The Realignment: 337 | The Realignment Live Part II: Kevin Roberts, John Burtka, Kristen Soltis Anderson, Nate Hochman, Saurabh Sharma, & Chris Griswold

Marshall here. Welcome back to the realignment. Today, we are airing the second of three parts

of soccer and my realignment live recordings that went on at our live event in DC last week.

A lot of great episodes. This one is focused really on the future of the right. We're kicking

it off with the Heritage Foundation's president, Kevin Roberts, along with the Intercollegiate

Studies Institute's Johnny Berkha. We're talking about the future of the right in the context

of institutions like think tanks and student programs. Then, I speak with Kirsten Sotis Anderson

of Ashland Insights about the rights struggles with young voters. After that, we're following up

on the Gen Z theme with American Moments Saurabh Sharma and Nate Huckman of National Review.

Finally, closing out with realignment favorite, American compasses Chris Griswold speaking

about the future of conservative economics. Lots of great stuff here. Once again,

trying to get the video up for now, you're going to have to deal with just the audio version.

Hope you all enjoy that conversation and of course, a huge thank you to Lincoln Network

for sponsoring this conference with us.

I'm joined by Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation and, of course, Johnny Berkha

of the Institute for Collegiate Studies. There are too many three-letter agencies

in terms of government. There are too many three-letter think tanks. That's the really

phoned in apology I'll make on that. I want to start at the broadest level because the show

is called the realignment. We're focused on this idea of it. Everything is changing. Everything

is different. That's almost become such a cliche of it. I now think it's actually helpful to ask

the two of you starting with you, Kevin. What is conservatism? Conservatism is the belief in

an enduring moral order that probably necessitates some form of organized religion but at least

necessitates an understanding that there's a higher power. For me, I would say God. For others,

they might say nature and nature's law that's imprinted either on our soul as I would say it

or on our nature. What's imprinted on our soul, and this is what conservatives not only understand

but try to conserve, is the natural spirit towards self-governance and governments of a few different

kinds, republics, limited monarchies, maybe more organized democracies that work to do one thing,

which is to protect our freedom. But by that, I don't mean that in a libertarian sense. I mean

that in a conservative sense, which is the freedom to do what we ought. That there, once again,

that confers a moral obligation to one another in spite of whatever differences we may have,

political, ethnic, linguistic, religious, and so on. To sum up here, conservatism has really been

at its peak in the United States, in the United Kingdom, in modern history. It may be at its peak

in many different kinds of societies in the future. But always, conservatism is something

that's focused on conserving that enduring moral order. And one quick follow up before I get too,

Johnny. What does it mean to be conservative then in an increasingly secularizing society?

Exactly the same because there's an enduring moral order. And so it doesn't mean that it's easy.

I happen to know that it's not easy every day. But for those of us who believe that there is,

whatever our religious tradition is, there are many that would speak to this, that we have to

become more effective to the heart of your question. We have to be more savvy at explaining

conservatism in a political sense. But because I happen to think that in most cases, politics is

downstream from culture and society, there's certainly an interaction there, that a lot of what

conservatives in this increasingly secular society, even hostile society have to do,

is spend less time focused on politics, per se, and more time on building the institutions in

civil society, like churches, rotary clubs, Kiwanis clubs, and very much influenced in

heritages by Robert Putnam's book, Bowling Alone. And that's something that is a failure,

that is keeping civil institutions together. That's a failure of modern conservatism because

we've spent far too much time waging political fights. Great, same two questions. Whichever

direction you want to take it. I would largely agree with Kevin's definition of conservatism.

I'd go back to Edmund Burke and CS Lewis, Burke viewing society as a partnership between the

dead, the living, and the unborn. And CS Lewis talking about chronological snobbery, the belief

that we came most recently, that doesn't necessarily make us right. We have to be in constant

conversation with the great minds, the great ideas from throughout history. So I think of it more

of as a posture towards reality than a particular political movement. But I think in our American

context, it certainly is defending the American political order and the broader kind of Judeo-Christian

Western tradition that helped to shape that order. What do you think of Kevin's point that the

right has been too focused on politics over civil society? I think I would say maybe have

a slight difference of opinion. I think if by politics you mean sort of this hope or this

fantasy that if only we win one more election, then everything's going to be okay. I think he's

absolutely right. But I do think to some extent it's mutually reinforcing. Politics is downstream

of culture, but also culture, innovation is downstream of politics. And I think of some of

the, let's say a town like Pittsburgh, a town where you look, if you were to go back to the

year 1900, you see these gorgeous architecture thriving manufacturing city. Now it has come

back a little bit recently, but I do think that if you kill the economic drivers of these communities

through bad policy choices, the institutions of civil society are totally going to shrivel up.

And if you visit a lot of those churches in that whole Allegheny region, I'm Eastern Orthodox,

so one Sunday on a drive back from Pittsburgh, I stopped in this parish and there were literally

three people there in this mountain town. And there was this 70, 80-year-old priest,

and he could barely walk. He needed people to support him on each shoulder. And I guarantee

that the annual budget of that church is probably like a couple thousand dollars. And I really

don't think it's the result of poor evangelism on behalf of the church. I think it's bad policy

led to those industries dying, which resulted in all sorts of pathologies and despair that really

helped kill the church. So I think it cuts both ways.

So I want to focus on this politics is downstream from culture point. I think it's really entered

the lexicon. I'm curious how you think folks should operationalize that, because I think that now

that we're, I think almost a decade into this becoming like a very, not conventional in the

sense that you're boring me, but in the sense that this is something people talk about, what should

folks do with that? Because some folks will hear that and say, hey, like, let's launch the daily

wire and put out like conservative movies or, hey, like, let's just like exit the political space

altogether. Like what should folks actually do with this phrase? Now what there's broad agreement,

I think it'd be fair to say that there's that there's truth to it.

Well, thanks for that. They are mutually reinforcing that is culture and politics. And

I grew up on the Gulf Coast. So I've seen the river that runs through my hometown Lafayette,

Louisiana flow backwards during hurricane season, which is to say that if politics is downstream

from culture, sometimes politics flows upstream and affects culture, or you can use Johnny's

metaphor, the point is, they're mutually reinforcing. And I would never say, in fact,

I have argued vociferously against the following, which is not being engaged in politics. That's

not what I'm saying. I'm saying that it's a matter we got a finite amount of time as individuals,

as organizations, as a movement, that we have placed too much emphasis on politics, especially

in Washington DC. It doesn't mean that we should disengage from Washington DC. It means that we

need to be a lot more focused on what's happening at the state level. But I think in the last half

decade, the conservative movement has done that. And we're seeing the fruit of that. Now, as we

sit here, the latest universal school choice bill was signed into law, the ink is barely dry in Iowa.

That's going to happen several more times this spring. So just bear with me for two more minutes,

if you don't mind. Because the point is, that is a reflection of the conservative movement saying,

there's not a darn thing that's really going to happen in good in DC politically the next few

years, but we ought to have the supernatural hope that we can make it happen. But now the next thing

is for conservatives to be focused on local government. Think of, if we were sitting in

this very spot, 12 hours or now, every one of us, when we left here, would be concerned about our

safety. That is abhorrent in the nation's capital of the leading republic in the history of the

world. And that is because conservatives have said, we're not going to deal with politics in a city

that's 90% Democrat. We can't have that thinking. But in order for that to be successful in a

political sense, we have to be very focused on rebuilding cultural institutions, starting with

the family, which of course has been ravaged by federal policy. I would also add actually something

Michael Gibson told me when we had lunch on Monday was that politics and culture are downstream of

excellence. And I'm still kind of unpacking the implications of that. But I do think of,

I think of what Elon Musk has done at Twitter. I think of what someone like Chris Rufo, who

obviously he's been supported by institutions. But in another sense, he's sort of an individual who

had this vision, pursued it, and has brought about pretty significant change throughout the country

in the realm of education, particularly in states like Florida. You think of Ron DeSantis in Florida.

Obviously, that is politics. But you also have these individuals who are excellent, who end up

leading institutions or forming or building new ones, and then producing in a really short period

of time significant changes in both politics and culture. Something I'm curious about then is the

degree to which, what would you identify as like what the national problems are? So two of you.

So you could say the border, that's a national crisis in the sense that Colorado has to deal

with that, New York, Texas, etc. What are local problems? So even if we're talking about crime,

is there, you know, there's a center left Bill Clinton of the 1990s who says, hey, I'd spend more federal money

on cops. So how do we kind of disentangle these local federal state issues from one another?

Well, the first part of that excellent question is public safety. I mean, all you have to do is ask

the American people. They will tell you. It's an amazing concept, which we overcomplicate in policy

and politics. Public safety, the disintegration of community, which means a lot. I mean, we could

take two hours just to unpack that. But the second part, so top of mind in terms of local issues,

but then they would also say education. And I think that's particularly tragic, the state of

education in every major city. So the top 100 American cities in terms of population, they have

all since the creation of the U.S. Department of Education. And since that time, we've spent nearly

two trillion dollars on government funded schools. I've only attended public schools. I'm a big

proponent. The only thing that's happened in those 100 cities is that educational attainment has

not just gone down. It is spiraled downward. And so if you go ask people in neighborhoods adjacent

to where we're sitting, there's an 80, 90 percent chance that there's going to be some combination

of those. And so is there a role, the second part of your question for federal policy in that? Sure.

And in fact, one of the things that excites me as someone who's firmly ensconced on the

political right is the opportunity on those issues in particular in local government

for us to build a very broad coalition across the political spectrum. And so what you'll be

hearing from me and from Heritage in the next year, the next two years, even with all of the

important focus on 2024, because of the presidential campaign, is for conservatives.

But even beyond that, just Americans to once again care about the American city, because as the

American city goes, so goes our self-governance. I guess I would, I'll leave it to Kevin to maybe

sort out the differences between the federal problems and the state problems. But I think the

broader issue in the broader ecosystem is that almost every sort of vital kind of core area

of public policy, whether it is both, maybe not public policy, but of the necessities of human

life when you think of housing, education, health care, they're all exorbitantly expensive,

and they're all mediocre or terrible. And I think it really does put young people

in a very challenging position when I live in Chester County, Pennsylvania, and I think the

median home price there, this is probably significantly less compared to areas around

DC, but I think this past year, the median home sale was something like $550,000,

which is really expensive. And if you think of you're a 22-year-old graduating from college

and you're trying to save up money for a down payment and make those monthly payments,

it costs a lot. It's the same thing with health care, same thing with education,

student loans. And so I think the conservative solution needs to somehow recognize the classic

wisdom of federalism and the power of what can be done and what should be done at the state level.

But I think the challenge is that you have had the federal government involved and

they're fingers in all of these for basically a century. And it's probably, even with the most

conservative president or Congress, never going to be totally decentralized in the way that the

founding fathers intended it. So how do you both reinvigorate this sort of robust tradition of

federalism, which we're seeing now in Florida and in Iowa and in other states like that,

while at the same time figuring out what do we do at the national level from a public policy

perspective to address some of these challenges? I want to pick up on what you just said with

the limits of what even the most conservative president could accomplish. To the two of you,

what actually are the limits? I think this is why, and not being partisan, I think this

is an interesting thing that Governor DeSantis is doing. Let's look at the experimental college

board curriculum for the African-American studies AP course. Not getting into the

specific curriculum, but he just said no to it. And I think most folks, especially in DC and the

traditional conservative media, would, going back to 2015, not think that that was an option

on the table. The right needs to reach out to minority voters. The right needs to be open.

Suburban voters get sketchy around those types of things in a couple of different contexts.

So what actually do you think is the limit on what the right can do given its actual perspectives?

Well, if we can overcome the greatest obstacle to good policy, which if Alexis de Tocqueville

were sitting here, he would say, is the lack of political courage, then the sky is the limit.

I don't mean the authority. The power is limitless. I mean that when conservatives have been in power,

especially in this town, even when conservatives have occupied the White House and both chambers

of Congress with comfortable majorities, that hasn't been often in our history to be clear.

But when that has happened, we've not seized the moment. And to be polite, I would just say they

were tentative. To be slightly impolite on purpose, I would say that they were cowards.

Because they didn't even begin to scratch the surface in wielding the authority that they had

constitutionally in the ways that Ron DeSantis is doing. We often refer to Governor DeSantis as

being Reagan-esque. He's far better than Reagan. And I love Reagan. At Heritage, we love Ronald

Reagan, right? But if you compare what DeSantis has done in one term and one month in Florida with

what Reagan did as Governor of California, which was good, DeSantis understands what time it is

in America. And your example of the African-American studies course is great. I happen to have a

PhD in early American history with a focus on African-American history in spite of the fact

that I'm obviously white. And so what DeSantis is saying is, truth will always persuade people.

And so go to the truth. And what did the College Board do yesterday? They acquiesced. It's an

amazing thing what happens when conservatives grow a spine. And I would add to that need for courage

in growing a spine. Also sort of this competence, excellence, and even a sense of cunning, you

know, because I do think DeSantis, I don't think he's just charging headlong into every

controversial issue. That's stupidity. That's not bravery. I think he's kind of strategically

approached things where he's picked fights that he knows that he can win. And once you start to rack

up some victories, and also he's addressing, I think, very real problems that people, regardless

of where you're at at the political spectrum, say, like, yeah, this is an issue. And he fixed it.

He made it better. And so I think that then gets you the momentum. And then you can reach a little

further, right? And maybe pick a fight. You're not necessarily sure that you're going to win,

but your momentum is going to carry you to that. And I think that's what he's starting to do now

with the College Board and with some other things. Okay, here's a follow-up for you, Kevin.

No PhD, Johnny. So we're going to take you out of this for a second. But Johnny's smarter and

more eloquent, so you may want to ask him first. So yeah, Johnny, I'd be curious as a white man

without a PhD in the category of... He's saying you have less privilege.

How should Florida teach African-American history?

I thought you were asking Johnny. I was excluding him by nature of his background.

Well, the way Florida has been teaching African-American history is great. I mean,

it's a vital part of the curriculum. They don't whitewash history. It's accurate history.

And so about 20, 25 years ago, the history profession was at its best. This is pre-wokeness.

When it said, we've got to elevate the voices of the enslaved. We have to elevate the voices of

people who certainly were oppressed. But you want to do that in a way that weaves a singular narrative

about the American experiment. Because otherwise, what you do is end up defining people according

to immutable characteristics, which is our skin color and other things, obviously. And Americans,

as someone who actually wrote a dissertation and edited two books on enslaved people,

you can use historical records to bring them to life in a way that clearly historians weren't

doing for most of our history. That's what Florida's curriculum does. It's what Texas's curriculum

does. The problem with the College Board's AP African-American History course is that it is

almost 100% identity politics. The purpose of it is to divide people. And you see, that's what

DeSantis has put his thumb on, is that Americans are tired of being told that in spite of our very

obvious differences, that we can't get along. The story of America as imperfect as it is,

is that we do, in fact, get along. We do get along. And in fact, we do get it right. It sometimes

takes us decades in a couple of centuries. But that's the rejection. Americans are rejecting

that notion that whether it's really overwrought COVID lockdowns, whether it's what's going on

with our curricula, whether it's going on with foreign policy, our political discourse, we want

someone who doesn't say, I'm going to unite you, but someone who actually is making decisions

that causes that. I would maybe jump in. I agree with everything Kevin said. I think, you know,

one possible way to address this might also be sort of an emphasis on having students read primary

source material instead of just the secondary literature as relates to some of the issues

and questions about race. So if you actually, because I think it's important from just a

civics perspective to teach a unifying history, like we have to have, we have to be educating

people to be good citizens in our republic. But that doesn't mean there aren't people that have

dissented from that tradition throughout. So if you're reading Malcolm X, like his actual speeches

or James Baldwin, or if you're working in other voices, you know, Frederick Douglass, who have,

you know, probably affirmed the American tradition more than some of the later people.

But I think if you're engaging with the actual primary sources, they're going to have a much

more holistic view than if they're just reading an Abram Kendi article from the Atlantic, for example,

for their social studies classes. So I'd go back to those primary sources for African American voices.

I think another follow up to you, Kevin, and obviously for you too, Johnny, that I think

will get folks who are looking at from the outside in on the conservative movement,

what, what time, you said, what time is, like, recognize what time it is in America, like,

what time is it? It's a time to realize that marriage rates continue to decline.

Fertility rates are at an all time low. And that demographic winter that is coming our way

will completely obliterate American society. Just ask the Japanese who over the weekend

made public their concerns at the governmental level about their population decreasing over

the next half century from 125 million where it is today to 53 million. And so conservative,

this sort of goes back to my point, there are a lot of causes for that, right? It goes back to my

point about, yes, politics and obviously to heritage, we think policy are important. But

just to speak with my heritage head on, heritage is always cared at least as much about civil society

as we do about politics and policy per se. And so for conservatives to answer the question,

I know what time it is that doesn't just mean that we're going to wield power in the way

DeSantis has, maybe in some policy areas the way President Trump did, but also just as important

as those things, that we're going to be engaged in local politics and revitalizing our community

institutions and let us be comfortable to sum up here that at the local level, we're going to be

working with people as conservatives who have a different political agenda at the federal level.

Let's check that crap at the door and let's go take back our American cities.

What time is it? I mean, I think it's, you know, to Kevin's point about, you know, crime in a city

like DC, it does feel like especially after 2020, like sort of almost everything has just kind of

gotten crappy. You know, it's just not the same. You know, there's low confidence in institutions.

We have $30 trillion in debt. Cities aren't safe. You know, there's lots of, I mean, I think it's a

very serious time. I think it's a time that'll make or break the future of our country. But and so I

would, you know, I would just say that it requires both building local community and those, you know,

rethinking kind of big policy solutions. But I do think it is a time when, you know, I think we'll

be looking for great leaders to emerge to take on the crises that America is facing today. And I

think especially the domestic crises against the backdrop of the threat from China, against the

backdrop of everything happening with Russia and Ukraine, I also think it's a very dangerous time

for the nation generally. And we are awaiting and looking for great leaders to emerge.

I think your answers just kind of got at like the tension like around an issue like immigration. So

for example, like the obvious center left Atlantic response to your point about Japan is, yeah,

it's too bad the Japanese weren't willing to like reconceive of themselves and allow more immigrants

in. So how should the right think of the immigration question, especially when you're bringing up the

context of birth rates, population, those different things? Well, I think you portrayed with the

Atlantic actually has said about Japan very accurately. And they're wrong, which I know is not coming

as a surprise for me. And it is because the nation state is more important than immigration.

I'm very pro-immigrant. We're all immigrants by definition, heritage is pro-immigrant. But before

that, we are pro-nation state, particularly those nation states that come out of the tradition

Johnny not only today, but in his career has eloquently advocated for that emphasizes the rule

of law. Why do immigrants want to come to a place like the United States? Why do immigrants want

to go to a very different kind of society, but also very stable of Japan because of the rule of law?

And what happens historically, I won't bore you with the details as a historian, but just thinking

about the American context is that every time as we as we sit here today, we have such a high

percentage of our population that has was born elsewhere, put off to the side, whether they

got here legally or illegally, what that system was, America has felt a tension. And it isn't

because of most Americans hate people. It isn't because most Americans hate immigrants. Quite

the opposite. We know that even the Atlantic, which won't admit that knows that. It's because we

have a civil society that can assimilate people only so quickly. And so the argument that immigration

is going to solve Japan's problem is not correct. I would concede that it may help in with some

labor shortage for a decade, but there are much more important things than labor shortages that

actually affect labor and business and job creation down the future down the road. So this is, I

think from a public policy point of view, perhaps the thorniest of a lot of thorny issues because

it involves so many variables and because obviously politically, it's been practically impossible,

not just for the left and right to agree, but for the right to agree with itself about the

importance of merit based immigration that focuses on assimilation rather than identity politics.

Yeah, it seems to me like like many systems in America today thinking of healthcare, like

there's just really not any coherent goal towards which our current immigration system

is working. And I think it's important that we define very clearly what are the national interests

that we have economically, culturally, and then set those immigration standards based on those

particular ends. I would favor a shift to merit based immigration. And I also think it's just a

general conservative principle that change needs to be gradual and incremental. So there's probably,

I don't know what the exact percentage is, but a healthy and natural level where you can welcome

people into society where they can assimilate and kind of climb up the rung of success and pursue

the American dream. And then there's also a level of immigration that sort of overwhelms the system

and creates these pools of people that basically live in the shadows and are at risk of exploitation

and never fully integrate into the opportunities that we have here. So I'm proud of the fact

that the realignment has a genuinely, you know, left, right center audience. And I think the way

you all have articulated, especially the local and like the, you know, birth rate related issues

or ones that anyone could say, okay, I get that concern. I think what they are going to feel a

degree of skepticism around is, okay, like what is to be done about that beyond just reciting

Robert Putnamisms that I remember from back in high school in the 2000s. So what is actually

to be done here in that context? Because like we can talk about culture, we can talk about local

communities. I'm sure there's a Japanese version of this conversation happening right now. It's

also talking about culture that isn't being addressed there. So how would we actually think

about that from a public policy perspective? Thanks for that question. By the way, I should

have said thanks for everything that realignment does. I'm really grateful. It's the kind of civil

discourse that we need to be having more of. And that's a heartfelt compliment from all of us at

Heritage. To get to the heart of your question succinctly, run for your city council. Run for

school board. Be active in your neighborhood association. This is a very Berkian response.

It's a very Aristotelian response. And the reason that that's important to do is because by virtue

of doing those things, among others, you will be more invested in your local community. And then

it will cause you, just because of the finite hours we have in each day, to turn off the national

news. Turn off both NPR and Fox. There's your across the spectrum comment. Listen to better

podcasts. They're very thoughtful. Like realignment. Like some of them we have at Heritage. If you're

on the left, believe it or not. And that's the kind of thing that has been missing in America

since the 1950s and 60s. I went to a humanities program at one of the most liberal public

universities in the country. And I get along with a lot of liberals. I don't get along with others.

But I think one of the reasons that's the case is because I've always been willing to be invested

with them on local issues when we've lived together. Now, some of those have gotten kind of

nationalized with some of the cultural politics that divide us vehemently. But if we can put

those off to the side and say local politics is about community, then I think there is a tremendous

opportunity for all of us in spite of what I know is a variety of opinions in this room to go work

together. And Johnny, a follow up on that to you then is you're working with students, you're working

if ambitious, you know, a bunch of people who I think very easily could come to DC, go to law school,

etc., etc., etc., national ambitions, like what do they want to do? Right? Like, or do you have

students who are talking about, yeah, like maybe city council, local races, how's that kind of

working out for you? Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. My mind went to a different place than

I think with Kevin's response. Yeah, answer both. So take it. Answer both. Yeah. So I mean, I he would

love for us to disagree. So I mean, my mind went initially to, to like all the problems that I

think we have in the country and like how we should fix them, you know, and I think we work a lot in

higher education and, you know, we're sort of operating as a counter university. So we're

identifying the best students, you know, at schools from Harvard and Yale to University of

Michigan, Wisconsin, Stanford, Alabama, sort of all over the country. And, you know, we're connecting

them with, with mentors, with friends, and we're introducing them to the great books, the great

ideas and, and helping them to build a career network so they can pursue, you know, opportunities

in Washington, D.C. But they can also start companies. They can also start publications. They

can also build new institutions that might help to reinvigorate things from the bottom up. And,

you know, we provide resources for them to do that. So that's how I think of it from a student

perspective. But I do think we need to think more radically about like, how do we disrupt the higher

educational, the higher education model generally, you know, could you promote trade schools, as,

as Michael was saying on his panel, can you, can you divert people to meaningful employment,

sort of away from higher ed, both, you know, both with the issue of sort of wokeness in mind,

but also just more practically, like, what's good for their career, what's going to be good for

their communities, what's good for their families, you know, on the, on the broader scale, how do

you, you know, repatriate as much, you know, manufacturing and vital industries back to

either the United States or to countries that are allies, you know, in a way from sort of the hand

of the Chinese Communist Party. How do you invest the tens of millions of dollars that we're currently

pouring into Ukraine? How do we take that money and invest it here in America instead

to rebuild our own country? There are so many issues where I think you could actually

problems that need to be fixed and need to be addressed and can be done politically. How do

you restore, you know, free speech within the tech platforms? How do you restore free speech within

the state, you know, education systems? Those are all challenges that I think can be tackled.

So last question for the two of you, take it away and we'll wrap. What is it like to lead

longstanding institutions during an anti-institutional age?

It's glorious. It's the greatest privilege I've ever had. No, I mean that because the anti-institutionalism

is very well founded. And as some people know, I'm an anti-institutionalist until institutions

figure out what time it is, which is that they must adapt to the times, including heritage.

And so it's glorious to be able to do that and also recognize that speaking for heritage,

which my colleagues, our supporters have been extremely, not just supportive, but enthusiastic

about recognizing that and realizing we have a republic to save. So let's be innovative,

even though we've been doing certain things a certain way for a long time. Clearly that worked

at a certain time, but it's not working as well now. And, you know, any spirit of America is

let's always continue to strive to be better. So that's why it's glorious.

Yeah, I would say, you know, having come from the American conservative, which operated much more,

kind of like a scrappy startup where you literally, as some of my colleague, former colleagues in

this room would know, you literally have to do sort of everything, you know, and it's fun and

exhausting and you're trying to get it sort of, you know, in some sense, be as provocative as you

can to get to establish, you know, this, this organization coming to ISI, as you said, it's a

70-year-old institution this year. And I think it's, you know, the difference is that you immediately,

you have, you know, people that have been on your board and have been involved with the

organization for 50, 60 years, people who have vast amounts of wisdom and knowledge,

who understand sort of where you're at as a 30-year-old leader of an organization,

provide you the resources that you need, you know, the great, you know, the tradition of the

conservative intellectual movement, sort of the great books from Russell Kirk, Robert Nisbet,

that there's just so much wisdom and so many great minds have been part of the ISI community over

the decades. Thinking back to one of our recent homecoming events where you literally, at an

alumni luncheon, you know, you have someone who's in their 80s, who was a former secretary of the

Navy, sitting with someone in their mid-40s, who's the president of a state-based think tank,

sitting with someone who's 23, who's doing the exact same program, the Weaver Fellowship Program,

and you can bring together these generations. And there's something that's beautiful and inspiring

about that pollination, and so cross-pollination between the generations. And so I think as,

you know, thinking of ISI, both looking back to the past drawing from our resources, but also,

you know, bringing the institution to bear upon the challenges that we have,

you know, it seems like our students and our supporters have been responsive to that direction.

That is a great way to leave it. Thank you for joining us today. Thanks for having us. Thanks.

So for this next fireside, I'm with Kristin Soto-Sanderson. We are talking about the right,

the GOP, and young voters. I'm kind of actually wondering, like, is it useful to treat the right,

the conservative, the American conservative movement, and the GOP as the same, or should

these really be separated out? So they should be separated out. And the research that I've done,

and this isn't specific to young voters, but when you ask people, do they think of themselves as

strong Republicans? Do they think of themselves as very conservative? And then the third variable

is, do you think of yourself as very favorable to former President Trump? And you create this

Venn diagram. A little under four out of 10 Americans fit into one of those buckets,

but a very small portion fit into all three of those buckets. So it is useful to think of them as

as not identical. But when I think about younger voters, oftentimes I'm thinking about it through

the lens of party in part because that's where we have the most concrete data on where young

people are at is when you look at election and election results. So the other question then,

too, then, is Yvonne Levin was doing his panel, and he was talking about how there's panic and

then there's worry when it comes to like a question of America's democracy and those

type of questions. If you're looking from the voter issue from the Republican party's perspective,

are you worried or are you panicking? So I guess in some ways I've been panicking for 10 years,

and so I've lost the ability to panic anymore. So for a little bit of background for those of you

who aren't as familiar with my work and what I do, I am a pollster. I have been in the polling

industry for over a decade and a half, and it was actually around the 2008 election when Barack

Obama won over young voters by a two-to-one margin that I began going, okay, well, it's on the one

hand very good that at the time young people were old millennials, that we were getting engaged in

politics. This is great, but what's bad is all of a sudden my friends are getting involved in politics

and they're saying, how can you be a Republican? You seem so nice and normal, and that's worrisome

to me. But I kept hearing, oh, well, it's normal. It's normal for young people to break so heavily

for Democrats. Don't worry about it. And at the time I was in graduate school, and I looked back

at historical data around voting in presidential elections and in midterms, and it wasn't always

the case that young voters broke so heavily for Democratic candidates. And what was even more

worrisome is to the extent anybody was saying, well, this is just a one-off because Barack Obama

is uniquely appealing to younger voters. Things will revert back to the mean eventually, is that

there's a lot of data that how people think about politics when they are young echoes throughout the

rest of their lives. Now, we all probably know someone who started off thinking one thing and then

had an aha moment and changed their mind. But in the aggregate, people don't change their minds

that much once they get kind of out of their 20s and 30s. And so if Republicans didn't kind of

make efforts to win those young voters back, that could lead to this ripple effect that you would

see for decades. And that's a little bit of what we're seeing. So if you're just thinking about

the millennial generation, they still vote leaning Democratic, even though now we're old. We're about

having 40th birthday parties and buying homes, having kids, doing all the things that Republican

strategists said, oh, that'll definitely make them lean right. And then when you see for Gen Z,

they are, in many ways, their political views are relatively similar to their older millennial

brothers and sisters. Still very skeptical of markets, relatively sort of socially and culturally

more progressive. And so for a variety of reasons, they're just not anywhere close to looking like

kind of the Republican Party, particularly the Republican Party of the sort of pre Donald Trump era.

So when you're telling the 2008 millennial story through the lens of Barack Obama,

I'm wondering how much is that about Obama and how much of that would have been the same if,

like, let's say Hillary Clinton wins the Democratic primary and more likely than not, also beats John

McCain. Like, would you see the millennial story? Because you still have had a 2008 financial crisis,

you still have had the Iraq war, the generational event. So actually, the way to frame the question

is how much of, like, generational voting choices are due to personalities versus, like, events in

context? Sure. So some of it is, I think, from President Obama's election was an accelerant,

but it was not the cause. And you can actually look back at the exit polls in the 2000 presidential

election. Young people and their grandparents voted essentially identically. Young people split

evenly between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Old people split evenly between Al Gore and George W.

Bush. And you get to the 2004 election. And at that point, you have the Iraq war that has begun

to disillusion some young people. And there you see a little bit of a generation gap open up.

But young people still break for, you know, John Kerry by only, I think it was like a

roughly a 10 point margin, not that big a deal compared to what we see nowadays.

But if you actually look at the 2006 midterms, so at that point, Barack Obama has just arrived

in the United States Senate, has not announced he's running for president yet. And in that midterm,

young voters broke for Democrats by a wider margin than any individual age group had, like,

broken for a party. If you look back through, like, exit polls just going back and back and back.

So you began to see the signs of this breakup between my generation and the GOP at the time

pre Barack Obama. The signs are there. But the 2008 election certainly didn't help. And when

you suddenly had a president who at least early in his presidency was very inspirational and

appealing to very to young people, and Republicans did not have a great counter to that, you had

the problem both of skepticism of markets stemming from the financial crisis, skepticism of American

engagement overseas as a result of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, skepticism of the right

on social grounds because of the sort of culturally conservative positions of the George W. Bush era

GOP clashing with young people who are moving the country in a different direction on LGBT issues.

So you had the issues piece, you had the personality piece as well all coming together

to create this perfect storm that made it very hard for Republicans to sort of hold serve.

And I think, you know, speaking of millennials like aging, I just turned 30. So that's meant that

I'm like more aware than ever that they're like generational differences, especially the younger

like Gen Z. Gen Z folks. What would you say are the differences between millennials and Gen Z voters

and how much is like maybe confusing or like over conflating the two of those like lead to

like a skewed perception? Oh, yeah. Well, and so being someone who studied millennials for a long

time, now I often am reluctant when people ask me, tell me a little bit about young voters because

a lot of my expertise on that topic 15 years ago had to do with the fact that I was a young voter

15 years ago. And now, you know, my generation is much older and I recognize that like I still

wear skinny jeans. I get that that means that I have less credibility to speak about what Gen

Z says, but I do look at the data. And what the data say is different between the two is that for

millennials, we came of age in a moment where there was a lot of emphasis on bipartisanship.

Let's reach across the aisle. Let's try to find common ground. Let's be pragmatic. Let's put our

heads down and let's power through the challenges that we are facing. And Generation Z is a little

bit different. So for my generation, the defining thing of our young adulthood was the internet.

You know, for the oldest millennials, you might remember a time when the internet was not ubiquitous,

but the internet's basically been there. But for Gen Z, it's smartphones. And so for them,

and social media. And so the ability to raise your voice, make your voice heard, speak your mind

anytime, anyplace on any topic, and have that voice heard by an awful lot of people, people

you might not even know, that's their normal. And so for Gen Z, they're much less interested in

let's find common ground. Let's try to put our heads down and overcome this challenge that we've

been handed. Let's blow things up because it seems like things are not running very well.

And so that's also caused some friction in workplaces where Generation Z employees come in

and they are not interested in trying to figure out how to adapt to or improve upon systems that

are in place in their workplaces. They just want to come in and have revolution and transformation.

And that causes a lot of that friction, even between Gen Z and millennials.

I'm curious, do you see that Gen Z like revolutionary energy, like playing out differently on the

right and left? It's a good question. And in a way, I don't necessarily, I think there's more

in common than is different in that the goals are, there is to an extent a goal of persuasion,

but there is a really big focus on organizing and being loud and being the squeaky wheel

rather than on let's go try to find people and convert them. Which I think there are

pluses and minuses to that strategy, but I think that is something that unites left and right.

Gen Z is total discussed with the systems and the way things are, which is something that

millennials had too, but even more so, like turned all the way up to 11 and paired that with

just, there's been such a decline in trust in institutions, even since the millennials first

came on the scene, that there's no interest in like deference to what came before or, you know,

those who were purportedly authorities or so on and so forth. That has just eroded even further.

So then I think the other question would be your 2015 book, Selfie Vote,

bought it, read it, enjoyed it. The metaphor is like selfie, right? It's like the selfie is the

way of like, you know, him kind of like it's like the millennials, they got a selfie. How would you

kind of like define Gen Z if you wrote the book today? Because it seems like it probably be like,

like not just like TikTok in terms of the company, but short form video attention, like it seems

like that's like a very specific like technological dynamic that wouldn't have existed even when

you're coming of age on like Facebook in 2008. Sure. And I'm always reluctant to, I mean,

I was a little bit hesitant to even have the Selfie Vote as the title of the book because I

thought, what if like three years from now no one's doing this anymore? They still are. So that

held up. But there's a chapter in the book called like Snapchat's from Hillary. And the other day

I was like, I wonder how many people are, you know, I haven't actually looked at the data recently

on like usage of Snapchat versus TikTok versus versus what have you, but these things are always

in flux. So I'm reluctant to ever define a generation or a group of people by a particular

app or what have you, because that can always change. But I do think that the point in calling

the book the Selfie Vote was that at the time back eight years ago, it was thought of as selfies

were like a thing young people did. And my point was, this is not something that I think is just

going to be associated with young people moving forward. Young people start the trends and then

everyone else adopts them. And so that's why getting in on the ground floor and focusing on

young people's political attitudes is important, because they tell us where everything is headed.

If you want to know where the country is going, look at what young people think. And corporate

America has this figured out, political America much less so. So when someone hasn't figured

something out, it suggests that they have like an incentive like not to figure it out or they

either or they don't want to figure out what is the political space like a frightened center,

like not figuring out about where Gen Z is leading things. So I think the incentives in our political

system are such that people are mostly focused on the next two to four years. There is no incentive

in politics to think long term. So when someone like me comes around and in 2009 is panicking,

Republicans, you're losing these young voters. It's very easy and frankly logical to say,

it is much more important to me to turn out another 5% of voters who are senior citizens

than it is for me to focus on trying to persuade young people where if I walk into a room of 100

young people, maybe 15 to 20 of them will go out to vote. Like that's, I understand if your frame

of reference and your incentives are, I need to win in 18 months, why younger voters would fall

off your radar. But I think the problem on the right is there really aren't institutions that

are thinking, or at least back, you know, 15, 20 years ago, we're not thinking long term. It's just,

I got to win the next election. And so that means if you have a problem that you don't need to solve

it immediately, you'll be fine. You'll pass it to someone else to solve. The problem for Republicans

now is like the bill is starting to come due as millennials have aged. They have held on in some

way, shape and form to some of those more progressive views. And now they're voting more and more than

ever. And it's harder to unwind that after someone has cast a ballot for a Democratic candidate

in election after election after election than it is to try to reach someone when they first

enter the political process. It's interesting because in your December national review piece

on like Republicans and young people, you are pointing out that like the fake Churchill quote

about how, you know, you get older and you become much more conservative just like,

A, like isn't a real quote, but also it's like not backed up in the social science.

But I'm interested in like why we have that narrative in the first place. So for example,

I think the big one would be like, look at the baby boomers, they protest the Vietnam War,

but then they go all in for Ronald Reagan. So like, A, I would love to hear like,

how like hear this through like the 20th century lens, and then hear how kind of like the right

is responding to this kind of dynamic like now that like you can't resort to, okay, things are

going to change. Sure. So there's a quote that people misattribute to Winston Churchill. He never

said it, but the fake quote is, if you are young and conservative, you have no heart. And if you

are old and liberal, you have no brain. And the reason why I hear that comment constantly is when

people are trying to say, well, it doesn't matter that young people lean progressive because they'll

grow up, they'll get married, they'll have kids, they'll buy homes, they'll pay taxes, they'll

wonder what that FICA thing is on their pay stub and they'll all magically decide that they're

conservatives. And this hasn't really been happening. The reason why it is so persistent

is I think twofold. One, you can imagine how especially in terms of cultural issues,

it's easy to understand why that would be the case, right? That somebody who is younger is going to be

more open to society structuring itself in a new way, to changes in, you know, being less

beholden to traditions. And so you can understand why someone who's younger might be more, you know,

socially progressive or left leaning. The economic piece is a little bit more questionable, but,

you know, there's an underlying thought process to it that's not crazy. But a lot of it is also

to what you mentioned, that it is baby boomers assuming everyone is like them. And there's a

ton of data that says that's not the case. Back in 20, I believe it was 13 or 14, there was a

democratic data firm called Catalyst and they did a 200,000 person study where they looked

at people's political views by birth year over the course of their lifetimes. And they show that

pattern that you just described for baby boomers, right? That back in the 1960s, they, you know,

70s, they first begin getting interested in politics and involved and they're much more

progressive and then Reagan comes along and they become more conservative and now they are

watching lots of Fox News and what have you. And so they may assume, well, everyone will go on this

same journey as me and that's not necessarily the case. Gen X, they came of age with Reagan being

that first big memory. And actually, Gen X leans slightly more to the right these days than even

in some cases, the boomers. In part, I believe because those memories that were shaped by them

coming of age in the Reagan presidency and then sort of the early Clinton centrist Democrat moment

have resonated with them. Meanwhile, for millennials coming of age during the Obama presidency,

and then, you know, for Gen Z coming of age in the Trump presidency, those leave a lasting

impact on how you view things. And that catalyst study said that events that happen to you in

your political life when you are 18 have, I believe, three times as much of an effect on

your lifetime political behavior as something that happens to you when you're 40. So things that

happen when you're younger, they shape the way you look at the world and that resonates.

In the selfie vote, the example I used of how this plays out in corporate America is there's a

reason why McDonald's wants to sell happy meals. And it's not just because they make money off of

happy meals. It's because then you have a very young consumer that develops a very positive

mental association with your brand. And so when they're no longer six years old, but they're 36

years old and they're going on a road trip and they see the golden arches, they have that warm

feeling inside that developed from when they were younger. Politics isn't exactly the same,

but it's not completely different either. So if we're talking about life events having a huge

impact, like the obvious Gen Z answer, because like the millennium answer is a mix of like 9-11

to financial crisis, the Gen Z answer would obviously be COVID. How is COVID playing out?

Because it seems like depending on where you live, that could go in either direction.

Sure. So it's fascinating because the politics of COVID cut against what you might expect,

given that for young people, they were not as at risk of the severe threat of COVID as someone

who was older. And yet younger people have tended to have more progressive political views. So you

would find in some cases, older voters being a little more resistant to COVID restrictions in

some ways, but because they were personally more under threat from the virus, being maybe a little

more accepting of it, where for young people initially feeling more, to the extent they're

more progressive leaning, okay, well, I'm supposed to care for my fellow citizens and do this stuff,

and then to later sort of push back very vigorously against it, look at what has happened to my

generation. I still find I did a fellowship on a college campus a year ago, and we had to do a

lot of things wearing masks, or unless you could go outside. And at the time, I thought this seems

maybe like it's a little bit of overkill. And I was thinking that the students would be really mad,

their college experience is being taken from them by them not being able to have as many

events, by them not being able to have social face-to-face interactions as much. And I didn't

see as much of that as I was expecting. Now it could be that it's a more progressive leaning

campus, or I was speaking more with progressive leaning students, but I in some ways saw much

less resistance to COVID, I saw much less resistance to the sort of COVID mandate,

and et cetera regime than I would have expected, considering the cross currents of who's most

affected by the disease. You know, hearing that, what I immediately kind of wonder is,

is a generational event just something that happens, or is it something that you develop

a reaction to over time? So for example, if we're telling the story of like US foreign policy, we'd

say I quote like, millennials, Gen X, like Zoomers, they're responding to like the forever wars and

how they were bad. But I'm sure the polling, especially towards the start was like much more

in favor. So now like the generation has has a different reaction. So I'm wondering if

is there a world where like, if you're 23, you're entering the workplace, okay, yeah, there's this

year of like COVID, are you going to think differently about that when you're 32, 32, 34?

And entirely possible. And so I think I'm so glad you brought up the example of the wars in

Iraq and Afghanistan, because again, if you did polling on this in 2002, shortly in the aftermath

of September 11th, you would find young people feeling very differently about things than they

did 10 years later, or even five years later. So this is constantly evolving. And so that's why

I am reluctant to say, well, here is firmly where Gen Z stands on COVID. And also, it's hard

whenever we have these conversations about where does Gen Z stand on X, because generations are not

a monolith, right? I find the same thing happens when people ask me about gender. Well, tell me,

tell me, Christian, what do women voters want? I'm like, well, you're talking about 52% of the

electorate. So we're going to need to get a little more specific than that. But I think that the

jury is still out on where young people will come down on something like COVID. And I think we'll

begin to see hints of this in, do young people decide that things like remote work are very much

how they like to live? Or do people begin going, I'm done with this, I want to go back into the

office? Like those are the sorts of things that aren't related to politics. But I think we'll

give us some clues about how they will, young people will think about the policies that were in

place in response to COVID-19. And I just kind of realized, and we were talking about this before

we started, like everything the past five minutes were incredibly biased towards people who go to

college. So even like, I'm like, I'm explaining COVID through the context of like, Oh, yeah,

like, remember, like when you're at U Chicago, I think that's where your fellowship was. And like,

you couldn't go to your like top tier school class, like that's not on 15 different levels.

That's not the average experience. Same thing is true of remote work and like white collar

employees. So like to what degree is there just like an even corporate America, I'm guessing

there'd be like a huge degree of like, almost like structural bias towards this point. So how

does the college versus non college things skew things. So I'm so glad you brought this up. And

we were talking about this a little bit before we came on stage that so many of our conversations

about Generation Z, we found this with millennials as well, like this, we went through this,

that the image that comes to mind of someone when you say the word millennial and now the word Gen Z

is grossly unrepresentative. The millennial example I always used to give was the New York

Times did this article, the headline was something like millennials are taking over the workplace

and what it means for you. And I was like, Oh, here we go. And the, the, the lead of the story

was all about a young man who goes to his boss and says, you know, I need the week off because I

had a friend who just passed away and I'm really going to need some time for me to recover from

this. And then a couple of days later, it turns out he's been at home building himself a tree

house. And this is what the New York Times holds up as like the example of millennials in the

workplace, right? Like vaguely duplicitous may have been making up a friend who died so you

can get out of work so that you can go home and Instagram yourself doing like a fun crafts project.

And I thought, well, this is extremely unrepresentative of what most, you know, millennials are

like. And I think Gen Z, we wind up in the same situation, right? It's easy to look at like something

insane that happens on a college campus and go like, Oh my gosh, the children these days,

what's happening to them? And like the vast majority of, of young people are not going,

certainly a four year residential college. And so you find that bias a little bit as well

in the political space, I think because so often jobs in media and in politics are fed

from those colleges and universities. But I think for the right, it's a huge missed opportunity

if you think about fighting this battle for the hearts and minds of Gen Z as a battle primarily

being fought on college campuses. There's plenty of effort and resources that go into that.

And yet you have this huge number of young people who are not going to attend a four year

college if they're going to go to college at all. And many of them may not be interested in the sort

of ways in which the left has tried to push the conversation in our country, you know, so far

away from, Hey, I just need to be able to make a good living, afford the things I need to afford

to get by. You know, I don't have time to have fights over whether we use the word Latinx or

not. Like those that's like a silly example, one that gets used probably too much. But I think

there is this huge missed opportunity to reach young people who are not on college campuses,

because I think both parties, but Republicans in particular, even though the party's base

increasingly is of non college educated voters, they have kind of missed that boat when it comes

to young people. Another speaking of young people, I'm really curious how you feel or how

you're seeing like the tech talk ban conversation go, especially red states college campuses,

like how are young people like reacting to that? Like what's the mental framework you think about

it around? So I don't have a good answer for you on this one yet. I'm always reluctant to answer

a question where I don't have like concrete data yet. But this is something that I'm going to be

studying over the next couple of weeks. So stay tuned. I do find that there is a generation,

I'll take a step back and focus it on generations and their differing views of China itself.

So it's interesting when you ask older voters, what do they think of the United States in relation

to China? They are much more likely to view the United States today as a superpower that is on the

decline and China as on the rise and about to eat our lunch. And younger voters instead actually

don't view the US as a big influential superpower now. But as a result, they also don't view America

as having declining influence in relation to China. So for younger voters, they are in some

ways a little bit less, and I say this very broadly, this is not young people on the right,

but just young people broadly, a little less concerned about a rising China taking over for

the US as a world leader. But that a lot of that is because for many young people, they don't think

of the US as this big, you know, the world leader right now anyways. So that I think affects the

way the conversation around China plays out for young people. So then I think the next question

would really come down to unpacking the midterms real quick, right? Because there are a couple

big exit polls differing conclusions to be reached. So how should we think about that?

Yeah, so the past election in the midterms, there were two big questions. One was would young people

turn out to vote? And two, if they did turn out to vote, which party would they break for more?

And it does seem as though young people turned out in relatively big numbers. There are some

analysts who believe that there was a huge sort of youth quake that happened. But I think some

of that data is a little bit shaky. But young people definitely did not stay home. This was not

a like 2014 style midterm. Where the bigger debate is, is did young people break for Democrats by

a little or by a lot? And there are two different exit polls for reasons that would take me like

eight hours to explain here. But one of them suggested that young voters broke really heavily

for Democrats, like historic level broke for Democrats. And another one of the exit polls

actually showed that the gap wasn't that big, wasn't that different from, you know, prior

midterms, et cetera. So it is a little bit of a choose your own adventure environment out there

at the moment. But what I think is most alarming to me as someone who leans right of center is that

that Winston Churchill phony baloney quote I mentioned before, like we are now getting more

and more proof that that is a bunch of nonsense, in that you used to have voters in their 40s

and their 30s, 40s used to break relatively conservative ish. And that is no longer the case

that as my generation has aged, we are still voting not by two to one margin type numbers,

but are still leaning much more leftward than Gen X was at the same point in time

in their generational cycle. And so you're beginning to see that challenge play out for

Republicans where the damage that was done 15 years ago is still showing up in those exit

polls. And it's going to make it so that Republicans have to do more and more to either try to win

over young voters like the next batch of young voters that are coming up like basically declare

bankruptcy with millennials and start fresh with a new generation or really run up the

numbers with older voters. But eventually the math is going to come for them.

So the last few big ones, I'm always curious how much social media matters. So for example,

I mean, at a political level, COC, the kind of phoned in think piece like AOC has so much

political power, look at all her followers. And you kind of sort of wonder like, is that

like just going to be commoditized away when like when everyone gets an Instagram and when

eventually like more successful politicians do kind of have those skill sets. So to what degree

does like social media, like the memes, like Twitter, do those space? How much do those

matter in your analysis? I think it matters a lot because it's the primary way that most young

people are getting information about what's going on in the world around them. I hesitate to use

the word like this is how they're getting most of their news because we think of news as this

like very formal, you know, I'm reading an article, etc. But the way they get information about what's

going on in the world around them is overwhelmingly through social media channels. I do think that

a problem that the right runs into and that Gen Z conservatives are getting better at, but is

you have to be I think native to some of these platforms in order to do it right.

If you just parachute in like I am not on TikTok, if I signed up for TikTok tomorrow

and attempted to become a TikTok influencer, it would be, I'm sure it would be horrific

and cringe worthy because I would be kind of like learning how does this platform work.

I think you have to be sort of native to the platform and the problem on the right is that

a lot of content that I think is created with an eye toward winning over young people on these

platforms is ultimately being pushed or asked for by someone who is a donor somewhere up the

chain who's really upset that their grandson is like leaning left and wants to know how to fix it.

And so the incentives are ultimately, yes, you're trying to reach young people, but you're also

trying to give this baby boomer something that they can then like share on Facebook.

And how, you know, that they think is what the kids want, but may not actually be what the kids

want. And so I think there's that tension, right? I think that there needs to be more of an effort

on the right to actually put the microphone in the hands of young people and let them do stuff

that isn't ultimately intended to be for young people, but it's really for the old people who

want to win the young people, if that makes any sense. Yeah. So I think the last big question

that can answer quickly is we've seen a lot of like narrative energy towards like, wow,

like minority voters in certain contexts are like voting more for Republicans,

Hispanics in Florida, like to what degree could we see these like generational stories like shift?

How much do you, and because once again, like the racial narrative is different than it was

five years ago, how can we expect big shifts? Or do you see things being pretty consistent?

I am not in the business of saying anything is impossible in politics anymore. So it is

entirely possible that you could have either the back end of Gen Z or whatever the generation is

after them, you know, reacting to what they've seen come before them and say, well, you guys all

pushed things this way and you wanted to blow up these big institutions and you wanted to read,

you know, radically change it, change X, Y and Z. And that was a disaster. So now I'm going to pivot

back this other way. I recall this, this will sound very off topic, but there was a fascinating

article I read about very, very, very young people these days who decide to join the Catholic,

not just the Catholic church, but decide to take up orders and become either a priest or a nun,

because the average age of priests and nuns has been going up dramatically. Nobody has been opting

into that life, but that for young women who are opting into that life, they are overwhelmingly

more likely these days to choose orders that are like very strict, right? That like, that it's almost

this backlash to like, oh, my culture, you know, everything's become more sort of loosey-goosey,

and I'm going to, I'm going to reject that. So there's always a chance that the next generation

will look at what millennials and Gen Z have done and said, that's ridiculous and stupid,

and they'll swing another direction. But I don't think that stuff necessarily just happens without

there being sort of institutions and individuals and resources behind trying to make sure that when

a tipping point begins, that there's like resources there behind it to push that change. And so if

there's suddenly going to be a generation that loves free markets or, you know, changes its views

on any number of issues, it doesn't just happen on its own. Very well said. Thank you for joining us

for this first session. And thank you all. Hey, everyone. Welcome to the most uncreatively titled

Gen Z panel. It also needs to be a panel that's more than decently self-aware. Firstly, we have

Saurabh Sharma who has a good taste in boots and a good taste in jackets. But no tie. No tie,

which is also a statement of itself, a statement of disrespect. Nate, by contrast, has less nice

shoe choice but respects with the tie. Nate is a writer with National Review, very, very prolific,

and Saurabh is the leader of American Moment, which is basically the leading... How would you

describe it? Because I don't want to make it sound like you're doing like the Gen Zs talking to the

olds like... No, all my people are incidentally young. It's my job to make sure that people who

believe the things that we talk about at conferences like this actually work in Congress and presidential

administrations and think tanks. Yeah, because this is... If I'm going to critique my millennial

generation, there were one too many millennial leadership, blank non-profit X, Y, and Zs.

So I think this could be a thing that hopefully Gen Z can work on. I don't write essays. He does.

So here's the first question that I want to ask the two of you. When you come to D.C.,

it's obviously a choice. There's the joke that D.C. is Hollywood for ugly people,

not a common anyone here's looks. But it's just the point that who are any of us? Who are you

too specifically to show up here and build organizations and write perspectives on how

the Gen Z right should approach politics? Well, if people on Twitter are to be believed,

it's just controlled opposition. And really, this is the gathering of the controlled opposition.

Saurabh's been looking forward to saying that all the time. Yeah, yeah, that's right.

Look, I think that politics is a lot more interesting now than it was maybe 15 years ago.

One of the rifts that I go back to quite a bit is that my job is actually relatively easy now

because politics is a lot more appealing if you're someone young with interesting opinions on

things now than it would have been in say 2006. Like if you were a young Republican in the latter

years of the Bush era, just sort of reflexively pro-GOP, you have your Reagan Bush hat and your

American flag tank top, that's fine. But it really didn't lend itself to doing anything

innovative or interesting here. Whereas the Trump election, and we keep talking about the Trump

election, we're like six years on from that now. So I'm starting to feel really old. That inspired

an entire new generation of people who were interested in the chaos and the opportunity

that chaos presented to come here. And so I got to take advantage of the fact that there was a

ton of chaos and get to build something that I think is trying to fill and underappreciate a need,

which is how the right needs to index better on the talent that actually exists behind the scenes.

But that's the reason why is because there's an opportunity with the generational shift that

was happening in politics anyway. Eventually the boomers do have to die and some of them

are starting to do so. And so there's natural turnover happening and making sure that that's

an opportunity for not just taking all of their opinions and putting a fresh coat of paint on

them, but actually having substantive and tactical alterations to the way the right goes about doing

things. Yeah, to answer who am I, I'm nobody except people keep inviting me to speak on panels like

this. That's the proper counter. It's like you put me here. But no, I mean, I'm a conservative,

so I'm generally skeptical of young people. And I'm particularly skeptical of young people

getting involved in politics. But I do think that young conservatives at the sort of politically

engaged level, so not just in DC, but the sort of activists, writers, people like Sorob, I don't

even know how you categorize him, you know, folks in who sort of came of age in the last 10 years

or so and came of political consciousness do have a sort of specific insight into a lot of the kind

of tumult and energy on the right right now. And there is clearly anyone who spends any time in

conservative circles in DC knows this. There is clearly a particularly potent militant mood on the

younger end of the conservative spectrum. And it's not unique to the younger end of the conservative

spectrum. And it exists across sort of various different generational divides within conservatism,

and certainly within the Republican base. But in that sense, I think, you know, once when Trump

was elected in 2016, there was a whole lot of soul searching in DC conservatism. And I think

some people reached the right conclusions about what 2016 in America first meant. And a lot of

conservatives, partially because of motivated reasoning, partially because they weren't paying

attention, didn't reach the right conclusions. And I think if you are a young sort of person who

is conservative minded, and you spent time in left-wing institutions like a college campus over the

past five or 10 years, the militant mood that I think Trump legitimately represented makes a lot

of sense to you. And the kind of American carnage vision he was articulating makes a lot of sense

to you. So in that sense, again, while I'm reiterating that I think young people are generally

not people who should be in positions of political leadership, I do think that young

conservatives have a particular insight into the state of the country and the urgency with a lot

of the issues that Republicans have taken an interest in in recent years actually requires.

Something I'm interested to hear from both of you is kind of the anti-institutionalism of the

Gen Z right. So I'm 30 years old, 10 years ago. If you're a Republican and you're in college,

you just joined the College Republicans. I don't even hear about the College Republicans anymore.

Whoever was a College Republicans president at that time, that guy was a big deal. Like,

you got to go spoke at the R&C. Six figure salary. Yeah, you got some salary. I mean,

wasn't Carl Rowe, I think Carl Rowe was affiliated, right? At one point, like it was, it was the

track of being made. At this point, I don't even know if those even exist on college campuses

to the extent that they do. Does it even matter? Even TPUSA, that's probably a conversation we

have had five years ago. Is that even relevant as it is right now? So my question to you guys is,

is it so disorganized? I mean, sorry, your institution aside, but if you're just an

average, normal, right-leaning guy or a girl on a college campus, you listen to some conservative

podcasts. Where are you channeling this? Like, what does it look like? Nate, you can go first,

and then sorry, I'm stuck. Well, one place you're channeling it is in group chats and on, as is,

you know, an anonymous Twitter account. I mean, I'm not totally... Try not to be too biographical.

I'm not, yeah, right. I'm not totally, like, joking, though. I mean, I do think, obviously,

the sort of digital technology now is a total game changer. And it has intersected perfectly

with the fact that young conservatives obviously are increasingly ghettoized on college campuses.

Obviously, college campuses were always notoriously left-wing. But the sort of the speed with which

the Overton window has moved left, and the aggression with which sort of dissent is persecuted,

this is not sort of unfamiliar to anyone. It's a very familiar conservative narrative, has left

a lot of young conservatives, particularly those on college campuses, without an outlet.

And as a result, you know, if they can't talk to their professors most of the time,

they certainly can't sort of try out their ideas with their friends. They look to, yes,

internet podcasts. Obviously, they all listen to the realignment. But also, you know, group chats,

internet chats, et cetera. And there is this sort of network and almost sort of a class consciousness,

for lack of a better word, forming for young conservatives. And there is, again, like this

militant mood to that and this anti-institutionalism, because what originally brought them together

and what gives them a common bond in the first place is the fact that they are marginalized from

and not welcome in the mainstream institutions. That's why they're there in the first place.

So that being kind of the basis of conservative youth politics, again, at least at the politically

engaged level, leads to a lot of relatively radical and relatively anti-institutionalist

conclusions. What do you think, Sarab? Yeah, I think the timeline here is really interesting,

because if you think about what a young person's experience getting involved in politics would

have looked like in the 90s and in the early 2000s, it necessarily had to go through institutions

and it necessarily usually had to be in person. The advent of the internet did one of two things.

One, because of time, the interests of young right-wing people became less and less attached

to the interests of institutions in places like DC or other metropolitan areas that purported to

champion conservative interests or right-wing interests. And then two, the internet made it so

that there was this entire new place where people could organize and an entire new set of leaders

often influenced or types that were untethered to any institution that they actually looked

forward to. And so what was the next stage? The internet met real life and so for a period of

about four to five years there, very famous internet YouTube-type figures, people like

Milo Yiannopoulos, people like Ben Shapiro would come to college campuses, they'd be on fire,

and it would be reported in Fox News. One of my favorite statistics is that for many years,

I don't know if this is still the case, the single most cited news outlet on Fox was campus reform.

This college outlet of the Leadership Institute, because golly gee, the boomers loved them,

crazy college kids stories. That era is basically over and now I think you're in a position where

why is it over? So it's over because it got boring, eventually like, you know,

play puff part 15. Right. It's a great clip though, let's be honest. Right, you know,

so-and-so destroys, libtard on campus. Eventually it just became one of these things that was

gauche and passé because the trends just moved so quickly at this point. And it also got, I think,

I think less transgressive in some ways. It became this sort of thing. I saw this during my own

time on college. It went from the sort of thing where like literally every single leftist on

campus would come and like ruin your day to like, you'd get like two weirdos complaining at you,

like, you know, you're a bigot, whatever. And then the second reason is, is that if you're

actually smart and you have some level of like time preference and the ability to resist the

marshmallow, you realize that maybe it's not a great idea to create a giant paper trail for

yourself in college that'll follow you all throughout your professional career, especially

when you can just have a pseudonymous Twitter account instead and say things in group chats,

you probably shouldn't. And so I think that you are seeing a greater and greater trend towards

people organizing in just small groups behind the scenes with people they trust. And we'll see

if that eventually grows into them forming new institutions. I mean, mine literally formed

out of a group chat with a bunch of people I trust. And so I think that that's naturally how

these things wax and wane. But that's that's how I think about it is this like timeline of

the internet destabilizing everything and the campus activism stuff getting boring.

And we'll see what happens next. I want to be very exact with this point because it's

interesting that this conversation is so college centric. And that's not to anywhere discredits

because the nature, like you said, there was a literal like media industrial complex around

like elevating what was happening on campus to the height of like the young right. But like,

a, we all know like education, you know, polarization. So like it's, you know, more

likely to be like a your average like college Democrats, probably much more representation

of that coalition than like a college Republican is even like at a southern state school.

So what do you guys think about like what's missing when we don't bring like non college

graduating or attending like Gen Z conservatives in. But I also want to say like I'm not counting

and this isn't like crap, but like I'm not counting a Charlie Kirk who is this type of person

who knows there's like an institutional advantage and like not going to college. So basically

just asking like the normal version. So how do you how do you think about that dynamic?

Well, people who don't go to college have the internet too, right? So there's that aspect.

But there's also there is actually like a real there's always obviously a sort of elite mass

political base divide in any sort of political movement or or just any that's just how politics

works. But there is if you look at the the the actual sort of polling for your average run of

the mill kind of 25 year old Republican voter, insofar as they actually exist, every once in

a while you find one out in the wild. They actually the trends among their views actually

track with the trends among sort of Gen Z writ large and that they're actually to the left,

particularly on cultural issues of older Republicans on stuff like immigration, diversity,

obviously same sex marriage, LGBT issues, etc. They're less religious, all of the kind of stuff

that you see. They're just the right wing of Gen Z, right? Now, obviously, there's there's

a sort of classical trend in American politics where people get more conservatives, they get older,

so that might happen. If it doesn't, the country might be screwed. But but the the sort of militant

mood of I think young conservative elites that again, anyone who spend time in conservative

circles in DC is aware of is very much a function of their institutional experience on campus.

And I think it's starting to trickle out a little bit just because the internet is such a sort of

universalizing force in terms of this stuff. But but we're not really going to know exactly what

the the actual sort of mass political base of our generation for the GOP is going to look like

for a very long time, because those people are only really coming of political consciousness

right now. Yeah, I mean, I share Nate's skepticism of young people writ large. And so,

you know, do young people have right wing views? Doesn't really matter strictly speaking. Because

when I think about some of what the core aspects of being right wing in the United States typically

mean, it's being very protective of the things you have, like the value of your house and the

policing of your community, the quality of your schools. Well, if you are a renter, you move every

16 months and you have no children or wife, why would you have all the political priorities that

would lead someone to vote Republican? And this is why I think the tail wagging the dog

on the question of whether the Republican Party has a political future is if we get policy questions

that make it easier to do those things right, like right now. Otherwise, like it's that they

that generation will have no reason unprompted to become more right wing, they're just going to

become more angry at the world around them. As far as the question of like, you know,

non college participation in politics at the elite level, I think that that Nate's right,

there's always a distinction between who gets involved in politics at this level,

where there wonks and think tank people and politicians and stuff, and who is the constituent

voting base of the party. I mean, there are similar divides inside the Democratic Party,

you know, and they have fights about it. Like, for instance, you know, go look at the staffer

so white account or whatever complaining about the lack of diversity on Capitol Hill,

the vast majority of or a significant quantity of the Democratic Party's base is

blacks. And so if there is a mismatch there, it's, you know, they analyze it internally,

and we analyze the education polarization inside the Republican Party. I do think covid's going

to pose an interesting opportunity where you have more and more young right wing men, especially,

that looked at what school exactly was like higher education exactly was on offer during covid.

It was going to be more debt to do zoom classes. And so I do think you are seeing a statistically

significant but by no means huge amount of people opting out of that system entirely.

And so the question will be, can the institutional forces in this town go about

finding people like that who could have and would have in another era gone to college,

which shows not to and elevate them to positions of influence here. I mean,

I've hired people that fit this exact profile. I think they're great. And so hopefully we do a

lot more of it, but it's going to require a cultural sea change on how people go about

making these decisions here. Yeah, actually need to address your point. Just did an interesting

segment on this. Millennials as we age getting 30 now, the typical like as you get conservative,

you get older is not actually holding for millennial generation. A lot of that I believe

is if you look at for one of the reasons why boomers became more conservative is because

they own property. And it's like, well, if you don't own property, it's kind of downstream for

a lot of effects. That's kind of interesting though about what you said is like in terms of

if they don't become more conservative. On the other hand, what I'm getting from you guys too,

is that Trump was just such a seminal moment. What if the meaning of conservative changes?

Do you think it has changed for people who consider themselves right wing? Notice Sarab,

used to keep saying right wing conservative as well. Those are actually not the same thing

really at all. So how do you think that's going to play out with Gen Z and even younger?

Right. I mean, well, in terms of how it's going to play out with Gen Z, again,

people in our age demographic are just sort of coming of political age of political consciousness

right now. I'm sure when you guys were looking for people to talk about Gen Z on stage here,

it's a pretty small pool of which is how Sarab obviously ended up getting selected.

So it remains to be seen and pretty much every young generation of conservatives when they come

to DC thinks that they're going to totally change conservatism, Bruton Branch. I randomly came

across this hilarious 2004 New York Times piece about Dan McCarthy was the one person who wasn't

cringe in that interview in that op-ed. But it was all about the young post-buckly right.

And it was interviewing all these young sort of conservatives in a hurry.

And a lot of what they were, the way that they were talking sounded extremely similar to the way

young conservatives are talking today. And they were all saying that they had a new vision for

conservatism. And they saw something that older conservatives didn't, etc, etc.

Don't skip that. I'm curious. What were they saying? What did they say?

Right. So this is, I think, the major distinction is that most of them, with the exception of Mr.

McCarthy, were neo-conservatives. And what they were often, what the New York Times was very

delighted to hear was that because they were neo-conservatives, what they were seeking was a

sort of detente with liberalism and an accommodation with a lot of the basic premises of progressivism.

And that meant sort of cultural issues like diversity and multiculturalism.

It meant sort of waging peace on the federal bureaucracy. There's a bunch of different ways

that they talk. And you obviously hear that as well today. But the kind of new conservatism that

they were championing was a sort of softer, kinder, kind of Bush era, compassionate conservatism.

That's not what you hear from young conservatives in DC today. And I think, again, a lot of it has

to do with sort of institutional shifts in the actual experiential nature of how these people

came of age in our generation, which we live in an extremely radicalizing moment across the board.

Gen Z kids are on both the left and the right are much more radical than their older counterparts.

So I think there's a bipartisan aspect to it, but it certainly is particularly potent on the young

right. Just on the point of like, oh, you're just like the previous generations of conservatives

that came to DC and were radical and thought they were upending the order then. Yeah, so what?

Like that's actually normal. Like any institution, this happens in the business world, this happens

in academic disciplines, this certainly happens in politics, has this period of like cyclical renewal

where there's this new set of young Turks that come in, they make necessary reforms,

they eventually become institutionalized themselves, then they become sort of corrupt

and ossified, and then they get replaced too. That's just normal and fine. I've never understood

why that's such a gotcha just because it's happened before. It doesn't mean it's not

necessary now. In fact, it's probably a good sign that it is. And actually, the cause of a lot of

dysfunction in our politics is that that generational change has been delayed for so long. You know,

Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, and George W. Bush were all born in the same summer in like, what was

it, the late 50s or whatever. In 1855. Yeah, that's right. So we're overdue for that generational

change anyway. And so I'm more than happy to be part of that tradition. The thing that I'm curious

about, and this kind of is a response to the Kirsten Soto-Sanderson panel and just like the point

Sagra made about Gen Z just following the trend of like lean to the left, like, what are you guys,

not personally, but at a movement level, going to do about it? Because I think this is where like

the on-lineness becomes like problematic. You see like a kind of like radicalization going on,

where it's like, I know it's based to say X, Y, and Z about like gay marriage, but like,

at a pure empirical basis, that's a stronger case for like the Benedict option than for like

actually dominating American politics. So like, how do you guys actually think about these dynamics?

Yeah, I mean, the thing that I always like to say to people about that is, you know, the distinction

between what's politically popular and what you believe is right to do only matters as much as

you decide it needs to matter. If the story of the institutional left over the last five decades or

so has been a highly polarized ideologically extreme set of very motivated, not that many people

infiltrating every single institution and deciding to drag the country in their direction anyway.

And I keep hearing that the backlash to it's coming any day now and it might well happen and it

sometimes does happen, but by and large, they've gotten what they wanted. And so if you believe

that a certain set of public policies are right and true and just and should be advocated for,

and your cadre is motivated and organized and capable enough of implementing them,

great, like that seems like untethered from the question of what like the rest of our like

former college buddies actually want to see in politics. And once the center of gravity moves,

the vast vast vast majority of voters change with that center of gravity the day after Obergefell,

the opinion on gay marriage in the country changed, not before it was the new center of gravity.

And so it's just a matter of motivated political actors deciding what their priorities are and

acting on them. Yeah, to the point about the backlash, the backlash has come multiple times.

The problem is that it just gets neutered when it comes to DC, right? There actually is a mass

political constituency for a variety of the different things that that I think, you know,

Sorb and I are interested in, and that a lot of conservatives are interested in. The problem is

that the kind of dominant legacy institutions in conservatism and certainly within the GOP

and a lot of sort of structural mechanisms about how donors work in the GOP, et cetera, et cetera,

they're interested in sort of talking the right way when they need to go out and win votes.

And then when they actually get to DC, they're interested in a very different agenda, right?

This is again, not a totally unfamiliar talking point. But, you know, it's it's sort of John

McCain going down to the Arizona border and saying build the dang fence when he's facing

a primary challenge and then turning around voting for amnesty, right? So this has existed for a

very long time in the GOP. It does exist in the Democratic Party, but not to the same extent for

a variety of different reasons. So I am worried about what's politically popular just to the extent

that it has you have to be prudential in the way that you go about having political goals. So

you can have a sort of long term set of political and cultural goals, but you need to work within

the constraints that exist to an extent to advance them. You can't be stupid. And there is a version

of being very online that's that's extremely stupid. But the sort of the ethos, I think,

of a lot of the young conservatives who are or aren't online is very much in touch with real

world material dissatisfactions and sort of problems that Americans have. And no trope in

politics, and this is particularly potent on the center, right? It bothers me more than this idea

that the culture war is sort of beneath us, right? The serious issues are corporate tax cuts and

occupational licensing reform. But anyone who cares about whether or not your nine year old

daughter is going to get turned into your nine year old son, you know, this is sort of just

catering throwing red meat to the base. Actually, that's something where the American people are

with us, probably much more than corporate tax cuts. And I would like to see Republicans starting

to to actually talk and act like that. And I actually think that that they would be politically

rewarded for it and become a much more viable political party than they are right now.

So my last question to you guys is, and sorry, we reference this, how do you avoid the pitfalls

that befell the people who came before you? So you're reading the 2004 piece, Nate,

you're looking back on that every new generation comes here, most of them get bought off or leave

because they think that it's just not worth it. And it's just frankly more rewarding to go work in

a like private enterprise. So what do you think and the advice would be not like to yourselves,

let's say in five years when a similar pivot pivot point comes, how are you going to avoid those?

So this is my opportunity to talk shop marketplace of ideas is basically fake. It was invented in

the 1960s itself magazines. And what I mean by that is that the the political right in the United

States for the past 60 years or so has been very, very focused on the marketplace of ideas. And the

idea is if we have the best ideas and the most refined arguments that will win. And because

academia is so closed off to people of a conservative temperament, a lot of them need something else

to do with their lives. And so they come here, and they become our think tank scholars, and then

there's no jobs left for the think tank scholars. So they become like campaign consultants, and

there's no jobs left for them. And so they become the Hill staffers. And so we have this complete

misalignment across like every stratum of how an effective political movement would actually

allocate resources and talent. And so I think that the core mistake of institutional conservatism

for the longest time has been too much of a focus on sort of intellectual and historical

study and sort of exegesis at all times, and much less focused on the actual practical work of

either taking over existing institutions, building new ones, or destroying existing ones,

the basic bureaucratic blocking and tackling that any political movement needs in order to

succeed. So that's my biggest thing is actually a complete tactical shift that would require a

changing of guard, because if you're someone of a very academic temperament, that means you really

care about having, you know, deep discussions over very minor points of difference in political

philosophy and not in building the coalitions that will imperfectly move the ball forward on

broad political interests that your movement and certainly the voters that subsidize your lifestyle

in this town have. Yeah, I agree with that. And I'm also interested in a tactical shift. I think

the one of the main other tactical problems with institutional conservatism as a sort of

self-conscious movement that was led by activists and intellectuals and operatives, etc., is that

it saw victory, its conception of victory was not just a détente with but membership within

this sort of managerial bureaucratic apparatus, which was actually fundamentally and structurally

opposed to all of the things that conservatives said that they actually cared about. And they did

get that membership within that sort of managerial regime in a lot of ways. And what happened is

exactly what we've been talking about, which is that it actually needed their capacity to channel

the very real sort of political energy that exists, I think, for the conservative program,

but that exists outside of the centers of power and is particularly potent in the people who are

furthest away have the least proximity towards the centers of power. So I think there are obviously

all the sort of young sort of youthful radical political energy on the right right now could

end up becoming neutered again. It wouldn't be the first time that that happened. But the nature of

I think the rights increasing sort of alienation from these power centers and the radicalization

of the actual reigning ideology that governs those power centers themselves has made that kind of

détente and membership within these institutions much more difficult. And a lot of young right

wingers in particular have a particularly potent sort of consciousness in terms of their understanding

of themselves as being outside of and fundamentally opposed to those institutions. So that again is

it's what's driving this kind of radicalism and militancy on the young right. But it's also one

of the reasons that I think that the when when our generation of conservatives sort of assume

positions of more power in the movement that it won't look like kind of the young neo conservatives

of the Bush era. So Rob Nate, thank you for joining us. Thanks guys. Nice job.

Hi everyone. We are joined by Chris Griswold of American Compass. We've had a long term relationship

with American Compass. We were serious. We were. Yeah, it's it's been fruitful, I think.

Orin was one of our first guests on the show. I got us our first Wall Street Journal reference with

a columnist who is not happy with what Orin had to say about free market economics. So I think

this is a good opportunity to serve and then who then refused a request to come on the podcast.

So that's also our first podcast beef. They cut a segment of it. Ask him on didn't come on. So

whole thing there. But today, though, we're of course here to like check in on this argument

that there are parts of the right that are reassessing the way they see economics, that picture,

we shape the narrative, get out what you guys are really working at. So aligning you might say

rerunning towards something. So here's the first question. And I know, Sagar, you and I talk,

you were both wondering this. What are you all trying to do? And by that, I mean, there are

parts of a specific the breaking points audience who would see Orin come on, they'll say like,

oh, my gosh, like American compass, they're trying to form this left, right populist alliance against

that. And I was like, that's definitely not it. Sorry, what's going on? So what, how would you

define what you're trying to do? That's a great question. I would say that we are working towards

a rejection of dogmatic libertarian economics on by on and by the right of center in favor of an

economics that understands, properly understands that workers, families, communities and industry

are the foundation of a nation's of our nation's liberty and prosperity. And so right out of the

gate, what is that? What is a rejection of dogmatic libertarianism mean or free market

fundamentalism means? Well, it means that a tired playbook of tax cuts, unfettered free trade,

deregulation, rinse and repeat, is just simply not sufficient to meet the needs of the nation.

And frankly, what the public is demanding. So that's what we're working towards is a

realignment of the rights conception of what conservative economics really really means.

So to what extent, is this a phenomenon discussed at conferences on Twitter? And to what extent

is it real? Because we're sitting here, we're talking about this right now as the animating

economic discussion on the broader political stage right now is debt ceiling confrontation

to cut domestic spending, essentially a copy and paste. There are a couple of people saying, well,

let's not touch social security and Medicare. I would say the mean Republican Senator probably

doesn't care or does agree with that statement. So to what extent is this a real phenomenon?

That's a it's a fair question. I think I would turn the question around and remind

everyone that one of the people who said he wouldn't touch Medicare and Social Security was

former President Trump and he won. It wasn't even close in the 2016 primaries, he steamrolled

everyone by, I think, correctly, intuiting that the public and especially the Republican base

was very ready for something different. I mean, we just just let's just cast our minds back to

how he was talking, right? Let's get the hedge fund bastards. Let's maybe rethink this free trade

regime that actually hasn't worked out that great for workers and their families and communities.

Let's not touch entitlements. And he won. And I think you see a whole bunch of especially the

more attuned and adept Republican politicians recognizing that. And now you have a whole

community of real intellectual policy leaders on the right. I'm thinking of people like

Marco Rubio, now Senator JD Vance, Holly, someone like Mike Gallagher in the house. I mean, there's

a whole movement. And frankly, I also think that some of President Biden's more economically

populist and trade skeptical postures are in large part due to him also seeing the success

of that. So I think it's very real. So even if we, you know, we're talking about it in conferences,

we're catching up to what the public has known for a long time and has been hungry for for a

long time. DC's last to the party, not first in my view. So I know that American Compass isn't

like an entitlement reform organization that's like not like the category of policy you're kind

of working on. But if you're just imagining being just like a average, like GOP, like member right

now, you're thinking about that, like those set of issues, debt ceiling, debt entitlement, social

security, like that's the point the saga is bringing up. How does the American Compass mindset

inform how a member should think about those sets of issues at a level deeper and just kind of

directionally agreeing with whatever Trump says, because there's also a direction because

like there's definitely something going on there too. That's right.

I think it's useful. If I was talking to a member of Congress, I would ask them to slow down

and take a breath, take a beat and ask themselves what they really think their constituents care

about. DC cares about the debt limit. And if we screw it up, then everyone will pay the price.

But that's a manufactured DC crisis. That's the archetypical manufactured DC crisis.

What a member of Congress's constituents care about are we have a public education system that

is radically misaligned with what the labor force needs. A college for all is broken. We have

communities that have been deindustrialized now for decades and have not recovered.

There are very basic fundamental questions about how the American economy functions

and how we conceptualize what capitalism is and is meant to be. That's where I think the public is.

And you see that. You see that again on both sides of the aisles. The elected officials

or aspiring elected officials who speak most effectively to that tend to win.

And so is the debt ceiling important? Yeah, of course it is. But that's a short-term thing for

the next couple of months. When that is resolved, one way or the other, we are still going to have

to look in the mirror and ask, what kind of economy do we want in the United States?

How do you think that the discussion around inflation has changed some of the work that you

guys do? And I would say an impetus amongst the typical right-leaning voter is going to say,

this is because of spending. I'm not entirely wrong. But that validates some of the most,

I would say, normy Republican talking points around the role of government,

around what you should do, about how you should even respond to a crisis. There's no,

like in the mind of a person in Washington hearing that. They're not going to

split that apart from the PPP program versus the second round of stimulus checks. So how

does this new economic moment that we are in, how does it change some of the work that you

guys are doing and thinking about? Spending is an interesting way to frame a question,

because spending and policy are not the same thing. And spending is a question about,

should we be redistributing or not, and how much and to whom, which again is a second-order question.

A more fundamental question is, what are the policy parameters that make for a healthy capitalist

society? Get that right. Some of those questions become less urgent in my mind. And we can talk

about some of the kind of principles that we use to think through that, what we think that means.

And that's how I would answer that question.

Another thing I'd like to really get to is, this is kind of related to Kevin Roberts,

like what time it is a question about, kind of modified a bit. It's basically just like,

what's the broad diagnosis of America that you think to a certain degree

most folks on the right, whether or not they're economically libertarian or not,

could basically agree. If you could get your most Cato scholar here, and they will say,

oh yeah, I think the education system isn't optimized for the current set of conditions.

Because it seems like if there's a baseline foundation of agreement,

that's how things can productively move towards something. So what would you,

how would you, yes, two-part events. So one, what's the baseline, and where do the actual

disagreements come about? Yeah. Well, so if you're asking me to kind of assess the political landscape,

both on the right and then in general, on these kinds of economic questions,

I guess I see three buckets. You've got things that both the left and the right increasingly agree on,

and getting tough on China, for example, is one of them. I think one of the things,

despite the kind of chaos in the house, by the way, in my opinion,

speaker's race is better, that shit's better than Game of Thrones. That was amazing.

You need to get out of DC more if that's true. It's very much not true.

That's right. I got a problem. The first step is admitting you have a problem.

But you've got, I think one of the policy areas that I'm hopeful about in terms of progress,

even in divided government, and with a slim majority, some of the stuff that'll come out of,

for example, the Select Committee on China, outbound investment. Got a great episode yesterday,

if you want to check it out. Nice. Outbound investment review. Maybe we shouldn't just

be sending all of our capital all the time to China without having to say about it. That

is an emerging area of bipartisan consensus that we might be able to see some movement on,

even despite the tenuous situation we're in in Congress. Then you've got, and this is,

I think, what you're talking about, policy areas that the right broadly agrees on,

that it can outflank the left on. And I think you're absolutely right that education is first

on that list. So I would imagine, I would hope, that most folks on the right understand that

college for all is a failed system. It does not work for the majority of American students.

Less than one in five go smoothly from high school graduate on time to a four-year degree

graduate on time to a job that required that degree in the first place. That's less than,

everyone in D.C. followed that pipeline, but it doesn't work for most Americans. And I think

most folks on the right understand that. The left is deeply beholden to the college, I'll say the

college cartel, called the higher education sector, if you want. And even if some of them, I think,

understand this, they're politically limited in what they can do about it. So I think if

Republicans are smart, they will hammer that. One of the things we've worked on, for example, is

workforce, on-the-job workforce training grants that make it easier for employers to offer training

to people as an alternative to going to college. Senator Tom Cotton introduced a bill modeled on

our idea of the American Workforce Act. That's, I think, exactly what the right should be doing.

And then you've got this third bucket of policy areas where the right hasn't decided what it

thinks yet. And I might put something like family policy in that bucket. It's like, should we be

sending cash support to working families? We would argue yes. There are more and more Republicans

saying yes, but that is not yet a resolved question. And so then I think you'll see that kind of

internal debate unfold on the right over the course of this Congress. I don't know if that answers

your question, but that's kind of my landscape analysis. I think it's always important to also

think and dig deeper into some of probably the most contentious fights. So you're referencing the

cash payments to working families. As you said, I mean, even the idea of spending cash. But one I

also think about all the time is taxes. I mean, what do you think? For example, I don't think,

I think any Republican president, Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, what replacement level would roughly

pass the same tax bill that passed in 2017, and pass the second version of it and come 2024 or

2028. Is that the right move? How should people be thinking about it? And what about taxes in

general? I think it's useful to reflect on how far we've come since 2017 and that tax bill.

I used to work for Senator Rubio, and at the time, this was before my time with him, but in 2017,

the outrage from the business community that he would dare suggest that you should take just a

little bit of this corporate rate reduction and direct it towards an increased child tax credit,

it was intense. It was insane. And this is this kind of typical libertarian free market fundamentalism

to which the right has been beholden for too long. And to challenge it was a very serious thing.

And I think he and Senator Lee and the others who helped them deserve enormous credit

for succeeding in that fight. That wasn't that long ago, but we have covered a lot of ground

since then where I think if you asked all of the Senate Republicans whether they think that's good,

like none of them are interested in undoing that. And several of them and an increasing

number of them are interested in doing more than that. So when it comes to taxes, I think

what I would like to see, what we would like to see, and I think what more and more Republicans

are understanding is that tax policy needs to be directed to the concerns of workers and families

directly, not through a kind of trickle down model that frankly hasn't worked that well in reality.

I think another thing about American Compass that is always interested, the two of us, is the fact

that not just like the policy or like the political specific angles, but just the fact that the

organization in and of itself was a critique of DC, basically the Asseli corridor, because

Orrin was at the Manhattan Institute. So basically a critique of like how think tanks,

organizations are structured or made. I'd love to hear your assessment of how responsive this

broad space has been to the set of issues that you're raising, where there are gaps that still

need to be filled, where maybe there's a circumstance where we're thinking like, man, we're trying to

do this China work, but this part is still missing, or maybe something that's been surprising to you.

Maybe there's been some organization or some interaction that's been helpful. Like how do

you just think of that ecosystem critique and how it's evolved? Yeah, I mean, we resisted for a

long time calling ourselves a think tank at all, partly for that reason. Is that correct, calling

you to think tank now? Well, no, we've given up that we've resigned ourselves to the fact that

there's got to be the useful term. But yeah, I mean, part, yeah, you're right, but the kind

of logic of the organization's existence is that no one was systematically talking about this and

doing the deep intellectual work to put meat on the bones of this political intuition that we should

care about workers, that we should embrace the fact that policy and governance is not only possible,

but can be good. And it's not just the government's job to get out of the way in every instance.

That's this again, this intuition that I think broke into the mainstream as a result of the Trump

campaign, but hadn't really cohere intellectually. And that's what we try and do is to think

systematically and carefully about these issues, do the analysis, do the research,

put forward policy proposals, and then do the advocacy to work with the Hill and others to

forward those ideas. And it is a critique, but I think it's an increasingly successful one.

I mean, we're, and this is the realignment audience here, right? I think most of y'all in the room

are pretty read into this dynamic. And we'll know that, is that a resolved fight? No. But is it a

fight that I think we're winning? Increasingly, yeah, I'm hopeful. To what extent do coalitions

play a role here? Because you reference Republican voters, I tend to agree with you,

they can mean Republican voter either probably doesn't care either way, or is more sympathetic

towards the Trump position. But there's an incredibly dug in constituency among small

business owners. And others, by the way, you know, until I became a small business owner,

I finally started, I was like, Oh, this is a pain in the ass. We have to deal with taxes

and accounting and all this other bullshit that the government makes you do. That said,

these people are a very strong constituency economically libertarian within the Republican

Party. And I have yet to see any evidence that the mean Republican legislator is not deeply

responsive to them as opposed to, let's say the unorganized massive voters who may show up to

vote for Trump, but they don't have a lobbying organization for them in DC. Well, I mean,

yeah, that's the problem. That's the problem we're trying to fix, right, is that you've got these

legacy institutions that have been around for a long time. And having worked in the house,

for example, where you, you know, average member gets there is just trying to figure out what the

hell is going on. You turn to the people that you think you can trust. And for a long time,

that was these libertarian organizations and nothing else. So to some extent, I think that

dynamic is just like for lack of an alternative. And our job is to present an alternative. And

simply the act of doing that of showing people, there is an alternative conservative way of

thinking. It's valid. It's legitimate. There's a lot of people who are responsive to it. All of

our polling shows that working class conservatives want this kind of stuff. There's a big response

to that. It's just you got to show them that there's something else. And I think you also

see that internally, right, you guys had had Kevin on earlier, internal to some, you know,

of those legacy organizations, I think they themselves are also understanding the value

of providing other options and expanding their mindset on economics.

Sager, when you reference the possibility of like a lobbying organization for like Trump voters,

that would be the greatest grift of all time, because like, you've had like five to 10 different

like Trumpist, like think tanks and like, who knows what's happening there. But all you'd have

to do if like the Trump working class lobby, you wouldn't even register lobbyists, you would just

call it that and then you just print money. So if I was looking for, you know, suggestions,

you need to get away from that. Scam pack ideas. And this might divide the crowd a little bit.

But to be very clear, I think it's important to distinguish between the intellectual and

political space that Trump opened, for which he is due credit, and distinguish that between

Trumpism. I don't know that Trump himself is the right vehicle to forward this particular

economic agenda. That's a separate question. And I think that's an important point to make,

because it's a much broader question than, what do we think about this individual? It's,

was he intuiting something correctly about what went wrong economically? And the answer is yes.

And now what are we going to do about it? Does an economic movement need a candidate,

then basically, right? Because I think it needs a bunch of candidates. I think it needs all kinds

of candidates. And increasingly, it's, I mean, advanced is a good example of someone who I think

thinks along these lines, broadly speaking, and dominated. And my old boss is another, right,

who was an absolute blowout in Florida. So there, I mean, there are, there are people thinking this

way and winning. Are they a majority yet? No. But you know, let's start somewhere.

A couple of things are coming to mind as you're describing this. So like, I've been doing lots of,

there's a lot of like good books out on like Ronald Reagan and that kind of like Aaron,

and I think it's good to get beyond even like, I think realignment category groups went a little

too far. And just like the critiques of Reagan became almost as cliched as like the supporters of

Reagan. So I think there's some nuance in exploring the difference there. But like what's

interesting about like that era, like how the California tax revolts were a real like presaging

of like Reagan, like economic domination during like the 1980s, like moving onwards. I'm curious

if there's any, if you guys have ever come across any like localized, here's this like random thing

that just happened about initiative, a candidate who you guys had never heard of, who just kind of

validated what you're talking because like obviously the big one is China, like that's been

the that's been the big whenever people write like the big 2020s history, they're going to talk

about the bipartisan China thing. But I'm just curious in the economic space, has there been like a

like maybe like a apprenticeship grant program that just came out of nowhere that could mean

something? Yeah, I'm not sure anything comes out of nowhere. But a really interesting example at

the state level is governors, originally Republican governors, now there's a Democrat as well,

following the Trump administration's example of banning the use of college degree requirements

for in the case of the Trump executive order, federal workers, and on the case of Governor

Hogan in Maryland. Shapiro and Governor Cox in Utah are the three that I'm aware of doing the same

for state workforces. That is kind of emergent from the bottom up on the state level. But I think

they're also noticing the federal trends and taking some cues rightly so from this, I mean, so that's

it, that's a, I think, an example of what you're talking about. And not to step on the prior conversation,

but I think big tech is another one where parents are talking to their local

elected representatives because they're deeply worried about what big tech is doing to their

kids socially and psychologically and emotionally. And governors and state governments are being

really responsive. And in some cases, leading, they are farther down the path than the federal

government is. So yeah, I think there are all kinds of examples. I think one other follow up

here, like there's been a lot of crap talked about free market fundamentalists. But I think

something that I've picked up just doing this show for the past three years, which is a long time,

breaking points, all those things is that any political group is a coalition of different

people. And look, like on the more hawkish one, you're the more like restraint is one of the

podcasts, but like restraint is impulses could be actually really helpful when thinking through

things. I think there are times like I could be more hawkish that you could find that more useful.

So like, what is something that you've come to more appreciate about more like economically,

libertarian minded? That like part of the broad conservative GOP coalition, because I think it's

both unfair, but also kind of like clouding. And I'm not saying you're doing this, but I think it

would be just too easy to just kind of dismiss the instinct, you could dismiss an institution

and individuals who are in bad faith. I think it's bad to dismiss an instinct entirely. Is there

some way that you would think about that? Yeah, I think I think it's, I think most revolutions

happen for reasons, usually understandable reasons. And I think the kind of neoliberal turn

happened for reasons. And it is still this, it's a popular ideology. There are reasons why it happened.

I think the ideology is now maladaptive and is ceased to adequately address what it was intended

to address at the beginning, which is usually what happens with with revolutions, social,

cultural, economic, whatever, where the unintended consequences become obvious and need to be addressed.

But yeah, I don't think it's a question of bad faith. I just think it's a question of

your, your analysis is wrong. And it is guided by ideology. And it no longer suits the purpose

particularly well in most cases, in my opinion. What are some future fights that people should

look to as to whether this view is winning or losing over the next couple of years?

That is a great question. I want to have so many fights that I don't know how to answer that.

It's hard of winning. So in terms of our work, I could put put it into a couple policy categories

of globalization, or maybe more specifically decoupling with China, industrial policy and

the need to directly support critical industries. Financialization, dealing with the fact that

our economy now kind of prioritizes financial engineering versus investment in actual things.

And then some of the stuff we already talked about, like education and workforce development,

we haven't talked about labor policy at all, which is a hugely important question.

Please add anything on that too.

I mean, it's like joining a union, man.

The podcaster's union was off-putting of the unions.

No, in seriousness, and maybe I know we're coming up on time, it's an important point,

I think, to understand that worker voice and power, collective worker voice and power,

does not need and traditionally has not been a partisan issue. It is now because big labor is

in bed with the Democratic Party, which serves the leadership in both of those institutions and

does not serve current labor unions, constituents very well. And Senators Rubio and others,

Congressman Jim Banks, we've worked with on creative ideas for how else workers might

have voice in the workplace or a seat on a corporate board in a way that doesn't require

them to co-sign a political agenda that they don't agree with. That is a huge question.

So those are kind of all the categories, and we mentioned family policy, those are the categories

in which we work in terms of policy, and I'm watching all of them. So I'm going to politely

ignore your question and not answer it and say there's, you know, I want to see victories on all

of those levels, and there are active discussions and debates on all of those levels that I think

merit attention. So the last actual question then separate from like fights to follow, what do you

need to have happen for the next two years that make you consider this to be a win?

I mean there's like a short-term long-term question, right? I mean things are, you know,

paradigm shifts to use that cliche word, they don't always happen like through kind of this

gradual change, the incumbents who have a stake in how things are currently done hold on for as

long as possible, and then eventually that's no longer tenable and things change really fast,

and you don't know when that will happen. So as far as I'm concerned we are working towards that

inflection point, and we'll keep doing that, and that looks again like the intellectual

work we've been talking about. Also like, you know, next week we're going to have a training

on Capitol Hill on conservative family policy and what that means. Got a bunch of people who

want to show up because I think young Hill staff are eager to engage these questions,

and so we'll continue doing that work as well to try and arm the interested

until that until that moment comes when when that that flip happens.

Well said, Chris. Thank you for joining this session. Thanks, Chris.

Hope you enjoyed this episode. If you learned something like this sort of mission

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