Ep. 82 Transcript: Avik Roy Makes the Case for a Centrist Realignment
Avik Roy, President of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, joins The Realignment to discuss the state of the Republican Party and why free market conservatives and moderate Democrats should join together to form a new political movement.
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Note: This is a rough transcript, lightly edited for clarity.
Marshall Kosloff: Avik Roy. Welcome to The Realignment.
Avik Roy: Hey, it's good to be with you. And I have to say, by the way, I love your intro music. It saves me the extra cup of caffeine, gets me bobbin. It's good stuff.
Saagar Enjeti: You know, that was actually a very controversial pick.
Avik Roy: Really?
Saagar Enjeti: It took us a while to get through it all.
Avik Roy: That surprises me.
Marshall Kosloff: So Avik, we need a couple of things from you today. This show has not been very positive of late. Coming into 2019, there's this realignment, there's all this energy and we're going to do these big things, industrial policy, healthcare reform, none of that's happening.
We're very pessimistic regardless of how you view the political feasibility or accuracy of those ideas. So you ran a conference after the election that was focused on an agenda for 2025, which implies by its very title that there is something that can be done in some form of period. So let's just open there.
Why are you optimistic or why do you have a vision of a political system that could be effective to implement changes?
Avik Roy: I appreciate the question, Marshall. Here's the way I think about all of this, and this is why we started the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity in 2016.
I came out of my involvement in public policy over that previous, let's call it four to five years, feeling even more pessimistic probably than you all I have felt recently, because in particular, if you believe in the things that actually have made America great: economic and personal freedom.
And the fact that in America, anyone can come here and be successful and make a real living and a life for themselves and their family, anyone who's from America, who's born on the wrong side of the tracks can rise up and do something for themselves and for their families.
That's what makes America great. And if we lose that and we lose the belief in that system, that's a real problem. What I saw is a Republican party that was descending into white tribalism politics and not really making an effort to, and certainly not appealing to, rising generations, Millennials and Gen Z, and the diversification of America.
In fact, you have this kind of racial determinism on the right where people like Michael Anton and Laura Ingraham say, as America becomes more Brown and black, we're going to inevitably move to the left because Brown and black people are inherently leftist.
Which strikes me as problematic on a lot of different dimensions. But most importantly, if we want to have a free society, that we live with the rest of our lives in, that's got to change.
And how do you change that? You have to change that by having a movement and a policy agenda that is about deploying freedom to make everyone's lives better and not simply be about tribal politics.
So how do you do that? How do you get that agenda through? You've got appeal to both Republicans and Democrats, because you're never going to have 60 people in the Senate who are gonna agree with you on everything. So how do you bring together enough people of both parties instead of waiting for your favorite party to win all the elections, how do you bring enough people together of both parties to achieve some of these goals. I'm walking through the logical stream here. So if you want to appeal to both parties, how do you do that?
Our theory of how to do that is you have to come up with ideas that are progressive in terms of their policy outcomes, but use economic and personal freedom as the means to achieve it. And so, that's basically the whole mission of FreOpp. That everything we work on, we require that it has to be a free enterprise oriented idea that improves the lives of Americans whose incomes or wealth are below the U.S. median.
That way you can appeal to center left Democrats who genuinely believe in social mobility. And you can appeal of course, to Republicans who want a pro-free market agenda. And then the final piece of this puzzle is that having worked on three presidential campaigns, I learned firsthand, I had a front row seat, to how important think tanks are.
It might seem quixotic to start a think tank. But what I realized is that if somebody running for president says, I need a plan to do X. I need to plan to solve healthcare. I need a plan to solve college debt or whatever it is. They're going to those think tanks, they're going to the AEI, if you're a Republican, or the Heritages or the Hoovers and saying, "okay, which scholars have a plan on this?"
And then they're synthesizing that to create the plan that they want to run on. And that then creates the mandate for doing something. If you're going to run on a governing agenda, which of course not every presidential candidate does, but if that's what your goal is, if your goal is to actually achieve policy change, you're relying on think tanks to vet and develop those ideas.
And so if we build a think tank that develops that agenda, then that can then become the agenda of those candidates. That's what Heritage did in the eighties. So if you think about Heritage, it likes to talk about how in 1980-1981, they dropped this phone book on Ronald Reagan's desk called The Mandate for Leadership that involved their entire domestic policy agenda, it was a thousand page document.
Heritage people like to talk about that and say this is what think tanks can do. This is the high watermark of Heritage's influence and impact. There are two things that are interesting about that. The first is that Heritage is 40 years old. That was 40 years ago.
So Heritage's high watermark was 40 years ago. And then secondly, Heritage was founded in 1973. So they were a seven year old organization when they had that high watermark of incredible national impact.
So when we founded FreOpp in 2016, we started with a strategy of, can we build out a domestic policy agenda that focuses on equal opportunity and economic freedom that can be taken up by the candidates running for office in 2024.
And then be implemented by that person, if he or she becomes president in 2025?. The Agenda 2025 conference was basically the launch point for that agenda, which we have been building out and our aim is to then start briefing the candidates about over the next couple of years, and see where we go.
Saagar Enjeti: Sure. So you said something important. You essentially said that the, and you've written this in the past, it's not a secret, about you think that Trump and largely the Republican party, Laura Ingraham et cetera, is white tribalism.
How do you square that with the fact that Trump won more minority votes than Mitt Romney and I think any candidate since George W. Bush in 2004? And, 2004 was a weird year. There was a rally around the flag and all of that. So really I think if you're going to discount that one, since 1960, how do you square that with what Trumpism ultimately came to do?
Because look, everything you're saying, I think is fantastic. But my 2015 Paul Ryan senses are going off a little bit. Which is that, oh, using free markets to produce a progressive solution. And all of that just sounds almost as if we are in a conference before Donald Trump came of the age and you talked there about briefing the candidates. In my view, there's only one candidate.
It's Donald Trump. If he wants to run, he's going to be the nominee. How are you thinking about all of these things?
Avik Roy: Boy, a lot of points there to tackle. Let me start with the data point or the statistics point first. The elections, you really have to throw off the ballot are 2008 and 2012 because a black man was running for president in 2008 and 2012. The minority vote disproportionately went to the Democrats as a result. What Trump has done if you actually take that into account, it's important. I'll put it this way. I wrote it, as you said, I wrote about this for Forbes.
It's important and interesting the improvement in Trump's own minority performance from 2016 to 2020, but all he has basically done is reverted to, in terms of the macro picture, the pre Obama levels of performance that minorities have had. These people were saying this is the most amazing performance in sixty years.
It's not. Now having said that, if we just going to go draw down from the macro to the micro and say, okay, where has there been interesting developments such as in the border counties of Texas, Miami Dade County, et cetera, where, Republicans broadly, not just Trump, but Republicans broadly did very well.
What's going on there? I think that's a much more interesting question. And I would say there, it's not so much about Trump. It's partly about Trump in the sense that, Trump does have some appeal, as we all know, to working class voters, but it's also that the Republican party did a really great job of investing in outreach into those communities.
So for example, a lot of the house seats, in fact, in every single seat that Republicans won from Democrats in this past November election, the Republicans ran either a veteran, a woman, or a nonwhite in a minority voter. So there, and that's particularly true in these, border counties and Miami-Dade where it was a lot of Hispanic, candidates, Republican candidates who won.
So that's something that the RNC invested in a lot is just having people who are, can authentically speak to the experience of being an immigrant or being a woman, or what have you. And that really mattered. Trump did a lot of that too. So the Trump campaign had invested from 2016 onward in just investing and showing up.
But so much of politics is showing up and just saying, hey, I'd love your vote, tell me what you want to see out of a candidate and finding those authentic local role models or spokespeople who can appeal to that constituency, and treating people like individuals, that really matters as we, as people who do this stuff for a living know. The way, Cuban Latinos and Mexican Latinos, and other types of Latinos think, and the way Texan and Latinos think versus other California. It's a diverse group of people, Asians too, like way Indians and, Vietnamese and Filipinos and Chinese, thinking culturally, these are all highly fragmented individual things, but this is my whole point.
Is that what's been going on with the Republican party, that's encouraging about November, because I know you've been asking a number of your guests. What's your take on the election? What's encouraging is that it's a total rebuttal to this racial determinism of if more Brown people enter America, it's a lost cause for Republicans to appeal to them because Brown and black people only want free stuff. And we are not the party of free stuff.
Therefore we have to stop black and Brown people from voting or being part of the American fabric. And what we're seeing from both the Trump campaign and the Republican party more broadly is a rejection of that concept. And that's really encouraging, but that's not, Trump specific. That's about Republicans in general. And it doesn't depend if it, I don't, I'm not as sure as you are, that if Trump runs in 2024, he's the nominee because I think a number of the other, suitors for that role are going to adopt, adapt to how Trump has identified this electorate and try to appeal to them as well.
Marshall Kosloff: So let's talk about that though, which is, I'm not going to expect anyone to name names here because that'd be travesty unfair to all of our careers in various respects, but I just don't see. There's obviously a hypothetical version of a post-Trump Republican who could say, hey, look, let's go into Hispanic communities.
The way we have let's appeal to Trump-Obama voters in ways that are effective. But I just don't genuinely look at the current playing field and think there's the political talent to accomplish that. Fact, Bill Clinton has always knocks against him, like very deservedly so, but there isn't a 1992 bill Clinton of the right in the playing field from my perspective, who would come from a part of the party where that needs to be there. So I just, I'm just curious why you think with the current playing field that's possible.
Avik Roy: When it comes to political charisma, I'm probably slightly more optimistic than you. I'm less optimistic that the policy agenda is totally worked out.
But I think that there are people who can appeal more broadly. I think these, Gen X and below candidates just have, we've grown up, those of us who are not baby boomers, we've grown up in a more diverse America. We were born after the passage of the civil rights act of 1964, so we just have a different way of, Jonah Goldberg famously said that Mitt Romney spoke conservatism as a second language. I think for those of us who are relatively younger, we speak, we don't speak inclusion as a second language. It's natural to us. We grew up in a more diverse country. So I think that helps a lot.
When you have the candidates like a Marco Rubio who can, who's more fluent in Spanish, that helps. Not everyone, of course has that ability, but being able to communicate directly in Spanish, I think is valuable when it comes to appealing to certain Latinos. I think the big mistake of the pre-Trump era was the idea that you have to cave in, on immigration to appeal to Latinos.
That's not true. You don't have to. 66% of the Latinos in America were born in the United States. They're not, they're looking for economic growth and security just like anybody else. That doesn't mean you don't have to have a dedicated, specific approach to Latino voters.
I think you do, but you don't have to just throw in the towel on border security in order to get there. I do think you have to have a less xenophobic approach to immigration. Prior to Trump, you had people like Ted Cruz and the standard right-wing line on immigration was I'm against illegal immigration, but I'm for legal immigration.
And there's obviously a group of people for whom that's not right-wing enough, right? For who really want a reduction in all immigration, not just illegal immigration. And that to me is a significant break point in this debate is it's one thing to say, we should have borders.
It's one thing to say that, that we should have a system in which the people who come to America as immigrants are, come through a system and that we use that system to get the best and brightest we can to come here. I think that's something that there's broad consensus about, and we don't need to kowtow to the left on that.
But this debate about whether immigration is just good or bad period, that is a debate that is worth fighting. And, I think people like me are on one side of that debate.
Marshall Kosloff: The followup was, Saagar I just wanna do a quick, precise follow-up here. When I was referring to political talent, I didn't just literally mean the charisma, because you should assume that any politician on the national stage has the degree of charisma necessary,but Donald Trump,
Avik Roy: I wouldn't assume that. But go ahead.
Marshall Kosloff: Fair, good point. I'm talking, let's talk the top 25, the best and the brightest of the national political class.
I'm talking about the literal skillset of navigating coalitions, because we're going to get into the coalition's talk later here, but if you're a Republican candidate going into 2024 to Saagar's point, you're basically sitting, waiting for Trump to tweet, waiting for Trump to go on Fox and friends.
You're probably not going to be too forward looking. Let's be Frank. What's a good way of seeing this play out was the way the Republican politicians were very hesitant to engage on the electoral results front because frankly they were scared. And any reporter would tell you, but on the, on the phones, they'd be saying on background, oh, like we know Trump lost, but we're just not going to say anything.
Being hobbled in that situation is going to replicate itself in 10 or 20 different ways over the next four years. And I just don't see the skill sets there necessary to navigate around that. So how do you appeal to Republican voters who hate the mainstream media who hate Joe Biden, but also at the same time, really like Trump, I just don't see how that's doable.
Avik Roy: Four years is an eternity in politics. And I think we just don't know what people are going to be exercised about in 2022. We just don't know. One thing we do know if we look at patterns is that generally speaking, a party tends to nominate the person who is from a personality standpoint, the opposite of the person from the other party who's president.
So you could say Trump in a personality, from personality standpoint, was the opposite of Obama. Obama, maybe in certain ways was the opposite of George W right? So who's the opposite of Biden. Exactly. The kind of the guy who's, when he's not, when he doesn't, when he's not in front of a teleprompter, can't really complete a sentence.
But has otherwise, has a somewhat non-threatening personality. Now, of course, we don't know, we don't, we just don't know yet if he's going to run for reelection in 2024, or if maybe the vice-president, his vice president would do that. So that might throw a wrench into the equation, but is Trump the anti-Biden, I don't know.
It seems to. I'm not. I just don't, I'm not sure because true Biden is an old guy he's too old to even be a boomer. He's a member of the silent generation technically. Trump was born in 46. So he's right on the old yeah, right on the edge there. But so I mean if you're, in fact that was, if you look at the exit polls, that was the group that Trump.
We talked about the minority vote, he improved on the minority vote and he did much worse with the older demographic, which has been recently, obviously a Republican strength because the older demographic was pretty comfortable with Biden. So the question to me is, if that continues to be true, what's the route to success here. And it seems to me that could, will Trump have his appeal to a certain segment of the electorate? Of course he will, but it's very easy for it. And I can tell you for a fact that there are people aspirant. There are other aspirants in 2024 who are thinking very strategically you could say, or maybe sincerely, depending on your view of their motives about what you can do to learn from Trump.
So that means obviously it means border security. It means being tough on China. And are there were people who were already hawkish on China, so it's not like people have to change their, their skin or whatever to do that. You take those two things, and layer on some economic policies.
It's, there's obviously an element of it, which is the Trump personality. But if you actually look at the data from 16, a lot of it was just his total outrage at the gang of eight bill and also the frustration about the wars.
Marshall Kosloff: Can you clarify gang of eight real quick.
Avik Roy: Sorry. Yeah. So the gang of eight bill was the immigration, bipartisan immigration bill, out of the Senate in 2013 that involved, basically the architecture of the compromise was there would be a path to citizenship for people who are illegally in the country today in exchange for a whole range of border security measures, including mandatory E-Verify.
So every company would have to use the electronic process to verify the citizenship of the people that they employed. And the criticism of that policy was that people who had long memories from 1986, a similar reform out of 1986 said, we got the amnesty, but we never got the restrictionism to go with it.
Or the, and so we just then had another round of illegal immigration after that. And so there was just a lot of deep pessimism. Whether that pessimism was warranted or not, that's a, we could spend an hour and a half on that. But that was the take was that basically the people who on the Republican side who signed up for that compromise, including Marco Rubio, notably, were, had sold out America.
And that's basically why Rubio got crushed by Trump in 16, was that he had been identified, he was the con, almost the poster boy of that. And the Democrats wanted him to be the poster boy, because Rubio was the guy that the Dems are most afraid of in terms of the presidential election.
And so by associating Rubio in particular with the gang of eight bill. Which Republican primary voters already were going to do, that really sealed Rubio's fate. And so it remains to be seen if Rubio himself can recover from that if he wants to run again in 2024. But that's more of a Rubio specific problem.
Saagar Enjeti: Yeah, this is the point that you just made, which is really key. And this is the whole debate because I probably align more with you before election day, which is you were like there's 2024 aspirants who can learn from Trump on forever wars, on immigration, on economic policy and all that.
Let's be honest. Trump ran on none of that in 2020, it was pure. Just I'm Trump, cultural grievance, largely, however you want to term that, that's fine. And he won a shitload more votes and, I was just traveling through and I drove past this sign. It was like in rural part of the country and it just said Trump, 2020, fuck your feelings.
And I was like, that's it. That's actually it, and it's such a potent force. And again, I want to be honest here with our viewers and all this, which is that, that is it's distillation. Before the election I probably would have said Trumpism, like 60 cultural, 40 economics. Yeah. I now believe it's about 85, 15.
I don't think Trump without the economics, without the culture or sorry, without the criticisms of the neoliberal world order NATO and all of that, but at its core, it's about just how much he pisses off the left. And there's just so much anger within, I think the broad American populace that they're willing to go along with that.
And I just don't see that within the GOP, like I don't see a person who's willing to embody that or willing to be just as hated as he is. And I think that's just a very important political lesson to try and learn from here. What do you think?
Avik Roy: So I agree and disagree. I agree that, there are plenty of people who support Trump who've been frustrated by in particular political correctness and in particular, by that sense that we just, again, kowtow to whatever new trend the elites want to rain down on us. Whether it's like now everyone is supposed to say Latinx, like when did that happen?
Like just everyone just decided that was a rule. Now, if you don't say Latinx, you're a bad person. That's the kind of stuff that goes on in elite circles that people are understandably annoyed with. And Trump really tapped into that. And that's a legitimate thing to be annoyed about.
And again, he's, Trump is not the only person who's ever been annoyed about that. I think other people can learn from that. Where I think there's a difference is, and this is something where I depart from maybe the conservative conventional wisdom a little bit, is that I do think that a part of that energy for, in 2016 was eight years of a black president, just to be completely blunt about it. I think there was an element, a darker element to it. It wasn't the whole driver, but it was enough of an element that won't be there when you've got Joe Biden, uncle Joe as president for four years. So I don't think that the energy is going to be exactly the same in 24, as it was in 16.
Marshall Kosloff: So the problem here and I, and the reference to the darker energy, that's obviously birtherism. I think that birtherism is something that going back to 2010, 2011, 2012 seems funny, but like genuinely, that was a real thing. It really did matter. I think Q Anon stuff is not as obviously odious on a racial level, but there's also a dark energy there that very clearly could be pushed in the wrong directions.
Here's what I want to focus on here then. You've pointed out and I actually agree with your point about the nature of white identity politics as a serious, as a real thing behind the Trump thing. Saagar, when we're talking about the 85 culture, 15 econ, I got a lot of that 85 culture is operationally white identity politics.
It's not polite. It's not really great. It hurts. No, it causes a lot of hurt feelings, especially amongst boomer Republican voters, but it's really a thing. How do we navigate that dynamic? Because what a typical more, let's say a person on the conservative side who is trying to explain away, white identity politics, they basically say, this is all the left's fault. If the left didn't divide us. If the left didn't do X, Y, and Z thing, if the left didn't say Latinx, you wouldn't have that identity thing happen. So what's something that people on the right can do because obviously the annoying thing about that conservative counter take that, what I just said is that no one on the right has any ability to determine what the Yale faculty lounge is saying or the, those sorts of things. What do you think about that?
Avik Roy: I think it's time for people in the Republican party and the conservative movement to stop making excuses. I just get so tired of the excuses.
It's always somebody else's fault. Oh, it's the media that doesn't give us a fair shake. Oh, it's the lefties who don't give us a fair shake. Newsflash. The left is never going to give you a fair shake. The media is never going to give you a fair shake. So if you're waiting for the moment. In which, we reach a Valhalla and the media gives you a fair shake.
Just stop paying attention to politics. Now just give up. Okay. That's just never going to happen. What you have to do is own it, and you have to decide what you're going to do about it, right? And the fact is the Republican party and the conservative movement made a tragic historical mistake in 1964 when they quote unquote took over the Republican party and campaigned for president on opposition to the civil rights act of 1964.
Now there's a heroic narrative that you read in National Review and all these places where it people say, it was so wonderful. The 1964 election, we ran this Goldwater guy and he was just so amazing. And so principled. And even though we lost that election, it was a noble defeat, like the civil war was a noble defeat.
And in some people's eyes, it was this noble defeat and that led to the Reagan revolution and everything has been wonderful ever since. And that reading of history, that heroic reading of history, that flatters all the people who worked in the Reagan administration and helped build that particular conservative movement, is completely wrong.
Basically what happened is the energy in the Republican party in 1964 was for people who were mad and saw it as a betrayal that LBJ signed into law the 1964 civil rights act. That's why the six States that Goldwater won were his home state of Arizona and five States in the deep South, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina.
And I can't remember what the sixth one was. And that led to this realignment in which the old hundred year history of the Democrats being a Confederate, Neo Confederate party in the South changed. We're still living with the echo effects of that, and that's had a lot of impact on just the way the conservative movement has behaved, the way the Republican party's behaved in ways that we have to own.
And say, you know what that happened? That is true. That is not something that the left is making up. It actually did happen. And we have to stand up and say, you know what? That was wrong. It was wrong for Republicans to campaign on opposition to the 1964 civil rights act. We need to say that Goldwater was wrong.
And if we're not willing to say that, then we don't deserve the votes of the people who were victimized by the pre 1964 regime. When you hear Republicans talk about states' rights, for example, the fact is that when it comes to the right of black people to vote in America, for the right of black people to buy a house or rent an apartment, they needed the 1964 civil rights, it was the federal government that was the guarantor of liberty, not the states in that particular case. And if we're not willing to say that, then shame on us. And let me just go back to Goldwater for one second here, because people want to just say, Goldwater was a good guy, card carrying member of the NAACP. He dis desegregated the Senate cafeteria.
All those things are true, but chapter two, I think it is, of the conscience of a conservative, his great manifesto about his conservative principles is about the terrible judicial activism of Brown V board of education. How, what a terrible thing it was that these leftist judges said separate but equal is wrong and said, no, these are public schools.
They have to be desegregated. He proposed a constitutional amendment to reenable the Southern States to segregate their schools. He said this in his own words. In the conscience of a conservative. So that is not the conscience of my conservatism. I just want to say, and until we are elite willing to leave Goldwater brand conservatism in the dust, we don't deserve to build a better conservative movement.
Marshall Kosloff: Here's the question here? How much? And I obviously disagree. I'm sorry. Clarify. I obviously agree with a lot of what you just said there, but here's my question. How much does that matter?So if we're looking at those working class, black, Hispanic, POCs of all sorts that a Republican party under your vision could reconstitute support under, how much are they really thinking on a deep level, man, the 1964 civil rights act was this great thing.
And the Republicans didn't support us. So we're going to go against it. So a better way of putting this is. Look, it's obviously a mistake to run into the black community and start talking about states' rights and federalism, limited government, because this goes to your point. I think of the Reagan quote, where he said,the worst, most feared statement in English language is if "I'm the government, I'm here to help."
Obviously if you're a black person in the deep South, it's the literal exact opposite. It's actually, if I'm from your local community association, that's probably a disaster. If you're a black person in the 1960s, like Mississippi, no offense to our Mississippian listeners. But my point here is. How much is that then this about just ignoring that language.
So let's just stop talking about states' rights in the wrong communities. Let's not have Candace Owens talk about runaway slaves in that weird Baltimore thing, pretending as if that's the thing that is going to make a difference. So how much is it just not using that language and how much does it actually require starting major fights, because I'm thinking about the number of things you just said in your statement there, which offend a lot of people in the right and start fights. So there's a lot that I just threw at you there, but how much of this then to sum up is ignoring or stepping past language that's outdated and doesn't work.
And how much is it about having a reckoning with institutions and individuals within the current establishment who will be very offended by what you just said.
Avik Roy: Some fights are worth starting. And let me give you an example that, is literally, I think the year of your birth or close to it, which is, 1992 or maybe it was 1991.
Bill Clinton's running for president. And, he's on a panel on a day with a Sister Souljah who had, penned a hip hop track if they called it that, hip hop then, I don't remember if they did, an anti-police screed if I recall correctly.
And he went and basically said we have to call out this racist, anti-police nonsense. That's coming out of our side of the movement and say, that's not what we're for. We actually want safe streets. We want all people to be treated equally in America and Sister Souljah is wrong to castigate white people and cops in this way.
And Jesse Jackson was hosting this particular event that Sister Souljah and Bill Clinton spoke at and was furious with Clinton for doing this. There were all these denunciations of Bill Clinton among enlightened lefties at that time. But bill Clinton was doing that very deliberately and strategically and saying, look, this is the marker I'm laying down that I am not beholden to this kind of leftism.
Most people hadn't heard of Sister Souljah before all that happened now, of course it's a famous episode in politics, but something like that can translate it absolutely can translate. I'll give you an example. So Rick Perry obviously did not end up being a major player in either time he ran for president, he gave a major speech on intergenerational black poverty in 2015 that, if he had become a bigger part of that campaign, I think would've been that kind of event where he made those points and said, look, if we're going to talk about the constitution, and how much the constitution matters and how we believe in a literal reading of the constitution and the original intent. Guess what everybody, the 14th amendment is technically part of the constitution too. The constitution didn't stop being written after the 10th amendment. The 14th amendment matters too. And the 14th amendment legally is superior to the 10th amendment because it comes afterwards. And he said this, he said, people like me talk about the 10th amendment a lot.
We don't talk enough about the 14th amendment and we have to. So these are the kinds of things that Republicans could do very easily, that don't involve the left giving you a fair shake, or the media being nicer to you. These are things conservatives can do today. Conservatives today can invest in border counties in Texas, in Miami Dade.
And deploy more personnel to those regions, to recruit candidates, to learn about the challenges that people of all races are facing in America and how our ideas, our principles, our policies will make them better off. Those are things that no one is stopping the conservative movement from doing today.
And yet, what is the conservative movement today?
Saagar Enjeti: Yeah, I actually, I want to focus on that and this is important. And the funny thing is, because we have a lot of leftist listeners, they remember the Sister Souljah moment with shame. They say, what happened is that Bill Clinton kicked the left in the face, realigned the democratic party around the right, and just tried to bring in a bunch of white people.
Suburban white people, which has then accelerated that trend within the Democratic party created the New Dems destroyed the progressive left. Jesse Jackson. He neutered the one candidate who actually almost won the Democratic primary with the rainbow coalition and put us on the road to basically the neoliberal bipartisan consensus that we have today.
And so I just think it's interesting that it's remembered there with shame and I'm thinking. If that were to happen on the right. Let's say there was a speech and look, what Rick Perry said I commend. I think it's amazing, but he didn't really call anybody out. If somebody were to be like, let's be honest here,
Avik Roy: He did call out Goldwater. He didn't call out contemporary politicians
Saagar Enjeti: So if we were to think about it and call it out in that way, here's how it would be written in the New York Times and the liberal media will do this whole fawning thing. Republicans reckon with race or whatever. And then the base would revolt because they think here's another politically correct politician.
And then at the same time, would a lot of black voters take it seriously, because this is where you again just said something, we need to invest in all of this. It's hard to invest whenever you have a core deficit hawkery ideology at your being, in terms of spending more money. Because when I look at the border counties, and I read the Wall Street Journal and all that about why exactly did Trump win all these votes?
It was stimulus checks. It was like, people were like, I got this check with Trump's name on it. And that was awesome. And it was the same thing. If you go and you look at, it's so many of these votes for Hispanic votes that Trump won in like Providence, Rhode Island or Boston. Nobody's talking about this because it still went overwhelmingly democratic, but he drove up his numbers, Philadelphia, in so many other areas, which were tremendously diverse. I think a lot of that had to do with economics, but to do that, the right has to reckon with spending more money and abandoning some of its more deficit ideology from the past. I just threw a lot at you, but I'm curious what your thoughts are.
Avik Roy: Yeah. I find myself having to wanting to respond to five different things that each of you asked me in your questions having to pick one, but that's all right. That's great. It's a great conversation. So,a couple of things to say there first, I want to say that in the case of the Rick Perry speech, and I can send it to you to put in the show notes, please do he takes, this is not a fawning, kiss up to the media speech. This speech takes on the Democrats who run all the cities where minorities live and say, hey,like you want to talk about the black poverty. We've had the war on poverty for 60 years and nothing's happened. Poverty has gotten worse in many places and who runs all these cities, Democrats.
So let's start holding Democrats accountable for the places where minorities live and mismanaged and where the opportunity has continued to decline. So th this was a speech that was quite combative in that sense as well, not merely about, it was owning up to the mistakes of the Republican party.
But it was also an assault on a lot of the pieties of the left on race and the opportunities. So that's, in that sense, it wasn't just some like I'm going to be politically correct kind of speech. And I think that helps address your point, which is the right wing will revolt when they hear this kind of nauseated PC rhetoric.
This was not a nauseated PC speech. It was a robust, manly defense of the traditional Republican party, the party that freed the slaves, is the way I would describe it. Now to your point about how well Republicans have to discard their deficit hawkery, I find that really interesting because I'm not aware of any fiscal hawkery coming out of the Republican party over the last 60 years. I've seen a lot of tax cuts. I've seen a lot of spending increases. I have seen no track record of Republican governance leading to reduced deficits. In fact, the only reduced deficits we've seen by and large are under Democratic presidents. It was Bill Clinton who presided over a budget surpluses in the nineties.
It was under Obama actually that deficit started to decline after the big spike up after the financial crisis. So I'm not seeing, I understand that there's a lot of rhetoric around fiscal hawkery, but I don't actually see any governing around fiscal hawkery. I see a lot of the opposite. And by the way, we, so I spent a lot of time in healthcare policy, as much as many of your listeners will know. And the biggest driver of our debt and deficit is healthcare. That's if you want to do like the, if you just want to look at all the charts, in terms of what's driving the increase in debt, the increase in deficit, the increase in government spending year over year, relative to our economy, it's all healthcare.
It's not defense spending. It's not transportation infrastructure. It's all healthcare. Who benefits from the healthcare spending in America. Old people who are disproportionately white. So this idea that the reason why Trump was against Medicare reform is because, it's Republican voters who actually benefit the most from the U S welfare state because Medicare is the biggest component of the budget.
Marshall Kosloff: So here's a quick one. I'll do one last thing within the Sister Souljah moment thing. Cause that's really, there isn't many opportunities for that experience moving to the next four years. The key thing in Saagar's retelling of the history though, especially from the leftist perspective is Sister, Souljah was actually in a weakened position.
Her aunt, like most, actually most people I'd say upwards of 99.9% of people, especially the year 1992, didn't want to hurt cops, were pro cop. She had a ridiculous infinitesimally small position that was crazy. And it was very important for Clinton to dunk on it in order to signal of reality, what he's actually going on. The problem that any modern Republican politician today has though.
And also the key thing too, unlike Goldwater, she was alive when the repudiation was happening. So it's
Avik Roy: She was in the room.
Marshall Kosloff: But that's the key thing though, which is that she was actually so weakened and her position was so unpopular that even though she was in the room, even though she arguably had a constituency, that constituency was not an actual threat to, that was not an actual threat to Bill Clinton and his agenda.
It's one, and I agree with governor Perry's statements about Goldwater, but Goldwater had been dead for decades at that point. He did not have any actual constituency outside of libertarian think tanks in DC. So there wasn't an actual consequence that happened there. The problem with the Sister Souljah moments that the right can have and needs to have is that there actually are major constituencies.
So let's think about a frankly braver speech that a Republican candidate could have given in 2015, which would have been when president Trump made the rapist comment about Mexicans coming across the border. We can easily see a world where a Republican politician let's say, Jeb, let's say Marco said the following statement.
We believe in border security, we believe in all of the post gang of eight points you made, but we are drawing a line here. We have no place for racism, race, or those things. That speech giver would have been absolutely steamrolled by Donald Trump because frankly, Donald Trump is a more talented politician than any of the Republicans, right in the field.
He has an actual constituency, but actually would have been ticked off the people who we're talking about who hate political correctness and Saagar made this point, would have sided with Trump over the speech of the New York Times. So I just don't see a system. So here's a better way to put this for me. A Sister Souljah moment looks brave, but it actually isn't truly brave in the sense that obviously Bill Clinton, as a Southern Democrat was going to win a fight against a radical rapper who said, kill cops. In this context though, I don't know a fight that a more, let's say inclusionary forward looking Republican could win against the more odious parts, but maybe it was an example I'm missing.
Avik Roy: I'd say I have a different take. So I'd say partially agree and partially disagree. So on the Clinton piece yes, Sister Souljah, herself and her radical positions were out of step with your typical Democratic party voter. But Bill Clinton did create a political cost for himself by taking her on, just as Saagar said, the progressive left was mad about this. They saw this as a cynical race baiting thing. And that's the base of the Democratic party. A lot of those people. So it's not like there weren't people alive who weren't, who didn't care. There were plenty of people on the left, in the Democratic base who saw what Bill Clinton was doing as treasonous, which is why it was unusual.
That's what made it so interesting is that no one else, if it was so obvious that Democrats should do this, that there was a clear strategy, a winning strategy. Why was it that only Bill Clinton did it. But I think that should show you from it a market political market standpoint that, what Bill Clinton did was unconventional and contrarian.
That's why it was covered so extensively because no one else did it. Jesse Jackson, wasn't saying Sister Souljah was a bad person, right? Your typical Democrat, wasn't doing that because everyone was afraid of the base for precisely the reasons you're raising in terms of why Republicans would similarly be afraid of taking on their base. And, so this is in a sense where I agree with you that it's tough, right? You can't, it's not easy to navigate these, this kind of Scylla and Charybdis kind of situation where on the one hand you've got this, very angry component of the base that really wants you to just own the libs and fight on this stuff and say things that are really politically incorrect and triggering.
And then there's obviously the broader constituents that says, hey, let's actually win elections. So as Saagar said before, the progressives hate this because it created this neoliberal consensus and the Democrats did all this stuff that we don't like. That was the whole point, right?
Bill Clinton created this durable Democratic coalition that led to books called the emerging Democratic majority that were all about this whole idea. And by the way, the emerging Democratic majority, we should note takes its title from a previous book published in 1960 or 1959 by Kevin Phillips called the emerging Republican majority, which was all about how Nixon should take advantage of the fact that white ethnics don't like desegregation to build a new Republican coalition. Sll this to say that, yes, it's hard. It's hard to navigate these things, but it can be done. And I'll give you an example. Someone who has done it, Nikki Haley is not, I'm not trying to describe her as the ideal politician.
There are things about her that there that one could quibble about or complain about. But on these issues, she's carved a really interesting path, right? So when it comes to her service in the Trump administration, she served in the administration. She left the administration. She seems to have been liked by the president.
And yet, never was like a toady to Trump either the way she would put is look, I don't always agree with the president, but when I don't agree with him, I tell him to his face, what I disagree about and I keep it between us. And that's an honorable way. And I would say in an old fashioned language, a manly way to disagree with somebody.
Not to do it in a way of, oh, I'm going to leak to the New York Times that I think Trump is, does tweets the wrong thing. She was very open. She's like, yeah, I disagree with them sometimes, but I'm gonna keep that between us and, I'm going to tell him in person, not to you, and then I'm going to go about my business.
And there's other examples of that with Nikki Haley. So there was the whole thing about the Confederate flag at the Capitol in Columbia in South Carolina, where that had been a, of course, a long standing debate in South Carolina. And there was a very vocal constituency that wants that Confederate flag to fly there and sees the Confederate cause as noble.
And then the shooting happened in Charleston and that moment led to her saying, you know what? We've got to do this now. And that took a lot of guts, it wasn't merely, oh, let's do the thing that the New York Times wants us to do, because if you're the governor South Carolina, And you're advocating for that position.
You are just, like you said, Marshall taking on a very vocal and passionate constituency that's not going to like that you're doing this. And yet Nikki Haley did it anyway. And again, you can come up with all sorts of ways of casting aspersions on her motive you want to, or whatever. But I look at that as an example of, hey, there's a way to, it's hard to navigate these things.
It's going to take a talented politician to do it, but it absolutely can be done. And we see examples of it throughout history.
Saagar Enjeti: Yeah, the real question is she going to pay a price if she tries to run for president, right? Yeah.
Avik Roy: She gonna pay a price or having taken down the Confederate flag in South Carolina, maybe among some voters.
But, I think that there are a lot of voters who are going to rally to, someone like her who's got that hawkishness on foreign policy. She resigned from the board of Boeing because Boeing was lobbying for bailouts. She did that very publicly and very deliberately because she didn't want to be associated with corporate bailouts.
And now again, we can dig into her and say let's look at her whole resume and whether she's done things that we disagree with or not, but my point is. She is, she's carving out a path that tries to do exactly what both of you are describing, which is how to be tough where appropriate and not be some pusillanimous person who's weak.
Show that strength of character and that strength of a political stance while also doing the right thing where it's appropriate, because there's a certain cowardice and weakness in saying, you know what? The base wants me to yell at Hispanics and Brown people so I'm going to do it. That's just weakness too.
Saagar Enjeti: See, I'm not sure that that's actually where it is. And I guess this is the real question, which is, okay now agenda 2025. What is your view of the new emerging coalition? You just mentioned Nikki Haley resigning from the board of Boeing over bailouts. Well, 75% of the American people support bailout, like that's actually a minority, is minoritarion a word? I don't know. Anyway, it's a minority position. It's not a majority position in order to be against, more bailouts, especially in the middle of coronavirus.
Avik Roy: Where people want bailouts for themselves, not for others.
Saagar Enjeti: Yeah, but you know that the way to do that as just doing largely for everybody and actually that had huge amount of support during the last couple of months before the election, like I just said, part of the whole reason Trump actually won a lot more votes is I think because of the stimulus checks. Ironically, Nancy Pelosi in the most cynical move of all time by blocking a bailout probably did ensure that Trump got, did not get reelected, which I think is crazy.
But let's talk then about that new coalition. What does it look like in an Avik Roy kind of view of this courageous R politician, still adhering to free market principles and more trying to make it more about policy. What does that actually look like? Both in terms of policy and the voters themselves, how do you get to 48 point, whatever, which is what you need to win an electoral college?
At least, in the current makeup over where we are right now to actually win a presidential election.
Avik Roy: Let's shoot, gonna have a better ambition than 48%.
Saagar Enjeti: I want 50 plus one.
Avik Roy: Well look, it wasn't that long ago when Ronald Reagan won 49 States, it can, it is possible.
Maybe, that was a completely different media environment. It's not possible anymore because the polarization that could be, but let's shoot for a unifying agenda that appeals to as many people as possible, but also being coherent. So what would that look like? And let's start with the old American conservative movmente with the conventional way it was described as you both know, and talk about a lot, is that three legged stool, right?
The, we're going to outsource economic policy to the libertarians. Yeah, we're going to outsource cultural attitudinal stuff to the social conservatives. And we're going to outsource foreign policy to the quote, unquote neo-cons or hawks or whatever you want to call them the anticommunist brigade.
And that was a durable coalition for a time. But obviously after the cold war was over, that's one leg of the stool that's kinda knocked out. We tried shoehorning Islam, radical Islam into the Soviet,box that didn't really work out so well. Now maybe China that gets to be shoehorned into that box a little bit.
And that might work better because China is a threat in a lot of different ways, but still it's been a struggle, right? The foreign policy piece of this, has been a real struggled to figure out where people are. And I think the China piece can be an interesting place for that to end up.
But that's part of the last 30 years, that's been a big problem. The lack of the foreign policy piece has been part of the disunity. The other piece that's been part of the disunity is that social conservatism itself is its own. It has its own legs of the stool, right?
The way evangelical conservatives are socially conservative is different from the way Southern Democrats are socially conservative is the way is different from the way opera fans in New York city are social conservatives. So that coalition started to break up. The Catholics of course are also very different in terms of their, the way they think of social conservatism.
So you put all that together and that coalition is now very different, right? Because a lot of the people who were socially conservative in the sense of elite aristocratic social conservatives are now Democrats. The boomer, rage people who we've been talking about, they're still around, the Southern Democratic, legacy of the Southern Democrats they're around, the evangelicals are around, but those are much smaller constituencies and getting smaller every year.
And so that's not enoughvto attract, the gen Z and millennials who are basically largely secular. And then you're left with the libertarians and the, who have not really even been operationally libertarian. What they've been is crony capitalists. We look at a Republican policy, politicians and policy.
It hasn't been libertarian. It hasn't been about free enterprise. If you look at our healthcare system, the status quo is not free enterprise. It's crony capitalism up the wazoo. And there obviously, like you talk about this all the time. That's been, the thing. It hasn't been about true free markets. It's been about, crony capitalism and an unwillingness to intervene in consolidated markets where there's a lot of monopoly power. So libertarianism has come to mean, do whatever business wants and in particular, don't intervene to break up concentrated monopoly power.
Whereas a true free marketeer would say, no, we need to have actual markets, which means we actually have to have competition. And we can't have crony capitalism where a monopoly then lobby the government to do whatever it wants. So then working back to say, what is that new coalition? I think that you have to take, if you take that stool of social conservatism from 1955, when Bill Buckley and that crew was running around, it has to be more about being opposed to political correctness, being against cancel culture and not so much purely about evangelical Christianity, right? Cause there are lots of people who are younger, who are not evangelical Christians, but don't like the fact that they're being told, they have to say Latinx because that's just dumb.
And that's actually a kind of cultural imperialism, right? If you actually talk to Spanish speaking people, they don't say Latinx, strangely enough. So that's, there is a sort of refresh or reboot of that same principle, which is what I would call small L liberalism. Free speech, freedom of conscious.
You shouldn't have to get fired from your job because you say that by the way, when rioting happens, Republicans win elections. That should not be a fireable offense in America. But the fact that is something that can, I think, bring a lot of people together. Not just people who currently think of themselves as Republicans.
And so if you have, and by the way, one of the things that's interesting is if the Supreme court does modify or overturn Roe V Wade, abortion politics become less salient in the Republican and conservative coalition than they are today, because it's going to devolve to the state level. It's going to be more of a legislative fight where legislatures are going to have to decide what their abortion policies in given states, and that's important, but you don't rely on the president so much for that.
That's more about local and state elections. So I'll have to say that we're going to see an evolution of the Republican coalition, no matter what, because the demographics are going to change and things like abortion may or may not be as important in that national level as they are today.
So the social conservatism should then be about America, being patriotic. It should be about border security and it should be about opposing cancel culture, but also be pluralistic. And about the fact that if you're black, if you're Asian, if you're Latino, you can be part of this coalition. So that's the social conservatism to me.
And then on the economic side, I know I've been talking for a bit, but
Marshall Kosloff: No, this is good. We need to sum up what you actually think about things.
Avik Roy: So the economic side, we have to do a total departure from both the purist libertarian movement, and also the crony capitalists K street nonsense of the Republican party.
And what does that look like? That looks something like what we might call the European center, right parties. And what are those European center-right parties do? Like the Germanys and the Switzerlands. Yeah. What do they do to take those two examples? They have universal health insurance with all private insurers, where they have a highly progressive system of subsidizing the cost of those plans for lower-income people, upper income people do not get a subsidy, and everyone has health insurance.
And so you lose your job. It's okay, because you're still going to have health insurance. You're not going to go bankrupt you in medical bills to give one example, they have a unsentimental, approach to monopoly power. They say, look, if you're going to be a monopoly, we're either going to regulate you like a utility.
So you can't use your market power to exploit people, or we're going to break you up. They don't just say, it's bad to intervene Jean to, because government intervention is bad. Therefore we have to let monopolies be like this whole tech thing, which I know you guys have talked about a lot.
What's the libertarian response? It's well.
Oh boy. If we tell Google what to do, that's government intervention. As opposed to recognizing the pernicious role of monopoly power and so what does that if you actually take the economic agenda and you say, look, we believe in markets, we believe in competition.
And that means tackling monopoly power. That means tackling the ways in which regulations drive up the cost of healthcare and housing and energy. Then you have an agenda. That's all about lower income Americans, but it's also robustly pro economic freedom. And I think that's the mistake that you see a lot of the sort of people who want it inherit the Trumpian mantle and say, oh, we're the Trumpians, we're the Trumpists.
We're going to turn this into, we're going to sit around in basements in Washington and turn this into an economic agenda. A lot of that effort has been misguided in my view because it wouldn't actually help lower income people. So you see a lot of attitude about, we really got to do more for working people by talking about working people more.
But when it comes to an agenda that would lower the cost of working people's healthcare or make their healthcare affordable period, what can we do to actually break up these monopolies? And deal with the incredible power that companies like Google and Facebook have, nada. Because they're not doing the hard work of actually thinking about how those businesses and sectors of the economy work.
So that's a big part of what we've been tackling is how do you actually do that?
How do you actually create that governing agenda that is robustly about taking on these corporate interests, and using competition and markets to do so.
Marshall Kosloff: No. It's very well said. There's been a lot here that we've agreed on, disagreed on.
And the cool thing is we have four years to either see someone proven right or someone proven wrong, but hopefully we can all win to some degree. Avik thank you so much for coming on the show. Great to have you, and I'm sure we'll have you back at some point soon.
Avik Roy: Hey, thanks. Thanks for all you're doing to have this conversation.
It's such an important conversation and I look forward to continuing it.
Saagar Enjeti: Great discussion, man. Thank you.