Not Another Politics Podcast – Episode 14

How is it that in a democracy with massive inequality, where the poor have just as much voting power as the rich, do the wealthy continue to get what they want politically? It’s a question that’s troubled political thinkers for a long time.

Political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have an answer in their new book Let Them Eat Tweets: How The Right Rules In An Age of Extreme Inequality. On this episode, we tackle that question and their answer.

Listen on Apple Podcasts or wherever you enjoy podcasts.

Transcript

Anthony Fowler:

I am Anthony Fowler.

Wioletta Dziuda:

I'm Wiola Dziuda.

William Howell:

I'm Will Howell, and this is Not Another Politics podcast.

Anthony Fowler:

Will, I heard just today, I'm not on Twitter myself, Wiola you're not on Twitter either are you?

Wioletta Dziuda:

I'm not on twitter.

Anthony Fowler:

So you're the only one, Will that's on Twitter. I heard that you spent a lot of time on Twitter talking about Taco Bell.

William Howell:

That's true but I want to be very clear, Taco Bell is delicious and I want to share that joy with the world.

Anthony Fowler:

Well, I'd like to say this episode is definitely not brought to you by Taco Bell and I don't think—

William Howell:

I wish it were.

Anthony Fowler:

I don't think all of the podcast hosts are explicitly endorsing Taco Bell, but at least one of them feels very strongly about Taco Bell.

Wioletta Dziuda:

But maybe our producer can turn this into some sponsorship, a long term sponsorship deal.

Anthony Fowler:

Sure, we are open to sponsorship.

William Howell:

Okay, so—

Anthony Fowler:

Let's talk about politics.

William Howell:

Let's talk about politics. It's hard to believe that there's a campaign and election before us, but there is. Whenever there's an election that features an incumbent, a prominent feature of that election has to do with the achievements of the incumbent. The signature domestic policy achievement of this president is the 2017 tax cuts.

Tape:

President Trump has just signed a historic $1.5 trillion tax bill, an important moment, not only for the administration, but also the country. This likely will affect everyone's taxes.

William Howell:

And it's a policy that dramatically reduces corporate taxes and reduces the tax burden placed upon high-income Americans.

Tape:

The first day under the new tax code, and while most Americans got a tax cut, there is a big gap between the winners and the losers. Now the top 20% of earners got 60% of the benefits...

William Howell:

And it comes on the heels of decades of rising inequality between the rich and the poor. Naturally one would wonder, we ought to wonder, we ought to be thinking about what the significance of income inequality is in contemporary American politics and how it was that this 2017 tax cut managed to get enacted in the first place.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Yeah, so this is one of the very puzzling moves by Trump administration because Trump ran on the platform of standing up for the small guy, for the little guy.

President Trump:

Many times I said we would drain the swamp and that's exactly what we're doing right now, we're draining the swamp.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Many people understand swamp means elites, people who are rich. So in a sense of this positing that the first thing that he decided to do is to implement a policy that I would guess, it's not a very popular policy or at least this should not be a very popular policy among his base.

William Howell:

So Anthony, you talked to some colleagues of ours who have written a book and it grappled with these kinds of issues about inequality in American politics, what's going on with the Republican Party, Trump, tell us about it.

Anthony Fowler:

Yeah, so I talked to Paul Pierson about his new book with Jacob Hacker and they're making an argument about exactly this kind of question. How is it that the super-rich are so important in the American political process? How have they gained that influence? And this ends up being also kind of tied into the history of the modern Republican Party. So we have these old models and political science, like the Meltzer-Richard model, which says, if anything, democracy should tend toward lots of redistribution, right? The median voter tends to be poorer than the average voter because of the distribution of income. And so you might think that the median voter would typically prefer that we tax the rich and redistribute to everybody else. And we don't see a lot of that happening, we actually see a lot of billionaires seeming to get what they want with relatively low taxes and low regulation and the regular citizens don't. And the billionaires are just a tiny, tiny fraction of the overall electorate, so how does that happen?

And that's kind of what Pierson and Hacker refer to is this conservative dilemma, which is if you are the conservative party that wants to be more aligned with the rich, you have to deal with this problem that your preferred policies on economics are not going to be electorally popular in and of themselves, and so you have to find some way to overcome that conservative dilemma. So a lot of the book is about how the modern Republican Party has overcome that dilemma and I think there's a lot of fun, interesting things to talk about there.

Anthony Fowler:

Great, well, I am really happy to talk to Paul Pierson about his new book with Jacob Hacker, it is called, Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality. Do you want to talk to us about the title? It's a great title.

Paul Pierson:

Well catchy, I guess. I mean, I think it has to be coupled with the first sentence of the book, which is, this is not a book about Donald Trump. So in some ways the title is kind of... it's a point about sort of double distraction. One distraction is the way in which tweets, which we see as kind of a summary of a whole set of appeals that are designed to sort of direct everyone's attention in a particular way. But we also think that a lot of the discussion about what's happening in American politics and what's happened particularly on the conservative side of American politics has focused too much on the, of course, giant figure of Donald Trump who is definitely worth paying attention to, but we see a much broader transformation of the Republican Party and see him as much a consequence as cause of what's going on.

Anthony Fowler:

Okay, so the book is largely about this phenomenon that you call the conservative dilemma. Tell us about the conservative dilemma, what is it and why is it so important to understand American politics?

Paul Pierson:

Well, I should mention, we take that from Daniel Ziblatt's work on a conservative parties actually in Europe, in the late 19th and early 20th century. And essentially he argues that the fate of democracy in those early days depended enormously on what happened with conservative parties. Conservative parties were tightly connected to economic elites, now they found themselves in the situation where they had to compete under a new set of rules that involved rapidly expanding suffrage, and it was difficult for them to compete directly on economic issues.

The dilemma was, do you reduce your alliance and your attachment to those economic elites and therefore make it easier for you to compete electorally on the economic issues that a lot of downscale voters cared deeply about? Or do you find a way to sort of change politics as much as possible to something else, ethnic cleavages, religious cleavages, intense nationalism, and so on. So the argument that we're exploring in the book is that the same sort of thing is starting to happen in the United States and has been happening, basically being driven by the growth of inequality in the US, the really astonishing growth. And that this has played through the Republican Party in a way that has basically reactivated that conservative dilemma.

Anthony Fowler:

So the Republican Party is the one in the modern United States that is more aligned with the economic elite, what are some of the ways that the moderate Republican Party has over the last five decades or so tried to overcome this dilemma?

Paul Pierson:

Yeah, that's a great question. And first, I think it's important that we stress that we don't see this as some kind of grand conspiracy where there was some sort of master plan hashed at the outset. We say in the book it's not like these folks are Bond villains in they're in a hidden layer inside a volcano or something like that. But I think there are probably two things that we would emphasize most in thinking about the big picture here.

One is parties in this kind of situation are inclined to develop really strong attachments to what we call surrogate groups. And the ones that we explore in the book are the Evangelical and broader Christian right, the National Rifle Association, and then right wing media, talk radio, Fox News, Breitbart, discontinuing evolution, so that's one major dynamic.

And the other dynamic is if you're not sure that you're going to have an easy time generating a majority of support, you try to find ways to work in the institutional setting to be able to win without a majority support. We think the Republican Party has been involved in those efforts as well, gerrymandering, voter suppression that I think we might judge a little bit differently than we would judge the inequalities that come just from the way the electoral rules are drawn up.

Anthony Fowler:

There is a third strategy that the Republican Party can consider and has taken at times, which is moderation, right? You could find the right coalition partners. You could try to rig the system in your favor, or you could just moderate a little bit and maybe upset some of those plutocrats. And you talk about Nixon doing that to some extent, and you could argue that Trump done that to some extent as well. Trump has been anti-trade, he's been anti-immigration in ways that might upset some wealthy business leaders, but appeal to working class people in places like Wisconsin and so on. What are some of the ways in which that strategy... made that story is maybe misleading or what are some of the ways in which that moderation has been an important part of what’s going on?

Paul Pierson:

Yeah, and it's another great question. And in a lot of ways, this exact question has been what has been at the core of the work that I've been doing with Jacob, really now going back to the Bush tax cuts of 2001, right? Because the puzzle there, we were really struck by how not moderate those policies were, especially when you look closely at them. And we think, "Okay, well, these powerful interests, they're going to get little things that people aren't paying that much attention to." But for governments to come in and say, "Our top legislative priority is to pass a bill..." That there's no evidence in public opinion that ordinary voters are pushing for, right? Voters, if you ask them what they think about the tax system, what they will tell you and this has been true for at least a quarter century, is that their biggest complaint is that the rich and corporations don't pay their share of taxes, right?

So, when you see a party, when it has control of government pushing in exactly the opposite direction and pushing hard, then it raises these big puzzles, right? And it is a far cry from Nixon, for sure. We talk about this in the book that Nixon, we went through some of the archival evidence on his discussions with his aides and they very clearly had the view that to be successful they did want to push right on some of these cultural issues and on racial divisions. But they were basically social Democrats on economic policy, well to the left of many Democrats today. And even Reagan and H.W. Bush's policies look much more moderate, I would say, on these issues than what you get from the Republican Party after the Gingrich revolution sort of post 1994.

On Trump, it's interesting. I mean, I think Trump convinced a lot of people that he was a different kind of Republican on economic issues and that he was going to moderate. And Mitch McConnell is crowing at the end of 2017, that it's the best year in 30 years for conservatives across the board, and he's got a real basis for saying that. I mean, the tax cuts were much more skewed towards corporations and the wealthy than even the George W. Bush tax cuts. The Trump administration fills up many, many key posts with people who are closely aligned with these factions. Mike Pence was put in charge of personnel and Pence has very tight connections, both with the Evangelical community, but also with the Koch network. His chief of staff is a long time, high level functionary within the Koch network. And they populated the administration with corporate lobbyists and figures like that, and they've carried out those kinds of policies in the EPA, Department of Interior and elsewhere. Our view would be that the big corporations and the wealthy who are focused on their economic priorities have fared better under the Trump presidency than under any other administration in the last 100 years.

Anthony Fowler:

Yeah. That's interesting. That's really interesting. On our podcast, I'm probably the token person that ends up defending the voters the most and defending voter ... there's all these accusations that voters are irrational, they're unsophisticated, maybe our democracy is broken altogether. I'm usually trying to defend the voters. The voters don't come out very favorably in your book, even though they're not discussed explicitly very often, but there's an implication here that they're being duped. Is that your view?

Paul Pierson:

We have been in all our work and continue to be in this book, we're skeptical of view which has a story tradition of political science. Voters are basically driving the show. Right? It's certainly not that we think that voters are irrelevant and I would shy away from the word “duped”. We do think that a kind of top down analysis is ... it's probably underemphasized in a lot of political science. There are a couple of ways in which you could think about that. So once the election's over, what do people with political power do with it? Our challenge to anybody who thinks voters are really driving the show, you can say it's a small in, right?

But we would start by saying, "Okay, the first thing that Republicans did when they had unified control was to pursue a bill, a healthcare bill, that was spectacularly unpopular, and was going to be damaging to huge elements of their electoral base, in substantive terms, but will yield huge savings that could be used for tax cuts. They were quite explicit that that was something that they were trying to accomplish with that. So that's the very first thing they did. The second thing they did was to pass a spectacularly unpopular set of tax cuts that provided 80% of their permanent benefits to 1% of the population. How do we explain that? I just think it's really hard to start with what voters want from their government, or how they're thinking about politics and get to that outcome. There's got to be a big elite story there going on.

Wioletta Dziuda:

So this is a very interesting interview. Thank you, Anthony. I'm extremely impressed by the story the author are putting forward in this book, but I'm left with three big questions that I hope we can address in today's episode. So my first question is why are Republicans captured by the elites, and what does it mean? Are they being bought by the elites by rich people? Or is this a reflection of the true preference of the Republican party? The second issue that I hope we can address is this story that Hacker and Pierson are telling, which is voters seem to be duped. They seem to vote against their economic interest and that's not rational.

So how do we think about it? Do we think that voters indeed are duped or do we think that they just have different preferences than what Hacker and Pierson thing they should have? Finally, one issue that the book doesn't dwell on despite its title is the issue of Trump. They seem to put forward this idea that Trump is just a symptom of what has been going on in the Republican party for a long time. Do we buy this? Do we think there's a little bit more to be said about the election of Donald Trump?

William Howell:

The place to start that you've identified for us is the status of the Republican party and how it is that they have been overtaken, Hacker and Pierson tell us. They've been overtaken by plutocrats. How did that happen? So I think their story is that the Republican party best reflect the interests, not just of average conservative voters who would like to see fewer taxes in a smaller government and greater Liberty, but that attend to the material welfare of the very richest Americans, and they do so increasingly over time. To the extent that they've succeeded, it's been a contributing factor to the rise of inequality between the rich and the poor.

So the question is, how did they pull that off? It's not just that money matters. It's that the only way you can get elected is by courting these people. It's that these people have made deep investments in terms of building out networks and organizational capacity and ground games. They're not just identifying people who share their views and supporting them from afar. There are longstanding organizational efforts on the part of these plutocrats to capture the political system. It is a story largely of capture, as best I can tell from the story that they're telling.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Yeah. So I think I would be interested in trying to disentangle those two, at least to understand to what extent one is a stronger force than the other. Because if it's mainly the support that the party needs, the financial support that the party needs to win any election, then we can start talking about reforms. If we can have some campaign finance reform. We can start thinking about which way money is channeled to politics. But if it's the latter, if there's some sort of longstanding entanglement where indeed major Republicans believe, they've sort of incorporated this into their thinking, that we should have low taxes and we should support billionaires, then that's much harder to solve.

Anthony Fowler:

There is this money in politics issue. Yes, you do need to raise money to run for office, and yes, more money does help you win elections, but those effects are not huge, right? The estimates we have are on the order of $200 per vote or something like that. So if you were George Soros or the Koch brothers, and you were just trying to buy an election, you would have to spend even more money than they've already spent to even have a chance of meaningfully tipping the result of a relatively competitive gubernatorial election or congressional election or something like that. So I don't think that campaign finance can explain all of the things that they're talking about in their book. I think it probably is something else altogether. One answer to that could actually be just who is the kind of person who chooses to run for office, who wants to be a senator and who has the resources? Who's willing to give up their job and go dedicate their life to political public service?

Most of them are themselves millionaires and they hang out with millionaires and maybe that's their social circle. So maybe some of it is just ... their own personal preferences drive them to do that, even though it's not electorally good for them. So I think that's got to be some part of the story is that ... we sometimes talk about the Republican party as if it's a unitary actor and it's deciding what's ... but of course the party is just a group of people that choose to become politically active and form a party. If most of those people happen to be millionaires, then the party is going to appear to make decisions as if it was a millionaire making those decisions. So that could be some of it.

William Howell:

But with the work that plutocrats are doing within the party goes towards candidate recruitment, just as it goes towards providing would-be candidates with platforms that are ready to run with. It goes towards with financing their campaigns and then building coalitions with other conservative groups, and that will support them in other policy domains. I mean, this is why I say, what the plutocrats are doing in their story is that they're reconstituting this whole political ecosystem among conservatives around their own interests. This is the work that the Koch brothers are doing. It's the work that ALEC is doing as an organization. It's in that sense that they are having a disproportionate impact on what it means to be conservative.

So let's move to the second question that you all raised at the top, which has to do with the status of the voter. I think I was struck by in the book and in listening to the interview is that the voters play very little role in the telling of this history. The voters are kind of passive and there's a hint that they appear to be duped. That could be. But they certainly aren't voting their economic interests, that's certainly what they are arguing and to the extent that we would expect them to do so, is it that they're not voting their economic interest because they're, dare I say it, irrational or they've lost their way, or they don't know their true preferences.

Anthony, this is something that you care a lot about. You've thought a lot about this particular issue, and it's something that you brought up with Paul. I'm really keen to hear your thoughts about this, both the treatment of voters in the book and then also his answer to your question about precisely this, this issue.

Anthony Fowler:

Okay. Yeah. So there's a lot here. So just to be clear, I used dupe. Paul does not want to use the word duped, but he kind of, I think, still implies that the voters are being duped to some extent. He's not alone in this. There are a lot of arguments like this. I think one argument that Paul makes in the interview is that, of course, elites shape the way that we think about politics, the way we talk about politics. Elites shape the candidates that we have even on offer.

But it's not obvious to me that just because a working class voter in Pennsylvania voted for Donald Trump, even though it's not obviously in their economic interest, it's not obvious to me that they were tricked into doing so. They may have very well agreed with Trump's principles. They believe in capitalism, and they believe that people who, because they were creative and entrepreneurial, and our economy should encourage that. So you could also imagine that some of these voters who do vote based on values like abortion and gay marriage, or they vote based on immigration, they're not being tricked into doing that. They actually care about those issues very deeply. It's a very common argument for liberal academics to say, "Look at those stupid voters in Kansas or Arkansas or wherever. Isn't it shocking that they're voting for these Republicans and they're voting on social issues?"

Then if I turn to the question on them and I ask them, "Well, which party is better for your own tax bill?" These are pretty successful academics I'm talking to who probably would be better off under Republican taxes, and then I say, "Well, why do you vote for Democrats?" And it turns out that they vote for Democrats because they really believe in free speech and they really believe in abortion rights and they really believe in gay marriage and so on. Maybe that's even true for all of us. We actually really believe in those things as a matter of principle. I obviously agree with some part of Paul's response and some part of what they're saying in the book, but it's not so obvious to me that the voters are stupid and they're being tricked and they're being duped here just because they vote a for Republican sometimes.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Yeah. So I'm very conflicted on this question. On the one hand, I'm completely with Anthony. The sort of doubt that I have in my mind comes from the book and I think Pierson and Hacker actually try to argue that those preferences, those choices are actually not immutable. That if you look far back and you think about abortion, for example, Evangelicals were actually not really thinking about abortion too much. This wasn't an issue that they cared about a lot, and somehow in their narratives, it's the political parties who decided to turn this issue into a big problem, and they sort of shaped the preferences of Evangelicals. So I don't know what your view on that is, and maybe you know history of abortion and gun rights a little bit more than me, but I think there's something to their story. I'm willing to believe that you can, the same way advertisement works on us, that you can somehow slowly change what people care about by sending them bright messages and by bombarding them with your own position.

William Howell:

Yeah. That's the story that they tell vis-a-vis, the work of the National Rifle Association and how it went from being firearm safety, a sporting club to something that was a dogmatic advocate for gun rights all the way through. But in their story that they're telling, I mean the argument that they're developing, they do want to say that there are longstanding commitments among Republicans, among Americans. The problem with the status quo is that corporations aren't paying enough. And so for them, part of the puzzle, how is it? The Republican Party is in the face of setback opposition for additional tax credits being given to the richest Americans and to corporations. How do they nonetheless, again and again, chip away at those obligations?

I mean, I would suggest that if you're paying back and think about American's views about tax policy more generally, and certainly your Republican Party, the puzzle appears a little less daunting. When you ask Americans, should taxes go up, stay the same, or go down, most people would say they ought to go down. And if you ask Republicans, what do you think of the 2017 tax cuts, they overwhelmingly say they like it. There's I think a greater reservoir for support for the very kinds of policies that the Republican Party is advancing. The plutocrats are advancing, then they admit.

Wioletta Dziuda:

But I think we should be very careful about how we interpret these answers. Because the way I'm reading this question, and I would guess that this is the way a lot of people read this question is, would you like your taxes to be lower? But of course I would love taxes to be lower. On the issue of Republican support—

Anthony Fowler:

You'd also like government spending to be higher and you'd like the debt to be lower as well. I mean, of course. Yeah. Right.

Wioletta Dziuda:

... Exactly. So if you ask currently, Republican voters, do you support what Trump did with the tax cuts... It's not obvious that they are reading this question as, do you really like the way this tax cuts were implemented? But they read it as more of a question, do you support Trump? Do you support this administration? Are you happy with this administration? And then this brings us back to one of the podcasts that we did one time. But if you ask people, they are just going to attach the meaning to the question that you did not intend. I think this is how I would interpret these kind of findings.

William Howell:

So this is like stark comparison that Hacker and Pierson offered between, on the one hand, citizens believe that corporations should pay more of their fair share and these policies that appear to cut against that appears less stark. When we recognize that how people interpret the question, they can understand the question in very different kinds of ways, just as other kinds of questions, elicit different kinds of answers. And when they're talking about decreasing taxes and not saying, I mean, it's not being sold as more riches for the rich, for the already rich. It's being sold as, in the name of Liberty and in the name of increasing jobs, reduce the tax burden that falls on Americans and on the very small businesses and medium sized businesses that create jobs all across this country. And then it's not some great surprise that many Americans say, All right, I'm for that.

Wioletta Dziuda:

So are you saying Will that it's not that you think that people really care about abortion and gun rights, and that's why they vote for Republicans despite not liking their economic policies. You argue something even stronger, that they actually perhaps mistakenly support those economic policies.

Anthony Fowler:

Why are you assuming that it's mistakenly? I mean, they aren't there.

Wioletta Dziuda:

I don't know, perhaps. Yeah.

William Howell:

Yeah, that's what I'm suggesting. I'm suggesting, this isn't to say that abortion and gun rights don't matter a bunch. Of course, they do. And then those can be contributing factors why people who are modest means would vote Republican. But that there are ways of understanding tax policy, that while they don't stand to benefit themselves individually, they think that the government is too big, that their Liberty is being impinged upon, that jobs may flow. And they may be correct or incorrect in those assessments, right?

Wioletta Dziuda:

So then I have a few questions for you. First of all, if that's the stance that you take, then there's no dilemma. You should interpret this apparent alliance of elites who want conservative policies with those groups that strongly believe they should fight for one particular issue such as abortion or gun rights. You should just say those things just seem to be going together. Then why is this the case? Is this just coincidence?

Anthony Fowler:

No. I mean, I certainly, no. I mean, I would not endorse the view that there's no one Republican voter, surely. I mean, you've got to build a political coalition. Republicans have decided to build that coalition in a certain way, which means that the people who vote for Republicans are a mixed bag of rich people who really want low taxes for their own self-interest, fundamentalist Christians who really believe that abortion should be illegal, gun enthusiasts who really believe that there should be no restrictions on guns. And maybe there's other working class people who even though economically it's not so clear which party is better for them, they agree for principled reasons with the Republican Party. I'm sure and many others too. So they've built some coalition and it seems to have gone together for the last couple of decades in American politics. But that doesn't mean that the voters have been duped. It just means that they had to choose between one of these two parties. There's a pretty stark choice there.

William Howell:

Yeah, I'm willing to go most of the way down the path that you're suggesting, Anthony. What they describe as a plutocratic takeover of the Republican Party, we can instead think about, it's just being, look at standard coalition-building. And this is what politics has always been about, where you have strange collections of people coming together under a common umbrella.

Wioletta Dziuda:

If I'm listening to you guys correctly, then you seem to be moving away from Pierson and Hacker. You seem to be thinking that what we observe right now in the Republican Party, the way they solve this conservative dilemma, it's just a simple coalition building. So this per se does not have any negative impact on the society and there's nothing wrong. If you have a person who really cares about abortion, another person who really cares about low taxes, there's nothing wrong with those two people actually building a coalition. And if they consider the majority, then it's perfectly okay that they get what they wanted at the expense of people who actually had different views.

So I'm trying to understand whether you are more in this optimistic camp, where you say it's just a simple coalition building and we don't like it because we might have different views, but it is what it is. Or do you share, I think Hacker and Pierson's concern that those voters are actually not understanding how much they are harming themselves. And they actually truly don't care about abortion, and truly don't care about gun rights, and they're truly not racist. But somehow because they listen to these elites that are trying to manipulate them, they end up believing those things. But they truly have different objectives, which would be then very pessimistic and depressing.

Anthony Fowler:

We've waded into really deep philosophical waters here, right? I mean, how paternalistic do you want to be? And what do you want to call a real preference versus what somebody just thinks is their preference? And oh gosh, I don't know. Is it true that a bunch of pastors who all of a sudden decide that they're going to make abortion a big deal and tell everyone that abortion is a big deal, can they change the views of people of their congregants? That's probably true. Does that mean that all of those congregants are unsophisticated, and they're being duped, and they would be better off if they would not go to church and ignore their pastors? I mean, I don't know. That's a hard question to answer. I don't know. I don't want to be so arrogant that I think I know the answer to that, that I can sit in my ivory tower and say, “Aha, all the voters would all be better off if only they would do X, Y, and Z”. I have an opinion, of course. I mean I have my... I can tell you...

Wioletta Dziuda:

Don't.

William Howell:

A key point is that these politics are more conventional than presented, is they're not confined to the post 1970 period when rich people took over the Republican Party and we see increasing inequality between the rich and the poor. It's that the Democratic Party and the Republican Party both alike for a very long time. I've had to figure out, how do you build a governing coalition? That's really hard to do. And how do you get people on board? And a part of that is through ideas, through the articulation of arguments. That is a lot of what the work is that's occurred within the Republican Party over the last 50 years.

William Howell:

The part with what Anthony is calling paternalism, I guess I'm inclined to not just say, Well, it's happened, so it must be okay. I'm inclined to say, it has happened. And it has happened for politically conventional reasons, but it is still really troubling that the rise of inequality really is a problem. And that it is alarming that some people who have clearly been left behind, when you think about the growth of wealth around the country, they've been left out of that bonanza, nonetheless support policies that contribute to it. That's troubling. But then the argument can't be, well, they don't have preferences, or they've been duped. It's that, well, other people haven't made good arguments on the other side, and they haven't engaged them or reached them in a way that is persuasive. And that just strikes me at this stuff of politics.

Anthony Fowler:

So a third thing that we might want to talk about is, what are they missing in their story? Donald Trump is not crucial to their story. Donald Trump in their story is essentially continuation of the Republican Party and the normal state of things in the Republican Party. Donald Trump, although he looked momentarily like he might be a reformer who was going to change things up and maybe be difficult for the rich and so on and help out the working class, once he was in office, he essentially did the bidding of Paul Ryan, and Mitch McConnell, and Newt Gingrich's of the world. He essentially passed the policies that they would want to pass. He deregulated and he passed major tax cuts and so on. So that's their story that does seem to cut against what Will wants to say in his book that we just discussed a couple episodes ago. So maybe Will you're a good person to kick this off. What are they missing in their story if they just think of Donald Trump as a continuation of the Republican status quo?

William Howell:

Right, that he's an eccentric Paul Ryan. I mean, I see that string, but there're also disruptions, there're also disjunctures with Trump, both in terms of the coalition that gets behind Trump, the kinds of politics that he advances, and to my mind, the populism that he channels. Trump's populism is one of born of widespread anger and disaffection with a political system that has failed. Hacker and Pierson don't point towards institutional failure. What they point towards is institutional capture. And there's this, optimism to be had, it's that, well, if only different kinds of people held the levers of power, then we could steer a different course, correct this rising inequality between the rich and the poor and thereby set things right. And the argument that Terry and I advance is not so hopeful in this regard. Because it suggests that now there's deep institutional impediments to problem solving. And that the government has proven incapable of attending to all kinds of issues, not just involving the economy, involving a warming climate, and developing an immigration policy that makes any sense whatsoever. And these features of our politics receive very little attention in the book, government dysfunction. The rise of populism and the anger and disaffection that it channels and the challenges that that presents to the rule of law. I mean, the challenges to present to the rule of law in their telling is all about the Republicans trying to suppress the vote.

And that's true, that's a real feature of our politics. But they don't point towards the Trump administration's effort to delegitimize the Justice department or to politicize the Justice department. Or to delegitimize the free and independent press and calling for the delay of elections. I mean, these kinds of deeply anti-democratic tendencies of the Trump administration, don't receive much attention in this book, not the kind of attention I think that they ought to receive. And it's in part because they don't see Trump as exceptional, as you say. It's just that what they see is just rising-ly conservative and kind of extremism being channeled through the Republican party in the service of a plutocratic agenda.

Wioletta Dziuda:

I think I agree with Will here. I think what their story helped me was to understand why Republicans, why Republican establishment is standing by Trump, despite the fact that he engages in this overly racist rhetoric. And this was puzzling to me. And basically their book says, "Look there's nothing puzzling about that." Republican establishment is all about trying to cling to power to implement those conservative economic policies for various reasons that we discussed before. But I think if you will, as a right, that there seem to be more that explains Trump's rise to power. So for example, there are the stories of voters who voted for Obama. People who are like first time voters who are super excited Obama and they voted for him. And then somehow they became discouraged and they voted for Trump.

And definitely you can't tell a story about those voters that they are racist or that they really care about abortion above everything else. There must have been something else that made them be attracted to two very unique candidates. Because Obama was in a sense was a unique candidate. And again, what it is I'm not completely convinced about. But I think with story rings true, that probably they were attracted to this candidate because they were tired of all the same, of governments inaction, of government's failure. And they were just gambling on a candidate is different and perhaps is going to succeed unlike the previous governments in solving their problems.

Anthony Fowler:

Yeah, I'd be inclined to say, both stories have to be right to some extent. Obviously Trump is atypical in just about every way you can think of. And Trump did bring in a new kind of voter that had not voted for Romney and didn't vote for McCain and didn't vote for Bush and so on. And some of that is related to populism. He was able to appeal to a different kind of voter. But I think I also kind of like the Pierson Hacker way of thinking about things. Why is it the case that Trump's rhetoric was so different than Romney and Bush and McCain, et cetera. And yet the policies he's implementing are pretty darn close to the policies you'd expect to get from a president Gingrich or president Paul Ryan or president Mitch McConnell. Obviously we don't know, we'd have to just speculate, but some of it is maybe Donald Trump himself just doesn't actually have many policy convictions himself.

He's good at saying whatever he needs to say to stay in the limelight and win the election or whatever, get some moral outrage. But once it actually came time to governing, here you had Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan who said here, "We actually been doing all the work to write up bills." And Trump just said, "Okay." Because he doesn't actually have any strong convictions himself. Who knows, we're obviously speculating there. But I think I kind of buy the story that a lot of the Trump presidency is kind of a continuation of other things we would have expected, if it had been president Romney or president McCain or president Gingrich or president Ryan, we would have seen essentially the same stuff with a few other Trump quirks obviously, that we talk about a lot on the show.

William Howell:

Yeah, I guess. I just wouldn't call them quirks. I think that they're not just kind of eccentricities, they are much more disruptive than that. But you're right, you can both point towards points of continuity over time and they in this book, do a good job of that. But that they provide less of an account for that which is different and that which is deeply troubling about Trump. Where I think there's real tension though, is this issue of effective government or ineffective government. Because in the story that Terry and I are developing, it's that our institutions and important ways are broken. And that institutional reform is needed in order to allow for a kind of problem solving that we can't get now.

Whereas in their telling the government is a reasonably well-oiled machine and it's that the plutocrats have grabbed a hold of it, and they've put it to good use in the service of their own private interests. But if only somebody else would get ahold of it, then we could recover some moderation. And people who have been left out of the largesse of the last 30, 40 years can get their fair share. And that's a point of genuine disagreement.

Anthony Fowler:

And then in the style of wait, wait, don't tell me, we're going to go around and we're going to say what our bottom line is at like normal. But we're also going to make a bold prediction about the future of the Republican party as we do.

William Howell:

Okay, so it's a twofer this week. Yeah. What's our bottom line about this book and what does the future of the Republican party look like? Okay good, Wioletta?

Wioletta Dziuda:

So for me, the book really clarified my thinking about what's happening with the Republican party and why the Republican establishment is standing behind Trump, despite all the failure of his presidency. When it comes to predicting the future, I think I fall on the side of money being important in politics and capturing big group of politicians. And there's this symbiotic relationship that cannot be broken. And unfortunately that will lead to more of this kind of coalition building with groups that have positions that are not necessarily representative of an even big chunk of the population. So unfortunately my prediction is pessimistic that we are going to continue seeing very conservative economic policies. And they might even start coming from the democratic side of the political spectrum until we have a revolution, until income inequality is so high that when we have a revolution. As we fortunately had a few times in the past and we improve the society. So that's my very bleak prediction.

William Howell:

Yeah. It is bleak. Right. The correct, of course, won't come until there's a proper revolution.

Anthony Fowler:

I said bold prediction. Wow. I wasn't expecting a prediction that bold, but—

William Howell:

I like it.

Wioletta Dziuda:

There you go. I delivered.

Anthony Fowler:

I like Wioletta's bottom line on the book. I really, I feel the book helped me think about things that I had been kind of struggling with. And how do you understand these complex political coalitions and the evolution of the Republican party? And I really don't agree with Wioletta's predictions. So I don't see a major violent revolution coming in our future.

Wioletta Dziuda:

I said until we see a revolution. So it's very far in the future. Yes.

Anthony Fowler:

I think a plausible thing that could happen, a bold prediction potentially for me, is that Republicans are going to lose a lot of seats in Congress. And they're going to lose the presidency in 2020. Partly because a bunch of people who voted for Trump because they thought he was going to be looking out for the working class. And because they liked some of his unusual positions are going to see that actually, he more or less implemented what Paul Ryan wanted him to implement. And they don't like that. And they've been disappointed by that. And there they've seen that these policies are not good for them, for the majority of Americans. And so Republicans are going to suffer electorally as a result of that. And then there could in the kind of medium run, be some reshuffling of the Republican party where perhaps those working class voters who are kind of on the fence between Democrats and Republicans and fundamentalist Christians, and lots of other. They see that their close Alliance with the super-rich is not good for them electorally. And so we could see some reshuffling or maybe just some small amount of moderation.

William Howell:

I'm going to join the chorus of voices saying that they learned a lot from the book and that they commend the book. In addition to the reasons that you two have identified, I'd also say it's beautifully written. And in thinking about what the future holds, my answer is also going to underscore my differences that I have with the book. Which is that I'm not especially hopeful in the way that Wioletta's not especially hopeful. But for reasons that stand apart from their telling of recent American political history. It's that to my mind, populism as a force in American politics isn't going to be going away anytime soon, even if Trump loses power, that Trump has profoundly disrupted our democracy and that the reverberations of his, what are likely to be in my view, his four years and only four years in power are going to be felt for a long time.

And that as long as our institutions fail to solve problems, that significant segments of the American public expect to see solved, the kind of anger and disaffection that lays the groundwork for populism is going to persist. And that's something that we're going to have to deal with for years to come. And so the work that lies ahead, isn't just about a course correction from the Republican party, which Anthony, I think you see as being more likely to happen if only because of turnover, that they see that this was a losing strategy on their part. But that regardless of who is in power, our institutions are ill equipped to meet the challenges of modernity. That's my view. Institutional reform is really hard and unless we attend to it for reasons that go beyond the kind of arguments that Hacker and Pierson offer, unless we attend to it, we're going to be in real trouble, regardless of who's in power.

William Howell:

Thanks for listening to Not Another Politics podcast.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Our show is a podcast from the Harris School of Public Policy and is produced by Matt Hodapp. Thanks for listening.