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The Realignment
The Realignment at WelcomeFest 2026 | The Difference Between Good and Bad Moderation with Steve Teles
00:51:34
The Realignment host Marshall Kosloff and Niskanen Center Senior Fellow Steve Teles are set to appear at WelcomeFest 2026 today in Washington, DC. WelcomeFest is known as the biggest annual gathering of the political center. Steve will appear on a panel titled, "Building Centrist Abundance." Marshall will interview Senator Ruben Gallego and San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins on the center's lack of a broad story and worldview that can respond to an anti-status quo moment. Ahead of their appearances, Marshall and Steve discuss their problems with "moderation," an approach to politics associated with gatherings like WelcomeFest. While defending moderation as a personality and instinct, they differentiate between "higher" and "lower" forms of moderation and offer alternative approaches for politicians, organizations, and movements associated with the idea.
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- [00:01]
A
Marshall here. Welcome back to the Realignment. Hey everyone, welcome back to the show. Today I am hosting a special conversation with Steve ahead of welcome Fest 2026. The two of us are appearing at the big annual gathering of centrist and center left Democrats. Steve is going to speak about abundance and centrism and I'm going to interview Senator Ruben Gago and San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins about the missing narrative within the broad political centers politics that I've written about and discussed on this podcast. Plenty ahead of our appearances though, we wanted to discuss our long running and increasingly developing beefs with the word moderation. Welcome Fest is officially billed as a centrist gathering, but in a lot of the reporting about the event beforehand and what I suspect the reporting afterwards, there's gonna be lots of throwing around the term moder moderate instead. So ahead of the event in the next few hours we wanted to just share our pre op and we'll be looking forward to discussing afterwards. Hope you all enjoy the conversation and I look forward to sharing what I record on this feed later this month. Steve, welcome back to the realignment.
- [01:21]
B
Here we are once again. Let's do it.
- [01:24]
A
Here we are once again. So this episode is effectively a tie in to welcome Fest which is going to happen on June 3rd. Steve and I are both speaking, interviewing, slash paneling in our own capacities. So I thought this would be a good chance to sort of not only review ahead of time because a lot of friends of the show are going to be there, but also sort of talk about the state of the broad political center, the sort of moderate category term that you and I aren't huge fans of. So let's just start with Steve. You're going to be on stage, give us a preview of what you're going to be talking about.
- [02:00]
B
So yeah, I'm going to be on stage with two sort of moderate, maybe abundance, hopefully abundance pilled members of Congress. And I think we're going to be talking a lot about pushing this distinction between moderate and abundance and what's the relationship between them, which I think is still underspecified. And in fact it might be actually good to start here a little bit. You previewed that both of us have some issues with the term moderate and so we might actually want to unpack that for the, as they used to say, the folks watching at home for why it is we actually have some degree of discomfort with the idea of moderation and I could start that or you could start it. Okay. So one, in some ways I don't have a problem with a sort of philosophical idea of moderation. Right. Again, one problem is there's lots of things that are going underneath this label that probably ought to get distinguished. So my probably favorite philosopher is Michael Oakeshott, and I think of Michael Oakeshott in a way as a philosopher of moderation. He has this idea that, that what he calls the pole of faith and the pole of skepticism, which are a little bit of what we can think of as the left and right should be understood at their best as being in what he calls a sort of magnetic tension. Right. That they can kind of correct the devices of each other. Right. And so a properly organized polity is one that has a sort of equilibrium between. Between these two. Right. And so the thing that that's produced at the level of the whole system is moderation, right. And that's one of the reasons why our constitutional order forces people into deliberation, right. We don't have a parliamentary system where we just, you know, have one election, you add it all up and then you. That party gets total dictatorial powers until the next election. Right. Which is a way to organize democracy. And it's got benefits, right? But ours doesn't. And one story about what the problem with American government is is we have a system that's designed to produce cross party kind of governance in order to correct our vices and bring out our virtues. But we're trying to run it like a parliamentary system, right? And so a theory of what our thing is wrong is that we don't have that kind of moderation. Now, it's not obvious that that moderation is produced by just having a bunch of people who themselves are moderate, which is a kind of paradox, maybe. But, you know, that's what at its best a system like ours of separation of powers should do is provide the opportunity for that. Now, again, that's mostly not what we're talking about. We're talking about moderation, right. When we're talking about moderation, we often talk about a particular strategy held by people who, who are trying to run for office in highly competitive seats, right? And there are, and I think we'll talk about more creative ways that people who are in those kind of places could run for office and organize what they do in government. But often what they try and do is, is have very low ask kind of policy packages, right? So I used to joke that the one way to think about what a lot of moderates do is take a really, really big problem, so they admit that there's some really big problem. And then they come up with a solution that's massively subscale, right.
- [06:06]
A
Is nowhere near tax credits for everything.
- [06:09]
B
Right. Or, or like a huge, you know, sort of new kind of leverage bond that you can buy to help whatever. Right. And so, yeah, so they've discovered a 20 foot like thing and then they built a two foot ladder. Right. And that's what they call, and we call moderation. Right. And so like that's one part of moderation is looking for, like always looking for something bite size. The second thing that we often associate with one kind of moderation is looking for things that are always have to be bipartisan. Right. Because there's a theory that when people in those seats do things with the other party that their voters like it and they get rewarded. But, and you know, often again, as we talked before, transpartisan legislating is a good thing, but the reason to do it is because there's a thing you actually want to achieve that's at the scale of the problem that you're looking to deal with, right. Not just because you like the feels that are associated with doing trans partisan kind of things. And then the last thing is moderation is associated with what I was called congressional individualism.
- [07:33]
A
Right? Yeah.
- [07:34]
B
So moderates almost by definition are not part of anything else. Right. They're not part of a group that is collectively trying to advance a vision of governance. And they're doing that by operating together and engaging in collective action. And we've talked about this before and sometimes you gave me a funny face when I mentioned that the classic version of this is education reform. Right. That that was an actual thing that people who I think we would identify in some ways as moderates, often working with people on other sides actually had a big governing program, Right. They had a theory of what was wrong with a huge big institution in society. They were like carving out pieces of it to do like every year. Right. They had a piece of that larger agenda for how you were going to reconstruct an institution. And they were working together, Right. They had caucuses, they had other kinds of things where they thought of themselves. And you know, they did things electorally. Right. They created Democrats for education reform to help them get money to run for office, to protect them from challengers. Right. And so in, in a way, right. I think the, the higher version of moderation has to get escape velocity from all of those three versions of what I'll think of as the lamer version of moderation.
- [08:59]
A
Yeah, totally. So I took a couple notes and some of these intersect for what you said. So I have to say outright a. I think moderation, or being moderate is a personality. So I'm moderate in my personality. I'm pragmatic, I'm friendly, I like to talk to people. But I think if I identified my political identity as a moderate, I think that would leave me, let's say I was an elected official, incredibly unsuited to this political moment. Because I think the purpose of, you know, I'm very obsessed with, like, words and their meaning. I think there is something about the evolution of the moderation story that when you use that word or your movement or your organization uses that word, it sort of forces you down a path by which you don't quite understand. You're forced down a path, and then you lack the ability to sort of calculate and think about things. So, like, a perfect example of this would be be. And I said this on the show. I've talked about this before, but after the election, Seth Molton, you know, out of Massachusetts congressman, gave a big speech about, you know, doing a sort of sister soldier moment on, you know, trans kids in sports. And separate from whether or not I agree or disagree of his actual speech, my instant reaction that I said live on the show was, oh, like, that's a real political mistake to make. Because that is an example of taking sort of like the moderate thing you're expected to. To do. Okay, so Trump won. And, like, Democrats were hurt by the they them ad. And, you know, we have this sort of baseline of, like, during moments of left liberal overreach, you need to sort of pivot to the center and sort of like, pivot to the right. But, you know, since I spent time on the Republican side of the aisle in the 2010s, I've always been at a DNA level, very. Just aware of the way that your base can shift very, very aggressively in ways that don't sort of, like, make immediate sense in the aftermath of something. So my sort of take on why that was a mistake is he decided to have the first thing he did be defensive, counter signaling. Trump has arrived. Trump has all this power, so I need to accommodate it. And if you talk to a lot of the moderates that we know, that was their entire political framework for how to understand the first few months of the administration. But frankly, because I just know the White House, I know the VP's office, like, I know a lot of the people who are in power, I instantly was like, oh, man, this is going to get out of control very, very, very quickly. So if I were a Member of Congress. I would have not given assisted soldier speech. I would have not sort of raced too quickly into voting for a pro ICE bill, which a bunch of moderates did, because they were trying to signal that they have defensively accommodated the moment. And instead I would just like, either like, shut up or recognize that the base of like the moderate squad are people like my parents in an upper income community in Oregon where they and all their friends are protesting Tesla dealerships, which is not something they would have done. And that is sort of, if you're seeing whether or not AOC would win the would win the primary or not, if you're seeing where a lot of AOC's growth is coming from, it's that she's been able to convince sort of formerly center left people who are sort of like in the no kings category or this would be a place she could really grow in that, like, she knows what time it is, unlike other people. Like, another example was like Gavin Newsom having Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk on his podcast was an insane decision. Like, why would you. Why would you do that? And that's kind of what happens when you just sort of like use the word moderate, which then puts you on this script of, okay, I need to play defense, defense, defense, and not then exploit the obvious opportunity. Right?
- [12:40]
B
So I guess I would say maybe I'm more pro hippie punching than you are, as why is she
- [12:52]
A
take that phrase to its conclusion. Punching hippies when an administration who your base hates and then makes hip going after hippies, the centerpiece of your thing is not a strategically smart decision, right?
- [13:07]
B
So again, I was about to pivot from my, like, glib kind of point there. It's all right. I, you know, I can see why you would do that. You know, one is, I think your point about being, in fact, maybe this is a fourth version of the difference between the lame and the higher version of moderation. Right? Is the lame version is it's entirely negative, right? It's entirely what you're not doing, right. What you're distancing yourself from. Right. I also think it depends on when you do it, right. If Seth Moulton had done it a year before, right. Then. Then you're really taking some risk to yourself, right? So this is the thing I often talk about this idea of costly signals, right. That especially in a moment like this, right. What voters want is a sign that you're not part of just the hive mind, right. That you're your own person. And I often talk about this as, in a way Downstream from representation. Right. What part of what voters want is an idea that you're their representative. Right. You didn't come from the, like, you know, the group hive mind, where they all get together. Right. And so I do think voters want to signal that you're, you know, that you're representing them and not the other guys. Right. That collection of unrepresented people who. Right. And so sometimes hippie punching is valuable if you do it in a way that's not just transparently like, this turned out to be politically toxic. I'm going to try to get out of the way of the train. Right, though. So if, like, if you had gone hard in the box against school closures, right. In 2020. Right. That would have been a costly signal that would have been saying, I'm will. And again, this. Not to keep coming back to ed reform. Right. But the reason the ed reform was valuable is it was a costly signal. Right. Voters knew that you. That people were. That people who mattered, who had power. We're going to be pissed off at you. And you did that because it was the right thing to do because you were trying to represent them and not the power holders. Right. And especially in a moment when there's pervasive, you know, skepticism of large institutions and power holders. Right. So again, the. When you do it is what matters. And this is where, again, I think it's more important that you do it when. When everybody else isn't rushing for the exits. Right. And when you rush for the exits, that just sends a sign that you got. Maybe you don't have any center whatsoever. Right?
- [15:57]
A
No, that's. That. That's exactly it. And I. And to be clear, like, we're. We're doing pure political analysis here. So I'm not meaning to say that, like, with any group of people, you should just always be, like, calculating and doing different things here. But, like, this is just why I'm just sort of like, speaking to my frustration with, like, what moderation has come to mean, which is that, like, part of the way that a lot of people pitch moderation is its political pragmatism and how it works and it wins. And I'm just trying to sort of say that a bunch of the way that, like, moderation has, like, implemented itself over the past two years has been that it's actually not been a good guide to someone trying to navigate a very political. A complicated dynamic. And the other example, and this is why I bring up the Seth Moulton thing, not just to, like, dunk on him, but, like, it should be noted, once the administration actually started, he didn't vote in favor of a bunch of Republican bills that were sort of largely construed as being anti trans. So like, this is the funny thing, like when he gave gave the speech to do a sister soldier moment. The second the actual obvious cost of doing so was there, which was seen as largely being bad faith on the sort of Democratic side of things. Like he then of course didn't do the same thing. But that just speaks to sort of like the point there and then the big thing though, for me, and this is me just sort of spending time in these moderate spaces, I've found that political moderation in Democratic Party circles is just really just become a version of status quoism and disinterest in public policy. So I read this book by Arthur Herman. It's a follow up to his Arsenal of democracy book. And he talks about the fact that there are founders and then there are managers, and what America needs right now are founders. And he's obviously making a reference to the tech industry that a bunch of people won't like. But let's just take the terms literally. And my problem with the current moderation framework is it attracts people who are just managers, people who think that like, my job in politics is to get elected and then I'm in Congress and then like, maybe I'll get to go to Senate and then like, why am I actually doing this? Why? It just sort of attracts that type of person and that is a person. And this is why. This is not about like the specific ideology or what their actual solutions or approaches are, but just sort of conceiving of your role being like a passive manager of a governing situation where America feels like it's burning down. You are just not set up for success. And then also critically, and this is what my whole missing liberal story came down to, if you are a manager, you by definition are juiceless. You cannot go on a podcast and be a compelling manager. Like the thing that I'm very frustrated by. We could put aside the policy part of it. Did you see that Zoron launched the like anti doge. What? Really?
- [18:30]
B
Well, it's not the anti doge, it's the Doge.
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A
Yeah, it's the sort of like left progressive answer to doge, which is saying we're going to do this sort of government accountability cost thing. But from a left perspective, where was the center left center interest version of this? It didn't happen because to do so would be to take a risk. To do so would mean you're going to get quote tweeted by a bunch of right wing accounts saying see the Dem is the zoron is saying Elon was right and like et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I just like see that like the sort of founder, the sort of, the sort of like moderate manager type finds it just much easier to say like affordability, affordability, affordability than actually do anything. And just like not realizing that that's just so juiceless and just not interesting. And it's not something that I think anyone is going to want to be attracted to and that's just like a real problem. But sorry.
- [19:22]
B
Well, here. So here's the fifth version of. I mean which I think is worth adding up at some point this is going to turn into a national affairs essay. But the fifth version of the lower and higher, which you're sort of getting at there is about, you know, do you think what moderation is, is that you think things are basically fine, right? That you know, we need some, a little bit of like housekeeping around the edges or things like, you know, do we have like fundamental problems of like the allocation of power of organization of society. Right. Which again lots of people believe and they're, you know, I wrote a whole book arguing that in the captured economy that was making that argument. Right. And so that's like one version of moderation. And then we come to this before the other is what I'll, you know, what we've called sort of Michelle re. Adrian Fenty moderation, right. I gotta say, Adrian Fenty, who was the mayor of D.C. is like the missing hero that nobody wants to talk about. Like this guy, you know, as mayor of D.C. did amazing amount of stuff. Like you drive anywhere around D.C. you just see all these things Adrian Fenty built, right? You know, school, new schools, pools, libraries, reform the, you know, the schools in ways that are still doing, you know, pointed. Michelle Reed did all this stuff, right. And then lost his seat because he did stuff. Right. And you know, part of the, the that's the higher version of moderation is I'm willing to. I got a big thing, big things I want to do again. I think it's in particular like I want to do things in physical space, right. Things will people actually see that will leave a legacy that you'll never be able to change. Right. And that'll durably change the way institutions operate in ways that will be more or less irreversible in the future. Right. And I'll take political risk to do it. The Lamer version of that is, you know, often associated with like people doing opposite state governorships. Right. Where you're like, you're the like concert, you're the Republican in the blue states. That's like the Larry Hogan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, which I sometimes call like adult supervision Republicanism, which is like, is quite popular in these states.
- [21:49]
A
They have, oh, they love it. Ratings.
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B
They love it because, well, they're basically, they want to elect like Massachusetts wants to elect a legislature of liberal Democrats. But then voters simultaneously think that if they do that, like somebody they'll just like take all the cookies from the cookie jar. There'll be nothing left in the cookie jar. Right. So they want an adult. They want adult supervision to make sure they only take two cookies. Right?
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A
Yeah.
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B
And that's, you know, and that is the thing. And in some ways there's the reverse version of it which is, you know, Andy Brashear is sort of that. Right. So that kind of governor doesn't do a lot. He just occasionally like builds some guardrails and that's okay. But that is not a very inspiring vision and it's not going to leave anything. Right. So if you look at all of those governors, none of those governors are party builders. Right. They're all going. This goes back to individualism. Right. They win just on their own idiosyncrasies. Right. And they get elected and they don't do very much, but they stop some stuff. And that's fine, but that's not going to affect, just to go back to. And then maybe the sixth version.
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A
Right.
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B
The same.
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A
So we're going to keep.
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B
Okay, so the sixth one. Right. Is partially about individual. Maybe it's related to the other ones. Individualism versus factionalism. Right. So the higher version of moderation is actually building a power base inside of a larger party. Right. And therefore trying to actually, you know, affect the overall. Right. You know, balance of power inside the party, trying to recruit people into that project, which is a longer term project. It's not a one election project, which is also probably another distinction. Right. Are you just trying to get past your next House of Representative election or are you trying to do something that's going to build power in the long term, even if there's some risks in the short term. So wait, so what was your number seven?
- [23:45]
A
So my. Yeah, number seven. And this is where abundance comes in. And this is a good sort of after. I'll give you. We each get one more after this, but number seven, because then we need to do civic abundance. My number seven was also just like a really, the really dispiriting experience I had with, with abundance. So people will know that like I'm probably one of the abundance people who like talks with the left the most. And that wasn't just like a pure Marshall wants to be friends with everyone sort of bit of pragmatism because I think some people interpret that way. It was also like the different way that these ideas were received by certain people on the left and certain people on the moderation center. So like after the 2024 election, after you and I had started to do a little bit of abundance discussion, I actually got put in touch with a possible 2028 candidate who a lot of people would see as being abundance coded. And I was talking with their team and the only, you know, I sort of gave the abundance spiel and the only thing they wanted to talk about was like the polling and that was such a dis, like literally the only follow up question was, do you have specific polling showing that people like this thing? You have to understand like at an existential level that was just dispiriting because like I do not. I think that there is no politics that's competent that emerge or compelling and interesting. Right? Because this is the time when everyone's saying it was the podcast election. You cannot pull your way to a compelling politics that offers a solution what people are sort of looking for. And I just kept running into this. And this is also the funny thing where like you know, you had revolving door project and like a bunch of those other like groups really sort of put out polling that showed that like abundance didn't like pull well. And the funny thing, and I actually explained this to some of like my left friends who like do abundance work now what I actually found is that like they actually convinced the sort of managerial donor and sort of moderation class that abundance is useless to them because it doesn't pull. Well, there's no like obvious version. So like that whole, there's a whole crew of people who just like left the space. And it should be noted there are lots of like abundant centrists who are still in the pace space. And I love working with them because they are people who do not start by saying what's the polls say. It's like, oh like we really, really, really, really need housing. And just because I'm a centrist and a personality doesn't mean I'm not willing to think big about that thing. So it really sort of sorted the wheat from the chaff and frankly I'M glad it happened. But then like with the left right, I just kept. And once again there are plenty of people on the left who are like, you know, way too triggered about abundance. So like lots of substackers and youtubers, but I just kept running into serious smart, 20, 30 and 40 something. Some people of institution of power on the left who were like, look like we've got some beasts of abundance. But like, and Steve, this is why like we're always going to make captured economy references. There's a whole cohort of people who I'm only friends with because they heard you talk about the captured economy and they were like, oh wow, that's a little different than the version I've seen on Twitter or in the discourse we're going to explore there. And it should be noted, I'm sure that there's all sorts of critiques we could offer of like the Roosevelt Institute's like balance of like labor and democracy and abundance. But like the Roseville Institute is doing a lot of like interesting abundance work. They're like funding fellows to work on factory built housing, which is super interesting. That's something you've written about and very, very, very interested in. And they're just not doing that because the fact that that doesn't pull well just doesn't come into the, to the reality. So what I'm really trying to do with like my writing and this podcast and sort of whatever welcome things I can do is just try to get people in the center to understand that like and this is what you really said earlier when you said that like party building is long term. Any successful like long term centrist, factional building has to be long termist and polling is the exact opposite of what will encourage long term thinking. And last thing of it, honestly, what I also hate about the polling argument is that like any politician who needs to be told that like X, Y and Z thing doesn't poll well or does poll well is just kind of dumb and like shouldn't be given a leadership position because a lot of they're like, wow, Americans don't like a border crisis. That's shocking. I'm shocked now. Now I'm a serious person on the border. Or wait a second, people didn't like peak woke 1.0. You know, like I saw this tweet with we finally got a member of Congress who's a Democrat who said it. He just tweeted out like, hey, I never said anything craz 2020 because I'm rooted and I'm just sort of like I'm just there. So we should have politicians who are rooted, not who are just swinging and you sort of referenced that. But yeah, triggered rant.
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B
Okay, so let me try to give. This is what I try and do with my students is I want to give the best version of the argument that I think there's a problem with. Right. So1 now you're right, right. That a good politician that's actually rooted in a place will have a certain natural immunity to like groups telling them that they ought to do something. Right. Now whether their staff has that immunity is another story. Right.
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A
Well then they're later. I hate, don't even get me started with the freaking staffers argument.
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B
Yeah, we're sorry.
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A
Like these 20 somethings, recent grads are just so powerful we can't control them. Like okay, President.
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B
Okay, all right, well let me say the. Right. So there, there is a version you can think of as the lower blue rose ism, right? Which is like Democrats should just ask blue rose to tell them everything that they do and just do that thing and then they'll get elected. Right? Now I do think again, blue road, the higher blue rose ism is that, you know, maybe one, maybe members need a little bit more bucking up just to not do absurd things that totally unrepresentative groups and some staffers in their office are telling them to do. Right. That's fine. I don't have any problem with people saying sometimes they need, you know, the, the, you know, the members just need a little bit of that. Now you're never going to figure out what you're supposed to do from Poland. Right? But you might figure out the thing to say, just don't, don't put your finger, don't put your finger on that. That is badly pulled. And if you put your finger on it, you burn yourself, right. And you'll burn yourself for no policy advantage.
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A
Right.
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B
But I would when I was thinking about the higher moderation, right. Or the higher abundance, actually I was thinking totally a non American example which is like the Madrid metric, right? So in Madrid Metro they keep building and they keep getting the cost down. It's at the, you know, transit cost project and works in progress is done stuff on this, right. And so they're building it fast and cheap and it's going places people like. And then people look at that and say, wow, that's great, let's do more of that, right? So because they're actually delivering and they're actually getting things done cheap, right. That is increasing the demand for more. Right. That for me is the essence of the abundance politics. Right. It's not necessarily that it's gonna poll incredibly well or people. And a lot of these are just the things we're interested in are just not high salience issues. Right? There are a lot of those. And this is why a lot of the politics of abundance stuff is like on the DL secret congress kind of stuff. Because they're things where the balance between how important they are and how much anybody understands them or pays attention to them are like inversely correlated. Right. So like, you know, transmission is super duper important. Right. It's, it's hard. It's one of those issues. Once you start thinking about transmission, you can't think about anything else. Right. Because it's integral to everything else anybody is trying to do. Right. And like nobody understands transmission. Like I have sat with Liza Reed, Edna Scannon and had her try to explain all of it to me really slowly and even I'm not sure I totally understand it. Right. But that's, you know, part of, and that is a huge long, you know, that to do to really get our transmission fixed in this country is going to be over a decade long project. Right. Again, a lot like education reform where you just need to keep grinding away at a thousand different obstacles and places. It's standing in the way before you get the thing done, right? Yeah. That's what abundance politics is. And I think the, the attraction of the, of the politics is not on the specific like equities of the issue. It's that voters know that you have something that is a big thing for the public interest that you really care about. Right. And you're trying to do something again at the scale of the problem you've identified. Right. And that you're willing to take risks for it. That goes back again to in a relatively low trust electorate, taking some of those risks and explaining why you're doing it and explaining who you're doing it with. Right. I'm not just me, you know, Marshall Koslop doing it. I am me and these other people who are reformers who are trying to do this project. Right. That's the higher politics of, of abundance. Right. It's not that this thing, you know, and again most politics, but most bad policy is downstream from some poll somebody did.
- [33:17]
A
And to your point about the. And this is why I've sort of been road testing this in the, in the field of discourse and content and live events. But like I read a book about, you know, the sort of like 1950s and 1960s, it's called JFK and the masculine Mystique. And it's talking a lot about like how the sort of idea of a new frontiersman. So like that was like the, you know, the people in the Kennedy administration, the best and the brightest. How like in many ways it culturally and stylistically was a response to the sort of man in the gray flannel suit, 1950s, like dynamic men of action. Right. Because it was, you know, insert different gender standards back then. But like my biggest frustration on the abundance end of things is that like I wish abundance were less seen. And this just seems obvious to me when I like talk with just normal people. This sort of makes sense. Like I want an abundance politician to be a politician of action, a politician of dynamism. Like, you know, like when the type of politician, let's say you were running for governor of California and people and you were to say, hey, I'm actually going to. Not that too many voters actually care, but a politician who were to say, I'm actually going to fix this high speed rail disaster and get it fixed. And then you just by your very continents and sort of dynamic and to your point about like your track record and risks you took, etcetera, etc, etcetera. Actually got it done. When I've talked with my politician friends, like that framework of like, no, abundance is like a mindset by which you like bring to politics, which is like actually deliver. Don't just pass the bill, actually make sure the bill actually happens because like there's just a gap there and people don't trust you. So you have to very physically demonstrate and make that very clear. That version has resonated with them so much better than I think a lot of the sort of iterations that have been pitched to them that just lead to like the polling trap.
- [35:02]
B
Yeah. I mean I, I think we've mentioned this on a thing before. Again, I'm in the D.C. area, so my example, this is Randy Clark, who's the head of the Washington Metro.
- [35:14]
A
And good news, there's an article about this in the Washington Post. I will link because this is the thing, it's not, it's very tangible how real this is.
- [35:20]
B
Right. And I, you know, and again, this is a playbook we have from earlier periods in American history for good nil. Right. You know, I often use the J. Edgar Hoover example. Right. And you know, a little malevolent. Right. But one thing he did is, you know, he formed, you know, a big piece of state capacity kind of in his own image. Right. So you had people out there, you know, G men, right? The reason they call them G men is they worked for, for, you know, for Hoover, right? They had they, you know, visually, right? There was a, literally a uniform. Whenever you see those teeth, you know, those things they have the skinny black tie and the black suit and the white shirt, right? But you know, previous ones, you know, the Forest Service, right? Men in uniform doing a big kind of long term governing project. Dan Carpenter talks about this in his book Reputation and Power, right? Is partially about that. You know, reputations and networks, right? That's the thing that the great sort of agency creators of the past did, right? Is on the one hand, they literally projected that image of what they were trying to do with government out to the public. They were, People are aware of the things they were doing. They were constantly finding opportunities to show people what, you know, the hard, you know, the, you know, the slow boring of hard boards, right, that they were doing to make things for the public, right? And they were connected up to networks of like large organizations in society that help give them some protection, especially from Congress, that we're trying to sort of drag them down into proceduralism, right? Yeah. Now this actually gets to one thing we haven't talked about, but one of the challenges that is we're just not as organized a society as we once were, right? So one of the reasons why some of the great, you know, agency leaders that, you know, you're interested in the early part of the 20th century, right? You know, a lot of those guys built on top of these huge national organizations like the Grange or the Rotary or the, you know, Junior Leagues or all those kind of things, you know, the Scotch polls talked about these, of national federated organizations, right? So if you were, you know, running an agency and had one of those big giant, you know, organizations behind you, right? You could get a lot of space to actually manage your agency toward, you know, what we now think of as abundance and state capacity, right? And one of the problems is who can actually do that? What organization in society now can actually give you that protection to do that, that big thing in government, right? And so you have to rely just on the reputation side. And the downside of that is actually it's hard to. For anybody to get like a single reputation in a, in the kind of communications world we have in now. It's harder to just capture the communications sort of ideal and have people say, oh, yeah, well, you know, this guy's untouchable because everybody loves it. That makes sense totally.
- [38:29]
A
And it's Just sort of. I guess what I'm you know, getting at here is just that, you know, to sum, to sum everything up and books will. I'm definitely going to be posting my welcome Fest segments so people hear more on these topics. But I think my point is just that like I do not think people who have come into the post 2024 moment with the low level moderation framework that we have describing have particularly navigated this moment either at a policy level effectively or politically effectively. And there are so many things that I could sort of critique about policy outcomes and people could just sort of dismiss me as sort of being sort of just a little too left with center left. But what I would just say that even on like the terms of high moderation that you're really describing here, like you actually by the way should write this for national affairs because it's like a very important like useful dynamic here. Just like even by the terms of high moderation, the low moderation approach just really seems to be antithetical to it. So yeah, I think that's just like, I think it's just important that people, I want people to come. So like once again a lot of listeners are going to be there. I want you to come into welcome Fest conceiving of like a couple different sort of conceptions of. Oh, one other thing before I let you leave. I'm also not happy with. It's now become conventional wisdom that like moderation isn't sexy anymore. So people are starting to pivot to like heterodoxy. And my problem of heterodoxy is it's basically a back end way of, of, of basically reflecting that like the left has all the energy, the center doesn't have energy. So I'm going to pick up a bunch of like left takes that I don't actually really believe in. So I'm magically going to be in favor of something approaching Medicare for all or a public option. I didn't think that two weeks ago and I'm going to be like moderate on this thing. And once again you could be moderate or heterodox if that's what you actually are like. I think I am a genuinely like heterodox person in my politics. I like Zoran Mamdani and I want to re industrialize the defense industrial base. Like that's actually what heterodoxy looks like. But I got there because I've had seven years just sit on a podcast talking to smart people and developing it versus I think the heterodoxy language that a Lot of people are starting to adopt now that they know that moderate doesn't work is excuse for not thinking deeply or actually having a broader worldview or set of policies. So it's not going to lead them to a good place.
- [40:56]
B
So I'm not sure whether this is one we actually cover, but I think the. What you're getting at that in political science, we talk about that as sort of agenda control, right? That is the heterodoxy or the thing, the hippie punching, right? Are both things you do if you actually don't have any control of the agenda.
- [41:14]
A
Yes.
- [41:14]
B
The higher moderation is the thing saying what we're trying to do is like intrude this thing onto that. We want to control what people are talking about. We want to make them have to react to our thing. And again, that. Sorry to go back to this, right? But that's what Ed reformers were so good at doing, right? Was putting teachers unions and the defenders of the status quo on the back foot. They were always worried about what we were. We were doing to them, right? And they were having to respond to it, right? And we had captured also the imaginary about what the public interest was, right? We were saying that those are the concentrated interests. They're the ones who stand for the status quo. And we're just constantly sending incoming at them, right? It's charters, it's, you know, it's new materials, it's all that stuff. So they have to respond to it, right? And at its best, that's what abundance should be doing, right? Is constantly sending out incoming that the status quo has to respond to. But that also picks up that. Imagine people still believe in an idea of the public interest, right? And that the public interest is, you know, in some ways inimical to concentrated kinds of interests of various sorts. That's again, a thing that YIMBY people have been very good at doing, again, is putting the other side in the back foot, right? Saying actually, no, you're the bad guy, right? Prove me wrong. Right? It's like, you know, that guy who sits on the quad with the prove me wrong thing, right? You know, and that's what, you know, really good moderation should be doing, is not just differentiating yourself from the toxic whatever of the other guy, but constantly producing, you know, a coherent. The other point is it's not just like, again, heterodoxy suggests it's not part of anything larger.
- [43:07]
A
It's not cohesive.
- [43:09]
B
It's not cohesive, right? Whereas again, the way I always describe what abundance is about is it's about state building, right? And this is the parallel to the progressive era, except again, as Skoronic describes it, what the progressives were trying to do was take what he called the state of courts and parties and build a new American state, a modern American state. Right. And now we're trying to take the modern state, in a way, the state that was created in the 70s, which I think of as the state of litigation and contracting out, and we're trying to build a new American state as an alternative to that. And that's a. And that's got pieces all over the place, right? Just like the project the progressives did. Right. And then you were mentioning the military, right? One big, you know, one of the three cases in Skoronic is about the military, right? That we had this very weird, federated, decentralized military, you know, including. Including up through the Civil War. And you had these generals like Sherman who had, like, you know, tried to fight the Civil War with this weird National Guard kind of military and said, no, we need to build up the actual U.S. army. And in a way that's very parallel to the problem we have in defense now is we have a military that was very optimized for one set of problems, was organized around one set of problems. But a. But a country where we have, as you were mentioning, profound problems with the defense industrial base. Problems of like, how do we adapt to the centrality of drone warfare. All that stuff is going to require fundamental change in the basic way that we organize the military in ways that should be parallel for things we're doing in other parts of the state. And that is a big. There's nothing about that that feels small ball or incremental or heterodox. That's a big comprehensive indictment of the status quo and a project to do something about it. And that again, for me, is what. That's the higher moderation.
- [45:14]
A
I will close the episode by taking the year of hints and apologize for my side eyeing you when you talked about the charter movement, because I'm just gonna. I think what I was doing there was like, focusing on, like, the specific politics and policy of charter schools. And I think I'm going to reinterpret why. I appreciate the example you're giving here and why as I'm thinking more about this as like a leadership critique. So think of your point, right? Like 2009, 2010, like Michelle Rhee. And this is why, like, I have a really soft spot for Michelle Rhee because, like, I remember I was like, obviously people are be Shocked to hear this. I was like a weird politics nerd in high school. So shocked to hear that. But I got Time magazine and I got Newsweek and I got the copy of Time magazine where Michelle Rhee had the broom in the classroom. It's a famous picture and I actually, like, cut it out and I put it in a little frame and I put it in my room when I was in high school. Because put aside the politics of charter schools and the policy, I remember thinking, man, if I were a politician, I'd want to be really badass and aggressive like that. I would want to be like this person. And I think if we sort of take your point of view, Michelle Rhee and Adrian Fenty, as like embodiments of like, higher moderation versus sort of low moderation, I think if we took a Michelle Rhee type and said, hey, you know how, like, you had this like, really anti status quo critique of the Pentagon and the sort of defense primes that literally no one likes and no one's will defend. I'm going to let you loose on the Pentagon and you need to treat it the way you treated a teacher's union or like an incumbent schooling system in 2009. And I actually think the politics would have juice and they would really, really, really work. Like, you know, Michelle Rhee, you're out there somewhere. If Michelle Rhee wanted to pivot into becoming like a defense reformer, and just like, she would, I met her once in person, she would just be really, really, really good at it because she would be able to say without Hemming and Haing, it is insane that we're on pentagon audit number 12 and it's been 20 years and this stops now. You don't have to be a defense policy expert to be able to say that. Like, that's just sort of a political leadership instinct. And just the fact that, you know, you just don't have people. And by the way, nothing I said is like, incompatible with moderation or quote, unquote, centrism. And then also critically, like, no one likes, plenty of centrists will say, like, oh yeah, like the war in Ukraine is revealed and the war for Iran is revealed, that our defense industrial base is totally not ready. Like all of our exquisite systems. Like, you are not going to get a single cancellation from a centrist donor for saying any of that stuff. Yet. The way the sort of like late stage, low moderation class sort of embodies that is not like reformist and aggressive. It's just sort of like, like juiceless and comfortable so, like, I want, I want the Michelle Reese back. So where are they, Steve? That's my closing question for you. Like, what happened? Because it's a personality. Because it's not just a, it's a personality type. What, what happened to them? Where'd they go?
- [48:13]
B
Well, okay, so my general theory of, in politics is I, I, I, I put less into personality and I put more into organization, right? So Michelle Rhee actually came out of an ecosystem, right? She had been, you know, she had started a, the New teacher project before. In fact, that's how she got on the, on the radar screen of Adrian Fenty, right? So she had actually done a bunch of work in this space already where she had, like, you know, done some of the hard work of getting, you know, getting new people into classrooms and stuff. Stuff. And that got her into that position, right? And in some ways prepared her for that. So we don't just have to think, well, there's certain of these people who are somehow floating out there in the, in the atmosphere and we need to find them, right? We can also make them right again. I think, you know, we, we've talked a lot about the students for abundance, which we should always be hyping every time we talk about this, right? But that's, that's one thing that, that's doing and having all these chapters out on college campuses. And if you're listening here and want to start one, you should like, you know, hit us up. But that's partially, you know, the way you build anything as an organizer, right? You need some initial part of the funnel, right? Like people get in where they can see whether they are capable of leading something, right? There's lots of people who are capable of doing great things who just never get an opportunity. Nobody, like, invites them to go and do stuff or they never see that opportunity. So part of that is just like creating that funnel, right? Getting them into it, sifting it, right? You know, getting them into the people who are ready for, for higher levels of engagement. You do, you know, you do that kind of thing. And I think those kind of people can be made as well as just sort of found. And I think that's in ways that's the most important thing we're doing in abundance, right? It isn't just what the people at the very top are doing, like the people who are the members of Congress who we're going to talk to at welcome and people like that who are super important, right? But all the people who are underneath them, including the people who made one day become members of Congress come out of a lot of really hard organizations work. And I think that's something that I've learned often from people both on the left and the right, who are generally both better at this kind of thing than people who are aware we are, right? They think about where these pipelines come from, where do the next generation of people are going to be leaders. They think about how to inspire them, how to train them, how to do all that, right? And we're just, you know, as you know, we're just in the middle of building that whole kind of apparatus which hopefully will produce the people who do that kind of big, ambitious work in the public sphere in the future. So again, if you think you're one of those people, right, you gotta, you know, hit us up and we'll find ways to help you get on that. Get on that ladder.
- [51:25]
A
That is an excellent place to end, Steve. We're recording this on Friday, but I look forward to seeing you in D.C. on Wednesday.
- [51:32]
B
Look forward to seeing you there too.
- [51:34]
A
Adios.