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Aug. 21, 2024 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy
58:11
Chris Rufo Thinks We're Stuck with the Nanny State | TRUTH Podcast #60
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All right, it's the week of the DNC. A little bit of craziness going on in Chicago.
I'm going to be there later this week myself, probably Thursday morning, and talking about it with my friend Chris Ruffo, who I've been looking forward to having on for a while.
We're going to talk not mostly about boring Democratic National Committee stuff, although we'll touch on some of the fun things this week.
But a conversation about the direction of the right and what exactly is the new right?
Do we actually know what that is?
How do we define its future direction?
What do we think of the America First movement?
What are the different strains percolating beneath the surface?
He's a thinker.
He's not somebody who just spouts usual partisan talking points.
I get the sense he finds some of them boring at times, as I do, but cares about actual ideas.
And that makes for a fun discussion.
So, Chris Ruffo, welcome to the podcast, man.
It's good to be with you.
So before we get into, I think, the more intellectually interesting topics, what do you make of the apparent theater around the protests?
100,000 protesters descending on Chicago at the DNC. What do we make of what we're seeing this week?
Well, I mean, you know, we'll see how it unfolds, but my sense so far is that it's a managed spectacle.
If you look at the last Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, it wasn't a spectacle.
It was real, you know, blood on the streets, real rioting, and a real radical left-wing revolutionary movement that wanted to assert itself against what they saw as the Democratic establishment.
That kicked off about a half decade of bombings, airline hijackings, assassinations, and other incidents of political violence.
And so I don't think we're going to get that.
I think what we have now is almost the reprise of that in a kind of theater kid form.
So you have people who I don't think have necessarily that kind of militant conviction, but they want to adopt some of those aesthetics, some of that rhetoric from the past.
And so they'll be hitting the streets and we'll see.
Is it something that is a serious militant conviction?
Is it just kind of play?
But my sense politically is that this benefits Kamala Harris.
Kamala Harris can now pretend that she is tacking to the center.
She can pretend to, you know, silence the pro-Hamas protesters and then position herself, you know, I think in a misleading sense, but position herself as the moderate candidate.
Yeah, it's interesting.
That was actually my take on this as well.
I think there were some Republicans actually were upset at that framing of it.
But I think that that's actually got to be what's going on here, which is that, of course, a lot of this is organic.
There are crazy people across the board that genuinely think of themselves as crusaders for justice from the left.
So I don't think it's that Kamala Harris's camp is necessarily planting these protesters.
But I think that they're not super upset about its existence either.
And as long as they maintain the balance of it not totally overthrowing their convention, it comes out as actually a better scenario.
Because there's no better way to sell yourself to the public as a fake moderate.
I don't think she's a moderate.
I don't think she's much of anything.
That's a different question.
But to sell yourself to the public as a thoughtful moderate than to be assailed by the people on the far left such that when Republicans say that, oh, you're a communist, no, no, the real communists have shown up.
And now you get to say, oh, no, no, I'm just this interest that they don't like so much because I'm so moderate.
So it does seem like a good way for her to pull off a trick that otherwise would have been harder for her to pull off if the protests hadn't been there.
That's my take on that at least.
Yeah, I largely agree.
And I mean, we'll find out the downside or the risk on the other side of that strategy is if things do get out of control.
She could appear weak, she could appear unorganized, you can have a chaotic movement that could kick up.
You know, as a partisan on the other side, you know, I hope that she is not able to get away with it.
And I hope that the activists and the demonstrators put some real pressure on her.
And then we'll see how she acts under pressure because, you know, leadership is really decision making under pressure.
Kamala Harris has been shielded from decision-making within the administration.
She's, of course, vice president.
They don't actually make any decisions for the most part.
But also she's been shielded in the first part of this campaign, which is just a full-blown Soviet-style propaganda campaign from the media.
That tries to cover her from any unscripted moments, cover her from having to take any positions, and really cover her from scrutiny.
And so the best case scenario in the next few days is if she's forced to make decisions under pressure and then the American people can have a bit better sense of her judgment and sense of her leadership ability.
Do you actually think she is ideological?
It's actually a question I've wondered about.
Yeah, I go back and forth on that.
That's a great question because it's not immediately clear.
I think she is ideological.
You get a sense when she speaks that there is some ideological motive that she has.
But I think more than ideological, she's ambitious.
Yeah, that much I think is clear.
That's a little different.
Yeah, I think she's created the persona That kind of allows her to be everything to everyone, and then she just manages whatever way that the winds are blowing, she manages to position herself, position the sails to take her to where she wants to go.
It's hard to say.
And what I would say that we know for sure is that when it's unpopular, she's willing to jettison all of her positions.
And so I think she's a creature of ambition, and I think she's a creature of incentives.
She has a keen sense of incentives and so the question is not really what does Kamala Harris believe.
I actually don't think that's an important question at all.
The question is what are the incentives that are going to be around Kamala Harris that will guide her to make whatever decisions seem most favorable at the time.
That I think is a more difficult question but perhaps a more important question.
Yeah, I lean in the direction of that being by far the more important question for people who want to understand what the country is actually going to look like under Kamala Harris.
I think calling her ideological is to give her too much credit, actually.
I don't believe she's particularly ideological, unlike a Bernie Sanders, right?
She tried to position herself on one hand when she ran for California attorney general as some kind of moderate, tough on crime figure.
I do think it's worth remembering the Democrats hit her for prosecuting too many people.
It's also part of the reason why I think it's a little bit of a weak and unconvincing and self-defeating Republican attack when Republicans started to initially say, oh, she locked up too many black men or whatever.
That was actually the left attack on her when she ran for president in 2020, which ironically makes her seem more tough on crime than she actually is, which again does her the favor in the same way these left wing protesters are doing by making her seem like something she's not.
I think the reality is she tried to pretend to be moderate when she was in the role as leading prosecutor in the state of California, California, only to become an apparent ideologue running almost to the left of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in that primary, which I think didn't convince anybody in the Democratic Party, which is why she didn't make it to the Iowa caucus, only to now convert back to being the centrist moderate in a way that supposedly she thinks is her path to winning this only to now convert back to being the centrist moderate in
I think far more compelling, from my vantage point at least, is what I think is true, is that she's just another example of a puppet in a system, right?
Biden was a puppet that they wielded, and I think that Kamala Harris is a new puppet that actually can be controlled far more easily than a true ideologue like a Bernie Sanders or even Elizabeth Warren, who I do think are far more ideological Democrats than one like Kamala Harris, which I think shows up far more in the breed of the pawn.
And those are two different strategies, depending on what we think is the right theory of the case here for what the Republican criticism of her actually is.
I find it much more compelling to say we're running against a system rather than against an individual candidate.
But that's different than saying that she's a communist, which is what Bernie Sanders is certainly closer to and what she has sounded like in the past.
And I do think that's an interesting fork in the road that we're going to have to take if we want to win over independents and voters to Have some consistency to what our actual message is here on our criticism of her.
Yeah, it is really kind of astonishing.
This campaign is shaping up to be a campaign in which she tries to take no positions on any of the issues.
She doesn't publish policy papers or position statements.
She doesn't take questions from the media.
And it's a kind of vaporware campaign.
It creates a perception that the campaign is driving energy, is driving enthusiasm, is driving joy, these positive kind of marketing emotions.
And, you know, they're hoping that they can get her across the line with that.
And then she has really total free hand to pursue whatever policy agenda materializes at that point.
And I think that, you know, the difference between Kamala Harris and Joe Biden is significant.
You know, Joe Biden was very clearly a puppet, you know, kind of cognitively very damaged, especially the final two years of his presidency.
Clearly just reading the script that was prepared for him.
You know, Joe Biden is not naturally- Occasionally not even that, on occasion.
It's when he stopped reading the script that he stopped being useful.
He was reading the script and then eventually stopped being able to read the script.
And then that's exactly when they decided to dispose of him.
But I think you have to look at the source of their power, the basis of their power.
The basis of Joe Biden's power was the Democratic Party, the old party machine, the old Democratic operatives, the old state-by-state infrastructure.
And so he was really the last party man standing, the last person of his generation where the party politics mattered.
And so he was able to get over the finish line in 2020 as really the consensus choice of the party machine.
Kamala Harris is not really a creature of the party in the same way.
Joe Biden goes back to when the parties were actually quite powerful.
Labor unions were very powerful and decisive.
All of the old kind of machine politics interest groups that we learn about from the past.
Kamala Harris is a product of the media.
And so Kamala Harris's popularity goes up when the media is favorable towards her, and it goes down when the media is unfavorable towards her.
And so while Joe Biden really based his strength on the party and appeasing those party insiders and the party apparatus beneath him in order to secure his position, of course, when the party turned against him, he was done.
I think the media has the same role for Kamala Harris.
She's more of a postmodern candidate.
She is a candidate of language and symbol and affect and emotion.
That is, for the time being, propped up by a heavy media campaign around her.
And so I think the tactic for the right has to be to try to drive a wedge between the media, which is really the kind of...
You know, if you look at the new figures in the Democratic politics, if you look at AOC, if you look at even Bernie Sanders to a certain extent, and then of course Kamala Harris, you have to drive a wedge between the media and the candidate.
And once she loses that base of support, or there even becomes kind of a more even playing field in that regard, I think we can have some advantage.
That's an interesting framing because it suggests some agency that our side might have in doing this.
How might we drive that wedge, as you put it, between Kamala and the media, which otherwise seems as glued as can be without daylight between them right now?
I mean, after the DNC this week, I assume we're going to see A Steven Spielberg-style production that leaves nothing but for applause, room for applause from the media after that.
You're into Labor Day.
What might a wedge actually look like at a point where the junction looks like it's airtight right now?
Yeah, I think you have to attack Kamala Harris by proxy and you have to attack the media figures more directly.
One of the things that we've done successfully, I think, in recent years is we've taken the media reaction to George Floyd and we've really, I think, successfully criticized and then demolished the credibility Of many of the people who were promoting that.
If you look at Ibram Kendi or Robin DiAngelo or any of the kind of leading lights, even in the New York Times, they're treated as a figure of ridicule, a figure of contempt.
And so I think we have to do that at an accelerated pace and start embarrassing some of the media cheerleaders directly because media people are susceptible to reputational pressure.
The currency that we have in media is reputation.
You know, the power of our byline, the credibility that we have.
With the population, with peers, with other elites.
And I think that a successful campaign would really be simultaneously, of course, putting pressure on the candidate, but also continuing to put pressure on the media, not in a blanket sense, not just saying, hey, it's all fake news.
But actually going after some of those individual figures and really trying to put pressure even on those, say, center-left figures that have historically criticized Kamala Harris to try to at least get some foothold, get some traction, and then see if we can start kind of ruining this honeymoon with some bad weather in the next couple weeks.
Yeah, I think that's smart.
I think that that's very directed advice.
And what's your appraisal of how we're doing on that so far?
Not great.
Not well at all, I would say, because, look, I think you hinted at this just now in a previous exchange, but the right really hasn't figured out the best line of attack against Kamala Harris.
Of course, calling her a communist I think is hyperbolic, but certainly when she proposes something like price controls.
That was a very helpful line of attack there, tactically.
But the other thing is she's fake, she's a phony, she's a chameleon.
I've seen, of course, J.D. Vance launch that line of attack.
I think that is getting a little bit closer.
But what Trump did so brilliantly in 2016 is he had these...
These kind of hooks, whether it was Low Energy Jeb or Lion Ted Cruz, you know, somewhat childish, of course, you know, kind of name-calling.
But the reason that it worked is not just because it was name-calling.
But because it really tapped into some fatal flaw, some Achilles heel in the political persona of these people.
And so we haven't quite figured it out with Harris.
Harris is kind of hard to pin down, deliberately so.
And I think we make a big mistake at not recognizing her political talents.
She's a much more talented politician, despite her kind of Strange elliptical and circular verbal style.
She actually is quite talented and she's been, you know, winning the political game over a long period of time.
I grew up in Sacramento and I had an old colleague, an old friend who was with Kamala Harris very early on in her political career.
And without giving away too much of the game, this person essentially hitched himself to Kamala Harris's career and has really risen quite steadily and quite rapidly in political life.
That doesn't happen by accident.
And so I think that we have to take her seriously, not as an intellectual or someone with strong ideological convictions, but simply as a political animal that will do whatever it takes to succeed.
She's not going to be wiped out simply by calling her a communist or impugning her intelligence.
Yeah, I personally am drawn to what I think is true.
You said what made those attacks in 2016 so effective as they did hit the nail on the head is the idea that whether it was Biden or Kamala, these are cogs in a broader machine and that we're not running against an individual candidate, we're running against a machine.
And that's what Draining the Swamp is really all about, which relates to the policy vision of getting there and shutting down the bureaucracy, of which we're just seeing the latest specimen put up on offer swap in one for the other.
It doesn't matter.
It's the same game we're up against.
I think that's closer to the flame rather than anything that's even personal to Kamala, in part because she is, as you say, this ambitious creature of politics that Doesn't really have a particular ideology, doesn't really have a particularly distinctive quality about her because that's by designs, which you want in a cog.
And so anyway, I think this idea of running against the machine is a message we probably could be owning a little bit more wholeheartedly.
I do want to pick up on the point you raised, though, in her commentary around the grocery prices and her proposed solution of implementing price controls in the United States.
So anybody who's studied basic level of economics and studied history would share with you that these price controls don't work as a measure of actually controlling prices, in part because they create black markets, in part because they create supply shortages, and in the long run even exacerbate the very inflation they were created to actually correct.
Look back at the Carter era, look back at the history of many other countries that have gone a similar direction.
Now, I'm going to give you a couple examples of some other policies.
This is really taking the discussion away from the partisan politics of today, but more to the realm of longer-run ideas that you and I care about.
So, what if I told you a series of other horrible policy ideas that have been proposed similar to the policy proposal of fighting grocery price increases through price controls?
Price controls on credit cards.
This has been proposed in...
The interest of capping credit card interest rates legislation to say that we want to just like want to cap grocery prices, we want to cap prices for credit.
We're going to put a law that effectively applies a blanket maximum to what a credit card issuer can actually charge to a customer, or raising the federal minimum wage, something that actually creates, again, supply shortages in the labor market while in the name of actually helping those very workers.
Yet in those two instances, and I can give you a couple of other examples as well, the dirty little secret is that both of those policies were actually proposed by Republicans in recent years.
Which I think actually raises an uncomfortable but I think important debate for us to be able to have.
Those are policies considered to be those that belong to the so-called new right, right?
The idea that we have to reject the method of doing business from yesterday for the new era that requires protecting American workers and manufacturers.
Yet I think that also impedes our ability to go after Kamala Harris.
I think we should be going for Kamala Harris more strongly for her failed economic policies, like price control measurements.
But I think the reason many on the right are unable to do it is that actually very similar logic has been applied, not only by Republicans in recent years in the new right, but just like it existed in the Carter era, existed under Richard Nixon as well.
And I do think we probably in the long run do ourselves a disservice by sweeping that distinction under the rug and pretending in the three months leading up to an election like that doesn't exist, versus actually just airing it out in the open and just say, actually, what is actually our ideology?
And, you know, I think the thing about the reason I think Democrats have a little bit of a structural advantage here, and I'll pause here after a second, Chris, because I wanted to lay out my view and then hear your response to it.
It's part of the reason I wanted to have you on.
I think you and I had an exchange on Twitter that caught my attention on related topics to this.
The reason I think Democrats have an ideological advantage is that they've got their far left and then they've got their center left.
But they disagree on degree, not in kind.
The far left wants massive government intrusion into the economy and into private life.
And the center-left says, hey, let's modulate that a little bit.
We want government intervention in the economy and in everyday life, but just to a smaller degree.
Whereas on the Republican side, I think right now, we have a fundamental contradiction where we have those of us who believe that actually we don't want the government in our lives, have a more libertarian orientation, say keep the government as small as possible, keep it out of the economy.
But then we also have a strain that says, no, no, no, actually, the other thing we want is actually we want the government to use heavy-handed, muscular state intervention techniques.
When it comes to antitrust policy, capping credit card interest rates, deciding which kinds of education we do versus don't want to subsidize, raising the federal minimum wage, but just not in certain other areas, which is not a difference in degree, but a very difference in kind in what our attitude is towards the government and what it's supposed to be doing in the first place,
which I actually think puts, if you view the world through Republicans versus Democrats right now, Republicans at a bit of a structural disadvantage with two completely ideologically incompatible in some ways views residing under the same roof versus in the Democrats case, it's going to be a struggle between those who say a ton of state intervention or it's going to be a struggle between those who say a ton of state intervention or a lot of
And I'd just be curious for your take on that whole framing, because I think it does set us up for maybe a conversation you and I can have on what is the new direction of the new right.
Yeah, I think that's right.
And I think it even goes further than that.
There's this new right idea among certain factions, a new right at least, that is trying to change the composition and the orientation of labor unions.
I've seen that circulating around.
And look, I think those are all bad policies.
I think they're bad ideas.
And I think also, in addition, they won't work in a political way.
You know, large labor unions seem to select for corruption, if you look at some of the kind of hard labor unions of the past and the present.
And public sector labor unions seem to select for incompetence, with Randy Weingarten of the teachers union being the top example of that.
Secondarily, I mean, you know, the private labor unions have been in decline.
And so even someone who is, I think, a smart analyst, but of a different political persuasion, someone like Antonio Gramsci would say that you always want to actually start making alliances in growing industries.
And so this right wing idea, again, I disagree with it on principle.
I'm more of a free market I really believe in a free market, a laissez-faire economic policy to the extent that it's possible.
Even setting that aside, I just think it's bad politics.
You're not gonna juice political power out of a declining sector of the economy or of the society.
But I do have a kind of disagreement with some of my libertarian friends and colleagues, people in, let's say, the more establishment right.
I accept that we want to have lower taxes, we want to have a smaller government, we want to have free trade.
I think the evidence on those three is overwhelming.
Obviously there are exceptions.
If it's a competitor nation, a geopolitical adversary, if it's someone that is dumping products in the market, you can play tit-for-tat games in order to balance the scales and have free and fair trade.
I think there's a totally coherent argument in favor of that.
But my problem is really a problem about the bureaucracy.
In an ideal world, we would have a kind of laissez-faire, 19th-century-style liberal state.
We would have taxation at 1% or 2% of GDP, and we'd have a very small government, analogous to what they might have had in centuries past in the United States.
And so the argument on the right has been now for about a hundred years is to reduce the size of government.
And yet for the last hundred years, the size of government has only increased.
And today, the status quo that we have to deal with is one that is kind of shocking.
The public sector in the United States as a percentage of GDP is larger than the public sector in communist China.
We have a massive state.
We've had a hundred years- I just want you to pause right there to say that the public sector as a percentage of GDP in the United States is a greater percentage of our total GDP than the percentage of China's public sector as a percentage of its GDP. That's right.
Not in absolute terms, but in relative terms.
It's actually more stark when you frame it that way.
If it was in absolute terms, it would actually be at least understandable.
But if it's in actual percentage terms, the percentage of our GDP comprised by the public sector component of gross domestic production is actually greater than the portion of China's total GDP comprised by its public sector.
That's right.
And I think it really is...
And what can we learn from that?
Or what can we conclude from that?
We can conclude that the right's promise to reduce the size of government has been an abject failure.
And in fact, the right is worse at restraining the increase of government.
Then the communist Chinese, seen from a certain angle.
That's quantitatively true.
It's not qualitatively true.
Of course, China has a much more repressive state system.
And much of what you call, what we may call on paper, the private sector is it's still state-directed in a way that's not true in the United States.
But you're making a valid point, at least, for discussion.
It's not a perfect comparison, but it's really just a comparison to start people thinking.
And the main point, though, is, with only some exception, basically, at the end of World War II, when the whole economy was kind of a state-run economy in the United States, You know, it's been a steadily increase.
And so what I hear, and I think this is the crux of the debate that we need to have on the right, is, you know, what do we do?
The libertarian promise to reduce the size of government, or as Grover Norquist said, make the government so small you could drown it in a bathtub.
I mean, it just is totally detached from reality.
And my basic position is, yes, in an ideal world, we should get there.
We should move to the extent that we can incrementally towards that kind of more libertarian position regarding the state.
But in the meantime, if we win the state legislatures, if we win state governorships, if we win the Congress, if we win the White House, we actually have to have a prudential plan to deal with a massive state.
And it's really a management problem that we have.
And so, you know, while I admire someone like Javier Millet who's saying, you know, afuera, get rid of the government agencies, that of course is a different country with a different set of priors.
I would like to see it if possible in the United States, but I wouldn't bank on that.
You know, and for example, in the first Trump administration, Betsy DeVos tried to convince Congress Controlled by Republicans in both the House and the Senate to cut funding, basically to abolish the Department of Education through the appropriations process.
She wasn't able to do so.
And so I think it's incumbent upon the kind of libertarian conservatives.
To actually substantiate their case for reducing the size of government with a plausible theory of action as to how they're actually going to get it done in a significant way.
Because for the time being, I just remain very skeptical and I think we should have at least, I think actually first and foremost, but even if you disagree with my premise, you should have at least a backup plan.
When we take over the institutions of government, what do we do with them?
I think Governor DeSantis in Florida has provided a counter method that has been successful in its own way.
And I think that that's really where I think, not tariffs, not manufacturing, not taxes.
You know, we shouldn't just be a kind of more miserly version of the left.
But we actually have to have a kind of right-wing theory of the state where we have a plausible plan of governing and shifting the state more towards our interests, more in align with our principles, and not simply promise and fail to deliver cuts in government spending.
Yeah, I think that's a fascinating vision, Chris.
I think it's fascinating because it's coherent, it's interesting, and I think that these are open questions and open terrain for what direction the new right, whether that's with a capital N or a lowercase n, we can debate, you know, actually takes on.
So I think maybe there's sort of three different options at least on the table here.
Maybe four different options.
I mean, one is you have the whole historical neoliberal worldview that more trade is good for the sake of Itself, you know, that's created, I think, a lot of problems of its own, increasing our economic dependence on places like China to provide even our own defense industrial base.
That doesn't make any sense.
It's nonsensical.
It's resulted in immigration that has diluted, I think, a sense of our national identity just because civic attributes haven't really been part of the screening process.
So, you know, I mean, that's camp number one, what you think of as old guard establishment Republican language today.
I think separately from that, you have a protectionist response to that, which says that, OK, well, in response to that, we want to eliminate trade, period, to protect American manufacturers from the effects of foreign price competition, eliminate a lot of legal immigration, period, to be able to protect American workers from the effects of foreign wage erosion, from foreign to be able to protect American workers from the effects of foreign wage
And I think part of what misses the point there is actually, in many cases at least, when you think about protectionism as an end in itself, as an economic matter leaves everybody worse off, even the very people you're supposed to help.
And I think it also misses the point even on achieving some of the goals of national security, where if we want to decouple from China, we actually are going to do that less quickly unless we're willing to nearshore in combination with onshoring as well.
With civic identity, look, if you're going to have an immigrant in this country that's not only going to be economically productive, but speaks English more Fluently knows more about American history and the American civic ideals and will score better on a civics exam and a deeper appreciation for the United States of America and maybe even greater willingness to die for their country than somebody who grew up in, I don't know, Williamsburg is the daughter of some sixth generation person on the Upper East Side.
I'd say bring that person in, even if it's going to have an incremental impact on at least wage competition in the labor market, because I think that makes the country stronger.
It's going to be massively less immigration than we have today, but whatever few that number is, whatever that number is, I think that's a different vision of how you restrict immigration rather than worrying about the effects on wages, which I think matters less than the effect on national identity, which I do care about.
So anyway, you've got the neoliberal version, the protectionist response.
Then I think you have the divide where you and I might so far see very similarly in our aversion to economic protectionism, but may have slight divergences on what we see as the solution.
Your point is, how do you actually use the levers of government to advance affirmative conservative goals?
Whereas I don't view shutting down the size of bureaucracy as a procedural goal.
I view that as a substantive goal in its own right.
And I think if your point is that we have a pretty poor track record of dismantling the nanny state and dismantling the regulatory state and dismantling the bureaucratic state, I would agree with you.
But I also don't think we have had somebody who has been as committed to that end as Javier Malay has been in his early days of governing in Argentina.
And I think America deserves a much better breed of Javier Malay on steroids than just saying that we're going to resign ourselves to the existence of the managerial class who, at our best, we're just going to say are going to redirect their energy by executive order in things that, you know, you gave an example of one state, but even halted and at times running into obstacles in the courts when somebody else from a different party takes over the same shoe fits the other foot.
I'd rather dismantle the damn thing in the first place, actually shut it down.
in a way that we just have not yet.
And I don't think the example of historically failing to do it is sufficiently compelling to abandon that strategy because I don't think we've had somebody who's been as even ex-ante committed to that vision as say someone like a Malay has been in Argentina.
Certainly that's earned the nomination of a major party for US president, running for it in the primaries. - I think there are two problems though.
And the first problem is that Argentina is kind of a failed country.
They've had significant economic problems for multiple generations.
You have a huge volatility in the politics.
It's also a smaller country.
And I don't think someone like Javier Malay, a kind of doctrinaire, I mean, Paul Ryan was the kind of closest we have to an Ayn Rand-style Republican.
He was unable to do it, of course.
Ronald Reagan's, the kind of rhetorical premise of the Reagan administration was that government was not to solve the problem.
Government was the problem.
You have some cuts to certain places of the government under Reagan.
The same under Nixon.
You had proposals in the second administration and Nixon.
But they've never been able to do it with the same kind of vigor or the same kind of results.
And so the other problem though, even if you just think domestically, Look at a state like Florida.
That's, I think, the good test case.
You're not going to defund or dismantle public universities.
The public universities of Florida are nationally ranked.
They have very popular football teams.
They're very popular with voters.
Voters, in fact, want to expand higher education rather than dismantle it.
There are similar analogs in the federal space, but the idea, just to focus on that as one example, is, okay, well, you're not going to dismantle higher education.
I don't even think that's preferable in the abstract, even as a theoretical matter.
But you're left with the question of, wait a minute, in Florida, which is now a conservative state, Why are all these institutions advancing monolithic left-wing priorities?
And what can we do to have them reflect the desires and the values of the people who pay for them, who vote for them, who should be represented within them?
And so you have a series of reforms that are essentially management techniques.
How do you reform hiring?
How do you recruit better boards and better executives?
How do you launch conservative research centers within the institutions?
How do you take over some of the failing smaller institutions like we have done at New College of Florida?
And then how do you reorient those institutions?
So that they advance the shared values of the voters who put the legislators and the governor in office.
I think we have to do something similar because, look, the sad truth is that while Americans in the abstract say, we want to have a smaller, less intrusive government, When you actually disaggregate that and talk about specific programs, the American people are not libertarians.
And in fact, the one, I think, significant reform that we did have, or at least the appearance of a reform, was welfare reform under the Clinton administration, a kind of impossibility now, given the state of the left.
You know, even Charles Murray, who was, I think, the intellectual inspiration for that, his book, Losing Ground, he kind of even admits that decades later, all of the actual reforms have now been watered down to such an extent that the welfare reform of that time doesn't even matter.
The state has a way to kind of grow back, and there's really no method of pruning or much less dismantling it.
And so, you know, even after that, Maybe you can provide a counterpoint.
I would love for you to provide a counterpoint.
But even more broadly, more theoretically, the founders of this country were also not libertarians.
They had a very sense that the state served a purpose, that the state was supposed to advance the common good, that it was supposed to protect the rights and secure the rights of citizens, and then contribute to the happiness, the overall happiness of the society.
Let me respond to that, actually, Chris.
I respectfully disagree with the contention about the founders not being libertarian.
I think the founders were a motley crew, actually.
They had vigorous debates as illuminated in the Constitutional Convention.
I think we have a backdrop of deep common ground, but even on this micro-debate, some level of common ground is a difference between...
And analyzing this issue at the level of the states versus the federal government.
I don't think it's the same analysis.
And I think our founding fathers actually were, if you were to broadly aggregate them, they had diverse views.
But at the federal level, I think they mostly were, by what today's standards we would call staunch libertarian, even while recognizing the role for states and diverse in their approaches, had the ability for a state government and even local governments that sit beneath this state to foster a vision of the good, an affirmative vision had the ability for a state government and even local governments that sit beneath this state to foster a vision of the good, an affirmative vision of the good that they did not want the federal government adjudicating, but they
The 10th Amendment and the vision enshrined in the Bill of Rights, including and up to the 10th Amendment, saying that that which is not reserved expressly to the federal government is reserved respectively to the states and to the people, which is really just a small set of functions that were otherwise reserved to the federal government.
And I think that that's responsive to, I think, your point about states.
You could pick your favorite state examples, Florida, South Dakota.
You go straight down the list of what you would think of as models of different versions of conservative governance.
That is exactly what our founders, certainly of them, may have envisioned happening at the level of the state versus at the level of the federal government.
I think part of what we've been missing is just fortitude.
I mean, you've got a guy like Nixon that talked a big game about taking on the nanny state, but he actually passed into law the EPA. He actually put into law—he expanded a lot of the federal bureaucracy underneath him.
And I think domestically, part of the issue with a guy like Nixon—and I bring this up because you brought him up, but also because it's evidence of what we've seen since Nixon— He wasn't actually an ideologue.
He was a pragmatist, really, actually.
And I think that's what made him strong on foreign policy is that he was a pragmatist on foreign policy rather than an ideologue.
He was able to effectively get Mao out of the clasp of the Soviet Union to do what was previously thought to be impossible, which is to drive an even broader wedge.
I think that we actually need more of that ideology I'm a big fan of being a pragmatist on foreign policy.
But on domestic policy, I don't think we've had somebody who's been quite as ideological on the matter of the federal government in the same way that Javier Malay has.
And I don't think that that undermines the case you're making, which is mostly drawing from examples at the state level, which is exactly what our founders may have envisioned, that they were libertarian when it came to the federal government, but not necessarily libertarian, but much more Virtue-oriented Aristotelian in their conception of what a state or local government was supposed to be.
Yeah, I mean, certainly.
I mean, I would prefer that arrangement as well.
But unfortunately, over the last 250 years, we've inverted the kind of power structure between the federal government and the states with, again, kind of no viable method for return.
You have a trillion-plus dollars per year in means-tested welfare spending.
You're coming up on a trillion dollars a year in You have defense payments.
You have Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.
The core of the federal spending is, as a matter of public opinion and a matter of practical politics, more or less at this stage, impossible to touch.
And then the discretionary spending is still a massive influence on public life.
And my basic position, again, though, is not to say that, of course, the states are different.
The federal government doesn't run university systems like the states.
I think that's good.
But it's really a tactical question.
I think the lessons in Florida the last few years Have taken, you know, what we might call a new right or a kind of, let's say, even an anti-woke agenda and saying, well, how can we actually implement this in policy?
And so I think that tactically, we have to be willing to transpose some of those ideas onto the federal landscape.
Because again, and again, you know, Positive and alternative theory, I don't think desire is enough.
You know, the Republicans, you know, going back to kind of Paul Ryan have- Can I ask you a question about Florida a few times, and I think it's just an interesting example.
This is really not particularly important in the realm of public debate.
What do you think of Florida's passage of its ban on laboratory-developed meat products?
I don't know.
That is one that took me by surprise.
It took me by surprise, too.
It's sort of interesting because most people think about the free state of Florida.
You're free to do what you want.
Now they've got people in other parts of the country that have developed technology to say, oh, you can make it taste better or more healthy or whatever, and you develop it in a lab.
And then they said that they're just going to ban that.
So if you go out in Florida, you can't eat that in the free state of Florida.
What's your perspective on that?
I'm a bit torn about that one because, look, again, my natural bias is towards a free market solution.
However, I think that there is a kind of viable claim to regulation regarding food.
I mean, our country is a mess regarding our health, regarding our kind of metabolic health.
And certainly there's precedent for restricting certain, you know, kind of food practices that are harmful.
This is not always to say that we should maximize that authority.
Which we're not doing, by the way.
Yeah, which we're not doing.
But, you know, so I don't know all the details.
I can't comment in detail.
But I think there is some latitude, actually.
And I think that particularly regarding food and health, I think that there is a positive case for the state taking an active role in promoting the health of the country.
I don't think that you can have happiness without health.
And to the extent that we can determine practices that are too dangerous to health.
I think it's fine.
I don't know about lab-grown meat, but my general suspicion- The claims of the people who advance it would say that they actually are I agree with the very reasons you cited because of the failed food processors of yesterday to be able to offer a far more pristine product.
But my only point was when it came to the question of freedom, it was an interesting conundrum that I thought presented itself.
It is, yeah.
But look, I would say, setting aside the lab-grown meat, I think that What DeSantis has demonstrated is that one can wield political power on behalf of cultural interests.
And so to say that the people of a state or the people of a nation represent some kind of culture, some kind of cultural aspiration, that the state has a legitimate role in fulfilling that, because that's what actually leads us to happiness.
And so the states have an obligation.
To help create the conditions.
So you have things like policy regarding family, policy regarding economic life, policy regarding cultural life.
The left understands this.
The left actually has, I think, a malevolent, but a very I think that, not to say that we have to, you know, copy, but we should actually learn some of the lessons.
And I think simply learn some of the lessons we seem to have forgotten.
And as regard Florida, I mean, look, Florida has done a very good job in a very tough last four years at protecting the interests of Floridians and of making sure the institutions of the state that have popularity among the voters actually reflect the values of voters.
And so the question in the federal level, setting aside kind of federalism arguments, which in principle I agree, Yeah.
day one, you assemble the speaker of the house and the leader of the Senate, you have a majority in both houses.
I just think that we need to start thinking very concretely.
You have that situation.
You have the trifecta.
What do you do?
Really, truly, what is the agenda?
What is the theory of the case?
And what is the best possible outcome that you would see for a new administration?
Yeah, look, I think your only thing I love about you is you're able to tee up ideas in a way that actually few politicians are.
And I personally am of the breed of our, I believe, and miss the days of our founding class, the Thomas Jeffersons of the world, who had your type of interest in ideas, but also were the people who occupied the positions to actually implement them versus today.
What I think we've devolved into is Separation of those roles.
I think we live in one of these moments where you do need leaders who have both your capacity.
Hey, maybe you should think about a future different than the one you're in, man.
But people who actually have the ability to generate independent thoughts for themselves, a standard that we don't really apply to politicians today, actually being the ones driving the decisions.
But nonetheless, to answer your question, and I'll have a question for you on the back of this, is I think the agenda on day one should be Shutting down as much of the federal bureaucracy as possible.
If your social security number ends in an odd number, you're fired.
Period.
That's two million federal bureaucrats out on day one.
Maybe step two is if your social security number starts with an odd number, then you're out.
That's 75% right there.
And then you bring out the chisel after that.
Then you look at agencies that shouldn't exist.
Shut them down.
Department of Education.
Send the money back to the states.
FBI. Failed institution.
Its culture has become...
So ossified in celebrating the legacy of J. Edgar Hoover.
For God's sake, the J. Edgar Hoover building that people still walk into.
Shut it down and take the agents on the front lines and move them to the U.S. Marshals if you have to, but pick which agencies haven't yet been corrupted in the same way.
You brought up food, food and nutrition services, FNS, which sits under the Department of Agriculture, underneath the USDA.
Shut that down because it's been captured by food lobbying organizations for the last 50 years.
I don't think we can reconstitute it.
I think the best we can do is actually shut it down.
Now you can do that without the Senate Majority Leader or the House Republican Leader in the room.
You bring those guys in the room and say, okay, here's LBJ's nanny state created by FDR and frankly metastasized through every president or nearly every president hereafter.
How are we done?
Social Security and Medicare are a different breed, but at least how do you attach a work requirement to every welfare payment or nanny state payment that is ever disbursed?
You don't have to say you're going to take them away, just going to attach a work requirement to it as the first step.
I think that that vision of dismantling the nanny state, there's two kinds of nanny state.
There's the entitlement state and there's the regulatory state.
The nanny state's the superset.
I believe the right answer and the right theory of the case is we want to dismantle the nanny state and in the process revive national pride and identity in this country and my question for you is it sounds like you would not vote for that but your reason for not voting for it is it because that that end state is not desirable or is it because the recent history of the last 50 years would suggest to you that whoever says they want to do that isn't actually going to do it which of those reasons would be your reason for not supporting that vision as opposed to a different vision I
mean, the latter, because, look, I think the theory is sound.
The theory is really the Elon Musk Twitter takeover theory.
You have a power law distribution so that 20 percent of the employees deliver 80 percent of the work, 80 percent of the value of a company or 80 percent of the accomplishments within an institution.
And, you know, Elon fires 80 percent of the Twitter workers and I think has You know, maintain or actually increase the innovation in the product.
I think you'd find a lot of government bureaucracies, it might even be a more extreme distribution.
But so, you know, in theory, yes, you could cut half of the federal employees.
And I think actually the government would work quite well.
We actually kind of know this.
You know, there are government shutdowns periodically.
Yeah, exactly.
One of the things that I've noticed during government shutdowns is that, like, my life and everyone I know, their lives are exactly the same as prior to the government shutdown.
If you had a government shutdown that never reopened, I think actually 90% of Americans would feel no difference at all.
And so all but non-emergency or non-essential personnel.
The only difference they feel is lower taxes or whatever to be able to fund the non-essential in the meantime, right?
So, yeah.
They would like that, yeah, of course.
But so in theory, I agree.
And also in theory, as a kind of political theory, I think it would be a better government, a government that is smaller, a government that is lighter, a government that provides more latitudes for citizens is a better government.
My problem is really strategic and tactical in nature.
You know, what you're describing was the kind of right wing firebrand position of Newt Gingrich.
Before that of Reagan and after that of the Tea Party.
And so you've had, you know, a long period of time in which that is the default kind of right wing, you know, now we call it like a Freedom Caucus position.
Your legal theory, again, we'd have to submit it to scrutiny, but the legal theory is that you could do it on day one.
I don't think so.
I think that would be highly contested, at least.
And you have the Schedule F executive order that President Trump was rolling out in the first administration, where you can say policy officials, those that have kind of- Yeah, I mean, that's really small potato.
I mean, that's good.
It's a good step forward, but it is small compared to the scale of what I'm talking about.
Yes, of course.
And so you get kind of a contestation even at that level.
I think it makes sense.
I think they should do it.
I think they should go as far as possible.
But the question then, you know, It kind of remains.
I mean, you'd have to have, even accepting the kind of constitutionality of what you're talking about, saying that the president, as the unitary executive, has sole control over the composition of the workforce in the federal agencies.
I mean, great.
If we can make the case and it gets past the Supreme Court, fantastic.
But even just assuming that...
It's a discussion for another day, but it is my belief.
Yeah, yeah.
We'll just put it aside and we'll assume it to be true.
We'll put that to one side for now, yeah.
You'd have to have a kind of different character, a kind of different prince, let's say, in the metaphorical sense, that would be willing to take such a dramatic action.
And so what I've kind of learned, or at least biased towards, is be open to that possibility.
If Trump were to get in and say, this is what we're doing, we're taking the Vivek plan, I would be the first person to support it and provide as much air cover as I could.
But I think we also need to have a kind of plan B. And the plan B is not as romantic, it's not revolutionary in nature, but it's more akin to trench warfare.
Institution by institution, policy by policy, to actually combat it in that sense.
And to say that if we are going to have a state That state should actually transmit the values of the people who are elected to run that state.
And I think that long-term, Leaving open the possibility of surprise, of the kind of Elon character or the dramatic character, I think we need to have a prudent plan for incremental changes and a prudent plan that is essentially a management plan.
Because my sense of the kind of near and medium term, as much as we lament the rise of the managerial state, there's really no viable alternative to the managerial state.
We're going to be a world of large bureaucracies for the foreseeable future.
And until we can Change that until we have the rudimentary particles of a replacement for that system.
I think we have to have a plan for fighting within that system, which for most conservatives is simply we hope that it goes away sometime.
My position is that's not enough.
It can't be enough for our lives and our children's lives and probably long after that.
This is a very interesting discussion.
I think that Your position, I think, is certainly coherent and even compelling, which is for the class of leaders we have, we need a plan that they can actually execute.
And my claim is not, I think, maybe after this discussion, discovered not in tension with that.
It's just a different claim, which is to say that We require a plan as ambitious as restoring the pre-Woodrow Wilson vision of the federal government, and we deserve a better class of leader who's actually going to be able to give it to us.
And right now you're saying we have the class of leaders that we have without the actual plan for at least working within the institutions we have.
And, you know, my Point is, we have a clear idea of what dismantling an actual nanny state would look like.
The thing we're missing is the class of politician required to actually see it through.
And I think it's an interesting discussion that I think you and I, I hope, will be continuing over the next couple of years.
Because every time I talk to you, I learn something new or think about a problem differently, which is different than what I can say when I'm talking to the average D.C. politician.
Yeah, I get that, and I would say that that is precisely part of the problem.
I remember I did a D.C. congressional breakfast talking about critical race theory or DEI or some kind of culture topic, and it's very difficult.
The median Republican politician is not fluent in these issues.
They're kind of businessmen from suburban Rural, ex-urban districts, median age, probably 65, 70. I think it's going to take a generational turnover.
And one bright spot, of course, there are many of us that are starting to work on the journalistic side, on the intellectual side.
And then I think Trump's selection of J.D. Vance as the vice presidential nominee was also a sign that there's going to be a turnover.
And I think like you, like me, like J.D., We're part of a new cohort, a generational cohort, that's going to have a different character, a different nature than, let's say, the baby boomers or even the kind of Paul Ryan, the kind of baby boomer at heart.
On the optimistic side, perhaps generational turnover will open up new possibilities.
But for the time being, Trump is signaling no cuts to Medicare, no cuts to Social Security, no cuts to defense, no cuts to X, Y, and Z. He's not signaling a kind of radical Millian policy.
And so I think the prudent thing is to do what someone like Russ Vogt is doing.
Which is to say, hey, how can we advance the president's agenda within the bounds of possibility?
And what I think he's developing is a set of new management techniques, which is, you know, not inspiring.
It's not romantic.
It's not revolutionary.
But I actually think that the problem that we face is one of kind of management institutional techniques.
And I look forward to working on these with you as we move forward.
Appreciate it, man.
Great conversation, and keep at it.
Your work's important.
Your voice is important.
And I think I'd love, even in the coming, however, whatever the time horizon is for the future, you and I are continuing to hone, I think, each other's perspectives, even in the way that we did in this short time.
So thank you, man.
Good to see you.
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