The Cārvāka Podcast

Trump Vs Harris

In this podcast, Kushal speaks with Noah Smith about the upcoming American elections. Which American president will be harder on China, and how did Noah get interested in covering the Indian economy.

Follow Noah: Twitter: @Noahpinion Blog: https://www.noahpinion.blog/

#DonaldTrump #KamalaHarris #AmericanElections2024

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Duration:: 59m
Broadcast on:: 09 Aug 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

All right, today we're going to talk about American politics, economics, Indian economics, and a lot of things. My guest today is Noah Smith. Noah is, how do I address you, Noah? Do I address you as an economist? Do I address you as an opinion maker? Do I address you as a sub stacker? Sure, you can just call me an economics writer because that's pretty much what I do. All right, great, great. So first of all, Noah, thanks for coming. It's an absolute pleasure to host you here. And I've been reading your work for a while. So I want to start here. So you know, you're the most quoted guy in my timeline when it comes to Indian economics, which is very interesting. A lot of your writing always appears on my timeline. So my first question is because I want to keep the main section of the podcast based on American elections, American economics, especially three, four of your sub stack posts that I've read. I'm going to focus on them. But before that, my first question to you is that there are actually now studies that I've shown that a lot of coverage about India in Western media is actually almost negative all the time. If we look at, if we did a meta analysis of the content of Indian media, or Western media covering India. So how the hell did you manage to be bullish on Indian economics in such a climate? So how did you manage to do that? I want to know the secret sauce. Well, I mean, I don't think that's necessarily true that it's overwhelmingly negative. I think that under Modi, especially in the last five years, there has been a torrent of negative press about the Modi administration, especially from, you know, American media is dominated by liberals who live on the East Coast. And their information about India, a lot of it comes from their Indian and Indian American friends, who primarily are liberals, whose families strongly support a Congress party, and who, you know, basically take a very dim view of Modi. And so that, you know, they tell all their friends, you know, Modi sucks, look, India is going fascist and other sort of things like that. And then the, you know, nice white liberals of America think, Oh my God, India's being fascist, I better write about that. You know, and so, and, and so I think, you know, I'm not, I'm, how to whatever degree they're right or wrong about any of that, that's where it comes from. I think that's the vector by which it comes in. I think that also there's a, there's just a general undeserved skepticism toward Indian growth. So, and, you know, I'll be perfectly honest. I think, I think some of it is comes from racism. Because if you look, every country that develops and that industrializes, people say this race of people can't do it. You know, when Germany was first starting out, the British went to Germany and they said, all these people are lazy. You know, they don't want to work their dumb. The Germans can never industrialize. And that turned out to be wrong. People said the same thing about Japan. People say, you know, these, these people can never, can never modernize and industrialize. And they proved them wrong and they, they had to prove them wrong again and again, you know, of course, people said that about China, you know, even Japanese people said it about China. They said China will never be able to industrialize. And now we just take it for granted that manufacturing, you know, and is a thing that China can do, you know, and, and so, but I think that each country sort of has to prove itself to, to the world because, I don't know why this is, this is stupid. Like, people are stupid about this. They don't understand how universal these industries are. They don't understand how universal these capabilities are. They don't, you know, they're like, Oh, of course, those guys could do it. Of these new guys can't do it. And I think that there's, there's some of that too. So I think what you're seeing is a combination of, you know, antipathy toward Modi that comes from a bunch of Congress supporting people in America. I think you're seeing also this, the natural kind of chauvinism toward any country that hasn't industrialized yet. And I think those two, that's what's really going on here. And I just don't share any of these. You know, I, I know that every country can industrialized because I just see them do it again. I mean, I don't know. Maybe there's a country out there that can't. But we have yet to find it, you know, every country they've been skeptical of as, as, or every country that succeeded, they were, they were skeptical of. And so we don't, you know, and so I don't share that, you know, I take an economist's view toward it. And also in terms of, of Modi stuff, you know, like, you know, maybe, I, I, I try to basically be neutral about other countries politics. Like I know that lots of people, either there's culture wars and there's bitter partisan fights in every country. And people shout about that and that shouting spills over, right? If you're anywhere in the world, you get American politics all day, you know, either someone's yelling that, you know, Trump is horrible or someone yelling Trump is great. Usually it's going to be someone yelling Trump is horrible because the people who travel overseas tend to be much more anti Trump. But, but you basically get a lot of that yelling and, and you know, America's political conflicts infect the minds of, of, you know, everyone in the world. And so, yeah, anyway, when I say, yeah, so, so I think that I try to stay insulated from that to realize that I don't understand other countries politics. I understand the quasi universal economics of industrialization a lot more than I understand the particulars of another country's politics. And so I try to focus on what I can understand. So, so, so for me, a national follow up to that would be, how do you go about researching on a subject and how does, how does no one Smith prepare? So let's say if I was to look into China, the way you're looking into India, so how would I go about doing that? Well, if you were looking at China, you know, I mean, you'd start with, with history, you know, just read, read the history of policies of, you know, know who the leaders were and what their policies were. And, you know, you could, there's a whole lot of good stuff on this. There's, there's books, of course, but there's also a lot of good World Bank and IMF reports, especially World Bank. The World Bank has a bunch of people who are dedicated to just, you know, researchers who are just dedicated to writing this stuff up. There's also a lot of stuff in economics journals, you know, sometimes economists, especially economists from a country will write a sort of a short economic history of, of policies in that country. So you can read about Chinese special economic zones. You can read about the Chinese land market and how that worked. You can, you know, with China, there's no shortage of information, you know, there's much more than for India or for almost any country out there. Like, right. And so you can just read so much about what China did and when it did it and the key figure is like Deng Xiaoping or Wenjibao or, you know, all these people. And you can, so basically just, there's so much to read about the history of policy in these countries. I, you know, I think that that's going to be more informative than going to the country because going to the country, you just, you get a snapshot, you walk around, you see some things. Your perception of it is highly dependent on the people you happen to meet and your little slice of life. It's like, you know, the story of the elephant, right? Everyone's grabbing a different part of the elephant. Well, you'll only grab one little part of the elephant. And, you know, so, so, yeah, anyway, I don't know. Fair enough. So let's say on the Chinese question, do you think America would have been worried is the word I'm looking for over here about China, had China been a democracy? Let's say something like India or America or Canada, would America have been as worried about China and its growth? Had they been a democracy vis-a-vis how they're governed right now? Well, I think they would have been worried to some degree. And the reason we know this is looking at Japan, Japan is a democracy. It was always our ally, not even just a democracy, but a U.S. ally, you know, very extremely peaceful country, allied with the United States, you know, you could go there without a, without a visa. And yet at the same time, you know, Americans were very frightened of competition from Japanese industry in the '80s and '70s and '80s. And that, I think that fear was irrational. I think it's rational for China because China's a military competitor and a geopolitical rival. But it wasn't rational for Japan because even if Japanese industries did great, that only helped our system of alliances. But, so I think that also Japan is just much smaller than us. You know, it's like they were, even if you care about America being the most powerful country in the '70s and '80s or something like that, Japan was never going to overtake us because they're just small. You know, they're now a third of our population. They were less than half even then. And so there was just no, you know, China's, of course, different because it's four times our size. So, but I think Americans would have been worried, but I wouldn't have been worried. So would it be fair to say that you wouldn't be worried about? So would it, would you be supportive of, let's say, nuclear-armed Japan today? Of course, yes. I wrote that. You know, I wrote, Japan needs to get nuclear weapons as fast as possible. And South Korea as well. One of the key imbalances inviting war in the Pacific is that Japan and South Korea don't have nukes, whereas China and North Korea do have nukes. And that creates an asymmetry that invites a conventional attack by China and by North Korea because only one side has nukes and the other has to rely on the American nuclear umbrella. That's an imbalance. So I recommend that those countries get nukes yesterday. That's interesting. Now, I have a very different take on foreign policy. I have never understood, like, when I listen to a lot of foreign policy think tanks in general in the angler's sphere, there's a lot of talk about rules based or values based order. Now, I get very confused about these arguments is because if you peel the layers of the onion, beyond a point, it's all transactional. Everything is transactional when it comes to foreign policy, whether it's American foreign policy. I don't even have an issue admitting that even Indian foreign policy is extremely transactional. I just think foreign policy at its core, at its core philosophical level, is an extremely transactional thing to the extent that I say foreign policy is about, you know, having short term relationships, long term relationships and one night stands depending on the nature of the relationship. That is all foreign policy is about. Where in America, while, while chiding India, where on one hand, Blinken is chiding India and they're increasing their investments in India. In fact, I think for the last three years, American investments in India have either equaled Chinese investments or surpassed Chinese investments, which is so confusing because here is the ambassador, you know, where hate speech is legal in America, but the American ambassador is like, Oh, we're really concerned about hate speech in India. And I'm like, hang on, then why don't you do something about it in America and ban it, but you can't ban it in America, but you want to talk about it in India. And what it creates is on social media, there is this confusion about the American attitude. And so what do you think foreign policy is all about? Like even the American relationship with Saudi Arabia, vis-a-vis Mohammed bin Salman and and and UAE, basically, MBS and MBZ. So what do you make a foreign policy concept, chili? So, you know, I'm not a foreign policy scholar. My friend, Paul Post, is and he has, you know, he'll tell you theories, but I think that it's very hard to, you know, there's theories that can help explain some of it. Obviously, you know, being transactional is a huge part of foreign policy. But then I also think that trust is a big part of it too. And countries that have so, so, so for example, Paul found in his research that countries that have trade agreements are more likely to form alliances in the future. And so there's some indications that you just build up trust over time. You know, but then, but then you do have these sort of ruptures and, you know, for example, the UK and Prussia were allies in many of the wars of the 1700s and and 1800s. But then, you know, of course, they ended up fighting each other in World War I, right? So there were that that was a big break. There were other, you know, big breaks too. United States and China were either explicit allies or de facto quasi allies for most of their, you know, most of the last 100 years, you know, the United States intervened against Japan to stop Japan from conquering big pieces of China in World War II and that the proximate cause of World War II, you know, United States. And then, of course, we fought China in the Korean War after the Nationalist got yet switched for the Communist. But then afterwards, we then, you know, quickly patched it up. And we became friends with the communist China, Nixon went there, Kissinger went there. And, and we became their quasi ally, we helped them, we transferred military technology, we helped them against the Soviet Union. We felt it was safe to put all our factories there. We shepherd them into the WTO, even after the Cold War ended. There was a long history of cooperation friendship between the United States and China. I think the United States was taken a bit, a back was a bit flat footed by how much China intended to, you know, kind of challenge and displace the United States, despite, you know, allying with it in the moment. I think that the United States sort of feels like this was a bit of a betrayal. But I do believe that trust and long-term cooperation are important. And I also am optimistic that once, you know, Xi Jinping is gone, and if the Chinese regime, you know, moderates and changes a bit, then the United States and China will be friends again, because I think that our, you know, countries were historically friends and can be friends again. And I think at the same time, a long process of distrust can be toxic and poisonous. So in the Cold War, the, you know, India was, was officially neutral, not allying. But in practice, it was a little more aligned with the Soviet Union, and the United States was a little more aligned with Pakistan. And that was, that was very bad for U.S.-India relations. It was, first of all, it was a bad choice for us. You know, we should have aligned with India instead of Pakistan, but that's history. Can't change that. And, you know, that made the United States ended up abetting the Pakistani genocide in Bangladesh, that India intervened to stop. And that was really bad. You know, we should not have done that. And that was, that was bad, but I can't, I can't change that history. But I do think it, in many ways, poisoned the well between the United States and India, in ways that are now beginning to be fixed. You know, we're beginning to develop more of a trustful, long-term relationship. But I think it took a very long time. And you still saw the United States condemn India for doing nuclear tests in the 90s, you know. I think that that was, that was stupid, you know, but of us, of the United States. And, but I, so I think that that Cold War distrust is taking a long time to go away. And you still see India and Russia have this relationship of trust, even though, honestly, Russia's usefulness to India is a lot less than it used to be. You know, it's, it's military equipment is much less good and plentiful than it used to be. It's trading opportunities are much less. And there's really no chance that India will, I'm sorry, that that Russia will help India out against China if they do get in a fight. Like Russia is now becoming a Chinese proxy state. And so, so I think that, but that still you see the legacy of that relationship of trust and cooperation that India built up with the USSR during the Cold War. And, and so I think trust is very important in addition to transactions. Yeah, I understand where you're coming from. If you speak with most Indian foreign policy establishment, either inside or outside, they, they still hold what happened during the Bangladesh war against the United States of America. And they have a very long memory. So like, they have an elephant's memory. They don't forget it. And every time when I, they got like in the Indian content space, like I'm someone, someone who's often even mocked for being very pro West, like I don't hide. I'm a very pro West person. But on average, I'm far more pro West than pro Russia. Although I understand the Indian foreign policy, like Indian foreign policies are interesting. Modi was in Russia. Then now he's going to Ukraine. So go figure that stuff out for yourself. I mean, I, I, that's just the Indian, we are doing things. The Indian foreign policy has always been India first. And we will do whatever it takes for our country to benefit. And, and that's, that's just the way India is always going to be. I don't see Indian foreign policy changing. I think for Indian foreign policy to change, a lot of what America does with Pakistan is, is going to be there. But now I want to come to America and a bit of the domestic stuff over here. Now, again, I want to take you back to China. This is something you wrote actually four days ago, where you've written why Trump or Harris might fail to stand up to China. Now in the American writing space, right, I was trying, or whatever little I have understood, I've seen you're someone who's been consistently talking about the Chinese being quote unquote threat to the United States of America. And I don't want to misquote you, which is why I'm being very careful about how I have understood where you're coming from and your positions by doing whatever little reading I have done. So what why do you think that that is the case and why like after reading your essay, it was quite a long essay. What I have concluded it is that Trump is because of the money. What was that amount? 33 billion or something invested by one gentleman in TikTok and which is and that person is invested deeply in the Republican Party. So the probabilities of Trump actually acting against China and the Republican Party acting against China are far less compared to the the the Kamala Harris administration if they come to power. But even they would be very status-coist and let us assume talks kind of a situation. Now, can you explain that whole problem? Right. So I think that on the Trump side, you know, Trump was actually very anti-China during his first term. And in fact, I believe that that was a needed change. You know, Trump saw China as more of an enemy than people had seen it before. And one interesting thing is that Democrats basically agreed, you know, Biden agreed and Jake Sullivan agreed. And you know, Democrats saw Trump bashing China and instead of simply polarizing and saying, Oh, well, Trump is China. So we love China. You know, that could have happened, but it didn't. Instead, they basically just agreed. They said, you know what? Actually, that's true. We're going to become harsher on China as well. And so I think that that tells you that bipartisanship tells the fact that Trump failed to polarize the issue tells you that there's some underlying truth to it. There's some underlying reality that both parties can recognize. And I think that the reason is because during the rule of so before Xi Jinping, before, you know, 2013, basically, I think that China was, you know, Chinese policy was much more ambivalent. And within China, you saw many debates between hawks and doves. You saw many debates between people who wanted more engagement with America and cooperation and people who wanted more confrontation. When Xi Jinping took over, he homogenized the Chinese state under himself. He became a personalistic dictator in a way that Hu Jintao, Jiang Zemin, and even Deng Xiaoping had not been. He's the first China's first personalistic dictator since Mao Zedong. And therefore, what China thinks stopped being a function of debates between all these intellectuals on various sides of the of the issue. And it started being a function of what Xi Jinping, the man, thinks. And that and Xi Jinping is very hawkish. He's not the most hawkish person in China, but he's very hawkish. And he's just takes it as a matter of course that it's America's destiny to displace the United States as the global Edgemon. And if you read, there's a really good book called The Long Game by Rush Doshi, who is my favorite, you know, American scholar of Chinese policy. And he just sits there and patiently translates massive amounts of text of Chinese official party communications and documents and stuff. And he's basically identified a big shift in policy thinking toward confrontation with America. And that's become clear from China's actions on multiple fronts and from their rhetoric as well. It's just they're not trying to hide it. They're not trying to be ambiguous. There's very little ambiguity that China has shifted toward being much more opposed to the United States under Xi Jinping. And the United States has to react to that. We have to deal with that. You know, Xi Jinping's not going, you know, he'll be in power for the rest of his life unless he gets overthrown in some sort of coup or something. Like he's dictated for life. And then, you know, his chosen successors will probably be in power after him. So for the next few decades, you know, for the next at least three decades, I'd say, we're dealing with Xi Jinping type governance in China rather than Deng Xiaoping type governance. And that's a big that's a sea change that I think America recognized in part thanks to Donald Trump. Now, the problem is that Donald Trump's harshness toward China in his first term gives him a lot of credibility as being a China hawk and a fighter against China. If he flips a 180 and he starts accommodating and appeasing China, he won't suffer political consequences. The reason is because he's already built up his credibility as a China hawk. And that credibility is like a stock of capital that he can now afford to spend down appeasing China. So for example, the TikTok, the fact that he came out against the TikTok divestment bill has not persuaded, you know, most of his supporters that he's weak on China. They still think he's very strong on China, even though he chose to appease them at that time. The fact that he canceled export controls on ZTE didn't even register with these people. His praise of Xi Jinping goes unaddressed. And so I think that Trump has the political space and credibility to appease China without getting punished for it in politics. Whereas Democrats don't, you know, if Kamala Harris tries to cozy up to China, she will face a firestorm of criticism, including from me, but also from Republicans and from, you know, a lot of centrists and from various people, she will get a firestorm of criticism. She can't afford to be wimpy on China the way Trump can. But then President Biden, one of the things I've observed about his policy when it comes to China is he's been very hawkish in China. That is something I have observed in whatever little I've followed. So why would there be no backlash in the case of Donald Trump from the Democrats? Because if he deviates from that policy landscape, can't the Democrats also pick up the pieces from there telling the people of America or average Americans that look here as our president, former president, Biden, what he had done and look at Donald Trump? So wouldn't that apply to him too? I would like to say that it can. And I think among, you know, Democrats will be quick to realize that Trump, if Trump is pro-China, you know, they'll be quick to realize because they're looking for reasons to criticize Trump. Independence will be a bit slower to realize that and Republicans will be very slow to realize it. So you'll see the typical partisan pattern. But I think that there'll be a cushion of credibility, you know, that Trump will have. I don't think he has infinite ability to appease China without consequences. But I think he has a big cushion. He can get away with quite a bit of it before people start noticing and before the zeitgeist and conventional wisdom turns over it, you know, and changes. So I think that that's the big danger. So I want to discuss both the political parties of America. And I know you've written on the Republicans, their entire party platform in July. But I want to first talk to you about the entire nomination or, I don't know, was she nominated? She was just handpicked. Kamala Harris being handpicked the way she is. What does it say about the American system when, I mean, it's impossible to say that the Democrats didn't know Biden was not mentally out there. Like everybody knew that. It's impossible to know. Because in 2020, you know, he was fine. Like, and then he basically, I think a combination of age, but mostly like the stress of the presidency. And, you know, possibly other factors too, I think sent him mentally downhill. But because the Biden administration was extraordinarily secretive and kept him away from the press most of the time, I honestly didn't know. You know, like I just did not know he had gone downhill so much. I watched some of the speeches, he seemed okay. You know, I can show you, you know, say the union speech or, you know, where he seemed okay or other other speeches where he seemed fine. And then a couple moments where he seemed old, but it didn't seem like it was a pervasive problem until I saw that debate. And then I think like many other people, I recognized that he had gone downhill a lot more than than I had realized previously. And so I think that, you know, they had to have known is not really right. I think that the people close to him, of course, knew. But I think that they were secretive enough where I think there's a huge number of people who just didn't know. So what does it say about the Democratic Party, the ones who were close to him then? Because at the end of the day, the position of the American president is a very important one. They are literally the strongest country in the world. The American president is the most powerful man in the world, our woman, the position, I mean to say, now in such a scenario. And also, what does it say about the system where Vice President Harris, I mean, she did not do really well in the presidential primaries in her bid when she ran during Biden's term, before Biden's term. And now, there was no primary again. I don't know. I mean, it just to an outsider looks as if this was a fixed match, like the results were decided. Okay, we're putting it in. Okay, the Obamas did not endorse her on day one, they waited for a few days. And now the Obamas have also endorsed her. So now everything is fine. Don't you think the American people deserve the primary in case of Biden opting out? Well, I mean, they deserved one, but it was not feasible. You know, you can't you can't do that. That's not that that's not the way the system works, and it wasn't practical, either. You know, the Biden dropping out was too late, you know, for for that primary, those primaries to be to be held. People have to prepare campaigns, people have to declare their candidacy, get to know the voters, campaign in places, there was just not time. And so political parties exist for a reason. That reason is to, you know, they they they're not simply pass throughs for voters. You know, in the old days, voters didn't even get primary voters didn't even get a say. And if I'm not mistaken, you know, in a in a parliamentary democracy, like India, you know, the voters don't directly get a say in who the leader is either. You know, the party chooses Modi. The people choose Modi's party. They don't choose Modi, the man, they would if they could, but they but they, you know, they would, yes, and they would choose Kamala Harris, you know, the Democratic party. People would choose Kamala Harris, but they didn't get a chance to and and Indian voters didn't get a chance to choose that Modi would be the head of the BJP. There was no primary. There's no there's no primary system like that. It's not even a presidential system. And so so I'd say that this is a way in which American democracy functions a little bit like a parliamentary democracy when, you know, when there's no when there's not the opportunity for the primary voters to give their input, the party decides. And that was true, you know, back in the day, the party they they just had caucuses, which are people show up in a back room. They still have something called caucuses. It's more like a primary now, but but they had, you know, they basically they had just had people show up in a back room, pick the candidate, you know, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, you know, our most popular and successful president of the 20th century did not he was not chosen by Democratic voters at all, primary voters, just not at all. Some guys got together and they smoked some cigars and they made some racist jokes and they, you know, drank a bunch of alcohol and they said, here's our man, you know, that's how they did it. And this is this is, would would FDR have won an open primary? I don't even know. Maybe he wouldn't have. And so we'll never know because that's not the way we used to do it. Then we created the primary system. But actually, I believe the primary system has big problems with it. One huge problem with the with the primary system as it exists today, which is that there is an incentive to select extremists because you're taking the the consensus of the partisans, you know, Democrats are 25% of the American electorate. And yet the person they choose will be the consensus of that 25% will not there's no, you know, there's no reason that person should be even an independent or a centrist or blah, blah, blah, you know, there's a there's an incentive to choose extremists, the Republicans exactly the same. And so that's why this is a big problem with the closed primary system. Now, many people have been thinking about ways to fix this. One way is open primaries where Republicans can vote for the Democratic nominee. But then there's a lot of problems with that too. You get a lot of intentional trolling and, you know, there's not a lot of interest in voting in the other party's primary. And so we haven't figured out how to fix the system yet, but I do think that the primary system results in candidates who please the base instead of candidates who please the center of the country. And therefore, you know, you often people feel dissatisfied with the results of this because if I'm an independent in the middle, which is like, you know, 38% or something like that of America's independent registered independence, if I'm an independent, I didn't get to choose this Democrat and this Democrats to the left of where I want. I didn't get to choose this Republican and this Republicans to the right of where I want. I can choose, I'm always having to choose the lesser of two evils if I'm in the center. I never get to choose, you know, someone who very rarely do I get to choose someone who's like, yes, this person really represents me. So the center gets to decide, but the center never gets represented. So they become apathetic and they stop voting and they get disgruntled and their trust in government goes down and down. We've seen trust in American government go down and down over the years. And the fact that the parties keep nominating people who seem like extremists to the center, even if they don't necessarily seem like extremists to me, but they seem like, you know, Obama was not extremist. He was the most centrist candidate we've had. And yet, you know, a lot of people felt he was too centrist felt he was too left for them. We never get a centrist politician in the presidency, a true centrist politician because of the primary system. So I think that's a bigger problem than, you know, some people getting together and subbing in Kamala Harris. That's just what parties do. And that's what parties and parliamentary democracies do. I mean, my personal opinion is brilliant political maneuver. If you ask me the moment they realized Biden was going to lose as per the polls, I think, I mean, I know a lot of my friends who worked for the Republican Party over here, they were like, Oh, this is cheating. I was like, Oh, this is brilliant politics. Like, they just checkmate. Are you man? I mean, how can you? Yeah, they just checkmated them. Like the Dems basically checkmated the Republicans. And now the polls show that either Kamala Harris is equal to Donald Trump, or is two points above Donald Trump. And even when Fox News is showing that, then, you know, the Republicans need to worry and and immediately how Trump has changed his polling strategy, where he has said that, you know, I'm not going to debate her or something of that sort has been said by Donald Trump or he's not going to debate her right now. He's going to debate her later on. And do you think that is the reason Donald Trump, if it was not for the primary system, Donald Trump would have never been the Republican nominee, because it incentivizes extremism or populism, because I don't think that Donald Trump is an extreme is full disclosure. I'm not a fan of Donald Trump. I've I would have preferred a more centrist Republican, but that's just me and my point of view. But I've never been a Donald Trump fan. I've never hidden it. Yeah, whenever I've spoken about it. And but I think he's a populist. And do you think populism sells more to the base? And that is why he won the primary two? To some degree, but Republicans have an even more extreme system for primaries. So what Democrats, when if you win 22% of the votes in a state primary in a Democratic primary, you win 22% of the delegates. In Republican primaries, the plurality winner gets all the delegates from each state. Wow. So what you saw was that again and again, Trump got a minority of votes, but he got a plurality because no other single candidate got more than him. And he won that primary in 2016 as a minority candidate within even within his party. He was a plurality candidate. He had the most fired up core base of supporters, but had the Republicans been able to somehow pool the anti Trump vote, he would have lost. Because still a majority of Republicans were against him. And so he dominated first, he dominated a minor, a significant minority of the Republican Party. And then through the Republican Party and the votes that he got in 2016, he dominated a significant minority of the popular vote. And then he's never been this majority candidate. He's never had a real mandate. He has lots of people who like him. And he has a lot of other people who don't like him, but are willing to hold their nose and vote for him instead of a Democrat. I'm not saying he's everyone hates Trump and that it's undemocratic, but I am saying that Trump has never had particularly a large mandate or been a particularly popular politician as American presidents go. You know, Obama was much more popular than Trump. You know, George W. Bush was more popular than Trump. Bill Clinton was obviously much more popular than Trump. And so you really, Trump is the least popular president of my lifetime as president. But it was because of the primary system. And because he was able to have this hardcore of super fired up base supporters. Yeah, so he's populist, but he's not necessarily popular. Fair enough. Fair enough. So now let's focus on the Republican Party in general. And I know you wrote this. I really enjoyed this one. Don't I'm talking about the one where you analyze, evaluate the whole Republican Party platform itself. Yeah, I really enjoyed reading this is because because for me, as we record this right now, I'm in Canada. And a lot of times people confuse the Canadian Conservative Party with the Republican Party of America. They have no idea how left the Canadian Conservatives are on many issues. The Canadian Conservatives are actually just the centrist political party. They are actually the centrist that people dream of. Like they're very left on social issues, very left. I think the Canadian Conservatives in many ways are like me socially liberal, fiscally conservative. I'm pretty much like that. I'm liberal on almost every social issue. Like women's rights, gay rights, whatever, just my whole idea is I want to be left alone. I want others to be left alone, be an individual. And as for economics is concerned, I do understand a little bit of wealth terrorism. I get the value of the welfare state, but beyond a point, I don't like it is because when government becomes too big, it becomes a problem. And where do I have the proof of concept from my home country, India? My proof of concept comes from the socialism of India. I have lived socialism, so I understand where it creates problems because I have a lived experience of studying my nation's policies far more than my Western friends. But what is the Republican Party today? Because Trump has fundamentally changed the Republican platform. Right, so the Republican Party has moderated on a lot of economic issues. The Republican Party has become more supportive of keeping social security and Medicare. And a lot of this is some of this is due to Trump a little bit, but I think more of it is due to who their base is. The Republicans now have a lot of older, less educated voters as their base. That used to be the Democrats. Those people have migrated from the Democrats to the Republicans. Those people are the people who depend on Medicare. They depend on social security for their livelihood because they didn't earn a lot of money when they were working, right? Because they didn't have college degrees. They didn't earn a lot of money when they're working. Now they're old and they're pensioners. They depend on this stuff. So, of course, the Republicans are going to have to moderate because that's who their base was. I don't, I credit Trump a little bit because he moderated on this, but I think the Republicans were, could be seen to be moderating well before this on those economic issues. And I think that in general, the Republicans are starting to realize that working class people favor them on cultural issues. And so working class people are voting for them. And so, they're starting to try to think about ways to economically appeal to those voters as well. But that's difficult for them because they were the party of the rich. And now they're switching to a party of the working class and they don't really know how to do it. So I think, but it's a needed, it's an important shift. I'm glad to see that shift. I think that there are some bad populist ideas, but then some of the ideas that they have are quite good. And pretty centrist. Now, the thing that Trump made the Republican party radical on, he radicalized the Republican party on one single issue, which is immigration. Trump made the Republicans an anti-immigration party, and they were not before. They were a pro-immigration party under George Bush. They were very strong with pro-immigration with Ronald Reagan. The Republican party had been pro-immigration for a long time. Trump reversed that. And it was largely due to him. It was not due to any shifts in the base. It was Trump himself. He made opposition to immigration, his relentless core issue that he did. And the Republican platform reflects this. You can see in the Republican platform, almost every single issue, they say, cutting off the flood of illegals will fix this and that, and do all these magical things, fix the economy, fix housing, fix medical care, fix everything. Just cut off the illegals and it'll fix all these things. Will it actually fit those things? Fix those things? Well, no, it won't. It won't fix any of those things. But it's something that the public supports. The public is very angry with all the people illegally crossing the southern border. And that's Trump's biggest area of popular support. I think true populism, popular populism. That's one thing that he's actually popular on. And that wasn't always true. When Trump was president, American sentiments swung in a more pro-immigration direction than it had ever been since we started taking polls. Americans became extremely pro-immigration under Trump and the reason was a backlash, what we call thermostatic politics, the fact that that's just a fancy term for backlash against the current leader. And so the fact that Trump was so anti-immigration activated this American perception, no, we're the nation of immigrants. We love immigration and this defensive reaction of becoming pro-immigration in response to Trump in his first term. In Biden's term, that has flipped back hard. The anti-immigration sentiment is spiking. It's just about as high as it's ever been now anti-immigration. And so that's bad. And I do blame Biden for this. I think that he ignored the crisis at the border for three years and only did something about it recently once the political pressure became intolerable. And because of that, he made so many people so many people were made so mad by that that we're going to see a backlash against immigration in general, and that backlash will spill over into a backlash against legal immigration and skilled immigration, the other things America needs to really support itself economically and to maintain our self-image as a nation of immigrants. So I think anti-immigration sentiment is going to turn against legal immigration now, too. And I hate that. I'm very upset about that. And I blame Biden for not doing anything about the border crisis for three years. But don't you think the American immigration system is so messed up in the first place? You hear the H1B quota system. Why can't they just go for a point system like the Australians have? Or I know Canada is the worst example to give right now because Justin Trudeau's government has really messed things up over here by just letting a flood of immigration in Canada. But don't you think America would be better off with a far more streamlined immigration system than what they have right now? I don't even understand what the American immigration system is. Oh, I can explain it. It's pretty easy. About 15% of our immigration is skilled, officially through employment. We don't do a point system. We instead just say, can you get a job? That's our skills-based immigration. And honestly, this does very well. Like, can you get a job in America? Obviously, someone who comes from another country and can get a job here is going to be skilled. But it's a more general definition of skill. The points-based skill system can actually be kind of narrow. It's educational and intellectual ability. But then there's other kinds of skills, too, like entrepreneurialism, just skills within certain occupations that are useful, too. And so, I think our employment-based green card system, versus a temporary, H1B is a temporary system. You can't stay in the country forever. It's just a temporary work visa. You have to get a green card to stay. And so our green cards are the real immigration. H1B isn't real immigration. It's an onboarding ramp to real immigration because the people who get the H1B is often then get the green cards afterwards. But it's not itself. It is not immigration. It is officially called a non-immigrant visa. It's a temporary work visa. And so the same is true of H1A for farmworkers and the other temporary things, too. So green cards, we have a modest amount over there for employment. Then we have a very big amount reserved for families. If you're kid or your parent or your brother or sister of spouse, all these things, work in America, live in America, work in America, you can come to. And so this is sometimes called chain migration. And it traditionally is the way that people immigrated to America. Like that, even before we had any of these laws, that was what actually happened. People would, whole villages would migrate to America together. You'd have a whole village from Sweden and then in five years, that village would be gone. It would be in Minnesota. And so you had people come because they had relatives here. And so when we made our system, we gave families the pride of place in our immigration system. We said family is the most important thing. We value family above all other things. And therefore, that should be the bulk of our immigration system. And then we have a small amount on top of that, which is humanitarian immigration. We say your refugee, your Sikh asylum, you know, we have this other thing called the diversity visa lottery. This is pretty small. It's like, it's just taking random people, randos, basically. And. Or the category, right? The ones who are talented or something of that sort. Oh, and that so, oh, is also technically a temporary work visa. But unlike other temporary work visas, it's the one for the super specialized people. So do you, did you see the op-ed I wrote, the post I wrote with Min Kim? Yes, that's exactly what I opened it up to. Oh, yeah. So her company actually helps people get O1s. Her company is called Lighthouse. So if you know anyone who's looking for O1s, call those guys up because they're very good. You know, that's what they do. And so, well, they do O1s. They do EB stuff. They do J's. I don't know, they do others anyway. But yeah, so O1s are interesting because they don't have a time limit like H1B. So H1B, you definitely have to go back after a certain amount of time if you can't get a green card. So it's kind of sucky. It's kind of a sucky program. I don't like it. It should be better. But with O1s, you can just stay on O1 forever if you just keep renewing it. And that's unique for a visa program. I think it's unique. I think it's the only visa program that works that way. I'm not sure if the entrepreneur visa works that way too. But anyway, it's for extremely talented individuals. But the guidelines, the rules for who counts is extremely talented that have been relaxed over time so that now we have all these people just perpetual on O1s who are not a Nobel Prize winner, but simply a pretty good machine learning researcher has published a few papers. Like you can get an O1 that easily now. And I think that has not been widely recognized. When it is widely recognized, the Trump people will try to shut it down. Because remember, it's not really illegal immigration Trump people don't like. It's non-white immigration. They don't want the racial composition of the country to change. That's what they're really about. And so they will try to shut this down once they find out about it. So I don't want to trumpet this too hard, but I figure your podcast is probably safe. Well, now that I've spoken about it, unfortunately, a lot of people in terms of numbers, I don't know about that, but too many important people listen to this podcast. So as long as they don't talk about it, but it's okay. I think we'll figure it out. But then how does one tackle illegal immigration? At the end of the day, don't you think illegal immigration is unfair on the people who actually tried the legal route? Well, it's unfair to them, but it's also unfair to taxpayers who have to pay for that. It's unfair to a bunch of people. I don't think illegal immigration has large negative consequences. I think it has maybe some small localized negative consequences. I don't think it's a disaster, but I think people hate it. It's unfair. It is unfair. It's not fair at all. And I think to many Americans, even more importantly, than unfair, it's disorderly. We didn't say you may come in. You came in without the permission from the people who already live here. And that's something that we won't buy. We don't want people to come here without permission. We demand that we have a border. We demand that we get to decide who comes in and who doesn't come in. And so actually, illegal immigration is two different things. If you look in the numbers of illegal immigration, you'll see two big humps in the history. The first hump was when a bunch of people crossed the border to work. And that started in the 1970s, and it peaked in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and then it effectively went away. And it was almost all people labors from Mexico, mostly single men. And if you looked at the illegal immigration debates in the '90s, that's what people were debating. That ended. And one reason is because fertility in Mexico crashed, and everyone was needed with their parents. Take over the family restaurant or take care of the old parents or whatever. You didn't have five kids. You had one kid, two kids. And so the sons couldn't go work in America anymore. Also, we cracked down pretty hard on that kind of stuff. In 1996, we made it illegal for unauthorized immigrants to get any welfare benefits at all at the federal level. That was Bill Clinton, who did that? And then we also built fences, which, you know, we built the wall. We did that in the 2000s, under Bush, and under Obama as well. And then we implemented under Obama a program, my sister at the Justice Department was actually part of this program. She's a lawyer. She was actually part of this program saying basically if you are a illegal immigrant, you commit any sort of crime we just report you. You know, so we speed on the highway, we deport you. You're out. And so that became an engine of mass deportation under Obama. It was very effective. So all these factors, the Mexican economy did better, so it was more of a full factor. The old illegal immigration stopped, but a new wave began. And the new wave is something completely different. The new wave actually uses our asylum law against us. The new wave, people crossed the border illegally, but they don't hide out in America. They don't vanish into, you know, the great city of Los Angeles or Phoenix or whatever, and then look for day labor. That's over. Instead, what they do is they turn themselves into the border patrol immediately and they request asylum. Because of our asylum law, which comes from a 1967 treaty that we signed with the United Nations, because of our asylum law, we are obliged to offer them asylum as if they had presented themselves legally at a port of entry. We cannot penalize them. You cannot use the asylum system to penalize them for crossing illegally. We cannot say you crossed illegally, so we're not going to give you an asylum hearing. It seems like that's an obvious thing we should be able to do. We should be able to say, look, you just came illegally. Of course, we're not going to give you an asylum hearing. You broke in. We can't do that because of our law and because of the treaty we signed, but mostly because of our law. We can ignore the treaty. We ignore some treaties sometimes, but we can, but we could change our law, right? But then every time that Trump or Biden does something to stop this wave of asylum seekers, the courts strike it down because of this asylum law. And so we need to change that asylum law in order to stop the flood of asylum seekers. All the other things you see, all the other get tough on the border measures, they're all inherently temporary because the courts will strike them down. And so we need to change asylum law, and I don't see either party talking about doing this. Democrats, probably because pressure groups, you know, will stop them from doing it. And Republicans, because either they're stupid and don't understand this is what's going on, or more likely, they want to keep the issue in the news because if you fix this, that deprives them of one of their biggest, most important issues. So I think it's cynical on their part. They don't want to fix it so they can keep yelling about it. Fair enough. I think that's, I think that's a good summary of the problem over here. I just have one thing I have always said, immigration is not a right. It is a privilege. And I think as long as every country is able to communicate that, things will be fine. A lot of times, even in Canada, the immigration debate is very hard here. And I've always said that a lot of, unfortunately, a lot of students on the receiving end of this problem are of Indian origin. But I always say that, listen, it's not your right. A country is always within its right to send you back once you're done with your education. Nobody promised you. And in fact, it's illegal to promise you a permanent residency just on the basis of you coming to get educated over here. It is what it is. One last question before we wrap it up, I want to focus on, I did not understand this. This one you wrote on July 21st. Don't rock the word. So basically, what you're saying is a lower voter turnout helps the Democrats. Now, this is so counterintuitive. Right. So this, that actually, I didn't write that. My friend Wally wrote that. That was a guest post, because I don't know enough about politics. And he was a Democratic Party worker for years. So he wrote that. But I understand what I understand the idea. And the idea is that, remember, I talked about education polarization and the switch where working class voters used to vote Democrat and now they were Republican working class voters at lower education. That's how we define working class inside, which means that working class voters at lower education voters tend to be more marginal. They they're not as well informed. They don't watch as much news. They go out to vote only if they feel motivated to do it. Otherwise, they stay home. They also have more work to do, you know, because they have jobs that aren't as flexible. You know, most people with professional jobs can all take off their jobs. So, you know, take take a day off to go vote because our voting is voting day is not a holiday in America. So the low propensity voters are the working class, the people who don't vote that much. So when you have the high turnout elections where everyone's really excited to vote, that benefits whoever the working class votes for. When you have low turnout elections where only the educated informed news junkies go out to vote, that benefits whoever the educated class votes for. And they flipped. It used to be that the less educated people tended to vote for the Democrats because they were the party of the working class of labor and it used to be the more educated people voted for Republicans because they were the party of the business elite. That's over. Now, the more educated people are the professional class who vote Democrat and the less educated people are the sort of like angry non-college voters who, you know, are more traditionalist in the thinking and vote for Trump. What that means is that because of this flip in who supports who, the Democrats have gone from being the party that benefits from high turnout because they were the working class party. Now that the party that benefits low turnout because they're the educated class party, that's what happened. So then why would they be so keen on mailing ballots then? That would be a bad strategy for them, right? So, yeah, so actually, this is a big mystery. We don't know why Democrats haven't realized this yet and Republicans also don't seem to have realized this yet. We think that this shift is not understood by the strategists of either party. In other words, they're just dumb. Like they just don't know what's going on. And the Democrats have, you know, long institutional memory, all these pressure groups that want more voter turnout, basically Democrats have been, you know, they were the they were the high turnout party for so long that they have this deeply ingrained institutional muscle memory, right, of being the high turnout party where high turnout is good. They haven't yet realized that that's why while I had Wally write this article from my blog because we need the world, we need the Democrats and Republicans, we need the Democrats to realize this, right? The Democrats need to stop, you know. I mean, of course, if you want to support more people being able to vote more easily for moral purposes, that's perfectly fine. I don't, I can't disagree with that, right? But at the same time, Democrats need to stop treating turnout suppression as a pro-Republican dirty trick because it's actually a Republican blunder. And they haven't realized it yet, but it's time for them to realize it. Interesting. It's very interesting how American politics will play out in the Australian scenario because in Australia, everybody has to vote. It's very interesting in Australia. I think it was Claire Lehman from Colette who had written this that because Austria, and she had written it for the Australian, that the main new mainstream media newspaper in Australia, and she had explained why in Australia because everybody or more than almost 95% of the population kind of votes. So most politicians end up taking the centrist position because if everybody is voting, most people are centrist and the politics and the incentives behind voting patterns or the party platforms are always centrist. So that's why whether it's the left or right in Australia, they're very centrist. Yeah. Yeah. So Noah, thanks for coming. Once again, pleasure talking to you. I wish you all the best and hopefully if I'm in your neck of the world, we'll catch up someday. But once again, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thanks. Let me know if you're in my neck of the woods. Yeah. All right, guys, we'll wrap today's discussion in the description. You will see Noah's, I don't know, we're still calling it Twitter. I call it Twitter. I'm not used to calling it X. So I'll have Noah's Twitter handle and the link to his sub stack. If you have not subscribed to his sub stack, go subscribe to his sub stack. Like I like sub stack. I use I've subscribed to multiple sub stacks. So I like to read a long form essays. So if you are, you can go there, do that. If you like to support my content, you know, the drill, you can join the membership program or just like this video or leave a rating on the audio platform. I'll see you guys next time. Until then, Namaste. Take care. Bye bye.