The Gray Area with Sean Illing takes a philosophy-minded look at culture, technology, politics, and the world of ideas. Each week, we invite a guest to explore a question or topic that matters. From the the state of democracy, to the struggle with depression and anxiety, to the nature of identity in the digital age, each episode looks for nuance and honesty in the most important conversations of our time. New episodes drop every Monday.
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episode 272: What a smarter Trumpism would sound like
Michael Lind is a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin, the co-founder of the New America Foundation, and an important contributor to American Affairs, a journal originally created to imagine a more Trumpist conservatism.
Lind is by no means a supporter of Trump. But, for decades now, he has been developing a coherent intellectual worldview around many of the same issues that Trump intuited, however crudely, during his campaign. He’s one of the intellectuals that the nationalist conservatives trying to imagine a Trumpism after Trump tell me they read most closely.
There are three big pieces of Lind’s thought that I think help to illuminate this era. One is his idea of the “new class war,” which builds a deep cultural component into class identity and maps much better onto populist resentment. The next is his approach to China, which has long been skeptical of Washington’s optimistic consensus. And the third is his insistence that political conflicts — be they class wars or partisan ones — don’t end in victories, they end in “settlements.”
References:
"The New Class War" by Michael Lind
"The Return of Geoeconomics" by Michael Lind
"Classless Utopia versus Class Compromise" by Michael Lind
"Donald Trump, the Perfect Populist" by Michael Lind
Book recommendations:
The Machiavellian Defender’s of Freedom by James Burnham
Foundation by Isaac Asimov
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy
My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.
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Credits:
Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
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