¶ James Bennet joins the Chuck ToddCast
Well, joining me now is somebody I've known personally and professionally a long time, a couple deck together in and around the Atlantic. It's James Bennett. He is currently the Lexington, a senior editor at The Economist. He writes the Lexington Column, basically what the Hell, the column that tells the rest of the English speaking world what the hell is going on in America?
Perhaps, or at least that's the north star. That's the job. Is that fair, that's the aspiration. Yeah, it's great to see you, Chuck, and really nice to be with you.
It's good to see you. I want to talk more about what's happening, but and then in sort of the role of America and what's happening around the world. But at some point I want to talk about how we all consume information, since you've been in so many parts of that debate as well, both at The New York Times at The Atlantic, and yeah, and then some look, this is a week where we saw we're taping here, this is going to hit on Monday.
We're taping on a Thursday.
We've had the big you know, essentially the global the meeting of global leaders that happens every September, and I guess the most striking thing is just how much of it. While the meeting took place in the United States, the President of the United States was the guy on the outside looking in, was he not?
Yeah? Yeah, he and very much presenting himself that way, right, lecturing all the rest of the world on everything that
¶ Trump scolds other nations in scathing U.N. speech
they're doing wrong, and you know, attacking United Nations itself as a failing institution, which is the approach he's taken to a lot of institutions in the US. And as usual, he's not wrong in his critique in every respect, and it's hard to make the case that the UN has covered itself in glory in recent years in terms of solving global conflicts. As always, he pushed it pretty far and didn't necessarily offer a very clear alternative that seemed constructive.
He came across in ways we've seen other sort of leaders who are trying to be outsiders, who are trying to go against the establishment. And yet as anti establishment as he sounded, I mean, the UN can't.
Function without the United States.
Most of these countries sort of are tied in to the United States in one way or the other.
So while you know, I think back to.
Like Hugo Chavez giving a crazy speech or the president
¶ Trump behaved like Hugo Chavez in U.N. speech
of Iran. Right, And I'm not trying to say that Trump is like Hugo Chavez, but he's behaving the way a Hugo Chavez did, like seeing conspiracy and just attacking everybody around him and not believing there's anybody worth working with and all of that. But you know, I got these messages. Europe is still going, what the hell is going on here? And they still can't seem to figure it out. What my answer is, man, We're still trying to figure it out too, to those years.
What do you say to that? Yeah, I mean, and there's a lot of muscle memory in that institution and in a lot of the states in that institution to look to the US for leadership. As you said, you know, we were instrumental in the creation of the United Nations and have been this central, the indispensable state in terms of maintaining what was understood to be the post war order. And Donald Trump doesn't have a lot of patience for
any of that stuff. He's a bilateralist, not a multilateralist, and he's very concerned, you know, obviously with national interest as he perceives it. You know, he confuses everybody because
¶ Trump is not an isolationist, but it's all centered around him
people think he's an isolationist. He's not an isolationist, he's I think, I don't know if you feel he's the most interventionist president of my lifetime.
He has no ideology other than transaction. Right, everything is it's just I look at it. He's he's an what's another word. It's not isolationists, and it's not internationalists. It really is sort of a Trump list.
I don't know.
I mean, it's always about him, right, if he can get enriched, or why is he intervening in Argentina because he's a political ally? Why does he care about free speech in Europe in one moment but doesn't care about a country's acting unilaterally in Brazil? Right, It's all through the prism of him.
¶ Trump sees his interest as the national interest
Yeah, I mean, a slightly more generous way to put that would be it's through what he perceives to be the national interest. But for him, there's no separation between
the Trump interest and the national interest. So he if you're a friend of Donald Trump's, if you're Javier Malay in Argentina, he will rush to your rescue, you know, if you if you're if you're if you're Jay or Bosonaro in Brazil, He'll turn around and say, I respect sovereignty, I'm against intervention blah blah blah, but you ziling and proposed tariffs on you because I don't like what your justice system is doing to my buddy. So is that
in the American national interest? I don't really understand how that is, but I think that's the story he tells himself and that his followers accept.
One of the things that I find when I think about sort of where both you and I have lived professionally, a lot of those institutions, The Atlantic, the Times, NBC economists, there's this.
You know, what are we seeing?
Are we should we be sounding an alarm about the law losing the democracy or should we be less alarmist and more focused on the fact that the public doesn't like what's being sold right now by the leader right like you sort of see, Like I think sometimes we underestimate the voter in all of our handwringing about what Trump is doing in the moment, Like I think there's a you know, I can't tell you how many people say to me, well, you keep saying that the voter
will eventually get it right, but he's going to cancel elections and so we're not going to be able to do this. Where are you on that scale of totally
¶ How alarmed should we be?
alarmed being ten, totally.
Blase, being zero. I think it's the hardest thing for us as journalists right in the Trump era is calibrating that because you don't want to be hysterical. It said, well, you don't want to be hysterical, period. It's just not terribly constructive.
Well, there's some news organizations out there that have been at a you know, to do the spinal tap thing, that are at eleven all the time. Yeah, my friends at the Bulwark, Oh bless them, man, every single day. This is the end, right, And you're like, is anybody listening?
Yeah, and they look they do a lot of good work. There's also been a very good business and being either a total alarmist about Donald Trump or being totally against Donald Trump. And the number of journalism organizations that have managed to keep their poise and not be led down one path or the other is diminishing by the day. But some of that reflects reality in that, like the last couple of weeks, Chuck have worried me a lot,
¶ Things have gotten pretty dark in the past two weeks
you know, like things got pretty dark again. Like with Donald Trump. It's so hard to tell what I actually wrote about this this week. You know, I'm really worried about the way Trump is changing the incentives of our politics right now, the prosecutions. You know, the more we see this turning political opponents into enemies and they'll claim the Democrats struck first. Whatever what he's doing is without precedent. Now for an American president Nixon era, the stakes become
existential for holding onto power. For everybody in Donald Trump's govern right, they're going to be now at risk of
¶ Staying in power is existential for Trump & his administration
prosecution if a Democrat comes in. There's no way not to think that's a possibility. And so these stakes that have been rising for years now for hyperpartisans on both sides feel to me like they're reaching a level that is really dangerous to the democracy. And so it just concerns me a lot. There's a long winded answer your question that you know, I think there's a non hysterical way to try to take people by the lapels and say this is a really really bad idea.
Well, like I get I throw myself into into reform, right, Like, it's clear that if Trump got elected president, our system was breaking anyway. Right, Like, if the system had been functional, Donald Trump doesn't become president. So I do think, like, you know, the rational way to address this is saying, Okay, what is wrong with our institutions.
They're not working. Let's take the justice system.
The fact is in this, in the current way we conduct politics, you can't have the attorney general be a political a direct political appointment of the president.
I think that's just we've got it. I actually think we need to figure out a different way.
Maybe it's like the Federal Reserve, but a different way that there is a little distance between the where the president certainly nominates, but that doesn't necessarily fire at any one time.
And we've got to create a.
System that maybe staggers when different terms of the FBI deputy ags.
Because what we're.
Doing if we already had half the country, right, Donald
¶ If you lose the rule of law, you lose the country
Trump spent five years convincing half the country the justice system was rigged. Now he's rigging the justice system. That will in turn tell the other half, well, now it's rigged. Okay, doesn't matter when you believed it got rigged. Now we've got one hundred percent of people thinking the whole thing is rigged, and if you lose the rule of law.
You lose your country. Yeah, you know, and you cite the Federal Reserve as the example, but of course that an institution that's now in the process before our eyes of being.
This is such an important moment. I think this is this is the single most important moment for the Supreme Court yet. Right, We've had quite a few of them. But if if they let this Lisa Cook thing go through, that's a change in the in the in the unitary executive.
¶ If SCOTUS allows fed firing, there's no going back
I mean that that's there's no going back under this without constitutional amendments to fix this.
Yeah, And what we've seen over and over again is there's a pretty strong majority on this court for the idea that the executive has a lot more power than the norms of American politics have allowed a president up till now.
I am very I think Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett are going to be fascinating on this. I think they're going to you know, they Roberts fairly or unfairly. He so it strikes me he's so determined not to have a constitutional crisis with with Trump that he's always looking for a way out.
¶ John Roberts desperate to avoid constitutional showdown
Right.
He always postpones the confrontation, you know, like when he put a warning in there, he tried to tell Trump, don't do the fed thing. We're going to treat that differently. Well he did it anyway. We're going to see if they treat it differently. I think we know where Roberts is going. But does can he bring Barrett or Kevinaugh with him? That's what we're going to find out.
Yeah. Yeah, Like his idol Marshall, who managed to manage his politics in a way that assured the independence of the Court but at the same time didn't piss the President off too much. I think he thinks he can navigate through this and I hope and preserve the legitimacy
in the mid Court, I hope. So whether we're going to wind up with a radically I think we already are seeing a radical revision of what we've understood up till now to be the balance of powers, and of course, with the soup hine Congress not choosing to exercise any of its authority. I think the view from the Supreme Court is like Congress is supposed to be a coequal branch of government, not a bunch of White House interns.
But what they're getting right now is White House interns can what you said about reform like that is the hopeful way and to imagine kind of the constructive outcome here, which is what happened after the Watergate era, you know, and.
It also what happened after the Gilded Age, you know.
R two.
If you actually look at the two I've been I've been obsessed with looking think about when a lion's share of new constitutional amendments have happened in this country. They've really only like we basically had three chunks right right after the Civil War, right when we had another chunk basically between you know, nineteen ten and nineteen you know, forty,
¶ Government will require major reform after Trump
you know, and then we really haven't had any sinse arguably, you know, we've yessed the eighteen year olds to vote. I think the twenty eighth amendment has something to do with pay raises, which is a very like ourt gain one that's sitting there.
So civil rights, I mean, all the environmental reforms and the way, but.
They're not constitial amendments. Oh I'm sorry, constitutional I'm sorry. Yeah, no, no, no, no, that's what I mean. So if you look right like if you believe we're sort of in a simil, Like, I look at this period and it's sometimes I think it's the eighteen eighty sometimes I think it's the nineteen twenties. But actually that whole era is very similar. Right from about eighteen eighty to FDR. You know, we had a pandemic in the middle of it that made us go crazy.
We did prohibition right after the pandemic. I now understand how that happened. Right, Look at how crazy we've gone after our pandit. You're like, oh, right, Like you know, prohibition has always been one of those things you're like, yeah, people bring up the pandemic, but until you experience a pandemic and watch the crazy, you're like, oh, that's how prohibition happened. Okay, I get it now. So that's where I do have some hope, right, is that we did right.
The first reform of the media happened with the muckrakers, arguably in the early part of the twentieth century, and in some ways, I think what's happening now with our current media ecosystem is we're in the middle of a resorting of it and the muckrakers now are on YouTube.
Yeah, it's interesting, right, I mean the Society of new Newspaper Editors was created in I think like nineteen twenty two, and that was the first effort to really professionalize the industry. It was partly coming out of this experience of World War One and feeling like we were being manipulated day by day by the government. We're confusing our readers and
that's you know. One of their first principles was you need to separate news and opinion, and that sort of led to what then was this kind of golden age which may turn out, chuck, just to be an aberration, you know, that periodic idea of journalism in America, because before that it looked much more like what we're living with now, which is fragmentation and partisanship.
Well, you know, one of my one of the questions I keep asking, right, you and I grew up in a we might have grown up in an outlier era.
Yeah, right. I think about the fall of.
The Berlin Wall, and I think about the Cold War, And now I look back on the Cold War and realize what a stabilizing force it was for our two parties. It kept the isolationist extremists and the right the socialists
¶ The cold war was a stabilizing force in American politics
on the left. We're kept from power by sort of the the you know, I think sort of the focus on the Soviet Union, the focus on the fight for you know, essentially for protecting democracy. And I do wonder if you, you know, go I express it this way. Six of our seven presidential elections a century have been decided by five points or less. We only had five in the entire twentieth century decided by five points or less.
But in the nineteenth.
Century it's something like ten of We had two periods of like five or six in a row that were decided by five points or less. So in some ways our is our natural state in this country polarization. And the period basically from Truman to i'd say nine to eleven, right, you sort of like a ten year from Truman to Clinton, right, Truman to the two thousand election, where we only had two elections decided by five points or less in that
period of time. Sixty eight sixties have three Sidney, sixty eight, sixty and seventy six.
Is that the outlier period of American history? Yeah? And you know, it's strange about it, Chuck. It's going to sound so stupid when I say this, but I've actually gone to political sciences to try to explain this, and I can't get a good explanation. Why is it, Why is it that there's this kind of homeostatic quality, thermostatic quality that we do remain so evenly divided, You know, why wouldn't it go to sixty forty at some point or seventy we come back to it, just it's split
down the middle with knife's heads. And some of that is now jerrymandering and redistricting and so forth, but kind of knife's edge margins in the House, and for the presidency being traded back and forth, you'd think at one point it would tip one way or the other.
Well, because it did tip. That is the way it worked during the Cold War argument, Yeah, we would have
¶ America is a four party system crammed into two parties
these periods where no Democrats waive, no Republican Reagan revolution, right, that sort of thing. One theory I've had is that our two parties are too big, but we have stuffed We're really a four party country, stuffed into a two party system because of the duopoly. And so where there's really been a ton of change is within the two parties. Right,
the two parties vacillate between pragmatism and their base. Right, they go back and forth between who's in charge of their party, and then that in turn sort of has sort of driven the other part. The other party almost reacts in the same way. The more pragmatic Republicans are, the more pragmatic Democrats are vice versa. Right, And now I do think you're seeing. I had a progressive friend of mine say to me the other day, I'm looking for my own Trump. Now I'm done trying to win
from the ground up. And I went just a big sigh. You're like, oh boy, this is exactly my fear. Is that every political physics, he said, right, every action, you're going to get an equal in office of reaction.
Yeah, And that's what I mean about the prosecutions. Now, it's like redistricting. It's it's just such an appetite in the Democratic Party. It's like if you talk about bipartisanship, if you talk about not if you talk about not responding in kind, that's considered like a weak and pathetic, And there's a huge appetite for, as you say, you know, among Democrats, for their own version of Trump. I think you're so right about the you know, the fall of
Berlin Wall. It's like the Great crack up. And I don't think I certainly didn't appreciate it at the time that the nineties were this sort of wonderful time away.
Since that literally there's our houseyon days where the nineties who knew?
But you think in the way it's underwear, right like that you get in that election in ninety two, you get Ross Perrot and you get Buchanon, right, And there are these two strains that have become dominant, you know, in our politics. And it took some time, and then
¶ Public sentiment has been pessimistic the entire 21st century
I think Donald Trump's recognition in some ways that all these institutions were a lot more fragile than they seemed. And you know, the tremendous dissatisfaction in the country, like we've had wrong track numbers for basically this whole century, right so far. Yeah, people have felt the governments on the wrong American.
Well, and it's created And this is where I've been, you know, obsessively studying the nineteenth century election patterns because we've been voting against we have not voted you know, I think in O eight we voted for Obama.
Right.
Every other election has been a bit more or it felt like the last voters voted against right, they voted, they were they were clear what they didn't want. They weren't necessarily clear what they wanted, but they knew what they didn't want. And that really is the hallmark of those nineteenth century elections, every one of them, I mean between you know, we had we had seven presidents in
twenty eight years, between Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. In each one of them, in their own way, won by promising, well, they were going to try to this is how they were going to bring unity, and this is how they were going to do this.
And you know, they were.
All and it's very similar to what we're seeing today, just over a different issue, where each president is promising, you know, that they're going to be able to break this gridlock or they're going to be able to break this polarization, and you know, unfortunately, you know, the question really is are we going to get through this period. One of my favorite expressions is I'm short term pessimistic,
long term optimistic. I'd just said the same thing in nineteen thirty nine, and I'd have been right, but the short term was really messy, right, But by nineteen forty six that was you could be really optimistic, and the question is do we get through this without violence, without mass violence, and only with isolated violence.
¶ Can we get through this without mass violence?
And I think that's the you know, that's my sort of blunt way of putting it. So when you look back at the say, the progressive era, what do you see as creating the conditions for.
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Well.
Back then, you had, you know, you had a lot of movements that were sort of in place for a while. Right, you had the movement to get women the right to vote that had been sort of percolating for a while. Also the temperance movement right that was percolating for some time. So you had some So you had the muck rakers. That's the problem of what we're missing. There isn't really a big movement for reform. I'm surprised there hasn't been
¶ It's hard to imagine a productive modern constitutional convention
a bigger call for a constitutional convention, for instance, like where we arguably are due for one. But there's always there's this weird fear on the left of one. You have more interest on it from those you know, from people on the right than you do on the left, when arguably, if you look at the biggest grievances of the left, almost all of their grievances are only going
to be solved with constitutional amendments. There are no laws that are going to solve this when it comes to campaign money or some of the existential things.
That they care about. And so you're right.
Other than the conditions being similar, right where you have a new economy, we were going from an agrarian to an industrial. Now we're going from industrial to this to this new economy. There are these five or six lords, right, you know, sort of you know, the robber barons of today. So in that sense, I think, and you you know, we don't have our Teddy Roosevelt yet, but I do think people but I do think people are looking for him or her.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know. The idea of it. Honestly, it's the it's so hard to imagine a productive constitutional convention in a country.
That's the pass legislation anymore.
Like it's all one big, beautiful mail because it's the only way to do it. Stuff everything into you know. But you know, it's it's funny.
It's like, I also, look, I think one of the
¶ The last "protectionist race" led to a world war
to solve this is to double the size of the House uncap the House, which ironically was shut down in the nineteen twenties.
It was a dispute over by.
The way, you want to talk about our polarization. The reason we stopped expanding the House is because they disagreed on which states should get the extra members of Congress back in nineteen twenty. They couldn't resolve it for an entire decade, so they just capped it and said, o R, We're going to wash our hands of this in nineteen thirty.
And you know, now, I mean, now we're stuck with this system where the irony is the Senate is now more apt you know, is the state legislatures will decide control of the House of Representatives while the people decide the Senate, when the founders actually had it the other way around. Yeah, yeah, let me ask you this on because you have to you look at sort of America through the the economist has to look at it through
a little bit more of an international prism. The last time we had sort of a protect a race, a protectionist race, if you will, it did end up.
In a World war.
¶ We're no longer living in the international rules based order
Why why aren't there more people worried about this rise of Because nationalism and protectionism is contagious and we're already seeing it.
Yeah, and we are seeing it. And no, I mean you know, the Economists has been terribly worried about this for quite a while, and there's been and you know that the Economists was founded in the middle of the nineteenth century to oppose tariffs in the UK. So this is particularly, you know, something subject it's obsessed with and you know, as a bunch off, if it wasn't for tariffs, the UK would still be an empire, right Well, I don't know. I think it might have caught up with them.
Other issues might have cracked with them eventually.
But perhaps, but look at we wouldn't have a country without UK tariffs.
So God bless it's true. It's true, and the truth there is as you know, I mean, there have tariffs are you know, we've had tariffs imposed by for one reason or another. It's not nothing new under the sun in that sense. But what is it goes back to what we were talking about at the outset, is this idea that we're no longer living in what we understood to be the rules based international order after that war, you know, after World War Two, and each country is
¶ Drones are massively changing the dynamics of warfare
we're back to a kind of nineteenth century idea of
great power struggle. And that's tremendously destabilizing, you know, and that's where it's a little harder to be a long term optimist because of what history has taught us about what happens when you no longer have systems that are capable of kind of because you know, people recognize that this sort of order served everybody better, and a trading environment in which you know, alls had a chance to rawse we've just a been and the we're in the process.
I think of really backing away from those ideas well.
I think when you combine that with the ease with which a medium sized power or even a small country can inflict major damage, right, the fact that you can essentially fight with robots, I mean the Clone war, you know, the Clone Wars, right, if you're a Star Wars fan,
the Clone Wars are here. I mean I had Dexter folcns on and a couple a couple of weeks ago, and he was sounding the alarm about this change in warfare and just how And of course I've noticed over the last week where so more people are noticing, hey that the Russia Ukraine war is a drone war now and this is the future of warfare. And you know, Ukraine and Russia are able to what normally would be
a reason to come to the negotiating table. You're running out of troops, you're running out of physical resources, human resources.
¶ Refugee flows are causing political instability worldwide
If you don't need human resources to fight wars, you're more likely to fight wars.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no. And again in an environment where the US is asserting its ability to kill these suspected drug runners at sea with no due process whatsoever. It's it's tough political proposition. The politics are probably good for him. The long term consequences of that. For any idea that
¶ Trump has no interest in leading internationally
there are rules that govern our behavior, they weren't created for naive reasons. You know, they weren't created because we
all believe people were angels. Quite the opposite, right, I know, it's because we knew they weren't, and you know they had their better angels that maybe coaxed out I chuck, you know this week, that's part of this tragedy in some ways of Donald Trump watching him at the UN ranting I'll use that word about immigration and excoriating all these nations for is like, refugee flows are a deep problem in the world right now, and it's not happening
because people invited them in it's happening because of war instability, smartphones that help people navigate in ways they couldn't communication we didn't have. They are all sorts of forces driving this. And the Refugee Convention, which dates to nineteen fifty one, is totally out of date. Here is something the US could lead on, you know, like this is, this is and Donald Trump is actually, by virtue of his politics,
is particularly well equipped to provide that leadership. But it's not going to happen.
So for us, this problem, right, No, I mean, this is the problem. Like we kind of all know what our problems are, what American leader the role American leadership can play. But if the leader of America doesn't want to lead, what are you supposed to do?
Right? Right?
And that's you know that, for the life of me, he's always campaigning, he's never thinking about leading. He doesn't care if he's got a fifty percent job, right, let
¶ Trump is constantly campaigning and only for his base
alone a sixty percent. I used to say, what made our twentieth century politics work is that we the incentive. Presidential incentives were to succeed, you had to be at a sixty percent approval, So you governed to get to sixty even if it meant you only won fifty, but you always tried to govern a little bit above your party, you know, and win over some people on the other side.
And and you were rewarded for it.
Politically, we have you know, I sort of I've been quoting a lot of Milton Friedman lately, where he famously said, you know, it's not about electing the right people, it's about having the right and bad people will do good things if the incentives are aligned correctly. And this gets it to what we really need are better incentives, not better people.
But so, Seranda, what you're saying about Trump when you say he's always campaigning, that he's campaigning for his base because he has hacked our politics like he's understood good. That's what keeps him alive.
Right, That's what keeps him politically alive and politically powerful.
Right.
How is it that he has tamed the Republicans in Congress because he's convinced him.
I'll go back to a quote I've quote quote Tom Cole. I've had this.
I had a conversation with Tom Cole about this right after January six because he he had the most Tom Coles January sixth statement is the most incredible statement because it was a fascinating attempt at walking a tightrope. He said, I'm not going to vote to certify the election because my constituents don't want me to, and I'm in a representative democracy. He did not say it was right or wrong. He just simply said, I'm doing this because my constituents
have asked me. And I said, and I went to him and I said, you know, you have you got I think it was in his district he got sixty
¶ Did we export our politics to Israel, or the other way around?
four percent and Trump got sixty two. And Cole says to me, he goes, and if I oppost Trump, He's going to take his sixty two and I'll keep mine too.
And you know, now, I love.
Tom is a just one of He's just I've known him thirty years. You know what he was before he was a member of Congress or an elected of Fisher who is a pollster.
So the guy is a very very much you're kind of guy.
Yeah, but he but unfortunately I think he's thought, you know, he he he didn't want to take the risks, right, That's essentially what he was telling me, Hey, it's too risky and he's got control of the base, and that's what's broken about our politics? Right, if you control the base of the party, you can control your party even if a majority of the country doesn't want you.
Like, think about this.
You are the Beerau chief in Jerusalem, so let me let me throw a question at you that I enjoy more of a retal. But did we export our politics to Israel? Or did Israel export its politics to us? And here's how I frame it. Israel and the United States had the same issue. They've got a controversial leader that a majority of the public doesn't want as leader, but it's the only thing that majority agrees upon.
Yeah, I mean it's a parliamentary system versus a republic, right that we the democracy that we have. It feels like now we have the weaknesses of a parliamentary system without its strengths. But you look at Israel and you can see a politician who's hacked the parliamentary system too, which is vulnerable in exactly the same way. I mean,
¶ Only Obama had a majority of the vote in the 21st century
I think, you know, we've learned from each I guess who's who's who's learned from who. I think they've reciprocal reciprocally, you know, influenced one another.
I just find it fascinating that Bibe is able to get stronger in his position, getting further away from the mainstream.
Yeah. Again, he's had to do that, arguably to hold his coalition together. And it's reflected something that's happened in Israeli politics, which is that it has moved right as the coalition you know, for some resolution, a peaceful resolutionist conflict has basically collapsed over the course of the last twenty five years. But it's true. Yeah, I mean it's not.
It's interesting, it it does. You know, it's similar, and that you wind up within a system that's supposed to theoretically drive you towards majority resolution of problems, you wind
¶ Governors are the only politicians that campaign beyond their base
up with kind of a minoritarian government, right, which is well, I think that's what we have right now.
Yeah, we haven't had I mean, we've only had one president this century who's gotten over.
Fifty percent of the vote. It was Obama twice. Right. It's a shocking fact, isn't it. It's just yeah, Trump got close this time, but he didn't make it. Yeah. Yeah, it's really remarkable. And you're right, there's no longer the same incentive to aim for sixty percent.
And I don't know how to change. You know, it's funny. The answer is, we got to change our incentive structures. Okay, how do we do this?
Right?
It's easy to say, how do you do it? I mean, I think partisan primaries probably aren't you Getting rid of those are probably an answer. But you know, say, just saying you want to get rid of partisan primaries doesn't mean it's going to happen overnight and basically change the rules in fifty different states to pull that on.
Yeah. Yeah, governors still have to campaign that way. Right, I'm trying to think who within our system.
It's also the one place where voters still vote person over party, Right, How else do you explain a Larry Hogan in Maryland and a Laura Kelly in Kansas. Right, But nobody expected Larry Hogan to win a Senate seat, And I promise you Laura Kelly's probably not winning a Senate seat in Kansas, right, right, Right, So we do see it there as voters, and that you know, That's
why I do think. Now here's something Remember maybe I'm rambling here, but we had two of the most effective late twentieth century presidents were both former governors, Reagan and Clinton, who both did strive for sixty percent ism.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no accident, right right now?
And then the other and then I always say the other president that had some success at being bipartisan was Eisenhower, who was from the military and kind of a political You know, that's not an accident either, right, Our more partisan or polarizing presidents have been senators or Donald Trump.
Yeah. Yeah, George H. W. Bush looks better and better in rent spect. Didn't win a second term. Yeah. Well,
¶ Biden misunderstood his 2020 mandate and overreached
and because it turns out he wasn't a Reaganite, right because the Conservatives, as they suspected all along, right, they were right.
Now, they were always right, you know, he was not he was, he was you know, he was a little close.
You know, he was in the the Dewey wing of the party. I guess he wanted to go backwards like that. Yeah, or now we would call it the Bush wing of the party. There was a bushwing in a Reagan wing, and they were and a true internationalist, you know, at that moment when the wall was coming down, very concerned with you know, strengthening you know.
You know, it's it's funny about H. W. Bush's presidency. I always thought that if Biden had modeled himself off of H. W. Bush, that that was the presidency. You know that you can have a successful one term a if you kind of behave that way, and obviously Biden never did. But he had an opportunity to be the Democrats version of that. He just you know, perhaps it was just he was too late in his life to figure out how to.
Do it and that so that mistake was what going too far left or.
Totally on misunderstanding the twenty twenty mandate twenty twenty election. Now, I think, I really think it's pretty obvious that the twenty twenty election was voters saying, I want off the roller of the Trump roller coaster.
We knew that at the time. Of course, we didn't clean things downes.
Please I'm tired. I feel like I'm throwing up all the time. I just right, get me off the roller coaster.
¶ Who is the Economist reader?
And and instead, you know, somebody whispered in his ear that he could be FDR and he and he did. I mean, this is that the first two years of his presidency or just the just a colossal mistake, you know, just when you look back on it, just it is just opportunity that he had to bring the country together and he blew it.
Yeah, really did. Yeah, he started inviting all those historians to the White House. You know Clinton did that too, and you want God knows, we want to learn from history. But if the point is to figure out how do I like compete with FDR and establish myself to be it feels like again you start creating some troubling incentives there. I don't know.
The minute you're trying to be more than one page in a history book as president is when you're going to blow it, then you because then you know you're going to be more than one page.
But for all the wrong reasons. Yeah, yeah, overreach in Hubrews. Who's the I'm curious.
Let's do a little bit of media landscape here in the last last ten minutes here, who do you believe you're talking to when you write for the Lexington at the Economist. Who's your who's your reader? Who is our reader? I mean we have a global readership, you know, in the English language. They are English, the English language.
Mostly English language, And yeah, I think that's fair to say. Increasingly we're translating the stuff and to other languages. Is one of the things that AI is going to allow us to do at greater scale, which is excited, exciting things right, all right, And by the yeah, not just text but podcast, video, all that stuff. All of a sudden, there's a real opportunity to get my view is really high quality, you know, reporting in front of a lot more people. So that's that's good. But I don't, you know,
it's a mix. It's a we do a podcast checks and balance and do a reader questions periodically or listener
¶ Writing about American politics for an international audience
questions periodically, And it's always thrilling to me to here. Like there's a guy, you know, he listens to the podcast when he's driving his tractor on his farm in Australia. Like it's how he keeps in touch with his combine, you know, in his cabin. It's how he keeps in
touch with American politics a little bit. So for what I do, I guess I'm thinking about how, as you said, how do you We have a very big readership in North America too, so it's a tricky thing, like, you know, how do you sound you know, relevant enough to readers who are pretty steeped in our politics, but still you know, accessible to people who aren't.
Are you the first American that has done the Lexington or is the Lexington always.
Been written by somebody you know? Yeah, I am the first American. I don't think that's a good thing. Actually, I mean it's something they made an announcement about when I got the when I you know, I was grateful to get the gig. I think one of the strengths of the column has always been that it is written by an outsider.
Well, the tell call understood is better than any American. Yeah, I completely agree.
For me, it's been a great opportunity to get some detachment. And my editors are fabulous and they have you know, they've kept their poise through this nutty period, and so it's you know, our internal editorial conversations are outside of the mosh pit, you know. But I do think it's always been, you know, a strength of the of the column. And there's we're not byline. The column is up byline.
My joke is, I'm like the dreadpire Roberts. You know, every there's different one of us every but I, as an American, I've had I've tried to work hard to honor that bad spirit, which is not just about funny spellings,
¶ If you had more resources, what would you focus on covering?
you know, which is also part of it all. Those OUs and.
So that that you can just let the that's something that a I can fix. Hey like this put this in the form of the of the economists. Fine, oh you're all every oh, we'll have a U after it now.
Yeah, yeah, but it is it is, it is. I do try to try to think about that about a global audience when I'm writing.
That's what I was curious, is like, is it is it You're trying to explain America to the world or explaining the world to America.
Yeah, well, at this at this time, Chuck, Honestly, I'm out there trying to explain it to myself most of the time, you know.
I mean, now, by the way, I've been calling myself a political anthropologist, because that's I kind of feel more that way now than anything else. I'm trying to understand how these various American tribes interact with each.
Other, which is why this should be a great time to be a journalist, right, Oh, I completely in that sense. Yes, I agree that this is why we got into the business. And if you're curious and you understand, want to understand
¶ Legacy media needs to give more attention beyond D.C. and NYC
what's going on. There's been a lot going on that I don't understand, and so I'm, you know, I'm trying to use the column for that purpose.
But if you had more resources to cover America, what would where would you be focused and what would you be focused on?
I would be spending a lot more time out in the country than I am. I'm trying to travel a fair amount. I haven't been able to the last couple of months. I've been in, you know, in DC and New York too much, but I would. And it's it's a little hard when you're writing on a very regular pace to get out spend the time you want to
spend reporting. But this is this is where I've found my you know, the most value kind of you know, for in my own work is just I you know, I mean, it's such an obvious thing to say, but it's spending time in Texas and Florida and Ohio and I want to get I haven't gotten to Alaska. I want to get to Alaska. It's and getting a better sense of how people are processing the national politics in their own lives. I don't know, how do you answer that question, Well.
I definitely think it's it's just more of everything outside of Washington and New York, right, Like I think this is and unfortunately legacy media is stuck shrinking and so therefore they have fewer resources, so they're gonna you know,
¶ Need to find a new model in order to bring back local journalism
I feel like they're retreating from this. The upside of the sub stacification of journalism is that in theory, you've got people living in Kansas City or Lansing that are going to then try to start their own reporting outlets
or their contributions. And I think there's I mean, I do because I do view journalism's problem as I do it, I view it through the prism of Craiglist, which was, you know, as soon as we made classifieds free, we just we ended up gutting the foundation of journalism in America, which was local journalism. If you actually read to tokfol he was fascinated by how fascinated we were by local politics.
Well why did that exist? Because every community had not one paper, every community had three papers, two papers, you know, depending on some places for papers, you know, you might have a black newspaper, a democratic newspaper, a Republican newspaper, and a wig paper or you know something else.
Right, And.
When we lost that local politics, it it really it gutted the foundation of journal So it's clear we have to go local. Now I'm trying to see if there's a way to scale it, you know, is there a way to both incubate it and scale it and and share some of the resources in order to get some of these locals to thrive. But ultimately, you know, we've we you know when we talk about our lost communities,
right that we've we've lost community. Well, the thing one of the community glues used to be the local paper.
And I'm not saying we can bring newspapers back, but if if you unbundle the newspaper and think about all the different things the paper did for different aspects of the community, then you, as a publisher of a local information ecosystem, ought to be thinking about how do I give something to every segment of my community so that they all come back to this one entity called the local paper, whether it's high school box scores or places to save money on on groceries, or know where the
concerts are tonight, or micro forecasting. Because you have the tools to do this, we know it's going to you know, rain harder in this zip code than it is in this zip code. And oh, by the way, your city, here's who's corrupt on your city council.
I just I could not agree more. I just think and it's a hard story to tell because it's it's a story, as we'd say, about a dog that's not barking, right, It's about something that's gone away. But when you think about the devastation at the local level to wipe out, and many of them are ghost newspaper ones that are left are barely staffed. People aren't able to go out
into the streets and interview anybody. There's no stories of corruption, the poddles that aren't getting filled, the stories that just
¶ There's too many journalists in D.C. and not enough in America
make you empathize with your neighbor because of what they're going through. Oh that's gone. There's some really good experiments out there, but chuck. You know one thing, but journalism for journalists. That's my biggest complaint, which is most of the local experiments are journalism. But posts. Yeah, I mean by that, do you mean that there's too much media coverage.
Or no, it's more of you know, they're they're they're you know, they're covering stories of marginalized communities.
But oh yeah, oh they're not tough driven y, Yes, they're justice stuff or whatever, right, Yeah.
They're all as this as a friend of mine says, you know they you know, they all got drunk watching Woodward and Bernstein, you know, and all the president's men.
You know, Well, that's a curse of our business generally right now. I think it has been for many years. Yeah, you're totally right. Sorry, I misunderstood what you were saying. Yeah, and the other thing, you know, it drives me crazy, Chuck, and you and I spent a lot of time covering white houses, and I'm not faulting anybody for doing that, but you look at the white images from the White House briefing room. You would not imagine this was an
industry and existential crisis. You know, with any kind of resource constraints. That room is more packed than it has ever been. Right, And I even when I you know that is not you'll learning a lot in the way. Again, I'm not faulting anybody. I've done that well. But but this goes to this.
I always say, you know the problem with journalism in America, there's too many journalists in Washington and not enough in America.
Yeah right, yeah, Ok, And.
I benefited from that, I always joke. I mean, I didn't start local I started at the hotline. You know, I was able to shortcut my way. I didn't have to go to the city the city hall beat to the state house beat, and you know, that's there are times that I think that I regret I didn't have
¶ Journalism now caters to niche audiences
that route. Then again, I got to where I got without that route. But maybe it's because I was benefiting from a system that was atrophying at the time, which it was right. Newspapers were consolidating in the nineties. Local political reporters are getting laid off left and right, and so the people doing politics were all in Washington.
Yeah, well, yeah, you could still have a good business at the local level, and there was still a lot of good local newspapers, many family owned. Still there was, but the content consolidation was underway. The hard part of it is it's not bad faith. It's business and technology, the incentives of our business, and that period we were talking about earlier, which now to me looks like a
golden age. People might disagree, but the rise of objectivity and all of that was driven by I cited propaganda and journalists coming together to try to do better, which is true, but it was really about business and technology, you know, you're able to reach a mass audience for the first time. In the late nineteenth century with the invention of the rotary press and radio and television, all of a sudden, what had been a subscriber business became
an advertising based business. When you're running a big advertising business at scale, you don't want to alienate by your readers to be broad. They want to be broad, right, So that meant just the facts, you know, it meant a wide range of opinion. If you're going to do opinion, it meant separating news and opinions so you could be trusted. All of that was collapsed by the Internet. And now you can build a really successful business serving a niche
what it wants to hear. And if you're going to build a subscriber business, by the way, best way to hold onto your scribers. Reassure them you see the world the way they do.
And I mean, you know you were a victim of that.
¶ Deplatforming Trump was a massive mistake
I felt, frankly, I had I had a show on on a cable channel that that we had to move because the audience was just we weren't ideal, we weren't ideologically aligned.
You know, how did you hear that from the audience? Can I ask you that, like, what was that feedback loop?
Like it was all negativity and just like just just like it was just hate. You know, how dare you put a Republican on? Yeah, you know that sort of thing. Now, Look, I don't I didn't want to spend our time talking about your manifesto, But your manifesto I could have changed out the name of your organization and put the name of my organization and it would have read.
It very similar.
Yeah, I'm sorry, Chuck, you know, and it just was like, you know, you sort of knew and and you and
¶ Once ABC caved in lawsuit, resistance to Trump collapsed
now everybody sees it, by the way, yeah, right, like everybody now has this.
Much clearer picture of what you were going through at the time. I think what I went through in different ways, what some of us were going through. I mean, I do I think the you know, we got to this moment this week. I always say there were two when you think about the Jimmy Kimmel situation, there's sort of two original sins here. Original sin one was bullying the social media companies to deep platform Trump. It is it is literally the Biff gets the gambling book back to
the future too moment. I mean, if I could go back and change that moment and he and he stays on Twitter. I think he punches himself. I think what Mitch McConnell was betting on, Right, we all know Mitch McConnell was betting on Trump was going to punch himself out and people were going to tire of it and
move on. Except we kicked him out of the main stream, so nobody if people saw those with social posts and a consistent basis in twenty twenty one through twenty twenty four, I don't think he's the nominated the Republican Party.
Yeah.
Yeah, But the second original sin was was Iger paying off the George Stephanopuloslawsit like that, just that triggered everything that we've been dealing with over the last nine months.
And other people start folding too.
And because folded, right, it took one to cave, and the minute they got one to cave, and then all of a sudden, everybody lot whatever whatever was remaining in people's spines collapsed.
Yeah. I was thinking about this when you were talking about the Tom Cole example. You know what you need is people who are willing to say And by the way, I was okay with losing because it mattered, you know, that's right, And I cared about public service. I cared about it. Then, Mike, I disagreed my constituents. So I led my constituents, you know, rather than I just did what they wanted me to do, which is, you know,
¶ Public pressures journalists to not platform people they disagree with
a way to try to make the compromise. Yeah. Yeah, And that's how you wind up with very few Liz Cheney's and they wind up where she is, and it just that's how you get this cascade of kind.
Of of of of cowardice. Really, and yeah, the media thing, Chuck, the thing about it, Like I think you and I both were. We were acting in accordance to what we saw as our journalistic principles and what was good journalism.
Yeah, and we were products of the eighties and nineties.
I'm not gonna lie. I know, I still I believe in it. I believe in it too. I think we're right. But the thing is, even for the activists coming after us, not this is not my problem to think about. But it was stupid politics too, you know, it's bad journalism and stupid politics, and it empowered Donald. It empowered exactly the phenomenon. They said, they were so freaked out about right.
You don't get an extremist unless you keep the dreamist
¶ Michael Bennet was consensus candidate to replace Schumer
from having a sec you know.
Wanted to trade everybody on the other side as an extremist, Like you said, you can't have a Republican on Like really, we're living in a country where you can't hear from a member of the other you know.
How dare you platform this person? And you're just like, yeah, I mean, and that was the craziness about January sixth. Nobody told me I shouldn't interview the president of Iran, but I was told I shouldn't put on Kevin McCarthy because he didn't certify January sixth.
Seriously, Yeah, yeah, yeah, well that's I mean, at the New York Times, I could publish Vladimir Putin, you know, I could publish, but I could publish I did. This is what I feel. I mean, a talent ban leader, but Tom Cotton was beyond the pale, you know. Yeah, and again I mean at febreell moments and people are but you know, we as journalists, it's in those times that we particularly like we owe it to people to keep our heads.
Are you jealous of some people may not know that your brother is Michael Bennett, the Senator who wants to run for governor. Are you jealous that he's leaving the SLA Corridor.
I am envious that he gets to spend all that time in Colorado.
I had a senator. I had a senator I'm going to leave the name out of it. Who's just crestfallen that he's running for governor. Always wanted him to replace Schumer, and now they don't know who the best person is to replace Schumer. There's a real movement to try. Schumer would be gone if there was an obvious answer, and there's plenty of Democratic senators that just know that he's sort of he sort of he's punched out right. We can You know, it doesn't matter what you think whether
Schumer was was once good at this whatever. You know, when somebody you know, you know, when Joe Flacco shouldn't
¶ Nothing gets done in the senate, many senators leaving
be your starting quarterback anymore, it doesn't mean he didn't win you a Super Bowl once. But your brother was the consensus candidate, and now there's no consensus candidate.
Huh uh. I don't know how to respond that. It's nice to your nice things said about one's brother.
I know, I hear you look I don't want to. I put you on the spot. And I know I don't write about Colorado or about him. I have a real I mean I have He is a conflict for me. He is my brother, and uh, you know I I.
I think sometimes we make two. You know. It's like I feel like you two.
Have always handled that very professionally, and I don't know why that's so difficult for some other entities in our business.
You know what it's worth on that front. Let me close. But the Senate like these you know, sorry, yeah, no, go ahead, No, we were gonna say about the Senate. I mean again, not speaking about him or his No, right, that is just like these these these uh, there are a lot of people leave in the Senate right now. You know, I don't blame them.
I don't blame And Lisa Murkowski is apparently thinking about running for governor.
I don't blamer Yeah.
Right, You've already got at least three senators, Marsha Blackburn, your brother, Tommy Tupperville, so you might add Lisa Murkowski to that. You can't get anything done in the Senate, and even if you're a committee chair, only two people matter in the Senate. John Puhne and Chuck Schumer. And that's the problem. They control the floor, they control amendments, they control, and it is you know, this goes back to the dysfunctional Congress where you know, we grew up
in an era where committee chairs mattered. You know, Chuck Grassley and Max Bacchus would never have allowed any tariff policy that looks like today get through the Senate back in the eighties and nineties just wouldn't have happened.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In the House too, I mean there were giants, you know, it's committee chairs like the Dan rustin Kowskis of.
The committee chairs were taken seriously, well, if the bill can get through committee, then it's got to be brought.
To the floor. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a different model of leadership that we've really moved away from, you know, a more distributed model in both chambers. And it hasn't made our politics more efficient.
No, And this is why I mean, I sort of joke, out of the five hundred and thirty five elected members of Congress, we only have four that do anything, and the other five hundred and thirty one are elected pundits if they.
Choose to be. I mean look at Ted Cruz. He has a weekly podcast. Yeah. Should he have that much time? Yeah? Yeah, I mean he does.
That's the thing, Like he has that much This is not this is like, it's not like he's not doing his job right there?
What is there to do? Although he used it for good last week when he came out and criticized the rare Republican saying, I thought when he criticized the administration over the Jimmy Kimmel situation, he showed refreshing consistency.
I thought, well, this is where I think that Trump is actually acquiring a lot of I don't think people realize that. You know, with tariffs, he's quiet got Republicans upset with him in the Midwest, right your grass leaves, you're Jerry Moran's you know, the Farm States on free speech. Now it's got Ted Cruz and David McCormick sided with him on the extra judicial killings of the boats in
¶ In the TV era, successful presidents have had cults of personality
Venezuela Ran Paul right, like, you know, that's how coalitions break apart, and he's thrown so many different things out. You know, his coalition is not they're basically united on culture and that's it. But he's cracking it himself by his sort of sloppy, sort of sloppy implementation of these various ideas.
Yeah, and which is one of the big questions as we start looking at the twenty twenty and god knows what kind of state the country is going to be in and all the rest of it. But if you know, is there another figure that can hold this really pretty and coherent, you know, set of policies and impulses and emotions and grievances together. The way he has history shows no.
I mean, you know, we just talked about Bush forty one, Right, he couldn't hold together Reagan's coalition for arguably more than two years. Al Gore couldn't even do it for one election. Yeah,
¶ Newsom having success emulating Trump's style
Joe Biden basically got to the presidency on the fumes of the Obama coalition, right, that didn't hold together. It's I would argue that in the TV era, the successful presidents have all been cults of personality in some form, right, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, even w Obama Trump, And the failures have been the
ones that couldn't be cults of personalities. Carter, Bush forty one, Biden, Johnson, Right, Like you know, the ones that didn't know how to it, you know, for one reason or the other.
Yeah, And it's becoming a cultural figure as much as a political one in a sense, you know. And and that's where I feel. And again one of the great failures that it just seems crazy in retrospect how little he communicated with the American people as opposed to this always on presidency that we now have. And I feel like that's just the world we're going to be living in. You know that to succeed politically, you have to dominate attention the way Donald Trump does. It's what Gavin Newsom
is banking on now, right. Ye.
Like, I'm a skeptic, but I you know, I always say I'm a skeptic, but I have an open mind on these things. Like you know, you never know what works in America until you see it happen. But it is interesting to watch Newsom try to basically do do the Trump thing and have more success. He's having more success at it than I expected.
Yeah, me too too.
Well, All right, do you guys publish every week or is it every other week?
It feels like every week where every day, Chuck, It's like everybody else but the but they call it a paper, by the way, not a magazine. I got a different word for every thing, but this it is.
Yeah, it's thinner than magazine paper.
But we published weekly. Yeah, my column comes out weekly.
Hey, is David Bradley's dream of The Atlantic becoming a competitor the Economists actually come true?
Uh? You know you view them as a direct competitor. Now. I don't think you'd have to ask my boss that question. I think she would say.
Or a semaphore, Yeah, I mean everybody, everybody competes with the semaphore definitely.
Right. Wants to be kind of a global digital publication reaching an audience, much like we do, and everybody's in. We are in a competition of all against all for attention. Yeah, there's a lot of I think there is a lot of overlap. I mean, you know, having been you know, working with you at the Atlantic back in the day, it's DNA is so fundamentally American, you know, and it remains that way today.
But you remember, I mean at north Star, for David was always the Economist. Yeah, that was his north Star, not the New Yorker. That's what people don't know.
But The Economist was founded by that collective of writers back in the eighteen fifties to promote the American idea. That was the whole concept. And I think you're doing an awesome job of that actually to this day. But that's a different role than the than the economist has, so I think that creates some you know, meaningful differentiation.
I h I miss you, my friend. I miss I miss you in a newsroom, miss collaborating with you. But I am thankful you're writing that column every week.
Thanks, Chuck. I'm glad you're doing You're just doing the the way you are with you.
It's you know, there's you know, it's no fun to just sit back and watch right.
No, no, no, and it's it's far from over. Yeah, that's for sure.
All right, brother, Well than great to see