#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Episode publishedPodcast: Lex Fridman PodcastLex Fridman Podcast
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The following is a conversation with Sagar and Jetty, his second time in the podcast. Sagar is a political commentator journalist, cohost of Breaking Points with Crystal Ball and of the Realignment podcast with Marshall Koslov. Sagar is one of the most well read people I've ever met. His love of history and the wisdom gained from reading thousands of history books radiates through every analysis he makes of the world. In this podcast, we trace out the history of the various ideological movements that led up to the current political moment. In doing so, we mentioned a large number of amazing bo
Yes. We absolutely need to return to immigration. But without that, multifaceted explanation. Let's start with the easiest one. There has been a wave of anti incumbent energy around the world. Financial Times chart recently went viral showing so the first time, I think, since World War 2, possibly since 1905, I need to look at the dataset, that all anti incumbent parties all across the world suffered major defeats. So that's a very, very high level analysis, and we can return to that if we talk about Donald Trump's victory in 2016 because there were similar, like, global precursors. That indiv
of the reasons I'm a big fan of yours is, you're a student of history. And so you recommended a bunch of books to me, and they and others thread the different movements throughout American history. Some movements take off and do hold power for a long time. Some don't. And some are started by a small number of people and are controlled by a small number of people. Some are mass movements. And it's just fascinating to watch how those movements evolve and then fit themselves maybe into the constraints of a 2 party system. Mhmm. And I'd love to sort of talk about the various perspectives of that.
I won't go that far, because to say it's a class struggle really implies that things fundamentally align on economic lines, and, I don't think that's necessarily accurate. Although, if if that's your lane lens, you could get there. So there's a a very big statistic going around right now where Kamala Harris increased her vote share and won households over $100,000 or more, and Donald Trump won households under 100,000. So you could view that in an economic lens. The problem, again, that I have is that that is much more a proxy for 4 year college degree and for education. And so one of my favor
And so the trivial formulation is that is the the wokeism, the anti wokeism movement. Yeah. So it's not necessarily that, Trump winning was a statement against wokeism. It was the broader anti elitism.
It's difficult to say because, I wouldn't dismiss anti wokeism or wokeism as an explanation, but we need to understand, like, the electoral impacts of woke. So there's varying degrees of, like, how you're going to encounter, quote, unquote, wokeism, and and this is a very difficult thing to define. So let me just try and break it down, which is there are the types of things that you're going to interact with on a cultural basis. And what I mean by that is, going to watch a TV show and just for some reason, there's, like, 2 trans characters. And it's never, like, particularly explained why. The
At this point, do you think this election is a kind of statement that wokeism as a movement is dead?
I don't know. I mean, it's very difficult to say because wokeism itself is not a movement with a party leader. It's a amorphous, belief that has worked its way through institutions now for almost 40 or 50 years. I mean, it's effectively a religion. And part of the reason why it's difficult to find
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