The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement by Fredrik deBoer

Episode Date: September 2, 2023

How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement by Fredrik deBoer Amazon.com An eye-opening exploration of American policy reform, or lack thereof, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement and how the country can do better in the future. In 2020, while the Covid-19 pandemic raged, the United States was hit by a ripple of political discontent the likes of which had not been seen since the 1960s. The spark was the viral video of the horrific police murder of an unarmed Black man in Minneapolis. The killing of George Floyd galvanized a nation already reeling from Covid and a toxic political cycle. Tens of thousands poured into the streets to protest. Major corporations and large nonprofit groups—institutions that are usually resolutely apolitical—raced to join in. The fervor for racial justice intersected with the already simmering demands for change from the #MeToo movement and for economic justice from Gen Z. The entire country suddenly seemed to be roaring for change in one voice. Then nothing much happened. In How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement, Fredrik deBoer explores why these passionate movements failed and how they could succeed in the future. In the digital age, social movements flare up but then lose steam through a lack of tangible goals, the inherent moderating effects of our established institutions and political parties, and the lack of any real grassroots movement in contemporary America. Hidden beneath the rhetoric of the oppressed and the symbolism of the downtrodden lies the inconvenient fact that those doing the organizing, messaging, protesting, and campaigning are predominantly drawn from this country’s more upwardly mobile educated classes. Poses are more important than policies. DeBoer lays out an alternative vision for how society’s winners can contribute to social justice movements without taking them over, and how activists and their organizations can become more resistant to the influence of elites, nonprofits, corporations, and political parties. Only by organizing around class rather than empty gestures can we begin the hard work of changing minds and driving policy.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. I don't know why we went long this time, but it seemed like something to do. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends.

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linkedin.com for just christmas tiktokris voss one and uh i think there's youtube in there somewhere you guys know the drill but as always we love you we appreciate you uh and we hug you even though your dad probably didn't because as we aforementioned uh we have an amazing gentleman on the show he's a multi-book author and he's got his hottest new book coming off the presses us is september 5th 2023 how the i'm sorry let's sort of recut that how elites ate the social justice movement frederick deborah is on the show with us today he's gonna be talking about his latest book and we're gonna get insights that we're gonna learn some crap today people because that's what we do on the chris faust show we learn stuff and we uh get smarter because when you're smarter uh i don't know, you're sexier.

You're more hot. I mean, look at me. I just get hotter every day. Frederick DeBoer is the author of The Cult of Smart, a book about meritocracy, education, and the potential for a more humane society. What? Has he seen the news lately? Yeah, we need some more humanity. It was selected by New York Magazine as one of its 10 best books of 2020.

He holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, where he concentrated on the assessment of student learning. Welcome to the show, Frederick. How are you? I'm good, Chris. Thanks for having me on. There you go. And I guess, is it okay if I call you Freddy through the show?

Of course. There we go. And I guess, is it okay if I call you Freddy through the show? Of course. There we go. So give us your dot coms. Where can people find you on the internet and get to know you better? Yeah, you can look for me at freddietobor.substack.com. And you can also find my professional website at frederictobor.com. That's mostly just sort of where I warehouse old pieces. And you can find like my academic CV and stuff like that.

But what I'm doing right now goes down on Substack. There you go. So what motivated you to write this latest book? Sure. I sort of looked around, and I thought to myself, didn't we say a couple years ago that everything had changed? I mean, weren't we all talking about how society was sort of getting ripped up from the foundations and we were going to start over again and there was going to be all this massive and revolutionary evolution in how human beings think and act and then just sort of nothing happened. And it wasn't just that we said

all that stuff and that nothing happened, but that like very quickly after it became clear that nothing was happening, people sort of decided not to talk about the fact that nothing was happening. And I just felt like some serious stuff went down in 2020, some of which I agreed with, some of which I didn't. But definitely we said it was a special moment in history. And then it just passed like a fart into the air. And, you know, I thought like we needed to take stock and figure out what exactly happened. You know, I totally agree with you.

I went in 2020 and we were holding court in a new app called Clubhouse. And it seemed like everyone was kumbaya-ing, getting together and holding hands and going, you know, this is a moment that we need to recognize humanity. We need to be better people, you know, maybe look towards our better angels, as some say it. And then as soon as it was over, it's like, everyone's like, all right, let's go back to being assholes. Or at least it seemed to be that way. I don't know.

So I think I'm on the same level as you are. So the title of your book, give us a 30,000 overview of the book and what it entails. We'll get into the deets. Yeah. So looking back at the last sort of like 25 years of American progressive social change, but also particularly the 2020 moment. My argument is just that a big part of the problem for progressive people, left-leaning people, et cetera, is that the class of people who sort of tries

to make this change happen are not the class of people who we're trying to make change happen for. In other words, the people who we're trying to make change happen for. In other words, the people who are running these activist organizations, who are employees at the nonprofits, who work for the sympathetic press in the national media, who work at the universities, they are overwhelmingly people with college degrees. They're also hugely disproportionately coming from elite colleges. A point that I make all the time that I think most people don't understand, going to a college that's exclusive or elite is super, super rare.

So only something like 20% of American colleges reject more students than they accept. The average American college accepts almost everybody who applies. So going to a college that is elite or exclusive is just a very, very thin slice of American life. We have people who are hyper-educated. They're dominantly found in urban enclaves. So they're vastly more sort of concentrated in the cities and the country writ large. They are possessed of a certain like vocabulary that most people don't speak. And one way after another, they're not like sort of the ordinary American.

And so you could see this in 2020 where you had a lot of passionate sort of like Black Lives Matter activists, who I think had their hearts in the right place and who really cared, but whose experience of life in America in the 21st century is just not like the average black Americans experience of life. And over and over again, what you find and what I detail in the book is how that distance between their perspective and other people's perspectives made it much harder for them to actually create change. There you go. So who are the elites? I think you've kind of given me a rundown of them. Do you mostly focus on what goes on the left side of the elites, or is it both sides, left and right? Tell us how you break that down. I think that it doesn't have to be a left or right phenomenon. I think that if you look at

the activist class of the Republican Party, for example, I think that there is a stereotype that, for example, your average pro-life protester, say, your pro-life activist, is someone who is like a church lady who comes from rural Arkansas and is not educated. If you actually look at who's making things happen in the Republican Party, who the movers and the shakers are, they are also hyper-educated. They also tend to be things happen in the Republican Party, who the movers and the shakers are. They are also hyper educated. They also tend to be heavily concentrated in the cities. They often have a vocabulary that's very distinct from those of the people that they're talking about. Because I'm talking specifically about sort of, okay, why did the 2020 moment specifically not

go anywhere? I'm focusing more on the left. But the reality is, is, you know, again, we have to be careful about sort of like, what the median in this country is like compared to our sort of perception of who these people are. So I think with if you look at 2016, there's a stereotype that the that the average Trump voter was like a laid-off iron worker from Akron, Ohio. But if you look at the numbers, the median Trump voter

in 2016 made $89,000 a year. A lot of these guys are guys who own car dealerships. We should note that's quite above the average of normal Americans. Yes. The median American makes something like $36,000. Yeah.

And so one of the sort of sad, persistent dynamics in American life is poor people don't vote, right? It's been a consistent, certainly as long as I've been in line longer, if you look at the participation rates by income band, poor people just don't really vote. And so you get this stereotype where on the one hand, you have the sort of, oh, country bumpkin MAGA, you know, Rust Belt guy who's angry about globalization. He put Trump into office.

And then for Hillary Clinton, oh, you know, who's angry about globalization he put trump into into office and then uh in uh for hillary clinton oh you know it was probably uh you know the the sort of the negative stereotype of like the black welfare mother who doesn't do it the reality is neither of those people vote in the american system and like voting in and of itself is something of an elite practice kind of the way it's designed to the way the schedule is. I mean, you know, let's put it on a weekday in the middle of the day when, you know, most people that are lower income are, you know, they just can't call in their boss and take the day off, you know. And, you know, some of the games that are played with voting and polling and stuff. So delving

into it, the social justice movement, there was a lot of stuff that came out of it george floyd um there was there was a lot of kumbaya moments and now we're kind of on the other side of it um and we're seeing you know it hasn't really worked out like we're seeing you know all the different issues that we're seeing uh you know the cars breaking into in san francisco and and i want to make clear i'm not adding to the narrative i see on fox news of of like oh my god this is you know the cities are burning and all that kind of crap but there definitely is a higher sort of break-in and crime things going on in some cities there seems to be a little bit of that going on i don't know what percentages i've heard it's actually fairly small but you know you see

the videos you get an impression that something you know it's complete chaos or something out there in the streets yeah i mean the best read of the data that i have is that um crime really did spike in 2020 and particularly murder um saw a major spike i didn't do it by the way not accusing you personally that it remains the case. The average American city, big city, is remarkably safe compared to where it was 25 years ago. And in the cities that are particularly dangerous, they tend to be concentrated within certain populations in certain geographic locations, right? So I think Baltimore has about 800,000 people or less than that even. New York City has over 8 million people,

but Baltimore has more total murders per year than New York City, right? So like, but Baltimore has, this problem is concentrated within the black male population overwhelmingly between 15 and 30 years old. And that's true in Chicago, and it's true in St. Louis, etc. If you are as a tourist, go to these places, and you are not frequenting the kind of places where gang violence happens, you remain in very little danger

physically. I always tell my fellow lefties, though, that look, crime is an example, perfect example of where if enough people think there's a problem, there's a problem. In other words, I think the worst thing that you can do, if a voter says to you, well, I don't feel safe at night, or the subway seems unsafe, so I don't want to ride it. If you say, well, you know, I've got the stat book here, and I can tell you, you're just going to lose that person, right? Like the perception of crime is very important. I think that the issue that's really confronting the United States right now is sort of unfolding on a lot of different levels. But we have a sort of mismatch between what our perception of where the problem is coming from and how the problem is actually going to be solved.

What do I mean about that? During this whole 2020 moment, if you said, hey, look, you know, black people are dying at highly disproportionate levels to police violence, which just absolutely is true. It's just a fact. at highly disproportionate levels to police violence, which just absolutely is true. It's just a fact. Conservatives would tend to say like, well, hold on a minute, but they're killing themselves in Chicago. And what about black on black crime?

But of course, both of those things can be true at the same time, right? And in fact, part of the problem is, is that there's such deep distrust of the police in these communities that nobody wants to go to the police and tell them when they've been witnessed to an act of violence. There's a culture of stop snitching. And so it's really difficult for the cops to sort of practice preventative policing. But ultimately, you have to build that trust with the community. I think that

liberals and lefties have to accept that people are just super, super sensitive to crime. One of the things that I say in the book, at the exact same time as the activist class were shouting, defund the police, in the polling, a majority of black Democrats were not saying defund the police, a majority of black Democrats were saying, maintain the current police presence or even increase it in my neighborhood. Right? The perfect example of what I'm talking about when I say that there's just a difference in the lived experience of a Black Lives

Matter activist and the average black person and so you just you have to confront these as complex social issues and not get into a slogan fight because if you are the one saying oh no crime's not a problem to a bunch of voters who are scared about crime you're just going to lose their votes and in the in the title of your book you talk about how the elites ate the social justice movement and i've heard you talk about non-profits other organizations corporations sure uh went crazy falling over themselves i think it's black rock that isn't isn't it the black rock uh company that has um you know that forces some sort of calculator justice system on corporations um that do that uh is that uh what you're talking about your book when you mean you know like these

these elites and organizations that are eating the social justice system and maybe don't do justice sure that's part of it i mean look like um the sort of the the classic example is the gay rights movement after the legalization of gay marriage. My parents were close with a lot of activist-style people. My father had lived in New York for 10 years and he knew a lot of people who were sort of in this early gay rights fight. And back then it was genuinely just radical just to be gay and to call for gay rights and gay marriage. One of the things that happens in the history of progressive movements is winning is de-radicalizing, by which I mean simply the fact that gay people won the

right to marry resulted in, like just kind of inarguably in my opinion, resulted in like just kind of inarguably in my opinion resulted in like a de-radicalization of what had been the gay marriage movement a lot of people um did what anyone does what most people do with politics such as they got the right they wanted and they went off to you know have families and raise kids and just sort of just be people right yeah um there's nothing wrong with that in and of itself but what happened next was that um you know a lot of these corporations had sort of saw opportunity for good press and so if you go to a pride parade now a major pride parade you know bank of america is hanging on handing out pins, right, at the Pride Parade. You go to a big defense contractor like Raytheon, and they've got Pride flags flying from their flagpoles out front.

Nobody in the activist class takes that seriously. They all sort of say, oh, they're just being opportunistic. But what it inevitably does is it just sort of sucks up sort of public understanding of what these issues are and sort of aligns them with institutions. Of course, also the political parties are guilty of this, too. So there's this famous picture that after George Floyd was killed, you have all these Democratic leaders like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi. And they were wearing literally kente cloth, so it's a traditional African cloth, and they kneel, right, sort of in respect for George Floyd.

And it's like, okay, but like, that's cool, but you make the laws, right? Like your job is not to put on kente cloth and to kneel. Your job is to make the laws that are actually going to result in a more racially just society and that's the sort of thing i'm talking about so a lot of social signaling or virtue signaling uh going on without a lot of substance basically yeah i mean that you know the um this there's this um, you know, it's easy to do good, but it's hard to do good. Well, right. Um, that's one thing that I don't do in the book is I'm not making fun of anyone

who was, um, impassioned in that moment. I'm not making fun of anyone who got radicalized. I'm not trying to make anyone regret what they were sort of feeling. I am saying that there's a reason why it's really difficult to make real positive change. I would say that if you're looking at racial justice specifically, you can say arguably that like the sort of movement for racial justice, whether you want to call that the sort of civil rights era and the black power era, the sort of Jesse Jackson rainbow coalition era, the,

you know, now the black lives matter era since about 1965, there's been a lack of results. And I would argue that that lack of results stems from the fact that there's not a real clear sense of what the ask is, right? Like in politics, you got to know what you want, right? The civil rights movement took a long time to get going for obvious reasons. But when it got going, it really made a lot of headway quickly because they knew exactly what

they needed. So the Voting Rights Act came first. Why did the Voting Rights Act, why was that the top priority, if nothing else? It was the top priority because if you don't secure the vote for black people, if you don't protect their right to vote and make it a federal crime to stop them from voting, then none of the rest matters because they're going to remain disempowered.

You say, okay, we got that. Now it's a federal crime if people stop us from voting. National Guard was deployed to places to ensure that black people could vote. Okay. And they have the Civil Rights Act, right, which is made up of a whole bunch of non-discrimination clauses and ways to tear down Jim Crow and segregation. You can't have a lunch counter with a sign up that says no coloreds anymore. Right. That's great. But then the question became what next? And in fact, if you read Martin Luther King's work from late in his life, he was open about the fact that he was frustrated

with the lack of progress. But the problem is, is they couldn't settle on an actual demand. You have seen reparations has been something that has sort of floated around semi-seriously for decades. You have this sort of now thing with the prison industrial complex and the war on drugs, et cetera. There hasn't been that one thing to ask for. And when there's not that one thing to ask for, it there's that not that one thing to ask for it's really easy to not get what you want there you go you know and correct me if i'm wrong here in my

memory of this but you know one one of the challenges uh martin luther king had was the fighting the other leading voices in the party or in in in the group of folks who want to reform you know like malcolm x you know it was more, you know, violence and whatever Black Panthers and stuff. And so, you know, the fight over what is this message, how we get out is very true. supposition that these these huge organizations these elite voters uh have just kind of hijacked the movement uh for the feel-good virtual signaling and sales of whatever product they can move and and uh i don't know so you can look good around people on social media and maybe get chicks or something i don't know uh i see a lot of virtue signaling on with my you know people that are on the far left i'm a moderate democrat Democrat, by the way, full disclosure.

But I can see both sides of the party, and I'm not happy with the extremes on either side. And so do you think it's that, or do we need to also place some blame on the average person who votes or doesn't vote? Yeah, I mean, look, like, um i believe so you can look at any election and you can say okay the democrat got this many votes and the republican got this many votes but also there's another one which is like people who didn't vote right the last time that's a presidential election was held where one of the candidates got more votes than people who did not vote was Teddy Kennedy. Okay. Not Teddy Kennedy, Theodore Roosevelt, excuse me. Theodore Roosevelt's election was the last time that a candidate got more votes than the number of

people who did not vote. Okay. So we've got this issue. Now I'm among those who say that, um, we have to look at this scenario as saying, uh, we need to give them something to vote for, right? It's not, you know, it's very easy to say, oh, they're so apathetic. They're sitting on their ass. They don't care. A lot of people care, but they don't see real distance between the two parties in terms of what they're offering. And they don't see a lot that's worth supporting. They don't pay attention to even know. They're busy watching The Bachelor or whatever's on Instagram. I want to talk about this idea of a moderate Democrat position because I think that what gets defined as a moderate position is very important and not discussed enough. So I'm not a moderate, but let's look at the child tax credit expansion. So for those listening who don't know, there is a

child tax credit in this country so that if you have kids, you get some money knocked off of your federal taxes. There was an expansion of that program that was passed as part of one of the big COVID relief bills, where for a single year, this program was expanded such that it became somewhat more generous. And parents could actually, instead of just taking money off of their taxes, they could get like a refund so they could get cash money for this thing. It's very common in many, many countries to have some sort of cash benefit for parents in order to pay for whatever. That program to me. Right. That was sort of set up to be a sort of a dream of what the left wants. But if you actually look at like the history of the Democratic Party,

that kind of universal cash benefit for an identified population that has an unusual financial burden, Social Security for the elderly, Medicare for the elderly, Medicare, Medicaid for the disabled, etc. Social Security payments for people who for the disabled, et cetera. Social security payments for people who are permanently disabled, such as the blind, et cetera. That is actually right in the center of the party's wheelhouse. That is just the sort of thing that the Democrats do really well. That kind of a program tends to be very popular. It's actually much cheaper than you might think when you actually look at how much that do outs or if how much it actually costs.

And it has this beautiful sort of scenario where it is race neutral. Anyone who's a poorer parent can drop, it can draw from this money, right? It is, it is a means tested, so you don't get it if you make above a certain amount of money.

So it's restricted to people on the bottom. But even though it's race neutral and white poor parents and Hispanic and Asian, whatever, the people who benefit the most from it are black parents because of the distribution of poverty in this country.

So it has this function where it could cut child poverty in this country. So it has this function where it could cut child poverty in this country dramatically. It is a benefit that's generous enough that it's going to give people the opportunity to take care of things for their kids without being so generous that it's a disincentive to work, if you want to talk about that. And it is race neutral and any people can take advantage of it if they're poor enough. But it also has this nice effect of being disproportionately helping black people because they tend to be more impoverished. That to me is not extreme. Right. It's only extreme in the context of sort of contemporary Democratic politics. You know, Joe Manchin was the one who killed that program.

And Joe Manchin is seen as like, you know, the most right-wing Democrat senator from West Virginia, et cetera. That's a good example, though, where Social Security was not a radical left-wing program within the Democratic Party of the New Deal coalition, right? Medicare and the various Great Society programs was not a radical position within the Democratic Party of the 1960s. And I think that it's a question of how do you sort of frame what you see as what is moderate, less than sort of like this is objectively moderate or extreme, etc. Definitely. You know, it's sometimes I think, I mean, there's criticism of us as Democrats that we don't communicate effectively our message, or there has been in the past at times. But, you know, trying to find stuff that's good for everybody, something that's towards the middle.

And, you know, the poverty of white people is very big, especially the mid and central south in fact i think uh most of the social services are consumed by them which is kind of interesting um do you see what what do you think about the criticism let me play devil's advocate what do you think about the criticism of programs like that that say um they're buying votes um like you could say that about almost any kind of expenditure right like i mean look uh look it is famously a a tactic of the defense industry is to have parts of their process be done in as many states as possible so i believe the stealth bomber, the old stealth bomber, literally had at least one part made in every state in the union, all 50 states, because that meant that if you tried to cut that program, 50 states worth of senators, right, had people on the phone, you're going to cut that and kill my

job, right? I live in Connecticut, right? I'm from Connecticut originally. And I, it's a true blue, super sort of blue Democrat state. But the biggest firearm company is here. Pratt & Whitney makes the jet engines for the jets. It's very much a part of the sort of the M.O. of defense industry is to understand you spread your operation wide so that you have as much geographical representation in Congress as possible. Is that buying votes? I don't know, but it's just a reflection of the fact that like everybody's getting something out of the system, right? Like you can't be too cynical about sort of who's getting money from what, because certainly the defense industry is getting a lot of our money. There you go. And I suppose anybody who accuses it of buying votes would, you know, I mean, they're trying to play those political cards.

Do you find that, you know, with institutions and elites, you know, one of the challenges I had was when the overturning of Roe versus Wade happened, there was a lot of hair on fire screaming on social media. And, you know, probably so. People, I mean, it was a shock to the system. You overturned something that people kind of felt was a God-given right at this point after, what, 40 or 50 years or more. But, you know, I started asking people that were going hair on fire on facebook and i said okay well this is great you're really fired up about this let me ask you two questions did you vote for hillary in 2016 show up to vote and are you registered to vote now and you're planning on

voting in 2020 no yeah i'm like shut the fuck up yeah i mean it's fair point i mean that i did i was there i represented so uh you did it and now you're complaining and oh my god votes voting has consequences or not voting does i mean abortion to me is uh i i don't think people understand it's like if you ever doubt the the ability of a small group of motivated citizens to make change you have to look at abortion rights in this country when roe v wade happened in the 1970s in polling then a significant majority of republicans even favored a woman's right to choose so we are in a concept we're getting a context now where abortion is the ultimate dividing line and where it's such a super passionate issue and it's conservatives versus liberals and Democrats

versus Republicans, et cetera. Accepting that a woman had a right to have an abortion was just sort of like a general popular opinion that was very common among both sides of the aisle back in the 1970s, 50 years ago. What happened was that you had this group of people, of activists, pro-life activists, who were just super, super motivated. And they just went to work every day. And they refused to take no for an answer. And they fought like hell inside of the Republican Party. And they made abortion a litmus test where if you're going to be a national Republican, you better be pro-life or else we're going to come and get you. And eventually they created the condition where the court was sufficiently skewed towards conservatives where they got what they wanted. Now I'm a pro-choice guy So I think that's unfortunate But In 50 years they completely changed public opinion And they were able to get rid of Roe v. Wade And I think it's really important

That people not become too cynical About their ability to sort of Make change within the system Because if you really Believe in something And you really pursue it And you use the sort of power that you have within your party, you can make something happen. I will say that this has led to a bunch of Democratic victories, right? I mean, one of the things that happened immediately after Roe v. Wade went out is that, like, oh, people are like, wait, they got rid of abortion.

And now suddenly they're winning a bunch of elections that they could have lost. And that's just how American politics functions. You know, you, once I win some, and then they just, it's clawed back, you know. There you go. You know, and you, you, you lead into the, the point I was trying to make where, you know, the apathy of voters who don't show up and then they wonder why change happens and, oh my God, you know, things things voting or not voting has consequences uh what i mentioned earlier about the people who don't show up to vote and who who don't care and this is another

way why social change fails because you know you i've heard so many people it doesn't matter which president you do or whether it's left or right i've heard so many people be like well we voted for that guy to go you know fix this and in whatever and you're like but you voted for the president to go in from one side and you voted from the congress to go in the other and you know they for about 20 or 30 years they've been doing this death match thing where you know they just i i can't remember who the speaker of the house was who basically said, we're not going to pass anything Obama wants, you know. And, you know, sometimes it's happening on both sides where it's just like, if it's, oh, that's a right thing, we're not going to do it. If it's, oh, that's a left thing, we're not going to do it. Instead of trying to, you know, have that old sort of, you know, Tip or Neal or Pryor thing where we try and figure stuff out um and and do you think that your your point to like

you know these politicians who do the virtual signaling but they don't do anything about it when they have their hands on the ability to do something about it and then of course we have these voters who have their hands on the ability to do something but they don't show up to vote um uh who's who's the bigger one at fault is the is the elites or is it the is the voters that that just don't give a shit and then they and then they're all angry because oh my god uh voting has consequences so i i think that i would sort of distribute the blame here i would say that um and again like this is true of of of Republicans as well as Democrats in their own way. I focus on the left side because I am on the left and I want my side to do better.

So that's what I'm trying to sort of tell them how to do it. That's the point of the book. It is just the case that like there is in group politics and there's out group politics. When you're in your group politics, you want to be more extreme and you want to sort of be more pure. When you get to the out-group politics, you want to be more compromising and you want to shade towards the center so that you can win, right? Part of the problem with what's happened in American politics is that the internet eliminates the distinction between in and out-group politics, right? Like literally, it just used to be the case where, you know, you'd be doing politics like you'd be engaging in political debate in your union hall. Right. And the local candidate, a Democratic candidate would come and talk to you guys and you talk it out and you'd sort of have the kind of arguments that now happen on Twitter, right? And then that's the in-group. And then you'd send the candidate out to sort of win the election.

And in the election, he wouldn't talk the same way he'd talk in that space, right? Because you have to operate on multiple levels. In the internet era, everything is happening in the same space all the time, right? Like the social distance between the same space all the time right like the social distance between the inner space and the outer space the in-group conversation and the outcome conversation has been shattered if you are someone who is a candidate and you go to a small meeting of you know people who are sort of affiliated with a given political movement there's going to be somebody with a cell phone camera there and they're going to and they, there's going to be somebody with a cell phone camera there, and it's going to have video of you saying the extreme thing that you say in the in

group, and that's going to go out on Twitter. And if you are a politician and you say something in a big speech for everybody to hear, well, that's going to get taken back to the people in the in group, and they're going to know that you said something that's not the same as what you said in the out group. So that's one just structural problem with American politics right now is it's gotten harder to have a difference between the message that you say to people in your party, in your group, in your ideology, and a message for the public at large. And when it comes to the public though, right, as you suggested, they don't make a lot poll of people and you say, okay, are you big government or small government? Well, I'm small government. And you say, should we,

should we deficit spend? Should we, should we rack up the national debt or should we, should we live within our means? Live within our means. Okay. So we're small government. We're going to live within our means. And you say, OK, which of these programs are you going to cut? And you say military, Medicare, Social Security. And they say none. Right. So they they want a small government balanced budget, but also don't cut any of the programs at all. Right. And that's just like that's just how people operate. Like politics happens at such a level of abstraction that it's hard to sort of identify when you're being a bit of a hypocrite. That's true. There seems to be a lot of hypocritical things that go on on both sides, and maybe we need to identify that more.

So what do you hope to people learn from in your book? And do elites need to change their behavior? Do companies need to quit mucking about, you know, we've seen the kerfuffles with like the Bud Light thing, maybe less social signaling. Do politicians need to get in and do the dirty work as opposed to just, you know,

focusing on these, on these, these hot topic issues, but never do anything about it. Yeah. So I think that just sort of gets to what I was just saying about inside and outside. A fundamental problem that the left has right now is the way you become a person of influence in the left of center, whether that's moderate Democrat, liberal, left of liberal, whatever. The way you become a person of influence, the way that you sort of get sort of a position of power,

an audience, whatever, it's like within the system of American meritocracy, right? You bust your ass in high school, you go to elite college, you probably go on to a graduate degree of some kind. And then you end up, if you're going in media, you end up maybe at like the Atlantic, right? Or the New York Times, or you go to academia and you end up at a, you know, really exclusive liberal arts college, or you go with this sort of think-take slash nonprofit route, and you end up, you know, at the Ford Foundation, et cetera. And that's sort of like the progression that you go through to

become a person of influence. And the problem is, is that progression, right, produces people who talk in a weird way, who have politics that are kind of extreme, who have politics that are much more focused on social and cultural issues than on pocketbook issues. People go through the process of becoming sort of elite within these spaces because they want to be part of the conversation, but they, in doing so, they lose the ability to talk like a regular human being. It's always been the case, right, that there is a sort of elite class who guides the parties. But again, it used to be a lot easier for those people to stay out of the way, right? So you had, in the 1960s, you had Democrats had, you know, this concept of the best and brightest, which was like this sort of layer of these elite college grads who were very well credentialed and who knew

everything, but they weren't on the campaign trail, right? Like, you, like, they sort of directed policy, but then, you know, you would go on and you would send out LBJ, right, who was a guy who knew how to speak to the people. The problem now is right. Like if you want to know what elite democratic position is or opinion is, you go on Twitter where everybody's performing for each other. Right. Or you listen to their podcasts. Right. Or everybody is available all the time. And we just we have a fundamental problem that people who go through these elite spheres you know they they can't say like um like black people they say black bodies whatever the fuck that means right it's like a big thing that they say right like um uh they don't say homeless anymore they say the unhoused

right and and most people when they say here's you say oh the unhoused, right? And most people, when they say, here's you say, oh, the unhoused, there are black bodies, they don't say, okay, I'm going to educate myself to make, they're going to say, what are you talking about? I don't know what that is. So that's like just a fundamental problem. And so I think one thing that I want people to absorb from the book is that like, you know, the average, you know, Dartmouth University graduate who then goes on to get work, to get a prestigious internship, and then lands at a non-profit group that is staffed entirely by people like them, where just everyone is from the academic elite like that. That is a system for producing people who appear out of touch to most of the country.

There you go. You know, these are great points. Do you think this contributes to why people don't show up and vote, why people feel out of touch with government? It's because, you know, everyone's talking so elitist. I can see how that sounds really, what's the word I'm looking for? It really sounds like you're playing people when you're talking down to them talking so elitist, I can see how that sounds really, what's the word I'm looking for? It really sounds like you're playing people when you're talking down to them or you're telling

them what their experience is while you're sitting eating your tofu in your high-rise condo and your Tesla. And you're trying to tell someone who's living in poverty, paycheck to paycheck, and at the ends of our society, you're trying to tell them what their experience is. Yeah. And I want to say this, Chris, to be very clear to your audience and to you. I am one of these people I'm talking about, right? Let's be real clear here. I have a PhD, okay? I am a professional writer with a PhD who had lived in Brooklyn for the better part of a decade and et cetera, et cetera. I am not saying that I am the man of the people, as I say in the book, right?

I know how to critique these people because I've been among them from my entire adult life, right? And I'm not advancing myself as someone who's more pure or more real or more down to earth. But what I am saying is sooner or later, there has to be an acknowledgement, right, that you can understand and believe in and see value in the concept of intersectionality, for example, which is a very prominent sort of cultural studies lefty kind of philosophy. You can value that, but understand that the rest of the world sees you when that's the term that you keep using in your daily day-to-day engagement with other people. When that goes into your position paper that you write as a nonprofit. When that is in the article that you write for the Washington Post.

And it is alienating to them. They don't know what that is. They don't have the benefit of $80,000 a year college education. And there has to be some grappling with maybe the reason that people think we're out of touch is because we actually are out of touch. There you go. Becoming self-aware. You make a good point. It's alienated in language.

And, well, you're trying to utilize this principle of self-grandizing or virtue signaling combined with, well, we want to help people. I think some people have an intent to help people. It's the delivery that's the problem. You know, it's always the intent that takes you to hell. But I think you're right it's alienated it's talking down to people when you're not speaking in in their sort of language and uh and maybe that's the reason a lot of people don't vote in this country because they're just like i don't feel like i'm part of this system and we have gotten out of control with cities united and several different things where, you know, basically as a billionaire, you know, buy justice, pick your Clarence Thomas and a jet plane and justice. You know, a lot of this is really kind of amplified, you know, these elites and stuff.

So maybe people on the left, as you're calling us out, need to be more self-aware of that. And maybe we need to be like, maybe we should talk about the kitchen table sort of products as opposed to these virtual signaling social movement things that don't really seem to hit the pavement. Or maybe they'd hit the pavement better if we didn't. In the book, I quote from a pamphlet that the British government gave out after they developed their National Health Service. The country had been devastated by World War II. There was just rubble everywhere, and they were trying to sort of rebuild from the ground up. And so they created their national health service. And they gave a pamphlet and it said, in the plainest language that possibly you can, it said, okay, this is our national health service. This is what it can do for you. Everybody gets to access it. You pay for it with your taxes. And here's some things about it. And at the end of the book,

one of the pieces of advice I give is just tell people in plain language what you have done for them there you go so look at if you look at like obamacare i think obamacare had some good provisions and i think that i'm glad that we have obamacare rather than nothing it was better than nothing but like a fundamental political problem with obamacare is you people say okay what is obamacare and you say well and then you launch into a 20-minute dialogue about like just trying to explain the law right people okay so well there's there's medicaid expansion but not all the states took advantage of it and there's a provision that says that you can't be turned down for new coverage just because you have pre-existing conditions, but they can still turn you down because you can't pay and lots of other reasons. Also, no, the government doesn't give you coverage, but what

it does do is creates a series of marketplaces. And on those marketplaces, private insurers send you like potential offers and they're rated gold, silver, or bronze for the record. And you have to cover a certain amount of coverage, but you can, if you want, choose coverage that's very minimal. Once you start to do that, you've already lost, right? Yeah, people are just glazing over their eyes going, oh. Guess what? Social Security. When you get old, the government will give you back money taxed from you so that you have money to live. That's a program that I know how to describe.

And guess what? Social security is incredibly popular, right? Because you just, Hey, look, while you're working, we're going to take some money from you. And that's going to ensure that at the end of your life, when we used to have a poverty, elderly poverty rate of 40% in this country, it's single digits now. And it's single digits now because we made that that that that program you've got to be able to simply and coherently tell people the what we have given you is this and that's how you get people to vote there you go i know the biden administration has tried to target more what they call kitchen table topics and i'm kind of at the point too

because i've gone from the far i'm not i was never too, because I've gone from the far, I was never far right, but I've gone from the right in the 90s and voting for Republican, which is interesting because George W. Bush embarrassed me so badly with basically monetizing. It was called the Dick Cheney presidency, I think, monetizing Halliburton in the war. It's funny, I left the Republican Party because I was embarrassed over George Bush and his dumbness. Can you believe what I... Anyway, whatever. I mean, George W. Bush is a perfect example of how

if you have enough balls, you can just sort of misrepresent even who you are. You ask the average person, who's George W. Bush as a person they'll say oh he's a country bumpkin from texas he was an aristocrat from connecticut what are you talking about you from a hugely wealthy new england family who went to yale using skull and bones but he just sold it he just sold it so strong you know yeah and he he talked it too i

mean he did sound like a country bumpkin half the time but uh and then i went to the far uh left uh far liberal and now i'm back at the middle because i think i i like what you've talked about in the book i become so tired i well social movements are there and there's there's importance to them uh and we need to fix some things i get tired of this the signaling of these extremes that we can't get back to the middle things. I get tired of the signaling of these extremes that we can't get back to the middle or we can't agree to the middle. It's our way or other or nothing. And the same thing on the right too.

And these politicians that do all this virtual signaling, but as you mentioned in the show, you guys control the legislation. Like go fix the damn crap and let's all get along instead of doing more signaling to, I don't know, voting that you're going to have come on your base that you know is going to come from that far extreme left. Let's try and get that middle voting out. And I know the Biden administration was trying to do more kitchen table things. I'm at that point. Okay. Yeah. Let's, let's fix abortion and, and

either make it legal or illegal, or let's all get together and try and find a way to make it work somehow. Uh, so everyone's happy or at least, you know, uh, everyone can agree that there's some way that that can be done, but can we fix the goddamn roads? Can we get, can we get my bridges to quit falling down? That might be a cool thing. I like the child stuff. Can we, you know, I don't, I don't like hearing that kids show up to school and they don't have food. My mom was a teacher. I've seen, I've heard how that, how the horrors of that, uh, can we, can we, you know, help

mothers and maternity and, you know, can we do a lot of these social things that you do in other countries that just form a good country, a humane thing, these kitchen table things. You know, I don't want to hear about, you know, the trans movement is very important to me, LGBTQ, et cetera, et cetera. But some of these, some of these things like, you know, uh, what's gone on with, uh, uh, you know, people, people want to change their sex and all that stuff. That's like, I think I read the figures on it. It's maybe 1% of the country or 2% of people in the country that want and and really need that and are

interested that that's a great thing let's do that but you would think that 95 of the country were arguing about that in you know the way the politics and the way they milk it and the way they you know run everybody even politicians are running around the nose hairs on fire like this is the thing we need to talk about. I watch political debates where they talk about things and you're just like, man, can you just fix my fucking roads and maybe help give us more jobs? Let's quit running around with these things. But it's kind of like the elites and politicians

have gotten sucked into this virtual signaling and then they go back to their offices and they go, which stocks do they need to buy this week? Right. I don't know i mean look like the you know uh i think that it is a constant throughout history that um politicians will start to demagogue on social issues that are not unimportant but that are just not as relevant to the vast majority of people as much broader issues. So, you know, if you look at like, for example, the sort of the border crisis, right? We do have a crisis. The best way to solve it is going to be sort of like contentious no matter what, right? There's no sort of like just sort of like, hey,

I've got one weird trick that's going to make everybody agree on immigration. It's just not going to happen because people just don't agree. But we could at least have the debate about how many people to let into the country and how and who to choose, et cetera. If you looked at like trump who for years is this the first time we said the word trump in this podcast probably that's crazy yeah an hour in that's that's wild um but you know trump would not talk about immigration without talking about the gang ms-13 right yeah and ms-13 are bad guys i don't like MS-13. But like that's just such a such a minuscule little element to the broad immigration debate.

But he did it because it's effective, because if you do that, right, if you keep sort of saying, hey, here's MS-13 over here, then people won't notice that like you don't really have an immigration policy. Right. Like you don't actually have like a policy that you want. You don't have a coherent sort of idea in that way. You know, there are some problems that are just like, we just got to fight them out, right? There are problems that we just sort of have to have out and they're going to be uncomfortable. And you and I would disagree about plenty of it. I do think that if we're going to start anywhere, if we want to have any sort of sense of bipartisanship or sort of coming together to understand our problems, I think we should start here. Okay.

Um, this country is far richer than it was 50 years ago. Um, but, uh, many, many people, uh, are struggling more than they would have 50 years ago because of the increase of the price of housing, education, right, and health care. Those three things have grown so enormously in their costs over the past half century, totally obliterating the sort of gains we've made in average wages, like just far, far, increasing far, far faster. I don't think there's any reason that we can't sort of say as a country, okay, look, like, we clearly have a really serious costs problem with housing, education, and healthcare. There are three things that people can't just choose to go without, right? And by education, I'm including daycare people can't just choose to go without, right?

And by education, I'm including daycare, which is just insanely expensive now, right? And if you can't get daycare, then your kids can't, then you can't work. And if you can't work, then you can't, you know, like, I would like to see people sort of talk about those three things as a unit and say, they've gotten hugely more expensive. We've got to figure out why. And we have to come together and find some sort of way to fix this because we're just not going to ever see any real positive gain in people's wages that means anything. If their mortgages, their rent, their insurance premiums, their daycare payments are going up so high that it eats all of that money. Like that's a good example of where I think there might be the opportunity for some real bipartisanship.

Are you saying that Reaganomics trickle-down didn't work? I am indeed saying that it did not, in fact, trickle-down. Damn it! I was betting on that. I saw somebody on TikTok do this video, so I'll just quote the numbers, and don't sue me for not being accurate because I'm not sure if they are, but they sound they are. And he showed that

housing is up 29% over the last 30, 40, 50 years. However long it is, I'm losing, I can't feel my legs anymore. Housing, child care, all these costs, education like you mentioned, are up 20, 30%.

Where with wages, and i think his numbers may include the last few years of increase uh only went up six percent so we're asking people to afford all these things and you know i've been watching the middle class die since the eight the mid 80s you know and and i've been watching it slowly disappear and it's getting worse you know you were hearing about people in florida who can't insure their homes anymore because of legislation there that made it harder for them to sue and people to sue and whatever. You can't insure your home. And I was shocked by that. I'm like, holy crap.

There's people going out on insurance? I mean, it's really time that we said, hey, politicians, quit doing those signaling of the flags of the social things. Fix what's wrong in this country for everybody. And then let me ask you this. I know we're going along on the show, but this is great stuff do we do we also as whether we're activists or elites or just the average human being do we all need to start recognizing that we need to quit being so extreme we need to start saying how can we come together how can we agree how can we compromise instead of this this uh far left far, just like our way or the highway? Yeah, I'm not sure that I would put it in those terms.

Here's how I would put it, right? I want people to express their conscience, right? When some people express their conscience, they say that there should be no abortion under any circumstances. And I express my own conscience and say, that's crazy, right? Because that's just how politics is and how it works. I don't want either of us to be less extreme in the sense that, like, we back off what our conscience is telling us. What I do want is to say this. Like, a thing that I tell young lefties a lot is they're not just going to stop making Republicans.

In other words, when you're in the process of thinking about the potential future, it has to be an actual, like, potential future, right? You need to bake into the cake the fact that, like, there's always going to be people who you can't stand who have as much influence as you do, and you're never going to get everything that you want. So you don't compromise on your deeply held moral beliefs, but you understand as an adult, like, shit, I'm just not going to get everything that I want. What can I live with in a way that I can go to sleep at night? That's not everything that I want, but it's some of what I want. There you go. A compromise and living like an adult who knew self-accountability you know i've started a thing doing whenever politics comes up is i've started laying a foundation of saying okay if we're going to talk about this i want to lay a foundation we're all americans here and we're

going to talk as fellow americans you're a fellow american of mine we're all americans that's more important the constitution is more important than whatever the else you want to talk about from here on out and everything revolves around that basis and it's interesting to me establishing that foundation and even if i have to call it back whoa hey we're americans first so what do we need to do for america the left the right I'm not saying totally, but in the conversation, what do we need to do as Americans? And so that's kind of helped keep some of the conversations I've had more grounded. And people have kind of had an aha moment where they go, wait, we are Americans. And it recognizes that we're two people.

We're going to have to compromise on, you know, the extremes or what people want. But that used to be what this country was kind of good at. You know, Tip O'Neill would compromise. But, you know, once we got, who was the Republican, Newt Gingrich in, you know, it was like fucking the highway or nothing. And it's kind of been that way ever since. Great discussion. Great discussion.

Any final thoughts, Freddie, as we go out? My final thoughts is that you can learn all about these issues and more in the new how elite state, the social justice movement by me, Frederick DeBoer out next Tuesday. There you go. September 5th, 2023.

You can order wherever fine books are sold. Give me your.com Freddie, wherever you want people to find you on the interwebs. Yeah. So it's Freddie substan, Freddie, sorry you want people to find you on the interwebs. Yeah, so it's freddysubstack.com Sorry, I can't even remember my own web address. freddytobor.substack.com

But if you just put in my name into Google, that's the first thing that pops up. There you go. How elites ate the social justice movement? I don't want to see what happened after it passed through their system. But maybe that's where we are today. Maybe there's a joke there in our second book, Freddie. Anyway, guys, thanks for tuning in.

We certainly appreciate you guys being here. Remember, we're all Americans, damn it. I mean, the show's international, so those of you who are American, we're all Americans, just so you know. You might want to remember that first. Go to goodreads.com, fortune.chrisvossyoutube.com,

fortune.chrisvosslinkedin.com, fortunecom fortune's christmas and all those great places on the internet thanks for tuning in be good to each other stay safe and we'll see you guys next time love the discussion