Pod Insights The Ezra Klein Show What a More Responsible Republican Party Would Look Like About this episode If you watched this past weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference, you heard a lot of debunked election conspiracies, dire warnings about “cancel culture” and unwavering fealty to Donald Trump. What you didn’t hear was much in the way of policy ideas to raise wages, improve health care or support families. This is the modern G. O. P.: a post-policy party obsessed with symbolic fights and curiously uninterested in the actual work of governing. But does it have to be that way?
Ramesh Ponnuru is a senior editor at National Review, a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a Republican wonk who is pushing his party in a more responsible, policy-centric direction. We discuss:
— Why Republicans have lost interest in policy.
— Whether Trump would have won the presidency if Senate Republicans had passed a big stimulus bill before the 2020 election.
— Why Ponnuru thinks the Republican Party’s 2024 hopefuls have learned the wrong lesson from Trump’s 2016 victory.
— The conservative case for a universal child allowance.
— Why so few Republican politicians have openly endorsed the Romney child allowance plan — and what that says about the tensions within the party’s coalition.
— What it would take for Republicans to move away from being a “business owners’” party and toward being a “parents’” party.
— Why Ponnuru thinks Republicans should support limiting, or outright banning, just-in-time scheduling practices.
— Whether there was ever a mass constituency for Paul Ryan’s version of conservatism.
— Who are the most important emerging voices on the political right today.
And much more.
Recommendations:
"The Great Debate" by Yuval Levin
"The Upside-Down Constitution" by Michael S. Greve
"Popular Crime" by Bill James
"The Chronicles of Narnia" by C. S. Lewis
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.
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] .
“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Rogé Karma and Jeff Geld; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld.
Transcript 10,126 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:06 Ezra Klein? I'm Ezra Klein, and this is The Ezra Klein Show.
0:23 Ezra Klein? So before we begin today, we are still looking for an associate producer on the show that is a position that requires two years of audio experience, but it's going to be involved in everything from researching guests, to booking, to transcripts, to cutting and editing episodes. If that sounds like something you have the experience for and want to do, we have the listing right now in the show description. So go check it out. Today's episode is about one of the core obsessions or themes that this show is going to have. And that is, how do we get, can we even get, a more responsible Republican Party? And one way I define that is a Republican Party that is more centered around an actual governing agenda. The Republican Party we actually have has spun off too much to culture
1:05 Ezra Klein? war and grievance politics as, depending on how you want to frame it, a distraction from, an absence of consensus on more direct policies that would improve the lived economic lives of their voters. Or another way of looking at it is that it is trying to distract from opposition to those policies. But there are Republicans who are trying to diagnose the problem, who are trying to push the party back in a more policy-centric direction, and trying to push the party also towards a policy-centric direction that I think would be healthier. Towards a kind of policy direction that would make it more reasonable for Republicans to say they are actually a working person's party, or, as you'll hear in this, a parent's party. One of those Republicans is Ramesh Ponnuru. Ramesh is a senior editor at The National Review. He's a columnist at Bloomberg View, a fellow at the American
1:48 Ezra Klein? Enterprise Institute, somebody I don't always agree with, but I always try and read and listen to. As always, my email is [email protected] . Here's Ramesh.
2:02 Ezra Klein? So let me start here. If Republicans had passed another big COVID stimulus prior to November, maybe one as Donald Trump wanted with $2,000 checks, do you think Trump wins a second term and Republicans keep the Senate?
2:15 Speaker 01 You know, the race, even in retrospect, is a little odd because in one way, it was not tight. It was a more comfortable margin for Biden than, say, the 2,000 race for the Republicans. But at the same time, you know, you look at three states where if you switched, what, 22,000 votes in the right places, Trump would have gotten the election kicked into the House, where Republicans would have had a majority of state delegations and he would then have won. So in that sense, it was pretty tight. And you do have to look at small things that could have made a difference. So even though most people's opinions were pretty
2:58 Speaker 01 baked in, and there wasn't a whole lot of fluctuation in public opinion about Donald Trump throughout his entire presidency, yeah, I think that could have made a difference. Definitely could have made a difference in the Senate. There are a number of other things that you could point to, like, what if Trump's policies on COVID had been basically the same, but he just carried on a little bit less like a maniac about it, had done sort of the bare minimum of being a reassuring figure when he spoke about it? What if he hadn't discouraged mail-in voting? That might have been enough.
3:30 Ezra Klein? The reason I'm interested in this counterfactual, to your point, there are many things Donald Trump could have done differently, but many of them, he didn't want to do differently. He didn't want to stop being a maniac on Twitter. He didn't want to stop giving his press conferences. But this is one where Donald Trump certainly at times wanted to do a bigger stimulus, and it seemed like the Republican Party's incentives were aligned to do it. But they didn't. So why do you think they didn't? Why didn't Mitch McConnell and Trump come together on this one, given their electoral interests?
3:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, that is a really interesting question. It is certainly true that Trump, from time to time, talked about, you know, we need a stimulus and we're better off going big and I want the $2,000 checks. But he didn't have in him the ability to engage in a policy question in a sustained way and negotiate with people on the Hill. I mean, like, that sort of thing just wasn't something that he displayed at any point in his presidency. He didn't do a lot of the traditional job of a president and instead sort of took on the mantle of the internet commenter-in-chief on his own presidency. And that's one of the things that was really bizarre about this, because I think there's absolutely no question that if Trump had engaged in August and September and said,
4:43 Speaker 01 "I want $2,000 checks," and made this a test of Republican support for him, he would have gotten those $2,000 checks. And there would have been some grumbling, and there would have been some Republicans who voted against it. But he would have had it. He would have had the bulk of Republicans, he would have had a lot of Democrats who would have just been with him on the policy question. And I think you have to look at sort of psychological, more than political, explanations for why Trump did that. Now, the question for McConnell, I think, is a little bit different. And I've never had a clear handle on that. I do think there's an assumption that the legislation wouldn't actually have any real-world
5:24 Speaker 01 effects that you need to care about, that it's just a sort of a political game, which I think was actually a pretty widespread assumption among Republicans. And then there's just the, you know, we don't want to spend money, we'll spend money if we have to, but it's not our comfort zone.
5:40 Ezra Klein? I want to key in on that assumption, that passing a big COVID relief bill would have just been a political game. Because one of your big themes in pieces you've been writing recently is that the Republican Party has detached itself from policy, from putting forward proactive agendas, and turned to focus on cultural grievance and conservative entertainment. Why do you think that's happened?
6:04 Speaker 01 I mean, I think it's it's hard to deny that it has happened. You can certainly see that in the way Republicans have conducted recent elections. And not just in the way that the Republican politicians have behaved, but in the way the various factions of the party have responded to that. It's not as though you've got significant actors in the Republican Party who are demanding that Republicans run different kinds of campaigns that have more of a policy focus on it. And I think to a large extent, Republican voters are behind this. The Republican voters themselves have become post-policy. So it's not as though Republican politicians are being punished for not running on policy
6:49 Speaker 01 agendas and then delivering on those agendas. If anything, they feel as though they're being rewarded for doing something different. Just look over the course of the last 30 years, right? So Republicans in 1994 run on a contract with America, which has granted quite a lot of slogans in there, but there is some policy substance to it. There is this felt need to say, we have some ideas about what we want to do if we take power. And then in the Obama years, the opposition party is much, much less eager to run on that kind of idea-based platform.
7:32 Speaker 01 There's a deliberate decision not to have an Obamacare replacement plan in the run-up to the 2014 elections, for example. And then you get, you know, by the time you're in the Trump administration, Republicans really only attempt two major pieces of legislation and then call it a day. When the healthcare replacement fails and the tax cut doesn't seem to yield any political returns, Republicans basically draw the lesson, well, I guess it's a waste of time to do anything on policy. And so they campaigned in 2018 saying, Or rather not saying, look, if you give us continued
8:14 Speaker 01 control of Congress and the White House, we're going to do a couple of things for you. And in 2020, Trump doesn't campaign on the basis of here's what I'm going to do in my second term, and Republican senators and House members don't campaign on give us back control of the government so we can do X, Y, and Z. And, you know, look, I'm somebody who's been arguing for years that conservatives should have that kind of an agenda. But the Republicans are in decent political health without having done any of that kind of work. And so I think that there is an inclination on their part to just keep doing it. But among the reasons why that is still worth pushing back on is that at some point,
8:59 Speaker 01 if you're involved in politics and interested in office, it's because you want to accomplish something.
9:05 Ezra Klein? Well, I'm actually not sure that's true for everyone. Sometimes people are here because they want to become Twitter celebrities, which I think has actually become a more, a more common route in sort of Republican Congressional Conference. But you hit something there that I think is really deep that I want to focus on for a minute, which is who controls the Republican Party? And I think if you talk to a liberal about this five years ago, 10 years ago, the model they have of the Republican Party is it is controlled by corporations, the Chamber of Commerce, that whatever those players want, they get. And I don't think that's entirely wrong even now. They got their tax cuts even after Donald Trump ran as a quasi populist. There was the Obamacare repeal effort.
9:47 Ezra Klein? So the Congressional wing of the Republican Party has still been pretty responsive there. But what that wing of the party wants is pretty different than what the base of the party wants. The base of the party does not want the kinds of immigration reforms the Chamber of Commerce wants. The base of the party does want a lot more cultural grievance fighting than the Chamber of Commerce wants. And I think a reasonable model of the Republican Party over the past 10 years is that those institutional players have not dissolved, but they're weakening, and the base is getting much more of what it wants. And there's actually a pretty big conflict between what the two sides want. And so where the Republican Party is going right now is sort of a mush. Do you think that's right?
10:26 Speaker 01 Well, the way I've thought about it is that Trump
10:32 Speaker 01 Exploded an old Republican sort of synthesis program and agenda without really replacing it with anything coherent and fleshed out. So the Republicans are left in a kind of state of disorientation and don't really know what they stand for and are kind of sort of feeling their way forward in that respect. The divergence you're talking about between sort of, let's say, the donor base and the voting base of the Republican Party, there's always been a difference there as there is in the Democratic Party. I think that divergence got a little bit wider during the Obama years. And it's not just a matter of sort of interest groups within the Republican Party.
11:17 Speaker 01 I think it's also intellectually, the Republican agenda became further and further detached from reality because it wasn't adapting with the times and it was sort of still keyed towards the circumstances of America in, you know, 1981. So I go on this tangent a little bit because there is this sort of tendency sometimes to think of the history of conservatism as though sort of Obama era conservatism is the way it was always. But in some ways, that kind of extremely anti-government and somewhat rigid and doctrinaire economic libertarianism was unusual for the Republican Party. It wasn't the way the party was under Reagan or under George W. Bush.
12:02 Speaker 01 And so in some ways, Trump was a kind of correction to an aberration that got the party back in an odd way towards more of its historical self-definition. You know, I mean, like the Ryan moment, the Paul Ryan moment where the Republican Party was about makers, not takers, and was all in on an entitlement reform. I mean, that wasn't the way the Republican Party was between like 1981 and 2008, right? I mean, Reagan explicitly said basically he wasn't going to do much on entitlements and didn't. And then George W. Bush actually expanded an entitlement with the Medicare drug benefit and obviously was a big government guy in general.
12:45 Speaker 01 And so the Republican Party had kind of gone down a little bit of an ideological cul-de-sac during the Obama years.
12:52 Speaker 01 One of the reasons why that old Republican Party sort of blew up was because it had become such a brittle orthodoxy that had gotten so far detached from political reality. It was not where voters at large were, and it turned out it wasn't even where Republican base voters were, where the Republican electorate was. So, I mean, you saw this in 2016, right? I mean, you'd have these ads from the Club for Growth, you know, Trump has said this about healthcare, and Trump has said that about taxes, and he's done this on trade. And there were a bunch of Republican primary voters who actively liked what Trump was saying on those issues. And then there was another group of Republican voters who just didn't care, right?
13:33 Speaker 01 They weren't so excited about any of those old Republican agenda items that they held it against him, that he wasn't for them.
13:40 Ezra Klein? I've heard you make this argument on another podcast, I think it was on 538, where you argued that a lot of 2024 hopefuls have learned the wrong lesson from Trump in 2016, that Trump won largely because he was seen as a moderate in the party, not because he just played to the base. That's a challenging argument to hear at this moment, so give it to me in more detail.
14:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, and I'll tell you, like, I underestimated Trump in 2015 because I thought of him as a kind of the latest flavor of the month of extreme right, sort of far-right candidates, or of candidates for those Republican primary voters who described themselves to pollsters as very conservative. You know, and I made this point, I have a really embarrassing column in retrospect from mid-2015, where I said, don't worry about Trump, because, you know, I was like, look, look at all these people who've come and gone before, like the Herman Cain's and Michelle Bachmann's of the world. This segment of the party never unites around a candidate and never dominates the Republican presidential primaries for various reasons.
14:48 Speaker 01 And the Republican presidential primary after Reagan...
14:53 Speaker 01 Has always gone to somebody at the center of the party or on the left of the party and not to anybody on the right of the party because these very conservative voters split. They split on religious grounds. They split economic versus social conservatives. They split sort of how pragmatic they're willing to be and somebody comes up on the middle and left of the party and consolidates. The basic structural theory about how the Republican Party worked turned out to be correct, but I was wrong in that Trump ended up being that guy. Trump is the guy who ends up dominating among Republican voters who describe themselves as moderate and maybe the crucial constituency, Republican voters
15:34 Speaker 01 who describe themselves as somewhat conservative. And he actually does much worse in general among those voters who describe themselves as very conservative. Now, we all have a distorted picture of this because of, you know, some obvious aspects of Trump, the Trump's racial politics and Trump's nationalism being the key aspects of this, but then also because over the course of his presidency, it was the very conservatives who became his strongest supporters and the Republicans who defected or became lukewarm supporters were the moderate Republicans. But that wasn't the way it was all through 2016. And to get sort of get back to the question you're raising, it does strike me that a lot of the people who are trying
16:17 Speaker 01 to be kind of Trumpist candidates for the post-Trump party, whether it's Senator Cotton or Hawley or Cruz or Rubio, they seem to be under the impression that you can build a successful intra-party coalition from the right in. And maybe they're right, they're professional politicians and I'm not, but even with the bizarre campaign of 2016, it has not worked for any post-1984 Republican presidential candidate.
16:49 Ezra Klein? One thing I think about when trying to evaluate Donald Trump's success and the lessons of it is that those of us, and this describes you and me, who are policy wonks by inclination and trade, have a tendency to pick through Trumpism and find the policy threads. And so he did a lot of things in the 2016 campaign, made a lot of comments that were more moderate, right? He wasn't going to cut entitlements, he was going to raise taxes on people like himself, he was going to give everybody beautiful generous healthcare. And then there are a number of Republicans who are trying to build a kind of post-Trump Trumpism around his policies. And even people who are one-time critics of him, like Lindsey Graham, have said, what we need to do is keep Donald Trump's policies and just move
17:31 Ezra Klein? forward from there. But I do think one question is whether or not what Donald Trump really understood was the policy communication wasn't very important, and that what is uniting Republicans right now, the core of the energy in the party, is a sense of cultural threat. And you could describe that in a lot of different ways, and it comes together in different ways. It's racial change, right? Demographic change, it's secularization in society. He did do very well among evangelical voters in general, and they stayed with him in a very loyal way through 2020. And this goes to this question, can you force policy on a Republican party, on a Republican base, that is not primarily worried about the things policy wonks worry about? Like, I noticed at CPAC this year, the big conservative
18:12 Ezra Klein? conference, its theme is "Uncancelled America," right? And say what you will about your ideas of cancel culture or not cancel culture. Its theme is not healthcare, the economy, coronavirus, climate change. Like, all of these things where I could come up with a bunch of policy ideas, even from the right to do something about them. It's theme is cancellation. There was a lot of Republican energy around the 1619 project at the New York Times. Is that where the energy is? And what happens if the energy is on things that really don't have policy solutions?
18:43 Speaker 01 I did this interview with Senator Cotton and it had been set up as a thing on cancel culture, which is fine and great. And you know, there's a lot of interesting stuff to say about it. But I did say, I did ask him, so, okay, if this is like this huge problem in America, what are you as a Senator going to do about it? And, you know, he didn't have much of an answer to that. I'm not sure that there really is much of an answer, you know, other than, well, I'm just going to keep saying what I'm saying. And I'm in this position where I depend on voters rather than than these cultural institutions. And so I have this freedom, which is, you know, I mean, that's actually, I mean, it's not a terrible answer to the question, but it's, it's not a completely satisfying answer to the question either. Let me back up a second. There is some policy substance that was important
19:25 Speaker 01 to Trump. Trump, whether because he was a brilliant strategist, or because he had a certain cunning sense of these things. He did, I think, understand the red lines in the Republican Party. Because sometimes you'd hear people saying, well, you know, Republicans are for Trump, whatever he does, they'd go with him, you know, he could do anything, he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue. Okay, fine, he can do lots of things. He proved that he could do lots of things and still retain Republican support. But he didn't try to do some things like stick with his old pro-choice position on abortion, or really stick to his occasional advocacy of gun control, or tax increases. If he did that, I think he would have found that there were large numbers of Republican voters who cared about those particular issues. And so he had to stick with them on those. He had to stick
20:10 Speaker 01 with them on religious liberty thing. Lots of other stuff. Republican voters don't in large numbers have strong views on trade, and he could do what he wanted to do on that. So that was one element of sort of policy substance to Trump or to Trumpism. A second, he was very good at using a policy issue to communicate a value, or communicate something he wanted people to know about him, whether it's, you know, I'm strong, or I'm on your side, I'm tough, etc. So the wall being an aspect of that, the trade stuff being an aspect of that, too. Maybe he could have found different policies, more serious policies, more effective ones, that would have communicated some of the same things.
20:55 Speaker 01 But there is some policy substance there. The thing about, you know, like Senator Graham saying, we need Trump's policies, but presumably not some of Trump's personality or Trump's negatives. The record of the Trump administration was such a grab bag of sort of, you know, Trump's distinctive nationalist policies and just old line Republican stuff and a little bit of frankly, a little bit of the reform conservative stuff that I was pushing among many others for a few years. It's sort of a grab bag, right? So different people who say that, oh, it's Trump's policies, they mean totally different things by that, right? Lindsey Graham might mean tax cuts when he is talking about that. And Senator Cotton might be talking about a crackdown on illegal immigration. And one of the problems
21:39 Speaker 01 that Republicans have right now is that every argument inside the party ends up being sucked into the vortex of an argument about Trump and Trump personally, Trump's personality and so forth. And he's kind of paralyzed the Republican policy debate for that reason. And the fact that there's so little coherence to Trump and to his record has helped contribute to that as well.
22:24 Ezra Klein? I've been struck that one of the most interesting populist ideas to come out from the Republican, at least Senate caucus after the election, was not from one of the post-Trump populist players like Hawley or Cotton, but it was from Mitt Romney, right? The 2012 Republican nominee. And he's got this idea, which I think is genuinely exciting and plausibly bipartisan for a child allowance. But, but I haven't seen even one other Republican Senator endorse it. So can you walk me through the idea first and then the debate over it on the right?
22:57 Speaker 01 So Romney's idea was, is for a child allowance, which is a monthly payment to nearly all parents in the US for each child that they have. If I remember correctly, it's between the age of zero and six, it would be $4,200 a year. And then thereafter, until they're 17, it was $3,300 a year.
23:23 Ezra Klein? And is that that per child?
23:25 Speaker 01 Per child, that's right.
23:26 Ezra Klein? And then, and then there's a cap on it, as I remember it's something like basically after four children, it's, it stops.
23:32 Speaker 01 Right. And there's also an income cap where it starts phasing out if you're a single filer making more than $200,000 or a married filer making more than $400,000, which is to say it covers nearly everybody and it's a flat benefit. It would replace the existing child credit and would replace some other programs like temporary assistance for needy families, which is the main program that used to be called welfare, but is a much smaller program than it used to be with a much smaller caseload. And he'd also get rid altogether of the tax deduction for state and local taxes that you can apply on your federal tax return. So this is, this would all be, at least in theory, I mean, some of it has to be scored
24:15 Speaker 01 a little bit more, but in theory it's supposed to be deficit neutral, not to increase the deficit. And this is a policy that would have a number of potential advantages. One would be that it would very sharply decrease child poverty, which is something that the existing child credit does, but this would do even more. It simplifies government supports for children by folding a bunch of existing things into this new child allowance. Because it is a flat benefit, the idea at least is that you don't have the situation which you can sometimes have with government benefit programs where if you earn more income
24:56 Speaker 01 or if your household earns more income, you lose benefits and so you're being punished for moving up the ladder. And then one of the things that particularly conservatives, although not only conservatives, have been talking about for the last few years is that America's birth rate has gotten lower and that there's long been a gap between the number of kids that Americans say they want to have and the number of kids that they actually end up having. And to the extent that, that economic constraints are a reason for that, maybe something should be done to enable people to hit their family related goals.
25:37 Speaker 01 So these are some of the reasons why people are in favor of this idea. But there's also some opposition and a lot of the opposition is along the lines of what Senator Marco Rubio and Senator Mike Lee have said. And although they themselves have been advocates of an expanded child credit and taken some flak from their own right on that, they think that the Romney proposal is a bridge too far, that it's a kind of resurrection of the old welfare system where you're handing out money to parents and not requiring work. I'd say that this is a debate that's still percolating on the right.
26:17 Speaker 01 I'd say to the extent that conservative voters and writers are paying any attention to it, it's been largely positive, but conservative politicians have, as you note, been standoffish. There hasn't been a ton of criticism, but not a ton of interest either. And I suspect that a lot of people are just kind of hanging back and waiting to see how this develops and where it goes. Partly, it's gotten wrapped into the whole COVID relief debate since Romney is trying to affect the outcome of that. But I imagine if we assume that he's not going to get his way completely on this, this will be a continuing issue going forward and we'll see if it takes off.
27:02 Ezra Klein? So Rubio and Lee were the two Republican senators who had been most forward on trying to put forward pro-family, pro-child policies more recently. And their immediate opposition, combined with the silence or opposition of any other Republican senator, really struck me for its ferocity, actually. One of the reasons I'd wanted to chat with you about this is that this seems to me to put two parts of the Republican coalition very much in tension. There is the Paul Ryan side of the party, the welfare reform side of the party that says, if you want to get anything from the government, anything at all, you have to work, including as a single mother, including, by the way, in some cases, as a married parent. And then another part of the party that has traditionalist family views, it would like
27:48 Ezra Klein? to see more parents, but I think usually mothers, staying at home with their children, that would like to see it be more possible to have single breadwinner families. And particularly in this post-Trump moment, where I do think there's been more assertiveness, again, from social conservatives, saying they've gone a raw deal in the party recently. You know, Romney seems to be coming in and saying the party's focus on work, on paid, formal labor, as the only kind of valuable work, and its dismissal of parenting as a valuable form of work, is wrong. And I think I thought I would see a larger social conservative chorus saying, he's right, and we've gotten this wrong. I've been a little bit surprised that there hasn't been more support from him. Or do you think I'm misreading this?
28:33 Speaker 01 Well, you have seen some social conservative support for Romney's idea. I'd say, you know, some social conservatives who write for First Things or National Review have been pretty positive about it. Actually, it's sort of been kind of uniting folks from The Dispatch, as well as from First Things, people who have not always been getting along much in recent years. You haven't had a ton of criticism. What I would say, actually, the shoe that hasn't dropped, you haven't had a lot of conservatives on the economic side attacking the idea as a tax increase designed to fuel a spending increase. Because it would
29:11 Speaker 01 seem to me that the Romney plan is a straightforward violation of Grover Norquist's pledge for Republicans not to raise taxes. Because that pledge says, you can't get rid of a tax deduction without making up for it with a tax cut somewhere else. And that's exactly what Romney does. He gets rid of the state and local deduction, which is a pretty significant tax increase, and he doesn't use it to finance a tax cut. He uses it to finance this child allowance, which is, to a certain degree, just, you know, spending. And I've been surprised. Maybe I missed it, but I was, I kept expecting The Wall Street Journal. To run a bitter attack on it because they've been for 30 years bitter enemies
29:54 Speaker 01 of the child tax credit. Getting back to the question of sort of this trade off or this conflict among conservatives, you do see that in the debate you've had so far among policy walks, among, for example, my colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute, some of whom are for the Romney idea and some of whom are against it, where there's an empirical question about, you know, if you move from our current suite of policies to this policy, what effect does it have on people's incentive to work at various, in various situations? And given this effect on people's incentives, what effect would it actually have on work effort? Then there's this other question, which is, how much should we care about that?
30:33 Speaker 01 And particularly for social conservatives, if the question is not, should we scale back our participation in the paid labor force in order to spend more time on video games, but rather, should we do that in order to spend more time raising children? Then we look at it differently and we don't think of a reduction in labor, you know, paid labor supply as the end of the world or necessarily even a bad thing.
31:01 Ezra Klein? Tell me where you fall in this. So I wrote this column about this. It's very much about this exact idea. I think that not only on the right, but actually on the left, we overstate the value of paid labor. I'll use myself as an example. We had a three day weekend recently and I will say that my Monday without childcare was a lot harder than my Mondays being a New York Times columnist. I mean, the idea that probably being a single parent of three kids is not labor is just a wild way that we have mentally constructed our perceptions of the economy. What is the value of saying it is work to go work at a daycare center, taking care
31:42 Ezra Klein? of somebody else's child for $9 an hour, but it is not work to be at home taking care of your child or your children?
31:50 Speaker 01 I generally make a point of saying paid labor rather than labor when I wish to talk about work for a paycheck. You don't want to gloss over the enormous amount of work that gets done inside a household, in raising kids especially. And yeah, I do think that that is something that has gotten devalued for various reasons. I mean, households do need to make money and you want as many of them being able to sustain themselves as possible, but we aren't and shouldn't be materialists. And this gets actually to another point about the future of the Republican Party.
32:32 Speaker 01 There's been a lot of discussion over the last several years about the Republicans being a workers' party. There is something to be said for that compared to being a business owners' party. It certainly makes more political sense, but I think being a parents' party is in some ways more attractive than either of those because that's something that includes a material dimension, but it's not just replacing one materialist vision with another.
33:00 Ezra Klein? I want to key in on that because I think that's a really interesting way of putting that. So let's go back to Rubio and Lee here. What they say in their statement about the Romney Plan, and I'm paraphrasing this, but I'm getting it mostly right, is to say to be a pro-family party is to be a pro-work party. And they mean here, as you just said, paid work. Now, most parents want to get paid for their work. Even if the Romney Plan passed, you'd be getting a very small amount of money from the government to stay home with children. It's not the amount of money you need to even be above the poverty line with a couple of kids. And so to make that decision in the ways people would, would tend to mean, and I've done reporting on cases like this, it tends to mean people have sick parents of their
33:42 Ezra Klein? own, children with disabilities, they have a terrible boss or a hellish commute, they have their own mental health issues. People don't want to live in poverty for no reason. Despite what Paul Ryan used to say about government being a hammock, it's not a safety net, it's horrible to just be on social insurance. But so what is it that Rubio and Lee mean, in your view, when they say that the way to be pro-family is to be pro-paid work, when what they are saying is that in the case of a single mother with three kids who believes there is a reason that it is better for her to stay home with her kids at this point in their development, they are saying, no, we here in Washington Know better than you do what would be good for your family, and that's to go to paid work. Like, they're the heroes of their own story. You're in this movement more than I am.
34:27 Ezra Klein? What is the case for why Rubio and Lee know better than that mother? What's good for her family?
34:32 Speaker 01 You can't say that there's never any conflict between these two things, because in the life of every parent and of every family, there are very difficult conflicts that have to be managed, even for very affluent, well-off and lucky parents. There's just a conflict between paid work and child rearing. But it certainly is true that if you create the conditions for a flourishing economy, which can include promoting work, that this can be good for families and can be good for family life. So here, I actually will defend Lee and Rubio. Sometimes you'll get people who will say things like, "We shouldn't care about incentives on work at all
35:16 Speaker 01 if we're helping people, if we're bringing people out of poverty. You have to care about magnitudes, you know, the size of these effects and so forth." But I also do think that they're right. You know, the old welfare system did, by creating these poverty traps and discouraging work, harm families. I think that, to some extent, and here I get back to disagreeing with him, I think that they are misapplying those lessons in thinking about this current proposal, which is a different proposal from the old welfare system, and it's in a different context than the old system was. For example, like, you know, as I was saying earlier, we're talking about a flat benefit, which doesn't create that same kind of trap that you had in the old system.
35:58 Ezra Klein? Right. I just want to cut in here to say that in the old welfare system, it had a structure where oftentimes, for somebody on welfare, getting a dollar in paid labor wages would cut a dollar in welfare earnings. So it was a situation, I've spoken to Kathy Eden, the researcher, about this, where unless you could get a job in 96 that was, or 95, let's say, before the reforms, that was above $8 an hour, which for many single parents was hard, it actually wasn't economically worth it to go back to work. That is not the structure of the child allowance, which it's really, if you can get a job that's above $200,000 a year, then you begin to lose some of the child allowance. But that's a very different kind of incentive structure.
36:38 Speaker 01 And I mean, so let's think about this also in terms of like... I mean, if we're talking about the sort of the value of work, I mean, one of the harms of unemployment or prolonged spells of unemployment, involuntary unemployment in my is what I'm talking about here, is its effect on kids. And it's not just the material effect on them, although that's obviously an important, severe one. But also, I do think it is good for kids to see their parents making a living and setting that example. It's not the only important thing in the world. It's not always something that has to happen. It depends on the particular situation and the and the trade offs that a particular household confronts. And, you know, we can and should do some things to make it easier for for households to to negotiate these things.
37:22 Ezra Klein? I talked to a lot of Republicans in Washington, including some people we've been talking about about these policy questions. I spent a lot of time talking to Scott Winship, who was a former Mike Lee staffer, and now he's a colleague of yours at AI about this. And I would say that there's a very high level of abstraction when conservatives begin talking about things like work, right? I mean, that it's important for for children to see their parents and go and work. And I agree, of course. But that is a really different situation when you're dealing with a parent who has a good, flexible job, then you have a parent whose only job they can get has just-in-time scheduling behind it. And so that their parent is constantly not being able to be there when they said they were, they're not being
38:03 Ezra Klein? able to come to school functions, that their whole home life is unstable. In my piece, I talked to a woman named Wanda Lavender, who, you know, was working in a daycare. She was there for 12 years. Her wages never went above $9. So then she began working at a daycare and a Popeyes. She's working more than 60 hours a week. She never has time to see their kid, her kids. Like, she has rheumatoid arthritis, so it's really hard on her body. Work is great. I think it's good for my son to see me as a New York Times columnist. But a lot of people get, you know, the only option they have is very difficult exploitative labor. And something things like child allowances do is also give them a little bit more economic room to say no to jobs that aren't very good, so they can
38:46 Ezra Klein? get a job that is better, that is better for their family and allows them to also be a better version of a of a role model, but also a direct parent to their children. And I guess where I'm going with this is that One, I think a Republican Party, based on being a parents' party, would be actually electorally lethal for the Democrats. I mean, I think it's a very scary thing for the Democrats to consider. But two, that party would have to actually want to make work better. You know, that party might want to do things like a higher minimum wage. You know, there is, there is some interest in wage subsidies. So I don't want to take away from that. But for a party that cares so much about work, I often see it less interested in like how that work actually functions in a family-specific life than in a sort of idealized,
39:30 Ezra Klein? abstract conception about the inherent dignity of wage labor.
39:34 Speaker 01 It seems to me that one of the things that, that social conservatives in particular, although not only my fellow social conservatives should look at, is this thing that you mentioned about scheduling practices, about these flexible scheduling practices. And it may be, you know, one would want to do some empirical work on sort of, you know, if you put restrictions on that, what kinds of effects would it have on employment and national? But it may be that you just need to stop companies from being able to engage in these practices because people need predictable work lives and work schedules. And that that is a case where competition, as great as competition is in a lot of ways,
40:19 Speaker 01 is not going to lead you to an optimal outcome. Because, you know, maybe you can get a little bit of edge from a kind of exploitative practice that undermines the flourishing of families, which is a crucial component of our society's flourishing. And so maybe Republicans and Democrats alike, at the state level at least, should look into restricting these kinds of corporate practices. And I actually was talking about this with somebody we both know who's a libertarian. And I was saying, I wonder if there's some way we can solve it. And, and she just said, well, you know, maybe we should just ban it. And it does seem to me that that is something, you see here and there some interest in it. I've seen some of the folks at the Institute for Family Studies, which is a sort of moderately social conservative thing to have.
41:03 Speaker 01 They've talked about that. But it seems to me it ought to get more attention left, right and center.
41:29 Ezra Klein? We've talked about Republicans a lot here. How do you assess Joe Biden's presidency so far?
41:34 Speaker 01 I think that the Biden administration is benefiting from the refusal of Trump to go away and to let others sort of let him go away. It seems to me that there's this disjunction between the expectations that a lot of Democrats, and particularly progressives, have of this presidency and what seems to be likely as an outcome. I think we're maybe beginning to see some of the letdown happen with the apparent sinking of the Neera Tanden nomination for OMB. But look, it seems to me that you're going to be six or seven months into this administration, and there are going to be a lot of Democratic voters who are going to say, look, we've
42:19 Speaker 01 got the House, we've got the Senate, we've got the White House, and there isn't a big minimum wage increase, there isn't any election reform, there isn't much in the way of a Green New Deal, probably there isn't a public option on healthcare, you know, just keep going down, listen to Puerto Rican or DC statehood, and that the hopes have just really outstripped the capacity of the Biden administration to deliver.
42:48 Ezra Klein? So I think that will be true, but let me argue it two ways. On the one hand, I think the generalized view among progressives correctly is that Joe Biden has shown himself in this iteration to be a much more progressive and ambitious president than anybody would have imagined even two years ago, right? Not just 10 years ago, but two years ago. If you look at what's in the fiscal rescue bill, like, that is a vast array of progressive priorities, including, by the way, $15 minimum wage, even compared to where things were a couple of years ago. That's a pretty big victory for progressives. If you look at a lot of his appointments, particularly, I would say, his second-tier appointments, they've been very progressive, huge, huge. We've talked a lot about the Romney child allowance, but the child, basically, allowance
43:31 Ezra Klein? idea that Biden has in the bill and Senate Democrats are doing is as big or bigger, depending on how you want to think about it, than the Romney plan. So there's a lot in there, and then that is supposed to be the first of a series of bills, the next one being a bigger reinvestment package in the economy. The question is, how much of this can you do through budget reconciliation? And I mean, I've talked about this on the show before. I wrote a very big Sunday Review cover at the beginning of the presidency, saying that Democrats need to go big and they need to go fast. And to do that, they need to get rid of the filibuster. And then, of course, Senators Manchin and Sinema said, absolutely not. We will never do that under any circumstances. And so there is simply no doubt the Democrats are going to end up disappointing a lot of
44:13 Ezra Klein? their base on a lot of issues, particularly around things that you can't do through direct economic measures. So statehood for DC and the offering of statehood to Puerto Rico, democracy reform, gun control, immigration reform, et cetera. But you can, through budget reconciliation, get tremendously large economic and healthcare bills done. I think even plausibly, we'll see, but plausibly, a public option, certainly lowering the Medicare age. So we're going to have to see what that looks like in a year, whether or not Democrats think Biden has delivered beyond their expectations for him or underdelivered. Really depends on what happens with budget reconciliation bills and how ambitious Democrats are willing to be with them.
44:56 Ezra Klein? But I would say he's surprised me to the upside so far.
44:59 Speaker 01 I mean, one way, sort of one optimistic way of looking at this for the Democrats, maybe a little bit more optimistic for, say, a Bill Kristol Democrat than an Ezra Klein Democrat, would be this. So you have the potential for we achieve something like herd immunity, we've got an economic takeoff as a result of that. And maybe the problem that every presidency from 92 onward has run into of overreach and then backlash doesn't happen because he's just structurally incapable of achieving the overreach. And so you don't have a kind of 1994 or 2006 or 2010 or 2018 kind of backlash against
45:45 Speaker 01 Biden and that you have more kind of a, if you're a Democrat and you largely approve of this agenda, you have more sort of slow and steady progress.
45:54 Ezra Klein? So Josh Jordan on Twitter summarized a bunch of recent polls, looking at what percentage of Republicans believe the election was stolen from Donald Trump. USA Today Suffolk Poll, 73%, Gallup, 83%, CNN, 75%, Monmouth, 72%, Fox News, a low result, 68%. So we're looking at somewhere between 2/3 to 4/5 of the Republican Party saying the election was stolen from Donald Trump. That is a hell of a thing to believe. How do you understand that belief? And how do you think it changes political incentives and strategies for people who want to lead that party going forward?
46:31 Speaker 01 So the theory that the election was stolen is so amorphous, right? So some of the people who say yes to that mean, well, those Facebook algorithms were unfairly twisted. And some of them mean vote totals were altered and changed. And some of them just mean, well, The Washington Post, its coverage was not as even-handed as we believe it should have been. And was much too critical of Donald Trump and too soft on Biden. Different degrees of plausibility to different theories, and also different degrees of severity. But that's, I think, sort of the key of this. It's an umbrella. And you can be a Q nut, or you can
47:12 Speaker 01 just be a sort of standard-issue Republican who doesn't trust the media. And both of you can affirm this. And particularly at that level of abstraction, no wedge is being driven between the two of you. And so a politician can get up and give a speech to you that you will be applauding for one reason, and the guy next to you is applauding for a different reason. The guy next to you maybe believes in some totally insane conspiracy theory involving the ghost of Hugo Chavez. And you, basically, you've got a problem with Jake Tapper.
47:48 Ezra Klein? I have usually agreed with that view. And I think it was a very common one through the Trump presidency. But I do think one of the things, probably the final year of the Trump presidency, some of what we saw on COVID, then obviously what we saw during and after the election, I think really calls it into question, this idea that, well, people are just saying stuff. Donald Trump is just saying stuff. Republicans are just saying stuff. And when push comes to shove, they're not going to act. But what I think we've seen is that It is a totally plausible mechanism of how people cognitively work to say, yes, people might embrace an idea only half seriously. They embrace it as a statement of identity and expression of group solidarity. But once you have cognitively put yourself there, then, once you get pushed,
48:33 Ezra Klein? it's not a far step to actually acting on that idea. Once you've opened yourself to it. So, which is to say, I think it has often been posited, there's some kind of tension between maybe half seriously embracing a somewhat ridiculous idea and then really believing it. But I actually think it's worth at least considering that that's more of a process, that the fact that you don't need to take it too seriously to say yes to the pollster gets you in the door on something nutty. And once you're in the door, then it's easier to actually become part of the party, which I would say is like, you see that in a lot of QAnon people, you see it in, you know, sort of Donald Trump post-election stuff, you know, and you see it in our Republican Party where, you know, most House Republicans voted to reject the results of the election.
49:18 Ezra Klein? I mean, at some point, I think you have to say, however people feel in their heart of hearts, once you're willing to say publicly you believe this, then it becomes harder not to act as if you believe it.
49:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think that is true. That is, that's a good point. So, first of all, you know, let's, let's say you have a poll question on X crazy thing. Millions and millions of people are gonna just all the way down believe that crazy thing. But then millions of other people, if I could sort of maybe paraphrase what you're saying as sort of, are signaling their belonging to a tribe, one of whose marks is accepting X as a non-insane view, right? As a tolerable view. That's not a meaningless act, you know? It's not a, it's not a harmless act if the X in question genuinely is crazy.
50:03 Ezra Klein? One thing I see you doing in a lot of your work is trying to reassure Republicans that the stakes of- Democratic victories, big D Democratic victories, Democratic Party victories, aren't so existential, that that politics is still a contest of ideas that you can lose and it'll be okay. You have a piece about how a republic should be optimistic in opposition, and that you can then win back and it'll be okay. In 06, you wrote this book about Democrats called "Party of Death", which the the argument had to do with things like abortion and death and dignity ideas, but obviously was a pretty hot title. I'm curious of watching the escalation of sort of political stakes in people's minds, how you feel about sort of the title and the rhetoric around that, looking back.
50:47 Speaker 01 I thought at the time it was a usefully provocative title, and I overestimated the extent to which people would actually, you know, kind of at least read the introduction. I certainly think that over the last 15 years, it has become more and more central to my political thinking that we have a real difficulty understanding the beliefs of people who are unlike us or who disagree with us. And so it's important, whenever we come across an opposing view or something that our initial response is to oppose or reject or be horrified by, to stop and think,
51:33 Speaker 01 is it possible for an intelligent person of goodwill to believe this? And try to do a real work of imagination in figuring that out. And I did try to do that in the book, but I'd say I've tried to do it more frequently in both directions. So I was opposed to Trump from the get-go, but I did try to argue I could totally see why somebody might support Donald Trump in the Republican primaries in 2015 and 2016. And we shouldn't just sort of assume that everybody who supports him is supporting him for obnoxious reasons or hateful reasons. And the same is true of people on our left.
52:18 Speaker 01 And yet, and I find that a lot of people are not willing to make that effort. And some people even sort of make a point of pride on left and right of not making that kind of effort.
52:30 Ezra Klein? Yeah, I think that's certainly true. It's funny, it's something I've talked about in my book too, but one of the tensions of politics, particularly in this era, is that Putting aside the actual argument of party of death, the stakes of politics often are life and death. I mean, I do a lot of work on healthcare politics. I think if you don't pass universal healthcare bills, people die. And I've talked about that in very explicit terms with Joe Lieberman, you know, threatening to kill Obamacare. And there's this interesting tension, particularly as the parties become more different from each other, between how do you approach politics with the seriousness it deserves? Right? I mean, things like climate change. There really are profound stakes here. And at the same time, don't push people to a place
53:14 Ezra Klein? where they feel they have to burn the Capitol down if they lose.
53:18 Speaker 01 I wouldn't say that the stakes are low, and I wouldn't try to minimize the stakes. I care about elections and the outcomes of legislation. So what I think the right in particular has a problem with is a kind of apocalypticism, the sort of the point of no return idea. If you lose this election, if you lose this bill, that's the end of the republic. That's the end of freedom. You can never recover it. And people sort of convince themselves of this, although they don't actually follow their own beliefs on it. Like, you know, Michael Anton, you know, he doesn't obviously believe that the country is now doomed forever because Trump lost reelection. Otherwise, he would have stopped talking. Right? He would have stopped getting, being involved in politics.
54:04 Speaker 01 Ted Cruz doesn't believe that Obamacare, having survived his attempt to get rid of it in 2013, means the end of the Constitution because he's still there. Right? Just as it wasn't the end of free markets and capitalism when we got Medicare in the first place in 1965, about which you could have made a stronger slippery slope argument than applied to Obamacare. That's what I want to counter because that kind of thinking logically could lead to defeatism, despair and surrender, just as much as it could lead to kind of extremism and violence and so forth. But it just strikes me as just the wrong attitude to take towards politics in a democratic country,
54:49 Speaker 01 even when we rightly care about political outcomes.
54:55 Ezra Klein? I think it's a good place to come to a close here. So let me move to our recommendation section. And I'll start with this. If I want to understand where the Republican Party is going. Who are some folks I should be reading?
55:06 Speaker 01 Well, I have to commend some of my colleagues at National Review, like Michael Brendan Doherty and Robert Verbruggen. I'd mentioned Joshua Hammer, Helen Andrews, Coleman Hughes. There are a lot of voices. I find that they are increasingly people who are younger than me, which is a little dismaying. One of the plus sides of the lack of coherence and definition in republicanism is there's a lot of interesting voices out there.
55:37 Ezra Klein? What book would you give a progressive right now to read about conservatism?
55:40 Speaker 01 I'm biased because he's a very good friend of mine, but I think I would give, both to a progressive who wants to learn about conservatism and the other way around, Yuval Levin's book, The Great Debate, about the debate between Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke. Because Yuval, being a conservative, is very much on the Burke side of this. But he does such a nice job and is such a fair-minded articulator of their different positions. I mean, my own experience was that I ended up being a little bit, maybe more sympathetic to Paine and a little bit less sympathetic to Burke by the end of that book.
56:22 Ezra Klein? And I'll note, you can listen to Yuval. He was on the show just a couple of weeks ago. The episode is called, Can the Republican Party Be Saved? What's the last book you read that actually changed your mind about anything?
56:33 Speaker 01 Okay, I'm going to give you two answers on this. One, the serious, heavy political book. Michael Grievous, The Upside Down Constitution, changed the way I thought about federalism and changed a kind of conventional conservative view of that. It's dense, but it's really quite interesting if you're interested in federalism and the Constitution. And then Popular Crime, Bill James, which changed the way I thought about a number of interesting historical episodes. And it's a real treat to read.
57:08 Ezra Klein? And so finally, we're hearing, I think, a kiddo in the background. What's your favorite children's book?
57:13 Speaker 01 He is, yeah, he's a little emperor of the house. So I really enjoyed reading The Chronicles of Narnia to my eldest when she was little. I'd read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when I was a kid, but I hadn't actually read the rest of the series. And I'm looking forward to reading it to my younger ones when the time comes.
57:36 Ezra Klein? Ramash Pindur, thank you very much.
57:38 Speaker 01 You're welcome.
57:49 Ezra Klein? The Ezra Klein Show is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Roche Karma and Jeff Geld, fact-checked by Michelle Harris, original music by Isaac Jones, and mixing by Jeff Geld.
Previous How the Texas Crisis Could Become Everyone's Crisis Next Stop. Breathe. We Can’t Keep Working Like This. Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
