The Return to Trumplandia

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Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, and I’m joined by my co-host, Emma Varvaloucas, the executive director of The Progress Network. And this is our season opener of our podcast for the year. And we are not going to do what we do for most of these episodes, which is interview someone.

We are instead going to frame the season. For those of you who have been listening for the past couple of years, you know that What Could Go Right? is one of the endeavors of The Progress Network to literally look at What Could Go Right? in a world where we are always and chronically looking at all that could and is going wrong. We do this at The Progress Network and Emma writes a weekly newsletter also conveniently called What Could Go Right? and we do a smaller form podcast, shorter form podcast called the Progress Report, where we look at a few news stories every week that are probably getting lost in the fray of all the cacophony of the negative news.

There’s always good things going on in the world, positive things that lead to a more positive future, and we try to highlight those. We do that in the newsletter and we do that progress report, but these endeavors here is not to say panglossian. This is the best of all possible worlds and pay no attention to the car wreck. And instead just pay attention to everything that’s happy and good and light.

Not at all. We acknowledge and start from the premise as we talk about in many episodes, that there is a constant ever going duality. There is a constant tug of war between creation and destruction, between love and hate, between hope and despair. And it is not an either or, it is not one or the other. And too many times those who wanna say, Hey, there’s all this good stuff going on, do so and neglect all the negative stuff.

We’re simply saying it is far more prevalent to neglect what is positive and to neglect the strains of what is constructive in light of all that’s destructive and problematic. And finally, we do this from the spirit of. In light of all that is destructive and in light of the fact that we are all trying to create a better future, not all of us, I mean many of us are throwing up our hands in despair and trying to simply get as much as we can, as quickly as we can while we can.

Whether that’s because we think the planet is gonna boil in a maelstrom of climate change, or we’re all gonna descend into some sort of chaotic hob state of war’s, our impoverishment. So we are not saying that those things aren’t part of the mix. We are saying what do we do about it? If those things are indeed part of the mix of possibilities, what is possible and what is probable are not the same, and trying to focus on what we can do first from the perspective of a sensibility.

Can’t make the world a better place tomorrow if you don’t believe that you can. And the world certainly isn’t going to become a better place tomorrow if all of us throw up our hands in collective despair and decide that it can’t be. So that’s why we have these discussions and that’s why Emma and I do the work that we’re doing along with other people at The Progress Network who scan the world every week for stories of things that are going right.

So Emma with that as prelude, to our season, let us talk about the 800 pound orange herd elephant in the room. You know, Trump is once again going to occupy a large portion of our collective mind share, and that is true whether one is a Republican or a Democrat. That is the nature of the Trump show, of which we are now in season two with a brief four year hiatus.

Where we weren’t sure whether the American people would, would renew the season, but now we have season two. There’s rumors and whispers of a season three, but we know there are some impediments to that, which hopefully will remain impediments to that. So what do we do, Emma, you’ve, you’ve written all about how do we read the news without losing your mind.

How do we live in this era?

Emma Varvaloucas: well, I’m gonna start with with first by saying it is been a rough. Month and a half even for me, I’m pretty even keel about American politics and I try to practice a lot of what I preach. And I have to say the fir, especially the first two weeks of the Trump administration, it was out the window. I mean, I was completely the doom scroller, you know, up at midnight, not sleeping.

Like what did Trump do now? What did Trump say now? So it’s all to say that, you know, this is, this is a struggle. But I have to say, I, I’ve gone a little bit more optimistic in the last couple of weeks, only because I feel like the pulse check of Americans responding to this, like there are signs of life, right?

I feel like in the first two, three weeks there was that blitz of executive orders. People were scrambling. I think it was a lot worse than a lot of people had expected. It was just kind of shock and awe. Right and overwhelm. There seems to be now at this point just from the American public, a little bit of like, whoa, okay.

Waking up here, here to protest JD Vance on his ski vacation. You know, at least there’s some, we’re alive, we’re responding. We might turn out to vote in the midterm elections. We might do our best to try to turn this ship around. So. All that being said, I do think it is like really, really important now, more than ever to not be a victim to the overwhelm.

The number one thing that I tell people when I say like, please don’t give up right now, please do not like, just turn off, put your head down. Just be like closing my eyes, ostrich, putting my head in the sand, you know, for the next two to four years. What we need to do is. Make sure we’re keeping on top of things and making sure that we’re keeping active in how we respond by putting limits on our information intake.

So I always tell people like get off social media. I think his name is Craig Maude, I think is his last name. He came up with this great concept that’s like, you need to make sure that your media right now has edges. So something like social media we know doesn’t have any kind of stopping point. It’ll go on, on and on.

There’s no beginning. There is no end. So the first thing you wanna do is. Make sure that you’re intaking your media through some kind of thing that has edges. So a newsletter has a start and a finish. A podcast has a start and a finish. If you pick up a physical newspaper that has a start at the finish if you are somehow intaking your information through something that does not have a natural beginning and ending point, you need to put those edges into practice so that you can.

Control, like, okay, I, I’m gonna deal with the news right now, my half an hour on Monday mornings or Tuesday mornings, or whatever it is that you do. So that’s my number one, my number one thing at the

Zachary Karabell: Does that include is is setting a time limit, an edge? Like I will do this for 20 minutes and then I will stop.

Emma Varvaloucas: I think that the product itself needs to have an edge because you can say, all right, I’m gonna go on social media for 20 minutes, or I’m going to. Jump around the homepage of the New York Times for 20 minutes, and then it’s like completely up to your own self-discipline to follow through on that. Right?

Which, okay, it’s probably not gonna happen. At least it happens to me anytime I try to put any kind of time limit, like on a TikTok scroll, like it doesn’t happen. I can’t do it. I just, I lie to myself every time and it doesn’t work. So you really want something that like has a already defined edge that you don’t need to dig into your own self-discipline.

To make that happen. Unless, I guess maybe you could try to kind of game the system and say, all right, I’m gonna do this for 20 minutes ’cause I know that I have to get on this work call with 20 minutes, so I’ll have to stop. That could work, but I just still think it’s better to do something where you feel like you have actually finished.

Like, I had a job to like, keep on top of what was happening this morning and I like finished that product. I finished the newsletter, I finished the podcast, I finished the article, whatever it’s.

Zachary Karabell: So what about the. Flip side here. I mean, it is certainly true demographically and politically and culturally that most of you who are listening and most of our listeners ’cause we do chart this and look at this fall somewhere between the center and the left of a political spectrum, right? That that tends to be the audience.

It clearly is not the only audience, meaning there is a, a range of views out there. There were 70 plus million people who voted for Donald Trump. There are people around the world who vote for conservatives who, I mean, you know, the idea that this covers the waterfront of human experience is, is wrong.

And I, I guess my question then, for all of us and for myself and for Emma, is how does one kind of embrace that? In a way that is genuinely nonpartisan. Like there are areas where we all have something to learn from each other. If we treat this too much as us and them, you know, there is, there is a Trump administration, right?

You’re either in favor of that administration or you’re in favor of some of what it’s doing, or you’re against it and against some of what it’s doing, or you’re against all of what it’s doing. And there’s a, there’s an a la carteness to right. All of us should be able to support things that the federal government is doing, even if we dislike who the president is, just like we should be able to dislike some of the things that are being done, even if we like who the president is, right?

There’s a whole, there’s a whole three dimensional, maybe not a three dimensional chess game, but there’s a, there’s a board there of, of picking and choosing. I mean, are we open to that still or is this time become so unbearably divided in an us and them that we can’t even do that?

Emma Varvaloucas: Mm. Okay. I think it depends if you’re talking about like people who voted for Trump versus like the Trump administration, right? I think as ever, you cannot do the US versus them mentality when it comes to people voting for Trump. A because like you don’t really know why people voted for him. Some people vote, I.

Voted for him still as like a protest mechanism against Democrats. You know, some people voted for him because they genuinely were signing up for some of his policies. Some of them voted for him because that’s what their families voted for. Some of the, you know what I’m saying? You, you, you don’t, you don’t ever really know why somebody voted for them unless they’re like really, really deep Maga and they’re like, Trump all the way Trump live or die, you know?

So I, I think we should always try to resist, no matter who’s in charge, we should resist the US versus them mentality. And you never know, like how people are going to react to what Trump is doing. Regardless of their vote,

Zachary Karabell: or think of, you know, x hundreds of thousands, whatever the number was, of Arab Americans in Michigan who voted for Trump, who had been lifelong Democrats and voted for Trump as a strong, powerful statement of protest against the Biden administration’s policies about Gaza and about Israel. You know, the irony, of course, being Trump essentially doubled down on those policies.

But I guess the point is. There. There is one example of a lot of votes for Donald Trump as president that says nothing about this set of policies, about USAID or doge or shrinking the federal government, expanding the federal government tax cuts. And in my view, that has to be honored. Honor does not mean I agree with that and I, I think that’s the right choice.

Honored means there were people who. Heartfelt decisions. You know, I saw something on a, I think it was on TikTok, it might’ve been on CNN, I think it was on CNN interviewing a woman who voted for Trump because she had had fertility issues and she believed that Trump was going to make IVF treatments free.

And that her, her moment in the booth was, this is the single most important issue to me, whether or not IVF treatments are free. And she believed and I think continues to believe that the Trump administration will prioritize that and make that happen. You know, that’s a real issue and a real vote for that issue. We could say, well, that’s, you know, shouldn’t have done that because all the negatives that come with it, but it should be a reminder to us that people actually vote in the United States as in the rest of the world, often for very particular reasons.

You know, they’re not sitting there going, here’s the whole spectrum.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, and I would say the flip side of that too, which is equally as valid, is that there are a lot of people who vote in the United States as very low information voters. Like sometimes you come to somebody with all of your ire of like, how could you vote for this? And then you come to realize that they had no idea of like any of the things that you just listed, right?

And that comes with our fractured media system too, is like you hear about things on one side that the other side doesn’t hear about and vice versa. I will never forget a discussion I had with somebody who voted for Trump, and I was just like, look, at the end of the day. Like this woman with IVF, right? I was like, democracy is my number one issue.

I really don’t think that I can vote for somebody that did not respect the legitimate results of an election. And then I started talking about January 6th and they were like, yeah, what exactly happened on January 6th? And I was like, oh, right. Yeah. Okay. First of all, that’s on them. Like they are, they, they really should.

Be more informed than they are if they’re gonna go vote. But also, I can’t assume that like, they knew about that and just didn’t care and said, screw it, and so our values don’t align or whatever. It’s just like they didn’t, they didn’t know. So, okay. I, I cannot bring my, I can bring some judgment about the lack of information, but I cannot bring the judgment of like, you made a decision that I really disagree about based on the same information that we both have.

Zachary Karabell: There’s also a spectrum of issues that concerned a lot of people that the Democrats clearly were not, you know, addressing. I mean, it’s, it’s not true that they were not addressing cost of living, and it’s not true that they weren’t trying to do that. It is true that whatever was being done was not.

Effective enough in real time to move a particular needle or the, the story that was told was not effective enough in real time. And I, you know, it does feel, I know for listeners who are new to this, and I hope we have many this season. Emma currently lives in Athens, not Georgia, Greece, and has a kind of an interesting perspective on both being an American, but also being aware of like what the lens is from outside.

Very valuable too, because. its hard to see yourself right, Look, I mean, we all have our own perspective and therefore are limited just by that reality. But you know, she’s able to have a little bit more of a, huh, this is how it looks, not always in the middle of it. And again, the United States is a very big country, so I don’t even know what any of us are always in the middle of, you know, we’re, there’s a lot of different realities in the United States.

I live in Manhattan and you know, I don’t really pretend to know what the world looks like from Dallas and I world looks like from Iowa lived. Know what it looks like visually. So there’s that, there’s that too. And I, I, I’m, I’m, I’m very struck evermore, at least in the first few months of this particular new Trump show, you know, most people’s daily lives are, are remarkably untouched by the massive amount of noise.

And I, before everyone gets Yeah, wait, wait a minute. What about the cutting of aid, or what about the evisceration of the federal government and the cutting of these programs? Some of that effect, real world effect will be felt in the next months and has not yet been felt. But it is equally true that I, I am still struck by in many societies, but the United States in particular, the mismatch between the intensity of passion and energy that we affix to what’s going on with the federal government and the amount that that infects our daily lives.

physically, materially Specifically.

What do you think about that?

Emma Varvaloucas: Mm. I think it depends who you are, right? And where, where you are. And if you’re living in a red state that were, was affected by the ro v raid rollback, I mean, your life could very well change very viscerally. I mean, I think I understand what you’re saying by there’s this sort of. Feeling of national emergency and national kind of freakout that has happened since the trauma administration came into.

And by and large, like life goes on. And I do think that we can look at that as kind of like a steadying presence for us. Like. But it’s gonna feel differently if you, if you’re amongst a population that feels like targeted or like you’re li like if you’re an immigrant in the United States and you feel nervous if you’re a transgender person in the United States.

There’s a lot of stuff going on with that right now. I think you’re naturally not going to feel the way that you described, but I do think that it is a great reason for people to like dive more deeply into their local politics, state politics, the politics. I really do like. Those changes are going to affect you probably much more than any federal changes are going to.

Of course, caveat caveating. Again, what I just said about, there are some populations that are gonna be very effective by federal policy.

Zachary Karabell: But even on the Roe v Wade overturning in a state like Louisiana or Mississippi. I mean, Mississippi is probably a better example where even prior to the court case, I think there was one remaining clinic open in the state. There were huge restrictions. Certainly if you or you know, were lower income getting there. The, the restrictions that, that were being put on.

The performing of abortions. You know, different states had already done the whole, like you had to have admitting and privileges in a hospital, but if you were in a rural area, that was impossible. You know, in, in many of those red states for whom that decision wa was the most consequential, many of those realities had already come to be in place, meaning it was it incredibly hard to get an actual physical abortion for most people in many of those states.

Now I states where. The consequences of that. And then the state legislatures that followed suit were much more extreme, although again, you had to have those state legislatures pass laws, outlawing abortion, you know, all that. The overturning of Roe V. Wade did was allow states to do that. It didn’t say that, you know it, it attempted a neutrality.

I mean, we’re gonna test whether or not that neutrality actually exists. Right. So I’m just pushing back like again, there is a lot that the federal government does. It’s got a $7 trillion budget, but you know, most of what it does is send people checks either in the form of social security or healthcare reimbursement.

The next thing that it does most is pay interest on the debt so that it can send people checks. And the next most important thing, or the next largest expenditure is the Pentagon. You know? So it’s like four. trillion dollars of Medicare, Medicaid, social Security, it’s a trillion dollars of interest payments on the debt. It’s a trillion dollars on the Pentagon, and then it’s like $2 trillion for everything else.

And even the Pentagon, while we talk about it as it, it is the Department of Defense, a lot of what it is, is a, is a works program for different states. You know, it’s, it’s making stuff in state acts, it’s employing people, you know, to be fair to like the, the efficiency people. A lot of what the Pentagon does is not really preparing us to fight wars or, or defend ourselves.

It’s, it’s its own form of social welfare. So like yeah, I mean there’s a lot the federal government does, but I, I’m gonna hammer home on this point and for you should absolutely disagree. Or others who are listening should absolutely disagree. If you wanna disagree, there is an, there is a mismatch between the role that the government plays in our daily lives and the amount of attention we give to the role that it plays in.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, I, I only look, I only buy it to a certain degree. I think like when it comes to the efficiency stuff, like I do, I do think that there’s this like, oh my God, they shrank, you know, this agency by 10%, like, what does that mean? Et cetera, et cetera. And I, I a hundred percent on the side of like, the way that they’re doing this is not.

They’re, they’re using the hammer when they should be using the scalpel. That analogy that you see everywhere. I’m totally with that. It’s not entirely clear to me that if you reduce an agency by five or 10%, that it’s gonna substantially change what that agency is producing. I just think that the, the worry and the alarm is with something like Roe v.

Wade, right? Regardless of. The reality of those states at the current moment is that it makes us take a step forward in a certain direction, and it reduces like a, a, a backstop, right? So if there is a world in the future in with, in in which, you know, some president wants to pass a federal ban, like a backstop is removed, right?

If there is a future in which these red states decide that they want to put abortion back on the books, it throws up another challenge. It creates a world in which I. Things are more difficult to move in a certain direction and easier to move in other directions. And that’s why you do see legislators now putting up legislation about criminalizing women that cross state borders.

You know, it, it, it still pushes you in a certain direction. Does that affect the daily lives of like most people in that state? No. But does it substantially change the landscape? Yes. That make sense.

Zachary Karabell: I mean, I, I mean, I certainly agree that governments everywhere are part of the tone setting and. And steering of a, a collective of a society. So I’m not suggesting that we should be indifferent, but I am suggesting that we pay ever more attention to, particularly what the federal government does. And this is, this is true in multiple societies.

Like the amount of attention that the central government now gets is, is larger and larger. And I think kind of the social media and media ecosystem is, is part of that because. It’s, it’s a place you can go to tell a specific story about a specific set of people doing a specific set of things. And you know, in that sense, it feeds the news narrative everywhere.

To the degree that, like the Prime Minister of England now gets way more specific attention on like a daily basis and what they do and what they do and do. They’re the president of France, you know, like all these things. The PM of India, the, I mean, these are always important positions. They are heads of government or they are heads of state and sometimes both.

Sometimes those people are separate and governments matter, but I feel like we’ve gotten increasingly imbalanced in like, there’s also just a huge amount of daily life in all of these societies that is conducted without reference to government, without reference to the state. Now you can say, well, the state is what enables it and we, we talk a lot on the show about.

More challenged societies about parts of the world where there’s much less robust state structures in a way that clearly is deleterious to those societies. Many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, which are also coincidental with a lot of poverty and a lot of disease challenges, right, are are marked by very little state structures that are able to collectively deal with those things. You know, again, one of the reasons we talk about USAID is the loss of that is a problem, is that it was often in many of those societies, the only thing that was collective resources to deal with real issues like disease. A lot of our lives is lived without reference to, certainly in the United States, without reference to the federal government.

You know, we do have multiple layers of government. Everyone knows this. I’m not trying to preach something as if you all who are listening don’t know that I’m just saying. One thing that became really evident during Covid was just how much power states have as opposed to the federal government, state governors state, those are real governments.

They, they, they shape a lot of our daily lives and they shape them, as we just talked about, with Ro Vivo eight very differently. Right. The government of New York and the morays in some of these states and the things that people hold value are, are indeed rather different than they are in Louisiana or Nebraska or California or Utah or whatever.

And then you have, you know, local governments, you know, there’s lots of. It’s very different if you live in Austin, Texas than it is if you live in El Paso or you live in a ranch in, in West Texas. Right. So I, I feel, I feel like we all, we’re kind of talking ourselves into this is what matters. And part of what we are trying to say on The Progress Network is there’s other things that actually matter that are going on that are palpable and real all the time.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, I mean, I think that you can you can take that. Message in two ways, right? One of it can be maybe understood or misunderstood as, so it doesn’t matter like what the federal government is doing. Like, don’t worry, you’re pretty little ahead. Like, it’s all gonna turn out fine, which I think is a fairytale, and like, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t encourage people to think that way.

The other way you can take it,

Zachary Karabell: my, my pretty little head then, then, yeah.

Emma Varvaloucas: the other way you can take it, which I think is the one that you mean, is. There is a lot of power that you have to shape your own life if you dig into systems around you that are not the federal government, right? Like there’s so much more to life than just the federal government. And I think it’s a really good technique to kind of keep your head on straight right now is just to like, recognize those and, and dig in where you can and, you know, make change in your own community.

A hundred percent. It’s just, it’s just sometimes that change in your community does intersect with things that the federal government is doing. And we need to stay alert to that and push back against that if it’s things that we don’t agree with. I think in either case, like the, the real danger here is people kind of falling asleep, either from willful ignorance or from despair.

Regardless of the reason, it’s like not now is not the time to fall asleep. Right.

Zachary Karabell: By the way, one of the reasons for the current ascendancy of not just Trump, but the Republican Party as a potent political force in the United States, which it clearly is in a way that even though it was a narrow electoral victory, and even though the margin of the House of Representatives is infinitesimal compared to the past eight decades.

The power of that came initially really from focusing on local politics. You know, the photogram sort of sits on top of a lot of other things, and part of the reason why Republicans are in the ascendancy is because they focused on state houses and they focused on city councils and they focused on school boards.

I think because of an intuitive awareness of, in, in the United States in particular, the exercise of substantial federal power literally rests on the foundation of those other things. And then if you don’t have those other things, it’s much more difficult to exercise power and influence. You know, it’s not like the federal government can just say, jump and everybody goes, how high?

There’s a lot of jump and how high right now, because there’s a lot of buy-in at all these different levels. ’cause the Republicans have spent the past 30 years focusing on that.

Emma Varvaloucas: It’s interesting you see it that way. I was actually like, maybe I’m just kind of too knee deep in liberal media, but I’m seeing a lot of. Well, not a lot, but some amount of pushback from Republicans like lower down to government levels because like the stuff that Trump is doing is not exactly on the, the Republican priority list.

Like the, the cuts to the federal government that like feel really, you know, so that he is actually getting like from his own party, a bit of slow roll.

Zachary Karabell: Through, let’s say the election rested on that. You’re totally right. Right. Because, you know, there are things the Trump administration is now doing that a lot of people are going, wait a minute, I thought we were, I thought we

Emma Varvaloucas: I thought we were Republicans.

Zachary Karabell: of living and immigration. Right? Like, I thought that’s what we were dealing with here.

And and, and anti woke, right? So those things, I think there was kind of a general, that’s a lot of what people thought they were voting for in American.

Some people voting for IVF. I mean, there’s a whole series of things. But yeah, no, you’re totally right that there are people now going excuse me, I didn’t.

Emma Varvaloucas: Right, and that’s what I mean about the pulse check. Like I, I do, I do think that there are. Some natural barriers to like, I think people are really afraid of the United States turning into Russia essentially overnight. And I totally understand where those concerns are are coming from. But the United States is still very far away from Russia and it’s not just me saying that, and Apple bomb, who is like very prominent, you know, ringer of the alarm about autocracy in the United States and in the world has said the same thing.

So I’m not trying to downplay the concern, I’m just trying to say like. There are a lot of natural impediments to, to that happening. The stock market Republican lawmakers who are like, this is not what we really meant, meant to sign up for, you know, people kind of showing up in the midterms. Trump is, is, is not an unstoppable force and I, I don’t think we should believe that.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, I mean that’s, that should, and we should always remember like, you know, we do live in a representative democracy may not be. Particularly representative of your views, your individual views. But there is accountability. And before everyone shouts, like, you know, this is how it all begins. Like, you know, there is right now accountability.

We’ll, we’ll, I guess we’ll pay attention to the lack of it at some point, but for the, for the time being there is, and you know, there’s a long, there’s a lot of steps to take and a lot of democratic erosion before. You get from like, where we are in the United States now to where Hungary is, let alone to where Syria is, you know, meaning we need to, the specifics matter.

And I’ve, I’ve said a lot, and I think I will hopefully keep saying those countries in the world where there has been democratic backsliding that are pointed to religiously like Turkey and Hungary and Russia to some degree. But Poland until the recent election where it seems to have. Kind of rejected some of that, you know, none of those countries had a legacy of democracy.

They, they had a decade of it in most cases. If, if that, it was not like there was an an entrenched culture of that. We will see whether or not, what, what I’m saying proves to be true, but to erode hundreds of years of lived experience. In the United States that got more and more lived, right? It wasn’t complete In 1789, women couldn’t vote.

Slaves couldn’t vote. People who didn’t own land couldn’t vote. I mean, the franchise democracy has, has expanded in the United States over 200 years. It hasn’t contracted. And again, I just think that’s gonna be very hard to erode. Now people are legitimately pointing to, you can have illiberal democracies, Zakaria talked about this, so have a lot bad things happening.

In a completely democratic way that is not, we’re suddenly becoming an autocracy. It’s we’re making collectively race shitty decisions. Not, not we’re becoming less free, but in fact we are a majority of us deciding things that maybe, you know, we shouldn’t, or that aren’t helpful for the world or are not helpful for society over time.

Like democracy is not a recipe for good choices. It’s just a system that says we get collectively. Not be silenced and, and have some degree of contribution to those decisions.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. Well, I mean, it has been interesting and you know, this isn’t the case for everything that’s going on right now, but. Certainly in a couple instances, it has been interesting to see when the US pulls back, what comes in to fill the space. We’ll talk about this later in the season, but it has been very interesting to see Europe all of a sudden there there’s a phrase in Greek, it’s, it’s you say someone in or means like there’s, they’re sleeping, standing up.

And I do feel like Europe has been sleeping, standing up when it comes to defense and when it comes to Russia and the threat of Russia for many, many years. And. Regardless of what we might think of how Trump is handling the situation clear my throat. One good thing is that it does seem like Europe is finally starting to wake up.

I think when it comes to the realm of public health, you don’t really see people filling in the gap quite yet. I mean, we’ll have to see what happens with that. Or when it comes to climate change, something that it seems to be very under-discussed is that Bloomberg Philanthropies has stepped in to say, we’re gonna cover the US’ funding in regard to the Paris agreement, and we’re gonna keep sending in our data and things like that.

Like there, there are, there is, there are some mechanisms that are going on right now where people are stepping in, where the US is stepping out and I do wish we would see a little bit more reporting on that.

Zachary Karabell: I think we will try over the course of the season to highlight those realities, meaning. Who is stepping up into which vacuums and in what way and in what way? Constructively. Right, because we’re certainly aware of the vacuum and we’re aware of some of the destruction that comes with that vacuum. But as you point out, there is this question of like a, who steps up?

I recently wrote a piece for the edgy optimist, you know, based on, I was in Kazakhstan, in Algeria, and for me at least, it was a reminder of this kind of global resiliency, not a reminder of. Now in the jungle, Robert Kagan, great scholar at the Brookings Institution, has been an acute observer of American politics and American history has been arguing for years that if the United States pulls back from the world, the world becomes a jungle.

Right? It’s a element of what Madeleine Albright talked about in the nineties of the indispensable nation. It’s the city on a hill. You know the idea that without the United States playing this global policeman collective enforcer of rules. The world sort of falls apart into some sort of anarchic dog eat dog reality.

And that’s, you know, certainly possible. We don’t know what lies on the other side of a world order that is clearly giving way to something. We just dunno what something is and we’re fearful that something’s gonna be really bad. But I’m very struck going to various parts of the world about the intense energy and resiliency internally of a global middle class that sees its own self interest in inter with regional.

Partners, you know, whether it’s Kazakhstan and the five Nations of Central Asia, and then knitting ties with India and yes, with Russia and yes with China, and yes, with whomever and these nodes and these really complicated webs and networks of connectivity and relations. No longer going through Washington, although most of which sold, use the dollar, right?

Which is an interesting aspect of American power in the world, which I think has been remarked on, but needs to really be understood as as probably the most potent. Far more important than the US military is the dollar as a part of American power. But even so, you have this like web of people creating these connections and you know, for them, when you ask about Trump and you ask about Washington, there’s a, there’s somewhat of a popcorn aspect to it, you know, American

Emma Varvaloucas: Oh yeah.

Zachary Karabell: if you’re not in the United States, it’s like really fun in so far as it’s hugely dramatic and kind of weird and, you know, it’s unsettling and it does have some impact on a lot of these countries.

But for a lot.

of people, really, its like, this is What happened in the US today? Right? Because it’s, it’s a good show, but it’s not necessarily more than that. You know? They, I mean, yes, they watch our show much more than we watch, like Kazakhstani politics,

Emma Varvaloucas: Well, it’s a reality of like, yes, the US is incredibly important to the world, but probably not as important as we assume.

Zachary Karabell: and you live that right in your daily life and in in Greece.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. I mean, I, I was thinking about that when you were, we were just talking about people, you know, tuning into the, the Netflix documentary that is American politics right now with their popcorn. I went to a dance class right after, I think it was like two weeks into the Trump administration and the dance teacher was saying, you are right.

You know, you look really tired. I was like, yeah, you know, it was like a long week and like freaking Trump, you know? And I forgot that like I’m not surrounded by Americans. And I still kind of assumed in my mind that I would get some response to that. Like, oh yeah, you know, and it was just complete dead silence.

I mean, people were just like. You know, ’cause they’re there. Greece has evolved in, its in its own little crisis right now. And it’s, it’s dealing with its own political issues. It has its own fights to fight. And it’s good to be reminded sometimes that other people are watching you the same way that you watch other countries like, huh, what’s, what’s going on there?

Oh, you had a constitutional meltdown, but, eh, okay, well, you know, the world keeps, keeps going on.

Zachary Karabell: Suddenly. Pay a little more attention to South Korean politics. ’cause the president declared Marshall Law tried to have a coup military stormed the palace. He got arrested. Like it’s a, you know, it’s a dramatic story. But it sure is not occupying my mindshare the way it would be if I were Korean and living in Seoul. So I, and I think remembering that too is pretty vital, particularly if you’re American because, you know, we tell ourselves a story. Everything we do and everything Washington does matters for everyone, everywhere, deeply. And it does matter more than what Kazakhstan does. I mean, the sense of the global footprint is just bigger and more important in that respect.

But it’s not as important or as big as I think we often think. And traveling around the world is a reminder of that, right? Like people are just kind of, and more than was true 30 or 40 years ago. There’s more people with state structures and with high literacy and with, you know. Kind of a collective, Hey, we want peace, we want prosperity, we want security, we wanna live well, we want our kids not to die of diseases.

We want, you know, women in the workplace. And more parity like that is everywhere in evidence in a way that I think we can easily lose sight of. ’cause we’re always relentlessly focusing on the crises of which there are many.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. And I, I think also along with that is like sometimes how long change takes. You know, I, we’re filming this right now, right after this very disastrous Oval Office meeting between Trump and Zelensky and JD Vance. I. And everyone’s kind of freaking out about the us you know, not being a player with the, the invasion of Ukraine.

And then all of a sudden I was reading this article that was like, well actually the US has two more years of commitments that like they must meet. So like the flow is not gonna stop regardless of this disastrous meltdown. I mean, the flow is gonna go on for at least two more years, and that gives Europe two years also to.

You know, fill in the gap. But in two years from now, the war might also be over. I mean, we don’t

Zachary Karabell: mean, we’ll see though right now, apparently the Trump administration has halted those. Now maybe it may be told by the courts to restart that as it as much of the funding that’s been cut, maybe instructed. And I think there’s gonna be a kind of a tooth and nail battle. Which by the way is very Trumpy in the sense of his MO as a real estate developer, was not to pay contractors and force them to every little bit Go to the courts and collect, go to the courts and collect under the belief that they get tired, they run outta money and they take what they can get, and I’m sure that, you know, I’m not sure, sure, but I’m relatively sure that that will play out with Ukrainian aid. Like he will, he will impound it and then be forced to release it and then not release all of it and release it slowly and difficult. So it’s all just very, very, very, very messy and very contentious.

And litig

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: That’s what people are unprepared for in. Trumplandia, in the United States It’s less like the whole system’s gonna be upended and suddenly we’re gonna be in Russia in that we’re just in for a period of really chaotic litigiousness fighting over basic stuff that we used to just do. Right? Like

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, take for granted.

Zachary Karabell: and and that’s a lot of time and energy that could be put to other things.

I think that’s what people are beginning to go, wait a minute, we’re gonna now spend all of our time. Litigating each and every element of this rather than just like, I don’t know, dealing with a few issues that we found important. So, that’s what we’re gonna be talking about this year and we are going to highlight things that are going on that are constructive of which there are many and co-exist and go on at the same time as the Trump show.

You know, back to the analogy. The Trump show’s on, it’s got great ratings, but there’s a lot of other stuff that’s on as well that we’re gonna pay attention to that may not have such great ratings. But it’s quality TV

Emma Varvaloucas: And will help you pay better attention to the Trump show,

Zachary Karabell: and will help you, help you put it in balance and put it in perspective.

And we do hope that this podcast is an element of that, to put things in perspective and put things in a different perspective. And yes. At the end of the day, put them in a constructive perspective, a perspective of, you know, we are still capable of creating a better future, even as we are evidently doing a lot of things that make that more difficult.

Emma Varvaloucas: I, I, I wanna mention quickly before we end, I watched a great interview with Anne Applebaum. I mentioned her before. She. Is a journalist at The Atlantic. She had a great interview with Jessica Yellen who writes the news, not Noise, Substack. And Jessica was almost, she, she didn’t wanna ask. She was like, I, I don’t even wanna ask you this question, but people keep asking me like, how do you know when it’s time to give up on the United States and leave?

And and Apple Obama was like, like when they start killing people, she’s like, we’re not there, you know? But I think it, it just, it speaks to that sense of like permeating. Crisis narrative where like, yes, like queer. This is not an unserious situation. There are challenges. It’s going to be a rough four years or at least a, a really rough two years of damage gonna be done.

I think the damage being done by the dismantling of the USAID is like horrifying. Like we are going to have to deal with those things. But we are not in any kind of situation where things are irreversible or unable to be changed again or faced and dealt with if we can, you know, get ourselves together.

So.

Zachary Karabell: Hosanna to that. So we hope you’ll all join us for this season for our longer What Could Go Right? episodes for our progress report episodes, where we look at, you know, in a shorter form, things that have gone well in the week for our newsletter. Also called What Could Go Right? which you can all get at The Progress Network dot org.

We welcome and want and hope that you will send us your comments, your thoughts, your criticisms, your suggestions. We would like this to be more of a dialogue. Obviously the format does not allow for that directly and we really do welcome that and want that. So please send us emails again on the site, the Progress Network.

dot org, and we look forward to the coming weeks and months in conversation with you.

Emma Varvaloucas: Absolutely, and thanks everyone for showing up, and we’re super excited for season seven to be spent with you guys.