Chris Ruffo joins me to talk about the chaos in Chicago, and why the protests are actually a good thing for Kamala Harris and her campaign. We also discuss the new right wing movement, and what it means for the future of the Democratic Party and the 2020 campaign. And, of course, we talk about what the heck is going on with the America First movement and what does it mean for the 2020 Democratic nomination race. Thanks to Chris Ruffo for joining me on the pod, and thanks to all of the protesters in Chicago for the chaos. And thanks also to the thousands of pro-Democrat protesters who have descended on the streets of Chicago to demonstrate against the Democratic National Convention in support of the party's presidential nominee, Kamala "Kamala" Harris. Thank you to all the protesters, and thank you to everyone else who has joined us in the fight against the DNC and all the craziness going on in the streets this week in and around the city of Chicago. It's been a crazy week, and it's going to get even crazier next week. I hope you enjoy the crazy! -Your Hosts: John Rocha, Andrew Yang, John Avlon, and Alex Blumberg John and Andrew to talk all things DNC and politics in general on this week's episode of The Weekly Standard Podcast. -John and Alex to do their best to bring you all the best coverage of the week's craziness in Chicago and the protests happening in and the events happening across the country this week! - John to do his best to make you feel like you can't get any better than this. -Jon to do your best to help you get the most out of this podcast on the most important thing you can do the most of what you're listening to the most authentic experience possible. -John to do the best job possible on the ground in the best possible way possible in your time in your day to help the most effective way possible - and most important to understand what's going on the best way to get the best of what's happening in the world - and how to get your voice heard in your mind and your most authentic voice in the most influential place possible. John to help spread the word out there on this podcast and much more. and on social media: in this episode of the podcast - is a great resource for the most impactful way possible
Transcript
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00:00:00.000All right, it's the week of the DNC. A little bit of craziness going on in Chicago.
00:00:04.000I'm going to be there later this week myself, probably Thursday morning, and talking about it with my friend Chris Ruffo, who I've been looking forward to having on for a while.
00:00:14.000We're going to talk not mostly about boring Democratic National Committee stuff, although we'll touch on some of the fun things this week.
00:00:21.000But a conversation about the direction of the right and what exactly is the new right?
00:00:51.000So before we get into, I think, the more intellectually interesting topics, what do you make of the apparent theater around the protests?
00:01:01.000100,000 protesters descending on Chicago at the DNC. What do we make of what we're seeing this week?
00:01:08.000Well, I mean, you know, we'll see how it unfolds, but my sense so far is that it's a managed spectacle.
00:01:14.000If you look at the last Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, it wasn't a spectacle.
00:01:21.000It was real, you know, blood on the streets, real rioting, and a real radical left-wing revolutionary movement that wanted to assert itself against what they saw as the Democratic establishment.
00:01:33.000That kicked off about a half decade of bombings, airline hijackings, assassinations, and other incidents of political violence.
00:01:44.000And so I don't think we're going to get that.
00:01:46.000I think what we have now is almost the reprise of that in a kind of theater kid form.
00:01:52.000So you have people who I don't think have necessarily that kind of militant conviction, but they want to adopt some of those aesthetics, some of that rhetoric from the past.
00:02:03.000And so they'll be hitting the streets and we'll see.
00:02:06.000Is it something that is a serious militant conviction?
00:02:11.000But my sense politically is that this benefits Kamala Harris.
00:02:15.000Kamala Harris can now pretend that she is tacking to the center.
00:02:19.000She can pretend to, you know, silence the pro-Hamas protesters and then position herself, you know, I think in a misleading sense, but position herself as the moderate candidate.
00:03:11.000But to sell yourself to the public as a thoughtful moderate than to be assailed by the people on the far left such that when Republicans say that, oh, you're a communist, no, no, the real communists have shown up.
00:03:20.000And now you get to say, oh, no, no, I'm just this interest that they don't like so much because I'm so moderate.
00:03:24.000So it does seem like a good way for her to pull off a trick that otherwise would have been harder for her to pull off if the protests hadn't been there.
00:04:13.000They don't actually make any decisions for the most part.
00:04:16.000But also she's been shielded in the first part of this campaign, which is just a full-blown Soviet-style propaganda campaign from the media.
00:04:25.000That tries to cover her from any unscripted moments, cover her from having to take any positions, and really cover her from scrutiny.
00:04:33.000And so the best case scenario in the next few days is if she's forced to make decisions under pressure and then the American people can have a bit better sense of her judgment and sense of her leadership ability.
00:04:45.000Do you actually think she is ideological?
00:04:47.000It's actually a question I've wondered about.
00:05:12.000Yeah, I think she's created the persona That kind of allows her to be everything to everyone, and then she just manages whatever way that the winds are blowing, she manages to position herself, position the sails to take her to where she wants to go.
00:05:37.000And what I would say that we know for sure is that when it's unpopular, she's willing to jettison all of her positions.
00:05:44.000And so I think she's a creature of ambition, and I think she's a creature of incentives.
00:05:50.000She has a keen sense of incentives and so the question is not really what does Kamala Harris believe.
00:05:55.000I actually don't think that's an important question at all.
00:05:58.000The question is what are the incentives that are going to be around Kamala Harris that will guide her to make whatever decisions seem most favorable at the time.
00:06:06.000That I think is a more difficult question but perhaps a more important question.
00:06:11.000Yeah, I lean in the direction of that being by far the more important question for people who want to understand what the country is actually going to look like under Kamala Harris.
00:06:18.000I think calling her ideological is to give her too much credit, actually.
00:06:27.000She tried to position herself on one hand when she ran for California attorney general as some kind of moderate, tough on crime figure.
00:06:33.000I do think it's worth remembering the Democrats hit her for prosecuting too many people.
00:06:38.000It's also part of the reason why I think it's a little bit of a weak and unconvincing and self-defeating Republican attack when Republicans started to initially say, oh, she locked up too many black men or whatever.
00:06:50.000That was actually the left attack on her when she ran for president in 2020, which ironically makes her seem more tough on crime than she actually is, which again does her the favor in the same way these left wing protesters are doing by making her seem like something she's not.
00:07:02.000I think the reality is she tried to pretend to be moderate when she was in the role as leading prosecutor in the state of California, California, only to become an apparent ideologue running almost to the left of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in that primary, which I think didn't convince anybody in the Democratic Party, which is why she didn't make it to the Iowa caucus, only to now convert back to being the centrist moderate in a way that supposedly she thinks is her path to winning this only to now convert back to being the centrist moderate in
00:07:29.000I think far more compelling, from my vantage point at least, is what I think is true, is that she's just another example of a puppet in a system, right?
00:07:40.000Biden was a puppet that they wielded, and I think that Kamala Harris is a new puppet that actually can be controlled far more easily than a true ideologue like a Bernie Sanders or even Elizabeth Warren, who I do think are far more ideological Democrats than one like Kamala Harris, which I think shows up far more in the breed of the pawn.
00:07:59.000And those are two different strategies, depending on what we think is the right theory of the case here for what the Republican criticism of her actually is.
00:08:07.000I find it much more compelling to say we're running against a system rather than against an individual candidate.
00:08:11.000But that's different than saying that she's a communist, which is what Bernie Sanders is certainly closer to and what she has sounded like in the past.
00:08:18.000And I do think that's an interesting fork in the road that we're going to have to take if we want to win over independents and voters to Have some consistency to what our actual message is here on our criticism of her.
00:08:30.000Yeah, it is really kind of astonishing.
00:08:33.000This campaign is shaping up to be a campaign in which she tries to take no positions on any of the issues.
00:08:40.000She doesn't publish policy papers or position statements.
00:08:43.000She doesn't take questions from the media.
00:08:45.000And it's a kind of vaporware campaign.
00:08:48.000It creates a perception that the campaign is driving energy, is driving enthusiasm, is driving joy, these positive kind of marketing emotions.
00:08:58.000And, you know, they're hoping that they can get her across the line with that.
00:09:02.000And then she has really total free hand to pursue whatever policy agenda materializes at that point.
00:09:07.000And I think that, you know, the difference between Kamala Harris and Joe Biden is significant.
00:09:14.000You know, Joe Biden was very clearly a puppet, you know, kind of cognitively very damaged, especially the final two years of his presidency.
00:09:23.000Clearly just reading the script that was prepared for him.
00:09:26.000You know, Joe Biden is not naturally- Occasionally not even that, on occasion.
00:09:30.000It's when he stopped reading the script that he stopped being useful.
00:09:33.000He was reading the script and then eventually stopped being able to read the script.
00:09:36.000And then that's exactly when they decided to dispose of him.
00:09:38.000But I think you have to look at the source of their power, the basis of their power.
00:09:43.000The basis of Joe Biden's power was the Democratic Party, the old party machine, the old Democratic operatives, the old state-by-state infrastructure.
00:09:56.000And so he was really the last party man standing, the last person of his generation where the party politics mattered.
00:10:03.000And so he was able to get over the finish line in 2020 as really the consensus choice of the party machine.
00:10:10.000Kamala Harris is not really a creature of the party in the same way.
00:10:13.000Joe Biden goes back to when the parties were actually quite powerful.
00:10:17.000Labor unions were very powerful and decisive.
00:10:19.000All of the old kind of machine politics interest groups that we learn about from the past.
00:10:26.000Kamala Harris is a product of the media.
00:10:28.000And so Kamala Harris's popularity goes up when the media is favorable towards her, and it goes down when the media is unfavorable towards her.
00:10:36.000And so while Joe Biden really based his strength on the party and appeasing those party insiders and the party apparatus beneath him in order to secure his position, of course, when the party turned against him, he was done.
00:10:49.000I think the media has the same role for Kamala Harris.
00:10:54.000She is a candidate of language and symbol and affect and emotion.
00:11:04.000That is, for the time being, propped up by a heavy media campaign around her.
00:11:09.000And so I think the tactic for the right has to be to try to drive a wedge between the media, which is really the kind of...
00:11:19.000You know, if you look at the new figures in the Democratic politics, if you look at AOC, if you look at even Bernie Sanders to a certain extent, and then of course Kamala Harris, you have to drive a wedge between the media and the candidate.
00:11:33.000And once she loses that base of support, or there even becomes kind of a more even playing field in that regard, I think we can have some advantage.
00:11:41.000That's an interesting framing because it suggests some agency that our side might have in doing this.
00:11:46.000How might we drive that wedge, as you put it, between Kamala and the media, which otherwise seems as glued as can be without daylight between them right now?
00:11:57.000I mean, after the DNC this week, I assume we're going to see A Steven Spielberg-style production that leaves nothing but for applause, room for applause from the media after that.
00:12:09.000What might a wedge actually look like at a point where the junction looks like it's airtight right now?
00:12:15.000Yeah, I think you have to attack Kamala Harris by proxy and you have to attack the media figures more directly.
00:12:24.000One of the things that we've done successfully, I think, in recent years is we've taken the media reaction to George Floyd and we've really, I think, successfully criticized and then demolished the credibility Of many of the people who were promoting that.
00:12:40.000If you look at Ibram Kendi or Robin DiAngelo or any of the kind of leading lights, even in the New York Times, they're treated as a figure of ridicule, a figure of contempt.
00:12:53.000And so I think we have to do that at an accelerated pace and start embarrassing some of the media cheerleaders directly because media people are susceptible to reputational pressure.
00:13:05.000The currency that we have in media is reputation.
00:13:08.000You know, the power of our byline, the credibility that we have.
00:13:13.000With the population, with peers, with other elites.
00:13:17.000And I think that a successful campaign would really be simultaneously, of course, putting pressure on the candidate, but also continuing to put pressure on the media, not in a blanket sense, not just saying, hey, it's all fake news.
00:13:29.000But actually going after some of those individual figures and really trying to put pressure even on those, say, center-left figures that have historically criticized Kamala Harris to try to at least get some foothold, get some traction, and then see if we can start kind of ruining this honeymoon with some bad weather in the next couple weeks.
00:14:01.000Not well at all, I would say, because, look, I think you hinted at this just now in a previous exchange, but the right really hasn't figured out the best line of attack against Kamala Harris.
00:14:16.000Of course, calling her a communist I think is hyperbolic, but certainly when she proposes something like price controls.
00:14:23.000That was a very helpful line of attack there, tactically.
00:14:26.000But the other thing is she's fake, she's a phony, she's a chameleon.
00:14:31.000I've seen, of course, J.D. Vance launch that line of attack.
00:14:34.000I think that is getting a little bit closer.
00:14:36.000But what Trump did so brilliantly in 2016 is he had these...
00:14:42.000These kind of hooks, whether it was Low Energy Jeb or Lion Ted Cruz, you know, somewhat childish, of course, you know, kind of name-calling.
00:14:53.000But the reason that it worked is not just because it was name-calling.
00:14:57.000But because it really tapped into some fatal flaw, some Achilles heel in the political persona of these people.
00:15:06.000And so we haven't quite figured it out with Harris.
00:15:09.000Harris is kind of hard to pin down, deliberately so.
00:15:13.000And I think we make a big mistake at not recognizing her political talents.
00:15:19.000She's a much more talented politician, despite her kind of Strange elliptical and circular verbal style.
00:15:27.000She actually is quite talented and she's been, you know, winning the political game over a long period of time.
00:15:35.000I grew up in Sacramento and I had an old colleague, an old friend who was with Kamala Harris very early on in her political career.
00:15:44.000And without giving away too much of the game, this person essentially hitched himself to Kamala Harris's career and has really risen quite steadily and quite rapidly in political life.
00:16:00.000And so I think that we have to take her seriously, not as an intellectual or someone with strong ideological convictions, but simply as a political animal that will do whatever it takes to succeed.
00:16:15.000She's not going to be wiped out simply by calling her a communist or impugning her intelligence.
00:16:25.000Yeah, I personally am drawn to what I think is true.
00:16:29.000You said what made those attacks in 2016 so effective as they did hit the nail on the head is the idea that whether it was Biden or Kamala, these are cogs in a broader machine and that we're not running against an individual candidate, we're running against a machine.
00:16:46.000And that's what Draining the Swamp is really all about, which relates to the policy vision of getting there and shutting down the bureaucracy, of which we're just seeing the latest specimen put up on offer swap in one for the other.
00:16:59.000I think that's closer to the flame rather than anything that's even personal to Kamala, in part because she is, as you say, this ambitious creature of politics that Doesn't really have a particular ideology, doesn't really have a particularly distinctive quality about her because that's by designs, which you want in a cog.
00:17:19.000And so anyway, I think this idea of running against the machine is a message we probably could be owning a little bit more wholeheartedly.
00:17:27.000I do want to pick up on the point you raised, though, in her commentary around the grocery prices and her proposed solution of implementing price controls in the United States.
00:17:39.000So anybody who's studied basic level of economics and studied history would share with you that these price controls don't work as a measure of actually controlling prices, in part because they create black markets, in part because they create supply shortages, and in the long run even exacerbate the very inflation they were created to actually correct.
00:17:59.000Look back at the Carter era, look back at the history of many other countries that have gone a similar direction.
00:18:06.000Now, I'm going to give you a couple examples of some other policies.
00:18:08.000This is really taking the discussion away from the partisan politics of today, but more to the realm of longer-run ideas that you and I care about.
00:18:17.000So, what if I told you a series of other horrible policy ideas that have been proposed similar to the policy proposal of fighting grocery price increases through price controls?
00:18:34.000The interest of capping credit card interest rates legislation to say that we want to just like want to cap grocery prices, we want to cap prices for credit.
00:18:42.000We're going to put a law that effectively applies a blanket maximum to what a credit card issuer can actually charge to a customer, or raising the federal minimum wage, something that actually creates, again, supply shortages in the labor market while in the name of actually helping those very workers.
00:18:57.000Yet in those two instances, and I can give you a couple of other examples as well, the dirty little secret is that both of those policies were actually proposed by Republicans in recent years.
00:19:08.000Which I think actually raises an uncomfortable but I think important debate for us to be able to have.
00:19:13.000Those are policies considered to be those that belong to the so-called new right, right?
00:19:19.000The idea that we have to reject the method of doing business from yesterday for the new era that requires protecting American workers and manufacturers.
00:19:30.000Yet I think that also impedes our ability to go after Kamala Harris.
00:19:34.000I think we should be going for Kamala Harris more strongly for her failed economic policies, like price control measurements.
00:19:39.000But I think the reason many on the right are unable to do it is that actually very similar logic has been applied, not only by Republicans in recent years in the new right, but just like it existed in the Carter era, existed under Richard Nixon as well.
00:19:51.000And I do think we probably in the long run do ourselves a disservice by sweeping that distinction under the rug and pretending in the three months leading up to an election like that doesn't exist, versus actually just airing it out in the open and just say, actually, what is actually our ideology?
00:20:05.000And, you know, I think the thing about the reason I think Democrats have a little bit of a structural advantage here, and I'll pause here after a second, Chris, because I wanted to lay out my view and then hear your response to it.
00:20:15.000It's part of the reason I wanted to have you on.
00:20:16.000I think you and I had an exchange on Twitter that caught my attention on related topics to this.
00:20:23.000The reason I think Democrats have an ideological advantage is that they've got their far left and then they've got their center left.
00:20:31.000But they disagree on degree, not in kind.
00:20:35.000The far left wants massive government intrusion into the economy and into private life.
00:20:39.000And the center-left says, hey, let's modulate that a little bit.
00:20:41.000We want government intervention in the economy and in everyday life, but just to a smaller degree.
00:20:47.000Whereas on the Republican side, I think right now, we have a fundamental contradiction where we have those of us who believe that actually we don't want the government in our lives, have a more libertarian orientation, say keep the government as small as possible, keep it out of the economy.
00:21:02.000But then we also have a strain that says, no, no, no, actually, the other thing we want is actually we want the government to use heavy-handed, muscular state intervention techniques.
00:21:09.000When it comes to antitrust policy, capping credit card interest rates, deciding which kinds of education we do versus don't want to subsidize, raising the federal minimum wage, but just not in certain other areas, which is not a difference in degree, but a very difference in kind in what our attitude is towards the government and what it's supposed to be doing in the first place,
00:21:26.000which I actually think puts, if you view the world through Republicans versus Democrats right now, Republicans at a bit of a structural disadvantage with two completely ideologically incompatible in some ways views residing under the same roof versus in the Democrats case, it's going to be a struggle between those who say a ton of state intervention or it's going to be a struggle between those who say a ton of state intervention or a lot of
00:21:47.000And I'd just be curious for your take on that whole framing, because I think it does set us up for maybe a conversation you and I can have on what is the new direction of the new right.
00:22:00.000And I think it even goes further than that.
00:22:02.000There's this new right idea among certain factions, a new right at least, that is trying to change the composition and the orientation of labor unions.
00:22:21.000And I think also, in addition, they won't work in a political way.
00:22:25.000You know, large labor unions seem to select for corruption, if you look at some of the kind of hard labor unions of the past and the present.
00:22:37.000And public sector labor unions seem to select for incompetence, with Randy Weingarten of the teachers union being the top example of that.
00:22:48.000Secondarily, I mean, you know, the private labor unions have been in decline.
00:22:51.000And so even someone who is, I think, a smart analyst, but of a different political persuasion, someone like Antonio Gramsci would say that you always want to actually start making alliances in growing industries.
00:23:04.000And so this right wing idea, again, I disagree with it on principle.
00:23:07.000I'm more of a free market I really believe in a free market, a laissez-faire economic policy to the extent that it's possible.
00:23:16.000Even setting that aside, I just think it's bad politics.
00:23:19.000You're not gonna juice political power out of a declining sector of the economy or of the society.
00:23:27.000But I do have a kind of disagreement with some of my libertarian friends and colleagues, people in, let's say, the more establishment right.
00:23:36.000I accept that we want to have lower taxes, we want to have a smaller government, we want to have free trade.
00:23:42.000I think the evidence on those three is overwhelming.
00:23:47.000If it's a competitor nation, a geopolitical adversary, if it's someone that is dumping products in the market, you can play tit-for-tat games in order to balance the scales and have free and fair trade.
00:23:58.000I think there's a totally coherent argument in favor of that.
00:24:02.000But my problem is really a problem about the bureaucracy.
00:24:06.000In an ideal world, we would have a kind of laissez-faire, 19th-century-style liberal state.
00:24:13.000We would have taxation at 1% or 2% of GDP, and we'd have a very small government, analogous to what they might have had in centuries past in the United States.
00:24:26.000And so the argument on the right has been now for about a hundred years is to reduce the size of government.
00:24:33.000And yet for the last hundred years, the size of government has only increased.
00:24:36.000And today, the status quo that we have to deal with is one that is kind of shocking.
00:24:42.000The public sector in the United States as a percentage of GDP is larger than the public sector in communist China.
00:24:51.000We've had a hundred years- I just want you to pause right there to say that the public sector as a percentage of GDP in the United States is a greater percentage of our total GDP than the percentage of China's public sector as a percentage of its GDP. That's right.
00:25:05.000Not in absolute terms, but in relative terms.
00:25:09.000It's actually more stark when you frame it that way.
00:25:12.000If it was in absolute terms, it would actually be at least understandable.
00:25:15.000But if it's in actual percentage terms, the percentage of our GDP comprised by the public sector component of gross domestic production is actually greater than the portion of China's total GDP comprised by its public sector.
00:25:48.000Of course, China has a much more repressive state system.
00:25:52.000And much of what you call, what we may call on paper, the private sector is it's still state-directed in a way that's not true in the United States.
00:25:58.000But you're making a valid point, at least, for discussion.
00:26:01.000It's not a perfect comparison, but it's really just a comparison to start people thinking.
00:26:06.000And the main point, though, is, with only some exception, basically, at the end of World War II, when the whole economy was kind of a state-run economy in the United States, You know, it's been a steadily increase.
00:26:17.000And so what I hear, and I think this is the crux of the debate that we need to have on the right, is, you know, what do we do?
00:26:24.000The libertarian promise to reduce the size of government, or as Grover Norquist said, make the government so small you could drown it in a bathtub.
00:26:31.000I mean, it just is totally detached from reality.
00:26:34.000And my basic position is, yes, in an ideal world, we should get there.
00:26:38.000We should move to the extent that we can incrementally towards that kind of more libertarian position regarding the state.
00:26:45.000But in the meantime, if we win the state legislatures, if we win state governorships, if we win the Congress, if we win the White House, we actually have to have a prudential plan to deal with a massive state.
00:26:57.000And it's really a management problem that we have.
00:27:00.000And so, you know, while I admire someone like Javier Millet who's saying, you know, afuera, get rid of the government agencies, that of course is a different country with a different set of priors.
00:27:12.000I would like to see it if possible in the United States, but I wouldn't bank on that.
00:27:17.000You know, and for example, in the first Trump administration, Betsy DeVos tried to convince Congress Controlled by Republicans in both the House and the Senate to cut funding, basically to abolish the Department of Education through the appropriations process.
00:27:32.000And so I think it's incumbent upon the kind of libertarian conservatives.
00:27:37.000To actually substantiate their case for reducing the size of government with a plausible theory of action as to how they're actually going to get it done in a significant way.
00:27:46.000Because for the time being, I just remain very skeptical and I think we should have at least, I think actually first and foremost, but even if you disagree with my premise, you should have at least a backup plan.
00:27:57.000When we take over the institutions of government, what do we do with them?
00:28:01.000I think Governor DeSantis in Florida has provided a counter method that has been successful in its own way.
00:28:09.000And I think that that's really where I think, not tariffs, not manufacturing, not taxes.
00:28:14.000You know, we shouldn't just be a kind of more miserly version of the left.
00:28:18.000But we actually have to have a kind of right-wing theory of the state where we have a plausible plan of governing and shifting the state more towards our interests, more in align with our principles, and not simply promise and fail to deliver cuts in government spending.
00:28:37.000Yeah, I think that's a fascinating vision, Chris.
00:28:39.000I think it's fascinating because it's coherent, it's interesting, and I think that these are open questions and open terrain for what direction the new right, whether that's with a capital N or a lowercase n, we can debate, you know, actually takes on.
00:28:52.000So I think maybe there's sort of three different options at least on the table here.
00:28:58.000I mean, one is you have the whole historical neoliberal worldview that more trade is good for the sake of Itself, you know, that's created, I think, a lot of problems of its own, increasing our economic dependence on places like China to provide even our own defense industrial base.
00:29:14.000It's resulted in immigration that has diluted, I think, a sense of our national identity just because civic attributes haven't really been part of the screening process.
00:29:22.000So, you know, I mean, that's camp number one, what you think of as old guard establishment Republican language today.
00:29:28.000I think separately from that, you have a protectionist response to that, which says that, OK, well, in response to that, we want to eliminate trade, period, to protect American manufacturers from the effects of foreign price competition, eliminate a lot of legal immigration, period, to be able to protect American workers from the effects of foreign wage erosion, from foreign to be able to protect American workers from the effects of foreign wage
00:29:48.000And I think part of what misses the point there is actually, in many cases at least, when you think about protectionism as an end in itself, as an economic matter leaves everybody worse off, even the very people you're supposed to help.
00:29:59.000And I think it also misses the point even on achieving some of the goals of national security, where if we want to decouple from China, we actually are going to do that less quickly unless we're willing to nearshore in combination with onshoring as well.
00:30:10.000With civic identity, look, if you're going to have an immigrant in this country that's not only going to be economically productive, but speaks English more Fluently knows more about American history and the American civic ideals and will score better on a civics exam and a deeper appreciation for the United States of America and maybe even greater willingness to die for their country than somebody who grew up in, I don't know, Williamsburg is the daughter of some sixth generation person on the Upper East Side.
00:30:36.000I'd say bring that person in, even if it's going to have an incremental impact on at least wage competition in the labor market, because I think that makes the country stronger.
00:30:44.000It's going to be massively less immigration than we have today, but whatever few that number is, whatever that number is, I think that's a different vision of how you restrict immigration rather than worrying about the effects on wages, which I think matters less than the effect on national identity, which I do care about.
00:31:01.000So anyway, you've got the neoliberal version, the protectionist response.
00:31:06.000Then I think you have the divide where you and I might so far see very similarly in our aversion to economic protectionism, but may have slight divergences on what we see as the solution.
00:31:16.000Your point is, how do you actually use the levers of government to advance affirmative conservative goals?
00:31:23.000Whereas I don't view shutting down the size of bureaucracy as a procedural goal.
00:31:28.000I view that as a substantive goal in its own right.
00:31:31.000And I think if your point is that we have a pretty poor track record of dismantling the nanny state and dismantling the regulatory state and dismantling the bureaucratic state, I would agree with you.
00:31:41.000But I also don't think we have had somebody who has been as committed to that end as Javier Malay has been in his early days of governing in Argentina.
00:31:51.000And I think America deserves a much better breed of Javier Malay on steroids than just saying that we're going to resign ourselves to the existence of the managerial class who, at our best, we're just going to say are going to redirect their energy by executive order in things that, you know, you gave an example of one state, but even halted and at times running into obstacles in the courts when somebody else from a different party takes over the same shoe fits the other foot.
00:32:16.000I'd rather dismantle the damn thing in the first place, actually shut it down.
00:32:25.000And I don't think the example of historically failing to do it is sufficiently compelling to abandon that strategy because I don't think we've had somebody who's been as even ex-ante committed to that vision as say someone like a Malay has been in Argentina.
00:32:40.000Certainly that's earned the nomination of a major party for US president, running for it in the primaries. - I think there are two problems though.
00:32:50.000And the first problem is that Argentina is kind of a failed country.
00:32:54.000They've had significant economic problems for multiple generations.
00:33:01.000You have a huge volatility in the politics.
00:33:05.000And I don't think someone like Javier Malay, a kind of doctrinaire, I mean, Paul Ryan was the kind of closest we have to an Ayn Rand-style Republican.
00:34:19.000Voters, in fact, want to expand higher education rather than dismantle it.
00:34:24.000There are similar analogs in the federal space, but the idea, just to focus on that as one example, is, okay, well, you're not going to dismantle higher education.
00:34:34.000I don't even think that's preferable in the abstract, even as a theoretical matter.
00:34:38.000But you're left with the question of, wait a minute, in Florida, which is now a conservative state, Why are all these institutions advancing monolithic left-wing priorities?
00:34:49.000And what can we do to have them reflect the desires and the values of the people who pay for them, who vote for them, who should be represented within them?
00:34:58.000And so you have a series of reforms that are essentially management techniques.
00:35:04.000How do you recruit better boards and better executives?
00:35:06.000How do you launch conservative research centers within the institutions?
00:35:09.000How do you take over some of the failing smaller institutions like we have done at New College of Florida?
00:35:15.000And then how do you reorient those institutions?
00:35:18.000So that they advance the shared values of the voters who put the legislators and the governor in office.
00:35:25.000I think we have to do something similar because, look, the sad truth is that while Americans in the abstract say, we want to have a smaller, less intrusive government, When you actually disaggregate that and talk about specific programs, the American people are not libertarians.
00:35:45.000And in fact, the one, I think, significant reform that we did have, or at least the appearance of a reform, was welfare reform under the Clinton administration, a kind of impossibility now, given the state of the left.
00:36:00.000You know, even Charles Murray, who was, I think, the intellectual inspiration for that, his book, Losing Ground, he kind of even admits that decades later, all of the actual reforms have now been watered down to such an extent that the welfare reform of that time doesn't even matter.
00:36:16.000The state has a way to kind of grow back, and there's really no method of pruning or much less dismantling it.
00:36:24.000And so, you know, even after that, Maybe you can provide a counterpoint.
00:36:30.000I would love for you to provide a counterpoint.
00:36:32.000But even more broadly, more theoretically, the founders of this country were also not libertarians.
00:36:38.000They had a very sense that the state served a purpose, that the state was supposed to advance the common good, that it was supposed to protect the rights and secure the rights of citizens, and then contribute to the happiness, the overall happiness of the society.
00:36:55.000Let me respond to that, actually, Chris.
00:36:58.000I respectfully disagree with the contention about the founders not being libertarian.
00:37:03.000I think the founders were a motley crew, actually.
00:37:05.000They had vigorous debates as illuminated in the Constitutional Convention.
00:37:12.000I think we have a backdrop of deep common ground, but even on this micro-debate, some level of common ground is a difference between...
00:37:26.000And analyzing this issue at the level of the states versus the federal government.
00:37:32.000And I think our founding fathers actually were, if you were to broadly aggregate them, they had diverse views.
00:37:37.000But at the federal level, I think they mostly were, by what today's standards we would call staunch libertarian, even while recognizing the role for states and diverse in their approaches, had the ability for a state government and even local governments that sit beneath this state to foster a vision of the good, an affirmative vision had the ability for a state government and even local governments that sit beneath this state to foster a vision of the good, an affirmative vision of the good that they did not want the federal government adjudicating, but they
00:38:06.000The 10th Amendment and the vision enshrined in the Bill of Rights, including and up to the 10th Amendment, saying that that which is not reserved expressly to the federal government is reserved respectively to the states and to the people, which is really just a small set of functions that were otherwise reserved to the federal government.
00:38:20.000And I think that that's responsive to, I think, your point about states.
00:38:24.000You could pick your favorite state examples, Florida, South Dakota.
00:38:27.000You go straight down the list of what you would think of as models of different versions of conservative governance.
00:38:34.000That is exactly what our founders, certainly of them, may have envisioned happening at the level of the state versus at the level of the federal government.
00:38:42.000I think part of what we've been missing is just fortitude.
00:38:44.000I mean, you've got a guy like Nixon that talked a big game about taking on the nanny state, but he actually passed into law the EPA. He actually put into law—he expanded a lot of the federal bureaucracy underneath him.
00:38:55.000And I think domestically, part of the issue with a guy like Nixon—and I bring this up because you brought him up, but also because it's evidence of what we've seen since Nixon— He wasn't actually an ideologue.
00:39:06.000He was a pragmatist, really, actually.
00:39:08.000And I think that's what made him strong on foreign policy is that he was a pragmatist on foreign policy rather than an ideologue.
00:39:14.000He was able to effectively get Mao out of the clasp of the Soviet Union to do what was previously thought to be impossible, which is to drive an even broader wedge.
00:39:25.000I think that we actually need more of that ideology I'm a big fan of being a pragmatist on foreign policy.
00:39:51.000But on domestic policy, I don't think we've had somebody who's been quite as ideological on the matter of the federal government in the same way that Javier Malay has.
00:40:01.000And I don't think that that undermines the case you're making, which is mostly drawing from examples at the state level, which is exactly what our founders may have envisioned, that they were libertarian when it came to the federal government, but not necessarily libertarian, but much more Virtue-oriented Aristotelian in their conception of what a state or local government was supposed to be.
00:40:26.000I mean, I would prefer that arrangement as well.
00:40:30.000But unfortunately, over the last 250 years, we've inverted the kind of power structure between the federal government and the states with, again, kind of no viable method for return.
00:40:44.000You have a trillion-plus dollars per year in means-tested welfare spending.
00:40:49.000You're coming up on a trillion dollars a year in You have defense payments.
00:40:54.000You have Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.
00:40:59.000The core of the federal spending is, as a matter of public opinion and a matter of practical politics, more or less at this stage, impossible to touch.
00:41:10.000And then the discretionary spending is still a massive influence on public life.
00:41:17.000And my basic position, again, though, is not to say that, of course, the states are different.
00:41:22.000The federal government doesn't run university systems like the states.
00:41:28.000I think the lessons in Florida the last few years Have taken, you know, what we might call a new right or a kind of, let's say, even an anti-woke agenda and saying, well, how can we actually implement this in policy?
00:41:40.000And so I think that tactically, we have to be willing to transpose some of those ideas onto the federal landscape.
00:41:49.000Because again, and again, you know, Positive and alternative theory, I don't think desire is enough.
00:41:56.000You know, the Republicans, you know, going back to kind of Paul Ryan have- Can I ask you a question about Florida a few times, and I think it's just an interesting example.
00:42:04.000This is really not particularly important in the realm of public debate.
00:42:09.000What do you think of Florida's passage of its ban on laboratory-developed meat products?
00:42:31.000Now they've got people in other parts of the country that have developed technology to say, oh, you can make it taste better or more healthy or whatever, and you develop it in a lab.
00:42:39.000And then they said that they're just going to ban that.
00:42:41.000So if you go out in Florida, you can't eat that in the free state of Florida.
00:43:31.000But I think there is some latitude, actually.
00:43:35.000And I think that particularly regarding food and health, I think that there is a positive case for the state taking an active role in promoting the health of the country.
00:43:49.000I don't think that you can have happiness without health.
00:43:51.000And to the extent that we can determine practices that are too dangerous to health.
00:43:59.000I don't know about lab-grown meat, but my general suspicion- The claims of the people who advance it would say that they actually are I agree with the very reasons you cited because of the failed food processors of yesterday to be able to offer a far more pristine product.
00:44:12.000But my only point was when it came to the question of freedom, it was an interesting conundrum that I thought presented itself.
00:44:19.000But look, I would say, setting aside the lab-grown meat, I think that What DeSantis has demonstrated is that one can wield political power on behalf of cultural interests.
00:44:37.000And so to say that the people of a state or the people of a nation represent some kind of culture, some kind of cultural aspiration, that the state has a legitimate role in fulfilling that, because that's what actually leads us to happiness.
00:45:08.000The left actually has, I think, a malevolent, but a very I think that, not to say that we have to, you know, copy, but we should actually learn some of the lessons.
00:45:24.000And I think simply learn some of the lessons we seem to have forgotten.
00:45:27.000And as regard Florida, I mean, look, Florida has done a very good job in a very tough last four years at protecting the interests of Floridians and of making sure the institutions of the state that have popularity among the voters actually reflect the values of voters.
00:45:51.000And so the question in the federal level, setting aside kind of federalism arguments, which in principle I agree, Yeah.
00:46:04.000day one, you assemble the speaker of the house and the leader of the Senate, you have a majority in both houses.
00:46:12.000I just think that we need to start thinking very concretely.
00:46:24.000And what is the best possible outcome that you would see for a new administration?
00:46:31.000Yeah, look, I think your only thing I love about you is you're able to tee up ideas in a way that actually few politicians are.
00:46:41.000And I personally am of the breed of our, I believe, and miss the days of our founding class, the Thomas Jeffersons of the world, who had your type of interest in ideas, but also were the people who occupied the positions to actually implement them versus today.
00:46:57.000What I think we've devolved into is Separation of those roles.
00:47:01.000I think we live in one of these moments where you do need leaders who have both your capacity.
00:47:06.000Hey, maybe you should think about a future different than the one you're in, man.
00:47:09.000But people who actually have the ability to generate independent thoughts for themselves, a standard that we don't really apply to politicians today, actually being the ones driving the decisions.
00:47:19.000But nonetheless, to answer your question, and I'll have a question for you on the back of this, is I think the agenda on day one should be Shutting down as much of the federal bureaucracy as possible.
00:47:30.000If your social security number ends in an odd number, you're fired.
00:47:54.000So ossified in celebrating the legacy of J. Edgar Hoover.
00:47:58.000For God's sake, the J. Edgar Hoover building that people still walk into.
00:48:01.000Shut it down and take the agents on the front lines and move them to the U.S. Marshals if you have to, but pick which agencies haven't yet been corrupted in the same way.
00:48:08.000You brought up food, food and nutrition services, FNS, which sits under the Department of Agriculture, underneath the USDA.
00:48:15.000Shut that down because it's been captured by food lobbying organizations for the last 50 years.
00:48:22.000I think the best we can do is actually shut it down.
00:48:24.000Now you can do that without the Senate Majority Leader or the House Republican Leader in the room.
00:48:30.000You bring those guys in the room and say, okay, here's LBJ's nanny state created by FDR and frankly metastasized through every president or nearly every president hereafter.
00:48:42.000Social Security and Medicare are a different breed, but at least how do you attach a work requirement to every welfare payment or nanny state payment that is ever disbursed?
00:48:53.000You don't have to say you're going to take them away, just going to attach a work requirement to it as the first step.
00:48:57.000I think that that vision of dismantling the nanny state, there's two kinds of nanny state.
00:49:01.000There's the entitlement state and there's the regulatory state.
00:49:05.000I believe the right answer and the right theory of the case is we want to dismantle the nanny state and in the process revive national pride and identity in this country and my question for you is it sounds like you would not vote for that but your reason for not voting for it is it because that that end state is not desirable or is it because the recent history of the last 50 years would suggest to you that whoever says they want to do that isn't actually going to do it which of those reasons would be your reason for not supporting that vision as opposed to a different vision I
00:49:36.000mean, the latter, because, look, I think the theory is sound.
00:49:41.000The theory is really the Elon Musk Twitter takeover theory.
00:49:45.000You have a power law distribution so that 20 percent of the employees deliver 80 percent of the work, 80 percent of the value of a company or 80 percent of the accomplishments within an institution.
00:49:56.000And, you know, Elon fires 80 percent of the Twitter workers and I think has You know, maintain or actually increase the innovation in the product.
00:50:05.000I think you'd find a lot of government bureaucracies, it might even be a more extreme distribution.
00:50:11.000But so, you know, in theory, yes, you could cut half of the federal employees.
00:50:16.000And I think actually the government would work quite well.
00:50:24.000One of the things that I've noticed during government shutdowns is that, like, my life and everyone I know, their lives are exactly the same as prior to the government shutdown.
00:50:32.000If you had a government shutdown that never reopened, I think actually 90% of Americans would feel no difference at all.
00:50:39.000And so all but non-emergency or non-essential personnel.
00:50:43.000The only difference they feel is lower taxes or whatever to be able to fund the non-essential in the meantime, right?
00:50:52.000And also in theory, as a kind of political theory, I think it would be a better government, a government that is smaller, a government that is lighter, a government that provides more latitudes for citizens is a better government.
00:51:02.000My problem is really strategic and tactical in nature.
00:51:06.000You know, what you're describing was the kind of right wing firebrand position of Newt Gingrich.
00:51:12.000Before that of Reagan and after that of the Tea Party.
00:51:16.000And so you've had, you know, a long period of time in which that is the default kind of right wing, you know, now we call it like a Freedom Caucus position.
00:51:30.000Your legal theory, again, we'd have to submit it to scrutiny, but the legal theory is that you could do it on day one.
00:51:40.000I think that would be highly contested, at least.
00:51:46.000And you have the Schedule F executive order that President Trump was rolling out in the first administration, where you can say policy officials, those that have kind of- Yeah, I mean, that's really small potato.
00:52:05.000I think they should go as far as possible.
00:52:07.000But the question then, you know, It kind of remains.
00:52:11.000I mean, you'd have to have, even accepting the kind of constitutionality of what you're talking about, saying that the president, as the unitary executive, has sole control over the composition of the workforce in the federal agencies.
00:52:34.000We'll just put it aside and we'll assume it to be true.
00:52:36.000We'll put that to one side for now, yeah.
00:52:38.000You'd have to have a kind of different character, a kind of different prince, let's say, in the metaphorical sense, that would be willing to take such a dramatic action.
00:52:50.000And so what I've kind of learned, or at least biased towards, is be open to that possibility.
00:52:57.000If Trump were to get in and say, this is what we're doing, we're taking the Vivek plan, I would be the first person to support it and provide as much air cover as I could.
00:53:07.000But I think we also need to have a kind of plan B. And the plan B is not as romantic, it's not revolutionary in nature, but it's more akin to trench warfare.
00:53:18.000Institution by institution, policy by policy, to actually combat it in that sense.
00:53:24.000And to say that if we are going to have a state That state should actually transmit the values of the people who are elected to run that state.
00:53:35.000And I think that long-term, Leaving open the possibility of surprise, of the kind of Elon character or the dramatic character, I think we need to have a prudent plan for incremental changes and a prudent plan that is essentially a management plan.
00:53:51.000Because my sense of the kind of near and medium term, as much as we lament the rise of the managerial state, there's really no viable alternative to the managerial state.
00:54:03.000We're going to be a world of large bureaucracies for the foreseeable future.
00:54:08.000And until we can Change that until we have the rudimentary particles of a replacement for that system.
00:54:17.000I think we have to have a plan for fighting within that system, which for most conservatives is simply we hope that it goes away sometime.
00:54:29.000It can't be enough for our lives and our children's lives and probably long after that.
00:54:36.000This is a very interesting discussion.
00:54:37.000I think that Your position, I think, is certainly coherent and even compelling, which is for the class of leaders we have, we need a plan that they can actually execute.
00:54:54.000And my claim is not, I think, maybe after this discussion, discovered not in tension with that.
00:55:00.000It's just a different claim, which is to say that We require a plan as ambitious as restoring the pre-Woodrow Wilson vision of the federal government, and we deserve a better class of leader who's actually going to be able to give it to us.
00:55:15.000And right now you're saying we have the class of leaders that we have without the actual plan for at least working within the institutions we have.
00:55:24.000And, you know, my Point is, we have a clear idea of what dismantling an actual nanny state would look like.
00:55:29.000The thing we're missing is the class of politician required to actually see it through.
00:55:33.000And I think it's an interesting discussion that I think you and I, I hope, will be continuing over the next couple of years.
00:55:40.000Because every time I talk to you, I learn something new or think about a problem differently, which is different than what I can say when I'm talking to the average D.C. politician.
00:55:51.000Yeah, I get that, and I would say that that is precisely part of the problem.
00:55:56.000I remember I did a D.C. congressional breakfast talking about critical race theory or DEI or some kind of culture topic, and it's very difficult.
00:56:06.000The median Republican politician is not fluent in these issues.
00:56:11.000They're kind of businessmen from suburban Rural, ex-urban districts, median age, probably 65, 70. I think it's going to take a generational turnover.
00:56:24.000And one bright spot, of course, there are many of us that are starting to work on the journalistic side, on the intellectual side.
00:56:33.000And then I think Trump's selection of J.D. Vance as the vice presidential nominee was also a sign that there's going to be a turnover.
00:56:40.000And I think like you, like me, like J.D., We're part of a new cohort, a generational cohort, that's going to have a different character, a different nature than, let's say, the baby boomers or even the kind of Paul Ryan, the kind of baby boomer at heart.
00:57:00.000On the optimistic side, perhaps generational turnover will open up new possibilities.
00:57:05.000But for the time being, Trump is signaling no cuts to Medicare, no cuts to Social Security, no cuts to defense, no cuts to X, Y, and Z. He's not signaling a kind of radical Millian policy.
00:57:18.000And so I think the prudent thing is to do what someone like Russ Vogt is doing.
00:57:22.000Which is to say, hey, how can we advance the president's agenda within the bounds of possibility?
00:57:29.000And what I think he's developing is a set of new management techniques, which is, you know, not inspiring.
00:57:57.000And I think I'd love, even in the coming, however, whatever the time horizon is for the future, you and I are continuing to hone, I think, each other's perspectives, even in the way that we did in this short time.