Joel Kotkin | Elites: The New Ruling Class?

[Music] professor joel cotkin is the presidential fellow in urban futures at chapman university in orange california and is the executive director of the houston-based urban reform initiative institute i'm sorry joel has been described by the new york times as america's uber geographer his research and writing looks closely at economic demographic political and social trends in order to offer insights into the future nature and shape of society he's the author of quite a few books including the new geography and the new class conflict but his latest book really has i think hit on something that's very important for us to understand it's called the coming of new new of neo feudalism a warning to the global middle class and it suggests an approaching return to fixed economic and ideological hierarchies not to mention a decline in the appeal of liberal capitalism around the west so joel thank you very much indeed for joining us before we unpack the the coming of neo-feudalism can i just ask you how does geography shape societies and and the lives of the people in them this is something that we don't talk about much now because so few people study history if they do it's likely to be some revisionist history pushing an ideology well i mean as somebody who teaches i can tell you that kids do not come out of school with remotely the historical understanding they had 10 years ago much less 30 or 40 years ago but basically geography is very important what makes for liberal societies um is the ability of people to move from one part of a country to another or in the case for instance of the uk to export a huge part of their population to the rest of the world um the countries that have been the best for the middle class historically have been countries with large land masses uh where their people are able to get housing at a relatively uh decent rate australia canada united states probably the three most attractive countries in the world right now um and so that's been our heritage now the weird thing is and particularly weird in australia given the fact that i think you've got a little bit of land um is that your australian government and in some cases and certainly your planners want to pack everybody into ever more crowded spaces in a country that has lots of land and basically making it virtually impossible for middle-class people particularly the younger generation to ever buy a house so you know i was always struck in australia by it was probably the most democratic country i'd ever been to i remember going to perth once and the guy picking me up at the airport uh in a um in in you know in the car from the airport and he um and i said hello um where do you live and he points up to a hill and says i've owned two houses up on that hill today that same driver had have virtually no chance of owning a house and would be probably living in a little apartment making the planners happy making uh the financial markets happy and making himself unhappy you're right uh and we'll go on to talk about this because part of the response to the economic chaos that came out of the great financial crisis and now covert is exacerbating these problems those who have assets are doing very well low and middle income earners are looking at flatlining wages and you raise some very interesting questions about who's benefiting and what it might all result in you're absolutely right about australia 17 increase in housing prices during essentially a covert dominated era and uh and and and to highlight the accuracy of what you've said that the problem so much worse in sydney melbourne perth whatever if you get out into the regions in australia you can buy a good house for a mere fraction of what you pay in the major cities but there's still this desire to to congregate so and in fact just on the geography shaping things our most famous historian who's still alive and doing a lot of writing jeffrey blaney well into his 90s now was launched to fame in this country by writing a book called tyranny of distance and he describes how the nation was in fact shaped by its isolation so it's something we ought to keep in mind but i'm particularly intrigued this morning as we talk your contention that we are in danger of returning to a new feudal system probably useful to outline for people who don't really have much of a focus on feudal times what a feudal system was and then to perhaps take us through your thinking about why we may be seeing and the emergence of a new feudalism which ought to be deeply concerning to us well first of all the feudalism you know obviously you know it's not the same you know it's not people going to go around with chain mail and and hack at each other with swords that that we're not going back to that um but what we are seeing is what i would consider the freezing of class lines other words a less and less upward mobility throughout the whole west and now beginning to affect china as well where you're pretty much if you come from a certain class your chances of staying there are better the uh the the all sort of you know sort of up from the bottom uh process has become which really uh was characteristic of much of the 20th century is now much much more difficult um and i also think that what you what you have is uh one thing is obviously that you have a uh two powerful classes um very much like the old french first and second estates the aristocracy which is now the tech and the wall street people um and what i call the claricy which is used to be what we would call the clergy but is now sort of our secular clergy um the universities the media the upper bureaucracy who can tell us to do whatever we want to do and in covid both of these classes got richer the online the people controlled the online platforms obviously jeff bezos have made a phenomenal amount of money in in the pandemic uh the clarity has become all-powerful able to determine what's true what's not um put limitations on on on on almost everything sometimes with scientific justification sometimes without but with an enormous exercise of power who is declined what i call the yeomanry which would be the old third estate the small property owners um the the artisans that class and then below them are what i would call the new serfs which is very often people who were from the yeoman class but now have no chance of ever owning a home or starting a business and are going to be living basically um hand to mouth um for the rest of their lives i mean the in certain places and i think sydney and melbourne would be good examples certainly um here in southern california in the bay area in the new york uh city area the chances of a average earning middle-class family buying a house is is very very small yeah you you draw out some very interesting parallels you say that this sort of this new um uh sort of technical class of very very wealthy people who who do well in our in in this new emerging feudalism as you put it has a parallel in china where it's all right to become incredibly wealthy you know in a communist state where everybody's meant to be equal provided you toe the government line and that they're in doing shades of of mussolini's italy uh you've got the situation where you know traditionally in your country and in ours the captains of industry tended to be economically conservative they were respecters of democ of democracy they had a deep identification with their with their country but you now see as david goodheart might call it uh the emergence of the somewheres and the anywheres the anywheres are sophisticated people who have no particular allegiance or patriotism about them in relation to the country that they live in and and you're seeing this sort of strange merging almost of this pattern in both america and china as i understand what you're saying well i think that what's happened in china is that um is you know in many ways i think you know what's happening in china i like to say america is evolving towards uh chinese capitalism with american characteristics sort of turning around dungeon bing's old phrase you know basically yes you can make a lot of money but you've got to kowtow to the party line so jeff bezos gives money to black lives matter which is a group that you know would probably wouldn't mind you know seeing him expropriated if not guillotined um you you have uh people genuflecting to ideologies that would that are completely opposite to the ideologies that allowed them to accumulate wealth in the first place and and part of what is also very much in the medieval fold is the rise of orthodoxies other words you can't challenge the orthodoxy um you now have facebook and google um for instance limiting and sometimes eliminating points of view up that are just dissenters whether they're um like for instance steve coonan who just wrote a very good book on climate change a former um chief scientist in the energy department under president obama um you know he comes out with a book which says well you know there's been a lot of exaggeration and maybe there are more pragmatic ways of doing it not a crazy denarius book it's called misinformation when when you you try to access it or on the most embarrassing things like the um whole question of where did kovid come from i don't know i you know i but i but but the fact that there were credible people who thought that maybe covid was was created in a lab were essentially silenced until the cdc said well well maybe it was true but in other words this this idea that like sort of like you have to go through the bishop's office to get approval for your views and by the way when when the bishop has a different point of view that becomes the new law but meanwhile anyone who dissents is kicked off um basically you know kicked off into what i like to call the the uh digital gulag i mean they still exist they're still breathing but they have a very hard time reaching anyone yeah recently in conversation with you on me park the south korean lady who escaped a north korean lady who escaped north korea she very vividly describes what a society looks like when all differing views are silenced you rapidly fall into a great darkness because your ideas are not challenged and the ruling orthodoxy can't be broken and the results are dreadful in every sense including economic but let's tease out a little bit what does a new clericy believe because this is what you're you know you're really touching on when you say that um they establish orthodoxies until a new orthodoxy comes along which by the way sort of takes you right back to you know the early days of western freedom when we used to burn people who dissented at the stake until we realized that was done because sooner or later today's minority would become tomorrow's majority and the whole thing would turn you get a very unstable situation but what is it at the moment that the cleric the new cleric as you call them believe how would you summarize that first of all they believe in themselves and they are very attached to credentials um you know i i thought one of the great comments about this is you know this the the what what what you know let's say journalism because i'm particularly sensitive there um that you know you go through the journalism schools they don't teach people to be objective anymore they don't teach them hey you need to inform the public which is how i was brought up as a journalist now you need to instruct the public and then you have this belief by let's say some of the health authorities well we can lie and chan and and and do things because it's good for people that i lie like i'll change what herd immunity is i'm going to change whether you should wear a mask or not wear a mask and then change that point of view with this idea that your authority is so great that nobody can can challenge it and what we have now is a alliance between this claricy which is overwhelmingly made up of people who have a particular ideology and the tech oligarchs and now the corporate world the scariest thing in the essay i did recently for claremont um the the scariest thing is now you have major corporations doing the same things we're going to discriminate against white people we're going to we're going to make sure that uh our employees go through some sort of you know indoctrination um united airlines except 50 of our pilots are going to be women or minorities they said well that's great but you know what i'm on an airplane a lot and i really just want a really good pilot you know i mean their skin color and their gender is irrelevant what i care about is that they're a good pilot so we're stripping away the merit and what's ironic about it is many of the victims of this i'm sure this is going to be true in australia as well um is you have an asian population for instance which generally overachieves relative to the other ethnic groups overall um and now we right and then you'll say well you know what we don't want um you know the bronx uh uh the bronx uh um um high school of science or the or stuyvesant in new york city or lowell and in in in san francisco to be based on merit these super academic high schools we're going to do it by lottery we're going to get rid of any sort of testing um i mean i can see this my my daughter goes to a charter school here in orange county my younger daughter which is a great school very hard to get into they're going to go to a lottery system and she says to me you know dad in five years that this degree isn't going to be worth what it was i know that what's going to happen to the how good is a berkeley degree going to be when sats are no longer used where the the number one way of getting in is basically being in the right ethnic group um you're going to degrade the quality of things and you're going to make it very difficult particularly for those people like working class let's say asian families who have worked really hard so their kids go to good schools and then they move up just like my grandparents coming from russia um uh were able to um get at least some of their kids into the professions and into into city college where from where they they they did well well they worked really hard in school all the habits that what you might call the bourgeois culture which by the way the black lives matter people say it's white culture it's not white culture you know the the most bourgeois people i know in terms of behavior are immigrants from africa um in houston uh the the nigerians by some measurements are the best educated wealthiest population in the city um and so you know it's not but what we've done is we've taken all the elements of middle-class value systems and decided that they're they're they're racist and discriminatory and they're the exact opposite look i come from a family where my father was the first one to go to college um uh you know my you know in for my wife you know she was the first one in her immediate family to go to college i mean from canada um all these people who have made this transition which is the really emblematic of the liberal capitalist era that whole process is now being uh negated and turned into something which is very similar to what you saw in china in the 60s or in the former soviet union except i have to say in china they do believe that math is math and engineering is engineering and two plus two equals four whether you're whatever your race happens to be and one funny thing is like the the craziest thing is my president of my university is a um italian mathematician and he says they accused me at a math of being racist and he said don't they know that this path comes from the arabs you know i mean he said roman numerals never you could never do calculus with roman numerals but but we've now taken all the great achievements of our society and you think about it why does somebody migrate from china or india to australia it's for those very opportunities and freedoms that australia offers that they can't have at home and yet we want to rescind those freedoms so that um so that a small ideological group and a group of oligarchs can completely dominate society let's tease that out a bit because this is where what you say strikes such a chord with me this it is a new aristocracy meritocracy is dying i find it that's amazing that it's happening in america where your great you know cat's cry has always been freedom in australia it's always been fairness i think you'd say uh kim beasley uh former distinguished leader of the other side of politics to me um uh you know often says this and i think he's right fairness you know jack's as good as his mate as in a saying that i grew up with you don't hear it as much now but now what you actually have that's so frighteningly reminiscent of what we've once broken free of is a class of people who just naturally assume that they know what is best for us and they actually don't really believe in um in democracy they actually don't really believe in it they know better well and where we're going to see this take place is going to be in the climate issue where you know they're basically going to say you know you're going to have to do what we want and we know you're not going to like it so we're going to do everything by administrative dicta this is what this is the new pattern whereas you know no you know legislatures are not going to be able to say to people you know what we're going to restrict um how much energy you can use we're going to we're going to raise the price of of of gasoline petrol by a huge amount but it's not going to be passed by the legislators it's going to be done by by executive order we saw this beginning to develop um particularly under president obama and and now um and then trump basically rescinded them and now biden restored them but in each case the legislators never got to talk about it and i want to make one last point just on this which is i'm not a conservative i've never been a conservative i've never voted for a republican for president um i you know i consider myself somewhat of a social democrat but today's progressives are the exact opposite of social democrats social democrats want middle-class people and working-class people to move up maybe own property maybe uh have a better life for their kids the today's progressives essentially want everybody to live in a in in a studio apartment um play video games all all day smoke pot drink and uh and water their plants um and watch porno i mean that's sort of the vision that they have their vision isn't you this young person is going to achieve what their parents achieved because under their rubric you can't address climate change except on the backs of the middle and working class at the same time that these people live at an extremely live extreme and and violate their own rules um which of course you know you might see this in the bishops in in medieval europe so this is a very interesting thing that um there's a parallel in my country and i'd say in britain too um and that is that um the traditional labour parties uh or sort of left of center parties uh um social democrat parties here uh were very committed to the working party to working people and to those who were disadvantaged or dispossessed but what has actually changed is not just in the name of identity politics they're creating new aristocracies out of victims real or perceived there's something else going on they actually think working men and women are the enemy of the environment they actually despise them a lot of them and and there's working people are and i think actually beginning to wake up to this so you're seeing a massive political realignment so you in a lot of cases and i think there are probably parallels right across the western world you've got people in the so-called leafy suburbs very well to do who are increasingly now disinterested in in social cohesion and even in patriotism they're more committed to environmental and social causes and so they're tending to vote now for ironically left-wing green type parties and it's a sort of workers and middle class that are attracted to the sort of center-right parties you're seeing quite a dynamic shift here and you talk about that too the possibility for a real realignment in coming times where the old left and right definitions and breakups mean nothing no i think that's very accurate i mean there's a very good book out recently called despised out of the uk which talks about you know the attitudes of of sort of the um a friend of mine calls them the cognitive elite um and their attitudes towards the working class and the the the great problem is can we find a champion of working class if you will somewhat nationalist perspective who doesn't indulge in white nationalism and and and racism that i mean even donald trump who is an awful human being in the last election picked up votes among jews among among hispanics and among even among african-americans and asians i think a candidate who could speak some of the same things that trump talked about some of which were very legitimate uh but without the ranker without the the you know the the the the sort of dog whistles to the to the white nationalists um i mean i just think he had he had you know he had diarrhoea of the mouth he didn't know when to shut up he didn't know he he didn't realize that that you know he wasn't sitting in the bar in queens talking to his friends um and and i think that basically um this is sort of the the the happening everywhere the labor party in britain lost seats in the midlands and in yorkshire that have never voted for a conservative i understand in your last election that everyone expected the labor party to win and the more conservative party won because working class and middle class voters deserted them this is beginning to happen in this country as well the question is you know once trump is out of the way um you know whether or not they'll be somebody who's got more appeal to minority groups um but we're starting to see it you know you look at texas recent elections in texas a border town mcallen overwhelmingly democratic overwhelmingly hispanic just elected a republican mayor you know why because they they want the border controlled because if you live on the border and then all of a sudden you've got people who are coming into the country illegally including some criminal elements but you know even or or people who might have covet you know australia has has the advantage of being an island basically a big big big big big island but you can cut it off we have a we have a huge borders on with both canada and mexico and and um so i mean i think there are a series of issues that are coming up that will continue to to separate working and middle-class families from uh from the progressives um the the progressives seem seem to be as a friend of mine said the alliance of the over-educated and the undereducated um and basically what they do is they say hey you know what we're gonna give you free money so you can you don't have to work or you can only work part-time um and you know and that's how we'll buy you off and we see this in in states like california where uh a lot of the middle-class jobs have disappeared the industrial jobs have disappeared so the traditional way of working people moving up has been cut off and so the the progressive response is essentially uh transfer payments and those transfer payments you know who pays for that that's the middle class i don't think zuckerberg and bezos and those people are paying the taxes that go um to transfer payments i think it's poor schmucks like us it's interesting uh one thing you said there the unexpected election result in australia there's something behind that that's really important a lot of people now don't feel they can safely tell a pollster what they really think yes we are silencing people one would have thought there'd be a little more graciousness and a little more intelligence uh apart on the part of modern elites in the face of this there ought to be a willingness to recognize that by the constant intimidation the constant attempt to silence and to belittle those who have a different view you drive them underground in terms of their views now the ultimate expression of what can happen there is that people say it's all a swamp and so they do something wild and radical as they did in the election of trump i've always seen him more as the product rather than the cause uh of of the dislocation and the disruption and i think that the more for instance we push let's say the the critical race theory approach what it's going to do is it's going to create a generation of white nationalists i mean think about it this way you're a young person growing up you're being told from day one that being white is bad that america is bad that being male is bad particularly for men you're you're telling all these people that everything that they their parents hold dear is bad um and some people will go along with it and will allow themselves to be emasculated in that way but are some people gonna say to hell with you and then they don't believe anything so you know if you've been let's say lied to or misled on climate or or the pandemic instead of saying hey but we do have to do something about these issues you say well it's all a lie you know i mean yeah today in america i don't know if this is true in australia i know the sydney herald is kind of your new york times right sydney morning those papers people just don't believe them they you know and i always i teach a class on propaganda and one of the things i say it's not that they purposely lie they just remove anything that interferes with the narrative so for instance you can talk about electric cars but you can't talk about the fact well if you have electric cars you got to generate a lot more electricity and how do you do that when you shut down your nuclear plants and your gas plants where's electricity going to come from you think it's going to be cheap you think it's going to be reliable um but the problem is you can't raise the issues and again this comes from the education system i find this within in theology as well as academia um also in in increasingly even in the sciences everything is political and i was talking to one you know bright young guy getting his phd in engineering at stanford and the kid says to me you know yeah i'm looking at this i'm saying well here are the advantages here are the disadvantages and i don't know where we're going to get the electricity and so he asked this professor the professor said you don't ask that question you know yeah i mean now i'm not saying electric cars are good bad and different maybe they're a good thing but if you but you have to understand that there are going to be problems with with the rare metals they're going to be problems with disposal of the batteries there's going to be problems uh in in getting the electricity um you're going to lose some of the redundancy that you have now um i mean could you imagine if you had a a a breakdown in your electricity supply and and and uh and all the cars are electric you you the society would come to an end the one thing that worked during power outages is the car that has gasoline in it i mean you know so i mean i again i i think that that it's not that i necessarily disagree with some of the positions that greens and progressives have it's that we can't even debate them reasonably yeah even a guy like steve coonan a leading physicist is essentially sent into the into the into the um into the digital gulag um you know because he you know the agent and then there's another factor and it's important in australia because your cons your population is so much concentrated in your capital cities is that it's also a elite that is overwhelmingly urban overwhelmingly affluent because you know to live decently in sydney today you have to have a lot of money yeah particularly if you're under or or of course the the favorite way is is to inherit it um but you know the you know so you have a class of people you know who will say well shouldn't everybody live in the city well you know i remember speaking at a conference at harvard and and uh somebody some people from uh the city of london said well we all live in the city and they said by the way do you all have country houses and of course they all did yeah so yeah you know jamie dimon wants everybody to come back into the office well that's okay for him he's got a luxury appointment in new york he's got a 30-acre um estate in bedford up in westchester county and he he uh and god knows how many other properties and believe me i don't think he drives back and forth he either takes a helicopter or has a chauffeur for him the office is great for the poor schmuck who's got a commute from new jersey for an hour and a half every day it's not so great and and this is how covid is accelerating this class divide this sort of almost uh you know if they knew their history they might like to go and have a look a good look at what unfolded in france you know the disdainful attitude of marie antoinette uh let them eat cake uh and it wasn't long before they so resented that they took a head off um this is uh this whole problem of a lack of perspective and a lack of balance and a lack of understanding because we refuse to believe that anybody who's gone before us had any wisdom or can tell us anything the vast difference between all those well-educated people that you've been talking about we've been talking about uh and and then being acquainted with wisdom as well as with information well you know a friend of mine who builds apartments in silicon valley um told me he said the the silicon valley elite is the least sensitive to the effects of what they're doing on society than any group of business people he's ever dealt with how many of the of the tech oligarchs have ever studied history how many of them know anything about you know i i did a a podcast with a um a venture capitalist a couple weeks ago and he started saying well we ought to get rid of the constitution it's old it was built 200 something years ago i said we're we exist because of the constant constitution once you get rid of the constitution there's not going to be any constraints like you know there's a reason why we constructed our society the way we did and we this and we um we decentralized power and had checks and balances which goes back to most you know montesquieu um and and but but it was it you know this this lack of respect for the past this lack of respect for for a history this lack of respect for saying okay how did how did we deal with environmental crises in the past um what did we do have these crises happened before you know there's very little understanding you you can't even get them to say well you said 1970 this would happen and it didn't so i'm not saying it won't eventually happen but why don't you get a little bit of of of humility here that you know al gore doesn't have a machine to go into the future and tell us what the future looks like he doesn't know i'm you know i'm i i'm teaching her class next year on the sort of history of futurism and how often we've been like remarkably off target in terms of predicting what's going to happen so let's have a little humility and that humility comes in part by studying history and understanding that life does not have an arc to the better there are this is why mid the medieval experience is so important we come from the for all its problems the the the um uh the beauties and and enormous accomplishments of the classical civilization and then we go through in in europe almost a thousand years of backwardness some points of light after a thousand but history doesn't necessarily go go forward you know the 22nd century could be much more repressive and and and poorer than the 21st century it it can happen it's happened before it can happen again same thing in if you study chinese history indian history you um islamic history all of which i've studied you would find that they've had periods of rises and falls so you have to understand these things but how do you deal with people who think that life can be and ideas can be reduced to algorithms which um uh which cannot pick up these subtleties well the great thing is that i've discovered during these conversations a lot of young people are beginning to realize they're being sold a lot of duds along the way here and they want more information and one of the things that i would say you know we talked a bit about the old definitions of left and right being wrong but uh you know useless now but one thing that always stands in my mind is one thing i do think conservatives have right is their profound belief the human nature doesn't change and if people want to reject their constitutional arrangements were the same in australia we have a later constitution we would rather draw on the best wisdom from around the world including america but you know go back and read the federalist papers not that i've read them all but go back and look at the deep thought the deep understanding of human nature the deep balancing of you know people's rights uh and responsibilities the deep the thoughtful division of powers the reason you have a collegiate system for electing your president the reason you have a senate to look after the little people the commitment to free speech because free speech isn't for the majority it's for the minority and if you wash that out of the system well let me come to another question that i think arises out of your writings this this um you know everybody knows better than steve cooner sort of approach now he's a physicist and he might actually know something about climate change and he's not a denier so he shouldn't be demonized but he's saying don't go too far that's that's a reasonable synopsis i think but no no no we who feel um actually understand better than those of you who know so this is a crisis now one of the things that you point to here is there's a real danger this sort of policy positions that are now being forced on governments will actually result not just in the lower and middle classes not being able to get ahead but in things like energy poverty and and a real cost burden that they're not being told about although i suspect many of them beginning to sense it so that the climate change policies you know everybody wants more renewables and they do in this country too and i understand why uh but they're not being exp it's not being explained to them the true economics behind it and in reality it may result in very considerable increases in costs that will be borne by people who can least afford those costs not the people who are doing all the spruiking right and of course what we found here in california is who buys teslas who buys electric cars who buys who puts solar on their roofs they're the wealthy people and they get all these benefits and there those benefits particularly on on on solar mean that the rates are higher for everyone else i mean we we what we see over and over again is a pattern in which the middle and working classes get to pay for the obsessions of the wealthy who don't have to live with the consequences i mean if i was to come up with it a a a a a quick summary of where we're going i think this is it and this is very much in the medieval um tradition you know if you take a look at um you think about the aristocrats who you know could go into a village and rape the the daughters of of a uh of of the of the peasants and then they can go and they can they they can get by indulgences for the church or you have the bishops who are who are preaching poverty and their and the and the the parish priests are poor and living with the poor you think the bishops live with the poor you think the pope's lived with the poor no they lived incredibly lavish lives and had mistresses and you know so this this idea of there being sort of one set of rules for one group of people and another set of rules for other and we have the same models if you read the history of the early soviet union within the first two three years of the of the revolution uh which thank god my parents managed to to to leave beforehand but my grandparents but but they but the but the thing that that's that's that happened is guess who's living in in the estates of the noblemen the bolsheviks um you know so so fundamentally and that's why i think your point about human nature is is important and one thing i agree the conservatives but i would say traditional liberals understood you'd need a balance of power you know the great justice brandeis um here in in the u.s he said you know let the states experiment you know like in your country maybe what works in western australia doesn't work in new south wales maybe what works in in in the northern territories is something different let the local people decide okay we're going to do this or we're going to do that but that's not the mindset of the clarity and the clarity and the oligarchs they want national policies they want top-down policies and they don't want the hoi polloi to get in the way interesting um just to go back to the human nature question for a while it's really important to remember and not to sound overly negative i know i have a tendency to always look for the sort of the downside of what other people are trying to do you really remember the upside so if you go back to the clergy you've got to remember that of course in earlier times many many many monks whatever right throughout europe kept truth alive they set up universities they lived very simply indeed but it's this and you could say the same of the people who've given us this incredible technology which you and i are using right now and avenues in social media i hope for good you know promoting good argument that's the theme of the series i do you can't get good public policy without a good argument if you shut the argument down if you truncate it if you distort it you'll end up with bad policy uh but it's it's a bit i mean and they might say well this is all good stuff and it's good that wealthy people are buying teslas it'll be like the history of the uh internal combustion engine though they were for the wealthy until henry ford came along and they became available for the masses i guess the point is that the poor and the middle classes weren't subsidizing uh the the wealthy people to buy their early motor cars there's a difference well and and also that you know you have a movement to eliminate a a great deal of independent businesses you know in covet at least i know in the united states about 35 percent of all the small businesses in this country will probably not make it through the whole crisis um what's going to happen with people who um uh once once the transfer payments what what's you know and what's going to happen to them i mean the the the problem is that we are setting up a system that i don't think to use the favorite green word is sustainable you can't have a society where you know one percent of the population controls you know 50 60 70 percent of the wealth um you can't have a society that's democratic when four or five platforms control the flow of information and the culture and you know now we have you know the the the the tech you know people buying up the studios buying up the newspapers um i mean that this is this is just terrifying um development and because governments are so afraid of these these companies or are owned by them that nobody's nobody's stopping them now the good news i'll give you some good news i think there's a consciousness both on the left and the right that these tech companies are out of control and are and have to be curbed somehow i think there is some some pushback there um i think there is some belief for instance here in the united states that we have given too much of our economy over to china and we've allowed our industrial base to atrophy um so there are some there are some good factors and and and frankly i i think president biden has followed president trump on on at least these issues he'll never admit it and and probably trump will never admit it but the reality is the historical necessity of this country to to begin to wean itself off china is um i think widely recognized so there are some good things going on um there is some pushback what we don't know is how the the politics will will shape over time this is a really interesting question and of course uh you know america remains there are no there are no global challenges that can be resolved that the full engagement of the americans and we're very conscious of that in australia very conscious of it because we've been feeling the eye of a very authoritarian regime to the north in recent times not least of all i suspect because we began we were the first country to say that we didn't want harway involved in the development of our 5g telecommunications network and then america followed most of europe's now followed and i i suspect that uh that was the you know the catalyst for a bringing forward if you like of what i suspect was always going to be a much more assertive china but the question remains i think um we have to believe in ourselves we have to believe in our culture our young people have been encouraged to believe that they're inheritors of a bad uh racist uh cruel oppressive culture that you'd have to say is it worth defending so how do you think that plays out i mean in the end i suppose what i'm saying is maybe the world's future if we're not to fall into a new dark ages as you alluded to a little while ago we have to actually believe that we have something valuable in our democratic conditions we have to actually believe he's one of the really interesting aspects of a current debate it has to be painted so bad you can never acknowledge progress and as one who looks at jimmy crow and the whole question of the way blacks have been treated in america i can see why there's been deep angst but the reality is that as many black clear thinkers have said there's been enormous progress since the 1960s a number of of black americans who have moved into the middle classes and are now doing very well has improved dramatically but there seems to be this sort of oh no no no it's all bad you can never concede that a liberal democratic order is the way to get things done because the minute you can see that you say well may you you're opening the suggestion that perhaps it shouldn't be overthrown it can be somehow made to work the objective seems to be on the part of um too many people now to rather carelessly say we don't actually have a better alternative but we just want to tear this down it's just terrible it's almost like the old communists of old who say you know we just got to get rid of democratic capitalism without them really having a clear idea now of what the alternative might be we've got to believe in ourselves that's my point for all of that and part of that's being humble enough to say we haven't got everything right but if we don't believe in ourselves we play right into the hands of those who say well you're right for everthrow well you know i i was thinking you know i i mentioned to my daughters and also to my students i would say you know i'm old enough to remember driving down to virginia my parents took me to williamsburg and seeing colored only hotels and i asked my dad i said what's that you know i'm from new york i you know i never saw anything like that and and when you think about it you would you know in 50 years um african-americans have made enormous progress they've had um and one of the really important things um that's happened is that the country is increasingly multi-racial um and has accommodated all sorts of people the you know the head of the dallas chamber of commerce is an immigrant from africa the you know the uh um we have many southern cities have african-american mayors um uh we have uh you know we have african-americans you know corporate executives at the highest level well you had you actually had a president we had we elected a black president who by the way did fairly well among working-class whites who were supposed to be racist um so you know the bottom line is yes there are bad things and racism still exists but if you look at the number of police shootings they're much lower than they had been in the past um and when when police um do something that's uh they misbehave there's a better chance that they're going to be punished and there are going to be changes in how policing is so our system has built in the ability to self-correct that's that great advantage of our constitution and of you know the tradition that comes out of you know basically out of the uk you know you can change things they can be done gradually you don't have to overthrow the government to change things and what frightens me is if the progressive regime gets so institutionalized that people feel that their freedoms are being uh completely squashed you may get a a um a reaction at least among some that is well like what we saw on january 6th um now i blame president trump for a lot of it but but you know part of it is there is this sense in large parts of the population that they can't trust the establishment they can't trust the professors they can't trust trust the liberal clerics they they can't trust the bureaucracy and they're unfortunately they're probably right that you can't trust them now how you deal with that lack of trust is a different issue but fundamentally um this lack of trust in our institutions is really scary yeah because i i think you know i mean but you didn't used to think well if a president if if a democrat won the presidency everything would change the next day we you know we always thought well you know there's there's the senate and they've got to deal with with the house of representatives and the supreme court and on the left they're talking about getting rid of the senate getting rid of the filibuster packing the supreme court i mean making it so that the progressive program is permanent forever and um that is a recipe for social chaos um that i don't i don't want to see i want to see many of the things that progressives want to see as well but i i think there are there are you've got to get buy-in you've got to get people to agree um to these things you've got to do it over time you don't do it immediately i understand exactly what you're saying it comes back to what you said earlier we need a little humility on the part of some of these people to recognize the worth and dignity of others and their right to have a say and a you know a a realistic enough assessment of the reality that if you don't allow people to ask questions to voice their concerns they won't own the solutions you push on them again history is a good guide as to what happens if you keep patronizing others right and and and you can't turn everything into a war a war is a war and yes during world war ii i'm sure in australia as well as in the united states and not even more so the uk people voluntarily gave up their freedoms because there was a cause you can't expect people whether it's covid or or or climate or racism to essentially sign away all their basic rights all the time i mean a a crisis is a crisis and um and you you need to be very judicious about how you apply it but now and we're going to see this i i'm completely convinced that when the pandemic comes to an end there will be an announcement we now have a climate crisis and we're going to we're going to deal with it with executive orders because there's no way the people are going to vote to get rid of their cars when there's no way they're going to change their diets there's no way they're going to want to move into little apartments in the city and and ride the choo choo trains everywhere they're just not going to want to do it so they're never going to get that through the legislature so they'll they'll do it by decree well that's an interesting line to segue into trying to summarize what what you've had to say that's so valued and you mentioned you teach a class as a futurologist a question around if you take that approach with the americans we've seen in cove it's been interesting australians have been relatively willing to obey dictates from the government in lockdowns and so forth and that i think the patience is wearing very thin now but they have been america is much more individualistic much more competitive people don't like being told what to do can you see you know what's your best guess on how this might unfold because i i find it hard to believe the americans will allow themselves by dictate to be deprived of all of these things that they've taken they see as their birthright i mean you stop and think about very extraordinary for us to understand the intensity of it all but their commitment to gun laws and what happens if if governments start to try to force people out of their private cars and you know impose measures on them that push their electricity prices through the roof we know that americans have said that they're not prepared to pay very much at an individual level at all to address climate change where does this end how do you see it unfolding given that americans can be stirred up they really can uh you know they will engage in cultural battles much more perhaps than most other westerners well i i'm what i'm hoping is that we will as we've done in the past find a way to address the issues in front of us um in a way that that also respects the rights of individuals and doesn't get a way of of um upward mobility um we've done it before you know we have to remember that after world war ii whether um under in australia the uk um japan the us there was we we really moved towards a more democratic society we made the changes we needed to make people were beginning to be able to buy houses in in the us in the 60s we addressed the the great gaping hole which was our treatment of of particularly of african-americans we've been able to do it in the past it's but we've gotta i think your point is right on target we have to have debate we have to have compromise i mean my great hope with president biden is as a life you know as a long-term senator he would try to get those kind of of compromises through the problem is a his own party doesn't want that or the lot of his own party and the republicans don't seem to want it either i mean we've got extremes on both sides that consider any form of compromise as a surrender you can't have a democratic society where extremes rule and by the way the vast majority of americans are neither on the right or the left most of them are somewhere in the middle some tilt a little left some tilt a little right i am sure that's the situation in australia and the uk as well yeah it is but the the problem is that great group towards the center has no voice is being pushed out of the public debate is being pushed out of the entertainment industry is being pushed out of most newspapers you know i used to uh work for i've i've been a columnist at the washington post the new york times and the la times and the openness of those publications i still do some for the la times but the openness of those publications to any kind of unconventional non-party line views has declined dramatically yes i my poor wife has to hear me when i look at the new york times and i said where the hell was the editor how could you allow somebody to write something that never dealt with the other side scientists say well scientists say all sorts of things they they're not you know they're they're not uh you know they're not you know members of the ss you know they they they they dissent they argue or they certainly should and um and until we we respect those traditions i think we're going to head towards a feudalism because feudalism has all the controls and the dictatorial ideologies um that we're seeing today they're just they're just not so oriented towards religion they're more oriented elsewhere well professor joel cotkin author of the coming of neo-feudalism a warning to the global middle class you've been very generous with your time there's a lot of food for thought there a lot of challenge and you do it in a very civilized and respectful way which is the mark i think of someone committed to quality debate we will not find our way out of the current maze of difficult problems if we will not respect one another so i i can only thank you very much indeed for your time and for the lifetime of experience that you've brought to this moment that's the thing isn't it you don't become an instant expert on anything too many people think that they can become an instant expert and all too often based on their feelings rather than their thinking and their knowledge like you know what history matters if i was to summarize my ideas more than anything history matters understanding history is critical to making good policy and creating a good society and to keeping your head yep that's true thank you so much it's my pleasure thank you for watching this episode we appreciate your support if you value vital conversations like this one be sure to subscribe to the channel there and also click the notification bell to stay up to date with new releases [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: John Anderson

Views: 136,939

Keywords: John Anderson, John Anderson Conversation, Interview, John Anderson Interview, Policy debate, public policy, public debate, John Anderson Direct, Direct, Conversations, Demography, Joel Kotkin, Kotkin, Kotkin interview, geographer interview, joel k, j kotkin, kotkin academic, feudalism, kotkin progressives, john anderson, kotkin elite, kotkin geographer, demographics talk

Id: SDO1zhDi7BI

Length: 59min 38sec (3578 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 01 2021