James Pogue
speaker
179 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
James Pogue’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
You know, it's funny because I think a lot of people in this world would look at liberals as sort of like pearl clutching and being completely unreasonable because their point would be that just happens to be the Americans who built the nation. If you'd want France to suddenly be a country where it doesn't matter at all that you had French heritage going back to the Gauls, then that's fine.
But then you just don't care about countries at all. And then you and me can sit here and go, well, downstream of that, you're basically saying that all these people can never be real Americans. This is fundamentally particularly on this continent in this nation built on ideas and things like that. This is fundamentally anti-American.
And so you probably saw, I quoted Jeremy Carl, who I know quite well, who worked in the Trump administration and who wrote a book about, you know, so anti-white racism. And Carl will say that, In the pages of the New York Times, America is not an idea. America is a people.
You know, this is like a very... I think back about certain details heading into the 2008 election, and I think about how things might have gone differently, and I'm actually not sure.
And you could hear in Appalachia, as I did, somewhat to my shock, you could hear Dr. Ralph Stanley, one of the great bluegrass luminaries, doing radio spots in Appalachia saying, Barack Obama is going to help keep our kids able to stay home.
And so actually at that time, and I'm not saying this was shared by everyone, but there was a feeling there that Barack Obama actually cared about some of this sort of reindustrialization stuff that he cared about. He had a vision of some kind of step back from absolute end of days. Financialization and capitalism are just going to shape our lives and we have no ability to check these forces.
I put this to J.D. once. He was almost the localist candidate in the 2008 race. And I think it was a really, really powerful part of how he was able to win some of these states. So the question that then comes due and that, like, speaks to what you're asking about is... Why was that sense lost?
And I think there's some way to look at what happened with Obama and think, oh, so he actually didn't do all the labor stuff. He actually didn't do all the populism stuff that he promised, or at least that perhaps people thought with some fantasy in their brain that he was going to be able to do. He did not reorient things towards this dispossessed working class that...
he actually was able to speak to pretty compellingly. And so the sort of like, if you're trying to absolve Bannon of why he would now be where he was, that would be the argument. I think in a much darker way, what you're saying is completely true. And I think they tapped into those forces that you're talking about. Donald Trump tapped into that force of like, there's something really off here.
And there's this idea on the new right that, that somehow like it wasn't racist or whatever to talk about the birtherism stuff that that was just, Oh, that was such a liberal media of reaction. Like, and you're like, come on, like this is ridiculous. And so the backlash now is, is, I think, pretty purely racial.
If not purely racial, it's racial tinged with this idea that he is the kind of end stage representative of this meritocracy that they hate, of this thing that elevated this worldview that was so lockstep, so overwhelming, that you almost couldn't not speak to it. And you see Barack Obama
wrestling with this, when he's recommending Patrick Deneen's books, and when he's talking about how, like, hey, you know, he says it very delicately, but he says changes have caused people to get very upset. Changes are threatening the liberal order that has existed for hundreds of years. Even he wrestles with these questions.
Yeah, I mean, correct me if you think this phrasing is too simplistic. But to me, the way I look at it is essentially that Obama was the sort of end stage of the end of history. And there was a promise with Obama, going to your point, completely independent of actual stuff Obama did, right? Where it was the achievement of, you know, whatever worldview we want to describe here.
But a worldview that essentially we, a technocratic society, have figured all this stuff out. And that we're going to build a more interconnected, diverse society forever now. And, you know, everything was going to get solved by this kind of Thomas Friedman idea of...
You know, now there will be a McDonald's in every country and there'll be no incentive to fight and we're all going to be, the world will be flat, right? And what Donald Trump, when he took office in 2017, represented above everything else was just the end of the end of history. And it really shocked people. Like, if you look at what Donald Trump did in 2017, it's...
I mean, am I too harsh in saying that it was virtually negligible? With the exception of a tax cut that worked entirely against the stated goals of his entire project. But it opened for the people around him this sense of a coming dawn, that suddenly all of these things that they really wanted to get back into the conversation were legal to say again, right? Like, wait, why is the future female?
Like, what was good about that? Like, you know, all of a sudden you started hearing at, you know, cocktail bars, people who are working in government going like, wait, are you sure women are equipped to run the country and stuff? And, you know, under the era of Obama, I don't think that sources of mine would have dared even say that at a bar with a recorder off.
Like, it was too far outside of the shared worldview that was shaping the entire Western project.
Yeah. And as you're asking this question, I'm getting a sense that I know where this may go next. And, okay, so yes, I thought... That picking J.D., first of all, it represented a desire on Trump's part to build a legacy. Because, I mean, challenge me here if I'm wrong, but there probably isn't a comparable figure who could...
Well, that depends if Donald Trump agrees, right, on what the MAGA project is.
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