 Policy Institute, we appreciate you being here today. I'd like to thank everybody on the panel for being here and participating. My only function here is to welcome you and to thank Gabrielle Gurley, who's the deputy editor of the American Prospect for MCing our panel this morning. And I'm going to turn it over to Gabrielle to handle the rest of the introductions. So thank you very much. And I just should add, by the way, that we're happy to have you stay. We'll have Q&A after the presentations, and then there will be food after the panel. So welcome to join us. Thank you. Written has launched us into the topic of the populist explosion. Previously, he was a senior editor at the New Republic and a senior writer for the National Journal and has written extensively for the New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, and the Washington Post. Welcome, John. Jeff Foe is the founding president and a distinguished fellow at the Economic Policy Institute. He studied, taught, and published on a wide variety of economic and political issues from the global economy and neighborhood and community development to monetary policy and political strategy. Welcome, Jeff. So, John, we're going to let you launch us into this discussion of the populist explosion. This? Okay. And I can't stand up, right? Yeah, there you are. How's that? Everybody can hear? Good. I'm happy to be here. I haven't been in this latest quarters of EPI. I just told Jeff and Larry that when Jeff left, I thought that, you know, the place was going to end up like it is operating out of a food cart. But here we are. This is fancier than anything I've ever seen for EPI guy. And I'm delighted because EPI is one of the most important and also one of the least dependent, if I can put it that way, of the think tanks in Washington. And it's one that I've relied on over the years for my own understanding of what's going on in the economy. Whenever I do these talks, and I've been doing them now since I guess September, and it's like, you know, being on a train and having the landscape keep changing around you each time, I still usually begin with the question that people ask, which is what is populism and why is it even relevant to talk about it at this point in our history? So let me just do that. And, you know, and we'll get on to Trump, and I want to talk a little about France later, too. So what is populism? Well, first of all, you know, political scientists always think they're natural scientists. They think they're physicists or something like this. So they're always looking for a definition that will fit all instances of populism. And there absolutely isn't. It's sometimes just used as a synonym for popular. You know, a Republican like Jack Camp, who seems to care about somebody other than rich people is a populist. But I'm going to use it in a particular way that reflects a tradition of politics that begins in the United States in the 1880s and 1890s. And that's where the word itself comes from. And the basic idea of populism as it begins in the United States then of migrates to Europe in the 1970s or 1980s or so is a demarcation between the people and the elite or an establishment. Now, populism is different from, let's say, liberalism. It doesn't seek to accommodate all interests with a view in terms of liberals towards the working people in the middle class, but still accommodating all interests. It's a politics that's based on an underlying conflict between the people and the elite. It's also not what you'd call an ideology that you can say, well, it's left or right. Let me make a distinction between a left wing and right wing populism and then take it back a little. A populist like Bernie Sanders, Yui Long, the original People's Party, want to mobilize the middle and the bottom of society against the top, basically. It's a two-prong relationship. Right wing populist Marine Le Pen, Donald Trump, Pat Buchanan, George Wallace, also want to mobilize the middle against the top. The rich people should have to pay more taxes and so on and so on. But in addition, they want to blame the people at the top for coddling a third group, be they African-Americans, Muslims, illegal immigrants, whom they believe are being favored at the expense of the middle. So this right wing populism has three terms. The left wing two terms. But now let me take it back a little. Because right wing populism, and we're talking here about campaigns, we're not talking about governing, right wing populism is not the same, let's say, as business republicanism. You get Pat Buchanan in 1996. I like social security in Medicare. I'm all in favor of him. He didn't want to cut those things. Donald Trump, Donald Trump going after corporations. Marine Le Pen, you know, the main difference you could almost say between Marine Le Pen in France and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, pardon my French, is that Mélenchon, when he was in Marseille, told the audience to have a moment of silence for the migrants who perished off in the seas coming to France. Marine Le Pen would have a moment of silence for the people killed by the migrants. But on domestic policy, very, very similar. I mean, she wants to expand and improve France's universal health care system so it gives equal coverage to people no matter where they live or what their income is and so on. So the Danish folk party, they didn't want to be in a coalition with the right center party because the right center party wanted to cut taxes on the wealthy and they didn't agree with that. So again, these populist parties left and right are sui generis. They're not. You can't just put them in the same category as liberals versus conservatives, left versus right, Democrats, Republicans. What they are and the way I describe them in the book is they operate as kind of early warning systems that there's problems in the politics of the country, that there is a significant group of people in the country who distrust the leadership of both parties, the establishment. And the kind of demands that populists make are generally demands that are perfectly conceivable that you could see happening but are ones that the establishment, the leaders of the existing parties, reject. And the obvious example here is Bernie Sanders and Medicare for all. They haven't counted, et cetera, et cetera. But in the context of the United States, as Hillary Clinton and others kept reminding him, it's impossible. How could you have that because of the existing Congress and you couldn't? So Trump, again, and we'll talk about what it means to govern the wall, this continuous wall, he's going to put a 45% tariff on goods coming that runaway shops send back to the United States. Again, things you could do conceivably, but again that the establishment won't accept. So these populist parties, candidates, operate as a kind of signal that something's really wrong, that there's a lack of responsiveness. Now, first populist, the People's Party, again, the failure of laissez-faire capitalism in the 19th century of our chaotic banking system, early warning sign. A lot of the things that the populists advocated in 1892 only come about in 1935. It takes a long time. So it doesn't necessarily happen now. And we'll get to this paradox when we talk a little about Trump. So Trump, Sanders, Perot, Buchanan, Occupy Wall Street, they're all part of a group that I would see as responding, again, to a failure of elites and the establishment. And the failure in this case, I would identify with the reign of a kind of market liberalism. In Europe, they call it more neoliberalism. That takes command of both parties, really, in the late 70s, early 80s. Corporate mobility, the idea that corporations can move wherever they want in search of lower wages, less regulation. Labor mobility, the fact that we could have a huge influx of unskilled workers coming into our country and not have that affect the wages of the unskilled workers who are already here. Deregulation, beginning again with the Democrats, airlines. And we're seeing the result of that now. Taxes, regressive tax cuts that began occurring with capital gains in 1970. And all this stuff continues with the Democrats. I mean, Bill Clinton, the year of small governments over repeal of Glass-Steagall. So again, it's something that has been happening in that has dominated American politics for better or worse for 30, 35 years. And what you could see in this succession of candidates, beginning with Ross Perot, who, again, I think is an important milestone in our political history, is skepticism about these politics. Perot on the great sucking sound that NAFTA is going to create. And continuing again up through Donald Trump and his campaign. And leave aside, again, the governing and what he does. The critique of Caterpillar, of Cav Carrier, of all these companies, Ford, why are they moving jobs out of the United States? The idea that we should buy America, hire America. I'm going to preserve Social Security and Medicare. I'm going to repeal Obamacare, but I'll have a system that's, in fact, more universal and provides better benefit. So the actual campaign, again, you could see, as you could see Sanders' campaign as a critique of this prevailing neoliberalism. Now, the constituency. Let me just mention that before I talk about Trump as president. Who did this appeal to? And here, too, there's an incredible match with one exception between the United States and Europe. Sanders got very much the same voters as Malinchon, Podemos in Spain, young college educated, the heart of his constituency. I went to a Podemos conference in Madrid in February of last year, and I looked around there and I said to myself, my god, you know, if SDS hadn't fallen apart in 1979, and it was 1976, it would be the same people. I mean, they were like the same age, the same people, but they were in their 30s, maybe. Professors were the leadership. So again, if you look at Malinchon's vote, that's where he's picking up a lot of his votes. If you look at Sanders, it's partly this kind of what we talk about post-material idealism of the young and stuff like that, student debt. But it's also, I think, and here I might be on thin ice because I'm among economists here. I think that there is a transformation going on in American capitalism. And all my evidence, of course, is my own children. But again, as kids look out upon the economy now, they no longer see a kind of easy path for themselves. It's become very much a niche economy. And I was just struck by this study by cats and kruger who are liberal economists. And what they concluded was that a striking implication of these estimates is that all of the net employment growth in the US economy from 2005 to 2015 appears to have occurred in alternative work arrangement. Temps, contracted work, part-time work. Again, there's something changing. And I think the young feel it. And I know that's also true in Europe as well, where unemployment is much higher among the young in places like Spain and France. Trump, the left behind, is very similar to the Brexit vote in northern parts of England. Very similar, again, to the kind of constituency that Le Pen gets that the Danish folk party get with one exception. Le Pen actually gets the young. Gets the young non-college graduates. She has a big support there. She has kind of a donut with the young and the old. Again, Trump's constituency is very much like the old Wallace constituency, the Buchanan, excuse older, lower middle class, non-college, not college graduates. And it goes up in our country, beginning, again, through in the Wallace vote. You can see it in 1968 and 72. And it goes through the electorate, sort of like a large animal that's swallowed by a python. And sometimes it's the religious right. Sometimes it's gun rights. Sometimes it's war on terror. But again, it got kicked off in certain ways by the great recession. And a lot of Trump's appeal was economic. And a lot of his appeal was in terms of immigration, which has both an economic and a cultural dimension to it. So what now? Now, the thing about populism is that it is primarily in the United States and Europe. It's not a method of governing, but it's a method of campaigning. And again, if you think about my description of it, it's polarization between the people and the establishment demands that nobody's going to grant right now. So what happens when a populist gets into office? And again, part of what we're seeing is the contradictions working their way out. Trump begins with these two big speeches to his inaugural address and his CPAC address, both of which I assume were written by Bannon or maybe Bannon and Miller that are heavy on the establishment people versus the establishment themes. But then, if you look at the unfolding of the legislation of what he's actually doing, he's begun steadily to step back. Of course, you know that's true on trade, the China, the NAFTA thing has now been delayed. Health care, again, I don't think Trump was lying when he said he was going to have an Obamacare replacement that was better and that he had to help insurance for all, but completely stymied. Now, why is it that he's stymied? Well, again, this is almost a tautological observation. First of all, if you look at the Congress that he faces, who actually supported him during the campaign? Not the presidential final election where it was Hillary Clinton, but who were his supporters when it was the primary? He had nine supporters from the House and one from the Senate. You know who the one is from the Senate, right? He's the attorney general. That's it. So he doesn't have a base for those kind of politics of the campaign in the Congress. It just does not exist. You know, it could exist with some of the Democrats, but again, there's such polarization on other issues and such as immigration that it's going to be very hard. Trump selects a cabinet. Who does he get? I have been unable to find one ex-cabinet head who endorsed him during his primary. I don't think there was. I think the best he did was Flynn, who was a more or less a marginal person. I won't use bad terms here because it's on streaming to all these people. But not the most reputable person. So again, who does he rely on? Who can he put in his cabinet? So he gets people like Betsy DeVos. He gets Mulvaney from the Tea Party, who again, Trump is a guy who wants infrastructure. He never talked about deficits during the campaign, but he's got this guy who comes out of the right, throw the widows out in the snow part of the Republican Party to run his budget. Price at health care price, one of these doctors who wants to screw all the patients and help insurance. Again, completely contrary to Trump's own promises. So he's stuck. Now, maybe he can rally his base. But by my calculations, Trump's base is at best 30% and probably closer to about 25% of the electorate. And I have all these ways I figured this out. But I think the simplest way is that if you look at the exit polls, half of the Trump voters said they were voting primarily because they didn't like Hillary Clinton. So if you figure that out, 50% of 50%, you get 25%. The latest poll has 30% strongly approve of Trump a voter. So he does not have the kind of base, let's say, that Hugo Chavez had in Venezuela. And God help us if that happens here. But he actually had a majority that he could rally against his opponents. Trump does not have it. So he really is stuck as president. What's he going to do? Let me just close by saying, what are the different sides of Trump? And how are they coming out during the campaign and now the presidency? Trump, you have to remember, was a pretty typical New York conservative Democrat, moderate Republican. I think he's a lot like Al DiMotto, if anybody here remembers Al DiMotto. Very similar. Now, we're talking about in the year, let's say, 1996, if you got a sort of cross-section at that point of Trump's brain. It would be very similar to that. It's somewhat similar to Ed Koch. I mean, he says at one point he favors single payer. He's pro-choice. He's very pro-business, again, which is characteristic of that side of a Democrat-centrist Republican, pro-Wall Street. That's one side of him. And that started, again, you can see that emerging in his willingness to, or his apparent willingness to try to make a deal with the Democrats on some things. And also, as well, in his support for things like infrastructure and not wanting to cut Social Security Medicare. Then there's the economic nationalist Trump. I, again, if you go back and look 20 years Trump, I think that's absolutely genuine. I mean, here's a guy who was going to run for president as the reform party candidate. I mean, he is a guy like me who grew up in a generation where, if you went into a store in the 1950s, you looked for things that were made in America. And it had nothing to do with patriotism. It had to do with, we made the best things. Everybody else made crap. That's his mindset. And when he and his vote, and this resonated with voters, they make America great again. That's what they hear. And again, this was something I think that the Clinton and the Democrats were deaf to. Immigration too. I'm not sure about that. I'm not sure how much that's opportunism, how much that's real opposition to gut-level opposition to illegal immigration. Then there's this element of opportunism, what he had to do in order to win Republican primaries and his change on abortion. You can even go back to the Berther stuff. His appointments, again, reflect that, the votes, price, people like that. So there's these different parts of Trump clashing, and you can see them in the Bannon versus Kushner stories. I mean, they're getting played out there because Kushner is sort of a younger version with the orthodox Judaism and all that stuff added of Trump. But fast forward like 20, 30 years or so. But again, very moderate, middle of the road kind of Democrat, whereas Bannon does represent his more populist hard edge side, more of the campaign. So it's playing itself out now. In my own view, where I expect Trump to go is sort of the path of least resistance, which is to win over the Republican right through the part of his populism that does appeal to them, which is the immigration, the illegal immigration, the deportation, stuff like that. Business, again, the moderate Democrat, centrist, Republican, tax cuts go easy on Wall Street, very contrary to what he promised. But I think he's going to have a lot of problems as president, and I'm not saying anything very original in telling you that, because if he allies himself with the hard right in the House, that position itself is not a majority position in the country. But I don't think he's going to be able to make many deals with the Democrats, because I think they're going to follow the McConnell strategy book in terms of dealing with the Republicans and Trump. So I expect we're going to see another four years of a mess. The only way I could see Trump really getting re-elected is if the economy does well. If the economy does well, people will forgive a lot of his excesses. If it doesn't, I really wouldn't expect to see him around in 2021 as president. And as far as I'm concerned, that would be a very good thing. Thanks, John. So Jeff, let's have you weigh in and respond to this portrait of America and the Trump presidency so far that John has sketched out. OK, well thank you, and thank you all for coming. It's not the first time in our lives I've been on a panel with John Judas. And sometimes I disagree, but I always learn something because he's a smart guy, and smart guys write smart books. So I think I got a lot out of this book. My take, I've got about five takeaways here in my 10 minutes. First, I think that in my view, and I think we agree, partly, at least mostly on this, populism is not much of an ism. And what I mean by that is that there's no idea, there's no coherent idea of how to govern, as John says. On the other hand, it's hard for me to find a real ideological distinction between populism and democracy. I mean, this is, after all, we're supposed to be a government of the people, by the people and for the people. And essentially, that's what much of this populism is expressing. It's also anti-elite. But in my lifetime, most people running for president from the opposite party have been anti-establishment in their campaign. I mean, Jimmy Carter, with different words, was as much a drain-the-swamper as Donald Trump. So was Bill Clinton. And I think that there's a natural tendency to label Washington as the leadest between among Republicans and Democrats. The Trump is different, obviously. But I think his differences are not ideological. And I think we make a mistake in trying to make too much of those. He's a political huckster with the attention span of a walnut. And I don't think this comes up to a religion or an ism of any sort. He's making it up as he goes. And I think that's what his experience in life has been. And that's what we're going to see as president. I think John's book makes a really important series of differences not only between Europe and the United States, but among or between sections of Europe. There's a right-wing tendency in Northern Europe and a left-wing tendency in Southern Europe. And I think that's instructive. I think there are lots of differences between ourselves and the Europeans on this sort of anger at the failure of neoliberalism to deliver. I think the most common is the resentment about immigration. It just seems to me, although it's got, you know, it comes off in various ways here from Europe. But that is one thing that I think that is common in Western Europe and the United States. And I think we haven't really come to grips with that. America first sounds fascist to most of our years. But for many of our fellow citizens, it seems sensible. If you were president, why wouldn't you put America first? Who else would you put first? And I don't think the Democratic Party and our liberal part of the Democratic Party has really come to grips with this. I watched the Spanish language news at night to keep up my Spanish. And I, for six months before the election, every night there was a story about Obama as the deporter-in-chief. And Obama was trying to come up with some sensible response to this, which recognizes that there's a border between ourselves and Mexico and the rest of Latin America. But still, that wasn't enough for that constituency. And it may, and I'm no expert on this, but it may be one reason why there was a surprising stay at home vote among Latinos. I think the immigration thing, obviously, there's a lot of racism woven into it. But it's more than just racism. And I would warn against the tendency, when we start thinking about this, to ask, well, is this either racist or is it economic and it's fundamentals? And I think these things are mutually reinforcing, and they always have been. My experience of the 1960s, when I look back at it, is that I don't think we could have had the breakthroughs we did in the 1960s if that decade wasn't a decade of rising employment, rising income, so that the white working class at least could feel that, well, they're not taking my job. I think it's a very different economic situation that we have now, and I think that it's important to remember that. I agree, obviously, that there's been a failure of neoliberalism here. I have a little quarrel with John's description of what happened in the 1970s. I don't think that it was driven by business concern with rising wages, because my analysis of the 70s is that wages were lagged prices in that inflation. And certainly since the mid-1970s, wages in America have gone flat while productivity continues to rise, which suggests that sort of fear and anxiety upon an extraordinary fear and anxiety upon the business class was not really at the bottom of it. I think the 1970s inflation, which is critical to our history of this, was just misread by Carter and Carter's people. I remember being at a White House meeting in 1979-80 with a group that were urging Carter to start spending money because the unemployment rate was going up. And we were told by the Council of Economic Advisers, people who were there, oh, listen, we can't spend money deficits. Wall Street, we'll get excited about that, et cetera. And finally, I said, aren't you worried about the coming election, going into an election with rising prices and rising unemployment? And one of the members of the Council of Economic Advisers looked at me, rolled his eyes, and he said, do you really think that the American people would elect Ronald Reagan, the star of bedtime for Bonzo? So there's been a disconnect between the Democrats in power and the way the world is going for a long time. John ends with saying the populism signals a crisis. And I think that's absolutely right. I would say that there are three crises that it signals and for which there are no obvious solutions right now. One is the economic one. And I think I would even stress more what John said about the economic situation of young people today. In the 1960s, there wasn't this kind of fear that when you get a college education and you end up $40,000 in debt, you're going to be driving your cab, waiting on tables for a long time, maybe for the rest of your life. That's a real possibility for more young people. And I think that was why that was part, a major part, of the Sanders phenomenon and the backing of Sanders. Yes, it was young people are liberal. Yes, young people are more radical. But I think the young people in the United States now are in real fear and anxiety about their future. 20-somethings are always optimistic. And then they become 30-somethings and they're still stuck. And eventually, they become 40-somethings. And this, I think, is both social dynamite for the future and I think it's optimism for the left. But it needs to be dealt with and so far it's not. Obviously, Trump is no solution, but neither was Hillary Clinton. The second crisis that I would see not nearly as broad is the crisis of the Democratic Party. The party is still not faced what happened in November and still not faced the disaster that it has slipped into over the last half a decade at least. It's not just what happened in the presidential election, but look around the states. And most people here understand this. The Democratic Party, by one count, has the least number of trifectas in the state, and that is governors and lower house and higher house, that it's had since the Civil War. Now, that is a long time. And remember, the Democrats were on the wrong side, generally, in the Civil War. So I don't think they've got it. I think Bunny is still running the party as it has since the 1980s. I think there's very little accountability. And partly, it's because everybody is into the resistance against Trump, and that's natural. I mean, I get 5, 10 emails a day about resistance, plus send us $24. But we've got to watch this. I mean, if there is no analysis, if there's no bringing to accountability what's been going on in the Democratic Party, I can assure you the probability is that it will continue. The third crisis, I think, is in democracy. And this is the one I understand least, but I think it's probably the most important. And in one way, it's the morphing of popular culture and politics. I mean, Trump got a long way with his ridiculous television program, which made him a household word over 10 years. And so what is that? I mean, everybody in this room looked at Trump when he started rising in the polls, and he said, well, this is impossible. This guy can't appeal to anybody. Well, he did appeal to a lot of people, and not because of his haircut, but because somehow or other he learned how to push those popular culture buttons. And in that Asinine television show, he became a household word. This goes back a long time. This is not just a Trump phenomena. After Richard Nixon won the election of 1968, a guy named Joe, I forgot his last name for the moment, wrote a book called The Selling of the President. McGinnis, right. And he outlined the sort of commercial-based kind of television strategy that he claimed put Nixon over the top. There's something about the way people get information. It's not just the manufactured fake news. There's something, I think, that's sort of embedded in our technological culture that makes, in the end, someone like Donald Trump seemed like a doer to many of the American electorate. In the same way, John Wayne seemed like a military hero. John Wayne, who actually was not in World War II, was a draft dodger in World War II. There's something about that that is now pervading our culture. Someone said, when you treat politics like a circus, sooner or later, you're going to elect the big clown. And I think that's what we did. Well, there is enough of a reaction to Trump now based on some of his more egregious comments about various minority groups, Mexicans, Muslims, American, African-Americans. You've talked about populism as a campaign strategy. Has there been enough of a reaction, particularly in popular culture, that Trump is really expert at manipulating to arrest its further development? Or are we going to be consigned to this nonstop division using the group that's been demonized du jour to continue to have this conflict in American society? Conflict between what? Between a majority group of white Americans whose attention has been diverted over here towards a third group, be they Muslims, be they Mexicans, African-Americans. Is this going to be a continued successful strategy any time the tough questions about how we perceive it, particularly on economic issues? It's long been a successful tactic to demonize the other rather than to deal with the economic problems at hand. Well, let me say a few things. Some sort of footnotes to what Jeff said. And this relates to the immigration question. What has made the issue of immigration so explosive in the last 15 years, particularly in Europe, but also in the United States, is its fusion with Islamic terrorism. I don't know what the PC word for it is today is radical Islamist terrorism. You put those two together, and that's really what's blown that issue up. And again, I think that accounts for a lot of what's happened in Europe with Marine Le Pen's popularity. And you have to remember what happened during the 2015, 2016 San Bernardino or Lando. Again, it's the fusion of those two that's so explosive. And it also really gives Trump a lot of support when he does things like the Muslim ban. It's not that different from the kind of things we pulled off during World War II in terms of the Japanese. People get worried about this kind of thing. So this kind of, let's say, scapegoating cultural nationalism where genuine grievances, again, about unskilled workers taking jobs, bringing down wages, gain a kind of cultural dimension, I think that's going to go on. I don't see that stopping. I don't see it stopping as long as especially as the Middle East and North Africa blow back. So yeah, we're going to have that with us for a while. I just wanted to mention one thing I was thinking, as Jeff was talking about, the 60s and young people. And he was talking about, well, if you had $40,000 in debt, then you didn't worry. I went to Berkeley in the 60s, and it was on a semester system. And there was no tuition. And it cost $80 a semester. I went to City College for less than that. Yeah, no, I know. But I mean, again, the contrast between then and now is so striking. And of what young people thought then. I mean, in Oakland at the time, if you got worried about making a living, you could always become a substitute teacher. I mean, even if you hadn't graduated from college. I mean, the economy was so different than it is now. And the people who talk about this, you know, we have five or 6% unemployment. What are you worried about? Do not understand the fabric of it and how torn it is and the kind of anxiety that it builds among particularly, again, among young people. And I think, again, Sanders, Melanchome, Podemos, all this stuff, again, the left wing side of populism is coming out of that. Well, it's interesting because we're about to undergo another significant economic disruption with the advent of driverless vehicles. Some stay to know in Colorado. They've already put driverless trucks on the road to deliver beer, for example. And right now, that's part of the gig economy. You have Uber, you have Lyft, and people can go in that direction. But if driverless vehicles take home, it's going to be a significant disruption to the economic landscape. Do you see anyone who is thinking about how we navigate that disruption that is going to fall disproportionately on younger workers? Well, I think that it's important to understand that we've always had technological change, right? This has been a reasonably steady factor in the history of the United States since its beginning. I think one of the differences now is that as Keynes warned in the 1930s, the larger foreign trade sector you have for your economy, the harder it is to control it. The harder it is to control business cycles, the harder it is to stimulate growth. And I think that is a fundamental problem we have now. And it's partly about how the world changed, but it's largely that the policy class in this country ignored the implications of it. These jobs at Uber, et cetera, these are survival jobs. They're not jobs for somebody on a career ladder. And so as all of this just continues without any sense of our collective responsibility for these questions, yeah, it's going to get worse. And there was a moment in history at the end of the 70s, the beginning of the 80s, when you could see that the United States was not forever going to be on top of the world economy. And people saw it coming. And there was a drive in the late 70s, early 80s, for something called industrial policy, which really meant looking ahead. Eisenhower in the late 50s appointed, I think it was Brother Milton, to a commission on the future. Nixon had sort of planning commissions. There was an acceptance in our public ethos and our politics of the responsibility to look at these questions and do something about it, either then read a long piece in the Atlantic monthly. That all stopped dead with Reagan and was never resurrected by the Democrats. One other point about the future I just want to drop in. My fear about Trump is that Stymie at home, he's going to turn to the one thing that previous presidents have turned to. And that is the fact that he's got more freedom to roam around the world, as John Quincy Adams said, in search of monsters to destroy. And I worry about that. I think that the automatic genuflection to Trump's attack on Syria by almost the entire republicans except the libertarians and almost all the Democrats, except for that wonderful congresswoman from Hawaii, two terms, two tours of duty in Iraq, a Democratic congresswoman raised the question about the evidence here that it was actually Assad and whatever you feel about that. And she was pilloried immediately by important members of the Democratic Party. I just worry that Trump is going to have all of these problems with tax reform and trade and health care and all of that. And given his adolescent personality, it's likely to go to the place where he can have more fun by himself. You've mentioned that the Democrats haven't figured out how to respond to Trump. How should they respond? What would you counsel them to do? How should they be learning from their mistakes in 2016 and preparing for 2018? Well, obviously, Democrats have to do what opposition does and be in opposition to Trump. But that's not enough. I mean, I don't think resist is enough. At some point, they've got to figure out why in those five states, the five Midwestern states where they lost, why he appealed and they didn't. I don't think it's just a matter of personality. I don't even think it's just a matter of the campaign tactics. I think that the Democratic Party has very little to say about the underlying anxieties and fear, both the fear that generates right-wing populism and fear that generates left-wing populism. So I think it's got to have a serious program. And without a serious program to deal with the economic issues, maybe they'll certainly gain seats in 2018. Maybe they'll win the election in 2020. But I don't think the issues that erupted in November are going to go away at all. What do the Democrats need to do? Yeah, I hate to be in this position because I spent a long time trying to create a socialist revolution and nothing happened. So I don't feel like I'm a good advisor to people, to what to do next. I wrote a piece for the New New Republic. We thank God that Chris Hughes is gone and our former Facebook owner. And what I said in that basically was that the wrong strategy is this kind of parody of Mitch McConnell, which is to oppose everything. And I don't think, again, the Democratic leadership is so stupid that they're going to do that. But a lot of people are urging them to do that, block every appointment, oppose every bill, don't work with Trump under any circumstances. Again, if you look at what happened with George W. Bush 2006 to 2008, or go even 2004 to 2008 when the Democrats ended up winning back the Congress and then the presidency, you choose your targets. The health insurance thing is a very good target. I compare it to abortion in an odd way. When abortion rights are threatened by, let's say, the Webster decision, what was that, 1989? Or if they should, God forbid, overturn Roe v. Wade, that fires up one side. If it looks like abortion's getting more permissive, that fires up the other. Health insurance works that same kind of odd way. It seems like once a bill is presented to the American people and we have it, people find all these problems with it. There are a lot of problems with Obamacare. But again, once there, we're in a position of seeing it taken away from us, it entirely shifts. And you're starting to see these polls again in the Washington Post, Catherine Repel today. People are now in favor of single payer insurance again. And again, if somebody tries that when they get into office, they're going to get into a lot of trouble. But I think, again, the momentum is completely shifted on that. And there are issues like that that the Democrats should fire under all cylinders on. Again, trying just to rely on Trump's unpopularity, which Hillary Clinton did in the election, is a big mistake, I think. You have to have a positive program. And it has to be focused on what, again, Jeff was talking about. I heard Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire in August of 2000. What was it, 15? And she was kind of boring, but she was talking about junior colleges, jobs, stuff like that. I said, this is going to be boring, a little boring. But this is the right focus. And if she went farther than that than it's Sanders stuff, she might get in trouble in the general election. But again, they dropped it. So I think, again, jobs, opportunity, middle class, what are people going to do? Not getting into this identity politics thing. Those, I think, were the important guidelines I'd follow if I were running the Democratic Party, which I'm certainly not. The problem for the Democrats, of course, is that once they get too far along on being real about jobs and being real about opportunities, they run into their funders. And that's the knot that they've got to unravel. Because if the Democratic Party is about being as liberal and progressive as Wall Street will allow you, then there's not going to be much of an answer there. Yeah, you see that. I was thinking about that today because Trump did this thing. He's going to review H-1B visas. That's a good idea. My point. And I think those things have just been exploited in order to screw American workers. And actually, H-1B starts under Clinton. What is going to be the response there? Is the party going to say, this is the wrong idea? When Trump, in his first press conference, he had to be kind of president, went after drug companies for their price. Something that's not going to happen now, I'm sure. But he did then. And it was very nice. And Larry Summers then wrote a column criticizing him for sowing uncertainty in the market. So again, I think that I'm, again, I'm just agreeing with what Jeff said. I think that the Democrats have to turn this thing around in terms of what their focus is and who their constituency is and what kind of coalition they want to build in 2018 and 2020. Well, let's move across the pond, if you will. There's obviously also a lot of turmoil in Western Europe. British Prime Minister Theresa May announced today that she's going to call on early election. The first round of the French elections are this coming Sunday. What do you make of what's going on in the UK and France on the populist front, if you will? Well, you know, France, again, this goes back to Jeff's point number three about democracy and how weird politics is getting. You know, if you look at the four leading candidates in the French election right now, Dionne, Mélenchon, Macron, and Le Pen, the two main parties that have been contesting our equivalent of the public and the Democrats, now they're called the Republican and the Socialist Party. Socialist Party, what, 8%, Dionne is probably going to come in fourth. Two of the top three are going to be from parties that were like invented yesterday and Mélenchon and that are mainly identified with their candidates. They wouldn't exist otherwise. So again, the French election is another example of how freaky politics grille in the five star movement in Italy could win. I doubt it because he won't cooperate with the other. He won't build coalitions. So he could get 40% and still not be the, his party still wouldn't be the leadership in their parliament. But something is going on and I don't fully understand it either. And you see it in France. You see it in Italy. That's a weird election in France. It seems to me, I mean, I would be tempted to vote for Macron and I know that's a heresy to say that. But if you look at the Socialists and Mélenchon, there is an acceptance on their part of slow growth. The Socialist Party has this incredible platform where they're for the 32 hour work week and they want to tax robots. Now, if anybody can square that circle for me, they're a genius because the only way you can have a 32 hour work week and still afford it is if you raise productivity in the economy. But you're going to tax robots, which will discourage increases in productivity. So I expected if Macron does when he's going to end up like a lawn, he's going to be stuck. He's just the neoliberal stuff. But he says he's for Nordic socialism or Nordic social democracy. I think if he really were and if there were a party behind him and support, that might be the way for France to go. More flexible work rules, but a stronger safety net underneath people. So because France does have problems. Less than 1% GDP increases over the last 10, 15 years. 10% unemployment, well, it's 8% now. But they do have economic problems. They do need more churning in the economy in that sense. So again, I think it's a peculiar election where I don't see any of the candidates necessarily having a platform that makes a terrible lot of sense. But again, in terms of the left, I see this very bothersome, worrisome acceptance that we're not going to grow. So we have to just redistribute better by, let's say, confiscatory taxes against rich people. From my standpoint, that might be good rhetoric, but it's not the way to go. Yeah, I think a victory for Macron would just be kicking the can down the road. It doesn't solve anything. I think the stakes, however, are suddenly huge. The stakes of the European Union. And while you could argue that Le Pen, if she became, if she gets elected, would not take France out of the EU or Maastricht, but the sudden vulnerability of this institution that we've been living with now and, for my part, admiring for the last five decades is really in jeopardy. And if that happens, I mean, it could very well be back to where we were before World War II. I was having lunch with a Italian senator who was the head of their Farm Affairs Committee at the time of the debate over the euro. I remember saying, well, I said, I don't know. I look at this, and I wonder what's in it for Italy. And he said, well, he said, you may be right about the economics, but we've had two world wars on this continent, and we're not going to have another one. So it's bringing locking Germany and France together has just been so very, very important for Europe. And the stakes are enormous. And to have to depend on the same old politicians who've screwed it up for so many of the French working classes, I don't know. I mean, I don't know what's going to happen. I didn't think Trump would be president. I didn't think Brexit would win. So I said, we don't know what's going to happen. But I do feel like the stakes are very high there. Any comments on the early election in the UK with Theresa May making that call? Could we be in for any surprises there with the? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know whether. I don't know how seriously to take her hard Brexit, you know what I'm referring to, her strategy of pressing forward and whether there's a secret agenda there. And again, I think that that was an instance where there were real legitimate issues for the people who wanted to leave. But in the end, the UK had, I think, more benefits than disadvantages because they weren't stuck with the euro. I mean, the euro was the nightmare for the EU. So again, I'm not sure what the underlying politics is there. You could read it. Just taking off what John just said about her, how committed she is to Brexit is a little bit unclear. You could read it as wanting a much bigger mandate for herself and therefore having, at the end of the day, having more flexibility with the negotiation. But who knows? OK. Well, I think now would be a good time to open it up for questions. We have some folks roving around with microphones. Why don't we go in the, sure, go in the back there. And please ask your question in the form of a question, if you would, and get as many as possible. Mr. Judas, I'm finna know this week congressional quarterly. This is a bit of a historical question. You alluded to the failure of Lacey Fairbankine in the late 19th century, which, of course, led to free silver. In that context, I wonder if you could sketch out what you think the legacy of William Jennings Bryan has been for you, both American populism and a liberal agenda. Oh, you should have Mike Cason or somebody who's a historian. He wrote a mic, wrote a biography of Bryan, and answered that question. I'm going to pay us on it. I'm not the best person to tell you that. Is this on the others? Yeah, there you are. I'm Mark McCarthy with Georgetown University. I want to go back to a couple of the points that were made earlier about the new gig economy and the alternative work arrangements that you mentioned, and then the driverless cars. And I know there's some skepticism in the Economic Policy Institute on the role of technology as a driver of labor market effects over the last several years. But there's some studies that show that jobs accounting for 47% of the US employment are potentially at risk of computerization. You add that together with these new ways of arranging work. There's a lot of pressure for disruption in the labor market. Maybe a much less labor-intensive economy. And so the question is, what do you do about this? How do you focus public policy to address these changes in the labor market? Is it just more worker training? Is it a universal basic income that some people have talked about? What's the best way for those changes to be addressed? Well, I'm going to let Jeff do the work part of it. I want to do another part, which is that I think the kind of changes you're talking about are just inevitable, and they're going to come. And that computerization is going to rule out a lot of jobs that are now done either manually or semi-manually or semi-semi. What, again, I would focus on is economic security and personal security, and whether Americans can feel all right about themselves if they lose a job for six months or a year. And I think that that's going to become more normal. I have a friend, a good friend in Denmark, who, because of various weird circumstances, lost his job as a journalist, couldn't find another job. His wife was a professional. She was an executive. This is a terrible story, but I think it'll make my point. She gets cancer, terminal cancer. His three kids, two were going to go to college. One is still younger. Now think about what would happen in America. He ends up being unemployed for about three years. Ruined, right? These people, Denmark, the kids go to college for free. They're now, I think, two are graduating. One is going to college. Wife gets free health care, all taken care of. And he gets unemployment for three years, and he keeps his house. They thought they were going to, again, it's that level of economic security. People don't realize in America the level of insecurity and anxiety that we feel. I mean, I know you guys haven't been to say, oh, yes, I feel it and stuff. But it's there. It's a constant. And that's something that we have to deal with. I think one of the wonderful things about the Sanders campaign was that he spoke to that. And he spoke to that very clearly. And I think people heard that, Medicare for all, free college, all that stuff. So that would be the dimension of it that I would look at. Yeah, I think the first thing we got to do is get off of this notion that the individual solution, as well as the national solution, is to get everybody more trained and educated. I mean, the BLS does these projections of jobs over the next 10 years. And their last projection was that the fastest growing, largest job categories of them. And I've got this is roughly right. I misstated by a little. I think there was one category out of the top 10 that required a four year college. And that was nurses. And there was something like four of them that didn't even require a high school education. So we've got this notion here that if only you better your skills, this is what this new global oriented economy is there for. It is just BS. It's not true. And people are experiencing this all the time. I mean, lots of stories about engineers. You go to engineering school, and they're constantly saying, oh, America doesn't produce enough engineers. Well, one of the reasons it doesn't produce enough engineers is because kids who would be engineers hear these stories about the upperclassmen or the people who were four years or five years before them getting a job as an engineer. And a year and a half later, the boss comes in with these four people from India and say, I want you to train them on your jobs because they're going to be doing it. So the globalization stuff that Trump is tapped into is, I think, hugely, hugely important. Unionization, I mean, part of this is all about the bargaining position of labor. I mean, if you look at the numbers, the numbers of stagnant wages increase productivity. I mean, for 30, 40 years, we have essentially turned economics upside down. Wages are supposed to be a function of productivity. Well, they're no longer a function of productivity. And the best answer as to why the best explanation is bargaining power of workers. I think things like guaranteed annual income and yeah, I mean, in any sensible society where its leaders were mandated to look into the future and deal with problems that are coming down the pike, we'd be having a discussion about that. I mean, John raised this question, well, how do you keep people or how do people feel about being out of work even if they had some income? Is that welfare or is that something else? There's no discussion of that. So that, I mean, people have been talking about the guaranteed annual income and technology for a long time because we still have a 40-hour work week. For many people, it was a 60-hour work week. But all that hasn't changed. And yet as a society, should we be just taking the increases in productivity and turning them into income that gets redistributed to the top? One would think that it's not too hard to make a political discussion out of that, especially because people are feeling it in their gut. And I think so it's something like that. I have a quick question. I'm a student at Howard University in Jordan Sellers. I look to history around what happened during the Holocaust. I mean, they had political parties, too. My question was, could you compare and contrast like the populist party versus a fascist kind of a party in really where these political campaigns can lead if they're kind of more of a populist, which is built off race, and if they're more of a fascist party, which is built off of religion? Okay, I get it. Yeah, I just wanna finish off what Jeff and I were talking about, and then I'll get to this, which is that, again, the two prongs for me are economic security and advanced manufacturing. You have to create the surplus on which you can have economic security. Again, the problem with the French, the left is all they're talking about is economic security, not growth, so you have to have both. That's the key, fascism. Now, the key difference between the right-wing populists, and again, I'm talking about Western Europe and the United States, and the fascist parties of the 1920s, and let's talk particularly about Germany and Italy. Two differences. First, the parties today are embedded in a democratic history that just did not exist to the same extent in either Italy or Germany. Those were new countries, again, formed in the mid-late 19th century, different kind of history. Parties, the right-wing populist parties have been in and out of government in Europe, Switzerland, for instance. Again, it's not, I don't think they see themselves in the same way as producing cadre and armed forces that will knock out other parties. The 1920s fascist parties were again in the shadow of the Russian Revolution. You have to remember that, too. And their primary adversary in the beginning were Socialists and Communists. That's one difference in context. The other thing is that those parties came out of a history of nationalism in the late 19th century, where it was integral to nationalism was expansion, imperial expansion, and that part of what was central to a nation's pride was its ability to expand and conquer and go beyond itself. Mussolini was gonna recreate the Roman Empire. Hitler, the third right. So what we have now is almost the opposite. Again, I'm not saying this in order to praise what's going on now and say that it's benign, but the populist parties now are almost, you might say, contractionary, not expansionary. The French, the Italians, they wanna get out of the EU, for instance, to bust up this international, this regional organization, which would be a tragedy in my view, but again, they don't wanna take over other countries. Trump doesn't wanna take over Mexico. He wants to build a big wall so that Mexicans can't get into the United States. It's much different than what you were seeing in the 1920s. That doesn't mean it's good or it's something we say, oh, I'm not gonna worry about it, because a fragmented world where you have a breakup of all these international arrangements, and you think, again, think of climate change, is not gonna be a great world, but it's not the same kind of threat of one country suddenly deciding it wants to take over the world. You probably have time for, we have a lot of questions, actually, go ahead. The disaffection with the elite, the populism that you all have both described has been very clear in public polling for a long time, since at least the financial crisis. It was not hard to reverse engineer President Obama's polling in 2012 from the fact they went to Oslo, to make Kansas to give a kind of a populist sounding speech, which was actually nothing like Teddy Roosevelt's speech there 100 years earlier. And I thought that whoever ran as a Democrat in 2016 was gonna run as an economic populist, because at some point, the campaign is not governed by the fundraisers, it's governed by the pollsters, who are gonna look at the polling and go to the candidate and go to everyone in the campaign and say, holy crap, we may not have been populist before, but we are now. And at least in the broad themes of the campaign, they would be economic populist, they would sound like Bernie Sanders sounded. But Clinton never really did. She seemed to get public permission from her Wall Street funders to say what she had to say in the campaign. They said publicly, we know she had, people still mad at Wall Street, she has to say certain things, but we know she'll be stable, we know she'll be sensible, we know she'll be sophisticated. She seemed to have permission to do it, but she never did. Was that because they thought it wouldn't be credible? Was it because just of democratic cluelessness, which I think both of you have described, with which I do not disagree? Why did she never do that, really? And would it have made a difference if she had? Well, look, Hillary Clinton had this problem in the third, the parties that have already held the White House for two terms, and then they have their candidate running for a third, always have. I mean, how is she going to take a strong economic populist position and not put herself in a position of criticizing the incumbent, Obama? That, again, I think that tension existed. But they got sucked into this idea that comes out of, that I feel partly to blame for myself from Rui and my book of demography as destiny. And they started counting the groups. You get blacks and Hispanics and professionals and blah, blah, blah, and you have this awful guy, Trump. So you run against him and you get all these groups on your side and you win. I mean, and I have some knowledge that that is what the strategy was. So I think they, you know, they gave up on it. And I don't think it was because she was compromised by the Goldman Sachs and stuff like that. I think she could have run that kind of campaign, but the circumstances were such that it just didn't, it didn't happen. Questions, other questions? Where's the mic? Sure, go ahead. Actually, two questions. One has to do with the Democratic Party itself. I first got involved in politics tearing down Dixon's science in 1960. And I followed that, been through the whole thing. And in the 1960s, there were a lot of new ideas and new approaches to everything in the war and poverty. You know that? Since then, since at least 1975, I don't see any new ideas from the Democratic Party. And I'm wondering, do you or do you see what they could do? Because a lot of the populism stuff is based on false facts. So, I mean, could they be populist and still be real again? Well, factual. I don't think it's a question of them not having access to ideas. I mean, we just had this brief discussion here about some ideas about how you could deal with this. I think that the party's leadership has been just basically compromised. And it started with Carter. Clinton did the populist number and that is, he campaigned populist and he governed with the plutocrats. And after a while, that succeeded. And that becomes how you succeed. It's also true that there's a whole industry of people who support the Republican Party and Democratic Party, the consultants and the pollsters who make a living being successful in one campaign or another, 50% with two parties, your candidate is gonna win 50% of the time. And so I think you've got a culture of timidity. And as a matter of fact, both Clinton and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton expressed that when Hillary was debating Sanders. It was the way you succeed, the way you get progress is inch by inch by inch. And if that's your mindset, you're not gonna come up with new bold ideas. And so I think it's not that nobody's got any ideas. I think there are plenty of ideas around. It's just that the Democratic Party has developed this culture. And I think I blame it partly on Judas, but mostly on Wall Street. I mean, they don't wanna, for Wall Street, identity politics is fine. They're not losing anything by that. Let's get one more question from another individual. Who's got, let me get, this will be our last question. Ball Booth. John, is there a path to, for the left kind of populism to win? And if so, what is that path? What would it take to, especially in a majority politics country? Or is this just wishful thinking? If you ask most of the Bernie crats, they would say that a Bernie Benign nominee, he could have gotten a lot of the votes that Trump got from downscale voters. If you ask Senator Democrats, they think that's absurd and that he would have been defeated more soundly, much more soundly than Hillary was. So there's no, especially if you got any empirical information as to what the truth of this is, but is there a path? Well, I have a crystal ball, but I left it at home. Look, I don't have good answers to that question. Nobody does, but let me sort of dance around it. First of all, I don't, I think Bernie Sanders would have had a very hard time had he won the nomination. And the reason is the tax and spend question, both in terms of his education plan and Medicare for all as well. If you look at what happened in Colorado, they had a single payer initiative. You know, this was on the ballot, and Bernie went there and supported it, and it lost 80 to 20, got killed. And the reason was taxes. People were scared to death that it was gonna raise taxes. And I think that a lot of that could have been used against him had he been the nominee. Okay, so leave that aside. Now, the thing, I talked about populism as an early warning. I regard Trump as a freak. I don't, I think his election was a, mistake isn't the right word, but it was just a lucky break for him. Things just broke the right way. He had a very poor candidate against him and said, so his election in that sense is premature and he's having exactly the problems you'd expect. It was somebody who had that campaign, got into office and tried to put it into effect. Now, if you had the equivalent of a Democrat, again, who was running against the establishment, who was making demands that nobody in the leadership would support, and this again is the populist framework, and have problems if he got elected, but what he might do is, he might scare the elites in the country, the party leadership into moving. This is what happens in the 30s. In the book, I talk about the early 30s. Roosevelt runs unbalanced budget. One of his first bills that he is to cut the state government workers. Who filibusters it, Huey Long? Again, pushes the, again, the existing establishment to the left. I think that that's really the role, but the actual execution won't be done by a populist party. It'll be done by a party that has moved to the left and has accepted what were populist demands as more normal politics. So that's a kind of semantic answer to you, but that's as good as I can do right now. Okay, so that ends our forum with John Judas and Jeff Foe. I want to thank everyone here in Washington and online for joining us, and look forward to seeing you at our next event. Thanks also to our host, EPI. Anyone who wants to stay, there's.