>> the u.s. court of appeals for the d.c. circuit hears oral argument in traneight versus donald donald j. trump and whether former president trump is immune from prosecution for his alleged role in the january 6th attack on the u.s. capitol. watch or listen live tuesday morning beginning at 9:30 a.m. eastern on c-span3, on the free c-span now app, or online at c-span.org. >> a healthy democracy doesn't just look like this. it looks like this, where american can see democracy at work, where citizens are truly informed, a republic thrives. get informed straight from the source on c-span. unfiltered, unbiased, word for word. from the nation's capital to wherever you are. because the opinion that matters most is your own. this is what democracy looks

like. c-span, powered by cable. >> are right. good evening, everyone. my name is emile doak. executive director the american conservative, and i'm pleased to welcome all of you both are in washington and watching as on c-span, the to nice book launch event for traffic latest much discussed book "tyranny, inc.: how private power crushed american liberty - and what to do about it." the knights gathering is organized by the community foundation founded last june, the bcf seeks to advance the appreciation for roman law, greek philosophy, and judeo-christian religion as the trouble foundation of western civilization. it does is by promoting scholarships, offering educational p programs for students and young professionals, and offering conferences and copia like tonight events. thismy event is also sponsored y my organization the american conservative. the american conservative exist

to advance on main street vision for conservatism. we pursue our mission primarily through our print magazine and online journalism as well as select conferences and events like the one you are attending here tonight. we were founded in 2002, over 20 years ago now, to reignite conversations we filled conservatives have neglected for far too long. our magazine was ever a voice against thehe iraq war in the early days ofen that conflict, d a commitment to a foreign policy of realism restraint continue to animate our publication today. what our mission was broader than that one issue. we also want to return considerations of faith and family, though civilizational foundations, to the center of our political discourse. and we felt they were too often simply paid lip service and then ignored when policymaking. and perhaps, most pertinent to two nights discussion we wanted to recalibrate the conversation about political economy on the political right. what a defense the interest of americaned workers against an

increasing globalize free-trade regime that prioritize corporate profits over the concerns ofce real workers in the real economy. if you've read "tyranny, inc." legibly the "washington post" called anomalously sensible, which i guess is a complement, but if you have read it like the "washington post" did, you will find stories of a these real workers attempting to navigate and economic order that is often stacked against them. in many ways the book echoes the disposition that isor animated r magazines pages for 21 21 yes now. a healthy skepticism of a a preference for main street over wall street. but we also welcome honest disagreement and debate about the best ways to advance those interests pics i hope will be able to get into some of these discussions sparked by provocative descriptions in "tyranny, inc." here tonight. we've got a great lineup of speakers for you to do just that. so before we startto want to introduce to nightss speakers before handing it over to the author of the book that brings us here tonight.

first sohrab ahmari of course as a founder and editor of compact magazine a contributing editor to ourve publication at the american conservative and ag contributing writer for the news statement. previous hen spent nearly a decade at news corp as an editor and columnist for the "wall street journal" in new york and london and the opposite editor of the "new york post." his latest book which we heard to discuss is of course "tyranny, inc.: how private a power crushed american liberty - and what to do about it." just out from penguin random house. if you haven't picked up a copycat please do. next marco rubio of course is the senior u.s. senator from florida and the author most recently of decades of decadence, how are spoilt elites blue america's inheritance of liberty, security and prosperity, just published earlier this year. matthew stover is director of research at theau american economic liberties project and author of life, the 100 year war between between monopoly power and democracy published by simon & schuster in 2019. he has served as as a policy

advisor to the senate budget committee and rights the big newsletter on monopoly. ashley carter is a labor union and contribute to compact magazine and last but not least as my colleague at the american conservative bradley devlin, our staff reporterex doing excellent work for us. if you've read his work you may think that isac older than his years picky actually very young. he's one of those gen zers was no real memories of that terrible day when one years ago, 22 years ago just yesterday and you can give us a perspective of conservatives with come of age during the height of much of the private security. so just quick couple notes here on how to nights event will proceed. a sohrab will source up with opening remarks trying from his bookss core argument for about ten 1 to 15 minutes because it really remarks them senator rubio for another ten to 15 minutes and then afterward i will invite the full panel to join us here on stage for discussion. if there is time and as you can see our schedule is very tightly

packed but if we do have time we will take one to two questions from the audience at the very end. either way that we will close probably at 7:45 p.m. so folks can move onto the own dinner plans and i would note though please to remain in your seats after the panel to allow the speakers to leave first. so with that please join in welcoming sohrab ahmari. [applause] >> my friends, thank you all, thank you all for being here. i should start by saying that i'm grateful to the community foundation of the american conservative for cosponsoring this gathering. thanks especially to a meal for his stead fast support for my work and thanks to the other panelists not least senator rubio who has shown genuine and real leadership in pushing his party my party to rethink some of its political economic dogmas and has been kind enough to take

both to endorse this book and have to take time out of the busy legislative schedule to appear at this event. so to begin i would like to pan out to a global picture. for years now defenders of freedom have been warning of a democraticin recession beginning in the 1970s and then especially after the collapse of the soviet union. dozens of societies built on coercion gave way to one's built on consent. more recently, however, coercion has made a depressing come back with many regions backsliding into kleptocracy, authoritarianism and ideological dictatorship. to see the severity of the freedoms global font, consider a single news story from china where the cleaning democratic horizon opened up my earlier market reforms have now been shuttered i xi jinping's regime. it was in the spring of 2020 the

height of the pandemic when jon mink, and meatpacker at a massive slaughterhouse complex had had enough. the state-owned firms subjects its workers to a digital pen opticon, tracking their every move, , communist party bosses make no bones about the purpose of this all present surveillance it's to stoke a culture of fear, reminding workers thatke the government is continually monitoring themta and failure to meet quotas or as as a put wg the peoples time results in docked pay their at the outset of thes pandemic chinese authorities identified slaughterhouses as the essential enterprise. management worked in to put in ever longer shifts with scant regard for the risk of viral contagion at the moment when covid and its medication were poorly understood. that cavalier attitude prompted john our protagonist to act. one day in april he led the

walkout of his colleagues. their demand was reasonable. they called simply for the complex to be temporarily closed. closed. very day.minated that framing the walkout as a violation of covert rules, the firms general counsel denounced his actions as immoral, unacceptable and arguably illegal, end quote, in internal memos. voicing dissent as as a statd firm in the peoples republic never exactly easy could a not e framed as a sanitary threat. zhang remains unemployed and china continues to silence t dissident workers and to fiercely resist efforts to organize them. actually, i lied, sort of. none of these things took place in the middle kingdom. i borrowed the language of my fake but all too real news story almost verbatim from reporting about events that transpired right here in the traneight.

it isn't a government owned chinese slaughterhouse that uses a digital panopticon to surveillance its workers comp punishing them for even minor lapses. and it wasn't a chinese slaughterhouse the terminated worker for leading the walkout at the height of the pandemic over the employers careless attitude toward the novel ecoronavirus. no, that would be the u.s. conglomerate amazon founded by jeff bezos. j the real zhang is named christian smalls, , an ex-worker at amazon's jfk warehouse, warehouse facility on staten island. at the height of the pandemic he became alarmed as his colleagues became sick. the human resources department dismissed his concerns telling another worker to keepp her illness on the download, according toim the "new york times." ..

>> this from the same company that a few months later would elbow it way to the forefront of corporate america's black lives matter activism in the wake of george floyd's murder in min yap lit. minneapolis. since then, small had fought to organize the 8,000 workers despite ferocious anti-union activity typical of the firm including, quote, confiscating pro-union pamphlets left in the break room and surveilling where workers congregate on the sidewalk, according to there times. we're used to thinking of coercion as a something that happens over there, entity ran call systems that a lack checks and balances like our own. and, of course, those regimes are as far as their state systems go, far more coercive than ours. but when we stop thinking about things in just purely geographic terms and focus instead on who is meting out the coercion, we

reach an unsettling new understanding. coercion is all too common in supposedly noncoercive societies like ours provided we pay attention to private power and admit the possibility of private tyranny. our reigning economic ideology tells us that in the private sector no one can force us to do the anything. competition insures that we're always free to find if a better deal elsewhere. the laissez-faire theorist hailed, quote, competition as the only method by which our activities can be adjusted to each other without coercive authority, end quote. milton freedman, likewise, insisted that the central feature of market society is that it presents one person from interfering with another in respect of most of his activities, end quote. but this is utopian thinking. in some ways as a idealistic and

dangerous as other modern utopias that came to legitimate real world repression in the previous century. market utopian withism has yielded a society shot through with private coercioners. coercion that we can't contest at the ball if ott box or in the court system or by other dem democratic means and give and take precisely because it's labeled private. take the fact that a third of the 25 million americans employed in food service and retail receive less than a week's notice of their upcoming schedules. according to university of california sociologist danielle schneiderde and kristin hartnet. just in time scheduling is intended to shift the downsides associated with periods of demand ontoo employees. in addition to wage precarety because with you can never be sure if you have enough wages and financial stability, workers treated this way report sleeping poorly and suffering mentally as a result. and their children are more

likely to show signs of anxiety and act out and misbehave in school, it and doesn't take a rocket scientist to connect the causal dots. it'sts a predictable result of their parents' inability to spend regular time with them. then there are today's lopsided employment agreements. whthese days when you sign on te dotted hine for a new job, you agree to a near total digital surveillance of your life including the confiscation of your personal devices, the use of software to monitor your communications and even the recording of your voice and personal likeness for commercial licensing. it'smm no longer just about, you know, using your picture in a company brochure. or consider commercial arbitration, a process originally intended for resolving disputes between merchants of relatively equal bargaining power. thanks mostly to supreme court conservatives, i i must say, practically rewriting the 1925 federal arbitration the act, the share of nonunion firms subjecting their workersto to mandatory arbitration agreements

has exploded to 54 percent as of 2017 up from 2% in 1992 two legal scholars. the employee win rate in these privatized so-called courts is just 21% which is 59% as often as in federal courts and only 38% as often in state courts. corporations, meanwhile, enjoy what scholars call repeat player advantage. the mores often a firm appears before a private arbitrator, the less likely employees are to prevail. arbitration clauses, more ifover, frequently bar employees from joining forces to vindicate rights they otherwise would enjoy under statutory law. even when going can it alone would be manifestly unjust, not to mention irrational. in one notorious case, a low-level employee of earnest and young would have had to shell out some $200,000 in

expenses to recover could havely $4,000 -- roughly $4,000 for wages. justice neil gore such uptheald the outcome on the grounds can that the employee had freely contracted to arbitrate his disputes. in fact, everybodyst and young presented the clause in an e-mail long after this employee -- stephen the morris, is his name -- had been hired and he had to consent as a condition of employment. he was told if you show up to work the next day, going forward you agree to submit your disputes to arbitration. and according to a certain kind of classical economic theory that's very popular among the judiciary but completely discordant with real life, at that point stephen morris had the ability to renegotiate his agreement or press for better terms. but as most of you know, what he really had to do was show up to work the next day because he had

to payr a mortgage, elder care and childcare, so on. so things don't have to be this way. a better model would admit that coercion is inevitable in all human affairs, not least in market activity. it would recognize that unchecked private coercion makes a mockery of our democratic ideals, and it would insist that such coercion be ameliorated between more give and take. this is the promise of what i call private -- sorry, what i call political, change capitalism. it was the philosophy that underpinned thed new deal generating the mass prosperity that defined the three decades after world war ii. and crucially, it formed a bipartisan consensus, winning the allegiance not just of progressives, but an earlier generation of conservatives from eisenhowerom to nixon. there are these -- these men weren't starry-eyed socialist, but hard-nosedded realists whom

experience had alerted to the dangers of unchecked market power. political exchange capitalism describes the world as a it really is, not the preindustrial arcadia of yeoman farmers and independent artisan sans, the premise for much utopian ideology, but a machine-driven -- characterized by a few colossal firms dominating most industries. its chief aspect, as the economist john kenneth gal bathe notedded, is the absence of competition; that is, the one thing supposedly needful under classical economic theory to prevent the private coercion. that parent had emerged by the late 19th century and has hardened since. big tech rule over ad markets, for example, would bring tears of embarrassment to the monocled eyes of any gilded age tycoon. gal bathe wrote, if there are only a handful of firms in the typical industry, it follows that privately exercised economic power is less the

exception than the rule. instead of waiving -- waving competition as a talliesman, political exchange capitalism strengthens the handsho of those subjugated by private power especially in the labor market. thus, the new dealers resolved to make it easier for workers to mount countervailing power after decades in which government had hindered themad from doing so sometimes with brutalim violenc. countervailing power is similar too competition, only here the counterpressure is exerted not on the -- of a given market not between producers and employees and so on, but on the other side of a market. not with can competitors, but with g customers and supply possessor as gal borat explained. private economic power is held in check by those subjugated to it. the first begets the second. and just as competition requires state antitrust action, something even laissez-faire

types admit,, so in labor markes promoted countervailing power requires government backing to offset the asymmetry that is otherwise created by employees going up against a few employers. otherwise most employees rationally choose to pull up with a bully boss or to suffer precarious hours and low wages or rather than take the risks associated with collective action. this was the logic behind the 1935 national labor relations act which sought to encourage unionization and collective bargaining and a 1938 fair labor standards act which created federal minimum wage and overtime protection. the result, union membership peaked in 1945 at 33%, up from 2.7% at the turn of the 20th century and remained high throughout the 1950s and '60s. under pre-new deal conditions, the asset will-less went along -- assetless went along to survive or to pitch ballots

against bosses that that sometimes threatened stability. post-new deal, they could challenge mass political parties. in a way, this model made explicit what ordinary people already knew, that economic life involves coercion. but it also gave them a measure of power to negotiate the coercion to which they have the long been subjected. restoring political exchange capitalism then foremost requires boosting union density, the share of the labor force belonging to labor organizations. today that figure has sunk to 6% in the private economy following the long decline that began, as yous know, in the 1970s. now, apologists for the current state of affairs claim that this is because unions have lost their luster among employees or because automation and globalization shifted manufacturing out of the united states. yet organized labor's supposedly lousy e reputation is belied by recentth polling showing unions are more popular now than they have been in a half century.

indeed, the desire to be represented has steadily increased among nonunion workers since the 1970s with one mit study finding that nearly half of the nonunion labor force in 2017 would hope to join the union if given the choice meaning that roughly 58 million americans are currently underrepresented. what about the robots and china explanation? that, too, is overstated. as labor economist lawrence michelle and his co-authors noted in a 2020 study, manufactured union coverage -- the share of workers who are union members or otherwise covered by collective bargaining agreements -- fell by 74% from 1977 to 2019. in non-manufacturing, coverage fell by a comparable 60% over the same period. you can perhaps, explain if the manufacturing drop by pointing to low bot r -- robots in china, but you'd struggle to explain the comparable drop in nonmanufacturing sectors.

statistical analysis, moreover to, shows overall union coverage only marginally changes if we transsuppose today'son industrialized conditions to 1979's economy. or put another way, saving manufacturing wouldn't have necessarily saved the union. so if american workers want to unionize and the loss of manufacturing isn't the main obstacle, then what accounts for labor's current doldrums? the answer is the same sort of private coercion that characterizes other dimensions of our economy all made possible by political choices. and if they're made by possible political choices, then they can be reversed. in the nearly 90 years since the passage of the wagner act, lawmakers, counts and often gop-dominated labor boards have effectively nullified large chunks of the original law from creating a free speech right for employers to campaign against yes to effectively abolishing

card check, to barring union representatives and even workers themselves from speaking in captive audience hearings designed to terrify employees, big business e and its political and media allies undermine the purpose of the wagner act to encourage -- a ferment of union action issw sweeping the labor market. starbucks baristas, delta flight attendants, railroad hands, dock workers, screen consumers -- screen writers,gr actors and may other groups have organized to unionize or to win other contracts. in april 2022, two years after christian smalls' term nation, a majority of workers at jfk voted to have his independence amazon labor unieurozone represent them in -- union represent them in collective bargaining. america, finally, isn't china. our political tradition cherishes human dignity and popular counterpressure against elite power.

while the united states has always been a market society, the country has also given rise to many honorable traditions that have sought to bring the market system under humane if democratic control. from the jabbing sewn januaries to progressive farmers to populists, from teddy roosevelt to franklin are roosevelt and to nixon and fdr -- i'm sorry, to nixen and eisenhower, these traditions played a decisive role in forging the first version of political exchange capitalism in the previous century. and once more, it's up to american workers to drag our leaders into a new consensus. on their vigilance, our vigilance depends a broadly sharedch prosperity and checks against private tyranny without which there canan be no land of the free. thank you veryto much, and i'm delighted now to welcome senator rubio. [applause] if.

>> thank you. i apologize. i was -- [laughter] i'll tell youou what i was doin. i was text screaming at my son for getting a parking ticket at school in gainesville, at the university of florida. anyway, thank you -- first of all, thanks for writing this and for the work that you've done in this field. maybe i'll just come from my perspective because i really think you touched on something. i was actually on a video conference today with some state legislators from georgia, and they asked about tech companies and what the federal government could do. and it struck me and i said to them what i had said to other people. i have -- there's one, and i think this is through true throughout the country, there's generally one power company no matter where you live. it's a utility. and they are allowed to operate in basically a monopolies -- monopoly space.

they are guaranteed a profit. in florida you go to the public service commission, and you say this is how much it costs to generate power, this is how much i have to charge people in order to make my statutorily-protected profit, but they control how much money you make, but they are a monopoly. imagine ifif the electric compay decide one day i am not going to provide electricity for people who believe this or people who are in this line of work or people who are in this line of business. well, be pretty dramatic -- it'd be pretty dramatic if they were able to do that. maybe i shouldn't speak this into the public square because maybe tomorrow someone will get some bright idea about what electric companies and f utilits should be doing to people. we're really not that far off in many spaces. it strikes me tomorrow there's going to be this artificial intelligence meeting in the senate where many, apparently many of these prominent if -- can markk zuckerberg's supposed to be there, so is elon musk. i think we may actually have a fight as a well coordinated as part of this thing, the fight they're supposed to have,

whatever. and out struck me if you think about it, i would argue that in a room with maybe up to a hundred united states senators, the two most powerful people in that room will not be members elected by the public, but two heads of important companies, one in particular with meta. and, you know, it's not because of wealth, it's because they control what is, in's essence, a utility in the 21st century are. if today four or five companies, if amazon, google, apple, you know, meta, i'll throw -- what is it called, x? all get together, they decide can, you know what we're going to do? we're going to destroy so and so. buzz or individual. eacould they -- business or individual. cocould they not really do that? could they not deny just about anybody a space in the public square? i do -- destroy your business? it'd be very difficult. this is an extraordinary amount of power in the hands of the private sector, and it can be used for what people presume to

be noble reasons and so forth, but it can also be used under tremendous public pressure to target political opponents, to target those who fall out of line, to target those who they may not agree with. and it can be used to threaten. how many people out there today are not afraid to openly express their views on a topic or take a public position on either side of the debate? although the it seems to be disproportionately on one side of most debates because they are afraid of the impact it could have on them not just reputationally, but many ways, not just economically. and i think that's what you sort of touch upon. we are not built to think of the public -- of the private square, private companies holding that amount of power over individuals. but that's how consolidated that, those industries have become. and where that sort of leads is an area that i've spent most of my time -- obviously, i've touched on some of the things that a t you've written about ad talked about today, but primarily really what is this a product of. and it really almost tracks

pretty well with my adult life. i graduated in high school, and i sayas graduated as a term of t from high school. a good student. in fact i i did not become a god student until i started paying for it. or, shall i say, borrowing for it. then i started caring a lot more about school and things of that nature. but i graduated in high school in '89. i'm, you know, going to graduate from the universitye of florida in '93. so just the world changed between '89 and '93. it change changed quite traumatically. i vividly recall growing up, remember the movie the day after wheresu the world was supposed o end? war games, where matthew broderick hacked into the pentagon and started a war game that almostd. ended the world? if so i grew up in that world. it was the united states versus the soviet union, good versus evil, reagan versus these devils, and then thed it all jt sort ofll fell apart literally. likebe the berlin wall collapse. i remember even when i was in college, and i will admit it was not the predominant thing on my mind atwa that time, i was a awe

of it, and i knew it was a pretty big deal. and i thought about that. but the rest are of thed world did too. and we emerged with two things, first of all, a real level of hubris, of a feeling that we won. we, free enterprise democracy, had won. andon communism and marxism had been defeated. and so, naturally, the war was over, this cold war, and now everyone was going to become a free enterprise economy, and everyone was e going to become a democracy. and you may say to yourself, well, you know, that was a noble endeavor, and that was certainly something we should have aspired bto. but we made decisions on a presumption that was fraud. a couple presumptions. the first p is that now somehowa global economy and global economic commerce would replace the nation-state. it was a saying, and i don't know who to attribute it to, but i know it was out there because i heard it at the time and many years later, never have two countries with mcdonald's ever gone to war with each other. well, that obviously sounds silly, but it was widely -- am i right? i don't care, what does it

matter anymore what these fact checkers said? [laughter] but i'm sure it was really said because i've heard it -- >> [inaudible] >> there you go. exactly. i don't know who to attribute it to. i imagine multiple people take credit for it. the point being this idea that somehow intercommerce between nation-states or between people would replace nation-states and no longer would it matter. national interest noas longer is really relevant because it would all be worked out that a way. the second assumption that was made is that now that the world is a sort of at this utopia that itwe had leeched, not only -- reached, not only would global commerce replace the nation-state, but in fact, we were really nothing more at this point not citizen of a country or members of a community, we weree now all either investors and/or consumers. in a global marketplace. the third assumption that was made as a result of all of this, the national order as things should be, that the market outcome would always deliver the most efficient outcome which is

10% true. if the market is $100% true -- 100% true.t. and that will drive investment. so who cares if the factory in your town or the employer that has been the anchor of a community for 30 years closed down. not just because of automation, but because of cheap labor. whoo cares? it's going. to go over there. you'll pay pay a lot less for whatever it is they made there, but here's the great news. a better jobob is coming. it will replace the job that was wiped out. it'll actually pay you more. you'll be happier. and that was another assumption that was made in this laboratory. but we all know that's not how it worked out. and what we've learned -- and i say all this to you guys, by the way, as a someone basically raised and, you know, grew up in the ranks of the free enterprise orthodoxy of the republican party.d and of the center-right. and r one of the reasons why is because the people on the other side of this debate were either

socialists or communists or a combination thereof, and i feel like those people are wrong, crazy, really bad for the world. so i'm the opposite of what that is. these assumptions sort of guided public policy and in some ways built a consensus. so that's why you get to 2001 and, sure, let's try and join the world trade organization. let 'em in. because, don't worry, yeah, they're going to cheat, yes, they're going to steal jobs for us, but they're going to get rich. and when they get rich are, they'll become just like us and stop cheating. that's a pretty stupid gamble, but that was the notion. why wereth these things wrong? the assumptions were wrong for a couple reasons. the first is nation-state will also matter because the most essential -- human nature will never change. 5500 years of recorded history teaches us that, and that's why history repeats itself. we change theng way we live, we change the way we dress, we change the way we speak, but human nature will never if change. and one of the. core elements of human nature is this desire to belong. and that's why anywhere in the

world that you put people together, 2 people, 10 people, they immediately want to join something and band together to do something. it's just a natural thing. and one of those things in the modern era, and i mean in the last 3-400 years, is the matter of -- rise of the nation-state. place and belonging matters. the idea that we had that that would no longer matter, we would all be citizens of the global world, it wouldn't matter anymore, you know, that was a fantasy that people adopted, people who could afford to adopt it who have passports and could travel all over the world and went to all these forums. but for most people in america, that was not true. but it was especially not true for the leaders of china and russia and other countries who said, no,o, we're going to stay with nation-state interests, thank you very much. we're continue to -- going to continue to focus on the nation-state. but the other error that was made -- and the mistake thatt ws made a was the belief that jobs was simply, like, the place that provides you a paycheck. and jobs are a lot more than just about a paycheck. first,ly the paycheck really matters, but a job is not just a

job. there are jobs and then there are stable jobs. there are jobs and then there are reliable jobs. there are jobs and then there are jobs that you can actually raise a family on. and our economic members don't mention that. it almost -- i always sort of, like, think to myself every time i hear the monthly report, 100,000 new jobs created, they don't tell you what kind of jobs. are these jobs that are going to be around in six months? do they pay enough? do they pay at least $40-50,000 at a minimum to you can raise a family? be a member of a community? can you rely on that job three or four years from now so you can actually become a member of a community? that's the first thing they don't tell you. what about underemployment? i don't know what percentage it's up to now, 30, 35% of people that have these degrees and can't find a job in the degree they got? they or borrowed money for that degree but now they can't find a job? are thesebs the kinds of jobs -- and the other point, when you yank jobs away, you don't just rob -- rob them of dug anity and

purpose -- dignity and purpose, the anchor of a community is those stable, reliable jobs because unless you have stable, reliable jobs, you don't have coaches for the little league. you don't have presidents for the pta, you don't have the civic organizations that actually hold a the country together. one of the notions that was lost in this era was that america is not an economy. america is not a government. america's a nation. and the glue, the fiber of a nation is not the government. the government is what, you know, creates laws and sort of protects us and does all sorts of things. but it's not the country. and it's not an economy. we have an economy. we need an economy. but our country, the fiber and the basic elements of the country are families and community. the two most important institutionsim in any society. and i don't care how wealthy you are, how much of gdp growth, how geopolitically influential your government may be. if you don'tou have family and community and they're not strong, your countryg, will note strong. it will be weak and divided. and those are the economic

implications that that's had. and so the struggle now for people and sort of a realization that, as a i said, look, i don't think there's anything wrong with learning and then adapting what you learn to what's before you. and beginning at about 2014, 2015, certainly by 2016, part of that happens to be on the presidential trail, if america's doing so well, why is everybody so pissed off at each other and the world in general? there's a lot ofa that. and it was shocking to me, because i'm a product of the american dream. my mom was a stock person at kmart. my dad was a, banquet bridgedd, and they owned a home -- bartender, and they owned a home and retired with dignity, and they left all four of their kids better off. this is a great country. why isn't everybody happy? well, i worked in this place for 30 years and my dad before we -- me and first they cut my pay, and then they got up and left. i can't find a job that replaces that a one. learn how to code and move to san francisco. and this was back in 2016 when

people used to live in san francisco. [laughter] and they said, i'm not going to -- you know, that doesn't work foror me. completely disconnects them. and so it disconnects them from community and family, from all the things that make life worth living and the implications that that had. so we lost that perspective. and the challenge then became i think socialism is a failure. everywhere it's been tried. if you look at the southern border of the united states, a substantial percentage of the people come from socialist countries called venezuela, nicaragua and cuba. it's failed everywhere. so i believe in the market. you know why? i believe in market and capitalism because it is the one economic model capable of creating not just prosperity, but widespread prosperity that allows you to build societies anchored in family and in community. where not everyone's going to be a billionaire or even a millionaire, but you're going ti produce the largest number of good paying jobs for as many people as possible.

but only if you make make that a priority. only if that becomeslyf part oe equation when you make public policy. and so d when you make public policy decisions under the assumption that, well, this policy -- will this policy generate economic growth and wealth. ing and that's important. you can't have good paying jobs without reality creation and economic success at the corporate level. you need that. but you can't just have that alone. it has to be the kind of growth that creates wealth and prosperity but also creates good paying jobs for as many people as possible. americans in our case. and that's the perspective that was lost. it didn't matter where the wealth was being created. it didn't matter where the wealth was being concentrated. it didn't matter if the wealth was the product of jobs created somewhere else. whatat mattered was whether some company with an address in the united states -- although american in no other way in terms of how they viewed themselves -- did well when the bell rang at the end of the day in the stock market. and that was a perspective we often -- here's the other

quandary that you reach. the market, and i believe in the market, but the market, it's a tool. it exists to serve the national interest. not the national interest and not our people to serve the market.. and where it really gets complicated is when the most efficient outcome is not good for your country. and there aree people that will still argue with you to this day, that's impossible. that never happened. it most certainly does. the market says it's more efficient to buy 88% of the active ingredients of our pharmaceuticals in china because they subsidize it, because they have lower labor. whatever it may be, is it in our national interestgn to depend oa foreign competitor/adversary for 88% of the active ingredients in our pharmaceuticals or to corner 80% of the rare earth minerals on earth? what about during covid where we couldn't make masks and couldn't makew, this? maybe we didn't need that many maxes, i suppose, but at the time in all this passenger that

was going on, for the first time we came face to face with deindustrialization, and the national interest component of it. and it's eas' to talk about deindustrialization simply from wouldn't it be like if we had factories like the good can old days? i'm not talking about going back to theof '50s. but if that has a national security component to it, a national economic security but also a job component to it. i've published a report a week agobo talked about the standingf men in theme workplace. and in particular what i was focused on are men without college degrees. why are men without college degrees struggling in the 21st century too find jobs? because the jobs that largely supported them were industrial type jobs, and they have vanished as well. we can go on ande on, but the point is we've come to a point where this realization is before us. and the two choices are not always a, look, worship the market or, b, let the government take over the means of production and pour a bunch of government money into every endeavor that has an american

flag stapled on the door. those areo two false choices. but toe the return to an -- we have to return to an era where we understand the proper role of the market, and that requires us to reembrace the concept of the national interest at a every level. and we should not be -- that does not make you a, you know, nationalist is a word thrown around these days, this is to say i don't a care what's happening in the rest of the world or i only care about america. i don't only care about america, but i do care about america before anything else. not because i'm inhumane, but because in an american elected official does not put the american nationalug interest as the first topic of thought behind any decision, well, who is? the bolivian senate? the senate of, i don't know, lithuania? if who is supposed to put the american national interests first? if you want to think about the corporate setting where they all argue or our job is to protect our shareholders, my job is to protect my shareholders happen to be the men and women of the united states of america and the families of this country. so i don't thinkd there's

anything wrong in saying, number one, we need to make the national interest the number one objective, the number one to anya we apply e public policy decision at the federal level. number two, that it is in the national interest to have an economy that empowers workers to have dignified and stable work so they can build families and communities.it and, number three, that should extend to our engagements around the world. there are things, there are a lot of terrible things that in the world, and if we can help, we should. but number one before we decide how we get involved and how much we get involved, what is the core national interest of the united states. that's more true today than ever. we are no longerhe the world's sole superpower. this is no longer a unipolar world where we have the luxury ofof playing in every conflict r in everything that's going on around the world. we can care about all of them, we can try to help where we can, but by and large, we do have to now pick our fights more than ever because as great and powerful as this country is, it does not have unlimited power. it does not have unlimited reach

or resources, and it has to prioritize them inn a new geopolitical era. i'll close with one last observation. i've talked about the a.i. thing, and it's interesting because i am a firm believer that you basically cannot hold back technological advance no matter how hard you try. technological advances are going to happen. everybody's freaking out about artificial intelligence. there are a couple of points that i have. primary primarily, is artificial intelligence going to become manager -- and nobody knows the answer to this, okay? but is it going to be a technology that makes humans do what humans do better, faster, more accurately, or is it going to be a technology that replaces humans? i mean, completely? is it going to be automation that actually allows one worker to do the work of five, or is it going to be something that actually takes the human element out completely? we don't know the answer to that. butt what strikes me about it is there's a lot more freaking out about a.i. right now which is not really on top of us in the levels that it could be much more than about automation. some of the same people, don't

worry about automission, that's going to be good -- automission. the workers will make more money. don't worry about deindustrialization because we're all going to be software engineers, and we're goingng to makebu a lot of money. but now those same people are freaking out, you know what why? because we have a massive technological advance that threatens not the blue collar worker, not the $40,000 a year worker, it threatens the people that are making a lot of money and suddenly realizing they may not need me anymore. one of the cornerstones of the hollywood strike is screen writers that don't want to be replaced byy a screen and actors that don't want to be replaced by a fake avatar or whatever it is that's going to replace them. now we're seeing a disruption that impacts white collar, higher educated or higher standard of living workers and now all of a sudden they are freaked out about some revolutionary change going on in society. but that interest dud not exist when it came to the american worker. and whether it was i out of malice, greed orup stupidity, wn we decided we were a country that no longer needed to make

things and create jobs that can employ asab many americans as possible in a stable way, we did real damage to the country and the national fiberrer. and the reason why i know this is true is because it's t not just happening to us. virtually e every industrialized country in the world, particularly in the west, is going through similar domestic upheavals whether it's immigration or the state of their economy or government policies on climate and the like. because they're all feeling the exact samehe thing. these decisions and these assumptions that have led this world and our country for 30 years were a mistake. and now we have to confront that mistake and hopefully reverse it. and it's my personal hope, although i think your a little bit more possess mix than i am, that the republican party will be the home of that movement but it won't be easy because there are a lot of roots, deep roots, o that go into everything from, you know, the intellectual world, public policy to much of the traditional center-right institutions. but there's change. we've made a lot of progress in

four to five years, we have a lot more work to do. the invitation to talk about itha because i do discuss what -- think what you discuss about tyranny is a by-product of economic decisions that actually empowered the vertical integration of certain industries who have extraordinary power. at a time when we all felt along with the privatet sector, don't worry c about it because there'l be a competitor out there. thereet is no competitor for amazon. there is no competitor for google. there really isn't.th and so we reap what we sowed. anyway, thank you for the chance to talko to all of you about this. i look forward to your questions. [applause] >> thank you, senator rubio. i want to invite our panelists now to join us up here on stage. the audience will bear with us for just a second, we're going to get micked up and then go -- mic'd up and then go straight into our panel discussion.

[background sounds] [inaudible conversations] >> we're all good to go.

i want to start our -- [inaudible] alll right. well, i want to start our panel discussion here tonight really where senator rubio left us off which is a question of where this book sits on the political spectrum. sohrab, you are a man of the right, a longtime commentator in the conservative space. the bookus has got a lot of criticism from the right. so i want to start on that note. there's a point where you retell that narrative that you mentioned manys your remarks about sort of the political economic history of this country especially in the post-depression era. and there was one note that stuck out to me where you said part of what drove the prosperity of what wemi saw in e middle of the past century was a commitment to limits. and that's something that's been a theme of a lot of things that i'vete written about from a conservative perspective. i just want to give you this opportunity to answer your critic, how are you not a full social u.s. quite yet? [laughter] -- socialist quite yet?

>> great question. so the smartest reviews of this book have come from marxists, and they've argued that this book is a -- what it puts forward is a fundamentally conservative project whereas often when i'm dealing with center-right or center-left podcasters or reviewers they'll say, well, it seems like your brain is a right-leaning brain when it comes to abortion, but, you know, you have more of a left-wing mentality when it comes to economy and how do you reconcile those two where, in fact, for me a commitment to a market that a exists within the limits of the common good arises from the same place. it's informed by my catholic faith and catholic social teaching which is early in the 19th century the pope recognized that unhinterred markets were creating vast prosperities in markets and wealth and that the way to combat is one of the ways, of course, is by allowing workers to encouraging them to

organize, bargain collectively. and in other places for the state to intervene in markets to insure that you wouldn't have catastrophic situations of market failure. so it's, it's not as if i shut down my conservative brain when i become, you know, a writer on political economy and then turn it back on when i turn to, let's say, cultural issues. it all kind of comes from the same place. and it's very important to know that,s you know,t, the new deal project, the new deal order and what preceded it, you know, herbert hoover laid down many of the flameworks that were -- frameworks that were subsequently -- the idea of class compromise was seen as the conservative thing to do in the face of market disruption and in the face of social unrest that was -- because workers didn't earn enough to afford the goods that they were producing, and it was leading to social

instability. so this model of what you might call class compromise is not class antagonism p right? it recognizes class antagonism is real, but it seeks to reconcile the classes rather than -- the antagonism if all the way into the abolition of one class by another. so, yeah, there's nothing, you know, contra convictly about -- contradictory about being supportive of a kind of socially-managed capitalist vision. >> so one quick follow-up for senator rubio before we bring in the rest of the r panel. you had touched on this at the end of your remarks that you were perhaps more optimistic than sow wrap is about remaking the gop as a working class party. yi'm wondering if you can expad on that a little bit, that optimism. and, two, what do you think are some of the main barriers to achieving that sort of political realignment? >> well, first of all, i think that's where the party writ large is in terms of the voters or. it's one of the things that was really apparent to me when i ran for president, how different -- i'd go campaign somewhere with

and hear nafta sucks, you know, the economy, you know, these people are sending our jobs overseas, allin these terrible - and then you go somewhere with the donors who live very different lives and realize there was already a massive disconnect between the doe far basese and voter base. and i think as a much as anything else, the trump cam main sort of exposed that because he challenged all sorts of conservative orthodoxy in his campaign, and it sort of revealed, hey, what the donors tell you is really a good idea. not every doe no, i think that's unfair. but generally speaking, and then where the voters were were tdramatically -- dramatically different. someone is going to be the voice of that group can. and one of the things that challenges at least from my perspective is the traditional political spectrum as we've identified it for 25 or 30 years. and we think that somehow if you were here 150 years ago, the center, the right, the left, the political party, it looked very different. there was an era in this country where there were very

conservative democrats and quite liberal republicans. so we've had multiple realignments and reinventions of how the parties align and so forth. i think polarization has sort of drivene people in the two camps these days. t so where is the home of the american who says, look, i don't want socialism, i don't want to be a government employee, and i don't want the government telling mego what to do with evy aspect of my life? but i do want public policy officials that, number one, care about. >> creating an economy where not just people canpe get rich are, but can find people good stable jobs. there are people that are, like, look, i feel terrible for what's happening in the world, but we always have toat do what's in america's national interests, first e and foremost. there's a market for that. that market's going to be met by some political movement. it won'tov be easy because, as i said, a tremendous amount of infrastructure, over 25 or 30 years that's been built on this traditional paradigm. but i think it's an inevitable

evolution, and i think the republican party is right now the only place that can be the home of it because the social radicalization of the democratic part makes it impossible for it finishsh it's just a hostile environment to the working class voter who's sort of looking for a common sense and balanced and politics that reflect not just their economic needs, but their general preferences for their families and the future of the country. i don't think it's going to be easy, but i certainly think that's where it winds up. >> i want to bring in matt stoller on that. you're a man of the left, you're our left-wing perspective on this panel. as you know and i'm sure our audience knows, sohrab has launched a new magazine, compact magazine, under the sort of hypothesis that there are enough disparate voices on the left and right that we need to highlight and emphasize in this new journalist. -- journal.

i'm curious your response to senator ruining owe and, two, where you think some of the limits to that left-right cooperation might lie. >> yeah. so i look at it -- so i'm a democrat, progressive democrat, and i kind of look at the problem as sort of, like, both parties are kind of interwritten, right? who's going to find the voice that speaks to that angry, the angry, frustrated person out there who just sees how disconnected the political elites really are? and just to give a quick example are wherepa both parties could o it. today is the first day of the google antitrust trialal which s been, which was brought by trump in 2020 and has been continued by biden. and either party could, you know, there are states involved

and either party could win and becomeg the dominant governing party. what ian think is happening and what your book is really about is a specific language of moral reform that you're rejecting which is the language of efficiency. because the language of efficiency, the language of economics, modern economics is the language of moral reform that it has taken over both parties, the corporate world, think tank world, policy making world, and it traps us into gnat see -- not seeing power. different parties, different philosophies of how to be. once you are removed from that sort of world where there is no power, a utopian world which is a trap, all of a sudden the possibility of building a society opens up. and i think, you know, what you see, it's happened to me and i think the it happens to everyone who's sort of one day doesn't see power and the next day does, it's like there are many ways to craft a society. we just have to choose to do it. and i think the party that decides to do that first is the party that is going to be sortrt

of dominant over a generation. >> that makes sense. bradley, you are our young conservative on the panel. it struck me that perhaps some of the most, the most praise for sohrab's book andbo project on e right at least has come from younger conservatives, you know? there are a lot of the sort of older generation who have panned this, but if you're looking for price the right, it's going to be the younger generation. i'm bond we aring why you think that is especially based on you as a young conservative. >> yeah, it has been from younger conservatives, not the old guard types that are continually turning out white patients on why we should spend another four years of a republican administration pursuing tax cuts. some that 2006s that sohrab has in his back that most everyone in the office probably knows, right? wages stagnant since 1973, the productivity of a low border --

laborer going up 75% from that same year and yet the real wages have only gone up 9%. and then if you look at a little deeper into that data, uh-uh you see that wages are -- you see that wages are stagnant, but the gains that have been made are concentrated amongst those wage earners above the 75th percentile, right? how do you get there? education.at education has increased 200% over that same time period. a lot of necessary goods, goods that we consider necessary for family formation; health care, college, homes, right? we've seenn the rapid increase n those types of prices. and timed and time again when young people are talked to about this, they say, yes, my student loan debt did factor in to me delaying getting married. delaying buying a home. delaying having children. and so there's, at the same time this argument the old guard makes, well, you know, if you're

educated, you can actually get into those rungs of wage labor that are seeing those gains. well, since 2000 the average salary/wage for college graduates has been pretty volatile and is currently on a down swing. there's a slight downward regress i haveness. -- regressiveness. so what actually pulls people out of this? young people haven't gotten a good answer from two the political parties that are focused on appeasing corporate power and, you know, setting up or continuing that neoliberal structure that sohrab so eloquently lined out in the book. and young conservatives, i think, are seeing this fallacy in their own lives and, you know, republican politicians -- not senator rubio -- will go on the stump and talk about wallets, wallets, wallets, paychecks, paychecks, paychecks, you know? everyone thinks taxes are okay

until it hits their wallet. well, young people are seeing those e in the costs of all these goods that they need to start families, so young conservatives are realizing that there's i think an incorrect anthropology that undergirds a lot of this, that pushes family to the side, pushes nations to the side and focuses more on this consent to choose at-will contracting. and, you know, they might not articulate it in a direct way, but they see that that kind of arrangement that so much of we can call it the uniparty consensus rests on is false, so they're pursuing other forms of conservativism that hearkens back to the time before the goldwater years in 1964. you look at the history of the republican party, for the longest time i think since really the republican party was

founded until the roosevelt-taft split, i like, the number one issue for republicans was the tariff. if you go down to one of the smithsonians down there, you'll see in an exhibit a brochure fromom republicans that a say, u know, democrat free trade leads to poverty and despair. republican protectionism leads to prosperity and goodwill to all men or something like that, right?t? and that's the tradition that more young conservatives are rediscovering in trying to navigate out of these problems that this neoliberal consensus has left are us with. so i want to attorney to perhaps the chief remedy that sohrab puts forward in the book which is union membership. the need too support and boost union withs. he mentioned this, but there is, you know, a lot of -- there are many statistics on in that show, you know, a lot y of workers do want to join unions. but i think another statistic

that's helpful to kind of put this into light was a survey done by american compass which asks why potentially union members would not want to be part of a union. if and the top sort of reasons why were, one, union political involvement is toxic. two, member dues. three, corruption. and then way down the list at number nine was fear of retaliation from the company. so, a.b., i know you've done a lot of work in labor and the clabor movement. i'm curious to get your thoughts on sort of why potential union members won't join unions. and if so, i was right, this is a great antidote to a lot of the issues we're seeing in our political economy, how we can encourage them more. >> yeah, sure. it bears keeping in mind that the way somebody becomes a union member, it's m not like becomina member of the nra or the democratic socialists of america or something like that. the main way that people become union members is actually kind

of incidental. it's by becoming an employee in a shop that's already organized. for those -- or the second largest way is actually by people who are the first to form a union and elect a labor organization at their workplace. and so for those cases i think successful campaigns are really going to be built around the issues that actually matter to those employees who elect a union. so i think these sort of abstract, you know, these survey ises are a bit abstract. i think they're interesting insofar as they sort of point to kind of reputations that unions have that are built up in ecertain ways. so what were some of -- what was the top reason that you said? >> top reason not to join, the union's political involvement is toxic. >> oh, political involvement's toxic, yeah. so, you know, for the reasons i was talking about, i mean, actual political orientation of union members are, you know, a lot of union members are

republicans already. different unions are going to have different sort of makeups, and some are going to be more conservative than others. but look at the diversity that exists in the labor movement now. if you y see the demonstrationsf some pilots now, they sort of all get together and stand in a line and sort of very conservative. they're all holding a sign on the same level in the exact same way. this is a lay a boar demonstration in the same way that's much more sort of boisterous. so, you know, i think, you know, even thoughow the labor movement is small and i want it to get a lot bigger, it's quite diverse and there's room in it for all kinds of people who want to join together and have a say at work and inan negotiating your contrt with their coworkers, their employer. and having something that's very important that sohrab touches on in the book, and that is not

being an at-will employee. and this sits on what senator rubio was talking about, of having stability in yourin job d being able to count on it. reliability, stability that you can't befo dismissed for no rean or for any reason that's not illegal. >> yeah, please do. just one more thought on the question of unions being perceived not wrongly by many workers as being politicized and specifically politicized on the side of the democratic party, our friend michael lind points out in his most recent book that at one point he just visited the page of the leader of the afl-cio, and her tweet was something like, well, you know -- slightly parapraigz, but we stand for maximal reproductive freedom. and, you know, as michael said, like, lots of workers who are either, who are covered by the afl-cio or would want to be covered don't share those views.

so what that's reflecting is the degree to which organized labor has become very much part of the democratic party. but one thing, one major reason for that is, you know, over the past two generations the labor movement has often, more often than not gotten the back of the hand from the republican party. and so it's been forced to shift to the democrats, i think, by political necessity. and, therefore, even those workers whoer are coming to the republican party as voters, they don't have an organized voice within the republican party in the same way that organized labor is an organized part of the democratic coalition. but if we had a republican party that wasto more friendly to labr organizations, then i think you would see labor becoming more independent because it'sen not o dependent on one party knowing that the other one will be, you know, hostile at every stage.

national labor relations boards will just be kind of made up of union busters and do to on. >> well, i want to turn it to the audience. we have time for one, maybe two questions, so if you have a question, please raise your hand, and we will do what we can. yes, right over here. >> [inaudible] very brieflyve in your remarks, and i was just curious to what tree -- [inaudible] >> sure, yeah. i mean, you know, when i became a catholic, i was, you know, working for a publication that pushes the kind of neoliberal dogma, right? tax cut, free trade over everything else. but it seemed to me the more i read the pope's teachings on social issues, on modern social -- catholic social teaching, the less the attempt to synthesize catholicism and

paul ryanism seemed tenable. and so, you know, neil mentioned the centrality of limits in a classical and christian tradition. i think there was a liberating aspect in being kind of having a cath a lick view on things because you look at a market and you neither fetishize the market nor you completely turn away from it. you say, well, it's a tool, it's a human institution but it's subject to the imperatives of the common good and, therefore, there are things that must limit it. and so that's the kind of attitude of respect for limits which is, i think, at the heart of my political economic thinking. >> can i add one thing on to here? one of the things i found very interesting about the reviews of sohrab's book that were critical,d they quote john mockingdale, ah, gotcha.

the catholic social teaching and some of these liberal theorists oftenar use similar language, bt they're getting at somewhat different things. and that's the anthropological fallacies that i awe load -- alluded to that runs all the way back to liberalism. and it's that choice-oriented, consent-oriented, at-will-contracting-oriented mindset that is completely foreign to really the entire western canon pre, you know, 15th, 16th century are. and that's kind of, for me, my faith has rediscovered that sense of when we talk about equality and freedom and human dignity,ht right? ..

i actually spoken this before. the catholic social doctrine was actually incredible faceting but also very intellectual deep but is rooted in some pretty basic principles. the first is dignity of the person, that individual dignity where to derive that dignity from? e from a faith perspective becae your meet in the image of the crater but also from what you have opportunity to do, what it is that you fulfill dignity from and it is a from the acquisition of wealth or status come material possessions and it is from at its fundamental core it argues that man was made to work. so what it argues is that human beings have an obligation to work. but then he goes on to say so yes in a functioning economy people have an obligation to work. but the economy your public policymakers have an obligation to create, to foster an economy that creates network. that's two sides of the same coin. so yeah, if you want, you have to have an economy that produces

a work. it can't just produces the work that fulfills the human dignity. any others has a very simple definition for the rule of civil officials and that is to promote the common good which is a term a speech a given 2019 about common good capitalism and it largely was the argument capitalism is a tool we use to achieve the common good and then the definition of what is in the common good is what politics is about. i think there are some fundamental principles that will be broad agreement on and one of them is weor need to economic policies that create work for those who we are expecting to work, and the kind of work that allows you to do the things that make life worth living and allow for human flourishing, like family formation. that's what we don't have an answer for for young americans. i mean i know when i was going up, get a degree, a degree that takes you seven or eight years, our money, doesn't matter to make it back a great investment. what's that formula today? outside maybe a handful of jobs that i can say if you had to do this come like if you forget how to invent this page on the

internet where people can connect with each other you can become a a billionaire. but other than that sort ofth thing, what is the guarantee that comee to america's quest item in guarantee you will be wealthy. i guarantee you will find if you're willing to do ask you will at least find a job that pays you enough to don't have to step at night worried you're going to get laid off at any moment, you're going to lose everything you have an event whose going to pay to raise his kids and why should we even get married and why should it even own a home? why shouldn't even be involved in the community if i'm going up to move every two and half years to find another job that is comparable? we don't have an answer is i used is that we're on the verge of becoming the first americans to leave the next generation better off. i think we're i can just tell you from personal experience and o'donnell nonetheless pressed the numbers back it up, members of my family are at least ten years behind where i was economically and socially in terms of home ownership, career, achievement and the like at that when i was 30 i was ten years ahead of where they the arn their 30s. i think that it's a committed

impact on the country moving forward that, i don't think we have fully yet absorbed. >> just briefly, matt. >> yeah, it's important to realize that neoliberalism is based on faith. like, it's religious zealotry and that's i saw like all just be real quick, senator hawley introduced a bill on a user usep which you know gets introduced periodically. the level of anger towards that, there was a metaphysical rage, like, how dare you, right? that's what you find when you propose new ideas or say hey, the stuff isn't working. they are like how dare you? that's because it's a criticism of the religion, right? that i think is important faith works in both ways. >> it sounds like when i increase the child tax credit, how dare you? >> you monster. i mentioned at the outset

unfortunately were in a really tight time was so immediately to their for today. just a few closing notes there. first of all if you don't already gone and bought "tyranny, inc." please do it is really important provocative book. secondly, you can keep up with everything sohrab is doing on the page of comeback magazine of what is a weekly column at the americans concern was so go check us as well. last housekeeping at as image at the outset pleased to stay in your seats until the speakers have had a chance to leave the room. so thank you i o to all of our panelist. please join me in thanking our panelists. [applause] >> if you're enjoying booktv then signed up for newsletters using the qr code on the screen to see the schedule of upcoming programs, author discussions, book festivals and more. booktv every sunday on c-span2 or anytime online at booktv.org, television for serious readers.

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