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Hilde Mosse comes from one of the wealthiest families in Berlin and stands to inherit an enormous fortune. But she longs for something more meaningful than the luxurious lifestyle her family provides. So Hilde decides to pursue her dream of becoming a doctor. As the Nazis take power in Germany and the Mosse family is forced to flee, Dr. Hilde Mosse lands in New York having nearly lost everything.. She finds her calling treating the mental health of Black youth ā and the symptoms of a racist system. In addition to photographs, school records, and correspondence spanning Hilde Mosseās entire lifetime, the Mosse Family Collection in the LBI Archives includes the diaries she kept between 1928 and 1934, from the ages of 16-22. Hildeās papers are just part of the extensive holdings related to the Mosse Family at LBI. Learn more at lbi.org/hilde . Exile is a production of the Leo Baeck Institute, New York and Antica Productions. Itās narrated by Mandy Patinkin. This episode was written by Lauren Armstrong-Carter. Our executive producers are Laura Regehr, Rami Tzabar, Stuart Coxe, and Bernie Blum. Our producer is Emily Morantz. Research and translation by Isabella Kempf. Voice acting by Hannah Gelman. Sound design and audio mix by Philip Wilson. Theme music by Oliver Wickham. Please consider supporting the work of the Leo Baeck Institute with a tax-deductible contribution by visiting lbi.org/exile2025 . The entire team at Antica Productions and Leo Baeck Institute is deeply saddened by the passing of our Executive Producer, Bernie Blum. We would not have been able to tell these stories without Bernie's generous support. Bernie was also President Emeritus of LBI and Exile would not exist without his energetic and visionary leadership. We extend our condolences to his entire family. May his memory be a blessing. This episode of Exile is made possible in part by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which is supported by the German Federal Ministry of Finance and the Foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future.ā¦
Content provided by Yascha Mounk. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by Yascha Mounk or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://player.fm/legal.
The community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for.
Content provided by Yascha Mounk. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by Yascha Mounk or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://player.fm/legal.
The community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for.
Thanks for reading! The best way to make sure that you donāt miss any of these conversations is to subscribe to The Good Fight on your favorite podcast app. If you are already a paying subscriber to Persuasion or Yascha Mounk , this will give you ad-free access to the full conversation with Marc, plus the exciting bonus episodes we have in the works! If you arenāt, you can set up the free, limited version of the feedāor, better still, support the podcast by becoming a subscriber today! Subscribe now And if you are having a problem setting up our podcast feed on a third-party app, please email our podcast team at leonora.barclay@persuasion.community. Set Up Podcast Marc Dunkelman is a fellow at Brown Universityās Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. His most recent book is Why Nothing Works . In this conversation, Yascha Mounk and Marc Dunkelman explore the challenges facing big projects in the United States, the origins of progressivism, and how Donald Trump fits into this story. This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. Yascha Mounk: Your book title immediately grabbed me when I saw it, which is Why Nothing Works . What do you mean by that? Why do you think that nothing works? Marc Dunkelman: I think there's a sense, particularly on the center left and probably across the country as a whole, across the electorate, that government doesn't function the way we intend it to. The book came from my noticing at one point when I was commuting into Penn Station and reading this famous book, The Power Broker , which was the story of Robert Moses, who reshaped the landscape of New York City over the course of 40 years. He just did it with a precision and alacrity that was remarkable. I was commuting into Penn Station probably 20 years after I'd gone to school in New York and I'd remembered going to school in New York reading articles in the New York Times and the New York Post about how Penn Station was about to be redone and here we were 20 years later and the station still hadn't been redone and there was this famous quote from Vin Scully, an architecture professor at Yale, when the original Penn Station had been erected. It was erected in the first decade of the 20th century and then demolished in favor of Madison Square Garden and an office building in the 60s. And he said, we once entered like emperors and now we enter like rats . And that's how it felt. It's a subterranean station with a warren of halls. It is the second most heavy-traffic transit hub in the country. There was almost no political opposition to building a better station. But despite Robert Moses having been able to do things that everyone wanted to stop half a century earlier, now we had a station and a piece of public infrastructure that everyone acknowledged was terrible. Yet nobody seemed to be able to get it done. That sparked this question for me. I realized that you could see this pattern across the whole of American public life. We can't build high-speed rail. We can't build housing. We can't build clean energy facilities. We can't connect the clean energy that we would get from those facilities to the grid. We just can't do things. I realized that there was something systematic going on. So this book is my attempt to understand systematically what has happened. Mounk: Why do you think that not just the United States, but other developed economies, other liberal democracies like Germany, are stuck in the same problem? Why is it that nothing works? Subscribe now Dunkelman: I would try to answer that question by going back in history to a moment where, after the Depression and after the Second World War, there was a notion that big institutions, at least in the West, were largely trustworthy institutions. We really placed faith in the wisdom of āgreat menāāin a gray suit with a fedora and a frown and their arms crossed and taking very serious decisions. In the United States there was sort of a sense that these men who had seen us through the Depression and the war were worthy of our esteem and that we could trust them to make big decisions. So we created institutions that gave them the discretion to accomplish major things. The quintessential example of this in my mind is the Tennessee Valley Authority. David Lillenthal was effectively the dictator of this bureaucracy in the Upper Southāwhich is a region of the country roughly the size of England and was incredibly poor at the time. He was given this mandate by the federal government to build dams and electrify poor farms and create reservoirs and reforest areas that had seen soil erosion. There was no substantive check on his powerāhe was just able to do it and hire federal workers to do it. Roosevelt really wanted these big public bureaucracies to take charge. And that was what defined progressivism in that era: This notion of the big bureaucracy that had a lot of discretionary power. Mounk: There's a sense of where āprogressiveā comes from. We want to achieve progress. We're going to do that by using the power of the state to do big projects. That is what it is to be on the left in some sense. Dunkelman: The power as it was distributed in the early 20th century before the New Deal, before the Great Depression, was too diffuse, too dispersed. We can't figure out ways to build the big sewer system our city needs because the machines are too powerful or the corporate interests won't let us. We need to vest power in publicly-minded men who will do these things, in solving various tragedies of the commons. That was the mentality. Then in the 1960s, sort of beginning with C. Wright Mills and his description of the power elite in the late 50sā¦ and then you see it on the left in the Port Huron statement and Students for a Democratic Society, rising through the counterculture and into the protests of the 1968 conventionā¦ is a totally different idea. Itās not that power is too dispersed and that's preventing us from doing big things. The problem is that power is too concentrated in these big bureaucracies and that they have created these monsters like Robert Moses in New York, like Richard Daly in Chicago. You see within progressivism and in some sense across the ideological spectrum a countervailing movement against concentrated power. It's not just in the world of politics. Like, the movie Chinatown is about a powerful guy who's stealing water from the valley outside of Los Angeles and giving it to the city. Or the tagline of the movie Network which comes out in the mid 70s: āI'm mad as hell and I won't take it anymore.ā That statement is directed at the āestablishmentā which becomes sort of a memeāthe notion that there is some collection of extremely powerful figures who sit in a back room, whether it's smoke-filled or not, and make decisions. Mounk: Just as a side note, what's interesting about this is that what you're describing is a theory of the deep state. At the time, it was really the left and this new progressive movement that saw itself as fighting the establishment and the deep state. And in some ways, those roles have today inverted. Dunkelman: You're absolutely right. John F. Kennedy's inaugural address was a big bureaucracy pro-establishment push, and then in reaction to that the new left emerged very suspicious. By Watergate, the zeitgeist in the country has just entirely bought into this notion that there is a powerful elite that runs the country and that the solution to that problem is restoring power to individual people so that the highway does not run through their neighborhood, so that the dirty soot-producing power plant is not put next to a school for the profit of the utility shareholders, so that a housing development that is going to somehow devalue people's property nearby can be stopped by the people who already live in the neighborhood. These are all notions that we are going to stop the establishment in its tracks. That then becomes the central thrust of progressivism moving forward. Mounk: The connection to why things don't work today, just to make that explicit, is that obviously all of that becomes an obstacle to ambitious projects and any form of centralized planning. Suddenly the fear becomes the ability of these big state institutions and the establishment to just run roughshod over a neighborhood or to tear down the old Penn Station that was beautiful. Dunkelman: That's exactly the idea. The notion is that progressivism from its very birth, and this predates even the New Deal, has always been this awkward marriage of two different ideas. The first idea has been, we have a tragedy of the commons, the only way to address it is to empower some centralized bureaucracy to do it . I call that a Hamiltonian impulseāthe notion of taking power and pushing it into the hands of some responsible figure. Then the second idea, right from the beginning of progressivism, is this notion that we should take power as it exists and return it to the people that are being coercively impacted by some far-off monarch, or powerful figure, who is doing something that they object to. We should be able to make sure that, you know, the Jeffersonian land holder is able to protect his fiefdom from some coercive authority above him. So right from the beginning of progressivism, when people talk about the progressive movement at the turn of the 20th century, they will just sort of list the different ideas that were associated with it. One of them is to create blue ribbon commissions so that we can do big thingsāthatās clearly a Hamiltonian impulse to put power in the hands of experts. A second is a public referendum, which is an explicitly Jeffersonian notion that we're going to let ordinary people weigh in and make laws because we don't trust the people in the legislature to actually pursue the public interest. We see climate change today and we think to ourselves, we need to empower some bureaucracy to curtail carbon emissions . That's going to require some powerful centralized public institution. That's a Hamiltonian impulse. And at the same time, we think about reproductive rights and we think to ourselves, what we do not want is some centralized bureaucrat telling a woman what to do with her body. That's a primarily Jeffersonian impulse. What we just talked about in the late 60s, early 70s, was that the prevailing zeitgeist within progressivism itself switched from Hamiltonian to Jeffersonian. Mounk: As I listen to the story you give, some of it feels quite specifically American, right? I mean, certainly the sort of mental frame of Hamiltonian/Jeffersonian can be useful in other countries as well, but it obviously goes back to a real clash of philosophical approaches among the key figures of the American founding that in some ways set up the original party system in the United States and has a particular resonance here. How easily does the story internationalize and what does that tell us about the American story? Dunkelman: My immediate reaction was to think of James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State , which begins with the story of the Germans trying to regularize the layout of forests in northern Europe, with the presumption that if you make the layout of how trees are planted legible, that will improve the output of the forests. That notion of reorganizing things and sort of imposing from above a logic that makes sense to someone perceiving the world as it is from 10,000 feet, then that will improve things, that's a classically Hamiltonian perspective. Scott's book walks through how that notion has taken hold across the country. He actually cites the TVA a bunch, but it is the same broad impetus that leads people in the world of development to imagine that if they go to a poor country in the Global South and they impose these standards and impose a system then that will inevitably lead to development and will be good. These two ideas of a planned economy versus embracing sort of an organic approach to growth and progress, it seems to me, span the Atlantic Ocean. I think you're right that, as the balance has shifted, the levers of bureaucracy and how things actually work in various places have shifted. Like the failure of āleveling upā in Britain, of investing in rail to the cities in the North: I think the Labour governments or even the Tory governments in the postwar era in Britain might have been more effective in getting that done. So, from society to society, the arrows in the quiver of the Jeffersonian counter-reaction to big establishment power work in various ways. Mounk: I think a lot of what you're saying is plausible to me and makes sense. But one way to challenge it is to say that, perhaps there's just an underlying shift of forces as societies and economies develop. So thereās big attempted infrastructure development when you're relatively poor and when people desire more than anything else an increase in the standard of living. But also when there's not a lot of entrenched powers to resist those changes, because there arenāt a ton of landowners with political power, that's when you end up in more of what you would call a Hamiltonian mode. All of the incentives of a political economy are going to drive you towards big projects that often come with very big benefits, but can also be quite disruptive and destructive in various kinds of ways. Thatās true whether you think about how Germans and other European nations mastered their environment or whether you think about Moses building highways that improved circulation in New York City, but cut off neighborhoods and really degraded them in ways that were quite damaging. Now, as a society becomes more affluent and more complex, and particularly as there's sort of a growth of a big middle class, you know, the political power shifts. Suddenly, the sort of prospect of future improvement becomes less important and the maintenance of what you already have becomes more important. Dunkelman: I think there's probably a lot to that. My one pushback would be to suggest that if you look at the architecture of power in the United States in the late 1800s, you could build the subway up through Manhattan pretty expeditiously as they did in the early 20th century because there was much less development in Manhattan at the time, and you could cut and cover and just sort of drive a tunnel up Broadway or between City Hall and Washington Heights. It was much easier to do. At the time, many people believed that the machines, which represented working-class interests in many cases, or else the machines that represented the robber barons at the time, that they were implacable and you couldn't do big things in America because they were so powerful and they acted as a check against big projects. That's essentially what progressivism emerged as a response to: there was suddenly a growing middle class that wasn't satisfied with the fact that they couldn't get a better sewage system. They couldn't get clean water. They couldn't get good public transportation. There werenāt bridges when they wanted them. There was a whole series of complaints and progressivism emerged to say, we can do better than this and among the things that they did was to say, t he machines and the courts are inherently standing in our way and we are going to develop a series of tools designed to chisel at both those institutionsā power . They wanted to be able to impose a minimum wage and to create labor standards and to erect bridges and to build sewer systems. And they wanted these things to be done by scientific experts. That was an idea that, again, spanned across the Atlantic Ocean. That idea was emerging in Britain and in continental Europe. The most remarkable change to happen in the first few decades of the 20th century is that we go from a situation that strangely enough looks a lot like today, where nothing was getting done, to one in which a whole bunch of progressives get together and begin trying to chisel away at the authority of the courts. Subscribe now I think youāre right that as society becomes more complex, more people have something at stake in preserving the status quo, and it is harder to get things done. But people would have said that in 1895 or 1905 as well: that you can't break up the sugar trust because everyone now knows how much sugar is going to cost and the chaos that would ensue if we had real competition. We're in a remarkably similar moment again where I think more and more people, and you see this in the election of Donald Trump, are just frustrated that the institutions don't work and are trying to figure out some way to axe their way through them. Mounk: As you're saying, Donald Trump ran in part on the sense that nothing in the government works. I think itās one of the reasons why he won, and anybody who opposes him should take that very seriously. And he's being very disruptive in what he's doing in Washington, D.C. But he can't single-handedly get rid of environmental reviews either, because those are enforced by all kinds of Supreme Court rulings that aren't going to go away overnight. So how realistic is it, do you think, that the YIMBY movement, that the āabundanceā movement, is going to or can transform these obstacles? What changes should we advocate for if we want things to work again? Dunkelman: I think that if you're sitting in America in 1895 and predicted the New Deal, you would have appeared bananas. The government was so corrupt and incompetent at that point. The federal government was tiny. If you're sitting in America in 1958 and seeing the power of centralized government and what it's doing and how it's remaking the American landscape, it's impossible to imagine that 60 years later it would be impossible to move a bus stop from one block to the next. There is no law that Congress is going to pass and that Donald Trump is going to sign that is going to change all these things: certain things are determined by judicial precedent, and you really have to chisel through a lot of ossified bureaucracy to free up the discretion of anyone to be able to do things expeditiously. But what happens in this country is that we toggle between being too decentralized, too wary of power, and then slowly over time, things begin to free up. So there was a big movement at the end of the Biden administration to pass a permitting reform bill. We on the left need to think of some better terminology because I think some people may fall asleep just in the middle of saying āpermitting reform.ā Just such a boring topic, just terrible. There was a law signed by President Nixon in 1970 called the National Environmental Protection Act. And a lot of people in this abundance, supply-side progressivism, YIMBY world are focused on that particular law. Weāre at the stage where weāre coming to see the problem as it is. Just a few years ago, we didn't understand the degree to which we progressives have become so inured to the idea that power is bad, that we were undermining our ability to deliver the things that people actually want. We need to find some sort of balance between stopping bad projects from moving forward and allowing good things to move forward even when there are costs. The question here is, in moments where there are trade-offs to be hadāif we build the power line that will allow us to harness a bunch of clean energy, it is possible that a rare orchid species may go extinctāis that reason enough not to build the power line? These are value judgments that we need to make and the thing that progressives have generally fought against over the last several decades is allowing anyone to make that decision. The perfect really did become the enemy of the good because we created procedures designed to make sure that there were no costs to each of the projects, which meant often the project couldn't go forward. Mounk: I would slightly also expand the way to think about those trade-offs, actually, because I think there's an immediate set of costs, and then there's a more indirect set of costs that we should take very seriously if we care about our political system. The immediate set of costs is, are we willing to forego the benefits of high-speed rail in California in order to save a bunch of trees that would be felled in order to build that high-speed rail line? Are we willing to tolerate the inevitable costs that any infrastructure is to have in terms of some amount of disruption to local communities, habitats, and so on, in order to build that infrastructure program? There are often very good reasons to build the infrastructure program. But of course, a lot of them only become visible at large scale. I get the instinct of saying: well, my neighborhood is lovely and nice. Why do we have to change that by allowing more high-rise buildings within it? But of course, the systematic cost of that is that suddenly, all of us are paying vast amounts of money on our housing in a way that, as we see from countries that have been better at building housing, like developed democracies in Europe, is completely unnecessary. The second kind of argument is the systematic risk that poses to our democracies. I do think that whether it is in this area or in a very different context, in the case of immigration, there's a kind of legalistic argument that people make. We need to respect the rule of law and we need to respect the way that these kinds of procedures are done: that's just not on the negotiating table. There's no way around those. I think that both misstate the extent to whichā¦ of course we need the rule of law, but the particular way in which the rule of law is applied. It comes downstream from political decisions and should be up for legitimate political debate. Of course people should be able to sue against building projects, but that should only be if they have reasonable concerns. And those decisions should be made in a very fast way and they shouldn't be a toolkit for just destroying our ability to act collectively. The thing I'm trying to get at in a slightly roundabout way is what it does to our politics when people give up and when this feeling of nothing works becomes very widespread. I think what people say is, well perhaps we just need somebody to go and destroy the whole damn thing , and that is what we're living through right now. Somebody like Donald Trump is himself a strange mix of Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian. In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Marc discuss how frustration with why nothing works paved the way for Trump, and how the left can effectively change the system. This discussion is reserved for paying membersā¦ Read moreā¦
Thanks for reading! The best way to make sure that you donāt miss any of these conversations is to subscribe to The Good Fight on your favorite podcast app. If you are already a paying subscriber to Persuasion or Yascha Mounk , this will give you ad-free access to the full conversation with Arlie, plus the exciting bonus episodes we have in the works! If you arenāt, you can set up the free, limited version of the feedāor, better still, support the podcast by becoming a subscriber today! And if you are having a problem setting up our podcast feed on a third-party app, please email our podcast team at leonora.barclay@persuasion.community. Set Up Podcast Arlie Hochschild is an author and professor emerita of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books include Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right and Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right . In this weekās conversation, Yascha Mounk and Arlie Hochschild discuss the fear of empathy among the American left, the impact of the loss of pride among white working class communities, and how to understand the deep story of Latinos who voted for Trump in 2024. This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. Yascha Mounk: Youāre a sociologist who tries to understand Americans by going to particular places to study them with a lot of time and depth. What do you think that method reveals? What do you think we academics and social scientistsāand Americans more broadlyācan learn by engaging with some of the places that tend to be out of our way? Arlie Hochschild: It's such a privilege to actually go to a small place. The first time I did it in the Deep South in Lake Charles, Louisiana. The second time in Appalachia, in Pikeville, Kentucky. When you really get to sit down with people, you're seeing what they feel and the history as to why they feel the way they do, and the circumstances that might predispose them to be open to Donald Trump. Mounk: I feel one of the things that it does is to create empathy for people whom one might otherwise see as the adversary or the enemy. I'm always struck by the fact that, for my friends and acquaintances in left-leaning liberal America, when we look at cultures very far away with moral values that are probably very different to those of most people living in the same country, they have a lot of empathy for people living in very traditional societies in Asia or Africa or South America. When it comes to the proximate āother,ā people living in their own society who disagree with them about economic policy or about trans rights or about the virtues of the new President of the United States, that empathy can quickly disappear. You have an interesting vantage point here because as you say repeatedly and explicitly in both of your last books, you're a liberal college professor from Berkeley, California, and you have profound disagreements with many of the people who you study. I'm sure you didn't like every person you talked to in Louisiana and every person you talked to in Kentucky. But there is a genuine sense one gets that you come away with a positive view of these communities and the people within them. Hochschild: I think people feel afraid of empathy. Empathy is a dangerous thing, actually. Not only is it not of interest, but people are scared of it. If you empathize with the āenemy,ā you're complicit. That tells you how fragile actually people feel in their membership. I often get told, I don't know why you do it , and I don't know how you do it. That strikes me as one thing that I hope that my books do. First, to be a mirror on liberal subcultures. And the second is to invite people to not be alarmed at making room in their hearts for people who are very different. Making room doesn't mean you're any less who you are. I don't feel my politics change at all. I write my books to help people become bilingual. Subscribe now Mounk: I imagine that if youāre a sociologist or an anthropologist who goes to study very traditional or patriarchal societies somewhere abroad that the reaction of colleagues over dinner wouldnāt be, how do you do it? Presumably the gulf in lifestyle habits and values is much bigger, but people would say, how exciting that must be . But the response to visiting a different community within the United States is, my god , that must be so exhausting being around these people . I mean it is I think very revelatory in that respect. The last book included many years of spending time in Kentucky. That particular part of Kentucky is one of the most strongly Republican and pro-Trump parts of the United States. Hochschild: It didn't used to be, but it is now. The district I visited, KY5, is the whitest and second poorest congressional district in the country. There I found a kind of small version of a national story that has to do with white non-college Americans. They've taken a hit over the last two decades, with lost income and lost property, and they have all the social signs of downward mobility. What we saw in microcosm in Pikeville, Kentucky was a smaller version of a larger story. These are people who are proud of being resilient and highly individualistic. So I came to focus on what I call the pride paradox. We have people in this community who used to have wonderful coal mining jobs and they were like GI war heroes because it was dangerous work and they felt heroic doing it. They came back with black lung, sacrificing their health for their family and community. All of this was a source of great pride. Then whoops, the mines close, you're on your own, there are no other good jobs. As one man told me, you can either stay and get a āgirly jobāāby which I mean a low-paid service job for teenagers with a wage that won't support a familyāor you go on Route 23 north to Cincinnati, but those factories close too, and then you come back empty-handed. So you have proud people, but with a story of loss. I argue in this book that if we focus on emotions, then weāre looking at loss, and at people who've given up on both parties, so they turn to a magic man, to a charismatic person. How does charisma work? One man told me, Donald Trump, he's like lightning in a jar . Itās an emotional narrative and pride turns out to matter a lot. Mounk: One of the things that drove me apoplectic during the first Trump presidency was that there are many things to rightly criticize about him and yet, again and again, I saw friends and colleagues, or people on CNN and MSNBC, beating up on things in a way that was exaggerated, taken out of context, or unfair. And I thought, why? This makes it so easy for them to say, they can't take a joke, they distort everything I say. In pointing out the pride paradox, you draw on one of the standard questions in social science research, which is: do you think that by and large when people succeed, it's because of their own individual agency, or because of the kind of circumstances in which they're in? And you point out that there is a difference between more left-leaning respondents and more right-leaning respondents. The former tend to say that it is because of circumstances and luck, and the latter tend to say it's because of individual choice. I buy that there is this distinction but I wonder whether the reality of it is a little bit more complicated. Hochschild: People in the heartland of red America look at circumstances and structures. One guy, for example, a very thoughtful recovering heroin addict was homeless when I first met him. I asked him about pride and shame and he said, well, a guy gets laid off at the mines and first he shakes his fist at the supervisor, then he shakes his fist at the owner of the coal company and then he shakes his fist at the Democratic Party and Obama who called for clean energy. So yes, you have a guy in an individualist culture that's blaming the structure, but it doesn't last. He thinks after a while that itās on him. That's when the shame kicks in. Subscribe now Mounk: I guess there's two interpretations of why they have elevated levels of shame. One of them is just that they experience the kind of events that often induce shame at a much higher rate. It just happens to be the case that if you grow up in Pikeville, Kentucky, born in 1980, when the core jobs are still there and then they up and leave, you're much more likely to end up experiencing shame and blaming yourself because your life circumstances are more likely to induce the causes of that, relative to if you are born in an affluent suburb of New York City with the opportunities, educationally and economically, that go with that. The second interpretation is that there's a cultural element. Obviously there's going to be more people experiencing those kinds of shocks in Pikesville, Kentucky than in Greenwich, Connecticut. But if you are from Greenwich, Connecticut, and it so happens that despite the favorable circumstances, you're really unlucky, and you also experience all of these shocks, you will end up as likely to experience that kind of shame and then possibly the same kind of circumstances. Is this a kind of a compositional effect or is there a cultural element beyond the compositional effect that leads people in those two places to respond to similar shocks when they are present in different ways? Hochschild: My vote is that there's something beyond the circumstance effect. I think it's culture. Mounk: We've been talking a lot about the individual level of pride, the pride you have in your own life achievements, in your own status within a particular social context. You write about the ways in which places like Pikesville have also lost the grounds for a lot of that collective pride. It used to be the case that they could deliver a lot of the nation's coal, that they were contributing to the growing economy. But the longstanding injury of being mocked as hillbillies, of being one of the poorer parts of America, of being looked down upon and joked about, now bites more because those grounds for collective pride are more vulnerable. So how has that change happened? Hochschild: Yes, collective pride is hugely important. I'm glad you raised that. They've taken a hit in their collective pride. We kept the lights on. We won World War I and II. We're the provider to the nation. That's another hit, another loss. So let's look at national pride, and Trump fits in there too. Hey, America, we can put other people down or other nations down , because people were kind of starved, in their collective pride. Mounk: When I teach about populism, I have a whole section of the course that I've taught in different kinds of iterations about the roots and the origins of populism. And I assign many works of political science and sociology and economics. One of the texts that my students find to be most convincing, and that I too have been very influenced by, is your account of what you call the deep story. Hochschild: Yes, a deep story is not a matter of what you say you believe or your party affiliation. It's a matter of how you feel. This deep story that emerged when I was in Louisiana listening to peopleās accounts of their lives was that you're a middle-aged man, you feel like you're waiting in line. At the very end of line is the American Dream. It's at the top of the hill. You can barely see it. And the line hasn't been moving. You're not prejudiced against anybody as you see it, youāre waiting patiently. And then there are line cutters. Well, youāre a white male, remember. It's a woman that gets there, damn, half the population are them, so new competitors. Blacks getting in, immigrants, refugees, highly-paid public sector workers are all line cutters. And then you look over your shoulder and Barack Obama is waving to the line cutters. Then there's an existential crisis. Am I getting out of this line? What's happening? The final moment in the right-wing deep story is that someone ahead of you, maybe with more education, turns around and calls you a prejudiced, racist, sexist, homophobic redneck and then you think, okay, I am furious. I've been shamed in two ways hereāpushed back and then shamed for being at the back. Then this charismatic leader comes who seems to take you out of that situation. That is the right-wing deep story. Then one woman told me, no, you have it a little bit wrong. Actually, the people waiting in line have paid the taxes that are benefiting the people who are cutting in line. And another woman said, we're just succeeding . So those were the stories that I heard people responding to in the second book, Stolen Pride . A guy who had read the first book said, Well, thatās not quite right. It's not up to date. We're waiting in line and there's a bully in line that is keeping us back and helping the line cutters. That's the bad bully. For them that was Barack Obama, calling for clean energy in this coal region. But then there's a good bully in line. You may know that he's not really a nice person, that he doesn't obey the rules. You don't admire his personal life, but he's our bully. That is the update to the deep story and the danger for democracy. Subscribe now Mounk: That is a helpful update because it makes sense of how smart, thoughtful and decent people can support Donald Trump. Maybe some people were just bamboozled by him and generally think that he's the most amazing person who's never done anything wrongāI think those people exist a little bit more in the liberal imagination than in conservative realityābut it provides a story for why you might support that person. Hochschild: He seems like the Robin Hood of stolen pride. Heās a good bully in that way. And I do believe that stolen pride is the major right-wing prevailing narrativeāthe election was stolen, our jobs were stolen. If you feel, hey, that Robin Hoodās getting my pride back, let him go ahead and steal from others to get it . Mounk: One of the key stories of the 2024 election is the huge swing towards Donald Trump in many minority communities, including African Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans, but particularly among Latinos. And it seems to me that the deep story you tell doesn't quite seem to apply to that part of the electorate. First, a lot of the people who are voting for Trump are the people who, in that metaphor, are the ones supposedly cutting into line. And secondly, that is a part of the American electorate for whom the line often has been moving. Not because they're so much more advantaged than white Americans, but because they might have immigrated or have parents who have immigrated from very poor societies. They might have started life in America at the very bottom rung of society because perhaps they didn't speak English yet. And now many of them are starting to have associate's degrees, bachelor's degrees, perhaps master's and professional degrees, and they're actually doing a lot better than their parents or grandparents were. So the idea that they feel sort of stuck at the back of the line doesn't seem to apply to some of them. How should we think about the very different demographic pattern and support for Trump in 2024 relative to what it was in 2016? Hochschild: I think there were three kinds of voters in the area that I was focusing on. One was the true-believing MAGA people who felt this is the Robin Hood for my stolen pride. The second group were pragmatists who said, it's useful to me to vote for a guy like that. I'm quite critical of him, but hey, maybe he could help my group. And the third category were democratic dropouts. People who had altogether despaired of the political process. My theorizing was about the first group. But I think there are a lot of pragmatists, and I would suspect a lot of the Latino Trump voters would say, thereās something in here for me. Let me get on that train. Mounk: Each part of this puzzle is important to explain. But it feels to me that for many purposes, that means that we really need an explanation for the other groups. I always had this impression during the first Trump presidency that we fought far too much about how to persuade the MAGA true believers to change their mind. Because it always seemed to me that's not what makes him win. What makes him win is that a lot of people who are not true believers are willing to vote for him or willing to go along with him. In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Arlie discuss the liberal deep story and the flaws in the Democratsā strategy. This discussion is reserved for paying membersā¦ Read moreā¦
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Thanks for reading! The best way to make sure that you donāt miss any of these conversations is to subscribe to The Good Fight on your favorite podcast app. If you are already a paying subscriber to Persuasion or Yascha Mounk , this will give you ad-free access to the full conversation with Oren, plus the exciting bonus episodes we have in the works! If you arenāt, you can set up the free, limited version of the feedāor, better still, support the podcast by becoming a subscriber today! Set Up Podcast Oren Cass is the founder and executive director of American Compass and author of The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America . In this weekās conversation, Yascha Mounk and Oren Cass discuss the decline of manufacturing in the U.S., whether there is any coherence to Trump's economic policy, and if the Democrats or Republicans are the more natural home for working class voters. This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. Yascha Mounk: If there's somebody who's trying to create the preconditions for a kind of multiracial working-class conservatism that takes the economic plight of working people in the United States seriously, that is you. What do you think the traditional Republican Party got wrong on economic policy and how does it need to change? Oren Cass: That's exactly the right questionāwhat happened on the right of center? One thing I always find interesting in these debates is that people have a very strange understanding of what conservatism is or should say about economics. At this point, we think itās tax cuts, free trade deregulation, maybe some light union busting. But all of those things as an agenda are a relatively recent phenomenon. What you saw happen with the Reagan coalition was this effort to really bring libertarians in and frankly move to an economics that is market fundamentalist. It puts excess faith in markets to always deliver the best possible outcome, and defines that outcome almost entirely in terms of consumer welfare. We embraced this quite formal economic model that said the goal of markets is to let people consume as much as possible, and the less work you have to do in order to consume, the better. And the way we're going to get that is to just get the government out of the way and let markets rip because markets always accomplish that. Neither of those things is conservative, but more importantly, neither of those things is right. So the focus of our work is on challenging both those elements, recognizing the limits of markets, and recognizing the role that public policy does need to play. But then itās also recognizing that what we want from our economy is much broader than just cheap stuff. It is an economic system that actually supports family and community flourishing, and supports a strong nation. That's not something markets are necessarily going to deliver in all cases. Subscribe now In the U.S. economy, it's absolutely the case that material living standards have improved across the board. Even if you're talking about very low income households, if you want to know how big their TVs are, whether they have air conditioning, even their access to health care, there's no question that it has gotten much better. But I think that is a very partial and incomplete measure of what we're actually looking for in a society. The reality is that, in part to accomplish that, we had to rely on much higher levels of redistribution, which can solve the consumption problem, but brings a lot of dysfunction and maladies in its own right. And I would say that what we have really undermined is the capacity of the typical American. Ensuring that someone who doesnāt have a college degreeācertainly doesn't have a job that we would think of as requiring a college degreeāis actually in a position to raise a family and achieve anything we would consider to be middle-class securityā¦ that's what is missing, and thatās what a GDP per capita measure doesn't even begin to get at. I think a very telling indicator is what has gone on with the opioid epidemic. Obviously, the sheer number of deaths from the opioid epidemic is an extraordinary tragedy. But what I find to be the most shocking measure is to just look at what it has meant for the death rate from drug abuse in this country as compared to what was going on with alcohol abuse in post-Soviet Russia. Our death rate from drugs in this country is now as high as it was in Russia from alcohol in the 1990s. That speaks to a real failure of our economic model and its ability to support the things we really care about. Mounk: You make a very convincing case, and Iām sympathetic to much of it, but there are two possible responses. The first is to ask whether the rise of the opioid epidemicāwhich is clearly a very serious problemāreally has economic rather than cultural roots. Many of the same economic developments have been present in other countries in Western Europe and elsewhere, but they haven't seen a similar rise in deaths of despair, particularly in deaths from drugs. There are questions about whether that is rooted in the fundamental American economic settlement, or whether it's to do with regulatory failures around opioids and the specific attributes of the American healthcare system. Then, more broadly, there's a question about how central manufacturing should be to the future of the American economy. Clearly what we've seen is a major disruption in which manufacturing has moved out from many parts of the United States, leaving a dearth of good jobs for people who are trained to be factory workers. But weāre now at a point where the younger generation has lots of people who are trained for the jobs that are actually needed across the economy and they're able to make better wages because we have a tight labor market. So perhaps itās too late to go back and try to push them into manufacturing. I'm not sure that I'm convinced by all of these critiques, but I'd like to hear your response to them. Cass: On the question about the cultural versus economic determinants, a lot of the dysfunction and tragedy that we are seeing in this country, I don't think anybody would argue this is a purely economic phenomenon. My frustration is that there do seem to be a lot of people who are trying to argue it is purely a cultural phenomenon. The clear tell here is that all of these things are only afflicting one part of society, specifically the part that has seen the economic challenges. I think thereās a very heavy burden of proof that no one has come close to carrying to claim that it is not an economic phenomenon that we are observing. On the macro question about manufacturing in particular, this isn't just about the jobs in manufacturing itself. I think what we are seeing in the U.S. economy today is sort of a fundamental disorder that is a function of saying that manufacturing just doesn't matter, that we don't need to make anything. We can have our iPhones designed in California and it doesn't matter where they're actually produced. But the reality is that the industrial sectorāenergy production, natural resources, essentially doing things in the physical economyāreally matters to the ultimate health of your services-based economy. There's no question that over time we are evolving and will continue to evolve more toward a services-based economy. But you do need to actually build that on a foundation of industrial strength, for a few reasons. One is the actual ability to make things turns out to be incredibly important in driving innovation. Another reason comes from a perspective of diversification and diffusion in the economy. There are some industries that are very well geared toward finance, tech, and media, concentrating in coastal urban cities. There are others that really benefit from being in places that are close to natural resources and have logistical advantages, like a lot of open space. So you actually want to have a diversified economy that does that other stuff too. If the factory on the edge of town employs fewer, highly paid and highly skilled workers, that is still an anchor for a flourishing local services-based economy. If you say we just don't care about the factory, shut it down and move it to China, I guarantee you the experience of that community is going to be very, very different. So I think there are a lot of reasons. My last point is that there are also concerns beyond the economic ones here. From a resilience perspective, from a national security perspective, you actually have to make things. We talk a lot about this concept of a defense industrial base. One thing we're doing a lot of work on right now at American Compass is just emphasizing that it is nonsensical to think you could maintain a strong defense industrial base absent an actual strong industrial base. If you want to be a world power, you have to have a commitment to maintaining a healthy industrial economy, even if itās not the most productive allocation of capital in every case. But generally speaking, I would say it is a much more productive allocation of capital than a lot of things we are allocating capital to right now. Mounk: So let's assume that my listeners are convinced by everything you've said so far, that we shouldn't make GDP the be-all and end-all of our economic policy, that we recognize that manufacturing is an important part of a healthy 21st century economy, that we're currently falling far below that in the United States and probably in big parts of Western Europe as well. How do we change that? Cass: There's both an outward-looking element and an inward-looking element. The outward-looking element that is obviously getting a lot of attention here early in the Trump administration is the idea of tariffs: that you actually want to give an advantage to domestic production over imports. This drives economists crazy. But it's important to understand that the reason it drives them crazy is because they are working from a set of assumptions and a set of models that says that making things doesn't matter. This is the same set of models that said free trade with China is a brilliant idea. Unsurprisingly, when you say, actually weād like to do something different , they say, what are you talking about? You're crazy. If you actually recognize that making things matters, that we would love to have high levels of trade but it needs to be balanced trade, then, in fact, having a tariff and putting a thumb on the scale for domestic production becomes a correction of an inefficiency that we're suffering from. Having a tariff says, look, you can import stuff if you have to or if you want to, but there's going to be a cost associated with doing that, which means you're going to think a lot harder about what you can make here. If you're investing, maybe it makes sense to invest in building things here. The implication of a trade deficit is that we lost all of the manufacturing jobs in one area and created nothing new to offset it. That's an immediate problem for the health of our economy and for the trajectory of our growth. The second problem, of course, is that people are not sending us this stuff for free. What we are trading instead of goods is assets. So whatās going on in fact is a trillion dollars of stuff is coming in and what's going back out is pieces of paper that say IOU. A lot of it is outright treasury debt, and then it's also assets: ownership of American companies or ownership of real estate. Weāre essentially trading the future control of our economy and claims on its gains in return for consumption today. Subscribe now Mounk: How do we fix that? There's been a lot of very big benefits from our globalized economy, including to our own country in terms of the goods and services that we've been able to use and in terms of the rapid economic growth it has enabled. How do we raise tariffs in a way that doesn't inspire a big global trade war? Cass: Before we get to how we do it, I do want to challenge the assertion that globalization has brought all of these wonderful gains to the United States. It's certainly true that for other countries, it has worked exceptionally well. But I don't think it's true that globalization has led to increased economic growth, for instance. In fact, economic growth in the U.S. has steadily slowed throughout the period that weāve pursued globalization. It was much higher in periods when trade was much lower. If you look at what globalization has actually done, how itās affected flows of investment, which industries have grown or not, it makes sense that this would not actually be good for economic growth in this country. I think it's worth scrutinizing even the idea that it has led to much cheaper stuff here. What we've done is after 30 years of saying we don't care whether we can make anything, we now look at how incredibly cheap these Chinese televisions or whatever are, and say, imagine how much it would cost to make one here . While that's true as a static analysis at this moment in time, it's not at all true as a dynamic analysis in which we envision a world where we actually were focused on maintaining and extending our technical capabilities, our infrastructure, and our expertise in manufacturing. Weāre already seeing this as we try to bring semiconductor manufacturing back. The first new TSMC semiconductor plant coming online in Arizona is already achieving higher yields than TSMC achieves at its state-of-the-art factories in Taiwan. There are absolutely going to be costs to climbing back out of this hole we have dug for ourselves, but the idea that things would be so much more expensive in the United States if weād nurtured and fostered a productive domestic manufacturing industry instead of giving that away isnāt at all supported either by economic theory or by experience. One policy that we focus on at American Compassis is very big and broad and blunt, which is that we should have a global tariff. We should essentially say that anything coming into this country has a 10% tariff attached to it. That makes imports less attractive than domestic production and consumption. Mounk: When you say a global 10% tariff, that means a tariff on Mexico and Canada as well. It means getting out of existing free trade agreements that constrain the ability of the United States to impose such tariffs? Cass: Yes, that's right. Now, I also think you ideally want to define that tariff as one that can go up or down over time, tied to the trade deficit. You want to say predictably over time that it's going to keep rising if it needs to to correct the trade deficit. Conversely, that can come back down if the trade deficit is in fact fading away as we start to do more of this stuff ourselves. But that's not something you want to announce overnightāitās something you ideally put in legislation so that it's much harder to change. You say this is going to start on this date a year from now and increase at this rate . When you ask about Canada and Mexico as an example, I do think there's an important point here about the long term, which is that there are plenty of places where our trading relationships actually can work quite well, where the U.S. is engaged in free trade essentially with other market democracies, particularly those that also have not just similar labor and environmental standards but also similar standards of living and so forth. Ideally, you would have quite free trade with them and it would operate much more as the classic models said and to the benefit of everybody. But to get from here to there, I think we need to replace the current baseline of free trade with a default where there are in fact going to be tariffs, and then let's figure out who wants to be essentially inside a U.S.-centered trading bloc. Part of being in that bloc is you have to play by the rules that we're going to define, but if you're in that bloc, then certainly there's no need to have those tariffs on you. But you're also going to need to maintain a consistent policy that says the countries outside the bloc can't just cheaply import things into Canada instead and then get them into the U.S. that way. You've basically got to have the onside team and the offside team. Mounk: Clearly some of these ideas have been very influential in those parts of the Republican Party that are trying to transform into this multiracial working-class coalition. Perhaps the most radical break that the current Trump administration is making with long-standing Republican policy is on tariffs. In the first weeks of this administration, Trump has imposed 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico and threatened to impose tariffs on many other countries. As we're recording, it's unclear what the fate of these tariffs is. Quite quickly, Trump seems to have come to temporary agreements with Canada and Mexico to suspend those tariffs in return for undertakings that they will do more to secure their borders with the United States. Do you think that the Trump administration is in fact moving American policy closer to the kind of endpoints you want to get to? Are there elements of what they have done so far that you're concerned about? Cass: I think that the distinction you made between tariffs as a bargaining chip versus as an economic policy is a really important one. We see this with all sorts of policies. We have taxes that are designed to raise revenue and fund the government, and we want those to be as broad and simple and predictable and efficient as possibleābut we also have taxes that we use when there are specific things we're trying to discourage, and it would be a huge mistake to analyze those in the same light. They are doing very different things. Likewise, tariffs, as we've just been talking about them for a few minutes now, as an economic tool, can have very important effects in shaping global trade and patterns of investment. But that's very different from using them as a bargaining chip. What you've seen with Trump, certainly with respect to Canada and Mexico, is tariffs as a negotiating tool. I think it's a huge mistake to ask whether this is good economic policy. Because it's not supposed to be economic policy. Subscribe now Mounk: What about the political cost of this? One of the things Larry Summers was absolutely right about in 2021/2022 was to warn about the potentially inflationary impact of the not-aptly-named Inflation Reduction Act and other measures that the Biden administration was taking. Clearly, that bout of inflation proved to be incredibly costly to Democrats. And we saw across the board that incumbents have been struggling for the last year or two in part because of post-pandemic inflation. Surely when you put up tariffs, you may be right that in the long run, perhaps that is good, but in the short-term, there is a serious price to pay in terms of inflation. Do voters just hate inflation so much that this is a suicidal policy? Or do you think that you can sell tariffs as a form of investment in the future and perhaps as a form of patriotic policy? Cass: I think there are good and bad ways to do it. Any effective policy to impose tariffs and reshore domestic manufacturing has to be paired with domestic industrial policy that makes that possible and effective. One of the advantages of having predictable phased-in tariffs is that you can pair that with predictable investment commitments to actually build up domestic capacity. I think one thing we should want to see is that, among other things, by using the revenue that we get from the tariffs to reduce other costs and to encourage investment, you can be doing these things in parallel so that it's not just a strategy of, we're going to shock the system and come out the other side . It's a strategy of we are going to facilitate a transition from one model to another . I think itās important to say that when we talk about the inflationary side of it, the kind of price effects you might see from tariffs are not of the same magnitude we saw in the Biden administration. If you press economists on it hard enough, they'll admit that tariffs aren't actually inflationary. There are relative price effects. Mounk: Explain to me why not, because the simple argument is that they're a form of tax, right? Today, I paid $10 for my cheap pair of shoes and let's say $15,000 for a relatively cheap electric vehicle from China. You're coming in, you're gonna say, well, they can't just import that without paying anything. We're gonna put a 10% tariff on this. Presumably, manufacturers are at least going to try to pass on those tariffs. Cass: Have you ever heard anyone else argue against another tax on the grounds that it's inflationary? Mounk: Some, but I get your point. Go ahead. Cass: The thought exercise to run through is, imagine you went up to your economist or policymaker friend and you said, I'm really concerned about this budget deficit we have and feel we probably need to raise taxes a little bit. I was actually thinking we should probably do a VAT, a value added tax. Your economist friend is going to get very excited. That's terrific. VAT is the most efficient, ideal revenue base. My model says it's going to be good for growth and all sorts of wonderful things. Then you say, great, just one other caveatāwe're only going to do it on imported products. Then they say, well, wait a minute, now I notice you're proposing a tariff. I now declare it to be insane and terrible and inflationary . What you realize is that no, actually, these are just arguments being thrown at tariffs. Is there a price effect on some goods? Absolutely. But the thing to understand about it, first of all, is that those are mediated by an enormous number of other forces. How much of it lands on the producer versus the consumer? It's certainly not true that the producer pays all of it. But in any economic model where you're thinking about the incidence of the tax, you would assume that it falls depending on elasticities and so on. It's only when it comes to tariffs that economists decide to throw all of that out the window and just score political points. Another thing you see is that it's absorbed at different points in the supply chain. So one really interesting thing with a lot of the China tariffs imposed in the first Trump term is that you could see that essentially the importers, the wholesalers and the retailers, were paying higher prices for those goodsābut that wasn't really showing up in a lot of cases in the retail prices that consumers paid. So there's an instance where maybe you're talking about lower profit margins for others. That, again, has its own set of costs and benefits, but it isn't necessarily inflationary. You also see situations where, because of how this stuff is being phased in over time, how supply chains adjust and so forth, you don't actually tend to see what consumers pay going up much at all. When you're asking what the scale of that is, you have to remember that only about 15% of American consumption is imported. Even if you put a 10% tax on it immediately on day one and consumers have to pay all of it, that's only 1.5%. If you're phasing that in over a couple of years, and if it's not even all being paid by consumers, you're talking about less than 1%. So you're actually essentially talking about actions within the margin of error of what we experience in inflation rates every year anyway, and, importantly, they are one-time level change effects, so a 10% tariff isn't another 1.5% inflation every year. You're certainly talking about an order of magnitude less than what we saw with Biden. Mounk: To push you one more time on this, let's distinguish between two forms of inflationāone of which is much more worrying from a macroeconomic perspective than the other. The first is if there's just profligate spending from the government or there's various forms of handouts or the central bank isn't independent in ways that leads to them making a ton of money available just in order to make sure that the government gets re-elected by inducing an artificial boom. These are the kind of policies that can create ongoing or runaway inflation. But then there's a second kind of inflation that might be less worrying in a macroeconomic way, but more worrying in a political way, which is one where even a one-time level change still means that people can buy less. We think that being able to buy stuff is good. Then even a one-time level change means that people can buy less than they could earlier, and that's a reduction in human well-being. But more importantly, in a four-year political cycle or in a two-year political cycle as you have in the United States, when you think of the House of Representatives and parts of the Senate, a one-time level change can really matter. Cass: I think that's certainly a risk. But the example from the first Trump term is really important to look at here. I mean, the tariffs that Trump put on China in 2018 were enormousā25%, for the most part, out of the gateāand it's important to notice both that there was very little inflation that actually showed up in the data and that where there were places that consumer prices rose significantly, I'm very hard pressed to remember any sort of political fallout or political cost associated with it. So not only do you have higher tariffs on everything from China, you now have every consumer who loves buying stuff from Shein and Temu seeing an even bigger effect on top of that. It would be cool if the political science crew took at least a minute to acknowledge that the Trump administration does in fact seem to be sort of living by the courage of its convictions on this stuff and doing things that may well have short-term political costs, but that are consistent with the broader commitments that they've made and certainly have the potential toāand in my view willāhave significant long-term benefits. In the rest of this conversation, reserved for paying subscribers, Yascha and Oren discuss the role of the unions and the direction of the Democratic Partyā¦ Read moreā¦
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