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What Happens Next – Sunday March 21, 2021 Loathing the Working Class, Censoring Conservatives, Future of Real Estate, Employment, Outsourcing My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next offers listeners an in-depth analysis of the most pressing issues of the day. Our experts are given just SIX minutes to present. This is followed by a Q&A period for deeper engagement. I think you will find this discussion to be both informative and provocative. This program is moderated to be politically neutral. Our speakers will give their opinions and then we encourage you to make up your own mind. This week’s topics include Loathing the Working Class, Censoring Conservatives, the Future of Real Estate, How the new stimulus will impact employment, and Outsourcing Work Our first presenter today is Paul Embery who is a trade union activist and columnist for Unherd. He is the author of a new book entitled Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class. Paul lives in the UK and writes about the Labor parties disregard for the working-class voter. We will discuss the implications of UK elites shock at Brexit voters and their belief that these citizens are deplorables. Our second speaker is Eric Kaufmann who is a Professor of Politics at the University of London’s Birkbeck College. We met Eric on What Happens Next during our discussion of political polling when he discussed the failure of pollsters to properly account for Trump voters. Today, Eric will discuss his recent article in the Wall Street Journal about the current wave of censorship of conservative academics on college campuses. Eric has also written on identity politics in the UK, the US and Canada in his book Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities. Our third speaker is Dean Adler who is the cofounder of the Lubert – Adler Real Estate Fund. Dean spoke on the show last summer and I’ve asked him to discuss today recent trends in the US real estate market. What Happens Next then pivots to labor economics. Our first speaker in this segment is Casey Mulligan who is a Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. Casey was recently Trump’s Chief Economic Advisor. Casey spoke on the show a few months ago about his new book You’re Hired! Untold Successes and Failures of a Populist President. Today, I asked Casey to discuss his recent Wall Street Journal article about how the recent stimulus law will negatively impact employment growth in the US. 1 Our final speaker is David Weil who is Dean and Professor of the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis and formerly an Obama appointed Head of the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division. David has a new book entitled The Fissured Workplace: Why Work Became So Bad for So Many and What Can Be Done to Improve It. I’ve asked David to discuss the implications of corporate outsourcing. Let’s begin with Paul Embery: Paul Embery: Thank you, Larry. My book: Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class, focuses on the serious disconnect that has emerged between on the one hand, the Labor Party and the wider left in Britain and on the other, the working class. And it explains why that disconnect has occurred. It looks at how the values of the modern left are out of sync with the values of millions of ordinary working-class voters in Britain. I've written from my vantage point as somebody who's been involved in the labor movement in Britain for around 26 years. I've been a member of the British Labor Party for most of that time and an active trade unionist. And the disconnect was a phenomenon that I and some others saw coming and I had written about. And in fact, four days before the British general election in December 2019, an election at which the British Labor Party was annihilated in many of its heartlands, I tweeted my prediction that Labor's Red Wall as it is called would crumble. And that's exactly what happened. Because the truth is that the British Labor Party is now a party largely of social activists and student radicals and middle-class liberals living in our fashionable cities and no longer looks very much or sounds very much like millions of working-class people living in post-industrial and provincial Britain. When labor started to embrace a toxic brew of radical social and economic liberalism resulted in a new kind of Labor Party. It was a Labor Party that was much more middle class. It was very metropolitan in their outlook. It was particularly London-centric. It was very globalist and it was a party that would become to embrace quite militantly the precepts of cosmopolitan liberalism. And all of this represented quite a serious departure from the Labor Party's roots, because the party was founded at the beginning of the 20th century in Britain expressly as a party for working class people, to give workers a voice in parliament. : And the party has always attracted to support of more middle-class liberal folk. And that is undoubtedly a good thing, but its main space support was always it's blue-collar industrial working-class base. Now for example, 77% of the Labor Party members today fall into what we call the ABC1 grade, which is the occupational middle-class and 57% of members are college graduates. And that shows a party that's moving away from its traditional base, and as the party and the left's demographic has changed over the past two or three decades in Britain, so have their priorities. Labor and the wider left in Britain now focus less on less on what we call bread and butter class base issues, such as socioeconomic injustices and more and more on more middle-class activists’ kind of pursuit. For example, the party on the wider left is 2 immersed in what I think is a very destructive creative identity politics and they place issues such as gender identity and Palestine and migrant rights, et cetera, much higher up the agenda than most working-class people do. And I certainly don't say that those issues are not important and most working-class people wouldn't say that those issues are not important, but they are not front and center in the everyday lives of ordinary voters. Because usually when you speak to working class people on the doorstep, they want to talk about things that matter to them in their everyday lives. They want to talk about economic insecurity, the lack of housing. They want to talk about law and order. They want to talk about immigration and national security and so on, the things that really concern them. But these are issues that cause left wing activists in Britain to look down at the ground and shuffle their feet in embarrassment whenever they are raised. And what I've tried to do in the book is also explain how much of today's left in Britain has become very authoritarian in nature and largely responsible for an ongoing culture war and the suffocating atmosphere which seeks to silence or cancel or marginalize anyone who doesn't subscribe to its ideology. And it's what some people have called a soft totalitarianism. And it's growing in Britain. There's increasingly a risk that your reputation or your career may be destroyed if you are argue an unfashionable political or moral view. And the book is written from a very personal perspective. I grew up in a very working-class place in East London called the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham. And Barking and Dagenham was caught very much in the eye of the storm at the early part of this century, the first decade really of this century, over the whole impacts of globalization and how the deepening global market was resulting in deindustrialization and the loss of thousands of blue-collar jobs in constituencies in places Barking and Dagenham was often accompanied by rapid demographic change. And that caused a whole load of the wilderness and disorientation in these communities. I tried to tell the story from the inside looking out rather than from the outside looking in. And my argument, and I'll sum up on this, is that unless the British Labor Party and the wider left in Britain return to a much more communitarian-based politics, the politics of belonging as some people have called it, and begin again to understand the importance of social solidarity, they will not win back the minds of the millions of abandoned them over recent years. Larry Bernstein: Let me start out with a question about Brexit. Brexit didn't appear to follow normal political patterns. It wasn't a conservative issue, it wasn't a labor issue, and it had a wide appeal across party lines. And we don't often see that in the United States where a good chunk of the 3 population in both parties will disagree with the elites that run the Democratic and Republican parties. How does your thesis, which you describe as cosmopolitanism and globalism perspective of the new Labor Party relate to Brexit? Paul Embery: Well, Brexit was a fascinating phenomenon in many respects, because it was what I've called a genuine democratic revolt, particularly by the working class and more particularly by the English working class. And many people actually voted for the first time in that Brexit referendum in 2016.

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