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« Back to James Fallows on America main page   Transcript for: James Fallows on AmericaTHINK TANK WITH BEN WATTENBERG#1409 James Fallows on America. FEED DATE: April 13, 2006 James Fallows Opening Billboard: Funding for this program is provided by the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. WATTENBERG: Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. Today we are joined by one of the most eclectic minds of journalism and editorial thinking in America: James Fallows. His topics have included Iraq, the market place, Japan, Vietnam, to just begin a long list. Today we are getting his general take on where America has been, where it is now, and where it is going. Fallows is the national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, chairman of the New America Foundation, and author of several books, including “Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine America Democracy”. The topic before the house: James Fallows on America, this week on Think Tank. WATTENBERG: Welcome to Think Tank, Jim Fallows. You are a very interesting and eclectic man in American life and letters. Can you tell us a little bit about how you grew up and, mostly, what are the important events that you have covered or been involved in as an activist and what do you think about America? FALLOWS: My personal story, in a very brief nutshell, is I grew up in Southern California. My parents were, sort of, working class people from Pennsylvania. My dad went to college and medical school thanks to the GI Bill. I was – went east to college at Harvard during the tumult of the late 1960s Vietnam War era. I sort of changed my political orientation then from a Reagan-supporter to a Vietnam War critic. I went to graduate school in Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar shortly after Bill Clinton was there. But I met him soon after that. So I had known him in the early ’70s. And then I’ve worked mainly as a journalist since then, since the mid-1970s for a number of magazines, the Washington Monthly, Texas Monthly, Atlantic Monthly... WATTENBERG: And a book author. FALLOWS: Yes, I’ve written a number of books. The main stories and events, if I had to sort of tick off the things that have affected me, during college it was both working for a Civil Rights newspaper in Alabama and being sort of involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement was one. I worked for Jimmy Carter for two-and-a-half-years as a speechwriter... WATTENBERG: So you’ve been on the ground. FALLOWS: Yes. WATTENBERG: You’ve had boots on the ground. FALLOWS: I worked in politics one time. My argument there was that people who are going to be political journalists should work in politics once. Once rather than zero because you’ve done it. Once rather than more than once so that you’ve done it and you’re not going to go shuttling back and forth. I lived in Japan, in East Asia, through much of the 1980s. That was very important for me in sort of establishing how American I am in my roots and values. I’ve covered the military a lot. I think precisely because I’ve never been in the military myself. And, indeed, was deliberately avoiding service in Vietnam. I wanted to learn as much as I could about the realities in the military. I’ve covered technology a lot. I worked at Microsoft as a program designer for a while. And I like to spend time outside the U.S. since I’ve traveled to, I guess I could say, most countries of the world. WATTENBERG: In some ways you have been a spokesman for at least a certain part of your generation. Although, as I say, very eclectic. Tell us about your refusal to serve in Vietnam. Because you’ve written about it. FALLOWS: I was in college – started in 1966 and I graduated in 1970 – and for the last two or three years – a very clear memory of my freshman year at Harvard was Robert McNamara paying a visit to the Harvard campus. He was then secretary of defense. And it was the first real protest on the Harvard campus. And there was a kind of sense of shock in the fall of ’66. There was a sort of rudeness to the sitting secretary of defense and a friend of the Kennedy family, which was so important at Harvard. Two or three years after that it was just complete chaos there and at many other campuses in the country. When I was graduating in 1970 it was shortly after the Cambodian invasion, so there was no end to my senior year, so the school was called off while they reconvened people for graduation. And I was determined not to go to Vietnam, just because I was so much against the policies. It was going to be so ruinous for the country to be involved that way. And so – as I’ve written about in the Washington Monthly, there was the famous physical examination at the Boston Naval Yard, which they did by local draft boards: they had the Cambridge draft board, the Harvard and MIT kids, the Chelsea draft board, the white working class kids. All the Cambridge people had medical excuses. Mine was being too skinny. All the Chelsea people basically were sent on. And that was sort of the class division of the Vietnam War. So with complete retrospect, I would actually have refused rather than avoided. WATTENBERG: Let me ask you about your refusal to serve in Vietnam. I mean, there were a number of arguments, one of which was that it was an immoral war. And not only did some of the people against it want - say we should get out, therefore, but wanted us to lose in a humiliating way so we would never do it again. And then there was another group that said it was the wrong war in the wrong place in the wrong time. FALLOWS: I was in the camp saying this was a disaster for the United States. That it was, I think, it was originally well-intentioned, probably better-intentioned and more defensible in its beginnings than I would argue the current Iraq war is. But it just had become – certainly, by 1970 when this choice was sort of coming to me, Nixon had already announced that the U.S. was getting out. It was a question of sort of face-saving and the getting out period. And half the casualties were from that point onward. Half of the American casualties were from that point onward. And so, it just seemed to me, a disaster for the United States. And so that was the essence of my view, not immoral but a disaster. WATTENBERG: You were one of the leaders who thought in the late-1980s that America was going – because we were doing things wrong in our education and our manufacturing processes and a number of other things, that we would fall behind Japan and the so-called mythical four tigers, which were Taiwan, Hong Kong... FALLOWS: Probably South Korea and Singapore went after that. WATTENBERG: They were moving ahead so fast and doing such a good job in manufacturing that America was going to go down the tubes. And, of course, since then at least Japan has gone into this monumental recession and we’re doing very well. Why did you go that way? And what do you think about it now? FALLOWS: I think that argument, that perspective actually stands up very well. And let me explain why. I was living in the eighties, in Japan, through the time of its descent, and seeing its spreading influence on the west of East Asia. I wrote a book about this. I actually wrote two books which address different parts of it. WATTENBERG: You lived in Japan. FALLOWS: And our kids were Japanese public schooling, speaking Japanese, the only foreigners who had ever been in that school. WATTENBERG: And you’re planning to go to China soon? FALLOWS: Yes. For the same... WATTENBERG: Good for you. So you’re a boots on-the-ground man? FALLOWS: I love – that’s why I like this line of work. WATTENBERG: That’s great. FALLOWS: The argument is that we’re seeing something in East Asia that is different from the American kind of political, economic system. It’s different in its view of sort of inclusiveness – you know, Japan is the least inclusive nation you can imagine. And it’s closely rivaled by, you know, South Korea or others. They don’t like immigrants in any way. And its organizing idea is different too. It’s not a matter of the customer being king, unless it’s the foreign customer. It’s – there is a kind of sense of planned – of commerce as national strength-builder. As the U.S. had in the Alexander Hamilton era. Partly in – and I think with the rise of China, and the sort of East Asian system generally, I think that is actually being born out by the passage of time. The argument we were making was partly, this is different, take it seriously, and the U.S. has to mend its ways. And the U.S. mended a lot of its ways. WATTENBERG: Yet, at the time, and certainly now, a lot of this concerns education. While we were saying, “The Japanese, they go to school and they work hard. And they work so hard some of their kids commit suicide. And they have these tests.” The Japanese were saying, “The American system is so innovative and encourages kids to think for themselves, that we should become more like them.” What do you make of that? FALLOWS: It’s significant that the other book I wrote in this period was called “More Like Us”. The idea was what the U.S. needed to learn from Japan was to take advantage of our own strengths. And I was always careful to say the Japanese system is the best at educating the bottom one third in the world. Now the bottom one third in Japan beats everybody else’s bottom one third. The U.S. is best at the top five or ten percent. You know, we have the best graduate schools. And I hope we always keep bringing in foreigners to be educated there. And so, it’s how the U.S. can keep using the advantages it has and correct some of the weaknesses it has, because our bottom one third also is a problem for us. WATTENBERG: Okay. FALLOWS: It’s a unified field theory. WATTENBERG: It’s very interesting. Just quickly. What happens next? FALLOWS: I find myself torn between two strong and warring impulses about the U.S. One is, almost as much as you, I’m a long-term optimist about the U.S., in the sense that this country has tremendous resilience that no other culture can match, for its historical reasons, for cultural reasons, for ethnic reasons or for whatever. So you always, each time the U.S. is counted out, it’s found some way of bringing itself back. On the other hand, nothing lasts forever. At some point there is time when a culture or an institution is counted out. WATTENBERG: But that could be ten years or a thousand years. FALLOWS: Exactly. We don’t know. And there are a number of trends now which could make you worry if you thought about them. WATTENBERG: You know, the Freedom House numbers, and it’s a pretty solid organization, and the Wall Street Journal and Heritage Foundation, the combination – show that democracy, in all its forms, and market economics and trade, in all its forms, is on a sharpedly ascended path. It doesn’t mean it’s going to last forever. FALLOWS: It doesn’t mean it’s going to last forever. And it doesn’t mean it’s going to be like the U.S. model. I think that’s the main lesson I took from living in Japan and Malaysia, which is you can have “democratic” “market systems” that are really different in the way they work from our system, and that we’ll find uncomfortable in various ways. I don’t just mean democratic Islamic fascism in Algeria, or someplace like that. I mean, the very controlled democracies of East Asia, which are very different from ours, and the controlled market system like we see in China, where some things are open wide-open and some things are not. So lots of different forms. WATTENBERG: Jim, Tom Friedman who’s a well-known columnist with the New York Times and writes books, he sounds, in some ways - the way you did fifteen years ago about Japan - he thinks China and India are giving America a real run for its money, that our education system is poor. The saving rates are poor. We’re becoming fat and happy and high-tech. Where do you come out on that? What do you say? I mean, you’re going to China... FALLOWS: Yes. Part of the reason I want to go live in China for a couple of years is precisely to be able to deal with these kinds of questions. It does seem to me that China and India together have advantages that Japan didn’t. I will say that I have a very close family member, who I won’t identify, but a member of my nuclear family, who does a whole lot business in India now in the software field, and every time he comes back from there he says, “Americans still don’t imagine what India in particular is going to mean for lawyers and architects, and all these skilled professions, not just unskilled professions.” Because there are so many very highly skilled English-speaking people there, which is a difference from... WATTENBERG: That’s another big – I mean, my own view, looking forward, is it’s nice to have the Europeans as allies, but probably our most important ally looking down the road is India. I mean, because they’re getting richer. They’re well-armed. They’re a nuclear power. They’ve got interests that coincide with – I mean, the Indians and the Soviets were buddies never made much sense. They’ve changed their system of government even though they’ve sort of gone back to the more socialist kind of – nobody’s saying let’s go away from a market system. It’s a very interesting situation. FALLOWS: And it will always be a prickly kind of partnership because, you know, the Indians leave the French in the shade when it comes to being difficult to deal with. But I agree with you, it’s an important alliance in the long run. WATTENBERG: Okay. Now you wrote a very influential book a number of years ago called “Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy”, undermine. Now, since then you’ve had the blogging, talk radio, 24-hour news channels, VCRs, DVDs and I’m probably forgetting a lot. And there’s a lot of talk that MSN, the mainstream media has given way to a somewhat more right, as in right-wing, point of view. Is the media still undermining American democracy, in your judgment? FALLOWS: The problem I describe there I think has gotten a lot worse. That book, which came out almost ten years ago, looks like a quaint relic of a different age now. Because it was before cable news, before Fox News and all the rest. And I think... WATTENBERG: Rush Limbaugh was just coming in through... FALLOWS: Yes. He just kind of had a twinkle in his eye. He sort of reached prominence during Gulf War I. I think that’s when he first became important. WATTENBERG: Very influential man in his way, I mean. FALLOWS: Yes, yes. I agree. WATTENBERG: A wonderful entertainer whether you agree with him or not. FALLOWS: That’s why I listened to him a lot in those days, because he was so entertaining. I think the main thing that’s happened is that back in my youth, at least, there was something like a common media experience. There was some sense of authority, whether it was Life magazine or Time magazine or the network news or the local authoritative newspaper. There was some sense that people from different walks of life would see us as a source of authority. Now there’s no one authoritative source and people have, kind of, their own realities. I think that’s an issue, where you have people – different senses of what the facts are, let alone the opinions. WATTENBERG: What do you think of the idea first-surfaced by Alexis de Tocqueville of American exceptionalism? Are we really different from everyone else in the world or are we just braggarts? FALLOWS: The big discovery that came to me when I was in graduate school in England, they’re about as close a nation to the U.S. as you can find, is how different it was, and how exceptional I felt at being American. And how I value the parts of American culture that the rest of the world has always viewed as being uncouth, rough, unmannered, violent, messy, fat. WATTENBERG: That’s the fun part. FALLOWS: As long as foreigners have come here, they’ve marveled all the things, all the rough edges of the U.S. But those are the things which are inseparable, for better and worse, from the strengths in the U.S. in the long run. So I do feel this is an exceptional society. And so the challenge for us is to both appreciate that and not run it into the ground. I’m not saying because we’re exceptional we can do anything, there are no limits. You know, we can run up huge debts. But, yes, I do believe in American exceptionalism. And I view it as a mainly positive phenomenon. WATTENBERG: Iraq, again, has engendered this idea of home front, domestic politics. And that has included the second or third, depending on how you figure it, Republican president, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, that has run up the deficit, run up the debt. Spent increasing amounts of money of the federal government. And it looks – the neo-conservative, Irving Kristol says, “We are for a conservative welfare state.” Is that the wave of the future and do you approve? FALLOWS: Let me move backwards. I don’t approve. And then I’ll sort of slice back about why. But let me have a segue between the question you just asked and the previous one about... WATTENBERG: The Democrats certainly approve. I mean, so in other words, you’re a party of one with conservatives... with real conservatives. FALLOWS: I’ll explain. The segue between what you were discussing a minute ago about American exceptionalism and Iraq... WATTENBERG: Right. FALLOWS: One of the reasons I am against the way the Iraq war both was conceived and has unfolded is that it has eroded the idea of American exceptionalism. People thought that, of course, the Americans wouldn’t torture people. And, of course, the Americans wouldn’t do things in secret. And, of course, the Americans – you know, we can trust the Americans not to do X, Y and Z. Whatever the merits of all the various cases has really eroded the good part of our exceptionalism. I think there’s been – in the three Republican administrations you mention, Reagan increased defense spending significantly. He also cut domestic spending somewhat. In his second term he had some tax increases. WATTENBERG: Because the Democrats Christmas-treed the original spending... FALLOWS: Yeah. WATTENBERG: ...but then he killed them in the election. FALLOWS: He still thought that budget deficits in principle were bad. WATTENBERG: Absolutely. FALLOWS: And the first George Bush thought they also were bad. He agreed to a tax cut as, you know, wooed for the “read-my-lips”. The change in the current Bush administration is they just don’t care, from what I can tell. And I am conservative in my nationalistic sense, that I think it is not good for the U.S. to be running, you know, such unbalanced budgets of every sort, you know, trade accounts, the current accounts and also the federal accounts. So I am more of a fiscal conservative. I think we need to match means and ends. WATTENBERG: Well, you know, Herbert Stein, the former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors and a colleague of mine at the American Enterprise Institute, very smart, he really thought upon deep reflection that the trade balance is meaningless, that it really, really doesn’t matter. Particularly when they don’t spend the money back, you know. FALLOWS: It doesn’t matter except for the composition of your labor force. It doesn’t matter except for where the jobs are. In the U.S. there’s an equilibrium with China now but there has – nobody denies that this long-term huge imbalance with China has reduced the number of manufacturing jobs in the U.S. So if that source of middle class income matters, then they do matter. They don’t matter in sort of the nation is going to go broke. But they do matter in the internal composition. And, actually, economists agree on that now. WATTENBERG: In the old days people – Charlie Chaplin, for one – they used to mock the idea of manufacturing jobs. You would sit on Henry Ford’s assembly line – bolt number thirty-two and say, “We should be doing more creative things.” And now we are. I mean, you know, being a lawyer or a lobbyist or a doctor or a researcher. And people say, “Oh my God, we’re losing manufacturing jobs.” We’re actually not. The numbers are staying the same; it’s relative importance. What is so important? I mean, why is it so terrible if we don’t have an enemy in sight, if this clipboard is made in China? FALLOWS: It’s because the manufacturing jobs were sort of the backbone of a broad middle class. They were disproportionately well-paying; that’s why many of them have been eliminated by China. And so, as they go away, as there are fewer people who can make money at the car works or the steel works or other manufacturing jobs, you have more lawyers and more janitors. And so it’s that polarization that matters. WATTENBERG: Let me get back to this idea that you mention of trusting America. The scandal, so-called, that America has been involved in in Iraq, I mean, you think Abu Ghraib or places like that. These have involved a miniscule number – you know, fifty people in Abu Ghraib, two hundred people allegedly illegally tapped at a time when we are – we believe under threat. And, I would grant you, that it’s gotten great publicity but, getting back to your own views on the media, hadn’t it been over-promoted, over-hyped? FALLOWS: Sure it’s been over-hyped. But you well know from your long experience in communications that, you know, one image, one episode can make – you think about one famous image from Vietnam of the South Vietnamese officers executing that man on the street. That was one case of one but it had a huge impact, like the little girl with the napalm as well. So it may have been only a few Iraqis but it had an effect. WATTENBERG: The tech bubble during the 1990s, which in a way had been.... Now the stock market seems to be heading upward but may be back again. We don’t really know that. What’s your general view of America’s economic future? FALLOWS: I think there are some areas of tremendous strength for the U.S. I think the technology area is something which is very important for us, the medical tech area, lots of others. And so the formula that’s made that successful, the combination of universities, openness to immigrants, certain tax policies, certain kind of federal research policies, that formula, I think is one we should keep up. WATTENBERG: Looking into the rest of the 21st century, what are our two biggest challenges and our two biggest strengths? FALLOWS: Let me answer the strengths first because that’s easier. I think one strength is the historic ability of America to take the greatest talent from around the world and give it a home here. And, if, for reasons of security, by us, whatever else, we stop doing it, I think that would be a tremendous loss. The other strength, I think, is a sense of possibility in America. It’s useful that there is still such a thing as the American dream. And that people think that in principle they can do almost anything. Those are related – I think they’re both tremendous strengths. WATTENBERG: You talk to cab drivers in Washington and that’s all you get. I mean, they work seventy, eighty hours a week but... FALLOWS: And for most of them it’s not going to come true. WATTENBERG: They live in nice places. They live in private houses out in Virginia and Maryland and... FALLOWS: But the idea that they think that it can work is very important. I think the increasing polarization of American life on every axis, economic, wealth, opinion, religion, suburbanization, just people having less and less actually in common with others by virtue of the Americans, I think that is a problem. And I guess it’s related to the other one is – I think that it’s the daily institutions of our self-government from the press for providing democratic information, to the voting system, to the districting system, to the political financing system, all these things are under some strain. And if we look back fifty years from now and found our democracy had faltered, we’d say, “Well, of course they should have seen that in 2006. See, the signs were there.” WATTENBERG: I think I disagree with you on the polarization thing. But the voting behavior, there is something built into our constitution where you give two senators to a little tiny state and two senators to California. There’s something a little screwy about the system, as is the swing-state idea, that if you want to really vote for president and you live in a state that’s red or blue you don’t really cast a vote, I fear. I agree with you. But, in any event, Jim Fallows, you have a very eclectic and imaginative mind and we thank you very much for joining us on Think Tank. FALLOWS: My pleasure. Thank you. WATTENBERG: And thank you. Please remember to send us your comments via e-mail, we think it makes help make our program better. For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg. Announcer: We at Think Tank depend on your views to make our show better. 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