The 2020 Election: Glenn Loury on America's Political Polarization

[Music] [Music] [Music] do [Music] so [Music] [Music] now [Music] now [Music] [Music] now [Music] [Music] alright [Music] now [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] hello everyone it's claire lehmann here and i'm the editor-in-chief of collect thanks so much for tuning in to our third installment of free thought live this one is brought to you by qualette in collaboration with think inc and supported by the judith nelson institute which we are very grateful for i know you will enjoy today's event with glenn lowry who needs no introduction glenn will be speaking to josh zepps the host of the uncomfortable conversations podcast over to you now josh i hope you're all doing okay uh we are in sydney at the moment so we want to give a nod to the traditional owners of the the land that we're on the gadigal people of the euro nation uh and to indigenous folks who are young and old and all your ancestors g'day it's it's great to all be here together i am hugely proud of claire lehman at quillette the world's leading free thought magazine and also to susie jamil at think inc which is the leading intellectual touring company in australia for collaborating on this it's a fascinating series of conversations with the world's most interesting minds today's event is also backed by the judith nielsen institute as you just heard so a big thanks to them for supporting us i am josh zeps like everyone on planet earth i have a podcast as you just heard from claire it's called uncomfortable conversations uh two of our first guests were claire lehman herself and also sam harris so if you do like smart funny provocative interviews then whip out your phone right now and look up uncomfortable conversations with josh sepps here's how today is going to work though i will chat with glenn for about an hour and for those of you who've bought tickets to a subsequent event to a hangout or to the private salon with glenn afterwards you will have received a zoom link so in an hour when the conversation ends click that link it'll start about 10 minutes later glenn lowry is one of america's leading academics and public intellectuals he has a phd in economics from mit he was the first black tenured professor of economics in the history of harvard university and he's published hundreds of essays and books and reviews he was for many years a contributing editor at the new republic and now he's the merton p staltz professor of social sciences and economics at brown university he discusses culture and race on the glenn show on blogging heads tv you can find him at patreon.com glenn's show please welcome professor glenn lowry [Music] g'day glenn uh let's just start by asking how are you uh i could be better i suppose uh it's a personal issue we're moving house things are very you picked just the right year to move this is perfectly convenient what could possibly go wrong yes and just about everything has gone wrong but i'm not complaining i'm not complaining i'm good well it was four years imagine cast your mind back to four years ago since we're going to be talking about the election a lot uh four years ago today we were less than two weeks since hillary clinton lost the election it was eight days after saturday night live opened their show with hillary clinton played by kate mckinnon singing hallelujah i remember it i was in new york a lot of the city was in shock a lot of the country was in shock a lot of the world was in shock were you yeah i was in shock i was very much surprised by it i may not have been as dismayed uh as some of my colleagues and friends um i didn't think the sky was falling with the election of donald trump but it was certainly unexpected why did you differ from the opinion of most of your colleagues well i thought the way i put it is that america is changing something important is happening in the country uh there's a populist uprising or insurgency of a certain kind uh the establishment uh the elites have been uh repudiated how could this guy uh a carnival barker i believe that's how president obama once referred to candidate trump i have possibly won this election against the old school democratic king maker of the clintons how could that possibly have been so i was i was uh quite surprised by it but i didn't think that it was necessarily the end of the world i thought my we're entering an interesting a curious and interesting time now let's see what's going to happen and to what extent did you attribute that rise in populism to economics versus the cultural or racial explanations i i attributed and i'm not an expert on elections and all of that public opinion no but you're an expert on economics yeah and and i attributed it to um the uh appeal of trump make america great again uh we're going to control who comes into the country we're going to jettison these uh these bad deals that are howling out the uh most vulnerable parts of our economy we're gonna get manufacturing back again i mean he won ohio he won michigan he won wisconsin close elections he won pennsylvania a close election uh i i i mean it was very clear what happened what happened was the uh strength of the democrats in the midwest uh got flipped and i did attribute that mainly to economics i think the cultural uh partisanship emerged more clearly in my mind as trump's administration went forward on a gun regulation on religious issues on racial issues which i pay a lot of attention to um but at the time of the election my sentence was it was mainly a working-class populist rejection of their unions were not as strongly pro-democratic at least their membership the leadership probably to a person uh was or but the membership straight and i took that to be an economic mainly an economic phenomenon and that working-class economic backlash against the uh the elites against the sense that the the whole deal had been stitched up for for decades uh and was was antagonistic towards the the working guy has now been somewhat repudiated in terms of the latest election results you mentioned all of those midwestern and rust belt states uh wisconsin and michigan and uh pennsylvania uh minnesota those have gone to to joe biden now does that mean and yet donald trump did do a lot of the stuff on international trade that he said he was going to do he did renegotiate nafta and he has taken a much more harsh line towards china does that mean that they weren't buying it i don't know i don't think so necessarily i mean these elections in those states uh that trump carried narrowly were also relatively close in favor of biden this time around pennsylvania there may be a recount there wisconsin was relatively close so uh you know one way of looking at it is it was pretty much a 50 50 situation in 2016 in some of those states and it was pretty much a 50-50 situation in 2020 they just flipped differently on those on those two occasions i must say it does strike me as amazing it does strike a lot of people outside of the united states as amazing how close these elections are like how predictable it is like if it was if if someone gets less than 48 and a half percent of the vote or someone gets more than 52 it's a slam dunk people like oh my goodness this was this was a wash do you have an explanation for why things are always bouncing around in the forty nine and a half to fifty one and a half percent zone uh i think we're closely divided um uh politically uh in the country trump got i think 73 million plus votes uh more than 10 million more votes that he received in 2016 he got more votes than hillary clinton got in 2016. a lot of people are uh supporting him so uh it's a closely divided country and therefore uh closely fought elections at least in the in the swing states we've been talking about let's talk about those 73 million americans who voted for donald trump because i think many of your criticisms of contemporary american culture and academic thinking may sort of feed into some of the grievances that were motivating such voters i still want to sort of stick on 2016 as being a point of comparison and during that election you'll remember the the debate with hillary clinton uh where donald trump was asked about some sexist comments that he'd made in the past and and his answer was the the biggest problem in america right now is political correctness and he got this huge uh roar of support from the crowd was he right then and and is he still right i would call it the biggest problem i i certainly wouldn't call it the biggest problem but i i think it is real political correctness is a real phenomenon and i think there are many people who are tired of being lectured tired of being told that they're racist because they side with the cops tired of being asked to apologize for america's missteps in decades and generations past uh tired of being told that whatever the latter-day insight or sensibility is about gender or identity they have to subscribe to it or else they're neanderthals tired of being uh condescended to uh the kind of sanctimony of of the uh elite uh opinion uh voicing on them so i i expect there's something to that i mean i can say that because i sometimes feel tired of being told what to think myself and i you know i'm an ivy league academic uh professor highly educated and so forth i i can imagine what the guy with uh dirt under his fingernails is getting a beer at the bar after a 12-hour shift is thinking when he's uh told that the you know the pronoun issue of gender identity or whatever and he's he's probably thinking uh you know that's a bunch of bunk and uh you're gonna call me a bigot because i don't sign on to your uh latter-day uh you know cultural conviction uh i think a lot of the people who are pro-life uh who are religious people uh felt the culture the political uh the center of opinion in the elite uh newsrooms and uh the media and whatnot uh were pushing against them didn't really respect their uh their way of life and uh and their values so i think political correctness is a problem i think people hear the horror stories of so and so not being able to speak at a university or the latest edict issued by uh some potentate about uh um some uh sensitivity to title ix questions of sexual assault and harassment in universities in the sense that due process uh not being respected for people accused things of this kind and do you think that then that that sort of narrative that that sort of talk uh about social justice and equity the kind of sensoriousness that you see from college students in uh in d platforming speakers the kind of group think that you see it some left-wing media organizations the the sort of the twitter arti really running the show on the left has been bad for the democratic party and bad for that they would have done better in the last election had that not existed i wonder if you could conceive of the democratic party without that existing i i wonder if it's a feasible move to imagine the democratic party simply stripping that away it seems to a certain extent that some of the constituencies of the democratic party uh hue very closely to these ways of thinking and democrats wouldn't be democrats if they didn't think that way but having said that uh yeah i expect and i i think i'm not alone in saying so that uh for example there's a debate now going on in saying that uh some of this political correctness uh uh uh phenomenon hurt the democrats there's a debate going on right now among democrats as they look at the fact that trump almost survived here uh that they didn't uh clearly take control of the senate and probably will not take control of the senate as you know depends on the outcome of two uh senate races that will be decided in january that they lost uh 10 12 seats in the house i'm not sure the exact count but a considerable uh setback in the house of representatives and that down ballot in the state legislature races in various states around the country the democrats didn't gain ground as had been expected uh and i and and people some people are saying one of the principal reasons for that is that the democrats were saddled with um opinions about issues that are not widely shared in the populace but that are essential to key elements of their constituency so the defund the police slogan that comes out of black lives matter uh a somewhat radical approach to the question of police reform uh i think was quite unpopular in many places in the country and some speculate that uh the democrats embraced uh to the extent that they did embrace it they kind of have embraced it they embrace it and then well no we're not really for defunding the police we're just for sending a social worker along with every police officer whenever he or she has to respond to a call uh we're for reallocating funds so as not to put so much stress on uh the punitive part of policing and to give more social supports to communities where crime issues may be a problem they said that we're not really for defunding the police but in fact the slogan i think uh didn't play well in in many uh congressional districts and probably hurt some of their candidates and just to clarify glenn on the question of can we imagine a democratic party without that for one of a better word woke element in it i think i'm just pointing to this uh this constant tension that exists in a lot of political parties but certainly on on all in all left-wing parties between the bread and butter uh working unionized uh you know high-wage potentially often anti-immigrant sentiment of the left versus the inner city cosmopolitan uh elite uh kind of woke version and there's there's always a tension between those things so i can imagine a democratic party that is the former i mean it's sort of the democratic party of bill clinton in a way or or even pre bill clinton and the work phenomenon is more is a more recent one i don't know whether you're giving up on the former version of the left all together and see it as a as a strand that's have that has no future well oh no i wouldn't say that i think it would be worth fighting for but i think there's a real fight now uh for that part of the polity uh and that uh trump has led the republicans in making real inroads there i doubt that we're going to see that completely reverse i mean i'm i don't know what's going to happen but um his talk about bringing jobs back and so on in effect rejection of the conventional republican symbiosis with the with the uh uh with the elites uh the financial elites and so forth and his kind of rhetoric of populism put america first and all of that i i think it has resonated in perhaps there's an opening trumpism without trump i i guess might be the way of putting it yeah well i was i was just a friend of mine was just asking me here in australia who i think the the next presidents are gonna be and and i i said well i think the next president will be will be president pence because i think trump will resign in january before he gets booted out so we'll get pence for three weeks uh then we'll get biden then we'll get kamala then we'll get tucker carlson then we'll get aoc and it'll just keep going around in these loops i'm gonna more and more so you think trump will resign i i i don't i don't get that why would he i'm being partially facetious but i think once the the knock comes at the door i could imagine a scenario in which he has a sensibility of you know what this whole game is rigged you can't fire me i quit i do things on my terms this is ridiculous and he just up ends the table and turns over and and storms out but it's just a just a hypothesis um it's just worth noting glenn i mean when we're talking about this this sort of battle for the soul of the democratic party and of the broader left they did pick biden you know it's not like the and and you know i heard tanahisi coates talk in the other the other day and saying i don't think that conventional sort of blue dog democrats should be allowed to tell activists the way that they can speak if i want to talk about defunding the police i'm terribly sorry that that might hurt you in your midwestern swing district mr democratic aspirational congress person but like that is not actually my issue you always need to have activists who are pushing the conversation in provocative ways and the chips will fall where they may politically what do you make of that ah i think that's interesting uh i think that's going to keep nancy pelosi up late at night uh i mean i think that's predictable coming from tallahassee cults i mean the the the kind of uh supercilious self-righteousness of that pose never mind the team that never never mind the fact that you need 50 plus one of whatever the body that's making the decision is in the democracy in order to get what you want never mind that never mind that not every congressional district looks like alex uh alexandria ocasio-cortez's conditional congressional district that some people in western pennsylvania actually have to fight tooth and nail as democrats to get themselves elected never mind all of that we get to say whatever we want to say and don't tell us how to talk suppose the right wing of the republican party were to take that polls and say we get to waive our banners and we get to uh hold our rallies and we get to shout our epithets and we get to act like the racist that we actually are and never mind that i mean uh clearly we would see the problem with that well some would say they do i mean some would say that the right doesn't do a very good job of clamping down on on race that's going out and and uh rallying yeah i suppose some would say that um all right i'll take that as a card let's uh let's talk about this you've got me there josh let's talk about this this past summer you wrote a piece in quillette in in june about the the riots and about the civil unrest in the wake of george floyd's killing uh and i think it's impossible to analyze the uh the the impact and the causes of the 2020 election without understanding what was taking place over the summer what was your position i think the piece was called something like denounce the violence now or without equivocation and i was urging my fellow americans i won't classify myself beyond that to not uh hold uh hold back in asserting the uh with clarity and with force with conviction uh the unacceptability of uh the uh of violence and the destruction of property and the attacks on police officers and the the looting and arson uh that were uh were breaking out around the edges of mostly peaceful demonstrations that's the formula mostly peaceful and indeed they were mostly peaceful but the fact is that they were not entirely peaceful and often the news the most newsworthy fact of what was happening was that a police station had been seized and was uh being set on fire that a shopping center had been uh attacked by mobs of people who broke through windows and carried out goods that property was being uh destroyed and that assaults were being carried out against people in in these situations and i thought that needed to be denounced with clarity for the sake of uh both the uh those who wanted to see donald trump unseated well he has been unseated narrowly so but i thought it was on albatross around the neck of democratic candidates to have to go into an election uh with this kind of disorder ongoing but also for the sake of the country as a whole i thought that the right moral principle was to um in the face of the unrest was to denounce the violence encourage people to express their opinions peacefully but to denounce without the hesitation or equivocation of the violence that was sticking out so i said so is there a problem with the way that the media covers such things in the sense that if you had 98 or 99 of of people who are hitting the streets being peaceful but you have one or two percent of uh of people who capitalize on the riots just to cause a shitstorm pardon the french that those people are the ones who who get all of the the attention and is there any way to avoid that well if they were getting all of the attention that would be a problem uh if you turned on fox news as i did occasionally do just to see what they were saying i would turn on sean hannity or tucker carlson and i did a loop of uh video of incidents of violence you think the only thing that was happening uh was the violence because they wanted to highlight it that was a misreporting of what was going on it was not a balanced reporting of what was going on but i think on the other side there was also a tendency to suppress a a critical uh reporting on uh on these uh demonstrations to put a prettier face on them perhaps than was warranted to downplay uh some of the ugliness that uh that one could find so um i think uh there's enough blame in terms of biased or distorted reporting about these incidents to go around it's part of what i see as a problem in our in our time with our political culture that the very narration and reportage and you know the putting out of facts gets conditioned by political sensibility and a reader doesn't know what quite what to believe is that getting worse i don't know uh maybe it will not be as bad in a post-trump era i i don't know um uh my sense is it's a lot worse now than it was 10 years ago and worse by far than it was 25 years ago well i mean i've even noticed it getting worse in the past four years in in the sense that uh that there are mainstream publications now where you can clearly see the ideological bent in terms of their wanting to be part of a a larger mission i suppose to vanquish trumpism and to my and and to always put the most negative possible spin on it which means that uh it's not that they're publishing lies or misleading information i'm not making a false equivalence between the new york times and breitbart here but i can even see as a journalist that there is uh there's an ideological pool in that that that is meant is intended to pull you along and if you diverge from it there are consequences well and we're hearing this from people of barry weiss case at the new york times or uh glenn greenwald or andrew sullivan there are a number of these cases of very fine journalists who are uh who have been squeezed by the sense to which their uh what they want to say doesn't line up with what what their their colleagues think is the appropriate posture for journalists i think that i actually canceled my subscription to the new york times i still have the online access but uh i i just felt it was becoming a propaganda rag i i i keep reading stories and thinking uh my god i mean you're not actually giving me a balanced account of what's what's happening here you're you're trying to tell me what to think uh i i felt manhandled so to speak by uh by some of these organs as they become propaganda organs to a certain degree so i don't mean to rain on your uh on your defiance towards the new york times but if you're still a subscriber to the digital edition you know they're still counting you as a subscriber in terms of in terms of the way that they promote themselves to advertisers so you're still part of the problem mr glenn lowry you're still part of that well yeah well i have to i have to have access because uh you know i i i'm a public intellectual and and i stuff is coming up and i i need to be able to get at the article in this behind a firewall so i you're allowed i forgive you i forgive you uh there i mean of course that just i'll i'll just touch on cancel culture here while we're on the subject and then we can we can get onto bigger things but the counter argument which i've heard put by the ezra klein's of the world is that yeah today's environment might be hostile to a person like barry weiss or andrew sullivan uh but the reality is that throughout all of human history if you are a trans woman of color and you are in an editorial meeting if you were even able to get a job that got you on a seat at the editorial meeting in the first place uh and you pitched something there would be a lot of raised eyebrows you know something that was personal to your lived experience as we're supposed to call it now there'll be a lot of raised eyebrows and it'll probably get shot down and you'd probably find yourself excluded and driven out so now the tables have turned and it's the andrew sullivan's who are getting driven out but this is the first time in history that it's been going that way um do you give any credence to that what kind of argument is that i mean how did two rounds make a right i mean this is what i was wondering but i just wanted to get your take okay well that's my two yes okay uh you tweeted um yesterday that the u.s race debate is about to change you said uh unencumbered by quote unquote orange man bad uh the discourse is freer now what are you anticipating well so um african-americans we talk about the race debate so i'm talking about blacks uh in the cities um you know uh with uh high uh crime rates and high poverty rates and schools that are not working and dilapidated housing and disorder and so on uh are i think entitled to better governance in those uh metropolitan areas than they've been receiving um people are these are one party states or cities uh there's a a lot of corruption there's a lot of malfeasance and incompetency uh people are long-serving incumbents who haven't really delivered for their people i i just assert that people will argue the point but let me stipulate that there are some problems in baltimore in saint louis in chicago in detroit uh in oakland california and whatnot that are the legitimate basis for uh political criticism of the governing classes of those cities now with donald trump uh trumpeting from the podium at a press conference attacking uh the elected officials serving in the congress or serving at the local level in these places um calling them in effect uh you know failed states and you know telling african-americans what do you have to lose you might as well try you know whatever with donald trump looming in the background any criticism that affirms something that donald trump had said becomes less effective and indeed discrediting to the person who offers the criticism in virtue of the fact that you're saying something that donald trump said now let me just declare i don't think donald trump was wrong about everything but it was impossible to agree with him given that he was orange man bad given that he was a racist quote unquote in the imaginations of so many people uh given that he was the personification of white supremacy in the imaginations of so many people so if as a person in my case an african-american engaged in debate about the race issue here in the country i wanted to step away from conventional wisdom uh and enter into some of these uh dirty laundry uh you know uh areas of saying you know why can't we why can't the schools work better at delivering effective education to people in our society who need it most um i would be loved to say it uh full-throatedly uh if i thought i was gonna wake up to a tweet from the president of the united states the next day saying you see even ivy league professors agree with me but with him out of the way perhaps there's more space for that kind of conversation to take place perhaps we can get past this apocalyptic uh uh kind of posture oh my god the sky is falling the world is coming to an end a racist in the white house fascism looms on the horizon and we can actually talk about what can be done to more effectively educate the tens upon tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of african-american and other youngsters who depend on public schools in struggling cities uh and who are if you look at the test scores and so are not being effectively educated what can we do maybe that conversation can take place maybe we can talk about crime and violence not just violence perpetrated by police officers i'm happy to talk about that by all means let's hold those police officers accountable but the greater far greater scale of violence being perpetrated on african americans in the communities where they live by criminals by thugs by violent criminals maybe we can actually talk more about that if we're not echoing orange man bad that's what i had in mind i like that i mean i think it's also a good repeat repudiation of uh you know i was talking to a lot of people in this sort of what i would call the broadly the radical center the intellectual dark web type people who are not supporters of trump but who are also you know not crazy about regressive leftist work uh politics and some of them i ha have had disagreements with leading up to the election because they seemed to believe that voting for trump would at least be a bulwark against the insanity of the far left and my position was always you don't understand that that trump is playing the left just as much as he's playing his base i mean one of the one of one of the ingenious aspects of his nihilism in my opinion is not just that he's able to activate the republican base but that he's so good at activating the left-wing base in precisely the wrong ways for them to appeal to the kinds of voters they need to appeal to to win elections and in precisely the right ways to cause a whole lot of headache uh for everybody so i take your point there that it's it's even a bigger point perhaps than the one you just made which is not only does his absence give people who have who share his critiques space to talk but his absence gives people who don't share his critics space to talk in a way that's more reasoned and rational than they have been so let's talk about some of those things i mean you just mentioned crime and violence what what would be agenda number one if glenn lowry was emperor of the universe now uh um i would invest more in education and i would open up the provision of educational services to more competition with charter schools and things like that um i would uh take seriously the uh problem of the maintenance of order in um areas where there are a lot of guns and and there's a lot of violence and um uh put that really near the top of my agenda i'm not i don't have a magic bullet i mean i don't know what the answer to the question of uh urban violence is but i i just know that the the loss the pay falls the agony the the tragic pain that's being endured by people children being gunned down and so on it's just it's just uh horrible i would i would want to make that a a major uh a major focus um i you know there are a lot of small bore kind of policy things that one can talk about but you know that that's that's you know there's health care of course that's not small bore uh we're gonna see what will happen uh with the democrats uh uh now in the white house but you need the legislature to get anything done and it's going to be a problem getting anything done in your academic economic research you're an expert on income disparities how much of a role does inequality play in all of this well i think it plays a major role um not just racial inequality by the way um i i think uh one reason for the populist uh turn in in american political culture is uh stagnation and wages and uh economic opportunity for a bulk of the population and the pulling away of of the elites uh so i i think it's a big deal what do we do about i mean it's obvious it's obvious that the energy in the democratic party on the left is substantially fueled it seems to me by uh a reaction against uh the rising inequality of wealth and and of income and the separation of economic opportunity between the coastal elite uh highly educated and uh you know people who are in the factories and mines and uh you know fracking uh industry and and things like that in in the center of the country and yet as you mentioned earlier that may be the the uh the ideas that are motivating the democratic party but the people who you're talking about there are overwhelmingly trump's base they are or at least in many of those places they are that's true i noticed that minimum wage legislation or i should say ballot initiatives that came before plebiscites that came before the electorate in a number of the states did relatively well i think that is an indication of people's discontent about about inequality yeah i'm trying to figure out whether or not there's a trans-partisan solution to this or at least a trans-partisan framing for the conversation so that the conversation about inequality on the left can't get caricatured by the right as being hatred of billionaires and the conversation about inequality on the right can't get caricatured by the left as uh as not caring about poor people and being hoity-toity uh rich wall street fat cats i i don't know can you see a common ground uh no i actually i don't see a common ground you're killing me i don't see it i'm coming here for good news it really got me down today [Laughter] so let's look at the next four years then uh so we've got a biden administration uh you know what what do you what do you foresee well i assume that uh the first uh 100 days or 150 days will be trying to undo a lot of what they can undo without the us congress of what trump had done this will be the deregulation impetus of trump will get undone because the president can do much of that by uh administrative fiat um there will be a lot of uh what i gather we'll be going back into the paris uh accord on the climate i gather we'll be trying to resurrect the iran deal i gather that our relations with our allies and nato will have certainly a different tone uh less adversarial an effort to restore america i i find it interesting uh make america great again put america first these were trump's uh you know slogans america first and i never heard anybody uh argue against that proposition although i think many people grade it added america should be a leader of the world in confronting the great problems of peace and prosperity and climate and as a leader we shouldn't be putting our interests nakedly first we should be trying to by example show how cooperative and humanitarian enhancing uh you know efforts of on a global scale can can be enacted uh but i never heard anybody say oh no america should be first no no no american americans how about america yeah that's not a very popular slogan i i gather there will be a less nakedly self-interested from a national point of view uh rhetoric and we're going to rejoin the w of the world health organization for example and whatnot uh so i expect it'll be a change in that kind of rhetoric um i don't know how many uh judges these are lifetime appointments to the federal courts trump appointed hundreds of judges three members of the united states supreme court his impact on the federal judiciary in just these four short years has been monumental that's not something that can be undone uh by a democratic purpose because those are lifetime appointments and moreover anything that abides should try to do by way of judicial appointments we'll have to get through the senate which is likely to remain in republican hands and so on so yeah lots a lot is going to come down to the much famed friendship between mitch mcconnell and joe biden as to whether or not anything happens in the next four years uh isn't it it's gonna show it's gonna test test that friendship i would imagine but what you're talking about there in terms of america first is is really interesting and it gets to something where i really want to get your thoughts on which is the role of america in the world and how we should think about the legacy of america because fundamental to all of this underpinning 2016 2020 the division in social in media between social media and these legacy media outlets who all have a certain agenda to push underpinning the grievances of the left and the grievances of working people is uh a sort of a differing sensibility about what america means and what kind of future we want for america and i noticed that you were on megyn kelly's podcast recently with coleman hughes and uh she excerpted a piece that sort of went viral where you were pushing back against the 1619 project at the new york times and this idea that america is fundamentally instantiated as a genocidal uh calamity and i want you to just sort of tell us what you said there and put it in a context that might be larger and help us think about the big forces that are shaping the states at the moment well that's tolerated joshua you've got four minutes no you got as much well no um so um i was asked about the 1619 project which i've been critical of this is you want to just explain yes sorry yeah explain i was just going to explain that the new york times sunday magazine devoted one of its issues to an exploration of the founding of america and a advocacy of the position that the year 1619 taken as the inauguration of slavery in the united states because it was the year in that very early 1619 is before the mayflow flower lands in massachusetts 1619 we're in virginia and uh some african uh captive slaves are put ashore and are acquired purchased by a colonialist it's the first instance of slavery in the united states so 1619 it's argued and the project should be the center of our thinking about the american story that's when the country starts and the narrative about america needs to much more uh assiduously attend to the role of enslavement of racial domination of white supremacy in the founding in the making of the country 1619 not 1776 it's the year when the american story really gets found at the struggle of african americans for human dignity and for equal citizenship an organizing principle around which you can understand uh the the history of the country um and i objected uh with others to to that for a number of grounds i don't want to necessarily right here recap people can always listen to megan's podcast you don't have to i'm not asking indeed they can they can but but i was saying there what's going on here is a struggle over the narrative that one is going to tell concretely directly to one's children in the schools how do we teach the story of the of the country and uh without wanting to fall into some kind of uh you know uh jingoistic uh propaganda you know america the land of the free the home of the brave america the beacon of hope to all of mankind uh america city on a hill you know uh uh without attending to the uh crimes in american history and to the to the the tragedy of uh what was chattel slavery over centuries to what happened to the indigenous people of the north american continent as a consequence of its uh if it's conquest and domination uh uh by what became the american nation state uh without forgetting those things nevertheless to tell a a more balanced uh account uh an account that credited of the greatness of the american project an account that recognized the extraordinary significance in world history of the founding of the country i mean the french revolution plays out in parallel to the american revolution at the end of the 18th century and the american revolution lays down a template a uh structure of government that instantiates uh enlightenment enlightenment era ideals that influence the founding generation of the country in institutions that actually survive to the present day and that constitute an example to uh aspiring uh peoples all over the world have done so for many generations a country that actually faced up to the imperative of destroying slavery fitfully and with a great cost in a great civil war but nevertheless the slaves were freed and made citizens of the republic and in the fullness of time came to be equal citizens of the republic this is a world historic accomplishment i wanted to say america is um the place where of the world turns uh in its desperation facing fascism of course my friends in russia have been emailing me telling me you didn't win the second world war all by yourself you didn't defeat nazism by yourself i take the point i take the point but uh the united states of america did defeat fascism in the pacific and did with the cooperation of allies defeat fascism in europe did stand toe-to-toe with the soviet union uh which of those forces the union of soviet socialist republics or the united states of america which you would rather would one uh with uh thought rather have seen prevail in the conflicts which was uh which was the cold war uh it's a good in a great country it's been a land of uh receiving wave after wave of immigrant from every corner of the globe tens of millions of new americans have come into our polity uh in the last half century from mostly non-european uh points of origin and have been assimilated into the uh into the body politic have prospered uh uh have have been accepted uh african americans are the wealthiest and most powerful large population of african descent on the planet uh i the the gross national product of nigeria with its 200 million people is less than a trillion dollars a year the united states gnp is 20 trillion dollars a year and african americans have got well maybe not quite 10 of that but and we're 35 or 40 million strong we're five to ten times richer than the average nigerian i gave that just as one example so so there's a lot to celebrate here and uh it's a good in a great country uh it's not a flawless country it's not perfect but it is perfectable and it has shown itself to be interested in pursuing that project of perfectability um and that is a different narrative in approaching the question of tell the story i wouldn't want to tell the story of america without attention to slavery but i wouldn't want to make the story of america be driven by my antipathy to slavery and my sense that those who were prepared to practice at our uh you know therefore beneath contempt and the project the political project that they initiated should be viewed with a fundamental suspicion no um in fact that political project brought about the world that we live in um and awards and all it's a story worth affirming there's nothing wrong with a patriotic affirmation of the accomplishments of the american project of the virtue of the american project even this one remains uh cognizant of of its flaws and of the need to to acknowledge them glenn on the question of who really won the the second world war your russian friends might write to you saying that they they played some part in vanquishing the nazis but i think we all know deep down that australia was the indispensable nation i'll just take it you're welcome you're welcome sorry i'm sorry but i do appreciate your sacrifice thank you uh what was interesting though was that so megyn kelly tweeted out a quote of some of what you were just articulating and what's extraordinary is to read the replies i mean i know one should never read twitter replies or a comment thread but you know just a random sample here what a convenient narrative of history one person uh writes that's all this is after all a narrative that highlights the triumphs of the oppressed and downplays the innumerable numerable horrors committed by the oppressors another person writes of you you insist on justifying what's wrong and ugly you don't listen to the people that you hurt demonized stepped on treated less than or stolen stole from it's all about you that's why we needed the 1619 project you're still not listening are you still not listening when i'm listening uh but uh i don't understand why uh uh a affirmation of the virtues and the and the uh signal accomplishments of the american project precludes what it is that those critics would have me do which is to acknowledge and uh teach to my children uh things that have been problematic and that have been wrong what what would they have me do uh about uh uh these uh historical wrongs i mean no they should not be forgetting forgotten but uh must we go through uh the next hundred years in various acts of abnegation and self-flagellation uh and apology uh i was gonna say i think what they what they want you to do is get a bunch of reeds and slap yourself across the back in a public display of self-flagellation every time you uh you appear in in public um i wonder i wonder whether or not you think that let's just talk about i want to sort of look down the track and i totally take what you were just saying because i think the reason why i was trying to link this this uh conversation about what is the moral character of the united states of america to the specifics of the election and all of the cultural war stuff that we're talking about at the moment is because i think part of trump's appeal and part of the make america great slogan is the sense that america has been great and can be great and that that vision is opposed to a vision on the left that is often mealy-mouthed and petty and sanctimonious and and somewhat ugly or judgy and if you've got a large body of americans who are saying we are fundamentally decent people and this is a fundamentally decent country and i don't hear enough of that from the left then who are they going to vote for apart from the guy who says that it's great and it can be even greater um but i i want to wrap up by thinking about how race and the culture wars uh feed into all of this in in the future um what should we be doing how should we be talking and will there be a day when race doesn't matter in the united states i hope so but i don't see it it's it's going to not happen in my lifetime a day when race doesn't matter what i think we should be doing is acknowledging the need to address uh the deficits within the african-american population that are a consequence of this long history of uh unequal treatment deficits reflected for example in the um uh intellectual development of the youngsters which is inadequate in the over-representation amongst criminal offenders or uh whatever uh and um uh make that the focus of our uh of our uh discourse uh that that's a big big complicated set of issues but development acknowledging the inadequacy of the development of african-american capacities to function and to perform this on the average for a large population not with respect to every individual but addressing those deficits um so i've been saying in some of the things i've been writing lately that and then again this is about narratives we were talking just a moment ago about the narrative of the uh american project how do you tell the story of the country and i want to talk about the narrative that we used to uh uh to account for uh the racial disparities and inequalities that we see in the country right now and one of those uh kinds of narrations is uh puts the emphasis on bias on unfair treatment on discrimination on racism uh the idea is that the gap that we might see whether it's in the educational or in the workplace or the wealth holdings or uh whatever is a function of bias of unfair treatment and that the remedy is to address ourselves to uh white society uh to insist that they uh reform that they uh repent that they uh uh acknowledge and reverse their bias and uh racially unfair uh engagement with african americans that's one near the bias uh but i want to juxtapose that the idea of development uh uh of this disparity for african american life or a failure to credit the uh uh value of african-american contribution rather they are a result of the fact that history has had a long has cast a long shadow and a history of slavery and then of exclusion and marginalization and then of segregation and discrimination has had its consequences and one needs to redress those consequences by enhancing the capacities of african americans to perform uh so that's the broad umbrella that i would bring to uh the question that you post about how i would like to see conversations about race and racial inequality uh shape up going forward but fundamentally i would i would situate that kind of a discourse within a commitment to enhance the capacities for functioning for all americans not just for african americans i wouldn't make the race question the primary question of politics or of social policy but to the extent that i'm talking about the race question i would want to focus much more on redressing the underdevelopment of african-american populations uh within the american political economy than on emphasizing uh castigating um uh and and criticizing the purported uh racial uh uh bias and discrimination because i think a lot of the disparities that we are uh confronted with today are not in any straightforward way the result of bias uh behavior by uh the power structure but rather our reflection of the uh failures of uh too many uh african-american uh youngsters to realize their full human potential one of the impediments of course about having that conversation is uh is that that's a conversation that the moment a white person steps into uh is uh is regarded as being uh something of an apologist for uh for for white supremacy you know you can't you can't sort of say well i mean you know what what about what about black on black crime or what about the dysfunction of of um of impoverished black families without sounding like you're trying to change the subject of racism well yeah you are changing the subject racism i think so i don't encourage you their convictions and when confronting an african-american who accuses him of racism say no uh i think when 70 of african-american youngsters are born to a woman who's not married meaning those kids are raised in the household where the father is not routinely present that that's a a very profound sociological fact that has far-reaching implications for the development of the human potential of the kids who are in that situation it's not neutral it's a significant uh impediment to realizing the possibilities that the society presents to all of its citizens and we want to help you deal with that problem we we want to uh so order our institutions so as to affirm uh what what needs to happen in the lives of youngsters uh so that by the time they're in the fourth of the fifth grade they're reading at grade level uh so that they are able to um uh mature into uh stable and well-balanced individuals who are uh uh able to function within the society without running a fall of our of our law and so on without being predators of with respect to their neighbors and so on we why should a white person shrink from telling the truth if it's what they think uh about uh about situations who cares if you're called a racist you know you're not a racist tell them i'm not a racist i'm treating you like an adult i i'm taking you seriously and i'm telling you what i really think part of the problem and uh by the way to the to the viewers we're aware of the uh slightly dodgy connection some we sometimes get your to your line glenn but such as the nature of chatting uh during a pandemic i mean the problem glenn is that it parallel to this kind of cultural taboo is running the machinery of the twitter council culture public shaming universe in which it's all very well for someone to articulate that they're not a racist but if the mob comes for you then it does it can have real world consequences okay i accept that i i know many people for whom those consequences have been very troublesome do you have a a message i suppose to people who are watching this who want to be able to articulate themselves in a more rational and unimpeded way about these sensitive issues not really i mean i just said what i had to say to them i said have the courage of your convictions and take people seriously enough uh to tell them what you actually think when you don't tell people what you actually think uh you're you're patronizing them in a way you're you're you're treating them like a child whom you're afraid to uh to uh provoke into uh into a tantrum uh i i worry about this a great deal that there is a uh superficial um pablum of public expression and then underneath that there is a uh there is a very very different sensibility that is is husbanded and it's not said publicly and maybe it's said only in the most intimate of private uh space but that is nevertheless there um i i worry that some of these uh for example incidents where um an encounter happens between a young black man and a police officer that ends badly the young black man is killed by the police officer maybe he was attacking him maybe he had a very extensive criminal record maybe he was on drugs when the encounter took place maybe he was a miscreant that hadn't held a decent job in a decade maybe he was abusive to his uh romantic partner or the mother of his children or whatever it might be uh maybe it robbed a convenience store of a package of uh cigarillos before he went out and got into a fight but the non police officer ended up winning been shot dead in the street and uh the superficial narrative is a white supremacy strikes yet again racist police officer thug police officer guns down innocent black man with his hands up begging not to be shot but the reality is well uh a uh belligerent criminal provokes a police officer by placing him in danger of his life to the point that the police officer feels compelled to use deadly force in order to control the situation leaving this young man laying dead in the street that's the reality of what actually happened in the minds of many many people and i worry that the the superficial conversation covers up the resentment that many people will feel will harbor at a being told something that they know is not true and b then being told to shut up about it unless they be called a racist or lay what is insince and uh i feel that that might be one of the things going on that accounts for the surprising um strength of a demagogue like donald j trump uh in american political politics that there are people who won't tell poll takers the polls were wildly off yet again this is twice in a row that the polls have wildly underestimated the uh the strategy know that they are not supposed to say certain things but they nevertheless harbor these thoughts and once it's gone underground it can't be engaged anymore you you you're not really winning an argument when your basic trump card pardon the pawn is is to threaten to to cancel people if they dare to speak out you're not winning that argument uh you're just making people go underground with it well hopefully those underground arguments and those conversations that people are having in private and in the solace of their own brains are being brought out into the open through conversations like this conversations like the ones that will it is committed to and ones that think are committed to and that i'm committed to on my podcast uncomfortable conversations glenn it's a pleasure and a delight to talk to you thanks so much for being with us thanks josh it was really my pleasure thanks for the wonderful conversation josh and glenn and thanks to you all for tuning in if you enjoyed today's conversation head over to colette's patreon page and glenn's patreon page and show your support and i have an exciting announcement for you all our next free thought live will be with helen pluck rose co-author of the best-selling 2020 release cynical theories watch out for an email that is about to drop into your inbox so you can register for that one that's all from me bye for now i

Channel: Think Inc.

Views: 5,730

Keywords: think inc, glenn loury, john mcwhorter, josh szeps, racism, us election, election, trump, donald trump, biden, joe biden, free thought live, quillette

Id: x8AJB37KZws

Length: 73min 20sec (4400 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 21 2020