Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. Class politics seems to be back in political style, and my guest today has an interesting take on it. Stephen Young, executive director of the Caux Round Table for Moral Capitalism and he was a former dean and professor of law at Hamline University School of Law. He has a new book out, it's titled, "America vs. the Overclass: How a New Elite Corrupted Our Nation and What We Can Do to Stop Them." Mr. Young, welcome to the program, very provocative book.
Stephen Young: Thank you so much, glad to be here.
GR: Well, we appreciate you making the time. So let me just start with a very basic question, how did you get the idea to write this? And in addition to that, as kind of an intro, you write about the United States as being founded upon a covenant, that's kind of how you set this up. So, tell us where this book, it's the book's origin story and then how a covenant figures into it.
SY: Actually Grant, part of the thinking about this book has been in my mind for a long time. It kind of got started when I was a college student at Harvard. But particularly the notion of a covenant, which is very New England, and I can't remember who, but Bernard Bailyn and some of the other writers on sort of the founding of the American culture. And then I think it was Professor Be er who assigned de Tocqueville, written in 1835 on, “Democracy in America”. And I remember picking up from de Tocqueville, a Frenchman, this notion that there was something different about these Americans because they had this sense of individual responsibility, which I thought, you know, that’s pretty cool. This was in the 60s, so it brought to mind JFK, his inaugural address about don't ask what your country can do for you, etc., etc. Also in particular, one of them, a professor who became my friend and mentor, David Riesman, he had come up with the theory in 1950 in his book called "The Lonely Crowd", that there was a new kind of American culture emerging, which was different from this older inherited culture from the Puritans. And that came up with this notion of inner-directed Americans who have a sense of focus and self-confidence and the work ethic, really, those old fashioned Protestant work ethic which is less popular these days as it once was. And then what's more popular these days is ‘other direction’, I don't particularly have any purpose in life, I don't really have a work ethic, and it's me-ism. So those things came together. The other thing about the class side, it's a personal anecdote. When I graduated 1967, Harvard class, 1200 young men who are now, they're all retired now, I think most of them, I can't even track them all. They’ve made a lot of money, they've been across our elite, across America, they are our elite, and of those 1200, 10 went to Vietnam, and I was one of the 10. And that just, that graduation day when they listed where everybody's going, I suddenly realized that I was the odd man out. Just put something in my mind about what is happening to us.
GR: Yeah, yeah, well that's interesting. And, you know, you mentioned Riesman, a towering figure in social science and certainly a classic of all time, that “Lonely Crowd”. So, after you talk about this covenant and maybe you could say a little bit more about it, actually, so you have this sense of individual responsibility, it's rooted in and these older religious values in part. What is the nature of the mutual obligation that you see as being the foundation here?
SY: I see sort of two things. One very specifically in this, it's a Calvinist Protestant tradition, which to me is very Old Testament. It's like God made a covenant with you, we make a covenant with God. And the best expression is John Winthrop's, I think, you know, sermon on board the Arbella sailing, where the pilgrims are sailing into Boston Harbor. He basically says, we have a job to do, and our job is, this is not perfectly, you know, correct, but our job is to serve the Lord. So we are not here to have fun, you know, we are, and Puritans were pretty dour people, I have some in my ancestry.
GR: (laughter)
SY: But the sense of responsibility then I think, and this goes to sort of the interpretation, Calvin is in there a little bit and Martin Luther is in there, is that we have a responsibility to others in God's creation, we are not here to enjoy ourselves. We are not here to make a mess of his creation either. And so, to some extent, life is not fun. But on the other hand, if you feel good about yourself, then life does become, fun is not quite the right word, then life becomes something that's reassuring and affirming of you. But it's based on this notion of a job to do. We can also see this, Grant, I think, and I so rarely hear people in these days talk about it, in Abraham Lincoln. I mean, in the Gettysburg Address in his second inaugural where he's talking about our responsibility to free the slaves, our responsibility to have a new birth of freedom. So, I think that's what I sort of consider the core part of America. Two quick points. One, there were there were parts of our people who were left out of this covenant. One is the slaves. And we're still suffering, I think from that non-inclusion to this day. Secondly, the southern slave holders, the gentry who then led the South away from union in the Civil War. They had they had a different, they were not really part of this covenant as believers. So, that's I would say, that's to me, the starting point of who is America? Where do we come from? Where should we be going?
GR: Interesting. And I have to say, this is an interview of you, not me. But you put chills down my spine when you mentioned John Winthrop in the Arbella. Because when I give talks to people from outside the United States trying to explain what is distinctly American about our political culture, that's where I start, and I'm very familiar with that speech that that you referenced. Yes, I think you've got it right. So, all right, so after that the book's main preoccupation then is about this notion of an overclass in American society and how this has changed as you argue for the worse in recent decades. So, what is the overclass, first of all? Let's just take it out as a concept. What is an overclass and how does it differ from a word that we're probably more familiar with, which is elite? You know, what's the distinction?
SY: Well, I would say the overclass is an elite. But the important thing, particularly these days with the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America, is that in my analysis, following other people, Bakunin, Trotsky, Hegel, is that the overclass is a managerial class. But as managers, they are neither capitalists or nor are they proletarians or workers. Because the overclass, basically college educated Americans, Americans with degrees who have white collar positions in government and business across the board. They live, in a quasi-Marxist sense, their relationship to the economy is rent extraction. These are salaried people, and some of them have very, very big salaries, which they can invest in the stock market, which is a money process, but they're not capitalists. They don't run businesses, they don't take risks, in fact, they're risk averse and they're not workers. And the idea for this class, I traced back to Hegel in the early 19th century in Germany, and it comes to the United States after the Civil War, first with Johns Hopkins University. It came with, it created the university movement. Prior to this, Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Princeton, Columbia were old fashioned, sort of Puritan Calvinist colleges whose mission was to create good citizens and good people, not to do research, not to have tenured professors who write books and peer reviewed articles. But to deal with sort of the quality of the young man as a student. By the time you get to 1890 and when you get to Woodrow Wilson, 1912, we have a whole university system which is based on research, training and creating experts who can manage us for the better.
GR: I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Stephen Young of the Caux Round Table for Moral Capitalism and we're discussing his new book titled, "America vs. the Overclass: How a New Elite Corrupted Our Nation and What We Can Do to Stop Them". Okay, so that's a pretty broad definition. I don't know if you're familiar with this book, I spoke to the author about a year ago, but it reminds me in some ways of this book, titled, “We Were Never Woke”. And he breaks out, you know, the different and academia figures into it the media, this kind of managerial class with this kind of education that you're talking about. Okay, so it's this group, but it's pretty broad. They don't create, and they manage, and they have a certain attitude toward risk and sort of putting themselves out there. What are the main tenants of the things that they stand for and against politically? I mean, for example, you say they have an ideology of decadence that's very provocative, so explain that.
SY: Well, my sense of decadence is, picking it up from just older writers, about the sort of rise and fall of nations and kingdoms and things like that, is decadence is sort of when you care about yourself and you don't really care much about other people or your country or your duties or your responsibilities. One thinks of the Russian aristocrats at the end of the, you know, Romanoff dynasty, one thinks of the French, Marie-Antoinette, let them eat cake, that kind of a feeling. It’s, I don't have a sense of responsibility, I think that to me, is core. And therefore, if I don't have a sense of responsibility, I don't really deeply care about other people or what they think or this, which puts me in a position of telling them what to do. I think the class has this function of telling us what to do. But there's a problem in the middle of this, because if they are, as Reisman said, other directed, which means they're always looking to somebody else to tell them what to do so they can then turn around and pass it on to, you know, to whomever they're listening. I also associate the culture of this overclass with, particularly Carol Gilligan's, sort of, I don't, feminist or, the feminine mode of thinking and acting, particularly an ethic of care where she argues against Kohlberg that the feminine instinct is to care for other people. But caring is also very close to managing other people. If I care about you, then I'm going to make sure you live right, according to what I think is right. And so the center of, I'd say the overclass is to create political, governmental, administrative structures which allow them to, quote unquote, “improve people, improve society”. I just read a review of a new book, I can't remember the name, but it was stunning. It was somebody out there, is arguing that that the destruction of the African-American family, which is not a good thing, can be traced back, he traces it back to the 1930s under the New Deal, the creation of housing projects, using architecture. And Le Corbusier, the famous French architect I remember is building at Harvard, and I was there, the architect is part of the overclass because they understand how many square feet you should have, this where the playground should be, you know, you should have no problem living in a 30 story building. I didn't know this, in some of the early projects, the elevators only stopped at every other floor so that you’d have congregations of people at different floors who were not really neighbors. That to me, is an example, the, I associate the federal debt, I mean, our total federal debt, what, $38 trillion is government expenditures on programs starting in the 1930s. And all those programs were designed by members of the overclass, in theory, to make America better. We are not a happy people. I try to bring that out in the book. I think we have identity, we just saw it with the 250th, we Americans are not happy. We’ve got problems all over the place, particularly with young women and particularly with young people, etc., etc. So, what have we got? What have we purchased for $38 trillion?
GR: I want to come back and follow up on some of those things after we take our break. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Stephen Young. He's the executive director of the Caux Round Table for Moral Capitalism. And I should say, by the way, if you're going to look that up, it's a French word, c-a-u-x, the Caux Round Table for Moral Capitalism. And he's the author of a new book titled, "America vs. the Overclass: How a New Elite Corrupted Our Nation and What We Can Do to Stop Them". All right, so there's a lot that you said before the break I want to unpack. First, you're tracking, I would say, the unintended consequences or maybe negative externalities, if I want to use those two phrases, of some of the New Deal policies and probably Great Society ones as well, and I can see that critique. At the same time, people are going to hear that I think and think, oh, wait a minute now, is this guy a conservative or a neocon dressing his anti-government desires in some covenant rhetoric? I have the feeling, though, there's something more going on here. So let me just put that question to you, because people are going to want to put you in a box. And I'm not sure you fit neatly in there.
SY: No, and I have felt more and more, and I'm really worried about the country, that putting people in boxes and then not liking them and then not listening to them is a form of decadence. It's a form of cultural and political decadence. And I've been very influenced, you know, I don’t know, sort of intuitively I guess, my dad was Jack Kennedy’s ambassador, the notion of the meeting of the, I’m a lawyer too, the meeting of the minds, which means I have to listen to you and you need to listen to me, and I might learn something from you, and you might learn something from me. The word I'm putting on it outside of the book, but I do talk about at the end of the book is being centered. And I think part of the traditional inner direction, going back to the sort of the Calvinist and it's very Protestant, but Catholics are centered in their own way, so were Buddhists by the way, Buddhists are very, they really believe in centering through meditation, right? But if you're centered, you're open to both sides. And what we're seeing in America, and particularly with our current president is a breakdown in compromise, a breakdown in Americans ability to say, okay, you give me two, I'll give you one, or whatever it is. Or let me point out the word you used, Grant, let me point out some negative externalities of your proposal that I don't think you're paying enough attention to. And I'm also a believer. And this goes back to the law, in each of us, we have our own truths, understood, but we also have a burden of proof to defend our truth. So I should come forward and not just say I'm right and you're wrong. But I have some obligation to say I think I'm right because, one, two, three. So, I worry about the breakdown of the sinner. Now I've grown up. I'm a baby boomer, grown up with protest movements and the notion somehow the people in the center are wishy washy. They don't have strong feelings, the center is not good. You've got to be principled, say Ronald Reagan on one side or then we have other people on the other side. Now we have the democratic socialists, which is all about me and my principles, I'm not going to meet you anywhere. So, I like to feel, and I try to live as a centrist, if you will.
GR: Interesting. And you've certainly got, a lot of different people factor into your book. I mean, you mentioned some of them, but we've got Carol Gilligan, we've got Leon Trotsky, you know, it's a varied group of luminary names. So, you just mentioned this, ‘it's about me’ and I did want to push back on that too and see how you reacted to it. It seems to me you could make the argument, though, that the, whatever we’re going to call these people, democratic socialists, new progressives will fit more people in under that title, folks that are really concerned, they do seem to be very empathetic and very concerned about others rather than themselves if you listen to them. I mean, they're, the protests over the Israeli war, for example. You know, there's a, there is an express, the protests over ICE, there's an expressed concern for others that these folks are embodying. So why do you see them as more self-oriented? I'm curious about that.
SY: Because my own feeling is that that expression of concern, we have this notion, which is around a lot these days, of virtue signaling. I tend to lean toward the idea that these are people, if you're other directed and you really have no strong sense of yourself, you're pretty risk averse. The second thing is you need a sense of power, a safe space to protect yourself. When I hear safe space, I don't hear nice fuzzy things. When I hear safe space, I say someplace I can stand it, it's my castle, and it's a power thing. But then, I need to tell myself that I really am a good person by virtue signaling. How do you signal your own virtue? You care about other people, and this is a great moral tradition. I mean, I could give you an argument from Kant. You know, I mean, to never use another human being as a means, right?
GR: Right. The only pure good is the goodwill.
SY: Right, right. Something like that. And you know, what is Jesus teaching us with the Beatitudes? He's talking about, or the parable of the Good Samaritan? But on the other hand, if I can very easily and I see this a lot, when we usually see this in people who are ideological, I don't care whether they're Jesuits on one side or Trotskyites on the other. If you've got an ideology about what is perfect in heaven and earth, you're going to impose your ideology. So you need to justify your ideology. So what you do is you say, I'm helping the victims. There’s also a theme which I talk about in the book which people are not talking about, but I sense it's deeply human. It's the old word Gnosticism for a certain kind of religion, Gnostics. Gnostics get very extreme, but my take and what I want to suggest in the book is Gnosticism starts with the evil. The first thing is, Star Wars is a movie really about, the first one, about Gnosticism. There's evil and there's good. Start with the evil, because that's what you get your focus on, then your mission in life becomes the extirpation, the wiping out of evil, which can easily put you in the position of using power or misusing power.
GR: Interesting, interesting. If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media and my guest is Stephen Young, and we're discussing his new book, "America vs. the Overclass: How a New Elite Corrupted Our Nation and What We Can Do to Stop Them." So, let's dig more into these, this overclass. And you use the term in your book and you used it again in our conversation at the beginning that I think it's important to unpack, to understand sort of what their M.O. is, according to you, and that's rent seeking, you know, these are rent seekers. That phrase is not going to be familiar to a lot of our listeners. So, just quickly give us a, what is going on with rent seeking? How is that different from making stuff?
SY: Well, a classic example, and let me put it in a political context of Donald Trump and his father. Rent seeking is when you extract money because you have a position of power. I think the economic or the legal origin of the term is I'm a landlord, you want to rent my farm, so I, the law gives me power over my land, right? I say it's going to be $100 a month, and you say that's too much, and I say tough. What I'm interested in you, is, I'm not building anything, right? You're the guy who's going to do all the work in the farm, I want your money. And the money that you get because you have a position of power is rent.
GR: And the legal system that allows you to do that.
SY: The legal system, but also, I mean, think of, well, Don Corleone in the mafia, the young mafia don when he's walking or when he walks into a store and says, I want my $10 this week. And the guy running the store, you know, he's a poor little Italian immigrant or something like that, but if he doesn't give money to the future, don, right, he's in trouble. That's not the law, but that's what, I should say, that's the law of power or something like that.
GR: Right. Okay, all right. So, if I then want to spend my money lobbying to change a law or to stop a law that privileges my position, that's a form of rent seeking.
SY: That is exactly rent seeking. And the scholars who talk about it, and a lot of the things I’ve read on rent thinking about like third world country dictatorships, kleptocracies, crony capitalism. You're the minister of the economy, I go to you and I say, I got this beautiful resort in the mountains, you and your family can go there any weekend you want, I'll pay for your transportation, you can eat steak. On the other hand, I would like a government license to be the sole importer of Palmolive soap or something like that. And you smile and you say, Steve, you're a good guy, I think we can work that out.
GR: Yeah, okay. And so, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I'm thinking of your broader argument here about this class of people. So then to paint in very broad brushstrokes here. So I'm in this class, I've got this education, I've got this managerial position I'm in mid-level management that I enjoy. Then a legal framework that is very favorable to landlords, the tax code is very favorable to landlords, by the way, you never earn any income as far as the IRS is concerned, if you're renting places. And I am able to benefit from a fairly generous tax code more generally. And at the same time, I am virtue signaling by saying, I'm worried about this, I'm worried about that, all the while my bank account is growing and I'm quite comfortable, okay.
SY: And I tend to live in a nice house and my kids get to go to good schools.
GR: That's right.
SY: Oh, and by the way, I'm going to retire, and I really shouldn't talk about this because my wife was a civil servant for many years and she has a very nice retirement situation.
GR: Yes they can.
SY: But your entire position, Grant, removes you, protects you from risk.
GR: Okay.
SY: Two things, from risk and from hard labor. Real work.
GR: Right okay, right, that comes through in your book. So, all right, so we're about 2 or 3 minutes out, but I do want to squeeze in a couple other questions here. One in particular was I do have some counterfactuals to throw at you and I'll just throw out the biggest one for today's, you know, today's culture, today's life, and that is Elon Musk. Okay, so he's the richest man in the world. He does make stuff, right? He is not part of this overclass the way you've defined it in a sense. I mean, he certainly has done rent seeking with the Trump administration, there's no question about that. But you know, he's made these cars, made these rockets, you know, he's an entrepreneur. How does he fit into your model?
SY: Well, I think he's a fascinating case because I think he challenges the model, but it's not a clear, simple picture. I would put him partially in the overclass. I sense a conflict in Musk. Part of him is a real capitalist who makes things, who takes risks, who runs companies. The other part of him is an overclass guy who's using intellectual property law to defend his, everything he does, he gets some sort of patent to or intellectual property, that's rent seeking. The entire Silicon Valley, high tech is built on rent seeking. And so, if Musk was, for a short time, a trillionaire, that's because of the stock market. That wasn't any cash he was getting, it was a whole bunch of other people where they were predicting that his company was going to make a lot of money for them. So, the (unintelligible) or they were just the classic rent seeking, they were just trading stocks, you know, I buy low, I sell high.
GR: So, I'm being very unfair on my last question, but we only have a few seconds left. We didn't really get to, what do we do about these people? So, what do we do about these people? I'm taking his.
SY: We restore a covenant.
GR: You don't want you don't want to take them out and shoot them, what do you want to do with them?
SY: Well, I think with all Americans, it's going back to the Constitution, democracy, people, bottoms up. Let's redo a covenant that we Americans, are going to work hard and we're going to care about people through open politics and free markets.
GR: So, last question. You only have 15 seconds, even harder. How do you do that now? The minute you try to have that conversation it's going to get hijacked by partisan, polarized debates, right? How do we break the barrier?
SY: I don't have a good answer to that other than you got to get out and try. You’ve got to start somewhere. People tell me, Jesus Christ started with 12 followers, right?
GR: Okay, all right. Well, that's fair enough. I wish you well in this endeavor, but it's going to be tough. That was Stephen Young. And again, his new book is titled, "America vs. the Overclass: How a New Elite Corrupted Our Nation and What We Can Do to Stop Them." And again, it's a very provocative book, it's not going to be what you predict it to be. Mr. Young, thanks so much for talking with me, I enjoyed this conversation. You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
