Loading summary
Transcript58 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome back to Firewall. I'm your host, Bradley Tusk. My guest today is a legend in American journalism. Joe Klein has worked at every major outlet that you've heard of. The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone. Famous for writing Primary Colors, but has also written a biography, Woody Guthrie. And we're just very lucky that he said yes when we asked him to join us. And so, Joe, thanks so much for. For being with us today.
- [00:37]
B
Good to be here.
- [00:38]
A
And you're down in. In Key West? You live there full time now?
- [00:42]
B
No, no, we're just here for a couple of months in the winter every year we. We rent a place here.
- [00:48]
A
That's smart. There's no reason to be anywhere cold in winter if you don't have to. So, you know, given that you have sort of seen so much change in your own industry over the past, you know, 40, 50 years, I have two questions. One or a question and a thesis. So the question would be, if you went back, however many, into the 80s, whatever it was, and you saw the media landscape today, with a lot of mainstream media being much weaker than it was, but also a lot of new forms of media existing, would you automatically say things are worse than they used to be? And then two, I would. The thesis is that if you look at the big institutions that have lost trust by the American people since probably the Vietnam War, so government higher ed, Wall street, the church, media, I would argue the media has actually done the best job kind of adapting to a changing world because it had to, because of market forces. And whether you like the new form of media or not, it has been much more nimble as an industry, even though it seemed the opposite than the others that I just mentioned. So take that any order you want. And it was a lot. So I can, I can repeat.
- [02:02]
B
Well, you know, as for the structure of the media, that was inevitable. If we're living in the golden age of anything right now, it's the golden age of marketing. When I was a kid, we had three flavors of ice cream, vanilla, chocolate and strawberry. And we had three TV networks, but an awful lot of newspapers. And over time, you know, the technology enabled us to develop, you know, a thousand TV stations and now the Internet and places like Substack, where I now reside. By the way, my substack is called Sanity Clause, after the. The Marx Brothers famous line, there ain't no sanity clause. The biggest difference in the business, I hesitate to call it a profession, is that is the basic rule of journalism changed as things became far more competitive. When you have more than three TV networks, when you have a whole bunch of news networks, when you have a whole bunch of websites, you have to do something to bring in the customers. And that thing has been controversy. So the biggest change from when I started at the turn of the 1970s, the Stone Age, is that the default position for journalists in those days was skepticism. My favorite question to ask as a journalist was, oh, really? Then they would have to say something and they would never be prepared for that. Or another, another good one was, no kidding? And then they would have to say something. But the change has been this. We've moved from skepticism to cynicism as the default position. And I think that that has done great harm to the Republic. It has splashed over into the political sphere, which is now a very, very, very cynical place, and into the public. I mean, you know, the reason why Donald Trump gets away with being the most corrupt president in American history is that people just say, aren't they all like that? And the answer, by the way, is no, they're not all like that. None of them should be.
- [04:38]
C
And do you think as the media has adapted in that way, the game of politics has sort of fundamentally changed along with it, or is it the same thing, just with a different sort of gloss on it?
- [04:51]
B
Oh, no, the game of politics has changed quite a bit because of the technology. I mean, you know, since this is the golden age of marketing, when I started, there were political consultants, but that industry was in its infancy at that point. It really, you know, began to take hold in the decade before I started working in the 60s. But now everything is market tested, everything is focus grouped, everything is polled to a fault. And I think that what's happened in politics over the last 10 years is, you know, in war fighting, pilots talk about having an OODA loop, which is to observe a situation, understand a situation, decide what to do and then attack. And the reason why I bring that up is that Donald Trump broke into the establishment politics OODA loop. He completely figured out how to destroy the market tested language that had grown up over the 40, 50 years before. And that's the secret of his success. And the Democrats haven't quite figured out how to deal with that or how to speak in a language that's appropriate to the 21st century. They're still doing 20th century market tested language. And I think that that is where we are right now, with Donald Trump knowing how to do it, other people trying to do Donald Trump but failing, and Democrats not knowing what to do at all.
- [06:33]
C
Well, what explains that why do Democrats. I mean, they've experienced the same thing we've all experienced. They probably at least intellectually understand what you're describing. What's stopping them from matching Donald Trump's skill at this?
- [06:48]
B
Well, they're scared. The problem is that Democrats made a. Made a frightfully stupid decision, an understandable one, but. But a stupid one in the early 70s, which was to emphasize group identity rather than individuals. And if. If you have to have a candidate who doesn't offend all of these various interest groups, I think if you go to the Democratic Party website, last I checked, there were like 17 different identities that you could sign up for, except
- [07:25]
A
ironically, at least in their 24 platform, the one they excluded were men, which is 50% of the electorate.
- [07:32]
B
Right. But, you know, the first. The first big issue I covered was busing in Boston, and I was on the street. And by the way, this is a good part of why I have a slightly different perspective. I came up through the underground press, and I was working for the Phoenix and then the real paper in Boston back then, ancient history. And I was out in the streets covering busing. And I went into that issue as a classic liberal. And I spent two years interviewing parents, and I couldn't find a single black parent who was in favor of busing. And so I realized that we weren't reading the black community the way it wanted to be read back then. I spent a lot of the rest of my life living in mixed neighborhoods. And I realized fairly early on that the notion of dividing people by identity was kind of un American. All people are created equal. And I think that starting in the early 70s, starting with the hard hat construction worker riots in New York, I think in 1970 or so, the white working class read this, understood this, understood where liberals were, where the left was, and rejected it. And I always thought that you had to reject identity politics. You could give special opportunities to the poor, but not according to race.
- [09:11]
C
So you're talking about things that happened in the early 70s where both the black voters and families did not support a policy that was intended to help them. And it outraged this sizable constituency which understood, as you say, very much what was happening. So why does it. And you had writers like you pointing this out. What is the force that. That. That keeps that moving in the way that it did, as opposed to a sort of larger questioning and a seeking of alternatives.
- [09:44]
B
Well, convenience and ignorance and cowardice, I think, are the three I lucked into. Right after that story, I lucked into a really wonderful mentor, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. And in 1965 he had written a report about the black family, you know, which said that the rate of single parent families was increasing dramatically in the black community. And along with that. So as crime, drugs, school dropouts, you name it, any, you know, any number of social pathologies, Moynihan was criticized for, for being a racist. And that's been the safest default position in the party. If question lack anything, you are, you're called a racist. And then, you know, that was irksome. It bothered me when I was called a racist and still am called a racist. But, you know, my interests are the bottom line. I mean, you know, I want to see poor kids educated. So I've stood against the teachers unions who have been against, you know, any kind of education reform. I want to see people treated equally. And I have to say that the black neighbors that I have, we've been living in an upper middle class, integrated neighborhood. Black neighbors that I've had really, really are very sensitive to and angry about the kind of condescension that comes from white liberals. The assumption that all black people think the same, all black people want to do this or that. One of my favorite polling statistics is that 73% of black people think that crime is a major problem. 27% of white liberals think crime is a major problem. So it has been very frustrating because I remember I interviewed Hillary Clinton in 1993, her first interview as first lady. And I asked her, are two parents better than one? And she said, well, they're an awful lot of really wonderful single parent families, as. Which is obviously the truth. But yeah, the sociology shows that two parents are better than one. You cannot find a Democrat today who would be willing to say that.
- [12:21]
A
So Joe, what do you do in the or how do you then sort of assess. And I think this is kind of what you're getting towards the, the progressive movement today, the dsa, all of that, which I think both says very proudly and I believe they think this, that their goal in life is to help those who have less. Right. But then when you look at a lot of the policies, because like you said, the people who tend to be the most sort of loudly progressive and left wing tend to be affluent, ish, young, white and often Indian and Asian people, but very rarely black and Latino. That a lot of the policies, and I think Mondami is going to have to really confront this, that the far left cares about are not things that people who are live in the poorest communities actually want or need. So like you were getting towards the point of defund the police, where you don't hear people who live in high crime neighborhoods ever say defund the police. They want to be treated respectfully, like everybody does and everybody should be. But the people who want to abolish law enforcement and incarceration and everything else tend to be people who live in, say, grew up in safe neighborhoods and live in safe neighborhoods to begin with, or even more immediately here in New York, Mandani is, you know, fighting as hard as he can to get Albany to raise taxes on the 1%. And I would argue that the point of, of that sort of obsession by the far left is not because they desperately have specific public policy needs that poor people have that they want the money to go to. I mean, they always have a cause for it because they know they need to. But the act of raising taxes on the wealthy is the ends, not the means. It's meant to be punitive because the people who tend to hate the 1% the most are the people not in the 80th percent, but the people in the second decile in the 10th to 20th percent because they're pissed off they're not in the 1%. And then when you look at the actual absolute amount of money available in city and state budgets who do raise taxes in that way, they tend to always end up with less money overall to spend on public housing, on Medicaid, on food stamps and things like that. Because at least when you have a tax that is only applicable to one city or one state, a lot of high income earners leave and you end up with less money. So in 2012, New York City had 12.7% of America's millionaires. Today it's 8.7%. That 4% drop represents $13 billion in tax revenue that the city and state would have had. That all could have been used for things to help poor people that now just doesn't exist, even if it made the people in the 14th percent feel better about themselves. And so how do you sort of reconcile the fact that what the far left says and what and then what they actually advocate for aren't the same thing?
- [15:13]
B
Well, the far left is in, is incoherent. And I developed a term them back in the 90s, reactionary progressives. And their, their most basic default problem is they subs is that they subscribe to a 19th century Economic theory that has proven to be wrong, which is socialism. And their basic assumption, as you were saying quite rightly, is that people hate the rich. Maybe some Places. They do, but not in this country. People love the rich. They want to be rich. They watch T shows about the rich and famous and. And try to emulate the. Their behavior. And that is a political reality that the Democratic Party just hasn't come to terms with. Now, I'm entirely in favor of taxing the rich, but not that way. What we've had in this country over the last, over my adult life, is a major shift from making things to trading things. We moved from industry to financialization. And I think there's an awful lot of casino gaming going on on Wall street at the expense of, you know, developing industries, developing new products. And what I would do is I would tax stock transactions very. You know, it's called a Tobin Tax, and it would be, you know, 1/10 of 1% on every major derivative transaction, for example. And in that way, you would discourage something that has been hurting our society, and you'd raise some money.
- [17:00]
A
Yeah, but this would be done nationally.
- [17:03]
B
Oh, absolutely.
- [17:05]
A
People don't. People typically don't leave the country to avoid taxes, but they easily.
- [17:09]
C
Some people are thinking about it, though.
- [17:10]
A
Yeah, but they will move cities and states. Right, right.
- [17:13]
B
But, you know, the interesting thing to me is that on issue after issue, the Democratic Party, which professes to be all about egalitarianism. Well, I'm just thinking they move from egalitarianism to equitarianism. They move from equality to equity, which was equality of results, which was never going to work in this country or anyplace else, for that matter. But the Democratic Party, on issue after issue, allows identity politics to trump. Now there is a word to trump. The interests, the actual interests of the poor and the middle class.
- [17:58]
C
So would you consider Zoran Mamdani a reactionary progressive?
- [18:03]
B
Oh, absolutely. I mean, you know, a lot of the things that he said he's in favor of have been tried in New York before and failed. Rent control is, you know, is a failure. It's. It's really truncated the housing market. The idea of free grocery stores, he doesn't understand. When I was a kid, all of those corner stores were Italian. Then they moved to being Hispanic because the children, the Italians went to college and became doctors, lawyers, business people and so on. It's part of the natural growth process of New York City. Something wonderful, by the way, that I grew up in. And he's trying to avoid it by setting up public grocery stores. And also, don't get me started about education, eliminating gifted intolerant programs, choking. In New York City, we have one of the greatest Successes in K through 12 education of any place in the country. It's called the Harlem Children's Zone. It's the charter schools up there. But Mamdani is against it because he's in favor of the teachers unit. And I could go on.
- [19:19]
A
New York has not raised the charter cap from the number of schools allowed since 2010.
- [19:23]
B
Yes. And you know, you get, you, you go to a, a group of schools like the Harlem Village Academies, and they are scoring at the same level as, you know, Scarsdale and other ritzy suburbs. Public schools.
- [19:41]
A
Yeah, look, success, which is, I would argue the most successful charter school network in the, in the country is setting up shop where you are now. Not, I don't, Key west, but in Florida. Because there's just no opportunity to help more kids in New York because the politicians won't let it because they're terrified of the teachers unions. What do you think it is that made that kind of cohort of people in that kind of second decile of income and wealth feel like they should be socialists? Is it just that the way that America makes money changed and they somehow weren't able to. To adapt to that? Or is it something else?
- [20:16]
B
I blame my generation. Baby boomers. We had a couple of really great causes to rebel against the war in Vietnam and racial segregation. And if those were being promulgated by a capitalist system, which they were, there was a next step that could be taken. And I believe it was a step too far, which was against capitalism itself. And that happened to my generation. And my generation became the teachers of generation X, Y, Z and whatever they're calling it now. And we indoctrinated people in, in those balloon beliefs.
- [20:59]
A
But what prompted. Because if you look at racial segregation, you can say that, you know, people, societies evolve over time. And that was a basic question of fairness and right and wrong. If you look at the Vietnam War, it was that people of your generation were being drafted into a unfair, unjust war and dying. What motivated this shift away from capitalism? It doesn't seem like it's either obviously morally wrong or threatening to the people who made that shift.
- [21:28]
B
Affluence was part of it a lot. My generation was the first really big college going generation. You take humanities courses and you become an idealist and socialism is an ideal, but it never works. So I mean, we, you know, we fell into the classic affluent intellectual trap, which was to judged by ideals rather than by realities.
- [21:57]
C
But some of it's probably also what you're talking about with the stock trading and the derivatives and These very difficult to understand complex systems that a relatively small number of people make a tremendous amount of money on. I mean, that's the sort of story of the 1980s, right? The wall street explodes with the deregulation. People make incredible amounts of money. They're not building factories in neighborhoods, they're not employing large numbers of people. They're just making a tremendous amount of money for themselves. I mean, an obvious reaction is to be opposed to that, as you are, to some degree. Isn't that part of it? It's not just idealism, it's just a repugnance of this kind of economic sort of reality.
- [22:39]
B
Well, my feeling isn't repugnance. You got to get the repugnance out of the equation. The paradigm is cigarettes. If you don't like something that's going on in society, you tax the hell out of it. And so we tax the hell out of cigarettes and, you know, cigarette smoking drop. And, you know, that's why a lot of people are in favor of higher gasoline taxes, although I think that that has now been passed over by history. I think there are other things, other ways we're going to deal with the environment. But one thing that we really didn't want was the financialization of the entire society, so that people were making bets on derivatives and making gazillions off it, as you just said. And it wasn't repugnance. It was. In my case, it was efficacy. It was this. If there is an easy way to tax the wealthy without the middle class really feeling it, this is the way to do it. The reason why it hasn't been done is because the wealthy have armies of lobbyists. That didn't exist 50 years ago, by the way. That's another big change in American politics. Who can focus on something obscure like a Tobin tax, a tax on stock transactions. And. And so I think that the Democrats have lost touch with practicality. And because they have this repugnance, your word toward rich people, people who, you know, who see the rich as oppressors,
- [24:31]
A
even though, as you said ironically before, the position. The position. Status that people who feel this way may kind of occupy is they're neither, in their mind, the rich, but com. But for all of the people who they think are truly being oppressed, they effectively are rich, right? So they're in this weird category where they don't want to pay any of the cost to help the poor. They don't. They're. They never propose raising taxes on the top 20%. It's only on top 1% or 2%, but at the same time, they're basically, I mean, and in some ways this is indicative of my view of your generation overall, Joe, which is the single worst generation in American history by far, which is all exemplified by complete selfishness at all times. And I would say help me work out, because the theory that I'm kind of trying to form in my head, and I have been for a week or two now, that I think you have a good perspective on, which relates to this, which is, you know, in the 1960s, there is this cultural shift towards individualism, right, as brought on by the baby boomers. And that did lead, I think, to some sort of good societal outcomes in that it, it did help ultimately produce civil rights and more rights for gays and people with disabilities and women, all kinds of things that are very, very good. At the same time, that shift towards individualism, I would argue, was the beginning of the degradation of social norms that are necessary to maintain a functioning society. And, you know, I have the same view as you of, of Trump. And I think in many ways he is the ultimate manifestation of a zero sum mentality where the goal is to simply benefit yourself at all times, regardless of the cost on everyone else. And I think that that generation, the baby boom generation, kind of ushered that in. And, you know, it's funny, even like I was taking my son to the Knicks game the other day, and just as we were getting on the subway to go to the Garden, you know, one person, and it was a middle aged Asian woman who clearly could have afforded the fair, instead ducks under the turnstile. Then we get on the train and someone would listen to music, but rather than using headphones, just blasting it, you know, to everyone. And these are things that I don't think were normal behavior a couple of decades ago. And so you wouldn't want to give back. Right, right. You wouldn't want to give back the gains that have been made in terms of things like rights. But at the same time, they seem to come along with the cost of a basic breakdown of society where basic order or people treating each other with basic decency and respect and not ostracizing each other for having any differences at all, or a society that can compromise and work together or anything else that sort of functions. A productive country seems to be not just on the client, but basically falling apart. Could we have had the gains in rights without all of the other damages that I just mentioned, or were the two somehow linked?
- [27:42]
B
Absolutely, because at the same time, by the way, Democrats cannot Acknowledge the fact that there have been gains in rights, about 50% of black.
- [27:52]
A
That's their only accomplishment.
- [27:55]
B
Yeah, I mean, you know, we've had the greatest gain gains in civil rights, women's rights, gay rights in human history over the last 50 years. And Democrats can't acknowledge that because it would mean that their basic pillar of ideology, which is identity, was no longer meaningful. But I like to look at it this way, and it's something that I have been thinking about for a long time. In fact, I named a character in primary colors after this, Orlando Ozio, the governor of New York. What is Ozio? Machiavelli said that Ozio was the greatest enemy of a republic. What is Ozio? It's Italian for indolence. And what Machiavelli was worried about was, how do you keep a republic coherent when it's not at war? And we've had the greatest experiment in Otzio, in human history over the course of my lifetime. And the thing that is missing, the thing that Machiavelli thought was important, the opposite of Otio is virtue. And that is why I have been in favor of mandatory national service, you know, for the last 40, 50 years, and especially in areas like teaching police and other public forums. And I actually got to see this firsthand. You know, for me, as a child of the 60s, journalism was an opportunity to get the education I never got when I was in college. And so after 9, 11, I figured I had to learn a lot about the military. And I wound up embedding in Iraq and Afghanistan at a very ripe old age. I mean, they used to call me Gramps, but. But what I found was this. And I interviewed an awful. I wrote. I've written two books about veterans. I've interviewed an awful lot of people with post traumatic stress. And, you know, most people think, oh, it's the stuff that they saw and did over there. Yeah, yeah, that's a lot of it. You know, war is far worse than you're shown on television. But there's another factor involved in post traumatic stress. It's loss of community. There was this woman, Natasha Young, who was a gunny sergeant in the Marines, and she mustered out. And she said, I deployed myself to Camp Couch and I was going to stay on Camp Couch. That was going to be my military order specialty, my mos. But she was saved by joining an organization called the Mission Continues, which would give fellowships to returning veterans who worked for NGOs, like Boys and Girls Clubs, Habitat for Humanity, whatever. And it's one thing I've seen constantly in the military is that those folks have a sense of community. They call each other brother and sister. The only two other groups who do that in American society these days are evangelicals and industrial union members, who are the latter of of which becoming rare as hen's teeth these days. But I think that this is a very basic but crucial thing that we've missed and that my generation has neglected, which is responsibilities. You cannot have a democracy without people being responsible. You can't have a democracy without citizenship, without citizens. And that's what we've been trying to do. You know, anything that, you know, that you demand of people. Now it's even gotten to the point where we can't demand that their kids get injections for, you know, for disease. We can't demand anything of anybody. But we have to, we have to demand one very basic thing, which is muscular bonding, becoming part of something larger than yourself. And therefore, I came up with A system in 1990 in New York magazine where you would extend public service across the board. There would be teachers like Teach for America who would spend two years in the schools. I also would have done the same thing with the police. You know, what if in order to get an architecture license or engineering license, you had to spend a couple of years as a building inspector? You know, there's nobody, no, no group of public servants more corrupt than building.
- [32:57]
A
Yeah, we have an actual. We do have a fix here firewall for then I want to throw a broader sort of macro idea at you, which is at least in place of New York City, we, any exterior of buildings just use drones. You don't need guys on scaffolding constantly inspecting for every damage to a piece of brick. And you don't need building inspectors taking bribes. You could do the vast majority of it with technology and remove any. Just like you can use AI to do procurement broadly in government or anywhere and remove the corruption with the risk of the corrupt corruption there. So, Joe, let me throw, you know, in the last sort of 40 minutes, I think we've basically identified three big problems and I want to throw a kind of solution at you of things we talk a lot in this podcast. So one would be a lack of cohesiveness and social norms that encourage and allow us to treat each other with respect and decency, follow the basic rule to make society function well, and have some level of trust and faith in our institutions. The second would be the problem of when we when the economy shifted into services and then when a lot of deregulation made it much more possible to make crazy amounts of money for not producing much of real societal value that led to this, you know, real pushback and backlash against capitalism overall. And you can disagree or agree on what caused it, but we know that there's a real distribution problem in this country in terms of economic inequality. And the third would be we have managed to morph our political system into one where, because of gerrymandering and because primaries determine everything, and because primary turnout is so low, the people who are loud and angry and extreme on either side are the ones who participate in primaries, and therefore they call all of the shots as to what ultimately happened. And those three things combine the have us feeling like the world is worse than it's ever been. That statistically that's not true in any way, but we certainly feel that way, and I don't think many of us are optimistic about the future of the country at this pace. So three things that we talk on this podcast all the time that I think kind of combine. Create a macro solution would be what you said about mandatory service. Completely agree. Although I would add one more element to it, which is that in addition to if you said no one can graduate from high school or college or get a Pell Grant or whatever, you might want to rule, put it without doing something of service, cleaning up trash and parks, volunteering at a senior home, at a. Tutoring a kid, whatever it might be, there's the notion of people, like you said, understanding what the rest of the world is like. There's also, I think, the notion of people understanding that despite what our society teaches you, which is that the only way to be happy is to accumulate as much money and status and wealth and things as possible, that ultimately happiness really tends to come from a sense of purpose and. And meaning and fulfillment, and that comes from doing things that help other people. And that by requiring mandatory service, you. You effectively force people to put themselves in a position where they then realize, oh, when I do this nice thing, I feel better. I should try to focus my time and resources more towards that and less towards kind of what Instagram tells me to do. So that's number one. Number two would be, you know, you talked about the Tobin Tax, and that makes total sense. A broader approach to this, and one that I think might be especially necessary if there's massive jobs displacement through AI would be Universal Basic Income. And just say, forget about, like, taxing the 1% this way or the stock transactions that way. But let's just make sure that everyone has what they need. And if you make under A certain amount of money. You directly get money from other people without having to go through government and the appropriations process and seeing 20, 30 cents of every dollar along the way disappear into patronage and waste and corruption and unions, you know, with jobs we don't need and everything else. And let a dollar of my money help someone directly at a hundred cents on the dollar of someone in need. And then third, mobile voting, meaning that it's not that we have a country that is 50, 50 divided on every single issue. The reality is 80% of us could come up with a reasonable framework and solution to almost any societal problem. Guns. Most of us would say it should neither be easy to walk into a store and walk out with an AK47, nor should we go door to door and confiscate everyone who has a gun legally. Immigration. Most of us would say we want to bring in talented people to fill jobs that are needed and pay taxes and put money back into Social Security and Medicare. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't protect your borders and have national sovereignty. And so the problem isn't that we can't find solutions. It's at the 80% who could agree don't vote in primaries and therefore their views don't count. And if people could vote securely on their phones, you could get primary turnout from 10 to 35, 40. It doesn't even need to be a majority. And that radically shifts the composition of the electorate, moves the underlying political incentives back towards the middle and allows politicians to not be held hostage by the extremes and actually find solutions for different problems, which a solves problems. And balance also gets back to that, you know, disproving the notion that government is completely incompetent and corrupt and shows that things actually can get done. And so to me, you know, a lot of ways the problems that we've outlined on this podcast, the totality of them could be meaningfully fixed with those three. Admittedly very difficult, very big ideas. But how does that strike you as a policy kind of platform overall?
- [38:31]
B
Well, I think that, you know, I think you're on the right track. The first two I definitely agree with. By the way, Pat Moynihan was the guy when he was working for Richard Nixon. I'm sorry, the plane is going overhead right now.
- [38:49]
A
We actually been waiting 40 minutes for this. So you did pretty good.
- [38:52]
C
I hired a couple earlier.
- [38:54]
B
You know, Moynihan believed that a guaranteed income would mean that at least mothers who were irresponsible, even mothers who are irresponsible, would not allow their kids to starve, you know, that it would take care of the most basic problem of poverty. By the way, recent research is showing that Moynihan wasn't correct about that. There's an awful lot of that money that goes. That goes wasted that people spend, especially fathers spend on, you know, gambling or the lottery or whatever. But I do think that a basic income is an important thing.
- [39:37]
A
And by the way, even before Moynihan, MLK was making the case for that.
- [39:42]
B
Yeah, it was around the same time.
- [39:45]
A
Yeah. Yeah, it makes sense. Well, and it makes sense that they would sort of share similar philosophies on things like this too.
- [39:50]
B
You know, I don't know how you fix democracy. I think that the numbers of people who were involved in primaries would increase if everybody went to boot camp. You know, if we had, if. If we had a six week period where you had to live with people of different ethnicities and, and from different parts of the country and with different skills, and you learn to be part of a community. People have forgotten. I mean, we're just spending all of our time looking into screens rather than dealing with each other. So I think the most natural way to build participation in a democracy is to build responsibility in a democracy.
- [40:36]
C
Joe, I think that's a great place to leave it. But I want to ask you one. Just sort of. It's not trivial, but one fun question. At the end, you mentioned the Osio character in Primary Colors who was at least in some ways a representative for the real life governor of New York at the time. So I'm curious how many of the people who had characters at least, if, if not based on them, loosely based or inspired by them, read the book and talk to you about it.
- [41:05]
B
More than a couple, you know, at, at. At the end of his presidency, I was working for the New Yorker, and, And at the end of Clinton's presidency, the editor asked me to do a big piece about what Clinton had actually accomplished. And I started at kind of like the assistant secretary level in various cabinet offices, and I was interviewing people across the board. And finally one day at the White House, Clinton comes up to me and he says, I know what you're doing. I want to be part of it. So we did a series of really long, in depth, wonky interviews that became my book, the Natural. But at the end of the first one, Hillary came in and where having a Diet Coke together. And, you know, Clinton is kind of loving the moment because we just spent 90 minutes talking about health care. And that was the kind of thing that really really got him off. And he says to me, so why, why did you write that book anyway? And I said, well, Mr. President, and this is the truth, I saw it as a, as a tribute to larger than life politicians. At which point Hillary snorted derisively. And I said, no, first lady, would you rather have a larger than life president or a smaller than life president? And at that point, she was looking at the possibility of two people she despised, Al Gore and George W. Bush being the next president. So she, you know, she nodded her head in agreement. Larger than life. And I said, in larger than life, politicians have larger than life strengths and larger than life weaknesses. And she looked at me and then she looked at her husband and burst out laughing. And she said, that's for sure.
- [42:55]
A
There we go.
- [42:56]
C
So did Mario Cuomo read it?
- [42:58]
B
I don't know if Mario read it. Andrew did. Andrew once said to me, you and my father have like a father and son relationship. And I said, oh, it's that bad, huh?
- [43:12]
A
All right, well, Joe, you mentioned it before. If you don't mind, just tell people again how to find your substack, please.
- [43:17]
B
My substack is called Sanity Clause and you find it at josephklein.sanityclause.com and we'll
- [43:28]
A
put in the show notes, too. And by the way, that's what led us to this, which is how outstanding it is.
- [43:32]
B
And we were just like, hey, well, thanks. It's a lot of fun. And it's also a way of me to remember important things in my life and write about them.
- [43:42]
A
Sounds great. Well, Joe, thank you for joining us. Thank you for just everything you've done for the world in your career. And yeah, it's been an honor to have you on.
- [43:50]
B
Well, thank you very much.
- [43:51]
C
Thanks, Joe.
- [43:56]
A
Firewalls recorded at my bookstore, PNT Netware, located at 180 Orchard street on the lower east side of Manhattan. We'd love to hear from from you with questions, feedbacks, or idea for a guest. Just email me at Bradley at Firewall Media or find me on LinkedIn. And to keep up with what's on my mind and my latest writing, please follow my new substack at bradleytus substack. Com. Thanks again for listening.