This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer from Bloomberg Radio. Our next guest is an award winning journalistic communications consultant who has worked for both A Barack Obama's presidential campaigns. He's a guest speaker at Stanford n YU. He's also a digital media producer who has worked with the likes of David Bowie, Moby Santana, Britney Spears, and a lot of others. Spencer Critchley is managing partner at the marketing agency Boots Road Group. He's got to do book out.
It's entitled Patriots of Two Nations, Why Trump Was Inevitable and What Happens next. Spencer joins us on the phone in Monterey, California on this election day. Spencer, nice to have you here with us. Oh, it's great to be with you. Thank you. So I want to be smart here without getting to political and pointing figures, because I feel like there's enough divisiveness and anger within our country right now. Um, and I don't want to point fingers
at a candidate or another. But your book, what I like about it is you look at history and I read something that you wrote, UM about it, about you understood kind of what happens and what's kind of happening in our nation right now, that this has been coming since the founding. America is two nations occupying the same land but seeing everything very differently, even including truth itself. Talk to us about that. I feel like that's a great topic and we could probably discuss it for hours. Yes,
I know, I certainly could go on for hours. It's an occupational but yeah, like like many people, I was stunned when Donald Trump won. I was helping out with the Hillary Clinton campaign that year, and I've been thinking about it ever since, and I started researching it and it did take me all the way back to the founding of the country. And I agree with you. I think we make a mistake if we blame, say Donald Trump, for example, for the division that we see in the
country right now. Um, I think he's a manifestation of a division that goes back to the founding. And ultimately, what I found was, while our founding uh fathers created the United States as the first civic nation based on Enlightenment reason, meaning you're not an American because of your ethnic identities, it's because you agree to support the Constitution and the laws of the United States, which is a free, rational choice, and that was the first country in history
to be like that. There was a counter Enlightenment resistance to that idea, and it wasn't just people being reactionary. There were people who said, yes, reason is important, but reason isn't enough. We also need to have faith and tradition and culture. For some of them it was race and art. And those people resisted the idea of a rationally dominated world, and we see that down to the present day. A lot of the loyalty to President Trump
is really a counter Enlightenment phenomenon. I would argue it's people who like him because of the patriotism and the preservation of traditional values and even loyalty to what they see as a strong leader. Well, it's interesting too that you kind of get into and again, like, I don't want to get political or point fingers or anybody, but our world we were going to have candidates like a Donald Trump. And I'm assuming you mean it could be
on either side of the aisle, the political aisle. Yes, it's it's more likely on the right because conservatism tends to be more of a counter Enlightenment tradition. Although you have to be careful about over generalizing that way. And in fact, everybody UH tends to thinking both the Enlightenment and counter Enlightenment mode. Basically everybody who liked art, music, tradition,
culture is thinking in a counter Enlightenment mode. But going back to say Edmund Burke, one of the founders of modern conservatism, he was a counter Enlightenment figure who was horrified by the French Revolution, which he saw as an example of Enlightenment rationalism gone insane. And I think he was right about that. There is a risk so we could see this on the left. We have seen less
wing demagogues. It can show up either way. And and the left, as I point out in the book, has its own kind of counter Enlightenment tendencies, although it tends to lean more it's it's dominated more by Enlightenment rationalism. There are sort of mystical counter Enlightenment features on the left as well, including with Karl Marx, who in some
ways was kind of a mystical thinker. Well, you know what's interesting too, And we had an earlier conversation on our broadcast UM talking about the digitization and use of digital and technologies within cities, and that basically the idea that technology and its own doesn't necessarily have the power of the efficacy unless you have a strong leader behind it to figure out how to use it right and and help it so that it creates a better society
and more equal society. And the same thing with kind of what you're talking about is that it feels like we have on both parties. Really you know, a group of citizens that are looking for strong leadership. That's true. And although the faith in an individual tends to be
more of a conservative counter Enlightenment tendency. But I'll tell you one thing that you hit on there is one of the risks with people on eyeside of this divide, the liberal side is the rise of technocracy and and too much faith in technocratic solutions, whether it's actually technology or bureaucracy, or faith in processes as opposed to preserving a sense of humanity at the core of it. And this is this kind of gets to the heart of
the counter Enlightenment objection to hyper rationality. On the Enlightenment side, Um, if you think about uh Nazi Germany would be one of the worst cases of the counter Enlightenment god mad because that was sort of an extreme malignant form of romanticism with an extreme degree of faith in a charismatic leader. Opposing that you get equally horrible results with the Soviet Union, which is the Enlightenment god mad, just as the French Revolution was, where it's way too much faith in systems
and the science taken to the extreme. And as I end up arguing in the book, you know, you you should not really choose one or the other. It's in order to really function well in the world, have a full life, and maintain a civilization. Frankly, you need to integrate both modes of thought. The trouble is, we've seen a widening gap between them in recent years, and uh, some folks operating in bad faith, I would argue, are
exploiting that gap for their own advantage. Well, I feel like gaps in general, right, you know, as a result of COVID nineteen, as a result of what happened to Minneapolis, and then subsequent you know, cases of racism that we've seen, you know, and maybe because it's all in front of us big time, because we've all been home and we've had the time to kind of see it front and center. You know, there are a lot of gaps within our society and whether you know, whatever you want to call it.
I mean, you you talk about this great divide in general, and then we also say, you know, until we kind of figure this out and we connect it, we've kind of not finished creating the United States. I think is a big idea, but I think an important one to think about, and just unfortunately a big idea only has
a minute laughter or so. Well. I appreciate, I mean, I really appreciate the attention you've given it, and you appreciate that you've read the book and really thought about what it means, and I think you know you've got it right. Um. There's it's hard to see this from either side of the divide, and it really required integrating
both world views to fully understand it. And the less sometimes people tend to see everything in terms of economics, um, and on the right, sometimes they see everything in terms of culture and identity. Uh. And you see crossovers even there. But you really have to see the big picture to understand it's not one thing that caused this division. It's complicated, it's smart, um, and it's a I just love the
provocative idea. Spencer, Thank you so much. His book, Spencer critically Patriots of Two Nations, Why Trump was inevitable and what happens next.