 Joe Biden is the president elect. He has defeated Donald Trump in terms of the popular vote and the electoral college. And in doing so has gained the largest number of votes of any political candidate in American presidential history. But what does the demise of Trump mean within the longer time frame of the 12 years since the global financial crisis? Does Biden's win herald a return to normal? And what might his presidency mean not only for the US, but for the rest of the world too? With me to discuss all of that is Adam twos author of crashed how a decade of financial crises changed the world. And the Shelby Cullum Davis professor of history at Columbia University, New York. Adam, welcome to Navarra media. Happy to be here. If our viewers or our listeners can hear beeping and horns outside or the bashing of pans, that's because you're in New York and people are celebrating the fact Joe Biden is now confirmed as the as the president elect. They are. Yeah, it's been a party for the last future relief. Yeah, what does it feel like quickly? Because obviously, New York's not exactly representative of the country, but it's it must have been strange the last four years. And does this feel like some kind of finality or not? Yeah, it felt like a death in 2016. I vividly remember the days afterwards. It was a sort of consolation to be in a community of people all grieving. I feel it mainly through my family. I'm obviously not American. My wife, my daughter were really torn up in 2016. It was brutal for them. And the city is solid in Manhattan where we live up the West Side, very mixed, very Jewish neighborhood historically, and overwhelmingly democratic. So we live opposite what used to be the campaign headquarters for the Clinton campaign. And it's been an empty shell ever since four years ago. So the whole place feels a little less cursed now than it has felt. Yeah, I mean, it's you can you'll hear sirens and people blowing their car horns. Somebody somebody's partying a bit too hard, perhaps they had to call the cops. Yeah. The last time we spoke at him was really in the sort of opening months, the COVID pandemic. It's unusual for a sitting president to lose an election to not be reelected, particularly when you look at the kind of economic fundamentals in January, February, they look they look to Trump's advantage. To what do you think the COVID pandemic played a role in the fact that Biden's won and in the manner that he has? I think it I think it has played a role. We lack right now the really accurate and reliable exit polling data that would allow us to break down the numbers and one should very much beware the stuff that's beware of the stuff that's circulating on Twitter, because they did conventional exit polls. And the problem is, of course, that a huge percentage of the vote was by post and that slants very heavily democratic. So the stuff that you've seen out there that is giving like huge percentages of LGBT voters voting for Trump, African American black voters voting for Trump, take that with a pinch of salt because that is the people who actually showed up. In other words, generally speaking actually pro Trump motivated voters. So we don't really we shouldn't be very cautious in doing any too close analysis. There were a lot of hypotheses out there about the fact that for instance, COVID would swing Florida to the Biden camp because the older voters were very off put by Trump's handling. On the whole, I think there's no doubt that it hurt Trump, the economic crisis has hurt Trump that COVID has produced. But it wasn't the winning card that the Democrats expected it to be. After all, if you know if this had been an election on Trump's COVID record, you would have expected them to sweep the board. And that's the bitter reality that we're all of course coming to terms with as delighted as everyone is that we now finally have the confirmation of Biden and Harris's victory. The reality remains that it's tight. And that it has not swept the board either in the Senate so far or in state legislatures, which are very important for future redistricting. So it hasn't had the effect we don't think that you won one would have expected. Your most recent book crashed, which is an outstanding work of history. That's not just a person opinion. It's been everybody I speak to over the last 18 well, particularly a year ago, you read crash, it's a fantastic book, and it's much recommended to our audience. But you look at Trump specifically, I think there's a whole chapter given over to him towards the end. And it's not it's a relatively commonplace thing to do where people are saying, you know, does his election does his triumph in 2016 represent a repudiation of the, of the politics and the political economy of the pre 2008 era. A lot of people, a lot of sort of commentators, the liberal intelligentsia, at least in Britain, I'm not so familiar with America's, but a lot of them over here are saying that this betokens a return to normal. What do you make of that? Well, I would agree, but not in the way I think they mean. In other words, the normality that this is a continuation of is the messed up, fraught, polarized, crisis written antagonistic reality that has indeed marked American politics. I would say that you really need to go back at least to the 1990s to see the origins of this. In other words, in the really the tuperative campaign against the Clinton administration launched from the right. Some would say you really need to think of this historically as originating in the Southern strategy that was run by the Nixon campaign in the late 60s, basically trying to flip the front. So reclaim claim Republican votes in the South on the civil rights issue. And that I think is the normality which Trump and the Biden campaign in this this election really continue to represent, right? What we are struggling over is the terrain created in this last half century of on the one hand, rising inequality of the breakdown of the classic blue collar, white industrial proletariat and its association with organized labor in the Democratic Party against something that goes back to the 70s with the notorious hard hats that were mobilized by Nixon against the countercultural left. And the issue of race. And that is the struggle that's been played out in Georgia. I would say that this is as it were positional warfare on the terrain of that American normality. So indeed, now as it were back in the liberal administered liberal governed version of that reality. And let's let's make no mistake about it. It's a huge relief. Because Trump is uniquely toxic as a politician, and has stirred up in a way that no previous Republican has the underbelly, the undergrowth of conspiratorial right wing politics, the militia and so on, has not even been willing to pay lip service to the conventional norms of anti racism and diversity in the United States. But I would say that we really are speaking about a continuity in various ways of politics in particular. And certainly with regard to economic policy, I mean, what would you say there was certainly a rhetorical shift there was a much more brutal trade policy, has anything fundamental shifted in the American income distribution? No. And do you think that race is unique in the US context? I'll ask for a sort of a distinct answer on that because of course it does. But many people in Britain and Europe sort of fold Trump within the broader populist upsurge after after 2014, really, I think maybe a good place to date it. And they say, you know, there's a continuity between Trump and Brexit and all of these things. But it sounds to me that the sort of post 1964 civil rights context is a really, really, really important one. And it may be lost on, for instance, many, many Brits who are on looking. So can you explain that with a bit more granularity? And if the Democrats do win Georgia, you know, what does that mean again, within a broader historic context? So the crucial thing to say is, of course, all societies have racial politics, right? This is not something that's particular to particular places, especially Western societies with their colonial heritage and their heritage of racial slavery. So this is indeed, in some senses, a common denominator of Britain, France, Italy, indeed, take your pick and the United States. But to ignore the consequences in the United States of slavery followed by the failure of reconstruction and Jim Crow that followed after that, in other words, the apartheid system of entrenched racism, that affects not a one, two, three, four, five percent of the population, but 13% of the population, that's the share of black people in the United States, and of course, far, far larger percentage in the so called black belt of the South, or in the big American cities. You know, you're really, you're not grasping the particularity, the salience, the extreme urgency of the, of the racial problem in the United States, unless you give credit to that and its history. So this is not something, as it were, that there was a colonial history that then came back by way of migrants, Windrush generation, for instance, and then is painfully rediscovered by institutions of the liberal variety, as is the case, say, with British universities or something. This is an omnipresent permanent reality of racial disadvantage, racial discrimination. And of course, in the last two or three decades, massive criminalization of black men in particular. And you see that you can't, it's just visible in every street, every street corner, in every American, major American city, and it's true of the Northeast as much as it is, and even more pronounced form in the Southern States. So when we talk about the racial component in the politics of the GOP, it's really, I don't think at all helpful to think of that as simply the same as the xenophobia of the UKIP party or something. That doesn't mean to trivialize the racism of UKIP, but it's to insist on the significance, historical significance and national significance of this problem for the United States. It's not untrue, I think it's helpful indeed, to just simply recognize the civil war as the abiding problem of modern American politics. And what do you think Trump's legacy within the Republican Party is going to be? Because I think it's fair to say he's not really turned the dial significantly on on domestic economic policy, you know, the rhetoric on trade and overseas, yes, particularly China, particularly Iran. But do you feel like he's permanently changed the landscape of internal Republican politics? Do you think that his successes, you think the candidate, if it's not him, the person that runs with the Republican nomination in 2024, do you think they're going to have to in some way replicate the politics and rhetoric of Donald Trump? Yes, because I don't think Republicans think of this as a failed presidency at all. I think that's the thing to start with, right? For liberals, it's so incomprehensible that the actual outcome is the way it is. And people on the left, because we broadly speaking regard his presidency as a shambles, whereas the GOP really don't. And the narrowness of their loss, which they have not yet conceded, essentially, Trump in particular has not foxes grudgingly admitted that they're now predicting the Biden will win. And the fact that Trump's vote, I mean, you said in your opening, which is true, of course, that Biden and Harris have won more than any previous ticket. But number two on that list is Trump. He won more than Obama. His vote is up by at least 7 million relative to his winning number in 2016. And they've managed to break into the constituencies, particularly Latino men in Texas and Florida. They never thought they would be able to reach. So they don't think of this, I think, as a disaster. And there isn't going to be a candidate, I think, that can run successfully for the Republican nomination in 2024 without doing lip service, too, that what they regard of essentially as the triumph of the Trump presidency, because it undead the Bolsheviks. It was willing to just simply face up to what they regard as a mortal threat to the culture, the identity, the politics of this country. So, and the people, I think, that are front runners that are not, as it were, Trump himself would be people like cotton of Arkansas and Pompeo, both of whom have positioned themselves as dynamic figures on the right wing of the GOP. And they are much more coherent ideological politicians than Trump himself, who, you know, who's perhaps one saving grace. It's his sheer incoherence and cynicism. Yeah, I mean, I've said this, and again, not a unique insane. He strikes me as an incredibly sweet, generous politician who's managed to navigate broader trends, which I think any liberal or progressive should be very wary about. And it does seem to me that the very complacency which we may be seeing now in this kind of discourse for a term to normality is precisely what underpinned his rise in the first place. So you think that there may be a more polished, more sort of politically literate version of Trump come to 2024? Isn't that the most likely outcome? Well, it's difficult to know anything else at this point. That's the way forward that we can see. Those people are already positioning themselves. You know, my fantasy, of course, is that some Romney styling so far, you know, one indulges in fantasies about reform of the GOP. But I think if you have an idea about how the American two-party system is going to function, you in some senses have got to have a hypothesis about this. Because if what we end up in is a rerun of GOP resistance of the Freedom Caucus, Tea Party version that crippled the Obama administration from 2010 onwards, then the prospects for any kind of progressive politics in the United States at this moment are pretty grim. I mean, this could not just become a lame duck administration, but truly a lame duck state, if you like. There will be a bit of the American social fabric and the economy which still continue to be profoundly dynamic. Its business sector may be part of that. But we know we could be looking at a sort of profound gridlock trench warfare in Congress. It does depend a little bit on how the Republicans play it. Sicking on that topic, I mean, obviously a lot of this depends now on these these two run-offs for the senators in Georgia that's going to be in January. Let's work on the presumption that things will broadly stay the same. The Democrats won't exercise de facto control them. Because of course, if it's 50-50, the person who is the kind of the makeshift is the Vice President. In which case that changed the complexion of all of this a lot. But if that doesn't happen, it does feel like Joe Biden might be going into the Oval Office next year as the weakest president of all time, partly because of his age. He's 78, for a British audience, and that's the same age as John Major, who left office 23 years ago. But also because, as you've said, his rival has done phenomenally well, exceeded all expectations, despite the fact that sort of will be on the pale within the normality of American politics. Do you think that could be the case with Biden? Do you think he may be a uniquely weak president? Or is that unfair on somebody who's just, again, won pretty comprehensively by ordinary measures with the U.S. presidential election? I think the question is, is it we're aware that how that support translates into leverage? And right now it's not easy to see how it does, right? So I think you're right that the most plausible hypothesis is that the GOP retains control in the Senate, which gives them a veto position over all major appointments, and also a veto position on all major legislation. It's also true that the Democrats look as though their majority in the House, the lower House of the Congress, has dwindled, which means that Pelosi or whoever succeeds, Pelosi will have an increasingly difficult job in balancing the two wings of the House Democrats. So on the one hand, the left, which your listeners will be familiar with, centered around people like AOC, very dynamic, very brilliant, quite charismatic, won her election in New York, hands down, in fact, the entire squad has come through this looking very good, so their electorate is rewarding them. But that is not what the Democratic majority in the House is built on, which is crucial. It's built on much more marginal people contending essentially purple states, narrowly between red and blue, and those centrists exercise huge leverage over a party managers when the majority is small. And what they will extract is essentially a middle-of-the-road Clintonite, Blairite agenda at very best, you know, focused on potentially things like deficit reduction, tax cuts rather than spending on welfare or on other types of infrastructure. So the balancing out will be very difficult. On this issue of power, you know, what makes, after all, an administration powerful? Another question you could ask is that, who are their enemies? So of course we, and who's, what are the counterweights? And you could ask, and we've identified of course, that one major counterweight is the partisan political opposition of McConnell and the Republicans in the Senate. But if you ask about broader societal interests, the wager, if you like, of the centrist Democrats is that if they position themselves in the right way, they can implement bits of a progressive agenda, which some of which they are, I think, quite wholeheartedly committed to. It's not difficult, after all, agree to agree that America needs a much more comprehensive and effective healthcare system. And I think they're quite serious about climate change now, though it has taken some time for them to get there. But I think the wager is that they may actually also be able to bring powerful social interest groups along with them, basically business, and major elements of the business community. And to that extent, you know, they don't face the kind of opposition that say an FDR did, because their agenda is, in many respects, you know, conforming with the long-rung strategic calculations of key bits of the American business, of the business lobby. And to that extent, you know, they may be able to get things done, not transform, not transformation, not the social democracy in America that the Democratic Party left dreams of, but they may very well be able to find ways around congressional logjams on issues like climate. And where does COVID fit in all this? Because of course, you're talking about people who are in the house, these purple states. But clearly, the context has changed so radically over the last seven, eight months that, you know, a singular focus is on the deficit reduction. For instance, do you not think the fact that COVID has changed that a little bit, there may be a greater emphasis on things like infrastructure, public health, climate, or do you think actually the old, the old terrain, which is, you know, we're so obsessed over by the Clintonites, to a less extent, Barack Obama, do you think that will sort of remain their default politics? Well, I think, I think you're right. I mean, the first thing to say is that the Americans don't have the answer for COVID any more than anyone else does, and no one does have an answer. So, you know, we've got to be clear about the benchmark that we're measuring against. Not even the Germans appear to have really a good idea about how to control this epidemic. That's the first thing to say. I think there probably is a solid majority of bipartisan variety in favor of somehow coordinating from the, from federal government down, state-level action, because this is a giant country, right? So, it can't be done from the center. It has to be done organizing the states, some of which are the size of large European nation states, California, 40 million people, Texas, you know, they're the size of Belgium, Netherlands, large, large chunks. And I think the Biden administration can probably hope for cooperation there. They may get lucky with a vaccine, which would really, which would really help. And it's also fair to say that, say Nancy Pelosi had agreed to the most minimal of Mitch McConnell's stimulus proposals, that would be, as it were, to support people facing unemployment immediately before the election. Say they'd settled for half a trillion dollars, which, you know, the Republicans would have conceded to them. If you add that to what they did in March, the CARES package, it would be by far and away the luggage stimulus package that had ever been done in America in peacetime. So, yes, there is, broadly speaking, an agreement to do things which Republicans would not have dreamt of conceding a year ago. So on the one side, yes, on the other side, and now this is all political. So now, where the Democrat, putatively in the White House, the game for the GOP shifts quite fundamentally. And there are bits of the GOP who are perfectly willing to take American society, the American economy, and the good credit of the American state hostage for the pursuit of various types of political goal. And they did that twice with the Obama administration in 2010 and 2013. They effectively, 2011 and 2013, they effectively threatened to drive America towards default and had to be torqued off the cliff twice. So they shut, you know, they threatened to shut the administration down. So we're talking about very serious, very aggressive players here. This is the age that, you know, that spawned Steve Bannon, who talked to himself almost, you know, he referred to Lenin and talked about smashing the state, the administrative state. So those folks are out there and they're still out there. So it's not clear exactly who it is that the Biden team will have to play with. You're a historian. So obviously you're looking at all of these things in a very sort of long term context. In the background to all of this is, of course, the relative decline of the American economy and the American state. If not the American military, you've got the rise of China. That kind of that reality, you know, intensified really with the COVID pandemic this year. Is that infusing Republicans or do you think that they're still very much, you know, minimal state, Koch brothers, libertarian sort of obsessed sort of ideologues. But I mean, as we've seen repeatedly, COVID does seem to have changed that. It does seem to have repudiated that kind of that vision of politics and of liberty. I'm not sure that it's COVID that has done that in the U.S., but certainly for folks of that ill, correct? Because after all, we were going to fight pitch battles over mask wearing and issues like that and shut down. I mean, people were took to arms. But what has is China. So I mean, remember back to the summer where you had Mike Popeu, a bar as Attorney General threatening large American corporations that they will be listed as agents of foreign influence if they continue to lobby against American protectionism towards China. So the mood, the music shifted dramatically under the sign of national security. That's what did it. So it isn't it isn't a pandemic. It isn't public health. It isn't worrying about old people dying in care homes that's going to do this. But what is this great power competition with China and the manifest perception of course, they're not going to concede decline, let alone it's inevitability, but they recognize China as they call it as a peer competitor. So this is no longer asymmetric counterinsurgency type stuff or the war on terror. This is classic or in some cases they see it even in cold war terms as a renewal of or continuation of the clash with global communism. And I think we shouldn't underestimate the way in which the socialism label has surged back to the foreground over Republican thinking and demonology over the course of this. Yeah, I mean, and so we have seen, I mean, we've seen it from the American left, the DSA, Democratic Socialists of America have acquired a momentum like we've never seen before. There is on both sides of the American political spectrum without drawing any equivalence, let alone a moral equivalence, a radicalization which certain elements in the Republican Party are happy to seize on as a ideological as it were driver. And that does imply shifts in the relationship of the state to business. So Barr basically was, you know, telling American business wake up to smell the coffee. The reason why we still speak English here is, or rather in his phrase, I think we still speak American is that your predecessor's worked with the FDR administration to crush to crush Nazi Germany and we expect you to do the same. And some of you have forgotten that. So very heavy duty historical memory lessons learned from the past were mobilized with and they were demanding as it were that the American capitalism close ranks around the hard power national security strategy directed against China. So what extent do you think Democrats might repeat those lines because, of course, you know, there have been Democrat politicians over the last 20, 30 years who've been incredibly hawkish? And do you think it's possible that you may see Democratic senators or people in the house actually saying, yes, China is this great threat. We need to have national protectionism. We need to exclude Chinese interests from the domestic American economy and so on. But we already do. I mean, this is one of the few things on which there is impact genuine bipartisan agreement in Washington. And it was seen as a weakness of Biden as a candidate that he has a track record of in fact being actually having had quite close personal relations with Xi because at the time that they were both number two, Biden was in fact in charge, I think, of managing one of Xi's visits to the United States. So that to which the Biden campaign countered by as it were competing with Trump for an anti Chinese position. Chuck Schumer, people like that in the Senate, Senate Minority Leader is a China hawk. And after all, you can see the way in which the Democrats might seize on a whole variety of different issues to motivate that of human rights. After all, there's a profound concern in dealing with the Xi Jinping regime. Xinjiang, Hong Kong are burning issues. And it depends, of course, a lot of this isn't as it were just for the Americans to decide. It depends on how aggressive Beijing chooses to be, for instance, over Taiwan. It'll be very interesting to see whether the Biden administration chooses to back away, for instance, from the really extraordinary overt aggression against an entity like Huawei. I mean, this was a targeted effort by the United States government, selectively moving really like responding rapidly so as to make the business model of China's tech champion non viable. And every time Huawei moved, they would move again, shut off another source of chips or chip manufacturing equipment. I mean, a really military style operation against military style sanctions operation against Huawei, whether or not the Biden administration will do that kind of thing. I think this is going to be very interesting to see whether they continue that, but the broad posture was not invented by the Trump people. It goes back to the Clinton when Clinton was Secretary of State in the Trump, in the Obama White House, in the White Obama administration, it was really initiated there and it was owned by Obama as well. Between 2011 and 2013, that front really hardened and the Trump people took that further, added a variety of different layers. Anti-immigration, stash of security, trade policy all bundled together. We'll see whether some of that unbundles. So you think that the sort of move against the globalization, which was the kind of the default opening up a markets and etc. before 2008, you think there's an element of bipartisan consensus in that because when I think of the quick things that may change under a Biden presidency, I think Iran, I think China, to a lesser extent, Latin America. What do you think Biden in the White House does for U.S. foreign policy? Well, it is very early to say, but they look like a continuity team with the late Obama administration. I think they are not anti-globalization, but I think they may be arguing that basically what we need to do is save our version of globalization from China. So I would imagine they would spin it that way. I expect them to be much more interested in collaboration. So working with Japan, South Korea, Australia, the EU, I think their policy towards Central America is really rather important and they have announced that they want to ramp up an age package. And that's I think desperately needed because it's something with which a region with which North America is profoundly and deeply entangled. It's now not just the U.S. problem, it's also a Mexican problem too, because the desperate migrants from Central America are moving through Mexico, helping to further destabilize the border region between the U.S. and Mexico. So I think, but of course you're dealing with 100 years if not more of conflicted, perverse interactions between the United States and Central America. So the idea that there's some sort of easy win here or any easy path forward is far from obvious. But in fact that they are going to pay sustained attention to the structural development problems of that region is a huge step forward and urgently necessary because if the COVID crisis has been a North American crisis in some extent it's even it has been an even greater challenge to Latin America. And the economic damage there will be grievous and the structural problems of that region are huge. So I would expect the Biden administration to engage whether or not they'll find it easy to find partners and so on is a different question. The final question Adam and thanks again for joining us today. To what extent do you think a Biden presidency over the next four years if there is inertia in the Senate? To what extent do you think it's possible to raise the living standards of ordinary Americans? Do you think that's something that the Democratic Party can definitively do or do you think they'll find that challenging? Well it's a very low bar. I mean the Trump administration raised the living standards of the vast majority of Americans if you were not in one of the groups that they victimized and of course they victimized many and many people of color migrants of course experienced the constant terror of fear of deportation ice and so on. But if you look at the economic data what the Trump administration shows us and it's a lesson that any liberal administration in the US should learn is if you do the basic Keynesian thing if you keep the taps on if you raise government spending and do not raise taxes if you run gigantic deficits even when the economy is approaching full employment you'll get more employment you'll get more rapid growth and the people who benefit most from that are the people at the bottom end of the income distribution and above all minorities and specifically black men. Trump you know makes this absurd claim that he's the American president who's done most for black people in America since Lincoln and you know apart from the delirious insanity of that the kernel of truth there is that unemployment abounds black American men fell to a record low at the beginning of this year and so you can do that these are not difficult things to do and there are a variety of different interventions that the Democrats can make within the welfare apparatus of the United States in terms of funneling whatever resources you do have to the places of greatest need which are the big American cities and the hardest hit states all of this should be within the realm of the political imagination that doesn't mean even under a democratic administration that it will necessarily happen right this is the sobering lesson of the last two big democratic administrations is that neither of them not the Clinton administration which is of course notorious now for its brutal interventions in the American welfare apparatus and its expansion of the criminal justice regime targeted at black men and disappointingly the Obama administration was far less effective if you like in dealing with the salient problems of inequality that you would expect would have expected them to focus on with a notable exception of the Affordable Care Act which is a messy story of compromise but nevertheless did deliver for the least well-off Americans so of course a Biden-Harris administration can make a substantial difference to tens of millions of people in this country but I think what has to say is a measure of just how great the need is and how obvious some of the answers are Adam thanks very much it's a great way to end it I know you've got to join somewhere else shortly and I hope you celebrate later on today in New York have a good time cheers good to speak to you you too bye