There’s Nothing Stopping You Now: Coleman Hughes On Race And Poverty In America

>> Coleman Hughes: I worry that our desire to fix the past, compromises our ability to fix the present, think about what we're doing today. We're spending our time debating a bill that mentions slavery 25 times, but incarceration only once, in an era with no black slaves, but nearly a million black prisoners.

 

>> Bill Whalen: It's Monday May 15, 2023 and welcome back to GoodFellows, a Hoover Institution broadcast examining social, economic, political, and geopolitical concerns. I'm Bill Whalen, I'm a Hoover distinguished policy fellow, and I'll be your moderator today, which means I have the high honor and privilege of introducing the stars of our show.

Two of my colleagues we jokingly refer to as the GoodFellows, that would be the historian Niall Ferguson, and the geostrategist lieutenant general HR McMaster. They are Hoover Institution senior fellows, one thing you probably noticed right away is we're missing a GoodFellow, John Cochran. Who I think for the first time in the entire run of the show, something like 106, 107 shows, John's not with us today.

That's because he's in the nation's capital about to receive his Bradley prize, next time we do a show, we'll talk about what happened that night. Congratulations John and we miss you, we look forward to having you back. But joining us in his absence today, I guess it makes him an honorary GoodFellow.

And that is also making his GoodFellows debut is Coleman Hughes. Coleman is a writer, podcaster and opinion columnist who specializes in issues related to race, public policy, and applied ethics. Coleman, welcome to GoodFellows, this is long overdue.

>> Coleman Hughes: My pleasure.

>> Bill Whalen: So two things I'd like to point out, my friend.

Number one, you have seriously blown the age curve on this show. I think I have neckties in my closet that are older than you. Secondly, Coleman, we're making another first here on GoodFellows. This is the first time we've actually had somebody on the show who could call himself a bona fide rapper.

Neil and HR, I hope you do not turn this into battle rap, though. Neil, I do understand there's actually a vibrant hip hop scene in Scotland.

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, I wouldn't know about that, having left Scotland prior to the invention of hip hop. Though I once did, as I was leaving Harvard, a rap version of the opening of the musical Hamilton, switching the character of Hamilton for the character of Henry Kissinger.

A few members of the Harvard history department have still bear the scars of that particular performance, but nothing to compare with the incredible stuff that Coleman has done. It's not often we have somebody who's multi talented on GoodFellows, somebody who's a brilliant writer, essayist, podcast, a broadcaster, but can also produce incredible music videos.

I'm in awe. And play a mean jazz trombone. It's renaissance man we have here.

>> Coleman Hughes: Thank you all so much. I just, I just wanna say I have the closest thing to Hoover swag on right now. I have my, my Thomas so shirt.

>> Niall Ferguson: We love that.

>> Coleman Hughes: This is, it says, you can't see, but it says, I'm a soul man.

My friend got me this shirt.

>> Niall Ferguson: Why don't we all have that T-shirt? I think that's.

>> Coleman Hughes: I think my friend had it made for me.

>> Niall Ferguson: That's something that Hoover should do more of, merch. We are in need of some merch like that Coleman, thank you for the inspiration.

 

>> Bill Whalen: I point out, by the way, to go to Coleman, you go to Coleman's website. There is a merch tab, by the way. So Coleman, Coleman's a step ahead of us, as per usual. Coleman, two topics we wanna get into today with you later this month is the three year anniversary of George Floyd's murder.

For those who might have forgotten, this was a black man in Minneapolis, Minnesota, who was murdered by a white police officer. Prompted protests, civil unrest, looting and destruction. Let's talk about the legacy of that tragedy. But for Coleman, a little California business, and that would be the state's progress regarding the awarding of reparations to black Californians.

Just to catch people up on this, California created a nine member task force to examine exactly what to do for black Californians in the way of reparations. It will make its recommendations to the state legislature by July the first. Coleman, two things about this stand out. Number one, in terms of reparations, we are talking cash payments, anywhere from $365,000 up to $1.2 million per individual.

But secondly, Coleman, not all black Californians are entitled to this. If you look at California, about six and a half percent of the state's population is black. That's about 2.6 million people. And the reparations task force looked at this and here's who they decided should get it. And I will borrow their language, quote, an African American descendant of a chattel, enslaved person.

Or the descendant of a free black person living in the US prior to the end of the 19th century, that's who gets reparations. Coleman, you've testified before Congress on reparations. I'd like to get your thoughts on what California is doing. Now let's discuss the legacy of George Floyd and ways to improve the lives of black Americans and achieve the ideal of a colorblind society.

So, Coleman, take it away.

>> Coleman Hughes: My position is that reparations should have been paid to freed slaves in 1865, thereabouts, during Reconstruction. Once you have a situation where I think I'm the six or seven greats descendant of slaves, I should not get reparations. There is no precedent that I've ever seen, whether in America or really a peer nation, of giving people reparations six generations or more out from the crime in question.

And there's a reason for that, which is because the phrase justice delayed is justice denied. Justice delayed six generations is just a fantasy, right? It's a fantasy to suggest that I know exactly how my life would have been different had my great great great great grandfather not been a slave.

That's the stuff of the butterfly effect in Hollywood. That's not the stuff of real social science, in my view. So reparations should have been paid to freed slaves, perhaps to their children, not to their long, long run descendants. I don't think that paints a constructive path forward. On the other hand, if you want to pay reparations for people that lived through Jim Crow segregation, people like my grandfather.

If you want to show that someone was denied a loan because of redlining in the 1950s or the 1960s, some of those people are still alive. And you see the operations program that was implemented just outside Ohio in Evanston, where they tried to identify actual individuals. I don't know how successfully, but they try to identify actual living individuals that were harmed by not being able to get federally backed loans.

So to me, the principle is you pay reparations to the individual that was harmed for the harm they experienced, not for the harm that their great grandfather experienced.

>> Bill Whalen: Right, and I understand, Coleman, it was, I think, $25,000 vouchers. And it's very specific as to what to do with the vouchers in terms of putting a down payment on a house.

It was not a cash settlement.

>> Coleman Hughes: Right, that's right. It was not a cash settlement. And it was also not reparations for slavery, right, it was.

>> Bill Whalen: Housing discrimination.

>> Coleman Hughes: Essentially, yeah, damages for housing discrimination.

>> H.R. McMaster: Hey, Coleman, I watched your testimony on reparations from, I think, a few years ago.

It was excellent, by the way. You did a phenomenal job, as you did on the recent intelligence squared debate, too, about if the democratic party has gone too far left. I love listening to that, to you engaged with these issues hey, but one of the points you made is that when you talk about reparations.

You distract people from what you could actually do to remove barriers that black Americans. Others have to overcome to take advantage of the great promise of America in education and in other areas. Could you maybe just weave that into the discussion, too? Your observations about how this could be a distraction from what's really much more important?

 

>> Coleman Hughes: I think that there's a difference between acknowledging history, which is a good thing. Even apologies can be useful to some extent. And we can get into the apologies that already have been issued that people don't actually know about, that's a separate issue. But I think there's a difference between acknowledging the past, learning about the past, which we should all do, and becoming obsessed and stuck in the past.

It's like we know people in our lives who are unable to live to their fullest potential because they're hung up about negative experiences they had in childhood, or they're on their 8th year of therapy on the couch, mulling over how they didn't have a good relationship with their mom.

And meanwhile, this person just totally stuck in their own past to a degree that has gone too far, right. Something analogous happens when we are trying to litigate the national crime and original sin of slavery, rather than just having a really rational, compassionate, evidence based conversation about what can we do to positively impact the problem of intergenerational poverty, which is disproportionately high in the black community.

You have kids that are born in single parent homes, high crime rates that have all kinds of disadvantages. They're going to failing schools and without denying that everyone has personal responsibility for their own choices, it's just much harder to come from that situation and break into the middle class or the upper middle class and so forth.

So what are the evidence backed ways of making that issue better? That is the conversation that people of goodwill should want to have, not how much should we pay the great, great, great grandchild of a slave.

>> H.R. McMaster: Yeah, and just to connect it to the George Floyd murder and the violent aftermath and the divisions that horrible murder laid bare.

You made the point in this debate that you've got on your podcast about has the Democratic Party moved too far left, that the far left reaction to George Floyd's murder. They'll defund the police movement, for example, really afflicted black communities in a very negative way, because those are communities, oftentimes, that need more policing and to have a safe environment.

So could you maybe segue into that part, the first part of Bill's question, in terms of, as we commemorate the murder of George Floyd, what you think has been positive, in terms of reaction and what you think has been negative.

>> Coleman Hughes: So, in a way, your question is about the legacy of the Black Lives Matter Movement, the Black Lives Matter Moment, and the protests and riots in response to the murder of George Floyd.

And here's my answer, the good thing you can say about what came out of that movement is that before Black Lives Matter, before 2013, almost no police officer got punished for almost any level of abuse. It was the bar for a police officer going to prison much less, or even facing punishments from his superior officers, was astronomically high.

And that held whether or not the victim of police brutality or murder was white, black, a child, an adult, etc. BLM in that moment, really started a conversation where police officers started facing consequences for those cases of brutality and in the extreme, murder. So I would count that as a good thing for the problem of police accountability.

Now, here are all the bad things that came out of the BLM moment. Number one, the problem was made about race, when in reality it was much more about police overzealousness, being too quick to shoot a suspect, right? And people may think you're crazy if you say that.

How could this not be about race? Every person I've heard killed by the cops happens to be black, how could this possibly not be about race, are you crazy, Coleman? Well, no, because it just so happens the only cases that the media will talk about are those cases where the victim is black, because that is the narrative which most taps into our emotions, both as black Americans and as white Americans and every other race.

But the fact is, what happened to George Floyd, it was a tragedy. The same thing that happened to this guy called Tony Timpa in Dallas in 2016. He happened to be white, the officer kept a knee on his upper back for 13 minutes and killed him, all the while joking as he falls unconscious.

Every bit as horrible as the George Floyd video, and it's on YouTube, but you've probably never heard of it because the victim happened to be white. Now, I could give literally dozens of examples of white, unarmed Americans killed in the precise same circumstances as all of the black victims whose names we've heard of.

And so the narrative that's been painted is that this is about race and that's divided the country, where it could have been a more useful conversation about how to train police better, how to hold police accountable better, right. Secondly, the riots and the protests that occurred, the anti police, the defund the police, all of that led to the greatest year over year homicide increase in the past hundred years.

That's according to Pew and that happened in 2020 and no, it was not because of the pandemic, because it didn't happen in any other country. It happened because of the anti police protests and not only that, the homicide increase was almost entirely concentrated in the black community. It was not experienced very much by whites and not as much by Hispanics.

There is a death toll in likely in the thousands, in the small single digit thousands of people of black people that were killed as a result of the police pulling back, crime rising, in some cases, mass police retirement because they were so demoralized and felt so unsupported, and in some cases, were just actually defunded.

And then in Minneapolis, they had to put $5 million of emergency funding later to correct the mistake. And all of this is against a background where, if you actually look at public opinion in the black community as it galloped it at the height of 2020, they found 60% of black people wanted the same police presence in their neighborhood.

20% wanted more, and only 20% wanted less, which was the BLM position. That was a minority position within the black community that was presented as if it was the majority position. So to me, if we are weighing the balance sheet of the Black Lives Matter movement and moment, there is a lot on the negative side of that scale that simply has not been sufficiently accounted for, in my view, by the positive things it brought.

 

>> Niall Ferguson: So, Coleman, maybe Black Lives Matter should pay reparations to the families of people who were killed as a result of that crime wave that seems to me to have followed directly from the BLM protest. And by the way, BLM could afford to pay reparations, since they've raised so much money as to be able to invest some of it in a nice real estate portfolio.

 

>> Coleman Hughes: As you know I mean, you're making this. Point someone tongue in cheek, but as you know, BLM raised $90 million total they say, and certainly at least $65 million in one injection in 2020 from the Tides foundation. They secretly bought a $6 million mansion, according to New York magazine, she gave a million dollars to her baby daddy and a million dollars to her brother in a classic case of, like, nonprofit inurement.

Which can be criminally liable and hasn't been prosecuted in this case, and one wonders why that is, whether there's a political aspect to that. But, yeah, I mean, Black Lives Matter got a lot of money, and there have been complaints from Michael Brown Sr. that would be the father of Michael Brown, who was killed in Ferguson, 2014, of, where is this money for us, right?

Like, BLM has made promises and saying, we're reaching out to the parents of people that have been killed and the parents have consistently said, we haven't seen that money.

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, then I had a question which followed on from something you said earlier, that debates about reparations are a distraction from the constructive things that we could be doing right now for people who are kids in poverty, kids in poor education, and so on.

I heard a very inspiring a talk by our mutual friend Roland Fryer just the other day in Austin, arguing that a fundamental problem of American race relations is just the blocked channels of social mobility. That could be getting more kids like him out of poor neighborhoods, broken families, and bad schools, and we're not doing it.

When you turn to this more constructive policy agenda, what would you rather see happening in California or any other state to address the very real problem that exists of disproportionate poverty, disproportionate exposure to violent crime, what are the positive solutions if reparations is not the answer?

>> Coleman Hughes: So it's good you mentioned Roland Fryer, because he has done, in my view, the best evidence backed study about how to help poor kids who are disproportionately black in the lowest performing failing schools that have been failing since for the past 50, 60 years?

He did a study where he got control of 20 schools in Houston, 20 of the worst schools in Houston, created matched pairs and randomized an experiment where he was able to take control of half of them and basically do whatever he wanted, right? And this is amazing, because most studies of education and what works are contaminated by the problems of observational studies, which is like, okay, these kids did better, but maybe that's because they came from better households, because it could be a million variables.

But what he did is he really matched those variables, and randomly treated half of the schools with some of the principal he had learned from charter schools in New York. He basically extended the school year, extended the school day, more hours, individual tutoring, more frequent tests, and then linking what kids struggled with on tests to what they get in tutoring.

And creating what he called a culture of high expectations, which he did by incentivizing principals in a certain way. And also, by the way, he fired half the teachers at these schools, fired all the principals, right, so that is something that cannot be done in normal circumstances because of unions.

And what he found is that they were able to raise the math scores of kids at these schools by standard deviation overall with effects, I think concentrated in lower ages and among the poorer kids in the already a fairly poor sample size. This is an extraordinary result, an extraordinary experiment, and I think if governments were serious about improving the lives of poor black and Hispanic kids or poor kids in general, they would implement these practices into the school system.

 

>> H.R. McMaster: I think we're up against Cole, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, is that a lot of these post modernist theories, these reified philosophies associated with various forms of critical theory tend to rob people of agency, right. The message is you have to tear down the whole system, right, and the message is that there has been no progress at all.

So my sense from this is the greatest harm that's done by these theories is that it robs people of agency. It robs people of a sense that they can build a better future and leaves them with this toxic combination of anger and resignation. Now, you might be surprised to hear this, Coleman, but I used a Clinton quotation a couple of episodes ago, and by Clinton, of course, I mean George Clinton of Parliament Funkadelic.

And I'm going to the America eats its young album again, and one of my favorite tracks from that, by the way, I think from this point on, I also would like to be known as General Funkenstein. But the lyrics are really about agency, and George Clinton sings, situation is just that it has no power over you, and this is from the track, if you don't like the effect, don't produce the cause.

And the other lyrics are, you don't like what you're about or you don't like what your country's about, you protest this and protest that and eat yourself fat. And the whole idea is that, hey, we can build a better world if we work together, and it's kind of a lesson from stoic philosophy in many ways.

And that, you see, I can kind of weave through a lot of problem with Funkadelic's lyrics. What is your sense of the role that various critical post modernist theories play in either impeding us really from making a difference?

>> Coleman Hughes: If I were a poor black kid growing up with none of the advantages that many people listening probably have had, what would be the best message for me to hear?

That the whole system is against me, but by all means, try, but keep in mind, everything's against you, right? You will have to work twice as hard to get half as far, but go ahead, or should you give me a realistic, charitable perception of what I'm able to achieve so that I actually feel like I ought to strive for it, right?

I'll tell you a story, my grandfather just turned 90 years old, and for his birthday, he wrote a 30 40 pages of memoir. And he included a story about he grew up in segregated Washington, DC, and he was one of the first black engineers at GE in the 50s, right?

And when he got there, he was basically told by a well meaning white colleague not to apply for a management position because the engineers, they're not gonna be managed by a black guy, right? So for ten years, he just sat there doing his engineering thing, civil engineering, and not striving for more because he believed his well meaning white colleague, and then he decided to sort of try for it.

And it turned out all of the white employees were very happy to be managed by him. And if he had listened to, again, the well intentioned person that told him, listen, this place is too racist for you to thrive, he would have just sat in his position and not strive for more.

And he ended his career as an executive. And the lesson of that story is that if, I think most people on the left, and many people more moderates would accept there's a danger to minimizing racism, and I would agree to that. You don't wanna minimize racism. I also think there's a danger to exaggerating racism because you are telling the next generation of black kids, this part of society is not for you, you're not welcome.

So you can't be surprised when they go elsewhere where they're demoralized by the system, when they don't take advantage of all the opportunities that may be available to them. I'd like to shift back to reparations for a moment, Coleman.

>> Bill Whalen: And before George Floyd's murder, which was May of 2020, in August of 2019, there was the 1619 project that came out in the New York Times.

I'd curious your thoughts on how effective the 1619 project has been in terms of driving the race narrative in America. And if you're trying to develop a counter narrative, I appeal to the two historians here, what is the counter narrative to 1619?

>> Coleman Hughes: Yeah, well, the 1619 project, as I imagine many of your listeners know, I'll use a word that I don't particularly like.

But pushed misinformation about American history in the sense that the 13 colonies revolted in part to preserve slavery, which is not true at all. And no major historian accepts as an accurate perception. In fact, the historian they hired for the project to fact check it because they were journalists, not historians, happened to be a black woman said, this is absolutely untrue, and they ran with it anyway.

And she later wrote an article, I believe, in Politico, saying they just bulldozed right through my fact-check, I think it was Leslie Harris was her name. So they were painting a false picture of American history in order to invalidate the American origin story. And nevertheless, that has been pumped into various school programs all around the country, which I think is a shame.

And I joined something called the 1776 project at that time to provide a counter narrative best I could with Bob Woodson. And I don't know to what extent that's had an effect, but I've certainly played my part, I feel in trying to push back against that narrative.

>> Bill Whalen: Nialll, what do you say?

 

>> Niall Ferguson: I think the debate has suffered from a kind of parochialism in the sense that it's focused on the United States rather than on the history of slavery. And it would be, I think, very valuable if kids in American schools, as well as students in American colleges had a sense of the broader global historical context.

A point that I made years ago in a book called Empire was that about the least original feature of the United States as a political project was that there was slavery in some of the states. Because there was slavery in so many different parts of the world in the late 18th century, just as there is still slavery in parts of the world today.

Slavery is something that goes back a very long time in human history. And so to argue, as the 1619 project did, that the defining feature of the United States was slavery was wildly misleading, not only in American terms, but even more so in global terms. There is, I think, a very strong argument for trying to teach this topic globally rather than making it the centerpiece of history of the United States.

Cuz there were so many other things about the founding that were remarkable, that we are, of course, as Coleman rightly says, were sidelining if we decide to make slavery the core issue. And this subject came up, Coleman, the other day, because I pointed out that my 11 year old son was about to be taught the Southern Poverty Law center version of American history, before I managed to intervene.

And that's a set of teaching materials that originate with the Southern Poverty Law center that explicitly recycle the 1690 narrative that the United States was founded on white supremacy. That's its kind of true origin story. So although this thing has really very little, if any, historical respectability, to me the striking thing is how successfully it's got into our educational mainstream.

So the school, which is not by any means a trendy woke school, is about to start using that kind of material for fifth graders. I don't know if you have any thoughts about that, but I'm really struck by the virality of this kind of content in defiance of all scholarly criticism.

 

>> H.R. McMaster: Well, I just say that it's been going on for a while, and I'd love to hear Coleman's response to that question, the virality of it, and then how to counter it. But I really see this latest sort of embrace of post modernist, post colonial, various critical theories as an extension of the new left interpretation of history.

Which really began to gain momentum in the US academy in the 20s and 30s and then really increased by orders of magnitude in the Vietnam period. And I would lump this together in sort of the overall kind of curriculum of self-loathing the founding, that questions really capitalism, the questions the viability and benefits of us democracy and rule of law.

And so what to do about it? I think the debate so far, like so much of what we see in our society, has been this polarized debate, with some in response to various aspects of CRT and the 1619 project. Advocating for a return of kind of a contrived, happy view of American history that may have predominated during the separate but equal or separate but unequal period in American history.

And I think that's just a false dilemma. I mean, I think that we ought to go back to what the founders knew, they knew that our republic would require constant nurturing, and our republic has been a work in progress from the beginning. I think it is wrong, obviously, to teach that our country was founded to preserve slavery, rather than founded on principles that ultimately made that criminal institution untenable.

And I think what our students should learn, Bill, to your question, what do you replace it with? They should learn that, hey, we failed at the founding because it wasn't practical in the late 18th century to be able to abolish slavery, it just wouldn't work. But then we fought our most destructive war in history to emancipate 6 million of our fellow Americans.

And then, of course, what you teach then is the struggle wasn't over. In many ways, it was just beginning with the failure of reconstruction, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow, and the separate but equal period. But then you ought to teach that we do have agency, there were improvements, there was the end of de Jorah segregation and inequality of opportunity in the 1960s.

But, hey, de facto, inequality of opportunity exists today, right? So let's get after it. Let's work together and I think that should be the overall thematic view of a course in American history, especially with regard to slavery and the ongoing struggle to achieve equality of opportunity. But Coleman I'd love to hear what you think about this.

Especially the question that Niall asked about how did it go so viral, and what is your prognosis for how we might be able to restore a degree of sanity in the history we teach?

>> Coleman Hughes: So I think in some sense, the reason this has gone so viral is because America and western Europeans in some way are more willing than most people in the world and more eager to know the sins and atone for the sins of their ancestors.

This is not really a normal tendency worldwide. I was at dinner once with some Ghanaian and Nigerian friends of mine, and I asked them, do you guys learn about African participation in the slave trade and how your ancestors captured and sold others to the west? And they said, yes.

I said, do you feel any guilt for it in school, as a culture? And they said, no, it's just a neutral fact to us. It's like any other historical fact, right? That's how most people in the world think about the sins committed either by their ancestors or by their country.

Americans and western Europeans, to some extent, feel a unique level of guilt and that's commendable. I think that comes from a really well meaning urge, and as a result, there's an opening for bad faith actors to poke that guilt and just never let up. It's often said that Americans don't wanna know about the history of slavery.

We're somehow disinterested. That could not be further from the truth, okay? I would say America maybe with the exception of Germany, has done more than any nation on earth to acknowledge its past since the US Senate apologized for lynching in 2004. Both houses of Congress apologized for slavery and Jim Crow in 2008 and 2009, respectively.

At least eight different slaveholding states, southern states, have individually formally apologize for slavery. We have a museum in Washington, DC, in the nations capital, partly federally funded, that has an extensive exhibit on slavery in the middle passage. And when it opened it had so many more visitors to that exhibit, and they were staying so long in that exhibit that they had to triage and ration peoples time there because there was so much interest.

That doesn't sound like a nation that's not interested in learning about its own. That sounds like a nation that's more interested than most in learning its own history and especially the darker periods of its history. So I think we have to understand some of the people pushing this narrative that Americans are ignorant and don't care and want to whitewash the past.

A lot of them are not operating in good faith because they don't want the debt to be repaid. The power of still being able to claim the debt is worth more to them than the debt actually being repaid. And so there's a bad faith game being played.

>> Niall Ferguson: Coleman can I ask you a personal question?

 

>> Coleman Hughes: All right.

>> Niall Ferguson: I completely change our tack as we are running short on time. I mean, I dont want you to feel as if you spent part of your morning with a bunch of boomers. I'm not even sure

>> Niall Ferguson: If you'd heard of George Clinton when HR brought him up.

 

>> Coleman Hughes: Of course, parliament for Funkadelic.

>> Niall Ferguson: I'm relieved cuz it's so before your time, but I actually want you to address a much younger demographic for a moment. Specifically my sons, who are aged 11 and five and are of mixed race, but will certainly be seen by many people, including, I think, many police officers, as black as they grow old cuz they're certainly a lot browner than me in pigmentation because they're mothers from Somalia.

You look back on where you were at 11 and you've been enormously successful very fast. You're a prodigious talent and you've achieved all of this, as somebody who's black, what's the advice you'd give? Cuz I'm not sure I can give them the right advice as I'm white. I'm not sure how do I really prepare Thomas and Campbell for being perceived to be black in the United States of the 2020s.

So I'd love you to give them some advice right now.

>> Coleman Hughes: My advice is that there are some real racists out there but they are very few and far between. And in 2023, they are not going to be the reason that you are not successful. They are, like I said, just so far the exception to the rule of people you are likely to meet and your life is in your own hands, right?

I love that I'm able to talk to my grandfather and just say, what was it like when you were a kid? Because it was completely different. There was a color line in this country that literally could not be crossed. And today it's just I can effortlessly go to a white employer, a white friend, an Asian friend, a Hispanic friend, nobody.

There's nothing stopping you now. And it is a disservice to the people who really were stopped in the past to pretend that those barriers are still anywhere near as they were.

>> Niall Ferguson: Thanks, I will.

>> Coleman Hughes: Even though hucksters will try to convince you of that for reasons that have to do with their own emotion and psychology.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, final question for you, Coleman, and that is, we are well past the Obama presidency, and you were too young to vote for Barack Obama. I'm curious if you would have voted for Obama if you had the chance. But Obama came in with the dream of a post racial America.

Here we could put a black man in the White House, the black man to climb the pyramid. But here we are in 2023, and I've listened to you on podcasts where you talk about the phrase colorblind society and how for some people this is a pejorative, that it is a terrible phrase to use but is the dream of a colorblind society of post racial America, is it realistic?

 

>> Coleman Hughes: I think the dream of a colorblind society is similar to the dream of a peaceful society in the sense that we'll never really get there. But we ought to know that we're on the right road. We ought to know what we're aiming for. We all know when society is getting more violent.

We know when we're going backwards on that road. We're never gonna get to a society that is perfectly peaceful but hopefully we can acknowledge what the goal is and then haggle about how best to get there. In my view, the goal, that ideal, that north star that we may never get to but should be going in the direction of, is a colorblind society.

A society where I try my very best to treat you as an individual, not with respect to your ancestry or background, and you try your very best to treat me as an individual. And we try to enshrine that in our legal and political system. Now, I'm not saying you can't have your culture.

I'm saying when it comes to the domain of politics and ethics, it can't matter that you happen to be you and I happen to be me, right? That can't be the way that we deal with each other from the perspective of just different tribes making tribal claims, that we should move towards a society where ethical and political conversations are had on the basis of race neutrality.

So is it possible? We're either gonna be walking towards it or we're gonna be walking away from it. And my claim is that we ought to know which direction we want to walk.

>> Bill Whalen: Well, Coleman, our time is up, but I want you to promise us something. You'll come out to Stanford, and you'll do GoodFellows live, and you'll bring your instrument, and you and Niall will jam.

 

>> Coleman Hughes: Anytime.

>> Niall Ferguson: Then hang out with Thomas and Campbell. That was a great answer, by the way, I'm really looking forward to playing that to them.

>> Bill Whalen: Thank you. Coleman, thanks for coming on GoodFellows, thanks for taking part in the conversation. Hope to see you soon.

>> Coleman Hughes: My pleasure.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Let's move on to a new segment, and that is Niall Ferguson's column in the UK Spectator. The headline, if you wanna look it up, Trump's second act, he can still win in spite of everything. That kind of tells you the gist of the column. Niall, long story short, here's what you wrote.

You contend that the, quote, campaign of lawfare against Trump has begun to backfire. You point to other world leaders who have survived legal challenges, even managed to get reelected. You point out that Joe Biden is not popular. And you remind us that in American politics, it's the economy stupid, and we could be 17 months from now looking at a recession.

Anything that I missed, Niall?

>> Niall Ferguson: No, those are the essentials. This is one of the more staringly obvious columns I've written in the last few years. It just seems to me very clear that in 2024, Donald Trump has a high likelihood of being the Republican nominee. He's the front-runner right now, and historically, if you're the front-runner now for the Republican nomination, you very likely to be the nominee.

There are very few exceptions to that rule. He himself was one of the exceptions John McCain was another. There really aren't any other exceptions. So he's quite likely to be the nominee. And Ron DeSantis chances of catching up with him have been looking less and less promising in the last couple of months.

Secondly, if you are president, and you're looking for a second term, and there's a recession, any time in the two years before you're up for reelection, you won't get the second term. And there hasn't been a president who's beaten that particular law of politics in 100 years. It stopped Gerry Ford getting a second term, topped Jimmy Carter.

It, of course, was one of the reasons George HW Bush did not get reelected. And of course, Donald Trump didn't get reelected in 2020 Because of a recession. And so if there's a recession, which Larry Summers thinks is 70% probable at some point in the next year, I don't think that Joe Biden gets reelected.

And so ergo, it follows that Donald Trump has a much higher probability than most people currently realize of being the second president since Grover Cleveland to get two non-consecutive terms. I'm amazed there's not more discussion of this. It's gone up a bit since his CNN town hall. I see Peggy Noonan wrote a column noticing that this went rather better for Trump than CNN was probably expecting.

But I still think that, generally speaking, few people realize just how likely this has become.

>> Bill Whalen: So Niall, in the last GoodFellows, I scarred you by bringing up Arsenal's struggles, now you scarred me because I worked on HW's reelection campaign in 1992. HR Niall mentioned the town hall that Trump did last week on CNN.

And with all things Trump, we just focus on the performance art. And fascinating to watch the reaction to this, he was vintage Trump in terms of being bombastic, insulting, my goodness, the audience lapped it up. CNN won the night, ratings nights. And yet there is very little conversation about one thing I'd like us to get into.

And that is what Donald Trump would actually do if Niall is right and he managed to get reelected. Let me read two things to you, HR. First of all, here's what Trump said on Fox News in April with regard to China and Xi Jinping. Quote, President Xi is a brilliant man.

If you went all over Hollywood to look for somebody to play the role of President Xi, you couldn't find it. There's nobody like that. The look, the brain, the whole thing. And here's what he said last week on CNN, HR. Quote, with regard to the Ukraine Russia war, quote.

 

>> Donald Trump: I want everybody to stop dying, they're dying. Russians and Ukrainians, I want them to stop dying. And I'll have that done, I'll have that done in 24 hours.

>> Bill Whalen: So HR, let's look forward to two years from now, on a second Trump presidency, what is he gonna do about the war in Ukraine, and what's he gonna do about China?

 

>> H.R. McMaster: Well, I think he'll be disappointed. I think President Trump has a great deal of confidence in his ability to make deals, right? And this has, of course, been the hallmark of his career, at least as he views it. And I think what he underestimates in this case is that Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have objectives and are motivated in ways that go far beyond anything that's in reaction to anything he's going to do, or any promises he can make to them, or his personal relationship.

I think one of Trump's strengths had been his ability to separate the relationship from the issues at hand. But he was hard-nosed when you look at it in retrospect on the issues at hand with China and then even with Russia, during which the first year of his presidency, he placed more sanctions on Russian entities than the previous eight years of the Obama administration.

But I think his faith in personal relationships, though he has that faith to a fault. And I think the most dramatic example of that were the summits with Kim Jong-un, where you had really high hopes. And remember, He was talking about the love letters that they're writing to each other.

And so I think that this demonstrates one of the flaws is his sort of relentless confidence in his own ability and maybe not applying what we might call strategic empathy from Zachary Shore, viewing these complex challenges that we face from the perspective of the other. And maybe a full understanding of the emotions, and the ideology, and the aspirations that drive and constrain Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.

 

>> Bill Whalen: And Neil, what would happen with regard to Russia and Ukraine? I would note that Trump will not call Putin a war criminal, and Trump has a very personal grudge against Zelenskyy.

>> Niall Ferguson: Look, I think I should make it clear that this is not a scenario that I look forward to, and I'm sure HR feels the same discomfort at the prospect.

But I do think we need to face this reality. The problem in the case of Ukraine is that president of the United States has a considerable amount of power over this particular war. Because Ukraine is so reliant on US support in terms of finance, in terms of military supplies, and of course, in the same way the sanctions that have been imposed on Russia since February of last year are, in the first instance, the result of presidential decisions, not only, but in large measure.

And so from a Ukrainian perspective, Trump's reelection would be pretty disastrous. They would have to worry about support being withheld or at the very least, that support would be withheld if they did not go along with a peace initiative. That I imagine Putin would seize with both hands.

The Russians, I'm pretty sure, are hanging in there, hoping that if they can just keep this war going into late 2024, they may be rescued by a change in American domestic politics. On China, it's worth remembering how very uncommitted Trump has always been on the issue of Taiwan.

There's a memorable passage in John Bolton's memoir of his time as national security advisor of Trump picking up a sharpie in the Oval Office and saying, this sharpie is Taiwan and this desk is China. Am I really gonna send a naval expedition to save a sharpie? So I think another aspect of a Trump reelection would be a significant change in the direction of travel in US-China relations.

I suspect if Trump had been re-elected in 2020, he would probably have done a trade deal with Xi Jinping by now, because he's really not that much of a cold warrior. Trump is a trade warrior, and I think he always regarded the tariffs as the opening play in a negotiation with Xi.

I mean H.R's right, Trump's always overestimated himself as a negotiator, particularly in the realm of international relations. But from a Russian or Chinese point of view, there's a potentially big improvement if he's re-elected. And I would imagine that they would seize the opportunities that presented very eagerly. So nobody should underestimate the foreign policy implications, to say nothing of the domestic implications, which we haven't touched on.

But if we go back to the conversation we just had with Coleman Hughes, one thing's for sure, the re election of Trump would cause a great wave of anxiety, not to say hysteria, on the American left, as, of course, it did in 2016. And this recurrent theme that we've heard again recently from President Biden, that there's this huge threat of white supremacism and racism.

All of that would be resuscitated, and it would create, I think, an incredibly toxic atmosphere in the United States itself, which would hardly help us pursue coherent foreign policy goals.

>> H.R. McMaster: Niall, I just wanna just tie into that, my main concern is what we do to ourselves, right?

Because he is so polarizing I mean, wouldn't it be great to have a leader that can get to the politics of addition? The other point I'd like just to make on the foreign policy aspect of this is, these authoritarian leaders who are pursuing agendas at our expense have studied him.

And they will do their best to manipulate his decisions and his perspective to play to his ego for example. And I think we saw this quite dramatically in the way that Erdogan was able to convince Trump to say, we're pulling all completely out of Syria and discard our relationship with the Kurds.

Which didn't ultimately happen, but was on the road to happening because Erdogan knew what buttons to push. Well, look how expensive this is for you. Why do you care about this? ISIS is already defeated, just leave. And, of course, the other arguments about why to be there, which is to try to influence the peace process over time or to diminish Iranian influence in the region.

Of course, were factors that he knew when he made decisions to stay in Syria with a small force. But Erdogan was able I think, to manipulate that kind of a reaction.

>> Bill Whalen: Final question Niall, you've laid out a scenario for Trump winning, now let's play oddsmaker. If I went over to the UK and laid down a wager on this, what sort of odds do you think I should be looking at for a Trump re-election?

 

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, the answer is that it's 50%, because every election is close. And every election in the United States comes down to a finite number and relatively small number of counties in a small number of states. 2020 was, in fact, quite close, 2016 was close. And so anybody who thinks that it's a really low probability scenario that he gets re-elected hasn't been paying attention to the way American elections work, where most states are already pretty sewn up, whoever the nominees are.

I think Trump is being underestimated at the moment in most people's minds, because they're not thinking enough about how the system works. And these machines are powerful, both parties are powerful machines. And that means that an elderly president like Joe Biden, who's already got an approval rating worse than where Trump's was at the same stage of his presidency.

If he goes into this election on the back of a recession, 50% is generous to Biden, to be honest, I would almost put it higher. If there's a recession on that conditional probability, actually, it's more like 75% Trump gets re-elected.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, all right, gentlemen, let's move on to the lightning round.

 

>> Speaker 1: Lightning round.

>> Bill Whalen: Niall, let's start with you, let's do quick questions so we can get through this rapidly. Naill, Henry Kissinger turns 100 later this month. Actually, his birthday is three days before our next GoodFellows taping, so let's honor the great man now. If Niall Ferguson were asked to create a Mount Rushmore, four choices of the history's most significant foreign policy advisors, four people to carve on the side of a mountain, Niall, who would you put on that mountain?

 

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, assuming that only American national security advisors are eligible, this is, in fact, easy. Henry Kissinger would be up there, Brent Scowcroft would be up there, our boss, Condi Rice, would be up there, and our fellow GoodFellow, H.R McMaster, would be up there, that's the four. Well done, H.R, Russia's May Day victory parade in Red Square consisted of fewer troops than usual and one, count them, one tank, a World War II era T-34, what was Putin thinking?

 

>> H.R. McMaster: Yeah, I think he's just in denial, right? And I think this is really encouraging to see the degree to which his forces have been depleted. And I think over time, it's gonna be inescapable that he himself is gonna have to come to that conclusion, that this was his greatest folly and that Russia cannot accomplish its objectives in Ukraine.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Niall, Erdogan, is that Turkish for survivor or Turkish for about to be voted out of office?

>> Niall Ferguson: He looks increasingly likely to survive, he's done better than expected in the first round, it'll go to a runoff. And I have to say, betting against Erdogan has been a losing strategy for more than a dozen years.

And this is why I'm not at all surprised that he's still standing against the expectations of most supposedly informed commentators.

>> Bill Whalen: H.R, Wendy Sherman, the first woman to serve as deputy secretary of state in the United States, is out of a job after it was revealed that she had blocked certain sanctioned measures against targeting the Chinese Communist Party.

Is this a big deal, little deal or no deal at all?

>> H.R. McMaster: It's a big deal because I think what Wendy Sherman, with all due respect to her, never got is that weakness is provocative. And that her career has been really an effort to make concession after concession to some of America's greatest adversaries.

From a really bad negotiation with North Korea, to the Iran nuclear deal, to this latest attempt at appeasing the Chinese Communist Party.

>> Bill Whalen: Niall, final question, Elon Musk is out as CEO of Twitter, he has stepped down, is this a Fergusonian prophecy coming true, that Napoleon met his Waterloo?

 

>> Niall Ferguson: No, I don't think this is Waterloo. I think this is an attempt to address a very specific problem that Elon Musk's created for himself, namely the decline in the advertising revenues that has followed his takeover and his changes at Twitter. That's all, it's not Waterloo, it's a tactical retreat and a new general is being sent into battle.

 

>> H.R. McMaster: Maybe he's Wellington at Waterloo and maybe the new CEO is blooker coming in from the flank. It can't be ruled out. But Napoli Lon was one of my better jokes of last year.

>> Bill Whalen: Yes, thank you very much, gentlemen. Great show today, great conversation, and look forward to the next one having John Cochran back as well.

On behalf of our two GoodFellows, Niall Ferguson and H.R McMaster and the missing John Cochran, all of us here at the Hoover Institution, we hope you enjoyed today's show. Make sure you subscribe to our show, you don't miss the next one, it'll be out in late May, early June.

And again, on behalf of my colleagues, thanks for watching and we will see you soon, till then, take care.

>> Speaker 2: If you enjoyed this show and are interested in watching more content featuring H.R McMaster, watch Battlegrounds also available at hoover.org.

>> Bill Whalen: And away we go in five. Ready Niall?

>> Niall Ferguson: As ready as I'll ever be.

>> Bill Whalen: Good.