What if the Great Recession isn't to blame. So called populists have thrived in the aftermath of the two thousand seven to two thousand nine financial and economic crisis, but as economics the sole cause of the challenge to what we have come to call the liberal democratic order, our guests this week argues not there are other forces at work. After all, the nine year economic expansion gets heat for not generating a lot of wage growth. But it's not
entirely terrible either. There's something else going on, and it's not just Facebook or Cambridge Analytica either. Welcome to Benchmark, the show about the global economy. I'm Genus Smilik, an economics reporter at Bloomberg News in New York, and I'm Daniel Boss, economics run and editor at Bloomberg feut In. Joining up us this week is Bill Galston from the Brookings Institution in Washington, author of the new book Anti Pluralism,
The Populous Threat to Liberal Democracy. He's also a columist at The Wall Street Journal and was an advisor to former President Bill Clinton. Bill. Welcome, good to be here. So it's not just about their session in its aftermath. What is the popular strivel about it's partly about economics, but we have to understand what about economics it's about.
The Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti wrote a terrific book in called The New Geography of Jobs, in which he pointed out that the knowledge slash innovation economy is having the effect of boosting large, diverse cities because innovation turns out to be a social process and not a solitary process. So more and more of the economic growth in advanced industrialized economies is being sucked into metropolitan areas, and increasingly smaller towns and rural areas and former manufacturing towns in
particular are being left farther and farther behind. So the fundamental economic driver, in my judgment, is the new spatial geography of growth. But on top of that we have the sense of cultural displacement that many people are now experiencing, and the tip of that sphere is immigration and its consequences. Sounds like the recession might need better pr Are you saying the recession has become a kind of proxy or a trojan horse for other issues that perhaps wouldn't get
a hearing in truly fabulous economic times. Well in truly fabulous economic times. People tend to be in a pretty good mood. I can remember the last of those, in the late nineteen nineties in the United States. You were in the White House there. Well, I'd left the White House after Bill Clinton's first term, but I was certainly there to admire the consequences of those policies, and unemployment was way below four percent. Economic growth was robust. The
fruits of that growth were widely shared. But we still even then had intense controversy about the issue that I think is the heart of the matter now, which is immigration. Because immigration, for a lot of people is the trifecta of woes. They see it as displacing them from jobs, as putting a ceiling on their wages. That's the economic dimension.
They see it as a security threat, both because of increased crime from drug gangs and things of that sort, although that's greatly overblown, and also because as things now stand in the world, it's seen as a potential source of terrorism. But third, and most importantly, I think it's
seen as the v vehicle of cultural displacement. People see immigration as changing the fundamental character of their countries, not just the color of their countries, but the character of their countries, and they feel increasingly marginalized in a country where for generations they were the center of the story. Now they're peripheral to the narrative, and they don't like
it now. People who are friendly to broader immigration will often bring up the fact that members of the white working class are People who are anti immigration often trace their origins to say, Ireland, Scotland, Poland and Nordic region. So, I guess, what do you think impoldens people to feel uncomfortable about current ways of immigration, even if their existence in the United States kind of owes to a wave of immigration that happened in the past. Well, it's a
very good question. And one of the most familiar things you have to say about the United States, and we say it with a measure of pride, is that we are a nation immigrants. That being said, we are a nation that's gone through spikes of immigration followed by reactions
to those spikes. And we saw it with the Irish in the eighteen forties, we saw it with the Chinese in the eighties, and we saw it with Southern European Slavs and Jews in the nineteen twenties, and in nineteen twenty four we enacted restrictive legislation that slammed the immigration gates shut, where they remained for forty one years. So we are a nation with a mixed history on immigration. And let me give you the most recent historical cycle.
In nineteen sixty five, when we reopened the gates of immigration after forty one years, first generation immigrants constituted four point seven percent of the US population. Today, that figure is three times as high and is rapidly approaching the highest share of first generation immigrants ever recorded in American history. So it's not entirely surprising that this issue has reached
critical mass. Now. Some of these groups, the Irish, Italians, Paul's many of these groups are traditionally associated with generational support for the Democratic Party. How is what you're describing changing? That these groups white working class voters shifted away from the Democratic Party some time ago. There's a long history here.
In the wake of the cultural revolution of the nineteen sixties, the anti Vietnam War mobilization of the late sixties and early seventies, the white working class felt increasingly distant from the emerging new currents within the Democratic party. So Republicans have regularly gotten majorities of the white working class vote
for most of the past half century. What has happened recently is that white working class voters, particularly in twenty sixteen, have begun to respond much more strongly to these cultural signals, and their turnout, which was relatively low, soared in twenty sixteen. So, just to give you the numbers, Mitt Romney, no one's idea of a populist, got sixty two of the white working class vote in twelve. Donald Trump, who is most people's idea of an American populist, four years later got
sixty seven percent. But turnout in the white working class rose by nearly ten percentage points between twenty twelve and twenty sixteen. And that was the election. It was intensity and not just preference. Now, one of the things I found really interesting in your book was the role that elitists playing all of this. Can you describe to me a little bit about what you mean when you say elitist and sort of what what is their role in
a liberal democracy? Uh? Where to begin. Let's talk about modern elites, the elites of the current day, who constitute a reference point for either approbation or or intense disapproval. What we're talking about now is not so much the ultra rich business people. We're talking about highly educated professionals who have the kinds of mobile skills that equipped them to succeed in the new global knowledge economy. They are,
as I said, highly educated. And it turns out that education is not just a key to economic opportunity, it also shape a fundamental outlook on life. The more educated you are, the more comfortable you are with change and dynamism and diversity, the less wedded you are typically to quote unquote traditional values. It's not as though you have no place. You're not nowhere. If you're highly educated, you
tend to flock together in large, diverse metropolitan areas. And people with less education believe that elites not only don't understand how people with lesser lower levels of education and income are living, but really don't understand how they're thinking. Either. Okay, well, elates us certainly getting a lot of flak at the moment. But as the immigrant at this table, let me just position the question this way. Isn't America about aspiration? I mean I was born in Australia. I didn't need to
come hire into accracy. I didn't need to come here for freedom of worship or freedom of speech. I'm here because of the aspirations that America office. What's wrong with aspiring to be an elite. Nothing, as long as the people who come after you have the same opportunity. The problem that we have right now is that upper middle class,
professionalized elites have become self replicating to some extent. They are able to use their stable families, their high income, their networks, their understanding of how the system works to position their children for success in turn, and so there is unfortunately less mobility between the working class and the upper middle class than there used to be. I'm not saying that we've hardened into a cast system, but I
will say this. First generation immigrants are more are likely to experience the advantages of aspiration then are incumbent members of the white working class whose ancestors have been in this country for two or three or four generations. And so you, as an immigrant, are an excellent example of
what keeps the American dream alive. And I would go so far as to say that at the heart of the American dream is the experience of first and second generation immigrants and after that it becomes a much more complicated story. Interesting. Now, one of the ideas in your book is that non college educated Americans who lost in the hope in the future longed instead for an imagined past that insurgent politicians promised her a star. I found that line to be really interesting. Why is it an
imagined past? What do you mean by that? Well, first of all, I should say that it was not entirely imaginary. There was a period during which the manufacturing economy in this country was much larger as a share of the total workforce. Indeed, not just as a share. We have lost thirty of our manufacturing jobs since the turn of the century, so there's there's been a there's been a
very big change. But people imagine that they lived in a period without demographic change, without cultural change, that they lived in a period in which life in the industrial workforce was a bed of roses. If they know anything about the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties, they will know how many people got their heads cracked in order to
earn and then keep the right to organize. So what we're really talking about is a period between n and nineteen seventy when the United States bestrode the world like a colossus. The rest of the world was flat on its back, much of it had been destroyed by the Second World War. Are and we have taken those extraordinary twenty five years, that quarter of a century as our benchmark ever since. And it wasn't ordinary. It was exceptional. And I think we've been mourning its loss now for
two generations. But we can't go back to it because it was the fruit of unique circumstances. Bill, Is this such a thing as America anymore? Or are we just a series of tribes living within the boundaries of a state. Is that something you pointed in your work. Yes, indeed it is. And tribalism in America is really nothing new.
I can remember back for fifty years when political machines in the big cities were alive and well, and they always constructed their electoral tickets based on the demography of the cities. So in big cities like New York, you had an Allion, you had an Irishman, you had a Jew, and subsequently you had an African American and then an Asian. And that was what a balanced ticket was. It wasn't
balanced ideologically, it was balanced ethnically. So ethnic identification, particularly for people not too far removed from their immigrant forebears, has always been part of American politics and American culture. And I can look at previous previous parts of American history when it was as fundamental as it is now. So America is not a tribal it's plury tribal. And on top of that, pluralism is a set of institutions
and organizing principles. So the real question that you're posing is whether Americans have lost faith in those institutions and organizing principles. And to that, I would say not really. And I say that based on recent survey research in which I've had the opportunity to play a part. About a year and a half ago, a two years ago, a bipartisan voter study group was organized, and they just put out the most recent in this series of reports about two weeks ago, and it found that support for
the organizing principles of American constitutional democracy is still very high. Indeed, it's somewhat higher than it was just a few years ago. You could even argue that the experience of this president has forced many Americans to recall what it was that attracted them to this country in the first place, and what it is that guarantees their liberties now. But at the same time, populism obviously emphasizes homogeneity over heterogeneity here,
at least it seems it does to me. Is that statement correct in you know, how do you see that changing in America going forward, given that we do have sort of this populous wave. That is the most fundamental question. And that's why I entitled my book anti Pluralism, because I meant that as the grave woman of my core charge against contemporary populism. That is, it does tend towards homogeneity. When populaces say we the people, they typically don't mean
we all of the people. They usually mean we our kind of people. And they tend to marginalize from the civic body people who are unlike them in ethnicity, or religion, or you name it. And this drive towards homogeneity in the face of increasing pluralism is I think the central threat of populism. The other is unbridled majoritarianism, which is impatient with constitutional restraints and impatient with gary of teas
of rights for individuals and minorities. You put those two things together, majoritarianism and a restrictive definition of the people, and you have it seems to me the most fundamental threat to the liberal constitutional order that the West is
seen in quite some time. Internal threat, I should say, there are lots of external threats that we could talk about as well build your book, and many that dwell on the conflict between populism and the established order tend to have the US and Western Europe as their framework. Yet there are newer democracies in very heavily populated parts of the world that are wrestling with their own challenge
from populism. Those countries have grown pretty well economically in the past ten years now in the face of it. That would endorse your argument that it's not just about economics. But these countries also haven't had historically high levels of immigrant Asian edith. So what's going on here? Well, you know, as the Polish Asians say in our nation's capital, thank you for asking. I used at the beginning of this interview the umbrella phrase cultural displacement. There are different ways
in which people can experience cultural displacement. Immigration, I think is the principle, though not only way that it has been experienced in Western Europe, in the UK and in the United States. But let's take a country which is reeling under an anti democratic populist onslaught, namely Turkey. The founding principle of Turkey was the exclusion of Islam from
public life. Turkish constitution was structured along the lines of the French constitution, and Islam and traditional mores were seen as like we're seen as obstacles to modernization, political modernization, economic modernization, social modernization. But the fact that it was excluded from a share of Turkish public life didn't mean that it had gone away. It was always there in
the smaller towns and rural areas. And what Mr Arnowan has done is to crystallized generations of resentment that more traditional Turks and more pious Turks outside the big cities felt about their values not being seen as legitimate in public life. Interestingly, I've just been reading a new biography of Hungary's Victor Orbon, and it turns out that Orbon and his closest associates came from Hungary's hinterland, and they
grew up resenting in even as students. They resent resented the sense of superiority that urban elites exuded visa vi those from the countryside who are seen as bumpkins, somehow less sophisticated, less up to the minute, and are to want to I meant Orbon has been able to mobilize those sentiments against the more liberal and pro European sentiments in Hungary's major urban areas. That's the fundamental dynamic, and you see it everywhere. You see the same thing in Poland.
By the way, Poles have experienced almost no immigration, but you know, what you have is a mobilization of Polish traditionalism and especially Catholicism against parties that identified with EU and sort of secular internationalist values. So what's the solution to all of this? Do you see a resolution or an end in sight? Well, to extent that this is based on public policy, I think that people who are liberal internationalists are going to have to find more common
ground on contested issues like immigration. They are going to have to compromise with forces that they do not agree with. If you know, if we and I'll use that term, we simply say, uh, our way is the way of the future, the wave of the future. We will triumph in the end, and we're simply going to hold our ground and wait for you people to die, which is a reasonable summary of one strand of thought in the US,
the Democratic Party, the demographic triumphalists. Then we're going to be stuck in this morass for a very long time. So number one, and I've i've, you know, I've laid out a pretty detailed program for how to do this. Get the issue of aigration off the table to the greatest extent possible. Number two, understand that the economic challenge is, you know, is not something you can read off the income distribution tables. It has to do with economic geography.
And urban America must do everything in its power through public policy to reach out to non urban America and integrate it into American civic life in the same way that Franklin Roosevelt did in the nineteen thirties with programs such as rural electrification. And finally, a lot of populism is driven by impatients at a gridlock political system that seems unable to act. And yet many of these people send representatives to Congress, like say, for example, the Freedom Caucus,
who have zero interest in legislating everything. People say they're tired of gridlock. At the Tea Party, which was an early manifestation of what you're talking about is not remotely interested in governing. I'm not going to argue with you, but those who are interested in governing have to get
together across partisan and ideological lines and govern. If I may put in a brief advertisement for another one of my ventures other than this book, I'm I'm one of the co founders of an organization called No Labels, which, over the past ten years has been working very hard to develop a force within the two party system that can get people from the center left to the center
light uh to cooperate and legislate together. We've put together a bipartisan caucus in the House of Representatives of twenty three Democrats and twenty three Republicans who have made common cause on a number of important legislative initiatives, and if the leadership would ever allow them to get to the floor, you might actually see a return to more sensible governance. How big a problem is that sensible governments is a nuanced thing, embracing the complexity of the world and the
nitty gritty required to legislate. These are not simple things. These are nuanced things. People are just getting shouted at from the extremes is what you're talking about even possible. Well, a late governor of New York, Mario Cuomo, the father of the current governor of New York, once said, you campaign in poetry, you govern in prose. Not a bad prescription. So the problem was that Hillary Clinton campaigned in prose. There weren't a lot of readers who stuck around to
the second page. And on that happy note, we're going to wrap up this week's edition of the Bloomberg Benchmark podcast. Check back each week or dive into the depths of the years ago. I'm Genus Smilets and you can follow me at Genus Smilet. I'm ten of the Mosque. You can follow me at Moss Underscore Echo. Thanks star guest Bill Galston, so you can follow at Bill Galston and to our producer Magnus Hendrickson. Thanks also to friend Chess, THEA. Leavie, Head of Podcasts,