President Biden's First 100 Days: Success or Failure?

 A very good afternoon, everyone, a very warm welcome, to yet another fascinating addition of our research features webinars.

My name is Leila Choukroune and professor of International Law and director of the University of Portsmouth Democrtic Citizenship theme.

Today, at the occasion of President Biden's visit to the U.K., we are going to talk with two of our university colleagues Dr Erika Hughes and Dr. Brian Frederick about President Biden's first hundred days.

You know, it's a bit of a ritual to talk about the first hundred days, a bit of a honeymoon period as well.

But we'll interrogate a number of decisions President Biden has made.

I'm thinking about two example, because, you know, my field is trade.

So in trade I was quite impressed to see, for example, the US supporting waiver of intellectual property rights on the vaccine.

Quite surprising.

Another very surprising move was his recent proposal to the World Trade Organisation to introduce provisions on forced labour in the fisheries subsidies negotiation.

Really interesting and surprising as well.

So there's plenty to discuss.

Is it a honeymoon period?

Is it not lasting?

Is it a real change or is it a new modernity in the sense of the rupture with what happened before in the recent past?

This is exactly what Ericka and Brian are going to discuss with us today.

But let me introduce them first.

They are extremely brilliant academics with very diverse backgrounds.

I'll start with Erika.

Erika is an academic for performance in the school of art, design and performance at the University of Portsmouth.

Her Research and creative work at the intersection of memory, history and performance.

Her projects and publications are focussed on two interrelated and international areas, theatre as historiography and theatre and cultural diplomacy.

She's the author of Holocaust Memory and Youth Performance.

She's also published a number of related work and she has a very varied theatre experience in the US, but with a number of countries, for example, Pakistan or Israel and so on and so forth.

I'm sure Erika is going to complement what I briefly said.

As to Brian.

He's also a very, really interesting academic with a reach background from his research, explores how harm reduction strategies are or could be employed by men who have sex with men to facilitate safe or safer drug related social sexual experiences in virtual environments and through virtual ethnographic contacts, he analyses this particular environment was also very interesting with Brian that he's moved to the UK in 2012 and he has a past, a past life, so to speak, pre-criminology.

He worked at that time in the entertainment industry for 14 years.

And then again, he's going to tell us probably a bit more about his own background.

So without further ado, I'd like to give the floor to Erika and Brian.

I think Brian might want to start.

So hello.

Thank you very much, Leila.

Welcome, everybody.

Hi, Mom.

I know that my mother's on the call from California.

That's really exciting, actually.

She always tries to try to get involved in me and my brother is a professor as well, tries to get involved where she can so hi, mom, love you.

So, yes, Leila.

I think that was that was a nice introduction.

Thank you.

But my research has broadened since coming to the UK in 2012.

I just finished, my colleagues and I here at the University, a Home Office report that explores technology facilitated domestic abuse.

I've also just finished I did a TV series on domestic homicide for True Crime and Crime and Investigation Channel, and I finished filming last week a series on serial killers for the U.S. audience.

And we'll be writing a chapter of a book this summer on gay serial killers, which would be very interesting project.

So my research has expanded.

I identify as a queer/cultural criminologist.

And so I'm very interested in sort of the media representations of crime, the marginalisation of oppression that is criminogenic and also cultural deviance, cultural transgressions and crimes.

So, yeah, my portfolio has expanded since moving to the UK and in particular since coming on board here at Portsmouth, which it's been an absolute pleasure.

I wish I could have met a lot more of my colleagues this past year.

It seems as though I've moved to Portsmouth and I've been in my home, which is a two up, two down, it's no different than where I lived in Cheltenham and so it really feel as though I've moved.

But I'll leave it at that and let Erika go ahead and introduce herself as well.

Yeah.

Thank you, Brian.

Thank you, Leila.

That was a great introduction.

And as you said, yeah, I really work quite a bit in looking at performance as cultural diplomacy.

And I am a scholar of performance, but I'm also a practitioner.

So I do theatre.

And in fact, I'm going to make a shameless plug for a performance that I'm working on right now, it's premiering at the Brighton Fringe Festival on the 24th of June, which is actually a documentary theatre piece that uses transcripts from an interview with the only living Holocaust survivor whose born testimony who was Jewish Holocaust survivor but she was a lesbian in the camps.

And she talks about that experience of being a queer Holocaust survivor in a really powerful way.

And she's still alive.

She's an amazing woman.

And in fact, the place called The Amazing Life of Margot Hueman.

So but so a shameless plug for that.

Please come join us.

It'll be online.

But before coming to Portsmouth, I actually worked with in a number of projects that were actually funded either federally or at the state level in the United States.

And those included actually a collaboration with the US State Department.

The performance that you mentioned in Pakistan was part of a three year series.

So I was there twice and staged an ethnographic theatre piece in the city of Lahore, that border city in the Punjab.

And then I've also worked in science communication quite a bit.

And so with the New York Academy of Science and AAAS, you know, those organisations really benefited, this is all, I should say, pre Trump era.

And this was during the Obama years.

And so, you know, my research was really well supported during those years.

And so, you know, one of the things that I'm also not kind of mentioned is the, you know, the real precipitous drop that happened in 2016 for for the money and then the kind of support that went to looking at arts programmes that really brought brought people together, or at least certainly attempted to, not without flaws and issues.

But but that was certainly I think the hope was to bring these groups together to make art work.

So.

That's excellent.

So it might not be a very conventional start, but why don't we start talking about queer and queer theory and what happened or what might happen with President Biden?

Well, you sort of gave me the transition.

So what about that?

What about what we call I hate this term.

What about what we call minority rights?

You?

Want me to take this first, Erika.

Yeah, go for it.

So I am I mean, I'm impressed.

I'm happy and relieved.

Obviously I am.

I identify as queer.

I come from a queer family and my family is very accepting, always has been.

And so to have gone through four years of vitriol targeting LGBT individuals to see sort of our rights slowly being repealed or at least attempts to repeal our rights, in particular transgenders in the military.

And then and then looking at what Biden has done in his first 100 days.

You know, it looks it looks to me as the children who are adopted can now become citizens if adopted by LGBT couples.

This transgendered ruling has been executive order has been repealed.

He has signed a new executive order, he they're using pronouns in the White House.

They're allowing people to choose their pronouns.

And these are all very positive moves forward on what it feels to me like is that we basically sort of reverted to the position that we were in before Trump was president.

So how much further have we come along?

Well, there are pronouns in the White House now.

And so I'm not sure if that if that if that if you can consider that progress or if you consider that sort of reversal of going backwards, but.

I'm happy to have Trump out.

Bottom line, Erika what do you think?

Know, I mean, I'm certainly happy to have Trump out.

You know, I was not originally a Biden supporter, but certainly when he was the candidate, bought the T-shirt, literally bought the T-shirt because of a campaign donation.

And, you know, but I think actually I think Brian point about this being, you know, kind of a reverse to was as opposed to kind of an advancement, I think is really apt.

And, you know, the other thing that I would add to that is that, you know, in the United States, we have this state and federal split in the states retain quite a bit of individual power.

And so, you know, while the the White House was introducing pronouns, you still have, you know, in states, particularly in the region that I'm from, I'm from the state of North Carolina originally, which very famously had these really horrible bathroom wars over the last two years where they criminalised somebody using a restroom that wasn't their legal you know, it's on their driver's licence, gender identity.

And to get that changed, of course, it's also fraught.

So, you know, right now there's a debate about transgender athletes and, you know, can they be in a sporting team on one side?

And so this is going on in Florida.

This is going on in Tennessee.

This is going on in Arizona, which is the state that I lived in most recently.

Actually, you know, I think I'm I'm from a number of hotbed states.

So I lived in Wisconsin.

I lived in North Carolina.

I lived in Arizona.

I don't know if that's a good sign or bad sign whenever I move to next.

If I were to leave the UK, politics might go back down.

But having lived in those spaces, you know, I think that no matter what kind of happens in the White House, what you see on the local level is initiatives that are still, I think, designed as a kind of countermeasure.

So I think when Trump was in office, people thought, OK, great, we have carte blanche, we can do what we want now that Biden's in office.

OK, now we have to kind of mobilise and fight against, you know, the coming cultural change.

So I think there's always a kind of give and take between the the state level and the federal level.

But you feel very much in your body when you live in one of these states where these debates are happening.

Leila could add something to that.

I don't want it to seem as though I'm saying all he's done is changed pronouns.

I mean, there have been a lot of firsts in this presidency.

Obviously, we have a vice president who's female.

We have we have these appointed individuals, trans individuals, lesbian individuals.

Two very important officers, I think our secretary or undersecretary of education.

Assistant secretary of education is a trans individual.

So he has made he has made progress there.

Yes.

So I just wanted to add a caveat to that, that I'm not I'm not whinging about, you know, only pronouns.

No, it's certainly unprecedented.

And I was interested when I said that it was somehow reversing to what existed before.

I'm not so sure about that hearing what you just said, but there's something else I'd like to to discuss in relation to equality.

And that's something really important because I'm I'm afraid we might not here in Europe always understand what it entails, the sort of word tension between the federal and the states, because I wouldn't like us to believe that, you know, what we are discussing now, what we are sharing now is shared by everybody that there's a big gap.

There are tensions.

So so how do you see that this tension between the state and the federal level and the state level?

That's an interesting question, Leila.

I mean, in order to have anything sort of passed at the federal level that applies to all Americans, as you all know, it requires a considerable majority in both houses.

And so any rights that are going to be extended vis a vis the federal apparatus, in my opinion, we're very we're a long way off, especially when you consider what's been going on.

I mean, even trying to just form an investigative panel to look at the January incidents.

I mean, we are a long way off.

You know, I don't want I've been a Californian all my life.

I identify with that sort of way of life culturally.

I mean, when Erika was naming off the states, I was thinking to myself, these are beautiful states, but I wouldn't want to live there.

And no offence to Erika, I've driven through the South a number of times.

They're very polite as long as you don't identify as a gay white male.

So it's walking in.

I think I'm very aware of my privilege as a white man in the States and how people treat me.

So I've been to I've been to a lot of our states and I find Americans to be very accommodating and very polite.

But I am a white man and I don't usually walking with a rainbow t-shirt on, so.

The idea, I would say, you know, yeah, I I've lived in a bunch of those, I've lived in South Carolina, North Carolina, Arizona, Wisconsin and New York, OK, OK.

But, you know, I will say, you know, because I also come from a queer family that's in North Carolina and, you know, and it's, I think, been a really powerful thing to watch.

You know, just, you know, from my kind of in high school up to the to the present, watching the kind of cultural evolution that's happened and the sort of back and forth ness that's really kind of inscribed.

You know, I think, you know, I love that you said, you know, wearing a kind of a rainbow T-shirt because I think there's something that really feels very embodied about, you know, when you walk into spaces and, you know, feeling like you have certain identities kind of ascribed or inscribed on who you are and that then restrict, you know, particularly when when it comes to restricting mobility or restricting access or something.

So, you know, I come from my hometown is a city that's about the size of Portsmouth.

It's about a little over two hundred thousand.

And it's in a larger metro area of about a million, you know, and then if you drive 30 minutes out into the country, you know, my brother does, it's very kind of stereotypical.

And that would be a kind of a, you know, a space that would be a little bit more a little bit more a lot more dangerous for people, for lots of different bodies and for lots of different ways of being, you know, and and so knowing that, I think that's another thing that I would say about the states.

I mean, its so massive and then in each state is you have these pocket subcommunities that are maybe right next to each other and maybe really, really, really culturally distinct where like the markers of, you know, if you look at the demographic data, you know, the people in this [in] town A and in town B might be very, very different from another.

A might have much more in common with another state, you know, particularly when it comes to education levels, when it comes to how much people make, you know, whether the people own their homes, the kinds of homes they own, etc..

Yeah.

So, I mean, it's just a diverse, multifaceted thing.

Leila, can I add something to that?

If you were to look at a map of the United States and you all might have seen this during election time with it, but they have the blue in the red and you can see where liberals versus conservatives live.

Liberals tend to live in the larger cities.

And it's it's sort of like it sort of starts up in the northeast and it works its way down along the coasts.

And then it sort of disappears in the centre and it starts back in Los Angeles and works its way up along the coast.

Everything in between is largely red.

So you have this you have a large amount of liberal minded Americans living sort of on either side of the country with um, with this very conservative base sort of making up the inside.

Now, mind you, the population density goes down as you get further into the centre of the U.S.

But it is it is striking to me that we have 50 states.

I wonder and I've often wondered with my brother and my brother is an absolute genius when it comes to politics.

Perhaps he's the one who should be in here today.

But we've often wondered if the US is just becoming too big to govern.

From a federal perspective.

Yeah, that's pretty interesting and I'm you know, I'm going to challenge you a little bit because, yes, the US is a big country, but you have bigger countries who are much more diverse, actually, culturally, ethnically in terms of religion.

In the U.S.

this diversity or rather the sort of, as you said, tension between the federal and state is very much and encouraged and supported by the Constitution.

So the are legal and political elements to that, it doesn't come naturally.

And this is exactly what you said, you know, Brian, we were talking about adopting reform and it's going to be a struggle for President Biden, as it was for Obama, I suppose, to let us see.

But I'd like you to go back to the question of equality.

And we can't, you know, not mention and discuss in detail the Black Lives Matter movement.

So what do you think about that and Biden's reaction to it and how is going to reform or not the country knowing that Biden himself, you know, in the campaign had to fight against a number of controversies, not particularly clear what his position has been always.

Well, I mean, I think, you know, watching certainly his remarks right after Derek Chauvin was found guilty, Derek Chauvin who murdered George Floyd, you know, was I think you I think it was a kind of a turning point moment, but it was also really fascinating, you know, because I kept wondering, what would he have said had the outcome been different of the trial?

I think that this is where, to be honest, this is one of the reasons why I wasn't a Biden supporter until the 11th hour, until he was the candidate.

You know, he was never a candidate who for me spoke out in the way that I felt that we needed to speak out, because I think that the reckoning that's happening right now in the United States has certainly been a long time coming.

And it's certainly not reaching certain parts of the country.

You know, it's certainly still very much, I think, a polarised notion.

You know, there are still plenty of people who categorise Black Lives Matter, honestly, as a terrorist movement, which to me is, I think, offensive as well as bonkers.

But but I think that, you know, I think what Biden has been trying to do for a long time is really kind of walk some sort of middle line.

And while, you know, I think diplomacy is, you know, I think the art of listening to everybody, I think at a certain point, you know, we still need leadership that I think is much more focussed on the way in which we can create opportunities to really I don't know, we need a truth and reconciliation kind of movement or something like that, potentially in the United States.

But that really requires wholesale grassroots engagement, you know, to reach people like certain family members of mine who would really disagree with what I'm saying right now.

So.

This is a very popular topic, with my students, the Black Lives Matter movement, obviously, you know, I've looked at I've looked at people's fear of crime and crime.

Violent crime has gone up in the US, I think, by 30 percent from 1919, I'm sorry, 2019 to 2020, its gone up about 30 percent in particular.

And I think Americans are more concerned about if you look at where what Americans are concerned about right now, they're concerned about health care.

That's number one.

Crime is is very far down the list.

With respect to Black Lives Matter, I am also a critical criminologist, and so I tend to focus more on abuses of authority, if you will, than I do knife crime on the street.

And it interests me as well.

To be quite honest with you, I don't feel as though I'm an expert in this area.

I can tell you that we may see a Biden victory as a victory for the BLM movement, but there are many who claim that it is not actually a victory, that that it will be a victory when criminal justice reform starts to really take shape.

And criminal justice reform with with an increasing crime rate is nowhere in the near future.

Because when you consider when you consider the ratio of black individuals in the population to those who are incarcerated, it's absolutely it's ridiculous.

It's insane, it's insane.

Yeah, work, criminal justice system training of the police and also, again, certainly not to properly state level, et cetera.

Erika would you like to add on that or shall we move to the next question?

Oh, no, no, no, no.

We can move on.

Leila can add pointed out that can I add a point in the ten years that I've lived in the United Kingdom, I can say that when I was a police officer behind me on the road, my heart does not start to race.

In the US, even though I'm a white man, whenever a police officer, my mother could attest to this and whenever a police car was behind my vehicle, my blood pressure would go up because you just have no idea who you're dealing with.

Yeah, same, yeah.

I agree completely.

That's really interesting to hear and I'm sure the UK police are going to be pleased with that, although it's also under scrutiny.

I mean, yeah Yeah, but yes, it's really interesting.

We receive a number of questions about the idea of leadership in particular.

Andrew, can I ask what leadership approach you can attribute to Joe Biden in his first 100 days?

And to that, I'd like to add a little bit, because we often hear or read that he's been very much influenced by a younger group of people, relatively leftist, so does it play a part in his leadership.

How do you see that his leadership and the influence to it?

His leadership style, it's I mean, it's reminiscent of of the Obama years.

It's very reminiscent of the Obama years.

It's it's a bit more laid back.

It's not obviously it's not as aggressive as Trump was.

I see his presidency in the first 100 days, it seems to me.

Not really.

You called it a honeymoon.

I think I attribute it more to a lame duck presidency, sort of the last few months of a presidency, because it doesn't really seem like he's able to get some of these crucial bills through both the House and the Senate.

What one of those is, is forgiveness of student debt.

Another would be health care, obviously.

So is he going to be able to accomplish what he set out to do in these first two years, or are we going to have to wait for these mid-term elections to see if we can actually get more Democrats in the Senate and the House of Representatives?

But I think this is very reminiscent Erika you might agree with me.

It reminds me of when I keep expecting Obama to walk out of the out of the wings and say, actually, I am the president still, you know.

I would be OK with that.

All things considered.

But, you know, but I think that the other thing is, you know, I think it's yeah, I would completely agree.

I think it's it's very reminiscent of the Obama years.

And at the same time, I think it's also I think he's really trying to hearken back to a notion of sort of statesmanship, you know, for lack of a better word, in the in the White House, after the you know, after the optics of the Trump era were so diffuse and scattershot.

And so I think this also really has to do with, you know, the the comparative lack of a Twitter, Twitter, you know, presence.

Its not that they don't have one.

But I mean, certainly they want.

It is nice to see.

You know, it's not this kind of rapid fire.

You know, it's measured as measured.

I mean, it's funny, you know, because I think Joe Biden did used to have this sort of, hey, you know, I'm a kind of loose cannon kind of reputation.

And, you know, now in the shadow of Trump, I mean, completely not chase, you know, in retrospect.

But so I think that the mode of transmission has to you know, it's really about the optics of maintaining control, maintaining self-control, not seeming like the kind of you know, I mean, you know, sometimes I kept wondering actually during the Trump era, you know, if they were doing this sort of Henry Kissinger, sort of Nixon as the mad man, sort of play, you know, which I don't think actually was the case, would be tactical.

But but anyway, you know, this is a kind of a reverse of that notion of and of one of deliberateness.

It is nice to not have a Twitter presidency anymore.

And in all fairness, and I can I can I can hardly find anything to to defend Trump for.

It was sort of interesting to have a president that commented on everything as inappropriately as it was on a daily basis and it reached so many.

You knew what was on his mind.

I'm not too sure I know what's going on in Biden's mind, but I am happy with this, with stepping back from Twitter.

So in a way, you've responded to Jule's remark not too soon to assess what's going on.

And of course, it is too soon.

It's just an exercise, you know, it's a ritual.

We always do that.

And you've given me a good transition talking about the media, because, you know, when you say, well, Trump was doing everything he thought on Twitter, did you think he was a bit more strategic?

And that is also something to please the masses, his electorate, et cetera, because I would really like to discuss with you knowing that you have a media and also art background, how do you portray leadership?

How do you carry yourself?

What sort of image that you give to the world?

Oh, yeah, I mean, I do I do agree, I don't think that Trump was completely off the cuff and I do think that there were so many very famously coded messages, particularly when it came to reaching out to the right wing or to the Qanon supporters or whatnot, you know, but, you know, at a certain point when you have so many layers of triple, quadruple speak, you know, then at a certain point the kind of core materiality of it becomes inconsequential.

And it's just about the manoeuvring of power lines, you know, in those in those kinds of moments.

So I yeah.

So I study the media, but I study the media's representations of crime.

But I so I it's a bit sort of out of my my depth.

But I can tell you that when I went home for Christmas a couple of years ago, I had to turn the news off because it was so negative.

I mean, even referring to the liberal media, it was it was just this constant barrage of anti Trump attacks.

And if you switched it to [Fox] news, it was it was obviously anti liberal attacks.

But but it became it got to the point where I I wasn't even I wasn't even looking at the news on a daily basis because it was just it just was this this constant flow of negativity.

And I understand that Americans in that and that, you know, media outlets, which tend to be more liberal.

Yes.

If you look at CNN, The New York Times, my favourite, but just there is no there was no hope in the media, in my opinion.

And I see hope now, which is good.

And I see less complaining, less, you know, whinging if you will.

Again, you know about the creation of an image.

What about Biden?

What sort of image is he trying to create, if any?

Or is he just leaving that to some of his team members?

When I imagine Biden you know, Biden sort of reminds me of my dad a little bit.

Right.

It's very hard to get a straight answer out of him.

He's a he's a true and true politician.

OK, it's almost like and I'm not I don't mean this to be callous or to be mean, but I don't see that the type of personality I saw in, for instance, Bernie Sanders.

Bernie Sanders, I mean, you know, you could you could caricature him, you know, very, very easily.

I mean, there were very with American politics and I'm 51 years old.

I've been voting since I was 18.

I used to read the, you know, all of the blogs.

And I used to read all the websites that show you sort of how people are leaning one way or the other.

And I would follow the news, you know, vociferous.

I mean, just it was it got to a point where I started to vote for candidates that I had a good gut feeling about.

Right?

Because you just don't know what is being espoused by the media.

You don't know what's true.

You don't know what's not true.

You don't know what they're telling you.

And so it went I would go with my gut know that that sounds really irresponsible, but do I like this person?

Do I feel like I can trust them?

And that's what that's what my measure was.

Does that make sense?

It does who is Brian.

I'm going to play devil's advocate.

So you go by your gut.

But what about emotion in politics?

You know, are you precisely voting?

And that's the reason Trump was elected?

I mean, we can't discount the fact that for the past twenty five years or so, I've studied deviant behaviour and that, you know, one of the things that I teach my students is how to how to recognise deception and eye movements.

So I think my gut is a bit more informed than perhaps someone else is.

But, you know, I just didn't get that feeling with Sanders.

I don't trust Biden as much as I trust.

I trusted Sanders from that sort of coming from that perspective, if that makes sense.

Yeah, you know, I think for me, you know, if we're thinking about legacy and the kind of what sort of Biden wants to have is his sort of thing, you know, I think I think he was really going for this new new deal that as of today is a trillion dollar investment into US infrastructure that as of today is kind of on hold because of the because he couldn't kind of get enough support on the Republican side.

You know, and you've got these two Democratic senators, one of whom Krysten Sinema is from Arizona.

She's actually a former colleague technically at Arizona State, you know, and and so you've got these kind of maverick people, which I mean, I think when you see the precarity of the situation, you see how easy it is for any kind of one or a couple of individuals to sort of hijack the system and then take real power in these in this situation.

So, you know, I think that what Biden you know, I don't know.

But my my sense is that based on what he was doing, he was trying to have a legacy of being this kind of new deal, also reaching across aisles, also the kind of, you know, ultimate, you know, for everybody president.

And we all know that to quote another president, you can please some of the people all the time, all the people some of the time.

But, you know, I think it would be really interesting to actually see now that this trillion dollar investments kind of collapsed, what the next steps are for his administration to reach across the aisle.

Really interesting.

So we're post post-truth, I suppose.

So let's go back to, let's say, a very, very important topics.

And we're going to talk about immigration.

We've received a question from Marius.

What are your views on Biden and how his policies on immigration, especially on the thoughts of Border Harris warning off undocumented migrants and the increase of the I.C.E. budget to eight billion?

That I guess so, yeah, I you know, it's it's not a good move on my know, in my opinion, it to me, you know, it's sort of it's saying one thing and doing another.

Yeah.

Eight billion to ICE is not really a lot when you think of it in comparison to other programmes that they spend money on.

But and we do know that they will probably be treated with more respect than they were under a Trump presidency if if they do cross over into the US.

But I come from Los Angeles and it's very close to the Mexican border.

I we have a very vibrant, thriving Mexican immigrant and Mexican-American community.

I would welcome them with open arms.

I'm not a politician.

I don't understand the ramifications of letting undocumented workers in.

I do know it's very similar to sort of what the UK was experiencing with them.

I just of a recent report on the BBC about a certain villages and cities not being able to staff their businesses because there are no there are no more Europeans to to take those jobs.

It's the same with the US, especially the closer you get to the border, there are there are jobs that Americans just simply won't take that that people who come over the border are more than happy to take.

Should they have to take those types of jobs?

Probably not.

But warning them off, in my opinion, is just it is not a very good move.

And let's not forget that, you know, Harris comes from the criminal justice background.

Right.

And so she might I mean, I'm sure she is sort of she's sort of indoctrinated into that way of thinking, but.

Yeah, not a good move.

I would say my I think my response is also in part anecdotal, because before moving to Portsmouth, I spent five years in Arizona, which is another border state and a very hotly contested you know, it's a very guarded border.

And a lot of that guarding of the border also comes internally.

Local policing in the state of Arizona actually passed a law that was overturned by the Supreme Court.

But it was a completely racist law where the police could basically ask you for your citizenship.

You know, I had so many undocumented students at Arizona State University when I was teaching there.

You know, there are there are you know, it's this the system is such that you see the flaws in the notion of the way that the border exists because you have legacies of populations crossing that space.

You know, before the United States decided to to draw a line there, you know, you have communities, you have cultural identity that goes back predating the United States in that region.

And so, you know, so it's just it's know.

So when you see the line itself be drawn and how arbitrary it is, I think it's that much more heartbreaking because, you know, you're really dividing you're continuing to destroy the communities that that predated the United States.

And I think Let's not forget that we have a state called New Mexico that doesn't allow the Mexicans into the state.

So, I mean, it it is sort of an irony.

A cruel irony.

Yeah, definitely.

Definitely.

So my heart broke when she said, you know, she's said, Harris in Guatemala and said, please don't come here.

And that sense that's the other thing I want to say.

You know, in that sense, I do think this is very much a return to Obama's policies because Obama was actually very hard on the border in a way that was really surprising.

And, you know, I think a lot about eight billion will you know, I think, as Brian said, you know, it will be about the facilities are terrible.

I mean, they're really terrible, you know, and if you are going to you are going to house people, at least give them a toilet, at least give them some space, you know.

But but yeah, I mean, I wish I would be full scale immigration reform, so because I'm an immigrant myself.

But don't you think it's also a bit of a reality check?

You know, when people need to come to power, not everybody is very pro immigration.

I'm everywhere in the world, including people from the left.

They dea,l with the reality of immigration and they they can't sell or send a welcome sign.

Please come in.

That's that that's complex.

And it has to do and I don't know whether you want to discuss that, but it has to do with international relation and how the US is projecting itself in the world.

The US in Latin America, the US in Africa, US multinational companies in Latin America and Africa and Asia, etc..

So so in this regard.

And then we'll move to the next question on climate change and a few other questions.

But what about foreign policy?

How do you see the US sort of well changing or not changing about Biden and his state secretary saying multiplel times, you know, we are the world's leaders and what we do is for the US first and foremost, so doesn't change anything Yeah Leila I think the world is going to wait to see what happens not only after the first two years, but certainly after after the after Biden has served out his presidency and then maybe runs for re-election.

I think the world is because we are we are potentially into this.

This, to me, feels like the time when Adolf Hitler was in prison.

This is what this feels like to me right now.

Is Trump going to come back with a vengeance in three and a half years, or are we going to are we going to elect Biden again?

But I think the world is going to because we've seen how easily it is through executive order to reverse so many international agreements that I imagine the world's a bit sketchy when it comes to American politics right now.

I mean, my sister was the international relations scholar, she should probably be in here as well.

But that's probably all I can say.

Are I myself am a bit sketchy on, you know, living abroad, you know, will these executive orders that he's signing and these reversals of what trumped it, will they stick or will they be reversed again when a Republican comes into office in three and a half years?

And I think what's super fascinating about that, too, is that, you know, if something is that easy to change, how substantial is the agreement to begin with?

How substaintial is the notion of, you know, these these big accords or these folks fly out, decide things?

You know, to what extent is that actually manifesting actual on the ground change or activity?

And, you know, and I think, you know, the Paris accords climate is one thing.

I think the real thing will be, you know, are they going to tax everybody now is at the same rate, you know, is this going to be when it comes to money?

So if you think about it, China actually becomes, in my, in my opinion, more attractive to do business with because it's not subject to these changes every four years or every two years.

Right.

It is more stable because their citizenry obviously doesn't have the right to sort of change the Communist Party out of rule.

So it's an interesting question.

I'm not an international scholar, but I do live abroad and I've become very aware of these issues as an expat.

Again, you know, I'm just going to crack the joke.

One shouldn't underestimate the stability of dictatorship.

Yeah, so that's China.

Then let let us move to climate change, because that's a good transition.

The climate change question from Karen.

When Trump name climate change, it looks corporate America.

But with companies issuing their own Paris aligned pledges, even without pressure from regulators leading to the to where we are now.

So do you think BIden's global climate summit and commitment to cut U.S.

carbon dioxide output between 50 and 52% percent by 2030 compared to 2005 level is possible?

And does it go far enough?

That's technical, but generally climate change related.

What do you think?

Well, I mean, I think there's there's US, you know, I'm not I'm not a total specialist on the exact numbers, but certainly the way I think I think we need to think about these things globally because, you know, if it's not being produced in the United States, but things are being outsourced, you know, and there's the same notion of kind of pollution just happening at different places.

You know, I don't know that we're really making any kind of long, long term changes.

And I would also just be dubious every time you get these big announcements of cuts, know a cut in you know, in relation to what?

In relation to what it actually was in relation to what it was projected to be, you know.

So is it a cut on the line that's already kind of going up?

You know?

And, you know, I think these statistics are one thing, but I think, you know, instead of a commitment to cutting carbon dioxide, I think that the discourse probably should shift to actually doing things differently.

So not the output, but but the mechanisms to get there.

What I what I found interesting that same that same sort of I'm referring to a survey that had been done by Axios Ipsos about what Americans are interested in and said that crime was sort of in the middle of the list with health care being at the top.

I believe climate change was number two or number three on that list.

So Americans are actually very interested in this debate and I find that promising.

I think you can find you do have your climate change deniers, but I think that's that's the very far right.

I think that Republicans and Democrats.

My sister's a Republican.

We are both we're both interested in these issues.

I don't have children, but my brothers and sisters do.

And it's for their futures.

I think that people are concerned.

So as long as Americans are interested in this and and wanting to sort of I do find it interesting, though, that Jeff Bezos apparently there was a report that he's wealthy enough now to change the to reverse the climate change situation.

I think he is worth a trillion dollars now, something like that.

Well, it's interesting that an American would have that much money, but that Americans are interested that Americans have this ranked high on their priority, I think will drive the agenda forward.

Leila, you look as if you're going to say something.

No, no, no.

I'm smiling again.

I was thinking, oh, we talk about taxation, but we touch upon that one thing you mentioned, you alluded to American support to the tax system.

The G-7 has come up with a proposition, as you know.

So let's just see.

But that's another topic I'd like to talk about with you, if you don't mind.

Is the question of health obviously in a pandemic and health.

So how much do you see?

Do you think there will be a significant evolution in the in the near future?

No, I just think that is the number one issue on Americans minds.

And I think 15 percent of Americans, that is the most important issue to them.

And I just before that, before the our seminar today, our workshops today, I looked up how much it would cost me to insure myself in the state of California.

It is roughly the cheapest plan I could find was around four hundred and fifty dollars, which is around, you know, it's it's comparable to what I pay to the national insurance each month as working here in the U.K.

But then you have to factor in the costs of out of pocket the costs of doctor.

The Doctor visit would have been sixty five dollars per visit.

And so I, I don't think that these well, Biden has promised to make changes to the federal marketplace, but the state marketplaces, I think, are priced out of just out of control.

My mother might be able to comment something on that as well because she's living there presently.

But but it isn't the one thing on Americans minds right now.

And I don't see that, you know, I just I just don't see it again.

It's one of those issues that will change every two or four years based on who is occupying the houses.

Yeah, you know, I, I think part of the problem is that there's not really a notion or a conception of health care that isn't at a high cost in the United States.

I mean, isn't it's not in the world view.

It's not in the kind of frame of reference of most Americans.

This was true for myself when I moved here and I had to go to the doctor before I'd gotten my NHS card or whatever.

I mean, and you didn't even need it.

I have no idea what you needed, but I thought I needed a thing.

And I called them.

They said, oh, you should just come here to the Eastney health Centre.

And then and I was like, how much is it going to cost?

And they were like  'excuse me?' And well I said how much is this going to cost?

We went back and forth for, like two, three minutes because was just completely I didn't understand that you wouldn't have to pay.

Right.

And then I thought, OK, why are you going to bill me?

So I mean, I think that the notion that we could could change.

And it's not that it doesn't cost money, it's not that it grows on trees.

We don't have a in the United States any kind of system that isn't about the really flawed notion of personal responsibility when it comes to your health.

Can I add to that?

I say I'm also an Italian citizen, Leila, and as an Italian citizen, I can travel throughout Europe.

And if I take ill in any of those countries, I can show my EHIC and get treatment.

So this is another thing I think that is foreign to Americans is that when we travel abroad as Americans without that type of coverage, we have to take out insurance and it could be quite costly.

So it is sort of it's a it's an interesting concept.

Americans can't wrap their heads around what it means to not pay for health care.

But until that's written into our Constitution, a guarantee of health care.

And to go to Emanuels question, yes, Obamacare has failed.

In my opinion.

Its people are priced out of that market.

They can't afford it.

It's a very paradoxical country, really, because it has supported a number of rights principally civil and political rights.

When you think about it, the US is no the main UN Convention on economic and social rights.

It's not a party to the ILO convention or forced labour.

It has not acknowledged or supported most of the ILO, the International Labour Organisation Convention on Unionisation, on negotiation, bargaining.

And we talk about supposedly the advance Western democracy.

Well, I mean, when you consider that the UK also is not, you know, is not the first in line to say international agreements that bind its hands, the US is very similar in that regard.

But you're absolutely right.

I mean, it is paradoxical and it's somewhat hypocritical at times.

And it's also not surprising then that that's the country where the kind of new oligarchs that are controlling, you know, all of global commerce have arisen out of, you know, I mean, the the labour.

I'll be super frank.

You know, one of the reasons that I wanted to become a professor when I was young was, you know, my father got laid off and I being a professor in the United States with tenure is pretty much the only secure, really secure job analogous to a permanent position that we have in the United States.

So the concept doesn't even when you're in a union state, you only got half the states even have half the states have I think it's right to right to higher state and you can be fired for pretty much any reason.

So I just.

Yeah, and I think as long as as long as representatives and senators are enjoying a very comfortable health care package, they're not going to be able to see beyond.

They're not going to be able to see the forest through the trees and understand how it really is that I have a good friend I've just spoken to who went to high school with her, her and her partner.

They are they are at the poverty level and they were still the cheapest plan for them in California was over a thousand dollars per month.

Yeah.

And when you consider that the poverty level is roughly I think it was when I left, it was roughly around fifteen thousand dollars.

Is it higher than that?

Interestingly studies have shown that the poverty level or the number of people under the poverty level in the US have only increased and massively in the past 10 years.

So with that, again, you know, it's paradoxical when you think about the wealth accumulated in the US.

So this gives us an excellent transition to talk about Barnaby's question.

Barnaby's question was basically about the left.

Is there something as a left in the US?

You know, I doubt that, but BIden wasn't the first choice for many people of the left.

How do you see the future of the Democratic Party on bridging the divide in the party and in particular regaining the support of young people who feel disillusioned with the two party system?

I, I because I think this I think this is it is not like we're talking about a test of the international community to see how we would succeed in these two and four years coming forth.

But I think it's also a test for Democrats and those who didn't vote for Biden or didn't want to vote for Biden.

I don't think they'll be so lucky the next time around.

If Biden does not achieve what he set out to achieve.

I think we've had such a taste of of, you know, a horrific four years presidency that I think it will be a much stronger movement next time around if Biden does not succeed.

And I think, you know, generationally, I think that the young millennials or the so-called GenZ are already so well mobilised, you know, and I think so well mobilised politically, I mean, if we think about the way in which, you know, who's really supporting climate change in the United States.

Well, it's definitely a generational movement.

You know, it is definitely a generational divide.

And we think about certain issues like that, you know, and I'll be I'm super interested to see the kind of young leaders like particularly like AOC, you know, and what you know, what she and not just her, but, you know, kind of I think what she perhaps represents, you know, it'll be really interesting to see how she leverages the position she's in in the next, assuming that she gets re-elected, which will be the real challenge.

You know, how is she going to leverage that in support of other voices that haven't been at the table, A and then other voices who are really going to push for things like universal health care, like getting rid of student debt, et cetera, et cetera, the internal stuff that, you know, that's not even to talk about foreign policy.

So, yeah, that's really, really interesting.

We have time for two more questions.

There is a remark from Marius.

The US has given itself the right in law to invade.

What I see Marius and correct me if I'm wrong, that you're talking about intervention, and this idea of pre-emptive sort of intervention.

So obviously, this is extremely controversial within international law.

Did I understand what you wanted to say?

It was just in response.

Sorry to your comments that the U.S.

refuses to sign up to a lot of international agreements.

Britain is somewhat recusant as well.

To the extent and and the U.S.

is not a party to the International Criminal Court, I mean, not the one the US has destroyed the World Trade Organisation dispute settlement system and so on and so forth.

Yeah, maybe more questions.

Sorry Brian, do you want to say something?

I'm not.

I'm not.

I'm opening up the link here, though, Marius.

And it looks like it's dated back to 2002.

So I'm not I'm a bit confused, actually.

I haven't heard that it's been repealed.

I see what you mean.

OK, I no, I'm not both here.

I just I don't I'm not familiar with this, but I can tell you that Americans in general would probably never allow themselves to be subjected to an international court's ruling.

It's a very, very similar mindset Brits.

Very similar to Brits.

I mean, generally speaking, when you when you hear sort of yeah, yeah, yeah, in terms of mindset, probably because there's the feeling that there is a strong domestic legal system.

In reality, it's very different.

Let me clarify that and say that it's similar to the mindset of Brits who voted to take us out of the union.

Why don't I say that?

Right.

That that's different.

But yeah, I understand what's...

And, of course, a question from Andrew Media eports reveal Biden failed to acknowledge the veterans on the 77th anniversary of the D-Day.

Do you think it was an oversight or a conscious decision?

I think as Biden gets older, we're going to see more oversights.

Well, I think he's 77 now.

But, yeah, I mean, I would imagine this is an oversight.

I mean, in the United States, you know, you just had Memorial Day.

And so I would imagine we're very prouf of our veterans, very proud of our veterans.

Yes, very proud.

So I'm sure this was just, you know, logistically thinking about where to distribute the most yeah...

And maybe the last question for me, because you both have a media and art background to some extent.

So what do you think about creation, the future of creation in the US?

Because on the contrary to Europe again, and at least the U.K., you know, I'm French and in France is quite particular about where artists are very much supported.

They receive a lot of help from the government its not the case at all in the US.

And friends who've been in the US gone through terrible periods because they have zero nothing.

Right.

So so how do you see that?

You know, I think there is a period of time when the National Endowment for the Arts really suffered major blows and then especially with Trump coming in, I think that will be reversed.

I think I think that, you know, the day for artist has yet to come again.

I want to agree, but, you know, I think for me, I think it even goes deeper than that because, you know, so much about the around the discourse to be, learning to be an artist in the United States now is learning to hustle, learning to brand yourself, learning to sell yourself.

You know, it's very much art being produced in a capitalist environment and art as a product.

And, you know, and that really runs counter to, you know, sort of how is it how it is in much of Europe.

I think the U.K. is even even though we have this kind of notion of creative and cultural industries, you know, I'm in the school of creative and cultural industries.

But there's still much more state support for the arts in comparison to the United States, where it's really seen in this in this capitalist box.

And so, you know, basically, I mean, since the 90s was really the early 90s.

That was the fall of the NEA, where some conservative senators in the United States took an opportunity to play a kind of a conservative card and say, yes, yeah, exactly.

You know, and and and so, you know, since then, you know, artists have really been labelled as dangerous.

That's the environment that I grew up in.

And so, of course, I wanted to be one.

No, but yeah.

But I think that it's really important, I think, for us to remember that, you know, that capitalist shell that's over, I think, everything that's happening in the United States and watching it kind of play out, you know, we're really the kind of ultimate petri dish in that regard.

So is it going to be the last word, this sort of capitalist approach?

Well, it is.

You know, it is sort of the elephant in the room, isn't it?

You know, It is.

But let's maybe conclude because we've covered a lot, let's maybe conclude with something more positive.

Something we all love about the US is precisely art and creation and what it has brought maybe in a very commercial way sometimes, but what it has brought in terms of freedom of expression and including artistic expression.

Absolutely.

Yes, definitely.

Excellent.

Well, thank you so much, Erika and Brian.

That was a great conversation.

Thank you very much, everyone, for taking part in this conversation.

If you're interested in US history.

On the twenty third, we have Dr. Bonny Ling on the question of slavery to sort of discuss the question of slavery in the US and more broadly today.

Well, thank you so much.

And I'll see you very soon for another Research Futures.

Thanks, everyone.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Bye bye.

Thank you and thank you very much to He, Claudia, Gloria, Barnaby.

I think we've gotten to say that.

And thanks so much for joining us.

Thanks a lot.

Thank you.