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The New Yorker Radio Hour
Episode 60: What Is Trumpism?
00:55:36
A populist candidate hires an economic team from Goldman Sachs, and an English professor delivers a Hegelian analysis of Trump the disrupter. Plus, Michael Chabon on TV’s best, most boring show.
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- [00:04]
Michael Chabon
Floor 38. These are just anecdotes, but it's building.
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David Remnick
Up into something more coherent. I think it'd be interesting to really try to unravel what his ties. There's this sort of country city divide.
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Mark Bauerlein
Their own convenient ends, and it's not clear where it goes next.
- [00:20]
Sheila Kolhatkar
From one World Trade center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of WNYC studios and the New Yorker.
- [00:29]
David Remnick
Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
- [00:33]
Bill Finnegan
Hey, Francisco, it's Bill.
- [00:35]
David Remnick
Francisco Nava is a retired barber originally from Venezuela. Recently, the New Yorker's William Finnegan went to pay him a visit while Francisco was packaging up a box to send home.
- [00:46]
Francisco Nava
So each box that is £65 cost $160 to send. Yeah. So I had to go.
- [00:53]
David Remnick
But the box wasn't filled with toys and gadgets and a cardigan for dad. It had cornmeal and rice, aspirin, rubbing alcohol, bandages. Because Venezuela is in the midst of an incredible economic crisis and Francisco's relatives can no longer afford the most basic necessities, Bill talked with his friends about how things got so bad in Venezuela and what they're doing to help.
- [01:19]
Francisco Nava
All the problems in Venezuela. They will take more than a year to tell you about it.
- [01:24]
David Remnick
That's later this hour. Now we're going to start with some economics a little closer to home. Economics isn't my strongest suit, but it doesn't take a Nobel Prize winner to see that a problem is brewing for Donald Trump. He's made big promises to working class voters. Bringing back jobs is promise number one. But many of the people he's brought in to steer his administration's economic decisions are Wall street big shots. And if you come from Wall street, you tend to prioritize investors, not jobs. You don't really care necessarily where the factories are as long as the labor is cheap. Sheila Kolhatkar has been writing about this for the New Yorker. Sheila, when it comes to economics and economic policy, we've seen the beginnings of a cabinet. Who's walking in the door at Trump Tower and who's going to run things in the Trump White House?
- [02:15]
Sheila Kolhatkar
Well, so two really important figures have emerged so far. And one, one of those is Steve Mnuchin. He is the person Trump has announced as his choice for treasury secretary. And the other very prominent figure is Wilbur Ross, who is a longtime Wall street investor who's going to be the commerce secretary. So these names are kind of interesting on several levels. I mean, as people have observed throughout the campaign. I mean, he is really relying on loyalists and people who backed him early on when no one else had the stomach to kind of come forward and say they were a Trump supporter. Both of these gentlemen signed on early on as Trump supporters.
- [02:54]
David Remnick
Are they populous in the way that Trump at least pretended to be during the campaign? They seem to be from the conventional world of finance.
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Sheila Kolhatkar
They are not the common man. They are both very, very wealthy financiers. So on that level, it's a little confusing when you try and reconcile this with his rhetoric. At the same time, there are some reassuring things about them as choices. Both of them are very, very smart and accomplished.
- [03:23]
Mark Bauerlein
Are they?
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Sheila Kolhatkar
Well, they seem like rational people. They are not advocating a return to the gold standard. I mean, there was at a moment a risk that someone really kind of radical was a completely.
- [03:34]
David Remnick
So that's our standard now, not to be completely irrational and out of control. And Steve Mnuchin, was he at the top of the Pops, as it were, at Goldman Sachs when he was there?
- [03:45]
Sheila Kolhatkar
He was very well regarded. His father had been a well respected Goldman banker. So he was sort of part of the family. And he was there for 17 years and he was very successful doing distressed debt trading, which is a very opportunistic type of investing in bonds that trade that are sort of at very depressed prices because the underlying companies are not doing well.
- [04:07]
David Remnick
Wasn't this one of the sources of our economic crash in 2008 and 2009?
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Sheila Kolhatkar
Sure, but some people figured out very cleverly how to make money from all this. In 2009, during the height of the financial crisis, he gathered a bunch of very, very wealthy investors together and made a bid for IndyMac, which was a collapsing mortgage lender in California. And again, the whole world was on fire. The economy was collapsing. Banks and insurance companies were getting rescued by the government and there were bailouts and there was a lot of panic and things were selling off. And they made a very cheap bid to buy this bank with the understanding that there'd be some kind of bailout or there'd be some kind of restructuring and they could make a lot of money.
- [04:47]
David Remnick
No, I understand that he made a lot of money, but this is an administration that's coming to the fore in which Donald Trump vowed to drain the swamp. It sounds like he is bringing the swamp in. For want of a better metaphor, he's.
- [05:01]
Sheila Kolhatkar
Replacing one type of swamp dweller with another type.
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David Remnick
And Wilbur Ross is known as the king of bankruptcy. What does that mean?
- [05:09]
Sheila Kolhatkar
Well, so Wilbur Ross is what's known as A vulture investor. And I think that people on Wall street secretly love being referred to that way, actually, even though they protest when you call them vulture investors. But it's basically someone who comes in and feeds off of a dying carcass of a company. So the thing that's.
- [05:25]
David Remnick
That sounds so uplifting, the thing that's.
- [05:28]
Sheila Kolhatkar
Kind of interesting to me about Wilbur Ross is that he made his fortune investing in, really, companies that were kind of left for dead, about to go bankrupt. Steel companies, textile mills, mines. And what happens in that situation is you go in there and the company's about to shut, it's going under, going into bankruptcy court, whatever it is. You can go in there with some kind of bundle of money and make an offer for whatever's left of the company. And then you have a tremendous amount of leverage to kind of pressure the unions, the pensions, the retirees, whatever it is, and kind of break all these contracts that might have been kind of holding up whatever.
- [06:06]
David Remnick
But as I read the campaign over and over and over again, Donald Trump hammered Hillary Clinton with the fact that she was getting so much more money than he was from Wall street, with her talks at Goldman Sachs, her associations, and Bill Clinton's associations with the investment banks and all the people around him, Bob Rubin and all the rest. Now we have the resurgence of Goldman Sachs.
- [06:32]
Sheila Kolhatkar
No, literally, billionaire financiers stepping in. I mean, it's stunning. I don't know what to tell you.
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David Remnick
That's not populism, as I understand it.
- [06:39]
Sheila Kolhatkar
No, no, it is absolutely stunning. And the contradictions and hypocrisy with what he was saying before are glaring and hard to ignore. I don't quite know what to make of this. I mean, I don't know if this is all just something he's doing to placate Republicans in Congress, because, of course, the expectation is when you have appointments like this, they're just gonna be pushing the standard Republican agenda, which is lowering taxes for wealthy people and getting rid of regulations.
- [07:06]
David Remnick
Now, in terms of policy, what policies do you see at the top of the economic agenda of a Trump administration? Does it have to do with tariffs on China or potentially protectionist trade policy? Renegotiating nafta, corporate taxes? What's at the top? What do you expect to see happen?
- [07:29]
Sheila Kolhatkar
Well, we've had some hints already from his nascent economic team. So Steve Mnuchin, during an interview last week on cnbc, said, our job is to make sure the average American worker has wage increases and good jobs. That's the priority of this administration. So There's a little hint of that populism that we saw from Trump all the way along. Now, at the same time, he did offer some very specific policy plans, much more specific than what Trump himself has offered. He said that they're going to enact an enormous tax cut. He said it'll be the biggest tax change since Reagan.
- [08:01]
David Remnick
What does that mean?
- [08:02]
Sheila Kolhatkar
Well, it was code for a huge tax cut for corporations. That's what I interpreted that to mean. In fact, he was very explicit. He said, you know, they're planning to reduce the corporate tax rate to 15%, which.
- [08:14]
David Remnick
From what?
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Sheila Kolhatkar
From 35%, which is where it stands now. And it's part of the reason a lot of companies have kept cash out of the country and they've refused to kind of repatriate it because they don't want to pay those taxes.
- [08:25]
David Remnick
I see how that helps corporate executives and CEOs and stockholders potentially. But the Trump voter in large measure is the now much talked about and in many ways legitimately so. The white working class. How is that voter being helped by policy? How will Trump help their lives or will he at all?
- [08:49]
Sheila Kolhatkar
Well, we've had one glimpse of it so far, which was the kind of sideshow about that carrier plant in Indiana. So this is a company that was building air conditioning equipment, had planned to move a couple thousand jobs to Mexico. And Trump decided to make a big public spectacle out of the fact that they were doing this, even though it's happening all across the country with all sorts of different companies. And then he went in there personally, he says, and convinced them to keep some of the jobs there in exchange for an enormous tax break from the state.
- [09:21]
David Remnick
So he saved some hundreds of jobs. The exact number is in dispute. And yet even Sarah Palin calls this crony capitalism.
- [09:28]
Sheila Kolhatkar
You know, there's a big question mark that comes up again and again anytime you have these kind of trickle down policies of tax cuts for companies and wealthy people being presented as a solution to middle class economic problems. So this assertion that by saving these corporations 20% on their taxes, you know, that does not automatically translate into huge job growth inside the U.S. i mean, there are structural problems, but that is not the case.
- [10:00]
David Remnick
What is the nature of the problem? We've gone now from catastrophic unemployment problems at the very beginning of the Obama administration, certainly in 2009, it was reaching untenable Depression era levels. And we are now at 4.7%, which is the best it's been since long before the Obama administration. What's the nature of the problem? What's gone down is manufacturing jobs. Is it an illusion to think those jobs are going to come back, or will they come back potentially in a different way, either through policy from the Trump administration or through things like innovation from Elon Musk or wherever?
- [10:42]
Sheila Kolhatkar
Well, I think there's a basic problem, which is that it's much, much cheaper to build all these products in other countries. And in fact, Elon Musk is one example. But Silicon Valley has really demonstrated that. I mean, we're all buying iPhones that are. Are put together by people in factories in China who are living in little drawers. I mean, it is much, much cheaper to build an iPhone that way than to pay people in the United States to do it. So that is a big problem. Again, Wilbur Ross, who is a very odd choice for this type of role, given a lot of what Trump said, he does have insight into these manufacturing sectors that I think is sort of interesting. And he kind of. He did say in this interview last week, he said a guy who used to work in a steel mill who' flipping hamburgers, knows it's not the same job. You know, we have to address that. It's not just the quantity of jobs, it's the quality. Trump has not laid out anything, in the view of many, many economists, that directly addresses those problems. And this is one of the issues with him and all these promises he's made. He has not shown a concrete proposal that is clearly going to lead to a resurgence in those types of jobs. And there are people who believe that, in fact, you cannot reverse that tide. Corporate coal is not going to become a viable option. The market has just moved against it and it's obsolete.
- [12:01]
David Remnick
Or steel coming back to Pennsylvania in a wholesale way?
- [12:05]
Sheila Kolhatkar
I mean, steel prices have just collapsed. So, again, how is he going to be able to manipulate the global prices of steel and make it economically valuable now? He could do things to make it a little more costly to leave. I think that there is something to the argument that perhaps some of the trade deals that were made earlier have not worked out as intended. The problem is, do we trust Trump? Has he shown through his actions so far that he is going to find the right people to go through those trade deals and really fix them in a way that's helpful now?
- [12:37]
David Remnick
So given everything we know about globalization, can he really turn the tide? Or is Trump going to focus on creating anecdotes about little pockets of success like we saw with the carrier deal?
- [12:48]
Sheila Kolhatkar
I think it's possible that some of these tax ideas that he's put forth Will perhaps free up money for certain companies to hire people. That is entirely possible. Now, it does not seem that anything he has proposed is going to accomplish that on the kind of scale that he has promised to all of these people in these states where the industries have fled. So that is sort of a big question. You know, there's another issue that people have talked about a lot, which is the fact that a lot of banks are not lending money. There are many reasons for that. They complain that it's because of overregulation, but frankly, many of them are also choosing to deploy their capital trading or doing financial speculation and doing things other than making loans, which is what the banks are there to do in the first place. I mean, their entire role in the capital market system is to lend money from people who have it to enterprises that need it to grow. And they haven't been doing that. This is a big problem. How to force them to do that. I don't know if anyone has figured that out. I mean, Steve Mnuchin made some interesting comments about that. He said, well, you know, we're actually not gonna repeal all these sort of reforms that were put in place after the financial crisis. We're just gonna get rid of the parts that are causing banks not to lend money. It sounded to me a little bit like what they've said about the Affordable Care Act. They said, oh, we're just gonna get rid of the parts that people don't like and we're gonna keep all this stuff about how if you have a pre existing condition, you can get insurance anyway. The problem is that the whole thing doesn't really work if you just take out certain elements of it. I mean, the less palatable parts are holding up the parts that are very popular. So again, they've made a lot of very sweeping statements about what they're going to do, but they haven't presented any fine print outlining how exactly they're going to accomplish that.
- [14:39]
David Remnick
What's the worst thing he could do? What do you fear?
- [14:43]
Sheila Kolhatkar
Well, as a starting point, he's promising very, very aggressive, ambitious tax cuts, and he has not proposed any way to pay for them.
- [14:52]
David Remnick
So deficits grow and grow.
- [14:54]
Sheila Kolhatkar
Yes. And then of course, that is going to lead to the familiar calls to privatize Medicare, I mean, all sorts of things that his voters would never have signed up for. And that, in fact, Republican voters generally are not in favor of. But those are the dreams of Paul Ryan and the other Republicans in Congress. And, you know, as the deficit potentially grows, their argument to do all Those things is going to become stronger. And so what's going to happen?
- [15:27]
David Remnick
Sheila, thanks so much.
- [15:29]
Sheila Kolhatkar
Thank you.
- [15:34]
David Remnick
The New Yorker's Sheela Kolhatkar. You can find everything she's written for us about politics and business@newyorkerradio.org this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come.
- [16:02]
Colin Nissen
I miss you. I miss your face. I miss tracing its contours with my finger while you were sleeping or trying to eat. I miss your little feminine touches around our home. The candles, the food, the toilet paper.
- [16:21]
David Remnick
This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. And now, from the New Yorker's department of shouts and murmurs, here's Colin Nissen, who misses you.
- [16:31]
Colin Nissen
Everything reminds me of you. All the things you left behind. Your photos, your books, your brother. I really thought he'd move out when you did, but he's still here on the couch, reminding me of you. I missed that. No matter how much we'd argue, no matter who had their feelings hurt or who felt belittled or emasculated. No matter whose penis was snickered at or whose vagina was mocked, whose money was stolen or whose. Who was told they smelled like an old wizard. No matter who put a dead mouse in whose gym bag or who brought who back to life after suffocating them with a decorative pillow. No matter what. I always knew the next morning we'd be lying by each other's sides. Or I guess I should say, I thought I knew. I miss your little quirks. Like the way you'd cry while chopping onions and keep crying even hours afterward, sometimes even for hours before. You always reacted so severely to onions. You took our iPad. I missed that. I missed the apps and games. I missed checking my email, surfing the Internet. I missed the crisp graphics and how surprisingly lightweight it was. I missed that little mini easel that propped it up on tables. I loved that thing. I miss being your partner on those Pictionary nights with our friends and that unspoken connection we had. All you had to do is draw bunny ears for me to yell out.
- [18:17]
Mark Bauerlein
You'Re sleeping with Richard.
- [18:20]
Colin Nissen
Not every couple can communicate without words like that. Not even our Pictionary friends, Amy and Richard. I miss handing you the phone when telemarketers would call, asking for the lady of the house. Now I'm forced to say, just a second, then come back on the phone dressed like a woman because I'm ashamed to say you're gone. That you gave up on us. That your brother won't leave. All of it. There's a hollowness inside me that was once filled by you, the kind of hollowness you feel when you tap on the secret wood panel in a rich old business tycoon's library. But there's no women's underwear or Nazi memorabilia hidden behind my panel. Just emptiness and sadness because you're gone and you took our freaking iPad.
- [19:16]
David Remnick
That's Colin Nissen with a story called of course I miss you. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and I'm here with staff writer Kehlefasaneh. So, Kay, you've been working on a piece about Trumpism, the politics of Donald Trump and how conservatives of all different stripes are responding to him. You recently talked with a writer by the name of Mark Bowerlein. Who is he, and why did you want to talk to him?
- [19:45]
Califa Sanneh
Well, for obvious reasons, we've been hearing a lot about Trumpism and what Trump believes. And a lot of what we've been hearing, almost all of it has come from people who criticize Trump, people who are skeptical about him. So I thought it would be interesting to talk to some of the scholars and intellectuals who are actually excited about Trump. Mark Baroline is an English professor at Emory University. He's a senior editor at First Things, which was a center for kind of erudite scholarship about the intersection of religion and culture.
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David Remnick
He was very politics post the Reagan administration.
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Califa Sanneh
Exactly, exactly.
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David Remnick
So Baroulein himself represents what?
- [20:20]
Califa Sanneh
Well, like a lot of people, he had kind of a complicated journey to where he is. He grew up as what he describes as a liberal and found himself kind of drifting into more conservative beliefs as he kind of got disillusioned with liberal politics. And then even now, he's somewhat at odds with some of the other people at First Things, the journal where he works, because a number of the people there were opposed to Trump. For him, it's part of a lifelong political evolution.
- [20:45]
Mark Bauerlein
My parents idolized Martin Luther King. I was raised with ideas of integration. You don't hear that word much anymore. That was the word in the 60s. You never heard the word diversity. And we didn't highlight differences. We actually highlighted the underlying unity. My parent, their phrase was everyone is the same underneath. So that, you know, you live next to a black family, you live next to a Mexican family. You may dislike certain things, but we're here together, and that makes certain common grounds. But one of the things that started to distress me in academia was the rise of identity politics, which I thought this is contrary to that universal, integrative message of Martin Luther King. And to me, There was an insistence about it that I found destructive. That actually leads to disunity, forms of suspicion, and of cynicism and tribalism. And I just, you know, in my mid-40s, I just started shifting and I adopted some conservative outlooks on social and personal issues. I have returned the Catholic Church, but I still live very much in sort of a strong liberal, intellectual world in the university.
- [22:23]
Califa Sanneh
I could imagine when you tell me your story and you talk about how. I remember reading a blog post you wrote about someone cursing on an airplane that you were on and kind of confronting them, and now you've got this presidential candidate talking about bombing the bleep out of isis, and I see you briefly have your hand over your face, but I could imagine that someone like you would see the rise of Donald Trump within the Republican Party and be kind of horrified.
- [22:49]
Mark Bauerlein
No, no, I wasn't. I mean, we all cringe, of course, over the language and some of the boorishness and saying, don't send that tweet, please. But. But you had. The estimates are 80 to 85% of evangelicals voted for Donald Trump. And there was a lot of discussion about what utter hypocrisy these people are voting for this, you know, multiply divorced pagan figure who has troubles with impulse control. He's. He's a. He is a creature of the sexual revolution. And how can you support him? I take that as evangelicals and the religious rights acceptance of political realities. They're not at the center of American culture and society, and they're not going to be for any time in the near future. They're simply willing to take what political advantages they can find.
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David Remnick
Okay. It sounds like, as with so many people on the Christian right, Baroulein held his nose and voted for Trump rather than a person who represented more of the same.
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Califa Sanneh
There is some of that, but I think also for Bowerlein, there was a sense that Trump was in many ways superior to the other. Whatever it was, 70 or 80 Republican candidates during the primary, a sense that precisely because he was willing to violate all these political taboos, he was able to kind of shake up not just the Republican field, but the way in which we talk. That's the paradox here. And I think something you've definitely seen among a lot of religious conservatives is a sense that there are so many kind of liberal taboos that constrain what we can say and what we can think, and that actually end up being a threat. And so, in his view, perhaps other Republican candidates were.
- [24:55]
Mark Bauerlein
Again, I'm on college campuses. It's the world of triggers and microaggressions. It has become a culture of a hermeneutic of suspicion about people. We're so unforgiving about the stupid things that we all do. Our lesser natures get the better of us. If you and I spent a week together, I'm gonna say something that's gonna offend you. I'm going to.
- [25:23]
Califa Sanneh
I'd like to think I'd probably say more than a few things that would offend you, too.
- [25:27]
Mark Bauerlein
And you just say, of course we're going to. And then we get past it because there's something else. But Trump exploded that hypersensitivity, that overweening awareness of identity markers. What is Donald Trump? He breaks the taboos now on the social issues. Millennials in particular are fierce about racism. They regard it as the sin.
- [26:06]
Califa Sanneh
Yes.
- [26:08]
Mark Bauerlein
For them to see someone say all these Mexican rapists, that crosses a taboo of race. And so it really is as if some extraordinary desecration were taking place right in front of him, and no one is doing anything about it.
- [26:36]
Califa Sanneh
Do you take some pleasure in the maybe unlikely fact that in this situation, you find yourself on the side of the desecrators?
- [26:45]
Mark Bauerlein
Well, you don't want to ridicule these people who are genuinely upset. But what you want to do is say, listen, the tension you're talking here about that Donald Trump has raised because he has broken these taboos. The taboos have become destructive to our society. We're losing the liberalism. The liberalism is endangered that everyone subscribes to, conservatives and liberals, too. The liberalism, I mean, that gives people a little space to think some bad thoughts. You've got to adjust your expectations here about human beings. You are utopians on human conduct. And there's a point at which the desire to make people behave is going to turn into coercion. That goes too far.
- [27:53]
Califa Sanneh
Do you think that's an issue that resonates as widely for those people who aren't university professors?
- [28:01]
Mark Bauerlein
I think in being in the campus zone, it exaggerates your sense of that. I think it's true. But I will say that everyone across America now has a sense of the campus as a place in which the social issues are reaching a saturation point of the ridiculous. They all watch Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity and here Rush Limbaugh on the right, and then Bill Maher, who is just as withering toward the college campuses as Bill O'Reilly is.
- [28:43]
Califa Sanneh
Yes.
- [28:44]
Mark Bauerlein
Americans who've never gone to college, who may be 50 years old, who are working class, they Just look at the campus and they say, you believe what's going on?
- [28:51]
David Remnick
I gotta say, he's a white man, straight, well employed. No one's painted a swastika on his car.
- [28:57]
Califa Sanneh
Not so far as we know.
- [28:58]
David Remnick
Is he the right guy to tell others? Don't be so sensitive?
- [29:02]
Califa Sanneh
Well, that whole question of, are you the right guy to say X, Y and Z to someone like him, that's precisely the problem. And again, I think he sees that the problem is that a certain way of talking about these issues, in his view, it relies on kind of shame and guilt to get people not to say things that they feel. And his view is that when you do that, you then inevitably create a reaction where people want to say things and people want to say the most outrageous things possible. You know, Barolin has a view that Trump's promise is that he can speak in an inclusive way about America, which he kind of does in his own way, but that he can do it without appealing to this notion of guilt, which Bowerlein sees as being, you know, kind of everywhere in our political discourse. One of the characteristics of political conversations among liberals and progressives in the Obama era was you had what I think of as a kind of English majorification of the political discourse, where so much of the political talk among liberals, among progressives, was kind of symbols and about rhetoric and about what words people were using. And this strikes me that one of the ironies here is that often when we're talking about Trump and you and I have just are talking about Trump right now, we find ourselves doing a similar thing. We find ourselves talking a lot about what he says, how he says it, what words he uses, and talking hardly at all about policies. I mean, I know this is the President elect, and it's easy to talk about him without even mentioning what his policies might be.
- [30:39]
Mark Bauerlein
You're right about that. People don't pay attention to policy. Part of this is because policies don't quite get down to meanings. Martin Luther King didn't say, I have a policy. No, he said, I have a dream. Republicans, they talk about tax rates. Okay, Tax rates, Never. They don't excite people. I mean, the wall. Who would think I'm going to build a wall? What do you mean, you're. What are you going to. Who's going to build the wall? How are you going to contract for it? What is Mexico going to do? All the policy details. What it's really about is, this is our country, this is our home. This is our home. It's going to have a boundary. I think that is really about a feeling of this is my place. It's harder for so many of them to believe that the more globalist, internationalist perspective is something that gives them a feeling of home.
- [31:50]
David Remnick
Baroline here sounds pretty dismissive of policy as such.
- [31:54]
Califa Sanneh
I mean, I suspect that part of what he's reacting to is recent elections, right? Is the idea that John McCain or Mitt Romney talking about things that do resonate among conservatives didn't really excite voters. And so there is part of it is maybe an acceptance that you need more bluster. You need to speak like the way Donald Trump does. And really, Bower Line takes the long view. You know, he's alert to the ironies of history and the ways in which all the things we do have all these unintended consequences. And he admits that the consequences of Trump's presidency will also be unintended, even for someone like him, who's relatively speaking. And he cites Hagel's idea about the right person coming along at the right moment in history.
- [32:42]
Mark Bauerlein
Remember Donald Trump? This is the key question. Donald Trump has been around for 25 years as a celebrity figure. He's flirted with being president two or three times in the past, and it's always laughed off the stage. Now, Donald Trump hasn't changed. Why this time? Why in 2016, it all clicked. It starts making you think like a Hegelian or a Marxist in terms of historical forces somehow coming together. And one person seems right for this moment.
- [33:13]
Califa Sanneh
He's the world historical figure.
- [33:14]
Mark Bauerlein
He's the world historical figure in Hegelian terms. That's right. Now, this is where I think we need theorists of social ritual to understand this kind of figure who in some folk traditions, the figure who always says the wrong thing, who does the wrong thing, the fool figure in medieval courts who has this capacity to say the thing that shouldn't be said but that everyone hears and knows it kind of needs to be said. That's how I look at this. And I won't be surprised if on many issues, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton would not have been that far apart art in their performance as president.
- [34:02]
David Remnick
Mark Bauerlein of Emory University, he talked with the New Yorker's Califa Sanneh, who's been writing about conservative politics and politics of all kinds. You can find his work@newyorkerradio.org this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. And just ahead, the novelist Michael Chabin on his favorite television show and staff writer Bill Finnegan on the crisis in Venezuela. Stick around. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Staff writer William Finnegan has been reporting on Latin American politics for decades. And Bill just recently returned from a trip to Venezuela. The economy in Venezuela is in a state of utter collapse. There's no other way to put it. Inflation has made the most basic necessities almost completely inaccessible. And people are waiting days for handouts from a failing government that seems unable to deal with the crisis at all. It's really the grimmest of situations. When Bill got back, he wanted to check in with an old friend, a Venezuelan living in New York, Francisco Nava.
- [35:33]
Bill Finnegan
So here we are in beautiful Hell's Kitchen, going to find my friend Francisco Nava, Venezuelan, who's lived here a long time, but he keeps close ties with family and friends back home. Lives with his mother, sings in a choir. His priest told him to do this interview. Hey, Francisco, is Bill.
- [36:01]
Francisco Nava
Thanks.
- [36:04]
Bill Finnegan
Hello.
- [36:07]
Francisco Nava
Ciela. Mother. 90 years old. If all the problems in Venezuela, they will take more than a year to tell you about it.
- [36:26]
Bill Finnegan
I met Francisco a long time ago. He used to be a barber. He cut my hair. And he's putting together care packs because it's for family and friends in Venezuela. And people in Venezuela need lots of basics, Food and medicine and I mean, right down the toilet. Paper.
- [36:47]
Francisco Nava
This stuff is so expensive. A person there has, I think, is between 15 and 20,000 Bolivares. A minimum salary for a month and a kilo Sugar. It costs 2,000 bolivares. Imagine. How can you, when you have a family of three kids, how can you live? I don't have enough money, you know, I'm retired now. I only have a little, but I share a little what I have, you know. But before December, I'm going to send these boxes here.
- [37:22]
Bill Finnegan
So Venezuela's in a profound crisis.
- [37:25]
David Remnick
Crisis.
- [37:27]
Bill Finnegan
Economic, political, humanitarian. I mean, the contrast between now and what Venezuela was 40 years ago, not that I was there 40 years ago, but there's intense nostalgia and people talk a lot about how it used to be. You can say that Venezuela is blessed and cursed with this tremendous oil reserve. They've got the largest proven oil reserves of any country in the world. I'm. I mean, in the 70s, the Concorde, remember the Concorde flew weekly from Paris to Caracas. I mean, you can still sort of feel the oil wealth sort of coursing through the city, but it's been really, really mismanaged. Oil prices dropped in 2014, and the bottom just fell out of the economy. And the result is massive food shortages. Production has just plummeted in Every area and things that Venezuela used to be self sufficient in, like rice, like beef. Long list of goods it no longer is. It now needs to import and it doesn't have the money to import.
- [38:34]
Francisco Nava
So each box that is £65 cost $160 to send. Yeah. So I had to go from here. We go into the ups, we have a tag and we put it. My mother, the one that packs everything and everything. Yeah.
- [38:53]
Bill Finnegan
Can we see what you're sending.
- [38:57]
Mark Bauerlein
Bill?
- [38:58]
Francisco Nava
Let me go to the bedroom.
- [39:01]
Bill Finnegan
Yeah.
- [39:01]
Francisco Nava
And bring the back. So she.
- [39:03]
Bill Finnegan
Okay. You know, the suitcase here is full of everything you can. I mean, band aids and Q tips.
- [39:24]
Francisco Nava
And cotton balls and cotton Hershey chocolate Q tips. Deodorants. They don't have deodorants. They don't have anything.
- [39:33]
Bill Finnegan
Quesonestas.
- [39:38]
Francisco Nava
Green peas.
- [39:39]
Bill Finnegan
Green peas, Aha. This is a big bag of pre cooked white cornmeal which is used to make arepas.
- [39:48]
Francisco Nava
Arepas is like a piece of bread, like a bagel, like a bread. And it's filled it up inside with cheese or anything that you wanted to put inside. So that was the food. That's the Venezuelan food. And people, this, this one you cannot find there. It's amazing. But this will fit family at least they will have some. It's not much, but it's a lot there.
- [40:14]
Bill Finnegan
Yeah.
- [40:15]
Francisco Nava
Well, that goes tomorrow, that one. Because, you know, every month I send.
- [40:20]
Bill Finnegan
One or two, so fabric, all the basics. That's great.
- [40:27]
Francisco Nava
Yeah, yeah. They delivered it to the door of the house of my sister.
- [40:33]
Bill Finnegan
Hugo Chavez was really charismatic by anybody's standards. He was a kind of telegenic populist and a great electioneer and ran for president in 98 and was easily elected. Venezuela had been enjoying a democracy for about 40 years at that point, and yet was experiencing increasing economic dysfunction, rising crime rates, had terrible corruption. So Chavez took over. He was a self proclaimed socialist and for some time he really delivered. He sold oil at a great discount to his neighbors, especially Cuba. And oil prices went up while he was in office. So he really had a lot of money to spread around. And he poured money out of the state oil company into health and education, housing. But he really raided the piggy bank, kind of drained the state oil company's coffers and the government's coffers for that matter, and sort of saved nothing for a rainy day. His vice president, Nicolas Maduro, barely sort of squeaked in and quickly held election after Chavez's death in 2013 and has become steadily less popular since. One of the craziest things One of the worst things about the situation, the emergency in Venezuela, is that the government refuses. And international aid, you know, Brazil, United States, United nations, all these charities, for.
- [42:16]
Francisco Nava
Them everything is good. They don't see it. It's like they covering the sun with a finger.
- [42:22]
Michael Chabon
Yeah.
- [42:30]
Bill Finnegan
And when Maduro came in, he ran as the son of Chavez, you know, hijo de Chavez. He's got a kind of a mystical streak. And he'll say that he gets instructions from Chavez, little birds sing to him, and Chavez in the afterlife telling Maduro what to do. Maduro's not a charismatic character, let us say an even worse economic manager than Chavez, which is really saying something. I mean, if this referendum was held, he has no chance of winning. So they've pretty much decided not to hold it. You know, just kind of deny Venezuelans the right to choose their leaders.
- [43:05]
Francisco Nava
And he doesn't want to listen to what is happening. Do the people want him out of there? He's not going to leave. He says, you kill me first, then I leave.
- [43:15]
Bill Finnegan
Yeah. You're talking about Nicolas Madurola. Yes, Nicolas Maduro, who denies that there's an emergency, who says we have the best health care system in the world, except maybe Cuba. This is while, you know, people are just dying in the hospital for lack of basic medicines, basic treatment. And some people say it's a matter of pride, Chavista, pride. We will not admit that our revolution has failed to this extent, that we won't accept this aid from the capitalists who want to make us look bad.
- [43:45]
Francisco Nava
My sister couldn't find her medication and she died. She died like 10 weeks ago because they didn't have the medication. She was 84 years old, but, you know, she needed a medication. Many people dying, many people dying.
- [44:03]
Bill Finnegan
The public hospitals, the government has even said that out of every three people who go into the public hospital, one dies in the hospital.
- [44:12]
Francisco Nava
Yeah, my brother, my. The brother of my sister in law, he was. He burned himself up and there were no medication. He got infested and he died. He died last Saturday.
- [44:28]
Bill Finnegan
There's no medication, no antibiotics, no anti inflammatories, nothing.
- [44:32]
Francisco Nava
No pain. Sterile guards, no pain, no nothing. Nothing. The most things that you need, they.
- [44:41]
Bill Finnegan
Don'T have it, you know, you can't. It's actually really difficult to visit a hospital, a public hospital now in Venezuela, most of them, La Guardia Nacional Enfuente y la Policia y Otros militares, they stop you from going in with machine guns.
- [44:59]
Mark Bauerlein
Yeah, yeah.
- [44:59]
Bill Finnegan
Like why? What is like. Nobody's trying to Invade the public hospital. Families are camped on the grounds or sleeping on the grounds of the hospital, trying to, you know, feed and help their loved ones and family members who are inside. What I learned from them was that those guys guarding the place are also bachaqueros. They're also. They're selling black market profiteers. They're selling medicines, they're selling medical supplies.
- [45:27]
Francisco Nava
A lot of people that they have, a lot of money is corrupted people. It's worse than being narcotrafficants and everything.
- [45:35]
Bill Finnegan
Venezuelans understandably complain about dictatorship and call Maduro a dictator and say it's a dictatorial regime. And quite understandably, their rights are being increasingly taken away. But at the same time, Venezuela has a terrible crime problem. Some of the worst violent crime rates in the world. Murder, robbery, rape, kidnapping. One of the most insecure places I've ever been. Second or third day I was there, second day I was there, I was sitting in a plaza in a little town near Caracas and a gunfight broke out. And, you know, people ran screaming. I mean, it's not something people sit around calmly with, but it was obviously pretty common. And one guy was killed, one guy was injured. A real dictator. Fidel Castro or something, I mean, would not tolerate one tenth this level of. Of disorder and public insecurity. The government really doesn't have control of the streets and organized crime does. So it's not a classic dictatorship. There just aren't any elections forthcoming. Thanks for showing us all this stuff.
- [46:56]
Francisco Nava
So happy when they will give these things to them. It's like the joy, the happiness when box arrives there. Waiting for the box, they call them. We're going to deliver the box tomorrow. It's like all the family has to be reunited in front of the box. Open the box. It's like Christmas. Yeah. It's amazing. Yeah.
- [47:20]
Bill Finnegan
Have you ever been there when one of your boxes arrived? No.
- [47:24]
Francisco Nava
No, but I know, I know. I know how. I know how people react to those things. I have everything, you know, I have everything. What do I need?
- [47:36]
Bill Finnegan
Yeah. You're comfortable here?
- [47:42]
Francisco Nava
Yeah, I'm healthy. You know.
- [47:55]
David Remnick
The New Yorker's William Finnegan with Francisco Nava. And I just wanted to mention that Bill and Francisco spoke quite recently, but the inflation in Venezuela is so horrible that some of the numbers Francisco mentioned are already a little off as of today, and they're worse. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and I'm David Remnick. The other day, I was lucky enough to get a visit from the novelist Michael Chabin, who lives with his Family in Berkeley, California. Michael's just published a new book called Moonglow.
- [48:28]
Michael Chabon
Hey, it's great to see you.
- [48:30]
Bill Finnegan
How are you?
- [48:30]
Michael Chabon
Good to see you, too.
- [48:31]
David Remnick
How are you? Fine. Michael, you're visiting us. It's a rare treat. We hardly ever get to see you. And not only you're visiting, but you're a bearer of gifts. You've got things to tell us, to recommend, and I'm all ears.
- [48:47]
Michael Chabon
Well, the first thing is this British series called the Crown. That is. I watched it. It's so good.
- [48:54]
Francisco Nava
Right?
- [48:54]
Califa Sanneh
But it's addictive.
- [48:55]
Michael Chabon
It's not just that it's good, it's uneven. It's good parts and bad parts. The cast is amazing. Some of the episodes are very well written. What we needed it for, and what I recommend it for.
- [49:07]
David Remnick
Now, this is the Netflix series done by the people who did the Queen.
- [49:10]
Michael Chabon
And Stephen Daldry directed the first. At least the first episode, if not the first two. It's so static. And yet as soon as we started to watch the second one, I was so grateful to be there because I compared it to watching an aquarium. Like, nothing happens. It moves at this glacial pace, and the stakes are so incredibly low. And it's something about that.
- [49:42]
David Remnick
Margaret can't marry her boyfriend.
- [49:44]
Michael Chabon
Exactly. The episode that really made me fall in love with the show because it was so meaningless on some level, was, I think it was the third episode called Windsor. And one of the main plot points in this episode was, would the children, once Elizabeth has, you know, become Queen, would the children keep their father's name, Mountbatten? Or would they adopt the royal family's name of Windsor? You're my wife. Taking. Taking my name is the law. It's the custom, not the. A custom practice so universal it might as well be the law. You can't do this. Am I to be the only man in the country whose wife and children don't take his name? You can't do this to Dickie. It will devastate him. You know that. You know how important it is to him. I've told him the royal house, Mountbatten is in the bag.
- [50:38]
David Remnick
That was a mistake.
- [50:39]
Sheila Kolhatkar
It's not.
- [50:41]
Michael Chabon
The name has to be Windsor, for stability. And that was the storm and the tempest of this episode.
- [50:52]
David Remnick
But it's about big things, too. And I confess, I watch this in one night and the rest of the next day. Don't tell my wife.
- [50:59]
Michael Chabon
She doesn't know yet.
- [51:01]
David Remnick
We won't tell her.
- [51:02]
Michael Chabon
Okay.
- [51:02]
David Remnick
And the idea that you're watching this thing, one big thing happens. A woman takes on the necessary ruthlessness of power.
- [51:10]
Michael Chabon
Yes. Right. And then Noah and then Elizabeth is the thing I said, that's like Game of Thrones with no sex, no violence. And instead of dragons, there are corgis.
- [51:20]
Bill Finnegan
Yeah.
- [51:20]
David Remnick
You can't have everything.
- [51:21]
Michael Chabon
Yeah. Because it's just. It is. It does end up being about power politics in some way, and alliances and people promising things and then not delivering them, turning their backs on each other and so on. But at this level of like, which handbag ought one wear when one is, you know, going out to Australia?
- [51:39]
David Remnick
It's.
- [51:40]
Michael Chabon
There's something very soothing.
- [51:41]
David Remnick
Well, it's kind of. And self help because, you know, you need those decisions, too. What else is on your mind?
- [51:47]
Michael Chabon
I'm the cook in the house and I am always on the lookout for new things to make or new recipes because I've been cooking for my family for, you know, 23, 24 years now. And even how many kids you have? We have four. Only two are still in the house.
- [52:03]
David Remnick
Right.
- [52:04]
Michael Chabon
And My son is 13, the youngest one. If I ever make the mistake of asking him what should I make for dinner tonight, he always says fried chicken. And I never make that choice because it sounds like I've made it before. It's a pain, it's a mess. And I always say no. This past couple weeks, I said yes, maybe. I think again, sort of in this comforting mode, trying to find some kind of thing that will console us all. And fried chicken sounded like it might be consoling, so I went to my go to for recipes, which is food52.com, the great website, and they have this buttermilk fried chicken recipe on there that is. I just, I can't recommend it highly enough. You. You rub the chicken pieces with a spice mixture and you keep them overnight in this mixture of like smoked paprika and some herbs and salt and pepper. And then you take it out and you dip it first in buttermilk, then in a flour mixture that contains that same spice profile, then back in the buttermilk. Here's where the secret comes in. And then back in the flour spice mixture. So it's.
- [53:09]
David Remnick
Where's the crunch bit twice.
- [53:11]
Michael Chabon
It's the double buttermilk with the flour, and then you put it in the hot fat and it. And typically with fried chicken, even if the crispy crust outside is incredible, the chicken inside, it could be dry, it's just chicken. But this, because it's been rubbed and sat in the fridge overnight, the meat itself has this incredible flavor. So you get this double.
- [53:32]
David Remnick
So we got the Queen of England, we got fried chicken and.
- [53:35]
Michael Chabon
And the third is a novel called Beetle Bone. It's by Kevin Barry, he's an Irish writer. And it is. It was just lying out on the table at Diesel Books in Oakland, California when I went in there the other day. And it's. It's a beautifully written novel about an imaginary escape that John Lennon makes in 1978. So two years before his death, he.
- [54:01]
David Remnick
He goes on a bender.
- [54:03]
Michael Chabon
Well, he's been on his bender and now he's sort of trying to recover and trying to figure out where. How to reintegrate himself into his life. And he runs off to visit this island that he bought off the coast of Ireland back in the heyday of the Beatles. In 68, he bought this island. I don't even know if that's really true, if John Lennon really did buy a tiny island. But it's so tiny and it's so remote, he can't even really remember where it is exactly. And he has a guide, a driver, an Irish driver. And it's just this prolonged conversation in a way between these two men. This damaged, most famous man in the world who's trying to find some kind of solace or comfort. And then this force of nature from the west of Ireland who's a jack of all trades.
- [54:51]
David Remnick
And repeat the title again. I want to make sure listeners hear it.
- [54:54]
Michael Chabon
Beetle Bone.
- [54:54]
David Remnick
Beetle Bone.
- [54:55]
Michael Chabon
Kevin Beetlebone.
- [54:56]
David Remnick
Sounds fantastic.
- [54:57]
Michael Chabon
It's so good.
- [54:57]
David Remnick
A little tv, a little chicken and a good book. What could be better?
- [55:00]
Michael Chabon
What could be better?
- [55:01]
David Remnick
Michael, thank you.
- [55:02]
Michael Chabon
Thank you, David.
- [55:03]
David Remnick
Michael Chabin. You can find his preferred recipe for fried chicken@newyorkerradio.org and that's it for the New Yorker Radio Hour this week. Thanks so much for joining us. I hope you have a great week ahead.
- [55:18]
Sheila Kolhatkar
The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Tsarina Endowment Fund.