Loading summary
Transcript24 lines
- [00:00]
Ryan Reynolds
Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited Premium Wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment
- [00:22]
Mint Mobile / Wayfair / Boar's Head / Shopify Advertiser
of $45 for three months, $90 for six months or $180 for a 12 month plan. Required $15 per month equivalent taxes and fees. Extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes. Me slow when network is busy. See terms now.
- [00:31]
Ivan Krastev
America is envying China in the way before Soviets have been envying America in the last decades of the Cold War.
- [00:42]
Jasia Monk
And now the good fight with Jasia Monk. Well, I have a special treat for you today. One of my favorite guests on the podcast and one of the guests that I every time get the most raving emails about, is back Ivan Khrustov. Ivan is the holder of the Albert Hirschman Permanent Fellowship at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, where he's also the interim rector. This is a slightly different episode with Ivan because normally I ask him to reflect about everything that's going on in the world. And you know that he usually has deep insights to share about whatever I throw at him. But this is the day in which we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. And so I thought that I would ask him about how Americans should understand themselves at this juncture. America has a long history of outsiders coming to the country and reflecting on what truly defines the nation. I think Ivan bears comparison to any of the them. In the last part of this conversation, I asked him to speculate a little bit about which elements of today's America will be remembered 250 years from now. Whether things like artificial intelligence really will be seen as an epoch of change, whether America's evolving sense of its own identity is really going to be one of the junctures we remember. And I also asked him about which American presidents will be footnotes in history or will be ones that are remembered. What about Donald Trump? And I ask Ivan about his personal relationship to the United States, and he talks about how he first came to the United States in 1991, how he came to love the country then, and how his relationship to to it has evolved since. To listen to that part of the conversation, to support what we do here at persuasion, go to persuasion.community or to writing.yashamonk.com and become a paying subscriber. Ivan has many wonderful qualities, but tech savvy is not one of them. So we had a little bit of a sound issue this time. We really work very hard to get the best sound quality we can. The sound quality improves dramatically after the first part of the conversation. So please stay with us, stick with it, and we promise to get you back to the cleanest possible audio we can by the next episode. I promise you Ivan's insight are worth the slight sound qualities. Ivan Krasztev, welcome back to the podcast.
- [03:40]
Ivan Krastev
Thank you for inviting me again.
- [03:43]
Jasia Monk
Well, it's a real pleasure to speak to you every time, Ivan. And today I thought we'd do something slightly unusual, which is that, you know, whatever I am, I'm a US Citizen at least, but a born European and a Bulgarian citizen are going to do the July 4 episode, the special July 4 episode for the 250th anniversary of the United States. But you're such a thoughtful thinker about every part of the world and you obviously know the United States well, but I think it is not asking you too much to play a kind of latter day Alexis de tocqueville on this 250th anniversary of the United States. What strikes you most about the state of a country?
- [04:27]
Ivan Krastev
Listen, my view is, and like most of Europeans, we believe that we know the United States. At the end of the day, we don't. And we understand it immediately when you get out of some of the big cities to which we normally go. But when I look at the United States today, I had the feeling that the country is really trying to reinvent itself and to refound itself and to decide basically who they are. And now when I'm looking back, my view is that there was different United States, and it can be seen much easier from outside than from inside. There was America that came and basically was very much being born of the place which it left. And this was Europe and this was America as a new world. And it's basically all the time comparing itself with Europe and struggling again this European legacy. But this America was very much populated by Europeans, people coming from Europe, immigrants from these countries being satisfied from the place from which they go. And there was another America. And this was very much the America of the Cold War, where it was not about Europe anymore, where America was mirroring itself with the Soviet Union. It was a much more different ideological America. America is the leader of the free world, which it was competing with the Soviets to whom the future belongs. And my feeling is that we are now going to a kind of a third America. America is much more trying to make sense of itself, looking at China, trying to understand who we are. And from this point of view, what President Trump is doing for me, paradoxically, is really kind of trying to change American identities on some several dimensions. One is obviously he's dreaming. Probably he will not do it, but he's dreaming to change the territory of the United States. I take it much more serious, his talk about Greenland or Canada or even Venezuela becoming part of the United States, because he had the feeling that in order to refound and to reinvent the country, first of all, you should change its territory. And secondly, of course, he's trying to reinvent America very different than this America of the Cold War that he has inherited. And he does not see America anymore as the champion of the liberal causes in the world. He's seeing a totally different America. But thirdly, and for me, this is most striking, is that unlike any previous Americas, I'm not sure to what extent the American President is self confident about America that he sees. This is what I found particularly interesting. I'm not sure. Well, he talks about America being great again, does he really believes in the greatness of America?
- [07:24]
Jasia Monk
So it's perhaps a kind of sign of his lack of self confidence. Right. It's often the case psychologically that teenagers who are particularly insecure are also the ones who try to bully their classmates in order to get the external proof that in fact they are somebody and they're worth something and they've proven their status in this very straightforward and brutal way. You know, we've talked enough about the psychology of Donald Trump over the last years, but do you think that at this point this is true of the psychology of the United States more broadly? Is there a kind of quarter millennium crisis of self confidence that the country suffers from?
- [08:03]
Ivan Krastev
I do believe that America was, has a previous moment of crisis. And you have the period around the Civil War, and of course you have 1970s, which was a very dark period in which America itself very much. But this idea of America that should reinvent itself, it didn't start with Trump, honestly speaking, from a very different ideological perspective. Even if you look at the 1619 project, you're going to see that suddenly America decided to tell a new story about itself. The idea was that all these cliches that we outside of America have been always thinking about America are not true anymore. But this America, regardless of it, is coming of America that wants to Face basically slavery and all other bad things that it has done, or this America that Trump is talking about is an America which in my view has lost this self confidence of a kind of an exceptionalism that does not come simply from the fact that America is powerful, but from the fact that America has a special purpose, because this was true for all these previous Americas. America that was running away out of Europe in order to create a new world was very much believing in its exceptional nature. And the Cold War America was very much believing in its exceptional nature. And in my view, this America which we see now, the America that is facing China, the America that is America first, I'm not sure anymore that it is very much believing its exceptional nature. And plus, many of the things that we think, think about America also starts to look different. For example, normally for us, for Europeans, America was an immigrant nation. This was a place where people go and basically they become Americans. Now, if you're going to look at the statistics, you're going to be surprised to learn that the Austrian citizens not born in Austria as a percent of the population is a higher percent than the American citizens were born in the United States. So in a certain way, kind of, you have the feeling that countries and identities are changing places. And from this point of view, President Trump is interesting, not simply because of his insecurity, but because he had, in my view, a very special idea of historical time. If you go closer, you're going to see that he's not very much interested of those that have been before him. And also, I don't believe that he's very much interested if he's going to come after him. He does not think in terms of legacy. If you think in terms of legacy, you want somebody else to build your Arc de Triomphe? No, in my view, he basically managed to reduce time to his individual lifetime. So the world starts with the moment he was born and in a certain way ends for him politically with the moment when he's not going to be president anymore. And for me, this kind of a collapse of time is something that probably explains partially this lack of self confidence. Because now when America looks at China, first they see a country which is much bigger than any type of challengers and any type of adversaries that America has been seeing before. But secondly, it's a country that is economically producing, having scale. You have the feeling that now America is envying China in the way before Soviets have been envying America in the last decades of the Cold War.
- [11:47]
Jasia Monk
I want to get back to China in a few moments between, to start with, America's relationship to Europe, which is obviously fundamental to the country's identity. Certainly when you think about the period of the founding, there's an argument at the moment which I think is widely believed in Europe, without people having thought about it very much, that Europe and the United States are diverging, that they're becoming much more dissimilar from each other. And when you just compare Donald Trump as a President of the United States to Emmanuel Macron as the President of France and Friedrich Merz as the Chancellor of Germany, it is fair to say that the differences between them are much bigger than the differences between Barack Obama and Angela Merkel, though they certainly had very different biographies. But I think in other ways, you're implying an argument that's quite interesting, on which America and Europe are actually becoming more similar. Now, part of this is that Europe is Americanizing, and certainly the fact that European societies are now societies of immigrants have very quickly speedrun become extremely diverse societies, but not necessarily with the historical knowledge about how to actually succeed in integrating newcomers and making them feel like Americans historically have managed to, that they truly are just part of the Austrian experiment, for example, that does make those countries somewhat more similar to the United States. And then conversely, of course, one way to think about Trump and the broader transformation of the American right over the last 10 or 15 years is that it has Europeanized that the American right has historically been quite striking, at least since the kind of fusionist right from the 1960s, by being a right that accepts the idea of liberal democracy, which was part of the founding creed of a country. Whereas certainly the hard right in Europe was always tempted by fascism, by anti democratic currents, by a rejection of the idea of liberalism, certainly. And so perhaps Europe is Americanizing and America is Europeanizing. And in some ways the two continents are now more similar than they were 50 or 200 years ago.
- [14:00]
Ivan Krastev
I very much agree and disagree. I first of all agree that because first of all, I really believe that Europe has been much Americanized. And the paradox of Trump position is that he starts to dislike Europe exactly because Europe starts to look like America. And paradoxically, for all these years, Americans were kind of telling Europeans, you do not have this diversity thing that we have, you are very much closed in your own nationalistic dreams and others. And now when this much not diverse Europe has arrived, basically, at least President Trump basically was shocked and discovered how much he dislikes it. But also, in a strange way, I do believe you are right, because on one level, American in economic terms, American Left is more and more fascinated by European social model. You remember Bernie Sanders dreaming about America becoming like Denmark. Not that many Americans know exactly where Denmark is. But on the other side, of course, now the European right is fascinated with Trump. Even some of the leaders who are going to distance for political leaders from Trump, they basically see him as somebody who speaks to their fears and basically who speaks to their hopes. On the other side, what has changed in my view, is that people with European origin are now minority in the United States. This type of a connection that existed, the level of the individual and the family, if you go to the American universities, you're going to see that European studies or European departments, this is kind of disappearing species. And at the same time also, when you look also at how the American right and to certain extent even American left are looking like, they remind me very much of what I see in Latin America. And this is why I'm not surprised that President Trump is very successful in Latin America. In a way, the Trump supporting candidates are winning in Latin America in the way they are winning in the red states in the United States. Because in a great respect, this is a right which is less related to this kind of libertarian ethos that was much more difficult for the American right. It is less kind of, at the same time having these very strong liberal credentials, which was typical for the Republican Party, you have something much more difficult. And American left is also much, much more about identity politics, different minority groups and coalition in a certain way, of minorities, which was not the case for the American left before. So we're coming together, we're in a certain way going apart. But the major story is that both Europe and America, in my view, goes through this identity crisis. We were not what we used to be before. And we don't know exactly how to define itself, even in the relations between ourselves. Because in my view, one thing that has happened, and I could be very wrong on this, but we see the end of the long 20th century. In the 20th century, America was defined by, as you said, it never happened here. Neither communism, no fascism. This was part of the American exceptionalism. And there was many explanations for this. One of them was also has a lot to do with the problem of race and kind of very much racially based politics which prevented any type of a worker's solidarity, which was so important for the early socialist movements and others. But on the other side, it never happened here. Even Americans don't believe it anymore. Suddenly I do believe we're living in a moment in which Americans provoke that their country can get fascist. And this is what half of the Americans believed, and also the other half believes that America can grow socialist or even communists. Nevertheless, the bulls are not very much clear about the meaning of these words anymore.
- [18:19]
Mint Mobile / Wayfair / Boar's Head / Shopify Advertiser
You want to get your backyard summer ready, but you don't want to break the bank. Wayfair gets it. Planning on dining al fresco or relaxing poolside? Wayfair has everything you need to prep your space. Shop now and save up to 70% off during Wayfair's 4th of July clearance. Score huge deals on outdoor furniture, area rugs and more. We're talking thousands of products for every style and budget, plus surprise flash deals. July 6th don't wait. Shop Wayfair's 4th of July clearance now through July 6th at Wayfair.com Wayfair every
- [18:48]
Jasia Monk
style, every home earlier you were saying that the sort of second phase of American identity was really defined by the competition of the Soviet Union, and that perhaps helped that period of American history revolve in a very explicit way about the American creed. Because of course, the United States and Soviet Union had one key similarity, which is that they're both universalist political projects, that they both thought that the world would be better off if everybody was ruled like they are. I wonder what that tells us about how this third phase, which is significantly going to be defined by competition with China, is going to transform and transmute American identity. You know, China obviously has roots in very much the same political system that drove the Soviet Union. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was informed by Marxism Leninism for a long time, but it's since become a quite notably different thing. And one of the things that it does seem to lack historically, though perhaps the stronger it gets, the more that will come to the fore, is that universalist ambition. China for now, claims that the party has figured out the right way to rule the country. It certainly is somewhat friendly with a few of the regimes that have similar post Marxist Leninist political parties that are in charge. But broadly speaking, it is perfectly happy to make alliances with anybody who is on its side in the broader geopolitical competition with the United States. So what element of American identity is going to be pushed to the fore over the next decades at least, are defined by this competition with China?
- [20:34]
Ivan Krastev
This is a great question because if you look at the end of the Cold War, more and more we are trying to see how exceptional this period was. You have two superpowers, both of them being pretty much ideological states. They were standing for certain type of political ideas and political philosophies and both of them has been very much obsessed with the idea of the future, how the future is going to look like. And they were universalist, exactly what you were saying. All of them believe that the whole world is going to look either like them or it's going to look like their enemy. And there is this character in Abdijk's novel who said, what is the point of being an American if there is no Cold War? So in a certain way, Cold wars created a very strong identity for the United States. But this identity as America as a free world was very much connected in opposition to the Soviet Union, for example. Soviet Union has a censorship, and they try basically to repress the freedom of expression. As a result of it, United States decided to make out the freedom of expressions and, for example, jazz or abstract art as symbols of itself. We can question to what extent a quite culturally conservative America is going to make just or abstract painting the symbol of its culture if it was not for the Soviet Union. So in a certain way, America was doing many things because Americans knew that in the eyes of many of the other parts of the world, they were compared all the time with the Soviets. And this is why all this focus on freedom, individual freedoms, but also collective freedoms, was so important. And also before going to China, for me, it's important that the fact that both Soviet Union and the United States, I mean, the elites, were sure that future is on their side, explains also why the Cold War did not become hot. Because if you believe that future is on your side, if we're going to clash, better to clash tomorrow, because tomorrow I'm going to be in a stronger position. And if you're reading Marxism, you're going to see that capitalism is going to collapse out of its contradictions. But if you're going to read George Cannon, you know that containment simply said we should outweigh them. Communism is going to collapse out of its contradiction. So there was this possibility that this fight does not need to become a military clash immediately. So it was not simply the nuclear weapon. It was this strong belief that future belongs to us. That makes for both sides kind of possible not to have this clash. The story with China is, and I believe this is really interesting, Chinese obviously try to increase their global influence. We can say that they want to dominate the world, but they are not interested, like the Soviets, to export their own model, probably because they believe that their model is too good and others cannot adopt them. But also what is very important is they're competing with the United States on the field, which Americans always believe that they're strongest at and this is economy. And then suddenly basically Chinese are doing fine, particularly when it comes to industrial production. They're producing much more than America is producing these days. And this puts America in a very difficult position because not simply free market, but industrial economic power was so important for America, by the way, so important for America during the Cold War. And now this is moment in which the United States is not anymore, in my view, convinced in its own economic power. And while there is a lot of talk about innovation, and rightly so, fascination of what Silicon Valley is doing, you can see some statistics. And you're going to see also the story of this clash. For example, the famous book about America and China as a clash between the society run by lawyers and society run by engineers. And you can see that suddenly many people in America starts to fear that if we're in a new Cold War, America starts to look like a Soviet Union when it comes to the economic developments. And in my view, this is very new. Americans were always very optimistic about themselves. They were very optimistic about the direction in which the world is going. And this was lost. And paradoxically, Trump, which will talk about America first and we're going to be great again, became the symbol of this kind of a crisis of, of confidence. Because while he talks so much about America first, you can see to what extent he in a way envies China. He envies the absolute power of the Chinese leader. He envies the industrialization of China. So the idea of re industrialization is like make America look more like China than it is looking now. So in my view, this is this new moment and this is why the competition of China, like the competition with the Soviet Union, really became a kind of a question for American self confidence.
- [25:57]
Jasia Monk
Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I sometimes say is a quip, but I think really does say something about the current situation in China is that the country works reasonably well in practice, but is a mess in theory. What I mean by that is that there was historically many political regime types that didn't necessarily work very well in practice, but certainly were much less good than the Chinese system at delivering wealth and affluence for its people and so on, but in which it was quite clear what the system was. And you could go and impose that system on another country if you were able to influence it. In China, the country is so based on a very long tradition of a meritocratic civil service selected through public examinations. It has such deep state capacity because it is a country that very complicated Permutations and variations has existed for many thousands of years. But if you tried to actually take the model and impose it on Nigeria or on Zimbabwe, it's just really unclear what that would actually mean and entail. And so that I think creates this weird situation where at some theoretical level the aspirations of a Communist party are always universalist. But in practice, I don't think that people in Beijing are particularly interested in universalizing the rule because they recognize something about the fact that the system is not easily exportable. But I actually want to take the conversation in a different direction, which is that the deepest reasons for the crisis of self conference in the United States, I think are not the competition with China or anything like that. It's a kind of crisis of conviction about America's own self perception. And you said earlier that there was historically three kinds of ways that Americans thought about themselves. The first we might associate with its most impressive contemporary articulator, Barack Obama. Right, a nation that was flawed from its inception because of slavery and other injustices, but in which, you know, nothing was wrong about the country, might not be fixed by what is right about the country in which the guiding ideals of its founding is what allowed us to overcome many, though not all of these injustices and that should spurn us on to do even better in the future. Then there is a kind of right wing rejection of that idea which says that no, this was never a universalist nation. It was a nation of white Anglo Saxons and it was a nation of Christians. And if we lose that part of our nature, then what is special about the United States is going to be lost. And then of course there's the left rejection of this narrative, which is to say that, you know, the country was not defined by 1776, the holiday we're celebrating today. It was defined by 1619. It was defined not by the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence. It was defined by the first day that slaves arrived on American shores. Are you an Obamaist in this juxtaposition or do you think that that way of contrasting the three different options is somehow too simple? Or do you embrace one of the other two?
- [29:21]
Ivan Krastev
No, no, I do believe that you're right. But all three in a certain way are talking about different type of exceptionalism. One is the America being exceptionally bad. And by the way, this was always part of the Americans discourse about America. Being critical about was one of the important things of how American democracy was functioning. And you can see it very much on the left. And you have also the exceptionalism of America as a country with a purpose, as a city on the hill. And it can have all these different type of incarnation. What was interesting about Obama's view is that in a certain way he believes that American is exceptional, but also very normal. He tries to integrate it in kind of in a world which is kind of not so America centered. And it was not simply about American power. But in a certain way, he believes, probably rightly, that we're going to see much more divergence that all of different nations are going to try to for their own way. I'm saying this because going back to what you said about China, in my view, in a certain way, interestingly rhymes with what we are talking now. Listen, in 1970s, Chinese were exporting ideology more than the Soviets. Mao and Maoism was so powerful in the third world because basically his idea of peasants being the major driving force of the revolution was fitting much easily to the reality of the third world countries outside of the west. And the communist idea of the working class, the classical Marxism. And then it failed. And I do believe that this was the moment in which suddenly Chinese decided that domina world and exporting your model are not necessarily the same thing. And here is the point which for me is critical. America and China know the world in two different ways. America was the melting point. America knows the world to the extent for over 250 years, people from all over the world were coming to the United States and they were becoming Americans. And the melting pot was about this. You know the world because you know how to transform others. America was always perceiving its itself not simply as an exceptional, but transformative power. China was not thinking in terms of a melting pot, but in terms of the Chinatown. Chinese go to the world and they are not trying to transform the places that they go, but they try to keep their identity and also to try economically to benefit and to dominate the place which they are. China towns are not trying to spread, but they were trying of course to prosper and to become much more powerful, particularly in economic terms. And now when this is happening, I had the feeling that Chinese are happy with power and of course their regime can collapse like any political regimes. But then the Americans are saying, if we don't have this special purpose, if like President Trump, who believes that America is the victim of the fact that he tried to be exceptional and particularly exceptional in its liberalism, then comes the story of what it means to be an American. And you're right about Obama. But one of the interesting things that happened after the end of the Cold War, and this is when the idea of the future became problematic in the American story was that suddenly at the end of history, you have the feeling that future has arrived and America was the future. And everybody starts trying to copy the United States in one way or the other. To speak American, to play golf, to read the Founding Fathers. And the moment when you have been the future for the others, you in a certain way lost the perspective of the future for yourself and you start asking yourself tough questions. If you're, for example, going to reread Huntington's who Are We? One of the interesting story and his particular resentment towards many of the new migrants coming from Mexico and other places was before coming to America was a one way ticket. You go through the ocean and you cannot go back. You're either becoming American or you're doomed. And now it was so easy to cross the borders in all directions. So suddenly this decision to come to America is not decision anymore, to become American forever. I do believe that this is the paradox in the age of migration. Suddenly particularity of America as a migrant nation suddenly was put in a question. Question.
- [34:04]
Pepsi Advertiser
And we're live from the living room as Doug eyes up the match. Say spread. He's reaching for the buffalo wing. Perfect. Hang on, what's this? Oh, he's gone for a can of Pepsi too. Incredible. What a finish. Sensational combination. Look at the delight on his face. There's no doubt about it. It just tastes better. Match days deserve Pepsi. Food deserves Pepsi. Grab a pack of Pepsi. Zero sugar for today's match. It's poetry in motion.
- [34:34]
Jasia Monk
That is very interesting. And it does go to the challenge that the right perhaps has always historically had of the American story. And that has come to the fore with Donald Trump, which is, you know, whether America is defined by its values, by the ideas in the Constitution, or whether it has actually historically only worked because it was in some ways a cultural and religious product. It's the question that in America is posed as whether or not the United States is a Christian nation. You know, just as Narendra Modi is trying to relitigate in India the question of whether or not India is a Hindu nation. And of course, these religions in both of these contexts go beyond faith, right? I mean, they are markers for a ethno religious identity that is setting itself up against another, against the significant Muslim minority in India and against a kind of broader set of people who are coming to the country in the United States. Now, of course, part of what that story gets slightly wrong is who it is who's actually challenging the Americanness of a country and some of the ideas and values, values that we could take for granted. I'm a great admirer of Samuel Huntington. I think he's made astonishing contributions to political science, from Soldier and the State to Clash of Civilizations, Even though I've often disagreed with him. I think the one book that it's hard, I think, to take seriously is exactly the one that you've criticized about who we are. Because I think the idea that Latinos are somehow undermining the true nature of America was probably silly at the time and seems much more silly today. And that's because I think most Latinos who've been in the United States for a little while are quite clearly very American. And in an ironic turn, it is often the, you know, liberal arts, college educated science of the Mayflower that seem to be rejecting many aspects of what America is. I would guess that most Latino families in the United States are enjoying some form of celebration or barbecue about July 4th today. And even though they may have all kinds of misgivings about the current state of our country, I think most of them are actually quite patriotic. I think there's a lot more people who both can take advantage of some of the things that the United States offers its citizens, including still the most remarkable middle class economy in the world, and who may actually have many more historical ties to the generation of the founders who may be sitting around rolling the ice and saying, really, we shouldn't be celebrating any of this.
- [37:21]
Ivan Krastev
Totally agree. Listen, the American dream is something that was so important for the way at least those of us outside of America were seeing America. You go there and you can succeed in one generation, you can succeed in two generations. There was this incredible social mobility that was so important in the way, for example, Europeans were trying to compare America with themselves. And also we are forgetting that particularly after the end of the World War II, America was so powerful, but also so prosperous and so rich. When you read basically anything, the diaries or memoirs of the Europeans talking about American soldiers or any type of an American that they are going to see in Europe in the late 1940s, 1950s, you have this totally devastated continent. And then you have all these people who are coming and they were rich and they're prosperous, but also they were self confident. They were really representing this new world. And I'm saying this because suddenly the American dream is becoming kind of a challenge within the United States. One level, this is challenge because of the thing that everybody is seeing, this fear that the next generation is not going to be able to live better than their parents. And I do believe this was really important for the United States because America depended on social mobility much more than traditional European societies. But secondly, it is something that you said. If we are going to a world of civilizations, if Chinese are going to become as a civilization which try to dominate but they don't want to export their model, if Indians are going to define themselves as a civilizational state, if Russians are struggling to do the same, not particularly successfully. So which is the American civilization? Is Europe part of it? For example, In Europe in 19th century, words like race and nation were synonymous. This kind of a ratio. The idea of the whiteness was very much an American invention. And the interesting story about the current type of a talk about this is that America was changing demographically not simply because new people were coming, but because people were redefined. For example, Bulgarians or Jews at the late 19th century were not going to be defined as white, but there was a moment in which they became white. And we know from sociology how Irish became white. And this is, I do believe, what is going to happen with Latinos and others. But then how we are going to define this civilization to which Europe belongs, America belongs, is it going to be, if it is on rational terms, who is going going to be white and how it's going to be white. And in my view, this is one of the biggest problem that is coming from some of the right wing attempts to redefine basically European American civilizations simply on the racial terms. Because the moment you're going to do it, you're starting to realize how historically constructed and how differently constructed race was in a different period, in a certain way, paradoxically, the whiteness came as the result to try to reconcile the difference between people coming from the different European countries, Germans and breeds, people coming from a different religious tradition, because religious divisions were so important in Europe in the beginning. So strangely enough, kind of the whiteness was the way to try to reconcile all this diversity of the American society. And after that, basically it became one of the sources of confrontation. But I'm saying this because as a result of it, 250 years after its founding, America is kind of forced to basically reread and to reinterpret all of its tradition, because the world in which it is living is not allowing it to coexist easily with the previous identities that it was telling itself.
- [41:32]
Boar's Head Advertiser
This episode is brought to you by Boar's Head. There's Turkey and then there's the Friar's deep fried turkey breast, new from Boar's Head. Deliciously golden Fried on the outside, perfectly seasoned all the way through. Bursting with savory flavor. Juicy. Okay, I need to stop. My mouth is watering. This isn't just any turkey. It's a taste that'll take you back. A taste born from a backyard tradition. I'm talking fold out chairs on the lawn, neighbors catching a whiff and popping their heads over the fence, kids being told to stand back. That feeling of the first slice being carved. And now you don't need a backyard fryer. You can get that same golden juicy seed. Season a perfection taste at the deli with the fryer's deep fried turkey breast. Discover the craftsmanship behind every bite at your local boar's head deli. Boar's head. Committed to craft since 1905.
- [42:28]
Jasia Monk
That's very interesting. Yeah, I mean, there is a strange set of paradoxes about the role that the idea of race plays in the American imaginary at the moment. And of course, the history of a country has, because of slavery and other things, been deeply defined by some imagination of race all along. But one of the fights of this moment, I think, is whether you will get a further broadening of the idea of who's white. And some sociologists claim that this is already happening, that there's going to be a kind of mainstream society that sees itself in the broadest census as white, and it is going to include a lot of Latinos and probably a lot of Asian Americans, and it may even in some ways include middle and upper middle class black Americans. And so whiteness becomes a kind of strange multiracial category with some kind of racialized remainder that is based on some mix of ethnic origin and socioeconomic status, or whether you actually do the opposite. And the idea is that you get the kind of overarching category, degree of person of color, the people of color, the term that was used incredibly often over the last five or six years, but that is now, I think, slightly declining in salience. And you are pitting them against this kind of remainder category of whites. And of course, ironically, whereas for the vast majority of American history, you would enjoy a higher status and you would want to be a counter as the category of whites rather than the category of people excluded from whites. Which is why, according to the sociological accounts, which I don't always fully agree with Jews and Irish Americans and so on, forged to be included in the category of white today, in some senses you might wish for the opposite, because in many contexts to be white is supposed to be a negative thing, and there may actually be negative consequences for college admissions or for your ability to garner some kind of contract from your local government and so on, if you are counted within that category. I mean, remarkably, this is not an ethnic example. The state of California has now included a mandate for the boards of companies in California to have some representation from the LGBT community. And if you falsely claim to be gay, then the state may prosecute you not for being gay, as it might have done 100 or 200 years ago in many countries, in many west, but for falsely claiming to be gay, which is a kind of remarkable thing. So what do you think is going to be the way that people think about their identity in a little bit of time? To raise the stakes here, Ivan, let's imagine that we're talking on the 500th anniversary of a Declaration of Independence. How do you think Americans will think about the role of these kind of forms of identity and of race 250 years from now?
- [45:37]
Ivan Krastev
Listen, first, if we're going to Talk on the 500th anniversary, which means that we are going to embrace the idea of individual immortality, and then probably everything was going to be different for everybody. But you are making a very important point. And the important point is that suddenly being part of a majority minority means that you do not have an identity. Identity goes only of being part of a different minority. And you can try to be one type of the other type of minority. But there was something wrong about the idea of the majority as a whole. And I do believe this is a very new idea. Normally, minorities try to be integrated in certain political majorities. And this was why, for example, political parties, ideologies, elections were so important. Because by being part of the majority, you have the feeling that you are integrated in the country. And now the story is that suddenly being a majority means being oppressive. Being minority becomes a privilege. And this is the paradox. And by the way, this is one of the paradoxes that is very much used by the right who said how it happened. Is it not that in a democracy the privilege is to be part of a bigger group? Does it mean that basically everything depends on us? And I'm saying this because I do believe in a democracy, there are two different idea of a majority. One is the idea of the historical majority that created the state. And in a certain way, in the case of America, there was this Europeans who basically came to the continent and wrote the constitution and put their rules and basically their tradition. And then there is the majority, which is born on the night of the elections. And this majority does not have a particular color. It has much more political identity than any type of an ethnic or religious identity. But the idea was that this second majority should not contest the first one. And this is happening because of the demographic changes. Suddenly you can basically see that either we are going to redefine what it means to be the white, or you're going to end up with all the fears that have been captured by Huntington with idea that the wasp America is disappearing and it is not going to be the same anymore. And these identities are not going to work well if they're not going to be redefined. I believe we are living in this interesting moment in which everything is two fluid and two everything is possible. And this is why nobody has the feeling that he lives at home. And this is not true only about America. I do believe we see the same in Europe, because home is the place that you feel the. That you understand and where you feel understood and where there is this intuitive understanding that you know how system works, you know basically how institutions works. And in this case, America was always very different than Europe because this sense of a home as a much more ethnically homogeneous and cultural homogeneous place was much more typical for Europe. And for the Europeans, home was like speaking a native language language, language that you speak before knowing the grammar, language that naturally comes to you. In America, even if you come from England, you should learn a new language, because American was this new language that everybody, even English speakers, should learn. Because America, from this point of view, was always different than the classical European nation states. But now, if there is no American dream, and if there is not a dream, that we all should become much more similar, that we all are not going to be so much defined by our ethnic or our rational identity. I do believe that suddenly the country starts to have this feeling of attention, of a political polarization of a civil war. And paradoxically, I do believe that there is one conflict, and I could be wrong, that probably, if you're going to look from the future, probably not so distant future, like the next 150 years, is that you're going to see that in the current America, America, the generational conflict can turn to be politically more important than some of the class conflicts that we know from before, or even type of an identity conflicts that we are talking about. Because paradoxically, for the first time in modern history, young people in the world, but particularly now in the United States, are minority. And this is a minority which does not feel representative enough in politics and as a result of it starts to contest democracy. And because they start to contest democracy, they start to contest the basic American values. And in my view this is an interesting story because the gap of wealth between the population, the fact that we are living much longer and for the first time you're going to have not three, but probably five generations living next to each other, the fact that we don't have many kids and suddenly certainly kind of the relations, the generational pyramid is turning on its head. All this, in my view, is going to restructure American politics to the extent that the identities that we talk about now, which are very much race based and ethnically based, can turn to be less important than it looks today.
- [51:22]
Jasia Monk
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of a good Fight. In the rest of this conversation, I ask Ivan about which political figures of his moment will be remembered 250 years from now. Will Donald Trump be a footnote in history? Will he be a strange, larger than life character, more remembered for his personal foibles than for his impact on the United States? Or do we actually stand on a hinge point of American history? Interestingly, Ivan does think that Trump will be remembered. I also ask Ivan about his personal relationship to the United States, how he first arrived in the country just after the fall of communism, what he came to love and appreciate about the country, what he saw with a critical eye, and how his relationship to the country has evolved since then. To listen to that part of a conversation, to support what we do here, go to writing.asher monkto and become a paying subscriber.
- [52:42]
Shopify Advertiser
Starting a business can seem like a daunting task unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website to marketing to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need. There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz and Allbirds continue to trust and use them. With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into Sign up for your $1 per month trial@shopify.com specialoffer.