Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics
Speaker 1: where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
Speaker 1: today's best minds, and Donald Trump has revived the plan
Speaker 1: to dismantle Obamacare in twenty twenty four. We have such
Speaker 1: a great show for you today. The Financial Times is
Speaker 1: John Burne Murdoch gives us a fascinating breakdown about why
Speaker 1: life expectancy in the United States is plummeting. Then we'll
Speaker 1: talk to the New York Times David leon Hart about
Speaker 1: his new book. Ours was The Shining Future, the Story
Speaker 1: of the American Dream. But first we have the host
Speaker 1: of the Enemy's List, the one, the Only, the Lincoln Projects,
Speaker 1: Rick Wilson. Welcome back to Fast Politics, Rick Wilson.
Speaker 2: Good Sunday afternoon for the Monday broadcast. To you, Molly
Speaker 2: John Fast.
Speaker 1: Yes, and we are waiting. I feel like we're in
Speaker 1: this weird holding pattern where we're waiting for the American
Speaker 1: people to wake up and be like, holy fuck, Donald
Speaker 1: Trump is going to be the Republican nomine discuss.
Speaker 2: For the five, three hundred and seventy fifth time to
Speaker 2: my friends in the world out there who say things like, well,
Speaker 2: Nicki Haley could still come from behind it beat him.
Speaker 1: I mean, what is the thinking. It's so wish fulfillment.
Speaker 2: Only run some numbers out for people because this is
Speaker 2: this was my world. Math is a bitch. Math is
Speaker 2: a cruel, horrible bitch. He will not be reasoned with.
Speaker 1: I hate him, Math, I love that.
Speaker 2: But she will not be reasoned with. She will not
Speaker 2: be negotiated with. She will not allow for fantasies to
Speaker 2: replace mathematical rigor. Donald Trump is going to go into
Speaker 2: Iowa right now. He's under fifty percent, yes, but Nicki's
Speaker 2: at seventeen. She's got fifty days to close a gap
Speaker 2: of roughly thirty points. Let's call it in round number theory.
Speaker 2: And does she do well? Probably? She probably does much
Speaker 2: better than people expect. Desantas is fading. He won't leave
Speaker 2: the race, but he's fading fast, so that never trump
Speaker 2: Ish vote will remain split. Okay, all the others are
Speaker 2: cat and dog, random noise in the system. She goes
Speaker 2: out of Iowa with a good head of steam, goes
Speaker 2: to New Hampshire, does pretty well, But Chris Christy's not
Speaker 2: going to quit, and neither is DeSantis, so they're going
Speaker 2: to still end up with Trump. Winning New Hampshire. Okay,
Speaker 2: so he's won two. Then they're going to go to
Speaker 2: South Carolina and he's going to do really well in
Speaker 2: our home state and still fall short. Then they're going
Speaker 2: to go to Super Tuesday. Now, just so people understand this,
Speaker 2: there are two states on Super Tuesday, Texas and California.
Speaker 2: In both of those states, and Texas, the last time
Speaker 2: I look, Donald Trump was leading by about forty percent
Speaker 2: over DeSantis, who was behind him and second, And in
Speaker 2: California he was leading to Santas by about fifty points.
Speaker 2: So once Super Tuesday happens and these winner take All
Speaker 2: states go and you end up with Texas, California, South Carolina, Iowa,
Speaker 2: New Hampshire, and a whole bunch of the other cat
Speaker 2: and dog states on Super Tuesday, and then Donald Trump
Speaker 2: is going to at that point have almost forty percent
Speaker 2: of the votes he needs to take the nomination. Then
Speaker 2: we go on March twelfth to the Great State of Florida,
Speaker 2: where Donald Trump is presidently leading tiny Ron by thirty
Speaker 2: five percent by thirty five rona Santa. His whole campaign
Speaker 2: was built around the horseshit predicate. Oh won Florida about
Speaker 2: nineteen points so okay, there, no, you can't. He owns
Speaker 2: the Republican Party, Ronnie, He's gonna get spanked.
Speaker 1: He's gonna oh man Rick Wilson in such peak Rick
Speaker 1: Wilson fashion. But it's a really good point about how
Speaker 1: I think this comes back to a fundamental problem Republicans
Speaker 1: have had this entire time with Trump, which is they
Speaker 1: truly believe that if they ignore him, or if they
Speaker 1: wish hard enough, the actuarial tables is a direct quote
Speaker 1: from The New York Times, right, remember the unknown Republican
Speaker 1: who said the actuarial tables can't possibly be wrong for
Speaker 1: this long like, eventually he's going to be And it's
Speaker 1: like the road to the end of American democracy, see
Speaker 1: paved with Donald Trump will just go away if we
Speaker 1: close our eyes hard enough.
Speaker 2: This wish fulfillment that Trump is going to get defeated
Speaker 2: by a true conservative goes all the way back to
Speaker 2: twenty sixteen, twenty fifteen, where I was the one asshole
Speaker 2: screaming no, no, no, this isn't going to work. And
Speaker 2: yet here we are and they still believe that this
Speaker 2: goddamn creature with the luck of the devil is going
Speaker 2: to drop dead of a heart attack. We are not
Speaker 2: that lucky. We live in the hands of a cruel
Speaker 2: and capricious god who does not want Trump dead yet
Speaker 2: for whatever reason.
Speaker 1: I would also just say, like, what has happened has
Speaker 1: not been that the Republican Party has come back to.
Speaker 1: What has happened is that the Republican Party has gotten
Speaker 1: very trumpy, and so they've rejected democracy and democratic norms.
Speaker 2: As anyone who's ever been on any social media platform
Speaker 2: and you say they were democracy, you'll instantly have fifteen
Speaker 2: hundred Twitter trolls. Would We don't live in it. Mostly
Speaker 2: we live in a republic. Yes, you fucked tards. It's
Speaker 2: a republic based on democratic and constitutional principles. So pardon
Speaker 2: me for shorthanding it. Next time, I use simple pictogram
Speaker 2: so you dumb motherfuckers can understand what I'm trying to communicate.
Speaker 1: Someone's been spending too much time on Twitter.
Speaker 2: Oh actually, actually I've been almost completely off Twitter the
Speaker 2: last week, and it's been glorious. I'm on the good place.
Speaker 1: Yes, you're in threads. But as we're talking about this
Speaker 1: idea that Republicans can't wish him away, but neither can democrats, right,
Speaker 1: And now we find ourselves in a situation where I
Speaker 1: think at some point Republicans are going to wake up
Speaker 1: to the fact that they could have had Nicky Haley,
Speaker 1: but they would have had to have originally not allowed
Speaker 1: Trump to take over the entire Republican Party. And I'm
Speaker 1: thinking about like the Republican Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson,
Speaker 1: who has that job because Trump deemed him sufficiently loyal
Speaker 1: because he wrote a brief trying to overturn the twenty
Speaker 1: twenty election. So, if anything, trump Ism is a contagious
Speaker 1: illness that is infecting the very few members who are
Speaker 1: still in office. Right.
Speaker 2: None of these candidates who could win, I say that,
Speaker 2: recognize that Will Hurd when he was in the race,
Speaker 2: and Asa Hutcherson, I guess he's still in the race,
Speaker 2: and Chris Christy all made cases that Trump was bad, wrong, evil,
Speaker 2: must be destroyed. They were never able to win. But
Speaker 2: none of the candidates who could win could get their
Speaker 2: way out of the bear trap clamped around their legs.
Speaker 2: That is Donald Trump's utter control of the Republican Party
Speaker 2: at every level, top to bottom, stem to stern. And
Speaker 2: if you are a Republican elected official in this country,
Speaker 2: there is nothing that frightens you more than the thought
Speaker 2: of crossing Donald Trump. No matter how bad, wrong and
Speaker 2: evil you know he is, you don't want to say,
Speaker 2: you know, Donald was slightly incorrect about claiming that Hillary
Speaker 2: Clinton needs live babies. They don't want to say anything
Speaker 2: to possibly offend him. And without offending him and having
Speaker 2: a fight with him and having a competition with him,
Speaker 2: then the message the Republican base voter receives is not
Speaker 2: while that Ron decaid as sure as a smart, strong fella,
Speaker 2: they hear this guy is ready to go wash Donald
Speaker 2: Trump's car and polish his shoes before the workday starts.
Speaker 2: It's just a weird blind spot that they recognize the
Speaker 2: perniciousness of Trump, but they don't recognize that somebody has
Speaker 2: to be sacrificed. Somebody has to blow themselves up to
Speaker 2: blow up Trump, and none of them want to do that.
Speaker 2: There's just a vast, gaping lack of political.
Speaker 3: Courage, right.
Speaker 1: No, I think that's a good point. I think so
Speaker 1: much about it. Like you have one party, democratic party.
Speaker 1: You may like them, you may not like them, but
Speaker 1: they believe in democratic principles, right, They believe in a democracy,
Speaker 1: whereas you have this other party which really believes in
Speaker 1: trump Ism. So now you have Trump. He is going
Speaker 1: to be the nominee one hundred percent who he picks
Speaker 1: as a vice president. It doesn't even matter, right because
Speaker 1: that person, like, you know, look how well that turned
Speaker 1: out for Mike Pants, right. I mean, you know, he
Speaker 1: picks whoever, whoever is, He's lucky. And then you know
Speaker 1: you will go into a year of like him coming
Speaker 1: after you. And speaking of which he did come after
Speaker 1: you this weekend, which is pretty interesting.
Speaker 2: He cannot get the Lincoln Project and me out of
Speaker 2: his vacuous little orange noggin.
Speaker 1: Why do you think that is.
Speaker 2: Because we whipped his ass and we never showed any
Speaker 2: fear about him. Because the thing he hates and lows
Speaker 2: the most molly is anyone who stands up to him
Speaker 2: and doesn't break and anyone who doesn't put up with
Speaker 2: his threats and bullshit intimidation. Even when he sent Bill
Speaker 2: Barr after the Lincoln Project, our response wasn't like, oh no,
Speaker 2: please stop, Johnold, We'll do anything you want. It was like,
Speaker 2: go fuck yourself, come on over, try me again, bitch.
Speaker 2: And look, he understands also that at a sort of
Speaker 2: intuitive level, the kind of direct, in your face campaigning
Speaker 2: that we did against him is something that had benefit.
Speaker 2: It worked. It show Democrats had a tough en up,
Speaker 2: and he intuitively gets that that's a bad outcome for help.
Speaker 1: Right exactly. So tell me what you think it looks like.
Speaker 1: Now we have Republicans nominating Trump, we have Democrats, a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff going on, this bad Senate map, we
Speaker 1: have a House that has now kicked the can. Mike
Speaker 1: Johnson has a CR that he's going to have to
Speaker 1: figure out starting in January. It's tiered, so people are
Speaker 1: a little confused about it, but ultimately he did a
Speaker 1: clean CR. It's a continuing resolution which funds the government
Speaker 1: for another month. But eventually Mike Johnson is going to
Speaker 1: have a come to Jesus moment right where he's going
Speaker 1: to have to do government and he's part of a
Speaker 1: party that no longer believes in quote unquote doing government right.
Speaker 2: It's not just that it is that they believe that
Speaker 2: the perverse incentive structure out there of I'm going to
Speaker 2: get a primary from my right if I vote for
Speaker 2: a CR is out there with enough Republican members. Because again,
Speaker 2: the dog caught the car two years ago, They're like, hey,
Speaker 2: district us into the most right wing, maga crazy districts.
Speaker 3: In the world, right, why not? And why not? Their
Speaker 3: prayers were answered, what's the worst they could happen?
Speaker 2: What's the worst it could happen? Their prayers were answered
Speaker 2: with that, And so now they exist in a world
Speaker 2: where if Matt Gates or Marjorie Taylor Green or Lren
Speaker 2: Bober or somebody wakes up pissed off at them and
Speaker 2: starts talking about them on Fox that they're a libtard, Cuckshill.
Speaker 1: Right or right Side Broadcasting.
Speaker 2: Right or pizza Jack or any of the other crazies.
Speaker 1: Human events, Yeah, human events, Oh my god. But I
Speaker 1: mean you could just get on there and have some
Speaker 1: vape pen and watch Beetle Juice and talk about how
Speaker 1: you don't like this person. They're insufficiently maga and they
Speaker 1: can be primary right.
Speaker 2: Well, it's a lot like China during the Mao era.
Speaker 2: You could be denounced at any time by anybody, and
Speaker 2: suddenly you went from being like a senior member of
Speaker 2: the People's Liberation Army to like having to dig potatoes
Speaker 2: in some Northwest Frontier province if you were lucky, If
Speaker 2: you were lucky We're just in a spot where the
Speaker 2: realization that Trump runs the Republican Party. It's even problematic
Speaker 2: for some otherwise very smart reporters to process that this
Speaker 2: horse race they desperately want isn't real.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about that for a minute. There is
Speaker 1: no primary, right, you have the incumbent Joe Biden, who
Speaker 1: is old. Okay, we're going to give you that he's old.
Speaker 1: He's eighty one. He's old.
Speaker 2: I noticed Joe Biden was old. I noticed that.
Speaker 1: He's spry, he rides a bike, but he is old.
Speaker 1: Sure he's been to like fifteen war zones, but okay,
Speaker 1: he's old versus the guy with the ninety one criminal indictments.
Speaker 1: All right, let's talk about this. A second straight News
Speaker 1: again is going to have an opportunity to cover Donald Trump.
Speaker 1: What is going to happen besides the death of the universe? Go,
Speaker 1: what should the mainstream media do. We're on the opinion side,
Speaker 1: so we're lucky we can just say our opinions.
Speaker 2: I wish they would adopt the Jay Rosen rule. Don't
Speaker 2: cover the odds, cover the stakes. And unfortunately, the horse
Speaker 2: race coverage, the breathless horse race coverage, distracts from the
Speaker 2: existential day that a second Trump term poses.
Speaker 1: And it normalizes him, right.
Speaker 2: Yes, it it gives people a sense of like well
Speaker 2: and Mallia to this point, I actually had a serious
Speaker 2: reporter last week say to me, well, I think all
Speaker 2: of this Project twenty twenty five stuff is a little
Speaker 2: overblow because there's no way the lawyers would let I'm like,
Speaker 2: that's not the point. They're not going to have the
Speaker 2: lawyers you think they're going to have.
Speaker 1: And also Project twenty twenty five is the Heritage Foundation's
Speaker 1: foray into fascism, where they replace all of the normal
Speaker 1: bureaucrats with far right fascist bureaucrats.
Speaker 2: Don't forget the Heritage Foundation is the soft face of
Speaker 2: this plan. They're the like gentry Republican version of this plan.
Speaker 2: And if you think that having people like Steven Miller
Speaker 2: and Steve Bannon and all these crazy and Kevin Slack,
Speaker 2: the Red Caesar guy and all these cuckoos back in
Speaker 2: charge is going to be constrained next time by grown
Speaker 2: ups or the cords somebody else, they will ignore the
Speaker 2: law and the courts. And our friend George Conways are
Speaker 2: a new group this week where they are pointing out
Speaker 2: to Republican lawyers, Hey, you know, you swore an oath
Speaker 2: to the Constitution as a rule of law not to Trump.
Speaker 2: But there will be enough Republican lawyers who don't give
Speaker 2: a shit.
Speaker 1: You're gonna have Pizza Jack as a Secretary of the Army.
Speaker 1: Let's be honest, like you're going to long for the
Speaker 1: days when you had Jared as secretary of everything.
Speaker 2: And you will find very quickly that even the Republicans
Speaker 2: in the US Senate who do not like Trump, and
Speaker 2: there are still in the Republican caucus.
Speaker 1: A few Mitt will be gone.
Speaker 2: No Mitt will be gone. There are still a dozen
Speaker 2: who are uncomfortable, four or five who are real like
Speaker 2: in opposition to Trump. Even those people, even Sue Collins,
Speaker 2: who believes that Trump has learned his lesson, they will
Speaker 2: vote for all these crazy appointees. They will vote for
Speaker 2: Pizza Jack. They will vote for Seb Gorka to be
Speaker 2: the Secretary of Defense or whatever they're going to name
Speaker 2: the most insane lunatics. The Dragon of Buddhipem.
Speaker 1: Gorka will be the person who puts the order in
Speaker 1: to send us to Gidmo.
Speaker 2: Actually, I think Seb will end up being I'm not
Speaker 2: kidding you national Security advisor.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, no, why not. What's the bar here?
Speaker 2: They're going to make cash and Carrie Patel, the Secretary
Speaker 2: of Defense, and Rich Grenell is going to go ahead,
Speaker 2: you know, the intelligence community. Again, that's good, great news,
Speaker 2: fucking great news.
Speaker 1: It's going to be amazing.
Speaker 2: Don't worry. It's just the horse race is what really matters.
Speaker 2: And so right, all the grown ups will be back.
Speaker 1: I think it's a good point, and I think it's
Speaker 1: worth remembering just that the stakes here are humongous. I
Speaker 1: mean they're basically I want to expand this for a minute,
Speaker 1: which is even if and again we don't know what's
Speaker 1: going to happen. We're still a year out. I can't
Speaker 1: believe we're gonna have another fucking year of this. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm exhausted just thinking about it. But even despite that,
Speaker 1: there still is a Republican party that does not really
Speaker 1: believe in any of these principles anymore of democracy.
Speaker 2: Now, no, we'd live in a post ideological republican party.
Speaker 2: They do not believe. They are what I call the
Speaker 2: old trope was limited government conservatives. They are unlimited government conservatives.
Speaker 2: They want power and control at every level. And that
Speaker 2: includes from what the law means in terms of it means,
Speaker 2: what the president says it means, to who can be
Speaker 2: an American, who can come to America to try to
Speaker 2: build a better life, to whether there's any degree of
Speaker 2: autonomy or individual liberty when it comes to women. All
Speaker 2: these things are going to add up in a fundamental
Speaker 2: way where if he becomes president, the transition time between
Speaker 2: him swearing that oath on the Bible as it catches
Speaker 2: fire and the outright deployment and use and abuse of
Speaker 2: military power in this country will be hours, not days,
Speaker 2: Days not weeks, weeks not months. Rick Wilson, Ray of
Speaker 2: Sunshine as always.
Speaker 1: John Byrne Murdoch is a columnist and chief data reporter
Speaker 1: at The Financial Times. Welcome to you Fast Politics, John,
Speaker 1: Thank you thanks for having me describe yourself so that
Speaker 1: I don't get it wrong.
Speaker 4: So I'm the chief data reporter at the which basically
Speaker 4: means I'm trying to do journalism using statistics, using data,
Speaker 4: using charts. So that means both finding stories in data
Speaker 4: sets or using things like Foier requests, and then also
Speaker 4: using graphs and maps and stuff to actually get those
Speaker 4: stories get that journalism out to people as well.
Speaker 1: And you're a senior fellow at the London School of Economics,
Speaker 1: so you are, as we say, on this side of
Speaker 1: the pond, no slouch.
Speaker 4: Well, you know, some of those titles come with more
Speaker 4: responsibilities than others, but that just means folks at the
Speaker 4: ls you give give me support on some of the
Speaker 4: pieces I'm working with.
Speaker 1: I decided to write to you because you had an
Speaker 1: incredible piece which something that had a sense that this
Speaker 1: was happening, but I don't think I quite understood it.
Speaker 1: So American life expectancy is having the worst crisis of
Speaker 1: my lifetime. So I'm hoping you can talk to me
Speaker 1: a little bit about this research you did. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Sure.
Speaker 4: So this was prompted by just the fact that, as
Speaker 4: I think most of your listeners will know, and during COVID,
Speaker 4: life expectancy around the world dropped pretty much everywhere because
Speaker 4: simply while people were dying this direct result of the virus.
Speaker 4: But the really interesting thing that I saw was after
Speaker 4: the initial sort of brant of the virus, after twenty twenty,
Speaker 4: by the time vaccines were online and that kind of thing,
Speaker 4: life expectancy broadly recovered in most countries in the world,
Speaker 4: so we saw this sudden dip and then a fairly
Speaker 4: smooth rebound back to roughly.
Speaker 3: Where it would have been.
Speaker 4: However, there was one exception, which was in the UAPs,
Speaker 4: where life expectancy dipped by about two years in twenty twenty,
Speaker 4: but then dipped by an another year or so in
Speaker 4: twenty twenty one. And that just got me thinking, like,
Speaker 4: what's happening here? Why is it that in the rest
Speaker 4: of the world we saw this blip, but in the
Speaker 4: US things have only continued getting even worse. And also,
Speaker 4: you know, what can we learn by making more direct
Speaker 4: comparisons between what we see in the US and what
Speaker 4: we see elsewhere. My entry point in that as a
Speaker 4: brit was to think, okay, let's say England and the US.
Speaker 4: So you've got two relatively wealthy countries in the West
Speaker 4: with fairly similar demographics, fairly similar in many ways, and
Speaker 4: yet people in people in England, people in Britain live
Speaker 4: a couple of years longer than people in the US.
Speaker 1: The central premise of those piece is why are Americans
Speaker 1: dying so young? Continue, Yeah, well.
Speaker 4: Exactly that, But as you say, it is completely in
Speaker 4: same because I've read and you and I've read, and
Speaker 4: all sorts of people who've read and heard over the
Speaker 4: last couple of years, so many stories about how much
Speaker 4: richer Americans are now than people or people in most
Speaker 4: parts of the We have.
Speaker 1: Lower inflation, much lower inflation, because we didn't sanction ourselves
Speaker 1: with Braxite.
Speaker 4: Continue well, indeed, yeah, there are all sorts of things
Speaker 4: going on here, but there's there's no question that the
Speaker 4: average American is now substantially richer than the average britt
Speaker 4: by somewhere between about thirty and even sixty percent, depending
Speaker 4: on exactly what be used. And so that makes this
Speaker 4: even more striking because you've got this very large gap
Speaker 4: in life expectancy between the two countries, despite the fact
Speaker 4: that Americans in theory have considerably higher living standards. Like
Speaker 4: it's people in England live five years longer than people
Speaker 4: in America, despite America much more insane.
Speaker 3: So that in itself is startling.
Speaker 4: But when you look at this across the income distribution
Speaker 4: is where it gets really. So this is where if
Speaker 4: you imagine the richest, most high earning people on the
Speaker 4: right and the poorest, most low earning people on the left,
Speaker 4: and look at what life expectancy is across that distribution,
Speaker 4: and what you say is, if you're a really well
Speaker 4: off person in America, you live about as long as
Speaker 4: a really well off person in the UK. So average
Speaker 4: life expectancy there is maybe around eighty five years. But
Speaker 4: at the bottom, the people who are right at the
Speaker 4: bottom of British society, who are really really struggling all
Speaker 4: sorts of things in their lives have gone role they're
Speaker 4: still living on average seventy six years, whereas the people
Speaker 4: right at the bottom of the US society are living
Speaker 4: less than seventy years. So it's really at the bottom
Speaker 4: end of things among people who've come across a lot
Speaker 4: of disadvantage that the US theirs exceptionally poorly. And this
Speaker 4: was I think actually the statistic that first stopt me
Speaker 4: interested in doing this was I was looking at some
Speaker 4: data on what's called health adjusted life expectance, So this
Speaker 4: is not just how long you're going to live, but
Speaker 4: how long people are expected to live in good health,
Speaker 4: so when we're still able to be up with about
Speaker 4: and physically acting and mentally sharp. And what that shows
Speaker 4: is the average person in America is expected to get
Speaker 4: around sixty five years in good health like that, and
Speaker 4: that figure in the UK, sixty five years is the
Speaker 4: figure for the lowest healthy life expectancy in the entire country.
Speaker 4: So there's a seaside tower a coastal town in the
Speaker 4: UK called Blackpool, which is kind of notorious for having
Speaker 4: a lot of drug problems up and antidepressants, homelessness. It's
Speaker 4: the sort of poster child are struggling art of this country,
Speaker 4: and the average person who's born in that part of
Speaker 4: England lives as long and healthy a life as the
Speaker 4: average America does.
Speaker 1: Some of this have to do with the fact that
Speaker 1: the British have healthcare.
Speaker 4: It's a really interesting one because that I think is
Speaker 4: certainly what a lot of people would assume is going right.
Speaker 4: In the UK, we have the National House of Free
Speaker 4: at the point of view, so you're never hit with
Speaker 4: a bill. You're never having to think, you know, am
Speaker 4: I going to be able to afford this? If you've
Speaker 4: got a health issue, it gets to can count. In
Speaker 4: the US, obviously, that's true for a lot of people
Speaker 4: who've got health insurance, perhaps with their employer or even
Speaker 4: if they're being directly. But of course there is a
Speaker 4: minority of Americans who don't have health insurance and don't
Speaker 4: have health cover, and therefore are worried about am I
Speaker 4: going to be able to afford this treatment? And so
Speaker 4: I think the default position a lot of people coming
Speaker 4: to this with like, well, that must explain it. And
Speaker 4: I don't want to say I'm not going to say
Speaker 4: that that isn't a factor at all.
Speaker 3: But when you.
Speaker 4: Start looking at the reasons for this gap in life expectancy,
Speaker 4: when you start looking at what people are dying, it
Speaker 4: starts to become clear that that that the health insurance
Speaker 4: factor can only explain the small part of it.
Speaker 1: Ooh, so interesting, So tell me more.
Speaker 4: What we can do is we can look at There's
Speaker 4: a couple of things, right, So one is we can
Speaker 4: look at the age at which people die and the
Speaker 4: rate at which people die at different ages in various countries.
Speaker 4: So if you take not just England, not just in UK,
Speaker 4: but a whole load of wealthy countries, so Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands,
Speaker 4: throw it over of them in here, and look at
Speaker 4: what is the chance of someone dying in any given
Speaker 4: year from the age of zero, from a newborn all
Speaker 4: the way up to one hundred years old. And what
Speaker 4: you see is in all of those other developed countries,
Speaker 4: the risk of death at any age is pretty similar
Speaker 4: to whatever country were in. So your chaps of dying
Speaker 4: at age twenty years old is about zero point not
Speaker 4: five percent. So that's saying about let me think, so
Speaker 4: one percent will be you've got worried one hundred chance.
Speaker 4: So this is about you've got about one in two
Speaker 4: thousand chants of diet age twenty years old in most
Speaker 4: developed countries, whereas in the US it's more time high
Speaker 4: than oh.
Speaker 1: So this is really interesting. So what you're saying is
Speaker 1: if you're a twenty year old in Britain and a twenty
Speaker 1: year old in America, the twenty year old in America
Speaker 1: is four times more likely to die exactly.
Speaker 4: And the reason I bring that up with answer to
Speaker 4: launting biggest question about the impact of the different healthcare
Speaker 4: is when you think about what someone is twenty years old,
Speaker 4: is dying of one in their late teens, twenties to
Speaker 4: only thirties, what we're talking about we're not really talking here,
Speaker 4: and we'll come onto this in more detailed with boarders
Speaker 4: of death. But generally these are not people who sort
Speaker 4: of got a chronic condition that requires expensive health care treatment.
Speaker 4: These are not people who've got who are dying from
Speaker 4: saying cancer or or heart disease. These are people who
Speaker 4: buy and large in America are dying from gunshot wounds, opioids,
Speaker 4: and to a smaller extent, road accidents and deaths involving vehicles.
Speaker 4: And it's not, of course that it's not that the
Speaker 4: healthcare system is completely ew elegant in it, but it's
Speaker 4: that if someone dies from the gunshot wound, chances are
Speaker 4: whether or not you've got health insurance wouldn't have made
Speaker 4: a huge impact on the situation. So I think when
Speaker 4: people think about life expense, because the average life expectency
Speaker 4: is always somewhere in the seventies or eighties, people imagine
Speaker 4: that trends in life expectancy and difference in your life
Speaker 4: expenses in countries are driven by what's happened to people
Speaker 4: aged in their late sixties and seventies, when in reality,
Speaker 4: the impact of the very very large numbers of people
Speaker 4: dying at young ages, which is what we see in America,
Speaker 4: people in their twenties and thirties, the impact of that
Speaker 4: is larger than the impact of lots of people dying
Speaker 4: very slightly earlier in their older ages. So the assumption
Speaker 4: is always to say, oh, people in the US are
Speaker 4: dying in their seventies instead of eighties. This must be
Speaker 4: because older people have less access to health care. But
Speaker 4: it's actually the vast quantities of people in their late teens, twenties, thirties,
Speaker 4: even early forties who die in America from things that
Speaker 4: people simply don't die from in these other countries.
Speaker 1: This is insane today. So it's the guns. I mean, really,
Speaker 1: if you were to change in one element, the life
Speaker 1: expectancy in America is falling because of guns.
Speaker 4: Well, so it's interesting to say that because this again
Speaker 4: is I think, you know, once we say it's not
Speaker 4: just about alcare, and it's not just about older ages,
Speaker 4: everyone goes to the guns. Everyone thinks, Okay, if we
Speaker 4: know one thing about America, it's that there are a
Speaker 4: lot of guns, and a lot of people unfortunately lose
Speaker 4: their lives as a result of that. But the really
Speaker 4: striking thing that I think people so people are definitely
Speaker 4: aware of this this next thing I'm going to talk about,
Speaker 4: I don't think people realize the scale of it, which
Speaker 4: is the opioid crisis Fentadel in this coming Stone. So,
Speaker 4: but I think everyone both in America and outside of
Speaker 4: America knows that America has a lot of gun and
Speaker 4: that you know, it's it's a very very large number,
Speaker 4: and it's far bigger than what we see in other
Speaker 4: developed countries. But the extent that that's true, it's twice
Speaker 4: as true for opio the death rate. Once you adjust
Speaker 4: for the ages that people die from guns and die
Speaker 4: from opioids, the death rate in America from opioids is
Speaker 4: twice as high as it is from guns, and other
Speaker 4: countries just don't have this opioid problem. Of course, you know,
Speaker 4: people do die from unfortunately from drug overdoses in various
Speaker 4: parts of the world. Within the UK, Scotland has a
Speaker 4: bit of a problem, but nothing is anywhere near the
Speaker 4: scale of the US. And in the US it's only
Speaker 4: been in the last few years where this where this
Speaker 4: is really really wouldn't taken off.
Speaker 3: So the guns take has been a probably in the
Speaker 3: US decades.
Speaker 4: The opioids thing has become this mssive problem recently, and
Speaker 4: that is actually why in the US we didn't see
Speaker 4: life expectancy rebound back up after COVID it's because we're
Speaker 4: not seeing all these COVID deaths anymore. But the sheer
Speaker 4: number of people dying from drugs drug over this is
Speaker 4: in the US has stop up so quickly that it's
Speaker 4: more than made up for the disappearance of COVID.
Speaker 1: Wow, I'm sober since I was nineteen years old, So
Speaker 1: this for me is someone who had drug overdoss myself
Speaker 1: and also had many friends die of drug overdoces. This
Speaker 1: is just an incredible you know, to hear something like
Speaker 1: this from someone on the data side is really quite shocking.
Speaker 1: And also I wish I were more surprised by it,
Speaker 1: if that makes any sense.
Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely, And and this is this is the thing.
Speaker 4: It's it's a tragic, tragic thing. It's been sort of
Speaker 4: slowly building up, and you know, we've been getting more
Speaker 4: news stories about this in the last three or four years.
Speaker 4: People are definitely aware of it. But I still think
Speaker 4: that the sheer scale of what we're seeing, of what
Speaker 4: we're seeing here is beyond what people realize, because again,
Speaker 4: you know, we're talking about a something that I think
Speaker 4: people think of as this is the thing that happens
Speaker 4: to other people, right, It's you know, you hear about this,
Speaker 4: but you don't necessarily see it. But it's happening on
Speaker 4: such a scale that it is literally pulling down.
Speaker 3: Life expectance that the entirety of the US.
Speaker 4: And you know, it's obviously easy to say again that
Speaker 4: well shore, but it's still okay if you're rich, but
Speaker 4: a you know exactly, that's that's a remarkable lack of
Speaker 4: empathy for them. But it's also this this does you know,
Speaker 4: affect people further up the income distribution as well. Things
Speaker 4: can go well for people a few role turns in life,
Speaker 4: and you're another statistic, Well, I think.
Speaker 1: Also, I mean, first of all, that's no way to
Speaker 1: go through life not giving a shit about people who
Speaker 1: don't have money. And then the other thing is that
Speaker 1: I think is so interesting. I want you to go
Speaker 1: back to that what you said that that people who
Speaker 1: do drugs that they're more likely to die of an
Speaker 1: overdose in the United States, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Well that's that's fentanyl. Right.
Speaker 4: So there are all sorts of opioids that get around
Speaker 4: various countries in the world. As I mentioned, Scotland and
Speaker 4: the UK has a smaller problem, but it does have
Speaker 4: an issue with these freet sort of street opening oils
Speaker 4: and in the UK, but nothing as leasure as ventandel
Speaker 4: is circulating pretty much anywhere else. The sort of the
Speaker 4: emergence of fentanyls in the city has really driven what
Speaker 4: was already this sort of slow rumbling problem in the
Speaker 4: US and turned it into this just absolutely enormous spike
Speaker 4: which just takes lives away like nothing else.
Speaker 1: Ventanyl is actually really a problem.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, it's an enormous bob. I'm sure some of your
Speaker 4: listeners will have been aware of them. Presidency from China
Speaker 4: being over in San Francisco recently to talk to Biden
Speaker 4: among others, and one of the points of discussion was
Speaker 4: spent A lot of it tends to be manufactured and
Speaker 4: imported from well, not so much imported, but it gets
Speaker 4: into the country from China, and it is a massive,
Speaker 4: massive issue.
Speaker 3: You know, in twenty twenty one, seventy thousand.
Speaker 4: People in the US died from fentanyl alone, and the
Speaker 4: numbers only increased since then, I believe in and this
Speaker 4: was not including other opiods, but that is still more
Speaker 4: than the total number of people who died outside the
Speaker 4: homicide or suicide.
Speaker 3: So it's an absolutely enormous issue.
Speaker 4: And as recently as twenty thirteen, about two thousand people
Speaker 4: who died from invented that.
Speaker 3: So you've gone from two.
Speaker 4: Thousand to more than seventy thousand in the space of
Speaker 4: less than ten years. It's just has been that sudden,
Speaker 4: and I think people don't realize that we completely changed
Speaker 4: from this sort of slow rumbling opioid crisis which started
Speaker 4: with prescription and puides, to something now which is just
Speaker 4: on a completely different stay.
Speaker 1: Because ramostone a time, I want you to go over
Speaker 1: the tap lines in this story again, poorer Americans are
Speaker 1: living how many years shorter?
Speaker 4: Are so? Poor Americans live about fifteen years shorter than
Speaker 4: the richest Americans. But then the point is that every
Speaker 4: country has a bit of a gap one to that.
Speaker 4: Like in UK it's maybe a nine yeager and that's
Speaker 4: certainly normal for wealthy countries, But in the US it's
Speaker 4: a fifteen yega. And that's not because both ends are
Speaker 4: stretched out, as it were, it's specifically because people at
Speaker 4: the bottom.
Speaker 3: End in America live much more lethal lives.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Basically, the way we think about it is the
Speaker 4: experience of being poor in America is much more deadly,
Speaker 4: like disadvantage in America is much more lethal than disadvantage
Speaker 4: in other parts of the world.
Speaker 1: Such an insane way to run a country. And the
Speaker 1: top lines I'm taking away here are that it's not
Speaker 1: necessarily healthcare. I wonder if you could, just for my
Speaker 1: own edification, I have two questions. One is maternal fetal mortality,
Speaker 1: if you had some take on that that you could
Speaker 1: fold into the data. And the other is racism and medicine.
Speaker 1: I know that African Americans get much less good medical
Speaker 1: care in this country, and I'm just wondering if you
Speaker 1: could speak to either or either or about sure.
Speaker 4: So maternal mortalities is definitely point worth mentioning, and so
Speaker 4: I'm glad you did. And that is still a figure
Speaker 4: where number one, the US does worse than pretty much
Speaker 4: all of its peer countries or other developed countries. But
Speaker 4: also that's especially true among black women, among African American women,
Speaker 4: and again in most countries. Do you see something slightly
Speaker 4: similar in terms of Black women in the UK for
Speaker 4: examples of their worst than white women in the UK.
Speaker 4: But the rate of maternal deaths and on black women
Speaker 4: in America is far, far, far, far far higher than
Speaker 4: from what we see either for black women in any
Speaker 4: other parts of the world, so they're definitely is affacting it. Sorry,
Speaker 4: that definitely is a factor. And racism and medicine again. Yeah,
Speaker 4: you know, I've read some powerful stories about about what
Speaker 4: that looks like, and certainly I think it's specially for
Speaker 4: black women that does seem to be a consistent theme.
Speaker 4: So it's yeah, I'm absolutely not sort of dismissing the
Speaker 4: roles of those things in play. And you know, the
Speaker 4: lack of access to healthcare in America is absolutly be
Speaker 4: an issue as well. But I think when you look
Speaker 4: at the data on this, it really is guns and
Speaker 4: particularly drugs, which account for the vast majority of what
Speaker 4: we're talking about.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so interesting. Thank you so much for coming. I
Speaker 1: hope you'll come back.
Speaker 4: Thanks for having me, and yeah, I'd love it.
Speaker 1: David Leonhard is a senior writer at The New York
Speaker 1: Times and author of Ours Was The Shining Future, The
Speaker 1: Story of the American Dream. Welcome too, Fast Politics.
Speaker 3: David, It's great to be back.
Speaker 1: Rolly, Yes, welcome back. So I want to talk about
Speaker 1: this book, Ours Was The Shining Future. I want you
Speaker 1: to sort of you know, I think of you as
Speaker 1: someone who writes more than pretty much anyone else, because
Speaker 1: you write this daily newsletter, and I know you don't
Speaker 1: do it every day, but you do it a lot,
Speaker 1: and it is considered to be at least by the
Speaker 1: people at the times. They're sort of digital front page.
Speaker 1: How did you find time to do this?
Speaker 3: First of all, I missed a lot of deadline. I
Speaker 3: spent a long time writing the book, and I loved
Speaker 3: doing it. I did a lot of historical research. I mean,
Speaker 3: it's really a book of stories and a book of
Speaker 3: history be of how the American economy has ended up
Speaker 3: where it is. But so part of the answer is
Speaker 3: that I spent years writing it. And then part of
Speaker 3: the answer is that it overlaps a lot with my job,
Speaker 3: which is I spent a lot of time in my
Speaker 3: job writing about the American economy and writing about the
Speaker 3: American political system, and this is very much a book
Speaker 3: about both. And then, weirdly, COVID help, because it's the
Speaker 3: world slowed down so much during the miseries of COVID
Speaker 3: and people stopped commuting. I basically found that I had
Speaker 3: a couple hours every morning when I wasn't commuting, and
Speaker 3: I at first at home and then when it was
Speaker 3: allowed at a coffee shop, sitting outside when you couldn't
Speaker 3: sit inside, and then sitting inside when you could. I
Speaker 3: ended up doing a lot of writing of the book
Speaker 3: during the long period of time when we really didn't
Speaker 3: do that much during COVID, and then finally I took
Speaker 3: a four month leave and really did the final sprint
Speaker 3: of editing the book during that.
Speaker 1: So, you know, we have a lot of people on
Speaker 1: this podcast who talk about the economy and who talk about,
Speaker 1: you know, this discrepancy between the way the economy is
Speaker 1: doing and the way people feel. Can you pinpoint this
Speaker 1: from your book?
Speaker 3: So I think they are basically the ideas the economy's metrics,
Speaker 3: or at least many of them GDP, the unemployment rate
Speaker 3: look good, and Americans are really grouchy about the economy.
Speaker 3: I assume that that's the contradiction you're talking about, and
Speaker 3: I think there are some important short term reasons for that.
Speaker 3: Then much of the discussion about this revolve around and
Speaker 3: I'd spend time talking about that as well. A lot
Speaker 3: of it involves inflation, but my focus in the book
Speaker 3: is the long term, and I think that doesn't get
Speaker 3: enough attention. So yes, it's the case that people are
Speaker 3: grouchier now than GDP and unemployment suggest they should be
Speaker 3: because prices have arisen so much in interest rates to prison.
Speaker 3: That's absolutely true. But I also think it's true that
Speaker 3: the inflation is like the man. But the kindling is
Speaker 3: the fact that the economy has delivered disappointing results in
Speaker 3: the way that actually affect people's lives for so long
Speaker 3: that people that sort of just lit this fire of dissatisfaction.
Speaker 3: And I think that does not get enough attention. So
Speaker 3: it comes for the bottom ninety percent of the population
Speaker 3: have grown much more slowly than economic growth. Wealth has
Speaker 3: grown really slowly. You will sometimes your economists fighting about this.
Speaker 3: They'll say, well, but if you do this inflation inflation
Speaker 3: adjustment differently, actually the last few decades have been better
Speaker 3: than all these people say. I think that's wrong on
Speaker 3: the merits, but it's also wrong when you look at
Speaker 3: any other measure. I mean, look at various measures of
Speaker 3: social well being, like people's health. Look at what Americans
Speaker 3: say about the economy, not just now, but over the
Speaker 3: last twenty years. People are usually rouchy about it. And
Speaker 3: then to me, the real statistic that just ends this
Speaker 3: debate about whether the American economy is actually healthy in
Speaker 3: a long term way. Is the following. I think life
Speaker 3: expectancy is the most basic measure of how well a
Speaker 3: society is serving as citizens. And in nineteen eighty the
Speaker 3: United States had a typical life expectancy for a rich country,
Speaker 3: similar to Europe. And for about fifteen years now we've
Speaker 3: had the single worst life expectancy of any rich country,
Speaker 3: worse than every country in Western Europe, worse than Canada,
Speaker 3: worse than Japan. And it's not even that close. This
Speaker 3: is the first chart in my.
Speaker 1: Book I'm covailing because today we had Jonathan Bernmurdoch from
Speaker 1: ft ON to talk about the life expectancy problem. Sorry,
Speaker 1: we go on going.
Speaker 3: No, he's great, he does plastic charts on social media
Speaker 3: and fantastic work. Overall, it's a shocking chart fifteen years right. Well,
Speaker 3: so there are two things, right, There's the gap between
Speaker 3: the US and other countries, and then you look within
Speaker 3: the US. The reason why our life expectancy data is
Speaker 3: so bad is that the life expectancy for people who
Speaker 3: don't have a four year college degree has just absolutely stagnated.
Speaker 3: It was growing really slowly, and then it even started
Speaker 3: falling a little bit before COVID, and then it plummeted
Speaker 3: during COVID. But this isn't just only a COVID story.
Speaker 3: These trends pre date COVID in a real large variety
Speaker 3: of ways. We are living a society with massive and
Speaker 3: massively higher inequality than we used to have, and that
Speaker 3: has affected people's health and their happiness and how long
Speaker 3: they live. And I think those of us who are
Speaker 3: lucky enough to be on the other side of that divide,
Speaker 3: I think it's really important that we spend more time
Speaker 3: thinking about how did we end up with this society
Speaker 3: that is so fundamentally sick for so many of our
Speaker 3: fellow citizens.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean that's a really good point. And a
Speaker 1: lot of this life expectancy stuff was made significantly worse
Speaker 1: by COVID and then following in short order deaths of despair. Right,
Speaker 1: So some of this should be able to be explained,
Speaker 1: at least on a macro level in America by this
Speaker 1: post pandemic period of insanity.
Speaker 3: In an absolute sense, that's right, but I think the
Speaker 3: relative is really important. COVID also hit France and England,
Speaker 3: and it also did bad things to life expectancy in
Speaker 3: all those countries as well. And when you look at
Speaker 3: it in a relative basis, COVID is not the most
Speaker 3: important part of a story here, because now all those
Speaker 3: countries have gone down, and on a relative basis, you
Speaker 3: just really see right around nineteen eighty, their lines keep
Speaker 3: going up at a different I don't mean exactly nineteen eighty.
Speaker 3: At some point in the ninet eighties, their lines can
Speaker 3: continue to go up at relatively healthy rate, and ours doesn't.
Speaker 3: And there seems to be something in particular that the
Speaker 3: United States is doing, and it's more than one thing
Speaker 3: that makes us particularly poor at keeping alive of our citizens,
Speaker 3: particularly our working class citizens. And that is a story
Speaker 3: that is much older than COVID. It's older than deaths
Speaker 3: of Despair, although they're important. It's a decade long story.
Speaker 3: It almost perfectly matches timing wise, the trends in economic inequality.
Speaker 1: So talk to me about this sort of political re
Speaker 1: alignments in the sixties and explain that to me a
Speaker 1: little bit, and how that factors into your these I.
Speaker 3: Have to say, so when I would disappear into archives
Speaker 3: of the Library of Congress or the Truman Presidential Library
Speaker 3: or the Minneapolis Historical society or you name it. I
Speaker 3: went into a.
Speaker 2: Lot of these.
Speaker 3: I read a ton of old newspapers. One of the
Speaker 3: things that I was really struck by was the echoes
Speaker 3: of our current political debates that existed in the sixties,
Speaker 3: or I guess we're echoing the sixties, not price verse.
Speaker 3: And what you really see start to happen in the
Speaker 3: early sixties is you see a whole bunch of people.
Speaker 2: On the left.
Speaker 3: The most influential figure in many ways was Seawright Mills,
Speaker 3: this Columbia University sociologist. He's one of the figures in
Speaker 3: my book. I'm sure many people have hurt his knee,
Speaker 3: and he wrote a couple of famous books, but he's
Speaker 3: this amazing character. He was a Texan who was a
Speaker 3: professor at Columbia University, and he rode a motorcycle down
Speaker 3: the Hudson River Valley to get to work at Columbia,
Speaker 3: and he loved picking fights with people, and he was
Speaker 3: a man of the left, and he said, look, the
Speaker 3: way to make change in this country is to do
Speaker 3: it through intellectuals. It's this notion that the way to
Speaker 3: create political change through the working class, which the left
Speaker 3: had long valorized Marxists had valorized at labor unions, had
Speaker 3: valorized it. See Ry Mills said, no, no, no, that's role.
Speaker 3: The way to create changes through intellectuals, through college students
Speaker 3: and college professors. And while he and his bellow leftists
Speaker 3: at the time had some really important and valid criticisms
Speaker 3: of the old Left, they were way too forgiving of Stalin.
Speaker 3: They had definite problems.
Speaker 1: This hits a little close to home because my grandfather
Speaker 1: got the Stalin Peace Prize.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 1: I didn't eat Yes, Howard Fast, recipient of the Stalin
Speaker 1: Peace Prize. Wow, my father found it in a box
Speaker 1: and dropped it. He was completely freaked out by the experience.
Speaker 3: Anyway, Yes, I'm sure. Anyway, there were really good critiques
Speaker 3: of the old Left that see right Mills and others had,
Speaker 3: but the notion that the way you create a mass
Speaker 3: progressive movement is through intellectuals was just fundamentally flawed. The
Speaker 3: numbers don't work. You can't create a mass movement just
Speaker 3: involving intellectuals unless you win over a lot of people.
Speaker 3: And what happened in the sixties, and it's that's a
Speaker 3: long complicated story. I'm not saying this all dates to
Speaker 3: the sixties by any means, is that increasingly the left
Speaker 3: in both this country and in much of the West,
Speaker 3: became a movement that was a movement of and by
Speaker 3: and for more highly educated progressives, and that created this
Speaker 3: big problem because the political right in our country has
Speaker 3: adopted this economic theory that is basically failed right, the
Speaker 3: idea that if we just get government out of the way,
Speaker 3: everything will be great for everyone, which is what Milton
Speaker 3: Treatment and Roden Reagan promised, and that's failed. I mean
Speaker 3: the income, the income stagnation, the life expectancy stagnation, the
Speaker 3: fact that people are so unhappy. A lot of that
Speaker 3: stems from this neoliberal economic revolution since the nineteen eighties,
Speaker 3: and the left has struggled to win over people from
Speaker 3: blue collar backgrounds of all races, has struggled to win
Speaker 3: them over because so much of the left is much
Speaker 3: more socially liberal and much more upset than most American
Speaker 3: voters are. And that's a story that really begins in
Speaker 3: the sixties and that we've seen accelerate recently. That helps
Speaker 3: to explain why you asked yourself, how is it possibly
Speaker 3: that the Democratic Party could have lost support over the
Speaker 3: last five years among Latino and Asian American and even
Speaker 3: black voters in the age of Donald Trump. How could
Speaker 3: that possibly be? And part of the answer is that
Speaker 3: the political left in our country is too geared toward
Speaker 3: the views of higher earning college graduates. And just to
Speaker 3: be glib about it, what I would say is if
Speaker 3: the Democratic Party spent less time listening to the views
Speaker 3: of white people with graduate degrees, which describes many of
Speaker 3: the people whose staff important progressive institutions, and more time
Speaker 3: listening to the views of Americans of color who don't
Speaker 3: have a four year degree, the party would become more
Speaker 3: moderate and probably more successful.
Speaker 1: This is a thesis that a lot of people have,
Speaker 1: but I disagree with it for a bunch of different reasons.
Speaker 1: But the reasons why I wonder. It's definitely a more
Speaker 1: nuanced conversation, and I want to keep talking about the book,
Speaker 1: but it's certainly a thing a lot of people think
Speaker 1: is right. But I'm just curious when you look at
Speaker 1: the sort of Republican's complete failure to you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: they sort of had one idea, which was trickle down economics. Right,
Speaker 1: do you think there's ever a moment, I mean, especially
Speaker 1: now when the when the Republican Party has turned so
Speaker 1: populist when they start to develop other economic ideas besides
Speaker 1: less taxes for the rich.
Speaker 3: Well, you see, I don't want to exact great Helmut,
Speaker 3: but you see little bits of it, right. I mean,
Speaker 3: I have been genuinely surprised by how much bipartisan legislation
Speaker 3: Joe Biden has been able to sell. And I just
Speaker 3: thought the Republican Party was too obstructionist for them to play. Yeah,
Speaker 3: me too, And look that is we should just credit
Speaker 3: Joe Biden and his aides. They manage that legislation really well.
Speaker 3: And Barack Obama was a fantastically successful president in a
Speaker 3: bunch of ways, like he passed the health reform that
Speaker 3: no other president had been able to pass. But Obama
Speaker 3: didn't really succeed at winning over Republicans to big, ambitious
Speaker 3: bills for I think a whole bunch of reasons. Bill
Speaker 3: Clinton didn't succeed be it. And Joe Biden has succeeded
Speaker 3: where Obama and Clinton struggled a little bit more. And
Speaker 3: I do think that Biden deserves some personal credit for that,
Speaker 3: but it's not just personality. And I think on the
Speaker 3: infrastructure bill and the semiconductor bill, you do both, which
Speaker 3: got some Republican votes. You do see some Republicans basically saying,
Speaker 3: wait a second, some of this Reaganism stuff doesn't actually work,
Speaker 3: and we need the government to do some things. Some
Speaker 3: of it's about competition with China. So you see it there.
Speaker 3: You see it with found Republican skepticism on a bunch
Speaker 3: of trade. This hasn't led to any legislation, so I
Speaker 3: don't want to exaggerate it. But you know, Mark or
Speaker 3: Rubio signed a public letter about how labor unions are important,
Speaker 3: so there are little signs. You know, Josh Holly talks
Speaker 3: about how bad Silicon Valley is because it's so big.
Speaker 3: Now he does it with a conservative bent, but that's
Speaker 3: start of the point, right Josh Liberally. The point is
Speaker 3: you do start to see some ways in which arts
Speaker 3: of the Republican Party are questioning trickle down economic But
Speaker 3: I don't want to exaggerated. Donald Trump's only significant Billy
Speaker 3: sign was a huge tax cut, mostly for the rich.
Speaker 3: The Supreme is still very much this trickle down Reganist philosophy.
Speaker 3: So you see little signs, but not more than little.
Speaker 1: It's such an interesting point, so who are the sort
Speaker 1: of if you were you've written this whole book about
Speaker 1: the history of it. You know, you have real insights
Speaker 1: into what the American economy looks like and probably what
Speaker 1: it needs to look like. What are the sort of
Speaker 1: tools like it does seem to me like the Biden administration.
Speaker 1: And again this is really not you know, this is
Speaker 1: one of the things I know the least about, but
Speaker 1: it does seem from like talking to Paul Krugman and
Speaker 1: people like that, and you know, we have justin Wolfer's
Speaker 1: on a lot that this administration has worked really hard
Speaker 1: to try to think creatively to solve some financial problems
Speaker 1: and even I'm thinking about like some of the problems
Speaker 1: with anti trust too rite, which has become a huge problem.
Speaker 1: But are there sort of kind of magic bullets out
Speaker 1: there that people aren't using. Do you see a sort
Speaker 1: of anything that you think historically people have not used
Speaker 1: that they should be.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I agree with you. The administration is trying
Speaker 3: to do a bunch of interesting and important things. But
Speaker 3: there is a very beginning the revolution and anti trust
Speaker 3: that Robert Borke over Sawborg has become famous for being
Speaker 3: a failed Supreme Court justice who was super conservative of
Speaker 3: all kinds of things, but actually his biggest intellectual contribution,
Speaker 3: as it were, was getting people comfortable with the idea
Speaker 3: of defanging anti trust policy. It took him decades to
Speaker 3: persuade people to do that, and it's going to take
Speaker 3: decades if kind of the new trustbusters like Tim Woo
Speaker 3: and Lena Kom can persuade the country to go back.
Speaker 3: It's going to take a lot of intellectual work defining
Speaker 3: what is too big. They've started, but really only just started.
Speaker 3: So I would say that Biden folks have done a
Speaker 3: bunch of interesting things. If I were to highlight maybe
Speaker 3: one thing. It's not a magic bullet, but I think
Speaker 3: it's really important. I think as a country, and I
Speaker 3: think the political left too, has really underemphasized the importance
Speaker 3: of organized life. And we start to see some real
Speaker 3: new recognition of that now. And we've had some big
Speaker 3: wins for the actors and writers and autoworkers unions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right. It's been an incredible time for labor.
Speaker 3: But there's a big butt which it is still phenomenally
Speaker 3: difficult for people who are not already in unions to orderers.
Speaker 3: One of the central characters in my book is one
Speaker 3: of these people who I think most Americans, and I
Speaker 3: would guess most of your listeners have heard his name
Speaker 3: and could give you a sentence or two on him,
Speaker 3: but don't actually know his story. A Philip Brandall who
Speaker 3: organizes the first important union of black Americans in the country.
Speaker 3: It's the Brotherhood of Sleeping Hard Quarters, the name of
Speaker 3: the union with sexist. It also included maids on these
Speaker 3: Pullman trains, which were fancy trains that wealthy people took.
Speaker 3: And Randolph spent twelve years trying to organize this union
Speaker 3: in the nineteen twenties and thirties, and he lost and
Speaker 3: lost and lost. He just kept losing. At one point,
Speaker 3: the union's furniture was thrown out on the street in
Speaker 3: Harlem because they couldn't afford to make their payments. And
Speaker 3: he signed workers up, but the company refused to negotiate.
Speaker 3: And it really is the same tactics that we see
Speaker 3: today at companies like Starbucks, in which people say we
Speaker 3: join a union and the company just kind of ignores
Speaker 3: them or figures out excuses to fire the people or
Speaker 3: give them bed shift. And then only, but not the
Speaker 3: only reason. The first thing you needed was Randolph organizing
Speaker 3: this incredible group, this incredible union. And then the second
Speaker 3: thing you needed was changes to federal government policy that
Speaker 3: forced companies to actually recognize and negotiate with the union
Speaker 3: when most workers wanted to join it. And only in
Speaker 3: nineteen thirty seven when that change in government policy happened
Speaker 3: did the Pullman Company need to negotiate with Randolph and
Speaker 3: his union. And it led to this incredible victory, decline
Speaker 3: in hours, increase in wages, and it also became the
Speaker 3: really the building blocks of the civil rights revolution. In
Speaker 3: the civil rights movement country, Randolph was the organizer of
Speaker 3: the march that scared FDR so much he agreed to
Speaker 3: integrate wartime factories to get the march counciled. In nineteen
Speaker 3: forty one, he was called the March on Washington, and
Speaker 3: twenty two years later in nineteen sixty three, when they
Speaker 3: held the actual March on Washington, they were just redoing
Speaker 3: the Randolph's original idea. And so it's just an amazing
Speaker 3: bit of history with a showdown between FDR and Randolph
Speaker 3: and all this incredible stuff. But to me, the lesson
Speaker 3: for today is, yes, the autoworkers and Hollywood unions have
Speaker 3: won some big victories, but we're not going to see
Speaker 3: fundamental change with this until we have a change in
Speaker 3: the law that makes it possible for Amazon workers and
Speaker 3: Starbucks workers and a lot of other workers who aren't
Speaker 3: unionized today to be able to organize. And Joe Biden
Speaker 3: said he was in favor of that. I don't doubt
Speaker 3: he was, but he didn't have the support in Congress
Speaker 3: to get it passed. And this is an issue labor
Speaker 3: law reform that whenever a Democratic president comes in they
Speaker 3: say they're in favor of, but it doesn't quite rise
Speaker 3: up the priority list the way healthcare reform or climate
Speaker 3: change or something else does. And I think the only
Speaker 3: way we're going to see real change in the percentage
Speaker 3: of Americans belong with labor unions, which will help people
Speaker 3: earn better wages, which will help the progressive political movement
Speaker 3: in this country, is if there is reform of the
Speaker 3: law so companies can't just crush unions the way they
Speaker 3: so often do.
Speaker 1: Now, thank you so much. A moment, all right, Rick Wilson.
Speaker 1: We have to do a thing that you and I
Speaker 1: do once a week, that thing we do, that thing
Speaker 1: we do. It is a moment of fuckery. My moment
Speaker 1: of fuckery this week comes via Elon Musk, who sits
Speaker 1: on a pile of government contract Have you heard of him?
Speaker 2: He sits on a throat of lives and spells like
Speaker 2: beef and cheese.
Speaker 1: He also controls, like, I don't know, a large percentage
Speaker 1: of the satellites.
Speaker 2: Yes, he actually controls fifty percent of the communication satellites.
Speaker 2: And we're been around the earth today. What could go wrong?
Speaker 1: Nothing at all. He sort of backed himself into a corner.
Speaker 1: He continues to tweet at and interact with largely the
Speaker 1: most far right people on what's left of his burning
Speaker 1: hunk of social media. He's my moment of fuckery because
Speaker 1: I am just watching this go up in flames more
Speaker 1: and more, and he is become more and more right
Speaker 1: wing and unhinged and interacting with the Charlie Kirks and
Speaker 1: all of it. And he has all of this control
Speaker 1: over the lights and starlank and he's made billions of
Speaker 1: dollars on government subsidies. And for that, he is my
Speaker 1: moment of fuckery.
Speaker 2: That's a great moment of fuckery. I gotta be honest,
Speaker 2: because it's.
Speaker 1: A huge moment. It's like the last year.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and look, I've said this before. I think some
Speaker 2: of the things that SpaceX does are tremendously important and impressive.
Speaker 2: Just so people remember this, Elon Musk does not build rockets.
Speaker 2: He's not a rocket engineer. He's not a car engineer.
Speaker 2: He's a guy who's got a pile of PayPal money
Speaker 2: that he'd got there in the nineties and he's leveraged
Speaker 2: it over and over again to buy these big companies
Speaker 2: and now he's become the greatest troll in the world.
Speaker 2: But to move on from.
Speaker 1: Yeah, who is your moment of fuck Gray Moore?
Speaker 2: You know my moment of fuckery? I got to go
Speaker 2: back to the classics this week. I got to go
Speaker 2: back to Donald Trump once again, because on Thanksgiving Day,
Speaker 2: Trump continues to post on his dollar store janky low
Speaker 2: end kmart social media platform truth Social, and on Thanksgiving
Speaker 2: Day he tweeted out probably the most deranged and insane
Speaker 2: threats that you could imagine. And I have to say,
Speaker 2: there are two moments of fucker here. One is that
Speaker 2: Trump keeps doing this, threatening the judges in the cases
Speaker 2: that he's under investigation in, threatening the legal system, and
Speaker 2: they are the people who won't fucking do anything about
Speaker 2: it at this point. A normal person who was threatening
Speaker 2: a judge in a case would be in jail at
Speaker 2: this point. If John Smith had been talking about Judge
Speaker 2: Ernigan and his clerk and his people were posting their
Speaker 2: home addresses and they were getting rolling waves of death threats,
Speaker 2: the person who was causing that would be in jail,
Speaker 2: and Trump isn't. Yeah, he would go to jail for
Speaker 2: contempt and he's not. So you know, Trump keeps pushing
Speaker 2: the legal system further and further, but the legal system
Speaker 2: keeps not doing anything about it. And that's a very
Speaker 2: dangerous precedent. It's a very very dangerous present.
Speaker 1: That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
Speaker 1: every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to hear the best minds
Speaker 1: in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you
Speaker 1: enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to a friend
Speaker 1: and keep the conversation going. And again, thanks for listening.