Chapo Trap House - 927 - Americas, The Beautiful feat. Greg Grandin (4/21/25)

Episode Date: April 22, 2025

Historian and author Greg Grandin joins us to discuss his new book America, América: A New History of the New World, which looks at the five century history of colonization & conquest of the New World, and how North & South America developed their distinct identities through a long history of mutual interaction and opposition.  We also catch up with Greg for his takes on the death of Pope Francis, the state of American empire at the start of the second Trump term, the U.S.’s lack of a forward-looking political horizon, and what possibilities we might see in the future of Latin America.  Buy America, América: A New History of the New World online here, or wherever you get books: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/747326/america-america-by-greg-grandin/

All I wanna do is hit the drum. All I wanna do is hit the drum. Hello everybody, it's Monday, April 21st, and we've got some chapeau coming at you. On today's show, Felix and I are privileged to be joined by a historian whose work I just said we have both knowingly and unknowingly expressed and been informed by throughout the entire course of our show. It is our distinct privilege to be talking with Greg Grandin today. Greg, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.

I'm a big fan. Greg, in preparing for today, and obviously you have a new book coming out tomorrow, America, America, a New History of the New World, which is a sort of a hemispheric portrait of the last 500 years or so of this side of the planet and sort of how North and South America are sort of the histories and destinies are very much intertwined and inform one another. In preparing for today's interview, I was thinking like, well, how should I kick things off? Well, I don't want to say today when I woke up offered, you know, a bit of good news, but I'll say it's a bit of tragic comic kismet that I woke this morning to the death of Pope Francis.

And I guess I'll begin there, Greg. Pope Francis is mentioned in the book, and I'm just wondering what you see in his life and career as sort of like embodying a lot of the currents of history and politics and the sort of tensions and contradictions between them. What do you see in the life and career of Pope Francis and his passing? Yeah, I mean, it sums up a lot of the arguments of the book. I mean, you know, he died right after meeting JD Vance. So I guess the main question is whether Vance killed him or, or he just lost the will to live after, after meeting him.

I don't know what was one or the other, but I mean, you know, I mean, there's a lot to say about Francis because he does kind of embody so many different currents. And one that's often overlooked is that he was an Argentine. And he was a, you know, I don't know if he was a Peronist, but he grew up in Peronist Argentine when the working class was entering the political arena demanding, you know, social citizenship. And that had a big effect on him. And certainly he lived through the worst of the fascist counter

counter revolutionary terror of the 1970s. There's a little bit of a murky history there about his role. And possibly collaborated with the Argentine junta in the 70s. You know, I've just been having this Twitter fight with people because I posted all I did was post saying a lot of it was supposed to say we shouldn't forget that, you know, there's this question out there and it's murky and nobody really knows. But, you know, history changes people and obviously history changed this person for the better. And then I got attacked that there's no history.

Everybody recanted. He had nothing to do with anything. I mean, it is a very murky history. You know, some people say he protected his Jesuits. some people say that there were two particularly troublesome one that he couldn't protect but did what he could other people know so it's the one that can only move diagonally yeah yeah yeah yeah The joke about the Dominicans, the Franciscans and the, and the, the Dominicans, the Franciscans and the, and the Jesuits, but I guess that's not really where the minute they're on the lights go out, the Dominicans say, let's meditate on the meaning of light and darkness. The Franciscans say, let's sing a song, uh, to delight in darkness. And the Jesuits say, let's, let's go change the light bulb.

So, um, no. So, you know, the point is it affected him. It had, it must have had some, just the violence itself of those, of that time, whether he was complicit or not, you know, obviously, and he was a Latin Americanist and he embodied a kind of Latin Americanist sociality that I don't want to deny that there's the opposite of that. There is a deep seated right-wing reactionism that is there also. But Francis, I think, brought to the papacy a certain kind of humanism that is the subject of the book. The subject of the book is how do you explain the existence of these two things in Latin America, a deep-rooted dehumanism, dehumanization that goes back to the conquest,

and an equally deep-seated humanism that the book actually argues emerges from the conquest, that the terms of modern political theory are set in the conquest of the new world and in the critique of the conquest by a handful of theologians and lawyers that have enormous influence going forward that's often unacknowledged. So yes, it is a history, the book is a history of how intertwined the Americas are, but there's been other books like that, oh, we're all American and all of that. But this book makes a further argument. One is that you can't understand

the liberal international order that is now being undone by Donald Trump. You can't understand it without understanding the history of the new world and the ideological competition between the United States and Latin America. And New World and the ideological competition between the United States and Latin America and before that the ideological competition between British colonialism and Spanish colonialism. Yeah, I mean you mentioned the Pope meeting with JD Vance a day before he

died. I mean I guess I was struck by, because a big part of your book is about sort of the Spanish Catholic Church mission to spread the gospel and to spread the Catholic Church into the new world. And obviously missionary work has been a huge part of the Catholic Church's history. I just wonder if in meeting a Catholic convert like JD Vance, the Pope was like, you know what, it's time to pack it in. Bye bye. It's all over. Well, I mean, JD Vance represented the other side of the schism that is deep and deeply rooted within the Catholic Church. It has a profound ideological, irreconcilable, I wouldn't even say it's a contradiction,

it's almost more like a paradox, but it's unbreakable between a certain kind of hierarchical, unegalitarian, patriarchal tradition and an emancipationist tradition. And there they were, both of them. There's Vance, who thinks, who wants, who is part of the Catholic manosphere. Or if they would let him in, I don't think they'd and Pope Francis, who, you know, without romanticizing him at all, because obviously he said a lot of things that we lot of cringe worthy things, you know, as an ideal type did represent a more humanist tradition. Well, Greg, I want I want to get into the book and a lot of the history in it.

But like since since we're talking about like saying being prisoners of the present moment, I do have to ask you as a historian of American Empire and a longtime observer of American Empire, I have to ask, where are we at now? Like what stage of empire is this? And I just like, what are your thoughts on the last two years of American history or the first couple of months of the Trump administration that really does it because, you know, people are beginning to feel like we are being occupied by our own government in this country.

Is this the empire finally coming home? Is this the culmination of a lot of the books you've written? Yeah, I would say that they confirm everything that I've written. I would say that I have been proved a hundred percent right. Prematurely so, I've been saying this since the 1980s. And yeah, I mean, there's a lot there. You know, obviously the big question is, is this the unraveling of the US empire, particularly the loss of, or the potential loss of the dollar as fiat currency, which, you know, which led it to, I empire, particularly the loss of or the potential loss of the dollar

as fiat currency, which, you know, which let it do it. I mean, if the United States was as fucked up as it was when because it had a fiat currency in which everybody put their monies into the dollar when there was a crisis, and therefore it allowed the United States to print as much money as it wanted, borrowed as much money as we wanted. If we were as fucked up as we were then, when we had that ability to do that, imagine what we're going to be like when that's taken away from us. It ain't going to be good. I mean, it's a lot of things, you know, obviously the end of the myth is an argument about what

happens when an empire founded on limitlessness as a way of organizing domestic politics hits limits. The meta argument of that is that there has been no empire in world history that so almost perfectly matched the dynamics of capitalism in terms of growth. Right? I mean, you know, that's the real argument, end of the myth is that, you know, there, you know, capitalism and the United States go hand in glove, you know, and expansion is part of that. And if capitalism can't expand, if the United States can't expand, you know, where are we? And the argument, of course, is that the polarization that the United States has had the privilege

of exporting has come home. And now we can no longer export our political polarization. And also the psych war that the US has been running on the world for the last 75 years has come home. I mean, this is what disinformation is. I mean, there's a lot of reasons for the epistemic crisis semantic crisis that we're in and some of it has to do with technology some of it has to do with you know, but certainly, you know, the US has been running a psych war on the world since since George Kennan's

1948 memo and that's come home, you know, it's the war. It's not just the war that's come home with that for expression. You know, it's it's the psych war that's come home. I was saying about like one one aspect of this psych war and that like I wanted to talk to you about is represented by Trump's trade policies and this back and forth on tariffs. And if I could describe like an idea behind them, which may be generous, it's that all of the countries in which all of the resources and labor that comprises like our consumer economy actually exist, that they are the ones that are ripping us off.

Yeah. That we're getting the shit under the stick in the global free trade regime that we created. Like is this part of a psych war? Where does this idea come from and what does it lead to? I mean, you know, I don't know if it's part of the psych war, but it's the craziest thing. It seems like there's 10 ideas within Trumpism that are on their own kind of coherent,

but when you put them together, they just kind of consume each other and eat each other up. And so, and then nothing ever happens I mean the the tariff war the time You know the idea is that we're gonna go back to creating value-added industry and have an industry, you know and have manufacturing here I mean, we're only going to do that with the magic of tariffs. We're not gonna do that by reigning in Financial capitalism and forcing it to invest in productive industry, wage paying industry.

We're not going to do it by strengthening unions to force better wages. We're not going to do it by investing in the technology that underwrites the creation of industry. It's such a crazy idea that just tariffs are going to bring us back to the world that Donald Trump grew up in, in Queens? And he's been saying this for so long. The thing about Trump is that he's kind of coherent when he makes that argument. You can go back to the 1980s and listen to these interviews with Donahue and Oprah where

they ask her about Reagan. Oh, he's a great president, but I'm not, I'm not a fan of his trade policies. And there was some crazy interview where Donnie even asked him about your father, you know, your father worked with the federal government to build housing for the working, he didn't make mention anything about it. It was just white working class,

but he said to build housing for the working class. And, you know, it was a partnership and they built this great middle class and Donald Trump said, well, you can't do it under this trade regime, you know, because all, you know, it's all finance and it's all deregulated. And there's like a, there's a kind of coherent argument there, you know, so his, his critique of, but then of course he doesn't want to do anything else that would, that would go along with that? Is he so embedded in the in the culture war, right? You know, we don't go to go back to it's a psych war, the psych

war is is the culture war gets all crazed and escalated in those terms. Yeah, it leaves the the autarky of his mind. And the second it like it makes contact with the world. I mean I think people overuse this term cargo cult but it like I did there's nothing else to describe it because it's like we need to have these tariffs to protect domestic industry. Okay what domestic industry besides pharmaceuticals and weapons systems? Right. The fucking industries that will pop up once the tariffs are there. Okay. Right.

Exactly. I know, I know without, and then of course, nobody's going to be investing in any popping up industries considering how back and forth they go. That's another question. Markets love uncertainty. Yeah. Yeah. There is this, there is this weird thing.

Uh, the, the fetish of tariffs is quite is quite remarkable. Well, I mean, whatever it is, it's it's it's hurting the economy. I mean, regardless of what you may feel about whether the economy represents the, you know, the best reflection of the health and safety of the people of this country is another question. But like Matt, when I was talking about this interview, he had a question. He wanted to say like, are there any historical parallels in American leadership for something this suicidal?

I mean, I don't think so. I don't think so. I can't think of anything. I can't think of anything that is so self-destructive. I can't think of anything that is so self-destructive. I can't think of anything that is so incoherent. I can't think of anything that is so... I mean, we could point to all sorts of things in which the malice and the suffering was comparable. I mean, Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears, but his nation building project was coherent. We could look to Woodrow Wilson and the first Red Scare and the deportations and denaturalizations, and I don't know how many thousands of leftists he threw in jail, breaking up the IWW, the Socialist Party.

But again, Wilson represented a certain a certain a certain moment in which the United States was was moving out into the world. But it's but it's hard to find anything that Matt that in which the cruelty is is comparable to the to the incompetency. Well, as long as you're talking about cruelty and incompetence, and like, we talked about like this, that Trump's economic policies could be seen as suicidal. But I want to talk about, like sort of what led to this in the last year and a half year or so of something that we I've described on the show as a

murder suicide pact. And that is this country's relationship with Israel, and what it's doing to Gaza right now. And I'm just like, once again, like as a historian, when you observe like the last two years of the Biden administration, his decision to leave the race and then Kamala getting in there and their steadfast refusal to do anything to rein in a client state that's massacring hundreds of thousands of people that in all likelihood did in fact cost them the election and led to this current moment with Donald Trump being president again. Once again, like are there any historical parallels there?

And just what do you make of this situation where like Israel is not popular in America, this policy is not popular, but we have a political system that seems to be entirely captured by the interests of a foreign country. And I guess one has to ask, like, who's leading who here? Is this American policy or is this Israeli policy? Or does it not matter? Well, I mean, I mean, in terms of parallels, of course, you could say Vietnam and turn it from the way that both the Democrats tied itself to Vietnam and then and then and destroyed themselves was a result of it.

But, you know, I agree with you completely. I think Gaza is, there is, there is no reconstruction of the democratic body unless Gaza is confronted. You could see that. I mean, Kamala Harris had to run a center right campaign because she couldn't move an inch away from Biden's Gaza policy. It's not that Gaza itself, it was, it was that is what Harris couldn't do or say because of Gaza. She couldn't run a center left campaign like Biden did in 2020 that won him the election. She had to run to the center, right? Because she, because Gaza was such a limiting, you know, limiting variable that wouldn't let her move.

I think Gaza is absolutely key. Again, to go back to end of the myth. was such a limiting variable that wouldn't let her move. I think concert is absolutely key. Again, to go back to end of the myth, the argument is that, and this is drawn from political science, political scientists have these theories about political realignments that every fifth or sixth presidency or every couple of decades,

rather than polarization and conflict breaking out, you know, the contradictions of other political and economic systems that results through changes get worked out in political realignments within the two party system. And so the Democrats become the party of the working class and political liberalism and so on and so forth. And I think there's a lot to that argument, to that way of thinking about things, but they don't really talk about foreign policy. What makes those realignments possible is the promise of limitlessness and is the ability of expansion in all sorts of ways. And I think Gaza is just a kind of concrete example of what I was talking about. There will be no political realignment in the United States. There will be no new emerging.

Trumpism isn't a stable political coalition that will govern the United States the way the New Deal did, the way the New Deal did, the way the New Right did. It's just a manifestation of the constant chaos. And the Democrats won't be able to rehabilitate themselves to create a new governing coalition. And largely, largely right now, it is because of Gaza Gaza because you can't talk about Gaza. I mean, who's going to, you know, and what can't be said because of Gaza and all sorts of other policy realms. I mean, you see the contradictions.

It's heartbreaking. Bernie Sanders and AOC on, you know, these rallies, which are inspirational, but then they're throwing, you know, protested and then the police come and take the protestors away about Gaza. That's not going away, you know, and it's a contradiction within the Democratic Party that is inherent in, you know, Clinton's turn towards neoliberalism and tying the party to big donors and to consultants. And so if you were, if the Democrats were to confront that contradiction and really break with Israel, you know, it would it would be tectonic and it's you know, loss of funding loss of donors, the hand wringing. I mean, can you imagine? You know, but on

the other hand, they also need the activists, they need the people who are angry. And we have, as you said, like, on the other hand, there is no future for them in this country if they don't come to terms with what they have done. Yeah. And like there's no there's not going to be any electoral coalition for them. And I guess like, well, I mean, you mentioned like the tectonic shift that this would result in not just in terms of our foreign policy, but in terms of the way our domestic politics are structured.

What would it look like to like to come to terms with not just our support for Israel, but just Gaza specifically? We need a truth and reconciliation committee in this country for starters. Yeah. Well, yeah, get in line. And outside of just taking responsibility for it. Yeah. I mean, we haven't taken responsibility for Iraq.

We've got to take responsibility for Gaza. Don't hold your breath. I mean, there's Iraq, there's Libya. I mean, like, you know, I mean, Afghanistan during the Cold War. I mean, you know, the Central America, I mean, you know, we like, you know, Jimmy Carr, they said the destruction was mutual. I Great to turn it to your book you mentioned this idea of the American frontier which was the topic of your last book the the end of myth and You write about how the frontier has always been kind of this pressure release valve for the contradictions and violence of the American Projects for your real estate in the new book, how does Latin America differ?

You state that Latin America, because it didn't have a frontier in the same way, was forced to confront a lot of these internal contradictions in the lives of the people who live there in a way that the United States didn't. When you say Latin America didn't have a frontier in the same way America did, like what do you mean by that? Does you mean geographically, mythically, politically? What makes Latin America different?

All of those things. Okay, so there's a lot of caveats, historical caveats, obviously I'm talking in ideal terms and I'm talking heuristically, but the United States came into the country basically like a single nation, a single pup, you know, and no other siblings. And it imagined it wasn't true.

Just Romulus, no Remus. Yeah, exactly. All those gates were open. Yeah. And it imagined an empty continent. Obviously Spain was still there, Native Americans obviously, but it, you know, and it revived the, it literally revived the doctrine of conquest in order to justify its sovereignty. When Latin America breaks from Spain, it breaks from Spain as seven independent republics.

It came into the world already a League of Nations, already a United Nations that had to learn to live with each other. They didn't have to. I mean, Argentina could have said, oh, we're going to adopt the United States model and we're going to drive to the Pacific and take over Chile and treat Chile as if they're the Nava or whatever. And of course they couldn't do that because they were settler colonial nations, they had to respect. So and the thing about Latin America is that coming into the world all at once meant that each nation both threatened and legitimated the other.

They legitimated the other because every nation legitimated the idea that a republic can throw off the shackles of Spanish Catholic colonialism and claim their independence. So if Venezuela and Colombia can do it, then so could Chile and it's legitimate. But they threatened each other because under the old laws of war, what was to stop, as I said, Argentina saying we want the Pacific or, or, you know, Columbia from saying we want, we want Peru. Um, Bolivar and a lot of other people, but I'll just use Bolivar's proxy for the whole,

the whole bunch of founding fathers, intellectuals came up with, came with this, up with this idea of reviving an old Roman law doctrine called Ute Posiditis, meaning as you possess. It was a doctrine of war. It meant that you got to keep what you took in a war. Like, you know, we're gonna grab whatever, we're gonna grab Iberia, we're gonna grab the, yeah, and keep it, and as you possess, so shall you possess.

Bolivar and other Latin Americans turned that into a doctrine of peace. They said, we're going to accept the colonial boundaries as they existed, the vice royalty boundaries, and we're just going to accept them and that's going to be the borders. So we don't have to fight any new wars over changing them, right? Yeah. There was no... And so now in reality, there was, there were resources on one side or the other, the lines weren't, you know, there were, but every conflict was mediated with the presumption that Ute Posenitse was a legitimate doctrine.

So it reaffirmed the doctrine. And Latin America has, I mean, Latin America is one of the most peaceful continents in world history. I mean, like it was the first continent of nations. I mean, Europe was on the continent of nations. Europe was a continent of empires, flitting around the world doing whatever they wanted. But Latin America was the first continent

of independent nations with fixed borders. And that becomes basically the model for the world that we live in. And so ideals of sovereignty, ideals of non-aggression, ideals of the premise that it's cooperation and shared interests that should govern international relations rather than competition. Latin America both critiqued the United States' revival

of the doctrine of conquest and critique Europe's balance of power, the vision of international relations, because they thought that if you didn't have a transcendent value higher than that, the idea that nations shared consent, interests that all the nations, all the people of the world has won, then what you were going to have is just constant warfare because nations pushing against other nations and stability established through that pushing is not a very stable thing. So they had a critique of Europe's balance of power, they had a critique of the United States' doctrine, and they came up with basically all of the ideas that Wilson floated for the League of Nations and that other people floated for the United Nations basically were already in place in Latin America.

And so the book teases that out and argues for the importance of Latin America in that creation of the so-called rules-based order, which of course gets violated. But then Latin America becomes one of the strongest critics of all of those violations, because most of them are happening in Latin America anyway. I mean, you talk in the book about how the nationalism of Latin American countries and how important the idea of nationalism is to them. In an American and European context, nationalism is often associated with like aggressive right wing politics and culture. But like, is the key distinction here in nationalism that's based on nations

founded by overthrowing imperial colonialism and those that found their nationalism by doing imperialism and colonialism? Well, I think that Latin America's nationalism is different. Latin Americans never developed a toxic eliminationist nationalism. Their nationalism was like a stepping stone to a universalism. You know, there's a little bit of nationalism. Nobody likes the Argentines, you know, because they're stuck up, you know, and things have gotten bad recently. Dominican Republic is, you know, the, the, the racism, uh, directed at Haiti

sharing on a shared island is, is horrific. Um, there's now tensions between Columbia and Venezuela, but for the most part, the Latin American nationalism, I mean, just think of that. Che Guevara, young medical doctor gets on that motorcycle, you know, with this new technology, new roads, and he rides around Latin America. And he realizes that Latin America is one. The idea that Latin America is one,

even as it isn't one, is deep, but it allows for a more generous nationalism. This idea that the communities, the nations of the world are the foundational premises that we have interests in common and cooperation should be. And I'll step back even a second because the book deals a lot with intellectual history and theology. And this is in some ways,

and maybe my childhood Catholicism coming out, but Catholicism itself, despite the horrors of the conquest, and again, those horrors of the conquest generates this very strong moral critique against the conquest, but the colonial state that emerges is both presumably universal because it's Catholic and Catholics believe that they were universal, they represented universal history, but they also acknowledge difference. Catholic colonialism had no presumption that they were ruling over an empty land like the Anglos did. The Anglos were like, oh, where did everybody go? A good part of like the first section of the book, as you really point out like that, the shared experience that leads to this sense of a kind of cooperative

nationalism or like a humanist ethos comes from the really unspeakable barbarism of the Spanish conquest of the New World. And but like there's the brutality of it. But like there's also a moral and philosophical revolution that accompanied it in Spanish Catholicism. And one of the main figures in the early part of the book is a man named Bartolome de las Casas. Because you talk a little bit about who he was. And this kind of road to Damascus moment he had accompanying a Spanish expedition

to pacify the island of Cuba. Like, yeah, he's well known. I mean, you know, this is nothing new. He's often presented as somebody who's most famous for writing a small pamphlet that was that was finally published in the 1840s and 1850s and then quickly translated into English so the English could say, look at where the Spaniards are. It became part of what's known as the Black Legend, that the Spaniards were particularly cruel. And De Las Casas is known as being a humanitarian and known as being somebody who recognized humanity of Native Americans. He has a famous line, all

humanity is one. The more proper English translation would be all human lineage is one, meaning we all came from Adam and Eve, but we're all equal. But I go a little bit beyond that, arguing that that critique of the quality and that critique that there's no such thing as a natural slave and this insistence that eventually comes to the point where he says that the Spanish Empire has no right to dominion over the Americans and much less the right to enslave Native Americans, that that was absolutely foundational to this, basically the beginning of modern political theory, that human beings are equal. And then he was accompanied by other Dominicans and jurists and theologians, people like Francisco

Vitoria, who created a very powerful way of thinking about the world that came to be known as the Salamanca School. And so later on, when the Dutch and the British are trying to get into the imperial game, they know these arguments are going on in Spain. They're hyper aware of them. There's a document from the eight 1607 by the company, the London, the London company, London colonial company in which the shareholders are sitting around thinking, you think we should put out a, you know, a statement, a pamphlet, maybe justifying our colonialism in North America.

And they debate the question for a while and they keep on talking about what's going on in Spain. And they said, you know, those Spaniards, they've been arguing the question for a while and they keep on talking about what's going on in Spain. And they said, you know, those Spaniards, they've been arguing about this for a century and they still can't find a decent justification for dominion. So maybe we shouldn't say anything. We should just keep it quiet. And that's a tension in the book, right, between an Anglo evasion with the reality of history and colonialism, and where you're pushing the Native Americans to the frontier, and a Spanish colonial state that makes Indians the main thing. They are the people extracting the money, the minerals, wealth that creates the world's first universal currency, but they're

also the main moral center of the whole justification of the thing. So that reconciliation of creating an empire that claims to be universal, but that is founded on the administration of recognized difference is, I think, what is the foundation of a certain kind of more capacious vision of humanity that later leads to things like, one, social rights, and two, a left that doesn't get bogged down in all the bullshit that the left gets bogged down here about whether it's race or class or gender or, you know,

let's all hate on the chopper guys because of what they, you know, because they're all brochureless. One cause to unite them all. Yeah. Yeah. If it wasn't for them, Hillary Clinton would be president. Like, yeah, I'm not saying that these debates didn't, these, these tensions don't exist absolutely in, in Latin America, but, but there's a left in Latin America that more easily reconciles

political economy and the fight for, say, abortion rights and gay rights. Not everywhere, in every country, but in a lot of countries. The culture war bullshit that happens in the United States, Latin America's long been exempt from it. But an important caveat, no longer, because it's been imported into the United States, but into Latin America. Do you see Claudia Scheinbaum as a manifestation of what you're talking about? Yeah, yeah, yeah. She's a perfect manifestation of that. She's I mean, she's an immigrant. She represents I mean she represents the rebel Mexican revolutionaries humanist legacy Because of the Mexican Revolution took an immigrants they took in Jews They took in communists and and and and and yeah, yeah

She you know what she absolutely is and she's able to she's able to speak in a vernacular That you know, she's a woman. She's she's able to speak in a vernacular that she's a woman she's she's Jewish and Jewish and very popular in a country that's overwhelmingly Catholic and yeah like yeah or by some lights could be seen as like socially conservative shall we say yeah and that's because Modena the party that she's involved in led by Omlo, her predecessor, has built a party. It's taken a long, long time, but not just the general humanism and social democracy that I'm talking about, but the specific one tied to the Mexican revolution had deep roots and they weren't dead yet and they've been resurrected.

And she has her limits because we live in a world of limits and, you know, she's presiding over a state with pockets of enormous immunity and wealth, thanks to neoliberalism, thanks to privatization, which created all those super billionaires. But she's doing what she can to re-enliven an ideal of social citizenship, you know, and I think she's, you know, I think she's remarkable, yeah. She enlivened an ideal of social citizenship. And I think she's remarkable. If I could return again to the age of conquest. You mentioned the sort of moral revolution.

The quote unquote discovery of the new world represented a kind of like apocalyptic concept to Christendom at the time, like to discover a second half of the planet in which nobody living there for thousands of years had ever heard of Jesus Christ or the New Testament. It presented sort of an opportunity and a problem philosophically and spiritually. Now in the example of De la Casas, you talk about a moral revolution that said, like, the subjugation of these people cannot be justified. You cannot justify enslaving the native populations because we are all equal in Christ, like you said, the shared human lineage. But you also talk about there's a corresponding sort of reactionary moral revolution that tried to create a language and philosophy that was based around sort of an attempt to categorize

societies by their stage of development and thus to justify the subjugation of a less developed culture By the more developed culture. Yeah, like could you talk about like How elites came to sort of hue to that point of view and do you see again? Like can you trace the lineage of that philosophy that point of view. And do you see again, like, can you trace the lineage of that philosophy that of a kind of a slaver morality in the 21st century? Yeah, I mean, Las Casas did a number of amazing things. One, he voided the idea that there was such a thing as natural slaves. He thought there were more people in the new world. It's an idea that goes back to Aristotle. Aristotle. They've been holding on this in Western civilization for a long fucking time.

Yeah. So these people, and I know, and the Catholic church revives it. And Aristotle says that it's the most ridiculous thing in the world. Anybody who believes in the idea of natural slaves must hate God because why would God make a majority of the world's population inferior to a minority. He was under the wrong impression that there were more people in the New World than there were in all the world. That wasn't true, but there were a lot. And then there were people like Vittorio who came up with very absolutist notions

of like every, you know, Native Americans have, they have reason, they can possess, they have the right of possession and they do possess and they also enter into political societies. So therefore they are human and they have natural inherent rights that questions the validity of the Spanish conquest. Okay, so there's that kind of moral absolutism and very strong scholastic arguments that the Spaniards lay out. But then the New World also allowed for the beginnings of a kind of new ethnography.

And there was one Jesuit, Jose Acosta, who traveled across the Americas and he wrote a book saying, you know, there's actually degrees. There's the Aztecs, there's the Maya, there's the Ketchwa, the Inca, and yes, they represented societies. But then there was, he basically said there were three categories, then there was societies in formation, and then there were those that was still kind of like hunting and gathering. And the English and the Dutch people like you go Gertruss and other late, you know, a century after they lost causes when they were coming up trying to find just a bit, the trick with, with the Anglo legal theorists is that they had to find

a political theory that would justify their ability to colonize while delegitimizing the Spanish. They seized on Acosta's book. They loved Acosta's book. John Smith had a copy of Acosta's book when he sailed into Chesapeake Bay. John Locke cited the great works of Joseph Acosta. What Acosta was saying was, yes, Indians do have society and they do have the capacity of possession and they do have organized in hierarchical societies and with their own princes.

Some of them do, not all of them. He relativized that. It provided all of those other thinkers a way out. So people like Locke and Groetus could seize on the fact that nobody less than the great Lerner de Costa said that there were vast tracts of the Americas in which there were like a third category. I mean they were human, nobody's saying they're not human, they just weren't yet organized into civil society. And those were the people we could subjugate. I'm wondering, something I've noticed recently that's sort of coming

back in vogue on the sort of new Catholic right, I guess, the Catholic convert right, I guess you might call them, that looks at the brutality of the Aztec Empire as a justification for the Spanish conquest being cool, good, and actually like a humanitarian mission. I'm wondering what you make of that in light of like, I think you cite something in the book that something like within a hundred years, the population, indigenous population of the New World had dropped by something like 80 or 90% through disease or just genocide. Yeah. I mean, that's an old, I mean, that's not just about the new Catholic New Right.

That's been an ongoing trope about the horrors of the Aztecs justifying the European colonialization. But yeah, demographers don't know exactly how many people were in the Americas. They estimate between 90 and 100 million people, and they estimate that within a century, 90% of them were gone. that within a century, 90% of them were gone. And by the end of the 1500s, the beginning of the 1600s, there was such a crisis, the Spaniards weren't sure where they were gonna get labor.

It was around that time the population began to stabilize. Most of this was through epidemics. There was the first wave of violence from the conquest, from dislocation, from slavery, from the destruction of communities and polities. But then what came after was wave after wave of European-broad diseases that just wiped out people in the millions, epidemics that wiped out people in the millions. And so, um, some historians call it, some demographers call it the greatest mortality event in human, in human history. And, and one of the things that I want to emphasize is that the book makes

a big contrast of in comparing North and South America and Anglo and Spanish colonialism is that Spanish colonialism, they had their moral crisis at the beginning of the conquest as the conquest was happening, right? They had their doubts and their questions and their dissenters and their challenges. So they had their moral crisis as the conquest was happening. Protestant America, I mean, they're fine at the beginning. They don't have their moral crisis until three centuries later in the 19th century. And when they do, it's limited specifically to chattel slavery.

That's the moral crisis. If you want to compare moral crises within Catholicism and Protestantism, when it comes to the New World, and it makes a huge difference whether you have your moral crisis at the beginning, when you acknowledge that there are actually people there, or you have it three centuries later when you reify it to one particular kind of oppression, as hard as it was African chattel slavery, it singles it out as a particular evil, but then it's hard, then it makes it hard to kind of expand that emancipationist impulse to other forms of exploitation, since it's so reified in the institution of chattel slavery. Well, I suppose like if you choose the one form,

you know, African chattel slavery that you've already made billions of dollars off of, and then you're like, well, it's time to wrap this up. But like, when you just like Anglo colonization is like, it was sort of like the opposite of a moral crisis, because they genuinely believe like, Oh, look, here's a land without people. Where did they all go? I don't know. It's start Jamestown. Absolutely. They came up with the john winter came up with a whole there was a Latin phrase,

um, Vasilim. How do you pronounce it? I don't, my Latin is despite that I've typed the word. This is a bad pronunciation show. So just, just spit, just go with it. Well, I'll just use the English language, but empty houses. They used the Latin term for empty houses. This is what happened was when, when was when the Mayflower shows up in the early 1820s, the area had already been visited by Europeans, Portuguese, Whalers, and the Dutch, and the Spaniards, and even the English. And they unleashed a disease, which they're not really sure what it was, but it's colloquially known as rat fever. They think it was, you know, in the ballot when they dropped the ballast, it went into the streams and it entered the bodies of Native Americans through their feet maybe.

And so the early descriptions, John Smith talks about like New England, almost the way Las Casas talked about Hispaniola, that it's beautiful, stocked with people, there's game, it's well organized, and yet when the Mayflower gets there, it's empty, it's gone, it's dead. And the pilgrims are hungry, the Puritans are hungry, they start digging up the graves because in the hope that they buried food with them. There was no suggestion that there was survival cannibalism, but who knows? But, but, but, but cannibalism plays a big, big role in justifying a lot of Congress conquest. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So but they come up with this whole idea that God gave us the land God set, you know, within

20 years, they had developed a whole legal theology that God had set the great pestilence down to clear the land for the saints. And that's a very different way of thinking about colonialism than what the Spaniards were. And again, as an historian, it's like, do you want to be a vulgar, it's all just colonialism and it's all just brutality, or do you think to give, you want to be, you know, a vulgar, you know, it's all just colonialism and it's all just brutality. Or do you, what do you think that these, these differences matter? I do think they matter because I think it creates the, it creates the terms for

evasion, moral evasion that you, that, that runs throughout us history. Uh, and it's there from the beginning. And so this, you know, um, the, the, the, the concept of an empty house, which is interesting because that was also the way that they talked about dead bodies. What they were, you know, without a soul, the soul had vacated the body. And this is a kind of, you know, gory equation there between death and colonialism. Well, there's Spanish colonialism and Anglo colonialism but I

think one of the one of the funnier parts of the early section of the book discusses French attempts at colonizing the New World and use an example of a colony that was set up on an island off the coast of Brazil composed of French Calvinists and French Catholics and the indigenous population of the island and it was a the indigenous population of the island. And it was a really amusing section of the book because like the contrast between the Calvinists and the Catholics and like how they related to the indigenous population is like well if you're a Calvinist and you believe a

hundred percent in predetermination, missionary work is really why bother. But like the Catholics which do believe in that you essentially said has such hatred and contempt for the indigenous that they didn't bother trying to convert any of them. They started to just try to convert the Calvinists. And they just started like dueling missionaries against each other before just packing it all in and going back to France. Yeah, yeah.

You know, Levi Strauss talks a lot about the club. Levi Strauss talks a lot about this episode. And and and and yeah, apparently the French king had this idea of shipping off the Calvinists and the Catholics together and maybe they would find a way of getting along. And they basically just started having intense theological arguments about themselves and paid no attention whatsoever to the Native Americans. And the only thing that came out of this was, there was a kind of, it was an intense solipsism of like the Europeans just arguing with each other as like Native Americans are dying around them

from European diseases. And I think the only thing that actually came of it, that the lasting effect was that the Europeans brought back a bunch of parrots that could curse in Portuguese. And French, I guess to return to the present day, Latin America has seen like a sort of providing example of a potential way forward for democracies in the world in terms of like social democracy. And like you said, social rights, political rights really not meaning anything without social rights.

But a lot of it is kind of like a similar story as well. Like are you paying, I'm sure you're paying attention to what just recently happened in Ecuador with basically the coup that just happened there. Yeah. You talk about that and some of like the pressures that are being faced by left-wing governments in South America, South and Latin America at the moment. Yeah, I wrote a kind of, you know, it was hard writing this book because it was before the elections. I wasn't really sure. You know, it would be a different, you know, different kind of accent if Biden, well not

Biden, Paris won or Trump won. And obviously Trump won. And I wrote a follow up in in the intercept about this, about the possibilities of a kind of Pan-American Trump. There's certainly a social base for Trumpism in Latin America over the last, you know, 10 years or 15 years. The right in Latin America, which found itself completely unable to compete with the post-Cold War left.

Latin America came out of the Cold War, and after the dictatorships gave way to constitutions, and once Latin Americans were allowed to vote their preferences, lo and behold, they tended to vote for social democrats. You know, they liked the, despite the best efforts of the Chicago boys, they did not think that socialized medicine will lead to the gulag. They did not believe that like cash transfer to the poor would lead to the, you know, to the death camps. They thought that citizenship meant social citizenship and democracy meant social democracy and that

social rights were as important and component of democracy as economic rights. And the old Cold War right was completely caught off guard by this. Like they thought, you know, the debt squads did it. They thought the debt squads did it their work and, you know, they'd be in charge. And lo and behold, throughout the 2000s and 2010s, the return of the left during a moment of the United States's post 9-11 militarism, basically emerged and was speaking in a very rhetorically strong voice.

Chavez in Venezuela, Kirchner in Argentina, you had Lula in Brazil, you had Morales in Bolivia, you had, you know, across the continent. Every left tradition was represented in the presidential palace. You know, the right learned quickly how to regain its footing, and it regained its footing by importing a lot of the culture war bullshit from Latin America. Right-wing evangelicals, of course, had a strong presence in Latin America during the Cold War, but even more so, you have all of the stuff about grooming, all of a sudden you have a gun fetish.

Bolsonaro in Brazil started talking about the second amendment. Now I don't know Brazil's constitution very well, but I doubt very much it's second amendment. It says anything about guns. It probably says something about, I don't know. And then of course, like Bush was very bad at containing the post-Cold War Latin American left. But Obama played a very strategic long game, mostly by turning the United States into a major energy.

All of that oil drilling and fracking and getting Canada to send its oil to the United States. A lot of that had to do with containing Chavez, because Chavez was in Venezuela, was using oil in the 1970s vision as a tax on the first world to fund social solidarity and programs in the third world. And coups happened in Honduras, in Paraguay, and then there was lawfare cases that destroyed the Workers' Party in Brazil under Obama. So Obama played a very good, Obama did a hell of a job containing the Latin American left. But still, leftists get elected. But they're more constrained now.

And they're fighting over what to do with Venezuela because, you know, my daughter is not Chavez. He doesn't have the oil money. He doesn't have the, he doesn't have the oil money. He doesn't have the charisma. Nicaragua is Nicaragua or take a, you know, whatever. And, and so the left is still very strong in some places, but it's, it doesn't, it doesn't command the rhetorical hegemony it did.

It's the right that's starting to fill up that space, that vacuum with this world making conspiracism. It's almost like left hegemony has given way to right wing world making conspiracism and you see it, it's the same shit that's happening in the United States, the QAnon, the pedophilia, the Bitcoin, and average citizens are a little bit, you know, things are bad. Crime is really bad. You mentioned Ecuador.

Nobia wants to basically turn Ecuador into another El Salvador, you know, in the sense of an outpost for the United States. So Trump has a lot of strong social base, but he also undermines his own possibilities, right? So that's the thing about Trump where, you know, I mean, Trump could very easily consolidate a Pan-American Trumpism if he wasn't so busy undermining the Pan American Trump is like the cat Canadian conservative guy or the you know by talking about invading Panama people don't like that even even you know. And if he wasn't like very grossed out by Malay like a very evidently is that true I didn't notice that housing growsed out by me. Like what's the look at the guy's hair? Well, their first, their first personal encounter was it was at a CPAC thing. I think like the last CPAC before the election, right? With the election year.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, before that, and it was, Malay had a video key, like either Trump or Malay video called in. One of them was, you know, they're in person. One was on video, probably Malay was on video. And he basically like wept. He was like, oh my God, I love you so much. Please help save America, save Argentina.

And like Trump is like, you've seen his more like human moments where he's like talking to kids, like the, you know, Santa's marginal thing, all that, or like, yeah, yeah, you know, he has these like very odd outer borough moments with various types of humanity. But with Malay, there were, he was just like, what the fuck is that? Like, what? I. What? I don't I still don't think Malay has been invited to the White House. It may never happen. I know. Can you imagine it's like

if I could suggest a reason for Trump's displeasure with Malay? I think it's Millie's bizarre fixation and obsession with his dogs that he keeps cloning over and over again and once he's buried with and like loves more than any human being. I think for Trump being a dog is like the worst insult being like being associated with dogs. Yeah. Like a dog. It's like really into pets and animals. I think Trump has contempt for guy who le leaps over his mastiff that died 30 years ago.

And, well, he's now cloned it over and over again. Going back a bit, though, that was a really interesting point you brought up about Obama's energy nationalization policy, because I'm cursed with a very good memory of Bush era liberalism, despite being a middle schooler at the time. But one of the big early policies, sort of, do you remember one of the first controversies of the Bush administration, the second Bush administration, was drilling in Alaska. That was one of the big things before 9-11. And energy policy was always, it was in the background of the Bush administration. And there was sort of like a liberal, a national liberal argument for

it, which was basically like, look, these Saudis, these Saudi guys probably fucking did 9-11. Do we really want to give money to these guys who are so closely linked to Bush? And of course, that that has roots in the last Saudi king to actually commit to an embargo for moral reasons in Faisal under Carter. But it was sort of like a carve out that the Obama types would give to the remaining wellstone ites of the party going forward. Like, okay, we're going to find a way to nationalize our energy supply, not nationalize in the way that everyone would like, but become a net exporter and not rely on these GCC countries.

Little did we know what he meant was we can try and starve any of these petroleum exporting Latin American states. That was probably the plan all along. Well, it was certainly an element of it. You know, I don't want to make an absolutist case that Chavez was the main driver, but it certainly was a key thing. You know, Hillary Clinton was in Mexico trying to get them to privatize Pemex. This was before AMLO. Pemex, this was before AMLO, that's now stalled on the shine bomb. But they did turn Canada into a gas station for the United States. And Chavez wasn't the whole thing, but Chavez's vision was very much about rehabilitating the new international economic order of the 1970s.

And oil revenue was key to that. rehabilitating the new international economic order of the 1970s and, and oil revenue was key to that. And, you know, the idea that they were naive enough to think that Saudi Arabia was going to like deposit its petrodollars in some kind of world bank that could then be socialized, you know, of course that wasn't going to happen. Kissinger, you know, Kissinger and, you know, basically, you know, turn them into private currency accounts and that it then deposited them into, into German, German, British and US banks, you know, and that, and then that kicked off the debt crisis, which then kicked off,

we could restructuring. But, um, but the idea for awhile was that, you know, all of this oil was going to, was going to, they wanted to create an energy bank and Chavez's vision was very close to the new international economic order. People don't realize how much that influenced what he was doing. Of course, that's the last time, and I suppose thankfully, that anybody is going to try to use fossil fuels to create a kind of third world international solidarity, but you can understand why you would do it.

Yeah. I think the first story that I read in 2009 that gave me an indication of what the Obama doctrine might be was Lanny Davis, that old Hillary Clinton barnacle, when they quickly unearthed his emails pertaining to the coup in Ecuador at the time, Honduras or Honduras. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it was. That was a sign of things to come. An overall Obama policy. Yeah. I was in Paraguay and Democracy Now said, you want to do a debate with Lani Davis from Honduras. He's in, and I'm on the phone.

And like, it's a four minute, four second delay. I said, okay, sure. And they said, yeah, he's a very calm guy. He's a nice guy. You know, it'll just be a polite debate. I was completely caught off guard by what a pit bull he was. It's like, I just wasn't, and plus I had to wait a couple of seconds, uh, you know, to hear what he was saying.

So I was, I was, I was not a good defender of, uh, of the anti-coup forces in that debate, but I did, I am very proud that I got him that at one point he said, my name is Laney, not Lonnie. that at one point he said, my name is Lainey, not Lonnie. Oh, he didn't like the way my Brooklyn pronunciation of his name, Lonnie Davis. Lonnie or Lainey or I don't know how about you say it. But yeah. It's so weird that they said to you his call. Well, it was just a producer, I guess guess had spoken with them on the phone, you know

Debate with someone and they they preface it by saying don't worry. He's calm You can guarantee that the guy they're talking about is foaming at the mouth on the other end And I was doing research for Empire Necessity and I was I wasn't really paying that much attention to Honduras I was like sure. Okay, I'll come on and talk. I was like, I was completely blown away. Greg, I mean, in terms of things to come, or rather things not to come, I was struck by something you recently said that contrasts both like the right and the left in the United States, the right and left parties that we have there, like the Democratic and Republican left in the United States, the right and left parties that we have there like the Democratic and Republican parties

with you know, their counterparts of earlier historical eras and you said that like the main difference is that like whether it was Woodrow Wilson or FDR they all had a positive they had a positive vision of the future which is something that is now totally absent from both the right and the left of American politics. No political party articulates or even seems to believe in that there is such a thing as the future or that like the state has any role to play in what the future will look like. Could you expand a little bit more on that sort of a bleak note? Well, this goes, this is a deep point of the end of the myth in some ways, the previous book, but also this book.

But, you know, the United States never had to have a positive good of citizenship. The idea of like, you know, of creating a community in which people have health care and good education. And, you know, because they get always it's always was the promise of limitlessness was a way of deflecting towards having a positive vision of a common wheel. And I think that once that limitlessness is taken away, once the wall is hit, there is no vision of a future. There is no, I mean, like a vision of the future, it's not that hard to think of a good vision of future. I mean, FDR vision of the, it's not that hard to think of a good vision of future.

I mean, FDR had it. Everybody should be able to eat. They should be, they should have healthcare. They should have a good place to live, you know, and, and it should be spoken in very strong, clear language. And it could be spoken about in the terms of social rights. We have the right to education. We have the right to healthcare. You have the right to live in dignity. we have the right to, you know, but because that, we hit that wall with limitlessness, they don't know how to articulate a vision of the future because the future was always tied to expansion. And so now we just have these politicians

that like, that bungle around, I mean, abundance, abundance, I guess. I actually wanted to bring that up. I was thinking about this earlier that in the context of talking to you, the abundance idea, which to their credit as at least an idea of a future, but the idea that we're going to do some zoning tweaks and have some like technological revolution to unleash a bunch of stuff. It really is feeling like they're like flipping over the couch cushions being like, there's gotta be some frontier left in here.

It's gotta be some future left. Or is it? Yeah. And then, you know, I was thinking like, right after the election, I was like, when am I going to read the, would the Democrats need a project? 2029. You know, somebody has to write that and it's and should say healthcare, it should say housing, it should say all like these basic good,

you know, a vision of like what, you know, like positive, you know, strong vision we're going to defend new pro, even political rights. I mean forget defending social rights. Now we just need a vision of defending political rights. But aside from that, when the New York Times finally publishes in op-ed, the Democrats need a project in 2029. And then, I don't know if you read it, it was about changing zoning laws and making the government more like a consumer agency. I was like, this is really going to capture the imagination. I mean, the right is the right. The right is putting forth the civilizational struggle and the Democrats are talking about like, you know, we have to we have to make it easier

for you to I mean, it was unbelievable like Like that that that I don't know if you saw it. Yeah, it was like if like you're in Berlin after World War One and you're like, this is terrible, like they're going to they're going to fucking make us pay for the whole thing, we're going to have to like give up all these all this territory, everyone fucking hates us. what if we change the fire code? What if more people can come to a beer hall? I know, I know. I mean, like, we talked a little bit about like-

A national 311 health line. Well, I mean, that's better than what I saw National 311 Healthline. Well, I mean, that's better. That's better than what I saw Dr. Oz say the other day, which is that we said unhealthy people do not have a right to health care, but we should help them by giving them physicals at quote, in a carnival setting. Festival like a festival like a 15 minute physical, a 15 minute

physical at a festival like setting. I know it's like, you know, it's like the red is it'll be like the red is or something. I immediately thought of Monty Python. No, you're not. You'll be stoned at the moment.

Like some festival. Bring out your own. I know is telling you to bend over. You'll be stoned dead in a moment. Like some festival. Bring out your unhealthy. The regardial is telling you to bend over. You know what I mean? Bring out your autisms. I know. I know, it's unbelievable.

What if your doctor is like a carny? Yeah, I know. That's the one I'm saying. That's kind of what Dr. Oz is. You must be this sick to ride. I mean, that's their vision of like a common good, like everybody coming together and having like. I know, but Greg, like we mentioned the Clinton administration and to me, I just like I'm thinking about, I just come back to them.

We're like, they inherited like they came into power at the end of the Cold War, like right after the Cold War ends. So like, you know, our gigantic defense budget, like rather than now that the Cold War is over, return the productive forces of our society to the people. No, it was just the Pentagon budget has grown steadily ever since then. And along with it, Clinton was like deregulate Wall Street and then also greatly ramp up like police and surveillance state. And then we're in a situation now where it's just like nobody's happy. Everyone's sick. Everyone hates each other. And the answer is just like a trillion dollar Pentagon budget to what?

I don't know. Take over Canada and Greenland to fight Palestinians. Yeah. But like and like a total police and surveillance state to deal with the, uh, you know, the, the violence and anger that, that such a society is wants to produce. Yeah. And I write that at the end of the book, I said, Clinton comes to power, that, you know, there's not an enemy in sight. The Soviet unions wiped off the gun completely wiped off the face of the map. He's inaugurated in the middle of one of the longest economic expansions in history.

What does he do? He treats the country as if it's an occupied nation and it's citizens belligerence. All of those laws, the terrorism law, the deportation, all of these things are the laws, the terrorism law, the deportation, all of these things are the mechanisms of what Trump is using to, you know, you get a speeding ticket, you lose your green card. This is all Clinton. The welfare law, and of course the deregulation. I say this in the book too, every other nation, wealthy nation, restructured to deal with the changing political economy. No other nation simultaneously gutted the institutions that could have ameliorated that restructuring to the degree the US did.

So gleefully destroyed unions, so gleefully destroyed welfare, and so gleefully destroyed small towns through its agricultural policy. I mean, it's really amazing. It's like, has any empire that was so victorious, you know, basically stand on top of the hill and take out its sword and then stick it in its heart. It's really kind of... I also say this in the book too about war, and I spent a lot of time in End of the Myth and in America, America on this. War is the main social institution in the United States. It's where social rights are advanced. Yeah, since 1948 certainly.

Yeah, at least, but even through that, even before that, and it was, you know, which were African Americans had a little bit of upward mobility since 1898. And so every war, veterans returning home, whether it be from pacifying the West or beating the Seminoles in Florida over the World War I or World War II or Cuba, they came home to a nation literally being built, and a social compact being extended fitfully and not fast enough, but being extended to more and more people. That change, well, kind of changes with Vietnam, but not really. It's really, it's really the first Gulf war where veterans come home and they coming home to a nation that is being taken apart.

You, I mean, it's literally being, it's factories are being dismantled and shipped elsewhere and it's social compact is taken apart. And, you know, of course, of course that anger and, you know, it's going to, and with that, you know, as the Democrats are moving, moving to a suburban, suburban with no, with no politics to address this, what you get is like you described earlier, like the psych or this kind of globalizing conspiracy theory, explain why everyone is so miserable and deprived and angry and sick all the time. Right, right. Especially since a lot of the a lot of the conferecees are true.

We come out of Iran Contra. We come out of, you know, you know, you hear. So it's it's the funny thing is I'm watching The X-Files with my daughter, you know, and I actually never watched that show from the beginning. And I didn't realize how much they incorporated real things into it, like Operation Paperclip and Operation MK Ultra. They really incorporated all of that stuff into the mythology with the aliens.

So I'm trying to explain to my daughter, it's like there really was an Operation Paperclip. They brought the Nazis over. They brought the Nazis over. Not to work on aliens. Not to work on chemical weapons. They really did that. Well let me know when you get to Confessions of a Cigarette Smoking Man episode, which will be the Earth statement.

Yeah, that was the statement. With wording the vector for any advancement or I always think the most American thing is how we accidentally invented the solid state video camera during the course of inventing a glide bomb in the 1960s. I didn't know that. The AGM 62 Walleye. They were making sort of one of the first TV guided bombs and they were like, Oh, holy shit. It's a video camera that doesn't weigh 300 pounds.

That's amazing. I didn't know that. But yeah, sure. Of course, all the technology that comes out of war. Well, and the other thing, what's weird, I was thinking about this the other day. It's like, you know, speaking about Germany and resentment about the terms of the settlement, you know, the military itself was a vector of revanchism, right? The aristocratic. But in the United States, the US military loses two major wars, Vietnam and Iraq, and its response is to become more bureaucratized, more rational, more woke after Iraq. The revanchism comes from outside. It comes from the veterans, not from the military itself, which is interesting.

I don't know where I'm going with this, but it's interesting that the right is targeting the military. This is one of the things that they want to do is why they're stripping all vestiges of Colin Powell or anybody with any kind. Yeah. No, yeah. I mean, we've thought about this a lot because another Matt thing, I think we pioneered it when we were literally our episode for our TV series talking about the X-Files, about why there isn't a TV show like this good anymore. And we were literally our episode for our TV series talking about the X-Files, about why there isn't a TV show like this good anymore. And we were talking about, you know, because this was after the 2020 primary, what would need to happen? And we said, okay, American Gaddafi, we need the,

we need some officer who's charismatic out there, who's listening to this, but it is, I have thought about that a lot. There's been a lot of, the military is like infamously kind of difficult to pull because it's a lot of people in very disparate locations that are moving around a lot and you have the existing problem with modern polling, which is who answers a fucking landline phone call. But it's like institutionally at least, it seems like the one remaining like federal institution that can kind of like drag its heels against whatever the fuck this is. Yeah. How long they can do that. I don't know. I mean, I don't know if people saw the Harvard dust up between the Trump administration and Harvard,

but we're reverting to a sort of Trump one pattern. The Trump one people yelled at Harvard because they didn't pick up their phone, I guess, after they've already told them to fuck off and got more money in donations from their incredibly wealthy donors than they were getting for the federal government. But I do, I do feel like we are, I'll probably eat these words soon, but like we sort of saw the apogee of they've expanded a lot of their momentum for this kind of like bureaucratic knife fighting. Yeah. And I would be interested to see how it plays out with the military, because you're right, it is like, especially since Iraq, they have like, in true military fashion, the most efficient form

of like HR cover your ass wokeness. Yeah, which is really amazing considering how much Vietnam really was a, you know, how the race race war here was transported into the into Vietnam, you know, how the race, race war here was transported into the, into Vietnam, you know, murder of Martin Luther King made it clear that whites were waived, you know, because between 1889 and I guess Vietnam, the military was the way the South, you know, reentered the nation as, as, you know, that's an argument made in the end of the myth. But I guess some somehow, sometime after Vietnam, it solved that problem. Right. Because if you go to, you know, if you go to Michigan and you see a, you know,

an African American and a white guy sitting at a bar together, they're from them, they're in the military, like, you know, so it's, it's interesting. And so they, there must be a reaction to this. Like we're not going to show any we're going to strip every everything that has to do with African Americans out of the military. I mean, it's unbelievable. The whole Jackie Robinson thing at Arlington Cemetery. They removed that from the website. Yeah.

And they're they're new. They're new thing for like when it's a particularly embarrassing thing, like when they take away something that like, you know, used to be like a consensus. Like Jackie Robinson. Yeah, like Jackie Robinson. Even like Trent Lott would be like, yeah, no, build a statue of him. The term they have for that when like people are following their orders and do something that's embarrassing even to them is malicious compliance, which is following our orders, but in a way that makes us look bad.

Yeah. What the fucking way is there? Not the right way. Greg, just to close out here, I wanted to talk about something that you said in a recent interview with The Nation. And this gets back to the book and potentially what lessons can people in the United States or political formations in the United States, what lessons can they take from Latin America? And one thing that you said is, one lesson we can take from Latin America is that you don't beat autocrats by complaining about their autocracy.

And I thought that was like such, such, it was like that was a perfect way of summing it up. So like, it's not enough to just point at autocrats or the oligarchy and say, look, we're ruled by oligarchs, we're ruled by billionaires. But you need to have a component of social rights. And you mentioned that in the countries in Latin America that have constitutions, all of them guarantee health care in their constitutions. So like maybe that would be a good place to start and not, for instance, zoning regulations. Yeah. Yeah. And not like thinking about the government, how they could deliver better services. But yeah, definitely.

I think that I think if, if, if the United States was at least aware that, like, I mean, even Bernie Sanders, I think it should explain this better that like, yes, other countries have healthcare systems because they believe in social rights and the United States has this fetish of individual rights. And if we could just confront that, you know, even no matter how long that takes, that would be a good thing. Um, the, the mechanism in which Latin America helps socialize the United States is no longer existent, I think, to some degree, I think the United States and

Latin America has separated, I don't think the light, you know, Latin America, except maybe Mexico, but, um, but you're going back to world war, world war two. It was exactly that. It was investing liberal. I mean, FDR came to power with liberalism exhausted. And what he did was he, he basically turned to Latin America and, and, you know, embraced the Mexican revolution and embraced, you know, if he didn't use the phrase social rights,

he reinvested liberalism with the notion of, that it had to provide material goods, it had to have a political economy. And he gets a lot of that from Latin America, which I talk about in the book. And so, yes, I think Latin Americans know that the way you beat fascism is not by calling fascists fascists,

but by by investing liberalism with social rights and and and and you know, everybody has an ideology you beat an ideology with an ideology, you know, nobody doesn't have an ideology we all live in a in a world of meaning and we've got to give people meaning. Yeah, and I like you said, you don't beat fascists by calling them fascists. And I guess like this gets into like this meta debate about Is Donald Trump a fascist? Why aren't you calling him a fascist? He's not a fascist To me like this is beside the point

I think I think I think the lesson is as liberals it only goes so far to say Donald Trump is a fascist When the liberalism that you're trying to defend is also very clearly fascist or like, let's just say very like tinged by fascism as well. Yeah. It was, it has to be, or offers no solution or remedy to the misery it's causing. Enormous waste of intellectual energy at a critical moment that, that, that fight over fascism. I mean, Latin Americans use the word fascism. They call everybody a fascist. They've been calling every right-wing government,

they understand basically that World War II was basically just transposed over to Latin America and the fight continued with the Cold War. And now the US was spacking the fascists. So everybody, Pinochet was a fascist and Mandela was a fascist and Rios Montt was a fascist. They were all fascists. And so theyinochet was a fascist and Della was a fascist and, you know, when Rios Montt was, they were all fascists. And so they happily used the word fascist. But to get into semantic arguments, and nominal arguments, I mean, in terms of how it relates to the United States.

And obviously, there was a strong current among liberals who liked to use the word fascist as a way of covering up and not talking about neoliberalism and not talking about history as history as movement, you know, that the way that Clinton ism creates the conditions for Trump is like, that's not the way they like to think about it. So if you talk about, you know, Biden doing a genocide. Yeah, yeah. And if you're not willing to, you know, to think about history as, you know, in those terms, then it's just a nominalist argument about names and typologies. Greg Grandin, I want to thank you so much for your time. The book is America, America, a new history of the new world. It will be in bookstores tomorrow. Greg, thank

you so much for just your time and just all the work you've done, which is so greatly informed. The content of this show, credited or not. Thanks so much, Will. It's been it's been great. I'm a big fan. And, and yeah, and it's been And yeah, it's nice to know that somebody's listening. Somebody's reading. Other historians are, but at least you guys are. The book is, it's a big one. So if you're looking for like a book to carry you through the beach all summer long I recommend America. Yeah, but it's an easy read. It's an easy read

The Irish Times said it compared me to Gabriel Garcia Marquez. So I a gab a Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I don't know Once again, thank you to Greg Grandin that That does it for today's show everybody. Till next time. Bye bye. Bye bye. Thanks. Thanks everybody. Dancing across the water, Cortez, Cortez. What a killer