A Conservative's View on Democrats' Biggest Weakness

“There is definitely a contest for the future of the center right,” says Reihan Salam, the president of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. In his telling, one side in this contest is “deeply pessimistic about the prospect of a diversifying America, explicitly anti-urban and increasingly willing to embrace redistribution and centralized power,” more so than conservatism before Donald Trump. This populist right has received a lot of attention since Trump’s election, and we’ve done other shows to try to understand it. But Salam is advancing a very different set of ideas with a very different theory of the electorate. He’s identified what he sees as a core fissure between the progressive elites who run the Democratic Party and the working-class voters of color who make up a large part of its base — particularly on issues of race and gender. And he believes that by putting forward an “urban conservative” agenda centered on education, housing and public safety, Republicans can exploit those internal cleavages and begin to win over demographics that have been central to the Democratic coalition. So for the final episode in our “The Rising Right” series, I wanted to use Salam’s thoughts to explore this alternate path for the American right. We discuss why the Republican Party has turned against major cities, whether antiracism is the right framework for addressing racial inequality, why he believes that children of Latino and Asian immigrants could become a core G. O. P. constituency, the difference between antiracism and “antiracialism,” the tactics of the anti-critical-race-theory movement, why he thinks there’s been an “overcorrection” on the right in favor of state power and redistribution, what a supply-side conservatism beyond just tax cuts could look like, why he believes we could be entering an era of “fiscal constraints” that could radically reshape policymaking on both the left and right and more. Mentioned: “The Anti-C. R. T. Movement and a Vision For a New Right Wing” by Jay Caspian Kang “America Needs Anti-Racialism” by Reihan Salam “Ibram X. Kendi on What Conservatives — and Liberals — Get Wrong About Antiracism” by The Ezra Klein Show “Prison-Gang Politics” by Christopher F. Rufo Book recommendations: Classified by David E. Bernstein Criminal (In)Justice by Rafael A. Mangual Sir Vidia’s Shadow by Paul Theroux The Strategy of Denial by Elbridge A. Colby Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Rollin Hu and Mary Marge Locker; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing and engineering by Jeff Geld; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein. This is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:19Ezra Klein?

  So we are wrapping up our series on the rising right today, at least for now. But before I get into today's episode, I want to talk through what I've been trying to do in these episodes and answer some questions I've gotten from a number of you. The point of all of these has been to explore one of the central stories in American politics right now, the fight over what the Republican Party will become. Because it isn't just that Democrats didn't anticipate Donald Trump. Republicans didn't either. It's their party he took over. But Trump was and is too contradictory and erratic and narcissistic a figure to answer the question he posed. The main constant in his view of what the Republican Party should be is that it should be his party.

• 1:02Ezra Klein?

  And that's left a wide open field to contest everything else, what the Republican Party believes, where it goes for votes, what it is actually trying to achieve. My intention in these shows has been to explore some of the answers that I see or that I've heard are gaining strength. And I really want to underscore that word, explore. The value of these episodes for me, and I hope for you, is if they help me understand these ideas and strategies and thinkers well enough to think about what they mean for American politics, to recognize them when they're being played out. And then also, it's in seeing enough of them close enough together, so the right doesn't look like a monolith, that it isn't.

• 1:45Ezra Klein?

  So the first episode with Matt Condonetti was about this long conflict between the establishment and populist right, which kind of implicitly and explicitly, I'm saying, is moving towards the populist right right now. The last two episodes with Patrick Deneen and Erika Bakayaki have been about the populist right and the way in particular, a kind of Catholic right critique and thinking is informing it. I think politicians like J.D. Vance are sounding a lot like Patrick Deneen lately. The Supreme Court majority that looks likely to overturn Roe v. Wade reflects and works with a lot of the thinking that Bakayaki is drawing on. But today's episode tracks a pretty different project. Reihan Salam is the president of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank that has long tried to shape a conservatism responsive

• 2:30Ezra Klein?

  to the problems and possibilities of cities. And his view is that Democrats have made this very fundamental mistake, that in trying to build a truly multi-ethnic coalition, they've alienated the exact voters they're trying to secure. Latino voters swung by about eight to 10 points towards Trump in the 2020 election, to take just one example. And recent polls show the Democrats are continuing to lose their support leading up to the midterms. Salam thinks that Democratic positions on race and gender and public safety have put the left at odds with a lot of Black and Hispanic and Asian voters who are quite a lot more conservative on those issues than white liberals are. And at the same time, he thinks failures of Democratic governance

• 3:12Ezra Klein?

  in blue cities, particularly around housing and education and crime, have created an opening for a new conservative agenda. And I should say, this isn't just theory. People at his think tank, at his institution, like Chris Ruffo in particular, are trying to weaponize these divides, deepen these cleavages. And they're doing so in ways that I find deeply harmful, but that are really having an undeniable effect on American politics and the fights we're having and the ones we're going to have. So I wanted to spend some time trying to understand the theory behind all of it. As always, my email is ezra Klein show at nytimes.com.

• 3:52Ezra Klein?

  Reihan Salam, welcome to the show.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  Ezra Klein, thank you so much for having me.

• 3:57Ezra Klein?

  I want to read something you said recently that I found interesting. You said, quote, "There is definitely a contest for the future of the center-right. My sense is that there's an emerging right of center politics that is deeply pessimistic about the prospect of a diversifying America, explicitly anti-urban, and increasingly willing to embrace redistribution and centralized power."

• 4:19Ezra Klein?

  So give me a critique of that right and what you think the alternative could and should look like.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  Yes, so populism is an affect, it's a style, it is oftentimes something that is used by parties out of power, parties in opposition, you know, by out-groups in general. When you feel like you're locked out of power, it is critique, but it's not always something that represents a kind of constructive political program. So I would argue that this rival politics that I'm describing could have populist elements, could have populist moments, particularly when it's in opposition. But more broadly, my thesis is that when you're looking at the changing center-right coalition, when I'm looking at how I think it might change in the future, what I'm seeing is a

• 5:04Speaker 01

  coalition that is broadly speaking ambitious, opportunity-oriented, it's heavily non-college, but it's a coalition that is rooted in areas that are economically stagnant and therefore not as exercised about inequality as they are about stagnation. I think that there is a real appetite for growth. So, you know, again, this isn't to say that it's classic boomer Reagan-era politics, but I think that some aspects of that normie conservatism actually resonate a lot with these people that I believe are people who can be incorporated into the coalition. And by that, I mean second-generation Americans, for example, when you look at second-generation

• 5:46Speaker 01

  Hispanics, people of Asian origin, I think that the politics for these groups are very much in flux, particularly for those who are not operating in elite contexts. And, you know, I think more broadly, there's the sense that something is badly wrong, something is broken in American life, but that the particular prescriptions of the post-liberal or anti-liberal right are not really all that responsive to the concrete quality of life challenges that people are facing. So I guess that would be my big picture, and there are a lot of different ways to kind of cut at this, but I think that there has, on some corners in the right, been this idea that state power is going to be something that will deliver us from the cultural triumph

• 6:31Speaker 01

  of the left. And I don't think that's quite right. I think that when you embrace centralized state power in that way, it can have all kinds of unintended consequences, including consequences that would not be especially attractive to a more pluralistic right.

• 6:47Ezra Klein?

  Let me ask you about two levels of that that came up there. So one is the level of affect. You described this coalition, this tendency on the right as anti-urban, which I think is true. I think if you listen to how cities, many cities are described by Republican politicians, you think we all lived in Mad Max hellholes. And that doesn't feel true to my experience, even though, of course, there are problems in a lot of these cities. But there's an anti-urban affect that then is married increasingly and differently than it has been in some recent years to an openness to redistribution, an openness to using the power of the state to act on behalf of your own constituency, a frustration that Republicans

• 7:29Ezra Klein?

  over decades, in the voice of this critique, put the market ahead of communities, ahead of families, ahead of the working class. And you're pushing against both of those ideas simultaneously. So can you talk a bit about the anti-urban and redistributive tendencies that you think are maybe over-correcting here?

• 7:46Speaker 01

  Well, I think that urban is a capacious concept, understood loosely, something like 80% of Americans live in urbanized areas. So in a way, the kind of anti-urbanism that I was invoking in that earlier conversation is really focused on these big, expensive, cosmopolitan metropolitan areas that have become so monolithically left that they are a kind of boogeyman for some on the right.

• 8:15Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, New York, SF, LA, Seattle.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Exactly. And also, you know, part of it is that you see this generational tension that's mapped onto geography as well. This is a much larger subject, but if you look at America and our experience of immigration, what you see is immigration levels that are not unusually high, but by the standards of American history, they are very high relative to native birth rates, because native birth rates have collapsed. And so what you see is this huge generational disconnect where there are people in aging, in many cases, depopulating regions of the country, who look at these big, diverse, immigrant-rich cities and communities, and they see something that is not entirely familiar to them. They see something that...

• 8:57Speaker 01

  Is very culturally ascendant, in some ways that, by the way, could even be unrepresentative, but that are culturally ascendant and that feel foreign and that feel alien and that feel hostile. So I think that this anti-urban tendency is connected to a variety of other demographic developments. And that's why I think that there are folks on the right who don't recognize that actually you have an awful lot of potential allies in these places, more than you might think. And, you know, it's one reason why I think a broader breakdown in American politics on both sides of the aisle is what I see as this breakdown of entrepreneurial coalition building. This idea that I actually want to grow my party.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  You know, when I think about the rival party, I'm not thinking about permanent enemies. I am thinking about a collection of constituencies, some of which might be won over, which is why I ought to be careful about the level of partisan enmity. I ought to be careful about how binary I'm making my agenda.

• 9:56Ezra Klein?

  You've mentioned a few times here and in other interviews that you think there is a turn in the Republican Party towards these antagonisms, this culture war, and we'll talk about that, but away from what you call quality of life issues. What are those quality of life issues you think that the Republican Party has been neglecting?

• 10:17Speaker 01

  Well, if you're talking about the very near term, I think the biggest, most essential, most important quality of life issue has not been neglected, and that issue is crime and public safety. Now, one could argue about how much it is that politicians at the federal level can really do about that, how constructive can they be, but I really believe that the increase in urban violence over the last two, three years is the essential quality of life issue. To even call it a quality of life issue almost seems to diminish it, but I think it's incredibly important. And then, of course, there are other issues that are related to questions of practical

• 10:56Speaker 01

  management, about some things that are intrinsically or especially likely to be public sector functions. This is something you've thought a lot about, Ezra, but, you know, think about traffic fatalities and... How much we take for granted, you know, it's incredible, just the basics of how our cities and communities work. The housing affordability crisis is so profound that, you know, it's not a boutique issue. I actually think it's an everything issue. It's totally essential to the brokenness of American life and of our politics. You know, that's a quality of life issue where I do think that conservatives have traditionally not had a ton to say about it. So I think that, you know, those issues where public policy management, getting things right, getting public sector incentives right is really essential.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Those are things that I think have been discounted, have been underplayed to some degree. I wonder what you think about that because you're someone who's obviously wrestling a lot with these quality of life questions. You're living in a state that by rights should be a progressive utopia, but where there are obviously really profound quality of life challenges.

• 11:57Ezra Klein?

  I think one of the interesting things about Democratic Party politics right now in California is that you're seeing a lot of politicians who are trying to reckon with why the governance of their own party didn't work out better. But at the same time, something I do see in the Democratic Party is a lot of politicians, thinkers, writers, et cetera, who really are doing that reckoning. I mean, you look at a Scott Weiner, you look at Congressman O'Connell, you look at a Mayor London Breed, you know, you look at a Matt Iglesias on something like housing. And I could kind of go down this list, you know, work I'm hopefully doing on sort of supply side progressivism.

• 12:39Ezra Klein?

  And I do think that there is a real wrestling happening with why a lot of blue state governance hasn't worked out better. And at the same time, I've heard honestly, a lot less of it from the right. One of the things that is striking to me is the vagueness of a lot of right wing prescriptions at this point. I mean, something I've been noting even just doing this series, you know, I think this is coming from not the part of the party that you necessarily represent, but a lot of pro-family conservatism ends up sounding kind of benali center-left in its policy prescriptions. Like they're, they're just proposing things that in some form or another. Joe Biden is already proposing. I think a lot of Republican thinking on housing is

• 13:21Ezra Klein?

  actually behind a lot of liberal thinking at this point. Even on crime, it's something that people point out a lot. There's obviously a very big fight at the level of almost meta-politics over things like defund the police. But because of the right's budgetary politics, if you really looked at things like the Trump budgets, they were defunding the police. And if you you looked at Democratic budgets, they were adding a lot of money into safety and policing. So something I do see when I look at the two coalitions is a genuine divergence between their brands, maybe we'll say, particularly their social media brands, particularly where the activist

• 14:02Ezra Klein?

  energy is seen as being, and their serious, pragmatic, practical thinking about what to do about the problems people are actually having.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  This is very exciting to me because you are vindicating my thesis about the Manhattan Institute, who we are and what we do, because when it comes to public safety, for example, we have a really sharp, dynamic team of people who are doing incredibly, of course, I'm biased, compelling work on these issues. Charles Lehman and Ralph Mungwell, for example, are squarely focused on the idea that there is a certain strain of progressivism, not yours, but there's a certain strain of progressivism that has pursued a starve-the-beast politics as it pertains to the criminal justice system. And when you starve the criminal justice system of resources, what you wind up seeing is dysfunction that would be avoidable if it were adequately funded. So, you know, we are certainly not of the view that government

• 14:57Speaker 01

  in every imaginable domain should be shrunk to the size where you can drown in a bathtub. Certainly when it comes to law and order, when it comes to proactive policing, when it comes to thinking about the carceral system, investing in it to make sure that it is humane and also has the necessary capacity to deal with violent repeat offenders. This is work that we've been doing actively at the Institute. And when it comes to housing policy and a range of other issues, some of that work is particularly focused on New York City, other work is more national in scope. But, you know, we have people People are doing really nitty gritty work also on what the coalitions for constructive change in those domains might look like. So I think in some ways you and I are approaching a similar set of problems. And of course, we travel in different cliques and different

• 15:40Speaker 01

  circles. But I think that what we're trying to do at MI is build a community of scholars, journalists, activists, who are very focused on those concrete material challenges.

• 15:53Ezra Klein?

  Well, let me open up then some of our divisions before this becomes too too agreeable of a podcast.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  Let's do it.

• 15:59Ezra Klein?

  Because I think Manhattan has a bit of a split identity at the moment. I followed the work there for a very long time. I know a lot of the very wonky people there working on social insurance, or budget, or crime. But I think most people coming into contact with the Manhattan Institute right now are coming into contact with it because a lot of the anti critical race theory push is being driven by Chris Ruffo over there. And he's been pushing very hard and very explosively in support of don't say gay laws and this narrative that Democrats are quote groomers. And so I understand at this point, you all is having this sort of dual theory. On the one hand, a deeper focus maybe on urban quality

• 16:42Ezra Klein?

  of life issues that that really is there. But on the other hand, believing that there is a political opportunity for Republican Party in splitting open divisions that that he sees that you see inside the Democratic Party or inside the Democratic Party's coalition around race and culture issues. So do you want to talk a bit about that view of the Democratic Party and that fissure you're trying to exploit?

• 17:05Speaker 01

  Well, gosh, that's a that's certainly one way to put it. My view is that there is a phenomenon that I think of as race essentialism. There are many generally bright, well meeting people who believe that the way to address the challenge of entrenched racial disadvantage is to raise the salience of race to basically embrace race consciousness in public policy, in culture. And my own view is that this kind of race essentialism Is polarizing, but also just analytically, I don't think that it gives us a really accurate view of the rich complexity of American life, of American ethnic life. I believe that

• 17:49Speaker 01

  we're going through a period of a lot of ethnic change. I believe that there is what a lot of folks call a societal mainstream, basically this kind of portion of society, a portion of society that sometimes mistakes itself for the whole, but it is a significant portion in which your ethnicity or race doesn't really determine your fate. This is a subject of great interest to me because I think that it reflects the life experience of a lot of the people I grew up around. I feel in some ways it captures aspects of my own life experience as a second generation American of color. And in a way, when I think about the hyper-race consciousness that I see, particularly in elite discourse, I see it

• 18:30Speaker 01

  more as a reflection of the internal politics of elite institutions and how they operate than as something that is really a perfect and complete distillation of American life. Race matters, and particularly when you're looking at the Black experience, there are many aspects of it that are really, really distinctive and important and worthy of our attention. But this whole idea of a rainbow coalition, this whole idea of using the lens of race to understand not just Black, non-Black divides, but to understand the experience of immigrants from Paraguay, immigrants from Bangladesh, I think that it's really limiting. And when you look at the ways in which immigration-driven demographic and cultural change are working,

• 19:14Speaker 01

  this universe of people who are not of European descent, who are also not the multi-generational descendants of enslaved African Americans, you're dealing with a big, big group of people. And so in a way, this push against race essentialism, I see it almost as this group of post-1965 Americans, call them New Stock Americans, they're asserting themselves in the conversation. They're actually saying, hey, wait a second, American life is a little bit more complicated than the kind of race-conscious, race essentialist thesis allows.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  And there are problems, but it's to some degree a matter of how we conceive of those problems. You know, everyone agrees there's a race problem, but if you disagree about the nature of that problem, you could feel really frustrated because, you know, you could wind up pushing in very different directions. And both sides are thinking, hey, you know, this is what progress looks like. What's going on here? It's in that sense, kind of a wicked problem.

• 20:09Ezra Klein?

  You make a distinction in your work between anti-racism and what you call anti-racialism. Can you unpack that a bit?

• 20:16Speaker 01

  Yes. So anti-racism, you know, here I'm just invoking a familiar idea. And I'm oversimplifying, but I think that part of the idea is that racial disparities are themselves prima facie evidence of racism. When you talk about institutional or structural racism, you are in some ways not talking about racist behavior or explicitly racist institutions in the moment. What you're talking about is the cumulative, multi-dimensional legacy of past racism and the disparities themselves as a kind of racism that is basically compounding, reinforcing over time. So that's anti-racism. Racialism is just a term that is, you know, not an uncommon one,

• 20:57Speaker 01

  referring to this idea that race should be highly salient. We should heighten our consciousness of race, you know, my kids in preschool, and that the kids at that age should really use a kind of racialized vocabulary for understanding themselves and their relationships to their community, their communities, and what have you. And, you know, there are a lot of, you know, again, thoughtful, serious, well-meaning people who believe that this kind of racialism is a good and effective tool for positive cultural and institutional change. Anti-racialism is the belief that, you know, in general, it would be better for us to look at the world through the lens of ethnicity rather than race per se.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  It would be better if we looked at the world more through the context of individuals, family networks, recognizing the complexity that exists within so-called racial groups.

• 21:50Ezra Klein?

  I think that the way people discuss anything outside of politics is always more complex and nuanced. Then the way they discuss it inside of politics. But the way I, I in general, understand the sort of anti racist and as you would put sort of anti Racialism discourse is that the anti racist discourse, right? Which I think you actually described it quite well, and I would sort of simply add to that description that I understand it as being a pretty laser like focus on the question of racial inequality rather than racial intent. And so the question of what is the motivation now is less important than the question of are we making measurable progress

• 22:34Ezra Klein?

  towards equality on whatever basket of measures you might choose. But the place where I do think this goes is that you bridled a little bit when I suggested that this was a divide that that you or the people around you are looking to exploit in the Democratic Party. And I thought that was actually a fairly neutral description of the way I think you see the world. Because as I understand it, and one of the things I think is provocative in your thinking is that there is certainly a strain of democratic thinking that argues the way you build, keep, expand, excite a multiracial coalition is by being very, very attentive to the differing experiences

• 23:17Ezra Klein?

  of the groups within it and really kind of embracing anti racism. And I understand you as saying that where the Democratic Party has gone on race does not represent a lot of people of color themselves. And that in many ways, it is by highlighting where the Democratic Party has gone on race that Republicans can create space to build a more multiracial coalition of their own. Did I describe that right or which point am I missing?

• 23:46Speaker 01

  So I guess I'll just say that, and perhaps this was me being overly sensitive, but I just don't think of it as cynical. I really do think of it as, and not to say that you were suggesting it, but you know, when you think about wedge politics and what have you. I mean, you know, for me, it really is, and I think for my colleagues too, just a really. Earnest attempt to grapple with the state of the country. And you know, insofar as there is a partisan political dimension, which of course is, you know, we're a think tank and we work happily with people on both sides of the partisan aisle. But yeah, I mean, you know, just thinking about the kind of larger political scene. Yeah, I think that you're totally on to something. When you have a kind of racialized understanding of your coalition as a rainbow coalition, you're missing the fact that there are many people within that coalition who don't think

• 24:31Speaker 01

  of themselves in terms of pan-ethnic categories. Maybe they want to be addressed as citizens. Maybe they want to be addressed in terms of kind of larger categories or even smaller, more specific categories. There's just a way in which these big pan-ethnic racial categories have taken on so much meaning. You know, they were created by some combination of census bureaucrats and basically marketers who are trying to kind of aggregate a lot of different groups. You know what I mean? And they just don't really describe the texture of life for people, particularly people outside of elite institutions. Now, I've mentioned that before, but and I do want to elaborate on this. So if you were someone who is participating in an elite institution where racial representativeness

• 25:15Speaker 01

  is an imperative, diversity is an imperative, there is this weird vibe because it's almost as though, hey, you are part of this institution and part of your obligation is to be a teacher. Part of your obligation is to be authentically a spokesperson for Group X. And so you have this aggregation of these different groups. You know, these are the environments in which something like Asian American identity takes hold and takes meeting. It takes hold because there's literally an ethnic studies department in which, you know, you could take classes in Asian American studies. So something that does not necessarily reflect the complexity and texture of your life does mean something in that environment. And so when I look at ethnic politics, a big divide for me is between basically these

• 25:59Speaker 01

  people who've engaged with these elite institutions, particularly people of color who've engaged with these elite institutions and where leading this Particular kind of structured, integrated life, where you are supposed to be authentic, you're supposed to be a spokesperson for X, Y, or Z, is something that has a big effect on your wider worldview. And that's one reason why I think there's a huge disconnect between people of color who've been socialized into these elite institutions and the racialized discourse that is so essential to those institutions, and people of color who exist outside of those institutions. So if you're someone who is second or third generation Mexican-American, who went to a good public university, but that was not selective, and you're someone who is middle,

• 26:43Speaker 01

  upper-middle-class, but you did not navigate that world, your subjective experience is really, really different from someone who went to Yale. And I think that that is a really interesting divide, because the people who do our jobs, people who are basically paid to be decently articulate spokespeople, who generate ideas, are very disproportionately drawn from people who've operated within these highly racialized contexts, in which this certain idea of diversity is really important. And I think that that has been a real challenge for Democratic politics. I think that Republican politics has all sorts of challenges, but I think that it is kind of relevant to some of the challenges that Democrats are experiencing in connecting with a diversifying electorate.

• 27:52Ezra Klein?

  One of the complexities of this, I think, is that, on the one hand, I think there's very much something to the idea. That there's an intertwining of educational effects, class effects, the people who rise up to the top of various kinds of elite institutions and the way they become unrepresentative. And that leads in all kinds of ways to divergence between the elite of a party and the base. I mean, you would see it in the Republican Party with the high level of attention to the needs of very rich people and the people who are in corporations, when the base of the party tends to be much more economically populist, if you look at polling. So I take that as an ongoing struggle in both coalitions.

• 28:36Ezra Klein?

  But it is, as you say, I think, a specific one with specific dynamics in the Democratic coalition. But I also think something that is not to be discounted here is a substantive grappling with the feeling, and in many ways, the fact, that we are not making the progress we hoped to. And I take the Obama era as being a real catalyst for this, because on the one hand, you have the election of the first black president, you have this real moment of hope, people talk about us becoming a post-racial country. And then not only does it activate a lot of racial animus and a lot of racialization in our politics, but you also just don't see as much progress as people were hoping to, and it begins to focus people on that.

• 29:20Ezra Klein?

  So I'll give an example here, that to take the racial inequality lens, the black-white wealth gap grew. You know, mass incarceration really wrecked black communities in a way that I think people look back on correctly as being quite racist. And then when the drug war came to opioid addiction in white communities, all of a sudden, it got a whole lot more compassionate. So at the same time that there's like an elite and educational dynamic to this, I also think there's a grappling with the view that having an overly colorblind or melting potish lens has allowed a lot of racial inequality to fester. And the people who put forward that lens sort of failed to solve it. And people are trying to grapple for ways to do better in the future.

• 30:04Ezra Klein?

  How do you think about or respond to that more substantive analysis of the racial inequality problem?

• 30:12Speaker 01

  So I will say, I just need to register a bit of a disagreement.

• 30:16Ezra Klein?

  Please.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  When you look at the sharp crime decline that took place through the 90s and the 2000s, it's really quite extraordinary because the burden of homicide, the burden of shootings, was so heavily borne by Black Americans. It actually yielded an increase in the life expectancy of Black men in the US that would be the equivalent of eliminating obesity and the harms stemming from obesity, diabetes, and what have you. So if I recall correctly, it was about an increase of about a year in life expectancy, quite dramatic. So we can, of course, litigate the question of to what extent did increases in incarceration, did some increase in how punitive the criminal justice system was contribute to that.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  But I really do think that that was a really dramatic human advance.

• 31:04Ezra Klein?

  Right. The disagreement is over whether or not mass incarceration is the driver of that.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  Right, indeed, indeed. And certainly, one of my colleagues has a book coming out later this summer that we can talk about later that I think will be a useful intervention in that debate. One thing I will note, when we talk about disparities, certainly in income, disparities in wealth are a little bit harder to come by when you're looking at Americans by ancestry. But it is really quite remarkable when you look at the dispersion of income by non-Hispanic white groups. It really is quite dramatic. And so when you look at disparities across racial groups, this is something that people like you and I, we fixate on because these numbers are tractable. These numbers are visible. I actually believe, and this is a policy view that I hold, that we need much richer data on income differences. I would like to see more data on wealth differences, which again is hard to come by,

• 31:53Speaker 01

  by Americans based on ethnic ancestry, based on a variety of other characteristics. There is some really interesting research that's being done now, looking at outcomes among African-Americans, and trying to tie it to which county of origin did they come from, from the deep south. And it does appear as though you see meaningful differences across groups. It really does seem as though reducing these things to race, part of the problem is that it could be that we find interesting bits of information. You know, why were the outcomes of people from this county who moved to Chicago versus these people who moved to Minneapolis or these people who moved to Oakland? Why were they different? There's a way in which the racialization of our understanding of these issues flattens distinctions that could really enrich our perspective and that could actually be really

• 32:38Speaker 01

  helpful strategies for thinking about what upward mobility might look like. That's something that I think is actually pretty sad. And I think that there is an industry that has emerged around these big, broad, pan-ethnic categories that embodies a kind of disparity fallacy. One thing that happens when you ask Americans, and the political scientist Zach Goldberg has done some work on this, when you ask Americans what they think about disparities across racial groups, they'll tell you one thing about whether or not they think they're rooted in racism, et cetera. When you also inform them, when you give them accurate information about the dispersion within racial groups, then they are somewhat less inclined to think that it's simply racism that's at work.

• 33:19Speaker 01

  So, you know, again, that's a much bigger, more complex question. And again, I'm not saying here, oh, well, immigrants, you know, do well. Why don't these people do it? No, I'm actually literally talking within groups. You know, when you compare black movers to non movers, when you compare people who came from one region versus another. And I think that that stuff is just so flattened by the fact that we have these really reductive, simplistic views of the challenges facing disadvantaged minority groups.

• 33:45Ezra Klein?

  I want to think about how I absorb that for a minute because on the one hand, I always think and believe we can have richer, deeper, more interesting data. And so the fact that you can see different trends for people who moved and didn't move, it's useful stuff and we should have it. I think it would be a very strange argument to try to mount.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  It would definitely be strange. I 100% agree that it would be strange.

• 34:16Ezra Klein?

  And this is looking specifically at the black-white experience in America to say that black and white are overly reductive categories and that policy has not been in many places, at many times, in many ways, for extended periods of time tuned.

• 34:32Ezra Klein?

  To increasing perpetuating and protecting that particular disparity. And the persistence of that disparity across the regimes or administrations of a lot of different politicians from a lot of different parties who prefer a sort of anti-Racialism, colorblind, melting pot lens is, in my view, the frustration out of which a lot of this emerges. So you can always do better in your analysis, but at the same time, sometimes I think that big blunt persistent facts with a lot of different kinds of validation have a kind

• 35:16Ezra Klein?

  of explanatory power that trying to go narrower and narrower, you often lose, I mean, just in part because of the numbers of people you're dealing with when you do that. I think the criticism of the view that you take here is that the anti-Racialism lens, whatever its politics, is to many people a convenient way to try to sort of wipe away the question of racial inequality. And they worry that, and this is, I think, particularly true on the democratic side, they worry that it becomes an excuse to not actually go deeper and not try to intervene more fully in some of these, you know, ongoing, very, very long-running in America problems.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  So I strongly disagree about one point, and I want to be very clear here. When you're looking at multi-generational Black Americans who are descended from enslaved African Americans, this is a group with group characteristics. This is a group that has faced a cumulative disadvantage and a lot of racist oppression historically. That is really important. Also, when you're looking at the Black American population right now, it is a more plural population than it was before. It is a population that includes a not inconsiderable number of people who are first and second generation. You know, I believe it's as high as, you know, close to a fifth when you, when you can include both first and second generation. And when you're looking at people who are

• 36:42Speaker 01

  Part of that multi-generational group, I think that that group is catastrophically underrepresented. And I also think that some of the strategies that anti-racist and anti-racist orientation has been associated with, I think when you're looking at race preferences and elite higher education, for example, I think that they're pretty darn unresponsive to the particular challenges facing that group. So when I talk about the flattening here, that is not to say that I believe that people who are the descendants of African Americans who are enslaved is unimportant or not meriting our concern. I think that there are some people for whom the flattening of these categories allows for an evasion of what are the kind of appropriate strategies? Are there strategies that exist outside of racially engineering elite professions and what have

• 37:26Speaker 01

  you? This could be an honest disagreement within two of us. I do think that broad strategies that are not explicitly racial in character can actually do a lot of good. But you know, I understand that this is a pretty deep disagreement. But yeah, I mean, I certainly think that that is certainly something that I think anyone, including any conservative, needs to reckon with. The question is, does the kind of way that we approach race consciousness flatten the experience of this particular group? And I do think sometimes it's a group within a group because of the dramatic differences you see between black movers and non movers and other kind of categories within that group. I want to basically address what are the most kind of pronounced persistent problems?

• 38:09Ezra Klein?

  And I think on the point of symbolic politics, we probably have a lot of agreement. I'm actually somebody who finds a lot of value in the rigor of the anti-racist perspective, really centering questions of inequality, really centering what you can measure and what effect your policies have on them. And to a large degree, my criticism in this space is that people don't always follow that where it goes or not. I think as consequentialist in their analysis as that would imply. And if people want to go back to it, I think I had a very interesting discussion on the show last year with with Abraham X. Kendi around a bunch of these issues. But I want to make sure we continue sort of exploring your work here as opposed to mainly my views here. I get plenty of time to talk on the show. And the Manhattan Institute, particularly Chris Ruffo, but not

• 38:52Ezra Klein?

  Only has really helped name the idea of critical race theory as the umbrella under which a lot of these ideological changes and ideas in the Democratic Party are being expressed, has really worked very hard to find examples of it happening across the country and raise their salience, has tried to make this a much more central question in American politics than some of it otherwise would be, or maybe it would be. You've had a very, I think, interesting view on what it is you're trying to achieve with that. So do you want to talk through the way you see the CRT fight and what the goals of it are on your end?

• 39:29Speaker 01

  I think that I gave you a pretty good sense of it when I was talking about race essentialism and why I think that it is pretty counterproductive. We use different vocabulary about this. There are a lot of folks at the Manhattan Institute, Glenn Lowry is, you know, one of our lead scholars who works on these questions of race and identity as well. He uses a different kind of language. He talks a lot about the development narrative versus the bias narrative. But I think that all of us in various ways are trying to think about how can we genuinely approach the problem of racial disadvantage? And also, how can we prevent a world in which we divide Americans into rival racialized camps? There's an essay that Chris wrote that I thought was very valuable. It was on what

• 40:11Speaker 01

  he called prison gang politics. And, you know, as you know, in California and many places around the country, when you look at people who are incarcerated, particularly in larger prisons, they are oftentimes organized into racial prison gangs. Basically, the idea is that your skin color is a kind of credible indicator of whether you're going to be on this side of the divide or that side of the divide. And, you know, I think it's a pretty scary, nightmarish outcome. And I think one way that Chris thinks about his work, and you'd have to ask him directly about it, is this idea, how can we avoid that fate? How can we avoid this racialized discourse exacerbating any tendency towards a white identity politics? How can emphasizing other categories, other categories that are crosscutting

• 40:52Speaker 01

  across lines of ethnicity and race, be things that can actually help foster integration, ethnic fluidity, things that we think would help us move towards a healthier society? Some of the battles over critical race theory are really centered on School curricula. And here, the big challenge is whether or not you have public institutions that are advancing curricula and ideas that are basically going against freedom of conscience. Do we have situations in which people are being compelled to adhere to certain ideas, certain controversial ideas? And I think that that's something where it is good and healthy to have transparency in school curricula.

• 41:34Speaker 01

  I think it is good and legitimate to believe that parents should have access to good, reliable information about what is being taught and about the ideological content of what is being taught. This is obviously a very contentious issue, but I think that it goes part and parcel with our general belief in educational pluralism. That is, the idea that schools tend to work best when they're broadly aligned with the values and sensibilities of families.

• 41:57Ezra Klein?

  That sounds more, when we talk about it, I guess it sounds more pluralistic than it feels to me it is playing out on the ground. So I think one question that is in my mind on all this is a point you make sometimes is that it's not good for American politics to be too focused on questions of racial difference. And I guess I question whether then trying to find like all the most controversial racial curriculums in local school districts around the country is really taking energy away from a toxic conversation that you're worried about or adding energy, making it more divisive, making it more electric.

• 42:38Ezra Klein?

  And when I look around and see schools and states putting forward laws censoring how teachers talk about, quote, divisive concepts, I think I get a little uncomfortable. And not because I don't see, you know, the Reihan Salam view, that there's a political argument for a more melting pot-ish approach to politics, but that I worry about the energies that are actually powering some of these backlashes being non-controllable, that what they are, in the end, is, I think, sort of what you fear, which is a lot of...

• 43:21Ezra Klein?

  Conflict and confrontation and ultimately, I think censoring. I mean, when you talk about being forced to teach something, I think being disallowed from teaching something. And then there's also the issue of the don't say gay laws, which have been advocated by people at Manhattan. It feels like it's going into a weird place to me and I'm curious how you see it.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  I would strongly urge listeners to check out the work of Leor Sapir on the Florida Law, the parental rights in education law. You know, I think that he has a really thoughtful approach. Of course, Chris has written quite a bit about it, too. And, you know, they've obviously given this a lot of deep, serious consideration. Honestly, I really do think that it comes down to the idea that school choice is really important. In the absence of school choice, fundamentally, public schools are creatures of the public sector. They are accountable to democratic legislatures. There is some degree to which curricula are zero sum. You are deciding to include some things and not include others. And I think that this has always been a subject of democratic contestation. And the thing that is really interesting is the idea that it shouldn't be a subject of democratic contestation.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  I think the discourse around this issue has, in my view, been a little bit confused because there are some people who are saying that, well, how dare you advance transparency legislation because there's already transparency versus others who say, how dare you advance this legislation because it's going to lead to censorship? I mean, it really is odd. I personally think that this is a fairly minimal expectation. The idea that actually the relationship in the classroom is not meant to be one in which parents and families are not a part of it, they're not a part of the conversation. And I do think that things would probably be healthier if we had a more genuinely pluralistic educational system. That is, a system in which the charter sector represented a bigger component of public education. And of course, you know, you will not be surprised to learn that I'm someone who is

• 45:11Speaker 01

  supportive of vouchers and other strategies for ensuring that we have more entry into education. And I think that that's something that would be really helpful in terms of dealing with the fact that in a big, diverse society that has deep disagreements about the content of curriculum, that one way to help resolve that dilemma is to have a Different kind of education system that is not so rigidly centralized. Because I think you're right, that there actually can be a certain brittleness that stems from that, you know, when you do have deep disagreement.

• 46:04Ezra Klein?

  I think you and I are going to pretty fundamentally disagree over whether Chris Rufo's project is actually making these tendencies you're talking about a whole lot worse. But I also understand you're not him. And so I do want to return to the political layer of your analysis because I think it's really interesting. Your view, as I understand it, is that this broader divergence we've been talking about on questions of racial essentialism causes the Democratic Party to misunderstand its own base in pretty fundamental ways. So tell me about that. What do you think Democrats get wrong about their own voters?

• 46:37Speaker 01

  Because Democrats have been so incredibly successful with educated affluent people, because that has become a kind of mass constituency, I think that there is a failure to reckon with the fact that there are many, many working class Democrats, particularly urban voters, voters of color, who don't think of themselves as being Republicans, who basically are pretty moralistic. When it comes to the welfare state, there are people who are actually quite allergic to the idea of a welfare state that is overly permissive, that is overly generous. When it comes to policing, they have instincts that I think left scholars would call authoritarian. They really believe in proactive policing. They believe in harsh punishment. And I think that this is a constituency that Democrats benefit from the fact that

• 47:22Speaker 01

  it's kind of stranded. They benefit from the fact that Republicans, for a variety of reasons, a lot of it's their own limitations about who it is they think they can speak to or who they're willing to speak to. But there is this kind of big group of people who adhere to what you might call traditional values, you know, when it comes to family. They are people who Just are not part of this kind of elite discourse and they are people who in other contexts might be more conservative. They're also, by the way, not people who are anti-government. You know, they're people for whom their rejection of welfare liberalism is selective. And that's something that had historically been a struggle for the Republican Party. But I think that that's a really big constituency. And if Republicans actually

• 48:04Speaker 01

  figured out how to engage that group of people, how to overcome the sense that this is a kind of culturally narrow, if not chauvinistic, group of people, then Democrats would be in much more trouble than they are. And as you know, from 2022 midterm polling, there are certainly some indications that there's a really, really big shift with people of Latin American origin. There are even some indications of a meaningful shift among black Americans as well. So I think it's because there's this group of people who are traditionalists along many of these different dimensions, including hard policy questions.

• 48:37Ezra Klein?

  Let me draw out an interesting word you used there, which is moralistic, which I think is an insightful word to use because there's a conventional version of this story you'll hear, which is that a lot of the Democratic base, and particularly it's non-white base, particularly it's black base and Hispanic base, are church-going, are religious, have more traditional views on things like abortion, gay marriage, gender expression than the Democratic elite level. But I think something you're drawing out there with your point about moralism and your point about this expressing itself also in other kinds of policy issues, is it, it's not just a religious divergence. There's a kind of assumption that tracks

• 49:22Ezra Klein?

  into economic and other kinds of policy here that is, I think it would be quite fair to say, underrepresented at high Democratic levels.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  So one way to distill it is the idea of conditional reciprocity, that government will do for you when you are in need, but it is important that you play by the rules and that you do your part. There's a term that the historian Fred Segal, longtime City Journal contributor, dubbed dependent individualism.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  The idea that individuals ought to be freed from their obligations to family and community through the largesse of a generous welfare system. Now, you are someone who is, I think, an exceptionally thoughtful technocrat. You know, and you're someone who is a great, if not someone who is an adherent to the idea of an unconditional basic income, you're someone who has, you know, thought deeply and seriously about the idea. And I think that those are ideas that need to be reckoned with, need to be taken seriously. But this moralistic tendency that I'm describing is something that finds that idea really dangerous, if not offensive. It's this idea, you know, and Fred clearly has a stake in this, right? I mean, you know, when he calls a dependent individualism, he's not saying that as a way of indicating his approval. And I think that that is really interesting.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  You know, this idea that there are some lower middle class, working class people for whom the idea that, hey, you know, I paid off my kid's student loans. That involved a lot of sacrifice on my part. It was a choice. It was hard. And I actually do believe that that choice and that effort should be held in esteem. And to be told that we're just going to wipe out student debt for people because that would be a good thing to do for people that through this moralistic frame don't necessarily seem to be the most deserving. I think that that is a deep, deep difference between a certain kind of left egalitarian technocratic tendency that, you know, by the way, has really compelling moral arguments behind it. These are serious people. These are people who've been my interlocutors, people I respect. But it just doesn't jibe with that other tendency.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  And the problem for the right is that other tendency, it's kind of under theorized. It's something where thinking about how does policy intersect with that? How does policy reflect those values? What does it look like to try to compromise on these things? I think that there hasn't been enough thinking about that. And it's one of the reasons why that's an area where I want to make an investment.

• 51:38Ezra Klein?

  It's interesting to me that you say it's under theorized because it actually picks up on another word that came in there, which is individualism. And when I think about some of the line you're tracing and where people that say in my cohort really do diverge. I'm not a big universal basic income guy personally for a bunch of different reasons that are a good subject for another podcast. But what I'm very much not is an individualist. I'm very much a structuralist. I tend to see people's life outcomes as much more driven by the structures that surround them, that they were born into. Not to say there is no space for individual work in my cosmology of human achievement. But it's smaller and that really does change what I think of as just desserts,

• 52:23Ezra Klein?

  how much of what you make would be moral or immoral to tax, how we should understand you if you fall off the straight and narrow path, even just thinking about the different cognitive resources that many of us end up having in the world. People with a lot of traumatic childhood experiences have a lot more impulsivity issues. That then leads to, you know, running afoul of the law. Like, how much do I get credit for not being traumatized repeatedly as a child? It seems relatively low. But whatever my arguments on these points are, I think this is a genuine place where people told my kind of position tend to be pretty different than a lot of the public, where I think people have much more individualistic intuitions. And that includes a lot of the Democratic voter base.

• 53:07Speaker 01

  This is really interesting and thorny. You know, when I talk about dependent individualism, it's not necessarily an endorsement. And I don't think Siegel meant it to be an endorsement of individualism per se, because it is also the idea that community networks of family and other kinds of informal affiliation, those things should matter. But it is, you know, a question of are they structured through the state? You know what I mean? I think that it's this question of liberty, equality, fraternity, this idea that fraternity is the piece that's really interesting. And how do we think about that domain? And how should people on the right think about that domain? But I think you're totally right about this idea that you have these different moral intuitions. So one moral intuition is

• 53:46Speaker 01

  the just world hypothesis, that basically work effort is rewarded. It is a very, very widespread belief. And, you know, that goes against another view that, you know, you described as more structural. I guess I'd personally describe myself as being, you know, kind of somewhere in between these poles. But I do think that that sensibility is important, and it's something that is not going to be banished from the face of the earth. You know, it's very, very deep. You know, my mother, for example, you know, I think of her as someone who is very much someone who is quite moralistic about these ideas and issues. It's something that reflects her hard won experience. And I think that it's something that is definitely systematically underrepresented in elite discourse, partly because it's almost like You know, it's not a matter of IQ.

• 54:29Speaker 01

  It's not a matter of educational attainment. You know, there are certain people who gravitate to education and elite education, partly because they have certain moral sensibilities. You know what I mean? So it is interesting, and I think that for Democrats, it is kind of a challenge because these are people who are part of your coalition. And how do you reconcile that moralistic sensibility with the one that is, as you put it, more structural? And for Republicans, how do you take that moralistic sensibility and guide it in a direction that can lead to good constructive policy? And that also reckons with the fact that, hey, you know, there are people who need an ambulance from time to time. There are people who find themselves in emergencies. There are people where, you know, the buy the bootstraps thesis isn't going to be enough for them.

• 55:13Speaker 01

  So, yeah, I mean, I think that it's one of these challenges that also goes back to entrepreneurial coalition politics, because you're never going to rid the world of liberal cosmopolitans. You're never going to rid the world of moralistic traditionalists. And so, in a way, for me, the big question for America and America's future as a multi-ethnic democracy is, can we build institutions that are capacious enough to accommodate this deep moral pluralism? And I see that as a big part of what I and my colleagues want to work on and think about in our various ways.

• 55:47Ezra Klein?

  Let's talk about what it would take to actually build that kind of coalition. So in 2008, you wrote Grand New Party with my colleague Ross Douthat, and the book is a push for the Republican Party to become a more working class party, and at least compared to where it was then, embrace more working class redistribution. But I've heard you say more recently that you think the right is now overestimating what redistribution can do, and that you want to see a supply-side conservatism that isn't just the old supply-side conservatism of tax cuts. So as somebody who's been thinking about a supply-side progressivism, I'd be curious to hear how you think about that agenda. What does a modern supply-side conservatism look like?

• 56:26Speaker 01

  Honestly, there's a lot of overlap with your agenda. Certainly, when it comes to housing abundance, it's been a real focus of our work at the Manhattan Institute. I believe that it's really essential. An area where we might disagree is that I'm a big believer in the idea that the potential return of fiscal constraints, of fiscal limits, will mean that there's going to, again, be a big trade-off between maintaining low-middle-class taxes and having an expansive or targeted welfare state. And so, for me, middle-class wealth creation, the idea of increasing savings. There's this idea some years ago by Joe Jerko, professor at the University of Pennsylvania, in which he said, "Let's replace subsidized FHA loans with a subsidized savings program

• 57:10Speaker 01

  to help low-income people build up a down payment so that they don't have negative equity, so that homeownership does not become a source of financial risk, but rather becomes a source of wealth building." And then beyond that, Canada, the UK, they have these very large tax-free savings accounts, something where Republicans have actually been strangely, in my view, reluctant to really pursue that. I mean, that represents a big revenue loss, but my view is that rather than pursuing further top marginal tax rate cuts, that's the kind of thing, the idea of middle-class wealth creation, so that our welfare state can be more targeted. I think that that would be a good and healthy thing. My colleague Chris Pope at MI is doing really brilliant work on the evolution of the welfare state. And one of his biggest observations is that there's a big difference between the post-war

• 57:54Speaker 01

  era, when there was this huge surfeit of revenue, partly because of the fact that tax brackets weren't being indexed, to what happened after that. And once those tax revenues went down somewhat, what you see is that the welfare state did become more targeted. People on the left and people on the right worked together to reduce Medicare growth to invest more in programs like S-Chip. And I think that that targeting was actually a really good and healthy thing. And I think that now, for creative policy thinkers on the right, I think that there's a lot of value in thinking, hey, if we're back to an era of fiscal constraint, which I believe we will be, let's think about countering calls for increased social insurance, drastic expansion of government, with something that is, in our view, more in tune with the

• 58:38Speaker 01

  American grain, and that's more fiscally realistic, and that will yield better outcomes for lower-income people.

• 58:44Ezra Klein?

  So I wanted to de-jargon a bit of this because I think it's very important. So, so one, when you talk about the period where tax brackets weren't indexed, what you're saying there is we had a long period in American politics where the tax brackets did not change with inflation. And so just by the nature of inflation and growth, people kept moving into higher and higher tax brackets at a much faster rate than they did later, which created more tax revenue. And I guess in this analysis, created the, the conditions under which the welfare state, the social insurance state could grow more rapidly. Is that the argument?

• 59:18Speaker 01

  And Ezra, just to give you an illustration here, you know, between 1945 and 1980, average tax rate stayed the same on the richest 10% of households, but increased steadily on the poorest 50%. But that's something that, you know, when you look at the backlash era, you know, if you look at Howard Jarvis, if you look at supply side 1.0, a lot of that came out of bracket creep.

• 59:39Ezra Klein?

  Talk a bit about what you mean when you say the return of fiscal constraint, because I don't disagree, but I think this is actually, if you believe this, a much bigger change where politics is about to go than people realize. And before I hand it to you, I'll ramble for one second and say, I think that it is a very underappreciated dimension of Donald Trump's presidency, that it takes place in this period of very, very low interest rates, the kind of discrediting for a while of deficit hawk concerns, including very much on the right, a very, very little fear over inflation. And so Trump, among other things, is a very, very big spender. Spending goes up a lot under him.

• 1:00:23Ezra Klein?

  He is very stimulative to the economy, there's very accommodative Fed policy and a lot of fiscal stimulus at a time when the economy is doing pretty well, which for that period is very good for employment and ultimately then for wage gains. When the coronavirus hits, he more or less signs on with, with Steve Mnuchin to this gigantic largely democratic, you know, fiscal stimulus plan. Trumpism without that kind of fiscal space, I think, looks very, very different. So why do you think the fiscal constraint is coming back? What do you mean when you say that? And how do you think it'll change or should change Republican Party politics? Because this won't just change where Democrats have gone.

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  You have spoken to brilliant, brilliant people like Larry Summers and others who've been really thinking about the larger macro environment. And Summers and Jason Furman, they've done some writing about basically why they believe that we have some fiscal space. What they don't oftentimes underscore is that, or they didn't underscore, I think Summers has been pretty hawkish, is that if you see a significant increase in interest rates, this world starts looking really, really different. So I'm not the best person to establish why fiscal limits are on the way back, but I think there are a lot of thoughtful, credible people who believe they are. And if they are, to the second half of your question, the implications are profound for Republican and Democratic politicians.

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  You could argue that the extent to which our politics have centered on cultural controversies is a product of fiscal slack, or at least the perception of fiscal slack. And if fiscal constraints come back, you suddenly have to start thinking very rigorously about priorities and choices. So President Trump, a big part of his political formula was the idea that we are going to take Medicare and Social Security off the table. Well, gosh, that is incredibly, incredibly powerful for Republican politicians for all sorts of reasons that are, I imagine, very familiar to you and your listeners. There's a universe of culturally conservative voters who are more pro redistribution, more egalitarian, for whom that puts them in play. And if you believe that fiscal constraints are on their way back, then suddenly the

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  really tricky politics of saying, well, if we want any new social spending, if we want to invest more in children, for example, that's going to potentially have to come out of old age social insurance programs. And beyond making those choices, you need to think potentially really radically about the big entitlement programs. I'm kind of obsessed about the way that cooperative federalism contributes to some of our fiscal bloat. But just fundamentally, those entitlement programs that were Paul Ryan's big bete noire, kind of his big cause was trying to fix them and make them more sustainable, suddenly they come back to the center of our politics. And Ryan's particular approach is no more attractive now than it was then, in fact, arguably is less attractive, given the rapid

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  Changing of society. So there is a real need for creative thinking about how it is you're going to approach those problems. And I think I'm proud to say that at the Manhattan Institute, we're doing a lot of that thinking. But you know, it's pulling teeth and certainly politicians don't want to think about that. And there is that deep asymmetry with the fact that Republican politicians, Republican elected officials as a general matter are just less policy oriented, especially when it comes to fiscal politics. And that is going to be a big, big problem if Summers and Olivier Blanchard and others are right that we're headed for an area of an era of fiscal constraints.

• 1:03:49Ezra Klein?

  I mean, this is a place where it does seem to me that you and Manhattan are very much swimming upstream with the conservative tide at the moment, because when I think about some things you've talked about just in this show, I would say what I'm hearing from people on the, I still have a great term for it populist right, the sort of like neo-Trumpian right. You know, your JD Vances, your Patrick Deneens, your et cetera. When I look at what they're saying, when I, when I talk to them or the people around them, I'm hearing a lot more openness to unions. I'm hearing a lot more talk about how to spend money.

• 1:04:27Ezra Klein?

  You know, there's talk about child allowances and a fair amount of just discussion of how would you redistribute money to families. Very few people are excited about messing with social security and Medicare. After Rick Scott, the Senator from Florida, brought out this 11 point plan to rescue America, which was very much a, within the context of fiscal constraint kind of plan. And included raising a fair amount of taxes on, on poor people. McConnell said, if we're fortunate enough to have the majority next year, I'll be the majority leader. I'll decide in consultation with my members what to put on the floor and let me tell you what will not be part of our agenda.

• 1:05:06Ezra Klein?

  We will not have as part of our agenda, a bill that raises taxes on half the American people and sunset social security and Medicare within five years. So can you talk a bit about how you see the trend in the Republican Party on this? Because it's sort of distinctively within, I think, my lifetime. Economic policy for them feels like a much more open field. I think there's much more agreement on social policy, which there traditionally wasn't, and a belief that they need to really crack open their economic assumptions. And that seems to be pushing many of them in a much more kind of big government direction.

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  Here, I believe that, you know, I'm necessarily being speculative, but I think a large number of Americans, if not a majority of Americans, embrace the idea that the role of government is to serve as a safety net. The role of government is to be, as Bob Woodsen put it, an ambulance, not a transportation system for people who fall into poverty. And so this idea that a program like S-Chip is targeted, there's some spending discipline, it really is focused on those of the greatest need.

• 1:06:09Ezra Klein?

  S-Chip being a health insurance program for children.

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  Yes. Rather than programs that are encompassing large numbers of middle income and more affluent people who potentially could provide for themselves, provided we have the right institutions to allow them to do that. So my big picture view is that for many middle income, upper middle income people, we do have a lot of scope to improve the workings of private insurance markets, of retirement savings and what have you. I think that there are many ways in which big data is changing the landscape. In a way, the kind of early social insurance programs, if you look at the days of Bismarck, this was a moment when we did not have very good granular information about risk, about who is going to have chronic ailments, who is going to need sustained safety net support, and who would not.

• 1:06:55Speaker 01

  And I think that when you look at some market democracies, Australia is one example of this, and there are others besides, where you essentially have a more private system that is built on basically savings, you have a universe of providers who are kind of serving you in a kind of more or less market-like arrangement, and then you have well-designed, targeted safety net systems. If you look at how the Affordable Care Act has evolved, I think it's not unreasonable to say that in many states, the exchanges have evolved into something akin to high-risk pools. Should those high-risk pools be well-designed and well-funded to therefore allow a wider insurance market that can be more market? And you know, should we endeavor to limit crowd out, particularly in a age of fiscal constraints?

• 1:07:37Speaker 01

  Those are ideas that our scholars are exploring and that I think are good and valuable. And I actually don't think would be that terrifying or awful because I think that actually there are a lot of people who are broadly satisfied with their private sector solutions. The question is whether or not we have regulations that allow good business models to thrive and expand or not. And also, are we adequately targeting resources on the needy so that needy folks are actually getting good services? And I think that that's another big struggle. So you have to get both pieces of that right. And I think that requires a lot of careful thought, but I do think that it goes with the American grain rather than against it.

• 1:08:17Ezra Klein?

  Let me try and fit this into your broader political theory that we've been tracing here. So as I understand you, I think you believe that on a lot of what I call cultural issues, although I don't always love the term, but issues around race and its role in American life. I think issues around probably gender, issues of what kinds of things are important in American politics. You believe the Democratic Party is out of step with many of the people who it claims to represent. And those are tensions that create opportunity for Republicans. Do you think that's true here? When I hear that critique inside the Democratic Party, which I associate with people like David Shor and others, the diagnosis is often for Democrats to really emphasize their economically populist roots,

• 1:08:58Ezra Klein?

  their attention to redistribution, their desire to pass programs that will make the the structure of the American government, I guess, more of a transport for people who are in poverty or people who are who are in trouble. Do you see the same dynamics here? Or do you think this is a place where it's actually Republicans who have a pretty tough persuasion job ahead of them?

• 1:09:21Speaker 01

  This is very multi-dimensional. I will broadly say that if I were someone who was a Democrat, you know, with fundamentally egalitarian instincts and you know, kind of that's my kind of flavor of politics. I think the Shor thesis is pretty compelling and would make a lot of sense. And the idea of building a majority where there's more pluralism in terms of cultural sense. And issuing of race essentialism, et cetera. I think that sounds roughly right. When it comes to this kind of other politics, which rests on the idea of a welfare state that is Lincolnian. We will do what you can't do for yourself. And we will endeavor to help you become someone who is less dependent, more economically capable of standing on your own feet, that kind of thing.

• 1:10:06Speaker 01

  I think that that ethic also is broadly popular. But I think that the bigger thing is that for any big picture change, when it comes to certainly the social safety net, any big legislative change, you need some middle ground. And I think that for me, the thing that I really hope for, and the reason why I find the shore thesis important and appealing, is because it's like, he has a vision of Republicans that doesn't anathematize people who voted for Donald Trump or Mitt Romney or what have you. But it's like, hey, how can we win some of those people so that we can build this big coalition for our vision? And I want a Republican Party that is similarly not saying, hey, let's do what we can to make sure that we dominate forever and we prevent these people from participating in the political system

• 1:10:50Speaker 01

  or whatever, because we're so afraid of the future. We're so afraid of a diversifying future. I want a Republican Party that says, yeah, we want to peel off elements of the Democratic Party. And when it comes to the politics of social insurance, the welfare state, et cetera. I mean, again, if you really believe that there are constraints, man, just eventually you're going to need to get to some modus vivendi. And it might not be 100% what I want it to look like. But if you look at that post 1980 experience, I certainly think going the direction of targeted programs like S-Chip, rather than programs that spend a ton of money on upper middle income people, I'd much rather have that. And I think that that was a product of that bipartisan contestation and the need to reach some settlements.

• 1:11:29Ezra Klein?

  Who do you think are the Republicans? And I'm not asking here about just the ones who are looking at 2024 and get talked about a lot, although it could be them too. But who are the Republicans who you see as most? In line with this vision, who are trying to peel off, who are worried about the quality of life issues you worry about, who have a view of the problems and possibilities that you consider modern and reflective of sort of urban politics and a changing America. Who do you look to and you think, huh, they're doing something interesting?

• 1:12:02Speaker 01

  That's a tough one for me to answer, partly because MI, you know, we're based in New York, you know, we're not really a kind of truly inside the beltway kind of institution. The truth is that I think that we're in a moment when among Republican politicians, there seems to be a suspension of a lot of these domestic policy debates. I think that there are people who are afraid of their own shadow. They feel so deeply insecure and anxious about the base. What does the base actually think? I think there's real uncertainty about that. And I think it stems from the fact that whereas the Democratic Party has these cohesive policy demanders like public sector workers, the Republicans don't really have anchor in groups like that. There are gun rights organizations, certainly pro-life organizations fit in that category.

• 1:12:45Speaker 01

  You can debate the defense sector or other sectors where they by necessity play both sides of the street. But it's a big struggle. It means that you don't have something that really mores the party. So I'm sorry to be evasive, but you know, there are people that I think are bright, capable people. I think that I have to be cautious as someone who leads a nonpartisan organization. I don't want to be electioneering.

• 1:13:06Ezra Klein?

  You can like people. I've been to 501(c)(3), you can think some people are doing interesting work.

• 1:13:12Speaker 01

  I will say that Senator Tom Cotton is someone who has talked about crime and urban violence in a way that I think is very far sighted. You know, I'm sure that he would disagree with me on some issues here and there. But I think that he is someone who has a clarity of purpose. And I think that he's the kind of person who does have a long-term orientation. We haven't talked about foreign and defense policy because that's not what the Manhattan Institute does. But I really believe that he's someone who is far sighted on those issues as well. So he's certainly someone that I think is someone with a lot of intellectual heft. And I think that, you know, there are many governors who I think have good political instincts, but you know, one thing we do is we really try to focus on people regardless of partisan affiliation who will listen to us on three issues out of 10. And so I don't have a great answer for you on the national scene.

• 1:13:58Ezra Klein?

  Then I think it's a good place to go to what is always our final question, which is what are three books you would recommend to the audience?

• 1:14:04Speaker 01

  You know, I'm really struggling Ezra, because I want to give you four books.

• 1:14:07Ezra Klein?

  You can give me four.

• 1:14:09Speaker 01

  Oh, oh, well, you are, you are far.

• 1:14:10Ezra Klein?

  I'll make an exception. We've known each other a long time.

• 1:14:13Speaker 01

  So David E. Bernstein has a book coming out in July called Classified, The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America that I highly recommend. He also has a kind of forward-looking agenda about how we ought to think about racial classification going forward, but it's just really a neat treatment of all of the ironies and weirdnesses of how it is we seek to categorize people by race and ethnicity. My brilliant colleague Ralph Mongwell has a book coming out in late July called Criminal Injustice: What the Push for Decarceration and Depolicing Gets Wrong and Who It Hurts Most. In addition to being just a superb writer and thinker and scholar, Ralph is someone who I think writes with great compassion and moral urgency, and he's someone that

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  I hope you'll be hearing from in the future. For book number three, I just want to shout out one of my favorite books of all time, published in 1998, called Sir Vidia's Shadow by Paul Theroux, and it's about his decades-long friendship with the novelist, essayist, memoirist, V.S. Nyipal, and it's just a really weird, strange, incredibly beautiful book. There is a biography of Nyipal by Patrick French that is sort of more scholarly and aligns and doesn't align in some interesting ways. But Theroux's book, as someone who has always cared a lot about friendship and the art of friendship and stuff like that, it just is really a beautiful and funny and biting book. And the fourth one, because I'm cheating, is a book by a former housemate

• 1:15:43Speaker 01

  of mine, Elbridge Colby, called The Strategy of Denial, which is essentially about this new age of great power competition and the challenge to US global leadership that China poses, what we ought to do about it, why we ought to prioritize it. So, thank you, thank you, thank you so much Ezra for letting me squeeze in for.

• 1:16:01Ezra Klein?

  Raham Salam. Thank you very much.

• 1:16:15Ezra Klein?

  The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld, and Roshay Karma. Fact checking by Michelle Harris, Roland Hugh, and Mary Marge Locker. Original music by Isaac Jones, mixing and engineering by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Our executive producers are Rina Noguchi and special thanks to Kristen Lynn and Christina Semuluski.