Jefferson Cowie, “The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics” (Princeton UP, 2016)

I was groomed to become one of his wives. This week on Disorder, the podcast that orders the Disorder, an Epstein survivor tells me her story and what justice looks like for her. I want to see action and I am demanding action. Do not just talk to talk, you need to start walking the walk now. It's one of the most powerful interviews I've ever done in over 20 years as a journalist. Search Disorder in your podcast app to listen right now. [Music] Welcome back to new books on American Studies. I am the co-host of the channel, Lillian Barger. Today, my conversations with Jefferson Cowley, the James G. Stolman, Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. His book, The Great Exception, The New Deal, and the Limits of American Politics published by Princeton University Press is a topic of this show. Cowley interprets the New Deal as a massive but unstable experiment from the main of American political culture. Against arguments in the New Deal with the product of American Pension for Reform, Cowley asserts that it was a remarkable historical detour. The Great Depression in World War II was specific historical circumstances that wrought a short-lived effort for government intervention in securing collective economic rights. Unions flourished industrial workers' gain job security and good wages, and the country enjoyed a relative amount of political cohesion. Multiple legislative measures and the growth of unions offered a counter-veiling power against corporate wealth accumulation and promised a bright economic future. Several enduring figures in political culture would all but undo the New Deal after the 1970s. The long tensions of immigration, religious and racial hostilities, the frailty of unions, and the ideology of Jeffersonian individualism remained and assured that new interventionist role for the state would not last. By examining the birth of the New Deal and its decline, Cowley locates a legacy of individual rights that stood against its long-term viability. As the central government had continued to expand under free market ideology, collective initiatives are being led at the local and state level by cross-class neo-progressivism, organizing labor and advocating for immigrants and other minorities. While the New Deal gave way to free market ideology, the future of my life in a new imaginary rising from below. Here is my conversation with Jefferson Cowley. Now let me introduce you to the author, Jefferson Cowley. Jeff, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. And thank you for sharing your thoughts with our audience. Your book gives us a sobering picture of the New Deal by locating its internal weaknesses and showing how why American political culture was too much for it to overcome. But before we get into this and other issues, tell us about yourself, your background, and how you came to write the Great Exception. Well, I was raised in a blue collar household, my father was a custodian, and I grew up not by any means poor, but certainly poor on the blue collar side of town. And he came away early on about what Richard Seven, Jefferson, Cobb, called the Hidden Injuries of Clash. Just sort of the small way that economic differences presented themselves and how they were internalized by people. And I always sort of self that and then when I got into basketball, together, developed a language to that and I got involved with the later emerging class politics. And well, my first book on a fact that it relocated to the north and the top in the Mexico, of Cavalos, and then a big book after that called "Stay in Alive" on the 1970s. And this book was a very interesting product of teaching and research. We often say that they go hang in the hand, but this really was. This actually came directly out of my lectures. But I began to try and figure out the rise to fall of the New Deal within a month of each other when I was trying to think about how to frame lectures. And I just began to think that when it was creating, I was kind of allowing it to fall apart. And that's what I began to put it together. And it also came out of rich discussions with my colleague, Michelle Correy, who was beginning to have some of the same questions and issues and when we began to include an article some years ago called "A Long Exception" that got a lot of play. And then I just had to make it into a book. Now there's been debates about the New Deal, I'm a historian, and what are other debates? And where is your argument falling among those debates? Yes, there has been a lot of things about New Deal. I'm fighting mostly with pretty much the entire political spectrum. I mean, conservatives, which are the sort of conservative critique of the New Deal that makes me say that the New Deal was a state intervention that's bungled up bad. You know, a rough economy had made it much, much worse. I actually don't believe that. There's a sort of a classic liberal interpretation that says that the New Deal is a modernization project that is part of the long semisdivir over a form tradition that culminates in the modern welfare state. Are you doing both that? And then there's kind of a new left interpretation that basically says the New Deal was very conservative and presented a much more dangerous or radical transformation of society when the time was right. Basically the key steal reforms when there's a possibility of wholesale transformation. And I'm trying to steer my way through all three of these arguments and come up with a quite new idea. Now what you're arguing that the New Deal was actually an exception or a detour from American political culture from the past. It wasn't a progression. It wasn't just the finishing up of the progressive reforms that start waking the 19th century, but was actually a detour that was brought about by very specific historical circumstances. So what was the deviation from the past? Well I essentially think that I don't want to deny that there were important building blocks in the Guilder-Age. It was the labor of evil, especially the Guilder-Age. And many of the reforms of the progressive era were important groundwork to the New Deal. But a lot of people basically think the progressive era is just to dress your household for the final triumph of the New Deal. But I think that without certain circumstances you're left without the major welfare state type reforms of the New Deal. And I looked at a variety of variables that came together in the 1930s, more than just the economic class and to try and figure out why for the first time really American history working people actually got economic leverage and power and mechanisms for redistribution that they had never had before on a large scale and actually haven't had visits class in the '97. And to do that I could get to look at how political culture was working at the time. Let's go back to the 19th century. What was the position of Cosmical deals mostly with labor and labor, the labor issue that was part of the New Deal? What was the position of labor in the 19th century in American culture? Political? What was the political position? Well, it was fragmented and that's part of my argument is that the labor question or labor's position, it was often called. It was divided between the skill workers wanted, collected bargaining for themselves and basically New Deal. The unskilled workers were mostly left out. There were more inclusive groups for the nice labor, but they had the fuzzy agenda. There were the socialists who believed in large industrial unions, but they kept getting deep by the militia and the courts. So it was a combination of a kind of fragmented identity for labor and a very oppressive political climate for their interests. Now the labor was divided among all kinds of factions. You've named some already, but there was also the religious issue, Catholic, non-Catholic, there was immigration issues. There was all kinds of agricultural workers and the working class was not a unified body of people. There were differences. There were competing for attention. Now what the Guilter Day, you talk about the, it goes into the progressive era, you talk about some of the progressive reforms in its relationship to labor. I think you mentioned corporate paternalism, Well, for capitalism. What did that do for labor? And why was that not sufficient? - Well, yeah, so you're exactly right. There's this, to go back to the Guild of the Age, your description's perfect. There's this sort of still competing interest in antagonism, ethnicity, on race, culture, immigrants, status. You know, we talk about the Cultural Wars in '70s or '80s, but really, there's a massive cultural war that's going on in the late 19th century. The progressive era, it continues. I mean, we tend to think of the major reforms of the Havessa area, maybe the creation of the Federal Reserve or something like that. But so much of it was a very kind of tapped down paternalistic attempt to culturally uplift and reform, especially immigrants. And there were beginning to be inroads among the states and labor, especially during World War I, where government basically provides certain rights tools for labor to organize, but then takes them away in the big strike wave of 1919. So it's kind of like a little blip of successful labor. And then after the rector of 1919, corporations began to become more enlightened and talk about having welfare capitalism. I think the corporation itself can take care of the labor question. And I think, you know, David Brody, who's in this laborist, I had a little, probably lying on one of his essays where he said, "You know, if it weren't for the Great Depression, probably welfare capitalism would have continued indefinitely." And that stuck in my mind, it's just sort of helped in my mind, really. And then if you think about it, we're back to sort of quasi-Walter capitalism in some circumstances. And you have this break where there wasn't actually a vibrant redistributive welfare state from the '30s to the '70s. So there's a lot going on, but nothing, so there's not a solution, really. One of the things that you talk about is, part of the problem with the labor had, it was part of the whole political culture, was this Jeffersonian individualism, this belief, and the whole concept of free labor. That came from the 19th century, and that that really kept labor from unifying. - Yeah, that's a good thing. - Can you talk about that, Bob? - Yeah, this is a sure, kind of the, in some ways the deepest, most elusive, most plastic dimension of the book. It's high, you know, individualism is so important, it is so hard to pinpoint. They were told to talk about the fact that there was this anti-centralizing force in American life. And I think that's really the case in the beginning, is a fear of the state, especially among native born peoples. And this makes it very difficult for people to, in a protest movement that is, the sense of dissent is often triggered against, the state, rather than trying to control the state, to go over the state. You know, that was dead, Eugene, that your dead is great insight. He said, wait a minute, if we're gonna research, you know, trying to stay for public institutions, we're gonna have to actually take over the state. And that was very different than most people who said, "Oh, the public values can only be preserved by limiting the state." And if you're limiting the state, they need to have much traction for national reform. - So basically, labor was caught between corporations, capitalism, industrial capitalism is very aggressive, that wasn't gonna protect their interests, and their unwillingness to use the state or to appeal to the state to protect their interests. - That's exactly right, well put. - So they were sort of, they were around their own. Yeah, they're on their own, and then they're also, but they're also frightened. They're on their own and they're own sort of isolated communities at least in the 19th century. Because, you know, they're in their ethnic enclave or their skilled brotherhood or whatever the case may be. And they have, there's a very pointed sense of solidarity. - And you could also argue, of course, that corporate capitalism or welfare capitalism was a defensive move by corporations from what they saw was happening with labor. They were like, "Okay, we better do it." We better protect ourselves by giving them something, give them something so we don't have to give them too much. - Right, well, and more so, so the state doesn't do it. - Right, okay. - You know, we wanna be in control of what it is. We don't want the government doing this, either. We wanna be in control of this. And then some of the drift of the progress there was the beginning of state intervention, especially during the war. And they made it in welfare capitalism. Which would actually fairly limited, let's recall. We're still an argument again, the government for unions running this. - Okay, now, Elvis, then you have, it goes through the, in 1920s and you have the Great Depression. What, what, what did the Great Depression, what was the pressure that the Great Depression brought upon government intervention? - I can see, you know, Hoover was, we could have continued with Hoover's policies of doing nothing. So what was the pressure? - I think Hoover did a lot, actually. I kind of stopped that, Hoover. I know he served a living boy for a lot of depression scholars. But, you know, he broke a lot of profit, given the degree of anti-statism that he inherited. And he had a very progressive spirit. You know, he was very much a volunteerist, kind of guy who wanted to get things done. It was just, the crash was so much bigger than anything that his ideas could have handled. Then we really did meet some kind of ailing power from the state of that moment. But he did try to do things. But if you think about it, when Roosevelt gets elected, we're free in a, well, Roosevelt takes office, we're three and a half years into the crisis. And it's getting worse and worse and worse. And very little is being done. So Roosevelt comes in at a very unique political moment when people are desked and he is a congressional land flight on a hotel. And he basically has a congress that is willing to do anything at that moment. Which contrasts for instance after 2008. Well, Obama had us to land. There's some majority that lasted about 10 months and then lost it, right? So it is a very, very different scenario and it's too crazy. As you said, it's a sort of counter example. So when Roosevelt entered office, did he come in with a strong vision or with something that he came to as the depression depended and he was in office longer? Did he finally go, we've got to do something? Or did he come into it already with a vision of something different for the country? Roosevelt came into office with a sunny disposition and a willingness to experiment. Other than that, he had no idea what he was doing. And actually, I do think actually a willingness to experiment in a certain disposition or effort. And so the other thing that happened that makes this sort of extraordinary, it's not only did he come in three and a half years into the crisis, but then this so-called first-new deal in which they mostly turn industrial regulation over to business itself to the national industrial recovery. It doesn't work. It's a failure. It's a failure to achieve its goal. And it's a failure in the Azure Spring Court. So you get not only all the time, all the wind that is back, he's allowed to completely fail the first time out and get a second run at it. Well, we often call the second new deal, which is the most famous policy, social security act, fairly withstandive act, international relations act, between 35 and 38. So it's quite an amazing little gauntlet of circumstances that Roosevelt navigates in order to get the famous new deal. So how successful was he? Obviously, he was a bit very successful. But how did he manage to consolidate the multiple or bring all these different interests together, corporations, labor, the left, middle class, the progressives, all these people who previously were sort of standing against each other? How does he get all these people to buy his program? Or does he? Right, and one of that's the tickets. See that is a question. And I don't think here we have Roosevelt genius necessarily to account for this. If we think about, say, for instance, one of the most divisive, political issues of the 19th and early 20th century that is with us today, it's immigration. We fought about immigrant versus native, then we fight about immigrant versus native. No. But one of the key elements in the 1930s is that state code of American politics did not really exist because immigration did close off the World War I. and then the 1924 immigration attack that closed off immigration from southern Europe. So right then there, we really don't have that divisive element that has plagued America really since Catholics began to-- even Germans actually began to land in the United States. And then the other thing that happens is one of the key questions, of course, throughout American history is race and what we would do about that well. They compromised by getting, by not including African-American occupations in the New Deal. So service work and agricultural work were excluded from the New Deal in order to keep the southern segregationist congressional delegation on board. This is something Eric Hetzelman developed brilliantly in his book, "Fear Itself." So right then, so you've neutralized race and you've neutralized immigration to big device issues in American politics. You mentioned individualism. This is an era-- if there's ever an era in American history where individualism was a day, it was in 1930s. We see it culturally and everything from fuzzy, burky musicals to jazz and a whole host of things and much, you know, Frank Capron, where the community plays a much bigger role in people's lives. And I think one more to really consolidate that in a foreign way that we're all in this together. But wasn't there also another element here that freedom or liberty was being redefined? Exactly. Thank you. Yeah. And this is a classic political philosophy question. There's two branches of liberty. Liberty from. That is freedom from your incursion on my right. But then there's also another version. And this is what Roosevelt tried to do. And this is the sort of genius move on his part. Was to redefine liberty as the freedom to do. What material backing, you need what kind of income and job and security you need to have the freedom to do something, a positive figure rather than a negative figure. And this was a really important part of almost all of FDR's major speeches in the 1930s. And it seems to me that that point right there is the thing that conservatives really went after of this redefinition of freedom or liberty that said, the state is going to level the playing field for everyone so that everyone has an equal opportunity. This was probably the thing that conservatives have attacked forever since then. Absolutely. And this is what I've tried to talk about is this. This is a delicate balance. But even while this is a massive breakthrough, the New Deal is a massive breakthrough, it's still a chain to the past in important ways. A chain to a lot of the conservative impulses in American political culture. And it never fully breaks through. And that's why it ends up being still being vulnerable. I use the term, the fragile juggernaut. It's both a juggernaut. But it also has the internal fractures that could break through any moment. Now let's talk about what the New Deal actually did for labor. A lot. It did a lot for labor. Let's talk about the Wagner Act. And let's talk about this kind of golden age of labor we could call it. That goes from the New Deal in the '30s to probably maybe the mid '60s. What was happening with labor? It never had seen the kind of power that it had at that time. That's exactly right. So labor law in America had been extremely restrictive and/or non-existent prior to the New Deal. So if you organize the union prior to the Wagner Act, the chances are that you, especially if you're unstealed, that the employer was taking the court, the court will put an injunction on the strike, he'd break the injunction, and then the trips would be sent in and your strike would be smashed. Under the National Liberation Act or the Wagner Act, as we call it, under Robert Wagner, basically not only are unions legalized, but there's also a set of rules for how they will function and a board to oversee that function. So it's really quite an elaborate field. But it's also important to remember that something like Roosevelt was going to a huge stand of labor. What they finally realized was they needed to get money in the hand of regular people somehow in order to keep the economic pump prime. And what's that a way to do it, then just have this national redistributive mechanism that labor provides. It doesn't cost the government much, and it takes money from the top and puts it in the hand of working people. And that will help stimulate the consumption, which is what it finally realized was the problem. It was under consumption. So this was a big thing. And then still, so you have the rise of the shutdown strikes, the Congress of the National Organization, the massive breakthrough of all the coordinators to steal, auto, glass, electrical, and you name it. And Oriental Liber goes from a little bit more than it is now to about 35% of the non-cultural workers in the United States, which is a lot. And this was sort of catalyzed by the war because you've already had this high level of organization. And the war boom comes along and all of the workers flow into new jobs and into the union that already has those jobs. So by the time the post-war moment comes along, those unions and those logs are working really well, redistributing wealth and creating what we call the quote-unquote middle class in America, which is really a well paid fairly affluent working class. Now this is, so you've got a lot of, the Wagner Act allows unions and labor to advocate for higher wages, for benefits, vacation time, all kinds of things that we've now considered sort of the American dream, regular work hours, opinions. It was quite impressive. What happened? Because now, basically, pensions are going the way of the dinosaur, very few people now have pensions. Good paying industrial jobs are gone. Now you could blame globalization. There's all kinds of reasons that people blame for why these jobs are gone. And the labor unions, the old labor unions are not, don't seem to have a play anywhere. Right, yeah, I show a cartoon to my class and it shows a public sector worker protesting in the public sector workers. It says, "Defend our pensions." And then the private sector worker is saying, "What's a pension?" And this brings me to something else that the new deal also created a mass bureaucratic system. Yes, it did. Yes, it did. The growth of government. Well, it did. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Which was also completely impressive in American history. Not wholly impressive. I mean, during more time we've had large governments and during the Gildedays we have the beginnings of that. But this is the first time that the government mechanisms are actually focused on not just on business because it wasn't. It wasn't on business, but also on the need of working people. And yeah, as you say, the unions could bargain for just about anything they wanted. They could put whatever you wanted on the table. And you could get it contractually. Whether it's vacation time or shorter hours or bargaining over the use of technology. What happened to that power? I use the term that J.K. Galpathy is counter-vailing power. You actually had in a pluralist society you had a group that played a very important counter-vailing power to the power of business. Right now there is no counter-vailing power. There is nothing on the other side of the scale. Right? You know, it's good that the labor union went in, labor union's plan didn't bargain for that. And there's no bargaining mechanism anymore. Well, basically if you've got to organize capital, the only counter-vailing power, you either have to have a state or you have to have to have an organized labor. Right. We have a state. I'm doing anything for labor. It's doing things for capital out. Okay. Now you say that even though we had this great period of working class prosperity that there There was already embedded in this new game. in the prosperity, there were already fishers, things that were going to really break down the new deal. The new deal was not going to be able to be maintained because of some things in American political culture that were going to come back. And even I think worse than they were before. Let's talk about, we're getting into the 60s now, we're getting into Johnson and the great society and some of those issues. So tell me, what were the things that were still there that people weren't really paying attention to but kind of came back and bit us on the butt. That's a different thing. I'm actually a big advocate of immigration to the United States, but it has this political cost of 1965, which passed the Immigration Reform Act, which opened up immigration again and was, "Well, that's fine, it's just going to have a big impact." But of course, if you go to a Trump rally today, you will know that immigration has fundamentally transformed politics. The African-American freedom struggle in the South and then in the North. First back open, this thing, which the Democratic Party tried to keep under wraps. And when that did, the Democratic Party decided to the right, it lost what was once called the South to the Republican Party. And that caused the impact in the 1930s through kind of ignore black workers to come back and beat Biden and behind just as you said and completely upended the political coalition. And even things like culture wars re-emerged very strongly, mostly after the 60s after all these cultural freedoms are demanded. And then in the 70s, one, things like abortion, prayer, and schools, and these questions of cultural value, sexuality, race relations, all of this shifts questions from economics to culture. And the churches now become politicized and even the left begins to get behind individual rights rather than collect the economic rights. And I think as a result, it's been declining the whole idea of collect the economic rights. Now let's talk about, I want to go back to Johnson's great society because a lot of people think of the great society as just a continuation of the New Deal. But you are saying that actually was a very individualistic vision. Yeah, I want to have that one both ways. In the following sense, it is a continuation of the New Deal in that Johnson and Tom Self is a New Dealer. A lot of these guys saw themselves working with the heritage of the New Deal, the believe in the New Deal. But here we are in 1964 in one of the strongest economies in moral history. Collector bargaining is working great. We're going great guns. Everything's lovely. Oh, but there's some people left out. What do we do for those people? Well, let's help them reform themselves individually so they can participate in this great economy. And part of the logic at that moment was the office is going to go on forever. Nobody predicted the 70s and 80s. And so things are good, but we really need to get everybody left out on board. And those people are left out probably because of education issues or because of personal problems, drugs, alcohol, whatever. Training issues, all sorts of things. And if we can deal with those, then we'll have full labor force participation. Well, that was great as far as it goes, but that only works if you're trying to perfect what appears to be a greater economy. By 1974, we know the economy itself is going to be falling apart. Now, the reason the new deal begins to deteriorate is because of the industrialization, globalization, or is it because group rights or individual rights become the focus of government or the courts, rather than, you know, group rights or social democracy. That what you're saying? My answer is yes. It was one of the things that all of those things mattered. Yet if all of those things mattered, then this is just too complicated. There's something else going on. If it's that fragile that it can die at the top of the cup, then something else is going on. Yes, the political discourse and the legal discourse shifted to individual rights. Yes, that actually slows down. Yes, globalization technology had an effect. But for my money, the real question is, why was there not a better collective economic response than 1970? The idea was that my books stand alive, much more steepest. But the argument I make in this book is that, you know, we shift our attention to, we sort of go back to the status quo and to you, and we're just fighting about immigration and culture and individualism, and all the states and race, and all these things that hold apart what appeared to be a permanent economic and political revolution, how the new deal, hold it apart, and ultimately, destroy it, I think. And that's completely, I mean, I think there's a lot of the same social security, fairly standard actions, like that they're still very important. And a bond of care is an important victory, but there's nothing compared, all of that is nothing compared to the redistributive function that a lot of the stuff once had. You also suggest that the Reagan revolution be called the Reagan Restoration. Why is that? Because, you know, I think it's a return to the Guild of H. You know, we often refer to this time as the Guild of H in a sort of mocking way, because we have our robber barons that are, and, you know, in poverty, working class, and things like this. I actually think it does, it rhymes with the previous field of agents, very important way, mostly around the way political coalitions form and fails the form. So Reagan is in a lot of ways, I think a lot less mysterious or magical than people tend to give him, rather than a revolution in transformation. You're basically seeing a return to the New Deal status quo, anti. And so, I think, for that reason, we have to regard to the liberal achievement, because all the more oppressive and conservative achievements are a little more predictable. Now, one of the critiques that I read recently about why we cannot call our current era of the Guild of H is because during the Guild of H there was a lot of labor activism and pressure. And even though labor was fragmented like we discussed, there was still a lot of activity and that we have much, we don't have a labor movement today that we, that's really viable. Would you agree with that? So there's no countervailing. I mean, there was some kind of a pressure even though there wasn't any government intervention. So now we just have gilded people with power and money, but we don't have a corresponding, you know, uprisings on the ground. We don't have people, you know, going out and, you know, at factory or even McDonald's. I mean, give there some of that, but not too much. Yeah, so to kill the age of that, you can get the Knights of Labor or for a little bit leased or the populist or whatever you might have. Yeah, I agree with that. If you're putting to be a freezer, I have critiques of that, but, but, yeah, it is different. There are many less challenges to capitalism itself right now than there were 110 years ago. There's no doubt about that. I mean, to be in the streets of Chicago, at the turn of the last century was to hear, you know, socialist and anarchist and a big stew of people who are trying to change the system and fundamental way. Definitely not here anymore, but there is a lot of fun going on. There's 50 now, minimum wage, justice for janitors. There's Occupy Wall Street. There's the fight for taxation and regulation and things like that. So, you know, Bernie Sanders. But what we see is, again, it's sort of more fragmented, looser, less cohesive, less like the New Deal block that we saw all focused on the natural relations that. For instance, right now, you might imagine if you want to really understand this, think about Franklin Roosevelt uniting everybody voting for Bernie Sanders and everybody voting for Donald Trump. All right, that's what happened in the New Deal. The cultural critique that you see in the Trump campaign against immigrants and women and minorities and whatever. It was muted and people all pulled it into an economic problem. Yeah, so there was more political cohesion than we have today. Because even today, you've got the Republican Party, it's split into so many different factions. There's not as much cohesions within the parties or cross parties. One of the things that I noticed about the Reagan era, which I think is the 80s and the 90s goes further, is the idea that it's the individual. If you are not doing well in our economic system is because you have failed in some way. You have not gotten your education. You have not tried hard enough. You're not creative enough. You don't have enough initiative. I think that's one of the reasons why the labor movement in the United States is so weak even today is because people have a sense that if I'm not doing well, it's my fault. I have. Yeah, I don't like the term neoliberalism because it's confusing as it is. But I'm going to use it now just because. Short hand. It's all I got. I think the great victory of neoliberalism is if I can give it agency, is exactly that. We've internalized the sense of blame in new years. I don't like, yeah, it's all my fault because I'm still to be an entrepreneur of my own life and make it happen. I don't need the security of wage legislation or bargaining legislation or good taxation or anything like that. I've got to do it on my own and that makes everybody very anxious, especially at the top and the bottom, continue to move apart and the treadmill gets faster and faster for those at the bottom and you get exhausted. I think it's an absolutely horrible situation. That's one of the reasons I wrote the book was to think a lot of people would say, well, we're going to get back to the deal. We're going to get back to the deal and I would be happy to do that. It would be a bonus of the deal. I did think that we actually have some more fundamental issues around, you know, rates and immigration and individualism and classes and so on. We actually need to struggle through before we can actually get to those more important issues. One thing that you're taught, I wanted to ask you, was do you really think that the United States, with all its diversity that it has, can achieve any kind of political cohesion again, because if you look at countries, you know, when people try to compare the United States, it's like, what can't we be more like Sweden or Japan or whatever? You know, Sweden is a much smaller country and, you know, in the 20th century, from the 20th century, Sweden was moving towards socialism or developed, you know, highly socialized government. But they're also, they didn't have the diversity. They're all kind of like related to each other. You know, it's like one big family. And you know what I'm saying? And that makes it a lot easier to find agreement because, you know, we're all kind of, in it together, we all look alike. We all have the same religion. We all have the same ethnic group. But the United States is so diverse. And it's even more diverse now than it was, you know, in the 50s. Can we? That's exactly my argument. That it's an extraordinarily diverse nation prior to the 20s. And it is now. But you have this light moved towards a more social home in Geneva in a post-war era. And that makes us look a little bit more like Northern Europe, giving us what Richard Haustler called a social democratic tinge. But it was based on that sort of sense of social homogeneity that we had a shared identity that, you know, we didn't go today. So we don't now. And you know what happened with that? You know that the black, you know, the black power movement came along and said, yeah, we're all supposed to be white. You know, the common man, and you talk about that, the common bank industrial worker, the citizen was a white male and excluded a lot of people. So it was a homogeneity that was sort of imposed rather than right. And so the question is, I don't, can America really ever have the cohesion necessary to develop the kind of social democracy that you're talking about? Well, that's the big, big question. That's what I'm pointing out is in order to do that, we need to focus on these other issues. So sort of a, because it's a double move that I'm making. One is we need to focus on tech and on issues we can't fight them on ourselves. And then the next move is, you know, to get there, we need to resolve these issues, come on to ourselves first. And can we actually be a truly multicultural society? I think that's a, you know, and only by truly embracing a multicultural society can we move towards a shared economic agenda. I think you're absolutely, what you're applying to ask the question is if there's a norm of tough, tough struggle. And I don't think anybody should take a theme yet. I don't think you can just pull the lever for Bernie and expect all to happen. That said, I mean, I've got to have some hope. Well, there's something that you do here, there's something that you do here, Jeff, that I wanted to talk about was, you know, the new deal with a central government, you know, bureaucratic project for social economic rights. And it seems like you towards the end of the book, you are sort of in a way kind of giving up that and saying, you know, the central government has become too bureaucratic. It is being controlled by forces that are, you know, big powerful corporate and government collusion. And that the whole thing seems to me that you're pointing to hope back to a local and state initiatives. That's the first. Yeah, I think the model, not for policy, but for how to achieve policy, is probably looking a little bit more like the progressive era, rather than the new deal, which is to say, it's not going to be one huge set of federal programs that come down from on high, but it will be much more community, state, municipal, it'll be way regular, it'll be minimum way regulations of the state level, it'll be state level, maternity leave, maternity leave, family leave, whatever it is. And then that's all that all the interesting experimentation will be local and state. And I actually have almost no hope of getting anything, getting to out of federal government. So what's interesting about that, I think that is probably the bright spot in your book. It's a white tower interpretation. Yeah, because your book is really kind of, we've got now we've got this huge new deal bureaucratic government, but it's turned against its own reasons of why it grew. It grew for economic reasons to level the playing field, but it has kind of turned against the people it grew for. Right now it's just sort of for itself, but you have a real real hope that I was very excited about when you're talking about the local and the state activism, because what's great about that is it allows a lot more people to be involved in a local level with shaping their long lives in what kind of communities that they want to live in. And then maybe that'll push those questions higher up the local food chain too. People holding their spawn to those on a national level. But yeah, I do believe that. I'm glad you found that optimistic. It's very interesting how people read the books and people say it's quite pessimistic and others say, oh, really what he's saying is, yeah, this is a good direction to go. And I also think experimentation is the way we go. I think there's chasing these notable ghosts and an ideal in the sky and it prevents us from thinking creatively about what other ideas might be possible. Well experimentation works a lot better when you're working in a small area or small thing. You can try a lot of different things and see if they work or don't work. And you get a lot more people involved, but you know, there's criticism. There's a lot of criticism of what some people would call localism. You know, what is it? think globally but at locally, you know, that whole slogan that, you know, this criticism of that because it leaves untouched, massive, you know, transnational corporations that any local community really has no power really to push against. I'm thinking, you know, if you're thinking about something like a Walmart, which is not a very good example, you know, it's a huge corporation that can go and crush, literally crush the businesses of a small community unless that community organizes itself in somehow through zoning or other efforts keeps Walmart out. You want to manufacture your plan or you want to retain an manufacturing plan or something. And that was the argument on my first book that capital mobility is there, you know, a great lover against any kind of local sense of power. So I'm not naive about what I'm talking about here. I'm just think that the federal system has, and it's so paralyzed that all we have right now is the local. And I'd like to see that pushed up to, you know, the local initiative is eventually pushed up to the upper echelon, but I think it's going to begin at the grassroots and at the top. And so what is the cultural component of this? It's like we just we've been saying you're saying you can't have economic, you're not going to have economic solidarity if you don't have some sort of agreement or something among all these diverse groups that our country is made out of. What kinds of, do you have any clues about how to build these bridges for some sort of common purpose? It has to be. We're all different living in our own little enclaves of people that are just like us. Yes, we are. We're watching, you know, a little, you know, specifically designed niche programming. Exactly. Internet, everything else. Yeah, now it's very difficult, but we're living our own little echo chambers. I really do. And that's, you know, I used to live in Africa. I'm moving to Nashville. And you know, if it was this little tiny city in which, you know, there was a vibrant discussion about what to do, but it was, you know, we everybody kind of agreed more or less how we wanted the world to be. And a bigger, more diverse place. That is a much more complicated question. And I think, but, but that's where you actually see where liberalism is the strongest in cities where people know they have to be in contact with one another. They are interdependent. That we all need public transportation. We all need good schools. We all need good health care. I mean, that's something that I think is not necessarily readily apparent if you're living in a more isolated place where you can continue the illusion of individualism. Okay, Jeff, where do you think your book is going to be most useful? Well, you know, it's a really scary question. I mean, my argument is with, for my argument, it is dying basically to stimulate new thinking among progressives and the left. I'm curious what conservatives will think about it because as I do endorse that, that means that their agreement conservative, conservativeism is based on consciously fragmenting the polity into ethnic and racial segments. But what I want to do is really try to push hard to open up discussion within people who are interested in questions of redistribution of wealth and power in a state to really question some of the values and issues that they've dependent upon. The Democratic Party kind of builds itself on the realm of the deal and hasn't really come up with a strong agenda since they've really been playing. I mean, this is a great sight. This is that era. Since that era came to a close in early 70s, they really haven't come up with a positive agenda. And I think resting on these laurels of those one great predictor is a problem. So in fact, what I thought was going to be more of a popular intervention of the book turned out of getting more back channel discussion through think tanks and policy organizations. So we're much more interested in the popular leadership. It seems to me like some conservatives would find some agreement with you on the local and state initiatives. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but mine's not an anti-cated. I know it's not, but it's useful for that. Yeah, yeah, I think you could write. But again, this is how I think you know how we think of right and left are probably problematic now. You know, I think you know, they're a conservativeist want good schools and you know, good health people that may not agree in how to get it, but they want it. So if we have that discussion within our communities, we know trust is higher on a community level than it is a state level, on a regional level or on a fairly national international level. There's sort of a consensus, concentric rings of identity. And the further you get out, the less trust there is. So I think that even maybe we can work out some of our differences, even on a level more effectively. Okay. What have you been working on next? What is your next project? I'm working, the short version is I'm working on a, the early version is I'm working on a little collection of reader on the history of capitalism, on defining core concepts in history of capitalism. And then I'm going to do a little community study. I think of a small town in the south from the coast from Indian removal all the way to the civil rights period and looking at how race works in this community level. You come interested in the idea of what, how, of white freedom. Okay. That's interesting. Okay. Thank you, Jeff. And thank you to our listeners for tuning in to another edition of new books in American Studies. It would be a pleasure to hear from you. You can reach me through my website at www.lilyandbarger.com. This is your host, LillianBarger.