Righting the Ship

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Promo code, beg to differ, offer ends November twenty seventh. Welcome to Begg to differ the Bulwark’s weekly roundtable discussion featuring Civil conversation across the political spectrum. We range from center left to center right by Mona Charen, syndicated columnist and policy editor Bork and I am joined by our regulars. Bill Galston of the Bookings Institute in The Wall Street Journal, Linda Chavez of The Niscannon Center and Damon Linker, who writes the Substack newsletter, eyes on the right. Our special guest this week is New York Times columnist Brett Stevens.

Well, the GOP gained control of the House of Representatives this week by a very slim margin and Pelosi announced that she will step down as Democratic leader. Steny Hoyer also will step aside from leadership. And as the Rupert Murdoch owned New York Post put it, a Florida man made an announcement this week. And then they buried the story on the on page twenty six, which was kind of amusing. But Trump announced for president in twenty twenty four with all of the usual whining and grievance and so forth that we have come to know all too well.

We are fortunate to have with us this week, a man who walked all the way out on the limb, climbed out on the limb, I should say, and said Trump is finished and that is Brett Stevens. So, Brett, why don’t you tell us what you made of this this moment?

Well, I think it’s different from twenty sixteen or past occasions when Trump has been written off. Because what the GOP rank and file most want and what they had most expected in the run up to the midterms was power. And it’s impossible in fact to analyze the midterm elections and not see the extent to which the influence of Trump in elections in key battleground states wrecked the party’s chances. So I think the understanding has finally set among a critical mass of Republicans that Trump is yesterday’s man that he’s a cement block around the ankles of the party and that they have to find a way to move forward without him. And they have a way, which is particularly the person of the Florida governor who won by nineteen percentage points and gives Republicans everything they like about Trump without the habits of self sabotage and all the personal baggage.

So I am predicting that Trump is not gonna be the nominee, and he’s not going to be the kind of factor he was in Republican politics these past seven years.

Damon Linker, as a number of people, have observed, the Republican Party was willing to be faithful to Trump through indecency, unconstitutional behavior attempts to interfere, like his first impeachment attempts to to strong-arm allies in an attempt to to rig an American election against his so likely opponent on and on and on Charlottesville, but the one thing they’re not willing to endure is election losses. What do you think? Do you think Brett is over optimistic? Or what’s your sense?

Bret’s column appeared the evening of Trump’s announcement, and I was so, like, I don’t have a lot of tendency toward superstition, but I immediately started, like, shaking. And then the next thing I did was I opened Twitter and I saw that Brett’s colleague Ross Dowsett tweeted in response to this column from Brent. Steven’s you absolute madman. What are

you doing?

And I thought Ross spoke for me. So I I don’t know. I mean, I I certainly think that it is possible that this could be correct. Brett could be right. This could be the end.

However, back in twenty sixteen, most people thought that Trump couldn’t possibly win the nomination. And then after he did, they thought he couldn’t possibly win the presidency. And he did. And then he, of course, did lose in twenty twenty, but he also gained eleven million votes over four years previously. He also came within a mere forty five thousand votes in three states from winning the electoral college despite losing the popular vote by seven million.

And even in these midterms, which the Democrats did so much better than expected, and, of course, in terms of kind of the expected context of the first midterm election when the Democrats control both houses of Congress and the presidency, you would have expected Republicans to do much better, all true. However, they didn’t really get wiped out. In fact, at the moment, the ongoing count continues, but the Republicans look like they won the total national vote in the House by about four point one percentage points over the democrats. And of course, the senate remains very close. And so my only cautionary statement is Trump is either in the lead in most polls or, you know, is at the moment a little behind DeSantis?

You know, maybe DeSantis will consolidate that. Other people won’t come in and divide the anti Trump vote. And if Trump does manage to make his way onto the ticket than he absolutely can win. I don’t think he will be likely to win, but it is certainly possible based on all those statistics I threw out. I would urge a little more humility and awareness that is as Mona kind of queued it up here.

Trump voters aren’t really known for thinking in terms of, like, rational calculations of self interest. Like, well, We want the Republicans to win and we can’t with Trump, so therefore, we will vote for DeSantis instead. Their MO tends to be yeah, Trump, he makes the liberal squeal like a pig and, therefore, we want we want more of that. And that’s not really something that can be reasoned with. And so I I really do worry that his hold over those key voters could be stronger than we poll watchers may suspect or

think. Bill Galson, one of the things that complicates this comfortable narrative that some people are embracing, namely that now there’s a successor to Trump who gives you all of the nastiness and Jack Assery and take it to the lips, tone and feel, but without the baggage, namely, Ron DeSantis. There’s a problem which is that DeSantis has not been tested and DeSantis, he has been the darling of the conservatives for fighting with Disney and fighting with, you know, the woke people in schools and so forth. That’s far different from taking on the gorilla of Donald Trump frontally, which is what he would be required to do. I mean, Trump has already begun to lob grenades at DeSantis and he cannot say, I was a loyal Trump ally.

I love Donald Trump. He was one of our greatest presidents but now it’s my turn. I mean, he can’t do that. So he has to take on Trump frontally. And don’t know if he’s got what it takes?

What do you think? Well,

I have a hard enough time understanding the voters in my own political party. Let alone the other one. I will say two things. First of all, Mona, as you know, I was away at a meeting for a couple of days, and I talked to a number of senior Republican operatives at that meeting, and many of them expressed doubts about DeSantis’ staying power as a presidential candidate, and in particular, what you mentioned, his ability to stand up to Trump. One of them said to me that he has a glass jaw.

Another said that when he is attacked, he tends to retreat into a kind of pestilence that he’s really not so good at turning it around. I don’t know whether that is true. But the fact that seasoned Republican operatives were willing to bring these matters up suggested to me a kind of a cautionary note. Second, I actually watched the entire fifty two minutes of mister DeSantis’ address to the national conservatism meeting in Miami. And I have to say I was unimpressed.

He seemed to me to be quite humorous, dark, but not dark in the kind of pocalyptic way that Donald Trump has mastered, which, you know, has a certain organ music grandeur of its own. But just, you know, dark in a kind of a downer way, he didn’t really connect with his audience and it was an extremely appreciative audience set up for him He didn’t land his applause lines very well. I know the difference between real enthusiasm and polite support. And he was getting polite support in that crowd, but nothing more. I wonder whether he is able to connect with people.

I am quite sure that whatever he does, he will be more admired than loved. I don’t know whether you have to be loved in order to be a successful presidential candidate or president. Richard Nixon certainly wasn’t loved. I do wonder whether he could steal the hearts of the Republican base away from Donald Trump.

Well, and, you know, it’s interesting the Nixon analogy. I I I have heard that too, that DeSantis doesn’t have a very good personality. Some people think he doesn’t have a personality. At all. But, you know, that didn’t stop Nixon.

But then again, Nixon was president and was a candidate in an era when the electorate didn’t necessarily expect to be entertained. And today, that’s – it’s a little different. Linda, I want to draw you in on the question of one person who may be a little too happy about Trump running, and that’s Joe Biden. You know, long story in The New York Times about Biden has, you know, had been preparing for this for two years. He has a whole team of something like thirty people, well, he and the and the Democratic committee.

But they have, like, thirty people devoted to just, you know, doing research on what Trump is doing and saying and so forth. And as soon as Trump announced, Biden started fundraising off it, there seems to be this kind of very unhealthy co dependency here where Biden has convinced himself that he is the only one who can beat Trump and that therefore, you know, even though he’s I think he turns eighty this

week. Maybe eighty two in two years time that that he has to run because Trump is running. Well, I think that’s a very bad sign truthfully. I think, you know, he should not get ahead of his skis on this and I don’t think he is the only one who could beat Trump. And I’m just going to harken back to the discussion we’ve been having, which is about Trump and whether he’s gonna get the nomination.

And I will say, I was very heartened on the night that he announced because something happened that was different from all of the other times that Trump has sort of come back again. And that is the People mostly ignored it, including Fox News. Fox News Channel did not play his entire announcement. They cut away at a certain point. And one of the things that I always thought about the last run was that the media was largely responsible for creating Donald Trump.

And that if he had gotten just a fraction of the attention that he got in two thousand and fifteen. In sixteen, he wouldn’t have been the nominee. So I think we’re getting too far ahead in assuming it’s going to be another Trump Biden race. I don’t think we know who’s going to get the Republican nomination. There are a whole lot of people who are very anxious for it, and Trump was really off his game.

In that speech. He, you know, was complaining. He was being a victim. He was sour. He didn’t look particularly good and he wasn’t particularly energized.

So, you know, he’s got people nipping this heels and it is not only Ron DeSantis, There are lots of other people out there, including former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence, was all over CNN this week, you know, talking about his book. And he clearly wants a chance to run, whether he has any chance, I don’t know. But I I’m not gonna predict what’s gonna happen in the Democratic Party, and I don’t know what’s gonna happen in the Republican Party, but it is not a Sherbet that Donald Trump is gonna be nominated. And if Trump isn’t nominated, and if it turns out that somebody else emerges, it’s gonna make it less and less likely, I think. That the democrats are gonna feel comfortable about nominating an eighty two year old man who is not particularly articulate at times and who seems to be losing it a little.

So Damon just note that a number of people weren’t able to make the announcement. Not even Matt Gates showed up. He claimed that he couldn’t because of the weather in DC, which was fine, by the way. And Ivanka has said that she is not I mean, he does have Jared. Jared was there, but not Ivanka, she’s not gonna get involved in politics.

She announced, and then there was a there a slew of big Republican donors who said they’re not they’re they’re out this time. They’re not supporting Trump. So there’s that.

One point I did wanna quickly make that hasn’t been touched on yet is something that I think was one of the more remarkable things about his announcement, Interminably long announcement speech, the other night. And that is he barely even made an illusion to the twenty twenty election and voter fraud and is stolen election and Biden not really being the legitimate president. He I think he made a passing reference to China trying to manipulate the election in twenty twenty, which could be true. But other than that, it really he did not do what he might have, which I think some of us worried he would to kind of turn this coming campaign into a kind of stabbed in the back narrative where he’s leading this charge of the just enfranchised masses who voted for him and rightly were trying to get him to stay president and they were denied by all this corruption and and so forth out there. That I think is interesting.

First of all, because it comes right after the midterms where sorting through all the numbers, the one thing that is is very clear is that the election denying candidates did not do well. And so I wonder if if he has now started listening to advisers or saying, look, you’re this is a loser. You can’t do that. For the next two years, you’ll think. And if that’s true, that’s good for the country.

And it’s also interest in the kind of game theory version of how primaries could unfold? Because that means that Trump is a loser. If he doesn’t make the claim that actually I won, they deprived me of it because they cheated. Then it opens up the possibility that his rivals can say, why should we put you at the top of a ticket again when you lost? In twenty twenty, which could then provoke him to then go back to the election denying narrative as a kind of defense So I think that is a very interesting and and sort of unprecedented

situation

that we’re gonna be in as this unfolds over the next God help us year in three months until the first votes are cast in the primaries in February twenty twenty

four. Right. Brett, one one more thing to sort of double click on as these first as the saying goes these days is that this election was a wonderful breath of normality. We had not only did the election deniers lose the there was this thing called the America First Secretary of State Coalition, just full of people running obviously for Secretary of State Rolls. In key states and only one was elected and that was in the deep red state of Indiana.

And in all of the important swing states, the election deniers were defeated. And one more thing, the Republican candidates who lost did not contest their losses. They conceded or at least they didn’t claim fraud. Am I wrong to begin to sense that the the ship is is writing a little bit here? Well,

Cary Lake, last I checked, has not conceded, but you’re broadly right. Generally speaking, they did concede the scale of their loss was stunning and heartening. I also think that it’s significant that in the same states where the election denying Mago Republicans lost by wide margins or at least underperformed badly like Hershel Walker in Georgia. The Normandy Republicans Mike D’Wine in Ohio, Brian Kemp in Georgia, Chris Sannuti, terrific governor of New Hampshire, won by very wide margins. And I think that also was observed by the Republican rank and file that Republicans win

so

long as they don’t present as crazy. And that I think is also having an impact on the calculus of Republican voters. It’s why I continue to believe that Donald Trump does not have a plausible future in part for the reasons that I think Damon very cleverly articulated, which is that his options boil down to either admitting that he’s a loser, which goes against his brand or switching from from that admission back to crazy mode, which Republicans understand is not a a winning formula. Nate Kone in the New York Times has a really interesting analysis of the election in which he notes that Well, the headline is Trump’s drag on Republicans quantified a five point penalty. Those five points or the difference between what would have been a Republican tidal wave

of tsunami and the result that we actually had last Tuesday. Yes. And one more point that I think is worth noting was made by Thomas Eddzel in also in The New York Times, who points out that these victories in these key states by Democrats were attributable to defections by Republican voters. So it’s important to realize that while the people in the Republican party who, dislike the Trumpism, are a minority. They are nevertheless a crucial voting block.

And arguably gave Biden his win in twenty twenty and gave these Democratic candidates in the senate, for example, their wins in twenty twenty two So it’s important to remember that even as we spend a lot of time discussing how much influence Trump has over the majority of Republicans, it’s not all. Well, the holidays are coming up fast and sometimes it’s hard to figure out what to get for people, which is why I highly recommend the signature gift box from Bull and Branch. First of all, you’re giving people wonderful sheets that are buttery soft made from organic cotton, but in addition to that, they come in a beautiful signature gift box with a big bow Your gifts will look as special as they feel. The signature hemmed sheet sets come in a variety of colors, For every bedroom style and every mattress size, they’re all seasoned sheets and they have unmatched softness to start, and then they get softer with every wash. I love the hemming.

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Okay. Let’s turn now to some lessons that the Democrats should take away from this season. There’s a little bit of a triumphalism. I’m gonna start with you, Bill Galston. President Biden was asked after he, you know, gave his little remarks, what he would do differently, and he said nothing.

Because they meaning the voters. They’re just finding out what we’re doing. The more they know about what we’re doing, the more support there is, your response. I

hope he reconsider his answer, which I’ve talked about repeatedly in terms of wonder.

And

I say that for a number of reasons. First of all, there are some gaping vulnerabilities. The Democratic Party and for President Biden, that turned out not to be germane this year, but certainly will be two years from now. I would point especially to the issues of crime and immigration as areas of potential vulnerability and the administration got away, and Joe Biden got away without positions on those questions. But I can’t believe he will be lucky twice.

Point number two, beneath the surface, of the election results were troublesome signs for Democrats, and I’ve I’ve written about this. Among other things, There were significant declines compared to both twenty twenty and especially twenty eighteen. Declines in democratic support among Hispanic among Asians and to a lesser but still significant degree among African American. If the Democrats were under the illusion that they would be able to count on the kind of block support from those groups to counterbalance losses in rural areas and small towns. I think they better think again Third, these midterm elections documented a shift in the electoral college.

Not to the Democrats’ advantage. Within living memory, Ohio was a swing state. And Tim Brian arguably ran the best campaign of a senatorial candidate in either political party, and he still lost to Jade events by six point six percentage points. Even more recently, as recently as twenty eighteen, Florida was the quintessential swing state, and mister DeSantis won his election by four tenths and one percentage point. Compared to nineteen percent this year.

Florida is no longer a swing state. And if Texas is moving towards purple status, it is at such a glacial pace that I don’t expect to see a blue or even purple Texas in my lifetime. Now granted The phrase in my lifetime is not nearly as impressive as it used to be. So this election makes it absolutely clear that Democrats will depend on the upper Midwest and two Sunbelt states for their electoral college majority. Twenty twenty four, their room for maneuver, I believe, has been narrowed substantially.

You put all of this together and I hope On sober second thought, mister Biden and company will understand that they’re going to have to shore up their defenses and develop somewhat better offense, a somewhat better vision of the future, if they hope to mount a strong campaign against the Republican nominee, whoever it is.

Linda, you were you were triggered by Bill’s remarks. What what did you wanna say? Yes. I

was. And I’m triggered triggered in a positive way. I’m going to agree with Bill on this but I did wanna say a couple of more things both about the Hispanic vote and about the immigration as an issue. We saw this week a federal judge lifting title forty two’s the use of what was president Trump’s invocation of a public health prohibition against people coming into the United States because they posed a public health threat that has been used to try to manage the flow of asylum seekers at our southern border. And this week, we had a federal judge who said, nope, can’t do it.

Biden can’t do it either. And therefore, it’s gonna be lifted. And what we could see is utter chaos because of that.

And it

really does point to the fact that the congressists got to do something on immigration. They really do. I mean, there is it really is unconscionable that two issues have not been resolved. One the security issue. And that does relate to the way in which asylum seekers are coming in huge numbers to the United States.

We make see a big flow of people coming from Haiti soon as we saw a couple years ago when you had people under the bridge outside small town in in Texas. And, you know, you have people coming from as far away as Venezuela and other places. Seeking legitimate asylum. These are people who are political refugees. And but our laws right now are a mess.

And we don’t have the resources to be able to deal with people at the border. So that’s got to be fixed. But secondly, I wanted to comment on the Hispanic vote. It didn’t turn out quite as good for the Republicans as they hope some of the Hispanic candidates that normally didn’t in fact win. Some did, some did not.

But the fact is that this trend away from the Democratic Party, and I’ve said this over and over again, it’s been coming for a long time. And what people have to understand about Hispanics is that they are more like the traditional immigrant group that starts life, you know, on some of the bottom rungs. But as they move up that economic ladder, they begin to behave more in their economic interests. And particularly Hispanics tend to be those who are successful tend to become small business people. They may all, you know, open a restaurant, a landscaping company, whatever.

And therefore, they’re going to be more amenable to candidates who want to, you know, erase some of the red tape and want to make taxes lower and that’s more likely to be Republican. So I think that, you know, the democrats are in for a big shock and depending on what happens in the nomination processes. In twenty twenty four, you could see having the Hispanic folk do what it had been doing during the periods in the nineteen seventies, certainly in the nineteen eighties. And under president George w Bush, and that is more and more Hispanics moving to the Republican Party. If not, calling themselves a Republican at least being willing to vote for

Republican candidates. Right. Brett, Mitch McConnell famously lamented candidate quality this year on the Republican side, but there was a problem with candidate quality on the Democratic side as well in Wisconsin where Ron Johnson was ranked as probably the most vulnerable Republican incumbent The Democratic Party in its wisdom settled on Mandela Barnes, who, you know, had very close ties to the defund the police people and I wanted to abolish ICE and so on or at least at some point in his career, had somebody that our colleague, Charlie Sykes, was saying, beating the drum for the longest time saying, this is not the kind of candidate you want to put up in a swing state like Wisconsin, and sure enough, Johnson was reelected. There are other examples of progressive candidates like Michel Vallejo in Texas getting through Democratic primaries and then losing in the general. Well, it’s AC Abrams in Georgia.

Anyone

who sort of thought of the way she acted after twenty eighteen, the refusal to concede the the election. The point is extremely well taken, and what you have is situation in which the folks who are voting in primaries are not the people who ought to be choosing candidates because they tend toward the fringe, whereas the general electorate is being decided or the elections are really being decided. At the center. They’re being decided by people who are prepared to split their tickets. This goes back to your earlier point, Mona, which is that we’re seeing a kind of or hopefully seeing a return to health in American politics just because it’s dawning on even at the fringes or or or near fringes of American politics that they’ve alighted on a strategic dead end.

There is a limit to what you can accomplish through a simple turnout strategy in an election and what worked in twenty sixteen for Republicans failed to work in eighteen, in twenty, in the special elections in twenty one. And now in these midterms, in twenty too, and I hope

the same wisdom dawns on the Democrats will see. Damon, in New York, the Democrats lost something like sick seats. I don’t know what the final number is going to be. But here’s another example of the Democratic Party losing touch with what voters are concerned about. So they reformed the bail law in New York in twenty nineteen.

The New York New York is a state completely controlled by Democrats. And arguably, the voters weren’t less than pleased that they eliminated cash bail for most crimes in New York, and voters let their displeasure be felt, and it may have caused the Democrats to house the representatives. And one of

the things that that makes this just completed election. So fascinating is that it shows that changes that we’ve seen over the last few election cycles that it it’s like they happen and then we immediately kinda draw these inferences as if the change is gonna stop right there. So, like, after twenty sixteen election when Trump scaled the blue wall in the upper Midwest with Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. It seemed like Oh my goodness. The Republicans are now winning these states.

And if that’s true, then, you know, all bets are off. Now Republicans can win in all kinds of new ways because they’ve activated these new white working class voters and that can counteract the efficiency of the Democratic vote in other places. And here we are, just a few cycles later and not only did Republicans not do so great in twenty eight, or twenty twenty or in the special elections last year. But now, this year, we see Michigan is like as blue as could be at every level of government, Whit Myr who who really triggered the right so much so that there was kidnapping plot by the by extremists to take her out, but even without bringing in those fringe people, A lot of a lot of conservatives in Michigan really hated her guts for the way she was handling COVID. Unless she wins this sweeping reelection, And as you say in New York, we think of New York as blue as it could possibly be.

We see all of these, you know, now it is a new map. In New York, and that can make a huge difference when you redraw the districts. Right. And a lot of people hold Cuomo or

responsible for the incompetent way that they initially drew the maps. And

Yeah. Yeah. So there’s that and also Cuomo’s in general kind of kind of disgusted him and the way he comported himself and so forth. So each state is, you know, all politics is local and so there are different dynamics at work in each of them, but it’s still remarkable that all these seats flipped in New York of all places and, you know, possibly being what led the the house to flip, but then you also have California where a lot of these kind of, you know, takes California about eighteen months to count their votes. So they’re still well added out there.

I’m sure they’ll get to

it

by Christmas. But you know, they’re they’re they’re counting their votes and Republicans are doing very well in a lot of close races out there. So, you know, the map compared to, say, a baseline of twenty sixteen has been scrambled since then. And all kinds of things are up for grabs. And I would just say in my my personal take on it is that we are an incredibly deeply divided country, and we talk about this in the podcast all the time, but we are also a narrowly divided country that the slightest shift from right to left or the composition of the electorate that shows up on an election day can make a big difference in who controls power.

And I think the circumstances are ripe such that if the democrats would kind of get its together in the way the bill is often advocating. Or if the Republicans nominated someone who has not named Trump, kept some of Trump’s appeal to a different kind of white working class or kind of independent contractor population, but yet didn’t repulse the inner ring suburban voters. Then I think if either of those things happen, you could imagine a swing of at least a few percentage points, pretty strongly in one direction or the other. But yet each side has has its own kind of quirks of its coalition that it doesn’t wanna give up on, which leaves us right on a knife edge at each time. It’s almost as if Both parties are trying

not to be majority partners. When both have the opportunity Yeah. Well, they

they wanna win the way they are now. Well,

and we’ll have Catherine Gail back who’s leading this movement for final five voting or, you know, ranked choice and so forth. And non partisan primaries, which really, I’m very gung ho about the because I do think that the partisan primaries are a big part of the problem because the incentives are rigged so that you have to appeal to the most extreme elements in a primary. So we’ll we’ll come back to this, of course. I want to transition to Brett’s really interesting piece that he published in The New York Times a few weeks ago about climate was really interesting, Brett, partly because your debut or maiden column in The New York Times as columnist was about climate, and you got a lot of pushback. And now you have, you know, written something where you say you’ve reevaluated.

Tell us what prompted you to travel to Greenland? Well, I

went to Greenland, thanks to an invitation by this marvelous guy, an oceanographer who by his own roof full admission, signed one of the various petitions that circulated at the time of my first column to have me fired from my job. And then he admitted, he he then started reading my column and thought, well, you know, if he’s not such a bad guy. Maybe I should try to reach out to him instead. He brings groups of influential people up to Greenland for really scientific tours with a lot of emphasis on science to the western coast of Greenland. And lots of people will tell you, well, you can just listen to scientists to give you this data and you believe them.

It makes a big difference to actually see it in person, it makes a big difference to see how there is a trim line similar to the bathtub rings in in places like Lake Mead showing just how extensive the massive the depletion of ice has been in the massive Greenland ice sheet. The trip was itself just part of kind of an extended process on my part to think through issues of climate and what are known as high impact, low probability events, which is to say that even if you think that It is unlikely that sea levels will say rise by eight feet in the next century. The impact of it is so would be so overwhelming if they did that you have to think about it much more or I have to think about it much more seriously than I had. I’ll say that the biggest single factor that changed my thinking about climate was the experience of the pandemic. The experience of a natural occurrence simply overwhelming the ability of a modern technological civilization to handle the problem without huge loss of life and disruption to our economies and and our way of living.

So those factors combine to kind of prompt some fresh thinking. And I always said to myself that I should never be afraid to change my mind in public, even on subjects where I’ve taken, you know, I’ve really put a stake in the ground. So that was that was how that long six thousand word giant piece

came to life? Well, it’s an excellent piece that I highly recommend. And by the way, the photographs are also fantastic. Name of the answer is a brilliant photographer, and volumes

had the good sense to send him up there. Yeah,

that really really adds depth to the piece. So you you said in the beginning, you know, that why you had taken the view you had before. You said that the severity of the threat seemed to me wildly exaggerated. And the proposed cures all smacked of old fashioned status and mixed with new age religion. And I would submit that there is still a lot of that out there.

And so one of the things you do at the end of the piece is talk about what you think are sensible approaches to solutions, which frequently rely on market based thinking rather than top down government imposed solutions. So talk for a little bit about that. You might figure out

that your your the diagnosis is cancer. It doesn’t tell you much about what the solutions ought to be. And one of the things that I thought very carefully about, not just up in Greenland, but really over the past few months, and in preparing that article was my conviction that even now the sorts of solutions that are offered for addressing climate change are really inadequate for a variety of reasons, either because the technology is unright, or because they rely too heavily on state intervention or because they are based on some kind of grand plan that tends to sound great in principle and then often fail for either political reasons or technological reasons or actually just scientific reasons in practice. And so To me, the most interesting part of the article was really on the prescriptive end that if we’re gonna really think seriously about climate, we need to think about a million small solutions rather than one big one. We need to be searchers for solutions rather than planners and designers of solutions.

And one example that I thought was extraordinarily interesting was the fact that In the last fifty odd years, a little more than fifty years, the American population has grown dramatically the size of the economy has grown dramatically and yet water consumption has barely budged. And the reason water consumption is barely bushed is we have found smarter ways of dealing with water usage, particularly in agriculture, particularly the move away from flood irrigation to drip irrigation much more economical methods. It’s not something you think about as a grand solution to climate mitigation, but it’s hugely hugely important. It’s gonna be very difficult to transition swiftly away from fossil fuel based economy to an energy economy based on other sources But there are a lot of things that we can do that are really smart that you wouldn’t think of as being important parts of a climate solution, like putting triple pane windows into new home construction to make homes much more energy efficient, because lots of homes are going to stand for fifty, eighty, even a hundred years. And over time, energy efficient homes are a really smart answer to the problems of energy usage.

Most important point, Mona, is that we need to make sure that economic growth and technological innovation are not treated as enemies of climate, but as essential parts of an ultimate solution to the challenges of a changing and warming planet? Yeah.

You are joined in this by your colleague, Ezra Klein, who has recently, within the last couple of years, done a piece about how the liberal allergy to development and to building and sort of standing in the way of development that was sort of the the birth of the environmentalist movement. But if we’re going to adequately fight climate change, more development is going to be needed, you know, of better power lines and of nuclear facilities and of other things where, you know, you’re against permitting, you are you’re in the way of progress toward a greener future? Well,

there’s no question that the environmental movement has in many respects been an enemy of environmental progress and the allergy of the environmental movement to nuclear power which is nuclear plants essentially do not emit greenhouse gases and are energy dense and remarkably safe and reliable. As one example, It’s a striking paradox that we’ve had for many years an environmental movement, which has consistently prescribed the wrong thing. And the whole mindset of limits to growth has not been a friend to a better environment. If we think that we’re gonna solve climate change by providing poor countries with climate aid, basically old fashioned foreign aid, and think that’s gonna make a difference. We’re being foolish.

We need to be investing in technology. We need to be investing in innovation. And we need to be placing a lot of small bets, some of which are going to pay off spectacularly. And others of which

will not cost us too dearly. Howard Bauchner: Yes, completely great. I should add just for fairness sake that there are many people in the environment movement now who are pro nuclear. There’s been kind of a bifurcation of opinion. As I understand it, I’m not the world’s greatest expert on environmentalists.

But That’s my understanding. Alright. Does anybody else on the panel wanna add anything or or ask Brett anything?

Bill? Well, I agree with a lot of what Brett says, but I do think we need to be empirical and keep an open mind.

As to

the best balance between market and state in

moving towards

the kinds of broad based solutions that Brett is talking about.

And there are

going to be some areas where concerted state action will be needed. In part, because there are familiar market failures in the environmental area as well as others. You know, I’ve I’ve recently been reading about, you know, holding back the rising tides to save Venice. And it wasn’t the market that built these enormous gates that are really proving quite effective in preventing the regular small floods that has been simply overwhelming a sinking city. And I suspect very strongly that saving lower Manhattan will require some Venice like solution that is going to be a matter of public investment.

I understand the temptation to react to the top down prescriptions of the conventional environmental movement by shifting in the direction of market based solutions. We shouldn’t balloon ourselves into believing that the market can solve all of our problems here. And, you know,

I don’t disagree with Bill at all I don’t want to overstate the case. There are obviously places where planning and investment by the state especially when it comes to large public works of the sort that the Netherlands put in place in the nineteen fifties and sixties after massive flooding there. Are are going to be essential and important. One of the things that the government can also do that’s important is to change incentive structure. The point that I make in the article is that our flood insurance programs in the United States encourage people to build and develop in areas that we should not be developing.

We should be retreating from some of these coastal areas that are going to be vulnerable to rising seas and to other climate events. And so that’s gonna require also some political will to nudge development into very different areas and to impose the accurate prices in terms of weighing climate risks, which is not something that we’re doing today. And

if anyone doubts that this is a problem, I would invite them to travel to the outer banks of North Carolina which before federally subsidized flood insurance used to consist of little checks, small houses, things that were easily blown down and rebuilt and are now populated by huge mansions that, you know, I will confess. I have enjoyed myself. We’ve rented them for summers, you know, with big groups, and they’re they’re great. But very questionable as to whether that’s a smart use of federal resources or and it does create all the wrong incentives. Okay.

With that, if nobody else has any comment on the climate matter, let us turn to our final segment this week instead of our highlight and low light of the week segment, if I’d like to do something a little different because next week is thanks giving and we will be taking a week off. And in honor of Thanksgiving, I’ve asked each of you to cite something that you are grateful for and specifically something about this country, about America, that you are grateful for. So Damon Linker, let me just start with you. Okay. Well,

I mean, I’ll start with the kind of the negative side and then come to the positive. So, like, this this week, I’ve been supremely irritated by the story of a guy named Sam Bankman Freed who — Mhmm. — is the son of prominent law professors and academics, big, big moral theorists. He’s he’s gone out and and he became a kind of crypto guru and turned himself into a multibillionaire doing it, creating a kind of marketplace for trading cryptocurrencies called FTX. Well, this has gone into a very sharp and serious downward spiral and collapse over the last several weeks.

And It looks like a disaster and he’s also given a series of interviews in which he kind of admits that it was all a shell game and that he was a con man, but he does it kind of with a wink like he thinks it’s kinda funny. I mean, he’s the only guy in the country who’s worse off for lawyers than having Donald Trump as a client because he won’t shut up. I found this very irritating and I even tweeted this week at one point after the latest revelation here about how this is almost enough to turn me into a populist causing this guy. But, you know, then I remembered, you know, this is frustrating. This guy, you know, was very much in Democratic elite circles, gave tons and tons of money to politicians, usually Democrats, And that that does turn my stomach a bit, the kind of intersection of corruption and great wealth and politics.

But also, I need to remember that the fact that it was exposed and that the market has sorted itself out now in such a way that the guy who made billions is now gonna lose at least a lot of it. It can be ugly if you lost money to this guy I have great sympathy for you, but I also think that you have seen here the one of many, many in endless infinite numbers of dramas about the free society that there are endless opportunities to make great wealth and create things. But if you are a con man, It’s probably pretty likely you’re gonna get out at sometime and end up smashed on the rocks of the free market and the free society with its publicity in journalism and so forth. So that’s my my small tribute to America and what I’m grateful four. I would much rather live in a place where such dramas unfold and unfold the way even this one did that irritates me at times.

Thank you

for that. In some other countries, like the one that just invaded Ukraine, the Kleptocrats are in

charge. Exactly. There’s no one to expose what they’re doing. Yeah. Right.

Alright.

Linda Chavez. One of the things that I have always

been thankful for is having been born in America having been born in Albuquerque, New Mexico in a part of America that used to be part of Mexico and Thanks. In part to members of my own family is now part of the United States. I’m my one of my ancestors was the last territory Corial governor of New Mexico for Mexico, and he ceded one third of Mexico to the United States when we lost the war in New Mexico. So I’ve always been thankful of that. But one of the ways to sort of broaden this out and to talk about it in terms of our recent election is that, you know, we focus so much on the border and about people trying to come here.

I think what we don’t focus enough on is about what that says about America. We are a country that literally millions and millions of people risk their lives to try to come here and live. And, you know, for all of our warts for some of our mistakes of the past and even the mistakes that we continue to make, we still are that shining city on a hill that people want to live at. And looking at this last select all of us were focused on Arizona. What was gonna happen in the governor’s race there?

What was gonna happen in the senate race in Arizona? Well, there was a measure on the ballot in the state of Arizona that passed narrowly, but it passed. And It passed in a state that has not been all that friendly to immigrants in recent years. And that is a provision that will allow undocumented students who have graduated from Arizona high schools to be eligible to pay in state tuition in state universities. And there are about thirty six hundred of these students who live in Arizona.

And it just says something. That even in a state like Arizona where immigration is such a fraud issue, that the people of that state could be generous and welcoming and say to those who’ve lived within the state, who’ve gone to the schools in that state and graduated from high school We want you to do better and we are going to allow you to pay in state tuition and graduate from college And oh, by the way, it’s gonna benefit Arizona because those students who do go to college will end up getting better jobs. And those jobs will mean that they’ll pay higher taxes. So we all benefit. Thank you.

Bill Galston.

I’m

grateful for America’s tradition of religious liberty, which permits the relationship between religion and public power to be well ordered. And in particular permits religion to have an impact on politics in the right way. I’m driven to these reflections by the death of Mike Gerson last night. I got to know Mike Gerson very well pretty early on when he was made to senator Dan Coates. And I sensed from the very beginning that there was something special about this man I was talking to a friend of his just a little while ago before I came on this show.

And he said, Bill, Mike Gerson was a great Christian. I’m not a Christian, not an expert on Christianity,

but he

was a great man. Great because of his willingness to bear true witness

to what

he believed and to integrate that in the right way with his public role in programs like Pepfar, for example. The age to Africa program is support for child allowances and he was a conservative but one of the most decent and honorable men I’ve ever met and one of the bravest.

We were talking

earlier about Donald Trump, Mike Gerson sized him up from the beginning, opposed him, had friendships going back many decades severed in the process. He never wavered and I’m gonna miss him a wand.

One hundred percent agree, and he was a he was a great soul, died tragically young at fifty eight of cancer. Okay. Brett Stevens. I’m tempted in a

waggish way to say that I’m grateful to see that triveils that both Elon Musk and Twitter are experiencing in their shotgun

marriage. It

reminds me of Henry Kissinger’s great line about the Iran Iraq War made both sides lose. The other image that comes to mind is of an anaconda that attempts to swallow a pig or a boar and both end up dead. And I can’t think of something I’d be happier to see than this company that has done so much damage to American public discourse being brought low by its greeting and chronically unscrupulous new owner and bringing him low in turn.

That being said,

it doesn’t seem like a very nice thing to say at Thanksgiving. So I’m gonna I’m gonna say something a little nicer. Okay? There is no way that Ukrainian forces could have liberated the city of Herzog in southern Ukraine had it not been for the steadfast support of the United States of America. And this is For all of my misgivings about the Biden administration or the conduct of its foreign policy, a triumph for the United States too, a triumph for the forces of freedom, a triumph for American credibility in an era when many seem to have doubts about it.

And I see the

war

in Ukraine very much as one might have seen the battle of Britain in nineteen forty. It’s one of these great battles on which so much else depends whether it’s the freedom of the people of Taiwan, or the possibility that the women of Iran and their friends in the other sex might prevail against the misogynistic regime that oppresses them both. So I’m grateful that the United States still stands as a beacon of freedom and as an arsenal for democracy around the world wherever it might be in jeopardy. Thank

you for that, and I just have to ask Bret, aren’t you a little bit amazed as I am that Joe Biden you know, whose record on foreign policy positions was never actually all that strong, frankly, has been so terrific and stalwart on this, which is really one of the great issues of our time is how we will respond to this act of aggression by Russia. And and he’s been stellar. You know, there’s there’s a lot at the margins that I could criticize him for. I think we should be providing

the Ukrainians with more effective and longer range munitions. But those are a small account next to the fact that he got the big picture right, which is that Russia could not be allowed to swallow Ukraine the way in which Hitler swallowed Czechoslovakia or Poland eighty plus years ago. On that call, he got it right in a big way and I flaw the administration and and cheer it on and put other differences aside. Right. A hundred

percent agree. Alright. Well, I would just like to pay tribute to something that we aren’t aware of or we’re only dimly aware of most of the time, but it was really highlight by this last election. And that is that there are aspects of national culture that are just ingrained from from youth, and they’re very hard to impose from outside side, they have to grow up organically, and I am grateful that this is a country that has been holding elections. Through civil wars, through recessions, depressions, storms, you name it.

We hold elections. And every American seems to have within his soul the sense that this is something that cannot be sacrificed cannot be changed. We elect student council presidents when we’re in school. I mean, having elections is just part of our national DNA. And the response of the electorate this time, two people who were attempting to interfere with the free exercise of the franchise and to metal in elections and to deny the outcome of elections shows a certain kind of rootedness and balance in the American people that I am grateful for.

And with that, I want to thank our guest read Stephens and the whole panel as usual, and I want to thank our producer, Katie Cooper, and our sound engineer, Jason Brown, Of course, I want to thank all of our listeners. Whereas I mentioned, we will not be here next week, but we will return the following week. By the way, I often ask you to rate and review us. This time, I’m going to ask something to move different. Apparently, the best way for people to learn about podcasts.

Isn’t through ratings and reviews, although that’s great. But it’s through word-of-mouth. And so if you enjoy this podcast and if you think this kind of civil Conversation across political aisle is healthy for our country or helpful to you in any way. Please mention it to your friends and family as you’re gathering next week and spread the word. We would really appreciate it.

So we will return in two weeks. Thank you very much. You’re worried about

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