← Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Why Trump’s Blood-and-Guts Strategy Worked
00:55:30
Happy Independence Day! We’ll be back next week with a new episode, but today we’re sharing the episode that started us on the path to “Interesting Times.” Ross Douthat talks to Reihan Salam, the president of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. Together they wrote the book “Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.” They review their George W. Bush-era prescriptions for the Republican Party to reclaim the working-class vote and the ways they were right (and wrong) about building a new Republican majority.
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- [00:01]
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- [00:32]
Ross Douthat
Hey listeners, it's Ross. We're taking a break for the July 4th holiday. So while I celebrate my brief independence from the podcasting life, I'm sharing one of the episodes that started us on the path toward Interesting Times. You might have heard it before, but I still think it's worth a listen now. Back in November, after Donald Trump's victory, I wanted to understand not just how he won, but how he had transformed the Republican Party, turning what had been a mostly white and upper middle class coalition into something much more blue collar and multiracial. I had advocated for that kind of transformation in a book I wrote long ago with my friend Reihan Salaam called Grand New Party. In the aftermath of George W. Bush's presidency, the two of us tried to envision a new future for the gop, not knowing, of course, that our prophecy would ultimately be fulfilled, in part at least, by Donald Trump. So in this conversation you can hear us talk about what we predicted and where we think the GOP has ended up, especially amid this week's debates over the not necessarily populist, big beautiful Bill. So enjoy. And Interesting Times will return next week. From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthit Raihan. Good to see you.
- [02:14]
Reihan Salam
I am honored and delighted to be with you.
- [02:16]
Ross Douthat
Ross, Are you? Are you honored and delighted to be with me?
- [02:18]
Reihan Salam
I am both thankful, firmly, vigorously, and also it is funny and sad that we as middle aged dads only get to hang out when we're on a podcast.
- [02:26]
Ross Douthat
I know. Here we are. We were talking about this beforehand, that this is the life, the life of the middle aged pundit dad, as you say, we haven't seen each other in a while. Would you like to come on a New York Times podcast with me?
- [02:39]
Reihan Salam
Although we do, I'm struck by the fact that we have spoken to one another every fateful political moment of the 21st century. And I know that when I'm watching these election results unfold that after midnight, I do know that Ross Douthit is gonna be awake and we are gonna talk and we're gonna think about it in real time. And that is a very precious gift.
- [03:02]
Ross Douthat
That's right. That's how the magic happens. Me sitting in a, you know, food spattered kitchen, spattered by myself to make it clear I don't wanna blame my wife and children for the food spattering. So let's go back. We met in the early 2000s in Washington, D.C. really met then. We really met then. No, technically, we met as undergraduates at a panel held at the Harvard Institute of Politics that featured Bill Kristol during the George W. Bush presidency. So at that point you were doing a lot of theater as a Harvard undergraduate, I believe that's right. And I was running the conservative newspaper, so we didn't have a lot in common. Except that you were interested in hearing build.
- [03:46]
Reihan Salam
Both paths converged. And I think that one thing is that we both came to conservatism through a kind of winding path. Just the fact that you came from this crunchy Christian world, having parents, boomer parents, growing up in this secular milieu. I came to it as a son of immigrants growing up in an outer borough, New York, that had been transformed by Giuliani and just coming to conservatism from different angles, but both being at an angle to movement conservatism. And I think that's something we bonded over early on.
- [04:19]
Ross Douthat
Yeah. And as I remember it, we were also like young journalists everywhere, sort of trying to make some kind of a name for ourselves. And we were working and writing at a time when almost all writing and arguing being done in Washington, D.C. was writing and arguing about foreign policy. This was the period after September 11, after the invasion of Iraq. I was working as a very junior editor for the Atlantic. And essentially, foreign policy had subsumed almost all conversation and debate in Washington, D.C. at that time, and certainly on the political right, where there was obviously a sort of rally around George W. Bush's foreign policy. And then as that foreign policy sort of soured as the Iraq War ran into difficulties. And I think we maybe not completely consciously and deliberately, but we're trying to carve out a somewhat different niche by looking for a set of issues that fewer people were writing about in 2005 or 2006. And so we ended up converging, in effect, as writers trying to think through domestic policy, which again in that period was an extremely unsexy portfolio for a couple of Young writers to have, indeed, totally different. Now, of course, when, you know, domestic policy is very hot, you know.
- [05:51]
Reihan Salam
So one element of this is, I think, that our views on domestic policy were also a little idiosyncratic. You, I think, were drawn to Christian Democratic ideas and the idea that there was a place for a religious conservative synthesis that was modern and where there was a kind of thoughtful policy dimension that was not reflexively free market, but that took the idea of tradition seriously. And what does it mean to modernize a tradition? For me, I was someone who was very, you know, market oriented, but also just someone who was really interested in the idea of emerging critiques of, you know, 90s capitalism and what should we take seriously, what should we not? And we were also, in some ways, reacting to interesting intellectual energies on the left. The kind of inequality obsession that really peaked during the Occupy era was something that you and I had experienced as undergrads and had been around. These ideas were already in kind of wider currency. So it really was a very dynamic and fun intellectual partnership because we were obsessing over a lot of the same things for very different reasons.
- [07:00]
Ross Douthat
Well, and it was coming at this moment where to sort of try and put it in historical perspective, you had a Republican Party that had been not completely dominant, but very powerful in American politics, with a coalition built in the 1970s and early 1980s by Ronald Reagan that was in part a kind of reaction against Great Society liberalism and a sense of sort of the failures of liberalism in the 1970s, which included galloping inflation, included rising crime rates, included a sense of foreign policy weakness. And so out of that, you had this Republican Party that was organized famously around some combination of social and religious conservatism, foreign policy, hawkishness, and free market economics.
- [07:51]
Reihan Salam
Free stools, as they often said at the time.
- [07:54]
Ross Douthat
The three legged stool, or the three.
- [07:56]
Reihan Salam
No, no, the three legged stool. The three legged stools. Not three separate stools, I mean, but that.
- [08:01]
Ross Douthat
That, you know, that is a serendipitous mixed metaphor, because by the time we were young and writing, it seemed like those different pieces maybe didn't necessarily fit together quite as well. There was a sense that the country was secularizing and becoming more socially liberal. So social conservatism had to adapt and rethink things. And then, as you mentioned, there was this very strong, not wing, but also center left critique of where the American economy was going. And George W. Bush, when he was elected president in 2000, very explicitly tried to address these changes. Right. This was where the idea, now 25 years old, of so called compassionate conservatism came in.
- [08:47]
Reihan Salam
And the ownership society, right, the ownership.
- [08:49]
Ross Douthat
Society, the idea that you were going to essentially use different government policies and levers to build a kind of society of independent stock owning, home owning, entrepreneurs. And a lot of that sort of concept came to grief with the financial crisis, the real estate bubble bursting and so on. But in some ways we were trying to pick up where compassionate conservatism had left off, figure out what it had gotten wrong, and figure out what would a Republican party that wasn't just doing tax cuts for the rich.
- [09:27]
Reihan Salam
What if we actually took these ideas seriously and had the right intellectual foundation for them? I think that's exactly right. Because in the second term of the Bush presidency, there was this line of argument from Call it mainstream Conservative Inc. Which was essentially the real failure here is that George W. Bush was. Was not sufficiently rigorous in his adherence to small government orthodoxy. The real problem was his Medicare expansion, et cetera, et cetera. But actually there was no one actually defending the idea that, look, you actually have to have a credible, serious approach to the welfare state. And this was the disconnect that we had observed. And we were not, you know, as I recall, we were not people who were, you know, statists by reflex or anything like that. It was just, guys, we need some modicum of realism about how this coalition won and where this coalition has room to grow, and also some realism about American political economy and the fact that the welfare state is not gonna go away. Can it actually rest on a more solid moral normative foundation and also something that makes sense given the ways in which the economy is changing. So I think that we were filling this missing quadrant because there was actually knowing, willing to defend the proposition that we need to modernize a market orienting conservatism. And social conservatives have a really important role to play here, if only they seize it.
- [10:52]
Ross Douthat
Right. And we were framing it also in terms of electoral politics. Right. So the subtitle of the book we wrote referenced the idea of Republicans winning the working class, meaning in our definition, non college educated Americans of all races and ethnicities. And part of our argument was that there had been after the 1970s, a kind of unfinished realignment in American politics where a large group of non college educated voters had shifted from the Democratic coalition to the Republican coalition. These were the voters who got described as Reagan Democrats once upon a time, but that Republicans, because of their inability to quite figure out how to actually run the government, had not been able to fully cement that realignment. And from that, that was where you got basically the policy agenda that we tried to sketch out in the book.
- [11:47]
Reihan Salam
And Ross, I will just note for our listeners that we had a bunch of wacky ideas regarding who could be the tribune of this coalition. I hate to embarrass you with this, but we talked about who is a blue collar populist who represents just something outside of conventional politics, who is someone who is a celebrity, who is someone who could actually break the strangle of what we saw as a kind of cosseted political establishment. So, you know, we talked about Bill O'Reilly, you know, a Long island middle class, upper middle class, but with a blue collar ethos. We had a bunch of different names. And one of my favorite pieces from the Ross Reihan collabs of that era was, you know, 2007, something that must have been painful for you, but we wrote our manifesto for what a Giuliani presidential bid could look like painful just because you were obviously an ardent pro lifer. This is something that was very important for you. But we came up with, I think, an extremely compelling vision for what a future Trump presidential candidacy could look like in describing something that would resonate with this working class, lower middle class. So obviously this was very special to me for biographical reasons, but then we already had in mind there has to be this class break. There has to be this cultural break, the parole voters, the northern, you know, secularizing working class, the multiracial working class, who brings it in. And we were actively fantasizing like lunatics about who is the person who could actually break that and change that.
- [13:20]
Ross Douthat
Right. But before our fantasies, let's say, collided. Collided with reality, there was this period when I would say our ideas were completely rejected, which was 2008 to 2012.
- [13:36]
Reihan Salam
A 2000 question mark. Question mark. Right.
- [13:41]
Ross Douthat
I mean, the period in which our ideas are rejected may extend indefinitely into the future, but there was a special rejection. So we wrote this book in it came out at the very end of George W. Bush's presidency. The financial crisis hit, Barack Obama was elected president, and the mood in the Republican Party picked up on the mood you've already described, right? This sense that the only problem with George W. Bush was that he spent too much money, that he was a big government conservative, and it ran with that. And this gave us the Tea Party era, which was effectively a limited government, anti deficit movement reacting against bailouts, stimulus spending, eventually Obamacare. And that, I would say, set the tone for Republican debates in a way that, you know, didn't preclude some ideas we were interested in we both have issues where we have libertarian impulses and sympathies, but the general mood of the Republican party for the four years after 2008 was we don't need to think about how to run the government. We just need to stand against socialism and figure out how to cut spending.
- [14:51]
Reihan Salam
And I think the Tea Party moment, what happened is that people saw discontent, they saw opposition to Obama, they saw a weak economy and they saw this grassroots energy. And the narrative was the Tea Party small government thing. And I think you and I both saw that's not really what's going on here. There's something else happening. There's a different kind of discontent and these guys are missing it. And I think that the Grand New Party thesis was closer to being correct than the Tea Party thesis.
- [15:18]
Ross Douthat
Right. And just, you know, without getting too deep into the policy weeds, the specific ideas that we argued for in the book and have in different ways argued for since fit into that perspective. You just described the idea that the welfare state has to be based on respect, reciprocity and support for certain valuable habits and ways of life. Yes, right. So we spent a lot of time arguing for family supports that would make it easier to have and rear children again with an explicit link between some form of responsibility and whatever way the government was spending money. Right. And that to us was the sort of middle ground. And I think pretty clearly the more sort of stringent we're just going to cut government spending model came to grief in 2012. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan ran on a very sort of well intentioned and serious blueprint for remaking Medicare and Social Security. But they had no, I think it's fair to say, no positive vision of what government policy, public policy could be doing to help working Americans in that particular moment.
- [16:31]
Reihan Salam
The Bush era positive vision had been discredited, fairly or otherwise. But what was interesting in that moment is had there been a Romney Ryan administration, I think it's fair to say that we would have known a ton of people in it. We would have maybe even had some modicum of influence. But they were open to some of these things, but they were so risk averse, they were walking on eggshells. They didn't really seize the main chance, you know what I mean?
- [16:55]
Ross Douthat
Well, and they were afraid, and this is sort of comical given what happened next. Right. But they were afraid that if they supported anything that seemed too much like big government.
- [17:05]
Reihan Salam
Right.
- [17:05]
Ross Douthat
That they would be attacked as socialists, rhinos and so on. Right. As, you know, none other than the late Rush Limbaugh attacked us. We were not important enough to be consistently attacked, but we were. But we were attacked by people in sort of the talk radio sphere of conservatism for selling out conservative principles by being willing to contemplate the government doing certain things. And that's amusing because of course, of what then followed four years later.
- [17:34]
Reihan Salam
And what happened to that entire world of people who notionally were committed to this, you know, really hardcore libertarian, small state vision, Suddenly some of those people are the ones who flipped most aggressively to this very different vision.
- [17:50]
Ross Douthat
Right. But first you had this brief opening for Republican politicians who again, wanted to sort of go back to where George W. Bush started to say, look, we need a middle class, working class policy agenda. We need to look at family policy, we need to look at healthcare, we need to look at education. And there was sort of a larger group of policy writers to which we were somewhat attached that got called the Reform Conservatives or the Reformicons.
- [18:19]
Reihan Salam
I remember it well.
- [18:20]
Ross Douthat
We're really, we're giving listeners the truly deep cut. But I think pretty clearly there was sort of a narrative that said, okay, these guys, the Reform conservatives, they're going to have influence on the next Republican administration, which will probably be led by someone like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio, who will modernize the Republican Party in various ways and will be a kind of Republican equivalent of Bill Clinton in the 1990s, something like that. But that story was then completely steamrolled and shattered and everything else by what happened next, which was the rise of Donald J. Trump. Right. Which is where we're going to turn next after a quick break, so stay with us.
- [19:29]
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- [20:07]
Ross Douthat
And we're back. And we've just arrived at the Trump chapter of recent Republican Party history. And as we were saying, Trump arrived on the scene as the actual embodiment of the blue collar populist tendency that we had been describing. It is, or was he?
- [20:24]
Reihan Salam
It is really really. And of course, you know, we would think this, but we anticipated someone very much like him. When you look to Grand New Party itself, but certainly when you look at our conversations around that time, but we.
- [20:38]
Ross Douthat
Didn'T anticipate him, let's be fair.
- [20:42]
Reihan Salam
No, no, no. Absolutely not.
- [20:43]
Ross Douthat
To our own. Absolutely foresight.
- [20:44]
Reihan Salam
So here's what I'll say about that reform conservative moment, is that I think you and I both, just as lovers of history, saw that it's never going to be just tax credits, right? It's never going to be just, you know, pure, unadulterated wonkery. Narrative is really important. And also just blood and guts are important. And by that I mean public safety, crime. You know, these are things that we wrote about in Grand New Party. Just the idea that do you feel safe? Do you belong? Donald Trump, the first thing that he did was talk about immigration in a way that was markedly different from how Jeb Bush talked about immigration. Markedly different from the thesis that a lot of people in that, you know, kind of respectability seeking moment have. And I don't say that derisively. The big thing that he did was it his specific policy prescriptions about building the wall and what have you. I don't think it was exactly that. It was rather directional. Jeb Bush gave people a sense, fairly or otherwise, that he cherished immigrants. He was married to an immigrant and he valued them, he saw them as really so central to the American story. Whereas a multi generational blue collar, working class American, you know, maybe his life has been a little bit chaotic at the edges. You're not the hero of this. And I think that Donald Trump made an argument, he did something that was so shattering, but it was basically a directional argument that we decide that we're gonna put Americans first. And it's something that you could plainly see in the politics of the right for the previous decade and a half. So anti immigrant and anti immigration sentiment, restriction to sentiment in various guises had been a really powerful current in Republican polit. And every now and again there was a flash in the pan. There was someone who had run on this but, you know, would never penetrate, would never break through. And Trump is someone who was able to really capitalize on it. And again, I don't actually think it was necessarily about the policy specifics, but it was, you know, I am listening to you, I am listening to you. And this immigration issue is a synecdoche for a ton of other issues where there are people who are not listening to you, they are not respecting you, they are not taking your concerns here seriously, and I will. And I think that was hugely powerful. And of course, it applied in a bunch of other domains too, you know, with regard to trade, with regard to China and the threat that it poses, the idea of an elite that is selling out our country. Those themes were there. It was visible, you know, and Obama was the one who capitalized on them in 2012, ambivalently. So that was, to me, what was so sad.
- [23:31]
Ross Douthat
You mean by going after Romney's corporate rating and outsourcing?
- [23:36]
Reihan Salam
Exactly. Exactly.
- [23:38]
Ross Douthat
Right. No, there was some sort of proto Trumpism in the way that Obama ran against Romney as sort of an embodiment of borderless anti patriotic capitalism.
- [23:50]
Reihan Salam
The Obama, Trump voters didn't change. It's the coalitions that changed around them.
- [23:54]
Ross Douthat
But to me, that power that Trump had, one was substantially different from the vision that we were offering. If you go back, it was, in the end just a much more powerful story. We thought we had this story about, here's how the government can stand up for people who work, people who raise families, all of these things. I think there was potency in that story and that it would have helped Rudy Giuliani in 2012, it would have helped Marco Rubio in 2016, but Trump just blew it up bigger in the way that you describe. He folded in the entire post 1991 globalization push. He folded in the outsourcing of US jobs to China and the ethnic and.
- [24:42]
Reihan Salam
Demographic transformation of the country. And against a backdrop of collapsing birth rates and this deep intergenerational tension that stems from that, he put it together.
- [24:54]
Ross Douthat
Right? He put it together. But he also did so in a way that certainly from my perspective in 2016, was often malignant. I think I wrote a column at that time describing Trumpism as a kind of dark mirror universe version of Grand New Party, right, where he was making a pitch to the kind of voters we wanted the Republican Party to make a pitch to. But it wasn't just more sweeping, it was more demagogic. And there was this strong white identity politics component that sort of liberal critics were not wrong to see in it. Now, I think there was always an underestimation, not everywhere on the left, but among many liberals, of how important economics was to Trump's appeal. He was literally flying around the country, going to, you know, cities where factories had closed and where jobs had gone overseas and saying, I will bring back the good times. You can't write that out of the 2016 story. But in the end, what he did electorally was not in that election. To build the pan ethnic working class Republican Party, he boosted the Republican share of white working class voters beyond what the Romney campaign had imagined.
- [26:08]
Reihan Salam
In the right competitive states.
- [26:10]
Ross Douthat
In the right competitive states. He flipped the Midwest, but he won more electorally important votes and he won the election without a popular vote majority. But I think it was reasonable to look in that moment from our perspective and say, okay, Trump did a version of what we'd urged on the Republican Party. But there was both. Something clearly toxic about the way he did it and it didn't build a new majority. Donald Trump didn't come into office in 2016 with majority support. He didn't complete the realignment. He just boosted a particular part of the working class share of the GOP coalition. Do you think that's what do you think?
- [26:50]
Reihan Salam
No, that all sounds exactly right. This was a very strange moment for both of us because first of all, in Grand New Party itself, we literally were saying that, look, if you do not embrace our path, there will be a demagogue who will capitalize on this discontent, on this rupture between, call it the conservative elite and the potential conservative majority of. We were both in different ways, wrestling with questions of ethnic change, immigration. I look back at the things I was writing in the second Obama term and it's just crazy things that are, I mean, not to pat ourselves on the back, but things that have now become total cliches. You know, just getting savagely attacked for saying that Hispanics do not care about amnesty. This is not the issue. Just talking about the idea that there is a more balanced, sane approach to immigration that can build a kind of multi ethnic working class conservative majority.
- [27:44]
Ross Douthat
Right. Because an important, just to clarify our own perspective. Right. Like we were immigration hawks relative to George W. Bush and John McCain.
- [27:57]
Reihan Salam
Yes.
- [27:57]
Ross Douthat
Our view was that securing the border and having some kind of skills based immigration policy that limited low skilled immigration was one the policy sweet spot. The place where you could have substantial immigration, but not at a rate that was sort of too disruptive, but also something that, as you just said, would appeal more to Hispanic voters, to a lot of, you know, the descendants of recent immigrants, than just saying, oh, you know, we're going to legalize everyone who's here and not open the border. Because the open borders moment had not yet arrived on the political left. But at the very least there was. The conventional wisdom was that the Republican Party had to move substantially to the left on immigration.
- [28:41]
Reihan Salam
Exactly. And our argument was that an emphasis, a frank emphasis on the importance of assimilation and the idea that immigration policy should be in the national interest, that there was such a thing as too fast or too many, and that actually it was legitimate and not racist. And then to see Trump in this moment, it almost felt like, oh my gosh, there's gonna be a backlash. He's gonna talk about immigration in this way that is inciting and it's gonna be something that will jeopardize the formula. The coalition that we had hoped to see, you know, we had a scheme, we had a plan for what it was gonna look like. And then it actually happened in this much more chaotic way.
- [29:19]
Ross Douthat
Right, right. I mean, our plan was Marco Rubio, let's say, or someone like him reinventing himself as a kind of moderate restrictionist on immigration while having a more middle class friendly agenda than Mitt Romney and winning a multi ethnic blue collar majority on that basis. Instead, we had Trump winning a minority of the popular vote. President making much darker, more sweeping, and again in my view, more toxic appeals. But so then how. This is the core question. How did we get from there to here? Because in 2024, as I said at the outset, the Republican coalition looks like, not completely, but it looks like the coalition we imagined 20 years ago. But guess what? It was Donald Trump who did it. So how.
- [30:15]
Reihan Salam
There are two phases. One is during the first Trump presidency period, you saw these dramatic gains in urban counties. You saw really material gains among Hispanic voters, 2016 and 2020. And that was in the thick of the COVID crisis. That was in a moment when, you know, as many of our listeners will recall, our senses were being assaulted at all times. So many things that radicalized people that we know, people who had been, call it respectability seeking conservatives were ambivalent about Trump. And when they actually turned, when they embraced him, the Kavanaugh hearings, when you think about the kind of early stages of woke discourse, just there are a lot of things that happen there where you saw this kind of diaspora of folks on the broad center right going in really different directions depending on what it is that animated the most. And Trump was someone who galvanized this. But I think that that's important to remember that there was something that happened during that first presidency.
- [31:17]
Ross Douthat
But this is my question about that galvanizing effect, which is, was it purely negative in the sense that you could make a case that what happened in Trump's presidency, especially at the end and to some extent in Biden's presidency, but really in that sort of pre Covid and Covid window, was that liberalism and the left kind of recreated some of the crises in miniature from the 1970s that had made the Reagan coalition possible in the first place. After the killing of George Floyd, you had riots and sort of a retreat from urban policing. Yes, A spike in crime. So crime came back. You had in the beginning of the Biden administration, a unwise stimulus package and recovery bill that goosed inflation and brought inflation back, which it, you know, hadn't been around since the late 1970s and early 1980s. And then you had, you know, without litigating all the details, in woke progressivism, a form of cultural radicalism that looked a bit like the cultural radicalism of the 1970s.
- [32:22]
Reihan Salam
Yes.
- [32:22]
Ross Douthat
So you could tell a story where basically everything we were saying in the Bush presidency was premised on the idea that the 1970s weren't coming back and the Republican Party therefore needed this forward looking agenda. But maybe what happened in Trump's presidency was that briefly the 1970s did come back and so the Republican coalition could expand to include blue collar Hispanics and all of these extra voters without having some dramatic shift in agenda of the kind we'd imagined. What do you think?
- [32:53]
Reihan Salam
That's one reason I stress these two different periods from the first Trump presidency and then the Biden presidency. So big picture, when you say negative, I do think the first Trump presidency, the real thing that happened was this galvanizing, this coalescing, this transformation of the left, this sense of cohesion, cultural power, cultural institutions, the idea of affluent, educated, but also just high status, high prestige people exerting this incredible power and the sense that many people had that Trump is the one thing standing against that. So I think that that was one foundation of it. Then you see a Biden presidency where I think there was this view that we are in the midst of a kind of democratic emergency. This legitimates real dramatic change. We need to question neoliberalism, we need to dismantle systems. We need to do something really new and different, you know, in 2020. My gosh, when you look at the state of the Trump presidency in that moment, I don't think anyone would argue, including those who, you know, see a lot of virtue in that presidency, as I do, I think they got some big important things right. But that, you know, it was pretty chaotic in 2020. Right. And then despite that, the massive gains that he made in that election against this whole of society effort he made.
- [34:14]
Ross Douthat
Well, he didn't make massive gains relative to 2016. He made massive gains with certain set of voters, again, minority voters, for instance, while losing voters in the suburbs Right. Losing pieces of the white working class vote. Right. So he essentially did it.
- [34:32]
Reihan Salam
It's a good point. It's a good point. There was a trade, a less efficient coalition, but a coalition that in a sense, as you're saying, reflected the outlines of what you and I had envisioned in the past. Of course, there are people who are determined bitter ender, never Trumpers, who are gone from the coalition, but then the number of people that you and I both know, call them centerite normies, who are alarmed in some respects by the Trump phenomenon, but then who found their way back into the coalition as a reaction to that kind of integrated progressive apparatus. And the question now is the question that you and I have been struggling with and thinking through and passionate about for, you know, this century, which is, is there some positive case here? Is there something that is dynamic and real and substantive that can fill this vacuum? Are we something other than merely being anti left? Do we really want the left to be the only dynamic force or do we want there to be another dynamic force? And what we envision in Grand New Party was the as a culturally creative dynamic force that was offering this moral, ethical synthesis that that actually made sense and that you could kind of champion and carry forward and that. And I don't know if we have.
- [35:45]
Ross Douthat
That, but centrally that had some very specific economic policies.
- [35:51]
Reihan Salam
Yes.
- [35:51]
Ross Douthat
Policies for how the government taxes and spends and regulates. Right. That we're supposed to be not just winning working class votes, but building a more prosperous middle class American future. All right, let's take a break there and when we come back, we'll get into where the Republican Party goes in the second Trump presidency. Foreign.
- [36:36]
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- [37:15]
Ross Douthat
And we're back. So let's do two things. Let's look back at the first Trump presidency and then forward to the new Trump presidency to ask was there in the first few years of the Trump era something that looked like a forward looking economic policy agenda for middle class America.
- [37:36]
Reihan Salam
This is an area where I suspect you and I have some subtle differences of perspective. I guess I'm a big trade off obsessive. And just the idea that when you have a package deal, this thing has to fit with this thing. So, for example, you could say that I want to have no immigration or very little immigration, or radically reduced immigration, but also I'm going to embrace trade. And I'm going to say that, okay, that means that we're going to import more strawberries or we're going to import more of this or that, things that are low scale, labor intensive goods. And you know, we'll do that. That's one formula. Or you could say you were going to have a selective immigration policy and we're going to embrace trade. I think that there are a lot of things about that Trump moment because you had all these outsiders who were coming in and they had conflicting imperatives. There were some people who came in who were like, let's hope that Trump just isn't serious about his trade agenda or about the idea of making a radical break with Romney Ryanism or what have you. And let's just kind of see if we can be chill and just kind of hope everything's gonna be fine. And it's largely rhetorical. Then there were other people who were real post neoliberals, anti neoliberals. So they were trying to coexist with one another in this White House where it was, you know, one voice was dominant one day. And you know, Steve Bannon had one perspective and Steve Moore had a different perspective.
- [38:52]
Ross Douthat
Right. Well, that's a good way to distill it. Right. Steve Moore, for those who don't know, is a term, sort of right wing economist who, supply side economics, supply side economics just wants to cut taxes. And cutting taxes is the solution to all of life's problems. That's slightly unfair, but only slightly. Steve Bannon, on the other hand, when he initially came in to the first Trump administration, said, we're going to do a kind of right wing new deal. We're going to spend a ton of money on infrastructure and we're going to rebuild the American working class that way. And, and one way to look at the first four years of Trump is that Moore got what he wanted and Bannon didn't. Right. Infrastructure became a joke. Trump did cut taxes in a way that included some family friendly provisions, included some ideas that you and I supported, but was still a fairly conventional Republican tax cut. And in a way, the Trump innovation was just to say we're just going to run the economy hot. We're not going to worry about entitlement spending or anything like that, and we're going to raise wages with a hot economy and that'll be it.
- [39:59]
Reihan Salam
That's the real innovation. Trump recognized that taking Medicare and Social Security off the table is something that would shatter the Obama coalition. It would really change things. It would make the cultural issues more salient. I do believe in wealth creation. I am not a huge fan of high taxes. I do believe there's a place for that. But it has to be connected to some larger vision for what it is we want. When it comes to upper mobility and the Bush ownership society, imperfect as it was, there was some thesis there, I think, that with the first Trump presidency, it just didn't really come together. It didn't gel. And in the absence of COVID who knows, maybe we would have seen something different going forward. I just think that if the Republican Party is not the party of private.
- [40:44]
Ross Douthat
Property and wealth building, but is there any chance that the Republican Party is about to not be the party of private property and wealth building?
- [40:51]
Reihan Salam
No, no. I think you're, you're right. But I do think that you have some people on the right who basically embrace kind of left ideas about inequality and what have you. And I think that that's a dead end.
- [41:04]
Ross Douthat
Right. So there's just to sort of send out categories. Right. There is a kind of thoroughgoing populist right that is essentially shares not the prescription, but the sort of critique of how the American economy has performed for the last 30 years that you see on the left, right. That says the economy has just not worked for middle class America and we need therefore a kind of radical overhaul. And to the extent that there is strong kind of intellectual support for, let's say, the huge Trump tariffs, it often comes out of this perspective. Right.
- [41:45]
Reihan Salam
And being just the tip of the spear in a way, the really rigorous, thoughtful people envision some larger reordering of the American economy. Economy. But tariffs are kind of a symbol.
- [41:53]
Ross Douthat
Of this tariffs as right as an opening into dramatic industrial policy that presumably would go beyond what the Biden administration did. I personally think we may or may not get Trumpian tariffs. I don't think you're going to see a dramatic right wing restructuring of the American economy. I think the question is a little narrower than that. So take, take the Vice President elect of the United States, J.D. vance, and the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, who both have obviously strong associations with this administration. Musk himself was originally a Clinton Democrat. He was never a doctrinaire libertarian. But as he has moved right, I think he has come to inhabit sort of that libertarian space where he's ended up in charge of a commission that's supposed to figure out how to, to transform the federal government trillions of dollars. It's not the Tea Party, but it has something in common with Tea Party ideas there. Right. Whereas the Vance perspective, in certain ways it goes all the way to the sort of deep structural critique you were talking about that you don't agree with. But in part it's just more based around, I think, the idea that the working class in America needs certain forms of help and support that it hasn't gotten and that traditional Republican policymaking hasn't delivered. I see that as sort of the tension inside the Trump administration going forward. Like, are we returning to a kind of just dynamism oriented libertarian government cutting or is there again some sort of populist synthesis available?
- [43:39]
Reihan Salam
My, my vision, and I wonder how you react to this. We were talking about this idea of the right as the anti left, and what are the ideas that occupy that space? My vision is that the thing that is healing ultimately is going to be the embrace of certain values, ideas, sensibilities, habits that contribute to human flourishing. Ultimately, the idea that you're gonna look to a tax credit or the idea that you're gonna look to the state to deliver this, it's just not going to happen. You need the be highly effective, capable and competent within its domain to create the conditions so that we can actually build these really families or networks of families or community. You know, it's a pluralistic vision for what the ultimate solution is going to look like to this discontent you're describing. And the fantasy of government fixing these things is something that stems from this intense secularization and this kind of collapse of communal life. And so when I think about Musk, I guess my reaction is this seems very exciting. The idea of celebrating the energy of building and creating and the idea of unleashing wealth creation. These kinds of things can be good and healthy. What I see JD as kind of thinking about in a really impressive, earnest, genuine way, I think he's wrestling with problems that are really, really hard for government to solve. And I think a lot of thoughtful people, including us in earlier eras, were kind of thinking about, you know, what can government do to kind of affirm certain ways of life or what have you. And that's just, that stuff is just. I guess I've come to find those things Less tractable. But what I do find tractable is some of the kind of zany dreams of terraforming Nevada as well as terraforming Mars. You know, just stuff like that. You know, my dream second Trump presidency would take big swings like that and hopefully not have them end in tears and be laughable. I really wanna think in big creative ways, how do we have a limited government that is highly effective and energetic within its limited domain, whether that's crime control, whether that's breakthrough scientific research, this kind of thing. But I just think that the game of inches of social policy, it's ultimately going to be creating a culture that celebrates and allows families to thrive.
- [45:58]
Ross Douthat
Right. So ultimately, you have turned against some of the arguments in our book. Right?
- [46:02]
Reihan Salam
Oh, Ross.
- [46:03]
Ross Douthat
Not, not turned against precisely. But that was our original brief, was that the Republican Party and conservatism needs to be working in the nuts and bolts of government to a degree that progressives take for granted and focused on, again, not sweeping policy interventions, but carefully tailored policy interventions that support work and families. Right. And I do think that in your arc, the experience of watching Trump come along and sort of sweep all that off the table with his Trumpian style, watching then the left come along and in my formulation, bring back the 1970s in certain ways has brought you back around. Not to the Tea Party, but let's say to Ronald Reagan. Like, I think you're in a sort of Reaganite space where it's good for the government to, yes, support some big projects in science and innovation, but ultimately, if American society is going to heal, it's not going to be government policy doing it.
- [47:13]
Reihan Salam
That's not entirely unfair.
- [47:16]
Ross Douthat
Right.
- [47:17]
Reihan Salam
I do think that, remember, you have betrayed me. Clinton, Hillary Clinton, 2016, the Biden presidency. They, they were, to their credit, let's be fair to them, they were actually drawing on these ideas. Big, ambitious child credits. And what have you read, the Biden.
- [47:34]
Ross Douthat
Administration did do temporarily a version of the. Yes, the kind of.
- [47:40]
Reihan Salam
The biggest ambitious version. And, you know, things that, you know, kind of. And, you know, look, you know, we could litigate specifics of this or that policy. But I think that that was humbling for me. Not because I, you know, now believe that, oh, you know, let's jettison the child credit or what have you. But just it was humbling because these are things that they attempted to do. And look at that child credit, you know, one year. Yes. Did it mechanically reduce poverty and did it have some, you know, salutary effects? Absolutely.
- [48:05]
Ross Douthat
Birth rates. Right.
- [48:06]
Reihan Salam
But exactly.
- [48:07]
Ross Douthat
Even on the margin but even.
- [48:08]
Reihan Salam
And also did working class and lower middle class people, you know, was this something that was this very kind of, you know, we're gonna have to fight for this. Was this something that created a groundswell?
- [48:16]
Ross Douthat
It did not. It did not have anything like the political effects that the Biden administration expected. I agree.
- [48:22]
Reihan Salam
And that's right. And also I think there was another element of the Grand New Party argument. It was partly, you know, a lot of it was corrective, and a lot of it was, look, we're not going to dismantle the New Deal era welfare state. There have been moments of actually government, but also a cultural elite can work together to create the conditions for flourishing families. And even now, I don't think there's specific recommendations there that I would jettison. But. But I certainly am more taken with the idea that the kind of healing that I think you and I both want, that is ultimately going to have to be cultural change. And by the way, there are things government can do, I think, about Thatcherism. You know, one of Margaret Thatcher's things is that she wasn't just laissez faire. She was running an activist conservative government that wasn't just targeting the size of the state, but it was also targeting civil society organizations, government bureaucracies, an educational establishment that was hostile to what she saw as the vigorous virtues that families needed to thrive. Government could not instill those vigorous virtues. Government could fight against the cultural institutional forces that were undermining those who manifested the vigorous virtues. I think that that's exactly right. That is an activist agenda for the right. And I think that it relates to certainly crime and public safety, but it also relates to how we think about entrepreneurship and how we think about family policy. So there is a place for smart social policy. But the lodestar is what can dollars and cents accomplish versus what can creating room for the cultural forces that we want to see thrive. So, you know, when I see someone like Musk, do I see him as an imperfect and flawed figure? Of course. But also he's someone who represents a kind of cultural force. And I see that as healing.
- [50:14]
Ross Douthat
Yeah. And I want to say that in prodding you this way, I actually agree with what I take to be part of your evolution. And in part, I agree with it because I think the American economy overall just looks different in 2024 than it did when we were making a lot of these arguments earlier that we have.
- [50:35]
Reihan Salam
In the run up to the financial crisis.
- [50:37]
Ross Douthat
In the run up to the financial crisis. And then there was a period of real wage stagnation in American life, if in a climate of low inflation where there was room for government policy to be more activist. And that moment, in a way, gave us the first Trump presidency. And I think there's a lot less room for that right now. I think the shadow of inflation hangs over.
- [51:01]
Reihan Salam
Fiscal consolidation looms.
- [51:03]
Ross Douthat
Yep. And the bill for entitlements is coming due. But then more generally, the US Economy, while the Biden era inflation was dreadful for a couple of years, it's actually done better by working class Americans who were the core constituency we were worried about, than did the economy of George W. Bush. The last 10 or 15 years have been better for working class Americans than.
- [51:27]
Reihan Salam
Were, I think, the great compression of wages. Yes, right.
- [51:29]
Ross Douthat
Upper middle class professionals are no longer pulling away from the working class. So when you look at those forces, I think, yes, I think there's less reason to be quite as, as activist in public policy in support of the working class relative to when we first started writing about these issues. And I agree with you that in the best version of Muskian dynamism, there is something that is the best kind of libertarianism. The worst kind of libertarianism is just the kind that is, you know, we don't care how we cut the programs as long as we get to a balanced budget and so on on. I am and always will be against that kind of libertarianism. The best kind of libertarianism is the kind that says why shouldn't we have self driving cars and why shouldn't we go to Mars and all of these things. And there are various forms of government regulation that stand in the way. So I am at least somewhat optimistic about Muskian influence in those areas. But I do still wonder, and maybe this is where we can come to a conclusion. Right. Is, you know, a political coalition that aspires to run the United States of America for an extended period of time, something both political coalitions have failed to do. Right. Still, at its heart, needs a basic economic agenda that says, here's how we're on your side, middle America. Here are the policy changes that we want to make to create growth and create fairness, both to create opportunity and to sort of sustain the American dream. And I'm not sure, I'm not just not sure. I don't think that the second Trump presidency, that you could sit down and say, here is the Trump economic agenda that is an equivalent of even the Reagan agenda or before that, the Roosevelt agenda that most Americans would recognize. I think fundamentally Trump, Trump has built this new almost majority on as you keep saying anti left sentiment. And I think that to actually get to the point where it is a durable majority under Trump or any other figure, you would need to be able to say to the average voter, this is what Republican policymaking looks like and here's how it helps you. And I don't know, I don't think we're really close to being there. And I'll give you the last word.
- [53:55]
Reihan Salam
Well, one strange bookend is that we began by talking about how we came to our obsessions with domestic policy in the shadow of 9 11. And when you're looking at the political economy debates of this moment and what will unfold in the Trump presidency, it is about another set of geopolitical crises surrounding how to meet the challenge of China and our deep enmeshment with China and Chinese economic growth. And it could be that it's not going to be primarily about our dreams for how we reorder the American class system, how we redress American stratification, but rather just how are we forced to remake the American economy in what could be a wartime economy. That's something that I stay up late thinking about a lot. And the other thing I'll say about this coalition that I find interesting and exciting, we've talked about the changing ethnic character of the coalition I'm really interested in, and this is where our biographies diverge in what you might call the meritocracy voters. I'm really interested in these people who really care about opposing dei, let's say, who really care about public safety, urban chaos, and who are people who are more important in their influence than their numbers. Will a Trump presidency consolidate support within this group or will a reinvigorated center left be able to win them back? That, to me, is a really interesting question that intersects with a lot of what we've been talking about.
- [55:30]
Ross Douthat
Well, on that note, we've barely begun to consider the possibilities for a second Trump presidency. But then again, the second Trump presidency itself has not begun. So I'm sure that there will be opportunities for us to really live our misspent youth again again in the future. Raihan and for now, I just want to thank you for joining me.
- [55:51]
Reihan Salam
Thank you, sir.
- [56:15]
Ross Douthat
This episode was produced by Phoebe Lett, Sofia Alvarez Boyd and Andrea Batanzos. It was edited by Jordana Hochman. Our fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary, Marge Lacher and Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones, sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker and Aman Sahota. Mixing by Pat McCusker and Carol Sabaro. Audience Strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samuluski. Our director of audio is Annie Rose Strasser, and be sure to follow us on our YouTube channel, Interesting Times with Ross Douthat.