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