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The Opinions
America's Next Story: Bret Stephens
00:29:30
The columnist believes America’s real political contest is in the center.
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Podcast Host/Announcer
This is the Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.
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David Leonhardt
I'm David Leonhart, an editorial director in New York Times Opinion, and this is America's Next Story, a series about the ideas that once held our country together and those that might do so again.
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GiveWell Sponsor
We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, ask not what.
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Bret Stephens
Your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country, that America is too great for small dreams.
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David Leonhardt
Change is what's happening in America, and.
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Bret Stephens
We will make America great again. God bless you and good night.
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David Leonhardt
I love you. As we come to the end of the year and the end of this series, I wanted to have conversations with a couple of my colleagues. I'm starting today with Bret Stephens, a columnist. As a traditional conservative, Bret no longer has a comfortable home in President Trump's Republican Party, but it's worth remembering that 2028 isn't that far away. And so I wanted to ask Brett whether the next election was an opportunity to rescue conservatism from Trump's warped version of it. What would that new version of conservatism look like? And if that doesn't happen, where does it leave conservatives like Bre. Rhett, thanks for being here.
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Bret Stephens
Good to be with you, David.
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David Leonhardt
So you once identified as a Republican. How do you describe your political affiliation now?
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Bret Stephens
I guess I'm in transition, is one answer. No, actually, the reverse is true. I remember growing up, my parents would often say they didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left them. And that's how they became kind of Reagan conservatives. The line was not original to them, but they were reflecting on their experience of being sort of Adlai Stevenson, Kennedy democrats in the 60s who were turned off by some of the radicalism in the party in the late 60s and 1970s. And now I find myself saying I didn't leave the Republican Party, the Republican Party left me.
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David Leonhardt
And that I think, very much conjures up Ronald Reagan for me and what we've been doing with this podcast series is trying to talk about the stories that America tells itself. And I would argue, I'd guess you agree, that the most successful political storyteller of the second half of the 20th century in the United States was Ronald Reagan. He told this story about freedom, about capitalism, about American confidence and American exceptionalism that was highly influential. And I think it's fair to consider the United States as living in the Reagan era from the 1980s through the early 2010s. I also think the Reagan era has ended. Do you agree with that?
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Bret Stephens
Well, it has, and that's a shame, because the Reagan era, at its core, was optimistic about American possibility. What you have today amongst conservatives, and certainly with the president, is essentially a pervasive pessimism about the future of liberal democracy. The idea that ultimately free citizens sorting out their problems through experiment and collaboration, the contestation of ideas, is going to yield good results. The conservatism that Trump expresses, I think is better classified as illiberalism. That's to say, you know, a set of ideas, often based in kind of ethnicity or race or place, that may have something in common with kind of the conservative traditions of Europe, but have much less in common with the conservative traditions of the United States. At its heart, there's a kind of a dark vision of the future, the future of the free world, a real pessimism or doubt about whether liberal societies can succeed. And I've never shared that pessimism. And so that's one of the many reasons why from the beginning, Trump simply left me cold as a traditional Reaganite Republican.
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David Leonhardt
You and I, in different ways, both lament that Trumpian pessimism. But I do want to try to give it its due in one way, which is understand why so many Americans found it attractive, find it attractive. And I think there is something important there about the failures of the last several decades, including the failures of Reaganite conservatism, which I don't think that Reaganite conservatism delivered on what it promised in terms of broad based, consistent increases in Americans living standards. And I don't think you totally agree with me about that. And so I'm interested, maybe not. I'm interested in both. I'm interested in both how you disagree with it, but then also why you think Trump's darkness was so appealing first to so many Republican voters and then was appealing enough to, to let him win two of the last three presidential elections.
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Bret Stephens
First of all, I think where Reaganism failed in terms of delivering on its promises is that Reagan never meaningfully cut the size of government in the way that he had promised coming into office in 1981. And I would argue that that explains many of our dysfunctions today. I don't want to get carried away by tangents. I also think it succeeded in this sense. For 35 years, in terms of at least finance capital, the United States was the undisputed world champion. And it explains why we have remained economically dynamic in a way that the welfare states of Europe or Japan simply have not. So I think that in many respects, Reagan delivered on his promise. I do think that Trump understood better than I did a couple of very serious complaints that parts of America which I don't inhabit had about the way things were running in America. I think one of them, maybe most importantly, he understood intuitively that migration was an important issue affecting ordinary Americans. And he also understood the failure of elite institutions to deliver on their promises. And whether the elite institutions were at universities or the public health administration of this country or mainstream media, Trump was onto something in a way that I was simply blind to because I think I was encased in a cultural bubble. And one of the things I've tried to do in the last 10 years is understand the legitimacy of the Trumpian complaint, even as I profoundly disagree with the prescription.
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David Leonhardt
Can I ask you to pause on mass migration for a minute? Because I'm guessing that some of our listeners heard you say the downsides of mass migration and thought, what downsides? How are Americans, and working class Americans in particular, are actually suffering because of high levels of immigration. How would you answer that question?
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Bret Stephens
Well, first of all, let me stress, as someone who grew up in Mexico City, whose father was born in Mexico, that I see many of the upsides, and I see the hard work, enterprise dreams that a vast majority of immigrants bring with them as they come into the United States, legally or otherwise, just in search of a better life and how much they contribute economically, demographically, culturally, and so on. But of course, there are downsides, and I think that you have to be living in a bubble somewhere between, I don't know, Scarsdale, New York, and Concord, Massachusetts, to miss them. I mean, we had hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people enter this country with no idea of who they are. Some number of them, by no means the majority, but some number of them, were, in fact, criminals. Many of them depended on social services, which were overwhelmed. Look at what happened in New York, Chicago, Boston and other cities that found themselves unable to meet the needs of desperate migrants. I see now on the streets of New York, the kind of poverty begging that I used to see on the streets of Mexico City. And more to the point, I think there is absolute legitimacy in saying that a basic expectation of people in this country is that they follow the rules. And when the first thing they do, even if the reasons are understandable, out of desperation to break the rules in coming into this country, it sets a tone, an idea that our rules are not serious. They can be laughed off. And that's, I think, problematic. I would love to see genuine immigration reform that combines really strict controls over the border with a very generous legal immigration and asylum policy. I think it would settle a lot of the cultural distempers in the country, particularly over the last last 10 or 15 years.
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David Leonhardt
You're moving us right toward where I wanted to go, which is. Let's try to imagine a Republican Party that is very different from Donald Trump, but that also is able to win a Republican primary. How do you think about a future version of Republicanism that takes seriously the reasons that Donald Trump was so appealing, but also rejects his nihilism and his racism and his negativism?
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Bret Stephens
Well, look, you don't have to go too far into the reaches of the past to find a lot of Republicans who are capable of thinking rationally on this subject. There are all kinds of conservatives who could conceivably get behind something like my idea of a sensible immigration policy. It's very difficult now, in part because the loudest voices in both parties, but I think particularly in the Republican Party, the ones with megaphones on social media or on YouTube channels, the Tucker Carlson's of the world, have so much sway through fear of what we used to call Normie Republicans. And at some point, I just have to assume or hope, wish that when the Republican Party has exhausted the available alternatives, they will see their way towards some kind of more sensible attitude towards immigration. But I don't think that's happening in the next two years. I wonder if it's happening in the next 20. I believe that we have to hold out the hope that it might happen at some point in the future, because it has to happen.
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David Leonhardt
And clearly circumstance is going to play a big role in that. I mean, how popular Donald Trump is. But what do you think the most important things that Normie Republicans can do to make their vision more attractive? What mistakes have Normie Republicans made that they can try to fix to bring about the transition that you're talking about?
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Bret Stephens
Well, those mistakes would be my mistakes, right? Yeah. And one of them was, without a doubt, a kind of derisive, holier than thou moralistic attitude about the concerns that people have about migration. And that until you kind of recognize that those concerns are real and valid, you're not going to be able to have a conversation with Republican voters about some other approach to immigration. I think the second issue is, and this is a problem that Republicans can't really solve, and it's this Republicans or conservatives see themselves locked into a kind of cultural existential struggle with a Democratic Party that they characterize and to some extent caricature as being essentially anti American, essentially so far out of touch with traditional American values that any concession to that party is hopeless and ludicrous and dangerous. It would help a lot to see a Democrat, the moderate wing, the Bill Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, reassert itself in a way that that caricature doesn't resonate quite as much as it does with so many Republican voters today. Which is why, to the consternation of some of my readers, I often find myself offering advice to Democrats like, please move to the center. And not least to save the Republican Party from the kind of xenophobic bigotry that has overtaken it.
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David Leonhardt
I guess the question is, do you want the Democratic Party to move to the center because that keeps it closer to you and you're a conservative, or do you genuinely believe that a more moderate Democratic Party, a more heterodox Democratic Party would be more likely to win? Because if that's true, in some ways it would be bad for some of the things you favor.
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Bret Stephens
No, it wouldn't be because a Democratic Party that moved to the center, captured the center again, started winning elections. I think far from having a radicalizing effect on the Republican Party, would have a moderating effect. And I know there's some countervailing data. You can go back to 2008, 2009, and say, well, the origins of the Tea Party were with a Democrat who won by overwhelming margins. But the perception among Republicans back in 2009 was that Obama was a real left wing radical. Of course, he governed much more to the center than Republicans ever gave him credit for.
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David Leonhardt
Yes, he did.
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Bret Stephens
But I do think that a Democratic Party that is able to take many of the cultural issues off the table, not just immigration, but some of the more polarizing issues when it comes to transgenderism, other sort of hot button cultural topics, would have the effect of forcing Republicans actually to move more centerward, knowing that that's where the real political contest lies, rather than to the extremes where they find themselves.
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David Leonhardt
Now, what would you Say to Democrats who say, look at Joe Manchin, he got drummed out of Congress. Look at Jon Tester, he lost. And look at the excitement around Zoran Mamdani in New York that the answer is not some sort of average between AOC and some Republican. It's an authentic, confident version of progressivism embodied by AOC and Bernie's tour and by Mamdani's victory in New York.
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Bret Stephens
Mamdani running one of the most brilliant campaigns. And I say this as someone who's no fan of Mamdani in one of the most progressive cities in America, eked out, what, 50% of the vote against a weak and divided field. Compare that to Abigail Spanberger in Virginia or Mickey Sherrill in New Jersey, running as centrist, pragmatic, get stuff done, national security credential candidates. And I think you see starkly that outside of the progressive bubbles, the winning tickets for Democrats are all at the center. And I think the editorial board has made this point very admirably in a close analysis of most of the races where the Democrats who won contested seats or difficult seats were all leaning towards the political center. There's a real problem in American politics today in that the noisiest factions are rarely the most representative. And cutting through that noise to understand that American politics may be isn't so different than it was 15 or 30 years ago is a really important task for commentators like us.
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David Leonhardt
When you look around the world, do you see countries that offer something of a model for what you want the United States and its politics to become? And what I mean by that is these populist forces and the version of relatively elite social progressivism that you do not like, are not distinctly American phenomena. We see versions of them across most of the wealthy world. And have you seen countries where either a center right has managed to marginalize the populists or the center left has managed to marginalize the elite progressives in ways that you think offer lessons for what you hope will be the Democrats and Republicans of our future?
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Bret Stephens
Good question. And as you were asking that, I was sort of doing a mental scan of the globe looking for leaders who would fit that description. And the name that came to mind, and I'm thinking aloud here, David, so dangerous. It's dangerous. But actually the name that came to mind was Giorgio Meloni of Italy, who by the standards of Italian prime ministers, runs an extraordinarily stable government, because what she has managed to do is adopt the language of populism and the politics of pragmatism. One leader after another who has dealt with her notes that she is anything but what she was billed as being when she came to office as the ostensible heir to the fascistic movements in Italy. She's sensible, she's able to talk to populace. She's been particularly persuasive when it comes to offering European view that Donald Trump can accept. Maybe it's her charm or a combination of charm and witness, but that ability to talk populist and govern pragmatic. I'm being deliberately non grammatical here. I would say that's probably the right prescription. Tonally, you have to be populist, but you also have to do stuff that works. And the problem that Donald Trump now has politically is that never mind the tone, it's the policies that are leaving people scratching their heads when it comes to, you know, the kind of destructive absurdity of Doge or the destructive absurdities of the tariff policies, you know, that are not making life better for Americans.
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David Leonhardt
That's a great point. And I think too often outsiders lump the European far right into one basket. But actually there's a huge difference between Meloni, which as you're saying, is what I think we should want the far right to become, and the German Far right, the AfD, which is truly terrible.
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Bret Stephens
The German far right is that they really mean it. They're every bit as bad as advertised.
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David Leonhardt
Okay, coming back home to the United States to finish, what do you think are the most likely scenarios? I don't mean names, although feel free to mention names. What do you think are the most likely scenarios for the kinds of candidates that the Republicans and Democrats nominate in 2028? And we'll start with the Republicans.
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Bret Stephens
Well, I find it difficult to conceive that J.D. vance isn't the nominee. J.D. is very clever, very opportunistic. Let me tell you a story about him that's interesting. A couple days before the 2016 election, I was invited on Fareed Zakaria's show along with an up and coming writer from Ohio, a certain J.D. vance. And we were talking about the election and afterwards we went for a little walk around Columbus Circle and we spent our time just insistently agreeing that not only did Donald Trump have to lose in order to save conservatism for the future, but he had to lose by the widest possible margin to drive the lesson home that Trumpism could never be mistaken for conservatism. So every time I see him on tv, that memory flicks through my mind. But I think he's the likely candidate. I think he could lose. However, Especially if in three years, Americans find that their lives are no more affordable, no easier, that their schools are no better, that their safety is no greater than it was at the end of Biden's term. And there's a real opportunity for a unifying Democrat who doesn't alienate large parts of the center. I don't know if it's Spanberger. I don't know if it's Josh Shapiro, Andy Beshear, Alyssa Slotkin. There are a lot of names, actually. The field of outstanding centrist Democrats is broad and deep. And I just hope that the party has the wisdom to understand that the imperative in 2028 is to ensure that Trumpism does not become the consolidated establishment of American politics.
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David Leonhardt
When would you guess the next time you, Bret Stephens, will vote for the Republican presidential candidate in the general election?
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Bret Stephens
2036.
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David Leonhardt
So that's three presidential elections from now.
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Bret Stephens
Yeah. I mean, fingers crossed. I would dearly love, David, to be able to vote in good conscience for a Republican candidate who believed in the things I grew up believing in. Lower taxes, less regulation, free trade, a belief in the virtues of immigration and sticking it to the Russians. And that's the Republican Party I grew up in. And maybe it will come back again.
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David Leonhardt
I want to close this by asking you to help. Spare me from some deep pessimism, because we began by you talking about how the optimism of Ronald Reagan's Republican Party is part of what attracted you to it. And there are times when I look at our society much broader than politics, and I look at the level of anger that is out there, and I look at the level of isolation, and I look at measures of mental health, and I look at the fact that almost any measure of how well our children are reading and writing has gone backwards. And I look at our fractured media ecosystem, which you've mentioned, and the fact that people don't trust institutions. And I sort of worry that as a society, we're just kind of falling apart and we're going down that path of an empire in decline. And in my darkest moments, I'm not completely sure how we get out of it, even though I desperately want us to. And I'm curious how. How much of that fear you have and how you keep it from becoming overwhelming.
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Bret Stephens
So the conservative in me is always like the line from Adam Smith, there's a lot of ruin in a nation. And if you think of this historically, I mean, let's go back 50 years to 1975, an America humiliated in Vietnam in the midst of skyrocketing oil prices A society that was shifting uncomfortably fast for many people. Urban decay. A perception that the Soviet Union was on the march and we were losing out against it. Basically an era of deep American pessimism. And all the data points were valid. The paradox of open societies is that in a democracy, you focus obsessively on everything that's going wrong and you spend precious little time thinking about what's going right. And that's normal. The nature of democracy is that we are problem obsessed, but it also means that we are trying to address those problems, however imperfectly. We're trying to deal with them. Paradoxically, if you look at an authoritarian system like China's, they hide their problems and advertise their strengths. But it means that as problems grow, they often fail to comprehend their magnitude and fail to address them in a timely and rational way. And so authoritarian systems, even though they appear strong, are actually extraordinarily brittle. So democracies tend, over time to solve problems in unexpected ways. We would not have known if we were having this conversation 50 years ago in December 1975, that someone named Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Larry Ellison were kind of tinkering with the toys of the future and they were going to create multi trillion dollar economies whose very nature we could scarcely have conceived back then. But that's in fact what happened. This is a recurring cycle in American history. And so that's kind of my source of optimism, David, which is that we've been. We've been this pessimistic before and we've been wrong before, and we've experienced a lot of terrible presidents, a great deal of illegality and bigotry coming from the highest reaches of government, and we've somehow made it through. One of my favorite lines from a presidential inaugural address is from Bill Clinton's first inaugural. He said something to the effect, he said, there's nothing wrong with America that can't be cured by what's right in America. I think it's a beautiful phrase and I think it has the virtue of being true.
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David Leonhardt
Brett Stevens, thank you very much, David.
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Bret Stephens
A pleasure.
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Podcast Host/Announcer
If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Opinions is produced by Derek Arthur, Vishaka Darba, Christina Samulewski and Gillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin and Alison Bruzek. Engineering, mixing and original music by Isaac Jones, sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Sabaro and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Aman Sahota. The fact Check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samulewski. The director of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.