take a very, very recent issue, that seems ridiculous on space but it’s very instructive. As of recently, we’ve had this new issue about whether or not gas stoves should be banned, right? Whether or not the fact that they cause childhood asthma. Should we move towards electric stoves? That’s an actual issue. We could have a political discussion about how we move forward because that’s what politics is supposed to be. But instead, what we’re doing is we’re having an argument about, you can’t take my gas stove from me. The government can’t come into my house with their jackbooted thugs and harm my family and take the gas stove.
Well, honestly, the reason why that’s happening is because the energy industry, the fossil fuel industry doesn’t want to lose gas stoves. So, as a result, we’re having an argument that isn’t even about the issue, and that’s what’s actually happened with our politics. It’s been hijacked by these narratives that the wealthy and the powerful have crafted to keep us from having actual conversations and making actual headway. And so, as a result, the experience that we have politically, but also now socially and economically, is not real. It’s fabricated. And so we’re chasing illusions as opposed to having informed discussions.
Jeff: But at the core of the inability to have that discussion is the sense that we have lost faith in all of our institutions. We’ve lost faith in experts, in science, in institutions themselves, which we used to rely on to tell us if something was dangerous or not.
Jared: Yes. And unfortunately, that is intentional. As I talked about in the book, this modern era has largely been framed by a document called the Powell Memo. And if any of your listeners haven’t seen this before, I highly recommend going to look at this. After the 1960s, the 1970s, you have the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, the feminist movement.
As all of these things are happening, the wealthy and the powerful basically come together and decide that they’re going to spend their money, their millions upon billions of dollars, to undermine experts, to go after education, to basically create an alternate reality that was based a lot on how tobacco companies went after experts when it came out that it caused cancer. And by the way, when energy companies, going back into the 1950s, understood that they were causing climate change.
So that has created this situation that we see now with the pandemic in which experts and scientists have been undermined, and in which we have this world of so-called Alternate Facts. This is a weapon. A really, really powerful weapon, and we see that throughout history that these things are incredibly effective.
Jeff: And yet, in a poll that I think Axios published yesterday, that in terms of faith in institutions, that business comes out number one. That 62% of the public has faith and trust in institutions of business versus a much smaller percentage, less than 50% in government.
Jared: Yes. And that’s also intentional as well. So, right now, we’re living in what experts have come to call the neoliberal consensus. Going back into the 1980s, people might remember Ronald Reagan coming out and saying that the government isn’t the answer. It’s the problem. And so what we’ve been fed for the past few decades is the idea that government should just actually not do anything. It shouldn’t regulate business. It shouldn’t invest in projects.
And meanwhile, the free market will settle everything. Now, this isn’t just a Reagan thing. It’s not just a republican party thing. We’ve seen elements of it within the Democratic Party as well. And so this has undermined any idea that we can come together and solve problems using the government, which has created a federal government that has largely been depowered, and as a result, has been overshadowed at this point by corporations, which have become the de facto representative body that we have.
Jeff: Talk about the historical antecedents for all of this because one of the things you do in the book, in The Midnight Kingdom, is go back even further to really the core of Western civilization and the ideas that grew out of that and how they have grown up on the one hand and been perverted in many respects by modern political leaders.
Jared: Yes. I needed to relearn the history of the modern world, and in doing so, what I discovered was, ideas like QAnon or the big lie, all these conspiracy theories, they’re supposedly unprecedented. I traced them all the way back to Ancient Rome. These have been in circulation over and over and over again, and they’ve been used by the powerful in order to protect themselves and to expand their power.
A real quick anecdote on what we’re discussing here, since the corporation was a thing, the original corporations were created in order to colonize other empires and to engage in the enslavement of humans, one cycle has replayed over and over again in which these groups go out and then they gain so much wealth that then they come back and overtake the government that birthed them in the first place.
We’re in another cycle like that. We have historic inequality. We have power, which is in the hands of individuals like Elon Musk, who has his own personal space program. Meanwhile, we have senior citizens who are having to cut their medicine in half. We have families that are doing without. We have absolutely terrible situations in place, in the most historically wealthy and powerful country in the history of the world.
These stories protect that. These conspiracy theories keep that going and keep us from understanding what has happened, but more importantly, what should happen. And these cycles, again, they are completely understandable and our situation is completely predictable. It’s our lack of information that keeps us from recognizing those things.
Jeff: And yet, part of that coda of Western civilization are some of the fundamental notions that have grown into these ideas of individualism, ideas of how capitalism works, ideas of rationalism and science. Talk a little bit about that.
Jared: Yes, so the entire idea, and whenever we say Western civilization, we need to put some quotes around that. Western civilization is, itself, its own mythology. And basically, it says, “Here’s the border between civilization and barbarism.” If you are within civilization, you deserve protection. The law is on your side. You deserve to have a good life. If you’re a barbarian on the outside of that, you deserve whatever comes your way.
And what happens is that that idea between civilization and barbarism, that line moves constantly. Sometimes, it’s saying, “These people deserve protection.” In the United States of America, we’re creating this new multi-tiered system. Of course, women now have had their reproductive rights trampled upon. We’re starting to get rid of a lot of the civil rights progress of the 20th century.
And what we’re watching in all of this is that line between so-called civilization and barbarism is constantly being moved and manipulated, which allows people to hurt other people, but with impunity. It allows them to persecute without feeling like they’re doing something wrong because what they’re doing is they’re protecting Western civilization, which is why we’re seeing neo-Nazis, why we’re seeing far-right extremists, white supremacists, why they’re coming out of the woodwork now. Whether it’s protecting statues in Charlottesville or saying that we need the government to basically clamp down on women’s rights, it is always done in the name of protecting civilization.
Jeff: And in many respects, that’s why you hear the argument often made, that for a lot of these people, the cruelty is the point.
Jared: Yes, that’s exactly right. And one of the things that I’ve seen, I come from a very, very small rural Indiana town, and I was surrounded constantly with evangelical fearmongering. We were basically told that our government, our neighbors, all these people were engaged in satanic conspiracies. And if we didn’t engage with them in warfare, if we didn’t lock them up, if we didn’t go after them, if we didn’t oppress them, they were going to destroy us, they were going to kill us. And as a result, what happens is you create these movements, which go to the capitol and try and overtake the government. They’re willing to go out into the streets and spill blood.
And when this happens, there becomes a movement that bases itself on opposition to something else. And that cruelty that you’re talking about, it becomes not something to feel bad about, it becomes something to rally to. And we’re currently in a moment where all of these energies are coming into place, and we’ve seen what happens. This is how governments get overthrown. This is how authoritarian regimes are formed. It’s when that cruelty becomes one of the things that lashes a movement together.
Jeff: It’s also part of, and you touched on this a moment ago, the mythology. Whether it is the mythology we tell ourselves with respect to part of the evolution of Western civilization, or the founding mythology of this country, or the mythology of businesses that start up, that those stories, those myths that are part of creation become inculcated in the culture of institutions, countries, and businesses, and it’s very hard to separate at a certain point.
Jared: It absolutely is. And I want to point out that what we’re actually talking about here is the difference between why things happen and the stories that we tell ourselves about why those things happen. I look around in my community and I see a lot of people who are– they buy the same trucks. Meanwhile, they’re constantly buying semi-automatic weapons. They have all kinds of stickers on everything that talk about, “Come and take my guns,” or whatever.
There’s this identity that has grown up in America that it’s like this revolutionary persona, a strong man who’s going to stand against tyranny. And meanwhile, what are we actually talking about here? We’re talking about purchases. We’re talking about why you buy trucks. We’re talking about why you vote for certain individuals. And what lashes all that together are these stories, because humanity needs stories to understand why we do the things we do. It’s why we have a religion. It’s why we have history. It’s why we try and make sense out of all of these things.
The problem though, is that those stories are infinitely manipulatable and weaponizable. And what we’ve seen now is that the stories that are being told are radicalizing people, and they’re also destroying the institutions that bind us together. And so what we need to do to defeat this, overall, is to tell ourselves a new story, to get to a new point where we start to disabuse ourselves of a lot of these mythologies and stories that have simply kept us oppressed.
Jeff: Arguably though, those stories represent a strain that is really, in this country, at least, in the DNA of the country. People have talked about changing the culture of businesses, for example. And I think it was Peter Drucker who said that culture eats strategy for lunch. These are changes that are very, very difficult, if not impossible, to make without real generational change, in some cases.
Jared: Yes. And I think that’s one of the things that’s happening right now. You were talking about businesses and these cultural stories. A real quick example, you take a look at somebody like Colin Kaepernick, of course, who was protesting racial inequality and police violence. Eventually, Colin Kaepernick signs a multimillion-dollar deal with Nike, a shoe manufacturer. Nike, of course, has exploited people around the world, operated sweatshops, exploited populations and their resources.
In a way, then, all of a sudden you’re starting to buy Nikes because you’re making a political point. And that’s opposed to actually going out and trying to change the world. Instead, you’re using your dollars and your purchases, which are about you, to go ahead and feel like you are changing the world. But one thing that’s happening is that this next generation, we’re becoming more and more critical and more and more nuanced about these things. We recognize when these stories are being used against us. We’re starting to push back against these ideas.
And so, a lot of what we’re dealing with right now, this lack of faith in institutions, this lack of faith in culture, this lack of faith in representatives, to be honest, that lack of faith is well earned. There does need to be reform. There does need to be progress. And I think this cultural literacy that is starting to gain steam in this moment– and by the way, thank you Donald Trump for making that obvious to a lot of people, I think that that forward movement is what’s going to make the difference in the long run, as we become more critical and as we expect more.
Jeff: But only if there are competing narratives. Only if there are different stories.
Jared: Yes, that’s exactly right. And one of the problems that we have right now is that we do understand that something is wrong, we do understand that our institutions are failing. It is deeply ingrained in our bones right now that something is wrong in America and that America is experiencing what could be argued to be a decline. Meanwhile, we have a lot of people who are institutionalists who are saying, “Everything is going to be fine. You don’t have to worry about this, and Donald Trump got defeated in 2020. Everything is going to be just totally, totally fine.”
Meanwhile, people understand it, at a molecular level, that things are not fine and that things need to change. The question now is how do things change? And the authoritarian right wing is offering change. They are offering an authoritarian movement that takes over where liberal democracy has failed. There needs to be an alternative.
And what we need to do is we need to reform. We need to go in and take care of this historic inequality that is currently straining our system. So we have to offer that alternative. You’re exactly right. We cannot continue down this path because the only means of doing that is to allow worsening oppression and worsening exploitation.
Jeff: And I guess the question is, it goes back to something Bill Clinton once said about affirmative action when he talked about “mending it, not ending it”. We have to look at the current state of neoliberal politics that you referred to before, and those that argued that things are fine. You talked about this in response to a recent David Brooks column in The Atlantic, and whether or not that has to become the jumping-off place for progress as opposed to completely reinventing a new alternative narrative, which somehow seems undoable.
Jared: Yes. And I want to go ahead, and something you had said earlier about what we feel or the idea that government can’t do anything or the business is the only means of getting things done. That was a new narrative that got brought to the forefront in the 1970s on the 1980s. Before that, we had the New Deal consensus. And you look back now at someone like Richard Nixon. Richard Nixon would not fit into the modern Republican Party.
Jeff: Not at all.
Jared: Richard Nixon was technically a liberal who believed that the government should invest in things and make people’s lives better. You can have political differences with him all day long. The New Deal consensus was based on that idea that the government should regulate business and that they should invest in programs that help people. I don’t think that you need to overthrow everything.
I think we need to go back to that New Deal consensus when the government was allowed to invest in social programs and work programs. Plus, also, disabuse ourselves of this notion the free market is the only way to get anything done has been a mythology all along. And I agree, we don’t need to completely overturn everything. We just need to move back into the past before that neoliberal consensus came into being.
Jeff: What’s different today though, in all of this is really communication, information, and the speed at which it travels. We have never dealt with this level of problems before, and certainly, there’s historical precedent for all the problems as you point out, but the speed with which information and knowledge and disinformation moves today changes the playing field, some would argue.
Jared: Yes, it absolutely does. And historically, the thing that I would point to was the emergence of the printing press, which eventually led– most people don’t understand this, but that’s what led to the reformation and Martin Luther influencing the schism between the Catholic church and this new reformation movement that would eventually lead to incredible amounts of bloodshed and revolution and just millions of people dying and suffering.
Each time that we see these technologies erupt, whether or not it’s the printing press, the radio, television, the mass communication that we have now, there are always these moments of tumultuous change. But it always ends up being who figures out that that change is possible and what it should be. Those are the people who write history. Those are the ones who change how the world works, whether it’s for the positive or for the negative. And we’re at another one of those moments.
The internet, social media, these means of communication. You’re exactly right, they are quickening, and we have already seen what the consequences are of not dealing with those changes, and it’s going get a whole lot worse before it gets better, unless we realize that this change is not only possible but inevitable.
Jeff: And that the change will keep happening. That the degree to which we act on it is certainly something that we can determine in what we’re talking about. But one way or another, the change is going to keep happening.
Jared: Exactly right. And one of the things that we have to absolutely get rid of is this idea that we are powerless or that we are alone. This is a lie that we’ve been told, and it’s one of the reasons why people are so frustrated now. They feel like government is beyond their control, that it doesn’t matter who they vote for, what happens.
We have to reinvigorate the democratic spirit with a small D and start working within our communities and with other people and reinvigorating a trust in one another and the idea that we can have power and that we can change the world because, right now, the wealthy and the powerful are working behind the scenes. They’re spending incredible amounts of time, money, and energy to convince us that we can’t do anything about this. But we can, and we have to.
Jeff: But in many ways, the reverse is happening if you look at local politics around the country. And part of the reason has to do with the state of news and media and local communities, et cetera. There’s a lot of reasons for it, but much of the national debate, the polarization, all the bad stuff we’ve been talking about is little by little filtering down into local communities and into the politics of those communities.
Jared: Yes. And that’s not by accident at all. Really quickly, to go ahead and use an example, the CRT debate or the groomer debate. These things are not grassroots revolts among these school boards and communities. These are being funded by wealthy donors like the DeVos”s, the Bradleys, the Coles, and they’re basically being used by their constellations of institutes and think tanks and foundations to basically go ahead and go into public schools and then privatize them.
They’re taking over school boards, they’re taking over local politics. And that is on the record. That isn’t a conspiracy theory. It is entirely their strategy. So we have to realize that these conversations, or rather these arguments we’re having are artificial. These are weapons to go ahead and privatize and destroy local politics as well as regional and national politics.
Jeff: Schools are an interesting example because it’s a case where one side is giving the other side the weapon. Part of the reason that these campaigns are so effective by these well-heeled interests that you’re talking about is because the situation in a lot of those schools is so poor to start with.
Jared: Exactly. And going back to the New Deal consensus, we have started not funding these things. Austerity is a part of the neoliberal regime. And so what you do is you go in, you tighten budgets, and things get worse over and over and over again. It’s not unimportant also to point out that these are the same people. The DeVos’s, the Bradleys, the Coles, all of these people funding it, they stand to make trillions with a T on privatizing public education. This is an incredible opportunity to go ahead and crater public education and then privatize it. And as a result, they’re trying to accelerate the decline.
Jeff: And those that want to prevent that have to realize that the system that they’ve been engaged in for all these years needs some change as well.
Jared: That’s exactly right.
Jeff: It’s just money that there really is fundamental change that has to happen.
Jared: Exactly. And one of the problems is that we tend to believe that nothing is going to change forever. The way that things were a couple of years ago are going to be the way that they are for the rest of our lives. We have to change. We have to recognize the change is happening, and we have to be proactive because there are plenty of people and plenty of groups out there, such as the people we’re talking about, who are actively trying to make that change.
Jeff: Talk a little bit about whether or not you have any hope that we’re going to see any kind of political change from all of this in the next 4 to 12 years.
Jared: I actually am very hopeful. One of the things that I gain a lot of hope from are conversations like these. People are starting to pay more and more attention to politics. For the longest time, we were told, Don’t worry about politics. The experts have it under control.” Meanwhile, you’re seeing young people who don’t even have training to do so. They’re winning labor fights against the largest corporations in the history of the world, including Amazon, Apple, Starbucks, you name it. I actually am very hopeful, and I think moving forward, we’re going to figure this stuff out and we are going to chart a new course, but it isn’t going to be easy.
Jeff: Jared Yates Sexton. His new book is The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis. Jared, I thank you so much for spending time with us here on the WhoWhatWhy Podcast.
Jared: Thank you. It was my pleasure again.
Jeff: Thank you and thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I hope you join us next week for another radio WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
This Sunday marks the 50th anniversary of the landmark Roe v. Wade decision. But since the ruling has been obliterated by the recent Dobbs decision, the struggle for abortion rights continues.
Felicia Kornbluh, our guest on this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, is a veteran of that battle. She is professor of history and of gender, sexuality, and women’s studies at the University of Vermont, and the author of A Woman’s Life Is a Human Life: My Mother, Our Neighbor, and the Journey from Reproductive Rights to Reproductive Justice.
She argues that the fight for reproductive rights is about more than just abortion rights.
Kornbluh, whose mother was an early pioneer in the pre-Roe abortion struggle in New York, believes that activists must also address the racial and economic biases that women face, especially when dealing with the American medical establishment
She believes that, post-Dobbs, the movement is better served by a grassroots political battle, rather than one conducted in the rarefied atmosphere of the courts.
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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Transcript Coming Soon…
On this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast we talk with Mickey Huff, the director of Project Censored and its annual look at the 25 most underreported stories.
Huff talks about how this age of digital news is both the best and worst of times for journalism. Outlets for independent reporting have skyrocketed, but the majority of them lack the power of mainstream corporate media. Thus the MSM behemoths often decide what news we hear.
And the news is further distorted by the power of social media to promote junk news and disinformation — all of which is processed by our shrinking attention span.
This results, Huff says, in a pervasive level of censorship, whether intentional or not. Amid this gloomy backdrop, he reminds us that independent media, like WhoWhatWhy, have become all the more vital in preserving the free press.
Each year, Project Censored surveys the media landscape to bring light to the top 25 most censored or underreported stories of the past year — it’s a reminder, he points out, of how much work there is yet to be done.
Of course all of this is made worse by a lack of media literacy on the part of so many citizens.
Everyone talks about the need for transparency in public affairs, but what the government means by transparency turns out to be… not all that clear.
In this reprise of an important WhoWhatWhy podcast, award-winning author Nicholson Baker (Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act) describes what it’s like to try to squeeze even a small amount of truth from a huge mass of documents that the federal government seems determined, for apparently arbitrary reasons, to keep secret.
Baker set out 12 years ago to learn about the use of biological weapons during the Korean War (1950-53). He never got the answers he sought, but what he discovered along the way –– should concern all of us.
Among other things, he demonstrates that the 1966 Freedom of Information Act is actually a maddening framework for not getting information. It’s designed to keep inquirers waiting for documents that never arrive, to release records only with massive whiteouts and redactions, and to induce frustration so pervasive as to trigger a brief dopamine rush when even the tiniest crumb is given out.
Baker details what he sees as the cost to the country, and to history, when the facts behind major governmental initiatives are kept hidden for decades — as with the JFK assassination records. He reminds us that at least part of the reason we never seem to learn from our mistakes is that we can’t even learn what they were. The past cannot be prologue if it’s hidden.
He talks about how the intelligence agencies are the ultimate secret club that effectively blackballs the rest of us from membership, and how we might act and vote differently if we had even a glimpse inside the clubhouse – to see what dirty laundry has been covered up there.
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Full Text Transcript:
(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. Few subjects in our public discourse are as contradictory as government transparency. Every politician talks about it, elections are sometimes won or lost on the subject, yet in reality, it’s a very different story. Perhaps it’s hard to conduct modern business under the glare of the public spotlight, particularly in this age of the internet and always-on 24/7 news. Perhaps it’s one of the challenges that our founders might never have grasped. But how do we balance the public’s need to know with the government’s ability to do its work sometimes out of the harsh spotlight?
Over the years, methods and institutions like the 1966 Freedom of Information Act have come along to try and do this. But for every effort like this, those in the inner recesses of government and in the administrative state have found ways to circumvent the process as we have seen in modern times. From the JFK assassination records to the January 6th documents, the goal of government always seems to be to wear down those making requests for information and make them give up and cry uncle. After all, often, those people protecting government secrets are there forever, and those seeking the information sometimes have a life.
That’s the struggle that award-winning author Nicholson Baker highlights as he seeks to find out more about America’s possible use of biological weapons during the Korean War but the broader issues that he illustrates are timeless. Even with the perspective and protection of three-quarters of a century, and like the assassination 60 years ago, facts are hard to come by.
Nicholson Baker is the author of 16 books, including Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act. His work has appeared in numerous publications and he’s received the National Book Critics Circle Award. He founded the American Newspaper Repository in order to save large collections of US newspapers. And it is my pleasure to welcome Nicholson Baker to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. Nick, thanks so much for being here.
Nicholson Baker: Wow. That was a wonderful introduction. Thank you. I’m delighted to be with you in spirit, Jeff, and to talk about information.
Jeff: Well, it’s good to have you here. First of all, what set you on this search? Why did you want to find out this information about the Korean War?
Nicholson: Well, I didn’t know much about the Korean War. I did not know much about biological weapons. I’m not intrinsically interested in them except that my grandfather was a pathologist who used to talk about fungal diseases at the dinner table. And one of the first things that happened was when I was researching a whole different book that was about microfilming valuable library holdings and tossing out the original documents, I saw a book in a university library and it was about the Korean War and the question of whether biological weapons were used.
And I looked down the list and one of my grandfather’s diseases was on the list, this disease, coccidioidomycosis. And I thought, wow, that’s just bizarre that American scientists were willing to work on and intensify diseases and were really trying to make people sick more efficiently for this long period, and it pulled at me. It horrified me, of course. I mean, it’s a bad idea but it was also the question mark over the whole thing who’d done it? Is it in fact true what the Chinese said and what the North Koreans said? Is it true that some unit of American forces tried to make an enemy sick during a war? Is that true? Bizarrely enough, it’s still a question.
Jeff: And how did you begin to dig in?
Nicholson: Well, I began by reading books and then the documents that are behind the books. I went to the National Archives. I went to the Eisenhower Presidential Library, the Truman Library, to repositories in various universities, private papers, there’s a lot. There’s a lot that you can learn about the past but there’s a class of documents that’s particularly interesting. And why they’re interesting is that you’re not allowed to learn what’s on them.
And so I would be sitting in the National Archives reading room in College Park. It’s a beautiful, big, light-filled room, and maybe 300 people sitting at little desks. And we’re all going through our papers following some research path, and it’s fascinating. And it’s a great privilege to sit there and be able to look at the record of one’s own government. Every so often, though, as I was turning the pages of the records of this very small Air Force department in the Pentagon, I would come to a piece of yellow stiff cardboard and I would say, “Access restricted.” The document was removed on such and such a date, and there would be the initials of the person who removed it and maybe the person who sent the memo and received it. And it would be a memo from say, 1950.
And I’m thinking why, when all these other memos have been declassified, all of them are stamped top secret. So every single memo in this entire file is top secret and yet these ones are still being kept secret. That’s the crucial information that this piece of cardboard can tell me that. The next step is to say what is the document. So then you file a request for that thing. And I did that in 2012. I said here’s 21 documents I know exist and they’re just across the wall. They’re in a secure area. And I still haven’t been able to see them. Eight years have gone by, many emails, nothing. It’s not an untypical experience, actually, for a person who’s trying to do research. It’s the norm really if you’re writing about sensitive things.
Jeff: One of the things about the Freedom of Information Act that is so frustrating that you talk about is that while it exists and seems like a good idea on the surface, there’s absolutely no enforcement mechanism for it.
Nicholson: Well, that’s true. For a while, the fact that it was a law forced, was a kind of useful crowbar at a lot of really amazing sets of documents. Thousands, millions of pages of documents, especially during– The law was signed in 1965, so all the way through 1975, ’76, all the way through the Reagan administration, some really amazing, lurid, shocking episodes from the past, from Democratic administrations and from Republican administrations came into public view as a result of it. Then there began to be this defanging process or this process of taking away certain powers of the Freedom of Information Act so that fewer and fewer documents came under its jurisdiction.
There have been ups and downs with that but we’re now at a point where the law is simply scoffed at. It’s not enforced. The law is that you’re supposed to get a response from a government agency for some document that you’re requesting within 20 days but some people wait 20 years and there’s no consequence to the government agency. It doesn’t happen. The only way you get something sometimes is if you sue and it costs money, it takes time, it makes you crazy, so people don’t sue. So what happens is that because the law is unenforced, history suffers.
We don’t know what our country actually did at crucial points in its history as a result of the fact that this law is sitting on the books but isn’t being executed in practice.
Jeff: And so much of the intent is it seems to wear down those making the request that that’s not a bug, that’s a feature at this point.
Nicholson: I felt it and that’s why I wrote this book as a diary is because I think it’s useful to point out the cost or the feeling that you get when you have to wait for years for something to be released. What does it do to you? It’s demoralizing and it’s crazy making really. But also the kinds of responses you get these polite letters from, let’s say, the CIA, saying we made a thorough search and then they come up with some reason they can’t release something. And then you send a letter back called an appeal and you say yes, but that’s not actually true because of these reasons. Another year goes by.
It’s an amazing ballet of frustration. It’s just so hard because all you want is to know what happened. And you’ve got a document, sometimes you’ve got to document, you know what they look like, they’re blacked out or whatever, you’ve got a document that has words on it but then all the useful interesting, the action words, the words that would actually tell you what’s going on in people’s minds or what events had just happened on this memo, let’s say, are blacked out.
And you know that something is there and it’ll say something like Mr. Wisner reported on the trip to blank. And he said that they were encountering blank and that many other operations would happen in the adjoining country of blank. So you know that things are being talked about but all of the crucial nuggets that would make you able to understand what that is, what is actually going on, are all withheld. So that document counts as a declassified document even though it has absolutely nothing to tell you, and that does wear on the person who is trying to get at what happened.
Jeff: The other catch-22 of all of this sometimes is that the requests are rejected because there isn’t enough information, but it’s impossible to get the information to make the request without seeing the document.
Nicholson: Well, that’s a very good point. One thing that I think is crucially important to do is to take the records of some of these big agencies, chief among them, the CIA itself, out from under the CIA. Take the records from the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s away from the CIA so that they are not protecting them in order to survive currently. What we need to know is how much is there. And even if they don’t declassify everything, if you know that there are, let’s say, 50 boxes about a certain revolution in a certain country, let’s say, 50 boxes of documents survive, a miracle. You know that then if that they send you 12 pieces of paper, that that’s a very small relief.
But if you don’t know the total size of the records that the agency is controlling, you never know where you are. And this is the chronic state of historical research is that you don’t know how much, so the agency will say, “We made a search of our records and we have these three pages for you.” And you think, well, is that three pages out of three thousand or thirty, or how much have you got? They’re not going to tell you, so you’d never know what is the iceberg and what is the tip.
Jeff: You’ve alluded to this a couple of times, the kind of psychological effect that it has, the way it wears you down.
Nicholson: It comes and goes and that’s also why I wrote it as a diary. Sometimes it’s interesting to have a charged emptiness and a feeling that there’s something there, you know it’s there, and you can’t get at it so you think, “I’m going to outsmart it. I’m going to look at newspaper articles from that period. I’m going to look at private document collections in universities. I’m going to figure out what that was even though the agency is not releasing that.” And it’s this challenge that’s kind of exciting, but it’s only exciting for a while, and after a while, you really just– It’s what you said so beautifully in your introduction, it’s a game of waiting.
An agency has people who are paid a lot of money to go very slowly with things. The classic example of that actually, there’s this beautiful story, I mean, this book is about sad things, but it’s also about inspiring things. And this little group called MuckRock brought a suit against the CIA saying you have this huge digital trove of declassified documents, and people can only see them in a certain room in the National Archives, four computer terminals that are surveilled by many cameras, and your keystrokes are recorded. Those documents are declassified so we’re bringing suit, and we’re suing you to say that these documents should be made freely available to anyone who wants them.
And the CIA said, “Oh, no, that would take us 28 years to do that. We’d have to look at every document to make sure that it was fully declassified before we released it.” And then that seemed ridiculous and everybody scoffed and said, “28 years, come on.” Then they came back and said, “No, no, we’ve recalculated. It would only take us six years.” And then this guy, Jeff Scudder, who had worked at the CIA and knew about digital stuff became part of the lawsuit, and he said, “Go to Staples, cost you $69 to get an external drive, take you two days to download those documents, and it would be a matter of trivial, trivial expertise. This is something you could do instantly.”
And as soon as he said that, the lawsuit changed. And the CIA, this multi-billion dollar, massively secretive organization, folded and it put all these documents that had only been accessible from these four computer terminals, it put them on its own website. It said, “We are making things available because we are open transparency advocates and we’re doing a great thing.” Well, they were forced to do it, whatever, it doesn’t matter. These documents are now available to anybody who wants to look at them anywhere in the world, and they’re a record of some really bizarre thing.
So that was a huge victory that happened. It actually helped me a lot in writing the book because some of the documents were material to the period I was studying.
Jeff: There’s also the sense that when they give you one piece of paper or a couple of pieces of paper that you’re so grateful for that that you forget about the larger tranche that you haven’t gotten.
Nicholson: It’s funny. The CIA has this weird way of sealing envelopes. They believe that if you send something through the U.S. Mail, you don’t just lick the envelope and seal it, you have to take one of those big industrial brown ceiling tape. And they actually seal the back of the envelope with this brown, strongly-reinforced tape. So you’ve got a letter, this just looks like a regular letter on the front, and it says, “my address,” and then it says, “return address, CIA.” Turn the back, and there it is. It’s sort of like a lock on a safe, this piece of brown paper.
And even so, it’s exciting. You think, “Well, then maybe there’s something material in here,” and then you open it up and so often, almost always, it’s a response that’s a non-response. It’s saying, “We haven’t found anything,” or, “We’re denying your request.” And it’s just wrong, basically. It’s just wrong because we’re talking about American history. And in order to do American history, you actually have to have access to what people wrote in the State Department, in the CIA, in the White House. You have to know what was the Truman administration doing, what were the Eisenhower administration doing.
Those things are held back from us now, but we can’t learn from some of the patterns and mistakes and behaviors and things that were said and done in the past properly because we don’t know what they were. So we can’t actually be informed citizens in looking at our current predicament and learn from what we’ve been through. We’re in a state of enforced amnesia.
Jeff: The other aspect is, and this becomes a joke sometimes, but maybe this is at the core of it, the idea that government repeats the same mistakes over and over again, that we do the same things wrong. Part of the reason may be that we don’t have access to that history of how these mistakes were made.
Nicholson: Very true. I think that’s absolutely true. You can see in the case of our adventures in regime change, that things that happened in Albania or in Guatemala or in Africa somewhere, or in Cuba, the bones, the structure of an intervention was often very similar. And in fact, in the CIA, in the Clandestine Service is what it’s called I guess, a department that was begun by the Truman administration in 1948 under a man named Frank Wisner. The records of those operations in, let’s say Iran or Guatemala, were held in binders, and they were used as pattern books for the next subversion or intervention.
So one of the reasons these historical events seem similar is because the people who were engaged in the covert action were referring to the notebooks from the past, so we need to know everything that are in those notebooks, and what we get is some, especially in Guatemala, we have some of what’s there and not all of what’s there and that’s wrong.
Jeff: To what extent did you find that the government plays favorites? That there might be journalists or organizations that they’re willing to release some material to and others not, and certainly, they have ways of accomplishing that.
Nicholson: Well, that does happen. I think that if you are thought to be friendly to an agency, it’s more likely that they will make some things available to you, and that’s understandable. Let’s say you’re writing about the Navy. If you’re a great fan of Naval History and you feel that you’re going to write a kind of inspiring story about something in World War II, you’re going to get treated differently than if you’re looking into some unfortunate event that happened under the jurisdiction of the Navy.
Let’s say the Navy’s working plague research on the island of Alameda, the Naval Research Program. Well, they’re going to resist that. The Navy is seemingly secretive about that. That I understand that. I understand that. It’s just the reality of it.
I guess the point of this is partly to just bang the gong and say, look, live with me through the difficulty of trying to arrive at a coherent account of what happened a long time ago and you will understand why it is important to reform the process by which old secrets are revealed. It’s important, it’s material. It affects our behaviors as a citizenry right now. We would vote differently and think differently if we knew better where we came from.
Jeff: Certainly part of it is the kind of got-you atmosphere that we live in politically. Because every side, every politician, every person inside government is so afraid that they might want to reveal somebody else’s secrets, but someday it could happen to them. And instead of learning from these mistakes and using them in a positive light, everything becomes a game of got-you.
Nicholson: And the politicization of everything is so exhausting, isn’t it? And really, if you look back, the structure of the American presidency, it’s fairly consistent as it doesn’t matter what a president says about the desire for openness and everything, each president when they get into power, ends up seduced or something by this fact that he’s sitting on a mountain of weapons and armies and secret armies. And so every president ends up doing things all over the world that he should not be doing. That is consistent. It’s Democratic and it’s Republican. It doesn’t have anything to do with where you stand. Unfortunately, and that’s the basic thing is we’ve got to understand this is nonpartisan.
Jeff: Beyond the political aspect, the other part of this, and it’s true of presidents, it’s true of even lower-level people and cabinets, there’s a certain seduction to secrecy. Talk about that.
Nicholson: I think it’s part of how the CIA, for instance, markets itself. The CIA’s product is secrets, and the excitement of its being a shadowy realm of unknowability gives it a certain kind of an allure. And the idea of saying it’s a central intelligence agency and the intelligence that it has is so intelligent that normal mortals can’t know it is part of how it markets itself. And in fact, it’s just a bunch of people sitting at desks figuring out how to poke and prod other governments to do things that Americans want done. That’s not going to sound good.
So secrecy is part of the creation of a kind of excitement, a feeling of a club to which you either do belong or don’t belong. If you have a security clearance in [unintelligible 00:23:23], you are somebody, you breathe a different atmosphere. You are a person who has access to unknowable things that other people don’t even know can be known. This is exciting. So yes, there’s absolutely, part of it is the fact that secrecy itself is a kind of exciting, intoxicational solvent that flows around documents.
Jeff: Nicholson Baker. Nick, I thank you so much for spending time with us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.
Nicholson: It was a pleasure. Thanks for the questions. I enjoyed it.
Jeff: Thank you. And thank you for listening and for joining us here on Radio WhoWhatWhy. I hope you join us next week for another Radio WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to WhoWhatWhy.org/donate.
The popularity of podcasts is surging everywhere, mostly due to the special ability of voices to reach people more directly than the written word. And when those voices, through intimate and lively dialogue, convey vital facts and perspectives, we are informed, entertained, and enriched.
Of the 55 WhoWhatWhy podcasts released in 2022, we have selected 10 to head our “Best of” list this year. Each encapsulates a part of what we have experienced and felt during the somewhat daunting but always exhilarating past twelve months.
Last Friday we picked our first five, and today we share the second five of our selected podcasts.To explore more, you can visit our podcast page, which is always available.
MP Mhairi Black speaking in the UK House of Commons.
Photo credit: PoliticsJOE / YouTube
Progressive Politics in the UK: A Conversation With Mhairi Black, MPAs the Conservative government in the UK struggles, progressives like 28-year-old MP Mhairi Black are providing a stark contrast.
President Donald J. Trump, followed by many top advisers, walked from the White House to St. John’s Episcopal Church, where he staged an infamous photo op while holding a bible, June 1, 2020. Photo credit: Trump White House Archived / Flickr
Why They Did It: Bad Actors and Those Who Enable ThemOne-time GOP operative Tim Miller explains why so many Republicans, who knew better, got caught up in the Trump vortex. What is the weakness in human behavior that explains this?
The Societal Foundations of National Competitiveness by Michael Mazarr. Photo credit: Rand Corporation
The End of American CompetitivenessMichael Mazarr discusses a new RAND study that looks at how America is losing its ability to compete — and may never recover.
Wars end – and then what? Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from © Ssgt. Brandon Cribelar/U.S. Air/Planet Pix via ZUMA Press Wire, The White House / Wikimedia,Hohum / Wikimedia, and DoD / Wikimedia
How Wars EndLong-time Foreign Affairs editor Gideon Rose looks at how wars end and what it foreshadows what’s next in Ukraine.
“A republic if you can keep it?” Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from ken fager / Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Corruption Is America’s Operating SystemHistorian and journalist Sarah Chayes shows how and why corrupt political and business systems have become normalized, how they determine the shape of our government, and how they undermine democracy.
The popularity of podcasts is surging everywhere, mostly due to the special ability of voices to reach people more directly than the written word. And when those voices, through intimate and lively dialogue, convey vital facts and perspectives, we are informed, entertained, and enriched.
Of the 55 WhoWhatWhy podcasts released in 2022, we have selected 10 to head our “Best of” list this year. Each encapsulates a part of what we have experienced and felt during the somewhat daunting but always exhilarating past twelve months.
The first five have been listed here with the other five coming next Friday. To explore more podcasts, our podcast page is always available.
Can democracy survive in a hypermedia culture? Photo credit: Truthout.org / Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Democracy Is the Mother of All DictatorshipsProfessor Zach Gershberg explains that at the heart of democracy lies a contradiction: The more open the society, the more susceptible democracy is to demagogues, distraction, and spectacle.
Marriner S. Eccles Federal Reserve Board Building on Constitution Avenue, in Washington, DC. Photo credit: Federal Reserve / Wikimedia
The Fed’s Current Role in Undermining DemocracyFormer Treasury and Fed official Lev Menand examines how as the Fed takes on more responsibility for the economy, it exceeds its legal authority and furthers our economic divide.
“This melting pot is at boiling point” mural near Shoreditch, in London, UK. September, 2017. Photo credit: Padaguan / Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Democracy and Diversity Don’t MixJohns Hopkins professor and journalist Yascha Mounk looks at how diverse societies have long suffered from the problems of tribalism, domination, and fragmentation, and why diversity may be antithetical to democracy.
Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from PIRO4D / Pixabay and Kris Ward / Pixabay
Why the Internet Is Less Safe Than Flying or Driving or EatingPublic-interest technologist and lecturer at Harvard Kennedy’s School, Bruce Schneier gives the reasons you should lay awake at night worrying about cybersecurity, crypto, and “The Internet of Things.”
Sheldon Whitehouse giving a speech on “The Scheme” to corrupt the US Supreme Court by dark money groups. Photo credit: C-SPAN / YouTube
How the Supreme Court Played Capture the Flag: Conversation with Sen. WhitehouseA Conversation with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse about “The Scheme” by which the US Supreme Court played Capture the Flag.
We have come to the last podcast of 2022, and our annual roundup of the year’s 10 best. We could reprise our unique takes on economics, homelessness, war, politics, democracy, even crypto and AI — but all of those things will still be with us, only more so, next year.
Instead, I thought we might end this year by taking a look at the role and power of art today. Joining me is bestselling author and senior New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz, whose recent book, Art Is Life, looks at some of these issues.
Saltz talks about how contemporary art reflects our tumultuous times, what influences the direction of art today, and whether art can still be a force of resistance and cultural rebirth in a market dominated as never before by investors looking for the “next big thing.”
Saltz encourages artists to tell their own story through their art, as he highlights the significance of diversity in our current climate. Ultimately, he emphasizes the power of art to drive change and urges us to explore our own understanding of why art endures.
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Full Text Transcript:
(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. When freedom is threatened, when liberty is under siege, artists around the globe rise to the challenge by speaking truth to power. With their art and creative prowess, they remind us why freedom is paramount and inspire us to collectively fight to preserve what matters. By changing minds, attitudes, and perspectives, artists can, in fact, bring about real and much-needed change in the world.
In a new book entitled Art Is Life, senior New York magazine art critic and best-selling author Jerry Saltz looks into the role of art and artists today and reminds us why art endures long after. Things like politics and economics and cultural battles simply fade away. It is my pleasure to welcome Jerry Saltz here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast to talk about Art Is Life: Icons and Iconoclasts, Visionaries and Vigilantes, and Flashes of Hope in the Night. Jerry, thanks so much for joining us.
Jerry Saltz: Hi, Jeff. It’s great to be here.
Jeff: Talk a little bit about how important art is in the world today. It seems that we have lost some of the focus on how important art and artists are.
Jerry: Well, it’s a real fair question for me, Jeff. And it’s come to the fore even more with the climate protests of throwing soup and mashed potatoes and glue at paintings. I understand that it’s a very contested space, that we’re living in an inflection moment. But for me, Jeff, art is still oddly enough around the sacred. It’s been here as long as we’ve been here. It’s never not been here.
A species that existed before us, Neanderthals, for a million years and who had fire and the material culture and made hand axes out of stone, they painted them. So art may be this fragile, useless thing, but yet it’s a cosmic force that keeps appearing and never doesn’t appear. And, in fact, I think that art is one of the most advanced operating systems our species has ever devised to explore consciousness, the seen and the unseen world. And the world we live in, you’re asking about art today?
Jeff: Yes.
Jerry: We’re seeing it through so many filters. The world we live in is absolutely a contested area, where every single thing that’s happened virtually in the 21st century has forced whatever side of the political aisle you’re on. We live in a continuous state of PTSD where everyone is in shock at all times, so the art made in our century, Jeff, has been made under anything but normal conditions and that shows in the art we’ve seen now. And I can only tell your listeners to really pay attention because right now is one of the most extraordinary moments in art that has ever existed. And we can get into that and why and how art is changing finally now.
Jeff: Talk about how it’s changing, how it is being reflective of really different times that we live in today.
Jerry: Well, that’s really a fair question. Again, since none of the art made in the century that we’re in now has been made under normal circumstances from the contested election of 2020. 2000, Bush v. Gore and then the Bush-Cheney war machine and the feeling that the arc of history was finally maybe turning towards justice under Obama, and then the onset and the “we” onset of the long American night in 2016, something happened in that period.
On the one hand, you have more money rushing into the art world than has ever been here in the history of the world. But on the other hand, the gates of art history finally fell. We lived through the collapse of the etiology at least of modernism, of one movement logically following on another. And first of all, we saw more women, artists of color, disabled, underrepresented artists show than ever before in the history of art. That means, Jeff, that more than 51% of the story that had been left out was finally making it to the public eyes.
And that in just sheer fact and force and number has forced art to change and it is rejiggering our history in real-time. And people listening to this that are younger than I am are being tasked with the most thrilling task of all, which is to rewrite our history. I’m a former long-distance truck driver with no degree, who didn’t start writing until he was 40. And then the huge loser like anybody who’s listening to us right now, and yet even I am part of this incredible rewriting.
Jeff: Has all of this money that you’ve talked about that has come into the art world has had a positive or a negative influence? Has it shaped how we perceive it? Has it corrupted it or has it enhanced it?
Jerry: Well, I think the answer to all your great questions, and I see why you have a good show and I’m just a visitor, the answer to all your questions, Jeff, is yes. Yes, it has corrupted it. Yes, it has made more good things happen. Yes, it has made us cynical. Yes, it has allowed more artists to show. Here’s what I think. I think that, first of all, money has made us cynical.
There’s no question that 99% of our audiences now look at art as this elite, pointy-headed, obscenely, over-inflated, pricey field of exclusivity. When you just peel back the onion layer, you realize that only 1% of 1% of 1% of all artists make any money, yet 99% of our coverage goes to that 1%. So we only seem to see art when it’s too expensive, glitzy, idiotic, stupid, awful, sensationalistic.
So that’s really unfortunately made people get a false negative on what the art world is. It’s just like the news reporting only what other people in the news have already reported that other people like you have reported because you heard it on the news. These cycles actually are all self-replicating illusions. If you peel back the cynical layer, Jeff, you realize that art, 99% of artists don’t make any money, and also that– Well, the point being, actually, I want to say, I want all artists to make money.
The good, the bad, and the very bad, because, Jeff, now, we’re living in a time when we get to see what every crap all artists have to say and we’ll sort it out in time. And in a way, that’s a great thing because like I said before, it’s caused walls to finally come down. And art has to take this money even though it’s coming from people who are probably ideologically, diametrically opposed to the people making the art, but we all live in the time of paradox. There’s no doubt.
Jeff: And I guess the other part of it is that proverbial chicken-or-the-egg question. For so long, it seemed that the culture was shaped by art, that artists shaped the culture. Now, it seems that the culture is shaping the artists. Talk about that.
Jerry: Well, I think, really, a great observation. However, I think it may have always been this way. It was always thus. It’s just more than ever now. In other words, the art you were seeing in the Renaissance was being shaped by that time. That wealth, that form of government, those wars, those ideologies and aspirations. The same way we have that now. Art is a kind of self-replicating organism, I think.
It almost seems to use us to reproduce itself. It’s like Bob Dylan said, “It’s like a ghost is writing the song and the ghost chose me to make it.” However, whatever ghost is making it has already been shaped by the organism that we call “culture.” That is history. That’s your biography, your delusions, your fears. And because, Jeff, we live in such a contested, speeded-up moment, this book, Art Is Life, happens to track the art of the 21st century as more of that life God embedded in more of that art.
And if you look for it, you will find it. It is there and it doesn’t always have to be idiotically obvious and didactic and finger-pointing. In fact, going back to Dylan. In 1964 when he really started to find his art, he said, “I’m done with writing finger-pointing songs.” In a way, he got out of his own way and started making his own ever-changing art. And that’s what’s happening now and it’s really thrilling.
Jeff: There is certainly greater access to art it seems today and it’s become more democratized in some respects. Is that a good or a bad thing?
Jerry: Well, on the good side of the fence, because you can see, I’m a Pollyanna. Like I said, I’m such a late bloomer. I’m such a late bloomer and, like I said, uneducated, I taught myself everything like most people are self-taught, that I always try to look first on the optimistic side. So, again, greater access means we’re going to see more artists having a shot. Look, Instagram was a game-changer.
Instead of having pointy-headed art critics be the person that was always telling everybody else what to look at, everybody could look at each other. Now, you can hear just the way I yammer on that I don’t wear authority well. So if anybody wants to go to my Instagram and follow it, you’ll see that every day or so, I’ll post artists who are completely unknown. I don’t necessarily like them all, but I think that there’s something in their work that’s convincing.
And many of these artists who I’ve never met, I don’t know them, have gone on to become famous. Most have not. So that access is a good thing. The bad thing about it is it just lets in tons, boatloads of mediocrity. But what I would tell everybody that worries about all the mediocre, bad TV shows and movies and novels and music getting through in the name of this or that, what I would say to you is that if 85% of the art being shown or seen or heard or read is mediocre, the truth is 85% of the art made in the Renaissance was mediocre.
We just never see it that all of this, Jeff, will be washed out in time, that we will be able to sort it out, that we don’t have to get our shorts in a wad just because a mediocre Ecuadorian female artist is having her show. We’ve had 200 years of mediocre white male artists having shows. We will sort this out. So I come down resolutely on the democratization of art, which you so beautifully put it, is a good thing in the end because it takes the doors of apartheid. One more screw off that hinge.
Jeff: The difference, I suppose, is that time, that events, and that artists and awareness of artists move so much faster today. I mean, yes, there were lots of mediocre artists during the Renaissance, but it took years and years and years for the best to emerge necessarily and gain in reputation. Whereas today, events move so quickly that even artists come and go before anybody is aware of them.
Jerry: That’s really true. What I always tell artists is, “I want you to have a really sexy, high-powered, 30-month career where you become rich and famous and you can have sex with people and you can get into restaurants and you’re in lifestyle Instagram feeds. I’m not against that for any artist that says, “Should I show with this huge, mega gallery, Jerry?” I go, “You can if you want to.” There’s nothing wrong with it.
But what I say to them, Jeff, is that, “As much as I like the 30-month career, I want you to have a 30-year career. I want you to have a life lived in art where you witness your own work changing, going through, evolving, becoming what it will, having some tough times and some great times, and also having that life lived in art.” So I guess, again, I’m a terrible judge of this. I want everybody to take the field. “Let me see what you got. Bring it,” I say. And the main lesson I have for artists, work, work, work, work, work.
I don’t want to hear about how hard it is because it is hard. That’s the price of admission to everything we do. When Jeff woke up this morning, when I woke up this morning, we had demons living in our mouths that said, “I can’t do this anymore. How am I going to fake people out? I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m not sure if this is new. Am I too young? Am I too old? Do I have anything new to say? Are my ankles too fat?”
All of these things are at play, but I’m sorry. That’s part of the organism, that is you’re diluted but real genius. One other thing I have to tell you, make an enemy of envy today. If you’re only looking out at what other people are doing and how much money this one has and how much attention that one is getting and how beautiful that one’s husband is or whatever, really, you’re dying inside.
And that’s the easy way out to see what other people are doing. So if I could get out of a damn long-distance truck and teach myself to be a writer at the age of 40, having never written a word in my life, surely, you can make bad squiggles and squares and landscapes and still live for me. Is it that hard to just be a bad critic like me? If you build it, they might come. That’s all I can say. If you just get to work.
Jeff: What difference has it made even in the art world as we have seen in virtually every segment of society, greater diversity today?
Jerry: Well, that’s the game-changer because we’re seeing like artists of color are painting a dead genre called portraiture and figurative painting. We closed the door. We would say the author is dead, the novel is dead, painting is dead, figuration is dead. It’s like we’re a bunch of morticians, Jeff, in all these different fields. So if you’re an artist of color and you go, “Well, you may say figuration is dead, but I have figures that have never been painted before in the history of art, let alone seen.”
And these are narratives not of continuity but discontinuity, narratives of other cultures, biographies, histories, mythologies, dreams, aspirations, and trauma. The same things all art is made of and has embedded in it, Jeff. So the change that’s having is, like I said, you are finally seeing, even if you don’t like it, 51% of the story that had been completely left out for only the last 50,000 years. And I just want to tell listeners that it wasn’t always so, that 51% of the hand prints and caves, they’ve all been examined by computers and that 51% of those hands are women’s hands.
So once upon a time, it wasn’t an open and shut door to the art world, where women especially are artists of color or disabled or underrepresented or whatever. I’m an illegal Estonian immigrant, need not apply. So come on in. The weather’s insane here. It’s a beautiful, fantastic, dysfunctional family. The art world is an all-volunteer army. Anybody that wants to come here can come. If you get very quiet inside and listen to your own voice, you will tell yourself an incredible story. And that story is reflected in my book, Art Is Life, because that’s what’s happened.
Jeff: Because of the way the world has gotten smaller, has art been able to resist becoming overly homogenized?
Jerry: No, because art is also a virus. Other people make what other people have already made. I always say to artists, “There’s nothing wrong if you too want to paint stripes or squares, and do 10,000 of those and see if you can do it.” On the 10,000th one, that’s different where I’m not thinking of all the other stripe or square or figurative or landscape artists. If it’s been done before, I say do it again. But do it 10,000 times and then have your best friend go, “No, it still looks like Andy Warhol or something.”
The other thing I would say is, do you really want to be a lesser example of somebody else’s great idea? If you tell your own story, the artist Louise Bourgeois said, you will be interesting. All of us come here from some trauma that becomes our normal. All you have to do is tell your own story. Be radically vulnerable. Tell your secrets without giving them away. And I promise you, if you do this and do it in a somewhat teeny bit original way, they may come to you.
You don’t need a gigantic audience, Jeff. Sometimes an audience of very small numbers will bring you to the mountaintop. 15 people can sustain a career that becomes world famous if they have faith in you, but you above all must be deluded enough to make your own work through your own dark nights in the soul, which will come every night at 3:15 in the morning. That’s the price of admission to the house of heart.
Jeff: Is it harder to make those stories stand out today? In a world in which there is so much noise in which everybody is trying to tell their story on social media and in all the other noisy outlets, does it make it harder for the artist today?
Jerry: I actually think, Jeff, it makes it easier because we’re all listening not at the whole bandwidth because that would be impossible. In the same way, our bodies are not conscious of breathing and heart rate and temperature and balance and forming vision inside of the retina of the rods and cones. You are looking at a certain wavelength and you’ll see more of it in more color and more heretofore unseen colors than have ever been seen before.
And every bit of that becomes part of your organism. Something for the artist to use, to steal, to put, and embed in their own work. Just remember, pleasure is an important form of knowledge. If you like this sweater or color or painting or person, follow that. It’s telling you something. Honor your taste and your taste will help make you what you really are and let you fly and spread your wings. It isn’t that hard to make bad criticism or bad art. Just do it for me. Try it for a year or so. See what happens. It can’t hurt.
Jeff: To what extent do you think technology will have an impact on 21st-century art?
Jerry: Absolutely. Now, we have to remember that when oil paint was first invented, people had never seen it before and that was a new technology, or a pencil or lithography or printing or etching. When the camera was invented, everybody said, “Oh, it’ll never be art.” That’s happening around us at all times. Now, we’ve seen NFTs. Well, that’s a mainly male field right now, unfortunately, but someday there will be a Leonardo da Vinci of NFTs.
It’s simply a medium or a tool or a material. Artists use materials. They embed their thoughts in those materials. And a digital file. In other words, every photograph that every listener here has ever seen doesn’t exist. Digital files are only electrons moving inside of your phone and the photograph doesn’t exist. It only exists as a digital file. Therefore, I claim that a digital file is material and that you should use it, whether it’s an AI program or an NFT.
Forget the money. The money’s always ridiculous and the money will be gone someday. This is very temporary, that the art world is so flush. So if you find a tool, use it. Even if it’s cardboard, plaster, NFTs, AI, just make your work out of whatever is at hand. If you can’t afford it, you have to find a cheaper way to make it. Let’s see you make your work. That’s all I’m asking, people.
Jeff: Jerry Saltz. Art Is Life is his recent book. Jerry, I thank you so much for spending time with us today here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.
Jerry: You’re really great at what you do. It’s a huge honor. Thank you.
Jeff: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another radio WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
Citizenship used to be a cherished status, taken seriously by those who held it. But in today’s globalized world, it has become a commodity that can be bought and sold.
In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, journalist Atossa Abrahamian, senior editor of The Nation and author of the 2015 book The Cosmopolites, delves into the world of “global citizens.”
She explains how multiple passports are becoming more popular as a status symbol, and a plan B for those who want to live in several countries. Some nations are turning citizenship into a business, selling economic citizenship (tax havens) as a product, and offering citizenship to the wealthy, while making it more difficult for the poor to obtain it.
Abrahamian warns that this commodification of citizenship may weaken its value and lead to criminal dangers.
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Full Text Transcript:
(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. To be a citizen of a nation used to mean a special bond with that country. Whether it was your land of birth or perhaps your parents’ homeland, citizenship often carried with it an emotional, legal, sometimes physical, and almost moral bond. Today, a lot of that has changed. As the elites strive to become citizens of the world, as tax havens become more accepted even beyond the one-tenth of 1%, as dual passports become a status symbol in high-end airport lounges around the globe, and more recently, as nations try and find creative ways to deal with stateless refugees and immigrants, citizenship has become a commodity.
What this means for the value of the nation-state, its impact on nationalism, its trigger potential for the nostalgia of days gone by, and the credibility of nations that sell citizenships to the highest bidder are all issues that impact both geopolitics and local politics. We’re going to talk about this today with my guest, Atossa Abrahamian. She watched this transformation and wrote about it in her book Cosmopolites.
Atossa Abrahamian is a journalist based in New York and is a senior editor at The Nation. She’s worked as an opinion editor at Al Jazeera America and a general news and business reporter for Reuters. She grew up in Geneva and studied philosophy as an undergraduate at Columbia where she returned to the master’s program in investigative reporting. And she’s the author of the 2015 award-winning book Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen.
It is my pleasure to welcome Atossa Abrahamian here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. Atossa, thanks so much for joining us.
Atossa Abrahamian: Hi, Jeff. The pleasure is all mine.
Jeff: Well, it is a delight to have you here. As all of this has changed with respect to citizenship, the selling of citizenship, which we’ll talk about, and the sense of the elites in particular wanting to be citizens of the world, it really has changed it seems fundamentally what it means to be a citizen of anywhere. Talk a little bit about that first.
Atossa: Yes, so whether it’s actually changed something or revealed the contradictions that have always been there, and that’s an open question, but as you pointed out in your introduction, that people used to feel quite attached to their nations. Again, whether this is mythology or something real, that’s up for debate, right, but if you surveyed the average European citizen or Indian citizen or Japanese citizen 50 years ago, you might have a pretty different answer as to whether they felt deeply bound to their homeland.
Now, people want to move more. People feel different types of allegiances. Because of people moving, they might have more than one passport and so I think that that’s a pretty expected byproduct of globalization and it’s one that we’re still trying to wrap our heads around.
Jeff: Dual passports, for example, have become almost a kind of status symbol.
Atossa: Yes, for sure. Having two citizenships can be really useful if you’re a person who travels a lot or has business around the world because it just opens up so many more doors to you. It means you can travel more freely in certain parts of the world. It means you can register a company. It means in some cases that you can have certain access to certain types of bank accounts or privileges. And yes, so if you’re just that person, it’s a status symbol and it’s almost like many people come by their second citizenships “honestly” but many people seek them out just as a plan B.
Jeff: Talk a little bit about what you discovered in researching Cosmopolites where nations now are using this as a commodity that they can sell in various ways.
Atossa: Countries realized that there was a demand for people obtaining a second citizenship in different ways. In some cases, like in Canada’s case, there’s been a long tradition of birth tourism, people going to Canada to have babies so that they would have Canadian citizenship by birthright. I happen, in full disclosure, I’m one of these babies, so that was one way of doing it. But then, as this practice became more and more known and established among certain circles in the Middle East or in China or Russia, some consultants came along and said, “Well, what if we just turn this into a business?
“Why don’t we find a way so that pregnant women don’t have to fly around the world when they’re seven months pregnant to have babies and just let these rich people buy passports instead?” and so that’s what happened. You had this small group of consultants approaching countries that had already made quite a good business selling access to other laws like tax laws, I’m thinking in this case about Saint Kitts and Nevis, pitching them on creating investor citizenship or economic citizenship and helping to market it around the world, and let me tell you, it was a hit.
Jeff: And then, of course, countries found out that they could do this in bulk. Talk about that.
Atossa: Yes. That’s a little bit more unusual. And that, to my knowledge, it’s only happened once. But in addition to there being these stateless rich people who are [unintelligible 00:05:44] and they don’t really have a home, and they have all these passports, and business ties and what have you, there are people in the world who don’t have any citizenship at all. That’s usually because they’re being deprived of this right by the country they live in. And in the United Arab Emirates, in particular, there’s a large number of stateless people on the order of 40,000, the bill and movement, there’s about 10,000 tandem.
It’s not great for a country to have stateless people either because they can’t keep tabs on people who don’t have documentation. At the same time in the Emirates, if you’re an Emirati citizen, you’ve got it made. You get– there’s a very generous welfare, they help you buy a house, they help you get married. There’s just a lot of financial welfare for Emiratis so there’s a reason that they don’t want to just give their passport away to just anybody and they don’t like the stateless people for political reasons.
Instead of documenting them with Emirati papers, the Abu Dhabi authorities struck a deal with the Island of the Comoros, this is a sovereign nation in the Indian Ocean, island nation, and the Comoros provided some 40,000, 50,000 citizenships to people who had none in the Emirates.
Jeff: And these were people that never had been to the Island of Comoros and probably never will be.
Atossa: Oh, yes, I mean, if they’d even heard of it in the first place. I consider myself someone who knows the map and I didn’t know what the Comoros Islands were a country before I embarked on this project. It’s not a place that is on most people’s radar and that’s actually why this plan worked because when it’s a small country, it’s pretty remote, not a ton of media go there so not a lot of people found out about it and they were able to pull off this plan without too many people complaining about it.
Jeff: Have other nations considered this or thought about taking advantage of it, either in a place like Comoros or a similar place?
Atossa: Kuwait was kicking around this idea with the Comoros as well and there were some negotiations that didn’t pan out. Kuwait also has quite a sizable stateless population. The only analogous scenario I can think of, which, it’s a little bit different but it’s operating on the same principle is when countries try to send asylum seekers who arrive at their borders to another country.
The UK was talking about sending asylum seekers who were coming to the UK to Rwanda just a couple of months ago. To my knowledge, no asylum seekers have been sent to Rwanda but this offshoring of populations that are unwanted, for whatever reason, that is definitely a trend and I imagine that this will continue gathering steam as time passes.
Jeff: What impact has this had that you’ve seen in terms of the waves and rise of nationalism that we see around the world, this sense that people are more or less connected to countries and those that long for days gone by become more nationalistic?
Atossa: I don’t think that there is necessarily a correlation between the people who object to these practices and the degree of their nationalism. In other words, nationalist politicians are just as complicit in selling passports as “globalist politicians” or liberal politicians, or what have you. This is a pretty hardcore neoliberal type of project. As we just have to look at the various nationalists who have been elected, they have no problem with these types of economic policies. I think that there’s quite a bit of hypocrisy going on. The broader question of whether the commoditization of citizenship and turning it into a product like a pair of sneakers, whether this weakens perceived value of the nation, sure, but you also have to- -remember that people are buying into nations by buying passports. So, they’re not dismantling the entire concept. They’re just revealing that everything has a prize, even a nation.
Jeff: In the years since you first started looking at this, have you seen an increase in the commodification of passports around the world?
Atossa: Oh, for sure. When I started reporting on this, it was 2011, 2012, just a small handful of countries were selling passports. Since then, it’s really exploded. Every month, you hear about a new country that’s looking into it. Armenia, I think is considering it. There’s always Caribbean countries that are kicking this around. So it’s become a pretty standard economic development tactic. Countries that don’t have a lot of money really have to be creative and resourceful, and this is a resource they have that– and when you think about it, it doesn’t pollute the environment, it doesn’t cost them anything, it can create some PR problems and you definitely want to make sure that criminals don’t get in.
Cyprus had some problems when it became apparent that they’d provided a Cypriot, a citizenship, which is also EU citizenship to some pretty notorious criminals out in Malaysia but the cost of this, besides the reputational cost is quite low for countries. And so it makes sense that this is what they resort to once they realize they’re in a bad economic situation, or just when they want to attract rich people and make a little extra cash.
Jeff: We’ve seen it in western countries, even where it goes along with buying citizenship comes along with buying property.
Atossa: Yes, you could get a citizenship or a residence permit. So in Malta, you could get a citizenship. Part of the package was you buy or rent an apartment or a house. Portugal was doing something similar, not with citizenship, but with essentially the Portuguese green card, a permanent residence. It’s hard to find a country that doesn’t offer permanent residents for money. The US has a program called the EB-5 program that essentially sells green cards. Canada has a version of this. It depends on the province. Most European countries have a version of this.
Look, countries just really like rich people, I guess and they want to make it as easy for rich people to come live there as possible while making it as difficult as possible for poor people.
Jeff: What, if anything, has been the pushback to this? Are there any nations, western nations, any place that has pushed back to this idea, perhaps even under the guise of it bringing in criminal elements?
Atossa: Yes, so the European Union, it’s not a nation, but it’s a group of nations, the EU is not a fan of this. They think that it undermines the European Union’s unity. They think that it can lead to crime. And so the EU has taken issue with some of its member states’ decision to sell citizenship, namely Malta and Cyprus to a point, and it’s actually starting to adjudicate this. We’ll see what happens. My hunch is they’re not going to be successful because after all, it is a country’s sovereign rights to decide who belongs to it. It’s really hard to tell a country you have to make this person a citizen when they’re dealing with stateless people so it’s also hard to say you’re not allowed to make this person a citizen if they’re dealing with someone they want.
So that kind of pushback’s been there. There are countries that probably would never do this because it’s not really what they’re– I don’t see France ever selling their citizenship outright because of the way that they perceive themselves. Pushback also comes from certain political groups and interest groups and whatnot, but I don’t know that there’s any particular country that’s leading the way in advocating against this.
Jeff: Has it made it easier at all for criminal elements to travel around the world? Has there been evidence from groups like Interpol or international organizations to say that this has become a problem in that respect?
Atossa: So for travel, I’m not sure, because if somebody’s on an Interpol list, they’re on the list whether they’re from Greece or Malaysia or China, or– Their photo’s there. And so unless they’re wearing a funny hat and a fake mustache and crossing the border like that, I think that would be the limiting factor. There’s biometric information floating around. So I think Interpol probably has ways of preventing people from traveling on second or third passports. Having another citizenship can make it easier for criminals, say, to open bank accounts in other countries or to go under the radar in other capacities, maybe not as physical people, but as business people or for tax purposes or what have you.
So, yes, for sure and you can just look at– There are lots of known instances of wanted alleged criminals obtaining second citizenship so it’s definitely a part of the business. I don’t know that it’s the motivating primary part of the business. Criminals aren’t always the most reliable clientele because they do tend to get caught and thrown in jail, but they’re there for sure.
Jeff: Talk about the cost of this, for the elites, for example, seeking these passports. What does it cost? What does that framework look like?
Atossa: If you’re going through official channels, you’re looking at a few hundred thousand dollars to start going up to over a million. Some of the Caribbean countries were on the lower end of that. The European countries, of course, are on the higher end of that. And then if you go through back channels, a few years ago, someone in Comoros told me for a few thousand dollars, you can get a Comoros passport but that wasn’t strictly above board.
Jeff: Talk about who’s making the money from this. Is it the countries? Is it groups within the countries?
Atossa: Yes, so countries, when they set up these “official programs”, there’s typically a fund where the money goes and the fund is supposed to benefit that nation. So let’s say that happens, they get that money. If you’re selling real estate– There’s a whole economy around this. So if real estate is part of the transaction, there’s the real estate brokers, there’s the sellers, there’s the lawyers, there’s that whole bit of cottage industry.
Then there’s the consultants or lawyers that actually process the immigration side of things both in the country and for the client. And I referred to them earlier, these consultants who really have set up the industry, and they’re taking fees, several thousand, maybe tens of thousands of dollars depending on the clients and they’re just taking that cut as part of the fee. Beyond that, there have been reports of bribery, of crooked politicians, of bureaucrats that are making a little on the side. So there’s also the informal side of things where maybe a little corruption comes into play.
Jeff: Are there more and more Americans that are participating in this?
Atossa: Yes, yes. I recently saw an article that American interest in second or third citizenship has surged, a combination of things. A few months ago things in the US– There was a lot of gun violence so I think anecdotally, that contributed to people trying to move, or at least have a plan B. These were people who were worried about their kids. And again, this is anecdotal. I did a little reporting around it and it really shook people up. Taxes are a perennial issue for Americans who don’t like taxes, politics and finally COVID.
I think when COVID hit and also countries had closed their borders, Americans who are used to being able to go wherever the heck they went, because they have a very good passport for travel, saw themselves shut out of everywhere in the world and not everyone was happy with that. And so to prevent this from happening in the future, I think there was a surge of interest in second citizenship as an insurance policy. If there’s another pandemic and you want to leave the US, at least you’ll have another place that is legally obligated to take you in as a citizen.
Jeff: And what is the gold standard in these passports? If you want to be able to travel anywhere, stay as long as you want, what’s the gold standard these days?
Atossa: I think any European passport, any EU passport is really good. Canada has a good passport. The US, all things considered, still pretty good. Every year, these consultants who work on this published lists, and yes, the top five always fluctuate, but any western or wealthy Asian country is a pretty good bet.
Jeff: And obviously, this is a business that’s going to continue to grow.
Atossa: Yes. Unless something crazy happens. We’ll see what the EU pulls off with their protests against this business. And we’ll also see where- -the politics of individual nations go but I don’t expect this business to stop thriving anytime soon.
Jeff: And finally, what are nations that you think that may not be actively in this business now but maybe in a few years will be?
Atossa: Well, again, we’ll see what happens in Europe but I imagine there are a handful of countries in Europe who would like to make a little extra money in this way if it meant not getting into trouble with the EU. Let’s see, the usual suspects are small countries, island nations, countries that were once colonized by another power and tax havens. Any countries that fit those descriptions I think would be likely sellers.
Jeff: Atossa Abrahamian, I thank you so much for spending time with us today here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.
Atossa: My pleasure, Jeff. Take care.
Jeff: You too. Thank you.
Atossa: Bye-bye.
Jeff: And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you’ll join us next week for another radio WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I’m your host Jeff Schechtman. The military war between Russia and Ukraine has the world’s attention for now. Yet, looking beyond the war, whatever the outcome, this conflict is also playing out and reshaping the geopolitical world order. Contrary to the view of some after the Cold War, the age of great-power politics is not over.
New players may be at the chessboard, but the game is the same, as Russia, China, Europe, and other aggressive and developing nations jockey for position. Putin has essentially knocked over the global chessboard and most assuredly, the pieces will not be put back in exactly the same way. And most notably, China’s position on the board may be the most significant.
Here to talk about this, I am honored to be joined by Timothy Heath. He’s a senior international defense researcher at the RAND Corporation, focusing on matters of China. Prior to joining RAND, he served as the senior China analyst for the US Pacific Command’s China Strategic Focus Group. He served as an analyst for the Office of Naval Intelligence and served in the US Army, doing a tour of duty in Bosnia.
He has over 20 years of experience researching and analyzing military and political topics related to China. He has published extensively, is fluent in Mandarin, and has degrees from George Mason University and George Washington University. It is my pleasure to welcome Dr. Timothy Heath here to the WhoWhatWhy Podcast. Tim, thanks so much for joining us.
Timothy: My pleasure. Glad to be here.
Jeff: It’s great to have you here. Are we underreporting, underestimating, under-focusing on China’s role in this global strategic battle that is playing out right now?
Timothy: I think prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, China certainly was in the headlines and the top focus of the US government. The invasion has just been such a shock that China has receded for the moment from the headlines. But rest assured, as your introduction well put it, China is very much a key player in how this crisis plays out.
Jeff: What is your sense of how China, and Xi specifically, are viewing the events taking place right now?
Timothy: I think there is some measure of, frankly, surprise or shock. I think a lot of the Chinese leaders really were skeptical that Putin would actually carry out the invasion. There are numerous signs that the Chinese were caught off guard a bit and they’re still responding to that. I think there’s several potential outcomes that could be beneficial for China’s interest, namely, a weakening of Russia. This war will almost certainly weaken and accelerate Russia’s decline and Russia’s animosity towards the US and West will deepen.
Both those trends will actually help China in the sense that Russia will become even more dependent on China and unlikely to ever abandon China to join the West in some sort of containment strategy. So that’s one upside. Now there are major downsides to this war for China — namely, the disorder that’s being wrought; the impact on global trade and investment severely hampers China. And Beijing is finding itself put in a very uncomfortable position between Russia, its most trusted partner, and the West, which China needs far more for its own economic growth.
Jeff: Is Russia really China’s most trusted partner? You get the sense certainly when you saw Putin and Xi and together as the Olympics opened back on February 4th, that this was at best a marriage of convenience. Talk about that.
Timothy: I think that is a common notion in the West. I think it really undersells the closeness of the partnership. Part of the reason why China and Russia are close is they have no other option. There are no other great powers who are attractive as partners. So merely at the very least out of the lack of options, these two countries realized they need each other, especially in their most important foreign policy objectives, which have to do with their immediate surroundings and dealing with the American power. So the relationship, I think there is more to it than a marriage of convenience.
With that said, I do agree there are some major differences between the two and limits to how far each side will go to bat for the other, and we’re seeing that play out right now. China has been reluctant to criticize President Putin but at the same time, they’re not giving a full-throated endorsement either of his invasion.
Jeff: What do you make of these comments that have come from China in the past day or so about maximum restraint and encouraging some kind of talks to take place?
Timothy: Yes, I think this is reflective of the difficult position China finds itself in. On the one hand, it does want to show solidarity and support to Russia who, as I said, China regards as probably one of its most useful partners. On the other hand, China does not benefit from a continuation of this war. Ukraine becomes more and more bitter, angry, and resentful towards China and China used to have a good history of relations with Ukraine that’s increasingly being put in jeopardy. But more importantly, China’s relationship with the West is getting hammered as this war continues, because Washington and the European Union are seeing that China ultimately is siding with Russia in a terrible war.
And this is going to hurt China’s relationship with the West going forward, and China cannot afford a serious disruption in its relationship with the West because it needs Western markets, technology, and cooperation actually far more in many ways than it needs Russia.
Jeff: One of the things that this war has done is it has solidified the West. It has certainly brought Europe and NATO and the US much closer together. To what extent is that a threat or something that China’s not happy to see?
Timothy: Absolutely, this is definitely a development that China does not want to see. China benefits most if the US and European countries are at odds with each other, divided, feuding, and unable to come to a common cause to deal with countries like China and Russia. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has definitely done the opposite. It has solidified Western ties, it has renewed a sense of common purpose, and increased military cooperation with all parties.
And China can only view this as disturbing and worrisome. So I think, going forward, it’s another reason for China to hope and perhaps encourage Russia to reconsider continuing this war for the long term.
Jeff: Talk a little about the lens through which China views the world. So much has been written lately about Putin and how he sees the world and the restoration of the Russian Empire. With China, it seems that economics is the driving force. Is that true and, if not, what is?
Timothy: I think the lens through which the Chinese view the world is the one of Chinese civilization and this grand ambition of placing China in the center of world affairs. There is a much more strategic and long-term vision coming from the Chinese leadership compared to Russia, which appears more tactical and obsessed with recent resentments in neighboring countries. And the Chinese vision is that of a revitalized China, a powerful China, a China that is economically powerful but also geopolitically powerful, and the two go together.
The Belt and Road Initiative is a vision of an interconnected Russia, Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, of course, Latin America connected through trade, investment, and infrastructure, all led by China and Chinese companies. And that’s the kind of vision that the Chinese are pursuing and the way they view the world. The war between Russia and Ukraine is very disruptive to that vision. It threatens it in some way due to the economic cost and the conflict that’s being generated and the antagonisms.
And that shows that there is quite a difference between the vision in Beijing about how the world should evolve and the vision in Moscow, which is much more tactically focused and obsessed with recent slights and humiliations from the past.
Jeff: Given the weakened economic condition that Russia’s going to come out of this with, no matter how it plays out, there is a sense that Russia will become but another notch in China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
Timothy: I think the Chinese would definitely hope that Russia will find itself more and more dependent and forced to defer to Beijing on some of its foreign policy decisions so that the Chinese are not surprised so drastically in the future. However, I think there are limits to how much influence China can exercise over Russia, even in a state of Russian economic decline. Think of the case of North Korea, which is almost totally dependent on China, and yet Beijing has found it has very little influence in telling Pyongyang what to do.
Similarly, Russia, given its historic pride and lingering suspicion about China, I think Beijing will find, despite its hopes that it can exert more and more influence over Russian foreign policy, there will be hard limits to how much Moscow will be willing to defer.
Jeff: Do you sense that there is a route to ending this current conflict that runs through Beijing?
Timothy: It’s hard to say. Putin clearly has his own agenda. He seems to have a very high pain threshold. I think China may have some role, but it’s limited because China will hesitate to put too much pressure on Moscow. China doesn’t want to be seen by Putin as a tool of the West. It wants to be seen as an independent actor and as at least friendly to Russia. But the way this war ends is if Putin ultimately feels sufficient pain from Western countries who have the most cards to play in terms of inflicting economic damage and even military damage.
Jeff: Lots has been said about Putin’s 2014 speech at the Munich Security Conference talking about the end of a unipolar world. He was talking about Russia being part of that world, but in fact, it’s really China that plays that role today.
Timothy: I agree. Russia is a declining power. Its economy is now smaller than Italy’s and shrinking. This war will only accelerate that decline. China is the most plausible competitor to the United States, which is why the US government has identified China as the most significant long-term challenge. And I think that’s going to be true going forward no matter President Putin’s delusions. The reality is China is just a much more formidable power than Russia can hope to be.
Jeff: Thinking strategically about this, if you were sitting in the White House, how does the US, or how might the US or West, benefit in terms of its relationship with China as a result of this current geopolitical imbalance?
Timothy: I think keeping the pressure on China helps the US because China is in a lose-lose situation. On the one hand, if it decides to start gravitating towards Russia’s position, it’s going to alienate a lot of countries around the world who are going to be shocked and horrified to see Beijing as a supporter and endorser of territorial aggression. It’ll raise worries throughout Asia about potential Chinese aggression against Taiwan, and it’s going to lose China a huge amount of influence.
But, on the other hand, if China decides to abandon Russia and gravitates towards the West, then it loses Russia. China becomes even more isolated because it will never have a very close relationship with the West due to its own suspicions and ambitions. And then that leaves China geopolitically weaker than before this crisis started. So I think, in many ways, this war has helped the US keep the pressure on China and put China in a difficult and awkward position that leaves Xi Jinping squirming.
Jeff: What has this done in terms of perhaps reframing any potential Chinese aggression towards Taiwan?
Timothy: Certainly, that’s been in the headlines a lot. I think in some ways we tend in the West to underestimate how difficult a Taiwan invasion is militarily. It’s very different from crossing a land border where you can just send units across the land border and start immediately taking on cities. Crossing a body of water against a well-armed opponent is still hugely risky for any country, let alone an untested military like the PLA.
Remember, China hasn’t fought a war in 40 years, unlike Russia, which has had numerous engagements. So it’s very high-risk for China. Moreover, keep in mind the Chinese vision, which is they want to be a respected power, a new leader of the global economy, and therefore rushing to an invasion of Taiwan doesn’t really help them strategically achieve their long-term goals.
So I think, in general, there’s still a lot of incentive for China to hold off on an invasion of Taiwan, [as there] was before the Russian attack. The events in Russia and Ukraine have shown that there is a huge risk of miscalculation and military disaster if you’re not well-prepared, as the Russians clearly were not. And I think that should add even more caution in Beijing about rushing to any reckless attack against Taiwan.
Jeff: Has the fact that so much of the corporate world, that huge companies have pulled out of Russia and have responded to this crisis in a way that might not have been anticipated — has that made a mark in terms of China’s thinking?
Timothy: Certainly, I think it reiterates to China that the global economy is an integrated one and that no country can act independently of another. That’s something the Chinese government has said itself. Now, China is a little more insulated from the West due to the fact it has a stronger economy, a huge economy with a lot of its own major corporations that can replicate some of the services and functions that Western companies do.
But the Chinese are deeply integrated in the Western economies. They are major trade partners and investors in Western economies, and they cannot afford massive disruption any more than the Russians can. So I think China’s observing of the economic cost being imposed on Russia as a result of this aggression should hopefully continue to add another source of restraint on Chinese thinking about Taiwan.
Jeff: China and Ukraine had been significant trading partners. Ukraine relied heavily on China as a trading partner. Talk a little bit about that and where that goes after all of this.
Timothy: So China and Ukraine through the 2000s actually had a very good relationship. In fact, at one point, Ukraine was furnishing some very important military articles to China, including China’s first aircraft carrier, the Varyag.They also provided jet engines and other important military technologies.
Now, that started to change around 2014, when Russia started to “essentially seize Crimea.” And China was forced to make a decision about which partner it valued more. China chose Russia as the more useful partner. That severely strained China-Ukraine relations, but nevertheless, they remain trade partners. Very important trade partners. And in recent years, China has become Ukraine’s number one trade partner.
Obviously, for China, Ukraine plays a much smaller role in total volume of trade, but China-Ukraine had friendly relations. Ukraine signed into The Belt and Road Initiative and was looking to cultivate those relationships. That relationship has now taken a severe hit due to China siding with Russia in the crisis. I think the Chinese are hoping to salvage the relationship, which is one reason why you have the Chinese leadership calling for an end to the war and peace talks as soon as possible.
The longer this goes on, the more damage to China’s relationship with Ukraine — which Beijing, ultimately, is not very enthusiastic about.
Jeff: Is that relationship repairable do you think?
Timothy: I think it is, merely out of pure pragmatism. Ukraine, they need the trade with China. They may not militarily ever repair the relationship. I think that relationship is gone, but China doesn’t really need Ukraine technology anymore. It relies more on Russia. And then politically, Ukraine has clearly thrown its lobbying with the West. So I don’t think China and Ukraine can ever be close political or diplomatic parties, but they can repair their trade relationship.
Remember China’s trade relationship with the US and Europe is very strong and they’re not especially on friendly terms today.
Jeff: Does any of this shift anything in China’s relationship with Europe? We’ve been talking about it vis-à-vis the US. Does it change any of its relationships in Europe?
Timothy: I think it does. I think we’ll see coming out of this crisis, European countries will very likely gravitate even more towards the US in terms of positions on Chinese technology like Huawei and 5G and espionage and human rights, and all the other issues that the US has pointed out as problematic and that Europe has taken a much more ambivalent and unsure stance on.
Now that the Chinese have shown that they are supporters of Russia and partners of Russia, I think the lingering antagonism between Europe and Russia will definitely color European views of China and very likely result in a, you could say, added friction in the Europe-China relationship.
Jeff: If Russia loses this war or it turns out bad for Russia, how does China walk back that relationship with Europe or improve it in any way? Or does it care?
Timothy: It does care. If Russia loses it in the sense that it takes such heavy losses, it calls for peace and quits, essentially gives up and falls back to Russia, it will leave Russia severely weakened and dependent on China I think. I think either way, if Russia wins or loses, China’s relationship with Europe is going to be permanently changed. Europeans will see Russia as a very dangerous threat. They will see China’s support for Russia as hinting at potential Chinese aggression down the road and, therefore, also a threat. And I think it’s going to add to the diplomatic strength.
It may even cause some European countries to rethink their involvement in BRI — Chinese-led BRI, the Belt and Road Initiative project — and perhaps limit their involvement to a degree that previously they would not have considered.
Jeff: Does this give China an opportunity to exploit Russia in some way? Certainly, Russia has lots of natural resources in addition to oil and gas. Does this give China a competitive advantage in accessing any of those resources?
Timothy: Oh, absolutely. The Chinese have shown in the past that they are not above exploiting Russian difficulties to extract the most favorable terms of trade. This is happening now as well, and will probably continue to happen. As Russia loses some of its access to Western markets for its energy, the Chinese will be ready to pick that up. They, of course, are insatiable in their import demands for energy. Russia is a very convenient, nearby source, and the Chinese will be eager to exploit Russia’s lack of options to drive a hard bargain and get the best terms possible for accessing that energy.
Jeff: How should Taiwan be viewing this right now?
Timothy: I think Taiwan, in some ways, should be nervous about the Chinese apparent lack of criticism of Russian aggression and potential sympathy for Russian aggression as a sign that China isn’t totally averse to the idea of attacking a neighbor. But on the other hand, Taiwan should be encouraged by the fact that Western countries have come together to oppose aggression against another neighbor by Russia. And that might suggest down the road, if China attempted aggression against Taiwan, there may be more international support for Taiwan than may have been the case before this war broke out.
Jeff: As this has all played out in the past couple of weeks, as somebody that really understands and has been looking for a long time at all these geopolitical aspects, what has surprised you the most?
Timothy: I think two things surprised me. First off, the fact that Russia went ahead with the invasion surprised me. It seemed that most analysts, many analysts assumed that the era of war in Europe involving a major power like Russia was gone for the foreseeable future, but that has proven incorrect. That shows that a lot of our assumptions about war I think need to be reconsidered. And we need to be more aware of the possibility that the world’s politics is moving in uncharted territory, at least compared to the previous two, three decades.
The other thing that has surprised me is just how much the West has shown ability and willingness to come together and has shown just an amazing strength and grip on the global economy and world politics. It shows that, for all its growth and all its impressive increase and comprehensive national power, China is still a junior player in world politics. The US and Europe still have a very powerful role to play in shaping the global order and shaping global politics.
Jeff: How much has leadership been a part of that? Whether it’s the leadership in Ukraine, which has pulled all these forces together by virtue of its charismatic nature, or that of anybody in the Western alliance?
Timothy: I think we cannot discount the fact that the leaders in each of these countries are playing an important role in shaping the policies. The Ukraine president, obviously, has gained quite a bit of fame for his strength of leadership and rallying his country. Putin’s leadership role has to be considered here as a man prone to delusions and self-deception. He clearly made numerous miscalculations about this situation. And then, we don’t have to go through the whole list of leaders, but certainly Western countries have shown prudence and calibration in how they respond to this.
They’re careful not to overextend themselves and start a war with Russia, but they’re certainly helping fuel Ukrainian resistance. And then the Chinese, I think in general, have shown a pragmatic nature regardless of the leader, at least for the past two or three decades. Xi Jinping is very much in character, in showing this kind of nuanced and ambiguous position that gives China maximum flexibility and tries to expand their room to maneuver without sacrificing some of their top partnerships.
Jeff: It certainly does seem that China walks this very delicate tightrope through all of this.
Timothy: I agree. As I said, I think they’re in a very difficult and awkward position. I don’t think they’re comfortable there. They are trying to minimize the damage to all their interests. They have a lot of conflicting interests going on right now. They want good relations with the US. They need that for economics. And they want good relations with Ukraine as an important European partner.
But that conflicts with what they want from Russia, which is a stable, close partnership. And so, this war is adding tension to all that, and the Chinese are scrambling, trying to balance all that and maintain a nuanced, flexible position that minimizes damage to all their interests.
Jeff: Does India play any role in this? Should we think about India’s position in this? They’ve also been trying to walk a fine line, it seems.
Timothy: Yes, they have. They are historically a close friend of Russia. They have a long history of close ties with Russia. And so, for their own reasons, they don’t want to sacrifice their relationship with Russia. They have their own issues with China so they have a very different logic from the Chinese. Indians fear the Chinese and are looking for partners to deal with China. Russia is right there in the backyard. And their long historic relationship with Russia makes Russia an attractive partner to India, even as India is warming its relationship with the US and Western countries.
So I think, with China in mind, India is trying to walk a tightrope, keep its relationship with Russia healthy enough that, coming out of this crisis, Russia might be a useful partner to deal in part with China and a lot of the countries along India’s border, like Pakistan and in Central Asia. So, yes, India is an important country to think about when this crisis is ongoing.
Jeff: And finally, certainly, we are in a whole new era of great-power politics. The thought that we had reached the end of history is certainly not true.
Timothy: You’re absolutely right. And this war shows that the great game between these competing powers is very unpredictable. And we need to think harder and be more humble about how we think it’s going to evolve. So what’s the next step? It’s hard to say right now, but certainly, we need to keep our eyes and ears open.
Jeff: Dr. Timothy Heath, I thank you so very much for spending time with us today here on the WhoWhatWhy Podcast.
Timothy: My pleasure. I really enjoyed this.
Jeff: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another radio WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
According to our guest on this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, author Shay Khatiri, Russia’s attack on Ukraine is not unlike the fall of Afghanistan. It was obvious what was going to happen. We refused to think it would happen, and then we were shocked when it did.
Khatiri is an author and a national security expert with a Masters Degree in strategic studies from the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International studies at Johns Hopkins University.
According to Khatiri, the current situation in Ukraine should not be surprising. Russian president Vladimir Putin has repeatedly told the world of his goal to restore the Russian empire (different from the Soviet Union). His actions in Moldova, Estonia, Georgia, and Donbas, as well as his behavior at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, and possible involvement in the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines flight 17, are all cases where Putin’s aggression has been met by… nothing.
Khatiri talks of how the postwar European architecture was designed to keep Russia out of Europe while at the same time catering to the pacifist DNA inside Europe. “Those days may be over for good,” he says.
Russia seems to be moving on Europe, and Europe has gotten a wake-up call that it needs to be better armed. And the US has been reminded that it has to walk and chew gum at the same time — that it must redouble its commitment to Europe, even while it pivots toward Asia.
Khatiri discusses the various worst-case scenarios that may lie ahead, including Putin’s possible use of battlefield nuclear weapons. And if Putin succeeds in Ukraine, the Baltic states could be his next target. If so, we would have no choice — by virtue of our commitment to NATO — but to defend these states, even if it means a direct, on-the-ground confrontation with Russia.
Considering the long-term consequences that might come from the bleeding out of both his economy and his military, is Putin “coup proof”?
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Full Text Transcript:
(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. It was Lenin who said that there are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen. The past seven days may very well be one of those weeks. Beyond the events happening hour by hour on the ground, some would argue that the world has truly changed, that the global strategic order that has shaped the world since World War II will never be the same.
On Wall Street, for sure, and in politics usually, the four scariest and often most misguided words are “This time, it’s different.” Reaching beyond the day-to-day conduct on the ground, we’re going to pull back 30,000 feet and look at the broad global strategic issues surrounding current events. We’re going to do this with a guest who has been with us before, Shay Khatiri.
Shay Khatiri is a policy associate at the Renew Democracy Initiative. He was a scholar at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He was born in Iran and writes the Substack newsletter “The Russia-Iran File.” He’s a regular contributor to The Bulwark, and his writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The American Interest, National Review, The Jerusalem Post, and numerous other publications. It is my pleasure to welcome Shay Khatiri back to the WhoWhatWhy Podcast. Shay, thanks so much for joining us.
Shay Khatiri: Yes, thanks for having me.
Jeff: Well, it’s a delight to have you here, even under these circumstances. Tell me first a little bit about what you’ve been thinking about over the past several days as you’ve watched these events unfold.
Shay: I was talking to a friend and we were talking about how much this looks like the fall of Afghanistan in a very strange sense, how it was quite predictable but we just didn’t want to believe that it would happen. And now that it has happened, we’re in shock that it has happened.
In a weird way, anger about our own mistakes that brought us here, pride in how we have been responding, but even more than that — I wouldn’t say, “Pride” because I have nothing to do with it — just amazed by the extraordinary courage that the Ukrainians have been showing, and sorrow for everything that’s going on. But also, I just want to make a point about President Zelenskyy, who really is the man of the hour and already has been — whatever the fate of Ukraine and his own fate. And we all wish that it’s a positive outcome. He deserves to be the man of the year.
Jeff: From a strategic perspective, there’s a lot of talk, as I mentioned in the introduction, that this will change the global landscape, that this will impact Europe for decades to come, that it will have a major strategic rebalancing in Europe from the whole post-World War II structure that has been in place. Is that what you’re seeing here?
Shay: The architecture of European structure has always been keeping Russia out of Europe and allowing Europe to resolve this at first through interstates councils like the European Union, and the European Council, and the European Economic Commission, and all these interstate organizations it has created to keep the US military inside Europe as a deterrent against foreign forces as well as non-European forces.
I hear you have to refer to Russia as a non-European force because it is not a participant in the European security structure. And also to keep the peace among Europeans themselves to make sure that rearmaments doesn’t happen among Europeans. We like to complain about how Germany would not spend on its own defense, how just generally Germans are too pacifist, but also other European countries who would not spend on their own defenses.
But we insert and we force that pacifist gene on the Germans, but also pretty much in Europe. And that has been the security structure of, “We will get into your peace and security, please do not arm.” [chuckles] And in a weird sense, I am still skeptical that we should rethink that structure but it is being renegotiated, the European security structure. And Germans are now considering building up their forces, obviously to extend to even Cold War measures all under [unclear] government, for instance. But certainly, not to the pre-World War II levels but we are rethinking these measures, whether it’s going to work or not. And we want to focus more on China so we want Europeans to take more care of their security.
We’ve been asking them and they are finally accepting, except that, I think, we are also realizing that even if Europeans do take more responsibility for their own security, we still need to invest more in European security as well. I think this has been a wake-up call. I think many people who thought that Russia could be managed have woken up over the past few weeks. So it’s a new world and whether we can keep Europe free and whole should no more be taken as granted.
Jeff: Besides the risk that everybody has been talking about, with respect to nuclear weapons, what do you think is the greatest strategic risk we see as things are playing out right now?
Shay: I think the biggest risk we are taking is if Russia succeeds in Ukraine because you cannot look at Russia’s actions over the past few months within a vacuum. You should look at it that shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the establishment of modern Russia, they invaded and still occupy a part of Moldova. Then in 2007, the first modern-day state-sponsored cyber attack happens against Estonia in the spring of 2007.
Shortly after that, Putin essentially declared war on the West in the Munich Security Conference, February of 2007, with many Europeans foolishly nodding that “Yes, you’re right, America is too arrogant.” And then you see Putin — and these are just military questions, by the way — you see Putin going into Georgia a year after that, and the annexation of Crimea in 2014, less than six years after that. And the ongoing war in Donbas, and he’s never paid a price for that.
Even after the annexation of Crimea, Europeans refused to impose sanctions on Russia. It was weeks later, after Putin-backed separatists shot down a civilian airliner carrying many EU citizens from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, that Europeans agreed to impose sanctions on Russia. And on top of that, you have Putin using his financial muscle, his economic muscle, to corrupt the finances and the economies of Western Europe with a very welcoming attitude on the British and German part, and that you saw Prime Minister [Boris] Johnson a month ago said, as Putin goes in, as a threat: “We will start to crack down on Russian corruption in the United Kingdom.” And I’m thinking, “Shouldn’t you be doing that anyway?”
So you’ve been seeing these aggressions that Putin has been doing as well as tightening his grip on power, restricting political and civil rights in Russia and poisoning, attempting to assassinate his opponents in Western countries, in Western Europe. And when you never face pushback, you keep going, and he’s so far succeeded. And you asked me about the biggest risk, the biggest risk is that he would succeed in Ukraine, having the confidence to think, “Okay, I can keep going.” I keep seeing that people are talking about [the fact] that President Biden keeps saying — foolishly — “We will not deploy troops to defend Ukraine.”
And listen, there is a defensible argument to be made for that. Stop telling Putin what you won’t do and how everybody is pushing back against the establishment of a no-fly zone or a blockade of Russian ships into Ukraine. And there are many measures that are worth considering, even if not adopting. And when you keep telling the Russians, “We will not go to war with you; that’s our limits,” Putin will say, “Okay, then I can do whatever I can and you still will not push back against me militarily.”
That’s the danger that we allow him to succeed. Now, to be clear, I am not saying that we should enter war with Russia right now over Ukraine. What I’m saying is: one, we should stop drawing that as a red line for ourselves, telling Putin about that; and two, we need to make sure that Putin does not succeed militarily in Ukraine, because if he does, then he has the confidence to go in further.
Jeff: People talk about going in further. What does that mean?
Shay: Putin has famously said that, “Whoever doesn’t miss the Soviet Union has no heart, whoever wants it back has no brain.” He misses the glory of the empire that the Soviet Union had. He does not miss the communist and atheist politics of the Soviet Union. And he wants to restore the empire, that’s quite obvious. He’s been telling us that he wants to do that. Believe the man, he’s telling you. And he also says that Russians believe that Russia is the patriarch of all Russian-speaking people. That includes Belarus, that’s being annexed softly. That includes Ukraine. And that also includes significant Russian-speaking populations in the Baltics.
In fact, if you go look up the title of the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, which has a lot of influence over Putin’s regime and vice versa, the title of Patriarch Kirill is “The Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus.” Not all Russians, all Rus. That includes all Russian ethnics who are Eastern Orthodox, and three Baltic states are former Soviet republics. He will make a move for them as well, as soon as he has the capabilities and the attention, as soon as this force succeeds. And he has time to rebuild what he’s lost. But the capabilities he’s lost during the Ukraine war, he will make a move for them.
And that would be catastrophic because we will be faced with two decisions. Defend the Baltics as we are required by US law, because those are NATO countries and NATO is codified — defending NATO is codified into US law since it’s a ratified treaty — or ignore that and that’s the end of NATO. That’s the end of NATO. That’s the beginning of a European rearmament. And that European rearmament is not just against Russia, it could be against each other.
If you go read Bob Kagan’s Foreign Affairs essay from a few years ago — I think It’s called “The Second German Question” — that should cause concerns, as populism and nativism and nationalism and anti-trade sentiments and protectionism are on the rise. Reminds you of the 1930s. And, again to some extent of the [1950s?]. But they’re still in their ascendance and you don’t want Europe to rearm itself at a time that its politics is becoming less liberal. So, suddenly, you have Europe divided into half, and the nationalists and the liberals all arming against each other. And that’s catastrophe. That’s World War III for you.
Interviewer: What’s the best possible outcome given where we are today?
Shay: The best possible outcome, I think, would be if we impose domestic political pressure on Putin so that he’s weakened from within the Kremlin. This is not a likely scenario. But it is possible that if he starts confiscating the assets of his oligarchs and pressuring people in power ministries — that’s intelligence, defense, those with political influence over the Kremlin — that you might see a coup against Putin. Because after all, this is a mafia state.
This is a mafia regime. He’s the mafia boss. And like a mafia, loyalty stops when the cash flow stops, when you begin to confiscate their yards, seize their bank accounts, deport them back into Russia, not allow them to leave Russia for anywhere other than China, Iran, and North Korea — then calculations change for them. Suddenly, they become advocates for peace. And if Putin doesn’t listen, they might turn against him.
Now, is Putin coup proof? I don’t know. He’s definitely tried to make himself so. But even if that’s true, that’s still some distraction from prosecuting the war successfully, if he’s also watching his back. Now, granted, even if you do all these things, I still wouldn’t bet the house that Putin would go down because of it tomorrow. The more likely scenario that we can do — and we should do all of these simultaneously, is to arm Ukraine to the teeth, to seriously consider a no-fly zone and blockade of Russian ship entry through the sea, and a ground blockade also into Ukraine.
We should consider those if we can implement them. That would be fantastic. Obviously, it’s very difficult and very risky. And make sure that Putin exhausts his resources in this war and make sure that he bleeds economically, he bleeds militarily. And again, you see that Russians were captured — Ukrainians are fighting for their lives — Russians who are captured are saying, “We don’t know why we are here. We were told to go there.” This is not a popular war inside Russia either.
So that has the added benefits once bodybags start returning and people see how many Russians — how many of their own compatriots are dying in this war they never asked for. They will turn against the war. And all of these are scenarios that are plausible and we should try all of them. Now, the risk of all these is if Putin keeps struggling in Ukraine and sees that this is a stalemate or it might end up in a loss for him, he might resort to the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine to just pacify the country like we did in Japan.
Now, that is a nightmare scenario. That will be a new world. You think we are in a new world right now, watch the panic if that happens. And I don’t know if that is a non-starter for Putin. In fact, we know pretty well that he has sent signals that he’s willing to use nuclear weapons if it comes to it. So all of these are possible scenarios and we should consider them. And we should consider that if Putin struggles domestically, he could be toppled — or he could use nukes.
Jeff: Where does China fit into this equation? And what influence do they ultimately have with Putin, do you believe?
Shay: It was right before the Olympics began or maybe on day one, Putin visited Xi Jinping in Beijing and they signed an almost 5,000-word statement about the future of China-Russian cooperation. And at that point, it was quite obvious that Russia was, if not necessarily going to further invade Ukraine, was seriously considering it. So this statement was not signed by the two leaders under the impression Xi Jinping had that a war was never going to happen. He knew the risks when he signed it. In fact, he might have welcomed it, the war, because it’s distracting us from focusing on China right now — as it should, by the way. We should be able to walk and chew gum, but we cannot. So if you have to choose one issue right now, we have to focus on Ukraine.
And the statement they signed basically said that they support each other in their challenges to the current securities architectures in Europe and in Asia — that Russia supports China, China’s claim over Taiwan, and China supports Russia’s claim over Ukraine. Their relationship is going to get closer and closer. And China has been verbally supportive of Russia.
And in the UN votes it will be very interesting to see whether China abstains or votes in Russia’s favor. I don’t think that China is going to vote against Russia in the UN. And finally, one thing that’s important is that Russia is going to be more reliant on China than ever because it is under sanctions. It needs China to help it evade those sanctions. So that’s going to increase Russian reliance on China.
And I think that Russia and China have had historical disagreements over Asian security structure because after all, Russia is more in Asia than in Europe. So I do think that Russia is going to for now forego those differences to have Chinese financial and economic support, but a Nixon-to-China is not going to happen to either Russia or China to separate the two. They have learned their mistakes of the Cold War that they made. They know that if they don’t — what’s the saying? — if they don’t hang together, they will hang separately.
And this also applies to Iran and North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, Belarus, name the bad guy. There was a very good essay a few months ago by Anne Applebaum, I believe in December for The Atlantic, “The Bad Guys Are Winning,” which I recommend reading, about how there’s a network of tyrants coming together.
Jeff: There is this sense though that China, that she doesn’t want to be in that company, that China sees itself as a much larger player on the global stage. And to the extent that Russia will depend on China to the degree, it will. It seems that she has undue influence with respect to Putin.
Shay: I don’t think that Xi has extraordinary influence on Putin. I don’t think anybody has extraordinary influence on Putin. After all, there are four or five people that Putin has ever trusted as a world leader. And those are his old KGB friends and colleagues who helped a lot to bring him to power, having been loyal to him. Nobody else really has influence over his thinking. And even then, there are reports that he is becoming a madman. And just, if you look at the ridiculous long tables that he makes people sit across. And people are speculating why he’s paranoid about that. Is he making people sit so far because he fears assassination, fears COVID? We don’t know if he’s vaccinated. And even if he is, he probably is aware of the shortcomings of the Sputnik vaccine.
And people are speculating that he might have some other illness actually that has not been reported. There was, a year ago, a report that he might have Parkinson’s disease. This information might be real. We don’t know, but what we do know, and [French] President [Emmanuel] Macron told his aides after he came back from his visit with Putin, that he doesn’t seem like a man in his right mind. He said that he looks very unhinged and you need to remember that Putin has been in almost total isolation since the beginning of COVID.
He has been avoiding people. He has been in contact with a handful, not having much social interaction; and after all, he’s human. And the isolation that drives you and me crazy drives him crazy too, except that he’s in isolation with a lot of power. So it’s even much worse because you get crazy ideas when you have a lot to do in isolation — you know, all you and I could do was Zoom calls and reading books. In isolation, he can start war too. He can think about that. So when you have too much time alone with a lot of thoughts, you get bad ideas. And I do think that he might be actually unhinged and that’s something that should terrify us.
Jeff: And finally, there is, as we saw at the State of the Union address, this tremendous outpouring of support for Ukraine in the US right now. How long do you think that’s sustainable? And to the extent that that support is there now, what should America do with it?
Shay: So [chuckles] I really want to know when the last time was when a US president received standing ovations from members — probably not every single member of both parties, I assume that Marjorie Taylor Greene didn’t stand up…
[laughter]
Shay: But I think 90% to 95%, maybe even more than that of the members of Congress stood up to cheer — I don’t even want to say, “To cheer President Biden,” but what he’s had to say about the Ukrainians. So that’s something encouraging. And I think it’s durable. I do think that it’s durable this outpouring support for Ukrainians. And are we going to six months from now — if there’s a stalemate, if Ukraine has fallen, God forbid — are we going to forget about it? Or not forget, but put it on the shelf, let’s say. Yes, probably, most people are going to, but they don’t think that it is going to be a controversial policy to keep, maintain our support for Ukraine.
I think that’s going to be a popular opinion, even if not a priority, six months from now. And as long as it is popular, you can count on the US government that it will do it. The thing with US national security is that most people want to act more often than they don’t want to act. And the difficulty is not that you don’t want to act while a majority want you to act — it’s the opposite that almost never happens. The real difficulty is when policy-makers have a policy preference in favor of action and it is unpopular, when that action is unpopular. I think that the American people and their representatives inside the government are going to both be in favor of action, which means that we can maintain support for Ukraine.
Jeff: We’ll see how it all plays out. Shay Khatiri, I thank you so much for spending time with us today.
Shay: Thank you.
Jeff: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another radio WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
Cable television, social media, and TikTok have given us minute-by-minute updates on the war being fought on the ground. But with sanctions, oligarchs, and bankers, a very different war is being fought.
Our guest on this special WhoWhatWhy podcast is banker and activist Bill Browder who, for decades, has been battling Russian President Vladimir Putin and hunting Russian oligarchs.
As the force behind the Magnitsky Act — named for Browder’s attorney who was murdered in a Russian prison — he understands very well the financial war that’s taking place. The Act, which applies globally, authorizes the US government to sanction those it sees as human rights offenders, by freezing their assets and banning them from entering the country.
Browder elucidates both the practical and the psychological impacts of the sanctions on not only the Russian people but on Putin and his band of oligarchs as well.
Having seen Putin up close and personal for decades, Browder believes he knew what the Russian president had expected when he started this war — and talks about what he might do now, in response to the unexpected.
He details why no one can oust, or even put pressure on Putin, and how he might even kill a few people around him to send a message to others. Browder sheds light on what the oligarchs are going through right now and how they are trapped in a system from which they can’t ever check out.
As for those Ukrainians in Putin’s crosshairs, Browder sees no viable off-ramp to lessen the bloodshed that he fears is ahead.
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Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to this special edition of the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. Beyond the minute-by-minute reporting of the ground war, the Twitter feeds, TikTok images, there’s a broader and more economically complex issues surrounding the war in the Ukraine, and the world’s response to it. Issues that include sanctions, the SWIFT system, the seizure of assets, including yachts and private planes parked around the globe.
All part of the interconnectedness of a global economic structure that Russia, for better or worse, has been a part of. Few understand the intricacies of these connections better than my guest Bill Browder. Years ago, Browder made millions in Putin’s Russia. What he didn’t know was what kind of price he would pay for getting involved in the ever-entangling web of Putin and his oligarchs.
The ultimate result was the brutal death of Browder’s lawyer and friend Sergei Magnitsky, who was murdered in prison after uncovering a multimillion-dollar fraud committed by Russian government officials. Browder has carried on Magnitsky’s legacy, a great personal risk to himself. That legacy and the Magnitsky Act are a large part of the basis of the sanctions that we’ve been talking about this weekend.
Long before current events, Browder’s been leading the campaign to expose Russia’s endemic corruption and human rights abuses. He’s the author of the international bestseller Red Notice and the soon-to-be-published Freezing Order. It is my pleasure to welcome Bill Browder back to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. Bill, thanks so much for joining us.
Bill Browder: Great to be here.
Jeff Schechtman: It’s great to have you here. I want to talk a little bit about the financial side of this because certainly there’s a lot of coverage of the war itself. Talk a little bit about what you see happening in Russia today with respect to the impact of these sanctions, the impact on the Russian Central Bank, how it’s affecting both the oligarchs on the one hand and average people in Russia on the other.
Bill Browder: Well, so first of all, the premise of the whole sanctions is that we can’t go to war physically against Russia and Ukraine. We all, of course, sympathize with Ukraine, we’re allies with Ukraine, but we’re not going to go and start shooting bullets for Ukraine. And so, the kind of bullets we can shoot are economic bullets. There’s a very great quote from the famous chess champion Garry Kasparov that we should fight them in the banks instead of with tanks. And that’s what we’ve done here.
And the sanctions are absolutely devastating across the board for all sorts of different types of people. So, who’s affected? Well, we start out with regular Russians. When they went to their cash machines this morning and they discovered that there was no cash in the ATMs. The ruble was devalued by 30 percent. The Russian stock market, some of the stocks are down 70, 80 percent. It’s an absolute financial bloodbath. And prices of goods of any kind of imported goods will go up 100 percent. That’s the regular person.
But it’s not just the regular people affected, it’s also the oligarchs. They can no longer land their planes, their private jets in Europe. The airspace is closed for all Russians. The assets for a number of oligarchs are now being frozen across the globe. And the interesting thing is that Vladimir Putin didn’t ever anticipate this. He thought that we would all be fighting with each other, the Germans fighting with the Brits, fighting with the Americans about doing nothing because that’s the experience he had every other time he committed such an atrocity.
When he invaded Georgia there was nothing. When he took Crimea there was nothing. And so, he figured the same thing was going to happen. And so, Putin is sitting there scratching his head and saying, “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe that this is happening.”
Jeff Schechtman: You know Putin. You’ve been studying him for a long time. How did he miscalculate so badly?
Bill Browder: Well, I don’t think he miscalculated. [chuckles] So, in the financial world, they say, “Past performance is not a predictor of future performance,” but he was just looking at past performance. It wasn’t just Georgia and Crimea; Russians have sent special agents to Britain, where I live, to kill Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive material. Nothing happened.
They sent special agents to kill Sergei Skripal in Salisbury with Novichok, a banned chemical agent. Nothing happened. They shot down a passenger plane with 298 civilians over eastern Ukraine; it was flying from Amsterdam to Malaysia. Nothing happened. Putin is so used to nothing happening that he thought he could do this, and nothing would happen. And I thought he was probably going to be right about this.
I thought that that was going to be the outcome. And to be honest, I’ve been lobbying for sanctions against Russian officials for a decade. And I’ve looked into the eyes of these European officials and they wanted nothing to do with me.
It was only through unbelievable outside pressure, parliamentary pressure, media pressure, and external events that I was able to get sanctions laws in place in these countries, but boy, did they not want to do them. And so, the fact that over the last 48 hours, the world has joined arms, completely cohesively, and started rolling out these sanctions programs in true devastating fashion is really something remarkable and unbelievable.
Jeff Schechtman: And in many ways, did Magnitsky Act here in the US set the stage for these sanctions?
Bill Browder: Indeed, it did. So, after my lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was murdered by the Putin regime in prison, I tried to get justice in Russia and couldn’t. And I said, “How do we get justice outside of Russia?” And I said, “Well, these people have all this money outside of Russia, let’s freeze it and not let them travel.” And that was the concept of the Magnitsky Act.
And I took it to Washington shortly after Sergei was murdered in 2010 and I was able to convince Democrats and Republicans equally that this was a good idea. Should we allow Russian torturers and murderers to come to America and use the banking system? And at the time, there was no Russian torture and murder lobby in Washington. And they said, “Yes.” And that was the Magnitsky Act. And Putin went out of his mind when the Magnitsky Act was passed because he understood exactly where this was going to lead.
He probably has been thinking about his long-term plans for a long time, and he knew where this was going to lead. And in retaliation for the Magnitsky Act passing, he banned the adoption of Russian orphans by American families, effectively sentencing orphans to death. A lot of these were sick children. And then he made it his single largest foreign policy priority to try to repeal the Magnitsky Act.
He even sent his emissary to Trump Tower in June of 2016 to meet with Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner to ask them if Donald Trump was elected that year to repeal the Magnitsky Act. So, he understood where this was all heading. He hated it. He hates it because Vladimir Putin is the richest man in the world. He’s stolen just an unbelievable amount of money. And he keeps all that money with oligarchs in the West. And he knew that that money would eventually be frozen, as it just has been.
Jeff Schechtman: How do you sense that this sanction regime that’s taking place right now will affect Putin personally?
Bill Browder: Well, the way I see it affecting Putin personally is that the oligarchs — so, Putin doesn’t hold any money in his own name. Because if he did, if there’s a document, a bank statement, or a property register, someone could wave that around and say, “Look, this guy’s a crook. He’s not a patriot. He’s a crook.” Or they could threaten Putin, to say, “If you don’t do this and that for me, I’m going to wave this piece of paper around,” blackmailing.
So, he can’t hold it in his own name, he’s got to find people he trusts to hold it. And so, who does he trust? He trusts a number of these oligarchs. And the oligarchs are really good for holding money because they’re incredibly wealthy to begin with. And so, it doesn’t look odd that he’s got all this money, or they have all this money. And so, when you sanction an oligarch, you’re freezing Putin’s money. And that’s why it’s so effective.
Jeff Schechtman: Certainly, if Putin didn’t anticipate this pushback, the oligarchs didn’t anticipate it. You know many of them. Talk about what you see as their reaction to what’s playing out now, and what they’re going to do about it.
Bill Browder: Well, their reaction is panic. They’re on all-day conference calls with very expensive lawyers in New York and London, desperately coming up with strategies, and ruses, and ways of trying to avoid this terrible impending doom. But there’s not much they can do. The size of these people’s assets is so large, they can’t just move them around from place to place. And so, they’re now stuck. These people are in bad shape. And as a result, Putin is stuck. And Putin is in bad shape.
Jeff Schechtman: There’s also this sudden spotlight that is on all of these oligarchs, including a website that went up tracking their jet travels. Talk about that.
Bill Browder: [chuckles] Well, all of a sudden, everybody understands that oligarchs are part of the problem, are part of what has to be sanctioned. And everybody wants to track their yachts and their jets and their properties. And I’ve been getting calls. My phone’s ringing off the hook from government officials all over the world saying, “Bill, you’ve been an oligarch hunter, how do we hunt them?” And they’re all going to come up a pretty steep learning curve, but they’re going to figure out how to hunt these oligarchs and they’re going to hunt them.
Jeff Schechtman: How many are we talking about, roughly?
Bill Browder: Well, when we were going into this crisis, I was saying to everybody, if Putin crosses the border, they should freeze the assets of the top 50 oligarchs. I think at this point, they should make the list longer, like 120. We’ve just been collecting our own list here and there’s easily 120 Kremlin insider, oligarch, businessmen, billionaire-type characters whose assets should be frozen.
Jeff Schechtman: To what extent can they put pressure on Putin at this point? And what form can that pressure take?
Bill Browder: Well, I think this is one of the big misconceptions of Russian politics and the Russian situation. Nobody can put pressure on Putin. He’s not democratically elected by any standard. And the oligarchs are all basically serving at his pleasure. In other words, at any moment, he can strip them of their assets, strip them of their freedom, and strip them of their life. And so, they’re all just sitting there hoping and praying that they can just hold on to whatever they think is theirs and not get imprisoned or killed.
And so, the issue is not that they’re going to rise against him, the issue is that we’re going directly after Vladimir Putin by freezing their assets. And it really is a punch in the face to Vladimir Putin to do this.
Jeff Schechtman: To the extent, though, that they are holding Putin’s money, it seems that it would give them some degree of leverage, particularly since so much of that money is outside of Russia.
Bill Browder: Well, it doesn’t really because Putin can issue an Interpol arrest warrant, bring them back to Russia, and throw them in prison. Being an oligarch is like the Hotel California, you can check out at any time you like, you can never leave. There’s no way that you can say, I’m like, “Thank you. I quit.” It doesn’t work that way.
Jeff Schechtman: Of course, Interpol was talking about disconnecting from Russia, a subject you know well, and was part of what you wrote about in Red Notice.
Bill Browder: Yes. So, after the Magnitsky Act was passed, the Russians really got mad. They got mad at the United States for passing the Magnitsky Act, and they got mad at me for being the person who made it all happen. And so, in terms of their anger towards me, they issued an Interpol red notice for me to have me arrested and brought back to Russia. I was able to get that overturned, but since then they’ve issued seven more. So, they’ve issued a total of eight Interpol red notices.
I was arrested in Madrid, Spain, in 2018 and also in Geneva Airport on these Interpol notices. And so, just imagine this. The International Police Organization is working with a criminal regime to chase after their enemies to arrest them to send them back to their death. And I’m just amazed that Russia could be a member of this organization and Interpol could put up with this. And I’m so happy that today the British foreign secretary, Priti Patel, has launched an initiative to kick Russia out of Interpol.
Jeff Schechtman: What resources does the Russian Central Bank have to be able to deal with the pressure that it’s under right now?
Bill Browder: Well, this is part of the beauty of these sanctions that the EU and the US and other, Japan and Britain, have all basically frozen the money of the Central Bank. So, they can’t use their sterling and their dollars and their yen and their euros. And so, all they really have is their gold reserves that are not frozen. And this puts them in a particularly horrible and precarious position because at the same time as all this is happening everybody wants to convert their rubles into hard currency, and they’re not allowed to because there’s no hard currency to convert it into. And so, it’s going to be like the Iron Curtain, the Soviet Union, where you have rubles but they’re of no value anywhere outside the country.
Jeff Schechtman: As you know, there’s been a lot of talk about what role crypto could play in all of this. Do you see it playing a role and if so, how?
Bill Browder: Well, I think Russia’s the largest holder of cryptocurrencies, I read that somewhere. If that’s the case, and I can’t confirm it is, it would make sense because if you want to take more than $10,000 out of a bank, you’ve got to write them like a long essay about what you need the money for. The anti-money laundering regulations are so tough and tight, but you can take $10 million of cryptocurrency and put it on a disc or a flash drive and hand it to someone and take it around the world with you and nobody’s going to know.
And so, this is the ideal way of defining sanctions. And I would imagine that this crisis will force a lot of governments to accelerate the regulation of cryptocurrencies so it can’t be like this criminal currency.
Jeff Schechtman: How long do you think that the Russian banking system and these oligarchs can sustain these sanctions?
Bill Browder: Very short period of time, because all these companies, these big Russian companies have huge dollar debts and what’s going to happen is they will default. And then it’ll be an interesting story about what happens after the default. If you own bonds of a Russian company as a Westerner, are they going to even allow you to exercise your bankruptcy rights? And my guess, my strong prediction is no, it’s going to be a real interesting expropriation exercise against Westerners.
Jeff Schechtman: What about dollar assets that these companies have?
Bill Browder: I would imagine that if you’re a lender to a Russian company and they have assets offshore and they’ve defaulted, and they’ve not given you your rights, you probably make an application to the court and the country where they have the assets and try to seize them.
Jeff Schechtman: Talk about where all of this is playing out. A lot of it seems to be focused in London where you are and that seems to be a central point of where a lot of this is taking place. Talk about that.
Bill Browder: Well, so for a long time, London was to Russia as Hong Kong was to China. All the Russians came to London. They came to London, not just physically, they came to London financially. Why do they come here? They came here because we have property rights and rule of law in London and they came here because the police never asked any questions about dirty money. It was the ideal situation. Your money is safe, both from the Russian, your Russian competitors, or other people wanting to steal it from you. And your money is safe from law enforcement.
And as a result, over a 20-year period, the amount of money that flowed from Russia to London was in the tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars. And so, you have every self-respecting crook, government official, and oligarch, and combination of those people has enormous villas in the center of London, in fact, so much so that the average British person couldn’t afford to live in London because they drove up the price of property so high.
Jeff Schechtman: There’s been a lot of talk from the UK foreign secretary in the past couple of days about further sanctions on these oligarchs and seizures from these oligarchs in London. Talk about that.
Bill Browder: Well, I think Britain is particularly embarrassed by this whole scenario of all this oligarch money coming in here that there was a communication written about, I think in The Wall Street Journal, or perhaps in one of the British papers, a couple of weeks ago about how the US government was so worried about Britain being the weak link if sanctions needed to be imposed, and that’s a very embarrassing and humiliating impression for the British to have of themselves.
And so, I think they’ve reacted very strongly in the government here to come up with a robust response to that, which is to go after the oligarchs to seize their properties and so on. Now, all the headlines, and we had the foreign secretary running around all the TV shows and radio stations over the weekend saying this, I’ve been living here for 30 years and I’ve heard a lot of really robust announcements, which end up with nothing. And so, I’m hoping that this is different. I think that everybody understands that we can’t just let it go because if we do, we’re facing World War III if we don’t show Putin the real cost right now.
Jeff Schechtman: How complex is it seizing these assets from these oligarchs around the world, the yachts, the townhouses, the jets, et cetera?
Bill Browder: It’s going to be extremely complex. The oligarchs who have the best lawyers, the smartest lawyers. They’ve created the most complex structures, asset protection schemes, specifically to deal with these types of issues. And so, they’re all going to wave their hands in the air and say, “Not mine. I’ve been living there for 15 years, but not mine.” And it’s going to be a very hard thing to prove because they’ve gone through these exercises, but we can’t let that stop us.
Jeff Schechtman: Besides being a full employment act for very expensive lawyers, will these sanctions have an impact then given what you’re saying?
Bill Browder: Of course, it’s totally devastating. You get put on the sanctions list, even if the government can’t get your property from you, nobody will ever do business with you again. No bank will allow you to transact, any money that you have in a bank account will be frozen, and you’re pretty much — you become a non-person in the world of finance. It’s like let you be a financial leper. And it’s terrible for anybody on these sanctions list.
Jeff Schechtman: How does all of this play out in your view?
Bill Browder: Well, my feeling is a very bad feeling. I’ve been fighting with Putin myself because of the Magnitsky Act for a decade and what I’ve seen him do is always escalate no matter what. He has no capacity for compromise, no capacity to back down, and will escalate even if it harms his own interests. He’s a conflict for conflict sake type of a person. He’s been humiliated now. He’s been humiliated by the Ukrainian military and he’s been humiliated by the West financially, and he doesn’t do humiliation well.
And so, I fear dramatically for the Ukrainian people because after this embarrassment of having all of his tanks bombed out along different roads and trucks running out of gas and planes being shot out of the sky, I fear that he’s going to do something really horrible to try to demoralize the Ukrainians, and I dread that. And I know what he’s like and I can’t imagine a scenario where he doesn’t do that.
Jeff Schechtman: If there is an off-ramp to any of this for him, for this whole conflict, where do you think that off-ramp is if there is one?
Bill Browder: I don’t think there is. I think there’s no off-ramp. I just don’t see — because he doesn’t back down, he doesn’t compromise, and what he’s asked for is so far beyond anything that anyone is willing to give him. We’re not ready to give him the sovereignty of Ukraine, and Ukrainians are certainly not willing to let him get the sovereignty of Ukraine. And so, I think there’s no off-ramp. The only thing that we could do is just a full-on containment strategy, where if he pushes he just encounters steel. That’s how we have to position ourselves with this guy.
Jeff Schechtman: You’ve seen a lot written over the past couple of days about the danger that Putin might be in in Russia itself. Is any of that true, and if so, how so?
Bill Browder: He’s not in any danger. He’s always been in danger of — if you’re sitting in that seat, you get to be the richest person in the world, everybody wants to sit in that seat. He doesn’t want anyone else to have that seat. He wants to keep it for himself until the end of his natural life, and he’s a very paranoid little man and so he will constantly look for traders, for betrayers, for anybody who’s even thinking about it. And I think that one thing we might expect, in the near future, is for him to start to kill some of the people around him to make a point to the other people around him.
Jeff Schechtman: And his clear unhappiness with the Russian military, how is that going to play out?
Bill Browder: I think it’s going to play out badly in the sense that he’s going to then find somebody else with a more radical solution to this thing and that radical solution is a big escalation in a heartbreaking outcome for some group of Ukrainians.
Jeff Schechtman: Do you have a sense of how the world economy will be impacted by these sanctions?
Bill Browder: Well, with the obvious things, the oil price is going to be up, which is going to create more inflation in a time when we can barely afford the inflation. Higher oil prices are particularly bad for the developing world and so you may see revolutions and overthrowing of governments in places that we weren’t even paying attention to because of the oil price.
I can imagine that there’s going to be an energy crisis in Europe because one of the obvious things that he can do is cut off the gas to Germany and Austria and Italy. I can imagine that all of us are going to end up paying higher taxes because we’re all going to have to invest more money in defense as life goes on. And, generally, we’re all going to be sitting here wondering when the next shoe is going to drop, and that makes it harder to make long-term plans, which is very unfortunate.
Jeff Schechtman: Bill Browder, I thank you so much for spending time with us. Your new book Freezing Order comes out in June, I think. We will look forward to that as well. I thank you so much for joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.
Bill Browder: Thank you.
Jeff Schechtman: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another radio WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you liked this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate
We should be afraid, very afraid, of the internet, says our guest on this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, longtime internet security expert, public-interest technologist, and lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School Bruce Schneier.
Most people, Schneier points out, either don’t know how their lives are directly impacted by digital technology or blithely ignore the implications of being always “online.” For example, we don’t think about how our phones always know where we are, or about the remarkable ability of modern camera technology to peer into windows, even if we are on a high floor of a hotel.
This might not be so worrisome, Schneier argues, if the government oversaw the internet the way it oversees airline safety or food safety or highway safety. Instead, as he sees it, no one is looking out for us in the digital world. There is no real government regulation and no significant laws designed to keep us safe.
And the rise of the so-called Internet of Things will only make us even less secure — as digital technology takes over not just our keyboards and screens, but our driving, our hospitals, our appliances, our money, and more.
Schneier heaps special scorn on cryptocurrency and its enabling blockchains as merely the fantasy of “white, male, libertarian crypto bros” — an enterprise with no real purpose but with a dire impact on global warming and other aspects of modern life. His bottom line: taking money out of government control is a stupid idea.
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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. The metaverse notwithstanding, the nexus between what happens on the internet, and what happens in the real, physical world, is disappearing. The blood-brain barrier between the two has broken. And every day, in our finances, in our interpersonal communications, in our entertainment, in our transportation, and even in what we eat, the connection between our digital world and our real world is further integrated.
Reactions to this vary from, “I’m terrified of everything; the government should control the internet,” to, “There is no privacy; do I have nothing to hide; and why should I care if I’m being served up greater convenience?” The fact is that vast sums of data on all of us are being collected, sometimes in the name of convenience, sometimes in the name of national security, and it’s unclear exactly what’s going on. It’s unclear where security theater starts, and real security begins.
In short, the cyber world presents 21st-century problems that have not yet been solved, much less, fully understood. We’re going to talk about that today with my guest, Bruce Schneier. He’s a public interest technologist working at the intersection of security, technology, and people. He’s been writing about security issues since 2004 and is a fellow and lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School. He’s a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and chief of security architecture at Inrupt, Inc. He is the author of numerous books, including We Have Root and Click Here to Kill Everybody. It is my pleasure to welcome Bruce Schneier here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. Bruce, thanks so much for joining us.
Bruce Schneier: Thanks for having me. What was that 2004 thing you mentioned?
Jeff: I guess you started your blog in 2004.
Bruce: Right. And I thought I was late in blogging, and now everyone thinks I’m early.
Jeff: [laughs] You were ahead of the curve.
Bruce: But I don’t know. In my community, there were a lot of bloggers. I remember for years not wanting to blog because it just felt too fast. I was doing an email newsletter, and then I liked it. I liked the monthly cadence. But to be part of the conversation, back then, you had to be immediate. And of course, now you got to be really immediate.
Jeff: Well, it’s so interesting, to digress for just a second here, that newsletters today and Substack and all the stuff that goes along with it, the imitations, are a throwback to the days of blogging.
Bruce: Right, and they are back. And so, newsletters were before blogging. I started my newsletter, and God, I’m going to look it up. I think 1998. And then it became a blog, and that was to be faster. So, newsletters were cool. They were not cool for a long time. And now they’re cool again, right with Substack and other ways that people are actually monetizing their newsletters, which I never did.
Jeff: But it’s the classic case of everything old is new again. It just comes around and in a just slightly different form.
Bruce: I guess. So, I started my newsletter in 1998, and my first book was 1993. Oh, right, then the blog was 2004.
Jeff: Well, Bruce, it’s a good way into this, because you’ve been looking at this so long. And one of the things I was thinking about in anticipation of our conversation is the way in which this world that you’re involved in changes so rapidly, not just over years, but almost over months. And that it seems like it is an endless struggle because what you solve today, which we’re able to protect today, changes tomorrow. Talk about that in a general sense first.
Bruce: And I think that’s true. And that’s bigger than security, that’s tech. And those of us who are steep in tech know it that things change so fast. And if it’s the invention of a new technology like the iPhone or some app, and suddenly things are different, or drones or wireless communication. Now, video is big. And I remember when video was too much bandwidth. And things change a lot and assumptions change—the notion that our phones know where we are at all times and all the good that brings—and it is hard to keep up.
Most people’s perceptions of what is possible—what happens—doesn’t match reality because it changes so fast. I was struck by this in another area. I was in a hotel, which is rare, right: in pandemic, hotels, traveling. And I’m up on a high floor, and it’s a giant window. And I opened the curtains, and there are some other buildings far off in the distance, and you can see tiny, tiny black dots, which are windows. And I think the cameras are so good these days, that someone in one of those windows has a really good image of me if they’re looking. And that’s something we don’t think about.
We don’t think about a loss of privacy from faraway buildings or from aerial aircraft. And now the world has changed, and our notion of what cameras can do doesn’t match the reality of what cameras can do. So, multiply that by everything, and that’s where we are.
Jeff: So, I guess the other part of the question then is, if we thought about this all the time, if we thought about those cameras every time we were in a hotel room, and the way in which our phone was really tracking us, and all the other information about us that’s out there, and the ways in which it’s been diced and collected, it would either cause us to not want to participate in any of this or just create a level of anxiety that was arguably unsustainable.
Bruce: Or more likely, we would just pretend it wasn’t true, which is what most of us do most of the time. So, we don’t want to have to think about this all the time. So, this is another thing about modern society. Modern society, we delegate, generally, government organizations to protect us, right? So, when I was in that hotel, I did not think for a minute about building codes and safety measures and egress staircases and how any of that worked because when that building was built, there were rules the builders had to follow. In case they don’t follow them, buildings fall down in Florida, but by and large, that works for us.
When I got on an airplane, I didn’t have to worry about aircraft design or maintenance or crew rest or pilot training or any of that. The FAA has rules, and I can get in a plane without even thinking about it. So, why is it that there are no such rules about data, about corporate spying, about government spying? Oh, we know the answer: corporations basically make the rules. But what we want is a world where government steps in, like they do in every other aspect of society, to protect me so I don’t have to learn about it, think about it, be anxious about it, ignore it. It’s just true. I can walk into a restaurant, and I know the food won’t kill me. It’s kind of neat.
Jeff: Is it one of the differences though? This brings us back to where we started, the speed at which technology changes and the ability or lack of faith in the ability of government to stay on top of that. Planes haven’t changed that dramatically over a 10-year arc or a 20-year arc. They’re fundamentally the same. Keeping planes from crashing into each other by the FAA is similar business today than it was 10 years ago. With respect to cybersecurity, that’s not true.
Bruce: Yes, the speed matters, and it’s a difference in degree—not that it’s a difference in kind. I think if we say, “Well, look. ’It’s too fast. We can’t do it,” we’re just saying democracy is over, which feels too extreme a position. I’m not willing to give up on the ability of us as humans to govern ourselves. You don’t have to say, “Okay, we’re now going to build society in the near-term financial interest of a bunch of tech billionaires. ’That’s the only way we can do it.” That feels wrong to me.
So yes, there’re going to be challenges. And we’re talking about aircraft, and we know 737 Max, the problems of regulation there. Where in fact, the FAA delegated regulation to Boeing, which of course, regulated in a way that was profitable for them—not that was safe for everybody else—and we saw the disasters there. So, there are a lot of challenges here, but I don’t think we as a people should give up our ability to decide what society should look like. We really don’t want to run the world for a bunch of oligarchs. That feels bad. I’d rather do it flawed than not do it at all.
Jeff: Is one of the differences and one of the reasons people seem to be less concerned is that it’s not necessarily a life-or-death situation? If you eat tainted food, you could die. If you’re in a plane crash, you will die. And we could go on and on with these things. Whereas if you’re surveilled, or if that camera’s looking at you through that hotel window, or if data is being collected on you that you don’t know about, there are no immediate consequences.
Bruce: So, I think that is a big difference, and that’s a reason why it’s not a campaign issue—why a lot of people do ignore it—that the effects are not immediately salient, like a plane crashing, a car crashing, you getting food poisoning. That’s changing now because computers are moving out of the world of keyboards and screens into our lives. So now, computers are in the planes and the cars and the power plants and the appliances and the medical devices.
So, we’re moving into a world where this stuff is life and death, where the way these systems work determine whether your hospital is working or not or whether the cars stay on the road or not. So, that change, I think that difference is important and make you put your finger on why people are willing to let this slide in a way they’re not in those other areas. But the internet of things changes that because the internet of things now affects the world in a direct physical manner in way your spreadsheets or your Facebook or your Gmail never did.
Jeff: To what extent does it have to also do with people’s understanding of how the system works and what’s really going on?
Bruce: I think that’s part of it too. These are very complex technological systems, and then we talked about how people’s intuitions of them are wrong, but a lot of that complexity is hidden. Airplanes are super complex too, yet we can describe them in simple terms, so we can think about them in simple terms. Search is complex, yet we understand it in simple terms. I don’t know. I think that is a difference, but that the contours of it aren’t obvious, and that’’s worth thinking about.
Jeff: The other question of course is how concerned people should be in this sense of understanding what the real dangers are—and getting mixed messages about that?
Bruce: So, I don’t know how concerned people should be. I mean, I want it so people don’t have to be concerned at all. Just like you don’t have to be concerned about airplane safety. You get on airplanes. You want to fly somewhere. I mean, COVID willing, but that’s not an airplane issue. I think people right now need to understand this is more than security, the threats of big tech to society, and we’re seeing some of that.
So right now, there is a bill going through Congress to try to force Apple and Google to open up their app stores. They are a monopoly. They have a lot of bad outcomes because they’re a monopoly. Monopolies are bad, and this is a law. This bill [is] actually being fought really hard by Google and Apple for good reason. I mean, there’s enormous profit margin for them because monopolies are incredibly profitable for the monopolists. To open up the app store.
And so how much does the average consumer need to know about that? It would be nice if they understood how much money they’re paying that they don’t have to, how much their quality of service isn’t as good because there’s no competition, and that would be great if they knew that. Then there would be some public outcry that would push Congress to do the right thing. Right now, the lobbyists are spending a lot of money trying to get Congress to do the wrong thing.
So, more public awareness would be better here, and we’re seeing that with Facebook. They’ve been—no actual regulation but a lot of hearings. They’re perfectly happy to drop democracy in pursuit of profits, and I’m not convinced that we as society should let them do that.
Jeff: How much of the concerns, or what should be the concerns with respect to security, cybersecurity, all these things that we were touching on a little while ago, how much is there a problem in the way that gets conflated today in the discussion about these corporations and how much money they’re making and their monopolistic practices et cetera? It seems that when the two things come together, it confuses people with respect to what they should really worry about.
Bruce: I think that’s true. The monopolists help. One of Apple’s biggest arguments of why they should remain a monopoly is they make these security arguments: “You are more secure. ’We’re a monopoly.” Facebook says same thing: “You break us up, you allow competition, it’ll be much less secure.” Monopolists say this all the fricking time. It’s never true, but it’s a common refrain. And you’re right. It does confuse people. It does make it harder to understand the issues.
Security permeates everything but is rarely the central thing that matters. Airplane safety is important, but what really matters for airplanes is, are they going to get where I want to go? Is there schedule good? What’s the price of the tickets? How annoying is the airport? So, all the things about the fact that we as consumers pay attention to, we take airline safety and security as a given and an afterthought, and that’s true, I think, pretty much everywhere.
And I don’t think that’s bad. I think that’s the sign of a mature society: that I can not worry about airplane safety because the government’s got it. They’ve got it for me. I’m free to worry about the things that matter to me. So, same thing with choosing a restaurant or in a lot of ways choosing a doctor and buying a pharmaceutical, ’there’s a whole system designed so I don’t have to worry about that.
Jeff: One of the things though, it seems like we crossed some kind of a threshold many years ago, when finance moved into the internet world, when our banking and our financial transactions moved online, and the public began to accept that completely. That when that happened, it indicated a level of security that was not unlike the safe feeling we have getting on an airplane or going to that restaurant.
Bruce: And largely that works. It’s a feeling of safety, of assurance, of security, I guess is also a good word, that we could just bank online and not think about it. And you’re right. We all do it. And Apple Pay was another threshold, that you can use your phone for credit card transactions. And I mean, I was a latecomer on this because I am. I do it now, and it is largely safe. We’re not being hoodwinked here. Banking online is fine.
There was lots of fraud, but there was fraud before. I’m not convinced the online banking caused a degree of fraud that’s different in any major way. In a lot of ways, this is a combination of regulation and banks realizing they need to eat the fraud. That in order for people to feel safe, banks just have to make good on fraud, even when it’s not their fault, and I think that was interesting to watch.
Sometimes industries are forced to do that. Credit Corporate Company was in the 1970s—Fair Credit Reporting Act. There are other rules about debit cards. But I think largely in internet banking, the banks realized. And they’re going to save an enormous amount of money by not needing tellers and branches and all of that physicality. But in order for people to do it, they need to feel safe doing it, which means banks need to eat fraud, and they do.
Jeff: And as we move that up the food chain to a new level today with cryptocurrency, with the blockchain, et cetera, talk a little bit about where you see that going in terms of—
Bruce: Oh, hopefully, gone. Hopefully away. I mean blockchain, cryptocurrency, I mean it’s all complete in the garbage nonsense. It’s bad. ’It’s insecure. ’It’s not decentralized. ’It’s not safe. ’It’s stupid at every level. It’s a big deal now, so there’s lots of money in it, but I hope where it’s going, people will realize that this is just absolute nonsense, and then it just goes away. That’d be great. Plus, it would be great for the planet too.
Jeff: Expand on that a little bit as to why you think that it should go away. What do you see as the biggest problems with it?
Bruce: I guess where do you want me to start? Why is it here? The problems are everywhere. It doesn’t work as advertised. It’s a complete disaster at every level. But why are we [unintelligible 00:18:57] I can tell it’s just a bunch of white male libertarian crypto bros who think it’s cool to stick it to the government. What’s its benefit?
Jeff: What about the blockchain and the sense that that’s the security apparatus of the future?
Bruce: But it’s not a security apparatus. How many times have you read about people losing millions of dollars? Blockchain is a data structure. And it’s a fine data structure, but to make it a currency, you need three things. You need the data structure, the blockchain, which is basically distributed database. We know how to do those. Those are super easy. There is the mining system, the incentive structure to get people to basically burn the planet to create these coins, and then you need this exchange mechanism.
It doesn’t do anything that normal finance doesn’t do. It provides no additional value, and it burns up the planet, and you can lose your money, and it’s rife with fraud. There’s nothing of value in it.
Jeff: Why do you think it has caught on the way it does, or at least capture the imagination of so many—
Bruce: Oh, God. Libertarian crypto bros. 100 percent, right? And then it became a thing, and then it increased in value, so now it’s a speculative bubble.
Jeff: What’s the downside in terms of the broader effect it has on what we should be concerned about?
Bruce: A couple of downsides: one, is people are losing an enormous amount of money in this, and when the bubble bursts, they’ll lose even more. But the amount of fraud and just hacks, ’it’s ultimately decentralization. People think bitcoin’s decentralized, and that’s just not true. And it enables ransomware, and this is a big deal. The reason ransomware is a thing is because of cryptocurrencies. The problem with any ransom system is moving the money.
For ransomware, the normal banking system won’t have anything to do with them, and suitcases full of $100 bills are really, really heavy. So, the reason ransomware works is because there are these cryptocurrencies, and regulating that space would do a lot to get rid of ransomware. So, there’s just one. But I think pulling money out of government control is actually kind of stupid. There’s a reason why governments issue currencies, and it’s a good one, and we generally like it.
And the notion that any investment vehicle, where if you forget your password, you lose your life savings, and there’s no recourse. Or, you lose your hard drive, and you lose your life savings; there’s no recourse. How does anyone believes this is secure makes no sense to me. Sorry. It is a weird, weird speculative bubble we’re living through, and hopefully it’ll end soon because the environmental cost is ginormous.
Jeff: What in your view should be our greatest concern, with respect to cyber security today?
Bruce: Yes, the concern I have is primarily not the illegal uses of our data, but the legal uses. I worry more about the governments and corporations who are doing things legally than I am about the criminals. I think the harms are greater there. And we talk about this in the beginning. In your intro, you talked about that our data was being collected by governments and corporations. [unintelligible 00:22:31] convenience and security. I mean, that’s wrong. It’s not convenience. It’s profit.
We’re being surveilled for security, which is defined in any number of different ways, whether the U.S., or China, or Russia, or France, or Switzerland, or Australia, and then also for profit, generally not ours.
Jeff: Is it unrealistic to think that any of these companies are going to do anything that isn’t governed by that profit motive?
Bruce: Oh, of course not. That’s why you need government to step in. You have to go to a company and say, “Yes, you have a profitable business buying and selling human kidneys. We’ve decided that’s illegal and immoral. You can’t do that anymore. Yes, you as an auto manufacturer are producing cars that explode on impact, or gasoline has too much lead in it. And we get that it’s less profitable if you going to do it another way, but we’re going to force you to do it.”
That is what government does. Government provides the playing field on which the corporations operate. We set the basic rules: what is allowed or what isn’t. Well, 100 and something years ago, we went to an industry and said, “Yes, we know you are making a nice profitable business sending five year olds up chimneys to clean them. We have decided that is immoral. You can’t do that anymore.” That’s what we do in society.
So yes, you cannot assume that corporations do anything that isn’t in their financial interest, and you shouldn’t. That’s not the way the system works. We build a system where we decide what is allowable, and then on top of that, companies decided what is profitable.
Jeff: To what extent do you think that legislators in particular, even more than regulators, but legislators have a clear understanding of the issues that we face?
Bruce: You know the answer to that question before you asked it, don’t you? They don’t, and that’s why the lobbyist do so well. If this bill to force Google and Apple to open their app store monopolies to competition passes, it’ll be—I think—a miracle. It’ll mean that the very expensive lobbyists failed to convince the legislators. That’s not the way to bet.
Jeff: Is there a problem, as you said, and you’ve been looking at these security issues for a long time, that it has changed by the way in which, like everything else in society, it has become so politicized, it has taken the real focus off what the problems that need to be solve really are?
Bruce: Oddly, I think not. A lot of these issues don’t fall on the standard Republican/Democratic divide. Now, I’m thinking again about the Apple, Google app store monopoly just because it’s what I’m paying attention to this week. It just came out of committee, and the voting wasn’t along party lines. A lot of these tech issues aren’t traditional politics. They’re much more power in lobbying. So, I don’t think that’s the big deal here, weirdly, because everything else is.
But here, big tech has got a lot of people in their pockets—Republicans and Democrats. Privacy/security has a lot of proponents—Republics and Democrats. It doesn’t fall cleanly, which I think is an opportunity.
Jeff: Unpack that a little bit. Where do you think the opportunities are?
Bruce: Because when something doesn’t fall in neat political lines, you just don’t have the politics of sports overlay that permeates so much of what we’re trying to do in governance, that you actually can have some real debate because the major political divisions aren’t in play. Politics of sports has really done a lot of damage. Any time you can get away from that, I think you’re doing well.
Jeff: And finally, Bruce, what keeps you awake at night? What do you worry about the most in this whole arena?
Bruce: I tend to sleep pretty well. And I think it’s what I’ve said before. I really worry about corporate control of our society, that we’ve really seeding so much governance to corporations and it’s in weird places. The Paris Call is this giant international agreement on stability in cyberspace, how nations should use cyber weapons. It’s something signed by a bunch of countries. U.S. signed it last year—big deal. A lot of that work was sponsored by corporations.
Now, to me that’s worrisome that this is this major international inter-government treaty, really, that is being managed by corporate interests. I don’t like that. And it’s like if our nuclear [unintelligible 00:27:24] treaties were run by [unintelligible 00:27:27]. We would think that would be wrong. I think similarly, that’s wrong here. So back to more general, corporate interest are steering too much of society right now, and I think that is to our detriment.
Jeff: I wonder if that’s a pendulum that just historically, we know swings from one side to the other, and we will overtime see a change in this.
Bruce: Oh, I think that’s true. What’s different now—everything swings in a pendulum like that, and I think corporate government balance is one of those things, is the amplitudes are increasing. The amount of damage that can be done when the pendulum goes bad gets worse every time. Climate change is the big example. Corporate control is a freaking disaster for the planet. So, do we get to the point where swinging back and forth becomes dangerous because the amplitude of the pendulum is too great? I don’t know the answer to that question, but that is what I think about when I think about the pendulum swing.
Jeff: And to that, finally, what’s the one thing you would like to see government do that could really make a difference, if you had to pick one thing?
Bruce: I don’t—do I have to pick one thing? Get involved, pay attention, stop goofing off.
Jeff: Those are good things.
Bruce: [laughs]. I know. I’m not optimistic either. We’re doing our best.
Jeff: Bruce Schneier, I thank you so much for spending time with us.
Bruce: Thanks for having me. This was fun.
Jeff: Thank you, and thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another radio WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
Is the United States’ 246-year experiment in self-government over?
According to our guest on this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, novelist and culture writer Stephen Marche (The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future), the US is careening toward catastrophe.
Marche breaks down the global history of civil wars and insurrections and concludes that the US now possesses virtually all the kindling required for a civil war to ignite.
As the popular acceptance of secession grows on both sides, the numbers of would-be violent activists in the country far exceed those of any other historical period of division, including the 1960s. While the United States is no stranger to political divides, violence, or even assassination, it once, according to Marche, could rely on a faith in its fundamental institutions to mitigate those forces. Marche says this is no longer true, as those institutions are inherently weaker and trust in them has all but vanished.
Marche lays out several future scenarios, in all of which order is confronted by chaos — and chaos wins out.
He explains why things may well get worse by 2040, when America finally becomes a minority-majority nation. He argues that history shows no way out other than the decline and fall of the current political order, precipitated by very high levels of violence, and perhaps the rise of as many as four successor countries.
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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman.
History may not exactly be like chemistry, where if you mix certain elements together, you get a predictable result, but sometimes the idea is pretty similar. History tells us that if certain things happen, things like the loss of faith in institutions, an increasing wealth gap, hatred of the other amidst demographic shifts, speeded up changes that leave people behind, the repeated incompetence of government, and then add the catalyst of a demagogue or two, a big galvanizing lie, and a destabilizing external event like a pandemic or climate change, throw in the steroid of social media, and the result will be predictable.
Given those sets of elements, history tells us that civil war in the US can’t be far away. More than fearing the loss of democracy, we perhaps best be fearing the loss of the country as a singular unit. In other words, has the United States reached its sell-by date? We’re going to talk about this today with my guest, Stephen Marche. He’s a novelist, journalist, and culture writer who has written for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. His books include three previous novels, and his latest work of speculative nonfiction is The Next Civil War: Dispatches from America’s Future. It is my pleasure to welcome Stephen Marche here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast.
Stephen, thanks so much for joining us.
Stephen: Pleasure to be with you.
Jeff: Well, it’s great to have you here. Those of us that look at politics and watch all this as closely as we do, have we deluded ourselves into thinking things are worse than they are? Is there a great middle out there that is not as exercised about all of this?
Stephen: I think in some way, it’s the opposite. I think one of the lines in the book is that no matter how bad you think American politics looks on the surface, underneath, it’s much worse. No, I think just on the simple basis of hyper-partisanship, like the direct, political aspect of this, it’s hard to get much worse where you have Republicans who don’t want their children to be married to Democrats, Democrats who don’t want their children to be married to Republicans.
There’s a fascinating study about Thanksgiving dinners where people from– when people came home to different political areas than their own, their Thanksgiving dinner was about an hour and a half less. So bipartisan Thanksgiving dinner can’t even happen anymore. And of course, you just need to look at Washington to see complete paralysis and the inability of the government to do basic functions like appoint diplomats in a timely manner, guarantee their debt, pass budgets. Yes, it’s hard to see it getting much worse, actually.
Jeff: As we look at the contemporary history of the country, certainly we saw a great deal of division and violence that took place in the ’60s. The McCarthy year is set in the ’50s, of course, created an awful lot of division, pitted individuals and families against each other. We do have a history of this. What is your sense of what’s different this time?
Stephen: Well, I think the ’60s make a really interesting point of comparison because America really did burn during the ’60s. I don’t want to dismiss the violence and the level of conflict in the ’60s. One hundred forty cities burned after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. It was significant. But I would say the big difference was that in the ’60s, there were meaningful institutions to navigate through that chaos.
So, when you take an event like Watergate, at the time, it felt like turmoil, but in hindsight, what it is is the press discovering corruption, people believing the press about the corruption, politicians responding to the people believing in the corruption, and a bipartisan approach to keep the systems legitimate by dealing with Nixon. So none of those things would happen now.
All of the institutions are much weaker, both the private ones, like the press, but also the public ones like the government. And so, that creates a real possibility of violence. And then, of course, the size of the violent groups in America right now simply dwarfs what were the violent groups in the ’60s. The Weathermen were at most about 1,000 people. Now you have a minimum of 600,000 sovereign citizens, and, of course, the Oath Keepers have infiltrated pretty widely into American society.
Jeff: Of course, the other point is that if you took the ’60s and added on to that, the 24/7 news cycle, the speed of information, social media, all of the things that we’re dealing with today, the country wouldn’t have survived that.
Stephen: Yes. Well, it’s interesting. The social media argument, that’s when I looked into for the book, and one of the things that’s interesting is, of course, other countries have that same news cycle. Not quite to the extent that America has, but definitely they have social media sometimes much larger, but you don’t really have the same uptake of violent rhetoric. It’s really a question of what the social media latches on to.
In my own country, in Canada, there was an attempt to smear our then Foreign Minister, Chrystia Freeland, with these rumors about a Nazi grandfather, and the Conservative Party responded by saying, “This is nonsense, please ignore it. It should not be a news story. Please don’t spread this misinformation.” The story died, and we all went about our business as usual because we responded to the attempt to manipulate our information environment collectively with solidarity. Conservatives and liberals understood that ultimately they were on the same team. That is what you don’t have in America; that understanding that liberals and conservatives are on the same team.
Jeff: How much of what we hear about in talk of civil war, in talk of secession, is simply political rhetoric directed at a particular base? And how much of it is serious?
Stephen: That’s a really good question because it’s hard to tell, to be perfectly frank with you. I think there are very serious people planning secession, particularly in Texas, and they mean it. They’re like the Scottish National Party or the Catalan Independence Movement. They have real goals, and they also have a basic understanding of how difficult it is, and that this is a process that involves other institutions. It’s not just, “Don’t mess with Texas,” and raising your gun. It’s actually quite a complicated legal process.
Then you have Ted Cruz saying, “We’re going to take NASA and the military.” And that’s not serious at all. That’s just pure talk. It has nothing to do with reality. So I would say both. The popularity of secession is growing, and on both sides. California Democrats, it’s about 41 percent right now, and on Southern Republicans, it’s about 58 percent. So there is a real substance there, but it is also definitely abused for rhetorical purposes.
Jeff: One of the things that happens when people talk about civil war, is they think of it not in historical terms, not in the sense of how civil wars have played out throughout the world, but only in terms of the US Civil War, and people’s suiting up with blue and gray uniforms. And in many ways, that conception is so misleading in this conversation today.
Stephen: Absolutely. What we’re talking about here, and I think it’s not just me, there are other people who think about the civil war, is insurgencies, or just a tolerance for political violence, and a normalization of political violence, and a sense that political violence is what determines the outcomes of government. And that, of course, leads to– what we’re really talking about here is not South versus North, or people in uniforms or even set armies. We’re talking about the forces of order versus the forces of chaos, and the forces of chaos are winning.
Jeff: To what extent do you think that the kindling is certainly there but that it’s going to take an extraordinary event to trigger something more dramatic?
Stephen: Well, that’s my argument, is that if you look at the political landscape and other things, like the environmental landscape, the high levels of inequality, vertical and horizontal inequality, the hyper-partisanship, all of these trends point towards civil war. And instead of giving a treatise on those trends, I instead encapsulate them in these little scenarios that are sparked by inciting incidents.
But those inciting incidents could come from anywhere. They’re not of interest necessarily in themselves. I think America is one spectacular act away from real violence. January 6 was a beginning, I think. But even that has not caused– the January 6 did not cause for a massive collective sense of, “okay, we have to deal with the crisis in our democracy.” In fact, it just led to deeper hyper-partisanship, and it caused the problems approaching civil war to be exacerbated.
So, in those conditions, I think, yes, America is really one spectacular act of violence away from the normalization of political violence and widespread turmoil.
Jeff: What about the possibility? And we’ve seen some of this with respect to January 6th, that this kind of action turns off a lot of people, moves some people away from paying attention to the political process at all if they just shut down.
Stephen: Well, there is a little evidence of that, but the other process that tends to happen is that, it’s called complimentary radicalization, to give the boring technical term, where what you’re in America is a reverse pendulum, where instead of things swinging to the middle, as things swing out, they get more extreme. And they get more extreme and more extreme and more extreme until you have President Trump, and you have more extreme right-wingers and more extreme left-wingers, and they radicalize each other.
So, it does turn people off politics, but it also has a strong effect where it actually exacerbates tensions on the other side, which then moves to more extremism on your own side. So, it’s a really nasty kind of spiral that happens. I would love to think that these events like January 6th would cause people to wake up and be like, “This is ridiculous, we can’t do this anymore,” but that’s not really what happens.
Jeff: To what extent does history teach us potential ways out of it, whether it is leadership, whether it is boredom, whether it is a change of political ideas? Talk a little bit about what you learned in that regard.
Stephen: Well, unfortunately, when America reaches the point that it’s in right now, what history teaches us is that it tends to lead to decline and fall, and it tends to lead to really high levels of violence. Now, I think America is America, and it is different from other examples in the past, and it’s different from its own past, and it is the country of change. But I will say that I do have hopes for America, but the hope is not that things are just going to work themselves out. That hope is gone, that train has left. What is required is really a rethinking of the structure of government, and even whether it makes sense to be a union anymore.
And I think the threat of civil war is quite real, and the possibility of violence is quite horrific. And so I think the questions that America needs to face now are the most profound of its political life that is based since the first Civil War. And the way out of this is to try and get to a point where you’re talking about those big issues rather than fighting them.
Jeff: What does contemporary civil war look like to you?
Stephen: Anarchy. Anarchy unleashed upon the world. It fragments very quickly. Insurgencies lead to response. They lead to responses, which leads to more insurgency. Violence breeds violence. You can barely keep track of it. I tried to get a sense of what that was like by going over the Iraq insurgencies and the Syrian insurgencies. It’s more or less impossible to keep track. Even the record keeping of it is almost impossible because groups fragment into tinier and tinier tribes, and they represent their own fears and their own hopes on an ever more fragmented level.
So yes, a modern civil war is a horrible, horrible eventuality. I have talked to some American media people who’ve asked me, “Do you think civil war might be a good thing? It might resolve questions?” No. It is strictly a horror. And then that’s why I think these kind of profound political questions are going to emerge even though they’re so unpalatable, and no one wants to face them, because the alternative is just too sickening, really, to contemplate.
Jeff: Does the level of violence have to increase in order to even create a real wake-up call?
Stephen: I don’t know. I would’ve thought, and having been through this, I keep waiting for the wake-up call and I don’t see it. I wrote the book as a wake-up call because I wanted to show what– But there’ve already been tanks on the streets of Washington on the 4th of July. There’s already been January 6th. So, those are pretty enormous wake-up calls to me. I’m not sure you’re going to get better ones.
Jeff: One would’ve thought that some external galvanizing event, the pandemic being a potential example, certainly 9/11, for like two minutes brought the country together. That some external, existential event might bring the country together in a way that provides an off ramp to this.
Stephen: Yes. That’s not going to happen. It’s very clear that’s not going to happen because when you have people at Trump events wearing, “I’d rather be Russian than Democrat,” that really says it all to me. You also have these massive events just get interpreted so quickly in a different way by both sides. January 6th, like Rush Limbaugh was on later that day saying, “The heroes at Concord were violent too.” And when you look at the numbers– the fact that the cop who died at the Capitol riots, only one party attended his minute of silence, his memorial. This is a man who gave his life for the physical security of the members of this institution, and they could not even agree to honor him.
So, I think one thing is that I think people like Joe Biden are kind of, they keep hoping that somehow sanity will snap back and people will recognize that these institutions matter more than partisan interest, but that is simply not going to happen. And to hope for it is a vain hope.
Jeff: What does the country look like within the context of a civil war? How does it play out, in your view?
Stephen: Well, getting an answer to that was unfortunately actually quite possible because there are many, many experts on counterinsurgency in the United States because America’s been fighting counter-insurgent conflicts unsuccessfully for 70 years. And the lesson that they taught me, that they shared with me, was that, it’s either, there’s two options: it’s either basically impossible to win a counterinsurgency, or it’s outright impossible. It’s really, those are the two schools of thought.
What you would see as large amounts of imprisonment. Already America is with a large number of prisons, it would be more so. Cities would be segmented, there would be lots of gates between neighborhoods. There would be barriers between communities. There would be unclear lines of authority. What sheriffs would decide to do could be considered flouting federal authority. And you would have constant battles between levels of government. You would have just large tribal groups of people armed in militias who essentially impose their own laws in their own neighborhood. That is what a civil war looks like, and it is extremely ugly.
And the government responses to it are almost impossible to know because almost every response just leads to increases in illegitimacy, the sense of illegitimacy, and from there, into more violence.
Jeff: Of course, political assassination is often a part of civil war.
Stephen: Yes. In America, as the secret service, a secret service agent told me, he said in America, assassination is part of the political process. It’s so common that one out of eleven presidents has been assassinated. I think with Biden it may actually be a little smaller than that. But that’s a high number, one in eleven. You get danger pay if you were even remotely close to that in any other line of work.
The question I think is really not the assassination in itself, because America has survived many, many presidential assassinations. The question is what would the response to it be? And I think at this point in history, a dead president would not be a cause for collective mourning. It would actually be more a driver of hyper partisanship.
Jeff: How does the rest of the world respond to this? And what role does the rest of the world play?
Stephen: Well, we’re all going to have to rethink our entire foreign policies. American military might, and American commitment to liberal democracy has been the linchpin of the world order for, since the end of the Second World War. And we were given the greatest series of international institutions ever on that basis, and they’re starting to fray. I think you can see the wolves that Russia and Ukraine is exactly what that looks like. They know that America’s weak, and they know that the institutions in NATO are vulnerable because the system that we had, which was internationally agreed on consensus backed up by American might, is falling because America is falling, and America is entering a period of chaos where it will be unable to provide answers for the rest of the world. What that means for each country is different. For Canada, we’re in real trouble, because so much of our trade, so much of our security, we’re basically an attachment to the United States. So, we’re in trouble.
For a country like Germany, it’s probably going to lead to them being more powerful. It’s probably going to lead to them having a bigger say in NATO, whether they want it or not, whether it’s good for them or not. They’re going to have to step up and actually take a more prominent role in international affairs. Seems true of Japan, which you can already see by their increased military budgets and their leadership on TPP, and so on.
America is going through a phase of real chaos where no one will be able to predict what it can do. During the Trump years, Canada was called “enemies of the American people” by senior members of the State Department. That freaks people out. They don’t forget that when Trump is gone. And so we’re going to have to find a way without big brother, and it’s going to be very tricky.
Jeff: To what extent would an unraveling in the US, some kind of a civil war, send a signal to insurgent groups and other countries that if it could happen here, it could happen anywhere, and give them cause to push forward with their own agenda?
Stephen: Well, I’m sure it will encourage them, but the breakdown in America, it’s very specific to America. It has to do with the political system, which really is increasingly no longer providing a sense of legitimacy and representation. You cannot say that about Canada. There are, of course, far right-wing people here and far left-wing people with violent intentions. But what you don’t have is a general sense in the populace that say the Supreme Court is a fraud. No one believes that here. And no one really believes that in England or Europe either.
There are certainly far right movements in there, but the breakdown in America is systematic and particular to conditions within it. So, I don’t really see it as part of a worldwide trend. I think it is specific to the United States.
Jeff: Talk about the role that business plays in all of this, because certainly the economic consequences of something like this could be staggering, and nobody has a greater interest in preventing that than the higher echelons of the business community.
Stephen: Is that true? I don’t even know if that’s true. You could make an argument that chaos in government serves them better as companies, especially hugely globalized companies like the major tech companies. I don’t see a lot of sense of responsibility on the part of Facebook to actually fix its algorithm. I just have not seen it. Of course, they make the right noises, but they’re definitely conscious that they’re part of the problem, and they don’t really take the preventative steps to try and save their own country.
But I don’t know. I assume they probably feel as powerless as everybody else, though, too, right? What is happening here are structural phenomena, well below the possibility of any business, even Facebook, really, to address in a meaningful way. And so that creates a sense of despair and hopelessness. I don’t think business people, even the people at Facebook, necessarily want any of this to happen. But I don’t know if they know how to step in and help.
Jeff: I was thinking less about the tech companies and more about companies and finance, companies in energy, really global multinational companies, and the stake that they have in this.
Stephen: Well, a lot of the funding of the far right groups comes from very prominent business leaders. We’ve seen that. But on the other hand, the same could be said for Democratic donors. To be frank, I didn’t really ask business people about that. The problem that they face, that the economy faces, is this incredibly heightened level of inequality. And no one really has the political solution to that. And they’re very hard to find. The solutions to inequality are all extremely unattractive to everyone.
While I wouldn’t blame business for the state that the United States is in, on the other hand, the particular economic system that we are in right now is definitely a contributing factor to the possibility of a civil war, because it creates these unbelievably high levels of inequality, which are at French Revolution levels.
Jeff: To what extent do you see the failure of leadership, of any high profile leadership emerging to address this as one of the causes of the potential problem?
Stephen: Well, I have two answers for that. One is that I think the problems here are structural. On the other hand, when I see someone like Senator Hawley raising his fists to rioters about to sack his own institution, and this is a man who has had every potential privilege, a graduate of Ivy League institutions, I do have to wonder if any country can survive when it’s best people try to deliberately forget about the sanctity of their institutions.
I find that that’s actually one of the mysteries. I don’t know what is motivating them, and I don’t completely understand how they could let that happen. I mean, how people with so much invested in the system could oversee its destruction for motives that seem shallow at best, like tiny little career advantages. It just seems like– well, I described it in The Atlantic– a suicide of the elites, and I think that’s the right phrase.
Jeff: Is that the problem, though, that because of this sense of American exceptionalism, and this misguided notion that prevails oftentimes about the country, that those people don’t see it, that they just cannot believe the possibility of it?
Stephen: Yes. That might be it. I think there’s definitely a sense that when you’ve been taught your whole life, that America is the solution to history, it’s very hard to just think of yourself as potentially one of its victims. And when you’re taught that your own government is the ideal form of government, when it’s very clear that it’s not working, it becomes very hard to come up with solutions when you have this idolization of your own failures, of the cause of your own failures.
I find the worship of the Constitution in the United States to be quite fascinating because every single group that I talk to, from Oath Keepers, to national separatists, to far left groups and so on, they all worship the Constitution, but it’s a completely different document in each of their minds. It’s a very old document that essentially has become the meanings that are ascribed to it. And it’s very hard, under those conditions, to see the crisis you’re facing that’s right in front of your eyes.
Jeff: Given all the people you’ve talked to, given the time you’ve spent looking at this, what is the timeframe you imagine?
Stephen: That, I really don’t know. I will say that the date that sticks in my mind is 2040. 2040 is a pretty big date in my mind because that’s when America will become a majority-minority country; that’s when white people will no longer be more than 50 percent of the country. That’s a huge cause of everything that I’m describing here. The sense of dominance from the privileged group being threatened from the rise of people below causes political violence all over the world. You can see it in India, you can see it in Africa, you can see it everywhere. And now you’re seeing it in America.
And then of course, in 2042, the best estimate is that about 30 percent of the country will control 68 percent of the Senate. So I think you really will have a state where America is, by then, like a quasi-democracy. It will no longer feel to ordinary Americans that their government represents a popular will. And, of course, that’s the function of democracy, to give that impression.
Jeff: What about generational change, and the sense that when you look out towards 2040, you’re really looking at an entirely different generation running the country?
Stephen: I don’t know if that’s true. People would’ve said by 2022, there’d be a different generation running the country, but it’s still the same old generation running the country. Although, to be clear, generational markers on a whole lot of functions, like racial resentment, and direct causes like that, there’s almost no generational trend for that. It feels like there is in daily life, but there really is almost no metric that registers that, which I think is really important to acknowledge. It’s not like young people get less racist. That’s not actually what happens. I think that the demographic trend that really matters is the one I mentioned earlier, which is that America becoming a majority-minority country, because that is generational change. And that is going to reshape America one way or the other.
Jeff: To what extent do you think economics will play a role in this? If the country is doing well, if markets are strong, if the country is awash in money, that it would forestall this, or maybe even eliminate it over time. And to the opposite extent, to the point that economics becomes a problem, we go into a deep recession or worse, that it really speeds this up?
Stephen: I had a really fascinating talk in the book with a guy who deals with inequality at the IMF. So, this is part of the Washington consensus. This is right-wing stuff. This is Wall Street Journal economic stuff. And they’ve recognized that the problem with inequality, with these huge elevated levels of inequality, is that it makes recovering from crashes really hard. First of all, it makes growth diminish earlier, but it also makes restarting growth a lot harder. So now that we’re all awash in money, incidentally, this is money that has been massively printed at quantitative easing over the past since 2008, which was considered an extreme emergency measure before 2008. Now, they’re just pumping money on a regular basis in a way that is probably not sustainable as these high levels of inflation are showing.
But the real problem comes when the crash comes, because this is capitalism, it works by crashes and booms. It’s not really a prediction to say there will be a crash. The question is, what happens after the next crash, and is there enough unity in the country? Is there enough solidarity in the country to come up with a coherent plan to get out of it? All of the far right people that I talk to, all of those movements, they all start in 2008. They all start in the market crash, and they all start with essentially the explosion of the housing market. The problem is, the money in America is really good right now, but money like this doesn’t last forever, there’s always a crash. The question is, what happens after the next crash? And that’s very troubling, because that requires a lot of solidarity, it requires a sense of fairness in the economic order, and that’s missing.
Jeff: Stephen Marche. The book is The Next Civil War: Dispatches From The American Future.
Stephen, I thank you so much for spending time with us.
Stephen: Real pleasure to talk to you.
Jeff: Thank you.
And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another radio WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman.
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In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast we talk with bestselling author Daniel Pinchbeck about the future of cryptocurrency.
With its founding roots in the 2008 financial crash, crypto evolved as a way to decentralize finance and disrupt what was thought to be a corrupt financial system. Instead, it’s become its own speculative asset class, spawning an entire ecosystem of new financial products.
Pinchbeck, the author of Breaking Open the Head, 2012: The Return of the Quetzalcoatl, and his own substack, examines how new products like NFTs and crypto tokens, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and smart contracts have the potential to enhance capitalism’s worst excesses — or possibly become the basis of a whole new system of finance.
We examine why the political left is suspicious of crypto, and how it fits perfectly with the libertarian worldview.
In an era in which crypto seems to be moving us toward the ability to monetize everything, Pinchbeck is hopeful that these new tools can still be sculpted and shaped for the greater societal good.
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Full Text Transcript:
(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. Even though it’s taken a hit this week, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, Dows, the blockchain they ride on are still, in the view of many, the decentralized financial instruments of the future. Even if they never replace the fiat currencies of nations, their roles in markets are here to stay.
And crypto, like everything else, has become politicized. You would think that an asset class that is almost pure speculation and not even about owning anything would be immune from the primal forces of partisanship. But no, both the left and the libertarian right have very different views of what crypto and its sister products on the blockchain and Web 3.0 should be.
Few have been harder than the left, who sees in it some kind of pure evil of the market. The good news is that when my guest — author, thinker, and all-around wiseman — Daniel Pinchbeck talks about the politics of crypto, he also helps us to understand what it really is, why it matters and why to the folks on all political sides it should matter in the future.
Daniel Pinchbeck has long been considered a Renaissance man and ahead of his time. He’s the author of the books Breaking Open the Head, The Return to Quetzalcoatl, Notes from the Edge of Time, How Soon is Now, and When Plants Dream. He saw around corners long before many others with respect to our ecological crisis and was a one-time executive director of the Center for Planetary Culture.
His essays and articles have appeared in every major publication. He’s spoken at conferences around the world and had his work featured in a 2010 documentary. He currently writes the Daniel Pinchbeck Newsletter on Substack. Daniel, thanks so much for joining us and welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast.
Daniel Pinchbeck: Oh, thanks for having me, Jeff.
Jeff: Why has there been such profound criticism, particularly from the left — and all parts of the left, towards crypto at this point?
Daniel: I’ve been toggling around, but I do really sympathize with a lot of the criticism. I mean, it’s a lot to unpack, but, in 2008, there was this major financial crash, the global economic system went down, and we saw that central banks could just create money as needed, something they hadn’t told us about when we wanted social programs and so on.
And I think that that led to a profound mistrust in the financial system, also destroying a lot of people’s primary asset. And around that time, Bitcoin was issued, and it was definitely issued as a challenge to the hegemony of the money system and the central banks. And many people suspected that behind it was a right-wing libertarian philosophy.
In fact, there’s a good book by this guy, David Golumbia, Software as Ideology [The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism] I think is what it’s called, where he looks at the politics of Bitcoin as something that, if it was to become super popular, would challenge the centrality and sovereignty and hegemony of nation states and limit their capacity to raise funds both for good and for bad, whether for building armies, or for building housing, or health programs.
So, libertarians tend to be people who prefer a strong emphasis on private liberty, a strong emphasis on private property, and government is reduced to the police force for those who have resources. So, I’m personally very much against the libertarian worldview, and unfortunately, it seems that a lot of the new cryptos are basically just amplifying that.
So, for instance, I’ve actually just been studying more and learning more about, for instance, Ethereum, started by this kid, Vitalik Buterin, who’s a very genius cryptographer, mathematician, programmer. But some of the early money to create Ethereum was a grant from Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel is one of the PayPal mafia right-wing billionaires who is Trump’s science advisor.
So yes, there’s a lot of suspicion on the left. I mean, where I see the problem is that the global financial system is deeply corrupt and basically supports the extraction, the following of capital from the masses to the small group who happen to control certain institutions and corporations and so on. And it’s a system that’s getting worse and worse, and it’s directly related to our planetary apocalypse.
The fact that we’re facing ecological catastrophe, Armageddon, even extinction, and so on. So, we need to flip this economic system in some way. And when you look at the blockchain, which is simply distributed ledger technology, you could define different mechanisms for exchanging value, for recognizing the things that corporations now see as externalities like the system that then understands the importance of carbon and gives that accounting.
So blockchain could allow for that, but, at the moment, it’s much more being used for creating new speculative asset classes that really have very little foundations or fundamentals. Although some of them are very seductive and attractive for people who are seeing that their savings in relationship to inflation, they’re going below water, they’re in debt.
So, the fact that crypto is this new asset class where you have the capacity, if you’re extremely lucky or get it early, to make high yields or extremely exponential returns, is of course very seductive to many people. But unfortunately, if you look at it as a whole rather than just as individual success stories, it seems to be tilting back more towards supporting the super wealthy than the average person.
Jeff: One of the things that you had said could be of some interest: Are these distributed autonomous organizations, Dows, the one that was created to buy this copy of the US Constitution, that those instruments, that that idea could have some potential in terms of dealing with some of the broken aspects of the system?
Daniel Pinchbeck: Yes. I mean, that’s my hope. I actually want to start one as an experiment for the creative community, but I think you have to be very careful because this whole thing about smart contracts… So basically the idea is that the people who are very fascinated with crypto tend to be people who see that centralization is one issue.
Although the question of whether cryptos are actually decentralized, or if it’s actually like a fraudulent concept, is an interesting one. But then also the idea of trust, that basically they feel that the best thing when we have a system, that in a sense is trustless, or in a sense guarantees that you don’t even need to have trust in other people because it’s all being dealt with by code in a very mathematical way.
Like if I get paid for something and somebody did some graphics, they’re counting on me to pay them for those graphics or whatever. If it was done as a smart contract in the blockchain, those royalties can be split automatically. So that’s very interesting. And also, with non-fungible tokens or NFTs, which are digital certificates of ownership, similarly, they can have smart contracts built into them.
So, if I create a work of art and I sell it as an NFT, then every time it’s resold to somebody else I could get 10 percent of that. And that’s built in and guaranteed. So as a creative person, I then share in the wealth as my work gets more popular or more valuable. So yesm distributed autonomous organizations are essentially creating organizations that are organized around smart contracts rather than legal contracts.
And this has some interesting pluses, but also some dangerous minuses. I mean, the problem is that our traditional legal contracts protect us in certain respects. I mean for instance, let’s say somebody pays rent on their apartment every month and one month they don’t have the rent. They lost their job or something, or they had big bills, generally you can go, first of all, it’ll take months to close, to evict you, you have to go through all the process.
There’s some humane legal situation there. You can argue if it’s fair for the landlord, fair for the tenant, but there’s some fungible gray area. With the smart contracts, it wouldn’t be like that. So, it’d be 12:01 on January 1st, you didn’t pay your rent, the door automatically locks you out and you’re done; or maybe even a drone appears on your doorstep and points a gun at you and says, “It’s time to go.”
So, we can see how these smart contracts, the rigidity of them could lock us into an even more… a dangerously unjust world that would really would be even more to the benefit of large capital holders and large institutions. So, there’s legitimate concerns about it. However, this idea that you could bring people together, have a distributed, decentralized mechanism for making decisions together, and then a vault where value is stored, and how that is a portion, it can also be described democratically. That’s all somewhat interesting.
Jeff: One of the other things that you talk about are the way in which blockchain currencies, or blockchains in general, [are] melding with things like artificial intelligence and all this talk about the metaverse and what the dangers are as all these things start to come together.
Daniel: We have to ask ourselves, technology is very intoxicating and seductive and addictive. We can have to step back and ask ourselves what have been the good and bad qualities of the last 20 or 30 years in terms of what technology has done for us and done to us. And as we saw recently with Frances Haugen testimonies around Facebook, these companies are well aware that they’re creating something that’s as addictive as tobacco or heroin, particularly for young people, and you are seeing among young people a huge amount of apathy, a huge amount of mental illness, suicide, and so on, and some of that is fueled by the social competition through Instagram, and sense of lack of self-worth around body image, and so on, which these technologies fuel.
But the tendency of this technological system is to keep pushing us further and further into virtual and digital realms, and in itself could be seen as something that we need to start questioning. But I’m intrigued by the potential of these immersive metaverses, these 3D, 4D artificial realities, and so on, but I’m concerned about the level to which we’re not facing up to this ecological emergency, and also the rapid reassembling of authoritarianism around the world, and the attrition that we’re seeing with liberal democracies. And some of it, I think, is just because people feel so disconnected and apathetic, and this technology used in certain ways could ameliorate that, but instead, it tends to pull people more and more into these artificial realities.
Jeff: The other thing that it does, and NFTs are perhaps the best example of this, is it takes further this idea of monetizing everything.
Daniel: Yes. That’s one of the big dangers. And I do recommend, if people want to explore this deeper, yes, as you mentioned, there’s my work. I’ve been looking at… Daniel Pinchbeck on Substack.com. It’s one of a number of issues that I address. Some of them are more mystical, or psychedelics and shamanism, or even conspiratorial, looking at thinkers like RK Jr., and other stuff, trying to put a critical framework on that type of stuff. But there’s a project called The Crypto Syllabus, which is very interesting. It’s a very high-level intellectual one, then there’s this guy, I think it’s called “folding intelligence,” which I just watched this incredible two-hour video that he did really going through in-depth… the problems with crypto and the dangers of it.
The model of Ethereum is the financialization of everything, like fractional ownership is a future potential. There is an interesting book, interesting in the sense of horrible from my perspective, called Radical Markets which is an MIT economist that has done some work with Vitalik, the founder of Ethereum, and the idea is, in the future, everything will be constantly auctioned. So, your house, your suitcase, your watch, whoever bids highest for it would have access to it. I assume there’s some safeguards on it, but in practice, that’s the idea. And just as I’ve written in the pieces, I admit that I’m a leftist, but more anarchist than anything else. But going back to Karl Marx, where he talked about in the original declarations of independence in the US and France, we enshrined certain freedoms and we denied other freedoms that maybe we should have thought more about.
So, we gave everybody the freedom to practice religion rather giving them freedom from religion. And we gave people freedom to trade rather than having freedom from trade. So personally, I would prefer this point freedom from trade, but a lot of this stuff with the way the crypto is pointing and the NFTs and so on, it would be trade would become an intrinsic part of day-to-day daily existence, even more than it is now.
Jeff: Is it your sense that the crypto world is here to stay?
Daniel: It’s an interesting question. I was feeling that was the case. Once again, for me stepping back, and I wrote about this in my 2017 book, How Soon is Now, people are very invested across the board in capitalism. And it’s hard for people to believe that the system might have an end date or terminus. Unfortunately, capitalism is coming into direct conflict with the life support systems of the planet, and it is immediately threatening our own future lives and certainly the lives of future generations. And that’s because it’s an economic model that, as I mentioned before, ignores what they call externality, such as the integrity of ecosystems, or the health of local indigenous communities, the values that communities might have [is] based on constant growth and exploitation.
So as a dynamic system, money is created as bank debt. So, the debt has to be paid back with interest. The constant growth of interest requires constant development, and discovery, and penetration of new markets, so that even with this idea of these endless vaccine boosters, for instance, it’s like they’ve turned our immune system into an operating system that becomes like a new market to exploit. Water once was available freely, it was delicious… now people buy it in plastic. So, capitalism has this inexorable push to keep developing, to keep growing, to keep exploiting. And as I said, the natural resources of the planet can’t really handle that anymore.
So, we need to transition to a new economic system that is not going to make people very happy. But if the choice is extinction or metamorphosis, then hopefully we choose metamorphosis. We have to put the breaks on a lot of the development, the endless growth, the endless consumption that has become the basis of our system. And so, I think that blockchain, other forms of crypto could be devised that would allow for a positive transition, but those are not the ones that are being used at the moment or promoted at the moment. The ones that are being promoted are more like speculative asset classes.
Jeff: And then, of course, there’s the ecological damage, the ecological cost of mining crypto.
Daniel: The problem is that particularly Bitcoin and Ethereum are based on what’s called “proof of work” mining. And so it requires massive computing power with all these… basically, to make a transaction, the computers have to guess an extremely complex number or completes a very complex mathematical equation or whatever. So, these gigantic rings and by some, I guess 0.55 percent of the world’s electricity is now going into Bitcoin mining. That’s a little insane considering the problems we’re already having with energy consumption, that Bitcoin itself is consuming as much as a small country like Finland, or maybe even a larger country.
The advocates for Bitcoin have a number of clever ways of arguing this. One argument they make is that Bitcoin mining tends to use renewable sources or even find access like excess sources of renewable energy that wasn’t really being utilized properly in the system, whether it’s like hydroelectric, or geothermal, or whatever, but I think it’s a dumb argument because we know that the Bitcoin mining is already using more power I believe than all the solar panels in the world. So, it’s certainly a regression and it’s also, as we can see, there’s not really a great social utility. Ultimately, Bitcoin is an open-source technological platform that is a certain set of code that a number of people have agreed upon as having this value. There isn’t really an intrinsic value behind it. And so ultimately, it is like a Ponzi scheme, a marketing scam in some way in that if people lose their belief in it or their interest in it, it just disintegrates.
And one of the points that Bitcoin advocates make is that the fiat currency is also speculative and virtual, and doesn’t really exist. That’s really not true, but I totally hate the way that if we look at the 2008 financial crash, and how we really saw how manipulated and corrupt the financial system is, and it’s really a problem, but it’s really cost America its standing in the world, which we’re now seeing as a massive global emergency as we see China and Russia, these authoritarian nations, becoming more aggressive and more forceful, partially because America has showed itself to be so corrupt and hypocritical that it’s lost a lot of its standing in the world.
But still, a fiat currency is in theory backed by all of the assets of a nation. So, part of the reason you could also argue that, yes, the US dollar is partially very valuable because it’s been the Petrodollar. They made a deal with the Middle East. We made a deal with the Middle East in the ’70s that the US dollar would be the medium of transaction for oil, so there’s that aspect to it. Beyond that, there’s also the fact that the US dollar is backed by 200 years of legal institutions, code institutions, highways, bridges, etcetera, forests, public parks, and so on. Whereas Bitcoin is really just backed by the collective belief in it in this particular iteration of this mathematical code.
The other thing that’s interesting about crypto is that the crypto can always be forked. So, somebody could create their own version of Bitcoin if they have the technical know-how, or their own version of a theory, but this has also already happened several times, or many times. And so that intrigues me because maybe you could figure out a way to create a Bitcoin. I mean, in some of the stuff that I studied, like Bernard Lietaer, who’s an economist and wrote a book called The Future of Money; he argued that one of the things that would get us out of our disaster would be a global trading currency that has a negative interest or demurrage charge.
So, when using that currency, there’s no incentive to hoard it or to hold on to it, you actually want to keep circulating it. So you could, for instance, create a Bitcoin-like currency as a global trading currency that loses value as people hold on to it, so they’re more incentivized to share than to hoard. So, yes, I guess that’s my answer.
Jeff: What is your sense of how China’s dealing with crypto right now trying to exercise more government control, and even trying to create their own digital currency?
Daniel: Sure, well, that’s been one of the concerns that many people, the progressive… well, actually, I mean, even on the right, also, it’s a shared concern, is that where this stuff is heading is very dangerous. I mean, China has already, of course, created this social credit system, where they develop this very totalitarian grip over the population because if you step out of line, they’re going to stop your kids from being able to go to school, or stop you from being able to travel, or whatever. So China is very troublesome, worrisome I guess, on many levels, if you’re interested in the future of democracy and human freedom, and so on.
I mean, they’ve developed a very, very powerful social credit system, which means that if people speak out against the government, or do anything, they won’t be able to go to… their kids won’t be able to go to school, they won’t be able to travel. Unfortunately, technology with its surveillance capacities, makes this a lot easier. The problem is that digital currencies would actually make that even way easier, because at the moment, if you say something on your YouTube or your Twitter that the government doesn’t like, and you say it loudly enough, they might shut off your channel.
But in the future, if it’s a digital currency, you can certainly have your money also shut off so you wouldn’t really be able to survive. That’s like a conservative look at the World Economic Forum, and how they always invite the Chinese Premier to open the conference and so on. There seems to be a coordination of interests among the power elite. Yes, so centralized digital currencies are an issue if you’re progressing from a left-wing, or also from a right-wing perspective, actually, they’re very dangerous because they could allow for a lot more control over people’s activities.
Jeff: Where is the nexus then, as you see it, in the West, between digital currency, between crypto, between the financialization of everything, as we were talking about all these attempts to do that, and the rise of authoritarianism, and the waning of democracy?
Daniel: As I mentioned, David Golumbia’s book, The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism, I think it’s called. There’s implicit bias in these cryptocurrencies towards this right-wing libertarian philosophy, which is very much based on private control, direct ownership, and then shrinking the government. I mean, the whole idea of Bitcoin, if it was to become the global reserve currency, it’s a currency that’s limited to 21 million coins, tokens, which shouldn’t be divisible when you couldn’t speculate it the same way that a country like the US wouldn’t be able to go massively trillions upon trillions of dollars into debt if they were forced to use Bitcoin as the reserve currency.
It has an implicit social bias, but there are some people who argue that it would prevent war because countries wouldn’t be able to build up a huge debt to buy or to build a huge war machine. But it would also prevent all sorts of ambitious social programs and healthcare initiatives and so on, education initiatives. Beyond that, I think in itself, it’s become… it’s a distraction. I mean, I feel back in 2011, there was the Occupy movement, there was the beginning to be a strong realization of the need for a new direction. And unfortunately, this crypto Ethereum came in.
In a way, it’s beautiful, it’s inspired a lot of younger people, a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of tech innovators, they’re building all these new things. But they’re not really, there’s no… there’s very little effort, I would say, to use the technology in this systematic design-science way to address our emergency issues right now. That includes this growing authoritarianism, and also the ecological disaster that we’re facing. And from an authoritarian perspective, I don’t think crypto is, well, I mean, it is interesting; you have countries like China banning it for whatever reason, or putting tight controls over it. But, in general, it seems to work well with authoritarian regimes.
Jeff: And I guess what one wonders is, one, whether it collapses as suddenly, it’s starting to lose value now, and all these people that have been fascinated by it suddenly lose interest, or, in fact, there’s a whole “Crypto 2.0” that begins to address some of these issues that you’re talking about, and that it becomes a problem-solving mechanism, perhaps, at some point, to address some of these global crises.
Daniel: Yes, I think that… that’s why I’m happy that you invited me on, and I’m excited that whether it’s this “folding intelligence” video, or The Crypto Syllabus, or David Golumbia’s book. There needs to be a much deeper conscious awareness of the public around what’s happening, what the dangers really are for this, and potentially what some of the opportunities are. Because it’s still something that can be sculpted and shaped… like Facebook and Google didn’t have to take the form that it took back in 2009 or 2010. Now we’re at the nascent stage or something, and essentially, the idea of Web 3.0 is that it’s going to do for money and finance what Web 2.0 did for media and communications.
And when we step back and ask ourselves, “What did it do?” In some ways, it’s positive. I like the fact that as an independent creator, I can use Kickstarter, or Substack, or people can create their own media brand really easily. It’s led to very much a fragmentation. I mean, there’s something also good about having trustable, coherent resources. It’s also led to fake news, it’s led to filter bubble effects, where people really obligate the information that’s from their own little thing, then their biases get exacerbated, and suddenly they’re mind-controlled by some right-wing group, or terrorist group or something.
There’s a lot of stuff we haven’t even started out with Web 2.0, and then bring that same type of disaggregation to the money and financial world definitely has a lot of dangers to it. And so, yes, and we’re seeing the way this thing is going, but there do seem to be these cycles of expansion and collapse, but the collapse doesn’t necessarily kill the beast, it just means that it has to take a slightly different form. I mean, one of the big points of failure of the whole crypto industry could be the stable coins.
And this is something that I don’t fully understand, but I know that because banks don’t really want to have low crypto, the crypto world created something called Tether, which is a crypto coin, which is indexed to the US dollar. So one Tether in theory equals $1, and Tether is in theory backed by these huge reserves of currency that the people who run Tether in theory have somewhere safe.
But in reality, it turns out that this is highly speculative that they claim to have… they would need to have like $85 billion in reserves. It’s not clear they even have 3 percent of that, and currency reserves that they have taken in they’ve also used to their own speculative investments. So, there is the possibility that the crypto thing could collapse in a very similar way to the subprime market collapse in 2008. And that would have a lot of repercussions. But to be honest with you, I think I would have positive ones because it doesn’t necessarily mean that this industry is going away. But there are a lot of problems with what’s happening right now.
Jeff: It’s a little bit more like the .com bubble that reemerged as Web 2.0 and became a different product, and we could see the same thing here with crypto.
Daniel: I think it’s going to be hard now to stop the basic movement towards the fragmentation of financial assets. I mean, there are so many of these coins. And I guess one question is how a regulatory framework develops. This is not anywhere near my area of specialty. But one reason that crypto has been lightly regulated is they take this fine line between being seen as securities, or speculative assets, or being currencies. So, they claim themselves to be currencies, when it benefits them or assets, securities, when it benefits them. And so, they’ve towed this very interesting line up to this point.
Jeff: We also have the question of how the existing banking system may be pushing back against this.
Daniel: Well, I don’t think it’s pushing back against it. I think, unfortunately, what’s happened is some of the major investment banks, the same ones that caused the 2008 subprime crash, the same ones who are always looking for fantastic returns, have enthusiastically embraced crypto. And I think that’s probably, unfortunately, part of the reason why it’s not really being regulated very effectively. And, for instance, if you look at Tether, it seems like it would be obvious that that would need to be tested in some kind of regulatory framework.
Similar number of people I know were involved with iOS, which literally raised $4 billion based on an idea of “proof of stake” rather than “proof of work,” which means that instead of having a totally distributed, decentralized way of approving transactions, there was like 21 nodes, validators that would move between different players in the iOS ecosystem over time. But as far as I understand it, iOS after several years, there’s no product, the thing doesn’t work. And what happened to that $4 billion?
Yeah, so it’ll be interesting to see. This is another question: We already learned that the corrupt financial system is very, very deeply corrupt; are they just extending their corruption in this area? It is, as I said, very tantalizing for average people who are now seeing a very low interest, or no interest, on their checking and savings accounts, to put money into crypto, where you could see phenomenal returns if you have the right information and get very lucky.
But a lot of it is very “scammy.” And they use like pump-and-dump schemes. And obviously when the scam always leaves somebody holding the bag. So if you’re not somebody who’s very privileged, in the “in” groups, who’s getting the right information, you can easily be one of the ones who falls victim.
Jeff: The other thing we touched on but haven’t really explored in detail is this whole issue of NFTs.
Daniel: That’s another issue. I’m happy for some friends of mine who are artists who were struggling, waiting tables, or sleeping on friends’ couches, and hit it big over the last year. One person I know had a million-dollar photography sale at Christie’s, and then later sold a single photograph, is now one of the 10 most high-valued sale photographs in history. So, from being unknown, he reached that kind of height.
And other friends of mine have had successful drops of collections of NFTs probably minting them hundreds of thousands upon millions of dollars. Of course, more people have had failures, have tried to enter the space and have not had success. But it feels like when you step back and ask yourself what’s happening, you can try to analyze the situation. With Ethereum, for instance, people had amassed a lot of it and made quite a bit of money on it, but there really wasn’t anything tangible to do with it. It’s not really used. You can’t really use it to buy anything. So, the NFT space became an opportunity for the use of Ethereum, and also the marketing of Ethereum.
So, high-priced Ethereum art sales help to promote the whole crypto enterprise. And while it’s benefited artists in the short term, they’ve all now been sucked into this crypto world. And because there’s no intrinsic value to crypto, it’s not like it’s backed by real estate or energy or whatever, it needs to keep finding new markets and new people to pull into it.
So, the artists who have now been pulled in… graphic artists, fine artists, musicians, and so on, really act as a publicity and marketing team for crypto.
Jeff: And finally, Daniel, is it your sense that regulators and the government have any real understanding of what’s going on here, or is this really happened way too fast for institutions to absorb?
Daniel: I wouldn’t know how to answer that. I studied it years ago, and I’d written about the potential of blockchain and Ethereum, which, in some ways, I was more hopeful about. It seemed to have a more idealistic frequency to it back in 2016, when I wrote my How Soon is Now book. In 2017… a book that I still think is very relevant, by the way, if anybody wants to check it out. It has introductions by Sting and Russell Brand and tries to really look at the types of changes we would have to make, systemically, to deal with the ecological crisis that we’re facing.
Jeff: But short of reading some of these books, does the government or leaders have any idea what they’re dealing with?
Daniel: Hopefully they have smart people who are getting up to speed on it. I just have no idea, that’s not my world, but it only takes a few months. It’s like anything to get conversant in the lingo and to understand. There are some things that I’d still really have a hard time understanding. I have friends who want me to get involved with a token project called Terra and Luna. And right now, if you get these Terra coins and you stake them on Anchor, you get apparently quite stable 20 percent return on your money, which obviously is way higher than banks. But then if you also get more into this Luna ecosystem, you can get for x returns.
But it’s very much beyond me. My friends are enthusiastic about it. To give you the positive view of it also, basically, the way it works now is we put our money into banks, and the banks use our money to make money, a lot of money, and they give us these miserable interest rates or hardly any interest whatsoever.
Whereas the good part of this crypto world is that we disintermediate, that you can choose to put your money into play directly, but then you’re also dealing with the risk of that, and you don’t have any insurance. If people get fleeced in crypto, there’s nobody to appeal to it. It is a very scam-infested situation.
Jeff: Daniel Pinchbeck, I thank you so much for spending time with us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. If people want more information about what you’re thinking about, they can subscribe to your Substack, and I thank you for your time with us today.
Daniel: OK, Jeff, thanks for having me.
Jeff: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another radio WhoWhatWhy podcast, I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you liked this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate
Behind the seemingly pointless noise and bluster of American politics, there are a few key factors that explain how we got where we are today. Exhibit A: the Supreme Court.
It did not evolve to its current 6-to-3 conservative majority by accident. What tipped the scales, in fact, was a 50-year right-wing project that can be traced back to a single secret memo — a brief document that laid out what a sympathetic Court could do to protect corporate America.
Elucidating how this conservative project changed the direction of American politics has been the work of my guest on this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse.
In what he calls “The Scheme,” Whitehouse details how that secret memo, written for the national Chamber of Commerce by attorney Lewis Powell — who would later become a Supreme Court justice — launched a plan by corporate interests to take over the majority of the Court and put forth a series of decisions that today adversely impacts the air we breathe, the climate we endure, the dark money in our politics, and the income inequality that helps divide us.
What drove all these changes, according to Whitehouse, were cases taken by the Court and decided in ways that effectively bypassed Congress, the White House — and the will of the American people.
If you want to understand what’s really going on in the United States today, listen to this illuminating conversation with Sen. Whitehouse.
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Full Text Transcript:(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the special edition of the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. Our democracy is hanging by a thread. Climate change threatens the sustainability of life on this planet. Income inequality seems to transcend the legitimacy of even the most ardent capitalists, a loss of faith in the institutions of government to do the right things for its citizens, a political system awash in and controlled by money that lacks any real transparency.
A legal system all the way up to, and including the Supreme Court that has been captured by corporations, and a social value system that once admired and rewarded public service, that now only respects and values the accumulation of greater and greater wealth. If greed is in fact good, we should be in a world that is better than ever, but of course, that’s not the case. Amidst all the noise and bluster of our politics, deep down there were reasons that got us to where we are, to the level of corruption we face today.
These fundamental problems didn’t happen in a vacuum. They were not the result of a series of spontaneous and unfortunate events. They happened because it was in the best interests of individuals to make them happen, because it enriched some, gave power to others, and spawned a network that made the worst of its excesses legal, secretive, and self-perpetuating. My guest today, Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has been engaged in a series of speeches and a soon to be released book looking at the scheme that got us to where we are.
A scheme in the classic legal definition of that word that reshaped the Supreme Court and was able to accomplish through the court what couldn’t be accomplished legislatively or even from the White House. It has been, as the very definition of the word scheme says, a combination of elements of statutes or regulations that are connected, adjusted, and integrated by design.
Sheldon Whitehouse has been a United States Senator from Rhode Island since 2007. Prior to that, he served as attorney general of Rhode Island and was a former US Attorney. He’s a graduate of Yale and the University of Virginia Law School, and it is my pleasure to welcome Senator Sheldon Whitehouse here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. Senator, thanks so much for joining us.
Sheldon Whitehouse: Jeff, thank you for having me on and bravo on a killer opening diagnosis of the evils that bedevil us.
Jeff: Well, it is so interesting that so many of the problems that we face today, the environment, money in our political system, corporate power, income inequality, we can go down the list, all stem from, in some way, as you have argued, decisions that have happened as a result of what’s transpired on the Supreme Court since the early ’70s. Talk about that first in a very general sense.
Sheldon: If you look at the history of regulation of corporations in this country, it has a parallel history, which is the history of what’s called agency capture or regulatory capture, where the industry would pick its people on the agency and wine and dine them and give them lots of opportunities to hang out and basically recruit them to their way of thinking about the world so that the agency became the tool of the industry rather than the regulator of the industry.
And I’m afraid to say, at some point, it became somebody’s bright idea that if you can capture an administrative agency, you can capture the Supreme Court, and why not? And they went very deliberately about capturing the Supreme court, and I think now the big donors behind it can say mission accomplished, and the great thing about capturing the Supreme court is that you can get judges who don’t face elections and voters to do things for you that you can’t even make Republicans do in Congress.
Jeff: One of the things that becomes clear as this evolved, that it really started with former Supreme Court justice Powell, all the way back in the ’70s, that he had an idea of how to really enhance corporate power through the courts.
Sheldon: Yes, he got recruited by the US Chamber of Commerce to write basically a strategy memo on how corporate America could respond to the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, the women’s movement, things that were disrupting the status quo that they enjoyed. And he wrote a really hot memo, full of warfare terms talking about essentially the end of America as we know it if they don’t react. And in that memo, he had a very, very big role for corporate power, corporate influence, and intermediary groups that could disguise who the corporation was so they didn’t have to take responsibility for what they were pushing.
And then within literally months, he was put on the Supreme Court by President Nixon. The memo was never disclosed to the Senate or anyone else as best I can tell. And when he got on the court, he wrote three separate decisions or participated in three separate decisions that opened the gateway for corporations to have a significant and established role in our politics, which is obviously something that the Founding Fathers would have never imagined in this “we the people” country of theirs.
Jeff: And there is a direct line, and we don’t want to get into the weeds in every case, but there’s clearly a direct line between those early decisions, the Powell memo that you talk about, going all the way up to Citizens United and this idea of corporate personhood and money is speech.
Sheldon: Yes, absolutely. You can draw the through-line. There are a few hiccups along the way when the court reckoned realistically with political reality and the Austin decision was actually a good one, but the effort to pack the court with judges that thought the right way about these things has resulted in those hiccups for the plan being completely overwhelmed.
And the Citizens United and then the recent Americans for Prosperity Foundation decision, I think, are the low points of this effort to credential corporations as entities that belong in our politics permit anonymity in political speech so that they can hide who they are and knock down limits on spending so that they can have powerful effects above and beyond the merits.
Jeff: And this runs to some of the issues that we’re hearing about today, particularly this expose that Jane Mayer did last week in The New Yorker looking at Ginni Thomas and the organizations that she’s involved with, the wife of justice Clarence Thomas, and the influence that those organizations have had on the court.
Sheldon: Yes, one of the structural telltales that Jane talks about in her piece, is the advocacy in the court of groups that appear as amici curiae, friends of the court. And there’s actually a rule in the Supreme Court that they’re supposed to disclose who they’re there for and who funded them, but the way it’s written, they’ve taken it to me, and did you actually contribute to the printing of the actual brief, a paper brief and its dissemination to the parties and the filing fees in the court? Anything else, you don’t have to report, and of course, that’s where everything is.
So it’s created this armada of front groups that are anonymously funded and that have no real purpose in life other than to show up in the court and broadcast the message of their donors, and very often they’re orchestrated to show up in fleets of 11 or 12, or in one case, 50 so that the judges really get the message that folks, this is what the big donors want of you. This is your moment, time to step up.
Jeff: Why has this been allowed to go on to the extent that it has without more pushback coming from either the opposition party or from outside forces that clearly could see some of what was going on?
Sheldon: Well, the court has been a very, very poor policeman of itself. They could simply redefine the way they read the reporting rule and clear up this problem, and they haven’t wanted to. The lawyers that are closest to the court and that appear there regularly tend to have an interest in making sure that the court is happy with them because they’re selling to their clients the relationship and confidence that the court has with them. So they’re not a very good alarm bell either, and for a lot of people, this gets a little bit far from the day to day and I’ll confess that we Democrats have done a pretty crap job at letting this thing get way out of control before we started to respond.
Jeff: And yet in the senate, to stay with that for a moment, Mitch McConnell has made this his life’s work.
Sheldon: Yes, it happened in plain view. And even with it happening in plain view, we’ve managed to do a crap job of calling it out and responding.
Jeff: And at this point, with a six to three majority on the court, what is your sense of what the future holds?
Sheldon: Well, the break on the ambitions of the donors that have stacked the court has been the sense on the part of some justices of the need to defend the institution. And I think that tension was particularly embodied by Chief Justice Roberts, who was about reliable a big donor vote as you could get until a moment came when it looked like it would be opportune to break from pattern and make the point that he was different and that the court was a proper institution and that precedent mattered, and things like that.
When you get to six-three, he’s no longer the swing vote. So the ability of the dark money majority to deliver for the interest to put them on the court dramatically expands by much more than the difference between six and five because what was not possible before suddenly becomes possible. And then as long as it’s going to happen anyway, Roberts now has a different decision, which does he go along with his group and not isolate himself further, or does he put the marker down that this is a bridge too far?
Jeff: The other side of that question, of course, is have they achieved their agenda? What’s left for them to accomplish?
Sheldon: They’ve achieved a great deal of their agenda. I would say that the primary center pole in the tent of their agenda has been this role for corporate and billionaire money in our politics to allow it, to allow it to be unlimited, to allow it to be anonymous. And as they’ve built that more and more and more, we’re really on the threshold of this Supreme Court creating a constitutional right to corporate and billionaire dark money in politics. And that’s why the Americans for Prosperity Foundation case was so bad because that was the first real beachhead in the battle to establish that last right, the right anonymity that then allows politics to be a complete, oligarchy-run festival of lies and slime and manipulation.
Jeff: Is there a legislative fix for any of this?
Sheldon: Yes. Absolutely. Particularly with the dark money, we could pass laws that required reporting. Now that there’s this new constitutional right to dark money, we bump up against that and the court hasn’t defined it yet, it’s just been a little beachhead so far, but we would have that to deal with, but yes, you could pass a law requiring transparency, and you could cite back to the Citizens United case, which had the premise that all this unlimited spending was going to be transparent as its predicate, as its baseline assumption. Sadly, the court refused to enforce that premise once it became clear that it was a false premise, they just let the dark money grow.
Jeff: To what extent do you hear from your colleagues, your democratic colleagues, a realization that this has transpired, that this has happened over the past 50 years? And what it would take to begin to unravel it?
Sheldon: Yes, I think there’s been a transformation in the democratic caucus in the last few years as we’ve watched, not just the decisions coming out of the court, but the really bizarre and peculiar behavior of the Republicans to make sure that the court was packed with the big donors selected nominees, come hell or high water, no matter what rules or principles had to be broken to get there.
The bad decisions had been growing for a while. The pattern was evident, but if you weren’t watching it regularly, you could just not pay attention. But when you’re in the Senate and you’re seeing what’s happening around you with Senate committees and rules and traditions, it’s hard to miss that. And I think there’s not a member of the Senate democratic caucus right now who has not had their epiphany that something really seriously wrong has happened with the court.
Jeff: The other part of it is that it affects so many things. It affects environmental issues, it affects election integrity issues, virtually everything in one form or another has some linear connection to this activity.
Sheldon: Absolutely. You can tie environment to the five to four partisan decision of the court that undid the Obama Clean Power Plan. You can tie voter suppression to the five to four partisan decision of the court that undid the pre-clearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act. Those ties are very, very apparent.
Jeff: Is there a simple way to make the American public understand this? Because there’s a certain complexity to the issue that defies that, it seems, on the surface at least.
Sheldon: Hey, for a long time, I had trouble making my colleagues in the Senate understand this. We’re over that hump now because we had that direct personal experience of watching the violence that McConnell did to the institution to get his donor’s court nominees in place. I think it could be that the Texas abortion case, some of these other decisions will send that real life signal out to people where they pay more attention.
I think that the democratic groups are beginning to see that they have common cause, because as you said, pick an issue, there’s a way in which the Supreme Court has harmed the public side of it and helped the special interest side of it to the detriment of civil rights groups, environmental groups, good government groups, you name it. So I think it’s coming, but I also think it’s incumbent on those of us who are in office to speak up about it because the public often takes its lead from the people who represent them in Congress. And if we’re not talking about something as being important, then it’s hard for the public to take it on as being I important.
So there’s a responsibility on us to up our game and to call out the court when the court is misbehaving.
Jeff: In the 50 some odd years between when Powell wrote his memo and where we are today, the very nature of corporate America has changed. The companies that were in the Fortune 500 50 years ago, more than half don’t exist anymore. There’s a whole new world that represents corporate America today. Is their agenda the same? Has it shifted? And can that have an impact on how this plays out?
Sheldon: I think in some respects, although the positions of what industries are strongest in the economy and in the politics might change, the fundamental goal of the political effort has always been me, me, me, me. Less taxes, less regulation, more profits, better ability to cheat, whatever the desirable goal is, that persists through time irrespective of the dominant industries of the day.
What I would say the huge transformation is the creation, thanks to the Supreme Court, of this enormous archipelago of fake front groups, whose job is to intermediate between those corporate entities and the political system, and have grown to a position where they can actually effectively dominate the political system when they choose to. And they’re completely unaccountable. They often don’t even disclose who their donors are. They have these creepily anodyne names like the Heartland Institute and the Heritage Foundation. And they are able to, working at these political and governmental issues 24/7, power up the corporate sector in a way that regular human beings just can’t compete with.
Jeff: Is the amount of money that is pouring into these organizations, these ancillary organizations, all of these boats out there, is the amount of money the same or more today?
Sheldon: Infinitely more. It’s multiple tens of billions every single year. And that sounds like a frighteningly big number, but consider that the International Monetary Fund, which is a pretty reputable economic organization, has quantified the subsidy for fossil fuel companies in the United States from their ability to pollute for free at around $600 billion every single year. So if you can spend a billion or two and get friendly judges on the court, so that it’s captured and will knock down President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, even if you were only saving a tiny segment of that $600 billion a year, even if you’re only saving 1%, that’s still $6 billion a year and that justifies your expense.
And of course, you’re not just doing that, you’re doing a lot more. The payback is probably in the 100 to 1, 1,000 to 1 level every year from even big investments in this political manipulation and it turns out, Congress can be a cheap date.
Jeff: Given the six to three majority and given the younger members that have been appointed to the court, it does seem that this will be the condition of reality for quite some time.
Sheldon: I think until the American public has the realization as to what is going on, which is our job to make the case, they’re like the jury, they’re not supposed to go out and do the investigating, we’re supposed to make the case to them as their elected representatives who do this work.
And I think if we do that, that can put the court sufficiently on its heels, that it goes back to the proper role of a court, and it stops doing all these telltale misbehaviors like throwing out precedent that they shouldn’t throw out, making up facts that they shouldn’t be, fact-finding, extending beyond the parameters of the case before them to make larger societal decisions, and venturing into disputes that aren’t real cases or controversies as required by the Constitution. Some of those things could shrink the court’s ambitions back to what the Founding Fathers intended.
Jeff: In terms of bringing the public along, how does the rise of populism, both on the left and the right, the good and the bad of it, how does that play into making people understand this?
Sheldon: Well, I think part of the rise of populism has been the very strong sense by Americans that their government is not responsive to them any longer. And I think the court has a role in that by doing a lot of things that it shouldn’t have been doing in the first place that the public hates, like allowing unlimited dark money into politics. And on the other side, on the legislative side, allowing so much money and special influence that Congress gets jammed up.
And now you have peer-reviewed scientific studies of Congress that show that statistically, we are in fact, not responsive to real people, and in fact, we are highly responsive to big special interests. And you don’t need a statistical study, to start feeling that that’s the case when you’re not being listened to, and I think that is a part of the fuel of the populism.
Jeff: Of course, the counter to that is the way in which identity politics and division is fed into the system as a way to counter this, as you’ve talked about in terms of the whole paranoid style of American politics.
Sheldon: Yes, the great old article from the ’60s, I guess, still very worth reading. I’m not a good judge of what is going on in the politics of division. I do think there’s a case to be made that some of that is stirred up to keep the public from paying attention to who’s got their hand in the tail and it’s quietly robbing the country of their ability to vote, their ability to have a Congress that listens to them, their pocketbooks and wallets.
The corporate side doesn’t want big public victories. They want as little attention to what they’re doing as possible. So they and Fox News can stir up a whole lot of unrelated passions and get people quarreling with each other. If you want to pick people’s pockets, there’s no better time to do that than in the middle of a quarrel, or a riot.
Jeff: Do we need heroes to emerge from the corporate world?
Sheldon: I’ve been hopeful about that for a long time, but we just aren’t seeing it, and there have been lots and lots of opportunities. Right now, for instance, a lot of corporations have put up with the United States Chamber of Commerce being reported out as one of the worst climate obstructors in America, top two, tied for the twin championship. And it was only when it was publicly reported and people started to call them to account that their corporate membership started to say, “Oh, wait a minute. Now, this is embarrassing.”
They weren’t there, when it was happening. They were only there when it started getting called out. And they’re only there a little bit because what they’ve done is they’ve set up a US Chamber of Commerce climate conversation group and anytime the chamber is asked to do anything that would be good on climate, it goes into that conversation and dies, goes into a stall.
Anytime they’re asked by the fossil fuel industry to do something wicked for the fossil fuel industry against climate, that goes into effect immediately without any bounce in the so-called climate conversation. So you have these corporations that are in a good place on climate that are part of an organization that is one of the worst climate obstructors in the country and they’re allowing themselves to be used as taxis having this phony conversation while the organization goes on about its business on all the stuff that helps the fossil fuel industry and hurts climate action.
So there’s a willful blindness in corporate America about all of this as long as they’re getting their tax breaks, their industry benefits, their deregulatory goals met, and it’s really unfortunate but no, there have been no heroes.
Jeff: Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, I thank you so much for spending time with us today here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.
Sheldon: Thanks so much for having me on. I really appreciate it, Jeff.
Jeff: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you’ll join us next week for another radio WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you liked this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
Our guest on this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, historian and journalist Sarah Chayes, argues that we can’t fix our floundering democracy until we face — and fix — our current levels of corruption.
In her view, we are in a “pandemic of corruption,” fostered by a network of corrupt businesses and political leaders worldwide. Before we can begin to set things right, however, we first have to grasp what modern-day corruption really is.
Behind this evolving crisis, says Chayes, is a shift in the very definition of power. Where society’s leaders once at least paid lip service to the concept of public service, today the only measure of social status, she contends, is money: The pursuit of power has turned into a no-holds-barred scramble for more and more wealth.
Chayes explains how we got here, and how we must build a coalition of integrity that transcends ideology, one that has its roots in equity and the public interest.
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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. Much has been written and talked about of late, about the way in which the current threats to democracy here in America may resemble autocratic regimes and democratic retrenching throughout the world. Examining those parallels has become, for better or worse, a college industry; but there is another layer to this. One that undergirds the weakening of democracy and that is the way in which corruption — the corruption of our politics, of our corporate and legal institutions — has chipped away at any trust in the fundamental institutions of democracy.
Politics, business, economics, even our entertainment amusement complex, are all part of a vast network of private sector interests that are often antithetical to democracy. In other words, we can’t fix one without the other. To better understand this, perhaps the words of Arthur Jensen, as written by Paddy Chayefsky all the way back in 1976 in the movie Network, can bring it into bold relief.
Speaker 1: You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples, you get up on your little 21-inch screen, and how about America and democracy. There is no America, there is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business. It has been since man crawled out of the slime.
Jeff: Understanding this corruption of democracy has been the work of my guest, Sarah Chayes. As National Public Radio’s Paris correspondent, Sarah Chayes has reported on Europe, North Africa, and the fall of the Taliban in 2001. She spent a decade on the ground in Afghanistan, including service to two commanders of the international forces there. She’s renowned for her innovative thinking on corruption and its implications, which she has probed on five continents, and most recently the United States, which she writes about in her new book, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake. It is my pleasure to welcome Sarah Chayes here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. Sarah, thanks so much for joining us.
Sarah Chayes: Thank you very much for the opportunity.
Jeff: It’s great to have you here. Do we even know what corruption is anymore? You begin the book by talking about the case of Bob McDonnell in Virginia, and it really brings into bold relief this idea that we’re not even clear what corruption is anymore.
Sarah: I couldn’t agree with you more, Jeff. And in fact, I think there are two competing understandings of what corruption is, held by two different groups within populations, both here and in other countries in the world. Members of elites who troll the political and economic leaders of a given country tend to define corruption quite narrowly.
In the United States, the Supreme Court decision that you mentioned was a unanimous decision that essentially defined corruption down to a one-to-one transaction between two parties, in which material goods and money are exchanged for the exercise of a very, very narrowly defined exercise of public office. And then there’s the common understanding of corruption, which is much broader.
I went, I think it was 2018, speaking with voters and non-voters in West Virginia, which is where I live, and I simply asked them, “What does corruption mean to you?” And their response — and it was clearly a cross-party line — was basically that whoever has the money, obtains the government decisions that they want. One woman said, and it was fascinating, “Money washes hands.”
I found that a really interesting way of putting it because what she was saying is that it’s money that defines value and even virtue in our society, no longer the ineffable, immaterial values of integrity, of selflessness, of wisdom, and judgment. Those things no longer define a clean person; it’s money that gives you the badge.
Jeff: Is there something that has grown up in this country, in American democracy, that makes that inevitable in some ways, that if we look at it historically, there’s almost — and hindsight is always easy — but there’s almost no question that that’s where we would get to.
Sarah: I totally disagree with that actually. And in fact, I disagree with the implication of the piece of tape you ran, which says basically that business running society is inevitable and has been true of human society to an equivalent extent throughout history. That’s a completely ahistorical way of looking at the course of human events. And the fact is that for… Remember Homo sapiens goes way back before recorded history. And so one of the things I look at in On Corruption in America, believe it or not, it’s quite a ride, I take you to ancient Greece, and I take you also to human evolution. And the fact is we were egalitarian hunter-gatherers, relatively egalitarian hunter-gatherers for 150,000 years. This hierarchical capture of political and economic power is an artifact of settled civilizations approximately 15,000 years. So in fact, we, as human beings, have laid down and even evolved an egalitarian principle.
And I think that fact… but we’re also primates and primates are on the whole highly hierarchical with the alpha pair basically hogging the bulk of shared resources. So we’ve got these two tendencies in us. Both of them are human nature. And that fact — together with this dichotomy that I described before between the alpha pair view of corruption as only a very minor and tawdry change between two venal individuals and the much larger systemic understanding of corruption on the part of the population — those two things help explain the conflicts that we get into over the elites not understanding.
I’ve often heard, for example, people say, “Well, why don’t Americans care about corruption? Why don’t ordinary Americans care about corruption?” I’m saying, “Are you kidding? Are you kidding they don’t care about it?” Take a look at the absenteeism in terms of voting. Take a look at the mavericks on the right and the left who blew open the American political system with very different motivations, in my view, but in that they both blew it open in 2016.
And so there’s this different appreciation of corruption and its impact, depending on whether you are in the “alpha” category or in the “ordinary people” category. But also, internally, we are constantly struggling between our primate hierarchical, I want to say, tendencies, and our revolutionarily egalitarian human tendencies. That’s the revolution that Homo sapiens imposed on the primate order. Sorry to get into the few past years. [laughs] [crosstalk]
Jeff: No, it’s OK.
Sarah: But I think that’s where I get very skeptical when people say, “Humans have always been a certain way and it’s timeless and unchanging.” And so the other thing I take a look at in On Corruption in America to address that question is I believe that we are in, sorry for the overused pun, but a pandemic of corruption worldwide at the moment. There is a level of capture of political economies by networked corrupt business and government leaders across the world that really was only rivaled in recent history in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
And I think it’s pretty easy to find clear evidence of a difference between these two periods that extended from the Gilded Age and today, being periods of high corruption and systemic corruption, and the period from about let’s say approximately 1935, 1940 through until about 1980, where there were some curbs placed upon business activity. And again, I’m not saying that was a corruption-free period; what I’m trying to get at is that the systemic capture of political and economic power was less acute at the time than it is now.
Jeff: Is there, or should there be, a difference or distinction between the corruption of power and the corruption of money? Because there seemingly is a difference and yet they flow together so freely.
Sarah: They do, Jeff. And here’s how I would characterize the distinction: I think it depends on what is the currency of social status. What I found was really interesting was that in the wake of the mass calamities of the early 20th century, meaning World War II, the Spanish flu, the Great Depression and eventually… sorry World War I. World War I, the Spanish flu, the Great depression, and eventually World War II; those mass shared calamities brought a virtue of public spiritedness to the fore in a way that it had not been so admired in the late 19th and very early 20th centuries.
And so there was a rivalry for power, but power in the guise of public service. Since about 1980, money has become the yardstick by which we measure social standing. Therefore, instead of using money for power, and it’s power that gives you social standing now, we’ve reversed the order and many people seek power only in order to maximize their wealth, to maximize their money. So the competition today for social standing is basically in who can rack up the most zeros in their bank accounts.
Jeff: And talk about the ways in which that got started. What was the turn that we made, the contemporary turn that we made, that moved us there?
Sarah: I think it happened around 1980. And I know that’s a cliché but that’s what I found in the record. And you suddenly find, even in popular culture, one of the things I looked at in On Corruption is Risky Business, the movie which a lot of people saw as a coming-of-age tale in the annals of those.
What I found really interesting was the extent to which that movie showers contempt on a decent, comfortable living by people who believe in education and believe in participating in their communities, in the health and life of their community. The parents — and that’s who incarnated those values — were so contemptible in that movie and the young hero gets ahead and gets the girl and gets all the respect by lying, and frankly by starting a whorehouse. I mean basically monetizing sex — let’s put it that way — which at the time was a criminal activity.
And the whole ethos of that movie is that playing by the rules and living a comfortable life is for chumps. The cool people break the rules, violate the law, violate the sanctity of a very important human activity and it’s a zero-or-nothing… I mean all-or-nothing, and they win every possible reward. That’s a crazy ethos to inculcate in young people and that was in the mid-1980s.
Jeff: And that was further enhanced by the way money became flaunted in the 1980s. The idea that greed is good was another part of that.
Sarah: It sure was. And we were… again it was supposedly satirical, that line in another movie, “greed is good.” But the terrible thing was… and I was in the graduating class in that period — I graduated from college in 1984 — and when I look back at where my classmates went, I mean all the best ones made a beeline for Wall Street because making money was a good thing in and of itself. And that… just look back at the decade or two decades previously, where if you were super rich, you were looked on with skepticism.
The default was “Where did you get your money?” So that’s another little vignette that I recall in On Corruption in America, which was a conversation, as I asked a lot of Nigerians. I spent a couple of weeks asking Nigerians about the social significance of money over time in their culture. And I’ll never forget someone saying, “It used to matter where your money came from.” And that almost resonates for me with the comment “money washes hands” from West Virginia.
And the point is, once money becomes the yardstick for measuring social status, a couple of things follow from that: One, is that’s a race with no finish line; there’s never enough in that framing of the value of money because someone’s always going to get more and then you have to get ahead of her and then… that’s one point. And the second point is the most efficient way of maximizing wealth.
Number one, it’s to build a coalition or a network so that you can concentrate power and wealth in a group of people that controls enough of the access to both that they’re capable of keeping the 99 percent out. They’re capable of disarming in a way the 99 percent individual rich people can’t do. They need to join forces… number one.
Number two, the most effective way of maximizing wealth is to take control of the levers of government power and twist and bend them to that purpose rather than to the public interest. And so that’s where you get corruption as the enemy of democracy.
Jeff: And that’s really where we’ve gotten to because as you talk about before the ‘80s for example, where power was more the status symbol and power even within the guise of public service as you talked about to the extent that money and politics have become conflated, they are today one and the same.
Sarah: That’s exactly right. That’s absolutely right. And we make a mistake, and we are misled if we think that the total extent of corruption is in somebody stealing the furniture from their Supreme Court office, state supreme court office, or somebody using government funds to take a private trip. That’s not the way corruption works in this context, I mean that happens, but that’s trivial.
The really important way that people conflate politics and money is that they use their access to government powers. They use their access to the ability not only to write laws and rules, but to ensure that laws and rules are not written, in order that the commercial and monetary interests of their network are served. And then, a couple of years later, they leave government office and they get to reap the results of the changes in the rules that they made when they were in government.
It’s not about the money you steal right then and there when you’re in government; it’s how you make your bed for when you leave government. And often, the other important thing to understand is, these exchanges are often indirect. You might favor a certain sector of activity that maybe you didn’t even work in before, but then when you get out of government your daughter gets a job on the board of directors of… Do you know what I mean? A position on the board of directors of a company in that sector. By so narrowly defining corruption as a one-to-one exchange between two parties, we miss the vast bulk of the way these exchanges take place, which is often deferred in time, and even in recipient or indirect in recipient.
Jeff: Is it different today in that it has become so much more systemic. If we look at the Gilded Age, and we see that the pushback that came to that, and the rise of the progressive era of that moment, it’s hard to imagine a similar kind of successful pushback today.
Sarah: I would challenge that the progressive era was really successful. I think I found looking into the Gilded Age that it was every bit as systemic, if not more so. Today you couldn’t actually have the general council of the railroad industry group continuing to receive salary from that group while he served as Attorney General of the United States. That’s pretty systemic.
I would argue that the progressive era was successful in writing better rules. They were never enforced. What I found was that the thing that really caused the effective changes was the series of calamities that I just mentioned. Two world wars, that’s two genocides, use of the nuclear bomb, a pandemic that makes COVID-19 look like a minor aftershock, and an economic meltdown that, again, makes 2008 look like a pale imitation. That’s what it took to really, substantively, change the rules of the games throughout the industrialized world, really.
Jeff: It is interesting though to look at it in a contemporary sense, and you allude to that. If we look at 9/11, if we look at this pandemic, if we look at the 2008 meltdown, none of those things — although smaller in scope than the things that happened back in the last century — while smaller in scope, they didn’t make a dent.
Sarah: Correct. Let me just backtrack a tiny bit, because you did refer to pushback in that earlier period. I took a look in On Corruption in America at some of that pushback, and I was awestruck. I looked at the labor movements. Again, today we’re seeing a level of striking and labor workers contesting their terms of employment that we haven’t seen in decades, but back then it was really stunning; often, unfortunately, violent — but courageous, inventive, multilingual.
I look back at strike movements that crossed six or seven different languages where the weekly newsletter had to be translated before it was sent out, and this was of course before the internet or anything like that. There was the Farmers’ Alliance, which came up with some of the most inventive and innovative reforms, many of which were eventually enacted, and long after the Farmers’ Alliance fell apart.
But again, we have a tendency to think of the urban classes as the most inventive, but in my view, the most thoughtful pushback against the Gilded Age system came from folks who were driving their covered wagons to meetings on the prairies, but that didn’t make a dent either when it was happening. As I say, many of the recommendations did eventually come to pass, but long after the movements themselves were shattered. And then what was your question which was a really great one?
Oh, yes, it was about the pattern. So the other thing that I found that ignorantly I didn’t even know about, was how similar. So if you look at our pattern of economic meltdowns, and as you point out now a pandemic, it really starts in about 1980 with the savings and loan crisis. And then you’ve got the .com, and then you’ve got the international currency collapse in 1997. And then you’ve got 2008.
I mean, you’ve got this series of almost-like a church bell tolling that climaxes for the moment in 2008. Well, lo and behold, I didn’t know it, but there was the very same thing back in the late 19th century. You had the panic of 1873, and then you had the panic of 1882, and then you had the panic of 1896, and it went on until you hit the Great Depression.
So if I were to map these two trajectories, and this is why I think this problem is so urgent and why you hear probably more passion in my voice than is easy to absorb is how concerned I am, because when you map the two trajectories, you put us in about what the latest panic before 1929 was about 1919, I think. You already had a world war. Well, we just lost two wars. They weren’t world wars, but they did involve a great many of the nations on the earth.
And so what I’m trying to get at here is, as you pointed out, none of these individual crises that we’ve had — and let’s add on top of it some of the exacerbated natural disasters that we’ve had, whose results were larger than, more devastating than they would’ve been had we not been in a kleptocratic context. What I’m trying to get at is the big ones are still ahead. If we can’t figure out how to reign this phenomenon in.
Jeff: What’s different, and this may make it worse not necessarily better, is the speed at which events move and information travels. Those are fundamental differences. And what impact they have on this is an open question. And as I say, it may be for the worse, but those two things are different.
Sarah: I agree with that. Although once again, I notice, looking back through history, that massive transformations in the structure of human society never waited for the internet. The Protestant Reformation happened, and by gum that was about exchange of information without modern technology. So I wouldn’t overblow it.
For me, the biggest difference is in the ecological imbalance that we’re in today. I don’t feel as though our species has as much wiggle room to make catastrophic mistakes as it did in 1517, or in 1914, or the 1940s. I think the wiggle room is much less generous now. And I think, in my view, that’s the calamity that lies on the horizon, and it’s staring us in the face.
And I’m not just talking parts-per-million CO2. I’m talking about a much more integrated… The earth is a deeply intertwined ecosystem. And we are basically dealing mortal wounds to vital organs in this, at least metaphorically, living organism that is planet Earth. The value of the Amazon is not just in how many tons of carbon it sequesters. The value of the Amazon is frankly the role that it plays in regulating the health of the planet. Our human understanding doesn’t even encompass it yet. We don’t even know, and yet we are dealing wounds to it from which it may not recover.
Jeff: Talk about what you see in terms of the pushback today. The indignation that does exist in some quarters, and the anger that goes along with that, and the desire that doesn’t really seem to have a clear outlet other than to just be angry and blow something up.
Sarah: Thanks, Jeff, because indeed there is enormous anger and indignation. And by asking that question, you draw our attention to another facet of corruption that often gets overlooked. When we talk about corruption, we almost entirely talk about things we can count. Material that fighting forces lack, or number of soldiers who are not fielded, or obviously amounts of money. What we often overlook is the psychic wound that is inflicted by corruption.
When the very person you have entrusted to uphold and defend the laws is the one who is violating them. When the very superior officer that you as a young soldier long to admire is the very one who is substituting shoddy equipment for the proper weaponry and tents that the country has paid for. That is a betrayal. And can you think of any more painful moral injury than betrayal?
When people feel betrayed they get angry, and sometimes they want to exact revenge no matter what the cost. I think we see that in a lot of the, as you say, almost objectless anger and desire just to blow something up that we see around the world, in this country and elsewhere. And that sometimes seems to be aimed in irrational directions, but guess what, when somebody is enraged [laughs], they rarely sit down and do a tee chart about what is the most rational course of action. That’s not how people behave when they’re angry.
The other point is that there’s a tendency to personify a single individual as the incarnation of what is, in fact, systemic. What I’ve seen around the world, and here, is a tendency to lash out at an individual and often topple that individual. There’s an almost unconscious presumption that “Okay, now democracy’s going to break out.” And I’ve seen that in Guatemala, Brazil, Burkina Faso, South Africa, and the United States, where the person at the top is seen to be the only person who needs to be curbed or removed from power in order for things to go so-called “back to normal.”
Whereas everything that I’ve been saying is that this type of activity is the work of a coalition, and these coalitions are sophisticated. They are many-headed like that beast of ancient Greek myth, the Hydra, who horribly would sprout two heads for every one you lopped off. This is what’s happened all the way in countries all around the world, that when protest and pushback movements just focus on one head, they cut it off and two more spring up, and they’re in the same position they were before.
The pushback, I think, needs to be much more sophisticated, much more multifaceted, and has to again in the Greek myth, what happened was even Hercules couldn’t kill the Hydra by himself. He needed someone, his cousin, to come and basically cauterize the neck, the second he lopped the head off. To just use that as a metaphor, what I’m thinking about is that that’s the institutional reforms that must take place after an individual is removed from power.
I think frankly, that that’s the situation that we’re in right now in the United States, where an individual has been removed from power, but we’re really having a hard time, the networks, and I would say that these networks cross political parties. I think that’s quite obvious in the predicament that we’re in today, the networks are bound and determined to prevent the types of reforms from being enacted that will more durably curb their practices.
Jeff: Isn’t part of the problem though, that there is a reverse to what you were saying in terms of the personification of evil if you will, the personification of bad, that there is this human tendency also to try and personify a savior, to personify the good and looking for charismatic leadership becomes the object of the exercise, misguided though what it may be.
Sarah: A hundred percent, I think that’s a really great point. And so to just continue exploring this analogy, isn’t what we the people need a coalition of integrity? How do we go about building a coalition, a fighting coalition, whose values are rooted, not in a particular policy outcome, but in the basic premise of integrity, equity, and the public interest? Can we?
So let me just add another factor to this. Is that another thing I discovered looking at pushback against kleptocracy around the world was that, guess what? The empire strikes back [laughs]. Kleptocratic networks do not take a challenge lying down. Some of the obvious ways they strike back is by imprisoning people or shutting down newspapers or whatever, but another, the most effective tool that they use, is to exacerbate identity divides. I’ve seen that again and again.
And that’s the most effective way that they can avoid confronting challenge by the cross-section of their victims, which is again basically 99 percent, but it’s the old “divide and conquer.” And unfortunately, again going back to evolution, we as a species are hardwired to collect around identity differences.
And so for me at this moment, the principal challenge before us the people is, how do we come together to build crosscutting coalitions that cut across our innate differences, but also our chosen political affiliations, in order to uphold the basic human standards of equity, integrity, and public interest? If we do that, all of our sectional, I want to say, our identity grievances will not be perfectly assuaged, but will be at least seen to.
Jeff: Sarah Chayes, her book is On Corruption in America: And What is at Stake. Sarah, I thank you so much for spending time with us today.
Sarah: What a pleasure, wonderful questions and conversation Jeff.
Jeff: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another radio WhoWhatWhy podcast, I’m Jeff Schechtman.
If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
My guest on this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, award-winning Wall Street Journal reporter Gregory Zuckerman, calls the worldwide effort that produced the COVID-19 vaccines a science story for the ages.
In Zuckerman’s telling — A Shot To Save The World: The Inside Story of the Life-or-Death Race for a COVID-19 Vaccine — it took a unique collaboration of scientists, entrepreneurs, government officials, and market forces to bring the new vaccines to medical reality in time to save millions of lives.
Zuckerman shines a spotlight on the key figures in the story: scientists who were previously working on vaccines for cancer and AIDS, but who, with the aid of venture capital dollars, bet the ranch on mRNA (messenger RNA) technology.
One revelation that may surprise some readers (if not others): The business of creating and distributing vaccines has long been neglected by many pharmaceutical companies because it promised, at best, low profit margins.
Countering the claim that the vaccines were developed “too fast,” Zuckerman details the ground-breaking biotechnological work behind the mRNA vaccines that began as far back as the late 1980s.
While there is much to deplore in the global response to the pandemic, the race to develop safe, effective protection against the novel coronavirus, as told by Zuckerman, shows how a bracing mix of cooperation and competition can sometimes produce heartening results in record time.
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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. Amidst all the noise and debate about vaccine mandates, less than clear information from the CDC, and the broader context of healthcare and society, it’s easy to forget that these vaccines themselves are truly miracles of modern science and that the herculean effort to develop them in record time is a science story for the ages. But the story doesn’t exist without understanding the players: the global panoply of scientists, entrepreneurs, and government officials, and market forces that all came together in a war effort that saved millions of lives.
After all, imagine the debate we’d be having today, and what our society would look like if no vaccine had happened. We’re going to talk about that effort to create the vaccine today with my guest, Gregory Zuckerman. Greg Zuckerman is a special writer at The Wall Street Journal, where he writes about business, economics, and interesting topics. He’s a three-time winner of the Gerald Loeb Award, and regularly appears on numerous media outlets. It is my pleasure to welcome Greg Zuckerman here to talk about his new work, A Shot to Save the World: The Inside Story of the Life-or-Death Race for a COVID-19 Vaccine. Greg Zuckerman, thanks so much for joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.
Gregory Zuckerman: Great to be here, and thank you for pronouncing my last name accurately. Nine and a half times out of 10 people do not.
Jeff: [laughs] I appreciate that. Thank you.
[chuckling]
One of the things that you talk about in the book early on is that the whole business of developing vaccines was not a particularly popular area of science or big pharma. It was a backwater in some respects.
Gregory: Yes, exactly right. It was a surprise to me. But when you talk to people in the pharmaceutical business, you realize that throughout history actually, vaccines are just not a sexy, very profitable business. If you think about it, you give a vaccine every so often — once a year, maybe more, infrequently once a lifetime — and it’s not like a drug, a pill, or statin kind of thing, where you take daily. So there’s just also so much you can charge for a vaccine, especially in other countries, not in the west, there’s pressure not to charge too much.
And they take years and years to develop. On average, the average vaccine historically has taken 10 years to develop. The fastest one until this past year was four years. So they take forever. Most of the time they don’t even work. They’re not successful. The efforts aren’t successful, not the vaccines themselves, but the efforts, and there’s just so much you can charge for it. So that’s why it takes outsider unlikely candidates to step up and develop some of these vaccines.
Jeff: What is it about vaccines inherently that takes so much longer to develop than say the normal drug?
Gregory: Well, partly it’s because viruses, these pathogens, sometimes go away. And we saw that with Zika. We saw it with MERS. We saw it with the first SARS where there were efforts, companies who set out to develop vaccines, effective vaccines, and they made headway. And I write about it in my book, and then these viruses went away. They evaporated, which is good for us, but bad for the vaccine makers. So that’s part of the problem as well. It’s also the case that a lot of drugs that are produced, they’re just incrementally better. They help you a little bit more than what’s on the market right now, whereas a vaccine, it’s a higher bar, and we aren’t just improving on what we have existing.
Jeff: And the technology, a lot of the technology that went into the COVID-19 vaccine was technology that was percolating along before January of 2020. Talk about that.
Gregory: So that’s what a lot of what my book is about. It’s the revolutionary vaccines that were being developed without many of us being aware. And these are small incremental improvements, breakthroughs that are in labs around the world, and especially in America, that had been going on for years. And there was a lot of drama, a lot of competition, a lot of personalities, characters, fascinating scientists, quirky odd individuals. They’re often competitive, they’re envious, they’re ambitious, they’re innovative. And yet there was a lot of really interesting work that was going on that really wasn’t a focus for anyone until 2020.
Jeff: What was the nature of that work?
Gregory: They were developing primarily two innovative vaccine approaches, there’s messenger RNA, mRNA, which I think a lot of us are aware of now because that’s at the heart of the vaccines that were produced by Pfizer and BioNTech, as well as the Moderna ones, they’re the most effective ones for COVID-19. And messenger RNA is basically just a molecule. We have ’em inside of us, naturally, we do. They transport the instructions from our DNA to the part of the cell where proteins are created so that we really depend on mRNA every single day of the week.
DNA can’t do it themselves. It needs to be transported. And that’s what mRNA is. And for years, scientists said, “Well, what if we could create, synthesize mRNA in the lab?” In other words, create something and transport it into the body as part of a vaccine or even a drug, and tell the body to create any protein we wanted to create. And in effect, basically have the body itself be a vaccine manufacturer, be a vaccine factory, your own factory in your own body.
So it was always the dream, the holy grail for scientists. What if we could use mRNA at the heart, to be the heart, of a vaccine? And they spent years working on it, and people told ’em they were crazy. Don’t waste your time thinking about mRNA as it disappears really quickly. The enzyme chops it up and it disappears. So people said it’s too unstable to really depend on. Don’t waste your time. And yet some stubborn scientists who I write about in my book, they kept at it, they kept working on it. And it was very dramatic what they were doing.
Jeff: Among the scientists that kept at it. What did they think they could accomplish? Talk a little bit about their mindset, why they were so persistent, and what their vision was for being able to pull this forward.
Gregory: Originally, the scientists, and they include researchers, deep in the basement’s bowels of laboratories and places like Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin, and Maryland, and elsewhere, in Germany as well, I write about, they really were hoping to create drugs using mRNA. In other words, you create the molecule in the laboratory, you stick it inside some encasement. It can’t go directly. It needs to be encased in this fatty substance so that it eases its way into the body, into the cells.
And we can tell, we can instruct the body to create anything, any protein you want to help our heart, to help fight cancer. Uğur Şahin, the CEO of BioNTech, was trying to insert using mRNA, using other kinds of methods, create proteins, let’s say a protein from cancer. So the idea being: we want to instruct the body’s immune system, we want to educate it. We want to teach it. That’s what a vaccine is. It’s an education, and you instruct, somehow you get the body to create a protein, or in the old school way, a traditional conventional way, you actually put a protein from the virus itself.
And somehow you tell the immune system, “Here’s what this protein looks like from a virus or from a cancer, and now go and fight it off. Next time you see it for real, when you experience the real thing, go and fight it off.” And that’s what they were trying to work on. It did not work for medicines, for drugs when it came to mRNA, but thankfully when it came to vaccines it was easier. And we didn’t know for sure it was going to work until last year, but these scientists on the eve of 2020, going into the pandemic, they were pretty confident. They had a method that would work.
Jeff: Were it not for all the testing and the FDA approvals, and all of the political and paperwork process that went into this, how quickly could this vaccine have been out there if everything else could have been done away with?
Gregory: I’m not sure why we would want to do away with testing. Frankly, you could have introduced vaccines, and what if they hadn’t worked, no one would want to take any nuance. They’d say, “I’m not taking a risk on this kind of thing.” They had to be really careful before introducing these vaccines. There already is so much vaccine hesitancy in this country. Can you imagine how much hesitancy there would be if these vaccines weren’t protective?
They’re historically among the greatest vaccines we’ve ever seen. They’re modern-day science’s greatest achievement, I would argue — vaccines that are 90-plus percent effective compared with the flu vaccine, which is 40 percent, 50 percent, 60 percent. So these are 90 percent-plus, but can you imagine if they had cut corners on the testing and they had introduced vaccine shots that weren’t effective or had side effects? No one would be taking this vaccine. And frankly, this pandemic would continue, and it would harm us all. So, luckily they didn’t cut corners in that regard.
Jeff: I guess the question is not so much about cutting corners, but about how close was what ultimately became the vaccine to what was originally there when January 2020 hit. How much further development of the technology had to take place?
Gregory: What’s interesting is that the technology was developed over years, even decades. Slowly sometimes, faster other times, small breakthroughs that people weren’t aware of. Lot of competition. It was almost like a relay race with a runner running fast, getting where you needed to go, but then stumbling maybe, and passing the baton to the next person, next researcher. And they moved a little forward, and a lot of egos along the way, a lot of controversy, a lot of competition, but they were making progress.
And then on the eve of 2020, they had the technology. They just didn’t know it was going to be effective as it was. They thought it would be, they weren’t sure. So had never really been tested like it was last year. They were waiting for some virus to challenge them, take on a new virus. They were hoping, in some ways, I wouldn’t say they were hoping for a pandemic, I wouldn’t say they were hoping for harm to be introduced to the world, but they were hoping to be able to test their approach. And they finally had that opportunity, they jumped on it.
Jeff: Where was the first effort that this developed? Where is the beginning of this process?
George: I would say the beginning of mRNA was in 1990 and in the late ’80s, really. In Wisconsin, there’s a gentleman named John Wolf, a researcher who worked with children with genetic abnormalities. And he was both a doctor, and a scientist, and researcher. And he treated his patients, and then in the evening went home to a lab and tried to figure out ways to help them. And he’s the first person who wrote a paper. He wrote with others. It wasn’t him alone. As with all scientific achievements, there are many people involved. But he’s the one who really kind of showed the world that actually this mRNA is worth working with.
Everyone had dismissed it, “It’s unstable, don’t touch it.” But he said, “No. I’m showing signs that mRNA injected into the body potentially can create proteins.” And now you say to yourself, “How does that help?” Proteins are the key to all medicines and drugs. And if you could instruct the body, that gets you a long way. Now, he didn’t make as much headway as he wanted to. And sadly, he passed away early in the COVID-19 pandemic, not from COVID-19, but he had cancer. But he showed the world, he sent a message. And then from there, there were some really pioneering researchers at Duke.
And they also made headway, and then stumbled and gave up. They said it wasn’t worth it. But then there were a couple of really interesting people, researchers at UPenn. So it went on and on. There was a group at MIT that eventually became Moderna. Moderna made headway. People dismissed them and thought they were exaggerating their possibility of mRNA, but they ignored the skeptics. So I find that the process and the evolution of this is really kind of fascinating and more dramatic than I had expected.
Jeff: And in the early days of trying to develop this vaccine, there were efforts that went away from the mRNA approach, some of the stuff at Oxford. Talk a little bit about that.
George: Sure. So there’s another approach, and that’s using something called an adenovirus, and that’s a harmless virus, like a cold virus, or with Oxford, a chimpanzee virus. And having that virus transport the genetic message to the body to create the spike protein. The spike protein we’re all familiar with, that sort of the characteristic — one of the characteristic aspects of this coronavirus. And just like mRNA sends a message to the body to create the spike protein, so does this adenovirus. It’s a virus that takes the genetic message and says, “Hey, immune system, we’re going to build this little spike protein in the body, teach the body’s immune system to fight it off next time.”
So the adenovirus approach, it’s a good one, it’s not a great one. It ended up leading to an effective vaccine for COVID-19, both the AstraZeneca Oxford one that’s in the UK and other parts of the country, but also in our country, the J&J, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is based on this adenovirus approach, and a really pioneering vaccine researcher in Boston named Dan Barouch. It’s a good approach. It’s just not quite as effective as the mRNA one, but it’s cheaper. And it doesn’t have to be kept in the same cold storage. So that helps in other kinds of countries too.
Jeff: Who really was the greatest force in really pushing this whole mRNA approach to the COVID-19 vaccine? And where does that lie? Where does the real initial effort to bring this forward, lie?
George: I would say that Moderna, this company in Cambridge, they saw what was happening at UPenn, those earlier scientists I talk about, and they’re the first people that said, “We’ll just raise a lot of money. We’re talking billions of dollars, and focus on it as a company.” Moderna was the only one really focused on mRNA. This company, BioNTech in Germany, they were doing the mRNA work too, but they were doing other things as well. No one was as focused on it as Moderna, and no one did as many revolutionary advances as Moderna.
No one really was aware of them at the time. I think partly because Moderna was a pretty secretive company. They didn’t want competitors finding out what they were doing. I write in my book all about some science they were doing, some scientists who were really hard at work and came up with revolutionary advances. But again, they were very secretive and no one really knew about them. They didn’t want people to know about them because they didn’t want the big guys, the big pharmaceutical companies, to hear what they were up to.
Jeff: Why weren’t the big pharmaceutical companies more aggressive once there was the need?
George: I think some of them tried. Didn’t make that much headway. I write about Merck in my book. Merck is the vaccine giant. They developed the MMR vaccine that we’re all familiar with — mumps, measles, rubella — that we give our children. They’ve got a rich history of vaccine advancement. So early in the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a dispute within Merck I write about. Some scientists really wanted to focus on COVID-19. Others said, “This could peter out. We’re making such headway elsewhere. Things like cancer. We don’t want to be distracted.” And again, as we talked about earlier, vaccines are not the sexiest, most popular area of business for most pharmaceutical companies. So that explains it too.
Jeff: Where does Pfizer come into it?
George: So BioNTech needed a partner. BioNTech is a relatively small company in Germany. They had made advances with mRNA. They knew they couldn’t do it on their own. So they reached out to Pfizer. Pfizer’s not — as much as we all know them, a household name — they’re not a vaccine giant. They had closed down their infectious disease business.
So, it’s not like they were an obvious choice, but they were — it took them a little while — but they eventually were eager to work with BioNTech and they teamed up. What’s interesting is Moderna tried to find somebody too. Moderna reached out to Merck. They reached out to other people to find a partner, and no one wanted to work with Moderna. So they had to do it on their own, go up against Pfizer and BioNTech, which was a challenge.
Jeff: And talk a little bit about the impact this has had on Moderna as a company at this point.
George: So Moderna, it’s hard remember, but at the beginning of 2020 before the pandemic, people had a lot of skepticism about Moderna. The stock had been down and today they’re a huge company, $135 billion and they’re focusing on using mRNA for other kinds of things. I think in the next few years we are going to see advances potentially in both them and BioNTech in cancer, in malaria, in other kinds of neurological diseases — Lupus, MS maybe. So I’m excited about the future for both Moderna and other kinds of companies using these techniques.
Jeff: And talk a little bit about Moderna as a revolutionary startup. We can look at Moderna the way we look at startups in Silicon valley displacing some of the larger companies and really creating destruction in that regard. Is that really what Moderna is, and are there other companies like Moderna that are coming up?
George: Yes, it really is in the biotech world. We all know from historically companies like Amgen, but today Moderna is one of those kind of companies that has become a huge giant, almost overnight. It’s gone from about $3 billion in market value to $135 billion. And yes, they are like any kind of startup that has exploded in value. And the beauty of it is they’ve done it by helping people, by saving lives. And they are a really hard-charging, ambitious group. The CEO, Stefane Bancel, I write about a lot in my book, he’s an interesting, fascinating guy. He’s almost like a Steve Jobs in that he drives his people really hard. Early on, people were collapsing. They were fainting. They were literally being taken to the emergency rooms in Boston, in the area, because they were trying to keep up with this guy. And he had a vision and he kept pushing them. And he said, he literally said, “We’re going to be the ones to save lives during a crisis.” And people were skeptical about him. People thought he was exaggerating. People thought he was a little bit of an Elizabeth Holmes character. People compared him to Elizabeth Holmes from Theranos, Infamy, but in the end, he was right. He was accurate.
Jeff: And talk about the interaction between these companies and this whole broad effort and the government.
George: So what’s interesting is that on the one hand, Moderna was in competition with BioNTech and with Pfizer, and they were racing to be the first ones. And on the other hand, they also were rooting for their competitors. Was an interesting dynamic because let’s say BioNTech and Pfizer had come out with their vaccine and it didn’t work. People would be skeptical of all of the vaccines, especially mRNA. So Moderna didn’t want that to happen either. And it was also a fascinating dynamic because they were working with the government.
Moderna was working with the government. Others were too. Operation Warp Speed was helpful to all these companies. So for the first time I can remember, the government was working hand in hand with these companies. And listen, there were all kinds of bad things that the government did, missed the boat on a lot of things, took its eye off the ball, underplayed the pandemic and the virus, and the dangers. But when it comes to the vaccine effort, this is a story. My book is really a story of success, and a it’s a good story as opposed to all the things that went wrong. My book is about what went right.
Jeff: Talk about the efforts that the pharmaceutical companies were engaged in, Moderna, Pfizer, et cetera, and their interaction, their nexus with the regulatory agencies.
Gregory: So, and when it comes to the FDA, there was some concern among some people that perhaps things would be going too fast, they’d be cutting corners, et cetera. I was reassured in my research, I was reassured in a lot of ways. The average person hears about a new vaccine and gets worried, and for good reason. Historically, as I said, the average vaccine takes 10 years, and this took 300 days. So I understand the impulse to be concerned and wary.
But from my research for this book, I was so reassured that these vaccines took years to develop, not days, it just seemed that way. They tested them, they put them together quickly last year, but the research had taken years. And as you suggested, the regulatory aspects of things the FDA, et cetera, they were not cutting corners, the trials were tens of thousands of people. So in some ways, it was very reassuring to see everyone’s urgency that the regulators worked with the private industry was very reassuring to see.
Jeff: How important was it to the developers of the vaccine to understand or to think that they understood the source of the disease, because that debate seems to still be raging today?
Gregory: It is, it’s also an interesting one because it unites people on the left and on the right, far left and far right. There’s suspicion of China in both those groups. I find it interesting. The vaccine researchers didn’t spend that much time worrying about the origins. They were too focused on trying to stop this thing. Frankly, it takes years often to figure out the origin.
You look at HIV, for example, there were all kinds of suspicions about the Russians, the US government, or the CIA. What are the origins of HIV? Eventually, we found the origins of HIV. It was in an animal, and I think it’s likely to be the same thing here. But I think the researchers, the key ones that I talked to, they knew it could take years to find the origins of this virus, so they didn’t really focus on it so much.
Jeff: Talk a little bit about the potential future uses of this mRNA and where the research is taking itself right now.
Gregory: So the beauty of mRNA is it sends a message to the body, and you can send a message, any kind of message to the body. So there’s hope in all kinds of areas, I’m a tad cautious just because historically we haven’t made success when it comes to drugs, just this one vaccine so far. But the good thing is that all these hundreds of billions of dollars of profits that are going to accrue to the companies like Moderna, BioNTech, Pfizer, et cetera, they’re taking out a lot of that money, and they’re plowing it into new areas, and they’re just as focused on that.
And in some ways, they didn’t really expect to make headway on infectious disease. When it comes to BioNTech, they were a cancer company, they really still are in a lot of ways. So they’re going to take this money and plow it into cancer. Again, teaching the body through mRNA to fight off cancer and teaching the immune system, which I’m hopeful, I want to say I’m optimistic, but I’m hopeful others are using some of these techniques.
The adenovirus approach for malaria, for HIV. Just like we turn on the immune system now with these vaccines, maybe we can turn it off when we need to, for people that have rheumatoid arthritis, maybe lupus, things like that, MS that people are excited about. So in some ways, you could see this as the first chapter, and then maybe there are more successes ahead.
Jeff: Why has HIV been so resistant to any kind of a vaccine?
Gregory: HIV makes COVID-19 look like kids play. It’s such a challenging, awful virus for so many people. It’s different from one patient to the next. It’s not the same virus, which makes it really difficult for a vaccine company or a drug company as well. It’s always changing. It commandeers the immune system, so the immune system actually has no chance against HIV often, or frequently, and actually the virus can make use of the immune system.
So it’s really just the biggest challenge modern science has ever seen. And we’ve made a lot of headway in terms of drugs, thank God, but not so much on a vaccine. But the same people I write about are going right back into that lab, and they’re using some of these techniques they’ve developed for COVID-19 and working on HIV. So I’m optimistic, I’m hopeful.
Jeff: When those that have put so much effort and time, and research, and resources into the vaccine see the hesitancy that’s out there, the resistance in some places even beyond the hesitancy, talk a little bit about what you understand their reaction to be to all of that.
Gregory: They’re frustrated, they’re perplexed, they’re saddened. I would say I share those sentiments. To work as hard as they did, to save lives, and to have such an effective vaccine. The flu vaccine is what, 50, 60 percent effective? And here we have much more effective and protective vaccines that they worked hard to develop, and to have people question their motives, and people resist taking them when the side effects are relatively few. These are relatively very safe vaccines.
It’s just perplexing also, because I don’t know, you step on a nail, and right away, you go to your doctor’s and you get a tetanus shot. No one’s asking, where is it from? How is it developed? How long did it take? You just trust the science, you trust the experts when it comes to medicine. But now people, everyone’s an expert, and they go on YouTube, and they heard a friend say something. And there’s a lot of junk science out there. So I think it frustrates them, it frustrates me as well.
Jeff: And do any of them feel that it really impacts the work, that whatever the next breakthrough is, that it will be met with resistance and fear, and this kind of junk science that you’re talking about?
Gregory: That’s a good question. I don’t think they have that fear. I think in the back of the mind, maybe, but it’s all relatively new. We didn’t have this resistance a few years ago. So we are in a new world, sadly, where people defer to somebody who says something on Facebook as opposed to their own internist who they’ve been going to for years. So I have not heard researchers say, “Jeez, why am I wasting my time on HIV or something like this, curing and finding this new discovery if people are going to ignore it?” But I bet you in the back of their minds, it’s a concern.
Jeff: Do you think that it has to do with other societal forces that we certainly won’t get into? Or do you think that there’s an element of the resistance, is because this is so new, so different, so cutting edge?
Gregory: I think among reasonable people who are resistant, yes, there’s that initial concern that this vaccine has been done so quickly. During an election cycle maybe that’s the hesitancy, but I think your earlier point, I think there’s so much in society that splits us and it’s politicized. I did a book earlier in my career called The Frackers, about the energy revolution and all the oil and gas we’ve discovered in this country.
And I traveled the country, little towns in Oklahoma, North Dakota, and Pennsylvania, and Texas, and got to meet people. It was a privilege for me, I don’t think we all have a chance to meet others, people that don’t agree with us, people from different parties, and support different types of efforts. And, sadly, I think we’re just split as a nation, and we don’t get a chance to interact with people that think differently than we do. And I wish we had more of an opportunity.
Jeff: The irony is that one would think that it would be a crisis like COVID-19 and the potential for a cure or a vaccine, in this case, that would bring people together, that it would have exactly the opposite impact.
Gregory: Yes, 9/11 I lived through and that brought us together, all political stripes of people. This one I think initially did, but it didn’t take long for the divide to become clear and become even worse. So yes, you would have thought that, but sadly, that’s not the case.
Jeff: Gregory Zuckerman. The book is A Shot To Save The World: The Inside Story of the Life-or-Death Race for a COVID-19 Vaccine. Greg, I thank you so much for spending time with us here at WhoWhatWhy.
Gregory: Thank you. It was a sad way to end things, but I want people to know that it’s about what went right, not what went wrong.
Jeff: Thank you so much.
Gregory: Have a great day.
Jeff: Thanks. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another radio WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
The history of empires is a repetitive tale of overweening ambition, followed sooner or later by crushing defeat.
Understanding this process is the work of our guest on this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Alfred McCoy, chair of the history department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and author of To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change.
McCoy examines the trendlines of empires over the past 700 years. By viewing this history through the lens of environmental science he has developed a method of “predicting” the fall of the greatest imperial powers.
What this tells him about the future “world order” is not hopeful.
He envisions US world domination at an end — the result of a bipartisan failure of competence and vision. In the power vacuum that follows, he sees China rising to become the next world hegemon, but only briefly. Soon, he predicts, China will be laid low by the devastation of climate catastrophe, leaving, for example, all of Shanghai underwater.
McCoy spells out what he sees as a growing climate-driven global refugee crisis, water wars, and geopolitical discord, leading to devastating violence that can only be averted by what he imagines as a truly new world order, with the UN at its heart.
It’s certainly a dystopian vision, but one we best consider.
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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. In all of our personal lives, we know that we have made thousands of decisions and taken thousands of steps that lead us to where we are today. The same is true for nations around the globe. Hundreds of years of geopolitics have led us to where we are today, on the precipice of climate catastrophe, witnessing the slow death of American democracy, the real litigation of racial issues never resolved, and the decline of the American empire. It is said that if we don’t learn from history, we are condemned to repeat it.
The fact is that even if we study history, human nature, human frailty, and the portfolio theory of decision making will condemn us to repeat mistakes over and over again. The key factor seems to be the degree to which the mistakes and the state of the world converge at any given moment. To help us better understand this, I’m joined today by our guest professor Alfred McCoy.
Alfred McCoy holds the Harrington chair in history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he heads the university’s history department. He is author of the previous books, The Politics of Heroin and In the Shadows of the American Century. It is my pleasure to welcome Alfred McCoy here to talk about his newest work To Govern the Globe: World Orders, and Catastrophic Change. Professor McCoy, thanks so much for joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy Podcast.
Alfred: Thank you for having me.
Jeff: Well, it’s a delight to have you here. Should we be surprised at the degree to which the historical decisions that have been made for hundreds of years, 700 years in the case of what you write about, have a direct impact on the problems and issues that we’re facing today?
Alfred: Should we be surprised? No. The question is not to be surprised, to express outrage or condemnation in my case. There’s much to be outraged about and much to condemn, but the effort that I’m trying to make in the book, To Govern the Globe is to try and tease out the key historical trends over the past 700 years, understand how they made our present, and how they’re likely to shape our future. And historians are really good at figuring out the story when it’s all over. Any historian worth his or her salt when it’s all over can tell you not only what happened, but they can tell you with magisterial certainty, almost incontrovertible certainty, why it happened just that way and no other.
But when it comes to the future, we are all dwarfed. We are all at the feet of our muse Clio rendered virtually powerless. All of our analytic paradigms break down. So, what I was able to do in this book, which does track the succession of empires, global hegemons, and their world orders over the past 700 years, was to try and use not historical science but environmental science. In environmental science, if you read the detailed reports, and they’re very difficult and quite technical, in journals like Nature, the one thing that separates environmental science from almost any other form of social scientific or pure scientific inquiry is that environmental science is all about the future.
It’s a science of prediction. And when you read their reports, they predict that like economists, like what’s going to happen in the current administration over the next year, two, or three years, they’re trying to figure out what’s going to happen over the next 80 or 100 years. All their projections go right to the end of 21st century. And they all have these lines on high probability, medium probability, low probability, and all kinds of statistical computation.
So what I did to figure out the shape of the present and the way that present is leading us into a very troubled future was to simply overlay the historical patterns of empires and world orders on top of these quite scientific environmental projections, and then see what the convergence of the two brings. And what I say, basically, is the following. First, Washington’s world order is coming to an end. And there are a couple of reasons for this. First of all, it’s been in power for about 70 years, which is pretty long for any kind of global system. But more particularly, American decline has been something of a bipartisan project in Washington DC.
Back in 2001, elites in both Republican and Democratic parties decided that American power was so overwhelming, was so overweening, that the future was ours. It was the end of history. All the world was going to be swept away into a single pattern of liberal democracy and global capitalism with open borders and free world trade. That was the future of all humankind. It was preordained. We were so powerful. We won the Cold War. We were the sole superpower. We were the most powerful global hegemon in the history of the planet.
And so we figured, we’ll admit China into the World Trade Organization and make them an equal in the international economy with all the privileges that accrue. And China, which has 20 percent of the world’s population, they’re going to play by American rules. They’re going to become a nice democracy and a capitalist economy. They’re going to follow our rules. And by 2014, a couple of things happened. First of all, China’s economic progress was absolutely unprecedented. During America’s rise to global power from 1900 and 1950, we increased our share of the global economy at the rate of 2 percent a decade.
China has increased since 2001 its share of the world economy at an extraordinary, unprecedented 5 percent per decade. So, by 2014, China had $4 trillion in foreign exchange reserves. And about that time, President Xi Jinping announced something called the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’, which was an attempt to link the whole of the vast Eurasian landmass from the Atlantic all the way to the Pacific by a grid of pipelines, rails, and roads that would create an integrated market, although they never said it. And as if by natural law, commerce, profit, and ultimately, geopolitical power would flow through this infrastructure across the Eurasian landmass to Beijing and make them the new epicenter of world power.
And around about 2013-14, the Obama administration began to figure it out and began the process of trying to challenge China. The Trump administration followed with its trade war, and the Biden administration is, of course, continuing the confrontation. So that was the first thing we did.
The second thing we did, which is another bipartisan disaster was we, again, at this apex of our power, we invaded Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks and we took a war of choice. We invaded Iraq and we tried to insert ourselves, this was a neoconservative project, into the greater Middle East, build an imperial capital and the Green Zone in Baghdad and transform the Arab world. And the economic logic for this is we would get a permanent hold on the world’s oil reserves. And so, in effect, we invested about $8 trillion in inserting ourselves into the Middle East and gaining control of oil just at the point when oil was joining cordwood and coal in the dustbin of history. A gross geostrategic miscalculation.
Meanwhile, China with its $4 trillion was laying down that grid of infrastructure across the Eurasian landmass, road, rails, and oil and gas pipelines, and building 40 modern ports around the rim of Eurasia, expanding its military, cutting the circles of steel that Washington had laid down around Eurasia to dominate that critical epicenter of global politics during the Cold War. In effect, China was well on its way to becoming the world’s great global hegemon. So by 2030, all the sources indicate, and these are short-term projections — they’re therefore reasonably accurate.
Back in 2012, the National Intelligence Council said that by 2030, China would be the world’s largest economy by far. The international accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers published a report that says by 2030, China’s economy will be 50 percent, at least 50 percent larger than the US economy. And since China and the United States spend roughly 2 percent and 3 percent, respectively, of their gross domestic product in the military, that means that China’s military procurements will grow ever larger than America’s. They’re already ahead in a number of critical areas like satellite communication, security, and anti-missile defenses.
And by 2030, it’s clear that China’s economy will be larger than ours. They’ll have moved ahead in critical areas like artificial intelligence, they’ll be a military peer overall, and in a number of critical technological areas where China’s emphasizing. Military, they’ll be ahead of us. In short, it’ll be over for American global hegemony. The only question of course will be whether the American liberal world order survives.
Jeff: Talk a little bit about the nexus then between what you were just saying vis-à-vis China and this first idea that you discussed in terms of laying out climate, and particularly environmental history over what we’re seeing today.
Alfred: Sure. What I found most was by surveying the past 600 years of human history is there have been 90 empires, large and small, but there have been only three world orders. The Iberian, that’s to say Spanish and Portuguese, the British, the American, and now in the germ, just over the horizon, China. And empires are fixed. They’re palpable, they’re tangible, they have borders, they have armies, they have own terms, they have treaties, et cetera. World orders are far more diffused yet they’re much more pervasive and persistent.
To wind back, if empires embody power, world orders very often embody principle. And they govern the languages people speak, the laws that they observe, the way that they worship, and even the way that they play. And so, to uproot something so deeply entrenched in Washington’s world order embodied in the UN, the World Trade Organization, all the rest, it’s very deeply entrenched, and it’s in a rule of law. And most importantly, it’s suffused with a spirit of cooperation. Well, climate change is already starting to hammer that spirit of cooperation by unleashing climate change refugees.
Between 2016 and 2018, we saw in Europe, the rise of Britain’s Brexit because of the refugees, the rise of ultranationalist parties across the whole of Europe. In the United States, we saw the election of Donald Trump under the mantra, ‘Build the Wall’. And so when you add up the Middle Easterners coming to the Southern Border of the European Union, the Africans crossing the Mediterranean, and the Central Americans coming north through Mexico to the Southern border of the United States, you add them all up, these three groups, you come up with just 2 million people between 2016 and 2018.
Now, projections by the World Bank, the United Nations, say that by 2050, and it’s going to be progressive year by year, there will be at least 200 million climate change refugees. The latest estimate is that it will be 1.2 billion climate change refugees, which is about one in every seven human beings are going to be uprooted from their precarious purchase on seashores that are pounded by storms, at desert fringes, where the deserts extend and render agriculture unsustainable.
And so, these people are going to be moving, not by economic choice, but they’re just going to be seeking refuge, struggling desperately to survive. And what this means is that, as we saw between 2016 and 2018, that the cooperation that infuses Washington’s world order, is going to give away to a Chinese world order, which has a much more nationalistic, kind of exchange ethos. I give you and you give me, it’s a rational exchange system of global economy. And so, what I see is that China’s economic lines coinciding with the accelerating pressures of climate change, and their damaged international cooperation, are going to bring an end around 2030, to not only US global hegemony, but to Washington’s world order as well.
Now, tracking that trajectory further, those lines that the environmental sign is further, what they tell us is that in all likelihood, if China does succeed the United States as a global hegemon and build a very different kind of world order, then China’s era of global dominance is probably going to last about 20 or 30 years because, and the environmental science is very clear on this now, by 2050, there is going be a significant sea-level rise, and that most of Shanghai, which is a city of nearly 18 million people, even its downtown is going to be underwater. China’s premier city was dredged from sea and swamp starting in the 15th century, and to the water it will return.
The second thing that’s going to happen to China is a phase of global warming that is not an idle phase. And for the North China Plain, that’s to say the region between Shanghai and Beijing, which is, in many ways, the agricultural and industrial heartland of China, now home to 400 million people, more than the population of the entire United States, that this will become, by 2050 — No, actually, 2050, it’ll start warming badly. By 2060, they’re going to have hundreds of extreme weather events.
And after 2060, they’re going to start a period in which they are — It’s projected they’ll have at least five periods of what’s called 35 degrees centigrade wet-bulb temperature. Now, what’s that mean? What it means is that the balance of heat and humidity at 35 degrees wet-bulb temperature is such that the human body can’t sweat. And a healthy adult, sitting at rest, not moving, no physical effort whatsoever, in 35-degree wet-bulb temperature is dead within six hours. And that is going to be the North China Plain.
So as these environmental disasters sweep China, and China, by the way is digging its own environmental grave right now as we speak, by bringing on more coal-fired electrical plants. And under that Belt and Road Initiative that I talked about earlier, a $1 trillion development effort, there are dozens of power plants that are in draft and that are under construction funded by Chinese aid, with Chinese technology, and indeed industrial equipment.
The head of the UN, António Guterres, has said that if these coal-fired plants that are now on the drawing boards come online, it’ll effectively neutralize any gains that we’ve made toward reducing carbon emissions. So, China’s literally digging its own environmental grave.
Jeff: And to what degree do you think that China is aware of that? You talked a lot about China taking a long view, consistent with that long view is understanding certainly what’s going to happen within the next 30 years.
Alfred: Yes. China is a command economy. President Xi Jinping has strengthened the Communist Party’s hold on the country. China has ample resources and more than enough political power to mandate an accelerated shift. Look, but it’s not happening, ok? Let’s take the recent COP26 as it’s called, UN Conference in Glasgow. And there was a historic joint decoration by the United States and China about climate change.
And this is very important because between the two of them, China and the United States account for 44 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions that are going up into the atmosphere and starting climate change. China accounts for 30 percent of them, nearly a third by itself. And we account for about 14 percent, minute changes from year to year, but 44 percent, nearly half. So the two powers got together and this was very skillful on the part of our ambassador, John Kerry. He worked assiduously to get this agreement with China.
And it’s a historic declaration about their mutual commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. And when you look at the document though, and you read the fine print, it says that China will introduce carbon-neutral measures in its next five-year plan. And it’s actually, they said 5-to-15-year-plan, if I have that right. And when does that start? That doesn’t start until 2025.
2025, that’s four years from now. The clock is ticking on environmental disaster. They’re not even going to start for five years, and then it’s going to be a very weak effort. China has committed itself to being carbon neutral by 2060. Well, by 2050, Shanghai is already underwater. They’re just not reading the environmental science, which is published, peer-reviewed in the very top scientific journals, like Nature — it’s incontrovertible.
And China may be bad, but India, which is fast emerging — India now is just 7 percent of global greenhouse emissions. But India’s economy is coming on stream very, very fast. Projections are that by 2050, India’s going to have the world’s second-largest economy. Well, India announced at Glasgow, at that UN Conference, that they were going to be carbon neutral by 2070.
By 2070, that’s when the literature says that north China is going to have 35-degree wet-bulb temperature. And by the way, the North Gangetic Plain is going to have it as well. Not quite as bad as China, but the research said they are going to be the second most affected region on the planet. So these two major powers, India and China, emerging to become the economic titans of the 21st century, they are postponing climate change to the point where it’s going to be way too late, way, way too late.
Jeff: What are the efforts, or does this take into account any efforts, that mitigate the degree to which those greenhouse gases go into the air? Whether it’s carbon sequestration, whether it’s changing from some of these coal-fired plants, the degree to which there’s any mitigation, does that push the data out furthering your view?
Alfred: António Guterres, he’s a thoughtful man. He’s the UN Secretary-General. He’s presiding over this international effort. He’s devoted much of his term at the head of the UN to climate change, for all kinds of reasons. It’s clearly the UN’s top priority right at this time. He said that, as I said earlier, that if the coal-fired plants not only burn woods that are being funded and some of them are actually under construction, if these come online, that will effectively neutralize all the gains made. Much of the world is trying. The European Union is going carbon neutral very fast. The United States is actually in the midst of some historic shifts.
To give them credit, the major corporations, except for the oil majors, and some of them are improving, but the major corporations like the automobile manufacturers, which are the source of metro emissions, are going into electric vehicle production. And the Biden Infrastructure Program provides many billions of dollars for construction of charging stations across the United States.
Once, General Motors had said that they are going to go out of production for gas-run motor vehicles by 2035. I think it’s going to be faster than that. I think by the end of this decade, we will see a systematic conversion of the US transport fleet, including major trucks, and American light trucks, and American passenger vehicles are all going to convert, I think, to electricity.
Then the critical question to the United States, of course, is converting the grid, the electrical grid, so that our source of electricity is from renewable energy. And that has to be from three sources: solar, wind, and in order to have a reliable source, we’re going to have to reconsider nuclear. And I think nuclear power, which was condemned by the environmental movement — and the environmental movement has gotten quiet about nuclear power. But France generates 70 percent of its electricity from nuclear power without any actions whatsoever. And there’s a possibility, in fact, they’re already being designed and in production. You don’t have to build giant reactors like Three Mile Island or Chernobyl.
Now, the Russians have designed and actually are starting to use, and an American engineer has them, mini nuclear reactors, which have lots of advantages. One, you don’t have to have the same high-tension lines to carry electricity, and two, in that rare event that there’s an accident, it’s a much smaller accident, it’s manageable, it’s containable. And also, as these units go into production, as with all engineering, the more you produce them, the longer you produce it, the more secure and stable the technology becomes.
So I think through these three methods, I think we have now developed the technological capacity, the corporate buy-in, and the capital investment, which by the way, was very significant at Glasgow. The major financial firms from around the world committed themselves to pulling away from dirty energy, like coal and oil, and investing in renewable energy. And so some of these, the private sector can move us forward. But again, China and India have got to come to the part.
Jeff: Given China’s technological prowess and the money that they have to do this, why aren’t they doing it faster do you believe?
Alfred: China’s drive for industrialization has been coal-fired from the very start. They built a systematic national infrastructure involving provincial coal mines with heavy employment like we have in the United States, where coal miners are among the key lobbyists, and Joe Manchin, who’s a major investor in coal, and the Democratic senator from West Virginia. Now he’s our barrier in this society to moving forward on carbon-neutral energy. Well, China’s got that as well.
Moreover, their power plants and their power lines, a huge investment in coal-fired energy, and they’re trying to do two things. They’re trying to sustain a rapid economic growth built on coal-fired electricity, and then also begin, in 2025, to shift to renewable energy. So it’s a major shift for China, just like shifting from gasoline-powered transportation in the United States to solar-or battery-powered transportation. It’s going to be a huge shift in the American infrastructure.
Jeff: Given China’s abilities, it is surprising, I suppose, on a certain level, that they haven’t advanced nuclear technology faster than they have.
Alfred: Yes. They’ve gone for solar and wind. And they work very hard to capture the inputs for storage batteries, like cobalt from Congo, et cetera. They built up fairly sophisticated technologies in both arenas. They are probably the world’s leading producer of solar panels. They’re one of the world’s major producers of wind turbines. So they’ve gone that route rather than nuclear, and I think, for them, that makes sense.
The technological investment in nuclear energy is a fairly heavy one. Mind you, of course, they’re increasing their nuclear weapons capacity. It’s believed that China will have about 1,000 nuclear warheads by the end of the decade in order to neutralize the US nuclear threat. And it’s possible that they may follow the US pattern of investing first in nuclear weapons, developing a cadre of nuclear engineers, and then extending that into the civilian uses of energy that back in the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration called the peaceful atom. China might go that route.
Jeff: Given the route that China and India are going, and given the state of the world as you’ve just described it, what, if anything, can or should the West do at this point?
Alfred: Well, it’s not just the West, it’s the entire world. I think climate change, first of all, is happening far more quickly than any of us could have imagined. The news from scientific research every day indicates that it is accelerating. The UN has said that by the end of the century, the world will face very serious climate adversity, if not climate disaster if the world temperature rises by 2 degrees centigrade.
Well, the planet doesn’t warm evenly. The Arctic is already at 2 degrees centigrade. Siberia last summer experienced a record temperature of 100 degrees Fahrenheit north of the Arctic Circle. The polar ice caps are melting with incredible speed. The Thwaites Glacier, we just learned this week, is on the brink of collapse. The kind of ice board that is holding that massive glacier the size of Florida back is collapsing. And if the Thwaites Glacier, eventually, and it will, wind up in the ocean melting, that could raise the sea level by 2 or 3 feet by itself.
With rising seas, accelerating storms, like those disastrous hurricanes, cyclones that swept Kentucky, the heartland of America, with all the forest fires in California, the forest fires in Australia, on and on. As these disasters accelerate, the world is very quickly waking up to the threat of climate change. And as the refugees are uprooted from their precarious perch, the ecological margins of the world, and begin their march for safety and survival and the world recoils, we’re going to discover that we’re faced not with a new world order and China, but with something arguably even worse, global disorder.
Vicious and violent localized conflicts breaking out all over the world, water wars, for example, wars over refugee resettlement, pushing back money with gas and gunfire, shoving boats, refugees back into the sea to drown. The alternative to this unimaginable level of disorder is a new kind of world order like the world has never seen. And for this to happen, let’s assume that it’s the UN that would be the vehicle for this.
First of all, the UN needs one fundamental reform, the Security Council, which was born as an imperialist club with five permanent members, needs to have rotating membership and to end the veto, that the great powers like Russia, the United States, China, Britain, and France have. That needs to change so that the UN becomes genuinely representative of the international community. And a reformed UN needs to gain a very small slice of national sovereignty, but a very significant slice of that sovereignty at three critical areas.
First of all, the UN needs to have power to sanction effectively any nation that engages in greenhouse gas emissions, and that isn’t making a fast transition to renewable energy. Regarding perhaps greenhouse gas emissions as tantamount to violations of national sovereignty, sending an army to invade another country. Second thing is a reformed and empowered UN High Commissioner for Refugees or some successor body needs to move beyond voluntary resettlement of refugees to mandatory resettlement on the basis of space, climate, and available resources.
And third, and finally, the process that we saw in Glasgow in the COP26 UN Conference, where the wealthy temperate nations, who, by the way, are going to weather this climate change more effectively than in the tropics. There’s a narrow band of the earth in the Northern hemisphere that will remain habitable even under the most disastrous projections.
These wealthy nations have got to begin transferring, not on a voluntary, but on a mandatory basis, capital and resources to the poor tropical nations, to first of all, allow them to feed their population, slow the refugee flows, and adapt environmentally so that the population that can remain will remain and survive.
And through these three small but significant reforms, we can build a new kind of world order that will avert the unimaginable violence that will come with global disorder.
Jeff: Given the global experience that is still ongoing vis-à-vis this current pandemic, it’s hard to imagine anything like that operating effectively.
Alfred: In the 19th century, when there were the first conferences on international law and banning war, something like the UN seemed almost unimaginable. It seemed impossible that the world could ever create such a body that would have such powers. And in fact, the UN really does have very considerable powers.
To cite one, when Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia ravaged that country, and then the country descended into civil war with the United States backing, actually, Pol Pot along with China, and it was just slaughter. About two million out of Cambodia’s seven million population died. The international community got tired of it and they created something called the UN Transitional Authority for Cambodia. And they just came in and they established a sovereign government in Cambodia under UN authority.
And they took control of the country, they rebuilt the institutions, they had a transitory army and police, and they made Cambodia into — It’s an authoritarian state, but it’s a relatively stable country. So the UN has real power, and that power is exercised in many, many ways. And so it’s possible to extend those powers over these three critical areas.
Jeff: The problem, I suppose, is that some of the problems that are leading up to anything catastrophic, some of the issues that we face today with respect to immigration, refugees, and the early impact of climate change is such that it is fermenting a stronger form of nationalism in places like the US and China.
Alfred: That has been the first reaction. But think about where we are in this debate. Only 10 years ago, we were debating whether or not climate change was real. There were very influential climate change deniers. Donald Trump actually stood up in Davos as president of the United States and mocked the whole environmental movement, denounced it. Well, that rhetoric has disappeared pretty quickly.
Not even Trump says that sort of stuff anymore. Not even Jair Bolsonaro, the president of Brazil, who was an adamant critic of climate science, even he’s gone a little bit silent on that issue. The same with the Prime Minister of Australia. The foremost vocal antagonists of climate science have gone silent. And so that’s a real change. Nobody is denying climate change anymore. It’s just gone. Yes, there are a few flat earthers out there. But nobody who’s in any place close to authority denies it.
So the question now is simply — Climate science is established. It’s not only established scientifically beyond a doubt, but it’s also now accepted by world leaders in almost every country worldwide. In a certain sense, and this is a terrible thing to say, in a certain sense, those horrible disasters we’ve witnessed in California and the West Coast in Australia and the Amazon, which came much earlier than anybody could imagine, in many ways, they are a gift because we were able to see it early.
It would have been much worse. Imagine if it had stemmed up silently and we hadn’t had those disasters until 2040 or 2050. We got them early. We could see the face of the future and the terror that it represented. And we’ve been given a gift. And the question is, how will we use that gift? And people, by the way, around the world have paid, and I’m not minimizing it, a terrible price for that gift. But out of that suffering, there needs to come change in a better future.
Jeff: Alfred McCoy, his book is To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change. I thank you so much for spending time with us here today on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.
Alfred: Jeff, thank you.
Jeff: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another radio WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you liked this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.