Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:57:26 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Walter Russell Mead
[00:57:26] S0: If I combine all these things, the changing forces of power, technology, military technology, all the things we've talked about with your observation that politics in the future is gonna be more personal. Are there any other rates of change, things changing in the world that we haven't talked about yet that you think are especially important for what the future will look like? [00:57:47] S2: There were three basic classes in American society during the kind of post World War II era of stability and they spread a lot in the rest of the world. One was an industrial working class, which is kind of more or less in stable jobs [00:58:03] S0: with collar kind of work.
00:58:04 · Walter Russell Mead
[00:58:04] S2: Yeah, exactly. Often organized in unions. They had a very pragmatic political attitude and they were economically focused and political competition between the left and the right was who can figure out how to raise living standards for the workers better. And that kind of centered politics on a fairly rational basis. Then you had the business class and by the 1940s and 50s it was no longer the founders, you know, the John D. Rockefeller originally or the first JP Morgan, it was grandsons and it was publicly traded companies, professional managers. And so there was a kind of institutionalization of business. That was also the era of these very regulated monopolies and oligopolies, so there's one phone company, a limited number of airlines, the three networks, very structured business world. And then between them, this organized, rationally focused working class and organized, regulated, publicly managed business class, you had this expert class, the technocrats, the administrators and so on, who according to the dictates of the best social science, peer reviewed social science, were like making the decisions, regulate the businesses so they don't get too greedy, but also keep the workers from being so demanding that the whole system collapses, etc. And they were the balancing group. I would say in American society today, all three of those classes are in total disarray. And yet we are facing a whole series of very serious changes, perplexities, what do we do about AI, just being one of many, we're not organized to answer these in the old ways. So we are really out at sea. And because America has been for so long and still I think remains the only potential pillar of global stability in organization, the internal incoherence of America faced with all these changes can't help but undermine any chances of global stability. So I think what that means is for people like you and me and maybe our listeners on the show, tremendously heavy responsibility to try to figure out answers and see some path through this and try to build a new kind of American politics and social order that can allow us once again to be reasonably stable for ourselves and then project that globally.
01:00:50 · S3, Walter Russell Mead
[01:00:50] S3: What do you think against that backdrop it's going to mean or does mean to be an American? If all of that is changing, [01:00:57] S2: what does it mean? Americans think about being American in different ways and they have for a long time. You hear a lot of people talk these days about America as a country founded on ideas. Honestly, I think I was maybe in college before I met anybody who thought that way. I'm from the South and down there you sort of thought, well, I'm an American because everybody I know is American, my family, as long as I have any idea who the heck they were, they're Americans. I'm an American the same way a Frenchman is French or a Turkish Turk, because I believe in America, but because I'm here, I'm here and no one else would have me and I, know, it's like, this is it. But there really are other people who love America and contribute to America who experience, yes, it's a country of ideas and we are a pluralistic country in this way and I don't myself feel more American than somebody that was naturalized last week. I think for me in some ways the sort of meeting ground between identity and ideas, honestly, it's the pledge of allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of The United States Of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible under God, with liberty and justice for all. And I would say anybody who says that and means it is an American. Pretty remarkable, Well written. It's good. It's good.
01:02:28 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, S3
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01:03:55 · Walter Russell Mead
[01:03:55] S2: A lot of things obviously going on in The Middle East. One background to a lot of stuff is just the sort of collapse of Arab nationalism and a kind of Arab identity as an organizing force in The Middle East. In the 1950s, Nasser and Egypt were the great pillars of Arab identity and pan Arabism. After the 'sixty seven war, they took a hit, but you would still have countries like Syria, Iraq, even for a while under Qaddafi, Libya aspiring to that mantle. If we look at what happened, Iraq collapsed, certainly America had a lot to do with that. Syria collapsed without America having a lot to do with it. So Iran as a non Sunni, non Arab power had created what people call that Shia crescent from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq into Iran. While that, thanks to sort of Israel primarily since October 7, that's broken up. But what hasn't broken up is the underlying weakness of the Arab world is still there. And you have the Gulf states that are very effective in many ways and are using their oil and their money very effectively, but they still can't defend themselves from Iran. They still, without outside help, they cannot stand and that leads to the Strait Of Hormuz in that region, which remains incredibly important for the economic stability and health of the world, that is in chaos. If The United States or some other power doesn't hold Iran back in some way, it has a hegemony over the oil resources in The Middle East in a way that allows them to blackmail a lot of people economically and provides them with the kinds of resources that would not certainly be used to our benefit. Israel, I think, may have hoped that it could kind of bear the weight of being a counter hegemon to Iran. Israel is too small and too alien to the rest of the Middle East to really play that role effectively, I think. Since Obama, The United States has been fundamentally unwilling to do that itself and we want to kick the can down the road, we want to find some other way other than us putting down a red line that we enforce with Iran. History doesn't give us a choice, we stop Iran ourselves or Iran asserts and maintains hegemony over the oil resources in the Middle East.
01:06:37 · S3
[01:06:37] S3: Why have we been ineffective? Obviously, we have vastly superior military capability or whatever. This is a specific question about Iran in the Strait Of 4 Movies, but also people used to call Afghanistan the graveyard of empires. Why do world powers seem to have such a difficult time being effective at all in the Middle East?