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Foreign.
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Welcome to the Compact Podcast. Today we'll discuss Trump rescheduling cannabis elections in Chile and the fate of white millennial men under dei. I'm joined by Ashley Frawley and Jeff Schulenberger. And I'm Matthew Schmitz. Trump won two presidential elections promising to make America great again, and now he is poised to deliver. According to reports, Trump is prepared to issue an executive order that will reschedule cannabis. So this isn't exactly a legalization, but it's something that changes cannabis's official status under federal law so that cannabis companies can get access to major banks, really. So the cannabis business can grow much, much larger. And we know that nothing will make America great again like letting businessmen profit off the mass sale of cannabis, which will improve the lives of the young people who use it, which will make our streets safer and more pleasant. So Trump is doing what he said. He is making America great again. Three cheers for Donald Trump.
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You know what's funny is this is another one of these things that I have changed my mind about. Anybody who's read any of my work knows that I've got a libertarian streak. And I used to be in favor of assisted dying. I changed my mind. And I've also changed my mind about this. And very, very recently, actually. I have always tended to be of a mind that consenting adults should do as they judge. Important emphasis on the word judge. Judge is best for them. And that is actually, that requires a lot of careful thought. Not just do what you feel, but actually what you judge you can handle. However, I recently spoke at a drug summit, an international drug summit, which is very much outside of my expertise. But what I was there to talk about was what will not work for stopping the global spread of drugs, which is something that's been continually suggested, which is more mental health support in schools. I'm not even joking. People think that this enormous global gazillion dollar industry can be stopped if we just supported more mental health in schools. So I was there to talk about how that's not going to work.
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There are very few things I wouldn't be improved or stopped by just insisting on the importance of mental health.
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Right. It's. There's just. There's just so many under qualified psychology graduates. Come on, we've got to give them jobs anyway. So that's what I was there to talk about. But as I was sort of listening to these discussions, I. I was absolutely floored by how bad the problem is, how intractable it is. You know, the first speaker gave this Talk about like how much money is involved. And I honestly reevaluated my life choices and began calculating, well, geez, man, just one drug run, you're, you're set for several lifetimes. It was like, you know, when you're up against that, it's so difficult to put in disincentives. It's absolutely mad. Anyways, so I realized that this idea that I had clung to for such a long time of, of legalization would, would of, of all drugs really. I mean this look like the standard sociological point of view. And me not being an expert in the area of drugs is something that you kind of, you learn about and you think, yeah, that sounds good. You know, crime is, is, is, you know, capitalism is criminogenic and you create the crime by creating the law. So get rid of the laws and let people judge for themselves, let the governments regulate it, whatever it might be. I realized that this was so incredibly utopian because the entire world would have to legalize drugs. Because what winds up hap at the same time essentially, because what winds up happening is if you have one country that legalizes it just become hub for all of these criminals and so on to pass into all these other countries where it's not legal. And so you just create these horrible problems. And then in the countries where it is legal, it is because it is illegal. Elsewhere it attracts all these horrible corrupt individuals, these drug runners, these gangs and organized crime. And yeah, legalization seems to cause way more problems than it solves unless you have a kind of worldwide simultaneous legalization, which strikes me as utopian. So going to Trump's executive order, it seems to me, particularly with the experience of Canada, that, you know, one thing that I noticed was when we downgraded the seriousness in the public mind, because in our mind now you have this idea of like the law isn't just what is allowed, it's what is good. And so then marijuana just became this thing where it was like you, you couldn't criticize it, you can't say it's bad. Like people are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's, that's a bit mad. This is a great thing. So you can't, it becomes very, very difficult to talk about why it's bad. And then all of the people I laughed at when I was a teenager who said marijuana is a gateway drug seemed to be right because I was watching frigging 50 year old people at a wedding shovel mushrooms into their mouths. Like everybody starts doing mushrooms all of a sudden, like all of these other drugs suddenly Seem to me to be much more, more prevalent. And as marijuana becomes no big deal, you have more illicit drugs and more illicit drug use. Now, I can't back that up with statistics. That's just my anecdotal understanding. But I wouldn't be surprised if that's, you know, backed up by stats. So, yeah, it's a disturbing lack of
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rigor from Ashley Frawley.
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I told you, I started this by saying I'm not an expert in this area. I can only bring to what, what I think won't work. But, yeah, so that, that's kind of the conclusion that I've come to and it's, and I, I really have to, I haven't written about this or anything like that, so I'd have to really give it some thought if I were to write about it. But, yeah, I've kind of come around the idea that, I don't know, I don't want to be like a doomer or something like that, but it just seems so impossible to deal with because the amount of money involved, the incentives involved legalizing it doesn't seem to work. But neither does, you know, neither does enormous, like the military industrial complex coming down on this. Like, I don't know, maybe you have, you know, Jeff or Matthew, maybe you have better, you know, understanding of solutions than I do. But my instinct is that, you know, I don't want to smell marijuana on the streets and watch people shovel mushrooms. Just a mess. Like maybe we could legalize, but also say, hey, this is bad. This is a bad thing for you, you know, and, and not be weird Mary White House moralizers for doing so.
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Yeah, I don't know. I think, I mean, there are a few things that are interesting about this. 1. It seems to signal certain things about Trump and his sort of coalitional politics. I would say it's connected to the backing he received from people like Joe Rogan, a noted stoner and promoter of both, of both weed and psychedelics and, you know, particularly this kind of young men demographic, the sort of podcast bro demographic, which is also the, the sports gambling demographic. So it really is this demographic that's connected to various kinds of vice that have been legalized in recent years. And so I do think that that is, is an interesting element of, of this where I think he's, you know, he's in, in some ways doing something that's statistically pretty popular. I think overall it's become a pretty popular policy, even if there maybe is a bit, bit of backlash here and there and specifically is a way of maybe shoring up some of his youth support, some of his young male support, and then it's also a money thing. I'm not sure if this is still the case, but a few years ago I was reading about how former House Speaker John Boehner, himself a noted bon vivant, though mostly known for his penchant for cigarettes and red wine as far as I recall. And he, I believe was the son of a bar owner, so, you know, kind of into the pleasures of life. But the point is he, after his congressional career, became a major lobbyist for the cannabis industry. So there is a kind of way that, you know, just the lobbying elements of this has, has worked its way into the Republican Party behind the scenes. And you have a number of key figures within the Republican Party who have become big enthusiasts of this simply because it is a new area and growing area of big business. You know, big weed is an area of big business. So that's, that's an interesting, I'd say kind of coalitional and, and sort of behind the scenes aspect of this. You know, the other thing that I, and, and related to that that I think is kind of interesting is, you know, when the legalization first went through in California, I happened to have a friend who was from Mendocino county and actually whose family were cannabis farmers, which, you know, Mendocino, if people don't know is, is one of the epicenters of, of the, of, of marijuana farming in, in the US Mendocino and Humboldt counties in northern, far Northern California. And basically he said his whole community of people he grew up around who were part of this illegal industry and in fact his own father had served time in prison for this. But nonetheless, all these people were, in his community were against the legalization. And the simple reason they were against it is that they knew it would immediately lead to a giant, a consolidation of these giant sort of agribusiness conglomerates and that small family farms of the sort that they had been, many of them running for generations, obviously with difficulties of, you know, attendant to criminalization, had, had nonetheless knew that their whole livelihood was, was basically going to be shot because they wouldn't be able to compete in this new environment. And that indeed, as far as I understand has been the case. And then the final thing that, that's interesting to me sort of anecdotally is that it does seem obvious. You know, I, I was a somewhat regular weed smoker in high school, so obviously the stuff was around, it was pretty easy to get and I do sort of basically Accept the argument that the whole way that things were run back then was quite, was quite bad because to be honest, it was a mostly pretty, I would say pretty harmless. You know, this is, I'm spouting cliches of the era, but I would say it was, it was mostly a pretty harmless drug, especially compared to alcohol, which I saw have much worse effects on, on friends and peers at the time. But at the time, you know, smoking a joint, I was talking to a doctor about this recently. You know, a joint might have sort of 5 milligrams of THC in it. Whereas today a sort of standard gummy that you get at, you know, a legal dispensary is going to have 10. Sometimes they have considerably more than that as well as it's just harder to, you know, when you're smoking a joint, it just takes time to consume it. And so it's harder to get really, really high. Whereas now with these gummies, you can just pop them like candy. So it's just much easier to. And you know, I think that there have been a number of adverse circumstances, circumstance of adverse effects that have been tracked and, and so on. But, you know, the thing that strikes me is that in the era of legal weed, it does seem that like the, the, the substance itself has just become much more dangerous than it actually was when it was. When it was illegal. But I suppose my own take on this is that, you know, there are, there are plenty of problems with the new paradigm, and there were also problems with the previous one. And so probably the best approach going forward would be something like what's happened with tobacco, which is basically that it's both heavily regulated, heavily taxed and heavily stigmatized. And so it exists, it's not criminalized, but it basically is. Is subject to a great deal of oversight. And unfortunately, or fortunately, the, the only way to do that really is to, you know, change the, the national legal status of the, the substance and make it something you can regulate through the FDA or atf, you know, these federal regulatory agencies. And so that, you know, really is, is probably the, the most positive way forward is just kind of heavy regulation as well as stigmatization, as well as the emergence of kind of, you know, just new kind of social norms regulating it. We've seen a significant change in how tobacco is treated in my lifetime. So, you know, that's, that's probably the most, the most likely scenario rather than a kind of return to the prior paradigm of prohibition. So. But I, but I do think that, you know, the interesting thing here is that the Republican Party has in some ways become the party of vice under Trump. And, you know, the question is where the impetus for this, this sort of this, you know, I suppose both, both stigmatization as well as kind of regulatory effort will come from, because one doesn't really imagine it likely to come from the Democratic Party either. So I'm not really sure at this
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point it will come from blue states. I think Massachusetts right now just had a ballot measure approved to restrict the use of cannabis. I've talked to people who are involved in the organizing efforts around this policy, guys, journalists, and they don't expect it to succeed, but they view it as the beginning of an effort very much like the one that has led to cannabis legalization. Or you could just look at other social movements like gay marriage. So you just kind of put things on the ballot. You. You lose, but you raise awareness. You kind of normalize the idea that, you know, law and culture could move in this direction. But Massachusetts, which is not the reddest state in the union, is where this is beginning. And I think that one reason for that is probably that some blue states have embraced this earlier than red states have done. My own native Nebraska still restricts cannabis, so there are still some red states that have yet to embrace this new, brighter tomorrow that Trump is prepared to bring. But I think the combination of maybe an earlier negative experience from blue states, along with the sense that the Democratic Party is comfortable with certain kinds of social regulation, frankly, and that its voting base contains a lot of upper middle class professionals who, even if they've shifted to the Democratic Party from the gop, which was their previous home, still maintain certain senses of what a healthy society looks like. I think for that reason as well, blue states are going to be where you begin to see some of the early pushback against this, even as maybe some red states take a last stand. So, yeah, I think, though, as I kind of said in my facetious opening, I mean, this move from Trump really strikes at the heart of his claim to greatness as an American president. I think of the 2016 inauguration. This American carnage stops now. Not really. No, no. I mean, the. The cannabis rescheduling began under Joe Biden, and Trump is not prepared to bring it to completion. So, you know, this whole notion that Trump stands against the uniparty that Trump resists American carnage, you know, we are, you know, ending these. These drug deaths that are killing our boys. Cannabis isn't fentanyl. There's a real difference there. But this idea that the government's going to stand against these socially destructive forces. This move makes it a lot harder to sell that story.
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I was going to say, I do think it's worth connecting to the sports gambling, which is another area where and Compact covered this with a piece from Christopher Caldwell three or so years ago and there's been subsequent coverage, but I think that was one of the earliest pieces to kind of pick up on its significance. And, and again, I think it is something where you see the sort of vice lobby and the vice contingent within the Republican coalition having made it very difficult for, or, you know, or being something that really Trump and his, his allies have, have embraced in that context. And, and again, it, it's this kind of young man podcast bro contingent that they want to keep in line. But at the same time, you know, basically say, well, you know, everything's kind of shitty, but you can have your weed and you can have your, you can have your sports gambling apps and, you know, your life will kind of suck, but, you know, you'll, you'll have these various things to make it slightly less unpleasant.
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And if you talk to anyone who runs a small business that employs relies on the labor of working class men, they talk about drugs and drug use so much, it's such a big issue in terms of labor. So the notion that we're going to close the borders, we're going to stop H1BS all this, but meanwhile we're going to turn kind of demoralization, kind of deculturation of the American people, their degradation through kind of extensive and powerful drug use make this into the biggest possible business. I mean, that really runs counter to that idea because it's going to make it harder to find working class labor in America and it's going to absolutely increase pressure for immigration. When I was young and was doing construction work in Nebraska, you know, there was always a kind of implicit hierarchy on the job site. And I was, I worked as an apprentice electrician and we electricians, we knew that we were the best, the very best. A classic electrician joke. What do you need to know to be a plumber? Water runs downhill in paydays on a Friday. Well, plumbers were next on the hierarchy. And then you have kind of carpenters, concrete guys and drywallers. And drywallers had this reputation, reputation of being kind of druggies. I mean, nice, you know, the ones we worked with. Nice guys, good guys. You know, I actually went to school with the son of the kind of main drywall crew we would work with on a lot of jobs. But yeah, they were, you know, kind of looked down on in sociological terms for their indulgence in drugs and other things. That's outmoded. Drywall crews are now Mexican. Where I'm from, there just aren't white drywallers. That's no longer the case. And so there's no coherence in this kind of policy that's emerging of, oh yeah, we're not going to bring in any labor, but we're just going to flood America with drugs. Like that's, look, it's not going to work. People need drywall in their homes. Somebody's got to put up the drywall. Maybe you don't like drywall, maybe you think it's not, not as nice as plaster or whatever, but somebody's going to put it up. So that's, that's just another issue here that, that I want to hit on to kind of highlight just how insane this is in terms of the kind of Trump movements claims to being a positive force and an important force in American life. America's not the only country in the world. Obviously God didn't put us at the center of the universe, at least not for all time and in all ways. So Jeff, what's been happening in Chile?
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So Chile has just elected probably it's, it's safe to say it's most right wing president since the end of the Pinochet dictatorship in 1990. And that is Jose Antonio Cast, who is a brother of one of the so called Chicago boys, one of the young economists trained by University of Chicago luminaries like Milton Friedman who oversaw the economy under the Pinochet regime. And Jose Antonio Cast's brother Miguel was the president of the central bank under, under Pinochet. So he has that kind of, that kind of background. He's also a Catholic and socially conservative while being, you know, a sort of hardcore free markets neoliberal type who defends the legacy of the Pinochet economic reforms.
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And so a true poster basically.
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So he, so, you know, I think, I mean there are a few things that, you know, people are comparing him to Milei. It is worth noting, you know, while he, he was known as something of a firebrand, particularly compared to the somewhat, you know, there was a long period in which the Chilean right had to, or, you know, I'd say kind of policed itself to ensure that its, its main representatives didn't say too many nice things about the dictatorship and made clear they had criticisms of its human rights abuses and, and things like that. And so similar to what happened with Bolsonaro in, in Brazil, you suddenly had a leader who was willing to kind of break that taboo or a candidate who's willing to break that taboo and say no. You know, we needed those, we needed those tough military guys in charge to crush communism and, you know, bring prosperity to the nation. And so, you know, that, that, that was a significant paradigm shift. Although I think Cast, as far as I can tell, is, you know, in keeping with Chilean politics, which tends to be very kind of demure and polite, you know, doesn't quite have the personality of a, of a Bolsonaro or a mile. He's, you know, much more, you know, much more polite and concerned about norms. And in fact, he fended off a rival from further to the right named Johannes Kaiser, which, you know, it's funny that all these Chilean right wingers are Germans. Sort of, sort of awkward. Cast's father was in fact, you know, did in fact serve in the Wehrmacht and you know, later migrated to Chile. So, you know, sort of awkwardly, you know, there is a kind of connection there. Just as, you know, under Pinochet there were kind of these bizarre escaped Nazis who got up to no good. You can read about some of this in the, the work of Roberto Bolano. But in any case, you know, it's, it's a, so it represents something of a paradigm shift similarly to Milei or Bolsonaro. But it does seem to be much more, you know, much more polite and in keeping with the studied, you know, moderation that tends to characterize Chilean politics. Also true of Gabriel Boric, who, you know, is the president for the past four years, who despite being a sort of student, you know, left wing, radical firebrand, I think was, was ultimately kind of domesticated into this, this, this very polite and institutionalist type of politics that tends to characterize Chile, which other than the, the, than the coup in 73 and one other major disruption in, in 1893, has had, you know, basically a sort of peaceful democratic transfer of power that characterized its, its post independence history, unusually for, for South America. And so I think the thing that's interesting about this is that the beginning of this trajectory was really that Pinochet obviously imposed these radical free market reforms, but by most accounts, including of people who are relatively sympathetic to that approach, the sort of Chilean model, as it's called, was really perfected under the center left democratic governments that succeeded Pinochet. That you had a series of kind of, you know, essentially third way, you know, sort of social democratic with neoliberal tendencies, governments that, you know, largely held power through the 90s and into the 2000s. And we're able to oversee extremely impressive growth and just economic numbers that everybody in the world seemed to envy and regard as one of the greatest success stories of the sort of end of history, peak neoliberal era. And yet all of that came crashing down in the 2010s because you had a series of protest movements culminating in 2019. And at that point you had really millions of people out in the streets of Santiago, a city that is roughly the population of New York, a little bit smaller. So something equivalent to a quarter of the city's population was taking to the streets. So this was truly an astonishing level of unrest. And it did force something that, interestingly, people on the, the American left often like to call for, which is a, a rewrite of the constitution, which was seen as a sort of referendum on the model that was imposed, because the constitution dated back to 1980, and so it was imposed under the dictatorship. And one of the conditions of the return to democracy was essentially keeping the constitution, which partly meant keeping the economic structure that was created back then intact. And, you know, so basically you had really, you know, what were initially protests about cost of living and also about various of these key neoliberal initiatives, such as privatized pensions, which people may recall George W. Bush, in his ill fated attempt to privatize Social Security, you know, cited the Chilean pension system as a, as a model for this. And in fact, it turned out quite poorly. And people were dissatisfied with it. That was one thing. Another was a kind of, you know, a sort of Milton Friedmanite voucher based education system. And so there are various things that people really rejected and were unhappy about. But, you know, it is worth kind of reading more deeply into what was going on then. And I recommend this book which I reviewed for American Affairs a couple years ago called the Chile Project by Sebastian Edwards, because it kind of goes into this question of, you know, to what extent is this, this sort of malaise or discontent that started emerging in chile in the 2010s, you know, understandable in purely material or economic terms? And to what extent does it have to do with a rejection of the kind of society that had been created in Chile and a kind of discontent with, you know, more, more sort of immaterial, you know, perhaps spiritual or perhaps kind of, you know, social factors that, you know, that are hard to quantify because if you look at the numbers, you know, okay, Chile was, was, you know, it wasn't booming in the way that it had in the 90s and 2000s, but it certainly was, was doing better than many of its peers even, even when at the point at which this series of protests burst out. And so anyway, all that is kind of interesting. And then the, the amazing thing now is that you have the election by a very large margin of a candidate who basically is, is promising a restoration of the very, of the very approach that seemed to have been rejected in the late 2000 and tens. And so you really have the whole, the whole cycle completing itself with this bizarre sort of reaffirmation of the very thing that was originally rejected. So you know, people should read Juan Rojas's piece which is largely focused on, you know, what went wrong with the left wing government, which was really supposed to bring about a model, an alternative new model to replace the one dating back to the dictatorship to make a more radical break with the Pinochet economic regime and why it failed. So people can read that. And then for a more in depth account, which goes back a couple years, but the kind of background history is all still relevant, people can read my what's the Matter with Chile? Which I published in American affairs in 2023.
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The Chile case is interesting and important because it was really Borscht's government was really looked to by progressives in the US and elsewhere as a very important kind of test case and model. Jeff, you mentioned people who hoped to rewrite the U.S. constitution, who still hope to do that. You have Asita Nuanevu, a, you know, millennial writer who has a book out about our need to kind of rewrite the constitution because we don't properly have a democracy now and we need to bring one about by rewriting it on socialist lines. And yeah, you know, Boris was, was the model for that. There was a lot of progressive attention on the country. There was a lot of kind of progressive money poured into the country to enable that and it just totally failed. And I think that's something that progressives who hope to have similar change here in the US should probably consider and think on. Also, just because there was a lot of progressive money put into the country without an actually successful change in the constitution coming about. It's also, I think, a reminder that to people who talk about color revolutions or globalist manipulation of national polities, there are real limits to that. You can spend a lot of money on something and that doesn't mean it's going to come about because, you know, voters will have gut check moments. So yeah, I think, you know, Chile is one, is one place where the kind of 2010s era kind of, or early 2000s era progressive dream went to die.
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C
One other thing that's kind of worth noting here is that the narrative about it on the international left was so much that, you know, really the Pinochet project was this kind of impose, you know, I mean, you were bringing up the COLA revolution idea, this sort of right wing narrative of, you know, international progressive donors kind of pushing their agendas through these astroturfed, you know, uprisings and so on, you know, and the Chilean uprest unrest of the 2010s was very clearly not that. Um, although it did eventually attract, you know, donations from, and support from abroad. But you know, similarly, I would say, I think there's a flaw in the narrative around Chile being. Well, you know, we had this democratic socialist project and then, you know, the evil US imperialists came in and crushed it. And so if we can just get the boot of American imperialism off our necks, we can have democratic socialism again. You know, that was just never right because the Allende project was very internally contradictory. It produced a lot of, a lot of problems within the country, which was very fractured and divided at the time. And so, you know, the, the, it's, it's not that there aren't foreign entities, you know, attempting to exert influence here. It's not that the US wasn't involved in, in supporting the coup, but you know, fundamentally the impetus for, for the coup had to do with the failure of the, the Allende project and the, the sort of chaos that it brought about and the contradictions that it, that it couldn't resolve. And I'd say similarly, you know, we're, we're back in that, in that situation that, you know, the, the sort of, the left once again proved kind of unable to, to resolve the contradictions that it, it sort of unleashed and, and you know, attempted to capitalize off of unsuccessfully. And you know, that this whole talk of like, well, it's, it's just like the foreign imperialists versus the, the, the authentic Chilean people who want socialism is just so silly and, and so, so unhelpful.
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Yeah. For so long there's been this attempt to kind of project onto South America, you know, well, we can't have socialism here because our workers are all total dupes and you know, brainwashed by capitalism. But over there, you know, these people, that's, that's where it's really at. And then they go and vote wrong also. Which is just a wonderful lesson that, you know, if you, you can't. People don't revolt because they have, like, a moral problem with capitalism. You know, they will revolt against any government if their lives are not getting easier, if their lives are getting more difficult. That's just a reality. And for too long, the leftist thought that you could just sort of moralize politics and sort of, you know, stand in front of the powers that be and tell them this is wrong and all would be well. That's not the case. And so any kind of government's going to get a whipping if you can't make people's lives materially better. And that seems to be the basic lesson.
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B
We don't just cover the news, we make it right. That's our new tagline with Jacob Savage's essay, the Lost Generation. Fair to say it's been a Sensation. More than 10 million views on Twitter. You know, one of our tweets promoting it, the chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, you know, drew attention to the issues raised in the essay, as did the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the Department of Justice, Elon Musk. That sage also weighed in. Yeah, quite a response to the piece. Jeff, let me center your voice here. You're one of our resident white male millennials. What have you made of the response?
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C
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. Obviously, it wasn't entirely unexpected because Jacob's previous piece for us, the vanishing white male writer, was also a bombshell. And so, you know, it's clearly tapping into something, and not just the topic, but the particular way that he approaches it, I think not as somebody who's particularly, you know, certainly not as a kind of conservative ideologue or a kind of crusader against affirmative action or something like that. You know, he clearly comes at it fundamentally out of his own experience, and it has a sort of authenticity that's, I think, grounded in his own trying to kind of make sense of his own experience and that of other peers. And so, you know, I think that's why it's sort of able to speak more broadly in a way that something that's more kind of polemical and politically, you know, targeted at, you know, pushing a particular line might not. I do think, you know, I would say, just speaking for myself as somebody who, you know, is sort of part of the cohort that he describes, you know, clearly it. There are ways that it's. It's unpleasant and uncomfortable to kind of think about oneself in these terms. And yet, you know, at the same time, throughout the 2010s, you were kind of told that you had to. And so there was kind of that Weird. That weird disjunction where you were kind of repeatedly told, no, you are this thing. And, you know, the dominant tenor of the public discourse became, you know, this is like the bad group of people who we can safely sort of crap on and say bad things about as a group. And so obviously, you know, I sort of recognize that. And it's, it's helpful to, you know, have somebody, have somebody, you know, kind of lay it out empirically, but also narratively. You know, it certainly made, to be honest, you know, kind of living through the 2000 and tens. It wasn't necessarily a way that I, you know, chose to, or wanted to kind of narrate my own experience. But in retrospect, it certainly, you know, has some, some illuminating aspects. And you know, I think for me it's, it's also interesting because my, my father is a retired professor. You know, he came from, you know, a sort of middle class background, but not, you know, I think he came from a background of like, whatever. His, his father was a doctor, his family went to state schools and so not particularly prestigious, but, you know, very solidly middle class. And you know, then he sort of managed to get into the Ivy League and then, you know, had a very sort of charmed career as a, you know, boomer, tenured white male professor. And so obviously, you know, for much of my, my own, you know, less successful path through academia, I was sort of comparing myself to, to him and thinking about what, you know, what was available to him, you know, compared to, compared to me. And obviously, like, it's, you know, I'd say the sort of figures who get the most criticism in Jacob's piece are figures who occupied those sort of white male boomers and Gen Xers who kind of occupied those positions. And I will say, I think it's probably fair to say without being too harsh on my dad, that he probably was kind of of that description of somebody who I think would have largely gone along with various kinds of diversity and diversification initiatives and thought that that was important and morally valuable. And, you know, but it's interesting to me because he also kind of knew my own path. And I think on some level he just somehow wouldn't have seen the connection or somehow wouldn't have. I don't know, I'll have to ask him. But, you know, he, he somehow wouldn't have seen the connection, you know, between the fact that there were just obviously less opportunities, part of them just having to do with the contraction of faculty hiring overall. But obviously within that contraction, there are certain, there are certain groups who are going to be more favored than others. So yeah, so it was interesting that the generational frame in part because it was quite sort of personally significant to me thinking about it. And then a final thing I'll say is that I hadn't thought about this that much, but my longest employment in academia was a full time and non tenure track position at nyu. So relatively elite and wealthy university. And I guess the interesting thing about that was that, I mean, it was quite a large department. It was, you know, if you talk to other to like tenured faculty about us, about our sort of category of faculty, what they would usually say was, or if you said like, oh, I teach in this program, this department, what they would say is, oh, so you're really on the front lines. And what they meant was, you know, essentially we were doing the bulk of undergraduate teaching, particularly of, of first year students of freshmen and sophomores. And part of their sort of tenured status meant they didn't really have to do that much of that sort of teaching. And so we were on the front lines. So it was a relatively low prestige and heavy teaching load kind of position. And it ended up being essentially a kind of second best option for people who didn't get tenure track positions because it did, it was full time, it did have benefits, it did have a certain amount of job security despite not being tenured. But the interesting thing about that was that within that department there was a kind of, you know, there was an imperative to diversify to recruit or diverse faculty. But it was particularly difficult to fulfill because, you know, essentially, you know, quote unquote, diverse faculty who were, who would qualify for that position were actually in a much better position to get a more prestigious job. So in other words, there was kind of a great deal of hand wringing about not being a diverse faculty. But it was also particularly hard for us to recruit sort of non white faculty essentially because they were in a better position to be recruited for more prestigious positions. So it was kind of a bizarre kind of middle space to be in because you were kind of not at the top of the pecking order. And in some ways that meant that you were actually, that the department was less diverse because the people who are kind of not able to make it through to the really desirable jobs were more likely to end up in that, in that position, if you see what I mean. So that was kind of a significant part of how I spent much of the 2010s that I hadn't quite thought about in those terms. But this essay clearly kind of laid it out in a way that made a lot of sense of it for me.
- [47:11]
A
I was really curious to hear your experience because I know you're both millennial men, so. So. But I will say that I had, like, the complete opposite. Obviously, I would have a complete opposite experience because I'm the people that they're. This article is kind of suggesting benefited from this stuff. So I was absolutely a hundred percent certain when I finished my PhD that it was going to be impossible to get a job. Like, I was certain of it. And I had a book contract with a good publisher, and I had done really well. You know, my thesis was really successful. I had publications and stuff, so I was in a good position, but I was 100% certain I was not going to get a job. And I had three job interviews and I got all three jobs. And now I'm kind of soul searching, was I as good as I thought I was? Perhaps. Perhaps I ticked all the boxes. Although, to be fair, like, the one diversity box that I could take in the UK probably doesn't mean anything to them. But, yeah, I mean, I don't know. I had such mixed feelings reading this. I have incredible. It's, you know, awful. And everybody knew that this was going on, but to see it all laid out in such detail and backed up with evidence was just utterly shocking. The way that meritocracy was just sort of thrown out the window. However, while I was reading, you did get the sense, like, I, as a mediocre man, simply expected to coast through life. And I was shocked when this was not the case. And he kind of says, even the successful white men I spoke to understood that something had fundamentally changed. They expressed gratitude and relief, a recognition that success was contingent, easily disrupted by circumstances beyond their control. There was so much fragility to things going well in the first place. One tenured professor told me that it's natural to think a slight perturbation would have meant things went worse. And I was just thinking, this is literally the first time in my life I realized not everybody feels this way. Like this. This guy said this like it was worthy of note, that I have success and I fear it might be taken away from me at any time. I literally thought everybody felt like that. Surely, like, the fact that he actually thought that that was worth saying was stunning to me. There are people in the world who are successful and just like, yes, this is where I'm meant to be. My life has unfolded exactly as I thought it would be. I find that really Shocking. I think this is a whole world I didn't know existed. Yeah. So the thing is, okay, I've said that and I know, I know I've painted a big fat target on my back. But, yeah, so there were points where I was a little shocked at how much he just kind of thought that things were going to go well for him. But we shouldn't be fighting over the crumbs that fall from the rich man's table. And there's this feeling of sh. Schadenfreude where you see some of the responses to this. You know, the overwhelming response has been positive. Like, oh, finally someone has said what I've been thinking. But there are people who are like, oh, no, wah, wah, White man, white man tears. What? Now you're feeling the pain we've all felt for all this time. You know, we shouldn't be, like, squabbling with each other over the crumbs. As I was saying, the crumbs that fall from the rich man's table. And like, we've all just accepted this situation that you're going to be educated and talented and have a lot to give to the world. But no, no, no, the pie is shrinking. The pie is shrinking. Everybody just kill each other for the scraps. That's what we're doing. And I've seen it now online. There's all these, like, witch hunts now starting up. Oh, did you get your job from a d. Are you a dai hire? You know, before this article, this kind of thing is starting to go on and like, can we not see the bigger picture here? The situation in academia is awful. It's really bad. It's. And it's worth noting how bad it is. You. You're producing all these people with PhDs and we can talk about the quality of the PhDs or whatever, but there aren't. There's no space for them. Suddenly you're hiring all of these, you know, adjuncts and so on, giving people like tons and a humongous teaching load and just offloading onto them for poor pay people living in their cars and this sort of thing. This is a terrible situation. And yet we're meant to point fingers at each other. You got the job. There's like two jobs and we're meant to kill each other for them. I feel like that's crazy. That's some Hunger Games stuff. Like, we need to have a conversation about this weird, horrible situation we're in, which is that we have, like, you know, we have education systems and we have education systems that people A hundred years ago couldn't have dreamed of. You know, we're producing people that, that know things that you, you know, the average person a thousand years ago, what was it they knew? As much as could be contained on a newspaper page. And now, you know, the average person has, like, the sum total of human knowledge at their fingertips. And we're like, oh, this is horrible. We're creating this horrible, insecure situation for very qualified, intelligent people. I mean, I think the scandal is deeper than a lost generation of millennial men. It's a. It's a scandal of wasted talent, of humanity, just generally. And this is going to come back to haunt us because think what we could be doing instead of, instead of this crap, you know, instead of like, what. What are he talks about, like, people doing these menial jobs when they were talented, and they're just like, they're constantly doing this crappy, like, day job, hoping that they'll get to do the thing that expresses their creativity. What a loss. What a loss. Like, what. What are we. What are we even doing here? I hope we have a. I mean, I know it's not going to happen. I know what's going to happen next. We're all going to start pointing fingers at everybody as a DEI hire and all that sort of thing. But I wish it was the beginning of a bigger conversation about where the heck we're going, because what a waste. It's sad.
- [52:56]
B
So really, Savage, I think, wrote a great essay. And what makes it truly an essay and not just a polemic or legal brief is the way that it makes the reader think of his own experiences. For both of you, you kind of think, okay, so, you know, what happened there? What was going on at the time or. And what's going on now? How should we. How should we. How should. It's not just how should we respond as a society, but what do I think about this? How do I feel about it? And your Savage really writes the kind of thing that you would maybe expect to read in a, I don't know, established prestige sort of, maybe kind of heterodox ish outlet or, you know, but, but, but a, but a main. But a mainstream legacy paper, but, you know, really couldn't have appeared in any of the legacy prestige magazines or journals because they're all so implicated in this process that it would effectively be an essay saying, department of justice, please sue us. You know, open. Kind of open a civil rights investigation into what we've been doing and posting PDFs about. And I think, you know, Savage One thing that's great about his essay and what he's doing is that he is speaking to that world, basically to liberal America. And he's asking it kind of, how do you guys feel about this? How do you, Is this what you wanted? And in that way, it really expresses a maybe Savage isn't sure about. I think Savage isn't sure that his argument will be heard. He's not sure at all. But there is this hope that we can have debate across ideological lines. Not everything is enmity or just group interest. And I think it's good to have that kind of democratic faith which Savage displays. That's what we need to sustain this project, obviously tempered by realism and also just his sense that these big institutions do matter. A lot of Compact is itself a startup publication or an upstart publication recently founded with fewer resources. And we're able to do things like publish Savage's essay only with the help of our loyal subscribers and generous supporters. Thank you, and please become one if you aren't. But these big organizations really matter. Conde Nast, the New York Times, and no one is really building anything to replace them. Maybe the person who has come closest to that and has shown the most ambition is Barry Weiss with the Free Press. So I think Savage is right to say these institutions really matter. The University of Austin is not displacing Harvard anytime soon. So improving this country has to involve, yes, challenging these institutions, engaging in various forms of social confrontation, but also laying out arguments and allowing people to see certain realities and hoping to persuade others. Boy, I feel very kind of happy, clappy and soft. I'm talking about the importance of civic persuasion and maybe we can all get along. But I think Savage's essay is a great model of the belief that arguments, words, things that are written with kind of both intelligence and feeling can help to move people. And that's at the core of the best understanding of our political project, I think. So on that Sunday morning radio hour Note. Thank you, Ashley. Thanks, Jeff. Thanks to our producer Steven Adubato, another white millennial male. We want to hold up here and thank you. Thanks to you listeners. For more, go to compactmag.com subscribe.
- [58:14]
C
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