As the author of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, the Cambridge University historian Gary Gerstle was one of first people to recognize the collapse of neoliberalism. But today, the real question is not about the death of neoliberalism, but what comes after it. And, of course, when I sat down with Gerstle, I began by asking him what the Trump victory tells us about what comes after neoliberalism.
Gary Gerstle is Paul Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus at the University of Cambridge. Gerstle received his BA from Brown University and his MA and PhD from Harvard University. He is the author, editor, and coeditor of more than ten books. He is currently the Joy Foundation Fellow at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, where he is working on a new book, Politics in Our Time: Authoritarian Peril and Democratic Hope in the Twenty-First Century. He resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Named as one of the "100 most pivoted men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's most pivotal broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the pivotal author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two cats, both called Pivot.
TRANSCRIPT
“It's important to recognize that the neoliberal triumph carried within it not just the triumph of capitalism, but the triumph of freedom. And I think the that image of the wall coming down captures both. It's people wanting to claim their freedom, but it also paves the way for an unregulated form of capitalism to spread to every corner of the world.” -Gary Gerstle
AK: Hello everybody. As we try to make sense of the aftermath of the US election this week, there was an interesting headline today in the Financial Times. Donald Trump apparently has asked, and I'm quoting the F.T. here, the arch-protectionist Robert Lighthizer, to run U.S. trade policy. You never know with Trump, he may change his mind tomorrow. But nonetheless, it suggests, and it's not a great surprise, that protectionism will define the Trump, presidency or certainly the second Trump presidency. And it speaks of the structural shift in the nature of politics and economics in the United States, particularly given this Trump victory. One man who got this, I think before anyone else, is the Cambridge historian Gary Gerstle. He's been on the show a couple of times before. He's the author of a wonderful book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era. It's a profound book. It's had an enormous impact on everybody. And I'm thrilled and honored that Gary is back on the show. This is the third time he's been on the show. Gary, is that important news? Have we formally come to the end now of the neoliberal order?
GARY GERSTLE: I think we have, although there's an element of neoliberalism which may revive in the Trump administration. But if we think of a political order as ordering political life so that all participants in that order have to accept its ideological principles, we have moved out of that order. I think we've been out of it for some time. The critical election in this case was 2016, and the critical move that both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders made in 2016, the two most dynamic presidential candidates in that year, was to break with the orthodoxy of free markets, the orthodoxy of globalization, the orthodoxy of a world without borders where everything was free to move and the market was supreme. And the only role of government in the state was to ensure as full access to markets as was possible in the belief that if governments got out of the way of a private capitalist economy, this would spur the greatest growth for the greatest number of people everywhere in the world. This was governing orthodoxy, really from the time of Reagan until 2016. Trump broke it. Sanders broke it. Very significant in this regard that when Biden came into office, he moderated some of the Trump tariffs but kept the tariffs on China substantially in place. So there's been continuity for some time, and now we're going to see an intensification of the protectionist regime. Protectionism used to be a dirty word in American politics. If you uttered that word, you were excluded from serious political discourse. There will be other terms that are used, fair trade, not just because protectionism has a negative connotation to it, but we are living in an era where governments assert the right to shape markets as they wish to in the interests of their nation. So, yes, we are living in a different era, although it must be said, and we may get into a discussion of this at some point, there are sectors of the Trump coalition that want to intensify deregulation in the domestic market, that want to rollback government. And so I expect in the new Trump administration, there is going to be tussles between the protectionists on the one hand and those who want to, at least domestically, restore free trade. And by that I mean the free operation of private capital without government regulation. That's an issue that bears watching.
AK: Is that a contradiction though, Gary? Can one, in this post-neoliberal order, can governments be hostile to regulation, a la Elon Musk and his association with Trump, and also be in favor of tariffs? I mean, do the two—can the to go together, and is that the outline of this foggy new order coming into place in the second quarter of the 21st century?
GARY GERSTLE: They can go together in the sense that they have historically in the past gone together in the United States. In the late 19th century, the US had very high tariffs against foreign goods. And domestically, it was trying to create as free a domestic market as possible. What was known as the period of laissez-faire domestically went along with a commitment to high tariffs and protection of American laissez-faire against what we might call global laissez-faire. So it has been tried. It did work at that time. But I think the Republican party and the constituencies behind Donald Trump are divided on this question. As you noted, Elon Musk represents one pole of this. He certainly wants protection against Chinese imports of electric cars and is probably going to get that because of all the assistance he gave Trump in this election. But domestically, he wants no government interfering with his right to conduct his capitalist enterprises as he sees fit. So that's going to be one wing. But there's another wing of the Republican Party under Trump that is much more serious about industrial policy that says we cannot leave the market to its own devices. It produces too many human casualties. It produces too many regions of America left behind, and that we must use the government to help those people left behind. We must structure free enterprise industry in a way that helps the ordinary working-class man. And I use the word “man” deliberately in this context. Interestingly, JD Vance, the vice president, embodies both these tendencies, sees, on the one hand, a creature of venture capital, Silicon Valley, close to the Musks and Peter Thiels of the world. On the other hand, he has talked explicitly, as in his vice-presidential acceptance speech, about putting Main Street over Wall Street. And if he's serious about putting Main Street over Wall Street, that's going to involve a lot of government intervention to displace the privileged position that finance and venture capital now has in the American economy.
AK: Gary, you're a historian, one of the best around, you're deeply versed in the past, you bring up Vance. He presents himself as being original, even has a beard. But I wonder whether his—I don't know what you would call it—a Catholic or Christian socialism, or at least a concern with the working class. Is it in any way new, for you, historically? I mean, it certainly exists in Europe, and there must be analogies also in American history with him.
GARY GERSTLE: Well, if he is a convert to Catholicism, I don't know how well-versed he is in the papal doctrines of years past. Or decades. Or even centuries passed. But there was a serious movement within the Catholic Church in the late 19th and early 20th century to humanize capitalism, to declare that free market capitalism produced too many human casualties. Too many ordinary Catholic workers and workers who are not Catholic were hurt by unemployment, poverty, being thrown out of work in the troughs of business cycles, having no social welfare to fall back on, as a result of injury or misfortune in life. And so there was a profound movement within Catholic churches, in the United States, and in Europe and other parts of the world as well, to humanize capitalism. Whether this very once important Catholic tradition is an active influence on Vance, I don't know, because he's a recent convert to Catholicism, and I don't know how deeply has imbibed its history or its doctrine. But there is a rich tradition there. And it's possible that this is one of the sources that he is drawing on to shape his contemporary politics.
AK: We were talking before we ran live, Gary, I said to you, and I think you agreed, that this use of the word "fascism" to describe Trump isn't always particularly helpful. It reflects a general hysteria amongst progressives. But I wonder in this context, given the way in which European Catholicism flirted, sometimes quite openly, with fascism, whether the F-word actually makes a little more sense. Because after all, fascism, after the First World War, was a movement in the name of the people, which was very critical of the capitalism of that age and of the international market. So, when we use the word fascism now, could it have some value in that context as a kind of a socioeconomic critique of capitalism?
GARY GERSTLE: You mean fascism offering a socioeconomic critique of U.S. capitalism?
AK: Yes. For better or worse.
GARY GERSTLE: I'm reluctant to deploy the term fascism, since I think most people who enter the conversation or who hear that word in the United States don't really know what it means, and that's partly the consequence of historians debating its meaning as long as they have, and also suggesting that fascism takes different forms at different times and in different places. I prefer the term authoritarianism. I think that tendency is clearly there and one can connect that to certain traditions within the church. The United States once had a intense anti-Catholic political tradition. It was unimaginable in the 19th century.
AK: Yeah, it drove the KKK. I mean, that was the Klan hated the Catholics probably more than they hated the Jews.
GARY GERSTLE: It drove the Klan. And the notion in the 19th century—I'm not remembering now whether there are 5 or 6 Catholics who sit on the Supreme Court—but the notion in the 19th century that 5 or 6 Catholics would be the chief custodians and interpreters of America's most sacred doctrine and document the Constitution was simply unthinkable. It could never have happened. There was a Catholic seat. As for a long time, there was a Jewish seat on the Supreme Court, but understood that this would be carefully cordoned off and limited and that, when push came to shove, Protestants had to be in charge of interpreting America's most sacred doctrine. And the charge against Catholics was that they were not democratic, that they vested ultimate power in God and through an honest messenger on Earth, who was the pope. John F. Kennedy, in 1960, became the first Catholic president of the United States. Biden is only the second. Vance is the first Catholic vice president. Before in the campaign that Kennedy was running in 1960, he had to go in front of thousands of Protestant ministers who had gathered in Houston so he could persuade them that if he became president, he would not be handing America over to the pope, who was seen as an authoritarian figure. So for a long time, Catholicism was seen as a carrier of authoritarianism, of a kind of executive power that should not be limited by a human or secular force. And this promoted, in the United States, intense anti-Catholic feeling, which took the country probably 200 years to conquer. Conquered it was, so the issue of so many Catholics on the Supreme Court is not an issue. Biden's Catholicism is not an issue. Vance's Catholicism is not an issue. But Vance himself has said, talking about his conversion, that of his granny—I forget the term he uses to describe his granny—were alive today, she would not be able to accept his conversion because she was so deeply Protestant, so evangelical, so—
AK: A classic West Virginian evangelical. So for me, the other contradiction here is that Vance is unashamedly nationalist, unashamedly critical of globalization. And yet, by embracing Catholicism, which is the most international of face, I don't quite understand what that suggests about him, or Catholicism, or even history, that that these odd things happen.
GARY GERSTLE: Well, one thing one can say in history is that odd things happen and odd couples get together. I don't know myself how fully Vance understands his Catholicism. I believe Peter Thiel led him to this. Vance is still a young man and has gone through a lot of conversions for a young man. He was—
AK: Well, he's a conversion expert. That's the narrative of his life, isn't it?
GARY GERSTLE: Yes. Yes. And he began as being a severe anti-Trumper, almost a Never-Trumper. Then he converted to Trumpism. Then he converted from Protestant to Catholicism. So a lot of major changes in his life. So, the question you just posed is a fascinating one. Does he understand that the church is a catholic church, meaning small c catholic in this case, that it's open to everyone in the world? Does he really understand that? But I would extend my puzzle about religion beyond Catholicism to ask, for all the evangelical supporters of Trump: where is Jesus's message of peace and love? Where did that go? So there are puzzles about the shape of Christian religion in America. And there's no doubt that for its most devout supporters in the United States that has taken a very hard nationalist turn. And this is true among Protestants, and it is true among many Catholics. And so, I think the question that you posed may be one that no one has really confronted Vance with.
“What we have to think about in regard to Trump is, will they take on projects that will threaten the constitutional foundation of the United States in order to achieve their aims? What does Musk represent, and what does part of Trump represent? It represents unbounded executive power, unconstrained by Congress, to promote conditions of maximum freedom. And the freedom they have in mind is not necessarily your personal freedom or mine.” -Gary Gerstle
AK: And I would extend that, Gary. I think that the most persistent and credible critics of Trump also come from the religious community. Peter Wehner, for example, former—I don't know if you're familiar with his work. He writes a lot for the Times and The Atlantic. Very religious man, is horrified—worked in the Bush and the Reagan administrations. Let's go back to—I was looking at the cover of the book, and obviously authors don't pick the covers of their books—
GARY GERSTLE: I did. I picked this.
AK: Okay. Well, when you look at the—
GARY GERSTLE: This is this is not the original cover.
AK: Right, so, the book I'm looking at, and for people just listening, I'm going to describe. The dominant picture is of the Berlin Wall being knocked down in the evening of November 1989. It's odd, Gary, isn't it, that...for the rise and fall of the neoliberal order, which is an economic order in a free market era, you should have chosen the image of a political event, which, of course, Fukuyama so famously described as the end of history. And I guess, for you as an economic historian who is also deeply interested and aware of politics, is the challenge and opportunity to always try to disentangle the economics and politics of all this? Or are they so entangled that they're actually impossible to disentangle, to separate?
GARY GERSTLE: Well, I think sometimes you need to disentangle them, sometimes they move in different directions, and sometimes they move in the same direction. I think to understand the triumph of the neoliberal order, we have to see that politics and economics move in tandem with each other. What makes possible the neoliberal triumph of the 90s is the fall of communism between 1989 and 1991. And no picture embodies that better than the taking down of the Berlin Wall. And that connotes a message of freedom and escape from Soviet and communist tyranny. But the other message there is that tearing down of those walls opens the world to capitalist penetration to a degree that had not been available to the capitalist world since prior to World War One, prior to the war, and most importantly, to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. And where communists came to power everywhere, they either completely excluded or sharply curtailed the ability of capitalist business to operate within their borders. Their message was expropriate private property, which meant expropriate all corporate property. Give it over to the state, let the state manage it in the interest of the proletariat. This was an extraordinary dream that turned into an awful tyrannical outcome. But it animated the world, as few other ideas did in the 20th century, and proposed a very, very serious challenge to capitalist prerogative, to capitalist industry, to free markets. And so the collapse of communism, which is both the collapse of a state—a communist state, the Soviet Union—but perhaps more importantly, the collapse of the belief that any governments could structure the private economy in ways that would be beneficial to humankind. It's what opened the way in the 1990s to the neoliberal triumph. And it's important to recognize that the neoliberal triumph carried within it not just the triumph of capitalism, but the triumph of freedom. And I think the that image of the wall coming down captures both. It's people wanting to claim their freedom, but it also paves the way for an unregulated form of capitalism to spread to every corner of the world. And in the long term—we're in the mid-term—that was going to create inequalities, vulnerabilities to the global financial and economic systems, that were going to bring the global economy down and set off a radically different form of politics than the world had seen for some time. And we're still living through that radically different form of politics set off by the financial crash of 2008/2009, which, in my way of thinking, was a product of untrammeled capitalism conquering the world in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's and communism's collapse.
AK: Yeah, and that's the other thing, isn't it, Garry? I mean, it goes without saying that the bringing down of the war fundamentally changed the old Soviet economy, the East European economies, Poland, Hungary, eastern part of Germany. But what no one—I think very, very few people imagined in '89 was that perhaps the biggest consequence of this capitalist penetration wasn't in Warsaw or Moscow or the eastern part of Berlin, but back in West Virginia with guys like JD Vance. How did the bringing down of the wall change America, or at least the American economy? I've never really quite understood that.
GARY GERSTLE: Through the mass exporting of manufacturing to other countries that—
AK: Wasn't that before? Wasn't that also taking place before '89, or did it happen particularly in the '90s?
GARY GERSTLE: It began before 1989. It began during the Great Recession of the 1970s, where the first districts of manufacturing in the U.S., places like Buffalo, New York steelmaking center, began to get hollowed out. But it dramatically intensified in the 1990s, and this had to do with China permitting itself to be a part of this global free market. And China was opened to capitalist penetration from the United States and Europe. And what you saw in that decade was a massive shift of manufacturing to China, a shift that even intensified in the first decade of the 21st century with the admission of China in 2001 to the World Trade Organization. So China was a big factor. Also, the passage of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which rendered the northern half of the Western Hemisphere one common market, like the European Common Market. So, enormous flight of jobs to places like Mexico. And the labor costs in places like China and Mexico, and then East Asia already leaving Japan for Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, parts of the South Asian subcontinent. The flight of jobs there became so massive, and the labor costs there were so cheap, that American industry couldn't compete. And what you begin to see is the hollowing out of American industry, American manufacturing, and whole districts of America just beginning to rot. And no new industries or no new economies taking the place of the industries and the jobs that had left. And this America was being ignored, largely in the 1990s and first decade of the 21st century, in part because the ideology of neoliberalism said, we understand that this global free market is going to increase inequality in the world, it's going to increase the distance between rich and poor, but the distance between rich and poor is okay because all boats will rise. All people will benefit. This is not just an American story, this is also the story of other parts of the North Atlantic economy. Britain certainly, Germany was a partial exception, France, other places, and this was the ideology...growth would benefit everyone, and this was not the case. It was a fallacy. But the ideology was so strong that it held together until the financial crash of 2008/2009. After that crash, it became impossible to make the point that all boats were rising under the neoliberal regime. And this is when the forgotten Americans and the forgotten Brits of the northern part of the of Great Britain. This is when they began to make their voices heard. This is when they began to strike a very different note in politics. And this is where Donald Trump had his beginnings with these forgotten, angry people who felt ignored, left behind, and were suffering greatly, because by the early decades of the 21st century, it wasn't just jobs that were gone, but it was healthy marital life, divorce rates rising, rampant drug use. Two Cambridge economists wrote a book called Depths of Despair.
AK: Yeah, that book comes up in almost every conversation. I once went down to Princeton to interview Angus Deaton. Like your book, it's become a classic. So let's fast forward, Gary, to the last election. I know you're writing a book now about politics in our time of authoritarianism, and you're scratching your head and asking whether the election last week was a normal or an apocryphal one, one that's just different or historical. And I wonder, in that sense, correct me if I'm wrong, there seems to have been two elections simultaneously. On the one hand, it was very normal, from the Democrats' point of view, who treated America as if it was normal. Harris behaves as if she was just another Democratic candidate. And, of course, Trump, who didn't. My interpretation, maybe it's a bit unfair, is that it's the progressives. It's certainly the coastal elites who have become, implicitly at least, the defenders of the old neoliberal order. For them, it kind of works. It's not ideal, but it works and they can't imagine anything else. And it's the conservatives who have attacked it, the so-called conservatives. Is there any truth to that in the last election?
GARY GERSTLE: Well, I think the Democrats are certainly seen by vast sectors of the population as being the defenders of an old order, of established institutions controlling the media, although I think that's less and less true because the legacy media has less and less influence and shows like yours, podcasting and rogue Fox Television and all kinds of other outlets, are increasingly influential. But yes, the Democrats are seen as a party of the establishment. They are seen as the party of the educated elite. And one of the factors that determines who votes for who now is now deeply educational in the sense of, what is your level of educational achievement? If you are college educated, you're much more likely to vote Democratic, regardless of your income. And if you're high school educated or less, you're much more likely to vote Republican. I don't think it's fair to say that the Democrats are the last protectors of the neoliberal order, because Biden broke with the neoliberal order in major, consequential ways. If the defining characteristic of the neoliberal order is to free the market from constraints and to use the state only to free up market forces—this was true, to a large extent, of Obama and of Clinton—Biden broke with that, and he did it in alliance with Bernie Sanders, set of task forces they set up in 2020 to design a new administration. And his major pieces of legislation, reshoring CHIPS manufacture, the biggest investment in clean energy in the country's history. $1 trillion infrastructure bill, the biggest infrastructure project since the interstate highway system of the '50s, and arguably since Roosevelt's fabled New Deal. These are all about industrial policy. These are all about the government using its power and resources to direct industry in a certain way so that it will increase general happiness, general welfare, general employment. So this represents a profound change from what had come before. And in that way, the Biden administration can't be seen as the last defenders.
“The question is, will they be able to get further than past generations of Republicans have by their willingness to break things? And will they go so far as to break the Constitution in the pursuit of these aims?”
AK: And let me jump in here, Gary, there's another really important question. There was a very interesting piece, I'm sure you saw it, by Nicholas Lemann in the New Yorker about Bidenomics and its achievements. You talked about the New Deal, the massive amount of investments—it was post COVID, they took advantage of the historical crisis. Trillions of dollars have been invested in new technologies. Is Bidenomics new in any way? Or is it basically just a return to the economics, or the political economy, of FDR?
GARY GERSTLE: Well, it certainly draws inspiration from FDR, because at the core of the New Deal was the conviction that you could use government to direct industry to positive uses that would benefit not just the corporations, but the population as a whole. But there was nothing like the Green Energy Project in the New Deal. The New Deal, except for hydroelectric projects, was primarily about prospering on a cheap fossil fuel economy. The New Deal also was very comfortable with accepting prevailing gender and race conceptions of the proper place of women and African Americans in American life in a way that is unacceptable to Bidenomics. So there are redirections under Bidenomics in ways that modify the New Deal inspiration. But at its core, Bidenomics is modeled on the New Deal conviction that you need a strong federal government to point industry in the right direction. And so in that sense, there's a fundamental similarity in those two progressive projects. And I think people in the Biden administration have been quite conscious about that. Now, the particular challenges are different. The world economy is different. The climate crisis is upon us. So, it is going to take different forms, have different outcomes. But the inspiration clearly comes from Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal.
AK: Well, let's go over to the other side and Trump. You scratching your head and figuring out whether this is unusual. And of course, it's the second time he's won an election. This time around, he seems to be overtly hostile to the state. He's associated with Musk, who's promised to essentially decimate the state. In historical terms, Gary, is there anything unusual about this? I mean, certainly the opponents of FDR were also very hostile to this emergent American state. As a historian, do you see this as something new, the pleasure in essentially blowing the state up, or at least the promise of blowing the state up?
GARY GERSTLE: That impulse is not new. There have been members of the Republican party who have been talking this language since the New Deal arrived in America in the 1930s and '40s during the '50s and '60s and early '70s, they were marginal in American politics. And then with the neoliberal order coming into being in the '70s and with Reagan as president, their voice has gained enormous traction. One of Reagan's key advisors in the 1980s and 1990s, one of his favorite lines was, “I want to shrink the size of the federal government until we can drown it in the bathtub.” It's a wonderful image and metaphor, and captures the intensity with which conservative Republicans have wanted to eliminate the strong centralized state. But they have not been able to do it to a degree that makes that have satisfied them. It turns out that Americans, for all their possible ideological opposition to big government like big parts of it, like Social Security, like Medicare, like a strong military establishment that's gonna protect the country, like clean air, clean water. So it's proved much more difficult for this edifice to be taken down than the Reaganites had imagined it would be. So, the advocates have become more radical because of decades of frustration. And what we have to think about in regard to Trump is, will they take on projects that will threaten the constitutional foundation of the United States in order to achieve their aims? What does Musk represent, and what does part of Trump represent? It represents unbounded executive power, unconstrained by Congress, to promote conditions of maximum freedom. And the freedom they have in mind is not necessarily your personal freedom or mine, as the abortion issue signifies. What they have in mind is corporate freedom. The freedom of Elon Musk's companies to do whatever they want to do. The freedom of the social media companies to do whatever they want to do. The question is, will they be able to get further than past generations of Republicans have by their willingness to break things? And will they go so far as to break the Constitution in the pursuit of these aims? Peter Thiel has said, very forthrightly, that democracy no longer works as a system, and that America has to consider other systems in order to have the kind of prosperity and freedom it wants. And one thing that bears watching with this new Trump administration is how many supporters the Peter Thiel's and the Elon Musk's are going to have to be free to tear down the edifice and the institutions of the federal government and pursuit of a goal of a reconfigured, and what I would call rogue, laissez-faire. This is something to watch.
AK: But Gary, I take your point. I mean, Thiel's been, on the West Coast, always been a convenient punchbag for the left for years now, I punched him many times myself. I wanted to. But all this seems to be just the wet dream of neoliberals. So you have Musk and Thiel doing away with government. Huge corporations, no laws. This is the neoliberal wet dream, isn't it?
GARY GERSTLE: Well, partly it is. But neoliberalism always depended on a structure of law enforced by government that was necessary to allow free markets to operate in a truly free and transparent manner. In other words, you needed elements of a strong government to perfect markets, that markets were not perfect if they were left to their own devices. And one of the dangers of the Elon Musk phase of the Trump administration is that this edifice of law on which corporations and capitalism thrives will be damaged in the pursuit of a radical libertarianism. Now, there may very well be a sense that cooler heads prevail in the Trump administration, and that this scenario will not come to fruition. But one certainly has to be aware that this is one of the possible outcomes of a Trump administration. I should also say that there's another very important constituency in the Republican party that wants to continue, not dismantle, what Biden has done with industrial policies. This is the other half of JD Vance's brain. This is Tom Cotton. This is Marco Rubio, this is Josh Hawley, senator from Missouri. And they want to actively use the government to regulate industry in the public interest. And there's a very interesting intellectual convergence going on between left of center and right of center intellectuals and policymakers who are converging on the importance of having an industrial policy, because if Elon Musk is given his way, how is the abandoned heartland going to come back?
AK: It's cheering me up, Gary, because what you're suggesting is that this is a fairly normal moment. You've got different wings of the Republican Party. You've got the Cottons and the Rubios, who were certainly not revolutionary. Why should we believe that this is a special moment then?
GARY GERSTLE: January 6th, 2021. That's the reason. Trump remains the only president in American history to authorize an attack on the very seat of American democracy. That being: Congress sitting in the Capitol. And once he authorized the attack, he waited for three hours hoping that his attackers and his mob would conquer this building and compel the legislators inside to do—
AK: And I take your perspective. I'm the last person to defend that. But we're talking about 2024 and not 2021. He won the election fairly. No one's debating that. So, why is 2024 a special election?
GARY GERSTLE: Well, here's the key. Well, maybe it's a special election in two ways. It may signify the reconfiguration of a genuinely populist Republican party around the needs of ordinary working-class Americans. And we should say, in this regard, that Trump has brought into his coalition significant numbers of Latinos, young blacks. It has the beginning of a look of a multiracial coalition that the Democrats once had, but now appear to be losing. So it may be an epochal moment in that regard. The other way in which it may be an epochal moment is: what if Trump does not get his way in his term in office for something he really wants? Will he accept that he is bound by the Constitution, that he is bound by the courts? Or will he once again say, when he really wants something, no constitution, no law, will stand in my way? That's how January 6th, 2021, still matters. I'm not saying he's going to do that, but I think we have to understand that that is a possibility, especially since he has shown no remorse for the outcome of the last election. If I read into your comments, I hear you saying: he won this time. He doesn't have to worry about losing. But Trump is always worried about losing. And he is a man who doesn't really know the Constitution, and the parts that he knows and understands he doesn't especially like, because his dream, along with Elon Musk's dream, and this is one reason why I think they are melding so tightly, at the apex of American government should be unbounded executive power. This is not how the country was set up. And as Congress and as the courts begin to push back, will he accept those limits, that there must be bounds on executive power? Or will he try and break through them? I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it's something that we have to be concerned about.
AK: I wonder, again, wearing your historical cap you're always doing, the more you talk, the more Trump and Trump's Republican party is Nixonian. This obsession with not being responsible for the law. The broadening of the Republican party. Certainly the Republican party under Nixon was less singularly white than it became later. Isn't, in some ways, Trump just a return to Nixon? And secondly, you're talking about the law and Trump ransacking the law. But on the other hand, everything he always does is always backed up by the law. So, he has a love hate relationship with the law himself. He could never have accomplished anything he's done without hiring all these expensive lawyers. I don't know if you saw the movie this year, The Apprentice, which is built on his relationship with what's with Roy Cohn, of course, who schooled him in American politics, who was McCarthy's lawyer. So, again, I'm not trying to defend Trump, but my point is: what's different here?
GARY GERSTLE: Well, a key difference from Nixon is that when push came to shove, Nixon submitted to the rule of law, and Trump did not. Nixon did not unleash his people on Congress when a group of senators came to him and said you're going to be impeached if you stay in office, you should resign. He resigned. So the '70s was a moment of enormous assertion of the power of Congress, and assertion of the power and authority of the Constitution. That is not the story of Donald Trump. The story of Donald Trump is the story of the Constitution being pushed to the side. If you ask, is there anything new about Americans and politicians trying to manipulate the law in their favor? There's nothing new about that. And Trump, having made his fortune in New York real estate, knows there's no such thing as perfect markets, knows that judges can be bought and corrupted. And so, he has very little regard for the authority of courts. Everything's a transaction. Everything can be bought and sold. So, he understands that, and he has used the law to his advantage when he can. But let me bring you back to his first inauguration speech. There was no mention of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution in what he had to say that day. I think we'd be hard pressed to find another inaugural speech that makes no reference to the sacred documents having to do with the founding of the American Republic. And so I think in that way, he is something new and represents, potentially, a different kind of threat. I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it's certainly possible. And let me add one other element that we have to consider, because I'm suggesting that he has a fondness for forms of authoritarian rule, and we have to recognize that hard rights are on the march everywhere in the world right now. The social democratic government of Germany has just fallen. Britain may soon be alone in terms of having a left-center party in control and upholding the values of liberal democracy. The world is in a grip of an authoritarian surge. That is not an American phenomenon. It is an international phenomenon. It is not a phenomenon I understand well enough, but if we're to understand the kind of strongman tendencies that Trump is exhibiting, the appeal of the strongman tendencies to so many Americans, we have to understand the international context in which this is occurring. And these movements in these different countries are fully aware of each other. They draw strength from each other's victories, and they get despairing from each other's defeats. So this is an international movement and an international project, and it's important, in that regard, to set Trump in that historical context.
AK: Final question, Gary, there's so much here, we'll have to get you back on the show again in the new year. There's certainly, as you suggested, a great deal of vitality to conservatives, to the Cottons, the JD Vances, the Steve Bannons of the world. But what about on the left? We talked earlier, you sort of pushed back a little bit on the idea that the progressive elites aren't defenders of the neoliberal order, but you kind of acknowledged there may be a little bit of truth in that. In response to this new conservatism, which, as you suggested, is in some ways quite old, what can and should progressives do, rather than just falling back on Bidenomics and reliance on a new deal—which isn't going to happen now given that they had the opportunity in the COVID crisis to spend lots of money, which didn't have any impact on this election, for better or worse. Is there a need to re-architect the progressive politics in our new age, the age of AI, a high-tech age? Or do we simply allow the Bernie Sanders of the world to fall back on 20th-century progressive ideas?
GARY GERSTLE: Well, I'm not sure where AI is taking us. AI may be taking us out of democracy altogether. I think one of—
AK: You're not giving it any chance, if that's the case.
“What if Trump does not get his way in his term in office for something he really wants? Will he accept that he is bound by the Constitution, that he is bound by the courts? Or will he once again say, when he really wants something, no constitution, no law, will stand in my way?”
GARY GERSTLE: Well, there are different versions of AI that will be coming. But the state of the world right now suggests that democracy is on the defensive, and authoritarianism is is on the march. Those who predict the death of democracy have been wrong in the past. So I'm not predicting it here, but we have to understand that there are elements of life, technology, power in in private hands today, that make democracy much harder to do effectively. And so, this is a period of reflection that groups who care about democracy at all points on the political spectrum have to be thinking very seriously about. As for the here and now, and politicians don't think in terms of 10 or 20 years—or you have to be a leader in China, where you can think in terms of 10 or 20-year projects, because you never have to face any election and being tossed out of office—but in the here and now, I think what Democrats have to be very aware of, that the party that they thought they were is the party that the Republican Party has become, or is becoming: a multiracial, working-class party. And if the Democrats are to flourish—and in that regard, it's very significant—
AK: It's astonishing, really.
GARY GERSTLE: It is astonishing. And it's important to to note that Trump is the first Republican nominee for president since George W. Bush in 2004 to get a majority of votes. And the only person to do it before him in the last 30 years was his father, George H.W. Bush, in 1988. Kamala Harris came within 200,000 votes of becoming president of the United States. That's not well enough understood yet. But if 200,000 votes had changed in three states, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, she would be the president elect of the United States. However, she would have been the president elect while losing the popular vote. And one has to go very far back in history to find the Democrats being the beneficiaries of the Electoral College while losing the popular vote. And I think the fact that they lost the popular vote for only the third time in the last 50 years, maybe? I mean, when they elected someone...has to suggest that they have to do some serious thinking about how to reclaim this. Now, Bernie Sanders is coming out and saying, they should have gotten me on the public stage rather than Liz Cheney, that going after suburban Republican women was the wrong route. You should have stuck with me. We had a left/center alliance that worked in 2020. We could have done it again. But that's not my reading of the situation. My reading of the situation is that Bernie-style politics is distinctly less popular in 2024 than it was in 2020. The Democrats have to figure that out, and they have to figure out what they have to do in order to reclaim majorities in American life. And in order to do that, I think their economic programs are actually on the right track, in that respect, under the Biden administration. I think they probably have to rethink some of their cultural policies. There were three issues in this election. The economy was number one. The immigration issue was number two. And then, the trans issue was number three. The Republicans ran an estimated 30,000 ads declaring that the Democratic party was going to take your children away by turning them from boys to girls or girls to boys. The Democratic party has to do some hard thinking about how to have a progressive policy on immigration and how to have a progressive policy on issues of trans matters without losing a majority of the American people, who clearly are, at this moment, not with them on those important issues.
AK: It's an astonishing moment, Gary. And I'm not sure whether it's a revolutionary moment or just surreal.
GARY GERSTLE: Well, you've been pressing me, on a number of occasions, as to whether this is just the normal course of American politics, and if we look in that direction, the place to look for normality is...incumbents always do badly in high-inflationary times. And Ford and Carter lost in the 1970s. Every incumbent during COVID and during the inflationary period in Europe seems to have lost a recent election. The most normal course of politics is to say, this is an exceptional moment having to do with the enormity of COVID and what was required to shut down the economy, saved people, and then getting started up again, and we will see something more normal, the Democrats will be back to what they normally do, in 2028. That's a possibility. I think the more plausible possibility is that we are in the midst of some pretty profound electoral realignment that is giving rise to a different kind of political order. And the Democrats have to figure out if that political order is going to be under their direction, what they have to do to pull that off.
AK: And maybe rather than the neoliberal order, we're talking about, what, a neo-authoritarian order? Is that—
GARY GERSTLE: Well, the Trump forces are maybe neo-authoritarian, but we don't have a name for it. Pete Buttigieg—
AK: Well, that's why we got you on the show, Gary. Don't you have a name for it?
GARY GERSTLE: No. You know—
AK: We're relying on you. I hope it's going to be in your next book.
GARY GERSTLE: Well, I have till January 20th, 2025, to come up with the name. Pete Buttigieg called it the Big Deal rather than the New Deal. I don't think that cuts it. And there's some other pundits who are arguing about building from the middle out. That doesn't cut it.
AK: That sounds terrible. That sounds like—
GARY GERSTLE: This is part of Biden's—
AK: Designing political parties by committee. It's like an American car.
GARY GERSTLE: This is part of Biden's problem. You can't name, effectively, in a positive way, what he's done. One thing that's going to happen—and this may be a sign that things will continue from Biden to Trump, in terms of industrial policy. Do you have any doubt that Trump is going to plaster his name on every computer chips plant, every battery factory? Trump brought this to you, he's got to be there for every opening. He's not going to miss a beat. He'll see this as a grand publicity tour. I think there's a good chance he will take credit for what Biden has started, and that's going to upset a lot of us. But it may also signify that he may be loath to abandon many of these industrial policies that Biden has put in place, especially since the Biden administration was very clever in putting most of these plants, and chip plants, and battery plants, in deep red Republican districts.
AK: Well, Gary, I know you're not particularly cheerful. I don't suppose most of our audience are, but you actually cheered me up. I think things are a little bit more normal than some people think. But we will get you back on the show after January—what did you say—January 25th, when you'll have a word to describe the New World Order?
GARY GERSTLE: Well, I said after January 20th, 2025, you can expect me to have a name. I probably should—
AK: Gary, now, we'll have you back on the show. If you don't have a name, I'm going to report you to Trump.
GARY GERSTLE: You'll have to bury me.
AK: Yeah. Okay. Well, we're not burying you. We need you, Gary Gerstle, author of Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, a man who makes sense of our present with historical perspective. Gary, as always, a pleasure. Keep well and keep safe. And we'll talk again in the not-too-distant future. Thank you so much.
GERSTLE: Thank you. A pleasure talking with you.
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