Hello and welcome to another episode of the Feudal Future podcast . I'm Marshall Toplansky , I'm Joel Kotkin and you know , joel , our podcast is all about unintended consequences , and today we are going to tackle some really interesting nuances around that topic when it comes to populism .
And to help us do that , we've got two wonderful guests Bill Binning , who is a professor emeritus at Youngstown State University in Ohio and political scientist , and our old friend Michael Lind , who is a writer and historian , a teacher at University of Texas and a contributor to Tablet magazine .
His newest book , hell to Pay how the Suppression of Wages is Destroying America , is just out . And gentlemen , welcome , thank you . Thanks for having us .
Joel , why don't you kick us off and ask about the state of populism and where things are going ? Yeah , and maybe populism particularly Bill , in your state . Historically , we've thought of Midwestern populism as being predominantly a left-wing phenomena . In recent years , it seems to have shifted a bit . What do you think is happening ?
Do you think populism is bifurcating in a place like Ohio , or is one tradition overcoming the other ?
I would say that a lot of it's . At this point , what's most noticeable is it's on the , I guess you'd say the right .
Let me give you this experience that you know we had James Traffick as a congressman for quite a few years and he was quite a , he was a Democrat , but he was quite , quite populous in his , in his speeches , in his style , and I'm not certain that he didn't sort of set .
And in Mahoning Valley , of course , one of the parts of Ohio that has shifted , that's realigned , has become much more Republican and been voting Republican and likely going to be carried by Trump , and I think that the groundwork for that was laid by the populist message of James Traffick .
And then a lot of the same things , a little different , a lot of the same things picked up by Trump and the MAGA message . So I mean that's my contribution . I don't really know .
We've had a lot of populism coming from the Democratic Party of late in Ohio but , like I was mentioning before , I thought there was a lot of the National Democratic Party certainly trying to pick that theme up in their convention .
Well , that opens up the question really of the history of populism .
Mike , maybe you can give us a little history lesson here about how far back populism goes as a theme in American presidential politics or even regional politics Brian or Huey Long in Louisiana during the Depression , or Traficant , or others including Trump , who at least they claim to be representing disfranchised groups , groups that are not represented in the political
system , and historically there could be two outcomes to that no-transcript . There are other cases where you don't have a functioning democratic system . That was true of the American South for most of the period between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Revolution , and so the populism there .
It never resulted in the incorporation of the concerns of the people that the populists claim to lead . Often they betrayed them , but they claimed to lead them . In much of the South you had a one-party , oligarchic regime run by the Democratic Party , the Southern Democrats , the Bourbon Democrats .
Run by the Democratic Party , the Southern Democrats , the Bourbon Democrats . They policed the mail , they suppressed dissent , they threw away Republican votes . I mean it was a quasi-dictatorship as well as being an authoritarian state .
I say this as a fifth-generation Texas and as a result , instead of having so , for example , the William Jennings Bryan agrarian populist concerns were ultimately addressed successfully by the progressives and by the new dealers . So you get the farm subsidies , you get for small banks ? You get the FDIC .
That was an 1890s populist thing , but it becomes incorporated into the political system . That was an 1890s populist thing .
But it becomes incorporated into the political system . So is this a typical response ? Is that you have a disenfranchised large group of people that have an agenda and then , while they put candidates out , that may be kind of fringy , but ultimately their agenda gets subsumed by one of the mainstream parties . Is that kind of the typical pattern ?
Well , it's one pattern and that was what happened with agrarian populism in the North and East and the Midwest . So , for example , woodrow Wilson refused to vote for Bryan . Wilson was a Democrat but at least one of the times Bryan ran he voted for the third party candidate . Fdr was for McKinley against Brian . I think he was too young to vote in 1896 .
But of course Brian eventually became Secretary of State for Wilson and resided protest over World War I . But , as I said , even though they detested Brian and Brianism , woodrow Wilson and FDR have this kind of elitist incorporation of the conservatives and the policies of the populists .
But in contrast , I think you have this Southern pattern where you just have this oligarchy in the South that was at the state and local level and they just they don't respond right .
They either co-opt the populists by buying them off or the populace betray their followers and create their own corrupt political machines , like the law machine in Louisiana , and you don't get the incorporation of these alienated voters .
So let me ask this of both Bill and you . Let me ask this of both Bill and you . It seems to me that if you were to look at who feels disenfranchised today and is represented in the Trumpian populist movement , it is people who are involved in manufacturing jobs middle class people , working class people in manufacturing jobs or trades .
And particularly small business owners . I think that's really .
Yeah , okay , and let's add that in , because now we're talking about non-industrial , non-oligarchic people . So is that particularly manifested in your area ? Go ahead , bill .
Yeah , let me give some limited context to that . Gives some context , limited context to that that manufacturing is certainly the case , that in the case of the Youngstown , ohio and probably many Midwestern de-industrialized areas , the current population feels aggrieved because their parents and or their grandparents did much . They felt or they feel they did much better .
They had industrial jobs in steel or in auto and they made at that time good wages , they were unions and they could buy a boat and a mama could stay home and life was good . And now if you go to the child or the grandchild , those opportunities are not there anymore . They're going to work maybe two jobs . They're going to work .
They don't get very good benefits , their pay is not very good . And so when you get somebody with well , I mean , trafficking was the voice for that we just say that's what Trump picks up in the Mahoning Valley . And what we've seen from that is that he's sort of redefined what the Republican Party is , at least in that part of Ohio .
And now we could predict I mean , predicting elections is a dangerous business , but we could predict that he's going to do he that is Trump's going to do very well in the Orange Valley and all along the eastern border , but that's a grievance .
A grievance is these males who feel that somebody screwed them and they're mad , and that people like Trump give voice to this . Grievances , these grievances .
Can I take issue with that ? It's not just angry white men . Uh , white married women vote uh , just like their husbands do . In fact , the only democratic presidents since world war ii who have received a majority of the white married female female vote were Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton in 1992 . So the gender gap is really kind of a myth .
It exists statistically , but if you factor out particular groups' advantages . So , for example , african-american women have extremely high rates of being single . Uh , african-american women have extremely high rates of being single and they also have extremely high rates of being democratic because they're african-american . Uh , single women tend to be uh , very democratic .
So I just want to push back on this angry white man uh thing .
It's actually families uh well , I'll make the point that it's the men who were working in the I'm not taking into account the whole female it is the males , historically , who had the jobs , and women working in the steel industry or the auto industry in the 50s , and it's not , and they may share the grievance of their spouse it's the male .
Well , it also goes to the role of the male in the household , because they were big breadwinners and now that's been in many cases . Their spouse , their wife , is a better breadwinner than the male . That just rubs salt in the wound .
But this is the family dynamic here , that you're both pointing out actually . Yeah right , if you look at , we're deep as we're recording this , we're deep into the political campaign season and JD Vance , who's the I was going to bring up JD .
You know obviously JD . You know Bill from you know .
Ohio politics yes .
And both Mike and I know him personally , so he's all about the family . Yeah , yeah , how does he ? How does he ? Is he successfully synthesizing the family and the class issue ? Or or is he ? Is he a failure , because obviously mainstream media has very little positive to say about him ?
Well , I think he's making an effort and of course he's having a hard time . One , developing his message and two , he can't break through the legacy media with any kind of message because they take up soundbites from 10 years ago and make that his message . So I think he's been trying to do that .
I'm not certain he's been very successful yet in delivering his message because he's getting distracted by all of these , by the cat lady , by all these other things that the legacy media picks up from things that are not . They didn't even say during his campaign . So I don't know that he's breaking through .
I think he thinks that way , but I don't think he's breaking through .
Mike to the family , because the corporate Republicans , the libertarian Republicans , want all mothers of young children in the workforce from immediately after birth . Maybe they'll give them like six weeks of paid leave .
So the Chamber of Commerce Republicans are in favor of daycare outside the home , because the basic model for growth shared by the conventional Republicans and Democrats now is no longer industrial , technological , productivity growth . They have no idea how to bring that about , they simply want to expand the workforce .
So both the business Republicans and the Democrats , who are now the party of the affluent in business mostly the elite businesses and professionals Through immigration , you expand the workforce Through providing daycare so that all mothers of young children immediately go back to work . You expand the workforce .
And then that means more spending , you know , more consumption , et cetera .
So there's a faction of moderate social conservatives that JD Vance is associated with , or in Cass at American Compass and so on , which responds to what a substantial number of American women a majority of American women say , that , given the choice , they would rather stay at home when their children are young or work only part-time .
Only a minority of American women want to work full-time while they have young children , and that minority is mostly college-educated professionals who belong to what I call the three-parent family . It's the working father , the working mother and the nanny who was paid to take care of the kids so that both parents can work .
And the Democrats somewhat to my surprise , I grew up as a Democrat are utterly hostile to homemakers . Now , for example I mean , I was talking to Democrats on the Hill over the last few years they absolutely oppose giving subsidies to homemakers to match subsidies for daycare . Okay .
So , for example , the Democrats have proposed universal preschool , universal daycare outside the home . Well , germany and Canada and various other countries give parents money and they can spend it either on institutional daycare or to support a stay-at-home caregiver , usually the mother , but maybe a grandmother or the father or something .
Not a single Democrat , to my knowledge , supports allowing parents to have a choice .
That's very interesting , which kind of goes along with homeschooling as well , if you look at that similar breakdown . But you know so I'm hearing from you guys a theme here that the pivot for populism at the moment one pivot is the changing nature of the family . Let me ask whether there are other pivots out there , potentially .
Let me ask whether there are other pivots out there potentially . So , for instance , the notion of the expanding public debt and the deficit kind of reminds me of the William Jen turn of the 20th century . Is that also a pivot , or is that something you think is just not involved in the populist debate at all ?
Not only elites care about the deficit . It's an excuse to cut government spending , by which they mean programs on the working class and the middle class , not raising taxes on themselves .
We see , by the way , I think , the potential betrayal of both populists and progressives , by Republicans like Trump and by Democrats like Schumer going after these crypto billionaires Because the crypto thing is a scam , right , I mean , we're not going to replace government fiat money with these crypto coins where you have to generate vast amounts of electricity to data
mine to test . So basically , this is a pump and dump scheme that these Silicon Valley investors want to get rich from , and both parties now are chasing their money . And it reminds me of this is a really obscure part of American history . A lot of the original populists in the 19th century remember William Jennings . Bryan was kind of an opportunist .
He kind of glommed on to this movement that already existed . It had started , you know , with people it was the Bitcoin of his time . We know that , the silver thing . A lot of the original agrarian populists claimed that Brian sold the populist movement out to the silver mining interests .
Right , but now maybe Trump will sell out the right-wing populists to the Bitcoin miners . Oh , that's very funny .
I think that what we have in the current political climate , or of the two major parties and their nominees and their platforms , is that was the older Republican Party . I don't know what Michael calls them , but the Party of the Bushes , et cetera . That was one of their . Remember Bush made I was thinking about this , he made the Bush .
I made a commitment that my lips , no new taxes . And then he broke that because they felt taxes were necessary to deal with the budget issue . We never hear anything from any of these candidates about the budget issue or the deficit .
We just keep rolling along in bigger debts and nobody talks about funding Social Security or funding Medicare or what we're going to do about any of these fiscal issues . That's ignored by both parties . So I don't know if it's a turning point . We just dropped it .
I mean that's the old Republican Party and I don't know that it'll come back if Trump's movement fails . I mean you could argue that the Trump movement has taken over the Republican Party , at least occupied it , at least temporarily . And if he doesn't win , are all Republicans , the elites , the country club clouded , as Michael said , the chamber of commerce ?
Are they going to come back Because that's their issue , the old balance of budget , cut spending or raise taxes or do something dangerous to have this big debt . But you don't hear that from political elites who are seeking office .
I agree with that , although there's one little asterisk . When she ran in 2016 , Hillary Clinton promised that no taxes would go up on any household making less than $200,000 a year . They were middle class , right .
Right .
Now , as this is basically the professional upper middle class right right now . Now , as this basically the professional upper middle class among at least white americans is now one of the bases of the democratic party . So by 2020 , uh , joe biden promised that no household making less than four hundred thousand dollars a year tax right , if their taxes go up .
Uh and uh , I think . I think the democratic platform makes the same number . It's it's four hundred thousand dollars . So on the democratic side , you can't raise taxes on the people you would have to raise taxes on if you're going to solve the deficit through taxes .
Right to his credit , in my view , one of his few principles is he doesn't want to cut Social Security or Medicare . This is just unpopular with his followers , right . So I do think , I agree . I think that this issue , it will be pushed in the prestige press , in the business community , but I think politically , it's a non-starter in either party .
One of the things I Certainly it is now , yeah , and the question is will it come back ? We don't know Right now . Nobody's talking . There's no Bush , the first out there .
Or Pete Peterson .
But what I also wonder about is when you're talking about who this populist movement is . Populism has a very mixed history with issues of race , but one of the more surprising things , at least until the Harris coup took place , was that the Democrats were losing Hispanics , even some African-Americans , some Asian voters . How is populism ?
It seems to me populism and race are sort of a very unstable combination . What do you see going out there ?
Well , what I see is racial de-alignment in politics by and large and educational alignment , and this has been going on for some time , that is , the diploma divide within all racial ethnic categories even African Americans , who were the most partisan Democrats is increasing . So non-college-educated Hispanics and Asian Americans are much more likely to be Republican .
Like non-college educated Hispanics and Asian Americans are much more likely to be Republican , like non-college educated whites , and the reverse is also true , that is , college educated Hispanics and Asians are more likely to be Democrats .
Now , this cannot last in a two-party system , because working class people are the majority in every democracy , including our own in Western Europe and so on . So the only reason you have two parties is that the working class is divided by other issues and arguably race has been the most important issue from the civil rights issue up in era until recently .
But so if the salience of race is declining on both sides right , not just among whites becoming less racist , but also among non-whites becoming less afraid that the Ku Klux Klan is going to come back , that they're going to go back to segregation and so on there've got to be other issues and I suspect the issues are going to be these kind of family and value
issues . They're not necessarily religious right type issues , but you know just . You know the differences in the lifestyle references among working class families and highly educated professional class families .
And of course you have issues like- .
I think Mike was right on that point . I think we see that We've seen that in this cycle of the election A race has not been very salient and some of the groups that he mentioned have been breaking away from the Democratic Party . They were held by old racial themes but now they were breaking away .
Whether that is a temporary hold on that with the Harris candidacy we'll have to see .
Well , mike , I just want to drill down a little bit further on your point . What aspect of this divide are you really referring to ? Is it having children versus not having children , our lifestyle choices ? What are , you think , the pivot points ?
I think it's paid care . Let me explain . The New York Times had a great statistic a few years ago . It's still valid , I'm sure the average American they looked at women because women live longer than men . In the US the average American lives within like 18 miles of her mother .
Okay , so ever since then I've been going to college , educated audiences and saying how many of you live within 18 miles of your mother ? Well , of course not , because if you go to college , your career has to define your identity and you go and this is what I did . I left Texas for Washington and New York for 30 years .
That put career above local , locality and neighborhood and family . If you're most working-class people now there are some working-class people with specialized jobs , like if you're a roustabout on an oil rig or something like that , you have to go to North Dakota .
But if you're a janitor or a security guard or a clerk at the grocery store or a nursing aid , you can do that anywhere in the United States and so many of them just do it in the cities where they grow up .
If you look at periodically , there's some story about how astonishing it is Enormous numbers of Americans not only live in the state in which they were born , but they live in the city in which they were born , which is true of me , but I'm very rare for someone with my education and so I think this whole caregiving thing is going to become a big axis not
necessarily populism , but will divide the parties , because the Democrats now are the party predominantly of professionals and their ideal is the two-order family . Well , that means you have to have someone take care of the kids .
If you have kids and you live a thousand miles away from your mother and your grandmother and your aunt and your uncle and so on , and so it's going to look after them . Either you pay them it's a paid caregiver out of your own pocket or it's universal daycare of some kind . And the same is true of multi-generational families .
Traditional working class families are more comfortable maybe because they didn't have an alternative with having the widow , grandmother move in with them , than I think the upper middle class couple is right . You know , we'd rather have them stay in a separate home as long as possible .
So are you projecting that we'll see pushback from people who are living in the same area that they grew up in , have family , have that infrastructure , against subsidizing that extra care ?
Yeah , I think so because it's a problem of coastal big city professionals more than it is of working class people in medium and small towns , because they have these local family networks to look after the kids even if both parents are working .
Bill , how does that ring to you in Ohio ?
Yeah , Well , and it's certainly true Crystal House is not one place and certainly what Michael talks about is the case in Youngstown that an extraordinary number of the percentage of the population was born there . There are very few people moving there . People were born there and they have a lot of networks to families .
You go there , they have big weddings , big other social activities because they've got all kinds of cousins and second cousins , et cetera , et cetera , all there and there's hardly a very few people .
I mean I was was there because I was , I moved there because I was teaching school , but but you're rare and you're you're you looked on as rare because most people there are don't even know people or meet people from someplace else . But you would not find that in columbus , for example . I mean that that's a very mobile place .
But I want to go back to another point on Michael's point about this family .
I mean one of the issues and I think Vance is trying to get at it but one of the things that we're seeing is that it's a very low birth rate and that's occurring to a great extent with the population that Michael's talking about professional questions , but they're not even getting married anymore . There's a very large percentage of young people .
I don't remember what it is statistically , but a very significant proportion of people 30 or 40 , are not married . People are not getting married and I think a lot of those people are in the class that Mike was characterizing . And if they get married they don't have any children .
And of course I think that that's what Bass was getting at when he was talking about the cat lady , but that's of course he just got . He never got his . I don't think he got the message . I don't think he got the message . I don't think that was the message . That's the point , lady , is that the elites especially are not one .
They're not getting married and if they're getting married , many of them are not having children . And of course that goes back to the Social Security problem . You don't have a population , a younger population , to work and pay taxes .
I just saw it , he just came out with it , I think the birth rate again , the United States birth rate again , is down one or two percent over the last year . So that's a continuing problem . But it's part of this culture that Michael Parks among elites especially , but even younger people , a lot of them are younger people without college education .
They can't see any opportunity for them to get married , to have a house , to have a wife , to have a kid , and the women don't see males as significant breadwinners where they can create that kind of life . So we're in a strange place .
Well , I guess it's kind of a weird notion that if populism depends on population and if you don't have any population , you're not going to have populism . So who knows what's going to happen 30 years from now , when nobody's around ?
Well , yeah , well , one of the really interesting things as we try to figure out where this is going in the long run is Eric Kaufman's book , where he talks about that ultimately the Western countries will have to go further to the right , because the only people having children tend to be conservative and tend to be religious .
You know , the religious will inherit the earth . The question is , will things in the interim get so bad that even the religious won't have kids ?
Well , I've looked at the data and it's true that , all other things being equal , everyone will be Mormon or Amish in like 500 years , but it takes .
that's how long it takes right under Amish in like 500 years but it takes that's how long it takes right , it's not a short-term solution to your shortfall , which there's this overwhelming pressure to use immigrants to plug the gap . But that's kind of a Ponzi scheme , for two reasons . First of all , the immigrants themselves get old .
So like do you bring in ever-increasing numbers of immigrants to keep the age ratio ?
And they have less children too , increasingly .
They assimilate and then they become low-fertility like everybody else . But the other thing is every country in the world except for like half a dozen now has below-replacement fertility rates , even in the Middle East and in South America and much of Asia and Israel is one of the few countries that is reproducing at a sufficient rate .
But otherwise it's a few sub-Saharan countries and Central Asian countries , and once that dries up then I think Eric Kaufman's point kicks in the only population which without some kind of government incentive you know incentive is having kids will be the very religious sectarians .
So , in terms of trying to put this all together , I'd like to ask each of you what do you think the future of populism is ? What will it look like as it evolves ?
You know , particularly once we get rid of Trump one way or the other , it's almost impossible to have rational discussions with Trump around , because his followers are kind of nutty and the people who hate him are kind of nutty . So where do you see the future of populism beyond the Trump years ? Will it help the right ?
Will it help the right , will it help the left ? Or how will it redefine our politics ?
Well , I think we're going to see decades of very bad Deep South type populism rather than good New Deal type response .
Because what should have happened if we were to have a happy ending is that , as of 2016 , the democrats should have said you know , we needlessly alienated all of these working class , white , midwestern , you know people in youngstown and elsewhere , and we're going to reach out to them and we're going to dial down the left wing , defund the police and the white
privilege stuff and all of that . Instead , they doubled down on their cultural leftism and on their , you know , basically defined 40% of the population as fascists , not just Trump . All Republicans are fascists and Nazis trying to overthrow America according to like mainstream democratic propaganda . So that's not outreach to the populist masses .
With Trump , I think we'll see what happens if he gets reelected I think it's unlikely at this point , but he strikes me as 90% of the populists in American history , whether they were mayors or governors . We never had a president , except maybe for Trump and Andrew Johnson and Jackson . They betrayed their followers .
They were just in it for themselves , you know , and then they just as they use their power to pass out favors to their cronies and to create family dynasties in some cases .
So , but what that means is , I think I'm worried that we're seeing this kind of situation where you have this unrepentant oligarchy , including many Democrats and Republicans who think we're not . These people are trash , I mean , they're rabble .
You know we're not going to compromise with them and they're going to become extinct anyway as the country becomes more non-white . So let them die . We hate them . That's the elite and it's kind of like the southern ruling class , you know , in the old days .
And then on the other side you will get people , some on the left like Bernie Sanders , but mostly on the right , like Trump . They will pop up every few years and some of them will have some success , uh , but they will ultimately fail because they're not that serious . You know there's no movement behind them , uh , and that would be a very disruptive society .
It would be post-democratic in many ways what do you think ?
I'm not . I'm not so sure . I thought about this a little bit . What would happen ? It's going to happen anyway , because even if Trump wins , he's going to be a short term , Of course , unless he can change the Constitution . He's only going to be there for a short while , and I think that that's where Vance comes into play .
I think that's where Vance comes into play . I think that's where Vance comes into play , even if they lose , because then you're going to I think particularly we'll call it the Republican Party , but let's say the right and you're going to see people like DeSantis and Vance sort of be competitors , I think , to create a message .
It's because they're not going to have personality . Trump relies greatly on his acting ability , his personality . They're going to have to rely more on themes and ideas , and so I think we're going to see , probably , as you would expect , I think , there's going to be an unusual amount of turmoil within the Republican Party if Trump doesn't win .
And you're going to see , as Michael talks about the older class , the elite Republicans try to come back , bush-growth try to come back and grab the reins . Of course you're going to see a lot . It's going to be a lot of fun to watch what happens when Trump disappears .
It's going to be whether it's sooner or later , but I think you're going to see the continuing conflict . There's not going to be agreement within the Republican Party , consensus as to what they're all about and who their leader's going to be . We see some contenders .
Creative destruction , I think , is the economic term for what is about to happen here , although I'd have to say the Democratic Party .
Those would be my two picks .
Santa was really since the meeting you know he was really on a lot of cultural issues . He just wasn't able to seem , I mean , at the Legacy meeting . It wouldn't give him a break , but he couldn't break out of Florida . They changed , made him a book burner and a lot of other things . The same thing they're doing to Vance .
You can't really get his ideas out either . Like I said , they take these things he said 10 years ago and talk about the cat lady . But those two have new ideas too that appeal to the working class in many respects and I think I don't want to pick up any more of the time , but we see that with Vance .
It's not necessarily clear to me , but when he talks about his acknowledging unions and the importance of unions , et cetera , is that going to become part of the media , the Republican Party ? Is that going to become part of the media the Republican Party ? Is that going to get crushed again ? Is that going to become an anti-union party when this subsides ?
So there's a lot of uncertainty against the World War I , but I think a lot of the action is going to be in the Republican Party . I don't know the Democratic Party . I think Michael's right .
I mean , it's a group of elites and they pulled a coup and they're going to try to keep control and they sort of agree on a lot of things and they're not really telling us what to do either .
Well , I would describe the Democratic Party as now the soft Stalinist party . I mean the degree of unanimity , the embrace of censorship , the ability of small groups to just designate people I mean as much of .
I can't stand Trump personally , but at least he did compete in a primary and had to prove something , and I just think that we're going into a period where it's very interesting .
There's one last question , maybe for Mike Do you think the Republican Party is where this turmoil over populism is going to take place , because the Democratic Party is basically now a done deal .
Yeah , I think it's basically the out party in American history that has an incentive to have debates right , because they want to get back in . And the Republicans , even though they go back and forth in the House and the Senate , they haven't won the popular vote in the White House since 1988 , right , with the exception of George W Bush in wartime in 2004 .
They've lost every major cultural , media , academic institution . I mean , they are the out party and I think there's I agree with Professor Binning there's going to be a huge debate between these different wings and a lot of creative policy thinking and a lot of different strategies .
Whereas the Democrats are now , they're the hegemonic party among the American establishment .
The way , say , the Republicans were in the McKinley era , right , where just everyone was an Episcopalian Republican , you know , in publishing and business and so on , and they'd have no incentive especially if they're winning demographically to , in fact , if they have any debates that will endanger their majority , right .
So you kind of have to choose between intellectual creativity among the outsiders and then , once you're inside , then you try to shut down thinking and just sit and debate because you're afraid you'll mess things up .
Well , we are living it this is the fun part about all of this is that we're part of living history . Gentlemen , thank you so much . Bill , it's a pleasure to have you on the show . Mike , thank you again for coming back Once again .
Your new book , which is Hell to Pay how the Suppression of Wages is Destroying America , is out , and thank you so much for being here .
Thank you for being part of the Feudal Future podcast , and we'll probably we will like to revisit this , maybe after the election , to see where we stand on the issue of populism , which I think is one of the more interesting movements in modern American history and , frankly as well in Europe as well .
Thank you , gentlemen , thank you frankly as well in europe as well . Thank you , gentlemen , thank you .