Chapo Trap House - 540 - It’s Coming Rome feat. Patrick Wyman (7/12/21)

Episode Date: July 13, 2021

We’re joined by Tides of History’s Patrick Wyman today to take a historical look on things, starting with a brief discussion of the assassination of Haitian president Moïse, and the increasing privatization of violence. We then turn to Patrick’s new book The Verge, examining the crucial years of the Renaissance, and investigating just how and why western Europe transformed from a global backwater to the world dominating colossus it became for the last few centuries. Finally, we ask who’s actually more threatening to the “elites”: JD Vance or Matthew McConaughey? Check out Patrick’s book The Verge here: https://www.twelvebooks.com/titles/patrick-wyman/the-verge/9781538701171/

Greetings, friends. Happy Monday. It's Chop O'Trap House coming back again. The lineup for today is a little bit skewed. Felix is on the injured list. He's taken a sick note, so he's filling in for the role of Chris today, who is on vacation. But if you're not, it's Matt and I coming to you, but we are joined by a very special guest. It's the author and podcast host, Patrick Wyman. The podcast is Tides of History. The book is The Verge, Reformation, Renaissance, and 40 Years That Shook the World. Patrick, welcome to the trap house. Hey, thank you so much for having me. Well, look, Patrick, before we get into the Renaissance and the story of how Europe went from being a wretched backwater of civilization to one that ended up

ravaging the rest of the planet for the last few hundred years, I want to talk a little current events and just hopefully get a historian's perspective on this. And that is the rather astonishing story to come out of Haiti over the last week involving the team of Colombian mercenaries, which apparently assassinated the Haitian president, Jovenel Moise. And there's just a lot of threads of this story that's fascinating. I mean, like the history of Haiti, but also like just the circumstances of this whole assassination plot. Very odd. Like Patrick, what do you make of it? So I think the thing that I, aside from the basic fact that like everything that's happening in Haiti now is downstream of like a couple of centuries of outsiders meddling

in Haitian affairs to make themselves feel good about things and to make money for themselves. Like I think the thing that stands out to me the most is that basically the privatized violence that killed the president, that there are people who are whose services are available for hire on an international mercenary market who can carry out fairly like reasonably high level assassinations of important people. And I think leaving aside the impact on Haiti itself for just a moment, I think we're going to increasingly see that, that just that violence is going to increasingly be a thing that you can buy for a price. There are huge numbers of people who have the skills who are just like, okay, for X amount of money, I can do this terrible

thing for you. I think to some extent we're just seeing violence, like we're seeing the state's monopoly on violence slip away a little bit and it becoming increasingly a market commodity. And we're seeing that not only with this, but I believe it was last year, there was the Nissan executive Carl Gozen, who was being charged with embezzlement and other white collar crimes from his time in charge of Nissan in Japan, who escaped the country with the aid of a private military contractors who put him into a crate and got him onto a private jet and then flew him to Lebanon where he has citizenship and where he won't be extradited. I've been like following a lot of like sort of gang history in America and it's really interesting how things have gotten

to the place they are in America since like they're early to mid 90s. Like what happened in a lot of places is that like how public housing projects became like people would obviously like fight over who had the rights to like sell drugs there and then the solution was okay, we're just gonna demolish them. But it's like that doesn't stop happening. Like crime goes somewhere. It doesn't just stop and all these neighborhoods that people don't think about are like a low intensity civil war and I used to think it was a policy failure but then I realized no that's the policy. The policy is to like put this in a place where cops don't go where you don't think about and there's this like murder rate that's comparable to any like low intensity civil war or like country that's like

kind of an unrest but it just it's you don't have to think about it because it's not like in front of you in the way that it would be in a housing project and I think that's sort of like that's gonna be sort of the future with countries. Like there are gonna be places on the periphery that you just don't have to think about and on one hand that's gonna be where a lot of our cheap labor pool comes from but on the other you know it's a good place for people who are on the higher end of state violence services to apply their trade. And apparently like these mercenaries are for from Columbia which is like you know the one-stop shop for mercenaries which is like all a byproduct of the last like the longest civil war I think ever fought was in Columbia and then

like we've been funding their military and training these operators for years and years and years and like Felix to your point about well even if you demolish the building the you know like the violence and the crime it has to go somewhere and the exact same thing is true with all these dirty wars and like this like Patrick like what you were saying this sort of like a gig economy-ification of assassinations like putting it on fiverr like hey I need to kill the Haitian president can I get 20 guys sure and I guess the other road the other interesting thing about this story is of course that the hiring of these mercenaries is apparently linked to a firm based in Miami and maybe not the exact same one but like certainly one very similar to the one that

tried to pull off that like ridiculous Keystone cops coup in Venezuela a couple years ago there's one of the things that's really fascinating about this is the way in which like small conflicts to just feed one another all over the world that like it's the same people going from place to place to place to place over decades and decades and it's like so even if the Wikipedia entry for for some particular conflict ends in 2014 it's not like the people who were fighting in that thing like stopped existing in 2014 you know like like the Chechen dudes who spent the better part of a decade shooting at Russians in the Caucasus just went to Syria and went to Iraq to fight for ISIS and Colombian mercenaries who spent two decades you know fighting fighting in a

civil war are now just available for hire and it's like these things are you just create these long-term mutually reinforcing cycles of small scale or potentially larger scale violence when you have these wars I mean said something that's um we've kind of like replicated what the Saudis have always done which is that there's this like endless pool of young men that you can send all over the world like that was that's what they had instead of like a formal intelligence body they had like just like military-age males or it's like okay if you're really religious and we sent you to prison we're gonna send you to like Chechnya we're gonna send you to Syria just so you're not a problem here and it's it's sort of perfect because you're not you don't have extensive

paperwork or relationships with these people but you have enough of one where I mean it's the gladio thing where it's like okay if you do exactly what I want great but if you don't that's not really my problem and that's just that's kind of what everyone does now like it's such a good system for nations with any type of resources that everyone's kind of copied it even places that do have a more formal intelligence thing and now what we're seeing is like it's sort of it's sort of being done by like non-state actors like we can't really get to the bottom of this one yet but it yeah it wouldn't be surprising if this is like you know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone is in this but you can't exactly like draw a paper trail all

the way back to where you want to draw it I'm just like I mean I just like to like add another element to this that's fascinating to me and like this is speculation on my part but it's like it's very hard to you know suss out like what the possible motivations for something like this would be I mean outside the obvious but members like Colombian journalists who have been checking up on this story have reported that the family members of the people who have been killed or arrested in Port-au-Prince are claiming that they were hired by the security firm to be to work as security for Jovenel Moise instead of killing him and obviously like their family members would have reason to concoct a story that would exonerate them in such a way

but it brings them on like if these guys were like a team of highly professional trained operators like wouldn't they have been fucking out of the country like the minute after they shot this guy because like apparently like after they did this their plan was to like okay let's just hold up in the Airbnb we rented in Port-au-Prince until this all blows over and then like a whole fucking country laid siege to them like these guys were professionals it's very hard to imagine them going forward with that unless something unless at some point there was some degree of a double cross you know like they got they got double crossed at some point I don't see how they would go into that okay what do we do we shoot him then we drive to the yeah

Airbnb and we play fucking Jenga like they wouldn't say yes to that like that wasn't where they thought they would end up one theory that I saw advanced was that he was actually that the people who killed the president were like his staff yeah we're actually already there and that those guys are the patsies they like it was like dial in Oswald they called up a private contractor to bring some guys who could just take the fall because I mean the question of who to kill this guy obviously everyone these first assumption is the United States but like this guy wasn't like Aristide this is the pro you know neoliberal client entrepreneurial after they ran Aristide out of there the second time but he had also he was also refusing to step down after

the end of his constitutionally ended Torm and his refusal to do that was creating is and is still creating a huge a wave of demonstrations which parenthetically have gotten a essentially zero percent over the course of months now a press attention compared to the whatever the fuck CIA operations are happening in Havana Cuba SOS that's an interesting that's an interesting contrast this has been going on for months it's getting bigger and bigger and like there I read an interview with a with a Haitian journalist saying that like there are like lumpen proletarian like social bandit gangs like turning into forces of like revolution in the streets around this stuff and in that a condition the most likely target the most likely candidate is someone in

the high the ruling class of Haiti like okay we got a we got a nerve this guy like that like the Dominicans did with Truyio with CIA help in the 50s Patrick though but like from like a broader perspective like in terms of just the history of American interventions in Haiti under the guise of humanitarian relief or whatever how is like the history of Haiti as an independent nation like since this revolution been I mean it's a it's it's it's a source of a lot of you know emissary and horror but like also as a symbol of freedom for basically the entire Western atmosphere yeah the the story of Haiti is really fascinating because there's always the counterfactual of like what if the United States had not been so incredibly invested in making

sure that Haiti could not be a success story like that the idea I mean it's hard to overstate how freaked out American slaveholders were by the prospect of an enormous slave rebellion right off the coast of the United States like that this is it's not just a threat to an economic system it's also an incredible ideological threat to their whole way of life and their whole understanding of how the world is supposed to work so from Haiti's very beginning there's this sense that we can't let Haiti be a success there's got to be tariffs there's got to be sanctions there's got to be eventually direct intervention in Haitian affairs and just you know landing Marines there for for decade after decade after decade that like there is it there's

no way of understanding Haiti in the present day that doesn't draw on on this these long series of antecedents this long way in which the United States has been fucking with in France too I mean but but the United States got fucking reparations yeah France got reparations from Haiti for the crime of liberating themselves there I mean it's like it's incredible like right like that there's you know I just it makes me think of the like development economists and and right wing economists who are like well you know what is it about these third world countries that they just can't get their act together why why are there institution why are their institutions so bad like I don't know man it's a complete fucking mystery just can't figure it out yeah it's like

you you shoot someone in the kneecaps and then hand them some crutches and are like hey walk it off yeah it's the there's the there's this one of those real famous anthropologists who went to who went to South America this guy Holmberg right so he wrote he wrote a book about one particular group of natives and about how primitive they were and they're basically you know they barely wore clothing and as it turned out these people were refugees that like their their entire way of life had been destroyed by ranchers who had taken their land a couple of decades before and it's like so this guy Holmberg shows up and it's like interviewing concentration camp survivors and coming up with a with an idea of what Jewish culture in mid 20th century Europe was like and that's how I feel

whenever we talk about Haiti it's like well it is the way it is because of this long interconnected series of ways in which we've been fucking with them well I mean yeah it just seems like they've never stopped being punished for having a successful revolution like the only successful slave revolt in the western hemisphere in the history of you know slavery in the in the Americas and well I mean it's just it's a really pretty astonishing story to come out of Haiti and that that's what I've been just sort of fascinated with this week but I don't want to believe your current events too much Patrick because we want to talk about your book the book is The Verge and I'll speak in by asking like okay so the book opens with a very like an incredibly cinematic depiction

of the army of the Holy Roman Empire sacking Rome so for our listening maybe you could explain why does the why did the army of the Holy Roman Empire sack burn loot rape and pillage everything in Rome and the Catholic Church what's up with that but also like how does how did this this historical incident like how did like how do you like how does this express like the thesis of your book and like why did you choose that to open open with so I chose it because I think it encapsulates everything that I think it encapsulates every major process that happens in this area in some ways it's it's the kind of natural culmination of the decades that had come before it because you have the army of the Holy Roman Emperor sacking the city that belongs to the pope in in just

incredibly shocking violent and disgusting fashion right like it's I mean it's real vicious they they're you know they're burning people alive in buildings they're they're selling nuns on the street for a coin a piece there's blood running in the gutters they killed a captain of the swiss guard in his bed in front of his wife it's like the it's it's just a nasty disgusting series of events but it's the entirely logical conclusion of what had come before it over over about 30 or so years so the army of the Holy Roman Empire sacked Rome because they hadn't been paid right so the problem in this period folks if you have a giant mercenary army the most important thing is that you have to have the money to pay that's I mean but that's exactly the that's that's exactly

the conundrum of this era is that you get the ability states grow the ability to raise increasingly large violent armies that are comprised of highly skilled professionals who get really good at this extremely effective way of waging war that revolves around pikes early handguns cannons fighting in tight formations like these guys are fucking professionals they're really really good at what they do because they just go from campaign to campaign to campaign from year to year to year to year so there's this enormous store of institutional knowledge and ways of doing things there are a ton of these guys they're all available for hire they all want to they all want to march off the next year they all want to take somebody's coin and and march off the war the problem is

after they've initially been hired because they're all hired on credit like the there isn't a lot of actual cash that's changing hands here it's a it it's all a series of credit transactions credit from the individual captains who are hiring the soldiers from the big captains who are hiring the small captains to the kings who are contracting with the big captains everybody owes everybody money the money itself is not actually there so as it turns out these guys in this particular army are raised for us for a campaign in italy in 1527 it there it's going to be a big campaign it's a big army there's 16 000 germans who are marched south over the alps that you got the the spanish garrison from from naples that's part of it spanish garrisons from lombardy the germans

haven't been by the time they start marching towards rome the germans haven't been paid since they left the year before the spanish guys haven't been paid in 18 months and they essentially just stop taking orders so the only way for the commander of this army to keep them together is to say okay if you guys just kind of stay together in this army eventually we'll get you paid but until then the pope is on the wrong side of the alliance that we're currently a part of let's go and see if we can shake him down so they go to rome they go through a series of negotiations try to get room to pay some sort of ransom those negotiations fall through and eventually they just end up assaulting assaulting the city and sacking the city and so this is a

thing that's happened all the time over the prior two decades sex murders horrible things happening to civilians it's a really common thing it's just this is the most it's just this is the largest incident and the most famous one and it's the most symbolic because it's the holiest city in christendom the pope is fleeing a lot of the soldiers in this army especially the germans are are lutherans so they've picked up they've picked up protestant sympathies in the past several years so they're doing things like stabling their their horses in churches using their archibus they killed one priest because he wouldn't give communion to a donkey correct yes they killed a priest because he wouldn't give communion to a donkey you mentioned all the the horrible atrocities of course

none worse than when you said these lutheran troops used holy relics as targets shooting lead balls into ornate reliquaries and the sacred heads of mummified saints yeah i mean will the persecution of catholics yeah i mean it's like wait wait wait it's a Patrick what year was this like 1527 this was that was 1527 yeah okay have you read uh hillary mantel's wolf hall i have yeah i love that book okay like so like that the events in that book take place concurrently with the sacking of rome and the pope clement fleeing and it's it's it's wonderfully portrayed in that book but it's like always alluded to because it's happening so far away but it is this like apocalyptic moment for the catholic church and it precedes of course henry the eighths you

know uh splitting with them yeah and it's actually the the reason why henry the eighth can't get his divorce is because the his uh is because he's related to the uh the the king of spain charles the fifth by marriage charles the fifth the king of spain after this is holding the pope hostage so the pope won't grant a divorce to henry the eighth as long as he's a hostage to the relative of katharina varagon uh yeah it's just like it's it's it's a really violent encapsulation of everything that's happening here and in my mind the thing that makes this period stand out is that it's basically about money it's about finance it's about the the ways in which the ambitions of europeans and their capacity to do things outstripped their ability to pay for them and so it just

unleashes these kinds of apocalyptic currents all over the continent um in in some ways that are obvious like sacking a city and in other ways that aren't that aren't quite as obvious like just a proliferation of printing presses pumping out disinformation more fake news uh you mentioned the uh one of my favorite uh you know weapons of the era the the archibus and you know for anyone listening to this if you see me in traffic or on the street and you try to roll up on me try it i keep that archibus with me at all times and i'm gonna put a fucking a ball of lead the size of a fucking mire's lemon through your chest if you even try it yeah we'll keep that i'm not gonna be i'm not gonna be caught lacking i will not be caught lacking by the duke of bourbon pro clement

or any of these goofies you always that you always have to keep your slow match burning just in case but i like you you coin like what what is that what is uh you you reference this thing called like the great divergence like what what is a great divergence and how did like how do these these currents lead to as i said you're up going from being by the civilizational standards of the era uh not exactly the peak of what we would call human achievement to dominating the next several centuries of the entire world yeah so the the great divergence is one of the central historical questions of the last 500 years or so it's basically why in the 19th and 20th centuries do European empires end up dominating the globe what is the what is this the causal sequence that leads us

up to that and historians political scientists economists have answered it in a bunch of different ways um there are people who think it's a fairly late development it only really happens with industrialization there are people who think the roots of it go all the way back to the roman empire or even before um some people think it's about resources some people think it's about culture um i think it's mostly an accident and that's what this book is really about i think it's about this particular 40 year period where things really spiral out of control very quickly driven by kind of deep a combination of deep structures and totally and totally contingent events accidents of birth and death and what you end up with by the end of it is a massive increase in scale

so at the beginning of this period western europe is is a backwater like nobody there are no nobody wants to go to western europe to get anything like sure they got nice cloth but like it's not worth traveling that far for nice cloth like you know like there are no uh it like dows from the indian ocean hauling up in lisbon there are no junks showing up in civil nobody nobody gives a shit um when vasco to gamma goes to india to buy the riches of the east you know silks and spices and precious gems and all that stuff he shows up with like a tub of rancid butter six hats and i mean it's like and some coral and he's like and he tries he's trying to trade for like buddy we can we can give you a teaspoon of cinnamon for this bullshit sorry it took you three ten years

to get here yeah they look at him like they they looked at him like he's a crazy person and that but that really encapsulates like where europe was relative to the incredibly sophisticated commercially advanced civilizations of especially of the muslim world and so but what we see by the end of this period is the beginnings of colonial empires right we see the fall of the new world empires the the aztec and the inca to spanish conquistadors we see the beginnings of the portuguese presence in the indian ocean like a future in which europe western europe is dominating the globe is visible even if only faintly by the by the end of the period that i'm talking about whereas at the beginning you would have laughed that out of the room so the i i think this is

a kind of a turning point i would call it a critical juncture like where a whole bunch of stuff happens very quickly and you can kind you can change some big things you can lay in some some foundations in a relatively short period of time just through the pure kind of conjunction of events i think that the uh the the area the era of time you're talking about the verge point is is really it really is this moment that's incredibly thick with historical contingency because this is when things start happening that move faster than people can anticipate and start changing things under people's feet in a way that uh that is really unprecedented but i think it's interesting and you talk about this a lot in the book how you can trace how that explosion occurs

in a context of that geographically determined reality of medium state competition in europe like the reason that these things that are around and have been around and throughout many areas in europe and hell were already to be found in china long before start getting stacked together by these states uh in competition with money one another that that motive that constant need to to to uh defeat and to uh expand at the expense of your neighbor necessitates the the the uh use of these things that uh should be handled with care because of their destabilizing powers but essentially at eventually you run out of the ability to choose not to use them because if they can be used they will be and if not by you than by your opponent yeah there's

there's just it's just this constant feedback loop uh where where if you if if i'm gonna raise 10 000 men my opponent's gonna raise 15 000 and my opponent's gonna raise 15 000 well then i gotta raise 20 000 and this goes on for decade after decade after decade the italian wars this long sequence of conflicts start in 1494 and end in 1559 all right so that's 65 years of more or less continuous warfare carried out by the largest states in western europe and in the middle of that there's also conflicts with the ottomans there are internal civil wars and peasant uprisings there are all sorts of other kinds of conflicts that don't even meet the criteria of what we would call great power conflicts there's local wars between uh between lords who don't like each other

there's all of this is happening simultaneously and so western europe is just this incredibly war-torn place where nobody has the money to pay for any of this so it's all just being done on trust and credit it's all like okay we i know you don't actually have the thousand ducats but you can owe me and we'll come up with ways of paying for it down the line and so when the currency actually does roll in when they do get larger amounts of gold and silver it has a multiplier effect so this is what happens with with charles the fifth when uh when the treasure starts showing up from the new world early in his reign is it's not like he uses that to clear his debts he uses it to take out larger and larger and larger loans so even though he's getting enormous sums of blood

money from uh from south america and mexico all of that money is just immediately being poured into more wars and more conflict well they they they say history rhymes at the present don't they yeah i mean it's like it's just putting just putting war after war after war on on credit cards and just and and trusting that that things are going to work themselves out somehow and the people who need to get paid will get paid and they did it worked yeah thank god for uh that that new world they got there where they could just build capital out of the human misery outside of uh like their own borders really helpful there yeah i just just you know four centuries of resource extraction after that i mean four centuries as as the beginning of that four centuries of direct

resource extraction and one way uh one one uh very important uh contrast that shows this point is that you have a chapter in the book about sulim on the magnificent and the apogee of the ottoman empire when it looked like they very well could have gotten to vienna and beyond if they'd really wanted to uh and uh you talk about the uh the creation of an ottoman state that was what every european monarch dreamed they could have and it's what charles the fifth tried to do in europe but you you make pains to point out that it was the very things that made the ottoman empire so enduring and powerful is what mean meant it was doomed to be overtaken by europe because there was no expediency within the system there was no real life or death competition the way that uh the that

dominated european statecraft yeah they never ended up with that kind of fiscal multiplier effect right because if you're if you're charles the fifth you would much rather have sulim on the magnificence finances you would much rather have his administrative apparatus it's just better everything about it is better you know you'd have you'd like much rather have his cool name you would much rather have his cool name yeah you wouldn't you wouldn't be named for a guy who got split in half by a halberd on a on a winter battlefields like that as as charles was um like it would you would much rather have been sulim on the magnificent because the ottoman empire is heir to like three different highly developed administrative traditions like the mongols the

Byzantines the islamic and the islamic states of the of the near east the ottomans have access to all of those administrative traditions and they've got really efficient ways of doing of doing fiscal exactions they've got ways of making sure that if your army is rolling through your territory they're not going to loot your own people you can just direct tax revenues in kind to feed them as they go like so you're when you when you raise an army you're not at risk of destroying your own territories they pass through which is not a given in the context of 16th century warfare so like there's no question who you'd want to be but because of this because of this surplus i mean they were running budget surpluses year after year after year they never had to develop these

fiscal tools to maximize their revenue they could just say okay well the next time we conquer somewhere we'll use that to pay off this small loan that we had to take out to cover a shortfall so you never end up with this multiplier effect that you end up with in western europe you never end up with this increasingly sophisticated and high level basically alliance between financiers and the political class at the top of western european states and that never happens in the ottoman empire because it doesn't have to happen everybody is motivated by debt they're they have that debt like spike in them in in in david graber's book debt he talks about how all of the nobles who made up the the like the hoarse cadres of uh courtesans conquistadors were all wildly in

debt and and at that risk of like losing their entire you know station life and and that's what drove them to those boats that's what drove the the monarchs to get the funds to send them on those boats that's where they burn the boats to keep the keep the creditors away well so that's that's one of my favorite like tiny little anecdotes about the the the whole era of exploration is that the the ships the the two caravans that columbus took um the the nina and the pinta were actually a tax payment in kind from the seaport of polos because they'd been dodging their taxes so instead of having to actually pay the sum of money to the crown they were just like okay well we'll give you these two caravans you can give them to this this shithead who's sailing west

into the atlantic if we never see them again okay that's fine we've cleared our debt everybody's happy now that's how movies used to get made yeah it's just like everybody in western europe owed everybody else because nobody had coin and so like no matter everywhere you look you just see these cycles of debt and of debt and credit and repayment that are all predicated on jumping toward the next thing whatever the next thing is it creates like a really powerful and destructive motor where nobody really cares what the consequences are everybody is just looking for their next way to stave off being imprisoned for debt or kicked off their land or losing their title or you know having your army of rampaging mercenaries destroy a city

so yeah like you mentioned some of the some of the big names from history that they turn up in your book you know see the men men of sulam on the magnificence caliber martin luther you know men cut from their cloth but there's also some uh some lesser known so i'm just gonna go with uh who the fuck was john heritage founder of the heritage foundation john heritage is honest to god my favorite character in this whole book because so he's a wool merchant and he lives in the english countryside he lives in glossershire in the late 15th early 16th centuries we only know that john heritage exists because his account book survives right so the accounts where he kept he listed all of the transactions that he made where he would go

around the countryside buying up wool from individual shepherds and you can just see him like standing there chatting over the gate with some guy while the dog's barking like getting mad because he stepped in sheep's shit like you can just see this guy out there going about his business day after day after day he's a kind of a common sort of guy and we don't normally get access to him the fact that we get access to him tells us that he was completely ruthless and he gets his start in business by kicking his peasants off their land that he had he had worked this patch of land for a long time his family had and he plots to dispossess the peasants and turn what had been farmland into sheep pastureage so 60 people lose their lose their

ancestral family home so that this guy can run some sheep on it and it's part of a process called enclosure that's central to debates about how we how we understand the emergence of capitalism in england and in europe more broadly so heritage is a participant in this process you get the feeling nobody liked john heritage very much but you can just see his business year after year after year and what's striking is that he's just typical he's just a guy out there doing this stuff but like wherever you turn if you were to find their account book you would find more john heritage and that's the thing that's really striking me about europe at this point in time is like it's not just about big name people it's that these instincts this kind of not caring about

who gets hurt by by your actions as long as the cycle of debt continues and the cycle of repayment continues you can even see that with a wool merchant like where else are you going to see it so the winners well mentioned martin luther when you can you talk about the the reformation both in terms of its effects on europe but also it's it's it's theological effects and its cultural effects but also the effect it has on the printing industry how do you see the reformation as like as central to this process like what does the reformation do at this time to propel europe in the direction it goes so the the reformation and printing is a really interesting thing and it's almost a cliche at this point to say like well you know the print the the reformation couldn't

have happened without the printing press because the church couldn't control the flow of information the printing press was central to the reformation but not for that reason it was central because printers figured out that they could make money by printing religious tracts they figured out that there was an audience for this stuff because prior to the reformation printing was always looking for a business model like more in the in the last decade of the 15th century more books are still being copied by hand than are being printed on a printing press even though the technology has been around for half a century it's hard to figure out a business model where everybody is happy with printing because it's speculative you don't know where your audience is you don't know who's

going to buy these things it requires huge upfront investments the reformation is a godsend for printers because they figure out that if they just print these little pamphlets that have you know it's like one sheet of paper you stamp a woodblock print on there everybody's going to buy them you're going to sell out in a day and you can then print another one these little tracts with their with you know eight pages from one folded up sheet of paper that that little woodblock print are full of really inflammatory stuff and that's the kind of stuff that pulls people in and gets them invested in the reformation as a process because it's really easy to imagine a world in which Martin Luther gets pissed off about indulgences he prints this thing and then it becomes a little debate

that occupies a tiny segment of the european clergy which is mostly what european reform movements were there are all sorts of these kinds of things where scholars get together and they debate you know what are we doing with purgatory now is purgatory a thing or is it not a thing occasionally you get and occasionally you better believe it's a thing buddy oh yeah well if we're living in it yeah it was definitely in the church's financial interest for purgatory to be a thing and so like but you end up with all of these little debates about it there was no guarantee that that what became the reformation was ever going to be a thing that anybody aside from this tiny latin speaking educated segment of the populace was invested in printing is what made it a thing

for everybody else because as it turned out martin luther was really good at writing these short punchy inflammatory really angry kinds of tracks in the vernacular so people who only read or spoke german could pick them up read them and all of a sudden they were invested in the reformation and they became the new market for printed works to be sold to like they're they're getting used to the technology it's like you buy an iphone and there's one app that you know how to use well now you have an iphone right and now you can get more apps you are a person who can be sold an app that's what happens with printing and the reformation is all of a sudden it creates a whole new class of readers and consumers of printed material that didn't exist

before uh was martin luther the original poster you know i know it's so cliche to say at this point but i mean i mean the the similarities are striking you know trolling the catholic church etc yeah i i really honest to god i think martin luther would have would have done great on twitter for like four years and then he would have completely melted his brain because he like the the martin luther's defining characteristic as a person was that he could never let a challenge go unanswered so and and he always had to win he always had to get the last work which would lend itself very neatly to a medium like twitter it's what made him so good at pamphlets because somebody would say something martin luther would write back they would say something else and martin luther

would write back and that's how the reformation develops it's not like big statements of faith about this is what we believe in we're protestants now it's no martin luther was pissed off that somebody said something so martin luther said something back and it just kind of got more and more and more extra forum stuff it's for more yeah that's that's exactly what the reformation is that's how we should understand it um at least being the reformation like i mean how do you view the reformation and like uh like how do you do you view it as like instrumental in the creation of what would become capitalism like like would capitalism have developed in the way it did without like i don't know the the protestantism for the you know um that's a really good question and i'm not sure

i have a great answer i think that it played a role in a few i mean i think it played a role in a few different ways but i think that there were already a lot of capitalists running around europe and this is one of the the kind of central things that i wish i had been able to spend more time in in the book is like the europe is full of capitalists it's full of people who understand how they can make money by investing their capital they think in monetary terms they think in terms of productive investments of their their funds that like this is this is their mindset their mindset guys they're on that grind they're on they're exactly they're on that grind and this mindset has diffused it's all over europe it's with that guaster sure wool merchant it's with a mercenary who's thinking about

how he's going to buy a castle with his pay from this next expedition that he's going on um it's all over the place the question the the thing that i always have a hard time answering is when we cross the threshold from having a society with capitalists to a capitalist society you know what i mean and i'm not sure i have a really good answer to that and without having a good answer to that particular question i'm not sure i can answer how Protestantism figures into that you know what i mean i think that yeah you can't it's it's difficult to point the time because it is this process of an inflection point being reached you know but but picking pinpointing it all you can really know is that there is one not necessarily what it was you know you can argue about that all

the time but the thing that uh what what Protestantism i think contributed most to capitalism was to provide a a social solvent really that could reorient people's understanding of themselves at relationship to things like money these abstract notions uh because there was a lot of stuff in Catholicism that made it hard to do capitalism that that were predicated on like a a a social fabric that was more important in main it was more important to maintain than uh to to allow in the efficiency of capitalism that might undermine it that's why you had things like uh oh well we'll have the Jews do the money stuff that's perfect then we can maintain a a a godly you know community but uh once you need to start treating people as strangers in a market you really have

had like a metaphysical you have you have you have undergone a a spiritual transformation of the way you view the world and Protestantism i mean not didn't emerge to do that but over time was put to that purpose by the emergent capitalism that's being generated by all this conflict it definitely made it easier to do that it like removed a layer it like removed a layer of uh uh it like removed a layer of friction from all of these transactions that's that's that's the best way i can yeah that's the best way i can think of to put it because even though you have like very like capitalistic merchant bankers in italian cities even in like the 13th 14th centuries right you have these guys who are doing this but they're genuinely concerned about the state of their souls they know that

they're doing usury they know that it's bad they know that they're supposed to go to hell for that right so that's why they they increasingly make these like huge donations because they're nobody wants some like franciscan standing on the street corner haranguing them talking about how they're like going to hell for this like that's that sounds terrible somebody banging pots and pans in front of your window all night exactly there so there really is in medieval europe this this like social sanction for greed that is it's present it's not all-encompassing it's not all-powerful but it does exist and it does play a role in regulating people's behavior and which and matt i think what you what you're getting at and i think what's absolutely right is that when when you have

Protestant places the barriers to that kind of stuff fall away yeah and you get an increasing embrace of the idea of wealth being good on its own and a product of kind of thrift and hard work and all the stuff that god wants you to go out there and do that you know Weber's Protestant work ethic right like and then that version of Christianity gets to be the one that sets the cultural and political economic terms for this new continent that that is then settled by the most the most efficient europeans at that point yeah yeah i the it's it's really hard to overstate like how fucking weird the puritans were in the context of 17th century europe like that's something americans take completely for granted is that like everybody thought these dudes were weirdos

they all thought they were weird and so we're like if they're in you know kind of baked into the foundational cultural and economic dna of the united states like we come from weird stock as a nation they were the people who had reasoned themselves out of believing in god anymore and then had to like re reason themselves into believing in god's like okay shit i got to the end of this equation and god is it real okay i can't stay out there that's not viable so let's get to work and then they rebuilt the belief in god purely out of reason and rationality and out of logical syllogisms and then had to spend their entire life manifesting the belief in that thing it's like rock rockos basilisk so just these absolute nerdlingers just like trying to do math equations

to keep believing in god and everyone else is like dude what is wrong with you settle down have some ale watch a christmas pageant what the fuck maybe i don't know maybe maybe put a wall painting on your church i don't know i don't know like it doesn't have to be you heard in vibes religion is is a large percentage vibes and you are killing them and then they said well fuck you we'll create our own vibes and then they did and it's what they fucking sucked the vibe sucked see more about those vibes in the film the witch then shall you be banished from this plantation's liberties i would be glad on it how sadly have the lord testified against you oh my god i love that movie it's so good oh it's

awesome i guess i i just like my last question here is like i i just want to just like just just ask just like broadly just just open to any commentary you want to you want to add just about charles the fifth i know this is one of felix's favorite historical figures and world leaders but just charles the fifth as a character a person a historical moment so the most outstanding thing about charles the fifth is his jaw which is just it's out there it's real out there uh it's contemporaries like wondered whether he could actually hold his mouth closed because it was so deformed by inbreeding uh it's uh like the there's there's a line from the english ambassador to to the court of castile in like 1560 and he writes home and he's like the king of castile

is an idiot that's that's the only way that's that's the only way that he could sum it up there were they met that medically yeah and he met that he met that medically um the the most outstanding thing that people noted about them was that he didn't talk because um he looked like an idiot when he did it and his tongue would kind of hang out of his mouth and so this is the guy so this is the guy who is the most powerful western european ruler since charlemagne just the finest product of the finest gene pools of the finest royal houses in western europe in the 15th century this is the guy you end up with and there's something really fitting about that in my mind because we don't like we don't have to look at charles the fifth and pretend that he's a great man

we don't have to be like look at what this guy accomplished look at what he did we can be like this was the product of like decades of structural consolidation that put this absolute fucking just guy on the throne of on like a bunch of different thrones and gave him the capacity to emissary multiple continents like it's a genetic consolidation it really because like even on the the side uh his his uh the spanish side isabella isabella of castile and fernand of aragon were already cousins they were both trustamaras so he is the product of multiple layers of continuous inbreeding over generations that were going to get worse from there that's the really stunning part to me is like it was gonna get worse yeah no he makes uh yeah he makes carlos

the fifth look like king arthur or other way around it's just like and that that that's the really liberating thing about having him is because he's he's the last substantive chapter of the book is talking about charles the fifth is that like we don't have to it frees us from the burden of even pretending that we have to like think that great people drive history forward through their individual agency which is bullshit to start with right but like if this guy who is supposed to be the most outstanding of them all in terms of the the the capabilities that he has at his disposal if he's a total fucking idiot like in the way that all the nobles of this day and age are total fucking idiots like that that tells us something really important about how history works and

how causality works that like it's not contained in you know long-term plans or destiny or the agency of great individuals there's something else happening here that should that should tell us that should give us some insight into the past it's why like uh probably my favorite movie about history or how history actually works for your point is a duck soup by the marx brothers yeah like it's all just it's all just like capital g guys doing stuff and like there's did you ever watch the series roam oh god oh my god yes so how we're new more nudity per minute than any other hbo prestige drama of the era more expensive than the other tv show but more nudity than any other historical epic you really got what you paid for with that uh the scene in

the scene early on in in roam when um the attack on mark antony is sparked by titus polo having gotten in a bar fight with uh with with some dude in a wine shop like supporters of kato or whatever yeah that like this is he was one of the one of one of pompe's soldiers a pompe pompe had polo had knifed to had knifed this guy's friend in a bar and the the guy was trying to attack polo not mark antony and that's this is how we get the disintegration of the the roman republic i think that's a much more accurate portrayal of how historical causality works than the idea that like people sitting on thrones make decisions that drive the course of history forward a question like at least like all this book like like you're writing this in in the present and in 2021 and

like as a historian you're writing about like a series of decades that like in in hindsight um you can see the way that like they they shape the world that we live in today i mean it certainly seems like you know it's impossible to do in the present moment but it certainly seems like you know we as a as a culture an economy a country whatever you want to say are just being hit with wave after wave of like world historical level crises or shifts that that we're currently experiencing an undergoing like as a historian like like what do you look for in our present moment for things that could conceivably be you know theoretically in a future point be like a verge moment that like we're currently experiencing now so i think that's i think that's a really good

question what what i i look for and this is true i think of historical periodization in general is that you should be looking for clusters of things that happen around the same time that if you want to define the end of one era in the beginning of another you want you want clusters of things that that happen that in seemingly unrelated fields that you can say ah yes we're doing something different now and i think you can do that about the present the one that really strikes me for the pandemic is the fairly sudden reminder that like workers think their bosses suck and you don't just have to do the shit that they tell you to do all the time like you can quit your job you can ask for more money like that i think that's a really huge and fundamental shift

that has been decades in the making and has now kind of exploded into being purely as a result of this contingent side of circumstance so there are structural roots to it but there's contingency in the sense that who knows whether this actually would have happened or not without the pandemic and so it makes i i think that particular thing is one example that that makes that shows us how a critical juncture can work and how it can happen that it's a combination of these long-term trends toward immiseration of working people plus the exogenous stimulus of having a of having a massive pandemic that makes clear that these people's lives and work is not valued the way it should be like so i that's one that i think about a lot that you can that i think

you can see the roots of it that if decades from now we have a more successful labor movement i think we'll be able to trace it back to this specific set of circumstances all right well it's a transition out of uh the renaissance to uh you know what we're talking about um as dan quinn would say the genetic bitches of the past i think i was hoping patrick you could join us now in um an examination of uh one of the genetic bitches of the present and join us in this week's reading series which comes courtesy of henry ulson of the washington post headline jd vance is scaring america's elite good and i'd just like to say for listeners here this article is illustrated the headline photo under the the idea that jd vance is scaring

america's elite is a photo of this his chipmunk face soy-facing it's just a chipmunk like soy face and this is the visage that is sending a chill up the spine of elites everywhere so jd vance longtime friend of the show we love his book and movie uh let's let's hear about how he's uh uh scaring scaring he's shaking things up so this is henry ulson washington writing in the washington post ohio senate candidate jd vance is being attacked by critics on the left and right for his populist economics and his changed views on former president donald trump that's a good sign that vance's message is getting through and that he can win okay so right at the back i'd like to know a little bit more about what his populist economic policies are and i also like that he

just sort of uh he he lets it slide real quick or is like his changed views on donald trump i love he's crazy on donald trump i saw him make it at the steam room and i he brought me around i mean like the entirety of the of the populist message is it's uh forcing your grandkids to like your facebook posts that's it it is all posting related it is a consumer revolt about not being uh not having enough views on your posts because you're old and nobody wants to fucking view your posts because posting is for young people you should be rocking on a fucking chair grandma why are you on the internet but they are and they want someone to tell them that they're good at it and they want the govern that person to be the government that's it that's nothing to do with

the with the hating uh capitalism or or going against corporate power it is whoever is in charge i don't care if it's the phone company or amazon they have to like my posts yeah this is a his changed views i mean like jadie vince i mean this guy's just like another glenn beck i mean he was a guy when trump was running for president who was like this is indecent he's unfit for office he's a he's a threat to everything the conservatives hold dear and then he became president and everyone liked him if you're on the right wing and then he's just like oh actually um he's a pretty good president he's done some good things for you know the people i care about in the hollers or whatever it's just like shut the fuck up dude no it turns out they still like him we were we thought

that the media might have enough of a disciplinary function on the broad right wing of america that we could make trump unpalatable to them nope they like him the and every effort you make to do that made them like him more so now you gotta like him jd that's it that's all it is uh also continues here uh vince has some qualities that most politicians lack these days thoughtfulness and are not that definitely chin is not one of them thoughtfulness and are an authentic willingness to speak his mind i've known him since before his memoir hillbilly elegy made him famous he's the same person now as he was then he is deeply concerned about the state of working class people of all races in today's hyper corporate globalized america and he hasn't

surrendered his mind to polls or to the donor class in an effort to fit in he is what he has always been words and all and he's offering that to the people of his home state with the belief that they will sooner trust a person like themselves than they will get another ambitious politician twisting to meet prevailing political wins okay i mean like that describes i mean we've just established that he just absolutely put himself into a fucking twizler yeah whatever you guys want so i especially like the idea that he hasn't surrendered his mind to the donor class no just a single donor just peter thiel just that guy who literally wants your blood nothing to worry about there the the blood baron has chosen him as his is his protege no reason to be concerned

that if the palantir guy thinks you're the horse to back i don't know i i don't know that that would be a real big endorsement for me but that's just me like these people are supposed to be shitting their pants all day about the intelligence in this uh the intelligence community and the surveillance state and actually look all the leftists don't care about that stuff anymore because they love uh big tep fucking teal those palantir which is just the number one contractor for every piece of the surveillance state like the actual apparatus of it is all subcontracted to guys like him i've uh i've decided that i i love jd vans now um i love him because he's like he's like what he's like 40 something right he's like one of those guys who's like it's very

rare where he looks so bad you can't tell what age he is like usually that's a compliment but it's just like he's so like bad looking in a timeless way like he has a fully like a grown man he looks like a fat 19 year old forever he just has one of those faces i fully respect that he is the type of guy who grows a beard so that it hides the second and the third shin like that's a sole purpose it's not careful patron careful so there's a difference between having the there's a difference between having the beard for for purely to hide the second and the third shin and that being a nice and that being a nice accoutrement i'm speaking from experience here i like how like he's doing this for like an audience of no one like it's like what he's doing he's demeaning himself so badly

like this like yell guy who like you know drinks stem cell smoothies with peter teal going out there and being like um a latte yeah how about a beer and just like no one no one likes it like it's i love that well i'll give him i'll give him a modicum of credit may if he's trying to do that to get people to like him yeah he that's the most sad pathetic strategy of all time but but if i were him if i were jd vance if i was in that position and i was that much of a fucking dork much of a pencil neck uh who even in a movie where uh based on my book and i'm the main character i come off like a pudgy little bitch i mean yeah it's amazing to think that that the worst main character of all time of this disgusting little puss jewel uh if i was him i wasn't gonna i'm not

gonna think i'm gonna cozy up to the maga people what i'm gonna do is i'm going to rattle the cage of the online left enough so that they talk about me all the time and then make the mega people notice oh the the libs hate this guy maybe if we have her for him they'll get mad that's his best hope but the problem is because of his demographic and his instincts he can only try to get the online left mad who these people don't fucking give a shit about a primary voters in ohio they don't fucking care this guy is just not part of the cycle of names that these idiots care about and all of those are related to things like trump and the fucking election theft and shit like that they like jim jordan they don't fucking know who you are and and and and they're not paying attention

to the fucking dorks on twitter who are making fun of them all the time like us yeah no ohio republican primary voters you know when you see someone who has like eight podcasts in their bio and it's all the same podcast basically it's like the the guillotine hell world week and like the only people that subscribe to those are ohio primary voters yeah all right so continuing he writes critics claim the opposite they say vance is a man who in 2016 criticized trump and then shifted his views to suit his political constituents so his potential constituents on the one hand that's rich if criticizing trump in 2016 disqualifies a person from office precious few republicans would still be around today yeah no shit yeah that um it says a former white house chief of

staff mic mulvaney went so far as to call trump a terrible human being in 2016 yet trump overlooked that insult to name him his top eight on the other hand vance says trump's performance in office made him change his mind and that the views of his potential supporters who do like trump shouldn't be ignored why shouldn't we take him at his word i mean why shouldn't we wow what would he have to gain by line yeah well what would be the incentive doesn't make sense settle lifetime of honesty up until this point uh the anger and vitriol behind some of the attacks on vance belie the real motivation for them vance calls out big corporations for hollowing out us manufacturing sending jobs overseas and making themselves and their educated hangers on the

lawyers financial mavens and others rich in the process perhaps his critics don't like that he says what most americans of all ideal ideologies think that the powerful have moral and social obligations to other americans that transcend the pure pursuit of profit the nerve of this guy i mean yeah i mean like most normal people do believe that but jade vance certainly doesn't believe it i mean he went right out of the fucking uh Yale law school to the internship at the american enterprise institute come on man well these guys have this idea that there is a a like intellectually consistent argument for some sort of populist nationalist republicanism that will get basically everybody without a college degree to vote for them and they think that because of what trump

was able to do but i think what they have vastly underestimated is the degree to which that is not ideological these people are not operating out of a co for the most part because very few people do operating out of some sort of coherent political analysis of the situation all of their feelings which are connected to things like the industrialization are being filtered through their culture that they surround themselves with that that's how they understand these things and trumpism i think the evidence is pretty clear is about him it's about trump and and it's like the degree that it has any staying power coherently is a degree that they can maintain itself around that whole the the phenomenon of him because it is this it's a phenomenon it's not an ideal

these people are not looking oh look jade vance he's actually got a coherent uh critique of capitalism from the right like no they don't give a fuck they want the circus barkers they want because that's what politics is and that's who votes in these elections is people who have fully assimilated cat politics as something to be passively observed i think one of the things that's really fascinating about vance in particular but you can see it in this op-ed here is the need to have an intellectual justification for hierarchy that that you that okay we can have social betters as long as they have obligations to the people below them one of the things that trumpism did was it embraced hierarchy without the sense of obligation and that it's just like some people

are better than others and deserve to have good things happen to them you my friends are among those good people who are higher up on the hierarchy you don't need to justify it with all of this bullshit about obligations you can just say you're better and justify that on whatever basis you want like it doesn't it doesn't matter and that's like that's where you can tell that vance is out of step is that he needs it to be ideologically coherent in some way shape or form when the beauty of trumpism was just tapping into that raw id that's present like like they're they're guys at my weightlifting gym who god bless them i don't talk to them but i listen to them talk because it's it's deeply fascinating but like who are convinced that trump is the only person

who's going to defend their right to have a gun which they believe every single american should own and carry it all times like that's and which is a fair read and they like they're they believe that that makes them superior and better to their fellow americans the this these couple of guys and like that's that to the extent that that's coherent it's just about superiority it's not it's a thin justification the guns are ancillary to their to their exalted position on the social hierarchy yeah and and the difference between guys like trump and the politics of trump and the politics of guys like vance is that guys like vance are still worried about the teacher grading their paper they're worried that like that they're not that they're not meeting some sort of obligation

to like transcendent notions of like uh yeah intellectual consistency ideological coherence uh you know the voice of the teacher basically and and guys like trump are actively oppose that entire concept and they are hostile to the the the the notion that there could be anybody judging them any no any transcendent social notion any people in a the teacher is out there it's like fuck that uh like the trump was at cpac in dallas given his speech and he's talking about uh how they impeached him twice and how they thought like they were going to get him to behave and he says i got worse that was i got worse so good it went wild we want to impeach him we're going to impeach bill bar we're going to impeach him he became different i understand that i didn't become

different i got impeached twice i didn't change i became worse like he he has inverted their value system and that has freed him he's free and if there's one thing you can notice is who are the people who are really in this and who aren't it's how free they are it's how free they are to not give a shit and in fact orient themselves against any sort of social uh uh obligation or uh or monitoring or or values that they're not their own and then you got nerds like fucking fans trying to fucking uh carry the two on this shit and nobody fucking cares it's the difference between having an intellectualized ideal of social and natural order and having a purely gut driven idea of what natural and social is supposed to be and for guy for people like trump and those

who are most suited to follow in his footsteps there's there's only the raw bleeding sense that they're better and that and that whatever any justification is ex post facto you know it's like it's the the like you start from the assumption that you're better and reason outward from there you don't take some sort of objective evidence and have it lead you to the conclusion that you're better it's just like the to the extent that like the racism is incidental to trumpism it comes from that it's like we're we're looking we already know that we're better all of that is just reasoning is just reasoning outward from that basic assumption and because jv vanson guys like him are at the end of the day meritocrats they believe that they're that through like a ritual of uh of the

of the accumulation of social habits uh and the the pursuit of certain certificate certify certifying checkmarks uh you become worthy of position in a hierarchy by by literally doing your homework and and of course the end result of meritocracy is it's the same situation that you had with charles the fifth you have a bunch of fucking uh a slack jaw dipshits like our ruling class is as as mediocre at best as charles the fifth was even though we're now supposed to have been you know operating out of meritocrat meritocracy for the past 100 plus years no we've got the same thick-headed dipshits in charge because it just over within a generation meritocracy just reinforces genealogy the same way old traditional hierarchies did and so we're at

the same place with with the third sons and the dipshit inbred mutants in charge protected by technology and social structures and if you're up there or you want to be up there and you want to defend it you can either make up a little fancy uh pageants for you and your friends to carry out to validate it or you can just fucking do it and which people would prefer uh is pretty clear which more fun you know and and the people who don't find it fun the people who need the little ritual that's the puritans those are the freaks the ones who need to be fucking doing math problems all day to prevent good people and it's like the right is losing their uh them very much like those people are becoming liberals now but guys like jade evancer like the last

carbuncle on the horse that is slowly being eaten away olsen continues uh the left opposes vance because his views would deprive them of their chance for really big government no one attacks senator elizabeth warren for using her privileged parts at harvard law school to become one of the nation's most prominent left-wing populace uh excuse me henry elson i think you should check our back catalog uh sir before you make a sweeping assertion like that but no he goes on um that's because he is pushing social democracy the form of economic regulation that is acceptable in media and academic hallways yet because vance who is educated at yell law school expresses a populist anger over economic decline that doesn't include yet another expansion of government they claim he

is not an authentically working class candidate anger on the right stems from his from the naive belief among conservative intellectuals and commentators that the trump era was a mirage and that free market fundamentalism can now resume its reign at the top of the conservative politic policy hierarchy these pundits want vance smart economic populism to fail because they know their goose is cooked if he wins i mean again i i would just like a description of what this smart economic populism that they're talking about is like how do we like a what like in the absence of a really big government i mean where is this new economic policy populism gonna come from tax cuts for small businesses and maybe a child maybe at the very late edge of it a child care tax credit or

something but he hates those he hates child care stuff so i don't know because he wants to be like he's well he wants to talk about the need for you know people that be able to choose single parent families even though that would require people to get higher wages than people like vance and his overlords want to pay them with a may third primary the race is already crowded with more than 10 declared candidates and a few others still waiting in the wings ohio's republican primary law does not require a runoff so whoever gets the most votes will become the gop's nominee and presumptive favorite with such a crowded field a candidate could easily win with only around one third of the vote that's a standard that is easily within vance's reach recent contested republican

presidential primaries in ohio show how this is possible both trump and rick santorum received roughly 36 of the vote in their 2016 and 2012 presidential campaigns respectively they both ran as economic populace and santorum was also a favorite of evangelicals and conservative catholics santorum swept most of the state's rural counties losing narrowly to eventual nominee mit romney because he lost in the state's major metropolitan areas trump also did well in rural counties but was particularly strong in ohio's south and southwest the appalachian region that harbors depressed coal and manufacturing communities the state's three large cities and they are surrounding upper income suburbs cast less than 40 of the vote in the 2018 gop gubernatorial primary

vance's message of anti-big tech social conservatism and anti-corporate economic populism is tailor made for the other 60 of the gop electorate and finally olsen concludes by saying mr smith isn't supposed to actually go to washington the fact that mr vance could is scaring america's bipartisan elite good i mean like yeah this guy who's been just just just cosseted in uh like Yale law school and like the heritage foundation and the american enterprise institute man he is a fucking he is a threat to america's ruling elite and as you pointed out patrick it's such a threat to big tech that entire his entire backing in political rear is funded by peter teal what what are we at what a shock that a guy who's funded entirely by peter teal

would find a political cap platform based on attacking all of peter teal's competitors the thing i just i i mean i try to i try to avoid reading op eds like this usually and so i'm baffled by its existence like who is it you guys got to answer this for me who is this for who is the what is the type of guy that reads this and is like you know that was a really well considered point made by uh what's this fucking guy's name uh hen henry olsen henry olsen i gotta say i think the audience is us yeah i think this is written for us to react to i don't feel too bad about it because that's not gonna work jd vance is cooked and even if he was it's like who gives a shit either way but like he's not he is not the american caesar so i'm not worried about him being unleashed on

america if he fucking wins the primary or not it's but like i think their strategy is get the libs talking about jd and how they hate him and then if enough of the people who vote for these things hear that they're gonna be like well guess what i'm voting for them does will that make you mad please tell me it will make you mad that's the only way i reason i get up in the morning anymore the libs hate jd vance so much that they turned his fucking vanity memoir into a vanity movie that they think was tried to get nominated for an oscar like like a safari guide to an imagined category of americans well see that's what i'm talking about like they can't they can't quit like middle brow prestige culture he can't do it he needs the validation of people who read opera book club books

and if he needs that he can never be the the the incarnate demon that he would need to get the to get the humors going and to get people uh caring about him yeah the as much as everybody wants to look for like who trump's natural successor is going to be it's just going to be some screaming guy just a just a perfect encapsulation of rage and hate and uh and grievance just raw grievance that's the only person who can tap into the same kind of sense that trump did it's not like gonna be some overly intellectualized law school grad like if this person went to law school they spent the entire this hypothetical person they spent the entire time boozing and uh and and running over small animals and in a bmw like that's what they did in law school they they weren't paying

attention they weren't getting clerkships if democrats and and and the libs out there are worried about that that theoretical figure in the future who comes and out of nowhere to channel the the the the grievances and id of uh trumps america uh there is one figure out there currently who i think represents uh their only chance of a a a bulwark to uh prevent this this this wave from crashing over them and i am of course referring to matthew mccanae because i i think this guy i mean it's already he's already shown that he is outpolling both uh beto or orc and whatever who's the current governor of texas patrick agreg abbot agreg abbot yeah patrick's the other guy uh yeah he's outpolling both of them if he decided to run for governor of texas and you know maybe if he

just does that it just line him up and if the democrats court matthew mccanae and just get him on his sort of like as matt was saying just a campaign of just pure vibes of pure feel good vibes about america like he released a july 4th message on twitter that he was just like it was it was about you know uh is celebrating america as a revolution but also just like instead of being like oh we have to talk about all the bad stuff in the past he was just like always got to get stronger always got to be braver that's what we just got to do as america and i thought you know mccanae he's got something and he i think mccanae represents the future of politics in this country if someone is if there if there is a you know a a a re chelou figure out there who's

willing to scoop him up and sort of pull the strings absolutely man is what i'm saying matthew mccanae please the problem with trump is and the reason that the trump show had to get canceled is because he riles people up too much you do you need to you need somebody who is famous somebody has charisma somebody who just dominates uh with their personality and you know only the way that a movie star or somebody of that equivalent is fame can but they can't be always riling people up like trump they have to be smoothing it out reminding everyone it's okay so like as the walls close in and as like the sluice gates open and the human abattoirs open up they're just like you just have this soothing calming voice just like telling you parables and stories about

shooting sejera and and and like you know just saying like kind of nonsense stuff like well you know i i always say that you know when you walk a mile in your own shoes you get to know other people better and you just hear that be like yeah you're right as the captured bolt gun goes to your forehead uh that's why we're gonna have president the rock in 2024 yes i mean honestly it's his for the taking if you want it clear yeah yeah i mean i would like would he have to declare a conflict of interest with his tequila brand at that point like how would that work would he have to put it like jimmy carter he would have to divest from the peanut farm the rock would have to uh you know mcconnell has his long branch bourbon he'd have to get rid of that too oh tragedy wait no no he

doesn't trump didn't do any of that shit no no they just said no he's gonna keep they'll they can keep it yeah no it would no they have to reestablish this the standards after trump left uh yeah i suppose that taramana tequila will go and trust until i leave office in 2056 all right i think we should wrap it up there for today i want to thank uh patrick wyman for coming on the show and hanging out with us uh the book is the verge um we will include a link for to order it i gotta say i gotta give uh i'm gonna give my plug for it on this is not this is not a bullshit pop history if you're a true history head this book will definitely you definitely fuck with this book but if you're not it is written in a very uh like i said cinematic style that is not it's not dry it's propulsive

it's it's it's a literary um the verge is great so thank you so much for patrick for thank you so much to patrick for coming on the show and for writing the book hey thank you so much for the kind words and for having me it is absolutely of my pleasure to talk with you guys all right cheers gang till next time bye bye probably