17: Democrats Debate While Authoritarianism Rises

Hi, I’m Jesse Hirsh and I’m here with my friend Alan Gregg for another kick ass episode of Red Tory here at the end of the end of history. And I like that phrase because of course, Francis Fukuyama tried to argue that the end of history was when the Berlin Wall fell.

And I kind of feel that the end of the end of history is where we find ourselves because, oh boy, relevant again. And it does seem that we’re in a world of competing ideologies, which is partly what I want to get into today.

But Alan, what have you been looking at? What’s been catching your eye?

What’s interesting? You talk about Fukuyama because, I mean, the end of history was because there’s no more disagreement.

Everyone was going to be for free trade, everyone was going to be for democracy, everyone was going to be for capitalism. And that’s the way the world is just going to go. You know, someone once said that if you make a prediction, don’t put a date on it.

I’m sure that’s what he’s hoping. Now, listen, I’m watching everything. I mean, like everyone else, my head is spinning.

But I’ve been particularly intrigued over the last kind of 48 hours on how the Democrats, we saw it a little bit in the, in the speech to the nation where they were clearly at odds in terms of what tactics they should be using to get, gain attention, gain traction. And now there seems to be just going to a whole other level of, of divergence.

And so you’ve got Gavin Newsom all of a sudden bringing, he’s got a new podcast, he’s bringing on, you know, the Magna Bros, talking to them, being very civil to them, walking back transgender sports, you know, got Chuck Schumer now bowing into the Republicans on the budget bill, infuriating the more radical elements of the party.

And then on the other side, you’ve got, you know, you’ve got that Bernie and AOC actually going into Republican areas, Republican areas where the Republicans don’t want to have town halls because they’ve been just getting wrapped on the head in an attempt to engage those angry voters and mobilize them against their opponents. So it’s very interesting. They’re clearly trying. There’s no strategy that has been adopted or is cohesive right now, let alone effective.

But there’s lots going on.

And to your point, I think we are going to see an open revolt within the Democratic Party because I think this divergence, and that is exactly the word, is going in multiple directions. Like if it was just a two way split. You might be able to negotiate and find compromise. And I on the one hand, kind of appreciate their timing.

Like, if they are going to have a big battle for the future of the party, now’s the time to do it. So they have enough time to come back together for the midterms and try to offer some semblance of unity.

But I’m reading a lot of animosity between the different elements of the party. I mean, AOC is furious about Chuck Schumer supporting the cr.

Bernie is being diplomatic, but he is putting out a lot of content that is, I would argue, totally independent and independent in the sense that he’s doing his own thing, but still under the guise of the Democratic Party.

He is very much trying to create his own kind of populist element and succeeding because the footage of these town halls he’s having are fantastic theater. Like the way he’s throwing to the audience to answer questions.

And they’re loving to be part of the show, let alone my crush, Jasmine Crockett, who she’s out now in the cable news circuit. She’s really firing up and being absolutely incendiary, inflammatory like she’s almost.

And I hate to make this comparison because it’s disrespectful to do so, but she is kind of playing the Marjorie Taylor Greene of the far left in the sense that she’s pushing all the buttons, saying all the crazy things with full confidence that her base in Dallas is just eating it up. I’m glad we’re in a brainstorm, period. But I wonder if they’re going to be able to bring it back together after this divergence continues to fray.

Well, you’ve talked before about the politics of attention and how just getting attention seems to be the goal unto itself as opposed to a means.

And, you know, if that’s the case, what you’re going to see is just more and more radical stuff on, on, on all sides and more and more incendiary things and more and more stuff that people probably even don’t believe in but think that it’s sufficiently provocative that they’re going to get on the news.

Well, and, and to my concern, and this goes back to what we were saying next last episode about how the frames have become the octagon or the wrestling ring that holds people in a specific argument.

And I do want to talk about Gavin Newsom in a bit, but what I’ve been hearing amongst a lot of moderate Democrats, which I think is a huge vulnerability within the party, is A lot of them are now either cautiously or even more openly endorsing Doge. Right. They’re starting to. And I think part of it, to your point of it doesn’t matter what they believe. They’re in moderate swing states.

They feel a need to get on board with the efficiency and waste and abuse. But I think it’s dangerous because it doesn’t allow them to give any room later.

And it just sows further division within the party because the AOCs as well as the legal scholars within the Democratic Party are fighting Doge hand and nail. They are just going full blitz.

So I worry if again, the right side of the party, the moderates of the party, are kind of torn between what they see in the polls in terms of what the sentiment is and to your point, the need to be radical to get attention amongst some of the big names or the big smaller names like AOC and Jasmine Crockett.

What’s interesting you say that because another thing I just ran across today is an organization called the Third Wave, as you know, advocacy think tank for the left. And they just started something called the Signal Project. And part of my interest is heavenly, driven by public opinion.

And their starting assumption is, you know, there’s signals and then there’s noise, you know, and don’t get distracted by the noise just because you might hate Policy abcd. If Policy ABCD are actually popular, you’re way better off look at going after edf.

Yes, and what they’re saying right now is that, you know, get that framing right and the framing in fact that they’re advocating for is that what, what the Trump’s policies are doing is that they’re risking American safety and security and, and to go at things like Doge, go at things like tariffs and talk about the implications that that has for the average person’s securities. So basically, except a lot of the whether you might find this odious but accept a lot of the premises, you know, who’s a genius?

That was Bill Clinton.

You know, he, he always, he always agreed with the ends of Republicans and just disagreed with the means and tried to find a different way of achieving the same kinds of things. So it’s, you know, wildly opportunist.

But again, I think it’s just one more piece of evidence of the Democrats, you know, flailing around trying to find something that will make them relevant again, absent any kind of leadership. I don’t know how possible that is.

Well, and especially we have a different frame of reference in terms of a multi party system versus they are fundamentally stuck in a two party system.

And that’s where I think the Democrats are really in a pickle, because I think this gap between the right of the party and the left of the party can only grow to. To your point, based on the analysis of the impacts of these policies. Right.

Like, even if all sides said yes, government spending needs to be reined in, the immigration side of these debates is going to further galvanize the far left the same way that the economy side of this debate is going to further focus the attention of the right and the kind of centrists. And that’s where I want to pivot to Gavin Newsom, because I listened in full to his episode with Steve Bannon, and I listened to it.

I already knew that he was doing a podcast and I sort of had it like, okay, I’ll get to it.

But I kept seeing all this analysis from really smart people I respect saying Gavin Newsom’s career was over, that this episode was such a face plant and Newsom doesn’t even realize I was like, okay, I have to listen to this. And oh my God, Steve Bannon kicked his ass six ways sideways. And Newsom didn’t even see it coming. And I don’t even think knew it happened.

But Bannon, who I will tip my hat to any day of the week, is brilliant, an amazing rhetorician. And his arguments were so fast.

And this is the point I’m coming to, the velocity not just of his speaking style, but the way in which he was able to make his arguments and pivoted. Gavin had no chance, no chance in any setting.

And anyone who’d listen to that, left, right or center, unless they had an irrational love for Gavin Newsom, would go, steve Bannon’s the winner, hands down, in part. And this is where you might want to listen to it. Although I’m not promoting him in any way. He must have said working class two dozen times.

Bannon and his entire argument was basically the conversations we’ve been having. Different ideological outcome that he desires. Of course, he just pummeled Gavin Newsom.

And at the end, Gavin Newsom not only sounded like he agreed with everything Steve Bannon was saying, but that he would vote for Steve Bannon.

And he wished that it was, to your point about Clinton, except whereas Clinton would come out on top as the guy who sort of managed it, Newsom came out as a fanboy and it was remarkable.

I did. I didn’t listen to it. And there’s. Obviously that wasn’t Newsom’s intention to be pummeled by Steve Bannon.

But you’re also starting to see a lot of Democrats going on the Magna podcast world trying to talk to that audience on the assumption that they don’t get that audience, or at least portions of that audience. Blue collar workers, working class people. Then, then they’re, that, then they’re stuck.

Yeah. So, and, and, and again, they’re getting their ass kicked over and over.

I, I agree with the desire, like, yes, you got to go to the people where the people are. Yes, you got to go into hostile territory.

But to go back to our George Lakoff principles, you got to have your value secured and you got to come with frames that allow you to get out of their frames.

Because what Bannon did that I thought was so brilliant is he combines the rigor of an intellectual with the improvisation of Donald Trump, in the sense that half of what he said was really smart and half of what he said was blatant lies. And Newsom kept trying to catch him, but Bannon was so fast. Right. This is my point about velocity.

The reason the Democrats are getting their asses kicked and will continue to get their asses kicked is the velocity of their opponents. Is it just they outpace them rhetorically, argumentatively, and most importantly, ideologically.

Because Bannon’s ideology, as much as I disagree with it, was way tighter and more relevant than whatever Newsom was trying to offer as an ideology. And he was struggling.

And the insight that I came out of it later accidentally, was we are in the situation we’re in because we have policy that’s made by experts, for experts versus Bannon was talking about policy that was made by regular people for regular people.

And that doesn’t mean that the policy would work, because some of his policy ideas, to me, like the reshoring manufacturing stuff, sure doesn’t seem realistic, but it sure sounds good. And that was huge.

But let me again go back to where the moderate Democrats who are more pole driven, would try to get these guys going, please. You’re suggesting immigration, for example. There’s just no, no opening there.

They would say, you know what, we have to do more to get immigrant criminals incarcerated and out of this country. Don’t talk to me about hard working immigrants who are here legally, you know, who are working at a job whose children were born here.

They make a massive contribution. But those criminals, we have to start getting at them right away.

That would be the way you would parse that kind of argument, to try to make your opponents actually look extreme while you, in fact, are starting on A premise that is widely accepted that immigrant criminals should not be in America, which is held by 95% of Americans. And as they marginalize your opponent by actually ceding some ground that is part of their terrain.

And here’s why that’s not working. In the meeting before we recorded this podcast, I was again sharing my shock at this Bannon.

And I said, you know, Steve Bannon reminded me of Vladimir Lenin. And he reminded me of Vladimir Lenin because he was a brilliant orator and incredibly radical. Bannon is an extremist and he welcomes it.

So to your point, and it goes back to the anti establishment ethos, he milks that so effectively and he wraps it in the working class American athletes like, I’m just a mick, I’m just an Irish guy who recognized this is that kind of left wing, working class hero in populist nationalist policies and they embrace the extremist. So I agree with the logic of that approach.

But I think the reason it’s going to fail is that if the Democrats are still seen as the establishment, no matter how credible, no matter how reliable, no matter how trustworthy, it’s time for a change. This is the rebels moment. And these guys are the rebels. And they are articulate rebels when you get to them.

Because I do later want to talk about Curtis Yarvin, and I’m shocked at how demented and twisted these guys are, but how they’ve constructed a story of elites and the wealthy that distracts from the real thing that’s happening with the wealthy, but provides a narrative that I think insulates itself from what you’re describing, because they are taking the moral position of the extremist, of the rebel, that we require extremism now to return us to our, you know, Christian roots, to return the traditional family, to fight back against woke, to fight back against postmodernism.

But they’re never going to get those. They’re never going to get those voters. They’re going to get voters who are, you know, not extreme in, in their outlook.

They’re going to get voters who are incredibly frustrated, who believes that no one represents them and no one speaks for them. And that continues to be the plurality of the population.

You talk about a two party system, more independents registered than there are Republicans or Democrats, you know, and swinging those middle of the road folks again is still the key to electoral politics in America, no matter how polarized it is.

Although, and again, I’m agreeing with you. And this is where, as an aside, I don’t think you’re boyish Or Pollyannish.

I think you’re a historian and you keep looking at this within the realm of history, to which I am very partial. And I keep coming at this at my most paranoid, that this is actually ahistorical, that we are in a moment that rhymes like history.

But there are variables here that we can’t currently account for.

And the one I want to throw back at you, which I’d love to hear your thoughts, and I want you to frame it in terms of what the Democrats could do as a strategy is nonvoters. Right. People who.

Because on the call I was on just now, the general sentiment was we’re going to ignore everything for two to four years and when it gets interesting again, we’ll plug in again. But to what extent could voter alienation, voter apathy be a problem?

And what could the Democrats do to reverse that, to mobilize to do what Obama did and actually get people motivated to show up at the ballot box?

But by and large, I mean, when we do a poll, and for a start, I’m an amateur historian, what I am is a professional researcher. And so I look at the data and the data is current as it is past. So without being overly defensive there.

But when we ask a question, you know, if an election was held tomorrow, whose party’s candidate would you vote for? The people who say, I don’t know. You remove them and proportion them proportional to the people who have decided.

Because those people who say, I don’t know, they don’t know what day it is. If you would ask them the same question, they’re hardly on this planet. And chronic non voters are exactly the same way.

I mean, we’ve got a lot of Canadians listening to the show. I mean, I just looked at some data that Polara came out right.

Now, after all we’ve gone through that you have 36% of Canadians say they have never heard of Mark Carney or they’ve heard his name but know nothing about him. That is 1/3, you walk down the street, 1 out of every 3 people know nothing about Mark Carney whatsoever.

And what I find particularly funny about that is his name is actually on some of our money.

Like his name’s in their pocket signatures. Yes.

Yeah.

Anyway. No, no. And.

And you know, one of the reasons I used to always do focus groups when I was doing campaigns is I wanted to have the campaign team behind the glass to have that feedback loop to the real world because they were so consumed with their platform and their advertising and whatever they had done, they assumed that everyone else shared the same kind of, you know, single minded focus on what they were doing day in and day out and were trying to remind them that, you know, no, they’re voting for David Peterson because of the way he ties his tie. He’s got nothing to do with anything else.

And while Americans have got to be more engaged right now probably than they ever have before, and I agree, we are facing all kinds of things the likes of which we have never seen before, for which there is, you know, no yardstick, no measure.

I mean, when we had Tobias on the other day talking about the Supreme Court and you know, what could happen in the event of executive power and the judicial power being in conflict and just putting your hands up and saying, I don’t know, we’ll just have to wait and see, you know, that all said that, you know, there’s still a lot of normalcy going on in this world.

Although I got to reject the word normalcy, I prefer the word typical, like typical versus atypical, because I think the other side to this is normalcy is also kind of behind us. That’s not to say that there isn’t a new equilibrium. There isn’t something that in hindsight we would say new.

But this is where the, for example, the influence and role of social media is still a huge variable because that’s where the, whether scholarly research or research industries, they’re just not there. The methodologies, the sentiment analysis, the measurement, it’s all contentious.

You in the past have also noted that polling can be contentious, but I think there’s been a lot of corrections in the industry that have brought back a certain level of credibility. But the other here is, for lack of a better phrase, the extent to which we have slipped into authoritarianism.

If we were to look at that as a kind of gradient, like a score out of 100 where 0 is no authoritarianism, perfect utopia, 100 is a total authoritarian society. That would be an interesting metric to look at, especially when you argue.

And to go back to your original point and prescription, I worry that the Democrats don’t have the capacity to really understand what’s going on outside of their own circles. And that I partly see in terms of just the debate within the party.

Because if I was someone who had influence, if I was someone who at the DNC was like, how do we prevent ourselves from splitting or fraying? How do we bring it together? I’d be looking at facilitating these conversations.

I’d be looking at getting AOC and the moderates and all the different parties in the same room so they could talk about their differences versus what I’m witnessing is the opposite that are all.

Running off and various directions, they’re all.

Retreating into their own organizations, their own think tanks. And that’s where I feel, quite frankly, they’re not prepared for the Steve Bannon of the world. Because what is happening on the right is everyone is.

They are all exchanging, they are all having these conversations. They are the crypto people, the tech bros. And because Newsom kept trying to pigeon Steve Bannon. But don’t you hate Musk?

But don’t you hate the oligarchs? Aren’t you worried about Big Tech? And Bannon was brilliant in that.

He sort of said, yeah, I really do hate them, but then kept, oh, no, but we’re with them and they’re on our side.

He spoke of a coalition and he spoke in ways that the Democrats should be speaking of, which is to find that commonality amongst the disparate elements of the party and to bring those interests where they have common ground and to focus on that common ground and not the things that divide them.

That’s where I am really worried that we are seeing a hardcore push for authoritarian control and the elected officials who should be stopping it are fighting amongst themselves rather than rising up.

I mean, you wrote, raised almost a month ago, Robert Michaels and the work that he did on political part form coalitions so that people could have an identity or a belonging that went beyond their tribe into a much more common ground.

I mean, to your point on authoritarianism, the other thing that’s very interesting, what’s going on right now is the extent to which the Magna forces and Trump in particular, are raising funds and developing structures outside of the traditional Republican National Committee that are way stronger than, you know, and more well funded and.

And more authoritative than what you’re getting out of your traditional party structure and setting that up completely independent of any control other than the individual’s control.

Absolutely. And that I think conveniently kind of allows me to get into Curtis Yarvin and his latest analysis Which I found fascinating.

And it was based on kind of two concepts. One, speed, like the velocity piece, is really central to a lot of these guys, psychology, especially the Silicon Valley types, right?

It’s the move fast and break things. Everyone’s trying to keep up with you. You get to set the agenda nonstop. But his second piece was, to the point of this coalition.

He came up with two names to describe the kind of partnership between Silicon Valley and the MAGA folks. He called the Silicon Valley Barbarians, and he called the MAGA Republicans Mandarins.

And he described this because he felt that together they did not have the sufficient ingredients to pull off Yarvin’s vision for a new American empire. And his primary frame was, the Mandarins are great at ruling, but they’re terrible at change.

And the Barbarians are great at change, but they don’t care about ruling. They have no interest in kind of good government and keeping things established.

Stop. Because I think you might have flipped around. The Mandarins are the Silicon Valley guys, right?

No, no, no, no. This is where he gets really interesting and he’s flipping stuff.

The Barbarians are good at leading things, but not good at change.

The Mandarins are good at. Sorry. The Barbarians are good at change, but not governing. He didn’t say leadership, he said governing.

And the Mandarins, who he described as lifelong Republicans who’ve converted to MAGA and are the D.C. powerhouse for the RNC, they’re great at governing, but once they’re in power, they don’t want to change stuff.

It was your point about the guy who’s like, where’s all the cutting? And they’re like, here. Here’s the bridge in your home riding. He’s like, okay, I guess we can’t cut, right?

So that’s how he described the Mandarins, that they’re good at running the show, but they’re not going to do the cuts necessary versus the barbarians. They’ll do the cuts necessary. That’s the Doge guys. But they got no experience in Washington. They don’t know how to govern.

And his argument was, you need a third piece.

You need the piece that actually brings this together, that sees the value of the change, of hacking everything and that understands political science, knows how to govern. And one could surmise that this is Yarvin inserting himself right into his role in power.

But his central argument is they have already lost because they only had a small window to proceed before the administrative state would just bog them down in legal challenges, would bog them down in inertia, would bog them down in resistance. And his general argument is that they will do as much as they can in this administration. They will lose.

They will lose in the midterm, they will lose in four years, it’ll swing to the Democrats, and then it’ll just be stasis, the same old bullshit. And then they will come with the rage of fury to actually implement this ideological plan that they envision. So I’m bastardizing it.

He had much more flowery and demented language than I could offer. But it speaks to their vision that this really is about burning it all down and building something new.

And he feels that the barbarians understand that implicitly. But the mandarins just can’t follow through because they love political power.

And that political power will mean that they’re just happy to be in Washington. And so that’s to go to where you started.

That’s why they’re raising all this political money outside of the Republicans, because the barbarians fundamentally don’t trust the mandarins, and the mandarins don’t fundamentally trust the barbarians.

There’s another group that’s sitting around that cabinet table and I don’t know where they would fit within that dichotomy, but they are the Ludniks. These are guys who are very well established, who have really quite credible financial bonafides. They also seem very confident.

And this has also been interesting in the, in the last week. They don’t seem to be hysterical about the markets, what they’re doing.

They don’t seem to be hysterical about the response from the Business roundtable. They’re saying there is a larger plan here. It’s going to take time, it’s going to be coming in place.

But they actually seem quite confident now whether they’re just kissing Donald Trump’s ass and why, if you had billions of dollars, you need to. I don’t know. But it again is kind of curious for me to see these, these individuals as calm as they are right now.

Because most of us don’t feel calm, right?

No. And that’s probably because we’re on the outs and they’re on the ins.

And again, based on the Bannon interview, I would say there’s two reasons for this. This, all of these people.

And I would love to hear you unpack this at some point because we’ve mentioned it in the past, all of these people fundamentally believe they are reshoring manufacturing.

They really wholeheartedly believe that they are reversing the neocon, neoliberal globalization agenda and that they are returning America to not only a kind of self economic Self reliance, but advanced manufacturing, like not old school manufacturing, advanced reshoring manufacturing, with the subtext being the China stuff, that these are all people who feel that China is a threat to American power and American prosperity, hence why the reshoring manufacturing must be done at all costs.

And Bannon is really interesting when he talks about how austerity is part of it and to hear Gavin Newsom kind of agree with him that yes, that has to happen. And this is where I’ve heard moderate Democrats also say the same thing, that the carrot of reshoring manufacturing really appeals to these people.

But the other piece I’d throw in with the Lutnik types, and this is my own biased projection, is that they believe a lot of these folks like Elon Musk and Trump are incompetent and that they are going to flame out and that Lutnick and his boys will be the ones left in power. Right, because they’re the adults in the.

Room, the Wall street guys.

Well, you started with Francis Fukuyama and I think that, you know that I don’t, I don’t think there’s any question for the first part of your analysis that, that you are right.

I think there is a widespread consensus around that cabinet table that a big, big part of America’s economic vulnerability today has at its genesis free trade, global free trade and neo neoliberalism.

And that that allowed basically the hollowing out of the traditional manufacturing sector in the United States, which is why they continue to buy more things than they actually make, which is why they have trade, trade deficits. So I think there is a widespread consensus here, and I raise Fukuyama because he said exactly the opposite.

We weren’t even going to have a debate around this, let alone completely and utterly reject it, you know, 25 years after I wrote the End of History.

And so whether these people who actually know something about business believe that they can start AI data centers and have them up and running and dominating the world, given how far behind they are starting, that given the costs that they have to incur, you know, in these endeavors compared to, to China, you have to say that they’re wishful thinkers rather than being someone who’s particularly realistic about the, the end solution.

But I, I do believe, and I think it’s a very important part of understanding what’s going on here is that initial analysis is, is absolutely correct and is part of the thinking that is driving a lot of this other stuff that doesn’t seem to make any sense at all.

And, and that’s where the ideal, the ideological part of this fascinates me. Because if they were serious about this policy, they wouldn’t be doing these tax cuts.

They’d be taking all the money that they saved from slashing and burning the administrative state and they’d be putting it into the economic development necessary to actually recreate the manufacturing sector in the United States.

Because what they’re doing right now with TSMC and the semiconductor forge while intel is battling for its life, that is literally trillions of dollars without a guarantee that it’s going to work.

Oh, for sure.

Like these are huge gambles.

I just think the tax cuts they think is non negotiable. Yeah, it’s non negotiable because it was there. It’s an extension of something that’s already been done.

The notion that somehow you’re going back to a tax regime that was pre Trump. So I think they’re stuck with that. I think, again, I think you’re probably right.

In, you know, in a lucid world, behind closed doors, if you said, you know, should we be doing this?

Most would say, well, no, there’s probably better uses of that kind of government funding right now in terms of building those resources we need to fringe shore new industries within our boundaries.

And I think you’re absolutely right. And the other side to this, to kind of go back to our conversation with our good buddy Tobias T. Gibson, they’re attacking education, right?

They’re attacking. And this is where Bannon again, Bannon and Newsom. It was Bannon who sort of said, there’s a reason why there’s a high tech cluster around Boston.

It’s called mit. There’s a reason why there’s a high tech cluster in Silicon Valley. It’s called Stanford.

And the extent to which not just education, but post secondary education is being absolutely decimated. I don’t just mean the humanities, I mean even stem, all of it. You cannot have this manufacturing base without the knowledge and expertise to run it.

Like China grew itself up to become an industrialized country because they invested in engineers. Like they have so many engineers.

And it’s not just manufacturing. You go back to look at all the work that Michael Porter and Richard Florida did on Livable Cities.

I mean, after they did all the data analysis, it wasn’t that complicated. You know, you put a really great university, a state capital and technology together and you get Austin, Texas, you know, in the middle of Shitville.

And so you start eroding one of those three, three, three pillars, the academic side, and you’re in Trouble very, very quickly. You will get a hollowing out of those cities. You get a hollowing out of those cities, then you have hollowing out of manufacturing.

It follows boom, boom.

And that’s where, you know, if, if I was a Democrat to go back to our point about trying to engage them but trying to change the frame, I would take seriously this mission of reshoring manufacturing. Right. I would be like, yes, we need to reshore manufacturing. We need to find a way to give good unionized blue collar jobs to Americans.

What are your details, guys? How are you going to pull that off? Because it’s all make believe.

It’s interesting you say that because you’re saying that a lot of the reshoring that the Trump folks, at least the people who’ve got his ear, are talking about are new technologies. They aren’t old technologies. New technologies don’t answer the blue collar worker who feels they’re being left behind and no one speaks for them.

You know, so what are those sectors?

What are those reshores that actually engage and give those voters some kind of hope that if you don’t have a PhD in computer science that you’ve still got a future in America.

Yeah. Or, or conversely that the jobs that will exist will be minimum wage jobs to like do the things the robots can’t, which is the Amazon warehouses.

So the jobs are so low skill and low tech that you’re not getting to your point. A high paying blue collar job that reinvigorates a community.

And so this is where I cannot help but see the specter of authoritarianism through all of this. That there is a clear political economic agenda that is logical, but the details and logistics around implementing that agenda are not logical.

And this is where I want to transition to Canada for a bit. Because last episode we were wondering about our good buddy Doug and what he heard on the phone and what was going to happen from the meetings.

And we’ve heard squat. Right. Doug was the only person to go on the record.

Everyone else, the federal officials, Canadian officials who participated in those meetings said nothing. And Doug was the only person went on the record who said it was a good conversation, everything is defusing, we’re feeling good about it.

But no specifics.

No.

And that’s good in the sense of diplomacy. Right. It’s better than this live conference Zelensky bullshit.

But again, I don’t see this American vision happening without annexing Canada, without having access to Canadian natural resources, Canadian talent even. And that’s where to shift this back. Carney is now Officially the Prime Minister of Canada.

I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the last couple of days, the last week around how the imaging has been going and how you see this playing out because the 51st state rhetoric is still strong. And to go back to our doomsday scenarios, I still see annexation as, as the focus here.

Short of military intervention. That’s not going to happen again. It’s, if you look at public opinion, I mean, only 13% of conservative voters want to become the 51st state.

So I mean, it’s such a small, small, tiny portion of the population that Pierre Poliev, you know, will cater to them at his peril. So that’s not going to happen.

I mean, if you look right now in the Ford election was arguably a preview of what we’re going to see federally is that because everyone was focused on the threat from America, the attributes of leadership that were deemed to be necessary to run office for the next four years made all of his opposition completely irrelevant. Right now, for the time being, Mark Carney has bested Pierre Poliev on all those same dimensions.

If you look and say which one would you use the word strength to describe? Which one would you trust most to stand up to Trump? Which one has the most experience in dealing with crisis?

He has a double digit lead on all of these over polio. Right now, when you get down to questions like who understands what people like you are going through, who cares about people like you?

For a start, there’s virtually no difference in the numbers who cite Carney vs PolyAV, but also the numbers who cite either 1 are 30 points lower than those who have views on who’s the strongest and who can deal with Trump.

So it depends very, very much, I think, how much relatability becomes part of the voting decision as opposed to just this more, this, this more rational notion of we need certain attributes in a leader unrelated to, you know, there’s a reason one of the best proxies for how are you going to vote is which political leader would you like to have a beer for with. Because that’s the kind of criteria that most people use to make their assessments of a political leader. They’re not doing that right now.

They’re looking for strong men. And men is part of that. One of the, the liabilities that poor old Stiles and Crombie had in Ontario was precisely that, just gender.

So whether that’s sustainable over the course of a 40 day campaign, hard to tell.

I mean, there’s no sense in the window that they’re looking at kind of late April, early May, that there’s going to be any let up in the tension between Canada and U.S. relations over that, that, that period of time. I mean, we’ve got all kinds of other stuff coming down the pipe on a schedule right now.

Forget about the more extemporaneous kind of where the hell did that come from? Stuff that seems to be emanating out of the political system every day.

Well, and I want to ask you a question about timeline or timing rather.

But before that, I want to get into the kind of framing of Carney, which as an aside, I would never have a beer with Carney, but I would totally smoke a joint with him because that kind of flips it. Like smoking a joint with someone who appears straight actually appeals, actually makes you think, oh, I wonder what he’d be like.

Stone, what kind of framing do you think Carney, at least initially, given what we’ve seen Ford doing? Because Ford, I think on successful levels, at least until this pause, has been very successful with the way that he’s framed this battle.

Either how do you think Carney is going to frame it or how do you think Carney should be framing at least the pre writ or the early start of this, his first week, let’s say, as prime minister.

Well, I think you’ve tried very much the same way as Ford.

What Ford has that Carney doesn’t have at least yet, is not only the strongman attributes, but also the relatability, which is why he’s able to attract, you know, working class voters and new Canadians.

And that’s going to be Carney’s challenge, is, is if it gets down to relatability, if people, I think he might be a sample of not one, but a fairly small one on the pot front because the beer one is still pretty relatable for most folks. But you know, he’s going to try to run exactly the same kind of campaign.

You’ve got to ask yourself, does this guy right here, who’s been in Parliament since he’s 24 years old, never had a job that wasn’t being paid by the House of Commons, you know, gonna have any chance standing up to this guy? The other question that the Polara guys asked, which was kind of interesting, was what do you think each of them would do to Trump’s demands?

And 44% say that Carney would strongly oppose them, as opposed to only 27% who said Poliev would strongly support them. Those who said they would basically accede to those demands would 41% Polly have only 17% Carney.

So if you wanted to get dirty, what he and he tried it a little bit at the actual convention itself, saying how is anyone going to stand up to Donald Trump whose preference is just be on their knee to Donald Trump and to try to paint POV as a toady to Donald Trump and afraid of Donald Trump?

And there’s a meme that, that’s circulating that’s getting a lot of attention, which is Pierre Polly. The only reason Pierre Polly have wants to be prime minister, so he gets to be governor of the 51st state. It’s effective. It’s being shared.

But to that point, do you think Carney should be attacking Poiliev, should be attacking Trump? Can he attack both? Is there a logic in terms of how he focuses his attention in that regard?

Well, again, I wrote in an article during the provincial election that Ford was wise to more or less completely ignore and marginalize. So he’s got. There’s way more ground to be gained by a focus and an attack on Donald Trump than there is in Poliev right now.

That all said, you know, I used to kind of ignore Poliev before he became the leader.

When he became the leader and I started to see the funds he was raising at the time, he raised more money in that last conservative convention than Carney did in this liberal one. And so I started youtubing some of his speeches.

And he is a stunningly effective political communicator on one, on, you know, not on a one on one basis, but in an in person basis. I saw one speech he was giving was in a basketball court in a high school in Nanaimo where he was standing center court.

Everyone else was around in the bleachers, not a note. And it was powerful, really powerful, oratorically powerful. So I wouldn’t underestimate this guy in a debate, for example.

And we know enough that it doesn’t happen all the time, but it can happen. If people all of a sudden see something they’ve never seen before in a political leader that impresses them.

Again, I remember again, although it sounded like an old fart, is that, you know, conventional wisdom has that, you know, Brian Mulroney won the 84 election when he said, you, sir, had an option. That wasn’t what it was.

It was, it was the day before in the French language debates where Quebecers looked at their TV set and said, holy, there’s only one prime minister up there because he was the only one who could speak fluent French the way they spoke fluent French. And could relate to them and looked regal as compared to the other options. And those numbers started to change that night.

So I know enough about campaigns and that campaigns can matter to not be so smug as to think that. And I wrote for the, for the Hub before this convention even started, before Carney threw his hat in the ring.

Well, and the only kind of safe prediction I feel I could make, and I’m making it in the hopes that I will be terribly wrong, is that the NDP are gonna fail to do shit. But otherwise than that, I think it’s wide open. And I think Poliev’s main opponent is Donald Trump.

And if he can find a way to deal with that, I think the advantage is his.

Once again, because of the anti liberal sentiment and because Carney is fresh, hasn’t had enough time beyond the never Trump and never conservative people. I still think it’s anyone’s game.

But the other thing that’s interesting, we’ve talked about this before is, you know, the dynamic that’s changed is we talked about, you know, conservatives have become the radicals and liberals have become the defenders of the status quo. Canada is broken. Worked really well before. These threats are in place now to say that is heresy.

So again, I wrote in a piece this, this week saying that, you know, Polly doesn’t only have to find a new songbook, he’s got to find a new voice.

Yeah.

You know, how do you be that agent of change? How do you voice the discontent that still exists?

Very, very much, you know, without sounding like you’re a bad Canadian or that you’re not mindful of how important it is right now that Canadians show solidarity, that Canadians do stand together, that Canadians rise up and get their elbows up.

Well, and, and where I do feel that he has a kind of narrow path to accomplish that and I hope he can achieve it. I hope it’s tainted. Is the anti elite right? That’s where Bannon was, was absolutely brilliant with Gavin Newsom.

That’s where the Liberals are fundamentally vulnerable.

I’ll have to watch that, that, that, that interview, it clearly really, really impressed you, eh?

Yes. But allow me to say to our listener, you’re my co host, so I understand as a researcher why you would do this.

But allow me to say to my listeners, please, I don’t want to send you to give more views to this catastrophe. But the point about the anti elitist, and this is where I lament that elections are no longer about policy. Right.

I am fundamentally the type of intellectual, right, left or center. I wish that elections were about policy ideas. I wish they were about future legislation.

But I fundamentally believe that the liberals are incredibly vulnerable on my accusations that they make policy by experts for experts, and that if Poliev can articulate policies, especially farming policies, rural policies, suburban policies that sound like policies by regular people for regular people, that will give him a lot of power. Cause I really don’t see the Carney liberals pulling that off.

Well, I think you’re right because I mean, painting Carney as a technocrat who wants to have technocrats as his army and his advisors opens up the argument of relatability. Very, very much so. Because we know that technocrats aren’t relatable at all. Because look at the shit policies they make, says the average person.

Yeah. And did you see that Carney cut the cabinet in half today?

Yeah, it wasn’t cut in half, but a lot.

Yes, but it was interesting to look at who stayed and who left.

Yeah, yeah.

And my initial reading of it was they’re preparing for when the election is ongoing, but they still gotta deal with Trump.

Trump.

Right. So they’ve got some competent cabinet ministers in there who are experienced, who are seasoned, but to our conversation, these are not populists.

Right. A lot of the feel good people, with the exception of Patty Hadu, who I love, I think she’s a great politician.

With the exception of her, most of the people who are still part of the cabinet are tough politicos and not the kind of feel good people that are, to your point, relatable. I get the logic. But if we are headed into an election, I think, again, it leaves them vulnerable in this regard.

Let’s watch.

I do want to come back before we end to the military threat. And I say this because I want it to remain on the table as a possibility so that we prepare.

And this is where I see that one of the metrics by which we can measure this potential scenario is domestic disturbance in the United States.

And right now, even though the coverage or the amplification of it is small, there are active protests in almost every American city, if not daily, weekly. These are peaceful protests. These are the Quakers, the peaceniks, the anti immigration people.

These are the folks who will show up no matter what no matter the weather. But it is growing. They are building momentum.

And there is this conspiracy theory which I wrote about and I still put in the category of conspiracy theory. This is Trump asking the military for advice on invoking the Insurrection Act. Right.

So he passed Direction Acts or the. The Alien Enemy Act.

So I wrote today about the Alien Enemy Act. Yes, I wrote previously about the Insurrection act, two distinct tracks. The Alien act is so they can deport people.

The Insurrection act is so they can deploy the military in American cities. And so both are tied to immigration. And on April 20 is when the report from the Joint Chiefs is due to come back to Hegseth.

And the conspiracy theory is on April 20th or shortly thereafter. That is when it’s possible that the Insurrection act will be evoked. And the concern is that that’s when mass protests will be underway.

I think no matter what, we are going to see mass protests come April and May because of the nice weather and because schools getting out and the usual matter. And if he’s cool with protests, if he feels that it reinforces his thing, then all is good.

But if he deploys the military, that’s when I think Mexican cartels and Canadians should start to get nervous that the military, once deployed, will not be brought back in. That’s my crazy prediction, putting it on the table. Still in the conspiracy theory bucket. But you know, as I said off.

The top, if you make a prediction, don’t put up a date on it.

I’m putting a date on it because I want it to be wrong. Because I want it to be wrong. Right.

We won’t say I told you so on April 21st.

Well, and the reason I keep saying April 20th is for fascists. That’s Hitler’s birthday, right? There are always Nazis.

Hitler was born in January.

It may be, but this is when they celebrate it.

For as long as I’ve been an anti fascist, I’ve been aware that Nazis love to hold fun protests and demonstrations on April 20, the same way stoners love to hold smokins on April 20 because it’s 4:20. Again. I make this prediction because I want to be wrong. I articulate these things because I want to be wrong. So good luck.

Prime Minister Carney, congratulations on your first day as officially Prime Minister. Chuck Schumer. Get your head out of your ass, Democrats. Please get things together. Alan, any last words before we say goodbye?

I think you’ve said it all, Jesse.

Okay, at some point I am going to have an end of the episode where I read some of our comments from YouTube live on the air, so you get a sense of some of the nice and not so nice things that people are saying. But the good news is people are finding us and enjoying the show and appreciating our conversation. So thanks to all of you who do.

We’re on all the audience podcast platforms where you can rate us five stars or one star. And of course, we’re on YouTube and other platforms. So we’ll see you again soon. Monday, I believe. And until then, stay fresh.

And we’ll see you all soon.

Till next week.