00:02Welcome back. This is the Paula Gordon Show. I'm Paula, Bill Russell, Thomas Frank, not to be confused with Frank
00:08Thomas, the baseball player you just told me, liberal, liberal state.
00:15Yeah.
00:16That used to have a meaning that was liberal arts.
00:19It was broadly popular, too.
00:21Well, we liked it.
00:22Yeah. And I'm on a one-man crusade to rescue the word liberal.
00:30So we'll be on a three-man crusade, what do you say? So what does it mean that has been
00:34so trashed, much less forgotten?
00:37Well, I mean, liberalism in the classical definition is just this belief in maximizing human freedom. And then it got
00:46updated in the 1930s. There's a famous definition from the 30s that I like of liberalism where it's freedom plus
00:52groceries.
00:54Whoa! Who did that?
00:55Well, it was a congressman from Texas.
00:57Fabulous. You mean something good did come out of Texas?
00:59There used to be a lot of liberals from Texas. It's hard to believe. Like Lyndon Johnson, you know.
01:03There used to be a lot of liberals from Kansas, but that's another subject.
01:06And from Nebraska, they had a Republican senator called George Norris, and his nickname was the Fighting Liberal.
01:13Well, Wisconsin, the home of Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy displaced one of the great progressives of all time, Fighting Bob. Not
01:25just any old senator.
01:26Well, he displaced junior. Little Bob, I think they called him. But Fighting Bob LaFollette, Norris, these folks in the
01:34Midwest, which was a hotbed of taking care of each other.
01:38That's right. A hotbed of kindness. A hotbed of niceness.
01:41Holy cow!
01:42How primitive. I know that's funny, isn't it?
01:45It's not just historians, though, to whom this is important. This is important to all of us because we've forgotten,
01:51along with the idea of liberal being...
01:53Freedom plus groceries.
01:54Fabulous. And what, then, is the liberal state?
01:56The liberal state is the traditional 19th century capitalist state, but with all the safeguards thrown in, okay?
02:04With Keynesian economics, with the regulated financial markets, with a safe workplace, with a labor union so that people have
02:13some voice at the place that they work.
02:15It's democracy applied to economics.
02:19I wondered if that word would come into this.
02:21What?
02:22Democracy.
02:23That much-abused word.
02:25Democracy in the economics...
02:27The liberal state is economic democracy.
02:29So it's democracy, not only in politics, but also in the world of economics.
02:37And that's what has been undone. That's what's been under such brutal attack for 30 years.
02:41And with that goes an attack on social democracy.
02:45Yeah. Yeah. And the word liberal now, I mean, means snob or something.
02:51God, where was I the other day and I heard someone called someone a liberal as like an imprecation, like,
02:56you know, just yelling at somebody on the street, you goddamn liberal.
02:59No.
03:00Yeah.
03:00Just because they didn't like them?
03:03Yeah. I mean, yeah.
03:05And...
03:06It was probably Saturday Night Night Live.
03:08I don't remember where it was.
03:09No.
03:10I don't remember where it was, but it was really, it was shocking to me.
03:13And I was just walking along.
03:14It might have been in Iowa City.
03:16I don't know.
03:17Yeah.
03:17And it was a funny thing.
03:19There was no, you know, physical marks to identify the person as a liberal, but it was just an insult,
03:25right?
03:26And now it means snob.
03:29It means, you know, this sort of intellectual, but intellectual in the hated, in the hated sense, not in the
03:35sense like that we respect learning or something like that.
03:37But, but, you know, somebody that's wrote a lot of books and wants to interfere in every aspect of your
03:40life.
03:41It means, it means a kind of upper class tyrant.
03:44And it's been given this sort of class definition.
03:48And...
03:48Coming from the people who are the ruling, as it were, class.
03:52Oh, Paula.
03:54I know.
03:54Where to begin?
03:55Yes.
03:56Look.
03:56Yes.
03:56Yes, what you're saying is true.
03:57But isn't that part of the dilemma?
03:58Yeah.
03:59Where to begin?
04:00That's, that's, that is, what you're saying is true, that this definition has been applied to them very successfully by
04:07people who represent the actual ruling class in this country, i.e. big business, the very wealthy, high net worth
04:14individuals, you know, the great fortunes, that sort of thing.
04:17They're the ones that funded and led the attack on liberalism ever since the 1930s.
04:22And they, it's only come into flower since the 1970s.
04:26And the funded part was really, really important because this was a very considered conscious act on the part of
04:36those who were, as you say, business, the high net worth individuals, the big fortunes.
04:42Yeah, well, they, that's, they hated Roosevelt and, and, you know, Roosevelt, that's 70 years ago.
04:48Oh, no, but that's when they started, that's when they started, you know, counterattacking.
04:52And they got nowhere for a very long time.
04:55And it wasn't until the 60s and 70s.
04:57Now, why would that be that they got nowhere?
04:58There's a line in this book I read by Thomas Frank called The Wrecking Crew that says the people actually
05:04liked the liberal state.
05:06They still do.
05:07No, if you do polls all the time, do people like Social Security?
05:11Hell yeah.
05:12And then ask them, well, do you like the, even better?
05:14How about the, the idea of having, you know, a secure retirement?
05:18People really like that.
05:19How about the idea of having pure food?
05:22You know, how about the idea of having, you know, food that doesn't poison you and have, making sure that
05:26that's the case?
05:27Oh, people dig that.
05:28How do we feel about health care?
05:30People would like to be able to feel health care.
05:31We don't know anything about it.
05:32People, the idea that you, that if some, a member of your family gets sick that you're going to go
05:36bankrupt, turns out that's a really unpopular situation.
05:40People don't like that.
05:41And that all is embedded in the idea of the liberal state.
05:46That's liberalism.
05:47I want to go back to Paula's original question, which is what happens when they cheat?
05:52And this is, you know, I've been thinking about it a long time because we've had a long time to
05:55think about it.
05:57More than eight years, 40 years, plus or minus, depending on where you start.
06:01And it seems there are two problems with the cheaters.
06:05One, a lot of their cheating is illegal.
06:09And then the question is, well, one of how does one enforce, can the laws be enforced and will the
06:16laws be enforced, which is one issue with it.
06:18The other, and in some ways it's sort of an existential challenge, is that this approach is not sustainable.
06:26You mean the current cheating approach?
06:28Well, at some point you run out of somebody to steal from.
06:32Yeah.
06:33That's we're finding out right now.
06:35Exactly.
06:36And when, and, you know, we've sort of cleaned out this house.
06:40We're now borrowing from the Chinese, various Middle Eastern countries, Russia.
06:48We're all going to be working for the Qatari Sovereign Wealth Fund.
06:51If we're lucky.
06:53Yeah.
06:55But that's the capital is in action.
06:56That's not funny.
06:57I'm sorry.
06:58Look, Paula, you wonder why I think that, why I laugh at all this stuff.
07:01And it's, there is no way to write a book like this.
07:04And without taking the kind of ironic attitude that I have, otherwise you would go mad.
07:12It's too depressing.
07:14It's too awful.
07:15And it's also too systematic.
07:17I mean, one of the things that I couldn't believe when I was writing this is like, why hasn't someone
07:20written this book yet?
07:21Why do I have this field all to myself?
07:24It's not funny.
07:25What the hell is going on?
07:27One of the real insights in this book that I went back and just sort of savored is something called
07:33the Jamba Declaration.
07:35Unbelievable.
07:36I had no idea about this.
07:37And I think in some ways that sort of is almost a paradigm for all of what's gone on in
07:43the last, well, 30 years.
07:4540 is a nice round number.
07:47Tell me about the Jamba Declaration.
07:49There's a lot of backstory to it.
07:51This is a truncate.
07:53I get a one and a half minute backstory and then get to Jamba.
07:56Look, when I wrote the book, I settled on a bunch of, several different narrative strategies that I would take.
08:03I would describe Washington physically.
08:05I would describe the systems of government and how they've been wrecked.
08:09And I would describe the career of Jack Abramoff, who seemed to me to be the ideal man of conservative
08:15Washington, D.C., really the ideal figure.
08:17And had been a long time.
08:18Yes.
08:19And you're doing this not because he is a bad apple.
08:21No, he's a single bad apple.
08:23He's representative.
08:24Jack Abramoff was a great idealist.
08:27He was the protege of leaders of the movement.
08:29He was the movement for a while.
08:32Yeah.
08:32He was the leader.
08:33And he would surface here and there in all these different places that you would never expect.
08:38He was the head of the College of Republicans.
08:39He ran a think tank.
08:40He had a role in Iran-Contra.
08:42And then one of the stranger things that he did is he was running a, I don't know what you
08:47would call it, a grassroots group in D.C.
08:50And he somehow, he had developed this fund.
08:53This is actually, he had been doing this in the College of Republicans for right-wing guerrilla movements around the
08:58world.
08:59He and his friends, and this was a big deal.
09:01This is the Reagan years.
09:01Remember, we had the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.
09:03We had the Contras in Nicaragua.
09:05But there were other ones.
09:06There was a group, there was a right-wing group fighting in Mozambique, and there was a right-wing group
09:10fighting in Angola.
09:12Some of these guys were incredibly bad, okay?
09:14They were what we would call now terrorists.
09:18And we were funding them.
09:19We were funding them.
09:19These are all people on our side.
09:21Some of them were running armies, though.
09:22I mean, this is because beyond just, I mean, it was terrorism.
09:25It was terrorism by organized armies.
09:27Oh, of course.
09:27Right.
09:28And what I mean is like planting landmines all over Angola and that sort of thing.
09:31Which gets us.
09:32Slaughtering civilians.
09:33Which gets us.
09:33Slape, mutilation, the full litany.
09:36Which gets us.
09:37Not nice people.
09:38No.
09:38Gets us to Jumbo?
09:40It does, as a matter of fact.
09:41Okay.
09:42So there was this, on the right, there was this cult of what they called the Freedom Fighter,
09:46okay, meaning all these different right-wing guerrilla groups.
09:49And the idea occurred to them that what they really needed to do was get all these guys together in
09:56one place
09:57and have a kind of right-wing Woodstock.
10:00And it was their grand scheme, their sort of cultural pattern that they were always after
10:04was to do what the left had done in the 60s, but everything in reverse.
10:08So, like, they would have big protests where they'd all be wearing ties.
10:12You know?
10:13Gee, that's important.
10:16Symbolically, it was.
10:17And it was a really good fundraising strategy as well.
10:20You know, take the tactics of the left, but use them on the right.
10:24And they really took this, they went much farther than the left and were much, much more successful
10:29than the left, as you notice once you, Jack Abramoff became one of the most successful
10:34lobbyists in Washington history.
10:36But anyhow, so they decided they'd have this big get-together of all these right-wing guerrilla groups
10:41in territory liberated by force of arms from a Soviet client state in Angola.
10:47And they were going to do it at, the guy that, of all the freedom fighters, the one they loved
10:51most
10:52was this fellow called Jonas Savimbi in Angola.
10:55And he was a very charismatic guy.
10:58You know, he always walked around with a big pistol on his hip and this sort of thing.
11:01And they all got together and they got some people from Afghanistan, some Contras, some,
11:07I think, people from Laos or something like that, and brought them all to Savimbi's hideout.
11:12A few Nazis, didn't they?
11:13Yeah, you said so.
11:15They came in later.
11:16That was a different meeting.
11:17Just want to be sure.
11:18That was meeting number two.
11:20And then they went to...
11:22That was Altamont, right?
11:25You know, if I left that joke in, I believe I removed that joke to compare...
11:30This was the Altamont of the...
11:32You didn't leave it in, but it looks a lot...
11:34This first one was the Woodstock, the second one was the Altamont.
11:36Oh, gosh.
11:37But I believe I cut...
11:38How did you guess that?
11:39I cut that out of the book.
11:40So was it screamingly obvious.
11:42Besides, I was at Altamont.
11:44Oh, no!
11:45Okay.
11:45We're going to come back with that in moments.
11:48When we return, be with us.
