Central Air - Don't Forget to Never Forget

Episode Date: September 9, 2026

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.centralairpodcast.comThis week: how the attack that “changed everything” has come to define less and less of our politics. In part that's because many Americans today are too young to remember 9/11, and in part it's because of three subsequent crises — the global financial crisis, the migration crisis, and COVID — and it's also because many Americans came to regret foreign policy decisions circa 2001-2003 that seemed like a good idea at the time.Josh, Megan and Ben also talk about whether we’re entering yet another phase of politics, defined by AI, and how difficult it is to make economic policy right now when the outlook is much more uncertain than usual. During cocktail hour, Josh has notes from his trip to Europe about ice, driving and French superiority.To hear the full episode, upgrade your subscription at www.centralairpodcast.com.

Welcome to Central Air, the show where the temperature is always just right. This is Josh Barrow. I'm here with Megan McArdle, columnist for the Washington Post, and Ben Dreyfus, who writes the Substack newsletter, Calm Down. I am just back from vacation. I hope you all enjoyed our conversation with Annie Lowry last week that we put out while I was traveling through Germany and France. And so I've had my lovely European vacation. And I am back. August is over. We are only going to have smart news. from now on through the rest of the year because it's not August anymore. And I'm really excited to be back with you. I have a lot to talk about Europe. I'm going to save most of it for happy hour this week. But I do want to say, Megan, Ben, I think I finally figured out what's going on with ice in Europe. They behave like ice costs $100 a pound. Now, I know it doesn't actually cost

a hundred dollars a pound. But like, imagine that ice did cost $100 a pound, all the things they're doing with ice would start to make perfect sense. It's a delicacy. The waiter carefully tweezers the one sliver of ice into your drink. I spend way too much of my life thinking about this. And one of my theories is that they treat ice in this expensive way that you're describing because in the mid-20th century when everyone in America was getting refrigerators and freezers, they were all living in bombed out Europe.

And they didn't actually have freezers at like the penetration rate that we did. So they were just like, oh, we don't even need it. We don't even need ice. Well, ice is as stupid. And then eventually, of course, they did end up getting freezers, but it was too culturally ingrained. Eventually in, like, 1978. Yeah.

It's not just that they're treating ice like it's something that costs $100 a pound. It's that they're treating it like that and then going, well, if you really want to give us the Marshall Plan again. Yeah, they're treating it like a decadent American luxury. There's, in fact, a rich literature on the dispersion of household goods. And there's a paper that I have downloaded onto my computer somewhere that actually compares how appliances dispersed in the UK and Wales and in the United States. I don't know why Wales is like a separate thing on this.

I thought it was part of the UK. It's not though. I think it's titled the UK or are Britain in Wales. And it actually, like they got stuff much later than us. There's all sorts of like fascinating little tidbits. Like the very fastest things that ever disperse are communications and entertainment. So like radio, television, color television move much faster than anything that you would actually do something useful with. And you can actually read in novels.

There's a Neville shoot novel from the early 50s, I believe. Maybe the early 60s. But anyway, it presents a kind of absent-minded professor who is being introduced to the exciting fact that you can get hot water in your home. All you have to do is call the gas company. He is, like, amazed by this, and you are prepared to be, like, funny old, old-fashioned people. And then you realize that they don't even get, like, actual hot water in the way that Americans have it with a water heater. Instead, they have one of these, like, coil devices that will heat the water at the sink so you can do the dishes. But it's not, like, generalized hot water in your house.

And I think this speaks to the fact that, yes, indeed, they, for a long time, had much less than we did. And I do think that, like, Canada and Europe, look, I am well prepared to admit that they do many things better than us, right? Like, the average restaurant in Italy or France, much better than the average restaurant in America. But they sort of fetishize it and, like, we can't do anything right, right? Everything that they do is better, even if it's obviously not. I don't know why Canada caught astray there. There's plenty of ice in Canada. Well, it's not ice in Canada.

I'm just sensitive right now. You know, our president is saying a lot of unfair things about Canada and sharing embarrassing memes of, like, him as a hockey player beating up Mark Cardi. And so I just, I want to be careful not to slander the Canadians who I, you know, feel that we have, we've not treated very nicely lately. Look, I completely agree. Let's come back to Canada in Happy Hour. Because now that we've mentioned it so much, I've got lots of thoughts.

Okay. I wanted to realize. Okay, great. Let's do that. But first, let's talk about 9-11. Naturally. Naturally. Naturally.

25th anniversary of September 11th this week and lots of remembrances going on. And one thing I've found interesting about this is, you know, like, and Megan and I will both talk about this. Megan was living in New York on September 11th. I actually happened to be in New York City on September 11th, 2001, even though I didn't live here at the time. And what people have always said is, you know, like, never forget. But now we're at a point where, like, there's, like, a tremendous number of young Americans who were not alive when this happened or were too young to have any real memory of it. The vast majority of residents of New York City are people who did not live here on September 11, 2001, including me. And it's kind of weird, the, like, the remove it sits

at in our society today. And, you know, one thing people complain about is, like, Jen Ziers, who like to make jokes about 9-11 on the internet, which I can't really get that worked up about. But I do think it's interesting where it sits in our politics, because I think, you know, to a dysfunction at the time, the way we talked about it was, like, this changed everything. And it really did change a lot of things. And I think it changed our politics in a lot of ways that were ultimately quite harmful and regrettable. And so it's been interesting to me, like, you know, there's, with Abdul al-Said being the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan, you have Republicans sharing around clips of him again, complaining about him. And, you know, one thing he said at some point about 9-11 is he said, 9-11 scarred our country in profound ways. But what we did after 9-11 scarred millions of other people. And when we talk about 9-11, we often fail to center them. A lot of people are upset about him saying that, but I think that's basically correct. You know, like we end up... I mean, yes.

Yeah, we ended up this horrible misadventure in being Iraq. It was a huge mistake for us and for the people in the Middle East. And I and a lot of other people thought it was a good idea at the time. And I think it's worth reflecting on sort of how this terrible thing happened to us. And it caused us to ultimately make a bunch of really bad decisions. So, to be clear, I supported the Iraq War and I think that I was incorrect to do so. I supported it for a number of emotional reasons from faulty reasoning about Saddam Hussein's behavior, in which I thought I understood what he was doing and did not account for the fact that I am not, myself, a rapacious Middle Eastern dictator.

Yet, you don't become a dictator by announcing it. It's a stealth plan, Ben. I told you that in confidence. Yeah, dictators are subtle. They operate behind the scenes. And, of course, there was a big fight over how many people had been killed, a lot. too many, far, far, far, far, far, far too many. And about whether it had been a success. And it certainly never turned into the neocon fantasy of the Iraqis greeting us with flowers and, you know, turning into basically like Switzerland on the Tigris.

But looking at it now, like, it's not in terrible shape. It's not in great shape, but nowhere in that region is in great shape. And, like, is the counterfactual where Saddam Hussein stays in power and his murderous psychotic sons succeed him? Like, is that a better counterfactual for Iraq for the people who are left? You know, like, I'm not then arguing that it was therefore worth it or that the Iraqis are happy about it. But, like, I genuinely don't know whether there's a counterfactual where everything was better for the Iraqis. No. I mean, you're really like getting in on my territory for Ron the Crank on this podcast, supposed to be saying this stuff, okay?

I also, like both of you, also supported the war in Iraq at the time and then regretted it and went whoops to daisies, you know. But I supported it because I believe in the, you know, let's go give democracy to people. We'll bomb them until they're happy until they're free. And, you know, it turned into a slog, a lot of consequences. I also have been arguing this point that Megan just made that, you know, Saddam Hussein, not a nice guy. And Iraq, it is sort of free now. I guess the thing is, is that, like, in the counterfactual, if we're going to be intellectually honest, and we want to, like, take away the fact that we wasted all this money on it and turned

all these people against us. Yeah, it wasn't a good idea for America. And it is also true that the biggest victims were the Iraqis who died. But I'm not sure that, like, the counterfactual is that things were better for this people. Sure, but, like, Uday and, like, Saddam, would be dead now by age. So like Uday and Kuse, when they came in to run

the thing, I'm not sure they're going to keep it together. You know, at some point, I feel like it gets a little hard to follow it down. I do think that when people talk about the problems of Iraq, they do focus too much

on the fact that, you know, everything was picture perfect. The most annoying thing in the world is Fahrenheit 9-11 has the scene where they're like, everyone was happy in Baghdad. Then they cut to this music thing where everyone's just smiling. No, no, no, no.

These weren't terribly nice people. But to your original point, Josh, I do think that, like, you know, we made a lot of very bad mistakes after 9-11 for emotional reasons, but also because we did all believe that genuinely, like, something had changed forever. And it's, it is the thing that makes me feel more old than I feel like I should when I do realize how many people don't remember this and don't remember that feeling of never again that day. Even though it led to lots of mistakes. I mean, people make mistakes after stuff. But to what you're saying about the guy in Michigan, that quote you just read, I agree 100%. Where I think it rubs people the wrong way is maybe that when he says like, but we're not centering their experience. Of course, we should center their experience sometimes.

But sometimes when you're running for Congress in America, you should center the American experience. Well, I mean, I guess you could frame it a bit differently. But I think there is an argument for even though I don't like the wording centering the experience of the people in Iraq because we badly miscalculated about what was going to happen there. And a large part of the stated policy purpose of the war was to benefit the people in the Mideast in Iraq and beyond. And it didn't work out. I think it didn't work out very well, even over the long run. And so I think it's, you know, we should remember that because we're going to have to make decisions like this again in the future. It's not like a lot of these fights about how we should think about history are fundamentally

fights about like, should we feel more guilty or less guilty? We're not really going to face the same policy questions again that, you know, we did in the lead up to the civil war about slavery and that sort of thing. But like the sorts of policy questions that we faced when deciding whether to evade Iraq could very well become live again in the future. In terms of, you know, was this ultimately to the benefit of the Iraqis? I think it's important to remember that we went through like two awful phases in Iraq, First, there was the war and the occupation where we faced this protracted insurgency,

and not only did we have a substantial number of American deaths, but there was a tremendous amount of civilian death in a civil war that we basically set off by invading the country. And so it's not that the dictatorship was any picnic, but I think that they went through, they went through a substantial period where it was even worse because they had various forces. Some of them anti-democratic dictatorial forces, fighting against each other, controlling different parts of the country and engaging in a lot of violence. And then after we left, they still went through these extended periods of tremendous unrest and violence, including ISIS coming to control a substantial fraction of the country for a number of years. Now, Iraq is a freer country than a

other countries in the Mideast. It's an imperfect democracy. So I think that is, I mean, that's better than being under a Baathist dictatorship, I'm sure. But I think that there was so much loss of life and economic destruction along the way there that I think it's hard to say it's worth it. When you also considered, I mean, to a point that Ben made, we don't know what the government of Iraq would be like right now if we had not invaded. Not all these dictatorships last forever. 23 years is a long time. You know, it's quite possible that Iraq's government would look very different than it did circa 2002, even if we had done nothing. I think that's right, but I doubt it would be a democracy. That was an American thing. And I'm not

saying that that justifies the invasion, as you say, there's a tremendous loss of human life. I genuinely don't know what Iraqis would say if you went to them and said, would you rather that Saddam had stayed in power? I should probably find out. But I would make, you hear things like that every year around 9-11, and I think that that's basically right. We should, we should reckon with what we did. I don't think that we should reckon with what we did in the hopes of preventing it again, because honestly, I think those hopes are pretty dim. I mean, like, The problem with the lessons of history is it's always hard to tell which lessons you should pay attention to. In fact, as someone who is an active war blogger during the time, the neocons especially, and certainly, like me and other people, were way too wrapped up in the lessons of World War II.

And it turned out they weren't super applicable. And that there were a whole bunch of other lessons that we needed that we didn't realize. In general, like, people can learn history. They're doomed to repeat it anyway. The reason not to say those things around 9-11 is the same reason that you're not like, like, why aren't we centering the much greater suffering of Guatemalan orphans rather than, like, this family whose grandfather got to live until 92? Why are we centering them today?

Well, because it's his funeral. And I understand that he feels like that's how he's going to mollify his base. But it is like, this is not the time or place. Well, I do sort of agree that in certain ways. And I think that, like, people should be aware that not only, is important to a lot of people in America, and you should be, like, sensitive about how it reacts to it. Like, it's still a very traumatic event in American history for a lot of people, and that people should be aware of that when you're, like, deciding what to say in public,

and your politician especially. On the other hand, like, what that quote that you just read said, you know, it really isn't offensive to me. Like, it seems like it becomes sort of an example of how other parts of America can go too far with this and try to weaponize it in ways that I've never been terribly comfortable with, you know. It's one thing to acknowledge how much this meant and how it's an important situation, but also that doesn't mean that we literally cannot acknowledge that a lot of people died in our responses to it, that were sometimes ill-founded and not smart. I think that then it gets complicated because you then, the left has so many different characters, right? And some of them are bad shit insane. And some of them will go further

than what that quote is that you said, right? And they'll say things that the left has been saying since September 12th, 2001, right? They'll say America deserved it, or America brought this on themselves. Well, I mean, also there was like a popular strain among, especially the Hollywood left where people believed in conspiracy theories about, you know, a false flag attack and that sort of thing. And I think that, fortunately, is largely gone by the wayside at this point. But, yeah, I mean, I think that there are, you know, that there are much more irresponsible things that very often were said than simply like, let's think about, you know, all the loss of life in Iraq. Totally. And isn't it maybe that that's one of those things that when people say America deserved it, it gets, it gets, you end up in this game where, of course, that's going to offend me. Of course it's going to offend lots of people. Because there's nothing you can do to deserve that. There's nothing that could be done that could deserve it. But then those are said by people who are ideologically sympathetico with people actually running for Congress. And we all flatten it because they're all posting them together in the same sort of stream that we're seeing on social media. And it's funny that just because when you look back at, that era when before we had Twitter and before we had Facebook and everything was a little bit

a little bit more like the before time it was one of those periods where suddenly people's posts were really offending people or Churchill gave like a speech and an insane speech in his class of University of Colorado or whatever it was and this became like a part of the culture war even though he was just some dumb fuck professor in Colorado and you ended up with all the things about um you know Bill Maher bill war who didn't actually say anything that immense but it all gets into this churn where everything becomes these people who are just, you're relating it as, these people are not feeling this as strongly as I felt it. And then it's hard, it's hard, I think, to know how to handle that. And when you're trying to be intellectually honest, I feel like it's

important for us to recognize when the actual candidate actually didn't say these things. He says something somewhat bad. I don't find what he said offensive. But that kind of statement where it's like, okay, yeah, it was bad, but let's pivot to something that America did that was worse. It just sounds like the first half is pro forma. Like, you didn't really want to say it, and you had to because you knew that like that is, and like people read that in context, they read it. And I think if you are running for office in the United States of America and you would like to win outside of Dearborn, Michigan, that's probably not a great idea. I guess the reason the statement actually resonates with me is that to be told, well, you know,

let's zoom out and think about how our actions here affected other people, is that I feel like I personally really needed to do that and didn't in the aftermath of those. Did you not? No, I was like, I mean, you know, I was a college student. Of course I've reconsidered, but I'm saying in the immediate years following September 11th, the first, you know, three years or so. And again, I was in college, so I'm not, you know, I'm not putting on too much of a hair shirt here. It's not like I was one of the policymakers who was directly involved in fucking this up.

But I was really deeply emotionally affected by the attack in a way that caused me to, like, develop a lot of political commitments that I think were very incorrect. And, you know, I was very fixated on the ideas, as a lot of Americans were, about that we needed, you know, that the core goal of American foreign policy needed to be to make sure that this sort of thing never happened again and that, you know, the placing the threat of Islamist terrorism, which was, and to some extent, still is a real threat, but like placing it at the forefront of American foreign policy to the extent of trying to go around the world and change regimes in such a way such that we could change foreign governments in a way that would make it less likely that this sort

of thing would happen. And that was sort of a totalizing effect on our politics. And you, you know, It's like you can see an individual politicians. This is what moved Joe Lieberman all the way, you know, from the Democratic Party to ultimately, you know, aligning himself with the Republicans. People really reformed their worldviews around it and ended up often deciding that the policy should be shaped in ways that were a mistake. And that if we had instead, you know, had a more clinical view of this, you know, there 35,000 Americans die every year in traffic accidents or something like that, like, It sounds like an absolutely insane way to talk about the terror attack. That is an insane way to talk about it. But if we had thought about it that way, we would have made fewer mistakes. I mean, all right. If your mother was a guy, should be your dad, right? Like, the fact is that people who are under attack do not behave in that way.

And there's actually a kind of meta-rationality to that, right? Which is that you, in order to make incredible deterrence threat, people have to know that if they do something, you are not going to be like, well, the expected value of punishing you is slightly lower than the expected value of letting it go. And like, we do things like that when the offense is minor, right? Like, you don't necessarily dispute every bullshit hotel bill or whatever. But when it is something like this, people are not rational. And we are evolved to not be rational in those moments.

I'm not saying that therefore we had to go invade Iraq. We didn't. That was the Bush administration. It was hubris. But like some degree of that was always going to happen. No one was going to sit around and try to work out the like advanced game theory on paper. Right. But invading Afghanistan and toppling the Taliban, which I do think we had to do.

Yeah. I don't like. I don't really like the full 20 year course that that ended up taking. and I don't have a strong view on what, you know, the when exactly we should have gotten out and how. But, like, I think certainly, like, that was sufficient to show that we would respond to this sort of attack with overwhelming force. I think if we had, there's, I don't think it's an issue that if we hadn't invaded Iraq, it would have failed to show that we were responsive to attacks. But I'm agreeing with you. That was like a Bush administration obsession.

It did not have to happen. It was not the rational response. But the general tenor of becoming extremely emotional and unable to think. think, like, in perfectly calculating terms about our response, whether or not that's a good feature of human nature, it just is a feature of human nature. And I don't think it's going to But that's the reason to consciously push back on it. That's why to say the uncomfortable thing. We're all talking about the errors of history, right? And you can all make them out. We need to be aware of them. It's important to, like, think about what was going on in the 90s when this, like,

right before this, okay? We had just aired, like, way too to the other side, right? You know, after Mogadishu, there was an entire pullback that led to lots of situations where the West and the U.S. agreed to not do stuff. You know, there was, UN peacekeepers were killed in Rwanda. And then everyone said, all right, let's not do anything about it because they didn't want to start a larger fight. And this then led to all these terrible things happening. This happened routinely in the 90s right up until it started to sort of break. And then, so there was a very like big understanding that actually, like, there is a huge cost to not doing stuff and to, to saying, like, let's keep trying to stop this.

Osama bin Laden himself, like, one of the best arguments against us doing basically what we did in Iraq is that we gave him what he wanted, right? But, like, he had been trying to lure us into a war for years. He had been, he had been quite shocked and upset that after 98, we hadn't given him what he wanted, and it just gone in and created all these wars. And when you look back on it, it's important to see that, like, you know, we end up. ended up giving him sort of exactly what he wanted, except for the bullet in the head, which you probably didn't want eventually years later. But like, he was expecting people to do that

forever. And then we hadn't really done stuff. We had gotten a little too chastened. And then, like I'm going to say, you know, some of that goes too far. We went, people were upset. And I don't, I don't think that you can ever really, really have people learn the lesson of history so much when the lesson of history is constantly changing. There's, there are actual problems with not doing anything. And there's also problems with doing too much. We had a highly interventionist foreign policy in the 1990s. It was like the peak of that era of liberal interventionism. And, you know, some of it worked pretty well.

Like the Kosovo intervention actually worked in a way that, like, you know, that seems like the one time. We bombed a country into submission in a matter of weeks and achieved a positive objective. But, you know, we, including, you know, we had no fly zones over Iraq for much of the 90s. We had, you know, the, we conducted air strikes on Sudan and Afghanistan. There was, you know, the, I think part of, you know, I think the Iraq war, you know, obviously 9-11 was the precipitating event that caused us to, you know, summon the political capital go do it. But in some ways, it was an extension of the 90s vision of foreign policy that the U.S. could go around the world, remaking things for the better. And partly, you know, we picked our shots better in the 90s than we did with Iraq. And Iraq ended up discrediting that whole project, even though.

some aspects of that project had worked pretty well in the 90s. But I don't think it's true that we were sitting back. What I'm saying is that there's quite a bit of serious tradeoffs to consider that have to do with people recognizing the mistakes that had just been made

and then overlearning those lessons, okay? A lot of people died because America waited to do things in those situations. That's why, you know, Tony Blair was quite clear about all of this in the late 90s when he was trying to get us to do stuff and goes around all of this stuff. Because there were actual consequences to it.

That does not justify every mistake that we then made in the 2000s. But it does mean that, like, we are constantly looking at the last war and saying, let's look at these lessons and try to say that here is the new way that we will fix this and going forward and never make these mistakes again.

But we're constantly going to be making these mistakes, and we're going to make them in both crazy directions. And the only thing that you could do is try to, like, not apply moral valences to this in exactly the same way. You could try to justify why did the Clinton administration, why did Belgium, why did France, not care when in Rwanda they killed all those Belgian peacekeepers and then immediately went

and started killing other people. Why did it take them so long to stop it? But what you have to understand is that, you know, life is hard. Life comes at you fast. And that happened after 9-11 as well. And I think that like what you're really getting at is that some key change that happened after 9-11 is that we became more tolerant of forever war, of like people on the ground, constantly a low level of Americans abroad, occasionally, dying, but also killing lots of people. And that, like, that became a thing that, of course, if you told me these stories now, I would say, like, of course, the U.S. should just go and kill whoever kills the peacekeepers. But, like, that stuff happened after 9-11. And it's interesting

then to look at what did change here and what have we actually kept in our politics and what have we not? Because a lot of it, we haven't. And I don't know the answers to that. But I think that when we look back 25 years ago, it's important not just to say, we did dumb shit because we were in a moral panic. It's important to say, like, what did we do? And then what, when we stopped being obsessed with 9-11, did we keep? And what does that say about us? And what can we learn from all of this? I think another thing that's interesting about 9-11 feeling so distant right now is, I realize this sounds trivially true, but like all of the other things that have happened since it. But, like, the more formal way to describe that is that, like, 9-11 kicked off a new phase in our politics.

everything changed. And it defined most of a decade, it really defined of a period of about seven years. And then the 2008 financial crisis hits, Lehman Brothers Falls. And that, I feel like that's when our politics stopped being centered around 9-11. We then entered a phase where the dominant thing was this immense economic error that, you know, caused a tremendous deep global recession. And politics was about that and who to blame for it and how to recover. out of it. And then that also sort of lasted less long than you might expect. That set off another era of politics that lasted like six years until about 2014. And since then, we've had a politics that's been defined by these global migration crises. And in a way that snuck up on us,

like 2014 was an absolute terrible year electorally for Democrats. And it was largely about immigration. There was, you know, the crisis at the U.S.-Mexican border with people, coming in huge numbers from Central America, including unaccompanied minors. And there's a funny thing about this where it's like liberals fundamentally don't care about that. And I actually include myself in this. Like I care about immigration policy deeply because immigration policy errors have tremendously harmed the Democratic Party and undermined other issues that I do fundamentally care about. And so I care about not making the public angry on immigration because both, you know,

the public's interests should be attended to and because you really get your shit fucked up if you don't. pay attention to it. But so basically, you know, that, that previewed a global phase that is continuing today with establishment parties, especially of the center left, but also on the center right, just being completely shalacked because of dissatisfaction with global migration patterns. And I feel like that's still the phase of politics we're in, even though COVID happened and COVID added its, you know, its own set of changes and disruptions and, you know, discreditings of establishments. But basically, I think that's part of why 9-11 feel. so distant. It's like it's a politics before the global financial crisis, before the dominance of

immigration as a policy issue and before COVID. I used to ask people in interviews when they thought this political era would begin. And the most common answer was 9-11, but everyone had different answers. And at some point they stopped saying 9-11. Then they would say things like the global financial crisis. And then they would say Trump and then they would say blah, blah, blah, blah. But I think it's interesting to imagine if on the day Lehman, went down, you know, and beginning that, that summer or fall, I guess maybe it was September. But, you know, going through to 2014, I just don't think that I would have thought, I would have considered it, that it was still, that people were still obsessed with it in the same way

that maybe they should have been. And that I definitely don't think that migration and immigration and those things had risen to it until a little later. But maybe that's a liberal blindspot. Right. That's the thing. Our politics changed in 2013, 2014, and liberals didn't notice. And that's part of why we did so badly, both like how we got shellacked in the 2014 midterms and then how Trump caught all of us unaware is because things had changed and we hadn't even really noticed how things had changed. Megan, what do you think? I think it was 2015. And I think it was that what was happening in Europe made it news in a way that it hadn't been,

and it increased people's focus on it. All of these people start flooding out of Africa and the Middle East and Afghanistan, Syria. I mean, so I went to Lesvos, which is where they were processing most of the immigrants in Greece who were swimming across the ocean. It was a very diverse group. There were people from everywhere. And it was all economic migration.

It was mostly economic migration. A lot of the Syrians, it was not. But mostly it was economic migration. And it was like I was simultaneously there thinking like all of these people, it was remarkable. They were, they looked happy. They were like walking around with their garbage bags, very pleased that they made it. There were people dying in the ocean every day.

And then so I had to, I got the last ferry slot out of Lesvos. just in time to catch my plane. And I got a state room because I was working for Bloomberg, and they would pay for things like that. And I was the only person in the first class dining room. Everyone else is on the deck with their garbage bags, looking very cheerful, very pleased to be there. But at the same time, you could see that Lesvos was totally overwhelmed. There was garbage everywhere. Everyone was angry.

The Navy was angry because they weren't, like, they're simultaneously trying to repel these people and running search and rescue operations on the rafts. People had learned that if you stabbed at the raft and were sinking, they would have to pull you out of the ocean. But, of course, many people that maneuver didn't work and they died. It was like the whole thing was just a tragedy. And I looked at it and I thought, like, you know,

I'm basically rooting for these people who picked up and left somewhere bad and went to somewhere better because that's the American way. And also that there is no way this is politically sustainable. And there's no way that you, can just have all of these people continually flooding in and make no effort to control it. And indeed, it was not politically sustainable and it has not been sustained. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, the tremendous error that Angela Merkel made there.

I mean, and a lot of political leaders of the center around the world made similar errors, although not necessarily on the same scale, I think came from, you know, liberals. And I mean that in like the small L sense that includes people like Angela Merkel, looked at these crises happening in poorer countries and these, you know, these poor people who wanted to get out and live a better life and were sympathetic to them. And then also, you know, look around Europe and see, you know, the rich countries do have some substantial capacity to absorb migration. And European countries have low birth rates and actually, you know, there's good economic arguments about why you want more working age people, you know, immigrating to work in certain industries to address labor shortages. And so I think they look at that in their first reaction is to say yes for a combination of those reasons. And then eventually they look around and realize that there's a political disaster happening and the people around them are furious. But they don't realize that until they see it. And then, you know, it's too late.

You've set off a global chain. Both you've admitted all these people. You've also caused more people to try to come because they've seen how many people have gotten admitted. And it proves very difficult to turn the spigots off once they've been. they've been turned on. And again, that's, I mean, that's why I put the number back to 2014, because I think that when people like Angela Merkel were focused on, you know, oh, we need some tightening on migration, they're doing that circa 2015. But everything had already changed some months, a couple of years before that. It's hard to separate some of this because

you're right. Like, there's obvious economic arguments for why they should have young, skilled people coming in to be in these countries. And it's not like people always loved immigration. But I then wonder, like, if it's just that you're looking around and she one day looks around and people in Sweden look around and go, oh my God, quite a lot of Syrians here, eh, ew. Is it also just a function like so many other things that that is when social media started and people started to see all of these things and spend more time on things and spend more time being outraged by everything and seeing things? And it sort of like turned everyone into a more culture war obsessed person. people were seeing things and reacting to other reactions that were outside of their own little home circles and their own economic self-interest in all of this in ways that are more used to associate with the cranks who watch cable news.

I don't think that's quite fair to the immigration people as witness all of the mayors who got super upset when Greg Abbott bust all the migrants up to New York and Chicago. And they were like, how dare you? How dare you, sir? And like, five minutes ago, this was great. You love these people, right? Like, in fact, migrants do impose costs on the society they arrive at, especially low-skill migrants, especially in societies in Europe where their labor markets are not good at absorbing people who are low-skilled.

Like, the last time they were any good at that was in the 60s. And so they're getting an influx of people who are on welfare quite hard to integrate. because they don't speak the language. America is really good at this, to be clear. I'm not saying that, like, there's no place, like, you know, low-skilled immigrants are useless. Far from it. But if you're, for example, you know, in Denmark, I was there in 2018 and I was interviewing people about it, and they said, like, look, one of the job requirements here is you have to speak English for basically almost any job.

Well, you know, like, no one says, what if we lowered the wage and hired some people who don't speak English? And so the people who can't speak English well just don't get jobs. And that's just a broad. And like that's an example. I'm not saying that is a broad problem in Europe. But like the German system is very much set up to like kind of run people through, apprenticeships and so forth. It's not super flexible at embracing low-skilled immigration.

Even the United States, though, I think there is a carrying capacity. And I thought this in 2015, I'm not, is that you do want people to assimilate. and there's a point at which that gets harder. As the foreign-born share of the population goes up, you know, like when the foreign-born share of the population is like 5%, 10%, those people are just going to assimilate. If they take them a generation, whatever, they're going to assimilate. But as it goes up to like 15, 20, 25%, you know,

they're having a lot more influence on your own culture. And, you know, if they're coming from a country that doesn't have high social trust, for example, that can affect Americans. If they're coming from a country that blast their music at 11 o'clock at night, an actual issue, by the way, not between foreigners and Americans, but between people who migrated to Houston after Katrina from New Orleans. Because in New Orleans, sure, we're like that was the social norm was we can do that. The social norm in Houston was very much not.

All of those things, there is friction, there are real costs, and there is a carrying capacity at which you were kind of optimally assimilating people. I think the United States probably hit that. We certainly hit the political carrying capacity. People don't like it. They don't want our foreign-born population to go to 20 or 25 percent. We're almost at 15, and they don't want it to go any higher. But Europe, I think, it's quite a bit lower than that. And they're still struggling to integrate immigrants who came like two generations ago because they're not good at it. They're just not. And so part of there, like, there is xenophobia and like these people are inferior or whatever. But, In fact, some of it is that there are real constraints because a culture is like mind-reading ability, right? It's like a superpower. When you and I share a culture, I have a better shot of predicting what you're going to do in various situations. It really is hard to integrate immigrants from another culture. The farther the culture is from yours, the harder it is.

I'm not saying that that therefore, like, I think immigration is great. I think that this whole discourse, like, where Americans fixate on Europe is like, we are not sad Europeans who can't integrate immigrants. We are America, damn it. We're awesome at this. I mean, so, like, one example in Denmark, migrants have a lower, higher unemployment rate than natives. In America, they have a lower unemployment rate than natives because we're good at this. But there are limits and there are real costs and we shouldn't just say, like, oh, those people are dumb.

They don't know anything. And they're just, like, bigots and terrible. I don't think that we should call them dumb. dumb bigots who we don't know anything. I completely understand it's like empathizing with them. But I do think like just to get back to the question of like 2014, 2015, I guess like to stress test the theory that that is when this became the new era and it suddenly became the thing. What changed in 2014 and 2015? So what happened in North America was that was the start of the crisis of unaccompanied minors showing up at the border and more broadly of really large migration flows from Central America. I mean, you know, we've had decades and decades of mass migration legal and illegal from Mexico.

And one of the things about that is that, you know, we have a long border with Mexico. There are tens of millions of Mexican Americans who are already U.S. citizens. So to a significant extent Mexican culture is our culture. And like there's, you know, there's a certain amount of cultural closeness that the U.S. sometimes takes for granted. We, you know, we draw immigrants heavily from Latin America, which, you know, even though we think of as like very foreign, actually has a great deal of cultural similarity to the United States, you know, ex-colonial European states, Christian majority populations. like we're in some ways doing this on easy mode compared to Europe. But that was the start of, you know, a somewhat different migrant population showing up in an

extremely chaotic manner at the border. And then also, I think more broadly, part of the issue is we are America and we're very good at assimilating immigrants and we should be able to do a lot of it. But we've had so much migration that has been just basically foisted upon us rather than us making decisions about who's going to migrate here. And so it often hasn't been the optimal choices in the same. terms of, you know, are we admitting the right immigrants who can assimilate well? We've admitted them, a lot of them, in very irregular ways that both looks chaotic to Americans and then also

create situations for immigrants where they, you know, they are not on a path to ultimately settle here as citizens. We have done a tremendously broad use of the temporary protected status program, especially for Venezuelans and Haitians, but also for a lot of other populations. And the Trump administration has been moving to revoke those. And I, you know, I feel very badly for hundreds of thousands of Haitians who were, you know, being pushed back toward a terrible situation in Haiti. But, you know, Congress never voted and decided to admit five percent of the population of Haiti to the United States. And there was never really a policy decision taken there. And the Haitians were never told that they had, you know, a permanent path to stay in the United

States, which also to some extent inhibited them from putting down roots here. So, you know, it would be nice if Congress would get together and write new immigration laws that would greatly tighten the asylum system and try to make decisions about exactly who we want to choose to admit to the U.S. and bring here. And then among other things, I think that would put us toward a higher permissible carrying capacity of how many immigrants we could admit without pissing everyone off tremendously. But, you know, that is that is not the path that we took over the last 15 years. But what do you think? I mean, I mean, in Europe, it's a little easier to pinpoint this, right, because of Syria. Like, Syria opens these floodgates that changes

of the populations in Europe. What, like, what changed in in the United States that you think that set us off in 2014. It was that surge in migration from Central America. Right, but what sent this search? That's my question. What, like in Syria, the reason that left Syria was before in Syria. Cell phones. No, really.

I mean, some of this is contingent, right? Like, you know, there's, you know, certain levels of unrest down there and then people get to the border and they start figuring out that if you send a minor over the border on a company, then they'll be paroled into the United States. And then sometimes you get misinformation that moves through those networks where coyote trying to sell people's services smuggling them to the U.S., tell them things about that they'll be able to get in, and then, you know, there's a rumor mill. Also, seriously.

These don't sound like huge, big reasons the way that you would say, the global financial crisis made them poor, so they came north. Some contingent things happened that happened to cause that. And then, you know, look, if that had ended in 2014 and there hadn't been, you know, huge global migration flows, I don't think we would still be in a phase of our politics. It's defined by migration. But that was, you know, 2014 was the first election. that really in a large extent was fought over the issue,

and we've been fighting all of the elections over that issue since. If you want a structural reason, Ben, I really do think it's cell phones. If you think about, like, so first of all, you're now not having to pay for expensive long distance, which makes it more attractive to leave. You can still talk to mom every night if you want to. It means that if you're sending an unaccompanied minor, you have a way to track the kid while they're moving.

Like, imagine just sending your 11-year-old child off with no idea where they were for months. Like, people did that in that 18th century, but that's a pretty bold move. And I think having the cell phone made it easier, finding out what things were like, finding out where your people lived that you knew. Like, as – and also finding out, right, the asylum system was always gamable. It was always set up so that, like, it was going to take a long time to figure out whether you actually qualified for asylum and so forth.

And people just kind of relied on people not abusing it too much. Some people always did. There were bad people in the world. But what happened in the 2010s was that people figured out en masse that if you showed up and said you wanted asylum, you could stay in the United States for quite a long time and work and send money home. And I don't blame them for that. If I was in their situation, I hope I would have the guts to do the same thing. But it was not sustainable politically in America.

There's an even thornier problem than that, though, which is that the number of people around the world who have potentially valid asylum claims in the United States is pretty large. And historically, most of them had no way to ever assert that claim. There was no way that we're going to get to the United States. So some of it is about, yes, you have economic migrants who assert asylum claims. They're ultimately not going to get through, but they can take advantage of the backlog. But if everyone who, like, met the legal requirements for asylum actually came to the U.S. and was able to. to assert it and got it, that would exceed our political capacity to grant asylum. And so to some extent, there are valid cases that we have to change the rule to say no to

because as it's gotten easier for people to assert valid claims, it exceeds the number that we can reasonably process. I don't mean to suggest that I disagree with you about changing the rules and to deal with this. I'm trying to look at like when we look at what changed in our politics then, that if we're going to say that it happened in 2014, I want to know what was different in 2014 than 2013. And I think that there are good answers to that. And I think that the cell phone thing that, Megan, you just said is actually quite like a very reasonable answer to that.

But I think that then we're talking about technological moves that happened that are essentially the same as social media, right? People are suddenly able to, because they have supercomputers in their pockets, able to do these things that are going to happen as opposed to, you know, a bill was passed in 2014 that we can, that changed everything. And the only reason why it's important to look at that is that then you have to realize, like, what are the things that are levers that we can change? And what are the ones that we can't? And actually, there's more important things going on in the world. And sometimes those things are global financial crisis. Sometimes they're 9-11.

Sometimes they're-coded. I guess I don't understand your question here. Because, like, I mean, all of these things are contingent. Like, you know, 9-11 could have not happened. There could have been some, you know, stroke of bad luck that Mohammed Atta had. And the attack plan could have fallen apart, like the al-Qaeda plan in the 90s to blow up planes of the Pacific. But, you know, things happen. And 9-11 happened and the Central American migrant crisis happened.

And if, you know, if the winds had blown differently, it might have happened a year earlier or a year later. But that is when it happened. No, no. But that's a hugely important thing, right? Like, the most famous way of doing this that people love to do is with the global financial crisis. What if they had bailed out Lehman, the way they'd bailed out bear, you know? And there's been a whole, all these people writing about if that by itself would have stopped the contagion, you know, and that we could have avoided all these things. People have spent lots of time on that.

And you can do lots of things about 9-11. What if the, what if found 11 didn't happen? What if they'd caught them? What if they'd, all of these, all of these different things. But then there's the question of what structural things were revealed by this that actually would still have happened. The most famous of it, you know, we can go all the way back to World War I, right? It doesn't matter what happens in Sarajevo that day.

Eventually, all of these countries are on a thing that is going to lead to something that blows up the world order. And I don't actually have a specific answer to. that with all of these. But when you look at whole eras and wonder, how did these become the gravitating, political-centering things for billions of people in the Free West, I think that it is important to notice what is just bad luck that it happened and what is actually a structural thing that we should recognize. Oh, yeah. I think. And so then we can identify. I think it's phones and social media. And then I think the other thing more broadly is the world getting wealthier,

which means that, you know, even though that on some level means conditions are, you know, better in more places around the world, it means more people have the resources that make it possible for them to figure out how to get to the United States or Europe and try to make an asylum claim. This is actually about these places getting richer rather than about them getting poorer. That's a good point. That's what I'm talking about. Well, and also the share of the foreign-born population is rising quite rapidly. Right. So the share of the foreign-born population in 2000 is 11%. it's 13% by 2010. It's almost 14% by 2020.

That's a pretty fast change, especially because, of course, it's concentrated, right? It's not like we sprinkle these people just randomly all over the country. They're concentrated in places where they're visible. But, I mean, I will say we had an anti-immigration revolt in the 1920s, which was the last time the share of the foreign-borne population was this high. And they passed a restrictive immigration policy that dropped the share of the foreign-born population to 5% by 1960, 5.4%. And so this is sort of what I was saying about the political carrying capacity.

Part of the contributing thing, aside from the fact that it had gotten easier for people to come, was that we had since 1965 with the immigration reform, we had slowly been accumulating people on rules that I don't think most people would have agreed to. Right. Chain migration where like you come and then you can one by one bring your whole family over, and they jump the line in front of other people who might be better for America but aren't, like, related to you. I don't think anyone would have selected that as a policy, like ex ante. No one sort of thought about it.

And this goes back to, I think, one of the big liberal mistakes has always been just assuming no one will cheat. No one will take advantage. Right. I used to have these conversations about, like, disability insurance and unemployment and so forth. I got yelled out on NPR once, I believe, actually, on left and center, Josh. for saying that people were running out their unemployment benefits. And, you know, they weren't looking for work until their benefits were about to run out.

And, like, I was talking about people I knew personally. And I was called, I was accused of being, like, classist and racist. And, like, no, people do that. And it's not like the worst sin in the world. But it is a thing that happens, and you should not design a system assuming that it won't. And liberals too often do. I want to move to the... Before we let you change the subject, Josh, I need to ask one question before you do.

Okay. If 9-11 happened today, again, it's called 9-12, and it's a terrible terror attack in the United States, how do you think we would react? Knowing that we can look back on this last time it happened. Oh, whoops, Dacey's even too far. What do you think would happen, or what do you think should happen? I think what I would try to do, and I think a lot of other people would have this reaction because they haven't forgotten 9-11 and what happened afterward, is to try to channel the rage that we would all feel and the grief that we would all feel and try to make. make sure that that's aimed at who actually did this to us and what we can do to actually reduce the likelihood.

That's it for this week's free episode of Central Air. If you want to hear Maya and Megan's responses to Ben on what we would do differently, seeing 9-11 happen if we knew what we know now about what actually happened in the aftermath, and if you want our conversation about the new uncertainty, the weirdness of trying to understand the economy and fiscal policy in the time of AI. and to form views about normal issues like what should interest rates be at a time when weird things are happening. And you have people from these companies saying, hey, maybe we're all going to die. And if you want my trip report from Europe, we have more of a look at why ice is as though it cost $100 a pound in Europe.

I talk about why the French get to be rude. It's because they actually really do often know better than you. And we talk about the Autobot, which really has no speed limit. I didn't like driving on a road with no speed limit. And we talked about what we can learn about approaches to governance in France and Germany as we think about the United States. So anyway, if you want to hear about all of that, go to centralairpodcast.com, become a paying subscriber to the show. We'd love to have you.