so i've been out here for a couple weeks enjoying your part of the country it really is nice out here and i also went up to vancouver you know in cannes to where they have universal health care you know about this because heard about this simplistic credible thing we'll talk about that later i was also out of port angeles but we'll talk about this later although what i want to start by talking about you know we always we professionals always adjust the microphone just a little bit just to see like a quarter of an inch but what i want to talk about tonight is trump or specifically the country that voted for trump the country that made just me donald trump president by the way and i still have a hard time getting my mind around that and i often wake up in the morning back in washington the other washington where i live and it's beautiful sunny day in the israelis are in bloom and you know i have two wonderful children and i'll be so happy  trump is president and he flies over our neighborhood in his helicopter you know oh well but let's talk about the country that just voted for him and this is a country that i'm going to describe to you is so i was out in port angeles on my vacation and it's that kind of country it's seattle is a very different place seattle is an unusual place in america but the country that i'm talking about is different the last few years in the country that i'm describing have been a time of brisk prosperity according to official measurements with unemployment down in the stock market up for americans who work for a living however nothing ever seems to improve wages don't grow the median household income in this country is still below where it was in the year two thousand and seven the economists have a way of measuring inequality that they call the labor share of the gross national product and in this country the that measurement hit its lowest point ever labor's share of the gross national product has its lowest point since they started keeping records on this in the year two thousand and eleven and then stayed there for the next couple of years in the fall of two thousand and fourteen with the stock market hitting all time highs a poll showed that nearly three quarters of the american public thought that the economy was still in a recession because for them it was now folks you know that there was a time when average americans could be counted upon to know correctly whether things in this country were going up or things were going down because when america prospered the american people prospered too but these days things are different the other statistical way of looking at it from the middle of the great depression up to the year one thousand nine hundred eighty the lower ninety percent of the population in this country a group that we might refer to as the american people that group took home seventy percent of the growth in america's group the american people pocketed none of this country's income growth at all their share in these great good times was zero the upper ten percent of the population by which i mean the country's financier's and managers and professionals took the whole thing to be a young person in this country right now is to understand i think instinctively the downward slope that so many people are on these days college costs are out of control you know this the university where i got my ph d back in the eighty's and ninety's today costs nearly sixty five thousand dollars a year to attend ok four years of that is more than a quarter of a million dollars you want to go to a school like that you take out a lot of student loans and as i been traveling this country for the last year i have met many young people you know again and again and again who are fifty sixty one hundred thousand dollars in debt and folks they're starting out life this way they're going out into this tube arised economy of ours with the equivalent of a mortgage and no house to show for it now at the other end of the social ladder of course it's all upside all the time back in one thousand nine hundred eighty the c e o s in this country made about on average about forty times as much as their blue color line workers today it's three hundred seventy three times as much one particularly lucky american family in fact has as much wealth as does forty percent of the rest of us put together the main accomplishment of the six high achieving individuals who make up this family their main accomplishment was to inherit shares in wal mart the retailer that has sucked the life out of thousands of towns in the part of this country that i come from and that's where we are folks nearly ten years after the financial crisis growth that doesn't grow and prosperity that doesn't prosper this country people now understand is simply no longer arranged in such a way as to make its citizens economically secure and that's the country that elected donald trump president what i'm trying to say folks is that the middle class is disintegrating in the great middle class nation and you know this is true there is outrage and there is fury around every corner you scratch any surface and it comes pouring out and you would expect everything i just described all of those shocking numbers the situation that we're in you would expect that this would lead to a revival of the left the revival of left politics in this country and the reason you would expect that is because that's what's happened in the past that's what's happened in very similar times in history in the in the one nine hundred thirty s in the eight hundred ninety s and yet here's the crazy thing this is the thing that has fascinated me for my entire adult life that the politics of this age of inequality have been dominated by right wing revolts one after another after another that only accelerate the disintegration of the middle class  but in truth and depending on how you count it this is the fifth conservative successful conservative uprising to happen in my lifetime so i was born in one thousand nine hundred sixty five nixon came along in  sixty eight the new what they called the new right and ronald reagan in the late seventy's newt gingrich in the one nine hundred ninety s george w bush a short while after that then the tea party movement and now trump it just keeps chugging along and to understand how crazy all of this is i want to try to put this in high relief and the way i want to do that is to remind you of what things looked like back in two thousand and nine after the the financial crisis had happened the great recession was underway and it seemed like the philosophy of free markets had really been discredited for good it really felt like that in those days here we had deregulated wall street we had bowed down and worshiped at the feet of wall street we had put nice friendly wall street guys in charge of overseeing wall street and here wall street went and poisoned the economy of the entire world with their mortgage backed securities and so two thousand and nine seemed like i mean it felt like to me a historical turning point here the george w bush administration had blundered into this whole series of disasters the iraq war hurricane katrina the jek aber mof scandal and then economic catastrophe and it felt like the last straw like this had to be the end of something and in want the other washington where i live the wise men of the city thought that they understand what was who understood what was what was going on they said the tectonic plates were shifting conservatism's long reign was finally at an end what had begun with nixon back in sixty eight and we had gone on with reagan and all those people i mentioned was finally now in two thousand and nine it was done the age of reagan was over one historian wrote the liberal age of obama was dawning the pendulum has swung one way and now is going to swing back the other by a force all its own we don't have to do anything that's just how history works that's just gravity for you back in two thousand and nine the pundits in the other washington loved to talk about how the republican party was on what they called a political suicide mission how its candidates had zero chance in the enlightened new america we were living in the republican party they said was being sent to the dustbin of history the reason i bring all this up you know why  of course this is exactly the same thing they said last year with commentator after commentator insisting that donald trump didn't have a chance that the republicans had destroyed themselves by making him their candidate but to stick with two thousand and nine the republican party themselves weren't particularly interested in their own demise they didn't really want to go to the dustbin of history and they did this is the crazy thing they did exactly the opposite of what those pundits in washington d c kept telling them they had to do they stepped on the gas instead of the brakes instead of moving to the center as every pundit we that's how you get your pundit license in d c you understand the gen right everybody always at all times and in all situations the answer to every question is moved to the center and they didn't do that the republican party didn't do that they totally disregarded this advice they purged their moderate faction they responded this is fascinating folks they responded to the failure of markets by becoming free market zealots remember this waving their copies of iron randon the air you know the tea party movement all of this stuff and then in two thousand and ten this radicalized republican party scored its greatest victory in congressional elections in many decades at the state level they took some six hundred seats away from the democratic party they purged countless republican moderates in two thousand and fourteen they went on to conquer the senate and today the tragedy is complete control congress the presidency trump immediately named a justice to the supreme court and they control the most state legislatures they have since the one nine hundred twenty s folks this is a wipe out for the democratic party and also for those pundits who have so persistently taken democratic victory for granted and all of this all of this has been going on while wall street lutes the world and while the middle class of this country falls to  pieces some years ago i wrote a book about the rise of populist conservatism in my home state of kansas and i had a phrase in that book that i was proud of i said i said that out here in kansas the gravity of discontent pulls to the right and to the right and further to the right the gravity of discontent ok and when i wrote that i meant that what i was describing out there in kansas was a kind of aberration it's like look at this crazy thing that is happening out here on the high plains the gravity of discontent doesn't work like it used to do well folks that's how it works now everywhere you go in this country everywhere you go in the western world the gravity of discontent pulls to the right and why is that one reason let's stick with the republicans here in our own country for the time being although we'll talk about foreign countries later on but one reason that this it works like that now is because our republican party here in america is very comfortable with the traditional language of populism by which i mean the language of class anger they speak it naturally it is second nature to them it just comes to their lips automatically and you know what i'm talking about they rail against the elite and the rigged system and they complain about the hollywood millionaires and the arrogant people that make our t v shows and the haughty professors who are indoctrinating our kids and we send them off to college and they pretend to love they call the real americans who inhabit heartland places like where i grew up and this is fascinating folks they deliberately mimic left wing protest movements from days of yore that's what the tea party movement was they were deliberately pretending to be you know pretending to be in one nine hundred thirty s social protest movement glenn beck mimicked martin luther king's march on washington back in two thousand and ten in two thousand nine paul ryan who is not yet speaker of the house wrote an article in forbes magazine that he entitled down with big business this is paul paul ryan wrote that and now here comes donald trump i was at the republican convention last july in cleveland and they called him when he came out on the stage they called him america's blue collar billionaire seriously and this was sort of the high point for trump his his speech at the republican the republican convention was a debacle it was a complete disaster they you know they had rehearsed anything all of their celebrities didn't show up yes it was it was a disaster but trump himself tried really hard he clearly had put some effort into his speech and it was like his the high point of his campaign and in that speech he pledged himself to the working class voters who were who had been left behind by the current recovery this is what he said i have visited the laid off factory workers and the communities crushed by our horrible and unfair trade deals and this next sentence is an exact echo of franklin roosevelt these are the forgotten men and women of our country trump said people who work hard but no longer have a voice then he went on and tried to reverse the sort of standard liberal criticism of conservatives as always being  pons of the koch brothers or something like that he said here's what he said big business elite media and maybe he tried to flip it right so that in fact it's hillary big business elite media and major donors are lining up behind the campaign of my opponent because they know she will keep our rig to system in place rig system remember he stole that from elizabeth warren this is everything here is theft well it's like nothing left it's just this is what people do in politics you know they swipe phrases from each other and how he goes on they are throwing money at her meaning hillary because they have total control over every single thing she does she is their puppet and they pull the strings now donald trump is a hypocrite this is in my opinion a hypocrite and a vulgarian and a bigot but when he said those things the man connected emotionally when he said the system is rigged folks he's right about that when he pointed out that huge parts of this country have been de industrialized and that's a terrible thing he's right what drives me crazy is that those are things that my side used to say those are things that my people used to say so where are the democrats in all of this you know this folks once upon a time protecting the middle class society was the primary mission of the democratic party that's who they were and democratic i mean they would never say stop talking about it you know where about the middle class were about protecting the middle class that's who they work and democratic leaders of the past i think if you put them in our current day situation they would have known exactly what to do about it you take someone like franklin roosevelt or harry truman or lyndon johnson or hubert humphrey these guys would have taken one look at what wall street is doing to the world and they would have swung directly into action many of our modern democratic leaders falter however they understand you know mentally that inequality is a terrible thing it's an awful thing and they cry big hot tears about it but they cannot find the conviction or the imagination to do what is necessary to put this thing into reverse and instead they offer us the same high minded policy platitudes that they have been dishing up since the one nine hundred eighty s they tell us  dude there's nothing anybody can do about technology right nothing you can do about that there's nothing anybody can do about global eyes shine now right globalization that is the the invisible hand of god almighty reaching down from the heavens to reorganize human affairs whenever he sees fit club say nothing you can do about that and so they promise us instead you know you know what they promise it's always the same thing charter schools more job training yes they'll shovel out the student loans but other than that folks they got nothing the example of their failure that i want to focus on tonight also comes from two thousand and nine and i keep going back to this year because for me this was the turning point the same year when the republicans were telling us that the republican party was dead and the issue i wanted to talk about is the issue of the wall street bailouts what to do about wall street which was the great question of two thousand and nine and if you ask me the great question of the century that we're living in this was the turning point this was the historical inflection point where the in this country in the entire world could have easily changed course but our leaders chose not to ok folks we came to the turning point in two thousand and nine and we missed the turn i want you to remember what it was like barack obama had been elected president in a massive wave of hope and enthusiasm and i was one of the hopeful ones and he had the entire country or most of the country anyways at his back an overwhelming majority he had the world behind him and then he proceeded to continue the wall street policies of george w bush essentially unchanged no big banks got put into receivership i don't know about seattle but in kansas city we put banks out of business all the time small banks and medium size banks it's a common procedure ok but for whatever reason it could not be applied to citibank ok no big banks got put into receivership no bailouts got on wound no elite bankers got prosecuted hell they didn't even get fired obama did fire the c e o of general motors he had no problem doing that but not the guys at will's fargo no no not the guys at goldman of course not so what i'm saying is that obama and his team the democratic party refused to change course when every sign was telling them it was time to turn when it would have been healthy for the country to turn good for the country's economy to make that turn when it was fully within their power to turn it's not any more but it was at the time thanks to the bailouts when it would have been overwhelmingly popular titter i mean had barack obama gotten tough with some of these guys he would still be president today we would have amended the constitution to keep him in there and lastly when the country fully expected our government to make this turn and when i say are the country fully expected to make the turn the wall street bankers themselves expected this to happen remember the famous meeting that they had with barack obama almost exactly eight years ago to the day was in march of two thousand and nine and he called them all down to the white house the leaders of the big investment banks and they go to the meeting in their ashen face because they know what's going to happen to them they know what he's going to do they're going to meet the new franklin roosevelt and he is going to take them to the woodshed and they come out of the meeting a couple hours later and they're all smiles because what we did for them folks is phoned the runways for them the immortal phrase of treasury secretary tim geithner we foamed the runways for the banks why look let's get one thing out of the way right away barack obama didn't play this greatest issue of them all the way he did because the working class rose up to defend wall street that is not what happened he didn't play it the way he did because the presidency lacks sufficient power the presidency is an enormously powerful office as we are reminded every day these days when we wake up in the morning and open the newspaper and see what outraged donald trump has committed over night folks obama played this issue the way he did back in two thousand and nine because that's how he wanted to play it and we have to get our heads around that if we want to understand what has gone wrong with the democratic party but in truth saying that only pushes the problem back a little bit because this doesn't this you know why does it why do you want to play it that way and this folks does not start with barack obama if we want to understand why he chose to act the way he did in two thousand and nine we have to go back to the one nine hundred seventy s to the one nine hundred eighty s to the one nine hundred ninety s and back in those days you might remember the democratic party was engaged in this very long running civil war over who they were and what they stood for and you had all these different factions in the democratic party back then and fighting you know like cats and dogs with one another but they all came together on one thing they all agreed on what they thought over everything else they agreed on this one thing and that was that the democrats had to turn away from the legacy of the new deal with its fixation on working class people ok and what democrats had to embrace instead they said was the emerging post industrial economy and the people that the democratic party needed to a den of fight itself with were and this is this is important now the people that the democratic party needed to identify with were the winners in this new economic order the highly educated professionals who populate our innovative knowledge industries what do i mean by professionals we all know the traditional professions are lawyers doctors clergy architects people like that these days though it's a much broader category it's an enormous group of workers basically everyone with an advanced degree so i'm one the math ph d s who write derivatives securities on wall street are professionals the biochemists who make prescription drugs also professionals now as a group this category of workers these affluent highly educated white collar people in the one nine hundred fifty s as a group they were one of the most republican demographic groups in in america by the one nine hundred ninety s they had completely changed sides and were one of the most democratic groups and that's basically who the democratic  who the democrats are these days they have gone with this group so what i'm saying here is that the democrats the way to think about them is as a class party in the one nine hundred centuries since they are a political party of a particular class it's just not the working class it's they're the party of highly educated professionals now we all know that the democrats have many other constituent groups of course minorities women and the young to name just a few but professionals are always the ones who come first you know they're the ones who sit in the front seat with their hands fully on the steering wheel and the rest of us ride in back and it's the tastes and manners of professionalism that are always celebrated by liberal newspapers and and you know what i'm talking about here folks you know always stories about their favorite t v shows  cupcakes craft cocktails which i'm going to enjoy some of later where this is all over with you know it's always that same kind of thing so what i'm saying is that american liberalism started in the hundred centuries as a populist movement but today it is kind of the opposite of that it's a movement of winners and the highly credentialed and the democrats have developed all of these flattering phrases for their favorite demographic group this group that they love above all others they call these high achieving professionals the wired workers who will inherit the future they're supposed to be a learning class that truly gets the power of education there's here's one you've heard they are a creative class are you familiar with this one the creative class we hear this all the time out is the ever stop and think about that the idea that creativity is the property of a class and that in order to please this class we have to reorganize the map of the city we have to set up like you know art zones and this kind of thing  have to write trade deals to make this class happy otherwise they'll all be like move to germany or something like that we have to bow down before the creative class and how here's the thing democratic leaders are themselves always drawn are almost always drawn exclusively from the ranks of the same group ok think about the life stories of bill clinton barack obama hillary clinton they all have this very similar trajectory where they're all plucked from these lives of security by fancy schools bill clinton was this teenager in hot springs arkansas right like he was in the school band in this kind of thing and he goes to georgetown it's a university in the other washington by the way he he becomes a rhodes scholar he goes to yale law school and the the gates of the world are sort of open swing open for him and with barack obama and hillary it's exactly the same kind of story and if you look at their cabinet choices it's the same exact same kind of people you know always not just highly educated but always from a very small number of institutions the washing post used to periodically run these stories marveling at barack obama's cabinet in the assembled i don't want to say brain power it's credential power you know that was in his cabinet all these guys from harvard like every single one of them ok not every single one there was some from oxford too but but there's you know it's it was extraordinary there is very limited set of you know but these are the people at the very top of their profession ok so let me summarize the idea for you what i think is the guiding idea of the democratic party and what makes him everything about them so frustrating it is that professionals are kind of magical class in fact they are the heroes of history you might remember in karl marx it was supposed to be the proletariat that stands at the end of history they're the winners you know at the end of this long dialectic well for democrats it's the creative class that's who stands at the end of the great dialectic of creativity and innovation they also happen to be the number one constituency of the democratic party and the leaders of the party are almost always drawn from the same group so you see what i'm getting at here folks it is a shift what i'm describing is a long term shift of allegiance from the traditional working and middle class to professionals and this is what explains everything that is so massively frustrating about our modern day democrats i mean how do you get into a situation like the one we're in now were inequality is growing inequality is out of control i mean we're headed back to a nineteenth century pattern of wealth distribution i mean we're there folks we're back in the one nine hundred centuries essentially in terms of how the economy works ok and the party of the left you know can't do anything about it they can't win elections you know we're the party of the left you've got this incredible inequality that's growing out of control and the party of the left is in a state of historic defeat where the middle class is disintegrating and people are turning to a mount a bank like this man donald trump how is this possible it's only possible folks when the party of the left isn't interested in its historic mission that's the only way you get this combination of inequality and defeat why aren't they interested let's go back to that question of obama and the wall street banks the i still believe is the most important question of the stupid century that we're in why did the democratic team fail to do what obviously needed to be done with the wall street banks why did they declare that wall street executives were going to be held to a different legal standard than ordinary criminals and they did declare this the high official at the justice department who said it and he had to resign as soon as it became public knowledge but he said it folks why did this administration choose wall street over average americans again and again and again why because for the achievement conscious people who filled the last administration investment bankers were more than friends these people classmates in both senses of the word their peers these people are the face in the mirror every morning right the two groups you know the treasury department and say j p morgan they are demographically identical they are the same you know they all know each other people go back and forth through the revolving door there is no difference between these two things say people at the justice department they look at wall street and they see an industry filled with people of subtle minds and extraordinary innovativeness and  jargon you know i'm talking about wall street has invented contrived this whole bogus jargon in order to shield themselves from outside scrutiny you know and the democrats are like dude that is so sophisticated so they look at this industry and they see exactly the sort of creative individuals that democratic party theory tells us we must honor and respect these financial wizards who are plucking wealth from thin air they're  its financial rocket science no one understands it complexity and folks it is exactly the same attitude they have towards big pharma so innovative you can't import generic pharmaceuticals from virtually no wrong in democratic eyes i mean so lovable think of mark zuckerberg so professional so creative that for this one industry in force much of our country's antitrust laws was basically suspended just for this one industry what does a party of the professional class believe in well you know the most important item on the list the only item that really matters is meritocracy the you know fa that the successful deserve their rewards that the people on top in our society are up there because god dammit they are the best ok this is the first commandment of the professional class everyone gets what they deserve and what they deserve is defined by how they did in school ok so you know the only solution for inequality if this is your attitude the only real solution for inequality is for you to go to a really top rank college right they look at that farmer watching his way of life blow away in the wind out in missouri or somewhere in the do good it should be gone to mit you know you say you see what i'm getting at here though this is not a philosophy for reducing inequality this is a philosophy for rationalizing inequality it is always your own fault whatever has happened you it is always your own fault because the way you screwed up back in elementary school or in high school right you didn't graduate how many stories have you seen in the paper blaming you know members of the working class for their own problems because they didn't go to college how many of these have you seen hundreds there's the thousands of them or maybe they did go to college and they didn't go to the right college and go to a good school right they always fall back on the and maybe they did go to a good school but they didn't study the right subject they didn't study a stem subject right they studied history like me or maybe i mean twenty years from now they'll be saying things like you fool you studied stem in college and everybody c see there was a glut of engineers it doesn't matter all this is a way of rationalizing it a way of pushing the blame for this enormous economic change back onto the individual it's always your own fault folks this is a philosophy of winners that i am describing in the democratic party basically is today a party of winners that is the left party in our system here in the united states a party of new economy winners i mean there's a reason you look at poor hillary clinton's presidential campaign and it was all about her resume and her credentials write the most qualified candidate for president ever by the way i think that is actually true that's just not a great way to run for president it turns out that she thought it oh that that was the way to go by running as a hyper competent expert friends both with wall street bankers and the more in light and sort of graduate student you know the democrat the democratic party's unofficial slogan in this last go around was america is already great i mean it's like something you'd see inscribed on a country club logo it's a it's not just complacency folks it's a sort of militant complacency it's complacency on wheels and it's no surprise that hillary then did very well with affluent suburban republicans and she did really well in prosperous college towns you look at the map of missouri or of iowa or any of these she does she wins the cities and she wins the college town and it is a wipeout everywhere else now this what is truly fascinating about this is that it's happening not just here in america this is happening all over the world everywhere you go parties of the left are dispirited and they don't know what they believe in anymore and they spin the same fantasies that i've been describing these fantasies of globalization and innovation and the creative class this is everywhere you go and everywhere you go working people are abandoning these parties by the millions and they are lining up with demagogues like marine le pen and donald trump who at least pretend to understand the situation that they're in as for this man trump i think you will make in some ways a perfect epitaph for our modern era of professional class liberalism he is exactly the opposite of everything i've been describing he lacks experience government experience completely he had zero he holds expertise in contempt he is noticeably indifferent to facts remember how his time with the pundits are all we all in love with consensus and bipartisanship and moving to the center what you think trump thinks about that he doesn't care it doesn't give a damn what the pundits think this man is a human middle finger to the everything that makes up this sort of vision of the washington d c vision of the presidency and what is our response to the age of trump now i know it look it is fun to enlist in the political wars i know i've done it i've been there and it is fun to speculate about what a stupid man donald trump is by the way every time i hear and i think you know my own feeling he seems stupid to meet i've never met him but every time i think about mocking him for that i  recall that back when ronald reagan was president somebody put out that there's this book of stupid remarks that he had made and you know enormous whoppers and lies that you know remember his tall tales and illustrated with photos of reagan actually looking stupid and folks he kicked our ass and we did the same thing with george w bush are all these little books you could buy of quotations of bush sounding stupid illustrated with photographs of bush looking stupid and he beat us too and now here comes trump i also think it's it's probably going the wrong way to scold his clueless supporters and to imagine that the real party divide the real partisan divide in this country is between a party of righteousness and a party of sin i think that's a mistake or that it's we're in some kind of titanic battle between in light moment and ignorance i don't think that's what it is but i think that the right answer to this incredible reign of fake populism that has been going on for decades now that the right answer to it is to give people the real deal to show those trump supporters out there that we care about them more than trump does that yes the system is rigged and trumps one of the guys that rigged it i'm from kansas folks and i can't help but think that populism by itself is a very healthy thing a suspicion of elites a hostility towards arrogance towards aristocracy that's who we are as a people that is democracy that's what it looks like and it's not hard to figure out the kind of populist issues that the democratic party could come up with that would bring working people back into the  about reindustrialization looks pretty good these days a lot of bernie's issues look very good universal health care free college i'd go for that how about enforcing antitrust laws in this country how about making it easier to form a labor union in this country again look at none of these are thank you none of these are radical issues these are all so you know straight out of the sort of harry truman playbook you know the script like this is who the democratic party used to be these are the same things that would be that would win elections for them that would bring these last voters back and would stop the disintegration of the middle class society would reverse inequality you know it's when when you know how long it took me to come up with those issues i swear ten seconds really it's the easiest thing in the world to come up with the issues that are so good with them for the democrats that's not hard it's not hard at all the hard thing is making the democrats commit to those things they don't want to do it they have resist everything i just described they have resisted this stuff for decades with every fiber in their being and they continue to resist right down to this day even after the debacle of last november folks they are going to have to be dragged kicking and screaming to victory until the day that happens we are going to bounce along in this country from government by one set of affluent people to government by a different set of affluent people you know your consensus minded clintonism deregulates the banks and then yields to george w bush authoritarianism which deregulates the bank some more self destructs and allows the consensus team another chance which they inevitably fumble and so on and so on where is this all going to end only when we the people come back for our party thank you very much bailing them out where everybody gets one hundred cents on the dollar you know this is the famous thing with a g where you know all the counter parties and all this sort of thing bailing them all these banks out so that everybody gets their bonuses and everything is good and status quo ante everything is  great for these guys is not the only option there's all sorts of ways to put these banks out of business you know and make sure it never happens again i mean when you say something is too big to fail that automatically means you have to do something about it you  know yes we bail them out at the time and there's all sorts of ways of making sure the economy does not collapse and they did that but they went much much much further the thing is that there's all sorts of steps that you take between zero you know doing nothing by the way which is what the republicans in congress want to do go to it but absolutely disastrous where there's all sorts of steps between zero and one hundred percent everybody gets paid you know in the public just eats it right there's all sorts of steps had this is another thing nobody realizes there's precedents for bailouts in this country there's different ways to do it just giving these guys money that's one way there's other ways roosevelt had a bailout agency was called the reconstruction finance corporation when they bailed out the banks they fired the top management if the bailout agency looked at the bank's records and said we don't you're obviously committing fraud there's all kinds of of funny stuff going on here you are all gone sometimes roosevelt's bail ut agency would say we don't like your banks so much we're putting it out of business and we're starting a new one over here with completely different management this actually happened in this country the home of free market capitalism and there's there's other examples like that happen right i saw it happen with g m yes it did that's right and i think by the way that was a much more successful bailout another model is in the eighty's the savings and loan debacle and you know we bailed us guys out but a lot of bankers went to jail and we didn't just say ok here's the money see you know forget about it there has to be accountability for these people but we didn't follow any of those any of those earlier models yes sir i great talk so i'm curious about the you talk about f d r and i guess when i think about f d r as a as a person i see him also as being somebody who was very well the who went to great schools got a really great education knew all of the you know saw all of these very wealthy people as his peers and yet when he became president he chose to do things differently and i'm just curious  right yes what i mean just because obama might see all of these people as his peers or same thing with bill clinton why didn't they why is why the why did you think i'm getting very different i mean that's that's one of the by the way that's one of the sort of questions i hope you all read listen liberal but this one of the questions that i try to address in the book is because so the i was as i mentioned very enthusiastic about barack obama when he became president i had been a graduate student at the university of chicago and he was a professor there and i had met him and he was our state senator in the neighborhood that i lived in and we all admired him all the hyde park liberals we thought he was a great man and when he became president i was overjoyed i said you know you look at the bush administration the hacks in the cronies in the fools in the dunces running everything and here comes barack obama and he's going to put smart people in charge we know that about him you know we do you know we don't know these other things but we know he's going to do that put smart people in charge and they're going to show you how government should be run and i was i was excited about this and then everything that we just described proceeded to happen and it was a huge disappointment and disillusionment for me and i started to question the whole idea of government by expert you know maybe that's not such a great idea and there's another book i'm sure you guys are familiar with this book the best in the brightest about the vietnam war and how the kennedy and johnson administration put all of these experts from it's the same schools harvard a lot of the same departments in charge of foreign policy and guess what they dream up this thing the vietnam war they will not listen to outsiders criticizing it and they're in the end it's disaster it's kit's catastrophe and it's he lays it down the author of that book lays it directly at the feet of these people's professional expertise and their unwillingness to listen to outsiders and so then i'm really depressed right so i've got two really bad examples  i say to myself well has there ever been a time when government the expert worked and the answer of course is yes and it's the roosevelt administration the brain trust and so you start you know these are guys roosevelt surround himself with brilliant people it was one of the first times this was ever tried to used all sorts of of brilliant people instead of politicians to advise them and it was successful and they pulled this country out of the depression and they won world war two so but you start comparing roosevelt team to obama's team and you notice the difference instantly roosevelt's people were not all harvard guys they were not the chairman of the member of larry summers the president of harvard you know the always the chairman of the department always the very top guy in the profession roosevelt didn't do that for a very simple reason expertise in economic expertise in particular had been badly discredited by the one nine hundred twenty nine crash i mean all these professors look like fools roosevelt chooses people from all different walks of life all of them were brilliant people but they came from all over the country and they came from all different jobs all different occupations they weren't all university professors i'll just give you a couple of examples harry truman did not go to college robert jackson was roosevelt's attorney general he was the prosecutor at nuremberg and the later became was on the supreme court was a lawyer with no law degree and i don't know how that how that works i guess he just passed the bar i don't know if you but you go right down the list harry hopkins his right hand man during the war was a social worker the man around the w p a social worker from iowa henry wallace the greatest ag secretary we've ever had in this country ran a magazine for farmers the man that ran roosevelt's federal reserve mariner eccles was his name was a genius he invented keynesianism without having read keynes he invented an american version of this and that's where all the deficit spending came from he was a small town banker from utah the guy that i referred to earlier who ran the reconstruction finance corporation was firing bankers all over was a banker from houston texas you know none of these people he did have some he did have an ivy league contingent but even these guys were unusual people john k galbraith you spent his entire life fighting against conventional wisdom or thurman arnold ran the antitrust division of the justice department who was he had been a professor at yale but he had actually also written a book called the folklore of capitalism it's actually fun you should go and read it sometime but it's not the kind of thing that you would it other did you tenure nowadays anyhow all i'm saying is that there are many sources of expertise in this country and roosevelt chose people from outside the mainstream had he gone with completely orthodox economists he would have the same thing would happen to him as what happened to barack obama and you look at obama and that's exactly what he what he did he chose the chose orthodoxy and so in some ways what i'm talking about is the curse of orthodoxy that these people at the top of the profession will not listen to outsiders they will not listen to people below themselves they see the bankers as their peers and there is this kind of class solidarity between them and the other people running american society and they have none of the sort of solidarity that are no the one of the broader solidarity that roosevelt's people have complete night and day difference i don't know if i've made any sense here but my quick question is it's a little unfair because it's it it's about a possible solution and look like your feedback and that is to try to deemphasize and reduce the career isn't that we find among elected politicians it used to be decades ago that it was more the party that was in charge they wouldn't have to raise money after they were first elected and we would get not have an idea i mean we're not careerists yet was one term limits right i was very unpopular one time i was never bit term limits is a you know for a lot of people that they think that that is a really good structural solution i've never really thought about it that much it's never been a a big thing for me but i think in this age of we have to do something there has to be some structural change the money in politics is out of control trump just got that that's not going away any time soon something has to change and change that i would like to see happen is make it easier to i mean this is never going to happen either it's completely pious sky but we ought to have third parties in this country again you know th so i'm i mentioned i'm from kansas my favorite political movement of all time was called populism it was in late one nine hundred centuries third party movement it was the last third party movement we ever saw in this country that tried to build from the ground up and was successful and had they had mayors governors senators members of congress and they did run a guy for president is kind of an afterthought today when we talk about third parties it's usually just a guy you know ross perot running for president or something like that you know nothing else and the reason that we've never seen another repeat of that is because as soon as populism died down the republicans and democrats came together all over america and passed laws against well the strategies that the populace used it's complicated here but they made it basically made it impossible to build of a real third party anymore and that's not healthy i mean because as any you know anybody that study game theory can tell you it's very easy to get in a situation with a two party system where the parties are locked in and they they know that they can't be challenged from outside for them to just strike a deal with each other and all sorts of issues are just completely off the table you know for example the trade trade deals up until trump i mean this is one of the really interesting things that makes you think maybe trump isn't such a fool that the democrats and republicans had basically agreed to never debate trade there's this complete consensus on it airtight in washington d c and here comes this guy and he blows it all apart and how that's that's neither here or there but there's a bunch of structural changes that i would that i would love to see happen that i think would really change things