Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:35:22 · Walter Russell Mead, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:35:22] S2: One of the interesting things about America is that our foreign policy arguments are very repetitive. Basically, if something comes up in foreign policy, we'll argue about it in many of the same ways they would have done in George Washington's day. Our views of the country and of foreign policy fairly predictably fall into one of four baskets. One is what I do call Hamiltonian, Alexander Hamilton. What you see is a strong capitalist economy that is trading effectively with the rest of the world, provides the money and the technological progress that holds society together, because people are making money at it and they're happy, and also gives you the strength so that no other country can attack you. We should have a strong federal government that does things like promote infrastructure at home, that sees itself as trying to help major American companies succeed internationally. George H. W. Bush in some ways. Then you have people who say, Ugh, money, that's just so vulgar. What about human rights? And would argue, you know, what causes the threats that America faces? Well, it's bad governance, dictatorships, and democracies don't go to war, dictatorships do. Generals like to fight, moms don't. American foreign policy should be about promoting democracy globally, promoting international institutions, let's get rid of war by getting rid of the causes of war. And that's [00:36:55] S0: a kind of
00:36:55 · Walter Russell Mead
[00:36:55] S2: Wilsonian approach, which we certainly had actually long before Woodrow Wilson. Then you've got people who say, wait a minute, the thing that's great about America is personal liberty. The fact that the government doesn't control us all and isn't taxing us to death. If we get involved, whether it's these Wilsonian's crusades for human rights, or Hamiltonian great power balance of politics, international finance, what we're going to have is a powerful government that has secrets from the American people, runs colossal defense budgets, gets us into endless wars, and that will destroy the liberty. We can conquer the world and lose our freedom at home. What kind of foreign policy is that? And again, we've been having this since the seventeen ninety's, And then finally there's the group I called Jacksonian after Andrew Jackson, who sort of say, Well listen, foreigners, they can be democratic, I don't really care what the foreigners do as long as they don't attack us or impugn our honor. If somebody attacks us, we should just go out and crush them. And laws of war, poof, no, like rats, you should exterminate them and you beat them and pound them and crush them until they understand that the last thing they should ever do is raise their hand against The United States. And Jacksonians often look like Jeffersonians, the isolationists in times of peace, but something happens like Pearl Harbor and nine eleven and suddenly the Jacksonians are activated. So I think we've been having these things for a very long time. We still have them today. I say these are like suits in a deck of cards. Very few of us have just like all 13 Hamiltonian cards. We generally all have a mixed hand, but we tend to have some suits are stronger than others for each
00:38:47 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Walter Russell Mead
[00:38:47] S0: suits of do you think most defines us today? [00:38:50] S2: Well, think the old democratic consensus, let's say the Clinton consensus, was very much a coalition of Wilson and Hamilton. Build a global system that advances the country's economic security but also promotes human rights and democracy and that will both make us rich and build a lasting global peace. That's been kind of the predominant establishment idea really since World War II. Special providence came out right around the time of nine eleven, and people at that time weren't really aware that there was anything but Hamilton and Wilson, and then suddenly discovered, oh, wait a minute, there are these Jacksonians there who want to nuke Afghanistan or whatever came up after that. I would say that Trump's coalition is a mix of Jeffersonians and Jacksonians, isolationists and hawks. You could say Vance as the isolationist champion in some ways and Rubio as the hawk. Rubio is not interested in the United Nations or you know, look at in Venezuela, let's get rid of our enemy Maduro, but we're not going to make the restoration of democracy in Venezuela the key of everything, someone like an Obama, I think, or a Biden would have tried much harder to do. So on Ukraine, you can see the Jeffersonians are saying, well, this is not really our fight, let's stay out of it, While the Jacksonians are just saying, Russia's the enemy, let's knock Putin and punch him in the nose while we can. They're all active today.
00:40:29 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:40:29] S0: Maybe say one word more about this notion of tech Hamiltonian as a key faction that's emerged. Typically tech and the government were in my career different concepts. One of
00:40:38 · Walter Russell Mead
[00:40:38] S2: the biggest things that happened in modern American history is the mutual discovery of tech and government. In the 1990s, which was back in the old end of history, end of nations, companies would say, oh I'm not an American company, I'm a global company, right? And nowhere was that stronger than in the world of tech, where Google has no boundaries, the cyber world is completely different, all of that stuff is irrelevant to us, Washington, they don't even understand us, and we will just do what we do. Today, tech is actually the locus of international great power competition, and China's attempt to build a technosphere that can dominate the American technosphere to American tech companies, this is really critical to your business, but also to the American state, American government, it's critical to power and independence. Much I think to the surprise of both the tech world and the political world, they've been driven in on each other and there's a kind of renationalization of tech and of the economy that we see. And the tech folks, and you may know better, certainly Jeremy understands them a lot better than I do. But my sense is that when the tech folks think about what are their economic interests, they're different from what you might call a legacy multinational, the post World War II, that are basically global trading and manufacturing companies. I make cars from things I import from all over the world, I have factories all over the world that make cars, so for these companies, free trade is the essence of their business. I need financial markets, I need labor markets, and I need manufactured good markets that are seamless and open. As Tom Friedman put it, I need a flat earth. But if you're a tech company, you don't. Alphabet is not importing and exporting a lot of goods. Even something like immigration, which is if you're a hotel company or a construction company, having hard working cheap migrant labor is pretty important to your business model. If you're a Silicon Valley company and suddenly there's no more unskilled labor crossing from Mexico, the cost of your janitorial and gardening services rises 30%. So what?
00:43:09 · Walter Russell Mead, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
You're much more concerned about security of supply chain, security of intellectual property, and I think increasingly companies are starting to realize that they need their employees to be patriotic, that is, your employees need to think it's an evil sin to sell IP to China. Your coworkers will rat you out in a heartbeat if they think you're doing something like that. Both the economic agenda of the tech sector of the business world and the kind of cultural political attitude is changing. Because again, with the legacy multinationals, I want to have a completely international workforce. I don't want it to matter whether my employees are from Sri Lanka, or Taipei or, you know, wherever. I need interchangeable units that I can plug in anywhere. [00:44:02] S0: If you take a big step back with all of this context and just think about global power, I feel like almost the whole world has decided that it's the Americans and the Chinese that have any real power or are contenders to be the powerful nation of the next period of time. What are the other interesting sources of power that have your interest and curiosity like with all the attention on just these two? We'll keep talking plenty more about these two as well, of course. But what other areas of power are most interesting to you right now?