Wednesday's inauguration closed the curtain on the tumultuous Trump Presidency. But have we reached the end of the Trump Era? American politics is more in flux now than at any time since the 1970s, with coalitions changing and ideologies evolving. Will history remember Donald Trump as having been a transitional figure akin to Jimmy Carter—the bridge from one ideological epoch to the next? Or will his legacy turn out to be that new epoch: an abiding shift by the Republican Party in the direction of nationalist-populism?

MI president Reihan Salam will put these questions and others to two of the country's leading political analysts: Rich Lowry, Editor of National Review and author of The Case for Nationalism; and Saagar Enjeti, co-host of the Hill's daily news show, Rising, and of The Realignment podcast, as well as co-author of The Populist's Guide to 2020.

Please join us on January 29th for a probing conversation on the future of populism, shifting party coalitions, and the challenges and opportunities facing the Biden Administration. 

Event Transcript

Reihan Salam:

Good afternoon and welcome to this month's Young Leaders Circle event. Today, we're going to address some of the larger questions around American politics in the Biden era with two of our country's most insightful political analysts, Rich Lowry, and Saagar Enjeti. Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review, a columnist for Politico and the author of most recently; The Case for Nationalism: How It Made Us Powerful, United, and Free.

Reihan Salam:

Saagar Enjeti is a co-host of both Rising with Krystal & Saagar on Hill TV and the popular podcast; The Realignment. He is also the coauthor of the book; The Populist's Guide to 2020. Both Saagar and Rich are conservatives who have thought deeply about conservatism and its relationship to populism, the changing Republican coalition and how recent upheavals on the ride relate to other trends in American life.

Reihan Salam:

Before we begin, I'd like to remind all of you watching that we want to hear from you. We plan on saving 15 minutes at the end to respond to your questions. So please do go ahead and submit them on whatever platform you're watching us on. Rich and Saagar, thank you very much for joining me.

Saagar Enjeti:

Thank you Reihan.

Reihan Salam:

Rich I wonder if someone from another country ... You were going to meet someone and you wanted to explain to them as straightforwardly as you can, what are the main cleavages in American politics right now? What would you say?

Rich Lowry:

Well, we have a big dispute between the right and the left obviously, and I think the right is united as one in opposition to what Joe Biden wants to do, what he's done so far, how he's done it, which I think is another symptom of just how the role of Congress is been drastically diminished in our system, partly by its own doing. It hasn't been interested in husbanding its power and its influence.

Rich Lowry:

So you see in two weeks Joe Biden implementing what would be a pretty ambitious legislative agenda over the first year, just through the strokes of Pence. And then you have divisions within the right, and this is ... Saagar and I, this is the division we live with every day and argue about between the populists in the more traditional conservatives and my more optimistic moments, I think this can be a healthy thing.

Rich Lowry:

It's created a lot of interesting arguments and I think on paper, it's very easy to kind of work out or at least in theory, how you'd work it out. You sit down, you figure out what issues you need to adjust in, and think about adjust on, think about more to keep Trump voters inside the tent, or at least most of them, while at the same time not being repellent to suburban voters, which is the most important reason why Republicans were wiped out in 2018 in the midterms, and the most important reason that the Trump lost this time around.

Rich Lowry:

That's very easy to do in theory, but patterns are still running high within the party. Trump is obviously a major factor himself for about 36 hours after the election. I let myself right-hand say post-Trump era. And then I'd scratch that out when I was tending to write it. And I would say post-Trump presidency era-

Saagar Enjeti:

Yes.

Rich Lowry:

And I would scratch that out too. The whole concept is now gone by the boards. It's not post Trump anything. So it'll be a fascinating time next couple of years, but there's a lot up for grabs and a lot that's going to be struggled over.

Reihan Salam:

I do want to follow up on that briefly. So, you mentioned a divide between the right and the left, but just imagine we just can't use those terms. We can't talk about conservatives and liberals. When you think about the underlying forces at work, some people will say it's about rural whites and more diverse urban areas. Others will say that it's about cancel culture, or what do you see as the underlying cleavage that is operating beneath the layer of ideological self identification, if anything.

Rich Lowry:

Two things overwhelmingly and neither are particularly new. One is the role of the federal government in particular and the role of experts and centralized power in Washington, and how much control it should have over our lives. Two is the understanding of America itself, and of what makes it special and of its culture and its freedoms. And this is where you see the tidal wave of a woke leftism associated with cancel culture. It's also nothing new, but this is much more prominent than it has been before.

Rich Lowry:

And you'll have some arguments within the right. Well, do we need to be as opposed to government powers we have in the past, is that kind of something we needed to rethink? You have some divisions as well about how to react to this woke leftism. Although everyone, I think is opposed to it in theory, but those are the two big drivers.

Reihan Salam:

Saagar, I wonder you're someone who has been very prominent as someone who has been advocating call it a more egalitarian approach for the political right. How central do you believe political economy considerations were to president Trump's rise? You seem to be going through a bit of an evolution on this question recently. So, I do want to press you on it a bit.

Saagar Enjeti:

Well, it's an important one and it's a thesis which I bought back in 2016 with the data that was available. And I thought-

Reihan Salam:

Just lay out the thesis for us, just for those who are less familiar.

Saagar Enjeti:

For those who are less familiar, the New York Times take if you will, like circuit 2017, is that certain policies around trade immigration and more which, and increasing financialization of America led to a downwardly mobile, rural and suburban fallout, largely among working class whites who had the bottom fall out of them financially. And then increasingly had many of the institutions in their towns within their life that were eroded by proxy. That led to an increasing desperation for more representation in Washington, which wasn't seen, or even really regarded as legitimate amongst the professional middle-class the media leads, the people who kind of the taste-makers in our society, which at the heart of it, from the original thesis, I would say my 2016 thesis, I would have said that the driving force would have been political economy combined, obviously with Trump grievance politics.

Saagar Enjeti:

However, I think that we have to reckon with people like myself and I have with the 2020 election results, which is the truth is, is that Trump won 10 million more votes than he did the last time around and Rich is right. He did lose because of the suburban voters, but despite not following through on many of the things that he said he would do in 2016, he largely held onto many working class voters, actually added some of them in different coalitions, minority groups and others, and won even more working class white support.

Saagar Enjeti:

So what is behind that? And I think that that is the ultimate question. And as you were alluding to, in talking with Rich, what is the cleavage that we have in America today? And I've never been more convinced that it's the four year college degree and a culturation through the education system, because when I look at those results and I look at the people who are most hardcore behind Trump, in many cases, it's a small business owner but somebody who hasn't necessarily been through the four year college degree system. So using the term working class, and there's going to be a lot of debates between left and right wing populous, like who really represents the working class, et cetera.

Saagar Enjeti:

I almost think that that is just outdated terminology in terms of how we can describe the coalitions in America today. I look at it much more along the lines of a four-year college degree, urbanization, a culturation towards certain values and different thoughts systems that you would get through that four year college degree process, and then people who are removed from that. I think that that is the future of American politics, the left largely becoming a movement of the four year college degree and the associated coalitions and then the right increasingly becoming more of a downwardly, mobile, more rural parts of American life. And then the two cultures between those two is the central clash that we have in America today.

Reihan Salam:

Just to clarify one thing. So it's not necessarily a matter of income-

Saagar Enjeti:

Yes.

Reihan Salam:

Because you could have people who aren't acculturated into this kind of educated bubble you describe. But it's more about your worldview as informed by whether or not you're in meshed in kind of one or another cultural sensibility.

Saagar Enjeti:

That's right. And I tried to think about it in terms of power, which is that it's easy to say that income itself is power, but it's not the only determinative factor. So for example, a Vox writer or somebody making 35, $40,000 a year living in New York City, but then writing for Vox appearing on mainstream media networks, being friends with people who are elite taste makers has 100X more cultural power than a plumber who lives in Dayton, Ohio, or in my hometown of College Station, Texas, who may make $110,000 per year.

Saagar Enjeti:

I mean, that person is high income relative to the general population, but that person's cultural tastes are not reflected in the mainstream culture itself. And when I see who was Trump most resonant with in 2020? Go look at the boat ... I think, I would make fun of these boat parades. But I realized, I'm like the boat praise is that kind of upwardly mobile non-college educated part of suburban life, which feels dramatically underrepresented by a party or by an elite society, which is not recognizing its own claim on what America is, how they express themselves, how they want Hollywood to be, what they want to see represented in the media. And I think, again, that is the central dividing line that we have today.

Reihan Salam:

Rich, do you buy this idea and it's an idea you hear from a number of different corners that essentially many conservative voters, they are using their political power, their political voice in a way to vote against trends that are more cultural in nature than they are political institutional?

Rich Lowry:

Yeah. This is clear in the Trump phenomenon. I totally agree with Saagar on this. I wrote a column before the election on how Trump was sort of the only middle finger available to a lot of voters to say to the left, to every of elite institutions in our life. You've gone too far and we want you to stop and we don't have any ... I'm not an assistant dean at Oberlin. I don't write for Vox, I own a small business or whatever it is. And this is just the one tool I have to have this sentiment expressed in a way that you're going to pay attention to.

Rich Lowry:

In fact, it's probably going to drive you crazy and that's a good thing. It was Trump. So he's really more of a cultural figure than a political figure. Now, Sagaar in saying that we've seen this sorting on the basis for your education said increasingly. And I would underline that. The lines here are still blurry. And he got a lot of voters still winning a lot of voters who are higher income.

Rich Lowry:

Now Saagar might be right, it's not because they're culturated into this point of view, but the future of the party, it can't be just the Trump appeal to just those voters. Because you're going to come up sure. He was lucky in 2016, 46.1% and he still won. This time he improved astonishingly, when everyone was writing him off and it was much closer than anyone thought, but still 46.7% or 46.9, I think. The party's never going to win anything with less than 47%. And you did see, and this is something encouraging, a lot of house members over-performing Trump and that's because they sure yes, they got a boost from Trump and that was really important, but they won the Trump voters and suburban areas would do 2% better than Trump.

Rich Lowry:

In a close election, that makes a huge difference. So the trick going forward, and again, that's where I go back right-hand to my original statement. This is easy to do on paper. It just might be hard to do in reality, the trick keep most of those Trump voters realize if you're not a working class party, you certainly should be a middle class party. A party about middle-class families and their interests at every single level, having a more elevated culture, having an economy that rewards work and that respects you, even if you don't have a four year degree. How do you do that? Which will have some appeal to suburban voters without just totally polarizing along these lines, which I think in the case of Trump just puts you barely, just barely, but puts you on the losing side of the equation.

Reihan Salam:

One thing that comes to mind is that if you have visible political conflicts that really turn around cultural issues, questions of identity, questions of who is going to be held in high esteem and who is not. One challenge is that you're leaving the playing field of actual policy to the people who care deeply actual policy who pay close attention to it when the wider public isn't paying close attention to it. Those people are typically educated. And I wonder if you both think that there's a danger here in which people who do take this kind of anti elitist, anti technocratic posture actually are not sufficiently engaged when it comes to nitty-gritty questions of governance and that that can create some vulnerabilities down the road.

Saagar Enjeti:

I completely agree with that statement. And that is the ultimate question. And Rich is also 100%,. I wasn't presenting these facts necessarily as a good thing. He is right which is that Trump lost because he was odious enough to about 1.5% of people who were willing to vote Republican at the top of the ... Or Republican to the bottom of the ticket. But Joe Biden up at the top, and the ultimate quandary for the GOP moving forward is what do you do in a situation without Trump and where you have embraced types of politics and largely around the election being stolen, which is also going to continue to turn off suburban whites.

Saagar Enjeti:

We find out what happens in the state of Georgia with two democratic wins in the US Senate. And if you'd asked me before the election, I would've been like, great, okay. These suburban voters can leave the coalition, but then you can increase working class voters amongst different minority groups, black and Hispanic. But Trump in particular, his particular personality. And this is where Rich gets to really, really hard is that you have to be able to appeal a lot more to that group. Millions more in order to balance out that coalition. And the reason I'm bringing this up is it goes again to what you're saying, Reihan, where yes, I do not longer believe that political economy was the sole or even the chief driver of what happened in 2016 or with the Trump phenomenon.

Saagar Enjeti:

But this is where I believe where the increasing that part of the coalition, either winning back suburban voters or expanding the coalition on the margins emphasis on policy itself can expand by certain millions of voters. And I would point to the most famous example of the 2020 election, which is the large Rio Grande Hispanics swing towards Trump and where anecdotal evidence aside, that's all we really have so far. Why did that happen because of the $1,200 checks with Donald Trump's name on them. That was the reason. And so I would point to that as the evidence for why we must reconcile focusing on policy and not just washing away the technocratic parts of governance, because on the margins, it can be the thing that wins you an election.

Saagar Enjeti:

And I think one of the great tragedies of the Trump presidency is that people could figure out that they could use the Trump brand and say the words work in class a lot and still do the same old things that they used to do. So that doesn't really serve anybody. It doesn't expand the coalition and it certainly doesn't help the voters that you were trying to help in the first place.

Rich Lowry:

So Reihan, can I address this question?

Reihan Salam:

Of course, please.

Rich Lowry:

I think this is really important. And again, I know you want to get at the tensions between Saagar and me, but we're agreeing on everything. Unfortunately, we're just supporting you Reihan yet again. But this is a key thing, we shouldn't be ruled by experts. National view 60 years ago was against rule by experts and overemphasizing the foresight and the abilities of these people. And that's been that skepticism has been proven, held out to be true of decades and decades and decades, but that can't translate into, well, we're just not going to think about what we should favor and why.

Rich Lowry:

And I think a great example of this and there are many examples of this where I think Trump's sort of instinctually got where his populism should take them. So on healthcare, we should have health care for everyone. Everyone should have health insurance. The government should figure out a way to make it easier for everyone to have health insurance so everyone could buy it.

Rich Lowry:

Great. You've had a lot of reformers on the right policy ones thinking in these terms for a very long time, having political resistance from folks who just think we should do nothing. And here's the most powerful person, the Republican party say, yeah, we should do that, but he never came up with how you would to it. And I was talking to someone who is sympathetic to Trump, worked at a sympathetic think tank to Trump, late in the campaign when he's getting hammered on not having a healthcare plan at the same time he's supporting this lawsuit that would have overturned Obamacare, why doesn't he have a plan? It seems to be the most obvious thing, just have something you can call a plan. Why not? And there are plans on offer. And this guy just said, I don't think he has the patience for it.

Rich Lowry:

He doesn't want to sit down ... This is complicated and you're gonna upset various people in your coalition when you do this. And it takes ... You have to sit down through a six hour meeting and work through this so you just never had the patience for doing it. So it was just another way. I have lots of criticism of Trump obviously, but there are positive things to be learned and there was more promise there than was realized. And this was one of the reasons why is that there wasn't that emphasis on policy.

Reihan Salam:

I have a pet theory, which is that when you're looking at Republicans right now and since at least 2016, one challenge they face, elected Republicans, Republicans in Congress is that they don't necessarily have a solid sense of what their electorate cares about most deeply. Now, if you have a group, voters who belong to a well-defined interest group, the NRA, let's say the teacher's union, regardless of its ideological coloration, you have certain discrete demands. But when you're talking about restoring America's greatness, when you're talking about revitalizing a place that's stagnant, when you're talking about what is ultimately a kind of spiritual crisis, it's not always clear what explicit clear program is, where I've got to do those things, then I'm going to be right with these constituents.

Reihan Salam:

I wonder right now is your sense that Republicans with Biden in the white house, with Trump out of office, are just confused as to where they ought to go next as to what they ought to do. I mean, they know they need to oppose whatever it is the president Biden is doing, but beyond that, is there any sense of cohesion around what should come next?

Saagar Enjeti:

Is that one for me Reihan?

Reihan Salam:

It's for either of you guys, please.

Saagar Enjeti:

I think you're right. Which is that it is very confused and they're getting their sea legs because we've had five years now of being ruled by Trump as a central figure. I was remarking to a friend this game stop Wall Street story is crazy in many ways, but one of them is that Trump and Biden's name is irrelevant. It's like the first time in five years, I'm like, wow Trump is not at the center of this thing. And I think that there's a lot of people who are trying to figure this out.

Saagar Enjeti:

And actually it comes back to Trump himself having left a basically undefined legacy of what he finds important and what isn't. And part of the other issue is that he has polarized the party along the lines of literally his personality. And now his claim that the election was stolen. And this is where I think we have a big problem. I subscribe very much to the Ross Stout theory, which is that increasingly there is an irreconcilable wing of the GOP people who were suburban and who voted for Trump, nonetheless, but who are like, "No, I am done with like, I cannot sign on to this level of madness."

Saagar Enjeti:

And then however, they are a minority though. Let's be very realistic. That's maybe 15, 20%, but then you have maybe 70% in which Trump actually increasingly his approval has only gone up since January six, where they are absolutely convinced that the election was stolen, they believe that any Republican who crosses Trump or who doesn't subscribe to that theory, doesn't accurately represent them. And then they are the ones who can continue to move primary elections. They can challenge. I mean, go look at Liz Cheney, go look at Adam Kissinger and all these people's future careers. It's not going to be good for them.

Saagar Enjeti:

So we can begin to understand that the polarization along that line leads to a lot of confusion. I point to none other than Kevin McCarthy, the house GOP leader, who is like, "Hey, everybody stop fighting." And nobody listened to him. He even flew down to Mar-a-Lago trying to get Trump to issue a statement saying, "Please, everyone stop." And of course, Trump didn't do that. I guarantee you he'll put out a statement in support of like Matt Gates' effort to impeach, or to take out Liz Cheney within days. And we're just going to have to see, look that's not going away.

Saagar Enjeti:

Trump will always insert himself in the process, especially when it's around him and about loyalty to him. And it's just going to be an albatross on the back of the GOP for the next couple of years, especially given the lack of vision that was defined under his presidency.

Reihan Salam:

Rich, any thoughts on the same thing?

Rich Lowry:

I mean, if the arguments about if there's a segment of voters who are just attracted to the madness itself, that's a huge problem. And I don't know how you get around it again. Again kind of repeating myself in different ways, give me a more populous oriented more Trumpy Republican, like Tom cotton. I can support the guy in a minute. I might disagree with them on trade, maybe a thing or two. Ron DeSantis, same thing. Maybe a little pro Trump, too pro Trump from my taste, but a really serious public servant who's done really impressive work down in Florida.

Rich Lowry:

Give me, even if I had to, give me Josh Holly, but it's the Trump personality coupled with the taste for conspiracy theories and all the rest that I think is a dead end. And I can't accept. And if that's the statement of the party that it would have thought, "Okay, we can appeal to them on immigration policy. We can appeal to them on tariffs. We can have an argument about checks, but if we have to, we can appeal to them with checks. But it's the madness itself that attracts them to Trump, that it's going to be hard to get around and impossible, not impossible, but really hard for anyone else to replicate.

Reihan Salam:

This is a bit contrarion but one interesting aspect of president Trump's 2020 campaign is that when compared to 2016, there was strikingly little emphasis on immigration policy, granted there was a lot going on in the country, the COVID crisis was raging, still is. You also saw the border shut down during this period of time. So in some ways it was perhaps a less salient issue, but also right at the tail end shortly before president Trump left office, his administration also issued an order that shielded Venezuelan migrants in the United States from deportation. Something that didn't get a lot of press, but was noteworthy particularly to people from Venezuela, certainly but also some folks in South Florida, people who turned out to be very loyal supporters of the president.

Reihan Salam:

And I wonder what you make of that because when people think about the Trump formula as a kind of political synthesis, immigration has really been at the center of it. Right now, as the Biden administration is floating various trial balloons about immigration policy, what it ought to look like going forward. I wonder if that's something where you might see more diversity of opinion among Republicans, partly because the Trump legacy on the issue isn't necessarily all restriction, restriction, restriction. That here was perhaps some wiggle room there.

Saagar Enjeti:

It's interesting, Reihan. I actually don't think there will be that much diversity of opinion. I think almost everybody understands Donald Trump became GOP nominee in 2016 and largely president because of immigration policy. He would not be the man who he was without immigration. I've seen some data in order to back this up. A friend of mine, Richard Hania has some great data that can go back and look at the chief reasons within primary voters in particular, why Trump is president. So outside of like Lindsey Graham and a few others, I don't think anyone's voting for comprehensive immigration reform or mass amnesty anytime soon. And one of the people I would point to on that is all the presidential hopefuls, Josh Holly, Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, everyone is United against the Biden immigration agenda.

Saagar Enjeti:

The average median GOP representative, a house member who we may not even know their name. I think they understand that too. It seems to be the one area where he actually pushed the party dramatically away from its pre 2016 consensus. That doesn't mean that there won't be what we were talking about. Venezuela and deportation, but I do not think there will be more than a handful in the Senate and more than 10 or 20 or something in the house for legalization of 11 million illegal immigrants in America. I just do not see that happening. And that along with China are Trump's two biggest legacies, I think on the party.

Rich Lowry:

Totally agree. I think these are the two things that he changed the party on, and it's just not snapping back to its old attitudes on immigration and China. And I think both of those are good things. And immigrants is another thing where there was no legislative achievement to speak of, but they did figure out the border crisis with some fits and starts and some real blind alleys, child separation being one of them.

Rich Lowry:

But they ended up having a really daft policy of if you're asylum seeker, you can wait in Mexico and will adjudicate your claim. And if it's good, we'll let you in, but we're not going to have this process where you come in, a file for asylum is probably a bogus asylum claim and we never see you again, which is the way it was working previously and was a huge magnet for people to come here.

Rich Lowry:

This is just another area where there's possibilities of a more thoroughly thought through approach than Trump himself was able to achieve, which would be lower levels in my view of legal immigration, more emphasis on skills, a real enforcement system. And then when you get that enforcement system and it passes all the legal challenges that neighborly would face and it's actually working, then I would be happy to [AMSTI 00:32:22] illegal immigrants who've been here the longest are embedded in their community, but can not have gone through this whole entire Trump phenomenon. And then snap back to that position that helped fuel his rise, which was always wrong and thoughtless to begin with, which was so-called Comprehensive Immigration Reform.

Reihan Salam:

Rich, I wonder this is a variation on the theme, but for many conservatives the immigration issue, one of the reasons why it's been so central is the sense that we are changing over time, the composition of the electorate in a way that creates a durable advantage for left of center politicians over right of center politicians. Yet one could argue that 2020 complicated that story. You see this in particular in South Florida. In Texas, you have a deeply rooted multi-generational population, not quite the same thing. If anything, those are people for whom border issues are going to be particularly salient.

Reihan Salam:

But if you're looking at Florida, here you have a case where there are many people who are leaving communist, socialist, authoritarian States who did seem to gravitate to the president's message and also to this general revulsion towards what U-turn woke leftism earlier on. So I wonder, is that something that could plan not necessarily in the big picture, are you for comprehensive reform or not, but in a more subtle way in terms of how folks on the right talk about immigration issues and the distinctions they might make about immigrants depending on source country, depending on motivation.

Rich Lowry:

Yeah, I think so maybe. I've said for years, I think a more populous party has great potential to cross racial lines in a more stereotypical kind of Mitt Romney republicanism. But I always had the caveat. Well, I don't think Trump's going to be able to do it because he's so polarizing and needlessly divisible on so many things, but he didn't do it. And this was in part in Florida because this was his best state's organization in the entire country.

Rich Lowry:

And never really disbanded after 2016 was constantly working out Spanish language messaging and videos and organizing. And it's also just the sheer revulsion that these groups have to the left. When you say progressive, they hear the same word that left-wing socialists dictators in their country have used to describe themselves. And that was just a huge opening for the Trump campaign that they definitely, in this case, exploited.

Reihan Salam:

Saagar, you are part of a larger community of younger conservatives who just to oversimplify see state power as a potentially valuable tool, who reject the traditional anti statism of the right. Is it your sense that this ... I won't call it statist, but this pro government tendency is pretty much a dominant among younger conservatives. So, leaving aside intellectuals in DC, if you're going to a chapter of young Republicans, somewhere in Texas and College Station let's say. Are you going to see a kind of similar tendency there? Is that the kind of dominant sensibility?

Saagar Enjeti:

Well, what's interesting is I think that it's agnostic and always has been, not just even amongst younger GOP voters, but most GOP voters on the question, which is that if you phrase it in a way in which it's enacting a left-wing agenda, then yes they would be ideologically opposed to it. But if you were to phrase it in a way of enacting a right-wing agenda or something that they would want, then they'd be like I'm okay with that. So I don't look at it as pro or anti. And the reasons why I fall into that camp is something that you just referenced a couple of questions ago when we were talking about how there's no institutions in American life, which represent many of the GOP voters within the Trump coalition, because they're largely all gone or they've eroded within their power.

Saagar Enjeti:

And I subscribe very much to the kind of the theories and the works of the great Michael Lind, where he talks about one of the ways that we can resurrect that, is that you can use government policy, at least now in the future to try and at least bolster, increase whatever you can use, whatever words you would like to increase non-governmental institutions, which exists specifically in order to represent the interests of many average middle-class Americans who don't have institutions like the church, which were as powerful in the 1980s in the 1970s, or even unions, or even there's rotary. There's always the classic example that people come back to. And so as Rich was pointing out a couple of answers ago when if the Trump phenomenon comes down to, the only way that we felt we had a voice was to vote for Trump.

Saagar Enjeti:

Then the logical conclusion of that is that the only place left that many Trump voters, GOP voters, even younger voters think that they would have a fighting chance at fighting back against non-governmental organizations, the media. Every other ... The commanding heights of American culture is the government. Then that is the only tool that is left to them. And so that's why I'm like, I'm not necessarily ... I'm not in love with the idea of state power itself. I just see it as the only real vehicle for at least trying to address and rebalance some of American society.

Saagar Enjeti:

And I suspect given the Trump phenomenon and so much of people's comfort with voting for Trump, merely as a bulwark against cultural leftism, that that is the same shared feeling. But I don't want to say that people are in love with big government. Because I mean, once Biden and Obama do it, they'd be like, "No, no, no, no, I'm out." But it's not philosophical, if that makes sense.

Reihan Salam:

Rich, I wonder what you make of that. My immediate reaction is that there's this kind of surface plausibility here. You have enormous concentrations of economic and cultural power from which people of a more conservative disposition are effectively excluded. They are on the business end of that power more often than not. So why not bring government power in to redress the balance. However, government power, there are no guarantees. We aren't Putin's Russia, we aren't Erdoğan's Turkey.

Reihan Salam:

There's no expectation that the right can guarantee that it will have the levers of power in a durable way. There are of course some people on the left who claim that our institutions are so biased towards the right, but bracketing that, if you don't believe that to be true as I don't. Then how do you think about that? Just this faith or this belief that government power might be the tool that conservatives ought to be cultivating and using in order to redress these other imbalances.

Rich Lowry:

So I'm not a libertarian. So I don't believe a government is always wrong and that government policy can't be used to achieve worthy ends. Now libertarian basically looks at society, simplifying, but as the relationship between government and the individual. Conservative focuses on everything that should be in between as Saagar was pointing out, the problem is we've had a huge erosion of things that are in-between and are really important and more important than the individual or government. Church, civil society, a whole host of institutions that are gone away or been degraded or people feel like alienated from so that they look for a sense of meaning from something else, which isn't good and it drains our lives of true meaning.

Rich Lowry:

And this is a huge source obviously of these so-called deaths of despair. So horrifying over the last decade or so, and opioid deaths are I think this year going to be higher than in a very long time on. On sort of tech and free speech, if I address that-

Reihan Salam:

Of course.

Rich Lowry:

So that's the way I look at it and this is not satisfying to anyone I know, but for me I have been in this business a long time. Conservatives have more of a voice than ever before. I don't want to slight this point of view, but I hear the arguments that people who hate Twitter the most by reading Twitter, because a lot of people have a voice on Twitter that they never had or would have had before.

Rich Lowry:

Otherwise they'd be an impressive lawyer sitting in an office somewhere I never hear from, now they have a Twitter account and I hear everything they think. And oftentimes it's very good. So I think in aggregate. There's more opportunities for conservatives to be heard than ever before. More sources of information, more cable outlets, more websites, websites didn't use to exist. At the same time obviously, these tech Titans have too much power and they exercise it arbitrarily.

Rich Lowry:

And this is extremely disturbing. And just one example from the campaign, it kind of scared me straight on this as if nothing else had before. Twitter blocking people trying to share a link to a news story about Hunter Biden for the New York post, just astonishing or parlor, the argument of people tend to be on the free market side, like myself to the problem with social media, form your own social network. Well, they did, they went and started it and every other tech entity conspired basically within hours to shut it down. That's hugely disturbing. So those are my two points.

Rich Lowry:

And then the third to just put a cap on how unsatisfying this is. I just don't know whether it's a good answer to it. Repealing section 230, we hear a lot about that would actually create an incentive for these big tech giants to sensor more than they are now breaking them up. I'm not sure that makes any sense. And just last point, I distinguished between Twitter and Facebook, I think probably net subtractions to the public welfare people find them useful. I found Twitter useful at a certain level, but Amazon is kind of grouped in with these tech companies.

Rich Lowry:

And I think that is truly a glory of the American system and has advanced productivity, which is the only way anyone gets richer or gets higher wages at the end of the day. And so I put Amazon, I'm sure it's had sharp practices and it should be looked at, but I've put that aside. To me, that's a huge plus to our country at the end of the day and the way social media probably isn't.

Reihan Salam:

Saagar, I wonder when you look at the Biden agenda, there are a number of elements of it that seem designed to cement the support of lower middle income working class voters. For example the proposal, the very ambitious proposal for a one-year dramatic expansion of the child tax credit. And needless to say, it's one year people make use of it and I'm pretty sure their expectation is that that winds up becoming something that is extended for a longer stretch of time.

Reihan Salam:

These are some ideas that some thinkers on the right have embraced in the past. Do you believe that a Biden presidency that makes these kinds of selective interventions, these selective welfare state expansions could put a kind of working class, a populous right in a very difficult position? Or do you think that ultimately it's really about culture, it's about identity and these measures are not really gonna make a material difference one way or another.

Saagar Enjeti:

So the answer is it's complicated. And so let's take the child tax credit, is that really something that number one they're going to insist on once this bill goes through three months of reconciliation, it seems very much like something that might get cut in order to satisfy a Susan Collins or a Joe Mansion or a Kiersten Cinema when we're talking about deficits. So let's bracket off of that and then let's look at what actually gets done.

Saagar Enjeti:

And the reason why is I don't think that they will be successful in doing this is because apparently they have learned nothing from the last five years of American politics. And the very first thing they put before Congress is a 11 million person amnesty with no real provisions for security. And the moment I saw that, I just thought, wow, I mean, they're not even trying with $2,000 checks, they're not even trying in order to pass some sort of broad-based more popular economic legislation, which would cement these approval rating in such a way that if you wanted to try and do something on immigration, he absolutely could have, which is that, look, it's been 10 day, I think we're on day 10 of the Biden presidency.

Saagar Enjeti:

We have no idea how the economic relief is going. I mean to re budget reconciliation last time I checked takes a long time. So I don't think that they are going to have many of the provisions that you're talking about here, which will even be there at the end of the day. And even if they are, I mean, he has is just so cementing the cultural left wing agenda through executive orders and through his very first legislative proposal, which again, I just find so bizarre from the person who preached unity during their inauguration, that I think that the Biden presidency by and large is going to be a wash and that the coalitions will remain largely stagnant.

Saagar Enjeti:

The thing that complicates all of this is COVID, which is that if he vaccinates everybody within a year and he does deliver some legislation, yeah I think he's going to be largely popular, but he's not going to create a permanent coalition, which will follow Kamala Harris in 2024, if that all makes sense.

Reihan Salam:

Let me flip this around a bit Rich. So I wonder you saw the early Obama years when it seemed as though the Republican party was utterly disgraced, badly beaten and made a really impressive comeback in those years. How would you compare what you're seeing from president Biden now to president Obama in those early weeks? And how do you think he's going to fare in managing the party's left wing?

Rich Lowry:

So Biden has never been a moderate. His moderation has consisted of staying in the center of his party, wherever it is. And it's moved steadily left the last 40 or 50 years, especially the last two or three years. So this is more aggressively, progressive agenda than Obama attempted initially. Obama basically it was a big spending program. So that's part of what Biden is up to here. But only part, in the midst of ... We heard a lot understandably about the crises, he'd be inheriting the pandemic, the related economic turmoil. So why did you transgender orders in your first 10 days? And it's because the party is further left than it's ever been and is more consumed with these kind of marginal cultural issues than ever before. And Biden realizes he needs to do it as coalition management.

Rich Lowry:

So there are going to be tensions, I don't think there's going to be outright war, but there are going to be tensions just going all the way all the way through. The thing I'll give Biden credit for is that when he first popped up and announced, he was running and said, "I'm an Obama Biden Democrat. And that part of the party still ascendant kind of conventional democratic party for the left. And it has been, but not wild, not like what you see on Twitter and not like what Bernie is talking about." I was like, "Okay, never going to work. You're wrong. You're crazy." And it seemed as though I was right through the first three democratic nominating contest, and then it turned out I was wrong all of a sudden, and he was right.

Rich Lowry:

He was saved by African-Americans who represent a more moderate coalition now in the democratic party. So it's more the upper educated whites who are the crazy left-wingers. So they're going to be tensions throughout, but I don't see any crackup or anything that will be unmanageable.

Reihan Salam:

We have some questions from the audience that I want to get to. Before I do just one quick one. So as you both know, Senator Rob Portman really recently announced that he was not going to run for reelection in 2022. And there are a number of people from president Trump's orbit people who have been very close to him and people who serve in this administration, members of his family or contemplating candidacies of their own in 2022. I wonder, how do you see this playing out? Do you believe that there will be other Republicans who will retire in 2022? And do you expect that the 2022 Republican wave will be built on president Trump and his political brand and the kind of political community he's built?

Saagar Enjeti:

I absolutely do around. He's not going anywhere. He endorsed and the way that we know this is what happened in Arizona, which is that days after he left the presidency, he went and he endorsed Kelly Ward and barely got him, she only won 51% of the vote in her bid in order to become the Republican. I think the GOP state chairwoman of that state after the GOP just lost Arizona for the first time in a long time. And I expect him to fully insert himself into the primary process. He's endorsed Sarah Sanders, her bid for governor in Arkansas. Whoever it is that does that run in Ohio, in Pennsylvania, in any of the States where they do have retiring or open seats in 2022. I very much expect him to be a part of that. And I think that's going to be a problem in many respects.

Saagar Enjeti:

I know may not necessarily in Ohio. I think Ohio is Trump country, if not a full red state at this point, but Pennsylvania is not. And you know, if he polarizes the electorate much again, along himself, somebody like a John Fetterman is going to have a very good chance in that state and same in Arizona in 2022. Now that Doug Ducey has been formerly censored by his own party. And he said, he's not going to run for Senate. I think that's going to be an issue for Republicans in that state. So it can be a plus in States like Ohio. It can be a minus in States like Pennsylvania and in Arizona, but I do know almost certainly he will be around.

Reihan Salam:

Rich, is there anyone you see on the horizon who is doing an effective job of melding together traditional conservatism with some of the more formidable aspects of president Trump's political personality and program?

Rich Lowry:

Yeah, the two gentlemen I mentioned earlier, Tom cotton and Ron DeSantis, and the trick again, easier to do in paper and on theory is to channel that kind of Trumpian energy from this segment of voters, but in a way that's more thoughtful and productive. I just find Cotton extremely impressive gus. He's able to look around corners.

Rich Lowry:

This was one reason he didn't rush out to endorse objecting to electors on January six because one he didn't think it was the right thing to do, but two thought it would when well over time, he was absolutely right about that. Ron DeSantis again, when DeSantis in the Republican primary, he was running against a guy named Adam Putnam down there, ran this really cringe inducing ad with his kids playing. I forget, I think there may be building a wall with Legos, like, "Oh, we love Trump so much." It's like, it's going to be embarrassing. But he had a theory of the case. He was going to win the primary by appealing to those Trump voters.

Rich Lowry:

And then he had a really well well-thought out program for what he was going to do with it. And he's an extremely serious guy who cares about his job and approaches it really intelligently. So I find that very encouraging, but past experience teaches me right-hand that the politicians I'm encouraged by always flame out for some reason and are eclipsed by someone else.

Reihan Salam:

We have a question from Amelia. Sagaar mentioned Michael Lynn's idea that government policy can help resuscitate civil society institutions, including labor unions, but doesn't that misunderstand the order of operations. In other words, don't you first need labor unions to create a viable redistributionist or a class politics? Doesn't that fact hamper both pro labor politics on the left and right.

Saagar Enjeti:

It's a great question, Amelia. And the question actually comes down to the margins and on emphasis. So when we talk about Republican governors who seem right to work as something that they must embrace and then implement whenever they come into office, especially in more purple States where you might have more of a labor working class coalition, we saw this in Missouri with Eric Greitens right before that whole thing flamed out. But the question is correct in that as Lynn points out, which is that we have the lowest level of unionization, I believe since even before Herbert Hoover was president, but this is again where it comes down to policy within the administration. Once you take office at the national level with the NLRB where actually, I think one of the smart moves that Biden made was immediately targeting the NLRB chair.

Saagar Enjeti:

I think it was the lawyer that was appointed by Trump, specifically as a bid to try and win back some more union voters who did, I think split 43% for Trump there. So look a less ... No, I want to say less aggressive, but maybe just a different approach by a Republican president on the NLRB different discussions whenever it comes to right to work and more could actually change once again things on the margins, because if president Trump can win 40% of the union vote, why four and even more in 2020, by not embracing union politics, like on a policy level whatsoever, purely just through culture, then we're talking about a sizable and potentially an even a larger population in the future. So that's really the way I look at it, especially with the changing dynamics of the party and where things are trending in the future.

Reihan Salam:

Question from Natalie and Rich I'm curious to hear from you on this one, some religious conservatives view Trump and his movement as a vessel for using state power to enact their vision of cultural conservatism. But isn't it true that the marginal white working-class voters Trump added to the coalition were more secular white voters in the Midwest. Are those voters interested in a Christianity inflected conservatism?

Rich Lowry:

Great question. And both of those things are true that evangelicals strongly in favor of Trump. This is one of the miracles of our age that Donald Trump was more bonded to evangelical voters than any other Republican in our lifetime. At the same time that a lot of these new voters he brought into the coalition are more secular minded.

Rich Lowry:

I think that the evangelicals viewed Trump as a cultural protector, and shield but I'm just not sure that that was ever that sentiment, which was very intense, was ever really expressed in any concrete desire for government policy besides kind of government policy that involved protecting religious liberty that classical liberals would support whether Trump was in favor of them or not.

Rich Lowry:

So I think this is definitely a fraught area and there's obviously potential tension within that coalition, but we didn't see it, I think really come to the forefront during Trump's four years.

Reihan Salam:

This is a related question from David, based on the data we have gen Z is the most irreligious and left-wing generation we've seen. Does conservatism have a way to grapple with that? Now this is your fan base Sagaar. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

Saagar Enjeti:

Well, there you go. That's kind of a counter to presumption of your question, David. And I think it's actually important to always push back against the idea of a left wing and what gets coded as cultural conservative and not because if you look at, let's say 2018 marriage data, lowest rate marriage rate that we have on record, what's the number one reason that people cite for not being able to get married. It's not that they don't want to get married, they're citing their economic conditions.

Saagar Enjeti:

So there you go, people still want to get married. They may not self-identify as Christian, they may self identify as culturally or as ... They may identify more as secular. They still want to get married and have children. This is something that we see also within the data around many kids people want to have, which is that people are having less kids than they say that they want to have.

Saagar Enjeti:

And so is it culturally conservative for them to want to have kids? No, I think they just want to have children. So what is the future there, which is, don't let these things get coded as culturally conservative or not. You just speak to people and say, "I want to make it easier for you to get married and have children." This is something actually Tucker Carlson said on his show, which is that the people who deserve ... The person who deserves to win the presidency is the person who can make it easier for 30 year olds to get married and have kids.

Saagar Enjeti:

And I think that that is a message that cuts through all of that. And branding it conservative or left-wing or other doesn't really do a service to what people actually want in their lives.

Reihan Salam:

I wonder Rich, if you have any further thoughts on this. Just the idea that cultural conservatism might mean something different now than it did 15 or 20 years ago.

Rich Lowry:

Yeah, definitely. Trump reset the culture war, not entirely. There are crossover issues. Abortion was important in '70s, '80s, '90s, still important now, but the older, if you will, cultural war issues had more to do with sexual morality. Whereas the new culture war issues and immigration is high on the list have more to do with national identity and what it means to be American and where you draw those lines. It has more to do with national sovereignty and the ability of a nation to protect its own. Whether that has merit or not, that's more where the cultural war is, but again there are sexual morality type issues still at forefront, abortion, obviously, and trans being two of them.

Reihan Salam:

One last question for the two of you. Both of you have embraced the language of nationalism, and both of you have argued that though nationalism is often characterized as necessarily divisive, it can be unifying. It's also true, however that whether we like it or not when you think about the language of nationalism, the politics of immigration restriction, these are not super majority issues. These are not issues where you have 70, 80% of majorities on your side.

Reihan Salam:

We also have a society that it really is a more atomized society. It's a society that has a larger foreign born and second generation population. There are many people who might be receptive to your underlying desire for a more unifying narrative of American life. But when they hear the term nationalism, that's not what they're getting from it for whatever reason.

Reihan Salam:

So does that give you pause? Does that make you think that perhaps if the objective of nationalism is to be unifying, we ought to use some different language entirely?

Saagar Enjeti:

That's an interesting question Reihan, I've thought about it a little bit. I don't think though that it does turn off the majority of the population. I think it only turns off a certain segment of the professional middle-class and in particular, the media. I think there are only 10 to 12% of the population that is going to get "triggered" by the word nationalists. They all just happen to work in the highest echelons of our society, right in the newspapers say that the word cosmopolitan itself is like somehow coded anti-Semitism and more, I think most people know that that's frankly ludicrous.

Saagar Enjeti:

And the reason that I embrace the term is because I don't see an alternative to being able to unite a country, which is multiethnic, multi-religious, not homogenous in really any ways of a more divided amongst certain different cleavages than we've seen in what? Since the 1910s or something like that. I think it's the only way and the cure for what plagues us currently as a society, which is why I'm very comfortable describing myself that way.

Saagar Enjeti:

I also think it's important to speak in majoritarian language, whenever you're describing what we're talking about. And I really reject the idea that the word national itself turns off more than people who work in the professional managerially.

Reihan Salam:

Rich.

Rich Lowry:

I think what we're talking about is nationalism. And that's correct word to describe it, doesn't necessarily mean though that that's the word you need to use in the political arena. There's a good case that you use patriotism instead, but any term can be abused as we've seen in the January 6th riot, all those people describe themselves as patriots, where I would argue that they weren't nationalists or patriots. But the key insight of nationalism is we're one country, one people. And the way to square this circle on immigration is to say emphatically to people once you're in, you're in. You are us, and we're here to protect you and you belong.

Rich Lowry:

And Donald Trump very often obviously fell down on that part of the message. And then the other part is it, while you're here and we are going to protect your interests, and we are going to forge an immigration policy that is in the best interest of the entire country. May not be in the interest of the people coming here. It's an interest support people everywhere to come to the United States. That's a great boon, but it's not necessarily in our interest. So we're going to have an immigration policy that has more of our economic interests, the interests of both natives and immigrant workers at heart. Again on paper, I think that's easy. Makes total sense actually doing it obviously requires some deafness and is more difficult.

Reihan Salam:

Rich and Sagaar, thank you so much for joining me. This was a really excellent conversation—

Rich Lowry:

About something before we go.

Reihan Salam:

Well, we have many, many more questions-

Saagar Enjeti:

No, we're good.

Reihan Salam:

But I also want to be respectful of your time. There'll be more time for sparring, I believe.

Rich Lowry:

—to put it, that's where it all happens.

Saagar Enjeti:

There you go.

Reihan Salam:

Thank you to our audience members for your time and some great questions. I encourage you all to keep up with Saagar and Rich's excellent work. Thank you everyone, and see you all soon.

Saagar Enjeti:

Thanks guys.

Rich Lowry:

Bye bye.

communications@manhattan-institute.org