Speaker 1: And so he ended up creating his own version of
Speaker 1: the elite in his mind. And this gets for me
Speaker 1: at least one of the big takeaways in understanding what
Speaker 1: we mean when we talk about elites is almost never
Speaker 1: are the critics of the elite trying to get rid
Speaker 1: of it. They're just trying to replace it and become it.
Speaker 2: I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea. I served in
Speaker 2: the CIA's Clandestine Service for twenty eight years, living undercover
Speaker 2: all around the world.
Speaker 3: And in my thirty three years with the CIA, I
Speaker 3: served in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Speaker 2: Although we don't usually look at it this way, we
Speaker 2: created conspiracies.
Speaker 3: In our operations. We got people to believe things that
Speaker 3: work true.
Speaker 2: Now we're investigating the conspiracy theories we see in the
Speaker 2: news almost every day.
Speaker 3: Will break them down for you to determine whether they
Speaker 3: could be real or whether we're being manipulated.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Mission Implausible. We're going to be speaking today
Speaker 2: with Evan Asenos from The New Yorker, and what it
Speaker 2: brings up is his level of expertise and talent makes
Speaker 2: me question, Adam, did you really work for The New Yorker?
Speaker 2: Like it's like the two different planets talking to Evan
Speaker 2: Asenolsen and you.
Speaker 4: I couldn't agree more. Evan is, I will say, Evan
Speaker 4: is like a reporter's reporter. He works his butt off.
Speaker 4: He could definitely get away with working a lot less,
Speaker 4: and then he's the full package, which is annoying. Really
Speaker 4: nice guy.
Speaker 2: And I think we could speak to him about most anything.
Speaker 2: But one of the things we spoke to him about
Speaker 2: and we're going to be talking about is probably the
Speaker 2: basis of so many conspiracy theories, the notion that there
Speaker 2: is a person or a group that runs things, There
Speaker 2: is an elite who is in charge of our lives
Speaker 2: that we have no influence over. Personally, I would like
Speaker 2: to be the person who's in charge.
Speaker 4: I would so not want to be the person in charge.
Speaker 4: I feel like my whole life I want power with
Speaker 4: no responsibility. So I guess that is the person in charge.
Speaker 2: I remember when I worked at CIA, if you came
Speaker 2: in the back door, the main door for the new
Speaker 2: part of CIA, to go from where you walked in
Speaker 2: downstairs to the main lobby, there was a escalator, but
Speaker 2: the escalator was only one person wide, And my thought
Speaker 2: was if I was in charge, what I would do
Speaker 2: is I would stand at the bottom of that escalator
Speaker 2: and anyone who just stood on it all the way down,
Speaker 2: I would fire them at the bottom of the because
Speaker 2: you would get you were busy on your way to work,
Speaker 2: and then some idiot would stand there and you couldn't
Speaker 2: pass them. On this escalator. You have just to stand
Speaker 2: and wait three floors down to like And I said, listen,
Speaker 2: if you if you have so much time on your hands,
Speaker 2: you can spend five minutes just going down this escalator
Speaker 2: without just walking down the escalator, then you're out. So
Speaker 2: that was my whole desire for power.
Speaker 3: And the thing about the elites is whatever their agenda is,
Speaker 3: it's not our agenda, right, So that means that things
Speaker 3: that are going wrong in the world, it's their fault.
Speaker 2: And if we wanted to be in power, I guess
Speaker 2: we would have to then have an agenda. We're just
Speaker 2: too lazy to an agenda.
Speaker 4: Exactly what would the agenda be. But that is the
Speaker 4: essence of conspiracy. Right at the end of the day.
Speaker 4: Almost every single one we're talking about is there's a
Speaker 4: secret group of people with obscure intentions, incredible power omnipotent,
Speaker 4: and we can't quite understand them, and there's no evidence
Speaker 4: that exists that can either prove or disprove their existence.
Speaker 4: But for some reason, we're going to believe they exist.
Speaker 2: Our guest today is Evan Osnos, an author and a
Speaker 2: staff writer at The New Yorker. He covers politics, foreign affairs,
Speaker 2: and spent a long time living in and covering China.
Speaker 2: He's written several books, including a book and a numerous
Speaker 2: articles on Joe Biden, infect interviewing him many times. He's
Speaker 2: also one of the regular hosts of my go to podcast,
Speaker 2: The New Yorker's Political Scene. So today, among other things,
Speaker 2: we want to speak with Evan about an article he
Speaker 2: wrote for The New Yorker in January called Rules for
Speaker 2: the Ruling Class, about how politics has become a game
Speaker 2: of elites disparaging other elites. Evan, you're part of the
Speaker 2: media elite, and apparently Jerry and I are part of
Speaker 2: the deep state elite. So my first question is does
Speaker 2: the term elite have a distinct meaning anymore or is
Speaker 2: it just a handy weapon to rail against enemies? Because
Speaker 2: if I'm a bureaucrat in the deep state, making what
Speaker 2: one hundred thousand dollars a year. How do those wealthy
Speaker 2: and real elite, powerful people get to come and attack us.
Speaker 1: I got onto this for almost exactly the question that
Speaker 1: I think interests you, John, is this question of if
Speaker 1: everybody is an elite, then who is left to be
Speaker 1: doing the accusing. I mean, I'll give you a prime example,
Speaker 1: Josh Hawley, Senator from Missouri. This is not a partisan critique.
Speaker 1: This is just an observation of reality that Josh Hawley
Speaker 1: grew up the son of a bank president. He went
Speaker 1: on to study at Stanford and then got his law
Speaker 1: degree and met his wife while they were both clerking
Speaker 1: for John Roberts, chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He's
Speaker 1: now a sitting US Senator, But when he talks about
Speaker 1: his political mission, he talks about going after elites, going after,
Speaker 1: as he puts it, some of the most powerful people
Speaker 1: in society, which left me honestly scratching my head, which is,
Speaker 1: if he's not one of the most powerful people in society,
Speaker 1: then who is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the word elite is a weird one as well,
Speaker 3: because it's like the silly putty of a word. Everybody
Speaker 3: thinks it's really cool to be an elite Navy seal,
Speaker 3: you know, or an elite diver, the elite Olympic team.
Speaker 3: So everybody wants to be an elite, but that's not
Speaker 3: something you want to be called in politics.
Speaker 1: I actually concluded that we love the adjective and we
Speaker 1: hate the noun. So we love elite navy seals. But
Speaker 1: if your child has made the elite swim team, you're
Speaker 1: going to be telling everybody about it, including if you're
Speaker 1: going out to hang out with fellow conspiratorial minded people
Speaker 1: who worry about the elites. What do we mean when
Speaker 1: we talk about elites. I've concluded that what we are
Speaker 1: actually talking about is status. And when I say that
Speaker 1: somebody is the elite, what I'm really saying is that
Speaker 1: I think that they look down on me politically, culturally, morally, economically,
Speaker 1: and that this really is about social rank and status
Speaker 1: and everybody, even if you are Rupert Murdoch, there is
Speaker 1: somebody who you look at and you say that person
Speaker 1: looks down on me. Tucker Carlson wanted to be an
Speaker 1: establishment elite. That's what he wanted. He desperately tried to remember.
Speaker 1: He created a news organization that was intended to be
Speaker 1: the conservative version of The New York Times. He had
Speaker 1: joined the most establishment institutions he could. He had joined CNN,
Speaker 1: he joined WMSNBC. He bombed out of those organizations.
Speaker 3: He tried to get into one other elite organization, and
Speaker 3: to quote Vladimir Putin, he failed to get into the CIA.
Speaker 3: I've just yes thrown it out there.
Speaker 1: I'm so glad you mentioned it, because when I was
Speaker 1: assembling his biography of Aspiration, every single thing that he
Speaker 1: was trying to do was to join the elite. You know,
Speaker 1: he tried to get into elite universities and he was
Speaker 1: not able to as he acknowledges. He eventually got into
Speaker 1: college because his girlfriend's father was an alum from Trinity
Speaker 1: College who put in a phone call and got him in. Then,
Speaker 1: by Tucker Carlson's own description, he got a string of
Speaker 1: d's there. He really didn't didn't do well, got rejected
Speaker 1: from his application the CIA. So one after another he's
Speaker 1: being rejected by organizations, and ultimately he does this self
Speaker 1: reinvention and decides that in fact, it was his time
Speaker 1: on the inside, his time sort of in the atmosphere
Speaker 1: of the ruling class that gives him credibility and He
Speaker 1: turns that into the core of his new mission, which
Speaker 1: is to say, we have an incompetent ruling class. And
Speaker 1: it is I, dear listener, who who knows this, because,
Speaker 1: as he says, I grew up in and among them,
Speaker 1: there's a scholar who calls them frustrated elite aspirants fea
Speaker 1: for the purposes of this conversation, but there it's a
Speaker 1: really important cohort all the way back through history.
Speaker 2: Doesn't Donald Trump play that as well? Didn't he want
Speaker 2: to be part of the New York elite and is
Speaker 2: upset that he wasn't treated that way. The things you
Speaker 2: just said about Tucker Carlson could be said about Donald
Speaker 2: Trump as well.
Speaker 1: One hundred percent. At first, Donald Trump wanted to get
Speaker 1: into Manhattan. That was going to be his innovation on
Speaker 1: the Trump story, get us out of the boroughs, get
Speaker 1: us into the city. Then he wanted to go to
Speaker 1: Palm Beach. There's a whole fascinating little story about him
Speaker 1: trying to get into the most exclusive country club in
Speaker 1: Palm Beach, and he was, depending on who you believe,
Speaker 1: he was rejected. He says, no, I wasn't rejected. But
Speaker 1: then and this is the most sort of relevant part.
Speaker 1: He turned this estate, Mara a Lago, which had been
Speaker 1: a private home, he turned it into a club, and
Speaker 1: as he said to his biographer later, he said, and
Speaker 1: I have a better club than them anyway, which is
Speaker 1: like the kind of spirit that you usually hear from
Speaker 1: a ten year old. But he was him acknowledging that
Speaker 1: this is about social rank, and so he ended up
Speaker 1: creating his own version of the elite in his mind.
Speaker 1: And this gets for me, at least, one of the
Speaker 1: big takeaways in understanding what we mean when we talk
Speaker 1: about elites is almost never are the critics of the
Speaker 1: elite trying to get rid of it. They're just trying
Speaker 1: to replace it and become it. They want to put
Speaker 1: their own people on top. And Trump, in his own way,
Speaker 1: is always it tends to be more blunt about this
Speaker 1: than other frustrated elites. And he says at one point
Speaker 1: he started saying right after he won the presidency. He
Speaker 1: started saying in twenty seventeen and has said ever since
Speaker 1: then to his crowds, he says, you know, they call
Speaker 1: themselves the elite, but I think we're the elite. He says,
Speaker 1: we have better boats, we have better this better that.
Speaker 1: So that's his understanding of what it means.
Speaker 2: I lived in Yugoslavia with Melosovich and the Serbs who
Speaker 2: told his people were the victims even though they were
Speaker 2: actually the majority, and then they could attack people they
Speaker 2: want putin and Russia is doing the same too. We're
Speaker 2: the victims. Therefore we can do whatever we want. There's
Speaker 2: power in victimhood. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think that's a huge insight because it's a binding agent.
Speaker 1: It takes people of disparate issues, disparate geography. They may
Speaker 1: have all these different things in common. But if you say,
Speaker 1: we together are fighting this common foe, and even better
Speaker 1: if it's like a faceless foe that doesn't really even
Speaker 1: announce itself. I mean, the best possible foe is hidden, right,
Speaker 1: it's the deep state, or it's these you know, it's
Speaker 1: media editors who are pulling the puppet strings. You guys
Speaker 1: have talked about this on the show. But the idea
Speaker 1: that there might be some actual entity, some force, some
Speaker 1: Masonic solution to like the things that we can't really
Speaker 1: explain in our own lives, seems to be somehow hardwired
Speaker 1: in what we want.
Speaker 3: But I was wondering if you could talk gal briefly
Speaker 3: on politicians who channeled that sense of like they're against
Speaker 3: us and I'm gonna because no program is complete without
Speaker 3: going back to the Roman Empire. There were the patricians
Speaker 3: and the plebeians. Everybody knew in that mobila volgas. That's
Speaker 3: where the word mob comes from. You know, it's like
Speaker 3: the how do the patricians take care of the underpaid
Speaker 3: poor in the streets? And famously, the plebeians were getting
Speaker 3: more and more power, and they finally reached out to
Speaker 3: one guy who said it was going to give it
Speaker 3: to them all, Julius Caesar, and he got rid of
Speaker 3: the republic and get rid of it all. So what
Speaker 3: is the business model for elites to basically gaslight people
Speaker 3: into thinking that they're going to represent them and are
Speaker 3: able to represent them. Because it works, It's worked for
Speaker 3: the last two thousand years.
Speaker 1: So there is this we could call it a sort
Speaker 1: of populist opportunity, and it's cyclical. As you say that,
Speaker 1: you get this kind of building of charge. I think
Speaker 1: sociologically that as people get more frustrated, they see the
Speaker 1: demonstrations of wealth and power that are concentrating into the
Speaker 1: hands of a few. This is a reality.
Speaker 3: It happens.
Speaker 1: But there are two ways that you can get through it.
Speaker 1: One way is you get through it by people at
Speaker 1: the top saying we think this is unsustainable, we think
Speaker 1: this can't last, and they almost willingly say, I will
Speaker 1: make an adjustment to a void revolution. I mean the
Speaker 1: example is this is not abstract. This is essentially what
Speaker 1: the New Deal was. And there was a book that
Speaker 1: I thought is really interesting on this subject by a
Speaker 1: guy named Peter Turchin called End Times, where he looks
Speaker 1: at the American experience and he says it was in
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties we were reaching a point when a
Speaker 1: demigogue could have emerged in the United States and said
Speaker 1: I'm going to harness you workers and we're going to
Speaker 1: overturn the system. Instead, what you had was Franklin Roosevelt,
Speaker 1: a traitor to his class, as he would acknowledge, basically saying,
Speaker 1: I'm looking at our current disposition of power in this country,
Speaker 1: and if we continue down this track, we will not survive.
Speaker 1: We will succumb to the kind of revolutions we've seen
Speaker 1: in other countries. This was after the Bolshevik Revolution, and
Speaker 1: so amazingly as a result of New Deal sort of
Speaker 1: redistributive programs, but also efforts to try to help the
Speaker 1: very poor. You actually saw the number of millionaires in
Speaker 1: this country decline on an absolute basis between nineteen twenty
Speaker 1: five and nineteen fifty, which is an amazing thing considering
Speaker 1: how much population growth there was at the time. That
Speaker 1: was in a sense, Roosevelt was recognizing the patterns that
Speaker 1: Jerry you're describing and saying, these are our options. I'm
Speaker 1: going to take the non revolutionary route.
Speaker 2: Let's take a break.
Speaker 4: We'll be right back.
Speaker 2: And Rebecca, let me turn a little bit here, because
Speaker 2: I think no journalists to spend more time with Joe
Speaker 2: Biden than you have. Are there beliefs that Joe Biden
Speaker 2: seems to have that he sticks with even if they're
Speaker 2: no longer true. Like, for example, I follow Russia and
Speaker 2: there's a lot of us are frustrated with how the
Speaker 2: administration has dealt with Putin of late in Ukraine. They
Speaker 2: seem to tend to act as if Putin is Mikhail
Speaker 2: Gorbachev and they're negotiating an arms control treaty and they
Speaker 2: got to worry about the balance of power and saving
Speaker 2: face and avoiding escalation when I'm frankly, you know, I
Speaker 2: look at Putin as a gangster, and you have to
Speaker 2: deal with them in a different way. So in your
Speaker 2: dealings with Biden, what is his mindset around these kinds
Speaker 2: of things?
Speaker 1: So it's an interesting thing to describe as a conspiracy,
Speaker 1: But I'll tell you one that he deeply believes in,
Speaker 1: which is that he believes that there is still, in
Speaker 1: fact a possibility for conspiratorial progress in American politics. Meaning
Speaker 1: he believes that if he can get Mitch McConnell and
Speaker 1: Joe Manchin to sit down with him, that they'll look
Speaker 1: each other in the eye and they'll reach some half
Speaker 1: a loaf solution. And the truth is he hasn't been
Speaker 1: one hundred percent wrong. He's actually managed to do that,
Speaker 1: particularly with Manchin. He was able to pick the lock
Speaker 1: and find his way there. But he has run up
Speaker 1: against the outer limits of what that theory allows when
Speaker 1: it comes to dealing with people who are essentially combatants
Speaker 1: rather than politicians. The Matt Gates is of the world,
Speaker 1: the Marjorie Taylor Greens right now, particularly the House Republicans.
Speaker 1: And I think you guys see this ten times better
Speaker 1: than I do. There are some core operating systems with
Speaker 1: how you imagine human affairs, And if you're from the
Speaker 1: Putin playbook, let's say, or the Siegen Ping playbook, you
Speaker 1: really are not all that interested in coming up with
Speaker 1: a political solution to a problem where you get something
Speaker 1: and I get something and we've come away a little
Speaker 1: bit unhappy. No, they believe ultimately that power is the
Speaker 1: bottom line, and that powerful people and countries and entities
Speaker 1: should prevail over weaker people and entities. And Joe Biden
Speaker 1: really doesn't believe that. Joe Biden believes in this other thing,
Speaker 1: which I don't want to romanticize it, but like at
Speaker 1: various points in our history, it has actually been very
Speaker 1: possible that you can get a bunch of people into
Speaker 1: a room with very different ideas, but you can find
Speaker 1: that area of overlap, and that's been a powerful that's
Speaker 1: been an asset for him, but there are limits to it.
Speaker 1: I do remember flying with Biden at one point back
Speaker 1: from Ukraine in twenty fourteen. He was over there in
Speaker 1: his capacity as VP, and I was writing a piece
Speaker 1: about him, and this was after the invasion of Crimea,
Speaker 1: and his view at the time, not that anybody was
Speaker 1: particularly listening. He was the vice president's not the most
Speaker 1: coveted office in the land. And he was pretty brutal
Speaker 1: about what he thought Vladimir Putin was. And he said
Speaker 1: at one point he was describing this scenario. And people
Speaker 1: can quibble with whether this anecdote happened exactly is described,
Speaker 1: but as he remembers it, what he says is that
Speaker 1: he looked into Putin's eyes and he says, I don't
Speaker 1: think you have a soul, and Putin said, I'm glad
Speaker 1: we understand one another. And when he told me that,
Speaker 1: which is in marvelous ago. But when he told me that,
Speaker 1: I say, that sounds like a movie line. Did it
Speaker 1: happen exactly like that? He said, absolutely positively. So whatever,
Speaker 1: let's bracket it and say that it was an expression
Speaker 1: of what he thought. And what he said to me was,
Speaker 1: that's who this guy Isvan.
Speaker 3: Let's talk about us for a little bit, the US
Speaker 3: being the deep state. This is another one of these
Speaker 3: very elastic terms. It means everything and nothing, and maybe
Speaker 3: it's a rorschat test as to how you view the world.
Speaker 1: So this idea, of course, the deep state is a
Speaker 1: concept's been around for a long time and it's been
Speaker 1: really a t active I remember that. One fun detail
Speaker 1: that always caught my attention was that, you know, Osama
Speaker 1: bin Laden's final residence, one of the things that they found,
Speaker 1: either in hard copy or on his computer was a
Speaker 1: copy of a book about Bohemian Grove. Because he was
Speaker 1: trying to figure out how power works in America. And
Speaker 1: give him time, I'm sure he would have been reading
Speaker 1: about skull and Bones or these other imagined sort of
Speaker 1: frameworks that we have. And it's so the current incarnation
Speaker 1: of that is what has come to be known as
Speaker 1: the deep state, but Steve Bannon called it the administrative state.
Speaker 1: And what they were getting at was this idea that
Speaker 1: there is this group of people that is and you know,
Speaker 1: braided into that means a combination of they went to
Speaker 1: fancy your schools than I meaning the person who believes
Speaker 1: this theory went to So they.
Speaker 2: Went to Harvard just exactly.
Speaker 1: But that's part of this gets back to the frustrated
Speaker 1: elite aspirint thing. Bannon not only went to Harvard and
Speaker 1: then worked at Golden Seat, but in some ways he
Speaker 1: was always had his nose pressed up against the glass.
Speaker 1: Like Tucker Carlson. He was trying to get as in
Speaker 1: as you can possibly get. And this is a pattern
Speaker 1: that repeats all the way back to the War of
Speaker 1: the Roses and this idea of people who wanted to
Speaker 1: be the ruling class, and when they get a piece
Speaker 1: of it, but they're kicked off the ladder at the
Speaker 1: higher rungs, then it radicalizes them and they become Bannon
Speaker 1: Carlson Trump. That is a very recognizable pattern. And in
Speaker 1: fact Trump had enough, he could find enough of those
Speaker 1: people around that he could fill a hole a good
Speaker 1: chunk of his administration with some version of that. So
Speaker 1: I think in that way, Jerry, I think that the
Speaker 1: current version of the deep state is it's a cousin
Speaker 1: of an imagination of power that is all the way
Speaker 1: rooted back in the ancient tropes around anti Semitism too,
Speaker 1: which is that it's impossible that I am rising or
Speaker 1: falling on my own merits. Therefore somebody must be conspiring,
Speaker 1: I guess.
Speaker 3: And what does that look like? On the left? Growing up,
Speaker 3: it was always those the power leads control everything. That
Speaker 3: was something that traditionally was more on the left things
Speaker 3: of things. It's the military industrial complex is running everything.
Speaker 3: Is that cyclical as well? Who's in or who's out.
Speaker 1: Well, it's notable too. It's fun to think about that.
Speaker 1: The concept of the power elite, which is the current
Speaker 1: incarnation of this theory, and that got rooted in the fifties.
Speaker 1: Eisenhower is famous for having established the idea of the
Speaker 1: military industrial complex. And one of the fun details is
Speaker 1: that actually Eisenhower wanted to make it the military industrial
Speaker 1: congressional complex. Yeah, and he thought about the military industrial
Speaker 1: scientific complex, and in the final speech it came out
Speaker 1: what it did. But he that's Eisenhower, not exactly a
Speaker 1: left leaning progressive, and so in some ways it tends
Speaker 1: to be that I think this exists in both forms.
Speaker 1: I mean the current version on the left, and Bernie
Speaker 1: Sanders is an eloquent exponent of this. But as often happens,
Speaker 1: it's impossible to be far enough in one position forever
Speaker 1: because there will always be somebody who outflanks you.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: So we've been talking about elites using the term elite
Speaker 2: to attack other elites. Let's talk about the average people
Speaker 2: out in the country.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: In your book Wildland, you travel around the country. Is
Speaker 2: the fury that people have out in the country is
Speaker 2: it based on lived realities or are people being manipulated
Speaker 2: to believe these things and to be so angry.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm glad you mentioned that, because I made a choice,
Speaker 1: a really specific choice, which is the subtitle of my
Speaker 1: book is deliberately the making of America's Fury, because making
Speaker 1: is a process that both happens partly of natural causes
Speaker 1: and partly it's artificial. It's generated, and there is a business,
Speaker 1: as we know, a business in making people angry. And
Speaker 1: you know, if we're being self aware, we see it
Speaker 1: in ourselves. We're more inclined to click on that link
Speaker 1: that seems to say something treacherous about somebody we don't like.
Speaker 1: But out in the country, I found this constantly. My
Speaker 1: first job out of college was in West Virginia, and
Speaker 1: I've always been going back over the years to try
Speaker 1: to understand how its politics have changed and moved. And
Speaker 1: when I first lived in this town called Clarksburg, West Virginia,
Speaker 1: it was overwhelmingly Democrats. This was in the late nineteen nineties,
Speaker 1: and then over the course of the last twenty five years,
Speaker 1: it's just transformed and it's now really squarely Republican territory.
Speaker 1: But I'll give you an interesting little demonstration of how
Speaker 1: things have moved in interesting ways. In nineteen sixty, remember
Speaker 1: the famous Democratic primary in which John Kennedy had to
Speaker 1: prove that he was not captive to the elite of
Speaker 1: the day, which was of course the Vatican, the Pope.
Speaker 1: People said, John Kennedy is going to be controlled by
Speaker 1: the deep state in the Vatican.
Speaker 4: That was how it was.
Speaker 1: And one of the ways that he proved that wasn't
Speaker 1: true was by going to West Virginia where it was
Speaker 1: an overwhelmingly Protestant state, and he could show that Protestants
Speaker 1: would vote for a Catholic Democrat. And one of the
Speaker 1: things that was notable to me when I looked at
Speaker 1: that compared it to today, was in this town of Clarksburg,
Speaker 1: West Virginia. In nineteen sixty, John Kennedy came to town twice.
Speaker 1: Robert Kennedy came to town, Hubert Humphrey came to town.
Speaker 1: All these figures came to town one after another, like
Speaker 1: really serious power brokers. John Kennedy went on television in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty for half an hour and answered questions from
Speaker 1: people in Clarksburg, West Virginia. And I asked folks at
Speaker 1: the Historical Society, okay, since then, which big Democratic power
Speaker 1: players have come to town? And they said, well, we
Speaker 1: went back and looked, and we, as far as we
Speaker 1: can tell, only one it was Jesse Jackson came in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty eight and that was it. So in some ways,
Speaker 1: as the party became more focused on urban areas and
Speaker 1: moved away from places like West Virginia, West Virginians began
Speaker 1: to say, maybe the Democratic Party, but not only do
Speaker 1: they not think about me? Are they actually maneuvering to
Speaker 1: make my life harder? And on some level they weren't wrong. Now,
Speaker 1: I could have a whole argument and about what Republicans
Speaker 1: were doing in that period to emserate West Virginia. But
Speaker 1: the practical effect is that at the moment it's a
Speaker 1: place where the making of fury has been very possible.
Speaker 1: It's fertile territory for them.
Speaker 3: And yet you've got guys like Jeff Bezos. So two
Speaker 3: hundred billion dollars and I did some rough estimates for
Speaker 3: an average worker at Amazon to ever get to where
Speaker 3: he is now, it would take them four point five
Speaker 3: million years. It it'd be back to the Pleocene era.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, I think that Americans have always had this
Speaker 1: slightly conflicted relationship to wealth and disparities of wealth. We are,
Speaker 1: after all, a country that was founded as a rejection
Speaker 1: of aristocracy. You know, we were supposed to be a
Speaker 1: place that was ideologically, spiritually opposed to things like inherited wealth.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, we were also always pioneering.
Speaker 1: We were frontier oriented the idea that you could build
Speaker 1: something out of nothing. It's one of the reasons why
Speaker 1: we're vulnerable to conmen, because we've always valorized the idea
Speaker 1: that you could go you could be Gatsby, you could
Speaker 1: go from zero to wealth in one lifetime. When wealth
Speaker 1: disparities have become when they have ballooned to radical levels,
Speaker 1: that's when it trips a wire in the American psyche
Speaker 1: and we begin to get angry. And we saw that
Speaker 1: in the Gilded Age, and I think it's a very
Speaker 1: credible case to be made that we're living through some
Speaker 1: of that now. I don't see how that can endure.
Speaker 1: I don't think that a country with that level of
Speaker 1: radical dissimilarity in lived experience can still hold together very well.
Speaker 1: Just to give you one prime example, if you're in
Speaker 1: McDowell County, West Virginia, you're an adult male, your life
Speaker 1: expectancy is eighteen years less than if you're over in Fairfax, Virginia.
Speaker 1: That's a very hard political solution to maintain. And so
Speaker 1: one piece of good news that is really interesting is
Speaker 1: that But actually, just in the last year or so,
Speaker 1: under it's really been during the Biden presidency, we're beginning
Speaker 1: to see levels of inequality narrow for the first time
Speaker 1: in a very long time. There was this period known
Speaker 1: as the Great Compression, when inequality did narrow from the
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties into the mid seventies, and it's been growing
Speaker 1: since then. But it's actually beginning to narrow to some degree.
Speaker 3: But how do you push back on these things?
Speaker 1: So I think one of the things that the data
Speaker 1: tells us is that if you can get people to
Speaker 1: pull themselves out of this nationalized political conversation all the
Speaker 1: time and get back to thinking about local issues, that
Speaker 1: is a step in the right direction. Take West Virginia,
Speaker 1: which we were talking about a moment ago. West Virginia
Speaker 1: historically had more little newspapers than anywhere else in the country.
Speaker 1: Just as a practical matter, the roads were poor and
Speaker 1: you couldn't deliver a newspaper very far and get it
Speaker 1: there by breakfast time, so every twenty miles there'd be
Speaker 1: a different newspaper. And so you had this intensely localized
Speaker 1: awareness of what was happening. You knew if so and
Speaker 1: so down the street had just opened a store or
Speaker 1: closed a story. You knew if the water treatment plan
Speaker 1: in your town was working or not working. And as
Speaker 1: everybody who listens to this podcast knows, local news is
Speaker 1: in real crisis. It is collapsing across the country because
Speaker 1: the economic model doesn't work. But one of the reasons
Speaker 1: why this matters is that the less people are getting
Speaker 1: from their local news environment, the easier it is for
Speaker 1: me to imagine the worst about my neighbor, because all
Speaker 1: I know about my neighbor is that he flies a
Speaker 1: Biden flag or a Trump flag. He is Team A
Speaker 1: or Team B. And I don't know that he and
Speaker 1: I both care about quality of education in the schools
Speaker 1: because we both have kids, or I don't know that
Speaker 1: he and I are both thinking about running for office.
Speaker 1: There's a way in which, when you lose that local
Speaker 1: connective tissue, people upload their political mind to the cloud,
Speaker 1: in effect, to the Fox News, to whatever Facebook is delivering.
Speaker 1: And so I do think one of the ways days
Speaker 1: of beginning to arrest that slide is by reinvigorating these
Speaker 1: instruments and these the sort of what some people call
Speaker 1: civic infrastructure, the spaces, the places, the institutions that really
Speaker 1: do give you a sense of place.
Speaker 3: Okay, let's take a break from the craziness just for
Speaker 3: a minute or two.
Speaker 2: And we're back. Hey, One thing I like about your
Speaker 2: article is you brought up Paul Fussell his book Class,
Speaker 2: and I remember years ago, I don't know even I
Speaker 2: was in graduate school reading that book. It was such
Speaker 2: a hoot and he enjoyed reading us So. Jerry brought
Speaker 2: up about the plebs, but Fusso talks about the polls.
Speaker 1: Fussel got something big about how societies work, which is
Speaker 1: classes are everywhere. You put two people in an elevator
Speaker 1: and they'll find a way to make one of them
Speaker 1: feel like they are outranking the other. You know, during
Speaker 1: the Culture Revolution, they got rid of any insignia on
Speaker 1: the uniforms, and that was part of this kind of
Speaker 1: radical spasm of classlessness. They discovered was that just doesn't
Speaker 1: work in practical terms, and so they needed to be
Speaker 1: able to figure out who's an officer and who is
Speaker 1: a plead to use Jerry's term. And what they discovered
Speaker 1: was that they had to come up with a new
Speaker 1: way of identifying themselves. So depending on if you had
Speaker 1: a pen or not, that signified if you were in
Speaker 1: the officer class, and the more pens you had, the
Speaker 1: higher up you were. So we can't just pretend it
Speaker 1: doesn't exist. But it's about managing it so that we
Speaker 1: understand that it doesn't become a source of this kind
Speaker 1: of nuclear powered dysfunction that has been so helpful to
Speaker 1: people like Steve Bannon who want to harness it.
Speaker 2: And Steve Bannon you can argue as a Leninist or
Speaker 2: a Molist.
Speaker 1: Essentially he is he really is. That's an analytical judgment,
Speaker 1: that's not a criticism. The man is a Mouist and
Speaker 1: he acknowledges it actually on some level. Maybe he'll write
Speaker 1: into the pod and say he's not. But he is
Speaker 1: somebody who believes in the nature of revolution as an
Speaker 1: organizing principle.
Speaker 2: Where did the concept of elites come from?
Speaker 1: The term came into our use from somebody vil Fredo Peretto,
Speaker 1: who is this kind of interesting, slightly eccentric economist, at
Speaker 1: the beginning of the twentieth century who was observing exactly
Speaker 1: the phenomenon you're talking about. Jerry. He was looking at
Speaker 1: societies and he was seeing everywhere he went that he said,
Speaker 1: it tends to be that there are always going to
Speaker 1: be elite. He didn't have the term yet, he coined
Speaker 1: it later. If you're talking about shoeshiners, there will always
Speaker 1: be elite shoeshiners, there will be some who lead the rest,
Speaker 1: same thing with thieves. There will be elite scholars, there
Speaker 1: will be elite political figures. And he needed a term
Speaker 1: for it, and that's where he brought in this French word.
Speaker 1: He was half French, half Italian, and he brought in
Speaker 1: this word elite, and that was derived from the Latin
Speaker 1: to choose, to select. And so you had this idea
Speaker 1: of this group of people, and that idea just seemed
Speaker 1: to satisfy something that we needed. But I think that
Speaker 1: concept turns out to be an instrument. That is, it's
Speaker 1: everywhere in Chinese jingying. Elite is something that people talk
Speaker 1: about and they will rail against the elites until they
Speaker 1: become elites, and it happens over and over again. Historically.
Speaker 1: One of the things that you do find is that
Speaker 1: people who are students of power tend to be very suspicious,
Speaker 1: like Saddam Hussein. They are suspicious of anybody who poses
Speaker 1: a threat to them because they know that in Sinsevilfredo
Speaker 1: Pereto was right. There is a circulation of elites. That's
Speaker 1: the term that Parretto had, which is elites never die,
Speaker 1: They're just replaced. There is always going to be a
Speaker 1: new generation that comes up and replaces you. And in
Speaker 1: some ways Parreto said, that's healthy. That's how societies get
Speaker 1: new leaders. And he used this metaphor of a river
Speaker 1: that if you damn the river, and so the elites
Speaker 1: refuse to give up power, then the water backs up
Speaker 1: and eventually bursts the banks. Look, I think there is
Speaker 1: an art we're dealing with a garrintocratic moment in American politics.
Speaker 1: We do have too many people who have stayed too
Speaker 1: long at the top of power across the board, and
Speaker 1: I think part one of the effects is that you
Speaker 1: get produces some strange effects in our politics.
Speaker 2: Is Joe Biden elite.
Speaker 1: One of the things you would assume President of the
Speaker 1: United States as a person at the height of American
Speaker 1: politics for now, half a century, you would think, how
Speaker 1: could you be any more elite than that? And yet
Speaker 1: anybody who really knows the texture of this community will
Speaker 1: tell you Joe Biden's kind of never really been at
Speaker 1: the pinnacle because it's about social status. It was because
Speaker 1: Biden didn't go He's a first president not to have
Speaker 1: gone to an Ivy League school in a long time,
Speaker 1: because he was going home to Delaware in the evening. Remember,
Speaker 1: of course, because of the death of his first wife.
Speaker 1: He would go home because to take care of these kids.
Speaker 1: But as a result, he wasn't part of the Washington
Speaker 1: social scene. There was also just an element of his
Speaker 1: personality that he was always a little too obviously ambitious.
Speaker 1: He was not the cool, calm, professorial type who could
Speaker 1: play it off. And so for a long time, the
Speaker 1: real elites in democratic politics, there was the Obama world
Speaker 1: and there was the Clinton world that says, I'm described
Speaker 1: this is not my analysis. I'm just I mean how
Speaker 1: it's actually felt by the players. And Biden was always
Speaker 1: a little bit on the outside. And it's one of
Speaker 1: the tensions has always been between the Obama world and
Speaker 1: the Biden world, and that has always been a source
Speaker 1: of energy for Biden actually and has been. I think
Speaker 1: one could argue a source of the reason why he
Speaker 1: eventually was able to make it to the presidency.
Speaker 3: So elite is a social construct as well. Right, it's
Speaker 3: not for the audience. It's not like you get your
Speaker 3: Elite card and dental plan, so you may be elite.
Speaker 3: I would consider Joe Biden elite, but he may not consider,
Speaker 3: which is a weird thing. My wife is British and
Speaker 3: there's a huge difference in there British culture between social
Speaker 3: status and money. I think money is often seen as
Speaker 3: being dirty, right, whereas in the US you've got status
Speaker 3: if you're rich, and in Britain it's not that way.
Speaker 3: You can be very rich, but you can still be
Speaker 3: like lower class.
Speaker 1: But like Donald Trump's a walking example of you can
Speaker 1: have the money and not be elite. Because he was
Speaker 1: not a part of that commune. He was not in
Speaker 1: the country club he wanted to be in. He would
Speaker 1: did not have the art collection that that would demonstrate
Speaker 1: cultural knowledge. He didn't use the right utensils at the
Speaker 1: right time, that kind of thing. This is why I
Speaker 1: think it's so fun about Paul Fussell's analysis is that
Speaker 1: he gets to the idea of the difference between an
Speaker 1: oriental rug in your living room versus a worn oriental rug.
Speaker 1: One of them is high prole, as he would put it,
Speaker 1: and one of them is elite.
Speaker 2: The used one is higher class. Right always, what's the
Speaker 2: deal with JD. Vance speaking of West Virginia and Ohio
Speaker 2: and issues.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's an interesting case because, as people will remember
Speaker 1: his self narrative is that he came out of Appalachia,
Speaker 1: and his whole memoir is about him distinguishing himself from
Speaker 1: the people around him, the people who would call in
Speaker 1: sick to the job, the people who didn't show up
Speaker 1: or didn't work hard. And he has a remarkable story,
Speaker 1: goes on becomes a marine, and then eventually goes to
Speaker 1: Yale Law School. And then interestingly, one thing that I
Speaker 1: have encountered over and over again is that his description
Speaker 1: of his own experience really bothers people in Appalachia. It
Speaker 1: is not a book that people like in that part
Speaker 1: of the world, because it feels as if he is saying,
Speaker 1: I did this through my own sheer, grit and smarts
Speaker 1: and discipline, and you guys are failing. And it gets
Speaker 1: to this underlying question that is at the core of
Speaker 1: any discussion of elites is about how much do I
Speaker 1: both deserve what I have and how much am I
Speaker 1: the author of my own destiny? And Jade Vance sort
Speaker 1: of wants to be this portrait of the rugged individualist
Speaker 1: who made it on his own. But a lot of
Speaker 1: people in the part of the country where he's from
Speaker 1: say that portrait does not ring true to me.
Speaker 3: So what are some of the current conspiracies about elites?
Speaker 1: I think one of the big ones is the idea
Speaker 1: that the government is going to take away everybody's guns.
Speaker 1: I encountered this before even Trump was on the scene,
Speaker 1: but it's a super theory. It encompasses a lot it
Speaker 1: requires for this theory to be true. And one of
Speaker 1: the great terms I've learned about conspiracy theories that I
Speaker 1: love is that they are self sealing. If they get punctured,
Speaker 1: they will figure out a way to seal themselves. So
Speaker 1: they still make sense. And one of the things that
Speaker 1: taking away guns requires is knowing where the guns are,
Speaker 1: so that means registering them. And anytime you start talking
Speaker 1: about registering people, that starts to ring a lot of
Speaker 1: conspiratorial bells. The idea that some faceless government entity will
Speaker 1: come and take you someday and tell you where to
Speaker 1: live and how to live. That's the thing that freaks
Speaker 1: people out. Thank you my pleasure.
Speaker 3: This is fun. I really enjoyed it. It was great meeting. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I hope to actually genuinely drink a beer with you
Speaker 3: sometime before.
Speaker 1: I'd love that. I'd love that. Help me in please,
Speaker 1: I'll book a flight to Hawaii and my family will
Speaker 1: just be there for a month.
Speaker 3: You'll barely know where that's all right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was fun, guys. It's a treat to join
Speaker 1: you on here. Thanks for the invitation.
Speaker 3: So let's now welcome Adam Davidson, a super numerary in
Speaker 3: all things conspiratorial. Adam, good to have you back.
Speaker 4: Good to be here, guys. Did you have fun with
Speaker 4: my pal avan?
Speaker 2: We did an impressive guy.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I try to read everything he writes because you're going
Speaker 2: to get insights and he's done the legwork, so he's
Speaker 2: an inssive dude.
Speaker 3: So, Adam, I got a question for it. After talking
Speaker 3: to Adam, he is like the poster child of mainstream media.
Speaker 3: What's your take on mainstream media now becoming like a
Speaker 3: pejorative and sort of Evan's place in that.
Speaker 4: The reason the New Yorker is so trusted and respected
Speaker 4: is obviously there's some great individuals, but there really is
Speaker 4: a system, Like there's this legendary fact checking system. There's
Speaker 4: these amazing fact checkers who really kill you as a reporter.
Speaker 4: They're really going I feel like every human being should
Speaker 4: go through a New Yorker fact checking once in your
Speaker 4: life because you realize.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've gone through it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's not the stuff that you were worried about.
Speaker 4: Like if you're writing an article about a country you've
Speaker 4: never been to, you actually end up getting a lot
Speaker 4: of those details right because you know you don't know
Speaker 4: them in yours, but it's all the stuff you knew
Speaker 4: for sure was true.
Speaker 3: Whatever. It is so unlike this podcast.
Speaker 4: Unlike this podcast where we have like the opposite of
Speaker 4: fact checking. So there's that, there's amazing editors, there's not
Speaker 4: to mention the lawyers and et cetera, et cetera. By
Speaker 4: some by the time you are reading something, it's gone
Speaker 4: through an incredible process. The thing is it's totally non economical.
Speaker 4: And I will say a dark secret, which is The
Speaker 4: New Yorker doesn't pay very well in fact, journalism is
Speaker 4: a profession where the more prestigious you get, very often,
Speaker 4: the less money you make. I went from NPR to
Speaker 4: being economics writer at the New York Times magazine to
Speaker 4: the New Yorker. I would that are each a step
Speaker 4: up in prestige, and I made about fifty thousand dollars
Speaker 4: less a year with each move.
Speaker 2: I hate to tell you about working at the CIA
Speaker 2: doesn't make you much money either.
Speaker 4: It doesn't either, and we thought this podcast game would
Speaker 4: do it.
Speaker 3: When you go to the senior ranks at CIA, you
Speaker 3: actually take a pay cut, right because you don't get
Speaker 3: over time anymore.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And you see a lot of people on social media,
Speaker 2: in other words, if they disagree with your point of view,
Speaker 2: if you're a journalist or someone who worked in the
Speaker 2: government the deep state, if you will they tell you about, oh,
Speaker 2: how much money they're paying you, how much money you're
Speaker 2: making money? Because the things that I care about, good
Speaker 2: journalism and credibility and people who actually know what they're
Speaker 2: talking about and working in government actually don't make much money,
Speaker 2: if any.
Speaker 4: I'm not going to name anyone at The New Yorker
Speaker 4: or elsewhere, but I will say within journalism, we really
Speaker 4: respect the ones who do the legwork and respect the
Speaker 4: other ones less. Now, Evan's also a really good stylist,
Speaker 4: which is, you know, being a great reporter and a
Speaker 4: good stylist and a hard worker. You know, we if
Speaker 4: we had a thousand more Evans, this would be a
Speaker 4: different country.
Speaker 3: So, and the thing that's thrown out often is that
Speaker 3: in mainstream media there's a slant. And I think that's
Speaker 3: fine to have a right or left slant as long
Speaker 3: as you know what it is, as long as the
Speaker 3: facts you report and what you're saying is accurate and correct. Right,
Speaker 3: the facts are right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's the New Yorker approach. The New Yorker is
Speaker 4: clearly it's from a point of view, but then we
Speaker 4: have to check our facts and make sure right true.
Speaker 3: But Tucker Carlson goes out and says things that are
Speaker 3: demonstrably not true, and arguably I don't think even he
Speaker 3: describes himself officially as a journalist, right, I think he's
Speaker 3: an entertainer or I'm not even sure.
Speaker 4: That's what his lawyer said in a lawsuit. They said
Speaker 4: this is entertainment. It would be absurd to imagine anyone
Speaker 4: would believe a word he said.
Speaker 2: But cable TV rewards that in a certain sense. They
Speaker 2: make their money off people coming on, filling up the
Speaker 2: time with people talking. I remember I never had spoken
Speaker 2: to a journalist or did anything, but when the twenty
Speaker 2: sixteen election came on, there was all the issue about
Speaker 2: Russian intelligence and what they might be up to. I
Speaker 2: found myself speaking to a variety of television stations and
Speaker 2: radio stations and things, and it's interesting. So I would
Speaker 2: go on to speak about something that I knew very
Speaker 2: well because I was directly involved with Russian intelligence in
Speaker 2: Russia and working the issues from here. But then they
Speaker 2: would call you literally every day to come on and
Speaker 2: talk about everything, and I just be like, no, I
Speaker 2: don't want to just get out there and blab about anything.
Speaker 2: But that's their model. They want people to come on
Speaker 2: there and just start throwing out opinions. And it's one
Speaker 2: thing to have an opinion that's backed up. It's another
Speaker 2: one to have an opinion just because you're mildly paying attention.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I was never good at that. I had a
Speaker 4: phase of my life where I was on cable TV
Speaker 4: a lot, like a lot, and I just found I
Speaker 4: couldn't like the people who really thrived were not the
Speaker 4: ones who knew more. They were the ones who were
Speaker 4: better at bullshitting, interjecting something that sounded like an opinion
Speaker 4: about something I knew for a fact they knew nothing about.
Speaker 4: And I struggled with that, although my wife and some
Speaker 4: of my friends would say, I do not struggle with that.
Speaker 4: I am very capable at bullshitting.
Speaker 3: Makes sense that when people said, you can have your
Speaker 3: own opinion, but you can't have your own set of facts, right,
Speaker 3: And I think with Alternate Fix that's changed. Now.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you really sound like, what did he just.
Speaker 2: Say, Adam? Can you tell me what he does?
Speaker 4: He was doing that boomer thing about how facts are
Speaker 4: like factual or something and not relative.
Speaker 3: Alternate Fix, great.
Speaker 4: Show, guys, As always, we really blowhearted our way through
Speaker 4: another one.
Speaker 3: Adam, I would vote to put you in the Elite
Speaker 3: even if no one else. You may be the last
Speaker 3: guy picked for the Elite team, but I still think
Speaker 3: you're on it.
Speaker 4: Thank you. Jerry, coming from another low life, you're the rut.
Speaker 3: Of the leader.
Speaker 4: Yes, that means so much.
Speaker 5: Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Seipher,
Speaker 5: and Jonathan Sterner. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission implausible.
Speaker 5: It's a production of honorable mention and a bottle of
Speaker 5: all pictures for iHeart Podcasts.