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- [00:00]
A
But the really big problem for the Democratic Party is it's viewed as to some degree the party of disorder. It's the view as the party of people sleeping on the streets, of crime, of disorder at the border, all of those sort of set of issues. And I do think those actually go together with the abundant stuff more than you might think. Right. Because I think for most voters, those are about whether government is working for them on the really kind of simple things that government does. Right. What abundance does is it's trying to center the really fundamental material challenges people have. And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.
- [00:53]
B
In the last months, there has been a big debate in the Democratic Party about the idea of abundance. Is one of the big problems that we have too much regulation, too many roadblocks to actually being able to do things like build new homes, get high speed rail from San Francisco to la, have more people enter the medical professions? And if so, is there a realistic set of policy ideas, a realistic set of electoral promises that can make those things happen? Well, Steve Tallis has written about this idea for a long time. He wrote a book with Brink Lindsay called the Captured Economy. And he has recently been writing a lot about how the movement for abundance can turn into a successful faction within the Democratic Party. And so I thought that he would be the perfect person to discuss both the substantive importance and appeal of these ideas, but also perhaps some of its electoral difficulties and liabilities with. Steve is a colleague of mine at Johns Hopkins University, where he's both in the SNF Agora Institute in Baltimore and a professor at the New School of government in Washington, D.C. we talked about what the account of the economic challenges of the moment is of the abundance movement. Why, for example, it is such a problem that we have far too few doctors in the United States. We had a pretty interesting debate about what an abundance faction might look like and whether it would actually be able to convince most normies, most people of pretty run of the mill cultural views, that this is something that needs addressing. We talked about the current state of the university, how universities can earn the trust of the bulk of a population, withstand the dangerous attacks on it from the current Trump administration, but also remedy some of the genuine problems with intellectual and ideological homogeneity that have arisen over the last years. And finally, in the part reserved for paying subscribers, we talk about how moderates, philosophical liberals can actually build political power. Steve has studied the conservative movement and how it has been so successful at investing in think tanks, magazines, the careers of students, building an esprit de corps. We talk about why it is so hard for philosophical leaders, liberals, to do the same, and how they might be able to do better. To listen to that part of the conversation, please support this podcast. Please become a paying subscriber. Please go to jaschamonk.substack.com. Steve Thallis welcome to the Vodcast.
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A
Thanks for having me on.
- [03:59]
B
It's a pleasure to see you in a context other than a faculty meeting
- [04:02]
A
that's almost got to be true. Almost anything short of being at a stress position is better than being in a faculty meeting.
- [04:10]
B
Ours, thankfully, are comparatively pleasant. I have to say that is true. I have a question to you about the Abundance Agenda, which has been discussed a lot in the last weeks and months. And you have a book that I read at the time and thought was really interesting with Brink Lindsey about some similar themes about the way in which all kind of regulations make it hard to build things in the United States, to do things in the United States. Do you think of that book as a precursor to the abundance movement? Is it different in some way? Sort of lay out for us what you argued back then and how that relates to a discussion that we're having at the moment?
- [04:51]
A
Yeah, so I think certainly Ezra and Derek would say that their book draws on a lot of stuff that came before and the idea of abundance. The word sort of comes from Derek, but there's a lot of people who've been working on similar themes for a long time. So Brink, Lindsay and I published this book called the Captured economy back in 2017, and the basic argument of that was that the economy had been simultaneously growing slower and getting more unequal. And this was sort of a paradox. If you had cut your teeth reading Arthur Okun's Equality Deficiency when you were in school, that was not a thing that was supposed to happen. There's supposed to be a big trade off between growth and inequality. And we said that we've been getting a decline in growth and a increase in inequality, and that's because of sort of pervasive rent seeking. Right. So the story of the and so
- [05:53]
B
what are some of those examples of rent seeking? I imagine you're talking, for example, about the fact that there's a real shortage of doctors in the United States, not because nobody wants to be a doctor, not because nobody would be able to become a doctor, but because sort of the medical associations are limiting how medical schools found, how many people can go to.
- [06:12]
A
So the basic idea in the book is that the usual story we tell the 80s and 90s is it's neoliberalism, right, which suggests it's markets that have run rampant and we deregulated everything and that led to an explosion of inequality. And we say, for example, there's an enormous growth in occupational licensing, for example, in medicine, like you were just describing, throughout this period. This is not a period of deregulation. It's in fact a period in which there's a sustained regulatory bias toward upward redistribution. So the book is largely about this theme of upward redistribution, the degree to which the relatively affluent and advantaged have been able to rig the rules for their benefit. Right? Now that again explains why you can get declining growth. Because there's lower innovation, there's lower dynamism, and so you don't get like lots of new products and ways of organizing economic activity. But it's also the case that the incumbents can protect themselves against competition. And that's doctors, finance, lawyers. And then in housing, right, which we know we've talked a lot about, we talk about in the book, that people who are already the incumbents in the housing market can protect themselves against competition from new supply, which drives up prices. And when you add all that up,
- [07:39]
B
so in housing, just to understand that that's a fancy way of saying that if you already own a home, then your interest is potentially in driving up home prices, since a lot of your net worth is probably bound up in that home that you own. That is in the short term interest at least of people who already own homes. But it makes life incredibly difficult for those who don't own a home, who therefore find homeownership more and more out of the reach, et cetera. And the long term impact of this is that housing is really expensive when it really wouldn't need to be. Yeah.
- [08:08]
A
And so basically that's true in almost any case where there's an incumbent, right? Almost any incumbent wants, having gotten whatever position or resources they've got, they want to prevent competition from the outside, right? Competition from new homeowners, competition from new doctors. And so the story really of the last 40 years is those incumbent anti competitive interests have, have won, right? And so again, that's the opposite to the neoliberalism narrative that many people are comfortable with, right? Is that this is a period of actual increasing regulation, increasing market constraint. And I do think that fits into the general abundant story, right? There's a reason why that is part of the prehistory of abundance, because again, it tells a very different story than the neoliberalism story. It tells a story about how our dynamism is breaking down, our ability to build things are breaking down because we have all of these anti competitive cartelized kind of markets. And so there's a similar, if you look at, you know, the people who people in abundance talk about, there's, you know, always a very clear reference back to Mansur Olson and the idea that economies generally get sort of break down and sand gets in the gears over time as you get anti competitive cartels building up. And you see even people on the very far left and the very far right of the abundance spectrum have that general way of thinking about the political problem. Right. That the political problem is Gulliver getting tied down by the Lilliputians. Right. It's all these small anti competitive interests that grow up in a democratic society. And we need to find some way to actually get majoritarianism. So I recently published a paper called Minoritarianism is Everywhere. But I think both in the captured economy and in the, in the abundance narrative, that's the general power story that's behind it.
- [10:17]
B
Great. And so we had this book by Ezra Klein, director Thompson, Abundance, a little while ago that really sort of built on this idea and then got very quickly polarized. To what extent do you think that book is a continuation of what you were saying? To what extent is it saying something different and new? And to what extent do you think it gets things right or wrong?
- [10:38]
A
Yeah, so I think in the way the direct continuity you can see through a paper that I wrote with Sam Hammond and Dan Takish for Niskanen center called Cost Disease Socialism, which built in a way on the captured economy argument. But at that time a lot of Democrats were out there proposing all kind of new subsidies for this or that right, for healthcare, for housing, for lots of other things. And the basic argument of the paper was if you've got a supply constrained domain, right, you've got something where somebody's able to keep supply from adjusting to demand and you add more money, you add more subsidy. That subsidy can only get processed through the price. It doesn't actually make it more available. It just pushes the price up.
- [11:30]
B
And therefore, just to explain that intuition to people who perhaps don't have an economics background, right? I mean, imagine that there's 10 places for schools in your local area. Let's imagine there's no public schools in some area. There's only private schools and there's 10 spots and 15 kids. And obviously all the parents want to send their kids to those schools. And because there's very strong demand and limited supply presumably those private schools are going to be able to charge enormous amount of money. Now, let's say that the government says this is a problem, we want to fix this. It's impossible for parents to pay $50,000 a year to send the kids to school. We're going to subsidize every kid with $25,000. Now, if that allowed new people to open up new schools and offer new places for kids, then that might actually bring the cost down. But if there's regulatory constraint, if the incumbents, the existing school is basically able to stop any new school from getting approved and they don't have an incentive in increasing the number of kids that they themselves admit, then all that happens is that those 15 parents now have more financial resources to compete with for those 10 existing spots. And so actually what's going to happen is just that the price of these spots is going to go up, but five kids are still going to be without a spot at those. Am I roughly capturing this?
- [12:46]
A
Yeah. The same intuition works in health care, right? If it's impossible to get new doctors, nurses, hospitals, and you add more subsidy because people can't afford it, that subsidy is just going to be, is just going to go into the pocket of the provider. And the same thing is true in healthcare.
- [13:04]
B
As a side note on healthcare, I think that's something that's really interesting to me in the American debate, because whether it is people who want to emulate something like the British National Health Service or that's more centrist or center right reforms of the healthcare system, I'm struck by the fact that virtually nobody wants to talk A about the artificial limits on the number of doctors that we've alluded to a number of times in this conversation. But B, even more so on the very, very high salaries of medical professional professionals in the United States. I mean, nurses in the United States make more than doctors make in most European countries. And it's just a simple question of arithmetic that if the median American household makes 60, $70,000 a year and they need a certain number of hours of medical professionals intersecting with them in order to help deliver their child, in order to help diagnose their diseases, in order to perform an operation on them that are seriously sick. So, you know, if a doctor is making 500,000 and the nurse is making well north of 100,000, it's just going to be incredibly expensive or bordering on impossible for average people to pay for those services. I mean, in the end, it's just a question of kind of basic underlying arithmetic. And I'M struck by the fact that people don't talk about their marriage. Now, I know that doctor salaries, nurse salaries is not the lion's share of healthcare, but I do think that there's just an underlying problem there that people across the political spectrum aren't really willing to face head on.
- [14:33]
C
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- [14:51]
D
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- [15:27]
C
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- [15:33]
A
Yeah, and I think the thing that both captured economy and the cost of these socialism paper and abundance all have in common is the idea that in fact this is a problem that people across the ideological spectrum need to face. And so in the Constitution socialism paper we argued whether you want to get to single payer or you want to get to an environment like Paul Ryan wanted where people are paying for more of their own healthcare privately, you can't get to either one. If you've got a system where the price pressure is so far up, right? With single payer you can't get there because you'll never be able to afford it, right? Every time you put in more money in order to allow people to buy health care, it's just going to send the price back up and then you're going to have to. You're going to be in the subsidy cycle. And similarly, if the price is so high that people are constantly going to the government trying to get them to help out, then you're never going to get them to cover the health Care themselves. And so the basic idea is you got to solve the supply problem if we want to go either left or right. And that explains to some degree the degree to which we feel stuck. We feel like we can't get anywhere either left or right because all these supply problems make these things immune, either the left or right categories of solutions.
- [16:59]
B
So I think that helps to lay out, you know, a lot of the intellectual groundwork for the kind of movement that has arisen around those issues over the last 10 years, including on the most obvious area that we've sort of touched on, but not being very explicit about, which is, you know, housing regulation and the so called yimby movement. Right. So traditionally the people who've been very strong are the so called NIMBYs for people who say, not in my backyard, who are all in favor of, you know, housing, renewable energy, all kinds of things. But if somebody wants to put a windmill in their neighborhood, if somebody wants to put up a house in their neighborhood, they're saying no, that's going to change the character of our neighborhood. That can lead to new traffic. That's going to lead in an honest moment, they might say to a quit with wrong kind of people moving in. We don't want any of that. And we have seen some success in the last years, including some recent legislative moves in California and elsewhere towards a more yimby environment where people are saying no. Perhaps we do need some amount of greater flexibility in being able to build these new kind of forms of housing. And there's, I think, some excitement about the idea that that could stand at the core of the message of a reformed Democratic Party. That the Democratic Party could go towards being a somewhat more aspirational party, but actually talks about material abundance in these kind of terms. Now, I have sort of two reasons why I'm somewhat skeptical about how likely that is to happen. And I'd love to run this by you, and I know that you've thought very carefully about this issue. The first is that instinctively, I think a lot of not the voters necessarily of Democratic Party, but the kind of donors, intellectual leaders, et cetera, still come from an academic and intellectual background where the instinct is to see problems rather than to want to do things. Where the instinct is always to say, but what about the adverse environmental effect, even if it's quite minor, of some kind of initiative, rather than to be excited about trying to do something and change something and build something. And the second goes back to the power of the incumbents. A lot of Americans are sitting on housing, wealth and even though it is obviously in the long run a huge own goal for a country to make it so hard to build housing, but we are all struggling to pay these artificially high housing prices, whether in the form of rent or whether in the form of mortgages, either. A lot of people already own a home and the short term interest is certainly in trying to preserve those property values or in driving them up further than they are at the moment. It's going to be very hard to make a political case for these kind of changes. So my hunch on the abundance movement is that it is right in the merits, but in terms of making it the center of an electoral platform, it is a very, very uphill struggle and it may never succeed. So what is your thinking on this?
- [19:59]
A
So politically I have so one, I've been thinking a lot about varieties of abundance recently, that there are in fact abundances across the entire left right spectrum. So we just nominated somebody for mayor of New York who at least claims to be in the category of, you know, left abundance or Red Plenty or whatever you want to call it. Right. You know, who does recognize that there are all these coalitional problems. I always, I always say, you know, the joke is you can't get the full communism through the National Environmental Protection Act. You know, you're going to have to, if you really want to do really big things through public ownership, you're not going to be able to do it through the whole panoply of procedural systems we created in the 1970s. And there are people on the right, which I've sort of jokingly called dark abundance, who also are recognizing we have now they have other kinds of things they think stand the way they think, you know, what, what they call wokeness stands in the way of abundance. They think that's the, the original source of all the seeds on the everything bagel. Right. And therefore we have to get rid of that. So one, one pathway through the political success of abundance is it's going to infect everything. It's going to affect every ideology, but it's going to appear differently given the thing that people are most worried they can't build. Right. So there are people on the right and they're most worried that they're not going to be able to build battleships in order to counter China. Right. And they need to build internal state capacity in the Defense Department and our ability to have a defense industrial base. Right. And obviously the people on the, on, you know, on the left right. There's one category I always call like Cascadian Abundance, which is, you know, Washington, Oregon. Right. What they want is, you know, a massive, rapid transition to green energy. But in some ways, many of the things, the same obstacles stand in the way. So that's one pathway is just that there's abundances across the whole political spectrum. Now there's a separate question about. And again, I've written a pretty widely read piece called Building an Abundance Faction that's about building a specific thing inside the Democratic Party. And the argument I make there is that abundance as an economic agenda, as a way to get growth going, to increase opportunity, to get more housing, goes together with what I would just call sort of being a cultural normie and that there's an elective affinity there between those two things. They're not necessarily supported by the same people. But if you think about what's the coalition that could sort of break the power of the old interest group liberalism, plus the far left that's been dominating the Democratic Party, it's going to be some combination of people who are motivated by abundance and growth and people who worry that the Democratic Party has gotten too far out of its skis on crime, on schools, on social disorder, on homelessness, on all those other things. And you can already see that in a way in San Francisco. Right. The winning coalition, even in San Francisco now, is this weird coalition of people who are abundance on housing and economic growth and who, you know, got rid of the previous prosecutor in DA in San Francisco, Chesa Boudin, who repealed, you know, who took out the people who are in the school board. And those things really do fit together. Right. Abundance on its own has to be matched with a kind of cultural appeal that it doesn't have on its own, but I think actually fits with it politically and coalitionally.
- [23:57]
B
So I'm very predisposed to like this idea for a number of reasons, but I'll spell out. But I also have one concern about whether I fully agree. So the first thing I agree with is that I think there's a lot of temptation by people who have focus on economic questions and who aren't necessarily on the far left on some of these cultural issues to say, let's just change the topic. What they want to do is to say one of the reasons, for example, why left wing social Democratic parties, some Democratic Party in the United States are doing less well, is that they no longer really have an economic promise to their historic core electorate. So what we need to do is to have a credible story to tell about how people are going to be doing better, including perhaps some amount of redistribution. And instead of talking about those losing culture war issues, instead of addressing immigration and trans rights and all of those kinds of things, we should just change the topic and focus on those economic things. And the reason why I've long thought that that's not going to work is that you first have to assure people that you are. Normie. Right. You first have to assure people that you are not captured by deeply unpopular and alienating ideas. And so if you change your topic.
- [25:15]
A
Yeah, I was interrupt on that. I mean, that assumes that you have control of what the topic is, which is a weird assumption in politics because politics is a strategic interaction where your opponent gets a say in what the topic is, too. Right. And so that's where the idea that you can simply keep your whatever, unappetizing set of issues and then move it over, and obviously you want a sufficiently attractive economic message that more of the conversation gets on that. But that isn't a way to get out of the fact that you've got a bunch of unappetizing cultural kind of offerings.
- [25:55]
B
Not exactly. And that, by the way, is a subset, I think, of a form of wishful thinking that is very strong on the left because the left is now so strongly dominated by people who have spent a lot of their lives in academia and to some extent media and so on, that if only the New York Times reframed how it talks about some issue, or if only the New York Times never acknowledged the existence of debate about things like youth, gender, medicine, or if only the New York Times didn't talk about the fact that a lot of people crossed the southern border during Biden's term, these issues wouldn't be in the public debate and people like Trump wouldn't be able to exploit them. And I think that's just incredibly naive about the extent to which those kind of institutions ever controlled the agenda, and certainly about the extent to which they control the agenda in 2025. So to go back to where we're at, I agree with you that Democrats need to address those cultural things without necessarily becoming focused on them, but they need to assure people that they're addressing them. And the second point I agree with you, of course, on is that a lot of the positions with which the Democratic Party is currently associated are deeply, innocuously unpopular and are a huge problem to the Democrats being able to win elections, even against people like Donald Trump. Now, here's where I think I might disagree with you, which is that so to what extent there is this cultural affinity between abundance people and the cultural normies the people who are relatively tolerant, progressive on cultural issues, but who are allergic to any kind of overly academic, overly radical extreme positions on these things. Which to say that I think a lot of the abundance people are cultural normies, but that doesn't mean that most of the cultural normies are abundance people. I think there really are at least three out of those four quadrants. There's gonna be people who are far left in culture and who are much more defensive of the kind of regulations, the kind of sludge that is historically built up. There may not be very many people who are very culturally left and really into yimbyism, really into abundance, et cetera. That seems to me like a relatively unoccupied quadrant. There definitely are going to be some normies who like economic growth, who think that we should be building more housing, who think we should be building high speed rail, who think we should be doing all of those things. But I think there's also going to be a lot of cultural normies who, when you ask them about all kinds of issues in the cultural sphere, have pretty reasonable opinions, who are pretty tolerant, modern people in 2025, but they're not woke. They are quite allergic to some of that stuff. But when you ask them about building new housing in the neighborhood, their instincts to say no. When you ask them about cutting some of that regulations at some level of obstruction, they might say yes, but the moment that means that they might be looking at a windmill somewhere in the distance from the house, they say this is terrible and destroying our landscape and we absolutely don't want that. Aren't there a lot of cultural normies who are gonna have a pretty strong NIMBY instinct, whether out of sort of cultural predilection or just out of material self interest? Because for example, they already are those incumbents who own a home.
- [29:12]
A
To make sense of my position on this, I think you have to understand that what I call the sort of factional theory of party that underlies it. Right. So the basic idea here is we've gotten used to more coherent homogenous parties than make sense for the United States, or make sense for any country, but especially for a country as big as the United States. I always use the example of Holland, which is not a very big country, Right. But has an enormous number of parties with representation in the legislature. They have a social Democratic party, they have a far left party, they have far right parties. They have the party for animals that actually has the name of an actual party that has representation in the legislature. And that makes sense because they have a more parliamentary style of representation. The United States has two parties. And so we have to take all that heterogeneity, more heterogeneity than they have in Holland, and somehow make it work inside of two parties. And historically, the way we've done that is our parties have been institutionally factionalized, right? That is, they've been tents in which a number of groups that are more like European parties are sort of captured, right? So you can imagine that back in the 1950s, that the Democratic Party has a union kind of faction, it's got a southern Democratic faction, it has a northern political machine kind of faction. And a party like that works by negotiating, right? It works by having primaries where you figure out whose relative strength there is, and then they have to somehow come back together. So they're what I would describe as frenemies, right? They're both enemies for who's going to have the most power in the party and then their friends when they're facing the other party. So my theory of abundance is not that the entire Democratic Party is going to become an abundance normie party, it's that we've already got a left DSA faction. We've already got the sort of old coke Democratic, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi interest group coalition, right? What we don't have is a faction that doesn't have to be. It doesn't have to be anywhere near a majority that combines abundance on economics and normie on social issues, right? But that's enough to get the party big enough to be consistently not just competitive, but be a big enough coalition to actually keep out this sort of mago, right? And so the theory here is, right, it's both about, like, how do you get power in the Democratic Party, but also how do you get the Democratic Party big enough? And I think the thing we've seen with the last few elections is, you know, whether it's Harris or Biden or whoever, they can, you know, if they're going to win, they're just going to sneak by, which means they're trying to squeeze just the last drop out of a coalition that's fundamentally too small. And so the aspiration here is that the creation of a new faction inside the Democratic Party that's competing for preeminence, that's part of that negotiated deal, which is, you know, you think about 2020, that's exactly what Biden and the left of the Warren and Sanders people did, right? They had a primary, Biden won, or, you know, he stole it, depending on who you're, you know, who you're talking to. But then just like a coalitional party, everybod got around the table and they said, okay, well that's the division of who won. But now we're going to divide up the spoils. So Warren got a lot of appointments in the, in the Biden administration. Sanders got people put places. If you had an abundance faction that was part of that internal negotiation, then the personnel of the party would have to represent that the message of the party. There would be more sort of pushback on some of the cultural issues as opposed to just having a kind of internally homogenous discussion. And so that's the theory is, even if it's just 10 or 15 or 20%, that's enough to actually get the party big enough to win and to push back against its crazier kind of internal dynamics.
- [33:39]
E
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- [34:09]
B
So perhaps we're getting too in the weeds here. I guess my question is still why do you should those two things be married to each other rather than be independent? I mean, why shouldn't we have an abundance caucus within the Democratic Party which is pushing for all of these kind of policies, but which isn't necessarily taking sides in the cultural fights of a party? And perhaps there would be some people who are relatively far on the left and cultural issues who might join that kind of caucus. And why conversely, shouldn't we have a cultural moderation caucus, which to some extent we have a Democratic party, though it's not nearly sufficiently activated, that could include some people who might be on the NIMBY side on all kinds of things. And if we have that, then we might need to have representation of each of those factions in the party. And perhaps having two factions fighting for this is gonna be even more influential because even more of these people are gonna have to be sitting around the table. Why think that sort of. Again, I agree with the importance of each of those things. Why should that be one faction rather than Two factions, given that there are issues at stake that, at least in theory, can be separated from each other. And there's going to be at least some voters, a lot of voters, but even some representatives, I think, who would get on board with a cultural moderation piece, but wouldn't get on board with the abundance piece.
- [35:38]
A
So I would say first that there are economies of scale in factions. Right. If you want to actually push back against the existing power centers of the party, you do need a large enough sort of group that can itself have its own internal heterogeneity. So I think, you know, there are going to be people who are going to be more leaning toward. Again, the other thing is to say I don't really like cultural moderation because I think the really damaging set of issues for Democrats are more around social order. I think the trans stuff is a problem, too. But the really big problem for the Democratic Party is it's viewed as, to some degree, the party of disorder. It's the view as the party of people sleeping on the streets, of crime, of disorder at the border, all of those sort of set of issues. And I do think those actually go together with the abundance stuff more than you might think. Right. Because I think for most voters, those are about whether government is working for them on the really kind of simple things that government does. Right. What abundance does is it's trying to center the really fundamental material challenges people have and the challenges of raising their kids about whether or not the general, you know, whether the university they send them to seems completely, you know, crazy. You know, that's a public most. For most people, that's a public service. Right. They want to think that that public service is serving the relatively normal preferences that they have. The same thing with police, same thing with border stuff. So I actually think those go together. The emphasis on material issues, on economics, right. Really simple like can you afford housing? Can you afford health care? And the, you know, is the government keeping you safe? Is it operating schools that you can send your kids to with a relatively high level of confidence that's trying to center those relatively normal considerations as opposed to constantly pushing the cultural envelope with things that seem eccentric, that are not really appealing to what most voters really care about?
- [37:59]
B
A couple of thoughts on this. One is just, I guess, semantic. It's not clear to me why those bread and butter, very important public order issues can't be framed in terms of cultural moderation. It seems to me that how people think about that is, for example, yes, I too am concerned about police violence in general. Police violence against African Americans in particular, that is a very reasonable concern. If it leads you to the conclusion that we should defund the police, that is ridiculous. That is a form of extremism, right? I am a cultural moderate. I think that that is way out there. Yes. I think that we should treat immigrants humanely and that dreamers, for example, deserve a road to citizenship. But if the Biden administration puts in place policies that lead to a huge surge of people coming across the border, that is a form of extremism driven by a set of cultural values that I strongly disagree with. You know, I'm a cultural moderate. I don't like that kind of cultural extremism. So the first point is, you know, why is it that you only seem to want to apply the term of cultural moderation to topics which, you know, if you listen to somebody like Sarah Longwell and her podcast and focus groups, I think is also very important to a lot of voters. But it's, I agree with you, perhaps ultimately less important than the public order stuff. But why only apply that term of public order to that? The second related question, which perhaps a little bit more substantive, is aren't you underplaying to what extent these two concerns can actually cross cut? So if somebody is a homeowner in a nice but not incredibly affluent neighborhood and they feel that neighborhood over which is a little bit poorer, a little bit less affluent, things have started to go out of hand a little bit. Crime is up, public order is a problem over there, Perhaps there's some drug dealing going on, et cetera, and you're coming in with an abundance agenda, which again I on the substant, I think is absolutely right in saying we're going to upzone your neighborhood, there's going to be new people coming in. That person who might be a complete cultural normie is going to say, hang on a second. My worry here is that we are going to bring the disorder to this neighborhood. That is precisely why this idea of we don't want the character of a neighborhood to change is such a dog whistle in those kind of contexts. That comes sometimes from a. I think in the long run counterproductive, I think sometimes perhaps shortsighted, but ultimately in some ways understandable concern about those kind of public order issues.
- [40:37]
A
Well, let me actually answer that question in two ways. One is, I actually think substantively yimby and public order go together, right? Not politically, but substantively. Because if you do want more housing, if you do want people to be able to build, I think you need to guarantee them that those new neighbors are not going to be a source of public order. And so I do think there's like a credible commitment thing there that, yes, we do want more housing, we want apartments being built, but somebody is going to be on, on top of that, right? Somebody's going to be making sure that, you know, again, most of the people who are going to be moving in also want police protection and order maintenance. So there's not really a conflict there. So long as, as you were suggesting, right. Police are serving the public. Right. So long as they're, you know, they're not actually a source of risk or harm themselves. And that's why those two things are, you know, go together, right? Having police that actually are out there, they're aggressive, they're trying to prevent crime, and they're well trained not to abuse citizens. So one thing is, I'll say those go together. If you want people to accept more housing, they have to believe it's not going to be a source of social order. And you have to be able to credibly make that argument. And that's why policing and increasing policing and these things go together politically. The other thing I would say is I don't think there's any natural. There's no things that naturally go together in politics. So I'm influenced by Hans Noel's, you know, book on political parties that argues that both liberal and conservatism were not like these assemblages of positions that just fit naturally together. If you think about, you know, fusionism and conservatism, the idea that sort of Cold War hawkishness and religious conservatism and free markets, right. That those things are not natural. Right. Somebody did political work to convince people that those things fit together and to think about policies that made them work together. And so that's a, you know, again, as we, as we say in our business, that's a socially constructed coalition as opposed to a natural coalition. And social construction is a thing that political entrepreneurs do. And so that's why, again, I think part of this project of actually making this work, of actually getting abundance to have enough power to actually get leverage inside the Democratic Party and in national politics, you have to make that thing feel natural in a way that it doesn't necessarily always fit together. You have to emphasize the places where there's an affinity between those two things. And that's what coalition builders and makers do. And that's why, you know, I'm, you know, again, me and math Matteo Glacis I feel like text to each other all the time about how people don't get this connection. Right. They think you can do abundance and still have a lot of weird, exotic cultural politics. But if you really want to make this a power center over long periods of time, somebody has to make that affinity. Part of that is also pulling people from the sidelines of politics. It's not changing the minds of the previously mobilized. But a lot of normies are simply turned off by a politics that's dominated by the kinds of issues we're talking about. And this is even true in universities, elite universities. Right. If you think about the way that politics happens somewhere like Hopkins, where we both teach, there's a lot of normies out there. 75% of our campus are STEM majors who kind of often think that the political categories that are shaped by the people in the rest of the universities are just weird and don't speak to them. But a lot of those people, especially engineers, have a vocation of making stuff. You could politicize that if you wanted and that would change the mix of people who are involved in politics. Just to go back to the housing thing, even the housing thing is more complicated because if you think about a lot of the yimby issues, yes. If you're going to build like more housing down the street and that increases supply, well, maybe that decreases the value of your own home. If you increase the possibility that you can subdivide your house. Right. Or build an ADU in the backyard, then deregulating actually increases the value of your. Of your house. Right? Because now you can actually subdivide it into two properties that are worth more than just one single family house are. So again, this is another one where I think there are ways to appeal even to incumbents in the housing market. But somebody has to do that work. You can't simply just deny that there's a potential problem there. Some political entrepreneur has to be creating policies that address that potential conflict and then find ways to bring those people into a coalition with other people. They may agree on other stuff.
- [45:50]
F
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- [46:18]
B
I think you're pretty convincing on that. I'll just Say one more thing to put a pin on this conversation, which is that there's always a tendency to think that the set of policies one favors are also the set of policies that are going to be electorally popular in primary elections. People nearly always believe that the candidate that they favor on substantive and normative grounds is also going to be the candidate who's most likely to win the general election. And I think that often isn't the case. And one of the areas where for me, my instincts go furthest apart is some of this abundance stuff. It seems to me that for the well being of Americans and for people in other countries that have their own problems of abundance as well, including I'm currently in Europe during a heat wave. The strange European idea that, you know, it's perfectly fine for the environment to heat your house to your content in the winter, but if you air condition any building in the summer, then somehow the globe's environment is going to explode. You know, I think an abundance agenda that proselytizes the advantages of having air conditioning in Southern Europe would certainly be good for Europe as well. So on substantive grounds, I'm very much in favor of the abundance agenda. I worry that some of my friends and colleagues and comrades in this fight, I suppose, are understating the extent to which in the short run it's going to be an electoral liability. Now, in the long run, by the way, it's very important for Democratic Party to show that it can govern. The contrast between California and Texas at the moment is very damaging to Democrats. So being able to govern on an abundance agenda is something that could improve the party's brand in the long run. I just worry that there is an understatement of how hard it is going to be to put that message out there in a way that is electorally winning rather than losing. But since you mentioned universities, I want to talk a little bit about that, which is a related issue, but a distinct issue as well. How is it? So first of all, what do you think the university environment is like nowadays? I think it's hard to speak about the shortcomings of universities at the moment because I think they are real and of long standing. And at the same time, there is a very dangerous political attack on universities that I think sees them as its enemies to such an extent that it just wants to weaken them as institutions of American social life, which is bad for a number of reasons. So first of all, how do you assess what the remaining strengths of universities are, but where some of the concerns about the ideological monoculture are well justified. And secondly, how do you think that the sort of academic milieu, the extent that nearly everybody who has anything to say in the Democratic Party now is a product of elite universities in a way that just wasn't the case 50 years ago, is shaping and misshaping the broader intellectual conversation, especially on the left and perhaps the center in the United States.
- [49:28]
A
Yeah, so that's a lot to chew on. First of all, to say my theory of universities, which I laid out in a piece that was in national affairs last summer on academic sectarianism, is that there is a problem in the politics of professors. Right. I think that there is a. In the sense that there is what I would call sort of selective recruitment into the profession, that, you know, there's not like some normative standard that we can say that we know what the political preferences of the population of professors ought to be, and that until we get it up to there, we're. We're missing the mark. I think that would be a weird thing to think. But on the other hand, I think there's clearly their self selection out of academia because people look at who's in academia now and they assume that it's not for them. There's lots of disciplines where the things people study seem not to reflect the kind of interest that they have. The obvious ones people keep talking about are like sociology of the military or military history in the history studies of religion, lots of other subjects like that which used to actually be major subjects that are not. That are not in. But a lot of people who are either somewhere between normie and conservative look at the absence of those subjects and they conclude that the field's not for them. Right. And they look at who's going into graduate school now, which again, my perception is significantly further left even than when I was in grad school, and, you know, has more of an activist conception of what the job of a grad student is. Right. Than it was when I was in grad school. And then people look at that and say, well, that's not for me. I might be interested in books, I'd be interested in research. But if that's what it is, then it clearly isn't for me. And so in that process becomes kind of recursive. And that's what's happened in academia. And that that's a problem, I think, for society, it's a problem for research, because research, you know, needs internal conflict. It needs people asking questions about the footnotes, rerunning the model, doing all that in a way that you really need motivated cognition for. Right. That is doing good scholarship doesn't come out of people being neutral. It comes out of the process of people having motivation, having ideological motivation to go and do all the checking and push people on assumptions and everything else. So that's my theory of what's wrong with academia. I don't think, Joe, I think we should try and work on all that so that academia serves its own ends better, so that universities are better for students, they produce better research. I do not believe in any way that's going to prevent what this current administration is doing. Right. I think Johns Hopkins, our university, has had a president who's been as far out on these issues as anybody. Right. Who's been, you know, we've created a partnership with AI. We're doing, we're building a new school of government that I'm sitting in right now that is going to have ideological diversity as a founding value. And we got all of our grants cut too. Right. So I think, you know, the people who think that this is going to give them, like Chris Ruffo repellent are entirely wrong. There seems to be no evidence that the MAGA kind of people discriminate between the people who are actually trying to work on these issues and the people who are not.
- [53:17]
B
Well, I largely agree with that. But just to say first that thankfully, so far as I understand, Johns Hopkins has not so far been in the direct firing line of the administration in the way that Harvard and Columbia has been. So Johns Hopkins has lost a lot of funding because Hopkins is very good at getting federal funding because it's excellent in STEM and other things. But from my understanding, there hasn't been a direct attack on Hopkins in the way there has been in most universities. More importantly, I think it's a question of where the reasonable public is going to shake out. Ten years ago, a majority of Americans had a positive opinion of higher education. And if that was still the case, it might be somewhat more difficult for the Trump administration to be doing what we're doing now. But the Trump administration is doing plenty of unpopular things, things and plenty of things that are pretty far out there. So who knows? But when I'm thinking about over the course of 20 or 30 years, where will the willingness of the American public to invest in things like high level research grants that allow universities to do basic research into really important things shake out 20 or 30 years from now? What will the American public's willingness to tolerate endowments that have some amount of tax favorite status shake out? These questions are going to matter a lot. So I don't think we have a disagreement on that. So in the short run I don't think this makes a huge difference. But there is beyond the most important question of how do universities live up to their mission. Also a question of these universities rely on the goodwill of a taxpayer and what can they do so that the average taxpayer looks at these universities and says I don't agree with everything that's taught at universities, I don't agree with everything this university does. But I can recognize the value that these universities provide to our country. And that I think is a legitimate question to ask and is responsive to some of the things that universities do or don't do.
- [55:19]
A
I mean, I do think now again, when I think about the things that really damage universities reputations, I actually think that a lot of the protests and sit downs and everything that came after the attack on Israel really damaged university. Right. Because it really again seemed like universities were taking a side in a very highly conflictual way that you know, again, if the people who were, who were sitting in at Columbia were all protesting against Americans open immigration policy, right. And they, you know, again those people have, as far as I can tell, a lot of camping equipment and guns, right. If that was them, right. Universities would not have been treating them the way they were treating protesters against Israel's policy in Gaza. Right. I think people saw that. Right. And again this goes back to my point about order. You know, a large percentage of Americans just don't like social disorder. Right. And that got read as universities allowing social disorder being. And again this had happened all over universities. And you go Back to the 1960s, Ronald Reagan ran largely on the mess in Berkeley. And by the mess in Berkeley he meant protests. I actually think there's a question that we need to be answering about whether we even think protest is a natural thing to be part of the package of the things we do in universities. And this is my, one of my most far out positions is I think there's, you know, we sort of assume that this was part of the all American university experience in the same way that, you know, sports and fraternities are, that, you know, protest is also part of that package. And I think, just like I actually think maybe we need to rethink how much sports and fraternities are part of our university experience. I think there's a real question of whether protest inevitably in a residential learning environment has a kind of menacing quality. And it's also not the thing we're supposed to be doing. The thing we're supposed to be doing is learning how to argue with each other and discuss with each other, and protesting is actually just something different. And so I do kind of wonder whether one of the responses at university should not just be getting more ideological diversity, but it should also be returning in some ways back to our knitting, which is reading, sitting together, discussing, rather than all these other things we've added onto the university experience.
- [58:12]
B
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the podcast. In the rest of this conversation, Steve and I discuss how philosophical liberals can build political power. We look back at the conservative movement and look at how institutions from National Review to the Federalist Society have been able to actually build power for the movement. We discuss why it is so hard to get major foundations and even individual donors who care about philosophically liberal values to invest in similar infrastructure. And we think about how that might be able to change to listen to this part of the conversation, please become a paying subscriber. Please go to jaschamonk.substack.com thank you so much for listening. Listening to the Good Fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about the show. If you two have been enjoying the podcast, please be liked. Rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about it, share it on Facebook or Twitter. And finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to goodfightpodmail.com that's goodfightpodmail.com
- [59:25]
A
this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License. Thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces.