Joel Stein Discusses the Rise of Populism

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: In an era of political turmoil, though, one author has opted for human to get his message across as he examines America’s political cultural wars. Joel Stein is a former writer for “TIME” magazine. His new book, In Defense of Elitism,” offers a sharp and witty take on what elitism means today and why he thinks it’s so important to fight against the rise of populism. Our Walter Isaacson, who was his editor in chief at “TIME,” sat down with him, as he recounts what he learned from spending a week in Trump’s heartland of Roberts County, Texas.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

WALTER ISAACSON: You were a humor writer at “TIME.” This is sort of a humor book. It’s actually a laugh-out-loud funny book.

JOEL STEIN, AUTHOR, “IN DEFENSE OF ELITISM”: Well, thank you.

ISAACSON: But you use the humor to make a pretty subtle and changing point about elitism and listening to people. Why don’t you start by reading the call to arms when you begin your book.

STEIN: Oh, my God. I’m going read my book out loud to Walter Isaacson.

ISAACSON: Yes, yes, yes.

(CROSSTALK)

STEIN: This is very nerve-racking. OK. “This book is a call to arms for the elite, not actual arms, since we don’t think people should those, but metaphoric arms, which are the type of arms that will be useless against the populist arms, which are real arms, which is why I’m not standing up to the populists in person, but here in print, where none of them will know about it.”

ISAACSON: Let me then me read the end of your book, because…

(CROSSTALK)

STEIN: OK, yes.

ISAACSON: Because this journey changes you more than you change the people out there that you’re trying to enlist. “Since I started this work, I have changed my mind about my superiority. It happened because I listened to others, due to the fact that it’s hard to talk when you’re taking notes. By doing so, I learned that gathering on a porch with your neighbors is better than sending texts. I learned that the old quilts, the ones that were for comfort over pretty, are better. I have learned to entertain strangers. I have learned that even other people’s problems — even when other people’s problems are minor injuries suffered in the name of progress, they are still real.” Tell me how you changed over this journey, where you went out, sort of half-jokingly, to defend the elite against the populist uprising, and you start off in the Panhandle of Texas and start changing your mind.

STEIN: Yes, I was really worried the night of the election, when Trump won. Like, I brought this bottle of Trump sparkling wine to a party, thinking we would toast him with this Virginia blanc de blanc and mock his attempt to be an elite. And when he won, like — Republicans have won in my life. I have friends who make great wine who are Republicans. Like, that didn’t freak me out, but a populist hadn’t won since really Andrew Jackson beat John Quincy Adams. And the thought of someone who just had no experience and knew nothing about the world or how the American political system worked running our country just made me feel very unsafe and worried.

ISAACSON: And so you went to Roberts County, Texas.

STEIN: Yes. Yes. Yes.

ISAACSON: Right in the Panhandle.

STEIN: Yes.

ISAACSON: I think it’s probably more than 90 percent Trump.

STEIN: It was, I think, almost 96 percent, the highest percentage of Trump voters in the entire country.

ISAACSON: And that’s why you picked it?

STEIN: That’s why I picked it.

ISAACSON: And what did you do?

STEIN: I stayed there for a week. And I just — I wasn’t — I didn’t have a meal alone. Like, these people invited me to their houses, to their churches, to their after-church dinners.

And there’s one cafe in town. I knew more people in Miami, Texas, than I know in Los Angeles by the time I left there, went to their parties. And I thought I would go down there and teach them a lot, and they would teach me something that I could probably stitch on a doily and put in my kitchen. And, instead, I really came to understand their point of view. Like, I read “Hillbilly Elegy,” and I thought these would be like opioid-addicted, toothless maw maws. But these were — these are people who knew more about our lives than we know about theirs. Like, they were educated, and they were smart, and they had a real vision of America that they care deeply about.

ISAACSON: There’s a guy named Bill Philpott in the book that actually surprised me.

STEIN: Yes. Yes, he had been a professor at Rice. And I was shocked. Like, when I told him I was writing this book about the elite, he immediately just showed me his business card. And I was like, “What do people here think of you when you tell them that you were a professor at Rice?” And he said, “I don’t tell them that.” And so I was like, “Oh, yes, because they would hate you.” He’s like, “No, they would think I was bragging.” And I was like — I thought, oh, well, that’s a different perspective.

ISAACSON: And it was the first step towards humility and anti-smugness, which I think is one of your themes.

STEIN: Yes. I mean, what I came out with at the end was realizing that me and my friends and so many progressives sit around thinking that, if only the Trump voters understood what was in their best interests, if only Elizabeth Warren could explain her Medicare for all plan in a way that they understood, then they’d be on our side. And that’s not the case. They understand what’s going on completely, and it’s — people don’t vote in their own interests. Political scientists will tell you people vote altruistically. Like, there’s a lot of rich people in New York and L.A. who are voting for higher taxes. That’s against their own interests as much as a soybean farmer who’s voting for Trump. These people are voting for what they want for America. And if you’re a white Christian in America, you used to have more power. You’re still the most powerful group, but I think people feel acceleration more than they feel speed. And they have noticed they have less power than they used to, and they’re afraid of what that means for what America will be.

ISAACSON: And as you go through the book, you’re almost giving more advice to your — quote — “friends amongst the elite,” meaning the smug Los Angeles dinner party types, which is, OK, here’s how we have to change.

STEIN: Well, yes. I mean, I think we’re losing a war that — I talk in the book about this guy Vilfredo Pareto, who is known the Pareto Principle. He is a turn of the 20th century Italian economist who Mussolini loved. And he had a theory of the circulation of the elites, which I think is pretty similar to Nietzsche’s idea, that there’s two groups of people who are constantly in battle. It’s very Orwell, that there’s always going to be someone in charge. And they’re always going to look the same, but they have a different outlook of life. And I’m afraid that we’re going to get the authoritarian, anti-democratic, populist version, who I call the boat elite in the book, because they care about money compared to ideas. Like, I think the intellectual elite don’t want a yacht. They want a TED Talk. And then Trump makes this crazy speech in Minneapolis last year after railing against the elites, successfully so, for years, where he says, why are they the elites? Like, we’re the elites. We have bigger houses, and we have nicer boats. And I realized, oh, these are boat people. And the boat people are trying to be in charge. And you see these kind of populist elites. You see them certainly in England with Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. You see Bannon. I think there’s just a bunch of people of this populist vision of a very small, nationalist, anti-globalist world that I feel is going to drive us backwards to the Dark Ages.

ISAACSON: Why has populism swept the world, Europe, here, Hungary, to Brexit, to…

STEIN: Poland to…

ISAACSON: Yes, to…

STEIN: Everywhere, right? We could just list countries.

ISAACSON: Yes. Yes.

STEIN: I want to ask you that, because you’re smarter than me, and you know way more about the world and you have seen more of the world.

(CROSSTALK)

STEIN: There’s been a lot of change, I think. And I’m not smart enough to know which changes we’re talking about, if we’re — if we’re talking about racial diversity, if we’re talking about the rise of women’s power, if we’re talking about globalization, or immigration, or the knowledge economy, or people moving to cities. But I forget how much change has happened so quickly, which is stupid, because I worked in magazines. Like…

ISAACSON: Yes, right.

STEIN: Yes. Like…

ISAACSON: We used to have paper magazines.

STEIN: Yes, exactly. Like, people talk about the coal mines. They don’t about magazines enough. But I — the change I felt when I was in Miami, Texas, was that the world is moving so fast. And they were living in what I would call the past, in the ’80s or something. But, to them, gay marriage just happened. And it’s sort of shocking. And marijuana legalization is crazy. Like, these changes are happening. Transgender people. Like, this is a lot to wrap your head around on a social level. And I don’t know why people are freaking out. But there’s a lot of change that’s been happening.

ISAACSON: I will give one answer, since you asked.

STEIN: Please.

ISAACSON: Which is what — and it’s partly from your book, reading it, which is, the smugness of the elites really started angering people.

STEIN: And when do you think the smugness — the smugness has been around almost my whole life, I feel like. But where do you feel like it got worse?

ISAACSON: I think it got worse in the past 20 years, when the Davos-type elites believe that free trade and immigration and everything and technology were all good for us. And it ended up being good for the financial of the elite, and not good for the most people who are left behind.

STEIN: Certainly good for the planet. I mean, globalization…

(CROSSTALK)

ISAACSON: Yes, but there was a certain smugness, and that’s what you write about.

STEIN: So it wasn’t the globalization itself that was bad. It was people’s smugness about the pain that it was causing other people.

ISAACSON: Correct.

STEIN: I completely agree. And I’m, as you can tell from the title this book, equally guilty of that smugness.

ISAACSON: The title of the book, though, may I say, seemed somewhat ironic and humorous by the time I got to the end of the book. You’re not defending elitism by the end of the book.

STEIN: No, but the subtitle is “Why I’m Better Than You and You’re Better Than Someone Who Didn’t Buy This Book.”

ISAACSON: Yes, that’s right.

STEIN: And by the time I finished this book, I was desperate to ask my publishers to remove that and just have “In Defense of Elitism” as the title. And they felt that they wanted to signal that this is a funny book, because most political books are very angry right now. And that anger, I think, is dangerous. And so I wanted to write a funny book, and they wanted to signal that, but I didn’t like the smugness of the subtitle anymore.

ISAACSON: Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles, is a character in your book.

STEIN: Yes. He just texted me. He liked it. So I’m…

(CROSSTALK)

ISAACSON: Oh, good. OK. I was about to say he comes off pretty good. Yes.

STEIN: Great. OK.

ISAACSON: Yes. So what were you using him as — for?

STEIN: Well, I was just thinking about the people in Miami, Texas, who told me that it was fine that Trump had no experience in politics. And so I thought, what if someone who was equally stupid and had no experience in politics was in charge of something? So I texted Mayor Garcetti. And I said, can I be mayor for the day? And he said, what does that mean, which is a nice way of saying no. And so I said, well, I would just like to trail around, make the decisions before you do, and you could tell me if I made decisions that you would have made. And he texted me back and he said, sure, which seemed insane. So I spent the day with him. And what I quickly realized is the mayor doesn’t sit around all day saying yes or no to things, which is kind of what I thought. He spends his day collecting information and connecting other people who know a lot, so that they can share information and improve. Like, it’s a real connector of a job. And the amount of people he knows and the amount of knowledge he has from being president of the city council forever, and probably from being a Rhodes Scholar, and — you know, it’s amazing to watch what he did and how much of it was not doing what I think Trump is doing, which is just firing off letters and saying yes or no.

ISAACSON: And one of the things Garcetti does in the book, which I think becomes a theme in your book, is, he listens. That’s what mayors have to do. And by the end of the book, it’s almost, instead of a defense of elitism, it’s a defense of listening.

STEIN: I don’t know how different those are. I mean, yes, smug elites tend not to listen.

ISAACSON: Correct.

STEIN: And I wish they would go and, instead of telling people they’re racist immediately, listen to what they say and — because plenty of elitists are racists. Like, just saying that these are the only racists in the world is not right. And, instead, listen to what their complaints are, and try and feel some of what Clinton said, in essence, which is like feel their pain, but really do it, I think, is important. But I think, on the other hand, elites are listeners. I mean, I don’t think populists are listeners. I mean, Trump is not listening to the State Department. Trump is not listening to the generals. I don’t — and I talk not just about politics, but I talk about, like, people who read one WebMD article and then argue with their doctor about why they have cancer, instead of food poisoning, which is something that happened to me. So, in general, I think we need to all listen better and respect expertise.

ISAACSON: And one of the points about listening is that we in the country aren’t listening to each other. I’m not talking about the elites and the leaders. I’m just talking about people across party lines talking. And by the end of the book, you’re talking about that as well in sort of a humorous way too.

STEIN: Yes. And I just think we have reached a really dangerous point of vitriol. And when you reach that point, you start to throw out democratic norms. And then you get yourself into a really dangerous position, where someone could really become an authoritarian leader, which is what I’m scared about.

ISAACSON: And what caused this polarization, besides the resentment against the elites we have talked about?

STEIN: And I think there’s a real difference between people who live on the coast and people who live in rural America. And I think there’s — there’s — Steve Bannon taps into this . There’s a real social disagreement about how we should live, what the hierarchy should be, and what our true beliefs are, and the need — we need to come to some sort of middle ground and listen to each other a little bit before they become too different.

ISAACSON: You wrote an article saying that the Democratic nominee ought to pick a Republican as a running mate. Why is that a good idea?

STEIN: First of all, every expert I talked to from both parties told me it’s a stupid idea. And I respect them. I think it’s a stupid idea. But I think the feeling behind it maybe was less stupid, which is that we need — there’s a populist party right now. And it’s not really that conservative. There’s a lot of never-Trump Republicans that they’re pulling their hair out at this — ending trade and raising tariffs. So I think we need a party that represents neoliberalism and globalization and is against the populists. And if we’re going to fight them, I think we need to grab — make it a really, really big tent. And I think the way to tell America that we’re interested in saving our democracy, at any cost, is to — is for the Democratic nominee to pick a Republican vice president, like someone who doesn’t believe in populism, preferably someone from a swing state like a John Kasich or a Jeb Bush. But I think that would — that would show a real sacrifice that Democrats were willing to make in order to save us from Trumpism and populism.

ISAACSON: But don’t you think that the Democrats also have a problem, which is most average working people in this country say that the leadership of the Democratic Party don’t get up every morning and care about them?

STEIN: Yes, and I think — I think this is probably not a time for progressive candidates. In the whole globe I’m looking at behind me, I’m looking at every country that has a far right populist leader or strong party. Like, the world is moving pretty far right. I don’t know that a far left person is going to succeed in that environment.

ISAACSON: And so you think, in some ways, to right the nation, we need a bit of a centrist thing, which is a moderate Democrat and a moderate Republican?

STEIN: Yes. And I think you should be willing to make that sacrifice right now. Like, I really am scared of who has their finger on the button, who can shut down trade, who can mistreat immigrants. Those things really scare me, and I’m willing to sacrifice the other things that mean a lot to me right now in order to just save this country from those things.

ISAACSON: Do you think impeachment and this march towards impeachment is not only polarizing, but it’s sort of a trap for Democrats, that it makes them seem more elitist?

STEIN: So I wrote a piece for “The Washington Post” that I’m guessing you read that said that impeachment is really bad for elites, because it looks so elitist. It looks — if you’re not following it very closely — look, I’m an elite. I love the idea of there being a courtroom in the Senate where the chief justice wears his robes and presides over it. It’s all like a PBS special to me.

(LAUGHTER)

STEIN: But I think people see it as, you know, inside Washington politics, and there are lawyers, and people are bringing up a more obscure thing, and it’s not about fixing the real problems of America. And if you do all of that, and you don’t throw the president out of office, I think you haven’t really accomplished anything, except making certain people more angry at you.

ISAACSON: And become more polarized.

STEIN: And become much more polarized. I mean, I think this is bad for the country, especially if you instead do the best job you can in a year and vote him out through a democratic process. I think that — I think that will bring people much more together than this will.

ISAACSON: So how has this journey changed you? And what are you going to do?

STEIN: I am going to stop screaming at other people for being racist or stupid or voting against their own interests. And I’m going to start to think — just show people some respect and learn about their lives. I think that’s a big part of it, more than any policy.

ISAACSON: Joel, thanks for being with us.