David Davenport is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, the author of a couple of things, actually a really thought provoking short piece entitled War is the New Normal in Washington, which is obviously part and parcel of his new book How Public Policy Became War Because four hours simply isn't enough. This is Armstrong and Getty extra large. So it's a pleasure to be talking to David today about his recent writings that his thinkings about our nation's politics. David,
it's a pleasure, Thank you. Good to be with you. So I'm reading this piece I got in my hand. Um, you say, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal in nineteen thirty three was America's French Revolution. That's a strong statement. What do you mean, Well, the French Revolution of Chris changed everything in France, political, social, economic, and we think that Gurdon Lloyd by co author, and I think that that's exactly what Franklin Roosevelt did. He was an early practitioner of
the Rama Manual school of public policy. It's a shamed a let of good crisis go to waste, and so the crisis of the New Deal really gave Roosevelt an opportunity to change the presidency and the executive branch in particular, and really how government and our society function and operate. Well, yeah, you make the point that it fundamentally changed the way legislation gets passed. What do you mean. Well, and of course, even before we get to legislation, Roosevelt was what we
call the emperor of executive orders. He did the executive orders, which is still a record to this day. But he also, as a historian David Kennedy pointed out in his write book on the Depression and New Deal, he quote wrote, Congress like a skilled jockey unquote. Previously Congress drafted its own bills, but Roosevelt started being a legislator in chief, drafting the bills. Sent his famous bank bill over to Congress in the morning, passed in the afternoon. Very few
saw it, much less read it. And so the idea of the president driving the legislative agenda really was born under Roosevelt, just out of curiosity, was at the beginning of the president writing the budget and Congress rubber stamping it, or did that happen at a different time. I would say that happened a little later but he certainly built out the branch, executive branch in a way that that
could happen. Uh. You know, we talked about Roosevelt and all of his alphabet soup agencies that he created and that became, you know, the enormous administrative state that we all know about today. So he was also the father
of the administrative state. And you fast forward and you you know, you get further and further away from bipartisanship as you go when you get to today where politicians regularly tell us, including President Trump, that look, we need to have this many senators and this many many House members to accomplish what we want to accomplish. In other words, you have to have the entire number of people you
need for a vote. The idea of bipartisan of getting some people from the other side just seems to be completely not even part the equation anymore. You're you're absolutely right to the extent Congress does something, and it really doesn't do a lot these days. Um, it's all basically on party line votes. Party line voting was in the six as recently as the nineteen seventies, that's approaching today, no kidding. In the seventies it was would vote party
line another another. That's incredible, that's impossible to imagine. Now, yeah, no, of course, And as you say, sometimes we even hold the bill in secret. We wait until we have fifty one votes in the Senate. For example of our party, we spring it on the Senate with very little debate, no chance really for amendments, no committee deliberation as much as we used to have, and we take a party line vote and move on Obamacare party line vote, Trump's
tax reform, party line vote. We do everything important these days, it seems like by party line, which makes you wonder why even have the human beings there? Why not just vote for uh, you know, a Congress representation and then a computer votes? Well? Who to all those OsO dramatic committee hearings that we all watch on c SPEN. Uh So, David, you know this is coming together in my mind. I read a piece I believe it was by Kevin Williamson who was talking about um and this is similar to
some of your thoughts as well. But when you have a war on something and and the air wars being declared all the time now or warlike verbiage being used, that justifies you, uh, suspending the standard practices, morality, the rights of people, your restraints. I mean, it's war. It's all out war. So obviously, you know, if some people have to be jailed and killed and heard or that's fine.
And Denny and and I know you write about that, but you're also talking about how once you make that declaration, you can be warlike in your passing of legislation to get the big war going. That's really interesting to me. You're right. I mean, if if you go back to lb J and the war on poverty and right on through the war and crying, the war on drugs, Carder's war on energy consumption, the war on terror, A great deal of public policy is done today in the name
of war. And one reason that's done is it allows the federal government to take over things that used to be state or local, such as crime or drugs. And then it allows the president to take things over and rely very little on the Congress because we're at war. You know, we don't have time for a lot of debate, a lot of legislative hearings. We were at war. So and and of course these wars never end. All of
the wars I just mentioned are still in effect. Yeah, and then getting back to the whole party line votes thing along with the war. The war is against the other party. They're the ones trying to stop all that is good and decent happening in the country. So you can't you can't beat by partisan and give on anything, or you'll be primaried by your own party. Right, So
it's a war like in every aspect. If you in fact, if you if you're in the legislature, if you're in Congress and you want to do something by bartisan, we call you a gang and put you in a room closet. The only five part doesn't work is the gang of six or the gang of twelve that decides something has to be done and then they have to hide in a small office or a broom closet to try to work out some kind of arrangement. And then, as you say, they're likely to be punished later and by having a
primary opponent. So it seems easy on those people. It seems to me, though, that the public is demanding this. I mean, you know, the public really punishes people that stray away from the well the party line votes. How do we get out of this or do we get out of this well? I I think that the two things that I would think would be important. One, there's a baseball cap back in Washington. You can imagine it. It's red. It's been worner on a presidential campaign. But
this cap says, make Congress great again. It seems like we do have to make Congress at least relevant again. You know, it has to kind of claw back some of its war powers that it's given to the president, has to claw back spending power. Uh. And then second, we have to make Congress more deliberate of again. The US Senate has long been called the world's greatest deliberative body,
but it hardly deliberates. I think, for one thing, we need to return powers to committees and committee cheers that have now devolved to the majority and minority leaders who are essentially party representatives. So those are some steps I think we could take in the right direction. You know, I tend to try to avoid cliches, but I can't resist in this case. To what extent do you think we get the government we deserve? Truly? Well, I did, to be honest with you, I do. I think the
people in Washington are essentially driving this um. Yes, they managed to co opt the people in it and get them to vote for it. But the people, by and large, I think most studies show UH don't share this kind of warlike notion of politics, the fact they're relatively disgusted by it. But party leaders spend a lot of money UH and and the media fans of the flames of this sometimes to get people think we are at war and we have to hate the other people and we
have to beat them back. I don't think the people, by their nature are really committed to that approach to politics, but I think the government and the and the leaders in Washington have sort of led us into this. Well. The contagion is definitely caught on though. I mean, when I'm not doing this, I'm I'm into music and musicians and that sort of thing. And man, some of my favorite musicians are just permanently angry and way off to one side. I'm sure you can guess which side, but um, so, yeah,
it's it's out there, it's and it's traffic tough. I don't even had to give up reading a couple of my favorite sports writers because they've gone over to the Yeah, I like, wait, I want to read the sports page, And yeah, I talked about sports. I talked about this all the time I read. I read the New York Times a lot, and it doesn't matter if it's a book review or an article about a recipe or a sports story. As you mentioned, Trump gets worked in somehow.
Didn't you find a gardening story? Yes, yes, things you should grow during these tough Trump times. I mean, it's just it's crazy, but so because being in the media as we are, we've noticed how the fixation on the one person, the president, is just so overwhelming, as if the president does everything. In our our attitude that the only election that matters, as the presidential election filters out into how much power apparently the president thinks he or
she should grab or does it work? That weird hasn't worked the other way around. I can't tell, well, I I it is ironic because you know, in the earlier days of our republic, we thought that the primary representative that was relevant to us was our own number of Congress. You're right that presidents over time have taken the view that, no, we're the only one that's really elected by the people.
You know, those are representatives are just elected by a small number of people, were elected by everybody, or at least voted on by everybody, and and presidents, I think have been very clever and how they amass power using executive orders, using a national emergencies. You, you and I live under thirty one states of national emergency, which increases
presidential power. All these wars we mentioned earlier on various domestic problems, so presidents have taken over way more power than was intended, though I think Congress is acquiesced in some of that. They've been happy to give up their power because they're cowards, because they don't want to have a vote that they could pay held to on a war. They just they think the most cowardly track and let
whoever's president decide. No, you're quite right. I happened to be in Washington a couple of years ago when it looked like Congress is going to have a major debate on Syria and what we should do in that word theater, and I thought, okay, this is going to be interested. But it said they decided to adjourn and go home and campaign early. And when Congressman said, I don't know if he was being facetious or not, we just like the president to bomb the place and tell us about
it later. You wouldn't want to take that hard vote, which is what happens. That's remarkably candid. I think what is it they say a gaff is when somebody accidentally catches the politicians telling the truth. Absolutely, it's a tough it's a tough environment, and I think it will take quite a bit to I think of it as as we need to just get out a bunch of tug boats. We're not going to blow up the system we have. It's like a big ocean liner that's moving forward with
a lot of speed and power and money. But we're just gonna have to get out the tug boats. Better civic education, more civic engagement by the people, Congress clawing back powers, becoming more delibertive again, it's gonna take all those tug boats to kind of nudge this ocean minor back. Yeah, that sounds like the sort of thing that happens over decades. Yeah, I'm afraid you're right. It took us a few decades to get here. It will probably take even more to
fix it. Is there even does it does? What's the term civil civilian? What's the They used to call it civics? I was hung up on civil Um, does civics classes even exist anymore? Is that notion anywhere in America's academia. Well, that's a big hobby horse of mine that I ride. I think that's part of the deepot problem. Uh. The last time American students were tested on civic education a few years ago, eighth graders, which was the only level where the test was given, only were proficient in American
history and only were proficient in government and civics. And that's that's I think a crisis level problem. And you're right, it's not being taught in the schools. A lot of times when it is taught, it's a very negative view of America that's presented. Uh. And we're training up a generation not only to not understand America, but not to
love America. Right. You know that's the thing. You can't even suggest civics and patriotism without somebody, perhaps one of those musicians I mentioned a spitting about you know, jingoism and and you know Indian genocide and slavery and the rest of it. I mean, it's just it's like, well, getting back to our name, it's all or nothing, one side or the other, which is really kind of a sick way to look at the world. No, and the Howard Zen wrote a casebook textbook many years ago called
The People's History of the United States. That's one of the most used textbooks in the country. Yeah, if I had a time machine, I'd go back and continually flushes rough drafts down the toilet until it became so frustrated he gave up on the shocking to me, that book is actually the textbook in so many classrooms. And you're right, I mean it's take the Founding for example, I mean the Founding and Zen's view was all about, you know, wealthy property owners setting up checks and balances not to
protect the republic, but to protect their own property. Columbus and other discoverers were here simply to rape and rob and and as my co author of several books, Gordon Lloyd likes to say, it's hard to love an ugly founding. And so if you portray the very founding of our country as something ugly, our our kids are not going to love it. Yeah. Yeah, Hey, this is just personal curiosity, David.
It's kind of off the topic. But I'm always interested in how co authors work together, which end do you handle in which end does Gordon Lloyd do or how do you? How do you mesh that stuff? Well, Gordon and I have become very close friends over the years. We started by writing I don't know, twenty or thirty newspaper columns together, and then we graduated two books, and basically we worked together because we enjoy it and we
learned from each other. So we get together every couple of months for two or three days in person to debate and sort out the issues in the book, and then we each go away and do some separate drafting. In the end, one of us has to do kind of the final draft so that it speaks with one voice. And uh, we have our little uh, he claims. He provides the words and I provide the music, and I say, well, occasionally I come up with a word or two, but no, it is tricky, but we've certainly learned to do it
together and enjoy it. You are the president of Pepperdine University from five to two thousand. What's your view of college campuses these days? The problem you mentioned earlier, which is now politics is everywhere, sports pages, gardening recipes. I saw that twenty five years ago in college when political correctness wasn't just coming up in political science classes, but had crept over into economics and into biology and science
and climate change and art. And I think what's happened is that that sort of the sixties generation, if you will, has taken over the faculties and administrations of lots of colleges and patients with other points of view has disappeared. And the irony is what college is supposed to be about is diversity of ideas. And it seems like on campus these days were interested in diversity of everything else, but not of ideas. I think it's very unfortunate. Well,
it's it's beyond perverse. It's as if hospitals became a hostile to the sick. I mean, it's it's why you're there. On a similar topic, UM, I know you're a Californian. Is there hope for Well? At times I call it corrupt Afornia. Times I call it cal Unicornia because we've completely lost our grasp on reality. Is there hope for California? I'm afraid relatively little. I've been here for forty years myself, and and thinking it might be time for me to
give up. I sort of have a Pendulou view of history that things swing hard in one direction and then they finally start to push back. In the forty years I've been in California, it's still all swinging politically, economically, financially in one direction. Uh when when Jerry Brown was the best hope Conservatives head going. You know, you're a state that's that's in trouble. So the only hope I really find is occasionally at the local or regional level.
I just don't see much hope at the state level. Wow, yeah, I don't. I don't want to be a down calling Mayflower van lines. Yeah, we don't want to be a downer show, downer podcast, just downer people in general. But you know, not not everything is a pendulum. Some things are just a continuum until it falls apart. The that's and I think that's the track California is on the
long term, the economics of that don't work. There's probably some real reckoning coming in in a lot of counties and cities over the public pension mistakes, and guaranteed the state has ignored that even when they brag about a balanced budget at the state level. Well, let's add on top of that free healthcare for illegals and see if that fixes the problem exactly. So, it's a it's a tough situation and I'm afraid Gavin Newsome and and the legislature that that has two thirds support of one party
is likely to make things worse. David really enjoyed the conversation. I hope we can do it again before too long. Thank you, gentlemen. It sounds like you have a good fix on things, and or at least we agree on a lot of things. And this is why I drink David great to talk to you. Thanks again. Is having a good fix on things? Are all going to hell and nothing can be done to stop it? Is there
any antage to that? Well, at least would you be caught with your pants down or would you be better off thinking I believe everything is fine and we'll get even better. No, if it all comes down, I want to be ready a couple of guns better. Yeah, um no it yeah. I'm a realist. You can't choose to be a realist or not a realist. And it's it's ugly.
Although getting back to the national stuff, identifying you know, the the on the ill health, the problems, the whole warlike everything, it just it may take the time for those ideas to spread, but I hope they will. I think it's the consolidation of power and attention, both of them, power and attention in the presidency. I always remember Bob Woodward talking about in his time in Washington, d C.
He's seeing cabinet positions go from something important. These are the people that ran the department and advised the president to Now they're just ceremonial. Presidents now run every department. They pick somebody to be the cabinet chief, to go out to ribbon guttings or whatever, but the president runs it. And it's just so many different things have gone that direction of consolidating everything. I make this pledge when I am president, y'all can run your department. I may even
answer your calls. Maybe on my fourth or eighth year, I might say, the Department Interior, what do you do? Now? How's it going over there at State? I'm the Secretary of Labor, sir? Oh yeah, how's it going at Labor? Good? Good, glad to hear. What do you like better the housing or the urban development? Well, sir, I didn't. I really didn't want an answer, but thanks for stopping by. The White House anyway. Here's here's a ceremonial lash tray for his souvenir ash tray extra large