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Speaker 8: All right, Sean Griffith, Welcome to the Jay Burdon Show.
Speaker 9: How you doing man, I'm doing great. Thanks so much
Speaker 9: for having me.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I'm excited to have you on. It's funny you
Speaker 8: sent me a pre production version of this piece, and
Speaker 8: then very shortly afterwards I saw it again in Chronicles,
Speaker 8: which is a magazine I read quite regularly. And so
Speaker 8: before we get into the article you've read, who are
Speaker 8: you and what do you do well?
Speaker 10: I'm a law professor. I'm a law professor at Fordham
Speaker 10: Law School in New York City. I've been a law
Speaker 10: professor for something like twenty five years. My area is
Speaker 10: corporate law, which isn't as political or at least didn't
Speaker 10: used to be as political as some other areas of
Speaker 10: the law, but these days it is, and the politics
Speaker 10: enters through this idea of ESG or environmental social governance
Speaker 10: and what some people call the woke corporation. And so
Speaker 10: the essay that I sent to you is an attempt
Speaker 10: to explain the persistence of ESG and corporate wokeism.
Speaker 11: Yeah.
Speaker 8: It's an interesting angle because a lot of people who
Speaker 8: I don't particularly enjoy define themselves in opposition to woke
Speaker 8: You see, obviously the woke left, but also this new
Speaker 8: emergent phrase, the woke right, and their conception is that wokeness,
Speaker 8: whatever you want to call it, is inherently Marxist. They
Speaker 8: are one and the same. And again sort of playing
Speaker 8: Desil Devil's advocate here, If communism and wokeness are synonymous,
Speaker 8: how can a corporate corporation corporate corporation, How can a
Speaker 8: big corporation go woke?
Speaker 9: Yeah?
Speaker 10: I think that's an interesting question. You know, I think
Speaker 10: that the question presents itself as a kind of a paradox.
Speaker 10: On the on the one hand, wokeism is persistent. Right,
Speaker 10: so we have a new administration, but we still the
Speaker 10: woke hasn't gone away, at least in the corporate world.
Speaker 10: I saw a statistic the other day that something like
Speaker 10: fifty or sixty percent of a fortune five hundred have
Speaker 10: board level reporting to their DEI departments. And there are
Speaker 10: all these big corporations that are you know, that are
Speaker 10: that are resisting the pushing to eliminate DEI.
Speaker 9: And they're hiring and promotion operations.
Speaker 10: And you can certainly see wocism still in some consumer brands,
Speaker 10: most most obviously maybe the NFL. So it seems like
Speaker 10: it's a persistent phenomenon. It's not just that it came
Speaker 10: up in the first place. But at the same time,
Speaker 10: it doesn't seem like it's entirely sincere. So when I
Speaker 10: talk two business people, CEOs, you know, they'll often say
Speaker 10: things like, oh, you know, I'm not very political. I
Speaker 10: don't consider myself ideological. It's not really who I am,
Speaker 10: you know. I'm just about doing the right thing for
Speaker 10: the corporation. Even when you talk to academics about ESG
Speaker 10: or woke corporatism, they're just like, Hey, isn't this just
Speaker 10: a some words that we have to say so that
Speaker 10: we can get back to business as usual And So
Speaker 10: that's kind of a paradox, right. You would think if
Speaker 10: the thing was insincere, it wouldn't be persistent, or you
Speaker 10: would think that if the thing was persistent, it couldn't
Speaker 10: it would have to be sincere. And it seems like
Speaker 10: those two things are butting up against each other. So
Speaker 10: the essay is really attempt to explain that paradox, and
Speaker 10: the way that I explain it is that wokeism is
Speaker 10: a form of managerialism. It's a necessary iteration of the
Speaker 10: current managerial elite.
Speaker 8: It's an interesting thing you point out because, look, I'm
Speaker 8: a full time internet person now, for whatever that's worth.
Speaker 8: But I did work in the corporate world, and one
Speaker 8: of the things that was very striking to me is
Speaker 8: how often it's sort of the business equivalent of having
Speaker 8: kids to save the relationship, where it's something you pull
Speaker 8: out when things aren't going well. For instance, my last
Speaker 8: real corporate job, the company ended up going under, but
Speaker 8: really about a month and a half before, when the
Speaker 8: writing was on the wall, everyone on the sales side,
Speaker 8: which is where I worked, was painfully aware that we're
Speaker 8: getting shell ACKed. And the big pivot was a pivot
Speaker 8: to diversity. We had hired this range of DEI consultants,
Speaker 8: and so I wonder if part of it is that
Speaker 8: it is DEI diversity. All of that has entered this
Speaker 8: level of best practices where this is simply things that
Speaker 8: successful corporations do. We are not successful, we don't have this.
Speaker 8: So clearly this is part of the transformation into a
Speaker 8: successful business. Now, obviously you and I understand that that's
Speaker 8: not the case. But to me and I'm glad you
Speaker 8: tied it to managerialism, it has become for managers, for
Speaker 8: the people who direct almost every company. It's become one
Speaker 8: of those key performance indicators, right, those metrics that determine
Speaker 8: whether or a company is successful or not. So in
Speaker 8: the same way that no one really questions why we
Speaker 8: want to be more profitable this year than last. It's
Speaker 8: not quite at that level, but it's a similar level
Speaker 8: of sort of received wisdom. If you see what I'm
Speaker 8: getting at, Sean, I do.
Speaker 9: I think you know.
Speaker 10: Your point is that there are all these departments essentially
Speaker 10: inside corporations that do wokeism.
Speaker 9: And that's true.
Speaker 10: It's basically ingrained as part of the corporate structure, and
Speaker 10: which explains to some degree why it's so hard to eradicate.
Speaker 10: On the other hand, the managers, if they wanted to,
Speaker 10: the CEOs of the corporations that you're describing, could just
Speaker 10: be like, well, we've got to cut costs. We've got
Speaker 10: to cut them somewhere. Let's cut them in the in
Speaker 10: the DEI department or whatever. And they seem not to
Speaker 10: do that. That seems to be a move that they're
Speaker 10: loath to do, and so there must be something there, right,
Speaker 10: There's something about how these things that seem like obvious
Speaker 10: things for the chopping block don't tend to go there,
Speaker 10: and I think that's in the nature of managerialism itself.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I think that you're entirely right. And by the way,
Speaker 8: for those wondering, because I will always get comments on this.
Speaker 8: The reason you can see I'm looking at something in
Speaker 8: the other window. It's not me scrolling Twitter. It's me
Speaker 8: referencing the article.
Speaker 12: Right.
Speaker 8: I do actually do my homework every once in a while.
Speaker 8: But you're entirely correct there. You mentioned the history of managerialism,
Speaker 8: and to me, I'm not nearly as well read on
Speaker 8: this subject as you are. But it goes back to
Speaker 8: Burnham's The Managerial Revolution, and he talks about the transition
Speaker 8: from capitalism to managerialism. For those who aren't familiar, he
Speaker 8: was writing in the thirties talking about the death of capitalism,
Speaker 8: which involved the death of the capitalist. At that time,
Speaker 8: there was a time where you could go to Ford
Speaker 8: Motor Company, walk up to the penthouse suite and there'd
Speaker 8: be a guy named Ford there who was in charge
Speaker 8: of it, sort of this baronial figure. It was almost
Speaker 8: feudal arrangement, and that was replaced due to any number
Speaker 8: of financial or technical innovations with managers joint stock, you know,
Speaker 8: the idea that no one really owns the entirety of it,
Speaker 8: and so who runs it, well, these managers for hire,
Speaker 8: and what Burnham describes and again I think what you're
Speaker 8: getting at there is that the system becomes self interested.
Speaker 8: Managers are interested in themselves, interested in people like them,
Speaker 8: and the fact that you know, their sort of jobs
Speaker 8: continue on continue being highly compensated. And so it really
Speaker 8: is like DEI and H. Let's be honest, HR is
Speaker 8: just DEI from a different era. They become entrenched interests
Speaker 8: and they become not for the corporation but for the
Speaker 8: managers essential both because they enable the managerial apparatus to
Speaker 8: run ever more minute parts of the office of the
Speaker 8: corporation to increase their control. But also it is an
Speaker 8: element of patronage, right, Those are good, high paying jobs, which,
Speaker 8: let's be honest, in the case of DEI, don't seem
Speaker 8: to be particular, really strenuous, and so like anything else,
Speaker 8: there is a sort of client patron relationship there. Am
Speaker 8: I overstating the case, Sean, I.
Speaker 9: Don't think so.
Speaker 10: I think that you're right there. There's at least two
Speaker 10: things going on there, right. The wocism, if for whatever
Speaker 10: you want to call it, it sort of justifies it
Speaker 10: has a role in justifying the existence of certain managerial folks, right.
Speaker 10: So it most obviously that would be your hiring, your
Speaker 10: DEI hiring department and so on, but also the people
Speaker 10: who implement those policies that are maybe a little bit
Speaker 10: above that department in the hierarchy, who are doing those things.
Speaker 10: So it's a thing to do, right, So I call
Speaker 10: it in the article a forever project. It's a perfect
Speaker 10: project for a manager because it's a project that you
Speaker 10: can always work towards but never achieve. But more importantly,
Speaker 10: maybe you can measure incremental movements towards that goal and goal,
Speaker 10: whatever it is, and get compensated for it, or at
Speaker 10: least pat it on the back for it by whoever
Speaker 10: it is that's patting you on the back.
Speaker 9: So it justifies there existence.
Speaker 10: It gives them a sort of a perpetual employment, perpetual
Speaker 10: goals to work towards. And that's true, I think, in
Speaker 10: the public and private sector, right, So that describes the
Speaker 10: managerial goals of the administrative state in the public sector.
Speaker 10: It also describes, let's say, the managerial goals of a
Speaker 10: big giant corporation in the private sector. I love the
Speaker 10: Burnham stuff, and I totally agree with everything that you said,
Speaker 10: and your characterization of it is exactly right. What I
Speaker 10: think is interesting is that it goes back even before Burnham,
Speaker 10: to a book called The Modern Corporation Private Property by
Speaker 10: burleyan Means, which is like a nineteen thirty two book
Speaker 10: which is still referred to in contemporary corporate law classes
Speaker 10: like which I teach, and we teach it in we
Speaker 10: cite it for the proposition of the separation of ownership
Speaker 10: and control. So burleyan Means in the early thirties, notice
Speaker 10: that those big corporations, they're very large, and they've outgrown
Speaker 10: the size to where a single shareholder like Ford in
Speaker 10: your example, could exert any control over them. And and
Speaker 10: they are so they're large, and their control is separated
Speaker 10: from ownerships. So the capital contributors aren't really in charge anymore.
Speaker 10: It's this other class of managers, as you say, now,
Speaker 10: burleyan Means call this the quasi public corporation. And their
Speaker 10: argument is that that's totally different from any other form
Speaker 10: of private property, and therefore it entitles the government to
Speaker 10: come in and run those companies for like stakeholders. Right,
Speaker 10: So this is kind of like what some people now
Speaker 10: call stakeholder capitalism.
Speaker 9: When we when when we.
Speaker 10: Talk when we refer back to Burley and Means, these
Speaker 10: days we refer back to the separation of ownership and control,
Speaker 10: But most people don't refer back to the to the
Speaker 10: stakeholder capitalism part. But Burnham, interestingly in The Managerial Revolution,
Speaker 10: he cites Burlean Means and he says, these guys were right,
Speaker 10: like they had that they had the right idea. The
Speaker 10: separation of ownership and control is happening like they're their
Speaker 10: historical demonstration, their economic demonstration, or that fact is true.
Speaker 10: But then Burnham says they didn't draw the logical conclusion
Speaker 10: that this is actually a revolutionary event. Just like a
Speaker 10: bourgeois capitalism replaced the hereditary monarchy or aristocracy as the
Speaker 10: governing class, this is this other class supplanting capital right,
Speaker 10: supplanting the ownership class as the governing class in the world.
Speaker 10: And then he had examples in the United States, Western Europe,
Speaker 10: and the Soviet Union where he's trying to show that
Speaker 10: in spite of the surface differences between those regimes, they're
Speaker 10: actually all running the same code.
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Speaker 9: It's managerialism. It's the separation of ownership and control.
Speaker 10: It's the liberation of managers from their controlling inputs.
Speaker 8: And it's an interesting thing obviously, you know. Orwell's nineteen
Speaker 8: eighty four is written largely in response to James Burnham,
Speaker 8: and you know, as much as my sympathies are with
Speaker 8: the span soldier who shot him, you know, Orwell brings
Speaker 8: up some interesting things there, and you know, one of
Speaker 8: them is this idea of these three super states opposed
Speaker 8: one to another, sometimes in an unstable alliance, but ultimately
Speaker 8: the same structure, ultimately directed in the same way. And
Speaker 8: to me, this is sort of one of the the
Speaker 8: primary errors of to be kind shall we say, a
Speaker 8: previous era of conservative many who are right now in
Speaker 8: the sort of anti woke coalition because they're so wrapped
Speaker 8: up in the dichotomy of the Cold War, which we
Speaker 8: understand was a real event and one that, to be honest,
Speaker 8: threatened the existence of human life. But also that dichotomy
Speaker 8: between communism and capitalism, or say, is not nearly as
Speaker 8: deep as many like to pretend. And also going forward,
Speaker 8: that dichotomy does not describe the current relationship with the
Speaker 8: whatever you want to call the woke mind virus, as
Speaker 8: the mean goes, Because you're completely correct, this is this
Speaker 8: managerial revolution is a revolution. It is a dramatic departure.
Speaker 8: But there is no inconsistency with this fusion of woke
Speaker 8: ideology and shareholder capitalism or managerialism, because ultimately they're pretty
Speaker 8: much not the same, but very much related. And you
Speaker 8: see the hatred from both the managerial class and the wokesters,
Speaker 8: if we could use that term towards the closest things
Speaker 8: we have to modern day capitalists, someone like Elon Musk,
Speaker 8: who fair enough you can buy stock in many of
Speaker 8: his companies, but he owns his companies in a much
Speaker 8: more definite way than most other CEOs, that most other leaders.
Speaker 8: And look, this is not supposed to be a you
Speaker 8: know what, this is not supposed to be sort of
Speaker 8: an acomium on Elon Musk. He certainly has many personality
Speaker 8: flaws we don't need to get into. But it's interesting
Speaker 8: that much of the hatred towards Elon Musk seemingly has
Speaker 8: very little to do with what he actually does or says.
Speaker 8: It is his stance as being outside of that managerial framework,
Speaker 8: again not entirely, look like we understand that his corporations
Speaker 8: are still run by managers, but he is a monarchical
Speaker 8: figure in that way. You know, he is the guy
Speaker 8: who decides the direction of his companies. Again not necessarily
Speaker 8: in the same way that Henry Ford could have, but
Speaker 8: still it's a different it's a different arrangement than one
Speaker 8: often found. And I think that that explains why so
Speaker 8: many disparate people hate him, or seemingly disparate, because again,
Speaker 8: it really is a like, I mean, we could even say,
Speaker 8: like a class based disdain. You see what I'm getting
Speaker 8: at there, Professor Griffin, I.
Speaker 10: Do I like all that? I mean, I guess there's
Speaker 10: a bunch of pieces. So let me see if I
Speaker 10: can put a couple of different ones together. I think
Speaker 10: that you were right to mention the Cold War. You know,
Speaker 10: when you think back to sort of prior managerial projects,
Speaker 10: I think we have an interesting question that we should consider,
Speaker 10: which is why is ESG and wokeism the current managerial project,
Speaker 10: which I think is hard to answer, but it's something
Speaker 10: we're thinking about. But there are definitely prior managerial projects,
Speaker 10: and the Cold War is one, right that is, and
Speaker 10: think about how the Cold War was fought. It was
Speaker 10: not fought with like, you know, a bunch of like
Speaker 10: separate business managers working on their own in separately and independently,
Speaker 10: like in a free market way. To deal with like
Speaker 10: the threat of Soviet communism, no where was a sort
Speaker 10: of a centrally managed central intelligence agency operation to undermine
Speaker 10: the Soviet Union. There's sort of a central coordinated way
Speaker 10: to think about it. It was a problem that needed
Speaker 10: coordinated administration to solve. The Second World War from our perspective,
Speaker 10: the US perspective, was a a large problem that needed
Speaker 10: coordinated administration to solve. Right the army, I read this biography.
Speaker 10: I think it was a Omar Bradley one time and
Speaker 10: the title of the biography was the Organizer in Chief,
Speaker 10: or maybe it was even the Manager in Chief, suggesting
Speaker 10: that Bradley's primary attribute and why he was a great
Speaker 10: general in the Second World War was that he was
Speaker 10: such a good manager. So a lot of like that giant,
Speaker 10: massive military effort, the coordinated economy that went into winning
Speaker 10: the Second World War, the administration of the military across
Speaker 10: different continents was a managerial project run by managers. Those
Speaker 10: generals were managers, not necessarily war fighters. And then the
Speaker 10: Cold War is a definite managerial project. But then these
Speaker 10: projects are left and right, so you might think of
Speaker 10: both of those as a little bit right coded. But
Speaker 10: like the Great Society, all this sort of war on poverty,
Speaker 10: all those are managerial projects which are sort of co
Speaker 10: coordinated problem solving.
Speaker 9: And I think that.
Speaker 10: That's an interesting that continuity of managerialism going back to
Speaker 10: the forties is an interesting thing to remark upon. I
Speaker 10: think the interesting thing in front of us now, though,
Speaker 10: is like why this project, like what what what about
Speaker 10: managerialism has made it necessary to be a project focused
Speaker 10: on I don't know, anti racism, gender norms, uh, perpetual
Speaker 10: self sexual liberationism or something whatever you however you want
Speaker 10: to think about those nested issues that are at the core,
Speaker 10: why are those the the subjects of of of managerialism now?
Speaker 10: And I think one of the reasons that Elon has
Speaker 10: hated is that he does not display those values. And
Speaker 10: it's and I don't I think that, as you were saying, Astutelee,
Speaker 10: he's kind of the controller of Tesla. I mean, if
Speaker 10: I wanted to nerd out on Delaware corporate law, which
Speaker 10: I will not do, I would tell you that there
Speaker 10: is a there's a dispute in Delaware about whether where
Speaker 10: Tesla was formerly incorporated, about whether Elon actually controls Tesla.
Speaker 10: But he is close to a controller of Tesla, for sure.
Speaker 10: And and he is not an ordinary CEO in the
Speaker 10: way that that Jamie Diamond at JP Morgan is an
Speaker 10: ordinary CEO. And so Elon has certain kinds of power
Speaker 10: inside his organization that other CEOs don't have. I like
Speaker 10: the I like what you were saying. He's sort of
Speaker 10: more monarchical than managerial, and he as a result of that,
Speaker 10: doesn't have to toe the line of the managerial orthodoxy,
Speaker 10: which is all of this woke ESG stuff.
Speaker 8: Yeahs, as far as the question of why this project
Speaker 8: over anything else. Sort of paraphrasing my buddy Arun's book, right,
Speaker 8: the Total State, he talks about how you're the This
Speaker 8: sort of managerial system is sort of organic, right, It
Speaker 8: seeks to grow in expand and really it is an
Speaker 8: expansion of control into ever more minute aspects of the
Speaker 8: human experience. Obviously, you know, with a great number of
Speaker 8: you know, the laws coming out of the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 8: you have an injection of management into freedom of association
Speaker 8: you know. Later, obviously we have this applied to the
Speaker 8: War between the sexes. We mentioned HR earlier. But it
Speaker 8: effectively creates another sort of deeper apparatus for control when
Speaker 8: you think to the sort of things that are often
Speaker 8: mentioned in these you know, DEI seminars. Obviously you have
Speaker 8: the personnel question, which is from my perspective, creating a
Speaker 8: patronage network within the workplace, right, people who understand even
Speaker 8: if you know implicitly that they are there because of
Speaker 8: the DEI and other things. But also, I mean, I
Speaker 8: think that it's a natural extension from the perspective of
Speaker 8: ever greater control over just human existence, right, the idea
Speaker 8: that things that were previously not to say, a political
Speaker 8: in the sense that people didn't have opinions about them,
Speaker 8: but outside of the realm of politics have entered into
Speaker 8: it and entered into management. Right, things that were previously organic,
Speaker 8: were previously mediated consocially and informally become part of you
Speaker 8: could say, like the political or managerial apparatus. It's not
Speaker 8: a fully formulated thought. And I'm gribbing from a book
Speaker 8: that I read two years ago, so you know, don't
Speaker 8: don't don't crucify me for it, But that's I think
Speaker 8: at least one element to it.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I like Oron's book, and I think he's got
Speaker 10: He's onto something for sure. I think for here's a
Speaker 10: question that I think we could pose that to try
Speaker 10: to draw, to draw some lines between maybe Oron's book
Speaker 10: and this essay and other ideas. Could you have a
Speaker 10: right wing managerialism? I think is a question that we
Speaker 10: could We could ask like, is there or is there
Speaker 10: something about managerialism that codes left? And so my answer
Speaker 10: to that question probably Orn's answer to but I'm gonna
Speaker 10: give my answer and he can speak for himself, is
Speaker 10: that there there there, you know, Burnham to go back
Speaker 10: to Burnham for a second. Burnham certainly thought that managerialism
Speaker 10: could be right coded.
Speaker 9: Right, so he treats.
Speaker 10: European fascism as a form of of managerialism, and so
Speaker 10: there's that we should acknowledge that. And maybe you could
Speaker 10: say that the Second World War and the Cold War
Speaker 10: were right wing projects and they were managerial projects. So
Speaker 10: it's possible that there could be some forms of right
Speaker 10: wing managerialism in the past. I don't know, but I
Speaker 10: think that you can't really have sustained right wing managerialism
Speaker 10: for for two reasons. One reason is theoretical and one
Speaker 10: reason is more practical.
Speaker 9: So the theoretical.
Speaker 10: Reason is and I think you were getting at this,
Speaker 10: like what is the defining.
Speaker 9: Trait of the left, Like what does the left want?
Speaker 8: What is it?
Speaker 9: What is it after? What is its goal?
Speaker 10: And I think it's something like perpetual problem solving in
Speaker 10: order to make things better for mankind? Right, Like, So
Speaker 10: if you go back to like Francis Bake and Enlightenment philosophy,
Speaker 10: their idea is, look, we're going to stop doing all
Speaker 10: this science and philosophy to like live virtuously or whatever.
Speaker 10: Like that doesn't mean or figure out the good, interrogate
Speaker 10: the good. We're going to direct philosophy and knowledge towards
Speaker 10: enlightening man's state, right, making things better, right, making their
Speaker 10: material conditions better. So from that point onward, the left
Speaker 10: project is sort of to make life easier for human beings.
Speaker 10: And so the motivating energy on the left is always
Speaker 10: to like incrementally improve things through coordinated administration, and that
Speaker 10: I think is the managerial project par excellence. If everything
Speaker 10: is a problem to be solved through coordinated administration, then
Speaker 10: everything comes into managerialism and it becomes something to work on.
Speaker 10: Whereas the motivating energy on the right, I think is
Speaker 10: something else, and we can talk about what that could be,
Speaker 10: and maybe it's something like hierarchy and transcendence. To put
Speaker 10: it somewhat provocatively, right, the left, the managerial left, wants
Speaker 10: to save mankind, but the right knows that mankind was
Speaker 10: saved two thousand years ago by God's intervening grace.
Speaker 9: Right, if you wanted to be really provocative.
Speaker 10: But the left has got a project all the time,
Speaker 10: and the right it's not clearly about a project.
Speaker 9: It's more about.
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Speaker 10: Hierarchy experiencing transcendence through hierarchy. Right, So there's a theoretical
Speaker 10: problem that's a theoretical obstacle to sustain right wing managerialism,
Speaker 10: Like it just doesn't fit. We're not always trying to
Speaker 10: solve problems, And insofar as the way that managerialism works
Speaker 10: is by always solving material problems, it wants to take
Speaker 10: on those characteristics of the left. So that's a theoretical
Speaker 10: objection to the possibility of right wing managerialism. The practical
Speaker 10: ejection is just these days, like left liberalism is the
Speaker 10: cultural code of the elite. And so if the if
Speaker 10: the managerial elite UH want to get into positions of
Speaker 10: authority in the managerial state, Uh, they need to they
Speaker 10: need to you know, internalize that code. And and as
Speaker 10: a pragmatic matter, it happens in you know, three different ways.
Speaker 10: It happens at school, right, So UH, to get into
Speaker 10: the managerial elite, you have to be credentialed through elite schools.
Speaker 10: And as everyone your entire audience knows, elite schools are
Speaker 10: a place of you know, intellectual conformity, left intellectual conformity.
Speaker 10: So you have to come out with a credential from
Speaker 10: that credentialing institution inside the manage the organization. To rise
Speaker 10: to positions of authority in the managerial uh organization, you
Speaker 10: have to survive successive promotion tournaments, right, And so in
Speaker 10: a promotion tournaments, the question is are you going to
Speaker 10: get promoted or is it going to be some other person?
Speaker 10: And that's an opportunity for you to be well more competent,
Speaker 10: would be the nice way of putting it. But the
Speaker 10: other possibility is other factors could enter into that promotion dynamic,
Speaker 10: and those factors can be ideological factors. So if you
Speaker 10: don't conform ideologically to the norms of the organization or
Speaker 10: to the norms of the culture, generally, you don't survive
Speaker 10: in the promotion tournament to move up. And as those
Speaker 10: organizations are more and more woke, those tournaments are more
Speaker 10: and more woke. And you know, this is the reason
Speaker 10: that you know, white men complain about their inability to
Speaker 10: rise within.
Speaker 9: Corporate hierarchies these days.
Speaker 10: And then the last one would be, you know, let's
Speaker 10: say some some right wing person, some conservative gets to
Speaker 10: the top of a managerial organization and decides it's time
Speaker 10: to raise the Jolly Roger. Well, that person is going
Speaker 10: to be denounced, terminated, and probably canceled unless they have
Speaker 10: some insurance against that. And the only insurance against that
Speaker 10: is to own the organization like Elon does.
Speaker 9: Right, only that level of.
Speaker 10: Actual access to capital provides for safety. I don't think
Speaker 10: that Jamie Diamond has the same level of safety in
Speaker 10: that sense as Elon. But anyway, those practical those practical
Speaker 10: hurdles sort of make it impossible for right wing managerialism
Speaker 10: to exist. So basically left wing left liberalism is encoded
Speaker 10: within the managerial organization, and that's the world that.
Speaker 9: We live in.
Speaker 8: Yeah, so there's a lot there. I think if we
Speaker 8: examine that idea of is it possible to have a
Speaker 8: right wing managerial regime. I'm glad you brought up the
Speaker 8: examples of the European fascists, the prominent mid century German regime.
Speaker 8: But to me, I think that it's sort of up
Speaker 8: for debate in my mind whether that is a possible future,
Speaker 8: Like we could have right wing managerial fascism. Not something
Speaker 8: I would advocate for per se, but just saying like
Speaker 8: that is a mathematical possibility. I wonder if one could ask,
Speaker 8: I guess if our current situation is a result of
Speaker 8: sort of living in the house that FDR built, that
Speaker 8: this great progressive figure sort of entrenches the managerial regime
Speaker 8: in America, and ultimately our government still exists in FDR mode.
Speaker 8: Right The French would kind of number their republics. We don't.
Speaker 8: But effectively it's sort of a new dispensation, some might say,
Speaker 8: of America. That's one point, and I'm actually not convinced
Speaker 8: either way. On that question, is it possible to have
Speaker 8: a right wing managerial regime. But you're quite right to
Speaker 8: bring up the question of intragroup competition and also of status,
Speaker 8: because I think that the status question is incredibly important
Speaker 8: to this. You mentioned that all of these institutions which
Speaker 8: both provide accreditation, which is both a key to enter,
Speaker 8: you know, different kind of tears of the managerial regime,
Speaker 8: but also provide status, and I think that that cannot
Speaker 8: be underestimated. To kind of pull a trick out of
Speaker 8: my Marxist hat here, I think that the the middle
Speaker 8: class is incredibly interested in social status and social standing.
Speaker 8: And for instance, you see this with there's certain changes
Speaker 8: in American society. Gay marriage is unpopular before Berga fell,
Speaker 8: it becomes popular the law of the land, and all
Speaker 8: of a sudden we see that sixty forty split reverse
Speaker 8: because again, you know it is it is endorsed by
Speaker 8: the government. It is a normal quote unquote, actually we
Speaker 8: could just say normal and statistical sense opinion now and
Speaker 8: it becomes widely held. And I think that your your
Speaker 8: comments again about the necessity the necessary level of capital
Speaker 8: to insulate yourself from this, I mean, look, that's entirely correct, Like,
Speaker 8: look all the Shenaniganst. Peter Teal has had to go through. Right,
Speaker 8: He's he's in California. He's clearly fighting off the kind
Speaker 8: of encroachment of the Wolke regime, and he's resorted to
Speaker 8: all kinds of crazy stuff. Right, He's required to have
Speaker 8: a woman on his board, and he finds some random
Speaker 8: reporter who's never sat out a boardroom in his life,
Speaker 8: that's loyal to him personally and says, all right, she's
Speaker 8: my woman. So point is like, that's not something that
Speaker 8: that sort of entry is of just working your way up.
Speaker 8: And then, as you said, raising the Jollie Roger, it
Speaker 8: is not possible for any number of reasons. I guess
Speaker 8: I'm kind of spoiling this, but I will have Will
Speaker 8: hild On soon, who's you know, writes quite a bit
Speaker 8: about this, to talk exactly about the sort of capital controls,
Speaker 8: artificial or not, that are put in place to keep
Speaker 8: that exact thing from happening, to keep there from being
Speaker 8: a conservative company, or even a company that puts out
Speaker 8: a right of center product, you know, whether entertainment or not.
Speaker 8: And I realized I threw a bunch of you there.
Speaker 8: But let's specifically pivot to that question of status, because
Speaker 8: I'm not entirely sure how you and many have tried.
Speaker 8: I mean, Barry Weis, so I'm no big fan of,
Speaker 8: but she's, you know, part of this project to create
Speaker 8: sort of an alternative anti woke university in Austin, which
Speaker 8: doesn't seem to be going anywhere. But it seems to
Speaker 8: be a very difficult nut to crack because the system
Speaker 8: is ever more left wing, because the institutions which provide
Speaker 8: both entry to that system and accreditation are incredibly left
Speaker 8: wing and without effectively, you know, as Jarvin would say,
Speaker 8: putting tanks in Harvard Yard, I don't know how you
Speaker 8: create or destroy that network of prestige and accreditation.
Speaker 10: Yeah, well, I saw You're raising a really important question,
Speaker 10: which is the universities and the culture basically, and I
Speaker 10: would put those institutions in a different category from like corporations,
Speaker 10: which we're talking about now, or corporations. At the end
Speaker 10: of the day, it's still true that if you know,
Speaker 10: for as woke as some CEO wants to be, if
Speaker 10: they're not returning dividends or growing the share price or whatever,
Speaker 10: they're going to be consequences for that, and so there's
Speaker 10: a there is a I don't think it is an
Speaker 10: adequate correction, but there is some correction.
Speaker 9: Like you have. You can be woke, but you have.
Speaker 10: To be woke and still a crete to capital. In
Speaker 10: other institutions, that is not true. So that is not
Speaker 10: true in universities. They don't have that same real world
Speaker 10: ultimate rubber meets the road moment that corporations have. In
Speaker 10: universities are different and the people that populate universities are
Speaker 10: different too. So you know, I'm a university professor and
Speaker 10: I don't make as much money as I would make
Speaker 10: as a university professor as if I were doing the
Speaker 10: same thing in the private sectors as a corporate lawyer
Speaker 10: for example. Right, there's a there's a pretty big delta,
Speaker 10: but that's okay. And so the people that go into
Speaker 10: universities to make those sorts of those same sorts of.
Speaker 9: Trade offs they have. There's a trade off, right, it's
Speaker 9: a psychic trade off.
Speaker 10: And you're like, well, I get to live with ideas,
Speaker 10: I get to pursue questions. I get to ask questions
Speaker 10: that I'm interested in all the time, as opposed to
Speaker 10: like what my client wants me to do and and
Speaker 10: so this enriches and it's a worthwhile trade off for me.
Speaker 10: Now some people make that same trade off, and their
Speaker 10: their engagement with ideas is as an advocate right or
Speaker 10: a believer or a adherent to a particular school of
Speaker 10: social thought. And I think that what happened you can
Speaker 10: draw so those we were talking earlier about those people
Speaker 10: who want to say this is all Marxism, and there's
Speaker 10: definitely a group of people that want to say this
Speaker 10: is like neo Marxism, and this like marching of the
Speaker 10: take it like a Gramskia control of the institutions. I
Speaker 10: think that is a You can tell that story much
Speaker 10: more convincingly in universities than you can tell in corporations.
Speaker 10: And the reason why is the people that are in
Speaker 10: the universities are were trained by, like literally trained by
Speaker 10: members of the Frankfurt School, came over to the United
Speaker 10: States and created disciples who trained further classes of university professors.
Speaker 10: So there's a straight line if you wanted to draw
Speaker 10: a straight line from person to person to person. And
Speaker 10: then there's just the fact that cultural, that post colonial,
Speaker 10: deconstructivist mode of thought took over American universities and whenever
Speaker 10: it was in nineteen sixties or nineteen seventies, and won't
Speaker 10: let go it's critical theory now. So I think that
Speaker 10: universities are run by true believers, and I think there's
Speaker 10: no fixing that other than to have our own institutions.
Speaker 10: As you say, and I don't disagree, that's really hard
Speaker 10: to do. It's interesting why that's so hard to do.
Speaker 10: Maybe that's something it's a sort of separate question. But
Speaker 10: I will agree with you that I wouldn't describe universities
Speaker 10: as simply managerial. I don't think they are. I think
Speaker 10: that corporations are simply managerial. I think that managerialism codes
Speaker 10: left and because of that, corporations, big corporations, the quasi
Speaker 10: public corporation's code left, But university's code left for a
Speaker 10: different reason, which is that they are ideological and their
Speaker 10: faculty are very often true believers.
Speaker 8: So to interject there, and look, I have spent much
Speaker 8: less time in higher education than you have, so I'll
Speaker 8: admit like I'm not an expert in this field. I
Speaker 8: left university as quickly as I possibly could, but nonetheless,
Speaker 8: couldn't you look at the incredible growth of administrators within
Speaker 8: education in the last twenty years and say, look, that
Speaker 8: is a system becoming more and more managerial. You see
Speaker 8: the same thing in K through twelve right that the
Speaker 8: student to teacher ratios have stayed the same, the number
Speaker 8: of administrators have grown. I think this the figure I'm
Speaker 8: talking about with. I think just since no child left
Speaker 8: behind but was up over one hundred percent, couldn't you say,
Speaker 8: well that is maybe it was not at one point,
Speaker 8: but it's becoming more and more managerial, especially as there
Speaker 8: is the infusion of government cash. So just a sort
Speaker 8: of a hypothetical throw at you there.
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Speaker 10: I think you could say that's more managerialism coming into
Speaker 10: the university.
Speaker 9: I think so. I think you could say that there's
Speaker 9: that that you know.
Speaker 11: Uh.
Speaker 10: One of the lines, I mean, it's not a line
Speaker 10: in the article, but one of the takeaways from my
Speaker 10: article is that when you hear the phrase public private partnership,
Speaker 10: like you should run away.
Speaker 15: Uh.
Speaker 10: And that's one of the situations where you have like
Speaker 10: government money coming into universities to staff up particular types
Speaker 10: of particular.
Speaker 9: Parts of the university. I also think there's something.
Speaker 10: To the idea that the ideologically committed faculty who ultimately
Speaker 10: govern the university appreciate that certain departments in trench left ideology, right,
Speaker 10: so like diversity administrators in trench aspects of left ideology.
Speaker 10: And so if you're a left wing faculty member, you
Speaker 10: are super happy to have a bud of diversocrats at
Speaker 10: your university because basically that put that ensures the hiring
Speaker 10: of future left wing ideologues and throughout the personnel structure
Speaker 10: of the university, where you know, you can only control
Speaker 10: faculty hiring, but in the administration of the university you
Speaker 10: can sort of push.
Speaker 9: Your values onto all forms of hiring as well. So
Speaker 9: I wouldn't.
Speaker 10: Disagree with you that managerialism comes into the university. I
Speaker 10: would just say the explanation for why the university has
Speaker 10: its sort of left liberal orientation, I think is more
Speaker 10: is more related to actual ideology, you know, the Frankfort
Speaker 10: actually the Frankfurt School, actual critical theory as opposed to
Speaker 10: like what happens in corporations, which is just like this
Speaker 10: sort of you know, as we started with persistent yet
Speaker 10: not entirely sincere.
Speaker 8: Yeah, there's there's something too that I want to go
Speaker 8: back to something you said earlier and I realized horrible podcasting,
Speaker 8: But you know what, it's my show, my name's on it,
Speaker 8: so we do it whatever I want. That said, you
Speaker 8: make the distinction between the kind of left wing and
Speaker 8: right wing vision and your description kind of smacks of
Speaker 8: Thomas Soul to me, right, the idea of the constrained
Speaker 8: versus the unconstrained vision, or the tragic versus the utopian.
Speaker 8: I can't remember what his half of that diet is,
Speaker 8: but point is, I think that even in that you
Speaker 8: see a common thread between both the kind of priors
Speaker 8: of liberal academics and I mean capital L liberal, and
Speaker 8: then also with the you know, the DEI kind of
Speaker 8: business model, because both of them place a primacy on training, right,
Speaker 8: the idea that you can fundamentally change people through the
Speaker 8: application of training, basically either forcing someone to sit through
Speaker 8: a seminar. And of course the versions that you and
Speaker 8: I see of this are kind of the cartoonish, right,
Speaker 8: the billboard that says, you know, stop raping women. It's like, okay, well,
Speaker 8: does does any you know, violent park rapist particularly care
Speaker 8: about this being you know, wrong or incorrect? And that's silly.
Speaker 8: But you see the same thing in other areas as well,
Speaker 8: the idea that man can fundamentally be transformed through the
Speaker 8: application of technique into something different, He can be improved.
Speaker 8: And obviously, you know, capital L liberals from another era
Speaker 8: would have a much more reasonable view of that ability
Speaker 8: to transform man from a lower to a higher status.
Speaker 8: They might have said, but you see the same idea
Speaker 8: sort of echoed dimly in the idea of diversity training,
Speaker 8: This idea that you know, racism is this sort of
Speaker 8: you know, inherent invisible force, but it can be pulled
Speaker 8: out of you. And look are their true believers? Are
Speaker 8: their synics with regard to that premise one hundred percent?
Speaker 8: But I think that that's an interesting sort of shared
Speaker 8: prior in both the idea of fectibility of man, that
Speaker 8: you can transform man from being flawed and understand that
Speaker 8: the classic liberals and the modern you know, Wolkesers have
Speaker 8: a very different understanding of what it both means to
Speaker 8: be flawed and then perfected. But I think that's an
Speaker 8: interesting kind of shared like load bearing premise. Do you
Speaker 8: see what I'm getting at, Sean, Yeah.
Speaker 9: I do.
Speaker 10: I like your toying with this idea of training and
Speaker 10: what can we really get out of training? I guess
Speaker 10: I would just push back a little bit and ask,
Speaker 10: you know, do they really believe that they're training your
Speaker 10: essential your rapist? The rape billboard idea is about, right,
Speaker 10: do we really believe that our training is changing people's
Speaker 10: way of thinking, or are these training programs just providing
Speaker 10: jobs for our ideological friends, in other words, a form
Speaker 10: of patronage. And I think a lot of training programs,
Speaker 10: a lot of the diversocrat stuff, is really just patronage
Speaker 10: for that the team, And once you understand it in
Speaker 10: that way, it's hard to take it very seriously. But
Speaker 10: on the subject of training, there's a there's a case
Speaker 10: that drives me crazy. So this is a case on
Speaker 10: the in the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Florida,
Speaker 10: and it's about a diversity training program. So Governor DeSantis
Speaker 10: in Florida had passed a law that said something like
Speaker 10: you couldn't corporations couldn't force their employees to attend training
Speaker 10: woke training, I think it was diversity training or some
Speaker 10: kind of training. You couldn't force your employees to attend
Speaker 10: the training, and so you know, if they didn't want
Speaker 10: to attend, they didn't have to attend.
Speaker 9: Period. That was the law. And so some corporation the.
Speaker 10: Title of the case is Honey Fund versus Something, State
Speaker 10: of Florida, and some corporation that was that wanted to
Speaker 10: hold the training sued the State of Florida and said,
Speaker 10: you're this rule that says I can't force all of
Speaker 10: my employees to attend this training violates my First Amendment
Speaker 10: speech rights and and spoiler alert, the company wins and
Speaker 10: defeats the State of Florida in this case. Now what
Speaker 10: that means is that, according to the eleven Circuit Court
Speaker 10: of Appeals, the speech rights of the corporation, which isn't
Speaker 10: it's an artificial entity, right, it's not, it doesn't exist.
Speaker 10: The speech rights of the corporation itself trump the citizen
Speaker 10: rights of the citizens of Florida that the governor was
Speaker 10: trying to protect from being sort of you know, ideologic,
Speaker 10: you know, propagandized by the court by the training program
Speaker 10: to not have to hear the message, to be free
Speaker 10: from that sort of a thing. And I think that's
Speaker 10: a whole that's a whole, separate area of Like, the
Speaker 10: managerial problem in our society is the extent of the power,
Speaker 10: including legal power, constitutional rights power, that corporations have. So
Speaker 10: you take this giant managerial corporation, the quasi public corporation
Speaker 10: that Burleian means and Burnham identify, and you.
Speaker 9: Give it like close to the.
Speaker 10: Full citizen constitutional rights of a of a person and
Speaker 10: then just set it free, uh uh, to wreak havoc
Speaker 10: on the on the society. That's sort of the state
Speaker 10: we're in. I think the reason why I think it
Speaker 10: is important to think about managerialism and in the corporate
Speaker 10: context is that it allows you to see corporations as
Speaker 10: potentially as much of a problem as the administrative state,
Speaker 10: and specifically, it allows conservatives to see them as a
Speaker 10: problem like liberals have seen have seen corporations as problematic
Speaker 10: for a long time, mostly for wealthy whatever reasons, and
Speaker 10: their their critiques are not entirely crazy, but conservatives have
Speaker 10: trouble right the the the alliance between big business and
Speaker 10: the Republican Party is an ancient and honorable alliance, right,
Speaker 10: And but I think that the conservatives need to see
Speaker 10: that these corporations aren't very conservative and and if you're
Speaker 10: just going to default to protecting big corporate rights as
Speaker 10: a political matter, you're not protecting conservatives.
Speaker 8: Well, and that's sort of an interesting thing you bring up,
Speaker 8: because you see this constantly that conservatives are and I
Speaker 8: think that this especially post twenty twenty, with the emergence
Speaker 8: of honestly the discussion around esg. The discussion around that
Speaker 8: phrase the public private partnership, that that diad of capitalism v.
Speaker 8: Socialism has really broken down because we're not The system
Speaker 8: we have currently has really almost no relation to a
Speaker 8: sort of an cap capitalist system anymore. Right, Like, Okay, sure,
Speaker 8: you know, Raytheon isn't literally part of the government, But
Speaker 8: I mean, would it really be that much of a
Speaker 8: change if we just did what the Russians did right
Speaker 8: and made it a state owned corporation A functionally there's
Speaker 8: not that big of a difference. And I see exactly
Speaker 8: what you're talking about, which is people on the right
Speaker 8: who understand this problem, who understand that this segment has
Speaker 8: become an ideological enemy, but lack the lack the language
Speaker 8: to address it, last lack the language to discuss it.
Speaker 8: And some of it. I think that role has been
Speaker 8: taken up, although you see less of this now by
Speaker 8: kind of the you know, the the wef tinfoil hat
Speaker 8: kook stuff. Right, that's a way to address that. And look,
Speaker 8: I'm not going to pretend that I like Klaus Schwab,
Speaker 8: but I don't necessarily take the maximalist view of his abilities.
Speaker 8: But nonetheless I think that's a very important project because ultimately,
Speaker 8: if you could right, if you could could smash the
Speaker 8: education system, you know, route them into the sea, right
Speaker 8: in sort of a cone and the barbarian esque move like, sure,
Speaker 8: that would be positive from an ideological perspective. I'm speaking hyperbolically,
Speaker 8: of course, but that still doesn't solve this other problem,
Speaker 8: which is everyone works for a company that has ultimately
Speaker 8: the same teleology, right is pointed in the same direction,
Speaker 8: at the same set of values. And I think that
Speaker 8: that's why this needs to be addressed. And again going
Speaker 8: back to that false dichotomy, the idea that the only
Speaker 8: way you can oppose big business is if you are
Speaker 8: secretly woke, which is something you see from you know,
Speaker 8: alleged conservative influencers constantly. This idea that if you have
Speaker 8: any issue with you know, big corporations, if you have
Speaker 8: any issue with this managerial system, that you are communist
Speaker 8: in some ways is laughable and to be honest, needs
Speaker 8: to just be driven out of you know, the public
Speaker 8: conversation is not a serious uh, not a serious point there.
Speaker 8: So one of the things that I think is important
Speaker 8: to address with this right is, uh, how how do
Speaker 8: you how do you to lack of a better term.
Speaker 8: How do you market this? Because look like this has
Speaker 8: been a very heady academic conversation. We're citing our sources.
Speaker 8: How do you explain this without going into to be honest,
Speaker 8: fairly grim domes from one hundred years ago?
Speaker 9: Right?
Speaker 8: Look, I may enjoy reading Burdam quite a lot, but
Speaker 8: you know it's not Stephen King. It's not exactly a
Speaker 8: page turner. So how do you express that in a
Speaker 8: simple mass market for Well.
Speaker 10: So there's a I hope everyone on this podcast will
Speaker 10: read my essay. But there's another great essay, and I'm
Speaker 10: sure you've talked about it before. That's the NS Lions
Speaker 10: essay I forget the China convergence or something it's called.
Speaker 10: And he basically in that essay makes the point that
Speaker 10: you were making, which is, what's the difference between this big,
Speaker 10: publicly American corporation versus a state controlled Chinese company?
Speaker 9: And there's not.
Speaker 10: Much of a difference. And the reason that there's not
Speaker 10: much of a difference in his argument as well, is
Speaker 10: managerialism is the common denominator. It explains both of them.
Speaker 10: I think that you're right about the question of how
Speaker 10: do we pitch this to the audience that's hard to
Speaker 10: get at. I want to respond to that, but I
Speaker 10: want to sort of get there in this maybe circuitous way.
Speaker 10: You know, some people say there's a civil war on
Speaker 10: the right, and there's some truth to that around all
Speaker 10: sorts of topics, and I don't like to think of
Speaker 10: it as a civil war. I guess what I would
Speaker 10: say is that the right is more intellectually interesting.
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Speaker 10: First of all than the left. That has probably always
Speaker 10: been true, but it is more intellectually stimulating now than
Speaker 10: it has ever been really in my professional life. Like,
Speaker 10: there are different kinds of arguments being raised on the
Speaker 10: right that that would not have been raised in a
Speaker 10: prior generation. And that's exciting, frankly. And I think part
Speaker 10: of the problem about how to express the relationship of
Speaker 10: conservatives to big business goes to what what is the
Speaker 10: what is our what is our identity as a conservative?
Speaker 10: Or what does it mean to be on the right?
Speaker 10: And I think there are all kinds of answers to
Speaker 10: that right, Like there's a lot of people who want
Speaker 10: to just like go back to neutral principles of like
Speaker 10: I don't like the kind of liberalism, the kind of
Speaker 10: right liberalism, like libertarianism, or like the version of liberalism
Speaker 10: that's just free market capitalism and do whatever you want, right.
Speaker 10: And then there's the kind of right, the kind of
Speaker 10: conservatism that says, look, that's that's that's maybe an okay
Speaker 10: intermediate spot, but that's not really conservative because if it's
Speaker 10: just do whatever you want, it's hard to distinguish that
Speaker 10: from like, you know, the heart wants what it wants
Speaker 10: and the you know, the decline of civilization, and so
Speaker 10: what we really need to do is reorient ourselves towards
Speaker 10: the good and there's some other source for that other
Speaker 10: than what we want right now, and that's another kind
Speaker 10: of conservatism. I think this question goes to that. Right,
Speaker 10: if we're just orienting ourselves back towards libertarianism, we're not
Speaker 10: going to get out of managerialism. There's no way out
Speaker 10: of it. And there's no way to persuade people that
Speaker 10: it's even a problem, because they'll just say that the
Speaker 10: market will self correct. By the way, when libertarians say that,
Speaker 10: when they say, look, I hear what you're saying, Griffith, Yeah,
Speaker 10: it looks terrible that these things are woke, but the market.
Speaker 9: Will fix it.
Speaker 10: And then I say, well, look, the market hasn't fixed it,
Speaker 10: and the market isn't going to fix it because these corporations,
Speaker 10: the big ones, they're connected with the state and they
Speaker 10: protect themselves from entry. So how's the market going to
Speaker 10: fix that? And they say, well, the market would fix
Speaker 10: it if it was just a free market. The problem
Speaker 10: is that we don't really have a free market, and
Speaker 10: then they sound like socialists who basically have never seen
Speaker 10: socialism right every time you explain.
Speaker 8: It, every time, markets have never been tried right.
Speaker 9: Exactly exactly.
Speaker 10: So I think that if you're if your preferred regime
Speaker 10: can't exist in reality, it's not a good argument, right.
Speaker 9: And so basically.
Speaker 10: I think we have to find a way to bring
Speaker 10: back to bring people to to a place beyond liberalism.
Speaker 10: I mean, I think that's basically the most interesting conversation
Speaker 10: on our side. That's complicated, right, how do you say that.
Speaker 9: To enormy I don't know.
Speaker 10: I'm trying to find a way to sneakily say it
Speaker 10: to law students, but you know.
Speaker 9: But not say it directly. So it's hard to know
Speaker 9: the answer to those questions.
Speaker 8: Well, look, good luck on that. I don't envy you
Speaker 8: at that project, but I share your diagnosis. I genuinely
Speaker 8: think that the right currently is the most not only
Speaker 8: is it the most interesting conversation currently happening, but it's
Speaker 8: also the most interesting conversation that has happened in public
Speaker 8: in my entire life. I mean, look, it's part of
Speaker 8: the reason why I started using my face and made
Speaker 8: this what I do because I believe it. I think
Speaker 8: there's interesting things happening. I think that to your point
Speaker 8: about the kind of to be honest, the irrationality of
Speaker 8: the kind of libertarian economics, to me, I find it very,
Speaker 8: very frustrating, because and Jesus, this is a space on
Speaker 8: the bingo card for watching my show. But David French
Speaker 8: recently put out a piece the New York Times called
Speaker 8: what happens if you refuse to admit that America is
Speaker 8: in decline? Or something like that, you'll be able to
Speaker 8: find it, And I wrote a piece responding to it
Speaker 8: because what's interesting to me about it is this sort
Speaker 8: of selective application of certain lines of attack. So for instance,
Speaker 8: he is talking about, you know, the new right, and
Speaker 8: he accuses them of nostalgia, right, you long for a
Speaker 8: world which never existed, And then the whole last third
Speaker 8: of the piece is saying, well, I just I long
Speaker 8: for the days of the conservative movement of the eighties
Speaker 8: and nineties. Was everything so grand then, where men were
Speaker 8: wise and august and weren't into you know, partisan politics.
Speaker 8: So there's some hypocrisy there, but you see a very
Speaker 8: similar thing with that attitude towards social right. The meme
Speaker 8: if we can use that term of real socialism has
Speaker 8: never been tried. I mean, look, you can buy a
Speaker 8: t shirt that says that from you know, any number
Speaker 8: of you know, Republican T shirt shops. It's fully entered
Speaker 8: into the culture. But very many of those same people
Speaker 8: will talk about the free market and it's like, well, okay,
Speaker 8: like do the free market of when, like the free
Speaker 8: market of four years ago? Well, I mean that wasn't
Speaker 8: really a free market. Again, this shore, the federal government
Speaker 8: wasn't quite as big as it is now, but it
Speaker 8: was still giant. It was huge, and you know, even
Speaker 8: companies like IBM, you know, maybe Boeing, any number of
Speaker 8: these corporations existed in relation to the government. This public
Speaker 8: private partnership was not as advanced as it currently is now.
Speaker 8: But simply, you know, rolling the boulder off your own
Speaker 8: foot and further up the hill only to let it
Speaker 8: go again does not solve this problem. And look, I'm
Speaker 8: being dismissive to conservatives and being dismissive towards these arguments,
Speaker 8: not because I hate them, not because I disliked them,
Speaker 8: far from it. But this is a losing playbook, Like
Speaker 8: we have tried and failed at this project before, and
Speaker 8: so to your point, like, you can't simply put your
Speaker 8: head in the head in the sand and pretend as
Speaker 8: if we are back in the Cold War, where we
Speaker 8: can neatly divide the line between you know, the Pinko's
Speaker 8: on one side and the you know, the patriots on
Speaker 8: the other. Like, look like I understand the appeal. There's
Speaker 8: a certain amount of moral clarity. It's easy to dismiss,
Speaker 8: but as you said, it's simply not a strong argument,
Speaker 8: and clearly it does not lead to positive political results.
Speaker 10: You know, they should sell t shirts that say socialism
Speaker 10: has never been tried on one side, and then free
Speaker 10: market capitalism has never been tried on the other side.
Speaker 10: Then you know, it would be the truest T shirt
Speaker 10: that has ever existed. You know what, if I could
Speaker 10: just indulge in a little nostalgia myself, you're mentioning French's nostage,
Speaker 10: you know, I would I would say the era of
Speaker 10: bourgeois capitalism right where where companies were set up by
Speaker 10: capitalists in in local communities with employees who and and
Speaker 10: a community that was also the consumers, right where everything
Speaker 10: was kind of like I think what I would say
Speaker 10: and I do say at the end of my essay
Speaker 10: is that like the managerial corporation is is the is
Speaker 10: the enemy of bourgeois capitalism, is the enemy of local business,
Speaker 10: is the enemy of small business.
Speaker 9: Uh.
Speaker 10: And that's that's where I think our conservative sympathies should be.
Speaker 10: Like there they should be with the local business owners
Speaker 10: who are really in the community, who are who are
Speaker 10: members of the community, who don't come in from some
Speaker 10: other state or some other country. Uh and you know,
Speaker 10: dump product on us or you know, extract whatever. I
Speaker 10: think that's the that's that's the that's maybe the place
Speaker 10: where the alliance between the right and business can be.
Speaker 10: I mean, it seems to me that the whole idea
Speaker 10: of the republic is that the self governing middle class, right,
Speaker 10: And it seems like the self governing middle class they
Speaker 10: do things like run small businesses, like podcasts, like doctors' offices,
Speaker 10: like whatever. Like that's and that seems like the alliance
Speaker 10: between where the alliance between business and the conservatives should be.
Speaker 10: It probably should not be at the level of the
Speaker 10: multinational corporation.
Speaker 8: Rashan, we are fast approaching time. Obviously, I will have
Speaker 8: your very excellent article linked. I think everyone should read it.
Speaker 8: You may notice we kind of jumped around. This is
Speaker 8: not a reading of this article. There's still a lot
Speaker 8: to be gotten from actually sitting down and scrolling through it.
Speaker 8: It's well written, it's easy to read. Highly recommend it.
Speaker 8: But where else can people find you? And where can
Speaker 8: they find your work?
Speaker 10: Well, you know, I'm not a highly online individual. I
Speaker 10: have a bunch of really boring law review articles that
Speaker 10: anyone could find on my SSRN website, and if anyone
Speaker 10: downloads and reads it, it will be you and my mother
Speaker 10: who have read those articles.
Speaker 9: So thank you if you do that.
Speaker 10: But I love it if people read the chronicles essay,
Speaker 10: and I hope they find it interesting.
Speaker 8: This may come back to haunt me, but my mother
Speaker 8: has literally no idea what I do, and I'm not
Speaker 8: particularly interested in telling her. But she'll find out one day.
Speaker 8: Hi Mom. But yeah, like I said, I highly recommend
Speaker 8: this article. It's quite good. Thank you for sharing it
Speaker 8: with me. As far as my stuff, the Jay Burdens Show, Apple, Spotify, YouTube,
Speaker 8: anywhere you want to listen to podcasts. As I've said before,
Speaker 8: this is what I do and I depend on your support.
Speaker 8: You want to throw me a few bucks a month.
Speaker 8: I think I'm at the lowest setting on every site.
Speaker 8: It's like five bucks or twenty two cents a show.
Speaker 8: You get the episodes early in ad free. I know
Speaker 8: the ads are irritating, but they pay my mortgage. And
Speaker 8: let me tell you, modern interest rates mean that that
Speaker 8: is much more of a project than it would be otherwise.
Speaker 8: But that said, thank you guys so much. The podcast
Speaker 8: has been growing and I couldn't do it without you guys.
Speaker 8: Also check out our sponsor Axios Remote Fitness Coaching. I
Speaker 8: was just talking to JD the guy who owns it
Speaker 8: earlier today is an other small businessman who you should support.
Speaker 8: Makes a good product, and yeah, we're friends. It's another
Speaker 8: good reason again, Sean Man, it was great to have
Speaker 8: you on.
Speaker 9: Thanks Jay, it was a lot of fun.
Speaker 8: Everyone at home, keep your head up. I can't last forever.
Speaker 3: Good night.
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Speaker 9: And man, sixty minutes.
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