In this May 2020 episode of The Dennis Prager Radio Show, host Dennis Prager interviews urban scholar Joel Kotkin about his newly released book The Coming of Neo‑Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class and a recent Hill article titled “Hygienic Fascism: Turning the World into a Safe Space.” Kotkin argues that COVID‑19 lockdowns, driven by health officials and executive orders rather than elected legislatures, constitute a form of “hygienic fascism” that accelerates a global shift toward neo‑feudalism. He describes a world in which wealth, power, and especially control of information are concentrating in the hands of a few large tech and media corporations (Amazon, Netflix, major newspaper owners) and a self‑reinforcing “clerisy” of academics and journalists. This elite, he says, is dismantling the middle‑class foundation of democracy—small property owners, artisans, and local businesses—turning many into “new serfs” who will likely accept socialist solutions. Kotkin cites the pandemic’s economic damage to small businesses (e.g., a barber in Santa Ana) and points to Sweden’s less restrictive approach as a living counter‑example. Prager interjects with his own history of challenging epidemiological consensus on second‑hand smoke, framing the current public‑health response as a continuation of expert‑driven overreach. The conversation weaves together critiques of centralized expert authority, the role of big tech in shaping public discourse, and the broader historical parallel to medieval church authority, concluding that the pandemic may hasten a reversal of the past 30‑40 years of global prosperity.
Chapters
I have been citing his pieces for much of my career, and he's been a guest on a number of occasions. He has a book that was just published, I think this week, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. Joel Kotkin, where are you holed up at?
I'm holed up in Orange County, and I have to say that if you're going to be holed up somewhere, there are worse places.
Yes, you remind me of my standard answer in the hallways of my radio station when people will say, how are you? And I can go, could be worse. And they think it's a bad answer. And I go, no, no, no, could be better is a bad answer. So, all right, you're in Orange County, California. What do you think of the directives coming from the governor? in this case, he's not your mayor, but of Mayor Garcetti and Governor Newsom?
Well, Newsom, at least, has, from what I can gather, has a certain degree of rationality or some escape pod. Garcetti and Alameda County, I don't know what they think they're doing. But I mean, essentially, if you wanted to create a situation in which you further destroy what's left of your middle class, this would have been a really good way of doing it.
Wow, oh my God, you know, I actually, I got a, what is the feeling in your stomach when you hear bad news? That's what I got when you said that.
Well, you know, you think about this is one of the themes of the book is that already the middle class, the small property owner, the Main Street merchant, the artisan, they were struggling before and they're struggling all over the world, against, you know, big tech companies, government regulators, all these other pressures. And then you add, we're shutting you down. Oh, by the way, we're not shutting down, you know, the big chains, and we're not— and we're certainly— this has been great for Silicon Valley and for the big oligarchical firms. But if— how long can my— the guy who cuts my hair who's in Santa Ana, How long do you think he's going to be able to go without having any revenue for 4 months?
That's what I've been saying from the beginning. I've called this the biggest mistake in mankind's history. And every day there's more evidence of it. And thank God Sweden is a living example of not engaged in this. So you wrote a piece and folks, whatever he writes is clear and he's an original thinker. and it's important, important, including this book which has just come out, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. Well, you wrote a piece for The Hill. What is the date on this? Let's see.
I think it came out Monday, didn't it?
5/10, so yeah, May 10th. Hygienic Fascism: Turning the World into a Safe Space. But at what cost? That's right. Hi, you, have you ever used fascism in an American context before?
Well, I've written, and I actually, when I was at school, I studied fascism in quite a bit of detail. I've never used it in the same way that I'm using it now, in that, I mean, this is part of the whole question of If you believe, and I think many people who are influential believe, that really what we need to do is to have designated experts, you know, and obviously those experts we agree with, tell us what to do. I mean, what's really kind of fascistic about a lot of this, in one sense, the legislature isn't there. The city council isn't making the regulations. The regulations are coming from a health official and the executive. Well, that's a pretty good model of fascism to start with. And then this whole notion that you should be able to control every aspect of people's lives, which I think the climate change movement was already sort of inculcating, and now this is taken to an extreme. And of course, you know, it's easy for those of us who, like, you know, for me, I've worked at home almost my whole career. I live in a nice neighborhood. I can, you know, I can be, I can be relatively comfortable, but look at the people who, you know, if you're, you know, my daughter works at Home Depot in Tucson, and she says people are getting ruder and ruder just because, you know, they're frustrated. You know, you're, let's say, a working-class family, they've lost their jobs, they're 4 people in a 1-bedroom apartment, and they're in lockdown. I mean, what are we doing to ourselves?
I just wanna say, you don't even have to react. You're certainly welcome to be, but I'm not asking you to do so. But my listeners, I wanna remind them, because many, many people listening to me over decades, I know, thought that I had a sort of idiosyncratic reaction to the battle against secondhand smoke. And I told people from the outset that I thought the epidemiologists were lying, L-Y-I-N-G, absolutely lying. 50,000 Americans a year die of secondhand smoke. Thought it was preposterous. I had the UCLA epidemiologist say it was preposterous. He then had to leave UCLA. And this is, it's sort of, first they came after cigar smokers and then they'll come after you. In Burbank, California, you can't smoke a cigar in a cigar store. And this was okay with people because 95% of people don't— 98% don't smoke cigars. But I knew, I knew that this was a bad tea leaf. And now we are seeing what you write, hygienic fascism, taking place.
And I think a lot of it is, in some senses, is that science, which instead of being something that we debate— I've read so many different things other epidemiologists, they have different ideas. There's an official science. The same thing has been true with climate. Even if you can prove that it was wrong, you think about predictions of, you know, what Newsom say, what, 15, 20 million Californians would get, would get the virus. Uh, the, the, um, they were predicting 2 million deaths in the United States. I, I would remind people here in Southern California and in the state of California, we've had more deaths from the seasonal flu than from COVID This year?
This year?
This year, by a good margin too.
And that affects people of all ages.
Right. I mean, the number— the reality is that, you know, we should have, as the Swedes have come to the conclusion, you protect your vulnerable populations.
Right, that's exactly right.
You know, people with comorbidity factors.
So what's the thesis of your book?
Well, the thesis is basically that we're evolving on a global basis, and of course this is going to accelerate it, where there's greater concentration of wealth and power in ever fewer hands, and most frightening of all, the control of the means of information in this group of smaller and smaller hands. I mean, I find it terrifying that companies like Amazon and Netflix are going to have enormous influence. The networks are all owned by these sort of big companies already. Many of the major newspapers are owned by them. So you have this elite class, then you have what I call the clerisy, which is sort of the yammerers, the media, the academics, the very, you know, where you basically get an academic to tell you the world's gonna come to an end unless we do something drastic. And you— there's no debate. And this is very medieval, you know, the medieval Catholic Church was not exactly a place of spirited debate on key ecclesiastical questions, let's put it that way. And then you've got this yeomanly, the middle class, which has been the basis of democracy, small property owners, small businesses, artisans, that is the class that's globally getting really destroyed. And many of them, and their children in particular, are becoming what I would call the new serfs. They're not— they're never going to own a house. They're never going to have a business. They're going to live marginally. And frankly, a lot of those people are going to opt for a more or less socialist model, because why not? So the bottom line is we are moving to a society that will grow slower, have less prosperity. We've had this enormous global increase in prosperity in the last 30, 40 years. I think we're about to see that reverse, some of it on climate and now with the pandemic.
We'll be back in a moment. Joel Kotkin's book is up at DennisPrager.com, and it comes with a small knife for you to slit your wrists. Back in a moment.
