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Sept. 18, 2024 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy
51:58
Why Are GOP Senate Candidates Trailing Trump? | Curt Mills | TRUTH Podcast #64
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Well, another week, another assassination attempt, apparently, in the United States of America.
That's what it's come to.
Sad to see.
This is a country where this would have been even major defining news for the trajectory of an election.
And yet where we are is that has become, in some ways, I'm sad to say, in America, ever so slightly normalized.
And that's what worried me most about what happened on Sunday is as tragic as it was that there was a second attempted assassination on President Trump, an attempt on his life in the same summer.
The first time, let alone the fact that they'd already escaped the news cycle a month later.
The second time, it was just considered another blip in a news cycle as well.
And I'm not here criticizing the media for that necessarily, but I am reflecting on where We're skating on thin ice.
the fact that this is not as shocking as it ought to be in normal times tells us exactly what's at stake for the future of the country.
And, you know, I have deep concerns.
I think that there are going to be troubling times between now and November.
I hope we get through it stronger on the other side.
But to talk about the election in particular, we had arranged this long before even the news of this past Sunday, but it made it all the more timely.
I've invited a guy who's become a friend and an intellectual counterpart in the last year, Kurt Mills, who is, among other things, leading the American Conservative.
So, Kurt, welcome to the podcast, and I'm excited to have the conversation with you.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
So, you know, just for the benefit of our audience who may not know you, I think they should, but for those who don't, just share with us a little bit of your background, which I think is a little bit heterodox from the world of business into the world of policy think tanks.
Take us through that, and then we'll get right into a discussion about what's in store for this election.
Sure, yeah.
I'm originally from the D.C. area, which in and of itself is a little bit unusual.
It's a pretty transient place and people aren't usually from there.
You can see that by how poor the fan bases are for the various sports teams.
Not much of a fight was put up to rename the Redskins, etc., etc.
So it's a place that's That's changing.
And so, in and of itself, being from here, I think, has given me a background.
And I was pretty much a politics junkie from teens on, so I followed the Bush years pretty closely, and that shaped my view.
I was always Sort of on the center right, but very much anti-Bush.
And that was very anchoring for me.
And then I've worked in a number of places, and I recently worked for a hedge fund.
And so I've seen a lot.
I lived in California for a little bit.
And as we're just kind of talking off air, kind of ready for this election to be over one way or the other, because I think we've got a lot of exciting work to do.
And I still remain pretty optimistic about the country.
So what do you think?
Let's just talk about going on with the election.
I've seen a number of your posts on social media and some of your writings.
You have studied this in detail.
Let's start with the presidential level, and then I want to go to some discrepancies between the presidential race and the Senate races.
What do you see actually transpiring as probably one of the more astute observers of the dynamics of this race and whether or not you have a prediction of where this is going to land?
Yeah, you know, it's very interesting.
I think we're going to rewind a little bit.
I think what you saw in 2022 was actually the limits of the anti-woke messaging.
So rewind back.
I agree with that.
Yeah, if we're having this conversation and say, November 2022, after DeSantis robbed and Trump, you know, kind of quickly entered the race, people thought he was Thought he was done.
I actually had sort of the opposite read, which is that the monomaniacal focus on the culture wars itself actually accrued weird benefits in places that were helpful in the Republicans keeping the House.
So take Southern California or New York State, if you're complaining about how the culture is actually changing very, very, very quickly.
In blue states, there was actually something of an audience for this, but it was terrible in these swing states.
The Republicans got shot out in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia.
They lost the Senate.
And I think you've seen that dynamic play out a little bit again with Trump overtaking DeSantis in the primary and also Trump's, in my opinion, superior performance to a lot of the more vanilla Republicans that are running down ballot in the Senate races this time.
I will note that if the So for anyone in the audience who's unfamiliar, Trump is running, generally speaking, way ahead of the Senate candidates in any races that's significant.
So for instance, he's going to win Montana, probably win Montana by 20 points.
It's not a done deal that the Republican there, Tim Sheehy, will win, although I think he's favored.
And then in other states that are safe red, like Ohio, the Democrats may yet win.
If this occurs, this is the first time split ticketing will have occurred at this level since early the 90s.
There was a long-standing history of people splitting their ballots in the 80s and 90s, and it has to do with basically the South and civil rights.
So you would have, oh, hey, Walter Mondale, he seems too far left.
I'm going to vote for Reagan, but I trust my local Congressman Sam in East Texas or whatever.
That is totally evaporated.
And if Trump wins or loses, if we have split ticketing reoccurring in America in a major way, and I'm a little dubious that it will actually happen, but if it does, if the polling is vaguely directionally true, it's going to be a watershed that will change politics.
Yeah, let's actually talk about that, because I do think it's been under-discussed in this cycle.
So you mentioned Ohio, and you know what?
I'm heavily, personally, supporting Bernie Moreno.
He's a great guy.
I think he should be the next senator.
But you're right, and fair to point out, right now in the polling, I think there has been pretty much every public poll that puts Sherrod Brown and Democrat ahead.
You see the same dynamic in Michigan.
You see the same dynamic in Pennsylvania.
You see it in Arizona.
You see it in Nevada.
You see it in Montana.
And so that's six states right there where Trump is dramatically overperforming Republican Senate candidates who could well lose.
And then even if you look at other states like Texas, where Ted Cruz is running ahead, but it is a lot closer than a lot of people might appreciate.
And yet Trump is probably up in Texas by, I don't know what, 20 points, 18 to 20 points.
And you've got still a Senate race that's between two to four points.
So I find that to be just analytically, I think, pretty interesting.
You actually are probably even a better analyst of horse race politics than I am.
I'm newer to this.
I think more about policy, which I know interests you too.
But what do you think is going on there where usually people are blaming the conventional media narrative is blame Donald Trump for the poor performance and the effect that he has on other Republicans.
That's the traditional media's narrative.
Yet the facts seem to suggest that Donald Trump is actually dramatically overperforming other down-ballot candidates himself.
What underlies that?
Yeah, I mean, so a lot of internet about the civil wars in the various parties in recent years.
So the Bush wing against the Trump wing and the Sanders wing against the Clinton wing, for lack of a better term.
But I think what is misunderstood is that if you just read the headlines, you would assume these are 50-50 propositions.
And I think on the left, it actually is.
I mean, if you look at the 2016 race, Sanders-Clinton was pretty close.
And if you look at the 2020 race, Biden-Clinton was a little, sorry, Biden-Sanders a little less close, but still, you know, 60-40.
Trump versus the establishment is far, far more of a running away proposition.
You know a little bit about this, having run in 24. It's like a four to one thing.
If Trump had exited the race, People like you or DeSantis would have eaten a lot of his vote.
And I think the perspective represented by the donor class, by the Wall Street Journal editorial board, it's a lot of resources, there's a lot of support, a lot of pedigrees, the people that staffed the Reagan and Bush administrations and were integral to Republican governance for a half century in this country.
But there just really aren't that many rich Republicans anymore.
And It's a weird thing that both the left and the right are in denial about.
The right's in denial of it because they think once they get rid of Trump, they'll be able to go back to 2014 or something.
And the left's in denial about it because the left is in denial about controlling corporate America.
Oh, interesting.
The fact that they actually do have control of corporate America.
Yes, they're in charge.
I don't know if it's a complicated thing to say in denial about it or want everyone else to fail to see the reality of that.
We'll get to that in a second.
On the right, though, so still that does not quite account for a lot of these Senate candidates running far behind Trump, because many of them certainly wear the banner of being America First candidates that reject the neoliberal dogmas that had pervaded much of the Republican Party, particularly as it relates to China.
And I just think analytically it's just interesting to watch candidates who...
At least I think facially appear to and I think actually genuinely do embrace a lot of Donald Trump's policies that are still like not by a little bit, but badly underperforming him in the same states where Trump is dominating, at least in the polls right now.
Well, yeah, so I didn't go into the race specifically.
So to close out my point, take someone like McCormick, though.
So just to push back to McCormick.
Yeah, the former Bridgewater CEO who's running in Pennsylvania.
And I actually think he's doing better than he was, say, two months ago.
But something very, very curious about McCormick.
McCormick is on the record opposing Trump's tariffs.
Now, if I were running for Senate and I didn't care about anything and I just wanted to win, I don't think of all the things to quibble about in Trump's record in Pennsylvania.
I'm not sure I would cut out the tariffs part.
And that's the sort of an example of the sort of distance between Trump and some of the older guard on this subject.
For McCormick, okay, you gave one example.
But I mean, even if you take, let's just take, you know, and these are all people who are many former friends who I respect, but let's talk about Brown in Nevada, Cary Lake, Bernie Moreno.
Tim Sheehy, Ted Cruz, they're all on the ballot.
They're all running, not by a little bit, but dramatically behind Trump, which means that you literally have people who say, I'm going to vote for Donald Trump, and then I'm going to go over to this column and vote for the Democrat, and then come back and vote for some Republicans.
It's just fascinating, and I just want to understand what's going on there.
It's not just one state, where it's just one candidate who, you know, McCormick might be the best example of somebody who is on the record having opposition to one of Trump's core policies.
But in other cases, I don't know that you see that and you still see the same result in the polls.
I think so.
Fair enough.
I mean, I think in fairness, there are some tough competitors to these.
So Brown and Tester in Ohio and Montana are probably two of the most effective Democratic politicians in the country.
I mean, it is not easy to win as a Democrat in Montana.
Even if you think Tester's shtick is entirely fake.
He was in charge of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee for a reason.
He hasn't proven track of winning.
And Sheehy, I think, is probably favored.
I mean, they've moved him now to lean on all these political reports, whatever they're worth.
I still think remains sort of an enigma.
I mean, we just don't know what these Republicans stand for in a way.
Marino is probably the closest to someone who's tried to just carbon copy Trump's foreign policy and immigration and trade positions.
But again, he's running against Brown, who's been in Ohio politics since the early 70s, since before.
You were born in Ohio.
And I do think Brown, again, one of the more effective ones.
I think Arizona is an example of, I don't want to have this lady come after me, but I don't think Carrie Lake, it seems like she's incapable of winning statewide in Arizona.
And then the brown Nevada.
Nevada is very strange.
The Republicans always think they're going to win there, and I always think it should be.
It's a lot of California emigres.
Places like Reno seem very not woke.
I remember being in Vegas right before COVID, and I was thinking this is the least COVID-friendly place in America.
The entire thing is tactile.
I'm not even sure anyone's paying taxes because it's all cash.
In theory, the COVID world would be most hostile to the sort of Vegas.
It's not a woke place, for lack of a better term.
But still, the Republicans haven't been able to overcome the read machine.
So I do think there is a situation in which I heard this comparison before that Trump winning in 2016 would have been like Reagan winning in 1968, which is like they take the presidency, but you don't have the cadres.
Yeah, well, I think that that is a scenario that's increasingly realistic.
I mean, if you take a case like Arizona, I actually do think Carrie Lake has a very good shot there, just because she has been statewide in terms of just media for a long time.
But we'll see how the results transpire.
But the reality is...
I do think that there are scenarios we had to consider where we might have the presidency without a majority in the Senate, which in some ways would be a bit of a travesty in having gone through the long slog of this election only to have kind of policy ambiguity.
Let's just talk a little bit more about this question, though, of what actually accounts for that rift.
Because I agree with everything you said about where the Republican Party is on policy relative to a neoconservative vision in the 2000s versus the Donald Trump led America first reinvention of the Republican Party from 2016 onward.
I'm not sure how much of it, though, is policy centric.
And I've grown more dubious of that, actually.
Yeah.
Because actually, the real debate I see brewing on the right...
You and I talked about this briefly when I was in D.C. for, I think it was my NatCon speech, relatively recently.
And we spoke shortly before I went on stage.
And I'll share this with the audience.
I actually see the next rift in the conservative movement as being between those who favor...
As I do, dismantling the administrative state, dismantling the regulatory state, getting there, shut it down, slash, burn, 75% headcount reductions or more, shut down agencies that shouldn't exist, take every federal regulation that wasn't effectively passed through Congress to rescind it because it's unconstitutional,
to go in and shut the darn thing down versus a competing vision that says, no, we want to use the levers of state power to advance substantive, affirmatively conservative, or if not conservative, at least pro-worker, pro-American manufacturing ends, which I think there's a compelling case for.
I just happen to be in the camp of going in there and wanting to shut it down.
And being that the most open policy debate that's yet to be adjudicated in the Republican Party, I think part of what Trump brings relative to these other candidates who he's badly overperforming in the Republican tickets in these swing states is actually I think part of what Trump brings relative to these other candidates who he's badly overperforming in the Republican tickets in these swing states is actually just somebody And he's somebody who's going to go and shake things up.
He's going to be an executive.
He's an outsider.
He gets people excited.
I think excitement and pride in country is something that we're missing, such that even if you do copy, word for word, Trump's policies as a Republican and run against him, you probably are going to underperform him in absence of actually having the ability to galvanize people Which might matter more in some ways than the specifics of where you land on industrial policy versus trade versus a particular view on whether or not you ban TikTok or whatever.
And I use that example somewhat intentionally because Trump, I think, bucked a lot of the consensus last year.
I'm just less convinced.
It's actually about the divisions and where you're seeing people land in terms of the numbers of going for certain Senate candidates, Democratic Senate candidates, but still voting for Donald Trump might actually just be a question about force of leadership rather than actual substantive policy.
I don't know.
You studied this more closely perhaps than I have.
What do you think?
Yeah, well, I think two things can be true at the same time.
So first, I agree with you.
I'm certainly on, you know, at least among the sort of non-con crowd, I'm definitely on the more restraint, libertarian side of things.
I would say it is a serious question that the people that would want to do with any of the capitalist tendencies of the Republican Party, even though it's ridiculous to imagine the United States is not capitalist, It's a serious question with, how do you answer Texas and Florida?
Or how do you answer all of the facts that the things that are actually attracting people, like Republicans can't win elections, what they can do is win people moving to their states.
And why would you want to throw away that model for some sort of vague control, maybe controlling the administrative state every four years, sort of.
It just doesn't seem like an even trade.
And I would As a tonic to that, I would say, though, I'm pretty interested in the Europe stuff.
To an extent, I think the U.S. is very different than Europe.
To another extent, I do think there are some similarities.
And something that is similar, I think, is that you are seeing center-right parties win throughout Europe on the issue of migration.
So I don't think that's going away.
I think it's pretty clear.
I mean, even the Democrats at this point.
Or have conceded that their policy of 21 to 22 doesn't work or at least isn't popular enough to win elections.
And then I also think there is a problem across the political spectrum in the Western world of family formation, young people being able to buy houses, et cetera, et cetera.
And just from a pure mercenary perspective, whatever party is able to provide solutions where at least talk about these issues, I think is going to find political real estate.
Yeah.
Now, I think some of this relates to something I talked about in my campaign, too.
I think in the country right now, people have a deep sense of...
I think that's actually part of what's going on with the migration issue as well, is the erosion of that great sense of identity.
But I do think that we live in a moment where there's two parts of the job of a presidency.
One is to be the chief architect of at least a policy agenda for the country, but that's about half the job of the presidency where it's the entirety of the job of somebody who's working in Congress or in the Senate.
But the other half of the job of the presidency is actually to provide that sense of national character and fortitude.
And I think that the fact that Donald Trump is able to do that, even for people who don't really particularly care about policy one way or another, I think actually accounts for a lot of that support over the policy debate itself.
But let's just talk about that policy debate on the right for a second.
I think you and I began this conversation when I was in DC for the NatCon conference, but maybe we can pick that up where we left off.
What do you make of...
Because the thing about Donald Trump is he kind of bridges this divide somewhat effectively.
But I think post-Trump, there's going to be, I think, an open question of where we stand on our attitudes towards the nanny state, the regulatory state.
I kind of come down on...
Let me go on a little diatribe here, and then I want you to react to it here.
Because this lays out sort of my view where...
I think part of what you've seen happen in America first is you've seen this reactionary response to the neocons, you know, as we call it, on foreign policy.
And so no to neocons.
OK, but actually part of what you've also seen is the accommodation of a neoconservative concession made on domestic policy.
So for a while you had conservatives in the United States that were dead set against the entitlement state, dead set against the rise of the regulatory state.
And the neoconservatives on their own admission were not only, I think, more interventionist on the foreign policy, but were also more accepting, accommodating, if not just at least defeatist about, OK, we're going to have the existence of this entitlement state.
We're going to have the existence of this regulatory state.
Let's accept the existence of it and work within those parameters.
That that effectively began what you see in America first as a rejection of the neocon foreign interventionism, but an acceptance of the fact that that regulatory state and the entitlement state may be here to stay.
Let's at least use that to direct our industrial policy towards American workers and manufacturers rather than to other substantive left-wing ends.
Where, you know, where I land on this is a more substantive rejection of neoconservatism on the whole, to say that we actually not only reject the foreign nanny state, and I do think that that's a kind of a nanny state, is a nanny state where the United States is the nanny of foreign, you know, so-called allies around the world.
If we're going to protect you but you don't pay for it, that's a nanny relationship.
But also a rejection of not just that foreign nanny state, Which is, I think, where a lot of the America First movement is today, but also a rejection of the domestic nanny state, both the entitlement state as well as the regulatory state.
I'm biased, but I think that that is the way forward for the future of the conservative movement, is that we don't want to replace a left-wing nanny state with a right-wing nanny state.
We want to get in there and actually shut it down, both the domestic version of that nanny state as well as the international version of it.
And I think this weird reversal you kind of have where the neocons sort of accepted the domestic nanny state and they were foreign interventionists.
The America First movement says, no, no, no, we're not going to be interventionists abroad, but we turn a blind eye to the domestic nanny state, I think is not good enough for where we're heading.
And the shut it down mantra is sort of what I consider to be our most appropriate rallying cry going to the future.
But that is very much a divide even on the nationalist America first right today.
And I'd just love to get your take on how you see that rift playing out.
Man, we could talk about this all day.
I mean, it's super confusing.
I don't know if you saw the new Reagan movie thing that came out.
I probably should.
Is it good?
Yeah.
I've just seen clips, but I was asked to comment on the release of it for The Times.
I think people can really disagree on this.
It's a really confused...
First of all, just for the audience, I think what you referred to, the neocons, right?
So the father of William Crystal, who's the now sort of joke artist, Bulwark person, who's very pro-Harris.
His father, Irving Crystal, is considered the godfather I think that's self-declared.
And he famously said, two cheers for capitalism.
So there was always this idea that the neocons were somehow less committed to capitalism.
It was a coalition partner.
I do think it's a little bit confused, though.
I mean, so on foreign policy, particularly, the Republican president Probably more than almost any in the post-war era who declared peace with the New Deal was Nixon.
We're all Keynesians now, and he's the bet noire of neocons on foreign policy.
The neocons hate Kissinger, or hate Kissinger.
But then other people who are on the more restrained side of the Republican side hate Kissinger for Cambodia, et cetera, et cetera.
I do think, in a very strange way, for the number of years Republicans have held the White House, for as long as these debates have been going on, really since at least the New Deal, there hasn't been clarity.
So let's go back to, say, the 2008 presidential race.
Something that nobody ever thinks about, because the Republicans got killed that year.
There was a guy called Duncan Hunter, who ran for president that year.
He was a long-time congressman from the San Diego area.
And he very much fashions himself as an anti-establishment populist.
But the way that he did it was by arguing, we've got to be more free market, more neocon, etc., etc., etc.
In the exact same race, somebody could go to a Duncan Hunter rally and be mad as hell and go to a Ron Paul rally.
And, you know, saying the exact opposite, essentially saying the Saudis did 9-11, et cetera, et cetera.
So there was always this inchoate id of the Republican Party that was mad as hell at somebody.
And it wasn't fully directed towards anyone and crystallized until Trump.
And you're right that Trump has provided, perhaps he's not interested, perhaps it's not important, perhaps it's expedient.
He hasn't provided clarity on something such as the administrative state.
I mean, he didn't talk about it at all in 16, pretty much, until it became a foil to his presidency.
And of course, it's super tied in to foreign policy and was tied into the Russia thing because there's an administrative state or at least a permanent bureaucracy on foreign policy as well.
So I didn't directly answer your question, but I think it's not settled and it hasn't been settled in a weird way for eight years.
Yeah, I think it's unsettled.
I mean, I do think that draining the swamp, I mean, that's what I take it to me, draining the swamp is go in and shut down the administrative state.
But I think that that is different from certain policies in the industrial policy right that say that, no, we need to use federal intervention and subsidies to subsidize the kinds of industries that make American manufacturing more competitive.
But you're going to need an administrative bureaucracy to administer that.
And part of the reason the CHIPS Act failed, or I think has failed to be a success, is in part because it gets commingled with other objectives.
You have bills that are now pending in Congress.
The Senate Banking Committee is considering a bill that would empower the CFPB To pass regulations that cap credit card interest rates.
That's the same CFPB that's now asking small businesses for information about their, you know, racial or gender quotas, which no one wants to empower the CFPB to do.
And yet here we're saying we want to empower that same agency to now cap credit card rates, which by the way is just a different kind of price control relative to the price control we would criticize Kamala Harris for on grocery prices.
And so you could go straight down the list.
I mean, there's a lot of Republican...
I mean, I think an interesting area where the rubber hits the road is on attitudes towards antitrust, right?
I mean, do we think that Lena Kahn is doing a good job or failing to do a good job because she's not breaking up people enough or because she's actually too arbitrarily exercising power that the FTC should have never had?
The Department of Education, there's debates about whether it should be subsidizing more two-year or vocational programs instead of four-year programs, or whether we should have a Department of Education at all and return that money to the states.
And so I do think that that's a brewing debate on the right.
I think that part of What we are missing is, I think in many ways, our America First movement, they're still waiting to be led on those issues.
What I've found is I've traveled the country and you could probably have a room full of solid America First patriots in a room where if you went in there and say, hey, we need policies that protect American workers and manufacturers.
And we need to make sure that we're investing in U.S. companies for U.S. production and we don't want the effects of foreign labor bringing down the wages for our American workers.
You'd get it delivered in the right compelling way.
A pretty good cheer for that message.
Probably a very good cheer for that message.
You could also just go into that same room if you're starting from the same blank slate and say, you know what, I don't want to replace a left-wing nanny state with a right-wing nanny state.
I want to shut it down.
And you get a good cheer out of that too.
But those are somewhat...
At least if not contradictory, policies that are deeply in tension with one another.
And so I think it's kind of interesting.
You see a lot of the same Tea Party sort of anti-government, anti-interventionist folks that in many ways have become part of the modern MAGA movement that's lifted up Donald Trump, even though the policies supported by certain elements of that industrialist policy right are actually completely at odds with what the Tea Party would have wanted back in 2010. And some of this,
I think, has to do with human psychology, where maybe it's not even about the substance of the policy quite at all, as much as somebody who at least recognizes and feels the struggle of people who have been left holding the bag and left behind.
And that recognition might be actually what people are most interested in and are open to a diverse range of policy solutions to get them out of it.
Yeah, man, there's a lot to chew on there.
I know you've talked about...
Your view that the CHIPS Act just doesn't work at all.
It's just a huge...
It's a cash bonfire.
Yeah.
There's a couple of reasons why you're talking about it.
When someone like Todd Young goes on and is like, this is the serious thing to do, and goes on Mitt Romney, et cetera, et cetera, why doesn't it work?
There's a couple of things.
There's the superficial objections that I have, which are...
Relate to just importing a lot of baggage, right?
You got the vector.
Why is that the same act that also says what the National Science Foundation has to do with respect to the racial composition or the gender composition of who wins NSF grants, right?
It's in the same act.
There's a lot of other baggage exactly in that same way, establishing basic regulatory and hiring standards for the companies who are recipients of that money.
So, you know, you could say that that's That's noise and not signal.
That's just sort of backdoor woke stuff.
It's a cost of doing business.
I'm not so sure that it's that easily dismissed.
I think that once you create the vectors for government agencies administering funds at this scale, it necessarily becomes a vector for ideological infiltration as well.
So I do think it's a little bit of a conservative contradiction in kind to say that, hey, we support those policies by empowering the very agencies that have been vectors for perpetuating a lot of the cultural poison that we stand against.
That's the superficial objection.
I think the deeper objection is that it actually coddles American industry in a way that makes it less innovative and less productive.
You look at the cost of capital of these semiconductor companies.
I mean, whatever.
As of when we're having this conversation, if it's not the most valuable company in the world, it's still among the very top.
Nvidia, right?
Right.
Was, at least as of very recently, the world's largest company by market capitalization.
Look at semiconductor stocks over the course of the last decade.
You know, over the last several years, it wasn't the CHIPS Act that propelled them upward.
It was increased customer demand.
It was massive demand driven by artificial intelligence demanding greater computing power.
It was concerns about scarcity relative to that demand.
And the lowering of that cost of capital, cost of capital means how much capital you have to raise or dilution you would have to take as a business in order to raise that capital.
If your stock is higher, you have to take much less dilution to raise that capital.
Pales in comparison to the amount of that federal subsidy anyway.
So you've got a company like NVIDIA, if it's a $100 billion company or a $2 or $3 trillion company, the ability to raise $100 billion and the cost at which you do that changed so dramatically that it pales in comparison to what the federal government might be providing through the CHIPS Act.
But what it culturally does, I think, for a lot of these management teams is it focuses them on becoming the lobbying of the government for their annual budget, even though the overall cost of capital of the business has come down, the annual budget that they're judged on, lobbying the government becomes that core objective.
And I think it actually stifles those companies from being as innovative as they possibly could be when their feet are actually held to the fire.
And so my own view is that I think a lot of that industrial policy is self-defeating by the combination of coddling those companies and furthermore using the vector of government bureaucracy to perpetuate more of the very kind of Poison, cultural poison, as well as any efficiency that we supposedly say we want to fight.
And I think the right answer is you can't have that industrial policy without expansive power of administrative agencies to administer those funds.
Instead, get the hell out of the way, which you could say is a old school pro capitalism kind of point of view.
And I don't think that that's something I apologize for.
But I do think that Understanding that that is a better policy that better advances the long-run interests of American manufacturers rather than the short-run subsidy model, I think is just something that is a little bit out of favor on the right, but I think the pendulum is actually going to probably swing back in the other direction pretty soon, not going back to going and invading Iraq or just singing pions to global free trade with China and spreading democracy.
But understanding that the reactionary response to that probably included more than we thought we were biting off.
And I do think that that recalibration is coming.
Yeah, the cultural thing strikes me as most likely to sell.
I know I just complained about it in 22. But no, I mean, it's just so demotivating, right?
I mean, it's just like if you are just a vaguely apolitical person who wants to work hard and make some money in the United States, which used to be like the ideal American, frankly, You just can't escape it in any of the large organizations in the United States.
Almost every large organization in the United States is at least tacitly woke.
And I don't want to sound just like a broken record on this, but it is ambient.
And if the cost of antitrust, the cost of industrial policy is a furtherance of that, I just think that's an argument against it right then and there.
And I think it sells.
And anyway, it's interesting.
It is a point of distinction to both East Asia and Europe.
I mean, this has been talked to death, but I mean, European companies and to by and large, especially on the continent and East Asia, don't have anything like this.
I mean, so I mean, I just think in a longer timescale, you're just going to lose talent.
And then additionally, the antitrust thing is actually pretty interesting because it's not like I'm a big fan of these large companies.
I've never actually worked for any of them.
But as a matter of global competitiveness, U.S. corporations are actually quite small.
The European companies are larger.
There's huge ones in Latin America.
So it's not even super clear that the concentration is all that bad.
So I'm not an enormous conviction on it, but it does strike me as an Like, right-wing defenses of Lena Kahn, when everything I hear about it is, you know, she's fairly culturally left, it's not clear at all that that's a bargain worth making.
Yeah, look, I think that that's, it's the easiest place to identify the problem, right?
So take this bill in the CFPB, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
I don't think that it makes any sense to at once rail against them for imposing on small businesses, reporting the demographic information of their hiring practices on race, gender, and sexuality as they're doing.
This is, you know, made in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.
Elizabeth Warren's the first person who led it.
It's been a left-wing agency since its very beginning.
While also saying that, hey, we're against that, don't do that, but here's a lot more authority to now cap credit card interest rates and determine who's not compliant with that vaguely worded statute and regulation.
I don't think you can believe those two things at the same time.
They're contradictory.
And I think the same thing goes for the FTC. I think the same thing goes for the SEC. I think the same thing goes for the EPA. It goes straight down the list.
And Nixon, as you put it earlier, he was probably one of the most responsible for expanding the scope of regulatory authority of the EPA. You can't have it both ways.
And history teaches us that even if in the short run you've installed someone on top of that agency who...
It stands for affirmative cultural values.
The bureaucracy, once it exists, feeds itself.
It's almost a nonpartisan agency, as its highest commitment is to its own self-preservation and existence.
But eventually, that has a natural left-wing migration over time, because the left is ultimately, at its core, more committed to state control than the right is.
And so, directionally, if you're going to have a bureaucracy that exists, And its sole objective is its continued self-sustenance, then that migration necessarily over time will be to advance a left-wing political ideology over a right-wing one.
You mentioned the credit card thing a couple of times.
So how do you answer the critique though, which I think is increasingly, I've mentioned before how I think Republicans are increasingly, whether or not they want to be a working class party.
You have a lot more working class people migrating to the Republican ranks.
It's just a reality of the gravity.
How do you answer the critique, then, that you're essentially swapping a public tyranny for a private tyranny?
So, I mean, Biden, still the President of the United States, was famously called Senator credit card, right?
And he pursued the interests of the credit card companies in his native state, in a certain sense as constituent services.
I believe the bankruptcy rules were rewritten about 20 years ago in the mid-2000s that made a lot of this credit card debt harder to discharge.
Famously, student loans are not dischargeable because of that law.
How do you answer that critique?
Yes, you got Uncle Sam's boot off the American working Joe's neck, but you've replaced the MasterCard.
Yeah, so a couple of things I would say there.
One is that you actually, the reason I support policies that generally Are opposed to the overgrowth of the regulatory state.
It's not because I think that's a more important objective than standing for American workers and manufacturers.
I actually think it's the best way to actually, in the long run, stand for American workers and manufacturers.
A lot of this is just special interest lobbying.
I think that it'll be large credit card companies that actually benefit the most because they're able to engineer around what their actual stated credit card interest rate is versus upfront fees to be able to acquire the credit card in the first place.
Well, you don't charge in the back end in front of interest.
You just charge on the front end in terms of access.
So you're going to have actually Many people who are workers, as you say, part of the working class standing for workers, who then have actual lower access to credit themselves for upfront fees that they're charged upfront for what can't be made up for on the back end.
And, you know, I think you could say the same thing for price controls, right?
I mean, a lot of working class people are struggling at, you know, the grocery supermarket.
Well, you know, why not cap the prices?
It's the same logic as you can have supply shortages.
And, you know, there are some of these laws of economics that I think are just because they've been exploited in ways that have increased our dependence on China, pretending that China is a free market actor when they're not.
Doesn't reject the premise as applied to at least a local domestic closed system.
You're going to have supply shortages in the market for credit for the same reason you would have grocery supply shortages.
If you apply Kamala Harris's price controls to the grocery market, it's not that different than applying a right-wing in any state credit card interest rate cap either.
You're going to have shortages in access to credit for the very people who...
You know, gonna be harmed by it the most.
Well, the folks are gonna be just fine, right?
They're gonna find other access to credit that fall outside of the scope of carefully crafted regulations.
Every one of these regulations written by not just the CFPB, but any one of these three letter agencies tends to be a captured process.
They call it the notice and comment period.
And the reality is it's the corporate massage period for a lot of these regulations, effectively making sure that they don't apply in scope to the people who are able to afford to influence the process.
And so, yeah, I think that it is a captured process.
I do think it's corrupt.
And the irony is by wearing the populist mantle, we actually are betraying the very workers who were supposedly the backbone of that movement in the first place.
We need to explain that to the people.
I think the reality is many people are struggling under crushing credit card debt, but the way we're going to do it isn't by actually increasing the cost of that by saying, okay, next time you get a credit card, you're going to pay an upfront fee because it's exactly what's going to happen if this credit card interest rate cap bill goes through.
But instead by actually getting out of a lot of the crony capitalism that enables advantaged corporate behavior that creates a new corporate oligarchy that isn't just corporate in nature, but a mixture of corporate and state power that together is more powerful than either one alone.
Where the government's able to dispatch a lot of these companies to advance environmental, social, and governance goals that increase the costs that are passed on to consumers of financial products because they're able to advance policies that Congress couldn't pass through the front door via the Green New Deal.
I just think shut the apparatus down and let companies be companies so that the government can actually operate in a way that The people we elect to run the government are the ones who actually pass the laws.
And if they are unable to have the popular will to pass those laws, they can no longer turf them to three-letter agencies who then turf them to companies to be able to do a lot of that backdoor bidding for private advantage.
So, you know, a lot to sort of dissect there, but that's where I land on it.
No, no, no.
I mean, no, that makes sense.
You know, I think, you know, roving it back a little bit to the history of all this and the foreign policy angle, you know, if you read the old sort of Reagan-era neocon people, so someone like David Frum or Fukuyama,
for instance, Fukuyama, the late 80s and early 90s, it was very interesting where they argued that The private industry would encourage social conservative outcomes.
So like in order to work effectively in private industry, you'd have to put on a suit.
You'd have to not do drugs.
You'd have to, you know, people with wives and families.
And this would all sort of take care of itself.
And I think it's actually kind of interesting because I think you have seen, this is just me diagnosing the right, but a lot of the people on the right that I think have drifted from market economics or sympathy from it are often more socially conservative because they feel that this gamble has not worked out for them.
Because of course, corporations are not bastions of social conservatism.
They are in many ways bastions of the direct opposite.
Granted, they are within the context of a crony capitalist environment, which you just diagnosed.
But the reality is that the felt reality is the felt reality.
And it is interesting in which that prediction didn't manifest.
And I do think it was tied into the Crystal Essay in 1997 with Robert Kagan.
It was towards a neo-Reaganite foreign policy.
There really was this sense, especially when I was growing up, and both of us were not that different in age, That, look, we just need to export democracy, and we need to export capitalism.
And there is a center-right global majority that wants some form of religiosity, hard work.
And, you know, it was it was this sort of strange neocon social conservative Marxist almost Marxist in the sense of like that the history is certain that it's moving in this direction.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's an end state paradise.
And man, I just reject all of this stuff.
It's just it's just crazy.
None of it worked, of course.
Yeah, I think so.
So where do you see, I guess let's just do this before we head out too, is as much as we talked about the fissures on the right, where do you see the current defining fissures on the American left and in the Democratic Party?
Because I think they have their own version of this soul searching to do as well.
Well, you know, it's in some ways more important because it's attached to power.
Unless the Republicans take the White House, then the right becomes more important again.
And it's attached to a lot of major institutions.
But in a lot of ways, it's a lot more quiet.
So, for instance, you know, I have observed...
So take the Biden fight.
Should Biden go in July?
And then the August fight, I believe it was August, should it be Tim Walz or should it be Josh Shapiro?
And it was extremely interesting.
Yeah, it was.
Especially the latter one.
Yeah.
So the elected members of the, quote, hard left, Sanders, AOC, were often Biden's greatest defenders.
Biden was not couped by the squad.
He was couped by Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi, who are card-carrying members of the Democratic establishment, if such a thing exists.
Meanwhile, though, I found that a lot of the left-wing writers, the hardest-left writers, were actually very, very anti-Biden.
The elected officials were pro him, the hard-left elected officials, and the writers were anti.
And then a very strange thing also happened in which like a lot of this sort of democratic professional class seemed more deferential to Biden, the sort of campaign workers, the people around Biden, in a very confusing manner.
And that was all, you could see a lot of it on X, you could see a lot of it, you know, it buried these magazines, but a huge dynamic.
Fast forward, Shapiro versus Walls.
So, you know, by all accounts, Josh Shapiro is an elite American and seems like an able enough governor and probably wouldn't have been a complete disaster for Harris.
But it does seem as if he would have cratered the Democratic constituency.
I mean, I think the conventional wisdom is that Walls is a bad pick and Shapiro would have done better.
And we can't run as a counterfactual.
But I think what would have been way more likely to happen if Shapiro was this election is that you would have seen major campus protests again this fall.
And again, this year's been crazy, but rewind, if we were having this conversation in March, so six months ago, the greatest liability of the Democrats were these protests.
So it is this strange situation in which the left has, again, to use a Marxist phrase, the commanding heights, but they're kind of afraid of their own people.
And it was the same way with the Biden administration, right?
So there was a Biden administration.
And he did have people around him.
They just weren't on camera.
Like, none of these people you'd ever heard of.
Like, Ted Kaufman, Anita Dunn, Steve Reschetti, Mike Donilon.
How many times were these people on camera?
Not at all.
The people who ran the cabinet were people who could have staffed a Clinton administration.
Jake Sullivan was the favorite to get that.
Bill Burns was another favorite to be Secretary of State, CIA director.
These guys are just like the Dem all-stars who would have served anyone.
And so that always...
Draws the question, how much loads do they really have for Biden anyways?
And then even beneath them, there is this sort of bureaucracy.
We talked about the administrative state.
The administrative state is a liability for Democratic presidents because it can now, you know, coup presidents or get rid of presidents if they don't You know, pass muster.
So it's an uneasy thing.
Versus if Trump does win, everybody knows Trump can fire you.
So it's a different dynamic.
It is.
I mean, I hope this idea that the people we elect to run the government should run the government stops being a partisan concept.
I actually think that there's deep nonpartisan appeal to it.
And if so, I think there's this conventional wisdom where you're seeing some realignment between the Republicans versus Democrats.
I think there could be something bigger going on with a new breed of left-wing, right-wing populism that doesn't manifest necessarily the form of economic populism, which I think the traditional version of this left-wing, right-wing economic populism argument.
I think there's a different one that relates more to just restoring self-governance, actually, in the United States.
And that one, I think, looks a lot closer to the character of the American Revolution than, I think, the left-wing, right-wing populism.
Sort of strange allegiances we're seeing with respect to economic populism.
I think we're seeing where we may have a new frontier on the populism of self-governance, which I think is actually, to me, certainly a lot closer to where my flame is.
But I think that will be the direction that I predict things go, where economic populism was a reaction to A reaction to, I think, certain kinds of failed policies and a place to relocate, as you put it, the anger.
We ought to be angry about something.
Tea Party people are angry about something.
Economic populists are angry about something, even though many of them apparently are the same people.
They're actually, on the face of it, arguing for somewhat contradictory policies.
I think closer to the bullseye is really the populism of self-governance, which I think has not yet been brought to the fore in the way that I think it will and should be.
Well, I agree with you.
It's not super currently fashionable.
I've noticed in other of your public comments that you've said that your favorite president was Thomas Jefferson.
That's correct, right?
That's not something you'll hear Republicans commonly say anymore.
I've seen more Republican arguments in favor of his arch rival, Hamilton.
And again, I'm the guy who always links it to foreign policy, but Hamilton is the patron saint of the neocons.
This is not somebody that you want to pick.
Our magazine was co-founded with Pat Buchanan and Scott McConnell.
These guys always get the attention.
But the third co-founder is a guy called Taki, the sort of great Greek-American writer, Playboy person.
And he always called Thomas Jefferson the greatest American.
And I agree.
I agree as well.
And it's interesting.
Jefferson or Hamilton, Coolidge or Teddy Roosevelt.
I think this is, I think, the dividing line that will We'll continue to run as an undercurrent on the American right.
And right now it's percolating beneath the surface.
You've got an election and everyone's supposed to do the, you know, partisan thing for the next 55 days.
But I think the, you know, less than that even.
But I think the deeper undercurrent here is not going away.
And in some ways, I think this is going to boil over in very interesting ways.
And I think in ways that can be very productive for strengthening the future of the conservative movement, you know, after this election, which Makes me more understanding of your claim at the start that you just want to get this done and over with so we can get on with it.
That's good to remember.
Cool.
All right, man.
Well, thanks for joining.
It's always a good conversation with you.
You make me think on levels that I often miss doing in the drudge of the day-to-day.
So thank you.
Thank you so much.
Yeah.
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