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Podcast Host
This is the Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.
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Aaron Retica
I'm Aaron Retica. I am an editor at large for the Opinion section of the New York Times. I'm joined today by one of our columnists, Jamelle Bouie, who writes about politics, often putting it in historical context. He's been doing this for a long time, since he got here. But it feels particularly relevant in this moment as we see Donald Trump, of all people, turning to the past in a new and really a little bit surprising way. Instead of talking about what's great about America, making America great, he's not talking about the 1950s when he grew up, but he's talking about the late 1890s. Jamel, welcome.
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Jamelle Bouie
Oh, hello. Thank you for having me.
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Aaron Retica
I want to start with Donald Trump's newfound love of William McKinley, the 25th president of the United States. He name checked him in his inaugural address and we will restore the name of a great president, William McKinley, to.
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Jamelle Bouie
Mount McKinley, where it should be and where it belongs.
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Aaron Retica
He wants to rename Denali mountain in Alaska Mount McKinley, which was not changed by some kind of woke fiat. Jamel, what is going on? Why are we talking about McKinley?
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Jamelle Bouie
I think to start, I don't think Donald Trump has any broad vision that he is trying to invoke when he mentions William McKinley. I think it strains credulity to think that Donald Trump has thought seriously, seriously about William McKinley in a systematic way. I think what's mostly happening here is that he is, for a variety of reasons, familiar with the name. William McKinley sees McKinley as maybe sort of an important and prominent Republican president and wants to associate himself with McKinley. There are also substantive things that McKinley did that I think Trump is attracted to, like for example, tariffs. But I think this is less citing McKinley as a, you know, as an example in the way that you're. You might be trying to emulate and more like citing McKinley as a totem to state your aspirations for the kind of influence you think you want to have. I think for us as political observers, the late 19th century is just an interesting period in general because it bears more than a few similarities to our own moment. It is a time of just rapid cultural and economic and political change in the United States. It's a time of mass immigration and the emergence of a substantial backlash to that immigration. It is a time where there are new, huge concentrations of wealth in industries that did not exist, you know, 20, 30 years prior, and the owners of those industries, of those companies, the possessors of that wealth, had large amounts of close to unchecked political influence. So there's a lot there that is not the same, but relevant to us.
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Aaron Retica
The idea that the Gilded Age is something we should be aiming at. Right. Is something that I found kind of amazing. Right. And somehow we have gotten to a place where the idea that it's a new Gilded Age is almost a positive. So what is it about McKinley for Trump? What is he seeing here?
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Jamelle Bouie
So in addition to McKinley's sort of use of tariffs, and I do think 90% of it is just that Trump is sort of monomaniacally obsessed with tariffs. But the other thing is that the McKinley era marks the real beginnings of blossoming of. You could say it's not positive, but you know what I'm saying, of American imperialism. It's the point at which the United States is, you know, we fight the Spanish American War and occupy Cuba. It's when we begin our occupation in the Philippines, we are making interventions into Haiti. Yeah.
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Aaron Retica
Puerto Rico, too. Right.
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Jamelle Bouie
Puerto Rico, Guam. Right. Sort of the extended American territories that most people are familiar with these days. We come into possession of them during this period. And it's primarily an effort to open up new markets, obtain new raw materials for Americans, domestic industry.
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Aaron Retica
So it's not a key feature of Trumpism to be super subtle. Right. So there were up right in front at the inauguration. You know, there's Elon Musk, there's Jeff Bezos, there's the guy from Google, just Mark Zuckerberg, like an amazing array of, we'll call him tech capitalists. And he is explicit. Trump is explicit in his joy and triumph over them. Well, as everyone always says, bending the knee. Right. He said the other day that when he came around the first time, no one was his friend. And now everyone wants to be his friend. So I Want to get into some of the theories that are animating all this that you've been writing about. But what is happening here? What are they all doing there? What is he doing with them? How ominous is this development? Help us, Trump.
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Jamelle Bouie
Sort of like, they didn't want me back then, but now they want me. Just reminds me of the lyric from Still Tipping by Mike Jones, the song when I was popular, I was. When I was a teen. The line is, back then. Back then hoes didn't want me, Now I'm hot, hoes all on me. I think this is very funny, and it's basically the dynamic that we're describing. Okay, real answer, no.
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Aaron Retica
Although that was a good one, I think.
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Jamelle Bouie
I think, first of all, I think that's worth sort of factoring into all of this. It's just the fact that, like, Trump didn't win the popular vote last time. And so by not winning the popular vote, by entering office as sort of like a minority president, you could say first, this, like, stimulated a lot of opposition against him. And I think it created the sense that he is an aberration. Right? This is. This is a weird thing that happened. It'll pass and we'll get back to normalcy, we'll get back to business. But while he's there, there's no need to kind of pretend like he's anything other than an aberration. So we can align ourselves with the opposition, we can align ourselves with the resistance, as it were, even if it's a nominal alignment, even if it's purely symbolic and it's not going to harm us whatsoever. But now he's won. He won with the popular vote. He made a comeback despite everything. And I think this has created the sense that, oh, maybe this is just where the country is, and we have to get with the program, we have to get with the picture. In addition, there are real kind of material concerns for the tech industry as well. Over the last decade, we've seen, you know, first it was blockchain, then it was NFTs, now we're at AI. And it's clear to me, at least, that they're looking for ways to profit. They're not making this much money as they want to. They're deploying all kinds of new things in hopes that those will be the thing that unlock a new amount of value. And it's not clear that that's what's gonna happen. And with Trump, you have an opportunity to tilt the regulatory environment in their favor. You have an opportunity to engage in the time Honored tradition of just like going to the government coffers to make up for the fact that your business isn't making money. So I think that's a part of it too. Right. Like, Elon Musk has major government contracts. Jeff Bezos is looking for major government contracts. Mark Zuckerberg and other Silicon Valley types wants the government to stay out of the way of AI development, which they hope will be the next big moneymaker. Sam Altman just announced he's willing to play ball with Trump as well and hope to get new investments in the AI. There's, again, a very material concern happening, but I do think there's also an ideological aspect happening here, and that is going back to 2020. There you saw in Silicon Valley, in the tech industry, tech workers behaving like workers. And what I mean is behaving like people whose interests are not necessarily aligned with those of the owners of the firms at which they work, and they're beginning to make demands. Our colleague Ross Douthat did an interview with Marc Andreessen where Andreessen essentially says that he feared that there are mobs forming in the workplaces. That's fear of workers making claims of exerting pressure, of making demands on the basis of the fact that because they are workers, they can bring the work of the firm to a halt. I think radicalized a lot of Silicon Valley CEOs, and to some extent, this feels like rich owners of businesses opposed to worker militancy. News at 11. Dog bites man. But I think this is a real dynamic of it. And Trump is nothing if not virulently anti labor. He loves to talk of the workers as a kind of cultural class, but when it comes to the actual interest of the working class, he is as anti labor as they come.
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Aaron Retica
Right. So talk about the Gilded in the Gilded Age was in part just this overlay of gold. Right. And the Trump Tower. The Trump aesthetic has always been, you know, proto regal in some way. And lurking behind all this, there is a. I was gonna say theorist. I don't know if that's the right word, but lurking behind all this is a blogger who you just wrote about. He's not a front and center person. He's someone who, as you put it, influences the people who influence Trump, and that is Curtis Yarvin. I want to talk a little bit about how his ideas fit into all this. Could you just talk a little bit about who he is and why he matters? Sure.
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Jamelle Bouie
I mean, he basically was a blogger who built a following with this argument that the United States was sort of under an oppressive liberal totalitarianism, that this had captured all the institutions of society, that this was a threat to progress, progress, meaning technological progress of some sort. That the push for equality or egalitarianism was undermining our technological future, and that the only way to arrest this and to put America back on the path to greatness was to both run directly at that liberal totalitarianism and transition the United States away from democracy, however flawed it might be, to something more like a monarchy or an autocracy led by the tech elite. And to my mind, just like describing what he thinks explains why he became influential, like, you're telling wealthy Silicon Valley guys that they deserve to be the rulers. It's like, yeah, if I were a wealthy Silicon Valley guy, I'd be like, you know, I think this guy has some good, good ideas. I think he has some good thoughts, and I do think that's much of it. His writing style is filled with esoteric references. He kind of writes as if he has access to secret knowledge, and that kind of thing also is very appealing to people. He is an effective rhetorician in that he is able to capture the attention of the people whose attention he wants and then, if not persuade them, then kind of bring them along with his train of thought.
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Aaron Retica
And where would his train of thought go? I mean, he can't. You talked about the material appeal, but what is the philosophical appeal of the rejection of democracy and a return to this kind of monarchy, this sort of tech monarchy? What have they done that would make you think, oh, yes, let's put them in charge of everything?
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Jamelle Bouie
I think it's just the mythology of Silicon Valley that obviously many of the participants in that world have sort of taken on as being true and not simply marketing the mythology of Silicon Valley as a singular place of genius, of technological advancements, singular wills pushing society forward. So I think just wholesale adoption of that mythology as true might make this appealing. Part of Yarvin's work is sometimes winking at and often outright endorsing notions of racial hierarchy. All this idea that certain people are at the top, certain people are at the bottom, and this is the natural state of things. And I have no doubt that that is also appealing for some set of people themselves part of a natural elite. When it comes to sort of how much one could operationalize this. The path to making the United States a monarchy is a very difficult one. But giving undue influence to wealthy oligarchs, that's a thing you can do. Unraveling the kinds of regulations Laws, standards, constitutional settlements that have at least grounded the United States for the last half century as more egalitarian country is something you can do. So if you think of it less as can you make the US A monarchy? And more can you make the US Much less democratic and much more stratified across social and economic and political lines, then yeah, you can do that. That's where we were 100 years ago. That's where we were in the late 19th century.
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Aaron Retica
Right. So it comes back to that. So let's end on coming back to Trump. So, I mean, it's a suckers game, right, to talk about what Trump's political ideology is like, what's going on in his mind. Like, you know, we've talked a lot about McKinley, we talked about Yarvin. It's not like Trump is sitting around reading all this, thinking about it, and yet he is pushing hard to do exactly what you're talking about, right? That it's understood by everyone that everything's never going to be perfectly egalitarian, and yet the goal was to make it more egalitarian. Right. And now if the goal is to make it less egalitarian, that part about Trump we can understand. But you mentioned earlier that in response to the concentration of capital and interests and the convergence in the late 19th century, an enormous number of important movements that changed the way the 20th century was shaped emerged. Right. You had labor unions most of all, but also the feminist movement that led to women voting. But do you think there's any chance that this push in the direction of elites and elitism, under the mask of populism and. Right. Famously, Hamilton said that those who sought tyranny would first pay obsequious court to the poor. Is there hope that this will actually lead to some sort of American renewal as people realize they don't want to live like this?
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Jamelle Bouie
So I'm always wary of saying that anything must axiomatically lead to anything. There's no guarantee that there is a kind of egalitarian backlash that might put the United States back on what I would think is the right track. But I think it is true that however much our political system may become undemocratic, we remain a country with a very vibrant democratic culture where political dissent and resistance, lowercase r, are just a part of American cultural life. So as this agenda moves forward, I would expect it to seed perhaps movements that are responding directly to it, that are attempting to make good on an egalitarian promise. And I would expect those movements to make some traction. The thing I think to remember is that the time from making traction to finding any meaningful success can be quite long. You're about to list through some of the groups that emerge from this period. The NAACP emerges in this period. And of course, it's a half century between the emergence of the NAACP and Brown v. Board. So this is all to say that politics doesn't end, history doesn't stop moving. Things continue going, human activity continues, human agency is real. And so the people in power now will overreach. People in power always do, and people out of power will respond to that overreach. And it remains to be seen what those responses look like, how they organize themselves, what they mean for us politically and culturally. But I think at the same time, it's important to remember that although nothing is forever, things can last a pretty long time.
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Aaron Retica
Okay, well, that seems like a perfect place for us to end. Jamel, thank you very, very much for taking the time to talk to us and for providing your incredible insight to help us see where we're going.
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Jamelle Bouie
Oh, it's my pleasure.
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Podcast Host
If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. This show is produced by Derek Arthur, Sophia Alvarez, Boyd, Vishaka Durba, Phoebe Lett, Christina Samulewski, and Gillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin, Allison Bruzek and Annie Rose Strasser. Engineering, mixing and original music by Isaac Jones, sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Saburo and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Aman Sahota. The Fact Check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Audience strategy by Shannon Basta, Christina Samulewski and Adrian Rivera. The executive producer of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose, Dresser.