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Michael, an old friend and acquaintance, is a writer and academic. He’s taught at Harvard, Johns Hopkins and UT-Austin. He’s been an editor or staff writer for The New Yorker, Harper’s and The New Republic, where I published him often, and he now writes frequently for the NYT and Financial Times. Michael also co-founded the think tank New America. The author of many books, his most recent is The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite, and his forthcoming book is Hell to Pay: How the Suppression of Wages is Destroying America.

For two clips of our convo — on how big donors have stymied populists, and how Biden is better at Trumpism than Trump — pop over to our YouTube page. Other topics: Michael’s upbringing in Texas; his ancestors who were indentured servants; the ways white Southerners dealt with desegregation better than the North; how white immigrants learned to be American from black Southerners; why Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror was the most important book Michael ever read; the evils of Soviet and Chinese communism; Krauthammer’s “The Unipolar Moment”; neoliberals getting the WTO and NAFTA; the collapse of unions; the rise of woke capitalism; Michael’s longstanding worries over free trade and mass immigration; the 2008 financial crisis; the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan; the dangers of elite consensus; Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot as forerunners to Trump; the populist success of Santorum and Huckabee; the corrupt mayors James Curley and Marion Berry; the Cathedral culture of the MSM; the potential of DeSantis to dethrone Trump; and Biden’s prospects in 2024.

Heads up that we just published a new transcript of our discussion with John Gray on the dusk of Western liberalism. It was a classic episode. Browse the Dishcast archive for another you might enjoy (the first 102 episodes are free in their entirety).