Speakers
With our country at a boiling point due to a polarized presidential election, a once-in-a-century pandemic, and nationwide protests and civil unrest following the death of George Floyd, the divisions in our society have never appeared deeper. Where do we go from here? How can we find a way to truly come together?
Authors Jordan Blashek and Christopher Haugh provide hope in their new book UNION: A Democrat, a Republican, and a Search for Common Ground. Two law school friends from opposite sides of the political spectrum, Blashek and Haugh traveled across the country, visiting 44 states and covering 20,000 miles to debate issues that are typically fueled by partisan rancor—from climate change, the environment, and the opioid crisis to criminal justice, law enforcement, faith, and the southern border. Their three-year exploration offers a roadmap to anyone seeking to understand the views that make up our country.
On August 3, Manhattan Institute President Reihan Salam interviewed Blashek and Haugh about their timely new book and what they discovered during their search for common ground across America.
SPEAKERS:
Jordan Blashek is a businessman, military veteran, and attorney from Los Angeles, California. After college, he spent five years in the U.S. Marine Corps as an infantry officer, serving two combat tours overseas. He holds degrees from Yale Law School, Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Princeton University. Jordan is based in New York, where he invests in entrepreneurial efforts to grow the American middle class as a part of Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative founded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
Christopher Haugh is a writer from Kensington, California. After graduating with highest honors from the University of California, Berkeley, he attended Oxford University and did speechwriting as an intern in the Obama White House. He went on to join the U.S. Department of State’s Policy Planning Staff, serving as a speechwriter to the secretary of state. In 2018, Chris graduated from Yale Law School, where he was a Yale Journalism Scholar. He is based in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York.
Event Transcript
Reihan Salam:
Good afternoon and welcome to our virtual event, Finding Common Ground in America. I'm Reihan Salam, president of the Manhattan Institute. And I'm very excited to talk today with the coauthors of a great new book, Union, a Democrat, a Republican, and a Search for Common Ground. Christopher Haugh and Jordan Blashek met as classmates at Yale Law School. Both Californians, Jordan arrived at Yale after five years as an infantry officer in the Marine Corps. While Chris came to Yale by way of The White House, where he was a fellow and the state department, where he was a member of secretary of state, John Kerry's speech writing staff.
Reihan Salam:
Their book was born out of the debate surrounding the 2016 presidential election. That was election season where many people realized they needed to adjust their understanding of the country and grapple with the increasingly gladiatorial nature of politics. Few people however did the work of getting out into the country, meeting a wide array of voters and synthesizing it into a very engaging and insightful book. Throughout the conversation, please feel free to submit your questions on whatever platform you're watching us on, and we will save some time at the end and do our best to get to as many of them as we can. Chris, Jordan, thank you both so much for joining me today.
Jordan Blashek:
Thank you so much for having us.
Reihan Salam:
So I have a question for you, Jordan and Chris, both of you devoted much of your young adult lives to service, military service in Jordan's case, Chris in your case, to work in the state department and The White House. And you're both clearly deeply patriotic. It's something that comes through in your book. It's something you've thought very deeply about. So I wonder what you make of this really fascinating shift. So there was a survey published about a year ago by The Wall Street Journal, which found that among people 55 and older, nearly 80% said patriotism was very important compared with 42% of those ages 18 to 38. I wonder how you interpret that change and what it augurs for the country's politics in the future.
Jordan Blashek:
That's a great question. Maybe I'll start and then Chris would love to hear what you think. My sense is that patriotism comes from experiences. It's both what we're taught and how we're acculturated growing up but also what are the experiences that build that love of country in the hearts of people. And for previous generations, I think they went through times that could build that sense of pride and love in their country, whether it's the World War II generation or the baby boomers who went through this incredible period of economic growth and saw America do incredible things around the world, especially in the fight against communism and lift up hundreds of millions out of poverty.
Jordan Blashek:
I think for the younger generation, for our generation, if you didn't have the opportunity to serve in government or serve in some capacity, serve the country, it's much more rare to have that experience. So instead what we've seen is we've seen America kind of lead the global financial crisis. We've seen increasing partisanship and polarization across the country. And we don't really have personal experiences that would inspire that sense of patriotism that other generations might have had. And I think that's a real challenge going forward.
Christopher Haugh:
Yeah. I would just add that I think there's a difference between patriotism as a label and patriotism as a feeling. I still somewhat chafe at being called a Patriot even though I know that in my heart of hearts, I am. And I think that if you got into that data a little bit deeper, I think you'd find that a lot of young people express a deep desire and love for certain aspects of the American ethos of our country's history of what we've accomplished, where we're headed. We just articulate it in very different ways. And I think that's part of the lesson of our book is how complicated and how diverse, how we articulate our patriotism, our love of country and community really is.
Reihan Salam:
That is one interpretation certainly. And I do wonder both of you throughout the book, talk about the need for a kind of common vocabulary. And I think that there is this pervasive sense that that common vocabulary is increasingly missing in our political conversations. So I'm curious just about when you two first met, when you first encountered one another in law school, what was it that led you guys to be able to have productive conversations in the first place? How did you kind of stumble in that direction?
Jordan Blashek:
Good question. I don't know how productive they were early on. We started off having conversations about things we both loved. So a lot of our early conversations over drinks were about our love of literature and history and great books. We talked about what we wanted to do with our lives. We bonded over things like heartbreak. We had just both come out of bruising relationships. And we talked about the influence of our mothers on our upbringing and what we wanted to do in the world. And those early things I think bound us together. But when it came to politics, I think we had a hard time having those fights. We often finished arguments red in the face and storming off from one another. And it was only over time as we did these road trips that we really developed a shared language for how to argue and our own understanding of the language that the others gravitated towards.
Christopher Haugh:
Yeah. We were fortunate in that we were able to isolate a variable in many ways. The fact that we only disagreed about policy or high level politics meant that we could disagree sometimes angrily, forget about it, talk about other things and come back to it over and over again. And so I think that was a critical aspect of being able to get in the car, go on the road, take six road trips, nearly 20,000 miles. Because if we didn't have those similarities, if we weren't able to isolate that variable, then I think we probably would have been torn apart.
Reihan Salam:
Is that why the conversations were so heated? Just the sense that you couldn't dismiss your interlocutor, this was not someone... Because for example, if you just were talking to someone, you could think, well, this person is ignorant. This person is foolish. This person is just otherwise an objectionable human being. And so you don't have to process it. But when you're grappling with someone that you kind of take to be a decent person who deserves to be treated seriously, is that what accounted for the friction?
Christopher Haugh:
I can jump in here. I would say so. I mean, I think that Jordan and I were always at our worst when we were talking about Trump or Hillary or when we were talking about any kind of standard bearer. And when we were able to remember that we had met in 2015, when it wasn't so strange to be friends across the aisle, especially coming out of the institutions we did where Jordan was serving next to people who were Democrats, Republicans or didn't care, where next to the diplomats I worked for, we often didn't know how people voted because there's this higher cause.
Christopher Haugh:
And so when we were able to sort of tap into that starting point and the fact that we had spent so much time together, not too much time but enough time to know each other's hearts, then we're far more able to say, "Okay. What you just said upsets me." Or, "I have a reaction to it, a learned reaction in many cases. But I know that you're Jordan and I know you're my friend and I know that we have these sort of starting points." But when we talk about symbols or individuals who we've never met where we have to protect them, where we have to argue for them, that was when we were at our worst.
Jordan Blashek:
Yeah. I think I would add one quick thing to that which is Reihan, I think you touch on a really interesting point which is, there are two different reactions in conversations. One of them is disdain. And that's kind of what you're speaking to you about. People who you don't really know, they have views you disagree with. And when you don't know them, it's very easy to have that sense of disdain towards them. But I think with Chris and I, it was something different. It was more this feeling of hurt or being misunderstood. So often in our early conversations, it was more the sort of attempt to try to win in an argument.
Jordan Blashek:
Sometimes things get phrased where you feel like it misunderstands your point or it seems like the other person's imputing some intention or value on you that you don't really hold. And because it's a friend on the other side, it's more a feeling of hurt. And as a result, you kind of lashed back. And we found that some of our worst fights came from that sense of being hurt or misunderstood or we're not heard. And the beauty of our friendship was that having that early foundation, we were able to learn what was causing us to hurt the other person and move away from it. So it didn't happen again as we progressed.
Reihan Salam:
One thing I'm kind of struck by is this idea that... Okay, so you mentioned different responses one can have to a disagreement. One response is withdrawal. One response is that I only have so much energy. It's limited. I cannot devote my life to this. And another response is I'm going to really get into this. But then presumably you're doing that because you think something is going to come out of it. So in those moments where you guys in your lives both with one another, but also just in conflicts you have in life, conflicts around politics, what is it that motivates the desire to really kind of lean into it and just devote energy to it rather than just say, "You know what? This is not going to be constructive. There's no point. I'm not going to pursue." Or whatever it is that motivates you to withdraw. What is it that makes you not withdraw?
Jordan Blashek:
That's a good question. I think some of it is temperamental. I'm typically the pugilist in these competitions. So I love engaging. I want to poke Chris and see if we can get into an argument. Chris tends to be a little bit more calm. And so when I do that, he's able to just kind of let it go. I think that's true across the board. Some people love to engage and they want to get into arguments. Other people just don't really want to do so. I think we have a bad tendency to withdraw from people we shouldn't be withdrawing from and engage with people we do.
Jordan Blashek:
So it always surprises me how much time and effort people put into arguments over social media or email where they're devoting substantial amounts of time to arguing with someone they don't even know and certainly not going to change their mind. And yet with our closest friends and family, there is this withdrawal effects. And I think you've seen it over the last few years that people are really scared to have hard conversations or talk about...
Reihan Salam:
Not wanting to jeopardize the relationship in some cases, perhaps.
Jordan Blashek:
Exactly. And I think the one thing that really helped for me and Chris, as we got on the road was, we actually couldn't withdraw. Like we were stuck in a car together after we had those hard conversations, we had to keep talking about it and eventually come around and reconcile whatever the disagreement was. And that was really important for us.
Christopher Haugh:
Yeah. I think the origins are hard to put a finger on, like, why you do that? And I will admit, I've withdrawn. And as Jordan said, I'm the one who's more calm is the nice way to put it. Thank you brother. But I think also just sort of less interested in the combat. But again, we were forced together and we had to opt in. I mean, whether it was being in law school and only really liking Jordan and a few others or whether it was being out on the road and having a fight in the middle of nowhere, Nevada and saying, "I really want to get out of this car but it's 110 degrees outside and I'm not walking to Reno 100 miles."
Christopher Haugh:
So we had to come back to the table. We had to keep chatting. And I think that's partially why we wanted to write this book is that we were fortunate in that way, that we committed to this project and we fought through the hard parts and came out the other side and learned that it was so worthwhile and that you can glean these lessons even if you're not sure exactly why you handed it out in the first place.
Reihan Salam:
I think it's fair to say, and correct me if you disagree, correct me if I'm wrong. But the Yale Law School, it's a pretty monolithically left or center kind of space. There is a kind of broad political consensus in an environment like that. So I'm curious, Chris, for you, what was it like to be in a place where your sensibilities are largely aligned with the kind of hegemonic consensus view in the place? What's that like?
Christopher Haugh:
Absolutely. Well, I both felt very comfortable and like an outlier because I am currently not a lawyer, I likely never will be, which is a whole other conversation.
Reihan Salam:
So you alienated for another set of reasons.
Christopher Haugh:
Exactly. Indeed. Absolutely. And I will also point out some of my best friends were like Jordan and another friend Garrett who come from very, very different backgrounds, from very different mentalities, conservative, not liberal. But I think what shaped, I ended up having this sort of same wanderlust that Jordan did at the end of my first year and then at the end of Jordan's second year, which was the year that we met. And I wanted to get out because it did feel like despite being very comfortable, despite feeling like I was amongst my peers, I was where I should be. It did seem like there was a lot of clarity as to where the country is without a lot of data or evidence at least in my approximation.
Christopher Haugh:
So I trained as a journalist, I consider myself a journalist, that's my ethos. And I really believe in the go to the source, go see it for yourself. And I felt like a lot of the sort of worldviews and the pontification about where we're headed as a country was coming from this very limited space. And I think Jordan and I kind of came to the same conclusion that we had to get out. We had to go to places where the new sort of American way was being carved out and crafted. But we came to it from very different places and very different reasons. I felt like I just wanted to go to the source and I'll let Jordan speak for himself. But we came to the same place, which was we must get out, we must go see what's going on.
Reihan Salam:
So Jordan, you are not accustomed to being in the majority when it comes to your political ideological sensibilities, you're from Los Angeles. You were raised in an environment where you couldn't necessarily take for granted that everyone agreed with you. What do you think it is that led you to this kind of contrarian place? And the fact that you've kind of been steadfast in those convictions, despite being around presumably a lot of really smart thoughtful people who disagree with you and have certainly given a lot of thought to how and why they disagree.
Jordan Blashek:
Yeah. That's a great question. In some ways, I'm this weird walking contradiction that I'm a Jewish kid from LA who's a conservative Marine. And I think as a young kid, I was always just sort of drawn to being different. I wanted ways to set myself apart and try to think differently. And so I think as I got older, I really enjoyed being able to take kind the devil's advocate side or the opposing view. And I found that I played that role in both environments I've been in. So both the sort of liberal institutions that I was educated in but also in the Marines, which is a more sort of monolithically conservative organization.
Jordan Blashek:
And in the Marines, I tended to take a more liberal stance on some things than my colleagues. And in academia, academic circles, I tend to take a more conservative one. And I think in both what I like to show is like, you guys don't have the whole picture, neither do I. But there's another side here. And I like to try to provide that. And so when Chris and I set off on the road, part of my aim was to say, there's another side to the story and the country. We're not hearing everything. And I want to go find out what that is. And luckily Chris agreed.
Reihan Salam:
Would you find yourself defending positions that you don't necessarily share out of a belief that those positions may have some legitimacy and deserve a hearing and deserve not to be dismissed or held in contempt?
Jordan Blashek:
Yeah. Absolutely. Early on in our friendship, Chris started calling me the Trump translator because with our Yale Law School peers, I was often put in this position of having to explain, well, here's why people I know, especially former Marines are supporting the president and they're not wrong. Like they have real justifiable reasons why they would do that. And I think as we deepened our understanding of the country through these road trips, I think both of us found that we were often trying to articulate or explain the views of people we met because we developed such a love and respect for them and we wanted their positions to be taken seriously. So I think we often found that.
Jordan Blashek:
Now the controversy is, whenever we found that we were trying to defend our parties especially in our arguments with each other, that's when we found out we are [inaudible 00:16:41] we weren't able to speak as ourselves. We were defending things that we might not necessarily believe in but doing so with a sense of vulnerability to it. Like if the Republican party is attacked, I felt vulnerable and vice versa with Chris. And that was sort of a negative version of speaking brothers.
Reihan Salam:
Chris, would you describe yourself as a joiner? I mean, do the kind of belonging to a party, belonging to a tribe, to a community, has that always been something important to you?
Christopher Haugh:
Actually quite the opposite I'd say. I am a registered independent. It's not because I haven't voted Democrat up and down since I was able to but that's just where I feel most comfortable. I think it comes from my early desire and love for [crosstalk 00:17:23].
Reihan Salam:
What you're telling me is that the book is egregious false advertising. It's actually a Republican. My goodness.
Christopher Haugh:
Yes. Indeed. Yeah. You've uncovered our uncomfortable truth. No. No. No. I think it comes from my love of sort of the image of the independent untethered journalist who walks in and is free of bias, which as we now know is perhaps an impossibility. But that was always my sort of ethos, that was what I desired. And so I never really felt comfortable belonging. And so I would echo exactly what Jordan said. Like I often found myself defending aspects of Clinton's policy or her history in 2016 that I didn't always agree with but I felt obligated to. And that always made me feel a little bit uncomfortable. And in the same way that Jordan had to be this sort of Trump translator and had to stand up for things that he didn't necessarily agree with. And again, I think that was one of those traits that pushed us together and put us out on the road. I mean, wish it was truly a lark. I mean, we went just to drive but it turned out that we had all of this raw material that made for such a productive conversation.
Reihan Salam:
One thing that's certainly true in my limited experience of a place like Yale Law School is that it's a very secular place. We were talking before about generational differences among Americans and it's also striking to see that younger Americans are so much more secular. Of course there are exceptions to that but I'd say on the whole, organized religion plays a less central role in the life of younger Americans. But in your book, you encountered a lot of folks for whom religion was very central to their lives. Charlene in Detroit served 40 years in prison before being released. Pete the trucker had serious battles with addiction earlier in his life. And for both of them, it seemed that religion was quite important. Can you tell us a bit about Pete and Charlene in particular? And more broadly about what you learned about religion and its place in the lives of some of those you had encountered?
Christopher Haugh:
Absolutely. So just to put a little meat on the bones there. Charlene was a woman we met in Detroit who had spent 40 years in prison. She was part of this program called Bags to Butterflies where this group of women who had come out of prison got together and learned to craft, and received wraparound services to try to get their lives back in order. And Jordan and I met Charlene and three of her compatriots in this effort who together had served something like 80 years in prison in total. And when you think about Detroit going into prison 40 years ago, and then coming out into the Detroit of the present after those 40 years with the bankruptcies with everything that's happened in the auto industry, it was amazingly dislocating.
Christopher Haugh:
But of course, Charlene had this deep faith that she was going to be able to sing, that she was going to get her life in order, that she was going to patch up her relationship with her children. And she expressed it as if it was coming around the corner. And she did have this great faith and she would constantly call out her love for God, her trust in him. And he was very similar in that Pete had seen a lot, had been through a lot and then got his life to get back together. And he credited God with a lot of that. And as someone who is agnostic, as someone who grew up amongst atheists mainly who comes from a community that would probably call religion something of a Relic of another era, it was amazing how important religion and religiosity, generally faith was to dealing with uncertainty, to dealing with the crises we face today as a country and as individuals. And how having that faith was one of the strongest indicators of the ability to kind of keep trudging on.
Christopher Haugh:
I mean, we have a lot of hope. This book is very hopeful. And in a large part it's because of people who are acting or people who are seeing what is the problem and then doing something about it. And often those people were inspired by some sort of larger purpose, some sort of religious purpose, some faith. And that was really striking to me. Jordan of course has a very different basis for being struck by that. But he also felt the same way I imagine.
Reihan Salam:
I really want Jordan to say, absolutely not. How dare you impute those views to me. But please Jordan, I'm curious to hear your thoughts.
Jordan Blashek:
I largely agree with Chris. I think there's a [crosstalk 00:21:43].
Reihan Salam:
This is a great disappointment to me.
Jordan Blashek:
And I think we saw expressions of faith everywhere we went. It wasn't always necessarily Christian or religious in nature. They were expressions of faith in this country, expressions of faith in their communities. And there was always something bigger that people were grasping for. And I think one of the major feelings Chris and I had out on the road was that everywhere we went, people were searching for meaning and community in their lives. And that really was driven home to us by this group of veterans in Page, Arizona, who carved out this sort of communal life for themselves away from society. They had all these rituals and ceremonies that they were doing to kind of keep their community strong.
Jordan Blashek:
But it struck us that across the country, everybody was looking for that. And there's varying degrees of getting it. And people are finding it in social protest movements. People are finding it in traditional forms like church. But it's very important. And I think it's hard not to do these trips and really see that this is a huge part of the country right now. I think some of our problems come from a feeling of loss of community, loss of meeting but there's also a big search for it.
Reihan Salam:
You've written a beautiful book celebrating what is a beautiful friendship. But I have to say, you guys are making me very nervous for this reason. So Chris, you are very clearly an idiosyncratic, naturally very charitable person. I won't say you're tentative but you're someone who is not looking to impose your views on others. You just kind of have a natural curiosity about you to the point where you sought out those who had dissenting views when you were at Yale Law School. Jordan, you're someone who is always inhabiting someone else's turf. It's kind of very natural for you to do that.
Reihan Salam:
So I want you to think about and inhabit a person in Chris's case, someone who is on the left, someone you care about and respect but who holds right-wingers in contempt. And Jordan, I want you to do the same and just imagine how it is you have gotten those people to be in dialogue with one another, kind of what it is that it takes. Because the two of you are just kind of unusually well suited. And of course you obviously had fraught. You obviously had intense disagreements. But you're unusually well suited to doing this because you're so practiced in it and it's important to you. But I want to know about in a culture where there's this intense partisan antipathy, how does you approach those people who are call it deeper within those bubbles? People from those hostile camps? How is it that you actually reconcile those perspectives?
Jordan Blashek:
Yeah. Great question. So first, you've seen the results of four years on the road together. So we've certainly changed each other. If you had seen us four years ago, we were always [inaudible 00:24:28] thinking about climate change or gun control or whatever and many other things. But I think my answer to that is one of the messages of the book is that we're actually not that unique. Everybody we met on the road was much more complex and nuanced than we could've imagined from whatever identification or labels we would have assumed upfront. So Pete, the truck driver, first time we meet him, he's wearing a Make America Great Again shirt. And we would have assumed that as a truck driver wearing that shirt, he probably would have had some very aggressive pro-Trump views.
Jordan Blashek:
And it turned out as we got into deeper conversation with him, that he had a very nuance understanding of the country. He railed against the president for not acknowledging climate change. He thought everyone should have universal healthcare. He was a big supporter of LGBTQ rights. And none of those things you would've known upfront. And so our view after meeting so many people on the road is that there is this real complexity to individuals and we put them into these boxes that lead us into this kind of polarized combative state but that's not who we are necessarily.
Jordan Blashek:
And while the political commentariat and our politicians in the media too, they thrive on those polarized divisions. The rest of the country is not necessarily there. And we don't have hard data to back that up but we do have our personal experience, just interacting with person after person who were always more complex. They're always quick to to be hospitable and to engage. And that was our experience on the road. Chris, what have you got?
Christopher Haugh:
Yeah. I would also just say that the journalistic conversation is a two way street. And so I may have come in or Jordan may have come in predisposed, taking for granted our values and what we believe. But Pete had to engage too. These veterans in Page, Arizona had to engage as well. And I wasn't exactly cutting the image of blasé journalists ready to have a objective conversation. I mean, I was often wearing skinny jeans, had earrings in and my hair has been longer than this before. And so we came in expressing whether physically or how we spoke certain parts of who we are and coming from an extreme and in some cases.
Christopher Haugh:
And when we were able to change the circumstances or when we were able to just continue conversations and listen, then it was a two way street. And Pete was more interested in learning from us then he was in teaching us. These veterans wanted to hear what I thought of the Trump rally that we had been at the night before more than they wanted to tell me about what they had read online. There is this deep curiosity I think about one another in this country and for me it's...
Reihan Salam:
Chris, what it is this that you do to get people to let their guards down? What is it that you do to kind of disarm people? In the course of these conversations, I'm sure you guys are approaching people cold, what was your tactic?
Christopher Haugh:
Absolutely. Well, I want to compliment my buddy Jordan here. And he's part of it at least for this project. His military service was a passport into a ton of rooms. There's an immediate sort of easing up in many communities when someone with that service comes in. Of course that's not true across the board. I mean, when it comes to my own process, it's very much so be as quiet and listen as much as possible. Because often when you're there and you continue to be there and you continue to show that you're listening and you're understanding, then through time and space you end up getting people to open up.
Christopher Haugh:
The last thing on this point. This was also a work of hybrid journalism. We engaged. That's something we often did. We spent some time with Willis, who's a lobsterman off the coast of Portland, Maine. And we found him, he was a little gruff at first. He wanted to talk to us. He was very generous but then he had to go to work. And we said, "How can we help?" And that was an important moment for me because as a journalist, I try to separate myself from the work of my sources as much as possible.
Christopher Haugh:
But Jordan and I decided very early on that this project was going to be about engagement. It was not going to be the traditional sort of swoop in, write what you see, swoop out. We were going to carry tackle. We were going to help bait things. We were going to make calls trying to find labor for Pete when we were on our way to Louisiana. And engaging in that way too is really important for getting people to start to open up and talk. Jordan was also a wonderful journalist. It's too bad that I think I can't entice him over the dark side.
Reihan Salam:
I wonder both of you and here I risk putting words in your mouth. So forgive me. But both of you have kind of gestured towards this idea that much of the intense polarization that we see in our society is elite driven. It's an elite phenomenon where people are trying to impose some kind of uniformity on the views of some kind of larger universe of people. And I wonder what do you see as the the imperative there? I mean, why would that be so? And I assume there are good aspects of that but I'm just kind of curious how you think about that, how you see that happen in action, assuming you buy the idea that this kind of polarization is elite driven.
Jordan Blashek:
I think there's a nuance there. I think we do have big differences across the country. There are very different experiences people have of America. There's also very different things people respond to. One of the the things Chris and I came to over time was that we believed that conservatives and Republicans tend to respond to this language of patriotism. It strikes a chord in their hearts and they really resonate with that. And the reverse is true where if someone talks down about America, they respond very viscerally. And I think on the left, there's this language of empathy. There's a real concern for those left out, those who are marginalized. And they get triggered when they hear things that kind of overlook that pain.
Jordan Blashek:
And so the two sides really do have different languages they respond to. They have different experiences in understanding some world views for who we are. But within that, there's still this deeper shared values and sense of shared future that we have together that Chris and I were trying to find on the road and we found it. And so what we came to is those differences are real but they are amplified by social media and by politics. So politics is all about line drawing and being able to say, "If you were on this side of the line, you're on my team. And if you're not, you're my enemy." And that line drawing is very sharp.
Jordan Blashek:
There's also something in the media where they're trying to drive engagement. They want people to engage on social media. They want clicks to their websites. They need to get traffic and stand out in a very crowded media environment. And the easiest way to do that is to trigger anger and to trigger outrage. And someone recently told us in the context of publicizing this book, that bad news out sells good news eight to one. And so it's no surprise that the media would bias towards to things that outraged. And so that amplifies the differences we already have. It makes people focus in on what is it that I viscerally disagree with Chris on rather than what are the shared values we hold in common.
Reihan Salam:
Chris, I wonder what were your takeaways about the health of the country and its communities in your travels? And I mean that comprehensively. So part of it is of course mood and openness and patriotism and hope, a big theme in the book but also just your sense of the texture of daily life for people. Obviously this book was written before the COVID crisis but I'm just kind of curious about your reading. What surprised you? What encouraged you? What discouraged you?
Christopher Haugh:
Absolutely. Well, in many ways this is a book about a skeptic and an optimist hitting the road. Jordan is far more of the optimist. I'm far more of the skeptic. I assumed when we hit the road, we would see signals of the unraveling. We would see the opioid epidemic taking hold. We would see the various forms of inequality, racial, economic. We would see the problems facing this country. And we did, I mean, we referenced our time in Detroit. We spent a lot of time in Tulsa where that city is dealing with deep historical patterns of all of those issues. And this is where our two perspectives sort of conjoined. We were hopeful because we saw all of those things, all of those issues. They are prominent.
Christopher Haugh:
But we often saw people right next to them working on them, talking about them, fighting to do something about them. We found that hope often nestles and lives right next to broken things. And that was really what changed my perspective. So yeah. So I do think that we did see aspects of the quote unquote unraveling and we try not to ignore them. And we try to point them out in this book. You can't have a rosy picture of this country without knowing the underbelly. But it was more complicated than that. And often it was right there where we saw the future of the country sort of being crafted at the same time.
Reihan Salam:
Jordan, any thoughts on that theme?
Jordan Blashek:
I think Chris nailed it. This was a scattershot view of the country and we saw both. We saw some really hard deep problems across the land. We also saw incredible people doing amazing work to make their communities better. And it was in that tension that we were left pretty hopeful for the country.
Reihan Salam:
A friend of mine observed a little while ago that 20 years ago when he was reporting on the state of the country, he would talk to many people, talk to civic leaders. And what he'd often hear were inspiring stories of overcoming. I overcame this obstacle and here's how I managed to achieve a successful life, talking to various kind of civic leaders, business leaders, et cetera. And 20 years ago, the story he would hear is I overcame these obstacles and only in America could I possibly have this triumphant story.
Reihan Salam:
Whereas now, he said he heard the exact same stories. The same stories about overcoming various obstacles but rather than hear a kind of triumphant conclusion about how only in America, only this country made those things possible, he heard something like the opposite that I had to overcome these things because of the kind of deep seated racism or injustice of the society. And it's funny because the conclusion is the same. These are people who kind of in either instance were people who want to do good, they kind of want to make the country a better place. But they go from a kind of triumphal understanding of the country, a celebratory understanding the country to one that's quite a bit darker.
Reihan Salam:
And Chris was a bit skeptical before about whether or not the decline in self-described patriotism is especially meaningful. And what I'm sharing with now is an anecdote. But I do wonder if that resonates with you at all or not. And Jordan, I'll give you first breath.
Jordan Blashek:
It's an interesting question. I don't know if we heard too much of that on the road. I think there's probably a healthy balance between the only here in America versus overcoming these really hard deep problems. My sort of sense would be that 30 years ago, when we have this great or maybe using more 40, 50 years ago, we had this great sort of growth in America in the American economy, this great rise in wealth. It was much easier to you have this optimistic feeling of here if I worked hard, I was going to make it and achieve something better with my life.
Jordan Blashek:
And now fast forward to where we are today, growth has slowed from main street. There's a sense that we're kind of running on fumes and it's really benefiting just a very certain class. But we're also seeing that there are lots of people left out of that last 30, 40 years of growth. And so it's kind of not surprising to me that the perspective might shift from, well, anyone could do it if they work hard and played by the rules to actually, there's a whole bunch of people who were left out of that growth. And so now the focus is on how do we get them to have better lives as well. It's a difference in perspective given what's happened the last 30 years.
Reihan Salam:
Jordan, I'm going to be incredibly unfair to you. I'm going to be incredibly uncharitable and say, doesn't that sound really transactional? Just the idea that we love our country because we have enjoyed this level of growth in disposable household income. You know what I mean? I mean, I kind of wonder as someone who made a great sacrifice in serving your country, and certainly you lead people, you started alongside people who made enormous sacrifices. And this is for both of you guys. Because the idea sounds plausible, right? I mean, the idea that, "Hey, there's some ways in which the American growth engine is not delivering quite as much as it had in earlier eras." But also one could argue that a society with a sense of cohesion and trust, that's part of the formula for having a flourishing society. So I wonder if there's something that it's circular to it. But I'm curious from kind of both of you guys, which comes first? Could it be the breakdown in trust? Could it be that kind of loss of faith in our institutions that is part of why we don't see this flourishing in other dimensions?
Jordan Blashek:
Yeah. So my quick response is that I think the charitable view is that it's actually like who we're placing the emphasis on in doing well. So if the emphasis is placed on the individual who succeeds, then it is this great aspirational story. If the emphasis is on the people who didn't succeed and why didn't they succeed, how do we help them? Then it becomes the other. It's like, what are the barriers that are not letting people through? And so my view is that the country has shifted from the sense of, "Okay. Let's praise the people who succeeded to what's our concern for those left behind? And that's the group we really need to prioritize. And so the narrative is shifting as we're focusing on that group. That would be my sense of it. And it's less transactional. It's much more this acknowledgement that we've had amazing growth. There's amazing virtues to our system but there are groups that were left behind and let's figure out now how to solve that.
Reihan Salam:
So Chris tell me, the people who are losing faith in the country and its institutions, are you more likely to encounter them at Yale Law School? Or on one of your road trips through a working class rural community? Because my sense is that it's actually Yale Law School where the faith in the American experiment has been shaken. And not to say that it's not shaken in these other communities, but tell me if I'm wrong about that.
Christopher Haugh:
That's a really good question. My initial inclination is to say that there's more skepticism at places like Yale Law School. But I do think too, to come to my colleagues defense, that that skepticism is born of a desire to improve, that it is saying somewhat like what we've been preaching in terms of the message of the book. It's saying, "Look at all these cracks in our system. Look at the ways in which the foundation may have been laid in a difficult or unjust manner. How can we change that for the better?" And so I think we were seated, at least personally, I was seated with that when we hit the road. I think honestly in our conversations, this wasn't a sociological sort of longitudinal breakdown of working class Americans in the country. There are others in Berkeley who do that quite well, Strangers in Their Own Land, that kind of thing.
Christopher Haugh:
But what I will say is that our experience, at least my experience with working class Americans was that there were issues that were far more prominent than say politics or whether or not the foundations of our democracy are shifting. One experience that comes to mind is we spend time with Carla who helped raise Jordan, who used to be an undocumented immigrant. And Trump came up because we had just been at a Trump rally just a few days beforehand. And we wanted to tell stories. And she almost dismissed it. She didn't find it interesting. She said something along the lines of, "I don't care what he says. I've got too many issues and concerns that are far more relevant to my daily life which is whether or not I'm taking care of my grandkids or what's happening to the property in Las Vegas that I haven't been able to sell. Or am I going to have work tomorrow?"
Christopher Haugh:
There were far more prominent issues. And I think that made for a very different kind of way of articulating where the country is, where it's headed, what are the issues? And I think in elite circles, 35,000 foot, it's far more, what are the ideals that animate this project? How can we better live up to them? Why are they falling down? What is the data on this? There's just more sort of leisure time for lack of a better phrase or way of expressing it.
Reihan Salam:
Jordan, any thoughts on that?
Jordan Blashek:
I had a friend who told me one time that when we're bored, we talk politics. So maybe we're way too bored because we talk politics all the time.
Reihan Salam:
So Chris mentioned before that Jordan, your military service in the Marines was a kind of passport. It allowed you both entrée into a lot of conversations that you might not have otherwise had. I'm curious just Jordan for your thoughts on the military to civilian transition, what you learned from your travels and how you've been thinking about it since?
Jordan Blashek:
Yeah. So as Chris said, I think everywhere we went, the military background opened lots of doors. Everyone we met on the road had a lot of respect for it. It was often the thing that made them comfortable with us initially. Whether it was because they personally had served or they had friends and family who served or they just respected the background. And so it was hard to have that experience and not feel like there's this deep respect across the country for our veterans. And I think our society is doing really well on that front. My personal experience leaving the military was that I thought I would be fine. I come from a great family who loves me. I was on my way to Yale Law School. I thought there should be no issue. And yet my first year was really hard, losing the military identity and the sense of purpose that you have every day was very difficult.
Jordan Blashek:
And I felt very disoriented for that first year until I met Chris and kind of found my footing. But taking that lesson out to the broader country, I can imagine how hard it is for people who lost their job, that they worked in for 30, 40 years or watching their communities change out from under their feet and feel this unmoored, this sense of the identity I knew is no longer there. And so like, who am I at that situation? And I can see how difficult it is because it was very hard for me. And finally, I guess the last thing I'd say on veterans is we still have a very high suicide rate among veterans. It's a very, very hard problem. I don't know if there's any easy answers. But there are a lot of people working really hard to solve it. And I wouldn't let that kind of tarnish the job that society has done in making our veterans feel that we're grateful to them, that we value their service. I think we've come a long way on that.
Christopher Haugh:
Can I jump in here and just quickly say, I agree with everything Jordan just said. I also believe that we can always treat our veterans better. My mother who I admire deeply was part of the Vietnam war protests and it was a critical shift in their movement when they decided to say we don't like this war but we believe in the troops. And that was a really important moment. And I think that liberals everywhere should take note of that. But what I wanted to add was one of my favorite parts of being out on the road and using this passport with Jordan, was the rivalry between the branches
Christopher Haugh:
One instance that comes to mind was when we went to Idaho and we were looking for this particular police officer, which would make sense when you read the book. And we were talking to this bureaucrat and we were telling him why we were there and I'm a liberal and he's a Marine veteran and we're writing this book and he looks down at his notes and he looks up and he says, "You're a Marine veteran?" And Jordan says, "Yes." And he says, "What's your favorite color of crayon to eat?" And everyone was taken aback. I started laughing. And it turns out he was an army veteran and he was just poking fun at Jordan. And we got some really good responses.
Reihan Salam:
Chris, tell us a bit about your takeaways from this experience and also from the relationship you've built with Jordan, about how you approach political conversations, how you approach some of the kind of raging political and ideological controversies in the moment. Do you see them differently now because of this experience and the investment you've made in kind of building this relationship?
Christopher Haugh:
Absolutely. I really think and I hope that I'm far more humble in approaching issues in large part because this is a complicated world. There's a lot of information out there and I'm only privy to a small fraction of it. And so when I'm trying to make decisions for what I believe and what policies this country should be putting forward to create broader prosperity for everyone, a better world to live in. If I'm not taking in what Jordan tells me, then I'm falling down on the job. We do like to say though that Jordan made me a better liberal and I think I made him a better conservative, in that we're very able to point out our blind spots, propose new data, think about issues in totally different ways.
Christopher Haugh:
And that doesn't necessarily mean that I'm drawn to the right or Jordan's drawn to the left. But it allows us to better articulate ourselves and to question our assumptions that maybe are a little rickety and to muster the right evidence and to come to the right conclusion. And sometimes that means we come to the middle. Sometimes that means we stand right where we are but we're better at it for it. And so I'd say that I've changed quite a bit as a result of our conversations. And Jordan I'm very grateful for everything he's done in terms of changing my worldview and helping me see things better. Jordan, do you have anything to add on that front?
Jordan Blashek:
No. I think you said it all.
Christopher Haugh:
Love it when he says that.
Reihan Salam:
So you formed this relationship, you developed a shared vocabulary. You've kind of found this way to have constructive conversations. But it's happening at the very same time that you see many institutions that are becoming less pluralistic that are kind of cohering around a shared set of ideas and beliefs. I hate to oversimplify, I hate to be reductive. But certainly, Chris you've talked a lot about your experience in media, your desire to write and think for the public. And certainly you're seeing many media institutions where there's a real conflict internally as to the range of voices and ideas that ought to be permissible.
Reihan Salam:
So I'm curious how you think about that. And these are people who are oftentimes adjacent to the world that you guys found yourselves in at Yale Law School. These are people who are oftentimes very well read, intellectually serious people who are saying that there are some views that ought to be verboten. There's some views that are held by a great many Americans that really should not have a space on the op-ed page take or on this broadcast. And I'm curious how you both feel about that development or if you think that I'm characterizing it not quite the right way. Jordan, do you want to take a first crack?
Jordan Blashek:
Sure. I'll take the first cracker. This might be one that Chris and I have slight disagreements on.
Reihan Salam:
I've been waiting this entire time slowly to peel away at this friend but please...
Christopher Haugh:
Rolling up my sleeves.
Jordan Blashek:
So my feeling is that that there's been a weaponization in some sense of certain rhetoric, certain ideas. And it's being targeted at institutions or organizations that are worried about their brand. And when you face an onslaught on social media, attacking you as racist or sexist, the easiest response to an organization that's worried about their brand and their survival is just to go along with it. And so you're seeing this incredible pressure being put on companies, on consumer goods, on universities in order to to adjust, in order to protect their brands. And part of where that comes from though is that it's a much more competitive landscape today. And whereas they might've been the monolithic or one of a handful of dominant organizations, today there's not. And there's so many other options and they're feeling cost pressure.
Jordan Blashek:
And so while I do find it very scary and especially as a conservative feeling like I can't fully voice my opinion in some of the institutions I'm a part of, I find that very scary. I also in watching as all of these alternative outlets are popping up for information and for news and for education. And there's something really positive about that. And so in some ways I see this as like the dying throes of some organizations as they're trying to protect themselves in an environment that's just increasingly diverse and more competitive. So I think there's some risks to it. I hope at some point that the use of certain words as bludgeons just to beat people into submission decreases in power the more it's used. But I also see some positives as well.
Reihan Salam:
Chris.
Christopher Haugh:
I'm trying to think of the right way to put this. And you can call me naive, but I think that progress is both important and oftentimes it leaves some things broken and it's about deciding what needs to stay broken and what needs to be put back together. What I mean by that in media in particular is I think that there are important new voices in media that are telling a very unvarnished story and a very different story about where we are, where we've come from, where we're headed. And I think that with all of those new voices coming in, it's changing the homeostasis of media. And I think largely that's a good thing. And I think it does have consequences. And I think that personally, I believe that the journalistic ethic, the sort of time honored traditions of the profession need to be defended and need to be protected and reasserted but I think they also need to adapt.
Christopher Haugh:
And I think overall, this is a good thing. I think, if you look at the trend line it's upward. But I also do see very scary signs in media of the sorts of neutral principles of journalism that are falling by the wayside in some cases. I think in other cases, they're being reformed and they're being refashioned. And I think that's really important. But one that really scares me is the sort of breaking down of what we call church and state, the editorial side and the news side. And I think that there's something beguiling about that to be able to break down that border. It allows you to say things as a reporter that you couldn't 10 years ago and vice versa. It allows you to report say on the editorial side which maybe we always should have been doing, but that's a different conversation.
Christopher Haugh:
But that's part of progress is that we make missteps and then we have to take a step back or we have to step sideways or we need to find ways of preserving what's good and think about being entrepreneurial, thinking about changing things. And I think that ultimately this is a good thing. But I do see the crisis. And Jordan has opened my eyes to parts of it. I mean, when we started these trips, I had blinders on. I thought that the media could do no wrong, that this is a diverse marketplace of ideas that it's going to get some things wrong, but overall the health of the media is strong. But I see the crisis in a new way. And personally, what I want to do going forward is try to protect some of those institutions but also encourage the progress
Reihan Salam:
In a similar vein, do the two of you notice a change in the climate in academia? You're both recent graduates of Yale Law School and I gather are still connected to those institutions via mentors that you've had and kind of friends who are still enrolled. Do you detect something having changed in those places that's had some material effect on the atmosphere and whether or not people feel comfortable advancing dissenting views?
Jordan Blashek:
It's a good question. I mean, my feeling on Yale Law School is a little conflicted. On the one hand, there were almost no conservative faculty members. I think there might've been one at the time. And I remember one of the professor's responses to this was, well, there's just not enough good conservative legal scholars, which is certainly not true in a country where 50% of the judges or more are conservative jurists. And so there was this massive bias on the intellectual side or the academic side. But then among the student body, the Federalist Society is the most powerful organization at school. And the Federalist's members are very willing to go toe to toe with their liberal counterparts. And so there wasn't this shyness among the students which I was very heartened by.
Jordan Blashek:
Now across the institutions, I think there was sort of a cowing of conservatives through the same things that's happening in media circles and in companies and various institutions where charges of racism or sexism are so powerful that people are very unwilling to fully voice their opinions. And I think that's a huge issue. What I think we're starting to see little bits of there, are people with powerful platforms, people who have a lot of courage and credibility stepping forward and saying, actually this has gone too far and I'm not willing to stand by this anymore. And doing things like signing the letter in Harper's Magazine or pretty podcasts where they're creating new spaces for that kind of discussion. So I think you're starting to see a pendulum swing back.
Reihan Salam:
Chris.
Christopher Haugh:
Yeah. I think this is another one of those areas where Jordan and I might respectfully disagree but I hear him and I take it very seriously. What I would say is that I felt very encouraged and of course I'm left of center. But I felt very encouraged to pursue what I cared about to think critically and radically whether it was conservatively or liberally. I felt that Yale Law School and places like that are still fertile grounds for diverse thinking, for entrepreneurial thinking, for voicing critical and oftentimes unvarnished and potentially not comfortable opinions.
Christopher Haugh:
I think that there are issues at the margins. And I think that if there really was only one conservative faculty member, that's a problem. But I often felt that my conservative friends at Yale Law School including Jordan who the two of us were able to sort of do something very different than say going to Cravath or thinking in singular ways. We were able to sort of explore anything we believed. And having a hopeful message was not exactly the sort of core of what was being talked about a Yale Law School. And so we were able to cut against the grain ourselves.
Reihan Salam:
You have a couple of questions, you've stimulated some questions from the crowd we have watching. The first is, what do Chris and Jordan recommend people do when they enter arguments when there is no shared set of facts?
Jordan Blashek:
Good question. So I think what Chris and I found through our own arguments is we always had different facts because I tend to consume different media than Chris. And if we entered the conversation, trying to convince the other person that our facts were right or that our arguments were right, the conversation would just enter this endless tit for tat sort of engagement. But if instead we ended the conversation with the desire to learn and to listen and we could say, "Hey, this is what I know. This is what I'm hearing. This is what I'm bringing to the table. What do you have. Tell me what you know from your side." And then we can begin to kind of hash out where's the middle ground there, how do we take these two different views and come to some senses. We had much better conversations. And so it's really just your intention entering the conversation that I think makes all the difference.
Reihan Salam:
[Forrest 00:57:19] has a question. I'm going to direct this to Chris. Do the author's experiences contain insights for how Congress can achieve more cross party consensus?
Christopher Haugh:
I think that's a very difficult question. In terms of what our insights...
Reihan Salam:
That's why I asked you Chris. [crosstalk 00:57:35].
Christopher Haugh:
Yeah. I appreciate that. Always looking out for me. At least from our experience, the insight I would say is like, try to find the quiet places. One thing we always say is be aware of your context. For example, if I met Pete at a rally, at a political rally, the two of us might've been screaming at each other. But when we're in the cab of his truck driving to Slidell, Louisiana there's this sort of common purpose and it's a much easier conversation.
Reihan Salam:
You also know that he could throw you out of the cabin of his truck at any moment. So that's another reason to be...
Christopher Haugh:
Indeed. It's a risk. It's a calculated risk. But what I would say is that I think it's really important to have those quiet places for communication. Because when Jordan and I were one-on-one, I could say, "You know what? That thing you're saying, tell me more. I'm curious." That that sounds like it's something that fits with my world view even if it's dangerous to my perspective or to my party or anything along those lines. So I hope and I know that once upon a time, Congress was much more able to carve out these quiet places. And I think it's less and less the case, I think for various reasons, some of them positive some of them negative. But finding those places to have those conversations, those sidebars, I think is critical and it was critical for the two of us.
Reihan Salam:
This is a serious followup. So one implication of what you've said is that in a way transparency can actually, in some instances be destructive because in some cases you actually want some modicum of privacy in order to ask awkward questions, work things out in a way that if what is a kind of complex process were exposed throughout, you might make it harder to reach some kind of compromise. Is that what you have in mind?
Christopher Haugh:
Absolutely. I think that's very important. I think having spaces to be creative and make mistakes and not be punished immediately for them is a really critical part of just any sort of human, creative endeavor and thoughtful endeavor. And I think it's true of Congress the same as it's true of Jordan and I just being two idiots on the road.
Reihan Salam:
Jordan and Chris, I'm curious building on what Chris said a moment ago about wanting to have this space where you have room to make mistakes, where you have room to engage in this kind of open inquiry. Have you changed the way that you communicate? My understanding is that many younger people, they're more likely to communicate now over WhatsApp and Signal with trusted communities of friends than they are in more public forums, partly because of that anxiety about things being misinterpreted and the desire to have a greater baseline of trust. But has that been something that you guys have done in your own communication?
Jordan Blashek:
Well, luckily Chris and I are both pretty analog to begin with. We don't really have social media presences much to our publishers chagrin and we normally talk by phone or in person. And so it was very natural for us. But I understand why people are moving in that direction to have constant record of all your missteps or your unfiltered thoughts or nascent ideas, it's really problematic that it's going to be held against you down the line. So totally makes sense people are doing that.
Reihan Salam:
So we're out of time I'm very sorry to say. But I'm just so grateful to you both for joining us. It is just really incredibly kind of you to have been here. Thank you to all of you for watching. I strongly encourage you to read Jordan and Chris's wonderful book. And I encourage you to stay tuned to the Manhattan Institute. We'll have more events much like this one and you can follow us. You can subscribe to our newsletters. If you're interested in supporting our mission, there are links below for you to do just that. Jordan and Chris, thank you again. And I hope to get a chance to talk to you again very soon.
Jordan Blashek:
Well, thank you so much. This is a pleasure.
Christopher Haugh:
Thank you so much.
Reihan Salam:
Bye guys.
communications@manhattan-institute.org