← The Realignment
The Realignment
577 | Steve Teles: Why the Realignment Has Made Think Tanks More Relevant Than Ever
00:57:47
Steve Teles, Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center, returns to The Realignment. Marshall and Steve discuss the past, present, and future of American public policy think tanks, the origins of the Niskanen Center and its theory of change, how elite-driven think tanks on the left, right, and center navigate a moment of democratic and populist backlash, and why politicians and voters should care about the industry's work.
Loading summary
Transcript40 lines
- [00:00]
A
Steve, welcome back to the realignment.
- [00:04]
B
Hey, good to see you again, Marshall.
- [00:07]
A
So this is actually the first episode we're going to talk about a whole bunch of things on today's conversation, but this is an episode that I've actually wanted to do because now that my own conference season is sort of at its midpoint, I've actually had a month of just saying, hey, I'm Marshall Kozlov and I work at the Niskanen Center. That is my full time job. It's not one of my six weird podcasting hats. And I get a question from folks saying, hey, what is the Niskanin Center? And when they look into the Niskanin center, they'll often cite like a 2023 Molly Ball, peace and Time magazine where Niskanin was referred to as, quote, the most interesting thing taken in American politics. Or they'll read some stuff from 2015 where Niscanin is this, like, libertarian heterodox think tank that's thinking about carbon taxes. So part of my job and what I'd love to do with this episode, because the realignment is now firmly in a Scannin center podcast, is spend a little bit of time before we get to other topics just talking about Niscanin. And I don't want this episode to sound a paid ad or anything like that, but I love to just sort of give people the like, hey, you want to know what Niskanin is? Check out this episode that Steve and I did. I think, Steve, you're one of Niscanin's longest reside. You came in 2017.
- [01:15]
B
Yeah. So this actually may be a good place to say what it is. And so just to give you a little level setting of what I do. So to my day job, I am at the School of Government and Policy and at Hopkins, but I'm a political scientist. And within political science, I'm in a field called histor, kind of a tradition called historical institutionalism. And, you know, I often say what it means to be a historical institutionalist is I always answer the question about what something is by talking about how it came into being. Right. Because most things we talk about, whether they're political institutions or parties or interest groups or political movements, are, you know, moving, changing things, rather than just some sort of, you know, long standing essence. And that's true of this Canada. So I, I came in honestly, right after the election of Trump, and Jerry Taylor, who had then been the president, had asked me to get involved. He'd asked me to be on the board, and I wasn't quite sure. That that was exactly what I wanted to do because I was an academic and, you know, you know, having that kind of think tank relationship might not be entirely appropriate, but I did kind of think, I mean, not to put it too overblown, but I did kind of think of this as my war work. Right. That this was going to be a really weird era. And my sense was that it was going to be really important to have some think tank that had relationships with Republicans, with conservatives during that. During that period. Right. Because it was going to be a period of enormous uncertainty. And it was really important to keep sort of relationships across ideological lines together. And I thought for a long time about sort of trans partisanship and ways of doing things in a democracy and why it was so important to do things not just sort of centrist, bipartisan stuff, which I thought just politically no longer worked, but things with strange bedfellows, coalitions. That, that in fact, is a very important part of, of democracy, even as we have partisan things where like one party gets to govern with their. Their agenda. Yeah. So I came on as a Senior Fellow in 2017 both to do my own kind of big picture writing, which we can get into later on, but also to help to think through with the people who were there at the time what this institution ought to be.
- [04:02]
A
Yeah. And I think that's the perfect pivot, something I am fascinated by this weekend. So I saw a friend from my American Enterprise Institute days over the weekend, and I'm not going to name names here, but he was talking about the. Of a major American think tank who's no longer in the business, who is just very down on think tanks now. Very, very, very down on think tanks. And I get why people are down on think tanks. It feels like there's all this paperwork getting written, all these papers that no one reads, all these panels that have been done in a couple different iterations. But I really, really, really strongly believe in think tank. So I'd love to do a segment with you here. This is both a scan and promotion. But also, like, here's why what we do isn't just navel gazing and pointless. Because I come at the defense of think tanks through the lens of me being a former politics kid. And because I'm a former politics kid, most of my peers growing up aren't people who went to D.C. they're not people who work in think tanks or work in government, but they're people who are back home. And to your point about strange bedfellows in this political movement, there are periods in American political history, where I don't think you as a political actor have to think really deeply about the big questions, quote, unquote.
- [05:15]
B
Right.
- [05:16]
A
So if it's the 1990s or 2000s, I think we could have used a little deeper thinking on foreign policy. But at a broad level, if you're a Republican in 2003 or 2004 or 2000 or 1997 or a Democrat, the party pranks make sense. The sort of orientation makes sense. You have a strong sense of what your political coalition is. And the country isn't faced by really big cultural, sociological, political questions. And that's fine in that type of period. But in periods like this realignment period over the past decade, I think everything is up for grabs. There are these weird straight, there are these strange bedfellows, there are these new issues. And what I've just found with my peers who are in elected office right now, what they will just say is, I don't have time to think about all this. I don't have time to read. I am not inclined towards reading in terms of the type of stuff that you are interested in. The bookshelf I have behind me wouldn't typically be of interest. But what they will tell me is I wish I had time to do the amount of reading you do because it would help me do my job better. And my staff doesn't know, the donors don't know, the orgs don't know. And also there are certain people who are telling me I can't just listen to the groups who are telling me what to think about things. So I think my defense of a think tank is that at our best, we can, for our different factions, our different parties, actually do that thinking in a way that needs to be collaborative and democratic. But someone has to be able to do that during moments like this.
- [06:39]
B
Yeah. And the one thing to say is, you know, just the term think tank is what fancy people in academia call an unstable signifier. Right. That is what do we mean by it? If you go back and, you know, and lots, you know, we've had lots of what you might think of as generations of think tanks over time. Right. So the Rand Corporation is a think tank, Right. That was created essentially by the Air Force to give them advice. Originally was advice about things like strategic bombing and nuclear force posture. And, you know, he got contracts from the government to do various kinds of work. And then people got to, while they were there, also do bigger picture thinking. So lots of the stuff that we associate with game theory, for example, came out of rand. Tom Schelling had been at RAND before he was at the Kennedy School. And it was involved in those kind of communities. Right. That was one generation. You think about later ones like the Urban Institute, which was designed to be kind of the Rand of the Great Society and the period after that. So they were going to be getting contracts from HHS and various departments to help that think through, you know, both to evaluate the programs that were coming out of that, to do some. A little bit bigger picture thinking about where the welfare state should go. But you had think tanks that were that way, or you had Brookings, which was a kind of. Kent Weaver describes that as a university without students. So they had.
- [08:15]
A
And noted. Brooking expresses this by their website, having a Edu address.
- [08:21]
B
Yeah. So. And they did actually have students at one. At one point. So they. They weren't even just a university without students. They were. They did actually a university with students. But, you know, they have departments. They have a thing that looks like a political science department and it looks like an econ. And, you know, some of those, you know, my advisor, Martha Durick at Virginia had previously been the director of government studies at. At Brookings, and they had one of the best political science departments in the country, Terry Moe, who's now one of the very famous political scientists about school choice. He had been there a million, you know, incredible people had been political scientists at Brookings. So that's like one generation of think tanks. Or you get. Think tanks, in some ways are actually more European. So, you know, as much as Heritage doesn't like to be thought of as European, the idea of a think tank that's basically works for a party is a very European model. Right. Lots of think tanks and a lot of parties in Europe have their own think tanks. And that's essentially what Heritage is. Right. It's a think tank who's, you know, at the time, right. It. It was basically working for the Republican House members. That's who they thought of themselves as serving and working for. Niskanen. I think it's because I want to.
- [09:41]
A
Tell a story here because this is the deep knowledge. It's actually very interesting. And this also is a tie into what Project 2025 was. So the origin story of Heritage, in terms of how it's told. Because, Steve, something that I've made more of a theme of the show is that we need to, as institutionalists or members of a party, whatever, get better at storytelling. And if you don't engage in these storytelling exercises, both lack a sense of identity. You lack a sense of rootedness that helps you think about big questions. And you sort of find it very difficult to talk to other people the way Heritage will explicitly tell the story. I was told this when I was just a DC youngling intern in the 2010s is hey, it's the late 1970s and there are these big debates. And one of the big debates specifically was about the B1B bomber, the Lancer. So like this alternate means of delivering nuclear strike packages. And Carter famously vetoed it. It then came back in through Reagan. But essentially Hill staffers came to edmies and were like, hey, all of the work we wanted to defend this program and all of the work that was done in it just like wasn't useful. It was too academic. It wasn't just purely aimed at us. So that's what you're really talking about. We were saying like this is what's like European. Like there are think tanks that if you like ask them and I'm sure there's a different tax status reality about this in the, in the UK and the European Union. They always say to this. I was like, oh yeah, what? We're the Tory party's think tank. We are the Labour party's think tank. We are partisan in a way that Brookings will obviously center left in orientation. They would not just. And this isn't not. And this isn't meant just like ironically, they would reject the notion that they are the Democratic Party center left like think tank. Like it's not just like a tax thing. They actually would reject because they're. Because we're an academic institution. We, we. If Democrats are going to be the majority of people who use our work like that's fine, but we are not a partisan think tank. And then the other thing too, this is the Heritage story. So they start with we decided to launch something because the B1 bomber was knocked out and things weren't use. You then have 1980 and this is where the mandate for leadership comes in and they say like, hey. Like we just were like, hey, what if we just came up with like hundreds of pages of things that Reagan could just do on day one. That's once again very European think tanky. And that was the tradition that which Project 2025 came about. There's a notion that you need to have a. Before the election actually happens, you need to have a very like public and identifiable. This is our deal and this is what we are going to do. And that will actually not only help us advertise our political caus, but Actually, people will just pull from this book when they get there.
- [12:12]
B
Yeah. So To Heritage is one kind of model. It's really, again, there's weird American tax reasons why they don't just call themselves like the Party Research Office, but that's kind of what they are, at least the Party Research Office for one part of the party. I think of Niskanen when it starts, when Jerry Taylor starts it after he left Cato, as the first of a kind of think tank that has come into being in other forms. I actually think Institute for Progress, foundation for American Innovation, to some degree have some structural similarities, even though what they're working on and what part of the ideological spectrum they're dealing with, they have similarities in the following way. Right. So Brookings often produces products that are at least quasi academic, Right. They think of them, you know, they may not be, you know, always trying to publish in the very top economic or political science journals, but they're trying to produce work that's largely going to be recognized as very high quality research, but doesn't necessarily have a specific kind of coalitional. We're trying to, you know, you know, pass some policy reform. We've got an idea for that. And the government relations at Brookings was always very far down and disconnected from what everybody else was doing. And it was considered to be slightly declasse to think too much about government relations, right. There might be somebody who was there and say, oh, well, you wrote this paper. I think there might be a member of Congress who might be interested in it. Maybe you could have a meeting with them. But it wasn't like an integrated operation. And I think both Niskanen and then later IFP and FAI have a different model where on the one hand we have more people doing what I would call 50,000ft philosophy work, right? Thinking about big ideological policy syntheses. And so, you know, at Niskanin, people like myself and Brink, Lindsay and Jeff Cabaservice, and there's a whole bunch of other people who've sort of done work in that thinking about, you know, you know, in a way, thinking about thinking. Thinking about how we should think about, you know, you know, what are the larger frameworks in which to evaluate policy. On the other hand, we have people way on the other side, right? So I think of our housing group, you know, they're like working on policies to get rid of HUD's chassis requirement or people in climate who are doing work on exactly like how you get the unlock for transmission of energy. And they're working very closely they have a lot more government affairs people who are like trying to figure out where the coalitions to be made are. They're introducing people to one another. They're thinking about policy in terms of where there might be often again very strange bedfellows coalitions to be made. So in that sense different than Heritage. Right. Which usually has a single coalition that it has in its mind. Right. It's a coalition of all Republicans. Whereas we're always looking for what's the issue that isn't already completely coded in that in that particular way. And that's what a lot of our people in our policy groups do. And either one of Those, both the 50,000 Vita and the blocking and tackling, getting way down deep into trying to figure out what the unlock in these various different problems is. Neither of those is the kind of thing that the previous kind of think tanks were doing.
- [16:05]
A
And it should be noted the to the point of Democrats that have Project 2029 after 2025, there's a real sort of history here that we'll go into in a different episode of like. Because American liberalism doesn't really exist as like a thing but American conservatism is a thing. There is a conserv conservative movement, there is a conservative ideology. The Heritage style think takes in a really good position to be forward facing because they say hey, we exist separate from the Democratic, from the Republican Party. So we do things that then influence our actual party versus and I've talked to a lot of people about this Democrats. Because once again there is no real remaining center left liberal intellectual tradition that existed in the 40s, 50s and 60s. You basically just find yourself like you work at the center for American Progress. CAP was launched as the Democratic Party's equivalent of Heritage. This is very explicitly stated during the Bush administration, the second one. But because they are really seen as an appendage of the Democratic Party and not the specific embodiment of an ideology. It's just very hard to be front facing and push things. So that's why you find CAP in a situation where they wouldn't have come come up with Project 2025. They wouldn't have launched Heritage first, not the Project 25. 2025 was a true win. But just like they're always going to be in a lag time. So it's just so funny that like the CAP story is. Well the Republican conservatives did this with with Heritage. Now we're going to do it and now near attendant she's on the board of Project 2029. Their thing in The New York Times is we're going to do what Heritage did for Democrats. And I just think that until you have, I mean, this seriously, like a think tank or an organization or even just sort of some sort of like, organizing apparatus that says, what would it look like to build out, like, left liberalism as a serious ideology, but separate than defending whatever Hakeem Jeffries is doing this week, you're going to continue to have this lag problem. So, like, this real lack of ideology is increasingly prevalent to me.
- [18:14]
B
So, yeah, so in one sense, CAP is like Heritage in that it is a partisan think tank, right? That is, when they think about what success is, it's getting Democrats to do something in particular, right? So, you know, it's not necessarily like we're passing legislation. The success is getting inherited, is getting all Republicans behind this, right? And then, you know, if they get elected, then they'll pass legislation on it. But mostly the persuasive success is actually getting the party to adopt the thing they want. Now, again, I mean, one problem here is that Democrats and Republicans are just not symmetrical structurally. And so they fake. You know, this is, you know, Matt Grossman has this, you know, great sort of analysis where he says that, you know, Republicans are a more fundamentally ideological party, whereas the Democrats are a more fundamentally interest group, coalition party. And so, you know, the way I always describe that is Democrats make policy by what I call the sort of everybody gets a piece of chicken model, right? Is that you've got a certain set of groups, right? And everybody's going to get a. Gonna get a piece of chicken. And that often leads to policy incoherence. But that's the way to make policy, right? And the magic policy is when you got something that, like, you can say is both one and the other. It's both climate and it's racial justice. We can imagine. You know, EJ is sort of a perfect example, environmental justice, sort of a perfect example of that. But the thing I would distinguish is in most of those cases, it's a. It is a single party coalition that you imagine coming out of the work product, right? That's what you imagine. At some point the Democrats are going to get a trifecta and then they've got some stuff on the ready to go, right? The thing that both Niscanin and IFP and FAI and I think Breakthrough Institute to some degree, right. Almost all of them have in common is they're not optimized to a single kind of legislative coalition. They're all to some degree, working on something that cuts across the standard existing left right dimension. Part of that is about salience, right. So they're working on what you might think of as lower salience issues. The issues that don't define the left right distinction, but that we think are like really important. Right. They're, they're really, they, they matter a lot, but they're not so ideologically coded. And so in the same way that Heritage and CAP are optimized to single party legislative coalitions, all of these are optimized to secret Congress, what Matt Iglesias called secret Congress coalitions. Right. Weird ones that somehow are going to get passed by, you know, Democrat and Republican members. They're not just necessarily going to be the centrist members. They may be defined by region or interest. Sometimes they're far left and far right coalitions in that way. But what really distinguishes ours is that I think they're more optimized to those, you know, often rare but, you know, still present times when, you know, like Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren putting together a housing bill. That's really what I think of as our kind of classic lane or when there was still discussion of permitting in the past Congress with, you know, Manchin Barrasso. Right. That's sort of our really great kind of place to slip into the political system.
- [22:05]
A
And the thing is, a lot of what's motivating this conversation isn't just sort of my Niskan and a day job. It's also that I went to a Niskanin dinner that I helped put together and there was a very prominent content creator who was there who does a lot of really good work on econ issues. People could probably guess who this is and what they. I'm going to use gender neutral terms here. I'm going to unironically use what they them said specifically was none of this makes any sense to me in terms of like the think tanks and this jargon is lingo. So like, because this is a leadership oriented podcast of people who want to do things, I think it's actually important that like, we as best we can, like articulate and talk about these things. So a question I'd ask for you. And you know, when you're talking about your own institution, you'll tell like 80% of what you believe or 80% is true. So with that spirit in mind, a question I'll ask you. And this relates to actually one of my challenges at Niskanin because my title is Director of Special Projects. And like, what does that mean? One of the things that that means sort of Our identity. I think the advantage of the old version of think tanks is the identity question is just super straightforward. If think of the way heritage tells a story. We are effectively a European style, part of the party apparatus. We matter not because think tanks or academic research in the abstract matter, but because we are very considerably a part of an ecosystem that advances the conservative movement and ergo the Republican Party's objectives. Super straightforward Brookings. Super straightforward. Right. Like we, if you, if you're a Brookings donor, you believe in academia, you believe in nonpartisanship, you believe in like this very specific standard, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. With Niskanin, though, and ifp less fai, because FAI has come to sort of the. Whether or not they've said this publicly, this is what's written about them in every single big article in the beginning. More of them. They're clearly the intellectual home of the rising tech. Right. So they've answered the identity question. But how does a Niscanin or an IFP define its identity and explain itself to people under the model you're describing here? Because it builds a lot of incoherence. It builds a lot of. And the one other thing here is that like the funny thing, and I've talked about this with Niskan leadership in the book Abundance. Right. Not just abundance showing here, but it was the big policy book of the year. Niscanin technically has the most cited work of any think tank. And that's not everyone saying, well, Steve, you actually were mentioned part of it, but it's not. Jeff Cabaservis said this big thing about the 50,000 foot thing thing, or Marshall said this thing on the realignment. It's hey, the scanning housing team said this very specific thing. The analyst at the Energy and climate team said this. That though is very sort of program specific and it doesn't build a brand and there's a world. And I'm glad we didn't do this. We're in a scan and just sort of said, hey, if our number one goal is to get attention, we're going to rebrand ourselves as the D.C. center for abundance. We're going to just own abundance and make this sort of we're the most cited think tank thing. Obvious that was the correct move. But there is just a tension here that I'm really curious to hear your thoughts on because I think in hearing your thoughts, you will also convey to people how this world works in these other dynamics.
- [25:20]
B
Yeah. So again, when you think about Niscanin, we have two kind of typical outputs. One Is the like really detailed granular report about how to, you know, get rid of the HUD chassis requirement. That, that's the one I mentioned.
- [25:39]
A
You said it twice. Could you explain what you explained it?
- [25:41]
B
Oh, that's just, you know, when you have factory, you know, manufactured housing, does it have to sit on something so you can wheel it away? When you think about like trailer parks, right, that was the idea that you had actually it had to be a trailer and that you could move it. But you could imagine if we got rid of that requirement it would, you know, you could just put it directly down on a concrete slab or something and then you could build a lot more housing a lot more cheaply. So that's just the example of that. The other thing is again, and you look in the Abundance book, a lot of what's also being cited is things like the cost Disease socialism paper that I wrote with Sam Hammond and Daniel Kakish, which is not just a granular. Here's something about some specific thing. It's saying here's a big general problem that we're all thinking about. All wrong, right? And so in that paper, just to give you an example, the argument covered a huge number of policy areas and said if you look especially this was directed leftward at the time, lots of Democratic candidates were all putting forth a proposals that were somewhere along the lines of there's something is too expensive, people are angry that they can't afford it and therefore the way to solve that problem is to subsidize it. Right? Whether that's, you know, subsidizing people's rents or Medicare for all or you can go through a whole bunch of different.
- [27:04]
A
Things, et cetera, right?
- [27:05]
B
Student loans, right. So, right. So higher education and then. But they all have the same common feature, that they're all in supply constrained areas, right. Where you just can't, you know, where like, you know, we're not producing enough doctors, there's not enough competition. Schools, you can think of a whole bunch of other examples. Or housing is the really the classic example. You can't build more housing. And so if you just give people a rent subsidy and you're not making it easier to build more housing, that money can only reappear in the rent, right? It can only go up. And so that was a big 50,000ft kind of way of saying everybody's thinking about policy in the wrong way and that if we really want to solve these problems, we need to do it with supply. And so that is a large philosophical argument. It also cuts against the right. Because what the right was doing is saying there's all these things that are. That are unaffordable. And what we need to do in the Paul Ryan era, where they were saying is we need to put these more on people's private balance sheet. They need. If they were paying for more for health care and higher ed and all these other things, then they would become cost conscious consumers and that would push the price down. What they both were not dealing with was the underlying supply problem. And so that's a good example. We published a number of these. I've done this. I wrote this essay on. On the Democratic abundance faction. I wrote this essay called Varieties of Abundance that was trying to get people not to think about abundance is just one thing that's centered around Ezra and Derek's book, but having a bunch of different varieties. And so when I think about what at least our think tank does is to try and get people to think about policy not just in these standard left right kind of ways, but to think about other kinds of syntheses or other kinds of frameworks that both help them solve problems more effectively, direct them toward where the problems are. And that's where I think the connection to what our policy programs do is they try and fill out, well, here's the things that aren't necessarily the things that one of the parties or works with their own coalitions or interest groups, but that actually are more likely to solve the problems that are directed by this other way to think about the general underlying pathologies or whatever in our political or policy system.
- [29:31]
A
Yeah, and that's helpful. And I think before we transition to our final topic, which is democracy, I would love for you to give. I gave my version of why people should care about think tanks and wonky. I'd love to hear your version because I think I did an episode on the abundance electeds and it was actually really interesting to actually meet a bunch of these elected officials who aren't. I didn't make this clear enough during the episode. Most of these people are not state representatives, they're not state senators, they're county supervisors, they're mayors. If they're mayors of a city, it's like Knoxville. So it's not like the mayor of Austin. It's like a very specific level. And for almost all of them, this was their first intersection with think tank world. And I think that given the format of the conference, just, you know, a lot of people like talking at people on much more in favor of the like everyone sort of co equal in a smaller Fashion thing. And that's a topic for another podcast. But the point is, like, I wish we'd had a chance with these people specifically to really like articulate why we matter, because I think a lot of them are just going to wonder that.
- [30:32]
B
Okay, let me give you again, think about two kinds of outputs. There's the blocking and tackling policy work and then there's the big synthesis. So I'll give you the second one. So after the abundance, meaning after the Varieties of abundance piece came out, I think I may have mentioned this in a previous podcast. Somebody wrote back to me and said, oh, you're like cascading abundance category and your varieties of abundance. Right? That, you know, she said, you know, I felt seen, right. That that was a thing.
- [31:02]
A
Kelly Jang. Right?
- [31:03]
B
Yeah, Kelly Jang. So she wrote me and now she has a substack on this that everybody should be reading. And she's a. I think that person too.
- [31:12]
A
That should be noted.
- [31:13]
B
Yeah, so, right. So one thing is, I think, and I think a lot of people who read the Abundance Democrats essay also looked at that and said, oh, okay, now I understand that I have to think about this problem in factional terms. That was not even really a conceptual category that was available to them to think about how to make sense of their practice. Right? So that's one big thing we do is just give people, you know, hopefully more creative ways to think about how to do what they do, how to think about where answers are either for their policy or political kind of problems. The other thing is again, lots of times policymakers, when you were saying the example of like the policymaker who just can't read, you know, everything, one thing we can do is imagine coalitions that don't exist now, right? Say, okay, I've got like a, you know, an intervention here and it's not ideologically coded. So we need to be able to kind of think and be ideologically bilingual in that way and be able to imagine how it might read in different ways to different kind of groups. There might be a problem that it could get attached to a thing everybody is really concerned about. So we have to be able to think about those kind of, of big agenda setting issues. What are the things like affordability that this could be viewed as an answer to? And because our people are just on the hill all the time, they actually have some of the relationships across offices. And some of the same thing is true in state legislative work, right. That in a polarized period, people often don't even know each other across offices. Right. But we Know, we know, oh, there's a guy over there and he. If you put him together with this other guy, then they might actually be able to cook together, but they wouldn't, you know, again, both because of time, because they're busy, because they don't necessarily, you know, have the time to have the imagination to imagine coalitions that don't exist, or they don't know that there's an intervention that actually could make that coalition work. That that's the kind of. And that, you know, we often talk about that in terms of legislative subject subsidy. That's a term that comes from a great, a great piece of political science about, about lobbying as legislative subsidy. And so when you go back to the original plans for Niskanen, Jerry Taylor, who'd been, you know, sort of done this deep dive into political science and had realized that he thought that what. What Cato, which he was then doing, wasn't doing right, as it wasn't like. Like in these offices, helping members do the kind of things that lobbyists do. Right. Lobbyists often do that kind of legislative subsidy work where they help members, you know, do things they can't do themselves. Right. Do the. The bank, but in. But instead of trying to sell stuff for the chemical industry or the national association of Shortening Inedible Oils, they're doing it for something that's more public, you know, public interested. And I think the final thing is, is that the other thing that was undersupplied was people doing that in a way that wasn't just R or D, red or blue coded. And again, especially in a period in which people are very skeptical of anything that's coming, any kind of information that's coming from the other side, a think tank that wasn't coded that way, but was actively, really involved in legislative work would have more trust than the ones that were completely coded that way.
- [34:55]
A
Yeah, And a key thing too, and it's necessary to build this out. But that's why I always like Niskanen's identity as a pragmatic think tank and not just like a centrist think tank, because centrist in D.C. terms really mean something. I think part of it really explains our relevance, especially on our most marquee issues, is that we aren't approaching it. We're very aware of the sort of factional significance of a lot of these words. And I just want to close before we finish on democracy by just really noting that, as I said towards the start of the episode, I had a conversation with a friend about a former think tank leader who's very down on think tanks as a model of the future. And I am just very optimistic about think tanks as a model for the future just because this is my market oriented sort of nature. But I think when there are problems, there is an incentive to work on those problems. People are looking for them, looking for solutions and approaches to them. And if they cannot do them themselves, there's just like a lot of work to be done. So I think, I would say our type of think tank or and I know once again niscanin is transpartisan, but let's say. So this isn't about niscan and this is about a certain type of thing. Take being irrelevant, like there's a reason why the DLC, the Democratic Leadership Council closed in 2009 and they shut their think tank down the same year. They kind of evolved into a different thing later on, but they shut down because their project was complete. They didn't really have anything else to say. They sort of had argued that if in 1988 you're coming off of your, you know, Republicans dominating the presidency for the next 20 years, Obama's election in 2008 really represented like the culmination of that project. So what more did you have to say? I think it also would be very tough to be a Democratic think tank, let's say in 2013, 2014, 2015, where everyone's sort of like, okay, Hillary's gonna come in. So like we don't really have any big questions. Also, I think if you were a right leaning think tank, that wasn't Heritage. Right, Because Heritage is sort of factional thing. You made a reference. I want to make it explicit. Heritage says like we are the intellectual wing of mega. We're not just generically conservative, that's how they used to frame it. But like we are the intellectual wing of Mega. So there's lots of work to do. Project 2025 really fits within that. If you're the AI, the Hudson, a previous iteration of FAI when it was the Lincoln Network, that's a weirder period for you. Because if you're not saying here's how we make MAGA useful or helping you brand yourself with maga, there's less to offer. But I think we're going to have a potential for a resurgence in the relevancy of conservative and Republican think tanks given the 2026 to 2028. Obviously JD seems to have Trump support, but you're just going to see a really crowded field again. And I think think tanks are going to have the ability to deliver a product or a framing or a messaging or a coalition. Opportunities that people are looking for.
- [37:39]
B
Yeah. So I'm actually. So I think pragmatism is a technique, just to be clear, when you use pragmatic. So pragmatic is a little thing that like, touches some trauma of mine. So I'll just go into a little bit about that. I think Niskanin does actually have a very clear philosophical position. And I'll say at least my understanding of that, which, again, you know, as they say, you know, your mileage may vary, but mine is. I do think we are classically liberal, right? We believe in markets, we believe in a free society, we like competition. But, you know, one of the. My favorite and this canon pieces was a piece that Sam Hammond wrote before he went to FAI called the Free Market Welfare State. And that was basically arguing that if you want markets red in tooth and claw with all the creative destruction that are involved in it, and we love creative destruction, we can't get enough of creative destruction. There's. That's a thing you have to make happen, right? You have to actually build supportive welfare state institutions so that people aren't constantly worried that if their job gets taken away that they're just going to be destitute and that nobody will. And that in fact, supporting competition is a kind of social project. That we all have to realize that it's important for us to share both the benefits and the costs of that creative destruction. And so. And that also involves designing markets carefully and thoughtfully. That that markets are human creations. They're the most amazing human creation, but they are created by law and institutions and norms and practices. And for me, that really is consistent with the longer liberal project that goes back to Adam Smith and David Hume and John Stuart Mill that liberals, you know, who really believe in all those things, have realized that we need lots of social architecture to make a free society work. And that really is, I think that, you know, in some ways is also very much IFP's project. Now, that project doesn't completely align with the left right kind of alignment. That doesn't mean that we don't have a philosophy. It's just our philosophy was not optimized for the left right distinction. Just like IFP's is progress. They have a thing called progress. There's a lot of ideas behind it. The reason they can work across ideological lines is their project is not the Republican or the Democratic project. And so just to be clear that pragmatism is the technique we have to adopt in a world in which the parties are not organized around our philosophical way of thinking about the world. Right. We have to go and find our coalitions where we can make them. But if you look at most of those interventions that we talk about that our policy programs do they make sense in terms of that larger idea of building social architecture for a free society.
- [40:44]
A
And I gotta say, and I will close with the question on democracy, but you keep saying things I want to respond to. What you also just articulated though, is what, or takes me to my feeling of what I appreciate the most about Niskanin, because I think classical liberals, I don't identify as a classical liberal, but I think I'm in coalition with classical liberals. My politics are a little more heterodox than that. But I understand that sort of idea. And what I think makes Niskanin fundamentally unique. And this is why our Jeff Kappa service led political studies department and the work that you do is so important. Because I think I would describe most of like the big thinker classical liberals at Niskanin as classical liberals who were mugged by reality in the same way that the original neoconservatives, so not the Iraq War neoconservatives, but like the 1960s, 1970s neoconservatives where liberals who are mugged. Mugged by reality. And in the case of Niskanen, the mugging by reality is just. I think Niskanen has had two potentially traumatic though no one feels traumatized to me. And that's important experiences of mugging. So the first example would be think of Niskanin's like 2015 iteration. We are libertarians who in this new political moment are doing unconventional things like, so we're libertarians who actually believe in climate change and aren't taking oil money to do sketchy things. So we're going to support a carbon tax. And I remember I was at University of Oregon then. That's how I first came across the scanning. Because like, that was like super interesting because my dad works in climate. I was like, whoa, this is like super unconventional. Here's the thing. This is all before Trump, this is before Bernie, this is before Hillary loses. I think that version of Niskanen's theory would have been really interesting in a world where Hillary Clinton had won, Jeb loses. Basically that iteration in the Scandinan's best case scenario was Hillary beats Jeb. And it's just clear that people are going to be looking for unconventional things on the sort of libertarian or quasi libertarian center, right to center. That doesn't work though. The second Iteration, I think this was never explicit, but it clearly is. Like the brand, if you talk to people, was in many ways Niskan and could be identified as a Never Trump think tank in many ways. A lot of people were in that sort of category. And because the Never Trump project just did not work, it either. Either just had people just say, okay, we're Democrats now in a very partisan way. So this is sort of the Bulwark versus the Dispatch. Actually, there are three models here, because National Review, there's the Bulwark, there's the Dispatch. So the bulwark is we're classically liberal conservatives. We're going to stand up through our history saying, stop. We don't care about whether or not our ideas win. We're just going to make the arguments. National Review is like, look, we kind of don't like Trump, but, like, we believe in the conservative project and we're going to be friendly at the conservative project. And the way to, like, making Trump be better is to, like, work with him. And then the Bulwark basically becomes a content factory that's very friendly to the Democratic Party and doesn't think it's at all trying to speak to Republicans anymore. Niskanin found itself mugged when that project didn't work, and therefore it had to sort of find something new. So now in this new era, I just consistently find Niskanon, people just like, are very aware of how classical liberalism to succeed, cannot just sort of throw the ideas out there and expect it to work. You really have to find a way of merging all these things together. I just always appreciate coming away for. I think it's just a real differentiating factor that I think we need to do a better job of telling.
- [44:09]
B
Yeah. So I think one thing just to be clear about classical liberalism, right. When I think of the classical liberal tradition, it includes both Keynes and Hayek. Right. That is, you can think about all the ways that they're different, but both of them were actually thinking about what is the social architecture behind a free society. Right. Keynes was that the, you know, the gold standard, which people had thought of as a kind of social architecture. Freedom was turning out to be making economies brittle, making them subject to boom bust cycles that would actually lead to authoritarianism and that we needed to rethink think that sort of role of government in smoothing out that kind of fluctuation, because that fluctuation had enormous political implications. Right. Because what Keynes really cared about was art and literature and all the things that would come out of a free society. And he Said, look, we need an economy that's going to make all of those fruits of liberty possible. Right. And that Hayek, similar, similarly. Right. Was thinking a lot about law. What's the rule of law that you actually need in order to make a free society possible? And one of the things that's interesting in Hayek is the way that he was trying to think in some ways about what's a. What's a rule of law welfare state. What's a welfare state that doesn't just pass over all the power to a kind of mindless, bureaucratic, administrative state that does things without kind of rules, which I think of as a very democratic project. Little D. Democratic project. And so I think that a lot of the differences that you're describing were people who had a kind of similar orientation having to kind of work around as the world around them changes. And so, you know, again, the existence of Trump and the larger sort of phenomenon of populism was a thing that people weren't really thinking about when Niskanin was starting. And then people had to, in this world, had to think about it. Right. If you think about, again, my colleague Brink Lindsay, on the other hand, had been thinking, you know, he'd written this very famous essay called Liberal Terran as Liberaltarians that was in the New Republic a while back that I think in some ways also made sense of a lot of the stuff that Niskanen was especially early that was trying to open people up to imagine who were their coalitions. Right. Brink was trying to say, on all these issues, our closest coalition partners are going to be liberals on civil liberties, on foreign affairs, lots of those are going to be liberals. And we need a kind of political orientation that doesn't just imagine that we're part of the right. I think that opened people up to think about that, about more than just political calculation. Right. Especially once people had gotten out of that mostly right centered world to then have these larger questions about the welfare state, about carbon tax, about all the rest of that social architecture. Because I think a lot of these people had thought, in reality, if you try and pursue kind of, you know, down the line, libertarianism, what you get is not libertarianism. What you get is populism. And that, that's, you know, so that's why a lot of those same people were reading the China shock literature and saying, you know, free trade here, which, you know, may have been very good in its own terms. Right. But if you don't match it with welfare state structures, with industrial power, with other kinds of things, you don't get. Get a free society. You get something in a way very different. And so I think of that really as being a kind of evolutionary thing, as people have thought about what does it mean to have this very broad church, kind of liberal, free society beliefs in a world in which the world is throwing up a lot of things you didn't expect.
- [48:16]
A
So for the last question, this is actually the perfect segue to something I mentioned on an episode that you were not on, which is the. That I think I want people in our world to think harder. And I know you've thought hard about this. So this is why I'm teeing you up for your final answer for the ways that in a populist moment, I think you have to really think hard about how our institutions and our ideas and our frameworks sync with lowercase democracy and participation. Because I think something the populist right and populist left did an incredible job of doing doing is put aside their actual policies and their political performance in their framing, in their storytelling, they make very clear that these are movements, that they're popular, that they're participatory. And I don't think that our world does a very good job of doing that. This is a lot of my beef with a lot of the think tanks. This is my beef of a lot of the voxy publications. They very much just are still oriented around top down rather than bottom up or rather than having top down, basically, because I think you need both need the top and you need the bottom. They need to meet. But I don't see enough of this. So you've talked about how you kind of have like an abundance or like a. A broader theory of democracy here. Because I think I want people to think about this because this just seems to be just that most obvious thing which you just seem missing. And there's nothing inherently ideological about this gap. Like, there's no reason why you can't bring democracy into things.
- [49:41]
B
Yeah. So I think about our democratic theory as having two components. One is, I think, because we're classical liberals. And one of the oldest things in classical liberalism is a focus on the way that like, concentrated interests end up capturing the state, capturing political power for their own narrow interests. You think about, you know, a lot of, you know, modern liberalism, you know, the British side, you know, comes out of, you know, the British corn laws, which were arguing that, you know, the aristocrats and their protectionism were immiserating the working classes of Britain in order to protect or through colonial privilege, which goes back to Adam Smith. And then, you know, I wrote a book by with Brink Lindsay called the Captured Economy available in all better bookstores that made the argument that we have a lot of things that look like the corn laws does today, right. Where we have whether it's in housing where existing homeowners end up resisting new housing which ends up increasing the value of their homes or doctors who try and limit competition from foreign doctors or new or nurses or lots of other things, intellectual property, finance, the whole thing. Once you start thinking about this and that, that goes even to outside of firms. Right. If you think about, you know, I've been interested in school reform for a long time. School reform is very easy to analyze in terms of there being a very concentrated producer interest in the form of teachers unions who often want to prevent competition, new entrants, other kinds of stuff. And so our theory of democracy is that democracy is always vulnerable to capture by organized, intelligent, often resource laden interest who, who steer policy in their direction and frustrate what, what is often majoritarian interests. So that's one thing that again mostly neither side of the political system wants to analyze problems in those terms. But I think that's one way in which much we're democratic.
- [52:03]
A
Yeah, I think that's a great place to end. What I would just add to this is I totally agree with the theory that makes total sense. What I'm also interested in a yes and sense is there are ways that I think our side of things get better at performing democracy. And it's not that you can't do it because I think the YIMBY groups they are so. And it's easy est for YIMBY because think of their story. So like to your point about how there's an incumbent interest, okay, those are the homeowners, the NIMBYs. And in San Francisco where NIMBYISM really gets its sort of organizational juices flowing, they say hey, actually so when there's a debate about new housing in a local city council, all the NIMBYs show up, but the majority of people, young people who are renting and want to buy and want to stay, they never show up. So what we are going to do, the way we are going to win is we are actually just going to organize and show up up. So despite how center coded Nyimbyism is because of the political theory and democracy theory you just articulated, they easier than any other category here were able to just say hey, we have hundreds of thousands of bodies and we're then going to orient our framing and our deal like, the thing I love about Yimbyism is when I hang out in Yimby spaces. Why don't like, perfectly identify as a Yimby for like, sociocultural reasons? Sorry, I like my suburbs and my cars too much. What I do love about them as a movement is that they just actually I just run into my most, my highest ratio of like a normal person who works a normal, like private sector job and is just like interested in this policy or this idea. It's the highest ratio of any other category. And I want the rest of our movements to do a better job of making that clear.
- [53:44]
B
So I think of think tank work in this context of sort of rent seeking as very democratic work because those, the interests who dominate various different kinds of areas of government activity, they've got all the information. They have the ability to come up with new policy alternatives, to come up with research that supports why whatever they're doing is actually in the interests of the public. Doctors are able to use their reputation, the fact that generally people like doctors, in order to make people not see that they're actually doing something against the public interest. And one thing think tank work can do is it can supply those people who are trying to create countervailing power, trying to create alternative coalitions with all of the tools to do that democratic majoritarian kind of work. And the last thing I'll say is our constitutional system is not really completely designed just to make policy on party line terms. But, you know, parties obviously wanted do that. They want to have at least the party leaders want all the policy making to be done in that way. But I think that's led to an enormous decline in trust and faith in government. And policymakers in many cases want to do stuff across party lines, but you need to actually do some of that hard work to help them do that stuff. You need to give them the research, you need to help them build the networks and to, you know, make those ideas at least, least, you know, familiar enough that they're willing to try new things. And that's also democratic work. It's democratic work in the sense of helping to subsidize the kind of trans partisan coalition that don't necessarily come just out of the interests of party leaders or the strongest, most ideological partisans.
- [55:35]
A
And last actual thing, could you define transpartisanship? Because people are going to think you're saying bipartisanship in a fancy way with their different ideas.
- [55:42]
B
Yes, so. So bipartisanship is really, when I think about this is, you know, we used to have a world in which the parties overlapped, right? There were Rep. You know, you think about or you keep mentioning Oregon. This is like the Sponsored by Oregon podcast. But you know, Bob Packwood was the senator.
- [55:59]
A
We don't talk we don't talk about.
- [56:00]
B
Bob Pack, we don't talk about pacwood. I can, I'm a Democrat, so I can talk all about Bob Pockwood I want. But you know, Bob Hackwood was a, you know, Republican senator from Oregon, but on lots of issues on abortion, on other ones, he was to the left of many members of the Democratic Party, right. And so in that world, when you thought about how you put together policy, what you often did is you put it together by often committee leaders who were in the center and then they tried to build coalitions out from the center. There is no center right in Congress, right. It's been almost entirely hollowed out. There's very little overlap between the leftmost Republican and the right most Democrat. And so that idea of building policy out from the center just doesn't work anymore. So transpartisan is about imagining well, how do we actually get coalitions of people who don't have any ideological overlap. And that's largely by finding some other dimension, whether, you know, or some issue that doesn't define the left right coalition in order to build new kind of policy changes on. And so I think a transpartisanship as trying to find coalitions between the parties in a world that's really optimized for a high degree of polarization, which is different than the world of the 70s and 80s when the Bob Packwoods was would do things with, you know, Dan Rostenkowski and Democrats like that in order to create changes like the Tax Reform act in 1986.
- [57:34]
A
That is an excellent place to leave it. Steve, thanks so much for joining me on the realignment and making this weird, but I think desperately important where we live in a little more legible.
- [57:45]
B
Thanks a lot, Marshall.