This is KZSU, Stanford.
(upbeat music)
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
And we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
(upbeat music)
(singing in foreign language)
Does that sound to you what it sounds like to me?
A cry of despair coming from the wounded heart
of this land of ours,
this country at war with itself,
this nation whose fallen angels always rise up again in fury
to devastate what its better angels work so hard
to bring about.
We live in an unhinged world friends,
and I dread these terrible angels who swarm up
from Tartarus time and again
to remind us of the power they exert over us,
and who keep our union divided.
They are the flies, they are Limush.
They are the ones who chain us to the sins of our forebears,
and who declare, "Thou shall not overcome,
"Thou shall not get over to the other side."
Who will rid us of the flies?
And what happens to a nation
when the person we elect to its highest office
is himself a brundal fly?
We have the world, we deserve friends,
we have the government we deserve,
we have the president we deserve,
and its purple haze all around.
Don't know if we're coming up or down.
They're buzzing all around.
(upbeat music)
Welcome back to entitled opinions, Liz Ami.
It's been a very long time since our last confession.
I know way too long for some of you,
but the radio show you've come to love her hate
to back on air now.
If only briefly, with a handful of new shows for you
over the coming weeks,
a few announcements before we get down to business,
our longtime production manager, Dylan Montanati,
has moved on after several years of devoted service
to entitled opinions.
We wish him the very best in his new job
at the University of Chicago Press.
Our new production manager is Vittoria Molle.
Vittoria is a second year graduate student
in Italian studies here at Stanford,
and she's been busy these past few months
overseeing the creation of a brand new,
beautiful website for entitled opinions.
You're all going to want to check it out.
Our new website address is entitledopignions.stanford.edu.
That's entitledopignions, one word,
dotstanford.edu.
It not only looks a lot nicer,
but is much easier to search and navigate than our old website.
So thank you, Vittoria, on behalf of the entire
entitled opinions brigade and welcome aboard.
(upbeat music)
- I'd like to welcome back Truman Chen,
a Stanford undergraduate who has been
an assistant producer of entitled opinions
for the past two years.
It's great to have him on board with us again.
Let me also take this occasion to welcome Cynthia Haven
to our team.
Cynthia runs one of the finest literary blogs out there.
It's called the book haven.
And those of you who follow entitled opinions
are definitely going to want to check out the book haven.
Cynthia is in charge of our public outreach as it were,
but don't worry, it's all very discreet.
Nothing that goes against our core principles
and general distaste for social media.
The day entitled opinions opens a Facebook or Twitter account
will be the day your host is no longer involved with it.
We're not here to make the wasteland grow,
but to open up a little oasis in it.
We're not here to spread the darkness,
but to hold vigil during its long night
of present day nihilism.
We're not here to rant and rave or gnash our teeth,
but to think in the midst of thoughtlessness,
entitled opinions on ongoing war against deadness,
above all, deadness of brain.
Speaking of brain deadness,
what has happened to this republic of ours
since entitled opinions went on hiatus almost a year ago?
Something weird, something untoward,
something that Nietzsche called the uncanniest of monsters,
namely nihilism.
In his notebooks, Nietzsche wrote,
"Nihilism stands at the door,
"wence comes this most uncanny of guests."
Nihilism has indeed come to the door,
the door of our homeland,
and we have taken in the guests
who is at once alien and monstrous,
yet at the same time familiar and close,
an intimate friend of our inner psyches.
Nihilism, the devaluation of the highest values,
the failure of values to preserve their value,
the default of Amor Mundi,
or our love of the world that we share in common.
The guest is uncanny because it's our will to truth
that exposed our values lack of foundations,
including the value of truth itself.
Nihilism, which is brought about by the will to truth,
undermines its very claims,
and leaves us in a state of aggravated uncertainty
about everything.
This uncanniest of guests is indeed at the door,
and we have indeed invited him into the house.
Now that he's inside, we have no choice,
but to think the uncanny by thinking uncannily.
That means trying to grasp what is familiar in the strange,
and what is strange in the familiar.
Uncanny thought is the challenge we face today on KZSU
as we turn our attention during the next hour
to Donald J. Trump, the 45th president
of the United States of America,
which once again has shown its capacity
for the extraordinary, the unprecedented,
and the unthinkable.
It showed it eight years ago
when it elected Barack Obama to the office,
and it's done it again in reverse
when it elected Mr. Trump to succeed him.
I'm pleased to welcome back to entitled opinions,
my friend and colleague Hans Sluga,
who is well known to those of you
who follow this radio program.
The show he and I did on Michel Foucault
a few years back remains one of our most popular.
The same goes for our more recent show on Wittgenstein.
Hans Sluga is a professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley,
author of several books,
among his most recent is Wittgenstein,
brought out by Wiley Blackwell in 2011.
Another book I highly recommend is Politics
and the Search for the Common Good.
That one came out in 2014 with Cambridge University Press.
We've devoted shows to each of these two major books today.
Professor Sluga is here to talk with me
about Donald Trump and American Plutocracy.
That's the topic of a lecture he delivered at Berkeley
a couple of months ago.
So let's get right down to business.
Hans, welcome back to entitled opinions.
Thanks for joining us on KZSU.
- Thank you, it's always great to talk to you, Robert.
- So the title of this talk that you gave at Berkeley is
Donald Trump between populist rhetoric
and Plutocratic rule.
And you begin by asking a series of questions.
Namely, who is Donald Trump and what does he stand for?
Do we know?
Does he himself know?
Or is he caught like all of us
in that precarious state of disorientation
that characterizes our political situation at this time?
So maybe you could say something about this
present empire of disorientation as you call it to begin with?
- Well, the first thing we have to think about is where are we
when we think politically?
And all politics takes place in a space of uncertainty.
We always know less than we should.
We don't know the consequences of our actions.
We are not always quite clear about our purposes
and desires either.
But we find ourselves today in a situation
that is much more extreme than this.
Our world has become so complex.
Population grows around the world.
We are now at more than 7 billion.
We all shouldn't be 9 billion.
There is a vastly increasing technology
that has brought about globalization
with all of its side effects.
And we have affected our environment,
both in natural, multi-cultural environment
in very deep ways.
We don't know what the effects of all this will be
in the long run. So we find ourselves acting now
in a situation in which we are not sure anymore,
what it is where we are and what we want.
And I want to say that's really the empire
of disorientation, which affects all of us
in some fashion or other, but which is also characteristic
of certain figures who are brought up in this environment,
Donald Trump being one of them.
- And I take it that for you Donald Trump
is a particularly extreme case of disoriented
leader in the sense that he is full of contradictions.
It's very hard to understand what his ideology,
if there is a coherent ideology that drives him,
or what his strategy is for going about
achieving his political goals, what his motivations are.
It seems that he's not like someone like Madin Lupin
France who for better or for worse has a relatively coherent
political vision and ideology that goes back to her father
and to a kind of traditional right wing political sphere
whereas with Trump we don't have any certainties
of that sort at all.
- Yes, so we have just heard that he has probably changed
his party affiliation seven or eight times
in the cause of recent years.
And when we look at his career, everything from his real estate
development to a reality star to being a precocious,
Twitter, a businessman, president, politician,
everything he is, right?
So he has really no fixed personality, I want to say,
his persona changes with the occasion.
- Right.
- So some people have feared or dreading the prospect
that he may be more along the lines of a traditional fascist
if he's given the opportunity, but having read the text
of your lecture, you want to warn against any kind
of easy correlation between fascism and Donald Trump
as a leader.
- Yes, so I want to say that this empire of disorientation
of which, as speak, doesn't simply have
Trump and his followers in its citizens,
but we are too caught in the same condition.
We find ourselves in a reality that we can't fully understand.
Hagel once said that the old of Minerva starts,
it's flight at dusk, yes, meaning philosophers can really
understand only things once they have passed their prime,
once they are on disappearing when the world becomes gray
as Hagel says.
- So we have far from being an avant-garde enterprise.
We are really looking at reality,
trying to comprehend the matter that comprehension takes time.
We often like the words, and I think that's where we find
ourselves also as theorize us as philosophers
for political theorists.
- Yeah, I mean, those of us who are not entitled opinions.
- Yes, yes.
- We're also what I mentioned, brain-deadness,
is a growing sort of--
- Growing phenomena alone.
- Perhaps it's also a healthy defensive reaction
against an excess of disorientation among people,
because as you say, there's so much uncertainty
that perhaps shutting off the thought process
is a natural reaction.
- So I think part of our disorientation manifests itself
in the fact that we have only very simple terms available
to talk about Trump.
One of them is to say that he is a fascist.
Another one is that he's a populist.
The third one is that we must understand him in terms
of a very individual set of psychological foibles
and eccentricities.
A fourth one says he's really neoliberal.
Some of you want to say he's just fundamentally
and conservative or Republican.
- So what is the case against him,
or against the possibility that we are in a historical
situation politically that could lead to our own version
where reenactment of the fascism of the '20s and '30s?
- Well, political terms are always used
in a very broad fashion.
They often used also very polemically.
And I think that's what's happened with the word fascist.
We have drained it over much of its specific meaning.
And I even want to say, if we want to use this term
as a piece of polemic, it's fine with me.
I don't object to that, but it doesn't really help
with analysis.
So fascism brings us back to the 20th century.
- Mussolini first and Italy, but then also other fascist states
of Europe, including German national socialism.
And they kind of represented something that was quite
different from what we have now, Nimi,
an organized, strong state, powerful state
in which the whole population is organized in some fashion,
moving along with the movement of the young towards
a new future.
So it's a form of statism that is quite absent from
what we find in America today or what Trump may be aiming at.
- Right.
So fascism doesn't fit neoliberalism.
I believe you told me that this paper or this lecture
that you delivered, which you will also go on to develop,
you went to a larger book project that you had heard
a lecture previously that was saying that the Trump
presidency is just neoliberalism coming back.
- Yes, and it's normal for you.
You don't agree with that.
- So my distinguished colleague,
Wendy Brown from Political Science in Berkeley,
lectured in the same series in which I gave my talk
a couple of months ago.
And her analysis was that Trump is fundamentally a neoliberal
and has to be understood in as a neoliberal.
And we have to critique him in the same way in which we could
critique neoliberalism around the world.
- So what is a neoliberal?
- neoliberalism in my understanding is a doctrine which seeks
to really separate politics from the state
and assert the preeminence of the economic, over the political.
Trump seems to be to represent something quite different.
I mean, the unification of the political and the economic.
So he's both a businessman.
He remains a businessman while he is a president.
And he said famously in New York Times interview
that for the president there can't be a conflict of interest.
- Right, we're gonna get back to that.
But first, another option, which is that a populist.
So he ran as a populist.
A lot of his rhetoric was populist,
but you also are not convinced that there's a genuine
populism at work there.
- Again, as with the term fascism,
the word populism has become partly a political term
as much of its substantive meaning.
And so we really have to try to recapture what could be meant
by this.
I take populism as a doctrine which upholds what I call
the virtue of the people versus the corruption of the elites.
And that kind of way of speaking is certainly very
prominent in Trump's inaugural lecture.
- Oh, yes.
In fact, if you don't mind, I'll quote her or listen
or some of the, what he said there about,
for too long, a small group in our nation's capital
has reaped the rewards of government
while the people have borne the costs,
the establishment protected itself,
but not the citizens of our country.
Their victories have not been your victories.
Their triumphs have not been your triumphs
and while they celebrated in our nation's capital,
there was little to celebrate for struggling families
all across our land and so on and so forth.
It sounds like very bonafide populism there.
- It is indeed, yes.
So that's why I say that he uses a populist rhetoric,
but he positions himself in a very different place.
They may have much more plutocratic form of government.
It has very little to do with populism.
- But before you make your case for the plutocratic Trump,
you say that we should go by a few simple guidelines
and that the first, it's a set aside,
at least for the time being what Trump has said
since we know that a politician's likely
to adapt his words to the occasion
and that we can't really trust
that he is telling us what he really thinks
and a second guideline is to set aside
what the politician thinks and this would I like.
In so far as we can even make that out
because what he thinks and what really motivates him
are not necessarily the same thing.
That's a very important point.
But there's also the third guideline
that we should set aside easy speculations
that we ourselves are prone to about what might motivate Trump
and what he might do and what the consequences of his actions
might be and instead you say we should concentrate first
on the empirical facts and establish
three kind of undeniable empirical facts.
So three of which are important.
The first is that Trump is a multi-billionaire.
The second that although he started by no means
from nothing he is in essence a self-made man
and the third that whatever else he has done
he is above all a real estate developer.
So these are these three truths.
Maybe we can go through them one at a time briefly
to build a case for the bureaucracy that he has.
- So it's not only is it billionaire
but he has surrounded himself with billionaire friends.
If he lives in a billionaire environment,
he has spent many years down in Florida
as we now find him
for recommending the place very often.
But he has a whole circle of billionaire friends
there with whom he has been in close contact.
Some of them have been given political tasks now
in this regime.
He has been financed by billionaires.
He lives in a billionaire world,
not in a world of people who are unemployed,
impoverished, disillusioned, populist.
- Exactly.
And on the question of the real estate man,
that's important.
The self-made man we can talk about later.
But given that he made his fortune in real estate
that for you is important because a real estate tycoon
is someone who has to deal with government
and the institutions of government.
Because real estate depends on obtaining licenses
and permits and traffic issues and so forth.
So he has a long history of dealing with government
at the local and perhaps even at the national level
because real estate developers require
that kind of collaboration.
And he's used his money to promote his real estate interest
and this is very important in understanding him as a president.
- Yes.
More generally speaking,
I think we have underestimated the political significance
of real estate in our world.
This has come to my opinion,
my attention first when I spend some time living in Hong Kong
and I realize that Hong Kong is all about real estate.
The richest people in Hong Kong are real estate magnates.
They dominate the political scene as well.
They determine everything.
And they are completely in agreement
with the Beijing government.
They are very pro-mainland Chinese Beijing oriented
because they like the authoritarianism of Beijing.
And they do not like unrest.
They do not like a populace that demonstrates against them
or they're interests.
- Right.
- And so I think there is a very specific character
to real estate.
We have seen this across the world.
Real estate has been the one area of our economics
where there have been very large profits made.
The 2008 crisis was a cause in America
was a real estate crisis, right?
As we know, it was a crisis
because so much money was being made
in a very abnormal fashion and it all collapsed.
But money is still being made.
It has been made in real estate in recent years
across the world and Trump is somebody who's
prefitted from this and he's a characteristic figure
of that kind of business.
- And how do you see him being a real estate person
operate in his still young presidency?
- Well, he says you know he has a big hotel right next
to the very close to the White House.
And he rents it out to passing diplomats.
Business is everywhere in his life.
So when recently Angela Merkel in Germany
was trying to improve her relationship with Trump,
she made sure to invite Ivanka Trump to Germany
and give her a prominent role at a conference
on women's interest in politics
because she thought this is the way to get
an entry into the Trump universe, right?
And so it's via this business interest
that you get close to Trump.
- But at the same time, the relation again
as on real estate and government, you know this,
you write that it shares,
these real estate type of thing
you might share with neoliberals
a dislike of restrictive regulations,
but unlike the neoliberals,
they do always seek positive contact with government.
Real estate needs permits and easements.
It is dependent on city planning, traffic planning
on the availability of power and sewage lines
of schools and parks real estate typically depends
on various kinds of subsidy and tax relief and so forth.
So this would be demarcation away
from the neoliberal extent
and that therefore Trump is not anti-government,
he just has a different notion of what governments' role is
in this alliance between economy and politics.
- Yes, and he wants less regulation
in order to assert his own real to power,
I think more effectively.
So he's an authoritarian certainly,
we shouldn't doubt that at all,
but not somebody who's necessarily out to destroy
the state or the institutions.
- Right, so how do you reconcile that?
You spoke about the Hong Kong magnates
being in favor of a strong authoritarian government,
but why then deregulation?
Why is, because that doesn't seem to go
with strong authoritarian governments?
- No, you want deregulation of your business
so that you can build more of your buildings,
building codes are adapted to your interests,
but you also want to collaborate with a government,
you want government to act in terms of your business
so that we are state interests here.
- And this is how you define plutocracy.
In fact, you say it is this integration of politics
and business that he represents
and its name is plutocracy.
So can you say a few words about what exactly is plutocracy?
It's an old, one of the traditional forms of government,
but yeah, in the traditional sense,
how do we understand plutocracy?
- Plutocracy, of course, means literally
the rule of the rich.
Plutuss is the god of money.
- Not the worst form of government according to Aristotle.
- Not the worst form of government, tyranny is.
- There is tyranny is, right.
But still, far down the ladder,
because it's a form of government
that is in the interest of the few
of those rich people, particularly.
And so another word that Aristotle
and Plato uses oligarchy, the rule of the few.
So by, by, by do the rich want to rule,
there are many reasons.
I think some of them are motivated by religious ideological
motivations.
There is always, of course, that interest to maintain
and preserve and protect what you have,
as well as to expand it if possible.
So they are monetary interests,
but they are also ideologically interested
that plutocrats can have.
- Yes, so in the traditional plutocracies
that we know from history,
so we have the Renaissance Florence
was very much a plutocracy when it was under the rule
of the Medici family.
The Dutch Republic of the 17th century
is notorious plutocracy.
But as you point out, in those cases,
the interests of the plutocrats
had strong connections with the interests of the people,
or let's say this society,
because in Florence, Florence had common enemies.
There was a common religion, Christian religion.
There was a sense that we all belong to
the city status such.
Therefore, plutocracy worked, to some extent,
in line with the public interest.
In the Dutch Republic as well,
it was also a period of cultural flourishing,
artistic philosophical, as we know,
because they did have a strong sense of collective identity.
Your claim is that plutocracy today in America
is similar in some respects
to the traditional plutocracies of the past,
but very different in other respects
because it does not have the same sort of alignment
with the public interest and the public sphere.
Yes, because we also, of course,
have to see this new plutocracy in this context
of a globalized world,
where money is not necessarily tied to one location.
The plutocrat is not necessarily identifying himself
with a place where they live
because they may live anywhere.
They may have many places,
in many parts of the world where they live.
So they become internationalized.
There is no attachment anymore to the local, I think,
or it's a weakened attachment to the local.
They'd be fine to local interests, local values.
And so I call this also a nihilistic form of plutocracy
as a result.
So you believe that Trump is aligned with the plutocrats,
whether he is aware of it or not.
Do you believe he's aware of his plutocratic allegiances?
Or is it just something that is structurally guiding him
regardless of his own sense of what his true mission
is as president of the United States?
I certainly think that the structural alignment
is what is most important causally
and for explanatory purposes,
but I think he also, of course,
identifies with plutocracy,
identifies with these rich.
You may remember this wonderful occasion,
which he explained to us when he told the visiting Chinese
president Xi Jinping that Justin attack had occurred against Syria,
and he said he told him this over dessert at Mar-a-Lago,
and that even on one of one of four chocolates cake,
it had been.
So how do you account for that discrepancy
with the populist rhetoric and his campaign?
He was convincingly passionate about his populism
and his nationalism, America, first.
Of course, his America was a very particular America.
It wasn't the whole America,
it was a certain kind of reduced version of America,
but nevertheless, he still loves to go to the rallies
even now that he's been elected.
He seems to feel a strong sense of connection
to the people who elected him who are far from plutocrats
on the contrary.
There are the ones whom the plutocrats are always screwing over,
no?
Yes.
How does he get away with this blatant contradiction?
Well, he likes to bathe in the masses clearly.
This is, he gets very great satisfaction out of being
with his crowd, with homie can identify,
and he certainly has some of that taste.
I understand, but don't you think that he would be careful
not to turn them against him by passing
the healthcare reform bill, which just happened yesterday?
His policy, since he's been in office,
have seemed to be designed to alienate the very people
in whose praise he wants to bask.
Yes, this is very strange phenomenon,
and that's why I called my talk
between populist rhetoric and plutocratic rule.
He seems to position himself somewhere in that space
and moves back and forth between it.
He doesn't always seem to kind of care or think
about the consequences of these policies
that he's actually promoting, whether they will
appeal even to his supporters or not.
He hopes or they believes they will,
without, in any way, look closely at them.
I think he will be disappointed eventually.
So from the point of view of what you call the common good,
in this case the American public interest,
do you think we're better off with someone
who is that confused about what he's up to
and who is so disoriented in his own sense of motivation,
that we're better off with a very confused plutocratic
than we would be with a very clear-minded one?
Yes, this is a wonderful question.
Some of my friends say,
"Start saying, wouldn't it be wonderful if Trump
"was forced to resign or just gave up on his position
"because he can't bear all this work anymore?"
And then they go on to say,
"But wouldn't Pence be worse?"
Because he seems to be much more the standard
conservative Republican, right?
And in one feels he would be worse.
Well, I think he would, only in the sense that he provides
this very benevolent face to anything
but benevolent sort of political agenda.
Yeah.
And if there's any consolation,
is that with Trump, what you see is what you get.
But the problem is that what you see,
as you say, you don't know how to understand it.
You don't know what to make of it.
The disorientation, the empire of disorientation
has so colonized his own psyche
that he can say and believe something one day,
and it's opposite the next day.
So there is this, what you call this surface turbulence
associated with him and his presidency.
But you believe that beneath the surface turbulence,
there is actually a steady, recognizable politics
of plutocracy, is that correct?
Well, I don't want to say that he is enacting this,
but it is a historical phenomenon that plutocracy,
which was once dominant in the United States,
in the late 19th century,
the beginning of the 20th century,
has made a comeback of a since Reagan Ronald Reagan
and has kind of asserted itself one more.
And Trump is in some ways the visible outcome
he is the tip of the iceberg, what I'm really interested in
is the iceberg itself.
Right.
Yes, in fact, and you quote, Richard Pettigrew,
who wrote this book called Triumphant Plutocracy
back in the early 20th century,
he was a one-time US senator from South Dakota.
And I'd like to quote for our listeners what he wrote
back then when he said,
when I entered the arena of public affairs in 1870,
the United States was just recovering from the effects
of the Civil War, the transformation from that day
to this is complete.
I saw the government of the United States
enter into a struggle with the trusts,
the railroads and the banks,
and I watched while the business forces won the contest.
I saw the empire of business
with his innumerable ramifications,
grow up around and above the structure of government.
I watched the power over public affairs shift
from the weak and structure of the Republican political
machinery to the vigorous new business empire.
And he wrote that after he had left the US Senate disillusioned
and he concludes in that book that the rise of American
plutocracy had already been mapped out
in the United States Constitution.
So to quote him again, when I entered the Senate,
I did not understand what it was I was facing.
When I left the Senate, I knew that the forms of our government
and the machinery of its administration
were established and maintained for the benefit
of the class that held the economic and political power.
Documents like the Constitution, which I as a child
had been taught to regard as almost divine in their origin,
stood before me for what they were, plans
prepared by businessmen to stabilize business interests.
This is heavy disillusionment.
Absolutely, yes.
Maybe we wouldn't want to identify completely with his
judgment here.
I wouldn't want to identify completely, not that I want to
venerate the Constitution as a sacred text.
But at the same time, you could see the history of our
republic since the Civil War as an ongoing struggle
between a plutocracy and the public interest that the
government has in some oftentimes tried to represent.
You go on to say that while the Pluto Crats had won when he
was writing with Roosevelt and the new deal, there was a
kind of resurgence of a government for the people and its
public interest.
And that a number of measures were passed in different
periods, in cyclical periods where you have health coverage,
you have public education, you have projects like the
education, founding of universities, all those things
that we are proud of in the history of our republic,
seem to have taken place under regimes where the
plutocrats were marginalized to a certain extent.
And then there are other periods where they come back with
the vengeance.
Now, are we just in a cyclical period with Trump or since
Reagan, where now the plutocracy is having its day and that
we will maybe somewhere down the line go back to a
government which is more aligned to the public interest or
something new happening today?
I want to say it's both cyclical and something new.
So I want to distinguish actually three levels in the political
development.
One of them is these surface tribulations, turbulence,
and the Trump and the shock he produced and his
psychological instability in some ways are part of that
turbulence.
But below that there are kind of more deeper flows and
currents and then there is a third deepest level that we
also have to look at.
So the second level, the middle level for me is this
resurgence of plutocracy.
But we have to see that this is taking place now in an
environment different from the head of the late 19th century.
It's taking place in a much better knowledge as the world.
It's a globalized world that makes this accumulation, this
vast amounts of money and therefore vast political
potential possible.
So what we are observing is a structural change here,
not one that has only to do with local policies.
It's a global phenomenon.
And that's what we need to get into grip.
The question is, are we now entering a long period of
plutocratic rule made possible by these technological
changes?
Do you believe that Marx's analysis of capitalism is at
all pertinent to this new global capital,
do you think that the plutocratic organized or did he,
could he, he could not have foreseen such a new development
of the way capital could be so concentrated in the hands of
so very few on a global scale?
Well, it didn't foresee this global scale, of course,
of accumulation of money and power.
But certainly, yes, something to offer, whether we can look
forward to the proletariat overthrowing this new regime,
that's a different question.
Is he good as a prophet, I want to say?
No, he wasn't.
No, but when you get the proletariat or at least a large
proportion of the Trump electorate would belong to the
proletariat, when you have them voting in the plutocratic,
we do live in an empire of complete disorientation.
It just still boggles the mind that it's exactly the wrong
people choosing someone to represent their interests or the
people choosing the wrong person to represent their interests.
And you say that the plutocracy today points in a new
direction than the previous, because it's no longer a
struggle over sovereignty, sovereignty of the state or the
independence of the plutocrats.
But in the direction of an integration and unity of the
political and economic realm, and this has something to do with
the fate of the state in our day and age.
And I take it that you believe the state is at the moment,
not withering away, but it's undergoing such a
transformation of its role that it is being absorbed into the
plutocracy.
And it's certainly not a counter force of the
plutocracy, but it is being enlisted by the plutocrats.
So it's undergoing a functional change, not necessarily a great
institutional change.
So that deceives us, it makes us think that the structures,
the institutions are still there, but they are doing something
completely different now.
If you want to look at the human appendix, it was once an
important part of the human body, but now it has become an
appendix, it has completely changed its function.
But plutocracy needs state.
Yes, it needs an order, right exactly, that order will be.
So do we mean by state a particular kind of political system
that operates in a particular way, let's say it's through
democratic elections?
Or do we mean simply an order at a specific level of magnitude
right, the state for us is also something which is smaller than a
global system, global empire, but it's also larger than a
city.
So and that kind of structure, I'm sure, will be
maintained.
But the question is, how will it function?
What purpose is will it serve?
How will it fit into this larger system?
Right.
And here I'd like to be Foucaulti and the suspicious about
the perversity of power and its operations and suggest or ask if
you agree that some perverse way, flutocracy might require
precisely the democratic form of government as the most
efficient form of government to promote its own interests, if
only because democracy conjugates so well with capitalism.
So China, for example, if it were the old communist top down
regime without a vibrant market economy would not be nearly
as advantageous to the plutocrats as a more liberalized
market.
So this is what I'm curious about is how necessary is the
democratic form of government, at least in appearance, or how
desirable is it for this global pro-tocracy that's coming into
being?
Well, we can't be profit.
So we can't really foretell.
There are certainly interests that plutocrats have, namely
any ruler has, namely to be legitimized, to be accepted by
the population and democratic processes.
However, fake or false or superficial, they may be can serve
that purpose.
So yes, we can see the maintenance of some form of democracy
coming together with plutocracy at the same time.
But do you believe that we can have this kind of wild
capitalism without democratic forms of government?
Is a wild capitalism possible under strictly authoritarian
regimes?
I don't know.
I ask this question without knowing exactly the answer to
my suspicion somehow is that democracy is necessary for this
new global order.
But the question is, are we going to be in a period of
wild capitalism, right?
We have been through one, but what is now forming at these
big global monopolies, as well, right?
And they are not interested in wild competition.
They want to maintain their power in the market, their
dominance in the market.
Yes, I guess that's true.
Although those markets require consumers.
Now, this is what I'm, I suppose I'm wondering is whether the
consumer society on which this global accumulation of
capital is predicated, whether the consumer must also be
conceived of as a voting citizen of at least a nominal
democracy.
I don't know.
Why, he must be conceived as voting through his shopping,
right?
Which product he will buy?
That will certainly be an issue.
Right.
But whether it will involve making political choices is a
different question.
As we know, very few people, relatively few people go to
vote these days, right, because they feel their vote doesn't
make any difference.
When you find out why they don't vote, they have all kinds of
reasons, some say the systems hopeless.
Some people say it doesn't matter who gets elected.
They are all good.
Some people have some personal reasons why they don't vote.
But we know that very large numbers of people in our Western
democracies don't vote anymore.
Right.
But public opinion is still a strong force.
And until recently, one could think that public opinion is
the bulwark against an over concentration of wealth in the
hands of the few.
And yet we see that the manipulation of public opinion is
pervasive.
And it often serves the interests of a plutocracy to be
able to create the proper kind of consumer society, which
seems to rely on this notion that the consumer has
this is free choice and is an autonomous agent of choices that if
only when it comes to the shopping of what you choose and
what you don't choose to buy and so forth.
So the market in that sense, I think, is intrinsically
democratic, not in the political sense per se, but
democratic in the sense that it brings all the people
together because the economy requires the full participation
of the consumer in it.
And in that respect, how you control the consumer and
through public opinion and market strategies, I think
is something else to be taken into consideration.
Absolutely.
So but the manipulation is made possible, increasingly, so
through these new technologies.
And we know that Donald Trump heavily used technologies,
manipulation of opinion in this election campaign.
He employed Robert Mercer from Cambridge Analytica.
And they kind of gave him a very detailed advice not to
how to get people to vote for him, but to disassuate people
from voting for the opponent.
And they were very successful in this.
So manipulation, both in the political sphere and in the
commercial sphere is possible, right?
And that's not very democratic anymore.
No, it's not yet you need people to develop those
technologies.
You need a banking system, but will process all of the
capital that's running through the system.
You need to give people the consumer enough leeway so
that you can actually incorporate and absorb the genius
that comes out of people when you put them to work in
certain ways with new inventions and so forth.
So this allowing the people, a certain margin of
democratic freedom, serves the interests of a
plutocracy in the final analysis if they are as marks at
controlling the means of that production in
devious and serious ways, maybe not obvious on the
surface.
So I would like to say that what we have seen and still
observing is this rise of plutocratic forms of governance, but
we need to ask ourselves how stable that is.
We don't know.
We shouldn't assume that this form of government is
necessarily stable arrangement.
If we look at the history, we see that plutocratic regimes
are deposed like any other regimes, right?
And they disappear and disappear in different ways.
So sometimes they become dynastic systems.
There's always a dynasticism in every
plutocracy, think about Trump and his family, right?
There's also the competition of other plutocrats,
in the enemy, the greatest enemy of the plutocrat is the
plutocrat, right?
The competitor who wants to outdo somebody else, the
enemy is sometimes also the offspring who wants to get rid
of the plutocrat or it's the revolution that overthrows
a plutocratic regime.
Or let me say last one, maybe the excesses of plutocracy can
bring down their own form as maybe happened in 1929.
Sure.
And here you and I are thinking that we don't yet identify
completely, as you say, there's always a degree of uncertainty
in the political, but especially nowadays, you have to be
trying to almost be asistic about seeing what actually might
fit and not fit the phenomenon.
But in terms of the enemies among the plutocrats, I wanted to
come back to that third thing about Trump, that I guess less
persuaded by to a degree than you seem to suggest, which is
that understanding him requires remembering that he is a
self-made man.
And you do mention that he's not technically a self-made man
because he was born into great wealth, but that he has all the
behavior and characteristics of a self-made man because he
seems to resent the plutocratic class.
He seems to be despised by many of them.
He has an aggressive self-reliance on his own opinion and
his own intuition, very typical of the self-made man.
He has a certain degree of vulgarity that comes with the
Nuvo reach and so forth.
All this I found persuasive on the one hand, but paradoxical
on the other because he actually was born into that class of
the super rich and had all the benefits of having a rich
father who favored his enterprises.
So can you say more about what are the personality characteristics
of the self-made man in Donald Trump that you think are
important to take into consideration?
Well, I think you mentioned many of them.
The question is, why would he have these sentiments when he
really comes from already a rich family?
He'd done a super rich family, but still nevertheless for
my rich background.
This may have to do something with his personal history.
I mean, I've done some reading there and it seems that he was
kept very short, very short leash.
He was sent to military school.
He was not raised in great comfort and luxury.
So that may have given him the sense that whatever he achieved
achieved on his own.
Well, certainly there are some syndrome, if you want to be
psychoanalytic about it, that seems to correspond to what is
known as weak ego formation, where you have a weak ego
formation, there is nothing from the, there's a constant hunger
and desire for affirmation from the outside.
But none of it will ever actually satisfy because it's a
kind of hole through which everything kind of leaks away.
And nothing sticks.
And this weak ego formation seems to be there at the root of
this need for constant ego gratification that is endless
because it has a hole somewhere at the center of it.
So in recent Associated Press interview, he goes through this
long list of people he has been dealing with all these foreign
leaders.
He has been speaking to, he keeps constantly saying that he has
had great relationship, he has established.
And then it ends up, the interview ends up by saying that
democratic congressman has recently told him that he will be
the greatest president in history.
So everything about him is great, but he's the greatest.
And he has given the greatest, and somebody else has told him
he's given the greatest address ever in Congress.
So it has to be also not only great, but the greatest as far as
he's concerned with that.
So I'm curious about this from a political point of view.
When I look at some of these types, these leaders, and also
in North Korea and elsewhere, how important is human psychology
when it comes to the political, when you're dealing with
individuals who have such markets, idiosyncrasies, and who
psyches are so unstable from many points of view that all the
kind of rules that otherwise dominate the institutional
reality of politics have to be put in suspension because there's a
psyche at work, which is completely outside of the bounds of our
grasp.
Well, institutions are there to kind of control the office
holders of course, and they do that, and we see that happening
all the time.
Yeah, we see that happening to some extent.
So he's being controlled by the Congress, by the Republican
Party, by business interests of various sorts, right?
So there's many ways in which he has to change his policies.
But his personnel, character, still expresses itself.
It's there in his words, but also to some extent in his
policies.
And there's this peculiar combination in dictatorial regimes.
There's much less constrained, of course, but he is nevertheless
still as long as we are living in a constitutional system.
Yeah, there's still certain controls on him.
Right.
So Hans, I wanted to address this larger picture that you
end your lecture with about nihilism.
And here I'm remembering the end of your book about politics
and the search for the common good.
And when we were discussing that book on our previous show,
at the end of that book, you say that we're in a position
where we have to think the contemporary without banisters, if you
want to use Hanoi, it's metaphor because the new is so new
that we can't rely on older guidelines.
And that now it seems like you're fulfilling this promise.
At the end of that book that you're doing a diagnostic of the
contemporary of the present in the political sphere.
But at the end of your lecture, you do provide this larger framework
of nihilism and invoke Nietzsche who says that we are living in an age
of as yet incomplete nihilism.
And Nietzsche who was writing, you know, 150 years ago said, I am
projecting for the next 200 years the story of this nihilism.
And you say that those 200 years are still not up.
And how do we understand nihilism?
Nietzsche speaks about it as the highest values devaluate themselves.
But you say that this is not a situation in which there are no values.
And nihilism is not a condition of Hanoi.
It is rather a state in which the values we possess have become unanchored.
And this will show itself in a multiplication of values in the production of
ever new values.
But also in their ever continuing devaluation in their constantly being
discarded and replaced, values themselves have thus lost their value.
It seems to me like in this last section of your lecture, we leap outside of the
discussion we've been having here on air.
And we're talking about something much more difficult to think, which is
values being incapable of retaining their value in the particular age that we live
in, which would be the age of nihilism.
How do you understand the relation between politics and this kind of nihilism?
In the Trump era, let's say.
Well, politics is always the search for some common ground, a common good, common
interest that we share, right, a common agenda that we can engage in.
And it typically involves reliance on drawing on certain values.
We cannot identify whether it's justice or equality or freedom.
But what we find ourselves now in is the situation in which all these different
issues are up for grabs.
And we have this kind of rotation or this kind of unanchoring of these
interests and values that we see kind of happening in the political scene.
And for the first time ever, I have become very concerned and alarmed by the fact that
in America, America was being a country of immigrants, everyone coming from some other
homeland here that there is not a sense of nativeist identity.
And therefore it was our form of government which provided the real home of the American
citizen.
And that form of government is basically a set of principles that until recently I thought
would never be questioned or submitted to the nihilistic devaluation of those values.
And this would be, you mentioned freedom being one of them, the rights of the individual,
the rule of law and of justice, a government by consent of the governed and a system of
government based on checks and balances of power to prevent the consolidation of power
in tyrannical forms and so forth.
I am wondering whether the nihilism Nietzsche speaks about that we were still involved in
is corroding the homeland of America which is founded on these principles as such.
The other one being the huge one being the difference between truth and falsity.
What is true and what is not true and our commitment to facts, a nation of fact, pragmatism
and so forth.
Do you worry that this kind of founding secular religion of the American republic is being
submitted to the same sort of relativity?
Absolutely, absolutely.
So I am also attracted to another characterization of nihilism which I mentioned in my talk as
well which is due to a contemporary Chinese philosopher, CJ Y, who describes nihilism as
the desublimation of the world to power.
So we have learned to control our will to power by adopting making these values, our
own, these are constraints of the world to power but we are now abandoning those and so
we find ourselves back in a situation where the world to power expresses itself directly
in the pursuit of money and the pursuit of political influence, political dominance, where these
become the ends in themselves now for us.
And I think we can see that in some ways that the values that have guided in some ways
that were public since it's beginning no longer taken seriously and behind them is this
cynicism of power and the sale of political power for money as well.
That is so pervasive now.
If you read Jane Mayer's recent book, Dark Money, showing how money has begun to undermine
everything in political life now.
Sure, but I have to believe that there is enough reserve, reservoir of faith in the founding
principles in the populace at large no matter how strange the voting patterns can be from one
electoral cycle to another that the republicans still has a large reservoir of commitment
and that it will somehow preserve us from the worst excesses of the desublimation of the
world to power.
I might be wrong about that, but it seems to me that I can still at least hope that
that reservoir exists.
Sure, but in order to do that we have to learn to diagnose the present, right?
We have to understand what's going on.
Right.
And that's what we've been doing.
That's what we have been trying to do, yes.
And of course, it's always frustrating because diagnosing the present is diagnosing and
also prognosticating a future, which is even more hazardous enterprise, but that's part
of the riskful enterprise of thinking in the midst of the contemporary.
It's not like being a historian of some sort.
And I promised our listeners that we would be thinking in the midst of thoughtlessness
and we certainly have been trying to do that with our guest professor Hans Slougat from
Berkeley University.
So I would, I want to thank you again for coming on and this conversation.
I do hope that this lecture you gave is going to be the almost like a blueprint for the
next book that you're working on.
That's the plan, yes.
Is that the plan?
And we'll look forward to having a look at that when it comes out and having you back
on in title opinions at that moment.
Thank you so much.
So thank you again and we'll be with you very shortly from title opinions.
I'm Robert Harrison.
Bye bye.
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