 Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Aaron Powell, and I'm Trevor Burris and joining us today is Jacob Levy He's the Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory at McGill University. Welcome back to Free Thoughts. Thank you Thank you for having me back. So let's give a big question that's on everyone's minds as we're a hundred days or so into the new regime How did we get Trump? How did this thing happen? There's a lot that's very idiosyncratic I want to start by talking about some of the things that maybe aren't so idiosyncratic In the long recovery from the financial crisis There was a real de institutionalization of politics in the US and across the liberal constitutional democracies one of the things that really stands out to me in retrospect about the Obama administration was the rise of Occupy and the Tea Party Simultaneously and the way in which there was real Activist energy that was taking place almost entirely outside the traditional institutions of party life and there are real costs and disadvantages to that parties do important work of mitigating and moderating and channeling a lot of kinds of activist energy and of Putting the energy into conversation with institutional traditions and what was happening in both Occupy and in the Tea Party and Then in important ways in the Sanders campaign and the Trump campaign even though neither of them is a direct lineal descendant of those two movements was that the party structures were really breaking down and voters got access to messages and Had access to what they took to be avenues of change that were so far outside of the traditional institutional norms that The generic election season appetite for change with a capital C spun out of control in a very different way and I think that we have seen that and are continuing to see that across a lot of the liberal constitutional Democracies in the post financial crisis era. I think that we've seen that now with Brexit There's some chance as we're talking now that it will Swallow French politics with the election of Le Pen though. That's not especially likely and It's happening in countries that are less consolidated constitutional democracies like Hungary like Turkey like the Philippines where just the Sheer desire to have things be different is creating openings for very aggressively authoritarian kinds of politics that seem to show people I'm doing things and there's an appetite for great powerful leaders who look like they're doing things some of it some of how we got Trump is Because the United States isn't immune to and in some ways because the financial crisis started here was ground zero four That radical de-institutionalization apology that creates a real opening for aggressive populist authoritarianism. Well, it seems It's interesting that these things happened simultaneously in many different countries and you'd have to come up with an explanation that Deals with how citizens in many different countries. I mean, maybe they feed off each other Maybe it begins with Brexit and then Trump voters are like, wow, it could happen You know, they're mobilized by that and now you move over to Le Pen and you have France But in so far as it is a worldwide movement could we assign a causal chain that's even deeper than De-institutionalization of the financial product the financial crisis such as just the schismatic Information gathering that people are now experiencing on the internet like the lat the death of centralized media authorities and the ability to kind of, you know, learn about conspiracies like Pizza Gate and And all all the crazy things that you know, your uncle used to send you in emails that seem to be believed wider than they were before I'm gonna go with the financial crisis as a more major determinant there it's it's certainly the case that The internet has made possible certain kinds of extra extra institutional Political organization that for Occupy and the Tea Party in particular did make a big difference But the shared appetite for extra institutional and anti institutional just she or shaking things up That's not I think something that's very specific to the circumstances of political organization in the United States if there's commonality as I think there is between Trump and Orban in Hungary and Erdogan in Turkey and to Terte and the Philippines that's not because The Philippines and Turkey are equally well wired or equally well prone to online organizations and conspiracy theorizing There's a tradition of conspiracy theorizing in Turkish politics in particular that long predates the internet the question is why does Why do those undercurrents in political life take the form that they take across these countries now and There I think that Constitutional democracies rest for a lot of their popular legitimation on the ability to deliver relatively steady economic growth and The the long sputtering recovery from the financial crisis combined in Europe with the Euro crisis in particular did real damage to popular willingness to accept Traditional institutional practices and to trust traditional elites to be able to keep things managed well So Sanders is pretty clearly a direct outgrowth of the Occupy Wall Street movement He speaks the same language as the Occupy kids, but Trump doesn't look very tea party. In fact that you know the most tea party candidates Tended to lose in that in the primary so I guess I wonder how much of Trump's success was Him riding that wave Versus how much of it was Simply the fact you've always had Disaffected people We've we've had cultural shifts in this country. They don't anything to do with the financial crisis But just changing demographics, you know changing complexion of the country away from White and towards more minorities and So you have a disaffected white voter base that's upset about the cultural shifts and then you have a guy who has a 30-year established brand, you know, his his voters have seen him on television. They know him on television he's got a personality that I guess I'm say matches their own in the way that he talks the way that he seems to upset the Coastal elite types and then you have a primary process that was Say not run well from the party standpoint like people did not drop out when they should have so that you couldn't organize Opposition around him, but Trump was never terribly popular Even among Republicans he continues to not be terribly popular even among Republicans You know, he lost the popular vote by two and a half million I think he did he got fewer votes than Romney did so He just happened to look into running against one of the worst candidates in modern history so that How much of it is like that just these kind of like almost black swan events happening around this guy and aren't really This line from the financial crisis through the Tea Party So some of the details of that I would quarrel with the The characterization of the Clinton candidacy in particular. I know that that's Solidifying into a kind of conventional wisdom and I think it's genuinely mistaken about the character of the Clinton campaign but We can trace a line of dissent from the Tea Party that doesn't require Trump to have been the Tea Party candidate There was a catastrophic failure of Republican Party institutional and structural leadership during the primary campaign That catastrophic failure had to do with the real structural weakness of the party And I think the Tea Party had contributed to that the fact that the last candidate standing in opposition to Trump was Ted Cruz who couldn't buy endorsements from his Senate colleagues to save his life Because he had made such a profession out of being an anti-institutional contrarian Not understanding how the rules worked just self-promoting bomb thrower That itself was a sign of how badly damaged the traditional Republican norms of Succession to the presidential nomination had been damaged And of course Cruz was squabbling with other people for the title of Tea Party leadership Cruz was engaged in this really Very very dangerous dance with Trump that badly blew up on him spending the first part of the primary Hugging Trump as closely as he could so that when as he thought was inevitable Trump dropped out He would inherit all of Trump's voters Cruz and some of the other candidates too were willing to dance very close to the edge of institutional legitimacy and Their attempt to channel Tea Party anger Was part of what I think so badly impaired the Republican Party that elites couldn't do what party elites normally do Which is to prevent the party from being hijacked and taken over from the outside It's certainly the case that trump appealed to some things in american political life that are always there The toxic white nationalism in particular is always there and there's been genuine increase in the immigration sentiment Among some parts of the white population over the course of the last 10 years or so in ways that Are significant odds with the fact since actual net immigration has been steadily falling But in the wake of the financial crisis economically disadvantaged white populations look for scapegoats and immigrants are Immigrants and ethnic minorities are routinely chosen as the scapegoats under circumstances like that So I do think that Trump's ability to get as far as he did to get within the flutter of a couple of butterfly wings of the presidency and Those arise out of causes that we can meaningfully trace to what had happened over the preceding eight nine ten years The butterfly wings they then do matter and the comey letter coming when it does and things like that those You you can't shake the dependence of events on other events on Details or in circumstances But trump's ability to get that close that was a sign of real structural damage to The normal institutional structural functioning of american political life and so far as there's a distrust of institutions the way you described it the Post financial crisis, but I think that for a while we've seen Americans Having less and less trust in the federal government you see that in some polling I think congress was You know below the mendoza line I think of like seven twelve percent or something and I think it was you've all lived in who said that In the fifties or they were as high as eighty percent approval rate for For congress, which is like mind-blowing for my entire life. Like it's it's been a well-known fact The kind of thing that j lino or like comedians just we all know they're crooks We all know they're not really working for us You have shows like house of cards that people think is a documentary or or actually veep which is a documentary We do live in a veep world of being being a seven-year resident of dc And no one really thinks that these things are making a stretch in terms of how this town works In the face of that building distrust of Of congress and you know libertarians. I mean I've thought this for a very long time like these people are not Working for you they're working for them and you should understand this and maybe we can change something So then you get outsiders you get people like trump and there's often outsider candidates who come in and say I'm not one of them. I'm coming from a different thing. This is not new I mean we elected someone who has never held elected office But i'm not sure that there was any reason that would like never happen Especially given what erin said about the popularity of trump. Don't forget that just knowing his name Was a huge it was a huge boon for him So can we just sort of say this is sort of the culmination of a lot of anti-government sentiment? And maybe libertarians should be like, you know a little bit I mean, maybe not in the form of trump But could do something with this anti-government sentiment if we if we align ourselves correctly I think that the collapse of institutional trust and institutional norms is very different from a healthy distrust of governmental overreach and What we're seeing in the rise of populist nationalist authoritarianism in the various countries that i've named is A desire to see power quickly and ruthlessly exercised What is it people distrusted about congress? It's not that congress passed too many laws Gridlock after all was one of the judicial names for what people hated about congress People in congress spend all their time talking and they spend all their time Not doing their jobs and they take human invocation The things that libertarians complain about with respect to over powerful national legislatures These are not the things that are associated with the low levels of public trust and the late night Comedian jokes about what life is in congress is like Open market societies a free and open civil society the liberal order They depend on a certain level of institutional functioning and The state is one of those institutions The state should be a very restrained one of those institutions And I do think that there would be the possibility for greater institutional trust that went along with a retrenchment in state activity and state purposes, but the the instrument of Let's just get people to hate the organization and to think that there is widespread Corruption or ineptitude or dysfunction That instrument's too blunt And what it gives rise to at a popular level is not a healthy liberal desire for more trustworthy institutions It is instead something that gives rise to a very illiberal desire to see great leadership So you're genuinely concerned. I'm genuinely concerned On a broad level. This is this is something new It's not politics as usual and it's worldwide That's right. And you you're right that there are precedents in the as we came out of the 1990 1991 recession There was both the pat bue cannon candidacy for the republican party and the ross pro candidacy for The general election and they appealed to similar constituencies as one another and they appealed to similar constituencies as Trump's base But of course the republican party leadership in 1992 was powerful enough to protect its even pretty unpopular incumbent president george hlb bush against the fiery populist racist absurd revolt of pat bue cannon and Well events just turned out wrong for perot perot turned out to be too erratic at the wrong time of the season to still be posing a credible threat in the fall whereas the By capturing the republican party Trump put himself in a position to always be within arms reach Of the presidency once he had the nomination There was always the chance that things would go this way because Voters tend to consolidate Around partisan identity which is different from trust in parties at institutions, but they did they tend to vote their team And elites have a certain tendency to line up behind their team And so trump had a robustness to his candidacy that perot didn't When perot went off the deep end he self-destructed He exited the race for six weeks and once he came back into the race No one was going to give him as serious a hearing because he had shown himself to be erratic and unreliable Trump showed himself to be erratic and unreliable and would suffer a two or three day dip in the polls And then stabilize again, but a lot of these things. Yes, he is erratic and and I mean, I really am Profoundly not a fan of donald trump So I find it weird that i'm defending him I'm not i'm putting that in stair quotes But I do think he's more normal than a lot of people Concerned and I think probably you in the sense that a lot of his policies have been tried before It's not he didn't pull these things out of thin air and aside from his kind of muddled communication style and his ability to say whatever pops into his head and if you listen to the nixon tapes For example, if you let the recordings of him just what he discussed in his office It's absolutely shocking and it sounds quite trumpish He just he just had the ability with the lifelong and politics to just turn that off and put on a different persona And trump does it so if that's the only big difference Maybe it's not that maybe it's not that concerning and on top of that We also don't know the level of underlying support for trump supporters in the in the Issue that voting is a course instrument. It could be that 70 percent of trump voters We're saying Okay negative one thousand to trump but negative 1100 to hillary So I guess I'll vote for trump as opposed to You know, I really wish trump was wearing a military uniform and creating a coup It may be some trump supporters thought that but we don't we don't know that underlying support So I wonder what you mean when you talk about trump's policies as having been tried before Or he stated so I mean any immigration is comes back perennially often with the number of foreign born people in the united states There have been wars on the press by f dr By lbj lbj f dr jfk used the irs against their political enemies Uh, I mean just there's just almost every single thing You can list someone having my anti trade my question wasn't about the precedent My question was about your sense that there are trump policies. Oh, well good point. Yes. There are two that least I can think Um, I mean he has he's then skinned So he'll he we're afraid of him using the government against his enemies. That's been done a lot I mean f dr was horrendous on that level Um and people who are paragons of liberalism Uh behind the scenes were totalitarians. I would say Uh and very very unsavory people. So that's been done. So he wants to attack the press. He wants to attack immigrants That's been done. Uh, so immigration trade those seem the things that are The two beliefs those those are core beliefs of his that's right being thin skinned about the press Those are new that's not new but you said something important which was behind the scenes Politics is partly Created by public speech Um politics is partly how we live Out in the world where we set norms by what we say out loud and Trump's willingness his eagerness To say the most toxic and poisonous things out loud even when he doesn't then as it were cash the policy check That's something that in my lifetime is Pretty new and dangerous. So I invite you to go read uh f dr's economic royalist speech, which is a shocking It's almost the murderer's rapist but to rich people in the united states and not forget that f dr banned gold The private ownership of gold via an executive order He tried to influence the supreme court through a court package I said in my lifetime that the the the the 1930s are a moment of global crisis in liberal constitutional democracy And to say that the united states was not immune to the crisis of the 1930s That to me sounds like an even more pessimistic version of what i'm saying now Which is the united states is not immune to the crisis of the 2010s, but we made it through so I have become over these hundred days less Scared than I was That I guess so I still I dislike trump profoundly. I think he's not Emotionally or cognitively fit to hold the office um I don't think that he can change or improve in any meaningful way um, but I I guess my sense of the amount of damage he can do has been in decline And so tell me if I'm I guess wrong in my optimism here That my sense is trump. So he's been by any objective standard wildly ineffective in his 100 days He's failed in almost everything Um, and most of that is on him that he's just he's not a very good negotiator. He doesn't understand the policy He doesn't have the perseverance to actually do anything um, but the thing that I've noticed is and we we heard about this during the campaign um, is that he's Exceedingly impressionable that the like that he'll he'll pair it whatever the last person to talk to him and I see that Now with so that the one that springs to mind is his we're gonna withdraw from nafta Like that that looked like him, you know, he needed something big for his 100 days because he hadn't had anything And so he you know, we're gonna pull out a nafta But then within a matter of days it was no no no, you know nafta's great And that's almost certainly because one of his advisors said no no no nafta's pretty good in all these ways um, and so If that continues and again, I don't think that trump is the kind of man who can change um, then It feels like what we may end up with is four years because I don't think he's gonna run again um, but four years of a guy shooting his mouth off on twitter and saying lots of things that may spook markets and spook allies but in the end the adults in the room are going to Pat him on the head and say that sounds good, but we should try this other thing sound and fury signifying nothing Insofar as politics is Partly constituted by our speech in our shared space and the sound and fury is always damaging in its own right With respect to international diplomacy Spooking allies isn't an aside to brush off. It would be hard to overstate how badly those couple of days were received in Canada and mexico and by america's other Key trading partners and allies in addition, but if the trend continues then they'll get to we can ignore what he says and listen to What tellerson says or other people? But so here's the question about the Impression ability and the willingness to pair at the last person in the room How much are we willing to bet that the last person in the room will always turn out to have been The one who is as you put it one of the adults in the room. I have some Concerned about that. I don't think there are actually a lot of adults in the white house There are some in The cabinet who've been scattered around but there are not many in the west wing who know what they're talking about I think that we got lucky with who talked to him in what order with respect to nafta and There are going to be a whole lot of things over four years So to say Well, sometimes we'll get lucky Sometimes the erraticness will leave that the last position standing is a relatively status quo one That's I mean is that more optimistic than Saying everything will always go as badly as possible. Yes Is it grounds for much optimism? I think not That that he was ineffective was partly a matter of unorientation towards staffing and legislation And one thing that presidents learn over time Is what are the areas in which they can act in a pretty unconstrained way? They can act in a pretty unconstrained way with respect to war and peace and they can act in a pretty unconstrained way with respect to withdrawing from trade treaties Those are areas in which the willingness to shoot his mouth off Does relevant damage to how How allies how our trading partners and how our rivals Understand what the united states is up to and sheer erraticness is very much not a virtue in any of those domains On the shooting his mouth off point. You've written about authoritarianism and post-truth politics and It's always an interesting point made by people like Hannah Arendt and and georgell or well that authoritarians speak in a particularly bizarre way Make you believe two plus two equals five or that there isn't even such thing as as truth And I was reading your essay on that and I was thinking about something that in the beginning of trump I I thought a lot about but now I think I've kind of clarified my thoughts on this but the question of whether or not he's a he's a Live wire just doing whatever comes into his head or he's crazy like a fox and he knows exactly what he's doing And and I can't figure out you know, you say which one is more concerning Someone who has no idea what's going on and just says everything or or when he you know called the taiwanese president Was that ignorance or is that? Real sly sly scheming and I'm more at somewhere in between. I'm it's more I'm more on the he's a live wire Who just says whatever pops in his head, but on that point you seem to imply in your essay that the Diminishment or or almost redefinition of the truth is intentional Or that that's what he's going for I try to be careful not to say that I think that what he has is a lifetime of learned habits That he developed over the course of the very unusual kind of local and familial power That his businesses were about and he uses his giant brain and his common sense as he always says or yes He yes, he also built up a certain kind of self image That he does believe to a certain degree. I do think that he believes that he's an extremely smart man, which is terrifying but the willingness to make He might think of them as aggressive claims With respect to the underlying facts and to use them as loyalty tests to see who among his immediate circle Is willing to really go out and stand up for what the boss said and who's not That's something that you can acquire in a kind of instinctive way that doesn't require careful calculation He's not going to change he is who he is This is a thought that we keep returning to The habits that he learned over the course of this strange kind of business where he's never really answered to stockholders He's answered to certain kinds of investors, but in a way that meant he often had them over a barrel as much as they had him Someone who is constantly aggressively talking down and writing down his debt and threatening bankruptcy if he didn't actually declare bankruptcy that All of those character traits are things that he more or less unconsciously cultivated in the kind of brash kind of bullying world of being a new york city real estate developer turned reality tv character and Those i think are compatible with A willingness to go farther than He thinks the facts bear him out on do you think he believes it one of the most one Let me get this one more thought out for forget One of the most really frightening interviews that he's given since he was elected Was the one in which he talked about how often he turned out to have been right So he gave a speech in which he said something about the terrible thing that happened in sweden last night And there wasn't anything that had happened in sweden last night And then something kind of vaguely related happened in sweden a couple days later. He says, oh, it turned out I was right What that means is he feels and and he said I don't know how it happens, but this turns out to be the case all the time He feels confident in saying things for which he doesn't Have any warrant or any support Going far beyond what the facts will allow And he thinks that the the world will see to it that He turns out with his giant brain to have seen the future coming. He's been taking the spice melange. Yes But does he believe it? That's the interesting question. I mean, and that's just like Did how much of it is knowing Lying because like some some of the stuff so that you bring up the three million illegal voters I have crazy uncles who well, maybe not uncles, but I've crazy people in my family who Believe that who believe who have like thought that was just the way the world works for a very long time And if you were ever part of a conservative email chain, you know, hopefully you're not but you'll see them in these They really believe it in the end. They see, you know, well, the illegals are voting all the time. It's the only reason So so I think he believes this stuff Trump I think that he knows that he's going beyond what he has Any clear evidence for? We saw it replay about the wiretapping of trump tower Uh, he has to know that when he's just retweets Things that he's hearing out of the corner of his ear watching fox news every morning that the details often aren't going to be right and people who have An orientation toward truth Learned from that to say, ah, maybe I ought to Check something once before I just repeat the thing that I thought that I heard He has no reason that he's acquired over his career to second guess himself that way and Once he's said something He's willing to Double and triple down on it But how much he believes it when he says it as opposed to finding it a convenient thing to say A way to score a point against whoever's annoying him that day At some level, that's a mystery. I don't yeah, I genuinely don't understand how his mind works But I do think that If he cares at all about accuracy, then he knows that he doesn't speak accurately I just want to point out that F dr. I'm currently working on a long piece about f dr and trump, but he was also a well known Liar to his staff and some of his friends by the end of his few terms It become very distrustful the way he would actually play his people against each other He also kicked people out of the White House press briefing room And and nixon had an aid call cbs after he wanted 72 to tell them that he would break their network Because they didn't play a ball in the first term So going forward with trump Does he do you think he represents like so is there I guess put it this way Is there something such as trumpism as a political ideological force in american politics in the sense that Do you think that we will see Whether in upcoming congressional elections or in upcoming presidential elections Trumpist candidates who continue to do if not winning the presidency Do well enough to be scary and well enough to exert a meaningful influence on american politics going forward I think so I think that This is something that steven bannon has been right about to say There is such a thing as trumpism at some level and it's more or less continuous with the jacksonian tradition in white american populism it is Anti-elite it is anti trade it is anti foreigner it is anti black It is populist in the sense of being oriented toward wholism and saying The true people Is a unified american whole and anyone we identify as not part of that whole Therefore as such is not genuinely american is something like an enemy is something to be treated with contempt and disdain and outside institutional norms Uh The republican party has been riding that particular tiger For a long time, but republican elites were for a long time In control of what it was they were doing with that voter sentiment This is something that that became almost a cliche about republican politics was the difference between What sentiments they would cultivate on the campaign trail and what their governance then looked like in washington With the breakdown of the ability of the republican elites to Control their nomination process A tremendous opening i suspect has been created for candidates who are much more genuinely committed to that Jacksonian white populist nationalist tradition And yes, I think we're going to see republican candidates for congress and republicans elected to congress who are Instinctively anti trade instinctively anti immigrant Have very little affection for the rule of law or for constitutional traditions as such So then does this so that that group of people that group of voters the the people who would be so white working class anti trade anti immigrant are A relatively small demographic Um it compared and and a shrinking one. Um, they're also a demographic without a lot of economic might And that's going to probably accelerate as we see more automation take more of those jobs And as we see, you know, it's more more immigrants come in and more people move out of those small towns to the coasts and become more culturally Whole foods ish whole foods ish. Yes Um Is does this does that mean that that that movement is not sustainable? At least, you know, so we're not because we have a kind of all or nothing system in the us Like we can't have them take some, you know minority party status. They can't carve out as much of a chunk And certainly not successful at the presidential level. Um, and then does this provide an opening for the democrats to Take over as the party of cosmopolitanism as the party of trade and an open society I think the answer to the last question is yes. I think that some of the answers to some of the premises leading up to that are more ambiguous So for one thing The senate doesn't get reapportioned as population moves around and as it were that the jacksonian populations There's a certain number of states that they are just going to continue to be overwhelming majorities in And the senate will provide a relatively long term public and powerful representation for them Another thing is that it's not just the white working class It it remained true that there was an income gradient for willingness to vote republican in the last election And within states or within regions you could get a relatively strong income gradient richer people will still more likely to vote for trump some of the strongest support for trump was from local business elites in rural or ex-urban or post-industrial or non-coastal Places and there was a significant donor class that was associated with all of that That is to say there are people who are continue going to continue to have economic resources that they can Divert to the support of causes like that It's not just the people those people employed It is their employers in all of the non-coastal non-cause of hollett and non-elite parts of the country Then finally constitutional democracy works better with two relatively functional parties And in a presidential system in a two-party system There's going to be a certain amount of alternation in power political scientists emphasize the difficulty of winning a third term in a row There's an amount of voter fatigue that sets in this by the way is one of the reasons why I think that Hillary Clinton is getting a bad rap for having been a bad candidate compared to political science models about Where the economy was and about seeking a third consecutive term for the same party. She did just fine But eventually there will be party turnover and if one of the two major political parties is in the grip of anti-institutional anti-constitutional anti rule of law Anti-alliance and all the rest authoritarian sentiments then You're always one mistimed recession or one mistimed FBI letter away from a very bad outcome You've written about the political correctness thesis which Is obviously a very nebulous term, uh, whatever that means, uh, but It's also related to identity politics. Um, and you've pushed back saying that political correctness Is not and identity politics is not the cause of this and actually Maybe paradoxically for liberals in the small l sense Identity politics is a good thing. Why is that? So there were a couple of different moving parts to that essay one of them was The explanation of the election itself and there were a lot of people who had written in the immediate aftermath of the election Essays that had the conclusion that eventually got reduced to a cliche and said that's how you get trump Yes, this is why trump one is the new thanks obama. Yes So that's how you get trump because well black people or gay people or trans people or women or Some cultural elite or a member of a hollywood society Said something relatively aggressive in demanding recognition for or accommodation for some minority interest It's a morally toxic argument in so far as it treats the White conservative voters as passive responders. Um, they are merely objects who Wait when they are acted upon they will lash out and one of one of the Things that I said a number of times over the course of the last year and before the election was The voters who feel so insulted by coastal at cosmopolitan and minority Elites, I'm not sure that anyone had said anything as bad about them as You in a fit of peak will elect the presidency Someone who is mentally and emotionally incapable of holding the office and who has no relevant competent experience and who is a serial sexual assaulter and who is a serial adulterer bankrupt and at The idea that there were other elite other insults going around that were Bad enough to justify that which was a much worse thing to do than what they were being charged with in the first That that that seems to be just a very strange account of morality and social morality, but more importantly When you look at the polling over the course of the campaign Trump's moments of most aggressive political Anticorrectness or incorrectness Were the moments when his poll support cratered His attacks on judge curiel for being incapable of hearing a case against him because he was Mexican His attack on the cons The speculation that the cons that mrs. Khan was not able to speak because she's a muslim and muslim women aren't allowed to speak And the billy bush tape those were moments when his poll results really cratered very quickly That it seems to me is just fatal for the thesis that says what we had was a sheer hunger for Political correctness and for telling feminists and minorities. What's the what and for making them back off? It was a close election that he lost the popular vote for and where His ability to cart across the finish line Was in detail. Well, it was about the timing of the comey letter It wasn't because he had bravely stood up to the forces of feminists or so so why is identity politics? Okay, though because identity politics provides a way to channel the energy of knowing Where the shoe pinches populations that are injured or disadvantaged by state policy Very often in the united states for example african americans They rally and they organize and they put political energy into things Because they understand at a basic level when they are being targeted and mistreated We've read we in this building have read policy document after policy document for as long as any of us have been uh politically literate about the evils of the drug war about the evils of civil forfeiture about the evils of over incarceration And Terrifyingly little happened or things got worse and worse and worse And then black lives matter Happened over the course of the last several years And for the first time in my lifetime, there was a real political movement About over incarceration about police mistreatment about the drug war that provided Enough political cover that the obama administration's justice department was finally in about year six of his presidency able to start making Tiny but in the right direction changes After a generation of every change being in the wrong direction It seemed to me that black lives matter was doing real work at channeling and organizing Black political energy because people get emotionally invested in things When they sense at an in-co-it level that it really matters for them for their lives for their communities And more good got done over a couple of years on police on prisons on the drug war as a result of black lives matter Then as a result of policy paper after policy paper after conference after workshop among Libertarians who understand the evils of those things But who don't have the same kind of ability to organize and channel a mass political movement around them So we're recording this right now as the Building around us is in a festive state celebrating the 40th anniversary of the founding of the kato institute um So what does discussed today so far say about and for the future of The libertarian movement that kato is a part of like does this Trump's a victory And the the forces that led to it change the way that libertarian should approach our overall mission Does it does it say that we've we've somehow failed in that mission Should we Be at least is there any cause for optimism about the future of liberty or to add one more question I was actually talking with matthew finia sometime co-host uh free thoughts, which is should we Worry about if we don't resist the regime will be considered like a vishi Government that are collaborators with when trump goes away We don't just resist it with all of our might and and never try to work with them Yes, I do think we should worry about that. I absolutely think that we should have an orientation toward Very very firm and clear Opposition throughout the trump president even on things that might he might agree we might agree with him I I I think it's important not to Chase little shiny objects and not to say because one person we like someone we've been going to meetings with for a long time Uh, someone who says things like what we say got appointed to one position Or because in trump's erratic random Descriptions of various things one day The stopped clock happens to say something relatively deregulatory That suddenly we say well, we will cooperate on areas of shared interest If you understand that the trump administration is basically erratic basically lawless Basically opposed to the free and open society um, if you understand that There's never going to be a serious deregulatory movement as much as there's going to be just a kind of chaotic Under-enforcement of regulations that will remain on the books thereby significantly increasing Regulatory uncertainty because you never know when you're breaking the law and when you're not if you understand that tax cuts and deregulation combined with increasing trade barriers Are really very rarely a net improvement in market conditions Then the stance has to be one of very clear consistent principled opposition even more profoundly than that Libertarians are a part of uh the liberal democratic constitutional market Center in an important way and and this is something that I have been Thinking about and taking a lot more seriously not just in strump, but in the wake of the populist uprisings Around the world. I do think that libertarians have underappreciated how much Our vision for free and open society is one that is situated within the institutions of liberal constitutional democracy and That which is bad for liberal constitutional democracy Is bad for our vision of the free and open society even when there's An occasional as it were haphazard policy when we need to care about the health of the political institutions That keep at bay the forces that would destroy the whole system that we are aiming for Thanks for listening This episode of free thoughts was produced by test terrible and ebb and banks to learn more visit us at www.libertarianism.org