The Steady Stater
The Steady Stater
Chris Matthews Uncut: Hard-Limits Hardball (Part 2)
In the second part of our conversation with Chris Matthews, the former Hardball host ponders the mixed legacies of Al Gore, George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, and FDR. He also shares his opinions on where to look for political support for the steady state economy, and which former president came closest to steady statesmanship.
From the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy, this is The Steady Stater, a podcast dedicated to discussing limits to growth and the steady state economy.
Brian Czech:Welcome to the show. I'm your host, Brian Czech. And our guest today is Chris Matthews. Yes, that Chris Matthews of Hardball fame.
Chris Matthews:Can I bring up something -- you're pushing me to think beyond my usual daily worries. You know, I think no matter what we say about school-- we may not like it when we're kids -- we do remember what we learned in school, most of it, we really do. You know, that's how we learned to write, I mean, certainly how to read and learn how to read, and we still can read. We learned a lot of things in school, we learned basic arithmetic, which we use all the time, we use addition all the time, we put things together, we have to add up costs and things, and bills and everything. We do use most of what we learned in school. But one thing we stopped teaching ourselves was geography, the idea of resources, and water and navigation, and which -- and even coastline, so you want an uneven coastline, so you can have harbors -- all the basic notions of what's life like on this planet and how we make it each day. And it's all about resources, agriculture, mining, it's everything. It's human life. But it's about limits. It's about what people have and what they need. And what's there. And where do we live? Nobody teaches geography anymore. I'm sorry. It's not certainly not a high-level education goal. People don't know anything, they can't show you a map. They don't -- they couldn't give you a map of the United States. AI Franken could actually draw a map. He's one of the few senators could draw a map of the United States, it was a gimmick. We don't know where we're at. We don't know where the water comes from, where our food, we don't know anything. We don't understand where the turkey comes from. We don't know where the spam comes from. I mean, it's a reality of ignorance. And I think that maybe the first set of goals is teach people when they're in their teens or younger, what world they live in, you know, in terms of resource. Because they don't -- we think theoretically, now, we think technologically, we think about, we all want to be Steve Jobs. I don't, but kids all want to be Steve Jobs. Why? Because you can make money out of it, it's state of the art. It's all about stuff, you don't even have to meet anybody, could live on technology like we're using right now. You don't have to even bump into anybody, it's-- live in your basement. But it's a whole world that they live in now and enculturated. So they want it they think -- there's a culture of simply being, you know, virtual. So we've gone from not studying geography to not actually living in a space with other people where we're almost like Lilliputians from -- you know -- from Dean Swift, you know, I think there is a danger in becoming schizoid, not connected to your physical reality. Maybe that's too deep. But it's I think people don't think about anything in terms of water supply -- out in California, they're aware of water. I'll tell you, that was an issue. They didn't know that. And they fight over it state by state -- the Colorado River, how it gets diverted, etc, etc. They're aware of it, of life on this planet in California, because the fires -- we know what's going on in California. And when I worked for the San Francisco Examiner, we had a guy, one of the editors who just absolutely brilliant guy at that, because that's what he studied his whole life as a journalist -- water and the limits of it. Interesting, huh? And you don't get that in a big city. You don't get that kind of education, that there's only so much -- and that's what the movie Chinatown was all about, water, remember?
Brian Czech:Oh, that's right.
Chris Matthews:Yeah.
Brian Czech:Goes way back, those water issues. Yeah.
Chris Matthews:Yeah.
Brian Czech:It's coming to come into a real head, so to speak. Well, I want to go back to a question about...
Chris Matthews:Well it is gonna be an issue, you know, this fracking thing in Pennsylvania-- you watch that issue in the next -- this election -- I keep forgetting it's this year, we have all these elections for governor and senator. There's gonna be a lot of talk about resources in Pennsylvania and whether a state that needs jobs should resort to fracking. And I think the politics would say, oh yeah, so you're not going to see much environmental general pushback on that. It's just -- it's like guns in Pennsylvania or the pro-life issue. It's one of those things where you touch it, it's a third rail. And so politicians don't want to be known as, you know, Johnny Appleseed here. They don't want to be that person, like people like Robert Redford out in California can be ostracized for being environmentalist. You know that history. I mean, it's real.
Brian Czech:Little bit.
Chris Matthews:You're not the good guy if you're an environmentalist.
Brian Czech:Yeah, so ironic.
Chris Matthews:They want the mining.
Brian Czech:Well, we're gonna continue being bad guys I guess here at CASSE...
Chris Matthews:That's the role you've chosen and fair enough and good for you. Because the counter-education isn't getting there and a geographical knowledge of who we are and what we live off of. And, you know, I do think about this friend of mines in solid waste. And he took me on a tour of Pennsylvania, solid waste sites. Big mounds of earth covering up God knows what, and what is our environmental concern, the heat level, that gets generated spontaneously in those piles of trash and garbage, and what goes on under that has to be relieved, through spouts that come out. Lets the heat out of etc. And they got to protect the water supply all nearby if they can. But think about those big mounds, when are we going to go into them someday -- I won't be around, I don't think -- but someday we're going to be mining those solid waste dumps with all that stuff in there. With all the metal, and other stuff that you have to, you know, maybe there'll be a technology to reuse all that again. I know that -- we all know that's coming. Anybody doesn't think about it's crazy, we're gonna have to go back over everything we've ever used and use it again, you know, can't strip mine the Earth, can't strip mine everything.
Brian Czech:You know that if you want to put it this way, the apple of our reforming eye is that Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978, or FEBGA. FEBGA remains the central economic policy of the USA, and it mandates the government onto the path of GDP growth. So, you know, it's as antiquated in the 21st century as FDR's original Employment Act was by 1978. So we're working on these comprehensive amendments, Chris. And first of all, would you have any rules of thumb for how we should go about building support on the hill? By the way, we would call it -- we would rename it the Full and Sustainable Employment Act. And we'd get the USA off that growth path.
Chris Matthews:Oh, God, I guess you have to do this. Your natural allies would not be the extractive industry states. You're not going to do well in Utah. And although you have religious concern in Utah for the Earth, with the Mormon people, probably in the suburbs, the more educated people book-learned people, who are willing to go to meetings and get involved in a green movement. And that would be probably -- I don't know, I don't want to judge this -- but I would say, people that read the newspapers in the big cities and would be open to a conversation, and even a speculation about where we're headed, cannot and probably are not facing really close elections, where the economy is shaky. You know, you just got to be logical about it. The people that can get on television, and bring this topic up. I know this was very -- well, you remember this, in the mid 70s, in the burbs? This is something you would talk about.
Brian Czech:Yeah.
Chris Matthews:And mainly but not only Democrats, mainly but not only. And, you know, you could have a conversation like that with Leach from Iowa. Some of the ones around Philadelphia, the suburbs. You could get these conversations going on radio and television. Gaylord Nelson, well he headed the The World Wildlife Association. What a great guy he was, what a character. I mean.
Brian Czech:Yeah.
Chris Matthews:He knew how to enjoy life, and he was a thoughtful guy and a great personality, and he got wiped away by this Wisconsin conservativism, that's came back. You know, Ron Johnson, I mean, look at the difference -- Ron Johnson and Gaylord Nelson, you cannot think of two different people politically.
Brian Czech:My gosh, yeah.
Chris Matthews:I know, gosh, but it's this conservativism, it says simply cut taxes, stop people at the border and whatever else. It's powerful. And some part of it is true politically and socially. It's thuggish politics, but it works in a time where people are afraid. Right now. I mean, you mentioned this at the beginning of our conversation, this is a time that sort of bangs back and forth between being scary and boring.
Brian Czech:You're right.
Chris Matthews:It's boring. There's something in our politics that lacks the spice that got me fascinated by politics back in the 50s with Kennedy and Nixon, I mean, talk about two political heavyweights, and Eisenhower was almost Godly, and everything was, you know, the legacy of Roosevelt and Truman -- it was just big time. It was exhilarating to have a political conversation. Adlai Stevenson even, I mean, he lost but what a voice...
Brian Czech:He worked for Muskie too, right?
Chris Matthews:And I -- and Muskie was a hit. Well, he was a light heavyweight, and he was something else, a true believer in clean water, clean air. He passed those bills, Brian, he did.
Brian Czech:Okay, yeah.
Chris Matthews:One man, clean air and clean water, and people like Phil Hart of Michigan. These were statesmen of the planet. They were looking out for the big stuff. And they had people like [inaduible] behind him and people like that.
Brian Czech:Yeah, we were...
Chris Matthews:And they were Westerners like Frank Church. I mean, Westerners were all those Pro-Environmental Westerners, who came out of the plains state, the Rockies, were all wiped out in the 70s, and the sagebrush rebellion. Just all wiped off. All the conservative people -- I mean, environmentally concerned people-- all are wiped out. My first boss, Frank Moss, you know, all those people who had environmental concerns, and were building vast national parks and preserving the land from mining and exploitation, so that you can have beauty out there forever. And all that stuff gets stopped. And they're still trying to peel it back, you know, out into places like Utah. They're trying to peel back the preserved land. But that was something the guys staked their careers on. And Nelson was one of them. And my god, Frank Church, and McGovern and all those people. They're all gone.
Brian Czech:Yeah, a lot has changed, and there was a particular change that I'm interested in vis-a-vis yourself and the parties, but first we need to take a short non-commercial break with James Lamont. Take it away, James.
James Lamont:Hello, listeners, we hope you're enjoying the show. Like many of our guests on The Steady Stater, Chris Matthews is a signatory to the CASSE position statement on economic growth. He's one of the many notable signatories among our ranks, including esteemed scientists, economists and other thinkers. You can see a list of these notables by going to our website, steadystate.org, and clicking the Position button. Then click the Signatures and Endorsements link in the right hand menu. You may see a name that proves useful in convincing friends and family members to sign the position themselves. And now back to the show.
Brian Czech:Welcome back steady staters. We're talking with Chris Matthews of Hardball lore. I saw a quote from you, from one of your Hardball episodes where you said "I'm more conservative than people think I am. I voted for George W. in 2000." And I'm really curious, were you really voting for George W. or was it more against Gore? Or had you just had enough of Clintonian government by then?
Chris Matthews:Well, I thought, I believed W. Bush when he said I want to see some humility in our foreign policy. Humility. Humility! That was what he ran on, stop bossing people around. No more. None of this hawkishness. Let's have a fight over it. Let's put our troops out there. I thought he meant it. I don't know what happened, I guess 9/11, Dick Cheney, the Neo-cons in the op-ed pages of the newspapers, hawkish, all they want to do is go to war with the Muslim world. I said, stop it, stop it. Gore, God, he could have gone either direction. He could have been the biggest hawk in the world, which he was when he ran in '88, superhawk, backed -- people like Ed Koch like him, people like that. I go look: I don't know which Al Gore -- I voted against the hawkish Al Gore. And I voted for the humble guy W. And I was wrong because W. became the biggest Hawk in the world. I think he feels guilty about it now, he's now painting. I don't think he has any more conversations with Dick Cheney anymore. I think he'd -- my hunch, just a hunch -- he knows he got suckered into that war with Iraq. And because Cheney and Scooter Libby, that whole crowd wanted to do it. I made a mistake. But I wouldn't say that is the evidence of my conservativism. My conservativism is fiscal in spending. It's more like Jimmy Carter. I'm with Carter on that stuff. And Carter understood. He talked about the environment and energy and all that stuff, and we have to limit it. And he didn't get any points for it politically, but my God, he brought peace between Egypt and Israel. They haven't been -- they had three wars since '48, he got rid of all the wars. And if Egypt wasn't going to fight Israel, no Arab country was going to find Israel. Israel's got a danger of course from Iran, but the whole Arab world is basically, you know, pacified, basically because this Southern Baptist sat down with, you know, Begin and Sadat and got them to cut a deal to recognize Israel's existence forever. So I mean, he got hardly any credit for that. He told the Panamanians you can have the canal back under the condition it stays open, it stays working, and we can use it when we do it. And we get first dibs. I mean, it's worked. It has been up and down and the canal still works. It's bigger than ever. And Carter, invented in the seven endless war with the Panamanians which would have would have been another sore spot for us. He said no, let's do it. The first days in office: he takes the oath of office, up at the Capitol and before he leaves the Capitol, he does two things. He thanks Gerald Ford for hailing the country and those guys became best friends forever for the end -- till Gerald Ford's death. They really did. I've been reading the diary. And then he sat down and with his pen, pardoned all war resistors from the Vietnam War, every single one that had been living up in Canada and everybody else was totally exonerated by him. In one act, he said, we're not going to argue about this Vietnam war anymore. I'm doing this thing. I mean, he did things like that with complete courage. And I think someday he'll be recognized for it. But I don't know it's gonna take a while. The country wants a tough guy president. They want a strong man. At least half the country does. And that's Trump. And Carter didn't look like a strong man bossing people around in the schoolyard. And they didn't think that was what they wanted. So we paid...
Brian Czech:And then after he fired the cabinet, that half didn't want him either...
Chris Matthews:Well, he -- he did. He fired them all. And then he got rid of the ones he wanted to get rid of. Brock Adams and Califano and the Secretary of Treasury.
Brian Czech:Okay, well, I want to go back to Gore for just a moment. And..
Chris Matthews:Yeah, Gore's hard to read, because Gore is very good at -- obviously, his movie was great, An Inconvenient Truth. And of course, he played a powerful role with that for a while, maybe permanently, to some extent. I don't know about Al Gore. He was a --
Brian Czech:I got a little story I wanna run by it...
Chris Matthews:...difficult to read. I'm sorry.
Brian Czech:Yeah. So yeah, he was ostensibly great on the environment, or was his book Earth in the Balance, you know, way before. Yet I feel like he led the masses astray with that old win-win rhetoric that "there is no conflict between growing the economy and protecting the environment..."
Chris Matthews:That's politics. That's politics.
Brian Czech:Yeah, well, you know, I saw him utter that. I call it the cynical Shibboleth. It was on the Washington Mall, right on Earth Day 2000 with thousands of people listening to every word. And you know what? An utter pall came over that crowd. And right then, I thought he could lose this thing because of this one lie. And then sure enough, seven months later, that election came down to those few hanging chads in Florida.
Chris Matthews:Well, that's another conversation. The Supreme Court jumped in on that under equal protection, and it was the argument that you can't have one county counting the chad is okay, and the other one counting it, it's not okay. And that was the basis of the five four remedy that threw it out, threw out, stop the voting -- stop the county rather -- and but that's another subject.
Brian Czech:It is. But for me, I just -- I wonder if he hadn't bought into that -- what I always also called the Clintonian rhetoric, the win-win rhetoric that you can have your cake and eat it too on the economy and environment. Gore might have won because he may have been seen as a truth teller, in a time, you know, where people wanted to see that, but I don't know. We'll never know, I guess.
Chris Matthews:No, I think this is something for you to think about, because I thought about this before, a lot. There is an American romance. The notion that you can avoid the tough trade-offs that you can have a victory through -- what's the right word -- audacity. And if you think about how football was played, our national sport -- no matter what anybody says -- football, it's a rough game, it's a Midwestern thing. And you're basically two sides pounding each other at the line, and lots of injuries, kind of boring, eventually, because it's just a few yards and a cloud of dust, and somebody wins a game by three to nothing or something on a kick. And it's boring. So what do we do? We found a romance, the forward pass, Knute Rockne and all that. And all of a sudden, oh, you didn't have to fight it out on the line. You don't have the trade-off of blood and guts. You could throw it. You could have a quarterback who could throw the ball 30 yards, and you can win the game big time. We're fighting the Korean War, and it's trade offs are a horrendous fight. We're down at Pusan practically trying to fight for our lives and all of a sudden, MacArthur does the Inchon landing, he cuts in from the left, and we win that we basically throw the whole battle back up to the Yalu. I mean, so we're used to that kind of incursion-- we don't have to trade it off back and forth. We can go around and win this. Churchill tried to do it with the Dardanelles in World War I, get out of the trenches and going through Turkey. Well, we always want to find that end run. That is the American thing, or the British thing. And I think that the romance is that you can have the technology jobs-- President Biden to his credit does talk like this we -- can create a lot of jobs and try to save resources. I don't know what the trade off is, it's like Reagan would say, I can cut taxes and bring in more revenue, well it didn't happen. It was great romance. Oh, we don't have to trade between cutting taxes and cutting programs. Oh no! We can just keep the same programs, the same spending level, but we'll cut taxes and there'll be more revenue coming in. By the way, he's talking about a particular line, tax elasticity-- it's in economics I studied it, it does happen. In a certain limited notion, you do get more revenue. If you cut your prices, for example, in this market -- I taught it in Africa -- you might get more sales, and that would make more revenue than you had before. It's always the end run, Brian.
Brian Czech:Right.
Chris Matthews:It's an emotion that is so powerful, that -- the end run, that you can avoid the conflict, the trade off, because if you do the forward pass, the Inchon landing or anything, if we can avoid it, that's better. So politicians say, you don't have to trade, you don't have to choose; I can get you everything. Roosevelt used to kid about his opponents and say-- his opponents, he was so good at sarcasm, FDR, if you read him-- I guess you can't hear him right now, but he would say, the Republicans come along and say,"I can give you everything the Democrats do, and it won't cost you anything." It was a great upper-class accent of Roosevelt. And he would say it like that was so rich sarcasm," and it won't cost you anything."
Brian Czech:That's great.
Chris Matthews:And I think that's what you're talking about. I think there is a notion of the end run of the forward pass, the Inchon landing. I think there really is a notion you don't have to choose, because choosing hurts. Nobody wants to choose.
Brian Czech:Well, Chris, you ran for the House of Representatives some years back...
Chris Matthews:When I was 28.
Brian Czech:...recall? Well, there was some speculation that you might run for the Senate in 2010. Right?
Chris Matthews:Well, there was speculation, because I was thinking about it. Well I had been away, I went to college in Worcester, Massachusetts, Holy Cross, and I -- then I went to grad school at Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I loved Chapel Hill. And I went in the Peace Corps in Africa for two years, and then I came back, and I worked in politics in Washington. I hadn't really been home since I was 17 -- living at home, except that race for Congress in the primary. And I, I thought about it a lot because a lot of people knew me, I had a Philadelphia accent -- don't know if you recognize it, but everybody up there knew it. I talked like I was from Philly. And I had the backing of the political machine in Philly, I had the governor's support. A lot, a lot of quiet support, and Mayor Scranton. A lot of people said they were for me, and they were going to be for me. But I just figured I'd never been up there. I didn't have a campaign organization, I couldn't make a phone call, in this regard without somebody outing me and saying, I did it. So I couldn't really keep the job of covering the politics of the country, and at the same time planning to enter it. I had to quit my job, and start from scratch in raising the money and all that stuff. And I just didn't want to make the leap. I was close to it. But it's -- I respect people that have the nerve to -- usually they're lawyers who have something to fall back on. They know they can go back to their firm or-- but it's a big risk to run because you can -- most people lose. I mean, there's usually a number of candidates for the same job and only one wins. And that's every cycle. Every time there's an election, a whole bunch of people run, and one wins, and all the others lose. That's why I have no problem with pensions for Congresspeople, if they managed to get elected, because the risks of losing is overwhelming. But you know what? I would have liked to be a Senator, whether I would like the job of being a senator is a totally different question. As Gene McCarthy, one of my heroes once said, it's a job and I don't want it. That's when he quit. He didn't run again in '70. It's a job of serving 10 or 20 million people or whatever the size of your state and they call up, you better work for them. If the guy has a sewer project, this mayor, he wants to talk about it with you all week. That's your job. You're really a servant, if you're a good Senator of the people of your state. And that's a hell of a calling. It's almost like being a priest. I mean, you have to really believe in it to do it. And it's very generous if you're a really great Senator -- it is a generous vocation. It really is if you think about it. Anybody who wants your help in that state deserves your help -- deserves it.
Brian Czech:Okay. Well one last question. And maybe it's a good segue, it's good from that. What would you say is our greatest source of hope for a democratic transition to a steady state economy?
Chris Matthews:Well, it's not totally politically correct -- but what the heck -- Teddy Roosevelt, I think you have to have someone who exemplifies the American character and takes it into a new frontier -- if you will -- and be willing to say, we're a country that is religious, to a large extent, and realistic, to a great extent, that we can adapt, that we can recognize the future fast-- better than any other country in the world. We can recognize the future better than anybody else. We're gonna charge into it. And we're gonna be the ones that knows what this reality is. And we're gonna face it, as we did when we first came here -- the Europeans came here -- and we're gonna be smart. And we're going to do what has to be done with a kind of a romance, if you will. And that takes a Teddy Roosevelt on horseback basically, to say, we're going to do this thing. And it's going to be tough. And it's going to hurt a little. But we have to do it. And that's how we got to the moon. And that's what we went where people hadn't gone before. And part of it is understanding-- I think we won't be the only country to do it though. I do look to the Germans now -- I know it's odd, given the history of the 20th century -- but I do love the grown-ups of the world. And politics is ironic. A true conservative is not somebody says No to the people who are poor, or left out. A true conservative is someone who keeps the country together, who holds the country together, a conservative holds people together, they keep them from wanting to be revolutionaries. A true leader on the environment, on growth issues, has to be somebody who can hold us together, and get us to see things in a set consensus. And I think -- look, I think Teddy Roosevelt belongs up on Mount Rushmore, because of that, and because if you have -- if you go to any national park in the world, you're benefiting from him. And the glory of this country is our geography. I mean, it really is. No other country in the world has our geography. And we got to keep it. And as I said, learning geography might be the first step to keeping it.
Brian Czech:Well, it's been a fascinating episode, and I'm sure all the steady staters out there will concur. Thanks so much for being on the show, Chris. And I really hope you can join us--
Chris Matthews:Thanks for having the show.
Brian Czech:Okay.
Chris Matthews:Take care.
Brian Czech:Well, folks, that about wraps 'er up. We've been talking with Chris Matthews, a leading commentator in American politics for the past three decades. As a prolific broadcast journalist, newspaper journalist, and book author, he's probably done as much to frame the debates as any politician -- we need him to keep framing too. He gets it about limits to growth, and he understands the political challenges we face as steady staters. We need more Chris Matthews and more hardball. Hardball with the CATO Institutes and the Chicago Schools and the dark moneyed, perpetual growthers who are driving the USA and the international community to an agonizing breach of limits to growth. I'm Brian Czech and you've been listening to The Steady Stater podcast. See you next time.